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Age of the Sky [Ranma 1/2]

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Grounders10 said:
Sailor Moon poster was spot welded to the wall behind her.
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-I'm not sure I want to know how she managed to weld paper-
Grounders10 said:
Perhaps Kyushu, maybe china?
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China
Grounders10 said:
What's the worse that can happen?"
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worst
Grounders10 said:
He ignored the deadpanned look she sent his way.
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deadpan
Grounders10 said:
Trains here! Move it!" he shouted
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Train's
Grounders10 said:
they whipped passed. Something
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past
 
Not sure if you or someone else mentioned this here or on SB but is this a star wars crossover? Pig aliens with spider droids and space ships makes me think of those pigs that work for the hutts and star wars has some rather famous spider droids and invasions of planets happens all the time in star wars.
 
deathgeonous said:
Not to be weird, but did you change the first chapter or something? Still, decent start.
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Nope, chapter one is untouched.
wowow2264 said:
Not sure if you or someone else mentioned this here or on SB but is this a star wars crossover? Pig aliens with spider droids and space ships makes me think of those pigs that work for the hutts and star wars has some rather famous spider droids and invasions of planets happens all the time in star wars.
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Not a crossover.
 
wowow2264 said:
Not sure if you or someone else mentioned this here or on SB but is this a star wars crossover? Pig aliens with spider droids and space ships makes me think of those pigs that work for the hutts and star wars has some rather famous spider droids and invasions of planets happens all the time in star wars.
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They reminded me of Japanese depictions of orcs to be honest.
 
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Chapter Two: The Siege of Nakai-Ochiai Temple
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    A Ranma ½ Fanfic

    Age of the Sky

    By: Grounders10

    -0-0-0-0-0-

    Chapter Two

    The Siege of Nakai-Ochiai Temple

    -0-0-0-0-0-​

    Blood spattered the concrete wall of the metro station in an arc as the last pigman fell. Ranma flicked her blade to remove the worst of the blood before wiping it off on a cloth that disappeared back into her pocket. A burst of gunfire had her look up to find one of the JGSDF soldiers putting another burst of bullets into a motionless pigman. One she had stabbed only a few seconds before.

    The young soldier looked up and caught her staring. "He was twitching," he said.

    "...Right…" She sheathed her blade before she turned away to study the rest of what had been a food court right in front of the turnstiles before the platform. The other ten surviving soldiers including the Sergeant were also putting additional shots into the fallen pigmen that lay scattered across the floor. Mixed amongst them were the bodies of several dozen JGSDF soldiers that had died before Ranma and Ryouga had arrived.

    Their charge up the escalator into what had turned out to be at least a hundred of the pigmen had prompted the men on the platform to follow. As one of the privates had put it, "Watching a tiny redhead charge an army with a sword while you're planning on running doesn't make you feel much like a man. Especially when she starts winning."

    Their actions had prompted an immediate response from two concealed groups of soldiers who had been forced into storage rooms when they'd been cut off. The unintended three-pronged assault had carved through the pigmen and the follow-up wave of reinforcements from the street above. Things had quieted down, but squeals and grunts could be heard

    Ryouga yanked his umbrella out of a pillar beside a very destroyed chain ramen stand. Concrete crumbled to the ground at his feet. "This is getting ridiculous," he complained as he examined his umbrella.

    "It's an alien invasion. Was it supposed to be sane?" She shouted back.

    "You could hope, right?" He replied as he walked over, "We should keep moving," he added once he got close.

    "We'll have to deal with the group up top," she replied, giving the entrance a meaningful look. If the first entrance was anything to go by then this one would have more of those walkers at a minimum, and it looked like it was still raining. She mentioned that to him and he shrugged,

    "Can't do anything about that," he grumbled.

    "You're planning on moving on?" the sergeant from before asked as he walked over.

    Ranma nodded. "We need to," she said, "We're aiming for the ship and if we take too long the tunnels might collapse further on."

    The sergeant, who looked to be at least a decade older than she was, sighed. "Yeah, I figured. We're probably going to be pulling out despite your assistance, but at least we won't be leaving people behind this-"

    The door of the food court's public men's washroom swung open to admit the surprising sight of a pigman walking out with his hands up at gunpoint from two of the remaining soldiers. "Caught him using the urinal sergeant," one of the two said, "He gave up without a fight."

    The sergeant stared at the pigman. "Someone, tell me the radio is still intact," he shouted after a moment.

    A female soldier in the corner shouted back, "Some fatass alien fell on it when he died, but we should still have the landline sergeant."

    "Good enough," the sergeant muttered. He jabbed a finger at the two who caught the pigman, "You two, find a storage room to stuff him in then watch him,"

    "Right away."

    "Know just the spot sarge," the second said before he grabbed the pigman by the shoulder and pushed him along. "Come on piggy. Got a nice dank hole for you to sleep in."

    "Didn't expect that," the sergeant said after they watched the alien get led away, "I'll get my men to man the guns again while I call this in. We might just be ordered to escort him out. Not sure anyone else has taken prisoners yet."

    "Well while you do that, we're going to get moving. We'll deal with the guys up top before we leave," Ranma said. Ryouga nodded.

    "They're in our way anyways," he said.

    The sergeant looked from Ranma to Ryouga, a curious expression of bemusement on his face. "I always thought the tales going around Nerima were just stories," he said after a moment, "But I guess some things really are larger than life. Or smaller." He smirked as Ranma rolled her eyes.

    "Ha, ha," she deadpanned as Ryouga chuckled.

    "Seriously though, I'd have left behind a dozen men. We might have lost a few taking it back, but we're still getting more men out than if you hadn't shown. So thank you. Both of you," he said, giving them a nod, "Any time you can buy us would be appreciated, and good luck with that ship."

    "Thanks," Ranma said with a strained smile as she glanced around the body-strewn room. The scent of dead bodies was indescribably strong and she was thankful that they would be moving on in a moment, even if it meant going back out into the chaos of the city.

    "We'll do what we can. Come on," Ryouga nodded to the sergeant, then patted her on the shoulder and promptly started walking towards the bathroom.

    "This way," she said without hesitation, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him towards the front entrance.

    "I know."

    "No, you don't." She ignored the chuckle from the sergeant before the non-commissioned officer started shouting orders to his men to get the sandbags set back up and the machine gun back in position.

    As they approached the stairs up she let go of Ryouga and, after making sure he was following behind her, placed a hand on her sword hilt. The staircase was not a straight run up from the food court to the street. You had to turn a corner then walk up the stairs. Not normally an issue, but it meant that they had no way to see what was around that corner and she could hear feet sneaking closer. Behind her, Ryouga hefted his umbrella.

    She exchanged a glance with Ryouga then sprang around the corner unsheathing her blade as she went. The first pigman went down with a surprised expression as the wave of ki-sharpened vacuum passed straight through his neck. A dozen more fell as the strike ripped down the line without slowing until it buried itself an unknowable number of feet into the soil behind the staircase.

    Ryouga dashed around her and leaped over the falling pigmen as he deployed his umbrella to block the rain. He sailed over the fallen and crashed down atop a particularly fat specimen carrying a bulkier gun nearly the size of Ranma's torso. The punches and kicks that followed up slammed pigmen into the wall of the stairwell or threw them back up and onto the street above.

    Ranma ignored the beating Ryouga was inflicting on the remnants of the attacking force. There must have been at least forty, not that it mattered. They were all of the gun-toting group and put up a significantly worse resistance in melee than the berserkers from earlier. So instead of wading in to assist Ryouga, and getting caught in the trap of too many people and not enough room to swing, she went over them. She charged up the walls of the staircase, her skill allowed her to find footholds in the pitted concrete walls and she blitzed past the group and leaped out into the open.

    It was nighttime and the rain was coming down in sheets lit by the street lamps as she sailed up into the air and into the sight of hundreds of pigmen. Six large groups were waiting to launch another assault on the station, each as large as the one Ryouga was presently tearing through. There were no spider tanks waiting for them, instead, dozens of walkers that looked like someone had stuck four sturdy and ungainly legs beneath a truck without care for the look were parked along the roadside where dozens more pigmen were running past in columns. Bright white flames flickered on torch-like poles at each corner of the walkers, bathing the streets and the rain in eerie flickering white light.

    Squeals of surprise rang out as pigmen soldiers pointed her out. Anger followed along with shouted orders. It was too late as she hit the ground with a splash and spun on the ball of her foot. Her sword followed, slicing through the air in a single grand circle. Water droplets made it easy to track her vacuum blade as the cutting wave flowed out in a spiral.

    Dozens of pigmen fell, their armor and weapons bisected along with their torsos. The metal of the ungainly walkers failed to stop the strike as well and with a loud series of crashes the row of machines toppled to the ground. Several weapons exploded, prompting follow-up detonations in similarly compromised or delicate machines. She winced as shrapnel pelted her, tearing small holes in her clothes but doing no more damage.

    "Damn it," she muttered as she fingered a nickel-sized hole in the hem of her shirt. A moment later a loud squeal announced the arrival of a pigman and his subsequent departure as it flew out of the stairwell and off into the distance.

    Ryouga followed up the steps a few moments later, his umbrella opened over his head. He looked around at the broken vehicles and the pools of blood and viscera before turning to her. "I'm starting to get why your old man banned that technique," he said warily.

    "I'm trying to control how much it cuts, but I'm having some difficulties," she replied with a wince. She was pretty sure the blades had gone straight through the neighboring buildings. She really needed to back off the striking power otherwise she might hit something she didn't mean to. Like a human being. It was enough of a miracle that the streets around here were seemingly empty. That said, it was disturbing as well. There should have been countless people flooding out from the city center. Sure, a bunch of them were probably cramming into the train stations under the guard of police and JGSDF soldiers, but there was no way that made up even a fraction of the people in the city. So where were the rest? How many had reached safety?

    "Right, which way-" Several angry squeals cut in and plasma fire pattered off Ryouga's umbrella from a floor up in one of the buildings. More squeals echoed it from the other side of the street. "I've got the right," he said, dropping the subject.

    "I've got left," she said. A moment later Ryouga leaped left and she jumped right like she'd expected she'd have to. She crashed through the glass window of a second-storey apartment's balcony and took two pigmen looting the fridge by surprise. Neither had apparently paid a lick of attention to the chaos outside and both paid for it as she ran one through and cut the head off the other before crashing through the wall into the next room, and coincidentally the next apartment, in response to the sound of gunfire.

    Three pigs were lined up on the balcony of the next apartment and only one of them looked back in time to see her stab him through the face. The other two died before they realized she was there and she jumped to the next balcony where more pigmen were trying to shoot at Ryouga. Across the way, Ryouga was tearing through a group in what appeared to be more apartments over stores. He seemed to be having as little trouble as she was, a fact demonstrated as he smashed a hole in the ceiling and leaped through into a pack that were trying to draw a bead on her.

    So it continued for at least ten minutes, probably more since she had looked at a clock about halfway through the battle up and down the street. Twice walkers arrived carrying more soldiers and twice Ranma left the building to come crashing down on the machines like the wrath of an angry god. A few scurried away and she let them go as she tried to keep track of Ryouga.

    Then it was over. As she withdrew her sword from the bloated stomach of a heavily armored officer, at least she assumed it was some form of officer given the fancier equipment he had, and looked around. No squeals from further apartments met her ears and there were no other sounds beyond the flames of several burning walkers after a pigman had doused them with a flamethrower while trying to hit her, and the hiss of the rain as it hit the fires. "Ryouga?" she shouted.

    "Yeah?"

    "You good?"

    "Pretty good. These guys suck," he shouted as he came up to a balcony across the street and four storeys further up, evidently following her voice, "We done?"

    "I think so," she shouted, jumping down to the street below. The streetlights were the primary source of light this far down the street from the station. A moment later he jumped down, umbrella held over his head as he bounced from balcony to balcony before finally landing before her as she wiped the blood from her sword. There wasn't much to be entirely honest, the rain hadn't let up in the least.

