They had been going to use burning torches to light their way through the tunnel, something that Ryoga apparently had a great deal of familiarity with even if he wasn’t actually quite able to explain where the ‘deep dark tunnel near Osaka city center’ was. But then Nabiki had explained what else might smell like sulphur and exactly how explosive methane could be when lit and they had decided to come up with another plan.

Which is why Ukyo’s arms were aching up a treat.

The marching order had been set easily enough, no argument in the slightest that Ranma needed to be at the front, or that Ryoga wasn’t going to be, and no argument in the slightest when the lost boy had volunteered to personally carry Akane, he was still the only one who dared get that close to her. Everything else had just been a case of in between the two.

Apart from Ukyo who had been volunteered to hold the ensorcelled, glowing blade that Gos had cast his light spell onto. It might have been a matter of expediency, the Chef being the rational choice as long as they were determined not to blind their frontman with light in front of him and admitting that there was no point in weighing down the others any more than they had to.

By their best guess the mountain tunnel shouldn’t take more than a day of travel to negotiate so the party had packed light, only enough gear for that leg and one back for Gos and no waterproofs for the first time since the waste.

They hadn’t even bothered with all the weapons that the group had become accustomed to carrying, figuring that the vast majority of them would be slightly less use against a Dragon than they would be against Gojiira himself, so they were actually travelling lighter than they had been since the very first day they had arrived.

All of which had combined with the nearness of home to give the start of the trek a rather lighter feel than any of them had really expected, one or two of them even finding the time for a bit of light banter.

But that had been hours and what felt like a good many miles ago and right now the banter seemed a very long time away indeed.

“I’m fairly sure someone has used this as a torture” Ukyo groused, changing the arm she held the blade in one more time. It wasn’t that the blade itself was that heavy, it was more that the constant need to have the light high up meant that Ukyo had spent those hours and miles with at least one of her hands up… all the damn time.

“We could tie it to your shoulder again?” Nabiki suggested, hiding a smirk in the gloom. Some of that banter back at the beginning had been aimed at her relationship with Ranma and even if the allegations had been completely foundless they had rubbed Nabiki a little the wrong way so she wasn’t exactly in much of a hurry to help the source of the ‘earthier’ of those jibes.

“Yeah right” Ukyo replied, not needing to see the smile to know that Nabiki was teasing. They had indeed tried tying the knife to various parts of her but it either was too obscured by her body or ended up shining into her eyes. The time they had tried her shoulder the Chef had bumped her head a few steps later then promptly fallen flat on her ass when she had stumbled in reply.

The tunnel they were travelling down was smooth enough, carved by seemingly natural effects working their way through what had presumably once been a softer rock but the same water flow that had done that was still, despite the growing heat, lingering on the floor making it more than a little treacherous and even ten minutes into the hole all natural light had completely disappeared.

Plus the smell was getting worse.

It probably meant that they were getting closer to the end of the tunnel but that wasn’t helping all that much, not when the rotten egg smell had become eye-wateringly strong an hour ago.

Ukyo was about to say something less than particularly kind about where exactly Nabiki could stick something of her own when she caught a handsignal from their pointman.

Much as she had expected Ranma had had few of the slipping troubles that the others had managed and, barring one incident where Ukyo had accidentally splashed him into her earlier, hadn’t had anywhere near as much contact with the ground water as the rest of them. What she hadn’t expected quite as much however was just how driven their pig tailed leader had become, forcing the pace right up and dragging them along behind him-her almost by will alone.

Like Nabiki she could guess a good chunk of the reason for Ranma’s haste, and could empathise with the desire to be away from this place that had hurt so many of the people she cared about, but she had missed the conversation the young man had had with Gos about just how long it took a dragon to wake.

Ranma was hurrying because he knew two things, ancient predators didn’t get to be ancient predators by missing the approach of other creatures and any hope of being there while the creature was still asleep was made hugely less likely the longer they gave themselves to make that fatal mistake.

