DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing characters are properties of the people who made them up. Mitsuki, and several other characters are mine, and so's the story, hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at my usual email address if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatever purposes. As per usual, I'm having formatting ripped out on upload, and now having line breaks introduced for no apparent reason. I apologise in advance for any formatting errors you may meet.
Justice
By
Raymond Cooper
Pretty Fist Of Fury
"SAILOR CERES FIST OF DOOOOOOM!"
An explosive wave erupted from Sailor Ceres' hand, propagating outwards rapidly towards the Menos and Zazie. The wave hit several Menos a moment before Asuna had a spot of inspiration, raised her hands and yelled, "HADOKEN!"
Konoka clapped politely from far behind, where she was helping Ku move Sakurako away from the growing fight. "That was only three seconds too late, Asuna."
"Shut up," Asuna growled back.
"You should all fear my demon right hand," Ceres continued, trying to talk the other Menos out of pressing their attack, but they moved ever closer. She held it up again. "It's a very powerful right hand! I wouldn't wanna mess with it!"
The Menos pressed closer, so Ceres let off another Fist of Dooooooom attack. Again, Asuna swore she heard a small voice squeak, "Death reborn revolution!" at the same time. She brought her hands up in the same instant and yelled, "Hadoken!" again. The wave expanded outwards again, ripping through trees and another two of the cloaked giants.
"What are these things?" Ceres yelled back at Setsuna and Chachamaru, who had recognised them moments earlier.
"A collection of spirits, bound tightly around a dominant core. Extremely powerful in their normal state. But these... seem to be midget Menos."
"Midget?" Ceres threw back to Setsuna.
"Mmm," Setsuna cut off with a quick nod. "They're generally much, much bigger. And they can't be reasoned with. They're not intelligent as you would recognise them."
"Oh, so we're all right, then." Ceres turned back to the advancing horde, now thinned out by Sailor Ceres' attacks. There were still a dozen to contend with, and Ceres could hear Hotaru panting from beneath the bandages covering her up. So, a third Fist of Doom attack was out of the question, at least for now. Hotaru seemed to sense her indecision in her hesitation, and gave a perky if breathless, "I can still do this!"
Ceres cradled her bandaged right hand with her left. "Nah, not yet. I've got other tricks up my sleeve." She raised her voice and directed it at Zazie again. "Now, you've seen what my right hand can do. But that's nothing compared to what I can do with my left."
There was no response from Zazie to that pronouncement, but Asuna felt it demanded one from somewhere. "Why? What can you do with your left?"
Ceres gave a cheeky grin back at Asuna, thankful someone asked. "I can hit stuff!" Then, with a flounce of her skirt, she skipped into combat range of the Menos, picked one, and delivered a punch with all her power behind it. The force of the punch first rippled the Menos, then shattered it into fragments, each hissing and then disappearing from this world as they were pulled back to the plane they had come from. Another one lunged at her, skeletal arms emerging from its cloak, but she slipped through the grasping fingers with a tight pirouette, dropped low, then rolled back onto her shoulders before pushing off with her hands and delivering a double-spring kick to the Menos' midsection that punched clear through. For a moment, Ceres could see the trees on the other side of the spirit creature before it exploded. A third Menos went down to a surprisingly low-skilled uppercut that knocked the beast's white mask clean off.
By this time, Chachamaru and Setsuna were moving into combat range of a Menos they'd each picked out for themselves, and Asuna, in the background, held her hands out ready and yelled, "Adeat!" before also charging into combat, swinging her harisen left and right.
In almost no time, the Menos were no more.
"Give it up now, in the name of truth and love," Sailor Ceres said, striking a pose and pointing at Zazie, who by now had stopped her advance to watch the raging combat. "By all that is good in the world, you cannot be allowed to strike fear into the hearts of those trusted people you call friends. Give it up now!" Ceres considered throwing a "Vile villain!" into the works there, but it had been a while since she'd had to pose like this and thought that was too much more a parody than she was intending. The idea was to get the schoolkid to give up before she got hurt, but Zazie's next actions ruled out any chance of that.
She reached behind her head, and dropped a bone mask down over her face.
"Wow, what's going on there?" Big Man asked back at the school.
