Whoo, back again! Higurashi Month 2019, because it has become one of my lowkey life goals to keep perpetuating this until it becomes a proper tradition for all three-and-a-half people in this graveyard of a fandom. And then keep doing it anyways, because tradition. If you wish to check out the prompt list, its on my tumblr page under the same username.

June 30th, 2019

"Think fast, Kei-chan!"

Keiichi didn't think fast enough, and a well-packed snowball smacked him upside the face.

"Gah!" he screeched, clutching at it and raking the powdery, wet clinging stuff from his eyes. "Mion!" he roared at the smirking club leader behind her scarf, whose teal eyes glittered with a wicked innocence. "How dare you try to challenge me as unchallenged King of the Castle?"

"That lack of challenge is about to be challenged!" she called up the small ramp of snow, tossing another expertly-packed snowball up and down in her mittened hand as the club leader's eyes gleamed even brighter. "Prepare to be upstaged, King!"

"Never!" Keiichi howled down the parapet, brandishing his mighty icicle-sword. "Minions, attack!"

With a ferocious battlecry (kind of) Rika and Satoshi rose up from the battlements of snow beside him and hurled their missiles down, as lusty and furious battle was thus engaged.

"You…have beaten me." Keiichi coughed weakly from his place in the snow, a convenient icicle lodged between his armpit and chest. "And so I, the…the Snow King, die at your feet."

"Keiichi-kun! No!" Satoshi cried, falling to his knees and clutching at the snow-spattered "wound" adjacent to Keiichi's icicle. "You must not lose hope! Fight on! We still need you in the battle!"

"No, no…" Weakly the fallen king waved him aside, coughing a little. "My time…has come, brave Satoshi. Avenge me!" The brown-haired Magician of the Mouth suddenly spasmed, arching up as a dramatically outflung arm pointed away, to the huffing and puffing Mion a few meters away as she dodged Rika's calculated shots. "Do not let…koff…the sacred Kingdom of…um…of the Kingdom that is ours fall into the hands of the wicked invaders. Koff!"

Keiichi turned his head to the side and hacked into the snow, scarf dislodged by the blow that had felled him. He weakly opened his periwinkle eyes again, looking into the tormented gaze of his most loyal vassal as Satoshi gripped his gloved hand. "Satoshi-kun…you must lead them now. Lead our people to victory! For I…at least…shall not see it. Koff!"

With one final wheeze, as though making a point, Keiichi went limp, eyes hazing closed. The icicle tucked between arm and body wobbled a little as his muscles relaxed, before Keiichi quickly squeezed his arm closer to his side to prevent it from falling and ruining the illusion.

"Keiichi-kun! Keiichi-kun!" Satoshi cried desperately, shaking his liege lord. "Nooooooooo!"

"-ooooo!"

"Gya-ha-ha-ha!" Satoko cackled from atop her massive fort, fanged tooth gleaming even underneath her scarf as boulders of snow rolled towards her frantically dodging opponents. "Tremble before the might of Satoko the Snow Lord! Dance, pitiful fools, dance!"

"We need backup!" Shion cried from a hastily-enacted snow trench as one of the snow missiles thundered by, clutching a bucket down low over her head, icicle lying abandoned close by her side.

"I can't!" Rena gasped from another scoop in the snow dug a little farther along, laid almost flat with Hanyuu huddled trembling beside her. A plastic sled was hastily drawn over the two of them as some meager protection against the constant barrage, held in place by the stubborn auburn-haired soldier. "We're pinned down over here!"

"Hau, hauhau!" Hanyuu squealed, mittened hands clamped over her shapeless wool hat as she cowered underneath the thin shield. "We can't hold out for much longer!"

"Damnit, no!" Shion cried, jerking her head up a little under the bucket, but quickly cowering back down, crouching as a large snowball bounced over her head, eyes wide and glistening with determination –and tears. "You guys aren't allowed to die, you hear me!? Make it out of there if you have to crawl the way back!"

"We can't!" Rena yelped, as another heavy snowball pummeled the ground next to her and Hanyuu, sending up a brief spray of powdery white. "Shi-chan, just go! Leave us behind! Get back to safety, don't think about us!"

"Damnit!" Shion snarled, lunging out of her cover and sprinting across the battlefield, charging through the barrage of snowballs as she wove in and out of the dangerous hail like a ballet dancer, ice crystals sparkling and flashing in the air around her. Her icicle flashed in her right gloved hand, and her left held the bucket down tight over her head. "I won't leave you guys!"

