Chapter Ten

If there was one thing that Ranma was not, it was slow. Okay, so sometimes he suffered from this malady in the figuring-things-out department, but when it came to the physical type of speed, he could move. 

Which was a good thing, since the muzzle of the gun that Akane held was about a millimeter from his forehead and her finger was already tightening on the trigger. Even he wouldn’t survive a shot from that range, he knew.

So he jumped, straight upward, his feet clearing her line of fire. 

She didn’t shoot, though, somehow managing to stop applying pressure to the trigger just in time. She re-aimed, forcing Ranma to keep moving in order not to be hit.

“She’s one of them!” Cei cried – or had he said that awhile before? Ranma couldn’t remember; he /was/ a little busy.

“Yeah, no kidding!” Ranma retorted as he dodged. Akane still hadn’t shot, however. 

“Damnit, *hold* *still*!” she shouted, trying to target Ranma. Her face was contorted into one of a strange combination of fury and pure cold calculation; she was barely recognizable anymore. 

“And let you kill me? Not likely!” Ranma speeded up. I can’t keep this up forever! Wait a sec… so why don’t I just… 

It was almost laughably easy to land behind Akane and immobilize her. He was careful, grabbing her first by the waist and then, in the moment that she was too surprised to move, catching the arm that held the weapon and pressing on the right combination of pressure points and nerves to make her arm go numb. The gun slipped out from between forcedly relaxed fingers and landed with a soft *thunk* on the ground. 

Akane was still frozen, though, even when Ranma loosened his grip on her to retrieve the gun and toss it off to the sidelines. Coincidentally, it landed near Miss Hinako, who gingerly picked it up and looked at it curiously. It wasn’t like any gun she had ever seen… where had it come from? 

Ranma held Akane’s arms tightly behind her back, making sure she couldn’t move them. She flailed and struggled, but couldn’t manage to work her way free. Eventually she stopped. “You…” she uttered in a low, glutteral growl, “do not have permission to touch me.”

“But apparently it’s okay for you to try and kill me?”

That earned him a short, spine-chilling laugh, but no response. He tried a different approach, but didn’t let go. “So who are you, anyway?”

She was silent.

“Is it your plan to kill me?”

“If it’s the most expedient way, of course. Your life is nothing.”

His grip tightened on her arms. Involuntarily. Honest. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She didn’t deign to answer again. Ranma muttered in frustration.

Meanwhile, Hinako was examining the gun, wishing that she knew more about weaponry, because this appeared to be a very odd one. It was hard to imagine where Akane – or whoever was currently occupying her body – had managed to acquire it.  

It doesn’t even look real, she thought. She – he – whoever – much have brought it with them, from wherever they came from. She turned it over in her hands several times. It doesn’t even look much like a real gun… Idly she took it by the handle and hefted it, experimentally, swinging it back and forth a little. Its weight was unbalanced, and it made a strange sound as it moved, one that was somehow familiar, yet refused to identify itself. She turned her attention away from it, to check on what was happening – she felt a flash of guilt for not paying attention to that – but the situation seemed unchanged; ‘Akane’ still refused to give any answers, and Ranma was clearly frustrated, yet unwilling to harm her.

Quite suddenly she felt a slight mental ‘push’ that she knew meant Ryouga wanted to take control. She couldn’t communicate with him, although she was aware of what was going on when he was in control and assumed that the reverse was also true. Those times when she wasn’t in control were weird and slightly frightening, to tell the truth. While she was thinking this, there was another push, more insistent this time. Alright, alright… she closed her eyes, allowing the transformation.

It was sheer bad luck that her finger happened to be lightly brushing the trigger of the item she was examining at the moment of the change. As one form replaced other and one mind came to the forefront while the other took a backseat, unpredictable things happened. In this case the event was a particularly bad one. One finger tightened around the trigger, with just enough pressure to activate it…

Ryouga had a reason for wanting to take control. He had been thinking right alongside Miss Hinako, about the weapon – in particular the strange sound that she had dismissed. It sounded almost like…

Thoughts became words as he took control; and since the moment of this also coincided with the unlucky event, what was intended to be a simple observation turned into a horrified half-shout instead.

“Water?!?” 

And it had been pointed directly at Ranma at the time, too…

***

Ranma was disoriented suddenly. He had been concentrating on keeping their attacker – it couldn’t really have been Akane – from breaking free, a more difficult task than it should have been, but also one that he could keep up for a while longer. All of his questions had been either ignored or answered so cryptically that they might as well have been. One thing was for sure, though; she was contemptuous of Ranma in the extreme, although she couldn’t get free. She repeated the phrase “You don’t have the right to touch me,” so many times that it was starting to get on Ranma’s nerves even more than the whole situation was already grating on them…

It was rather understandable that his head spun wildly when, in the middle of this, he suddenly shifted a foot to his right, and the entire world changed to every single one of his senses, including the sixth. 

It took him a moment to realize what had happened, and still wasn’t entirely certain when abruptly he no longer had the leisure to think about it.

His cursed form – clearly visible now as a totally solid female-shaped robot with glowing green eyes and copper wires simulating red hair – covered the short distance between them with a single step and quite casually kicked him. It was only due to his lightening reflexes that allowed him to dodge well enough to deflect the blow to his leg. 

He took a defensive posture, but there was no second attack. Instead, the… girl… simply stood there, smirking coldly. Akane, her form split into three parts, took a position behind the android. Ranma did a double take at seeing two other, and solid, figures moving with the translucent one that was her physical body. 