    "Which way?" he asked loudly over the rain.

    She looked around, searching for a landmark and eventually spotted a street sign that had been knocked to the ground and evidently stepped on by one of the walkers. "That way I think," she said as she pointed down the street. In the distance, a flash of light and a rumble lit up the downpour.

    "Towards the gunfire," Ryouga noted.

    "Yeah," she sighed, "Towards the gunfire. Come on, let's go." She started jogging down the street, her blade kept out and at the ready. Behind them, they left the burning walkers and dead bodies of a thousand pigmen.

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    The rain was letting up as they moved from the street to a ten-story rooftop several blocks down from their last battle. Ranma would have preferred to put a bit more distance between them, but there was something really big going on only a kilometer further down the road. With the rain slowing down to a light drizzle, it was possible to see the battle ahead.

    Ranma sheathed her sword after drying it as best she could and retrieved a pair of binoculars from her pocket.

    "Can you see anything with that?" Ryouga asked. The darkness of the night was truly settling on them and the streetlights were getting pitifully few in the war-ravaged streets. Even those that weren't knocked down weren't always on. Missing lights and blackouts made for pits of darkness illuminated only by the flickering white flames of more of those mechanized walkers and other vehicles.

    "Just," she replied as she fixed her gaze on the hill a kilometer ahead of them. She knew that hill. On it stood an old temple by the name of Nakai-Ochiai. Named for the border of two areas it straddled. It was dedicated to Inari and had proven to be a fairly popular location for both locals and visitors. It was a small complex of structures that surrounded a central statue of a Kitsune messenger. Every summer they held a small festival. She had visited it a few times. The hillside around it played host to a small forest a few hundred meters in diameter. It was a beautiful sight at night.

    Or it had been. What had been a verdant forest was now a mixture of mud, shattered trees, fallen logs, and fires that burned in spite of the rain. To Ranma, after several passing summer visits over the years, it was surreal. Tracers lanced out from trenches along the slope at indistinct shapes that only occasionally lit up as pigmen fired back. Their blue-white weapons fire crisscrossed with the glowing tracers.

    "That's Nakai-Ochiai temple," Ranma said as she lowered the binoculars, "Looks like there's a group holding out there."

    Ryouga peered into the darkness. A blinding beam of light ripped a path through a trench and cut a pine tree in half. As the fifty-foot-tall titan slowly toppled to the ground a flicker of ki slapped at them.

    "You felt that?" Ranma asked.

    "Yeah. How the hell are they using Ki?" Ryouga asked as he leaned against the counter.

    Ranma chewed her lip as she thought back to the experiments she had been helping run. "Technology of some kind, I guess?" she said, "Not that that's really all that important right now. We've got more pressing problems right now. They're going to get overrun if we don't do something."

    She turned to her rival and friend and watched him as he stared at the ongoing battle. He nodded after a moment. "Yeah, we need to get involved. Going to slow us down though."

    "It's in our path," she pointed out. It was, technically, true. Going around it would take a bit of time, though probably less time than it would take to break the attack and push on. But at the same time, it felt wrong to just do nothing. Not when it was right in front of them.

    Ranma raised the binoculars to her eyes again. "They're falling back," she said. Soldiers were tossing smoke grenades before falling back up the hill. In moments this side of the hill was nothing but dark billows of white smoke. The soldiers didn't look quite right to her. She focused on one near the front as he ran up the hill to the next trenchline. Before the smoke clouds billowed out to conceal him, she was positive he was wearing an orange shirt under his body armor.

    "Let's go help them. Before this turns into a massacre," he said. She nodded her agreement.

    "Follow me," she said as she pocketed her binoculars before taking a running leap off the building. Behind her Ryouga followed. They dropped three stories to land on the next rooftop. This section of Tokyo was slowly growing taller as it moved towards the center of the city, but for now, the rooftops remained transversable to them.

    Ranma vaulted an air conditioning unit, bounced over vent ducts and leaped to the next building. As she poured on as much speed as she could, her form began to blur to the untrained eye. From building to building they traveled, Ryouga keeping pace with her every step of the way.

    As they bounced over the lip of the tenth building they found a pair of Pigmen watching the battle and the area around them with a set of their own sets of binoculars. She grabbed one by the collar as she swept by and hurled it towards a nearby billboard advertising ramen bowls to the stunned disbelief of the second pigman observer. Disbelief that lasted as long as it took Ryouga to kick them into the black abyss between buildings. The ramen bowl sign burst in a shower of sparks as the pigman she had tossed lodged itself in the bottom of the grinning bowl.

    She hit the three-story roof below and instantly kicked off to leap to the next building. The battle was close enough now that she could make out the individual crack of rifles and zat-hiss of those ki-powered rifles.

    Several buildings further down, she was forced to crash through a window into an office as the building itself was several stories taller than she could leap. The room she crashed into was a conference room with a large wooden table and a projector pointed at the wall. It was also occupied by a pair of pigmen passed out in the corner. At least, they had been passed out before the racket of shattering glass roused them.

    Squeals rang out from further in the office as she crossed the room as fast as she could. The first pigman died with her blade through its throat as Ryouga landed in the conference room. His umbrella caught the second pigman soldier in an uppercut that tossed it back and through the glass partition that separated the conference room from the hallway.

    As Ranma ripped her sword out of the dead body she caught sight of the uniform it was wearing along with the large axe laying beside it. "They're the guys from the pods Ryouga," she shouted.

    "I noticed," he replied.

    Several more large and black armored pigmen came charging into sight. In their haste, or perhaps it was the typical lack of care she had come to associate with this particular breed of alien, they came crashing through the intact glass walls after knocking aside whole cubicles in their aggressive charge toward them.

    Ranma met the first one, ducking under his wild swing to land a kick into its armored belly. The force threw it back and into two of its companions. The three of them smashed into more cubicles and glass dividers sending everything from glass shards to paper and desktop monitors crashing to the ground.

    Ryouga parried the wild swing of his first opponent with his umbrella and followed it up with a punch to the pigman's jaw before twirling his umbrella to bat aside the strike of another. A heartbeat later both pigmen were sent flying as his umbrella crashed into the side of one and propelled it into the other. Out of the corner of Ranma's eye she caught sight of the two broken corpses flying out through another window in a hail of shattered glass.

    More of the pigmen swarmed them, waving axes larger than Ranma, heedless of the damage each swing inflicted on their surroundings, though they avoided any strikes that might endanger each other.

    Perhaps it was their location eight storeys up a skyscraper, but as Ranma skewered one pigman through the neck with her sword before kicking the last of his kind straight out the window, she was thankful that none of them had attempted to utilize one of those daggers.

    "Fucking pigs," Ryouga snarled as he wrenched his umbrella out of a corpse. He gave the gore covered bamboo a disgusted look as he tried to flick the bits off of it.

    "The downsides of running someone through with a blunt object," Ranma deadpanned. She ignored the withering look Ryouga sent her way as she cleaned off her blade. She could hear feet pounding against the floor above and she'd put money on there being more below them. "Why are they sticking axe wielding nuts so far up a building like this?" she wondered aloud.

    "Those first two were asleep, right?" Ryouga asked. She nodded. "Probably resting then. They've made camp here."

    Ranma nodded and had begun to turn away from the window when a flash of light flared in the distance. A twitch and a hop took her out of the way of a bolt of plasma that smashed through the window and blasted a hole in the wall near the staircase. She ducked behind a cubicle and watched as another shot set the 90s-era carpet-lined dividers aflame.

    "Snipers," she shouted to Ryouga as he unfurled his umbrella and blocked several shots. The blood and gore hissed as it was vapourized by the incoming shots and Ranma could see small darker patches forming on the umbrella where it was getting hit. They couldn't stay there. While it was possible that they could survive getting shot with one of those weapons, it was also entirely possible they would simply blast a hole in their torso and call it a day.

    "We're leaving!" she shouted as she bolted from her cover towards the stairs. Leaping down the seven stories to the next building would leave them exposed, so they'd go down. Even if the staircase was being flooded by hundreds of pigmen it would still be better than being stuck in the open.

    "How?"

    "Stairs!" Ryouga spun on his heel, ducked another shot from the shooter and charged the staircase by the elevators, smashing through glass dividers in his way. The door of the staircase was shoulder checked open by a large heavily armored pigman screaming a warcry that cut off in a startled squeal as Ryouga shoulder checked him back through the doorway he'd come from.

    The stairwell was no more than the typical square box with stairs around all four sides that dropped a half-level with every flight as they circled around a gap that ran down the middle from the top floor all the way to the basement parkade. To Ranma's annoyance, every step of it seemed to be swarming with the aliens as Ranma followed Ryouga in. Pigmen were rushing down from the floors above and a steady stream was climbing up towards them. All of them carrying axes, swords, and rifles too large to comfortably use in the tight confines of the staircase.

    Ryouga knocked the one challenging him further back with a kick. Its rotund form fell back into others who were climbing up and a half dozen fell back down the stairs into a heap that would block that route from others coming up the stairs until the group got themselves sorted out. Unless, of course, they wanted to try climbing over a pile of flailing arms, legs, and sharp weapons that had already claimed at least one leg in the confusion.

    The bigger issue was those coming from above. The concrete stairs shook from the constant pounding of thousands of feet nearly running down the steps and unlike those climbing up, there was little chance of blocking the route.

    The first alien that charged her went for an overhead swing. His axe buried itself in the steps above to several shouts of surprise from those above. She cut his head off and kicked the body back up the stairs. It was hurled off the side and down into the abyss by the pigman following him.

    Glancing up at the axe, Ranma was met with a burst of inspiration. Without hesitating, she grabbed the axe with one hand and ripped it out of the ceiling as she deflected a clumsy attempt to hit her with the haft of another nearly identical axe. Using nothing but her raw strength, augmented as it was by ki, she swung the monstrous weapon through the legs of the next pigman and into the reinforced concrete steps. An explosion of concrete dust and shattered rebar met her effort as she removed two steps from the staircase.

    The next alien promptly put his foot through the hole and fell with a squeal until he was halfway jammed into the step. What followed was a desperate scramble by those behind him to stop before they fell in the hole, but the press of bodies from the hundreds descending the stairs sent the first few stumbling forwards. One fell into the hole upside down to be stuck squealing at the pigmen below. Another tripped over the first and slipped off into space with a horrified shrieking squeal.

    "Kinda crowded in here!" she shouted as her mind turned over the situation.

    "You picked it!" he shouted back as he swatted a pigman out of the air and onto a lower landing as it tried to leap down from a higher level.

    "Yeah, and it's going to be a problem," she shouted back. Several more pigmen attempted to attack the problem from a different direction and leaped down from above. Of them, most mistimed a jump and either crashed into groups below them, or plummeted screaming down the shaft in the center. A few made it onto their landing before being promptly ejected by the two of them, but for all the bodies they tossed around the stairwell, wide enough for two average Japanese men to slip past each other in either direction, were small enough that the relentless numbers prevented them from making progress. They were stuck on that same landing despite their blatant physical superiority to the aliens.

    The issue at hand was how small the stairwell was. Her attempts to unleash the Yamasenken ran into a simple problem. The constructs of razor-sharp air required a minimum swing to properly form, but with the railings and walls on either side and the pigmen closing in even she couldn't swing her sword in a wide enough arc without being interrupted. Enough of a redirection or interruption would weaken or even disperse the technique. Which meant they were stuck doing it the hard way. One step at a time against a horde that was baying for their blood with every breath.

    Ranma caught a wide swing behind the axeblade before she heaved its owner into the void. The pigman's scream was lost in the cacophony of the chants, shouts, and screams from the other pigmen. For a brief instant, before she spun to face the next challenger, she caught sight of the stairs below. Climbing the steps was a seemingly endless column of aliens that spiraled up towards them.

    She disarmed a pigman before kicking him into the concrete wall of the stairwell. Then it clicked. "Spiral," she shouted to Ryouga.

    "What?"

