I had to attend two different class yesterday, prepare for a work-study that I am hoping to land (it's a paid work-study, so cross your fingers for me), and study for a mid-class exam (my campus' version of a midterm) next Wednesday... And yet I found time to write 4728 words for your reading pleasure.

Never let it be said that all of you guys aren't on my mind.

x-x

I do not own any of the franchises used in this story. The people and events and people in this story are completely fictional.

Fox Hunt

It had been two months since Keito had become a member of the newspaper club, but Kuyo had finally gotten information he could move on, Jaden Yuki was human.

This information hadn't come from his "spy" but the disgraced teacher Hitomi Ishigami, who had tasted Jaden's blood in their fight. When he asked why she hadn't spoken up sooner she had explained that her credibility had been ruined and she had hoped that he would discover the truth on his own. The youko didn't believe a word from the medusa's mouth, but finally having something he could use against the upstart was too good to pass on.

Bursting through the door of the newspaper club room, he and the six subordinates he had handpicked to assist him in bring the usurper to his authority in to justice, and subsequent execution, stalked proudly into the room. Examining the surroundings, he found almost all the members of the club were there, including the Hellion sisters and a shocked looking Keito, but Jaden Yuki was not present.

"I'm sorry, but could you tell me where Mr. Yuki is? I have important business with him." Yuko asked with a polite manner that would have fooled anyone who didn't know better. He smirked as they all began to show signs of the fear that was due a superior being, until saw that they were staring at the doorway he had just come through. Turning he was shocked to see a man with a sword strapped to his hip, wearing long tattered red cape with a hood that hid his hair and a mask with a crest of two pistols under a wide brimmed hat emblazed on the forehead, the sign of the professional hunters.

As his people tensed and readied themselves to fight against the ancient enemy of all supernatural being, he man reached up to hood and mask removed them to revile the smiling face of Jaden Yuki. "Did I scare you?" he asked, like he was an older brother who had startled his siblings.

"No." Kuyo said with snarl, "You may have scared your friends, but the members of my Public Safety Commission are trained fighters."

"Hmm," Jaden mused as he walked past the blond, "I guess I'll have to try harder next time."

Kuyo smirked, he had been waiting far too long for this. "I'm sorry to say that there won't be a next time."

"Really? No next time?" Jaden quirked an eyebrow as he set the mask and sword, which his clubmates recognized as nenekirimaru, down on a desk and then turned to face the leader of the P.S.C, "Why is that?"

"Jaden Yuki, you are under arrest as a human spy who has been admitted to this academy under false pretenses. Submit yourself over to us now or we will use force." Kuyo demanded, only Jaden made no move to do so and muttered amusedly, "Now who told you that, I wonder."

"But you can't arrest me for two reasons." Jaden said as Yubel's wings appeared from under the cloak, a dark look interring his eyes as he locked eyes with Kuyo, "The second being that I'm your superior officer, and that I have had enough of your insubordination. You're fired, effective immediately."

"You… FIRE ME!?" Kuyo shouted, orange flames surrounding him as they grew stronger being fueled by the fox yokai's rage, "I AM THE TRUE ABSOLUTE JUSTICE OF THIS- "

"Let's take this outside." Jaden said, cutting the rest of what Kuyo as he unleashed a wind blast that knocked the head of the P.S.C out of the nearby window. The stunned members of the squad that he remaining motionless until Jaden climbed out the window after their boss and they immediately moved to chase after him.

"I don't think so!" Tamao cried out as she changed into her sea-serpent form and rushed the one closest one to the window, ramming him through two walls and into the nearest bathroom, destroying the sinks along the wall until he hit the corner with enough force to crush a human's back.

The rest of the newspaper club stood in shock with P.S.C again until Moka saw the blade that Jaden had left behind. She remembered that he had described has having the power to make a yokai "bleed" youki during the times he had been training her in swordsmanship in the last two months. She wondered why he would leave such a powerful tool behind until she realized… he had left it behind for her.

Snatching nenekirimaru up, Moka drew it with a sharp movement and yelled out "ATTACK!"

x-x

As Jaden dropped down to ground, he found that Kuyo had already changed into his true form, a large human-sized fox with four tails that blazed with orange fire.

