I don't own anything except the Takahari family, their Dragoon Spirits, Count Draco von Schneider, and Kenji Okamura

Watching Lenus' remains sink, I turned at the bright light behind me. The Blue-Sea Dragoon Spirit was drifting over to an ecstatic Meru.

"The Dragoons are assembled again," Rose said. "For the first time in eleven thousand years." As was typical of Rose, she didn't bother congratulating Meru. Still, she sounded as close to pleased as I had ever heard her.

There's something odd about Rose… She knows more about Dragons, Dragoons, Winglies, and the Dragon Campaign than anyone else I've encountered here. What's the connection…?

Meru had abruptly gone from ecstatic to moody. She was staring at the water where Lenus now resided, a sad look on her face. What's going on here? Lenus was our enemy, and Meru didn't seem to have a problem fighting her… I thought on it for a moment. Waaaiiit a minute… Lloyd, and Lenus, both Winglies, both had platinum hair… and so does Meru. Could she be…? I nodded slowly to myself. Yeah. Meru must be a Wingly herself. She doesn't mourn Lenus per se, she mourns the loss of another of her own species. The Winglies are dying out, and the death of Lenus is another nail in the coffin…

* * *

From Fueno, we boarded the Queen Fury for the voyage back to Donau. I wasn't looking forward to our report to the king. Not only had Lloyd gotten away, we were unable to recover the Moon Dagger. And we now knew his next target: the Moon Mirror in Mille Seseau.

Once aboard the ship, I resumed my perch upon the mast, staring moodily at the sea. I was not without a trace of nervous anticipation, recalling what had happened the last time we sailed. But the Phantom Ship had gone down for good, and there appeared to be nothing but clear sailing ahead.

"Ian! Look out!" Ryan's abrupt warning came just in time for me to dodge the human shape plummeting at me. Leaping off the mast, I drew the katana from my back, regretting my decision to leave the Masamune in my cabin, and dropped to the crow's nest, near Rose.

"What the blazes!?" I looked up, trying to see who had nearly hit me. My heart stopped momentarily. Not again! Why do I keep running into supposedly dead people? He's supposed to be dead! "Kenji! What the blazes are you doing here!? You're supposed to be dead, chasing Hideo Matsuo!"

On the mast, where I had been standing moments before, was another member of the Vampire Hunters ninja clan, albeit from another branch, Kenji Okamura. An old friend of mine, Kenji had vanished the year before, while hunting a Japanese vampire. How he had survived, let alone gotten here, was a mystery to me.

Kenji opened his left eye and looked down at me. It was then that I noticed the scar over his right eye, and that his left glowed red. The red of a vampire. "Ian Takahari," Kenji said. "It's been a long time. I'm afraid, though, that we have no time to chat." He closed his eye briefly. "I'm sorry, old friend, but I'm going to have to kill you."

"What!? Why!?" I backed off a step. This wasn't the Kenji I knew. "Kenji, what are you doing!? What have you become!?"

Kenji shook his head. "I said, no time to chat. And I think you should run. Otherwise, I'll have no choice. Believe me, I don't want this any more than you do, but I've become one of them. I can't stop it."

"Sorry, Kenji," I replied quietly. "But I can't do that. I have an obligation to see this out, and if I have to, I will kill you, Kenji. You were a ninja, too. You understand."

He nodded slowly. "Yeah. I know. One of us won't walk away from this, and I hope it's me. I'm nothing more than a tool, but you have something that needs to be done." Without further comment, Kenji drew a katana from the scabbard on his back, and dropped.

I countered the slash, knocking him off balance, then kicked him in the stomach. I was still looking for a solution that would allow both of us to survive. I was ruthless to my enemies, but even ninja did their best to avoid killing their comrades. And Kenji had been a close friend, the last before arriving in Endiness. I wasn't about to lose him again if I could avoid it.

Recovering his breath, Kenji's free hand moved through a kuji sequence. Instantly, a tornado formed in front of me and sucked me in, tossing me high into the air, catching me, and flinging me into a wall. "Ugh!" My katana, called Stormbringer, flew out of my grip, sailing clear over the ship's railing. "No!"

Kenji walked up, a pained expression on his face, and raised his sword, preparatory to severing my head. "I'm sorry, Ian. I wish it had turned out differently. But von Schneider's given me no choice. Goodbye, mon ami."

Time seemed to slow, as my mind worked furiously. Draco did this!? To one of the only friends I ever had!? The blade came down…

But I was no longer there, having sprung out of the way. The mention of von Schneider, my old nemesis, had galvanized me into action. I triggered the spikes on my forearms, then launched a flurry of hand-to-hand attacks that drove Kenji back into the mast. "It's not over yet, Kenji!" I blocked a slice, then snapped my right heel into his left temple.

