The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Light-Hearted

I was two and one—a division and then a unity. Lines blurred, edges faded, and then there was a connection. My twin and I were, after all, originally the same. Were still one, for all that they were also separate. Linking themselves together was as easy as coming apart, if somewhat more spectacular.

It couldn't be helped, though. They were the Dual Contending Forces. To unite, they had no choice but to come apart and forcibly merge, splitting along the lines that separated them in order to come back together. As they divided, they felt themselves waver, as if the solidity of their existences had been disrupted. In that moment, they were energy as much as matter, wavelengths and signals that communicated and aligned. At the same time, they were matter and antimatter, something bound to disrupt and eradicate on contact. Though they could draw lines like 'the original' here and 'the second' there, the truth of the matter was that they were identical, pieces split equally and housing halves of the same soul. If anything, they were both copies and it was only by merging that they could recreate the original.

And wasn't that was the point? They were Thaumiel, the Duality and Twins of God. The division of that which is perfect only in unity—of Keter, the Crown. It only made sense, then, that Keter be here as well—and he was.

At the center of it all, there was light. A riotous calamity of power and forces, only barely contained by their Light Elemental's power. They couldn't blame him for struggling, consider the magnitude of the power in question—Raven's temporal trick had created something that had shocked even him, a cycle of endlessly increasing light. That Keter was able to control it at all, even just for a moment, was astonishing.

But then, he was the Light, or at least my Light. There was more at work now than a struggle of physical forces; this was as much a mental effort as a matter of power and a test of being more than even that. Who they were, what they were, what they believed, what they hoped for, and what they intended—the answers to those questions meant more than any amount of MP, here and now.

And thankfully, I knew all of those answers now, or at least thought I did. There was still a great deal missing in terms of memories and such, but that was okay. I was 'Keter', what laid above the mind's ability to comprehend. Even if I couldn't remember, I knew and I was. I was Jaune Arc and Jian Bing and Keter and Metatron. I was me—and I simply was.

It was enough. My divided selves fully lost coherence, coming apart and flowing back into place. They came together like a collision of particles, a fusion in addition to a reunification—a resonance and a chemical process, a release of energy and a change of state. People existed on countless levels that most of them weren't even aware of, but as I became one again, I was aware of them all. I became myself again as my halves underwent a convergence of being.

And trapped between them, held in place by my will and my soul, was Keter—and all the power we'd managed to gather thanks to Raven. If it had been power alone, it wouldn't have mattered; the reunification of my halves operated only partially in Malkuth and couldn't be affected by a gathering of energy any more than it could be stopped by physical distance or barriers.

But because Keter was there, it was more than just a lot of energy. All throughout that conflagration of power was my Elemental—a part of my soul given physical form in the world by attaching itself to something else; a part of the world with 'substance,' something that didn't apply to a soul on its own. Like Thaumiel, it was a part of me, at once separate and united. That was how skills like Agni worked, after all; they temporarily fused those parts back together, just like I was piecing myself back together now.

And those similarities were why I'd first considered this, why I'd had the idea and tested it out.

I'd obtained Agni and the skills like it by using Tiferet, but the process wasn't a fusion as such. I wasn't entirely sure how it worked, but I was pretty sure it did so along lines of similarity. Rather than creating skills, I was finding them, having my Semblance draw upon ancient knowing in a fashion similar to however it created skill books. I gave it reference points and the power it needed to search for something useful, connecting the dots I laid out for it. At a guess, that had something to do with the nature of my Semblance or the nature of Keter—what remained above 'knowledge' or 'thought,' above 'action' or 'formulation.' The spark that eventually grows into something more. It was probably connected to why I was so skills with sensory techniques, too, and why my soul had a million eyes.

Even so, Tiferet couldn't do everything; it had its limits. The first, of course, was the need for reference points, allowing it to find something specific. Without that, I assumed there was simply too much to find anything specific—if I was drawing from a well that went above thought or even separation and individuality, the signal to noise ratio was probably rather severe. That could be dealt with by learning more skills and became easier as Tiferet's level improved, presumably allowing it to find things with less specific information.

The second was trickier to work around—Tiferet couldn't find what wasn't there. It was the center of the Sephirot, connecting every point but Malkuth, the place where everything would take shape…but it needed to have taken shape for Tiferet to work. Someone needed to have put the pieces together, to created results and completed a process for it to exist as a fact instead of a concept.

That wasn't even a weakness, per se; Tiferet was a point of integration, allowing me to stand on the shoulders of giants. That's what Mankind did, in science and literature and everything else. We built upon successes and tried to learn from failures. My power, great as it was…I owed it all to others. To the countless people who'd struggled and works for years or decades to create the skills I now used in concert. That I'd mastered and combined to create something greater.

But the fact remained that Tiferet couldn't create things—couldn't build things on its own. It was where things came together, drawing up knowledge and ideas and drawing down what had been lost from human memory. It was a balance of surrounding forces—but the one Sephirot that it didn't touch directly was Malkuth, the Kingdom. Instead, it touched upon the Foundation of Yesod, because that was what it had provided.

