2026-05-27: Pushing Past It

• Cutscene: Pushing Past It
• Cast: Hyousuke Suzuki
• Where: Sumaru City: Hirasaka Ward
• OOC Date: 2026-05-27
• IC Date: November 12, 2012
• Summary: A lone figure stumbles through the dark, his strength drained by an insurmountable foe. His deadened legs are forced onwards by fading strength and ailing willpower, his vision blurred and body aching. He seeks no help, for none is wanted.

---

The Long Dark (Scott Buckley): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i_6R2zr9H8

Every step was agony.

The fight with the Hierophant Shadow, and the abominable thing that had arrived after it, had passed. Hyousuke was, as far as he could tell, safe for the moment. But the fight had taken its toll. The adrenaline that had propped him up during the fight had long since run dry, and exhaustion ripped through his body like a plague. His muscles - every muscle - screamed for rest, even for a moment, and they howled in pain when he forced himself to move forward regardless. His feet were leaden, turning every inch moved into a Herculean effort, while his legs fell forward more than they did cycle through the movements of a step.

He winced every time that his foot collided with the ground. The jolts surged through his body like lightning, bringing with them a flash of pain, somehow sharp and aching at the same time. The exhaustion used it to scream at him that he had no more strength to spare, and that he needed to rest, in whatever form it took. The poison that still lingered in his veins stung like knives, themselves laced with acid. It felt like his insides - the flesh, the veins, the bones and the guts - were all burning and melting, the process hastened with every jolting step.

Yet still, he limped on. Every step was a supreme triumph of will, a victory claimed with limbs he could barely feel, and a chest that felt as though it would burst at any moment. His breaths were long and rasping, requiring no small degree of strength. He had to force the air into his lungs, almost swallowing it to push it past his dry and stinging throat. He stopped for a moment, leaning against a nearby tree, and gasped for air past the protective layer of his mask. Some small part of him wished that there was someone - anyone - there to help him. The larger part was just glad that nobody could see that he was in such a state that required it.

He did not know when he reached Kasugayama's gates. He recognised their shape, of course. He knew the feel of them, even beneath the tough fabric of his costume, down to the last contours. He had passed them at ungodly hours often enough that they had been committed to memory, after all. But he could not sneak past them that night. His aching body, bereft of anything but the fumes of strength still trapped within his flesh, fumbled past the threshold in a clumsy display of exhaustion. Even when he forced his body upright and dragged it to the dorms, he listed to one side, limping and dead on his feet.

Casting off his armour was more an instinctive reaction than an active thought. Pieces clattered and crumpled against the dorm room floor, falling away like pieces shed from a crumbling cliff face. When the visor finally came away, and hit the floor with an unceremonious thud, he realised the blurring of his vision had not been from dirt or a damaged lens. Shapes blurred and colours bled, no matter how hard or how much he blinked, while a black edge crept in from the corners of his eyes, threatening to consume his sight if he did not focus.

He wanted to rest. He wanted to collapse against the bed, the wall, the floor - anything that could support his weight, and grant him reprieve. But he refused. Not because he did not desire rest, but because he could feel something rising in his gut. It burned him like fire, churning like a roiling ocean, and every stumbling movement forward threatened to spill it unto the world. It would come, one way or another. Even in his exhausted state, Hyousuke knew it. Yet, he remained defiant, exerting what little control he had over his circumstances, and choosing where that filth might be spewed.

He looked like a ghost when he stumbled through the bathroom door. Gaunt and pale, groaning with pain and effort, shambling like a reanimated corpse more than a person, he stalked through the halls towards the first stool he could find. Already, the thin clothes he wore beneath his armour were drenched in cold sweat, yet more still streaked down his face in thin, jagged, runnels. They carved paths into his skin like a knife's tip, hanging off his jaw if they did not sting at his eyes, marking a thin and dark trail on the floor as he shook or wiped them from his being. It was indecent and impolite, but such thoughts were far from his mind as that roiling storm reached its apex.

More crumpling came. This time, it was not the gentle folding of fabric against the ground. It was the harsh, thudding, collapse of legs giving way as the final hurdle was cleared. It was punctuated by the sharp slam of a head careening off of the side of a stall, its echoes drowning out the quiet drip of blood spattering against the floor from the cut left in the collapse's wake, diluted though it was by the salt-tinged sweat still glinting on his skin like shards of glass.It was a short, yet harsh, barrage of sounds that rang out into the still air of the night, before finally fading into silence.

He ignored the pain. he barely felt it. He barely felt anything. All he could see, with whatever failing vision his mind and his body saw fit to grant him, was that wretched night. A man and a woman's lives, reduced to little more than unsalvageable remains for the whims of some grotesquely powerful *thing.* They had died in front of him, no more than a stone's throw away. He wondered if they had died in agony, or in fear. He wondered if they were aware of what had been happening. He wondered if, like the man that had met his fate in the warehouse, there was something - anything - he could have done to stop it.

If only he was a little stronger.

That was always the problem. He was too weak to oppose his enemies, too weak to withstand their onslaughts, too slow to catch them before they vanished to execute whatever other plans they had. He wasn't good enough, wasn't smart enough, wasn't anything. He just wasn't enough. No matter how hard he tried, or how much of his body and his mind he sacrificed to see a job through, something always made sure to remind him that he was nothing more than a sledgehammer that deluded itself into thinking it had any other purpose.

He might have cried, had his body the strength to spare for it. He might have laughed at the absurdity of it all, had his lungs enough breath to spare. As it stood, all he could do was heave out a rattling, rasping, breath, before his jaw fell away and allowed the pain and aches to tear through his throat, falling as a stream of bile. He told himself it was the pain. It made sense that he was dizzy, and that such a thing would result from pushing his all-too-mortal body past its limits. He did not dare to entertain the notion that anything else could have triggered such a violent reaction.

No, it was certainly the pain. Little more than some physical sensation that he could push through. All he had to do was steel his nerves, clench his fists, and soldier on for those who needed it. There was no time to languish there, nor was there time to think on the matter. To do so would be an enormous waste of his energy. He was bruised and poisoned and battered, after all. The easiest, simplest, and most likely correct explanation was that he simply needed to rest for a spell, and tolerate whatever pain lingered.

Hyousuke dragged himself up, bracing against the cool rim before him. It was a struggle to prop himself up on his knees, let alone stand upright, and his legs collapsed from under him before he'd managed even that. More jagged tracks were carved into his skin. More clear fluid diluted the blood that drew from his still-leaking wound. it was sweat, he told himself. It stung his eyes and travelled past them, lingering with whatever cold, salt-tinged water still insisted on wrenching itself from his pores. He screwed his eyes shut, blinked it away, and tried once more to force himself past his weakness.