Chapter Three: The Best Place
Disclaimer: I don't own Shaman King.
Ryu's eyelids flickered and slowly parted.
Darkness surrounded his sides. Deep, boundless, omnipresent darkness engulfed his world like a dim ocean of uncharted waters, impenetrable and mysterious, harbouring secrets unreachable by the hand or eye of any explorer. Somewhere up above him, probably hundreds of miles away, a small sun shone. Its rays refracted as they sunk deeper and deeper in this interminable tunnel, they blurred and faded, illuminating the space in periodical waves. Light prevailed for a brief time, then darkness overtook its place. This cycle repeated itself over and over again as Ryu felt he was slowly drowning in this vacuum."
The man tried to move his arms. Nothing happened. When he tried to move his legs, his muscles did not respond to his commands. He was as lifeless and limp as a doll.
"I can't feel my limbs..." Ryu thought. The reflection passed painfully slow through his head, it trailed a path through his skull that resonated in the hollow world he inhabited.
His eyes explored his surroundings, but the only thing they saw was void. And that miniature sun that threw its light from far, far away, from a universe, different than this one. The man's skin could barely sense the warmth of the rays, but right now, this was the only proof that he was still alive in some meaning of that word.
"What is this place?" Another thought rang in his head. "Am I dead?"
His body was slowly drifting downwards, pulled by a force that was too weak to be gravity, but just as relentless and unavoidable. He couldn't turn around to check, but he didn't need to; Ryu could feel the darkness lurking underneath him with his own body. The light did not reach those depths, but that dense gloom was not caused by the absence of light. That darkness didn't feel cold or threatening to him, the only sensation it sparkled in his mind was curiousity.
That darkness seemed soothing, warm… almost comfortable. It called out to him, urging him to sink in deeper, to delve into its unexplored territories, to find its very core. It spoke of softness, of rest, it allured Ryu with a gift sweeter than a lover's caress, it surpassed the joy of being alive and walking under the sunrays of the world.
Was this… death?
He had never thought that he would be tempted to give away his life to… this. Wasn't death supposed to be a painful, oblivious feeling? Or was that only the superficial, organic sensation the body experienced when the blood stopped coursing through the veins and the heart stopped pumping? If the living knew how emollient and intoxicating this thing called 'death' felt, every person on earth would have commited suicide.
And right now, with the link between his body and soul so tenuous and stretching through what it seemed to be light years to him, he couldn't find any reason to turn back and live again.
Sharona's hand went directly through the water. She didn't even feel the pink liquid making contact with his skin. The woman could touch the water with the same success one could grasp the fog or a ray of light.
She retracted her hand.
"What the hell is wrong here?" Sharona thought to herself. Her efforts to dip up even a handful of water were futile. Her hands passed through the babbling stream without interrupting its course, the water completely disregarded them as a material obstacle.
There was no doubt that this was her Furyoku; she had immediately recognized the energy emitted from stream as her own. Physical forms did not have meaning in this universe, everything here was hidden behind the mask of a symbol. That water was her own energy, she did not feel it rejecting her, but somehow, she wasn't able to make contact with it.
Perhaps physical touch was not the way to communicate with her Furyoku. She raised her head and her eyes glided upstream the current. The well where the stream rose had mysteriously changed its position, right now the distance between it and Sharona seemed like the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Another irksome characteristic of this psychological dimension was that physical positions between two objects in space were as 'constant' as the mood of a hyperactive teenage girl.
Sharona made a small leap in the space and dashed towards the end of the stream with the speed of a rocket. Seconds later, she found herself hovering above it and staring into its depths. Underneath the surface was a neverending flux of energy, the water was pulsing in a soft violet glow. As she stared into the source of the stream, the memory of a familiar voice resounded in her head.
"The energy that flows through your body, which shamans have chosen to call 'Furyoku', springs from the core of your own soul. The mind does not have the power to manipulate Furyoku, as it is a type of energy unproduced and unprocessed by the mentality. Only a person's own soul can bend Furyoku at he wishes."
