“This was a daft idea” Nabiki breathed as quietly as she could manage. It wasn’t that she was once more soaked to the skin and it wasn’t that she seemed to have accumulated enough mud on her person to level out a baseball pitch, nor was it even the fact that she found herself crawling towards the badguys, but more that she was doing it alone and with only a one shot anachronism for protection.

It would have been a lot better if it hadn’t been her fault.

The others had been divvying out roles for the attack, making sure that they had all their bases covered and busy setting their faces to grim when Nabiki had spotted the hole that none of them were talking about.

The plan for the guys was a simple one, creep in close and then raise hell, but doing that plainly required the advantage of surprise. Without it things might get very nasty very quickly. Not that Nabiki didn’t think the guys could handle it, but whether they could handle it without losing another one of them was too loaded a question to ask, she didn’t exactly have a huge supply of genuine friends to lose.

Unfortunately someone had to go and raise the possibility that there was a magical alarm set about the camp, one that might already have been triggered when Ranma had sneaked in to eavesdrop and identify these folks.

Slavers weren’t exactly used to being attacked but these lot had apparently already been discussing the chances that they had really lost the people who had been following them, they had reason to worry.

That they hadn’t obviously reacted when Ranma had done his recce wasn’t much help either, there could always have been quiet preparations that the pig tailed warrior had missed, or even more magic used to disguise them. For that matter the mage they were all presuming was in the wagon could already have started to set up a nasty trap for when the scout’s friends cmae back with him.

The only way to tell was to get someone magically aware close enough to look, and the only one who stood a snowball’s chance in hades of doing that was Nabiki. For all his newfound confidence Gos was still Gos and therefore slightly more clumsy than the average recently awoken bear and slightly less subtle than the average half brick.

Not that Nabiki was feeling much better at the moment, every last lttle sound she made as she crept closer and closer to the badguys seeming to be loud enough to wake the dead and even her heartbeat seeming to sound like a bass drum in the otherwise still air of the late afternoon.

They had of course discussed waiting until nightfall to make their attack on the camp, but what with the flashy pyrotechnics that Ryoga and Ranma were likely to be chucking about they had decided that darkness was definitely not going to be their friend. When you added in that the break in the rain could end at any moment and thus significantly reduce their fighting strength by the factor of one pig-boy, waiting hadn’t really seemed smart at all.

Nabiki’s hand settled into another muddy puddle with a muted squeltch and her focus was dragged back to what she was supposed to be concentrating on. For the moment the rest of the plan was irrelevant, everything that came later for worrying about later, right then she had to focus on not sprouting a feathered wood and steel ornament delivered to her at high velocity from one of the crossbows.

Which apparently was just a matter of taking her time and moving really really slowly, or so Ranma had said, just after he had reeled off a load of other suggestions of how to sneak and she had less than politely informed him that she wasn’t going to remember any of that ‘shit.’

It wasn’t just that she was scared, although considering what she was doing and her comparative lack of experience with anything like this sort of danger she definitely reserved the right to be, and it wasn’t just that the others by necessity would be some distance from her, it was also all the unknown bits, had they really already been tipped off, could she really creep well enough to not be spotted, would she really be good enough to spot the trap if there was one.

No matter how much Ranma and the others had insisted, some more kindly than others, that sneaking up on folk was something she was very good at and had been doing all her life, this really didn’t feel that much the same as the sneaky snapshots and quiet eavesdropping she had done at Furinikan.

For one thing it had involved a lot less mud.

This was hardly the path she had imagined her life taking, building a successful career in private enterprise maybe, journalism at a push but not ‘creeping through mud and alien undergrowth towards some sadistic assholes and the innocents they had kidnapped for sale so that her friends could be sure there wasn’t a magical trap waiting for them before they went in and kicked some ass’.

“Focus” she whispered to herself again, fighting to stop another shiver running through her body. It was all well and good trying to follow Ranma’s advice about too much clothing distancing you from the ground you were creeping through and sensible enough to have lost the baggier stuff but this ground was still wet through and shortly after she had started creeping so was Nabiki. The net result was that she wasn’t only muddy and wet but also freezing her pointy bits off.

Then someone coughed and Nabiki finally managed that focus she had been trying for, mostly through sheer fear freezing everything but her mind. The cough had been mere feet away.