    "The stairwell. It's basically a spiral, and these guys are pretty hotblooded and definitely using ki," she shouted before she stole an axe from an alien and used it to bisect its owner at the waist. She spun on the spot, dragging the axe in a swing that carved up the wall before she narrowly avoided taking Ryouga's head off, before finally releasing the axe as a spinning projectile up the stairs. She ignored the blood and gore produced by the mulched bodies with more ease than she would have preferred.

    "You're thinking about using the Hiryu Shoten Ha?" he asked as he sent another pigman off into space.

    "Yeah."

    "Not from here you aren't," he replied bluntly.

    "I know." In order to buy more time she pointed her hand down at the two pigmen stuck in the stairs and unleashed an unannounced half-strength Moko Takabisha. The bolt of golden ki exploded on contact and blasted the two pigmen out of their hole and down through the next level of the stairwell along with who knew how many others. The explosion shook the building.

    Taking the moment that afforded her as more pigmen were accidentally pushed into the new gap, she looked down the shaft. "We can't do it here. We can do it down below. Not that far of a drop." They'd fallen farther fighting Prince Herb or that thug Taro. Really other than the pigmen and their weapons that were piling up at the bottom they would be-

    She blinked as Ryouga dropped into her line of sight as he leaped over the railing and plummeted. "Coming?" He shouted.

    "Impatient idiot," she shouted at him as the pigman he'd been keeping in check surged forward. She jumped and the axeblade of the last pigman crashed into the concrete where she had been standing a heartbeat later.

    The hot air of the stairwell whipped by as she plummeted the eleven stories to the floor below. Ryouga impacted the ground umbrella first in the pile of dead and injured pigmen that had built up in the base of the stairwell. The sight that followed was enough to turn her stomach, but she suppressed that feeling with practiced reflex as she embraced the soul of ice. Her feet squelched as she landed in the bloodsoaked concrete powder that formed the bottom of the stairwell.

    She looked up to see Ryouga put two pigmen through the plexiglass wall dividing the stairwell from the parkade. "Ryouga, on me," she called as she planted her sword in the concrete between her feet and began to go through the basic motions of the Hiryu Shoten Ha.

    When she had first learned the technique it had required her to use the full spiral. A lack of understanding of how to manipulate ki had made the clumsy and time-consuming wind-up a necessity. That was ages ago now, and she had learned quite a bit since then. The spiral was the optimal way to initiate a Hiryu Shoten Ha, but it wasn't truly necessary. You could substitute similar things and skip the setup if you had the control required to force the reaction. Doing it that way weakened the technique, but she felt that the overwhelming number of victims would probably more than make up for a little sloppiness. Especially since she had never used it on this many angry ki users.

    Ryouga tossed a pigman at the base of the stairs to ensnare those descending before firing a weak Shi Shi Hokodan into the crowd flowing in from the parkade where it seemed most of their numbers had been barracked. He jumped back and took up a place by her side. "Ready?"

    A pigman crashed into the ground next to them with a heavy thud. He was followed by two more who crashed down around them. Some had apparently decided to imitate them and let gravity do the work.

    "Hang on," she said as she pulled back her fist and reached out to the swirling storm of ki. She could feel a lot of anger and hate, and a surprising amount of fear as well. Though perhaps she should have expected that. It was like those times when they fought Taro or Herb or even Saffron. One or two unstoppable warriors against many times their number of weaker foes. Though she had proven to be Saffron and Herb's equal before the end, they had been hard-won fights.

    Fear was expected. Natural even. Like when you found yourself staring up at a city-sized behemoth of a spaceship. She let out a breath as pigmen vaulted their fallen comrades and charged screaming. Fear was natural. It was also a distraction, one that she crushed beneath a soul of ice. She met the eyes of the foremost charging pigman, its eyes as wide as its grinning mouth. Sweat glistened on its jowls and she could see the glint of the fluorescent lights of the stairwell in its pure black eyes. Its axe came down, aimed perfectly for her.

    She didn't even smirk as she threw her punch. Cold ki hit hot with the force of a natural disaster. With a twist they mixed, spinning and blending into something uncontrollable that reached out to claw at the burning souls around it. And there were many souls around that burned with the flames most natural in war. Anger, hate, and fear.

    The reaction was, to anyone who understood ki, naturally explosive.

    It was akin to detonating a hundred tons of C4 inside the stairwell. Air pressure slammed pigmen up and down the stairwell through walls even as it turned reinforced concrete to dust and iron powder. Walls failed as the tornado reached for the sky. Structural supports were ripped from their places. Steel doors found themselves without frames before joining the swirling madness as floor after floor disintegrated into a storm of debris. With a roar similar to a landslide the roof was torn away as the building failed.

    In but a few short heartbeats what had been a twenty-two-story office building was reduced to a short-lived shrapnel bomb that pelted sections of the city dozens of miles away with shattered glass, corpses, and the occasional steel fire door.

    For Ranma, she didn't even bother holding the pose as she grabbed Ryouga and dragged him down into the hole even as the blood and other unpleasant materials were vacuumed into the air. As they dropped to the ground in a huddle around her sword, both of them clutching each other to prevent either of them from being caught up in the technique. Ranma buried her head in Ryouga's shoulder as she tried to cover her ears in vain against the sound of the tornado.

    The tornado raged on and on. Perhaps fueled by the uncommon number of victims, as it continued to disassemble the underground parkade around them and eat at the buildings around it. Finally, however, it came to an end. The few pieces of material that hadn't been thrown across the city crashed to the ground as the winds that carried them evaporated as fast as they had appeared.

    On instinct, Ranma grabbed Ryouga's umbrella and popped it open over their heads. With a loud thunk, a piece of a car bounced off the bamboo paper. A moment later rain hammered back down on them as the downpour resumed. Ryouga gave her a nod as they separated and slowly stood. She handed him the umbrella.

    "Thanks," he said, his voice difficult to hear through the ringing from the tornado.

    "You're welcome," she replied as she pulled her blade from the ground and stepped out from under the umbrella to look around.

    There was no building anymore, nor a parkade, nor any neighboring buildings. It did, in fact, appear that the tornado hadn't been satisfied with just the buildings, for the street was missing half of its width and water was leaking into their crater from a broken sewer main. It was too far to tell which sewer.

    And falling all around them was the bits and pieces that hadn't been thrown far away. Spider tanks, a few cars, and some of those transport walkers crashed down into the crater as she took in the hundred-plus meters of devastated cityscape as best she could in the dark.

    "We need to move," Ryouga shouted over the ringing and the rain.

    "Yeah…" she agreed absently as she looked out on the devastation, "Yeah…" She nodded and gave herself a shake. Now wasn't the time to be stunned by the carnage. That temple was probably still under assault and they'd wasted enough time with this diversion.

    It took a moment to reorient herself without most of the landmarks, but once she had she led the way out of the crater. They were only a few stories down from the road, nothing that the two of them hadn't jumped before. The sight that met them when they crested the edge of the hole was the closest thing to hell either of them had lived through.

    The blacktop of the street was cracked and torn apart. Cars and walkers lay discarded upside down or embedded in buildings, like toys cast aside by a bored child. Street Lamps were bent over from impacts or cut to pieces. Most were dark, but a few were flickering with dim light. A fire had started up in what had been a Korean barbeque and was slowly spreading to the rest of the structure. The flickering light failed to illuminate more than the immediate area, but the flash and flicker of gunfire at the end of the street more than made up for the lack of intact streetlights.

    Part of a neighboring apartment building crumbled. The rumble of collapsing concrete and brick failed to obscure the ongoing battle ahead. The temple's defenders had fallen further back up the hill into yet more trenches. Several burnt-out tanks and other vehicles marked where defensive lines had been. In the flickering light of burning fires, flares, and gunfire she could make out the faint outlines of bodies strewn across the hillside despite the rainfall.

    Not, that is to say, that the defenders had died for nothing. Several times their number of pigmen were clustered about the open ground near the base of the hill. Broken walkers of several designs new to Ranma, and those three-legged spider tanks the berserkers seemed to prefer, was testament to the ferocity of the fighting, and an issue since the vehicles were providing cover for the pigmen currently closing in.

    "Almost there," she said, shouting to be heard over the ringing of their ears and the rain.

    "Are we sure this is a good idea?" he asked, "We're headed for the ship. That's the big issue."

    "I know," she sighed. He was right, they had something rather more important than bailing out a temple this far back from the main lines. The mother ship that loomed over everything chose that moment to fire again. The shot zipped off to the north, prompting a line of detonations as distant buildings exploded, "But we're here," she continued, "Maybe we can make time for them to escape before moving on?"

    "Like at the station?"

    "Yeah."

    "I think-" A bolt of energy zipped between them, cutting off Ryouga's thought. Charging at them through the rain was a large group of pigmen. Equipped with guns and backed up by a pair of quadrupedal walkers with large cannons mounted where the transport compartment had been on the other models, they were advancing up the street at a sprint.

    "We have to go through them anyways," she shouted as they both scattered, ducking and weaving through the gunfire, "So let's just deal with them."

    "FINE!" he shouted back as he leaped over another quadrupedal transport.

    One of the walkers fired. Night turned to day as a bolt of ki-fueled plasma flew the length of the street and, missing Ryouga by quite a ways, crashed into another walker. Which promptly detonated in an explosion that rocked the street, showering more debris everywhere as the building the wreck had been leaning against flew to pieces. The aftershock of ki rolled over their senses, an increasingly familiar buzz in the back of their minds the longer the battle went on.

    Ranma swiped her sword in the direction of the walker that had fired and smirked as the front right leg came off. The machine stumbled and fell to its knees. The cannon turned towards her, but promptly exploded as a bandana carved through the turret ring and hit something vital. The second walker started backing up as Ranma crashed into the line of infantry who were keeping remarkable discipline. At least until Ryouga leaped over the line and came crashing down on the second walker.

    His first strike cracked the plates across the front driver's cabin. The second punched a hole straight through. The third saw a screaming pigman ripped straight through the much too small hole and tossed away before Ryouga grabbed the turret with one hand. The metal of the machine screamed as he pulled it off, tearing through metal and ceramics with raw strength until with a bang the entire thing came loose and went flying through the air.

    As he finished dismantling the walker, Ranma had gone to work on the crowd with a combination of brutal close combat maneuvers and wide sweeping Yama-sen-ken strikes that killed over a dozen with each attack. In moments what had been a confident and disciplined company of pigmen was turned into a route back up the street where Ranma could see pigmen gathering behind barricades.

    "Keep moving!" she called to him as she sped past the walker. She could see two more walkers turning the corner as they took covering positions. One was a transport walker and the pigmen on its back opened up with a trio of larger fully automatic weapons.

    Silver bolts of light rippled out from the walker; punching holes in asphalt, tearing through buildings, and even cutting down one or two of the retreating aliens. She scowled at the walker, but Ryouga pre-empted her response with a shot of his own. The dark bolt of a Shi Shi Hokodan ripped the walker in half sending metal scything through the defenders.

    "Geez Ryouga, feeling outdone a bit?" she muttered as a second shot took two legs out from the other walker's left side. The turret fired as it fell. The bolt of light streaked off into the distance over the buildings.

    The fixed positions opened fire as she crossed half of the remaining distance as the gunners decided it was time to disregard any friendly fire concerns. Bolts cut down pigmen around her, but she ducked and weaved between the remaining pigmen, using them for cover as she advanced. The not-so-friendly fire cut down her meat shields, but it lasted long enough. With a shout of triumph, she vaulted over the last burst of weapons fire from the fixed position and was promptly in and amongst the defenders.

    Her sword cut a hurriedly swung gun in half as she carved its owner in half before yanking the blade free into a swing that sent a vacuum blade through a charging sword-wielding officer and his subordinates. The rest of the unit broke and ran. She let them go as she took a moment to look around. They had hit the last, and really first actual, roadblock on the way to the temple.

