{Week 91} {Oneshot theme - 'Arquebus/Weapon'}
Title: Disaster Zone
Author: thirteenxwishes
Genre: Dark, action, once again major on the AU front.
Word count: 2266 words
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Swearing. Mentions of death and violence. AU.
AU/Canon: AU. Just to reiterate. xD
A/N: This is something of a continuation to my oneshot The Ruins of History. Knowledge of that doesn't really affect the reading of this, but there are references. If you don't understand who 512 is from the description, I suggest taking a look at the original. Big hugs to swasdiva for the beta!
Summary: Ambushes are never fun - especially when you end up being rescued by a human. And just because that human happens to be Miko 512, it doesn't do anything to preserve his dignity. At all.
They were surrounded.
Sesshoumaru snarled, flexing his claws around the grip of his sword as he shifted restlessly from foot to foot, keen eyes searching for any gap in the enemy lines. Naraku had planned this ambush well.
Too well.
Well enough to have known that this patrol was short-staffed and would be going outside the relative protection of the city. His gaze darted to the panting group of inuyoukai at his shoulder, ragged and bleeding.
‘Damn it.’
The forest lining their path was a possible escape route - but beyond the trees sat many pairs of glittering eyes, numbers masked by a veil of shouki. On the other side, a sheer cliff plunged down into a fast-flowing river, leaving them boxed in with their enemies. The water was a victim of Naraku just as much as they were: miasma floated in grotesque clouds on the surface, sickly purple and festering. It was unsafe - even for youkai if they lacked immunity to poison. If it were him alone, escape wouldn't be a problem; but he had a group of strong, loyal fighters at his command and he in turn had a duty to bring them back to their families. Preferably alive.
And he was nothing if not honourable.
The horde of youkai assassins spanned the entire cliff path and were slowly forcing them backwards until they began to brush shoulders with every strike. The tide of their opponents was almost endless; it didn’t matter how many they killed. They just kept coming. The blank quality of their eyes, the loose movements risking death by claw, whip and fang suggested they were yet another group who had fallen victim to Naraku’s brainwashing. It sickened him, even as he cut them down.
“My lord!”
The cry was as familiar as the hilt of his sword: Katsuki, one of his generals. It came from the other side of their small group, and he easily cut a swathe towards the call. He caught sight of the dark-haired inuyoukai, but faltered, teeth clenching as he followed the line of his pointing finger towards the horizon.
A distinctive plume of deadly violet was blossoming, rising almost lazily upwards into the sky. Flames leapt hungrily from the ground, and as he watched another explosion wracked that distant point, forcing the curve of the earth to rupture and crack beneath the strain. Poison hissed.
To his right, Katsuki swore loudly.
“Miasma bombs…” The younger warrior trailed off with dawning horror. “And that’s-”
“The human settlement.” Sesshoumaru’s eyes were dark and hooded, locked onto the destruction of one of Tokyo’s final underground strongholds. "There will be few survivors, if any." His youkai senses could see the tunnels collapsing, feel the shudder of the ground as bunkers were crushed beneath the weight of crumbling soil. Death and shouki burned on the air. Too far away to reach them here, but-
A flurry of arrows brushed by and immediately Sesshoumaru was moving again. He knew they had precious little time to dwell on the bombings in the middle of battle, but that didn't make it any easier.
There was a sudden pressure against his back; distinctive armour dug into him, and he counted off the spikes mid-swing to identify the patrol member. Katsuki had followed him.
"Were any of our patrols protecting the settlement, my lord?"
His grip around his sword tightened.
"Perhaps."
The general cursed bitterly. Agreeing silently with his assessment, Sesshoumaru looked away and kept fighting. The sooner they escaped the ambush, the sooner they could exercise damage control over the latest bomb-site.
“My lord!”
