Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Well," said Kanzeon Bosatsu as se leaned hir hip against the arm of Nataku's throne. "They certainly have made good time. I expected it to take them ten years, to tell you the truth, if they made it at all. There've been days when I've been tempted to get behind that Jeep and push."

When Kanzeon Bosatsu let a witticism fall from hir lips, all of Heaven laughed. It was safer that way, though even the gods found it difficult to be certain when hir remarks were meant to be pointed or frivolous. As a result smiles followed hir wherever se went, and se thought that might be why so many people, gods and mortals alike, confused mercy with compassion. Kindness and compassion were deserving of smiles, but mercy was a different creature entirely.

Nataku didn't smile. He didn't move at all, and most people would find an excuse to edge away with the Goddess of Mercy so close. He simply stared straight ahead, dusty blue eyes sightless and dull, no life at all in his face.

"Hmm...I suppose it's too much to ask that you'd care about that, though. Right, Nataku?" Kanzeon asked with a smile, cocking hir head a little to the left as se studied the boy on the throne. "You don't have to care about anything at all. Pretty enviable, even for a kid. But then, you've never had to worry about seeing your friends die, have you? You were already like this when it happened."

Se paused, giving him the chance to turn away, to tell hir that he didn't have friends or hadn't known they were his for the taking--to do anything at all but sit there like a doll. When not even an eyelash flickered, se sighed and rose. Coming around to the front of the throne, se planted hir hands on hir hips and leaned over, meeting him eye to unseeing eye.

"You can dream your life away, Nataku, but you need to know something. It's still life. You make your own choices, and you'll have to live with the consequences. Are you sure you can afford any more regrets?"

The echoes of hir words died quickly in the heavy silence, as if the walls themselves were tired of the sound of hir voice, the only voice they had heard for five hundred years. Regarding the slight, still figure expectantly, Kanzeon couldn't see anything different in the expressionless face, the near-abandoned slump of Nataku's narrow shoulders, but it was something beyond the visible that se was waiting for. A flicker of consciousness, of intent, the weight of presence beyond the porcelain mask. There was almost something, a flutter there and gone, insubstantial as breath. It could have been hir imagination, but the imagination of a god was mostly truth that hadn't happened yet.

Reaching out slowly, se brushed aside the fringe of Nataku's long bangs with the edge of one perfect nail. Silvery-gray, Natatku's hair made him look like a little old man from behind, like one of the spry mountain gods, wise beyond his years.

"Even I don't know everything," se said softly, dropping hir hand to brace both of them on hir knees. "But I like to think that you can hear me, wherever you are. Maybe you're even upset that I don't come to visit you more often. Should I make up for that, Nataku? I'll feel guilty if I don't. So I think I'll stay right here. For a good, long while."

There. If coaxing didn't work, anger didn't move him, and outright bribery fell on deaf ears, perhaps sheer frustration would do the trick.

Kanzeon Bosatsu's smile was equal parts cunning and innocence, understanding and sheer, stubborn bloody-mindedness.

"I don't suppose you'd be interested in gossip, so why don't I tell you what's going on in the world below? I think you'll like this story. It's got everything: danger, true love, and daring deeds...and lots and lots of fighting. It's a true story, though, so I hope you won't mind if characters get killed off. It happens sometimes, right, Nataku? Anyway, it starts like this. Once upon a time, on the way to India...."

Goku ducked a roundhouse kick, leaned right as claws flashed out, and made very sure to knock the wind out of Kougaiji before he could finish the summoning he was chanting under his breath. Which was fun--almost nobody could spar one-on-one with Goku these days--but not nearly as fun as it should have been. There was something off about Kougaiji today, and it wasn't just the man's quietly torn expression. Kougaiji's attacks came hard and fast, but they were all drive and no planning, a series of good beginnings with no follow-through. Goku could tell he didn't have Kougaiji's full attention either, and that was dangerous. Kougaiji was strong, but Goku was stronger. Unless Kougaiji gave him all he had, what was the point?

The others--Lirin and Yaone and Dokugakuji--were acting weird too, paying more attention to their leader than to their opponents. It was pissing Sanzo off, Goku could tell--Sanzo might actually shoot Lirin this time for real--but he'd bet they were all feeling it. This wasn't a good fight. He didn't know why this was so, but he knew he didn't like it.

"Hey," he said, scrambling back and then darting in again, his fist blocked at the last second by braced arms. Loose shale skidded out from under his feet, and a far-off rumble reminded him that avalanches liked the way they fought. A lot. "What's up with you today? This isn't like you."

For an instant he knew he had Kougaiji's full attention, something like embarrassment but closer to guilt flaring in eyes that focused only on him. One corner of Kougaiji's mouth quirked up faintly, but the smile died before it could really take hold.

"How many times do I have to remind you that we're not friends?" Kougaiji asked resignedly. "And anyway, what makes you think anything's wrong?"

Sanzo always said that if you were stupid enough to ask, you were stupid enough to hear the answer--or was that brave enough? It tended to change from question to question.

"Sorry, Kougaiji, but you're usually better than this," he said sheepishly, and this time his fist caught the youkai square on the jaw.

Kougaiji's head snapped back, but though he staggered, he was steady again a moment later, only shaking his head briefly. Wiping away the blood from his split lip with the back of his hand, Kougaiji gave a cold, rueful smile and didn't wince at all.

"Well, if you think I'm going easy on you--"

"No," Goku offered, "it's not that. You've just got other things on your mind. But you know, if you were fighting Sanzo," he added, cocking thumb and forefinger into a gun, "he'd have got you in the knees by now for neglecting him."

A shot did ring out just then, followed by a piercing, accusatory shriek of: "Hey, Droopy! That's cheating!"

"Will you watch where you're aiming that thing?" Gojyo added testily, his half-brother muttering agreement.

Kougaiji actually chuckled, soft and half a sigh, and shook his head. Goku asked himself what Sanzo would do in this situation--then changed his mind and asked himself what Hakkai would do--but before he could make a guess, a bad thought hit him all at once.

"Uh...you're not...you know. In any trouble 'cause we made it this far...are you?"

Kougaiji's smile vanished, his face grave as his fighting stance faltered then eased. "That doesn't matter. You'll be too late anyway. This is just...busy work," he said, his face contorting momentarily with distaste.

Goku blinked, rocking back on his heels without noticing. "Huh? What do you mean?"

Kougaiji hesitated only a moment before giving an uncomfortable half-shrug. "It seems we never needed the fifth sutra. The four we collected already were enough," he began, which caught Sanzo's attention in a heartbeat. Lirin happened to be charging him at the time, but when Sanzo spun to stare at Kougaiji, it took him out of her path.

Robbed of the resistance she'd expected, Lirin's momentum left her overextended, and she would have fallen flat on her face if Sanzo hadn't grabbed the scruff of her collar on sheer reflex as she passed. Once he realized he'd done it, he dropped the girl immediately, but Lirin was back on her feet by then, staring at her brother in wary consternation.

"Are you sure we're supposed to tell?" she asked worriedly. "I thought that was a secret."

"It doesn't matter," Kougaiji repeated quietly. "My father will be returning soon, and then my mother will be free."

"Your mother?" Goku echoed, wondering how they'd gone three years without knowing this much about a--about someone who claimed not to be a friend. He was vaguely aware of weapons dropping out of position, all eyes turning their way, so he supposed he wasn't the only one taken by surprise.

Kougaiji looked almost embarrassed for a moment, but he squared his shoulders and raised his chin, wearing his certainty like a crown. "I'm sorry. You're right. I'm not fighting my best today. I owe you that much, at least, since this will be the last time."

"Hey, hey!" Gojyo protested, his offended voice loud in the narrow confines of the pass. "Don't go all cocky on us now--we're not done here yet!"

"I don't mean to belittle you," Kougaiji assured him, courteous to the end. "I simply mean that I won't be taking Gyokumen's orders after this."

"Excuse me?"

Goku was with Sanzo. Someone had been holding out on them, and that just wasn't right.

Kougaiji actually looked lost for a moment, as if their confusion was outlandish to him, or as if it had simply never occurred to him that anyone might not know this story already. So maybe it wasn't really a secret then, which made it okay. Goku knew how that felt, to be so close to something it filled your entire vision, something you couldn't imagine your life without.

Shaking himself a moment later, Kougaiji said simply, "My mother was cursed over five hundred years ago. When her curse is lifted, my obligation to that...woman will be done."

No one had to ask which woman he meant. Kougaiji had never put that much venom into anything before, not that Goku had ever heard, at least. Whatever else Gyokumen might be good at, inspiring loyalty in her people apparently wasn't on the list.

There was only one thing bugging Goku.

"What about your dad?"

It was weird to see Kougaiji's eyes go that cold again and know the guy was still in his right mind. "That depends entirely on him. If he chooses his whore over his wife, then he is not my father."

That rang in the stillness for a bit, and a quick glance around showed a silent ring of faces whose expressions ranged from nervousness to impressed speculation. Gojyo's brother was one of the nervous ones, and by the way he rubbed at the back of his neck--just like Gojyo--anyone could tell that he'd be much more comfortable fighting. Maybe that was for Gojyo's sake, only Gojyo was the one looking at Kougaiji like maybe he'd been underestimating the guy all along.

Dokugaku cleared his throat, his eyes jittering briefly towards his brother's without ever quite connecting. "Uh, Kou--"

"Excuse me," Hakkai's soft voice interrupted, "but...can you really trust this woman to keep her promise?"