'He's just a four-tailed kasai no youko, a lesser fox of fire, that's good.' Jaden noted as he called the Scythe of Nightmares into being out of black miasma, spinning it over his head before holding it into a ready position, 'While a youko may not be as powerful as a zenko or nogitsune of the same type and number of tails, I can't afford to let my guard down.'

"Jaden Yuki! You have had been acting as rebel against me for far too long!' Kuyo cried out as spat out a stream of flames from his mouth like a flame thrower only for Jaden jump over the fire slash down at the fox yokai who jumped back to avoid being bisected by the blade.

Jaden leveled a battle-hardened glare at the fox and said, "A word of advice that you should have applied to your plan before attacking me and my friends… Underestimating your opponent can be a mortal mistake."

x-x

For the most part the fight at the newspaper club was going well with the former members of the P.S.C were doing a masterful job of pushing back their former colleges and keeping the others from being overwhelmed by the more experienced fighters and Oyakata, Gabriel, and Sam had shown up, catching the enemy in a pincer movement which freed up the Hellion sisters to go help Jaden.

But while Moka was using nenekirimaru to the best of her abilities to keep pressure on her opponent, she could fight with the intent to kill her foe, girl with magenta hair named Deshiko Deshi. The P.S.C member used the four-foot-long bo staff she carried with her to keep the blade from so much as scratching her.

"Your form is unpolished, but not bad. However, your blows are missing something…" Deshiko commented as she dodged the vampire's overhead strike and blocked a vertical slash with her staff made of Australian Buloke. A grin flashed across her visage as she realized what had been absent as she and Moka fought. Kicking the vampire away, Deshiko laughed mockingly as her opponent righted herself, "I see it now, it's the nature of your soul! It yarns for you bathe yourself in the blood of your foes, but you deny yourself your true nature!"

"No, I hate bloodshed. I only use this blade as a tool to protect my friends." Moka denied, trying to forget the burning in her blood as she rejected her opponent's assessment of her.

Deshiko smirked as the vampire charged back at her, and changed into a stance that Moka recognized from when Jaden was explaining the technique commonly known as the mortal draw. Moka did her best to avoid her foe's the surprise attack as she drew the blade hidden in her staff, which would have cut her half, but Deshiko still inflicted a gash on the vampire's side.

Falling to the ground in pain she barely registered the magenta-haired girl standing behind her, rising her blade in preparation to deliver the final blow as said mockingly, "That's what happens when you bring a tool to a sword fight."

Moka once had heard that the reason why so many people would lose control and go berserk in a fight, experience their life flashing before their eyes, and even resort to cannibalism in desperate situations amounted to sheer survival instincts. When you're in pain you'll do anything, eat anything to make the pain stop while your mind looks for something, anything to get out of that situation.

The vampire had never considered herself capable of killing another living being, but she had never been in a situation like the one she was in right at that moment. Clinching her hand on the sword, she whipped around as quickly as she could and thrust the blade into her enemy's stomach.

"…" The entire world went silent to the two sword wielders as Deshiko stared down at the blade plunged down in her gut, she had inflected enough wounds like it to know that she was done for. Unless she got medical treatment immediately after Moka pulled the blade out, she would die in a matter of minutes to an hour. And while she did have allies there with her, none of them were medics or would even care enough to take her somewhere where she could get the treatment she needed.

She coughed up blood and took several steps back when Moka yanked the sword out from her and smirked as she saw the appalled look on the pink haired girls face. 'Looks like she isn't ready for the carnage of the way of a swordswoman. What do you think, you want to give her a hand like you did for me?' She thought as she stared at the word in her hand as she leaned against the wall.

Moka was shocked as Deshiko offered her the handle of her blade.

She smirked at the vampire and said, "To the victor goes the spoils, so take my blade. The shoufu no chikai no ken… the blade of the whore's promise…"

Deshiko seemed to lose the remaining strength she had when Moka took the sword, as her legs gave out under her and she slide down the wall leaving a dark streak of blood on the wall. "I can tell that you can master her better than I did. But whether you can use it for the sake of protecting your friends without spilling a river of blood?" She said as Moka stared at the blade she had been given in apprehension, "I suppose only time will if you're cleaver enough to pull that off."

Moka watched her foe close her eyes and say one last thing to her before she heard an explosion outside. Realizing that Jaden must still fighting Kuyo she rushed to go help him fight against the Head of the P.S.C along with Mizore and Kurumu, who had finished their fights, with Deshiko's voice repeating her last words in her mind like a ghost.

