Claimer: Chichiro is mine, as well as the storyline, and any other original characters.

Disclaimer: Hiei, Kurama, Yusuke, Kuwabara, Koenma, Genkai, and any other YuYu Hakusho characters used are not mine. Kagura isn't either, though she's from Inuyasha.

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Chapter 14—The Semifinals

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She sensed it when she woke at the first stray streams of light across her bed. It was there when she changed from blood-stained clothes into a spare set she had folded beneath her bed, and it nagged at the back of her mind as she walked into the brisk of the early light of the morning toward the woods. Something was coming—a pivotal event in the future, likely in the near future, that would change everything.

Although she had no idea what was going to happen, she could think of little else as her bare feet led her through the dewy grass of the forest floor toward the clearing where she and Hiei sparred so often. They had no engagement to battle, certainly not so early and not so soon after she'd been injured, but she felt like heading in that direction anyhow. She found that she passed the location completely, though, and continued on the same way she had been walking for some time until the trees yawned and opened into another, larger clearing sporting a chunk of an old boulder that looked to have been destroyed recently. The demoness made way for it, sitting down on one of its smoother surfaces and allowing her eyes to close.

Her mind was running with scenarios, reasons for the sensation. Was something bad to happen in the second to last battle or the final round against Kagura? Was one of her team to die in this tournament? Was it even about the tournament?

She leaned forward, ignoring the burn of her abdomen and chest as the movement agitated her wounds, and she propped her chin on her raised hand.

While the time passed, so too did the immediate, paranoia-inducing effects of her foreboding feeling, and soon enough her thoughts were on the past rather than the possible future.

As memories flashed across her closed eyelids, the demoness considered that—truth be told—it had been many years since she had lingered on the deaths of her family this often. After all, two hundred years was a good amount of time to get over something, not that she had ever entirely recovered from the event. Recalling the way that the blood had spilled her parents' necks and dribbled from their dead lips still had the ability to make her cringe and occasionally even brought tears to her eyes, but anger normally overtook that and she did not remain sad for long.

When she considered this, she also realized that it had been a long time since she'd had a feeling like this—one of foresight, or possibly suggestion that she would have a clear vision. As with her healing abilities, she would not call it a gift or a 'power'; she had little control over it and it showed up when it decided she needed to know something important about the future. Sometimes it was just an irritating, nagging feeling that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end and made the fur on her tails bristle with unease, but sometimes it could be a flash of images in her mind both achingly clear and frustratingly brief in the same.

Thus far, she had only received that annoying feeling—the one tapping at the back of her mind telling her, Be ready. Be ready for the worst.This time, however, she had little doubt that a true vision was soon to follow, and she could only pray that she would have it in time to change whatever misfortune was to befall her this time.

Her eyes opened slowly, though they rested on nothing but the little pebbles about her feet that were strewn throughout the grass. Unconsciously, the hand that was propping up her chin uncurled so that her fingers were rested on her cheek, and her index finger began to scrape along her skin. Her claw drew blood as she dragged it down her face, though she did not flinch or even twitch as the short but deep cut began to bleed freely. She uttered a low sigh.

"What are you doing?"

She glanced at Hiei from the corner of her eyes as he spoke, then returned her blank gaze forward and focused on the ground once more. "What does it matter? Sitting, I guess."

"You're bleeding," Hiei noticed monotonously.

She lifted her head just off of her palm, then, her eyes wide but not alarmed as she watched him. "I'm what?" And then she seemed to feel the trickle of blood now dripping from her chin and the sides of her face, and she touched her fingers to the small stream of red and withdrew her fingertips to look at them closely. "…Huh. Would you look at that?" She felt her face and finally her fingers found the little gash from her own nail; her index ran up and down it once as she asked innocently, "How'd that get there…?"

As Hiei watched, he recognized in the way she spoke that she truly could not remember doing it. "Will you be healed before the next round?" he asked, though of course he meant her wound from the last fight and not the little gash on her face.

"Kurama said I didn't have to fight," she told him, appearing surprised he had brought it up. "I don't think it matters."

"That's not what I asked," the Jaganshi growled flatly.

She blinked at him a moment before she said, "Well, no, I don't think I'll be healed by then. I'll probably be healed enough to fight, with the help of Kurama's plants'n such, though."

"Hn."

"Why do you care, anyhow? Like I said, Kurama told me—"

"And the final round?" Hiei interrupted. "Obviously I will be one of the fighters for that. Are you planning to be the second?"

