a/n: Ugh, this one just kept dragging on and on. I eventually had to split it into two chapters. Hopefully it works better from a pacing standpoint.
#065. "A Moment In Time"
Sheena already knew that taking the fork that crossed near Meltokio Human Ranch was utter lunacy—even assuming she'd been correct in thinking the Desians they'd passed earlier in the woods were headed toward Mithos Temple, to try and kill the Chosen.
To start with (as Kuchinawa had since reminded her about a dozen times in as many minutes since she'd made her detour), the Desians were already plenty likely to get lost along the treacherous mountain pass without any outside help. Only Mizuho citizens knew how to navigate the Fooji Mountains with any degree of accuracy, and most others who tried only ended up getting hopelessly lost at the mercy of the monsters who roamed these parts in search of food. The Desians they'd seen could easily end up dead before they ever reached the temple.
But Sheena, not wanting to take any chances with the salvation of the world—which just happened to include the involvement of a certain red-haired Chosen—had to be sure that the Desians' plan did not succeed. For all her reckless bravado, she also hadn't made her decision in the hopes of embarking on a suicide mission. The path she'd chosen through the mountains would take her and Kuchinawa dangerously close to the perimeter of the human ranch, yes; but she still meant to be as careful as humanly possible not to get caught.
She obviously had no intention of actually approaching the ranch, let alone getting with seeing range of its walls. Whatever terrible things went on in the Desians' domain was certainly terrible, even inhumane, but it also wasn't any of Sheena's business. She knew perfectly what happened to any Mizuho spies who were unfortunate enough to be spotted near there by Desian soldiers. The very thought of it made her shudder.
Of course, such thoughts were precisely the last thing on Sheena's mind, when a bloodcurdling scream of pain suddenly tore from the air beyond the cliffs where she and Kuchinawa were making their way across the pass.
Sheena stopped dead in her tracks, her skin erupting in goosebumps. She hoped the noise would quickly stop, but instead more screams immediately followed the first. "Wh...What is that?" Sheena stammered, forgetting to be quiet as her body started to tremble.
Kuchinawa appeared by her side, emerging from the nearby brush as silently as a ghost. "Be quiet!" he hissed, his eyes furious dark slits beneath the face mask he wore. "Why did you stop? Are you trying to get us caught?"
Chastened, Sheena lowered her voice, but she didn't concede to move farther. The screams were growing louder and more agonized the longer they carried on. "C...Can't you hear that?" she asked, gesturing wide-eyed toward the cliffside at the left where the sound was coming from. "It's awful, Kuchinawa! That poor woman...it sounds almost like she's being tortured!"
"Yeah, so what?" Kuchinawa snapped unsympathetically. "Desians always do horrible things like that to their prisoners, there's nothing you or I can do to stop it! We're supposed to be finding our way to the temple, remember? Now, let's go—before somebody sees us!"
Sheena barely heard him. Beyond the cliffs, she heard the woman start to scream again, the sounds more raw and awful than before. This time, however, her cries of pain were abruptly cut off halfway through: something had happened to make her stop.
A number of shouting men's voices rose up in place of the woman's screams. Sheena could only guess that these were from Desian soldiers, barking commands to their fellows in the ranch. Whatever they were saying certainly boded ill for the woman they were tormenting, inside those formidable walls.
Sheena hardly even realized she was moving before it was too late to stop. "I'm just going to go see what's happening," she said quickly to Kuchinawa by way of explanation, spinning on her heel and dashing out of the foliage before he could stop her.
She heard an angry exclamation at her back, but Sheena didn't turn around. She reached the cliffside in seconds and swung herself up the branches of the nearest tree, frantically beginning to climb. The ascent was easy; her natural clumsiness didn't seem any more eager to rear its head now than her common sense. From the tree's highest branches she was able to glimpse the goings-on of the human ranch down at the base of the cliff, with her body more or less safely ensconced in the cover of thick leaves. What she saw below made her blood boil with rage.
