Strength Unbounded

AU: *I do not own these characters or ideas, just the plot!* Finally, we get into the main plot. Forgive me; this chapter begins in Koenma's perspective before switching back to the first-person perspective of Hitomi. Also, I apologize to those of you who have added this story to your alert lists, since it's been so long since I updated. I hope it's good!

Chapter 3 – And the Fates Said….

[ k o e n m a ]

"Koenma Sir, have you made any progress on that project King Enma gave you?"

At his desk, the prince of the spirit world clenched his chubby, little fists. Of all the existences in the entire universe, Prince Enma, Jr., figured his had to be one of the hardest (and most certainly the lengthiest). His father put far too much store in him as the future leader of Reikai, and it was horribly taxing on his nerves. And, of course, the tagline of "Koenma" ("Little Enma") didn't help.

The little prince turned blazing brown eyes on his assistant, Jorge the oni, who had asked the question. The blue-skinned apparition paled under his gaze, giving him the complexion of cotton candy. When Koenma spoke, he spoke in a slow, quiet voice with a somber, rueful expression.

"Look at all this paperwork," he admonished, gnawing on his bulbous, blue pacifier. "Do you really think I have the time for such a pithy task?"

"B-B-But Koenma Sir!" Jorge insisted, sweat gleaming at the base of his horn. "Your father declared this project spirit world's number one priority!"

Koenma couldn't suppress a strangled sound of surprise. "What?! When did he do that?!" Of course, the project in question was the appointment of a new spirit detective. Yusuke Urameshi, the previous Reikai tantei, had retired his activity as spirit detective after the defeat of Sensui, inheriting his ancestor Raizen's land in demon world and choosing to reign from his home in the living world. Naturally, a new tantei would need to be appointed, but with no immediate spirit world concerns, the task had fallen by the wayside.

Koenma felt his cheeks flush as he mulled all of this over, only slightly calmer than a moment before. The more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed that his father would even do such a thing as to put a rush on this. Finding a living human with enough spiritual hardiness and potential alone was a long, grueling, and often fruitless task. Even once Koenma pored through the library of fate and found the answer, nothing guaranteed that the next tantei had even been born yet. In that case, the prince would have to wait fifty years or more for that fated one to be born and wizen to an age of understanding and spiritual peak. How could it possibly be rushed? Koenma swallowed hard, knowing this could only mean one thing.

"Dad knows something I don't!" Koenma wailed, feeling ignorant and powerless.

"N-N-Now, Koenma Sir," Jorge stammered consolingly, "it's a busy time of year for you! You haven't had much time for reading."

"That's very true," Koenma agreed, suddenly composed. Jorge gaped in disbelief at Koenma's bipolarity, but the little prince pretended not to notice. The oni went on slowly, probably trying not to shatter his boss's fragile state of content.

"But not to worry, Sir!" he cried, seeming proud of himself. "I did all the necessary reading for you and discovered that the new tantei is none other than this young lady!" Pressing a button, the oni brought up a picture on Koenma's office screen. The prince leaned forward to get a better look. She was petite, he thought, probably about the same size as Hiei. Her milky white complexion was offset by her wild, curly, violet hair.

"Is that natural?" Koenma asked, rubbing his eyes as he observed her exotic mane. Jorge the oni nodded solemnly.

"The unsettling green of her eyes makes me think of Kurama, Sir."

"What? Her eyes?" Come to think of it, it was true. Koenma had been so enthralled by her hair that he hadn't noticed before. The little prince leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed. He was in business mode. "Jorge, we'll need to get Botan in here to investigate her past and character, also to check her future and see how we ought to meet this little lady."

"Already done, Sir!"

"Whaaaat?!" Koenma blinked a few times, regaining his composure enough to take the hand-bound report being handed to him. He read quickly through it, discovering that she lived in Sarayashiki and even went to school with Yusuke. He wondered briefly if they knew each other, but this thought was immediately obliterated as he read the next part. He yelped with anger and surprise, shoving the now-wrinkled report in Jorge's face.

"What is the meaning of this part?!" he demanded. Jorge gulped, reading the indicated section aloud.

"'Hitomi Takeashi, sixteen, had suffered a severe, incurable immunodeficiency from a very young age,'" he read, following the words across the page with his finger. "'She falls ill often and is generally fragile and weak, so she never participates in gym class unless it is swimming. Doctor Iwamouto calls her condition impossible to diagnose. He is her regular physician.'"

