“Hello there, young man,” the barker said as he jumped out in front of Deimosu and Yaku. “Wouldn’t you want to try you hand at the ring toss, see if you can win a toy for your little brother here?”

“Bro…” Yaku started to say inquisitively before Deimosu gestured for her to quiet down.

Deimosu felt more than a little unclean as he took in the artery clogging cholesterol that was embodied in the weasely man’s smile, but the point of this whole distraction was to give the little girl he was now bringing to Korea with him a bit of normalcy.

“What do you think?” Deimosu asked. “Do you want to try?”

“How do you play?” Yaku asked.

“Well that’s simple, my boy,” the barker said, snatching up some brightly colored rings.

“Boy?” Yaku asked, but she was being ignored now.

“You take these rings here and you throw them out there onto those bottles,” the barker explained. “The farther away the bottles and the smaller the rings, the more points you get. The more points you have at the end of a try, the better a prize you can get. But you have to get all your points in one try.”

He gestured to the side where a number of toys, souvenirs and stuffed animals were displayed.

“You get five rings per try,” the barker continued. “You can choose the rings, but you only get five and each try costs a little bit more.”

“Small rings are more points?” Yaku asked, grabbing some from that pile.

“But harder to get to the target,” the barker explained.

“Can I try twice?” the little girl asked Deimosu.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I think I have enough for that.”

Nodding firmly as Deimosu paid the barker, Yaku collected her ten rings for her two tries and looked across to note the point values of different toys and other prizes, eyeing a large stuffed dinosaur. Then she looked to the point value legend for the game and made her choices.

Deimosu was rather neutral to the game until Yaku started throwing. The girl had some, obviously undeveloped, agility, but that wasn’t what caught his eye. Nope, it was the curious off-balance wobble the rings had as they flew through the air. Each one that Yaku threw only made him more and more certain.

The rings were unevenly weighted.

In the end, only two of the girl’s rings landed around a bottle, and those were each on different “tries” as the barker was quick to point out.

The disappointed look on the girl’s face as she collected the two pieces of candy she could claim as prizes was something Deimosu had expected to see. She wasn’t trained, so there was no call to expect she’d succeed at the game. If it had been a fair game, Deimosu would have given her a third try and some advice.

It hadn’t been a fair game.

“Let me have a try,” Deimosu said with a smirk as he handed over the cost for another game and reached out to grab five of the smallest rings, ignoring the barker’s crooked smile.

He shook the ring out and felt something inside the ring shifting. The rings weren’t just poorly weighted, there was something inside that could slide around making the balance of the ring change in mid flight.

That made things a bit interesting, and he was briefly appreciative for every sack of flour, bag of coins and crate of potatoes that had ever been launched at or by him in every Jackie Chan inspired lunatic training session his mother had every put him through to deal with debris or improvise a weapon.

“Are you just going to spin them around or...”

There was a small cracking sound.

There was also the matter of the amaguriken.

“…throw them?” the barker finished, wondering just what that sound had been.

“I already did,” Deimosu said, pointing with a smirk on his face.

The barker grimaced in confusion and turned to look out at the bottles and noticed five rings all around the absolute furthest, highest point bottle, still spinning and even seeming to smoke a little.

The man’s jaw dropped to the floor.

“So what does that get us?” Deimosu asked.

****

“Excuse me,” Yonjuu said irritably to the chef handing them their shiskabob. “What are you looking at?”

“Oh, excuse me, miss,” the man said quickly as the apparent teenager caught him staring at her ample bosom. “Here’s your food.”

“Why does everybody stare at my chest like that?” Yonjuu asked as she stepped away from the line. “Isn’t it rude to remind people of their flaws?”

“It’s just ignorance,” Nimu noted calmly as she chewed on a piece of beef marinated in honey. “They don’t mean anything by it, Yonjuu.”

“Nimu-ne-san,” Yonjuu said in a conspiratorial whisper as Sanya was placing her order. “I saw an article in a medical magazine recently. Did you know that there’s a surgery that you can have to make your chest smaller?”

