The Ark

Huuuuge scrap file. Conflicting calculation methods give me total lengths of 35 or 95 pages.

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POTENTIAL CHAP2

Kirov, Russia, 2064 CE

Kirov was once a proud city, back when the Russian economy still had legs to stand on. Now, unfortunately, with the absolute collapse of the Russian ruble, anarchy ruled its blackened and grimy rooftops, as well as the rest of the massive country. In every city, town, and village, food lines turned into hand-to-hand melees, where only those who were left standing or alive even got their daily ration. This was not a new situation. Things started turning for worse in the early 2030s when the nation's arsenal, based in Ishevsk, bankrupted and went out of business, permanently. The weapon factory was in constant competition with several Asian arms companies who, ironically, were selling their own versions of Russian guns. Ishevsk had to continually lower their prices to the point where they could not break even. Without money to support their operations, the gun works shut down, thus cutting off access to the once-lucrative American market, and sealing the already weak economy's fate. The "Red Depression" had begun.

By 2064, the government was tired. It was tired of reassuring its citizens that things would be okay when it knew full well they would not, tired of trying to balance demand for food with supply of food, and certainly tired of trying to keep its provinces from splintering away. The proverbial snapping of the camel's back came at Kirov.

As the bitter winter night's snow blew across the main street, an angry, heckling crowd swarmed around the supply depot, which was the distribution for all food in the city. Thousands beat at the chain-link fence that separated them from the nourishment they needed and deserved. The police line, on the other side of fence, were getting nervous. They were hopelessly outnumbered, not that they would bring their assault rifles to bear on their own citizens. The squad leader called into his commander through a hand radio on his belt.

"General Kharkov, we can't hold them!" the man said, his voice slightly distorted through the radio waves.

"Do not worry, I have the solution to this situation sitting right next to me!"

Kharkov was sitting inside an airborne helicopter that hovered high above the raging mob below, illuminating them with a high power spotlight. Next to him sat a young man, dressed head to toe in black combat gear and the only hair on his head being his eyebrows. Kharkov had to yell over the sound of the swishing rotor blades.

"All right, Ivan, get down to the rooftop below us and await further instructions!"

The man nodded and leapt out of the helicopter with no further delay, falling straight down to the roof fifty feet below, and landing neatly in a low crouch. He moved to the edge of the building, where he had an excellent view of the tumultous riot. Several minutes passed before Kharkov's voice rose from Ivan's shoulder radio.

"Okay, fire a few energy blasts into the crowd. That should break up this riot quite effectively!"

The soldier stood up and gripped his right wrist with his left hand, then began to gather his energy into a single, devastating sphere, preparing to unleash it upon the unsuspecting people below. They would have died if Hakari Briefs had not had a conscience. At that moment, something went off in Ivan's head, like he was waking up from a some predictable, uncontrollable, and horrible nightmare. His dull brown eyes gained a certain light, and he looked in horror at his own hands, which, he realized, were about to kill. The swirling mass of energy in his hand faded away and disappeared entirely, causing a certain Russian general to throw a fit.

"IVAN! What the hell are you doing? Blast them!"

Gently, a long suppressed rage awakened within this Ivan. Two computer chips, the only two in this Russian android's head, grappled and battled for control. Kharkov's faltered and shorted out, leaving Capsule Corporation's secret conscience failsafe in control, and its host sentient once again. The general was infuriated that his most powerful weapon had proven faulty.

"Damn it!" he screamed over the radio, "The android has developed a fault of some kind! Pilot, fire a cannon burst into the crowd!"

Ivan looked up to the helicopter and saw the triple-barreled chaingun underneath its nose begin to spin up in a menacing fashion. he acted immediately. The foot soldier launched himself into vertical flight and sunk his right knee into one of the helicopter's exhaust turbines, smashing it like tissue paper. The aircraft lurched and shuddered from the impact, then began spinning about in giant arcs, as Ivan had not wasted a single second of time, gripping the tail section in both arms shearing it off completely. Kharkov's voice exploded over the radio in incomprehensible and terrified screeches as his wildly unstable transport collided with the side of an abandoned apartment building. Ivan watched in stern silence as the rotor blades snapped off, followed by a large, bright, and satisfying fireball, which bathed the dark corners of the surrounding buildings with brilliant orange light.

The rioters that didn't run after seeing the heavily-armed helicopter hovering about now ran for their lives. The exploding aircraft not 200 yards away was incentive enough to get them to leave. The crowd dissipated and left, leaving a shaken police force to deal with the flaming hole left in an old, empty apartment. Kharkov's destroyer hopped off of his urban perch and landed in a dark alley. Out in the street, the snow started to fall in force, accompanied by a fierce biting wind. Ivan shivered and slipped off his backpack, opening it up and pulling out a furred hat with flaps, his ushanka. He slipped it on his head and buttoned up his coat, then sat down behind a rusted dumpster, using the its metal surface as a windblock. Now, it was time plan the next move. The Russian Army was not going to take the death of its vaunted General Kharkov lightly, and as soon as they figured out who killed him, a manhunt would begin. Thus, Ivan was no longer part of his army; he was a renegade. As his sentience took hold, his memories came flooding back. He knew what to do next: find his brother!

West City, the next morning

Hakari Briefs arrived at work early. He had a few android designs he wanted to revise before the next board meeting, though he in no way looked forward to sitting around the conference table with the money-hungry jackals that now ran Capsule. He walked in through the rotating door of the front lobby, gave a grunt of acknowledgement to the secretary, rode the elevator to the top floor, then walked down a door-lined hallway to his office. Before he opened his door, though, he ran his hand through his thick, purple hair and sighed deeply. Going through this routine was getting more and more difficult with each passing day. He hit the door's open button with the heel of his hand and stepped through the portal to his office. He was greeted with two eyefuls of pure sun.

He groaned and covered his face with the briefcase in his right hand. Right then, he wished he could rotate West City by 180 degrees, because there was certainly no way in hell the floor director would give him an office with a less painful view. He fumbled his free hand around the edge of the door, finding and pushing the button that closed the blinds. When the room darkened and his vision returned, he saw something on his desk. An old Russian AK-47 was lying directly over the blueprints to Android 17A2, and on Hakari's right side, something was flying toward him at extreme speed.

With the grace of a cat, Hakari dropped his briefcase and halted a gloved fist with the backside of his own.

"Hakari Briefs, son of Trunks Briefs, son of Bulma Briefs" the attacker said.

"General Ivan, total idiot" Hakari replied.

Ivan grinned.

"It is good to see you, Father."

Hakari dropped Ivan's fist and walked over to his desk, picking up the weighty assault rifle that lay upon it and tossing it to his "son" on the other side of the room. He sat down in his swivel chair.

"And like all good fathers, I think you should pick up your toys when finished. Why are you here?" he asked a bit of a smile on his face.

"I have fired the Russians."

Hakari's blood ran ice cold at those words. "Fired" was Ivan's term for trouble......military trouble.

"What the hell happened?"

"Your conscience circuit came in handy."

"Oh no....Kirov, right? It was all over the news."

"Yeah, Kirov. Now, I need to know where Eito is."

"Why do you need to find him?" Hakari asked.

"Because, I was used against innocent people. Whoever has Eito is going to do the same goddamn thing!"

Ivan's creator turned his chair to his computer and punched in a few call numbers. The screen soon changed to an inventory list which contained all of Capsule's projects. One caught Hakari's attention: Android 17A2. He moved the mouse cursor over the link and clicked, displaying another list. It read as follows:

Today is: 10/22/64, 7:41:34

Company: Capsule Corporation East
Product: Android/Robot/Artificial Human
Class: Electromag 1337
Type: 99/1 electromagnetic
M/N: 17A2
Orig. Designer: Gero, Arkardarvich
Reviser: Briefs, Hakari

Manufacture Begin Date: 1/1/60
Production Target: 50
# produced: 2

Number sold: 2
Last known date of sale: 10/22/64
Last known buyer: Russian Federation
Last date of shipment: 10/23/64
Transport Origin: West City, Japan
Transport Destination: Magadan, Russian Federation
Times paid: 2
Amount paid (tot): Z3,000,000,000

Hakari turned the flat-screen monitor to Ivan, who promptly and optically devoured the information shown on it. His eyes scrolled down the list of data, most of which did not concern him. His product class, however, entertained him. "1337" was most appropriate. Coming across the transport destination, the android's eye halted. Magadan, Russia, was the place Eito had been sent, and Ivan clenched his jaw. He had to go right back into the hellhole that he had just escaped the night before.

"Russia? You sold BOTH of us to the Russians?"

"It wasn't my decision. I have next to zero power in the decision-making around here. The Russians had the desire, not to mention the cash. Heh, that's probably what screwed their economy; three billion zeni spent on new weapons to pacify the people that are angry at the government for spending three billion zeni on new weapons. I think I hate my job."

Ivan slipped his backpack off and searched it, eventually withdrawing a map of the world. He unfolded and spread it out on the desk, searching the Russian area for Magadan. He found it in the far eastern tip, traced his finger along the red road line that snaked west, then cursed when he arrived at a certain name.

"Damn. Lensk."

"What's in Lensk?"

"Nuke central. This is going to get ugly."

"Are you seriously going out there?"

"Duh."

POTENTIAL CHAP2-2

Ivan built it as a joke gift for Eito's 55th birthday, a fully-functional, even dangerous joke, but a good-hearted joke nonetheless. He based the design off of a vehicle from the 22nd-century arcade classic "Halo", and drove it right through the barrier fence at the JSDF base where his brother's party was being held. The cost in damages was well worth ninety or so Japanese soldiers about to choke on their slice of birthday cake, all with their weapons drawn. None had time to remove their safeties and some didn't even have a magazine locked in place. Using the Split Form technique, three

POTENTIAL CHAP2-3

The circumstances of his existence, for one, were a mystery to Eighteen. She was partly to blame for this, as she never walked up to him and asked him flat-out how he came to be. Perhaps, deep down, she felt that if she were to question his existence, he would disappear. He and his "brother" General Ivan simply showed up at her door one day in 2064, as if announcing that Seventeen would be rejoining her life. They needed a place to stay, and too taken aback to protest or even speak concisely, she agreed. It was a sudden shock; she was in something of a stupor for a week. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they left, reappearing to her in the newspapers as they fought some bizarre, two-man war against the Russian government. The names of numerous Russian cities graced the cover of the papers for the months that followed: Magadan, Okhotsk, Lensk, Orel, Bryansk - all were tour dates of a gigantic cross-country battle royale. Finally, one headline caught her eye: ZASTAVA--IT'S OVER! Giving in to her curiousity, Eighteen pulled out a world map and found that Zastava wasn't even in Russia, it was in southern Yugoslavia. Her brother had been quite busy. Soon afterward, Seventeen came home, and with a new name: Eito Hakari. He was quite insistent on its usage, though he allowed Eighteen to call him otherwise. She never asked him about those five months in 2064, not for fifty years. Keeping his eyes on the road, he caught her looking at him through his keen peripheral vision.

"What?" he asked, with a chuckle in his voice.

"You know, you never did tell me how you came back to life."

Eito thought about that statement for a few seconds. He turned it around in his head, but he was just screwing around; she was right. He never offered her any explanation for his return. Sure, he had to stay on his toes while he ran from or fought the Russian Army sixty years ago, but that campaign only lasted five months. The years that followed from that point were quiet. He joined the Japanese Self-Defense Force just for something to do, and he had ample opportunity to explain to his sister just what the hell had gone on. He never did, because it was Ivan's wish. Eito's history was welded right on to Ivan's, and since one would not be complete without the other, completing that history meant telling all about the sordid past of a cruel Russia's General Ivan. However, if only slightly, Eito's resolution dissolved when looked into his sister's eyes expectant eyes.

"Yamma gave me a break, you could say."

"But you weren't simply revived, were you?"

To Eighteen, this was a prominent concept. She had seen Seventeen bleed before, but that gaping, revealing hole in his skin on the backside of his hand proved that bringing him back to life was not a simple cut-and-paste affair.

"No. That is why I am known as Eito."

"Where does that name come from, anyway?" Eighteen persisted.

"You know my license plate, right?"

"Yes." she confirmed.

"My offical designation was Android 17A2, but Ivan hated that name, so he took the A2 part, changed the pronunciation, and gave me the name 'Eito'."

"What about your last name, Hakari?"

"The son of Trunks Briefs was named Hakari, and he was my creator."

Eighteen sat back in her bucket seat and pondered Eito's words. Her brother just let Ivan rename him?

POTENTIAL CHAP2-4

Eito, along with General Ivan, was Capsule Corporation's ultimate misstep. After Bulma died, Trunks took over the company, and after HE died, his son took over. Unfortunately, as with most powers inherited, the next of kin, kin of important people in particular, lives in the shadow of their predecessor, garnering less and less respect with each generation. Hakari Briefs took the up reins of a company radically different from Bulma's time. Run by a board of ten executives, it was no longer a warm mom-and-pop business, but a heartless, souless conglomeration of factories and headquarters that spanned the globe. As with all businesses of this structure, money was the one thing it desired. They found it in Russia.

Dr. Arkardavich Gero was the foremost figure in robotic research, but in his own mind, he struck proverbial gold when he decided to simply upgrade two regular humans with select electronic parts. Twenty android designs and one Earth-Hell android fusion later, Gero's lab had been destroyed and the mad doctor himself had been killed three times, twice within twenty years and once in another dimension. However, the plans remained after all, as found by a Capsule expedition to the ruins of his lab. There, the company executives found their cash cow.

They wanted a weapon. What they got were the androids, but even with that mighty power, they wanted more. They forced Hakari into giving that "more" to them.

Hakari was afraid. His job was all he had, and if he didn't do what the execs wanted, they would surely do some "restructuring" of the company, which no doubt involved a coup d'etat. Thus, he built two androids for them, using the recovered genetic samples and blueprints brought back to him. However, Hakari Briefs was not naive, nor was he outright stupid. He threw a few proverbial monkey wrenches into Capsule's plans.

He made things believable by completely revising the design of Android 17. The electronics originally called for were durable and kept out of the way of the organic processes going on around them, but if they were damaged, surgery would be a nightmare. He switched to a construction based entirely on flesh and blood, artificial blood, that is. The new products, dubbed 17A1 and 17A2, were designed like androids but grown like humans and possessed the weaknesses of neither. Of course, Hakari couldn't let those bastards have a perfect weapon. He boiled down the amazing abilities of the Z warriors to a simple variation of the Electromagnetic Theory, and in giving such power to his creations, it gave them their greatest flaw.

If they powered up, their skin burned off slowly and excruciatingly, revealing the inhuman structure beneath. Though the transformation would be painful, it would not be fatal, as the network of bone plating and muscle underneath acted like a skin within itself, making the outer skin a merely cosmetic addition. The mind-melting pain of raising their ki ensured that the two lab brothers would use the power of the electromagnetic theory if and only if the situation was a dire one. Otherwise, they would not go to such lengths and instead, they would resort to normal, handheld weaponry, such as hand-grenades and assault rifles. Hakari's androids would never become the arbitrary threat that nuclear weapons had. The engineer also foresaw a Capsule plot to exercise total control over the Seventeens. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, so Hakari stuck a powerful conscience override into both to make sure that they would rebel against any immoral order.

In 2060, Android 17A1 was sold to the Russian Army for 1,500,000,000 zeni, which was a insane burden on their economy. Sure enough and as per Hakari's conscience circuit, the android, renamed to General Ivan, rebelled against his commanders in 2064, killing a high-ranking officer in a fit of rage after being ordered to fire upon a rioting crowd in the city of Kirov. Discovering that his brother, the Android 17A2, had also been sold to the Russians, Ivan fought his way east to a army base in Lensk, the most likely place where he would be.

The aftermath of the firefight left hundreds of Russian soldiers dead and the base itself a smoking, mile-wide crater.

The brothers fled to Ohkotsk, sailed south to Japanese territory, and wound up in Kanazawa, on western mainland Japan. In a fit of disarray, they referred to their creator, hoping to get their bearings straight. They found him in his office, slumped back with nine bullet holes in his chest. The Russians got there first. For Ivan, Hakari was his father, and his death was a challenge to war, one he would gladly rise to. Eito, though, never met the man, so he was only angry that he had been pursued so far.

General Ivan would have taken Eito along with him to overthrow the Russian government if he didn't discover his brother's suppressed memories. Deep inside the younger android's skull was a computer chip wired directly to the memory centers of his brain. They discovered it the night before they were to leave for Magadan and undertake their militaristic task. In a test of their electromagnetic fighting ability, Eito's secret electronic implant shorted out, letting the entire life history of the first Android 17 flood into Eito's consciousness.

King Yamma had been busy, for Seventeen returned from the land of the dead sixty years after his destruction at the hands of Goku, and in a new body, no less. The first thing Seventeen did was ask over and over where his sister was, and Ivan, being the soft-hearted fool that he was, took his forever-changed brother and showed up at Eighteen's apartment door the very next day.

She threw a fit. It was not a fit of anger, though. Ivan had never seen that many tearful hugs in his life, though he knew thinking that was meaningless. Technically, he was four years old, and he hadn't seen much of anything other than ground combat against the Russians. Unfortunately, the general couldn't stick around for the emotional reunion for too long. As soon as he appeared, Ivan disappeared, leaving Seventeen and Eighteen to catch up on each other's lives.

General Ivan

POTENTIAL CHAP2-5

Ivan and Eito were both heavily modified versions of the original Android Seventeen, made fully organic to avoid mechanical breakdown. However, they were still were nowhere near human. They were grown like humans but designed like androids, and their skin was a facade. Underneath, they were frameworks of black muscle and white bone, and capable or surviving indefinitely without their skin. They were the children of a power game between the last of the Briefs family and the top executives of Capsule. They forced Hakari to create Ivan and Eito for the sake of money. However

POTENTIAL CHAP2-6

"Tell me, Eighteen, did you sense anything....odd....at the funeral earlier today?"

She flinched, just as Eito suspected she would. He chuckled.

"Do you know who it is?"

"I think it's Goku" Eighteen said quietly.

