Giles watched the Gate, leaning into the comforting bulk of Jack. It had been a rather horrible surprise, waking up to find an imp sitting on his chest for the first time in years, and he was still shaken after sending the man in the utterly ridiculous robe through the Gate to his Advancement Trial.

“I’m going to have nightmares because of that man for weeks” He grumbled, unhappily. Jack shrugged. “His heart is unformed” The gigantic man grumbled, idly twisting a length of silver wire around a black stone.

Giles grimaced, and pushed himself up. “Close?”

“Ten minutes to contact with the dogs.” Jack said, casually.

Giles sighed, and began stretching. It took him a few minutes to get through the basics for his limbs, and then he moved on to his [Katas].

[KATA COMPLETED: MOUNTAIN MOVES]

[KATA COMPLETED: RE-ORDERING HEAVEN]

[KATA COMPLETED: UNITY WITH THE FIST]

Not a moment too soon soft golden light flowed over his fist, joining the aggregations of starlight over his hardened body.

A pair of massive white dogs and coal-black, smouldering eyes loped out around the edges of the building, followed by a man in crimson robes and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Greetings, heretic!” The Red Inquisitor exclaimed, cheerfully.

“Hello, oh holy manservant.” Giles sneered. “Still not figured it out?”

“Thy Wicked Lies Shall Not Sway Me!” Red replied. “Now! I do believe there was a man by the name of Simon Peterson on his way here! Where is he?!”

“And why would I tell you?” Giles said, bemused.

“For A Command Hath Been Handed Down From On High And Even The Apostates Will Answer Heaven!!” The Inquisitor replied, words sinking into the world around them. Giles grimaced as his estranged brother’s miracle-granted Charisma ran against the flows of mana around his body, causing them to ripple inauspiciously.

More worryingly, the flowers stretched up towards the gate, and the grass bent towards it under a wind that holed up from nowhere. It was basically impossible for his brother to miss, and the red-robed man began stalking forward.

Giles sighed.

“[I Cast Fist]” He stated, and his brother was smashed into the ground by a ghostly hand.

He immediately got up, of course, and the hems of his robes started hissing with pale smoke. “The Lord Is Great, His Fury Roused.”

Charisma, Giles pondered as stones began flinging themselves at him, was an absolute bullshit stat.

——

Jack heard the world singing hymns of praise in the distance, and strung his bow.

The two brothers always fought when they met, which was unsurprising. One of them was sworn to the Jubilant Sky, Luxury and Hell, while the other had come incredibly close to the Archetype of the Witch-Burning Patriarch.

More or less in response to the careless oaths his brother swore, as both of them tried to escape the shadow of their mother. The fact that she was a world-renowned Awakened, and the two of them at best counted as menaces on a national scale was a bitter outcome indeed.

Jack’s meandering thoughts brought him back to the present, and the blunt arrow with the silver flower at its head. He sighed, and carefully drew back, aiming at a cloud above.

[Memory of Falling Rain]

The arrow rose. The rain fell.

The cloud exhausted itself in seconds, but it had been long enough to wash away the annoying hymn that priest had sung to the plants, and more to the point - it meant that the two big dogs that followed Red around everywhere would have a much harder time tracking him down as Jack went to set-up for his first proper shot at the Inquisitor.

—

Giles was very happy when the cloud above exploded into raindrops that hammered into the ground around them. The constant urge to answer his brother faded rapidly as Jack altered the Battlefield.

He was also very concerned that the dogs hadn’t moved - usually they would go to harry his boyfriend, but this time they were sticking around.

“Petty trickery!” Red exclaimed, merrily. Not cheerfully, like he had once done when they were younger. “But! [I Walk Beneath The Blazing Sun!]”

The rain turned to steam. The light turned into a harsh glare. The dogs howled, and hurled themselves forward as the Red Inquisitor drew a flaming sword out of nowhere.

“Demon, You Who Have Possessed My Brother” The Red Inquisitor intoned, as madness and fury blazed in his eyes. “I Hereby Pass Sentence In The Name Of The Lord. Begone From This Earth, That We Who Are Left Behind May Grieve In Peace.”

Giles was dragged down by the dogs. He saw Jack come crashing through the burning trees towards the pair of them, terror and fury clear on his face.

The Red Inquisitor raised his sword up high, and brought it down towards his brother’s helpless form.

[MELPOMENE’S CONDEMNATION]

The flames guttered, and the sword dispersed to ash. Still, embers struck Giles’s face, before even their sharp and hateful sting was drowned in sorrow. Wonder and colour faded from the world. Tears and grief and grey rushed through their surroundings, lying like thick fog over the world.

Simon, Hero of Chaos stalked out of the gate, sodden, mildly frostbitten and utterly untouched.

Giles would have sworn, if he could. Heroes, like Charisma, were complete bullshit. The fact that his brother was trying, and worse, succeeding at killing him was bullshit. The fact that Jack had been reduced to a tearful mess on the ground not twenty meters from him was bullshit.

In his mind, he wanted to howl and rage - smash his idiot brother into the ground, hurl the Hero to the horizon. He wanted to be left alone, with Jack, in peace.

In his heart, he could barely move as the Hero’s suffocating Power pressed down on everything. All he could do was gaze on as black despair hung over them like a shroud.

His only solace was that if anything, his brother was doing a LOT worse. He was laid out flat on the ground as tha backlash of the Red Inquisitor's touch almost visibly fled him, tears streaming from his face. The dogs were falling away into the incense smoke and bones that had made them.

Stripped of the Archetype's touch, the apex of what his Awakened nature would reach, he looked small, faded, and broken.