"If she doesn't," Kougaiji said harshly, "then she'll become my enemy as well."

Goku opened his mouth to offer their help--surely the others would agree; it was for Kougaiji's mother, after all--when Sanzo's derisive snort choked the words in his throat. Sanzo's mouth had twisted into a sneer, but his eyes were knowing, almost chiding.

"Don't be an idiot," Sanzo said, and Goku winced in sympathy at Kougaiji's flinch. "If you could have fought her and won, you'd have done that from the very beginning. Why don't you tell us why you're suddenly so eager to die, instead?"

Sanzo's words were meant to sting, and they apparently struck in all the right places. Kougaiji had gone stiff with fury, and at Sanzo's scornful question, he flared up all at once, clenched fists quivering at his sides. "Because she's my mother! Don't you understand that?"

"No," Sanzo shot back, his voice chipped from pure ice. "I don't. I was pulled out of the river by my master the day after I was born. He raised me, not my mother...at least until your people killed him for the Seiten Sutra. Perhaps you've seen it lying around somewhere."

Oh, and that was bad--it had hurt Sanzo to say it, Goku knew that, but he thought it hurt Kougaiji to hear it, too. Kougaiji was silenced now, anyway, maybe shamed, but at least he was listening.

Sanzo left him to stew for a long moment, his calculated smirk not masking the old pain shadowing his eyes as he let Kougaiji's inner demons do the talking. From the look on Kougaiji's face, they weren't just talking, they were shouting.

"Well," Sanzo said at last, his voice as self-mocking as it was sarcastic, "you're right. I don't understand. From my experience, blood doesn't mean a fucking thing. It's the people who choose to be your family that matter, not some coincidence of karma. So why don't you tell me about this mother of yours, Kougaiji? Make me understand. What's worth all this? And what's so wrong with her that the four of you can't fix it?"

Sanzo's voice never failed to amaze Goku. It could start out flaying you, hateful and cruel, and then go so reasonable, so understanding, you knew without a doubt that no matter what you said in return, whatever truth you revealed, there was at least one person in the world who would listen to it without judging you. That was what Kougaiji was hearing now, Goku was sure of it, because while the anger didn't fade entirely, it was the truth he gave Sanzo in reply.

"It's a curse of stone. I can see her...I can almost touch her, but...."

Something shifted just then, all the tension of before returning as Sanzo and Hakkai exchanged looks, both of their faces going grim. Kougaiji wasn't blind. His eyes flicked between them sharply, the rest of his explanation dying in his throat. "What?" he managed warily, and Sanzo tossed Hakkai another glance, its meaning as clear as day.

You tell him.

"Do you mean that...she was sealed in stone, or...?" Hakkai asked diffidently, his voice plainly dreading the answer.

"Sealed and transformed," Kougaiji bit out, scowling dangerously. "Why?"

Sanzo looked away, swearing, which left it to Hakkai to explain. Goku didn't think it was cowardice on Sanzo's part. It was just that Hakkai was a million times better at telling people what they didn't want to hear in the nicest way possible.

"How...much do you know about the effects of forbidden magic?"

"Just tell him already," Sanzo growled.

Hakkai shot him a quelling look, but a glance at Kougaiji's face seemed to convince him that Sanzo had the right idea.

"The mixture of science and youkai magic is forbidden because it upsets the balance in the natural flow of energy. The effects may seem small at first, but that's because matter is slower to change than energy. What too few people realize is that energy and matter are inextricably combined. Magic, on the other hand, while commonly considered supernatural energy, still follows a set pattern of principles, and those principles are in balance with the natural world.

"That includes curses, I'm sorry to say," Hakkai added, his voice terribly sympathetic as he watched Kougaiji's face pale.

"Hakkai," Yaone began firmly, casting a worried glance at her prince. "What exactly are you saying?"

"It's simple, I'm afraid. If Gyumaoh's resurrection is successful, at the moment of completion, there should be a very strong shift in the energy of this world, strong enough to disrupt any magic in the area."

"And?" Kougaiji ground out through clenched teeth.

It was Sanzo who answered him, with the uninflected confidence of someone who spoke from knowledge, not theory. "A curse of stone traps the life and soul of the victim in a kind of stasis. If that stasis is broken before the curse is--if you break up the stone, or drain out the curse's energy--then there won't be anything in there but a big pile of rock."

"But how do you know this?" Yaone demanded, angry and defiant and warning them, fiercely, that if they were wrong or lying, they were all dead.

Goku wished they were wrong, but Sanzo wouldn't lie about something like that, and neither would Hakkai.

He just couldn't believe neither of them was seeing the obvious.

"Hey, Sanzo...why don't you break the curse for them? I mean, I know it's old," he said hurriedly as everybody turned to stare at him, "but so was the seal that kept me in that cave, and I've always kinda thought that a god made that one. Me being stuck in the cave--it's like a curse of stone, isn't it?"

"This guy can break a god's seal?" Dokugaku asked incredulously after a moment, shattering the silence that fell over the pass.

"Sure he can!" Goku said enthusiastically, beaming with pride . "He's Sanzo."

Kougaiji's laughter, harsh and humorless, startled them all. His expression had gone all weird, too, realization and regret mixed with an inward-turned fury, like he was beating himself up inside for not noticing this sooner. "Of course," Kougaiji muttered, shaking his head. "Of course he is. He's a Sanzo, and Sanzos break curses. Only it's too late to beg this of you, isn't it?"

"Oh, begging Sanzo never works," Hakkai said lightly, probably hoping to ease the mood...only it was Gojyo Hakkai was looking at, not Goku, and Gojyo elbowed him in the side with a grimace.

Goku didn't really think Sanzo would say no until he did.

"Yeah. It is too late," Sanzo said bluntly, "at least if what you're saying about this resurrection shit is true. On the other hand, if you can get us into Houtou Castle in time to stop it, anything's possible."

"Of course," Kougaiji repeated, a fixed, bleak smile contorting his mouth. "And naturally you expect us to fight alongside you."

The look Sanzo gave him was considering, but then one corner of Sanzo's mouth curved up in a smirk, and it was pure challenge. "Well, if you feel you have to, no one's stopping you, but you'll be busy breaking a curse...won't you?"

"Don't you think I would have if I could? I know more about magic than any five masters--"

"But what you know is five hundred years out of date," Sanzo interrupted, giving him the look Goku and Gojyo had both come to take for granted. You know this; why am I wasting breath telling you? "You don't know the counter to the curse because no one used to use it. Now it's almost as popular as boils and impotence."

"Gods."

"There are charms hung up all around her, right?" Sanzo asked, and he didn't look surprised when Kougaiji's entire party nodded as one. "The ink's mixed with the caster's blood. Obliterate the characters on the charms with the same blood, and the curse is broken. It doesn't even take a Sanzo."

"Gyokumen," Kougaiji growled, his shoulders straightening as clear, concrete hope fired his eyes.

"Or anyone of her blood," Sanzo added, glancing meaningfully down at Lirin. "It's already diluted in the ink. A little more doesn't make any difference."

That seemed to shock Kougaiji into thinking twice. "No," he said instantly, with all the authority of the old Kougaiji. "Lirin's not going back there."

"But I could help!" she protested, her chin sticking out just as mulishly as her brother's.

"Absolutely not. That bastard Ni wants you for something, and I'm not letting him get his hands on you."

"But your mother--"

"I said no, Lirin."

"But Kou," Lirin said, her small fists clenching, "if I don't break her curse, she won't need to love me."

Kougaiji's lips parted, but his words got lost along with his breath, his brows furrowing over eyes gone wide and shocked with understanding. "Oh, Lirin. I didn't even think...."

"That's okay," Lirin said with courageous cheer. "I want her back for you, anyway."

Kougaiji flinched, and then he was shaking his head, his stunned paralysis broken. "Idiot sister," he said, sounding just like Sanzo only a hundred times more gentle. "I didn't think about it, because I already knew. Of course she's going to love you," he said, his long legs taking him to Lirin's side in only a few strides. Reaching down, he took her fists in his hands, meeting her anxious gaze with a solemn smile. "She has to love you. You're my sister."

Giving him a watery grin, Lirin leaned into her brother and hugged him fiercely when he let go of her hands. Setting his own palms on her shoulders, Kougaiji smiled down at her and then up at the rest of them, all his old confidence returned with interest.

"Well?" he asked, eyeing each of them with a challenge of his own. "Are you ready to enter the castle?"

Goku knew it was probably supposed to be a quiet and serious moment, the sort that got talked about right before all the best parts of stories. He just couldn't help himself.

Letting out a triumphant whoop, he punched his fist into the air with a grin, laughing when the others grinned with him. Finally, finally, finally, they were going.

"In that case, I just gotta do one thing first," Gojyo said suddenly, smirking from ear to ear. Before anyone could ask or maybe dodge, Gojyo had both his hands around Hakkai's face, ignoring Hakkai's startled gasp and Sanzo's derisive snort, and dove in to kiss Hakkai within an inch of his life.

Shameless as ever. The perverted kappa.

"Aw, man...is my baby brother old enough to know about that shit?" Dokugaku grumbled plaintively, snickering when Gojyo gave him the finger without stopping what he was doing.

"Bite me," Gojyo added when he came reluctantly up for air, though he might have been saying it to Hakkai. In that tone of voice, who knew?

Goku glanced sideways at Sanzo, but Sanzo just snorted and ruffled Goku's hair without looking at him. Which...actually was enough, because it was Sanzo and because it was them, and anyway, Goku knew what it meant. All things considered, he might even have let Sanzo get away with it.

