Hikaru No Go Fan Fiction ❯ Hikaru no Highlander ❯ European Sorcerer Nikolai ( Chapter 2 )

Hikaru no Highlander
by Moonraker One

Author's Note: This chapter may seem rushed. I'm sorry. I just don't like romantic scenes.

CHAPTER TWO – European Sorcerer Nikolai

Hikaru cleared his throat before furthering the conversation. “Wait a minute, you're telling me that your father is the legendary Kenshin Himura from the revolution a hundred and fifty years ago?” he asked, waiting for Akira to nod his head solemnly in response. Fujiwara and Hikaru gave each other glances–both had been overseas at this time, taking part in wars on the European continent, and had missed the revolution as it happened in Japan. They had come back at the start of the nineteenth century, and heard the legend of a warrior who slayed thousands of men but had never been defeated in a battle to the death. Both had wanted to fight him, simply for the purpose of seeing if a thousand years' worth of swordsmanship experience gave them an obvious advantage. One of the differences between Fujiwara and Hikaru was their style at swordsmanship, and how it related to combat. Hikaru had mastered several styles for combat against many opponents for war, but used a variant of Hiten Mitsurugi-ryu for personal fights. Fujiwara-no Sai, however, liked to use one style of swordplay regardless of the situation. It tended to make him somewhat less versatile than his younger immortal friend, but he more than made up for it with style.
“Yep,” Akira grudgingly admitted. He held quite a bit of hostility towards his father, primarily for the reason of him killing Akira as well as his mother. He knew, from a previous encounter with his father fifty years prior, that although Kenshin had lost a good portion of his “hero spirit,” he was no less skilled a sword fighter. He could still decapitate a hundred victims from twenty yards' distance with a single swipe, just like back in the revolutionary days. Akira knew he'd been improving quite a bit since his previous encounter, and hoped it would be enough to take down the man once and for all. “I fought him once before, but I was no match for his level of skill. I've gotten a whole lot better, but I don't know if it'll be enough.”
Sai decided to present an offer. “I have an idea, Akira,” he offered. “Hikaru and myself are after a European sorcerer immortal by the name of Thomas Nikolai. If you know anything about him, we'll help you track down your father.” Akira flinched; he'd known that name from somewhere, but couldn't quite place it. Giving it few moments' worth of thought, it hit him.
“Thomas Nikolai? Oh yeah! I remember now. He plays go against me at the go salon I visit!”
“You play go? Let's play right now!”
Hikaru shot a glance at Sai. “Fujiwara, I swear, you're about the biggest go freak I've ever seen!” He stood there a minute and gave it some thought. “Y'know? That's a good idea. First,” he looked behind him then back at the two in his presence, “let's get out of this alley before someone sees the dead and the cops get involved.” With that, they took off at a good walking pace.


On the other end of the city, in an alleyway not too dissimilar to the one Hikaru and the other two immortals in his presence were at, a deal had just gone terribly wrong. On the receiving end of the bad luck, was a man by the name of John, whose girlfriend stood with him. Both he and his girlfriend were immortals, although neither of them had anywhere near the level of skill at the blade as the red-headed immortal in front of them possessed. “I swear to god, Ukiwara! I did nothing bad to you! Those men you talked to...they were lying! I did nothing against you!” Although the red-haired warrior seemed angry, he couldn't help but smile wickedly at the words of the quivering immortal standing in front of him.
“Ukiwara?” he uttered, laughing slightly. “Ukiwara is dead. He's sleeping with the devil now, courtesy of Hitokiri Battosai.” This statement only caused the man to quiver more, as the red-headed warrior kept his hand on his blade, sheathed at his side, ready to be pulled from the sheath at any moment.
“B...B...B...Battosai?!” John shrieked. “The legendary man slayer is alive?! Where?!”
The man barely had time to hear the red-haired warrior utter, “I am he,” before Kenshin yanked his blade from his sheath and decapitated the quivering man in the time it would take a normal person to blink. The female immortal, shaking from fear while leaning against the wall, got more frightened as Kenshin drew closer to her. With a sadistic grin on his face, Battosai grabbed her shirt and with a single tug, ripped it clean off. “We are going to have some parting fun, you and I,” he said, in between her shrieks of terror.
“No! NO! NOOOOO!”
Alas, her shrieks would not be heard much longer. The lightning burns left behind would be a dark reminder, though.


