What’s Waiting Beyond (4/7)
Oct. 20th, 2011 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bottanTitle: What’s Waiting Beyond (4/7)
Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [epilogue]
Pairings: KuroFai, SyaoSaku
Word count for this chapter: 6,850
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, gore, depicted death, stupid silliness, semi-coherent rambling on technology I barely understand
Summary: On one of his missions, Kurogane meets a strange woman at a devastated space station. The nightmares from his past return. And he somehow won't get rid of that particular idiot blabbering at him about dragons.
Author’s Note: This is a remix of the highly recommended Catch A Dragon By The Tail by![[info]](https://konnichipuu.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=3)
reikah. I stole her dragons put them into space. Because this is fanfic. :Db (I'm really not doing the fic justice, I'm very much reccing the original.)
They received the distress call before ever reaching the outpost. Kurogane was using the personal trainer, running his miles for the day, when the board computer’s impersonal voice filled the room.
Call from Lecourt, Human Outpost 60401.2, requiring immediate assistance. Repeating. Call from …
He was down the treadmill and in the cockpit within seconds, hair wet with sweat and his breath still short and deep. He noticed Fai peek his head in curiously, while he let himself fall into the pilot seat to answer the call.
“Souhi, Kurogane of Suwa speaking, registered demon hunter 21007,” he muttered. “What’s the problem, outpost?”
“Souhi, we got a situation at a spacecraft close to your position,“ the outpost’s crackling voice answered. “They have an unusual case of infection – no demons have entered the ship yet, to our knowledge.”
“Unusual, how?”
Erhm, the demons are said to be moving in unknown patterns – we don’t know more, the radio connection broke off shortly after that,” the outpost answered. Radio silence usually wasn’t that worrisome, the strong magnetic fields of a demon swarm broke any connection to the spacecrafts. It was just troublesome insofar that Kurogane seldomly knew what exactly would await him once he reached a ship. Mostly he simply would have to clean the outer mantle of the ships. “We’re sending you reinforcements, right away. They will reach you about 20 hours from now.”
“Understood, on my way.”
“Sending you the coordinates, Souhi. And good luck, we’re looking forward to cooperating with the great Kurogane of Suwa,” that wasn’t technically part of the protocol and Kurogane merely grunted in response, before cutting the connection.
“’The great Kurogane of Suwa’?” Fai grinned, draping himself over the back of Kurogane’s seat and making it creek under his weight.
“So what?” Kurogane gave back, fiddling with the instruments to adopt the incoming coordinates. Half a day from here, maybe six hours. Close, even for an area that supposedly was infested by demons like few others were.
“You never told me you were a legend!” Fai exclaimed.
“I’m not. I’m just good, can’t help it if everyone else stumbles over their own feet,” Kurogane muttered.
“You’re not very modest, are you?” Fai smiled down at him. Kurogane craned his neck to show the obnoxious guy his teeth.
“Not getting killed has nothing to do with modesty and all with skill,” he replied.
“Also, you smell, Kuro-min, get showered before saving the world.”
Kurogane ripped the spacecraft’s around on its course hard enough to make Fai shout and cling to the back of Kurogane’s seat to not fall over.
*****
Souhi docked with a loud clanking noise, and Kurogane barely needed to check the readings from the airlock to know that the demons had already entered the other spacecraft. The radio silence over the last few hours had been enough of a sign that the strong, magnetic fields of a demon swarm was diverting the signals, and when circling the freighter, he had seen definite damage to the outer walls.
He flicked the standby button on and was out of the pilot seat and down the ladder to the docking area in one smooth movement. He felt his stomach flip and drop as the artificial gravity changed a 180° – the ultra-high density mass that was installed in the floor basically divided the spacecraft into two levels. There were two meters of tunnel leading right through it to the other level, during which he was weightless. He had to turn over within the narrow space, and clamber out upside down into what had been the basement, before. It also lead to the strange circumstances that he was always climbing down to get from one level to the other. He heard Fai following him out of the cockpit, shoving himself out of the tunnel with his feet first and grappling a bit with the change in gravity. He turned to glare at the scientist that now shoved a wriggling butt up into the air, before pulling his head out of the hole.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said, yanking the locker that was embedded in the walls open to pull his white-and-red spacesuit out. The engines and storage rooms were in this part of the ship, as well as most of his equipment.
“Coming with you, helping those people down there – or possibly ‘up there,’” Fai gave back absent-mindedly; he still looked down through the hole he had just climbed up. “Funny, these spaceships, do they all work with gravity like that?”
“You’re not coming,” Kurogane gave back angrily, chucking off his clothes to wrestle his way into the skin-tight pants. He would have gone for one of the airtight suits that you didn’t have to undress for, but they were more bulky and harder to move in. Plus, he didn’t know whether there’d be rooms that were damaged enough to let in the cold from space. The skintight suits provided more freedom of movement, but they also needed to be fitted for each spacewalker personally.
“Of course I am, I can be useful,” Fai stated, and Kurogane could feel him stare at him as he undressed. Kurogane wondered briefly whether anyone had ever tried to teach the airhead the art of subtlety. The scientist hesitated, before pulling the locker next to the first open, the one that held an orange, airtight suit. “I’ll need one of those, won’t I?”
“You’re a scholar, last time I checked those didn’t have degrees in demon fighting,” Kurogane clamped his hand down over Fai’s wrist as he started to wrestle the suit out of its confinement. “Stay here.”
“You said you’d throw me out at the next possibility,” Fai replied blithely. At Kurogane’s lack of expression he rolled his eyes and yanked his hand free. “I’m not your responsibility, you know.”
“Everyone in that freighter is part of my responsibility,” Kurogane grunted in angrily and pulled on the torso of the spacesuit with more force than exactly necessary. “And the moment you enter, you’ll just be one more nuisance to look after and stand in my way.”
“In that case I’ll promise to not get hurt, alright?” Fai said surprisingly softly, and when Kurogane turned around to meet his eyes, they were warm and understanding. Something tugged sharply in his stomach and for a second he felt a bit light-headed. Suddenly, he realized how close they were standing, his hands still hovering, almost touching, and it seemed like Fai realized it, too, because he was leaning in even more, his face getting closer than it was supposed to – Kurogane yanked the orange helmet out of the cupboard and slammed it down on Fai’s head.
“Yeah, just don’t get killed,” he said hastily and turned his back on the man’s dazed face. “And you can keep your clothes on under that kind of suit!” He could hear a low snigger from behind and decided to ignore it. He mainly didn’t turn around to shout at the other man, because his cheeks were flaming.
They were dressed and ready to go within ten minutes. Kurogane secured Ginryuu at his side and made sure that the radio connection between them worked, and then handed the man a KFP, a force field pistol. Fai stared blankly at it while Kurogane explained to him how to use it. When Kurogane lifted his gaze to make sure he had understood, he realized that the man had used the time to study his face, instead.
“Listen when I talk to you,” he said in annoyance. “Remember that we don’t know what’s down there – last time, something helped the demons gain entrance to the ship. We don’t know what we’re facing.”
“It’s okay, I know what to do,” Fai gave back with a smile. Kurogane spared a second to look at him suspiciously, before nodding and opening the airlock.
They pulled themselves up through the airlocks of the two ships, which hissed and closed behind them, before climbing back down into the shaft of the freighter, yet again having gravity flip and contort around them as they were pulled towards the center of the ship. Kurogane remembered getting sick of these flips when he had only been a child and started his training under Souma. Fai, who, going by his ignorance about spaceships in general, must have lived most of his life on some torus or another, got used to them surprisingly fast.
The hallways was dipped into bright, bleak neon lights and showed the typical signs of use; the white walls around them were covered in black stripes where bored workers would kick them while talking, burn holes of forbidden cigarettes covered the brown PVC floor around the air vents. Hallways like these were bustling with life, with the ill-mannered shouts of workers and rough laughter.