"Goku? What would he be doing here, and after such a long time?"

"Well, maybe he wanted to be at Pan's funeral. She's his granddaughter, after all."

Eito stared off into space for a few moments. If Goku was there at the funeral, then he must have seen the cremation, which blatantly disregarded Pan's own wishes. Goku likely wanted a conventional burial, and now that that was impossible, there would be hell to pay. An angry super saiyan, in the past, would not have struck much fear in the android. Now, however, his new body was simply not built for sudden, jumpstart, and high-powered fighting. Goku could appear and kill him at any time he wished.

POTENTIAL CHAP2-7

She looked away from the reds and oranges of the beautiful, water-lined sunset and faced forward, her short, blonde hair quivering in the wind. They were almost at her apartment. Whenever she pondered the past, she lost all track of time, something she often tried to do intentionally. On the right, Eighteen's housing complex loomed high above them, a circular multi-story building. Eito turned off of the street and pulled into an underground garage, then parked near the elevator.

The two siblings hopped out of the JSDF combat vehicle, and just before Eito pressed a button to return the jeep to its capsule form, he pulled his Kalashnikov rifle out from under the driver's seat, slinging it over his back. The entire form of the wheeled transport flashed ink black, then shrunk and shrunk until it lay as a palm-sized bottle on the parking lot ground. Eito scooped up the little object, stood on his left foot, then secured the capsule in a secret compartment cut into the heel of his right boot.

Together, Eito and Eighteen boarded the elevator, their destination being the top floor of the tall apartment building. As they waited, Eighteen looked over the rifle neatly fastened to her brother's back.

"Do you really need that thing?" she asked.

"Absolutely. I am no longer a get-up-and-go fighter, you know."

"I mean here, at home. It makes me nervous" Eighteen corrected.

"Oh. Well, I dislike being parted with my rifle, but I suppose I could cloak it, so you do not see it."

Eito reached behind him and pressed a little button on the gun's side. It glowed bright white for a second, then completely disappeared, the only evidence of its existence being the slight cloth indent left by the sling. A few seconds later, the elevator doors slid open, leading into a curved, white-walled, and red-carpeted hallway, with frameless windows that allowed one to look out over the Sea of Japan, though the night's darkness prevented that. Every single room door on that floor was of the contemporary, gear-driven, vertical-sliding type, except for Eito's and Eighteen's. Their white-washed aluminum door was of the old hinge-and-knob variety, which they thought to be less of a mental hassle than the normal number pad. Unlocking the door and walking inside their shared apartment, Eighteen and Eito went into their own rooms


CHAPX-1

Goku thrust deeply into Eighteen, each gentle surge a loving kiss to the mouth of her womb. Their hips rocked in a slow, sensuous rhythm and each time he withdrew, her inner muscles closed involuntarily, only to be parted once more by his thick, lengthy, and powerfully hard shaft. Her bedroom soon filled with the wet, fluid sounds of two intertwined lovers moving together in perfect synchronization.

Goku stepped up the pace. He forcefully thrust and withdrew, thrust and withdrew, his strong member easily penetrating her cervix and filling her core with the solid flesh of a male saiyan.

POTENTIAL CHAP6-1
Startled, Ivan yanked his head up and looked across the rooftop at a tall, silver-haired man. He was dressed in a pair of ordinary blue jeans and a with a white shirt and jacket, but the rest of him was far from normal. Amber eyes, sharply-tapered ears, flowing silver hair, magenta stripes on his cheek, and a violet crescent moon in the center of his forehead - this was no Joe Everyman. Ivan's sadness turned into overpowered annoyance.

"Tell me what, who the fuck are you supposed to be?" Ivan shouted.

The man laughed heartily.

"Normally, I do not laugh in such a manner, but your similarity to Eito is simply riotous."

Ivan's fury grew supreme, and he whipped out the AK-47 on his back to bring it to bear on his new opponent. Yanking the safety lever down, the rifle's charging handle slammed forward, chambering a cartridge. Lining up his sights with his target's heart, Ivan grew calm and asked his first question again.

"Are you going to tell me who you are, or do I have to let a morgue identify you?"

The man sighed and smiled.

"I am the demon lord Sesshoumaru, and I am an acquaintance of Eito Hakari."

"Oh, bullshit. I know everything Eito knows, and I've never seen nor heard of you before. Besides, you expect me to believe you're some kind of magical demon? Come on! Work with me, here."

"If you do not believe me, have a look at this...." Sesshoumaru enticed, waving a large, brown, paper bag in front of him.

The ancient youkai set drew the bag back, then threw it across the roof over to where Ivan stood. The alarmed android took his left hand off of the foregrip of his rifle and caught the flying bag in midair. Lowering his weapon to his hip yet keeping it pointed at Sesshoumaru, Ivan turned the sack upside down, allowing its contents to fall on the gravel below. Lying on the ground with its backside facing up was a vest of black body armor, its fastening straps reduced to a few, haggard strips of thread. A small hole poked through the center of the back. Returning his hand to his weapon, Ivan flipped the vest over with a foot, and his breath hitched when he saw the markings. A large "1", displayed by long-dried out and peeling paint featured itself, but it was unimportant, because on the upper right chestplate was worn and frayed patch of cloth that read: "Eito". Below that was the sickening sight of a straight-vertical slash of a hole, resting right over the heart.

"How........how did you get this?" Ivan asked, barely restraining his rage.

"I took it off of Eito's body, right before I buried him."

"When the fuck was this?!

"Six-hundred years ago, General. Look inside the vest and you will receive the rest of your answer."

Franctically, Ivan shoved his hand through an arm-hole of the armor and searched, retrieving a rolled of piece of paper, sealed with a melted ball of wax. Breaking it open, he devoured the information it contained. It was a letter addressed to him.

General Ivan, Japanese Self-Defense Force

I have been watching you and your brother quite closely since those tumultuous days in 2064. You and Eito have done a marvelous job in protecting Japan. With so much zeal you have done so, in fact, your mere existence is enough to keep the rowdier Earth nations in line and hence keep Earth safe. This is essentially what Goku and company did so long ago, which brings me to the purpose of this letter.

As you undoubtedly know, you have been pursuing a man known as Goku, in reaction to the unfortunate events of the last two days, concerning your step-sister, Android Eighteen. You and Eito Hakari have managed to become ensnared in official Heaven business because of this. Two days ago, two residents of Heaven, names Vegeta and Bulma, broke into the soul storage department of heaven and kidnapped a soul from it. We do not know why they snatched that one up, nor do we know who it belonged to, as it was in line for identfication. Just today, they appeared on Earth at almost the exact same time Goku revived himself (that was the 900 gigawatt energy burst your Zastava detected).

Using a time machine locked away in Capsule Corp. storage, Vegeta and Bulma have essentially kidnapped Goku and this unknown soul, and taken them roughly six-hundred years into the past. Because Eito was enveloped in the time machine's energy well, he has been taken back in time, also. My agent, the Sesshoumaru you should be seeing before you, can attest to this. According to him, both Goku and your brother were killed in a large battle in 16th-century western Japan.

Your task is this: go back to the year 1542 and make sure both Goku and Eito survive their battle. This is necessary for a number of reasons. First, it should be done in order to prevent the unnecessary deaths of

DEATH SCENE

Sesshoumaru drew Tokijin and shoved it through Kib's heart. The Kai did not scream or even gasp at the sight of the sword buried in his chest. He simply looked down at the blade, running with streams of violet blood, opened his mouth to speak, then slumped forward to to the ground, dead. Ivan opened fire on the demon, causing tangerine-sized puffs of dark red mist to explode from Sesshoumaru's chest and dissipate in the air.

EITO'S DEATH SCENE

Eito cried out in horror as the blade of Kohaku's scythe sank into his chest and right through his pounding heart, the very tip of the weapon poking against the inner surface of the armor on his back. The transparent blood that the mortally wounded android had been coughing surged bright red and streamed from his mouth as his cries became sickening gurgles. Weakly and desperately, he clutched around in empty air for something to hold onto, latching onto the boy's shoulders. Eito's whole body slumped forward to rest in Kohaku's arms, the android's head drooping onto a shoulder. The young taijya's eyes blank and unfeeling.

The boy released the resistance in his arms and stepped back, letting Eito drop to his knees and fall forward to land face-flat in the dead sand with a dull ruffling sound. A pool of blood began to grow underneath him. Tears of fear formed in Eito's eyes, for he could no longer feel his own heartbeat, instead feeling the life gently ebb away. His vision blurred and darkened, fading away completely as he died. The brilliant green hue of his eyes faded away in tandem, dulling to their original sky blue. The final breath left his body, and in that moment, Eito Hakari died.

Ivan hadn't seen any of it, for he looked away in pain after the first inch of the scythe blade penetrated. Eito really was dead.

"Turn if off. Make it go away."

NARAKU CASTLE BATTLE

The tank rolled up to the peak of the grassy ridge overlooking Naraku's castle. A hatch groaned open and Eito Hakari poked his head out, followed by General Ivan out of the hatch left of that one. Frowning, Eito brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the castle grounds. It looked much like Sesshoumaru's abode, but was elevated high above the ground, looking more like a short tower. No living foliage came within three hundred yards of the ghastly, violet fumes that permeated Naraku's castle. The miasma killed off all the grass and even the toughest of weeds, leaving dry, barren sand in its place, any fertile soil long since sterilized. Zooming in further, Eito spotted Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru in the main courtyard, completely surrounded by Naraku's demon horde. They were fighting a losing battle. With each undead soldier the brothers cut down, three more took that one's place and advanced closer.

"Idiots......they will be overwhelmed" Eito muttered.

Moments later, Eito's radio chattered up, and the android answered it.

"Eito, Ivan, this is Goku. Vegeta and I are watching from the other side of the ridge, and we're waiting for Naraku to show before we engage. Ivan, if you've got a machine-gun in that tank of yours, I suggest you use it mow down the monsters that Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru are fighting! Eito, I need you to go in on foot and cause trouble in the rear of the castle. Naraku won't do anything, but he'll probably send Kohaku out. At that time, subdue and restrain him, because I want him alive. Understand?"

"Got it" Ivan said, dropping down to the tank gunner's seat and yanking back the coaxial machine-guns charging handle.

Eito grimaced. This whole thing was degrading from bad to awful in record time. Hostage situations had the unique capability of turning out legendarily badly

----------EITO VS. KOUGA

Eito slid through the deep summer forest with gun in hand, searching for his Kagura. His EM detector registered a burst of energy to the south, and with all speed he was was heading there. 800 meters, 700 meters, 600 meters, 500 meters - the distance to that vague point drew smaller and smaller as Eito pressed forward into the dark woods. At 300 meters from his destination, the trees cleared and melted away into a wide open and grassy field. Far out in the distance, the android warrior spied two figures near one another, without discernable movement.

Eito pulled up his binoculars and zoomed in on the unknown beings. To his appreciation, one of them was Kagura, but that attitude turned into shock and then rage when he saw who the second one was.

Kouga.

He had Kagura on her knees, the demoness sobbing and begging for mercy as the sharp steel blade of the wolf's katana slowly penetrated the cloth of her thick kimono and pressed painfully into the creamy skin of her back, resting just to the side of her spine. He laughed as she cried, enjoying having Kagura at his mercy.

"How do you like it, bitch? Do you like the feel of my sword against you, ready to push through your warm, squirming organs and end your miserable life?"

Kagura whimpered and weakly struggled against his grip, unable to do anything significant, due to the sharp blade behind her. Kouga snickered and leaned close to her, sniffing her hair then licking the outer shell of her left ear.

"Mmm...you smell good....for a stupid whore, that is. I will enjoy this greatly, and the spirits of my kin are probably looking down at you right now and laughing their asses off, because you're going to Hell, Kagura. You're going to die, because I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"

"Please, Kouga.....don't do this.....I didn't want to kill your kin....it's not my fault! Naraku made me do it, and you know that! Why are you still trying to kill me?"

"Because, Kagura, Naraku is dead, and I still want revenge. You'll do just fine for that" Kouga said, his voice chilling Kagura's heart.

Eito sneered and cursed inside his mind. This was unacceptable. Kouga was trying to murder Kagura, and if nothing was done, he would succeed. Gently and silently, Eito lowered himself to his knees and then to his stomach, crawling prone through the dark, waist-high grass to a rising hill. He slid himself to it's crest, letting him look down onto his love and his new target. He unslung his rifle with care, as any noise could easily reach Kouga's sensitive demon ears. Slowly, Eito turned the bolt on his Mauser and pulled it back a bit. A cartridge sat in the chamber, and it was ready to go. Locking it back into place, Eito took a quick look through his binoculars again, reading its range display. At 321 meters away from Kouga and Kagura, and even with his accurate firearm, this would be a tricky shot to pull off. Eito's line of view let him see Kouga and Kagura almost perfectly from the side, and that angle didn't provide a big target. The most reliable way would be to shoot at either Kouga's front or back, but given the situation, he couldn't just ask him to turn a certain way. He needed to get Kouga's attention, and the way to do so came quickly.

Eito moved his hand the the bolt handle of his rifle once more, silently rotating to the side and pulling it back, this time all the way. The 8mm cartridge locked inside ejected in the process, disappearing into the tall grass to Eito's side, but he didn't care. He only needed one shot, and he still had four left. Eyeing Kouga while moving to close the bolt and chamber another round, Eito slammed it forward as hard and loudly as he could, chambering another round. To Eito's approval Kouga's ears perked up and he took his eyes off Kagura, looking around for the source of the odd, metallic sound.

Kouga had turned a quarter of the way Eito wanted, but it was not enough. He pulled the stock of his rifle into his shoulder and drew his bayonet from his bag, holding it against the metal of the gun's barrel. He set the elevation to 300 meters and peered through the sights, lining up Kouga's chest as best he could. He began to tap the bayonet's blade on the gun, creating an audible clink with each tap.

Kouga raised an eyebrow. He was hearing another sound, this one repeating itself. He turned to his right and drew his blade away from Kagura's back to again find the source of the sound. To the best of his ability, he localized it to a hill in the far distance, near the treeline. Squinting, he caught sight of what appeared to be a black-haired head, half-hidden by grass. His ice blue eyes widened when he realized that someone was watching him. The tapping stopped. Eito closed his left eye. Kouga froze. A gloved finger pulled a trigger.

Kouga saw a small but brilliant flash of white light split the night and screamed out when he felt a searing pain in his stomach, a mere fraction of a second later. A tangerine-sized puff of black mist exploded from either face of Kouga's torso and faded away into the air. Simultaneously, he heard a roaring, echoing boom. His body recoiled backward and his legs gave out from underneath him, for the bullet found its mark. Kouga lay in the grass dazed and wide-eyed, a terrible pain shooting through his lower right waist while everything else went numb.

Eito smiled as the last wisps of smoke rose away from the muzzle of his rifle. His devastating feat of marksmanship managed to lay Kouga out in one shot, the heavy bullet punching right through his body to bury itself into earth behind him. Eito contemplated the need for a second or even a third bullet, but decided not to deal with it and rose from his sniping point. He slipped the bayonet over the front of the gun's barrel, then took off running toward Kouga's fallen form. Charging through the grass, Eito ran with fury, determined to reach his love before the wolf demon had a chance to get back up and possibly finish his sadistic goal.

----------SESSHOUMARU BEATS UP EITO

Sesshoumaru stood above Seventeen's roughly breathing form, and with burning amber eyes, watched him twitch and groan as he lay on his side, clutching his stomach and whimpering in pain. What appeared to be drool ran from the android's mouth and disappeared into the grass underneath him, his breathing so similar to an cold-induced sniffle it appeared that he might be coming down with one. Sesshoumaru was utterly disgusted with this ridiculous excuse for a guard soldier. He was drooling, and in front of him, the demon lord Sesshoumaru?

"You are truly pathetic, more so than the average pathetic ningen" the lord hissed.

"T-that would be....jinzo-ningen to you.........you pointy-eared mother fucker....." Seventeen rasped, struggling for air.

Sesshoumaru snarled and kicked Seventeen in the stomach with powerful anger, then flipped him onto his back, knelt down, then with his left fist, pummeled into the exact same spot, over and over again. Seventeen screamed at each blow, his screams becoming weaker and weaker as his steel armor compressed further and further, forced into him with each of Sesshoumaru's punches. Thankfully, Sesshoumaru soon halted his assault, giving Seventeen a chance to breath in the little oxygen he could. Unfortunately, the demon lord stopped not because of some inkling of mercy. He stopped because he decided that Seventeen was not worth keeping around and alive. Insolence was unacceptable, especially from a soldier tasked with defending the castle.

Sesshoumaru pulled back slightly and drew Tokijiin out of the ornate sheath underneath his sash. Through blurred and barely open eyes, Seventeen saw the gleaming blade of Sesshoumaru's straight sword drawing near, and he growled in subdued anger.

"Go ahead.....you bastard. Kill me for wanting to help. Kill me for being more honorable than you. Punish the unjust and chivalrous alike for no reason other than offending you!"

With a snarl, the enraged youkai lord seized Seventeen's throat with one hand, while pressing the blade's tip into the center of his collarbone, hidden by a few layers of woven cloth. Seventeen huffed in amusement, closed his eyes, and went limp in Sesshoumaru's grip, not caring anymore. If the demon ruler was going to kill him, he would be able to see Eighteen all that much sooner.

"Fine. Do it. I regret nothing" Seventeen said, all anger subsiding and calm returning to his mind.

With that, Seventeen stretched out and made himself comfortable for death. He threw one foot over the over and locked his hands behind his head. He began to softly sing a tune, too.

"If you're gonna die, die with your boots on. If you're gonna die, well, stand your ground. Gonna cry? Just move along, if you're gonna die, you're gonna die!"

----------SESSHOUMARU MAROONS EITO

"Kneel."

