[Episode 82605] [Episode 82605]It had not been a particularly restful night in that city that had been attacked fifty years previously.
When he awoke it was to hunger and the first hints of predawn.
Materials technology had been apparently high within that society. Once you got past the dust and the debris, a lot of things were surprisingly intact. The sofa he'd spent the night on was more comfortable than his futon.
Once it was light enough he climbed the remains of a skyscraper and surveyed the city. Or remains of it.
Ocean or something similar to the East. Hills and piles of debris, skeletal towers reaching for the sky, bits and pieces of avenues, overgrown parks and even the remains of the banners that he'd seen in that vision. There was also something he'd glimpsed the previous evening but not understood until he could see it from a higher angle.
In school he'd seen a picture of a raindrop once, that had been taken with the water splashing out. Here was the same thing, on a much larger scale, and made of stone.
Wandering closer to that, he'd seen odd silhouettes on the wall. The wall was burned except for the silhouettes of people. Once he saw that, and the poses of those people, he'd lost his taste for exploring the "raindrop" any further.
Bones could be seen frequently too, picked clean by insects or scavengers in the time since the attack.
It was when he tentatively identified a building as a preschool and noticed all the little skeletons whose bones had these precise cuts through them that Ranma went outside and was rather noisily ill for the first time in his life.
Some instinct stopped him and caused him to roll backwards away from the corner he'd found. A flare and brief sensation of heat showed him the wisdom of that decision.
One of the thin creatures with the sword arms had opened a chest plate and apparently had some sort of cannon in there. As the blast had missed the target, it energized swords and began moving towards that target.
Ranma analyzed the opponent quickly and efficiently now that he was seeing one in the flesh. It used chi or something like it, but it wasn't able to repair itself. This particular soldier was damaged, moving very slowly and with difficulty.
Ranma threw a piece of pipe from some rubble, and the soldier sliced it in half without any resistance. Ranma observed that and adapted tactics when he noticed another detail that caused his stomach some upset.
The chest and back had a square plate which was covered in some odd script. Writing. This was not a natural creature but someone's pet monster or some kind of soldier.
Ranma waited until the creature was closer then started pelting it with debris, watching as the blades never slowed as they cut apart the missiles as they reached it. Faster and faster he went. Faster and faster the creature responded.
Finally its footing became treacherous from the debris and it flailed about to remain upright.
The remainder of the pipe slammed into that damaged knee, shearing through it.
Ranma wasn't sure how long it took, or how many pipes and pieces of rebar he'd used before the thing finally stopped moving.
His opinion of them went up considerably as opponents. If it had moved as fast as those he'd seen in the vision, he would have gotten hurt. If he'd faced two or more, he'd be dead.
They weren't robots, at least in terms that he was familiar with, but they weren't alive in the manner he expected either. They had an armor of thick plates like some insect, and four eyes on their spindle shaped heads. They were tough, strong, and inhumanly fast. That plate in the front concealed a cannon that fired ki blasts and they could charge their arm-swords with ki to cut through darn near everything.
Ranma made a decision. Umisenken and Yamasenken were unsealed. In fact, in this situation, it was truly Anything Goes because anything less would put one more ghost in this city.
Ranma found the remains of a food market which had octagonal shaped canned food and water sitting which seemed mainly edible.
So the next priority seemed:
(Posted Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:40)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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