Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction / Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Reflections of Ruin ❯ The Messiah of Silence, Part II ( Chapter 17 )
[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]
By: P.H. Wise 
The beginning of the end.
Anime/Manga: Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction / Crossover Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Romance / Horror / Comedy | Type: Crossover | Uploaded On: 11.15.2007 | Updated On: 11.25.2007 | Pages: 7 | Words: 7.6K | Visits: 961 | Status: Completed
The beginning of the end.
Anime/Manga: Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction / Crossover Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Romance / Horror / Comedy | Type: Crossover | Uploaded On: 11.15.2007 | Updated On: 11.25.2007 | Pages: 7 | Words: 7.6K | Visits: 961 | Status: Completed
The Earth shone brightly behind the city of Eternity, once again lighting it all up in a gentle, glorious blue. There, on a shining balcony overlooking the tranquil waters of Mare Serenitatis, Tsukino Ikuko stood, her hair blowing in the ocean breeze. It was yet night on the moon, and the stars shone brightly above.
“I wonder what Usagi is doing right now,” she whispered to the Lunar night. She sighed. Here she was, safe and cared for in the Lunar palace while her only daughter fought to save the world! She wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously, and that only scratched the surface of her emotional state.
She felt a hand settle around her waist, and she looked down. Chibi-Usa stood at her side. She hadn’t heard the girl approach. For a moment, she considered slapping the girl’s hand away. The thought that her memories had been manipulated did not sit well with Ikuko. And yet... she sighed. “You’re worried, too,” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.
Chibi-Usa nodded.
“Isn’t all of this just ancient history for you, Chibi-Usa?” The girl flinched at the lack of the normal ‘chan’ that Ikuko used to add to the end of her name when she spoke it.
Chibi-Usa thought about her answer for a moment. “Pu said that even though from my point of view all of this has already happened,” she said, “From your point of view, and from theirs, it’s happening now, and can be changed. So... I’m worried. But it will be OK.”
“How can you know that?”
Chibi-Usa looked up at her grandmother. “I believe in Sailor Moon,” she said simply.
Ikuko thought about that for a few moments, and then smiled. She put her own arm around Chibi-Usa’s shoulder, and for a moment they two stood there, looking out at the waters of Mare Serenitatis. Finally, Ikuko looked down at Chibi-Usa and said, “Arigatou, Granddaughter.”
Chibi-Usa looked surprised, and then troubled. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because... because you might not get to see Usagi again for a long time. Maybe not until after you die.”
Ikuko stared at Chibi-Usa. “Why is that?” she asked.
“... Because even though people don’t age here, afterwards, even if you get to see Usagi again...” She sniffled. “Humans have a finite lifespan, Ikuko-mama. Usagi and the others, and me, don’t.”
Ikuko said nothing, but stood there, stunned by this new revelation. She had known that her daughter was very powerful, but she hadn’t really given thought to the idea that her daughter and her friends were immortal. That they would live, and live, and live, and live, and live long after she herself was gone, long after everyone they had ever known was gone. She felt a wave of deep, deep sadness mixed with pity. She looked out at the ocean and said nothing.
“I’m glad I met you, Ikuko-mama,” Chibi-Usa said at last. “Mama always told me that I’d love you.” She looked up at Ikuko again. “She was right.”
Ikuko smiled down at Chibi-Usa sadly. “I’m glad I met you, too, Chibi-Usa-chan.”
The breeze picked up, and the two stood there on the balcony, side by side: Ikuko and her future Grand-daughter, with all the majesty of the Dreamlands spread out before them.
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Reflections of Ruin
by P.H. Wise
A Ranma/Sailor Moon/Cthulhu Mythos Crossover Fukufic
Chapter 17 – The Messiah of Silence, Part II
Disclaimer: I don’t own Ranma. I don’t own Sailor Moon. Please don’t sue me. I’m not doing this for profit.
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A cold wind blew in through the shattered windows on the fortieth floor hallway of Mugen Gakuen.
Everything was gone. Everything. Usagi’s house. Minako’s house. Makoto’s apartment. Ami’s house. The Hikawa Shrine. Mamoru’s apartment. All of it, gone. Their battleground against the forces of darkness for the last three years, gone. The tennis court where Usagi had once been absorbed into a giant tennis ball, gone. The park where they always used to have their picnics, gone. All of it, every last piece of the Minato ward, gone. The whole vast army of the Chaos Spawn, the Daimons, and all the humans whom Usagi had healed, dead.
Erased by an unspeakable power.
Usagi stared out in shock and disbelief upon the Silence-touched ward, and Endymion and her Guardian Senshi did the same.
Mercury looked down at her computer, then out at the utterly silent Ward beyond. “It was... it was Sailor Saturn’s power signature,” she whispered.
“Ranma-chan... did this?” Usagi asked. A deep horror rose up within her heart. THIS was the power that Uranus and Neptune had feared. THIS was the power her mother had warned her about. For the first time, she understood – really understood – exactly why they felt as they did. The moment passed: her heart recovered, and she shut her mouth, a grim determination settling over her. They would find another way. The power of Saturn would not end the world.
“Minna,” Usagi said, and her voice sounded far stronger and more confident than she felt, ”Let’s go.”
The others nodded.
For all the destruction outside, the battle wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.
--------------
Mistress 9 smiled contentedly as the last sonorous syllables faded into echoes reverberating through the vast summoning chamber. Her part in the ritual was nearly done: the circle was prepared, the rites observed, and most of the chants had been spoken. The Pure Heart Crystals of the students of Mugen Gakuen floated in a spiral pattern above the summoning circle, slowly churning towards the center where a pillar of darkness gave off an eerie, shadowy sort of illumination. It moved like clockwork: every ten seconds, another heart crystal was shunted into the pillar of darkness and shattered, giving off a faint pulse of light that appeared to come from a great distance.
Mistress 9 felt a peculiar sort of anxiety as the heart crystals ticked and tocked their way towards oblivion, but it, like the light, felt distant, as though coming from a great distance. She frowned.
The door hissed open, and Eudial strode into the summoning chamber, the Fire Buster MK III slung over her shoulder.
Mistress 9 looked up.
“They’re here,” Eudial announced.
Mistress 9 shook her head. “Too soon,” she said. And it was. It was far too soon for any sort of interference to be permitted, and yet... no, it was important that this succeed. She knew that. “Delay them, Germatoid,” she said.
“Which group?” Eudial asked.
Mistress 9 thought about that for a moment. “The Soldiers of the Outer Solar System are the bigger threat,” she said at last. “I don’t want Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, or...” there it was again – that faint twinge of something wrong, “or Ranma to get anywhere near this chamber before the summoning is complete.”
Eudial nodded, and spared a quick glance at the tiny video screen mounted on her wrist-watch. She grinned widely – too widely. “It looks like that pathetic wretch might be useful after all.” With that, she hefted her Fire Buster MK III and walked out of the room, leaving Mistress 9 to her thoughts.
Mistress 9 studied the summoning circle for a long moment in silence. Something about this felt... off.
---------------
It felt strange, having brought Ruin to the whole Minato ward. Not at all like Saturn had expected. She’d expected to feel guilt. Resentment. Fear. Something. She’d not expected this – this peace. Like it was the most natural thing in the world, and the essence of righteousness itself to have done what she did.
Saturn shifted uncomfortably as she walked alone through the darkened corridors of Mugen Gakuen. She wasn’t altogether sure that she liked what her power was doing to her. She shouldn’t feel so at peace after destroying the entire ward, and yet there it was all the same, and no matter how much she disliked it, the feeling would not leave her.
She felt at peace. Even more, she felt righteous. And it sickened her.
A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. A door opened, and the man on the other side came within bare centimeters of being bisected by the Silence Glaive: Saturn managed to stop the weapon with its blade pressed to the tip of the man’s nose before she hastily lowered it.
There, haggard and pale, still clad in his now filthy lab coat, was Soichi Tomoe.
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“Long time no see, Akane,” Nabiki said, the irony in her tone flying right over Mistress 9’s head.
Mistress 9 looked up in surprise and paused in mid-chant. Above, the whole grand mechanism of the circle shifted and clicked into place, and yet another Heart Crystal met its end. She stared at Nabiki for a long moment, taking in the very drastic changes that had been made to her form. “Na... Nabiki,” she managed at last.
Nabiki followed Akane’s gaze up to the vast, membranous wings that grew up out of her shoulders and grinned. “It’s a bold look, I admit. But I don’t think you’re in any position to complain about it.”
Considering the black star on her forehead and the way her hair moved and shifted like a living thing, Mistress 9 found she didn’t entirely disagree. Still, it was a shock to see Nabiki like ... this. Wings, pale skin, red eyes, the inhuman air...
“I’ve heard all sorts of odd things about you lately, little sister,” Nabiki went on. She looked at the summoning circle, and at the floating spiral of heart crystals, then back to Akane. Her movements were different - reptilian, almost. Sinuous and powerful and cold. Her eyes were harder, sharper, like blood flash-frozen at the moment of gushing forth from a severed artery. Her skin, like the Nightmare Life-in-Death, was pale as leprosy. “You’ve made enemies in high places. Do you have any idea just how many people want you dead?”
