Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Rosario Vampire. I am merely twisting the creator's vision into my own dream. If the supernatural, sexuality, or violence is offensive to you, than you should not read this.

Chapter259

Summer time arrived just in time. Kurumu was ready for a break from school. She had a busy work schedule for the season ahead of her, but she was determined to find time to spend with Tsukune in spite of it. She was going to be doing live events at popular summer destinations while cooking up popular summer dishes.

The producers and sponsors were eager to have Kurumu appearing in swimsuits to help boost their summer ratings. She had no problem telling them it was not going to happen. She didn't even have to argue that her image as the sweetheart chef would suffer if she tried to use too much sex appeal.

"I am going to be cooking!" Kurumu had argued. "Hot oil. Open grills. Boiling water. If you think I am going to wear a swimsuit next to a fire while cooking you can forget it. Do you know how many people get burned every year doing stuff like that? I want people to be able to watch me and learn how to cook, not how to get themselves cooked."

"You can wear an apron..." One of the producers had tried to argue.

"An apron?" Kurumu shot him a glare. "And what about my arms and legs? Oh no. The naked apron is something you do for fun, after the fires are turned off. If you want that kind of fan service you can find yourself somebody that does not want a long career, because all it takes is one slip-up for things to go horribly wrong. And a cook with burn scars on her face is not going to sell anything."

Kurumu had made her point. While she would be dressed for cuteness, she would also be dressed for cooking safely. It was decided that the idea of safety was something that would be worked into some of her live events. The producers started looking for a fire extinguisher company that might want an opportunity to sponsor some events that covered cooking over campfires and open grills.

XxxxxxX

Moka welcomed the summer by loading up on extra classes. She had two reasons for taking the additional classes. First and foremost was to graduate as early as possible form the university. She wanted to build her career quickly, so that when Tsukune was ready, they could get married and start their family as soon as possible. The other reason for the additional classes was because it would give her an excuse to stay in the air-conditioned class rooms and library during the hottest weather.

She knew that she would be missing out on some possible time with Tsukune, but it was an acceptable trade. A little sacrifice now would help build a better future. Besides, she knew that Tsukune had work and some additional training planed for his own summer as well.

Aside from the extra studying, Moka had made other plans for the summer. She was going to be visiting with Tsukune's mother a few times. She was going to try to visit with her father, but knew she would at least get to see Kokoa, and was thinking of inviting her little sister over for a visit. As she thought about the summer ahead, Moka was confident that it would be a good one for her.

XxxxxX

Inari was looking forward to the summer ahead as a time of opportunity. She and Tsukune had signed up for special training classes together. Some of the training had been strongly recommended to them from Tanaka Ito from the Imperial Guard. They were going to be doing some formal search and rescue training, as well as wilderness survival training. (The two had once been sent out together when their class had been called up for extra rescuers were needed to search for some lost campers.) She and Tsukune had also signed up for the tactical response training. While neither of them intended to join a SWAT team, Tsukune was eager to get all the training he could, and Inari was eager to be with him.

Inari was looking forward to the training sessions. Not only would she be improving her usefulness to Tsukune, she would be spending time with him. The training programs were not held locally, so she was going to be getting Tsukune away from the others. She was looking forward to the wilderness training, and sleeping beside Tsukune under the summer sky.

She was also looking forward to their usual shifts together. There were fewer of them on the summer schedule than she would have liked, but that would not keep her from enjoying the ones she could get. Besides, with a busy summer ahead, there was always a chance of reaching the goal of fifty favor points.

XxxxxX

Tsukune was glad to get a break for the summer. While he had a busy schedule ahead of him, he was not going to be trapped in lectures and caught spending hours upon hours studying. A degree would be good for his career, but he still wanted a break from university. He was not the only one looking forward to some time away from the campus.

After the last class of the semester, Tsukune was one of many ready to relax for a while. He and Inari joined some of their classmates off campus for a small party. There was food, alcohol for those that were old enough, and music. Tsukune and Inari were not the only couple to be caught holding hands and trading smiles.

Tsukune knew his classmates thought he and Inari were lovers. He never said anything to deny or confirm their suspicions. He knew that the idea came from the way he and Inari acted, most specifically the way Inari had been possessively close to him from the first day of class. He was happy to let the thought go unchallenged, even if he never admitted to it himself, because he didn't want to have anybody else trying to attract his attentions in a romantic way.

The celebration of the end of the term with his classmates was a loud and merry one. When he and Inari left it was still early enough that their leaving together supported the idea that they were lovers, and were likely going off to celebrate in private. Tsukune found it amusing that they were half right, because he was going to spend some time celebration with his lover. After seeing Inari to her door and giving her a hug and a kiss good-night, he went home to clean up for his night with Moka.

