Ranma ½ Sickly Sweet
- Thread starter Ezit Meti
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Delicious pain and suffering... and not of the usual Nerima flavor.
Must has moar!
Also, great characterization on Yandere!Akane. If anything, Ranma doesn't feel as Yandere as his fiancee does, then again Yandere guys don't tend to be romanticized as much as their female counterparts.
More whenever you can!
Must has moar!
Also, great characterization on Yandere!Akane. If anything, Ranma doesn't feel as Yandere as his fiancee does, then again Yandere guys don't tend to be romanticized as much as their female counterparts.
More whenever you can!
Hope yer not a fan of Joketsuzoku.
= = =
Disclaimer: … What’s that other fic you’ve been reading?
Sickly Sweet
Part 5
About two weeks ago, in China…
About two weeks ago, in China…
Ranma’s fist plowed into Shampoo’s stomach, lifting her briefly off her feet and knocking all the air from her lungs. Without hesitation, she drove another punch into the Amazon’s face, sending her spinning through the air to land upon the narrow log that was their battleground. Gasping, she tried to get up, only for Ranma to grab her by her ankle.
“Hey, I thought you were the champion? Is this it?!” She asked before she tossed Shampoo into the air. Tumbling through the air with her limbs splayed like a ragdoll, Shampoo had no chance to guard against the flying knee that Ranma leaped and connected to her back, causing the Chinese Warrior Woman to scream in pain.
“Don’t tell me this is it!” Grabbing her under her arms, Ranma fell back towards the log below, tumbling head over heels faster and faster before she slammed Shampoo into the log, snapping it in half like a twig.
Before the two halves of the log could fold up to fall upon Shampoo, Ranma stopped each with a foot and balanced herself between them in a split as she looked down at her brutalized opponent.
“I thought you’d be more fun than that,” Ranma said. “Such a shame, for a village champion you’re not all that much.”
Shampoo reached up towards the outsider girl’s neck, but the trouble was there suddenly seemed to be either two or three of her depending on the moment in time. It felt like someone had tied iron chains around her arms, and then attached the other end to a sinking battleship. To be so effortlessly defeated, to be so humiliated on her moment of triumph. Even after a long tournament she should have been able to muster up some kind of a defense at the very minimum!
“Oh, so you can still move at least? Well that’s good! That means you can get up again and fight.” Ranma grinned. “So, come on! Get up!”
“Honorable Guest! You won; you knocked her off the log!” Shampoo heard that guide from Jusenkyo plead as she managed to get up despite the protests of her broken body.
Ranma jumped and kicked away the two log halves, before landing in front of Shampoo. “Pfft… a real fight isn’t over just because someone fell outta some ring. There’s only one way to end the fight…”
Her grin grew. “And that’s when someone doesn’t want to fight anymore.”
Her body immediately screamed no more, but the pride of being a Joketsuzoku drowned out the protests with a roar of “RISE!”
Unsteady and punch-drunk, Shampoo raised her arms, prepared to defend against any possible attack so she could possibly get a hit in. It didn't matter; Ranma went through her feeble defense like it was wet stationary–clobbering Shampoo with vicious lefts and rights before she grabbed her violet tresses and yanked her into a headbutt that left a blood dripping bruise on the Chinese girl's forehead.
As Shampoo staggered back, Ranma grabbed her by the front of her attire and held her up to punch her in the face, over and over, until finally her fist began to bleed.
Looking at her bleeding knuckles, Ranma smiled and just switched hands, holding Shampoo up by with her wounded hand while drawing back with the other.
“… Stop…”
Ranma stayed her hand, when one of the few words of Chinese she bothered to learn slipped out of Shampoo's blood leaking lips. “Eh?”
“… P-please stop… please…” Tears were running down Shampoo's bloodied face, leaving clear streaks in the red. “No more… stop…”
Ranma unceremoniously dropped Shampoo into the mud and smirked. “Now I've won.”
Defeated. Humiliated. Crushed. Effortlessly. By a powerful, ruthless outsider girl. Shampoo could not muster the strength to even look away from her gloating, mocking face. Her taunting, wicked, malicious cute face.
“Oh no… honorable guest…” That Jusenkyo Guide was fretting.
Ranma wrung her bleeding hand. “Relax, I beat their champion right? Like there’s anyone else in this village full of weaklings who can even touch me!”
Shampoo grabbed the leg of Ranma’s pants, gaining her attention. Looking down, Ranma saw that her freshly surrendered opponent was trying to get back up. “Hey, you said to stop, so I stopped. Fight’s over.”
She grabbed the waist of the black-haired girl’s pants and tugged on them, trying to pull Ranma down because she didn’t think she had the strength to stand back up.
Rolling her eyes, Ranma knelt down to her level. “What, what is… huh?”
Shampoo cupped her face and leaned forward with lips puckered. Seeing this, the Jusenkyo Guide properly flipped out. “No! Honored guest don’t let her kiss you!”
Ranma leaned back. “Why?”
“She is trying to give you the kiss of death! She will follow you to the ends of the Earth to kill you if she does!”
“What, really? Awesome!” She grabbed Shampoo’s face and promptly kissed her deeply on the lips, shocking the Jusenkyo Guide, horrifying her father, and enraging the spectating women warriors.
Pulling away from the kiss, Ranma grinned at Shampoo. “Get better, get stronger, then come and get me. I’ll give you a real fight to the death then!”
Shampoo, wide-eyed, gave a feeble nod and fell back into the mud.
“It will not just be her, child,” an older woman said as Shampoo was enveloped in the sweet embrace of unconsciousness. Ranma looked over to the source of the voice and saw a very small, very old woman standing at the front of a crowd of enraged Amazons brandishing all manner of weapons melee and projectile.
“Huh?”
“You come into our village, steal our food and then break and humiliate my granddaughter…” Shampoo’s Grandmother Cologne said levelly at the boy-turned-girl. “You have welcomed the wrath of this village and every capable warrior in it.”
“Well I just beat up your village champion so okay?” Ranma looked back at her old man, the panda. “Pop, I take back what I said earlier. China is fun.”
“Shampoo is not the village champion,” Cologne corrected, “She was the champion of that tournament, you fool.”
Ranma gave pause. “… Really now?”
Cologne nodded, and gestured behind her to the throngs of heavily armed, beautiful, and powerful-looking women radiating a massive killing intent towards Ranma. “These are the village champions.”
Sensing their killing intent and battle strength, Ranma blinked several times, and slowly nodded. “Ohhh… now that makes more sense.”
Within seconds, Ranma, Genma, and their Jusenkyo Tour Guide were running through the forest, chased by a horde of screaming, weapon brandishing women warriors.
= = =
“And that’s what happened,” Ranma finished explaining her harrowing adventure in China to an audient Kuno and Akane as Shampoo walked past the latter and towards her and the former.
“I see, so now this woman warrior is here to face you again, or perhaps to confirm your location for her sisters in battle to come and exact their vengeance,” Kuno said as he prepared his bokken.
Ranma nodded. Much as she liked fighting the good fight, she knew when she wasn’t going to enjoy a fight and a mismatch of about a hundred well-armed Amazon Warriors with years of combat experience ahead of her own dog-piling her all at once wasn’t exactly her idea of happy-fun-times.
Kuno frowned. Could he have been mistaken about Saotome, then? Would this sign of a weakness actually be detected by Akane? He looked to the idol of Furinkan, and found that she was staring–pointedly–at Shampoo even as she came within reach of Ranma. How strange, Kuno didn’t think he ever saw such a peculiar expression on Akane’s face before.
Shampoo stopped in front of Ranma, who was looking around for any sign of those other Chinese badasses. No sign of them, did she come alone? Or was she supposed to be some sort of diversion while they kept hidden, and struck when least expected?
“So… Shampoo… I see a lot of those bruises have already cleared up,” she said.
Shampoo, still smiling that lewd smile, just threw her arms around Ranma and pulled her close, before finally speaking.
“Wo ai ne.”
Ranma went blank. “Wo… ai…?”
Kuno was confused, as he was a fluent speaker of Mandarin. “She just said ‘I love you’, Saotome.”
Akane was suddenly next to the two girls, her speed and approach undetected and unmeasurable by Kuno, who leaped back with fright. One instant she was fifteen meters away, the next instant she was just there.
Shampoo looked at Akane, who smiled pleasantly at her. “Kuno-senpai, please translate: Hello, I am Akane Tendo, I’m Ranma’s fiancée. Did you just say you loved him?”
When Kuno translated for Shampoo, she stared back at Akane. “I love her, and she is going to be my wife.”
With Kuno’s translation, Akane took Ranma and Shampoo by their shoulders, and gently pried them apart, before taking both of Shampoo’s shoulders and placing herself between the two. Her expression, still sunny and pleasant, became a stark contrast to the menace that swirled around her as she stared directly into Shampoo’s eyes.
“No, she’s not.”
Shampoo actually recoiled a bit in surprise. Looking at Akane’s hands, she reached up and carefully removed them from her shoulders before moving them down to her sides.
Ranma looked back and forth between the two girls, and suddenly this was very interesting.
Shampoo spoke again, and Kuno actually cringed as he translated… this time to Ranma. "Beloved, who is this… ugly flat-chested girl?"
Shot right past interesting, and into a must see event. Miss this, miss everything.
“My fiancee,” Ranma said, sitting her ass down to watch the inevitable show while Kuno translated. The two girls smiled serenely at one another but the killing intent the two of them were putting out could power a city for years.
Shampoo said something else, but before it could be translated the ground where Akane had been standing was suddenly replaced by a deep crater and a large metal ball attached to a staff.
“What did she say, Kuno-sempai?” Akane said, as she landed by the edge of the pool.
“She just said… dead.”
“What a coincidence,” Akane said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Akane suddenly swerved to the side and plucked a hurled mace out of the air, then swung around to bat a second from the sky. Both Chinese hammers shattered, and through the spraying shrapnel Shampoo swung a dao straight for Akane’s heart.
There was a loud “Ting!” as Akane blocked the blade with one of her own: a heavy looking blade that looked like it had been taken off a school’s paper trimmer.
Kuno was alarmed, Akane now had a weapon. Where and when did she get that, and who left it out for her to get to it?
“If you wanted to play at sword fighting, you just had to ask,” Akane said, deflecting five more strikes in quick succession before slapping Shampoo back and forth across the face with the flat of the makeshift weapon.
Shampoo stepped back from her adversary for a moment, and then she said, “You hit just like my beloved.”
Kuno repeated it for Akane’s ears, but Ranma was the one surprised, pleasantly so. “Huh, then her face should be like… broken. When’d she get so durable?”
Picking up one of the staffs that remained of Shampoo’s giant mallet things, Akane grinned and began waving it and her makeshift sword about as though they were a pair of escrima sticks. “I’m more interested in how durable she is. Let’s experiment.”
She rushed straight for Shampoo, and parried her dao slash with the paper trimmer to strike her repeatedly in the stomach with the end of the staff. Shampoo forced her back with a stab to the face, before drawing a second dao out of nowhere and swinging both at her in a flurry of gleaming, dancing steel.
Akane gleefully met Shampoo’s attack with her own, her impromptu weapons deflecting or blocking Shampoo’s purpose-built blades from making any contact whatsoever. At the same time, her best efforts to capitalize off the openings her deflections permitted were in turn foiled by Shampoo’s incredible agility and her own counterattacks.
“Huh! She wasn’t nearly this fast before either,” Ranma said as she watched the battle intensify.
Shampoo’s pace suddenly quickened to an impossibly fast level while she said something else, and Kuno again relayed what she had said. “Stop being in the way, or I will break you like my beloved broke me.”
The tip of one of Shampoo’s dao neatly cut a horizontal line across Akane’s left cheek.
The edge of the paper trimmer left a bloody line across Shampoo’s left side.
A few strands of hair were lopped off Akane’s head.
The tie on Shampoo’s left tress was cut off, freeing her hair.
Akane caught a glimpse of her brightly grinning reflection as she turned back from the dao aimed to slice through her face.
Shampoo likewise saw a flash of her own sunny countenance in the reflection of the paper trimmer as she sidestepped an attempt to split her head open.
Their expressions did not escape Kuno’s notice, their cherubic smiles, their shimmering laughter as they came achingly close to scoring a fatal wound, their glazed over, soulless eyes. He being no stranger to battle, nor to the murderous tendencies of the youngest Tendo, was struck at what he was seeing unfold before his eyes.
“This is a real fight to the death…”
No posturing, no bravado, just two people who knew exactly what they wanted to do and who they wanted to do it to. He had to admit, it was a beautiful, if terrifying sight to behold.
“Have you ever seen anything like it, Saotome?” When Kuno got no answer he looked and saw why: there was no Saotome. “Saotome?”
Akane and Shampoo stopped; the tips of Shampoo’s dao were pressed into Akane’s throat and heart, while the paper trimmer rested perfectly on Shampoo’s neck, the edge ready to slice through her jugular.
“Ranma?” Both girls asked before they noticed she was gone. Scanning the schoolyard, they both only caught a brief glimpse of Genma-panda vaulting over the school wall, with a bound and gagged Ranma over his shoulder.
Akane frowned. “Not this again.”
Shampoo narrowed her eyes, and said something in reference to the panda that Kuno dare not say even in impolite company.
= = =
All bad ideas tend to look like good ones at the time. This one had seemed like a good way to perform a little damage control, but it seemed like just the exclamation mark on about a month of simply awful decisions. Then again if he followed that kind of logic, maybe trying to get the hell out of here with his son alive was only going to somehow make things even worse.
If so? He didn’t even want to imagine how this could get worse. For the time being he’d have to settle for carrying his unconscious son out of the school grounds and down the street hope he could get himself and the boy to safety before-
“Airen!”
She was gaining on him fast. Not good. Genma allowed his panda-enhanced survival instinct to guide him to a place which was anywhere else but here and it delivered: it was screaming at him to jump, which he did. Good thing too, because that blade would’ve hurt like hell. Genma cleared a parked car, which was rent asunder with a loud shearing noise, and continued his desperate flight down the street like the devil himself was in pursuit. If only he was that fortunate.
There had to be somewhere he could hide his son, get him away from this insane pursuer! Had to be a way to-weave left, weave hard left!
“Airen!” the purple haired warrior yelled as she crashed into the ground Genma would have been occupying if not for his sudden change of direction. That girl’s tenacity! It was something to behold! Genma fled down a different street, this time certain that the path was clear. No sign of pursuers behind. Not in front or above him either. Maybe he really could make it! Maybe they really would be home free!
The hope was rather dashed when he felt a rope encircle his panda form ankle and hoist him into the air. Upside down, with Ranma lying on the ground out of reach, he saw exactly how it could get worse as two smaller versions of that insane warrior girl appeared triumphantly before them.
“Silly panda no escape!” one said.
“Trap stupid panda!” said the other.
The two of them adopted a rather daft looking pose, arms stretched out horizontally, and they both called in unison. “Ling-Ling, Lung-Lung rescue Shampoo wife!”
A staff descended upon the back of their heads, one after the other. “Quite enough out of the two of you,” an elderly voice said. “Miss Saotome. We meet again.”
Genma held up a sign which plainly asked what the hell was going on. Ranma, having chewed through her gag, looked up at the twin girls as Shampoo too arrived on the scene. “Okay maybe now someone can explain, what’s all this business about me being Shampoo’s wife?”
Cologne just chuckled. “Well child it was-”
“BEHIND YOU!”
Kuno's cry rightly interrupted Cologne, as she turned and used her staff to block a new weapon Akane picked up on her way here, a fireman's axe.
“Oh, hello Miss!” Akane chirped.
“What a pleasant young woman. You are?” Cologne asked.
Akane lifted the axe and rested it against her shoulder. “I’m Ranma’s fiancée, Akane Tendo.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, dear.” Cologne said. “Your fiancée just asked a quite valid question, and I believe it might be best to give her an answer.”
Akane nodded. “Oh, all right. We should do this at my house; my sister will make us tea.”
“That would be lovely,” Cologne said. “You two! Stop teasing the panda and cut him down.”
“But great grandma!” one of them said, prodding Genma in the stomach with a stick.
“Shampoo wife say it fun!” said the other.
“And she completely right!” they said in unison.
Genma just growled in a mix of annoyance and dread.
= = =
It was that special time of day when the air held a discernable pure aura. Food tasted sweeter. Footsteps lighter, sunlight brighter. Life was just that shade more tolerable. The wonder and extraordinary beauty of everything all around her danced within her vision no matter what she did during this, and she could for a time forget. Yes. She could forget just for a few freeing hours at a time.
“Here you are father,” she said. “Your lunch is ready.”
“Thank you Kasumi,” her father said. “You see, I knew this marriage was just the thing to cheer you up. It’s such a shame you can’t see him while he’s at school.”
She could forget. Forget. Forget. Kasumi smiled and nodded. Forget and enjoy and feel the bliss.
“We’re home!”
… And Kasumi’s posture slumped like she was carrying a terrible weight. Her breathing turned into a series of weary sighs and her face became a mask of sorrowful exhaustion. Akane had come home early. Kasumi’s gaze turned towards the phone. Any moment now it would begin to ring and tell her of the terrible things that would fuel her nightmares over the coming weeks. What had she done to be sent home early? Given what she had gotten away with doing, what could she possibly have done to merit being sent home?
Somehow she wasn’t particularly surprised to see Ranma walking into the room next to her. What was a fair bit of a bigger surprise was the purple haired girl attached to Ranma’s arm like a particularly stubborn limpet, and-
Oh dear god. She was smiling. That same dead eyed soulless smile that so expertly deceived the unwary. The precise expression Akane used just before she did something particularly nasty. They were multiplying.
“Big sister, please be a dear and make some tea for our guests.”
Kasumi stared straight past the trio, ignoring the subtle manner in which Akane and the stranger were gently tugging Ranma closer to them and away from the other. She could see a tiny old woman, twin girls with hair coloration that could probably shine in the dark dragging along mister Saotome in panda form. Suddenly things seemed a little more obvious.
A nightmare, it was all just some terrible stress induced nightmare. She numbly nodded and shuffled off towards the kitchen. It would be best to go with the flow for the time being, let the nightmare take its course. It couldn’t hurt her now that she knew the truth.
“Pardon me, Miss Tendo!” a young man said. She took a moment to identify him as Nabiki’s classmate Tatewaki Kuno. How strange that he would be here, given that she rarely ever interacted with him. “Please permit me to assist you!”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “But please sit down. It will not take long.”
