Disclaimer: I do not own Ranma ½™ or Sacrifice™ or any related characters, terms or concepts.
Author's Notes: Okay, so that's 20 chapters of decent quality. Here's hoping that winning streak doesn't desert me now!
Part 20: Final Facedown, Part 2
Any doubts that Ranma could direct them to the hiding place of this "Ragman" had vanished by the time they first encountered a band of the now-familiar monsters Ranma dubbed Plague-Spawn. Several more bands of monsters slain later, and they stood in front of the location where Ranma swore that the Ragman was hidden; a small and very ramshackle fortress. Lina heaved a melodramatic sigh.
"You'd think a guy like this would have a better lair."
"Appearances can be deceiving."
Ranma sounded oddly distracted, and when Lina turned to face she saw he looked distracted too, though he was also twitching and… it might just have been a trick of the light playing on the eye-lenses of that mask he was wearing, but were his eyes turning red?
Though she would never know it, Ranma was distracted; by one of the nastier aspects of Otherworld Magedom, a little mental itch charmingly and aptly referred to as the Red Rage. It cause was unknown, though there were many theories, but its symptoms and effect were uniform and unmistakable. It was essentially a magically charged killing frenzy, a berserker state in which the unfortunate mage found their powers greatly augmented but also found themselves consumed with the urge to use that power to destroy anything and everything around themselves. Mages in the grip of the Red Rage could devastate armies… or annihilate their own forces with equal glee.
For some reason, Ranma was somewhat prone to the Red Rage; Yuki and Yiku had theorized it was due to the urge to seek out worthy opponents (which was the reason he could never refuse a challenge) that his ham-fisted father had crudely imprinted upon his subconscious. Luckily, all Elementalists received special training to help them learn to control dull, even nullify, their emotions. The "official" reasoning for this deliberate emotional stunting was that it made them more like their patron deity, favouring logic over instinct. The unspoken truth was that it also made them better at resisting the Red Rage's overtures.
If not for this, than Ranma's companions might have received a very nasty surprise indeed. Taking a slow breath, he forced the seething tides of fury, bloodlust and spite down into the core of his mind, mentally imprisoning them beneath several feet of ice. The Red Rage boiled with fury, but the mental block held and it calmed, waiting for either Ranma's conscious decision to unleash it or to dwindle to nothing. Ranma's eyes reverted to their normal blue colour as he gave Lina a reassuring grin, forgetting for the moment that she couldn't see it.
"Sorry, my mind was wandering. Now then, we need to stick together; we don't know how long the Ragman's been here and thus how many minions he has at his command. Remember; keep them at a distance if you can, and if you wound them don't let them hurt you."
"Isn't the object normally to avoid being wounded at all?"
Remarked Xellos in a dry, sarcastic tone. Ranma turned to him and smirked, though they couldn't see it, as he replied.
"Necromancer creatures are vampiric healers; they can restore their own health by injuring others. They generally aren't much from a distance, but let them get close and they'll laugh off every blow you land, right before they rip your face off and eat it."
Xellos said nothing in reply; simply returning to the state of silence he'd been in ever since Ranma had browbeaten him into accompanying them. If he had been human, he could have been considered to be sulking. The human (relatively speaking) members of the group simply ignored him as Ranma cautiously opened the door into the fort. Inside, they understood what Ranma had said about appearances being deceiving. This chamber alone was perhaps twice the size of the Saillune throne room and carved from black marble, whereas the outside had been small, shabby, and made from wood. Lina silently walked outside to observe the fort, then came back in.
"Okay, what is going on?"
"The Citadel of Night and Bones. A very impressive, very difficult spell that creates a personal pocket plan, accessible only by either the caster, his minions or those who posses the creator's Icorn. Step carefully here; you don't want to know what sort of traps he could have lying around here."
Ranma's point was punctated by a massive stone block descending from the ceiling to seal off the entrance. Ranma simply stood back and watched as the Slayers frantically tried to break out, neither Ryoga's Bakusai Tenketsu nor Filia's massive strength leaving so much as a scratch on the surface. He sighed as they persisted in struggling futilely for several minutes.
"Forget it; these walls are made of magic, not stone. Only something like, say, Lina's Giga Slave could destroy them. The only way out of here is to defeat the Ragman. Come on."