A vast shadowy mass shifted near the entrance to the chamber, but Mistress 9 paid it little mind. “What happened to you?” she asked. An unfamiliar smell clung to Nabiki, like sewage mixed with battery acid, damp earth, and growing things.
“I met a man,” Nabiki said, her tone exaggeratedly breathless, “and he showed me all sorts of wonderful things about the world.” The breathlessness faded into a cold, empty tone as she went on, “Terrible things. Things that would snap your mind like a twig and send you off screaming until your throat bled. Do you want to see?”
Mistress 9 met Nabiki's gaze, cold, imperious, unmoved. Beneath the surface, the chemical soup of human emotions bubbled unheeded in the corners of her mind, yet it was a strange thing, like the blurry field of vision around a pair of glasses; present, but easily dismissed. “Not impressed,” she said flatly. “Do you know who you’re dealing with, Nabiki? Do you think you’re going to scare me?”
“Is it true you killed mom?” Nabiki asked, changing tactics. She looked towards the shadowy mass at the entrance to the chamber, and her expression hardened, though not before Mistress 9 caught a flash of regret in her eyes. “Well,” Nabiki went on, “I guess I’ve one-upped you there.”
The shadowy mass shambled forward into the light: vast, shapeless, tenebrous, congeries of black protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, like an amoeba made of luminescent black tar. All across its surface, eyes formed and unformed as pustules of greenish light – eyes, and faces too, forming and unforming across its vast bulk.
Soun Tendo’s unmarred face, every one of them, each of them weeping and gurgling piteously.
The chemical soup pulsed and quickened. That old familiar fury rose up within her, but Mistress 9's mind had become a cold, strange, alien thing, full of unexpected angles. She looked upon the being that had once been Soun, and though there was an edge of anger to her voice when she spoke, it was nowhere near what it might have been otherwise. "What have you done, Nabiki?"
--------------------
“It’s not in you anymore, is it?” Ranma asked.
Soichi looked at her piteously. He was more like a skeleton than a man, wasted away by his experiences from a healthy middle aged man to something frail and old: something that hardly looked alive. “In... no.” His voice was painfully hoarse, like a man who had not a drop to drink for days. He swallowed convulsively. “I’m back, aren’t I?”
Ranma’s heart was moved to pity. “I guess,” she replied. “Wanna tell me who ya are?”
“Soichi... Tomoe. I think that was my name. I...” His voice dropped down to an insistent whisper. “I lost something.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You... can you help me find her? I...” his gaze seemed to clear. “She’s dead,” he said simply. “She’s been dead all this time. God, how long have I been looking for her? How many years...?”
Ranma wasn’t sure what to say. She had never been good at this emotional stuff, and though her heart went out to the man, she had bigger things to worry about than some guy who had been possessed, didn’t she? ... Didn’t she?
‘It is the duty of a martial artist to defend the weak.’
It was Genma’s voice, fainter than before, and coming once more as if from far away. She had ignored it before, but here, now, face to face with a man who had been utterly broken, she found that she just didn’t have it in her to ignore that voice a second time.
She put a hand awkwardly on the man’s tattered shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said lamely.
Soichi burst into tears and embraced the sailor suited soldier of Saturn. Ranma tensed for a moment, tensed at this invasion of her personal space; But this was no Amazon glomp. This man was hugging her like she was family. That, if anything, made her even more uncomfortable. For Ranma, physical contact had always been something to be avoided: a thing associated with attacks, whether they be punches, kicks, or throws. This was different.
Extremely uncomfortable and completely unable to relax, Ranma patted the man’s shoulder awkwardly, wondering what to do.
A purple light sprang up around them, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, everything changed.
FLASH
Ranma blinked. The whole world was blurred, and she couldn’t focus on anything. Stale, clinical sort of lights whirled above her. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even lift her head. But she could cry, and cry she did, wailing like a baby... like a... exactly like a baby.
A kind face looked down on her, and instinctively she knew it was someone important. “Welcome to the world, Hotaru-chan,” a voice said lovingly.
In spite of herself, she stopped crying at once.
FLASH
She was wearing pink dungarees and a white t-shirt, and the whole world looked off. Everything was far larger than it should have been. At her feet was a broken flower pot, dirt and water sprayed across the floor, flowers lying limply on the tile.
“Hotaru!” A man’s voice called.
She looked up. Soichi was standing at the doorway, looking shocked.
“Papa!” she squeaked, the word coming out involuntarily. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall, and she nearly fainted: she was a six year old girl with short black hair and purple eyes.
FLASH
She laughed delightedly as she raced across the meadow, the crackle of the summer grass announcing her passage to her father, and to anyone else who cared to listen for it. “You can’t find me!” she cried aloud as she ducked behind an old fallen log that lay at the edge of the meadow, too young to understand that in yelling out, she had given her position away.
Soichi smiled as he trod across the dry, brown field, grass crackling beneath his shoes with each step. “Now where could Hotaru-chan have gone?” he wondered aloud, although he could see her quite clearly.
“Here I am!” she called, standing up from behind the log.
He laughed.
FLASH
On and on it went, one after another, the memories of a childhood Ranma had never had. The life of a girl named Hotaru Tomoe. The good times and the bad, the highs and the lows, from birth until the day that Soichi had taken her to work with him. It ended there, with her watching his grand experiment through a glass wall, a strange sense of anticipation in the air.
The light faded. The vision ended. Six years in a few seconds. Ranma reeled at the intensity of it. She looked up at the haggard man before her in wonder, unsure of what to say or do.
Soichi smiled, and his expression was peaceful. Silence hung between them for a long moment before he spoke. “You’re her, aren’t you?” he asked.
Ranma didn’t know what to say. “I...” she began, and trailed off.
“I’m glad,” Soichi said. “I’m glad I got to meet you. To see...” He collapsed suddenly, and Ranma staggered beneath the sudden weight of his body, catching her balance at the last moment.
She lowered him to the ground, staring at him in a state of alarm. His ki pathways didn’t look good. The light of his life force was fading with each breath.
“I... I’m so very tired,” he said, and he sounded it. “But I’m awake. Thank you for that, Hotaru-chan.”
Ranma struggled with herself for a long moment, forcing the unwanted, unwelcome memories back from the forefront of her mind. She looked down at Soichi as one in a dream. At last she found her voice. “The name’s Ranma, old man.” Her words were harsh. Her tone wasn’t.
Soichi looked closely at Ranma, seeing her as if for the first time. “Ranma, huh?” He seemed to sink into himself. He took a deep, ragged breath. “That’s a strange name,” he managed. He took another belabored breath. “Ranma,” he said again, and there was a note of deep sadness in his voice. He took another deep, terrible breath, and then he simply... stopped.
She stared at his body for a long moment.
Soichi Tomoe was dead.
Ranma looked up.
Standing there, some twenty feet down the corridor, was Sailor Pluto, garnet orb in one hand, staff in the other, a sad look on her face.
“Pluto,” Ranma said, surprised. There were a hundred things she wanted to ask the other Senshi. Why had she shown her the life of a girl she would never be? Why had she shown it to Soichi, too? What did it mean? On an on, questions beyond count, each more troubling than the last. But she didn’t ask any of those. What she actually did ask was, “Why aren’t you with Uranus and Neptune?” Immediately, she wished she had asked one of the other questions, but it was too late to take it back now.
Pluto met Ranma’s gaze. “Uranus and Neptune have their path, and I have mine. My place was here, now.”
Ranma looked down at Soichi’s dead body. "Why'd ya show me all that?" she asked quietly.
Again, silence. Beat after beat passed with no answer, and Ranma could hear the beating of her own heart in the hallway.
Finally, Pluto spoke. “Sailor Saturn,” she said, her voice thick with unexpressed emotion. “Do you think you can love someone, or miss someone, from a life you never lived? A life that might have been, perhaps should have been, but wasn’t?”
Ranma studied Pluto’s face for a long moment, looking for some hint of why she would ask this question. Finding none, she shrugged helplessly, not at all sure what to think.
Silence.
“Why?” Ranma asked after a beat or two.
It was there for a split second and then gone, almost too quick to notice. In that moment, Ranma could have sworn that she saw a look of regret, and of love, in Pluto’s eyes. It was gone.
“Come,” Sailor Pluto said. “It is time for you to face your destiny.”
Ranma rose to her feet and scooped up the Silence Glaive from where it had fallen. “Right,” she said, disappointed by Pluto’s evasion, and really, really creeped out by the memories of the early life of one Hotaru Tomoe. The images she had seen were settling down into a far flung corner of her brain. Already the specifics were hard to recall, and they were fading. She looked closely at Pluto again, and a thought came to her suddenly, and she voiced it aloud: “How would it have gone?” It was an old question – a question that brought with it old memories, and the skies over Nemesis. “That other life, I mean.”
