WARNING: Spoilers! If you don't know who Kenji is, please read at your own risk! POSSIBLE CHARACTER DEATH AT END OF STORY.
WITH DUE CREDIT: This fic was loosely spun off from two fics - "Over the Sting" by sasori and "Chronicles of a Rurouni", one of my earlier fics.
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Yesterday's Shadow is Tomorrow's Twilight
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Chapter 54: Unspoken Promises
When Kenji, Aoshi and Misao arrived at the grand hall room, where Enishi was, he was just skewering the last opponent he had against his very long sword, and throwing him across the room. The by then unconscious man flew limply into the entrance, directly into the incoming Kenji.
The redhead gave a yelp of surprise and instinctively threw a punch into what he thought was an object of attack. The sheer force of his punch sent the poor man flying back the way he came from, which Enishi sidestepped casually, so that the man joined the rest of his comrades, who were sprawled all across the floor of the arena, out cold.
Kenji had effectively sealed off the only entrance into the room by standing frozen in position against the doorframe. Behind him, trapped and unable to enter, Aoshi remained silent, whereas Misao then kicked him between his shoulders, causing him to tumble forward with a yelp of pain.
The boy's screech broke the spell of silence. "What took you guys so long?" Enishi asked, miffed, as he wiped his sword against a clean patch of clothing on one of the fallen men. After a while of wiping, he was satisfied with the cleanliness of his sword, and sheathed it.
"We were disabling the cannons in the lower level," Aoshi informed, stepping into the room and glancing around it. For quite some time, he did nothing but keeping looking at the four corners of the room. Then he returned his evaluating glance to looking at a vague spot before him. "I see." He muttered, quite cryptically. "So this is how they used such a small space to create such a huge labyrinth."
Kenji and Misao both stared at him with question. Only Enishi seemed to know what he was talking about. The white-haired man snorted and said, "Glad you've got that all figured out." As if he had just noticed the trio for the first time, he looked at them seriously. "Where are the rest?" He demanded to know.
"Saitou and Soujirou have gone on ahead of us," Aoshi informed. "Kamatari and Chou are staying behind to bring the rest of the police reinforcements in. We have left them some signs to follow."
"And you would know this place well enough to leave signs, wouldn't you?" Enishi raised an eyebrow of incredulity.
"We have a map," Kenji stated.
Enishi stared at him.
"Well... a silver fox gave it to me, and so far it's been accurate, so..." For some reason, the boy suddenly felt like explaining himself, under Enishi's scrutiny. "Aah! Come on! Who cares where we got it from! It just /works, and that's it, okay! Stop staring at me like that!"
"Who the hell said I was going to ask you were you got the map from?" Enishi frowned. He stalked up to Kenji, and stared down at the slightly petrified boy. "...what are you doing here?" He pointed. "I remember I explicitly asked the old ego guy to keep you /away/ from this!"
"Never!" Kenji stomped his foot on the ground, hard. "Who do you think you are? You can't control my life like that! And it's not like Hiko-san's ever going to listen to /you/ anyway!"
Of course, that earned him a well-timed punch on the head from the straight-faced Enishi. Kenji fell face-first to the ground with an indignant squawk. He said nothing more.
"Let me see the map," Enishi held his hand out to Aoshi. Aoshi pointed at the ground, where Kenji was lying prostrate on. Enishi glanced once at the redhead, then swiftly bent down to rummage through his sleeves. The scroll was not difficult to find, since it itself was a rather bulky item. And since Kenji carried virtually nothing else anyway. Once he had relieved the boy of his burden, Enishi put the map on the ground, and unrolled it from end to end, with great force.
It was a rather long scroll, which measured nearly the length of a full grown man when completely laid flat on the ground as it was now. Enishi glanced once at the pictorial map, then moved immediately to the myriads of small Chinese scribbles that decorated a major half of the scroll. He looked upon it with deep concentration.
"I hadn't seen those small words in the scroll before," Kenji remarked, rubbing the sore bump on his forehead as he did. Aoshi frowned, realising that he, too, had not seen it when he was looking at the scroll earlier.
"You probably didn't," Enishi agreed, and for once, was not snide about his comrades' shortcomings. "It's protected by an adhesive that only comes off when you give it a decisive tug. Usually people don't go around tugging ancient looking scrolls like these."
By this time, Aoshi had stepped over and was looking at the badly scribbled, tightly packed words as well. "Shinomori, how many towers did you disable?" Enishi piped, when he had nearly reached the end of the document.
"One," Aoshi replied, still reading. "And Saitou, I believe, has destroyed another one."
