"Ideal Release!"
Toru quickly slashed at the air before quickly sheathing his sword. A slash of green Aether way off target began to fly into the sky, before realigning itself in the direction of Xander.
He remained quiet for a moment before suddenly running towards Toru once again, catching back up to him in only a couple moments.
Xander threw a punch which Toru quickly parried with his sword as he jumped back, but Toru used the momentum to deflect the earlier Aether slash away before it hit him.
It ended up hitting a pile of destroyed Unison council weapons, easily passing through them as it cut through it all in half. Strangely the slash sharply changed directions, quickly realigning itself back with Xander.
It was obvious this was some basic Aether control, yet there was something strange mixed in it.
Using this new opportunity, Toru threw another 2 additional slashes of green Aether. Both flying out in seemingly random directions before turning around, and heading straight towards Xander.
The martial artist quickly dodged them with an array of gymnastics and leaps, all while heading towards Toru, yet the slashes realigned themselves and were heading towards him once again.
This time Xander manifested 3 orbs of Aether, each being fired at one of the slashes. But rather then destroying them, each of the slashes instead split in half, decreasing in size yet growing in speed and number.
Xander had to halt as the slashes would hit him before he reached Toru, even if he blasted them all away with Aether, he felt that they would just multiply and come at him even faster. So to survive, he used flow control and easily started to deflect the attacks with the back of his palm.
Like the calm stream of a river peacefully flowing through a mountain, each of Xander's strikes carefully slapped away the slashes while never destroying them. They quickly turned back around towards him once again, but just as quickly they were instantly deflected.
Although he was lasting, this was his worst mistake yet.
Since flow control required the user to hold still, Xander was effectively a sitting duck. This let Toru perform 4 more additional slashes which Xander had to deflect, all while the others quickly turned around and came for him.
In total, 8 slashes of Aether were prowling around Xander, like a fish surrounded by a hoard of sharks.
Borrowers possessed a variety of powers through the use of Aether manipulation, but their greatest one was their Ideal, the 5th and most powerful form of Aether manipulation, roughly making up half of their strength.
Every human starts out as a blank canvas. As they grow, memories and experiences are painted onto that canvas, transforming that emptiness into a masterpiece. Effectively, this is what creates the self or a personality.
The thing that makes that self beautiful, the definition of its shape and nature, was it's desire or Ideal.
'I want to be the strongest.', 'I want to go to space.', 'I want everyone to be happy.', all these Ideals defined what that human was.
The reason why Borrowers are powerful, is because of their ability to take these ideals, and forcefully manifest them into reality with Aether.
These Ideals were split into two types. The 'Ideal Self', and 'Ideal Reality'.
Ideal Self makes use of Aether to transform the body into the best version of themselves that they could possibly think of, while Ideal Reality transformed the world around them into the one they desired the most.
Naturally, both had their eventual limits decided by their Aether capacity and output, but the Ideal itself is dependent on its user. Whether or not their Ideal changes for good or for worse, it wasn't up to them but the life they lived.
Xander continued to struggle against the numerous slashes, while Toru just kept dishing out more and more. 12..14..16..18.. until the number grew to big for it to be kept track of.
Aether control of this level shouldn't have been possible for someone of his level.
Even Xander was starting to waver as the slashes started to damage him. His hands were slowly covered in cuts as his body started to take damaged too. Even if he used flow control, he was still bound by how many he could deflect at a time. At some point, Xander was completely hidden inside the flood of green slashes that never ended.
"I'm quite a lazy guy, but being in battle only allowed the opposite. I kept losing and losing, so I went to sleep everyday, wishing for the power to win with as little effort as possible. Of course, projection with enough training could do that, but you know how I am already. Eventually I ended up manifesting this Ideal Self one day. I call it, the flowing torrent of death."
This Ideal was a self type Ideal that demanded all of his Aether attacks would automatically target the enemy forever. It didn't matter how many, and Toru didn't have to constantly control them either. He could keep dishing out attacks and they would all chase Xander endlessly, as long as the target remained in his line of sight, regardless of if it was obstructed. But Xander didn't know this of course.
It was just like a relentless torrent, clashing against a human that had gotten caught. No matter how hard they may try, the waves would forever push them further down into the depths, until they could rise no more.
Eventually, he just suddenly gave up. His flow control faded away as the hurricane made of slashes, finally got to devour him. He was ripped, torn apart, and shredded to pieces as his body was completely obscured.
Maybe he was hoping that since he was hidden that the ability would cease, but of course this wasn't the case.
Splatters of blood began to fly out as he was skinned alive. There was no possible way he could've survived.
Seeing this, Toru slowly began to relax his guard. He took a heavy breathe of relief as he cracked his neck and sheathed his sword.