"Only time will tell if what I handed you just now is a prize or a curse."

x-x

Tamao had drawn the short straw with her opponent who had changed into his true form an earth elemental, a humanoid yokai with stone covering his arms and chest.

The elemental was strong enough to break her tough scaled covered skin and while he wasn't as fast she was he was much more derailable. Her hands and claws were already a bloody mess from her futile attempts to break and scratch past the hard rock covering his body.

She panted as she rubbed the shoulder that her foe had hit earlier when she heard the same explosion Moka had.

"It appears as though Lord Kuyo is about done with your master, freak. Don't worry, I will send you to join him in hell soon." The P.S.C member said not noticing Tamao's snake like eyes constrict to a thin line as fresh anger surge through her as the water surrounding her move as if being stirred by an unseen storm.

Tapping into a power she didn't know she had and acting on instinct, Tamao threw out her clawed hand at the earth elemental willing the water to shape itself into sphere around him.

Tamao sneered at her enemy as he struggled to free himself only to go limp as he lost consciousness.

"As if either him or me would fall to the likes of you or your master." The serpent hissed before she used her new-found power over water to blast a hole in the wall so she to leave by, uncaring if he could hear her or if he was even alive.

x-x

Jaden's fight wasn't going as well as he would have liked. The arrival of the hellion sisters helped turn the tides a little until Kuyo interred his more combat oriented from in an explosion of blue. Which restored his human upper-torso, arms, and head which still had two fox ears made of the same blue flames that now covered his body and still digitigrade feet in place of the pervious orange flames.

"I must commend your skill for making me use this form against you, but it's over now." Kuyo said arrogantly, as he spotted Moka coming towards the scene of his fight with Jaden. He smirked as he realized he know the prefect way to break his foe's spirit.

"For you and your friends." The fox yokai said with a sadistic glee in his eyes as he lunched a spear of fire at the sealed vampire only to be amazed when it hit something other than its target.

"BOOOOSSSSSSSSS!" The two demon sisters screamed in horror as Moka rushed forward to catch her friend as he started fall to ground and his other friends gathered around him.

Kuyo smirked as he realized what had happed. Jaden had somehow moved in front of his spears path to protect Moka at the coast of his own life. "How utterly foolish."

"What did you say? Did you just call the boss's instincts to protect others foolish" Kneesocks asked her voice void of emotion as she and her sister turned to face Kuyo, their eye's void of anything other than a need to kill the youko. Hellish black flames started to surround them as their minds filled with a sensation that surpassed emotions such as furry.

"How dare you?! How dare you?! How dare YOU?! YOU BASTERD!" Scanty howled as her voice turned truly demonic as she and her sister charged at their former employer.

As the two demons assaulted the youko, Moka had dropped her blades in favor of holding the injured umberlist as she cried out for Sam to come help.

"Moka, stop she can't help." Jaden said, causing her to pause and tell him not to speak only for him to shake his head, as he reached up for the cross on her neck and pulled it off saying, "Protect the others for me… Fangs."

After the surge of youki from her unsealing subsided, Fangs didn't move for a while as she cradled Jaden's unmoving body in her arms.

"Jaden…" She said as she started at the umberlist, even sleeping during the few times he had fallen in to slumber while in classes he was animate as he twitched and snored, such an undeniable opposite to his current deathly stillness.

'I won't let things end like this!' Fangs swore to herself as she readied her namesake and sunk them into Jaden's neck.

"Fangs, you can't feed on Jaden now! He'll die!" Kurumu shouted, as Fangs pulled away from the umberlist's neck and laid him down on the ground.

"I gave him an injection of my blood just now to heal him from his injuries, but will need time to take effect." She said as she picked up nenekirimaru and shoufu no chikai no ken where Moka had dropped them, "So until then, I plan hunting down certain fox so I can make Jaden a new scarf."

Mizore nodded as she condensed her claws into the same bone white ice that she used against Burstinatrix when she was possessing Kurumu, "That sounds good to me."

"Me to," Kurumu said as purple fire crawled up her arms, burning a way the selves of her shirt.

x-x

(I know this scene is a bit of a Soul Eater rip-off, but I promise that I'm going somewhere with it)

While Kuyo had begun to taste the displeasure of a certain group of ladies, Jaden had discovered that his mind had traveled into the part of the Umber known as the Dreaming. Unlike the general partially formed landscape of the Dreaming, the area he was in now was stable and was fully detailed so it was like that one part of the dreaming tied pacifically to him as an umberlist, meaning that it was more a manifestation of his subconscious then a part of the Dreaming.

