Chapter 16
Fated to Fade
"It's about time to call it a night." Gin Morioka sighed, letting the binoculars fall, the strap around his neck keeping them from plummeting down to the distant ground. Night had fallen hours before, and now even the most determined night owls had succumbed to slumber, the last lights dying and leaving the dorms darkened. Though Gin's eyes were far from sated, he knew from experience there would be nothing more to be gained that night; he would have to restrain himself until the following evening, when he could return to his traditional perch in the tree outside the girls' dorms and resume his… appreciative inspecting.
As Gin turned, delicately trying to find a safe way out of the tree, a flash of motion half-seen in the corner of his eye snatched his attention, and the binoculars snapped back into place over his eyes as he scanned the array of windows before him. There! Behind those curtains… he could make out nothing, not even a shapely silhouette; only a faint, wavering light. He squinted, willing the light to grow, but his desires were answered only by the glow disappearing entirely. Growling in frustration, he started to lower his arms, but paused as the light flared back to life – in the next room. Blinking in surprise, he strained his eyes to search that room, recognizing it by its opened curtains as one belonging to a stunning, if incautious, first year. By the bed he spotted what looked to be the source of the mysterious light: a floating orb of translucent blue-green fire, hovering across the floor towards the opposite wall. Within a moment, the orb passed out of Gin's view, and only a second later the window of the adjacent room began to show signs of the same light.
Gin's brow furrowed under his headband as he considered this. "Hitodama?" he mused, referencing the corpse-light that was often associated with the spirits of the deceased. It would make sense; Yokai Academy took in all types of monsters, and that included the undead. He was surprised he hadn't considered the possibility of incorporeal spirits amongst their number. But, why would a ghost be wandering through the girls' dormitories?
A tidal wave of emotions crashed onto Gin: rage, envy, and finally a grudging respect. Taking an erect stance upon the branch, he offered a firm salute to the wandering ghost, a nod from one professional to another. He could only imagine the benefits of being able to pass through walls; no more peeking through gauzy curtains, and instead a full-on view of incomparable beauty… Wiping the nascent drool from the corner of his mouth, Gin turned and began to descend from his post, leaving the field to a fellow admirer of female flesh.
Behind him, the ghost-light passed from room to room, unrelenting in its search.
"Headmaster!" Barely pausing after his knock, Zack barged into the Headmaster's office. Despite the extraordinarily late hour, he was not surprised to find the cowled head of the academy standing behind his desk, though his golden eyes did widen when he noticed the Headmaster blowing out one of the few candles that still illuminated the room. Recovering, he held aloft the report that had sent him dashing to the office. "It's Fairy Tale; they're on the move! Most of the students that we have suspected of ties to them have left their dorms and are combing the school and its grounds, and we've even detected a few energy signatures passing through the barrier."
"I know." The Headmaster offered the commander of his personal guard a calm smile as he picked up another candle. "I was getting ready to leave the office." He lifted the small flame to his face, and the light made his eyes glint dangerously. "I wanted to take care of this personally." He pursed his lips and blew, and the dancing flame fell to the side before dying.
Swallowing, Zack nodded. "I've already deployed several of the standard guardians to various locations on the grounds; I also deployed Uriel, but he's close enough to be summoned if need be."
"Good." The Headmaster paid fatal attention to the last of the candles, plunging the room into nearly-complete darkness. Neither seemed impaired by this as the Headmaster walked up to Zack and the two stepped to the door, the guardian opening the door for his master and patiently waiting for the academy's leader to pass through. Instead, the Headmaster paused, glancing at a nearby wall. "While it would be best if we were the ones to find the phylactery … it seems that we may be too late." Without another word, he stepped into the hall, and after a moment Zack followed, closing the door behind him.