"The Reikai tantei must be strong! Hardy!" Koenma looked as though he might pass out, his shrill voice echoing off the walls unpleasantly. "She won't even make it through training, let alone a mission! How could fate turn out a spirit detective like this?!"

Another oni, pink-skinned with only two teeth, sprinted into the room before Jorge was able to comment. "Koenma Sir! Mister Hiei is here….and he brought a human girl with him!"

"Waaaah! That's got to be her!" Koenma turned to Jorge, purple-faced with both rage and panic. "You arranged this, didn't you?!"

"N-No!" Jorge backpedalled. "I swear, I know nothing abou--!"

"SHUT UP!" Koenma screamed at him. Turning to the pink oni, he yelled, "Send them in! And get Botan up here!"

As the pink oni retreated, Koenma gnawed on his pacifier so hard, he chewed a hole in it. What was he going to do?

"There goes my raise," Jorge muttered sullenly. "And I worked so hard, too…."

Usually, Koenma might have had some witty rejoinder for this, but today he came up short. Oh, what was he going to do?!

[ h I t o m I ]

"H-Hiei?"

I looked at him with a certain amount of fear. He looked at me with detest and something like apathy, defecting to hate.

"Hn." He walked casually through the giant gateway that had just opened up for us. I was quick to follow, staying as close as I could without warranting a disgusted sidelong glance from my guide. The entry corridor was large, dark, and very empty. I felt tiny inside of it, but Hiei seemed unaffected.

After a long, silent walk, the dark corridor suddenly opened into a bright, busy, chaotic room. My eyes widened as I tried to take it in, but the sight that met my eyes was almost more than I could handle, not to mention the stink. I held my breath, only daring to take very shallow breaths through my mouth. I could still taste their odor, though.

The room was stark, and it was filled with so many bodies rushing around and yelling frantically at each other that I could hardly tell we were confined to a room at all. There were no people in the sense that we know them as. They were all oni, like the monstrous demons and apparitions from my pictures books that my parents had read to me as a child. They came in all different colors, most of them some shade of red or blue. The all had horns, too, and comical, cartoonish voices that made my heart beat faster as they called out to each other. It was like an otherworldly stock exchange. I felt like I was going to faint.

Hiei must have been able to see the wobble in my knees, because he shoved me ahead of him. "Move it," he grunted unceremoniously. "I just gotta get you to that brat's office and then I can get outta this hell-hole." I had no idea what he meant or why we were even in this bizarre place. Hiei pushed me more quickly than I thought I could move across the strange exchange and into another dim, quiet corridor to a large set of doors. He knocked once, hard, and stepped back. I turned and looked at him, head cocked to the side curiously. He glared at me, his face slowly twisting as I didn't look away.

"The fox and Urameshi should be here soon," he said brashly, stepping away. "My task is done." Then, before my very eyes, he disappeared. I had no time to look for him though, because a blue oni stepped into the hallway.

"Miss Takeashi?" he questioned. I turned, blushing, and nodded. "This way please."

I followed him into a cavernous office filled with stacks of paperwork, all marked with sticky notes saying, "in." At the very back of the office was a huge desk with a large stack of papers on the left in a box that read "in" and a much smaller pile in a box reading, "out." I was led right up to the desk, where there was a large swivel chair like there was in The Godfather. I gulped, suddenly feeling afraid of whoever sat in that chair. I tensed up, expecting the worst. The chair spun around, and I closed my eyes, not knowing what to expect.

"Hitomi Takeashi." Slowly, I opened my eyes to acknowledge the speaker and found that no one sat opposite me. I looked around, finding only the blue oni that had led me in.

"D-Did you say my name?" I asked shyly, feeling my face flush.

"Hey! I take offense to that!" the disembodied voice whined. "Look down here, wouldja?!"

I obeyed, finding a small child sitting in the chair. I smiled, relieved. "Oh, you're so cute!" I cried, swooping down on him, reaching to pick him up. The child pulled away suddenly with a yelp, falling out of his chair. His head made a dull thud when it smacked against the checked linoleum floor. I cried out, rushing to his side to help him up.

"Don't!" the little boy cried, his teeth gnashing on the gigantic, blue pacifier in his mouth. His big, brown eyes were wide with rage. "The prince of the spirit world, and I can't even get any respect!"

"P-Prince?" I gasped, moving away. "Sp-Spirit world? Is that where I am?"

The little boy looked at me wide-eyed, stopping suddenly in the middle of his endeavor to climb back into his chair. Looking at the blue oni, he said in an incredulous tone, "Yusuke didn't tell her anything!"

