【SC】Endless Journey

The two flew all night, and finally landed on the coast of the Western Continent at dawn.The moment his feet touched the ground, Claude threw a punch at Sephiroth, who froze for a moment, and was punched on that delicate, inhuman face.

Claude didn't expect that he could really hit it, so he couldn't help being stunned for a second.Sephiroth spat out a mouthful of blood, looked down at him: "Satisfied?"

"..." Claude put away his fists and walked inland without looking back. "How is it possible, unless you return to the stream of life now."

"Your temper has turned bad, you wouldn't say that before." Sephiroth followed behind him slowly.

"I don't remember being nice to you. How long ago?"

"A month ago."

——That was when Sephiroth was still trying to be a good boy and a good brother.

Claude faltered, and suddenly turned around and grabbed his collar. The anger in his eyes almost overflowed his pupils: "Don't mention that again. Don't mention a word."

Sephiroth looked at him for a moment, his eyes gradually darkened: "Do you regret it?"

Claude stared at the face that still had traces of the silver-haired youth, tried hard to restrain his urge to draw the sword, and finally let go without saying a word.

He continued to walk deep into the jungle on the coast, trying to shake off Sephiroth, but found that no matter whether he accelerated or slowed down, he could not change the distance between the two.The two walked like this for more than an hour, and he couldn't bear to turn around.

"Ah, I'm sorry, I'm very sorry. I should have killed you before you thought about it, and I regret it all the time. So can I just be alone now?"

He delusionally saw a hurt look in Sephiroth's eyes for a moment, but the other party quickly recovered that infuriating calmness.

"You want to use your fragile body that can't heal itself to destroy that thing? I thought you would be less impulsive when it comes to the survival of the planet, Claude."

Sephiroth's tone was deliberately provocative—or maybe he was.Claude suddenly calmed down, he knew that it was useless to argue with Sephiroth, this man is a master of sophistry, and he can always turn the topic to his own advantage.So he took a deep breath and walked back into the depths of the jungle.

"You left the original Type S, not me. Have you planned to clean up the mess you left?"

Sephiroth raised his eyebrows: "What do you think I'm doing now?"

Cloud glanced suspiciously at the other party, and Sephiroth shrugged without further defending himself.

They walked in the dense jungle until noon, and finally found a relatively familiar scenery halfway up the mountain.The two pushed aside the layers of branches and leaves, and saw the entrance of a cave on a cliff.

"That's right here." Claude chopped off a branch, lit it and threw it into the hole for lighting. "After passing this mountain range, you can enter North Collier. We will spend the night here tonight. I will go find it tomorrow morning." A magic spar, and then go to Nibelheim and give White a sample of the original S-type."

"We don't have such a leisurely time. It adapts very quickly, and the sea can't stop it for too long." Sephiroth folded his arms in disapproval.

"That's why I need that magic spar. If you don't want to help, please get out of the way. Standing here is in the way." Claude pushed the other side lightly, Sephiroth looked down at him, Finally, he turned sideways to get out of the way.

Claude collected a lot of hay and firewood in the jungle, and when he returned to the cave, he found that Sephiroth had already dug the small pit needed for the bonfire, and brought back a few hard-shelled berries and a few wild birds whose internal organs had been processed.He never knew that the other party would do this kind of thing, so he was a little surprised, but he quickly recovered his indifferent expression.

Sephiroth took the firewood in his hand and made it into a scaffold, and then cast magic to set it on fire.The warm orange color instantly illuminated the entire space, and the two sat down on both sides of the campfire, and began to quietly stare at the dancing flames in a daze.

After some time, Sephiroth suddenly said, "You need to eat something."

Claude was still immersed in worries about the future, and replied casually: "I don't need it."

"you need to."

"I have the same physique as you, you should know—" Claude was halfway through speaking, and suddenly realized the sense of disobedience, so he immediately looked at the other party.