Two intense players sat opposing each other at a table in a dimly lit Go salon on the better side of town. One sat with a calm demeanor, happily taking in the sights of the salon, noticing that the paint was cracking on the ceiling, while the other clasped his hands on his head in sheer frustration. The tension in the air was so thick it could be cut with a sword; they looked up at each other before the calmer of the two reached into his go bucket and lifted a single stone between middle and front index fingers. A quiet thwap sounded as the white stone met the brown-colored board. His opponent sighed through his nose as he realized that the game was effectively over. “I resign,” Akira said, shaking his head. “You are amazing. I've won the meijin title some sixty years ago, but you are clearly better than me.”
Hikaru laughed as tactfully as he could to avoid insulting the weaker Akira. He simply could not believe that his dark-haired foe had the skill to keep up with him as long as he had. In the thousand years of his life, he'd fought few go players as skilled as the one in his presence. “Akira, you are without a doubt, THE best go player–other than Fujiwara over here–that I've every played,” he complimented.
Akira's sweating came to a close now that the game had ended. “I guess the fact that you've been playing hundreds of years before I was even born has something to do with it,” he quipped.
“Hikaru and I made a pact when we first became immortals,” Fujiwara entered. “He promised that he'd become as good as me at Go, if I become as good as him at swordsmanship. He's closer to overtaking me at Go than I am to him at swordplay.”
Suddenly, all three immortals sat up straighter in their chairs, fully aware of the fact that a powerful source of quickening had just walked into the room. A blonde-haired man garbed in a brown overcoat approached the desk of the Go salon, and began to ask questions regarding Hikaru and Fujiwara. In response to his questions, the lady at the desk looked upward, an instinctive sign that she could not precisely remember, but a quick glance and she pointed him in the direction of the third water-damaged table from the back entrance. Hikaru stared into the cold eyes of the sorcerer, and his blood seemed to lose a few degrees' worth of temperature.
“Nikolai,” Fujiwara simply whispered, an angry look on his otherwise happy face. Hikaru stared at him, seemingly incapable of any emotion besides pure hatred towards him.
“Good to see you fine fellows again!” he uttered in a fake tone of appeasement.
“Just tell me the time and place and I'll be happy to send you to hell, Thomas,” Hikaru flatly stated.
This statement sort of took Thomas Nikolai by surprise. “Why, Hikaru! No chit-chat?”
“You took something very precious to me and you destroyed her. I'm going to send you to your maker, just tell me when.”
Nikolai gave up on the psychological tactics. “The pier, tonight at seven.” With that said, he placed a single sheet of weather-tortured paper on the table, and sneered before he walked away. If Hikaru's eyes were lasers, they'd have eaten a hole through the back of the sorcerer as he left the building. Neither of the two immortals who'd fought him before could stand the presence of him, and he always was about as evil as they came. Hikaru could and would never forget the girl taken from him by Nikolai.


Two lovers were tightly woven into a fabric of lust and passionate embrace as they stared into the eyes of the other. Although they had yet to take it to the next step–to actually get physical–merely being in the presence of the other was sufficient to make them both perfectly happy. The difference between calendar ages simply amused Hikaru as he lie next to his soon-to-be bride. One was young, the other was old, yet they were both seventeen in body. He had always looked to the positive side of immortality; namely, he did not ever get sick, ever get old and frail, ever get injured, and he could live to see the wonders of the world all throughout the centuries. Yet lying next to the young woman he'd loved from the moment he saw her brought up the inevitable negative side of being seventeen forever: no children. It was the horrifying curse of being an immortal: you could never father children if male or become pregnant if female. But even that was not the most negative aspect; while he was over two hundred and fifty years old, he still was teenage in body, but he knew she would grow old and die. But he pushed all those thoughts aside as they would spoil the mood they were in.
“Hikaru,” she whispered to him, “you wanna marry me, right?”
Her question surprised him. “Why, certainly!” he argued. “We've known each other for your whole life! I was a friend of your father's before you were born, and once you were of age, I wanted you to be my wife!”
A tear rolled down her cheek. “That's what's got me worried, Hikaru. One day, I'm gonna wake up and be wrinkled and gray, and you, you'll be a handful of decades older but still physically young. You'll be wanting a younger wife like all men do!”
He wiped the tear from her cheek and shook his head. “No matter what, Eliza, I'll never leave you.”
She choked back a tear. “You promise?”
He nodded with a smile. “I will never leave you. If another immortal takes my head and I die, I still won't leave you. You are my love. You are my gift. I would fight the wars of my homeland a century ago again just to prove my worth to you.” He closed his eyes and ran his fingers through her hair; and recognized that he'd never felt something so soft, and so wonderful. She cried again, yet these were tears of joy, as she wrapped him in a loving embrace.
“Oh what I'd give to be able to live out the centuries with you, Hikaru.”
This time he began to cry. Oh god, how he wished for the same thing. Yet, he knew from the start how it would end. It would end the same way it did with the last two women he'd buried. It would end with the single greatest gift of his life succumbing to age and inevitability, tearing away at his heart and leaving him alone once again. Love was his hope for winning The Prize of being the last immortal in existence. He hoped that by winning, he'd be granted mortality, the chance to die and be united with all the women he would ever love and lay to rest.


