A/N: Wow! I'm blown away by the response from the first chapter. One week and already 10 reviews, 50+ favs, and 100+ followers. So because of your amazing support, here we are; this is the first 2nd chapter to a story that I've actually published in the last five years.

You'll notice that this chapter is significantly shorter than the first. I know a lot of you like long chapters, but I prefer chapter cut offs that make sense rather the word max/min limits. As such, there will be a wide range of chapter lengths. Plus not forcing myself to write past where I want helps me keep the flow going and results in faster updates, which we all enjoy. I'm going to try to make updates every Tuesday, but I already know I'm going to regret saying that. Deadlines and I have never really seen eye to eye.

So, I don't really like my title for this story, but I'm having trouble coming up with something better that fits. I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions for a more fitting title. And no, I will not rename it 'Piece of Shit'.

WARNING: Character death in this chapter, but alas, no sexy times.

DISCLAIMER: See first chapter.

Chapter 2: It's All Relative

Uzume would be the first to tell anyone that she was no brainiac. She was by no means dumb, but her intelligence was more of a worldly street smarts than the more recognized institutional standards. Ask her to read a person's intentions or get the feel of a crowd, no problem. Explain the complexities of relativistic physics? Not likely. Unfortunately, being ignorant of the laws of the universe does not mean one is not subject to them.

As Uzume slammed painfully into the stone wall on the opposite side of the Death Chamber, she only had one thought in her head. Fuck you, Physics… While Einstein might have never thought a localized time dilation field would ever be possible, his theories on relative motion were certainly accurate enough to describe what happens when you run through a space where time moves faster into a space where it moves slower.

Uzume, being a Sekirei and a rather agile one at that, was moving towards the archway at roughly 12 meters per second (m/s). Unfortunately, time was stretched across the portal such that one second where she started was only about 5 milliseconds where she ended. Luckily, she had stumbled and slowed a bit crossing the threshold, so rather than zooming across the room at a cool 2400 m/s, she hit the wall at only ~1,000 m/s.* Well, thank whomever for small favors, right?

Without her enhanced body, not to mention whatever new power she had regarding death, she would definitely have just been blood spatter in a crater. As it was, she was at least a couple broken bones and a vaguely humanoid ball of pain in a crater. The only thing she felt happy about right now was that her stumble had caused her to miss Harry and not carry either him or a chunk of his body with her into said crater.

Through her pain addled mind, she was able to hear that there were no sounds of combat. Not that she knew what magical warfare should sound like, but she figured it would not be silent, as it currently was. Braving even more pain, she attempted to swivel her head to see what was happening behind her. Bad idea… Not only did the movement aggravate several of her injuries, a broken nose and at least one rib, but it dislodged some the shattered stones that had been hanging precariously above her.

What she could see before she closed her eyes in a wince as the stones fell on her, was highly amusing. With a couple exceptions, the dozen or so people in the room were all staring in her direction with looks of dumbfounded shock plain on their faces. Several of them had their arms up with those sticks they called wands in their hands and looked like they had stopped mid-cast.

In a way, she was glad the rubble had shifted. Otherwise she would have laughed, and with a broken rib or two that would have caused more damage than a bit of broken masonry falling on her. Sekirei had strong skin and bones, but their internal organs were just as delicate as any human's. As such, a hundred pound stone falling on her perfectly intact right shoulder was nothing compared to a broken rib piercing her lung. And while it was not terribly painful, it did distract her from the hilariously gawping faces. Unfortunately, it also broke them out of their stupor.

Most of them went right back to slinging variously colored beams of light at each other. Though still wincing from her movement and the shifting rubble, Uzume was able to sense that at least one of the combatants decided to take a potshot at the wounded chick. Annoyed, she moved the only part of her that was not in searing agony to defend herself.

Lacing her power through the new material that now obeyed her will, she raised the fabric of the Veil of Death up around her in a half-dome shield. She knew the spell - as she remembered Sirius calling them - was coming towards her, not which direction it originated from. Rather than splash against the cloth or rip through it, the yellow colored spell seemed to simply disappear-swallowed by the inky blackness that made up the Veil's material. As the spell was absorbed, Uzume was momentarily stunned by an inrush of information.

The spell was some sort of evisceration curse, fired at her by a man named Lucius. There was a jumble of other information that she could make neither heads nor tails of, though she was able to understand that this man was fighting against Harry and his friends. There were flashes of memories that she recognized as Lucius' but any conversations were spoken in what she recognized as English, a language of which she knew only a handful of words, most of them profanities.

Uzume was quick enough on her feet to realize that the information had come from the spell, but she had no idea why. The how was obviously her new veils. She was going to have to learn a lot more about this magic business if she had any hope of understanding. Honestly, she was just glad that spell had been blocked. She was in enough pain as it was without having her insides suddenly become her outsides.

Realizing that now was not really the time to be moping about, she used her new veils to prop herself up as gently as she could given the need for swiftness. Sensing that the material she now wielded had quite a bit of extendability, she used it to wrap tightly around her torso to stabilize her damaged rib cage. There was little she could do about her nose at the moment, but she had no choice but to set her dislocated left shoulder and elbow. There was no way she could fight with it flopping around uselessly. It would just get in the way, not to mention hurt like a motherfucker.

Despite looking more unnatural, resetting the dislocated elbow would have been a lot easier, if not for the shoulder above it also being out of alignment. So she grit her teeth and used her new veils to position her upper arm in the correct position to rotate it back into its socket. Normally she would likely have just tried to jam it in, but she had recently seen a nurse perform this exact procedure as she entered the hospital to visit Chiho.

