((A/N: I'll say only one thing: you guys are so damn lucky I love this idea! Warning: Some OOC may show up, I don't know, I never played FFVII, but I own Advent Children, so I know what happened!))

Biting Off Too Much

Chapter 2

Yuffie tightened the bandages on the bullet wound her current patient had. She had gone through two or three men already, and every time the stable doors opened, more were either dragged in or the enemy soldiers had found the makeshift hospital. The rattling of a sub-machine gun and the boom of a shotgun were quick to remedy the latter, however.

Despite the fact that Yuffie was inside, away from the fighting, she was still shaking with fright. The squawking bird-mounts that were left weren't helping either. She'd never been in a battle fought like that. Almost no physical contact, just slaughter with guns and explosives. And monsters…that she was used to, at least.

Her hands were already soaked in blood up to her elbows when she yelled "Done! Who's next?" Several shouts greeted her. The doorman, a middle-aged man named Moshe, couldn't help them out because someone needed to hold the door shut. Yuffie moved to the soldier nearest her, a woman in her late twenties with blonde hair and a giant gash going from just under her ribcage diagonally across her abdomen. It she hadn't been laying down, her guts would have spilled out.

"What happened to this one?" Yuffie shouted over to Moshe. He was incredibly adept at telling how a person got a wound simply by looking at them. The man shook his head and replied, over the gunfire and screams outside "T-rap got 'er."

When Yuffie cocked her head at him in confusion, he rolled his eyes and replied "The goddamn growly things with the teeth and claws."

Yuffie blinked in surprise. Surely that should've been obvious, even if she hadn't a handle on this world's slang. Nodding shakily, she looked down at the woman again. She was losing a lot of blood, and if Yuffie didn't do anything to patch up that gash, the woman was doomed.

Panicking now, she yelled "Lionel! I got a bad one here!"

Lionel, who was currently fishing for shrapnel in a man's arm with a magnet, since his metallic fingers had no nerves and therefore he couldn't tell when he found the piece, yelled back over his shoulder "Kinda busy! What's it like?"

Yuffie didn't even have to glance down.

"Belly wound, straight across, heavy bleeding, Moshe says it came from a T-rap," she explained, using the slang term she had just learned. Lionel immediately straightened and started walking over to her, the magnet retracting into his arm and being replaced by a scalpel, several clamps, and a needle as well as a spool of silk. She stepped over to his patient, digging around in the man's arm. There was no anesthetic available, but all the soldiers managed to grit their teeth, bite back their tears and take the pain. It was as if they already knew that screaming wouldn't help.

And suddenly, there was silence outside. All the gunfire and explosions simply stopped.

Yuffie froze, shrapnel shard in hand, and looked at the door. Lionel stood from his crouching position, thread still dangling from sewing up the woman's stomach, which he had finally stopped bleeding. Moshe looked up at the top of the door, then at the bottom, then he finally moved his body. The door slowly swung open, and Moshe peered out, cautiously.

He only had a half second to yell out half a warning before a snarl broke the silence and a reptilian head suddenly flashed in and grabbed the man by the shoulder. Moshe yelled out, dropping his sub-machine gun as he was yanked outside. Lionel leapt forward, no visible weapon in hand, and Yuffie was wondering if he was going to try and take on the monster with a scalpel and bare fists, when his robotic arm suddenly flipped around, changing shape. Certain parts slid down his arm, making space for more parts from within his arm. In the space of the few seconds it took him to get over to the door, Lionel had transformed his hand into a revolver, and was currently flipping it open to shove in six pistol rounds that he had extracted from his pocket. The door was still open, and Yuffie could hear Moshe being torn apart…literally. One of the man's arms landed right in her vision, covered in blood, tattered cloth and teeth marks. Lionel fired outside with his new gun-arm, then started pushing the door closed with his shoulder. When a snarl sounded from outside, he fired without moving, simply lifting the gun a little higher. The revolver wasn't very powerful, so he had to fire a few rounds outside to get his desired results.

Yuffie had finally managed to unfreeze herself to get over to Lionel, and started pushing against the door as well. However, she froze once more when she heard the blood chilling snarl again, but with a powerful mental yank she made the decision that she would no longer let fear of this devastating new kind of warfare control her. A throwing star appeared in her hand, and with a flick of her fingers, she buried it in the eye of a Tyrannoraptor. A scream of pain like none other she had ever heard before rang out, piercing her ears and making her wince. It sounded more like taking two large rusted metal sheets and rubbing them against each other. She shook her head, but otherwise kept pushing. Lionel seemed unaffected, and the only response that he gave was to fire a few more shots from his revolver-hand before it went click-click and said it had run out of ammo. Lionel swore, and she could tell that he had a mouth as bad as Cid's was when he went too long without a coffee break.

