Fair warning: the following contains gore, bathing, and bathing in gore. Also, cluster F-bombs.
==========================================================
MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode Two:
"Lunacy"
==========================================================
Suzuki Tsukusa grinned triumphantly as the Twisted Inquisitor, the main boss of the raid she and her friends were on, went down at last. Its death meant that the run was almost over, and that she actually would have time to do the dishes and feed Mokumoku before turning in.
If anybody from Her Prime Ministerness Tanaka to the Queen of Hell herself touched the squirts she’d fuck their shit up beyond all recognition. Zombies included.
People bought stories about honest cops all the time, and that was even less likely. But everybody weighed things differently, Tsukusa figured.
Not that it mattered nearly as much as the way the fresh spawn of reinforcements was wading into their team.
She triggered one of her slow-charging powers and giggled at the resulting carnage as her AI-controlled summoned ‘allies’ waded in, and from there it really was essentially over.
She didn’t actually doubt that her friends were both fairly good-looking; neither would ever have agreed to a face-to-face meeting if they’d been talking completely out their ass. But at the same time, a published model and the star attraction of a maid cafe?
On the internet?
If Stormward was the queen of her school, it was because she had more money than God. She’d never said so - the girl had more taste than that - but what she considered ‘basic’ and ‘treats’ was practically a signpost. Sunsword probably did get hit on every hour she was at work, but a maid cafe brought in a pre-primed audience; getting those pervs’ attention would be literally like shooting fish in a barrel.
A couple exchanges of joking around finished the night’s festivities, and Tsukusa shut her computer down and padded through the dimness of the apartment’s living room to its small kitchen. Finding this place had been a hell of a risk after Mom died, but the stability it had given the squirts was totally worth everything she’d done to keep it.
Smiling, she started the water and got to work.
* * * * *
“Heyo!” Tsukusa called as she strolled casually in the door of Keiichi’s Bar And Grill, old-fashioned physical doorbell jangling as she shouldered the heavy wooden portal aside like it was nothing but a screen door.
At this hour of this day of the week, the only other living soul in the place was Keiichi himself, kicked back with an ebook behind the bar. He came upright and smiled when he saw her - a little warily, though, as he should be.
“Hey, Kid,” he rumbled. Despite his advancing age and wirey build, and despite being of a height with her who was none too tall for a girl, Keiichi had the deepest and most resonant voice of any man Tsukusa had ever met. “You want your usual?”
“Depends what kinda business I got,” the girl answered, hopping onto one of the stools anyway.
“That brat Moto goin’ on about how I ain’t willin’ to pay my piece, I bet,” Keiichi guessed.
“Pretty much word for word,” Tsukusa agreed. In theory, someone who hadn’t joined the family shouldn’t’ve been collecting for the Yamaguchi-gumi - but then, theory said a lot of things, and practice could vary as long as it lined up with the reasons for the theory.
“How ‘bout the tab he’s been runnin’ with me, then? Happen he mentioned that when he was doin’ his reportin’?”
Tsukusa leaned both elbows on the bar and let herself give that extra-special shark-smile that’d once gotten a middle-school girl into the front lines of an illegal kickboxing ring. “Funny enough, nothing like that came up.”
Keiichi snorted. “Yeah, he and some buddies been comin’ by and runnin’ up a bill.” He shrugged. “I ain’t called ‘em on it ‘til now ‘cause I know who they work for, but my margins ain’t that wide.”
“So you counted it towards your share for the month,” the teenager finished.
“Yup. I’ve got the receipts.”
“I figure I’d better take a look at those, then,” Tsukusa allowed, and they went into the back to do that.
* * * * *
“Neechan, Neechan, Neechan!” Tsukusa’s little sisters cheered, swarming out of the crowd of elementary-school students to latch onto her legs and grin up at her cheerfully. Tsunoko had lost one of her incisors the previous week, so for the moment it was easy to tell the two of them apart.
“Hey, squirts,” she grinned back, reaching down to ruffle their hair in either hand. “Where’s your brother?”
“Niichan’s with his giiiiirlfriend!” Tsukiko sang against her big sister’s waistband, delighted to be the first to deliver the news she expected to embarrass him beyond words.
“Oh?” Tsukusa asked playfully, putting on her thickest movie-gangster impersonation. “In dat case I ‘tink’s mebe I should be meetin’ ‘dis bird.”
The twins giggled and let go of her legs to tug her along by both hands, eager to see their older brother in trouble. The younger girls’ excited chatter preceded the sisters and made Tsukishi look up from the book he and the female classmate next to him had been going over. “Oneechan!” he said, sounding somewhat alarmed, “you’re early!”
She dropped into a seat on the low concrete wall next to him and messed up his hair, too, just to get the usual indignant squawk. “Work was pretty simple today,” she said, “so I thought I should pick you lot up. Don’t think I’ve met your friend before, though.”
