Doppelganger

"You...you look just like me!" Bell stammered as he stared at the elder boy. "The white hair, the red eyes! Everything!"

Ryo raised an eyebrow at his mannerisms, and his mouth upturned only just a little. Never in his old life or his previous, had he ever cracked a real smile towards anybody. He raised a hand to his white locks and ran his fingers through them as he shrugged before looking pointedly at the boy across him.

"I think it would be more appropriate in this case, Bell, to say that you look just like me."

"W-why?" Bell asked, still feeling blown away by this coincidence.

"I'm older." Ryo said simply.

"...Right. I guess that makes sense." Bell said as his eyes ran over Ryo's face over and over again. "But this is so cool! The villagers used to say things like everyone having a doppelganger somewhere in the world...I thought it was all made up."

"It seems you were not given a choice either then." Ryo muttered.

"What does that mean?" Bell tilted his head.

"Never mind." Ryo said as he gestured to the plate in Bell's hand. "Your food is going cold."

"My bad." Bell said quickly as he looked back down at his plate before grimacing slightly. "Still...Minotaur meat. Are you sure this is safe?"

"Been eating this for over a week now." Ryo said as he picked one up for himself and bit in. "No problems yet."

"If you say so." Bell said as he stabbed another piece of meat with his fork and held it up. "Thanks for the meal."

Bell shook off the way his skin was crawling and bit down. It would be one thing if this meal was disgusting alongside being sourced from a monster. But when somebody was so gracious to share something this tasty when they didn't even know you was very rude.

And besides...something told him that refusing any further would anger Ryo. And the image of an angry Ryo unsettled him for some reason.

For a few minutes, the campsite was filled with nothing but the sound of two people eating, chewing up the meat as they tore away pieces and chowed them down. To an outsider, it would indeed look like two brothers sharing a meal together, the older one looking at the younger from time to time to make sure he was enjoying himself. Eventually Ryo finished his own set of steaks and wiped the grease from his lips.

He lifted open the lid of the tea he had brewing and dipped his cup in and withdrew a boiling hot yellow-gold liquid from inside. To Bell, it looked like Ryo had drawn honey from the teapot, honey that had been heated enough that it had become more liquid like. Ryo took a deep sip to Bell's surprise, like he didn't care that he'd just drank a boiling liquid that was sure to boil the skin of the insides of your mouth if you just inhaled it like that.

Ryo swallowed and sighed as he felt himself warm up, odd enough as that was. He then looked at Bell who was staring at him questioningly.

"Got a cup?" He asked the farmer boy.

"Huh?...oh, yeah! One moment." Bell said as he reached for his pack and from it pulled out a small wooden cup. He held it out as Ryo just grabbed the rim of the burning hot pot and tilted it carefully so just small enough a stream of liquid would enter the cup. He filled it right to the brim for the younger boy to then gently take a sip so he didn't singe his tongue. Bell pulled away from his drink with a strange look on his face.

"Good?" Ryo prompted.

"It is." Bell said. "It definitely is sweet...but it's also a bit earthy. It's not what I was expecting." 

"Mullein tea." Ryo said. "Can never go wrong with it."

"It washes away the grease quite well." Bell said. "Though I wish we had some vegetables to go with all this meat. Grandpa always said to never have meat without vegetables."

"Unlike my grandpa who barely touched his." Ryo said as he drank some more tea. "Probably another thing that contributed to his untimely death...apart from his old age."

"Oh...did yours die recently too?" Bell asked.

"...No. He kicked it three years ago." Ryo said. "It's better this way I guess."

"Oh." Bell looked a little taken aback. "I'm sorry to hear that...pardon if this is an intrusive question but was he, you know, bad? I'm not trying to be rude or anything. It's just the way you said that-"

"Not to me." Ryo said. "To everyone else...that's a different story. And from what you've told me about your 'dreams', your grandpa was a different kind of bad. Though I suppose he was good to you."

"The best." Bell gleamed. "So do you have a surname...Ryo 'something'?"

"It's just Ryo now. Nothing more." Ryo said as he finished his tea. "Anyway, what vegetables did you have in mind?"

"Oh, I got these from the last village I resupplied in." Bell said. "They were a bit weird...like they wanted me gone as quick as possible."