    This was where the real battlefield was. Small fortified dugouts carved from shell craters in the street or across the hillside with heavier weaponry set up in the ruins of storefronts and apartment buildings. As she looked around she could see groups that had been taking cover behind walkers and in foxholes turning towards her and Ryouga. All of the remaining walkers assaulting the hill were abandoning the attack and turning to face her and Ryouga. Several at the front exploded as they exposed their sides and back. Rounds from the last tank on the hill and missiles from the infantry ripped them to pieces.

    Ryouga joined her at the barricade as the nearest groups started to open fire. They ducked back behind one of the walkers. "They don't look happy," he said.

    "You think?" she rolled her eyes. "I counted ten walkers." There was a loud explosion and they both felt the ripples of a ki-detonation. "Nine walkers," she corrected, "and that's just this side."

    "And it's still raining," he added as he glanced up at the bottom of his umbrella.

    "Try not to drop your umbrella," she replied with as much seriousness as she could. There was no way she would be able to rescue him in this madness.

    "Really wish it would let up again," he grumbled. The wreck they were hiding behind shuddered as something exploded.

    She patted him on the shoulder sympathetically. "We need to move," she said. Ryouga nodded.

    "Left and right?" he suggested.

    "Together I think," she replied. It was a debate as to whether him getting lost would be worse than him getting turned into a pig. "Ready?"

    "... Yeah," he said after a deep breath. He was probably questioning his sanity for coming with her. Not that she could blame him. This was way nuttier than anything they'd been involved in up until now.

    Their cover shook again as more shots flew in. They needed to go. "Come on," she shouted, leaping up and out the left side.

    -0-0-0-0-0-​

    There were moments when Lieutenant Jack Fraser missed his family's bakery back in Seattle. The smell of fresh bread in the morning. The frantic rush around lunchtime and the lazy afternoons waiting for someone, anyone really, to poke their nose into the shop as he manned the counter, seemed so much better looking back at times. Times like hiding in a trench he'd helped dig a couple of hours earlier in the middle of Tokyo to help defend a temple from an alien mothership. Yeah, moments like that really made him wish he hadn't signed up for the US Marines Officer Candidate School.

    A pulse of what the nerds in their ragtag group claimed had to be plasma vaporized the top half of an airman three feet to his right in a flash of light. Oddly, there was no heat, but he had gotten used to that strange quirk of the alien's weapons. He peeked over the edge of the trench and fired a three-round burst from his borrowed type 89 at one of the advancing aliens. Two of the rounds bounced off the metal plating the aliens liked to use for body armour. The third round was just a touch higher and managed to catch the pig-thing in the neck. It reeled back, clutching its neck with a hand nearly as big as Jack's head before jerking back as another shot from a different rifleman took it straight in the eye.

    He turned his rifle on another and fired. It went down after nine rounds as a lucky round ripped off its jaw. He kept firing at other targets that were running up the slope towards his position until his weapon clicked empty and he ducked back down. As he slapped a new magazine into his weapon his radio spoke.

    "Lieutenant, we-" The voice was drowned out by the firing cannon of their Type 90 on the northern slope. Chariot-2 had outlived, in the sense that their vehicle was still operating, the rest of his platoon. The other three tanks were a mixture of melted or burning metal.

    "-street." He pulled the radio free of his webbing and keyed the talk button.

    "Repeat last, the tank chose the worst time to fire," he said loudly. He winced as something down below fired and a stretch of stumps that had only a few hours ago been trees disappeared in a silver-white explosion.

    The voice of Staff Sergeant Talia Ortiz, his second in command, crackled through the radio, barely audible over the rifle fire and constant downpour. "Movement on the street," she shouted, "Enemy company has pulled off the line and appears to be advancing north, Lieutenant. They've taken two of their walkers with them."

    He peeked over the edge of his trench and fished out his binoculars. Leaning into the mud he peered through the binoculars. The water made it hard to see, but he could see the pigs turning their backs. "Doesn't look like they're breaking Sergeant," he said after a moment.

    "Something's caught their attention, Lieutenant," she replied.

    A plasma bolt vaporized a patch of mud two feet to his left and he promptly slid back into his trench. "Whatever it is isn't us at least. I'll radio the Major and find out if we're expecting anything," he said. Not that he was expecting anything. The nearest JSDF defense station had declared that they'd been overrun nearly forty minutes prior, and the next nearest was… well, a bit too far to make a break for it. The last group that had tried, and succeeded, at a breakout had been promptly obliterated by the mothership the moment they were off the hill. The entirety of a JSDF armored platoon and accompanying infantry had been vaporized in the time it took him to blink.

    "Understood sir."

    He hesitated a moment as he spared a glance up towards the alien ship. The curvature of the hill made seeing the entire ship difficult, but he could spot the tail end of it. It had been annihilating positions left and right since it showed up, but for some reason he couldn't fathom it, it hadn't fired on them yet. It hadn't wasted even a second before annihilating the breakout forces, but it never fired on the hill. He just couldn't understand why. What was so special about them, or maybe about the temple, that the aliens were willing to fight through the meatgrinder they'd assembled out of mud and fallen trees just to take it? It just didn't make any sense, unless they had some sort of weird taboo about blowing up holy sites? Then again he'd seen a church in the city explode from a shot by the spaceship, so maybe not.

    After tweaking the setting, he triggered the radio. "Lieutenant Fraser to Major Ida, Major can you hear me?"

    "I hear you, Lieutenant. How is E Company doing?" his superior asked. Major Kenichi Ida was the current commander of their mish-mash of Japanese and American survivors.

    "Rough. We've been pushed all the way back up to Chariot-2's position," he replied, "I think we're down to a single platoon effective. Everyone else is either dead or wounded." As he said that another soldier, airforce by his shirt, went down missing his head.

    "The priests say that we only need a little bit longer," he said, "I will see what I might send your way, but our forces are stretched thin."

    Fraser held his tongue on his thoughts of what a few pagan priests could do about their situation. It wasn't like they had much of a chance of escaping on foot anyway. Besides, with aliens running around blowing up the city maybe they'd get lucky and there would be something to this whole thing after all. "Understood, but I wasn't calling for reinforcements, sir," he said, "The enemy has pulled a company of troops from the line along with a couple of their walkers. They're moving north. Do we have anything coming in?"

    "Not to my knowledge Lieutenant. Not enough to punch through the forces that overran the area anyways. But they're moving north? Odd… But we should count our blessings. Just be thankful they aren't being thrown your way. Major Ida, out."

    Jack groaned and leaned back, his helmet pressed against the trench wall. "Fraser out," he said, before swapping his radio back to the company net. "Staff Sergeant, you still with me?"

    "I'm here, sir," Talia replied, "We've lost another two men. Walker vaporized their foxhole."

    "Course it did," he sighed, "Where and who-"

    His next words were drowned out from even his head as every sound was buried by what he could only equate to a train crashing into an avalanche. It was the ripping and tearing of stone and metal mixed with the unrelenting rumble and scream of a natural disaster. He grabbed at his ears as the sound went on and on and on. If it weren't for the earplugs every marine was required to wear for hearing protection he would have probably gone deaf from the sheer volume of the noise.

    Then, as abruptly as it had arrived, the sound vanished in the night air. Slowly, as the ringing faded, he started to pull himself up to look over the edge of the trench. Then a steel fire door came crashing down in the dirt behind him. He dropped in a heartbeat to the dirt as more debris rained down. Most of it was mere gravel, but there was a scattering of metal shards, lengths of rebar, and the occasional larger object. Objects like steel doors, cars, or one of those weird alien tripod walkers that he hadn't seen in hours, or bodies. Lots of bodies. All alien, but they rained down across the hillside for a dozen seconds before the bombardment ceased.

    As the last pattering of falling items and bodies trailed off his radio crackled to life. "Command to all units, status report," the Major demanded. There was silence for a few seconds, during which Jack peeked over the edge of the trench.

    The view was even more destroyed. One of the enemy walkers burned merrily beneath the wreckage of another of those tripod walkers. Pigmen were looking around disorientedly, many of them stumbling and shaking their heads. They didn't look like they wore much in the way of ear protection. Perhaps they just didn't normally need it, or maybe their superiors simply didn't care about their health, either way, they seemed to be in shock.

    "Company!" He shouted into the company RF as he lifted his rifle to his shoulder, "OPEN FIRE AND SEND THEM TO HELL!" He followed his own instructions and put a round straight through the neck of a pigman who had staggered out of cover.

    Across the line, the ragged remains of the mixed American Company shook off their shock and opened fire. The staggering front ranks of the aliens dropped as M16s and M249s ripped through them. Aliens further down scrambled for cover as Chariot-2 fired. The Type 90 ripped a walker in half with its shot as their last AT team dropped a pair of missiles into two of the entrenched repeating plasma gun positions in the line of stores at the base of the hill.

    A few aliens started shooting back, plasma fire flickering in fitful spurts up the hill. A few marines ducked, but the rest kept firing. Jack's rifle clicked dry as Chariot-2 fired again and another walker exploded. One of the gun walkers fired in reply. Its shot vaporized a section of the manmade berm Chariot-2 was hiding behind, a shot that also wrecked the tracks. Twin ATGMs flew down the hill in reply to impact it in the turret ring. An explosive chain reaction ripped the walker into a thousand tiny pieces that rained down across the area.

    Jack dropped back into his trench and quickly slammed a new magazine into his gun before grabbing his radio again. "Staff Sergeant, what the hell was that?" he asked

    There were a few heartbeats before his second replied, "Tornado. Eight hundred meters north, up the street where that pig company is still going. It- Sir, it looked like it ripped a skyscraper to pieces from within. God's honest truth, sir."

    Before he could reply, a burst of Japanese that he barely kept up with from the command net cut him off first. "B Company is engaged on the south-east slope. A car just dropped out of the sky and knocked out the lead walker," Captain Goro Teruya of B Company said, "Enemy forces have started pulling back for the moment. What was that noise?"

    "D Company here, south side is pulling back as well. I'd like to second what he asked, sir," 2nd Lieutenant Hikaru Onaga said. Originally of D Company's section platoon, she had been forced to step up once D Company's Captain had disappeared during the fighting. No one was sure where he went or if he was dead.

    A softer voice spoke up right after. "A Company reporting," said Captain Hotaka Teramoto. Hotaka had originally been the commander of the 81st Reconnaise's D Company, but as he was currently the most senior JGSDF Captain in their combined force he had taken over the slot of A Company commander. Not that there was much left of A Company. Like Fraser's E Company, A Company was a mish-mash of mixed units and even included some elements of the Tokyo Metropolitan's Special Assault Team. "The west side is still mostly quiet. Light contact with skirmish elements only. No walkers sighted as of yet."

    "Understood. E Company, status report?" Major Ida demanded.

    "Just a second sir," Jack said into his radio before flipping back to the company net, "You're sure about that Sergeant?"

    "Yes sir," she replied. She sounded sure, a bit stunned, but sure.

    "Keep the company firing. We've knocked them back, but let's not give them a chance to recover. I'm going to report in," he stated.

    "Yes sir."

    He keyed the battalion command net. "Fraser to command, according to my sergeant the source of the noise was a tornado ripping a skyscraper apart from the inside about eight hundred meters north of our position. No sign of it anymore, over," he said.

    "A tornado? Since when do tornadoes start inside buildings?" Teruya asked.

    "I've heard a tornado in person, Sir," Lieutenant Onaga said, "That's what they sound like."

    "Easy everyone. Your sergeant's sure, Fraser?" Major Ida asked.

    "Yes sir."

    After a few moments of silence the Major said, "Regardless of the source, your orders stand. Hold the line. Lieutenant Fraser, you were low on men?"

    "The enemy doesn't appear to have the same ear protection we do sir. The incident broke the enemy's cohesion. We've knocked them back down the slope," he paused as Chariot-2 fired again, "but they've still got at least three infantry companies advancing on the slope with walker support. If someone can spare a couple of squads at least we'd appreciate it." As he said that

    "Onaga, think you can spare a squad or two?" The Major asked.

