And here's Emergency with Kazui for @qrevo, thank you for the request! I realized as much as Kazui's moment saving Fuuta lives in my brain, I haven't ever written anything for it, so have some more Kazui propaganda haha! (There's reference to violence, but no graphic descriptions or anything 👍)
Kazui may have joked that his reflexes were dulling with age, but they were still perfectly intact when called upon. He thought leaving his profession behind meant he’d no longer be the first responder to an emergency situation. He thought that he’d be done stumbling onto blood-covered scenes of victims and assailants. Milgram had proved him wrong.
He left many of the others in the common room, enjoying a lighthearted conversation after dinner. He stepped into the dim prison hallway, hoping to grab a cigarette from his cell and return in time to catch the end of Shidou’s story.
There rose some shouting from up ahead. Kazui picked up his pace, but there was no need to get too worked up, he thought. Mikoto had been awfully loud in his cell after his verdict. Tensions were high among the prisoners, and squabbles broke out all the time. Even upon recognizing Fuuta and Kotoko’s voices, he figured the two were having one of their usual disagreements.
It was only when he could make out some of Fuuta’s desperate words that his instincts kicked in.
“Help! Please! Is anybody -- aargk!”
Kazui’s feet were pounding across the prison before he had a moment to think. Everything snapped into focus. His time in Milgram had felt like some strange dream, but now his senses became completely clear.
He followed the noise, now recognizing the sickening sounds of violence and agonized cries between each. Though he could already piece together what was going on, his training had him peer around corners and into cells to be sure there were no other threats. He went flying into Fuuta’s cell.
He had only a second to take in the scene. Kotoko was winding up for a kick -- another kick by the look of it. Fuuta was curled in a heap in the corner, his uniform straps tangled around him. His hands shielded his face. All of which, and the ground below, dripped with blood.
Kazui took Kotoko’s arm, yanking her back before her boot could connect. She recovered much quicker from her surprise than he expected. She shifted her weight around, using new leverage to escape his grasp. As she took a swing at him, he suddenly recalled their earlier conversation about fighting styles.
He blocked blow after blow. Damn, she was strong.
“Kotoko, what is all this? I’m not trying to hurt you, but you can’t --” Kazui grunted as she landed a solid hit. He continued rattling off some typical deescalation attempts, but she didn’t hear a word of it. She hardly even looked at him, keeping her eyes trained on Fuuta as they fought.
“He’s a killer,” she said evenly. “Do you even know what he’s done?”
“Do you?”
“It’s unforgivable.”
“It’s not your call to make!” At last, Kazui managed to shove her outside the cell. She stumbled back. The two took a breath.
She wiped blood from her lip where Fuuta must have struck back. “The warden knows this is true justice. You know it is, too.”
Then, she disappeared around the corner.
Kazui stepped out to be sure she wouldn’t return. He ran back to Fuuta the moment she was out of sight. She wasn’t his top priority.
He found Fuuta mumbling to himself, still clutching his face. Kazui had only seen him with his confident, fiery attitude. He felt his stomach clench hearing the boy whimper in pain and fear. Kazui often forgot how young these prisoners truly were.
“Hey, it’s okay. She’s gone. Hey, look at me.” He gently took Fuuta’s hands, pulling them away to assess the damage. His face twisted at the sight. This was more than he was equipped to handle.
Fuuta’s hands wrapped back around himself. He gasped for air. “She… please… I can't... my eye…”
“You’re going to be alright. Just stay with me.” In a swift motion, he swung Fuuta over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The boy cried out, but Kazui was already on the move. He called to Shidou from down the hall.
As soon as he set foot in the common area, he began giving orders. He told Shidou to examine Fuuta's condition, laying him on one of the tables. He demanded the others stay put until he could find Kotoko. He asked where the other guilty prisoners were. Most just gaped at him in shock. Though their delayed reaction was frustrating in the moment, he understood their surprise. He realized it was the first time he’d raised his voice since coming here. He’d always sat back and let the others take the lead; it was probably strange to see a laid back man like him suddenly taking charge.
Yuno leapt to her feet, already ignoring his warnings. He caught her with an arm before she could run out the door. “Oh god, Mahiru!”
“I’ll find her. Don’t leave.”
He turned on his heel and went running once more.
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thinking abt bellum v hard. (fyi there are 1658 words under this cut)
there's not a lot of concrete stuff to think abt but there ideas. he's kind of already won by the time link shows up on the scene. he's not really actively antagonizing the world of the ocean king, he mostly just has the ghost ship to go around collecting prey for him while he has the yook and anouki turned against each other and seems to have infested the different temples and whatever with monsters to delay any opposition. is he the one who destroyed the cobble kingdom? they're meant to be supporters of the ocean king so i think we can guess that bellum is the one who tried to eradicate them.
maybe he was the one who... mind controlled? or otherwise meddled with the yook to keep them from checking out the ice temple and keeping the anouki occupied with dealing with them. (tbh theres some untapped potential in the relationship between the yook and anouki) he doesn't really do anything to the gorons but maybe he doesn't see them as a worthwhile threat since they see the crimsonine as more of an artifact and not something they should really do anything with, and link has to pass a test to even be allowed to go to the temple. the cobble kingdom is already destroyed, and it can be assumed that he mightve mimicked their engineering based on eox being the hostile boss of the last temple and turning into sand, suggesting a relationship to bellum, and maybe that he's trying to hide the fact that he's the one fucking with everyone. i'm not even sure if characters (besides the main group) even know that bellum exists until link's quest is more known.