Which meant that she was lot closer than she had intended to be and still hadn’t felt any hint of a magical presence, whatever else the mage was doing with his time it wasn’t setting up magical alarms to detect people sneaking up on them.

“You reckon t’ boss will let us ‘ave a turn with ‘er” groused a voice, thickly accented and distinctly brutish sounding, whatever else the speaker was he certainly wasn’t well educated.

“Nah” another voice replied, seeming to be only marginally further away than the first one, “bastard’s enjoying himself too much” he insisted and Nabiki had to fight down the urge to growl at the pair of them. There was little doubt as to what they were discussing, or rather who, it had been the final straw that had removed any of Nabiki’s last objections to doing this, Ranma had reported that one of the girls in the camp, the new slaves, had clearly been misused by the guards.

Of course he had tried to put it more delicately than that, tried to say what he meant without saying it, but Ranma was still Ranma and he had done a crap job of it right up until Ukyo had connected the dots and growled loud enough to frighten off the local wildlife.

To be honest Nabiki wasn’t sure what had stopped Ranma running right in there and then and rescuing the girl, and she rather suspected that he might have should that ‘misuse’ have been happening while he was close enough to see it, but she was grateful he hadn’t been asked to make that choice, as confident as she was in the young man’s outstanding abilities he wasn’t operating at full par and the memory of that one lucky enchanted shot at Konatsu was still fresh in her mind.

Just in case she was wrong Nabiki carefully recalled and ran through the exercise she had read in Gos’s tome, the one about sensing other magic around you, and then suppressed a sigh of relief when she once more came up empty.

Magic was a tricky thing, trickier than most folk would ever understand, it was powerful beyond the imaginations of most men but wilder than any rule could govern. The mages of this world used chants and gestures to force that power into shapes they could use but the magic itself naturally resisted any attempt to sculpt it.

This meant that anytime a spell was cast, the magic was successfully forced into a form, it left a stain on the area around it. Over time that stain would ebb away, would be washed out by the natural regenerative forces, but as long as the spell lingered it took a great deal of skill to even slightly mask it’s presence; and mages with that sort of skill did not accompany slave raids.

All of which meant that Nabiki’s part in this was done, just as soon as she signalled the others…..

Which wasn’t exactly going to be easy with numbnuts and numbskull sitting four feet away.

The original plan had called for her to slink back the way she had come, thus being even further from the fight when it did start, no doubt a factor in why Ranam hadn’t planned something more elaborate, and then imitate a particular bird noise that Ranma had made her practice. But obviously creeping away wasn’t the safest option anymore and working up the nerve to make the relevant noise was going to be a little more difficult than anticipated.

After all if she got unlucky and one of the nearby numpty brothers would turn out to be a budding ornithologist and her attempt at a bird noise would be much akin to painting herself orange and doing a rendition of night fever.

She needed another plan

She was still working on plan C when she heard the muffled thud of two folk falling gently to the turf they were sitting on. She hadn’t heard the person who ad caused it in the slightest but a little voice in the back of her head told her that she should have expected him, there simply wasn’t a chance in hell that Ranma was ever going to allow her to go into danger alone, even without this quiet bond she knew they had the man’s spine deep honour code simply wasn’t going to allow him to sit by and let her do this alone.

At the same time he also seemed to have learned a lesson from his time with Akane and hadn’t had the argument that he might have, hadn’t insisted that he protect her and indeed had done his level best to make sure that his protection wouldn’t have have been discovered if it wasn’t needed. Had she not needed the help then Nabiki doubted she ever would have found out he had been following her.

While the implied lack of faith in her abilities rankled a little it really wasn’t as important right then as not having had to come up with a plan D. Since plan C had been ‘run like hell and hope one of the others gets to her in time’ she really didn’t want to know just how desperate plan D might have needed to be.

“Thanks stud” she breathed, trusting the young man’s freakily good hearing to pick it up as she finally relaxed and let some of the tension built up over the last hour of creeping flow out of her body.

For a little moment longer there was only the quiet continuing sound of the damp forest around her and the slightly muffled camp noises ahead of her, peace seeming to have returned to this little corner of the Bremon foot region.

Then a cry split the cool evening air, one that the people in that camp had absolutely no chance of understanding, even if it hadn’t been projected with more force and determination than grammatical correctness, and even if another different cry hadn’t rapidly joined it.

