Naru looked sleeplessly at her clock. 2:30 am. She gave a heavy sigh - she had sat in her room all day and all night furiously debating with herself about whether or not to do what she had finally decided to do, but now she was going to do it. With rather shaky resolve she forced herself to stand up. She had been lying in her bed for several hours now but had not even changed her clothes. All the better, she decided, for offering her less distraction and less time to change her mind. For while her heart and mind alike were less than certain about what she was about to do, deep down both knew that she had been very lucky that her failure to do this sooner had not cost her dearly, and that she might not be so lucky a second time. She took a deep breath, focused herself, walked out of her room and went over to Keitaro's room.


"Keitaro," said a soft voice, barely jarring him out of his sleep. "Keitaro?"

"Huh? Whothere?" Keitaro mumbled out as his consciousness entered that not-quite-asleep, not-quite-awake state. As he opened his eyes and saw the origin of the voice staring at him from above, his eyes quickly flew all the way open and with almost equal speed he shot himself out from under Naru.

"Huh? Naru? I'm sorry! I don't know how I ended up in your room! I ..." Keitaro became aware of his surroundings just then. "Naru, you're in my room ..." he said with the surprise in voice being unintentionally thick.

"I .. I'm sorry Keitaro. I ... just wanted to talk..."

"About what, Naru?" asked Keitaro, suddenly feeling as though he were both weightless and upside down in his own room.

Even in the low light, the embarrassed blush on Naru's face was obvious. "Well ... umm ... I ..." Her direction crumbled under the gaze of Keitaro's big, heartful and always kind eyes, and she was forced to look away. "...can we go for a walk?"

"Umm, ya, I guess so," replied Keitaro, puzzlement now being the dominant feeling running through him. Puzzled though he was, he nevertheless got out of bed, sliding into his shoes but without changing out of his PJs, and quietly walked out of the Hinata Inn side by side with Naru. However, their exit had not gone totally unnoticed. A sly figure followed them silently outside and hugged the shadows behind them.


Naru had waited until they had walked some distance from the Hinata Inn and into a nearby park before speaking. "Keitaro, I ... I've been thinking ..."

"About what?"

The peaceful, soft tone of Keitaro's voice combined with the serene silence and stillness of the night around them suddenly brought Naru's emotions to the near surface, and despite the rather plutonic nature of their conversation so far she suddenly found herself fighting back tears. "I ... umm ... you ..." She made the mistake of meeting Keitaro's eyes once again. He noticeably started when he saw the welled-up tears her eyes, and the concern that his eyes spoke back was too much for her. With a great release of much pent-up emotion, she flung herself into Keitaro's arms and clung to him as though the heavens themselves were trying to take him away, and she wept her heart out. Keitaro, completely floored, stood there in total shock, unable to do or say anything but to gently wrap his arms around Naru in return. He stood there for what felt like half an eternity with the love of his life crying her eyes out on his shoulder. Finally, as Naru's tears began to slacken, Keitaro spoke.

"Naru?"

She looked up at him. For once, she was not concerned with how she appeared to him, which was fortunate, because having just offloaded such a powerful payload of emotion into his shirt she was not looking like what she would have called her own best. But Keitaro was likewise in no state of mind to notice. He was still trying to make sense out of her sudden and totally unexpected outburst.

"Keitaro ... I ... I ..." But before she could say anything more, Naru's senses were themselves assailed by a totally unexpected sound - gunshots. Gunshots followed by a series of unearthly roars and yet more gunshots. And they sounded close. Too close for comfort. The atmosphere of burgeoning emotional intimacy between the pair shattered like a piece of glass, they turned to look in the direction that the sounds had come from just in time to hear the sound of someone, or something, crashing through the wall bushes that they had found themselves behind coming from that same direction. But they scarcely had the time to feel fear before the identity of the someone or something was revealed - a wide-eyed and somewhat tattered Kitsune came barreling through the growth.

"Kitsune! What on earth are you doing out here?" asked Naru.

Despite the circumstances, Kitsune shot them one of her characteristic mischievous grins. "I had a feeling you two lovebirds would try for a little late-night rendezvous tonight, so I waited until I heard Naru moving around and then I followed you guys."

