"Bravo. I knew that you'd get it once you had the right data." Joshua giggled his usual creepy little giggle, ironically rather pleased that Minamimoto managed to figure it out so quickly. He was right, of course. A Level i Flare wiped out everything simultaneously, crossing dimensions and wiping out everything in that same wavelength. But as he so easily pointed out, Minamimoto's Psyche didn't hit across those waves. Simply by switching to a parallel dimension, Joshua had evaded something that otherwise could well have erased him from existence.
...or perhaps not. Minamimoto managed to put himself back together, albeit in an extremely unsavory way. Perhaps Joshua would have survived... but for once, that was a game that the boy would not want to play.
"Of course, I do come from your future, a few steps ahead of where you put your equations. You thought that making yourself a Taboo Noise would be enough to stop me? Audacious, but doomed to failure from the very start." Though Joshua had to admit, it had given him the visceral satisfaction of crushing Minamimoto himself. For that, at least, there was something to be said for the Reaper's plan.
Unfortunately, it seemed like the Reaper was being goaded a little too far, and while Joshua was good at side-stepping attacks... in this man's own words, he was too zetta slow to evade forever. Which meant that, instead of preparing an attack or a defense, he simply stood his ground. "Mm... indeed not. I'm bound to one dimension here, as are you. And my use of Psyches are severely limited, as I'm sure yours are as well." And yet he sounded not at all concerned with this turn of events.
And there was that laugh! Minamimoto wondered if that was a just a trait of Joshua's pretty boy RG form or if he laughed like that as the Composer too. The idea of it - or the chill air? - sent an unpleasant shiver up his spine.
He had other things to consider than his bodies own irregularities and possibly physiological-chemical responses to the Composer though. The sharp headache was receding to a dull throbbing that beat in the background of his mind as he processed this new information.
"Taboo, huh?" he muttered as he approached. Sho certainly hadn't intended anything like that; he merely meant to refactor into Shibuya after unleashing the Level i Flare. But the formula had been a rather high-level refinery sigil based on Taboo code... it was entirely possible... or had his future self...? The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. The numbers and symbols for how to make that come true - a Taboo Reaper! - were flashing through his mind. He'd already experimented with Taboo noise in similar ways... then this... could it be? Genius! It was a work of art! The equation was perfect!
And also completely useless here, as Joshua pointed out. What he also did was not back down. This gave the Reaper pause. What was he planning? Could he do something? Sho couldn't depend on everyone to convey everything as precisely as he did, so "severely limited" could mean "0", or it could mean .01 or better... which was more than Sho had.
"Are they, now?" he said threateningly as he stopped a few steps away, though his menace was a little undercut by the fact that his breathing still hadn't returned to normal. "Then it looks like we'll just have to crunch numbers the old fashioned way - by hand!" At this he pounded his fist into his palm, a wide grin on his face - but he didn't attack yet. He was still wary. What ace in the hole did Joshua have now? Why was he just standing there? What the factor did he know that Sho didn't!?
Nothing at the moment? Well that was rather odd. Joshua had been preparing- though it was difficult to tell from his relaxed posture- to get out of the way of Minamimoto's first swing, but it hadn't come yet. It seemed like he was still one to give a healthy respect to Joshua... so hm, how to play this Game? That was the question of the moment.
After that moment's pause, Joshua sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I should have known that someone like you would figure out the truth by now. Really, Minamimoto, there's nothing I can hide from you, is there?" The Reaper had a suspicious streak a mile wide, but it was a roll of the dice as to whether he'd bite or he'd snap. Either way, Joshua was ready for any eventuality.
There was an awkward pause as Joshua neither struck first nor prepared for an attack. Holding back until the last nanosecond? Then he just had to say something so slickly complimentary that it didn't register as a compliment at all. Was this a real number, or was the kid spouting results for which he had no backup?
Well, there was one way to find out.
"Let's see it then," Sho said with a grin. "You stopped bullets once... let's see you stop fists!"
