[OLD] Densetsu Side-Stories

Reason

“I am a man of honor,” Asher said as he held one hand against his face to hide his eyes, “When someone is being attacked, I do whatever I can to defend them. If for some reason the offender becomes the victim, I will do whatever I can to resolve the argument. And if I become the victim, whomever lashed out at me is now my enemy…”

“Is that so?” Arashi asked, frowning at the one he stood before, “So what if the others are your victims, then?”

Asher smiled back at him. “There’s an old saying. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He raised his other arm to his chest. “It’s simple, really. If I am your enemy, then my enemy must be your friend. But what if we have the same enemy?”

“I don’t think I have any enemies besides you,” Arashi answered him, “Are you suggesting you are your own enemy?”

“Only when I have failed myself do I become my own enemy,” Asher said. “Our enemy is the one behind everything. The creator of the demon knife—EDGE—and the one who brought the artificial girl into your life.”

“Kiri?” Arashi asked with shock, looking to one of the two girls behind him. “Do you mean she’s the reason why all of this happened?”

“The man who created her was but a lowly professor of your childhood friend,” Asher said, pointing to the other girl behind Arashi, “Lowly with the IQ of a genius…”

“Lowly, you said?” asked a cackling voice from the shadows. Blue polygons flickered as a man in black stepped out of the darkness. He smirked just like Asher, only his grin seemed more villainous than insane. “I’ll have you know that I’ve come quite a ways in my life…”

“Professor Arakawa?!” Arashi’s friend Saki asked, looking up to the man. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Arakawa said, “You should be studying, like a good student.”

“I do believe she deserves to know the truth,” Asher said, gesturing to Arakawa. “And you’ve already revealed yourself, why don’t you explain why?”

“I’ve come to retrieve what is rightfully mine,” Arakawa said, “The artificial girl, if you please.”

“I won’t let you hurt her,” Arashi stood forward. “You’ll have to take me down if you want to hurt her.”

“With pleasure…” Arakawa threatened.

“There’s just one thing I wonder about,” Asher said, “Why do you wish to harm this girl?”

“Why, you ask?” Arakawa repeated, brushing his long silver hair out of his eyes to reveal the dim tone they held, “She’s an abomination. When I created her nearly thirty years ago, it was simply because I wanted to prove my college wrong. We had written a report on Mary Shelly’s novel ‘Frankenstein’, a fine tale about a genius by the name of Victor Frankenstein, who had created an artificial lifeform. The project was a failure—instead he created a living monster. I wanted to show them I could do what he attempted to successfully. So I built an artificial body. My vision of her was the embodiment of fear. Long, straight, pitch black hair… Piercing red eyes with no pupils… Skin blacker than the galaxy itself, and to top it all off, an outfit that would surely show she was a force to be reckoned with.”

He paused for a moment to catch his breath. “Of course, it didn’t work out. I created the opposite of what I had imagined. A human girl with a bright color scheme, who feared everything that moved even so much as an inch. She was not the embodiment of fear, but the epitome of fear. I decided then that I would annihilate her to remove such a waste of space from this world.”