This time, the cry didn’t come from the warrior at his back but from one of the other fighters - the youngest, Jirou, barely old enough to serve on patrol. He was on the outskirts of the battle where the opposition was thinner, and so was first to catch the burn of purity skirting through the trees. The cloud of oppressive shouki lifted. The youkai they were fighting edged away from the forest, wary. A few got too close to the sheer cliff and slipped, tumbling down into the river like stones cast away by a churlish pup.
Sesshoumaru smirked. The tide was turning.
“512.”
The youkai in front of him bared its teeth, lunging - and fell just as quickly with an explosive bang, revealing the miko in question standing behind it. She shook the smoke away from the barrel of an ornate wooden rifle, shaking her head in distaste. Whether at him or the weapon, he couldn’t be sure. He raised an eyebrow.
“You have an arquebus?”
She snorted.
“You try finding a longbow in this hellhole that lasts longer than five minutes in a fight.”
He took a moment to examine her choice of weapon. The musket-style gun was ancient and slender, its long barrel carved with intricate designs - constellations, curling vines and flowers inked in pastel enamel. The firing mechanism gleamed burnished gold.
It struck him as a rather feminine form of gun, one he wouldn’t expect a woman as… unique as her to carry. And that wasn’t even considering its rarity; antique shot-weapons were difficult to find in a world under Naraku’s iron fist. Life and death were dictated by the slash of the sword, as if the samurai classes had woken from their centuries of sleep to a new feud and new masters who were so very much more than simple human daimyo. Their descendants really didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they closed their fists around the hilts of their newly forged swords. Especially since modern guns happened to be much more convenient than relics like hers.
Another wave of mindless youkai barrelled towards them. The swift rapport of 512’s arquebus - the musket bullets glowing eerily - cut their numbers down to half. The rest fell easily to his sword. He slanted a glance at the rather ruffled miko.
“An oddly accurate weapon.”
She brought the butt of the gun to her shoulder again and fired, the spray of bullets rescuing Jirou from the creeping footsteps of an assassin. Sesshoumaru caught the spinning motion as they flew by, and had the answer to his question before she spoke. She said it anyway.
“The barrel’s rifled. Can’t be worrying about accuracy when there are youkai to kill.”
“Hn.”
Another few minutes of stubborn silence passed, at odds with the noisy clashing of blades, the hiss of bullets and humming arrows cutting through air and unguarded flesh. Eventually, Katsuki broke it. He spoke tentatively, eyeing the blue haze surrounding her bullets with some unease.
“I’m assuming you came to us through the forest?”
Sesshoumaru scoffed to himself. Trust Katsuki to want confirmation of the obvious; the inuyoukai was a first-class fighter, but his pedantic tendencies were well-known, both to himself as his superior and the fighters serving beneath him.
The miko simply looked at him, blue eyes flat.
“You could say that.” She shrugged, firing off another round. “Don’t know why you didn’t just charge it yourselves. There weren’t that many waiting for you; probably more here now.”
“So it’s a clear route?”
A sardonic grin uncurled across her face, almost hidden by the curve of her gun. “Unless you count bodies.”
The general relaxed fractionally, grey eyes crinkling. Sesshoumaru surveyed the thinning number of enemies; each of his patrol members could now be seen clearly through the crowd. This situation under almost under control, which meant-
His smooth flow of thought was rudely interrupted by a bullet whistling centimetres away from his ear. When he caught the scent of his own singed hair, he growled, spinning on his heel to confront a certain miko agent - only to find her frozen, gun limp in her hands as she stared at the smoke-filled sky above the horizon. Her lips parted soundlessly. He was forced to take out an enemy only a breath away from cutting her down, and slid to a halt smartly by her side.
“512.”
His sharp intonation was a reprimand she didn’t notice. He tried again, a growl of irritation hiding between his words. They really didn’t have time for this.
“512!”
And suddenly she was moving, the butt of her gun coming up and knocking out anyone standing in her way. The wood crackled with power - by the time she reached the edge of the main group, those she hit were crumbling away into dust, their screams nothing but whispers on the wind.
