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Yomatsu Hara-Saka Continuation:
Part 2
by Korogi
"HELLO!!!" Kuwabara screamed to the
blackness that surrounded him. Every night since he'd been back from
Yomatsu
Bounds, the same dream had haunted him night
after night. He would awake in his dream to find himself in total
blackness, no one around ...
"Good crap!" he cursed, roaming
through the blackness quickly. "Same damn thing every night!" He pounded
his fist into his palm. "But things are going to change tonight!"
He walked quickly into the darkness,
pounding through the wall he knew was just beyond the blackness.
Beyond, just as he
expected, loomed the sheer cliff, dropping off
to a beach of sharp rocks below. He heard the sound of the ocean
beating against the razor-like granite just off the edge as he turned.
Every night, a creature would leap from the darkness and a battle would
begin. Through the nights, his methods of killing off the beast progressively
got better and better, until he was able, last night, to pick the creature
off with a single blow from the rei-ken.
Kuwabara called upon the spirit
sword and waited patiently, mentaly coaching himself and running through
his plans ...
... and he waited.
... waited ....
"Come on," he huffed impatiently.
"I know you're there!"
"... Don't look ... "
The very air around him churned
in to a living organism, whispering the broken words to him, tugging at
his body, mind and
soul. It floated in like a rush of cold
air ... spoke its presence and disappeared, leaving the air thick and humid.
"What??" Kuwabara spun around to
face the cliff edge. That soft whisper had entered the dream ...
something that hadn't been there the nights before. "Who's there?"
he called to the savage ocean, keeping his distance from the looming cliff
he was destined to fall off every night. "I know you're there!!"
"... You can't hide ... "
The whisper came at him from all
sides, floating in and out ghostly, once again plunging temperatures instantaniously
before
reverting to the heavy, humid environment.
He turned to stare back at the blackness he had broken free from, raising
the rei-ken defensively. "Come on," he whispered. "I'm not
playing games with you ..."
The blackness did nothing.
For some reason, the dream decided
to switch on him tonight, the blackness dissolving into a dark and dead
open meadow. The trees bent out at odd angles from him, charred black.
They circled around him .. circled around a patch of blackened earth ...
the battle field in Yomatsu where Hiei had supposedly 'died' three
nights ago.
Kuwabara lowered his sword and his
stance, circling confused eyes around the dead grove. It was just
like he had remembered it... there was the black circle where Hiei had
finished himself off ... the broken trees that had been leveled during
the attack ....
"... We'll find you ... "
Kuwabara whipped around in
circles again, covering every inch of the circular meadow with his thin,
glaring eyes. "SHOW
YOURSELF!" he bellowed, threatening every inch
of the circular field with the golden, glowing sword.
"... Sleep ... "
A numbing heat struck him
... followed closely by a raging fire that struck up through the bent trees,
burning its way steadily
toward him, incinerating the forest as it went.
"Shit!" Kuwabara cursed, turning
and running back to the cliff. "Here we go again!"
He watched the cliff come at him
as he ran, growing quickly closer as he headed back to his point of origing
... the only place he COULD go. The fire keeping pace with
him from the back, matching his speed and clumsy agility perfectly.
This was NOT part of his plans ... the damn dream decided to switch itself
on him, throwing all his plotting to the wind.
He skidded to the edge of the cliff
and turned quickly to see the fire burst forward, closing the distance
between them quickly. "Maybe I should just jump and get it over with!"
he screamed to the fire, brandishing the rei-ken.
"... Sleep ... " the nothingness
whispered.
"Sleep? What the heck do you
mean, 'sleep?" his voice scolded the air, panicing as e tried to
think about what to do. He braced himself, watching the fire grow close
and closer ...
.... the beast leapt from the blackness
as the fire approached ... a horrible, green-eyed, two headed thing ..
like a huge, black wolf.
It was lost instantly in the fire
...
... and seconds later, Kuwabara
was blown backwards off the side of the cliff, hurtling downwards toward
the sharpened rocks below.
....
.... and he woke to crash head first into
the wall half way across the room.
"What the ... " he sat up as clothes
and odds and ends around the room blew into the wall next to him, shattering
and pounding holes in the concretel. Outside his window, a huge mushroom
cloud of fire belched from Tokyo's fish market district ... remiiscent
of the droppings of the atomic boms he had watched in school. He
saw the path of destruction coming straight for him, uprooting trees and
blowing up buildings as it rushed along, barreling down on him ...
and he leapt from his room.
The shockwave hit ... leveling the
house behind him almost instantly, sending the roof crashing flat to the
ground level, belching soot and plaster dust up at him.
Silence. A dead silence.
"Oh god! Shizuru-chan!!" he
yelled, picking his way to his feet and scrambling quickly through
the rubble pile. He frantically
tugged at boards, tossing briks to the pavement
below, clawing and cursing.
"Son of a bitch!" someone cursed
off to his left. He turned quickly to see his sister stand to her
feet beside her bike, the
cigarette in her mouth broken in half and dangling
on the edge of plumeting to the broaken pavement at her feet. She
dusted her clothes off, quite disgusted. "What the hell happened,
onii-san?"
Kuwabara turned his face back to
the cloud of fire as the you-ki hit him, following the shockwave, reeling
him back as the heat hit him. "Not again," he groaned.
Shizuru looked to him, throwing
the tattered cigarette away in the rubble heap that was once their house.
She had felt the psychic disturbance too, flowing over-head ... but it
wasn't the same as all the other stuff she had felt before.
" 'Oh no, not again,' WHAT??" she hounded.
She watched rather helplessly as
her brother ran a hand through his curly red hair, looking off to the leveled
terrain before him. "Koenma's gonna be busy tonight."
The stamper pounded roughly down
on the last file, marking the document in red ink as Koenma quickly closed
the folder, shoving it onto a 5-foot tall pile that stood beside his desk.
He smiled, glancing to his CLEAN desk ... not a single file cluttered the
oak surface ... quite an incredible sight, if he did say so himself.
"Finally DONE!" he congratulated
himself, pushing his tiny form off the chair, rising to his feet
and growing quickly to his human form. He nabbed his jacket that
lay slung over the back of the chair and went for the door. For the
first time in close to one hundred years he had become completely caught
up on his work ... time for a well deserved break.
With a proud smile, he reached to
the knob and threw the door wide open, triumphantly. "Guess what Ge ...
"
The offices beyond were in sheer
panic. Kaibutsu of all forms made mad-dashes across the area to a
large machine that was
quickly spitting out file after file. The
white forms littered the floor... warning lights were going off, plunging
the office into a pulsating whine.
"BOSS!!! B O S S !!!!!" George
Saotome ran through the massive waves of monsters and such, plowing into
desks and
knocking over chairs in his attempts to get to
the boy. He carried a fist full of ticker-tape, waving them around
frantically as he leapt an over-turned trash can in his office-wide 200
meter dash.
Koenma stood completely stunned
as the blue monster made it over to him, panting widely and shoving the
ticker-tape in his face.
"It's some kinda epidemic, boss!! Spirits's
are pouring in from Ningenkai like a burst dam!! It's terrible!!
There's a line a good 2 miles long ... "
"Nani ... kore ... " Koenma stuttered,
clasping a hand to his forehead in disbelief. "Just what in HELL
is going on here?"
"Koenma-san!!" someone yelled, waving
a phone receiver around in the air. "Reports say that half of Tokyo
was just blown three ways to Meikai!"
Koenma paled, the pacifier growing
bluer as his face became whiter. "You're kidding, right?"