"Fools!" Satoko thundered from on high, red eyes gleaming in a way that rather clashed with the childish pom-pom atop her knitted hat. "To come charging into my hellish playground is to invite your own demise! None of you shall escape here alive!"

"Yaaaaah!" Shion screamed in retaliation, throwing her icicle like a spear. It stuck point-first, quivering, in the snowy wall of Satoko's fort near where the snowballs emerged, and whatever Shion had hit, it gave both her and her comrades enough time to dive into better cover before the temporary pause in missiles ended and the snowy barrage came again, flying thicker than ever. Shion dived behind a large snowdrift, wallowing a deeper hole with frantic twists of her body, and Rena and Hanyuu scrambled for a place where the snow had blown high against a water barrel, huddling against it in the safe hollow scooped out by nature and the winds.

"We need to take out her cannons!" Rena cried, clutching Hanyuu to herself like a teddy bear.

"I know!" Shion screamed back, clutching her bucket-helmet as she pressed her body full-length down against the snow. "But I lost my weapon giving us time to run!"

"We're done for! We're done for!" Hanyuu wailed, tears pouring down her cherubic cheeks and soaking into her checkered scarf.

"No!" Rena cried, blue eyes sparkling with determination. "Keiichi-kun is out there! He's in an alliance with us –he won't let us down! I know it!"

Satoshi brandished the icicle that had slain his king. "Muu, y-you'll pay for that!" he shouted at Mion, wishing his voice didn't tremble so much as he threatened his club president. "Rika-chan, fall back!"

The young miko did so, keeping up a steady barrage of snowballs to pin Mion down, until she finally leaped behind the snowy ramparts and hunkered down with him. "Mew, what is it, Satoshi?" she asked, keeping her eyes fixed on the bush Mion had dived behind for cover, a snowball ready in her tiny hand.

Satoshi swallowed thickly. "I'm sorry, but…the King didn't recover from the wound he, erm, received battling the Ice Demon. He's fallen."

"Curse you, Snow Demon!" Rika cried, hurling her snowball at the bush for emphasis as it exploded into harmless powder on the tough evergreen branches. "What shall we do, Regent Satoshi?!"

Satoshi blinked twice. "Regent?" he asked behind his scarf, confused. Rika groaned quietly to herself as she fished for another snowball.

"Mew, Keiichi did name you as his successor, didn't he?"

"Muu…I guess he did." Satoshi sighed after a moment of consideration.

"Then you're the regent." Rika replied firmly, hurling a snowball at Mion's bush as it gave a stealthy rustle, as if their green-haired president was considering movement. "Don't you dare, Snow Demon!"

"Y-yeah!" Satoshi cried, waving his hand in what he hoped was a vengeful and authoritative gesture. "We're the regents in King's name, and we'll never let you capture our fort, you, erm, evil Ice Demon!"

"I thought I was a Snow Demon?" Mion asked with a snicker from her hiding place, and Rika frowned.

"It works either way. Whatever you are, we won't forgive you! You hear me?!" The young miko shook her tiny fist at Mion's hiding place. "We shall never forget your wicked deed, Snow Demon!"

Satoshi shook his icicle again for emphasis, then crouched down behind the ramparts to think desperately as Rika kept watch upon the battlements. What could he do? Keiichi was their best warrior, and he'd been cut down easily by the fierce and terrible Snow/Ice Demon. Satoshi was nowhere near as capable as he was, and furthermore, if he fell, then it would only be Rika standing between Mion and victory. Ideally, they could grab their flag and make a run for Shion, Rena, and Hanyuu's forces, but they were dealing with Satoko, and…

Wait…

Of course!

"Muu, Rika-chan!" Satoshi commanded, pulling his head up a little as he tugged down on his knitted cap. "Keep Mion busy! I have an idea!"

"Of course! Nipah~" Rika chirped, beaming. Then her expression darkened as she turned and launched a barrage of small, well-packed snowballs at the bush, hand-over-hand, arms swiveling like a pair of tiny windmills. "Yaaaaaaaah!"

Satoshi, meanwhile, jumped down to the bottom of their fort to build a trap.

"You can't keep me pinned down like this forever!" Mion cackled from her now decidedly snow-caked bush, likely braced against the branches in the back. "You'll run out of snow eventually!"

True enough, Rika was starting to have to search frantically for enough snow to pack into a ball within her arm's reach –moving away too far would create a gap in her defenses, and allow Mion to dart out from the other side of the bush. And that would mean they would lose.