Suddenly, those words gave meaning to the uncanny disembodiment of the stream of Furyoku. Manipulating the stream itself was like trying to splash the water coming out of a hose in the direction of a plant with his bare hands; it was wrong, inappropriate and absolutely ineffective. The only real way one could water a plant in this situation was to pick the hose with his hands and direct the water stream at the base of the plant. That well of murmuring liquid was where that stream came from, it was the entrance to the core of the soul which Faust spoke of. Through this locus she could take full control of her energy. That was the key.
"The hose, eh?..." Sharona murmured.
She retracted her limbs and moved her torso forward. With one swift motion, she lunged herself towards the raging waters like an eagle. She plunged headfirst in the well and to her surprise and relief, the water here was not ethereal like the one in the stream, if offered a satisfactory physical resistance to her movements and density and volume that somehow felt comforting.
As she dived towards an unseen bottom in a tunnel with no walls, Sharona could feel her environments changing. The temperature of the water started rising from below average to warm, a light somewhere below her flickered and started growing stronger with the second. The woman just realized that she could move through the water almost as easily as she could on the surface. She wasn't suffocating, oxygen turned out to be unnecessary for her to exist in this water. Sharona ignored physical and biological laws elegantly like a flawless deity.
A deity…
The light at the bottom of the well exploded, engulfing the woman and her entire world, sending them to a higher level of existence.
Rose and cherry sparkles sprung out of her hands. Bright energy in all the ranges of red and pink flowed through her fingers and sunk in Ryu's body.
It was incredible. Every single aspect of her being - her body, mind, spirit: all of them were in the water. No, they were the water. Every millimeter that came in contact with the water was under her control. It was a sensation the ordinary human senses could not compass, it was magnificence beyond the understandings of the feeble human mind. Was this how God felt? She existed in a form that was not of flesh and bone, but it wasn't weak and airless, either. She had transformed into a energy that now flooded her subconscious world and sought to gush out.
Sharona moved a hand and the whole stream leaped in the air. It rained like a waterfall all around, it crashed against the mental structures of her psyche and poured out through the crevice that connected her to the periphery of Herself. She rode the waves of this raging deluge, listening to the roaring orchestra of the water, vigorously approaching the exit of her mind.
And they made it; like a river flushing out of the crevice in a mountain wall, the tremendous quantity of Sharona's Furyoku poured out of her mind, shot through her veins and entered Ryu's body. The moment her conscience penetrated Ryu's inner world, an ominous feeling of spreading darkness settled over the flow of pink energy. The water swept even faster than before, illuminating the darkness like a comet slitting through the empty space.
The sensations of this world were radically different from her own inner universe. While the unknown in her head gave out the feeling of something that was once her own possession, but lost and buried in her sub-consciousness, Sharona felt the total absence of everything friendly and familiar in this place. The unknown openly radiated a feeling of an ominous threat, directed towards Sharona's invading mind. So far, the Furyoku was passing through the formless tunnels of Ryu's soul unhindered. She prayed that this journey lasted till it reached its destination.
At some point, the darkness started pulling back, giving way to a more material shape of Ryu's inner universe. Walls build from dark red bricks the size of elephants towered from both sides of the pink flow, the floor was covered in something too grey and colorless to be sand, but also too rocky to be ashes. A stairway larger and higher than the Cheops pyramid ascended towards a gloom-shrouded heaven.
The river curved and crashed into the lifeless soil, spilling to both sides of the channel, attempting to climb the steep crimson walls, overflowing on the staircase and flooding the floor along its entire length, soaking every crack and hole in the ground with invigorating powers. The waves of this cherry-colored water receded, revealing the figure of a nude blonde woman who seemed to be glowing in the darkness.
