#silversadmurai

And he had certainly never fought in earnest.

The past several days had been revealing, though, making things apparent that he had wanted to avoid if possible. Between being robbed and assaulted and having to intervene with nothing but his bare hands to fight, and finding the... In the wake of all of that, Norman considered it an inevitability: he would have to fight. Really fight. His wit and agility were no guarantee, and no guarantee meant that he needed to regard it as if it couldn’t be avoided.

But he could try. He kept to back streets still, evaded larger congregated groups of the infected as well as he could, and minimized confrontations to whatever degree he could. It was in one of these back streets, taking the long way around to avoid being detected by a throng of them up ahead, that he nearly tripped over it.

A four-foot iron pipe, with a crook on one end and a few screws protruding, broken on one end and lying in a puddle. Norman stared at it as though it would bite him, for a moment, before bending down to pick it up. It was a hefty piece of metal. Must have broken from somewhere and ended up here? He gripped it in both hands experimentally, weighing it -- figuratively as well as literally.

Well...a real weapon wouldn’t hurt. Wouldn’t hurt him, at least, not in his own hands. He’d prefer it to be longer -- more varied uses, better reach -- but it would serve. It would serve far better than bare hands, certainly.

Approaching footsteps interrupted the thought process. Behind him? The infected, had they... The boy wheeled about with his new weapon in hand, startled and brandishing it at the ready almost without thinking. He stared, wide-eyed, at the stranger...though the other didn’t look out of his mind by any means. No reason not to regard him a little cautiously, at any rate. He’d gotten...lax about simply trusting strangers off the bat.

“Who are you?”

He hated crowds. He was a master at handicraft. He was a perfectionist who wouldn’t settle for anything but his best. He hated that boy with the name Tenshouin.

But if there was one thing that was probably more certain than anything right now, it was the fact that Shu was not, by any means, someone skilled in combat.

And that was the problem.

Up until this point, he’d been fine. He’d heard there were infected members of the populace, of course, but he hadn’t actually had any noteworthy run-ins himself until about three minutes ago. And in those three minutes, he’d gone from being confused, to realizing they were some of the infected, onto where he was now: running away from a few of them who seemed to be hell-bent on catching him. What the hell did they want to do that for, what did they think they were going to get out of this!? Were they like the zombies he’d seen in some of the movies that Kagehira would watch from time to time? Zombies weren’t real, but then again this whole situation shouldn’t be real. Anything’s possible, right?

But the problem with running as much and as quickly as he was doing lied in the fact that while Shu was a performer adept at expending his energy on the stage via intricately-planned dances, he was not adept at running long lengths as fast as his legs could manage. So after another couple minutes of running for dear life, his knees decide they’ve had enough of this nonsense, and so they buckle underneath him, leading him to go tumbling forward in the most ungraceful manner possible. He curses under his breath, lifting himself up to a sitting position and catches sight of the infected barreling towards him akin to wild animals or something. They were damn aggressive, alright.

“Don’t you--” dare, he wants to finish that with, but reasoning with them seemed like perhaps the most idiotic thought he’s ever had in his life. This was great! They were going to catch up to him, maybe rip him apart or something, because he’d probably be able to struggle for all of 30 seconds before losing an arm or something, right? Superb. “D- Damn you, get away--! I am not fresh meat!”

Heaven help him.

[[LISTEN. WHEN YOUR BALLS HAVE BEEN THROUGH AS MUCH AS GIN-SAN’S BALLS HAVE. YOU LEARN NOT TO BRING THAT Up.

[[ THIS IS PERFECT THANK YOU

“That does it! You guys want a piece of me?!”

For whatever reason, perhaps for contrived plot-related reasons, another mob of infected emerges from the kitchen. What, did they season the ramen with powdered Saint Fragments?! Takumi is losing his mind over here.

He turns to the guy sitting next to him. “You know how to fight!?”

This place was entirely too loud. Ai hadn’t the faintest idea why anyone would want to cause such a commotion until she’d neared the street-side crowd... and into a jumble of figures either regretting or celebrating the outcome of some medium-scale bet. She’d been used to gamblers before, often sought out for vengeance on “unfair operators” by sore, drunken losers.

She pressed her back against the dingy wall, eyeballing a particularly dejected looking man with snowy hair. His garments... they seemed almost familiar, like he had come from some place like her, when she was still human. Before she knew it, it seemed as if he’d caught her staring with her wide, curious eyes.