Core Memories

“That’s… four down,” Vallya panted out as their reality shifted once more, John busily reading and then closing his completion bonuses a few feet away. The kitsune shifted slowly on her feet, nursing a particularly painful wound at her side. “And still no signs of any anger or vindictiveness. I don’t know if I’m more relieved or frustrated…”

Vallya bit her lip bitterly as John knelt at her side, his hand glistening with a golden light as he let a Heal spell flow over the claw marks. That she had yet to do anything to further embarrass herself was a blessing in its own right, of course. At the same time, the idea that this sadistic anger manifested so easily around the ones she cared about, while remaining dormant the few times she was allowed to unleash her frustrations, drove her absolutely mad.

“Well, you went weeks without any issues. You can’t just expect it to pop up whenever it’s convenient.”

“I can expect whatever I want.” Vallya pouted with a huff. “Let’s go again. Those little jackals aren’t going to get the best of me this time.”

“Frenzy Dogs,” John corrected, as he finished healing Vallya’s injury and stood once again. “Don’t forget to stay focused on the enemies we’re fighting. I don’t want you getting hurt because you’re intentionally trying to get upset so you can control it – and these ones in particular don’t seem to mind getting hurt. Pretty sure that last mini-boss was perfectly willing to disembowel itself if it meant getting a little taste of flesh.”

“Whatever they are, I won’t let it happen again,” Vallya vowed, giving a quick and firm nod. “I’ll prove it. I’ll clear out more than you can, and I’ll do it without getting hurt at all!”

“That’s the spirit.” John threw her an affectionate nod as he clicked through the menu to re-open another dungeon, raising the level up by one more to keep the experience gains maximized. “Get ready – we’re going back in!”

Vallya burst off the very moment the Barrier finished forming. She moved so quickly that if it weren't for the pink aura shielding her, she'd likely have been absolutely whalloped by the clusters of branches that had sprung up all around them. As it was, John got a face full of leaves when all the branches snapped back into place behind her, losing half their greenery as the Star Guardian zipped off to find their enemies.

John glanced around the small clearing they had spawned into nonchalantly. He was in no hurry to join Vallya among the bristles and brutes – he hadn’t been the one to issue the challenge, and he had something else in mind for this dungeon anyway. Vallya was frustrated, but she was also finally starting to relax, to lose herself in the repetition and adrenaline of training through these dungeons.

And, just a little bit, losing her control. Even if she didn’t seem to realize it herself, John could tell that she was getting a little happier every time she took one of their enemies down – no matter how frustrated she seemed to be getting outwardly, he could see the inward enjoyment of the hunt. And what a hunt it was now.

He could already hear the sounds of carnage in the brush, the rustle of trees at various distances, usually followed by a grunt, or occasionally a burst of pink and purple blazes barely visible through the treeline. John still remained motionless, though he wasn’t exactly idle. Two small clay balls formed from the ground at John’s feet while he eyed the scenery, zipping off through the trees in the opposite direction to where he could hear Vallya working, darting through the underbrush. John couldn’t see exactly where they were going or what surrounded the small spheres as they moved, but he could hear them occasionally colliding with a rock or a tree trunk in the distance – and he could hear the excited snarls when some of the monsters finally caught sight of the small, agile projectiles. John recalled the first clay orb, shooting it along the forest floor like a bolt of lightning until it rolled to a halt against his boot.

One of the Frenzy Dogs burst through a particularly prickly bush in a twirling motion, almost seeming as if it were trying to chew off its own hind legs in mid-air. John wasn't sure if the creature had lost sight of the small ball of dirt and thought it was darting around in the air, or if the blue-skinned monstrosities were so aggressive and hyper that they even lashed out at plants, but it didn't matter for long. As soon as the four-legged freak spotted John, it gave him its full attention, snarling and bounding toward him.

“Not just yet. You stay over there, I need another one of your friends to join me.”

120 DMG!

The dog was caught at the apex of its leap by a pillar of stone rising from the dirt, impacting the beast’s chest and knocking the wind clean out of it. John followed up his first cast of Elemental Infusion with another, this time bringing up an entire box of rock and stone to close over the Frenzy Dog, sealing it in – the beast immediately set to gnashing its teeth against the stone, but John kept pouring mana into the enchanted rock to reinforce it, keeping the beast contained for now. While he was doing that, the other small clay ball found another of the Frenzy Dogs and caught its attention. John could hear the creature’s furious snarls as he brought the second one home – it only took a second for the blue-furred whirlwind of claws and fangs to enter the clearing behind it.

"Alright... let's see how this plays out."

-118 HP!