"Really. I wonder why."

"Well apparently the last visitor they had walked into a bar and was the only one that walked out." Bell said as he looked back at Ryo puzzled. "When they investigated, they'd found everybody inside brutally murdered and beheaded, with their bodies chopped up and their blood and remains painting the walls. It happened without a noise apparently." Bell paused as he wondered to himself. "Maybe it was the same one that killed that merchant family. Who knows?"

"Fascinating." Ryo looked off to the side as the corner of his mouth upturned a bit. "I wonder who the culprit was. It just solidifies the fact you're a half-wit."

"What? Why?" Bell asked.

"A potential killer is walking around these woods and up these trails and here you come tottering along up here with no caution whatsoever." Ryo said. "What if you'd run into him?"

"It would have been quite a while ago." Bell said. "I'm sure the chances of that happening would have been next to none."

"...How your grandfather urged you to be an adventurer, I will never understand." Ryo said.

"Found it." Bell said as he held up a green vegetable. "That village plants zucchinis, so I thought I'd get some. It never hurts to eat some greens with your-" 

SLICE!

Bell was cut off as the top half of the vegetable in his hand suddenly toppled into several perfectly cut pieces and scattered on the ground beneath his arm. His gaze slowly travelled between it and his hand before he looked at Ryo's cold red eyes staring directly at him with a poisonous glint in his pupils.

"You bring that abominable thing in my presence again, it'll be your hand next time." Ryo said before the older boy surprising shivered and grimaced. "It's one of the few things I can't stand eating. That and boiled okra." Ryo then looked at Bell's flabbergasted face, his jaw hung wide open in surprise. "What? What the matter with you? You giving the mosquitoes an invitation or something?"

Bell continued to stare at him as the expression on his face slowly changed.

'Has he figured it out?'

Did the kid manage to draw the connection between him and the massacres after him revealing his technique like that? Not that it really mattered. Ryo never had the habit of proclaiming every single achievement of his after all. A kill was a kill, nothing more nothing less. What did he have to hide from this runt?

...

"That was...AWESOME!" Bell said as his eyes sparkled.

"...What?" Ryo cocked his head.

"I'd read stories about people who could cut things so quickly with their swords, you couldn't even see them draw their swords. The old hero stories were full of them. If you can do that already, you'd be a great adventurer once you reached the city!"

"I thought I told you I'm a sorcerer." Ryo said flatly.

"There can be magic swordsmen too." Bell said. "Unless you're saying that your magic is what cuts things." Bell leaned forwards and looked at him. "Is that it?

'Is he an idiot...or is he smart? Because I don't remember him being like this.'

An idiot perhaps that Bell didn't recognise the immediate danger he was in, given that he'd just been shown how easily Ryo could just kill him then and there. But smart since Bell instantly came to the conclusion that it was his 'magic' that allowed him to cut things without using a blade.

Ryo swore that this boy was supposed to be dense enough that light bent around him...but then again, the boy was also supposed to be able to adapt to his opponents and perilous situations almost as good as the Tenth Shadow.

Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration.

But even so, perhaps beneath that cowardly, rabbit-like exterior lay a sharp and intelligent mind.

...

Bell was so caught up in his fascination that he didn't realise an ember had popped out of the fire and landed in one of the folds of his sleeves. Only when the smell of burning fabric reached his nose, did Bell look down and see fire covering his arm, after which he began screaming in both shock and pain as the latter registered with him. He grabbed his arm above the fire and waved both about to put the flame out that way.

When that didn't work, the boy seemed to act on impulse and just dunked his flaming arm into the pot of tea, which although put out the flame, burned his arm in a completely different way. The boy quickly pulled back his arm screaming in pain while Ryo just watched the whole thing go down, amused at the show.

At least he was right about the boy being an idiot.

Bell held up his arm as he stared at it in shock, angry red flesh with burnt black patches here and there stared back at him, and the cold of the night air suddenly hitting that wounded flesh made the pain ten times worse. Only for then the situation to become a further ten times more worse for Bell when an invisible slash just lobbed off the entirety of that wounded arm.

