"Sir, we're four miles out from Sunnydale along the western ridge of the mountain valley," Riley Finn glanced out at the devastation with a bewildered look. "Every tree is pointing away from the town. It's like they were all blown down. No signs of any animals so far. The local vegetation seems to be primarily evergreens with a few sparse sections of hardwoods. It's easy driving along the ridge since it has been cleared by whatever knocked the trees down. With exception of a few bumps it was like riding a dirt road sir."

"Good work Agent Finn, return to base for debriefing," he heard from the Colonel over the microphone. Finn heard the Colonel pause as someone spoke on the other end. "Bring a sample of the wood with you to test for compatibility to our needs."

"Understood sir, returning to base," Finn put the microphone back on the humvee and nodded to his partners Forest and Graham. "Pack it up and let's roll."

"With the HSTs I thought it was a strange world," Forest said, scanning the horizon with binoculars. "But this is too far out there."

"I'm sure they'll tell us the latest when we get back to base," Graham said with a grin as he tossed a stick in the back of the hummer. "This isn't the kind of thing you can just cover up with a few lame excuses."

"No, I guess not," Riley said with a matching grin. "It's back to being soldier boys after pretending to be grad students for so long. That excuse wouldn't have held more than a couple more years."

"Wait-" Forest motioned for them to stay quiet. "There's something out there." Together they waited, but whatever Forest had seen seemed to have vanished. "Damn, I know something's out there."

"Could be just stress," teased Graham lightly, but he was scanning the area as closely as the other two. Forest didn't just react over nothing. Unfortunately, Graham was the first to spot the creature as its arrow pierced his shoulder. It was a stone arrow.

"Base this is Team 3, we have a man down, requesting back up," Agent Finn called into the microphone as Forest dragged Graham behind the hummer. "We can't see the hostiles, but they are armed with arrows. One shot Graham in the shoulder. Does not appear to be life threatening."

"Can you get away?"

"No Colonel, we're under heavy fire! Arrow fire," he reported, ducking under a stray arrow. He peeked over the dashboard to see rough brutish humanoids climbing up the mountain side. A number of them were simply firing arrows at their location, not worried about targets. "Sir, they look like cavemen! Like those things you see in National Geographic!"

"What?"

"Cavemen!"

"I'm sending a team out now! Stay alive! That's an order Agent Finn!"

"I'll do my best sir!"

The people at the committee sagged as they heard about the team. The Colonel was barking orders to his people to send out another team, but it could be a while for help to arrive. Walsh was calling in commands for the Initiative to be on guard on her own radio. Everyone knew the team might not be alive by the time they arrived.

Buffy got up and grabbed her sword from her bag. "Buffy, what are you doing?" Her mother was alarmed by her action.

"Mom, this is what I do. It will take them some time to get there, I can be there faster," Buffy said, slipping her jacket back on her shoulders. "I can't be sitting around at a table talking about things when I could be helping."

"Buffy This is hardly the time for heroics," Giles said with a cautionary tone.

"I know Giles, but I have to go," She gave her stunned mother a peck on the cheek and ran out the door. Willow sighed, knowing she couldn't follow her friend until she healed.

"Does she really think she can outrun a humvee on broken terrain?" asked Maggie Walsh with a confused look.

"Oh, I know she can," Giles said with a slight smirk. "Now since we are taking a break I think I might take a nap and heal from being tortured last night."

Angel winced and sat in the corner contemplating his actions. Forgiveness would never be an option.

Graham, though wounded, was managing to help his partners. Every time one of them ran out of a clip, he replaced it, giving the other a full gun. This had happened several times so far. There must have been hundreds of these hulkish things clamoring up the mountain side. Riley and Forest's cover fire had killed the first few waves, but the creatures seemed fearless. Their dead fell in front of them, but they kept coming. And soon, Graham put the last clip into the third gun and passed it to Forest. "Last Clip."