There it was again – there and gone. Regret mixed with mother-love denied.
Pluto began to walk away down the corridor, and after a moment, Ranma followed.
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Nabiki turned at last to survey the creature that had once been Soun Tendo, taking in its blasphemous curves and eye-wrenching angles in one contemptuous sweep of the eyes. It was fast. Almost too fast.
“Don’t turn your back on me, Nabiki,” Mistress 9 said.
Nabiki turned to face her sister. “Or what? You’ll take my heart crystal?” She glanced up at the revolving spiral just in time to see another crystal shatter with a pulse of light. “Or will you tell daddy on me?” her gaze shifted momentarily towards the Thing behind her. “Oh wait. Your other daddy, then. Your real daddy.” She twisted the word ‘daddy’ when she spoke it, uttering it with ever greater contempt.
Alien mind or not, NOW she was angry. Mistress 9 looked at the thing that had been Soun Tendo, her lips curling into something approaching an inhuman snarl. “Ryouga,” she said. “Come to me.”
With a faint pop of displaced air, the Daimonically possessed Lost Boy appeared at Akane’s side. He looked around, taking in the situation.
“That’s the best you can do? That’s your knight in shining armour? Ryouga?”
Ryouga glared at Nabiki. “Hey! Don’t insult someone who’s been summoned to kill you!”
“Right,” Nabiki drawled. She snapped her fingers. At her signal, a dozen Deep Ones rushed in from around Soun’s vast bulk, tridents in hand.
Ryouga cracked his knuckles and grinned.
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They wended their way through the dark corridors of Mugen Gakuen, streamers of mist flowing all around them. Onward and onwards they went, with classrooms appearing suddenly out of the mist on their right and their left like ghosts and fading away behind them just as quickly. Empty classrooms, every one. A stray backpack. A folder. Silence. Their own breathing seemed deafening: their own footsteps the thundering footfalls of giants.
Usagi gave Endymion a nervous look.
Endymion’s eyes were hard as diamonds as he surveyed their surroundings, but he still took the time to give her an encouraging nod.
At the forefront of their little band, Mercury walked at Venus’s side, mini-computer in hand. The glow of it cast strange shadows across her face. “Turn left at the next intersection,” she whispered, and even the whisper seemed loud.
The florescent lights flickered, and the scent of human waste wafted through the corridor. Usagi tried very hard not to stare at the scuff marks and faint streaks of some brown substance across the floor of the corridor.
They turned left, and as they did, the distant sounds of fighting began to filter through the silence, filling it slowly at first, then with ever growing intensity. Usagi and the Senshi exchanged glances.
"Minna," Usagi said, "If we don't stop the Death Busters here..."
Mars nodded her understanding. "We know, Usagi. We won't fail."
Venus voiced her agreement. "It's time to do what we always do, minna." she said, and in her voice was the power and dignity of a leader.
The others looked her way. "What do we always do, Minako-chan?" Usagi asked.
"Save the day," Venus replied, smiling faintly.
As one, the Senshi strode down the hallway towards the door to the summoning chamber.
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Explosions rocked the summoning chamber as Ryouga did battle with the Deep Ones. He ducked to the side of the first blast and it struck the statue of the Messiah of Silence behind him, sending shrapnel spraying in all directions. The next three blasts he took on the chin - dodging had never been Ryouga's strong point, and daimonic possession had done little to help him in that regard. He came charging out of the ensuing explosion with all the grace and subtlety of a mad bull, and his first punch blasted a Deep One clear into the far wall, where it cratered spectacularly.
Akane and Nabiki faced off, neither one willing to make the first move. Chaos swirled all around them, blasts of energy flying every which way, with Akane's hair writhing in an unseen wind and Nabiki's blood red eyes glowing balefully.
It was Akane who broke the standoff. She'd never been the patient one. Her hair whipped out across the space between them like a mass of black snakes, binding Nabiki in place, wrapping around her arms, her legs, her throat.
Akane looked disappointed. "Too easy," she said. "But you never were much of a fighter."
Nabiki smirked. "And you never were very bright."
Akane felt that familiar rage rise up within her again - the rage that had told her she was being impaired by Ranma's arrival in Nerima, the rage that had directed her mallet on many, many occasions, that very human rage - and squeezed.
Nabiki's head tore off, her body broke apart into smoke, and she was gone.
Akane had time to look confused for a split second before Nabiki slammed into her from behind, shoulder first. She went sprawling heavily and slid across the summoning circle.
Tick. The circle rotated. Another heart crystal went up in a burst of light.
Akane rose to her feet, glaring furiously at her yet living sister. "An illusion?" she spat. She'd KNOWN it had been too easy. Well, this wasn't over yet. She performed a quick kipup and turned to face her sister, her eyes full of the promise of death.
"SPARKLING WIDE PRESSURE!" came a muffled cry. A moment later, the far door to the chamber exploded inwards in a shower of sparks, flying right off its hinges and skidding ten meters across the floor. Ryouga looked up just in time to see the door come flying at him before it struck him with a tremendous clang and flung him into the base of the statue of the Messiah of Silence.
Silhouetted against the lights of the corridor, the sailor suited soldiers stepped forward.
"Death Busters!" Usagi announced, her gaze taking in the whole room. We won't allow you to summon your master. This is our world, and we will fight for it with all our strength! A soldier of Love and Justice, I am Serenity."
"Sailor Venus!"
"Sailor Mercury!"
"Sailor Mars!"
"Sailor Jupiter!"
"In the name of the moon, we'll punish you!"
Combat paused for a long moment as the three sides - Death Buster, Chaos Spawn, and Silver Moon - faced off against each other.
Nabiki shook her head incredulously. "Daddy, I have a task for you," she said.
The great, shifting mass that had been Soun Tendo half slithered, half bubbled out of the dark corner it had been waiting in, his faces forming and unforming across its vast bulk.
"Kill them," she said, and gestured dismissively.
The thing that had been Soun charged, and each of the Senshi scattered in a different direction: the great mass smashed through what was left of the door and into the corridor beyond before shifting its front to its back and coming around for another pass.
Usagi stared in horror. "It... it's a person!" she said even as Mars leaped clear of a projected pseudopod and Venus blasted it with a Crescent Beam.
Meanwhile, several of the Deep Ones simply dogpiled on Ryouga, biting and clawing and kicking him as he went down beneath them... which got them exactly where he wanted them.
"BAKUSAI TENKETSU!" he yelled, and drive his finger into the floor.
An explosion of dust and shrapnel reduced the Deep Ones to so much bloody pulp. Ryouga rose to his feet a moment later, totally unharmed, gore streaming off his body, and grinning savagely.
The survivors drew back and clutched their tridents nervously.
"Is that all you got?" Ryouga asked contemptuously.
A volley of green blasts was his answer.
Across the chamber, Usagi and the others were hard at work distracting the Shoggoth while Mercury took a reading on it with her computer, standing well back from the main action of the battle. Jupiter took a pseudopod to the stomach, and screamed in horror as the thing began to absorb her into itself... only to be freed a moment later by a well placed magical rose shattered the magic of the absorption process and flung a nauseous Sailor Jupiter back away from the beast.
"Don't let it touch you!" Mars yelled. "It can kill with a touch!"
Jupiter staggered to her feet, shaken and trying not to vomit. "Woulda... been helpful to know... before," she groused.
Mercury's computer beeped, and she looked down at the screen. She took an involuntary step back. "It's human. Or was, before it was transformed. Sailor Moon, we'll pin it down, and once it's in place, you heal it!"
The battle plan was set. The Senshi moved into action. The creature shifted surprisingly easily on its vast bulk, sending vast swathes of pseudopod at whichever Senshi it wasn't actively charging, which made corralling it a difficult proposition at best.
"Mars Fire Snake!" Mars incanted, calling down a circle of flames around the bulk of the Soun-Shoggoth, light and head burning high.
It burst through the flames like they were nothing, leaving Mars with just enough time to look surprised before...
Tuxedo Kamen swept by, swinging on a rope taken from the support of the statue of the Messiah of Silence, scooping Mars up into his arms and out of danger even as the Shoggoth rumbled through the space she had just occupied.
"Thanks," she said, barely daring to breathe.
He nodded.
"VENUS LOVE-ME CHAIN!" Venus called out, and links of golden hearts flowed out and around the beast, binding it in place. "NOW!" she yelled.
"JUPITER OAK EVOLUTION!"
"SHINE AQUA ILLUSION!"
The Shoggoth collapsed, denting the floor as its bulk smashed down uncontrolled, unsupported.
Usagi brandished the Crescent Moon Wand. "MOON HEALING ESCALATION!" she cried. Waves of healing power flowed out across the tortured form of the beast that had been Soun Tendo, and it began to melt - not into a human form, but into nothing. When the darkness and corruption was removed, there was nothing beneath it. The mask concealed the absence of a thing.