Negi looked up from where he was quietly whittling, and saw something on the nearest screens that gave him a chill: Zazie was preparing to fight Asuna, Setsuna and Chachamaru. "No!"
Big Man glanced over, in an uninterested manner. "Is the teacher still here?" he asked, plaintively. "Shouldn't someone have shipped the brat home by now, or pushed him out the door?"
One of the production assistants gave a muttered reply that Negi didn't catch, but Big Man obviously did. "Hmm, you're right. That would be a great last episode. Could the student kill the teacher? Yeah. I like it. But now," he said, turning back to the screens while Negi's chills multiplied at the merest mention of having to fight his students, "what is going on here? Where did that girl get a harisen? And that one – how did she get a sword?"
"It was in one of the schoolbags, and we were running low on weapons to stock the packs," someone called from the editing booth.
"Riiight," Big Man sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb. "And where did that one get exploding rocket fists, and the other one the white mask?"
"Don't know," came the voice from the editing booth again.
"It's a class of monsterssss," Nitta mumbled from his bed, away from Negi's. "Evil, evil monsters. Magic! Demons! Robots! Ninjas. At least the most evil turned her homework in on time."
"Evangeline's not that bad!" Negi countered without thinking.
"I'm talking about Chizuru!" Nitta replied. "Her ideas for fruits and vegetables belong in the dark ages."
Negi fell silent again, trying to watch the battle as it unfolded. He watched in close-up as Zazie dropped the white mask across her face, and then something happened... an energy wave exploded outwards from her, a wave of black that blew outwards, then dropped down, the darkness growing as if some kind of cloak had erupted from her back. From this cloak of darker night, almost like a magic trick, she pulled a scabbard.
"Is that a katana? Isn't there only one of each weapon on the island? This is crap!" Big Man growled towards the editing booth. The voice inside sighed, but didn't answer immediately. "I asked for one of each weapon.
"There is only one of each weapon on the island. That we put there. Maybe they found some others?"
"I have it on good authority that this island is pristine."
"It was a school! Schools are full of weapons."
"American schools, maybe. Not Japanese schools."
Another sigh from the booth. "Maybe not. But you have to admit, it's a possibility."
"Yeah," Big Man allowed, eventually. He returned to the screen, where Zazie unsheathed the sword. Strangely, it had a black blade, with a metallic white cutting edge. She swung it in circles around her, making the moves of impressive skill look like a circus performance. She was trying to intimidate the others, Negi realised. She must have thought there was a threat before her.
A quick reverse shot of the group showed that of the three girls facing her, only Chachamaru didn't betray immediate fear. Something was going on, and Negi realised the girls' hair was being blown around... directly away from Zazie. She was still pumping out energy, black tendrils snaking around her like a demonic halo.
Then, she stepped forward again.
The rear lounge wall exploded beside the bookcase, sending a small shower of debris and dust billowing into the Ai Sou's lounge. Ami coughed, waving her hands in front of her as she got up from where she had been watching the television moments before, and ran to the metre-high hole to see what had caused it. Some part of her brain registered the wall as the one that backed onto Hotaru's room, but Hotaru wasn't strong enough to blow a hole in the wall like had just happened.
And to be honest, Ami had to admit blowing holes in walls wasn't exactly Saturn's style, either. There would have been no wall left, nor much of the room behind it, had it been Sailor Saturn that had done this. So who?
Quietly, up the hall, Hotaru's door slid open, and Hotaru stepped out. She looked strangely calm and composed, not the shy-but-occasionally-excitable girl Ami was used to seeing. She was much more reserved, and held herself differently.
With only a slight mental switch in how she saw the younger girl, Ami saw Saturn's fuku imprinted across Hotaru's body, and realised it was Saturn's eternal composure she was seeing, the cold sentinel of the solar system. Hotaru/Saturn walked past Ami, through the lounge to nearly the front door. Tiny tap-taps in the hall made Ami glance behind, to see Shinku arrive from upstairs, a concerned look on her face. Hotaru didn't pause until she stopped near a piece of rubble, reached down and picked something out of it. She held it up.
It wore a pink dress.
Hotaru tossed it back across the room with as much thought and concern as something throwing some clothes into a laundry hamper. "I am not one for games," she said, eyeing Shinku seriously. "I will not allow such... antics."