A group of four Desians had cornered a prisoner near the outer perimeter of the ranch, a young woman by the looks of it. She was caught with her back to the wall in a remote corner, having nowhere else to run from her captors. The prisoner was rail-thin and dressed in filthy rags, which Sheena could see plainly through the horizontal cords of thick wire that generated the invisible force fields along the outer wall. The only element of the prisoner's appearance that wasn't as drab as her wardrobe was a flash of rose color at the top of her head, flaky dirt caked in her hair not quite enough to subdue its vibrance. The woman's body was skin and bones, a clear byproduct of malnourishment, and she was hopelessly outmatched by the four burly soldiers who stood in a semicircle around her. Despite that, she stood tall and bravely held herself in a fighter's stance as her tormentors closed in—her fists were both raised defiantly in a bold gesture of self-defense, as though she dared any one of the four men before her to be the first to strike.
As Sheena watched, frozen by warring indecision and anger, one of the Desian soldiers took the initiative.
"Guess one round of punishment wasn't enough for you, swine," he snarled, stepping forward and raising a silver battle-axe in one gauntlet-clad hand. "But even a prisoner with your attitude will learn sooner or later, that there can only be one fate awaiting any human who dares to defy a superior half-elf!"
The soldier ran forward at the prisoner, raising his axe high so he could bring it down in a wide arc. Then, a number of events occurred in quick succession that made Sheena gasp in disbelief from her tree:
For a few long, agonizing seconds, the prisoner held her ground, tensed and unmoving in the face of the soldier's charge. Just as a terrified Sheena was making up her mind to jump down and intervene, the prisoner feinted right, then threw herself to the ground and out of the swinging weapon's path. The axe's arc missed hitting her by a hair's breadth—the Desian soldier, blindsided, couldn't stop his weapon's trajectory in time, and with a yelp of shock he careened axe-first into the ranch's fortified wall.
The blade tore through a number of the thick coiled wires that generated the outer force field, which were strung between narrow columns erected at intervals along the ranch's perimeter. The soldier screamed as an electric surge from the severed wires traveled up the axe and into his body, electrocuting him until he finally let go of the weapon and staggered back. The force field around the ranch flickered visibly for a moment, but ultimately held, leaving only an unsteady segment fluttering in and out of existence around the axe deeply embedded at the base of the fence. It wouldn't be moving from that spot anytime soon.
Turning the soldier's own attack against him was just the beginning. While the Desian was still struggling to recover from his failed attack, the prisoner hit the ground rolling so that she could spring up again without any lost momentum. Once back on her feet, she spun in place and kicked the soldier directly in his helmeted head, striking at an angle that whipped his neck about quickly enough to crack. A blow like that could leave a man paralyzed for life, Sheena knew, and with stunned fascination she watched as the prisoner followed up by diving at the fallen man's belt to seize the metal handle of his whip.
The other Desians hardly had any time to react. Before they knew what was happening, the prisoner was on them, launching herself with a scream of rage at the men who had tortured her. They yelled out and beat a hasty retreat, two managing an escape while a third fell at the mercy of the prisoner's whip. He frantically attempted to stand up but she struck her weapon down on him again and again, tearing through the gaps in the soldier's armor until his body was left a broken and bleeding mess. She wouldn't stop until he was dead.
Sheena hadn't realized that the scene below held her paralyzed until a sudden intervention broke the spell.
"What in Mithos's name are you doing?" Kuchinawa's voice snarled harshly in her ear, strong fingers seizing her upper arm with bruising force. The younger ninja's free hand had already slapped itself firmly over Sheena's mouth, anticipating her startled shout of surprise. He let her go nearly at once, but wasn't done yet, spinning her around to face him on the branch where she sat.
Sheena's shock at seeing him left her at a temporary loss for words. "I—"
"Save it!" he hissed. "We're getting out of here, now, while they're still distracted with that prisoner! Come on!"
Sheena's tongue weighed heavily like lead in her mouth, stricken thoughts racing to form a coherent argument. "B-But..." She glanced down below, and saw that though the woman had successfully killed the fallen soldier with her whip, the two others were already fleeing toward the center of the ranch to find backup. "But that woman—"
"No! Forget her!" Kuchinawa all but shouted, shaking Sheena by the shoulders to make her look at him. "You said you wanted to help the Chosen, right? You wanted to stop those Desians we saw earlier, before they reach our people at the temple!"