The silence was deafening. Something stirred in the shadows, and as Kurogane turned, a small swarm of demons was moved into the light, crawling over the floor, before hesitantly pooling around his boots.
“Okay, they’re here,” Kurogane said into the mouth piece of the radio connection. “We’ll check the hallways for survivors before we kill these guys. I’ll hand you a string of bombs.”
Something flashed next to him and a part of the ceiling exploded and crashed down before them, making the demons skitter away in every direction. Kurogane turned to glare at Fai who was looking thoughtfully at the gun in his hands.
“So you know what to do,” he said coolly.
“I just wasn’t sure what this lever was good for,” his voice crackled over the radio connection. His face was pale in contrast to the garish orange of the suit, even when he was smiling his toothy grin. White would become him better, Kurogane realized, which would mean a skintight suits, which would mean undressing, which would-
“Try not to destroy the ship before we’re done,” Kurogane cut that particular train of thought off and dug in his backpack for a roll with radiation bombs. They were as small as a thumbnail and connected by a long string of cable so that you could fire all of them at once. Radio fuse had proven unhelpful around demons, but even cables didn’t always carry signals through dense clouds. “Take the other way round,” he said. The radio connection crackled and hissed as the demons around them shifted. “This hallway encloses the whole spacecraft, we’ll place radiation canons at the walls. Take anyone you meet with you, if anything happens, try the radio – it will probably give out after some time, there seem to be a lot of them. We meet up on the other end, getting rid of all of them at the same time.”
Kurogane showed him quickly how to undo the security belt of the bombs and how to place them along the walls. Fai nodded and opened his mouth to comment, but the radio swallowed his words as white noise.
“What?” Kurogane asked, looking at his lips to read them.
Fai just grinned and clapped Kurogane on the shoulder.
“Yeah, you take care, too,” Kurogane murmured. He turned his back on Fai, as they hadn’t any way to communicate (as long as he didn’t decide to make an idiot out of himself and dance a phrase in Mercantile, anyway).
The hallways were empty safe for the black clouds that hovered in the corners and swiped out to follow Kurogane around the moment he passed them by. It was eerie, his every step echoing in the silent hallways, and the air thick with the little pests flitting about. The slow, keen headache that accompanied their appearances started to settle in, and the demon hunter started to move faster. Kurogane had a bad feeling about this mission – maybe he was getting too used to having that chatterbox around. The silence suddenly felt uncomfortable.
Kurogane wasn’t opening any doors, in order to not let the demons spread – they would have to clean the whole ship room by room, always careful to activate force fields to not let the demons pass. It was basically the job of pest control – the only real difference was that this pest, different from cockroaches, would kill anything it came in contact with.
A small swarm of demons was following him ever since he had entered the spacecraft, clinging to his heels like a puppy, skittering off every now and then to explore locked doors. It was steadily growing, while he moved along and installed more of the radiation bombs along the way, linking them with a long cable that would hopefully carry the signal even through the magnetic field as it was growing in force.
He found the first dead bodies about two hundred meters and four bombs down the hallway. The first of them were the usual, dried-up bodies he’d find at most sites, the skin of young women and men wrinkled with age that they never reached. They were huddled into corners and sunken against doors that hadn’t opened to their screams. Often, demons hovered nearby, flicking over skin and in and out of orifices, as though trying to find another scrap of energy to feed on. Kurogane barely stopped to examine them – they were always the same and he wouldn’t find out much more than he already knew.
It was the corpses that followed after those that got his attention. People clad in spacesuits or airtight suits, like the one he was wearing. One of them wouldn’t have alerted Kurogane too much – even when it shouldn’t happen, some suits would develop leaks due to bad handling or careless manufacturing. In case you hadn’t to wear them on a regular basis, there was a possibility that the owners wouldn’t notice a leak until they ran out of air on a space walk. Much more often it happened that people pulled on a suit in a hurry during an attack, and either forget to seal it, especially around the torso, or accidentally confine a swarm of demons inside with them.
But there wasn’t just one but half a dozen bodies strewn across the floor, at one point heaped over each other in such fashion that Kurogane had to climb over them to keep walking. He kneeled down, rolling over the corpse of what must have been a woman lying face-down on the floor.
There was a hole in her suit. Not a small one, one that she wouldn’t have seen when pulling it on. It was a giant rupture across her front, the suit basically slashed open by something. Kurogane stared, then passed a hand across the disintegrating edges of the stuffing. Fourteen layers of suit molten away, briefly stopped by the tear-resistant ripstop layer – these things were fire-proof, bullet-proof and water-proof, and something had had no problem at all going past that. The face behind the gold-coated visor of the suit stared accusingly back up at him, eyes shriveled in their sockets and skin stretched and cracked to bare the teeth in a bizarre grin.
It wasn’t a sound that alerted him so much as a change in the light. He looked up. There weren’t any demons in the air before him, though a moment before the cloud had been so dense that he could barely see four meters ahead. A shadow fell over his hands as something shifted behind him. He spun around on his heel.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Kurogane took in the row of razor-sharp teeth four inches from his face, the gaping tunnel behind them, the bulging mass of darkness that held them. A small drop of demons sprang from the surface of the beast’s head, spun in an arc, and immersed back into the rippling blackness as though it was water. And then the beast sprang forward in the same moment as Kurogane shouted and dropped to the side, letting the demons pass directly over his head.
Kurogane scrambled to his feet, drawing his force field pistol during in the movement. The beast was as almost filling the hallway with its height, which should have made it hard to move for it. But instead of bumping into the walls while turning around, it structure simply shifted – as though pulling a sock inside out, its front legs stood where it landed while the whole backside melted into the black body and emerged where the head had been before. Kurogane cursed loudly and pointed the pistol. The beast came rushing at him again, and he had the feeling its paws weren’t even touching the ground – he pulled the trigger. A kekkai sprang up.
It crashed against the abruptly forming, green wall in front of it, splattering into all directions as though it was made of liquid and then back from the walls of the perfect square. The demons hummed in an angry cloud inside its cage, rushing from corner to corner to test the walls, as they shrunk and closed in around it, until they were pressed into a dense box, maybe a meter and a half high. The beast formed again, much smaller and less distinct, to snarl at him.
Kurogane’s hands were surprisingly steady as he pulled out the emitters that he’d place on all four sides of the kekkai to render the demons useless. He had never seen them behave in such way, or form anything beside clouds. They didn’t have a reason to, he thought – besides slashing through spacesuits, maybe.
There was barely enough room to put up the fourth radiator between the wall of the hallway and the force field, and he jammed it in with some effort, making the green walls hiss and crackle. The demons pressed against the walls where Kurogane’s glove brushed it, making it bulge and deform. Kurogane pulled back hastily and the creature seemed to stare at him out of the darkness. He hit the button to release the radiation.
A low hum was crawling up from the ground and the bars on Kurogane’s suit that warned him of the radiation were hitting the red scale, even as the radiation was supposedly confined. The demon screamed. Kurogane didn’t know how it did it, but it was a sound that penetrated the layers of his suit and seemed to ring directly within his head. He gritted his teeth and searched hold on the walls as they were vibrating with the sound. The cloud inside the force field exploded from the inside out, grappling at the walls, making them bulge to the outside, and for a moment, Kurogane was afraid that they would break free. He had never seen a demon break through a force field, but this thing did a lot of stuff he had never seen before.
And then, suddenly, the sound broke off. As though someone had activated a gravity field, the demons fell to the ground, like sand that had been suspended in the air. All that was left was a small, black heap at the middle of the square. Kurogane switched off the radiators.