He was current setting in a very comfortable chair in what he wanted to say was a very ritzy purgatory jazz club. There was a scratched-up record on playing a song that Jaden couldn't seem to pin the name of down.

"Swing, Swing, Swing. For dancing, swing is thing" The of a lady's voice and shuffling feet drew Jaden's attention as they broke into the sound of the record playing its song.

Turning his head to the sounds general direction, Jaden saw a woman next to the phonograph playing the jazz tune he was hearing, dancing a little dance that was completely out of tune with music. Taking a moment to observe the woman Jaden saw that she had long hair like Moka's only it was black as pitch and several inches long and she had a body to make Kurumu envious which was seductively compressed into a black double-breasted suit. But oddly enough her skin was an almost blueish-gray,

Jaden watched her dance to an imaginary swing song for a moment before speaking up, "This isn't swing music, if you want dance to swing just change the record."

"True, but jazz is much more suited for the night." The odd woman answered, turning to reveal that her eyes were hidden by the shadow of her bangs and her scarlet painted lip were parted to show off the sharp teeth in the corners of mouth in a carnivorous smile.

Jaden couldn't escape the feeling that unlike Moka's fangs, the gray woman's teeth where meant to tear up meat, but she hadn't acted aggressively toward him so he continued their debate, "In my experience music is something that should fit the tastes of the listener not the environment, after all it's not like it cares where it gets played so go ahead and play swing if you want."

"That's right the choice is mine." The gray woman nodded, her smile never leaving her face, "It is indeed, yes sir."

"You could choose too, you are eligible." She said as if she were reminding someone at a party that they had turned the drinking age as she pointed at the duelist in the chair.

Jaden's shoulders tensed as something in her manor rubbed him the wrong way, "For some reason, I get the feeling you aren't talking about music right now."

"Well maybe not exclusively at this point." She replied as she leaned out from behind the umberlist's chair, her burning red eyes finally revealed to Jaden, his own eyes widening at the gray woman's sudden relocation.

"You made a choice to take that last attack for your vampire friend without a second thought." The woman said as her circular pupils dilated to drink in every aspect of Jaden's appearance, "And yet as you realized that your organs seared beyond medical treatment, you were so worried that your friends would fallow you into the abyss that you begged your dear Fangs to step in and look after everyone."

"Now, wouldn't it be great if you were more powerful so you would never have to be afraid of such things happening again?" She asked with a disturbed eagerness in her hellish red eyes, her body tensing as if every fiber of her body was anticipating what would happen if Jaden agreed, "I'm talking about real power. Power so unbelievably great you can kiss fear and anxieties good-bye."

Jaden shook his head no as he rebuffed what she had said, "Power is well and good, but forgetting all fear makes you reckless and disregardful of what you want to accomplish."

"Still afraid of losing yourself again?" the woman asked knowingly, "You won't get anywhere by being wishy-washy about this."

"Think that you died and now you're up in heaven where you can't get hurt? Hate to break it to you but you're still on Earth." She chided the young umberlist as she took hold of his forearm and led him to the doorway out, "And I'm sorry to say that you can't hid your head in the sand here."

Open the door to reveal an empty void, she turned back to Jaden, releasing his arm as she said, "Come back whenever you're ready for me to make you stronger. In the meantime, let's see how far you can go on your own."

Quickly shoving him through the doorway the gray woman closed the door with one final piece of advice, "Find a rule or something you can break. You'll come out better for it."

After being surrounded in inescapable blackness for a while Jaden was surprised to find himself waking up, a foreign power coursing through his veins. Looking around he saw the others up on top of the roof of the school fighting Kuyo's battle form.

Seeing the youko about to clash with Fangs, Jaden stopped trying to fight the power threatening to over whelm him and just went with it.

x-x

Fangs and the others had done an excellent job of beating Kuyo to within an inch of deaths door, but as the silver haired vampire would say later the bastard just refused to go down.