Sadako Yurei resisted the urge to sigh loudly as she passed through another wall, moving from one silent bedroom to another. She grumbled as she scanned this room just as she had the others, searching for any sign of the object that she had been ordered to find. Though it had been described to her, she still didn't have any hope of finding it among the uncountable dorm-rooms, and had begun to wonder if she had been given this job as an insult. After all, it wouldn't make any sense for such a valuable object to be hidden where it could be discovered any day by the girls who lived there, and since the servants of the Hell-King were also looking for it, they would have leapt at any hint of its discovery.
An ugly scowl crossed her face as she gave this room a cursory scan, invisible arms crossing over her chest. As a shade, her ability to become temporarily intangible and drift through solid objects was invaluable to such a search, but she had little doubt that her less-than-pleasant demeanor had once again earned her the bad end of the deal. Even though it had only been months since she had been approached by one of Fairy Tale's operatives after being disciplined by one of the teachers, she was coming to hate that organization as much as she despised the school itself.
Throwing her arms up in frustration, Sadako passed through the door into the hallway, tempted to abandon her task altogether. Still, the boy with the strange, mismatched eyes had told them all that finding the strange object would cause the academy a lot of trouble, and that was one thing that all of them wanted. She would love to throw dirt in the face of the Hell-King, and if finding some 'File-whatever' and handing it over to that Kiriya could do it, then she was in.
She glanced down the hall, making sure that she was done before moving up to the fourth floor. There was another door, but surely such a precious object wouldn't be hidden in a bathroom, would it? She stared at the door for a moment before shrugging; it would at least be a break from bedroom after bedroom.
She drifted into the room, checking each nook and cranny for something that looked out of place, but, predictably, found nothing. Something like the object that the boy had described would have stuck out like a sore thumb here, and the people who cleaned probably would have found it anyways. She bit back a scream of frustration as she finished checking the last stall, and allowed her rage to boil over briefly, placing her ghostly hands against the cracked wall and slamming her face into it, phasing into incorporeality at the last moment, her head passing harmlessly through the bricks.
And into the hollowed niche beyond, where the hourglass waited.
The shade snapped her head back, blinking rapidly at the wall. Not quite believing what she had seen, she leaned forward again, passing through the bricks. There it was, sitting in the middle of a hollow just barely big enough for it. It just as Kiriya had described: an ornate hourglass, with its bases made out of what looked to be aged ivory decorated with roses and skulls. While it looked normal enough, if ancient, a second observation revealed two main oddities: the first was that the thin middle of the hourglass appeared to be completely blocked by a black bead, which would make the object entirely useless, since the sand would be unable to pass from one side to the other. This point was moot, however, since the second abnormality was the fact that both ends of the hourglass were completely emptied of sand, which might be explained by the thin crack that marred one side.
Sadako leaned out of the hole in the wall, a dark smile seeping onto her face. She allowed her body to become solid once again, and began picking at the cracks in the wall, trying to sink her nails in deeply enough to tug a brick free. Finally her fingers sank into a crack, and with a heave she managed to pull the brick partway out. A minute later, the brick was free, and she reached in to claim the hourglass, her hand closing over the cool glass and lifting it free of its dark home. She hefted it, giving the weighty ornament a dark smile.
"So sorry, little girl," purred an ominous voice from directly behind her. "But you really shouldn't have touched that." Eyes wide, Sadako glanced behind her. The man standing there smiled enthusiastically at her, his teeth grey just like the rest of his face. He bowed slightly, his formal manners accentuated by the dark suit he wore. The man extended his hand, and black sand began to pour from the palm, stopping just above the ground and quickly rising, forming into the shape of a scythe. Gripping the weapon, the grey-skinned man pulled it back, his smile never relenting. "I'll have to kill you now, just because you were too nosy. A shame."
As the scythe arced towards her, Sadako reacted in the only way she knew, phasing into incorporeality. The blade of the scythe passed through her, carving a furrow into the wall behind her. Though she was saved from the scythe, Sadako's actions carried a cost, as the hourglass did not phase with her, and thus fell to the floor, clattering loudly on the tile. She started to leave it where it lay, but her assailant's reaction made her freeze in place: as soon as the hourglass struck the floor, the grey man screamed in agony, dropping to one knee. Seeing her chance, Sadako snatched the hourglass from the ground and sprinted towards the door, almost stumbling but aware that falling would spell her demise.