Slowly, reluctantly, they followed Ranma's lead. They had anticipated needing to use Light spells, but the place came with its own forms of illumination; numerous braziers and "shelves", carved to resemble a variety of grotesque faces and figures, stood everywhere, each filled with a flickering flame of an unusual colour. As they walked through the chamber and into the hallways beyond, Lina noticed flames that were sickly green, bright purple, jet-black, tarnished silver, blue-tinted white (or was it white-tinted blue?) and a weird black-tinted deep red that was disturbingly reminiscent of blood.
She couldn't help the feeling that they didn't really illuminate the darkness so much as distinguish it from what was in it. As they went down one turn and up another, entering a room full of very… 'graphic' 3d carvings, Ryoga started getting frustrated.
"How long are we going to tramp through this lousy labyrinth? Where are we?"
He pounded on a carving in frustration, at which the wall suddenly spun around, snatching Ryoga up like a set of diabolic jaws and cutting him off from the others, who rushed to the spot where he had been.
"Ryoga! Hey, are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm fine! I can't seem to make this thing work backwards though."
"Us neither, is there a passageway there?"
"Uh… yeah."
"Then you'll have to follow it, try and find your way back to the main hall."
"Are you out of your mind? With my sense of direction?"
"You don't have any other choices, now do you? We'll continue after the Ragman."
They could hear Ryoga muttering to himself before he walked away down the passage. Silently agreeing as a group to avoid touching anything else, they continued their journey. They blinked when they realised they had entered a deformed cul-de-sac, instantly going for their appropriate weapons as the faint sounds they had learned to associate with the monsters they had come face began trickling into the room. Ranma slowly spun around and began backing towards one of the alcoves in the walls. No sooner had he placed his back against it than the ceiling suddenly dropped on him, landing with a dull boom that instantly brought the Slayers' attention to it.
"I should have seen that coming. I must be getting slow."
Ranma muttered to himself; though it had appeared he had been crushed, in actual fact the only part of the ceiling that had dropped was a stone wall, serving to plug up the alcove. At the same time, the section of wall he had his back too had risen upwards revealing a new passageway. He came out of his observations to realise the Slayers were calling out to him. He shouted back at them.
"I'm fine, but look's like I'm cut off from the party too. Wait, there's a switch here. Back away; I'm going to press it."
Ranma pulled on the lever and was rewarded with the sound of grinding stone, though the wall blocking him off didn't move. Lina called to him, saying something about a passageway opening up in their chamber, but Ranma wasn't listening. He was too busy listening to the approaching sounds of monsters. As he settled in a fighting stance, the first of them began to appear, a wave of Scythes, who he knew would be especially deadly in this enclosed environment. He smirked; trapped alone in the dark with hordes of enemies and no innocent bystanders? This was going to be fun… Inside Ranma's mind, the mental block exploded…
Lina had been calling to Ranma, but backed off at the sounds that began coming through the wall; explosions, screams, bones splintering, the crackling buzz of electricity and other sounds that she couldn't identify and frankly didn't want to. She turned to the other Slayers who, without a word on her part, nodded and followed her down the passageway that had opened up. Ranma didn't need any of their protection. After several minutes of walking, the passage flared out into a wide, column-filled room. It was the prefect place for an ambush, as Lina soon realised.
A drop of warm, slimy liquid dripped down onto her face. Lina wiped it away with her fingers before looking up where it had come from. Clinging to the ceiling, drool running from its eagerly curled lips, a painfully gaunt figure with long, taloned fingers and vicious fangs shrieked back at her before launching itself to the ground below, more of its ilk swarming from behind the columns.
"Ambush!"
That was all Lina had the time to say, and it was all she needed to say as the Slayers, already tense and battle-prepped, met the incoming rush of enemies. Zelgadis hacked the head from one of the clawed fiends, but another used his momentary distraction to close and deliver a vertical-sweeping blow that would, had Zelgadis been an ordinary man, first torn his face from his skull and then opened him up like a gutted fish. As it was, Zelgadis managed to shut his eyelids in time to keep his opponent from gouging out the vulnerable orbs, leaving the beast's claws to scrape harmlessly over his stone skin. Zelgadis' riposte opened a gash in the beast's sides through which its entrails spilt onto the floor, leaving it tangled in a bloody skirt as it tried to retaliate in kind.