Tsukune was coming out of the bath, expecting to find Ruby waiting to help him dress, when Moka came upon him. She was dressed up, with her rosario playing the part of a hair ornament. When he had made the date with her, Tsukune had said they would do whatever she wanted, if it was within his power to grant it.

It turned out that her plans were very easy for him to comply with. With the support of Ruby and the Me sister, everything had been set up. Moka and Tsukune shared a nice, candlelight supper on her balcony. After eating, they retired to her bedroom for a very special candlelit time together.

The Mokas took turns with Tsukune. They knew how busy they were all going to be over the summer, so it was important to enjoy their time together while they could. Tsukune shared her passion and returned it in kind. By the time they drifted off to sleep, physically spent but very satisfied, it was in the early morning hours.

XxxxXxxxxX

Kurumu was glad that she had won the argument over wardrobe choices for her summer events. All other reasons aside, it would have taken considerable effort to hide the marks on her body if she were to try to go out in just a bikini. Tsukune had visited with her after spending the weekend with Mizore and their daughter.

It had been an enjoyable night. Tsukune had been kind and warm from the beginning. He had been glad to be with Kurumu, and was happy just to be beside her for a while. While it was sweet, Kurumu was not about to let Tsukune off that easy. She applied herself to arousing him, and then enjoyed the heat of his desires for her, returning them in kind.

Kurumu knew that she was special to Tsukune. She knew that he loved her deeply. But she also knew that when they were alone, when they were free to abandon themselves, even though he would never say so himself, that she was Tsukune's favorite lover. Kurumu knew that Moka came first in Tsukune's heart, but Kurumu was the leader when it came to pleasures of the flesh. She was a succubus, so pleasure was life to her. Just like she would serve him any food he wished, she would give her body to him in any way he desired.

Thinking of her night with Tsukune made Kurumu smirk proudly. Even the high and mighty Moka was forced to admit that there were things that she was too proud and proper to do. Kurumu had no such limits. When it came to making Tsukune happy, it did not mater how she did it, because Kurumu lived for his pleasure.

XxxxXxxxX

XxxX

x

Inari was trapped together with her teammates. Everything had gone wrong with their wilderness training. To start with, she and Tsukune got assigned to different teams. She had been looking forward to being with him, and suddenly she was on her own. The next problem was that here teammates were all city born and raised humans. They stomped about carelessly and knew next to nothing about even basic survival. Inari was willing to admit that she didn't know a lot, but it was better than nothing.

The training course was almost over, and Inari was looking forward to getting back to her normal routine with her captain. They just had one last thing to get through. Each team was given a map and a compass, and three days to hike the route assigned to them. The hike was being made with minimal equipment as a test of the teams' survival skills. To complicate things, the weather had turned bad. A summer storm had decided to hit the area only three hours into the hike.

Inari had trouble believing how badly things had turned out. The rain was not heavy enough to cancel the exercise. It was the kind of light drizzle that made sure everybody would be cold and wet. It was also enough to make sure the ground was muddy, making the members of her team slip and stumble frequently.

The first night of the exercise was cold and miserable. Because of the weather Inari's team did not reach the expected camping spot before dark. For safety's sake, they were forced to stop in a place where there was no prepared space for a fire, and no dry wood to be found. The small shelter they were able to put up was enough to get them out of the wind and rain, but left them without any other comforts. They were forced to huddle together for warmth, sleeping poorly under their thin thermal blankets.

The next day started out under a cloudy sky, but there was at least a break in the rain. The team did their best to hurry to the camping point they had not reached the night before. The camp site was one of the check points that they had to visit to prove they were following the map properly. They had a card that had to be marked with the stamps kept at each site. Missing a stamp, or getting a stamp from the wrong site, would count against the team. Also, visiting the camp site, even briefly, would give the team a chance to start a fire and heat up some rations while drying out some of their things.

After a break at the camp site, everybody had to hurry in order to make up for lost time. They wanted to reach the second camp site before dark and were behind schedule. To try to recover time, the team alternated between walking and jogging, and by lunch time things were stating to look good. But then the rains returned.

The turn in the weather forced Inari and her team to move at a slower pace. Trying to hurry now meant just keeping their heads down and pressing on. Jogging would have been an invitation for an injury as the trail became more muddy. With the thick clouds overhead, darkness was falling early. The team tried to push on, hurrying to reach the next camp site that their map said was less than a kilometer away.

Inari almost didn't hear the wet rumble in time. The rain had picked up as darkness fell. The path was almost hidden from sight, even with flashlights being used to help see where they were going. Inari was bringing up the rear of her team simply because she was the only one in the group that was neither afraid of the dark or afraid of the wilderness. The rest of her team felt better because someone was between their backs and the wild darkness. As she followed the others she became aware of the strange rumbling sound. It was too low of a sound for most humans to hear,

Once she heard the sound, and realized where it was coming from, Inari started looking around. In the darkness, using her beyond human vision, she was able to see the first ripples in the ground. The ground had saturated with water and the hillside was starting to shift.