"Finally! That guy was such a pain! There's always a guy like him once in a while that pushes me to my limit. Any longer, and I would've broken! Anyhow, that's that."
He then flinched as he remembered,
"Crap! I wasn't meant to kill him, was I? He was too strong to capture anyway, so I'm sure they'll understand."
He was about to turn around and leave, but then he noticed something peculiar. The hurricane was still swirling around Xander's body, never dispelling. Once the target was dead, the ability should've come undone and the slashes would dissipate. And yet they still stood, whirling around what should be a corpse.
Unless, he wasn't dead at all.
Realizing that he was still alive, Toru was about to unleash the most powerful slash he could muster, but then a laser of Aether erupted from the ground right beneath him, smashing right into his jaw.
The powerful force knocked his head up, while also causing him to bite his tongue. Most importantly however, Toru was no longer looking at Xander.
From the river of jade slashes, Xander quickly dashed out with one powerful leap, heading towards Toru at full speed while concentrating a great amount of his Aether into his right palm.
The damage from the Aether slashes was very much visible, as his clothes were largely torn and blood seeped harshly through his wounds, yet it was obvious he didn't care about the pain.
'Helpless Crane: Rippling Ocean.'
He forced that palm into Toru's chest, who could do nothing but take the oncoming damage of Xander's technique.
His body, his organs, his blood, his atoms, all of it began to shake violently. Each and every fibre of his being, all barraged by a quake of energy. It was a pain he couldn't forget, a pain that he had experienced once before in the distant past, but he couldn't quit remember where.
It wasn't just Toru's body, but the air itself had begun to tremor from the power of Xander's attack. Suddenly, his body was sent flying across the ground, helplessly crashing through the piles of the destroyed heavy weapons, before finally falling to the ground.
Despite all of that, Toru remained conscious... well... barely.
As he coughed a river of blood, the beaten man slowly got up by using his Katana as a support, although his movements were still weak and shaky.
Most of the bones in his body were broken and his organs were scrambled, including his Miracle. Even if it weren't damaged, he wasn't sure if he could survive any longer.
Helpless Crane. A style of martial arts which integrated the use of Aether, specifically Refinement and enhancement into it's array of techniques. It focused around flowing waves of Aether through objects or people, causing it to bounce of and collide with itself creating a shockwave that destroyed the target.
Rippling Ocean was a technique of the martial art, that carried this wave into the body. The style itself is one that Xander had created to better destroy opponents effectively.
With a shaky voice he asked,
"How?"
Xander was kind enough to answer as he walked towards him,
"I knew from the beginning that two of us were evenly matched. But the difference between you and me, was that I knew how to counter your Ideal already. Of course I could've used my own, but the circumstances weren't very... Ideal..."
Despite it being a horrible time to crack a joke, the beaten man laughed a little anyway. Xander then continued,
"All I had to do was defend until you blinded yourself with your own attacks. Then using your mass of Aether as a blanket to hide my own, I fired a pulse of Aether through the ground, and pushed your vision away elsewhere. Of course, the rest was history."
In a Returner battle where citizens watched them fight, unsurprisingly, their abilities were analysed and stored by not just crazy fans, but even enemies hoping to see them fall. It wasn't hard to get this information, so anyone could look it up and search for a particular returners Ideal ability. This was the case with Xander who had memorised the abilities of every single returner he could get his hands on.
'Knowledge is power', He was the utter embodiment of this saying.
Toru just lightly smiled.
'We weren't equal, at least not in the physical sense. Experience doesn't matter if he's planned ahead that much. I lost the second I fell into his expectations.'
With a weak laugh the swordsman fell onto his back, coughing a river of blood from his mouth. His breathe began to slow as his heart started to give in. The pain of living was just too much to bear, and so he drifted off into his last sleep. It was what he loved after all.
And then, there was only silence.
**
Once upon a time, there was a woman that a man loved very much.
She had no name, no face, no smell, no clothes she liked to wear, no nothing. Utterly devoid of everything, she eventually faded from the mans memory.
Yet there was one thing that the man could remember vividly, one thing he could never forget, even if he never saw her face. Her sweet soothing voice.
Every time he heard it, it shook the very depths of his soul, imprinting itself on his very being and essence. An unforgettable melody produced by a human.
One day she died, but her voice would forever ring in the mans mind. Yet as time passed, even that too began to disappear. Until eventually she had vanished from this world entirely.
In the far future during the mans travels, he decided it was time to rest. And oddly enough, he could hear the voice once more.
He couldn't remember who it belonged to, and yet, he knew he loved them very much. For years he travelled around the globe, trying to find who this voice in his sleep belonged to, and in his despair he couldn't find them at all.
So he made a promise.
To recall that voice, to never forget the person he once loved. He would dream, and dream, and dream, and dream, until finally,
Dreaming was all he could do.