A/N: Don't tell me you havent used First Aid over and over cause Raine wasn't there and you were out of apple gels!

"Sh- ah! Freaking... flying... Mother Goddess... Martel on a... pogo stick..." Zelos clenched his teeth, bleeding all over his couch as Sheena scurried about the mansion looking for gels. He tried to wipe the blood from his face, but his pink silks did little more than to smear the blood around. He coughed a few times, his abused windpipes still trying to recover.

"F-first Aid," he gasped, waving one hand over himself. It did little to allieve his situation. "First Aid, First Aid, First Aid!" Using the spell over and over, he was slowly gaining some of his senses. Sheena came back, her arms filled to the brim with gels.

"Are you OK?" she asked him, selecting an apple gel from the bunch.

"Wh- who... me?"

"No, the freaking mouse on your shoulder!"

Zelos glanced at his shoulder once and Sheena resisted the urge to slap him. He was wounded, after all. Dumping all of the gels onto his lap, she picked her way through the glass to where Nyoka's lifeless body lay. She shivered once before grabbing at the former beauty, trying to drag her out of the house. She weighed a ton.

An idea struck Sheena and she rushed upstairs to where Kuchinawa was sitting on the edge of his bed, picking at a tray of food placed before him. He looked up when Sheena entered the room, speaking for the first time in days. "Sounds like you guys had a party." He sighed once and crawled out of the bed, facing her. "Let me guess. You have orders for me, Master?"

An instant wave of guilt. "Please don't call me that."

"But you do need my help."

"...Yeah. Come on." She turned around, unable to bear looking at him so broken and beaten. It was worse than seeing Zelos covered in blood. Sheena reached Nyoka's body and waved at it. "Can you dispose of her? She's freakishly heavy."

"That's because she's been genetically engineered to be stronger than a team of oxen," Kuchinawa said helpfully, hoisting Nyoka up over one shoulder. "Her name is Nyoka. Her name was Nyoka."

Alarm bells started ringing in her head. "Wh-what? How do you know that?"

"'Cause I used to work with her," Kuchinawa said, sparing her peaceful, sleeping face a single glance.

"Bitch told me she was a teacher," Zelos spoke up from where he was scarfing down the gels. Sheena sweat dropped once.

"Well she was obviously lying, Zelos!"

Kuchinawa surprised them by speaking up again. "Actually, she wasn't. She taught me and a few others some tricks of hand-to-hand fighting since she was the oldest. And what exactly do you want me to do with her body, master?"

"Dump her in the freaking river for all I care!" Zelos said.

"Uhm," Sheena said, trying to think of a way to be fair. Zelos might not care about Kuchinawa, but she couldn't help but remember what he was like when he was just a teenager. "If you two were close... I mean, do you want to bury her or have a proper funeral, Kuchinawa?"

"Not particularly." Kuchinawa turned to the broken window, not bothering with the door. "The river is good. She didn't like anything sentimental, anyway." He leapt out the broken window, taking to the rooftops in true ninja style. Sheena tried to keep track of him but he was soon lost among the chimney tops. She cursed.

"I forgot to ask him who these 'others' were that he mentioned," she said to Zelos, taking a small apple gel for herself. Nyoka had given her a black eye before Sheena had snapped her neck.

"Well, it's not like you're never going to see him again," Zelos pointed out.

"Oh... right..."

"What the hell happened here?" came an authoritive voice. "Speak up! This is the Meltokio City Guard!"

"I'll take care of this..." Zelos muttered, getting up off the couch.

Kuchinawa watched, not without a certain grim satisfaction, as Nyoka's body was carried off by the sewer currents. She had always been pretty, true, but she'd always been manic and bi-polar and just generally psychotic. It could have been worse, though, he thought as he noticed rats diving into the water after the corpse. Instead of psychotic, she could have been-

"Psychic?"

A pair of slender arms wrapped around his waist.

"I was just thinking that."

"I know," said the owner of the arms. "So..." she reached out past his waist, snagging at his arm. One long fingernail tapped at the gold bracelet. "You left the Family only to be caught in another cage? Poor Kuchinawa. It seems to be your destiny to be constantly bossed around by bitches."

"Is your only intention to make me mad? Because I'm not expressively forbidden from killing people."

"Aww, sounds like somebody needs some love."

Kuchinawa turned his head, wishing his mask was off so that she could see his raised eyebrow. He nodded at their filthy surroundings. "What, here?"

One hand produced a small paper fan, still unfolded. She rapped it against his forehead. "No, stupid. I mean do you want revenge against the ones who did this to you?"