Not that the mistake was inevitable but in his experience it happened anyway, someone always snapped the twig, always ate the wrong food or tried to lean on the wrong lever-outcropping, it was just the way the world worked around people who knew Genma Saotome.

If they were going to have a fight then their odds got a lot better if the beasty below was still waking up rather than sitting there waiting to munch whatever came out of it’s food pipe.

But that wasn’t why he was pausing the group, and nor was the fact that they had been walking between soot encrusted walls for a good twenty minutes (something he had chosen not to tell anyone else in case they too put narrow passage and ‘chimney’ together). Instead it was a touch more of a gruesome discovery.

Deliberately he indicated what he had found and then moved on further, making sure that his eyesight wasn’t going to be compromised by the light as the others looked at what he had just found, adding only another signalled exhortation towards quiet before he went.

He stopped a few feet further along, trying to put the pieces together himself, the discovery was definitely worth a little thought, because it sure as heck shouldn’t have been here.

“It’s a samurai” Nabiki whispered, her characteristic voice carrying anyway down the corridor at least as far as Ranma, she had recognised the bits of armour that hadn’t burnt off or melted, that and the sword that lay by the man’s outstretched hand bones.

”Burnt to a crisp” Ukyo countered with her usual willingness to state the less welcome truths.

“Shhhh” Gos replied, clearly a little more nervous than the rest of them about the rather immediate implications of the soot around the body. To him soot meant fire and the only fire he was expecting down here could only come from one toothy source.

The body was far from recent, the action of the water having accumulated some interesting limestone formations on the uphill side of him, but more to the point he was absolutely the very first person that they had seen wearing anything even remotely like that sort of gear on this side.

Simply put he couldn’t have been from this side, which meant all sorts of things that should have been of interest, and would have been had the fact he was scorched balck been preying instead on every mind.

“Cover the light” Ranma ordered, his voice authoritative even though it was said so quietly.

Nabiki of course recognised the tone, it was the same one he had used when planning the attack on the slavers, and every fight before that. This was the Ranma that Cologne would have dearly loved to have married her grand daughter to, the tactician, the calm warrior, the leader. Immediately she moved to do as they had been asked, doing so deliberately before Ukyo could find reason to disagree.

Tired and sore as she was Ukyo’s temper had definitely taken a turn for the worse and she had indeed been about to argue before Nabiki clasped the glowing blade between her hands. A few moments later she was also about to break the silence and demand to know what exactly the need had been.

Then she too saw the light up ahead. At this distance it wasn’t very bright, more just an easing of the unrelenting darkness, a dim greyness where there should have only been darkest black, but it was light anyway, with all the implications of that, and suddenly her heart was beating fast and loud enough to outrace any tycho drum.

She swallowed hard and waited for their leader to give another order.

“Leave the light” Ranma said, “and anything else we don’t need” he added, returning to the group to whisper the plan his remarkably adaptive mind had come up with. “It’s time to do it” he insisted.

Quietly the others moved to obey, lowering the waterskins and packs they had brought, dropping the contingency gear they had brought in case the way had become treacherous and silently using the time to steel themselves for what they knew they must see ahead.

Meanwhile Ranma looked once more on the dead samurai and offered a silent prayer for the man’s soul, there could be little chance the man had known any of the reasons that had brought him to his death in this dark hole so very far away from the land of his birth.

On impulse he reached down and picked up the sword that had finalised the impression of the man’s identity, very surprised indeed to find it still even partly intact after all this time.

According to Shinto and the budo taking that home for the man would at least offer some compensation to the man’s lost spirit and all of a sudden Ranma was feeling an odd kinship with the long dead warrior.

AS he did take the weapon his hand dipped into a pool of water that had collected behind it and been warmed by the unearthly heat rising from below, suddenly Ranma was a he again and was absolutely sure he had made the right call. He lashed the weapon to his back with a pair of simple leather ties and turned back to his watch down the tunnel.