Ranma’s ‘fierce tiger domineering’ and Ryoga’s depression bullet flared into life even as the calls were still sounding, the shining evidence of the strength of soul the two martial artist originators possessed almost immediately streaking out from their hands and lashing through the air to seek out the crossbowmen on top of the wagons.

The mote-tailed comets became full fledged flaring blasts as they impacted on the confused targets, a wash of energy accompanying the detonations sweeping out a bare heartbeat later.

And the two targets being thrown right off of their perches and through the air, still none the wiser as to what exactly had happened to them.

The rest of the camp had little time to gape though, even less time to work out exactly what was going on, even before they cold come to the hugely unlikely conclusion that they were under attack by at least two mages they had more urgent things to worry about, like the sudden flurry of throwing knives that was winging it’s way into the camp, or more precisely the people in the camp.

They might not have been spatulas but that wasn’t slowing Ukyo down a great deal, each throw fired off with a speed and precision that would have truly daunted even the most flamboyant of folk who made their living by such skills.

The fact that each knife very carefully didn’t hit lethal locations, very deliberately maimed rather than executed was perhaps not immediately appreciated by the people being hit, not least of which because of the rather ‘personal’ locations Ukyo was choosing for those disabling shots.

Even so three of the guards did manage to draw their arms and might have managed some form of defence but for the fact they were quite as outclassed as they were.

The first of them, a young guy for whom slaving had been a natural progression from the bullying of the children of his neighbours, was perhaps one of those least able to understand exactly what was going on. Like a lot of bullies the idea of being on the losing side was a bit alien to him and the fact that his bruisers muscles and wicked looking machete was largely irrelevant had completely passed him by.

Instead he growled something unintelligible and was about to move on to some choice insults about the parentage of the attackers when he finally got his just deserts, a red and black blur swept out of the woods moving at a speed his brain just wasn’t quite able to follow.

So he never saw that blur resolve itself into a certain cursed martial artist, nor managed to follow as said martial artist turned the rush into a kick and that kick into a half dozen more.

He did however have a brief moment to feel the pain that resulted, the flares of agony that ran from the wrist and elbow of his weapon arm over his torso and hip, and right up to his still roaring face. He had time to feel his bones grind and his muscles compress, and time to feel the ground part company with the soles of his boots, but by the time his back was bouncing off of the cart behind him he was long away into the embrace of unconsciousness. Which probably saved him more of a beating.

The second was perhaps somewhat more skilful than the first, an older guy whose rather particular tastes had led him to the trade, and kept him an outsider even there, but one who knew how to use the slender rapier he had whipped free of his scabbard. Much like the first however he really wasn’t quite prepared for the devastating effects a lifetime of training had given his attackers the ability to perform.

His rapier had been snapped before he had even identified the form in front of him as a human being, the hand that did it being turned up a moment later and delivered with a palm strike of bone-crunching force to his sternum, all almost before the broken end of the rapier had fallen to the grass.

His chest cavity compressed, his ribs and muscles flexing under the force of the single blow, and the air that had been in his lungs blew out nearly explosively through his agape mouth.

As he folded up a sweeping kick connected a knee very precisely with the side of his head and darkness rushed up to consume him as his mind finally admitted the inevitable fact that he had finally met a person he would never subject to his perversions.

The last of them, the only one still standing as Ukyo’s second volley made sure of the people she had injured, was by sheer luck, the leader of the group. He was also perhaps the only one of them who had stood a real chance against any one of the martial artists attacking the camp. But any chance he did have had been wasted by the time he had been forced to waste pulling up his trousers.

Had he not decided to help himself to one of the new slavegirls, had he for once kept his urges under control and thought instead of what would have been best for his group then he might have managed to at least make a good showing against the young folk steamrolling through his guards. But he simply wasn’t that sort of guy.

Unfortunately for him the man bearing down on him had never been the sort to put his own personal comfort before his martial ability, otherwise he never would ahev allowed a crone to repeatedly beat on him with a boulder; he also happened to be thoroughly bent out of shape over a girl who had suffered something all too alike to what the leader had been putting his latest victim through. Perhaps more immediately importantly however said storm of vengeance was not exactly well known for holding his temper.

Ryoga had only needed a moment to guess what the last man had been doing, had only needed one whimper from the girl to know all too much about how bad this man was, and at that point a little switch in his head had flicked once more and any intent of restraint had been forgotten.

Ryoga had no need for a sword himself, his family school’s iron cloth technique making his belt more than appropriate enough as a substitute.