"She was – is," Shinku corrected herself, "very childish. But she is only a child. Poor Hina Ichigo. Is she still alive, I wonder?"
"Her life force hasn't yet passed back to its source," Hotaru said, her voice not changing in tone from her cold sentence before. Ami realised she was very, very angry.
"I shall make sure she sees the error of her ways," Shinku replied primly, before gathering the shattered doll in her arms and giving Hotaru a last glare before retreating at a dignified pace upstairs.
"Was that necessary?" Ami asked Hotaru, trying to see some aspect of her friend inside the body in front of her. "I'm sure she meant –"
"None of you have seen what is going on here," Hotaru replied, dismissively. "It is therefore not my concern." She headed back towards her room, but stopped at the hole in the wall. Her gaze was as emotionless as before, as she eyed the hole, and then the bookcase next to it. After a moment's consideration, she stepped to the other side of the bookcase, and with a single hand pushed it across the floor to fully cover the gaping maw to Hotaru's bedroom.
After Hotaru had returned to her room and closed the door, Ami quietly crossed the floor to the bookcase, and rested a hand on it before trying to shove it.
The bookcase wouldn't move in the slightest for her.
Behind her, Cologne watched with slitted eyes from the dining table.
"How has your stay been so far?" Makoto asked as she fell into step beside Setsuna, as the former senshi walked towards the cafeteria. The question was asked with a bit of a wry grin, Setsuna noticed, so she returned with a slight smile.
"It has been... different. It is unusual to see Mars like... this." She gestured to the walls of the UAC base.
"How is it in your timeline? Where Crystal Tokyo was beautiful and brilliant?"
Setsuna ignored the slight touch of sarcasm in the words, instead allowing her mind to roll back to before Yoshihiro's ship had crashed into the Time Gate and broke the only protection time had against abuse. "Green, mostly. Oh, there's the northern ocean, and another engineered ocean in the equatorial latitudes, but it's mostly green. A blue sky now, too. Living space for humanity and other races to expand peacefully."
"What about Earth?"
"Don't you remember it?"
"It was a long time ago I was there. And really, we only saw anything of Crystal Tokyo. We didn't get out much, if you recall."
"It was... outside the city, it was beautiful in areas. But it was a slow process trying to reclaim everything. Mars was surprisingly easier, since it was ruined and uninhabited and could just be remade, but Earth... Earth was still populated, and living, and the planet itself rebelled against any more changes. Progress was being made, though. Great progress. The planet was growing again. While the land was still brown from space, the oceans and rivers were again a bright dazzling blue. It was a long process, but it was gaining speed all the time. And it was... peaceful. Neo Queen Serenity provided for all who needed, those who didn't worked for those who couldn't. A time of peace and growing prosperity for all." Setsuna allowed herself a small, contented sigh as she thought back, a smile touching her lips again. "I miss it greatly. The work, the effort, the people. The people were what made it all worth it. Having been through hell before the formation of Crystal Tokyo, but helping rebuild the planet into a beautiful place. You would never again see anything like it."
"Evidence that people can be better than they often are?"
"Yes. In a time of great need, where everyone reveals the goodness in their hearts."
"With the senshi at the top of the ladder?"
"With a leading body of senshi, yes."
"Is that the right choice?"
"I don't understand," Setsuna said, confused. "I thought the point of all this effort being expended was to get me home, to make things as they were."
Makoto continued as if Setsuna hadn't spoken. "Because, it seems weird to me, that when we were in the future, we didn't really see that. We saw a cold sterile paradise, and only senshi. Ranma, many, many years ago, told Hotaru the future he could see was one of us lording it over our fellow humans. Crystal Tokyo only being for the special people, the beautiful people, rather than the people who needed out help most. What you're describing sounds awfully like that."
"The future was hard, yes," Setsuna interrupted, "but that's because the Earth was nearly destroyed. It needed healing. The best way to rehabilitate a people and a planet is to make them do it together."
"Serenity could have done it easily. Usagi – my Usagi – did it, twice. Three times if you count what she did at the moment of her death. And that's it. None of this 'but it was populated' crap, because she would still have been able to reform the planet."