taking a note from the manga, where bellum says something along the lines of feelings of love and friendship creating more worthwhile life force for him, so taking that into account with stuff in the game suggests that he maybe doesnt make his presence well-known to avoid something like a mass panic or a persistent fear in people, which could downplay positive emotions that makes their life forces more worth taking to him along with other worthwhile forces maybe being ones connected to divine power (like his taking of tetra and seeming desperation to keep her specifically, since she's most likely a descendant of hylia's mortal form), so he likely is very hands-off with how he's affected the world in order to preserve the value of his prey, somehow. idk why he turns people into statues maybe its a preservation method. maybe hes saving tetra for some reason or maybe trying to bait link in as well. maybe he wants to grab link, too, but failed to catch him the first time and resorted to allowing him to go down the path of dismantling bellum's work all so that bellum can try and capture him himself.
the spirits he does manage to capture and left alive and instead just sealed away within their temples, which i believe is because spirits and gods and whatever in loz can't really die unless they explicitly permanently become mortal (hylia) and can only really be sealed away temporarily in some form, mostly due to a lot of them being a sort of representation of some part of the world (i like to imagine that demise is the god or whatever who created monsters, he's the father of monsters and opposes hylia due to the way her favored creatures [hylians ig] attack and kill monsters and he wants the world to be habitable and safe only for his creations)
it's probably safe to say that the ghost ship (like. the whole thing) was created by bellum, and in some form is perhaps some kind of living being, hence why bellum is capable of effectively possessing it the way he does, since it's an extension of himself like the boss monsters, it just maybe takes parts from some existing ships, or maybe it's not alive and bellum is capable of creating large structures like that he is compatible with.
bellum himself turns to sand when he is defeated, as well as most of the other boss monsters, but the cubus sisters (who certainly have a relationship with bellum due to having the same eyes and being connected to the ghost ship) do not turn into sand, which makes me think that bellum didn't actually create them; maybe they're corpses or something being remotely puppeted by bellum.
bellum is clearly made up of the sand of hours, a crystallization of life force, and oshus is said to have used those sands to create the phantom hourglass, and the sands are also mentioned to have been created from the force gems connected back to oshus himself, so bellum was probably created from those force gems and therefore those sands of hours at some point somehow (i enjoy the idea that oshus was the one who created bellum; with oshus being our main source of info on bellum, i think it'd be interesting if he was the one who originally made bellum but obscures this fact by just talking about how he 'appeared' and whatnot).
bellum seems to have a weird sort of... inverted? perverted? ability to create life (perhaps a sort of parallel to the one we can assume the ocean king has if we assume that he created the three spirits as well as bellum maybe) but only in a hivemind or derivative sort of way, only able to create things that follow simple commands and when he possesses something else he takes it over. (i like to take him in a more biological or physiological way rather than magical, when he is removed so is the control, but there might be little remnants, but his influence is gone. i take bellumbeck aftereffects to be terrible sickness rather than others going with the idea of taking on some bellum-like traits or residual controls. the things bellum creates can only follow simple rules unless he is directly in control therefore he can use it as he wishes, but if he takes control of something he did not create, it's a bit more of a battle, he has to contend with that other being's subconscious or whatnot and has no effect unless he is physically connected. his control is more limited and ends up incorporating some of the hosts' subconscious desires with some guiding from bellum himself to achieve a favorable outcome.)
with the world of the ocean king being a sort of parallel/separate world to link n tetra's great sea, it's interesting that the ghost ship can be physically present outside the world in which it was created. definitely there can be contact between different worlds in loz (like hyrule and the dark world/lorule in alttp/albw and a little bit with termina if you take that as a literal place and a little bit with koholint and then the twili realm and whatever i'm missing) but it's interesting to see bellum as a villain capable of (in some way) contact and interact within other worlds and drag inhabitants of those other worlds into his own (oshus can send people out of his world, so i assume he can also bring them in, maybe that's how link gets in despite falling off of the ghost ship, unless somehow the ghost ship is still within the world of the ocean king but is also present in the great sea but the area around it is a fragment of whatever part of the world of the ocean king its in superimposed over the great sea... idk) so it's interesting that bellum could bc considered a villain able to tamper with or at least interact with world boundaries to let things in and out, maybe it's something that he is only capable of with whatever power he's attained by the start of the game.
whatever relationship he may have to oshus and the other spirits is not at all a part of the game, but at the same time we don't learn a whole lot about them anyways. there's also stuff with the chief of the golden frogs as another ally of oshus, but i imagine bellum didn't bother with him because he has no relation to the spirits' locations and the pure metals, and zuaz was left alone perhaps because his location is secret, while astrid and kayo were maybe found due to living on a more populated island (more prey for bellum to go after, more people to know about astrid and kayo). a lot of the monsters in the dungeons were probably already there, while the bosses were specifically made to protect what was hidden there, or maybe the bosses came first and their presences attracted other monsters.
i think bellum created the two monsters you fight overseas on the spot; they existed specifically to try and kill link because at those two times (link going to get the final spirit and link going to get the first pure metal) bellum suddenly panics and decides to try and eliminate link at the cost of the loss of a possible worthwhile piece of prey. bellum was probably also the one to begin the rumor of the ghost ship; i imagine he can take a sort of human form the same way oshus can, and spent a bit of time after defeating oshus and creating the ghost ship integrating him within some pirate crew and using them to grow and spread the rumor of the ghost ship, eventaully leading them towards it and taking them has his first victims (and along the way taking the time to foster good relationships with them in the hopes that their positive emotions and feelings would make them more worthwhile prey, back to the manga snippet idea of feelings of friendship and love [and probably positive emotions in general] being another form of better life force).
bellum's cool
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