Kuchinawa peeled the hands from around him, stepping away from the woman cloaked in shadows. She couldn't see his grin, of course, but she knew it was there. "More than anything."

"Then tell me everything you know about the boy Lloyd Irving and his following. It's about time you became part of the Family."

Sheena warily tapped at the new glass window. "That was really fast," she said, somewhat in awe.

"Yeah, well, money speaks!"

"Uh-huh..." Sheena nervously rubbed her hands together. "We need to warn everyone else," she said, wondering when the blood stains would be taken care of. The workers had done a good job of cleaning up the glass, so well that she could walk around barefooted without fear, but the memory was still fresh there in her mind. My body is a machine. I can kill without thinking.

But she was thinking, when she killed Nyoka. She was thinking of protecting her best friend who was lying defenseless. It had been in defense, all of it. And maybe just a little bit of revenge for the black eye. Sheena shook her head, pacing around the room. "If you're feeling well enough, we'll go to the town gates together. From now on until we know what's going on, we have to assume our lives are in danger. Maybe everyone who was in the world regeneration journey, or only the rich ones. Using that logic, you, Presea, Regal, and I are the ones in most danger. We'd be in the most danger anyway since we're stationary while Lloyd, the Professor, Genis, and Colette are always on the move. Thank the Goddess we found out how to contact between Rheiards or even we wouldn't be able to find them."

She stopped pacing to face Zelos, trying not to show how nervous she was. "Do you... have anything to add that I haven't thought of?"

"Only one thing." Zelos bounded to his feet. "I say, damn the law about flying within the city limits. This is a matter of life and death. My life and death! We go to the roof and use the Rheiard there."

"That won't be necessary."

Sheena must have jumped three feet straight into the air. Another enemy? Only Kuchinawa? No, it was none of those. Kratos silently closed the door behind him, crossing his arms and waiting for some sort of reaction.

"K-Kratos!" Sheena squeaked, resisting the urge to run up and give him a large sloppy kiss on the cheek. "How did you get here?"

"...The front door was unlocked," he said.

"You know what I mean."

The edges of his mouth turned down. "I can still teleport from Derris-Kharlan to this world. But only because of some unsettling news I've recieved."

"That was pretty fast! How did you know I was in danger?" Zelos said, walking over and slapping Kratos on the back. "I always knew we had a connection. Maybe we're long lost brothers. Gasp! That would make me Lloyd's uncle! Duudde!" He grinned, but Sheena began to have a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as Kratos didn't answer at once.

"You weren't the first to be attacked," Kratos said, confirming her fears. "Raine is with Presea right now."

-Several hours earlier-

It had been Presea Combatir's fourteenth birthday two days ago. She didn't particularly feel fourteen, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she had been living for thirty years. In her opinion, those missing sixteen years didn't really exist. True, things had happened, but she didn't remember them. Life was memory. If you couldn't remember what you did yesterday, how do you prove that yesterday ever happened? Maybe even then your memory was unreliable. A few years can change the way you saw things in the middle of a battle, or how you thought of a certain person.

She dunked her head into the stream, fighting hard not to gasp against the chill. She had just been practicing her martial arts in the woods just outside of the island resort of Altamira. She didn't feel fourteen because that was generally the way fourteen year old's felt. They still felt thirteen, and they wouldn't feel fourteen until they were almost fifteen and by then it was too late. She smiled. And how many fourteen year old's wondered if the life they were living was real or an illusion brought up by an exsphere, and she was actually fifty years old?

Snap.

Twig breaking. That was not a wolf. Too heavy for a wolf, wolves had silent feet. Too light for an Ogre. And basilisks slithered; it was a continuous motion and not what she had heard. A person? Yes, a person. With boots. A smile lit her face as she turned around. It was probably Regal, then, coming to check up on her. He was always concerned about her, even though she could take care of herself. She had been smiling a lot more that Mithos was gone and she could be here with Regal, a man who was almost a substitute for the father she had lost.

Her smile was lost. It was not Regal.

"Hi," said the stranger. Presea couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl. The stranger's hair was shoulder length, silky and black, and his skin was dark like a Triet desert man. Like her, the stranger had narrow, slender hips and was perhaps two or three heads taller than her. But at least Presea had a small amount of development in her chest, a source of endless worry for the pink-haired teen, who was not sure whether or not this was a welcome development. Presea said nothing.

"You're Presea, right?" the stranger said, taking a few steps forward. His voice was low, a teenager's voice. He was a boy, then. His right hand was shoved into his pocket, a disarming smile on his face. She moved her hand, in plain sight, over her dagger. Her axe was resting against a tree stump, maybe a yard away. The pretty boy's smile changed to something more wicked. "Yeah, you're Presea. I've come here to kill you."

