Nabiki leaned against her and Ranma’s tree on the school grounds, gasping for breath as Akane looked around, her breathing only slightly raised (Nabiki grimaced as she again resolved to start exercising again — darn it!). “Soooo ... Ranma’s around here somewhere?” the youngest Tendo asked, confused.
“Shed ... against school ... grounds wall,” Nabiki gasped out between pants.
Akane looked around again, her eyes passing unseeing over the storage shed. “What shed?” she asked in bewilderment.
“Magic ... give me a moment,” Nabiki got out, and Akane nodded and waited, fidgeting, as Nabiki’s breathing slowed down to close to normal. Finally, Nabiki straightened and opened a pocket on her book bag. Pulling out a couple of cheap rings, she checked the kanji carved into them, dropped them into one of the pockets on her shorts, and latched onto her sister’s upper arm as she handed her her book bag. “This way,” she said, guiding Akane toward the shed in the middle of the stretch of school grounds wall. They were six feet away when she felt her sister tense.
“Wha — !”
Nabiki whirled to slap a hand across Akane’s mouth. “Shhhh! We don’t want him to know we’re here,” she whispered in her sister’s ear.
Akane nodded, then when Nabiki removed her hand, whispered, “Who?”
“Gosunkugi,” Nabiki replied distractedly as she quickly thought. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going in, and you’ll stay out here — I have defenses against magical threats you don’t, yet.” Nabiki decided that mentioning the minimal defenses she’d long since placed on all of her family and regularly renewed could wait until later — like when she strengthened them, she would want them present for the final stage of that, anyway. “But if you hear anything that sounds like fighting or I shout for help, come running. Got it?”
Akane nodded without saying a word, the worry radiating from her saying all that needed to be said, and Nabiki turned to tiptoe up to the door as Akane slipped forward to plaster herself against the shed wall beside it. Pausing, Nabiki pressed an ear to the door but couldn’t hear anything but a faint whimpering moan. Shrugging to herself as she glanced at her sister, she stepped back and with a single solid kick sent the door slamming back on its hinges, charging through right behind it only to freeze at the sight of the sunken-eyed underclassman on his knees with his arms clutching at his chest moaning in pain. Tears streamed down his cheeks and blood was running down his face from a flattened nose.
The Tendo Initiate glanced around the shed at the knocked over candles and smeared chalk, eyes narrowing at the still-visible line drawn through what was left of the summoning circle, then began to chuckle as she looked back over at the Gosunkugi scion. Her chuckles quickly turned to laughter, until she was bent over clutching her sides. Through her laughter she heard Gosunkugi growling and her guffaws choked off instantly when she glanced over to find him glaring at her even as malevolent hatred like she’d never felt before beat against her. Not even her blackmail “clients” that she’d met since becoming an empath had hated her so much. “You sick bastard, just what did Ranma ever do to you?” she snarled.
“Nothing — what do I care about some world-blind jock?” he managed to force out through clenched teeth, hatred undiminished as he forced himself to his feet, legs spread to brace himself, one hand on the wall.
“So it was an indirect attack on me, then? What did I ever do to you?” Then, when he failed to respond, Nabiki finally shrugged. “Not that it matters, since it looks like you just got an easy lesson in what happens when you summon someone you can’t control. Of course, you were stupid enough to think you could control Ranma, weren’t you?” A vicious smile spread across her face. “Not a chance — not that man! He’s worth a dozen of you. But then, you already know that now. Still, just to cement the lesson....”
Stepping back, she raised her hands as she fought to bring her own burning anger under control. Let’s see, how do I do this? I want to leave him wondering for a little while, at least ... right! Early in her study of her new Art, she had read that performing the rituals in a mystical language could heighten their effectiveness, and she supposed it could — if it helped put the Initiate in the proper frame of mind by heightening the otherworldly feel of the performance. But when she’d eventually learned that in truth, any foreign language would do, so long as it was connected in the caster’s mind to mysticism, and that Japanese would do just fine for well known rituals, she’d decided to mostly drop her language study to focus on the magic itself. Still, she’d kept up the study on a casual basis since even if she didn’t really need it to enhance her usual rituals, she could easily imagine times that being able to perform her magic in a language few people could understand would have its uses — like now, as she pulled up in her mind’s eye the image of the circle for the Journeyman’s Curse, and Gosunkugi blanched as she began to chant in a distinctly Western language where the only words he recognized were his own full name.