This kind of conversation happened occasionally between him and the teenager Sephiroth, when they were still trying to take care of each other, so they paid special attention to each other's physical condition.But in fact, they are all super bodies strengthened by Jenova's genes, and it doesn't matter much if they don't sleep or eat for a few days. The Sephiroth 140 years ago knew this very well, so he never cared about life and death. other issues.

Sephiroth strung up wild birds with branches and stood beside the fire, the outline of his face was inexplicably softened by the light of the fire.For a moment, Claude saw the shadow of little Sephiroth as an illusion, and a familiar feeling of suffocation suddenly appeared in his chest.

……That is impossible.

When Sephiroth remembered everything, he was already Sephiroth. The experience of these six years was completely redundant to him, and there was no need for such a personality to continue to exist.

Claude withdrew his gaze and looked at the bonfire in silence.However, that familiar feeling was always lingering in his heart, which made him feel irritable.

"Is there a way to kill it?" Finally he decided to distract himself by returning to the most pressing topic at hand.

Sephiroth looked up at him, and continued to turn the roasted bird by the fire. "No."

"I wouldn't have meddled in this without you, tell me the truth."

Sephiroth looked at him again, his eyes were a little unclear.After a long time, the other party said lightly: "It was possible before yesterday, but it has absorbed the data of you, me, and Genesis, and can create a mimicry of any of us. Although the strength of each mimicry individual is far It is far inferior to our own body, but its number is very large, and the speed at which we destroy it may not be able to catch up with the speed of its proliferation—you know that a Jenova cell usually completes a round of proliferation in 24 hours, and its expansion speed is almost It is exponential. If you want to completely destroy it, you can only cause a large area of ​​physical damage to it in a short period of time. This kind of thing can only be done by using the black magic stone to summon a meteorite to hit the extreme north."

"Don't even think about that!" Claude blurted out.

"Look, I know you can't agree, so there is no other way." Sephiroth spread his hands, "Summon the meteor or give up Gaia, you only have two choices."

Claude was silent for a moment, then nodded slightly: "I thought you were also in the cycle of the flow of life, and if the planet dies, you will not be able to escape the fate of destruction."

"The premise is that I still plan to stay on this planet." Sephiroth's tone was calm, but Claude had already understood what he meant, "You have seen how our mother left her hometown."

...that dream.

Claude remembered.

It turned out that it actually happened on Jenova's home planet.

"One thing it says is true, that is our origin and destination. The planet may be destroyed, but we will survive. If it really gets to that point—"

"It's you, not us, I'm not interested in surviving with you." Claude interrupted him coldly.

Saphie Roth paused for a second, and a dangerous gleam appeared in his green vertical pupils: "You can't make decisions for yourself, Claude. You have to live."

"Why?" The familiar irritability surged into his heart again, and Claude had a vague premonition that he would hear nonsense such as "a doll can only obey its master" again.But Sephiroth unexpectedly didn't taunt him, but just raised his jaw slightly.

"... about the research institute."

Claude didn't expect him to mention it at all, and raised his head suddenly.

Sephiroth glanced at him, and slowly said: "...It was an accident. I didn't intend to use this method to liberate you from the crystal. I thought I would recover my strength before then."

Claude was stunned for a moment.

It took him 3 minutes to digest the information behind Sephiroth's words, and a belated sense of absurdity and anger suddenly flooded his heart——

In fact, he no longer cared what Sephiroth thought at first, and after knowing the truth about the other party's resurrection, he never considered whether he was also in Sephiroth's scheme.During the long sixty years of their last life, Sephiroth hated him and maliciously caused pain on his body and soul, and in the endless entanglement afterwards, he suddenly shifted from pure harm to some elusive interest.He knew that Sephiroth could intentionally make him cloned in order to let him experience the pain of the research institute, and he could bear the fact, but now the other party told him that he did not have such malicious intentions at the beginning, but instead let him fall into a flash in an instant. Some kind of emotional breakdown.