But he didn't.

Ni Jianyi spun his chair lazily about when he heard the door snick open behind him, a cigarette smoldering forgotten between his lips. Lady Gyokumen's presence probably required him to get to his feet at the very least, maybe with a bit of bowing and scraping to go along with it, but he'd never concerned himself much with keeping up appearances. She swept in trailing a cloud of silk, more of it than usual but concealing less, and he let his eyes wander appreciatively as she approached.

"Well? Have you finished the preparations?" she asked, her autocratic tone expecting no surprises. That was what passed for politeness with her: giving you the benefit of the doubt instead of warning you of the consequences. Still, it wasn't like he didn't deserve a little politeness. After all, he'd never failed her yet.

"Everything's set," he said, leaning back in his chair so he didn't have to tilt his head that far, smirking up at her as she came to stand by his shoulder. She was tall for a woman of either race, what they'd call 'statuesque' if she were a bit homelier. She was stunning, though, and half of her arrogant confidence was in how thoroughly she knew it. "The machinery's all been double-checked, and the spells have been in place since this morning. It just needs the final invocation, and all systems are go."

"And my beloved will be returned to me," Gyokumen finished, her eyes devouring the gargantuan figure half-obscured by hoses and wires.

Ni's snort went unnoticed or ignored. Perhaps she mistook it for a grunt of agreement. It didn't matter either way to him, no more than he cared whether she believed the crap she chanted like a mantra. It wasn't love that drove Gyokumen to these lengths; it was ambition, pure and simple. However modern she prided herself in being, part of her would always be the frustrated girl of five hundred years ago, helpless to reach for the reins with the weak hands of a woman. Having found the most powerful man in Shangri-La and bound him to her, she'd be damned if she let a little thing like death put her back down in the dirt where she'd come from. It was almost a pity that she'd never understood she already had all the authority she needed.

On the other hand, if she'd been that wise, he'd have been bored as hell.

"There's still room for error," he reminded her, nodding towards the table--damn near an altar, really--set up before what he liked to call the Shrine. Gyumaoh's bulk overshadowed the human-sized workstations and banks of equipment that surrounded him, but the four scrolls laid out at Gyumaoh's feet were far more impressive to the discerning eye. "Without the Maten Sutra, we can't be completely certain our translations were correct."

Which pissed him off, honestly, and very little in this world had that power. He wasn't used to secrets. He was too observant, smarter than his supposed peers by untold orders of magnitude, and all the knowledge of heaven and earth had been his for the taking from the first moment he opened his eyes. That four scraps of antique scribbling could resist his scrutiny for even an hour was fucking insulting.

That they could do it for thirteen years...that wasn't just an insult; that was a thrown gauntlet, a slap in the face. He'd worn one of those Sutras years ago, and some days he couldn't even pick that particular scroll out of the pile. They were hiding things from him, and he didn't like it. All he wanted was to get to the absolute center of things, the stark core of Truth that all knowledge dribbled out from, but how was he supposed to do that if he couldn't even master his own library?

Sometimes he wanted to single out the Sutra that had been his, hold it up in front of the others, and tear it calmly and deliberately down the center. Make an example of it. Not that it would stay torn for long, but it was the thought that counted.

"So confident, Ni?" Gyokumen asked, her lips curving faintly as she glanced down at him. "And I thought you'd sworn we deciphered the texts properly."

"Oh, no, my Lady," he returned with a winning smile. "I don't think I'd have been so foolish as to swear. Not in so exalted a presence, anyway. No, I said I was reasonably certain that our translation was correct, and I'm still reasonably certain now. Having the Maten Sutra would make me one hundred percent convinced."

Not that he was one hundred percent convinced of that, but what Gyokumen didn't know couldn't give him a headache.

She was so much easier to humor with her ankles riding his spine.

Her eyes narrowed as he watched, her mouth turning down in a moue of frustration, but it was only because he was watching her so closely that he caught the flicker of uncertainty that marred her hauteur. "No," she said slowly, "it's not worth the effort of retrieving it. That priest's little party may be close at hand, but dealing with them now would take too much of our resources."

It'd empty the castle, she meant. Ni said nothing, pasting an attentive smile on his face. Something told him he'd be seeing that group in person soon, and he was looking forward to it. After all the stories he'd heard about Koumyou's student, he couldn't wait to meet Genjyo Sanzo now. That kid had come a long way from the last time Ni had seen him, sweeping the temple paths and being hit on by Ni's own pupil. Even back then, that guy had been a sour-faced little ice princess. It was almost comforting to know that some things really didn't ever change.

Gyokumen shook herself suddenly, blinking away her distracted thoughts with a tightening of her lips. "Never mind. The priest can wait, and our translations have worked thus far, so they must be correct."

"We did go with what made the most sense," Ni offered, which could sound like agreement if you wanted it to.

"Then we continue. Assemble your people; it's time my lover returned."

"Sure thing," he said, and though she'd half-turned to sweep out again, something made her pause and toss a considering smile over her shoulder.

"Hmm...you won't get above yourself when Lord Gyumaoh is restored, will you?" she asked sweetly, her eyes glittering with memory.

Because he'd been fucking her for years; that was what she meant, he supposed. "Not me. Rewards come to the deserving, though, right? And I've been waiting to take care of a few personnel issues. It looks like I've got someone under me in need of discipline...with my Lady's permission, of course."

"Oh?" Gyokumen asked, amused. "Well, how you handle your subordinates is your concern, Ni. I'm sure Professor Hwan will benefit from your personal attention."

"Oh, I think I could teach her a thing or two," he drawled, grinning complacently, and the grin didn't fade even after she left the room.

He wasn't an idiot. He knew she intended to have him killed after the revival was complete, canny enough to remove the potential for blackmail before it became a threat. He also wasn't worried. Money and power only interested him as means to an end, and he'd never be so stupid as to fall to an assassin. He'd stick it out to the finish, as eager as Gyokumen to see the results of their work, if for vastly different reasons. He liked a good puzzle, and this one had kept him interested for more than a dozen years. He wanted to see how it ended, one step closer to an understanding of a Truth he only half believed in.

Or, failing that...how many other men could say that they'd destroyed a world before they were forty?

"Okay," Gojyo said, shaking his head sharply to clear it, "that was weird."

When Kougaiji had offered to whisk them off to his castle, he'd thought: 'Great, it's about time.' Because it used to really piss him off, watching those four disappear into thin air, back to the comforts of civilization in the blink of an eye while the four of them were still slogging through some trackless wasteland. All right, and having his smirking, asshole brother waggle his fingers in a prissy goodbye every now and then hadn't helped.

Now that he'd tried it, he figured he owed Dokugaku a beer. You had to hand it to a guy who could have his body turned inside-out on a regular basis and still make other people envious of the fact.

With his skin feeling uncomfortably tight and his head ringing like there was too much space between his ears--a thought he wasn't even tempted to share with the others--he firmly told his stomach to remember this feeling the next time it decided it wanted to part ways and took a look around.

His first impression of the place was: 'big.' Not just big on the order of Sanzo's dusty old temple being big--big like the palace of the Three Aspects was big. Probably. Not that he'd ever been there. And not that he'd want to, thank you very much, one moment of insanity six years back when he'd considered going after the late Cho Gonou aside.

Big like an emperor lived here, or like the architect had been building on something other than a human scale. Or a youkai scale, for that matter.

Kougaiji had apparently brought them in via the servants' entrance, though, because the long hall was dim and empty-looking, and not from a lack of ornamentation. Ornamentation it had, in spades. It just didn't look like it had seen many visitors.

"This is as close as I could bring you," Kougaiji said, scanning the area with a fine tremor of eagerness shivering through him. He looked like a dog about to have its collar slipped, and Gojyo hoped it wouldn't make him careless. "If you go down this hall and turn left, you'll see two guards posted by the far door. Through the door is a set of stairs leading down to the labs. It's a maze down there, but all you have to do is keep going straight. Don't take any of the side halls. When you reach a door marked 'Regulation Room,' you've found what you're looking for. The sutras are usually there too," he added, glancing at Sanzo, who nodded.

"Understood."

"Good luck," Hakkai offered, "all of you. I hope we can meet again when this is all over."

"Yeah! I wanna meet your mom, Kougaiji," Goku enthused, and Gojyo grinned to himself, wondering if the shrimp wanted to find out if she was as tough as her kid. "She must be a pretty neat person. And anyway, you owe me a rematch. Friendly this time, okay?"

"I...I'd like that," Kougaiji said, startled but not offended. If he'd been a girl, Gojyo would have said he looked charmed.

Monkey's taken, he almost said, until someone clapped a heavy paw on his shoulder.

"Hmph. Still my little brother," Dokugaku said from the lofty height of the inch--maybe half an inch--he still had on Gojyo. "At least you had the sense to hook up with a healer."

"Yeah, well, I promised myself I'd die in bed--it's just going to take longer this way," Gojyo shot back with a sneer for show. "What about you?"

"Oh, I'm not planning on dying anytime soon," Dokugaku said, which wasn't what he'd asked but answered him anyway. The dumbshit had promised himself he'd die for his prince if it came down to it, Gojyo would bet money on it, and if today happened to be that day, then at least one of them would be satisfied.

"Make sure you don't," he said gruffly. "I owe you a beer, and I hate not paying my debts."

"Please take care of yourself as well," Yaone was saying, bowing respectfully to Hakkai, and just this once, there weren't any shadows in her eyes at all. She looked genuinely happy for Hakkai, as if they weren't all about to go tripping off to their dooms, and Hakkai's cheeks had gone just the littlest bit pink.