Seventeen yelped as the enchanted necklace of demon teeth around his neck glowed bright blue and pulled him toward the grassy earth with invisible, magical hands, forcing him down to one knee in a kneel, as per the demon's command. Sesshoumaru slowly stepped up to the subdued android, and Seventeen grimaced, anticipating a blow to his jaw, much like Daisuke had done many times before. Enraged, Sesshoumaru drew back a fist and prepared to lay Seventeen out in one punch. He so badly wanted to beat the tar out of this insolent ningen. His teeth gritted and his fist trembled with focused strength, but he faltered. He turned away and lunged at a dead tree, punching it instead of Seventeen.

Sesshoumaru's right fist blasted clean through the bark and sank into the wood below, shaking a flurry of leaves from its branches, each one fluttering and softly falling to the ground from the sheer force in the punch. The demon lord snarled and withdrew his hand, a few cuts lining the knuckles and black demon blood spilling of them. Rubbing it annoyance, he returned to Seventeen, who sat in shock, unable to process the fact that Sesshoumaru hadn't hit him. Breaking free of the subduing spell, Seventeen stood up and graciously thanked Sesshoumaru for not attacking him.

"Thank you for n--"

"Kneel!"

Seventeen crashed down to the ground with a thud, groaning at the slight pain. Sesshoumaru used the subduing spell with much greater vehemence, his displeasure with his soldier quite evident, even after nearly breaking his hand on a tree trunk. Using the left arm so graciously donated to him by Seventeen, Sesshoumaru grabbed the shorter warrior by the back of his black haori and yanked him up, the android' feet dangling a full foot above the ground. He used his other hand to draw Seventeen's katana from its sheath. The android cringed at the sight, believing death really hadn't decided to spare him.

Instead of running him through, Sesshoumaru walked them both over to a tall oak tree, floated to a thick, high-up branch, and shoved the katana in his hand through the back of Seventeen's collar, firmly nailing him to that branch. Sesshoumaru floated away a few feet, and Seventeen opened his eyes, for he closed them to avoid watching Sesshoumaru stab him to death. He caught sight of Sessshoumaru, then looked down and saw the ground. However, the ground was fifty feet away, because he was fifty feet up in the air.

"Hey, what are you doing?" Seventeen asked, alarmed by his spatial situation.

"I am punishing you for your insolence. I am a fair demon, so I decided it would be best not to beat you to death, even for such a low remark. You are to stay there until tomorrow afternoon, which should give you plenty of time to contemplate your own disrespect toward me. I advise you to do just that, because you will likely break your legs in the fall" Sesshoumaru explained, a stoic smile gracing his face at the sight of Seventeen's predicament.

Sesshoumaru turned away and floated down to the ground, beginning to trudge off into the forest, making his way home. Seventeen just watched in amazement at the silver-haired demon as he walked away. Sesshoumaru could have easily torn his head off, but he didn't. He didn't even as much as push him, though the subduing spell hurt a bit. Maybe, after all, Sesshoumaru was a fair demon, preferring odd, creative ways of discipline in lieu of simple beatings. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad under the demon's command. Seventeen smiled a bit, then could not resist grinning, because he realized that this would be better living than most of his previous life had been. He called out to the demon lord.

"Well, good night, then, Sesshoumaru-sama!!!" Seventeen shouted, laughing all the while.

Sesshoumaru just waved his hand in acknowledgement. Seventeen shook his head and chuckled to himself, but the impetus of the whole affair returned to him. Kagura. Seventeen had been looking forward to seeing her again, for his first encounter with her had been....intriguing, despite Daisuke's interruption. She had been seductive, confident, and uplifting to be near, and he could not see why Sesshoumaru would see her as an enemy. Sesshoumaru ordered him away from Kagura, and he had been rather forceful with his command, going so far as to seize him by an arm and personally drag him away, much to his anger. Thankfully, That anger only got him nailed to a tree, the other possibilities being far more unpleasant. Still, it annoyed him that he could not see the enchanting demoness again.

Oh, well. There would be other opportunities to visit with her. For now, all Seventeen could do was hang from his own sword, up in the canopy of a tall oak tree, and ponder his own thoughts. Not long after Sesshoumaru left, Seventeen yawned, tucked his hands inside his armor, and fell asleep midair.

FALSE KAGURA/SEVENTEEN NONCON

Seventeen awoke feeling well-rested, but braced himself before opening his eyes, as looking down at the far away ground would be an unwelcome shock after such a peaceful rest. Slowly, he slid his eyes open, expecting to find himself looking out over the forest treetops, but instead, found himself lying on a soft futon, bathed in a single beam of sunlight that shone from a hole in the rock ceiling, looking up at the stone stalactites of a dank cave. He jolted up, but groaned when a tense force yanked on his wrists. He was chained to the stone floor!

"Sesshoumaru must have double-crossed me........." Seventeen thought.

That theory quickly evaporated when Seventeen looked down at his body. Except for a white sheet draped over his manhood, he was completely naked. The cold steel of the chains around his ankles and wrists made him feel even more vulnerable.

"What the fuck?!?!" Seventeen screamed mentally.

A dark figure emerged from the shadows, a dark, seductive smile playing across her lips. She wore both green and blue kimonos, as well as a heavy, crimson-striped one on the outside, all three tied off by a golden sash. Her ebony hair formed into a small tail at the back of her head, tied off by a leather wrap. Her ears tapered into fine points, and her blood-red eyes swept up and down the muscular form of her new catch.

"K-Kagura??" Seventeen asked, unsure of himself, her, or the whole situation.

Her smile widened into a grin and she moved her right hand to the knot of the golden sash around her waist, teasingly undoing it while covering her face with the fan in her other hand, letting her eyes peek out from over it. Seventeen's mind screamed at him. So much was happening at once, and it's owner could not think straight, especially with the heightening arousal pulsing through his veins at the sight of Kagura undressing for him. The red-and-white kimono pooled around the demoness's small feet, though two more layers of cloth remained. There was still a chance to stop this.

"Kagura......w-what are you doing? Seventeen asked, the quaver of both fear and desire shaking his voice.

"Do you not desire this body?" the woman asked, imitating innocence.

"Kagura....."

"I will take that as a yes" she confirmed.

She stepped away from the cloth on the floor and stopped just in front of it, her right hand coming to rest at and beginning to undo the knot holding her second, blue kimono together. Eventually, it surrendered its hold on the cold body contained within, and it too pooled around this false Kagura's ankles. Seventeen's cock was now raging hard and pulsating with his artificial blood and real desire, yet fear permeated his mind. Would Kagura really do this? Would she really capture him, nail him to the floor, and ride him like some common animal? Gods, he hoped not. Indeed, he had taken a shine to Kagura, but was unsure of her feelings and did not pursue the matter any further, for now, at least. He needed time. He needed time to decide if Kagura would really be the one for him, and not reject him if the question ever arose. Why would she thrust herself forward at him now, offering her body to him?

"Kagura, please stop this! Do not continue!" Seventeed pleaded, tears starting to form in his eyes.

He didn't want this. He didn't want her in this way. If he took her, or her him, he wanted it to be in a warm bed next to a single burning candle, a cool summer wind blowing in through the slightly cracked-open window, giving much needed relief to their heated, intertwined bodies. He wanted it to be slow and sensuous, not fast and meaningless, like it had been with Pan. His tryst with her weighed heavily on his mind forevermore afterward. How could such fantastic pleasure not meet with a meaningful relationship afterward? She simply left him in the hotel, leaving him alone to his own unhappiness and confusion.

Seventeen realized he was naive to think that such a one-night stand could lead to anything worthwhile, but he never gave up the hope of finding that certain someone, vowing never to succumb to wasted desire. If Kagura continued on her alarming, yet arousing path, that vow would be broken, and so would he.

She moaned in the throes of acted passion, moving her hands over her covered breasts and upper stomach before settling them on the knot of her final, light green kimono, tightly fisting the ties in her hands. This was the last layer before her intimate bindings revealed themselves to Seventeen's view. By this time, his fear had fermented into outright anger. Enough was enough.

"Kagura, stop this or I will be forced to stop you myself!"

The demoness's hands, previously working the tie to her kimono, slowed at their task and stopped completely, then rested on her hips, swaying them slightly in a mocking manner. She pouted mockingly while Seventeen sneered. The android looked around him. He could faintly make out the shiny outlines of his armor lying against the stone wall, a black mass, presumably his clothes, lying underneath it. He looked at the tent that his manhood had formed with the sheet, and he mentally cursed. He would have to make a move to get his clothes, meaning he'd be completely stark naked, likely to Kagura's amusement.

"War is hell, I suppose" Seventeen thought.

Tossing his inhibitions to the wayside, he concentrated and focused small, yet powerful charges of his energy in each arm and leg, and tensed his muscles in preparation for his breakout. All at once, he grunted and pulled hard on each chain, the metal links beginning to contort and weaken. The false Kagura had other ideas, though. She raised a single hand into the air and snapped her thumb and middle fingers together, the resulting sound echoing all throughout the cave. Seventeen immediately froze at the inhuman growls that boomed from the darkness. All around him, he could sense many dozens of predatorial eyes watching him, circling him, readying themselves for the pounce.

"Fuck...."

Seventeen pulled on his left arm and the chain binding it down snapped into pieces. Frantically, he pulled on his other, but it was too late. The unseen demons made their move. The android sensed a rapidly approaching presence, and he turned his head to see a giant, red-eyed, three-foot tall spider, its exoskeleton shiny black and the joints between its leg segments deep violet, leaping at him. It tackled his freed shoulder and slammed it to the ground, causing Seventeen to scream out from both pain and terror. Soon, three more arachnids joined the fray, each one holding down a leg or an arm.

Naraku's imitation of Kagura laughed triumphantly, for Seventeen would not be getting away. She wasted no time in slipping out of her thin, green kimono, revealing her smooth, creamy white flesh underneath, her intimate areas still covered by the cloth wrap. She stepped into the beam of sunlight that Seventeen lay in, and stepped between the hissing and twitching spiders that were pinning the android to the ground. Seventeen shuddered and screwed his eyes shut as the counterfeit demoness knelt between his legs and crawled over him, laying herself flat over him, leg to leg, chest to chest, and face to face.

Seventeen turned his head away, avoiding the chilly, feminine breath that blew over his pulse point. He feared what was about to happen. It was now clear that Kagura intended to rape him, because she certainly was not taking "no" for an answer. The android weighed his options, but sadly, all he could do was lie there on that futon and let the demoness do what she would with him. He shuddered as she licked over the throbbing veins in his neck and placed feather-light kisses up and down its length, working along his jaw and inching closer to his mouth. At last, she pressed her lips to his. Seventeen tensed, and after only scant seconds of the intimate contact, broke away,cried out in disgust, then in a flash of anger, side-swiped the demoness's head with his own. She yelped in pain, the growled and returned the headbutt, with double the force.

Seventeen's arms and legs, pinned down and held away from him by the now silent arachnids, went limp from the blow; he was unprepared for its ferocity. Uryoko pushed off him, reached down, and seized the stunned android's face in one small, yet powerfully strong hand, and stared directly into his blurred, green eyes. She saw a myriad of emotions: pain, fear, anger, and most deliciously, defeat. He was beaten, for he knew that he could not win.

Uryoko laughed and slid down Seventeen's body, raking her hands over the smooth panes of his narrow yet well-sculped chest, sliding them over his ribcage, and sweeping them over the finely toned muscles of his stomach, finally stopping them at the edge of the white sheet of cloth that covered him. She grinned in amused anticipation when she laid eyes over his aroused yet concealed manhood, for a shimmering wet spot had formed at the apex of the bulge, a telltale sign of his excitement. With a theatrical sweep of Uryoko's hands, the soaked sheet fluttered into the cold, damp darkness of the cave. Her eyes grew dark and lusty when she looked upon the erect shaft before her. Nine inches tall and at least two inches thick, it was large, heavy, and iron hard, swollen with Seventeen's unwilling arousal. A thick line of clear liquid oozed from the tip, spilling over the bulbous head and running down the underside. She giggled, for all she had really done so far was undress and grind herself a bit.

Seventeen gasped as Uryoko wrapped both hands around his cock, and whimpered pathetically when he felt her death cold breath on it. Fighting his own urge to remain ignorant of his own plight, the now trembling android eased his head up to look down into those blood red eyes, just in him to see her smile and engulf his shaft in the wet and cold flesh of her mouth.

He threw his head back and his scream echoed off the uncaring stone of the dank cavern. The sensation sickened him yet ridiculously, provided ample fuel for his carnal desires. The cold lining of this Kagura's mouth felt as cold as death, as if it were not a living being plundering him, but rather a recently deceased corpse. Uryoko moaned and shoved her plump, red lips down onto Seventeen's member as far as she could, taking him into the furthest and most lifeless recesses of her throat. She smiled at the groans coming from above her, and drew her mouth back, leaving a fine coat of cool saliva on the exiting shaft. Seventeen bucked and strained as hard as he could, but the spiders tightened their grip on him, gently pressing their fangs into his limbs as a warning.

Uryoko waited for Seventeen to surrender to the fangs of her spider minions, then resumed her


GENERAL IVAN APPEARS IN FEUDAL JAPAN

On a large, grassy, morning-lit glade located just a mile from Sesshoumaru's castle , a spherical shell of crackling white light formed ten feet above the ground. Before it imploded, out leapt General Ivan, who, with a muffled thump, landed on a foot and a knee, with his Kalashnikov charged and ready for battle. Instinctively, he pulled the rifle's stock into his shoulder and peered through the weapon's sights, and fanned his aimed gaze just above the swaying tips of the grass blades, searching the landscape for potential enemies. Seeing none, he lowered his gun and stood up, looking around the area much more calmly. According to Kibito-kai, Sesshoumaru's castle lay straight south of his insertion point, and it would only require a twenty-minute walk to reach it. Quickly, he unclipped a single strap on his magazine bandolier, and reached into a large chest pocket, pulling out a metal compass. He flipped it open and analyzed his position.

"Let me see.....Eito is to the south, and I.....am......facing.........northwest!"

Ivan looked over his left shoulder and immediately felt like an idiot, for there, sitting high on a hill, prominent and obvious, was the castle. He grinned, snapped his compass shut, stuffed it back into his pocket, and reclipped his bandolier, then slowly turned and simply looked the structure over. Even from this range, it was massive, at least 200 yards wide. A short, sprawling manor house sat on top of wide, stone steps, surrounded by an elaborately decorated wall, with dozens of village houses at the base of the hill, the whole thing protected by a double-layered ring of sharpened logs sticking up from the ground. He could the little dots of many people bustling around inside, horse-drawn carts leaving and entering.

"Eito sure knows how to live" Ivan snickered to himself.

With that, he slung his AK-47 behind his back, shoved his hands into his pockets, then descended the hill, en route to his sibling reunion. Immediately after reaching the hill's bottom, he found a dirt road leading up to the village perimeter, so he decided to follow it. It was a well-traveled path, and even with the early hour, it was busy with movement. Any people that Ivan did happen upon gave the android an odd look when they laid eyes on his outfit, and picked up their stride a bit. Ivan smiled but continued on unhindered by their reactions. When he arrived at the front gate, two silver-haired men and a little, beaked, and green-skinned toad creature peered down at him from the top of the timber wall, the latter calling out to Ivan.

"Who are you, and what is your business on our land?" Jaken shouted.

"Hello! I'm looking for the guard commander! I wish to speak with him!" Ivan returned.

"Are you from near here?" the toad continued.

"No, I am not."

"Well, then, whose lands do you represent?"

Ivan thought for a moment. Since this was feudal Japan, he would have to choose his words carefully, or risk being shot by nearby archers. He didn't pretend to know anything about the local principalities, so he made up his own story. He became Lord Ivan of Zastava.

"I am Lord Ivan, ruler of the faraway land of Zastava, which lies far across the sea. I have heard many tales of the feats that that your master's soldiers have performed in battle, and I have to see them for myself" the android explained.

Jaken frowned and clutched his staff tightly. Lord Sesshoumaru was in a meeting with Number Seventeen, discussing their strategy for the assault of Naraku's castle. The demon lord would be displeased with the interruption, but to simply shun away a foreign lord would be to invite hostility, something definitely not required at that moment, given the terse situation. The little toad demon looked closely at this "lord" down on the ground, who stood there looking up at him with visible impatience. His clothes were odd, with a furry, circular hat on his head and various pockets all over his pants and top. A strange metal contraption hung from a shoulder, the only indication of its function being the metal blade folded underneath its length. Jaken sighed, then gave in.

"Very well. I will notify Lord Sesshoumaru. You, down there, Open the gates!"

Another inu-youkai soldier, who leaned up against the gate's massive frame, stirred to life, and removed the wooden timber from the metal brackets behind the door. With ease, General Ivan pushed the left one open, though it easily weighed a ton, due to the forged iron reinforcement. Jaken climbed down a tall bamboo ladder and walked up to the "lord".

"Follow me, Lord Ivan." he said.

Silently, the two walked up the center village street, the boards laid down on it sinking slightly into the mud as they walked. Along the way, Ivan garnered even more suspicious stares from those he walked by, the soldiers in particular. The human ones frowned and shrugged, while the demons bared their fangs somewhat and stifled hostile growls. Ivan paid them no heed. At last, Jaken and General Ivan passed under the arch that allowed entry to the castle. The short toad led the android to the center pond.

"Wait here" Jaken said, then scurried off into the manor.

Ivan sat down on the edge on the pool and removed both his rifle and ushanka, setting them next to him scratching his closely-shaven hair with a gloved hand. While he rested, Jaken jogged through the halls to the main staircase, climbing them like a rock-climber might scale a cliff's face. The daily exertions of a small being living in a structure designed for much larger ones could prove strenuous. At last, he arrived on the second floor, then bounded down the patterned carpet to rest at the heavy wooden door of Sesshoumaru's study. Jaken tilted his hat to one side and pressed an ear to the door. An argument was taking place.

"Lord Sesshoumaru, if we attack from that direction, every single soldier thrown in there will be slaughtered! That includes my own division!" Seventeen gawked, incredulous at the demon's suicidal battle strategy.

"I am fully aware of that. However, attacking Naraku's castle from any other direction would mean trying to surmount a vertical stone wall, one with no footings and too high to jump over, even by an inu-youkai. You and I would be the only ones capable of getting over, and those odds are not any more encouraging" Sesshoumaru calmly replied.

