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Ignacio stretched his arms above his head, listened to the ways his shoulders popped and cracked, and then murmured the enchantment under his breath which granted him the glowing costume that called him Eternal Sailor Encke. He hadn't felt the presence of any youma nearby, but he figured it wouldn't hurt to take a simple patrol: dust any of the youma he saw in his vicinity, loop around, perhaps drop by his comet if everything seemed quiet.

What he hadn't expected was to sense the bright spot of a general's aura in the vicinity.

General's auras were almost invariably problematic, and Encke considered it his job at this point to drive them out of whatever area they infested. Leaving it to sit could result in a pile of bodies so high that they would be incomprehensible. Leaving it to sit could result in more scares like when Richard hadn't come home that one night, leaving others to wonder what happened to their close ones, and perhaps they wouldn't be so lucky.

He steeled himself and pursued the sensation, though noticed with a quiet curiosity that it didn't seem to be in any particular hurry to either get away from him or approach him.

Implied that they were busy with something, perhaps.

Now, it seemed, the aura was moving.

Slowly.

Flaunting, perhaps.

Perhaps Encke was too inclined to assume when it came to the world's enemies donned in black military garb, but he never wanted to take any chances. He could have let it be. Encke was never going to let a general's aura be. Not in his nature.

He dashed after it.

Considering the aura's considerably slower movement, it didn't take too much time for Encke to approach where the aura was the most blaring and the strongest.

What he spotted, though, made a huff of air leave his lips.

Even with the lack of smoke pipes that spat fire and choking death into the sky, it was incredibly easy to tell who the half-youma general in front of him was. Promoted. A pity, that. Also still on fire, apparently. There had been a part of Encke that had hoped that perhaps he had simply burned to a crisp.

Encke didn't spend time wishing death on many, but he made an exception for the man who had drained his love and left him to die.

"A general now," he noted, unable to help the sardonic drip of amusement in his voice as he watched Faustite from a distance. He bounced on the balls of his feet. "I'd say congratulations, but it looks like you have hardly anything to show for it."

His tone and the smirk he wore were vicious, but Encke couldn't quite hold back the boiling urges he felt toward the weak general in front of him.

"You want me to give you energy," Encke didn't make any moves to attack Faustite -- of course, he always seemed to be tied by some level to the fact that he tended to act in defense of, not in offense, though perhaps it would have felt like a rush to be able to ensure that the general never stood up again -- "You should know by now that the answer to that is no."

Badly would be correct.

Encke casually moved in Faustite's way, adopting a wider stance and spreading his body out so he was a bit harder to simply dodge around. "I don't think you understood me." His tone was a bit less jocular and a bit more of a warning as he stated, "I am not giving you energy. That also includes not permitting you to take anyone else's."

The general seemed to hardly be a threat in his current state, but if he attempted to attack someone who had even less of an ability to defend themselves?

Well, all bets were off.

"Walk away, general."

The reality was: often, no, Encke didn't think before he spoke. Alternatively, the reality was: he thought too much. Mixed up between anxiety and trauma and his own natural tendencies to impulsive behaviour left him wobbling between the two like an endless pendulum swing. The phrasing hit him and he realized the irony of the situation; he had told the general to walk away, but the general didn't necessarily have anywhere to go.

Encke's lips twitched upward as if it was actually an amusing joke, but only for a moment, and he resumed leveling the general with an unamused expression.

"Answer's pretty obvious, or did whatever has you looking like that take away your sense? Away from the citizens of Destiny City."

He wasn't entirely sure how holding Faustite into an alley would accomplish that just yet, but perhaps he would give up and use whatever barebones energy he had left to just teleport back to the pit of hell they called the Negaverse.

"You don't have right to anyone's energy just because you're not feeling well. Leave."

The barebones energy that apparently didn't exist. A situation created by the monstrousness of the Negaverse: whatever the general had locked him from his basic humanity, leaving him desperately dependent on draining other people to live. Felt almost vampiric.

And for a fleeting moment, Encke understood.

And if he let himself sit at that moment too long, the nightmares of what had awoken him to the war underneath the city would return and distract him. The undeniable hunger that had seeped through every part of his body that he so desperately had tried to fight off that begged him to take from others --

He could kill him instead. And in all truth, it might have been a reasonable reaction. Faustite had proven himself a threat to the populace time and time again. There was nothing that said that Encke acting would not have been justified. It would have still been in defense of the city, even with Faustite being in this state. And it would be easy. If he truly had no energy, Encke could probably flatten him.

That was probably overconfident. He was still a general.

But something about that still felt deeply wrong, and Encke found himself cursing himself for being so fundamentally good that he couldn't convince himself to get it over with. He also found himself cursing himself for the brief moment of sympathy he couldn't quite get around --

"Too easy, perhaps. No point in beating someone when they're already down unless they're beating on someone else." Encke let out his own long-suffering sigh. "What the Negaverse did to you is ******** up. You still don't have the right to the life force of another being."

And Encke let him sit.

If he was simply sitting in an alley, he wasn't a threat, general of the Negaverse or not. Perhaps he'd gain enough energy back just being there that he could leave and go to whichever place he'd actually be able to recover without stealing more energy or souls. The Negaverse, he guessed. At least the damage had already been done with whatever was taken there.

He still remembered the starseeds that they had been able to rescue, though, and none of it sat comfortably with him--

At the concept of thinking the world was entirely black and white, Encke couldn't help it. He laughed. "No, I don't, and no, I don't think this is totally black and white." After all, Encke had helped people purify before. He had helped people get out. Even if the entire entity in itself was evil, not everyone in it was completely irredeemable, and it was something he had to negotiate with the fact that he couldn't simply let anyone in the Negaverse act.

Perhaps there was a time he might act against someone who could be redeemed, but it begged the question: at what point was someone irredeemable?

And if they were irredeemable, did Encke's limits of only acting in defense no longer apply?

"But I don't suspect you chose to be made of fire, either way, no matter what the root cause. Certainly would be a lot easier to go take a nap."