Kenji dropped like a sack of bricks, then recovered with inhuman speed and swept his legs under mine, knocking me over. "Sorry, Ian, but it looks like it is over. See you in the next life."

I knew that this time Kenji's sword wouldn't miss. I closed my single eye, and waited for the stroke that would cut off my head.

The blow never landed. A glowing sword interposed itself between Kenji's katana and my head. Soul Cleaver. Ryan had arrived just in time. Before Kenji could recover, Ryan yanked something off his belt, which he promptly plunged into Kenji's arm. A hypodermic needle, filled with an unknown substance. Whatever it was, it dropped Kenji to the deck within moments.

Carefully picking up the unconscious ninja's sword, Ryan walked over and helped me to my feet. "You okay, Ian?"

"Yeah. But what took you so long?" I retracted the forearm guards.

"You never change." He looked at Kenji, still asleep on the deck. "I thought you told me he was dead."

"That's what I thought, too. Last year, he just disappeared, while on the trail of the Japanese vampire Hideo Matsuo. That was the last thing I heard of him." I nudged Kenji, without result. "What'd you do to him, anyway? What was in that hypo?"

Ryan grinned. "You're not the only one who knows how to use the Dark Mirror. When you told me about the vampire problem, I started going back during the night, experimenting at a clan-run lab. I eventually came up with this serum. It incapacitates vampires, and, while it can't restore them to full humanity, it does remove the thirst for blood. And in cases like Kenji, it removes the imperative to obey vampires such as von Schneider. He'll be mostly okay by the time he wakes up."

I shook my head. "So that's why you've been looking so tired the last few mornings. When was the last time you slept?"

Ryan considered. "I think the night before you showed up in Fueno. Had to use a lot of caffeine, but I've lasted. Never expected to run into Kenji, though."

"Neither did I. But I suggest you get some sleep, Ryan. I'll take care of Kenji."

He started to shake his head. "No, I can last until-" Ryan never finished his sentence. I had used a kuji deep-sleep technique, having anticipated his reaction.

"Sorry, Ryan, but you really need to sleep. Can't fight when you haven't slept in a week." Leaving the two unconscious ninja where they were, I turned to the ship's railing. "Now I need to retrieve Stormbringer, assuming the ship hasn't moved too far away."

I took out the Scroll of the Nine Hands and studied an advanced technique that I'd never had cause to use before, then set it aside. Where I was going, it would be ruined.

Taking a deep breath, I leapt over the side, my shape changing on the way down. By the time I hit the water, I was entirely shark. This particular spell was extremely advanced, and not normally used by a ninja of my young age.

But with the death of my parents, I had become the only Master of the Rage Demon Art of Ninjutsu. I had to learn the remaining moves, and I had to learn them soon. The shape-changing would also allow me to remain underwater long enough to retrieve Stormbringer, a katana that I had owned since my initiation as a full ninja, the day I had gone from a mere apprentice to a mature assassin. I remembered the day well…

* * *

I was fourteen the day I became a ninja. It was a full year after my first human kill. It was because of that event that I had been deemed ready for the final test at such a young age. Taking the test with me were my brother Ryan and my friend Kenji Okamura. As with all such tests, we would become ninja if we survived our first true combat. In the Art of Ninjutsu, the strong survive.

The mission was to neutralize a gang of thieves that had begun preying on nearby villages. The bandits had firearms; we were armed solely with our katanas and other traditional weapons such as caltrops, shurikens, and blowguns with poisoned darts. If we eliminated the thieves and survived, we would no longer be mere apprentices.

We arrived in the bandit's hideout before dawn, with Kenji leading us. Silently, he indicated that we should spread out, each taking one section of the cave, killing everyone in the area.

I found the closest entrance quickly, and quietly dropped in on the guard below, relieving him of his head in the process. After wiping the blade of my sword on his clothing, I took a couple of steps to the right, peering around the corner. There was a guard standing not more than two feet away, oblivious to the presence of a ninja and a dead body close by.

As soon as he turned his back, I jumped around the corner, clamped my left hand on his mouth to prevent him from summoning help, and cut his throat with the other.

A sudden exclamation caused me to spin around in surprise. I'd gotten careless: a third guard, gun drawn, had come up on me while I was distracted.