John winced, but didn’t move as the teeth latched onto his arm. It was a relatively small amount of health compared to his totals, though that didn’t make the sensation of long fangs piercing through his skin any more appealing. The dog snarled and began to jerk its head back and forth, tearing and chewing at the skin. John grimaced as it took considerable strength of will to resist the urge to either pull his arm away or lash out at the offending creature, forcing himself to suppress both fight and flight.

“Not yet. She’s a Star Guardian at heart. She’ll notice soon.”

-82 HP!
-93 HP!
-117 HP!
Status Effect: Bleed

Not quite quickly enough to save another few hundred hit points from dripping away, of course, but Vallya did eventually seem to notice something was amiss. The sounds of combat came to an abrupt halt, one last yip of terror and pain breaking through the dense greenery, followed by a quick and smooth rustling as Vallya soared into the spawn clearing once more.

“Master, what-”

Vallya instinctively lifted one of her hands when she saw the Frenzy Dog latched onto John’s arm, violet fire already held above the palm of her hand, flickering and crackling with malevolent potential. But she had only just begun to make the motion to throw it when she noticed John’s even gaze, the complete lack of response he was giving the furious Barrier creature, and the way he wasn’t moving even as streams of blood trickled out around the dog’s lips, Gamer’s Body unable to heal the wounds while they were still occupied.

“I could use some help here,” John said, making an effort to keep his voice level and his face as still as possible.

-78 HP!

“What are you up to?” Vallya asked, her eyes flickering between the dog and John, suspicion warring against an equal mixture of protectiveness and vindictiveness.

-114 HP!

“Nothing, I just need some help. Mind taking care of this one for me?” John asked, as casually as if he were inviting Vallya to go for a walk. He gestured with his free arm at the one currently being mauled, smiling warmly the whole while. Vallya’s face twitched and flickered as she tried to decide what John was expecting, what he wanted her to do, what she even wanted to do.

-92 HP!

“You’re going to get seriously hurt!”

The words came out with an angry, scolding tone, the kind a mother might use on a reckless child. The ball of fire careened from Vallya’s hand with a practiced flick, colliding with the Frenzy Dog and exploding viciously. John felt the flames wash over his arm with a gentle, cooling touch, an almost aloe-like sensation as the flames chilled and sterilized his wound before Gamer’s Body quickly whisked it away entirely.

The flames were not so gentle with the demonic hound, which was launched violently back, purple flames searing and scorching its fur. Vallya floated after the beast hesitantly, her eyes still twitching uncertainly as she approached the Frenzy Dog with two more spheres. Her pink irises locked onto John’s as she hovered past him, a deeply wary look seeping out from her. John kept his smile wide and gave her a thankful nod as she went – and the very moment that she was past him, when he saw her eyes fully lock onto the monster that was already climbing back onto its feet, he released his Elemental Infusion entirely. The stone he was controlling crumbled, the balls of clay crumbling to heaps by his boots.

“Thanks, Vallya,” John said happily as Vallya cast both of the orbs forward, catching the creature mid-air and incinerating it almost entirely. The beast fell to the ground in a heap, not even getting out a final whimper as it crumpled.

“Just what are you up to, exactly?” Vallya asked piercingly, turning to face John. She was mid-whirl when the second Frenzy Dog arrived, twice as angry as the first and ignoring the Kitsune entirely as it launched itself at the man who had imprisoned it. John **** his eyes to stay forward, **** himself to remain perfectly focused on Vallya. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as a smile plastered itself to his face.

“Nothing! I just- AH!”

-187 HP!
-143 HP!

There was a sense of relief, almost, as the teeth sunk in this time. John didn’t bother pretending – if anything, he exaggerated the agony, falling to one knee as the Frenzy Dog latched onto his wrist and began to furiously tear at him, shaking its head back and forth in a furious motion that more than lived up to its name.

Vallya’s eyes shot open wide, and this time, whatever confusion or hesitation she felt was drowned out. Anger poured from every detail of her features, a fire not unlike the one she now held in her palm, a glistening inferno that formed a spear-like bolt as it careened from her hand and pierced the hound, knocking it off John’s arm. Its teeth tore at his flesh one last time as it was pulled away, howling and screaming the whole while.

-37 HP!

“You little vermin. How dare you hurt him!”

Vallya twisted her hand and the fires now embedded in the hound’s chest grew more intense, licking along its underbelly. There was no explosion this time, and the damage was limited – enough to maim, to inflict agony, not to kill. The hound whimpered and howled, struggling in vain to free itself, but whatever technique Vallya had used to shape the spear of fire was strong enough to hold it as she slowly incinerated the beast.

“Vallya,” John warned, his voice quiet but firm, “finish it off.”