Something was off. The color, possibly – demons used to turn gray when rendered harmless. These didn’t. He hesitated to deactivate the force field. Suddenly, something stirred in the pile, and the demons rose back into the air, starting to slowly turn in a circle. Kurogane cursed and switched the radiators back on, but this time, they didn’t seem to have any effect – their dance only grew in speed and intensity until they resembled a small hurricane, turning on the spot fast enough to blur. Kurogane felt the typical headache that he associated with demons hit him full-on, hard enough to make the world break up into dissociated colors and forms. Through the haze of his own, confused mind, he watched the force field flicker and turn off, and the radiators break, the lamps along the hallway splinter and go out.
When he came back his senses, the hallways was immersed in twilight. He scrambled backwards as he couldn’t tell what were demons and what were shadows – and then the creature shifted, and he saw it stand at full height over his broken equipment, throwing his head back as though to challenge him. Kurogane stumbled to his feet, his hand clutched firmly around the hilt of his sword. If technology didn’t help, he would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
The beast roared and started to tear towards him, jaws wide open to rip apart his suit and flesh and swallow his mind. Kurogane took stance, bundling the flow of his ki as he watched the demon approach. He roared, letting his voice travel, and he let his energy flow down his arms and burst out of the blade as the creature leapt to meet him. The light of the hama ryuu-ou jin was blinding in the darkness.
It was parted like butter before his sword, falling apart, its very matter splitting and disintegrating. Kurogane stood in the middle of the black wave as it rolled over and passed him. When the demons hind legs ran by his flaming sword, there was nothing left but gray dust that hit the front of his suit and fell to the ground in a trickle all around him.
Kurogane panted and looked around for remaining swarms. There were none. He breathed and sank to one knee, leaning heavily on the hilt of his sword and closing his eyes for a valuable second to let the nausea of the energy burst pass.
“Kurogane-san?” a voice crackled over the radio connection. Kurogane stopped breathing for a moment before hitting the answering button with shaking fingers.
“Brat!? What are you doing here?”
“It’s him,” the boyish voice of his student was brimming with excitement. “Sakura, we’ll be out of here, soon!”
*****
“What exactly happened here?” Kurogane, Fai and the few dozen men and women that had survived the attack had gathered at the core of the ship, within the machine rooms. This area was the easiest to protect and shield off against the demons, with two airlocks separating them from the outer levels. Under their feet, the artificial gravity was produced, pulling all of them steadily downwards, which led to the strange situation that they were walking on top of an orb and that they could see the ceiling close around them. People that stood 20 meters away were tilted at an 45° angle and would vanish from Kurogane’s field of vision as they went to the ‘opposite side of the room.’
“It started as a normal attack,” Syaoran explained earnestly. He was employed as one of the stationary demon hunters aboard the ship. He had taken a seat next to Sakura, on one of the humming pipes that protruded from the ground and led straight into a giant engine behind them. Fai stood to the side, absent-mindedly eying the ladder leading up. “The demons gathered on the outside of the ship, usual cloud formations, high degree of density – they soon started to concentrate in one place, though. We couldn’t get them off the surface, anymore, or burn them, not even with the radiation shields. We have recordings of them changing their form and starting to attack the mantle – within a few hours, they had entered the control rooms.”
“We locked the whole ship down, after that,” Sakura said, her face pale and her eyes huge and fearful. Her hands shook slightly and she moved to rub them over her thighs, as though cold. She was working as a pilot trainee for this freighter class, now, from what Kurogane had gathered. Personally, he wouldn’t have trusted her to fly anything, at all, never mind a giant freighter, but possibly he was underestimating the girl. Maybe people were just desperate to get anyone to fly around these zones. “We lost… we lost three engineers in the first twenty minutes. One of them worked up there when the demons entered, and two more were attacked when they went up to check on him.”
“We don’t know how to stop them, anymore,” Syaoran admitted. “Radiation doesn’t work on them – they operate on a different wavelength than the one we used to apply. And while our force fields seem to contain them, we’re almost out of fluid just by securing off the doors around the engine room.” Kurogane didn’t correct him on that point – no use adding to the panic if he didn’t have a better solution.
“Don’t you have rescue vessels on this ship?” Fai asked them.
“By the time we realized how bad it was, the rescue vessels were contaminated. They just slashed them open,” Sakura’s voice dropped until it was barely above a whisper. “I think they’re conscient, they know what to attack to make us helpless. We decided to wait for help down here, where they would reach last. We weren’t sure anyone was coming.” Syaoran’s hands twitched, and he cast a nervous glance at her face, before he hastily grabbed her hand.
“Don’t worry, Sakura, I’ll get us out of here,” he promised. She looked back at him with big, shining eyes, and a bit of color came back to her cheeks. Syaoran’s spine straightened visibly under her gaze.
“It’s okay, I’m not afraid,” she said, putting on her brave face. They stared into each other’s eyes smiling, and the world around them visibly fell away as their fingers entwined. Kurogane cleared his throat and they almost jumped apart, though Syaoran still loosely held the girl’s hand.
“Right, do we have a map of the ship?” he asked. Sakura nodded and pulled a small disc out of her overall and jumped down from the pipe to put it on the ground. She pressed the sides of it to pull up a three-dimensional blueprint of the ship, that she adjusted to hover at her eye level. It was basically a tall orb, consisting of different layers that mostly contained cargo rooms on the outer levels and the crew’s rooms further on the inside. The innermost level held the engines and valuable storage.
“We’re here,” she said, reaching inside the hologram and touching the room that surrounded the red core. “Syaoran said we’ve had demon sightings on the first three levels-“
“Fourth, too,” Kurogane grunted back, not fondly thinking back to Fai making an ass out of himself and playing fetch with that one. He had almost blasted the idiot away with his hama ryuu-ou jin, that time.
“We’re not sure what they’re waiting for,” Sakura said a little afraid. “Maybe they just don’t understand that we’re further down here.”
“Maybe,” Kurogane said, and felt Fai’s gaze prickle at his neck. “We need to gather all of them in one place, so that I can kill them all at once – is there a big room that we can use, an empty freight hall?”
“That would be,” Sakura turned the orb by touching and dragging it with the tips of her fingers, her youthful face aglow with the blue light. “right here. Hall C – it stretches across the first and second level, it’s big and unused due to maintenance,” she looked up at him, worry in her drawn brows. “How do you plan on getting them there?”
“How do you lure a predator anywhere?” Kurogane gave back with a humorless smirk and snatched the helmet up from where he had thrown it at a table. He didn’t protest as Fai came to stand beside him, a grim look exchanged between them.
“I’m coming with you!” Syaoran shouted and started to pull off his shirt while he ran off towards a pillar that held suits.
“I’m not going to let you go to your death, brat!” Kurogane said.
“I’m fast, I have learned,” the teenager gave back, pulling out a suit as he spoke. Sakura squeaked as he went for his belt and Syaoran hastily thought better of completely undressing in public. “I can definitely help you.”
“You’re still a kid,” Kurogane yelled after him as he vanished inside a niche of lockers.
“I’ve seen my fair share of action since you have trained me, Kurogane-san,” his voice was muffled and overlaid by the noise of rustling closes and the boy’s elbow bumping into the lockers. “And you weren’t any older than me, when you started your missions!”
“And I was so green that I almost got myself killed!” Kurogane barked. He was also damn sure that that his own training was an entirely different matter.
“I’m coming, too!” Sakura announced. Kurogane whirled around to stare at her. “I’m old enough to decide for myself, and I’m good at sports. I can run fast enough to get away from anything. I want to help these people,” she put on that expression that usually got her wherever she wanted to be. “You can’t stop me.”
“Oh yes, I can, princess,” Kurogane bit out. “If there’s one thing I can’t use fighting a demon-“
“If you’re about to call me a little girl,” she cut off his word, jabbing her finger right into his chest. “have another think coming.” With that she took off towards the stored suits, leaving Kurogane staring after her with his jaw hanging open, as she started to pull the handle of one of the lockers. The door needed two good kicks and Sakura landing on her butt as it suddenly flew open, but then it was magnanimous enough to dump the whole suit right on top of her. Kurogane covered his eyes with his free hand.