A scant five minutes later she was walking out into the room to find the table completely surrounded by the guests probably summoned from the Necronomicon. The twin girls were sitting on top of Mister Saotome and poking him with sticks. The tiny old woman was conversing with father, while the last of the strangers was still clinging on to Ranma’s arm and would likely be dead by morning at this rate.
That boy, Kuno, was standing a short distance away with his back to the wall, observing everything with a hawk’s gaze. He was particularly focused on Akane. Kasumi remembered that about him from Nabiki, apparently he was interested in the abomination against life and light.
“So Cologne was it?” Soun began as Kasumi began to serve the tea.
The old woman nodded. “Yes.”
“Your Great-Granddaughter seems oddly attached to my future son-in-law. Would you perhaps explain what’s going on?”
“Ah, yes. My Great-Granddaughter, Shampoo, is infatuated with Ranma. She seeks to marry her and bring her back to our village. It’s quite simple, really.”
Soun nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a concern. As I already noted, Ranma is engaged to my daughter, Kasumi-chan.”
Cologne blinked. “You mean Akane, yes?”
“That’s right, Kasumi-chan.”
Well now Cologne was a bit befuddled. “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that she was engaged to this girl.”
She gestured towards Akane. Soun followed the gesture only part-way before his gaze snapped into the opposite direction and onto Kasumi. “Yes, Kasumi-chan.”
Kasumi slowly shook her head.
“Oh don’t mind Daddy, he’s just being silly,” Akane said.
Cologne let out a hum. “I… see?”
“At any rate, I regret to inform you Cologne that your Great-Granddaughter’s claim is void. From birth, Ranma has been engaged to my Kasumi-chan and there is little that can be done.”
Shampoo tugged on her Grandmother’s sleeve and whispered something to her. Cologne nodded and translated for the girl, “Shampoo says it doesn’t matter who Ranma is engaged to. She will kill anyone who gets in her way and take Ranma back to our village in China.”
Kasumi, who had taken a seat alongside Soun, suddenly backed away from the table and the purple-haired girl across it as she turned a far less friendly look in her direction. It occurred to the eldest Tendo that the girl didn’t see a person, just an obstacle.
On the other hand, the girl would kill anyone who gets in her way… “I’m not Ranma’s fiancee at all, Akane-chan is.”
Soun pretended not to hear that.
Cologne looked from the properly spooked Kasumi to Akane, who was nodding in enthusiastic agreement to Kasumi’s assertion.
“Perhaps it would be best if you explained Shampoo’s infatuation,” Kuno said. “From the way Saotome told it, your great granddaughter was rather badly injured the last time they met.”
“Ah, she was. Quite grievously in fact,” Cologne explained.
Ranma, who was rather enjoying being sandwiched between two girls alternating between amorous looks for him and murderous looks at each other, joined the discussion. “Yeah, about that. How is she suddenly up and about like that? I could’ve sworn I put her down for at least six months, not two weeks.”
“We of Joketsuzoku have very good health care; we’re a warrior village after all.”
“And how did she get stronger, too? I mean, Akane almost ripped my arm off and she got a few good hits in on Shampoo.”
Cologne chuckled. “Shampoo has always been very strong. She just didn’t expect your attacks to be so violent and overwhelming.”
Ranma grinned and looked to Akane. “See? That’s how you win fights, by hitting them hard as you can right through their guard on the open. Once you get that momentum going they’ll never be able to fight back.”
“Oh I know that,” Akane said as she nuzzled him.
Shampoo gave Akane one of those murderous looks, the kind that actually might kill by itself.
Kuno could understand that, but something still bothered him. “That’s another thing. Ranma said that Shampoo had given her the Kiss of Death, didn’t she?”
“Yes, about that. Ranma interrupted Shampoo at a crucial moment, and gave her what we would consider the Kiss of Marriage. Shampoo fell in love with Ranma on the spot, and now seeks to marry her.”
Akane’s grip around Ranma’s arm turned a shade tighter.
“Oh, that’s what happened? Man, I just wanted her to come and try to kill me,” Ranma lamented before she brightened. “What about those other champions? They must still be pretty mad about it, right?”
Cologne sighed. “About that…”
= = =
Shampoo sat up in her bed with a jolt, causing the damp towel pressed to her forehead to fall into her lap. Pain. It was gone. She dabbed at her jaw and prodded her stomach. No sign of injury. She shook her head and looked around the room. She was surrounded by an army of warriors, each of them carrying what she knew were their favored weapons.
“Your injuries have healed quite rapidly,” her great grandmother said. “Shampoo, we have been awaiting your full recovery. It is only just that you lead us in our pursuit of that pigtailed demon that so cruelly humiliated you.”
“Pursuit?” Shampoo said. There was a low rumble of agreement from the gathered warriors. Several of them raised their weapons in salute; the killing intent directed towards Ranma Saotome could probably be felt from space.
“All right,” she firmly said. ”We will find her.”
The warriors cheered.
“Bring her back to the village.”
Another cheer, louder than the first.
“Then I shall take her as my wife.”
Dead silence, the kind that hung in a room like an unwanted guest that neither knew when to leave nor how to bathe.
“That is not a particularly funny joke,” one of the champions said, pushing her way to stand by the bed. “After what that outsider girl did, this is no time for flippancy! It is your duty to lead us as we hunt her down like the animal she is! For every drop of your blood she spilled today, we shall spill a hundred of hers! It is our duty, our honor-bound privilege to track that wild beast down and ensure she lies dead by week’s end!”
Shampoo turned to look her in the eyes and tilted her head. Her lips turned up into a cruel smile and she stared at the champion for a moment. “I don’t care, that outsider shall be my wife.”
“We must kill that outsider girl, and if you’re not going to do it. We shall!” the warrior warned.
Shampoo’s stare turned a few degrees colder as she stood up and eyed the warrior’s neck. “Are you going to stand in my way?”
“If that is what it takes to stop this foolish plan of yours, yes!”
Shampoo’s hand lashed out like a cobra, and had comparable lethality. In one moment her hand had ensnared the champion’s throat. In the next it had twisted, leaving a terrible crack the only sound in the room as everyone else - even her great grandmother - was stunned into silence.
“Dead,” Shampoo said. Her grip released and the former village champion slumped to the ground.
“You killed her!” another champion gasped, as the others pointed their weapons at Shampoo.
Shampoo nodded. “Anyone who tries to stop me from marrying that outsider dies.”
Suffice to say this was not the kind of proclamation to be taken lightly or ignored. Every champion on the room immediately fell upon Shampoo, who responded with a grin.
= = =
“… And she killed all but one of them,” Cologne finished.
Kasumi was pale as a sheet.
As was Kuno, for similar reasons.
Soun was staring at the bottom of his teacup, thinking about how beautiful the wedding had been.
“What happened to the last one?” Ranma asked.
Cologne recalled the last champion stabbing herself through the chest as Shampoo advanced upon her. “She took the coward’s way out.”
Ranma looked at Shampoo. “You are Hard. Fucking. Core.”
“Ranmaaaaa!” Akane whined as she pulled her away from the Stone-Cold Killer. “I can be hardcore too!”
Ranma grinned. “Really?”
Kasumi grew wide-eyed. No… Ranma wasn’t…
Akane nodded. “Yes.”
No. She wasn’t. She couldn’t!
“Prove it to me, babe.”
Akane got up, and walked down the hallway. Genma, Kasumi, Ranma, and Kuno watched as she left, and then followed her footsteps through the wall as she went upstairs, and then across the ceiling as she walked to her room. From inside the room, the sound of heavy furniture being moved was the only audible noise in the house as the Chinese joined the Japanese in looking towards the ceiling.
A few moments after the noises stopped, and then there was a thumping that everyone followed back down the stairs until Akane burst into the room with a sheathed katana. She looked directly at Shampoo. “Let’s go outside, Shampoo.”
No translation was necessary for this challenge, nor for its acceptance. Grinning broadly, Shampoo got up and drew her dao.
Kasumi shot to her feet. “Akane, where did you get that?!”
There was no way she should have one. The dojo didn't have any weapons, no house within six blocks had any weapons. Hell, Kasumi kept the cutlery under lock and key unless she needed it!
“Oh, I bought it from some old guy,” Akane said as she partially unsheathed the blade, which gave off a red glow and hissed promises of power and destruction that Akane apparently didn't hear (or had long happily accepted) as she resheathed it.
“How-?”
“Nabiki gave me some cash in exchange for some gravure shots she could sell at school.”
Ranma raised her hand. “I would like to see these shots if there are any left.”
Akane blushed. “I’ll show you so much more than that after I fillet Shampoo.”
Shampoo smirked and headed outside, Akane following her. Both girls walked out the patio door to the grassy lawn of the Tendo home’s back yard.
“Ready when you are,” Akane said as she drew the katana and tossed away the sheath.
“Big sister!” Ling-Ling and Lung-Lung declared together as they joined Shampoo’s left and right flank respectively. “We shall fight beside you!”
Shampoo looked to her younger sisters in battle and nodded. Akane hardly seemed concerned, as she pointed the katana at Shampoo’s throat. In fact, she seemed a little disappointed. “Aw, I want you to be my first, Shampoo.”
“The only person dying is you, ugly tomboy!” Ling-Ling boasted.
“You make peace, because you is dead!” Lung-Lung promised.
Akane shrugged her shoulders. “We’ll see.”
“Three-on-one and she’s not even worried, this is gonna be awesome,” Ranma said as she sat down on the patio to watch.
Kuno immediately stepped up. “Please, allow me to act as a referee-!”
“A what? Kuno-senpai, there’s no refs in a fight to the death,” Akane said as she got ready. “However, I would appreciate some help in picking up the pieces.”
Kasumi looked at the telephone. She had to call the police. But… but would any come this time? Would they even be able to stop this if they did?
Shampoo attacked with both her dao, twirling from side to side in her approach before slashing for Akane’s torso with both blades. Instead of dodging out of the way Akane parried both strikes with the katana.
Suddenly changing direction, Shampoo attacked from Akane’s unguarded side, the blades becoming barely detectable flickers of metal in the afternoon sun as Akane leaned back and forth quickly to dodge them before using her blade to deflect or parry consecutive strikes.
With a suddenly lunge, she caught both of Shampoo’s swords against her own and shoved her back. Two blurs at her sides had her on the move, and she narrowly avoided being stabbed through the side by Lung-Lung’s weapon, a three-pronged Tiger Spear. Jumping back from consecutive stabs, Akane quickly tapped the spear downward into the ground before thrusting the blade to run Lung-Lung through her chest.
A quarterstaff landing atop her blade and pinning it against the spear stopped Akane cold however, and both Ling-Ling and Lung-Lung smirked as they pressed their weapons together, trapping the katana in place.
Akane was unconcerned, even as Shampoo leaped to bring both dao upon her head. Simply pulling back on the weapon, she broke free of their lock and blocked Shampoo’s downward slash before performing an uppercut that Shampoo barely blocked. Being off the ground, however, the force of the blow sent Shampoo hurtling into the air much as Ranma’s kick sent Kuno flying.
“She’s quite skilled,” Cologne noted.
“Man, she said she was big on kenjutsu. I didn’t realise she meant this big.” Ranma almost kinda wanted to check out waving a sword around. Kuno was pretty badass at it, but Akane…
Nabiki arrived. “Hey guys, what’s all that racket going on in the back yard oh dear how did Akane find a sword.”
Kasumi immediately punched her in the face. “Ow what?!”
“You did this! This is happening because of you!” Kasumi hissed.
The twins were unleashing an all-out assault, Lung-Lung repeatedly stabbing at Akane and attempting to catch her sword between the prongs of the spear, while Ling-Ling’s quarterstaff kept Akane from launching a meaningful counter to regain momentum. She was being pushed back, even as Shampoo landed on the opposite side of the backyard and prepared to jump back in.
“You is good, but you is no Joketsuzoku!” Lung-Lung taunted as she thrust for Akane again, causing her to sidestep directly into a vertical strike from Ling-Ling, which she parried by raising the katana over her head.
“Soon you be dead, and Shampoo take wife home!” Ling-Ling added as Akane brought the sword back down to deflect another spear thrust.
Turning around, Akane blocked the staff again, before warding off another spear stab. Back and forth she moved with focus and intensity unbecoming of her until this moment. Staying in motion and turning in circles, she continued to ward off the dual attacks until she found an opening out… which was filled by Shampoo rushing to rejoin the battle.
Shampoo’s dao and Akane’s katana clashed faster than Kasumi and Nabiki’s eyes could keep up. Even Genma’s panda eyes were having trouble following the movement. As for Ranma, she was sitting there with tears forming in her eyes and whispering “It’s so beautiful”.
She was good, Shampoo admitted as much as Akane deflected another strike with uncanny ease. She didn’t like obstacles in her way, and this one was becoming a pretty stubborn one!
Lung-Lung landed behind Akane and Ling-Ling at her right side. Her eyes gleaming, Lung-Lung rushed forward as Akane turned away from another Shampoo’s strikes. Akane looked over to see Lung-Lung’s approach, and naturally deflected the spear away from her.
“We got you now!” Lung-Lung yelled as she began to push Akane back again and away from Shampoo.
Stepping side-to-side to avoid two stabs, Akane grinned and hooked her sword behind the blade of the spear. She then turned and overextended Lung-Lung’s final lunge directly and deeply into a surprised Ling-Ling’s heart as she tried to attack Akane from behind as before.
The young warrior froze in place at the sight of life fading from her twin’s eyes. “Lin-!”
Akane promptly swept her sword through Lung-Lung from shoulder to waist, and turned to face Shampoo, who had also stopped moving.
Kasumi fainted right where she sat, as Nabiki’s mouth fell open. Genma, who had found the twins’ poking and prodding annoying at worst, sat up with an audible “Growf?!”
Kuno took a step back in disbelief. “… She…”
Soun began weeping, he didn’t know why.
Ranma, wide-eyed, only developed a sickening grin. “… Hardcore.”
Cologne watched as the bodies of the two young warriors fell to the ground, and narrowed her eyes at Akane as she took the bloodstained sword in both hands and raised it while smiling at Shampoo.
She said pleasantly, “Shoot I wanted you to be my first, but third is fine too.” She then grinned. “So come and make me three-for-three.”
Shampoo, wide-eyed and hyperventilating, smiled as she said only one word:
“DEAD.”
In a split second, she and Akane lunged at one another, the afternoon sun gleaming off their blades and bloodthirsty smiles.
= = =
Disclaimer: … What’s that other fic you’ve been reading?
Sickly Sweet
Part 5
About two weeks ago, in China…
About two weeks ago, in China…
Ranma’s fist plowed into Shampoo’s stomach, lifting her briefly off her feet and knocking all the air from her lungs. Without hesitation, she drove another punch into the Amazon’s face, sending her spinning through the air to land upon the narrow log that was their battleground. Gasping, she tried to get up, only for Ranma to grab her by her ankle.
“Hey, I thought you were the champion? Is this it?!” She asked before she tossed Shampoo into the air. Tumbling through the air with her limbs splayed like a ragdoll, Shampoo had no chance to guard against the flying knee that Ranma leaped and connected to her back, causing the Chinese Warrior Woman to scream in pain.
“Don’t tell me this is it!” Grabbing her under her arms, Ranma fell back towards the log below, tumbling head over heels faster and faster before she slammed Shampoo into the log, snapping it in half like a twig.
Before the two halves of the log could fold up to fall upon Shampoo, Ranma stopped each with a foot and balanced herself between them in a split as she looked down at her brutalized opponent.
“I thought you’d be more fun than that,” Ranma said. “Such a shame, for a village champion you’re not all that much.”
Shampoo reached up towards the outsider girl’s neck, but the trouble was there suddenly seemed to be either two or three of her depending on the moment in time. It felt like someone had tied iron chains around her arms, and then attached the other end to a sinking battleship. To be so effortlessly defeated, to be so humiliated on her moment of triumph. Even after a long tournament she should have been able to muster up some kind of a defense at the very minimum!
“Oh, so you can still move at least? Well that’s good! That means you can get up again and fight.” Ranma grinned. “So, come on! Get up!”
“Honorable Guest! You won; you knocked her off the log!” Shampoo heard that guide from Jusenkyo plead as she managed to get up despite the protests of her broken body.
Ranma jumped and kicked away the two log halves, before landing in front of Shampoo. “Pfft… a real fight isn’t over just because someone fell outta some ring. There’s only one way to end the fight…”
Her grin grew. “And that’s when someone doesn’t want to fight anymore.”
Her body immediately screamed no more, but the pride of being a Joketsuzoku drowned out the protests with a roar of “RISE!”
Unsteady and punch-drunk, Shampoo raised her arms, prepared to defend against any possible attack so she could possibly get a hit in. It didn't matter; Ranma went through her feeble defense like it was wet stationary–clobbering Shampoo with vicious lefts and rights before she grabbed her violet tresses and yanked her into a headbutt that left a blood dripping bruise on the Chinese girl's forehead.
As Shampoo staggered back, Ranma grabbed her by the front of her attire and held her up to punch her in the face, over and over, until finally her fist began to bleed.
Looking at her bleeding knuckles, Ranma smiled and just switched hands, holding Shampoo up by with her wounded hand while drawing back with the other.
“… Stop…”
Ranma stayed her hand, when one of the few words of Chinese she bothered to learn slipped out of Shampoo's blood leaking lips. “Eh?”
“… P-please stop… please…” Tears were running down Shampoo's bloodied face, leaving clear streaks in the red. “No more… stop…”
Ranma unceremoniously dropped Shampoo into the mud and smirked. “Now I've won.”
Defeated. Humiliated. Crushed. Effortlessly. By a powerful, ruthless outsider girl. Shampoo could not muster the strength to even look away from her gloating, mocking face. Her taunting, wicked, malicious cute face.
“Oh no… honorable guest…” That Jusenkyo Guide was fretting.
Ranma wrung her bleeding hand. “Relax, I beat their champion right? Like there’s anyone else in this village full of weaklings who can even touch me!”
Shampoo grabbed the leg of Ranma’s pants, gaining her attention. Looking down, Ranma saw that her freshly surrendered opponent was trying to get back up. “Hey, you said to stop, so I stopped. Fight’s over.”
She grabbed the waist of the black-haired girl’s pants and tugged on them, trying to pull Ranma down because she didn’t think she had the strength to stand back up.
Rolling her eyes, Ranma knelt down to her level. “What, what is… huh?”
Shampoo cupped her face and leaned forward with lips puckered. Seeing this, the Jusenkyo Guide properly flipped out. “No! Honored guest don’t let her kiss you!”
Ranma leaned back. “Why?”
“She is trying to give you the kiss of death! She will follow you to the ends of the Earth to kill you if she does!”