With a growl, he kept fighting. The swing of his sword mirrored the motion of his thoughts as he debated whether to follow the impulsive miko. There were only a few of Naraku’s fighters left now, enough for the patrol to cope with by themselves...
Katsuki looked at him from above the spinning line of his longstaff, waiting for orders. He sighed.
"Stay here and finish these off. I will search for any patrol members that may live."
The tactic made sense. He could search for their troops and save the hapless 512 at the same time. Sesshoumaru killed four with a slice of his sword as he turned, launching himself through the gap left by the scattered soldiers.
The miko was surprisingly swift for a human; she'd managed to cover a fair distance by the time he caught up with her, but not quite far enough to reach the burning expanse of ground above the settlement.
“512, I gave you an order-”
“-and since when do I listen to your orders, sir, when other things are more important!”
She was still running, looking over her shoulder and glaring at him, eyes narrowed. But the anger was missing, instead replaced by… fear?
He blinked, his own annoyance momentarily halted in its tracks.
On the horizon, the wreckage spread out before them and 512 sped up, feet pounding desperately along the remains of the cliff path. He kept pace easily. Golden eyes surveyed the yawning chasm torn open by Naraku’s bombings, the inner workings of the underground settlement laid bare to the eyes of the world like an overturned anthill. He could see countless bodies. Miraculously, some were still moving. Some.
There was nothing visible to identify any patrol members. The weight of loss and responsibility punched through him with all the strength of a bullet, settling like cold iron in his stomach. He forcibly turned his attention to the agent at his side.
'Act now, reflect later.'
512 was looking down at the massacre with abject horror. Her fingers clenched spasmodically around the grip of her arquebus, and he thought he could hear the minute grind of teeth above the roar of flames and the whimpers of the dying.
“That bastard.” Her voice hissed, mingling with the fire. “This is revenge for the nightshade poisoning, isn’t it?” She looked at him sharply when he didn’t answer. “Isn’t it?”
He counted breaths, remaining impassive in the face of her outburst.
“Fifty of his best troops died. Naraku favours retribution... you should know this by now, 512.”
“Who cares about that!" Helplessness passed across her face like a shadow, captured in the smoke rising from the crater. The mechanism of the arquebus clicked. He snorted, looking away from the miko's obvious loss of composure. She was no use as an agent if she didn't maintain her focus. Removal of emotion was necessary to deal with situations like this, a fact he'd learned all too well during his time as leader of this revolutionary band.
He thought she'd learned it too. Always cynical, always efficient, never failing to return from each of her missions with the information he needed, the sabotage performed, the death he desired. This was his image of her - not the fuming woman standing to his right.
Unfortunately, experience isn't always the clearest path. All he heard was her gun dropping to her side, sliding along the coarse material of her combat trousers. He assumed that the usual 512 had returned, reeled herself in like the agent she was to cope with this, the next in a series of fresh horrors.
But Sesshoumaru made one vital mistake as he stood and watched the unearthed tunnels burn: he forgot that when it came to Miko 512, his assumptions were usually wrong. Very wrong. This time was no exception.
"Shit," she said. His eyes slid right.
"Shit." Again. She was steeling herself for something; he vaguely hoped it was a productive something rather than a stupid one. Even he wasn't able to stop her iron war-machine of a will when it began to crank into life.
"512-"
Too late. The agent was already running, charging down the slope and straight into the deadly heart, her thin silhouette swamped by the poisonous smoke.
Many thoughts battled for his voice but eventually came out as a formless snarl.
'Idiotic wench!'
Muscles strained. He wasn't going to do this for her; at least, not for 512 the woman. But 512 the agent, perhaps...
His curiosity was still alive and kicking. And Sesshoumaru Taisho was no cat to be killed at its expense.
He afforded one last glance over his shoulder at the victorious group on the ridge before following her, in the vain hope that some of their patrol members yet lived.