Both Drizzt and Dove's party heard the sound of gunfire echo off the mountain sides. The strange rumbling Blam-Blam-Blam was a noise none of them had heard before and it disturbed them a little. Drizzt saw the Orcs attacking the three figures behind the carriage. The horse must have run off at the sound of the disturbance. Calling his panther friend, they leaped across a narrow spot in the gorge walls to the other side, charging towards the orcs.

Dove and company saw things a little differently from their perspective. The orcs outnumbered the humans many to one, but the humans with their strange weapons had managed to make a sizable pile of dead orcs on the mountain side. They seemed to have some kind of quick loading crossbow or bolt launcher. The items had to be magical weapons of some sort. But even magic weapons couldn't protect them for long. Arming themselves, even McGristle was charging to attack the orcs, though Dove suspected it was for the bounty on orc ears rather than an outpouring of goodwill towards strangers in peril.

So intent were both parties on the orcs, neither one noticed the other group as they converged on the weakened soldiers.

The soldiers themselves were surprised, but happy to see the strange people attack the cavemen and provide a welcome distraction as Forest ran out of bullets. Two were about Forest's height but there was on only about 4.5 feet high! One was a massive brute of a man who swung his axe with enough strength to cut a standing tree. His dog ripped the throat out of a caveman and leaped at a second.

Riley watched as help came from the other side as well. A short black man with long white hair stabbed a caveman through the gut, dropping him to the ground. His panther raked several with it's huge claws, dropping more. With casualties like these any human army would have broken by now and ran, but the cavemen kept coming. The three soldiers glanced at each other a long moment before Forest and Riley grabbed two abandoned axes and joined the melee.

Buffy ran like she had run few other times in her life. Her spidy sense was going off, so she knew something was wrong, but it might have just been a remnant of the creepiness of the last couple of days. The path Team 3 had taken was luckily the closest to the city hall. The trees and buildings around her seemed to blend into the background as she rushed out of the town and down along the ridge. She made some better time by jumping off a small cliff that a Humvee would have had to drive around. A twenty foot drop and she kept on running with her stake in one hand and her sheathed sword in the other. Five times in quick succession she leaped from boulder to boulder gaining time. Soon she could see the hummer perched on the ridge. The cavemen were clamoring over the top wielding axes, clubs and a few massive swords. They were not doing well against the three armed soldiers, but they had the advantage of numbers.

Buffy watched as the newcomers assisted the soldiers. If it had been a normal week, her heart would have leaped at the lucky timing. Unfortunately, it had not been a normal week. Buffy just wanted to hurt something and she was afraid it was going to be someone she cared about. She had to escape the confines of the town and her mother's overprotective arms. She was the Slayer and it called out for her. Now, the Slayer was in control of Buffy and not the other way around.

She leaped, literally, into battle, knocking an orc to the ground by landing on it's head. The instant she landed, her sword flew from its scabbard and cut the throat of another. Using a two handed style, she slashed with her sword and stabbed with her stake. They weren't vampires, but they died well enough with a stake to the heart or head. She spun around, hamstringing one while stabbing the kidneys of another. Down and down the orcs fell, piling up like so much cordwood.

Who was this mad woman? Skilled as she was, she wasn't even wearing armor! This blond little thing seemed to have strength and speed far beyond her size. Her grace was more than normal for a human by far; elves were not as graceful. Nor were they as mercilessly deadly.

The adventures would glance at her every so often and were amazed at her power. She had been hit by three arrows and it did not seem to have even slowed her. When a cross parry broke her sword, the woman simply pulled back her fist and punched the orc in the face, knocking it and several others backwards down the mountain side. Now she stabbed at them with only a dagger and her bare hands. No! That wasn't even a dagger, but merely a pointed stick!

In the midst of battle they had not missed the arrival of their quarry either, but were not in a hurry to apprehend him with the attacking orcs. So long as he fought along side them Dove's people would not attack the Drow, but as soon as his treachery was revealed, they would be forced to strike him down.