“What, really? Awesome!” She grabbed Shampoo’s face and promptly kissed her deeply on the lips, shocking the Jusenkyo Guide, horrifying her father, and enraging the spectating women warriors.
Pulling away from the kiss, Ranma grinned at Shampoo. “Get better, get stronger, then come and get me. I’ll give you a real fight to the death then!”
Shampoo, wide-eyed, gave a feeble nod and fell back into the mud.
“It will not just be her, child,” an older woman said as Shampoo was enveloped in the sweet embrace of unconsciousness. Ranma looked over to the source of the voice and saw a very small, very old woman standing at the front of a crowd of enraged Amazons brandishing all manner of weapons melee and projectile.
“Huh?”
“You come into our village, steal our food and then break and humiliate my granddaughter…” Shampoo’s Grandmother Cologne said levelly at the boy-turned-girl. “You have welcomed the wrath of this village and every capable warrior in it.”
“Well I just beat up your village champion so okay?” Ranma looked back at her old man, the panda. “Pop, I take back what I said earlier. China is fun.”
“Shampoo is not the village champion,” Cologne corrected, “She was the champion of that tournament, you fool.”
Ranma gave pause. “… Really now?”
Cologne nodded, and gestured behind her to the throngs of heavily armed, beautiful, and powerful-looking women radiating a massive killing intent towards Ranma. “These are the village champions.”
Sensing their killing intent and battle strength, Ranma blinked several times, and slowly nodded. “Ohhh… now that makes more sense.”
Within seconds, Ranma, Genma, and their Jusenkyo Tour Guide were running through the forest, chased by a horde of screaming, weapon brandishing women warriors.
= = =
“And that’s what happened,” Ranma finished explaining her harrowing adventure in China to an audient Kuno and Akane as Shampoo walked past the latter and towards her and the former.
“I see, so now this woman warrior is here to face you again, or perhaps to confirm your location for her sisters in battle to come and exact their vengeance,” Kuno said as he prepared his bokken.
Ranma nodded. Much as she liked fighting the good fight, she knew when she wasn’t going to enjoy a fight and a mismatch of about a hundred well-armed Amazon Warriors with years of combat experience ahead of her own dog-piling her all at once wasn’t exactly her idea of happy-fun-times.
Kuno frowned. Could he have been mistaken about Saotome, then? Would this sign of a weakness actually be detected by Akane? He looked to the idol of Furinkan, and found that she was staring–pointedly–at Shampoo even as she came within reach of Ranma. How strange, Kuno didn’t think he ever saw such a peculiar expression on Akane’s face before.
Shampoo stopped in front of Ranma, who was looking around for any sign of those other Chinese badasses. No sign of them, did she come alone? Or was she supposed to be some sort of diversion while they kept hidden, and struck when least expected?
“So… Shampoo… I see a lot of those bruises have already cleared up,” she said.
Shampoo, still smiling that lewd smile, just threw her arms around Ranma and pulled her close, before finally speaking.
“Wo ai ne.”
Ranma went blank. “Wo… ai…?”
Kuno was confused, as he was a fluent speaker of Mandarin. “She just said ‘I love you’, Saotome.”
Akane was suddenly next to the two girls, her speed and approach undetected and unmeasurable by Kuno, who leaped back with fright. One instant she was fifteen meters away, the next instant she was just there.
Shampoo looked at Akane, who smiled pleasantly at her. “Kuno-senpai, please translate: Hello, I am Akane Tendo, I’m Ranma’s fiancée. Did you just say you loved him?”
When Kuno translated for Shampoo, she stared back at Akane. “I love her, and she is going to be my wife.”
With Kuno’s translation, Akane took Ranma and Shampoo by their shoulders, and gently pried them apart, before taking both of Shampoo’s shoulders and placing herself between the two. Her expression, still sunny and pleasant, became a stark contrast to the menace that swirled around her as she stared directly into Shampoo’s eyes.
“No, she’s not.”
Shampoo actually recoiled a bit in surprise. Looking at Akane’s hands, she reached up and carefully removed them from her shoulders before moving them down to her sides.
Ranma looked back and forth between the two girls, and suddenly this was very interesting.
Shampoo spoke again, and Kuno actually cringed as he translated… this time to Ranma. "Beloved, who is this… ugly flat-chested girl?"
Shot right past interesting, and into a must see event. Miss this, miss everything.
“My fiancee,” Ranma said, sitting her ass down to watch the inevitable show while Kuno translated. The two girls smiled serenely at one another but the killing intent the two of them were putting out could power a city for years.
Shampoo said something else, but before it could be translated the ground where Akane had been standing was suddenly replaced by a deep crater and a large metal ball attached to a staff.
“What did she say, Kuno-sempai?” Akane said, as she landed by the edge of the pool.
“She just said… dead.”
“What a coincidence,” Akane said. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Akane suddenly swerved to the side and plucked a hurled mace out of the air, then swung around to bat a second from the sky. Both Chinese hammers shattered, and through the spraying shrapnel Shampoo swung a dao straight for Akane’s heart.
There was a loud “Ting!” as Akane blocked the blade with one of her own: a heavy looking blade that looked like it had been taken off a school’s paper trimmer.
Kuno was alarmed, Akane now had a weapon. Where and when did she get that, and who left it out for her to get to it?
“If you wanted to play at sword fighting, you just had to ask,” Akane said, deflecting five more strikes in quick succession before slapping Shampoo back and forth across the face with the flat of the makeshift weapon.
Shampoo stepped back from her adversary for a moment, and then she said, “You hit just like my beloved.”
Kuno repeated it for Akane’s ears, but Ranma was the one surprised, pleasantly so. “Huh, then her face should be like… broken. When’d she get so durable?”
Picking up one of the staffs that remained of Shampoo’s giant mallet things, Akane grinned and began waving it and her makeshift sword about as though they were a pair of escrima sticks. “I’m more interested in how durable she is. Let’s experiment.”
She rushed straight for Shampoo, and parried her dao slash with the paper trimmer to strike her repeatedly in the stomach with the end of the staff. Shampoo forced her back with a stab to the face, before drawing a second dao out of nowhere and swinging both at her in a flurry of gleaming, dancing steel.
Akane gleefully met Shampoo’s attack with her own, her impromptu weapons deflecting or blocking Shampoo’s purpose-built blades from making any contact whatsoever. At the same time, her best efforts to capitalize off the openings her deflections permitted were in turn foiled by Shampoo’s incredible agility and her own counterattacks.
“Huh! She wasn’t nearly this fast before either,” Ranma said as she watched the battle intensify.
Shampoo’s pace suddenly quickened to an impossibly fast level while she said something else, and Kuno again relayed what she had said. “Stop being in the way, or I will break you like my beloved broke me.”
The tip of one of Shampoo’s dao neatly cut a horizontal line across Akane’s left cheek.
The edge of the paper trimmer left a bloody line across Shampoo’s left side.
A few strands of hair were lopped off Akane’s head.
The tie on Shampoo’s left tress was cut off, freeing her hair.
Akane caught a glimpse of her brightly grinning reflection as she turned back from the dao aimed to slice through her face.
Shampoo likewise saw a flash of her own sunny countenance in the reflection of the paper trimmer as she sidestepped an attempt to split her head open.
Their expressions did not escape Kuno’s notice, their cherubic smiles, their shimmering laughter as they came achingly close to scoring a fatal wound, their glazed over, soulless eyes. He being no stranger to battle, nor to the murderous tendencies of the youngest Tendo, was struck at what he was seeing unfold before his eyes.
“This is a real fight to the death…”
No posturing, no bravado, just two people who knew exactly what they wanted to do and who they wanted to do it to. He had to admit, it was a beautiful, if terrifying sight to behold.
“Have you ever seen anything like it, Saotome?” When Kuno got no answer he looked and saw why: there was no Saotome. “Saotome?”
Akane and Shampoo stopped; the tips of Shampoo’s dao were pressed into Akane’s throat and heart, while the paper trimmer rested perfectly on Shampoo’s neck, the edge ready to slice through her jugular.
“Ranma?” Both girls asked before they noticed she was gone. Scanning the schoolyard, they both only caught a brief glimpse of Genma-panda vaulting over the school wall, with a bound and gagged Ranma over his shoulder.
Akane frowned. “Not this again.”
Shampoo narrowed her eyes, and said something in reference to the panda that Kuno dare not say even in impolite company.
= = =
All bad ideas tend to look like good ones at the time. This one had seemed like a good way to perform a little damage control, but it seemed like just the exclamation mark on about a month of simply awful decisions. Then again if he followed that kind of logic, maybe trying to get the hell out of here with his son alive was only going to somehow make things even worse.
If so? He didn’t even want to imagine how this could get worse. For the time being he’d have to settle for carrying his unconscious son out of the school grounds and down the street hope he could get himself and the boy to safety before-
“Airen!”
She was gaining on him fast. Not good. Genma allowed his panda-enhanced survival instinct to guide him to a place which was anywhere else but here and it delivered: it was screaming at him to jump, which he did. Good thing too, because that blade would’ve hurt like hell. Genma cleared a parked car, which was rent asunder with a loud shearing noise, and continued his desperate flight down the street like the devil himself was in pursuit. If only he was that fortunate.
There had to be somewhere he could hide his son, get him away from this insane pursuer! Had to be a way to-weave left, weave hard left!
“Airen!” the purple haired warrior yelled as she crashed into the ground Genma would have been occupying if not for his sudden change of direction. That girl’s tenacity! It was something to behold! Genma fled down a different street, this time certain that the path was clear. No sign of pursuers behind. Not in front or above him either. Maybe he really could make it! Maybe they really would be home free!
The hope was rather dashed when he felt a rope encircle his panda form ankle and hoist him into the air. Upside down, with Ranma lying on the ground out of reach, he saw exactly how it could get worse as two smaller versions of that insane warrior girl appeared triumphantly before them.
“Silly panda no escape!” one said.
“Trap stupid panda!” said the other.
The two of them adopted a rather daft looking pose, arms stretched out horizontally, and they both called in unison. “Ling-Ling, Lung-Lung rescue Shampoo wife!”
A staff descended upon the back of their heads, one after the other. “Quite enough out of the two of you,” an elderly voice said. “Miss Saotome. We meet again.”
Genma held up a sign which plainly asked what the hell was going on. Ranma, having chewed through her gag, looked up at the twin girls as Shampoo too arrived on the scene. “Okay maybe now someone can explain, what’s all this business about me being Shampoo’s wife?”
Cologne just chuckled. “Well child it was-”
“BEHIND YOU!”
Kuno's cry rightly interrupted Cologne, as she turned and used her staff to block a new weapon Akane picked up on her way here, a fireman's axe.
“Oh, hello Miss!” Akane chirped.
“What a pleasant young woman. You are?” Cologne asked.
Akane lifted the axe and rested it against her shoulder. “I’m Ranma’s fiancée, Akane Tendo.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, dear.” Cologne said. “Your fiancée just asked a quite valid question, and I believe it might be best to give her an answer.”
Akane nodded. “Oh, all right. We should do this at my house; my sister will make us tea.”
“That would be lovely,” Cologne said. “You two! Stop teasing the panda and cut him down.”
“But great grandma!” one of them said, prodding Genma in the stomach with a stick.
“Shampoo wife say it fun!” said the other.
“And she completely right!” they said in unison.
Genma just growled in a mix of annoyance and dread.
= = =
It was that special time of day when the air held a discernable pure aura. Food tasted sweeter. Footsteps lighter, sunlight brighter. Life was just that shade more tolerable. The wonder and extraordinary beauty of everything all around her danced within her vision no matter what she did during this, and she could for a time forget. Yes. She could forget just for a few freeing hours at a time.
“Here you are father,” she said. “Your lunch is ready.”
“Thank you Kasumi,” her father said. “You see, I knew this marriage was just the thing to cheer you up. It’s such a shame you can’t see him while he’s at school.”
She could forget. Forget. Forget. Kasumi smiled and nodded. Forget and enjoy and feel the bliss.
“We’re home!”
… And Kasumi’s posture slumped like she was carrying a terrible weight. Her breathing turned into a series of weary sighs and her face became a mask of sorrowful exhaustion. Akane had come home early. Kasumi’s gaze turned towards the phone. Any moment now it would begin to ring and tell her of the terrible things that would fuel her nightmares over the coming weeks. What had she done to be sent home early? Given what she had gotten away with doing, what could she possibly have done to merit being sent home?
Somehow she wasn’t particularly surprised to see Ranma walking into the room next to her. What was a fair bit of a bigger surprise was the purple haired girl attached to Ranma’s arm like a particularly stubborn limpet, and-
Oh dear god. She was smiling. That same dead eyed soulless smile that so expertly deceived the unwary. The precise expression Akane used just before she did something particularly nasty. They were multiplying.
“Big sister, please be a dear and make some tea for our guests.”
Kasumi stared straight past the trio, ignoring the subtle manner in which Akane and the stranger were gently tugging Ranma closer to them and away from the other. She could see a tiny old woman, twin girls with hair coloration that could probably shine in the dark dragging along mister Saotome in panda form. Suddenly things seemed a little more obvious.
A nightmare, it was all just some terrible stress induced nightmare. She numbly nodded and shuffled off towards the kitchen. It would be best to go with the flow for the time being, let the nightmare take its course. It couldn’t hurt her now that she knew the truth.
“Pardon me, Miss Tendo!” a young man said. She took a moment to identify him as Nabiki’s classmate Tatewaki Kuno. How strange that he would be here, given that she rarely ever interacted with him. “Please permit me to assist you!”
“Thank you,” she whispered. “But please sit down. It will not take long.”
A scant five minutes later she was walking out into the room to find the table completely surrounded by the guests probably summoned from the Necronomicon. The twin girls were sitting on top of Mister Saotome and poking him with sticks. The tiny old woman was conversing with father, while the last of the strangers was still clinging on to Ranma’s arm and would likely be dead by morning at this rate.
That boy, Kuno, was standing a short distance away with his back to the wall, observing everything with a hawk’s gaze. He was particularly focused on Akane. Kasumi remembered that about him from Nabiki, apparently he was interested in the abomination against life and light.
“So Cologne was it?” Soun began as Kasumi began to serve the tea.
The old woman nodded. “Yes.”
“Your Great-Granddaughter seems oddly attached to my future son-in-law. Would you perhaps explain what’s going on?”
“Ah, yes. My Great-Granddaughter, Shampoo, is infatuated with Ranma. She seeks to marry her and bring her back to our village. It’s quite simple, really.”
Soun nodded. “I see. Well, that’s a concern. As I already noted, Ranma is engaged to my daughter, Kasumi-chan.”
Cologne blinked. “You mean Akane, yes?”
“That’s right, Kasumi-chan.”
Well now Cologne was a bit befuddled. “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that she was engaged to this girl.”
She gestured towards Akane. Soun followed the gesture only part-way before his gaze snapped into the opposite direction and onto Kasumi. “Yes, Kasumi-chan.”
Kasumi slowly shook her head.
“Oh don’t mind Daddy, he’s just being silly,” Akane said.
Cologne let out a hum. “I… see?”
“At any rate, I regret to inform you Cologne that your Great-Granddaughter’s claim is void. From birth, Ranma has been engaged to my Kasumi-chan and there is little that can be done.”
Shampoo tugged on her Grandmother’s sleeve and whispered something to her. Cologne nodded and translated for the girl, “Shampoo says it doesn’t matter who Ranma is engaged to. She will kill anyone who gets in her way and take Ranma back to our village in China.”
Kasumi, who had taken a seat alongside Soun, suddenly backed away from the table and the purple-haired girl across it as she turned a far less friendly look in her direction. It occurred to the eldest Tendo that the girl didn’t see a person, just an obstacle.
On the other hand, the girl would kill anyone who gets in her way… “I’m not Ranma’s fiancee at all, Akane-chan is.”
Soun pretended not to hear that.
Cologne looked from the properly spooked Kasumi to Akane, who was nodding in enthusiastic agreement to Kasumi’s assertion.
“Perhaps it would be best if you explained Shampoo’s infatuation,” Kuno said. “From the way Saotome told it, your great granddaughter was rather badly injured the last time they met.”
“Ah, she was. Quite grievously in fact,” Cologne explained.
Ranma, who was rather enjoying being sandwiched between two girls alternating between amorous looks for him and murderous looks at each other, joined the discussion. “Yeah, about that. How is she suddenly up and about like that? I could’ve sworn I put her down for at least six months, not two weeks.”
“We of Joketsuzoku have very good health care; we’re a warrior village after all.”
“And how did she get stronger, too? I mean, Akane almost ripped my arm off and she got a few good hits in on Shampoo.”
Cologne chuckled. “Shampoo has always been very strong. She just didn’t expect your attacks to be so violent and overwhelming.”
Ranma grinned and looked to Akane. “See? That’s how you win fights, by hitting them hard as you can right through their guard on the open. Once you get that momentum going they’ll never be able to fight back.”
“Oh I know that,” Akane said as she nuzzled him.
Shampoo gave Akane one of those murderous looks, the kind that actually might kill by itself.
Kuno could understand that, but something still bothered him. “That’s another thing. Ranma said that Shampoo had given her the Kiss of Death, didn’t she?”
“Yes, about that. Ranma interrupted Shampoo at a crucial moment, and gave her what we would consider the Kiss of Marriage. Shampoo fell in love with Ranma on the spot, and now seeks to marry her.”
Akane’s grip around Ranma’s arm turned a shade tighter.
“Oh, that’s what happened? Man, I just wanted her to come and try to kill me,” Ranma lamented before she brightened. “What about those other champions? They must still be pretty mad about it, right?”
Cologne sighed. “About that…”
= = =
Shampoo sat up in her bed with a jolt, causing the damp towel pressed to her forehead to fall into her lap. Pain. It was gone. She dabbed at her jaw and prodded her stomach. No sign of injury. She shook her head and looked around the room. She was surrounded by an army of warriors, each of them carrying what she knew were their favored weapons.
“Your injuries have healed quite rapidly,” her great grandmother said. “Shampoo, we have been awaiting your full recovery. It is only just that you lead us in our pursuit of that pigtailed demon that so cruelly humiliated you.”
“Pursuit?” Shampoo said. There was a low rumble of agreement from the gathered warriors. Several of them raised their weapons in salute; the killing intent directed towards Ranma Saotome could probably be felt from space.
“All right,” she firmly said. ”We will find her.”
The warriors cheered.
“Bring her back to the village.”
Another cheer, louder than the first.
“Then I shall take her as my wife.”