Idiot! You've lost your touch! But I hadn't lost my speed. As he opened his mouth to sound an alarm, my katana swept down, cutting through his wrist and dropping his hand to the floor. As the guard looked stupidly at his stump of an arm, I hit him in the throat with a shuriken, ending the threat rather permanently.

After setting fire to the three corpses, I continued through the cave, killing a handful of bandits along the way. Eventually, I reached my objective: the sleeping area of the hideout. Pulling out a crude gas grenade I'd taken from a body, I tossed it into the room, silently killing every thief that had the misfortune to be asleep during our raid.

The raid was swift, silent, and deadly. When it was over, every thief was dead, and my old katana was shattered. Upon returning home, Kenji, Ryan, and I became full ninja, and I was presented with the sword Stormbringer, a powerful weapon used by several generations of Vampire Hunter ninja. By the time I arrived in Endiness three years later, I had killed over two dozen people with it. I wasn't going to let it simply sink…

* * *

It didn't take long to find the katana, and I was back aboard the Queen Fury within minutes. There I found that Ryan had woken up sooner than expected, and was talking to Dart and Karen.

"Ian! Where were you?" Karen asked. "And didn't you tell me Kenji was dead?"

"Hey, slow down. Anyway, I was retrieving my sword. Kenji had knocked it overboard. And as for Kenji himself, I thought he was dead, too. But he's not. He's become one of them." I took out a cloth and began drying Stormbringer as I spoke. "It's only because of Ryan's timely arrival that I'm still alive. Draco von Schneider, while apparently not the vampire that infected Kenji, did order him to kill me. I guess Draco's given up on turning me and has decided to simply eliminate me."

"So this guy's a friend of yours?" Dart asked.

Ryan nodded. "Yeah. Old friend."

"When should he wake up?"

Ryan shrugged. "Don't really know. That's the first time I've been able to test the serum, but I think Kenji should be awake by morning. I suggest we restrain him until then, because I don't know if this stuff will actually work. It's still experimental."

"C'mon, guys!" Karen said. "Kenji won't wake up till morning, so shouldn't we all just get some sleep!?"

I shook my head. Always exuberant. Not as bad as Meru, but… Well, I guess she's got a point. If Kenji's not going to wake up for a while, there's no point in our losing sleep over it.

* * *

The next morning, Kenji regained consciousness. We'd tied him to a bed in what passed for an infirmary on the ship, but it appeared that Ryan's serum had done the job.

"Sorry about that, Ian," he said. "von Schneider got to me shortly after Matsuo infected me."

"Don't worry about it, Kenji," Ryan said. "I've had a similar problem here, and Ian let me live. And I nearly killed everyone when Doel got a hold of me. Compared to that, what you did was nothing. Besides," he added with a grin, "did you really expect to be able to kill Ian?"

"Actually, Ryan, I nearly did. If you hadn't shown up, Ian would be without a head. And then you would have killed me. What did you do to me, anyway?"

Ryan held up the empty hypo. "Call it an antibiotic for vampires. You'll note that you no longer thirst for blood, and a few other changes. You're still a vampire, I'm afraid, but without the negative effects of it."

"Better than nothing, I guess. Where are we going?"

"We're almost to Donau," Albert replied. "From there, we return to Fletz to report to King Zior. Unfortunately, we failed in our mission, but one of our enemies is no longer a factor."

Kenji glanced at me. " 'No longer a factor'? Did Ian have something to do with that?"

I grinned. "You might say that. Lenus ended up without a head."

"You always did like the beheading method. I'm glad to hear your skills have continued to improve." His expression turned solemn. "I gather from some of your moves last night that you've become the Master of your Art. Are your parents…?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Just before I got here, the dojo was attacked by assassins. Ryan, Karen, and I got out, but they didn't."

"Sorry. Didn't mean to bring up a painful topic."

I laughed humorlessly. "Kenji, have you forgotten? A ninja knows no pain. We can't afford to feel."

* * *

It took us only days after that to return to Fletz. Much to my surprise, the king didn't seem very disappointed that we'd failed to retrieve the Moon Dagger. He was simply glad to see that we'd made it back safely.

Zior arranged a banquet that night in our honor, but Karen, Ryan, Kenji, and I opted to make a brief appearance, then retreat to the area between the towers to talk. We had some catching up to do, and the next morning we would be leaving again, this time for Mille Seseau, to follow Lloyd…

Author's note: Sorry that this update took so long. I've had a bad case of writer's block. As for how short the events after returning to Fletz were, it occurred to me that they wouldn't have much bearing on the ninja. They remain in the shadows as much as possible, and recognition can cause problems in their line of work.

Please read & review. I can always use input.