Behind him, Amelia was truly beginning to appreciate Ranma's gift to her. The Blood of the Gloomfrost felt as light as a feather in her hands, yet the way flesh touched by it was mashed into a squamous pulp and the way bones splintered like cheap glass ornaments in its wake clearly indicated the sheer weight of its blows. Though she had never actually wielded a weapon like this before, it seemed to fit into her grasp as though it had been born there.
Dispatching his opponents, Zelgadis noticed that another of the monsters was creeping up behind Amelia. He started to shout a warning, but Amelia whipped the hammer over the back of her head and crushed the creature's skull to pulp. Zelgadis fought back the urge to sigh as Amelia grinned in triumph and gave him a "V-Sign" before the two of them returned to the fight.
Though hesitant to use a Fireball in this enclosed environment, Lina had no problems with using her Flare Arrows to riddle her enemies with holes. They screamed, a sound that embodied pleasure and joy as much as it did pain and rage, and kept on coming despite the volley, though some inevitably dropped to the ground and were crushed by their uncaring companions. Gourry, whose enchanted sword augmented its keen edge with flesh-melting surges of electricity, quickly cut down those who made it through Lina's spells.
The ambush was over as quickly as it had started; the Slayers were left surrounded by piles of corpses. Lina looked around for any signs of life or further ambush, and then signalled the other Slayers to follow her. They knew there would be more ambushes like this to follow, but they couldn't let that stop them; they had to face down the Ragman.
It was several hours later, as far as the Slayers knew. It felt like several days, what with all the fighting they'd been doing. Even now, they were engaged in mortal combat with yet another brood of monstrosities spawned by their as-yet unseen foe. These were a slightly different form to the various beasts and freaks they'd already fought, standing about ten feet high and with physiques that reminded Lina and Gourry of the "Fighting Dragon's Blood Macho Men". If those bandits had dagger-like fangs, claws like meat-hooks and were in the habit of going around devoid of both clothing and skin anyway.
Instead of fighting until they were all dead however, in this case one of the few survivors pulled a lever that opened the floor beneath the Slayers, sending them hurtling down into darkness before the floor slammed shut again. Fortunately for the Slayers, the sixty or so foot drop wasn't enough to kill them. Instead, they landed, rather painfully, in a dark and unpleasantly wet chamber, Zelgadis in particular landing with a sort of squelching splash, where they were immediately assaulted by an indescribably foul odour. Even through their protective masks, the stench was hard to bear. Lina swallowed the urge to gag.
"By the gods, what is that smell?"
Instinctively she cast a Light spell, only to immediately wish she hadn't. The source of the stench was revealed to be an incalculable amount of filth, rot and decay, spread throughout the entire room. The floor was covered in a noisome carpet of filth and muck; the walls were adorned with partially defleshed skulls and other bodyparts, cemented in place by their advanced state of decay, and numerous deep pits, filled to the brim with rot, were scattered all around, with maggots squirming in an almost solid layer, several inches thick in some places, across everything. It was into one of the pits of maggots and muck that Zelgadis had fallen, and Lina didn't need to be able to see his face to see his expression at discovering he was up to his chin in putrescence.
Slowly and deliberately, he pulled himself from out of the mass of filth, frantically brushing off any clinging maggots the moment he was back on "firm" ground. The Slayers tensed at a sudden loud squelching noise. Beneath the light of Lina's spells, the uncountable masses of maggots began to pour and ooze across the ground, swarming down the walls and out from the pits to coalesce into a giant, quasi-humanoid mass before them, towering up towards the ceiling. It raised its gangly, malformed limbs threateningly and voiced a gurgling roar before taking a squelching, shambling step forward.
"Ew."
The Slayers started at that sudden pronouncement; not because they disagreed with the sentiment but because of who had voiced it. Xellos looked at the monstrosity with one eye open, his face twisted from his normal eternal grin into an almost human expression of disgust. The Slayers shook off their bewilderment and went into fighting stances, readying themselves for the onslaught of a creature that would still be deadly even if it were only half as dangerous as it was disgusting. Lina shook her head as she began casting a Fireball.
"I wonder if Ranma's having a better time of this?"