He lunged forwards, swinging with an outside right that angled in for a trajectory towards Joshua's face. Sure, the kid was quite the one for dodging, but there was always Sho's left, which was tucked in by his side, ready to shoot up for a jab to the central point if he only sidestepped and didn't just get the heck out of the way.
The idea that he might counterattack never crossed the mathematician's mind.
Ah, and there was the Sho Minamimoto that Joshua had expected. Forcing the issue, trying to find his solutions through brute force and direct application. Honestly, that lack of foresight would be the death of him. ...hadn't it been that way at least twice by now? Ah, the travails of being his opposite!
Still, he was sure that Minamimoto was fully aware of momentum and inertia. The boy could have simply dodged to the side like usual, but that was what the mathematician was surely expecting, and this time, Joshua didn't have a Psyche to blast an opening. So, he'd have to use what advantages he did have. Minamimoto would have to reach down a fraction to aim at Joshua's face, and his blow was coming outside and in. That left an opening that the boy quickly exploited- he stepped into the blow, stooping low and simultaneously pulling on Minamimoto's oncoming arm and sweeping at his near leg. The result, hopefully, would be a graceful judo throw that would send Minamimoto sprawling a good distance away.
At least enough for Joshua to call out. "Or perhaps not. Why are you going after me, anyway?" At most, he estimated a full minute before the nurses would break up their little spate. That should be enough time to at least try to change their positions a tad...
When Joshua stepped inside his swing radius and reached up for his arm, Sho's first instinct was to use his teleportation Psyche to evade and reappear behind him. This, of course, didn't work due to a number of missing factors for that particular algorithm, the most crucial of which being his ability to use Psyches.
Plan B was initiated, but the momentary pause trying to use tools he didn't have meant that his left hook was also too late to catch Joshua as he grabbed his arm and took out his feet.
Joshua's body strength and Minamimoto's own momentum wasn't nearly enough to send the Reaper flying base over face through the air, but it did manage pitch his Y-axis at least once before he landed on his back with a thump.
"'cause I'm gonna be the next Composer, you hectopascal!" he spat angrily, pushing himself over and stumbling to his feet. "Or didn't you get that the first time I derived you?"
He wound up again with his right, but as he swung, he instead lashed out quickly with his foot, kicking at the teenager's leg. Any thought about nurses or other matters besides dealing with the remainder before him were far from his calculations as he focused solely on how to best destroy this integral.
Well, that was a bit disappointing. Here he'd hoped for a little more room... ah, the frustrations and limitations of a human body! If he had even a fraction of the power he deserved, then this wouldn't have even been a contest. And while the novelty was still invigorating...
...that blow to his leg was not. Now it was Joshua's turn to be caught off-guard, as he'd thought that Minamimoto would try the same tactic again- he had forgotten just how quickly the Reaper could adapt. The boy's knee buckled from the blow, and he staggered back, trying to think of another option. Just a few moments would do...
Ah hah. That just might work. "You know the rules. You have to beat the current Composer in order to take his place!"
Sho cackled triumphantly as the kick connected, sending the Composer stumbling back. Ignoring both the nurses and the rivulets of sweat dripping down his face despite the sharply chill air, the Reaper quickly followed up with another wide, powerful swing, depending on Joshua still being off balance to prevent an occurrence like his first attack.
"What the factor do you think I'm wait what-"
At that moment, as confusion struck his brain, so did a sudden rush of blood and all the pains from his previous exertions caught up with him as the fever that had been incubating since his encounter with Eve last night finally came on in full force. The world spun before his eyes, the horizontal plane of the park changing axes rapidly, causing him to stumble drunkenly and his punch to go wide of its mark, far outside the acceptable margin of error. Not that this was going to stop Sho; staggering and pivoting, he came around, throwing another wild swing at the boy as he tried to focus his eyes.
"You are the- there's no way - don't tell it was- you're lying!" he sputtered incoherently as his attack didn't even come close this time.