Tiferet couldn't create things—but I could. I had, with magic Missile so long ago. Given the choice, I preferred to make use of what had already been perfected, but I could make new things as well.

So I had. When, even after my ability to summon Elements improved, Tiferet hadn't offered any skills above those like Agni, I'd accepted the truth—that such skills likely didn't exist. Elementals were a power that few could access to begin with and which even fewer did. Of those, how many mastered them? And how many obtained access to higher Elementals? How many people, in all of history, had reached the point of a Dimensional or a Light Elemental? Very few, in all likelihood. So it was unlikely anyone would have been able to create something like Agni for me to draw from.

Which meant I just had to do it myself. I knew the process, after all. Even if I hadn't gained that knowledge along with my mastery of the skill, my senses made it easy to see the details and the minutia. All I needed was to put it into practice, which was easier said than done.

But now, I had everything I needed and then some.

What I was making now, like all things, began with an idea. Skills—the things my power interpreted as skills—covered a broad array of possibilities. If was, in many ways, an exception, but in most cases Aura-based techniques weren't a science. At least, subjectively they weren't; objectively, you could break down the how's and why's and all the variables and see how something worked, and in many ways I thought that was what my power did.

But for most people, skills in general were more art form than science, if generally martial art form. They were something a person learned and practiced for years, like a normal fighting style, figuring out the tricks and the quirks, practicing for days, months, and years until they figured it out. From the outside looking in, you could analyze the mechanics of a martial art's fighting, break it down into biology, ranges of motion, and an interaction of forces. And that view of things is both accurate and true, but it's not complete. From the perspective of the fighter, it's not just a matter of kinetic energy and chemical responses; it was a matter of training, reflex, instinct, and memory. The punches and blocks, the reactions to shifts in the flow of battle, they weren't just methodical responses to the situation; there was a person behind the fists and it was important to remember that.

Similarly, learning to create fire or channel power through the body to achieve some great feat…it wasn't just a matter of the movement of MP. For me it was streamlined—not automated, still something I knew and felt, but still nearly effortless; so long as I had the power, I could perform the skill, as easily as if I were breathing. I didn't have to think about the idea or science or even heart behind it, though I knew them; Keter was something above all that, while simultaneously encompassed it.

For others, however…

The soul wasn't something that could be boiled down to just the numbers and the facts—not all the time, not in every case. Because the soul wasn't just one thing, wasn't just this or that, here or there. It was a matter of expression, of who a person truly was, and things that drew from its power were colored by it. A person could have a natural ability in one thing and a complete lack of talent in another, simply because of who they were. The ultimate expression of that was their Semblance, but it applied in other ways, too. There was no guarantee that following the same steps would have equal results for every person.

And even if two people managed to master, say, Magic Missile, that didn't mean they'd create the same thing—it could vary not only from person to person but from day to day. I could be certain my skills would do what they were supposed to do when activated, unless affected by an external forces, but if someone else summoned fire while relaxing and summoned it while consumed by fury, they results would almost certainly differ. They might draw more power to fuel it without thinking, something they couldn't identify mathematically without something suited for the task, but even if they used the same amount of power there were bound to be differences. This person's flames could be hotter than another's, generate more smoke, cause more pain, or any number of other things. One of the reasons learning skills was so hard for normal people was the simple fact that nothing about the process was certain. Things that drew power from the soul could be changed by the soul.

How much that was true varied from skill to skill as well. Elemental skills weren't the best example because unless they were created using Dust, they depended on the user's Elemental Affinity—their Aura's natural affinity with a specific element. As that depended on the nature of their soul to begin with, it was more likely to vary; something simple like a Far Strike, would probably be changed less. At the same time, it only made sense that things that drew more from the soul would be more personalized.

Elementals were perhaps the best example of that. A part of the user's soul given physical form through a medium they had an affinity with, the nature and identity of the entity created were completely in the air. How it looked, how it acted, how much control the user had over it…there was no way to be sure of anything.

That was true even for me. Simple skills required only MP, but greater ones could call for other things. My Elementals required an Affinity that my Semblance and skills thankfully granted, just as many of my stat skills demanded some special condition or another that it handled. Things like that, my Semblance could break down easily enough.

But with some of the greater skills I knew—the Brahmastra, Ohr Ein Sof, Sahasrara, and Thaumiel, to name a few—there was more to it than just numbers. The first time I'd received a skill with a 'Special' cost had been an eye opener for me; it required something my Semblance couldn't quantify.

It made sense in a way. Malkuth—the Kingdom, the realm of the physical laws and actions, where things take shape—was a place of 'concrete' things. Things that are solid, that are defined and work in specific ways. Physics, matter, energy. Time, space, and distance. It was when those things interacted with Aura that shenanigans ensued and things that drew more from the realms above Malkuth were, by their very nature, harder to define.

Skills like Agni were good examples. Skills that merged a fractured soul into something greater than its parts, it varied on countless levels. The person, the Elemental, and more. Agni itself had been a name—the name of its user, specifically. It was entirely possible I could only imitate it because of my Semblance and Tiferet; that had anyone else tried, it would have manifested differently. A transformation into a being of fire, perhaps, or something in the other direction; merging the person with the Elemental, instead of vice versa.

