Prologue / Lingering Memories, Destined to Fade Away Like An Ocean's Wave
Alarms rang loudly through the lifeless hallway. Two shadows scurried along, escaping from the ones chasing after them. Though, it was more correct to say that only one of them was escaping, while the other one had been blindly following with his hand being held.
"Don't let them get away!"
Red lights flashing. Footsteps echoing. Breathing, heavy and rough.
Bullets flying from behind.
In front, the woman tossed herself into the next hallway, pulling the boy along with her. She panted as the sound of gunshot consumed her ears, but there was no time to take breaks. She glanced back to see if the boy was holding himself up well. Although, it wasn't as if she had any defining method to take notice.
The boy's head was completely covered by a mysterious mask void of details, as if it was a solid cage to lock him inside. His clothing was minimum, consisting of a white gown, but there were holes against the back where he had been hit. And despite all of that, the boy said nothing and merely went along with whatever the woman had been ordering him to do. There wasn't even a cry of pain.
That was normal. At least, for what she has seen.
Readjusting her white lab coat, the woman continued running off with the boy.
She was close to an exit point, so there was no point in stopping here. The same went for the guards, aiming their rifles down the corridor. A storm of bullets filled the space between them. The woman nudged the boy to move slightly in the way, such that the bullets would only hit him. She was thankful that he was tall enough.
"Damn it! She's using Project IK as a shield! We can't hit her!"
"Keep shooting! A bullet has to slip through at some point!"
Gasping for air with the pressure against her back, she found the door that supposingly led them to the exit. Personally, she had never got past these doors yet, but with the all-access keycard she stole, she would soon find out.
The door opened at the scan of the card, locking her pursuers behind. Giving herself a moment to breathe, she glanced back to see that the boy was still able to walk despite being attacked with lead.
She couldn't say the same about herself.
The adrenaline wore off and her leg started to hurt. It was a ridiculous notion that she could avoid every single bullet they fired at her, as she stumbled against the wall. All the boy did was stand there as his own blood dripped from his back and onto the ground.
And then a few bullets slowly fell out from his wounds into the puddle.
"Project IK…" she murmured, trying to stand up straight. She bit through the pain and waddled over. "You'll be out of the facility soon. If I had known what the director's true plans were concerning your existence, I would have never lent a hand…"
"..."
"Alright, now that we're here…"
The woman looked over to realize that the difficult part hadn't been done. She heard from her co-workers that this room was reserved for disposal, but she never once thought that the facility's form of "disposal" was simply a tall man-made cliff with a body of water at the bottom.
The woman looked over the edge, seeing there was a thin barrier that prevented people from accidentally falling over. In this case, they would have to purposely do so, but the bullet in her leg was making it difficult to imagine that she would survive to swim out with the current.
Project IK didn't have much of a will of his own, but if she removed his suppression mask, he might have been able to carry her out of the water before she could drown.
Hearing the loud bullet impacts against the door, she didn't have much time left.
She reached out for the boy's mask and adjusted a few settings on it. This mask was specially made for this project, restricting the boy of his emotions, thoughts and freedom. A change cost herself time, since the documentation said that it would need a few minutes for the mask to collapse once the function was processed, a safe-feature for when the activation was done by mistake.
Or when the director had intended to use Project IK as he intended to do so.
And through a few seconds of modifying, the mask outlined its crevices with a red glow.
"Eleven years of research and experimentation, and this is what it all came down to…"
As she stepped back from the boy, the sound of a gun barrel loading came up behind her. She could feel the barrel against the back of her head.
"You see, I could say the same."
The gun fired, but she was able to move out of the way quickly. She looked back to see a man in a militarized and sleek outfit, draped with a gray poncho and combed blonde hair. In his hand, there had been a silver pistol with smoke coming out from it, and in his mouth, a cigarette had been lit. From how much had been left, he looked as if he had been waiting here for a while.
The woman tried to knock him back, but the man stuck first, kicking her away before aiming the gun at her again. This time, she couldn't dodge as the bullet lodged right into her arm. She screamed on the ground as she wanted to ignore the pain so badly, but the barrel of the man's pistol pressed up against her chin.