"Shawn! Joshua! What in the world are you two up to?" The nurse had caught the word 'composer' as she ran up to them. "Don't tell me you're having this violent a fight over music." She'd heard of plenty of ridiculous reasons for fighting, but really? A fight over that?
She motioned to a nearby pair of orderlies. "Now. Are you two going to play nice or are we going to have to take action?"
Well well, it seemed like Minamimoto was reaching his limits. Rather oddly so, to be honest; if he didn't know better, Joshua would say that the Reaper was... sick. Fever, maybe. It certainly wasn't any other physiological response that could be named, even if the Reaper was rather unnaturally fixated on him.
Joshua smoothly flowed around Minamimoto's clumsy- albeit savage- swings, seemingly unruffled by the attack from earlier. Of course, this worked out well to his advantage, as the nurses came right on cue, and that meant Joshua was the winner of this impromptu Game. He quietly whispered, "Maybe I am. You never had an idea about the truth from the start, did you?"
After that, he hopped back, raising his arms in a nonchalant shrug as he giggled at the nurse. "I'd be more than happy to be separated from him. He did attack me first, after all."
Ignoring the staff, or perhaps not noticing them, Sho lunged at Joshua again, his fist going wide of what he thought was a moving target.
"Kiss my arc! Once I've derived you, it'll be elementary to calculate the rest!" he yelled as he stumbled past clumsily. As he turned to attack again, he seemed to notice the nurs for the first time.
"And you can just factor yourselves before you even think of sticking me with your chemical negations!" he yelled, waving an arm at them in an attempt to ward the orderlies off.
Well, at least one of the two was calm. The nurse nodded to Joshua, then motioned to one of the orderlies, who picked Minamimoto up from the waist as the other held his arms down. She noticed his glassy eyes and flushed cheeks; was that from the fight, or was it something else? She wasn't entirely sure until she touched his arm while preparing the sedative injection.
"You started a fight while you're running a fever? I don't know what you were thinking, but we're going to have to give you an extra dose of medicine." She injected the sedatives first, following that with an injection of Tylenol."
She turned to both of the boys then. "You're not going to fight if I move away, right?"
Ugh, that didn't seem to have worked. It seemed like Minamimoto had decided to go with a simplification process before solving the Joshua problem, and that did not bode well for the teenager. Ah well... it was worth a shot, and he could still think of some way around Sho Minamimoto's plans. It would just take some thought.
For now, he just shook his head and smiled. "I won't. Thank you for coming when you did." The Grim Heaper's threats went unremarked upon... as far as they went, they were relatively mild. Besides, it wasn't like the Reaper was really capable of carrying out those threats at the moment.
"Hey! Hey, keep your digits to yourself!" he said, backing away from one orderly only to bump into another. After that, his flailing was quickly reduced until the nurse could start administering her drugs as he struggled vainly in their grip. "Ow."
He nodded absently at the nurses question, more preoccupied with how to get out of this situation than what exactly he was agreeing to. He stumbled back a bit when he was released, eying the others warily. His brain, which was quickly slowing down in its computing processes, was busily trying to make an accurate threat assessment between the orderlies and the Composer. Eventually it gave up and just summarized that they were both > what he cared to deal with in his current state.
"This, this isn't over, you hexa-Pascal's triangle!" he slurred as he backed away, waving his fist in a way that might have been menacing had it not looked like he was trying to drunkenly swat imaginary flies. Making a 180 degree rotation, he beat a hasty retreat before the orderlies could catch him.
He got as far as the bench a few feet away before he collapsed, one arm holding him up before he slid down to sprawl across its seat. He stared up at the sky, his lips silently mouthing numbers as he calculated the speed at which the world was spinning.
"I don't think you'll need to worry about Shawn," the nurse said to Joshua. "Though we'll want to keep an eye on you, too - we wouldn't want you catching whatever bug he seems to have. Let us know if you start feeling feverish, all right?" She nodded once and then turned, beginning to walk away.