It wasn't for her.
Author: thirteenxwishes
Genre: Dark, action, once again major on the AU front.
Word count: 2266 words
Rating: Teen
Warnings: Swearing. Mentions of death and violence. AU.
AU/Canon: AU. Just to reiterate. xD
A/N: This is something of a continuation to my oneshot The Ruins of History. Knowledge of that doesn't really affect the reading of this, but there are references. If you don't understand who 512 is from the description, I suggest taking a look at the original. Big hugs to swasdiva for the beta!
Summary: Ambushes are never fun - especially when you end up being rescued by a human. And just because that human happens to be Miko 512, it doesn't do anything to preserve his dignity. At all.
They were surrounded.
Sesshoumaru snarled, flexing his claws around the grip of his sword as he shifted restlessly from foot to foot, keen eyes searching for any gap in the enemy lines. Naraku had planned this ambush well.
Too well.
Well enough to have known that this patrol was short-staffed and would be going outside the relative protection of the city. His gaze darted to the panting group of inuyoukai at his shoulder, ragged and bleeding.
‘Damn it.’
The forest lining their path was a possible escape route - but beyond the trees sat many pairs of glittering eyes, numbers masked by a veil of shouki. On the other side, a sheer cliff plunged down into a fast-flowing river, leaving them boxed in with their enemies. The water was a victim of Naraku just as much as they were: miasma floated in grotesque clouds on the surface, sickly purple and festering. It was unsafe - even for youkai if they lacked immunity to poison. If it were him alone, escape wouldn't be a problem; but he had a group of strong, loyal fighters at his command and he in turn had a duty to bring them back to their families. Preferably alive.
And he was nothing if not honourable.
The horde of youkai assassins spanned the entire cliff path and were slowly forcing them backwards until they began to brush shoulders with every strike. The tide of their opponents was almost endless; it didn’t matter how many they killed. They just kept coming. The blank quality of their eyes, the loose movements risking death by claw, whip and fang suggested they were yet another group who had fallen victim to Naraku’s brainwashing. It sickened him, even as he cut them down.
“My lord!”
The cry was as familiar as the hilt of his sword: Katsuki, one of his generals. It came from the other side of their small group, and he easily cut a swathe towards the call. He caught sight of the dark-haired inuyoukai, but faltered, teeth clenching as he followed the line of his pointing finger towards the horizon.
A distinctive plume of deadly violet was blossoming, rising almost lazily upwards into the sky. Flames leapt hungrily from the ground, and as he watched another explosion wracked that distant point, forcing the curve of the earth to rupture and crack beneath the strain. Poison hissed.
To his right, Katsuki swore loudly.
“Miasma bombs…” The younger warrior trailed off with dawning horror. “And that’s-”
“The human settlement.” Sesshoumaru’s eyes were dark and hooded, locked onto the destruction of one of Tokyo’s final underground strongholds. "There will be few survivors, if any." His youkai senses could see the tunnels collapsing, feel the shudder of the ground as bunkers were crushed beneath the weight of crumbling soil. Death and shouki burned on the air. Too far away to reach them here, but-
A flurry of arrows brushed by and immediately Sesshoumaru was moving again. He knew they had precious little time to dwell on the bombings in the middle of battle, but that didn't make it any easier.
There was a sudden pressure against his back; distinctive armour dug into him, and he counted off the spikes mid-swing to identify the patrol member. Katsuki had followed him.
"Were any of our patrols protecting the settlement, my lord?"
His grip around his sword tightened.
"Perhaps."
The general cursed bitterly. Agreeing silently with his assessment, Sesshoumaru looked away and kept fighting. The sooner they escaped the ambush, the sooner they could exercise damage control over the latest bomb-site.
“My lord!”