Sharona turned around slightly to take a look at the river that still raged across the dark tunnel. She could feel the threat that loomed above her beginning to vanish, this place was becoming more and more familiar with her being as the waters permeated the ground and united with it. The woman then looked at the stairway in front of her; it was constructed of a material, different than the crimson rocks that made up the walls around her. Her bare feet felt no warmth coming from the stone - it was unnaturally cold even for a normal stone. As if it was dead. But that would make no sense, seeing as stone was never an animated, living substance to being with. However, every basic natural law was voided of meaning in this ethereal dimension. Everything here could be reckoned as a metaphor or a symbol.
Dead stone. How ominous of a symbol was that? Something that was already unliving could die? It was an overexaggerated suggestion of degradation, decay and destruction. Has this place always been like this? Did it transform into this deserted crypt-like corridor the moment Ryu's life started fading away? Or was this environment the embodiment of a section of Ryu's conscience that had no relation to his biological status? Perhaps a storage room… or rather a storage land for memories? Nothing in this place hinted of the presence of life, there were no signs that this shrine-resembling construction was ever associated with a function of subsistence.
At any rate, Sharona discarded these thoughts as she started walking up the staircase. Her naked feet tapped dully up the stone steps, the quiet echo resonating through the seemingly boundless place. The stairs took the echo up and repeated it again and again, sending it towards the summit of the dead temple, as if it was heralding Sharona's approach to someone waiting for her at the end of the stairs. This strange reflection drilled in Sharona's head and became of astonishingly large importance. Who was up there? Was there supposed to be someone at the end of this stairwell waiting for her? With this entire place sucked dry out of life, why would there be someone left to greet her? It was impossible to orientate herself in this place, displaced from the physical boundaries of the world, and there was no way her imagination could picture this location as designed for functioning anywhere in the huge mechanism of Ryu's mind. Was the human mind actually separated into easily distinguished portions with fixed purposes? No, applying real-life logic to a person's subconscious reality was a waste of time, nothing here worked the same way things would work or follow the same logical pattern as they would in life. There wasn't an architect who'd draw the blue-prints of an individual's psyche and point separate locations with arrows, ending with underlined text such as 'Memory storage room' or 'Self-identity center'. There was no way a human's mind was constructed like that… right?
Her legs took a step after step, not feeling fatigue at all as she climbed the endless stairs. Thankfully, her body in its current condition wasn't limited by its physical shortcomings. She felt overflowing with energy, her legs could keep walking forever. Man, that sounded really… bad. And disturbing. What if she really did spent the rest of eternity climbing this stairwell, attempting to reach its end that seemed stretched in the endlessness? Maybe this was the punishment this foreign, hostile world had prepared for her audacity to enter and try to change its flow. Or perhaps she wasn't destined at all to reach Ryu's soul, maybe she was going straight towards a dead end.
Sharona shook hear head, trying to remove these pitiful, laughably miserable thoughts, as she feared that they might actually affect her surroundings. While in that mental form, thinking and acting had almost the same impact on the inner world. She paced forward with an increased speed.
She didn't know how long she had been walking up that stairway, but at some point of time, the steps ended and she came to a wide landing, revealing an imposing sight. A large wooden arc towered ten meters in the air, numerous kanji of different sizes carved along its supporting columns. Warm, orange light was illuminating somewhere from behind the arc like a setting sun. And in front of that arc stood a large man, bigger than any other person she had ever seen in her entire life. She was hesitating to even call him human; he was ten times Ryu's size, his gigantic figure blocked the light coming from behind the arc and his presence emitted an intimidating aura that not even Anna possessed. His large, brawny body was in the firm posture of a sentinel and his arms were resting on the biggest wooden sword Sharona had ever beheld. The weapon was pointed downwards and its tip had drilled a hole in the ground under the weight of the man's hands.
Sharona made several quick and extremely accurate calculations inside her head. Whatever this thing was, it was tough. Even if she had any means to attack it, she probably wouldn't even make it flinch. Also, the expression on this… man's face didn't speak of a very friendly and chatty person. Talking her way pass him also seemed like a lost cause. But she felt she couldn't back out now, not after she had gotten so far. Her instincts told her that what she was seeking was beyond that gate.