Buffy was angry. And not just a little angry. She was furious. The pain in her back only fueled her rage and strength, granting her a frenzy she had never felt before. And it felt good.

Breaking the sword had troubled her little, but Mr. Pointy was so bloodied that it was starting to slip in her grasp. Soon it would be fists alone, but that had never stopped her before. As cavemen demons went, these things were fairly weak. Sunnydale had seen it's fair share of similar creatures, but they had all been able to pack a punch. These fell unconscious with one punch.

And yeah, it felt good. Real good.

Drizzt was disturbed by the blond woman, but for a very different reason. He could sense the Hunter in her. That same rage which had sustained him for ten years in the wilds of the Underdark was reflected in her face and it terrified him.

Was she a kindred spirit? Or was she too lost to the demon inside?

Riley Finn was happy when the cavemen started to balk, but something nagged him. If they had suffered such losses, why were they only backing off now? His question was quickly interrupted by the sudden falling of boulders on the cavemen in front of them. Glancing over his shoulder he saw what had given the cavemen pause: massive bald humanoids with skin the color of the local stone and the ability to toss boulders like he would skip a rock. Diving down, he knocked Forest to the ground as a boulder crashed through the spot their heads had been a moment before.

"Stone Giants!" Fret called out in warning. Dove turned to the Dwarven Sage and glanced up at the giants.

"Good Goddess! If it rains it pours!" swore Dove, shooting an arrow at the closest, putting out an eye.

"It could be worse," called out Kellindil with a smirk as he shot two arrows at once. "They could have helped the orcs!"

"It matters little if they worked together if we're dead," remarked Gabriel as he pulled his sword out of an orc's eye socket.

The Orcs were finally in full retreat, but the stone giants had them pinned down behind the hummer. Drizzt sent Guenhwyvar out to distract the giants before flanking them himself. He silently thanked fate that the carriage had not been hit. For all their strength, the giants had little control over their aim. But luck was on both sides of the battle and just as the dark elf ran out from cover, a boulder hit his leg, folding it under him even with the adamantine chain protecting his thigh. To think he would endure all this hardship only to die helping others who hated his kind.

Buffy saw the giants and grinned like a feral animal. Now these were demons! She silently cursed herself for breaking the sword, but stuffed Mr. Pointy into her jacket and snatched an abandoned axe on one hand. Racing towards the giants, she grabbed the cable for the winch off the front of the hummer, slapping the release with the blade of the axe. Bouncing off three boulders in quick succession, she drove the axe blade deep into the thigh of a giant, using the handle as a spring board to propel her up to its neck. Keeping her momentum, she swung down over its shoulder and up on to the other side, dragging the cable behind her. Leaping back up onto its other shoulder she hooked the cable together and pulled on the line extending back to the hummer. Using her Slayer enhanced strength, she pulled on the main cable, tightening it into a wire garrote around the giant's neck.

The giant struggled in vain to pull the wire away from it's neck, but its thrashing only dug the cable deeper into it's flesh. In a few short moments the giant was dead and toppled to the ground.

"That mad woman just took down a giant!" Fret, the dwarven sage, had never seen anything like it. "With a rope! Just a rope!"

"Less talking Fret, more killing," grinned Kellindil as he blinded another giant with his split arrow technique. "Why don't you stop hiding and get a few blows in?"

"I'm a sage, Elf, not some Gutbuster," the little man growled. "This brawling has its purpose, but I do not enjoy it like you or Gabriel."

"Come now! Are you both going to gab all day or are you going to help us out?" Gabriel called as he ham stringed a giant, causing it to fall to one knee.

Riley crawled over to where the black swordsman lay clutching his leg. It was broken, no doubt about that. Carefully, he put a hand on the man's arm, Riley caught his attention. There was a look of fear on the man's face. Agent Riley Finn was confused

"Forest, get the first aid kit and patch up Graham. Then come over and help me set his leg," Forest nodded, slipping back into the soldier role. Riley turned back to Drizzt. "Can you feel your legs?" It was clear the man didn't understand him. And "man" might have been pushing it. He didn't look even as old as most high school kids, let alone be old enough to be called "man." He tried again, using hand signals this time. "I'm going to help you."