Seventeen groaned and leaned over the table he and Sesshoumaru stood at, bracketing the crudely-drawn map with splayed out, gloved hands. His straight, black hair spilled down on either side of his head, hiding the fretful look on his face. This battle was proving to be hellish, even in the planning stages. Most, if not all, troops committed might not come back alive, or at all. Worse, the presence of such warriors was crucial

"What about your brother, Sesshoumaru-sama?" Seventeen asked, still looking down at the map, a withered sheet of paper with a large circle and the word "NARAKU" written in bold letters next to it.

Sesshoumaru growled at the thought. Naraku burned down his childhood home and he did not want to share the revenge with anyone.

Jaken turned to the soldiers flanking him and whispered quietly to them.

got within a hundred yards of the outer village perimeter before an arrow punctured the dirt in front of his feet. Ivan recoiled in surprise, threw himself behind a tree, and reached a hand behind his back, wrapping it around the handle of his gun, ready to draw it. Up on top of the timber wall that encircled the village and castle, a silver-haired man dressed in green robes, black armor, and with a crossbow in hand called out to him.

"You there, in the hat! You are on our territory! Identify yourself!"

"This is General Ivan of the Japanese Self-Defense Force! I wish to speak with your lord!"

"Oh, what about?" the demon soldier asked.

"Does it matter to you? I would think not!

According to Kibito-kai, Ivan was a twenty-minute walk from this Sesshoumaru's abode, a comfortable distance to the android, as he understood that feudal Japanese lords were zealously territorial, and anyone that got too close got killed. The wish made upon the Dragonballs set him down

"I think I'll put on a show for Eito....." Ivan thought.

The thoughtful android reached into his shoulder bag and retrieved a small capsule, one designed by Capsule Corporation. It was labeled: "T-55" He clicked its activation button, threw it on the ground, then widened his heels and threw his arms out, two spheres of golden light surging out of his arms. Those spheres warped and took the form of Ivans Two and Three, each clone quickly snapping their heels and saluting. Grinning, Ivan One gave them a command.

"Gentlemen, let's make a scene, shall we?"

"Yes sir!" Two and Three replied, snickering equally.

Atop the timber wall of the village perimeter, two sky-blue haired inu-youkai women were sitting at their posts, watching the grassy distance for enemy attackers. Naraku's incursions into their territory, in the past, had been frequent and vicious, requiring the need for all of Sesshoumaru charges, male and female alike, to rotate shifts at each watch tower. One female dog-demon was adjusting the sights on her crossbow when she saw her counterpart perk up.

"Do you see something?" she said.

"No....I hear something" the other replied.

Both stiffened and stilled their breathing for a moment, searching for the odd sound. It was a rumbling, bass-like, impossible to localize, and almost organic in nature, like a giant, rapidly breathing animal. Alarmed, each huntress hunkered down below the cover that the lip of the timber wall provided, and scanned the distant treeline for movement. The sound was getting louder and stronger by the moment, as the boards beneath them were vibrating slightly. They slid an arrow into their weapons and locked back the bolt, ready for combat.

Suddenly, the bass rumble exploded into a lurching, roar, with the faint squeak of metal grinding on metal beneath it. Far away and atop a certain hill, some thing crept into view, spouting thick, black smoke from its ass and its curved, bowl-shaped head swiveling from side to side, as if surveying a hunting ground. Each demoness whirled around and cried out to the hornman down on the ground.

"WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! SOUND THE ALARM!!"

The human male sitting next to a ten-foot long horn jerked to life at the comment, hurredly springing up and pulling the bone tube to his mouth. The crooning siren rang out throughout the entire castle grounds. Dozens of soldiers with dozens more hot on their heels burst out of dozens of houses, throwing on their armor and grabbing for their crossbows and swords, each one sprinting to the ladders that connected the top of the timber wall to the ground. Within moments, the wall's whole circumference was jam-packed with military might, not one single scrap on area uncovered by some sort of defense. Seventeen's "upgrades" to Sesshoumaru's army were hard at work.

The monster that threatened the castle let loose a roar, then belched more inky fumes as it groaned forward, descending its earthen perch and leaving deep trenches in its wake. Not one single being present for this display, demon or human alike, knew just what the hell had been unleashed upon them. However, inside Sesshoumaru's manor and behind the door of his den, Android Seventeen and the demon lord himself sat on either side of a floor table, arguing over the best way to assault Naraku's castle, the banter of their voices managing to drown out the already heavily-muffled noise of the horn's wail. They had no idea of what was happening outside the walls of their conference room.

"Lord Sesshoumaru, if we attack from that direction, every single soldier thrown in there will be slaughtered! That includes my own division!" Seventeen gawked, incredulous at the demon's suicidal battle strategy.


"I am fully aware of that. However, attacking Naraku's castle from any other direction would mean trying to surmount a vertical stone wall, one with no footings and too high to jump over, even by an inu-youkai. You and I would be the only ones capable of getting over, and those odds are not any more encouraging" Sesshoumaru calmly replied.

Seventeen groaned and leaned over the table he and Sesshoumaru stood at, bracketing the crudely-drawn map with splayed out, gloved hands. His straight, black hair spilled down on either side of his head, hiding the fretful look on his face. This battle was proving to be hellish, even in the planning stages. Most, if not all, troops committed might not come back alive, or even at all.

Just then, a mortified Jaken burst through the door of the study, hopping up and down and trying to form words as he clutched onto his wooden staff. The android and demon looked at the short toad-demon in confusion mixed with intrigue.

"Jaken, what is it? We are busy" Sesshoumaru said.

"We've come under attack! A monster is on the rampage not a half-mile from the village wall!"

Both Seventeen and Sesshoumaru hastily climbed to their feet, annoyed that Naraku knew the most inopportune times to attack. Seventeen grabbed his crossbow and charged it, hustling out of the den and down the stairs, with Sesshoumaru following close behind. The moment they exited the manor, they were greeted with unholy, alien sounds of the furious creature nearby, as well as the yells of numerous soldiers as they opened crossbow fire on it. Their arrows flew straight and true, but merely bounced off the thick armor of the lurching steel beast.

As Sesshoumaru and Seventeen rushed to the village perimeter, the android noted how mechanical this "monster" sounded. It didn't sound like any demon or animal he had seen of fought thus far. If anything, it sounded like a roaring diesel engine, with its throttle wide open. Reaching the thick wooden wall, Sesshoumaru picked up Seventeen by the back of his armor, and floated them up to a spot on the defensive line, where two warriors had shuffled aside in order to make room.

As soon as Seventeen gained his footing on the wooden gangplanks and peered over the wall's edge at whatever it was that was making such a mess, his jaw dropped open ever so slightly and his eyes went wide with realization.

This was not a monster, not in the stereotypical, fairy-tale sense, anyway.

This was a Russian T-55. There, down on the ground, spinning in place and mashing the dirt with its steel treads was a damned battle tank, happily roaring away in 16th century Japan. Only one person could have the technology, not to mention the flamboyance to bring such an anachronistic war machine to this place, to this time, to prance about in it solely for the purpose of showing off.

Ivan. General Ivan.

Seventeen had no idea was to think, much less what to feel. His brother was right there, right in front of him! He had not seen him in three years, and he couldn't decide just how to express his relief at seeing him again. Despite this, a stupid grin grew across Seventeen's face, and he absently dropped his weapon, letting it clatter onto the gangplank. His fists clenched into tight balls and he began hopping up and down like a giddy schoolboy. He laughed heartily and tears of happiness began to flow freely.

Ivan, only Ivan.

Sesshoumaru looked to his guard commander and immediately thought him a loon, as he seemed to have lost all emotional control. He watched with a mix of unexpressed confusion and puzzlement as the android abandoned his weapons and hopped down the ladder, running to and frantically unsealing the giant wooden door, slipping through it and sprinting off toward the giant metal beast that had closed to less than one-hundred yards.

Even more intriguing was the fact that the creature stopped spinning in place, and apparently, humans were beginning to pile out of a newly-opened portal atop its head. Each was dressed exactly alike the others, with bluish gray pants, coats, and odd-looking, circular hats, with shining black boots and gloves. They stood in a line in front of the now-silent monster, arms folded neatly across their chests. All together, they began to sing, theirs voices melting together in an eerie choir.

Do svidunia, bereg rodnoy
~Farewell again, our dear land.~
Kak nam troodno predstahvit shtoh eto nyeh sohn.
~So hard for us to imagine that it's real, and not a dream.~
Rodina, dom radnoy,
~Motherland, native home,~
Do svidunia Rodina.
~Farewell, our Motherland.~
I v pokhod, I v pokhod, nas volna morskaya zhdyot nyeh dazhdyotsyah.
~Let's go; the sea is waiting for us.~
Nass zahvuot morskaya dah, ee preeboy!
~The vastness of the sea is calling to us, and the tides! ~
The enchanting musical verse ended with Ivan One stepping forward, holding out an arm, and catching one of Seventeen's causing them to dance a little jig around in the grass. They laughed out loud as they spun around, then abruptly broke away, threw a few playful, yet lightning-fast punches at each other, then heartily shook gloved hands.
"Brother, Brother, Brother! Wherever have you been?" Ivan asked rhetorically, grinning madly.
"I took up a new job, you could say" Seventeen beamed.
"That's some job you have there" Ivan noted, releasing Seventeen's hand and leaning to one side to get a better look at the castle. "What are you, like a lieutenant or something?"
"Oh, please. A lieutenant? No, I am the demon lord Sesshoumaru's territory guard leader!" Seventeen proudly replied.
"Would that be him flying toward us now?" Ivan asked, looking up torward the airborne form of Sesshoumaru, who had just leapt off the village wall and taken flight.
Seventeen turned around to see Sesshoumaru land ten feet away from him. He had Tokijiin partially unsheathed, ready to fight. He held up his arms in an attempt to quell the alarmed demon lord.
"It is all right, Sesshoumaru-sama! This one is not an enemy" Seventeen explained, pointing to his brother.
Sesshoumaru looked Ivan and the two others like him over with great scrutiny. Their mode of dress did not indicate them to be local residents. If anything, they looked dressed for a bitter winter, as the the clothing on them appeared to made entirely out of wool. A set of rectangular pouches adorned their chests, each one bulging with odd, thin, and metal boxes. A contraption built from wood and metal and appearing to be a weapon hung from a canvas strap that ran diagonally across those pouch sets. Despite these oddities, each oddly dressed human bore a striking resemblance to Seventeen, the only real difference being the color of their eyes and hair. Sesshoumaru slowly resheathed his sword and stepped up next to Android Seventeen, staring Ivan down.
"Who are you, and why have you feigned an attack on my castle?" Sesshoumaru asked of Ivan.
General Ivan jolted to attention, motioned for Two and Three to line up next to him, and knelt respectfully for the demon lord. Ivans two and Three followed suit, hopping off of their tank to kneel on either side of One.
"Forgive us for the intrusion, Lord Sesshoumaru. We could not ignore the opportunity for a little bit of theatricism with our arrival. We are Generals Ivan One, Two, and Three of the Japanese Self-Defense Force, and we have come seeking our brother and your guard commander, Eito Hakari."
Sesshoumaru raised an eyebrow and looked down to Seventeen.
"Eito Hakari?" Sesshoumaru asked.
"Ah, yes. Eito is Ivan's nickname for me."
"Very well, then. Ivan, you have found your brother. What is the point of that thing?" Sesshoumaru inquired, pointing to the now-dormant T-55.
"Heh, it would be rude to show up on my brother's doorstep without a present, wouldn't it? I come bearing gifts of war, with which you can better fight your war with Naraku" Ivan cackled, much to Seventeen's surprise.
"How do you know about Naraku?" Seventeen prodded.
"The Kaioshins took me aside, sat me down, and told me everything. I brought a bunch of stuff along, figuring you could use the extra firepower."
A little bomb went off inside Sesshoumaru's head. The Kaioshins were involved? If Ivan was truthful in his claim of meeting with them, he had to be a being of considerable power and importance. The Kaioshins rarely made themselves known to anyone, even his father. Inutaisho only had a passing encounter with one, and it was in the days immediately before his death. However, here was a little ningen, or jinzo-ningen, as Seventeen said, barely looking twenty-five years of age, and he was already working in concert with some of the most powerful deities to ever live. Oblivious to Sesshoumaru epiphany, the two android kin chattered on about the weaponry Ivan dragged along.
"What exactly did you bring with you, Brother?" Seventeen asked.
"Well, I brought a lot of things, essentially anything I could fit into a capsule."
"Oh, and how many capsules did you bring?"
Ivan One motioned to Ivan Two, who hopped up on top of the tank's turret, reached through the open hatch, fumbled around, then withdrew a backpack from within the tank. The Ivan duplicate then hopped down and handed his prize to his superior, who promptly zipped it open, displaying it to Seventeen. The green-eyed android smiled at the contents. Inside were at least fifty different capsules, each capable of compressing sixty-five tons worth of even the most dense war material. Some capsules were labeled "T-55", and others were labeled with names like "Small arms - assault", and "Ammunition - assorted". However, one little capsule toward the back of the bag caught Seventeen's attention. It read: "EM heatsink - Eito". Evidently, Ivan had spent a little time engineering a few surprises in his lab. With such an abundance of supplies, fighting a head-on war with Naraku's hordes would be a much less difficult task to endeavor, easy even.
"I take it that you approve of what I have brought" Ivan posed.
"Yes.....it is all here....all that we could want or ever need. Thank you."
"Allright, then. Let's get it unloaded. Lord Sesshoumaru, may I bring this into the castle?" Ivan asked.
"Yes. Follow me."







The sound of diesel engines roared once more as three more Russian tanks came into sight at the top of the grassy hill where the first one had come. Following close behind was a solid line of Ivan duplicates, nearly three hundred strong, each lugging a metal box or wooden crate. Seventeen stood in awe.
"You are really going to take this to Naraku, are you not?"
"Absolutely. Ivans Four through Three Hundred are bringing in more tanks, small-arms, and ammunition, plus a few surprises. Once we're done unpacking, we'll be able to take on anything in the land."
The android general shouted another command through his radio, and the tanks groaned forward, with six columns of soldiers in tow. Seventeen turned to Sesshoumaru, who stood staring passively at the parade of armaments before him.
"Lord Sesshoumaru, do we have permission to bring these supplies into the castle perimeter?" the android asked.
"Yes. Go ahead."
but he wasn't sure where it was in relation to him. Therefore, he sat down in the tall grass, set his gun aside, extracted a compass from a chest pocket, and withdrew a map from a thigh pocket. It was a road map of the whole of Japan, rather useless in 1542, due to the nonexistence of cars and most of the roads indicated on it, but it served its purpose

MIROKU BRIEFS INUYASHA AND KAGOME

InuYasha and Miroku sat on opposite sides of the little table in the living room of Kaede's little hut, which really wasn't so little anymore, due to the additions made to it over the last ten years or so. They were discussing Sango's condition and the chaotic battle she lived through just the night before. The two were uneasy at the thought of a new enemy, not really because Goku was so enormously strong, but because they didn't know what to think about him, be him friendly or hostile. That uncertainty ate at InuYasha's mind, and he absently twisted the a lock of his silvery white hair while he thought about it.
"InuYasha?" Kagome asked.
"Mmmm?" was InuYasha's reply.
"You shouldn't worry so much."
"Oh, and why not? I don't like seeing my friends getting themselves killed."
"Sango isn't dead, InuYasha! She said it herself, Goku saved her, and if he wanted to kill her, she wouldn't be lying asleep in her room right now. You saw what he did to those snakes" Kagome said, trying to oust the hanyou from his mind set.
The door to Sango's room slid open and Miroku stepped out, picking up the wooden staff that he had propped up against the wall. He shut Sango's door and walked over to the table, sitting down on a cushion, next to InuYasha. He too was concerned.
"How is she?" Kagome asked.
"Sango is doing well. She is fast asleep and any bleeding cuts have long been healed. She might even be up again within a day."
"That's good. Now, what did you see last night, when you followed Goku out of the clearing?" InuYasha asked, with great expectance.
"I followed him for at least a mile, but he didn't notice me. Eventually, he tired out and stopped at a stream, where he proceeded to clean his wounds. I watched him rest there for nearly an hour" Miroku said.
"Go on" InuYasha requested.
"I debating whether or not I should approach him when Sesshoumaru showed up."
"Sesshoumaru? What was he doing there?" Kagome squeaked.
"I'm not sure. Goku probably wandered into his territory, but I don't know how he would have known about it. Also, he only seemed to notice Goku and not me. I am unsure of the specifics of that regard, but Sesshoumaru and Goku did engage each other in hand-to-hand combat, which resulted in Goku's victory."
InuYasha was stunned. The dog demon caught sight of Goku for only for a few seconds, but he could tell easily that he was wounded. He had taken Hiraikotsu to the head, and was still bleeding from it. They way he stumbled into the woods looked even more pathetic. How could such a heavily-wounded man manage to walk a mile and still beat up a demon like Sesshoumaru?
"How could Goku have won? He could barely stand when we let him run away."
"I thought the same thing when the fight started, and Sesshoumaru had the upper hand for a while, until Goku transformed" Miroku continued.
"What do you mean by 'transformed'?" Kagome inquired, acutely interested.
"It was like he set himself on fire, flame and everything. His hair began to shine golden for a few seconds, then there was this burst of light around his whole body, and tiny bolts of lightning jumped around him. He moved fifty feet in a flash, and before I had blinked twice, he sent Sesshoumaru careeening into a rock cliff with just one fist. The strangest part of all is that fact that I've seen this kind of thing before" Miroku said.
"What?" InuYasha asked, raising a black eyebrow at the monk.
"When I was seven, I lived up in the mountains at a Buddhist temple with my teacher. Every few days, monks from other villages would come visit, and my master would take them to this walled off structure near the temple's well. When I finished with my studies for the day, I went and watched them, watched them fight."
"Fighting?" Kagome said.
"Yes. What fighting it was, too. My master, he could disappear and reappear on the other side of the courtyard, and he could throw sixteen punches in a heartbeat, all the while making it look like he only punched once. The other monks could do the same things, but not nearly as well. They moved so gracefully and so forcefully, it was like they could have destroyed the whole temple if they slipped up. Goku, though......he's incredible. I doubt my teacher ever attained such power or speed."
"Where is Goku now?" InuYasha questioned.
"Well, Goku had Sesshoumaru down, but his hair turned from gold back to black, then he collapsed. Sesshoumaru and Rin dragged him off, probably to his castle.
GOKU AND SEVENTEEN VISIT INU GROUP
A knock at the hut's door caught the attention of InuYasha's sensitive ears, and two scents tickled his nose.
Goku, and Seventeen.
The hanyou stood up and growled low, placing a hand on the hilt of Tetsuseiga. Kagome, who had been reading a manga while sitting at the table noticed his concern and put her book down.
"What is it, InuYasha?" Kagome asked.
"It's Goku, he's right outside, at the door.
The saiyan knocked again, and InuYasha heard a voice from the other side of the door.
"Huh. Maybe nobody's home."
Angrily, InuYasha yanked the door open, and caught Goku's gloved fist mid-knock, catching him wide-eyed and off-guard. InuYasha thrust his whole skull forward, crashing it into Goku's and knocking the saiyan back a few feet, at the cost of a severe headache. Dazed yet determined, the hanyou leapt high into the air and drew his massive sword from its sheath, raising it above his head.
"STOP!!" Seventeen screamed.
InuYasha jolted and halted his attack, landing on the grass with a dull thump, and turning to the source of the voice. There, leaning up against Kaede's hut was the green-eyed form of Android Seventeen. The guard commander quickly shoved off the wall behind him and moved between InuYasha and Goku, trying to break up the fight before it went too far.
"Get out of the way, Seventeen-san!"
"I do not think so, InuYasha-san, for if I do, you would most likely be killed."
InuYasha frowned at that thought. If anything, he was about to kill Goku, not the other way around. Seventeen saw the hanyou's confusion, then gently turned to his side to revealed Goku's crouched form, his hands drawn back into the form of a most powerful Kame-hame-ha.