"Lovely," Enishi stood, stretched and glanced around. "You left out three other towers."
"Three!" Kenji gasped. "That's impossible! The map only has two indicated on it!"
"I don't think you were looking at the map in its full application, Kenji," Misao mildly reminded. "There must be some mention of other things that wasn't drafted on the map in the hidden text."
"Which, unfortunately, you couldn't have made heads or tails of even if you had seen it anyway," Enishi smirked at him, while Kenji growled back.
"Well, what /does/ it say then, smart guy?" The boy pouted, one step short of sticking his tongue out at the infuriating man called Enishi.
"There are three more," it was Aoshi who next spoke. "They are layered against one another. We completely missed them. Two other rooms are are only accessible from the first layer of cannon rooms. The last room has to be accessed from somewhere else." He stood as well, and shot Enishi a glance, as if seeking his agreement on the matter.
Enishi simply nodded. He put a finger to his temple and counted something on his other hand, thumb against fingers. "Saitou probably doesn't know about this, so he won't be searching for the next layer. Someone else has to do it. If you take on all three towers as a group, you won't make it in time for sunset. You're going to have to split up and each of you take one tower."
"One person on an entire tower?" Kenji tried hard not to gawk.
"Got a problem, shrimp?" Enishi sneered.
"No!" Kenji blushed, and really stuck his tongue out at Enishi this time. In the midst of his embarrassment, his mind came to grind down on him about something. "Hey," he addressed Enishi in a calmer voice, "what about you? You're not coming along with one of us?"
Enishi shot him a strange glance. "I have some other business to attend to," he declared quietly. Walking towards a certain corner of the room, he began to examine the wall there with great interest. He did not explain his words.
"Come on, Kenji," Misao pat the boy on his shoulder, pulling his attention away from staring at Enishi. The redhead looked at his senior, who jerked a finger towards the exit. "We have to get going if we still want to see Kyoto tomorrow. Aoshi-sama has already sent a pigeon messenger to inform Jiiya, but I doubt he would be able to do anything about it in such little time, so," she pat him on the shoulder again, "it's our call entirely!"
Kenji glanced at the ground with a slight frown. Responsibility had never been his forte.
"We shall see you back at this room when we are done," Aoshi's authorative voice informed Enishi, and he turned to exit the room immediately, without seeing Enishi's gesture of acknowledgement. Slowly, but surely, the trio began to file out of the room, shuffling along reluctantly in spite of the situation. It was as if there was something more to be said in this situation - something that would at least bring a suitable closure to this particular episode of their chance meeting.
And yet nobody wanted to say anything.
Because they would be seeing each other again later.
Right?
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Soujirou breathed a small sigh of relief, when he noticed that Zheng had run out of bullets - again. He stopped batting flying metal away and landed on his feet lightly, watching with amusement as Zheng discarded the used weapon into a steadily increasing pile beside her. "Zheng-san, that is quite an awful waste of materials, don't you feel?" He pointed out nicely, but was reciprocated with a growl from the woman.
"Silence!" She was shrieking. Pulling out a weapon that was the length of her entire arm, she loaded the item and pulled its safety. Nearly half the weapons in the huge box had been depleted, yet none of the bullets had hit Soujirou, and she was growing frustrated and angry. The bullets, however, had found their ways out through the ceiling, walls, and ground, creating more than one hole in the enclosure, letting in sporadic streams of light which danced to every movement by the people in the room. "This one'll pound you into mincemeat for sure!"
"That's what you've been saying since ten weapons ago!" Soujirou lamented. Zheng's vein throbbed with rage. Oblivious, Soujirou continued, "You should really stop wasting materials like this! Have some pity for this nice room!"
"Shut up, impudent boy!" Zheng pulled the trigger on the massive weapon, and a huge bullet, the size of five fingers combined, shot out from the barrel, travelling near soundspeed directly towards Soujirou, who remained rooted on the spot, with no indication that he would be moving. Zheng's lips slowly curled up into a sadistic grin. No one could run from a bullet at such near range, no matter how fast that person was!
In the next instance, however, the bullet suddenly, miraculously vanished into thin air. Zheng blinked at the sight before her. She had not seen Soujirou do anything, nor did she see the huge bullet she had shot anywhere around. She glanced around, cold sweat breaking out of her forehead. She had a feeling she did not want to know.
And her feeling was right.
