Get to the CPW right now.
Leave it to Sango to be MIA when shit was blowing up.
"Kikyō, we need to move." Kagura threw off the welding mask she had been wearing. "Kagome! Inuyasha! Get everything into the van."
Was Kagura far too excited about this? Yes.
Was it terrifying that currently it was possible that a giant-ass hole to hell was eating the center of Manhattan? Also yes.
"But Sango's not here," Kikyō called, but she was gathering up parts and throwing them into packs faster than Kagura had seen her move, maybe ever.
"Sango texted me," Kagura grumbled. "That poor woman can't catch a break."
Leave it to Wormtongue to work out the rest of his goddamned kinks on the night that Sango was finally letting the fine-ass locksmith pick her lock.
"Ummm, guys?" Kagome's voice was high-pitched as she greeted Kikyō and Kagura as they ascended the basement steps; she was looking, wide-eyed, down at her phone. "It's…"
Kagome held up her phone for everyone to see the 'Worm-watch' website that she and Sango had compiled, with its many many 'discovered' (a.k.a. hacked) webcam streams, and there, sitting right above the building they'd been watching so closely, was a pillar of caged lightning enveloping the building.
"The big one." Kagura finished the sentence. "Get in the van. Looks like we're winging it."
(Kagura was really glad that she'd made far more of everything than she thought necessary. Because she had this suspicion that all that saved up reiki and yōki was going to be… necessary.)
"Kagura, things are crawling out of the portal… they look like… worms." Kagome trembled as she kept watching her phone screen.
"That shithead opened the portal to the borderlands, goddammit," Inuyasha growled, then threw a reassuring arm around Kagome's shoulders, turning his attention to all of them. "Those demons look a shit-ton scarier than they actually are. They'll die if you so much as sneeze reiki on 'em."
"Well, I don't think that most of the citizens of New York know that. And I am also pretty sure that it doesn't keep them from eating people, either," Kagura snarled, not even paying attention to where she threw things into the backseat. Kagome and Inuyasha could deal with it.
Traffic laws were for chumps, especially when the world was about to end. And Kagura suspected that most of New York's finest were too busy streaming toward Central Park to try to shoot worm demons out of the sky to notice a van running red lights.
"It's gonna be okay." Kikyō's voice was like a lullaby, relaxing the anxiety that was making Kagura tremble (though it did have the added benefit of adding more lead to her foot). "I promise."
"You can't say that, love," Kagura deadpanned back, her eyes on the road enough to not die, "but I appreciate the attempt."
"Inuyasha? Tell me more about the worm demons, please?" Kikyō turned her attention to the two sitting in the backseat, holding on for dear life.
"They're stupid as fuck, and the only thing they had goin' for them is being able to reproduce like bunnies," Inuyasha answered. "You have as much yōki in one of your boom bombs as a thousand of them have."
"Uh, Inuyasha? There might be a thousand of them in the city now. Can… can bullets hurt them?" Kagome asked.
"Not as effective, but yeah. Those little shits can be taken down with human weapons," Inuyasha sighed. "Kagura can't you go any fucking faster?"
"You try driving a van with basically nukes in it," Kagura snarled.
Okay, fine, so they weren't nukes nukes, but… she'd only played with the booms that yōki meeting reiki produced once before backing away. Kikyō had laughed at her.
"If even you think this is dangerous, damn." She'd giggled. Then they'd made out. That was a good day.
"Just don't crash," Kikyō breathed.
"What the fuck do you mean with nukes in it?" Inuyasha apparently had not intuited the whole poof/boom/really big boom thing like he should have.
"Reiki and yōki don't mix," Kagura stated flatly. "Well… not usually. You two have a weird thing going with your whole… thing."
Kikyō had explained to Kagura that Inuyasha and Kagome seemed to be destined soulmates and all that, and so their reiki and yōki were not at odds. Well, that was only true when said reiki and yōki were still attached to the wielder… When they were divorced from their sources, well, that was where the really really big boom had come from that one time.
"Keh." That was usually Inuyasha's way of finishing an argument. Sometimes Kagura liked to poke, because irking Inuyasha was a little bit fun. Tonight though, Kagura let it stand. There was Manhattan traffic coming, and she needed to concentrate to make sure that she didn't kill anyone, and didn't die.
Although as they drove, it turned out that Kagura's worries were… not as bad as she thought. Because while she was barreling into Manhattan, pretty much every other car, truck, cab, tuktuk, and motorhome were on their way out of Manhattan because… well shit, Kagura could already see the electric pillar. She stepped on the gas and zoomed through the city, paying no mind to the fact that apparently the only vehicles heading toward the apocalypse were police cars, fire trucks, black SUVs, and her.
"Think the suits are going to try to get us?" Kikyō asked, looking at the assortment of metallic demon death machines that made up the back of Kagura's van… and, given that their demon death machines looked like human death machines, getting pulled over would suck.
"Let's try to look as legal as possible," Kagura frowned, though she would be surprised if any of the emergency vehicles took the time to pull over a rundown van driving toward things. Cult leaders and crazy people were things, and worm demons streaming in from another dimension were definitely higher priority things.
"Sango is on the scene. I guess… Miroku came with her?" Kagome stared at her phone. "Are there any easy-to-use toys that we can give him, Kagura? Apparently he won't leave Sango. He's all 'protect protect protect' right now and she decided against threatening him at gunpoint to go."