Dead silence, the kind that hung in a room like an unwanted guest that neither knew when to leave nor how to bathe.
“That is not a particularly funny joke,” one of the champions said, pushing her way to stand by the bed. “After what that outsider girl did, this is no time for flippancy! It is your duty to lead us as we hunt her down like the animal she is! For every drop of your blood she spilled today, we shall spill a hundred of hers! It is our duty, our honor-bound privilege to track that wild beast down and ensure she lies dead by week’s end!”
Shampoo turned to look her in the eyes and tilted her head. Her lips turned up into a cruel smile and she stared at the champion for a moment. “I don’t care, that outsider shall be my wife.”
“We must kill that outsider girl, and if you’re not going to do it. We shall!” the warrior warned.
Shampoo’s stare turned a few degrees colder as she stood up and eyed the warrior’s neck. “Are you going to stand in my way?”
“If that is what it takes to stop this foolish plan of yours, yes!”
Shampoo’s hand lashed out like a cobra, and had comparable lethality. In one moment her hand had ensnared the champion’s throat. In the next it had twisted, leaving a terrible crack the only sound in the room as everyone else - even her great grandmother - was stunned into silence.
“Dead,” Shampoo said. Her grip released and the former village champion slumped to the ground.
“You killed her!” another champion gasped, as the others pointed their weapons at Shampoo.
Shampoo nodded. “Anyone who tries to stop me from marrying that outsider dies.”
Suffice to say this was not the kind of proclamation to be taken lightly or ignored. Every champion on the room immediately fell upon Shampoo, who responded with a grin.
= = =
“… And she killed all but one of them,” Cologne finished.
Kasumi was pale as a sheet.
As was Kuno, for similar reasons.
Soun was staring at the bottom of his teacup, thinking about how beautiful the wedding had been.
“What happened to the last one?” Ranma asked.
Cologne recalled the last champion stabbing herself through the chest as Shampoo advanced upon her. “She took the coward’s way out.”
Ranma looked at Shampoo. “You are Hard. Fucking. Core.”
“Ranmaaaaa!” Akane whined as she pulled her away from the Stone-Cold Killer. “I can be hardcore too!”
Ranma grinned. “Really?”
Kasumi grew wide-eyed. No… Ranma wasn’t…
Akane nodded. “Yes.”
No. She wasn’t. She couldn’t!
“Prove it to me, babe.”
Akane got up, and walked down the hallway. Genma, Kasumi, Ranma, and Kuno watched as she left, and then followed her footsteps through the wall as she went upstairs, and then across the ceiling as she walked to her room. From inside the room, the sound of heavy furniture being moved was the only audible noise in the house as the Chinese joined the Japanese in looking towards the ceiling.
A few moments after the noises stopped, and then there was a thumping that everyone followed back down the stairs until Akane burst into the room with a sheathed katana. She looked directly at Shampoo. “Let’s go outside, Shampoo.”
No translation was necessary for this challenge, nor for its acceptance. Grinning broadly, Shampoo got up and drew her dao.
Kasumi shot to her feet. “Akane, where did you get that?!”
There was no way she should have one. The dojo didn't have any weapons, no house within six blocks had any weapons. Hell, Kasumi kept the cutlery under lock and key unless she needed it!
“Oh, I bought it from some old guy,” Akane said as she partially unsheathed the blade, which gave off a red glow and hissed promises of power and destruction that Akane apparently didn't hear (or had long happily accepted) as she resheathed it.
“How-?”
“Nabiki gave me some cash in exchange for some gravure shots she could sell at school.”
Ranma raised her hand. “I would like to see these shots if there are any left.”
Akane blushed. “I’ll show you so much more than that after I fillet Shampoo.”
Shampoo smirked and headed outside, Akane following her. Both girls walked out the patio door to the grassy lawn of the Tendo home’s back yard.
“Ready when you are,” Akane said as she drew the katana and tossed away the sheath.
“Big sister!” Ling-Ling and Lung-Lung declared together as they joined Shampoo’s left and right flank respectively. “We shall fight beside you!”
Shampoo looked to her younger sisters in battle and nodded. Akane hardly seemed concerned, as she pointed the katana at Shampoo’s throat. In fact, she seemed a little disappointed. “Aw, I want you to be my first, Shampoo.”
“The only person dying is you, ugly tomboy!” Ling-Ling boasted.
“You make peace, because you is dead!” Lung-Lung promised.
Akane shrugged her shoulders. “We’ll see.”
“Three-on-one and she’s not even worried, this is gonna be awesome,” Ranma said as she sat down on the patio to watch.
Kuno immediately stepped up. “Please, allow me to act as a referee-!”
“A what? Kuno-senpai, there’s no refs in a fight to the death,” Akane said as she got ready. “However, I would appreciate some help in picking up the pieces.”
Kasumi looked at the telephone. She had to call the police. But… but would any come this time? Would they even be able to stop this if they did?
Shampoo attacked with both her dao, twirling from side to side in her approach before slashing for Akane’s torso with both blades. Instead of dodging out of the way Akane parried both strikes with the katana.
Suddenly changing direction, Shampoo attacked from Akane’s unguarded side, the blades becoming barely detectable flickers of metal in the afternoon sun as Akane leaned back and forth quickly to dodge them before using her blade to deflect or parry consecutive strikes.
With a suddenly lunge, she caught both of Shampoo’s swords against her own and shoved her back. Two blurs at her sides had her on the move, and she narrowly avoided being stabbed through the side by Lung-Lung’s weapon, a three-pronged Tiger Spear. Jumping back from consecutive stabs, Akane quickly tapped the spear downward into the ground before thrusting the blade to run Lung-Lung through her chest.
A quarterstaff landing atop her blade and pinning it against the spear stopped Akane cold however, and both Ling-Ling and Lung-Lung smirked as they pressed their weapons together, trapping the katana in place.
Akane was unconcerned, even as Shampoo leaped to bring both dao upon her head. Simply pulling back on the weapon, she broke free of their lock and blocked Shampoo’s downward slash before performing an uppercut that Shampoo barely blocked. Being off the ground, however, the force of the blow sent Shampoo hurtling into the air much as Ranma’s kick sent Kuno flying.
“She’s quite skilled,” Cologne noted.
“Man, she said she was big on kenjutsu. I didn’t realise she meant this big.” Ranma almost kinda wanted to check out waving a sword around. Kuno was pretty badass at it, but Akane…
Nabiki arrived. “Hey guys, what’s all that racket going on in the back yard oh dear how did Akane find a sword.”
Kasumi immediately punched her in the face. “Ow what?!”
“You did this! This is happening because of you!” Kasumi hissed.
The twins were unleashing an all-out assault, Lung-Lung repeatedly stabbing at Akane and attempting to catch her sword between the prongs of the spear, while Ling-Ling’s quarterstaff kept Akane from launching a meaningful counter to regain momentum. She was being pushed back, even as Shampoo landed on the opposite side of the backyard and prepared to jump back in.
“You is good, but you is no Joketsuzoku!” Lung-Lung taunted as she thrust for Akane again, causing her to sidestep directly into a vertical strike from Ling-Ling, which she parried by raising the katana over her head.
“Soon you be dead, and Shampoo take wife home!” Ling-Ling added as Akane brought the sword back down to deflect another spear thrust.
Turning around, Akane blocked the staff again, before warding off another spear stab. Back and forth she moved with focus and intensity unbecoming of her until this moment. Staying in motion and turning in circles, she continued to ward off the dual attacks until she found an opening out… which was filled by Shampoo rushing to rejoin the battle.
Shampoo’s dao and Akane’s katana clashed faster than Kasumi and Nabiki’s eyes could keep up. Even Genma’s panda eyes were having trouble following the movement. As for Ranma, she was sitting there with tears forming in her eyes and whispering “It’s so beautiful”.
She was good, Shampoo admitted as much as Akane deflected another strike with uncanny ease. She didn’t like obstacles in her way, and this one was becoming a pretty stubborn one!
Lung-Lung landed behind Akane and Ling-Ling at her right side. Her eyes gleaming, Lung-Lung rushed forward as Akane turned away from another Shampoo’s strikes. Akane looked over to see Lung-Lung’s approach, and naturally deflected the spear away from her.
“We got you now!” Lung-Lung yelled as she began to push Akane back again and away from Shampoo.
Stepping side-to-side to avoid two stabs, Akane grinned and hooked her sword behind the blade of the spear. She then turned and overextended Lung-Lung’s final lunge directly and deeply into a surprised Ling-Ling’s heart as she tried to attack Akane from behind as before.
The young warrior froze in place at the sight of life fading from her twin’s eyes. “Lin-!”
Akane promptly swept her sword through Lung-Lung from shoulder to waist, and turned to face Shampoo, who had also stopped moving.
Kasumi fainted right where she sat, as Nabiki’s mouth fell open. Genma, who had found the twins’ poking and prodding annoying at worst, sat up with an audible “Growf?!”
Kuno took a step back in disbelief. “… She…”
Soun began weeping, he didn’t know why.
Ranma, wide-eyed, only developed a sickening grin. “… Hardcore.”
Cologne watched as the bodies of the two young warriors fell to the ground, and narrowed her eyes at Akane as she took the bloodstained sword in both hands and raised it while smiling at Shampoo.
She said pleasantly, “Shoot I wanted you to be my first, but third is fine too.” She then grinned. “So come and make me three-for-three.”
Shampoo, wide-eyed and hyperventilating, smiled as she said only one word:
“DEAD.”
In a split second, she and Akane lunged at one another, the afternoon sun gleaming off their blades and bloodthirsty smiles.
Lyxandra, it's been over four months since the last post in this thread. Posting in a thread that has had no activity for weeks (let alone months) is... quite heavily frowned upon on here (and on many other forums). Such a post is called a "necro", because you've effectively raised a "dead" (or otherwise just inactive) thread.
I suppose it's fortunate for you that I was one of the first to see this, because I've seen many posters react with great anger to people who necro threads.
Please don't do this again.
I suppose it's fortunate for you that I was one of the first to see this, because I've seen many posters react with great anger to people who necro threads.
Please don't do this again.
*Giggles*
= = =
Disclaimer: I made it just for you. Only for you.
Sickly Sweet
Part 6
How had her life gotten to this point? How was it possible that each new day forced her to reevaluate the idea of her worst nightmare come to life? Whenever anything remotely close to the thought “it can’t possibly get worse” began to bubble up to the surface it was probably safest to slap it right out her head.
Akane had tasted blood. Her first actual kills right there in the garden. Blood seeping into the soil. Two young bodies butchered by a monster.
And the fight wasn’t even remotely close to being finished. It was like watching a pair of tanks ramming into one another just to see which gave first. Shampoo was just a blur bouncing around the garden with the occasional flash of sharpened steel. Akane herself remained in the same location, twirling her sword all around her and parrying every blow that came her way.
“Oh dear, I thought maybe you’d start taking this seriously now!” Akane said.
Her stance changed and the smile on her face broadened even further.
The sword flashed several times in front of her, each strike missing Shampoo by a hair’s breadth. The warrior ducked directly underneath the blade and leaped back against the wall, panting.
Holding the clearly cursed blade to her lips, Akane ran her tongue along its back lewdly, before a large section of the wall behind Shampoo suddenly fell on her with a tremendous clamour.
“Nice!” Ranma cheered.
“Kasumi dear!” Soun said. “Would you please check and see who is at the front door? They’re making an awful noise out there.”
What a nice place he must be in. If someone wasn’t needed to deal with all this mess, she might just visit some day.
The rubble exploded and Kasumi instinctively hit the dirt. Shampoo had leaped into the air, and began to kick the large chunks of rock still airborne down at Akane, making it seem as though the very heavens themselves had decided to drop meteors on this wicked girl to get rid of her once and for all. At first Akane was content with simply cutting the improvised missiles out of the air, but suddenly she leaped backwards, spun around and hurled a caught rock right back up at her target. Shampoo didn’t even bother trying to dodge. She just punched her way through, and continued the momentum towards her hated foe with a blade in her hand.
“She keeps saying the same word over and over,” that Kuno boy said, “Dead. Over and over again.”
Look at the two of them, standing opposite one another like that. Shampoo’s sword pushing against Akane’s, neither giving an inch and both wanting the other dead. That hatred, that burning rage directed at one another. Each wanted the other’s blood staining their weapons and didn’t much care how it happened. Each one was outright projecting murderous intent towards the other. And yet, to someone unskilled in reading body language it would probably appear as though they were enjoying themselves. Having fun. Playing around.
The truly terrifying part was it was probably about half true. They probably were enjoying themselves. They probably were having the time of their lives, and oh didn’t that seem like an inappropriate way to phrase that? What lengths would these two reach for next?
“I’ve finally found you.”
And who was that standing on the roof of the dojo? A robed figure, wearing some form of mask that completely concealed his features. Wonderful. Another lunatic to add to the mix. No, please just send them all over here! Maybe she should start an asylum?
“Ling-Ling... Lung-Lung... It has come this far? But no further. No further than this!” the young man thrust his arms out to the side and from his sleeves extended an array of knives fanned out to appear as a pair of wings. “This barbarism stops now! I am Mousse of the Joketsuzoku, and I am here to end this!”
= = =
It had been one of those unfortunate quirks of fate that kept him away from the village that day. A simple errand turned complicated because he wound up taking directions from some idiot wearing a bandanna.
By now he would have missed the tournament. By now Shampoo would be finished with her prize. Probably gloating over those she was victorious over. A shame that he missed her moment of triumph and glory, but he simply couldn’t-
Mousse stopped in his tracks like he’d walked right into a solid wall. The main difference was that any wall would have been less painful. He could only stare in shock as his mother ran towards him with tears in her eyes.
“Mousse, thank goodness”, she said. “You’re alright. When I couldn’t find you, I feared you’d done something foolish.”
“What happened here?” he whispered. No. This was not the time for silence. He would mourn the dead later. This was the time for anger! This was the time for justice! He clutched his mother by the shoulders and stared at where he supposed her eyes were.
“Who is responsible for this?!” he yelled. The list of suspects was not a small one, there were several other villages that were long jealous of the Joketsuzoku for their strength and wisdom. If whoever was responsible for this attack still lived, they would not live long enough to regret this senseless slaughter! Had his beloved been among the victims? No, that was not possible! She was too strong to be so easily defeated!
His mother hesitated for reasons he did not at that time understand, so he yelled his question again. “Tell me! What happened here?”
And as his mother told the story, Mousse felt his heart grow cold and black. A story of madness, death and disaster. It seemed impossible to his ears, but he knew this woman too well to believe she would speak false of such a terrible event. Of all the terrible possibilities his mind had conjured within that scant minute, this surpassed them all. His beloved Shampoo had been among the very first to die this day. A rabid dog had devoured her whole and stolen her body.
Which meant it would have to be up to him to pull the trigger and put it out of its misery.
= = =
For reasons that are baffling beyond human comprehension, there is something intrinsically attractive to the male mind when two attractive women fight. Why should this be the case? A fight - a proper fight - is a place where faces get bruised, teeth get knocked out and eyes can swell up at a moment’s notice. Why would any man find this idea attractive? Why find the idea of two beautiful faces messing one another up appealing?
What it really boils down to is the rather sexist preconceived notion that chicks can’t fight worth a lick. They’ll tug hair, roll around a little, tear at each other’s clothes. Maybe at worst a good old bitch slap. Heaven forbid they might throw an actual punch or kick!
In case it wasn’t clear already? Toss that idea right out of the window where either one of these two were concerned. They were pretty, and both of them were very talented in the special art of making other things very unpretty. And there’s little that you’ll find anywhere in the world which is less pretty than a mangled corpse.
“This is getting good,” Ranma said. He was lying down with his chin resting in both palms, slurping on a drink through a straw. Quite nonchalant for someone watching a scene which involved two very, very dead young girls, two armed lunatics and the love of his life.
“Say, Genma!” Soun suddenly declared. “It’s been a while since we’ve played a good old game of shogi! Come on, you old rascal, let’s play a few rounds!”
“Soun, is this really the best time? Your daughter is fighting for her life out-”
“I’ll just set up the board!” Soun loudly interrupted. Anyone paying him particular attention might take care to note that he was keeping his back to the garden. “I’ll even have Kasumi bring some sake! Ha! For some reason we’ve had trouble keeping ourselves stocked with alcohol lately, but we should have plenty!”
Again, if anyone were paying particular attention they might have caught Kasumi behind the others sneaking a sly drink from a flask which was quickly concealed once again within her apron.
“You rabid beast!” the robed man yelled, “It is time to put you out of your misery!”
He swooped down like a bird in flight with swords pulled out of his robes, too many to seem practical to carry yet there he was with five blades in each hand. His roar filled the air, the sound of shattered heart that had been replaced by the raw stuff of rage and regret. This was a man who once had love pumped through his veins, but now there was only fire of a different sort. The blades descended neatly upon their target, meeting expected resistance that was no match at all for his strength, his skill, his devotion to his cause.
“Well damn,” Nabiki groused. “I liked that tree. Gave the garden a much needed peaceful image.”
“Say, who is that guy anyway?” Ranma asked.
“That would be Mousse,” Cologne replied.
Her eyes narrowed in concentration on the newcomer. “He is the practitioner of the Hidden Weapons fighting style.”
Imagine a child’s face on Christmas morning. Imagine that there were no gifts underneath that tree, but instead the parents took that child outside and showed them a gift wrapped full sized and operating Gundam. Picture that child’s face. It is full of joy and wonder, anticipation, excitement and is already imagining the untold destruction it shall reign down upon the world. In comparison, Ranma’s expression made that child look like the newborn God of Grumpiness.
“I must fight him,” Ranma declared.
“You dare dodge my divine wrath?” Mousse yelled. A mace attached to a length of chain whipped out of his sleeve, forcing both Akane and Shampoo to scatter. “There is no escape! You are the walking dead, so allow me to kill you before you take anyone else with you!”
“Is it my birthday?” Akane asked, bewildered yet exhilarated, “Pretty sure it isn’t, but thanks for the gifts everyone!”
The mindless fury in Shampoo’s eyes dimmed, then seemed to invert entirely as her face broke out into the most genuine and pure joy. She rushed towards Mousse but her dao was blocked by a giant plastic duck that appeared out of nowhere.
“Now she’s saying, ‘You are trying to kill me? How wonderful!’”
“Wonderful?” Nabiki asked. Mousse tugged a chainsaw out of his robes and dove down towards Shampoo, hitting nothing but air and dirt for his trouble. “Don’t you mean psychotic?”
Kuno shook his head. “It appears that she is grateful he’s doing something - anything - other than trying to date her.”