Tsukishi went red. “Oh,” he said. “Um... Oneechan, this is Takahashi Noriko, one of the other members of the Literature Club. Noriko-chan, this is my big sister Tsukusa.”
Noriko gave a seated bow whose jerky quickness just emphasized her sudden pallor and wide, frightened-mouse eyes. It made Tsukusa want to scoop her up and coo about how adorable she was, but besides completely ruining her own image, doing that would probably have just given the girl a heart attack out of sheer panic.
Instead, she gave her a conspiratorial smile and said, “You’re the one that makes sure he’s paying attention, then, right? I knew somebody had to be when I stopped getting calls about him sneaking novels into class. Thanks!”
Come to think of it, hadn’t she seen this kid before? Yeah, she had - Mister Takahashi that liked to make a show for his wife, that ran that garage next street over from the bus station, this was his daughter. No wonder she was terrified.
Still, her attempt to reassure the girl worked, at least partway. Noriko stared at her for a long moment, then smiled tentatively. “My seat is right behind his,” she said softly, “so I can poke him whenever he gets off task.”
“I owe you one, then,” Tsukusa told her. “I’d been trying to convince him, but there’s only so much a dropout can say, y’know? And a big sister just isn’t the same as a Mom.”
Realizing what she’d just said a split-second later made her want to blink just as much as the younger girl was. She hadn’t meant to be that open.
“You’re better than our mother was,” Tsukishi told her fiercely, before she could think on it further, and the twins piped up their agreements eagerly, one latching onto her outside arm and the other climbing onto her back to take a deathgrip around her neck.
“Gack!” she said, reaching up to pull the tiny arms away from her airways, and then the school’s Public Address system cut in and interrupted.
“Attention all students and staff,” the secretary said, sounding terrified. “For your safety, please proceed in a quick and orderly fashion to the assembly hall. Please remember to comply with all instructions from Self-Defense Force personnel, and take care to move in groups.”
“Zombie drill!” the twins cheered excitedly.
Tsukishi, old enough to recognize the difference between a ‘drill’ tone of voice and the real thing, and to know that a drill would have been scheduled during class hours, looked terrified. “Fucking shit,” he said, lapsing from his usual polite speech.
“Kishi-kun!” Noriko scolded him, “Language!”
Tsukusa, for her part, was in complete agreement. “On a fucking shit cracker,” she said.”C’mon, squirts. Move.”
For once, the uniformed policeman stationed to ‘command’ the military detachment at the school was far too busy to give her so much as a hairy eyeball, too glad of another apparent adult to help corral and calm the dozens of panicking youngsters.
The scene was surreal enough on its own - children huddled like a solid knot of disaster victims, surrounded by a protective ring of white-faced adults, all nervously watching the barred doors and blocked windows as the unfamiliar pop and chatter of gunfire, flavored with screams and shouted orders and warnings, went on outside - but the sudden appearance of a tiny pet rabbit with a samurai’s gauntlet strapped to the miniature harness it was wearing too the feeling of unreality to an entirely different level.
Especially given that, not only was the thing talking, like some magical girl’s merchandisable mascot, shouting “My Lady! My Lady!” in a piping little girl’s voice as it hopped its way down the bleachers, but she recognized it.
“Mokumoku-chan?” one of the twins asked from behind her.
“My Lady!” the rabbit yelped one last time as she skidded to a halt right in front of her. “Oh, praise your Father and all the other gods, I am in time!’
“What. The. Fuck.”
The rabbit flinched at the completely blank stare she was receiving. “Oh dear,” she fretted. “I’m making a mess of this, aren’t I. I must-”
A particularly final thumping noise interrupted her as something heavy hit the main entrance doors very hard.
Mokumoku shrugged the gauntlet off her back and shoved it towards Tsukusa’s feet with her nose, then drew herself up into a dignified standing posture and began to recite. “In the name of Your Holy Father, Tsukiyomi-no-Mikoto, I, who before being graced by My Lady with the name-”
A second loud bang caused something metallic in the entrance doors to give way with a thoroughly alarming ‘KRAK!’ The policeman, who’d been staring at the bizarre tableau just as intensely as anyone else, jolted awake and hurried to place himself between the civilians and the door, the last squad of soldiers taking their positions to either side of him.
“Short version,” Tsukusa told Mokumoku.
“Your Father ordered me to give you this and have you-EEP!” the rabbit started to say, cutting off with a squeak as Tsukusa swooped down to scoop her off the ground by her ears and dangle her painfully in front of the girl’s face.
“You work for my father. He told you to give me this,” Tsukusa said, and felt the twins tensing at her back at the rarely-heard and always-feared note of real fury in her voice.
“...Yes, My Lady,” Mokumoku whispered, in spite of her own discomfort, curling into a tiny knot of tension, the classic lapine ‘don’t notice me’ defense. Despite several months as the ‘family pet’ of the small Suzuki household, she’d never heard Tsukusa sound like that before.
