Chapter 31
The pack of hyenas snarled and snapped at each other, held back only by uncertainty and the threat of Rin's daggers. One was on the ground, writhing in pain, and the others did not look keen to be the second to challenge her, though they were starting to edge forward.
The thing with hyenas, Rin reflected, was that they always hunted in packs. And contrary to most species, the females were the undisputed leaders, larger and more aggressive than the males. And the leader of this pack was the imposing woman behind the bristling sea of dappled, shaggy fur, staring straight into Rin's eyes.
Something was on the ground at her feet. A person? It raised its bloody head and looked her way with crimson eyes.
The morning after she had met with Mukuro, a package containing a flip phone had been delivered to Rin's door. When she powered it on, it pinged with a new message containing the dossier on Rin's target: the hyena demon Chiyo, Jakaru's second-in-command. She was tall, listed as 6'4", powerfully built, with broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. In the photo, her coarse hair, a dingy gold splattered with black spots, was swept back like a lion's mane. Her smile was wide and confident; her powers were listed as 'unknown' but she was estimated to be at least an A class, possibly S class.
"Of course," Rin muttered to herself. What had she gotten into this time? This wasn't her fight.
Except, a part of her brain thought traitorously, Mukuro was right. She couldn't leave it alone. Not when someone needed her help.
As she trailed Chiyo from meeting to conference to meals, using her invisibility where needed, Rin found little of note. Suspiciously little. The woman shadowed her boss closely but spoke only in monosyllables. The only place she went without him was to her room or the bathroom, neither of which was Rin comfortable with infiltrating. After all, she wasn't trained in spycraft. She tapped out an update to Mukuro every few hours, but there really wasn't much to say. If Rin was keeping Chiyo from any nefarious plans, that was enough for the moment, according to the Demon King.
Now, on the last night of the conference, while a lavish ten-course dinner was being laid out in the grand ballroom of Mukuro's castle for all the various dignitaries and hangers-on, Jakaru's second-in-command was finally doing something out of the ordinary. After conferring briefly with Jakaru, she had slipped away. Rin had almost missed her disappearing through a maintenance door that dumped them out into the yard behind the enormous castle. By the time Rin made it through, Chiyo was a speck in the distance. Rin swore and took off running.
The ragged red-eyed figure couldn't be anyone but Hiei. He was on the ground, bleeding. They locked eyes. He tried to speak but the woman planted a foot on his back with a feral grin, forcing the air out of his lungs in a strangled grunt. Her teeth were long and wickedly sharp, longer than her mouth should have been able to contain.
Spirit Knives sizzled into being in her hands. This wasn't good. She needed to get him out of there.
"Let him go," Rin called. She wasn't expecting it to work, but she had to try.
Instead of replying, the woman spat, "Kill."
The pack of beasts snarled and charged as one.
Rin activated her invisibility, vanishing from sight. She didn't know if these were normal hyenas that could track by scent. If they were, she was in a lot of trouble. Spinning in a tight circle, she threw handfuls of daggers in all directions, hoping to confuse their Spirit senses, then stepped into nothing.
The sensation never failed to give her severe vertigo; Rin gagged as she stepped back into reality a split second later at Chiyo's back. After weeks training with Genkai, she had unlocked flash step, though only the most basic kind. She could only muster the power to do it a few times, and it drank down her Spirit Energy like a thirsty man in the desert.
Chiyo was just beginning to turn as Rin rushed up, plunging daggers into the woman's pressure points. She roared in pain and swiped an arm backward, but Rin ducked and added more Spirit Knives for good measure. The woman went over like a felled tree, but Rin knew that she wouldn't stay on the ground long. And the hyenas were running their way, coming to defend their fallen mistress.
The sad bundle of black rags on the ground was starting to move, but Rin spared no time in talking to him. Instead she scooped him up in a fireman's carry, gasping at his weight - he was heavier than he looked - and ran. But she knew just running wouldn't help her. They had to find a defensible position. There was no way she could take on Chiyo and a pack of hyenas by herself. The baying of the hyenas followed her. Rin scanned the landscape. There was a small bluff in the distance; maybe they could take the high ground. Flash step was out; she needed to save her Spirit Energy. She could hear the sound of paws hitting the hard-packed dirt behind her.
A boom shook the air. Rin chanced a glance back to see a fireball lifting from the palace in the distance. Jakaru was making his move.
"Rin. Hold on to me." It was Hiei, his voice muffled and ragged from being slung over her shoulder. He struggled a bit, then dropped to his feet in front of her. She fisted her hands in his shirt, and the world went black.
Her stomach twisted, and she fought the urge to vomit as they reappeared on an unsteady, narrow surface. This man. This man had the audacity to land them on the branch of a damn tree. It was a wide branch, to be fair, about a foot wide, but still. A branch. He was cool as a cucumber as she clung to him, her heart in her throat.
"Steady, Rin," he said, his red eyes watching the approaching hunters.
"You know I hate heights," Rin ground out over the frantic beating of her heart. She could feel the tree swaying under their weight.
Down below at the foot of the tree, Chiyo was glaring up at them. Even from thirty feet away, Rin could feel the animosity radiating off her, the feral intensity of her gaze. The hyenas had fanned out to encircle the base of the trunk, leaving them nowhere to run.
"What happened?" Rin asked Hiei.
He huffed and looked away. "She jumped me. Some kind of technique I've never seen before. I barely saw her before she had me on the ground." He shook his head, as if to clear the memory of being overpowered so easily. "We've got to take her out." Blood was streaming from a cut on his temple, and one arm was hanging useless at his side. This wasn't going to be an easy fight.
