Shizu's POV

I can barely force my lungs to suck in air as my legs pump as hard as I can manage. I can feel myself losing this fight. I am going to die. My eyes start to sting and can feel them watering now. The tears are blurring my vision. My foot hits something, hard. I'm falling. Now it's all gone, all over, and all black.

Pain. Burning pain. The kind of pain that makes you wonder how you can still feel anything at all. I slowly open my eyes and access my wounds. My right leg has several cuts and bruises, my left arm has a few gashes in it. Other than that I appear to have escaped fairly well, with only minor scrapes. My face doesn't hurt so I must've covered it up with something. Probably my left arm.

I'm tired of this. I look around to access where I am and find that I am in an alley. I either fell here, or they dragged me here so that no one would see them beating me. I see a pipe sticking out of the ground and figure that it would have been the thing that my foot hit while I was running.

Maybe Sumi is right. Maybe I should join a gym. I stand up and start walking. People are staring at me but I don't care. I've been in this situation enough times to know that people will always stare. Unless they have a child, because then they will stare until the kid says something and then they will scold the kid and look away. I find myself at a park. I don't really know where I am exactly, or whose territory I had wondered into, but I couldn't care less right now. I didn't need to look to hard and I would be able to tell. Green for the Thunder Brothers, Orange for the Onigumo Clan, and Red for Naraku. As I look around though I don't see any of these colors. All I see is blue and gold. I can tell with the way some are looking at me that I have somehow stumbled upon another gang's territory, but I've never heard of it before.

Suddenly, although he was probably looking at me for a while, a guy comes up to me and asks to take me somewhere. I already have a pretty good idea of what's gonna happen, but I'm too tired to say no. I follow him, and as I do I study his features. He has a strong build, and a rigid back, so he's probably a guard. We walk for about ten minutes when he enters a house. I follow silently. We wait for about five minutes before he starts walking towards a hallway. Again I follow silently. I don't want to make a habit of this 'following silently' stuff. We turn down another hallway and then we enter a room.

There are three guys in the room. All of them have silver hair and gold eyes, but the markings are different. The oldest one has two purple markings on his cheeks, and his eyebrows are thick. He is wearing a blue fighting kimono with a gold crescent moon on the sleeve. I would assume that there is another on his back. The second oldest has two maroon stripes on his cheeks, and a blue crescent moon on his forehead. He has thin eyebrows, and is wearing a white kimono with a maroon hexagon design. The youngest doesn't have facial markings, but has two triangle ears on top of his head. He has thick eyebrows, and is wearing a red kimono. They all seem rather intimidating. After my quick examination (this was all done in the time period of three seconds) the oldest one starts talking.

"What were you doing on Taisho Territory?" simple and straightforward.

"I wasn't aware that I was until now," I state. He raises his eyebrows at me.

"How does someone wander into Taisho Territory, and not know that they have?" he asks skeptically.

"Well, I believe that it starts with insulting Naraku, running away, not being able to see clearly, and getting beaten to a pulp. After that I just sort of wandered and I ended up here, so... yeah," I say, trailing off as they show no emotion. Even Naraku would show anger at the disrespect I've shown so far.

The guard moves as if to 'restrain me and demand order' which is what guards do when someone disrespects their leader. I notice something glint and realize that it is a blade. I act on instinct and quickly disarm him, sharply hitting his wrist to dislodge his hold on the blade, and then moving forward into his arms and jabbing him in the gut twice, causing him to curl up defensively, and then I knee him in the head, grabbing the blade as it falls, and stand in a defensive position in front of the door, crouched, the arm not holding a blade horizontally just below my face and the arm holding the blade held beside my head. The older one has his eyebrows raised again.

"If you are experienced in fighting, then why did you run away from Naraku?" he asks.

"Everyone has their reasons for everything. Why do you breathe?" I say.

"I breathe because I need to in order to live," he says, taking no offense.

"Same," I say. There his eyebrows go again. Up into his forehead.

"Why did you need to run in order to live?" this time it was the second oldest one who asked the question. I looked to the guard, found him still on the floor, and lowered my stance. If the leader wasn't asking the question, then it wouldn't be as disrespectful to answer as I usually do.

"Well, let us imagine this scenario. Let's say that you are a human, and you find yourself surrounded by about 20 demons. Do you: A) Stay there and die, B) Try to fight all of them and die, or C) Run away, weeding out the week demons, even though you know that the ones that will catch up with you will be the strongest of them and most capable of hurting you?" I say.

"Hn." That's all he has to say? 'Hn'? Wow, what a jerk.

"Well then, I suppose it is in your right to stay and tell us the rest of your seemingly very interesting story," the oldest one says to me.

AN: OMG I didn't know how to end the story! I feel so bad leaving it like this, but it was already getting really long and I didn't want to end up with 20 pages of story, because lets be honest, when you read a really long story like that, you tend to leave the story for a few days and then come back when you feel you have the mental patience. I am a really long story writer, but I'm bad at updating, so if you want me to update, and I haven't in a while, just review a lot, because I check those things, (I actually had another account but I had to create a new one) and if I see a lot of "Please Update" then I will remember and I will update. Also there is not a direct plot to this story so if you have any ideas, and want to have an input, I will try to incorporate all of your ideas into my story if I can. The only reason I won't put it in is if it doesn't make sense to put it in at the time, in which case I will say so in the Author's Note at the bottom of the page, and you will only have to ask me to put it in the next chapter and I will try my best to do so. Another thing is that I will probably not do any character deaths unless it is an extra character, or I feel it will really move the story along. I also do not have a beta so I apologize in advance for any spelling or grammatical errors I may make. Sorry. Thank you if you took the time to read my authors note, and please read them in the future. I will try to give you a hint at what's to come in all of my author's notes, but this time I really have no idea, so please review with ideas! This will probably be the longest Author's Note, so if you read all of it, thanks so much!

~lunasilverknight