“Right, then,” Tsukusa said, almost mildly, in spite of the six-inch range on a death glare considerably worse than any she’d ever produced on purpose. “I don’t have any fucking clue what the fuck this fucking crap is all about. But if you’re serious about this shit, then you can tell my fucking sperm donor, whoever the fuck he may be, that if he wants something from me other than a set of crushed balls and a broken fucking neck, the down payment starts at seventeen fucking years of child support and my mother back.”
Mokumoku’s voice quivered in terror, but she forced herself to reply anyway. “This will help you protect your brother and sisters.”
Tsukusa set her down immediately, and picked the gauntlet up as a third great impact blew both doors wide open. “What does it do?” she asked, strapping the thing on as a muscle-bound, mutated gorilla-thing lumbered through at the head of a shambling column of ghouls.
Family was more important than justice.
“It temporarily unseals your own power when you tell it your name and parentage,” Mokumoku told her quickly, hopping into Tsunoko’s arms.
Well, why not? She’d fight the same fight either way, and it wasn’t like flapping her jaw cost her anything. She held that hand up to look at the thing. “I’m Tsukusa,” she said to it, “And my parents were Atsuko and Tsukiyomi.”
The astonishing thing about the change, she thought once she realized what was happening, was the weight. It seemed to drain out of the world and into her. Or perhaps density was a better word - she felt no heavier, just somehow bigger. Like, even though she was no taller, and they no shorter, everyone around her had shrunk, leaving her the only adult on a kindergarten playground, standing there with the same reckless energy that she’d always gotten from a proper pre-fight warm up fizzing through her entire body.
The deformed monster at the zombies’ head bellowed through the tiny head almost buried in its mountainous shoulders and charged, bowling through the soldiers in a chorus of screams to the percussion of breaking bones.
‘Moon-child’. She guessed that that made it official. She charged to meet the thing. The further from the kids she could stop it...
It - he - saw her coming and roared again, raising two arms each larger than her entire body in a widely-telegraphed prelude to smashing her against the auditorium floor like a melon with all the power in his massively-humpbacked shoulders.
She skipped scornfully to one side, out of the way of the blow, and shattered the knee of the smaller of his twisted, withered legs with an almost casual kick. With its tendons and ligaments torn and the bones they were anchored to in about three times as many pieces as they should have been, the joint and the leg it was part of twisted out of place with a horrible wet ripping noise and dumped the mountain of half-rotten meat to the ground.
So she shattered its elbow, too, with another kick that dropped her entire weight onto the point of its elbow.
A human, so wounded, would have screamed, no matter how much adrenaline his system was carrying, but the monster didn’t make a sound.
A smaller, more human zombie lunged at her from one side, and automatically she caught its arm, broke it, and then slammed a quick punch into its face. Its entire skull folded around her armored fist like a loaf of bread - the faint crackling resistance of the crust and a gooey softness beneath.
How much stronger had she gotten?
Apparently these creatures had just as much need of their heads as a living human or most of their movie counterparts, because the one she’d just hit crumpled like the proverbial cut-string marionette. If its companions minded, they didn’t show it, charging forward in a clawing wave of talons, rotten fingernails, and clumsily-handled rusty melee weapons. The first one she disarmed and knocked down, splattering its head with a stamping foot as she took a single step forward and picked up the next to pitch into the middle of the rush.
It bowled half of them down and fouled the limbs of the rest, tumbling them down in a thrashing mass. With much of their threat nicely neutralized, she stepped close and started crushing heads and waving arms with judiciously applied steel-toed kicks, starting with the ones that seemed closest to working their way free of the mess.
“Watch out!”
At the soldier’s shout, and following storm of gunfire, she whipped around to see that the hulking brute that she’d hit first - and failed to finish, dammit - had dragged itself into reach while she was distracted.
Turning around to look was the wrong response. Even with the damage she’d already done to it, and even with the concentrated fire of the military squad pouring into it and ripping entire swathes of its body away, it still brought one scabbed club of bone and flesh masquerading as a fist down squarely onto her head.
If she’d just thrown herself out of the way, she’d probably have been able to dodge the blow, but as things were, she could barely see straight, her head was ringing like a cathedral bell, she felt like she wanted to throw up, and she suddenly had a fucking nasty headache.
Oh, and she had zombies crawling all over her face, stinking like a sewer and trying to tear her open with their bare hands. One of them wrapped itself around her neck, trying to claw her throat open, and she reached up and dug her fingers into its neck in the approved eye-gouging fashion.
Apparently she was now strong enough to rip open a dead man’s ribcage.
Since the zombie had been crawling on top of her, this dumped everything that had been inside said structure right out all over her, and did nothing to ease her efforts to not lose her lunch.
Between the growing struggle to hold down her nausea and the sheer confusion of the horde’s assault, she rather lost track of the details of the fight, distracted by the need to punch, kick, elbow and headbutt her way through the press until a delivery truck landed on her stomach and completely stunned the muscles that had been trying to reverse themselves.