GOKU VISITS SANGO
Goku stood at the door to Sango's room, hesitant to perform the simple action of sliding the door open. He wasn't sure if he could face her again, but his conscience demanded him to try. Screwing his eyes shut, he raised a trembling, gloved hand to the little wooden knob of the door and gripped it hard enough to allow a few ominous cracking sounds to escape. He breathed in deeply and exhaled with raggedness, then opened the door, stepped through, and closed it as soon as he was clear.
The saiyan braced himself, though he was unsure of what he was bracing himself for. Fearful of something he couldn't identify, he simply stood at the door, shaking slightly, with his eyes still closed. Tortuous seconds passed, and nothing happened, so Goku calmed himself. He listened closely to the sounds coming from the floor, just a few feet away.
They were of a slow, steady, and calm breath, like that of a sleeping woman, dreaming peaceful thoughts. The saiyan inched his eyes opened and sure enough, she was there, tucked neatly underneath the covers of her small futon, long black hair undone and spilled across the top sheet, and one hand lain on her pillow, just in front of her nose.
Sango looked so at peace, despite having fought with such terrifying determination a short day ago. Part of Goku just wanted to plop down next to her and watch her sleep, in the hope that maybe that would be enough of an apology
SEVENTEEN VS SESSHOUMARU/DAISUKE

Seventeens One through Three ran across a snowy field in tight formation, their heavy footfalls crunching loudly into the frozen fluff below. Number One took a short peek over his shoulder to see both Sesshoumaru and Daisuke following behind them, maintaining a comfortable distance. Number One clenched his teeth. The two demons were mocking him, as they could easily overtake and strike him down.
Number One signaled to his comrades, and they made an abrupt left turn, heading for the leafless trees of the forest to their side. Before they entered, though, One held out his arms to his subdivisions and they latched onto a wrist with their own hands, causing their bodies to dissipate into the energy clouds of their creation, and rejoin with their creator. The now-unified Seventeen ducked underneath a tree branch and vaulted over a fallen log, making his way torward the frozen rice paddy he had seen earlier, when he first arrived. He would be able to take on both Sesshoumaru and Daisuke there.
Sesshoumaru saw Seventeen's manuever and took to the sky, avoiding the trees completely while tracking his grounded quarry as he wove through the woods. To the tai-youkai's intrigue, the ningen soldier was quite intent on reaching the frozen lake on the other side of the trees, though his reasoning was not readily apparent. Still, Sesshoumaru was not objected to fighting there. In a great burst of speed, Sesshoumaru soared over and far past Seventeen, touching down in the center of the ice patch,

SEVENTEEN FIGHTS FOR INUYASHA

Sesshoumaru floated away from the melee and watched as the fatally-wounded demon centipede battled out its last breaths against his hanyou brother. Tokijin had done immense damage to it, as its dull, green, and chitinous exoskeleton had been slitted and punctured many times over along its dorsal axis, causing great clumps of its corrosive blood to spill out onto the compounded layers of snow, which was still falling in force. He huffed and resheated his sword. The demon would soon die, and it would not venture any further into his land, making any further moves against it unnecessary.
Android Seventeen chuckled and gave a few taunting spear slashes at the retreating demon horde. Their attempt to invade had been thwarted, and all they could do now was run away, running north to the safety of their territory. He hefted his long weapon over a shoulder and began walking slowly torward Sesshoumaru, eyeing the fleeing remnants of the attack force as it disappeared into the trees. Sesshoumaru turned away from the dwindling duel between InuYasha and Naraku's minion, motioning for Seventeen to follow.
"This battle's finished. We're leaving" Sesshoumaru said, not even pausing his stride.
Seventeen raised an eyebrow and looked back at InuYasha and the centipede as they parried and dodged each other's blows. To him, the battle looked far from over, with plenty of frenzied, energetic movement on both sides. He moved his attention to the group of humans standing on the battle's sidelines. The faces of the two women and one man were anything but confident.
The tall, black-haired monk held a frown with grim determination, his whole head and eyes darting up, down, and side-to-side, following every fighting twitch that the white-haired half-demon made. He gripped his wooden so tightly that it looked like his knuckles might split open at any moment. Seventeen shifted uncomfortably when the young monk noticed him, holding a distracted, yet piercing gaze for a few scant seconds, returning his eyes to the battle not a heartbeat later.
The rather lovely demon-slayer maintained a stance similar to that of the monk, if a little bit softer in intensity. Nevertheless, she was every bit as concerned as he was, stifling an odd gasp and trying to stamp out the urge to leap in and help out. At one point, Sango's foot made an absent twitch forward, earning a stiff reprimand from the occupied half-demon.
"Stay back, Sango! I can take him!" InuYasha growled, dodging the centipedes array of insectoid talons, while rolling on a shoulder to evade the torso's crushing bulk.
Seventeen glimpsed Kagome only once and immediately, realized two things. One, she was wearing the uniform of what he thought to be a 22nd-century schoolgirl, for they were a common sight around Satan High School in West City. Second, it looked like her heart might leap out of her chest, for she was by far the one most affected by the battles developments. She hopped up and down from the wrenching suspense of the hanyou's battle, holding her longbow tightly in her hands. It then dawned on Seventeen that perhaps she could see something that he couldn't. She was close enough to the battle to be able to tell if InuYasha was weakening, or fell into a kind of predicament that would impair his ability to fight back effectively. Seventeen focused his sensitive, android hearing onto the few short words that flowed from her fearfully parted lips.....
"InuYasha.......please don't die....."
Seventeen's eyes widened at those simple words, and he flipped his long spear off his shoulder and clenched it tightly in both gloved hands. The creaking, terrified tone of the ananchronistic girl's voice told him endless volumes of her feelings for the silver-haired dog-demon. It was love. Seventeen smiled the smile of a General Ivan about to plunge into a hopeless battle, and knew that even in the 16th-century, he was part of the Japanese Self-Defense Force, and his pledge to defend Japan would hold true at any time, in any situation. There, just a 150 short yards away from him were his beleagured country men and women, and it was his purpose to help them. The fact that love was woven into the rapidly-expanding, militaristic equation made the matter all that much more important.
The chivalrous android peered much more closely at InuYasha and his opponent. The centipede was twenty-feet tall, weighted at least five tons, and looked none too pleased with InuYasha. Its gushing wounds were also doing a fine job of aggravating it, causing it to fight more ferociously than it would have otherwise. Its sharply-clawed arms propelled it along the snow-covered ground with great speed, braked it to a halt, and pushed its forward body up into the air, allowing it to strike down onto InuYasha with at least ten massive talons, with a good two tons of its weight backing up each lunge.
InuYasha, however, didn't seem to be faring as well. The size of his sword meant that when it came time to strike, he had to halt his body completely or at least slow down dangerously, all to simply swing it through the air. With the demon centipede moving as fast as it was, doing so would be suicidal. Worse, the dog-demon showed signs of tiring, as when he rolled or leapt to avoid a claw or mandible, his effort to get back up made him look like a giant boulder just barely surmounting the crest of a hill. He was stuck in the hopeless rut of a defensive battle, one in which he could not fight back. Idiotically, he had just deprived himself of reinforcements by saying that he could handle the entirety of such a burden all by himself.
Seventeen took one step forward, but immediately, Sesshoumaru's voice stopped him.
"Where are you going?"
"I am going to kill that centipede. InuYasha could use the help."
"My brother is none of your concern. Now, let's go." Sesshoumaru replied, the simple coldness of the statement taking Seventeen aback.
His brother? InuYasha was Sesshoumaru's brother? Yes, Seventeen could see the resemblance, at least as far as the hair went, because Sesshoumaru didn't have those furry ears. Still, how could brothers, bound by common blood, be so radically different in demeanor? The thought made no sense to Seventeen, as even with the numerous differences between General Ivan and himself, they shared at least some parallels, being defenders of their country, fine tacticians, and spectacular warriors. Sesshoumaru was just going to let InuYasha fight alone, maybe even die, and that was something Seventeen would never do to Ivan. He growled at Sesshoumaru.
"How could you be so cold....to your own damned brother? I cannot conceive of what twisted reason you would hold to your black, shriveled heart, but it will not keep me from saving lives."
Sesshoumaru was upon Seventeen in a flash, holding him high above the ground by the collar of his green haori. He bared his fangs and locked his displeased golden eyes with the jinzo-ningen's disgusted jade orbs.
"You.....serve....me. You are to be loyal to me, and follow all of my orders. By youkai law, I have every right to kill you for this insolence. Beg for mercy, and perhaps I will forego your execution."
Seventeen laughed softly in Sesshoumaru's face and neatly folded his arms across his chest, even as he dangled from the demon lord's hand. Sesshoumaru's threats did not have the slightest impact upon him. Enraged, the demon raised his other arm and drew his hand back, extending his razor-sharp talons, aiming them straight the largest artery in Seventeen's neck.
"Loyalty, hmmm?" Seventeen mused, "One variant of loyalty would be to defend a person and all those they hold dear, and though you show obvious disinterest in your brother's fate, it would be my duty to make sure he leaves this place alive. Now, are you stopping me because you hate InuYasha, or because you are concerned for my safety?"
Sesshoumaru seethed for a moment as he considered the ningen soldier in his hand and the reasoning. He then realized that he was essentially going to kill Seventeen for wanting to go into a battle, potentially getting himself killed anyway. He grunted and decided to let the his diminutive subordinate have his way. There was no sense in redundant injury.
"Very well, you may fight if you so desire, but I will not provide any assistance" Sesshoumaru said, dropping Seventeen onto his feet.
"That will work out fine, Sesshoumaru-sama, because I do not need any" Seventeen said, flattening out the wrinkles in his haori.
Free to do as he wished, Seventeen tossed his head to view the current status of InuYasha's battle, and to his dismay, it had shifted far in the centipede's favor. The dark-haired taijya had entered the fray as well, though she too came under the brutal fury of the demon centipede's power. She swung and threw her boomerang-like weapon as hard as she could, but the metal weapon bounced uselessly of the centipede's incredibly thick hide. The gashes that marred it already must have been lucky successes.
The futuristic schoolgirl appeared to have had enough. She raised the bow and drew an arrow from the quiver slung behind her back. She pulled it back hard enough to cause the bow to shudder from the stress, then released the finned projectile at the Sacred Jewel shards buried in its head.
The arrow flew straight and connected with its target with absolute accuracy, but something went wrong. The pinkish aura of its magical energy allowed it to easily blast through the exoskeleton, but upon contacting one of the three jewel shards, it exploded, vaporizing into nothingness.
"What happened?! I hit it dead-on!" Kagome screamed mentally.
Undaunted, she reloaded her bow and shot twice more, with the same effect. Shocked, Miroku turned to Kagome.
"What is going on, Kagome? Why aren't your arrows hurting it?"
"It's the jewel shards in its head....they've been cursed" Kagome replied, finally seeing the odd violet glow radiating around the little magical fragments.
Kagome figured that blasting the Shikon fragments out by an arrow was an impossibility at that point, so she drew another arrow and aimed lower. It flew accurately once again, and this time, it punched clean through a large body segment below its head, leaving an oozing, bloody tunnel at least five feet long. A wave of relief flowed through Kagome's body, for it looked like destroying the demon the old-fashioned way would work. That exaltation lasted only a moment, for she grimaced when the hole filled up with thick, fleshy sludge, and closed over, leaving no mark or indication that there had ever been a wound.
Miroku cursed silently and twisted his fingers around the beads in the gauntlet that shielded the Wind Tunnel in his right hand. He did not want to use it now, or ever again, for the ten years of its continued disuse had primed it, for lack of a better term, and even the slightest exposure could prove fatal for him and anyone near. Kagome saw this move and immediately berated Miroku for doing such a thing.
"Miroku! You can't use your Wind Tunnel anymore! If you use it, you'll die!"
"If I don't, Sango and InuYasha will."
It was time to act, in Seventeen's mind. He was planning to charge in with his spear and distract the centipede's attention away from the half-demon and demon-slayer, but now, with the apparent ineffectiveness of conventional weaponry, it was time to go electromagnetic. Just then, he noticed the large flakes of snow as they drifted down. Such delicious cold surrounded and enveloped his body, cooling down whatever skin was exposed. He smiled confidently, for these were ideal fighting conditions for a warrior with an overheating problem. The cold air and falling snow would save his skin.....literally.
Seventeen quickly pulled off his gloves, discarding his boots and socks along with them, throwing them down onto the snowy ground in a small pile. He then untied the sash around his waist, tossed it with his boots and gloves, and undid the shoulder latches on his black steel armor. He then slid it up, off his body, and over his head, tossing it with a clatter into the growing mound of clothing. He fumbled with the knot of the belt around his outer haori for a moment, but he discovered that he had tied it too tightly, and could not undo it. Frustrated, Seventeen pulled hard on either side of the knot, stretching it open and slipping it down so he could simply step out of it. His haori fell off, leaving the black t-shirt he had come to this time in.
The android stood still for a moment and stilled his breathing, simply contemplating the cold around him. He shook his head, though, for he was still too well sheltered from the precious cold. He yanked his t-shirt up and off, exposing his lithe upper body to the cold winter atmosphere. He then grunted and nodded; his torso was sufficiently cold to allow him to use some of his ki without destroying his outer skin. He looked down at his legs, though, and frowned. With his pants on, his legs would burn up quickly were any useful amounts of energy applied to them. Amusingly, the absolute best way to use the low temperature to his advantage would be to fight complete starkers naked, but........that would be rather......awkward, considering the number of complete strangers present, Sesshoumaru most prominently. Still, he could do the next best thing.
Seventeen kneeled down and rolled up both pant legs, allowing his shins to bathe in the chilly air. Satisfied with the modification, he threw a few blistering-fast punches, testing his own speed.
"This will do nicely" Seventeen thought.
It was time to act, and Seventeen hunkered down, tensed his legs, and gripped the ground with his bare hands, preparing to launch himself at the demon centipede. Sesshoumaru looked at Seventeen with great interest, blinked once, and frowned, discovering that he was no longer there, and was already eighty feet away, propelled forth by the simple strength of his legs.
Miroku cocked his head when he heard an odd noise in the distance. It was fast growing louder, and sounded quite organic, like a yell or a shout or something. He backpedaled a few steps when the source of the sound grew to a peak, seeming to emanate from just behind the giant centipede. He then recoiled in surprise when the whole body of the centipede lunged back at him from the shock of some unknown force, almost falling over and crashing to the snowed-over ground in the process.
InuYasha had a perfect view of what happened. He had his sword drawn back and ready to swing when his sensitive, furry ears angled to his right, homing in on a screaming voice. From a side, the image of a shirtless, barefooted, and black-haired man slid into view, one forearm braced in front of his head and the other one pulled back behind it,, fists clenched, charging the lowest part of the centipede's body in head-on attack. Time slowed to a crawl as he let his fist blast forward, streaking past his ear and slamming into monster's white and shiny underbelly.
Seventeen's body quaked slightly from the sudden force that returned through his arm as he contacted his target, but stood his ground, even as his bare feet sunk into the ground under the pressure. For a moment, both centipede and android held still, each daring the other to move. That was a game Seventeen won readily. The giant insect let out a squeaking roar of pain as the the skin plate underneath Seventeen's fist bowed inward and sprouted hair-thin cracks in every direction, the result being a blooming flower of destruction.
The giant hurtled backward and swayed in disorientation, its grounded legs flipping down and sinking into the earth in sequential order, helping to balance and refoot their owner. It was still alive, but it was angry, far above and beyond pissed. Its pale, yellow eyes jerked in all directions, furiously searching for the offender that had dared to attack it so foolishly. There, down on the ground, was the object of its anger, standing next to a dumbfounded hanyou and amazed taijya, its fists held proudly and eyes narrowed tightly, anticipating all movement.
The centipede's foaming, dripping maw swung open and it screamed out its rage to the night, then reared back and shoved its head forward and down, intent on shearing Seventeen in half and pounding his remains into bloody mush. InuYasha bared his fangs and leapt away with Sango close behind, staring in disbelief as the black-haired human stood perfectly still. With a thunderous crash, the centipede's mandibles collided with the ground, kicking up a giant cloud of snow and cold dirt.
InuYasha shielded his face from the flying particles that had been blasted into the air, his golden eyes peering just over the top of it. The centipede was still there, and as the winds carried the cloud away, he saw that the human was too. The oversized insect struggled and groaned to escape, for Seventeen had wrapped his arms around the nearest mandible, wisely avoiding contact with the its sharp serrations, holding on tight, and essentially nailing whole beast in its place. The monster snapped its mouth shut again and again, trying to gobble up its android meal, but failed miserably, because Seventeen's arms were threaded between its symmetrical teeth, too small to even be scraped by them. In a smart move, Seventeen had also stepped out from between the giant mandibles, holding on from the outside.
"Who the hell is this guy?" InuYasha asked himself.
Seventeen gritted his teeth and moved one of his arms up the centipede's fang, pressing his palm flat against the smooth underside while rotating his other arm to press against the same fang with just the point of the elbow. With both points of rotation asserted, the android began to squeeze. InuYasha watched intently as the mandible began to contort and warp,the tiny, yet faintly audible sounds of cracking structural failure tickling his ears. Abruptly, the fang bent up several degrees, Seventeen shoved forward, and the whole thing broke off, various chunks of chitin simply breaking off and falling away. The monstrous creature howled in its sickening language, lurching quickly away from Seventeen.
The android snickered and flipped the mandible he held in his hands end for end, aiming the sharp, curving taper of its tip at the centipede's stomach. He braced his arms and charged. Another howl exploded when Seventeen plunged his new weapon deep into the flesh of his target, using the thing's own tooth like a giant bayonet. He pushed it in so far and with such speed, in fact, that it became totally immersed inside the centipede, punching through the back to stick out a few inches. However, to his dismay, he received a spattering faceful of foul-smelling green blood, blinding him for several dire moments.
The insectoid leviathan teetered with precarious imbalance, then tumbled forward, its bulk bearing down on Seventeen's head as he rubbed his eyes to remove the blood that had drenched his face.
"LOOK OUT!" InuYasha screamed to Seventeen, leaping away to avoid a crushing death.
It was too late. Seventeen was crushed by the centipede's body, the entire earth shaking from the impact.

