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She was someone he had seen before as a victim, and so, he did was he'd done in the past. Followed her a short while, pass her by to let her know he was there, then retreat back in case she screamed.

He'd only help if she needed it. But she smiled at him and waved him away, her walk back to a man who Castor didn't know and didn't want to think about. Some women were victims. Some were by trade. She was just another face in an ocean of them.

He was just someone who tried to keep them as faces rather than as numbered corpses.

His body protested the fact he was jumping up and down the buildings, raw freshly healed skin pulled too taught and threatening to tear and leave behind scars that no amount of senshi magic could undo. Castor knew it would be better for him here, where they neon lights helped mask his shadowed face, the still discolored skin and raw pink flesh of a wound that told the story of healing too quickly from their own powers.

He felt energy signatures, but ignored them, avoided them lest they be chaos. He didn't want to see anyone, or they to see him in such a state. However when his path crossed one so close, he looked to see who it was, curiosity getting the better or him.

He should have let it remain a mystery.
"Hoping to run into old friends Wolfy?"

Castor snorted, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand and looking at the knight who's eye he'd destroyed years past. There was history between them just as there would be a history between himself and the streets of red and smoke.

History didn't just get brushed away and aside. It lingered under the skin and when it was a wound, it festered until you saw fit to treat it.
The wounds of Wolframite and Castor would always fester. They would eat away at them in their own ways.

"Better dead than corrupted into a monster." He gave a shrug, looking back at the shadows who roamed the streets. "But trading the skin of one monster for another isn't much better in my opinion." He kept his eyes on the people, not on the knight. If they started anything, it wouldn't be just between them. Too close to victims. To police ever searching for criminals who hid themselves in plain sight.

"I've been coming to this part of the city since I wore senshi shorts Wolfy. Unlike some who call themselves senshi, being a guardian means you don't shy away from those who need it most." He moved, eyes fixed on a pair of women who were circling around a building almost out of his line of sight.

"Plus I wear traditional battle armor when I'm royal. That's breezy enough for me. But, then, I'm not the one who wore ribbons and bows my entire career of killing now am I?"

He chuckled, though it was clearly riddled with a bitterness.
"Isn't it? Vigilante isn't entire correct either sadly, as at it's core, a senshi is created to protect a world. Displaced protectors doesn't roll off the tongue as easily I'm afraid."

Shoulders went up and down. A dance of barbed words they had between them, semantic and ideals that clashed. Neither of the men were strangers to it, and neither would bother with backing down in many ways.
They had both seen enough of the war on earth to see the rise and fall of power; to understand that such would be the way of the war for ages to come.

"I have never been fond of extracting pain Wolfy. I have never particularly enjoyed causing needless suffering. It was not your eye I aimed for that night, and had I a choice, things would not have gone the way they did." A bite in his words, Castor was aware of how he had been directly involved in the other man's pain. His loss that Castor would not know in many ways.
Crippling another person.

It was a guilt that he would carry, not only because it had caused pain and changed another person's quality of life, but in the knowledge that he'd done it with the intent to kill not maim.

"Blades suited you better." A rumbling breath and Castor closed the distance between them, blue eyes worn and tired at the edges, yet his body taught like a violin string.

"Like is a strong word. Tolerate is more reflective of how I feel towards their purpose and usefulness." Then, he was looking past Gev, peering down at the streets once more.

"Pretty ideals have no place on the battlefield. The basic understanding of the costs of war isn't something many of them are willing to grasp, nor, is their position as senshi." He looked over to the knight briefly.
"What is it you think of us senshi as Wolfy?" Saccharine sweet, Castor was trying to bait the man.
"What does the former general see the senshi as now that he is subordinate to one?"

Being a senshi was toxic. That was something Castor had grown to accept. It ate away at your life, your core, until you came to accept that something, an intrinsic part of you did not belong. Too many refused to acknowledge that fact.
"Ironically, for all my hate and want to remove you from existence, you're one of the few I can tolerate when it comes to this shitstain they would try to call an army. You at least, are willing to face the facts and the reality of what we're up against. That said, you were a good solider to the negaverse, and they were foolish to have squandered your potential."

Another low roll of his shoulders, he hunched down as two men came around a corner. Plains clothed officers. Shirts too clean. Shoes not worn and old. They didn't look like prey, only like predators. Not apex, but threats none the less.

"The knights are beholden to the senshi who's colors they carry and their cause. Your powers stem from their world, who's starseed is their own, and let's be frank, if a knight who carried my crest did something in gross violation of my world's order? Of what I stood for? No, we are no different than the general kings and queens in this regard. There is a freedom not found within the ranks of chaos true, but it is leashed."

He kept his eyes on the men, motioning Gev to join him.
"I've seen the men before. They've been targeting my girls." He followed them with his gaze, keeping his voice low but conversational.

"I am not Ganymede, so I cannot speak of her views. Only that as a royal, a knight who bares her crest will be seen as an extension of herself. She might not have chosen you in this life, nor you her, but end of the day, our knights are extensions of our worlds and our powers and we must control them unless they would be used against us. All freedoms come with a price."

Blue eyes looked up at Gev, pondering something before he returned to his stalking of the men, now joined by a third. They talked in hushed tones, money changing hands under coats and they looked nervous now. They had prey and now they had to catch it. Meaning Castor would have to catch them.