Usagi cut off the flow of magic and stared at the half-melted beast in open-mouthed horror. "Why... why isn't it becoming human?"
This could be a problem.
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Nabiki felt her heart fall out of her chest as she saw Sailor Moon's healing attempt totally, utterly fail to restore her father to his self. It wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it. The Dark Man had lied. The Dark Man had lied! DAMNIT! Her eyes shone with inhuman intensity, her wings flexed and unflexed, and her innards seemed to shift strangely within her. Then came the fear - the walls were coming down in the face of her despair, and a sense of Presence gathered around the middle Tendo sister, a quivering fear external to the minds of those who felt it, flowing out across the chamber in rotting waves.
Akane was not impressed. "Where are you looking, baka?" she called tauntingly, blasting Nabiki to the ground with a pulse of eldritch energy.
Pain ripped through her body, and she shoved it down into a deep, dark corner of her awareness. Pain was flesh. Flesh was transitory. Flesh didn't matter now. Smoke rising from her form, Nabiki arose and glared balefully at her sister. "Put a little more effort into it next time, Akane. I think that tickled a little." It was foolish, yes, but necessary. Akane needed to be mad. Nabiki needed her to be mad. Everything depended on that.
With her one great hope dashed and her other fading quickly, Nabiki Tendo threw herself into battle once more.
--------------
It was nearly over now in the world outside of Mugen Gakuen. The ancient powers were well and truly awake, yet in this most desperate, final hour, humanity proved its worth. Man and woman fought desperately against the dying of the light, knowing they were doomed, knowing that they could barely stand to look at their foes without the risk of madness, they stood and fought. And fell. Humanity unaided could not stand against the rise of the Spawn of Chaos.
In the skies over New York, a squadron of F-16 fighter jets bore down on a tremendous, sentient ball of nuclear fire. Missiles were launched, and vanished into the flames with nary a disturbance of the celestial sphere; Cthuga scarcely noticed as his fire-vampires swarmed out from their places upon his fiery form. The fighter pilots noticed. They had time to scream before the rain of living embers sheared through their planes like they were made of tissue paper, setting the metal itself ablaze through supernatural might even as others tore through the cockpits, turning the pilots into living pyres which burned bright and brief. There and gone: such is the human condition.
At the South Pole, a vast, incomprehensible power stirred. Awakened by the taint of Chaos, the First of Lilith's Children opened his eyes and beheld the astonished faces of human scientists, and he was greatly angered.
Ten minutes later, Antarctica exploded, and a little girl on a liferaft - the daughter of the head of the expedition - screamed in horror of what she saw in that moment.
It was a surprisingly common reaction that day. A scream of horror. A scream for innocence lost. A scream for sudden, unwanted understanding. A scream for all the piles of rotting leaves in all the gutters of the world.
Rome burned. The Vatican burned. The Pope lay dead in Saint Peter's Square, and all around his body were flames and chaos. Mecca vanished, the whole city falling into a great sinkhole as the burrowers beneath ate out the foundations of the very heart of the Moselm world. Cities burned across the whole face of the Earth. Some fared better than others. The European Union, under UNIT's watchful umbrella, fared best of all. They'd had some experience with this sort of thing in the past, and it served them well in the present. But even there, things did not go well. Even there, the price was higher than any were willing to pay.
Yet it was paid. Drop of blood by drop of blood, humanity paid it.
--------------
When Saturn and Pluto finally met up with Uranus and Neptune at the entrance to the summoning chamber, the battle within was winding down to its conclusion. The Guardian Senshi, unwilling to destroy what was left of Soun Tendo, were now reduced to simply trying to evade it. That was a game that the Shoggoth would win, even half melted as it was. They simply did not have the reserves of stamina necessary to wear out the great beast. It was at this point only a matter of time before one of them was killed by the thing.
Ryouga, having slain the remaining Deep Ones, had lent his assistance to Akane in her battle against Nabiki, turning a somewhat even fight into a totally one-sided one. The moment the Outer Senshi entered the summoning chamber, two things happened: the first was that Nabiki took a full strength blow to the stomach and went flying backwards into the statue of the Messiah of Silence, which collapsed on top of her from the force of the impact, the whole wreck drenched in rotting, external Fear; the second was that the great summoning circle shifted, and the second to last heart crystal was consumed in a tremendous flare of light.
There was a shimmering above the place where the heart crystals had been destroyed now - a sense of shifting and warping that twisted the eye. Somewhere beyond that, a vast, lurking presence waited impatiently, knowing that its time was nigh.
Into this scene, the Outer Senshi arrived.
Pluto nodded to Saturn.
The pig-tailed Senshi leaped into the air, Silence Glaive in hand, moving straight towards the thing that had been Soun Tendo.
Usagi looked up, her eyes wide, "NO, YOU CAN'T...!"
"SILENCE GLAIVE SURPRISE!" Saturn incanted as she came down, blade first.
The Glaive bisected the Shoggoth from top to bottom. The ground cracked in a sphere-shape around Saturn's feet, a pulse of horrific purple energy rippled out from her body, and all sound failed for a split second as the top half of the building exploded even as the final crystal snapped into place and vanished in a flash of light.
When vision returned to the combatants, the ceiling and everything above it was simply gone, as was the Shoggoth that had been Soun Tendo. The summoning chamber was now on the top floor of the building. All eyes were fixed upon Saturn and the other Soldiers of the Outer Solar System.
"This is over, Akane," Saturn said, glaring at the girl from across the room. "If ya give up now, we can probably find a way ta heal ya, but we ain't lettin' ya bring the whole world down around you."
"Sailor Saturn..." Usagi whispered, staring at the place where the Shoggoth had been. A tear traced its line down her cheek.
But Akane was not ready to surrender. No, the very thought of surrender was laughable. She had won. She laughed out loud. "The summoning is done, dummy. What do you think you can do? Look!"
Above the summoning circle, where once had been a faint shimmering, now there was an angry reddish crack running through the sky itself from one side of the building to another, and it was spreading. Soon it vanished into the distance in both directions, and the aether itself trembled.
"Pharaoh 90 won't have this world, Mistress 9," Pluto said determinedly as she, Uranus, and Neptune stepped out in front of Saturn. "Surrender, or be destroyed."
Saturn looked surprised at that, but said nothing.
Ryouga cracked his knuckles and stepped forward. "Well, well. Look who's hiding behind a bunch of girls," he said. "I hope you're ready for round 2, Ranma, because I've been looking forward to this all day." His aura flared, and a deadly pink light sprang up around him...
"DEEP SUBMERGE!"
"WORLD SHAKING!"
"Dead Scream."
The first two shouted, the last whispered, and the last the deadliest of all. The three ringed spheres of energy merged in mid-flight into one multicoloured orb which struck Ryouga full force and exploded violently, raining down... parts. A hand here. A foot there. A pieces of head across the floor. Blood everywhere.
Blood everywhere.
Ryouga was dead.
Saturn stared in open-mouthed shock. Ryouga. RYOUGA was dead. RYOUGA WAS DEAD.
Akane, the Inner Senshi, Saturn, all of them stared in shock. Silence filled the room for a long moment.
Then came a distant rumble, from the deepest depths to the highest heights. Then came the beginning of the end. Reddish cracks spider-webbed across the sky from the central line.
Akane sank to her knees, looking utterly lost. "Ryouga..." she whispered. "Ryouga. Ryouga...!" The rage Nabiki had worked so hard to kindle mingled with grief, her very human emotions battling with the film of Pharaoh 90's influence that lay draped across her mind. The balance tipped one way, then the other. She screamed, and power flared violently around her.
She caught Saturn's gaze, and everything seemed to stop. Saturn's face - Ranma's face - mirrored her own feelings.
Silent tears began to flow down Saturn's cheeks as she stared into Akane's eyes, the whole world forgotten around them. The whole world became the two of them; two hearts meeting for one terrible moment. In the midst of chaos and death, two hearts were united in grief and pain.
Even as Akane looked upon Sailor Saturn, even in the midst of her grief and her rage, she felt an irresistible upwelling of love for the pig-tailed girl: a fierce, desperate love born of need and loss, desire and hope. Pharaoh 90's alien influence, repelled by the power of love, grief, and anger, popped like a soap bubble. Light stirred in Akane's eyes, and she stared at Saturn in wonder.
"Ranma..." she whispered.
Usagi and her Guardian Senshi strode forward to meet Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. "I don't approve," she said, and her eyes were full of anger mixed with horror in equal measure.
Pluto met her Queen's gaze. "I know," she said simply. "I'm sorry." She looked as though she was going to say more, but at that moment, the sky split open at the seams. The whole vast expanse of heaven unfurled to reveal a terrible, empty, ABSENCE, bordered by angry red light, its raw, jagged edges crackling with power. The Abyss looked down upon the planet Earth, and madness came whirling in its wake; dark power pulsed within its maw like the heartbeat of the Universe.
