A New Challenge
- Chiba Hiro
(I do not own Ranma ½ or any of its content. All of it belongs to Rumiko Takahashi, and other creators of the series.)
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Chapter 12: The Underground Labyrinth
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"Great! I think Ryoga's bad sense of direction rubbed off on me!" Ranma shouted out for what became the third time that day he said out loud. He didn't care if anyone heard him like that as long as a ray of sunshine kept burning bright, but in this situation, Ranma was only on the first level of the underground hideout.
It had been ten hours since Ranma had been given the map to the underground hideout, and he spent the greater part of the previous night and morning to alert the chief. The chief would not allow Ranma to go of alone after his friends, but knowing Ranma as the stubborn martial artist he is, Ranma beat the elder up, and sent him flying with a sky rocketing kick.
Since then, Ranma had been following the map's direction it indicated, but to no avail, Ranma wound up in an underground pathway, always ending up back to where he first started. It took him nearly two hours to figure out that he was wandering around in circles.
No matter what path, or pattern he chose to follow, he always ended up back to his starting position nearly twenty minutes after trying to diverge from the paths he vowed not to take twice while he was underground.
After an endless cycle of wandering and choosing, he decided to try marking the places he walked past already, and if he went past them again, he'd known he was there previously. Good plan, right? No, even when he marked each wall with a tally, his tally marks totaled forty-seven.
"Damn it! I'm getting nowhere at this rate! Even if I mark the stupid walls, I always end up back here! What's wrong with me?" Ranma cursed out loud, and he pounded a fist to the wall closest to him.
Suddenly, the place where his fist contacted with the wall, it pressed inward like a button, and a new entrance opened up.
"Alright! I think I just found the right path!" Ranma cheered, and marked the wall with the tally mark. "Just in case." He said with a devilish grin.
Ranma went through it, and found himself in the middle of a real labyrinth. Great, just what I needed, Ranma thought with a sweat drop, and continued on.
Ranma looked down at his map, and immediately saw the significance it had. It's not a map that leads people to where they want to go, it's a scale drawing of the maze I'm in, he thought.
All of the intersecting and parallel lines on the map represented a maze, but Ranma soon realized that mazes were never his strong suit, and the walls were too high jump onto, and run all the way through like jumping rooftops, and it had too much of an incline, as a result, it could not be scaled.
Ranma tried one last option before walking down the maze. He shot a ki blast at the wall in front of him, but it remained intact, not even a mark.
"Damn it! These walls are covered in some kind of protection ward, and I can't blast, nor pummel through it!" Ranma cursed. Ranma's knuckles bounced off of the walls with a ring pulsing through his fist. That hurt, he realized.
"I was right, these walls can't be hit or blasted. Looks like my only option is to go through this stupid maze and see where it takes me." Ranma said, and consulted his map of the maze.
Left, right, left, straight, right, and another right, then stop. Ranma followed the map through, and he found himself in the middle of four intersecting paths.
"Alright, I think that first part was a little too easy. But now it looks like I have only three options left. I don't know if I can go back or not." In regular mazes, if you went backward after choosing which path to take, you usually get a penalty, but Ranma foolishly chose the straight path, and he was met with a dead end.
"Damn! I hit a dead end!" Ranma shouted out, and looked all around him for signs of the impending penalty. It looked safe enough, he thought. Maybe they wouldn't notice.
Before Ranma could walk back the way he came from, a pillar of light appeared in front of him to block his path.
"What the? Who goes there?" Ranma demanded.
Out of the pillar of light, a fiendish looking creature emerged, and stood half a meter taller than Ranma.
"For trying to cheat, you must be severely punished!" the creature hissed.
"Cheat? Who's cheating, you overgrown cockroach!" Ranma challenged, and got into a fighting stance.
The creature lunged at Ranma with its razor-like claws, but Ranma leaped back to avoid them.
It slashed continuously at Ranma, but its movements were far too slow to catch him off guard, Ranma thought. Ranma dodged the claws with his blinding speed.
"Take this! Hissatsu Tenshin Amaguriken!" Ranma shouted, and he jabbed at the dull edges of the creature's claws with his lightning fast hand movements.
A second later, the creature's claws shattered like a weakened blade. The creature was shocked for a moment, but this gave Ranma his chance to defeat this creature. Ranma leapt into the air and flying kicked the creature in its jaw.
The force of the kick sent the jaw clean off the rest of its mouth, and the creature disappeared into the light once again.
"I pass." Ranma said, and went back the way he came to where the four intersections lay. He decided to try his luck again and pick the path to the right, and surely enough, it was the correct choice all along.
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After a few twists and turns, Ranma had gotten almost a third of the way through the maze. His efforts weren't wasted, he thought as he passed through each opening, and there was never any need to take his eyes off the map.
It felt as if he was a master of mazes. But before he could get any further, a hawk interfered and snatched the map from his hands in the blink of an eye.
Ranma looked toward the hawk, and it was flying into a completely different direction than what he remembered seeing on the map.
Still, he would not let the hawk fly away with his hard earned map. The hawk passed by a dead end, and it fazed right through the wall like a ghost.