She reached up and sank one hand’s fingers into a bullet hole near the giant arm’s elbow and let it pull her out of the pile of mostly-wrecked meat. With a quick pivot and a wet, sickening crack, she pressed her other hand into the beast’s forearm, forcing the joint into a position no natural limb should take. Even if its dead flesh felt no pain, it had enough sensation to realize that it very definitely wanted her gone.
The colossus flailed and hurled her away, shanks of stinking meat tearing away under her fingers. She should have slammed painfully into the ground, but the pain never came, despite her bouncing three times before she finally slid to a halt. With a grunt, she staggered back upright and threw herself onto its back.
In hindsight, launching herself at a monster that was easily two or three times her size was probably not the cleverest thing she’d ever done.
Moments after she landed, it rolled over on top of her and began to lift itself up slightly, then slammed itself right back down, using its massive weight to crush her repeatedly into the pavement. Despite feeling increasingly like she had been run over by the Shinkansen on a particularly busy day, Tsukusa realized, with some surprise, that she was still conscious.
And she could still move her legs.
Waiting for the beast to rise again, she dug her fingers in and scooted herself out from under it on her back like a mechanic sliding a creeper out from underneath a car, then doubled her legs up against her chest and mashed its almost-hidden head back into its chest cavity with a ferocious double kick.
And that, except for a couple of bursts of assault rifle fire and the irregular pop-beat-pop-beat-beat-pop of the white-faced cop going through the pile and putting single finishing rounds into the skull of any undead still twitching, was that.
Tsukusa pulled herself to her feet again and stood for a moment, ignoring the foul effluvium dripping from her shirt and shorts and hair and every inch of skin, ignoring the smoldering burn of her cuts and scrapes, the pinching of her gauntlet’s metal against the skin of her knee, even ignoring the ferocious ache pounding its way out from inside her skull, all in favor of just trying to catch her breath through the stunning stench and the horror of doing all of that to human bodies...
The thought tipped a desperate balance, and, quite shamelessly, she began to throw up.
* * * * *
Repeated scrubbing in the gym teachers’ shower and some donated clothes from the adults present had her decent and no longer stinking like roadkill within an hour, and she came out of the shower room rubbing her hair dry to find the cop from the assembly hall and a white-haired guy in a JSDF uniform with a lot of bling waiting for her.
The former offered her a cup. “Coffee?”
“Please,” she said, taking it and taking an immediate sip to wash the still lingering taste out of her mouth.
The three of them stood and stared at each other awkwardly for a long moment, and then she turned and dropped herself into one of the teachers’ lounge’s chairs with just enough grace to avoid spilling her new drink. “How are Tsukishi, Tsunoko, and Tsukiko?”
“Quite insistent on seeing you,” the soldier said, “and a little scared, but none of them are hurt.”
“I got no clue what the fuck is going on, just so ya know,” she said.
“Nobody does,” the cop put in, with an ironic twist to his tone that suggested this one had more of a sense of humor than she’d ever heard a pig admit to.
“Your... retainer, Mokumoku? Seems to have more of an idea than anyone did to date, if her story about Izanami can be believed.” Soldier shrugged. “But that wasn’t why I’ve come to speak to you.”
Tsukusa stared down into her coffeecup. “How many troops you got could’a kept breathin’ after gettin’ swarmed like that?” she asked.
“None,” Soldier said, smiling a little, like she’d surprised him pleasantly. “Which is why we need you.”
“I ain’t a patriot,” she told him, looking up with cold, basalt-grey eyes. “I’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed.”
“And ain’t nothing in this world for free,” the old man said, finishing the quote and nearly making her drop her drink. “I’ve been authorized to offer up to one billion yen for your agreement to work with us for a minimum of three years, with an additional million each month. Yamada-kun-” he nodded to the cop, “-tells me that you’re still technically a minor, so there will need to be a trust fund arrangement, but under the circumstances, that shouldn’t present a difficulty.”
She looked at him for a long, quiet moment, then, conversationally, asked, “You’re offering a billion fucking yen to some random no-name fucking punk.”
Soldier gave her a thin smile. “And to both of the others like you that we’ve found.”
Tsukusa thought about it a few moments longer, but her answer was never in doubt. “For that kind of money, you’ve bought yourself a thug.”
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
==========================================================
MAHOU SHOUJO SHINTO SCION
Episode Two:
"Lunacy"
==========================================================
Suzuki Tsukusa grinned triumphantly as the Twisted Inquisitor, the main boss of the raid she and her friends were on, went down at last. Its death meant that the run was almost over, and that she actually would have time to do the dishes and feed Mokumoku before turning in.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Inq's ded, now 1 more wave b4 I go punch RL 1s again.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: did htehy hit your neighborhood?
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: No, would’ve told U2. Hypothetical HHOS.