Out of the Audient Void, an horrific THING descended upon the city, emerging from the womb of the Void in a grotesque parody of human birth, dripping with entropic eddies, globular yet writhing on every part of its surface. Vast tentacles flailed about its body, and a single great eye opened in the very center of its globular mass, bathing the ruined building in its malevolent red glow; its gaze was fixed upon Sailor Saturn.
On her alone.
Pharaoh 90 had arrived.
END CHAPTER 17
-------------
Author's notes:
It's been a while. Have been absurdly busy with graduate school.
“I wonder what Usagi is doing right now,” she whispered to the Lunar night. She sighed. Here she was, safe and cared for in the Lunar palace while her only daughter fought to save the world! She wanted to laugh and cry simultaneously, and that only scratched the surface of her emotional state.
She felt a hand settle around her waist, and she looked down. Chibi-Usa stood at her side. She hadn’t heard the girl approach. For a moment, she considered slapping the girl’s hand away. The thought that her memories had been manipulated did not sit well with Ikuko. And yet... she sighed. “You’re worried, too,” she said. It was more of a statement than a question.
Chibi-Usa nodded.
“Isn’t all of this just ancient history for you, Chibi-Usa?” The girl flinched at the lack of the normal ‘chan’ that Ikuko used to add to the end of her name when she spoke it.
Chibi-Usa thought about her answer for a moment. “Pu said that even though from my point of view all of this has already happened,” she said, “From your point of view, and from theirs, it’s happening now, and can be changed. So... I’m worried. But it will be OK.”
“How can you know that?”
Chibi-Usa looked up at her grandmother. “I believe in Sailor Moon,” she said simply.
Ikuko thought about that for a few moments, and then smiled. She put her own arm around Chibi-Usa’s shoulder, and for a moment they two stood there, looking out at the waters of Mare Serenitatis. Finally, Ikuko looked down at Chibi-Usa and said, “Arigatou, Granddaughter.”
Chibi-Usa looked surprised, and then troubled. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because... because you might not get to see Usagi again for a long time. Maybe not until after you die.”
Ikuko stared at Chibi-Usa. “Why is that?” she asked.
“... Because even though people don’t age here, afterwards, even if you get to see Usagi again...” She sniffled. “Humans have a finite lifespan, Ikuko-mama. Usagi and the others, and me, don’t.”
Ikuko said nothing, but stood there, stunned by this new revelation. She had known that her daughter was very powerful, but she hadn’t really given thought to the idea that her daughter and her friends were immortal. That they would live, and live, and live, and live, and live long after she herself was gone, long after everyone they had ever known was gone. She felt a wave of deep, deep sadness mixed with pity. She looked out at the ocean and said nothing.
“I’m glad I met you, Ikuko-mama,” Chibi-Usa said at last. “Mama always told me that I’d love you.” She looked up at Ikuko again. “She was right.”
Ikuko smiled down at Chibi-Usa sadly. “I’m glad I met you, too, Chibi-Usa-chan.”
The breeze picked up, and the two stood there on the balcony, side by side: Ikuko and her future Grand-daughter, with all the majesty of the Dreamlands spread out before them.
--------------------
Reflections of Ruin
by P.H. Wise
A Ranma/Sailor Moon/Cthulhu Mythos Crossover Fukufic
Chapter 17 – The Messiah of Silence, Part II
Disclaimer: I don’t own Ranma. I don’t own Sailor Moon. Please don’t sue me. I’m not doing this for profit.
--------------------
A cold wind blew in through the shattered windows on the fortieth floor hallway of Mugen Gakuen.
Everything was gone. Everything. Usagi’s house. Minako’s house. Makoto’s apartment. Ami’s house. The Hikawa Shrine. Mamoru’s apartment. All of it, gone. Their battleground against the forces of darkness for the last three years, gone. The tennis court where Usagi had once been absorbed into a giant tennis ball, gone. The park where they always used to have their picnics, gone. All of it, every last piece of the Minato ward, gone. The whole vast army of the Chaos Spawn, the Daimons, and all the humans whom Usagi had healed, dead.
Erased by an unspeakable power.
Usagi stared out in shock and disbelief upon the Silence-touched ward, and Endymion and her Guardian Senshi did the same.
Mercury looked down at her computer, then out at the utterly silent Ward beyond. “It was... it was Sailor Saturn’s power signature,” she whispered.
“Ranma-chan... did this?” Usagi asked. A deep horror rose up within her heart. THIS was the power that Uranus and Neptune had feared. THIS was the power her mother had warned her about. For the first time, she understood – really understood – exactly why they felt as they did. The moment passed: her heart recovered, and she shut her mouth, a grim determination settling over her. They would find another way. The power of Saturn would not end the world.
“Minna,” Usagi said, and her voice sounded far stronger and more confident than she felt, ”Let’s go.”
The others nodded.
For all the destruction outside, the battle wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.
--------------
Mistress 9 smiled contentedly as the last sonorous syllables faded into echoes reverberating through the vast summoning chamber. Her part in the ritual was nearly done: the circle was prepared, the rites observed, and most of the chants had been spoken. The Pure Heart Crystals of the students of Mugen Gakuen floated in a spiral pattern above the summoning circle, slowly churning towards the center where a pillar of darkness gave off an eerie, shadowy sort of illumination. It moved like clockwork: every ten seconds, another heart crystal was shunted into the pillar of darkness and shattered, giving off a faint pulse of light that appeared to come from a great distance.
Mistress 9 felt a peculiar sort of anxiety as the heart crystals ticked and tocked their way towards oblivion, but it, like the light, felt distant, as though coming from a great distance. She frowned.
The door hissed open, and Eudial strode into the summoning chamber, the Fire Buster MK III slung over her shoulder.
Mistress 9 looked up.
“They’re here,” Eudial announced.
Mistress 9 shook her head. “Too soon,” she said. And it was. It was far too soon for any sort of interference to be permitted, and yet... no, it was important that this succeed. She knew that. “Delay them, Germatoid,” she said.
“Which group?” Eudial asked.
Mistress 9 thought about that for a moment. “The Soldiers of the Outer Solar System are the bigger threat,” she said at last. “I don’t want Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, or...” there it was again – that faint twinge of something wrong, “or Ranma to get anywhere near this chamber before the summoning is complete.”
Eudial nodded, and spared a quick glance at the tiny video screen mounted on her wrist-watch. She grinned widely – too widely. “It looks like that pathetic wretch might be useful after all.” With that, she hefted her Fire Buster MK III and walked out of the room, leaving Mistress 9 to her thoughts.
Mistress 9 studied the summoning circle for a long moment in silence. Something about this felt... off.
---------------
It felt strange, having brought Ruin to the whole Minato ward. Not at all like Saturn had expected. She’d expected to feel guilt. Resentment. Fear. Something. She’d not expected this – this peace. Like it was the most natural thing in the world, and the essence of righteousness itself to have done what she did.
Saturn shifted uncomfortably as she walked alone through the darkened corridors of Mugen Gakuen. She wasn’t altogether sure that she liked what her power was doing to her. She shouldn’t feel so at peace after destroying the entire ward, and yet there it was all the same, and no matter how much she disliked it, the feeling would not leave her.
She felt at peace. Even more, she felt righteous. And it sickened her.
A flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. A door opened, and the man on the other side came within bare centimeters of being bisected by the Silence Glaive: Saturn managed to stop the weapon with its blade pressed to the tip of the man’s nose before she hastily lowered it.
There, haggard and pale, still clad in his now filthy lab coat, was Soichi Tomoe.
------------
“Long time no see, Akane,” Nabiki said, the irony in her tone flying right over Mistress 9’s head.
Mistress 9 looked up in surprise and paused in mid-chant. Above, the whole grand mechanism of the circle shifted and clicked into place, and yet another Heart Crystal met its end. She stared at Nabiki for a long moment, taking in the very drastic changes that had been made to her form. “Na... Nabiki,” she managed at last.
Nabiki followed Akane’s gaze up to the vast, membranous wings that grew up out of her shoulders and grinned. “It’s a bold look, I admit. But I don’t think you’re in any position to complain about it.”
Considering the black star on her forehead and the way her hair moved and shifted like a living thing, Mistress 9 found she didn’t entirely disagree. Still, it was a shock to see Nabiki like ... this. Wings, pale skin, red eyes, the inhuman air...
“I’ve heard all sorts of odd things about you lately, little sister,” Nabiki went on. She looked at the summoning circle, and at the floating spiral of heart crystals, then back to Akane. Her movements were different - reptilian, almost. Sinuous and powerful and cold. Her eyes were harder, sharper, like blood flash-frozen at the moment of gushing forth from a severed artery. Her skin, like the Nightmare Life-in-Death, was pale as leprosy. “You’ve made enemies in high places. Do you have any idea just how many people want you dead?”
A vast shadowy mass shifted near the entrance to the chamber, but Mistress 9 paid it little mind. “What happened to you?” she asked. An unfamiliar smell clung to Nabiki, like sewage mixed with battery acid, damp earth, and growing things.