“Hikaru? Hikaru? You okay, Hikaru?” a voice called out. When he realized that he was thinking back to times past, Hikaru Shindo violently whipped his head left and right, returning to the current situation. He looked to his left and saw Akira, who had been snapping his fingers to try and wake him from his train of thought. “You seemed to spaz out for a second there.”
“I'm...I'm fine. Don't you worry. Let's just go.” Fujiwara could tell that his best friend was thinking of the past and how things used to be, for it was only then that he wasn't his usual talkative self. With Hikaru's uncharacteristic willingness to just leave, as opposed to playing a final game, he could tell that the only thing on the mind of the skilled swordsman was the upcoming battle. Then again, Nikolai had it coming; Fujiwara was there and had seen the first-hand murder of young Eliza Masterson, the girl whose family Hikaru had befriended during a seventy-year stay in England. Plus, it would give Fujiwara himself a chance to further his blade skills.
They left the go salon and headed for the sixth apartment building down from the salon, where Akira had decent living quarters near the roof, where they could practice. “I'm hoping to see just how good you two are,” Akira explained. “I know that being just a tad bit over a century old, I'm far behind you guys, but I wanna see just what difference a millennium makes.”
Fujiwara laughed. “You'd be surprised how many immortals wondered the same thing...and met the service end of our blades,” he joked. This brought a collective laugh from all three. As they continued down the sidewalk, a girl who looked unusually tall for her visible age came running towards them. Akira recognized her immediately.
“Yuri! What're you doing here?” She seemed visibly shaken by something.
“Ak...Akira!” she stammered, catching her breath. “Some guy just cornered me while I was walking! Said his name was Thomas Nikolai!” Hikaru cringed at the sound of the name. “He was asking all sorts of questions about you, and wanted to tell you he decided to make the 'little meeting of yours' for a sooner time! He wants to see you on the roof of the building Akira's apartment is in, and...oh god, I'm sorry I doubted you.”
Akira shook his head. “No, you had every reason to doubt me; I should've told you from the beginning.”
“That bastard Nikolai never was patient,” Fujiwara swore, which was unusual for him, with a shake of his head. “Not with killing or anything else.”
Akira consoled her with his hug, but seemed worried about his newfound friends. “Are you certain you're ready?”
Hikaru had never been more certain of anything in his life. “You have no idea how long I've wanted this.”


Two lovers, Hikaru Shindo and Eliza Masterson, soon to be married and very much in love, lay running fingers through each other's hair and kissing. It was the scene two hundred and fifty-something years after Hikaru's birth. He had hated all the rain that England had, plus the food was bad and the people were not friendly as they should have been. Yet, this girl made him forget all the bad things in life whenever she kissed him. A sharp, piercing thought blew through his mind like a bullet; he could sense a weakened quickening approaching, and instinctively pulled himself upward to a standing position. Taking only a second to don his shirt, he ran from the house. He only made it to the doorway when he found a sword come out of nowhere and impale him through his chest. A loud screech was all he could muster before the source of the blade tore it from his body and attempted another slash. Before his assailant could do so, he unsheathed his own blade and killed the man with a heart stab–someone had hired several mortals to do his dirty work.
“All of you,” he said to the trio of normal people approaching him. “You want to die?” One took a swipe at his neck, only to be stopped by a decapitation. The second tried a forward strike but got cut in two instantly. The third, actually managing a sideways slash across Hikaru's stomach, received a neck stab for his effort. Before he could resheathe his sword, he heard a shrill scream come from inside the house, which caused him to run like he'd never run before.
He froze where he stood once he saw the reason.
“HIKARU SHINDO!” the man shouted. “I've finally found you!”
Hikaru gulped; what did this man want? He'd never seen him before. “Who're you?”“SHUT UP! I know you perfectly well, my brother died from the diseases you Japanese brought over. So I'm gonna kill you, boy.”
“Do what you want with me,” Hikaru pleaded, “but please leave the girl alone. She's innocent.”
“I bet she is,” the man argued. He instantly pulled a dagger from his pocket and buried it in the back of the girl's neck. Hikaru felt his heart stop a moment when her face froze; the frightened facial expression one gets when they know they're going to soon die was one he had seen before. He was too shocked to move or even blink, as it couldn't immediately register with him not even as she hit the floor. “But that isn't going to save her. Ha ha ha.”
When it did register with Hikaru, he took his blade and slashed at his assailant, efficiently catching him below the collar, almost beheading him. The man's blade met his own, yet Hikaru's added experience allowed him to counter, and slash the lower leg almost off, bringing the man to his knees. Hikaru raised his blade, and prepared for the final strike when the man simply vanished.
“Hi...ka...r...” Eliza weakly muttered.
“Eliza?!” he shouted, clutching her in his arms. Before she'd even taken another breath, she was gone. “ELIZA!” He buried his face in her hair, still warm after death. His tears stained her shirt amidst the blood already on it. It simply could not be that she be taken from him already. He'd hoped to at least be afforded the opportunity to prove his love to her. Now she was gone, taken in her prime. “Please don't leave me...I'm not ready yet...Please not yet, ELIZAAAA!”