"Well, he does not get any of the reiki blasters," Kagura grumbled. "I've been fine-tuning each of those babies to perfectly mesh with its wearer. I even bedazzled your names on them really cute!" Kagura never skimped on the fine details. "But… we can probably give him a couple dozen of the grenades. Just tell him that they make big booms."
"Dozens?" The entire van seemed to erupt in the same word. Kagura rolled her eyes.
"What the hell do you think I've been doing for a month?" she exasperated. "As much fun as making your soulmate almost pass out is, it's to get the reservoirs on these things BIG. So that when the fighting happens, Sango and I don't have to be human shields while you three zap stuff." Kagura exhaled as she turned up Central Park West. "So… we have a lot of them. At least thirty a piece."
"If we don't die, Kagura," Kagome sighed, "we are going to need to have a talk about overkill."
"If we don't die, Kagome," Kagura snapped back, "it'll be because we had enough of those things to close the portal back up before this big bad Naraku comes out."
"Yeah, all these worms feel like they're the advance guard or something." Kikyō wrung her hands. "I can't imagine that Naraku, who made at least 2 terrifying demons come out of the smaller portals, is going to be a worm."
"Well… worms first, Naraku second," Kagome piped up, leaning forward so she could see through the windshield. "Looks like we're almost here. I told Sango to meet us at Rudin Playground."
Kagura nodded. The pillar of light that shot up into the sky was starting to grow wider, as if a magnetic tornado was connecting their world to Oz. And instead of only seeing bolts of netted lightning define the edges of the structure, Kagura was starting to see tubular writhing bodies with monstrous faces pouring out of the top.
"You didn't say that these things were gonna be so ugly," she complained, pulling to just before the police line and parking.
The second that they opened the doors, they could hear the chaos. The sky was full of guttural growls, snarls, and howls of demons, and booms and blasts of gunshots. Humans were yelling and sometimes screaming as well; because the demons did not go down easily, and liked to make a snack of their attackers.
"Shit, the army is going to be leveling streets if this keeps up," Inuyasha murmured, snapping his human disguise into place, and throwing the reiki blasters to each of them in turn. "I'll… carry everything else."
Kagura nodded, tightening the straps around her person.
It was showtime.
"We got this, Gu." Kikyō's hand roped into Kagura's. The damn woman always knew.
"You sure, Keek?" Kagura asked, squeezing her hand in response.
"No but… there is no one I'd rather be walking into demon hell with than you." Kikyō smiled, and they all took off at a run. It was time to at least try to close the mouth of hell.
"Where the hell have you been?" Sango's bright red face greeted them from the playground they'd agreed to meet at.
There was nothing but carnage in front of them: bullet-riddled, soulless faces of dead demons, though really often with NYPD-issued boots sticking out of their mouths. Apparently, the unending barrage of these stupid demons was doing its job attacking the city, with the police forced to fall back and fall back and fall back. How the demon hunters had made it all the way to the core of the conflict was all down to Inuyasha. It turned out having a disguised demon as an ally came in really handy. He found the paths through the park past the chaos, landing them all at ground zero without so much as a demon bite or a bullet hole.
"Kagome!" Miroku popped out right next to Sango, who it seemed he was holding onto. "Shit, I really really underestimated what you were chasing."
"Understatement of the year," Kagome answered.
When Inuyasha nodded that the coast was clear, both Miroku and Sango jumped from their hiding place inside of a play fort. Inuyasha handed Sango her pack, then turned to Miroku.
"These things are basically grenades," Inuyasha said, handing Miroku ten of the egg-shaped devices. "They'll waste these low-level demons, but… don't waste them."
"I got it." Miroku took the devices from Inuyasha, then both men nodded at each other.
"Whatever made this thing is somewhere in that building," Sango summarized, then turned a scowl toward Miroku, "and what with him here, I couldn't get a closer look."
"Because you needed to wait for the people with the weapons, Sango!" Miroku snapped; no one missed the way he put his hand tenderly on Sango's arm. "You're watching the way these things can take a dozen bullets before going down…"
"Well then," Kagura interrupted, partially because the bickering was not doing anything toward getting them to ground zero, but also because she wanted to see if her weapons worked. "Time to light up the sky with one of these. Inuyasha, will you do the honors of throwing this toward the highest concentration of demons you think you can hit?" Kagura then gasped as she looked at the disguised demon. "Oh, and don't forget to wear the special things I made for you. I don't want to wipe out our friend demon."
"You're somethin' else," Inuyasha chuckled, and pulled the netted wire vest that Kagura had constructed: a reiki disrupter. "You know with me bein' only half-demon, all reiki can do is zap me human. So… if it comes to it and you need to waste something, just do it. I'll survive."
"I was thinking more about the excruciating pain side effect," Kagura drawled. "If I can help it, I don't want to put you through that." Kagura then winked. "Besides, your demon powers are really handy right now."
"Yeah yeah," Inuyasha smirked. He scanned for where the biggest set of noodles was, then pulled out the pin and launched. "Time to light up New York."
Magenta light flashed through the sky as the reiki bomb exploded, painting Manhattan in its colors and reverberating so strongly that the ground underneath Kagura's feet shook. More importantly though, in that space, where there were once a mass of writhing demons, the sky was now clear. One reiki bomb had been enough to obliterate more of those demons than the entire New York National Guard had succeeded in taking out.
"Looks like they work," Inuyasha chuckled, and unhooked another one. "You ready to walk into hell?"
"Yeah," Kagura answered, "I think that we are."
And truly, she was. Her first experiment worked; now it was time to see if all the others worked, too.