[Episode 223472] [Episode 223472]It was supposed to be a simple day. Go to school, deal with his fiancées, and go home; the same as any other day in the week, but the moment that he set foot onto a rooftop to begin his journey home, the day took a turn for the worse.
Ranma saw it before he felt it, but it was too late by the time he noticed the black cloud in the distance, sprouting upward into the shape of a mushroom. He only had time to raise his arms to protect his face before the onslaught of heat slammed into him like a tidal wave, sending him flying off the rooftop and straight into a house.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
His breathe came weakly to him, each more laborious than the last. It had taken him hours to dig through the rubble to the surface, but upon breaking through and reaching the open-air, the pain of his charred limbs made themselves known. Lying down on the mixture of concrete, dust, and random objects that littered the remains of the building, he stared up blankly at the fog-covered sky. He couldn’t tell if he was wearing clothes or not, but his whole body burned with pain. Some parts of his body had his skin fused with his muscles or burned outright to the bone. Despite the vicious wounds, there was no blood pouring from them, but the pain from each of them was excruciating. That wasn’t exactly correct; most of the pain he felt had molded together into a single dose of pure agony that dazed his mind and blackened his consciousness.
Ranma was dying. He knew it both instinctively and consciously, but even so, there was little he could do. The beckoning appeal of sleep called to him, to replenish his energy and shed his exhaustiveness, but he knew it was one from which he would never awaken from. He had to keep moving. It seemed like ages past before he was finally able to rise to his feet laboriously, using part of a shattered wall as a support to pull himself up. Time seemed nonexistent here, where night and day were both hidden by the dark fog that expanded endlessly beyond the horizon. Everywhere he could see, there were remains of buildings standing desolately among the rubble and bloodless corpses.
Charred. Burnt alive. Some of the bodies were just blackened bones, their mouths agape in the midst of their final death scream. It was only now that he noticed that he couldn’t hear anything. There was no insect or wind. Just a universal silence.
It took more than a bit of effort to get the words out of his sore throat, but what came out was a dry and raspy voice, completely unlike his own. “H-hello?” He winced at the sound. It was unbearably loud, like fourteen drums playing simultaneously next to his ear. He could taste a bit of blood leak into his mouth…or was it out of his throat?
It didn’t matter. He had to find out what happened to Pop and the Tendos. He needed to get to the Tendo dojo. He began to drag his wounded legs forward in an agonizingly slow shuffle. The bits of broken cement and wood were painful to the open wounds on the soles of his feet, but he ignored them. There were no stars to tell him where North was nor were there any landmarks to show him the way. It was a desperate gamble, but there was nothing else he could do; nowhere else to go. If he stopped, he knew he would die.
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(Posted Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:22)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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