There was a beat of silence punctuated by Ranma slurping on his drink, Soun trying to play shogi with Genma, weapons of all shapes and sizes being tossed willy-nilly around the Tendo garden, Chinese and Japanese obscenities. So, not actually silence. But the spectators weren't saying anything for a little bit.
"It just hit me," Nabiki said, "Kuno and I are the only sane ones here."
Cologne whapped her lightly on the back of the head for that remark, but then reconsidered whether or not it was actually deserved. Being the only sane people in a crowd of lunatics was quite possibly punishment enough for even the most outlandish transgression.
"Thanks!" Shampoo cheerily yelled in Chinese, grabbing a dozen knives Mousse had hurled right out of the air. She then proceeded to juggle them in the same manner that a clown might juggle brightly coloured balls at a child's birthday party, even using her feet and shoulders to push the handles so that they would arc back upwards into the air. Even her expression was the same. A big friendly cheerful smile that absolutely did not reflect the killer aura she was presenting as she snatched one of them out of the air and lunged for Akane with a stab as quick as a boxer's jab.
However, Akane was also grabbing Mousse's thrown weapons. In her case she caught what appeared to be a full toolbox by the handle, and she swung it into the path of Shampoo's knives as a peculiar improvised shield.
"You know," Akane sweetly said, "It might be a little more polite if you were to sort out your issues with your own boyfriend before trying to lay mine. It might make you seem less of a two timing wh-"
"Attack of a thousand swans!"
The two girls turned around to see Mousse hurling his hands up into the air, releasing a rather large collection of ornate metallic swans that drifted gently down towards the ground. One happened to strike a knife that Shampoo was juggling - And then the swan exploded in quite the disproportionate manner to its small size.
The reaction from the two girls differed enough to illustrate perfectly the manner in which they liked to fight. For Shampoo, she simply tilted her head and tossed one single knife up into the cloud. It struck one swan, and then the explosion caused it to ricochet into another and another until those directly above herself (and only herself) were destroyed.
As for Akane? She licked the back of her sword before tossing and kicking the toolbox into the air, sending it smashing through the swans and scattering them, their explosions setting off a chain reaction of explosions from the swans caught in their blast radius. As the blasts and the smoke cleared, Akane rested the sword across her shoulder and smiled.
"If I wasn't smitten before," Ranma said. "I would be now."
"Oh, darling! You're making me blush!"
Shampoo yelled something in Chinese, but before either Cologne or Kuno could offer any kind of translation Mousse loudly interrupted them: "Of course I didn't expect that to work!" he yelled from atop the roof. "That was simply a distraction so that you would be caught off guard by my true ultimate attack! Behold, monster! This technique is my own contribution to the school of Hidden Weapons and shall be your end!"
All heads craned up to see what Mousse would pull from his robes this time. Shampoo rolled her eyes and prepared to throw a knife at him, while Akane simply stared up in wide eyed curiosity.
Down on the ground Kasumi whimpered in fright, Cologne backed away, Genma's black fur became white, Nabiki lost all trace of cool and Kuno appeared to transform into a statue where he was sitting.
"Is that what I think it is?" Ranma asked, staring up in simultaneous wonder, awe and shock.
"I'm not a mind reader," Akane said, "However. If you think that Mousse somehow pulled a Sherman tank out of his robes and is about to drop it on us, you would be absolutely-"
And then she was rather rudely interrupted when an M4 Sherman tank landed its thirty point three tonnes on her and Shampoo. Shortly after this, Mousse himself jumped atop the tank, breathing heavily. Touching the surface as if trying to make sure. Trying to make sure that he'd done what he had just done. That he had slain the beast. That he had been victorious.
"It's over?" Kasumi asked. "It-it's finally over?"
"Yes, miss!" Mousse triumphantly called. "The wicked beast is defeated! You and your family, all families are safe."
In that instant the weary but beautiful face of Kasumi Tendo tried to remember how to do a certain thing. It was a thing that was difficult to do, given that she had come to associate it with… Evil, pure unrelenting evil and malice and blood and gore. But her muscles creaked into compliance. Because that was no longer true, you see. She was smiling! Oh, how good it felt to smile again!
“… It’s dead,” Soun suddenly said, jarringly aware of the world around him, “It’s actually dead.”
Everyone on the patio turned to look at him.
“Tendo…?” Genma asked.
"Ahaha!" Soun suddenly called, leaping up onto the tank next to Mousse in a surprising feat of athleticism. He pulled a pair of celebratory fans out of nowhere and began to dance around, spinning and whirling in triumph and jubilation. "It's dead, it's dead! The spawn of that horrific monster is finally dead and gone forever!"
As for Mousse, he was simply standing there with tears flowing freely down his cheeks although otherwise his expression was one of absolute contentment. "The world is a better place now," he sniffed. "One less monster in it makes it all seem that much better. That much brighter!”
Soun then took his hands in his own. “Young man, words cannot express my gratitude! Would it be too forward if I were to ask you to marry one of my daughters! Perhaps Nabiki, or Kasumi?!"
Kuno twitched.
Which was right around the point that the tank began to move. Soun and Mousse toppled over, Soun falling off the side and crashing to the ground. Kasumi immediately jumped back in fright, caught in Kuno's waiting arms where he held her just a little bit longer than he probably needed to before pulling her inside the building by the hand.
“Well that didn’t last,” Nabiki said.dryly.
As for the tank itself, on either side of it there were two girls. Holding up their end while staring each other down with oddly vacant eyes and smiles that seemed to originate less from happiness or contentment and more from the devil's own back garden.
"No!" Mousse yelled, clinging to the barrel of the tank for dear life, "No, this isn't possible! You can't be alive! Not after this! What kind of monster are you?!"
"The kind that's getting laid tonight," Ranma breathlessly said, eyes only on Akane.
Soun stared at Akane as well, his expression once more a delusional haze.
"You leave me no choice!" Mousse yelled again, wrapping a chain around the barrel and kicking off the side of the tank, "I'll just have to cut you down the old fashioned way! Even you can't survive decapitation!"
And so, he kicked off the side of the tank and swung down underneath with a sword extending from his sleeve. He swung out for his target as he went past–and in the process succeeded in nothing more than cutting a few strands of hair. "Damn," Mousse seethed, sensing he had missed.
He kicked off the wall and decided to make a second try-
And then found himself face to face with a grinning pig-tailed boy, who gently but firmly yanked him off the chain and placed him squarely upon the ground.
"Hi there," Ranma said, forcing his hand right into Mousse's empty one, "I'm Ranma Saotome, your future sparring partner. Man, that whole hidden weapon thing gives me chills! You never know what's coming next. The things you could do with that! Wow! A whole tank! Wow!"
"Huh?" Mousse grunted. "Wh-What are you?"
"Sparring against a guy like you must be incredible fun," Ranma said, rolling around on his heels, "In fact, I bet Akane's had a complete blast. Haven't you, dear?"
"Uh huh…" Akane said, rather putting most of her effort into keeping a tank above her head.
"See? Complete blast," Ranma said, "Only thing is…that chick is my fiance. The love of my life. I noticed her and she noticed me and we were meant to be together. Now, I don't so much mind you trying to kill her or anything because she's a big girl and she can take care of herself."
"Hrm? There was another girl there?" Mousse asked. He turned around and adjusted his glasses. "Oh my goodness! I am so, so sorry! I didn't even notice!"
"Hey, no biggie," Ranma calmly said. "Like I said. She's a big girl and she can defend herself, so I don't mind her getting into a fight."
"That's rather generous of you," Mousse said, "If someone had attacked my fiance, I would have probably tried to kill them."
"Oh, no," Ranma said, patting Mousse on the shoulder. "No, no, no. If someone attacked Akane, she'd kill them before I ever found out. No. Bu~ut what I do mind is when someone carelessly cuts off her beautiful hair and makes it look less beautiful than it used to. That makes me-"
What happened next could only be understood by the martial artists present, and it is important to notice that in Ranma's last sentence, the space between his second last word and his last word was not any greater than the difference between any other words he had spoken. So, let's start.
To begin with he grabbed Mousse by his collar and then kneed him right in the guts with about as much force as a artillery piece's kickback. With his other hand he slapped Mousse across the back, forcing him to topple over Ranma's knee. His opposite leg then spun off the ground where it kicked Mousse in the neck, then continued its arc so that the master of hidden weapons was lying on the ground with a knee pressed into his throat.
"Mad," Ranma said, leaning down so that his face was right up against Mousse, and in so doing putting even more leverage, more weight up against his throat, "And when I get mad, fights aren't fun anymore. Not for me. Not for you. Not for anyone."
Mousse managed a gurgle. This was almost the extent, the limit of what he could currently do.
“So, let’s not have anything like this happen okay? Deal with your girl trouble and then come fight me anytime,” he said, “We’ll have fun. Do you got me?”
Mousse gurgled again, and nodded.
Ranma lifted his knee off his throat. “Superb! We will get on famously!”
Coughing, Mousse got back up and nodded. “I am… sorry for your fiancée, blame my p-poor eyesight.”
“It’s all right, no one’s perfect you know?” Ranma asked. "Well, except my fiancée."
“Oh you’re too much!” Akane cooed before she and Shampoo tossed the tank aside like they were getting rid of a couch.
Shampoo rolled her shoulder. She announced something in Chinese, and then began picking up her weapons.
Kuno stopped and blinked. “She says that she can’t possibly fight if she has to deal with Mousse right now.”
"Ohhh, fine!" Akane sighed. She picked up the sheath of her sword and reinserted the blade. "We'll pick this up another time. Look forward to killing you soon!
"Good " Cologne said, banging her cane loudly against the floor and then hopping out into the garden. "Enough blood has been spilled today. I see little point in further escalation. Come along, you two. We shall settle this in more private quarters."
"Oh dear what a shame!" Soun said. "It has been rather wonderful having you here, Miss Cologne. Your village sounded like such a fascinating place to live, and the fact that you came all the way here to visit our humble dojo is a tremendous honour."
"It would also be advisable to take him to a doctor," Cologne called, continuing to hop away on her cane faster than some men can run. "Though the same might be advisable for the rest of you as well."
"Well, that was something for the scrapbook," Nabiki stretched out her arms. "Also, free tank. I suppose that might prove useful… Give me a night to sleep on it before asking how."
“What about the bodies?” Kasumi asked of the two dead Amazons. "They couldn't have been older than ten, maybe eleven years old. We can't just leave them there."
"Have no fear, Miss Kasumi!" Kuno said, "I shall make arrangements for the garden to be cleaned, and for the bodies to be taken away discretely. It would not do for you to sully your hands with such dirty matters."
Kasumi looked to Kuno, and nodded. “Ah, thank you…”
“You will bring them to us when you are done collecting them," Cologne said to Kuno, “They are of the Joketsuzoku and we will tend to them as we do.”
Kuno looked from Kasumi to Cologne. “As you wish, I am sorry for your loss.”
“You needn’t worry, child, the Joketsuzoku always pay back in kind.”
As she said that, she looked towards Kasumi, and then to Nabiki. She then looked back to Kuno.
“Yes, blow for blow in fact.”
Nabiki didn’t need to have things spelled out for her, and she pulled out a tablet computer to plan a trip to America. Cologne’s words were not beyond Kasumi’s ken either, and she visibly sagged.
"And that takes care of that!" Ranma said, dusting off his hands, "C'mon, sweetie let’s get your hair sorted out."
Akane hugged him closer. “You, a stylist?”
“Well if I do it as a girl it might help,” he joked.
"Sounds good," Akane cooed as she hooked her arm with Ranma’s. She then called to the others as they walked into the house, "Don’t wait up, It might take a little while! Especially since we didn't get the chance to try out anything with your girl form last night.”
“You are a kinky, naughty little scamp aren't you?" Ranma could be heard huskily, eliciting an eager giggle from his fiancée.
And out on the patio, as a very small ninja began to cover up the corpses and prepare them for transport, Nabiki quickly exchanged some spare earmuffs for some rather hefty wads of cash.
"Thank you Nabiki," Soun said with a rather happy delusioned grin. "Between you and me, this is quite the favour you're doing. Ranma and Kasumi were rather obviously energetic last night, and I would much rather not hear those kinds of antics. Even if they are engaged." He sniffed back some tears. "My baby girl is all grown up!"
While just behind him, Kasumi slunk back indoors without uttering a sigh or shedding a single tear. She sat down at the sitting room’s table and toyed with her earmuffs while trying desperately to ignore the ninja scrubbing away the blood in the shadow of a tank looming ominously in the garden.
All she heard–and felt–was the deafening sound of silence echoing off the walls.
Hello Darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…
<End Day Two>
= = =
Disclaimer: I made it just for you. Only for you.
Sickly Sweet
Part 6
How had her life gotten to this point? How was it possible that each new day forced her to reevaluate the idea of her worst nightmare come to life? Whenever anything remotely close to the thought “it can’t possibly get worse” began to bubble up to the surface it was probably safest to slap it right out her head.
Akane had tasted blood. Her first actual kills right there in the garden. Blood seeping into the soil. Two young bodies butchered by a monster.
And the fight wasn’t even remotely close to being finished. It was like watching a pair of tanks ramming into one another just to see which gave first. Shampoo was just a blur bouncing around the garden with the occasional flash of sharpened steel. Akane herself remained in the same location, twirling her sword all around her and parrying every blow that came her way.
“Oh dear, I thought maybe you’d start taking this seriously now!” Akane said.
Her stance changed and the smile on her face broadened even further.
The sword flashed several times in front of her, each strike missing Shampoo by a hair’s breadth. The warrior ducked directly underneath the blade and leaped back against the wall, panting.
Holding the clearly cursed blade to her lips, Akane ran her tongue along its back lewdly, before a large section of the wall behind Shampoo suddenly fell on her with a tremendous clamour.
“Nice!” Ranma cheered.
“Kasumi dear!” Soun said. “Would you please check and see who is at the front door? They’re making an awful noise out there.”
What a nice place he must be in. If someone wasn’t needed to deal with all this mess, she might just visit some day.
The rubble exploded and Kasumi instinctively hit the dirt. Shampoo had leaped into the air, and began to kick the large chunks of rock still airborne down at Akane, making it seem as though the very heavens themselves had decided to drop meteors on this wicked girl to get rid of her once and for all. At first Akane was content with simply cutting the improvised missiles out of the air, but suddenly she leaped backwards, spun around and hurled a caught rock right back up at her target. Shampoo didn’t even bother trying to dodge. She just punched her way through, and continued the momentum towards her hated foe with a blade in her hand.
“She keeps saying the same word over and over,” that Kuno boy said, “Dead. Over and over again.”
Look at the two of them, standing opposite one another like that. Shampoo’s sword pushing against Akane’s, neither giving an inch and both wanting the other dead. That hatred, that burning rage directed at one another. Each wanted the other’s blood staining their weapons and didn’t much care how it happened. Each one was outright projecting murderous intent towards the other. And yet, to someone unskilled in reading body language it would probably appear as though they were enjoying themselves. Having fun. Playing around.
The truly terrifying part was it was probably about half true. They probably were enjoying themselves. They probably were having the time of their lives, and oh didn’t that seem like an inappropriate way to phrase that? What lengths would these two reach for next?
“I’ve finally found you.”
And who was that standing on the roof of the dojo? A robed figure, wearing some form of mask that completely concealed his features. Wonderful. Another lunatic to add to the mix. No, please just send them all over here! Maybe she should start an asylum?
“Ling-Ling... Lung-Lung... It has come this far? But no further. No further than this!” the young man thrust his arms out to the side and from his sleeves extended an array of knives fanned out to appear as a pair of wings. “This barbarism stops now! I am Mousse of the Joketsuzoku, and I am here to end this!”
= = =
It had been one of those unfortunate quirks of fate that kept him away from the village that day. A simple errand turned complicated because he wound up taking directions from some idiot wearing a bandanna.
By now he would have missed the tournament. By now Shampoo would be finished with her prize. Probably gloating over those she was victorious over. A shame that he missed her moment of triumph and glory, but he simply couldn’t-
Mousse stopped in his tracks like he’d walked right into a solid wall. The main difference was that any wall would have been less painful. He could only stare in shock as his mother ran towards him with tears in her eyes.
“Mousse, thank goodness”, she said. “You’re alright. When I couldn’t find you, I feared you’d done something foolish.”
“What happened here?” he whispered. No. This was not the time for silence. He would mourn the dead later. This was the time for anger! This was the time for justice! He clutched his mother by the shoulders and stared at where he supposed her eyes were.
“Who is responsible for this?!” he yelled. The list of suspects was not a small one, there were several other villages that were long jealous of the Joketsuzoku for their strength and wisdom. If whoever was responsible for this attack still lived, they would not live long enough to regret this senseless slaughter! Had his beloved been among the victims? No, that was not possible! She was too strong to be so easily defeated!
His mother hesitated for reasons he did not at that time understand, so he yelled his question again. “Tell me! What happened here?”
And as his mother told the story, Mousse felt his heart grow cold and black. A story of madness, death and disaster. It seemed impossible to his ears, but he knew this woman too well to believe she would speak false of such a terrible event. Of all the terrible possibilities his mind had conjured within that scant minute, this surpassed them all. His beloved Shampoo had been among the very first to die this day. A rabid dog had devoured her whole and stolen her body.
Which meant it would have to be up to him to pull the trigger and put it out of its misery.
= = =
For reasons that are baffling beyond human comprehension, there is something intrinsically attractive to the male mind when two attractive women fight. Why should this be the case? A fight - a proper fight - is a place where faces get bruised, teeth get knocked out and eyes can swell up at a moment’s notice. Why would any man find this idea attractive? Why find the idea of two beautiful faces messing one another up appealing?
What it really boils down to is the rather sexist preconceived notion that chicks can’t fight worth a lick. They’ll tug hair, roll around a little, tear at each other’s clothes. Maybe at worst a good old bitch slap. Heaven forbid they might throw an actual punch or kick!
In case it wasn’t clear already? Toss that idea right out of the window where either one of these two were concerned. They were pretty, and both of them were very talented in the special art of making other things very unpretty. And there’s little that you’ll find anywhere in the world which is less pretty than a mangled corpse.
“This is getting good,” Ranma said. He was lying down with his chin resting in both palms, slurping on a drink through a straw. Quite nonchalant for someone watching a scene which involved two very, very dead young girls, two armed lunatics and the love of his life.
“Say, Genma!” Soun suddenly declared. “It’s been a while since we’ve played a good old game of shogi! Come on, you old rascal, let’s play a few rounds!”