She lifted her eyes to the treetops as she considered. "I don't know," Chichiro mumbled finally. "I hadn't thought too much about it yet, I guess." She had, though, and the only reason that she was not leaping at the opportunity like she would have even the previous day was because of the battle with Waikiki. If she could not handle a demoness that Kagura had thought their team would be able to take care of easily like the rest of the opponents of this tournament, Chichiro had figured, why should she assume that she would be able to handle Kagura?

Silence descended on the clearing for a long moment. The early morning wind, still so cold, rustled the trees and kicked up the piles of fallen leaves that signaled that fall had begun.

"You're distracted." Hiei's voice had come from behind Chichiro. True enough, she had been, for when she focused on him, she noticed a flash of light from the corner of her eye and realized Hiei's sword was at the side of her neck, not a centimeter away from her flesh. "Even injured, you should have seen this coming—and you also would have said you had planned on fighting Kagura without having to even consider."

"I'm a little shaken from the fight yesterday," the fox demoness admitted, unafraid of the katana at her throat because she knew it was for demonstration only. She didn't move or try to move it.

"There's something more," Hiei growled instantly, and after a brief pause he withdrew his weapon.

"I…" She wasn't entirely sure how to word it; after all, she rarely spoke of this sort of thing to another being, and even now she wasn't sure what drove her to explain it to him of all people. She stubbornly decided to settle on that Hiei could likely figure it out for himself later with his jagan if he truly felt like it. "I sense something, that's all. Something big is about to happen."

"Hn." The way she spoke, she reminded him of Kuwabara and his 'feelings', and so he remarked, "You sound like the fool that I used to have to deal with."

She grinned backward at him. "So sorry to have made you get stuck with another, then."

He mirrored her smirk. "I think I'll manage."

Chichiro found that she started at that; somehow, it was unexpected that his return comment would be so close to a jest and not angry or sarcastic like she was used to.

The faint sound of the loud speaker announcing the next round saved her from trying to find a reply.

When her large, furry ears twitched and swiveled back without her knowledge of their movement, Hiei gathered that she had heard something impossible for most ears—such as his own—to pick up. "What is it?"

"Already…?" she mumbled to herself, confused. I thought Kurama said we had longer… "Good thing I'm not fighting," she told Hiei in response to his question with a small grin. "The next round is apparently starting now."

She couldn't tell if it was annoyance or anticipation that entered Hiei's face—he was a rather difficult person to read, that much she'd learned quite easily. When he turned from her toward the direction of the arena, she thought he'd disappear from her view as usual without word, but when she did not move to follow he growled without looking to her, "Are you coming?"

She tried to halt the smile that spread across her face but found she was unsuccessful in the attempt; thus, she was glad that he had not glanced back at her after he'd posed his question. "Yeah, I'm just going to go slower'n you. Not like I need to be there for the fight anyhow."

"Hn." And then he was gone, with little trace he'd ever even been standing before her.

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Chichiro almost launched into a coughing fit when she set foot on the floor of the arena, just outside the ring where spectators from the battling team were permitted to watch the matches. An enormous dust cloud had been kicked up by something, and for a moment she thought it had been an attack that had caused the cloaking cloud, but a second glance told her that the tunnel of wind was the attack. She figure easily enough that the attack was from the other team, seeing as how neither Hiei nor Kurama had powers over sand or wind, to her knowledge. She kept her eyes on the ring as she walked over to join Koenma.

The battle had started out routine enough. Hiei and Kurama were facing off against two rather feminine-looking male demons with a wild appearance named Assize and Lasiazze that had not used any weapons for the first few minutes, relying only on their fists and legs for assaults.

Then, from nowhere it seemed, Assize had summoned up a thick cloud of sand from the dirt around the ring. The exaggerated movements of his arms—large swishing actions while his torso seemed to come close to rotating along with the circular motions—appeared to control the tornado of dust. Though in many ways it was an impressive maneuver, the ones it had been intended to kill—Chichiro's team—were far too fast to come anywhere near it. Assize's own movements were just too slow and soon enough, after he had figured this out himself, he had expanded the dust cloud to engulf the entirety of the ring.

Chichiro had entered right at that point, and now as she stood beside the prince of the spirit world, she asked quietly, "What's goin' on?"

"Well," he began to fill her in, "the guy Kurama and Hiei are fighting apparently thinks a whole bunch of dirt is somehow gonna take care of our team."

"Ridiculous," Chichiro muttered to herself, but when she attempted to penetrate the cloud with her eyes, she found she could not even see movement within it. It's not that thick, she considered. I should at least be able to see one of the people fighting…

In the center of the encased ring, Kurama shielded his eyes from the sting of the sand, ignoring as best he could the raw feeling of his bare hands and face; too much more of this and the skin on them could be scraped off entirely, and he did not much fancy the idea.