Hikaru, leaving his two allies below in Akira's apartment with Yuri, slowly pushed the door to the roof open. The same, evil grin that always was on Nikolai's face was there once again. Never could this man be forgiven in Hikaru's eyes. And it would be his blood that would be shed. Sins would be paid for with a head. Since Nikolai had used his magic on Hikaru before, the swordsman knew how to counter it. Sorcery would get Nikolai nowhere; in fact he knew it would cost him his head sooner. Both warriors knew these facts to be true, and without a word, the European sorcerer drew his blade, his grip tight on it. He could picture his broadsword slicing evenly through the soft tissue of Hikaru's neck, the lightning power of his quickening surging through him, providing him with the knowledge of a thousand year old immortal. Hikaru Shindo was eagerly sought out by evil immortals who believed themselves to be superior in sword fighting skill; he had learned countless techniques in fighting and had one of the most powerful quickenings of any immortal, so his head was a target almost always. Yet, with each kill, he furthered his reputation as an unbeatable fighter, and his blade had to be one of the best crafted in the entire world. Only those who were extraordinarily brave or foolish tried their luck against him. Yet, Nikolai had the determination of a thousand evil immortals coursing through him as he readied himself to take on his opponent.
“It ends here, Thomas,” Hikaru merely said, pulling his katana into one of his trademark stances. For those less skilled with the blade than Hikaru, it blew their minds how fast he could calculate his foe's next move and precisely counter it. It's how he kept his head attached for a millennium. He saw Nikolai attempt a diagonal slash at his feet, so Hikaru brought his sword downwards to meet his foe's. Both pulled back and aimed at a higher position. For Nikolai, it was like chess; you had to give ground to attain it. For his opponent, no such analogies could apply; he knew at least fifty different sword styles, and could counter the best of them.
“Damn, you're good, Shindo,” Nikolai uttered as he found his lateral slice blocked at the last moment. Hikaru pulled back his sword and aimed for the sorcerer's shoulder; a last minute ditch effort by Nikolai spared his arm.
“I haven't been resting the past seven hundred or so years.” He tried to end it quicker by making a forward slash at Nikolai's neck, but a counter by the sorcerer found a small slash across Hikaru's left wrist; the momentary loss of grip on the sword almost cost him everything.
“HA!” Nikolai shouted, slashing away at Hikaru's neck with all his might. Only a last minute retraction of Hikaru's head saved most of his neck. Instead of decapitation, the most the European sorcerer managed was a vicious cut across his foe's throat, which resulted in severe bloodshed but not death. “Dammit!” he cried, when his opponent used the instant's distraction to impale him above his stomach. By this point, Hikaru would give up no further ground, and with a cut across his foe's back, forced him down to his knees.
Nikolai knew his fate as he stared up at Hikaru, whose blade was held high above his head in ready position. Because he could say nothing due to the rapidly-healing wound to his throat, he simply glared at him in sheer fury. The sound of a rapid slice through several layers of flesh and other tissues echoed throughout the immediate vicinity of the roof, followed by the slight buzzing of gathering lightning force. Hikaru sheathed his blade before Nikolai's powerful quickening, as well as his wisdom and magical skill, surged throughout his body. The newly-acquired quickening sped up the process of the healing, repairing all wounds Hikaru had attained during the battle. When he could scream in pain, he let out a wail like he'd seldom done. Like his friend Fujiwara, he could not get used to the power that surged through him every time he took an evil immortal's head.
“Say hello to Satan for me in hell, Nikolai,” Hikaru panted, catching his breath. A breeze came in from nowhere, a breath of summertime before the season was near, calming him and reminding him.
It was as if she was trying to tell him she was finally able to rest. He smiled and brought her to the front of his mind, right before the other three came up to the roof.
“Hikaru!” Fujiwara shouted. “You took care of Nikolai?”
“No,” he corrected. “We did. Eliza was here with me, in spirit.”
“Now c'mon,” Akira stated. “We gotta find my father.”
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