Zelos's face flashed guiltily in Sheena's thoughts; however, he had to fight to be seen over the recent memory of the prisoner's tortured screams. Sheena found her gaze flickering unbidden toward the ranch again. More soldiers were gathering to meet the ones that had run away from the corner of the wall, listening intently to whatever story was being conveyed.
"But—she—" she stammered.
"Sheena!" Kuchinawa said. She'd never seen him so upset before, all traces of his regular teasing and competitive nature gone. "Human ranches are Desian territory. They're half-elves, you imbecile! They all have Exspheres! If we go down there, we'd never make it back to..."
He didn't stop talking, but something in Sheena compelled her to look away from him toward the ground. The prisoner was now trying in vain to lift the soldier's battle-axe that had been embedded at the base of the wall, knowing it would leave behind a gap just big enough to squeeze through if she could get it free. For their part, the Desians hadn't fully regrouped yet, but it would only be a matter of seconds before they gathered their weapons and headed back in the prisoner's direction to retaliate. She was running out of time.
Kuchinawa abruptly stopped his tirade mid-sentence, following the path that Sheena's eyes had locked on behind the cloth mask covering the lower half of her face. The younger ninja's body stiffened on the branch beside her, and once more he yanked forcibly her by the arm to get her attention.
"Sheena, you can't!" he said harshly, gesturing desperately toward the ranch. "Think of the Chief! Think of the people of Mizuho! Spying on the human ranch is bad enough, but if we let a prisoner escape? The Desians would retaliate, and kill us all!"
Head bowed, Sheena allowed herself to be pulled forward. She refused to meet Kuchinawa's eyes. The shame in her posture was real, but already the fingers of her free hand were curling inward, toward her sleeve—feeling for the number of concealed guardian seals she'd brought with her into the mountains. She grasped only two, wind and fire, but even one would be enough for what she had to do.
"Kuchinawa, they're going to kill her," she began lowly, voice trembling in fear of what she was about to risk. She desperately wanted to make him understand her reasoning. "You saw what the soldiers were doing. You know what the Desians are capable of. That prisoner's gotten this far on her own, but if she can't make it past the wall, it doesn't matter. We can't just sit back and watch it happen!"
"Damn you, idiot, of course we can!" Kuchinawa snapped back, sounding nearly afraid himself. "That stupid Chosen of yours is starting on his journey tomorrow, or have you already forgotten? If he succeeds, it won't matter anymore, what the Desians are capable of. This isn't our fight!"
He was wrong. Sheena yanked her arm away from him, fire in her dark eyes as she pulled down the cloth that covered her face, so he could see her clearly.
"Then whose fight is it? We're supposed to ignore what's happening in Tethe'alla because of the Desians, until the Chosen's trials are through?" she snapped. "Salvation doesn't happen overnight, Kuchinawa! People are getting hurt in those ranches—why don't we try to put a stop to the suffering that's going on right now in front of us, instead of making Zelos do it all by himself!"
Kuchinawa opened his mouth to say something back, but Sheena's mind was made up. With a silent prayer to Mithos on her lips, she steeled herself and leapt down from the tree branch away from the other ninja, scaling the trunk in calculated leaps until she'd landed on the rocky cliff's edge below.
A lifetime of training flashed lightning-quick through her mind's eye. Mechanically, she pulled up the cloth mask over her face again, so that she wouldn't be recognized or remembered by anyone at the ranch even if she were seen. Sheena gathered her wits and desperately appealed to Mithos that she'd get away from this ordeal undetected with her life intact, if nothing else so that her grandfather wouldn't have rescued her from Gaoracchia Forest all those years ago in vain.
Her nerves as steady as they would ever be, Sheena grimaced and threw herself over the side of the cliff, already planning out exactly what she needed to do. Diving headfirst toward the human ranch below, she twisted midair and pulled out the wind-guardian seal from her sleeve in a single, fluid motion. This was it. She couldn't afford to make any mistakes now; too many lives hinged on her actions in this moment in time.
If Kuchinawa was smart, he'd run for the temple and leave her behind. This might not be his fight, but as of this second, this choice, it was hers.
The earth rose up to meet her, and Sheena hit the ground running—hurtling headlong into the second-most important decision of her life.
