My palm rotated the dagger inside his skull-mask's pit, and his limbs strained to thrash, but my silver threads coiled around them, choking off any sudden movement.
Five seconds passed in silence. The only sounds were that parting of flesh and drops of blood striking the ground, pooling beneath us.
"...How many more of you are lurking deeper in Fuyuki, caught in its corruption?" I asked, glancing at a patch of unnaturally pale skin beneath his robe, glowing with a tint of grey.
No reply, only more writhing, his leg, knee, and shoulder joints popping in and out of their sockets as he tried to slip through the binds.
Watching him without blinking, I rose to my full height, leg exploding into a full swing that rammed into his chest. Assassin's spine bowed inward, body screeching through air, a cascade of crunches erupting in his wake, back slamming into the pillar behind him.
My threads shadowed him, collapsing from a magic circle into lines that crept along asphalt, reforming into the same magic circle on that pillar a breath before he crashed into it, roping around his body and immobilising him again.
Green magic circuits blazed to life across my palm as I snapped my fingers. [Gradation Air] activated, and a coin took shape overhead, spinning as it plummeted. One silver thread shot up from below, looping around the hollow at its center, tugging it down into my open palm mid-stride.
Halting in front of Assassin, I tightened my hold on the dagger buried in his eye and wrenched it free, a shower of blood spraying from his face, a bit of it smattering my cheek.
Ignoring his rapid breaths, I raised my boot, tapping it under his chin to force his single working eye up, right to the coin hanging like a pendulum from its thread.
[Ultimate Hypnotist]
My coin swung, once, twice, a dull arc of bronze against a burning backdrop of Fuyuki behind me.
Assassin's working eye consciously refused to follow it; he knew exactly how to counter hypnosis, even when gravely injured. His gaze kept sliding, down to the dagger dripping red in my grip, sideways to those dragon tooth warriors keeping their distance, anywhere but the coin.
Predictable.
Humans trained against manipulation almost always keep their eyes off the thing engineered to catch and hold their focus like this coin, keeping their attention fractured between everything else.
Solution? Give the eye no other choice but to look where you want.
I looked at those dragon tooth warriors, and dust tore skyward in a horizontal curtain across the bridge, tracing a path my eyes had swept, swallowing them from view. The dagger left his sight next, drawn behind my back.
Even the fire behind me dimmed as I angled my stance, blocking Fuyuki's burning skyline from his working eye with the width of my shoulder.
Then I pressed my heel into a precise nerve cluster in his neck. Assassin's breath audibly spiked, and for one second, his eyes searched for a way to escape and found none.
His eyes continued, drifting around the empty space I'd carved for them and finally settled on the coin. His pupil followed my pendulum on instinct, mouth slackening behind the skull-mask, shoulders uncoiling, body relaxing.
"... Who turned you into this corrupted version and how?"
"It was Saber, she attacked everyone—" He snapped into awareness, jaw clenching, breath forcing through his nose in short, controlled pulses, eye clamping shut, focus shifting from visual to auditory as he listened to my heartbeat to anchor himself. "Torture, force, or kill, but even my corpse won't tell you anything more."
"Saber... Who was Saber in this war? Artoria, or someone else?" I asked.
Assassin kept his mouth shut, ears deliberately trained on my heartbeat now. So I slowed it down instead, each beat falling note by note until it collapsed into the same rhythm as my coin-pendulum.
Auditory Hypnotism.
"Was Saber Artoria?" Another question.
His mouth slipped open on its own, and he replied. "Saber is a corrupted version of King Arthur—"
Assassin bit his tongue mid-word, teeth grinding together as a fresh wave of blood slid down his bone-mask and chin.
"You..." His working eye snapped wide, rolling toward me, veins popping against white. "What kind of thing are you?"
He sounded terrified, but his pupil was already slithering down from the coin-pendulum to my silver threads binding him, fixing his focus on them.
I jerked my heel slightly, and the threads connected to it vibrated, travelling down through Assassin's pinned frame, quivering at the exact same frequency as my pendulum and heartbeat.
Touch Hypnotism.
Body screaming, he tried his hardest to resist this time, but one single rhythm reached his brain through touch and sound, and my boot finally pushed his chin up, landing his eye on the moving pendulum again.
Under my flat expression, Assassin's working eye lost its light, pupil blown wide and unmoving save for the small arc it trailed back and forth. The controlled breathing was gone; what remained came slow and uniform, timed to my rhythm rather than his.
"Say your name." I commanded this time.
"...Hassan." That word came out blank, stripped of the defiance from before, no resistance left in him to fight. "Hassan of the—"
"No!"
He broke out of it somehow, holding on by a shred of pure willpower, attention locked onto his own erratic heartbeat, chest heaving.
"Oh? You can still fight?" I raised an eyebrow at him, a small furrow surfacing between my brows before smoothing out in a blink. "Good try, for a Heroic Spirit."
My dagger hand thrust forward, burying his own weapon in his chest, punching straight through his heart. Blood spurted in a fountain that arced overhead.
"W-wha—" he stuttered, no longer having a heartbeat to resist with, and was cut off.
[Ultimate Despair] flickered awake for a moment.
A domain of bleeding concentric circles expanded from me, spreading across asphalt, swallowing the bridge, fire, and sky itself into a single crimson eye with a radar pattern.
Assassin's body went limp, drool leaking from the corner of his mask. His hands reached for me with desperate abandon, words dragging out of him, long and distorted, as if someone else were speaking through him.
"Master—Master, I'll tell you, I'll tell you everything, just don't—don't let it take me back, let me stay, let me stay close, please—"
I tilted my head, heel dropping to the ground as I looked down at him from above.
"Speak."
A pause.
"Everything you know."
"Yes—yes, I'll tell you all of it, all of it."
Assassin clung to my leg, ignoring his own flesh tearing against my silver threads, refusing to let go even as life left him with every breath.
...
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***
[Ultimate Hypnotist] - Basically, Izuru is master class manipulator of the mind through sensory input, by making a person's five senses follow a single rhythm, he can put them in a trance state where they answer whatever he asks. Here it went even a level further, directly breaking Assassin's mind into a drooling mess via [Ultimate Despair], overpowering and resonating with the Angra Mainyu's corruption inside Assassin.
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[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[15 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
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[Author's Thoughts]
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