If anybody from Her Prime Ministerness Tanaka to the Queen of Hell herself touched the squirts she’d fuck their shit up beyond all recognition. Zombies included.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Sunsword: ican stil lhardly belive these thigns are suppodsed to be real. Straight out of a mvoie...
[Team-OOC]Stormward: They are. My mother's been working all hours and worrying a lot, and she's scattered her work all over the place whenever she's been home.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: yes but sombies?1
People bought stories about honest cops all the time, and that was even less likely. But everybody weighed things differently, Tsukusa figured.
Not that it mattered nearly as much as the way the fresh spawn of reinforcements was wading into their team.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Less talk, more tank! Leave my pets alone you fucks!
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: there ,aggroded.
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Don't worry, we'll finish them quickly.
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: LOL Sic em, boys! Fuck up their shit!
She triggered one of her slow-charging powers and giggled at the resulting carnage as her AI-controlled summoned ‘allies’ waded in, and from there it really was essentially over.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Sunsword: monsters or not wer’re still on for tomorros, right/
[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: Damn straight. I refuse to believe either of you is /that/ fucking pretty.
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Whatever your judgement on that score may prove to be, I am indeed that tall.
She didn’t actually doubt that her friends were both fairly good-looking; neither would ever have agreed to a face-to-face meeting if they’d been talking completely out their ass. But at the same time, a published model and the star attraction of a maid cafe?
On the internet?
If Stormward was the queen of her school, it was because she had more money than God. She’d never said so - the girl had more taste than that - but what she considered ‘basic’ and ‘treats’ was practically a signpost. Sunsword probably did get hit on every hour she was at work, but a maid cafe brought in a pre-primed audience; getting those pervs’ attention would be literally like shooting fish in a barrel.
Quote:[Team-OOC]Moonspawn: 5pm then?
[Team-OOC]Stormward: Presuming that the district isn’t evacuated, that should be manageable.
[Team-OOC]Sunsword: Styill works for me
A couple exchanges of joking around finished the night’s festivities, and Tsukusa shut her computer down and padded through the dimness of the apartment’s living room to its small kitchen. Finding this place had been a hell of a risk after Mom died, but the stability it had given the squirts was totally worth everything she’d done to keep it.
Smiling, she started the water and got to work.
* * * * *
“Heyo!” Tsukusa called as she strolled casually in the door of Keiichi’s Bar And Grill, old-fashioned physical doorbell jangling as she shouldered the heavy wooden portal aside like it was nothing but a screen door.
At this hour of this day of the week, the only other living soul in the place was Keiichi himself, kicked back with an ebook behind the bar. He came upright and smiled when he saw her - a little warily, though, as he should be.
“Hey, Kid,” he rumbled. Despite his advancing age and wirey build, and despite being of a height with her who was none too tall for a girl, Keiichi had the deepest and most resonant voice of any man Tsukusa had ever met. “You want your usual?”
“Depends what kinda business I got,” the girl answered, hopping onto one of the stools anyway.
“That brat Moto goin’ on about how I ain’t willin’ to pay my piece, I bet,” Keiichi guessed.
“Pretty much word for word,” Tsukusa agreed. In theory, someone who hadn’t joined the family shouldn’t’ve been collecting for the Yamaguchi-gumi - but then, theory said a lot of things, and practice could vary as long as it lined up with the reasons for the theory.
“How ‘bout the tab he’s been runnin’ with me, then? Happen he mentioned that when he was doin’ his reportin’?”
Tsukusa leaned both elbows on the bar and let herself give that extra-special shark-smile that’d once gotten a middle-school girl into the front lines of an illegal kickboxing ring. “Funny enough, nothing like that came up.”
Keiichi snorted. “Yeah, he and some buddies been comin’ by and runnin’ up a bill.” He shrugged. “I ain’t called ‘em on it ‘til now ‘cause I know who they work for, but my margins ain’t that wide.”
“So you counted it towards your share for the month,” the teenager finished.
“Yup. I’ve got the receipts.”
“I figure I’d better take a look at those, then,” Tsukusa allowed, and they went into the back to do that.
* * * * *
“Neechan, Neechan, Neechan!” Tsukusa’s little sisters cheered, swarming out of the crowd of elementary-school students to latch onto her legs and grin up at her cheerfully. Tsunoko had lost one of her incisors the previous week, so for the moment it was easy to tell the two of them apart.
“Hey, squirts,” she grinned back, reaching down to ruffle their hair in either hand. “Where’s your brother?”
“Niichan’s with his giiiiirlfriend!” Tsukiko sang against her big sister’s waistband, delighted to be the first to deliver the news she expected to embarrass him beyond words.
“Oh?” Tsukusa asked playfully, putting on her thickest movie-gangster impersonation. “In dat case I ‘tink’s mebe I should be meetin’ ‘dis bird.”