“Soun, is this really the best time? Your daughter is fighting for her life out-”
“I’ll just set up the board!” Soun loudly interrupted. Anyone paying him particular attention might take care to note that he was keeping his back to the garden. “I’ll even have Kasumi bring some sake! Ha! For some reason we’ve had trouble keeping ourselves stocked with alcohol lately, but we should have plenty!”
Again, if anyone were paying particular attention they might have caught Kasumi behind the others sneaking a sly drink from a flask which was quickly concealed once again within her apron.
“You rabid beast!” the robed man yelled, “It is time to put you out of your misery!”
He swooped down like a bird in flight with swords pulled out of his robes, too many to seem practical to carry yet there he was with five blades in each hand. His roar filled the air, the sound of shattered heart that had been replaced by the raw stuff of rage and regret. This was a man who once had love pumped through his veins, but now there was only fire of a different sort. The blades descended neatly upon their target, meeting expected resistance that was no match at all for his strength, his skill, his devotion to his cause.
“Well damn,” Nabiki groused. “I liked that tree. Gave the garden a much needed peaceful image.”
“Say, who is that guy anyway?” Ranma asked.
“That would be Mousse,” Cologne replied.
Her eyes narrowed in concentration on the newcomer. “He is the practitioner of the Hidden Weapons fighting style.”
Imagine a child’s face on Christmas morning. Imagine that there were no gifts underneath that tree, but instead the parents took that child outside and showed them a gift wrapped full sized and operating Gundam. Picture that child’s face. It is full of joy and wonder, anticipation, excitement and is already imagining the untold destruction it shall reign down upon the world. In comparison, Ranma’s expression made that child look like the newborn God of Grumpiness.
“I must fight him,” Ranma declared.
“You dare dodge my divine wrath?” Mousse yelled. A mace attached to a length of chain whipped out of his sleeve, forcing both Akane and Shampoo to scatter. “There is no escape! You are the walking dead, so allow me to kill you before you take anyone else with you!”
“Is it my birthday?” Akane asked, bewildered yet exhilarated, “Pretty sure it isn’t, but thanks for the gifts everyone!”
The mindless fury in Shampoo’s eyes dimmed, then seemed to invert entirely as her face broke out into the most genuine and pure joy. She rushed towards Mousse but her dao was blocked by a giant plastic duck that appeared out of nowhere.
“Now she’s saying, ‘You are trying to kill me? How wonderful!’”
“Wonderful?” Nabiki asked. Mousse tugged a chainsaw out of his robes and dove down towards Shampoo, hitting nothing but air and dirt for his trouble. “Don’t you mean psychotic?”
Kuno shook his head. “It appears that she is grateful he’s doing something - anything - other than trying to date her.”
There was a beat of silence punctuated by Ranma slurping on his drink, Soun trying to play shogi with Genma, weapons of all shapes and sizes being tossed willy-nilly around the Tendo garden, Chinese and Japanese obscenities. So, not actually silence. But the spectators weren't saying anything for a little bit.
"It just hit me," Nabiki said, "Kuno and I are the only sane ones here."
Cologne whapped her lightly on the back of the head for that remark, but then reconsidered whether or not it was actually deserved. Being the only sane people in a crowd of lunatics was quite possibly punishment enough for even the most outlandish transgression.
"Thanks!" Shampoo cheerily yelled in Chinese, grabbing a dozen knives Mousse had hurled right out of the air. She then proceeded to juggle them in the same manner that a clown might juggle brightly coloured balls at a child's birthday party, even using her feet and shoulders to push the handles so that they would arc back upwards into the air. Even her expression was the same. A big friendly cheerful smile that absolutely did not reflect the killer aura she was presenting as she snatched one of them out of the air and lunged for Akane with a stab as quick as a boxer's jab.
However, Akane was also grabbing Mousse's thrown weapons. In her case she caught what appeared to be a full toolbox by the handle, and she swung it into the path of Shampoo's knives as a peculiar improvised shield.
"You know," Akane sweetly said, "It might be a little more polite if you were to sort out your issues with your own boyfriend before trying to lay mine. It might make you seem less of a two timing wh-"
"Attack of a thousand swans!"
The two girls turned around to see Mousse hurling his hands up into the air, releasing a rather large collection of ornate metallic swans that drifted gently down towards the ground. One happened to strike a knife that Shampoo was juggling - And then the swan exploded in quite the disproportionate manner to its small size.
The reaction from the two girls differed enough to illustrate perfectly the manner in which they liked to fight. For Shampoo, she simply tilted her head and tossed one single knife up into the cloud. It struck one swan, and then the explosion caused it to ricochet into another and another until those directly above herself (and only herself) were destroyed.
As for Akane? She licked the back of her sword before tossing and kicking the toolbox into the air, sending it smashing through the swans and scattering them, their explosions setting off a chain reaction of explosions from the swans caught in their blast radius. As the blasts and the smoke cleared, Akane rested the sword across her shoulder and smiled.
"If I wasn't smitten before," Ranma said. "I would be now."
"Oh, darling! You're making me blush!"
Shampoo yelled something in Chinese, but before either Cologne or Kuno could offer any kind of translation Mousse loudly interrupted them: "Of course I didn't expect that to work!" he yelled from atop the roof. "That was simply a distraction so that you would be caught off guard by my true ultimate attack! Behold, monster! This technique is my own contribution to the school of Hidden Weapons and shall be your end!"
All heads craned up to see what Mousse would pull from his robes this time. Shampoo rolled her eyes and prepared to throw a knife at him, while Akane simply stared up in wide eyed curiosity.
Down on the ground Kasumi whimpered in fright, Cologne backed away, Genma's black fur became white, Nabiki lost all trace of cool and Kuno appeared to transform into a statue where he was sitting.
"Is that what I think it is?" Ranma asked, staring up in simultaneous wonder, awe and shock.
"I'm not a mind reader," Akane said, "However. If you think that Mousse somehow pulled a Sherman tank out of his robes and is about to drop it on us, you would be absolutely-"
And then she was rather rudely interrupted when an M4 Sherman tank landed its thirty point three tonnes on her and Shampoo. Shortly after this, Mousse himself jumped atop the tank, breathing heavily. Touching the surface as if trying to make sure. Trying to make sure that he'd done what he had just done. That he had slain the beast. That he had been victorious.
"It's over?" Kasumi asked. "It-it's finally over?"
"Yes, miss!" Mousse triumphantly called. "The wicked beast is defeated! You and your family, all families are safe."
In that instant the weary but beautiful face of Kasumi Tendo tried to remember how to do a certain thing. It was a thing that was difficult to do, given that she had come to associate it with… Evil, pure unrelenting evil and malice and blood and gore. But her muscles creaked into compliance. Because that was no longer true, you see. She was smiling! Oh, how good it felt to smile again!
“… It’s dead,” Soun suddenly said, jarringly aware of the world around him, “It’s actually dead.”
Everyone on the patio turned to look at him.
“Tendo…?” Genma asked.
"Ahaha!" Soun suddenly called, leaping up onto the tank next to Mousse in a surprising feat of athleticism. He pulled a pair of celebratory fans out of nowhere and began to dance around, spinning and whirling in triumph and jubilation. "It's dead, it's dead! The spawn of that horrific monster is finally dead and gone forever!"
As for Mousse, he was simply standing there with tears flowing freely down his cheeks although otherwise his expression was one of absolute contentment. "The world is a better place now," he sniffed. "One less monster in it makes it all seem that much better. That much brighter!”
Soun then took his hands in his own. “Young man, words cannot express my gratitude! Would it be too forward if I were to ask you to marry one of my daughters! Perhaps Nabiki, or Kasumi?!"
Kuno twitched.
Which was right around the point that the tank began to move. Soun and Mousse toppled over, Soun falling off the side and crashing to the ground. Kasumi immediately jumped back in fright, caught in Kuno's waiting arms where he held her just a little bit longer than he probably needed to before pulling her inside the building by the hand.
“Well that didn’t last,” Nabiki said.dryly.
As for the tank itself, on either side of it there were two girls. Holding up their end while staring each other down with oddly vacant eyes and smiles that seemed to originate less from happiness or contentment and more from the devil's own back garden.
"No!" Mousse yelled, clinging to the barrel of the tank for dear life, "No, this isn't possible! You can't be alive! Not after this! What kind of monster are you?!"
"The kind that's getting laid tonight," Ranma breathlessly said, eyes only on Akane.
Soun stared at Akane as well, his expression once more a delusional haze.
"You leave me no choice!" Mousse yelled again, wrapping a chain around the barrel and kicking off the side of the tank, "I'll just have to cut you down the old fashioned way! Even you can't survive decapitation!"
And so, he kicked off the side of the tank and swung down underneath with a sword extending from his sleeve. He swung out for his target as he went past–and in the process succeeded in nothing more than cutting a few strands of hair. "Damn," Mousse seethed, sensing he had missed.
He kicked off the wall and decided to make a second try-
And then found himself face to face with a grinning pig-tailed boy, who gently but firmly yanked him off the chain and placed him squarely upon the ground.
"Hi there," Ranma said, forcing his hand right into Mousse's empty one, "I'm Ranma Saotome, your future sparring partner. Man, that whole hidden weapon thing gives me chills! You never know what's coming next. The things you could do with that! Wow! A whole tank! Wow!"
"Huh?" Mousse grunted. "Wh-What are you?"
"Sparring against a guy like you must be incredible fun," Ranma said, rolling around on his heels, "In fact, I bet Akane's had a complete blast. Haven't you, dear?"
"Uh huh…" Akane said, rather putting most of her effort into keeping a tank above her head.
"See? Complete blast," Ranma said, "Only thing is…that chick is my fiance. The love of my life. I noticed her and she noticed me and we were meant to be together. Now, I don't so much mind you trying to kill her or anything because she's a big girl and she can take care of herself."
"Hrm? There was another girl there?" Mousse asked. He turned around and adjusted his glasses. "Oh my goodness! I am so, so sorry! I didn't even notice!"
"Hey, no biggie," Ranma calmly said. "Like I said. She's a big girl and she can defend herself, so I don't mind her getting into a fight."
"That's rather generous of you," Mousse said, "If someone had attacked my fiance, I would have probably tried to kill them."
"Oh, no," Ranma said, patting Mousse on the shoulder. "No, no, no. If someone attacked Akane, she'd kill them before I ever found out. No. Bu~ut what I do mind is when someone carelessly cuts off her beautiful hair and makes it look less beautiful than it used to. That makes me-"
What happened next could only be understood by the martial artists present, and it is important to notice that in Ranma's last sentence, the space between his second last word and his last word was not any greater than the difference between any other words he had spoken. So, let's start.
To begin with he grabbed Mousse by his collar and then kneed him right in the guts with about as much force as a artillery piece's kickback. With his other hand he slapped Mousse across the back, forcing him to topple over Ranma's knee. His opposite leg then spun off the ground where it kicked Mousse in the neck, then continued its arc so that the master of hidden weapons was lying on the ground with a knee pressed into his throat.
"Mad," Ranma said, leaning down so that his face was right up against Mousse, and in so doing putting even more leverage, more weight up against his throat, "And when I get mad, fights aren't fun anymore. Not for me. Not for you. Not for anyone."
Mousse managed a gurgle. This was almost the extent, the limit of what he could currently do.
“So, let’s not have anything like this happen okay? Deal with your girl trouble and then come fight me anytime,” he said, “We’ll have fun. Do you got me?”
Mousse gurgled again, and nodded.
Ranma lifted his knee off his throat. “Superb! We will get on famously!”
Coughing, Mousse got back up and nodded. “I am… sorry for your fiancée, blame my p-poor eyesight.”
“It’s all right, no one’s perfect you know?” Ranma asked. "Well, except my fiancée."
“Oh you’re too much!” Akane cooed before she and Shampoo tossed the tank aside like they were getting rid of a couch.
Shampoo rolled her shoulder. She announced something in Chinese, and then began picking up her weapons.
Kuno stopped and blinked. “She says that she can’t possibly fight if she has to deal with Mousse right now.”
"Ohhh, fine!" Akane sighed. She picked up the sheath of her sword and reinserted the blade. "We'll pick this up another time. Look forward to killing you soon!
"Good " Cologne said, banging her cane loudly against the floor and then hopping out into the garden. "Enough blood has been spilled today. I see little point in further escalation. Come along, you two. We shall settle this in more private quarters."
"Oh dear what a shame!" Soun said. "It has been rather wonderful having you here, Miss Cologne. Your village sounded like such a fascinating place to live, and the fact that you came all the way here to visit our humble dojo is a tremendous honour."
"It would also be advisable to take him to a doctor," Cologne called, continuing to hop away on her cane faster than some men can run. "Though the same might be advisable for the rest of you as well."
"Well, that was something for the scrapbook," Nabiki stretched out her arms. "Also, free tank. I suppose that might prove useful… Give me a night to sleep on it before asking how."
“What about the bodies?” Kasumi asked of the two dead Amazons. "They couldn't have been older than ten, maybe eleven years old. We can't just leave them there."
"Have no fear, Miss Kasumi!" Kuno said, "I shall make arrangements for the garden to be cleaned, and for the bodies to be taken away discretely. It would not do for you to sully your hands with such dirty matters."
Kasumi looked to Kuno, and nodded. “Ah, thank you…”
“You will bring them to us when you are done collecting them," Cologne said to Kuno, “They are of the Joketsuzoku and we will tend to them as we do.”
Kuno looked from Kasumi to Cologne. “As you wish, I am sorry for your loss.”
“You needn’t worry, child, the Joketsuzoku always pay back in kind.”
As she said that, she looked towards Kasumi, and then to Nabiki. She then looked back to Kuno.
“Yes, blow for blow in fact.”
Nabiki didn’t need to have things spelled out for her, and she pulled out a tablet computer to plan a trip to America. Cologne’s words were not beyond Kasumi’s ken either, and she visibly sagged.
"And that takes care of that!" Ranma said, dusting off his hands, "C'mon, sweetie let’s get your hair sorted out."
Akane hugged him closer. “You, a stylist?”
“Well if I do it as a girl it might help,” he joked.
"Sounds good," Akane cooed as she hooked her arm with Ranma’s. She then called to the others as they walked into the house, "Don’t wait up, It might take a little while! Especially since we didn't get the chance to try out anything with your girl form last night.”
“You are a kinky, naughty little scamp aren't you?" Ranma could be heard huskily, eliciting an eager giggle from his fiancée.
And out on the patio, as a very small ninja began to cover up the corpses and prepare them for transport, Nabiki quickly exchanged some spare earmuffs for some rather hefty wads of cash.
"Thank you Nabiki," Soun said with a rather happy delusioned grin. "Between you and me, this is quite the favour you're doing. Ranma and Kasumi were rather obviously energetic last night, and I would much rather not hear those kinds of antics. Even if they are engaged." He sniffed back some tears. "My baby girl is all grown up!"
While just behind him, Kasumi slunk back indoors without uttering a sigh or shedding a single tear. She sat down at the sitting room’s table and toyed with her earmuffs while trying desperately to ignore the ninja scrubbing away the blood in the shadow of a tank looming ominously in the garden.
All she heard–and felt–was the deafening sound of silence echoing off the walls.
Hello Darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again…
<End Day Two>
Disclaimer: You think you can go to another story and read it?!
Sickly Sweet
Part 7
Tradition. There is a certain power behind that word. Something we do because it works. Because it has always worked before, so it should continue to work. However. Doesn't that seem rather self fulfilling? We enact tradition because we have always done it that way, and since we have always done it that way we should continue to always do it that way. Surely those that came before were great and wise people, smart enough to know what is best. After all! Would we be here today where we are if they were not?
On the one hand Cologne was a severe stickler for tradition. On the other? She was much more liberal about it. No, more like, she was flexible about it. She had lived long enough to watch society and the world around her rapidly evolve and change, and the funny thing about evolution is that even the most fit thing going cannot survive if their habitat changes too rapidly for them to keep up.
Which might explain her unusual reaction to these events. She should have executed Shampoo as soon as she lay eyes on her after that terrible crime. She should have stopped the twins from getting involved in this madness before it started. Because; She had watched her village stagnate. Unwilling to improvise. Unwilling to really push themselves as far and as far as they could go. Make use of the advances in technology to push themselves to greater heights, instead clinging to tradition like a comfort blanket, little noticing how it smothered them in their sleep.
To her twisted,elderly mind? Shampoo did not enact a tragedy upon their village. For how can you kill something already dead?
She found Shampoo in the basement of the building they had purchased. Staring at the bodies of the twins. For a moment, she thought the girl might have been mourning them but a closer look revealed the deeper truth.
"What is the obstacle you are killing?" Cologne asked in their native language. "Your compassion? Your grief? Or is this simply an analysis of your opponent's fighting style?"
Shampoo tilted her head to the side and clenched her fist, then violently struck at the air itself. A flurry of seemingly random strikes, harsh kicks, lethal uppercuts. To Cologne it seemed as though the girl were fitting ghosts rated than performing a kata. The blows felt like they were striking something. Something solid. Something invisible. Something tangibly there.
"Shampoo fighting..." She slowly said, enunciating each word carefully. But not in mandarin, Cologne noticed. "Biggest ob-obstacle stand in way."
"And what might that be?"
"Language barrier."
====
The early morning was Kasumi's favourite part of the day. It was peaceful. It was quiet. Nobody else was awake yet. There was a pleasant serenity surrounding the home, and she could get on with the quiet task of cooking without having to worry about cleaning up blood or bits of debris or calling the nice people at emergency services to let them know of another terrible accident that, for reasons beyond her comprehension, they resolutely ignored beyond necessary medical treatment.
Then the rest of the family would, sadly, awake and ruin just everything. Look now. Here was father. Sleepy eyed and smiling. "Good morning Kasumi!" he would happily say, before sitting at the dinner table to await breakfast. Her poor father. Sitting there so serenely, oblivious to the carnage set out before them.
"Oh, I see that they cleaned up the blood already," Soun said. "And the bodies as well. Such a shame. I am feeling rather peckish, you see."
Kasumi was, at that particular moment in time, chopping up some green onion when she heard her father say something that probably didn't actually mean what she thought it meant. On hearing the sound of Nabiki coming from the back yard, she quietly put the knife down and slipped out of the kitchen to have a word with her. Of the rest of them, Nabiki seemed capable of handling the situation the best.
"Nabiki," she whispered. "This might just be my imagination, but I think father might be worse than we thought. It almost sounded just now as though he wanted to - To… I can't even say it!"
Her little sister reached up and patted her on the top of her head. "There there," Nabiki said, giving her a rather unconvincingly reassuring smile. "It's alright. I know the stress has been getting to you, but don't worry. I have a plan that will let you take off a little steam. Gave it a try yesterday and it works a treat."