EITO ARRIVES IN 1540

A summer dusk had just begun to fall on the countryside of the Japanese Eastern Lands, the grass tall and healthy, the trees heavily-leaved, and the rivers flowing fast and strong with clean water. There was no wind and only the occasional chirp of cricket could be heard in the calm quiet that bathed the land. That peaceful silence, however, was soon shattered.
The blades of grass at the bottom of a shallow valley began to swash and waver in a ghost wind, one that did not flow from any direction, but radiated above an invisible point a few feet up in the air. That wind pushed the grass outward and away in a giant circle on the ground, one that was rapidly expanding, fed by the energies of a division of physics that had yet to be discovered in the 16th century or even fully understood in the 22nd.
A giant sphere of pure white light burst into existence above the exact mathematical center of the grassy circle, and out of it exploded a human-sized teardrop of the same energy. The massive sphere compressed and imploded on itself, removing a large amount of oxygen from that plane of existence, leaving a temporary vacuum which the surrounding air soon filled in.
The energy teardrop continued to hurtle through the sky at damned near Mach Two, a trail of visible ozone behind it. The bright object traveled a full mile before slamming into a rocky mountainside, steadily losing speed as it melted into and blasted through the stone. It bore a tunnel that crisscrossed the various ones that ran miles around the inside of the mountain, eventually and partially lodging itself in the wall of a large cave, one of many in the mountain.
The little bubble of light shone for a few moments more before imploding like its big brother had done, dropping a disoriented Android Seventeen onto the stone floor below the glowing, spherical depression cut by the beam of various quantum particles. He rolled onto his back and cupped his temples with both gloved hands, trying to ease to absolute nausea and dizziness he was embroiled in.
After laying there for a few minutes, Seventeen's green eyes regained focus, and he found himself staring up at the stalactites of a cave's stone ceiling. However, something else caught his eye. Such a stalactite, one not above him, quite thankfully, glowed bright yellow and red, dripping molten rock. He turned his head to look directly at it, and saw another just like it, and another, and another, and yet another in the same condition. Slowly, his mouth agape, the alarmed android gained his footing and stood up, careful to avoid the searing droplets of rock coming from above. He followed the row of melted stalactites to a perfectly circular tunnel bored directly into the rock, one not cut long ago, because it was still dripping with flash-heated lava. It was hundreds of feet long and flawlessly smooth; the finest laser drill could not have done a better job of cutting it.
The jinzo-ningen of a distant future struggled to reconstruct his hazed mind. He recalled images of standing next to General Ivan on top of a building's rooftop, leaping onto some kind of aircraft, falling off its wing, then landing on the cave floor, just a few moments ago. How could he have possibly changed spatial position so radically, when so little time passed? Standing on the rooftop and winding up here were a few scant moments apart, and the whole situation made no sense to him. There was nothing made of rock within fifty miles of West City!
"Where on Earth am I?" the android mused.
Seventeen reasoned that the only way to answer that question would be to get out of the cave he was in, wherever that was. He looked around at his rocky surroundings for an exit, but decided that the dark passageways leading out of the stone atrium he stood in held the risk for getting hopelessly lost, and getting lost to an even further extent was something he really did not need. Besides, he could see what he thought to be the sky through the tunnel. Crawling through it seemed to be the best choice. However, he would have to wait for the rock to cool off, first.
The disoriented android sat down out of the way of the dripping stalactites, peering intently at the glowing hole in the rock, impatiently waiting for its rock to cool down. He was

SEVENTEEN SAVES KAGURA

Kagura watched with half-lidded eyes as the rippling surface of the water drew further and further away, her body sinking deeper into the dark recesses of the murky abyss. She struggled against the invisible chains of suffocation that squeezed in on her chest, the strength with which she held onto her breath and very life fast waning and leaving her. She opened her eyes fully, frantically looking for something to grab onto, but she only found Kanna. She too was drowning. Even now, the little, ghostly girl clung onto her mirror her black, empty eyes staring forward at empty water.
The demoness couldn't hold onto her breath, and she faltered, the last pockets of precious oxygen bursting from her mouth, drifting off in large bubbles. She gripped and clawed at her throat, thrashing about aimlessly as her lungs filled with water. Sadly, death began to wrap its cold cloak around her, and she went limp, her hands releasing her throat and her arms drifting just above her, following her down. With one last conscious thought and movement, Kagura opened her eyes and glimpsed the world as she left it.
"I died free, at least."
She closed her eyes and waited for the darkness to claim her.
However, neither Kagura's nor Kanna's life was destined to end then or there.
An man's arm, sleeved in olive-drab cloth and capped by a shiny, black glove, shot out from the darkness to grasp one of Kagura's. The other arm grabbed Kanna by the back of her kimono and all together, Naraku's incarnations began to ascend from their watery grave, pulled along by Android Seventeen, lured and compelled by the voices that whispered their demands into his head.
The three crested above the pool's surface in the middle of a cave chamber, one rapidly filling up with water that had not existed anywhere near just a few moments ago. Deep down in the lurid depths, the already heavily-damaged mirror, propelled by the force of the water it was spurting into the cave from some distant dimension, slammed into a submerged rock wall, breaking apart and sinking down to be lost forevermore. The legacy of the demon sorceress Kaguya would never venture any further into the world.
To Seventeen's relief, the water stopped rising, for the cave's tall ceiling was only ten feet above his head. However, and thankfully, he was within reach of a wide stone tunnel, a typical feature of the honeycomb structure of the mountain. Bracing himself on a cushion of his own energy for a second, he flung the taller of the two women he held in either arm up into the tunnel, cringing slightly at the thud that echoed as a result. With the short one under an arm, Seventeen himself climbed up into the tunnel, removed his gloves, and set to observing his two catches for signs of life.
The short, white-haired girl with the cracked mirror clutched to her chest did not breathe, but she did have a pulse. The taller, black-haired one, unfortunately, was not faring so well. She had neither breath nor heartbeat, but knowing that both were on the verge of death, Seventeen needed an assistant.
The green-eyed android held his right arm out away from the dying women, and waves of golden light rolled of the shoulder and surged down the length of his arm, breaking off completely and amassing in a large sphere of light. It twitched and collapsed, dropping a perfect copy of Android Seventeen onto the floor into a kneeling crouch. This Seventeen's variant of the Split Form technique, taught to him by General Ivan, though he could not perform it to the insane extent that the Russian could.
"Two, work the small one. I will give CPR to the other" Seventeen said, shuffling over to Kagura's side.
Two complied and followed Seventeen's lead, moving over to Kanna, removing the circular, silver-lined mirror from her curiously strong grip. He rolled her onto her stomach and pulled her up onto her knees, wrapping both arms around her waist and lining up the knuckle of a thumb with her diaphragm. With a great heave, Seventeen Two pulled back, compressing Kanna's lungs, causing her to surrender a great amount of water, healthy, lurching coughs following soon afterward.
Seventeen One had one hell of a time with Kagura, though. He tossed his sexual inhibitions aside and pressed his lips to soft, ruby ones, creating a tight seal for the breaths that he gave her. He watched from one eye as her chest quivered slightly with each breath, and he pulled away just as she coughed up water, like the the other one had done. He gave her two more breaths, but she still had no pulse, so he went about compressing her chest. He interlaced both bare hands and pressed them against the bottom edge of her sternum, throwing his weight on top of them and pressing down. He repeated that action five times, gave her two more breaths, and checked her pulse, but there was none. He started all over, breaths, compressions, and all, but it did not work, apparently. A sad realization came to Seventeen's mind.
"Damn......I may have been too late....."
Abruptly, on the Seventeen's fourth repetition of CPR, Kagura's bright, crimson eyes shot open, and she looked up at Seventeen, following his hands and noting how they lay so lecherously on her chest. He had continued to work on Kagura, trying to reassert a strong heartbeat within her, even after she started breathing again. He could not have known that her heart wasn't even inside her, making any attempt to check for a pulse inherently impossible.
Seventeen Two, who had been holding Kanna up with one arm, rocking her from side to side, trying to awaken her, jolted his head to his right in a quick jerk, seeing a fast movement in the outer vestiges of his peripheral vision. It was Seventeen One, sent flying by Kagura's angry, retalitory slap. He braced his the arm and cushioned his creator's landing, pushing him into a sitting position. Two looked at Kagura's raging, flaming eyes, her raised hand, and Seventeen One's bruised cheek, and he could not help but laugh out loud.
"Serves you right for going for the pretty ones, eh, One?" Two cackled.
"Shut up, idiot!" One said, rubbing his face even as he shouted.
"How dare you touch me....you....you hentai!" Kagura spat, clutching her kimono together.
"Hentai, am I? I was not touching you in that manner! Perhaps nearly drowning killed off part of your brain and you forgot what CPR is?" Seventeen shot back, more surprised than angry.
Seventeen Two looked down at the little girl in his arms, for she had begun to move, reaching for the mirror that lay on the cold stone floor of the large, water-lined tunnel. He helped her in that regard, using his longer arm to snatch it up and place it in Kanna's hands. Kagura peered past Seventeen One at Kanna as she gripped her mirror, and she moved

KING YAMMA COMMISSIONS SEVENTEEN

Heaven.
That was a name that conjured up all sorts of outlandish imagery in the minds of many humans on Earth. White, puffy clouds, gleaming, golden gates and spires, huge castles - this is what such people dreamt of when Heaven crossed their mind. They also believed it to be the place they ventured to to receive their just reward for their good deeds in the world of their birth.
Well, they were half right, at least.
Heaven was indeed the destination for the good men and women after they died, but the glamorous visages that were frequently associated with it were nothing more than a romantic's silly, half-baked notions, concocted from a mix of philosophical imagination and a few, lazy summer afternoons.
"Heaven" was a place in the corporeal realm, a vaunted and storied one, but a place, like any other. It did not simply exist. It was run, like a business, for lack of a less poetic term. Souls entered at one end, were identified, logged, and recorded by a massive otherworldly workforce, its ranks numbering at least 500 million demons, or youkai. Such youkai analyzed each soul and scrutinized its history, sending the paperwork to a behemoth known simply as King Yamma, who in turn stamped his official seal on the final documents, sending their subject to one of three places. Upstanding citizens were ferried to the "Heaven" portion of the afterworld, while the sinful ones were cast down to Hell. The third destination was reserved for the elemental, truly all-star evils of the universe, and it was given a simple name: Purgatory. Whereas souls in Heaven and Hell eventually returned to the living world through reincarnation, those in that horrible dimension never returned, for no amount of Hell's punishment could possibly turn them from their monstrous ways.
King Yamma's administrative compound, a giant, sprawling castle with a tall, multi-floored steeple as a gate, was swamped with both soul and paperwork, as per a usual business day. Demons dressed like mundane office workers and shouting through megaphones guided and directed the endless line of formless spirits through that main gate to Yamma's huge desk, where he stamped their documents and sent them on their way, wherever that might lead them. The stamp relegated to Purgatory lay unused in the bottommost drawer of the giant's desk, gathering dust from long disuse.
Yamma himself was a bull youkai, a taiyoukai, to be exact. He was the very most powerful of his type, and his humanoid form, towering above all others at twenty feet, was merely an abridged version of his full-power state. If he transformed into his true bull form, he would easily stand as tall as a healthy brachiosaur. He was powerful, too, able to go head to head with the dog demon InuTaisho himself in most instances, not that he would consider such a thing, as the resulting battle would probably trash both Heaven and Hell.
He sat in his massive leather chair as usual, wearing a black-and-white pinstripe suit, twisting strands of his thick, black beard around a finger as he stamped away at the forms that came his way.
"Going to Heaven." Yamma said, his booming, godlike voice seeming a tad bit bored.
He slammed the correponding stamp handle down onto the table, emblazoning the mark of Yamma in red ink on top of the paper underneath.
"Going to Hell." he said again, this time switching stamps.
"Going to Heaven......going to Heaven.....going to Heaven.....going to Hell.......going to Hell.....going to Heaven...Heaven.....Hell.....Hell....Hell......Hell......Heav.....wait, no, Hell"
The Hell stamp had been getting more than its fair share of use over the past week. This, to Yamma's dismay, was due to the chaotic situation on Earth, in a huge nation named Russia. The economic collapse there had flung the entire country into civil war, and a particularly bloody one, at that. In each major city, hungry, unemployed, and angry people by the millions stormed municipal warehouses and stormed out with food......and weapons. The government was hard-liner leftist, and tolerated no action against its law. However, it was convoluted and weighted down by its own bureaucracy, so by the time it got its act together, hundreds of thousands of vintage SKS and AK-47 rifles were in the hands of a disgruntled public........
The fighting began soon after, pitting heroic rebels against the hopelessly corrupt leftist government. Of course, the conflict was not separated so cleanly black-and-white, but to foreign observers, it was close enough. Nobody felt completely at ease around such an extreme leadership. Incidentally, most of the rebels killed in the fighting went to heaven, while the opposite held true for most of the government forces.
Normally, King Yamma, being such a busy, busy deity, would not have given a petty Earth nation's civil war much thought. This was not because he was apathetic to the situation, quite the opposite applied to him, in fact. The truth was the fact that he simply didn't have the time for it.
That was to change quite soon.
Closing time came for the spirit's halfway house, and another demon, again dressed like a everyday office worker, emerged from the doorway at the top floor of the gate's steeple, holding a cloth-covered gong handle. The accompanying gong, a brass plate with the mark of Yamma stamped on it, stood next to the door. The demon worker raised his hammer, rooted his feetm and struck that giant alarm as hard as he could, the oscillating sound of its report filling the whole building.
When the gong struck, Yamma jolted in his seat and missed the paper he had targeted with his stamp by nearly two feet, imprinting the symbol for heavenly ascent on the table's wood instead. Yamma frowned at this, for this was the kind of ink that nothing erased. It was a super form of permanent, holy permanent. The giant sighed, stamped that last form, then snickered as he moved the outgoing mail box over the red mark that blemished the table. He then set his Hell stamp in its ink pool and sat back in his chair, the automotive suspension used to cushion it creaking under the pressure.
Yamma relaxed for a few moments, then leaned back down and opened his top desk drawer, pulling out an enormous cigar, one measuring five feet long and two feet thick. He flipped a switch underneath his desk, and the battery of industrial strength ventilation fans mounted in the ceiling whirred to life, roaring like an old piston-engined bomber from a long-finished air war.
He motioned for his personal cigar lighter, a demon worker armed with a kerosene-fueled flamethrower, to come forward. The short little demon climbed a ladder to get on top of Yamma's desk, and he set the fuel switches on the tank on his back, letting highly flammable kerosene flood into the nozzle of the flamethrower. He pulled out a cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket, lit the pilot light on the flame gun's muzzle, then flipped his gas mask down. Yamma held out his cigar, squinting and leaning his head back to get as much distance between the cigar and his face as possible.
The demon worker pulled the trigger on his weapon, and a long plume of yellow fire shot out from his flamethrower, bathing the tip of Yamma's cigar with its heat. Soon, the massive stogie was alight. Yamma nodded and dismissed his heavily-armed assistant, then leaned back in his chair and took a few puffs of of his cigar, blowing wide smoke circles and watching them disintegrate in the ceiling fans.
The bull youkai mused to himself about the day's developments
KAGURA'S DEATH
Kagura was dying, Naraku's gift of freedom a cruel joke designed to raise her hopes and crush them like ants underneath a sledgehammer.
Three round, circular holes, arranged in a neat triangle that bracketed but mockingly ignored her heart, burrowed through her chest, muscles, lungs, and ribs to end at her back, each exit wound a blood-soaked blossom of torn flesh and three layers of printed cloth. Little streams of her life essence flowed from her nose and the corners of her mouth, mere droplets compared to the veritable river flowing down the inside of the back of her kimonos. Her eyes, each a pool of crimson rose, stared forward blankly, her vision unfocused and unmoving. She simply trudged, her legs quivering and faltering underneath her as she continued on her aimless journey, determined to simply possess her freedom in itself for a few moments longer.
Eventually, she had not the strength to press any further, and she ground to a halt, trembling as she stood. The wind sorceress had run out of steam, and at last, she collapsed, gracefully folding her knees in front of her as she sank to the ground. Kagura found herself sitting in a vast field of flowers
SCRAP
Closing time came for the spirit halfway house, and atop the roof, two of the house's workers emerged from wooden hatch on the roof of the main compound. Together, they lugged a large, green, canvas bag, and they carried it to the edge of the roof and set it down. Unzipping it, one withdrew two pairs of earmuffs, designed to protect their hearing from the signal they were about to send. The other youkai worker withdrew a large, metal tube, with a collapsible bipod on its underside. He flipped those metal legs out and set the contraption up on the floor, its muzzle pointing torward the sky.
It was a 50mm mortar tube.
The youkai set their hearing protecting over their ears and one picked up the 50mm shell that lay in the bag, holding it over the dark recess of the mortar's barrel. He looked to his assistant and began counting down.
"Launching in, three, two, one....LAUNCH!"
He let the heavy projectile drop down into the mortar, an ominous clinking noise resounding from within as the primer slammed into the firing pin. A moment later, the mortar lurched and the shell took flight into the spirit world's sky. It traveled up and up and up past the yellow clouds, disappearing into them. At that moment, it exploded, an unholy roar blanketing the
Yamma hadn't paid too much attention to that nation, because it was just one country on one planet in a big, big galaxy. That changed, however, with the Red Ribbon Army's attempted takeover of the area surrounding Magadan,
In all actuality, Heaven was a giant pasture reserved for good souls, and it wasn't a classicist's definition, either. The landscape looked much like a uniformly pleasant Earth, with tall, green grass, rolling hills, sometimes gigantic pine trees, and the occasional, granite mountain. Cities dotted its area, not because the powers-that-be lacked imagination, but rather because cities were a universal convention when it came to housing large numbers of people.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Kibito-kai said, half-asking and half-declaring.