Drizzt didn't understand a word the human said to him. It was not in the common tongue, nor any other language the dark elf spoke. The strange person kept saying something and motioning to his broken leg. This went on for a while as the big dark skinned human bandaged up the smaller like skinned one.

"Are you bleeding?" Riley knew it was useless to ask, even when he made dribbly motions with his fingers.

For some reason the human was suggesting mind flayers were involved by the waggling of his fingers under his chin. Drizzt nodded, hoping that the human was asking if he had ever seen any. It would certainly explain the unnatural courage of the orcish hoard. To his surprise the human scrunched up his brow and went for his knife.

"Forest! This guy's bleeding, but he's trying to get away," Riley called back to his friends. "Hold him down while I cut the clothing away from the wound." Forest was getting up but froze as he looked beyond his CO. "What is it?"

Forest pointed to the sight of a petite blond girl strangling a giant with only a metal cable. All three soldiers looked on in horror as the giant toppled over, the blond girl simply leaping on to the next giant, using her stick as a hand hold to climb up to the neck.

"Holy Hell"

"Yeah, you said it Forest."

Buffy killed the first one easily. Timing her leap perfectly, she drove Mr. Pointy deep into the second giant's bicep, causing a howl of pain. The gray skinned creature swatted at her like she was a fly, but it didn't manage to rid itself of her. Using both hands, she would leap and then drive the stake a little higher on the arm. The giant flailed trying to get her off, but one hand was not enough to pry off the Slayer. When she got up to the shoulder, she ran towards the neck and kicked the jugular as hard as she could. The giant doubled over in surprise, coughing at the sudden jolt.

She heard a cry off to the side and noticed a human dressed as a knight tossing her an orc axe. Catching it one handed, she spun it around and sunk the ragged blade deep into the throat, spurting blood.

Well crap. This was another outfit she wouldn't be able to wear to the Bronze.

At this point, the giants, being much smarter than the orcs, started running away. Of the five that had been downed, four were dead, fifth being the one Gabriel had cut at the ankles. The female giant would not be moving anywhere and judging by the deep cut to her ankle would soon be dead for there was no escape. She looked at her killers with horror. How could such small creatures have injured her kin so? What would they do to her children? The squirming bundle on her back reminded of how they had only wanted to scare the orcs away. They hadn't meant to get killed. After the blast had killed most of their herds, the giants had chased everything away in an attempt to keep the food for themselves.

Perhaps it was good in the end. With the loss of the five of them, perhaps the clan could survive the loss of the herds. Less mouths to feed meant more of the remaining to go around.

The rage was lessening with every breath she took. All the rage was expended in the battle. To say she was winded was a rather dire understatement. She wanted to sleep for days.

Buffy used a club as a cane, keeping herself upright as she limped back to the hummer. She hadn't used all of her strength, but it was nearly so. One of the soldiers had been hit with an arrow. The black swords man with the white hair was clutching his leg as his panther growled at one of the soldiers. It looked like the soldier boy was trying to help, but the overly protecting cat didn't understand the situation. Buffy spotted the huge red haired man charge up the hill with his axe at the ready. He wasn't looking at an orc or a giant: he was looking directly at the injured man with the panther.

Buffy didn't have to think. The club flew out of her hand, spinning end over end, right into the back of the man's head. He fell to the ground out cold.

And Buffy suddenly realized she was much more tired than she thought.

Dove caught the blond madwoman just after the club connected with McGristle's head. She gave Dove a smile of thanks. Gabriel moved over to help carry the blond madwoman up to the carriage. Fret and Kellindil followed close behind. There was no doubt in her mind that the Drow was not like the majority of his people, the battle had made that clear. He had no reason to assist strangers, but he had.