And to make matters worse, while Tamao's new powers over water and Mizore's white-bone ice were proving effective against the youko, they were running low on energy because of their respective inexperience and susceptibility to heat and were on the verge of collapsing. And due to the ineffectiveness of Scanty's and Kneesocks' hellfire against him, which would have incinerated any other foe instead of merely leaving first degree burns, the Hellion sisters weren't far behind. Kurumu had scored an impressive strike with her claws across Kuyo's shoulder along with the cuts and gashes from the other girls, but had been overwhelmed by his superior fire power and was on the verge of unconsciousness.

The newspaper club was starting to lose its advantage.

'Damnit, giving my blood to Jaden weakened me too much. If I didn't have these swords I would have lost the edge long ago.' Fangs thought, tightening her grip on nenekirimaru and shoufu no chikai no ken, making a promise to herself not to say that out loud lest Jaden never let her forget her making such a stupid pun.

Glancing over the edge of roof at where the still prone form of her friend lay, the vampire felt seeds of worry take root. The blood should have taken effect by now, so why hadn't he awakened? Was Yubel keeping him immobile while he healed? Was he just incompatible with the blood?

She turned back to the fight as she heard Mizore and Tamao finally collapsing to their knees as they finally ran out steam and they were soon followed by Scanty and Kneesocks, who had exhausted themselves from letting their hellfire run rampant in their berserker rage.

"I loathe to admit it, but you and your friends put up an incredible fight when they faced off against a superior being." Kuyo said, managing to play his injuries as not as serious as they really were, "But, now you are done for."

Fangs wasn't fooled by the youko's posing as she brought the two swords up in a cross formation. "You're the one who is finished you filthy fox bastard." She snarled as she leveled the blades at Kuyo's chest and head, making her intent to drive them through his heart and skull, "Even in my weakened state you will still fall before me." Fangs promised as her vampire's legs tensed as she prepared launch herself at her foe.

Kuyo's smirk stayed in place as raised his hand out to his side to prepare a fire spear like the one that took Jaden down, confident that he would hit his mark this time, only to be surprised when the man he thought dead appear between him and the vampire unarmed.

The umberlist hadn't used high speed movement, he had just appeared in flickering distortion that the group would have missed had they blinked at that moment. But while his appearance was shocking, the changes to his appearance were even more surprising. The wings he had donned in his fight with Kuyo had lost Yubel's signature purple colored which had been replaced with an ashen gray color, and his triangular bang over his forehead had parted like it always had to show off Yubel's third almond shaped eye. But while the eye residing in its place now was similar, the red color had replaced by a blazing golden-yellow and the sclera was a pitch black, a color scheme that had appeared in his usually brown eyes.

Fangs felt inexpressible relief at seeing her friend walking of his own volition, a feeling shared by all the other members of the newspaper club and Y.I.A staff up on that roof. But vampire also felt worry freezing away in her guts due to her knowledge of the risks she had disregarded in giving Jaden her blood. Risks that she was afraid had come to pass as she watched Jaden power run wild. All the young umberlist's friends had seen his power manifest as a black smoke like miasma, but now that smoke had been replaced by seemed like condensed inky shadows that moved and writhed into sickle like points before subsiding and then surging up again as the gray wings fall apart and return into him in a surge of the same ink-like shadows.

Jaden's mind was burning under the influence of Fangs' blood, all that was that if he didn't do anything to elevate the pressure building he would be crushed by the new energies ravaging his body and mind. Kuyo was about lunch in to another of his fear inspiring taunts, but whatever he was going to say was lost as Jaden closed the distance between them and buried his fist into the youko's gut.

Kuyo didn't have time to process what had just happened as he stepped back to dodge a wide upward swipe from the umberlist's other hand only to be caught in a surge of the very solid claw-like shadow-mass that cut into his chest as it knocked him up into the air as Jaden leaped up into the air after him and punched the youko hard enough to sending him summersaulting down to the ground where he landed face first.

'How is this possible?' The head of the Public Safety Commission wondered, asking himself a question that would plague his mind for the rest of his days as Jaden slammed his boot into the back of his skull, bringing the fight to its finish.

As inky-shadows disappeared from his body, Jaden finally felt the burning sensation fade only to be replaced by mind numbing pain as he tried to scream only for the sound to become unearthly howl replaced by a primal high-pitched coldblooded-screech that seemed to make the area around him osculate as it tore through the air.

After that Jaden knew no more as merciful unconsciousness calmed him.

Next Time: Debriefing… No, not that kind!