A woman with short, spiky black hair mumbled irritably to herself as she walked to her car in the early evening gloom.
Stupid Jaedite. Stupid humans. Stupid energy that she had to drain from stupid humans to please stupid Beryl who would eventually enact a stupid invasion to take over this stupid world.
But back to the root cause of all this: Stupid Jaedite. It was, after all, HIS idea to seed around a few minor youma across Tokyo to work small, subtle, and invariably inefficient energy draining operations in order to power the portals he needed to transport more powerful youma and more efficient tools for the Senshi to find and annihilate.
Oh, sure, Hematite had expressed her own satisfaction that these assignments had a fairly small chance of ending with them vaporized, but then SHE didn't have to drive all over the damn city in urban traffic to find the collected energy.
And besides that, she REALLY hated being a used car salesman. Or saleswoman, as the case may be. She may have been a shadow-spawned creature of darkness, but it still made her feel like pond scum.
As she closed the door to her car and stuck the key in the ignition, she sighed in resignation. There was nothing to be done about it, really. And it WAS kind of nice not having to worry about being blown up.
She turned the key.
_______________________
Sousuke lowered his binoculars and nodded, smiling slightly at the massive fireball that erupted from the target's garage.
"Inside a sealed vehicle, the destructive pressure should have been far greater than in the previous experiment," he explained to the gray tomcat next to him.
"So you think fifteen pounds was enough this time?" Orion asked.
"There is only one way to find out," the mercenary said seriously, hefting a rocket launcher and slinging it over his shoulder.
_______________________
"What's going on? Where's Hematite?" A short girl with dark red hair asked nervously, looking around the small clearing within the trees of a local park.
Another woman with long, luxurious black hair shrugged, looking completely unconcerned. "Who knows? Maybe she got caught working late at work. Not all of us have nine-to-five jobs as covers, shrimp."
The little youma bristled and glared at the taller one. "Fine. Here's the energy." She held out the pitcher she had been holding - a product of an energy-draining op disguised as a lemonade stand - which had dozens of motes of light swirling inside. "Can I leave now? Meeting at night gives me the creeps."
The taller youma snorted. "Some demonic scourge of the Negaverse YOU are. Now gimme." She snatched up the pitcher, grinning greedily. Not that SHE would get much personally, but she was eager to return the fruits of her subordinates' labors to Jaedite. Middle management in the Negaverse may have been boring drudge work, but it tended to pay off. Besides, her OWN operation, a small network of energy-draining phone booths, had been proving steadily less and less productive. Stupid cell phones.
A slight rustle from some bushes alerted both youma that someone was coming, and they both turned, expecting to see Hematite approaching mumbling apologies about being late.
Instead, they saw a young man with a pigtail wearing Chinese clothes, strolling up with his hands in his pockets, and smirking at them.
The raven-haired youma raised an eyebrow. Who was this? A mugger? Well, whoever he was, now that he had seen her, her subordinate, and the pitcher of energy, it was probably best that they kill him and... wait, was somebody shouting something in the distance? Something about a "series lucius"?
The youma glanced above them, neither willing to take much attention away from the teenager.
After that glance, they then turned completely around in order to confirm that, yes indeed, there were roughly two dozen missiles of light arcing over the treetops and streaking toward them. Unfortunately for them, this action took valuable dodging time.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Kaboom! Boom! Ba-boom! Boom!
Ranma briefly held a hand up to shield his eyes as brilliant flares of energy lit up the otherwise gloomy clearing, and then leapt into action as the dazed youma staggered out of the impact zones, their disguises gone.
The little one, who just resembled some sort of blue, vaguely female gremlin, let out a cough before it felt itself being kicked hard into a tree, stunning it.
The larger youma, who resembled Hematite's youma form except that her upper torso was more snake-like as well and her hands had vicious claws, didn't take notice of her partner's plight, instead glaring at the apparent source of the magic arrows: some kid riding around in the air on some sort of giant stick.
'Well, that's just dandy. Who the hell is that, and how come he can fly?' She scowled, trying and failing to figure out a way to bring down the flying threat. The only one of her "contact group" who had any sort of ranged attack was Ganzite, and because her draining operation was so slow she didn't show up at these meetings nearly as often to hand over the fruits of her labors.
Thwack! The boss youma was suddenly alerted to an immediate threat on the ground with her as a roundhouse kick smashed into her head, sending the creature reeling to the side.
Ranma ducked as the gremlin-woman leapt at him, and then jumped back as she crashed into her boss, who barely grunted from the impact as her body slowly rose up again.
Glancing upward, the pigtailed boy could see a much brighter charge gathering in Negi's hand. Looked like he was going in for the killing blow right away. Probably for the best; Ranma knew how easy it was to make mistakes when fighting two opponents, so they had best wittle the number down as soon as possible.
Swatting the smaller youma aside with a snarl, the boss youma charged Ranma viciously, claws raking and slashing wildly as Ranma ducked and dodged backwards.
Skrak! Thick gouges appeared in a tree trunk that lacked Ranma's dexterity, causing a brief shower of bark chips and slowing down the creature's assault slightly. Ranma capitalized on the opening by landing a snap kick to the youma's head, causing it to jerk backward and blink rapidly. Then he leapt upward to avoid a flanking lunge from the small youma again, leaving the vile little thing to crash into the damaged tree.