Presea didn't waste any time after that. She rolled to the side, hefting up her axe and charging to where the beautiful boy was standing, one hand in his pocket. The edge of the blade scraped against the ground until the last minute when she drew upon all of her strength and lifted it high above her head to cleave the boy in two.

While her arms were raised, her abdomen was left defenseless. He casually reached within her wide-open guard with his left hand, jabbing at her stomach with his index and middle finger. She flew back into the stream, her axe soaring through the air to land with a meaty thunk in the trunk of an old oak.

"Hee hee hee," said the boy. "You know Genis begged for his life right before I killed him?"

He's lying.

Presea hated him anyway. A flame ignited deep inside her and she drew her dagger, holding herself so tense she began to quiver.

"Heh, actually, this is the first time I've ever fought someone around my-"

Presea charged at him, full of hot rage but her eyes were like flecks of ice. She was more careful this time, thrusting and then side-stepping to-

He reached out with his left arm without so much as turning his head, snatching her wrist. His eyes swiveled in their sockets to look at her, draining away the eruption of hate and replacing it with something colder. He threw her over his shoulder, slamming her down against the muddy earth and causing the air in her lungs to escape at an alarming speed. He's too fast. I'm too slow. I always relied on someone else to get the speedy ones.

I'm going to die here.

But instead of using his free left hand to flip her over and chop down on her neck, crushing her windpipe, he took advantage of her momentary paralysis. He pressed his knee down against the small of her back, keeping her on the ground, bending down to speak into her ear. "You know this isn't going to be fun unless you scream for me," he said, grabbing both her wrists with one hand and yanking them above her head, pressing her face down into the dirt with his other hand. "Make a sound," he dared her. "Yell for help." The hand on the back of her head slid down, running the pink hair through his slender fingers until he reached her cheek, then continuing down along her neck and shoulder. This was a different sort of attack altogether. "Or you could say: 'Please don't kill me, Zev,' and I promise I won't kill you. And then you just relax, pretty girl. You'll enjoy it."

But what Zev forgot was that Presea had lifted far heavier men than him. He didn't know how she managed to break free, but soon enough he found himself falling back onto his bottom, the girl under him wrenching free. Presea whipped around, smashing her open palm against his face. The blood splattered all over his pretty dark eyes, blinding him, and Presea got up and ran for her life. She smashed through the forest, forgetting the small trail and instead making a direct line towards the gates of Altamira. Behind her, she could already hear Zev giving chase, making more noise than she was. And something else. There was a wrongness in the forest, a silence so profound she could hear every panting breath, and every crash as a shrub was ruthlessly torn aside. What to do, what to do, what to do. She put on a burst of speed, flipping out her knife that she had managed to grab as she ran away. Taking a branch, her deft carpenter's hands made a crude trigger-trap. Then she ran again, knowing she had almost wasted too much time because he was right behind her and-

"Rraarrwaaoo!"

It was like the sound of an angry cat. A half-howl strangled in a wolf's throat. The knife had been lashed to a springy branch, held back until the right moment when he stepped on the trap. It should have dug itself deep into his chest, she had made it so that it would accommodate his height.

So why was he still chasing her?

"Boo!" Zev came from her left, grabbing her and slamming her up against a tree, grinning from beneath his bloody mask. He kissed her, roughly and without any tenderness. She could taste the blood on his lips, and somehow knew that it wasn't only his blood that had run past those sharp teeth, she knew he had gulped it down like any predator ever had. She bit his lip, tearing at it and beating at his chest with his hands and kicking him in the gut and kneeing him where it really hurt until he shoved her away, again yowling in pain. She picked herself up- no time to waste- and began to run again

Presea's heart sped up as she saw the shiny gates of Altamira. Yes. Oh Goddess, there it was. There was Regal, he would save her from the monster. She tried to run faster, the sight giving her legs strength, but then something came crashing down right in front of her. She was going too fast, she couldn't help herself from runninging right into him. Zev caught her, his dark eyes flecked with gold, his claws raking along her back, tearing her lavender dress.

"You don't escape from me," he said, smiling with far too many teeth. "Never."

He opened his cavernous mouth wide, maybe to take a chunk out of her. Maybe he'd start with her arm, for punching her. Hot thick saliva dripped down from those teeth, rank breath blew her hair back. She bit her lip. She wouldn't scream.

A/N: Nyoka is African for "Snake," Zev is Hebrew for "Wolf." Till the next update...