...or perhaps not. Minamimoto managed to put himself back together, albeit in an extremely unsavory way. Perhaps Joshua would have survived... but for once, that was a game that the boy would not want to play.
"Of course, I do come from your future, a few steps ahead of where you put your equations. You thought that making yourself a Taboo Noise would be enough to stop me? Audacious, but doomed to failure from the very start." Though Joshua had to admit, it had given him the visceral satisfaction of crushing Minamimoto himself. For that, at least, there was something to be said for the Reaper's plan.
Unfortunately, it seemed like the Reaper was being goaded a little too far, and while Joshua was good at side-stepping attacks... in this man's own words, he was too zetta slow to evade forever. Which meant that, instead of preparing an attack or a defense, he simply stood his ground. "Mm... indeed not. I'm bound to one dimension here, as are you. And my use of Psyches are severely limited, as I'm sure yours are as well." And yet he sounded not at all concerned with this turn of events.
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He had other things to consider than his bodies own irregularities and possibly physiological-chemical responses to the Composer though. The sharp headache was receding to a dull throbbing that beat in the background of his mind as he processed this new information.
"Taboo, huh?" he muttered as he approached. Sho certainly hadn't intended anything like that; he merely meant to refactor into Shibuya after unleashing the Level i Flare. But the formula had been a rather high-level refinery sigil based on Taboo code... it was entirely possible... or had his future self...? The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. The numbers and symbols for how to make that come true - a Taboo Reaper! - were flashing through his mind. He'd already experimented with Taboo noise in similar ways... then this... could it be? Genius! It was a work of art! The equation was perfect!
And also completely useless here, as Joshua pointed out. What he also did was not back down. This gave the Reaper pause. What was he planning? Could he do something? Sho couldn't depend on everyone to convey everything as precisely as he did, so "severely limited" could mean "0", or it could mean .01 or better... which was more than Sho had.
"Are they, now?" he said threateningly as he stopped a few steps away, though his menace was a little undercut by the fact that his breathing still hadn't returned to normal. "Then it looks like we'll just have to crunch numbers the old fashioned way - by hand!" At this he pounded his fist into his palm, a wide grin on his face - but he didn't attack yet. He was still wary. What ace in the hole did Joshua have now? Why was he just standing there? What the factor did he know that Sho didn't!?
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After that moment's pause, Joshua sighed and shrugged his shoulders. "Ah, I should have known that someone like you would figure out the truth by now. Really, Minamimoto, there's nothing I can hide from you, is there?" The Reaper had a suspicious streak a mile wide, but it was a roll of the dice as to whether he'd bite or he'd snap. Either way, Joshua was ready for any eventuality.
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Well, there was one way to find out.
"Let's see it then," Sho said with a grin. "You stopped bullets once... let's see you stop fists!"
He lunged forwards, swinging with an outside right that angled in for a trajectory towards Joshua's face. Sure, the kid was quite the one for dodging, but there was always Sho's left, which was tucked in by his side, ready to shoot up for a jab to the central point if he only sidestepped and didn't just get the heck out of the way.
The idea that he might counterattack never crossed the mathematician's mind.
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Still, he was sure that Minamimoto was fully aware of momentum and inertia. The boy could have simply dodged to the side like usual, but that was what the mathematician was surely expecting, and this time, Joshua didn't have a Psyche to blast an opening. So, he'd have to use what advantages he did have. Minamimoto would have to reach down a fraction to aim at Joshua's face, and his blow was coming outside and in. That left an opening that the boy quickly exploited- he stepped into the blow, stooping low and simultaneously pulling on Minamimoto's oncoming arm and sweeping at his near leg. The result, hopefully, would be a graceful judo throw that would send Minamimoto sprawling a good distance away.
At least enough for Joshua to call out. "Or perhaps not. Why are you going after me, anyway?" At most, he estimated a full minute before the nurses would break up their little spate. That should be enough time to at least try to change their positions a tad...
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Plan B was initiated, but the momentary pause trying to use tools he didn't have meant that his left hook was also too late to catch Joshua as he grabbed his arm and took out his feet.