"People don't always want help being handed to them. They don't like the thought of charity, and often feel they are beholden to the person who helped them. This then means they become not free, but enslaved by a different kind of rule. Like your Usagi would have been had the world rolled over. She gave the human race what it – what she – wanted. What did it bring?" Setsuna raised her voice little. "A lot of deaths. A lot of people falling from the sky in unpowered planes, a lot of people in hospital dying simply because their life support machinery switched off. Why would they hate being helped like that?"
"It wasn't what she did, it was how she did it," Makoto countered quickly. "No one's denying that Usagi's heart was in the right place, just that her head wasn't tempered by experience."
"And that experience showed her that sometimes people have to do things for themselves."
The two women reached the cafeteria door, and paused. "I hope your belief is right," Makoto said, quietly before opening the door. "But, still, I will be sending someone back with you."
"Why?"
"Because, frankly, we don't know if sending you back makes things like they are, or if they make things like they were. We hope the latter, of course, but fear the former may still be the case. So we'll be sending someone back who's studied the history of that time, read all the diaries left behind after the war, and most of all, someone who doesn't already exist back in that time."
"You don't trust me," Setsuna sounded a little bitter, and Makoto couldn't help but feel sorry.
"It's not that, Setsuna, and you know it. It's that as the histories say, you disappeared before Usagi made her choice. We don't exactly know what was going through your mind, but you dropped out of sight before Usagi turned Tokyo into Crystal Tokyo."
"I wonder why?"
"I wonder, indeed?" Makoto echoed, almost as wonderingly as Setsuna. She knew, but she wouldn't tell for the moment.
Inside the cafeteria, Chao sat with Sailors Dione and Charon, the two senshi's backs to the door. Chao caught sight of them, and quietened the two girls before standing and gesturing to the two elder senshi. "Would you like...?" Makoto asked, waving at the table. Charon half-turned, caught sight of Setsuna, then turned back, the set of her shoulders hardening.
"Yes," Setsuna replied, grabbing some food from the benches at the front of the room, then making her way back with Makoto to the other table. She sat next to Chao, across the table from Dione. Makoto sat on Chao's other side, with Charon sitting opposite the Meltrandi. "We all meet again."
"Yes," Charon answered immediately, her single word snapping across the table. Setsuna was taken aback a little by the harshness of the answer.
"How was everything after we left?"
"About as you'd expect," Dione answered, a little more diplomatically. "We managed to dig another fifty metres before it got too cold even for the Meltrandi to continue."
"I don't know why you don't have machinery doing the digging," Setsuna wondered aloud. "I mean, the Meltrandi are great with this kind of thing, but machinery can work all day and night without slowing or having to stop for temperature."
"It not that," Chao replied. "It more... hmm. It more that we are under intense scrutiny from Earth at most times. They know there is a Zentraedi colony here, so they keep a close eye on the surface. Are we going to return to our warlike ways. It's the same reason the senshi can't power up and blast the gate out."
"How long would it take Earth authorities to get forces here?"
Makoto fielded the question. "With the time for the landing ships to touch down, load up Evangelions and Gundams, head back to orbit and fold here would be maybe six hours. The fold displacement to Mars would be the shortest time. Over ninety-five percent of that would be landing, loading and launching the transports."
"Valkyries of whatever designation could be here in a matter of minutes, after the attachment of a fold pack," Chao added helpfully.
"Could you hold them off?" Setsuna wondered aloud again.
"Maybe for a time," Makoto replied after considering. "I won't lie and say it's not something we've ever thought about or drilled for. It's just the level of force Earth could level against us is tremendous and most of it is developed as anti-senshi weapons."
"Under a concerted attack, once the transports arrive," Charon spoke up, "we would last approximately two and a half hours. At most, on a good day with everything going right for us and wrong for them."
"You managed to fight for a year in the war before being overrun by Evangelions."
Charon snorted. "Except, most of us were younger and less capable of containing or controlling our power. As well, although more experienced now, most of us haven't fought as a senshi in decades, if not centuries. In Makoto's case, a millennium. And we wouldn't be fighting the dozen or so Evangelions that attacked us in the war. No, we'd be facing well over a hundred."
"You fought that Evangelion on Earth easily enough," Setsuna continued, turning to Chao, who looked embarrassed as she got an evil glare from Makoto.