"Hmm..." Soujirou looked at the bullet he had managed, with his bare hands, to catch. "...it doesn't look all that fantastic at closer glance, huh? Just a piece of small metal that uses speed to injure. And it's not even sharp!" He tapped at the rounded tip of the shiny ammunition. "I really don't understand how you intend to take over the world with this. But, since I don't intend to take over the world or anything, I suppose I have no need to understand!" After chirping his final statement, he tossed the bullet behind his shoulder, and the item clattered harmlessly on the ground, sliding far away from him. He walked forward, towards Ming and Zheng, a smile firmly on his face.
"He is a monster!" Zheng muttered to herself in her native tongue, preparing to fire another shot at him, unwilling to believe that her weapon would fall so easily. It was only Ming's hand on hers that stopped her from taking any further action. "Ming!" She frowned at him. "We must take him out now or he will be very troublesome in the future!"
"I know," Ming whispered back. "But it's useless," he declared, "firing at him straight on will be useless. We will never hit him that way. Let me battle with him at close-distance. You should be able to find a chance to shoot him down from there!"
"You're planning something very bad for me there, aren't you?" Soujirou pouted, because he had not understood a single word his two opponents had spoken all the time. The duo continued speaking in quiet whispers to each other, so Soujirou sighed. "Well, if you're not attacking me anymore," he drew his sword back out from the sheath, which he had been using to bat bullets away all this while, "then I'll just have to start attacking you!"
The moment he vanished, Ming and Zheng immediately leapt away from their previous discussion spot - and just in time, too, for the entire area there exploded - with a sickening popping sound, into debris and cracked walls in the next split second.
Ming immediately dashed forward to catch Soujirou before he rebounded off. He had been assessing the situation since Zheng started firing the shots from just now, and was fairly confident that he had a good grasp now of what Soujirou's ability was. Although he could not see, his other senses were so heightened that he no longer needed sight to battle an opponent successfully. Soujirou's strength was in speed, he knew. If he could at least keep that particular quality at bay, all he had to worry about would be Soujirou's skill with the sword.
His first swing met thin air, as Soujirou had ran up the wall and subsequently against the ceiling. The wanderer stopped there, holding his sword against his body and using the roof and gravity to send himself downwards. With a sudden twist of his body, he almost cut Ming's left hand off - from shoulder down, had Ming not swing himself out of Soujirou's sword range in time.
The two warriors both landed back on the ground and took immediate steps backwards, each to decide what he would next do. Ming certainly took a longer time, for by his next shifting of weight, he could sense that Soujirou had vanished into some other worldly realm of speed again.
It was only the pre-emptive movement of wind that informed Ming where Soujirou would next strike. He brought his own weapon - yet another random sword on the wall - up and heard it clash against the sharp blade of Soujirou's. But Soujirou was not the type who would cringe swords with his enemy. Seeing that his attack had been neutralised, the boyish wanderer immediately leapt back into a speedy maneuver, thrusting his sword in from another angle; nearly impossible to block if Ming had not been a seasoned warrior himself hardened by years of first hand experience.
Their dance of attack and defence continued in a flurry of movement which Zheng admitted she could hardly keep up with. Having had her share of life-risking fights, she found this situation rather confounding. Time and again she took aim with her gun, but she could not find a spot that was opened enough to sidle a bullet attack in. She tried to calm down, but her inability was getting to her. She shook her head, trying to concentrate. It was do or die.
In the next few moments, however, several rather interesting things happened.
Ming stopped defending all of a sudden, surprising even Soujirou, who swerved instinctively, just in time to miss sliding his sword right through the mafia boss' heart. As a result, the blade went cleanly through the man's left shoulder, and Soujirou was thrown off guard for a split second at this sudden development.
At this point of time, Ming shouted something at Zheng, and Zheng had not needed to be told twice.
She pulled the trigger on her gun. A loud shot resounded in the ears of everyone present.
Including Enishi, who had just walked into the room via the secret tunnel Ming and Zheng had been using just now.
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... to be continued
23/3/05
tougenkyou . net / xd
a/n
the ancient chinese war chronicles document certain war formations that
troops employ in battle against the enemy. these formations seemingly
bend time and space to their will, but are actually just cleverly set
up optical illusions. for example, they could make people feel like
they are moving uphill when in fact they are moving downhill by
manipulating the water stream and certain landmarks.
imagine! you're moving uphill and the water is streaming uphill along with you! the tricks they use mainly play with the enemy's mind, often causing them to become too tired or dispirited to fight. of course, whether or not these war formations really existed or not is certainly a point of debate. but hey, all for the sake of dramatics! not like anyone ever complains whenever soujirou breaks the speed of sound anyway, right? XD