"It was all true?!" I suddenly burst out, falling to my knees in disbelief. Just at that moment, I heard footsteps behind me.

"Hitomi!" Yusuke rushed to my side, followed closely by Kurama. "Are you alright? Where did Hiei go?"

"I'm certain he would have left by now," Kurama reasoned. "After all, he never agreed to stay with Hitomi…."

"H-Hello, Yusuke," I stammered, trying to gather myself. I forced myself to take a deep breath, finding this smell didn't burn my insides as badly as Hiei's did. I allowed myself to be helped to my feet and into a chair as the baby boy—the prince of the spirit world?—skittered around me, mumbling things entirely too quickly for me to catch them. Yusuke finally blocked his path, glaring down at him solemnly.

"Koenma, what happened?" he demanded, bending down to grab the boy and place him on the desk. Koenma stood there, flushed and frustrated.

"Nothing!" he shouted. "She fell over like that after I introduced myself. You didn't tell her anything before bringing her here?!"

"Of course I did!" Yusuke yelled back. "I'm not some garden-variety idiot! She's heard everything about me and Kuwabara and everything we did as the tantei!"

"So why didn't she know me or Hiei….?" Kurama wondered. Koenma took the same pondering stature as the redhead.

"Yes, Yusuke, and why was she so shocked when she came here?" In the background, the blue oni shifted around uncomfortably. "There's a contradiction in your story here…."

"Oopsie! Not quite, Sir!"

Every head turned suddenly to the door of the office. There stood a tall, lean, blue-haired beauty wearing a pink yukata. She smiled at me, tilting her head to the side. "Nice to meetcha, Miss Hitomi!" She swept further into the office, going to stand by Koenma's desk. "She simply thought the stories were tall tales told by high school boys to make her feel better when she was sick. She didn't believe the stories. And Yusuke and Kuwabara were fine with that because they didn't think she needed to know it. That's also why they hid some of the more intense bits from her knowledge."

"Botan!" Yusuke exclaimed, grinning victoriously. "This might be one of the few times I'm happy to see you!"

Botan glared at Yusuke. "I'll take that as a compliment."

"Um, excuse me," I broke in, "but who is Botan? How does she know what I thought about Yusuke's stories? And most importantly, why am I here?"

"I'll field that," Prince Koenma volunteered. "You are not an ordinary living human, Hitomi. You are, in fact, the next Reikai tantei. The fate proclaimed spirit detective, protector of all."

"Except demons," Yusuke amended seriously. I blinked, trying to absorb what was just said. All of Yusuke's stories about his jobs had been….truth? And there was even more to them than I knew? And I was supposed to do things like that, too?

"Oh, don't look so shocked, silly," Botan declared with an absurd giggle. "You were brought here because of your new sense, weren't you? Because you could sense Hiei's demonic aura and you passed out?" The blue-haired wonder took a small book out of the folds of her yukata, flipping through it. "Yes, that's correct."

"My new sense…?" I repeated dumbly. "So Hiei smells like that because he's a demon?"

"And a powerful one," Kurama answered magnanimously. His eyes were closed as he thought. "His powerful aura was probably what broke through that wall in your mind keeping you from exercising this sense. You probably have the same type of thing going on here, to a much lesser degree and with a different flavor, because there are only apparitions and oni here, whose auras are different from those of demons."

That did explain my sense at the entrance. I was beginning to get a headache from the flurry of information. Yusuke laughed, placing a brotherly hand on my shoulder.

"Wow, I had no idea you were the next tantei!" he cried, as though proud. "That's really awesome though. I had no idea you had it in you."

"I…. I don't!" I finally cried, breaking the reverie that seemed to be surrounding everyone. "I'm not strong enough to do something like that! I've never even worked physically hard a day in my life! How am I supposed to do this?!"

"We know that about you, Hitomi," Koenma said solemnly, giving me a calming look. "I didn't understand it at first either. But I've come to the conclusion that you must have the spiritual potential to become strong and you may already be spiritually hardy."

"Spiritually….hardy?" I still couldn't believe it or understand, but I decided to play along anyway. "So what do we do now?"

"Easy!" Yusuke cried, taking me by the hand and pulling me out of the chair. "We go see the old lady!"

"O-Old lady….?"

"To Genkai's temple," proclaimed Kurama in a stately manner, following as Yusuke pulled me out the door. As I looked back, Koenma, Botan, and the blue oni were all waving a sly good bye.

But I never heard who she was….