"What's the use of saying this now!" Claude almost roared, "You want to be resurrected, and take my crystal away from the Peking University cavity, so there will be no high concentration of magic crystals to inhibit its growth, and the whole planet will be buried for you , but do you care? You don't care at all! So what are you telling me now? Things have already happened, and nothing can be changed. You can't let everything go back to when the institute didn't clone you and me, and neither There is a way to make these six years disappear completely."

Sephiroth stared at him quietly until he had vented completely before speaking again: "I know you think I hate you."

"You are." Claude stared at each other with red eyes.

"I did hate you and the planet in the past, but that was a long time ago." Sephiroth stood up and came to his side from the position opposite him, "Before you killed me for the first time, I I thought I was omnipotent, so I couldn't accept that I was killed by you who was so small at the time. I resented you, just as I resented the planet that took everything from me and my mother. But when you killed me for the second time, I realize that the fate between you and me is special."

Hearing the last few words, Claude froze suddenly.

"You adored me, you hated me, and you killed me with your own hands. No one in this world felt more strongly for me than you did, so I thought then that even if I couldn't maintain my full self in the stream of life, at least you would remember Me. As long as I remember you, I can keep finding my complete self from your memory, so that it will last forever." Sephiroth looked at him sideways, his eyes gradually became darker, "But after a long time I Only then do I know what kind of psychology this is. Because I care about you, I will care about your hatred, because my memory of you is also deep enough to use you as the anchor of my rebirth. If you think this is A kind of hatred is also okay, but I don't hate you, I just want to see you struggling to live, you are especially alive in pain."

The air suddenly fell into a dead silence.Sephiroth watched the blond young man's expression turn blank from shock at the beginning, and finally showed his very familiar and complicated look.

Claude closed his eyes slowly, as if trying to calm down those surging emotions.When he opened his eyes again, there was only deep fatigue left in the blue: "It is impossible for Sephiroth to say such a thing. Who are you? Is it you or him?"

Sephiroth knew that "he" refers to the self that Claude grew up with, so he narrowed his pupils slightly: "You want me to be him?"

Claude didn't deny it, so he snorted displeased.

"What a naive thought. You know I've always been me, Hojo can't control my thoughts, and neither can anyone else. The reason why I am me is because I have learned the truth about the planet. As long as the truth remains the same, No matter how many times I've been resurrected, my view of the planet won't change, it's just that you keep refusing to accept reality."

Claude did not reply immediately, but looked at the bonfire in silence for a long time.

Until Sephiroth thought he didn't intend to continue the topic, Claude suddenly spoke again.

"The life of human beings... is a life of constantly re-understanding yourself and the world. From being ignorant, to thinking that you are omnipotent, to realizing your own limitations, and feeling frustrated, anxious and regretful, and then get up and continue Move forward. Because human beings are always aware of their imperfections, they keep changing themselves.”

Sephiroth couldn't understand what he wanted to express for a moment, so he listened quietly.

"You think you are perfect, the truth of the planet, so you don't need to change. But Sephiroth, nothing is perfect, even the universe itself as a perfect closed system is dissipating, and so are we " Claude said in a low voice, "Even if you and Jenova try their best to keep your 'existence', your end point is still destruction, and the same is true for the original S type. You can find some other meaning, so I have been trying to make you understand human life better after resurrection, but I failed completely."

Sephiroth seemed to be touched and couldn't help opening his mouth, but he didn't interrupt him in the end.

"It wasn't until just now that I suddenly realized that what made me suffer was not the experience of Carter Holm and the Institute, nor the pain you deliberately caused on me in the past, but the fact that I had hoped for you but was finally disappointed .I'm disappointed in myself for being so weak."

After Claude finished speaking, he didn't continue, but Sephiroth fell into deep thought.

For a moment he was stung slightly by the word "disappointment," and then he realized it was the shadow of the past six years on his soul.That experience had not had an impact on him, but Claude didn't know it.

"So in these six years, have you been changed?" Sephiroth asked.

Claude glanced at him, then lowered his head again. "Yes. I have been changed by you, from before to now."

The two of them didn't speak a word that night. Claude returned to the campfire after inspecting the entrance of the cave, and lay down on the spot to take a nap.