The twins giggled and let go of her legs to tug her along by both hands, eager to see their older brother in trouble. The younger girls’ excited chatter preceded the sisters and made Tsukishi look up from the book he and the female classmate next to him had been going over. “Oneechan!” he said, sounding somewhat alarmed, “you’re early!”
She dropped into a seat on the low concrete wall next to him and messed up his hair, too, just to get the usual indignant squawk. “Work was pretty simple today,” she said, “so I thought I should pick you lot up. Don’t think I’ve met your friend before, though.”
Tsukishi went red. “Oh,” he said. “Um... Oneechan, this is Takahashi Noriko, one of the other members of the Literature Club. Noriko-chan, this is my big sister Tsukusa.”
Noriko gave a seated bow whose jerky quickness just emphasized her sudden pallor and wide, frightened-mouse eyes. It made Tsukusa want to scoop her up and coo about how adorable she was, but besides completely ruining her own image, doing that would probably have just given the girl a heart attack out of sheer panic.
Instead, she gave her a conspiratorial smile and said, “You’re the one that makes sure he’s paying attention, then, right? I knew somebody had to be when I stopped getting calls about him sneaking novels into class. Thanks!”
Come to think of it, hadn’t she seen this kid before? Yeah, she had - Mister Takahashi that liked to make a show for his wife, that ran that garage next street over from the bus station, this was his daughter. No wonder she was terrified.
Still, her attempt to reassure the girl worked, at least partway. Noriko stared at her for a long moment, then smiled tentatively. “My seat is right behind his,” she said softly, “so I can poke him whenever he gets off task.”
“I owe you one, then,” Tsukusa told her. “I’d been trying to convince him, but there’s only so much a dropout can say, y’know? And a big sister just isn’t the same as a Mom.”
Realizing what she’d just said a split-second later made her want to blink just as much as the younger girl was. She hadn’t meant to be that open.
“You’re better than our mother was,” Tsukishi told her fiercely, before she could think on it further, and the twins piped up their agreements eagerly, one latching onto her outside arm and the other climbing onto her back to take a deathgrip around her neck.
“Gack!” she said, reaching up to pull the tiny arms away from her airways, and then the school’s Public Address system cut in and interrupted.
“Attention all students and staff,” the secretary said, sounding terrified. “For your safety, please proceed in a quick and orderly fashion to the assembly hall. Please remember to comply with all instructions from Self-Defense Force personnel, and take care to move in groups.”
“Zombie drill!” the twins cheered excitedly.
Tsukishi, old enough to recognize the difference between a ‘drill’ tone of voice and the real thing, and to know that a drill would have been scheduled during class hours, looked terrified. “Fucking shit,” he said, lapsing from his usual polite speech.
“Kishi-kun!” Noriko scolded him, “Language!”
Tsukusa, for her part, was in complete agreement. “On a fucking shit cracker,” she said.”C’mon, squirts. Move.”
For once, the uniformed policeman stationed to ‘command’ the military detachment at the school was far too busy to give her so much as a hairy eyeball, too glad of another apparent adult to help corral and calm the dozens of panicking youngsters.
The scene was surreal enough on its own - children huddled like a solid knot of disaster victims, surrounded by a protective ring of white-faced adults, all nervously watching the barred doors and blocked windows as the unfamiliar pop and chatter of gunfire, flavored with screams and shouted orders and warnings, went on outside - but the sudden appearance of a tiny pet rabbit with a samurai’s gauntlet strapped to the miniature harness it was wearing too the feeling of unreality to an entirely different level.
Especially given that, not only was the thing talking, like some magical girl’s merchandisable mascot, shouting “My Lady! My Lady!” in a piping little girl’s voice as it hopped its way down the bleachers, but she recognized it.
“Mokumoku-chan?” one of the twins asked from behind her.
“My Lady!” the rabbit yelped one last time as she skidded to a halt right in front of her. “Oh, praise your Father and all the other gods, I am in time!’
“What. The. Fuck.”
The rabbit flinched at the completely blank stare she was receiving. “Oh dear,” she fretted. “I’m making a mess of this, aren’t I. I must-”
A particularly final thumping noise interrupted her as something heavy hit the main entrance doors very hard.
Mokumoku shrugged the gauntlet off her back and shoved it towards Tsukusa’s feet with her nose, then drew herself up into a dignified standing posture and began to recite. “In the name of Your Holy Father, Tsukiyomi-no-Mikoto, I, who before being graced by My Lady with the name-”
A second loud bang caused something metallic in the entrance doors to give way with a thoroughly alarming ‘KRAK!’ The policeman, who’d been staring at the bizarre tableau just as intensely as anyone else, jolted awake and hurried to place himself between the civilians and the door, the last squad of soldiers taking their positions to either side of him.
“Short version,” Tsukusa told Mokumoku.
“Your Father ordered me to give you this and have you-EEP!” the rabbit started to say, cutting off with a squeak as Tsukusa swooped down to scoop her off the ground by her ears and dangle her painfully in front of the girl’s face.