Without thinking, Ranma charged at the wall, expecting to follow the hawk, but he crashed into it like a bull. Ranma quickly recovered himself, and shouted curses at the hawk for stealing his one and only map.
"Hey! Give me back my map, you stupid bird!" Ranma shouted. His voice was made a little too high than expected, which resulted in a giant echo which came back to him twice as loud.
"Ow! That's not a normal echo!" Ranma said, and cuffed his ears as the sounds he made came back to him twice as audible.
"Damn it, I never knew that the echoes in here could make your eardrums split." Ranma commented.
"Very well, then. I accept your challenge, birdie." Ranma said, almost to himself, and he stepped back a few paces, and drew his hands toward the middle of his chest, and concentrated on building up his ki.
A ball of yellow energy appeared between his open palms. It gradually grew until it was as wide as the narrow walls would allow. Finally, with all of his might, he thrust his battle aura into the ball of ki, which adds to the destructive force of such a technique.
Ranma's eyes blazed with confidence, and he sent the ball of ki at the wall like a jet airplane. "Go! Moko Takabisha!" Ranma shouted as the blast made contact with the wall.
As expected, a force field appeared at the last minute to defend the wall, but the sheer force of Ranma's ki blast was so powerful that the shield broke, and the wall disintegrated into a pile of rubble.
As the wall disintegrated, the blast still had more than enough energy to follow through again, and it continued down the walls after the first.
The devastation caused a whole mass of dead ends to be wiped completely out. As the smoke cleared, Ranma saw the end of the maze nearly a hundred meters away. Alright, I did it! He thought.
Ranma ran through the path created by the blast in less time than it took for him to get lost in the previous hour.
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"Yeah, I did it! You see, I don't need a map to get through that stupid maze! All it needed was the old confidence striker, and I'm home free!" Ranma boasted, but he was interrupted before he could get any further. Shrill laughter filled the space around him, and the walls of the maze behind him disappeared.
"Who's there?" Ranma demanded, and stood on guard.
"I'm afraid you will get no further from this point on! I will be your opponent for the time being!" the voice said, and its incessant laughter continued.
"Show yourself, coward! My friends are being held captive right now, so I'd like to get on with it, buddy!" Ranma challenged.
"You should watch what you say, Ranma." The voice replied.
"Do me a favor and stop hiding!" Ranma ordered.
"You do not order me around, foreigner!" the voice replied back, and a kunai shot from out of nowhere and struck the ground between his feet. Ranma stepped back just a little before the kunai could get either of his feet, but it was as close as ever.
"That's cowardly! How dare you launch a weapon at an unarmed opponent! Take it back!" Ranma shouted, and threw the kunai back in the direction in which it came from. The kunai met with a scrape of steel on steel, and then there was a moment of silence.
Ranma still waited to see whether his opponent would show himself, or send another throwing weapon at him, still choosing to remain hidden.
Then, the voice came again, but this time it was choked and had a pained tone hidden in it. "Very nice, Ranma Saotome. I see that I have underestimated your marksmanship. How did you know where I was?"
"Easy! I traced the kunai's path back to where you originally shot it from, and with a little ki energy, your kunai found its way back to you on its own! So you should thank yourself." Ranma said jokingly.
"I see, you are a worthy opponent. Let us play a game." The voice initiated.
"Well, as long as it doesn't involve gambling. I suck at it." Ranma joked.
"The rules are simple. If you can find where I am located without using your ki tracing abilities in a set amount of time, you win. But if you can't find me, or if you succumb to cheating, I'll blow the entire place up with a field of dynamites hidden six square inches under the ground in which you have gotten yourself into. Are we clear?"
"Jeez, now you got dynamite under the ground! That'll make walking around dangerous!"
"Precisely. Now, would you care to try your luck, or would you rather surrender now and I can spare you the misery of your troubled life?"
Ranma considered the option of being spared from his miserable everyday life, what with all the crazy stuff happening in Nerima, his current job, and his annoying rivals! It would be great if I could just vanish from all of it, he thought, but then again…he was doing this to repent for all the nasty things he's done to Ryoga and Mousse.
Of course they can't be the only ones, he thought. If I can earn their trust again this whole rivalry will be gone for good! No, even if I do rescue them, they're still gonna hate me for the times I humiliated them in over a million fights. Yet, I plan to rescue them 'cause a martial artist never leaves a comrade in the hands of an enemy, no matter how bitter they may resent each other.
Over the years, Ranma has come to depend on Ryoga and Mousse for help on a few occasions. They saved Jusenkyo once before from the Musk and Phoenix, haven't they? After all that, Jusenkyo had finally returned to normal after two years. Ranma and Ryoga go way back, but he only met Mousse halfway, it didn't matter to him how long ago they met. The important thing is that Ranma never leaves the weak behind.
"I'm not leaving! I accept your challenge!"
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A/N: Trick-or-Treat! I hope you guys celebrated some form of holiday for spirits, and other such things! This my Halloween treat for you, another chapter to add to my story! Please rate, comment, and review! The climax is just around the corner, look forward to it and I'll update soon! Happy Halloween, or Happy Hallows Eve!