"You made a mistake, stirring up all this commotion for the director."
"Do you even know what Project IK is all about? Don't tell me that the incident that occurred at Hebijo Academy concerning Dōgen last year wasn't enough to make you see that this whole operation is going to go south once the final phase starts." The woman narrowed her eyes. "Or is it the fact that you know what the director really wants?"
"Oh, I know what he wants. And frankly, Dōgen was an impulsive fool. He had a part of this project as much as anyone else, but once he tasted power, he became irrational and sought out to control it for only himself, casting the rest of us to the side. Compared to him, the director isn't stupid to not see such a warning of fate."
"And yet, he can understand why Dōgen wanted that power to begin with. That's why the objective, or the underlying one, has changed without anyone knowing."
"What he does is not my problem. I still have a debt to repay to the director, after all. I'll do what is needed to make sure that his ideals for Project IK come to fruition."
The man removed his cigarette, pressing it up against the woman's bullet wound. The burning intensity against the raw flesh exploded against her nerves, unbearful to its scorching torture. She felt like passing out then and there.
"And concerning you? I don't think that this is entirely what this is all about."
"Gr-grah…!"
"It's because you knew of the test subject's fate. Your mistake was not to act here, but to have grown attached to that thing. And your efforts for that will be in vain."
The man glanced up to the standstill boy, walking from the woman. The mask was still glowing red, so the release system could still be rejected if the man intervened right now. The woman was only a mere researcher and assistant to Project IK, so he was thinking that she was of no threat to him. He left her side to disable the mask's current function, holstering his pistol in the meanwhile.
This had been the bigger concern.
If Project IK was released, no one would be able to predict what would happen.
"Let's see here…" He took another cigarette and lit it up as he thought to himself. "It should be easy to disable it. Just a few presses here and—"
He could feel the woman reaching out to grab his pistol, but that was such an old tactic. The man was already wary, taking a step away to have her stagger forwards with nothing to show for her efforts, but he made a mistake in his hubris.
Her real target hadn't been the gun and once he realized it, he pulled out his pistol and shot right at her. A bullet wound in the stomach, in the shoulder and in her leg, all freshly made, but she was still moving. Her arms reached out as she pushed the boy against the railing and the momentum took it from there.
And through her numbing pain, she whispered to his mask.
"Project IK… You'll be known as… Isayuki…"
Without any will of his own, he didn't understand that he was falling, so he was merely carried by gravity down into the water.
Just as the man's final bullet hit her heart.
"So live on… as Isayuki… from now on… freely…"
With the sound of a loud splash, the woman slammed against the railing with blood being drained out from her. Red stained against the metal as it was becoming harder to breathe as color started to escape from her eyes. As her vision became blurry, she could see the man approaching her with the pistol against her forehead.
"I didn't want to do this, but you gave me no choice."
"Even so…" The woman slowly closed her eyes to brace herself. "I'll die with no lingering regrets. I just… thought it was wrong… that he would be used… like that…"
"... Then I'll give you the honor of dying with those last words."
He pulled back on the trigger.
A single gunshot fired. Silence followed. Blood spilled out and the woman took her last breath, being limp and lifeless as her body collapsed against the cold ground.
The man glanced at her body, making sure she wasn't moving, but with a quick scan, he noticed something in her hands. It was something that he was familiar with, as it rolled out from her hand with the pin already pulled.
Without a second thought, he tried to look away, but the flashbang still managed to get him. A light that was strong enough to render his eyes blind for a few seconds, but heavily disable and unusable for a few minutes.
"Tsk! The usual flashbangs don't last that long! Did she smuggle an experimental one!?"
That was enough time for the boy to have been swept away in the currents. The man rubbed his eyes after the blur wore off, trying to look down the cliff and clicked his tongue.
Project IK was nowhere to be seen.
Opposing his irrationality of diving in the steep drop to find the boy, he retreated back in order to give the command to make a wide search for Project IK's retrieval.