"I could care less if we lose Wolframite. I could care less if earth falls. What I care about is us. Our worlds. Chaos will always find a host willing and able. What drives me is dreams of worlds restored. Of our homelands alive again. Us, alive again. We were never meant to be human. We we never intended to be born aliens in bodies not our own."
There was a deep sadness in his tone as he breathed in and out.

"Senshi have always fought between ourselves. But we have always united in order to protect our people. Now we have no people. We have no histories, no homes. We have no memories of what were were, are. The senshi are broken- and in ignorance we flail and lash out at the reality. That we are a dying breed, and we must stop looking selfishly at one lifetime and consider a thousand lifetimes. Consider the millions of souls of our peoples, trapped in the cauldron, without a world to return to. To be belong to."

The men vanished down the street and Castor stood.
"Tell me. If I told you those men likely intended to find a prostitute to arrest then violate, would you kill them to save her?"

A tisk sound behind clenched teeth, Castor clearly disagreed. "It doesn't take a leader to see the potential in others. You''re dedication, passion, willpower- I know that you suffered at the hands of the blood moon. That you were subject to Charonite's draconian way. That you were Beryl's subject for a time and later would see the rise and fall of your beloved leaders in ways considered inhuman. Willpower, Devotion, Passion. How you mold and shape it varies to each leader, but it is such qualities in a person that makes them soldiers. Makes them threats. Their weaknesses are what caused you to question and retaliate. They were unsuited to lead you as required."
He tisked again.
"Don't sell yourself short. Height aside, you are a solider behind a cause. Saying you are lesser than you are only gives your enemies a weakness to exploit. Would the seduction of 'freedom' have been as sweet had your leaders given you no reason to question their cause?" Castor wasn't sure what was more surreal. That he was standing next to Wolframite under sheep's clothing giving him a pep-talk, or that this was perhaps the longest frame of time Castor had been near the man and not tried to violently murder him.

"Tanz won't ever have justice." He muttered, body tensing visibly with her name.
"I doubt she'd have wanted justice anyway. She was always more the revenge cut and dry type."

He looked back at Gev again, as if wanting to say something else. To admit, share something.
But words died behind closed lips drawn in a thin line. Gev was not the one to share his sorrows over a woman long dead. The agent Wolfy wouldn't have understood. The knight would never understand.
Watching a woman you saw so full of life become a being that was so twisted that she had died long before her body was finally let go from it's thrall? They had violated her starseed in his eyes. Violated her body, her soul, all that she had been.

He would never forgive the negaverse for what it had done to Tanzanite.
He'd never forget what they had done to the woman who's initial he carried on his skin from a drunken night of revelry and free spirit.

"To answer your question- Royalty is not a gift nor a blessing, , moreso I find it a curse. We are born from necessity. From a need to fill a void. From that moment we become royal, our purpose changes. We change. No longer must we simply protect our worlds, we are our worlds. We become the soul of our people. If we died, if we well and truly die?"

"We exist to maintain the balance and do what others cannot. Our purpose is to maintain order and restore balance. Chaos will always exist and it must exist. Just why those who talk as if purification is the path we must take fail to grasp what is at stake. If we fail a purification, we die. We die, and countless others will die with us as our power and abilities vanish for eternity." You no longer lived to protect. You were bound to serve. Your soul was chained to a world and to a people as a senshi, but as a royal, you were held to the vast universe. You had to serve more than your own interests.

He gave a final glance to the men who were making their way to a known place for prostitution. To a place where they could find a victim.
"Make it a clean kill. The less brutality on them, the less their deaths can be sensationalized." He descended down to earth, the echo of boots hitting pavement going unnoticed as the men walked on unaware.

"Potential isn't limited to who's symbol you stand under. And as seen with the others who call themselves as knights, your royal can be long dead and useless in the ground for them to still exist. That alone is-."

He stopped and ******** it, this isn't the place for us to talk of the cosmos and it's bullshittery of a system." At the mention of taking the one with the hat, there was the spark in Castor's eye. A glimmer of violence and thrill. Not for death, but for the fight. The battle.

Challenge.

"If I didn't know better Wolfy, I'd almost say you're trying to seduce me. Letting me have two scumbags all too myself."

Right behind the knight, the senshi went after one of the men, grabbing him by the back of the neck while he summoned his magic.
"Heaven's fury." It was a crackling of ice forming followed by a distinct sound of pierced flesh. No screams, no blood, but there was an immediate result. The man's body went slack and Castor pushed him into the final member of the trio.

His hand was a brilliant red, and the blood from the man began to appear.

Severed spine, Castor's ice spikes had been driven home in an pointed manner. He didn't bother to wait, already closing in on the remaining plainclothes officer.
"Death is almost too good for monsters like these."

Tongue clicked behind teeth in disapointment. He wanted a fight. To have a struggle. This was easy. This? It was boring. Still, they were getting the job done. Like common thugs perhaps, but the less it looked like magical work, the better. After all, a hailstorm in summer wasn't exactly something you could write off as criminal violence of a retaliating pimp or gang member.

Blue eyes went to the knight, pausing as he caught sight of the hand at the man's chest.

He almost swung out.

He wanted to hit the knight. Lash and thrash and cry proof of his lust for what he'd been trained to do, enjoyed doing. So when the chain formed around the final man, Castor moved away, eyes narrow and waiting. He expected brutality. Carnage. A lust to kill and blood on the pavement.

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"You will never really be Gevaudan in this life though." He spoke with a twinge of satisfaction.
He wanted to be justified in his loathing of the man before him.
"Under it all, you'll still be Wolframite."