As Sadako raced down the hall, it became obvious that the man's deafening screams had reached into the dorm rooms, as several bleary-eyed girls emerged from their rooms as she neared the end of the building, adding their own cries to the chaos as the man dashed past them in pursuit of the shade and her cargo. Hearing the terror of the girls behind her served to speed Sadako's feet, and she could almost feel the blade of the scythe arcing towards her; she didn't dare glance behind her, for the knowledge of what she would find if she did. Instead, she focused on the end of the hallway, and the railing there. Instead of turning down the stairs, she grabbed the railing and lifted herself over, her momentum carrying her away from the building as she fell towards the ground. Behind her, she heard the screech of metal as the scythe obliterated the railing, and the frustrated roar that followed.
Sadako managed to control herself enough to slow her descent, shifting partway into her disembodied form but still keeping the hourglass from slipping out of her grasp. As she touched down, she looked around desperately, trying to figure out the best path of escape; surely the forest would give her the best chance of losing her pursuer, and somewhere in that stretch of tangled trees was Kiriya and the others, who could maybe protect her from the grey man. Still, there was the matter of finding them… Not waiting to think it over, she sprinted for the tree line, clutching the hourglass to her chest.
She barely noticed the streams of darkness racing along the ground beside her until they converged between her and the forest, grains of black sand swirling together and quickly forming into the shape of the grey-skinned maniac. Stumbling into a stop, Sadako stared in wide-eyed horror as he stepped towards her, his expression one of murderous rage. "You were warned, little girl," he snarled, pulling back his weapon for a fatal blow. "You shouldn't take things that don't belong to you!"
"Halt!" Sadako's eyes widened as the black-clad men stepped out from the forest, each of them wearing sunglasses and wielding thin swords. She recognized them as the Headmaster's guardians, and remembered that she had been warned to avoid them at all costs. One of them pointed menacingly at her and her assailant. "Put down the weapons and come quietly, or we will be forced to-"
"Oh, shut up," the grey man snarled, turning away from Sadako and swinging his free arm in their direction. Following the motion, more black sand billowed out, arcing like a whip towards the guardian who had spoken. The Headmaster's servant raised his sword in an attempt to parry, but the black sand slid past the sword and collided with the guardian's chest, picking him up from the ground and flinging him back into one of the nearby trees with bone-rattling force. Groaning, the protector slid to the ground, and his comrades turned vengeful gazes on their adversary.
Realizing her chance, Sadako started to run away from the conflict, but the grey-skinned man noticed her and turned to continue his pursuit, disregarding the guardians until he could reclaim the artifact. As he stepped after her, however, a ball of flame landed between them, exploding into a blinding column of fire that made him flinch back, shielding his eyes from the light with his free arm. Stumbling from the force of the explosion, the shade fought to stay on her feet as she ran towards the forest, quickly disappearing amongst the dead trees.
"After her!" a voice bellowed, and the guardians that had been advancing turned and dashed after the girl carrying the hourglass, not sparing another glance towards their enemy or their fallen comrade. Snarling, the grey man turned to follow them, but a wave of flame sprouted from the ground, cutting him off from his prey. "You're mine," a voice promised from nearby, and the scythe-wielder turned to face his newest opponent.
"You're in my way," Mori Retsu noted, rage boiling at the edges of his voice. "Kindly move, or I will have to remove you myself. You won't live long enough to regret that." He inspected the man who was walking towards him: another of the Headmaster's black-clad protectors, but with a palpable aura of power around him. This man was entirely bald, and a faint fiery glow penetrated the darkness of his sunglasses. He held a slip of paper in one hand, and the shimmering runes on it flared into life suddenly, burning but not consuming the seal's far end.