“Seems no one is listening to you, today, Kuro-bossy,” Fai laughed next to him.
“Just shut up,” Kurogane said between gritted teeth. Right now, Syaoran was doing his best to talk Sakura out of the mission, but he was having as little success as Kurogane had had, before.
“Why don’t you just let them?” Fai said blithely. “You can go with your student, and I will take care of Sakura-chan. It will be fine.” Kurogane gave him an askew glance, wondering whether he was as sure as he sounded or his usual, idiotic self. Fai didn’t seem to be the type to easily play with other people’s lives. “Syaoran is right – this is a big ship and we can need the help.”
“Yeah,” Kurogane mumbled. “I just hope everyone remembers that this is not a fucking family getaway.”
“Just worry about yourself and the boy, great Kurogane of Suwa, I won’t let anything happen to the girl,” Fai replied with a thin smile and flashing eyes.
*****
It took them three hours to pass through all the levels, making sure that all of the demons were following them. The force field pistols were of good use for controlling them, for a short time, and they had the situation mostly under control. And while Kurogane had to trip Syaoran up, one time, making him fall flat on his face to pass under a demon’s claw, he had to admit that the boy was much better than he had remembered. After scouring the fourth level together, they split up for the third one, and met each other just in time for Kurogane to push Syaoran’s butt up the ladder and pull himself up, as the demons clashed like tidal waves under them. As they were running towards the storage room, Syaoran leading the way, the tidal wave of demons filled up the whole corridor behind them. The light flickered on and off wherever they passed by, the magnetic field of the demons making the electronic go crazy. They had long since lost the form of separate beings and were simply a foaming, bubbling wall of darkness that came rushing after them.
It was a good thing that they weren’t too intelligent or fast – they never had the idea to cut off the hunters’ way, even they passed by several corridors that would have made it easy to do so.
Syaoran gestured to the front and shouted something that his suits swallowed and the radio connection wouldn’t carry. Kurogane understood the meaning well enough – that way, that’s the door to the storage room. The demons behind them were definitely too close for Kurogane’s liking.
They came to stop in front of the door and Syaoran started to punch in a code that would open it. The reader bleeped with red light and the boy started over. Kurogane threw a look over his shoulder and the demons were crashing in behind them, splashing up the walls before coming directly for them. He cursed, shouldered Syaoran out of the way and broke the lock open with a crashing hit of Ginryuu. No one could tell him swords weren’t useful on spaceships.
They pushed the door open and to the ground and stumbled into the adjoining Hall C, that stretched two floors high and wide and deep inside the big ship. Time stopped for a moment as they found themselves faced with a wall of darkness that was gathered, in the middle of the hall, forming a hill rather than a creature. Their way back cut off by the demons pouring in behind.
Kurogane cursed loudly at this stupid, half-assed plan and prepared hastily for a ki attack, while Syaoran fell in position at his back. Suddenly, the darkness before them parted and a blue tube of energy, slightly taller than a human, emerged from it and enclosed the man and the teenager before Kurogane could even grasp what the fuck was going on. He felt Syaoran stumble into him from behind, and turned around to see a wave of demons crash and splatter against the blue, translucent shield of light. What the fuck.
“Kuro-pon, we’re here!” a cheery voice called over the miraculously working radio connection. Kurogane looked forward and saw Fai sit on his butt in the middle of a giant bubble of light, waving at them. Sakura stood up from where she had been sitting next to him on the ground and came running to fall into Syaoran’s arms as they approached.
Kurogane stared at the field that surrounded them, stepping out of the tunnel that Fai had extended. He had somehow erected a dome of blue light in the middle of the room. It must be able to shield the magnetic field of the demons, as well. He had never seen anything like it – but he supposed he was getting used to that, today.
“What the hell are you doing,” he asked, scowling at Fai as he packed away a card game.
“Nothing, just playing with Sakura-chan while we were waiting for you,” he grinned. “She’s pretty good, I never once won against her!”
“No, I’m really not,” Sakura hastily said, pulling Syaoran into the dome behind her. The tunnel of light melted back into the dome, behind her. “I’m not even sure I understand the rules.” Kurogane resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and wondered whether it even mattered if he reminded them that this was a combat situation and not a damn picnic.
“Whatever,” he gestured up at the dome around them. Demons were still crashing up to the walls like an ocean of inky water. “If you can do this, can’t you just render all of the demons useless?”
“Not in this form, no,” Fai answered, looking serious for once. “It’s a different set of abilities. Shielding is one thing, attacking is another, entirely.”
“’Not in this form’?” Kurogane repeated incredulously. Wait. Wait, don’t tell him – no, he really wasn’t sure he believed that. He stared at Fai.
Fai merely smiled at him and prompted, “Prepare your dragon attack, Kuro-slow, I’m ready to lower the shield whenever you are.”
“Yeah, a second,” Kurogane replied, falling into a combat stance. He reached down for the energy flow within his body. It sometimes felt like those pools and streams were so vast that he could get lost within them, and he wasn’t always sure, if was all his own energy that he was reaching to pull up from within. When he opened his eyes, the world around him was aglow with more than just the blue light of the dome above their heads. He could clearly see the energetic bubbles that surrounded the children, as they stood by Fai’s side, and the seemingly gigantic energetic waves that flowed from the slender man up into sustaining the field that protected them. Kurogane wondered how it came that he hadn’t realized what he was, before. Maybe he had, to trust him unquestioningly with the care of Sakura. He nodded at Fai, and Fai smiled and nodded back.
Within half a second, the dome retracted and shrunk to merely encompass Fai and the kids and leave Kurogane faced with the gigantic, malevolent life form in front of him. Kurogane roared as it darkened the lights above them and poured down on top of him, like tar, with claws and jaws, and half-formed bodies, the bizarre travesty of a living being. He ripped his sword up and pure energy blasted from the blade, enveloping him in a cloak of light and tearing into the darkness. His vision went white as the energy spread outwards and burned everything away that wasn’t human.
When the black spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes, he was down on one knee, and the whole room around them was filled with the gray, metallic sand of killed demons. Steps crunched in the dust before him and he looked up to see into Fai’s wild, grinning face. He held out his hand and Kurogane grinned back and gripped it and let himself be pulled up, dust falling from his shoulders.
“You did it,” Fai’s laughter was breathless over the radio connection before he threw his arms around Kurogane’s neck, helmets of the orange, ridiculous suit bumping with his own and Kurogane was surprised enough to simply catch his weight and hold him. Fai looked at him for a moment, eyes sparkling, before he wrestled free and started at the latches of his helmet.
“Don’t pull it off, yet-” Kurogane started, then huffed in exasperation as Fai freed himself and shook his hair out. The roots were dark with sweat, possibly from the strain of sustaining the energy field and his face was reddened with the stifling heat of the plastic.
“C’mon, there’s nothing left here to attack you,” Fai teased him, helmet under his arm.
“Radiation,” Kurogane said.
Fai lifted an eyebrow, “You didn’t even use radiation, Kuro-hero.” Kurogane opened his mouth to object, then closed it to Fai’s obvious amusement. Kurogane glared at him for a moment. Then his eye caught Syaoran and Sakura, who obviously didn’t follow the security code either, going by the fact that they were animatedly kissing. And finally pulled the fucking helmet off, because he felt ridiculous.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he grunted, peeling the phones and mouthpiece that belonged with the radio equipment off of his head and dumping it in the upturned helmet. Fai’s eyes glittered and he took a breath as though to answer, when he suddenly stiffened in surprise. Kurogane followed his gaze over his shoulder.
“Oh, I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” Syaoran had peeled away from Sakura and was now talking to a fifth person that had entered the room. “Were you hurt in the attack?”
“You,” Fai hissed and stepped away from Kurogane. The woman stared back at him, seemingly unmoved. “Xing Huo – this is your doing!”
Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [epilogue]
Pairings: KuroFai, SyaoSaku
Word count for this chapter: 6,850
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, gore, depicted death, stupid silliness, semi-coherent rambling on technology I barely understand
Summary: On one of his missions, Kurogane meets a strange woman at a devastated space station. The nightmares from his past return. And he somehow won't get rid of that particular idiot blabbering at him about dragons.
Author’s Note: This is a remix of the highly recommended Catch A Dragon By The Tail by
reikah. I stole her dragons put them into space. Because this is fanfic. :Db (I'm really not doing the fic justice, I'm very much reccing the original.)_________________
__CHAPTER FOUR__
__CHAPTER FOUR__
They received the distress call before ever reaching the outpost. Kurogane was using the personal trainer, running his miles for the day, when the board computer’s impersonal voice filled the room.
Call from Lecourt, Human Outpost 60401.2, requiring immediate assistance. Repeating. Call from …
He was down the treadmill and in the cockpit within seconds, hair wet with sweat and his breath still short and deep. He noticed Fai peek his head in curiously, while he let himself fall into the pilot seat to answer the call.
“Souhi, Kurogane of Suwa speaking, registered demon hunter 21007,” he muttered. “What’s the problem, outpost?”
“Souhi, we got a situation at a spacecraft close to your position,“ the outpost’s crackling voice answered. “They have an unusual case of infection – no demons have entered the ship yet, to our knowledge.”
“Unusual, how?”
Erhm, the demons are said to be moving in unknown patterns – we don’t know more, the radio connection broke off shortly after that,” the outpost answered. Radio silence usually wasn’t that worrisome, the strong magnetic fields of a demon swarm broke any connection to the spacecrafts. It was just troublesome insofar that Kurogane seldomly knew what exactly would await him once he reached a ship. Mostly he simply would have to clean the outer mantle of the ships. “We’re sending you reinforcements, right away. They will reach you about 20 hours from now.”
“Understood, on my way.”
“Sending you the coordinates, Souhi. And good luck, we’re looking forward to cooperating with the great Kurogane of Suwa,” that wasn’t technically part of the protocol and Kurogane merely grunted in response, before cutting the connection.
“’The great Kurogane of Suwa’?” Fai grinned, draping himself over the back of Kurogane’s seat and making it creek under his weight.
“So what?” Kurogane gave back, fiddling with the instruments to adopt the incoming coordinates. Half a day from here, maybe six hours. Close, even for an area that supposedly was infested by demons like few others were.
“You never told me you were a legend!” Fai exclaimed.
“I’m not. I’m just good, can’t help it if everyone else stumbles over their own feet,” Kurogane muttered.
“You’re not very modest, are you?” Fai smiled down at him. Kurogane craned his neck to show the obnoxious guy his teeth.
“Not getting killed has nothing to do with modesty and all with skill,” he replied.
“Also, you smell, Kuro-min, get showered before saving the world.”
Kurogane ripped the spacecraft’s around on its course hard enough to make Fai shout and cling to the back of Kurogane’s seat to not fall over.
*****
Souhi docked with a loud clanking noise, and Kurogane barely needed to check the readings from the airlock to know that the demons had already entered the other spacecraft. The radio silence over the last few hours had been enough of a sign that the strong, magnetic fields of a demon swarm was diverting the signals, and when circling the freighter, he had seen definite damage to the outer walls.
He flicked the standby button on and was out of the pilot seat and down the ladder to the docking area in one smooth movement. He felt his stomach flip and drop as the artificial gravity changed a 180° – the ultra-high density mass that was installed in the floor basically divided the spacecraft into two levels. There were two meters of tunnel leading right through it to the other level, during which he was weightless. He had to turn over within the narrow space, and clamber out upside down into what had been the basement, before. It also lead to the strange circumstances that he was always climbing down to get from one level to the other. He heard Fai following him out of the cockpit, shoving himself out of the tunnel with his feet first and grappling a bit with the change in gravity. He turned to glare at the scientist that now shoved a wriggling butt up into the air, before pulling his head out of the hole.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said, yanking the locker that was embedded in the walls open to pull his white-and-red spacesuit out. The engines and storage rooms were in this part of the ship, as well as most of his equipment.
“Coming with you, helping those people down there – or possibly ‘up there,’” Fai gave back absent-mindedly; he still looked down through the hole he had just climbed up. “Funny, these spaceships, do they all work with gravity like that?”
“You’re not coming,” Kurogane gave back angrily, chucking off his clothes to wrestle his way into the skin-tight pants. He would have gone for one of the airtight suits that you didn’t have to undress for, but they were more bulky and harder to move in. Plus, he didn’t know whether there’d be rooms that were damaged enough to let in the cold from space. The skintight suits provided more freedom of movement, but they also needed to be fitted for each spacewalker personally.
“Of course I am, I can be useful,” Fai stated, and Kurogane could feel him stare at him as he undressed. Kurogane wondered briefly whether anyone had ever tried to teach the airhead the art of subtlety. The scientist hesitated, before pulling the locker next to the first open, the one that held an orange, airtight suit. “I’ll need one of those, won’t I?”
“You’re a scholar, last time I checked those didn’t have degrees in demon fighting,” Kurogane clamped his hand down over Fai’s wrist as he started to wrestle the suit out of its confinement. “Stay here.”
“You said you’d throw me out at the next possibility,” Fai replied blithely. At Kurogane’s lack of expression he rolled his eyes and yanked his hand free. “I’m not your responsibility, you know.”
“Everyone in that freighter is part of my responsibility,” Kurogane grunted in angrily and pulled on the torso of the spacesuit with more force than exactly necessary. “And the moment you enter, you’ll just be one more nuisance to look after and stand in my way.”
“In that case I’ll promise to not get hurt, alright?” Fai said surprisingly softly, and when Kurogane turned around to meet his eyes, they were warm and understanding. Something tugged sharply in his stomach and for a second he felt a bit light-headed. Suddenly, he realized how close they were standing, his hands still hovering, almost touching, and it seemed like Fai realized it, too, because he was leaning in even more, his face getting closer than it was supposed to – Kurogane yanked the orange helmet out of the cupboard and slammed it down on Fai’s head.
“Yeah, just don’t get killed,” he said hastily and turned his back on the man’s dazed face. “And you can keep your clothes on under that kind of suit!” He could hear a low snigger from behind and decided to ignore it. He mainly didn’t turn around to shout at the other man, because his cheeks were flaming.
They were dressed and ready to go within ten minutes. Kurogane secured Ginryuu at his side and made sure that the radio connection between them worked, and then handed the man a KFP, a force field pistol. Fai stared blankly at it while Kurogane explained to him how to use it. When Kurogane lifted his gaze to make sure he had understood, he realized that the man had used the time to study his face, instead.
“Listen when I talk to you,” he said in annoyance. “Remember that we don’t know what’s down there – last time, something helped the demons gain entrance to the ship. We don’t know what we’re facing.”
“It’s okay, I know what to do,” Fai gave back with a smile. Kurogane spared a second to look at him suspiciously, before nodding and opening the airlock.
They pulled themselves up through the airlocks of the two ships, which hissed and closed behind them, before climbing back down into the shaft of the freighter, yet again having gravity flip and contort around them as they were pulled towards the center of the ship. Kurogane remembered getting sick of these flips when he had only been a child and started his training under Souma. Fai, who, going by his ignorance about spaceships in general, must have lived most of his life on some torus or another, got used to them surprisingly fast.
The hallways was dipped into bright, bleak neon lights and showed the typical signs of use; the white walls around them were covered in black stripes where bored workers would kick them while talking, burn holes of forbidden cigarettes covered the brown PVC floor around the air vents. Hallways like these were bustling with life, with the ill-mannered shouts of workers and rough laughter.
