Tendo sobbed uncontrollably as the cold barrel of the gun was placed firmly against her temple.
Her shoulder shook. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
"Get up," she begged, tugging desperately at the still form of her fiancé. "Ranma, please get up…"
Ranma Saotome was lying unconsciously on the debris riddled floor of an office's cubicle with blood flowing out from the numerous wounds scattered about his body. Directly above him knelt Akane Tendo, one of his many fiancées, in front of him half dozen heavily armed men in black fatigues and masks. All six of them were on high alert, their guns trained unwaveringly at the pair of downtrodden teenagers.
Tendo looked up and locked eyes with the leader of the group – the very same man who was holding the Glock-18 automatic pistol pointing straight at her head. This was it. They both knew the score. They both knew that she and Saotome have nowhere else to go. They both that was it; this was the end of the line.
The man smiled as he cocked the hammer back slowly with his thumb. It was totally unnecessary, he knows, but the moment seemed to call for the dramatization. He returned his gaze back onto his target and pulled the trigger.
Tendo narrowed her eyes and disappeared while he blinked.
In that split second before the hammer struck the bullet Tendo moved.
She slapped the pistol up causing it to discharge away from her and Saotome. She rose to her feet and – in one smooth motion – took hold of the man's arm, broke it in two places, and threw him into his six teammates. Being highly trained, they reacted immediately; two of them having caught the thrown captain and the rest starting forward with their guns up and blazing.
Growling with guttural fury, Tendo ripped a segment of the Plexiglas-divider separating one cubicle from the next and chugged it at her assailing. The onslaught of relentless bullets and noises skipped a beat as the men parted to dodge the flying chunk of solid, blunt force trauma. Tendo seized the opportunity. She heaved Saotome's lifeless form onto her shoulder and got ready to run.
Without a moment of deliberation Tendo ran through the hole in the wall she had just made.
She bounded toward the massive glass window that separates her from cool air and twenty-stories drop outside. Two steps later she found herself with bullets whistling after her once more. She gritted her teeth and ran on. The bullets made a short work of the glass window, shattering it into thousand jagged pieces that then got ripped into million smaller pieces before they hit the floor.
Tendo leaned forward, sprinting even faster toward the now-broken window.
"Ranma," Tendo whispered mostly to herself. "You better wake up otherwise we're dead."
With that, the shorthaired girl – with her unconsciously fiancé on her shoulder – took one last step and leaped through the remnants of the broken window of a twenty stories building out into the cool air outside.
Roma: the Shadow that crosses the Moon
A Ranma ½ fan-fiction by Krimzon
It was like something out of an adrenaline junkie's nightmare – like finding out you have faulty parachute half-way into your sky-dive.
That was the third thing on Ranma Saotome's mind after he woke up realizing that he was not in bed but instead free-falling down the side of sky-scraper. The other two things were the fact that he was hugging his fiancée Akane Tendo and that he was in pain.
Of course, being a well-trained martial artist, he could, without looking, easily tell that the pains were coming from numerous lacerations and contusions all around his body, a cracked rib or two and a dislocated shoulder.
Saotome opened his mouth to scream but it died in his throat as his eyes met with Tendo's.
Tendo's eyes: they were bloodshot and half-sealed with maroon mixture of dried-tears and congealed blood. Yet they still held those same soulful brown orbs that were burning with fiery passion to live.
"Ranma," the pigtailed boy heard she whispered – somehow managing to sift through storm of the howling winds and the deafening roar of automatic gunfire and find her lovely voice.
'Wait, gunfire!?' Saotome halted his train of thought. 'Why the hell would…'
Saotome shifted his weigh and spun both him and Tendo around so that they would make a harder target to hit. The hail of bullets continued to rain on as they jettisoned toward to the hard concrete below.
"Ranma! Do something!" Tendo yelled into the young man's ear as she clutched cling even tighter to his torso.
Saotome would have yelled back at her if he had had the time to do so - sadly, there was literally not a second to spare.
"Kyaaaaa!!"