"No chance, pal," the guardian smirked, shaking his head. "You and I never got to tangle, back in the day. 's time we remedied that, eh?" The guardian's white teeth reflected the dancing flames as he smiled fiercely. "I hear you can't die without us breaking that pretty little trinket of yours. I say no one's tried hard enough!" With that, he swung his arm in an overhand throw, and the seal sailed straight at Mori Retsu. As it neared him, it exploded into another ball of flame, growing as it came.
"I don't have time for this," Mori growled, dissipating into sand just in time for the fireball to sail through the space he had just inhabited. The guardian turned as the sand reformed behind him, narrowly dodging one scythe swing and deflecting another with a plume of flame that forced his opponent back. As Mori Retsu recovered, the guardian drew forth three more seals from a pocket and threw them forward, the papers flaring into spears of fire. Mori shifted his form to allow them to pass safely through his chest and retaliated by sending forth another whip of black sand, which lashed against his enemy but failed to do more than stagger him.
"Gonna have to do more than that, Sandy!" the guardian cackled, already drawing forth another seal. "Time I get through with you, you're gonna be glass!"
"Uriel. Enough." Both men froze in place at the soft voice, turning in surprise to face the white-cowled man standing nearby, both them of completely surprised by his presence. The Headmaster of Yokai Academy smiled quietly, hands folded before him as he stood and waited for the crackle of his guardian's flames to die. "Go after the girl, quickly. I shall see to our friend here."
"But, Hell King…" The protector glanced from his master to Mori Retsu and back, and only moved when the lord of the academy gave him a pointed smile. Swallowing, the guardian turned and ran in the direction that the shade had fled without another word, leaving the Headmaster and Mori Retsu alone together.
Mori glanced at his enemy, frowning deeply. "Forgive me, but I don't have time to kill you right now," he apologized, warily eyeing the other man. "Perhaps another day?"
"You don't even have the energy for that right now." The Headmaster shrugged minutely, shaking his head. "What little power you recently drew from the nightmares of my students and from distant Tsukune has not been enough to restore your physical form for long. I would only give you minutes more before you fade from the physical world once again." As Mori Retsu growled in frustration, the white-clad man bowed his head politely. "Surely it wouldn't hurt to pass those last minutes in conversation, since there is no way you can catch up to your phylactery now. And even if you did, there is no way you could hide it before either my forces or those of Fairy Tale caught up to you and took it away."
The villain was silent for a moment, his scythe crumbling into sand as he considered his enemy's words. "I remember you," he finally said, his eyes wide as he struggled with his corroded memories. "You were there, at the final battle. I remember that."
"Yes," the Headmaster yielded. "And thus, you could say, I am indirectly responsible for your birth… for the fact that you exist at all. It was my efforts that led to the defeat of Death and his army, and then-"
"The Lux Aeterna. That was your doing!" Mori Retsu's voice dripped with hatred, but his lips curved in a dark smile. "I'm sorry, but I'll pass on thanking you."
The Headmaster chuckled. "Perhaps you will appreciate it more if I offered to prevent your demise, instead. After all, you must know by now that, following your failure, Fairy Tale made an agreement with Thanatos, and he will soon be here to claim you. Aid me, give me just a little information, and perhaps we can defeat him before that happens. Or, in the worst case…" His eyes glittered under the edge of his cowl. "I won't use you as bait in my efforts to destroy him."
"I don't need your help," Mori Retsu snarled. "All the time since that battle, I have been avoiding him, one step ahead of that silent monstrosity. Centuries have passed by the handful, and he has never caught me! Soon, I will have enough power to defeat him myself, and, once I have done that, I will surpass my predecessor, and you will learn the true power of the greatest lich!"
The answer was a quiet laugh. "Lich? No." Shaking his head, the lord of the academy offered the other man a pitying smile. "You are, at best, an artifact soul. At worst…" The smile lifted into a predator's grin. "A mere shadow that gained its own mind, a soul severed from-"
"Silence!"