The silence was deafening. Something stirred in the shadows, and as Kurogane turned, a small swarm of demons was moved into the light, crawling over the floor, before hesitantly pooling around his boots.
“Okay, they’re here,” Kurogane said into the mouth piece of the radio connection. “We’ll check the hallways for survivors before we kill these guys. I’ll hand you a string of bombs.”
Something flashed next to him and a part of the ceiling exploded and crashed down before them, making the demons skitter away in every direction. Kurogane turned to glare at Fai who was looking thoughtfully at the gun in his hands.
“So you know what to do,” he said coolly.
“I just wasn’t sure what this lever was good for,” his voice crackled over the radio connection. His face was pale in contrast to the garish orange of the suit, even when he was smiling his toothy grin. White would become him better, Kurogane realized, which would mean a skintight suits, which would mean undressing, which would-
“Try not to destroy the ship before we’re done,” Kurogane cut that particular train of thought off and dug in his backpack for a roll with radiation bombs. They were as small as a thumbnail and connected by a long string of cable so that you could fire all of them at once. Radio fuse had proven unhelpful around demons, but even cables didn’t always carry signals through dense clouds. “Take the other way round,” he said. The radio connection crackled and hissed as the demons around them shifted. “This hallway encloses the whole spacecraft, we’ll place radiation canons at the walls. Take anyone you meet with you, if anything happens, try the radio – it will probably give out after some time, there seem to be a lot of them. We meet up on the other end, getting rid of all of them at the same time.”
Kurogane showed him quickly how to undo the security belt of the bombs and how to place them along the walls. Fai nodded and opened his mouth to comment, but the radio swallowed his words as white noise.
“What?” Kurogane asked, looking at his lips to read them.
Fai just grinned and clapped Kurogane on the shoulder.
“Yeah, you take care, too,” Kurogane murmured. He turned his back on Fai, as they hadn’t any way to communicate (as long as he didn’t decide to make an idiot out of himself and dance a phrase in Mercantile, anyway).
The hallways were empty safe for the black clouds that hovered in the corners and swiped out to follow Kurogane around the moment he passed them by. It was eerie, his every step echoing in the silent hallways, and the air thick with the little pests flitting about. The slow, keen headache that accompanied their appearances started to settle in, and the demon hunter started to move faster. Kurogane had a bad feeling about this mission – maybe he was getting too used to having that chatterbox around. The silence suddenly felt uncomfortable.
Kurogane wasn’t opening any doors, in order to not let the demons spread – they would have to clean the whole ship room by room, always careful to activate force fields to not let the demons pass. It was basically the job of pest control – the only real difference was that this pest, different from cockroaches, would kill anything it came in contact with.
A small swarm of demons was following him ever since he had entered the spacecraft, clinging to his heels like a puppy, skittering off every now and then to explore locked doors. It was steadily growing, while he moved along and installed more of the radiation bombs along the way, linking them with a long cable that would hopefully carry the signal even through the magnetic field as it was growing in force.
He found the first dead bodies about two hundred meters and four bombs down the hallway. The first of them were the usual, dried-up bodies he’d find at most sites, the skin of young women and men wrinkled with age that they never reached. They were huddled into corners and sunken against doors that hadn’t opened to their screams. Often, demons hovered nearby, flicking over skin and in and out of orifices, as though trying to find another scrap of energy to feed on. Kurogane barely stopped to examine them – they were always the same and he wouldn’t find out much more than he already knew.
It was the corpses that followed after those that got his attention. People clad in spacesuits or airtight suits, like the one he was wearing. One of them wouldn’t have alerted Kurogane too much – even when it shouldn’t happen, some suits would develop leaks due to bad handling or careless manufacturing. In case you hadn’t to wear them on a regular basis, there was a possibility that the owners wouldn’t notice a leak until they ran out of air on a space walk. Much more often it happened that people pulled on a suit in a hurry during an attack, and either forget to seal it, especially around the torso, or accidentally confine a swarm of demons inside with them.
But there wasn’t just one but half a dozen bodies strewn across the floor, at one point heaped over each other in such fashion that Kurogane had to climb over them to keep walking. He kneeled down, rolling over the corpse of what must have been a woman lying face-down on the floor.
There was a hole in her suit. Not a small one, one that she wouldn’t have seen when pulling it on. It was a giant rupture across her front, the suit basically slashed open by something. Kurogane stared, then passed a hand across the disintegrating edges of the stuffing. Fourteen layers of suit molten away, briefly stopped by the tear-resistant ripstop layer – these things were fire-proof, bullet-proof and water-proof, and something had had no problem at all going past that. The face behind the gold-coated visor of the suit stared accusingly back up at him, eyes shriveled in their sockets and skin stretched and cracked to bare the teeth in a bizarre grin.
It wasn’t a sound that alerted him so much as a change in the light. He looked up. There weren’t any demons in the air before him, though a moment before the cloud had been so dense that he could barely see four meters ahead. A shadow fell over his hands as something shifted behind him. He spun around on his heel.
For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Kurogane took in the row of razor-sharp teeth four inches from his face, the gaping tunnel behind them, the bulging mass of darkness that held them. A small drop of demons sprang from the surface of the beast’s head, spun in an arc, and immersed back into the rippling blackness as though it was water. And then the beast sprang forward in the same moment as Kurogane shouted and dropped to the side, letting the demons pass directly over his head.
Kurogane scrambled to his feet, drawing his force field pistol during in the movement. The beast was as almost filling the hallway with its height, which should have made it hard to move for it. But instead of bumping into the walls while turning around, it structure simply shifted – as though pulling a sock inside out, its front legs stood where it landed while the whole backside melted into the black body and emerged where the head had been before. Kurogane cursed loudly and pointed the pistol. The beast came rushing at him again, and he had the feeling its paws weren’t even touching the ground – he pulled the trigger. A kekkai sprang up.
It crashed against the abruptly forming, green wall in front of it, splattering into all directions as though it was made of liquid and then back from the walls of the perfect square. The demons hummed in an angry cloud inside its cage, rushing from corner to corner to test the walls, as they shrunk and closed in around it, until they were pressed into a dense box, maybe a meter and a half high. The beast formed again, much smaller and less distinct, to snarl at him.
Kurogane’s hands were surprisingly steady as he pulled out the emitters that he’d place on all four sides of the kekkai to render the demons useless. He had never seen them behave in such way, or form anything beside clouds. They didn’t have a reason to, he thought – besides slashing through spacesuits, maybe.
There was barely enough room to put up the fourth radiator between the wall of the hallway and the force field, and he jammed it in with some effort, making the green walls hiss and crackle. The demons pressed against the walls where Kurogane’s glove brushed it, making it bulge and deform. Kurogane pulled back hastily and the creature seemed to stare at him out of the darkness. He hit the button to release the radiation.
A low hum was crawling up from the ground and the bars on Kurogane’s suit that warned him of the radiation were hitting the red scale, even as the radiation was supposedly confined. The demon screamed. Kurogane didn’t know how it did it, but it was a sound that penetrated the layers of his suit and seemed to ring directly within his head. He gritted his teeth and searched hold on the walls as they were vibrating with the sound. The cloud inside the force field exploded from the inside out, grappling at the walls, making them bulge to the outside, and for a moment, Kurogane was afraid that they would break free. He had never seen a demon break through a force field, but this thing did a lot of stuff he had never seen before.
And then, suddenly, the sound broke off. As though someone had activated a gravity field, the demons fell to the ground, like sand that had been suspended in the air. All that was left was a small, black heap at the middle of the square. Kurogane switched off the radiators.
Something was off. The color, possibly – demons used to turn gray when rendered harmless. These didn’t. He hesitated to deactivate the force field. Suddenly, something stirred in the pile, and the demons rose back into the air, starting to slowly turn in a circle. Kurogane cursed and switched the radiators back on, but this time, they didn’t seem to have any effect – their dance only grew in speed and intensity until they resembled a small hurricane, turning on the spot fast enough to blur. Kurogane felt the typical headache that he associated with demons hit him full-on, hard enough to make the world break up into dissociated colors and forms. Through the haze of his own, confused mind, he watched the force field flicker and turn off, and the radiators break, the lamps along the hallway splinter and go out.