Half-dream and half-awake, he felt something fluffy and warm covering his body, raised his hand to touch it, and found that it seemed to be something like wings, and soon fell into a deep sleep again.

Until around three o'clock in the morning, Claude suddenly felt the ground shaking.He jumped up suddenly, quickly grasping the handle of the knife behind him with one hand, only to realize that Sephiroth was already standing at the entrance of the cave with a serious face.Claude walked to the position next to him and looked, and found that a huge silver-white wave could be vaguely seen on the sea level in the distance.

"How fast does it adapt?" Claude's face also became very dignified.

"24 hours is enough for it to evolve a round. We must leave here quickly." Sephiroth turned to extinguish the bonfire, but heard Cloud's voice behind him.

"Get out of here quickly."

Sephiroth understood his meaning almost instantly, and suddenly turned around: "Are you crazy? Even if you can lure it here, so what?"

"Ultima." Claude said in a deep voice, "Because the destructive power of the magic spar is comparable to that of a meteor, I hid it in this cave a long time ago. To cause widespread destruction, it's the only one—"

"Absolutely not." Sephiroth stopped him categorically. "You can't escape such a large-scale explosion. What if you die here? Are you so relieved to hand over the planet to my hands?"

Claude paused, and looked aside: "I already contacted Vincent and Nanaki yesterday. If I can't go back, I will ask them to recover the Ultima magic stone."

Sephiroth couldn't help raising his eyebrows: "So I'm the only one who doesn't know about this arrangement?"

"You can't agree, so there's no need to say anything."

Sephiroth choked.At the same time, Claude has already pulled out the six poses and held them in front of him: "Come on!"

The silver tsunami finally landed on the Western Continent. Huge waves hundreds of meters high swept across the coast. The violent vibration made the stalactites in the cave begin to crumble, which seemed to be the prelude to another doomsday.

As soon as the original S-type landed, it rushed towards the direction of the cave, and the virgin forest was instantly turned into powder under the crushing of huge waves.Claude immediately turned around and ran to the depths of the cave, Sephiroth also followed closely and flew to his side.

"From here down." Claude reminded.

Only the first part of the cave is very dimly lit, while the deeper part is illuminated by the glistening green light of a certain mineral on the stone wall.This scene made Sephiroth feel familiar, but it was not the same as the scenery he had seen.They ran for 5 minutes before Sephiroth finally realized where the sense of déjà vu came from—the flow of life frozen in ice and snow at the bottom of the Peking University cavity also looked like this.

"Is this the cave where the demon crystallized?" He observed the surrounding minerals while flying, and could faintly feel the magic power flowing in it.

"...It's the magic spar cave." Claude didn't seem to want to answer this question, but he still answered his doubts in the process of avoiding falling rocks, "The ancient species once left some uncarved giant magic spar it's here."

A woman with brown hair and green eyes with long braids flashed through Sephiroth's mind, and a certain sense of displeasure arose spontaneously.

There was a loud noise from the entrance of the cave, and it seemed that something rushed into the cave with things like gravel and broken branches.The silver-white original S-type quickly washed away the entire space like a flood, forcing them to speed up and run downward.

This cave is much deeper than Sephiroth imagined, like a small North Great Hole hidden in the mountains, the bottom goes deep into the place close to the core of the planet.If the original S-type completely filled this area, at least half the area of ​​the North Continent would be needed. In a certain sense, Claude's plan might really work.

The speed of the liquid flowing down the trend was much faster than their running speed. When Claude rushed to the edge of a cliff next to the underground abyss, the original S-type had already broken through the upper rock wall above their heads.A huge amount of silver-white substance spewed out in an instant, and it was about to submerge the two of them.Claude immediately turned around and swung a knife, Sephiroth also released a hurricane at the same time, and the two air currents immediately pressed the flood peak back into the cave above.

"Here, go straight down!" Claude shouted at Sephiroth, and jumped into the abyss.