“What? I know it’s a Barrier creature, but I should still teach it-”

“Do you want to be a Star Guardian, or a spirit of vengeance?”

Vallya blinked, the words having a remarkable effect on her. Unlike with her actions toward John, there was no obvious break in her tone or pose as guilt washed over her, but rather, she seemed as if she were awakening from a dream of some sort. Vallya turned her eyes back to the Frenzy Dog and twisted her wrist once. The flames intensified again, earning a mourning howl of misery, but this time there was no joy in Vallya’s expression at it. She frowned, flinching away from the beast and tossing a second ball of conjured fire its way, almost as if trying to chase the beast away. This one exploded with a lethal amount of ****, shattering the tree trunk the demonic canine was pinned to and finishing it off at last.

“I even knew that you were messing with me,” Vallya murmured. “I knew it, and I still wanted to take it all out on that thing!”

“You were-”

John paused for a moment, glancing over his shoulder as a scraping and padding sound grew rapidly louder, a much heavier sounding noise than the ones from earlier. John and Vallya both lifted into the air in unison as a Frenzy Dog twice the size of the others rampaged into the clearing. It snapped and snarled at the air around it for a few moments, until it eventually realized that its prey was now airborne. The creature looked up and leaped, moving through the air nearly as rapidly as they did, its teeth gnashing the whole while. It might have caught their legs, were it not for the blade that struck home in its sizable chest at the same moment two blue spheres of fire erupted on its body, one on each side.

The canine wheezed in a rather sickly way as its momentum was brought to a halt, all the air knocked out of it by the nearly simultaneous strikes.

“You were worried about me,” John finished, glancing over at Vallya as she hovered next to him. His control over the winds he used to fly were getting better, enough that he could hold a conversation without screaming, though with the added sound of the trees he was disturbing rustling around them, it was still a bit louder than normal.

“If I was just worried about you, that’d be one thing,” Vallya responded unhappily. “This was different.”

“You may have taken it too far, but you had a perfect chance to torment that other one and chose not to. It wasn’t until I looked genuinely hurt, genuinely afraid, that you were set off,” John noted. “I don’t think this anger in you only comes up for things that Jiina would’ve been set off by. For all that she claimed to be interested in me, she-”

John’s words halted for an instant as the mini-boss below started to get back to its feet. It didn’t seem to have learned its lesson the first time – John wasn’t even sure if these berserk fighters could learn – and was already preparing to leap again, even with John’s blade still embedded in its chest.

The Gamer put his fingers out like a gun and cast a White Lightning that honed in on the blade’s pommel like a lightning rod, carrying the magical electricity directly into the beast’s chest. For good measure, he activate the Rune of Channeling and cast his Fire Orbs spell with the blade as its point of origin. John didn’t even see the fiery globes form – he just watched as the Frenzy Dog’s chest expanded from three consecutive explosions, billows of fire and smoke emanating from the hole his blade had left in its ribs. This time, the dog didn’t get back up.

“-she would’ve loved to see me in pain. She made that very clear,” John remarked, eyes widening a bit at the memory of how she’d spoken to him.

“And how does that help me?”

“It shows what I already suspected. You aren’t losing yourself, Vallya,” John said, walking over to the downtrodden Kitsune as the Dungeon Barrier broke up and faded around them. He took her hands gently into his own, rubbing the backs of her fingers with his thumb. “At least, I don’t think so. Look, I get that this is new, and I’m bullshitting my way through a lot of it. But I’ve been doing that for over a year now, and it, uh, well, it’s gone okay so far?”

“Very reassuring,” Vallya said, giving John a pointed glare.

“My point is, you’ve been worried about losing yourself, but so far you’ve always had a reason,” John continued, not heeding her snark. “Even a small one. This feeling inside you, this piece of Jiina, it’s amplifying your feelings. Just like the Shard of Bishamonten amplifies my anger. It can’t **** you to feel things, but it can amplify them. You were mad at Magnus for hitting his brother. You obviously don’t like it when I keep things from you. And you stopped being worried about me and angry at the Frenzy Dog when you noticed that I wasn’t reacting to it, that I was letting it hurt me. When I cried out in pain, when you thought I was in real danger and you wanted to protect me…”

“...I did. And then I wanted to see it burn,” Vallya emphasized, shuddering as she spoke the words.

“Exactly.”

“So, what, I have to just learn to never get angry? About anything?” Vallya asked, scoffing for a moment. “I guess I could have Tricia make me one of those suppressors. Kill my whole anger system.”