Ranma, as it would transpire, was currently completely in the throes of the Red Rage, and having a simply wonderful time as he butchered and slaughtered his way through the citadel's barracks'. Once he'd been cut off from the Slayers he'd unleashed the Red Rage that had kindled within him when they'd approached the fortress, using the last of his conscious mind to direct himself towards the greatest concentration of life-force energy. Had anyone the mind to, Ranma's trail through the citadel could easily be back-tracked by the vast pools of blood, mounds of ash and charred and/or mutilated corpses left in his wake. His face split into a feral grin at the sight of more victims approaching.
The first of the approaching creatures, a Netherfiend, fell in less than a heartbeat, impaled from the inside out with numerous jagged shards of ice. A Tatterdemalion, a demon similar to a Netherfiend but scrawny instead of bulky and with its stomach area consisting of a nest of thorny, fang-mouthed intestine-tentacles that dripped copious amounts of corrosive venom, charged towards Ranma, only for a massive pillar of lightning to crash down upon it from the ceiling, leaving behind nothing but a scorch mark upon the floor. Ranma howled in dark exultation, like a destructive force of nature that relished the suffering it inflicted.
Subsequent attackers were met with a Razor Vortex, a horizontal whirlwind of blade-like winds that sliced those caught within their ungentle grasp to ribbons, being a lower-level ancestor of the Gore Storm spell. A Wind Slice spell produced a semi-transparent blade of magical energy that ricocheted from wall to wall, slicing off anything in its path so that it left the floor in its wake littered with severed limbs and heads. An Ice Spike spell impaled enemies from below with icy stalagmites, whilst a Storm Fury Blast merged gale-force winds and savage lightning bolts into a single devastating beam of energy that annihilated everything before Ranma.
Charged with the fury of the Red Rage, Ranma felt not even the slightest hint of fatigue from casting so many powerful spells in such rapid concession. He licked a trickle of blood –his or an enemy's, he couldn't say- from the corner of his mouth and set off at full speed down the corridor. The appearance of a set of massive, ornately carved doors, guarded by a pair of Styx, deepened his smile. Casting a Speed-Up and an Ice Talons spell he shot towards the doomed guards, who barely had time to aim their weapon-limbs at him before he had literally torn them in half.
With a dramatic gesture he smashed the doors open with such force they were almost torn from their hinges. At the sight of the occupants of the chamber; the last two of the Mazoku who had struck him down at Delasoa, his rational mind shared a surge of savage glee to match that of the Red Rage. He roared with the fury of a tornado and hurtled towards them, both his rational mind and his raging mind equal in their desire for vengeance.
"Yuck. I sure hope this comes out in the wash."
"Why would you even want to keep that clothing? You might get rid of the stain, but the memory lingers. I intend to burn this the moment I get a chance to do so."
"I gotta agree. I mean, that was one seriously gross monster; a giant man made out of maggots? Ick, that's really all I can say. Say, anyone have any ideas where we are?"
"Beats me; I lost track somewhere back around when we got attacked by those giant cockroaches from hell, or was it the mutant spiders? Either way, I can't remember. I wonder if we're ever going to find this Ragman character."
"Seek and you shall find human."
A stereotypical "Mad Dark Lord™" laugh suddenly echoed through the chamber the Slayers had entered, prompting Filia to frown and then tap Xellos "gently" over the head with her mace.
"That wasn't funny namagomi."
Xellos turned to her with a hurt look.
"For your information, that wasn't me. I happen to have a much more sophisticated sense of humour."
Any retorts Filia or the other Slayers may have had were cut off by a crackling globe of darkness that hurtled from out of the shadows to impact and detonate amongst them, hurling them across the floor as the laugh sounded again. Tired though they were, the Slayers took up their now intimately familiar fighting positions.
"Who did that? Who are you?"
"Why, child, I am he who thou seek. I am the Ragman, the Lord of Terror, soon to be absolute ruler supreme of this entire wretched dimension! And you are none other than the legendary Lina Inverse. Before I destroy you, I must offer you my thanks in return for allowing me access to this marvellous world of yours."
"What are you talking about? I cast no spells that should have contacted the Hidden Lands, and why didn't you start this goal of yours there?"
"Hidden Lands? What are you talking about? I come from Otherworld, an entirely different universe to this one altogether."
"Huh?"