"Mew, Satoshi, are you done with your plan yet?" she asked quietly but nervously, scrunching her shoulders inside her thick coat.

"Yup." she heard quietly from behind her. "Rika-chan, can you do me favor and make, like, as much noise as you can, and keep Mion in place for about twenty seconds, on my count?"

"Mew~! Of course!"

"Right."

Rika quickly scooped together as many small palmfuls of snow as she could gather in one space, planning for another large barrage to pin Mion down. "Ready, sir!"

"On the count of three…now!" Satoshi cried, and Rika immediately filled her small lungs and shouted as loudly as she could, pummeling the beleaguered shrub as it quivered and shook under her rain of snowballs. She thought she heard an odd twong and a scrape of snow behind her, and Rika's hair stood on end beneath her cap as something whooshed over her head, but she was too busy focusing on keeping Mion pinned down to look to see what it was.

Right until a gigantic snowball that was only a little bit smaller than Rika herself plummeted down out of empty air, slamming into the other side of the bush as Mion gave a brief, startled cry that was swiftly muffled, likely by a mouthful of packed snow.

Rika turned around, jaw a little loose, to see Satoshi kneeling beside a dip in the snow roughly the same size as the snow-boulder, as well as a contraption made from a discarded snow shovel, his scarf, a miraculously-uncovered inflated dodgeball, and several other things that she couldn't see clearly.

"Satoshi…how on earth did you do that?"

The blond teen smiled as Mion thrashed her way out of the small mountain of snow, visibly sulking at her defeat. "Well…one doesn't live in a house with Satoko without learning a thing or two." he said modestly.

"Now let's go help Shion and the others."

"We need a plan!" Rena shouted desperately. She, Hanyuu, and Shion had managed to worm their way closer to the fortress, but they were still a good ways off and nowhere near to capturing the flag. Hanyuu had dived under the leafless skeleton of a bush, which was at least catching most of the snow from the boulders being hurled at and around her, and Rena had picked up another sled en route and was cowering behind her makeshift bulwark like a knight with a shield.

"I know!" Shion cried back, likewise pinned down behind a slender tree. "If we just had a way to take out her cannons-!"

"Rejoice, friends! For we have come to honor our treaty!"

Shion, Rena, and Hanyuu's heads whipped around. Satoko gaped from atop her snowy battlements.

Satoshi and Rika were posed atop the slope that led to the battlegrounds, a shaft of light illuminating their snow-dusted clothing and the icicles they proudly held aloft.

They were also on a gleaming blue sled.

"Your time has come, Shion, Rena, and Hanyuu! You shall no longer fight this terrible foe alone! Yaaaaaah!"

With a shove from Rika, who sat in the back of the sled, the two began rocketing down the hill. With a shrill cry from Satoko and some incomprehensible manipulation of the traps in her snowy fortress, the hail of missiles was redirected towards the charging duo.

Who were entirely prepared for this action.

"Yaaaaaaaaah!" Satoshi continued to yell, grabbing a projection from the side of the sled and whipping it up and out in front of him, to reveal –another sled.

Which the hail of missiles crashed into, leaving him and Rika to continue, albeit slowed, streaking down the slope.

"Mew, Shi, catch!" Rika called, grabbing another sled and hurling it at the cowering Sonozaki. Shion caught the bright red plastic disk with a grin, and her teal eyes glinted as she looked at Rena, whose own eyes flashed in understanding.

"Yaaaaah!" they cried in addition, grabbing their shields and charging towards the fort in the wake of Satoshi and Rika's sled-cavalry. An additional sled hurled towards Hanyuu (perhaps with a bit more playful vehemence than Shion's) added another member to their headlong charge, and Satoko snorted with fury, twin streams of smoky air escaping from beneath her scarf.

"Block my boulders all you like, none of you will scale my castle!" she roared furiously, waving an icicle of her own above her head and then turning and leaping down with a flare of her padded winter coat, disappearing within the snowy depths to conjure up more diabolic trickery.

Satoshi and Rika crashed up against the base of the fort, and Shion's group arrived a few moments later.

"We need to scale the walls!" Satoshi cried, and Shion nodded, tightening her bucket-helmet on her head.

"Got it. Use our icicles!" She took Rika's and demonstratively stabbed the pointed end into the snowy wall at about knee-height for the older club members. "Go, go, go!"

