Fighter and Sacrifice
Agatsuma Soubi is a so–called Fighter, or spell caster. In spell battles, the Fighter uses word manipulation to cast attacks upon the opponent. During a spell battle, two teams face each other. Each team is composed of two members: one is the Fighter, who attacks and the other is the Sacrifice, who receives attacks. Basically it means that even though the Fighters fire attacks towards each other, it is their team mate, the Sacrifice who receives the damage inflicted by the opponent. This damage manifests itself as an restraint, which appears in the form of shackles on the Sacrifice’s wrists or neck. Because of the interdependent fighting technique, most of the time we see a strong relationship between the Sacrifice and the Fighter of a team. You can also say that the two individuals become as one on the battle field. A team loses when the Sacrifice is destroyed or beaten.
Soubi, as a Fighter, originally forms a team with his Sacrifice Seimei, who’s original, or ’destined’ name is Beloved. Seimei is Ritsuka’s older brother. Rituka’s ’real’ name, as opposed to his brother’s, is Loveless.
Laws of Battle
Even though in one team the Fighter is strongest in spell casting, it is actually the Sacrifice who controls the Fighter. Soubi takes this into the extremes as he sees himself as his Sacrifice’s battle tool. And thus he will do everything as his Sacrifice commands. So taking it a step further, you can almost classify the Sacrifice — Fighter relationship as the Master — Servant type. As an absolute rule however, a Fighter cannot have two masters. One Fighter is only compatible with one Sacrifice and this is emphasised by the fact that a Fighter carries the name of its Sacrifice somewhere on his or her own body. In Soubi’s case, as he was Beloved’s Fighter, has that name carved onto his neck.
Damage of the attacks on the Sacrifice will increase four fold when Fighter and Sacrifice are not compatible. Inversely, a Fighter’s power decreases by half when its name doesn’t match with its Sacrifice, and with an additional half when the Sacrifice isn’t present during battle. To switch from one master to another is mentioned as unforgivable, but Soubi, after the death of his original sacrifice Seimei, makes the choice of becoming Ritsuka’s Fighter. This explains why the words on Soubi’s neck start bleeding during battles he fights with Ritsuka. Apparently him choosing another Sacrifice is seen as betrayal towards his original Sacrifice and Soubi probably suffers a lot of physical pain from this.
How to start…
Spell battles commence with a declaration made on either side. The other party then accepts this declaration and prepares. Soubi often says the words ’we’re on auto’ after the declaration. ’Auto’ means that only the Fighter of the team battles, the Sacrifice does not actively participate. Soubi has to do this in the beginning because Ritsuka is neither prepared or trained to handle a battle situation. Next, with the words ’battle system, expand’, the Fighter makes himself ready for attack. As spells are the main source of power during a battle, the words Soubi speaks are used to form an image, and from that image a certain amount of power is extracted. These spells do not only function as attack, but can also be used to fend off the opponent’s attack, or serve as power-up tactics to increase the Fighter’s own abilities.
Once a team enters a spell battle by declaring as such, it is not able to declare its own withdrawal. This means that if the other team wants the fight to stop, it needs to cast a withdrawal spell on the opponent to erase them temporarily, after which the battle will end.
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