"You're in trouble," Sayo chimed as she drifted behind Chao.
"I was covered in magical runes, protecting me from a lot of damage," Chao replied, blushing with a wide but nervous smile on her face. "And I train, constantly, to fight Evangelions. Most of the Zentraedi here don't train as hard, or at all. They're mostly here because of the subtle prejudice on Earth against my people. And, most of all, I was facing off against one Evangelion unit. The others weren't there yet. We would be inundated with Evangelions, loaded for senshi. One on one? No problem. One on a dozen? Not so good odds for the poor Meltrandi girl caught in the middle."
"I think you sell yourself short," Setsuna replied, "but I guess I can see your point. The question is, at some point this week, we are going to have to fire up that ancillary Time Gate and it could take time to power up. If that triggers something on Earth, we may need to hold out for some time. Can it be done?"
Charon shot a glance at Makoto, before lowering her eyes and answering fiercely. "It would be done." The younger senshi stood suddenly, scraping her chair away from the table, and returning her plates to a provided tray before leaving.
Dione's eyes followed her, then she too stood, and bowed at Setsuna. "Always an honour." She followed Charon out the door dutifully as a friend.
Setsuna eyed her meal with less enthusiasm than she was considering it before. She stabbed at it with her fork, trying to rekindle some kind of interest in the possible taste of the food, but with little luck. She gave a dejected sigh.
"This will happen, relax," Makoto said. "Besides, I joined you coming down here to introduce you to your partner who will be going back with you."
"Who's that?" Chao asked, before she realised both Makoto and Setsuna were staring at her. "Oh."
The waves of dark energy washing off Zazie were intense. Sailor Ceres hadn't felt anything like it before, not even from the Dark Kingdom monsters she had fought and lived with. Even Umiko, worst of the Master's current crop of allies, didn't feel this bad to be around.
It was power, raw power washing off her. Spiritual pressure that battered at Ceres' core and clothing. Zazie's blade seemed to hum, and to Ceres, it seemed as if the bone mask covering Zazie's face also hummed in concert with it.
Beside her, she felt Asuna tense, ready to launch herself at the other girl, but even as Ceres reached out an arm to catch Asuna as she passed by, Asuna was moving, her harisen shifting form unbidden into that of a mighty sword. She swung it at Zazie, an in articulate roar erupting from her mouth, but Zazie swatted her away.
"Is this another form of Menos?" Ceres asked Chachamaru and Setsuna, both behind him feeling very worried.
"No," Setsuna replied through gritted teeth as she watched Asuna flung into a tree that snapped and splintered where Asuna hit it.
"It is unlikely Zazie is a standard Shinigami, with Menos companions. It is more likely she is some kind of mix of Shinigami and Hollow, but which element was her starting point – be it a Shinigami transformed into a half-Hollow creature, or a Hollow given Shinigami powers - I cannot say."
"Thanks, robot girl," Ceres replied, as Zazie left forward at speeds Ceres hadn't seen in a long time.
It was almost as if the circus girl had simply appeared closer to her, but Ceres knew that it was more likely the girl was pulling some kind of full-body version of a kachu tenshin amaguriken move, using either training or sheer power to move faster than the human eye could match. As the girl's blade hissed through the air, Ceres bent backwards at the hips to allow the katana to pass through where she had been standing, and once the sword had passed by, she planted her hands on the ground behind her, and flipped over backwards to a standing position while hoping to catch Zazie in a double kick as her legs passed by.
However, Zazie had moved already, and was behind Ceres. Obviously, she'd targeted Ceres as the major threat in the present group, and was targeting her first. She stabbed out with the point of her blade, hoping to catch Ceres in the small of her back, but Ceres' right hand moved of its own accord grabbed her own midsection and hauled herself out of the way.
"Watch out!" Asuna heard the small squeaky voice say again from Ceres' right hand.
Ceres spun immediately, her left hand up and held side on at Zazie's throat level, but again the circus girl shimmered and was behind Ceres again, already spinning to bring her sword in close enough to strike. Ceres jumped, flipping over the blade, but Zazie changed direction in mid-slice, and brought it upwards. Bouncing off her own subconsciously-wrought frame of reference, Ceres managed to dodge most of the unexpected attack, but still caught a nick as the sword passed through the left side of her midsection.