"Kitsune!" shouted Naru and Keitaro together, but before they could subject her to much of a tongue-lashing for her brazen intrusiveness, Kitsune headed off the issue.

Still smiling, she said, "you guys can slap me silly later, but right now, we gotta get outta here! Come on!" Grabbing Keitaro and Naru each in one hand, Kitsune bolted, demonstrating an aptitude for the sprint that any self-respecting prankster and snooper should have. Naru managed to keep up with Kitsune's pace well enough, but Keitaro, who was rather overwhelmed by the succession of dramatic events that had taken place in the hour or so that had passed since Naru had awakened him, was more or less being dragged along by Kitsune, who still wore her squinting smile as though they were running from some practical joke that they had just perpetrated instead of the threatening sound of gunfire and primeval roars. After running a short distance, Kitsune dived them into a ditch and huddled down. A very frazzled and tattered Naru and Keitaro looked at Kitsune in bewilderment.

"Kitsune, what are you doing? What is going on here?" Said Keitaro.

The Fox giggled, still acting as though this was all some big joke to her. "Well, like I said, I followed y'all after you left Hinata. When Naru got goin' with that whole 'I love you Keitaro marry me not Motoko' sob thing, I finally thought that I was gonna see somethin.' But the two of you just stood there huggin' and all for hours, and I started to get bored. So I wandered off a bit, and you wouldn't believe what I walked into instead!"

Naru squirmed a bit when Kitsune said the bit about 'I love you Keitaro,' but before she could say anything, Keitaro pressed Kitsune on.

"What did you see?"

"Hee hee, well, I see these two fellas just sort of walking down the road. Dunno why, but something about them just caught me as strange. So I started following them instead. And would you believe it, not 10 minutes after I first saw them, this big hairy thing just whips right past me faster than greased lightening and goes flying into these two guys! It pins one of them right of and bites the poor guy's face right off his head like one of those marshmallow bunny thingies! Then it looks up at the other one and snarls at him - let me tell you, I dunno what this thing was, but it sure was scary-lookin when it was mad! Anyway, this other guy pulls out a gun and shoots the monster-guy a few times. It drops to the ground, but then several others appeared out of the shadows around him, and just my luck, this guy starts high-tailing it right in my direction. That's when I decided that I'd better back off a bit myself, and it occurred to me that I should get the two of you out of here as well."


Keitaro and Naru sat staring at Kitsune not knowing what to make of her bizarre story, made all the more extraordinary by the fact that she told this tale of monsters and horror with the same cheerful disposition that she used when she spoke of Keitaro's antics or was telling some totally age-inappropriate story to Shinobu or Suu. It was Naru who broke the ensuing silence first.

"Kitsune, when we get back home, the first thing I'm gonna do is smash every bottle of sake that I can find. I sure wish you could go just one night with out getting totally fitz-chased and sticking your nose into other people's private business! Now we all heard those ... noises ... but I think those things you saw had more to do with your blood alchohol level than with monsters. Now whatever is going on out there has nothing to do with us, so let's just get home and we'll talk about this very thoroughly tomorrow!" She said with more than a little irritation in her voice. Equally irately, Naru stood up suddenly.

"Naru, wait!" shouted Keitaro and Kitsune together, both of them standing at the same time as well. Then, as Naru turned back to look at them, everything she saw seemed to drop into slow motion. First, from the direction they had came, the direction of the disturbance, a tall man dressed in a black trench coat from them was running directly at them at an incredible speed. Apparently seeing them, the figure raised his hand, in which was apparently a gun. Following the line of fire of this she turned to look at the space just to the side of her that was momentarily to be occupied by Kitsune, but out of the corner of her eye she saw something else. Turning in the other direction, she saw something else coming at them from the other direction, but Naru's brain would not process what she saw. It was some kind of animal, one with strikingly canine features, but it was running on just two legs. Like the figure rapidly closing from the other side, it was moving at an inhuman speed.