Suspicious. Very suspicious. But pretty okay, too.

"Thank you, and please do the same. Perhaps we could discuss medicine sometime, if you'd be interested...."

"Byyyye, Sanzo! Don't forget you promised me meat buns! Heeey...can you cook?"

"Damn stupid brat."

"Eww," Goku warned, waving his arms and shaking his head in negation. "Don't ask, Lirin--you don't want to know what he does to his ramen."

Sanzo curled his lip and scowled, which meant he was still in a pretty good mood. "Tch. If you idiots are through, can we get moving? The longer we stand around here, the more likely someone will notice we're here."

It was hard to argue with that, though Gojyo would usually try on general principle. If he didn't give Sanzo a hard time, Sanzo would think Gojyo didn't love him anymore.

So it was down the hall and to the left, but there were a lot more than two guards there, and they were all dressed up in their parade best, armor and weapons gleaming. Fuck. "Somebody's getting overconfident," he muttered as he ducked back around the corner, throwing an arm out when Goku would have walked past him. "They've called out the fucking honor guard to welcome Daddy home."

"How many?" Sanzo asked calmly, like he was offering to deal out a hand of cards.

"Eh, you know. Only forty or so," Gojyo said with a grin and a shrug. "It's all the shiny I'm worried about--I'll probably go blind from all the polish in that room."

Sanzo snorted. "What good will that do? We're the ones that have to look at you."

"Prick," Gojyo said, but he was grinning. Why not?

"Well, it's a pity we can't do this quietly," Hakkai said, taking a cautious peek of his own around the edge of the wall, "but a mere forty or fifty won't...hmm."

Okay, now that was bad. Hakkai humming was always bad--well, okay, not always-always, but humming to himself in that thoughtful way that meant any reasonable person would be giving his expletives a workout? That was bad.

"C'mon," Gojyo prodded, "don't keep us in suspense. What?"

"Well...I admit it's difficult to judge distance and scale in a place like this, and perhaps I'm wrong, but...don't the guards seem a bit...oversized to you?"

This time all three of them peeked out. It wasn't just Hakkai.

"Okay, that was freaky."

"Hmph. Probably bred for size, not brains."

"Yeah, but bigger doesn't have to mean stronger, right, Sanzo?"

"Ah. So it wasn't my imagination." Hakkai shrugged as if it didn't bother him, but Gojyo was pretty sure it did. All hope of doing this quietly had just gone down the drain. Any brawl they started here was going to bring the whole castle down on their heads, and while that would be fine ordinarily, they were on something of a schedule here. Problem was, no one had given them the exact deadline.

"So?" he asked, looking at the others with a game shrug. "How do we want to do this?"

Hakkai glanced at Goku, then at Sanzo, where his eyes remained. Goku never looked anywhere else.

Sanzo drew his gun.

"Same way we always do," the crazy priest said, thumbing back the safety. "Straight ahead until none of them are standing."

It might not be much of a plan, but even Gojyo had to admit that it was great for morale.

"So...on three?" Hakkai offered, and Goku's grin ate up his face while Sanzo nodded in time with Gojyo.

"Fine."

"I got nothing better to do."

"All right. One--"

"Lady Gyokumen!" they heard, joined by the gallop of racing feet as someone from the main hallway burst into the vaulted room beyond. "Someone alert Lady Gyokumen! Prince Kougaiji is attempting to break Lady Rasetsunyo's curse!"

"Three," Sanzo growled, and they left the safety of the hall as one.

The noise was deafening. Machinery churned crazily, vapor escaping in hissing plumes of steam as engines heated and burned, the scent of ozone choking the air like smoke. The spells at full charge made their own cacophony depending on their focus: deep, bone-jarring hums for those associated with earth and the flesh, air a screaming whine as it tried to fill unmoving lungs with breath, water sizzling thickly like blood on an open flame. The chant forced out in Gyokumen's clear soprano scraped against the din, made strident by the effort of hearing her own voice over the howling in the room.

As Gyokumen stood before the altar, raising her hands in entreaty before the Shrine, Ni watched from the command center, ignoring the dials that twitched and spun before him. Professor Hwan was diving madly from bank to bank, adjusting levers, trying to balance the power, and she shoved him hard to push him out of her way without a word. The crackling light jittering off her glasses made her tense expression look a little insane, and he supposed he looked like that himself right now, except that he was calm, standing with his rabbit tucked under his arm and a smile on his lips.

This was it, the end of everything or a window onto the Truth, the cycle of rebirth busted beyond repair or the start of a new world where destiny and karma were things of the past. He'd learn something either way, so he wouldn't leave here disappointed.

"Come to me!" Gyokumen shrieked at the end of her chant, her voice hoarse and raw from spitting out the harsh syllables of the invocation. "Come to me, my beloved! Take up your body and your name and live again!"

He only had the chattering pulse from the master panel to warn him of what was coming. Animal instinct wanted him to turn and hunker down, but his will kept him standing upright, a barrier raised at the last second as the banks of machinery exploded around him, sparks and flames like sheet lightning crackling from the overloaded equipment. Professor Hwan screamed piercingly as she was tossed back, her skin seared black and red where an explosion had caught her full in the face as she leaned over a panel. When her hands clutched instinctively at her cheeks, she went slack with pain and crumpled unconscious to the floor. Her hair was on fire, he noted with mild interest, and he wondered if she'd wake up before it blistered her scalp. Maybe she'd go into shock and die instead.

Gyokumen didn't turn from the Shrine, hadn't seemed to notice the wreckage at her back at all. The apparatus surrounding Gyumaoh was nearly incandescent, magic and machinery straining to contain the energy pouring in. Bright whips of power stuttered and snapped, gathered reluctantly in as the forces summoned were bent to an adamant will. The vast bulk of Gyumaoh was mostly obscured, but Ni could feel the knotting together of the two powers, magic and science, and could just imagine what it was doing to the reformed body in the stasis capsule. As it built to a blinding peak, he thought he could sense something else as well, a breath of air from a land far beyond--gone utterly beyond--somewhere dusty, dim and sunless.

Then everything exploded in a flash, and he even he had to close his eyes, one hand shielding his face despite the barrier he'd erected.

Something popped loudly as the light died, and he heard a loose, wobbling scream as some vital piece of equipment failed with a bang, its engine winding down and clanging like a metal lid dropped on a stone floor. The spells surrounding the shrine cut themselves loose from their moorings with their purpose fulfilled, fading out with a series of breathless, open-mouthed death rattles that left the room cold. Or maybe that coldness was emanating from the figure inside the Shrine, machinery peeling off it like a metal snake shedding its skin.

"My love," Gyokumen rasped from the floor where she'd been knocked sprawling, shaking her long hair from her face and tipping her head back with a dizzy bonelessness. "My...love?"

Ni couldn't see her face, but he could just picture her surprise.

Freed of the immense capsule, Gyumaoh stood as tall as four men, each of his palms as big as a shield, his feet like small boats. His shaggy black hair, coarse as a horse's tail, fell into his face in lank tangles like a weedy riverbank. In his prime, his stature and bulked muscle would have made him seem more than godlike. His people would have seen his dragon-like claws and wondered.

The only thing anyone would be wondering about him now is why his corpse had been so uncouth as to refuse burial.

"What...how is this possible?" Gyokumen breathed, horror and revulsion sharpening her voice. "The process was a success...I don't understand."

Success? Ni had his doubts about that. A success would have resulted in a shockwave of negative energy that made the so-called 'Minus Wave' look like a ripple on a still pond. His barrier would have fallen at the very least, the entire overly-magical Houtou Castle along with it at the worst. No, no...at the worst he'd be explaining to the Ten Kings of Hell that he only believed in what he could touch, so unless they'd like to come down from their thrones and spar with him, he was going to go his own way, thank you.

This...was hardly a success. Gyumaoh moved, but with no more thought behind it than an animal. His great body had been reanimated, but not wholly and not perfectly. His once-proud muscles showed through in places, ruddy skin stretched too tight and tearing loose on gaping holes edged in black and glistening with fluid matter. The only thing in his eyes was an idiot hunger and enough fury to silence even Gyokumen. As for his soul, Ni could smell it from here: rotted ice with dead things lodged underneath.

It was the problem of the soul that wouldn't leave him alone, sinking a hook into his fast-spinning thoughts and digging in. The body he could understand, a question of weights and measurements, or maybe they'd been a little too zealous in force-growing the original seed. The body was a cipher, though, however genetically perfect. How had they screwed up so badly with the soul? The summoning invocation was--

Not perfect, he remembered with a start; just his best guess...but his best guess had been pretty good, it turned out. Good enough to drag a soul kicking and screaming out of Hell if it had ever been there. Perhaps sealing Gyumaoh's body into stasis five hundred years ago had sealed his soul to his body as well, and it had gone mad in there, drifting apart and losing bits of itself as the centuries dragged by and all the castle slept.

The Ten Kings weren't going to be happy to have this thing show up on their doorstep, he thought with a faint laugh, and that little hook of doubt gouged in hard and twisted. A soul in Hell--

"My Lady!" someone shouted, the lab door banging open with a crash. Gyokumen scrambled up from her knees, incapable of being seen at a disadvantage by a mere servant, and her movement briefly caught the attention of her 'beloved.' "My Lady, Prince Kougaiji is attempting to break your seal on his mother--and the Sanzo party is attacking the King's Guard! They--"

Ni had never heard anyone, human or youkai, make a noise quite like that before, not without someone's boot on their neck. The man's voice stopped with a choked hitch, as if the warning he'd been about to babble out had turned to glass and jammed inside his throat. Staring at the imposing figure of the resurrected king, he began to tremble all over, faintly at first and then more strongly, his huge eyes devouring his face.