Considering that the glowing light from the mask was not visible when he looked down, the man had a begrudging feeling that they were going to somehow turn up empty. His body didn't even show any evidence of surfacing.
"I'm sure glad that Dōgen isn't alive anymore to hear of this since he'd probably be the most pissed one of the board, but concerning the Yoma… Never mind, there's no point thinking about it."
It caused the man to take a begrudging huff of his smoke.
"Either way, I'm not looking forward to making this report to the director."
And unfortunately for him, he was correct.
One month passed since Project IK was declared to be halted.
Prologue / Author's Notes
Many years ago, I remember reading about a fanfiction with this very concept. What if we allowed Murasame Houou some time in the spotlight by giving him someone who is innocently loyal to his bluffs, self-indulging confidence and commands?
And then some time passed, and I properly made an account and started writing fanfictions of my own. Now fast-forward to a few months ago where I suddenly remembered about this story for Senran Kagura and I returned over to take a look to see how far it went.
… Only to find out that the story vanished.
I'll keep this part of the fanfiction's background short, but to say in the least words, I managed to come into contact with the original writer a while ago to find that they simply dropped everything regarding their fanfictions, and thus deleted everything. Their account was still technically active at the time and I guess they never unlinked their email from their account, but I won't divulge too far into it.
They might have already taken care of that little knot and left the fanfiction space for good this time, but not before providing me permission to take up the mantle to continue the story for myself. And since I definitely needed something else to distract me from my current fanfictions and life in general (read in sarcasm), I decided to accept the offer and continue the concept for myself.
Of course, I'm readjusting the story as I see fit, but I'd like to thank the original writer for giving me permission by keeping them anonymous as per their request.
Now, let's get the elephant out of the room first.
This story certainly isn't going to match the original tone of the Senran Kagura games. That's simply how the nature of it plays out, given the concept of it and centering it around a pair of male characters. We will have some of its all-female cast being seen, with two of them being vital to the core story, but all in all, it's going to be somewhat balanced between the genders. And as mentioned in the synopsis, this is going to be taking place after the events of [Senran Kagura 2 : Deep Crimson]. About one year, to be exact.
Also, I'm not fucking with this whole two timelines bullshit shenanigans, their continuities or whatever the routes means. I don't even know why they felt the need to do something like that in the first place, but for the sake of Deep Crimson's own continuity, I'll be mostly ignoring the games outside this timeline.
Deep Crimson already retconned part of Burst's original ending(s) anyways, so consistency wasn't something they were good at. The fact that they can't keep the narrative straight between routes makes this difficult enough as it is, damn it. It's no wonder people just start at the beginning and adjust as they go along when considering this style of narrative.
So Gessen Girls' Academy? More like, Gessen these schools out of my face.
And Yumi? More like, you and me won't see her in this story.
By the way, I haven't played Shinovi Versus, or many of those games in that timeline, for myself either, so… I guess it's on a backlog of some sort.
I'll refrain from speaking about the story itself and my decisions about it until the end of Chapter 1. Each chapter will be split up into multiple parts, so the next time you'll see Author's Notes, it will be at the end of those parts. This is simply the Prologue, so we'll be seeing Murasame far more from now on.
As for Murasame himself, I'd gone ahead and made some little changes to his character. He'll still be the same pretentious asshole we know and love, but I think when putting him up as a main character, I can afford to paint him to be a little more tragic in a sense.
After all, if you were in Murasame's shoes, the events that happened to him were… pretty unfortunate. It's simply one of those moments where he did everything he could to be a shinobi, but his lack of talent held him back. Even if he was mostly in the wrong for what he was doing or how he was acting, you honestly can't say that you don't see where he's coming from, right?
Hopefully, I'll see you once again there, so I can ramble a bit more about Enigmatic Variables. I'll be uploading the first three of four parts of Chapter 1 to see how it plays out and I'll likely cover any concerns in part four's author's note.
Anyways, as always with any story, I hope you enjoy reading about the misadventures that await.