When he came back his senses, the hallways was immersed in twilight. He scrambled backwards as he couldn’t tell what were demons and what were shadows – and then the creature shifted, and he saw it stand at full height over his broken equipment, throwing his head back as though to challenge him. Kurogane stumbled to his feet, his hand clutched firmly around the hilt of his sword. If technology didn’t help, he would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
The beast roared and started to tear towards him, jaws wide open to rip apart his suit and flesh and swallow his mind. Kurogane took stance, bundling the flow of his ki as he watched the demon approach. He roared, letting his voice travel, and he let his energy flow down his arms and burst out of the blade as the creature leapt to meet him. The light of the hama ryuu-ou jin was blinding in the darkness.
It was parted like butter before his sword, falling apart, its very matter splitting and disintegrating. Kurogane stood in the middle of the black wave as it rolled over and passed him. When the demons hind legs ran by his flaming sword, there was nothing left but gray dust that hit the front of his suit and fell to the ground in a trickle all around him.
Kurogane panted and looked around for remaining swarms. There were none. He breathed and sank to one knee, leaning heavily on the hilt of his sword and closing his eyes for a valuable second to let the nausea of the energy burst pass.
“Kurogane-san?” a voice crackled over the radio connection. Kurogane stopped breathing for a moment before hitting the answering button with shaking fingers.
“Brat!? What are you doing here?”
“It’s him,” the boyish voice of his student was brimming with excitement. “Sakura, we’ll be out of here, soon!”
*****
“What exactly happened here?” Kurogane, Fai and the few dozen men and women that had survived the attack had gathered at the core of the ship, within the machine rooms. This area was the easiest to protect and shield off against the demons, with two airlocks separating them from the outer levels. Under their feet, the artificial gravity was produced, pulling all of them steadily downwards, which led to the strange situation that they were walking on top of an orb and that they could see the ceiling close around them. People that stood 20 meters away were tilted at an 45° angle and would vanish from Kurogane’s field of vision as they went to the ‘opposite side of the room.’
“It started as a normal attack,” Syaoran explained earnestly. He was employed as one of the stationary demon hunters aboard the ship. He had taken a seat next to Sakura, on one of the humming pipes that protruded from the ground and led straight into a giant engine behind them. Fai stood to the side, absent-mindedly eying the ladder leading up. “The demons gathered on the outside of the ship, usual cloud formations, high degree of density – they soon started to concentrate in one place, though. We couldn’t get them off the surface, anymore, or burn them, not even with the radiation shields. We have recordings of them changing their form and starting to attack the mantle – within a few hours, they had entered the control rooms.”
“We locked the whole ship down, after that,” Sakura said, her face pale and her eyes huge and fearful. Her hands shook slightly and she moved to rub them over her thighs, as though cold. She was working as a pilot trainee for this freighter class, now, from what Kurogane had gathered. Personally, he wouldn’t have trusted her to fly anything, at all, never mind a giant freighter, but possibly he was underestimating the girl. Maybe people were just desperate to get anyone to fly around these zones. “We lost… we lost three engineers in the first twenty minutes. One of them worked up there when the demons entered, and two more were attacked when they went up to check on him.”
“We don’t know how to stop them, anymore,” Syaoran admitted. “Radiation doesn’t work on them – they operate on a different wavelength than the one we used to apply. And while our force fields seem to contain them, we’re almost out of fluid just by securing off the doors around the engine room.” Kurogane didn’t correct him on that point – no use adding to the panic if he didn’t have a better solution.
“Don’t you have rescue vessels on this ship?” Fai asked them.
“By the time we realized how bad it was, the rescue vessels were contaminated. They just slashed them open,” Sakura’s voice dropped until it was barely above a whisper. “I think they’re conscient, they know what to attack to make us helpless. We decided to wait for help down here, where they would reach last. We weren’t sure anyone was coming.” Syaoran’s hands twitched, and he cast a nervous glance at her face, before he hastily grabbed her hand.
“Don’t worry, Sakura, I’ll get us out of here,” he promised. She looked back at him with big, shining eyes, and a bit of color came back to her cheeks. Syaoran’s spine straightened visibly under her gaze.
“It’s okay, I’m not afraid,” she said, putting on her brave face. They stared into each other’s eyes smiling, and the world around them visibly fell away as their fingers entwined. Kurogane cleared his throat and they almost jumped apart, though Syaoran still loosely held the girl’s hand.
“Right, do we have a map of the ship?” he asked. Sakura nodded and pulled a small disc out of her overall and jumped down from the pipe to put it on the ground. She pressed the sides of it to pull up a three-dimensional blueprint of the ship, that she adjusted to hover at her eye level. It was basically a tall orb, consisting of different layers that mostly contained cargo rooms on the outer levels and the crew’s rooms further on the inside. The innermost level held the engines and valuable storage.
“We’re here,” she said, reaching inside the hologram and touching the room that surrounded the red core. “Syaoran said we’ve had demon sightings on the first three levels-“
“Fourth, too,” Kurogane grunted back, not fondly thinking back to Fai making an ass out of himself and playing fetch with that one. He had almost blasted the idiot away with his hama ryuu-ou jin, that time.
“We’re not sure what they’re waiting for,” Sakura said a little afraid. “Maybe they just don’t understand that we’re further down here.”
“Maybe,” Kurogane said, and felt Fai’s gaze prickle at his neck. “We need to gather all of them in one place, so that I can kill them all at once – is there a big room that we can use, an empty freight hall?”
“That would be,” Sakura turned the orb by touching and dragging it with the tips of her fingers, her youthful face aglow with the blue light. “right here. Hall C – it stretches across the first and second level, it’s big and unused due to maintenance,” she looked up at him, worry in her drawn brows. “How do you plan on getting them there?”
“How do you lure a predator anywhere?” Kurogane gave back with a humorless smirk and snatched the helmet up from where he had thrown it at a table. He didn’t protest as Fai came to stand beside him, a grim look exchanged between them.
“I’m coming with you!” Syaoran shouted and started to pull off his shirt while he ran off towards a pillar that held suits.
“I’m not going to let you go to your death, brat!” Kurogane said.
“I’m fast, I have learned,” the teenager gave back, pulling out a suit as he spoke. Sakura squeaked as he went for his belt and Syaoran hastily thought better of completely undressing in public. “I can definitely help you.”
“You’re still a kid,” Kurogane yelled after him as he vanished inside a niche of lockers.
“I’ve seen my fair share of action since you have trained me, Kurogane-san,” his voice was muffled and overlaid by the noise of rustling closes and the boy’s elbow bumping into the lockers. “And you weren’t any older than me, when you started your missions!”
“And I was so green that I almost got myself killed!” Kurogane barked. He was also damn sure that that his own training was an entirely different matter.
“I’m coming, too!” Sakura announced. Kurogane whirled around to stare at her. “I’m old enough to decide for myself, and I’m good at sports. I can run fast enough to get away from anything. I want to help these people,” she put on that expression that usually got her wherever she wanted to be. “You can’t stop me.”
“Oh yes, I can, princess,” Kurogane bit out. “If there’s one thing I can’t use fighting a demon-“
“If you’re about to call me a little girl,” she cut off his word, jabbing her finger right into his chest. “have another think coming.” With that she took off towards the stored suits, leaving Kurogane staring after her with his jaw hanging open, as she started to pull the handle of one of the lockers. The door needed two good kicks and Sakura landing on her butt as it suddenly flew open, but then it was magnanimous enough to dump the whole suit right on top of her. Kurogane covered his eyes with his free hand.