Soon after that the group were ready once more and Ranma was once more leading them down the dark corridor towards the date with destiny that awaited them at the bottom.

The glow gradually resolved itself into a deep red hue, echoing the increasing warmth that was accompanying their downward progression. A heat that soon had them sweating hard in even the relatively light clothing they had chosen to come down here in.

Then they heard the echoes of the muted roar of something else, something none of them had heard before outside of documentaries. Unsurprisingly it was Nabiki who put the pieces together first and made the only logical deduction left to them.

“Lava” she whispered, her voice carrying to the entire group, “we’re in a volcano” she insisted. It explained all sorts of things, from the smells to the tube they were walking down, it also made a dreadful sort of sense considering the nature of the beast they were coming to see.

But it didn’t make anyone any more comfortable.

It was only a matter of a few more minutes before they got their confirmation and they knew for certain that Nabiki had been right. The group came to the end of the tunnel and finally found what had presumably once been the great caldera of the magma chamber.

That was some great time ago of course, presumably even before the beast had moved in. Lit by twin streams of lava that ran across the floor and the rippling glow of another unseen source that they had to pray was the gate now it was instead a vast cathedral to the new occupant, the beast they had come to dare the wrath of, the dragon itself.

Even with the vastness of the chamber there was no missing it, easily two hundred meters long not including it’s coiled tail the creature was a monument to dark fears and myths made flesh. Every inch of it’s gargantuan body was covered in dark scarlet lit scales any one of which was taller than any of the Nerimans. Its wings were folded to it’s body, their tips however still evident, darker still against the lava lit scales. At the end of each of it’s limbs were vast paws, claw tipped and lethal looking even without the vast power and weight that would be behind them. But most fearsome of all was it’s head, a truncated triangle of horn, tooth and interplayed muscle, and one which was made all the worse by the eyes, the wide open, malignant staring eyes each one of which reflected the lava as if it were the flames of hell itself.

“Fu-“ Ukyo began, but she never finished the thought, no swear word enough to eve come close to the bowel loosening fear that was suddenly all her universe.

“uh” was about all that Gos managed, his own bowel control not even up to the chef’s standard and a new warmth already making its way down his leg.

“It’s not fully awake” Ranma asserted, of all of them he had gotten the most time to acclimatise t the beast, appeared to be the one best coping with the sight they had discovered. He had spotted the way that the sinister pupils in the eyes were yet to actually react to even the occasional flares of light from the bubbling lava streams, had noticed the way that even though those orbs were definitely fixed in this direction they didn’t quite appear focused yet.

And besides he was still not flame-grilled so there had to be some reason.

“We go quickly” he asserted, raising his hand to point to a narrow path down the side of the bowl towards the great stone floor below. “Ukyo leads” he insisted, his hand continuing to describe a path towards the glow that the beast’s body obscured the light of. “You stop for nothing” he insisted and nobody needed to guess what, or who he meant.

Nabiki had known this moment would come, had prepared herself for it, long hours spent trying to think up an argument why he shouldn’t be the one to hold it’s attention while the rest of them tried the gate. In the end though she had been forced to concede the point, there was simply no way Saotome Ranma was going to let even the people who had wronged him most in this life take this responsibility from him.

Ranma would hold the dragon until they were all safe, even if it cost him his life, and there wasn’t a word she could say to stop him.

So instead she tried to give him a reason not to linger, there on the ledge above the scariest thing she had ever seen in her entire life Nabiki took Ranma into her hands and kissed him, told him in deed all the things there were no words for, of how grateful she was for his strength and his caring, of how much she respected and relied on his honour, of the growing feelings she had for him, of how those feelings were most definitely not of a sister to a brother, of the future they might have, of the wonderful things they might explore together… if only he made it through that gate after them.

“Wow” Gos offered, his eyes wide and his mind spinning just from seeing that kiss. Ukyo said nothing but she did quietly admit to herself that whether he knew it or not Ranma was well and truly claimed once more. Ryoga saw it and didn’t understand, all he knew was that he and Akane had been let off at least one hook by that kiss.