"Run!" Inari shouted. Following her own advice, she rushed forward. "Run!" She shouted again. As she reached the first of her teammates she grabbed on to them and pulled them along.

The humans, fortunately, were all experienced with teamwork. When Inari shouted for them to run there was only the slightest pause before they obeyed. That pause was almost too long. A four meter wide section of the hillside started to shift. The section of path that the had been on was suddenly lost as mud, rocks, and even a tree went sliding down. The group stumbled as the path behind them was swept down the hillside, and the ground they stood on started to shift.

The group ran. Inari was torn between wanting to stay at the rear to make sure everybody stayed together, and wanting to take the lead because she could better see the path ahead. They ran on, the fear fueled sprint guttered down to a ragged trot through the wet darkness. Flashlights tried to penetrate the gloom to shine on the path ahead. Nobody said anything because their labored breathing was all spent just helping them to keep going.

The rain continued to fall. All around them was the sound of water flowing in ever growing streams and the creaking of branches in the wind. The subsonic rumble of shifting earth came and went. It was with great relief that the team reached the camp site. It was just a level area with a three-sided shelter, but any sanctuary from the rain was welcome.

Everybody staggered into the shelter. The cement pad the shelter was built on was damp form the blowing rain, but above the puddles surrounding it. The fire pit at the front of the shelter was filled with water and looked like a stone lined pool of ink. The group took stock of their situation as they dropped their packs in the shelter.

It was a half hour later when everybody finally started to relax. Using their limited resources, the team managed to close up most of the open side of the shelter. They used their tent, which was made in sections that each person had carried, and the rope intended to tie it down. The canvas wall of the shelter was not perfect but it was enough to block out most of the wind. With the rain beating down on the shelter, everybody was finally free to settle down for the night.

XxxX

XxxxX

It just came down to luck. A seed fell to the ground in the cleft of a rock and was lucky enough to take root. That rock was part of a steep cliff face that, by luck, had been exposed by the countless years of weather. It was bad luck that the rocky patch of the hillside prevented the trees roots from ever reaching very deep into the ground. Its roots clutched at the rock face as best they could as the tree grew, until the night that the tree's luck ran out. The force of the wind and the weight of the rain, and the flowing of water over the rocks, formed an unlucky combination.

The tree had been growing for a quarter century from the hillside. When it toppled, its roots pulled from the rock face with a series of loud cracks that were lost in the wind and the rain. Chunks of rock also broke free, adding to the mass that started its journey down the hillside.

A boulder bounced ahead for the rest, glancing off of tree trunks and flattening bushes. It was a three hundred kilogram missile guided only by gravity. A shelter of wood and tin never had a chance.

The boulder crashed into the corner of the shelter, snapping the post and ripping a chuck out of the walls. It twisted and spun, and continued on its way, but the damage was done. In its wake came rocks and mud and debris ripped from the hillside. The boulder smashing into the corner of the shelter had been enough to jolt everybody awake in time for the shelter to come down on top of them.

Made of sheets of corrugated metal and wood beams, the shelter was made to withstand rain and wind and snow. Rocks and trees were more than it could handle. The corner smashed by the boulder collapsed first, making the rest of the shelter twist and groan. More supports broke as debris fell against the shelter's walls, and then most of a tree stuck the meager structure and the rest of it came down.

XxxxX

For one confused moment Inari thought she was reliving the nightmare of when she had been stabbed. Pain exploded in her side just when she had started to rise. Something had woken her into darkness and noise, and then the pain had struck her. It was the yelling that put things into place for her.

Her teammates were yelling. Some where shouting in confusion. Some were crying out in fear. Someone was screaming. Inari blinked her eyes and forced her mind to focus. It didn't take long for her to understand what had happened, and with that understanding came something else... Fear.

XxxxxxX

The instructors of the wilderness training course knew there was a problem even before Inair's team was late to return from the three day hike. Each team carried a tracking device that also had an emergency call function. It was late on the second night when the one assigned to Inari's team stopped transmitting. The instructors knew that something was wrong, but had no way on knowing what, or how bad the situation was.

Trackers had failed in the past, so the instructors were not too alarmed. They had been dropped any number of times. Fuzes have burnt out and batteries have died. Because the last location of the team had been in the area of one of the shelters, the instructors were not overly concerned. Even though they were not panicking, the instructors still planned to investigate.

