Scroll Eight
Kanami, the demon who is not
Sesshomaru continued his graceful flight over the rooftops, searching for some indication as to where his quarry was as he leapt with only the lightest touches of his feet coming into contact with the rooftops. He had traversed the entire city in this manner; leaping across the great chasms between the structures with the ease and grace of a great cat, so that he seemed to be some sort of ethereal white bird flying high above the city.
He began to wonder if there was any end to the city, until he came to a place were the great glass towers ended, descending gradually onto lesser buildings. These structures were still great to his eyes, but nonetheless, they were smaller than the towering spires at the center of the city.
His gradual descent brought into view the water of the bay, great ships rested upon waters that sparkled in the sunlight, but were polluted with the filth of humans. Had he been a more elemental minded creature this sight would have saddened him, but as it was it merely disgusted him.
He realized that the price of greatness was high, and humans had had to pay doubly much to attain it, for why else would a sentient species-or even a semi sentient species such as humans were, pollute their water?
These questions were pushed from his mind when he felt a tingle on the edge of his periphery senses; a sharp spiky smell of wrongness. This was the only warning he had before something slammed into him, knocking him from his flight and smashing him through the skylight of the building below him.
The shattering glass seemed to fall slowly as he was smashed forcibly to the ground. All around him the air seemed to blossom with the sharp rapport of human weapons, fire exploding from the barrels, pushing projectiles through the air with their force.
He leapt to the air just before the strange bullets converged on the spot he had been. A bright beam of energy unfolded from his claws as he sought to defend himself from the twenty or so foolish humans who thought to injure him.
Their attempts would have been laughable if not for the speed at which the bullets were firing. His whip curled through the air in a deadly flower of his own, silencing the threatening weapons by killing the users, but not before a few inevitably found their mark in his flesh. The wounds were not serious he knew, but they stung enough for a Samiyosho.
He touched the ground as the glass finished falling, shards glinting maliciously in the light as they shattered upon the floor. Already the ground was flooding with so much blood that he thought perhaps it might stain his shoes.
He was silently congratulating himself on a job well done when the crunching sound of the glass behind him gave him the warning that the wrongness was approaching again. He turned around confidently, sure that he could dispatch the approaching entity with ease; it had some power, but not nearly enough to challenge him.
What he beheld was almost laughable in its pretentious demeanor; a slight woman, smaller even than Nirakumi, no more than a girl really, stood in the pooling blood, wearing a light blue dress. She was holding her back in a rigid posture that would suggest importance, but with her chin tilted downward and to the side so that she was looking up at him through her ragged dark hair with a grin of insanity upon her face.
And then the exact same woman stepped out of the shadows to his left, and then another. They came out of the shrouded shadows of the ruined courtyard, stepping one by one into the shaft of light pouring down from the ruined sky light. As each of them approached their power grew exponentially until he was surrounded by seven identically tilted crazed grins. He began to worry slightly; their power together was much greater than he had anticipated.
"Tarumoto sends his greetings, assassin." They all spoke in unison.
Sesshomaru narrowed his eyes, regarding them with an inscrutable expression; he did not give a damn as to who this Tarumoto was or whether he thought that Sesshomaru was an assassin, but this was the first creature he had encountered that resembled a demon, and he wanted a few questions answered.
"What are you, creature?" he said
"I am Kanami." They said, again speaking in unison.
"A single entity?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Immortality and power are hard to come by together." Their voices meshed to form strange sibilant tones.
"I see. You could not have too much power or your body would burn out." So she was not a true demon, but something unnatural. She may have been a lesser spirit at some point, but no longer, she had twisted herself into something else.
"Yes, growing new ones to hold new powers can be very convenient." They replied flippantly. Sesshomaru brushed aside this comment, focusing on the information that he wanted
"Were are the Youkai of this time?" he asked, deciding that he could risk letting slip that bit information about his time travel, as Kanami would be too dead to tell anyone after he left here. Kanami, however merely looked confused, all of them blinking in baffled unison.
"Youkai?"
Sesshomaru's face took on a speculative look. A demon who did not know what she was? It was an interesting prospect.
But he was not allowed to explore the subject further, as Kanami had finally grown tired of being confused by her target. She wanted to see blood
Suddenly the room seemed to shift, as if the walls were melting. Sesshomaru needed no further provocation to attack; he lashed out in a great arc with his energy lash, slicing the one in front of him neatly lengthwise; the corpse slowly peeled apart, the two halves falling to the ground in opposite directions. As the whip cracked back on the rebound he felt the one directly behind him fall. Around him the rest of them were already moving, but each of them seemed to stagger as the one behind him fell.
Though Sesshomaru would not realize it till much later, his course of action had been the best one he could have taken; because they were identical, seven bodies shared one mind as network. And like all networks, there is always a central hub, the head of which was now rolling on the ground some ten feet away from its body. This afforded him much, as even though Sesshomaru is quite probably one of the most powerful demon lords in history, his strength would have been no match for the coordinated attacks of Kanami, each of whose bodies possessed a different talent.
The world seemed to right itself and Sesshomaru experienced no more mind altering effects after the fall of the first one, but he did not notice this pleasant detail; he had more pressing things to worry about.
Stray objects around the courtyard began to quiver with a life not of their own, rocks, garbage, concrete slabs, and most noticeably the dead bodies of the human gunmen danced through the air, forming a whirling and macabre dance of the dead. The Kanami to his left began closing in, apparently attempting to fight him hand to hand, and the one to his right made a motion with her hands, and he recognized the beginnings of a magical attack.