As they got closer, the sandy haired human was trying to perform some first aid on the dark elf, but the panther refused to let him nearby. The Drow was clearly in great pain, but believed that the human was going to kill him. The human was truly concerned about the elf's health and was clearly confused why he was refusing treatment. It was almost as if the man had never heard of a Drow before.

"Drow, he is trying to heal you," Dove said in the common tongue. "He was going to cut the clothes away to look at the wound."

Drizzt was confused at how the people who had hunted him for so many weeks were not actually killing him. McGristle had tried, but the club was fortunate. If that axe had landed hands distance closer, he would have bled to death in seconds. As it was, the axe had landed directly between his legs, bouncing and scratching the side of the strange carriage.

It was about then that the reserves and Medical Corps arrived, too late for the fight, but just in time to save the day.

Back in Sunnydale they had heard every shout, every close call and the constant putt-putt-putt of the guns. They listened as the last clip was plugged into the rifle and shot off. Almost everyone in the room had been surprised to discover that Buffy, had indeed out ran the medical transport and military back up and arrived in time. Staying inside the hummer, Graham had narrated the entire battle, the blood still flowing around the arrow wound, but doing relatively well all things considered. When the people back home had heard "Civilians down" they were glad the Colonel had sent out more than just one medical truck. Just in case Team 3's hummer was damaged in the fight, he had also sent a flatbed truck with a tow cable. There weren't any replacements coming in from wherever now, and what he had was what he had.

The problem was Colonel Hennessey was a military man to the core. And he was not used to being at the top of the command line. He was supposed to have a CO to report to on a regular basis. He never wanted to go beyond his current position as commander of the Sunnydale Base, but forces had conspired against him to shove him into the position to top military commander in the area. There was supposed to be a chain of command and he was supposed to be in the middle. The situation was damn wrong, but there was not a thing he could do about it.

Everyone was amazed to discover humans lived on the world. Or at least they looked like humans. The cavemen were a surprise, but the mayor wanted to see a few, so asked them to bring back any live ones they could find. Giles slept soundlessly in his drug induced stupor and so had little input, although he would have wanted some information on what his slayer was fighting.

In the conference room Dr. Chung had met up with the medical transport ready for action and had her best emergency doctors and nurses on standby. Amelia Chung had done field surgery for three years when she was in Les Medicines Sans Frontiers just after medical school. Stationed in a war torn parts of southeast Asia and later in the Congo, she had learned some of the best techniques for this kind of wound. When she was in Papua New Guinea she had worked high in the mountains where primitive wounds were very common place. There were places in that region no outsider could go because of the constantly warring tribes, but she had lived for a year on the outskirts in a high elevation area and saw the kind of wounds primitive weapons could create. And people always forgot that primitive didn't mean not dangerous. Spears and arrows were weapons and could kill as easily as a gun or a knife. It didn't matter if the blades were made out of stone or sharpened wood, dangerous was dangerous. Unlike many conventional weapons, primitive weapons took special care and had different needs. She was sure that the army doctors would simply treat the wounds like any other, ignoring the additional problems of poisons, strange infections and foreign particles and other things that had just been forgotten by most of modern medicine. It wasn't that she didn't trust the military, but well, actually she didn't trust the military, but in this case she had expertise that fit.

She still didn't believe in magic or demons or witchcraft or vampires, but she knew that many cultures did have similar beliefs. It had been sometimes difficult to practice medicine in some areas because of this. To some modern medicine had been good magic, to others it had been bad magic. Regardless she was stuck in a town transported to another world where a large number of intelligent people believed in magic. That Mr. Giles, though he was still a patient and some of his ramblings could have been attributed to his medication, was a highly intelligent man with some interesting view points. He also seemed fluent in Latin, Greek and several other languages. She assumed it was due to his British upbringing. He was also a very attractive man.