This time, the cry didn’t come from the warrior at his back but from one of the other fighters - the youngest, Jirou, barely old enough to serve on patrol. He was on the outskirts of the battle where the opposition was thinner, and so was first to catch the burn of purity skirting through the trees. The cloud of oppressive shouki lifted. The youkai they were fighting edged away from the forest, wary. A few got too close to the sheer cliff and slipped, tumbling down into the river like stones cast away by a churlish pup.
Sesshoumaru smirked. The tide was turning.
“512.”
The youkai in front of him bared its teeth, lunging - and fell just as quickly with an explosive bang, revealing the miko in question standing behind it. She shook the smoke away from the barrel of an ornate wooden rifle, shaking her head in distaste. Whether at him or the weapon, he couldn’t be sure. He raised an eyebrow.
“You have an arquebus?”
She snorted.
“You try finding a longbow in this hellhole that lasts longer than five minutes in a fight.”
He took a moment to examine her choice of weapon. The musket-style gun was ancient and slender, its long barrel carved with intricate designs - constellations, curling vines and flowers inked in pastel enamel. The firing mechanism gleamed burnished gold.
It struck him as a rather feminine form of gun, one he wouldn’t expect a woman as… unique as her to carry. And that wasn’t even considering its rarity; antique shot-weapons were difficult to find in a world under Naraku’s iron fist. Life and death were dictated by the slash of the sword, as if the samurai classes had woken from their centuries of sleep to a new feud and new masters who were so very much more than simple human daimyo. Their descendants really didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they closed their fists around the hilts of their newly forged swords. Especially since modern guns happened to be much more convenient than relics like hers.
Another wave of mindless youkai barrelled towards them. The swift rapport of 512’s arquebus - the musket bullets glowing eerily - cut their numbers down to half. The rest fell easily to his sword. He slanted a glance at the rather ruffled miko.
“An oddly accurate weapon.”
She brought the butt of the gun to her shoulder again and fired, the spray of bullets rescuing Jirou from the creeping footsteps of an assassin. Sesshoumaru caught the spinning motion as they flew by, and had the answer to his question before she spoke. She said it anyway.
“The barrel’s rifled. Can’t be worrying about accuracy when there are youkai to kill.”
“Hn.”
Another few minutes of stubborn silence passed, at odds with the noisy clashing of blades, the hiss of bullets and humming arrows cutting through air and unguarded flesh. Eventually, Katsuki broke it. He spoke tentatively, eyeing the blue haze surrounding her bullets with some unease.
“I’m assuming you came to us through the forest?”
Sesshoumaru scoffed to himself. Trust Katsuki to want confirmation of the obvious; the inuyoukai was a first-class fighter, but his pedantic tendencies were well-known, both to himself as his superior and the fighters serving beneath him.
The miko simply looked at him, blue eyes flat.
“You could say that.” She shrugged, firing off another round. “Don’t know why you didn’t just charge it yourselves. There weren’t that many waiting for you; probably more here now.”
“So it’s a clear route?”
A sardonic grin uncurled across her face, almost hidden by the curve of her gun. “Unless you count bodies.”
The general relaxed fractionally, grey eyes crinkling. Sesshoumaru surveyed the thinning number of enemies; each of his patrol members could now be seen clearly through the crowd. This situation under almost under control, which meant-
His smooth flow of thought was rudely interrupted by a bullet whistling centimetres away from his ear. When he caught the scent of his own singed hair, he growled, spinning on his heel to confront a certain miko agent - only to find her frozen, gun limp in her hands as she stared at the smoke-filled sky above the horizon. Her lips parted soundlessly. He was forced to take out an enemy only a breath away from cutting her down, and slid to a halt smartly by her side.
“512.”
His sharp intonation was a reprimand she didn’t notice. He tried again, a growl of irritation hiding between his words. They really didn’t have time for this.
“512!”
And suddenly she was moving, the butt of her gun coming up and knocking out anyone standing in her way. The wood crackled with power - by the time she reached the edge of the main group, those she hit were crumbling away into dust, their screams nothing but whispers on the wind.