But the guard was standing in her way.
Sharona decided not to waste any more time and strode with an even pace towards the giant. She stopped right in front of him, the shadow of his colossal figure covering her completely. The woman raised her head and looked at him straight in the eyes.
"Let me pass." She ordered with a firm voice.
His eyes: two glowing coals, staring down at her menacingly.
"I cannot." The guardian spoke with a voice that seemed stunningly familiar. Sharona couldn't see the man's face due to the thick shadow obscuring it, but the voice was raising some serious questions about his identity. It wouldn't have been strange, considering where she was now, though this body seemed… actually, why not? Even people could take different forms in their own heads if they wanted to. However, Sharona wanted to ascertain if that possibility was true.
"Who are you?" She asked firmly, not letting an ounce of fear creep into her voice.
The colossus answered in a mighty voice:
"Bokuto no Ryu."
Sharona snickered. It was so predictable and cliché that she couldn't suppress her laughter. Why did she even bother doubting it? There was no way someone else but Ryu and his own mental projections or emotional manifestations could exist inside his head. It wasn't like she was dealing with a possession, so the only foreign entity here was herself.
"I've been thinking about that possibility since I laid my eyes on that sword." She smiled contently and folded her arms. "However, you don't quite look like the Ryu I remembered."
"The old Bokuto no Ryu has retired. I am his replacement." The colossus answered in a firm, vibrating voice that made the floor tremble slightly.
Replacement? Sharona held back a snicker at the giant's choice of words. It was interesting that a psychological projection like him wielded a 'mind', even a vocabulary that actually allowed him to engage in an intelligent human conversation, a fact that contradicted Sharona's adopted belief that the insides of a person's psyche were a turbulent, formless chaos. She should have known better than to come to conclusions about the essence of matters that she had no understanding of.
"Replacement?" She cocked an eyebrow.
"A temporary replacement." The being added.
A cold wave swept across Sharona's body. She didn't like the sound of those words one bit.
"What do you mean?" She asked with a slightly shaken composure.
"Bokuto no Ryu's mind is deteriorating very quickly because his body can't sustain it. It has already went beyond the point of restoration. Large sections of his psyche have fallen apart and right now even the core is collapsing."
Shit! All that time Sharona and Ryu had been wasting trudging through the forest with the poison coursing through his body has taken its token on Ryu's life. Sharona realized that every single moment was of vital importance right now. She shouldn't be standing around here chit-chatting with this man.
"You have to let me pass! I have the means to bring him back to life!" The woman insisted feverishly.
"It is pointless! No matter how much Furyoku you pour in his body, it will not be enough to keep his mind and soul in this rotting carcass. He was doomed the moment his core started collapsing."
"I don't give a rat's ass about your doubt! I'm not going back after I came this far without doing everything in my powers to get him back!" Sharona snapped angrily and strode forward. As she was about to walk pass the guardian, he raised his weapon and roared:
"I said that it's useless!"
He swung the sword with the size of a mast upon her head. Though in every other case something that big and heavy would have smashed every single bone in her body, that didn't happen now. The sword was broken in two six inches before it reached her head by an unknown force. To make the effect even more dramatic, the sword blazed up in fire that crawled up the blade. The giant's eyes were wide in amazement. Sharona's eyes were just as large and amazed.
"How the hell!?" The colossus stared at his broken sword in disbelief, completely ignoring the flames that had reached his hand and were spreading up his arm. He gazed at Sharona.
"Maybe… you should go." He said as the flames overtook his torso. The colossus was not flinching a muscle, it seemed that he didn't feel any pain. Sharona shook her head and tried to ignore the sight of this burning giant that couldn't care less that he was being scorched alive. She turned around and hurried through the arc, entering the light.