It shook the floor slightly when Gyumaoh stepped out of the ruined capsule, ignoring Gyokumen and her little altar. Entirely naked, he might have been an impressive sight--if you liked that sort of thing, and if he hadn't been rotting in some embarrassing places. Intent on the quivering guard, he didn't spare a second glance for Ni, putting paid to any notion that Ni would be singled out for being human. It didn't say much for Gyumaoh's memory, but five hundred years was a long time. A very long time.

"No...no my Lady, please, stop...stop him...."

A very long time to go without being reborn, but why would he have been? He'd been marked as one of Heaven's enemies, so if he'd been anywhere, he'd been in Hell. Waiting and waiting for a chance at rebirth that never came, stuck down there in the dark. In the dark.

The screams almost distracted him as Gyumaoh picked up his loyal subject and ate him, but nothing could distract him for long.

They'd had the power of four sutras behind their attempt, but not the fifth--the Maten Sutra, with the power to break the dark. If the Seiten scripture was the power of light and creation, they'd assumed that its opposite would be that of death and destruction. You only had to look upon whose shoulders it rested to be forgiven for that. But what caused destruction might defend against it as well, and it might be the only thing that could break the power of Hell and force it to give up a soul intact, not shredded from the force of its grip as it tried to keep it.

Ah. So that was what had happened. He hadn't successfully brought back the dead after all; he'd merely helped to create the biggest revenant in all of India.

Gyumaoh's mad eyes turned his way when he threw back his head and laughed, struck with hilarity over his own lack of foresight. It didn't happen often, so he liked to savor each occasion as a reminder of how absurd life really was.

"Ni Jianyi! Stop that noise this instant!" Gyokumen snapped, her voice ringing out like a whip crack.

She probably ought to have been more worried for herself--she was closer, after all--but it wasn't the noise that set their monster off. Dropping the remains of the guard, Gyumaoh straightened and lifted his head, his ears pricking up as he sniffed the air. He looked bizarrely like a dog scenting prey, but it was something outside the lab that drew his attention: the sound of battle, or perhaps the smell of blood. The only door to the lab was small, human-sized, but that didn't deter Gyumaoh in the slightest.

Ni had seen any number of youkai pull weapons from thin air, but he'd never seen a full set of armor materialize along with it. Not that he couldn't see the attraction--youkai weapons were sturdier than their counterparts and required no upkeep at all--but he was surprised the creature could manage to summon his in this condition.

Hefting an immense sword over his head, Gyumaoh brought it down on the wall above the door with a screeching shock of metal on stone, and it was the wall that crumbled, not the Ox King's sword. A few more hacking blows, and Gyumaoh was shrugging through the gap, emerging into the Ox-sized halls beyond.

"Damn it, why didn't you stop him?" Gyokumen spat, turning on Ni with a furious glare. "We have to get him back! Fetch the king here and sedate him, understand? I'll deal with Kougaiji and those other fools. Once we have the Maten Sutra...you'd better hope you can fix this mess, Professor Ni, or I will be very disappointed."

He inclined his head graciously as she stormed out but didn't say a word. He didn't have any intention of fetching like a good little dog, not when there were other games to be played.

The brush of something against his foot made him hesitate and look down, but it was only Professor Hwan's hand, slowly losing its tension in death and uncurling, her fingers resting against his shoe. A pity, really. He'd been looking forward to teaching her some new tricks.

Stepping around the still-spitting debris of the command center, he approached the altar with an even stride, one hand still in his pocket. The four sutras waiting for him weren't even singed, but this time he managed to place his old scripture right off. Among other things, his governed the power of the mind and the will, and the emptiness where all thought and consciousness ceased, and it didn't shiver from his touch like the other three. It was used to him, his faithful servant, and how else was one to go hunting Sanzos except with their own weapons?

Lifting it from the altar, he left his rabbit in place of the sutra, patting the stuffed doll consolingly on the head. "It's just a temporary switch," he murmured, "so don't pout, hey? I'll be back for you when I'm done."

The scripture unrolled crisply at his touch, and when he swung it around his shoulders, it settled there meekly as a good servant should. Maybe it was looking forward to meeting its last brother after so long apart.

Ni was looking forward to meeting Sanzo, anyway, and that was what mattered.

"This really is becoming excessive," Hakkai said with a tight smile, blasting another group of youkai back into their peers.

"Oh, now don't you start with the 'excessively' shit," Gojyo groused at Hakkai's back. While he appreciated the cover, it wasn't the wisest of choices, strategically speaking. Hakkai himself was fine as a stationary fighter if need be, but Gojyo's shakujou required a lot of room to wield properly, and Gojyo didn't have much experience with having a second person inside the chain's radius. Not unless he intended to cut them to ribbons, that is.

"Perhaps you'd prefer 'gratuitous,' then?" Hakkai obliged over the sound of gunfire and Goku's frustrated yell.

The brawl with the oversized guards had indeed brought more guards running to investigate, and from there it seemed as if the entire castle had decided to answer the call. There had been too many of them in the open chamber above, but descending into the maze hadn't helped matters as much as they would have liked. They'd tried to follow Kougaiji's instructions and take only the turns with no second options, but they'd been forced back once and hadn't found their way since.

There seemed to be fewer youkai than there had been, as if some were being rallied elsewhere. Hakkai expected at any moment to find themselves pinned on all sides, but it was possible that Gyokumen had gathered a company to herself and gone to settle things with Kougaiji. He only hoped the splitting of the castle's forces would buy them some time, though he feared they might already be too late, that the resurrection might have succeeded before they ever arrived. It would explain the presence of the now-dead honor guard and how rattled their opponents seemed to be.

On the other hand, their world was still in one piece, and that was reason enough to keep fighting, no matter how tired he felt.

He wasn't the only one growing tired. He could hear Sanzo cursing low and steady even above the sounds of battle, the regular jangle of spent casings hitting the floor an ominous counterpoint to the chiming of the shakujou chain and the thump of Nyoi-Bo against flesh. Eventually even Sanzo would run out of ammunition, no matter how much he kept squirreled away in the folds of his robe. When that happened, there was still the sutra, but--

Somewhere deeper in the maze, something thudded against stone with the force of a battering ram, shaking all of them on their feet. "Goku!" he heard Sanzo snap, and Goku's ready affirmation. Before anyone else had quite recovered, Goku was charging at the youkai between him and the nearest turning of the maze, taking full advantage of their confusion.

"Move!" Sanzo shouted at them, and then they were all running after Goku, leaving their enemies straggling half-heartedly behind them.

He wasn't sure when he and Gojyo lost Sanzo and Goku. The corridors they threaded really were a maze, and not all of them were particularly well-lit. He suspected there was some sort of barrier in place as well, not the sort that would stop you from getting in, but the kind that waited patiently for you to get far enough away from the exits to lose you for good. It would explain why Kougaiji hadn't been able to get them any closer than the hall outside, and why Hakkai had had the white flutter of Sanzo's robes just ahead of him only moments before and an empty corridor before him now.

"Gojyo," he warned as they approached a four-way junction, on the verge of asking if Gojyo had seen the other two turn, when--

"There they are! Get them!"

A full troop of armed youkai came pouring out of the hall to their right, and everything became a jumble for a little while. He tried to stay close to Gojyo, as close as he could and still give his friend room to fight, but the sheer force of numbers forced him back and back again. He tried to stick to physical attacks where he could, wary of tiring himself out before the real battle, but there were just so many of them. He dodged someone's claws, reached out without thinking and snapped a forearm halfway between the wrist and the elbow, spun when he felt someone coming up on him from the side and crushed the youkai's throat with a stiff-knuckled blow. When he whirled back around, there was no one left in the corridor but him and more youkai, no sign of Gojyo at all.

The last two soldiers had spears, and he was just resigning himself that it would be a chi blast or nothing when he realized there was a third man behind the others: dark-haired, in glasses and a lab coat, with a smile so unsettling Hakkai fell back a step in surprise. He saw the man's hands rise up, reaching for his compatriots' shoulders, empty of any weapon--

--and something in their heads simply exploded, blood pouring from their ears and noses, filling their slack-jawed mouths. The two youkai crumpled like abandoned dolls, and when they fell, Hakkai saw that the man's hands were still raised, still empty, and that he hadn't touched his victims at all.

"Messy, I know," the stranger said in a conversational voice, "but I never did find a better way to do it. You must be Cho Hakkai, yes? I was looking for the priest, but you'll do for a warm-up."

"Who are you?" Hakkai asked warily, still trying to figure out how the man had killed those two youkai. Was it focused chi or a spell? Or something else entirely?

"Ah, that question," the stranger said, smiling as if it amused him. "Usually I'd tell you I'm just a pervert, but you can call me anything you want if you can make this interesting."

Hakkai was ashamed to say he didn't notice the sutra on the man's shoulders until he was dodging the first blow.

"And there goes my idiot nephew," Kanzeon sighed, shaking hir head as se paced the floor before Nataku's throne. "After all the trouble I went through to make sure he was surrounded by the strongest, most stupidly loyal people karma can buy, he goes haring off on his own. You remember Konzen, don't you, Nataku?" se paused to ask, turning to regard him with a rueful smile. "The bitchy one with all the hair. I wasted eons trying to get him to lighten up, but it turns out all I had to do was give him a gun of his very own. Or a monkey. I still think the monkey was the better choice.