The door was almost shut when a chatter of erratic gunfire met their ears, and splinters started flying off the door. The enemy was firing on them! Lionel abandoned the door and leapt at Yuffie, knocking her to the floor before he stood up again, shotgun in hand, and stuck the barrel around the corner, firing until the gun ran empty. Ducking back down, in the middle of reloading, he froze suddenly. Then, gradually, Yuffie heard it too. More gunfire, but from further away. However, it was forcing the current volleying away from them. And it was lessening the enemy gunfire! The troops Yuffie was 'with' had found them!

Lionel sprang up, shotgun at the ready, and looked through the now completely open door once again. Sure enough, the blue uniforms were falling back to the beach, and there wasn't a single standing raptor around. The view when the dust settled, however, quickly killed his good mood.

There was barely anything left standing of the town. The lighthouse was demolished, half of the hotel was gone, and there was only splinters left of the general store, which would make sense because it was where all the ammo was stored. Almost all of the houses were gone, and the buildings that had stood on the cliffs, as well as the artillery positions, were all gone, swept away in the barrage and following landslide. The street stretching down the middle of the town was layered in bodies and blood. Impact craters from the artillery littered the entire area, and it seemed as though the stable was, thankfully, the only place that still stood in one piece. From makeshift foxholes and trenches, as well as firing spots behind stacks of bodies as well as in craters came 'their' soldiers. There wasn't a single one that didn't have a wound, and all of them were drenched in blood. None of them was wearing a uniform, and they seemed more like, well, rebels than actual soldiers. There were about thirty of them left, men and women ranging in age from early teens to middle-aged adults, all toting weapons, be they heavy rifles, automatic weapons, shotgun, heavy machine guns or even, she only saw one of these, a half tube that looked more like a slingshot that turned out to be a grenade launcher. Yuffie peered out at them all, suddenly shy. She'd never seen anyone with such fierce and triumphant looks. It was almost like they were animals.

Lionel set the shotgun down, leaning against the side of the stable and looked around, wiping all the instruments in his mechanical arm to get the blood off so that they wouldn't rust and jam. He looked up at who Yuffie assumed to be the leader, a woman about two feet taller than herself, frizzy blonde hair pulled back into a messy ponytail, more muscle mass on her body than even Cloud. She was carrying a machine gun by herself, whereas the other heavy weapons crews were in pairs, one to handle the gun, one to carry the ammunition, but this woman simply had the ammo coming out in a belt through the top of a backpack. Currently, she was resting the large gun on her shoulder and was looking down at Lionel with a grim look on her face.

"The wounded…how many are there?"

Lionel scoffed, spitting out something that looked suspiciously like tobacco and said "You mean those who actually stand a chance of living through their wounds? About seven."

Yuffie's eyes widened at this. There were at least thirty people in the stable, and he was labeling twenty-three of them with a doom brand?

"W-wha…WHAT?! YOU'RE JUST GONNA LEAVE TWENTY PEOPLE BECAUSE YOU SAY THAT THEY CAN'T MAKE IT!"

She didn't know what possessed her to blow up like that, but next thing she knew, she was up in his face, yelling up a storm at him, bloody fists clenched in fury.

It was weird.

Ever since she got here, something had been pulling down who she was and leaving someone else there. Suddenly, battles shook her, blood creeped her out, a certain species of giant lizard terrified her, and she was just getting angry at people right off the bat that normally wouldn't even make her frown.

Yuffie spun around to the big woman and snarled "Where the hell am I, anyway?"

"Ok, so maybe I shouldn't have yelled at her like that, but she didn't have to hit me!" Yuffie snarled, massaging her cheek. The woman, Donna, had immediately backhanded her as soon as Yuffie was finished yelling.

Currently, they were in the stable, helping up those who could make it out. Those who couldn't would be told of their condition and left to their own devices with some medical supplies. It was sick, Yuffie thought, but Lionel explained that it had been happening all across the Hyluric Isles, which was where they were, for the past fifty years, which was how long this war had been going. The 'enemy' was the Addumanese Union, who had slowly been conquering island chains for colonizing. Or so they said.

"It's actually an enslavement conquering." Lionel had told her as he helped up the woman with the now stitched up belly gash. She was weak from blood loss, but Lionel said she was fit to travel. "They take an island and put the people to five times what they were normally working to bring out more gems. It's more like a concentration camp. A lot of the workers die in the first week."

It was either a civil war or a revolution, she wasn't sure. She hadn't expected any of this. Somehow, this world had not yet been touched by the Heartless, even though there was darkness everywhere on this world.

