Ragged screams ricocheted off cavern walls, a chorus of broken knives and broken people. They made a sort of music, discordant and rhythm-less, but listen long enough and you could hear a tune. Jan heard it. He knew the instruments being played, the masters who played them.
Jan had been one of those instruments; the devil had played a concerto on him.
Jan slipped through the halls of hell, an improvised knife in his hand. He’d torn a ray of sunlight from Heaven’s warm, butter yellow sun. The ray had dimmed since then but it still threw faint a light across the walls, warred with the torches to paint the crystal flecked caverns of hell in a light that was almost beautiful, if one could see past all the blood.
Seven hundred years ago, when Jan had been a boy and not a sinner, he would have sat by the firelight listening to his grandmother tell stories like this. A daring rescue into Hell, a man with no more than a splinter of sunlight going up against the Devil’s wrath and the demons that had tortured him, and for what, the glory of the saints?
Stories like that had been his life. They had turned a little boy into a soldier, a winged hussar charging down from the mountains above Vienna to massacre his King’s foes, and they had twisted into something else along the way when Jan learned that the world could never live up to the stories told about it.
There were no stories now. The old heroes were dead and gone: Jan had met them, seen them flayed on racks beside him for all those deeds no one had ever put a story too. There was no honor now, no glory. Jan hadn’t come to rescue a saint to hear the songs that people would sing.
He’d come because when the Saint and the Sinner switched places, the saint had left a burn mark etched against her bedroom wall. Late on sabbath nights when all the others were asleep Jan would take a stolen bottle of communion wine into the bedroom and stare at that mark.
A woman etched in ashes. The curve of a hip set in agonized black against the wall, a hand splayed out, fingers clutching at the flat, lifeless surface. Jan drank and stared. He invented a life, a name, the good deeds that got someone into heaven, and a face to match that curve. When the bottle was empty and Jan was thoroughly drunk he’d stand in front of the burnt woman and whisper the names of past women he’d loved and wronged: Aniela, Dorota, Ksenia, Ula. He’d whisper their names and the face he imagined became their faces, these women who might have been saint
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How did you react to your first century break guys and girls?
When Magent Magent kneels down he becomes completely invulnerable to everything, right? 20th Century Boy protects him from anything, even drowning or going crazy from kneeling at the bottom of a river forever!
Who could break this 'unbreakable' defense though? Usually 'unbreakable' is relative, right? Nothing we saw in his fights could break his defense, but could something he didn't run into beat his perfect defense? Character can beat his defense physically, with hax, or whatever, but they have to go through his defense. Tricking Magent into dropping his defense doesn't count.
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Round 1: Can anything from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure break 20th Century Boy's perfect defense while activated?
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Round 2: If you had to pick the weakest character from another fiction who could beat 20th Century Boy's defense, who would it be?
Just a series of questions on how mercenaries function(ed). I chose Condottieri somewhat arbitrarily but it seemed like a good idea to narrow things down, and it's an interesting time period anyways.
