Ranma looked down the hill towards the school and just barely caught the flash of light that told her that one of her children had gotten careless. A hint of worry crossed her face and she started to turn back down the path, but no, it was only one of them. If something very bad had happened she'd have felt a lot more power from all three of her children.
No, this was just a behavior breach. Naiki would be getting a lecture later, but that was about it.
Which left her to her job at hand. Looking back up the hill, she analyzed the chi she was feeling.
This hill was not the most unusual of places she had been, but it wasn't ordinary either. Under the grass a path cut a rivelet in the rise of the hill through which yin travelled in a swift current that was shielded by a crust of yang. Somewhere up in this little wooded hill, someone had built a reservoir of darkness that looked up toward the sun.
Ranma was mildly impressed. Unfortunately, it sounded like someone or something was misusing it.
The morning's message still stuck in Ranma's mind. That a new job would come only days after moving to this new place, and that the hunt was to take place in that same neighborhood. It raised Ranma's hackles even if the situation seemed straightforward.
Two nights ago someone had made off with an American exchange student. The police found witness reports that did not seem to make sense, at least not to normal investigation reports. Some of the weirdness had started to leak to the press, otherwise Ranma might never have been called in.
The information Ranma had said that witnesses had seen the girl taken away East by a "giant insect-man." Of course the police had searched, but Ranma wasn't surprised that they hadn't found this overgrown path. She herself had barely found it with chi-senses, the entire hill seemed to be designed to not be noticed, in fact.
As for the giant-insect man, like the police, Ranma didn't think there was a demon involved here. More likely, it was just an ugly and very skinny guy in some sort of tattered overcoat who had stumbled on this old refuge. There were a lot of people like that out there, with the instinct to draw them to such places without knowing why they were drawn.
If a kid's life wasn't at stake, she'd have never accepted the assignment. The police would have found this eventually, probably with only a little more trouble, and Ranma didn't like getting involved in police matters if she could avoid it.
She took a sniff of the air and kept her eyes open as she climbed and moved deeper into the flow of yin chi. She shivered a bit against the instinct to feel a calming sensation as she hit the deeper chi.
It was a reminder. Something that happened anytime she came to a place of heavy and pure chi, yang or yin.
A reminder that she wasn't unmagical anymore herself. Years of chi-mastery, the neko-ken, Jusenkyo and her....unwilling liasions with a trio of spirits had had in many ways forced her to become a creature of magic herself. It had been getting worse since only a little after her children were born. She had to deal with it, but she didn't have to like it.
Then she found what she was looking for.
A veritable pool of dark chi in a little bowl surrounded by foreign-planted grey oaks and looking up into the sky. In the center of the little bowl was a hole in the ground down into which a ladder descended.
Ranma didn't wait before diving down into that hole and instantly a sickening sensation drifted through the, until then pure chi. She covered her mouth and shook her head clear, taking in the darkness as she considred what she faced. Someone had desecrated this holy site with blood in order to shield it against exorcists.
Most exorcists, that is.
Exorcists that dealt mainly in yang probably wouldn't have the experience to filter out the corrupted yin from blinding their senses and hampering their powers. Fortunately, the red-head wasn't just an exorcist. She was a chi-master, both in yin and yang, and she wasn't going to be stopped just by a little booby trap like this.
As she regained her balance, she took in the trap and sighed in relief.
It was old, very old, left over from some past evil and Ranma was probably still looking at a common sicko with sharp instincts.
She moved forward, wrapping herself in the umisenken and searching for any more signs of other chi-traps.
The long underground cooridor pushed downward further into the hill, finally coming out in large underground room that shocked Ranma's senses again.
He stood in an ancient lava-chamber, among walls that were virtually glowing with yang while yin seethed in center until it was forced back through the tunnel and up into the hill.
In her shock at the triple blind, Ranma dropped the umisenken and almost missed the incoming motion.
At the last moment she dodged aside and the knife slashed through where her neck had been just a moment before.
"What demon comes to this holy place?" her attacker demanded.
As Ranma had expected, the man was long and spindly, almost anorexic, with deep, sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. His jaw standing out against his skin could certainly look almost insectile in the wrong light. And those long strands of standing hair looked something like antennae.
"Shut up," Ranma said slashing forward with a simple strike into the man's face.
The man tried to dodge aside, but Ranma was more than ready for it and casually swiped across with his fist to complete the strike anyway and send the predicted sicko sprawling to the floor insensate.
That left just finding the girl.
The first alcove held a girl, indeed, but she had been dead for at least a month. She hung from the wall in chains that held her tight against the wall. A host of little cuts were slashed into her body through the tatters of her clothing and her cloudy, half-rotted eyes stared outward.
Ranma wasn't surprised that the girl's body was still heavy with chi, or the two tails that hung limply from her lower back. A sicko with chi instincts wouldn't just hunt average people, after all. Those instincts would draw him to weirdos, like her and her kids. Another reason she had taken this job so quickly.
"We got him for you kid," Ranma whispered, closing the girl's eyes and moving to the next alcove and the next until she found the girl she was looking for.
Katrina Strnad, the missing girl was weak and barely conscious, mouth open and breathing tiredly. Ranma immediately noted what had drawn the sicko to this one: she was a vampyr, girl probably didn't know it even.
"Don't worry," Ranma said softly, reaching up to pull the chains out of the wall and moving to carry the girl.
Miss Strnad slumped heavily over Ranma's shoulder and the red-haired girl made for the exit.
"You will not take that demon from this place!" a voice demanded angrily as the thin man charged forward at the woman freeing his prisoner.
Said-prisoner woke up and flinched fearfully at the sound of that voice, and then it was cut off with a bone-crunching thud.
"You should have stayed down, freak," Ranma said as the body of the serial killer crumpled to the ground, neck snapping at an unnatural angle from the impact of Ranma's foot.
From there it was simple to leave the descrated site and soon she was depositing the little girl at a Catholic church she knew of that was friendly and knowledgable towards the living version of their traditional foe.
"Might want to mention the place to someone who can purify it too," Ranma muttered, mostly satisfied that the job was done.
Still, it was rare that things went so exactly as she expected them to, and that was bothering her.
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(Posted Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:59)
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