With a growl, he kept fighting. The swing of his sword mirrored the motion of his thoughts as he debated whether to follow the impulsive miko. There were only a few of Naraku’s fighters left now, enough for the patrol to cope with by themselves...
Katsuki looked at him from above the spinning line of his longstaff, waiting for orders. He sighed.
"Stay here and finish these off. I will search for any patrol members that may live."
The tactic made sense. He could search for their troops and save the hapless 512 at the same time. Sesshoumaru killed four with a slice of his sword as he turned, launching himself through the gap left by the scattered soldiers.
The miko was surprisingly swift for a human; she'd managed to cover a fair distance by the time he caught up with her, but not quite far enough to reach the burning expanse of ground above the settlement.
“512, I gave you an order-”
“-and since when do I listen to your orders, sir, when other things are more important!”
She was still running, looking over her shoulder and glaring at him, eyes narrowed. But the anger was missing, instead replaced by… fear?
He blinked, his own annoyance momentarily halted in its tracks.
On the horizon, the wreckage spread out before them and 512 sped up, feet pounding desperately along the remains of the cliff path. He kept pace easily. Golden eyes surveyed the yawning chasm torn open by Naraku’s bombings, the inner workings of the underground settlement laid bare to the eyes of the world like an overturned anthill. He could see countless bodies. Miraculously, some were still moving. Some.
There was nothing visible to identify any patrol members. The weight of loss and responsibility punched through him with all the strength of a bullet, settling like cold iron in his stomach. He forcibly turned his attention to the agent at his side.
'Act now, reflect later.'
512 was looking down at the massacre with abject horror. Her fingers clenched spasmodically around the grip of her arquebus, and he thought he could hear the minute grind of teeth above the roar of flames and the whimpers of the dying.
“That bastard.” Her voice hissed, mingling with the fire. “This is revenge for the nightshade poisoning, isn’t it?” She looked at him sharply when he didn’t answer. “Isn’t it?”
He counted breaths, remaining impassive in the face of her outburst.
“Fifty of his best troops died. Naraku favours retribution... you should know this by now, 512.”
“Who cares about that!" Helplessness passed across her face like a shadow, captured in the smoke rising from the crater. The mechanism of the arquebus clicked. He snorted, looking away from the miko's obvious loss of composure. She was no use as an agent if she didn't maintain her focus. Removal of emotion was necessary to deal with situations like this, a fact he'd learned all too well during his time as leader of this revolutionary band.
He thought she'd learned it too. Always cynical, always efficient, never failing to return from each of her missions with the information he needed, the sabotage performed, the death he desired. This was his image of her - not the fuming woman standing to his right.
Unfortunately, experience isn't always the clearest path. All he heard was her gun dropping to her side, sliding along the coarse material of her combat trousers. He assumed that the usual 512 had returned, reeled herself in like the agent she was to cope with this, the next in a series of fresh horrors.
But Sesshoumaru made one vital mistake as he stood and watched the unearthed tunnels burn: he forgot that when it came to Miko 512, his assumptions were usually wrong. Very wrong. This time was no exception.
"Shit," she said. His eyes slid right.
"Shit." Again. She was steeling herself for something; he vaguely hoped it was a productive something rather than a stupid one. Even he wasn't able to stop her iron war-machine of a will when it began to crank into life.
"512-"
Too late. The agent was already running, charging down the slope and straight into the deadly heart, her thin silhouette swamped by the poisonous smoke.
Many thoughts battled for his voice but eventually came out as a formless snarl.
'Idiotic wench!'
Muscles strained. He wasn't going to do this for her; at least, not for 512 the woman. But 512 the agent, perhaps...
His curiosity was still alive and kicking. And Sesshoumaru Taisho was no cat to be killed at its expense.
He afforded one last glance over his shoulder at the victorious group on the ridge before following her, in the vain hope that some of their patrol members yet lived.
It wasn't for her.