"Well, it won't matter for much longer. He'll die first, of course. It's funny, though. No matter how big a pain in the ass he is, there's something about him that people want to get close to. Those friends of his? They'd die for him if it came down to it, and don't ever let him tell you he wouldn't do the same. You and I already know better, don't we, Nataku?"

There it was again, that tiny little flutter at the very edge of sensing, just enough to tell hir that se wasn't entirely alone in this room anymore.

"Of course, you know what that does to Goku, right?" se pressed on, thoughtfully twining a blue-black lock of hair around hir fingers. "There's no healer on hand this time to put my nephew back together, though by the time Goku finds him, it's a moot point. There's not enough left of him to be put back together. Eating humans...nasty habit. But that monster down there just got its soul shredded, and it's just smart enough to think that filling up the spaces with somebody else's soul might make it all better. So you know what that means, right? No more Konzen, ever. No more sun for our little monkey."

A stronger flutter, less like a butterfly beating against hir cupped palms and more like a sparrow caught in a net.

"Goku will break another limiter, but he's been getting stronger, and this time there's not going to be anyone on earth or in Heaven who can make a limiter powerful enough to stop him. He'll kill Gyumaoh, you can count on that, but he'll kill his friends, too. And once he does that, the Goku you know is never coming back. After that it's just killing and more killing, and it never really ends until we all do--poof! Nirvana for all, ready or not.

"Well. I guess that's not a very good ending, though, is it?" se asked gently, folding hir arms as se considered Nataku's too-perfect face. Se knew it wasn't kind to call him back to the world, but se couldn't always be kind. Not if se wanted to be merciful. "If someone wanted to change it, I don't think it'd be very hard. An intervention at the right time, a bit of luck...you could even pull a happy ending out of this, one where they all go home and live happily ever after. That's always been my favorite kind of ending.

"So, Nataku? Are you just going to let this happen, or are you going to do something about it?"

At first there was nothing, neither sound nor movement, and the steady pulse of hir heartbeat drummed loudly in the silence. Then se felt it clearly, a shiver of real intent that blossomed into a breath and a sigh.

Nataku's head shifted by slow degrees, turning with the ponderous deliberation of stone grating against stone, for the first time in five hundred years. Sightless eyes lifted up to meet hirs, awareness sparking fitfully and then catching, spreading.

"Kanzeon Bosatsu," Nataku said, his soft voice almost breathless, childlike still.

"Yes, War Prince Nataku?" se asked, modulating hir triumphant grin into a respectful, listening smile.

"Your nagging could bring the dead back to life," he said, and Kanzeon laughed like se'd been handed a present from a favorite nephew.

Gyokumen had been disappointed when she hadn't run into the priest and his friends, but the castle guards were already on the hunt. They might all die for it--the priest and his lackeys had been getting stronger by the day--but they'd at least keep their unwelcome guests busy. In the meantime, she might as well see to Kougaiji once and for all.

She stalked through the corridors unimpeded, soldiers making way for her as she passed, but their fawning deference didn't improve her mood. She was only mistress here while the master was away, and if Rasetsunyo returned, she'd have to give way to the useless bitch. She was only mistress here until the castle realized that they had a master, that Kougaiji wasn't a pretty little boy anymore. Still clinging to his mother's skirts, oh yes, but a man in his own right.

She had power, but not the blood to back it up, not without a marriage bond. It was the impermanence that infuriated her, her future determined by her reflection in the mirror, by the wandering eye of a weak-willed man. It truly was a pity that Ni Jianyi had been born human. She wouldn't have been able to tie him to her through love or lust, but their goals had dovetailed nicely all the same. He wouldn't have discarded her when her beauty was dimmed by age; only if her mind dulled as well, or her will.

No matter. She was a realist; she worked with what she had.

Rasetsunyo's tomb was a casual stroll away from the labs, almost cheek-to-cheek with what had once been the castle dungeons. It had amused her to leave the bitch down here, near the guards' quarters where she would have liked to see the simpering fool abased as a whore, even closer to the torture chambers where Gyokumen had fantasized nightly of taking her. Rasetsunyo had had such a fairy-tale life until Gyokumen came along: the beautiful daughter of a poor but noble family, renowned for her grace and her kindness, the woman who'd won the heart of the terrible Ox King with her gentleness.

She'd presented her husband with a son right on schedule, and Gyokumen remembered well the desperation she'd felt that year, certain that her own days were numbered. Gyumaoh had doted on his son and wouldn't hear a word of suspicion about the brat's red hair or the notched corners of his eyes. 'It's my blood, no fault of hers,' was all he would say, and Gyokumen would have reason to be grateful of his certainty only a few years later when she gave birth to Lirin--reddish-blond, at least, but still with those damning eyes. The eyes of a halfbreed, as if she'd be foolish enough to rut with a human. Not in those years, at least.

When she'd learned Heaven had marked her beloved for death, she'd made her plans accordingly. Not to save her love--she'd known she didn't have the power to do that--but to bring him back and let Heaven wonder. When they sent the killing god Nataku for him, she'd been ready. First she'd sealed Rasetsunyo in a curse of stone--Rasetsunyo, who might have been able to intercede on her husband's behalf, pure soul that she was--and then she'd prepared the place where her lover's body would be restored.

Only it hadn't happened the way she'd intended. She'd never dreamed that Heaven would punish the entire castle for their lord's misdeeds and seal them all in a sleep of five centuries. If Ni Jianyi hadn't broken that seal, they'd all be sleeping still.

If Ni had freed Rasetsunyo first, then everything might have been different.

Or not, she mused with a smirk, her eyes heavy-lidded in contemplation. Ni didn't have any more patience for the weak than she did, and Rasetsunyo wouldn't have entertained him for long. Perhaps it would even have been better that way. At least then she wouldn't be forced to deal with this now.

Passing under the final arch to the room beyond, she stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what they were doing, her cheeks going cold as shock drove the blood from her face. They couldn't be...how on earth had they known?

The big swordsman had the plain little alchemist balanced on his shoulders, and she was cutting down the rope framework of charms that held Rasetsunyo encased in the rock. Nearly half of them were already scattered around the floor, and square in the middle of the mess were Kougaiji and Gyokumen's own daughter, Kougaiji helping Lirin smear a line of bright blood through each of the charms.

"I think it's working, brother!" Lirin said excitedly, glancing up with a huge, delighted smile that froze the moment her eyes met Gyokumen's. "B-brother," she squeaked, cowering even now, as strong as she was. Gyokumen felt a fierce prick of shame at her daughter's weakness, for not having the strength to stand up like she should.

Kougaiji didn't cower, at least. He rose to his feet with a smooth economy of motion that reminded her of her beloved when he was still young. It used to make her sick, the way Kougaiji looked so much like his father in his prime but had only the whining, cowardly heart of his mother. Now that she was seeing the iron core of him for the first time, it made her breathlessly nostalgic for the old days. She'd planned it all so very carefully, once she'd found a lover capable of becoming a god. She was still certain she'd enjoy being a goddess, and she didn't intend to give up that dream for anyone.

"I suggest you leave, Lady Gyokumen," Kougaiji said coldly, eyeing her with arrogant disgust. "If you go now, I'm willing to let you live for my sister's sake. You aren't welcome here any longer."

"Oh, my," she said, laughing prettily as she covered her lips with a coy hand. "We have gotten courageous, haven't we? I suppose you're counting on your allies to stop my plans, but you're too late. Your father has returned. I can't imagine what he'll say when he learns his own son has turned traitor."

For an instant, she saw uncertainty in his eyes, and just for that moment, she knew she'd won--but then the iron came back into his gaze, his lips curving in a scornful smile she didn't like at all.

"I imagine he won't have anything to say," Kougaiji said, "as I don't believe you've succeeded. Leave now, Lady Gyokumen. I won't offer you the chance again."

She could see the certainty in him, and though she didn't know what drove it, she knew it was beyond her power to shake. When his father had worn that look, Gyumaoh had been the same. It only left her one option, of course, but she wouldn't be too very sad to take it.

Letting her eyes go wide and concerned, as if the horror of her situation had finally hit home, she brought her hand to her lips again and called to herself her own inborn weapon.

Tiny and delicate, the poisoned dart nestled between the tips of two fingers, and releasing it with a genteel puff of breath looked remarkably as if she was blowing her stepson a kiss. The fool didn't even see the danger coming...but her daughter did, and Lirin shot to her feet with a speed that was almost frightening, her hand blurring to snatch the dart out of the air just inches from Kougaiji's throat.

"Mother!" Lirin snapped as the other three went on guard all around her. "Don't you ever...ever touch my brother!"

"Perhaps you're more than a mouse after all," Gyokumen acknowledged, focusing her will for a summoning spell.

Everything happened very quickly after that.

She was dimly aware of another series of crashes from the labyrinth--her lover knocking down more walls to get at his prey, no doubt--and the shuddering of the ground beneath her feet distracted her for a few, fatal seconds. If her daughter was fast, then Kougaiji was nearly as fast, and the alchemist and the swordsman were closer. She barely had time to fire another dart, and this one was knocked out of the air by the big one's sword, turning it away from Kougaiji once more. The prince didn't even flinch, though the blade kissed the air just inches from his face, so perfectly, stupidly trusting in his vassals that his own attack wasn't slowed by a heartbeat.

