Invincible is merely a word.
His name was tallied among the dead. They found Ashina at the center of a scattered heap of slain Sith, his final opponent draped atop him with a still-smoldering hole through their chest. As for the Knight himself, cause of death was not evident. It could only be presumed that the shrapnel in his head was rattled too much too soon, leading to his demise. Those who tended to the cleanup of the Temple laid him amongst fallen comrades in an out of the way chamber designated for holding the dead.
Unbeknownst to the gravetenders, Inosuke's would-be corpse stirred. Nigh motionless, he clung to life, his spirit still bound into his body as if caught in an iron trap. Once so far gone he'd been mistaken for mere remains in both the physical and spiritual checks, yet by fluke, miracle, or force of will, the Manslayer lived. Now the warmth slowly returned to his body, the color returned to his skin, and a shallow rise and fall returned to his chest. Gravetenders, in their confidence, did not notice the signs.
Cadaverous air entered Knight Ashina's nostrils, it was the first sensation he became conscious of. Slowly, like a man trapped in sleep paralysis, he became aware of himself and his inability to move. Where there should have been panic, only exhausted ambivalence coupled with an acceptance of fate came. Am I dead? he wondered whilst trapped in the endless void of his own thoughts. There was a stench, something cold beneath him, and muffled sounds dancing around his perception. There was a world around him that he was painfully aware of in his inability to properly ascertain it.
This is death, he concluded. An absence of any drive whatsoever. Odd notions told him where the pain should be, as well as how bad it should be, yet it was unsettlingly truant. No hunger, no thirst, no ambition, no emotion, only this oblivion on the threshold of being. Even time appeared absent in the stygian afterlife. For what felt as if could have been minutes, hours, days, or years, Inosuke didn't form another thought. What use was there fighting the inevitable? What use was there in defying destiny?
Suddenly, an inexplicable jolt surged through his spine, radiated through every bone and sinew in his body. All of those emotional and physical vacancies were suddenly filled their proper tenants. His eye shot open as he rose with breakneck speed to a full ninety-degree sitting-up position. His lungs forcefully filled themselves with air, orchestrating a loud gasp from behind the Knight's teeth.
A pair gravetenders shrieked, startled by the sight of what they were certain was dead man sitting up so suddenly. Ashina hardly seemed to notice them fleeing from the impromptu morgue, still shocked at the advent of his return to the real. He glanced down, checked his hands, inspecting each side with disbelief, trying to affirm whether or not it was real. I thought I was dead, he recalled. An inspection of his surroundings quickly told him he wasn't the only one who had drawn that conclusion.
Fighting through the stiffness in his muscles, he checked his body for wounds. There were none. How? It didn't make sense. Not at first. He went over every detail he could still remember in his head, but his memory was as fickle as the pain in his head was sharp. It dawned on him then what must have taken him down; the interloping shards of cyberware in his skull.
How did I recover? Could it be-? It had been years since he'd thought of Ashina's Gift. It was among the earliest of the family teachings he'd written off as myth or embellishment. Returning from the grave was a perverse capability reserved for the reprehensible disciples of Bogan. Wasn't it? The question was troubling; had this been good fortune, or something more? Could the gift be more than legend?
In his disorientation and shock upon waking up in a morgue, his shrapnel-clouded mind had nearly forgotten his predicament, the Jedi's predicament. Sudden urgency overtook his movement as he checked the bodies around him for the faces of a few specific people. Relief came when he found no matches, but it came with its own flavor of shame. They died and not him, and not them. He felt guilt for the relief he found in callous clause.
Jedi live, and wonder why.
Gravetender's returned with terrified reluctance, fearful that his rise was yet another Sith machination. There was no time to assure them or explain the very unlikely mechanisms behind what they had seen. Inosuke struck them with the signature Ashina Glare, bolstered rather than hindered by the lack of his eye.
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