InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Puppet Without Strings ❯ Fluffy's Findings ( Chapter 6 )

Puppet Without Strings

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.

Pairings: InuKag, MirSan. Others have yet to either be revealed or thought up.

I'd like to thank Iron Fang and Other_Hitomi for their reviews. Your comments are what motivate me in my writing. I'd give you both hugs if I could.

- Chapter 5 -

Upon entering the abandoned Higurashi mansion, Sesshoumaru's first instinct was to turn and run. The air was so saturated with the pungent smell of dried blood that his nose scrunched itself up against his will in repulsion. Memories from the war returned to assault his mind at full-throttle as he crossed the large expanse of floor to get to the staircase.

Crisp, white outlines in the shape of human bodies marked each and every place that a corpse had once lain. Sesshoumaru paused in his ascendance to examine two of these marked-out shapes on the mansion steps. The blood on the carpet had pooled out in almost-even, circular puddles, located around the torso area of each marking. Sesshoumaru noted this similarity in every corpse marking he passed as he neared the level where President Higurashi had once resided.

It did not take a genius to figure out what this meant. The people who had once lain within those outlinings had met their demise in one swift go. The shape and location of the bloodstains denoted that a single hit to the upper left torso each was all it had taken to send them to the next world. Their pain had not been drawn-out. And while this fact would have presented some semblance of relief to a sympathetic few who knew of the wasted deaths, all it meant to Sesshoumaru was that the president's killer had been highly-skilled and deathly efficient. A great complication to be overcome.

The security block was in a separate building to the mansion near the main gate. Sesshoumaru had seen it. Every single individual present there during the night of the murder had been killed.

So, using what knowledge he had gained from surveillance videos and his own deductions, Sesshoumaru proceeded with a mental reenactment of the night of the murder.

-The killer had, first and foremost infiltrated the grounds and silenced the staff in the security room. The men in that room were meant to be the eyes of the entire security staff. Their absence ensured that the guard unit in the mansion would have no way of knowing where the intruder would be until they could see him with their own eyes. By then, it would be too late.-

This again proved how well thought out the operation had been.

-That taken care of, the assassin had entered the mansion.-

Where from, remained uncertain but Sesshoumaru chanced that it had been from somewhere on the eastern vicinity of ground floor.

-He'd run through the halls, keeping to the shadows.-

Apart from his family, one body-guarding unit and a general security personnel, part of the president's housekeeping staff had also been hired to maintain the mansion. They'd been housed on the ground level of the building.

-Witnesses might have proven a liability and so the killer had entered every occupied room on the ground floor and murdered their occupants.-

The grand marble staircase Sesshoumaru had just ascended had been the only one in the building and therefore the only one that led to the Higurashis' sleeping quarters.

-It had been inevitable that the assassin had met resistance there. By that time, the bodyguards had been on full-on alert because of the null-responses from the security room. They'd opened fire on the assassin but he'd…-

Sesshoumaru still frowned upon the ludicrousness of the next fact.

-…he had either dodged or not been affected by the bullets. Because in less than a few seconds of each other, both guards fell to the floor dead by his hand. He'd continued down the hallway with the stealth and speed similar to that of moving air.-

As Sesshoumaru progressed down the corridor, he passed more chalked corpse outlines. The video camera overhead was still in tact. He remembered what it had recorded.

-Two more bodyguards had met him in the stretch of distance between the staircase and the president's room. He'd disposed of them without so much as a pause in his forward movement-

Expertly dodging every blotch of blood on the mansion's extravagant carpeting proved an effortless task. Sesshoumaru paused at the threshold of President Higurashi's room before stepping in to survey the interior. A splatter of blood on the mahogany of the room's double doors painted a morbid and unsightly picture. This marked the area President Eiji had stood in front of when he'd been shot. He spied another spot in the center of the grand room where two more large bloodstains converged into one. The chalk drawings over them had been made one on top of the other.

-The assassin had been so fast that the guard personnel hadn't had a chance to sneak the President out of his room to the concealed fire escape in front of Higurashi Souta's Room. They hadn't even had time to regroup.

