Chapter 1: The Beginnings of an Original
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2.5 billion years before the Golden Age War.
Black clouds blanketed the purple skies. The rise of a mighty storm, high above, raining down deadly bolts of lightning that covered the entire planet's surface.
Crouched atop a large mountain made from diamonds, a young man who looks no older than 18 holds a staff along his shoulder, with medium-length cyan hair that has white-colored tips at its end hanging towards the front of his face.
Electric hollow energy sparks off his body and the ingrained silver staff. While in the far distance, he watches something rapidly approaching him at an immense speed. His lips curl up into a smile, immediately, from the top of the crystalline mountain.
A second later, Isaiah Body splits into a trail of dazzling white lightning dancing upon the planet's purple horizon.
His divine instrument, Kirin, back in his hands, Isaiah swings his staff overhead, clashing with what appears to be a stone-like rod, edged into the shape of a sword. He continues to chuckle and laugh before saying, "Good to see you again, Mugen. Let's have another one of our many duels! testing to see what more we can show each other, just like old times as children, sister!!"
Quickly, Mugen drops into a low, guarded stance, aiming their blade at Isaiah and driving it forward with powerful thrusts enhanced by their true hollow hollow energy output, as if a blinding storm of blurred motion from Mugen's fast hand movements.
After that, Isaiah responds almost instantly. Parrying using his silver staff and swiftly dodging in between Mugen's deadly thrusts as she begins to speed up increasingly more with each blade strike.
"You've gotten faster than before, my sibling…" While still being on the back foot, he goes to strike at her side, but before he can pull it off, she blocks the staff, hitting her, then steps forward, pressing her foot against the ground beneath them, and strikes his chest and neck twice before jumping back.
She places her blade directly in front of her chest, holding the hilt slightly with enough pressure. Hastily, she pushes in, switching to a mid-guard stance before Mugen takes the chance to swing from the side at an angle. This strike was aimed at taking Isaiah off balance and nearly did.
He tumbled back slightly and plunged his staff behind his back into the ground beneath them, regaining control of his balance before Mugen came dashing towards him using Burst Flow.
The sword strikes were powerful and precise, carrying immense weight and pressure behind every strike. Mugen swung the blade towards their brother Isaiah.
However, in the tense atmosphere. A duel between siblings; neither Mugen nor Isaiah is going for the kill, but rather assessing the strengths the two have been building.
Although with beings as powerful as them. They were bound to cause some degree of destruction, even if holding back their true hollow energy outputs.
From each strike between Isaiah's and Mugen's weapons, the planet rumbled and shuddered under their weight.
Isaiah & Mugen were members of The Seven Visionaries, the race of originals different than any other of the first Irregulars to come into existence.
They possessed a higher-caliber hollow-energy output than their descendants and immense reserves, born innately with true hollow energy fully realized, without the need to awaken it. Furthermore, each visionary was gifted a powerful innate trigger ability coupled with ageless immortality, allowing them to grow in strength for eons at a time.
At their current ages, Mugen and Isaiah were equally matched in reserves, able to fight for hours on end without needing any break or rest, even when training against one another.
To them, this was a sign of both sibling love and affectionate rivalry, allowing one sibling to showcase strength worthy of their title against the other in battle.
At the next moment, the two ensued into another grandiose clash; Mugen pivoted on balls of their feet, twisting their whole body to the right whilst swinging the blade at Isaiah in an awkward motion.
Isaiah prepares to block the attack before he realizes that Mugen's sword disappeared for a brief second.
'What?'
Before he knew it, he was already struck on the left side of his abdomen by the blade, with the sharp pain of its edge reeling him back from his thoughts.
Mugen had used underhanded movements, creating a pseudo blind spot in her brother's vision, and swapped the blade positions to follow through with a clean strike to the body.
Isaiah chuckles to himself and says in an excited tone of voice:
"Good job, Mugen! Your ways of the blade continue to sharpen with every day you train." Isaiah jumps back into the role after his siblings attack, then immediately dashes ahead, using burst flow to leap over Mugen and strike them from behind.
Mugen blocks the initial attack with the flat of the blade to stop the attacker's momentum.
Before she could go for another sword strike, a split second later, she was struck by the butt end of Isaiah's silver staff as the part she blocked detached from the other half he was holding onto, using it as a temporary distraction for a follow-up hit.
"Seems to me that we're so far even."
Isaiah laughed, once again charging at Mugen. Instantly, he broke into an offensive barrage of powerful strikes from his silver staff, combining forward thrusts, backswings, and overhead slams to the shoulder, arms, or legs of Mugen's body.
While taking the brunt of these hits, each strike felt like a mountain was dropped directly onto Mugen, with each hit more pain-inducing than the next one that landed on them.
Quickly, Mugen parried back another stream of incessant thrust attacks from her brother. Switching position to a crouched sword-drawing stance, her hand smoothly wrapped around the blade's hilt, gripping it only just enough.
Isaiah's smile widened.
"…There it is! The foundation of your monarch slaying sword style."
A moment after, Isaiah called back the other half of his silver staff, reconnecting it as he aimed it with his shoulder, and his hand stretched forward toward Mugen.
White Lighting began to spark wildly and dance around Isaiah's porcelain-like skin and his mighty staff, which he called Kirin, covering the planet's atmosphere.
On the other side of battlegrounds, blades of various colors and intricate designs formed out of thin air above Mugen, creating a dome of endless blades.
Both sides' eyes focus on each other.
The round-2 begins…
With a single flash of light.