"A plan? What exactly did you do?"
Nabiki gestured out at the tank sitting in the back garden. "Went in the bank with a tank fired a blank at the clerk and handcuffed her ankles to the safe and thanked her–but I didn't take nothing!"
"That's… nice…" Kasumi said, drifting off as Nabiki skipped- actually skipped - off to take her place next to their father, who was staring out into the garden with a far off gleam in his eyes and serenely licking his lips. Okay then. Nothing strange about that. Maybe he really was just hungry?
"Good morning Kasumi!" Mr. Saotome said with tremendous enthusiasm. She turned to greet him, and then stopped completely cold in her tracks when she saw that he was carrying next door's pet dog over his shoulders and repeatedly lifting the terrified creature over his head, extending his arms to full length, then lowering it a little behind his head.
"Don't mind me!" he said with an almost lyrical lilt. "I agreed to train next door's dog. Haha! It will be a martial arts master in no time flat, just you watch!"
"Excuse me," Kasumi whispered slightly, feeling rather light headed all of a sudden. "I… Think I need some air. I shall be back shortly."
What was wrong with all of them all of a sudden? Had the stress of yesterday made something snap inside their heads? Dealing with those two for years on end… Something had to give. She had to find help. Someone for them to talk to. Someone that could help them alleviate the stress and keep her from going off the rails as well. So she stepped out into the street and -
"Good morning mister postman!"
"Good morning Mrs. Katayama!"
Then for no reason Mrs. Katayama, the nice old woman that helped teach her how to cook casually pulled out a handgun and kneecapped the postman, who laughed through the entire experience. Then he pulled a hand grenade out of his bag, yanked the pin out with his teeth and then shoved it right down Mrs Katayama's smiling gob.
"Good morning, Kasumi!" The postman waved at her. As did Mrs Katayama before the grenade made such a terrible mess of them both all over the pavement. Up a little bit behind those two she could catch sight of a pair of young children juggling a cat, and over there was a woman dumping acid on a passing man's foot while he yanked on her neck with an umbrella.
And they were all smiling that same vacant smile, their eyes were all the same soulless gleam.
Kasumi backed off in muted horror. Muted, but only because she had long since run out of stock to draw from. What was going on all of a sudden? Why was everyone–why was everyone behaving this way all of a sudden? It didn't make sense. It didn't-
"Good morning Kasumi!" three voices chirped all at once, and she reluctantly turned around to see them. All three. Standing there. Ranma. Shampoo. Akane. All caked in blood and carrying very sharp and pointy looking weapons, some aimed directly at one another.
"Why don't you join us?" all three said in unison. "It's so much more fun this way…"
"Nooooo!" Kasumi yelled, sitting up in bed with her heart racing and her bedclothes drenched in sweat. She looked around her room. Padded walls, shields and pepper spray by her bed within easy reach. Bandages, first aid kits. Little items of comfort dotted all around the room telling her that she was safe. Well. Not safe, safe. But that she had at least the illusion of safety, which was the closest she could manage under the circumstances.
"It was just a dream," she sighed, collapsing back onto her pillow with her arm draped over her eyes. "If it wasn't such a terrible nightmare, I might be a little disappointed at how cliche that was."
Then again… Could any nightmare she could come up with possibly match the unrelenting horror of what might happen in reality? At the very least you can wake up from a bad dream. The only escapes from reality aren't known for being healthy.
====
The newest permanent fixture to Nabiki's wardrobe was a camera slung around her neck. Nobody questioned it. Nobody even really noticed. Ranma and Akane only had eyes for each other, Kasumi and Genma only had eyes for the two psychopaths that might tear out their throats if they did the wrong thing, and Soun was… Well…
"Taking up photography," Soun said aloud. "That's a nice hobby, Nabiki. It is safe. It is healthy. It is good."
Sad to say but Soun doesn't really count as an anybody anymore.
Anyway! You could really see the difference between sisters here. Kasumi was scared for her life, and the lives of those around her, yadda yadda, but Nabiki? Oh, you better believe she was loving this shit. Now, that might seem crazy but really, when the dust settled and the blood was mopped up off the floor one only had to ask: Who could possibly be sane after a lifetime of this?
Soun coped by… "Ah, I wish you could have taken some pictures of the wedding. Kasumi was so radiant, and for some reason we didn't think to hire a photographer. What a peculiar oversight." Well, that.
Kasumi coped by… "Oh father, p-please Ranma and I aren't–I mean, please father snap out of this, it's not–it's not healthy to be like this!" … that.
Neither of these options seemed particularly inviting. In fact, the invitation might as well have been written in blood with the very last letter smearing off the page, with a large bite mark where there should have been a corner. If dread and denial were out, then the only rational form of insanity was to enjoy herself. Maybe make a little cash out of it.
"So dearest," Akane said. Nabiki would have described her as staring right into her new fiance's eyes, but that would be a tad redundant. That's where she'd been looking since they appeared at the dinner table together. Not walked there. Not jumped there. Appeared. "Are there any other bitches from your past that you think might want to step to me?"
"Sorry my love," Ranma said, tenderly stroking some hair behind her ears. "I have no other bitches for you to stomp." He giggled a little. Nabiki got the impression that the reason the answer was no, was because he'd already taken care of them. "Although Shampoo seems pretty damned insistent. She might come back for another go."
"Mph! You keep finding new ways to make me hot. I'd love to have another chance to break her back."
Ugh, these two! Just being in the same room as them made the air taste too sweet to breath. Kasumi made a motion similar to weeping, although no tears came out. Nabiki passed her a glass of water, for all the good it would do. Beyond that the middle Tendo sister was actually rather surprised that breakfast was actually a pretty sedate affair. No broken limbs, no blood, no anything but the two lovers staring at each other and saying nigh incomprehensible things in that lovey dovey tone.
Sure, the things they were saying were pretty obviously about the minimum amount of pressure needed to break various bones in human anatomy and similar topics, but compared to other things that had happened so far things were actually pretty calm.
Somehow that made her skin crawl just a little bit. As if, by the end of the day, something worse was going to happen than either of the previous days. That was just a little touch unnerving.
"You know Nabiki!" Akane suddenly said from up on the fence, where Ranma was carrying her bridal style. "Daddy had a point. We're going to need a photographer for our wedding."
Nabiki crooked an eyebrow. "I won't do it for free, even if you're family."
Now, that might seem risky. But the thing about monsters is that they have levers and buttons. If you know what you're doing, if you know how to dance then you can get clear to the other side of the room without flipping any of them.
“That’s fair,” Akane said agreeably. “Could you get us some rates?”
“Yeah, don’t cop us a discount because we’re family,” Ranma added.
Well then. It looked as though she would have to do a little bit of investigation into how much a professional wedding photographer winds up making on any given job. And a little research into making sure she knew how to do it to that standard, because the idea of ruining their memories of their special day - Not exactly thrilled with that idea.
"I'll get you some rates," Nabiki cooly told them. "So you're already planning it out?"
"Well, of course we are," Akane cooed. "It feels like I've known him for-"
The two of them stopped completely, and the smiles on their faces grew even wider. Nabiki followed their gaze forward. It wasn't just the two of them on top of that fence. There was someone else as well. She was staring at them with dead eyes, and her lavender hair swept up by the wind. With the sun at her back it made Shampoo look like the cover of some shounen series. Wedding plans could be forgotten for the time being. You couldn't cut the tension with a knife. You'd at least need a chainsaw. Nabiki snapped a picture, thought about stepping back to a safe distance, then concluded that no reachable distance could be construed as safe.
Besides which, one does not run from a rabid beast unless one wishes to be chased by a rabid beast.
Akane slipped out of Ranma's grip and stood on top of the fence with her hands behind her back. Ranma rubbed her shoulders and stepped back, wide eyes.
"Oh, this is gonna be good," he said. Dispelling any notion of personal concern he might have for his beloved fiancee's physical well being.
"Ready for round two?" Akane asked.
Shampoo stepped forward. It wasn't a run, or a charge. No sign of muscles tensing for a sudden attack. The aura around her was beyond menacing. She stepped right up to Akane without either of them seeming to raise their guard-
"W? hèn n?," Shampoo said, and then thrust a box right into Akane's hands. Then peered her right in the eyes and said "I. Will. Tear. You. Limb. From. Limb. And. Make. You. Eat. Them."
Akane tsked. "I hear a lot of promises, not seeing a lot of keeping them."
Instead of following through, instead Shampoo leaped away and was about three buildings off before Nabiki could even turn her head.
"I guess she didn't want to do this today…" Nabiki sighed. Actually… Looking over at Akane, that foreign girl might have hurt her in a way she didn't have a way to contend with.
Imagine, if you will, a drug addict. Imagine that you held his drug of choice right in front of his face and then tossed it down a sewer grate. Akane was twitching. Still smiling, but twitching. She'd been deprived of her violence high. A rematch against a rare worthy opponent had been dangled in front of her face and pulled away at the last moment.
“Ohhh… I’m gonna beat her to death,” she said plainly despite how she trembled. “I’m gonna make her want it. I’m gonna make her beg for it.”
In the meantime, Ranma had pulled the box out of her hands, and peeled the lid off. A delicious aroma hit Nabiki, and all of a sudden she was absolutely ravenous. Even after Kasumi's delicious and filling breakfast, that smell made her want more food down her gullet, now, now, now.
"A bento?" Nabiki asked.
"Yep," Ranma confirmed. "All the food cut into the kanji for 'die'."
Akane looked down at the bento, and sniffed it. “Aw, it’s not even poisoned!”
Ranma leaned in, and sniffed it himself. “No, I guess she’s a girl who gets satisfaction in killing with her bare hands. Man, she’s not that bad when you think about it like that.”
“No, but I’m still going to kill her,” Akane said, “And bathe in her blood.”
Nabiki let out a small breath of relief she didn't know was inside her. Well, maybe she'd been worried over nothing after all. Maybe there wasn't something worse coming along later today after all. Then again, if Akane didn't get her violence fix anything might happen.
Oh, don't be silly. This wasn't like her at all! Akane would arrive at the school, then the boys would beat themselves up trying to win the right to date her. Akane could get her violence fix that way, and all she'd have to worry about was how to make some quick… cash…
Arriving to what turned out to be an unadulterated ruin somewhat dashed Nabiki’s hopes.
====
The front yard of Furinkan High school was like the aftermath of a battlefield. There were athletes of all sorts strewn around, whimpering and moaning. No blood had been spilled. As a martial artist's daughter she could tell at first glance: They had all been taken down with the barest minimum effort to put them down.
"Greetings, Akane Tendo… And to her fiance Ranma Saotome!" Announced the most likely culprit, the only one left standing in the midst of it all. Her classmate, the idiotic kendoist. "I, Tatewaki Kuno, hereby acknowledge your engagement, and henceforth put an end to this charade of a morning ritual! Congratulations to you both!"
Akane was a bit surprised. “Oh? You mean they’re going to stop doing this thing now?”
Kuno nodded. “It was difficult convincing them, but they have found that I’m very persuasive.”
“That you are,” Akane said, looking at the carnage spread before them.
Ranma looked around. “Man… you did this all on your own. And look, there’s not a scratch on you!”
Kuno nodded once again. “I hold myself to a higher standard, as you yourself only saw-”
With an almost casual motion of his arm, Kuno blocked Ranma’s punch with the flat of his bokken, the impact sending a shockwave across the schoolyard.
“-yesterday,” Kuno finished as the wind created by the impact died down.
"Remind me," Ranma politely asked.
“If you so insist,” Kuno obliged.
If anyone could tell which of them made the first attack, it certainly wasn't Nabiki. It looked almost instant to her, and most of it she could only figure out after the fact. The first thing Kuno tried was a diagonal downwards strike that caught a roundhouse kick from Ranma, causing a loud crack to fill the air. Everyone gasped because they thought they had heard a limb break, but Nabiki knew better. She'd heard Akane do that enough times to people to know, that wasn't a limb and nor was it Kuno's bokken. What had been broken was the sound barrier.
Then like that they were movement akin to a tornado at full force, striking and parrying one another at speeds so fast that Nabiki still had a hard time seeing who was throwing the blows.
"Kuno has the reach advantage," Akane whispered into Nabiki's ear. Even she nearly jumped at this sudden proximity, but she managed to keep herself at least seeming unsurprised. "So Ranma dearest is trying to get inside his guard. But Kuno's using air pressure to keep him back."
“Impressive, Saotome! You are much like your fiancée and myself, a truly rare breed of martial artist!”
"Yeah, and we’re about to become a little rarer," Ranma retorted. Suddenly he leaped up into the air, doing a picture perfect corkscrew somersault. “When I’m through with you!”
Kuno tried to strike him back with another series of precise air pressure blows, but somehow it seemed as though Ranma was pinballing off the difference to propel himself closer. Before Kuno could adjust his attacking strategy, Ranma had kicked the bokken right out of the kendoist's hands.
"Feh. I was thinking you were stronger than-" Ranma began, and then Kuno grabbed him by the sleeve, judo flipped him overhead, and then connected a high kick immediately after releasing him. A very much surprised Ranma went flying past Akane and Nabiki, and crashed into the school’s wall.
“I see that you need more reminding than that. I said that one must hone their skills at all opportunities,” he repeated for the second time.
Ranma rose to his feet like a zombie. That is, if zombies giggled like lunatics. "Now this is more like it," he said. "Why do you fight with that dumb stick when you're so much stronger without?"
"It's because I'm so much stronger without," Kuno tersely explained.
“Oh man, if I wasn’t straight as fuck I’d be super gay for you right now,” Ranma said as he understood it. This monster in front of him was literally holding himself back for his own amusement! “THIS SCHOOL IS SO COOL!”
Want further proof? Want exhibit… What would it be now, H? Huh, could the number of exhibits also be used as evidence about how cool this school was? Whatever! The point was, Kuno threw a punch that wouldn't have connected if he had springs for arms, and then a large hole appeared in the wall right beside Ranma's head.
Ranma looked over at the hole in the wall, and then at Kuno, his eyes as wide as biology would allow.
Kuno looked at his outstretched left arm. “Hm, my off hand is getting stronger after only two days.”
Ranma was suddenly very much inside his reach, but not to attack. Instead, his hands were together, as if pleading, and his eyes were full of stars that themselves were in awe.
“Please teach me how to do that, senpai,” he said.
"Aw, isn't this sweet?" Akane sighed, much against Nabiki's reaction. Huh? After that comment about turning gay for Kuno, shouldn't this have triggered her kill-switch? "Two of my bestest friends have formed a connection."
"... Kuno's one of your bestest…" Nabiki winced at the taste of the word in her mouth. "Best friends?"
"Well yeah, I mean, he always wants to train with me, and he’s always concerned about my well-being. But between you and me, I think he started trying to be nice to me because he has a crush on Kasumi. What do you think?"
Nabiki inhaled, exhaled and really tried not to think too hard about any of this. Especially not the idea of Kuno and her older sister… Huh, turned out denial was a nice place to visit this time of year after all.
Kuno looked from Ranma, then up towards Akane. Then back down at Ranma. The kendoist quirked an eyebrow and, to Nabiki at least, it seemed as though he came to a decision.
"Very well!" Kuno announced. "I shall gladly teach you."
Ranma was overjoyed. “Wow, we’re going to be best friends, man.”
And then Kuno got struck by a wheel. Right in the side of the head. In a sudden evaporation of all the dignity and poise he had heretofore demonstrated this morning, Kuno twirled around in place, held up an index finger, and then collapsed to the ground staring up at the sky.
“Well, that happened,” Ranma said prior to the tremendous crash that destroyed the front entrance to the school proper. Of all things, an airplane had just struck them out of nowhere. Well, not nowhere. Presumably it was in flight. More like, without warning.
And out of that wreck a lone figure stood. He stumbled out, pulled the ripcord for the parachute on his back, then looked around. To the amazement of all he was completely unscathed, aside from some nasty looking tears on his clothes and some mussed up hair, although that may well be the bandanna wrapped around the top of his head.
The boy's eyes settled on Ranma, who by now was giddy with a heavy variety of emotions. The stranger's eyes turned intense, and he took a meaningful step forward while lifting up an umbrella to point it directly at him.
"Ranma Saotome! Prepare to die!"
Ranma’s lips just split into a murderous smile, as he rolled his neck to crack it.
“Hey Ryoga, it’s been a while.”
Sickly Sweet
Part 7
Tradition. There is a certain power behind that word. Something we do because it works. Because it has always worked before, so it should continue to work. However. Doesn't that seem rather self fulfilling? We enact tradition because we have always done it that way, and since we have always done it that way we should continue to always do it that way. Surely those that came before were great and wise people, smart enough to know what is best. After all! Would we be here today where we are if they were not?
On the one hand Cologne was a severe stickler for tradition. On the other? She was much more liberal about it. No, more like, she was flexible about it. She had lived long enough to watch society and the world around her rapidly evolve and change, and the funny thing about evolution is that even the most fit thing going cannot survive if their habitat changes too rapidly for them to keep up.
Which might explain her unusual reaction to these events. She should have executed Shampoo as soon as she lay eyes on her after that terrible crime. She should have stopped the twins from getting involved in this madness before it started. Because; She had watched her village stagnate. Unwilling to improvise. Unwilling to really push themselves as far and as far as they could go. Make use of the advances in technology to push themselves to greater heights, instead clinging to tradition like a comfort blanket, little noticing how it smothered them in their sleep.
To her twisted,elderly mind? Shampoo did not enact a tragedy upon their village. For how can you kill something already dead?
She found Shampoo in the basement of the building they had purchased. Staring at the bodies of the twins. For a moment, she thought the girl might have been mourning them but a closer look revealed the deeper truth.
"What is the obstacle you are killing?" Cologne asked in their native language. "Your compassion? Your grief? Or is this simply an analysis of your opponent's fighting style?"
Shampoo tilted her head to the side and clenched her fist, then violently struck at the air itself. A flurry of seemingly random strikes, harsh kicks, lethal uppercuts. To Cologne it seemed as though the girl were fitting ghosts rated than performing a kata. The blows felt like they were striking something. Something solid. Something invisible. Something tangibly there.
"Shampoo fighting..." She slowly said, enunciating each word carefully. But not in mandarin, Cologne noticed. "Biggest ob-obstacle stand in way."
"And what might that be?"
"Language barrier."