It was a thin cut, and barely enough to make Ceres hiss in sudden unexpected pain, but no more damage was done. Zazie quickstepped back, allowing Ceres a few seconds for realisation to seep in. It didn't take long. Ceres dropped her eyes from her opponent to the shallow gash in her side, which she could see bleeding through the tear in her fuku. "What?" she asked, stupidly. "I thought we were invulnerable like this?"
"Like what?" Setsuna asked from behind. Ceres ignored her, staring at the blood welling up and staining the white fuku.
"I have no data," Chachamaru replied. "Chao did not give me data on this combatant."
"We can be hurt," Hotaru stage-whispered to Sailor Ceres. "It's just very difficult to do. You should know that! Our fights in the System, and against some of the other monsters."
"Oh yeah," Ceres replied, hand scratching the back of her head in embarrassment "I keep thinking I'm like normal, but I'm not." She pressed her torso. "I'm a lot more vulnerable like this."
"Then why don't you power up again?" Hotaru asked. "I'm sure you could take someone of this power level easily. Don't forget, you fought Sailor Saturn unpowered, and that was –"
"That was different," Ceres sighed, checking the now-closing wound. "You didn't really want to hurt me, you were wanting to hurt yourself but couldn't do it directly. And what did I do? Really? I stayed out of your way, mostly. Even powered right up, I might have trouble with this girl. That robot girl back there," Ceres thumbed her left hand at Chachamaru behind them, "said her friends were spirit creatures, right? So she's gotta be some kind of spirit creature herself. A monster from beyond the grave. I don't know if I can kill something that's already dead."
"You shouldn't be wanting to kill anything!" came Hotaru's shocked response.
"Bad choice of words. But the point remains, how do you beat something that's already dead?"
"If it is a Shinigami," Chachamaru offered from behind, "attacking their chest to sever her chain of fate would either remove her from this plane of reality permanently and send her to the next cycle, or effectively turn her into a Hollow, allowing you to do the same by slicing her mask in two."
Before Ceres or Chachamaru could react, Zazie flickered, then appeared next to the gynoid, bringing her katana down on Chachamaru's throat. Chachamaru wasn't quite able to get her full forearm up in time to deflect the attack, but in the event, it wouldn't have made much difference. The blade sliced through the protective arm as if it wasn't there, but it slid off in a direction Zazie hadn't expected and buried itself halfway through Chachamaru's chest rather than decapitating her.
Chachamaru looked down, an expression of surprise on her face, as Zazie withdrew her blade and gave her first expression in the fight – a very smug sneer half-hidden by the bone mask on her face. The gynoid toppled over a moment after Zazie moved away again at speed, Asuna and Setsuna rushing to her aid.
Zazie flicked back above Ceres, dropping her blade at still super-fast speeds, but Ceres threw herself forward into a dodge, rolled onto her back and lifted her hands before her held together in the shape of a gun. Without speaking, she yelled, "World Breaking!" and a dusty-grey energy ball erupted from her fingertips, blasting through where Zazie had been a scant instant before. "Hey... I didn't know I could do that," Ceres said, looking at her still-pointing fingers. "That's kind of cool." Her right hand moved, and Hotaru coughed.
"Can we not do that again anytime soon?" she asked.
"Sorry, Hotaru-chan," Ceres said, flipping to her feet again. "I can't risk powering up, to answer your question before. If I do, I run the risk of being found, and we don't want to be found right now. She'd be... very angry. I don't know what she'd do."
"Oh. Sailor Ceres! Look out!"
Without looking, Ceres moved to the left as fast as she could, Zazie's blade whistling down her right side and skill managing to scrape some skin and material off her forearm as it went. Thankfully, Ceres reflected, Hotaru was able to move and was uninjured. She was used to fighting as one person, not one person with a midget attached to her wrist, and remembering Hotaru was there was throwing her off. She should have heard that, should have see that, felt it coming. But Ceres was having to deal with something interrupting the flow of her lifeforce in part of her body, and it was very distracting.
Zazie flashed again, appearing further away, looking for an opening. Ceres was very good at dodging, it seemed. Most of her strikes had been intended to be one-shot kills, but obviously Ceres had been able to successfully dodge them all, to varying degrees of success.