“You work for my father. He told you to give me this,” Tsukusa said, and felt the twins tensing at her back at the rarely-heard and always-feared note of real fury in her voice.
“...Yes, My Lady,” Mokumoku whispered, in spite of her own discomfort, curling into a tiny knot of tension, the classic lapine ‘don’t notice me’ defense. Despite several months as the ‘family pet’ of the small Suzuki household, she’d never heard Tsukusa sound like that before.
“Right, then,” Tsukusa said, almost mildly, in spite of the six-inch range on a death glare considerably worse than any she’d ever produced on purpose. “I don’t have any fucking clue what the fuck this fucking crap is all about. But if you’re serious about this shit, then you can tell my fucking sperm donor, whoever the fuck he may be, that if he wants something from me other than a set of crushed balls and a broken fucking neck, the down payment starts at seventeen fucking years of child support and my mother back.”
Mokumoku’s voice quivered in terror, but she forced herself to reply anyway. “This will help you protect your brother and sisters.”
Tsukusa set her down immediately, and picked the gauntlet up as a third great impact blew both doors wide open. “What does it do?” she asked, strapping the thing on as a muscle-bound, mutated gorilla-thing lumbered through at the head of a shambling column of ghouls.
Family was more important than justice.
“It temporarily unseals your own power when you tell it your name and parentage,” Mokumoku told her quickly, hopping into Tsunoko’s arms.
Well, why not? She’d fight the same fight either way, and it wasn’t like flapping her jaw cost her anything. She held that hand up to look at the thing. “I’m Tsukusa,” she said to it, “And my parents were Atsuko and Tsukiyomi.”
The astonishing thing about the change, she thought once she realized what was happening, was the weight. It seemed to drain out of the world and into her. Or perhaps density was a better word - she felt no heavier, just somehow bigger. Like, even though she was no taller, and they no shorter, everyone around her had shrunk, leaving her the only adult on a kindergarten playground, standing there with the same reckless energy that she’d always gotten from a proper pre-fight warm up fizzing through her entire body.
The deformed monster at the zombies’ head bellowed through the tiny head almost buried in its mountainous shoulders and charged, bowling through the soldiers in a chorus of screams to the percussion of breaking bones.
‘Moon-child’. She guessed that that made it official. She charged to meet the thing. The further from the kids she could stop it...
It - he - saw her coming and roared again, raising two arms each larger than her entire body in a widely-telegraphed prelude to smashing her against the auditorium floor like a melon with all the power in his massively-humpbacked shoulders.
She skipped scornfully to one side, out of the way of the blow, and shattered the knee of the smaller of his twisted, withered legs with an almost casual kick. With its tendons and ligaments torn and the bones they were anchored to in about three times as many pieces as they should have been, the joint and the leg it was part of twisted out of place with a horrible wet ripping noise and dumped the mountain of half-rotten meat to the ground.
So she shattered its elbow, too, with another kick that dropped her entire weight onto the point of its elbow.
A human, so wounded, would have screamed, no matter how much adrenaline his system was carrying, but the monster didn’t make a sound.
A smaller, more human zombie lunged at her from one side, and automatically she caught its arm, broke it, and then slammed a quick punch into its face. Its entire skull folded around her armored fist like a loaf of bread - the faint crackling resistance of the crust and a gooey softness beneath.
How much stronger had she gotten?
Apparently these creatures had just as much need of their heads as a living human or most of their movie counterparts, because the one she’d just hit crumpled like the proverbial cut-string marionette. If its companions minded, they didn’t show it, charging forward in a clawing wave of talons, rotten fingernails, and clumsily-handled rusty melee weapons. The first one she disarmed and knocked down, splattering its head with a stamping foot as she took a single step forward and picked up the next to pitch into the middle of the rush.
It bowled half of them down and fouled the limbs of the rest, tumbling them down in a thrashing mass. With much of their threat nicely neutralized, she stepped close and started crushing heads and waving arms with judiciously applied steel-toed kicks, starting with the ones that seemed closest to working their way free of the mess.
“Watch out!”
At the soldier’s shout, and following storm of gunfire, she whipped around to see that the hulking brute that she’d hit first - and failed to finish, dammit - had dragged itself into reach while she was distracted.
Turning around to look was the wrong response. Even with the damage she’d already done to it, and even with the concentrated fire of the military squad pouring into it and ripping entire swathes of its body away, it still brought one scabbed club of bone and flesh masquerading as a fist down squarely onto her head.
If she’d just thrown herself out of the way, she’d probably have been able to dodge the blow, but as things were, she could barely see straight, her head was ringing like a cathedral bell, she felt like she wanted to throw up, and she suddenly had a fucking nasty headache.