"Use multiple strategies!" Rika cried from behind Satoshi as Hanyuu started clambering up the makeshift staircase, adding her own icicle to gain height as Rena tossed her another.

"Right!" the auburn-headed warrior cried, lifting up her shield and crouching under it. The tiny miko seized Shion's smaller, round shield and jumped onto the platform Rena had made, letting Rena surge upwards and launch Rika towards the sky, bearing her own shield in case of errant missiles. This concern was well-founded, for a smaller but still formidable snowball crashed into the blue-haired child –and more importantly, her shield– almost as soon as she had cleared the battlements, sending Rika falling backwards onto the shattered no-man's-land with a shrill cry as her patterned scarf waved in the wake of her fall. Hanyuu was halfway up the wall, crouching down beneath the battlements nervously, afraid to breach the top that had already almost claimed the life of her comrade –her shield lay below her in the snow, discarded.

"Rena!" Shion cried, plucking up said shield and dashing towards the still-crouching Rena as she grinned and nodded, lowering herself a little more.

"Go, Shi-chan!" she cried in encouragement, and Shion stepped onto the shield and was propelled upwards. Satoshi hastily dismounted from his own, grabbed it, and hunkered down beneath the plastic rectangle, ready for Rika, who came running back as she leapt onto his own platform. The shrine maiden sailed upwards a beat behind Shion, and Hanyuu watched as both crowned the battlements. Another well-placed snowball struck Rika backwards once again, but Shion was larger and less susceptible to a change in momentum, and merely was thrown backwards as she scrabbled frantically for the edge of the snowy battlements, dug into it with the gloved hand not desperately holding up her shield, and caught herself, half-draped over the edge.

With a grunt, despite the concentrated barrage of snowballs quickly aimed towards her position in a bid to prevent that very action, Shion hauled herself up over the verge, keeping her shield propped up before her as she did. Indeed, the heavy pelting of snowballs actually served to help that purpose, for as long as she made sure it wouldn't be pushed back, Shion didn't have to spend a mote of effort actually keeping the shield propped up.

Curled up behind the shield, Shion shuffled clumsily sideways, covering the ascent of Hanyuu, who quickly clambered up over the ramparts as well and huddled behind the Sonozaki.

"Hau, hauhau, what do we do now?!"

Rena began carefully climbing up the icicles, holding her shield parallel to her body to cover herself as she crested Satoko's line of vision. "Try to draw her fire! We can beat her, just as long as we hold the castle wall!"

"Keep a line of defense, and keep pushing forward!" Satoshi cried behind her, and before long the entire group was huddled in a line behind a series of plastic sled-shields atop Satoko's fort, feeling a barrage of heavy, wet-packed snowballs thud into their barrier.

"Spartan shields!" Shion shouted over the thud of artillery. "Overlap the edges, damnit! Overlap now!"

With a bit of shuffling, everyone got themselves sorted into that configuration, but they knew it couldn't last for long. Satoko was bound to eventually think of the same trick Satoshi and Rika had used to defeat Mion, and their shields were no good against a direct overhead assault and a constant frontal barrage.

"Hanyuu!" Rena grunted, teeth clenched together and blue eyes focused and intense as she held her portion of the shield-wall up firm. "Try to peek through the edges and see where she is! If we can just get her with a snowball…"

Doing as she was told, Hanyuu squirmed underneath Satoshi's arm and peeped through a slight gap in the interlocked sleds. "Hau, she's standing behind three catapults, everyone. Its right in the middle of the fort! I can't see her flag though…"

"Knowing Satoko, she's hidden it somewhere." Rika said with a frown as an especially heavy snowball impacted her shield, jolting her back a little. "Do you think if we all make a break at once and circle around the edges of the fort with our shields, where the catapults can't reach-"

"Satoko will have prepared for that." Shion said grimly, pulling her bucket-helmet a little tighter down on her head with one hand. "She had no way of knowing which direction we'd attack the fort from, after all. I bet there are a bunch of traps set up to trip us on the inside of the fort, too."

"Satoko would've laid out a series of paths for her to walk along." Satoshi pointed out, breath huffing in clouds from under his scarf. "We know the battlements are probably safe over here, because we're sitting here now and nothing's happened, and Satoko had to get down there somehow."

"Mew, follow her footprints in the snow?" Rika tried.