Knowing that the best way to win a fight was to silence the magic user, he ignored the one closing in and lashed out at the one who was performing the spell, trying to slice her body in a diagonal fashion, but she put a shield up just barely in time, deflecting the blow onto the one next to her, who shrieked as the front of her chest and most of her abdomen slid to the ground, revealing her still beating heart. The objects and bodies floating in the air fell to the ground along with her intestines, and her heart stilled.
The chi attacker still lived though, and this was his biggest problem, he had lost his chance to take the offensive; the Kanami to the left had come in to close to allow him to use the energy whip to any effect, and the one to his right was still hanging back so he couldn't get at her; she was preparing to use her spells.
The two in front of him were not his only concern however, as one of the two remaining behind him began to move as well. The one behind him to his left began to move so fast that she was a blur even to his demon eyesight. The only thing he could do was twist slightly so that the dagger meant for his throat met his shoulder instead, then she was past him and moving around the room so fast that he lost track of her as the Kanami in front of him began raining kicks and punches at him.
He blocked or dodged them easily; backing up lightly and channeling her attacks past him so that she was often overbalanced. Despite this however, she corrected her balance so quickly that he had no chance to take advantage of these openings. Sesshomaru focused on her, hoping to take care of her quickly so that he could get the Kanami with the chi powers before she got him.
With her right leg the Kanami before him aimed a whirling back kick at his head, which was an impressive move for someone of her stature. He blocked with his hand, grasping her ankle and trying to wrench her off balance. She twirled in the air, and her other leg swung over his head, ruffling his hair, and down around behind him, to land a light blow on his calf. Her foot twisted out of his grip, and she did a small cartwheel to regain her footing. She came up just in time to block his claws with her left hand, which were snaking in to tear out her throat. With her other hand she punched at his torso. He used his speed to step to one side, using her momentum against her and helping her along past him. As he reached in to rip her spine out, she twisted around in mid stride, twirling into his attack so that her back was right up against him, inside the reach of his arm. She drove her elbow into his stomach, only to meet thin air as he side stepped her again.
They continued in this fashion for a bit longer, moving about the courtyard in a flurry of movement, while the chi user continued to charge power for her attack, and the third one blurred around the room, looking for an opening to cut him again. Curiously the fourth one made no move to attack him. It watched him with oddly feral eyes; not just insane, but wild, like a rabid dog.
This struck him as so odd that he was distracted for a moment, and in that moment of distraction, the one with the daggers saw her opening.
In a lightning quick blur she was behind him, stabbing with the dagger several times in the span of two seconds. He turned furiously and backhanded her across the courtyard; she flew back, tumbling across the floor and into the one with the feral eyes, were they both lay stunned and did not get up again.
The one fighting him hand to hand used this opportunity to land a crushing blow on his left collar bone, which snapped in two places. At the same time Sesshomaru used her over extension and force from the punch to spin himself back around to find her unguarded heart with his claws.
She gasped in shock as he ripped her rib cage open, spraying blood across the courtyard and flinging her punctured heart to rest somewhere in the shadows. She crumpled slowly to the ground, a few drops of red clinging to her deathly pale face even as her life force flowed into a dark puddle around her. She died kneeling in her own blood, hands splayed out before her as if in a gesture of supplication.
Then he turned to the last one standing, the chi user. Time seemed to slow. Even as he was upon her, ripping her throat out, she released her final spell of devastation.
Blue light exploded outward in lancing beams of energy, the pinpoint needles of chi power ripping through his flesh.
Sesshomaru's world dissolved into blinding agony, and then nothing, not even the beating of his own heart.
The end
Mwahahahahahahaha, mwahahahah! Mwahah- hakhak- choke- wheeze
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just joking
What will become of our not so heroic hero now?
Who will come to his aid?
Will it be Rin, the little girl with the short attention span?
Or will it be the creepy mafia broad, Donya Alexander?
And will Nirakumi ever come back from a galaxy far, far away?
One can only hope not.
AN: a character reference for Kanami, she looks like the actress who plays 'Boomer' in the new Battlestar Galactica. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to get into a fight with her, much less seven of her.
as you can see, since chapter five I have chosen to change the narrative style, and the story is flowing much more smoothly now, though still not as quick as I'd like. I like this style much better, so I will not be switching back, you will not have to worry about any further confusing switches of that variety.
Additionally I am now resigned to the fact that this story has grown exponentially larger in content than my original idea. Did you know that at first this was going to be a three chapter story? At this rate I'll be lucky to get away with under twenty, and that's if I don't add any further plot twists than I already have planned. At the rate I write new chapters I won't be done for a long time.
Oh well, this story is one of the fist I ever started, and it's still going, so I feel a bit proud that I've stuck with it for so long.
Any way I have several reasons that the updates take so long:
1. I rarely have time to write, and when I do I often try to concentrate on my actual book.
2. I have limited access to the internet.
3. I'm a lazy bum
I know it's obscene, but there you have it, my life in a nutshell.
Thank you to Racheal for you kind review, I know that you can just come over and tell me what you think of my stories, but it's much more fun to get a review.
To Anna's pastime; I really hope you enjoyed this chapter, the yakuza did go after him, and the scene that ensued was my first real attempt at I fight scene, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but on the downside, I felt that I finally had to update the rating to M because the blood was starting to spill over the top.
To anyone else who was kind enough to review: here's to you kids, another chapter.