“I met a man,” Nabiki said, her tone exaggeratedly breathless, “and he showed me all sorts of wonderful things about the world.” The breathlessness faded into a cold, empty tone as she went on, “Terrible things. Things that would snap your mind like a twig and send you off screaming until your throat bled. Do you want to see?”
Mistress 9 met Nabiki's gaze, cold, imperious, unmoved. Beneath the surface, the chemical soup of human emotions bubbled unheeded in the corners of her mind, yet it was a strange thing, like the blurry field of vision around a pair of glasses; present, but easily dismissed. “Not impressed,” she said flatly. “Do you know who you’re dealing with, Nabiki? Do you think you’re going to scare me?”
“Is it true you killed mom?” Nabiki asked, changing tactics. She looked towards the shadowy mass at the entrance to the chamber, and her expression hardened, though not before Mistress 9 caught a flash of regret in her eyes. “Well,” Nabiki went on, “I guess I’ve one-upped you there.”
The shadowy mass shambled forward into the light: vast, shapeless, tenebrous, congeries of black protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, like an amoeba made of luminescent black tar. All across its surface, eyes formed and unformed as pustules of greenish light – eyes, and faces too, forming and unforming across its vast bulk.
Soun Tendo’s unmarred face, every one of them, each of them weeping and gurgling piteously.
The chemical soup pulsed and quickened. That old familiar fury rose up within her, but Mistress 9's mind had become a cold, strange, alien thing, full of unexpected angles. She looked upon the being that had once been Soun, and though there was an edge of anger to her voice when she spoke, it was nowhere near what it might have been otherwise. "What have you done, Nabiki?"
--------------------
“It’s not in you anymore, is it?” Ranma asked.
Soichi looked at her piteously. He was more like a skeleton than a man, wasted away by his experiences from a healthy middle aged man to something frail and old: something that hardly looked alive. “In... no.” His voice was painfully hoarse, like a man who had not a drop to drink for days. He swallowed convulsively. “I’m back, aren’t I?”
Ranma’s heart was moved to pity. “I guess,” she replied. “Wanna tell me who ya are?”
“Soichi... Tomoe. I think that was my name. I...” His voice dropped down to an insistent whisper. “I lost something.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You... can you help me find her? I...” his gaze seemed to clear. “She’s dead,” he said simply. “She’s been dead all this time. God, how long have I been looking for her? How many years...?”
Ranma wasn’t sure what to say. She had never been good at this emotional stuff, and though her heart went out to the man, she had bigger things to worry about than some guy who had been possessed, didn’t she? ... Didn’t she?
‘It is the duty of a martial artist to defend the weak.’
It was Genma’s voice, fainter than before, and coming once more as if from far away. She had ignored it before, but here, now, face to face with a man who had been utterly broken, she found that she just didn’t have it in her to ignore that voice a second time.
She put a hand awkwardly on the man’s tattered shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said lamely.
Soichi burst into tears and embraced the sailor suited soldier of Saturn. Ranma tensed for a moment, tensed at this invasion of her personal space; But this was no Amazon glomp. This man was hugging her like she was family. That, if anything, made her even more uncomfortable. For Ranma, physical contact had always been something to be avoided: a thing associated with attacks, whether they be punches, kicks, or throws. This was different.
Extremely uncomfortable and completely unable to relax, Ranma patted the man’s shoulder awkwardly, wondering what to do.
A purple light sprang up around them, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, everything changed.
FLASH
Ranma blinked. The whole world was blurred, and she couldn’t focus on anything. Stale, clinical sort of lights whirled above her. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even lift her head. But she could cry, and cry she did, wailing like a baby... like a... exactly like a baby.
A kind face looked down on her, and instinctively she knew it was someone important. “Welcome to the world, Hotaru-chan,” a voice said lovingly.
In spite of herself, she stopped crying at once.
FLASH
She was wearing pink dungarees and a white t-shirt, and the whole world looked off. Everything was far larger than it should have been. At her feet was a broken flower pot, dirt and water sprayed across the floor, flowers lying limply on the tile.
“Hotaru!” A man’s voice called.
She looked up. Soichi was standing at the doorway, looking shocked.
“Papa!” she squeaked, the word coming out involuntarily. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall, and she nearly fainted: she was a six year old girl with short black hair and purple eyes.
FLASH
She laughed delightedly as she raced across the meadow, the crackle of the summer grass announcing her passage to her father, and to anyone else who cared to listen for it. “You can’t find me!” she cried aloud as she ducked behind an old fallen log that lay at the edge of the meadow, too young to understand that in yelling out, she had given her position away.
Soichi smiled as he trod across the dry, brown field, grass crackling beneath his shoes with each step. “Now where could Hotaru-chan have gone?” he wondered aloud, although he could see her quite clearly.
“Here I am!” she called, standing up from behind the log.
He laughed.
FLASH
On and on it went, one after another, the memories of a childhood Ranma had never had. The life of a girl named Hotaru Tomoe. The good times and the bad, the highs and the lows, from birth until the day that Soichi had taken her to work with him. It ended there, with her watching his grand experiment through a glass wall, a strange sense of anticipation in the air.
The light faded. The vision ended. Six years in a few seconds. Ranma reeled at the intensity of it. She looked up at the haggard man before her in wonder, unsure of what to say or do.
Soichi smiled, and his expression was peaceful. Silence hung between them for a long moment before he spoke. “You’re her, aren’t you?” he asked.
Ranma didn’t know what to say. “I...” she began, and trailed off.
“I’m glad,” Soichi said. “I’m glad I got to meet you. To see...” He collapsed suddenly, and Ranma staggered beneath the sudden weight of his body, catching her balance at the last moment.
She lowered him to the ground, staring at him in a state of alarm. His ki pathways didn’t look good. The light of his life force was fading with each breath.
“I... I’m so very tired,” he said, and he sounded it. “But I’m awake. Thank you for that, Hotaru-chan.”
Ranma struggled with herself for a long moment, forcing the unwanted, unwelcome memories back from the forefront of her mind. She looked down at Soichi as one in a dream. At last she found her voice. “The name’s Ranma, old man.” Her words were harsh. Her tone wasn’t.
Soichi looked closely at Ranma, seeing her as if for the first time. “Ranma, huh?” He seemed to sink into himself. He took a deep, ragged breath. “That’s a strange name,” he managed. He took another belabored breath. “Ranma,” he said again, and there was a note of deep sadness in his voice. He took another deep, terrible breath, and then he simply... stopped.
She stared at his body for a long moment.
Soichi Tomoe was dead.
Ranma looked up.
Standing there, some twenty feet down the corridor, was Sailor Pluto, garnet orb in one hand, staff in the other, a sad look on her face.
“Pluto,” Ranma said, surprised. There were a hundred things she wanted to ask the other Senshi. Why had she shown her the life of a girl she would never be? Why had she shown it to Soichi, too? What did it mean? On an on, questions beyond count, each more troubling than the last. But she didn’t ask any of those. What she actually did ask was, “Why aren’t you with Uranus and Neptune?” Immediately, she wished she had asked one of the other questions, but it was too late to take it back now.
Pluto met Ranma’s gaze. “Uranus and Neptune have their path, and I have mine. My place was here, now.”
Ranma looked down at Soichi’s dead body. "Why'd ya show me all that?" she asked quietly.
Again, silence. Beat after beat passed with no answer, and Ranma could hear the beating of her own heart in the hallway.
Finally, Pluto spoke. “Sailor Saturn,” she said, her voice thick with unexpressed emotion. “Do you think you can love someone, or miss someone, from a life you never lived? A life that might have been, perhaps should have been, but wasn’t?”
Ranma studied Pluto’s face for a long moment, looking for some hint of why she would ask this question. Finding none, she shrugged helplessly, not at all sure what to think.
Silence.
“Why?” Ranma asked after a beat or two.
It was there for a split second and then gone, almost too quick to notice. In that moment, Ranma could have sworn that she saw a look of regret, and of love, in Pluto’s eyes. It was gone.
“Come,” Sailor Pluto said. “It is time for you to face your destiny.”
Ranma rose to her feet and scooped up the Silence Glaive from where it had fallen. “Right,” she said, disappointed by Pluto’s evasion, and really, really creeped out by the memories of the early life of one Hotaru Tomoe. The images she had seen were settling down into a far flung corner of her brain. Already the specifics were hard to recall, and they were fading. She looked closely at Pluto again, and a thought came to her suddenly, and she voiced it aloud: “How would it have gone?” It was an old question – a question that brought with it old memories, and the skies over Nemesis. “That other life, I mean.”
There it was again – there and gone. Regret mixed with mother-love denied.
Pluto began to walk away down the corridor, and after a moment, Ranma followed.
-------------
Nabiki turned at last to survey the creature that had once been Soun Tendo, taking in its blasphemous curves and eye-wrenching angles in one contemptuous sweep of the eyes. It was fast. Almost too fast.
“Don’t turn your back on me, Nabiki,” Mistress 9 said.