The man managed one parry, his sword stopping the suddenly rigid leather just before it could neatly bisect him through the waist, but he was used to fighting swordsmen, not martial artists, and never saw the elbow strike that followed it coming.

Nor would he ever see anything again as that blow not only shattered his cheekbone, fractured his skull and rattled his brain around inside it’s cranial cushion, but also span his chin about fast enough to put an irresistible torsion onto his neck.

The double shatter of first the man’s face and then his spine sounded loud across the already stilling clearing, the thud that followed as the man’s now limp body cartwheeled head over heels to the floor more or less irrelevant after that.

What had been an almost lively camp in this remote clearing was suddenly very still indeed, only the groaning of the injured breaking through the silence that had descended every bit as suddenly as the attack had started.

From his-her place in the center of the camp, amid the fallen forms of the slavers, Ranma slowly looked about, not yet allowing himself to relax from the fighting stance he was in.

Slowly he took it all in, the places of all his friends, Ukyo just inside the tree line, spare knives still in hand, Ryoga standing over the fallen form of the man he had just broken, Nabiki kneeling in cover with her crossbow ready just in case, the stunned expressions of the slaves that had seen the attack, the slowly writhing forms of the people Ukyo had put down, and the still forms of the people that the others had dropped.

About then the slaves that had been hitherhto stunned into silence began to shout, to scream to cry, their mingled voices shattering the calm and bouncing arounf the clearing in complete disorder. Whatever they were trying to say there were too many of them trying to say it at once and Ranma didn’t have time to talk it out.

”Shut UP!” he hollered at the slave wagons, a brief flare of his power flashing in his-her good eye more than enough re-enforcement to assure compliance from the already part ‘tamed’ new slaves. “Clean up and Mage” he said much more quietly, turning back to the others and leaving the other issues until they were sure the life threatening ones had been dealt with.

“Door hasn’t moved” Nabiki asserted from her position, earning her a confirming nod. Quietly Ranma was very much impressed with how she had handled herself this time, it could not have been easy for her to do all that creeping, he knew form personal experience how much the mind liked to play dirty tricks under those situations, and yet she had not only done it right but she had also found the time to think of something else she could do during the fight.

It showed a lot of what it took.

“Ukyo stay on cover” Ranma ordered, not explicitly saying that he didn’t trust Nabiki’s aim but clearly aware that there were an awful lot of people lying around this camp that might recover before they were meant to.

“Ryoga” Ranma continued, calling the man to him for the next part. But this time the lost boy didn’t follow up and steadily all eyes turned back to him, where he stood staring at the fallen, tangled form at his feet.

“Not now” Ranma asserted, his voice steel hard, “later!” he insisted, “Living first then the dead” he quoted, revealing another depth of training that to be honest Nabiki didn’t want to know how he had acquired.

Ryoga, unable to resist the steel in his rival-friend’s voice, looked up and numbly followed the order he had been given, closing in on the pig tailed martial artist’s position.

“Breaking point on the door” Ranma supplied, stepping back to give the lost-man room and dropping into a familiar stance that told the others exactly what was in store for the mage if he was still standing after his door flew in at him.

Nabiki immediately moved to object, to warn them that paranoid mages regularly trapped their doors, but by then it was too late, the almost robotic motions of the pig-man had brought his finger to the door and his whispered word had proclaimed the completion of his own act of will.

The door shattered completely, its wooden surface turning into a mass of flying splinters that might have scared the hell out of people not used to the same spliters not being made of stone.

But they didn’t hit the mage within, he was too well protected within the layers of bedding that covered his form, from head to toe. Suddenly it was very clear why he hadn’t been making use of his powers, why he hadn’t risen up to protect the rest of the group, the man was far beyond caring, dead and cold apparently days before.

Shrugging Ranma dissipated the ball of energy he had been collecting and finally allowed his stance to relax.

“Okay” he said, “get Gos in here” he ordered, nodding towards Nabiki, “and lets sort this lot out” he added, sweeping a hand around to indicate the fallen, beaten foes.

By then the residents of the less salubrious wagons were starting to once again consider presenting their case, increasingly afraid that this wasn’t a rescue but just a change of ownership.

However one man among them stopped the next outcry before it could happen, his own voice indicating a significant enough strength of purpose to temporarily at least give the others pause. “let us out and we can help you” the man offered, his accent speaking not only of still more foreign places but also of authority and possibly education.