“Surgery?” Nimu said in surprise. “Something so drastic, I’m sure there are plenty of people that could…appreciate…your situation.”

She gestured weakly toward Yonjuu’s peaks as compared to her elegant and efficient chest. Though, Nimu had to admit, that she wouldn’t mind having Sanya’s chest, the girl was almost the epitome of slender grace and sublime beauty.

“Oh please,” Yonjuu said. “You’ve seen it to, the only pictures of big-breasted women belong to semi-mindless harlots that anyone in their right mind would avoid. I don’t need to be comforted in my deformity.”

“You are not deformed,” Nimu sighed, shaking her head. “You’re just an…acquired taste.”

“Hey, a strength test,” Sanya noted in excitement.

The youngest of the three cut off any further discussion of Yonjuu’s problems by pointing to an elaborate rig with the traditional hammer and a weight meant to be flung by the contestant as high as possible.

“You don’t need to be testing your strength,” Nimu said, rolling her eyes.

“You don’t want to be trying that rig anyway,” the chef said. “Tokijo is a cheat, don’t know quite how, but he’s definitely a cheat. He lets a few win here and there, but most people fall suspiciously short.”

Nimu sighed as Sanya smiled widely, eyes glittering like twin polished onyx stones.

“All right,” she said. “This is a chance for Sanya San, Pillar of Strength of the San batch to demonstrate to all comers the strength that is hers! Ohhh-hohohohoho!”

And off she went, marching up to the line for the hammer.

“Well, at least we’re blending in to the other festival goers,” Yonjuu noted with a sigh.

“A San with a chance to show off doesn’t blend,” Nimu noted shaking her head as she followed the younger girl. “They scream like a siren.”

“And when she does that she sounds a good deal too much like Mo…” Yonjuu started to agree.

“Don’t call her that,” Nimu growled

“She can’t hear us out here,” Yonjuu protested.

“It’s not a matter of fear,” Nimu responded firmly. “It’s a matter of the respect she deserves.”

Yonjuu shrugged the matter aside as they proceeded to move to the front of the group of spectators as their sister came to the front of the line.

“What’s this then?” the barker asked as the short, slender Sanya walked up to where he held the hammer. “Uh, little girl, this probably isn’t the best game for you.”

He spoke with a dismissive laugh as he gestured at her.

“Please,” Sanya said with her own air of derision. “I so rarely have a chance to truly demonstrate the power in my hands and I’ve been told your contest here is a truly difficult challenge.”

“Listen, girl,” the man said with a snicker. “I can take your money, but you’re what twelve years old and eighty pounds soaking wet?”

“I am fifteen, physically,” Sanya protested. “And I’ll have you know I weight ninety six pounds! Now, please hand me the hammer and step out of the way.”

Shaking his head in amused disbelief, the man heaved the hammer up to his shoulder as the girl handed him the money for her try at a swing. Pocketing that, he took the hammer in both hands, rolling his eyes as she reached out with one hand, waiting for the extra-heavy hammer to drag her to the floor with a cutely surprised expression.

Only the girl took it in hand easily and swung it about like a child with a butterfly net.

“Ooo, this is sturdier than I thought it’d be,” she said in satisfaction.

That said, Sanya barely noticed the shocked expression on Tokijo’s face as she walked to the rig, playing with the forty-pound hammer like a baton-twirler. Swallowing he cricked his neck and surreptitiously fingered the remote in his pocket. As the girl eyed the target, he turned up the power on the electromagnetic in the base of the rig to the maximum level.

There was no way that that slip of a girl could defeat two tons of electromagnetic force pulling down the ball.

No little freak of a girl was going to make a fool of him.

“Do you smell ozone?” Yonjuu asked Nimu.

The much less sensory adept young woman turned to her younger sister with an arched eyebrow.

“Oh, right,” Yonjuu said as a flash of blonde hair passed the sizeable crowed behind them. “You don’t smell things like I do.”