The two stared at each other, the grey-skinned villain trembling with rage. His fury failed, however, as he suddenly glanced down at himself, noticing that he had begun to grow fainter, almost transparent. He looked again to the Hell King, his anger giving way to a sadistic smile. "Very well then." He straightened, smirking even as the trees became visible through his form. "Three days. That is how long it will take, after Charon finds his flesh, for Tsukune Aono to be consumed. Once you forget, it will be three days until he comes for us both!" Laughing darkly, Mori Retsu allowed himself to fade entirely, and a moment later the Headmaster stood alone on the yard of his school.
The Hell King stood silently, regarding the space where Mori Retsu had just stood, his face inscrutable. Three days. His jaw clenched, he turned and walked back towards the school, already trying to think of a way to use this information. He would have to; now, it was all they had.
"Stop where you are! Don't make us use force!"
Sadako Yurei raced through the dead forest that surrounded Yokai Academy, thoroughly lost but only concerned with the men that were pursuing her. She hadn't seen the scythe-wielding maniac that had hunted her at first since she had left the school's yard, but she knew that she would be in almost as much trouble if she was captured by the school's guardians; after all, they would have to know that she was working for Fairy Tale, considering what she was carrying. Somehow, the idea of being forced to face the Headmaster terrified her as much as the grey man had, and that lent her the adrenaline to continue running, dodging roots and rocks without ever slowing down… until she failed to dodge one final time.
"Waa!" she shrieked, falling forward. Clutching to the hourglass, she didn't have a free hand to catch herself or time to shift into her disembodied form, so she slammed into the ground face first. Her head spinning, she tried to rise from the ground, moaning in pain, but froze as she heard the footsteps end a short distance from her. Eyes wide in terror, she turned to face the Headmaster's protectors, staring into their sunglass-obscured eyes as she waited for them to advance.
The one in the lead stepped toward her, his face impassive as he extended a hand. "Give us the hourglass willingly, and we'll apprehend you without violence. Otherwise…" His voice trailed off, and she flinched away from his cold stare.
"Ugh…" The protectors turned as one of their number groaned and slumped to the ground. Though they quickly moved to face the new threat, one after another of them fell as a massive blade arced through their ranks. For a moment, Sadako was terrified that the grey man had caught up to her, but the glimpses she caught of the scythe revealed that this weapon was different; it looked more organic, almost like shaped bone with flowing curves and jutting spines.
"You!" the final guardian snarled, lunging at the white-haired boy that had defeated his comrades. He ducked under a wide swing and thrust with his sword, but the boy was already out of range, moving incredibly fast. The scythe revered direction, and with its greater reach the guardian was unable to escape, swinging his sword in a desperate attempt to deflect the strike. His parry was successful, but costly, as his blade went spiraling into the darkness of the forest, and, as he glanced to the side to search for it, the boy advanced. The guardian turned back to his opponent just in time to see the scythe's handle as it was punched into his face, sending him sprawling onto the ground, the shards of his shattered glasses spraying around him.
"That was disappointing," Kiriya Yoshi lamented, shaking his head as he looked over the still forms of the guardians. "Almost boring, really." He shrugged indifferently, and turned a smile towards Sadako, his mismatched eyes aglow with his victory. He stretched out his hand towards her, nodding towards the hourglass. "Nice work. I'll be taking that…"
The shade mutely offered the hourglass to him, and he took it from her and slipped it into a thick cloth bag he had tied at his waist, drawing the mouth securely closed before offering Sadako a hand to pull her from the ground. "Mission accomplished," he noted, grinning in the direction of the academy. Turning a bright smile towards Sadako, he motioned further into the forest with a nod of his head. "Shall we?"
Together, the two Fairy Tale operatives disappeared into the trees, leaving behind them the limp forms of the Headmaster's forces. It would be several minutes before Uriel emerged from the trees to find the emptied battlefield, and, by then, the pair were long gone.
