"Rei, what's gotten into you?"
The nearly rabid warrior was still not in the mood for speech yet, and truly Pluto was the only one who was capable of words. Amy was completely speechless, and Usagi, well, Usagi's panicked screams racked the room, and rendered Usagi herself pretty much helpless. Thankfully, Rei's gun had flown off somewhere as a result of one of Ami's perfectly timed, if not devastatingly powerful kicks. The rest of the events followed a pattern. Pluto guarding Usagi, while Ami tried to incapacitate the attacker, who would break through both women's attempts and nearly deliver a fatal blow before being dragged back where the sequence would start again.
But inevitable, they were all getting tired. The movements slowed and pauses of heavy breathing occurred occasionally as the fighting lapse. Pluto attempted to get something out of their berserk friend once again.
"Mars! What the hell is wrong with you!"
Still no answer. Neither of the two wanted to do anything that would seriously injure her, but their attempts to simply restrain her had been essentially useless. Unless someone did something, or they got some serious reinforcement, this whole event would end badly, for someone at least.
Meanwhile, the real Rei, accompanied by her perfect soldier, was exploring the hallways, searching desperately for the source of the screams that they could now clearly hear. "Good god, Hiiro, why did you build this place like a labyrinth?"
"Easier to catch intruders."
"How is being lost helping you catch intruders?"
"We're not lost."
Rei screamed in frustration.
Suddenly, Hiiro caught her arm.
"Wait. This way."
Rei was willing to be dragged, but still rather puzzled.
"Hiiro, where are you going?"
"I can feel something in my mind, like fear, panic. It's this way.
She was at first skeptical, but then remembered she was certainly in no position to reject notions of extrasensory perceptions. They were about as likely to find Usagi in this direction than any other. And Hiiro proved to be correct, by coincidence if nothing else, Rei mused as Usagi's telltale screams became louder and louder, a bad violin concerto, accompanied by the percussion of the signature bangs and impacts of a fight. For the last stretch, Rei dodged in front of Hiiro, picking up the pace and quickly turning into the last room at the corridor. She assessed, and oversimplified, the delicate situation, and landed an elbow in the spine of Usagi's attacker, knocking the woman to the floor. However, the figure, now obviously a doppelganger, retaliated quickly and violently, flipping Rei over to the floor herself, and confronting her with, well, herself. A strange prospect for anyone to face. Fortunately, for Rei there was no moral dilemma or paradox to puzzle over. This was an imposter, no one important, and her job was to destroy anyone who threatened Usagi. This made recovery from her initial shock expedient, and she threw her whole body into a roll, which dislodged her opponent, and set both of them up in standing positions. Rei knew that she had about as much strength and speed as her build would allow for, which wasn't all that great, but in an appropriate ration. This creature couldn't be built much stronger, and besides, Rei was fresh, while she knew it had been battling for quite some time. While it charged her, she quickly maneuvered around its back, and met it with a volley of kicks when it spun around. She thought she was still getting in before it had time to recover, but she was proved wrong as the thing grabbed her leg, throwing her to the other side of the room where she managed to recover enough to utilize her energy to rebound back within striking distance. She knew she wanted her next move to test the thing's capability for magic, and if it was zero, hopefully destroy it for good. She darted up close, without any hint of any sensible move coming up. Somehow, she managed to lightly place her hand on its stomach, and it only managed a few puzzled hits on her highly unguarded body before drowning in a deluge of fire. In a few moments, nothing was left but the nasty flakes that all those monsters had eventually turned to.
Rei sighed, taking Hiiro's outstretched hand. She understood why she hadn't had assistance. In such close proximity, and dressed so similarly. it would've been easy to attack the wrong one. The copy had been a good one.
Finally, Amy broke the silence, wryly, "I guess that answers which one was real. Nothing human burns that fast, even in Mars' flame. And real flesh smells a lot worse too."
Demantoid pounded on the wall in temporary fury, soon recovering, and smoothing back his dark hair, hoping no one had seen his loss of control. Unfortunately, a smooth, lyrical voice from behind him proved differently
"You know what you did wrong, don't you?"
"Shut up, Agate"
"If you build something off a model, you can't hope to make the copy better than the original. And because of your choice of models, yours turned out rather a failure."
"What was wrong with my choice of models? I wanted confusion. The firemaid was the strongest threat I could see at the time."
"You could have sent some other avatar, or senshi, or whatever they call themselves - you're well enough acquainted with the planes, and they might've been even more confused if that was the only one they knew. Mars' is not the strongest, or the fastest. You couldn't endow your creation with the same power as hers. Her build isn't for dark magic, but neither could you use pure magic. It was a bad choice, my friend, a bad choice."
A/N: Ok. So my ending was a little weird, but at least it didn't end in the middle of a chapter. I tried not to be too confusing, but if you didn't understand, the outline that Demantoid was creating in some previous chapter, eventually became the demon that looked like Rei, who then attacked, Rei comes to the rescue again. but I'll foreshadow a little R/H angst here, because, really, we couldn't let them be too happy, now could we?
more specifically, I guess I'm sorry I didn't make the plot run a little deeper, I've just been working on one or two chapter surface plots for awhile, and its just habit. I will get some more direction soon, I promise. At least by chapter 16 or 17, I hope. Also Mina can't really appear for quite awhile due to certain unknown reasons (well, unknown to you at least, although you might guess) but until all the senshi show up, they won't have much action, and I'm just better at writing Rei.I've never really thought about the other characters enough to give them any 3dness. (er.I guess the correct term is three-dimensionality?) anyways.ja! Fira X. Khushrenada.