She felt claws pierce her flesh and drag, searing, from her shoulder to her belly, heard herself cry out in shock and pain like some braying peasant girl. Agony made her hunch in on herself, her hands flying to the rents in her skin and going a slick, sticky red almost instantly. Kougaiji's people were surrounding her, and while instinct was screaming at her to retreat, to transport herself away from here by magic while she still could, sheer disbelief made it impossible to concentrate fully. It was all she could do to spit another dart from between her lips, and Kougaiji dodged this one with insulting ease.

"Warned you," someone said, but it wasn't Kougaiji's voice, it was Lirin's--Lirin standing before her proud and strong, balling up her fist in rage. "You don't touch my brother."

She felt the punch to her face as a bright explosion of light, but it was the unexpected tearing in her back that made her eyes go wide, a shock that just missed her spine and drove right through her stomach. Blinking in surprise, she looked down to see the better half of a sword piercing her like an insect on a pin, and when her hands circled the blade on their own, she didn't even feel the cuts as she pulled numbly at the curved line of steel, trying to tug out again. For some strange reason, it wouldn't be moved.

"Kou--"

"Thank you, Dokugaku," Kougaiji said before his subordinate could finish. "You've done us a great service. Yaone?"

"Yes, Prince?"

"Bring the remaining charms. Let's finish this quickly."

Gyokumen cried out weakly as the sword was wrenched out from behind, her knees giving way and tumbling her gracelessly to the floor. It wasn't a very clean floor, but it was very, very red. The sound of running footsteps gave her a flicker of hope--surely it would be someone coming to help her, someone who would take her to Ni. Ni could fix anything, though she'd have to be very careful he didn't fix too much, knowing him as she did. The sound of the guards' voices was music to her ears.

"My Lor--"

"Lady Gyokumen!"

"My Lady! What's happened here?"

"What's happened," Kougaiji snapped, his voice icily commanding, "is none of your affair. Who are you loyal to? Your prince, or a dead king's whore?"

It took them an insultingly short time to decide.

"Lord Kougaiji!"

My lover's son after all, she thought with a twinge of regret. My own lover's son....

The numbness was spreading now, moving outward at an alarming pace, and though she fought it tooth and nail, it had her in the end. She had just enough time so see the last of the charms dipped into the spreading pool of her blood as the stone at Kougaiji's back began to shimmer and melt.

It was hard to stand after so many centuries of stillness, and part of Nataku was savagely amused by the thought that all the Bosatsu's work to recall him to himself might turn out to be in vain. The more he moved, however, the looser his joints became--like a puppet when you oil the wood--and he was reminded all over again of how fast he healed when he wasn't constantly on the verge of falling apart. Even the wound he'd given himself that day in the audience chamber had probably healed entirely in a few short weeks. A little stiffness in his limbs was nothing.

Kanzeon kept hir own counsel as se watched him pace the room, curled contentedly into the throne they'd abandoned him in as if se had all the time in the world. Perhaps se did: time and space meant nothing to a Bosatsu, after all, and se wouldn't send a useless tool to do hir bidding.

He didn't believe for a moment that se was truly concerned for Goku. He was, and that was what mattered. Kanzeon's most likely objective was maintaining the balance of the world below, the sutras and hir nephew after that. Nataku had never spent much time in the world below unless he was sent to kill someone, so he had no real attachment to the matter of its continued existence, the sutras even less.

As for Konzen Douji, he'd never met the man himself, couldn't speak of the god's fairness or worth in any terms but this: Konzen was important to Goku, so Konzen was important to him. In a way, he did feel like he knew Konzen a little, if only secondhand. Goku had sat with him one afternoon when he was wounded, had perched all day at the side of his bed and talked until he ran out of stories to tell. Some of them had been about Goku's life on the Mountain of Five Elements, and some were about his new friends, Marshal Tenpou and General Kenren, but most of them were about Konzen. Konzen who looked after him, Konzen who'd named him, Konzen who was like the sun.

Some of the stories had confused him, because it was obvious that Konzen did a lot of yelling, but Goku loved him anyway. He couldn't be all bad, then, could he? Nataku had contrasted Konzen in his mind with his own father: Konzen's gruffness with Litouten's eerie gentleness, Konzen's yelling that maybe masked caring with Litouten's show of caring that masked cold ambition...Goku's blinding happiness with his own stifling misery. Then and there he'd wished that he could be like Goku, that he could live in the Bosatsu's palace and humor Konzen's moods and belong, finally, to someone who saw him and not a killing doll.

Konzen might not even be one of Kanzeon Bosatsu's priorities at all, but he knew he'd do his best to save the man for Goku's sake, not hirs, even if it cost his life. He somehow couldn't think of his death as too terrible a thing. No matter what Kanzeon said, he hadn't been living, anyway.

"All right," he said at last, turning to face the throne he'd never intended to leave. "I'm ready now."

He was used to battle, so it wasn't the anticipation of a fight to come that lifted his spirits and left him almost eager to go. He had no idea what the cause might be at all, but when he pondered it carefully, he thought it might be because he actually had a purpose of his own this time, someone to protect. Perhaps this was what he'd been missing all along.

"Then I'll open a portal," Kanzeon said simply, and he nodded, already prepared, and waited.

Gyumaoh hurt. He hurt everywhere, the pain ripping through his skin and into his bones, so fierce he couldn't think. He suspected he'd died, but there was no fear connected to that; he might say instead that he suspected it would rain, or that it wouldn't. He didn't remember rain anyway.

He remembered his mistress, remembered that the taste of her had been sweet though he didn't remember why, remembered the image of her writhing beneath him without feeling the urgency he thought (suspected, remembered) should go with it. He remembered the creature at her side, too, some far-distant part of him wondering why she'd been fool enough to invite it in, wondered what payment it was extracting for all this.

Mostly he hurt, and was hungry, right down into his soul. He knew that if he could just eat enough to fill that emptiness inside, he'd be fine, and though he'd caught a whiff of the most tantalizing scent of all, it never seemed to materialize.

Hunched over in a tight tangle of limbs, Gyumaoh bared his teeth in a ravenous grimace of pain, drew breath to howl his frustration aloud...and stopped, eyes fixed feverishly on the door. He couldn't imagine what that exquisite scent was doing down here in the dungeons--former dungeons, the small part of him that could still think said--but it was coming closer, coming his way.

In a moment, he would feed; in just a moment, closer, closer now--

The portal was easy to make, but Kanzeon drew it out as long as se could, giving Nataku every chance to change his mind.

Nataku merely stood and waited, his stance perfectly at ease, accepting whatever came.

All these years, se'd been stopping by to see him whenever the whim struck, and still se'd forgotten how small Nataku really was. If he'd been human, he might have been eleven or twelve, the same as Goku when the little monkey had been dragged kicking and swearing into hir audience chamber. But Nataku wasn't that young; he'd been alive for quite a bit longer than that before his father realized that Nataku was never going to look any older, that no one could make him grow if he didn't want to. And Nataku didn't want to. It wasn't like he'd ever gotten the chance to be a kid in the first place.

It was a pity he was going to look so young in the world below, but if hir nephew discounted his help because of that, then Konzen deserved to be eaten. If se hadn't taught him by now that outward appearances meant nothing, then se might as well give him up as hopeless.

"Okay, kiddo," se said at last. Standing at Nataku's side, they watched together as the swirling mist of the portal's outline solidified into an archway suspended in space. "Last chance to back out."

"Thank you for the offer, Bosatsu-sama, but I'm ready. Do you have any other instructions for me?" Nataku asked politely. Kanzeon wanted to ruffle his hair for old time's sake.

Maybe if Nataku was very lucky, se'd be able to count on Sanzo to do that for hir from now on.

"Nope, no instructions," se said, which was the truth as far as it went, but--

"Then I'll be going. Thank you for your company all these years, and give my regards to Jiro Shin."

"He'll be glad to receive them."

Nataku smiled, so meaninglessly se wondered if he'd spent much time watching Tenpou at work, and--oh, what the hell.

"Nataku," se said as he started for the portal. "If you leave Heaven now, you won't be coming back."

Se didn't think he'd acknowledge the warning, but he did. Turning at the last moment, he cast a wry look over his shoulder, as sad and proudly resigned as ever.

"I've already hung around too long, don't you think? Besides...Heaven has become so boring lately."

Se smiled back as se watched him go, though se sighed when he was gone. Se really should have tossed him over the edge of Heaven centuries ago.

That Jeep could have carried five, easily.

There didn't seem to be any more youkai left, and Sanzo counted that as a point to the good. He probably had enough ammunition to reload two, maybe three more times, but then he'd be down to his fists and the sutra until he found someplace to restock. Problem was, they were a long way from anywhere very friendly to travelers.

On the truly negative side of things, he was all but certain that the others had also been split up in this fucking maze, which made them all prime targets. He wasn't so worried about Goku, but Hakkai's energy wasn't limitless, and if Gojyo ran into a tight space, that shakujou of his would be more of a liability than a friend. He should have asked just how extensive the maze was; at least he'd have had some idea of how likely he was to find the others again by accident.

The next bend in the corridor didn't have any offshoots, but he took it cautiously, suspicious of the open door at the end of the hall. It looked like another large, empty chamber just beyond, which meant he'd probably reached a dead end not worth exploring. Anything at all might be waiting inside, and going for a look was just asking for trouble. Part of him wanted nothing to do with that room, in fact, and he shivered briefly as an icy breeze twined around his ankles. It was the breeze that decided him on going in. Where there was air, there was ventilation, which meant that he was heading either out of the maze or toward some outer wall where a shaft had been sunk. Either one would give him a point of reference to retrace his steps from, so it would be stupid not to check. Just in case.