"What is this place?" Shippo asked, unhooking himself from the Kai's shoulder.

"This the demon afterlife, Shippo. When a demon dies, its spirit comes here."

"There's a separate afterlife, just for demons?"

"Yes. The spirit energy of Earth's demons behaves a little differently than that of mortals, but they both
His green eyes darted across the suddenly alien landscape and the distinct divide between the healthy grass and desert sand that sat mere feet away.

RANDOM RHYME
Half man....
Half machine....
Android....
Seventeen.
GOKU/SANGO FIRST TIME

Sango sank her unclothed form into the pleasantly warm, mineral-rich water of the hot spring's epicenter, a small cave behind the waterfall that spilled into the spring from the stone cliff above. She sighed as the gentle warmth rose up the toned, taut flesh of her legs and thighs, covering those creamy panes with pleasant, relaxing sensation. However, she gasped as the water reached the base of her saiyan tail. She had not grown used to the new appendage quite yet, and the high sensitivity of the area where it joined with her spine was still new to her.
She marveled at the feeling. It was sharp, sudden, and strong, but not unpleasant. It actually gave her a pleasant tingle from her head to her toes, and she realized that she had just gained some insight as to why InuYasha didn't like to have his ears touched: they were the most sensitive areas on his body.
After waiting for her to tail to acclimate to the heat of the water, Sango moved to the back of the cave, where she had sunk a wooden bench at the pool's floor and weighted it down with a few, heavy stones. In one hand, she carried a lit oil lantern, and in the other, a bucket full of bathing supplies Kagome had brought along from the other side of the Bone Eater's well, with her katana lain over the top. She hung the oil lantern on one of two iron stakes driven into the stone wall, then pulled a bar of soap and a washcloth from the wooden bucket, hanging it up as well. Working up a frothy lather with the soap and washcloth, Sango began to bathe.
For the first few minutes, things went as usual. She scrubbed her back, arms and chest, eliminating the grime and dirt that had accumulated on her shapely curves from the past day's training. Ever since she had managed to manifest her own power, Goku had been running her ragged, continually pressing her to her maximum limit. She could feel the effects quite well; every muscle had a cramp somewhere, and this relaxing bath was just what she needed.
The course of her bath changed when she moved the washcloth to her lower back, absent-minded of the tail there.
A bolt of pleasure shot up Sango's spine and into every folicle of hair on her head as she brushed past the base of her furred extension. She moaned out and lost her grip on the soap and washcloth as her knees began to fail her. Falling forward against the stone wall of the lantern-lit cave, the suddenly afflicted taijya braced her arms against the rock while her eyes drooped closed, her heart pounding.
"Wha...what was that?" Sango thought, bewildered by the sudden wave of pleasure that almost crushed her.
Every nerve between her neck and tail tingled in rolling waves, almost as if a thousand tiny icicles touched her at once. Soothing, liquid heat pooled at the bottom of her toned stomach. and she felt her cheeks grow warm from the heated saiyan blood that flowed there in the resulting blush.
"That felt really good......"
The demon slayer decided not to tempt fate and retrieved both the soap and washcloth from the water, dropping them into the bucket. It would be a better idea to simply wash her hair. She had reached the rinsing stage when she heard a male's voice coo, followed by a large splash of water. Someone was in the hot spring with her.
Quietly, Sango slid her katana from the bucket's top and drew it from it's sheath, stalking through to warm pool to the stone arch where the waterfall joined the rest of the spring. Holding her breath, bracing her neck, and gripping her sword, she poked her head out of the wall of water. With speed of a feral predator, she scanned her eyes over the rippling water of the spring and the surrounding sand bank. Her line of vision landed on a pair of broad shoulders that jutted from the center of the spring's surface.
Abruptly, those shoulders recoiled and lifted from the water, drawing Goku's wet mop of spiky black hair along with it. He flung his head back shook it from side to side, getting his hair out of his eyes while drying it at the same time.
Sango's eyes widened and she stifled a gasp of shock. She and Goku were in the same hot spring, completely naked! The taijya yanked her head back behind the waterfall with an audible splash, hoping that Goku didn't see her.
"Wait a minute, Goku can't see at all......as long as he doesn't come over to this cave, he won't know that I'm here"
Sango squeezed her eyes shut from the sudden spike of tension that resulted from Goku's voice calling out.
"Hello? Is someone there?" Goku asked out loud, turning his head from place to place.
Only the sound of the crashing waterfall greeted him, plus the occasional chirp of a few crickets in the nearby forest.
"Eh, I'm probably hearing things.....must be some water in my ears." Goku muttered, turning his head on one side and knocking it on the other, trying
"Oh no! He heard me! But......if I keep quiet, he won't know."
Indeed, Goku wouldn't have known......if the wind hadn't changed. Goku, like all other saiyans, possessed an acute sense of smell, as eons of evolution and eyes destroyed in battle led to the sharpening of the other senses. A certain, pleasant scent wafted from the cave and across the surface of the water, wrapping itself around Goku's muscular form and gently tickling his nose. He took a small whiff of it, then another, and another, and another still, losing himself completely in that heavenly smell.
It wasn't a strong aroma, but it was most definitely there, both spicy and uniquely sweet at the same time, interlaced with the faintest twinge of a cherry blossom. Goku could remember only one other time he encounted such a scent: the first time he had bedded Chi-Chi.
It was at that point that his long-dormant Saiyan instincts broke down the doors of their prison, roaming free across his mind.
Sango simply sat on her underwater bench, quietly rinsing out her hair, when she heard the telltale sloshing of a person moving through water. Goku was drawing closer to her hiding spot. She suppressed her urge to run and sank herself deeper into the cave pool, so that her nose hovered above the water's surface. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears as Goku drew closer, and closer, and ridiculously closer to the waterfall. He was so close, in fact, that Sango could see his silhouette splayed on the water's wall, illuminated by the light of the half-moon above.
Goku's tall, chiseled form slowly pressed through the watery barrier, and Sango wished that she could disappear.
"Get a hold on yourself, Sango....he's blind, he can't see you, he can't see you, he can't see you."
Sango repeated those four words like a mantra, but soon, her mind went blank with fear when she saw the gleam in Goku's blind eyes.
At first, she reasoned that it was just the reflection of the glowing lantern, but there was something else in those onyx pools, something she didn't see when she trained with him or when he able to see at all. It was a feral gleam, almost a glow, and Sango's heart just about burst when she realized what it was......
Desire.
She had seen that look before, whenever InuYasha looked upon Kagome, and again when Miroku looked upon her on that fateful night so long ago. Goku began to move again, his tail swishing through the waist-deep water behind him in an excited, almost playful manner, his lust-filled eyes sweeping across the cave, even though he saw nothing. Slowly, he slipped through the heated water of the small cave and drew ever closer to Sango's quaking form.
She dared not say a thing and she dared not move an inch - she was absolutely petrified. Goku stood right in front of her now, following the scent that had him spellbound. Her breathing hitched when Goku, both seeing and unseeing, peered directly into her eyes. She stopped breathing entirely as he bent down, his face scant inches from her own. He pressed forward slightly, his thick locks of hair brushing over her right cheek as he leaned in to take a small sniff at her hair. She trembled as he inhaled her scent, then whimpered when a low growl issued itself from his throat.
Goku had found the source of the bewitching scent that had set his senses ablaze - Sango. It filled his powerful lungs with its overwhelming strength, a combination of cherry blossom and feminine arousal. It threw him over the edge, his already failing self-control collapsing completely.
Sango shrieked when Goku took hold of her forearms and dragged her to her feet, nuzzling deeply into her long, silken hair. He growled incoherently, breathing deeply of this female's natural odor while moving his large, calloused hands to her toned hips. Abruptly, he pulled her to him, grinding his hips into hers. That was the point at which time Sango felt it.
It was huge, a warm, solid, and heavy weight pressing up against her flat belly, its thick length pulsing with Goku's hot saiyan blood and raging need. Goku sensed her tension and took one of her hands into his own, cupping it against his fully erect shaft. Sango's dark brown eyes widened to their zenith as she wrapped her slender fingers around him, taking in the velvety-smooth and iron-hard feel of Goku's powerful cock. Huge was a pathetic understatement, it was massive, at least eleven inches long and three inches thick. Miroku was big, she knew that much to be true, but Goku...........Goku was monstrous.
Something clicked inside the taijya's brain, and she decided that then was as good a time as any to make a break for it. She wriggled out of Goku's grasp and sprinted away as fast as she could, crashing through the waterfall, forgetting entirely about her katana and everything else, for that matter.
She reached the sand bank, at least. One had to give her that much.
As Sango burst from the water, a strong hand shot out from nowhere and grabbed one of her arms, and she yelped when found herself yanked back into the powerful embrace that she had just tried to escape from. Goku flanked her right foot with his own, pushed forward, and toppled them both onto the damp sand beneath them, him lying on top of her, his manhood nudging into her belly once again.
Sango thrashed underneath Goku, trying to get away, when he crushed his lips to hers, ending her struggle with devastating finality. She stilled at the feeling of his kiss, her heart pounding madly. She didn't know what to feel, much less what to do. The feeling that came to her after she accidentally brushed her tail was coming once again, filling her feminine core with an throbbing ache that begged to be relieved. She soon melted underneath his suddenly gentle touch, giving him the access her silently pressed for.
She opened her mouth and allowed his tongue to enter, the warm slickness exploring her mouth and prodding her own tongue. As if it had a mind of its own, her tongue responded to the challenge and pressed back, dancing with his skillful muscle while tasting it at the same time. Gently, Goku pulled away, leaving a breathless Sango in his strong arms.
"G....G-Goku..." Sango stammered.
"Mine...." Goku murmured.
Sango tried to speak, but abruptly trailed off into a throaty moan when the powerful saiyan above her began pressing light kisses to her throat, lavishing and suckling at her pulse point while cradling her head in one of his large hands. Of their own accord, Sango's hands, previously pressed against Goku's chest in an effort to push him off, relaxed and moved up and around Goku's head, her fingers combing through his thick, jet-black, and almost mane-like hair. She was lost to him; his advances were sudden and unexpected, but they were gentle, soothing, and wonderfully erotic, and every fiber of her body craved more.
The instinct-driven saiyan warrior felt the taijya relax and melt into his touch, and confident that she wouldn't reject him and try to run away anymore, he gently lowered her to the sand, her ebony tresses spilling out in all directions around her. He grew bold with his ministrations, moving his lips to the hollow of her collarbone while a wandering hand slid up the taut and creamy flesh of a thigh and the left side of her ribcage. Ever so slowly, he settled it over the beautiful curve of her ample left breast, cupping it and kneading it in a sensual rhythm.
Sango felt her heart pounding strong and fast deep inside her chest as Goku teased her. She arched her back in response to his touch, wanting as much of it pressed to as much of her flesh as possible. She got her wish. Goku slid his large hands underneath her shoulder blades and pulled her upper body closer to him as he took one of Sango's swollen peaks into his mouth, lathing his long tongue over it in wide circles.
Goku howled out to the night as the smooth heat of a molten fluid powered its way up and out of his shaft, his hot seed charging forth and flooding Sango's tight womb completely. The huntress could do nothing but throw her head back and scream as she felt the heavy, spurting surges of Goku's thick and powerfully virile semen burst deep into her, each one bathing and coating the trembling flesh of her cervix and innermost chamber with its with its hot, creamy feel.
The wild male saiyan growled and grunted as he rode out the waves of his climax, rocking his hips
RUSSIANS ATTACK SEVENTEEN
By noon, Seventeen's old log cabin, deep in the old InuYasha forest of the Musashi plains, was alive again. It had not seen the slightest disturbance for over sixty years, standing a silent vigil on its tree-covered, grassy hill, waiting for its deceased owner to return to life and return home. Though it was heavily-aged, it was solidly built and withstood the test of time with admirable resolve. The cabin was a small home, with only three rooms: a bedroom, a kitchen, and a small living space. The "attic" was just the space between the ceiling and the roofing, though there was a cement basement underneath the house. Weeds and crabgrass had run rampant around the whole lot, nearly four feet tall in some places. Simply getting in was a challenge, too.
Thick vines jutted from the ground in just to the side of the front door, the descendant of a long-abandoned garden. Seventeen tried to grow his own food, at one point, but the only thing that ended up growing was his impatience, so he decided to go out and kill his dinner the old-fashioned way. Left untended, the potatoes he planted sprouted a few days after Goku killed him and Hell Fighter Seventeen, veering to the side, wrapping around the house corner and blocking the door.
Seventeen finished surveying the exterior of his former haunt, satisfied that it was structurally sound. The logs were solidly adhered to one another and the roof seemed to be watertight. He figured it wasn't about to collapse on him, or anything, so he drew his combat knife from its ankle sheath and went about cutting down the vines that barred the door. Eventually, he succeeded, and the fibrous locks of plant fell away. Seventeen flipped his knife end-for-end in his hand, preparing to throw it, just in case a rabid animal or animals took up residence inside.
He gripped the doorknob, turned it, and pressed the door open, a beam of sunlight cutting through the decades-old darkness. He darted his green eyes around the living room, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell, but not seeing any freeloading rodents. Just then, he remembered the kerosene-powered generator in the basement. Stepping over Kami-knows-whatever lay on the floor, Seventeen made his way to the basement stairs, which sat inside the wall between the kitchen and living room, accessible by moving a wooden board from the side of the doorway that connected the two rooms.
SEVENTEEN/KAGURA
Deep inside the labrynth behind the waterfall, Seventeen sat on his disheveled futon, knelt in front of his little prayer shrine. He had removed his gloves, armor, and outer haori, setting them next to Dakki and his M-16 up against the wall. With green eyes closed and his jet black hair spilling down the sides of his face, he prayed in silence, for someone Up There had been kind. He was alive, Naraku and Uryoko were dead, and the Western Lands were safe from that idiot Daisuke and his bastard legions for all time. Goku and Sango were well on their to starting a family, Sesshoumaru and Rin were on their second child, and Yamma wasn't going to come down too hard on Vegeta and Bulma for their highly illegal temperal matchmaking.
By all means, Seventeen should have been happy.
He wasn't.
One thing was missing from the final equation - Kagura. Deep in his artificial heart, he, the quiet jinzouningen from the future, knew there was no going back to the good times, that she couldn't and wouldn't forgive him, no matter what false pretenses had existed. He had found his revenge on Uryoko, but he wasn't going to find what he really wanted. There could be no love for Juunana.
He exhaled deeply and opened his eyes, feeling a slight, unfamiliar pressure behind his them. Little drops of salty water fell upon his knees, and the soft, orange light of his lantern blurred from the silent tears that flowed from him. For the first time in a long time, he cried. He didn't cry after Gero mutilated him, he didn't cry after Goku killed him, and he didn't cry after Uryoko raped him. He thought he had forgotten how.
For Kagura, though, he remembered.
He had no one to blame but himself. People had been using him all his life: he was Gero's weapon, a Russian tool, and now, he was Naraku's pawn. He fell for his trick completely, never giving Kagura a chance, always hounding her, always hurting her. He had been used again! More tears fell. Everything was ruined, by his hand alone. All he had to do was shut up and listen, check things out just a bit further, but instead, he picked up the nearest weapon and went to war, against one demon woman, no less. All Seventeen had now was his own life, and the purpose of defending Sesshoumaru's territory. It would just have to do; it was a better life than living as a hermit in the forest.
Seventeen wiped his eyes and undid the straps on his boots, removing them and tossing them over the little stone wall he had constructed to enclose his futon. He sighed and lay down on his side, brushing his silken hair away from his face while yanking his bandana off. From the corner of his vision, he noticed his pillow growing wet with tears. Maybe, in time, he would forget. Pulling the bedsheet up to his waist, the android wept silently until he slept.
Hours passed, and the sun had long since dipped below the horizon, the pitch of a deep, rain-drenched night covering the land. Images of the past battle played through Seventeen's dozing mind, and because of them, he never quite fell asleep, always on some kind of mental alert for something he couldn't identify. Glimpses of Dakki and the Kyoushin Taihou, plus InuTaisho's Daishi-ken thundered in his thoughts with their unearthly power, until something jolted him fully awake. He raised his head above his stone barricade, staring into the darkness of the cave.
It was a sound, the sound of cold, bare flesh landing upon hard stone with rhythmic repetition.
Footsteps. Someone was coming.
Seventeen shook himself out of his sleep-drunk stupor and reached over his bed wall, grabbing at the handle to his anachronistic assault rifle. He thumbed the safety and the charging handle slammed forward, locking a 5.56mm cartridge into place. The intruder was coming closer.
"Stop right there," Seventeen ordered.
The figure halted as commanded, a pair of bare feet, the edges of a white kimono, and thick, long locks of raven hair just prodding into the still-lit lantern's glowing light. Seventeen's jade eyes widened, then his face contorted into a sneer when he identified of the trespasser.
"I thought I killed you, Uryoko. It seems that true bitches don't stay dead."
Seventeen shouldered his gun and peered through the sights, lining them up with Uryoko's heart. His finger descended onto the trigger and he was about to fire when the woman's voice cut through the silence.
"How did that song of yours end, anyway?" she asked.
Seventeen's finger stayed itself. The figure stepped out of the dark and into the light. The android's grip on his weapon faltered, and it, along with the hand it was held in, drooped to his side, the tip of the barrel scraping on stone.
Kagura was a mess, soaked completely from traveling in the rain. Her hair had come loose from its tie and spilled down her face like pure, refined oil, just brushing against the top of her shoulders. Her fan hung loosely from one, cold hand, while the other clasped the top of her layered kimonos togethers. She made her way forward torward the stunned jinzouningen, standing less than a foot away from him. Her fan dropped to the floor, and the freed hand came back up with great speed, slapping Seventeen across the face with bruising force.
He stood there, frozen in place, his head turned to a side from the Kagura's angry hand.
"That was for before," Kagura stated, "This is for you."
She closed the distance between them and with even greater strength, pressed her ruby lips to his. Seventeen's eyes immediately closed as her hands rose up and encircled his neck, pulling him closer so that she could deepen her passionate kiss, her tongue demanding entrance. Unconsciously, he granted it to her, and their velvety muscles touched, stroking one another. Regaining hold of himself, Seventeen mumbled something into Kagura's mouth and abruptly pulled away, despite the immense pleasure.
"Kagura....wha-" he tried to say, a finger across his lips cutting him off.
"I have forgiven you."
"But why?" he forged on, removing Kagura's hand.
"I didn't feel like losing to Naraku again."