“All right,” Sanya declared loudly to the audience. “Now you shall see why I am known as my sisters’ pillar of strength. Ohhh-hohohohohohoho!!!”

And, flipping back her long and unbound black hair, the girl lifted the hammer with a wild expression and then swung it downward with enough force to crater into the stone beneath the rig.

To Tokijo’s eternal shock, the metal marker not only lifted up from the magnet that should have been holding it firm, it rocketed up into the evening air a good twenty feet, only to come down and be caught by the fifteen year old girl that had just demolished his rig.

“Well, not so challenging after all,” Sanya said. “Ho, ho ho.”

That said she handed off the hammer to the shell-shocked barker and ignored it as the weight of the hammer carried him sprawling to the ground, while she walked back to join her sisters, cracking her knuckles as she did so.

“Mmm, that felt good,” she said.

“Are we done with the random destruction for now then?” Nimu asked.

****

Yaku sat on a park bench, holding tightly to the large stuffed shark Deimosu had given to her. She was staring at a giant glass jar while Deimosu was getting them some drinks.

There were a lot of people looking all around the glass jar, with little notepads in hand, or just figuring in the dirt or their heads. Every so often someone would walk off to the side and write down a number in a book and take a ticket in return.

As she watched it, she held up her fingers and closed one eye. More than a few processes had been accelerated in her, some more than others. At least one of those left her hearing a voice occasionally. She shouldn’t have been hearing it yet, not until her body and brain were more mature, but she hearing it.

The voice taught her things.

Words sometimes, but mostly numbers.

And some of what she’d learned from that voice was being used right now as she estimated the diameter and height of jar in front of her. She wasn’t using any units that a school would recognize, but she was using the same standard for all her measurements and that was all she needed.

The rest of the math was all the same.

And then she was looking at the fruit-flavored skittles in her hand and examining them, her feet kicking back and forth childishly.

“All right, here’s your soda,” Deimosu said handing her a fizzy red drink that smelled of sweet things she hadn’t had before.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Cherry limeade,” Deimosu said. “It’s something from America, I hear.”

“Mmm,” she said, taking a long sip. “Can I go write a number on the list?”

“Sure,” Deimosu said, looking over at the booth that was taking guesses for how many skittles were in the big jar, best guess and winner to be announced in a another hour or two.

Coming away from the booth and walking through the festival some more, Yaku watched the colorful dances and entertainments, blinking and restraining the repetitive urge to giggle at some of the sights. Curiously, she was hearing laughter from all around, there was some girl laughing especially loud a little bit ago.

That girl had sounded familiar, actually.

“Deimosu-san, are you going to be my brother?” she asked.

He shuffled about uncomfortably.

“I have to do something…dangerous,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

“You might die?” Yaku asked.

“Die?” Deimosu said, surprised the girl jumped to that.

“That’s what they call it when a person breaks and can’t be fixed,” the little girl said.

“Right,” Deimosu said, embarrassed. “So you see, I can’t take you with me. You might get hurt.”

“Why do you need to do something that could make you die,” Yaku asked.

Deimosu frowned quietly.

“Some people hurt my mother,” the demi-god said. “I have to…make sure they don’t hurt anybody else.”

That wasn’t his motivation, though. He wanted revenge, and he had to admit that.

“I can help,” the little dark-haired girl said, clutching the shark.

The blonde haired Satomi had to laugh at that.

“I’m sure you can kid,” he responded with a smile.

“No, really,” she said. “I can make things.”

“Let’s get safe first, then talk about other things,” the Satomi boy said as he ruffled at Yaku’s hair.

****

“You had to place a guess at the jar,” Nimu noted.

“It wasn’t a guess,” Yonjuu protested. “It was a count.”

“How did you count them?” Sanya asked. “All you did was walk up to the glass and lean over your oversized torso to put your ear against the glass while you knocked on it.”

“Be fair, Sanya,” Nimu said.

“Thank you, Ne-san,” Yonjuu sai, smoothing out her clothes.