Nabiki turned to face her sister. “Or what? You’ll take my heart crystal?” She glanced up at the revolving spiral just in time to see another crystal shatter with a pulse of light. “Or will you tell daddy on me?” her gaze shifted momentarily towards the Thing behind her. “Oh wait. Your other daddy, then. Your real daddy.” She twisted the word ‘daddy’ when she spoke it, uttering it with ever greater contempt.
Alien mind or not, NOW she was angry. Mistress 9 looked at the thing that had been Soun Tendo, her lips curling into something approaching an inhuman snarl. “Ryouga,” she said. “Come to me.”
With a faint pop of displaced air, the Daimonically possessed Lost Boy appeared at Akane’s side. He looked around, taking in the situation.
“That’s the best you can do? That’s your knight in shining armour? Ryouga?”
Ryouga glared at Nabiki. “Hey! Don’t insult someone who’s been summoned to kill you!”
“Right,” Nabiki drawled. She snapped her fingers. At her signal, a dozen Deep Ones rushed in from around Soun’s vast bulk, tridents in hand.
Ryouga cracked his knuckles and grinned.
--------------
They wended their way through the dark corridors of Mugen Gakuen, streamers of mist flowing all around them. Onward and onwards they went, with classrooms appearing suddenly out of the mist on their right and their left like ghosts and fading away behind them just as quickly. Empty classrooms, every one. A stray backpack. A folder. Silence. Their own breathing seemed deafening: their own footsteps the thundering footfalls of giants.
Usagi gave Endymion a nervous look.
Endymion’s eyes were hard as diamonds as he surveyed their surroundings, but he still took the time to give her an encouraging nod.
At the forefront of their little band, Mercury walked at Venus’s side, mini-computer in hand. The glow of it cast strange shadows across her face. “Turn left at the next intersection,” she whispered, and even the whisper seemed loud.
The florescent lights flickered, and the scent of human waste wafted through the corridor. Usagi tried very hard not to stare at the scuff marks and faint streaks of some brown substance across the floor of the corridor.
They turned left, and as they did, the distant sounds of fighting began to filter through the silence, filling it slowly at first, then with ever growing intensity. Usagi and the Senshi exchanged glances.
"Minna," Usagi said, "If we don't stop the Death Busters here..."
Mars nodded her understanding. "We know, Usagi. We won't fail."
Venus voiced her agreement. "It's time to do what we always do, minna." she said, and in her voice was the power and dignity of a leader.
The others looked her way. "What do we always do, Minako-chan?" Usagi asked.
"Save the day," Venus replied, smiling faintly.
As one, the Senshi strode down the hallway towards the door to the summoning chamber.
------------------
Explosions rocked the summoning chamber as Ryouga did battle with the Deep Ones. He ducked to the side of the first blast and it struck the statue of the Messiah of Silence behind him, sending shrapnel spraying in all directions. The next three blasts he took on the chin - dodging had never been Ryouga's strong point, and daimonic possession had done little to help him in that regard. He came charging out of the ensuing explosion with all the grace and subtlety of a mad bull, and his first punch blasted a Deep One clear into the far wall, where it cratered spectacularly.
Akane and Nabiki faced off, neither one willing to make the first move. Chaos swirled all around them, blasts of energy flying every which way, with Akane's hair writhing in an unseen wind and Nabiki's blood red eyes glowing balefully.
It was Akane who broke the standoff. She'd never been the patient one. Her hair whipped out across the space between them like a mass of black snakes, binding Nabiki in place, wrapping around her arms, her legs, her throat.
Akane looked disappointed. "Too easy," she said. "But you never were much of a fighter."
Nabiki smirked. "And you never were very bright."
Akane felt that familiar rage rise up within her again - the rage that had told her she was being impaired by Ranma's arrival in Nerima, the rage that had directed her mallet on many, many occasions, that very human rage - and squeezed.
Nabiki's head tore off, her body broke apart into smoke, and she was gone.
Akane had time to look confused for a split second before Nabiki slammed into her from behind, shoulder first. She went sprawling heavily and slid across the summoning circle.
Tick. The circle rotated. Another heart crystal went up in a burst of light.
Akane rose to her feet, glaring furiously at her yet living sister. "An illusion?" she spat. She'd KNOWN it had been too easy. Well, this wasn't over yet. She performed a quick kipup and turned to face her sister, her eyes full of the promise of death.
"SPARKLING WIDE PRESSURE!" came a muffled cry. A moment later, the far door to the chamber exploded inwards in a shower of sparks, flying right off its hinges and skidding ten meters across the floor. Ryouga looked up just in time to see the door come flying at him before it struck him with a tremendous clang and flung him into the base of the statue of the Messiah of Silence.
Silhouetted against the lights of the corridor, the sailor suited soldiers stepped forward.
"Death Busters!" Usagi announced, her gaze taking in the whole room. We won't allow you to summon your master. This is our world, and we will fight for it with all our strength! A soldier of Love and Justice, I am Serenity."
"Sailor Venus!"
"Sailor Mercury!"
"Sailor Mars!"
"Sailor Jupiter!"
"In the name of the moon, we'll punish you!"
Combat paused for a long moment as the three sides - Death Buster, Chaos Spawn, and Silver Moon - faced off against each other.
Nabiki shook her head incredulously. "Daddy, I have a task for you," she said.
The great, shifting mass that had been Soun Tendo half slithered, half bubbled out of the dark corner it had been waiting in, his faces forming and unforming across its vast bulk.
"Kill them," she said, and gestured dismissively.
The thing that had been Soun charged, and each of the Senshi scattered in a different direction: the great mass smashed through what was left of the door and into the corridor beyond before shifting its front to its back and coming around for another pass.
Usagi stared in horror. "It... it's a person!" she said even as Mars leaped clear of a projected pseudopod and Venus blasted it with a Crescent Beam.
Meanwhile, several of the Deep Ones simply dogpiled on Ryouga, biting and clawing and kicking him as he went down beneath them... which got them exactly where he wanted them.
"BAKUSAI TENKETSU!" he yelled, and drive his finger into the floor.
An explosion of dust and shrapnel reduced the Deep Ones to so much bloody pulp. Ryouga rose to his feet a moment later, totally unharmed, gore streaming off his body, and grinning savagely.
The survivors drew back and clutched their tridents nervously.
"Is that all you got?" Ryouga asked contemptuously.
A volley of green blasts was his answer.
Across the chamber, Usagi and the others were hard at work distracting the Shoggoth while Mercury took a reading on it with her computer, standing well back from the main action of the battle. Jupiter took a pseudopod to the stomach, and screamed in horror as the thing began to absorb her into itself... only to be freed a moment later by a well placed magical rose shattered the magic of the absorption process and flung a nauseous Sailor Jupiter back away from the beast.
"Don't let it touch you!" Mars yelled. "It can kill with a touch!"
Jupiter staggered to her feet, shaken and trying not to vomit. "Woulda... been helpful to know... before," she groused.
Mercury's computer beeped, and she looked down at the screen. She took an involuntary step back. "It's human. Or was, before it was transformed. Sailor Moon, we'll pin it down, and once it's in place, you heal it!"
The battle plan was set. The Senshi moved into action. The creature shifted surprisingly easily on its vast bulk, sending vast swathes of pseudopod at whichever Senshi it wasn't actively charging, which made corralling it a difficult proposition at best.
"Mars Fire Snake!" Mars incanted, calling down a circle of flames around the bulk of the Soun-Shoggoth, light and head burning high.
It burst through the flames like they were nothing, leaving Mars with just enough time to look surprised before...
Tuxedo Kamen swept by, swinging on a rope taken from the support of the statue of the Messiah of Silence, scooping Mars up into his arms and out of danger even as the Shoggoth rumbled through the space she had just occupied.
"Thanks," she said, barely daring to breathe.
He nodded.
"VENUS LOVE-ME CHAIN!" Venus called out, and links of golden hearts flowed out and around the beast, binding it in place. "NOW!" she yelled.
"JUPITER OAK EVOLUTION!"
"SHINE AQUA ILLUSION!"
The Shoggoth collapsed, denting the floor as its bulk smashed down uncontrolled, unsupported.
Usagi brandished the Crescent Moon Wand. "MOON HEALING ESCALATION!" she cried. Waves of healing power flowed out across the tortured form of the beast that had been Soun Tendo, and it began to melt - not into a human form, but into nothing. When the darkness and corruption was removed, there was nothing beneath it. The mask concealed the absence of a thing.
Usagi cut off the flow of magic and stared at the half-melted beast in open-mouthed horror. "Why... why isn't it becoming human?"
This could be a problem.
-------------
Nabiki felt her heart fall out of her chest as she saw Sailor Moon's healing attempt totally, utterly fail to restore her father to his self. It wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth it. The Dark Man had lied. The Dark Man had lied! DAMNIT! Her eyes shone with inhuman intensity, her wings flexed and unflexed, and her innards seemed to shift strangely within her. Then came the fear - the walls were coming down in the face of her despair, and a sense of Presence gathered around the middle Tendo sister, a quivering fear external to the minds of those who felt it, flowing out across the chamber in rotting waves.