    There was a moment before a reply came. "Third platoon is just under half strength. I think we can shuffle them to the northside without too many issues. Maybe if we could get an MG team from the west to cover the absence we'd be golden," she said.

    "Western contacts have been minimal," Ida noted, "Teramoto, do you have a spare MG team that Onaga can borrow?"

    "I think I can send an extra to the northside as well," The A Company CO replied, "I have excess crew served if you recall sir. I should be able to pull away four guns and men to crew them without issue." By dumb luck most of 1st and 3rd battalion's surviving vehicles had been caring the spare equipment for their weapon's companies. Their biggest issue was manpower, not weapons.

    "Transfer a pair of MGs teams then. One north, one south. Onaga, get your third platoon shuffled north immediately. Lieutenant Fraser, hold that position."

    "Yes sir," he replied before he flicked over to the company channel. "Staff Sergeant, we have reinforcements inbound. Third platoon from D Company and an additional Machine Gun team from A."

    "Excellent news sir, however, we have more movement up the street. I see gunfire," Talia replied. Fraser peered over the edge of the trench. The line of pigmen and the two turreted walkers had opened fire on something in the darkness. The cannon of the left walker fired and in its flashing light Fraser made out… something human-sized but it was moving too quickly. The form was made far more visible as the shot detonated one of the many wrecks littering the streets. It also highlighted a second form moving in the distance.

    Then a lot of things happened in mere seconds. It started with one of the right walker's legs abruptly coming apart, dropping the walker to its knees to keep it from tipping over. Then the left walker exploded and the first figure crashed into the right walker after leaping the entire line of infantry, who seemed to be dropping in number to the other flickering form. A body was hurled from the right walker before the turret abruptly went flying without so much as a little explosion.

    "Talia, what the hell am I watching?" he demanded into the radio before ducking as a few shots slapped against the mud to his right.

    "I have no idea, sir," the normally stoic staff sergeant sounded as confused and awed as he was. He peaked back over again.

    The pigman unit that had been advancing up the street was gone. Both walkers had been torn apart with their escorts simply gone, indistinguishable from the ground in the nighttime rain. More walkers were pulling off the line, transport walkers with their support repeating plasma rifles along with more pigmen.

    Then a bolt of dark light erupted from one of the two figures and shattered one of the walkers in a single strike. The explosion of shrapnel laid out every pigman in forty meters of the spot who hadn't been in cover from the walker. More rushed to fill the breach, dropping the cordon to the point where it was starting to feel like an even fight.

    Another walker lost its legs.

    He keyed his radio on the company RF. "Everyone, covering fire for the pair coming up the street. Suppress the gun positions and clear out the walkers to the sides," he barked before raising his rifle and putting a few shots down towards one of the crew-served weapons the pigs were so fond of. He missed, only for a few shots from someone else to catch the operator.

    The two down below swept through the line and hunkered down behind a broken walker.

    Chariot-2 fired again and another walker died. A plasma shot crashed into the protective berm in front of the tank. Chariot-2 fired again and the walker that had fired on it died.

    The two figures burst out from behind the wrecked walker and crashed through the wall of a rickety convenience store. The repeating plasma gun firing out of the window went silent in the same heartbeat and Fraser had to take a moment to stare as he watched them practically dance, if the leaping acrobatics the two figures kept doing could be called a dance, through the enemy lines.

    More shots skipped off of the mud around him and he pulled back into the trench. Lights flashed and the earth shook as a series of explosions rocked the battlefield. Chariot-2 fired again and another explosion shook the world before two more joined it.

    "Status on the enemy line?" He asked the Staff Sergeant. He'd check himself but someone down there seemed to have a bead on him as more shots were smacking into the earthen trench lip disturbingly close to his location.

    "The right flank is breaking," she replied, "Multiple walkers down, the left flank appears to be attempting to break off."

    "Let them go, we can't pursue even if we wanted to," he replied. He would love nothing more than to run them down, but that damned ship. He glanced up at the alien mothership and caught the tail end of a shot flying out to somewhere in the city.

    "Yes sir."

    "Concentrate fire on the walkers, leave the small fry our guests," he continued. He really had to wonder who they were, but until they attacked him he wasn't going to shoot at them, especially since they seemed to be human, which was good enough for him.

    An explosion was followed by the sounds of the gunfire directed at his position dropping off entirely. He shuffled a little bit to the right down the trench and peered over the lip. The AT team fired another rocket from one of the other trenches as he scanned the field.

    His radio crackled. "Down to our last couple shots Lieutenant," the lead for the AT section said.

    "Understood, hold fire for now, we should be good unless something new shows up," he said. The pigmen had broken on the right and the units on the left were falling back, their handful of walkers providing covering fire as they walked backwards up towards the next street over.

    Chariot-2 fired and another one exploded. They had to be getting low as well. "Chariot-2, how's the ammunition looking?" he asked over the radio.

    "Eleven shots left, all HE, sir," was the reply. He grimaced. The good news is it would probably be sufficient for the targets at hand, but this was a close thing.

    "Understood, hold tight."

    Not even two minutes later the battle was over, for them at least. He could still hear the gunfire to the east and south of the perimeter. All that was left here was the cries of the wounded as their handful of medical personnel rushed about treating and pulling the injured off the line to the relative safety of the temple behind them.

    He rose to his full height for the first time in several hours and scanned the hills. He wasn't the only one. Many of his men were leaving their trenches as sergeants bellowed instructions. His own mind was busy cataloging the damage to the defenses, counting the blown-out trenches and the craters where ad hoc bunkers had been assembled. They had to have lost at least a quarter of their company during this last assault given the missing defenses.

    He sighed and ran a grubby hand through his hair. "That was too close," he complained. They were already at a point where a sensible commander would have retreated, but that wasn't an option. Hopefully, not too many more had been injured otherwise holding the next wave was…

    The Lieutenant's breath caught in his throat as a shiver rolled down his spine. If whatever weird mystic thing the priests were doing didn't work then they were dead. They had nowhere to go. He swallowed and refrained from shaking his head. He had to at least look like he was in control.

    "Sir." He turned to find Staff Sergeant Talia kneeling beside the trench. A redheaded teenage girl with a sword was standing behind her with a black-haired boy standing under an umbrella. The flickering flames of a pile of shattered and burning trees backlit them in a haze of glowing raindrops. The flickering shadows washed out the colours even as the glow about them lit them up.

    He swallowed. Between the lighting and what he'd seen over the last few minutes it made him wonder how real this was.

    "So, are you two the visitors from up the street?" He asked, glancing from one to the other.

    "That's us," the redhead replied. The boy behind her nodded. "I'm Ranma Saotome, this is Ryouga Hibiki, we were just passing by and decided to help out a bit."

    Help out a bit. Well, he supposed they had done that exceedingly well. The pressure was off them for now. It wouldn't stay off, but a break was appreciated. "Well, um, thanks for the assistance. Anything I can do to help you?" he asked. Anything he could do to help them? After that?

    "We're pretty good," she glanced around, then winced, "Um, I hope no one got hit with the debris from the Hiryu Shoten Ha earlier." She gestured at a steel fire door that was balanced precariously on the edge of a crater.

    He stared at it for a moment. "... Are you saying that the tornado was your doing?" he asked after a moment. There was no way-

    "Yup. Sorry about the mess," she said, causing him to turn to stare at the girl who sheepishly rubbed the back of her head. "I don't normally set it off inside a building, but I didn't have much choice. There were a lot of those berserker types camped there."

    Berserker? She didn't mean the drop troops did she? They did have that sort of attitude, charging into combat with nothing but axes. "It's… Fine, not a problem, it was a good distraction, we managed to get the drop of the lot out here," he said, trying to wave it off casually. He had no idea who this girl and her companion were, but anyone who could do that wasn't someone he wanted to offend, especially not now.

    "Let me just call this in, I think the Major will want to talk to you," he said. Let the Major handle the redhead and her friend. He unhooked his radio and keyed the mic. "Company A to Major Ida, we've got someone over here you're going to want to talk to." When it doubt, kick it up the chain and let someone else deal with it.

    -0-0-0-0-0-​

    Ranma raised an eyebrow at the American as he spoke quietly into the radio. She hadn't expected to find Americans up here. None of them seemed to be wearing the proper uniforms, but they were definitely acting like soldiers under their mudstained eclectic mix of t-shirts, tank tops, and plate carriers.

    All of them looked battered and exhausted, their faces only lightly stained in mud thanks to the constant downpour. It was hard to believe it had only been a few hours since this invasion kicked off. Though, she had to wonder how so many foreigners got mixed up with this.

    "They look half dead," Ryouga said from behind her. His voice was low and barely carried over the rain. She glanced back his way to find him looking around pensively.

    "... Half of them probably are," she replied as she looked around. The hill wasn't quite so bright now that everyone had stopped firing, but she could make out the outlines of bodies on the ground in the flickering flames that were resisting the weather's attempts to put them out.

    "...yes sir. I'll send them over," the man the sergeant lady said was a Lieutenant said before turning to them, "Head up to the shrine. The Major wants to speak with you," he said.

    "We'll do that. C'mon Ryouga," she said, grabbing him by the arm as she did. For once he didn't protest as she dragged him up the hill. He was looking about, pensive at the carnage that she was trying to ignore. A lot of people had died on the hill before they had gotten here.

    A lot more were probably going to die after they left.

    Ryouga pulled his arm out of her grip as they came upon the remains of the path up to the shrine. Well, the stone path itself was fairly untouched, but the torii gates that had stood along it were as much matchwood as most of the trees on the hill were below a certain point. As they reached the point where the ripped up landscape transitioned sporadically back into trees she spotted a few Soldier's kneeling in the shadows of the trees. Tracing the area she spotted others. It was another line of defense.

    The soldier nearest the path, an older looking man with the markings of a sergeant, waved them on. They hurried, their feet splashing in the puddles left behind by the rain. At least Ranma's were, Ryouga was avoiding them as best he could, probably afraid that getting one foot too wet would cause him to turn into a piglet. Not an unwarranted fear really. The exact bar for changing never seemed to remain the exact same, but even getting a hand wet was usually more than enough. A foot would probably suffice as well.

    Within the darkness of the tree-shadowed stairs a flicker of flame appeared around the bend as the steps wound towards an intact Torii gate and the apparent entrance of the shrine which had been barricaded with sandbags, overturned tables, and a pair of battered looking APCs that resembled those old M113s the Americans had been fond of.

    The one on the right was having its track repaired by a tired looking crew as they approached the barricade. The officer, a second lieutenant, waved them through. "You're Saotome and Hibiki, right?" he asked as she hopped the sandbags.

    "Yeah," Ryouga said as he followed her over.

    She nodded. "That's right, we're looking for someone who knows what's going on," she replied before glancing into the shrine grounds. Tents had been erected around the area covering supplies and treating wounded while those who weren't fighting, which seemed to include enough civilians to fill many of the buildings around to bursting, were hanging around the edges of the shrine. A handful of priests could be seen speaking with the civilians leading some groups in prayer or handing out food from a large pot they were carrying around.

    The Lieutenant waved towards a side building. "Major Ida is waiting for you and your friend in there. Just stay out of the main building. The priests are doing something weird in there," he said.

    Ranma glanced towards the central building of the complex. Now that the Lieutenant mentioned it there was something… off. A weird Ki related pressure that seemed to be pushing outwards from the building. She frowned but nodded to the Lieutenant. "We'll keep our distance," she said. She had some passing familiarity with the priests up here. They weren't exactly the dark powers worshiping cultists type so this was probably some sort of blessing they were trying to invoke to help out. Hopefully anyways.

    They really didn't need those sorts of complications at this point.

    "We'll head in," she told the Lieutenant and started towards the indicated building. Ryouga followed her. They weaved between the soldiers and their helpers as they took the most direct route they could. The moment they stepped up onto the outer walkway he folded his umbrella and gave it a shake. She snorted as he grumbled about the rain. He shot her an irritated look and she grinned sheepishly before turning away.