Ceres, for her part, was thinking rapidly. "Hotaru, if I step up the pace, can you keep up?"
"What do you mean?"
"I can match her speed, but moving faster than the eye can see, it puts a great strain on your body. I can handle it, but I need to know if you can. I know you're –" Ceres fell silent.
"Weak?" Hotaru asked, before giving a snort. "You can say it, I was a sickly child. Having both Saturn and Mistress 9 in me, and nearly dying as a young child, then being regressed to a baby and back again... there's also a death and rebirth in there, too. I may be weak, but I'll survive."
"My little cockroach," Ceres said with a tender smile directed at her bandaged right hand.
"I thought that was your right hand of doom?" Asuna asked helpfully.
"Idiot, shut up! If talking to her hand makes her feel better and more confident –"
"But what about when her hand talks back?"
Ceres ignored them, and cradled her right hand gently. "If you're sure you can handle this, I'm going to go all out at this level. I won't lie; it's gonna be hard and tiring and I need ya to be firing at all times. That 'death ribbon revolution' thing –"
"Death reborn revolution," Hotaru said, then swore as a blast of energy erupted from her and nearly fried Ceres' head.
"GAH! No doin' that without warning!" Ceres calmed again. "But what I'm tryin' ta say is, it's gonna be hard. Harder on you, because of your... current situation."
"It's okay, Sailor Ceres, go ahead. Use me!"
"Right." Ceres turned to Zazie, who was levelling her blade for another attack. "Let's try this again. This time, it's all-out. We go until one drops. No cheating, no quarter given. We go at it, and we go at it with everythin' we got, right?"
Zazie gave a brief nod, the silence only broken by the near-inaudible screech of a bat. She lowered the point of her katana to face Sailor Ceres directly, pushed a foot backwards in the dirt, creating a small groove to push off from when the time came. She was the perfect embodiment of stillness once she was ready.
Ceres stood ready and loose, shaking her arms and legs one by one, letting the tension go. While she did that, she spoke over her shoulder without taking her eyes off Zazie. "You three. Once I got her fighting, you go. Find somewhere defensible. Somewhere ta hide and be ready ta fight if it comes to it. If I fall, there will be no one else from outside. You'll have ta do this on your own. Stand together, get those collars off, then storm the school. There's enough of ya with fightin' skills to be able to do it. I'm sure ya got mad scientists an' stuff, what with this robot and creepy ninja girl trailing everyone." Finally, she cracked her neck, first to the left, then to the right. "Now, go, go fast and get everyone off this island alive."
Asuna, Chachamaru and Setsuna nodded in unison, watching and watching now as Ceres took up a crouched pose, with left hand reaching forward, fingers poised to grapple while her right hand stayed down low in a blocking position close to her stomach. Her eyes grew cold and hard, watching now. Setsuna shivered; no matter what Sailor Ceres was dressed like now, she was a very skilled fighter in hand-to-hand combat.
She suddenly felt very hopeful of the outcome.
Still... as Asuna had pointed out earlier, Ceres' accent shifted when she got nervous about something, and it was about as shifted as one's accent could get right now. Did that mean she wasn't confident of success? Wasn't confident of protecting the class? Or was there something else she was scared about right now?
Setsuna took another look at Ceres' right hand. It wasn't just in a blocking position. No, she was holding it to herself, cradling it, as if it was something very precious to her rather than merely injured. The fact Ceres had been able to deal devastating attacks from it suggested that it wasn't in fact injured, but there was something else going on.
Chachamaru had already stepped back, seeing Zazie's attention purely on Sailor Ceres, and Setsuna realised that it was time they make their departure. She touched Asuna lightly on the shoulder, and the two began backing slowly, one step at a time, a few steps behind Chachamaru.
There was an almost imperceptible nod from Ceres, and the two combatants blurred with speed, then disappeared. Almost immediately, Chachamaru froze. Taking her lead, so did Setsuna. The gynoid's head spun as if on a wheel, spouting gibberish that sounded like a record sped up far too fast for human understanding.
But Setsuna knew what she was saying. She could feel the microbursts in air pressure erupting from punches and kicks and attacks, just not differentiate between any of the standard attacks and blocks. She could only spot the big differences.