The girl's dorms had returned to their previous quiet, the girls returning to their rooms at the orders of the faculty, who had emerged to briefly investigate the disturbance before ordering the onlookers to scatter. Now, even the teachers had returned to their beds, unable to offer each other any answers. The strange man that had chased one of the girls through the halls would be at the heart of most of the school's gossip the next day, fear and excitement buoying several theories to impossible heights before they imploded under the weight of doubt and counter-concepts.
Now, though, two girls had slipped back out of their rooms to inspect the damage wrought on the dorms, silently forming their own notions about what had happened. They had managed to get a description of the scythe-swinging madman from several of the witnesses who had caught a glimpse of him as he had raced down the hall, and those words had sparked memories for both of them. They had both faced Mori Retsu once before, and so they had both come to the same conclusion.
One of the girls placed her hand on a gash in the concrete wall next to the ruined railing, shaking her head. "That creep sure didn't hold back," she noted, shaking her head. "But I thought Sis and the others beat him?"
The other girl grabbed the brim of her pointed hat as the wind fought to claim it, staring past the railing at the charred grass and craters that littered the nearby earth. "They beat him, but I guess he's back… but that's why they were sent away, wasn't it?" Yukari Sendo turned a worried frown to her friend, her fists clenched tightly as she wondered what this could mean. "If he has managed to come back, then could something have happened…?"
Kokoa Shuzen shook her head, crossing her arms before her stubbornly. "That guy wasn't a match for them once; I'm sure he couldn't have beat my Sis again. Still…" Doubt crept into her eyes as she stared at the wound in the wall.
"We'd better contact them, and let them know what happened here," Yukari proposed, her energy returning with the hopes of a quick response from their friends. "They might need to be warned, or it might mean that they need to come back to the school!"
Kokoa's spirits were similarly raised by that idea, but eagerness of a different sort lit her eyes. "Yes, but I want to hunt this guy down before they can make it back! We owe him a little payback anyways, and it would be nice to be the heroes before they get the chance!"
Yukari grinned at that idea, nodding. "Let's see what else we can find out tomorrow; I'm sure Gin will want something about this mess in the next paper anyways. If we can get a good lead, I'm sure we can be of help, even if we don't manage to find him before they arrive." The two shared an eager, resolute nod before walking away, heading back to their rooms to rest up for their busy day ahead.
But, as they walked away, Yukari turned a worried glance back in the direction of the devastation. There had to be some reason that Mori Retsu had reappeared, and the fact that they didn't know what it might be was worrying. Trying to swallow down her concern for her friends, she picked up her pace to catch up to Kokoa, promising herself that they would find some way of discovering the truth.
She would have to trust that Tsukune and the others were still alright.
Author's Note: I must say, I'm somewhat torn on what I think of how this chapter turned out; I hope it meets your approval, and would appreciate feedback on it. Perhaps it is best that I feel somewhat conflicted about it, since my hubris over some of my previous work has left me a tad frustrated. Still, I am glad to get to post this one, since it has been one of the chapters I had the most fun visualizing.
Sadly, though, it may be a week before my next post, as I have a few other projects that are calling for my attention. I do owe my Love Hina fic a little consideration, since the second chapter is all but finished. Also, it seems that I'm up next to post for the webnovic I work on with my wife and a mutual friend, and so I'll have to be spending some of my writing mojo on that. Plus, I'm going to have to get creative with the next chapter, since, well… I've got nothing planned for it. ^_^; Seat of my pants, is there any other way to write?
Hrm… remarkably, I can think of nothing else to say. This may be a first. Oh well, instead of further ramblings, allow me once again to offer my thanks for reading and reviewing. With any luck at all, I shall be back in a week, bearing a chapter fresh from the keyboard; see you then!
Oh, yes. That is what I'm forgetting, with all of the projects I'm juggling… sleep.
~Wynn P.