"How should I put this? Reality is like an infinitely vast ocean, with an infinite number of tiny islands scattered across its surface. Each island is in fact a universe. Your universe, consisting of the Sea of Chaos and the Four Worlds that rise from its depths, is one such island, whilst I came from another."
"Ranma told us nothing like that; he said you all came from a place on this world, cut off from outsiders by powerful spells!"
"Then he was obviously lying to you. If 'Ranma' is the name of that young Stormlord that accompanies you, than he too is a student of Otherworld. In fact, judging by the strange appearance of both himself and his witless slave, I'd say they come from a different universe to Otherworld as well."
"What? Why would he lie to us?"
"Who knows? For that matter, who cares? You won't live long enough for it to matter."
Lina was really getting sick of the way these villains always had to gloat so long about everything.
"You talk big, but let's see how you stack up to your boasts in person!"
That laugh echoed again and the Slayers tensed as they saw something moving in the shadows, the doors behind them slamming shut.
"Face you? Personally? Why not; how better to test my new powers than by annihilating the most powerful warriors of this world!"
"Hold on!"
"What? First you challenge me, then you beg for mercy? And I haven't even revealed myself yet!"
"Who's going to beg who for mercy? I just want you to explain what the hell is going on!"
The unseen shape in the shadows shifted restlessly and then heaved a long sigh.
"Very well, if I must. As you were probably aware, I was slain at the battle for Karn many millennia ago. Though it should have been True Death, my spirit was too powerful and I had made too many pacts with forces beyond your comprehension to slip quietly into that long night. Instead of experiencing oblivion, my physical form was utterly shattered, casting my screaming spirit into the void between dimensions. I was ruined, my powers torn from the very essence of my being. I was less than the meanest ghost, but yet, I lived. Travelling blindly through the rifts between dimensions, I was drawn to one in particular. Your dimension."
The shadows swirled around their bodies as the Ragman's voice took on the distracted tone of someone deep in contemplation.
"I have watched your world for several centuries now, though I could never muster the strength to break free from the Astral Void and enter it for myself. But that changed, thanks to you, Lina Inverse."
"What do you mean, thanks to me?"
"When you destroyed the Darkstar-Valgaav conglomerate, you unleashed an incredible amount of raw, demonic essence. Essence which I absorbed to revitalise myself and which I used, in conjunction with the planar rift created by Darkstar, to enter your world at last. For a time, I drifted across the world, still bereft of physical form. I contemplated approaching the Mazoku, to offer them my allegiance as I had done with countless other forms of demon in the past. But I rejected that consideration after a week or two."
"Why?"
Xellos sounded somewhat offended, but that was nothing compared to his reaction to the Ragman's next, casually spoken sentence, which left him gobsmacked and Filia struggling to hold in a grin.
"Because Mazoku are idiots, that's why. They claim to desire chaos, but what they seek to achieve is nothing less than oblivion. And that is not chaos."
"Yes it is!"
Said Xellos and Filia as one, the former in a rather petulant tone, the latter in a disbelieving one.
"No, it is not. Destruction is chaos, yes, but oblivion is cold, endless stagnation. Nothing changes, nothing moves; all is empty; all is dust. Oblivion is nothing less than order in its darkest form. Chaos is conflict, change and strife, destruction and creation in equal measures. I would never seek to destroy a world."
"Than what do you seek?"
"Isn't it obvious? I seek to rule it. Through methods long and bloody, I expanded my magical might, though physicality always eluded me, and began my experiments in creating a new breed of Mazoku, a race of Demons to replace the old and foolish breed who threaten the integrity of this world. This culminated in my creation of Valmont, Geist, Eilanna and Phobos, and my sending them to acquire the Nullstone and the Tablet of T'vok. Through an ancient rite, I was reborn; as a new Mazoku Lord. Enough talk. Now, we fight!"
To Be Continued…
Argh, I know, I know, I promised the final showdown with the Ragman, but I really felt I should get some feedback on my combat-related writing style first before I set it up. I deeply apologize for this inconvenience. Besides, I was getting close to my self-set word limit for this chapter anyway. I'm trying to "paint" the scenes so you can fill in the details with your mind, but I can't tell if I'm doing it right. Input please? And I wouldn't mind suggestions for the Ragman's new form either.