The light disappeared. She was at the top of a hill, surrounded by dry black bushes and dying vegetation. A narrow stone stairway was meandering down a small valley, where the decay seemed to have spread even further. She descended down that path, careful not to trip on the cracked, broken up steps. Thorns and bushes were scratching her naked feet, the air was still and had the taste of evaporating life, of some unknown plague that had struck this place dead. Dying cherries trees stuck out of the ground like gallows, the ruined foundations of strange buildings and unknown Japanese houses were scattered around like graves. Nature itself here was murdered brutally by a scourge, the land was left lifeless as the result of an apocalypse going rampant. The sky was painted gray, not a single bird was coursing through it.
The path was rolling down the desolate valley, entering in a place that resembled a town. It was abandoned. The buildings were falling apart, as if no one had ever lived in them. She stared at the distance and saw a hill ascending towards the skies. On top of it flickered a small orange light. Sharona hurried towards that hill.
As she moved closer and closer to the hill, she noticed that her environment was steadily changing. The grass was becoming greener, the trees were blooming and sending soft petals everywhere, a light breeze was blowing through Sharona's hair. The atmosphere here felt radically different that in the other part of this valley: it was tranquil, soothing, warm, like in the early days of spring. Even the colors here seemed to be brighter. It was as if she had entered a dream. The last remaining shard of a happy illusion that was mercilessly being crushed by the invading reality.
Sharona came to another stone stairway that lead towards the summit of the hill where the light was shining from. She ran hastily up the stairs, she felt faint and out of breath when she made it to the top. Sharona moved a stray bang of hair from her face and explored her surroundings. The place she had stumbled upon appeared to be some sort of a temple, probably a shrine dedicated to the dead. She had seen such shrines many times when she was in Japan. It wasn't too surprising to see such a construction in Ryu's inner world, seeing as a man like him would hold a strong fondness towards his roots. Lush green grass carpet covered the surroundings of the shrine, spreading to the edges of the hill from where the panorama of the dead valley burst upon Sharona's gaze. The ground was strewn with small flowers that gave out their sweet fragrance in the air. The gentle breeze was rippling through Sharona's hair ever so quietly as she walked towards the end of the hill, where a man sat on the ground, staring in the distance.
There was no doubt that it was Ryu. It was the same stooped posture, the same broad back, the same raven black hair. Even his trademark wooden sword was lying on the grass behind him (hopefully, it was a normal-sized sword). He was just as naked as Sharona was, but she didn't find his nudity physically arousing like a woman would find a man. His forms had an ethereal, pure, almost divine aura around them, there was no way his nakedness could incite indecent thoughts. Ryu slowly turned around and stood up.
She beheld him. His face was tranquil, it radiated something soft, soothing, gentle, almost childishly innocent. There were no physical changes in his features, but the expression seemed different. Sharona didn't remember seeing Ryu ever being so… unrestrained. Society always placed inhibitors on people's behavior, remodeling their personality at some extent along with it. Different people accepted these inhibitors, these so conveniently called 'social norms and standards', differently, which was why some people fit in differently in human community. The people who fought these standards and strived to retain the basic integrity of their individuality were loners, they could never accept society completely, nor it could accept them. Others were able to accept their inhibitors as datum, as a factor that was an indivisible part of their character and gist of human beings and they managed to socialize, slowly and imperceptibly molding their essence into something radically differing from what it used to be. It was now, when every single muscle on his face was loosened in pleasant placidity, did Sharona realize how much Ryu was hiding from the outside world.
"You are Ryu, am I right?" Sharona checked, just in case.
"Yeah." The man answered.
"You remember me, right?"
"Of course I do." Ryu smiled. "I'm a little surprised that you'd go as far as to some here."
"I couldn't just let you go, you know…" Sharona muttered.
"I know you couldn't. Because you'd never be able to forgive yourself for that, am I wrong?"
His smile faded away a little. "But still, I don't know if I want to go back."
Sharona's eyes widened in disbelief.