Left without enough time to form a coherent word, Saotome roared out intelligibly as he quickly focused his 'ki' into the palms of his hands and thrust them downward. The blue-ish white light arced around his upper limps and tore into the ground below where it bore a massive hole into the street and created an equally massive explosion that arrested their downward momentum.
Boooooomm!!
And give them upward ones instead.
"Ahhhhhh!!" Tendo screamed in fright as she went from the velocity in the counts of hundreds of kilometers per hour to zero and back to similarly large number again, this time in the opposite direction.
Saotome would have been echoing her sentiment had he had any air left in his lungs after that battle-cry he gave whilst he was releasing the massive ki-blast that saved them.
Saotome took in a gulp of breath only to have it knocked out of him again as he and Tendo crashed into a near-by building. Embedded in the bricks and plasters, Saotome tried once again to take a breath. This time he ended up choking on a mouthful of coppery liquid that flooded his trachea. He clutched at his sides, overcame with paroxysm of blinding pains and lack of oxygen.
Swimming in and out of consciousness, his body slowly tipped forward, balancing precariously over the newly created ledge. Then he started to fall.
"Ranma!" Tendo yelled as she grabbed him by the back of his shirt. She yanked him back from the edge with her left hand while holding onto the crater they have created in the wall with her right. "Are you alright?"
The pigtailed boy spat out a huge glob of coagulated blood and saliva before answering in form of an easy-going grin.
Of course, with the kind of pain he was feeling, it came out more like a grimace than anything else.
Tendo gave him a half-hearted smile in reply before turning serious.
"Come on," she urged him to get up. "We have to get moving. They can't be more than a minute behind us."
Saotome nodded. He was about to ask how and/or where they were going to go when Tendo cocked her right arm back and unleash a haymaker to end all haymaker. She punched a hole through the steel lining and the brick layer on the other side, effectively making a hole in a foot-thick, brick wall with her bare hand.
She pulled herself through and waited for Saotome to follow suit. Seeing that he was not about to do so any time soon, she reached out and grabbed him by his arm and began dragging him through, all the while completely ignoring the look of amazement on Saotome's face
"Wha…? Since when could you do something like that, Akane?" Saotome asked after he was upright again.
"I'll tell you later, we don't have time for that right now," Tendo informed him rather succinctly. She turned away from him to survey the room they have just entered. It was an empty one – fortunately – however it was document storage room so that meant there was about a seventy percent chance it was under constant surveillance.
"Fuck!" Tendo bit off a curse as she spotted the Close-Circuit video camera fanning about in one of the corners on the ceiling. She cast a quick glance around the room and came to a stop on a small circular disk lying on the desk next to her.
"Ah ha," she said, hefting the onyx paperweight, trying it for its weight.
"What are you…," Saotome began to ask.
He trailed off when Tendo suddenly threw her arm back and whipped it forward, sending the metallic disk whizzing toward the CC camera.
Whossh—Crack!
"There," Tendo said patting her hands. "That should buy us a few of minutes at least."
Just as the last word left her lips there was a loud bang. Saotome tilted his head to look. He saw the door exploded inward and a small apple-sized object flying through.
"Close your—," Tendo tried to tell him but it was too late. Saotome eyes widened in shock as the outer casing of the metallic cylinder disintegrated.
Then his world went white.
Whump
"Offtp," Saotome grunted as he was tackled to the floor.
"Idiot," he heard Tendo muttered in his ears.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat!!
Saotome froze in terror. Those bullets were flying so close he could feel them carving their inexorable paths in the air. He tried to get up and run for cover but was pushed back down by Tendo.
"Stay down if you don't want to get killed," she growled, pinning him down with her elbow.
With stars still dancing about behind his eyelids, Saotome had no choice but to comply. He could feel himself being dragged by his arm. The relentless gunfire overwhelmed his senses and all he could think of was what Tendo was doing.
Suddenly the room was punctuated by rapid thumping noises and screams.
Then it was filled with silence.
'That's it,' Saotome thought. He could not stand it anymore; he needed to know what was going on. He forced his eyes opened despite the pain. Everything looked blurry and out of focus but that slowly went away in a couple of moments. He squinted his eyes and finally able to make out the details.