Hearing this, Sephiroth also swooped down towards the abyss, and in the process heard the sound of the cave above collapsing.

——Their retreat has been completely blocked.Sephiroth realized immediately.

However, Claude's expression didn't change at all. The other party just kept jumping and shuttling between the falling boulders, and finally landed on a platform that hadn't collapsed yet.Sephiroth landed beside him, and found that there was an entire stone wall made of demon crystals.

"...a giant magic spar." He whispered.

After landing, Claude immediately ran to the giant magic spar, dug a few times at the bottom of the thing with the six-style, and found a small black box.Claude opened the box and was slightly relieved when he saw a green magic spar lying intact in the cloth.

He remembered Sephiroth, who was still behind him, and turned towards him.

"You still have time to leave now. This rift is further down to the core of the planet. The underground river here may be connected to the Mohuang Spring somewhere. Anyway, it's not the first time you go down, and you can always get out..."

A falling rock almost fell on top of the two of them, and Sephiroth cut it open.

"Why did I come with you if I had this plan?" The man's tone was a little more annoyed than he even noticed.

Claude paused, and finally stopped trying to persuade the other party to leave.

The rumbling above was getting closer and closer, and huge cracks began to appear inside the entire mountain range, and it was about to collapse completely soon.They stood in the center of the magic spar cave, watching the silver-white substance that could swallow the extreme north break through many obstacles and pour into the depths of the cave, and suddenly fell into a strange tranquility.

Cloud took a deep breath, raised the Ultima magic stone, and started to cast the magic that could level everything here.During his chanting, Sephiroth released the magic shield, so the original S-type kept attacking the area where they were, but never touched the two people in the shield.

When Claude finished chanting, the mineral veins in the entire magic spar cave began to emit dazzling fluorescence.The world began to collapse and dissolve in this green light, and at the same time, countless crazy screams echoed repeatedly in their minds——

"no, you can not--!"

"We must live—! We cannot disappear here!"

Trillions of original S-types howled in the brains of Cloud and Sephiroth, giving them splitting headaches for a while.

The magic shield finally couldn't withstand the impact of Ultima, and cracks began to appear.Claude barely took a look at the shield that was about to shatter, and suddenly laughed at himself.

"Sometimes I really can't understand what you are thinking." The ground shook so violently that Claude staggered and had to support himself with Six Forms.He glanced at Sephiroth from the corner of his eye, and then turned his gaze back to the world around him that was constantly evaporating: "You have been completely resurrected, with a brand new body, you can live until the end of the planet without me." Yan. Why are you so obsessed with letting me survive?"

"You have always understood, you just don't want to understand." Sephiroth moved the corners of his lips, ready to face the torrent of energy after the shield shattered.

Claude smiled bitterly: "Maybe you're right."

As soon as the words fell, the shield made a crisp cracking sound, and then it was completely reduced to powder. The powerful energy of Ultima squeezed and roasted Claude from all directions. He felt that his internal organs began to rupture. Every inch of muscle and bone was in severe pain as if being run over by a tens of millions of tons of hydraulic press. Blood began to flow from the nasal cavity and ear holes. gush out.

"Claude, this way!"

At the moment when he was about to lose consciousness, he heard Sephiroth's roar, so he didn't know where to give birth to a force and grabbed the hand that was stretched out by the other party.Sephiroth turned on the shield again, relieving part of the pressure on the two of them, but Claude's internal pressure caused him to completely lose his vision, so after spitting out a large mouthful of blood, he pulled Sephiroth towards the memory. Jump down in the direction of the abyss.

In the process of falling, he felt that the other party wrapped him with wings, and he couldn't help but think of what happened last night.

"If both of us survive, I might regret it..." Claude said with the last of his strength.

"Then use the rest of your life to redeem your sins. In short, escape from here first." Sephiroth coughed lightly, wiping the scarlet overflowing from the corner of his mouth where he could not see.

With a loud noise as they fell heavily into the liquid, endless demons poured into their mouths, noses and lungs, causing them to faint completely.