Ranma didn’t even manage the ‘wow.’

By the time he had come to his senses again the rest of the party were already most of the way down the slope and were nearly to the cavern floor, abandoning stealth to instead make the most of the time they had.

Ranma leapt from the ledge and all but flew to the floor below, summoning up his warrior spirit to shroud him and seeking that single purpose of mind that was the mark of a true warrior.

His feet touched stone, the air still whipping about him as it was disturbed by his passage, his pigtail settling about his shoulders, his travelworn and sweat marked clothes cast dark and scarlet by the fires ahead of him. His own eyes locked on those of the dragon and both knew without a shadow of a doubt there would be a fight today, and one like they hadn’t ever known.

As Ranma coalesced his aura into the first of his assaults, gathering the confident blue light between his hands he saw the dust shifting from the beast’s great form, finally shaken off after all these years of slumber. He could see the way that same dust gathered towards it’s pinching nostrils and knew it was gathering its breath for the fire that made it’s most feared attack.

Briefly he thought of seeking the soul of ice, of trying to combat the fire with the cold of his spirit but the idea was discarded almost as soon as it occurred, there simply was no comparison, any attempt to try that from his own reserves would be not only his doom but also utterly pointless, a pebble thrown to the great ocean.

As the others fled hell for leather across the chamber neither combatant made any sign of noticing them, both knew where the real danger was and neither had the focus to spare on irrelevancies.

With a great cry that came literally from his soul Ranma let fly the ball of ki he had been gathering, flinging it with all the force he could muster right at the redlit eye of the waking beast. Unlike the rounded comets he had so regularly used in Nerima this bolt travelled faster and flew sharper, a spearhead aimed at evening the odds perhaps just a little.

The beast’s head pulled up with agonising slowness, it’s great heart straining to provide the blood to the long dormant muscles that it now required obedience from. With the resolute force of a glacier and the gathering speed of a landslide it’s neck turned, it’s eyelid moved to blink shut and it’s legs strained to shift it’s bulk.

It almost managed, the eyelid nearly closing the head nearly ducking aside, had it not been so colossal, had the bolt not been moving so fast then perhaps it might have succeeded but it was that big and Ranma had not held back.

With a roar of agony that hadn’t been heard in millennia the beast expressed a pain and surprise that defied human understanding, blasting it’s hate out in a vast conflagration even as it’s draconic mind struggled to understand the damage that had been done to it.

By which point Ranma was already running, his legs straining hard enough to throw even stonechips up behind him and his whole body bent to the task of getting him clear of where he had been.

His feet left the floor, his knees still pistoning as he bounded off the wall and propelled himself still higher while desperately his lungs sucked in all the precious air he could get.

The dragon’s breath swept over the uneven floor, blasting it with a heat to rival suns, simultaneously smoothing and cooking it, shattering the smaller stones and melting others. It sucked the oxygen from the air and whipped the whole expanse of the chamber into a typhoon fury.

Ranma, an undisputed master of aerial combat, needed every technique in his possession to keep himself aloft, buoyed up on the vast shockwave updraft and not down amongst the fiery death below.

He twisted, he tumbled, his arms spread wide and his spine craned to make the very most of his skills..

And he came down, right through the very end of the fire and down a crouched landing onto dimming red rocks below, his feet and one hand connecting at the same time.

Suddenly he leapt back up again, hopping from one smoking foot to another while frantically waving his left hand and shouting, “Hot hot hot!”

The dragon could hardly believe it’s eye, could hardly think because of it’s pain and it’s rage, in all the millennia of it’s existence it had never known anything like this, no biped had ever survived it’s fire, demigods and divinely inspired they ahd all burnt to a crisp under the heat of it’s malice. Yet here was a simple human apparently unharmed by even that blast.