What he could only assume was the real Akane lay slumped unconscious at the ghost’s feet, being dragged along as if connected by an invisible rubber band. She looked rather battered and bruised, although the ghost was perfectly healthy. The third figure looked absolutely nothing like the other two. Ranma couldn’t look at him very closely, but he was tall, and obviously in control of Akane’s body. His eyes were dead, though – Ranma realized that this was like the beginning of the day – years ago now, seemingly – when he had first discovered the phantasmal Ryouga standing behind the robotic P-chan. He moved like a marionette, mimicking the movements of the smaller, translucent figure he stood behind. But the solid unconscious duplicate of that form belied that comparison; she was the puppet, not he.

“So, we finally meet, Ranma Saotome.”

Ranma’s attention snapped back to his robotic nearly-twin. He could hear her clearly, although the words coming from both Akane’s body and Miss Hinako’s slipped away from his awareness as if they were less substantial than air, and in a way they were. The events from that other world as a whole slipped away from him; the robot was the only real, currently aware thing registering on his senses right now.

“Who are you?”

She laughed, sending a shiver down Ranma’s spine. The sound was far too human, containing none of the mechanical edge that her appearance insisted it should have. “I’m sure that spineless… pig… Cei has told you my name by now.”

“Elrii?”

“Indeed.” She made a gesture, and to Ranma’s shock the two conscious figures currently symbolizing Akane’s form and the soul occupying it kneeled at her feet, looking up at her adoringly. She placed one hand on Akane’s head; although it was noncorporeal to Ranma apparently she perceived it as solid enough to touch. The phantom looked up at her, the expression on the two faces a mixture of adoration and fear, and spoke.

“Mistress…” the words tried to slip away too fast for Ranma to understand, but they impinged upon his mind with such force that the memory burned into his brain. It made him sick to his stomach.

“You made a mistake,” was the chiding answer. “You are fortunate that you did not fail.”

“Yes, mistress…” the figure crumpled further down to the ground, but was forcefully dragged back up. 

“You will be punished later,” Elrii assured it. “Right now…” she turned her disturbingly robotic yet remarkable humanlike gaze back on Ranma, who had been too frozen to move. “We need to get rid of a… nuisance.”

Ranma shook his head to clear it. “I won’t let you just leave, and you can’t defeat me.”

Elrii didn’t even bother to laugh at that statement. The expression on her face showed exactly how ridiculous she considered that claim to be. “You think too much of yourself. I don’t need to defeat you.” With one swift motion she swept down and picked up the solid unconscious figure of Akane, holding her up by one wrist as if she were a doll rather than a person. “This one is so close to death… so close… do you have any idea how small the difference is between having only your mind and having nothing at all? So little… of the three parts, the mind is the strongest, yet the most fragile. Without a body or chi it pops like a bubble… it has no substance. That’s all she is… this ghost you see is merely a shell of lifeforce – and my friend here is in control of that lifeforce. You wish for her death? It will be painless…”

Why does it always come down to Akane’s life or death? I’m never in danger, it’s always her… “You’ll spare her if I let you leave?”

Elrii grinned at that. “Of course not. Us leaving would kill her as well, because we would take her chi with us. We merely wished to educate you so you would realize exactly why she had died… and how you will do the same.”

“What the hell?”

“Try and stop me.” She motioned to ‘Akane’, and dropped the lifeless form. Her minion obligingly backed away, leaving a large open space around the two. 

“You asked for it…” Ranma attacked, moving more quickly than even he expected, yet totally in control. He could feel an unfamiliar sort of power rushing through him… he felt as if he were twice as strong as ever and faster than even he’d dreamed possible. And he was.

Unfortunately, this made absolutely no difference in the outcome of the fight - at least not the difference that he was eexpecting.

His flurry of punches connected; she hadn’t even made an attempt to dodge. Her substance didn’t even cause him any pain when he connected with the incredible force that he had managed, although he’d been prepared for that consequence; her body felt like flesh. The punches, ten times faster and more forceful than any amaguriken he’d done before, simply didn’t affect her at all. She blinked metallic eyelids, once, but that was more for effect than a result of the sudden barrage she’d been placed under. Confused, he jumped away.

And nearly collapsed to the ground, feeling drained of more than just energy. The already translucent figures around him grew more so to his eyes, until he could barely see them; only faint echoes of his surroundings and pastel washes of color for the other people existed anymore. Even the other solid figures grew faint; only the robotic girl registered as fully real to his senses. He could hear several voices, but none of the words registered well enough for him to comprehend them.

Except for Elrii’s.

“Now that was a stupid move,” she told him bluntly as he collapsed further and further. “I tell you what you don’t know and yet still you waste your life uselessly. Oh well,” she finished philosophically, “One more life or one less in this place won’t matter very much… but that heroic, although amazingly stupid, final act of yours was rather impressive. Idiotic in the extreme, but impressive… you forgot one little fact, though. You’re in the chi realm now – such as stupid name… okay, let’s call in the spirit realm, although it has only coincidental things in common with death. You were pushed out of your physical body into the spirit realm when you changed into your so-called cursed form – you always had been, you just weren’t aware of it. And since you – or rather my friend here, in a botched attempt to free me - had severed your ties with the physical, your body was transformed into pure energy when you switched your ‘location’ from the physical realm to that of the sprit. If it hadn’t been, you would be dragging it around at your feet, get it now? And you used the chi that had been created from your physical form in your attack – incidentally giving some of it to me in the process. So you’ve killed yourself… and just after I explained how your friend was going to die without any chi or a physical body, too.” She shook her head almost sadly. “It’s almost sad, that I would win by the stupidity of my opponent…”

I’d like to know how not figuring all that in ten seconds makes me stupid… when I’m not even sure I understand it now… Ranma’s thoughts sounded faint even to himself as the almost invisible world faded to black, and he into unconsciousness… or was it death? His last thought, barely audible to his own mind as he faded away, was that he sure as hell hoped it was the former… 

***

~Mordain

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