"What are you babbling about? Of course you'll come back with me! You can't just… give up on your life and die when there's still so much you're leaving behind."
"I've been thinking… Maybe it will just be better if I leave it that way. Unfinished."
"Are you trying to run away from everything, Ryu?" Sharona asked in a disappointed voice. "Is death your excuse to turn your back on everything? Your friends, your dreams, your achievements, all the personal responsibilities that come with them; you're letting all of them slip away?"
"It's natural that you wouldn't fully understand me." Ryu tilted his head a little. "Don't misunderstand: I value everything I have achieved in this life. I treasure every person who has lend me his shoulder for me to rest on, everyone who has cheered me up, encouraged me to keep on chasing my goals, to be myself. I will never do anything to betray their trust or to let down on their expectations."
"Then come back! If you can choose between your friends and your peace, between life and death, why do you pick the grave? Why does dying appeal to you that much?"
"Because there's no point for me to go back… I'm a useless, powerless man who can't do anything to amend his mistakes."
Sharona was stunned. That man was acting so tragically suicidal because he still felt guilty about incapacitating her from fighting! To think that someone as bulky and masculine as him could be such an agonizing drama queen! She noted to herself for the nth time never to judge a book by its cover. And in the current case, Ryu turned out to be a novel with thick covers and very soft pages.
"Well, it's not like the girls can't do anything without me." Sharona remarked with slight irritation. "They're not babies. Even though they lack my strategic skills and without me are as organized as a headless chicken, they'll manage enough not to die on the arena."
"But you want to be with them, don't you?"
"Of course I do, but there are things that are just… outside my grasp." And this is a thing that I must also finally learn as well, Sharona thought to herself. "Not everything works out the way it was planned. Unexpected events, though trivial, can affect our lives in short or long terms. I always do my best to calculate every single detail, to measure every risk before I make a decision, but sometimes this can't be done… I just have to make that important step."
She peered at him with a small smirk, like an adult would look at a stubborn child. "You know perfectly well that, too. It's just the way life is."
Ryu slowly raised his arms. He stretched them out over his head, then lowered them, turning around to span the blue sky above him, the lush green grass, the flowing pink petals, the idyllic silence that reigned on the summit of the hill: it was a small chunk of Eden itself.
"Look around... There's another place that looks a lot, if not exactly like this one… in the real world. I used to hang around a lot there. I felt at peace there. That hill, along with the temple, the tree, the grand view that unfolded from the summit… I called that spot "The Best Place."
He made a small pause, just to get Sharona's attention. It didn't seem like he was aiming for a dramatic effect, but it happened nonetheless. "Some time afterwards, I met Yoh. He… convinced me that I had to find another "Best Place", because I was disturbing the dead spirits there with my egoistic behavior. There was no mistake that I was being selfish in trying to claim that place as mine when it was created for other… souls to be inhabited by. I changed three "Best Places", but not one of them could match the first, original one. No matter how hard I tried, I could never forget about it. Now… it seems that this hill has come to haunt me again, even in death." He lowered his arms. "This place isn't real. Being here has never felt so good before… so soothing, so calm, so… amiable. Almost as if it wants me to lie down on the grass, fall asleep and never wake up again. There is no way it can be real."
"Then why are you still wasting your time here?! If you know that it's just a dream, why don't you shake it off? Don't you want to go out and return to your real "Best Place"?"
"I… don't know. I… just thought… what if I stayed here?... Maybe there's a chance that I won't die."
"You will. There's no way you can ignore that wave of decay that's drawing closer. It will consume this hill, your "Best Place", and you will die. You'll disappear along with that fleeting dream of yours!"
"Maybe… that would be for the best…"
Sharona bit her lower lip in frustration. The way things were going, Ryu might really not leave. But why!? How exactly was his death going to redeem his mistake? What kind of guilt-driven logic made him think that his self-castigation would make things better? He was just selfishly trying to alleviate his own pain, not helping to fix his mistake. Sharona wouldn't let Ryu die with the thought that he had achieved some sort of spirit purification.