"Too obvious." Rena's eyes narrowed. "This is Satoko –she loves bluffs and double-bluffs. Sure, she would've left some kind of path, but which one is the safe one…"

That was, indeed, a conundrum. There were several trails meandering over the snow, some of single footprints, some of many, but the general area of the fort's interior was so mussed and packed down that it was impossible to pick out a safe path, or even a definite one.

"Perhaps if we picked one and shuffled along it single-file…" Satoshi mused aloud, his eyebrows furrowing above his scarf as he frowned in concentration.

"One of us is going to be picked off for sure if we do that." Shion argued as powdery snow sprayed over the top of their shield wall. "Definitely the person in front, at least. And where would we even look for the flag? It has to be in the fort, but we can't see it anywhere, and we can't just go wandering around searching for it."

"Let's just destroy her canons for now, everyone." Rika piped up, violet eyes wide and innocent from within her bundle of woolen wrappings. "Even Satoko only has so many traps here –if we get rid of the canons, she has to deploy her next line of defense, and with these shields, we can hold out against pretty much everything."

Rena brightened. "Yeah, I like that! If we pick off her traps one by one, eventually we'll get her to the point where she has to be throwing snowballs herself, and not only do we outnumber her for that, we'll still have our shields! We'll be practically invulnerable!"

Shion's eyes narrowed. "If we can pull it off…this is still the God-Sent Master of Traps, after all. And you can bet she'll have traps that are only set off when you step on them. We'll take her out, and all her projectile weaponry, but there's still the ground cover to deal with as we search for the flag. And it could be anywhere in here."

"That's a problem we can deal with when we get to it." Rena said determinedly. How do we take out her canons?"

"Muu…" Satoshi peeked through a gap in the shield wall, then looked around them. "Well, there's more than enough snow here to form a barrage of snowballs…"

The battle was long and arduous, but, eventually, the combined teams managed to break down each line of Satoko's defense, destroying and triggering trap after trap as they clawed their way forward. Hanyuu was taken out by a snare trap, hoisting her up high in the air and making her lose her shield, subsequently helpless to Satoko's snowballs, and Rena sacrificed herself to let Shion duck behind an attack, going down in an explosion of loose-packed snow.

Satoko herself, frothing and raging, was finally taken out by a well-placed snowball from her brother, who sat by the sulking younger blonde, consoling her, as the others spread out in cautious search for the flag.

"I found it!" Rika squeaked at length, scuffling in the snow and coming up with a bright red-and-black checkered dishcloth. "Mew, we win, Regent Satoshi!"

Satoshi looked up from where he was patting his sister. "Oh –er, yay!" he capitulated belatedly, throwing one hand up in the air. "Victory for the Snow Kingdom's forces!"

"Aw, man…" Shion pouted, leaning carefully against a safe scrap of the wall. "Since your team has the most people left, that's a double-win for you, isn't it!"

"I told you not to underestimate the mighty powers of the Snow Kingdom!" Keiichi cried in triumph from the top of the wall, startling the rest of the club, and beside him, Mion rolled her eyes.

"Yes, yes, whatever." she drawled, waving a gloved hand dismissively at him. "I do hereby declare as Club President that Keiichi, Satoshi, and Rika win this game, having not only found the opposing flag but also having the most people left over on their team. Second is Hanyuu, Shion, and Rena's team, as they did not have a fort or flag to defend but still managed to leave one survivor on their team. And last…" She audibly gritted her teeth under her scarf. "…is me and Satoko's team, with both of us KO-ed and our flag captured."

Mion then clapped her gloved hands together with false cheer, smiling brightly under her scarf. "So then! Back to my place for hot cocoa and so on, and we'll decide the punishment games there?"

"That sounds great." Rena yawned, shivering a little.

"Yesssss…" Keiichi cackled under his breath, rubbing his mittened hands together. "Revenge will soon be mine, Mion! You'll regret all the crossplay costumes you forced me into! You'll rue the day you put me in a mini-skirt!"

He cackled louder, but then grunted as Satoko punched his stomach, passing by. "Yes, yes, your vengeance is nigh." she huffed, then smirked. "Don't forget we all had a vote on whether or not to put you in those costumes, Keiichi-san…you have a long way to go before true vengeance. Oh-ho-ho~!"

She cackled in her turn, skipping lightly down the staircase of icicles as Keiichi sulked behind her.

Hot cocoa sounded real good right about now.

Maybe he could dump it on her head.

AN: Welp, that's it for this year. I'm finally done! And I'll be seeing y'all again next year for Higurashi Month 2020...all ten of you.

12.14 AM, USA Central Time