Joshua's body strength and Minamimoto's own momentum wasn't nearly enough to send the Reaper flying base over face through the air, but it did manage pitch his Y-axis at least once before he landed on his back with a thump.
"'cause I'm gonna be the next Composer, you hectopascal!" he spat angrily, pushing himself over and stumbling to his feet. "Or didn't you get that the first time I derived you?"
He wound up again with his right, but as he swung, he instead lashed out quickly with his foot, kicking at the teenager's leg. Any thought about nurses or other matters besides dealing with the remainder before him were far from his calculations as he focused solely on how to best destroy this integral.
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...that blow to his leg was not. Now it was Joshua's turn to be caught off-guard, as he'd thought that Minamimoto would try the same tactic again- he had forgotten just how quickly the Reaper could adapt. The boy's knee buckled from the blow, and he staggered back, trying to think of another option. Just a few moments would do...
Ah hah. That just might work. "You know the rules. You have to beat the current Composer in order to take his place!"
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"What the factor do you think I'm wait what-"
At that moment, as confusion struck his brain, so did a sudden rush of blood and all the pains from his previous exertions caught up with him as the fever that had been incubating since his encounter with Eve last night finally came on in full force. The world spun before his eyes, the horizontal plane of the park changing axes rapidly, causing him to stumble drunkenly and his punch to go wide of its mark, far outside the acceptable margin of error. Not that this was going to stop Sho; staggering and pivoting, he came around, throwing another wild swing at the boy as he tried to focus his eyes.
"You are the- there's no way - don't tell it was- you're lying!" he sputtered incoherently as his attack didn't even come close this time.
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She motioned to a nearby pair of orderlies. "Now. Are you two going to play nice or are we going to have to take action?"
[Jen]
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Joshua smoothly flowed around Minamimoto's clumsy- albeit savage- swings, seemingly unruffled by the attack from earlier. Of course, this worked out well to his advantage, as the nurses came right on cue, and that meant Joshua was the winner of this impromptu Game. He quietly whispered, "Maybe I am. You never had an idea about the truth from the start, did you?"
After that, he hopped back, raising his arms in a nonchalant shrug as he giggled at the nurse. "I'd be more than happy to be separated from him. He did attack me first, after all."
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"Kiss my arc! Once I've derived you, it'll be elementary to calculate the rest!" he yelled as he stumbled past clumsily. As he turned to attack again, he seemed to notice the nurs for the first time.
"And you can just factor yourselves before you even think of sticking me with your chemical negations!" he yelled, waving an arm at them in an attempt to ward the orderlies off.
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"You started a fight while you're running a fever? I don't know what you were thinking, but we're going to have to give you an extra dose of medicine." She injected the sedatives first, following that with an injection of Tylenol."
She turned to both of the boys then. "You're not going to fight if I move away, right?"
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For now, he just shook his head and smiled. "I won't. Thank you for coming when you did." The Grim Heaper's threats went unremarked upon... as far as they went, they were relatively mild. Besides, it wasn't like the Reaper was really capable of carrying out those threats at the moment.
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He nodded absently at the nurses question, more preoccupied with how to get out of this situation than what exactly he was agreeing to. He stumbled back a bit when he was released, eying the others warily. His brain, which was quickly slowing down in its computing processes, was busily trying to make an accurate threat assessment between the orderlies and the Composer. Eventually it gave up and just summarized that they were both > what he cared to deal with in his current state.
"This, this isn't over, you hexa-Pascal's triangle!" he slurred as he backed away, waving his fist in a way that might have been menacing had it not looked like he was trying to drunkenly swat imaginary flies. Making a 180 degree rotation, he beat a hasty retreat before the orderlies could catch him.
He got as far as the bench a few feet away before he collapsed, one arm holding him up before he slid down to sprawl across its seat. He stared up at the sky, his lips silently mouthing numbers as he calculated the speed at which the world was spinning.
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