"Hiei, Hiei, Hiei," came a call from below. Chiyo's voice was husky, deep, resonant. "Little demon man, we weren't finished. Come down here."
The words hit Hiei like a physical blow. He hunched over and shuddered, retching, sending Rin off balance. This was bad. If he lost it, she would fall too, and they'd both be wet splotches on the ground below.
"Hiei, what is it?" Rin asked. "Are you okay?" She looked him over for injuries and found nothing immediately wrong, though she could feel him shaking all over.
"She's doing something," he ground out. "I… I don't - . I can't - ."
"I said, come here," Chiyo roared, her voice deep and reverberating like the call of a great cat. She stared straight at Hiei, not giving Rin a second glance.
He groaned, a pained and wretched sound, every muscle in his body held taut, then pulled away from her. Towards the woman and her pack of hyenas on the ground. Rin wound her hands into his clothes and wrenched him back, though it was like trying to stop a landslide in motion. He began to drag her along with him along the shivering branch.
"Hiei, please, look at me. Don't listen to her." Rin put a hand to his face and forced him to lock eyes with her, but his gaze was a dull, unseeing red. She clung to him harder, tried to make herself dead weight to hold him back. She even tried slapping him, but he didn't react at all, just kept pulling towards Chiyo like a magnet to a lodestone.
Rin's mind raced. The hyena demon's powers were clearly some sort of mind control. But if so, why was she only using it on Hiei? Chiyo could have had them both on the ground by now, but she had ignored Rin almost entirely. Was that because Rin wasn't a threat?
Or was it because Chiyo's powers couldn't - or wouldn't - work on Rin?
It was time for a gamble. Rin sent a desperate plea for help to any god that might be listening, then let him go. Hiei stumbled forward, and a roar of triumph came from below. At the same moment, she sighted on Chiyo and threw. Spirit Knives flew at the hyena demon's face. Not waiting for the woman's reaction, Rin stepped into nothing, reappeared on a branch lower down, and threw again. A third flash step, her final, and she appeared inches from Chiyo, close enough to kiss, close enough to smell the woman's heavy scent of musk and sweat. She pushed down the nausea from three flash steps made in such quick succession; she could throw up later.
Rin knew that her opponent wasn't stupid. Chiyo had seen that Rin was a distance fighter, not a close-up brawler. That was why Rin had to do the exact opposite of what the hyena demon would expect: get right up inside her guard. Before Chiyo could do more than widen her eyes, Rin rammed a dagger deep into her throat with all of her strength.
Chiyo gasped in shock and pain, sending droplets of hot blood raining onto Rin's face. Blood poured down the woman's neck and onto her chest, staining her suit jacket a darker shade of black. Her eyes were a blaze of fury as her mouth worked, open and shut, but no sound came out but a low croaking.
Rin turned tail and ran to the base of the tree, all the while expecting the hyenas to descend upon her, but they only watched their mistress, their flat black eyes expressionless, as she tore the knife out of her neck.
Hiei stood to Rin's right, swaying slightly, gaze unfocused.
"Hiei," Rin called, reaching a hand out to him, keeping an eye on Chiyo, who had not yet made a move. The hyenas were staring at their mistress, and she at them; some feral power dynamic was playing out, but Rin had no idea what it was, or how long the lull would last. "Hiei, please, come back to me. I need you." Her voice broke, but he gave no sign of hearing her.
There was a red mark on his cheek from where she had slapped him; his eyes still vacant and staring. If he didn't wake up soon, Chiyo and her hyenas were going to tear them limb from limb. She briefly pressed her forehead to his, the lightest touch of skin on skin, the heat of his flesh almost burning her with its intensity.
As she turned back to Chiyo and her pack, the chorus of growling and giggling started up again. Chiyo raised her fists like a prizefighter, eyes alight with rage, grinning bloody murder, her teeth pink and slick with her own blood. The wound in her throat gaped. Rin conjured her sizzling blue Spirit Knives, dropping into a ready stance in front of Hiei, her heart pounding loud enough to drown out the panic in her brain. This was it. She took a deep breath.
Before Rin had a chance to parse what was happening in front of her, one of the hyenas, one of the larger ones, snapped at its mistress' heel. There was a long, pregnant pause as Chiyo looked down. One of the others took its chance to tear into Chiyo's calf, while another leaped onto her back. The hyena demon opened her mouth to roar, but only a strangled croaking came out. She plunged a hand into the melee, picking up a snarling hyena by the throat, and punched her other fist straight through its chest. Reaching behind her, she grabbed the one on her back by a foreleg and threw it bodily; it slammed into the ground fifty feet away and did not rise.
Rin watched, bewildered, as the woman ruthlessly fought an entire pack of hyenas and won, though not without cost. One of the hyenas took a chunk out of her bicep, and another bit off a few fingers as she shoved it away. Another leapt straight for her neck, jaws open and ready for the kill. Instead of dodging, Chiyo plunged her whole arm down its throat, and the animal exploded from the inside. After that, the fight left the remaining hyenas, but Chiyo still advanced on them in a blind rage, blood and viscera speckling her face. The survivors, apparently having decided discretion was the better part of valor, turned tail and fled into the Demon World wilderness.
Rin snuck a glance at Hiei, but he showed no signs of snapping out of it. The situation had changed, but Rin's mission had not. She needed to protect Hiei and take care of Chiyo. Rin adjusted the grip on her knives as the hyena woman turned back to them.
"You." The word was low and poisonous, just a croak on the edge of hearing. "You ruined… everything." The hyena demon stalked forward, a black aura rising around her, her predator's eyes locked on Rin.