DISCLAIMER: Shaman King is not mine, I only own An, the other monsters, and the plotline. :3

I hope y'all enjoy this chapter: it kind of made me afraid of it when I realized what I had written for the fight scenes. I mean, there's a lot of blood. o.o And violence. o.o Not that there wasn't before, but still. o.o

Anyway, after this, only four more chapters. :( Sad face! I really don't want to upload this entire thing, it'll make the ending so final XD But of course, I wouldn't tortue you, ze reader, like that. Not intentionally... XD Enjoy!

Twenty-Four

Manta was not sure at all of how he had gotten into this situation. One moment, he had been standing just behind Yoh, and the next, An had him clutched in her strong, cruel arms, her hand inexplicably formed into a dagger. Manta stared at it, unable to comprehend how he could be in such a situation so quickly. He wanted to panic, and panicking would be the easiest thing to do in this situation - for what could he do here? - but he also knew that panicking would do nothing to help. There were only two ways this could play out: he could somehow survive, or he could be killed. And the second option was looking a whole lot more likely at the moment.

"I guess I overestimated you all," An said, her voice right next to Manta's ear so that it rang almost painfully in his head. "I honestly thought that you might have figured me out already. I thought you all were smarter than this. Well, you definitely would have been, if human memories weren't mostly wiped in this place. Quite the shame; it would have been a nice change to have my prey be able to fight back at the level that they knew in the other world, a good challenge. But I can deal with this; after all, you did help me slaughter my siblings, so all's well that ends well."

With that, An's hand dagger glinted in the red light cast by the sky, and Manta squeezed his eyes shut in a last desperate, pitiful act to stay alive and also so that he would not have to see it plunge into his throat.

However, it never did; or, at least, Manta never felt it slice him.

Incredibly scared but also incredibly curious as to why nothing was happening, Manta peeked one eye open to see that, directly in front of his face, there was a shining, glowing crystal that was attached to a wire. It was wrapped around An's wrist and was pulling her arm away from Manta's neck.

Just one moment later, something - actually, someone, that someone being Chocolove - whizzed past Manta and tackled An, and another person, this time Trey riding atop his snowboard, zipped in and plucked Manta up with one hand before zooming away a respectable distance. The blue-haired boy put the short one down on the ground only somewhat carefully.

"Better pull out Mosuke," Trey suggested, turning back toward the battle.

Manta, trembling a little from the almost fatal encounter as well as from a sudden rush of adrenaline, nodded. Mosuke appeared at his side in his spirit ball form, and quickly Manta fumbled to whip out his laptop from his backpack and integrated his spirit ally into it to create his hammer. Even as he held the weapon, though, Manta felt his spiritual energy drain slightly, and he knew that he would not be the best person to help with this battle.

But, so help him, he would try.

()()()()()()()

Chocolove held up one of his shaft claws, his oversoul glowing as he prepared to strike An. Chocolove had not expected that he would ever be in this situation, where he had to kill someone whom he had had a sort of acquaintanceship with, but this was the monster, the thing they had to defeat to go home. This was the thing that had tried to kill Manta, and the thing that would have killed them all too.

For the sake of everyone else, he could not let An live, not that it would be such a hard thing for him to kill her here, after what he had just learned from both her and Ren.

But, just before Chocolove was about to thrust his shaft claw into An's throat, he gasped and jumped up.

He could not explain how it had happened, nor could he explained why it had brought on such a reaction from him, but it did. Instead of being about to almost kill An, Chocolove had been about to rip out the throat of an old man.

Said old man was looking up at him with scared eyes, but in less than a second, they had narrowed and hardened, and with surprising nimbleness, the old man sprang to his feet and knocked Chocolove to the ground.

Chocolove, his head hurting where he had struck it on the red ground, looked up to see the old man suddenly morph back into An.

()()()()()()()

Ren rushed at An with his oversoul powered Houraiken, but as he swung at her dark-haired head, she expertly ducked under his attack without even having to look at him and dodged behind him. Knowing that he would have to be careful in order to avoid stepping on the fallen Chocolove (not because he wanted to go out of his way to make sure that Chocolove was comfortable, but because if he did step on Chocolove it might cause him to stumble), Ren whipped around, ready to attack-

Only to find himself staring at an incredibly tall girl with blue eyes and dark green hair.