The next best alternative was opted for. They'd locked the President in his room, assembled in pairs and separated.-

Sesshoumaru was not unfamiliar with this tactic. Meeting an opponent in successive waves tired the enemy out in most cases. The strongest of the team would be stationed closest to the protected. This was so that in the unlikely event that the first few waves of guards did not manage to take down the aggressor, the protected would still be well-defended.

But the guard unit hadn't known that the extent of this assassins abilities.

-The two that were guarding President Higurashi in his room had been youkai. One of them had pushed the man to the floor in the middle of his room, away from windows and the door, and crouched over him to shield his body with his own. They'd focused their senses on the double doors of the room, ready to open fire if the intruder did get pass their comrades in the hallway.-

Sesshoumaru had outstanding memory and had had nearly every detail of the assassination report memorized. He sifted through it in his head, then shot a glance at the room's one broken window. The curtains that hung beside it fluttered with the morning breeze.

-But the intruder hadn't come through the door.

No sooner had the gunshots stopped that he raced through the room adjacent to the president's and used the ledge above its window to swing himself onto the balcony of the president's room.-

Sesshoumaru examined the splintered window pane. The glass was thick, almost unbreakable. Most individuals probably should not have been able to break through these enforced panes and judging from the height and small stature of the assailant, he should have been no exception.

But he had gotten through. This was no normal person. The evidence was pointing increasingly to the killer being of demon-blood.

-The momentum from the killer's next swing proved enough to propel him clean through the pane of one locked window. The demon crouching over the president barely had time to fling him away before the attacker was upon him.-

Sesshoumaru noted the untouched condition of the room's furniture.

-The youkai guards, even with their superior power, hadn't proven much more of a challenge than the humans had.-

It troubled Sesshoumaru to a degree. He frowned at the President's corpse outline just

before the door.

-The President hadn't so much as been able to turn his door handles before the killer raised his gun and fired, with deadly precision, a single shot to the man's mid-left chest. He'd then left through the very doors the President had been intent on using.-

This noted, Sesshoumaru continued on down the hall towards the childrens' rooms. He walked until his sensitive nose picked up a familiar scent and stopped over the dried red-brown stains ahead of Higurashi Kagome's bedroom doors. The blood that had once run here had belonged to his old comrade.

The bloodstains that Hizashi Kouga had left, however, did not resemble the rest of the murdered victims. While the others had bled in a concentrated single area, Kouga's blood left disordered splatters all over some ten meters of the hallway floor. Sesshoumaru crouched at what he thought was the exact spot Kouga had first clashed with the assassin.

Now, Sesshoumaru was, by nature, a solitary individual. A lone-wolf so to speak. However, if there were one person that he would grudgingly oblige to working with, it would have been the wolf demon, Kouga. Before this assassin, Sesshoumaru had been undoubtedly sure that his dark-haired compatriot was the fastest being on two legs in the entire planet. That title not only pertained to the speed with which the wolf could run, but also to his unbelievable reaction time.

For all his strength and cunning, speed was the one area Sesshoumaru knew he would never best Kouga in. Sesshoumaru found the spot on the ground that the assassin's gun had once lain.

-While the killer had been somewhat distracted by Kouga's human bodyguarding partner, the wolf demon had made his move. The killer, never expecting such a burst of raw speed, had paused in confusion as Kouga had just about disappeared from view. This small weakness was all the wolf had needed to knock the weapon from his unsuspecting hand. Never pausing even to take a breath, he'd then proceeded with a barrage of assaults to the killer's smaller body, all of which were promptly dodged and returned.-

Sesshoumaru frowned. Even Kouga's swiftness hadn't been enough to take the bastard down. He'd watched the scene from one of the surveillance videos.

-The two had exchanged blow for arduous blow, neither receiving nor landing a hit for the first minute of fighting. They'd kicked off walls, nearly slammed through ceilings, destroyed what little furniture that had been present in the hallway, during which time, Kouga had demanded for Higurashi Kagome to take her brother and escape while he held the intruder off.

The president's daughter had hesitantly obliged. Sensing that his targets were fleeing, the assassin had strengthened his assault. Kouga had been gradually driven further and further back.-

Even through the distorted black and white of the video, Sesshoumaru had been able tell when Kouga had steadily started to tire. And then, the fatal mistake had been made.