    A guard at the door let them into a room that was only somewhat less crowded than the dining room back home had been. At its center was an officer with small shots of grey streaking the corners of his hair. His head was bowed over a map that was spread out over a table. He looked up as they entered. An exhausted grimace faded into something less tired on sight of them.

    "Mr. Hibiki, Mr. Saotome," he said, nodding to them both, "Welcome to Nakai-Ochiai. If you like I have some hot water available?" he gestured to a teapot sitting on the table.

    Ranma blinked at the offer. Someone was well informed. "Ah, sure," she replied. They weren't going to be there long, but might as well. The officer poured a cup of water and passed it over the table. "Thanks," she said as she poured it over her head before he adjusted his shirt. "So, you're the Major, right?" A few of the radiomen were staring at him.

    He nodded. "I am. You know, before Lieutenant Fraser mentioned you I didn't expect to see someone like yourself this far from Nerima, even now," he said, "I assume you're heading for the spaceship?"

    Straight to the point then. "That's right, but we needed to pass through here anyways because of a collapse in the rail tunnels," he said as he finished adjusting his shirt. Ryouga joined him at the table and a glance proved that his ability to read maps hadn't magically improved in the last few minutes as his eyes had already glazed over.

    The map was a print out of a satellite image of their location, probably pulled from google earth or some other orbital imaging program, with additional notations attached with sticky notes and a variety of coins, pencils, and what looked like a pair of Evangelion themed bobbleheads.

    "How bad is it out there?" The Major asked, looking grim.

    "We bailed out the station closest to here when we arrived," Ranma replied, "but they've probably pulled out now. Everyone is getting out of the city.

    "The streets are empty," Ryouga added, "There's no one around anymore."

    "No one?" the older man repeated.

    "We've… seen a few bodies," Ranma clarified, "But that's it. We haven't run into a single live person since we left the station." He stroked the pommel of her family's sword thoughtfully. He was really starting to wonder where they had been shuffled off to. There was no way they had all escaped already.

    The Major grimaced. "We pulled as many people back into the temple as we could, and we've had more make their way in since, but not that many. We can only hope that they've gotten out of the area," he said, "Thank you for your assistance with the northern perimeter. I understand things were getting a bit close for the Lieutenant's liking."

    "There were a lot of them," Ranma admitted, "Glad we can help, but we do need to keep moving. We're headed… this way." He tapped the edge of the map closest to the path they needed to take to reach the Ochiai Station.

    "... Ah, hopping the train I take it?" Ida asked. He nodded. "We haven't quite finished clearing out the latest push over there. You'll probably need to cut your way through. I have no idea if there was a garrison there or not, but if there was then its probably been overrun. You'll have to clear the station to get onto the train."

    Ryouga snorted. "Not a problem," he said.

    "What he said," Ranma gestured to Ryouga with his thumb, "We're heading that way so we'll do what we can to clear them out, but… Well, there's a clearish path heading north to the train station. You could try and get out that way if you want."

    The Major shook his head. "Not possible I'm afraid. You might have gotten rid of the physical obstructions, but the damned ship has us under its guns. The last few attempts to escape this encirclement saw the troops involved get vaporized moments after they stepped off the hill."

    Ranma blinked. "By what?" he asked.

    "By that ship. Its high enough up that the moment you're off the hill you're in sight," he said with a frown, "And no, I have no idea why they haven't simply opened fire on us and flattened the entire hill. They definitely have the firepower. They haven't been cautious about their firepower anywhere else. The lightshow all night has been evidence enough of that." As if on cue the light outside the rice paper walls of the building flared bright enough to cast the shadows of those outside. Ranma noted the silhouettes of five men patrolling the outside.

    "Direction?" The Major barked into one of the radios before him.

    "North-North East, sir. Looks like somewhere in Itabashi," the voice that replied said.

    "Continue observation," the Major replied before setting the radio down, "Every time it fires my heart stops thinking they've finally decided to remove us from the board."

    "Do you think it has anything to do with whatever the Priests are doing?" Ranma asked.

    "The- Not likely," Ida said, shaking his head, "They say they're conducting an ancient ritual of protection for the shrine and the area around it, but I can't imagine what a ritual could even do to that. Likely we're sitting on something here they want, but any connection to the Shrine is at best coincidental. Just wish I knew what it was. If its mobile we might be able to get the temple evacuated."

    Ranma grunted as he turned his attention to the table and its map. "I hear you. We'd stay and help, but that ship is…" He shrugged.

    "The bigger issue, by far," the Major agreed, "I won't keep you, just be aware that there's a practically endless stream heading our way from the ship. We get the occasional moment of calm, but until something major changes, you might have to cut your way to the next station." Ranma exchanged grimaces with Ryouga. That was not a pleasant prospect.

    The Major cleared his throat. "Now, if you need anything-" A harsh whistling cut him off. It started small, rapidly grew louder and came from above. "GET DOWN!" He shouted, dropping below the table.

    Ranma flipped the table and dived behind it with the Major while Ryouga leveled his umbrella towards the noise and ducked. Loud crashes echoed as the ground shook with the impact. A moment later a metal slab crashed through the door of the building and took out a table with one of the radio sets. Piggish squeals rose from outside as people screamed.

    "Drop troops," The Major growled as he grabbed his rifle.

    Ryouga let out his own shout and charged back out the door. He raised the umbrella over his head as he passed through the doorway. Ranma followed, leaping over the table and drawing his sword as he dashed out the door.

    A drop pod much like those at the school had slammed down through one of the tents and a pig wielding a hammer with a head as large as Ranma's torso was in the process of bringing his hammer down on a fallen soldier when Ryouga crashed foot first into its side. The pig flew, bouncing across the ground to crash through a stack of boxes. It flipped to its feet before it went any further.

    Squealing loudly, it leaped back to confront Ryouga, crossing the yard in a single leap as it brought its hammer down in an overhead swing. Ryouga met it head on, catching the downswing of the weapon on his open umbrella.

    On the porch Ranma shielded his face as the shockwave from their impact blasted back the water. She scowled as she felt her curse activate. "Stupid idiot Ryouga," she grumbled as another shockwave rolled out, scattering more water from the air and the puddles. The two were going at it with more vigor than she'd seen from any of the aliens before. Fist, umbrella and foot met blow after blow and replied with just as much force.

    Beside her the Major cursed. "I can't get a shot," he said, aiming his rifle at the two combatants.

    Ranma nodded. It was looking like a stalemate when the whistling sound began again. Her eyes widened. "SCATTER!" She shouted as she looked skyward, but it was pointless. A pitch black drop pod in a night sky? She might as well have been blind.

    A drop pod crashed through the roof of the building across from them, then a second one slapped into the ground a few yards away, and then a third came right down atop the main temple, only to bounce impossibly off the roof and instead tumble to the ground upside down. A silvery dart crashed down through one of the APCs out front before beginning to unfold into one of the spider tanks. Its cannon twisted towards the other APC.

    "MOKO TAKABISHA!" Ranma shouted as she charged off the porch towards the gate. The bolt of ki crashed into the side of the machine, crumpling metal and throwing it aside. It immediately started trying to get up again. A negligent swipe with the Yamasenken sent the head, and half the pod, of the closest pig rolling.

    The cannon of the tank squealed as it tried to turn to face her, its joints complaining as they tried to continue working. Its legs twitched and lashed out randomly as it tried to stand. It was, by any measure, heavily damaged. She didn't care as she leaped over it and sent a vacuum balde straight down through it into the ground bisecting the machine and ending it permanently. Even as she did so, however, more pods crashed down in the compound. Some bounced off the temple roof, each strike sending shivers of ki through the air from the tiles; others crashed amongst tents and out buildings.

    More pigmen clambered out of their pods as the soldiers amongst the civilians opened fire. Some of them died, but too many were like those Ranma had fought before. Heavily armored, angry, and trained in Ki just like her and Ryouga.

    Ranma pivoted the moment her foot touched the muddy ground and she dashed back inside pushing herself to move more quickly, to react to the sudden assault faster. Like when she had trained for the chestnut fist or when she had trained her speed and balance until she could run fast enough to run on water. Only now there were falling metal coffins, collapsing tents and buildings, and dozens of panicking civilians.

    Another spider tank crashed down in the middle of the compound, smashing a statue of Inari beneath its prow, before it rose to its feet blaring a horn and dripping shattered statuary. Ranma gritted her teeth and pushed harder, darting between the people, her blade lashing out with exacting precision at the pigmen as they clambered from their pods. Alien blood splattered the soaking ground as limbs and heads were separated from their owners.

    The tank seemed to notice her as she juked around a clumsy swing of a Pigman's axe, carved its owner in half, and used his pod as a stepping stone to leap over the crowd towards the armored vehicle. Its turret tracked her flight, a glow building inside. She swung her sword putting more ki into the swing than usual and the tank fired. Brilliantly white ki-fuelled plasma parted beneath the strike flying off into the sky as the Yamasenken strike parted the metal of the machine.

    Then something inside went wrong and an explosion ripped the vehicle in half. A cloud of glowing fog formed from evaporating ki rose from its remains, a cloud she landed in. Electric like the oily static before a thunderstorm it clung to her form, wafting around her like a cloak.

    A pigman wearing a black cloak and carrying a greatsword longer than she was tall rose from where the explosion had knocked it and charged her with far greater speed than its companions had demonstrated. Fast enough that she raised her blade to defend.

    Meteoric iron clashed with some alien alloy and Ranma allowed her blade to give way, just a little. The greatsword slid past as she deftly stepped forward into the alien's guard. Its eyes widened just a fraction as it tried to recover from the overextended strike. It failed as her blade caught it in the middle of the nose and carved straight through its skull.

    It fell and two more pigmen charged from the sides, axes raised only to fall as she danced between them. More charged her as seemingly half the drop force turned its attention upon her alone, each one screaming in their impossible to understand squealing. They died, one by one, leaving her standing by the fallen statue of Inari, the last wisps of glowing ki-fog dissipating off of her and over two dozen bodies piled at her feet. Each one slain by her family's blade.

    She took a deep breath and looked around. The gunfire had ceased and across the courtyard Ryouga was catching his breath from beside a third tank, its broken cannon-stalk had a familiar looking pigman with a hammer impaled upon it. It squirmed for a few more moments before falling still.

    Civilians and soldiers alike peeked out of their cover, guns and eyes searching for any hint of the enemy. Many of them were looking at her and she could already hear the whispers starting. Shrugging, she brushed off the last remnants of the ki fog, wiped off her blade and sheathed it before crossing the broken courtyard to Ryouga. The people parted before her as she padded through the blood and water.

    "Finished with him?" She asked. He nodded and rested his umbrella against his shoulder.

    "Yeah. He was a better fighter than Mousse," Ryouga admitted, glancing up at his dead enemy. As he said that the pigman's grip on his weapon finally loosened and it started falling. The pigboy reached out and snagged it before it hit the ground. He hefted it in his free hand. "Good balance," he mused before leaning it against his other shoulder.

    "It's a bit big to wield in one hand," Ranma replied with an amused shake of her head.

    Ryouga grimaced and sighed. "Maybe," he admitted before firmly planting it into the broken concrete beside the walker. He raised a hand in brief prayer. They stood there for a moment before the Major hurried over. He had a cut across his temple that was bleeding freely. At his side was a Miko from the temple. The shrine maiden looked frazzled beneath the splatters of mud and blood on her white robes.

    "There you are," Major Ida said, "Thanks for the help both of you, but we have an issue."

    Ranma sighed. "What now?" she asked with a sigh.

    "The enemy is renewing its attacks everywhere except the north. More of these berserkers. My men are handling it for the most part, but the east is getting overrun. I have reports of a giant walker spearheading the assault," he says.

    The Miko, who looked to be barely older than Ranma, stepped forward. "Please, we need more time. The ritual is nearly complete. Just a few more minutes," she said, grabbing Ranma's hand.