The room was littered with bullet holes. Bookcase ripped apart and filing cabinet shot to hell. Basically everything that has not been nailed down was thrown to the far wall. Even the stainless steel work desk he had been lying behind was battered beyond repair.
And in the middle of it all stood Tendo, completely unscathed.
She was holding a pair of assault rifles that she had presumably liberated from the four unconscious militias dressed in combat fatigues that were lying at her feet. She looked like she was inspecting them. She snapped a couple of levers back into place and fired off two shots in a rapid succession. Satisfied that they work, she chucked one of them haphazardly toward Saotome who caught it reflexively.
He sat up and stared at the automatic weapon in his hand in awe.
A gun – he has got a gun in his hand.
"Are you alright?" Tendo asked as she walked over to him. She offered him a hand to help him up. "Hey, come on – don't blank out on me. We have to keep moving; we can't stay here."
Saotome took the proffered hand and stood up. He noticed right away how different his fiancée's hand was. But just as he was about to ask his attention was turned back to the gun in his hand when Tendo pointed at it.
"Okay, Ranma, you'll need to know how to fire that thing so I'm going to give you a crash course on firearm," Tendo told him imperatively. "I know how you feel about weapons it's necessary. We don't have time for explanation right now so you're just going to have to trust me on this, okay?"
Saotome hesitated – too bad, Tendo did not have the time for hesitations.
"Good," she said with a note of finality. She lifted her rifle and showed it to him with the barrel pointing down.
"This is a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle. It fires 750 rounds per minute but you only have to worry about 30 because that's how much you have in your magazine. So aim, fire and count to thirty – once that's done you hit this ejector here," Tendo said, tapping at the base of the handgrip. "And then you replace the spent magazine with a new one. If it starts clicking like it's stuck that mean it's jammed. You point it at away from you and eject the magazine then pull back on this lever back. Once it's unjammed you pop the magazine back in and start firing. Aim, fire, count and don't touch anything else, got it?"
Saotome nodded numbly. Tendo was not impressed.
"Listen Ranma, this is really important. I know you're confused and that's probably because of the blood loss but you've got to concentrate, okay?" Tendo said. She had taken hold of his arms and was shaking him pleadingly. "I've just got back – I don't want to lose you again."
Saotome looked into her eyes helplessly. He offered her a feeble looking smile that she gladly took.
"We'll get through this," Tendo told him. "I promise."
"Okay, Tomboy," Saotome croaked. His throat felt like sandpaper – like he had not use it for days.
They shared one more crocked smile before heading out door. Tendo, leading with her G36 right up against her cheek bone her cool eye peering down the three times optical sight, and Saotome, following, holding his gun awkwardly.
Tendo lead Saotome down the corridor, moving quickly, eye-balling each corners and doors before moving passed or into them. They arrived at the elevators without any encounter. It spooked Saotome a little having met no one at all. The tension was mounting and the gun began to feel heavier and heavier in his hands. He shuffled from side to side uncomfortably as he watched Tendo walked over to check the elevator.
"Hey! Stay away from the windows, Ranma," Tendo hissed at Saotome. He flinched in surprise and at the volume the young woman used. He jogged over to her, feeling even more disoriented than ever.
"What's wrong with standing next to windows?" he asked, feeling annoyed at being snapped at.
"It could be nothing, or it could be your head. You have to be careful, Ranma. They could be hiding in the building next door looking at your through one of these," Tendo warned him. "This gun can hit a target from eight hundred meters away – it's not even eighty meters from here to that building across the street."
Once again Saotome could only nod. Eight hundred meters – suddenly the enormity of how powerful the one meter long creation of carbon fiber and steel began to dawn on him.
"Anyway, the power hasn't been cut that means they're either getting really sloppy or they're waiting for us to go down the elevator and trap us that way," Tendo informed him.
"So what do we do?" Saotome asked. "Take the stairs?"
"No, they probably have a couple of squads waiting for us or coming up the stairs as we speak," Tendo answered.
"So what do we do?"
Tendo looked between the elevators and her gun for a couple of moments before turning to Saotome with a smile. She walked into the opened elevator and hit G before walking out again.
"We go up," she told him.