“Seems no one is listening to you, today, Kuro-bossy,” Fai laughed next to him.
“Just shut up,” Kurogane said between gritted teeth. Right now, Syaoran was doing his best to talk Sakura out of the mission, but he was having as little success as Kurogane had had, before.
“Why don’t you just let them?” Fai said blithely. “You can go with your student, and I will take care of Sakura-chan. It will be fine.” Kurogane gave him an askew glance, wondering whether he was as sure as he sounded or his usual, idiotic self. Fai didn’t seem to be the type to easily play with other people’s lives. “Syaoran is right – this is a big ship and we can need the help.”
“Yeah,” Kurogane mumbled. “I just hope everyone remembers that this is not a fucking family getaway.”
“Just worry about yourself and the boy, great Kurogane of Suwa, I won’t let anything happen to the girl,” Fai replied with a thin smile and flashing eyes.
*****
It took them three hours to pass through all the levels, making sure that all of the demons were following them. The force field pistols were of good use for controlling them, for a short time, and they had the situation mostly under control. And while Kurogane had to trip Syaoran up, one time, making him fall flat on his face to pass under a demon’s claw, he had to admit that the boy was much better than he had remembered. After scouring the fourth level together, they split up for the third one, and met each other just in time for Kurogane to push Syaoran’s butt up the ladder and pull himself up, as the demons clashed like tidal waves under them. As they were running towards the storage room, Syaoran leading the way, the tidal wave of demons filled up the whole corridor behind them. The light flickered on and off wherever they passed by, the magnetic field of the demons making the electronic go crazy. They had long since lost the form of separate beings and were simply a foaming, bubbling wall of darkness that came rushing after them.
It was a good thing that they weren’t too intelligent or fast – they never had the idea to cut off the hunters’ way, even they passed by several corridors that would have made it easy to do so.
Syaoran gestured to the front and shouted something that his suits swallowed and the radio connection wouldn’t carry. Kurogane understood the meaning well enough – that way, that’s the door to the storage room. The demons behind them were definitely too close for Kurogane’s liking.
They came to stop in front of the door and Syaoran started to punch in a code that would open it. The reader bleeped with red light and the boy started over. Kurogane threw a look over his shoulder and the demons were crashing in behind them, splashing up the walls before coming directly for them. He cursed, shouldered Syaoran out of the way and broke the lock open with a crashing hit of Ginryuu. No one could tell him swords weren’t useful on spaceships.
They pushed the door open and to the ground and stumbled into the adjoining Hall C, that stretched two floors high and wide and deep inside the big ship. Time stopped for a moment as they found themselves faced with a wall of darkness that was gathered, in the middle of the hall, forming a hill rather than a creature. Their way back cut off by the demons pouring in behind.
Kurogane cursed loudly at this stupid, half-assed plan and prepared hastily for a ki attack, while Syaoran fell in position at his back. Suddenly, the darkness before them parted and a blue tube of energy, slightly taller than a human, emerged from it and enclosed the man and the teenager before Kurogane could even grasp what the fuck was going on. He felt Syaoran stumble into him from behind, and turned around to see a wave of demons crash and splatter against the blue, translucent shield of light. What the fuck.
“Kuro-pon, we’re here!” a cheery voice called over the miraculously working radio connection. Kurogane looked forward and saw Fai sit on his butt in the middle of a giant bubble of light, waving at them. Sakura stood up from where she had been sitting next to him on the ground and came running to fall into Syaoran’s arms as they approached.
Kurogane stared at the field that surrounded them, stepping out of the tunnel that Fai had extended. He had somehow erected a dome of blue light in the middle of the room. It must be able to shield the magnetic field of the demons, as well. He had never seen anything like it – but he supposed he was getting used to that, today.
“What the hell are you doing,” he asked, scowling at Fai as he packed away a card game.
“Nothing, just playing with Sakura-chan while we were waiting for you,” he grinned. “She’s pretty good, I never once won against her!”
“No, I’m really not,” Sakura hastily said, pulling Syaoran into the dome behind her. The tunnel of light melted back into the dome, behind her. “I’m not even sure I understand the rules.” Kurogane resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and wondered whether it even mattered if he reminded them that this was a combat situation and not a damn picnic.
“Whatever,” he gestured up at the dome around them. Demons were still crashing up to the walls like an ocean of inky water. “If you can do this, can’t you just render all of the demons useless?”
“Not in this form, no,” Fai answered, looking serious for once. “It’s a different set of abilities. Shielding is one thing, attacking is another, entirely.”
“’Not in this form’?” Kurogane repeated incredulously. Wait. Wait, don’t tell him – no, he really wasn’t sure he believed that. He stared at Fai.
Fai merely smiled at him and prompted, “Prepare your dragon attack, Kuro-slow, I’m ready to lower the shield whenever you are.”
“Yeah, a second,” Kurogane replied, falling into a combat stance. He reached down for the energy flow within his body. It sometimes felt like those pools and streams were so vast that he could get lost within them, and he wasn’t always sure, if was all his own energy that he was reaching to pull up from within. When he opened his eyes, the world around him was aglow with more than just the blue light of the dome above their heads. He could clearly see the energetic bubbles that surrounded the children, as they stood by Fai’s side, and the seemingly gigantic energetic waves that flowed from the slender man up into sustaining the field that protected them. Kurogane wondered how it came that he hadn’t realized what he was, before. Maybe he had, to trust him unquestioningly with the care of Sakura. He nodded at Fai, and Fai smiled and nodded back.
Within half a second, the dome retracted and shrunk to merely encompass Fai and the kids and leave Kurogane faced with the gigantic, malevolent life form in front of him. Kurogane roared as it darkened the lights above them and poured down on top of him, like tar, with claws and jaws, and half-formed bodies, the bizarre travesty of a living being. He ripped his sword up and pure energy blasted from the blade, enveloping him in a cloak of light and tearing into the darkness. His vision went white as the energy spread outwards and burned everything away that wasn’t human.
When the black spots stopped dancing in front of his eyes, he was down on one knee, and the whole room around them was filled with the gray, metallic sand of killed demons. Steps crunched in the dust before him and he looked up to see into Fai’s wild, grinning face. He held out his hand and Kurogane grinned back and gripped it and let himself be pulled up, dust falling from his shoulders.
“You did it,” Fai’s laughter was breathless over the radio connection before he threw his arms around Kurogane’s neck, helmets of the orange, ridiculous suit bumping with his own and Kurogane was surprised enough to simply catch his weight and hold him. Fai looked at him for a moment, eyes sparkling, before he wrestled free and started at the latches of his helmet.
“Don’t pull it off, yet-” Kurogane started, then huffed in exasperation as Fai freed himself and shook his hair out. The roots were dark with sweat, possibly from the strain of sustaining the energy field and his face was reddened with the stifling heat of the plastic.
“C’mon, there’s nothing left here to attack you,” Fai teased him, helmet under his arm.
“Radiation,” Kurogane said.
Fai lifted an eyebrow, “You didn’t even use radiation, Kuro-hero.” Kurogane opened his mouth to object, then closed it to Fai’s obvious amusement. Kurogane glared at him for a moment. Then his eye caught Syaoran and Sakura, who obviously didn’t follow the security code either, going by the fact that they were animatedly kissing. And finally pulled the fucking helmet off, because he felt ridiculous.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he grunted, peeling the phones and mouthpiece that belonged with the radio equipment off of his head and dumping it in the upturned helmet. Fai’s eyes glittered and he took a breath as though to answer, when he suddenly stiffened in surprise. Kurogane followed his gaze over his shoulder.
“Oh, I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” Syaoran had peeled away from Sakura and was now talking to a fifth person that had entered the room. “Were you hurt in the attack?”
“You,” Fai hissed and stepped away from Kurogane. The woman stared back at him, seemingly unmoved. “Xing Huo – this is your doing!”
