"This is embarrassing."
- Ii Naotora
Sometimes a wise-cracking juggernaut with a cannon on his back and a pair of fierce war princesses wasn't enough to stop a demon. The leader of the slightly-less-than heroic trio went flying backwards screaming like a fire cracker in a blast of purple energy. He landed fifty feet away on his back, where he could still see the swirling cackling hourglass form of Da Ji in his fuzzy vision. Goemon wasn't feeling very ganbare anymore.
Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping continued to press the botched union attack on their own. They charged at their opponent together and swung their chakrams and double-sided mace at the same time. Da Ji retaliated by kicking them right in the balls.
The two dark marble orbs levitating around the demon mistress grew until they were five feet in diameter and broke open to reveal their cores made from scalding white venom extracted from Orochi's fangs. Da Ji waited until her attackers were in leg's reach before she jumped and delivered a double kick that made them reel in pain. Shangxiang and Yinping fell backwards and were caught in the orbs hovering behind them.
The poison-filled spheres slammed shut like faberge coffins. Da Ji stretched her arms outward as she became surrounded in glowing violet smoke, making her magic globes rise higher in the air. The black outlines of Shangxiang and Yinping flickered weakly from inside their Spirit Crucibles.
Da Ji's nocturnal eyes turned toward Goemon while she smirked.
"You're pretty awful for a legendary thief," she mocked. "You let me take your weapons right out from your hands while you were just lying there. I'm the one stealing from you."
She glanced toward the spheres hovering above her left and right.
"Enjoying yourselves in there?" she sarcastically asked the orbs. "There won't be anything human about you once you've had enough of Lord Orochi's essence. I just need to stir you a little to get you started."
Da Ji smiled with her vulpes fangs showing. She raised her hand and spawned a long black rod that extended in two directions above her head, physically connecting the globes on either end. She twirled her wrist and started to spin the staff in a horizontal windmill, performing a mockery of the way Yinping wielded her double-sided mace. The orbs moved faster and faster as they circled above their mistress. By the fifth rotation they were spinning around her in a whirlwind blur, churning their two captives in circles.
Goemon was still fighting for the strength to sit up. Da Ji cackled as she watched him stumble off the ground and lean over his segmented pipe like a hobbled old man with a crane.
"Bye-bye, ugly," Da Ji said with a bright and cheerfully sinister tone. "I'll see you again after I'm done ringing out these bell bimbos."
Her dark smoking aura turned into a void to the demon world and consumed her along with the spheres. The silk garlands hovering behind her back slowly waved in a phantom breeze as they disappeared last.
Endless midnight haze lingered through a chamber of dark miracles. The cavernous structure was older than all of recorded time, hidden away in a forbidden realm that was detached from time itself. The ceiling was held up by temple columns made of masses of indistinct marble bodies sunken together and rising infinitely into the darkness above. The chamber glimmered dimly from the pale blue flames of torches that burned perpetually but never seemed to melt down.
Guan Yinping was one of the fossilized human shapes molded near the base of a column. She was a recent addition to the legion, glued in place under a cocoon of snake venom that clung to her hibernating mortal form like congealing white wax and gave her battle dress a colorless frosted texture. She had wound up this way at some point while she was trying to wrestle off of the column, as she was posed with her back straining forward and her chest thrusting out like she was the majestic figurehead at the front of a boat. Her white wax face was paralyzed with a look of terror, her mind was asleep, and her body was being saturated in bad chi.
Sun Shangxiang had been left on the ground next to Yinping's column. She was petrified in her own pale cocoon, crouching on her hands and knees like she had been trying to crawl away. Steam rose off of the thick drying venom covering both of their forms. The gentle sizzling sound brought to mind beef being slowly seared in a wok.
This was the deepest pit of the fox's den. It was a dungeon for Hell itself, a place too murky and rancid even for Da Ji's tastes. The chamber was abandoned of all life, yet teemed with an ominous and barely perceivable presence. When cold wind periodically blew lightly through the darkness, it almost sounded like distant monks chanting in indecipherable tongues.
The two ferocious battle maidens were starting to quicken in this forsaken womb of death and unsacred incantations. Hibernating under their veils of the Serpent King's ether, they rotted and became more beautiful at the same time.
"Hey there, Oxface. Miss me?"
Goemon was struggling back to his feet when Da Ji reappeared in a cloud of giggling purple haze. The demon had only blinked out of reality for a few seconds, but there was no telling how long she had been hiding away in some twisted dark corner of space and time with her captives. Her two haunted orbs were back to their normal watermelon size and idly spun around her in a slow ring.
"Why don't you stay out of your hole and fight me, you filthy weasel!" Goemon fumed with rage. "Give those girls back!"
"If that's how you want to play, that's fine by me," Da Ji replied with a suggestive grin.
The demon's two accomplices materialized at her sides in twin puffs of smoke. They were otherworldly beauties with icy pale skin and chillingly sinister complexions. Their vixen eyes were pulsing purple, while light violet garlands waved playfully and weightlessly behind their backs.
The one with long dark hair wore a short black and green skirt with a matching top that left the graceful physique of her shoulders, thighs, and waist uncovered. Her fists were dressed in fingerless elbow-length silk gloves and her nails were filed into elegant black claws. Freshly picked violets decorated her hair around her ears, and the front of her sturdy athletic belly featured a navel piercing with the same type of dark flower. She was the perfect balance of brawn and beauty.
The other one with short brunette hair wore earrings shaped like archery arrows. The top of her head was adorned with a golden tiara with two tiny pointed flanges that implied horns. Her black and blood red finery consisted of a single-piece backless dress held up by a ruby-studded leather collar buckled around her neck. The opening left her shoulder blades bare and completely unrestricted. It descended to a quarter of the way down her backside before forming the window dressing under her royal tailbone. A long tattoo of an arrow stretched down the length of her back, starting from the feathered fletching on the base of her neck, traveling down the nimble valley of her spine, and ending with an arrowhead shaped by the natural curvature where her rear cleavage started to divide.
Da Ji smirked toward her foul and mysterious companions while she addressed them.
"Fengshui. Jiangshi. I'm so happy you could make it. How do you like your yummy incarnations?"
"I can feel these muscles aching for destruction. I knew you'd bring me something meaty," Fengshui giggled.
"These eyes are sharp enough to see miles outside of the den. I'll have no problem hunting down prey now," Jiangshi purred.
"Good," Da Ji said cheerfully. Her devious intentions turned toward Goemon while he was still recovering.
"Now let's have some fun with this annoying oaf."
Fengshui flexed her elbows like she was holding up an invisible shoulder yoke, and a seven-foot-long black mace with massive spiked flails made from dragon bones hanging on either end appeared on her shoulders. The weapon easily weighed three times as much as her, but she carried it like it was a couple of bamboo sticks tied together.
Jiangshi balanced on the toes of one foot and stretched out her left arm while raising her right. A gilded yew bow decorated with red peacock feathers appeared out of the dark ether gathering around her left hand. A bundle of blazing arrows appeared in her opposite hand.
Goemon was smacking the side of his dizzy head to clear his vision when the attack began. He saw three dark blurs rushing toward him for an instant, and then he saw nothing but darkness.
Author's note: He should have brought Impact.
Author's note 2: I guess you could say being SSX can be tricky.