Ranma was about to tell the guy to ‘button it’ not wanting to have to deal with the issues accompanying the release of the captives while still trying to properly capture the others, far too much could go wrong during the confusion, but Nabiki beat him to it.

“Hold on just a few moments more” she insisted, stepping from her half cover and into the edge of the clearing, “let us stabilise the situation first” she said, automatically dropping into the sort of speak she had heard used by her own world’s soldiers. “Don’t worry” she added, deliberately evenly, “these guys are good at this” she said, all the while still in fact trying to keep her racing heartbeat under control.

All she had needed to do to signal Gos had been to flare her own magical aura, something that even the lowliest of novices could do and detect being done, the once crippled mage would see that and know that they were either in desperate need of his help or had the situation sorted. As long as her aura didn’t flash again the guy would know that there was no need to come in mob handed, and that he had time to bring the last member of their party in too.

Meanwhile Ukyo had been deliberately, if not particularly gently, binding both the wounds and the hands of the folk she had downed and Ranma had been doing the same for the others. Ryoga should have been helping but he had become distracted when his eyes had once more fallen on the crumpled form of the late leader of the group.

“May we at least know what you intend to do with us?” the cultured man in the cart asked, having added a trace of an edge and raised his voice just a little, to once more insist that his fellow captives let him talk.

“We’re going to let you go” Nabiki said, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world, just not thinking about how rare such beneficence would be in this world, “we’d hardly go through all this just to let you rot in your-“

Whatever else she had planned to say was drowned out by the sudden outcry form the wagons, the joy and relief bursting free of the poor souls that had all but given up hope completely.

Nabiki raised an eyebrow and let a hint of a smile fall across her face, letting the sheer emotion wash over her for a moment and finally finding the balm to wash away the last of her fear.

“What’s the catch?” the man asked, his voice cutting through the cries like a knife, his slightly exotic eyes narrowing in an obviously suspicious manner. Clearly he was expecting some sort of epithet, some little modifier to be added about ‘after a term of service’ or ‘as soon as your families pay the ransom’ but he had no way of knowing the sort of motivations that really drove his rescuers.

Nabiki found her smile only getting all the larger as she saw the last of the slavers being bound and lowered her crossbow completely, “No catch” she insisted, stepping towards the bar that secured the door, “my friends and I just don’t like slavers” she explained.

“You’re saying that a talented troupe of warrior mages just happened to be in the area? And took on a dozen slavers just because they felt like it?” the man said, his refusal to believe such as evident as the nose on his face.

“Yep” Nabiki smirked, delivering a hard palm strike to the bar to start it moving and silently smiling even more at the description of ‘warrior mages.’ Somehow she really didn’t think that Ranma was going to appreciate being told they thought he was any kind of spell caster. “Only” she said, drawing the door slowly open, “only one and a half of us are mages” she supplied.

As the slaves held up their shackles for opening the man who had apparently elected himself their leader just shook his head, apparently refusing to buy that either.

Nabiki turned back to look for where the key might be and found a bunch of them being flung in her direction by a slightly scowling redhead.

She raised an interrogative eyebrow even as she caught the keys, asking what was wrong without saying a word and knowing that Ranma wouldn’t miss the question .

“You should have waited for us” Ranma supplied, stepping closer, “just in case” he added, looking over the pleading forms of the soon to be ex-slaves. It was only then that Nabiki started really thinking about what might have gone wrong, all sorts of scenarios where a desperate slave or two, not believing they were being freed, tried to take her hostage to ensure they were actually let go.

It would probably have made Ranma hurt more of them and that wasn’t soemthing that the pig-tailed warrior was evidently appreciating the idea of.

“You girls are in charge?” the prison-leader said, changing tack as he looked for the catch still. If they weren’t in charge then there was evey chance that whichever man was would overrule them, in which case he would have to be-

“Who you calling a girl?” the redhead suddenly demanded, stopping that line of thought dead. Needless to say the man being shouted at was a bit lost for a reply at that point, the wet material of the redhead’s shirt leaving him in very little doubt that she was in fact a she.

“Um sorry?” he offered, giving up.

“Humph” Ranma replied, with what amounted to close enough to a pout to make Nabiki laugh aloud.

“Right” Nabiki insisted, before Ranma could really get the hump, and that pout got tooo cute, “let’s see those hands!”