But she tried to suppress the urges for someone she would have to work with. She had needed to do the same to plenty of people in the past when she was breaking through the glass ceiling to become the hospital administrator. It had been a long tough fight and she had given up many things she would have liked: friends, a husband, children, time off etc… It was still a man's world in many respects and for a woman in her late 30s to have attained so much, she had sacrificed what she needed to meet her goal. Now that she was at the top, perhaps she could change the problem. Although some of her subordinates would still say she was incompetent if she decided to have a child. Dr. Mack Gargen was a scorpion of a man who was just waiting to sting her.

She was broken out of her reverie by the driver calling out. They had arrived. The trucks ceased their bouncing over the uneven terrain and rolled to a stop. Jumping out of the truck she was amazed at how flat the top of the ridge had been. Wide enough for two trucks to drive side by side, it was almost begging for a road to be built on it. Unfortunately it was the perfect place for a battleground.

She was horrified by the mass of bloody bodies on the ground. The cavemen, or australopithecines she identified, were piled in a mass of bodies killed by bullets, swords, axes and sometimes just blunt force to the head. Shaking her head, she rushed over with the other doctors to assist the soldiers.

"Doctor! Graham has a shoulder wound from an arrow," the blond kid, Riley Finn reported when he spotted her. "We have several civilian casualties both from the cavemen and the giants. Two broken limbs, multiple arrow wounds, two head wounds and that's just what I saw from a brief inspection."

She could quickly tell it was worse than that. This was a massacre. No normal fighting group would press that hard and take those kind of casualties without breaking. Something was wrong here. She started barking orders like she had on battlefields 13 years ago.

"You and you, assist the strangers; you check after Buffy Summers; the rest of you, find survivors in the pile and treat them," she was at the top of her game. When the soldiers looked at her like she was crazy she put on her steeliest gaze that had helped her rise to the top. "Hippocratic Oath. We help anyone in need of medical treatment, period!"

"Yes Ma'am. What your orders," the two boys actually saluted her.

"Go get some stretchers and take care of the wounded," She said, smiling internally. They'd grow up to be good kids.

"Dr. Chung, there's another problem," the doctor turned to look at Buffy Summers sitting on a rock. The little blond girl should have been dead by the gross number of wounds on her body. She had three arrow in her shoulders, one dangerously close to an artery, friction burns on her hands as if she had shimmied down a rope at great speed; her face and all visible skin were covered in shallow cuts and bruises. She shouldn't even be able to sit up, much less talk with a normal tone. "That guy with the red hair and the nasty dog needs to be locked up. I knocked him out, but he's dangerous. Tried to kill the black guy after his leg was broken."

"Knocked him out?" It was difficult to believe, even after everything she had been told, that this little girl could knock anyone out.

"She threw a club at his head," Riley said as he carried a wounded caveman on a stretcher. "From twenty feet away."

It was still hard to believe. Chung moved to help the strangers with their wounds. The other group was clearly lead by the woman with the dark skin and white hair. It was a little unnatural a style, but it didn't appear that the woman had dyed it. Perhaps it was simply the local evolutionary mutation, like red hair in northern Europe. The woman understood the doctors were there to help, but she was clearly confused as to why Chung's people were caring for the cavemen. Chung could not have cared less. She was a doctor and she cared little about personal grievances. She motioned for the white haired woman to take off her top when a privacy screen had been put up. The woman had scars all over her back. Many were poorly healed. She could see where a scar here and a scar there had tightened the movement of the woman's shoulder. Chung washed and bandaged the new wounds and after a short while she was ready.

The Language barrier would be a problem until they could find a translator. The strangers spoke amongst themselves. It amused her to see them standing together. It was an odd sight with the medieval weapons and armor, but modern bandages and medical care. Chung attempted to invite them into the trucks, but it was difficult with only hand signals, but she thought they understood.

Buffy and company is owned by Joss W. and Mutant Enemy.
The Forgotten Realms and such are created and owned by Ed Greenwood and Wizards of the Coast and the various authors of the fiction.
Ranma 1/2 is owned by Rumiko Takahashi.

Thanks go to Janessa Ravenwood for editing this massive literary beast.