She knew screaming would only draw more attention to herself, something she did not want in the middle of a battle, so she managed to limit herself to a harsh grunt as she manipulated her left arm back into place. She decided to just rip the bandaid off completely and swiftly popped her elbow back in place before the pain from her shoulder could ebb.

She quickly used more of The Veil to place her left arm into a sling. She would be at a disadvantage fighting with only one arm, but at least it was secure now. Checking the lower half of her body, Uzume was happy to note there were no broken bones. She did have a sprained right ankle, but again she was able to wrap it up tight enough that she could at least move. Aside from some small cuts and bruises, she figured she was as combat ready as she was going to get. As she made to climb out of her crater she came face to tip with a wand pointing directly between her eyes.

"That's far enough," a deep voice intoned. Of course, Uzume had absolutely no clue as to what the very tall and well-built black man had actually said. Not realizing she had taken quite a bit more time to sort out her injuries than she thought, her first instinct was that the battle was still raging and the man had just said some sort of spell. She reacted automatically, bringing her veil up to push the man's wand away from her face. That was a mistake.

When the spell had impacted her new veils previously, she had learned only the smallest amount about the man called Lucius. As The Veil touched this man's hand, her brain was overwhelmed with information. She knew everything there was to know about Kingsley Shacklebolt in the barest of an instant. His favorite foods, favorite color, where he kept his porn collection, the details of the torrid affair he had had with his boss a few years ago. She knew everything, including all his memories of growing up, learning to speak, read, write. She knew all of his training in magic and law enforcement. It was all there.

The feeling she had when she first touched The Veil returned. She had too much information all at once, and her brain just could not process it all. Eventually the pressure reached a maximum, though it did not subside. In order to relieve some of it, Uzume focused on Kingsley's memories of his language. Even just that fraction was so complex, and with her headache was nearly impossible to focus on. She managed to glean enough from the memories to get at least a rough understanding of English. Certainly enough to recognize that Kingsley had not been trying to curse her after all.

The pressure reduced by a small fraction to the point where she could hear that someone was screaming. As she regained more awareness, she realized it was her. And why should she not be screaming? Her brain was fit to explode!. Forcing herself to calm down and fight through the pain, she looked around. Again, everyone seemed to be looking at her, this time with mixture of different emotions, none of them very favorable.

There were a few people that were tied up in ropes or chains, apparently the losers of the battle. Several of them were unconscious but those who were awake were watching her with either a sadistic glee or calculated intrigue tinged with fear. The other adults in the room without exception had their wands trained on her with expressions ranging from deep sorrow to horror to righteous rage.

However, the one person she wanted most to see was nowhere to be found. Perhaps that was a good thing, she could not bear to see him look at her with rage and hatred in his eyes like the others. There were several young people around Harry's age all watching her with shock tinged with confusion. Uzume was with them. Other than her screaming like a loon a second ago, she had no idea why they were all looking at her like that. Nor did she receive any time to ponder.

All at once, a barrage of spells, mostly red in color, was launched at her. She groaned; this was going to hurt. Her head was still reeling from Kingsley's memory download, and if something similar happened when blocking these spells as did with Lucius' spell earlier, she was in for a world of pain. Seeing no alternative, she snapped her veils in place and, true to theory, received what she now realized were only small fragments of information about the spells and their casters.

As the new information fully overloaded her and she began to succumb to the onslaught she realized how ironic it was that she was absorbing stunning spells. Though none of them touched her, the feedback was essentially doing the same job. Her vision grew spotty, and she fell further out of the crater onto her hands and knees. As she did so, she came face to face with Kingsley Shacklebolt.

He was lying supine, staring blankly upwards with an expression halfway between the stern one he had been wearing when he spoke to her and one of shock. In that moment, before she was finally and fully overwhelmed, Uzume realized that she had not just taken Kingsley's memories; she had taken his everything.

Kingsley Shacklebolt, a man she now knew as intimately as herself, was dead by her hand and she had no idea how.

* Yes I realize I could have converted this to 2.4 km/s and 1 km/s but 2400 and 1000 vs 12 just seemed to have more impact.

pi R round's HP Fanfiction Pet Peeve Corner

Today's Lesson: Using Harry's School Timeline as the Calendar of the Universe

I have admittedly read a lot of HP fanfics, and I see this one a lot. Most people don't even seem to realize they are doing it. It's not an error of grammar or word choice, but it comes off to the reader (a.k.a. me) as a lack of general awareness of the world. As much as we all love Harry and Co., the rest of the world, Magical or Muggle, does not orbit around him.

What exactly do I mean? I'll give you my worst case scenario. Say you're reading a story and there are two adults (as in non-Students) speaking about past events, and they suddenly pop out that "So and So happened third year..." Third year of what? You and I know the author is talking about Harry's third year after matriculating at Hogwarts. But these people, who are not students in the same year of schooling as our hero, would have no context to understand that. The only people who should have a reason to refer to time periods in such a fashion are the students and even then only when they are talking amongst themselves or to people who know them rather well, like family.

Now, I know someone will say, "They're just doing it for the reader's sake, so they understand the timeframe." I say give your readers a bit more credit. If Harry starts school in 1991 as per canon, then an event that occurs in August 1994 would be the summer before his fourth year. Not too hard to do some simple math.

And just so you don't think I'm only calling out fanfic authors, JKR did this too to some extent. Mostly to hide the fact she wasn't able to publish all her books in consecutive years like she wanted, but also so the story remained somewhat timeless. But this is a pet peeve; it might be unreasonable, but it still rankles. (like people saying 'acrosst the street' or 'ecscaped from prison')