“I don’t know whether that’s necessary,” John cautioned. “Besides, like Lerianna told me when she was talking about her libido, suppressing one part of your emotional response system can have a lot of unintended side effects. The best scenario would probably be you gaining control over whatever’s inside of you the same way I did the Shard – through lots of training and experiencing the worst it can throw at you. But that’s not something you can do at will, and your situation isn’t exactly the same, so I don’t know for sure whether that’s an option or not.”

“Then what do I do? How do I stop lashing out at people because of some petty little thing?” Vallya flailed her arms about, her voice rising as her exasperation took over. “It seems to happen so fast and from things so small that I don’t have a clue it’s happening until I’m basically torturing someone!”

“You stopped when I asked you to,” John pointed out. “You cared more about what I thought than you did about hurting that monster. I think the best answer we have right now is the same one I gave you before. It’s just not something easy to do. You have to change your mindset. You need to find something stronger than that anger. You have to find things you care about even more passionately. Something you can’t live without – or failing that, things you’d gladly die to return. Something that’s so important to you that the drive to protect it runs stronger than your cravings for vengeance.”

“What’s stronger than the sadistic urges of a goddess whose whole existence is based around penitence and retribution?”

Vallya looked to John as she had so often as of late, as a drowning woman giving her last lurch toward the man holding the only life preserver in existence. John swallowed before he answered, feeling his heart and mind burdened with that dependence.

“Love.”

Vallya let a beat pass, her face unmoving. Then she snorted lightly, a disbelieving giggle escaping from her lips before she could stop it.

“Is that what you’ve got for me? Cliches and platitudes? It’s sweet, John, but we don’t live in a romance novel.”

“...I’d have died for her, if I could.”

Vallya fell still again, and this time, there was no easy break from it. She blinked once or twice, her mouth falling open, but her throat closed tightly, her breath and words choked away from her before they could even fully form.

“It was part of the grieving. I guess it always is. Denial, anger, bargaining, and all that,” John murmured, not staring at Vallya herself, but turning his eyes toward the ground. “But it wasn’t just grieving - and it wasn’t only after the anger. It was before, and during, and it’s still there to this day. It’s a consistent decision I’ve probably spent way too much time thinking about, not some spur of the moment thing. Believe me, I’ve done some terrible, awful things as a result of my grief. I don’t regret many of them, but… do you know what I said to the leader of the Albidians before I killed him? No, I shouldn’t try to minimize it. Do you know what I said before I tortured him to ****?”

Vallya remained silent. He didn’t seem to really want an answer – he knew it anyway.

“He put me under a spell, some kind of an enchantment, like the ones on the **** collars – but stronger. It made me want to serve him. The only thing that saved me was my anger,” John admitted. “It was the most powerful spell they could create for me. It made the idea of obeying him, in his words, ‘more important than breathing’. And that was the only reason it didn’t work. I was so… unbelievably angry that in those moments, at any point during that fight, if I had the choice between walking away alive or dying alongside him, I’d have slit my own throat if it meant taking that fucker down.

“Even knowing it would mean trapping people back in my world until someone found the Portal Stone. Even knowing Sophia was bound to my soul and would die with me. Even with all that, I was so angry, I hated him so much, that compared to that, everything else felt meaningless. I said… I said some things that I regret. Things I’m glad only one other person was there to hear, and that I wish she hadn’t been **** to hear either. But, for all that? As angry as I was?”

John’s next word broke as it tried to crawl free of him. He coughed a little, forcing his tight throat open against its will, panting slightly as tears trailed their way down his cheeks.

“The only thing that would have stopped me was her. If… if there was a spell, a ritual, or just a devil offering some kind of deal, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant dying. Even if it meant letting Joaquin go. At my darkest hour, when I did things I still see at night in dreams that are too fucked up to tell if they’re nightmares or not, she was still my first thought. Still the only thing I really wanted.”

“John, I-”

“Don’t.” It wasn’t an angry word, but it was a resolute one. John held up his hand, not daring to look up, not sure he could move his face at all without the entire thing shattering into a ruined mess.

“I’m not telling you this to make you sad, or for sympathy. I’m telling you this so you understand I’m not just shoveling false hope at you. I’m telling you that I’ve been there. I’ve faced the strongest compulsion that another person could throw at me, the most they could try to manipulate me, and I found something strong enough to hold myself together. Two things, I guess - hate and love. So you know what? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it won’t be love for you, or even hate. Maybe there’s something else at the center of your being - part of your pride as a Star Guardian, maybe, or friendship, or your connection to this world and the people in it. However strong this feeling may seem, it may be based on your own emotions, but it’s not you, and it hasn’t changed who you are. It’s just a piece of Jiina, going up against all of you. I’m sure of that now. So take your time. Take a good look at yourself, at whatever’s deep down in your core. When you find that...”