The Bellators

4:9:6

 Silence fills a different room, one shaped as a cube lit up bright as on all the exterior surfaces are grids of screens displaying real time footage from the many rooms and areas of the train, sensory overload to the extent where it's difficult to focus on any one of them, in fact it's not designed to be as that's the justification for the many desks spread across whether it be the few personal desks on the edges and corners towards the top of the room, the longer tables –though is split in half and on the ground– occupied by more chairs on the center floor, or the remainder of the room beneath that center which likely houses similar furniture. However, the single person standing on the center floor, which has a skeletal design to allow for sight below, isn't at all focused on any of the screens, but rather the contents inside this room.

That person is the senile bald man in the brown overcoat, clutching onto his makeshift handgun with copper wires wrapped around the barrel, aiming it in all directions with rather frantic motions despite there seemingly being no threat.

Yet that man's face is nothing but safe, his expression wearing a mixture of dread, terror, and reluctance. He stumbles back, glancing from side to side, waiting as he knows he can't be the one to initiate. All he can do is wait for a threat that seems invisible, or just generally nonexistent.

There behind him a silhouette leaps up onto the wall from below, a jump high enough that it lands him higher than the man's position, and in the two hands of that silhouette are katanas with both blades pointing up. Immediately the old man's yellow eyes expand in horror, as without even hearing a sound he senses the danger and spins around just as the silhouette launches off the wall straight for the man who aims his gun, and from his perspective he aligns the barrel with the silhouette who's revealed to be the Swordsman in the purple hakama whom he fires a light red glowing bolt at that suddenly bursts out a similarly colored translucent sphere that consumes the Swordsman, one that doesn't move at all but instead suspends the Swordsman in the air as the bubble doesn't seem affected by the train's gravity. Furthermore, the inside of the bubble seems to hold some sort of watery content as the man isn't standing on the bottom but instead is also hovering, with bubbles emitting from his mouth and nose and the vaguely discernible particles registerable.

But with a rapid flurry of slashes with both katanas at speeds such that all that can be observed are blurs, that red bubble pops in an instant, unleashing a flood of red-tinted water that pours down below onto the bottom floor, freeing the Swordsman but after having his momentum suspended he can't conclude his launch, and instead he spins both blades backwards which strangely forces him to plummet down faster, as though the speed of his spins itself is able to generate its own current to carry him. Regardless, just as quickly as he appeared, he vanished, leaving the Alchemist to stumble back, his attempt of detainment again failing.

Again alone with no sight of the threat, the Alchemist is forced to just make glances to the side with no real direction, only having the option of waiting and warding off the next advance, though that only repeats the cycle that's been continuing since the start of this battle if it can be defined as such at all.

And similarly repetitive in this fight, the voice of that man speaks again with echoes that drown the room, the deep voice with a judgemental attitude, judgemental and disappointed, "There's many questions I could ask you, there's a handful of pointless ice breaker questions any of them would ask and then there are a few more critical questions I myself am curious about, but if I could only get one answer I'd want to know: from the beginning when you first joined our crew, did you always have the intention of one day leaving, that it'd only be temporary and you'd part ways sooner or later? I am genuinely curious, I know you've lived a life far longer than all of ours, far longer than ours combined actually, maybe to us those years felt like a lifetime but I imagine to you it was like a short nap at best, maybe a restroom break. Maybe they're the ones who are too emotional over this because it really wasn't all that big of a deal, we just passed by each other and that's it. Is that it?"