One More Chance ( A Date A Live Fanfic )

Chapter Seven

        Shido lay rested on a bed in one of the resting cabins of Fraxinus. He had put up what can only be termed as a ' Dramatic show ' outside just now. He wasn't injured in the slightest by accessing the Formless Realm, not by a long shot. He was someone who had already reached the state where he could harness blade force , how could he be injured by merely entering the Formless Realm ? But , in order to convince everyone that he was still a normal human, he had to do it. Still, perhaps he went a little bit overboard with the kid . Sure , she broke the rules of the duel, even if by accident so he was genuinely pissed off at her. But maybe he should have just carved out her stomach, maybe ? He had in fact considered it , but considering that there was a high chance that he would accidentally take out a few organs due to the stomach being made out of purely soft tissue unlike the rib cage, he went against it. 

       The reason he cared for the formal duel between swordsmen was because he deeply respected the craft. His swordsmanship  was one of the few things that he was gifted with since birth and he was deeply engrossed in it. Of course, when he was nine years old, he had given up on the blade. It wasn't because he was bored with his kendo classes like any other kid his age would have. No , the reason, just like him was strange in every sense of the word. 

      He remembered staring at not just the kids but also adults for hours whenever he himself was not training. He remembered observing them practice their swings or engaging in mock fights with each other. And whenever he stared at them, he always thought of their actions as foolish and futile. He saw them swinging their blade. They thought of it as a sport , a way to clear their minds and train their bodies. However, even in his youthful eyes, their actions were not just useless , but also disrespectful , for in his opinion, since their blade never drew blood, it was a useless blade….

       He always thought that the blade only has a single purpose, to take a life. All other paths upon which a swordmaster could tread were inefficient and futile. Any deviation from this path will only lead to your blade rusting and your skill perishing. At the age where most kids could barely understand death , his young self had already established a preconceived notion of imparting it to others ! Such was his dedication to the blade. 

       

           For him , that was all a blade could accomplish. Taking lives was all a blade was capable of and all it should ever be capable of. Of course, he wasn't an idiot and knew that his thoughts went against the established common sense of the masses. As such, he kept his thoughts to himself. The reason he gave up on the blade was because he knew that any other path that he would try to tread with the blade would never be possible for him. Perhaps he could do it , but he himself would never be satisfied. And perhaps it was appropriate too. After all, what use is the power to  kill another ? The systems that exist in place have laws that put limits on a person's actions. As such, one does not have a necessity to kill another or be afraid of someone else killing you. As such, he had discarded the blade under that pretense. 

        Of course, this sort of thinking would be strange for any human, let alone an eight year old child. But now that he had a basic idea about what kind of person he must have been in his past life as Rhadamanthus, perhaps this sort of thinking made sense. Even after his memories were sealed, certain aspects of his personality  and his ideals of the blade must have still been retained which manifested as his strange thoughts. After all, from the knowledge he had received , he was the one who had created the ' Slaughterer's Path ' swordstyle that he had used extensively throughout his life and was still using even now. Upon gaining the memories and skills of the swordstyle, there also was a message along with it. Like a small post it note that you write to remind yourself of something in the future, this too was the same. It read , " To my future self I leave this message. The following is a culmination of years of my skill and experience. If you choose to walk this path , great power awaits you. However do keep in mind that the path you walk on will only be treaded with blood. If you lose hope and stop midway, that same blood will drown you ...."  In the past he used to think that he had become a monster after his family had died. But knowing and thinking about his acts as Rhadamanthus, it seemed that he had always been a monster….