"Sagitta magica convergentia lucius!" Negi shouted, putting a considerable magic charge into a single attack. "Forty-one arrows of light, converge and strike down my enemies!" With that, he shoved his palm forward, causing dozens of streams of light to burst around him and feed into one titanic energy bolt that lit up the night sky as it curved toward the ground. 'It's up to you now, Ranma!'
Boss youma wasn't stupid. Well, she wasn't THAT stupid. Big honking magic blast = painful, flashy death. She got her bearings and immediately began to slither for cover as fast as her rather unconventional lower torso could move her.
The teenage martial artist would have none of it, and the snake-woman barely managed to block another kick to the head as the boy seemed to materialize in front of her. Growling, she thrust one arm forward, her claws bared to impale the puny human's face.
Instead, the boy's image blurred, and she found that same arm tugged around behind her as a weight fell on her back.
As Ranma placed one foot on the boss youma's hip, he used his free hand to grab the back of the creature's head before slamming it into the ground, hard. Then he dove away a moment later, smirking as Negi's light missile careened down like a meteor.
BWAKOOM!
The smaller youma had to shield her eyes from the brightness of the impact, and then she had to shield her eyes from the dirt and dust flung into her face from the impact.
... Youma dust, she realized after a moment. Oh dear. NOT good. The boss was down. And she was the smart, strong one.
Had the little creature been better educated about things like human warfare, it's quite possible she would've surrendered. As it was, however, she was only familiar with three possible outcomes from battle: Success, retreat, and utter annihilation. She decided the first was impossible and the last was undesireable, so she turned and fled.
To her credit, she was quick. Ranma took off after her immediately, realizing that Negi wouldn't be able to hit her through the cover provided by the park's trees, and soon found himself frustrated by the little gremlin-girl's agility in jumping from branch to branch like some kind of monkey. He was keeping up, but it would seem that the youma had some good sense when it came to running away, and was deliberately running along branches that were too small to hold him and diving through branches that were too close together for him to get through easily.
Ranma frowned and bounced off a tree trunk to land on the ground, ending his pursuit. Then he kicked a rock up off the ground with his foot, caught it in the air, and then reared back his hand as he took aim.
The gremlin youma felt her excitement rise as she heard the sounds of pursuit stop behind her, though she dare not look back. Success! Well, sort of. Her boss was dead and the energy she had collected had been lost when the vessel was shattered by that initial energy bombardment, but it was entirely likely that when she was brought before Jaedite that he would decide she was too weak and pathetic to punish for cowardice. It had worked for her so far.
Whack! The youma let out a startled cry as a rock struck her in the back of her head at high speed, throwing her forward and slamming her into a tree, which left her even more stunned.
After falling down out of the branches onto the ground, she shook her head wildly to try and clear it, hopefully in time to get back to her retreat.
She didn't quite make it.
Ranma smirked as he grabbed the little blue thing by her head, eliciting a nervous yelp. "INCOMING!!" Then he threw her skyward.
The gremlin youma windmilled wildly as she broke through the top of the canopy of trees that covered that section of the park, and she let out another startled cry when she saw a little boy on a staff rocketing toward her, his palm crackling with electricity.
"FULGURATIO ALBICANS!" KA-KRACK! BOOM!
_______________________
"I don't understand," Sailor Mercury mumbled, looking over the area again and again as her computer continued to scan the surroundings. "There was definitely a disturbance here."
"Yeah, I'd say that's a safe bet," deadpanned Sailor Mars, looking at the numerous charred craters on the ground with her arms crossed over her chest. "But it looks like the disturbance decided to settle itself, for once."
Sailor Moon just shook her head sadly as she stared down at the pile of broken glass sitting amongs the burnt grass, wishing dearly that she could find the nasty litterbug responsible and punish them in the name of the mooon.
"It's strange..." Mercury said as she scratched her head. "There are very faint readings of Negaverse energy, but they're fading fast. And they're... spread about. Like it was scattered." She blinked, and then snapped her fingers. "Of course! I know what happened! These readings are consistent with those we get when a youma is destroyed, only spread around! A youma was killed here, and I'd say it was destroyed with explosive force."
Moon frowned and turned toward Sailor Mars. "Mars, have you been out hunting youma without the rest of us?" Of course, Sailor Moon didn't really know what she was supposed to think of the idea; Mars seemed really strong to her, and she didn't particularly enjoy fighting monsters.
"It wasn't me, meatball-head," the red-skirted Senshi snapped, "I was with you when Ami got the reading, remember?"
"Then who was it?" Moon asked quietly, for once more concerned with the situation than having her hair insulted.
"It could be anyone, really," Mercury decided, putting away her computer. "I've heard of other demon hunters in Tokyo, so it might have been one of them. Or maybe the youma are infighting. It's also likely that a Dark General got upset with one and blasted it here."
"Whatever it is, it's less work for us, and one less night I have to spend running outside in the cold in high heels and a miniskirt," Sailor Mars said, stifling a yawn. "Let's get outta here. I'd like to actually get a good night's sleep for once."
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(Posted Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:29)
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