It’s rage only became worse, it’s fury an almost physical thing as it flooded it’s muscles with blood once more and hurled itself at the anomaly before it.

“Shoot” Ranma offered when his good eye spotted the incoming creature and registered the renewed danger.

Ignoring the pain and the heat he turned towards the beast and took three long powerful strides, what was left of his shoes falling to pieces under the renewed stress, falling unheeded behind him as he once more hurled himself into the air, this time towards the great beast itself.

It was another gamble, much as the last leap had been, a hope that the creature, old as it was, wise as it was, magical as it indisputably was, would not yet be used to the effects of one sided vision.

From his own experience he knew it wasn’t just a question of not seeing to one side of yourself, it was more than that, your body needed two eyes to judge distance correctly, a lot of your hand eye co-ordination (or jaw-eye) was based on the difference between what one saw and the other.

So as he tumbled he didn’t deliberately dodge to the wounded side, he just concentrated on moving as fast as he could, making himself the most difficult target he could be for the wounded beast.

He had no way of knowing that after the flame his friends had paused had, despite all their instincts, tuned to look for the disposition of the man that was even now buying them the time they needed to flee. He had no way of knowing the relief that had crossed every face at seeing him alive in the wake of the fire or how heartfelt that was from one set of eyes. Most of all though he had no way of seeing how that relief turned to horror as he appeared to leap right at the mouth of the beast that so defined danger to them.

Through the whipping rush of air and the roar of the dragon’s hatred Ranma never heard the scream that escaped Nabiki’s throat but the more sensitive Dragon did and perhaps it was that that saved Ranma’s life.

On anther day the dragon would have ignored that cry completely, concentrated wholly on the danger before it but this day the dragon had already had it’s universe redefined to a cry not so very unlike the one that it just heard from out of it’s line of vision.

Reflexively it closed it’s good eye and bunched the muscles in it’s neck in unconscious expectation of more pain. None of which stopped it snapping it’s great toothed jaws shut on what should have been the yielding flesh of the fool that had challenged it in the air.

Instead the teeth closed only on themselves and by the time the dragon’s good eye had opened again it had already felt the unfamiliar touch of a human foot, right on it’s snout.

Ranma had evaded those jaws by a hair’s breadth, had turned and twirled once more and finally managed to swing his body the way it needed to go, his right leg lashing out and connecting just hard enough to redirect his force and correct his fall.

Ranma sailed past the Dragon’s vision, already gathering another great bolt of energy into his hands and once more it’s concentration faltered.

Simply put this couldn’t be, there was no way any being, even another dragon, should still be alive, let alone fighting, it was the oldest of it’s kind, the greatest and most powerful. By force of will alone it had lasted millennia, had made the mountain move around it and changed the course of the heated flows in the world itself. It had destroyed countless enemies, countless rivals and even a few mates, but it had never known gall like this.

All of which rather distracted it from the fact it was flying through the air in an enclosed space.

As Ranma’s blast splashed almost harmlessly into the joint of one wing and his attention was turned to his own landing the dragon fluffed its.

The normally graceful behemoth crashed into the baked stone floor in a tangle of long neck, limbs and wings, it’s tail slapping down almost derisively behind it as it made a mistake it hadn’t made since the day it fled it’s birthing chamber.

Bones stronger than steel flexed, muscles built like corded cable stretched and a horn made of substance unique in the universe snapped raggedly through, sending fresh waves of unaccustomed pain through the great beast that owned it.

In fairness Ranma’s landing wasn’t much better, the place he would have naturally fallen to being rather occupied by the flow of one of those magma streams and the other options being somewhat limited.

He had had a few heartbeats to curse his luck and wonder what exactly he had done to deserve it before his entire focus was once more required to avert disaster and oce again his every skill and talent was being called on to twist himself out of the trajectory he had been in.