Akane was not impressed. "Where are you looking, baka?" she called tauntingly, blasting Nabiki to the ground with a pulse of eldritch energy.
Pain ripped through her body, and she shoved it down into a deep, dark corner of her awareness. Pain was flesh. Flesh was transitory. Flesh didn't matter now. Smoke rising from her form, Nabiki arose and glared balefully at her sister. "Put a little more effort into it next time, Akane. I think that tickled a little." It was foolish, yes, but necessary. Akane needed to be mad. Nabiki needed her to be mad. Everything depended on that.
With her one great hope dashed and her other fading quickly, Nabiki Tendo threw herself into battle once more.
--------------
It was nearly over now in the world outside of Mugen Gakuen. The ancient powers were well and truly awake, yet in this most desperate, final hour, humanity proved its worth. Man and woman fought desperately against the dying of the light, knowing they were doomed, knowing that they could barely stand to look at their foes without the risk of madness, they stood and fought. And fell. Humanity unaided could not stand against the rise of the Spawn of Chaos.
In the skies over New York, a squadron of F-16 fighter jets bore down on a tremendous, sentient ball of nuclear fire. Missiles were launched, and vanished into the flames with nary a disturbance of the celestial sphere; Cthuga scarcely noticed as his fire-vampires swarmed out from their places upon his fiery form. The fighter pilots noticed. They had time to scream before the rain of living embers sheared through their planes like they were made of tissue paper, setting the metal itself ablaze through supernatural might even as others tore through the cockpits, turning the pilots into living pyres which burned bright and brief. There and gone: such is the human condition.
At the South Pole, a vast, incomprehensible power stirred. Awakened by the taint of Chaos, the First of Lilith's Children opened his eyes and beheld the astonished faces of human scientists, and he was greatly angered.
Ten minutes later, Antarctica exploded, and a little girl on a liferaft - the daughter of the head of the expedition - screamed in horror of what she saw in that moment.
It was a surprisingly common reaction that day. A scream of horror. A scream for innocence lost. A scream for sudden, unwanted understanding. A scream for all the piles of rotting leaves in all the gutters of the world.
Rome burned. The Vatican burned. The Pope lay dead in Saint Peter's Square, and all around his body were flames and chaos. Mecca vanished, the whole city falling into a great sinkhole as the burrowers beneath ate out the foundations of the very heart of the Moselm world. Cities burned across the whole face of the Earth. Some fared better than others. The European Union, under UNIT's watchful umbrella, fared best of all. They'd had some experience with this sort of thing in the past, and it served them well in the present. But even there, things did not go well. Even there, the price was higher than any were willing to pay.
Yet it was paid. Drop of blood by drop of blood, humanity paid it.
--------------
When Saturn and Pluto finally met up with Uranus and Neptune at the entrance to the summoning chamber, the battle within was winding down to its conclusion. The Guardian Senshi, unwilling to destroy what was left of Soun Tendo, were now reduced to simply trying to evade it. That was a game that the Shoggoth would win, even half melted as it was. They simply did not have the reserves of stamina necessary to wear out the great beast. It was at this point only a matter of time before one of them was killed by the thing.
Ryouga, having slain the remaining Deep Ones, had lent his assistance to Akane in her battle against Nabiki, turning a somewhat even fight into a totally one-sided one. The moment the Outer Senshi entered the summoning chamber, two things happened: the first was that Nabiki took a full strength blow to the stomach and went flying backwards into the statue of the Messiah of Silence, which collapsed on top of her from the force of the impact, the whole wreck drenched in rotting, external Fear; the second was that the great summoning circle shifted, and the second to last heart crystal was consumed in a tremendous flare of light.
There was a shimmering above the place where the heart crystals had been destroyed now - a sense of shifting and warping that twisted the eye. Somewhere beyond that, a vast, lurking presence waited impatiently, knowing that its time was nigh.
Into this scene, the Outer Senshi arrived.
Pluto nodded to Saturn.
The pig-tailed Senshi leaped into the air, Silence Glaive in hand, moving straight towards the thing that had been Soun Tendo.
Usagi looked up, her eyes wide, "NO, YOU CAN'T...!"
"SILENCE GLAIVE SURPRISE!" Saturn incanted as she came down, blade first.
The Glaive bisected the Shoggoth from top to bottom. The ground cracked in a sphere-shape around Saturn's feet, a pulse of horrific purple energy rippled out from her body, and all sound failed for a split second as the top half of the building exploded even as the final crystal snapped into place and vanished in a flash of light.
When vision returned to the combatants, the ceiling and everything above it was simply gone, as was the Shoggoth that had been Soun Tendo. The summoning chamber was now on the top floor of the building. All eyes were fixed upon Saturn and the other Soldiers of the Outer Solar System.
"This is over, Akane," Saturn said, glaring at the girl from across the room. "If ya give up now, we can probably find a way ta heal ya, but we ain't lettin' ya bring the whole world down around you."
"Sailor Saturn..." Usagi whispered, staring at the place where the Shoggoth had been. A tear traced its line down her cheek.
But Akane was not ready to surrender. No, the very thought of surrender was laughable. She had won. She laughed out loud. "The summoning is done, dummy. What do you think you can do? Look!"
Above the summoning circle, where once had been a faint shimmering, now there was an angry reddish crack running through the sky itself from one side of the building to another, and it was spreading. Soon it vanished into the distance in both directions, and the aether itself trembled.
"Pharaoh 90 won't have this world, Mistress 9," Pluto said determinedly as she, Uranus, and Neptune stepped out in front of Saturn. "Surrender, or be destroyed."
Saturn looked surprised at that, but said nothing.
Ryouga cracked his knuckles and stepped forward. "Well, well. Look who's hiding behind a bunch of girls," he said. "I hope you're ready for round 2, Ranma, because I've been looking forward to this all day." His aura flared, and a deadly pink light sprang up around him...
"DEEP SUBMERGE!"
"WORLD SHAKING!"
"Dead Scream."
The first two shouted, the last whispered, and the last the deadliest of all. The three ringed spheres of energy merged in mid-flight into one multicoloured orb which struck Ryouga full force and exploded violently, raining down... parts. A hand here. A foot there. A pieces of head across the floor. Blood everywhere.
Blood everywhere.
Ryouga was dead.
Saturn stared in open-mouthed shock. Ryouga. RYOUGA was dead. RYOUGA WAS DEAD.
Akane, the Inner Senshi, Saturn, all of them stared in shock. Silence filled the room for a long moment.
Then came a distant rumble, from the deepest depths to the highest heights. Then came the beginning of the end. Reddish cracks spider-webbed across the sky from the central line.
Akane sank to her knees, looking utterly lost. "Ryouga..." she whispered. "Ryouga. Ryouga...!" The rage Nabiki had worked so hard to kindle mingled with grief, her very human emotions battling with the film of Pharaoh 90's influence that lay draped across her mind. The balance tipped one way, then the other. She screamed, and power flared violently around her.
She caught Saturn's gaze, and everything seemed to stop. Saturn's face - Ranma's face - mirrored her own feelings.
Silent tears began to flow down Saturn's cheeks as she stared into Akane's eyes, the whole world forgotten around them. The whole world became the two of them; two hearts meeting for one terrible moment. In the midst of chaos and death, two hearts were united in grief and pain.
Even as Akane looked upon Sailor Saturn, even in the midst of her grief and her rage, she felt an irresistible upwelling of love for the pig-tailed girl: a fierce, desperate love born of need and loss, desire and hope. Pharaoh 90's alien influence, repelled by the power of love, grief, and anger, popped like a soap bubble. Light stirred in Akane's eyes, and she stared at Saturn in wonder.
"Ranma..." she whispered.
Usagi and her Guardian Senshi strode forward to meet Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. "I don't approve," she said, and her eyes were full of anger mixed with horror in equal measure.
Pluto met her Queen's gaze. "I know," she said simply. "I'm sorry." She looked as though she was going to say more, but at that moment, the sky split open at the seams. The whole vast expanse of heaven unfurled to reveal a terrible, empty, ABSENCE, bordered by angry red light, its raw, jagged edges crackling with power. The Abyss looked down upon the planet Earth, and madness came whirling in its wake; dark power pulsed within its maw like the heartbeat of the Universe.
Out of the Audient Void, an horrific THING descended upon the city, emerging from the womb of the Void in a grotesque parody of human birth, dripping with entropic eddies, globular yet writhing on every part of its surface. Vast tentacles flailed about its body, and a single great eye opened in the very center of its globular mass, bathing the ruined building in its malevolent red glow; its gaze was fixed upon Sailor Saturn.
On her alone.
Pharaoh 90 had arrived.
END CHAPTER 17
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Author's notes:
It's been a while. Have been absurdly busy with graduate school.