“Right, sorry,” Sanya said. “You were leaning your side against the glass so your chest wouldn’t have been in the way, sorry.”

“Excuse me, young miss,” a man said stepping out in front of her. “A young college-going girl like yourself, out with your younger sisters, should feel right at home in trying their hand at this test of skill and accuracy.”

Nimu turned to see a large array of bottles and several containers of rings.

“Skill and accuracy,” she repeated moving to pick one up and nodding appreciatively at the shifting weight of the ring.

These were well designed throwing rings. The shifting weight, when thrown by an expert such as herself, would result in just that extra bit of impact when it struck. She looked out over the bottles and noticed several rings around the bottles and worked out the nature of the game being presented.

“I suppose a little practice would be in order,” Nimu said.

Two minutes later, Nimu had a stuffed godzilla as a flabbergasted barker rambled about how something had happened “twice in one day.”

It had been a while since the Mistress had quit teaching them how to fight. Since most of the other Ichi batch had tried to break free of her. Now they all had to just settle for their powers and experience when she sent them into fights and tasks.

And that had lost Nimu a lot of sisters, older and younger.

But she, herself, still knew a thing or two, and she’d been practicing and teaching what she knew, quietly, the sisters she could. Probably why the girls under her had survived so long.

“Enjoying the festival, Nimu-ne-san?” Sanya asked the apparent college-girl teasingly.

“Have you noticed anybody here yet?” the eldest responded in a deadpan serious tone.

“That’s the Ni’s job,” the lolita ogre said, pointing to Yonjuu. “I’m just here to beat them up when we find them.”

“That’s a ‘no’,” Nimu decided as she turned toward the girl with the strong physical senses. “Have you noticed anything?”

“Not really,” Yonjuu said. “There’s a lot of fireworks and smoke in the air, hard to get a good scent of anybody in particular. It all just blends into a mess. I’ve been breathing through my mouth most of the time to avoid gagging.”

“You still didn’t answer the question, Nimu-ne-san,” Sanya reminded her in a sing-song voice.

“Yes,” Nimu said glumly. “I’m enjoying the festival.”

****

Tokijo wiped his forehead as he looked over his jury-rigged repairs on the strength test and breathed a sigh of relief. At least he'd get a good two or three more hours of operation before the crowds started to thin out.

And here was his first victim coming now.

A blonde gaijin teenager walking through the crowds with a kid who was carrying a big stuffed shark. Obviously he'd already had some luck at the carnival, which meant he'd be ripe to pluck.

"Excuse me, young man," he said, smirking. "Care to test your strength?"

A few minutes later Kojiko watched the blonde guy walk off with his prize and then looked toward his machine and the now clearly shorting out electromagnet. After that he looked toward the festival reps and police officers heading his way.

This was just not his night.

****

"Okay, everybody," a voice called out over the loudspeaker. "We're going to announce the winner of the 'guess how many skittles' contest in the next few minutes so get yourselves over here to find out if your guess is the correct one."

****

On one side of the festival, Yonjuu steepled her fingers together, smirking. I few quiet echos from her knocks on the side of the jar, with her ears against the glass and she had probably the most exact estimate of skittles of anybody.

"Okay, let's get this last thing over with and back on mission," Nimu said.

"What are we going to do with all the prize money?" Yonjuu wondered to herself.

"Is that the prize?" Sanya wondered. "I thought it was the candy."

****

In another area, Yaku simply wondered if her calculations were accurate. She thought they were, but it would have been better if she had another jar to compare it to. Oh well, she thought the numbers were still right, they usually worked well for her.

"What was the prize for that contest anyway?" Deimosu asked her.

"Some money," Yaku said in an aside as if that wasn't overly important.

****

"Okay, after the tally and the count," the cheerful speaker was saying as she waved at the crowd. "We've come to the astonishing conclusion that we have a tie for the most accurate guess."

"What?" Yonjuu said, surprised. "Who's going to be able to match my count?"