Oh, and she had zombies crawling all over her face, stinking like a sewer and trying to tear her open with their bare hands. One of them wrapped itself around her neck, trying to claw her throat open, and she reached up and dug her fingers into its neck in the approved eye-gouging fashion.
Apparently she was now strong enough to rip open a dead man’s ribcage.
Since the zombie had been crawling on top of her, this dumped everything that had been inside said structure right out all over her, and did nothing to ease her efforts to not lose her lunch.
Between the growing struggle to hold down her nausea and the sheer confusion of the horde’s assault, she rather lost track of the details of the fight, distracted by the need to punch, kick, elbow and headbutt her way through the press until a delivery truck landed on her stomach and completely stunned the muscles that had been trying to reverse themselves.
She reached up and sank one hand’s fingers into a bullet hole near the giant arm’s elbow and let it pull her out of the pile of mostly-wrecked meat. With a quick pivot and a wet, sickening crack, she pressed her other hand into the beast’s forearm, forcing the joint into a position no natural limb should take. Even if its dead flesh felt no pain, it had enough sensation to realize that it very definitely wanted her gone.
The colossus flailed and hurled her away, shanks of stinking meat tearing away under her fingers. She should have slammed painfully into the ground, but the pain never came, despite her bouncing three times before she finally slid to a halt. With a grunt, she staggered back upright and threw herself onto its back.
In hindsight, launching herself at a monster that was easily two or three times her size was probably not the cleverest thing she’d ever done.
Moments after she landed, it rolled over on top of her and began to lift itself up slightly, then slammed itself right back down, using its massive weight to crush her repeatedly into the pavement. Despite feeling increasingly like she had been run over by the Shinkansen on a particularly busy day, Tsukusa realized, with some surprise, that she was still conscious.
And she could still move her legs.
Waiting for the beast to rise again, she dug her fingers in and scooted herself out from under it on her back like a mechanic sliding a creeper out from underneath a car, then doubled her legs up against her chest and mashed its almost-hidden head back into its chest cavity with a ferocious double kick.
And that, except for a couple of bursts of assault rifle fire and the irregular pop-beat-pop-beat-beat-pop of the white-faced cop going through the pile and putting single finishing rounds into the skull of any undead still twitching, was that.
Tsukusa pulled herself to her feet again and stood for a moment, ignoring the foul effluvium dripping from her shirt and shorts and hair and every inch of skin, ignoring the smoldering burn of her cuts and scrapes, the pinching of her gauntlet’s metal against the skin of her knee, even ignoring the ferocious ache pounding its way out from inside her skull, all in favor of just trying to catch her breath through the stunning stench and the horror of doing all of that to human bodies...
The thought tipped a desperate balance, and, quite shamelessly, she began to throw up.
* * * * *
Repeated scrubbing in the gym teachers’ shower and some donated clothes from the adults present had her decent and no longer stinking like roadkill within an hour, and she came out of the shower room rubbing her hair dry to find the cop from the assembly hall and a white-haired guy in a JSDF uniform with a lot of bling waiting for her.
The former offered her a cup. “Coffee?”
“Please,” she said, taking it and taking an immediate sip to wash the still lingering taste out of her mouth.
The three of them stood and stared at each other awkwardly for a long moment, and then she turned and dropped herself into one of the teachers’ lounge’s chairs with just enough grace to avoid spilling her new drink. “How are Tsukishi, Tsunoko, and Tsukiko?”
“Quite insistent on seeing you,” the soldier said, “and a little scared, but none of them are hurt.”
“I got no clue what the fuck is going on, just so ya know,” she said.
“Nobody does,” the cop put in, with an ironic twist to his tone that suggested this one had more of a sense of humor than she’d ever heard a pig admit to.
“Your... retainer, Mokumoku? Seems to have more of an idea than anyone did to date, if her story about Izanami can be believed.” Soldier shrugged. “But that wasn’t why I’ve come to speak to you.”
Tsukusa stared down into her coffeecup. “How many troops you got could’a kept breathin’ after gettin’ swarmed like that?” she asked.
“None,” Soldier said, smiling a little, like she’d surprised him pleasantly. “Which is why we need you.”
“I ain’t a patriot,” she told him, looking up with cold, basalt-grey eyes. “I’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed.”
“And ain’t nothing in this world for free,” the old man said, finishing the quote and nearly making her drop her drink. “I’ve been authorized to offer up to one billion yen for your agreement to work with us for a minimum of three years, with an additional million each month. Yamada-kun-” he nodded to the cop, “-tells me that you’re still technically a minor, so there will need to be a trust fund arrangement, but under the circumstances, that shouldn’t present a difficulty.”
She looked at him for a long, quiet moment, then, conversationally, asked, “You’re offering a billion fucking yen to some random no-name fucking punk.”
Soldier gave her a thin smile. “And to both of the others like you that we’ve found.”
Tsukusa thought about it a few moments longer, but her answer was never in doubt. “For that kind of money, you’ve bought yourself a thug.”
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."