Within seconds it was done, and the boy staggered as he felt the mystic currents within the room contract and wrap themselves about him. He stared at his nemesis, wide-eyed with shock — she had actually cast the ritual without any preparation, on his consecrated ground, in seconds! “Wh-wh-what did you do?!” he gasped.
Nabiki shrugged. “Just something to make your life ... interesting. Enjoy — and don’t forget that I’ll be keeping an eye on you. If I can do this here and now, just think of what I can do if I take the time to do it right.
“Oh, and one more thing, just so you don’t get the idea Ranma’s the only one that gets physical ...” Stepping forward, a leg slammed up into Gosunkugi’s crotch hard enough to lift him up onto his toes, and he shrieked as he collapsed to the cement floor. He curled into a ball and desperately clutched at himself, sobbing from the new pain added to the renewed pain of his cracked ribs and broken nose. “See you at school, maybe,” Nabiki said with a jaunty grin, before turning to walk out of the shed.
As soon as she was through the door and pulled it closed she spun to the side where Akane was still plastered against the shed wall, grabbed her sister’s arm, and pulled her around the corner to the side against the school grounds wall. Pulling out the rings she’d earlier put in her pocket, she handed one to the youngest Tendo and slipped the other on her finger. “Put on the ring, and concentrate on the thought that we’re hiding, nobody can see us!” she hissed. Akane stared at her for a moment in confusion, then nodded and slipped the ring on as her confusion vanished into determination.
A few minutes later, they heard the shed door creak open, followed by Gosunkugi’s breathy gasping. A few seconds later he hobbled around the corner, still bent over. His eyes passed over the two girls as if they weren’t there, and he turned and hobbled back around out of sight. A minute later they heard the door close again.
Nabiki crept to peek around the corner of the shed, then motioned Akane to follow as she slipped along the school grounds wall toward the gates.
The two girls slunk through the gates, and Nabiki straightened with a sigh, slipped the ring off, and held out her hand for its partner. Akane slipped off her own borrowed ring and handed it over. “What was all that sneaking about? Were we invisible?”
“No, we weren’t,” Nabiki replied as she started down the block, Akane quickly catching up. “The rings are enchanted with an obscurity ritual — wear them and try to hide or sneak somewhere, and they’ll make it harder for people to notice you. To Gosunkugi it looked like I vanished on an empty field.” And he doesn’t know you were there at all. “You heard what went on inside the shed?”
Akane nodded with a grin. “It sounded like Gosunkugi got Ranma, and wished he hadn’t.”
“Right in one. I think Ranma broke some ribs — I know she broke his nose. Gosunkugi revoked the summoning before we arrived.”
“And what did you do to him? What language was that?”
“Esperanto, and I cursed him with a variation of bad luck — if he doesn’t manage to guess what the variation is and revoke it sometime in the next few weeks, he’s going to have a very interesting month at school.”
“He summons a naked girl who’s really a guy to ... to play with and that’s it?” Akane growled, hands tightening into fists.
Nabiki shrugged. “Besides the kick to the nuts I gave him, yes, for starters — even if I was willing to try to kill him, I wouldn’t want to risk the backlash from failure by casting one of those rituals without extra preparations. Besides, I shocked him to his core, believe me — very few Initiates can do what I just did, and I very much doubt he’s one of them.” She stopped at the corner of the block. “Okay, Ranma will have bounced back to the park and probably will have either decided to wait there for us, or headed for home. Why don’t you go home and call me if he’s there, while I head for the park and see if he’s waiting? I need to collect his clothes, anyway.” And it’ll get you behind my wards that much faster.
Akane nodded and broke into a run toward the dojo while Nabiki crossed the street as she headed for the park. As she did, she caught a hint of motion out of the corner of her eye. Turning her head to apparently watch her sister, she focused behind herself with both her sight and her Sight, and ... yes, there was an imp following her. Focusing on Akane and the block behind her ... no, no imp — though some sprites were buzzing along behind the running girl. Must be on the way to Party Central, the middle Tendo thought absentmindedly as she faced forward again and started to jog. If the imp was Gosunkugi’s spy there was nothing she could do to keep it from knowing about Akane now, and if it wasn’t she’d worry about it later — one crisis at a time.
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(Posted Thu, 30 Dec 2010 06:29)
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