All the burnt part of his arm which included his hand and the lower half of his forearm was cut cleanly off so quickly that Bell didn't even feel pain. Bell immediately looked to where Ryo was sitting only to find the seat empty. Then he felt a sharp connection with the back of his neck before everything went dark, and his body collapsed into Ryo's hold.

"...I see why I'm supposed to be guarding you now." Ryo said. "How the hell did you even make it this far in the original timeline?"

He lifted Bell's stumped arm out of which was pouring torrents of blood and the flesh was slowly becoming colder.

"I guess I'll have to see to that then. But first..." The older albino said before he looked down at the ground where the severed burnt arm lay. "...waste not, want not."

Ryo picked up the arm and held it up. To humans, the smell would perhaps be revolting or to some like pork, as he'd heard from the savage cannibal islanders of his old life. But to him however, the smell was completely different...after all, on what did a cursed spirit feast on better than the flesh of humans?

His mouth widened as he drove Bell's old arm, fingers first into his mouth, before placing his palm on the back of the stump and pushing it all the way in. With just one gulp, there was nothing more of the lost limb to be found. Ryo licked his teeth as he wiped away bits of blood.

He'd wanted no part of this liability...but he was bound through a Binding Vow now and there was nothing he could do about it. Being able to feast off of him however in given opportunities like this had not been against the conditions of the Binding Vow. And he did have to say, he was quite pleased with the taste of his eventual-

He snapped out of his thoughts as the sound splattering blood hitting the ground caught his attention and noticed that the stump on Bell was now beginning to leak onto the floor. He rolled his eyes and gripped the stump before concentrating. His hand glowed a wispy white aura around it before the stump began to bubble and then regenerate. First grew the bone, then the tendons, and then flesh before a final layer of skin grew out of the stump as the new structure ended in a ball out of which four fingers and a thumb sprouted.

For a fraction of a second, the bulbous looking flesh stayed the way it was before it shrank down and gained proper shape, restoring Bell's full arm, as if it had never been lost in the first place. Ryo sighed as he dropped the boy on his own makeshift futon next to his pack before walking over to his seat and plopping back down. Tonight it seemed, he wouldn't be sleeping.

And it was going to be a long night.

---

(The Next Morning)

Ryo stood in the middle of the campsite with one arm outstretched and the other drawn into himself with the fist closed. His eyes were also closed as he concentrated on his Technique, while the light of day bore down on him. It would not be long before the sun was up. The air was fresh and cool, the perfect time to wake up in his opinion.

Not too far away from him beside the now dead campfire lay Bell, completely out of it under his blanket with his fresh new arm laid on a towel. Ryo could obviously do nothing about the missing sleeve but Bell would never be able to tell the difference between the old one and the new one. Why would he anyway? Ryo had simply just regenerated the arm to its previous state and as of now, the younger albino lay on his back with his mouth open, still seeming to invite the flies as soft snores emerged from his throat.

Ryo breathed out slowly as he activated the specific technique, and his shadow darkened before materialising into a black liquid. The liquid began to circle around him, at first on the ground before it developed into waves and a miniature maelstrom of shadows began to orbit around him as silent as...well, a shadow.

Ryo brought his hands and crossed them together, holding the fingers out while locking the thumbs together to form the symbol of the bird, or more specifically, his owl Shikigami. The shadows rippled a little more as it prepared to release the spirit familiar but at the critical moment, Ryo clamped down on the Technique and stopped the shikigami from coming through. He breathed again before bringing in a large portion of his overall cursed energy reserves to perform the next action he was about to undertake.

"Materialise the shikigami in part." He muttered to himself. "Bring out the technique, but not the animal."

He broke the bird symbol he used to summon the owl. Nue's essence had now been released, and though she herself was not out, he could use that to his advantage and take control of her powers. He outstretched a hand and clenched it, as if he was about to forcefully rip something away.

"Give it to me Nue." He said as he pulled backwards in his mental plane. For a moment, he felt his power grab ahold of something else before it slipped away. "I am your master. I make you with my powers, so when I take something from you, it is mine by right. Relinquish it and give it to me!" He growled as he reached out again and this time yanked a little harder.