"Each of these guesses is an amazing two pieces off in their count. Yonjuu Ni at 3,789,546 and Yaku Go at 3,789,542," the speaker continued.

"I was wrong?" Yaku asked with a expression quite similar to the one she had worn when she missed almost all her ring tosses earlier.

"You were only off by two," Deimosu said. Though he was more concerned with the other name connected to the winning.

"The prize money collected from the booth entry fees will be split between both guessers," the hostess added. "So why don't both parties come up and get their prize money!"

"Well, I suppose it shall have to do," Yonjuu said in disappointment, not paying attention to the name of her competition.

Nimu lingered behind, frowning and eyes narrowed.

"What?" Sanya asked, looking back at their elder sister.

The what came clear as both groups stepped out in the open to collect their money.

"Everybody give them a hand!" the speaker said as both Yonjuu and Yaku started forward.

The three sisters and Deimosu stared across at each other as Yaku quite calmly walked up to the podium.

"Why was I wrong?" she asked the woman at the podium.

"Excuse me?" the woman asked bending down to the little girl.

"You said I was wrong by two," she said. "Why? I counted it all up."

"You're one of the winners?" the woman said.

"Yaku, it means 'benefit' which is something that helps a person," the girl said.

"Wow, you must be very smart!" the woman said, "here's your prize. Isn't this amazing, everybody, what a brilliant child here!"

The camera flashes that followed were the trigger for the action.

Yaku blinked at the cameras, waving a bit innocently as Deimosu moved forward to pick her up and the three sisters darted forward to try and grab her.

The confused event hostess could only blink as the five people left in varying degrees of speed, only to have one of the three teenaged girls return a minute later, grab the other envelope and bow.

"Thank you very much," Yonjuu said.

"Yonjuu, we're going to need you!" the oldest teen girl shouted back.

The girl, trying as much as possible to hide or minimize her generous chest, flashed a victory sign (or perhaps just the number 2) at the cameras and then dashed off.

****

"I swear, there was something freaky about that kid," Tokijo claimed. "He must have set me up before he had his try. Yeah, I bet he put that magnet in there and rigged it to fail."

"And he did this all in twenty seconds between you finishing repairs on your rig and your half-dragging him over to try it," one of the annoyed men in uniform suggested.

"But..."

"You have thirty minutes," one of the officers said. "If we see you in this festival after that time, you're going to jail."

Tokijo sighed in minute relief as the officers walked away, leaving him to pack up for the night. Maybe he'd be able to get a lawsuit out of this or something.

He barely turned about when a tall blonde figure rushed past him, barely registering the teen that had just got him kicked out of the festival, the man turned to rage at his nemesis, only to be flattened to the ground by a slim foot.

Looking up from his newly prone position, he caught sight of the youngest of the three sisters he'd tried to bilk later. The very same one that had just about splintered his rig. Groggily watching her through the concussion he watched her pick up his sledgehammer and light out after the boy.

And then two more sets of feet stomped into his back and onward.

****

Sanya leaped up with all her genetically enhanced might, trying to cut off Deimosu's retreat with their younger sister.

"You can't escape now that we've see you, little boy," Sanya shrieked. "Ohhh-HOHOHOHOHO!!"

As she landed Deimosu pulled the little girl out of the way, and then the hammer in her hand slammed down into the ground.

Over-balanced, she was too busy righting her to even be aware of Deimosu's response until she had the eerily elative feeling of weightlessness and the discovery that her feet were spinning over her shoulders fast enough to reproduce a moment of no gravity.

She had time to produce the thought "cool" before she slammed into, rather through, a nearby wall.

Then Deimosu was running again, Yaku on his back, clutching her stuffed shark

"Is she all right?" Yaku asked.

Deimosu glanced over his shoulder and winced, he hadn't thought he'd hit her that hard.

****

The younger of the three numbered huntresses wasn't seriously hurt, but she spent several seconds unburying herself before she could even stand unsteadily. From there she had to try to regain her sense of balance and direction. It was almost a minute before she was sure of even which direction she was facing, by that time the chase was well out of her line of sight.

