This chapter is kind of just two small chapters put together. Don't worry if you find this one to be kind of boring. That will not last long. :)

Review or I will kill off one of the Inuyasha characters. Mwahahaha!

"What was that?" Kagome gasped upon hearing the roar from below the vent. She had just begun crawling through it, and hadn't been in the room in time for that fateful explosion.

"Is everything alright, Kagome?" Inuyasha called from behind as he climbed after her.

"Yeah, I'm okay," she assured. "But I don't know if I can say the same for the others. Something happened down there."

Warily, she reached the opening at the end of the vent and peered through to find the shattered, bloody remains of what had once been the tile-floored room. Half of the floor and two of the walls had been completely blown away. And their friends were nowhere to be seen.

"They're gone!" Kagome explained as Inuyasha crawled up beside her to see the destrucition for himself. Below the destroyed floor was a lower story, but the lighting up here was bad enough to make it impossible to see the bottom with human eyes. "We've got to get down there."

Slowly, with some help from her husband, Kagome lowered herself onto a remaining patch of the floor that jutted from the wall. It began to crumble under her weight, and she flinched back, barely managing to step onto stable ground at the far corner of the room before the tiles plummeted to the darkness below. Though there was nothing to land on directly beneath him anymore, Inuyasha still managed to swing to safety beside his wife using the frame of the vent as he descended.

"Let's go through this doorway," Kagome suggested, motioning to the opening through which Sango had seen the specter only moments before. It had vanished since then. The former hanyou followed her through it and the two of them emerged into a long, equally dim lit hallway, smeared and splattered with blood from various past conflicts.

"God, this place gives me the creeps," Kagome muttered as she began walking for the metal gate halfway down the hall. Beyond it, she could see a flight of stairs, leading down. But upon reaching the door and attempting to pull it open, she realized that it was locked.

"Damn. We might have managed to find them down there."

"Lets try the other end of the hall," Inuyasha encouraged.

Kagome turned around to find that the hallway had been almost completely barricaded thirty feet down. Metal shelves and bed frames were piled up haphazardly against the walls, leaving just enough room to slide through. Beyond it, Kagome could see nothing but deepening shadows and, beyond that, darkness.

Kagome walked to the barricade and slid through, camera in one hand and bow in the other. She reached the other side with only a few scratches from the sharp metal edges and immediately turned on the camera's night vision, quickly realizing that its battery was only half full. She began to walk onward, scoping out an open doorway not more than ten feet away.

"Little pig."

Confused, Kagome turned around to locate the source of the deep, growling voice that had just whispered those words. She had turned just in time to witness a silhouetted, hulking figure grab her husband by the sleeve of his fire-rat fur robe and wrench out from his place halfway through the barricade.

"Inuyasha!"

Dropping the camera, Kagome ripped an arrow from her quiver and drew it along her bow, aiming through the opening as she watched the former hanyou grapple with and finally kick free of the half-human abomination that had attacked him. There was now just enough space between the two. Just enough space for Kagome to deem it safe to open fire.

Her arrow was pulled back to its absolute full extent and immediately let go. It missed the target's head, but pierced deep into its shoulder with searing force. To Kagome's dismay, she realized that the holy energy that once flowed effortlessly from herself to her arrows had been cut off, along with the rest of her power. If she was at her usual level, the monster would have been instantly vaporized in a powerful exorcism. Instead he only roared, more out of anger than pain, giving Inuyasha just enough time to run back towards the metal gate. With surprising speed, his enemy recovered and began to pursue him with slow but massive strides.

"Go, Kagome!" Inuyasha called over his shoulder as he ripped open a wooden door at the side of the hall. "I'll find a way to meet back up with you!"

Then he darted past the door, slammed it behind him, and was gone.

"Inuyasha…" Kagome could only watch, horrified, as the barely humanoid goliath began to bash against the locked door with determined force. Frustrated, it momentarily stopped, then turned and suddenly locked its beady eyes onto Kagome's.

At that moment, Kagome knew that she had to run, too.

Whirling around, she scooped up her camera and held it up to the darkness beyond, sprinting into the unknown. Terrified and alone.

Sango awoke from the blackness that had been her only sense to find herself alive and, to her surprise, relatively comfortable. The sensation caused the blackness in her mind to fade to gray and then slowly take the form of the shapes around her. She was slowly opening her eyes.

The first thing she distinctly saw was her own hand, entangled in her long brown hair, slumped in front of her face. Past that was the edge of a thin mattress on which she realized she was lying on her side. Carefully, she rolled onto her back, looking up to find a large fluorescent light beaming down on her from the gray concrete ceiling. Gray, padded walls with red markings surrounded her.

Something darker than all the gray and red was standing in the far corner.

Panicked by this unknown presence, Sango sat up and her whole body went rigid as a soldier's. Her eyes immediately focused on the anomaly in the corner. It was a man. For a moment, she was given the hope that it was Miroku. But the hope was shattered when she saw his face. Though more human like than the person that had attacked her, his eyes were glassy and wide with madness, and his drooping, pasty face was twisted into an eerie smile.

"You've awoken quicker than I expected," he spoke in breathy English, completely unintelligible to Sango. "How do feel? I heard a blast from above and saw you fall. It is without doubt that God purposefully placed you here to aid me in my quest."

"E~tsu?" Sango mumbled in confusion. Tense with distrust, her eyes scanned the padded cell for her boomerang bone. She finally saw it on the ground; it had been slid halfway under the bed. Before she could reach for it, the stranger stepped towards her and offered a pale hand, to help her to her feet. Gingerly, she accepted it and slowly rose off the bed, scooping up the tassel of her boomerang bone in her free hand.

"You seem strong," the man observed with an almost imperceptible tilt of his bald head. "Exactly what I need."

Again Sango regarded him with utter confusion. "What are you saying?" She asked in bewildered Japanese.

"Oh! I see, now…." At last the man recognized the source of her confusion. Speaking in surprising fluent Japanese, he explained, "I know your language well from my earlier years spent abroad. I'll do my best to…get used to speaking it again. Now, as I was saying, how do you feel? Not too bad, I hope?"

"…I'll be fine." Sango replied with wide eyes. "But, who are you? What's wrong with this place?"

"My name is Martin Archimbaud. And you are?"

"…Sango of the demon slayers." Proudly, Sango inclined her head, widened her stance and jerked her boomerang bone up to shoulder height.

"Demon slayers?"