She remembered the other figure at the exact same moment she heard the gunshots. Her head swiveled back along the same line she had followed before, but that same space was no longer empty. Kitsune had stood up just as Naru had, but now she stood directly between the man and the beast. Continuing to move her glance in that direction, she saw the man running towards them firing his gun. At this point her perception seemed to slow down even more. A deafening roar suddenly exploded almost right behind her - the creature she had seen was now virtually on top of them, and just as the first gunshots seemed to arrive it leapt forward in an unbelievable display of strength. But they were not the first gunshots. At the same moment, Naru heard a muffled thud and felt a light, warm spray played across her face. Through a slight red haze she saw Kitsune's face. In what was a rare sight, Kitsune's eyes were open. But the expression on her face was like nothing Naru had ever seen cross the face of her old friend. Usually it was Kitsune's actions that produced expressions of disbelief on others, probably because of some inappropriate joke or prank. But now it was Kitsune who wore the expression of disbelief. Naru's eyes focused out from Kitsune's face to see a growing line of blood running down her chest from what had to be a bullet wound that lay between her left breast and her collarbone. Moving her hand over the wound, Kitsune then looked in shock at the beet-red blood that quickly covered her hand.

With a few heavy breaths, she slowly kneeled down and came to rest against the wall of the ditch that they had taken cover in. The last image of Kitsune that Naru remembered of that night was her friend sitting there, back against the side of the ditch, breathing heavily with virtually the whole upper left portion of her body soaked in her own blood, the look of disbelief and shock plastered across her face.


Suddenly, Naru's slow-motion view of events switched to high-speed. "Naru, LOOK OUT!" came a shout from her side opposite of the now downed Kitsune. Turning in that direction, she saw two blurs flying towards her. From the side of her she barely recognized the figure of Keitaro before he slammed into her with more force than she'd ever seen or felt him use on anything. The second was the creature that she had seen take off in a flying leap right before she had seen Kitsune hit by a bullet. It should have gone well over their position, but it too had been hit by bullets, and the energy of these bullets had robbed it of some of its forward inertia. Now, it was coming down right upon her. Or rather, it would have come down upon her had Keitaro not rammed her out of the way. Now it was Naru's turn to be sent flying. But the distances had been too close, and the speeds too great, and Keitaro could not get clear of the creature's path fast enough.


Motoko ran at the very limit of her own great physical abilities. Her sleep had been violently interrupted that night by terrible dreams, which had suddenly awakened her with more energy than had Tama-chan landed flat on her face. Immediately, she had sensed something was frightfully wrong with the energy aura of Hinata. The residents had all become part of Hinata's aura, and Motoko's warrior senses had learned to read the aura. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that this sort of disturbance in Hinata's energy could only mean one thing - one or more resident was in grave and immediate danger. She didn't know exactly who, or how, or why, but she thought she could sense a general direction from where the danger was coming. Trusting her own instincts, she grabbed her sword and ran. She ran for all she was worth towards that which endangered her beloved Hinata and it's residents. Then she had heard the gunshots. The unearthly roars. And the all too earthly screams. Motoko mustered every speck of Ki that she had and ran even faster.


The sickening sound of flesh and bone being crushed between impossibly powerful jaws resonated louder in Naru's ears than did Keitaro's scream. Then it was as if the sight of the creature slamming into Keitaro, its jaws making first contact with Keitaro's right shoulder, and the pair of them hitting the ground made Naru's brain catch up with everything that she had just witnessed and her own scream involuntarily burst from her lungs.

The creature then took notice of her. The creature, itself bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds not unlike the one that had felled Kitsune only moments before, then turned away from Keitaro and advanced on her, its eyes radiating a crazed fury that left Naru paralyzed with terror. She saw Keitaro lying motionless behind it, his right shoulder a bloody mess of mangled flesh that would have been unrecognizable as part of a human body if viewed without the rest of Keitaro's body. But she had little time to ponder the sight, for the creature leapt at her with a terrifying roar. Another volley of gunshots rang out. The creature contorted in midair as the deadly projectiles struck home. It came crashing down to the ground, its ferocious and bloodstained jaws coming to rest on the ground mere inches from Naru's feet. Shock now overtook Naru, and the last thing she remembered seeing before she lost consciousness was the image of the glowing blue eyes and smoking pistol of the man that Kitsune had seen.