Fortunately, the signs of passage were somewhat less mobile.

Nimu thought about moving ahead to cut off the fleeing young-man and their sister, but she didn't want to be seperate from Yonjuu. If Sanya was still with them, it would have been one thing, but the ogre of their group had already been left in the dust.

They passed by the stand with the weighted rings and Nimu veered by momentarily to grab a handful of the rings and then snatched at the lengths of rope tying down the tent with the display of toys.

Stuffed animals, sodas and more scattered over the stone road to the outcry of the scam artist as all sorts of children started grabbing and leaving off into the crowd.

Nimu, still running started working with the rings and ropes.

The first weighted rope came whizzing over Deimosu's head with a whine that minutely warned him of its approach in time to duck low and bring Yaku out of the path of the weapon.

He glanced back in time to do a quick backflip over the silent rope that was angling toward his legs.

Both the girls were pulling their weapons back, one more quickly than the other, and Deimosu realized that at least one of his pursuers wasn't just an untrained laboratory experiment.

Though as he watched the girl with the larger chest trying to reel in her rope clumisly, he was pretty sure that the training was only extensive for one of the two.

The hammer-girl certainly wasn't very well trained.

He continued leaping back out of the village towards the hills and forests around town

"Deimosu," Yaku said quietly.

"Just a second," the martial artist said as he deflected the rope again.

The weapons weren't strong enough to do much damage, but with the weights, they could trip him up if they got lucky, at least it would be luck in the one girl's case.

Another rope came in as the girls continued to chase him, not letting him get distance on them as they kept his eyes facing them.

As the rope came in again, Nimu quietly pulled some of the length in before swinging again. Stepping in front of Yonjuu momentarily to cover the other girl's less subtle movements to do the same. They'd gained yards on the blonde warrior doing this and keeping him distracted with their make-shift lassos.

In a little bit, they'd be in sprinting range.

Nimu was fixated on her plan and its execution and Yonjuu was likewise distracted by the effort of using the difficult rope weapon without making a mistake such that she was ignoring what her senses were trying to tell her about the direction they were heading.

Deimosu grimaced as he finally noticed that the girls had been coming closer to him and the girl he was protecting.

"Deimosu," Yaku said again, a bit more urgently.

In that moment the two girls zipped forward and Deimosu found himself first deflecting the competent flying kick by the elder of the two girls. She predictably recovered from the block ready to strike out, such that Deimosu could not out right take the second girl out of the fight completely without making Yaku vulnerable.

He could, however, step aside, leaping back to place the clumsy one between the lithe older one and him.

"Deimosu-san!" Yaku shouted again as they came to a landing and the blonde martial artist felt the gaping lack of solid ground behind him.

A cliff-side, of course, not much of a problem normally, but, it was just another limit to what he could do with the kid to take care of.

"We're not going to fall, don't worry," Deimosu said confidentally as he set her down next to a tree and stepped forward. "Don't move from there."

"Hai, Deimosu-san," Yaku said.

Nimu saw the young man stop for what seemed to be no reason for a few moments before her tunnel vision gave way and she saw the sheer slope just beyond the young man's position.

She stopped, her eyes wide, as she suddenly realized the precarious nature of their situation. They needed Yaku alive and ofr the most part unharmed. Severe head trauma from a fall was probably something that they definitely wanted to avoid.

Unfortunately, her younger sister, despite her various enhanced senses, hadn't exactly the same level of discipline.

Yonjuu stepped forward, trying to throw a kick up into Deimosu's head. From there it would be easy for the young man to toss the tracker out into space where she would likely land badly.

If she didn't die immediately, she'd still be too damaged for the Mistress to consider it worth repairing her.

Deimosu noticed the slender one stop even as the bouncier of the two lodged forward in a novice's roundhouse. He grabbed her foot incoming and could read the horror on the other girl's face, obviously predicting that he was about to send her comrade, probably sister, out into open air.