There was one more detail she hadn't expected, though. As soon as she asked the question, she thought that everyone would become confused. Instead, most of them rolled their eyes and nodded, and one of them even asked which world she was from. Somehow, these people knew about other worlds already. Lionel was able to give a vague response about that too.

"Aw, hell, things are always screwy here. This place is actually more like a crossroads between the worlds. If you look up at the stars at night, you'll find many more constellations than any other world. The land is illuminated, even when the moons are dormant. This world isn't really a world, more like a place to fill in the gaps."

Yuffie's head was, even now, reeling with the information she had received. Too…much…knowledge.

She looked over at the cyborg medic, who was helping another soldier up onto one of the giant bird mounts. She frowned, asking "What are those things? They look a little like chocobos."

In truth, the only thing the two species had in common was the fact that they were giant birds. After that, the similarities ended. Whereas chocobos were beautiful golden roosters, these wingless creatures looked more like ugly grayish ostriches with giant beaks that could quite possibly snap a Tyrannoraptor's neck effortlessly. Gray feathers covered their bodies except for their bald heads and legs, both of which were scaly. The powerful feet were armed with three equally powerful toes, each one tipped by a lethal looking talon. The neck was covered in a fuzzy down all the way to the head, like a chicks', and powerful muscles flexed all the way up to the axe like bill. Small, beady eyes one either side of the head glared down at whatever was below it, as the thing was at least five or six feet at the hip. So, of course, anyone would need help mounting one of these things. It was what Yuffie herself was supposed to be helping Lionel with, but the cyborg told her that he had it handled.

Said medic turned to her as his current patient climbed up into the saddle and took hold of the reins, and said "They're Brutornis. We use them for mounts here in the isles. The land on this entire world is all desert, but it's a little cooler here since we're on the ocean. On the mainland, the natural war between the species is brutally ruled by two killer species: the Brutornis and the Tyrannoraptor. Each one is specially suited to killing the other. It depends on how resourceful and intelligent the combatants are to decide the winner in a one on one, which happens frequently."

He walked over to another man who was saddling up the birds for the wounded to help the next soldier up. Already, three were out the door, and with the one Lionel had just helped, only three remained. The other wounded had been informed of their situation, but not abandoned. There was food, water, and medical supplies in the storeroom, but only enough to last a week. That was how long Donna intended to pull out for.

The Addumanese troops were preparing for another assault, and more landing craft had been sighted. The zeppelin was damaged and had landed somewhere inland for repairs, but everyone knew that they wouldn't survive another attack like the one they had just endured. So, the order to retreat had been issued. Currently, all soldiers who weren't seriously wounded were helping load food, water and ammunition onto wagons pulled by Brutornis teams, as well as leaving as few working weapons behind for the enemy as possible. There wasn't time to collect them all, however, so all they did was chuck grenades down the street, spraying metal, blood, dust and body parts everywhere. Donna intended to leave around sunset, since they'd reach the top of the cliff at night, when they couldn't be noticed.

But, one more thing had hit Yuffie.

She turned to Lionel and asked "What of the wounded here? I know you said you aren't abandoning them, but when the enemy moves in, won't they be in danger? Isn't that kinda like abandoning them?"

Lionel looked at her for a second with a frown, then chuckled and grinned, saying "That's right, I almost forgot. You don't know. The Addumanese are famous for the care they give their prisoners of war. They don't put the soldiers to work in the mines, just the civilians. They draft the captured soldiers into their own forces. Our men'll be safe while we're gone, Princess."

"Oi! Don't call me Princess! I'm the Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi!"

Lionel nodded, flipping his mechanical arm around to revolver again as he said "Nice to meet you, Princess."

He turned away from her, aiming the empty revolver at the ceiling, checking the sights to make sure it was going to be accurate.

Yuffie was pissed. Not even Leon ever talked to her like that, although, the way things were going right now, it was more like she was Leon and Lionel was her…wait a minute. Leon, Lionel. Their names were similar, and they even looked a little alike, subtract the metal arm, except that their personalities were completely flipped around.

She frowned once more and pointed at the revolver arm, asking "If you've got that thing, why not use it all the time, instead of toting around a shotgun?"

Lionel didn't even look at her and answered "Some of the parts of the gun are used in operating the arm when it's in regular mode. If those parts become over heated, or if the gun jams from overuse, I take a very high risk of causing the arm itself to malfunction. It happened with my first mech-prosthesis."

First? How many arms had he lost?!

Before Yuffie could ask anymore, however, a loud explosion ripped through the air, causing the ground to shake and the giant birds to start squawking in fright.

((A sharp cliffie, hmm? That's your punishment for not reviewing! Hahahahahaha!!! Okay, I'm done acting insane for now.))