First thing in the morning a pair of instructors set out on horseback to discover what had happened. It took the instructors an hour to get their first understanding of how bad the weather had turned. The rain had slowed to only a light drizzle, but the damage had already been done. An hour away from the main site for the training course the two instructors were faced with a trail buried under a mudslide. Hours later they were still looking for a safe route to where the tracking device had stopped working. They checked in regularly by radio, so they were notified as teams returned from the hike.

As time passed and teams returned to the main site the instructors started to become more and more concerned. Of the four team only one had failed to return by noon. That one team was the one with the broken tracker. The tension around the training center was climbing.

Tsukune didn't need the tense atmosphere around the instructors to know something was wrong. When Inari's team was not already back before his own he had planned to wait for her and tease her a little over it. When hers was the last team still not back from the hike he started to wonder. When the official deadline for the exercise passed, Tsukune knew something was wrong. He went to the instructors, ready to call upon his status as Inari's superior to learn what he could.

That was when he saw the map on the wall. The map showed were all the marked trails, checkpoints, and shelters were. One of the instructors was marking on the map while another manned the radio. Another washed out path was being reported. Tsukune saw how serious the situation in the office was and felt a sense of worry.

"Please tell me the situation," Tsukune spoke up. He had drawn himself up straight and squared his shoulders, casting aside the identity of someone there for training and assuming the air of authority of someone accustomed to being in charge and expecting to be obeyed.

"The two rivers are flooding their banks making the fords unusable and the bridges questionable..." One of the instructors answered without thinking.

"You can wait with the others," The senior instructor spoke up, cutting off his junior.

"I could," Tsukune replied. "But it would save time if you tell me what you know." He willed his determination to be reflected in his face and voice. "The last team is past due. The instructors are appearing nervous. There are almost twenty people outside that you just trained to help with search and rescue and survival. Now, tell me what you know about the people that are still missing so we can do something to help them."

While the instructors all had years more service with the police that Tsukune, none of them could match him for the violence and darkness he had seen. When he was quiet and calm he had a presence that the instructors had noticed. Now that he was asserting himself, Tsukune was a figure of authority too prominent to deny.

"We lost the signal from their tracker last night," The junior instructor spoke up again. He pointed to where a red flag was pinned to the map on the wall. "We're trying to get someone through to them to find out what's going on, but the paths have all been blocked so far."

Tsukune studied the map on the wall. It was the same as the one he had carried though the hike, except that it was clean and in good condition. It only took an instant for him to locate the prominent landmarks and important locations. With a small nod he turned back to the senior instructor.

"I can get to them," Tsukune said with confidence. "I will have to go on foot, but I can carry a radio with me."

"And then what?" The senior instructor demanded. "The weather keeps getting bad enough to keep the helicopters on the ground. The wind in this valley is too dangerous for them the way things are right now. And even if you can find a way to them, you will not be able to get them back to base before it gets dark."

"I can carry a pack with emergency supplies," Tsukune said. "Food and extra blankets, and a first-aid kit. If I can't get them out tomorrow," He gestured to the map. "I should be able to get them up to that fire-watch tower on the ridge."

"That place has been out of service for ten years," One of the instructors spoke up. "We use satellites and airplanes to watch for fires now."

"But it is probably the best shelter in the area," Tsukune argued. "And a better place to wait until some way is found to get everybody back here."

"I don't want any more people wandering around out there," The senior instructor complained. "You guys just had one training session. If you lead them back out there again you are going to turn yourselves into victims."

"I won't be taking anybody with me..." Tsukune began.

"You're not going out there a..." The senior instructor cut him off.

"The only person here that has a chance of keeping up with me," Tsukune returned the favor, "Is my lieutenant, and she is one of the people missing." His face darkened. "I made a promise to her. I will go and find her, and her teammates. I am asking the you give me the tools that would make it easier."

"What makes you think you can even find them?" The senior instructor demanded.

"That is classified," Tsukune said with a cold smile.

"What?" The older man protested. "Are you some kind of special agent or something?"

"Would you like to call the Imperial Guard and ask them?" Tsukune challenged. He hardened his voice and projected a thread of power into it. "Would you like to sit in your office and talk on the phone while the people that you are responsible for training are out in the rain and weather? Or would you like to take a small gamble and trust someone that has already proven that he can do the impossible for the sake of his friends? Because I am going ether way."

"Get this idiot whatever he wants," The senior instructor snapped before he turned towards his office with a paint blistering curse. "But make sure his tracking device has fresh batteries. It may be a week before we have time to go looking for his body."

XxxX

The rest of the training class wanted to go with Tsukune when they found out he was going to help the missing team. He killed their enthusiasm when he strapped on a pack that weighed thirty kilograms and literally ran around them without even breathing heavy. He finished off the chance of any of them going along when he kept running, down the path and into the woods. He had work to do and was tired of wasting time.