LEAD-IN TO SESSHOUMARU/INUTAISHO CONVERSATION

Along the sandy dunes of a beach that bordered the Sea of Japan, two figures stood motionless on a rocky precipice that overlooked another sea, this one made of tall, green trees. Their robes and long, silvery hair fluttered in the wind every so often, the perceptible silence between them marred only by the foamy that surf crashed upon the beachhead. The taller of the two inu youkai sported no less than three swords, multi-layered armor, and a long, split-ended pelt of white fur, which he wore as a cape. Blood dripped down his left arm and onto the fast-accumulating snow below. The other was dressed in a similar manner, his haori printed with red flowers. After a seeming eternity, one of the sentinels broke the silence.
"Sesshoumaru, why have you come?" the taller inu asked.
"I wish to know why, Father."
"Why?"
"You never taught me how to fight like you."
The Inu no Taisho snorted and looked down in annoyance at his bleeding arm. His fighting style didn't spare him that wound.
"Would you have been able to stop Ryukotsusei if I had?"
"That isn't the point. It was my right to know," Sesshoumaru pressed, no emotion in his voice at all.
"Spoiled children think everything is their right, I suppose, but I intend for my knowledge to die with me. If Yamma is willing, that will happen tonight."
Sesshoumaru narrowed his burning amber eyes, partly from being insulted by his own father, partly from the implication behind the words that followed. His father was planning to die that very night, and for a pathetic ningen, one that carried his child, no less. Another period of silence washed over the two before Sesshoumaru spoke again.
"Are you going, Father?" Sesshoumaru asked.
"Are you going to stop me, Sesshoumaru?" the Taisho countered.
"I'm not going to stop you. However, I would like the fangs, Sou'unga and Tetsuseiga, to be handed over to me."
"If I say I won't give them to you, would you kill your own father?"
A wave of water crashed onto the beach, both overshadowing Sesshoumaru's silence and betraying the answer to his father's question.
"Do you desire power that much?" the Taisho scoffed, his deep voice laced with a mix of amusement and disgust.
Sesshoumaru was silent once more.
"Why do you desire power?" the Taisho pressed.
This time, his son was quick to answer.
"I must walk the path of conquest.....power is necessary in order to walk that path."
"Conquest, huh?" the Taisho mused, just loud enough for Sesshoumaru to hear, "Sesshoumaru, is there something you want to protect?
"Something to protect?" Sesshoumaru spoke, slowly and threateningly extending his right arm and flicking his razor sharp claws out, "I have no need to pursue such an endeavor."
Sesshoumaru poised himself to strike, but his father transformed, his body expanding and contorting into the form of a demon dog. The Inu no Taisho then leapt off the precipice and dashed into the night and into fate's grip. It was at that point that the dream ended.
The taiyoukai did not explode into consciousness like others would. His mind simply switched on and his dormant, deep golden eyes opened to the calm expanse of his darkened bedchamber, the fireplace now populated only by a few dying and burnt-out embers. He lay under neath the red satin bedsheets with a sleeping Rin's unclothed form pressed up along his own, his right and only arm resting over the smooth contours of her long, curved back and underneath her lengthy brunette tresses. He let his head sink a bit deeper into the pillow beneath him, and he exhaled quietly, looking over to the wall rack on which the Tenseiga rested, along with the Tokijin. He then looked down to Rin and watched her beautiful, freckled face twitch every so often in the midst of restful sleep.
The dream had returned.
It had first come shortly he mated Rin during the previous summer, reocurring every so often for the year that followed. The taiyoukai knew why it plagued him.
"Father, I wonder if you knew this would happen. You gave me the tool that gave me my mate, and now, I have become you."
SESS/RIN LEMON

Night had just reached its deepest and darkest point in the Japanese Western Lands, and the castle from which the territory was quiet

SESS/KAGURA LEMON

Sesshoumaru strode through the entrance of a cave with a struggling and screeching Kagura thrown over his right shoulder, as he had no left arm with which to hold her. The wind sorceress writhed and pounded on the inu-youkai's back through his silvery mane, though her blows were dampened by the vest of steel armor between his white haori and his hair, not that she could stopped him anyway.
The heavy, falling snow outside cooled the air down at the entrance of the cave, but as Sesshoumaru pushed deeper with his living prize in his grasp, the air grew warmer, heated by a hot spring nestled far inside the cavern. A knowing gleam flashed through the dog demon's amber eyes. His secret sanctum lay just ahead.
"Where are you taking me?!" Kagura screeched.
"Don't yell, the cave focuses all sound," Sesshoumaru grunted, the sharpness of the wind witch's voice paining his ears.
"Put me down, immediately!"
Sesshoumaru huffed.
"Soon enough, wench."
"Crass dog! How dare he refer to me like that!" Kagura seethed in her mind.
Kagura thrashed about in an effort to escape Sesshoumaru's hold, but to no avail. He carried her far into the labrynth even as she made her pathetic attempts to get away, at last arriving in a large, and swelteringly hot chamber, heated by the hot spring that surrounded a pillar of rock which connected floor to ceiling. Visibility was good inside this atrium, the light that illuminated it shining from the bright moon and in through a oval hole in the stalactite-filled stone ceiling.
Suddenly, Sesshoumaru gave a great heave, and tossed the still-raging Kagura onto a heavy bed of thick, brown and black furs, lain in a small trench that he cut into the rock that served as the hot spring's bank. His next statement to Kagura came as a command, one filled with undisguised, lusty intentions.
"Undress."
"What?" Kagura yelped, righting herself and bringing herself to her knees on the fur bed.
Sesshoumaru removed his fluffy boa and yanked off his armor.
"I said undress. Now." he repeated, tossing the boa and armor off towards a stone corner.
Kagura sneered and stood up, staring Sesshoumaru straight in his amber eyes with her own, furious, and blood-red ones. He towered over her by more than a foot, but that did not prevent her from confronting him.
"I refuse."
She shrieked when she found herself pinned to the furs beneath her, a lightning-fast blur of pure white blinding her vision for a moment. Sesshoumaru held her by the neck with his right arm and lightly yet threateningly dragged his claws across the pale column of her throat, one filled with her deliciously and rapidly pulsing blood.
"I grow tired of your flirtacious teasing. You waltz around this Sesshoumaru like one would do a dance floor and flaunt yourself like a victor's prize, " Sesshoumaru growled, his face a few mere inches from hers, "Tell me, did you think that I would tolerate it indefinitely?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kagura denied.
"You return from the dead and immediately throw yourself at me.. This time, however, I will accept."
Sesshoumaru released the subdued demoness's neck and moved it down to the sash that tied her red-and-white outer kimono together, flicking his index claw across it and slicing it clean. Kagura lay breathless and still as he repeated the action for her green and light blue ones, for as much as she wanted to slap the dog across the face, she was becoming highly aroused by his aggressive tactics.
He slipped his hand though her colored garments and with a great flare of his muscular arm, flung them open, revealing her beautiful, enticing, and completely nude form to him. He gazed up and down her trembling, curved body with darkened eyes of the purest gold, admiring her innocently flushed cheeks, the gentle hollow of her collarbone, the supple curves of her ample, creamy breasts, the toned pane of her stomach, but most of all, her focus of her femininity.
The slit of her hairless womanhood gleamed in the moonlight, almost dripping with her excitement and anticipation, and his gaze burned darker.
She wanted him. She most definitely wanted him.
He gave up a dry chuckle and lowered his face to her neck, running his long, rough tongue over her pulse point before moving lower to bite at her collarbone with light, fanged nips. Kagura gasped at the feeling of his teeth, but moaned out completely when that same mouth covered her left breast, his tongue coiling around the peak there while his right hand kneaded and massaged the other. As he assaulted her firm globes, her hands unconsciously moved over his still-clothed arms and shoulders to tangle in his silvery tresses, pulling his head closer to her chest, desiring more of his touch. By Kami, he gave it to her.
Sesshoumaru pulled away from Kagura's breasts after giving one a final nip with his fangs, then looked up directly into her half-lidded eyes as he slowly moved his head lower and lower still. Her heart began to pound as she realized what he was about to do. Sitting up, Sesshoumaru nudged his right hand between her smooth, firm thighs and spread them apart, leaving Kagura totally open to him. He traced his hand along her pale flesh, tracing her feminine seam with one finger.
With no warning, he shoved three of his long digits deep inside her.
Kagura squeezed her eyes shut, stifled a moan, and arched her back against her clothing and the furs beneath her as Sesshoumaru began to pump his hand into her hot and clenching channel, the pad of his thumb working against her pleasure center in matching rhythm. The inu youkai watched with quiet amusement as she began to work her hips against his questing appendage, giving herself fully to him and the pleasure he created for her. Faster and faster he worked her, and faster and faster she moved her hips, the heated sensation of climax beginning to spread itself through her writhing body.
His timing intentionally cruel, he withdrew his hand, earning him one of Kagura's angry growls. She opened her eyes and opened her mouth, preparing to berate Sesshoumaru for denying her her craved release. She stayed her tongue, though, when Sesshoumaru locked his gaze with hers, licked her delicious nectar off of his fingers, then lower his face to her aching core.
She screamed out entirely when he shoved his long, rough tongue deep inside her.
Kagura moaned, cried, and mewled as Sesshoumaru plundered her with his tongue, pumping it into her in long, deep, and fast strokes, although it was merely a mock-up of what was to come, not that the demoness could focus her mind even that far. The youkai lord's skilled muscle danced and thrusted inside his entertainment's feminine canal, each deft undulation that it made stroking against her tight walls and hurtling her torward a screaming, explosive orgasm.
Sesshoumaru stopped for a moment, drawing his tongue back into his mouth while licking his lips, savoring her taste. He decided to make her give the rest of that taste to him. Breathing deeply and heavily, Kagura drew her elbows up underneath her and gazed down between her legs, just in time to watch her debaucher launch his final, oral assault. Needless to say, it was a devastating one.
Kagura slammed her head back down to the furs and took hold of Sesshoumaru's head in both hands, her fingers tangling in his silver hair and her nails raking across his scalp when he gave her swollen pleasure nub as long, firm lick, sealing his lips to it. He swirled his tongue back, forth, and all around, causing Kagura to let loose not moans, but all-out snarls, baring her fangs to the pointed stalactites of the ceiling, the nearly frightening sounds of her impending climax filling the labrynth while her hips began to buck.
Her calves drew up to her thighs, her body growing unbearably hot. Just a few moments more, and she would be there.
Deliverance came early.
The wind witch's body tensed for a moment, then convulsed rapidly as she screeched long and loud enough to elicit a painful grunt from the youkai that was pleasuring her. Her climactic honey spilled freely and heavily, each generous drop flowing directly into Sesshoumaru's conquering mouth and down his throat as he swallowed it in silent gulps. White-hot ecstasy surged through Kagura's veins with every slamming throb that her heart produced, then ebbed away into a quiet, quivering aftermath as her peak subsided.
When Kagura relaxed and released her grip on his head, Sesshoumaru gave her bud one last push, then pulled away, her essence dripping down and off of his chin in milky rivulets. She lay limp, wide-eyed, and completely breathless before him, the stream of hot fluid that flowed from her still-pulsing womanhood gleaming in the moonlight.
A tiny smile on his lips, Sesshoumaru stood up and proceeded to undress himself, easily garnering Kagura's full attention. He untied the sash that held his white and red, hexagon-printed haori closed, untucked it from inside his hakama, and slipped it off of his shoulders, giving the recovering demoness on the bed a full view of his bare torso.
Kagura's crimson eyes wandered over his lean, yet muscular form, for it was truly perfect. He was


SEVENTEEN POWERS UP
Seventeen bolted upright with a groan, staring with horror at the back of his left hand, a barely-visible seam working its way from his index knuckle torwards his wrist. It began to spread up his arm. Soon after, he felt it, that horrible burning sensation that licked at every nerve and danced up and down his spine, along with every bone in his artificial body. He gnashed his teeth in restrained agony and threw himself out of the bed and onto the hard wooden floor with a loud thump, crawling pathetically torward the open window. He had to get away from the castle as soon as possible. InuYasha stopped him short of his goal.
"Juunana-san! Where are you going?" InuYasha asked, taking hold of Seventeen's shoulders, trying to set the beleaguered jinzo ningen upright.
"Get....get away from me!! Everyone......stay away!" Seventeen groaned, the pain becoming much more severe, "I have to get out of the castle!"
"What are you talking about, Juunana?" Kagome asked, concerned for her friend's well-being.
Just then, she saw it. The skin over Seventeen's right shoulder blade was tightening up and cracking from the stress, clear liquid running down from the wound. Such sores were appearing all over his torso, and wisps of white smoke rose up from each one. A convulsion ripped through the android's lean body, and InuYasha pulled his right hand away in pain, burned by an invisible heat.
"Juunanagou, what is happening to you?" Kagome wondered, a look of horror covering her face.
"Idiot! I told you to....STAY AWAY!" Seventeen growled to InuYasha, who cradled his right hand in his left, incredulous at the burn marks that covered it.
With that, the android mustered his all of his strength into his legs and threw his body torward the window well, tumbling over the edge and down the tiled roof of the floor below, rolling down it, and landing on the grassy, yet hard ground with a thud and a groan. Kagome and InuYasha leaned out through the windows and watched in utter confusion as Seventeen picked himself up and began limping away torward an empty field, gradually picking up into an all-out run.
The android carried
SHIPPO DIES
The bullet slammed into Shippo's chest and tore through his heart. He sank to his knees as his screaming blood bubbled up his throat and spilled out his mouth, his body crumpling to one side with a sickening thud on the metal floor. Five more bullets ripped through him soon afterward, the last of which passed through his head, killing him instantly
SCRAP
Yun's jaw tightened, and he carefully lifted Hasarin's head from his lap, standing up and looking down to his to his counterp

Shyushu turned around and strode a few steps away from the injured and howling ryu-youkai, returning only to deliver a swift, solid, and full-booted kick to his jaw, sending him hurtling into the foam-padded safety wall outside the ring, his unconscious body slumping to the grassy ground below. Almost immediately, a group of fellow contenders swarmed around him, relieved to

The windows had disappeared too, becoming glass panes interlaced with wire to protect against the frequent sandstorms, rather than militaristic gun ports whose frazzled edges had been refinished time and time again from the centuries-long hail of sand and enemy attack.

Hasarin lifted his head weakly to Shyushu's, silently pleading for mercy. The dog-demon

Shyushu only smiled, reveling in his victim's terror, and twiddled his clawed fingers mockingly in the ryu's face as he twitched his left arm outward ever so slightly.
In the about three-hundred years before he died, our current Taisho-sama and Shyushu were both candidates for leadership of the Central Lands, the focus of all inu-youkai power in Japan. The council of dog-demons
As he descended it, Shippo and Rouyakan passed by, heading upstairs to meet with the Taisho.
one floored by red-and-white marble, supported by ornate pillars of the same material,

Speaking of Naraku, I need to tell Taisho-sama about that saimyousho we ran into at the border, so let us hurry."

Daisuke's shoulder-mounted radio cackled to life, an electronically-distorted voice rising up from it.

"Daisuke-sama, this is Point Recon reporting in."

Daisuke slipped his crossed feet off the edge of his desk, his heavy combat boots hitting the the tile floor with a dull thud. He pressed down onto the transmit button of his radio.

"Go ahead."

"Sir, we've checked the front up and down twice now, and we still haven't found any more reviews. It's a damned wasteland out here."

"Damn it," Daisuke sighed, running a gloved hand through his silver hair, "Keep looking, they're out there, somewhere. Retrieve whatever you can."

"Hai. Recon out."

Daisuke sat back in his chair and folded his arms, grunting uncomfortably.

"What the hell is going on?"

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