Once more that focus robbed him of the opportunity to see the state of his friends, those same friends that had heartsore turned away to run once more for the gate when they had thought him snapped up and only turned about once more as the echo of his ki-projection cry had burst about the room. Those same friends who had watched in renewed horror as he had seemed destined to fall right into the magma flow and drawn a ragged breath of renewed hope as he had averted that disaster too.

Nabiki and the others were nearly there. As the great dragon had moved it had revealed the glittering coolly reflective surface of the Gate between Worlds. They had run towards it’s stone girded surface with every ounce of strength they had in them, only partly aware of the enchantment that Gos was weaving about them to make that ounce go further still, and they had almost made it.

This time as they turned Ukyo was already on the bottom step of the short ornate flight that led up to the arch topped portal, her breathing ragged by genuine hope shining in her heart. Now she, like the others was torn, they knew that there was no way even Ranma was going to pull this landing off right, it was from too high, too fast and he had had to spend too much effort tuning to avoid the fireflow. Almost as once they winced as he and the dragon crashed down.

Suddenly they had to make a choice, did they do as they had been instructed and flee through the gate, escape to what they had to believe was the safety of their own world, or did they abandon that and go back for the man that had made that possible. They were not good choices and they were made worse when the more observant of them saw the sudden wrench that Ranma’s leg went through as he landed.

With the sound of the lava and the echoing crash of the dragon’s landing they couldn’t hear the pop of the joint dislocating but they could see the way the habitually obscenely graceful Ranma cascaded to the floor, his arms flying to his abused limb as he bounced and bounced again, curling reflexively into a tight ball.

“I’m going back for him” Ukyo said, “Get the others through the-“ she was cut off as Ryoga’s fist lashed out and ended her argument. Immediately afterwards Nabiki found her arms full of sister and her vision full of the sight of Ryoga picking the dazed Ukyo up and throwing her for the gate.

”RUN!” he ordered and at last she as able to move again, hurling herself up the steps even as the tears burned hot against her cheeks.

There was simply nothing she could do, she wasn’t fast enough, strong enough to help Ranma now, that was something that only his closest rival had the skill for, all she could do was obey and pray that it worked out alright.

In the reflecting surface of the portal she saw Gos make the decision himself, there was no way he was going to make it back across that room and even a magic poor cripple was better than a flame baked corpse, he took to the steps with a vigour that surprised even him. Meanwhile Ryoga was turning away towards their fallen friend and in the background the great dragon was lurching and rolling as it bellowed it’s agony to shake the room itself.

Then the sudden icy cool of the gate hit her, an indescribable contrast to the burning heat of the room beyond and suddenly everything stopped making sense, there was no up, no down and nothing else as she fell through the trans-material hole that the Gate was, her sister still clutched to her chest.

Meanwhile behind her, in that hell hot room Ranma had seen his triumph, had seen the win he had been fighting for, through the pain of his hip, the mist in his good eye and the spinning of his head he had seen. Little did he realise how little of that daze was due to his vision and how much of it was due to the room itself reacting to the strength of the dragon’s hate.

Nor did he see the man who had first sworn to kill him racing across the suddenly tossing ground towards his fallen form, or the cold hard determination on that man’s face to not fail this one time, to pay back some of the times that this fallen friend had given his all that others might live brighter lives than even his own, to perhaps expiate some of his own wrongdoing with the woman that the fallen man had once upon a time wrongly given his heart to.

The ground shook, the mountain itself quaked and the magma that was it’s heart’s blood lurched from its regimented paths and exploded across the room.

Ranma rolled to try and sit, to try and look his enemy in the eye, one last time, and instead saw his death coming right for him.

It was what a vulcanologist might have called a ‘bomblet’, what others would have called a ‘fiery ball of volcanic death’, and it, along with a hundred others, had hurled itself from it’s flow-bed into the air, the difference with this one was that it was now headed right for the place where Ranma was still trying to shake his head clear, force his body to obey the commands he was giving it.

Heartbeat by racing heartbeat it moved closer, trailing fire, and still Ranma’s body refused to move.