-Kouga had chanced a fleeting look in the direction in which the daughter had gone to gauge her position. That had been his downfall. His attacker had used that small distraction to do a feint, which Kouga had promptly fallen for. He'd received a powerful kick to his midsection that sent him careening into the door of Kagome Higurashi's room behind him. The killer had taken advantage of Kouga's brief incapacity to pull out a secondary weapon.-

The hunting knife had been what caused the arched lines of blood splatters all over the carpet.

-Having had no weapon of his own, Kouga had relied on his claws to defend himself with. The six-inch blade, however, served to give the killer a sizeable advantage over Kouga's shorter claws.-

He knelt over a long, slightly arched splatter of blood.

-The slash had been wide and powerful. It sliced open part of Kouga's forearm. The next one landed on his left shoulder. The interval between each subsequent injury after that had become smaller and smaller. Finally, a last and most critical swipe managed to open up a good portion of Kouga's right thigh.-

His speed had gone clean out the window after that.

Further down the hall saw Sesshoumaru examining the remnants of blood from where Kouga had been downed.

-The assassin hadn't had time to finish him off. The second Kouga had crashed to the floor in pain, he'd taken off after the children.-

But the wolf was to be not so easily pushed aside.

One of the reasons Kouga had gained Sesshoumaru's hard-earned respect back in the days of war had been the ardent determination that he possessed. Such potency of this trait had only been seen by Sesshoumaru in one other individual. It was the reason he treated Kouga like a brother. Because in a strange sort of way, the wolf reminded him somewhat of Inuyasha.

-Wounded and bleeding profusely, Kouga had somehow managed to pull himself off the blood-soaked ground and stumble after the killer as fast as his gashed leg and battered body would let him.

It had taken only a minute for the killer to locate the Higurashi children and even less of that time to close in on them. They had been nearing the parking lot of the mansion's exterior.-

Once they had the advantage of wheels it would have been impossible to catch them, even with the killer's superior speed. And according to that area's surveillance video, they'd almost made it too.

-He reached them before they got to the car park. In a desperate attempt to save her brother, the girl had shielded him with her own body. The killer had charged at her.

She'd screamed.-

The surveillance camera in that area had only picked the scene up from a distance. They hadn't been close enough to the parking lot for the picture to be clearer. But it was sufficient for Sesshoumaru to make his deductions.

-The tip of the blade had been just a few short inches from her when Kouga, claws poised and arm locked had ploughed into the killer from the side.-

How the wolf had managed to pick up such momentum in his feeble state had been a wonder. One second the killer had been running in the children's direction, and the next, he'd been sprawled under the wolf demon several feet away. The huge smear of blood on the gravel floor had just about been weathered away by nature. But the bright yellow evidence marker told Sesshoumaru the exact place the two had fallen.

Now this was the part that still puzzled Sesshoumaru.

-For reasons unknown, Kouga's claws had managed to embed themselves into the assassin's left side. The wolf had somehow been able to damage a suit capable of withstanding the force of a dozen speeding bullets.-

What puzzled Sesshoumaru more than that though, was the fact that the assassin had up and run after taking the hit. It was painfully obvious that Kouga had been spent to the marrow after that last desperate assault. He'd fallen to the floor and never gotten up again. The children would have been sitting ducks had the killer so chosen to stay and finish the job.

Instead, he'd fled. He'd run back to the mansion, grabbed the fallen gun and simply… fled.

Sesshoumaru had tried time and time again to think of a logical explanation. Had the suit held some sort of significance to the user? The children had been unarmed. It was illogical to think that the killer had felt at all threatened by them. So why?

There was something. Something crucial that he had missed.

A twig snapped somewhere. Sesshoumaru swung his gaze in its direction to catch a fleeting glimpse of something brown moving away from the iron fencing.

An intruder.

Sesshoumaru checked himself in time to stop a few choice profanities from leaving his lips, as he raced in the direction of the main gate. He'd been hanging around Inuyasha too much.

