They had been running ever since leaving the blood bank and Nabiki was breathing heavily by now. Sure, being turned into a vampire had enhanced her body to levels normal humans could only dream of, but Ranma wasn't satisfied with that. No, he wanted to make her stronger and faster still, in case they ever had to face a threat more dangerous than the ghouls they had encountered up till then. And to get her to that level, Ranma forced her to run anywhere they had to go at full speed and always took large detours.
Nabiki really wished she'd be able to hate Ranma for torturing her so, and to take revenge in some non-violent, very humiliating way. Instead, ever since she had been transformed, she had been forced to call him 'Master' by some strange compulsion and was unable to form even the slightest malicious thought against him.
She was well aware that her condition wasn't Ranma's fault, that he had saved her from a fate much worse than this – living as a mindless ghoul couldn't be much fun – and that the real blame for all of this laid with Happosai and those three bastards who had attempted to rob and turn her. But damn it, her lungs were burning and her legs were aching and every step sent jolts of pain coursing through her whole body.
Just as she was about to call out to him and ask for a break, Ranma came to an abrupt stop and tilted his head as if he were listening to some faint sound.
“Something the matter?” Nabiki asked as soon as she had managed to catch up with her master.
Ranma didn't respond immediately, instead keeping his tense posture for several more moments, until he exhaled slowly and opened his eyes. “I can feel a group of ghouls a few hundred metres over there,” he said and pointed to their right. “A few normal humans are near them, too, but I'm not too sure just how near. It's a little too far away to say more than that.”
“I guess you want to go there and take care of it,” Nabiki said with a slight shudder as images of their former encounters with those mindless, blood-craving creatures entered her mind. “Do you want me to go on home?”
“No, I want you to stay near me. There might be some vampire nearby.”
Nabiki nodded, at the same time a little annoyed that she'd have to wait even longer for a relaxing hot bath and glad that Ranma showed such concern for her. Though she wasn't sure if the latter thought was simply caused by that strange compulsion or if it was genuine.
“Let's go then.”
-V-V-V-
They arrived at a poorly lit alley and Ranma indicated his companion that she should stay behind him while he went and took a closer look.
“Are you sure this is the right place, Master?” Nabiki whispered as they slowly walked into the alley.
“Yeah, I'm sure. I can feel their rotten chi coming from there,” Ranma answered and pointed farther ahead.
The deeper they went into the alley the darker it got, the light from the brightly lit main street bit by bit being consumed by shadows. Nabiki's heart started beating faster in her chest and she strained her senses to hear, see or smell something that would confirm the presence of ghouls, while she secretly hoped that her master was wrong.
“AAAAHH!” Somebody shouted suddenly, causing Nabiki to jump in frightened shock. “Get away from me, you rotten monsters!”
The mercenary girl buried all hope for a false alarm at that point and clung closer to her protector.
Soon after the scream a filthy man dressed in tattered clothes hurriedly crawled out of the darkness with his back turned towards them. He bumped into Ranma, which caused him to jump forward and spin around, his eyes wide open in fright.
“Le- leave me alone! Don't eat me!” He shouted, waving the neck of a broken bottle at them threateningly.
“Calm down, we're not here to eat you,” Ranma reassured the man.
The man's breathing slowed slightly and he took a closer look at Nabiki and her companion. Seeing that they were normal people and not blood-thirsty monsters, he lowered his improvised weapon and kept one eye on Ranma and Nabiki while he warily looked back over his shoulder with the other one. “You gotta get away from here! There are some kind of monsters back there!”
“I know, and we're here to kill them,” Ranma told him.
This caused the man to direct his full attention towards the pigtailed vampire. “You gotta be kiddin'! I'm serious, there are real monsters back there! They ate my friend Richie!”
“I'm not calling you a liar,” Ranma said and a sword suddenly appeared in his hand. “But we're really here to kill those things. You'd better get away from here.”
The man looked from Ranma to his sword, to Nabiki, to the back of the alley and back to Ranma again. Nodding his head slowly, he said, “Ye- yeah, I guess you're right.” He threw away the bottle neck and ran towards the brightly lit main street as fast as his legs would carry him.
“Here they come now,” Ranma murmured to Nabiki. “Seems like they ran out of bums to eat back there.”
Shifting her gaze from where the homeless man had disappeared around the corner back towards the darkness in front of them, Nabiki could make out several human shaped creatures.
As they slowly got closer, she could see that they weren't any different from the ghouls they had encountered before. Their clothes were torn and dirty, their eyes were vacant and some of the ghouls were even missing pieces of flesh or whole limbs.
“Here, keep an eye on the blood while I take care of those zombie guys,” Ranma told her and handed her the backpack.
Nabiki shivered and clutched the backpack tightly as her master's comforting presence left her. She just hoped this fight would turn out better than the other ones, especially their first.
They had been practising late at night in a park because they hadn't wanted to draw any attention, which their training surely would have done, when they had heard screams coming from nearby. Rushing towards the screams, they had seen several strange people attacking a young couple and Ranma had immediately rushed in to help them. After he had beaten them all down, he had turned towards the couple to make sure they were all right, which had been a huge mistake. The assailants had simply gotten up again and attacked Ranma when his back was turned, scratching and biting him. It had taken him a while to figure out that something was wrong with these guys and to take a look at their chi, which had been when he had finally realized what they really were. Nabiki would never forget the gory fight and the images of Ranma, bleeding heavily with huge bite marks on his arms and legs, bashing in the skulls of the ghouls and ripping their hearts right out of their chests with his bare hands still haunted her dreams.
She shook her head to focus back on the fighting going on in the alley and saw Ranma slashing right with his sword and beheading one of the ghouls. He used the momentum from the slash to spin around and smash his left fist into the head of another one, which exploded like an overripe melon from the huge force behind the blow, and turned his attention towards the next one.
Nabiki wanted to turn away from the fight, but the picture of her Master whirling through the ranks of the ghouls and decimating them with hands, feet and his sword equally horrified and fascinated her, making it impossible to divert her gaze.
Ranma was speeding up his movements now and, even though they had also been enhanced, Nabiki's eyes were no longer able to keep up. All she saw was a red and black blur of movement and streaks of silver whenever he used his sword. He raged through the zombies, sending limbs flying, bursting their heads and ripping out their hearts.
Several minutes later, the last ghoul was dead and Ranma, covered in blood from head to toe, walked back towards his companion.
He flicked the blood off his sword and made it disappear again, then he put one arm around Nabiki's shoulder. “Are you all right, Nabiki?”
She had to suppress the urge to cling to him tightly. She wanted to be strong and didn't want him to find out just how disturbed she found these fights. “Yes, Master. I'm fine.”
“That's good. Let's go home now.”
-V-V-V-
Alucard was perched on a nearby rooftop and had witnessed the whole fight between the pigtailed young man and the ghouls.
“Now this is interesting,” he murmured with a smirk. “Seems like the robbers aren't simple teens with a vampire fetish, after all.”
It was clear to the No Life King that the young male was no ordinary human, if he actually was human in the first place. But he didn't have the feel of a vampire or ghoul, or any other supernatural creature Alucard had encountered in his long life.
Alucard wondered what he should do.
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(Posted Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:28)
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