    "What kind of ritual?" She asked cautiously after pulling her hand free of the Miko's. She had had far too many weird rituals performed on or around her to not ask, even at a time like this.

    "A ritual of protection passed down here for centuries. They say it was taught to the Head Priest by Inari to protect us in times of great need," the girl replied.

    Ranma sighed. "Look I doubt a blessing of protection is going to stop bolts of ki," she said carefully. Those sort of things tended to help armor turn blades, not stop armies in their tracks.

    "It isn't a blessing," the girl blurted out, "Its a barrier. It'll cover the entire hill once its erected." Ranma blinked.

    "Barrier?" Ryouga repeated. The Miko nodded.

    "Yes, they're nearly done, but if something like that walker gets inside it won't matter," she says.

    The Major removed his cloth cap and ran a hand through his hair. "While I don't have as much faith as she does, she's not wrong about the walker. I'm not sure my men have enough firepower left to stop it," he said, "I hate to divert you from your goal, but we do need your help. Now more than ever."

    "East side you said?" Ranma asked, looking east over the walls. All she could see were the lights from the spaceship and a few patches of stars. The city was dark above the trees.

    "Same way you have to head," he confirmed.

    "Then we'll handle it," Ryouga said, clapping Ranma on the shoulder, "C'mon, let's keep moving." He started towards the back of the temple and she easily hooked him by the arm and spun him about.

    "This way you idiot," she said with a roll of her eyes. It said something about the situation that he didn't complain as she let him go and started running.

    "Good luck," the Miko called after them as they leapt the wall. Ahead of them flashes of light could be seen through the trees and the thunder of explosions, omnipresent on the hill, grew louder.

    -0-0-0-0-0-​

    Ranma slowed her pace as she hit the defensive line at the treeline. She leaped up into one of the upper boughs of an oak peered out into the darkness. The street lights had failed plunging much of the street into darkness except for those areas where fires merrily burned. Tracer fire speared out from trenches to clatter off broken stone walls and rip apart already tattered rice paper doors. A handful of walkers, their forms lit by those the white torches on each corner, provided support from amongst the shattered alleyways that faced onto the street.

    They didn't seem to be the main issue, however. Where the main road leading east met the perimeter road was only slightly visible behind a dark bramble wall that completely obscured the street beyond, though a golden glow seemed to highlight the tops of the hedge.

    "What the hell is that?" she shouted down to Ryouga.

    "Why would I know?" he shouted back, "Bet its magic."

    "Where the hell is the walker then?" Ranma asked.

    "Behind that wall of thorns," one of the men hiding in trenches around the base of the trees shouted back up. "Look, this isn't a place for kids you two-"

    Ranma tuned him out as she peered into the darkness. Behind them huh? They were probably using them to help protect the walker. She scowled. Probably with something like those damned daggers the berserkers used. They certainly looked similar. Well, she knew how to get rid of those.

    She leaped off the tree and landed just behind the first trench. Ryouga ran to catch up as silver bolts of Ki slapped the ground around her. She leaned aside as one whipped straight through where her face was. She drew her sword and ducked the next shot before charging down the hill. That soldier shouted something as she leaped the trench then the next foxhole and the next after it. She barrelled down the hill, leap over and around the network of mudchurned holes that had replaced the forest that used to stand on the hill.

    An autocannon fired somewhere to her right, ripping apart a walker in a burst of tracer fire and explosions.

    Men shouted in surprise as she passed them, but she paid them little mind. Her eyes were on the bramble fence that she could see slowly growing larger before her eyes. Larger, and moving sideways, making room for the golden glow to start seeping through the center.

    She bounced over a foxhole, landed on the tipped over cabin of a truck and threw herself through the air. She touched down beside a hole where two shell shocked looking young men scarcely older than herself huddled, and lashed out three times with her sword. The air rippled with the distortions of the Yamasenken as they expanded out large enough to strike the center of the hedge.

    The shots struck home and the center of the hedge came apart the different angles of the strikes sending uneven pieces crashing to the ground. She threw another strike in for good measure and watched as the center finally cracked open. Piggish figures around the hedge scrambled out of the way as heavy chunks of vine tell towards them. One carrying what looked like a staff was squished by a pile of vines larger than they were.

    "That's the walker?" Ryouga asked as he caught up with her. She nodded and absently leaned out of the way of a bolt of ki.

    Striding down the main road was another walker. Four-legged like the other machines it stood shoulder to crenellation with the surrounding commercial buildings, all of which shook with each ponderous step. A shimmering golden dome surrounded it. A trail of autocannon fire stitched across the dome sending ripples through it but not penetrating. A bolt of ki larger than Ranma streaked out from a turret mounted atop the machine and she winced as the IFV exploded. Other smaller turrets on the sides opened fire sending waves of death across foxholes and trenches up and down the hillside. Pigmen swarmed about its feet, ducking in and out of its forcefield without issue as units moved too and from the surrounding buildings. Visible behind the machine was a train of more open air walkers.

    "Well its only the size of an apartment building," Ranma said with forced cheer, "We can take it." Her teeth tingled as it fired another shot from its main gun vaporizing a chunk of treeline. The sheer quantities of emotionless ki being tossed around were… rather disturbing honestly.

    "Start with the legs and work our way up?" he suggested.

    "I'll take the machine you take the minions?" she replied.

    "... It might be ceramic," he noted.

    The main gun turned their way.

    "MOVE!" She shouted and leaped forward. They split, she went forward, he went left. The good news was that he wasn't likely to get lost. His target was right there and even he wasn't that bad.

    Turrets across the vehicle spun to track them both and a fusillade of shots swept in from all sides. She dove, rolling through a break in the shots as she junked to the side. That lost about a third of the guns shooting at her. They tracked back towards Ryouga.

    Ranma lost track of Ryouga at that point as everything devolved into a rather hectic series of leaps, rolls, deflections, and misdirections as she charged down the hillside towards the enemy lines. Mud and blood flew into the air in spurts all around her. At the very least they weren't shooting at the soldiers while they were shooting at her. It was faint comfort as she pushed herself to move as quickly and as unpredictably as she could over the broken muddy ground.

    The main gun fired towards Ryouga. A distant shout of "Shi Shi Hokodan!" rang out in reply and a depressed beam of ki smashed into the emotionless bolt. The detonation sent a shockwave across the battlefield, blasting pigmen and humans off their feet and sending ripples across the dome.

    Ranma grinned and jumped up and over the last barrage of shots. She leveled both hands on the dome and gathered her ki. "MOKO TAKABISHA!" she shouted and released the beam of confidence charged ki.

    The dome rippled even harder and dimmed noticeably.

    She slid across the muddy ground then leaped again finally leaving the field as Ryouga launched another attack from his side. The dome dimmed further, becoming less of a shining beacon and more of a lukewarm glow that permeated the area.

    Then the ground broke open and vines rushed clawing at her with intent to ensnare her. She let out a squawk of protest and carved them apart with a hasty slash of her weapon. More sprouted around her and she tumbled under a pincer of vines that tried to block her path. Coming up the other side she vaulted a burnt out, and still smoldering, car.

    "Not natural," she cursed as further vines sprouted from the ground. The presence of such things didn't stop the gunners from trying to shoot her either with both groups to the same goal. This was just like those amazon twins, only with thorny vines rather than an entire garden center's catalog of horrifically bad ideas. Not that they hadn't used similar.

    "I'm not letting that happen again," she spat, slipping into the mindset of the amaguriken just a touch. Her form blurred as she unleashed Yamasenken strikes at the newly grown vines even as her eyes swept the area for the controller of them. There had to be a controller. This couldn't be just the plants.

    She flipped up onto a broken car and spun on the spot scanning as she instinctively carved apart the vines around her swaying around the shots from the walker which was getting far too close to the hill for her liking.

    Another Shi Shi Hokodan slammed into a shot from the main gun, flaring brightly enough to send the entire area into a moment of daylight.

    There. Visible for but a second in the ruins of the central hedge was a bent figure clutching a staff. Its form was covered in a soaked cloak that hung unflatteringly off its stooped form. Its free hand gestured while the other one shook the staff and more vines grew. Vacuum blades carved them apart and she dashed towards the controller, ducking between ruined cars and blast craters as her blade carved out every attempt to stop her.

    Then a creaking alerted her to the movement of the hedge. Vines thicker around than sedans were long swung down towards her. Her heart felt like it stopped for an instant as what looked like an entire forest fell towards her, then instinct kicked in. Her blade flashed, disappearing from common sight for an instant and the air wailed from the abuse as it warped and distorted from the Yamasenken. Above her the hedge buckled, rocked backwards by the force even as it came apart like vegetables going through a food processor.

    A wall of boulder-sized chunks of vine crashed down around her, slapping into the ground with wooden thunks. She weaved, bouncing and rolled off and between them as what had been a small forest of alien flora crashed down around her. She lost sight of the controller during the mad scramble, but had been relieved to see the old looking pigman had been as panicked looking as she had felt.

    Ranma paused as the foliage settled to catch her breath. That last ditch desperate act had drained her harder than anything up until that moment. She leaned against a chunk of vine for lack of anything else before realizing what she was doing. Thankfully after a moment of terror it failed to sprout anything resembling more vines or subsume her into it or anything so weird and disturbing. She relaxed and gulped down the wet evening air.

    A shout of "Shi Shi Hokodan" was followed by a flash and the sound of something important exploding as the light went out.

    She blinked in the sudden gloom, then grinned. She gave her weapon a flick and felt her heartbeat steady. "Nice work Ryouga," she said to herself. The dome was down.

    No one to waste an opportunity she vaulted the vine and dashed across the top of the debris field towards the walker. Smoke was billowing from a satellite dish-like mounting on the top of it. Autocannon shots and RPGs slammed into the machine's front. They rippled across its armor leaving dents but little more across the metal. More shots slammed home, but little progress occurred as its turrets replied.

    Then she was through the hedge and into the horde of infantry that were scrambling for cover from enemy fire. Beyond a sweep to clear her way towards the machine she paid them little mind. They had next to no cover here and the JGSDF could deal with them. She needed to deal with the walker.

    A pigman tried to bar her way, but she weaved around its gunfire and used its face as a launchpad to leap up and over the heads of the army. Turrets fired on her, tracking shots over their own men until she passed beneath the walker. Her eyes scanned the machine. Its legs were blocky and heavy, each as thick as a tank and plated like one. The bottom of the vehicle was no better, being plated just like the legs, though there was no way to guess the thickness.

    It looked tough, impregnable but the dents and cracks left behind by the missiles and autocannon shots said enough. It wasn't.

    She landed on a pigman and drove her blade through its skull into the pavement. With a spray of blood and concrete powder she drew it up and into an arc around her to clear the area before slashing twice towards the front legs of the vehicle. She spun and bolted for the back of the vehicle before the sound of shearing metal reached her ears. Pigmen squealed as the walker toppled forward, the lower two thirds of its front legs having been sheared off by the strike.

    The walkers behind the giant opened fire, their guns ripping into their own infantry as they tried to bring her down. She scowled at their brutality, but repeated her actions from earlier to make use of the infantry around her as cover. It also didn't stop her from lashing out twice more at the hind legs of the walker as she cleared the vehicle. The angle ensured that the strikes continued through into the main body of the vehicle and something inside detonated, blowing out the left flank of the walker in the process.

    Another explosion rang out within the convoy itself as Ryouga smashed into it as he came over the buildings, having opted to go around, or more likely simply blundered his way past the hedge. Walkers tipped over as the other martial artist rampaged through their ranks.

    Ranma grinned. That was all the distraction she needed. Ryouga would deal with the walkers, she would deal with the main walker.

    Using a pigman as a springboard she launched herself upwards to a nearby building, kicked off its air-slicked concrete wall, and arced over the edge of the machine's roof. The main gun was mounted towards the front in a turret, twin rails poked out of the heavy armored dome and sparked with power before firing another shot up the hillside. Around were an additional four armored turrets equipped with the repeating plasma weapons the smaller walkers were so fond of. In the center was the barrier's projector, still smoking from when it had been overloaded.