The mansion's outer fences had been fitted with ofuda charms to stop rogue forest youkai from entering the grounds. They would now serve as a hindrance to the demon lord-to-be. Clearing the five meters of fence would have been a breeze if not for their presence.

`Intruder alert. All personnel to sector 5B. They are to be detained at once.'

Sesshoumaru used the communicator on his wrist to alert the stationed guards. This place was supposed to be top-secret. If word got out that it had been cordoned off as a crime scene, then things could get ugly. The president was supposed to have died of heart failure after all.

By the time the guards had moved out, Sesshoumaru had already exited the main gate and was headed for the area he'd first spotted the trespasser. He saw the snapped twig and footprints in the mud. There had been two of them. He allowed a minute for his nose to grow accustomed to their scent. Then he was off in a flurry of white.

Further down the trail the two scents split. The intruders had taken different routes to throw him off. No matter, he'd go after one of them and send the guards for the other.

`Lieutenant Takehiko, take your men and scout sector 4A. One of two intruders escaped in that direction. I'll go after the other one. If there is a getaway vehicle I want it found.'

`Yes sir!'

Sesshoumaru ploughed through the woods, dodging branches and skirting roots. The bastard had run downwind. His or her scent was faint but Sesshoumaru had worked with worse before. He would not allow one mangy snoop to get in the way of his entire operation.

He violently cleared a low-hanging branch from his path and that was when he saw him. Or rather… her. The figure of an escaping woman a hundred yards north of him.

Sesshoumaru channeled youki into his right arm, willing his legs to propel him faster than they already were. The glowing cord that materialized into his firm grip stemmed from this powerful demon energy.

The woman had been running through a viscous puddle of mud when she felt the tip of his energy whip wrap round her soaked ankles. Her descent to the dirt was far from graceful.

Sesshoumaru had leapt the remaining distance and retracted his whip before making a poised landing in front of the her sputtering form. Even with a scorched ankle, the dark-haired woman had somehow managed to pull herself up and whirl her body round to face him. The verbal assault she launched was loud and unbefitting for a lady. The sight of her nearly brought a smirk to his serious face. An angry, wide-eyed female whose whole front half had been browned by mud was laughable at the very least.

`You fucking bastard! That hurt! I could have died!'

Ruby eyes were wide and heated and delicate nose, fuming. Sesshoumaru used his communicator to inform the guards of their whereabouts. They were coming for them.

In his mind, the wench should have been grateful. As much as he'd wanted to, he hadn't channeled even a tenth of his full power into the whip. She should have been glad that she'd been allowed the preservation of her feet.

`You have three seconds to identify yourself, your accomplice and your reasons for being on restricted territory. Do not attempt to lie your way out of this unless you are prepared to face dismal consequences.'

That only served to heighten the woman's fury.

`I don't have to tell you a damn thing! I know my rights!'

As quickly as it had vanished, Sesshoumaru's energy whip rematerialized and wrapped itself round her ankles. A slight flick of his wrist, and the woman was pulled forcefully to the ground once more. It wasn't just her front half that was dirtied now. Denim leg-coverings that had once been blue were now a sickly shade of dark brown. White, muscle tank top was now soaked through with disgusting russet liquid.

She sat up again, wincing. Sesshoumaru stood over her prone form, using his height as a means of intimidation, as if his death glare wasn't frightful enough.

`I will repeat myself only once more. Tell me who you are and what your intentions here were.'

The woman replied by splashing a sizeable lump of mud at his face. She launched herself to her feet and made to start running again but Sesshoumaru's patience had reached its limit.

She'd gotten in no more than two steps before the demon slammed her, face-first, into the earth. His clawed fingers reached for the pressure point at the back of her neck and within seconds, her squirming stopped.

Sesshoumaru was beyond aggravated.

­- Stubborn bitch -

He turned her body round and searched her pockets for some sort of identification. It was irksome, having to resort to such low methods. But the wench had left him little choice.

He found a black leather purse and sifted through its contents as his ears picked up the sound of his subordinates' approaching footsteps.

The writing on one of the cards made him curse.

`Fuumie Kagura,' it read, `Minami Broadcasting Station - TV Four.'

- The bitch is a reporter! -

Sesshoumaru felt his mood plummet to hell.