====
The early morning was Kasumi's favourite part of the day. It was peaceful. It was quiet. Nobody else was awake yet. There was a pleasant serenity surrounding the home, and she could get on with the quiet task of cooking without having to worry about cleaning up blood or bits of debris or calling the nice people at emergency services to let them know of another terrible accident that, for reasons beyond her comprehension, they resolutely ignored beyond necessary medical treatment.
Then the rest of the family would, sadly, awake and ruin just everything. Look now. Here was father. Sleepy eyed and smiling. "Good morning Kasumi!" he would happily say, before sitting at the dinner table to await breakfast. Her poor father. Sitting there so serenely, oblivious to the carnage set out before them.
"Oh, I see that they cleaned up the blood already," Soun said. "And the bodies as well. Such a shame. I am feeling rather peckish, you see."
Kasumi was, at that particular moment in time, chopping up some green onion when she heard her father say something that probably didn't actually mean what she thought it meant. On hearing the sound of Nabiki coming from the back yard, she quietly put the knife down and slipped out of the kitchen to have a word with her. Of the rest of them, Nabiki seemed capable of handling the situation the best.
"Nabiki," she whispered. "This might just be my imagination, but I think father might be worse than we thought. It almost sounded just now as though he wanted to - To… I can't even say it!"
Her little sister reached up and patted her on the top of her head. "There there," Nabiki said, giving her a rather unconvincingly reassuring smile. "It's alright. I know the stress has been getting to you, but don't worry. I have a plan that will let you take off a little steam. Gave it a try yesterday and it works a treat."
"A plan? What exactly did you do?"
Nabiki gestured out at the tank sitting in the back garden. "Went in the bank with a tank fired a blank at the clerk and handcuffed her ankles to the safe and thanked her–but I didn't take nothing!"
"That's… nice…" Kasumi said, drifting off as Nabiki skipped- actually skipped - off to take her place next to their father, who was staring out into the garden with a far off gleam in his eyes and serenely licking his lips. Okay then. Nothing strange about that. Maybe he really was just hungry?
"Good morning Kasumi!" Mr. Saotome said with tremendous enthusiasm. She turned to greet him, and then stopped completely cold in her tracks when she saw that he was carrying next door's pet dog over his shoulders and repeatedly lifting the terrified creature over his head, extending his arms to full length, then lowering it a little behind his head.
"Don't mind me!" he said with an almost lyrical lilt. "I agreed to train next door's dog. Haha! It will be a martial arts master in no time flat, just you watch!"
"Excuse me," Kasumi whispered slightly, feeling rather light headed all of a sudden. "I… Think I need some air. I shall be back shortly."
What was wrong with all of them all of a sudden? Had the stress of yesterday made something snap inside their heads? Dealing with those two for years on end… Something had to give. She had to find help. Someone for them to talk to. Someone that could help them alleviate the stress and keep her from going off the rails as well. So she stepped out into the street and -
"Good morning mister postman!"
"Good morning Mrs. Katayama!"
Then for no reason Mrs. Katayama, the nice old woman that helped teach her how to cook casually pulled out a handgun and kneecapped the postman, who laughed through the entire experience. Then he pulled a hand grenade out of his bag, yanked the pin out with his teeth and then shoved it right down Mrs Katayama's smiling gob.
"Good morning, Kasumi!" The postman waved at her. As did Mrs Katayama before the grenade made such a terrible mess of them both all over the pavement. Up a little bit behind those two she could catch sight of a pair of young children juggling a cat, and over there was a woman dumping acid on a passing man's foot while he yanked on her neck with an umbrella.
And they were all smiling that same vacant smile, their eyes were all the same soulless gleam.
Kasumi backed off in muted horror. Muted, but only because she had long since run out of stock to draw from. What was going on all of a sudden? Why was everyone–why was everyone behaving this way all of a sudden? It didn't make sense. It didn't-
"Good morning Kasumi!" three voices chirped all at once, and she reluctantly turned around to see them. All three. Standing there. Ranma. Shampoo. Akane. All caked in blood and carrying very sharp and pointy looking weapons, some aimed directly at one another.
"Why don't you join us?" all three said in unison. "It's so much more fun this way…"
"Nooooo!" Kasumi yelled, sitting up in bed with her heart racing and her bedclothes drenched in sweat. She looked around her room. Padded walls, shields and pepper spray by her bed within easy reach. Bandages, first aid kits. Little items of comfort dotted all around the room telling her that she was safe. Well. Not safe, safe. But that she had at least the illusion of safety, which was the closest she could manage under the circumstances.
"It was just a dream," she sighed, collapsing back onto her pillow with her arm draped over her eyes. "If it wasn't such a terrible nightmare, I might be a little disappointed at how cliche that was."
Then again… Could any nightmare she could come up with possibly match the unrelenting horror of what might happen in reality? At the very least you can wake up from a bad dream. The only escapes from reality aren't known for being healthy.
====
The newest permanent fixture to Nabiki's wardrobe was a camera slung around her neck. Nobody questioned it. Nobody even really noticed. Ranma and Akane only had eyes for each other, Kasumi and Genma only had eyes for the two psychopaths that might tear out their throats if they did the wrong thing, and Soun was… Well…
"Taking up photography," Soun said aloud. "That's a nice hobby, Nabiki. It is safe. It is healthy. It is good."
Sad to say but Soun doesn't really count as an anybody anymore.
Anyway! You could really see the difference between sisters here. Kasumi was scared for her life, and the lives of those around her, yadda yadda, but Nabiki? Oh, you better believe she was loving this shit. Now, that might seem crazy but really, when the dust settled and the blood was mopped up off the floor one only had to ask: Who could possibly be sane after a lifetime of this?
Soun coped by… "Ah, I wish you could have taken some pictures of the wedding. Kasumi was so radiant, and for some reason we didn't think to hire a photographer. What a peculiar oversight." Well, that.
Kasumi coped by… "Oh father, p-please Ranma and I aren't–I mean, please father snap out of this, it's not–it's not healthy to be like this!" … that.
Neither of these options seemed particularly inviting. In fact, the invitation might as well have been written in blood with the very last letter smearing off the page, with a large bite mark where there should have been a corner. If dread and denial were out, then the only rational form of insanity was to enjoy herself. Maybe make a little cash out of it.
"So dearest," Akane said. Nabiki would have described her as staring right into her new fiance's eyes, but that would be a tad redundant. That's where she'd been looking since they appeared at the dinner table together. Not walked there. Not jumped there. Appeared. "Are there any other bitches from your past that you think might want to step to me?"
"Sorry my love," Ranma said, tenderly stroking some hair behind her ears. "I have no other bitches for you to stomp." He giggled a little. Nabiki got the impression that the reason the answer was no, was because he'd already taken care of them. "Although Shampoo seems pretty damned insistent. She might come back for another go."
"Mph! You keep finding new ways to make me hot. I'd love to have another chance to break her back."
Ugh, these two! Just being in the same room as them made the air taste too sweet to breath. Kasumi made a motion similar to weeping, although no tears came out. Nabiki passed her a glass of water, for all the good it would do. Beyond that the middle Tendo sister was actually rather surprised that breakfast was actually a pretty sedate affair. No broken limbs, no blood, no anything but the two lovers staring at each other and saying nigh incomprehensible things in that lovey dovey tone.
Sure, the things they were saying were pretty obviously about the minimum amount of pressure needed to break various bones in human anatomy and similar topics, but compared to other things that had happened so far things were actually pretty calm.
Somehow that made her skin crawl just a little bit. As if, by the end of the day, something worse was going to happen than either of the previous days. That was just a little touch unnerving.
"You know Nabiki!" Akane suddenly said from up on the fence, where Ranma was carrying her bridal style. "Daddy had a point. We're going to need a photographer for our wedding."
Nabiki crooked an eyebrow. "I won't do it for free, even if you're family."
Now, that might seem risky. But the thing about monsters is that they have levers and buttons. If you know what you're doing, if you know how to dance then you can get clear to the other side of the room without flipping any of them.
“That’s fair,” Akane said agreeably. “Could you get us some rates?”
“Yeah, don’t cop us a discount because we’re family,” Ranma added.
Well then. It looked as though she would have to do a little bit of investigation into how much a professional wedding photographer winds up making on any given job. And a little research into making sure she knew how to do it to that standard, because the idea of ruining their memories of their special day - Not exactly thrilled with that idea.
"I'll get you some rates," Nabiki cooly told them. "So you're already planning it out?"
"Well, of course we are," Akane cooed. "It feels like I've known him for-"
The two of them stopped completely, and the smiles on their faces grew even wider. Nabiki followed their gaze forward. It wasn't just the two of them on top of that fence. There was someone else as well. She was staring at them with dead eyes, and her lavender hair swept up by the wind. With the sun at her back it made Shampoo look like the cover of some shounen series. Wedding plans could be forgotten for the time being. You couldn't cut the tension with a knife. You'd at least need a chainsaw. Nabiki snapped a picture, thought about stepping back to a safe distance, then concluded that no reachable distance could be construed as safe.
Besides which, one does not run from a rabid beast unless one wishes to be chased by a rabid beast.
Akane slipped out of Ranma's grip and stood on top of the fence with her hands behind her back. Ranma rubbed her shoulders and stepped back, wide eyes.
"Oh, this is gonna be good," he said. Dispelling any notion of personal concern he might have for his beloved fiancee's physical well being.
"Ready for round two?" Akane asked.
Shampoo stepped forward. It wasn't a run, or a charge. No sign of muscles tensing for a sudden attack. The aura around her was beyond menacing. She stepped right up to Akane without either of them seeming to raise their guard-
"W? hèn n?," Shampoo said, and then thrust a box right into Akane's hands. Then peered her right in the eyes and said "I. Will. Tear. You. Limb. From. Limb. And. Make. You. Eat. Them."
Akane tsked. "I hear a lot of promises, not seeing a lot of keeping them."
Instead of following through, instead Shampoo leaped away and was about three buildings off before Nabiki could even turn her head.
"I guess she didn't want to do this today…" Nabiki sighed. Actually… Looking over at Akane, that foreign girl might have hurt her in a way she didn't have a way to contend with.
Imagine, if you will, a drug addict. Imagine that you held his drug of choice right in front of his face and then tossed it down a sewer grate. Akane was twitching. Still smiling, but twitching. She'd been deprived of her violence high. A rematch against a rare worthy opponent had been dangled in front of her face and pulled away at the last moment.
“Ohhh… I’m gonna beat her to death,” she said plainly despite how she trembled. “I’m gonna make her want it. I’m gonna make her beg for it.”
In the meantime, Ranma had pulled the box out of her hands, and peeled the lid off. A delicious aroma hit Nabiki, and all of a sudden she was absolutely ravenous. Even after Kasumi's delicious and filling breakfast, that smell made her want more food down her gullet, now, now, now.
"A bento?" Nabiki asked.
"Yep," Ranma confirmed. "All the food cut into the kanji for 'die'."
Akane looked down at the bento, and sniffed it. “Aw, it’s not even poisoned!”
Ranma leaned in, and sniffed it himself. “No, I guess she’s a girl who gets satisfaction in killing with her bare hands. Man, she’s not that bad when you think about it like that.”
“No, but I’m still going to kill her,” Akane said, “And bathe in her blood.”
Nabiki let out a small breath of relief she didn't know was inside her. Well, maybe she'd been worried over nothing after all. Maybe there wasn't something worse coming along later today after all. Then again, if Akane didn't get her violence fix anything might happen.
Oh, don't be silly. This wasn't like her at all! Akane would arrive at the school, then the boys would beat themselves up trying to win the right to date her. Akane could get her violence fix that way, and all she'd have to worry about was how to make some quick… cash…
Arriving to what turned out to be an unadulterated ruin somewhat dashed Nabiki’s hopes.
====
The front yard of Furinkan High school was like the aftermath of a battlefield. There were athletes of all sorts strewn around, whimpering and moaning. No blood had been spilled. As a martial artist's daughter she could tell at first glance: They had all been taken down with the barest minimum effort to put them down.
"Greetings, Akane Tendo… And to her fiance Ranma Saotome!" Announced the most likely culprit, the only one left standing in the midst of it all. Her classmate, the idiotic kendoist. "I, Tatewaki Kuno, hereby acknowledge your engagement, and henceforth put an end to this charade of a morning ritual! Congratulations to you both!"
Akane was a bit surprised. “Oh? You mean they’re going to stop doing this thing now?”
Kuno nodded. “It was difficult convincing them, but they have found that I’m very persuasive.”
“That you are,” Akane said, looking at the carnage spread before them.
Ranma looked around. “Man… you did this all on your own. And look, there’s not a scratch on you!”
Kuno nodded once again. “I hold myself to a higher standard, as you yourself only saw-”
With an almost casual motion of his arm, Kuno blocked Ranma’s punch with the flat of his bokken, the impact sending a shockwave across the schoolyard.
“-yesterday,” Kuno finished as the wind created by the impact died down.
"Remind me," Ranma politely asked.
“If you so insist,” Kuno obliged.
If anyone could tell which of them made the first attack, it certainly wasn't Nabiki. It looked almost instant to her, and most of it she could only figure out after the fact. The first thing Kuno tried was a diagonal downwards strike that caught a roundhouse kick from Ranma, causing a loud crack to fill the air. Everyone gasped because they thought they had heard a limb break, but Nabiki knew better. She'd heard Akane do that enough times to people to know, that wasn't a limb and nor was it Kuno's bokken. What had been broken was the sound barrier.
Then like that they were movement akin to a tornado at full force, striking and parrying one another at speeds so fast that Nabiki still had a hard time seeing who was throwing the blows.
"Kuno has the reach advantage," Akane whispered into Nabiki's ear. Even she nearly jumped at this sudden proximity, but she managed to keep herself at least seeming unsurprised. "So Ranma dearest is trying to get inside his guard. But Kuno's using air pressure to keep him back."
“Impressive, Saotome! You are much like your fiancée and myself, a truly rare breed of martial artist!”
"Yeah, and we’re about to become a little rarer," Ranma retorted. Suddenly he leaped up into the air, doing a picture perfect corkscrew somersault. “When I’m through with you!”
Kuno tried to strike him back with another series of precise air pressure blows, but somehow it seemed as though Ranma was pinballing off the difference to propel himself closer. Before Kuno could adjust his attacking strategy, Ranma had kicked the bokken right out of the kendoist's hands.
"Feh. I was thinking you were stronger than-" Ranma began, and then Kuno grabbed him by the sleeve, judo flipped him overhead, and then connected a high kick immediately after releasing him. A very much surprised Ranma went flying past Akane and Nabiki, and crashed into the school’s wall.
“I see that you need more reminding than that. I said that one must hone their skills at all opportunities,” he repeated for the second time.
Ranma rose to his feet like a zombie. That is, if zombies giggled like lunatics. "Now this is more like it," he said. "Why do you fight with that dumb stick when you're so much stronger without?"
"It's because I'm so much stronger without," Kuno tersely explained.
“Oh man, if I wasn’t straight as fuck I’d be super gay for you right now,” Ranma said as he understood it. This monster in front of him was literally holding himself back for his own amusement! “THIS SCHOOL IS SO COOL!”
Want further proof? Want exhibit… What would it be now, H? Huh, could the number of exhibits also be used as evidence about how cool this school was? Whatever! The point was, Kuno threw a punch that wouldn't have connected if he had springs for arms, and then a large hole appeared in the wall right beside Ranma's head.
Ranma looked over at the hole in the wall, and then at Kuno, his eyes as wide as biology would allow.
Kuno looked at his outstretched left arm. “Hm, my off hand is getting stronger after only two days.”
Ranma was suddenly very much inside his reach, but not to attack. Instead, his hands were together, as if pleading, and his eyes were full of stars that themselves were in awe.
“Please teach me how to do that, senpai,” he said.
"Aw, isn't this sweet?" Akane sighed, much against Nabiki's reaction. Huh? After that comment about turning gay for Kuno, shouldn't this have triggered her kill-switch? "Two of my bestest friends have formed a connection."
"... Kuno's one of your bestest…" Nabiki winced at the taste of the word in her mouth. "Best friends?"
"Well yeah, I mean, he always wants to train with me, and he’s always concerned about my well-being. But between you and me, I think he started trying to be nice to me because he has a crush on Kasumi. What do you think?"
Nabiki inhaled, exhaled and really tried not to think too hard about any of this. Especially not the idea of Kuno and her older sister… Huh, turned out denial was a nice place to visit this time of year after all.
Kuno looked from Ranma, then up towards Akane. Then back down at Ranma. The kendoist quirked an eyebrow and, to Nabiki at least, it seemed as though he came to a decision.
"Very well!" Kuno announced. "I shall gladly teach you."
Ranma was overjoyed. “Wow, we’re going to be best friends, man.”
And then Kuno got struck by a wheel. Right in the side of the head. In a sudden evaporation of all the dignity and poise he had heretofore demonstrated this morning, Kuno twirled around in place, held up an index finger, and then collapsed to the ground staring up at the sky.
“Well, that happened,” Ranma said prior to the tremendous crash that destroyed the front entrance to the school proper. Of all things, an airplane had just struck them out of nowhere. Well, not nowhere. Presumably it was in flight. More like, without warning.
And out of that wreck a lone figure stood. He stumbled out, pulled the ripcord for the parachute on his back, then looked around. To the amazement of all he was completely unscathed, aside from some nasty looking tears on his clothes and some mussed up hair, although that may well be the bandanna wrapped around the top of his head.
The boy's eyes settled on Ranma, who by now was giddy with a heavy variety of emotions. The stranger's eyes turned intense, and he took a meaningful step forward while lifting up an umbrella to point it directly at him.
"Ranma Saotome! Prepare to die!"
Ranma’s lips just split into a murderous smile, as he rolled his neck to crack it.
“Hey Ryoga, it’s been a while.”
…I am dreadfully conflicted between finding this horrific and finding it awesome. Well written sir!
I was going to make a further observation to the effect that it must take a great deal of skill to feel how such monsters in human form would react to any given situation… and then the blood-freezing realization struck that, in fact, for all I know of your personality, writing these people might simply come naturally. If I thought you might reside within a thousand miles of myself, that's the kind of thing that could give a body nightmares. Thank goodness for the cognitive power known as "calling it Someone Else's Problem!" Ahh, blissful unconcern.
I was going to make a further observation to the effect that it must take a great deal of skill to feel how such monsters in human form would react to any given situation… and then the blood-freezing realization struck that, in fact, for all I know of your personality, writing these people might simply come naturally. If I thought you might reside within a thousand miles of myself, that's the kind of thing that could give a body nightmares. Thank goodness for the cognitive power known as "calling it Someone Else's Problem!" Ahh, blissful unconcern.