"You're doing this because you think you'll make things better? You think you'll amend that way? Well guess what: you're dead wrong, buddy! Your self-righteous death won't change a fuckin thing; it will ravage my conscience and burden me with the guilt that I actually squabbled with you over a stupid sprained ankle that hard to make you considere suiciding! Did you even think for a millisecond how broken Millie would be when she found out that you died? Or did you take in mind the agony all of your friends would go through? And did you even think about my feelings about it? Did you even think about apologizing to me for what you did before killing yourself?! You are acting like a spoiled crybaby over something so trivial and idiotic it's not worth mentioning a second time and you want me to forgive you for that? You're not the man I thought you were, Bokuto no Ryu, and I will never forgive you if you die on me after I came all the way here to save your damn ass!"
Ryu stood there dumbfounded, looking somewhere ahead of him. His sight was blurred and vacant, as if a complicated subconscious mechanism was put in motion inside his head. Ten seconds later, his gaze focused on her.
"So I was wrong, after all… Even in death…" He uttered.
A gust of decay wafted on the wind, its horrible stench making Sharona's nose wrinkle. She looked down: the grass was slowly losing its color and vitality, dying away in front of her own eyes.
"This place will fall apart soon. Take my hand!" She exclaimed and stepped forward, stretching her hand.
The crucial moment was now. There was nothing more she could do to help him. It was up to him whether he would live of die.
Ryu didn't hesitate even for a second. He leaped forth, just as the sky above their heads cracked like a broken mirror, and grabbed Sharona's hand.
Light engulfed them.
Fifteen seconds had passed since Sharona started the Furyoku transfusion.
The pink fire under her palms died away. Several lonely sparkles leaped from her fingers and disappeared.
Sharona was struggling to breathe. Sweat had broken out on her forehead, stray locks of hair were stuck on her face. Blood was flowing under her hands where she was pressing Ryu's chest. It wasn't his blood.
She raised her hands and looked at them. Two deep gashes were cut deep in the flesh, from them blood was gushing out profusely. She could barely move her fingers.
Sharona then stared at her patient. The poison in his wound was disappearing, his skin was slowly regaining its original color. She smiled to herself in content: her efforts were not at all in vain. Though she couldn't close off the wound, at least the poison in the man's body was neutralized.
She looked at herself. Her dress had undergone a radical transformation in its appearance over the last hour. Dirt, blood and sweat were mixed in a substance that would make any housewife recoil and pucker up in revolt. She dared not imagine what her face might look like after carrying a man the size of a lumberjack through the forest, her face black and blue and scratched all over by sharp pine branches. Then she thought about the reaction of her friends when they saw her in this condition. They'd probably blame Ryu for it again, she thought with a small smile. The poor guy had suffered so much and it didn't seem like it was going to end for him very soon.
"Well, no one said life was a walk in the part to begin with." Sharona said to herself as she made an effort to pull the man up. After a minute of fussing about and trying to bring him on his feet while carrying him on her shoulder, the couple started trudging on their way. Ryu was half-conscious, so he had some control over his legs, otherwise Sharona's spine wouldn't have bore the weight of Ryu's body. As they walked, the thick branch roof over their heads started parting and more and more sunlight was illuminating their faces. It wasn't long till they went out on the forest and the village came in their sight.
Sharona's tremendous exertions had taken its heavy toll on her whole body. She could barely move her legs, she was going to pass out any moment now. She felt her mind giving out, a black cloud settling over her sight and her muscles losing control. The woman groaned out when her legs bended.
"Enra Enra…" Sharona moaned.
Her spirit companion appeared.
"I did my best to pull him out… but I can't keep going anymore… Call Yoh… Call the girls…"
She reeled forward and fell prostrate. Ryu fell along with her and his massive arm pressed down on her back.
"Call for help…" She whispered a moment before she blacked out.
From the Author: So much with this chapter. Hope you liked it!