Ren blinked his golden eyes, unable to figure out how it was possible that he was looking at this person who was so familiar to him. How had she gotten here?

"N-nee-san?" he breathed, struck by the sudden realization that this was the perfect image of what he could just barely remember as his sister. However, even as he said the words, he knew that this was not his older sister, no matter how much it looked like her. This was An, trying to trick him.

But it was too late. Before Ren could retaliate, An, in this impossible copy of his sister, formed her arm into a giant block and struck Ren broadside the head, knocking him to the ground and causing his vision to flicker painfully for a moment.

He had to get up… No matter what An looked like, he had to get up and fight her…

"Watch out!"

Startled to the point where the pain in his head almost went away, Ren scrambled to his feet and rushed a few feet away as fast as he could. Gripping Houraiken tightly, Ren turned once again to see that Trey, Yoh, Lyserg, and even Manta had rushed up to cover him, surrounding the still green-haired An.

The girl smirked and whipped out talismans, tossing them into the air so that they flew at blinding speeds around all the boys, cutting at their skin. Ren had to hold up Houraiken in order to protect his face from the projectiles, and because of his already throbbing head, he could not figure out how he could stop this.

()()()()()()

The talismans whipped around Lyserg, cutting at his skin and drawing blood. The dowser covered most of his face with his arms to protect his eyes, which were narrowed as he scrutinized An's grinning green-haired form.

Taking action, Lyserg willed his pendulum to dart out and wrap around her form. Even though the dowser had essentially immobilized her, the talismans did not stop cutting at his skin and clothes. Lyserg blinked, about to will his dowsing medium to crush her, but when he looked again, it was not the green-haired An that he had in his wire's clutches. Instead, it was a silver-haired maiden with deep rose red eyes that seemed to stare into Lyserg's soul.

His green eyes widened. "J-Jeanne-sama…"

Startled that he would ever attack the Iron Maiden, the dowser let his wire fall from around her body, and he also let his arms fall from his face and gave up his resistance against the razor sharp talismans, ashamed of what he had done.

Even though the talismans still flew, Jeanne's arm shaped into what resembled a two pronged pitchfork, and she launched herself at Lyserg like a hell bent demon, knocking him to the ground. She plunged the two prongs of her arm into the ground on either side of the dowser's neck, a twisted smile on her face, her red eyes filled with bloodlust.

Lyserg wished that she would just get it over with. He had done a terrible thing in attacking the Iron Maiden, even if he had not intended to. The dowser had been attacking An, after all, not her, not Jeanne. However, even though he was scared as well as ashamed of himself, he would not close his eyes in preparation for the end.

And thus, he was forced to watch, horrified, as Trey knocked Jeanne away with an icicle that was attached to the bottom of his snowboard. When they were both out of his sight, Lyserg sprang to his feet, barely even registering that the talismans had faded away, and looked to see Trey hovering a few feet off the ground, looking down at Jeanne on the ground, unnaturally dark red blood pouring out of a wound on her side.

Lyserg, sickened and enraged, was about to unleash all of his fury upon Trey when Jeanne changed to the form of a young girl with long blue hair and pained eyes, blood still coming from her and staining the ground.

"Onii-chan…"

Realizing that the Jeanne which he had attacked, that the Jeanne which had attacked him was not real, Lyserg took a step backward, shocked. He had seen An change from her first form to that of an old man, and of course that of the green-haired girl, but he had not known that the imitation of Jeanne would bring out such a reaction in him.

He watched as Trey's snowboard fell to the ground along with him in surprise, and the blue-haired boy used his arms to back up in such a way that allowed the dowser to see his wide ebony eyes.

"You're… I… I can't remember you…," Trey stuttered.

The blue-haired An grinned, her eyes and everything else about her becoming catlike as she pounced at Trey, digging claws into his chest before jumping off, blood dripping from her fingertips, as she landed nimbly to the ground several feet away, turning back around to glare at Yoh. Her side was still bleeding profusely, but it did not seem to bother her all that much.

"Remember me, Yoh?" An taunted, her voice changing as she suddenly became a blonde, clad in a short black dress and sandals with a red scarf tied around her head, a blue beaded necklace around her neck.

The dowser could hear the disbelief in Yoh's voice. "A-Anna?"

Calmly yet sinisterly, the An-Anna pulled off her beads and held them at arm's length, the blood on her hand dripping down over the blue.