At first there was a spark, then a fizz before the sound of crackling ensued and Ryo opened his eyes to see his outstretched hand covered in ropes of purple electricity. The connection between this generated lightning and its shikigami owner weakened, and as that link weakened, the power of the lightning in his palm grew stronger. He smirked to himself.

"How much of a shame is it that little Megumi did not have what he needed to make this work." Ryo said to himself. "He had no idea how overpowered his technique was, how versatile his power set could be. All those precious abilities that his familiars had, and he could have taken them for his own."

He dismissed the Technique entirely as the shadows collapsed into the ground and receded into his own, while the lightning died out. A small gust of wind blew over the area before everything stilled again. Ryo shrugged before sucking out a piece of food from between his teeth and spitting it out. He'd helped himself to a little breakfast before trying this out. Nobody improved their powers and climbed higher up the power ladder on an empty stomach after all.

There was an end goal to it all. Not only did practicing how to hijack his shikigami powers improve and add to his own arsenal of abilities, but it familiarised him with how to do it further. After all, none of his shikigami had a power as great and precious as that of the last one, the one he was yet to subdue...

"Makora's wheel adapts to all phenomena." Ryo murmured as he tighten his vambraces a little. "Not just Cursed Techniques but against other factors as well. If it just so happens I clash with a god during my time here, it would be useful to have such an accessory on my side."

He was very confident that no adventurer, regardless of how strong they were could measure up to him. His powerset was pretty much just hax in nature, but it definitely trumped much of what he knew about other adventurers in this world.

The ultimate unpredictable factors were the gods who ran the different Familia. Each with their own natures and their own Domains to govern, it stood to reason that their powers, though taken from the same source, would take on a different flavour according to the nature of the god that the mysterious 'Arcanum' belonged to.

It was indeed, quite the parallel to Jujutsu sorcerers and Cursed Techniques. All sorcerers used Cursed Energy, but their Techniques were inherent to them, and it did rely heavily on things like lineage and such. All gods used the Arcanum, but the forms that Arcanum would take when the god would fight would be different from each other based on the god's nature.

Having Makora's wheel to help with things if it ever came to that would be advantageous. Not that he didn't have other cards to play first...

...

Bell gasped as he sat up quickly, his eyes wide and his chest heaving as he blinked confusedly. He looked around the campsite in confusion as he registered where he was before he lifted the arm he'd burnt last night and held it in his other. Looking it up and down, he did not see angry red burnt flesh but smooth, pale skin. The only thing out of place was that his sleeve was much too short, like it had been perfectly cut off with scissors.

"Finally up, you idiot." Ryo said, prompting Bell to look at him as the older boy sat on the tree stump. "You'll never be able to make it as an adventurer if you can't even tell in time that your clothes are on fire."

"M-my arm!" Bell said. "Last night I-"

"Burnt it before deciding to quench it in a pot of boiling tea." Ryo said flatly. "I've encountered fools before Bell Cranel, but never in my life have I been given such a laughable display of court jester antics. Just what were you thinking?"

"I...I panicked." Bell said awkwardly. "But...I could have sworn that my arm was cut off...I thought..."

"I restored it for you." Ryo said. "If I weren't around to help you when I was, you'd probably be monster chow now. There's nothing that screams for trouble more than the smell of cooked human flesh." Ryo stood up and pulled his cloak over him. "Well...I suppose that our time together has come to an end Bell Cranel. You are not the only one that wants to reach Orario. I wish you luck on your journey...well, as much luck as you can get if you're able to somehow self-immolate yourself."

"Wait." Bell said. "If we're both going to Orario, why don't we go together?"

"Why would I want to do that?" Ryo raised an eyebrow.

"Uhhh...it'll be good company?" Bell suggested.

"...Goodbye Bell." Ryo said as he turned and walked away. "I'd consider it perhaps...if you were able to even keep up with me."

Bell watched as the older boy walked away further down the road in the direction of the Labyrinth City. Bell's stare lasted for a few more moments before he quickly rushed out of his bed and flipped open his pack, hastily gathering his blankets and his bedding and folding them, while keeping his eyes on Ryo as his form disappeared further down the trail.

Just as Bell finished up packing, Ryo disappeared behind the tree line and the young boy got to his feet and quickly rushed after him. He still had so many questions that he needed to ask! 

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