As a small pocket of lighter air with little dust whipped around him, he pulled his arm away from his eyes long enough to try and spot Hiei. Annoyingly enough, though, he could not seem to find Hiei or his opponents in the thick fog of pale dirt. If he could take out Assize, then they would only have Lasiazze to deal with, and hopefully he did not also possess the ability to control sand or wind.

He sensed something behind him suddenly, and crouched low to push off the floor of the arena. As he leapt to the side, he caught sight of Assize for the briefest of seconds before the dust cloud engulfed him again, and the fox recognized that he had narrowly avoided being killed by the weapon he'd spotted in his opponent's hand. So this cloud isn't meant to harm us after all, he thought as he covered his eyes once more. It's only a way to keep up blinded while they try to kill us with their own hands. And as he relied only on his senses to monitor whether or not the opponents he was focused on were nearing or not, he tried not to recall Chichiro's advice that his sensing reflexes 'could use a bit of a check-up.'

Across the ring a ways, Hiei stood rather nonchalantly with his arms crossed, eyes closed against the sand. At the faint thrum of a bow string, he leaned off to one side and leapt upward, unfolding his arms as he opened his eyes and tried to make out Lasiazze in the fog of dust. All he spotted, though, was the arrow that had thumped into the stone ring where he had stood before. Irritation steadily began to creep into his senses.

Withdrawing his sword from its sheath, he stabbed it into the ground quite unceremoniously and then waited for his opponent's move.

As Kurama waited, he gathered a seed from his mane of hair and pinched it between his fingers. Having figured out easily enough that Assize was somewhat of a coward and also fairly inexperienced, he knew the other demon would attack from behind a second time in a row and he was ready for it when his opponent did indeed leap for him from behind. With a flick of his fingers, his death seed was sewn into the other's body and began to take root even as he dodged Assize's attack. The battle would end soon.

Hiei's was not to last much longer either. His own opponent had decided on more close-range attacks, and every once and a while he'd duck out of the fog and swipe a dagger at Hiei, with little effect, before he would disappear back into the dust. The fire demon was easily able to evade it, and he waited for the perfect moment to exact his plan.

At Lasiazze's next attack, he leapt up into the air—a perfect target for a bow and arrow. Lasiazze lined up the shot and released the arrow slightly ahead of Hiei's descending form, but when he was only feet from the ground and in the place Lasiazze had shot the arrow for, he somehow sprang up again out of the way of it. As though he had kicked off of something invisible, he was suddenly heading straight for Lasiazze with his arm raised. The fire demon's fist slammed into the other's face, and his opponent was sent careening backward.

While the fog of dust began to dissipate, Lasiazze watched Hiei approach with wide eyes. "But…how did you…?!"

Somehow, the spluttering questions of his adversaries never got old for Hiei. "Did you not notice my sword, incompetent?" he muttered back with distaste.

He allowed Lasiazze a moment to recall when he had stabbed the sword into the ground—a perfect kick-off point to avoid an airborne attack. "But then you must have—!"

"—Known exactly when and how you would attack," Hiei finished for his opponent, rolling his eyes. "Stay down. You're not good enough for this tournament."

Lasiazze obeyed, and when the dust cleared enough to reveal Assize—mangled by the death plant—the loud speaker announced the end of the round and Hiei and Kurama's win.

"I never thought I'd see the day when you spared an enemy," Kurama commented with a smile as they were walking back.

"And when you didn't," Hiei added on with a shrug. He didn't really know why he had done it, but it certainly had not been sympathy or pity. "He wasn't worth it," he told Kurama flatly, without interest.

"No, he wasn't," the fox agreed calmly.

At the edge of the ring, Chichiro (covered with dust) eyed the bow still in Lasiazze's grasp, glaring at the quiver of arrows on the demon's back. "A bow?" she growled indignantly. "That doesn't seem fair. Long-range weapons shouldn't be allowed."

"Long-range such as whips and fireballs?" Koenma brought up dryly, though the fox demoness he spoke to hardly seemed to realize he had said anything at all.

"Congratulations!" she called to Hiei and Kurama as they neared, a large grin on her face.

"Yes," Kurama said as he headed for her, returning the smile as usual, "we have made it to the final round. Whenever she decides it will commence, we will face Kagura."

Suddenly, Chichiro knew whatever her foresight involved that it would take place during the battle against the wind demoness mastermind of the tournament, and instantly she had no desire whatsoever to fight in that final round. Only Hiei noticed Chichiro's face fall before she managed to cover it with one of her usual, cheery smirks.