The two fighters were just moving far too fast and far too much for anyone but the artificial girl to even spot them.
A punch, a kick, a block, a punch. Was fighting ever really this repetitive? Ceres thought to herself when she had a moment to think. Fighting at high speed, Zazie and herself danced around the clearing, around the other three girls, while making strikes, blocks and counter-strikes. Hotaru was holding up well, but Ceres was hardly using her. No, most of the work Ceres used her right arm for was using her forearm or bicep to block incoming strikes. Hotaru was being shaken and was probably unable to draw a breath at the speed Ceres was moving, but the idea of this fight was to end it in under ten seconds.
She was at about eight now. Another two seconds, maximum. While she had more reserves she could call on, if she couldn't defeat Zazie in that time, then she was going to have to pull back, go for round two at another time. Just right now, she had to keep fighting.
Ceres blocked another swipe from Zazie's blade with her right shoulder. The blade cut in, but Zazie pulled it out before it sunk in too deeply. Ceres thought maybe she was enjoying the fight, something she seemed to prove by dancing back and taunting Ceres to come at her again. Never one to pass up such a pleasant invitation from a woman, Ceres skipped forward, bringing her left hand up to make a strike at her opponent's throat with two of her fingers outstretched. Zazie smiled under her bone mask, however, and stepped sideways while bringing her blade up to Ceres' undefended stomach.
Realising too late that she couldn't pull her left hand back to protect herself, and that the blade was angled to catch Hotaru – which Zazie had to be thinking was an injury rather than something that Ceres felt was too precious to risk in combat – Ceres panicked.
But an instant before Zazie's blade bit home, the katana stopped dead. Ceres looked down; Zazie did likewise. Two small arms had broken from the bandages covered Ceres' right hand, and had caught the blade between the even-smaller hands.
More to Ceres' relief, there was no blood on the blade's edge. Zazie blinked in surprise, then leapt back, her dark cloak disappearing as she sheathed her blade. A moment later, her bone mask disintegrated into slivers of light on the evening's breeze, and then a moment later, she was gone.
As Zazie left, Ceres dropped her speed back into normality. She panted a little, as Asuna and Setsuna blinked in surprise at the sudden appearance of the senshi, while Chachamaru gave Ceres a cursory glance, then looked upwards.
"Are you all right?" Asuna gushed as she ran forward, broken free of her immobility. Setsuna followed a moment later.
"Are you injured?" she asked, eyeing Ceres' wounds. Most were closing as she watched.
"I'm fine, really," Ceres said, waving the two girls off. Setsuna and Asuna fell silent almost immediately. "What?" She glanced up to see the two girls focussed on her right hand. A quick glance showed that the bandages had fallen off, and Hotaru now sat, revealed to the world. She gave an embarrassed chuckle.
"Hello," she added, blushing and bowing.
"Master," Chachamaru said, from the back of the group.
"No, no, not at all," Hotaru said, blushing even further. Ceres looked up as a teenager in a brief leather outfit, pointed hat and cape descended from the sky, surrounded by bats.
"Not you, you idiot. Her."
"Oh."
"Chachamaru. It's good to see you. How is boya?"
"I have not been able to penetrate the school. We have been defending the other students from predatory attacks by Zazie and Mana."
"Zazie, eh? I didn't think she'd get involved in this at all." The vampire turned to Sailor Ceres. "And who might you be?"
"The defender of life and love, the pretty dusty soldier Sailor Ceres."
"And you?"
Ceres sighed, and held Hotaru up. "Say hello to my little friend."
"Hello," Asuna said, feeling slightly stupid.
"Please to meet you. My name is Hotaru," Hotaru replied.
"The cameras can see you," Evangeline said dryly.
"Oh! I'm the... the Fairy of the Forest," Hotaru covered quickly. Ceres groaned.
"Well, fairy, we've got some planning to do. Right now. Like, how to stop this. Right?"
"Right," Hotaru agreed in a strong voice.
TO BE CONTINUED..
SAILOR MOON SAYS: Lots of fighting this chapter. Loooots of fighting. Next chapter has more Chisame, coming to grips with a not-so-technophobic ghost, and the Fairy of the Forest introduces herself to the rest of the cast.