    Landing in a roll she came up to her feet quickly as the smaller turrets began to turn her way. Charging her blade with ki she dashed to the closest one and carved it open across its gun barrel and right through the armored dome. Metal wailed as the turret seized up and stopped tracking her.

    She rolled under the shots from the turret across the vehicle and sprang up over the shots from the other two. She swung downwards towards the other turret, sending a rippling vacuum blade through the armored turret and into the machine. A shriek of something escaping a pressurized container sounded before a gout of white ki burst up through the turret, tossing the dome and the guns into the sky along with a chunk of the vehicle. She repeated the process with the other two guns. The first simply died without ceremony while the second detonated like the other one had done.

    Catching her breath she eyed the main turret and gave her sword a small twirl before sheathing it. Sliding into a Iaijutsu stance she readied herself to cut it off the vehicle. She'd have to aim down to avoid hitting the hill if the strike overpenetrated, which they had been so far.

    Then part of the hull behind her popped open like a hatch that had decompressed and a wrench longer than she was tall was tossed up onto the roof. It was followed by the thinnest looking pigman she'd seen up until now. Still overweight looking compared to a human, it was practically skeletal compared to the warriors she'd seen though its muscles rippled cleanly beneath the oil stained tank top and orange jumpsuit, the top of which was tied about its waist. It even had thick coke-bottle glasses that reminded her of Mousse. It came up onto the hull pointing at her and squealing something furiously in her direction. She'd been on the receiving end of enough angry ranting that she didn't need to understand the words to get that it really wanted her dead.

    She drew her sword and combined a strike against the turret with a longer one against the pigman. The turret slid forwards, wailing with the shriek of metal on metal as the front section of the vehicle toppled to the ground. At the same time a chunk of the nearby buildings exploded into dust and the corner of the roof began to slide towards the ground. The pigman dropped to the ground, scooping up his wrench in the process, and rolled under her strike as the tail end bisected the smoking barrier projector.

    With a shout that more resembled an angry boar's squealing the engineer charged across the wet metal. She barely slid to the side in time to avoid the opening overhead strike that promptly put a massive dent into the hull. She could feel the ki wafting off the strike as she counterattacked. Her own strike missed as the engineer sidestepped her strike then parried the next.

    It squealed angrily and rushed her. Sword met wrench with a clatter of metal and Ranma felt herself sliding backwards as their weapons locked together. This was the point where she'd mouth off at her opponent to try and provoke a rash response, but what was the point when neither of them could understand a word of the other? And besides, she had a feeling from the constant pissed off squealing that the engineer was rather angry with her already, probably the damage she'd just finished doing to the machine.

    A machine that chose that moment to lurch as something deep within detonated. The pigman snarled and Ranma found herself forced onto the defense as the engineer redoubled its strikes. Blade and wrench met again and again as she scrambled backwards from the assault, her slippers slipping on the wet metal as the vehicle tipped further to one side. Not that the pigman had it entirely his way.

    Changing up her methods she deflected the next strike downwards and stepped into the engineer's guard. Her punch caught him in the jaw and knocked him back across the metal hull. She followed him, her feet slapping against the soaked deck plating. He rolled out of the way of her kick and twisted into a leg sweep with his wrench before leaping to his feet as she jumped back.

    They circled each other, their duel lit only by the handful of flickering lights that dotted the roof of the walker and the flash of explosions that lasted only an instant.

    Her foot caught on something and she stumbled. The pigman was across the distance before she could recover, but she still managed to interpose her sword in front of his oversized wrench. It still drove her to the ground with a strike that blasted the air from her lungs.

    Coughing she rolled aside from his next overhead strike and kicked out at the back of his knees. They seemed to be built like humans and as his leg went out from under him she grinned and summoned her Ki.

    "Moko Takabisha!" The engineer had barely enough time to let out a squeal of protest before a beam of energy carried him off the top of the vehicle and into the building across the way. As cinder blocks rained down on the street below Ranma gulped in air and coughed as she inhaled the heavy rain.

    A pulse of ki and something else rolled over her from the direction of the hill as a beam of light flew upwards and then blossomed outwards forming a softly glowing blue dome over the hill.

    "Huh," she sighed and laid back with a laugh. They'd done it. She laughed loud and hard before a flicker of movement caused her to throw herself to the side. A dining chair crashed into where she had been.

    The engineer landed in a crouch a moment later. Blood stained his shirt and he spat a wad of it onto the hull plating as he rose from his crouch, but he was definitely alive. He pointed at her and said something before tossing his hand to the side contemptuously.

    "Well back at you buddy," she grumbled as she rose to her own feet. She mimed as best she could at him leaving and he snorted. Yeah, like it would be that easy. These were aliens that practiced magical sacrifice, cowardice was probably a big nono with them. She raised her blade to a ready stance, an act the engineer mirrored. His wrench began to glow a soft golden light and a hum could be heard over the rain.

    "Of course you have special techniques. Because why not," she complained, "Why are you the one giving me issues?" He grunted at her and she scowled at him. Maybe he got the tone?

    Without warning the ship above opened fire, its beam weapon slamming into the shield over the temple. The air warmed noticeably as the beam splashed outwards, rivers of power spraying wildly across the neighborhoods surrounding the temple. Canyons were carved through rows of apartments and office buildings, streets ripped apart, and a stray beam even cut down the last of the hedge setting what was left on fire before the shot ended leaving the dome glowing softly and seemingly unharmed.

    The flare also seared away Ranma's nightvision and she winced only to just narrowly dance backwards out of the way of the humming and glowing wrench. It carved a trench through the armored plating without slowing down as he spun it into another attack. She plunged herself into the soul of ice as the engineer pursued her across the walker, his strikes carving up plating with contempuous ease. He even took another chunk off the projector.

    She didn't dare try to parry with her sword, even if her own Ki protected it she wasn't sure she'd be able to block the raging fury of the engineer head on. It was a bit like when she had to fight Ryouga when he was acting like a berserker. Which meant she needed an opening.

    Taunting was right out, which left misdirection of some kind or-

    The ship fired again and this time one of the splashed beams came far closer, vaporizing what was left of the left foreleg of the walker and flashing the water in the air into steam. The walker tipped forwards towards the beam as Ranma's form flashed from girl to boy in the blink of an eye.

    The engineer's eyes went wide as its footing shifted and it stumbled, its strike going wide. Ranma found an upturned edge of a damaged armored plate to balance against and surged forwards, slamming his blade straight through the pigman's side as it twisted away.

    The beam from the ship winked out, drowning them in the gloom of the night again. The vehicle was rocked by another explosion as it came to a rest in a tipped forward position. The engineer mirrored it, down on one knee with Ranma's sword in his side. Warm rain pounded down around them as they sat there posed in the moment before Ranma ripped his blade from its side and kicked his opponent towards the rear of the vehicle.

    Its wrench went flying, bouncing and sliding until it slid right off the vehicle.

    To his surprise his opponent came out of the roll on one knee, something clutched in the hand that wasn't trying to staunch the flow of blood from his side. It wasn't a dagger at least, but almost… medical needle-like. A fact confirmed as he jammed the device into his side and gasped loudly.

    Ranma delved into the movement of the amaguriken as he sprinted the length of the vehicle. Blade extended forward in a thrust he was brought to a jarring halt that nearly ripped the weapon from his hands as the engineer caught it between his hands. Ranma placed his hand on the pommel of the blade and pushed with all his might, it slipped a few inches forward slowly but surely closing on the kneeling pigman. It grunted as it tried to hold back the blade.

    "Just die damn it," Ranma snapped surging against its efforts, slamming the blade straight through the block and into its sternum with a splatter of blood. The engineer screamed in pain and gurgled, spitting blood at Ranma as the ki infused blade sank deeper until it came out of his back. They stared at each other both snarling at the other as the flesh around the injury bubbled, the cuts created from each little rock of the blade to drive it deeper fusing back together in its wake.

    The engineer grabbed Ranma by the shoulders and tried to lift him, only to get a headbutt to the forehead. Ranma used the distraction to plant his foot on the engineer's belly and kick him off the blade, and off the vehicle.

    He raised his sword to prepare a vacuum blade and felt his form shift as the rain cooled. She adjusted her form and launched a single blade at the engineer. He had some experience in aerial fighting, it seemed as he tried to twist away. All he succeeded in doing was taking the strike across the knees rather than straight across the chest. Screaming the pigman fell, disappearing into a hole in the road that was rapidly filling with water.

    Ranma wavered and dropped to her knees, leaning against her sword. She laughed long and hard as the relief of victory flooded her. She glanced over at the glowing dome that continued to exist despite the fury of the space ship above and grinned.

    She rose to her feet and pointed her sword at the mass of metal that floated over the city. "You're next," she declared before wiping her sword and sheathing it. Now, where the hell had Ryouga gotten to?

    -0-0-0-0-0-​

    A/N: Oh my god its done. *flops face first onto pillow* Gah, this should have been done ages ago! Expect more of these, I meant to finish act one before my break ages back and now I'll be doing these as much as I can until then (which yes Gekkou my dear means I will be With Grace and Elegance next).

    Thank you everyone~

    And a thank you to my lovely Editor~ Hail she of the fluffy tails, Emissary of Floof.

    What? She's very floofy when she wants to be.

    Gekkou_Yoko: Chur welcome, my less fluffy maned companion with even more bushy tails!~ I would ask that you grow your hair out again, it looked very nice.

    Grounders10: My mother starts complaining when I do that *pouting kitsune* she hates the build up of hair in the drains.

    Gekkou_Yoko: Wanna know a secret?
    Grounders10: … Sure?

    Gekkou_Yoko: That's why a lot of women have short hair after having kids.

    Grounders10: *sweatdropping kitsune* Ah… Well then… '>.>

    Gekkou_Yoko: Yup. its *Hair Envy.*

    Grounders10: *Floofs hair* There is much to envy. *Floofs tails for emphasis*

    Gekkou_Yoko: That, and two long haired people means vacuuming is a pain, cuz it kills vacuums, and makes hell for drains.

    Grounders10: … Well our vacuum seems to be holding up well enough… *considers the weird noises it makes* then again… course it could be just possessed by demons like the cats tend to think.

    Gekkou_Yoko: Or it really is possessed, like the vacuum cleaner at a certain Tabletoppers workplace.

    Grounders10: *considers* I'm… just going to go get some crosses and ofuda. Mixing religions shouldn't cause issues, right?

    Gekkou_Yoko: Nah, I do it all the time, the only one that gets tetchy about it, is the Bible Bloc.

    Grounders10: …. Right then. *Goes demon ward shopping with haste*

    Gekkou_Yoko: Und even then, they plagiarize other Religions for their holidays, kinda like the English language and verbs.

    Grounders10: *Calling from down the hallway* Can we try to not anger them please? I hate pitchforks.

    Gekkou_Yoko: Bah, I'm immune to both pitchforks und fire.

    Grounders10: *Even more distantly* Doesn't stop them from stinging!

    Gekkou_Yoko: But the free hair styling rocks! Bible Bloc really knows how to make the juice flow! The 80's was awesome, they never stopped!

    Grounders10: *very distant facepalming*

    Gekkou_Yoko: *is suddenly Zapped by Bible Bloc* And now the 80s I am, its like it never left.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Those poor poor schmucks in the Tank platoon melting would not be fun :/. Glad Ranma and Ryouga arived in time.
     
    Grounders10 said:
    Repeat last
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    In military radio communications this means 'please repeat the previous fire mission'. They'd use 'say again' instead, precisely to make sure they do not accidentally have the artillery murder some poor bastard who thought the shellfire had stopped and moved into the target area.

    Yes, including at a time they do not have the artillery on the line. Forming the habit when it doesn't matter makes sure it doesn't go wrong when it does matter.
     
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