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The effort wasn't lost on Bix. Even with Mina's shield he was not used to the crash and clang of weapons against one another. His arms almost vibrated from the repeated strikes and after taking another grazing hit his bow swung wide, almost not hitting Sasha at all.

HP: 31
Dmg: 1

Noting Sasha's more obvious fatigue, Bix felt like the spar was winding down. He spun the bow from the grip and knocked Nona's hooks away from him with a baseball bat-like swing. The clang echoed across the field and once more reverberated down his own arms with a sting like pins and needles.

He wasn't sure how many more hits would be necessary.

HP: 30
Dmg: 6

Bix shook his head, also panting slightly. "No.. not necessary. If you can recognize that's all you have left than that's good enough."

Something was bothering him about Sasha though. Her fighting had seemed empty, her moves almost desperate. Mina's blades were retracted and he leaned on her a moment.

"You doing okay?" There was genuine concern written all over his features.

It definitely wasn't a question he expected but it had been one that was on his mind lately. He told himself that the truth didn't matter but he had found it out, however inadvertent, and he'd barely spoken about it to anyone.

"Actually yeah.." Bix unsummoned Mina, dragging an arm across the sheen on his forehead. "We recently all had a.. mass hallucination? Shared dream?" Bix sighed and quote fingered, "Things that could have been."

Those words still clung to him. The dream still clung to him and when he wasn't expecting it he'd suddenly wonder where they were right now. Those versions of themselves that had a nicer, friendlier Deus.

"Deus wasn't like this. The towns still existed and kids came here from a young age to work towards being a hunter. There were families and I knew my father." He said finally. "He was Sun Division Lead. But he died. I even checked it out on the computers here when we all woke up and sure enough... Ferdinand Bolinsky was Sun Division Lead and died. But all of his information is locked. All I could get was name and rank... I almost went to go and ask someone, anyone, maybe H... if they knew him. What was he like? Was he a shitty dude or a good dude?" Bix shrugged. "It doesn't matter though, right?" He asked her as if she could answer that for him.

On some level it also made him angry. It was his father. Caelius withheld that letter from him. He still did. Didn't Bix have the right, above anyone, to know about his own father? As he worked it over his face tightened under the pale skin but like most things, Bix willed himself to let go of it.

Bix motioned to her, hoping she'd join him just a moment to talk. It wasn't like there were many others they could have this conversation with. He plopped himself on a slight incline of grass on the side of the field. A couple hunters seemed glad to see them moving, taking up their own spar in the empty space.

Bix watched them idly, both sword wielders, as they circled before finally launching together with a flash of runes and the clash of metal.

"You don't look like you are happy with what you found out. In fact you haven't looked yourself this whole time." He'd hoped the spar could rouse a bit of fire in her but she still held a bit of a defeated posture. He didn't expect a massive confession of information and the two of them were never particularly close friends, but he hated seeing someone with such life in them suddenly seem so empty.

"He was different." Bix said during the pause and before Sasha could respond. It was as if he was trying to make her feel better by sharing his own small defeats. "The me that knew my father. He was, ummm, serious. Burdened with glorious purpose!" He bellowed it almost before he realized she probably wouldn't get a Thor reference, and then his hands fell back down to the grass where he picked the ends off the shorn blades. "Emotionally closed. Less tolerant. I guess I'm better off."

"You know.." he seemed disbelieving but amused at himself for a moment, "the other day Ceres and I were saying how we think we're the only ones on the island that don't have relatives or exes here.." It was probably not quite the sort of observation she was expecting right off the bat but Bix often didn't find the harm in sharing his passing thoughts. He then got a dreamy look and sighed, "Rep was a cross dressing Delacroix in the dream world..." And then a laugh. "Imagine if you were his cousin?" He remained gloriously oblivious to any history between the two besides the passing rumor he may have heard ages ago.

His casual asides finally led to a moment of brief thought. Bix's brow wrinkled almost as if he were exaggerating the amount of thinking he was doing, but no, he just looked that puppyish all the time. "Doesn't sound like your cousin is all there. No pun intended. Just, body swapping isn't exactly a human trait that I know of. Have you been examined?" FEAR or insanity.. maybe something new was at fault.

He was pretty relieved to hear her laugh. The musical tone gave some life to her face no matter how brief.

"I just meant.. well I'm not in Life but we are all especially susceptible, if not more connected to FEAR. And from first hand experience especially so with Insanity as well." He ignored the flash of memory, his own feet on a morgue slab. Toe Tag. Sheet. "Have you had the body examined." Somehow it felt easy to refer to it as a body even though he'd only found out moments before. Bix unknowingly kept himself in a world that was just like his comic books and shocking supernatural developments were commonplace and often just more mysteries waiting to be solved. It was much easier to roll past the trauma that way.

"What if there's something odd about it or.. I don't know." Like he said, he was not in Life. "And where is she in your body?" He had to imagine if the culmination of your life was stealing the body of someone else, your existence up until that point had to be pretty terrible. Would she be off living it up? Or were there more sinister things at work? "...and what was that like? Did you see her and it happened?" Was there a supervillain speech? "Did you feel it or anything?"

"Maybe you can't hear her fully.. because you aren't fully with her." Bix shrugged because science and technology aside, it made sense in his mind.

"Something horrible is always about to happen." Bix said seriously, looking in her eyes. "You and I have been here long enough to know that. But you, no matter how unintentional, have something of hers and she has something of yours. But you at least have your weapon." Bix gave Sasha an almost challenging smile. "The question is what are you going to do about it? I never took you as the type to just roll over when stuck in a corner." The opposite actually.

"We're never gonna be able to stop the bad things that come. We'd put ourselves out of a job. We fight horsemen. Of the apocalypse. Literal end of the world. It's always on the horizon... so something bad is gonna happen and you feel it in your bones? You're the only one who knows? Well... fight. Tooth and nail." Whether it be research or training or getting poked and prodded in the lab, "Exhaust every resource until it rears it's (lets be honest, probably ugly) head."

It was better than dragging around being sad. Of course this was coming from the hunter who seemed to always find away to delude himself away from the truths of their existence. Perhaps it wasn't delusion but the only way he could keep going as a sane human being, if any of them could be considered sane.

"Sorry.." Bix suddenly gave a sheepish smile, his pale cheeks turning pink. "I sound like some sort of lifecoach or something."