These weren't his enemies though, and that look of concern on the other woman's face said they probably weren't the evil sort that his mother would likely consider worth killing.

Instead of letting her momentum continue past him out into the sky to be dashed into whatever sort of landing she could manage, he pulled straight up slamming her hard into the ground, driving her senseless.

Deimosu still had hold of her leg as he stepped aside to shield Yaku more closely now that he was down to one opponent again.

Sanya followed the trail of casual and not so casual destruction into the trees and hills outside the city.

"Why are there always wild areas so near every city around here?" Sanya asked. "It's like right outside the cities there's a bunch of hidden wilderness hideaways everywhere, at least there are no dangling peaks."

As she was pondering this, Sanya San caught a glimpse of motion ahead of her in the trees and noted Yonjuu getting dashed heartless to the ground as Nimu came to a stop mysteriously.

"You didn't kill Yonjuu," the older girl said, trying to cover her relief with a cool professionalism. "For that I'll give you a choice. That girl is our sister, we want her back."

"And what happens to the 'material' when she goes back?" Deimosu asked.

Nimu's mouth twitched and she hesitated to answer.

Unfortunately, she didn't get the chance to.

"You're mine! Ohhh-HOHOHOHOHOHOHO!" a shrill voice called out from above the small group just before Sanya slammed into the ground.

The look of horror at approaching death returned to Nimu's face and Deimosu's as well as the overly strong girl shattered the edge of the cliff.

The martial artist scooped up Yaku even as the ground underneath them became a mass of pebbles, and simultaneously kicked the instrument of the accident backwards into her elder sister.

Again, Sanya flew back further than should have been possible for the strength of the push, knocking both her and Nimu clear of the crumbling.

Which still left Deimosu with Yonjuu and Yaku to consider in a cascade of rocks and no longer having a clear ground to leap away from.

He could feel Yaku clinging to his back as he held his hand out in a gesture to use something he knew little about and had little skill with: magic.

Nimu sat up watching her sisters and Deimosu tumble away with the cliff side. A brilliant flash of light washed outward, some reflected fragment of sunlight, perhaps, and the three were gone.

Dashing quickly to the edge she found curiously no sign of blood or battered bodies as she hopped carefully down the cliffside toward the settling rubble.

There was a tingling, tantalizing trace of power in the area, the young man wasn't just a martial artist it seemed. He had inborn power, it seemed.

"I...I didn't see that you were on a cliff," Sanya called from above. "Are they okay?"

Nimu looked up toward Sanya with narrowed eyes.

"The good news is they're probably alive," Nimu noted. "He teleported or something."

"Is there bad news?" Sanya asked.

"There's no telling where they went," Nimu said. "Because he used a gift to get them there."

****

It was dark, in all directions.

Yaku listened intently, eyes recovering from the bright flash, but coming only to darkness.

"Deimosu-san! My eyes aren't working," she said in a panic. "I can't see anything."

"It's just dark," Deimosu's voice said, and a comforting hand laid down on her shoulder. "Give me a moment."

"You sound tired," Yaku said nervously, something in the back of her mind was giving an explanation, but it wasn't coming as clear as other secrets did.

The sudden crackling sound of electricity made Yaku jump as Deimosu's face, grey from fatigue, appeared out of the darkness limned in the subtle blue light of the electricity gathered in his hand.

Around them were brick walls extending on into the blackness in either direction and at their feet lay the still unconscious form of one of the three sisters that had chased them out of the festival.

"Are you all right?" Deimosu asked Yaku.

The little girl nodded, biting her lip firmly.

"Try not to be scared, we should be fine," Deimosu assured her.

"I'm not scared," Yaku said firmly.

Echoing down through the dark corridors they found themselves in, a harsh and shrill cry passed by them.

Yaku jumped and grabbed tight to Deimosu's side, who had to thrust his electrified hand upward to avoid it touching the girl.

"What's that?" Yaku asked.

"Wind somewhere," Deimosu said, hiding his own doubt at that explanation.

Yonjuu remained thankfully unconscious for the moment...