Something like that was personal and complicated—and I was trying to do something even greater, merging not just with one Elemental but with my Light Elemental, who'd been created from all the pieces of my soul. Even for me, that wasn't something that could be done easily.

But I knew how to do it, because of the skills I'd already learned.

To begin with, I needed power. Power alone wouldn't be enough for this, but I still needed it; this was a process that would take energy on an absurd scale. More than I could generate on my own, even given an amount of time that would be completely unreasonable to ask for in a fight. Originally, the plan had been to generate this power in the fight against Malkuth, drawing upon both Lucifer and Malkuth's seemingly endless reserves. Lux Aeterna had converted that energy into light and I'd fed it into Keter to contain it. Even then, I hadn't been sure if it would have been enough and Malkuth had trapped Keter before I could follow through with it regardless.

Thankfully, Raven had come through with more than I could have possibly asked for, a gathering of raw, contained Light beyond anything I had even imagined being able to get under these conditions. There were no certainties—couldn't be, really, with something like this—but this was everything I could hope for and then some. I'd just have to hope it was enough.

The rest was trickier. Agni, Kubera, Varuna and the others had several things in common and power was only one of them. Agni had formed in battle, Kubera in the face of the death of his people, Varuna in the wake of unbelievable disaster. The presence of power to draw upon in each case, but also need. Necessity was the mother of invention, and it played a role.

That was the first hurdle I'd had to figure out a way around. And I had motivation, yes, and a desperate need, but they were calm things, intellectual. I needed power to defeat a foe, but they were a distant one, shadowed in unknowns. I was terrified of Malkuth and his minions, for completely logical reasons; they were nightmarishly powerful, after all. I knew I had to defeat them somehow, for me, my friends, and the entire world—but it was a little hard to be that hard pressed when mulling things over on a couch. Even without the Gamer's Mind, I'm not sure if I could have done it; I was worried and desperate, but not like I'd been when it was my father on the line.

In truth, that had been another part of why I'd put myself on a time limit, why I'd given myself only a week to prepare. Malkuth was a world-ending threat, yes, but it was hard to really conceptualize or feel a danger that was wrapped in secrets and maybes. Malkuth's strength, the strength of the Legendary Grimm…I had to see it for myself. Had to test their limits and mine, push myself to the breaking point, and not just know but experience what I was up against, what was at stake.

Gilgamesh had pushed me more than I had been in a while, but even he hadn't been enough in the end. He hurt me, might have even been able to kill me early on if he'd wanted to, but I'd had plenty of things in my bag of tricks and I'd pulled them out one after another. I'd set things up in my favor, changed the tide, and I'd known all the while that I could win. That I'd need to be cautious, careful, and do things right, but that this was a foe I was theoretically able to defeat. He hadn't been what I'd needed and if I'd won against him and Malkuth hadn't appeared, I might have been relieved—this is all I was up against? Even if he turned out to be one of the weaker Legendary Grimm, if I could beat him, then with enough effort, enough time, I could defeat the others, too.

But Malkuth had appeared. He was weakened, limited by his current form, but he was here, and I'd thrown my best hits at him.

He'd shrugged them off like rain. Crushed me. Terrified me when he tore apart my plans and captured Keter. Ripped through my barriers and went after the ones I'd loved, forcing me to pull out the Arcana—and even then I'd known he was holding back. He even withstood an assault from Raven and I that would have annihilated me with ease.

If I couldn't even match him as he was now…then how was I ever going to face the real deal. I'd lost before, when my previous self had had centuries more experience and I was losing again now. Fighting him, facing him, it had made me wonder. Maybe even doubt.

Good.

And to cape it all off, I had a blurring of the self. That was the other thing those skills had in common—an understanding of who they were, but also a blurring of the lines. I knew who I was already, what my Elementals were, but it hadn't been enough.

This was something else. Thaumiel, pushed to its limits. The use of Ohr Ein Sof, nearly unmaking me each time. Coming apart and back together—seeing, feeling, knowing.

It made the difference and all my pieces came together at last. I felt power flowing through my being, power beyond words—but it was nothing compared to the certainty, the feeling of wholeness and completion. The knowledge of a simple truth.

I am.

Opening the eyes of my new self, I saw the world around me. Raven behind me, Malkuth before me, both of them stopping just to stare at what had happened. In my heart, I could feel the Arcana shifting, and before my eyes…

You've thought of a new skill. Would you like to name it?

I paused for a moment, considering it. Those who'd come before me—or perhaps just Tiferet—had named skills like this after themselves, or else had taken those names for their own afterwards. Perhaps they'd been their human names or the names of their Elementals or maybe they'd even found their true ones, as I had so long ago. But in my case, what should that name be? Jaune? Jian? Keter? All names that were mine, that were important to me.

But here and now, knowing what I was doing and why I was fighting, with my goal almost in sight…with the computer I'd left myself still waiting…

I suppose there was only one thing it could be. Out loud, I could call it something else, but this skill was mine, the combination of everything I was, and it deserved the name.

With a thought, I titled it Metatron.