From the looks of things, they hadn't quite gotten around to clearing out all the old furniture when they converted this section of the dungeon to lab-and-labyrinth. Sanzo wasn't an expert on torture by any means--the reports of his traveling companions to the contrary--but he recognized a rack when he saw one, and the iron bed where human bodies were roasted alive. There were splintering wooden frameworks suitable for whipping or stretching, a strange contraption of heavy stones on a pulley system, and a pile of the oddest birdcages he'd ever seen. All of it was shoved up against the far wall in the corner, next to a huge, hideous statue of a crouched demon. Despite the clutter, the vast room echoed emptily, and Sanzo couldn't see any other exits. Maybe it was behind the ugly statue.

The ugly statue that was standing, joints creaking like a wicker frame, and lifting a sword right out of a nightmare.

One section of his mind was coldly considering the possibility of retreat. He'd need the Maten Sutra for this, and a chant took time, time he wouldn't have if he was dodging the sweeps of a blade longer than he was tall. If he had someone to provide a distraction, run interference, there'd be no problem.

The rest of him took in the monster's appearance with a glance--the too-tight and tearing skin, the rot the patchy hide exposed, the sheer size of the thing--and knew he was finally seeing the Ox King of legend. Imperfectly resurrected, it seemed, but alive nonetheless, which meant he'd failed in half his mission. Apparently the gods were feeling merciful enough to allow him to correct that.

He was prepared for speed, but he hadn't quite allowed for the reach. He realized that when he was dodging a downward-arcing slash that buried the edge of the blade in the floor where he'd been standing less than a minute before. Gyumaoh was actually quite slow, but apparently size did matter after all.

"Lovely...now I'm thinking like that fucking kappa," Sanzo growled, drawing his gun and firing off an experimental shot. The bullet caught Gyumaoh on the breastplate right above his heart, where it flattened uselessly and pinged off, for all the world like Sanzo had hurled a pebble with a slingshot. He needed to aim for meat instead.

The next shot would have caught the creature square in the face if he'd gotten the chance to fire it.

"Fuck!" he snapped, throwing himself down and rolling aside, and felt the heavy blade cleaving the air just above him. When he rolled to his feet, he was further away from the door.

Of the two shots he fired before he had to retreat again, one only grazed and the other connected just fine, burrowing into Gyumaoh's cheek and...nothing. His best guess was that the bullet had hit bone and stopped there, like shooting a stone wall. What he was trying to shoot though was too dense--there was too much of it--to create the truly satisfying exit wounds that would drop a monster this size in its tracks. As far as he could tell, he'd only made this one mad.

Snarling and enraged, Gyumaoh lunged for him with a speed that was impressive, one massive hand shooting out with grasping fingers splayed wide. Sanzo feinted out of the way, but then it came back for another pass, and he was already in its range, damn it. Too close, and too late to run.

He saw the hand sweeping in again, and he was almost too busy judging which way to duck to notice the flash of light in the center of the room. Something hit the ground running, something uncannily fast, the simple speed of it raising the hairs on the back of his neck. It couldn't be Goku--it was too small and too quiet--but it was coming right at him.

Only not.

There was a flurry of white and silver, and only because he was so used to tracking Goku's movements in a fight could he see the boy clearly. It was a boy, just a kid, in white robes as formal and archaic as Sanzo's own. Long hair whipped around the small frame in a silvery cloud as the kid reached Sanzo's side and launched himself into a spinning kick, one that hit Gyumaoh with the power of a mountain falling down.

The Ox King didn't just stagger; he was hurled backward with such force that his feet left the ground entirely, huge body describing a ponderous arc through the air until he crashed into the abandoned devices against the far wall. The ground shook as he landed, the splintering of wood and metal a series of sharp reports that echoed in the room, but after a guttural groan, Gyumaoh lay completely still.

The boy's feet touched the ground lightly, landing with perfect grace, the flutter of his robes settling once again into immaculate folds. He was standing a little ways ahead, so Sanzo couldn't see his face very clearly, but the boy seemed to be staring at Gyumaoh with almost vindictive satisfaction. And stay there, that look would have said if it was on Goku's face.

Then the boy turned to him, studying him with a weird sort of expectation that was as wistful as it was guarded. Maybe he was waiting for thanks or admiration, but it didn't look like that, somehow. It was almost like he was waiting to be greeted by name.

Sanzo stared down at the kid and instead asked the only question that really concerned him at that moment.

"What the fuck?"

"Please excuse me, Konzen Douji-sama," the child said politely, with an air of quiet self-assurance that was jarringly mature for his years. "I don't mean to interrupt, but you see, I've won against this one before."

He remembered the stories now, but they suddenly made less sense than he'd thought. War Prince Nataku had defeated Gyumaoh five hundred years ago, he knew that, but Sanzo had pictured someone a bit older. Definitely taller.

Then again, this kid wasn't much younger than Goku had been when Sanzo first found him, so perhaps it wasn't that much of a stretch after all.

"So you're Nataku," he said, wishing absently that he had time to light a cigarette. "I don't know who you've mistaken me for," he added, calmly noting the way Nataku started with surprise, "but my name is Genjyo Sanzo, and you're not interrupting."

He watched Nataku contemplate that--it only took a second--until a quiet smile spread across the boy's face.

"I see. Thank you."

Sanzo nodded brusquely, looking past Nataku to the immense figure beginning to stir again at last. It really was too late for that cigarette now, and he'd be damned if he died with any regrets. "The others will be here soon," he said, utterly certain of that if nothing else. "I'll seal that thing's movement. Try to buy us time."

"Of course," Nataku said, as simply and easily as that.

It made him want to keep a close eye on the kid, waiting for the jest that was sure to follow. That was just one more sin to lay at the feet of the bad crowd he'd fallen in with, though: Nataku was perfectly sincere.

The off-hand thought that he could get used to that teased him briefly as he drew breath to begin his chant.

Twisting himself out of the way, Hakkai ducked right--just not quickly enough. The concussive shock of power caught him in the left shoulder, but it was only a glancing blow. It merely numbed his arm instead of taking it off at the socket. That was fine, though. He only needed one hand to fight.

Hooked fingers swooped into his vision, and throwing up a shield was automatic, his right hand coming up in warding as his chi answered his will. This time he didn't stop with a simple barrier: he pushed it outward in a rush, knocking the man back a dozen feet before exceeding the limits his chi would obey him that far from his body. The scientist hit the ground and tumbled, rolling to his feet, grinning widely.

"Hey, you're pretty good," the man said, sounding genuinely pleased. "I haven't had anyone stay on his feet this long in years. It's too bad you're running out of energy, though. Say, tell me something. Did you decide on chi as your weapon because of that business with your sister? You gave her the knife, after all. Guess you learned your lesson, huh, Mr. Empty Hands?"

Don't listen, Hakkai told himself firmly, shifting his left shoulder as best he could. He certainly had learned his lesson: learned it from Chin Yisou, and he wasn't likely to forget. If he let the past control him, he wasn't the only one who suffered for it.

"Or maybe you were trying to learn how to rely on yourself alone. That's pretty admirable," the stranger said, his voice encouraging, directly at odds with the cold humor in his eyes. "You were really thinking ahead, weren't you? After all, you're alone now. Only I don't think you're going to be able to rely on yourself much longer."

The man was fast for a human, very fast indeed, but Hakkai was faster. The kick that should have taken him in the chin was caught and blocked, and though he couldn't follow through properly with only one hand, he set his fingers just so and twisted.

And ducked, barely in time, as the man turned with it, his other foot leaving the floor, arcing up, and sending bright pinwheels of light exploding across Hakkai's vision. His cheek throbbed angrily as he staggered back, falling into a crouch, and the man was too close, far too close--

There was nothing elegant about it at all, but it had the benefit of the unexpected. Straightening his knees with a snap, he drove the top of his head into the other man's face and followed up with a fist in the gut. It was a distinct pleasure to hear the breath whoosh from his opponent's lungs, but the fact that the madman was still trying to laugh made Hakkai's lips pull back in a grimace of distaste. There was something quite wrong with this man, and he honestly didn't care to know what.

"Ha...not bad, Demon-Killer," the man said, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose with the back of his hand, his sniff turning into a chuckle. "You know, I always wondered if that story was true, about how bathing in the blood of a thousand youkai would turn you into one. I can't wait to find out what you look like on the inside. I just can't decide whether I want you living or dead when I open you up."

"I'm afraid 'dead' is the only option I can offer," Hakkai said, bracing himself for one final blast. Much as he hated to admit it, without removing his limiters, he was nearly at the end of his endurance, and removing those limiters wasn't an option. He was too close to the source of the Minus Wave, and this would be a particularly bad time to find out his will wasn't strong enough to withstand the effects at close range.

"Well, I suppose that's fine. It's not like I can't recreate the effect, now is it? Say goodbye, now," the man said, raising a hand where power gathered to an incandescent heat, far stronger than anything he'd used thus far. Had his opponent only been playing with him?

Hakkai gathered his will, his one good hand lifting automatically, stubborn to the end.

The ticking ring of a chain being spun out lifted his heart before his mind quite caught on to what it could mean.

Singing through the air, the curved blade of Gojyo's shakujou arced through the corridor, hitting the wall and scraping along its surface for a few feet in a shower of sparks and shrieking metal. Friction rolled the hooks of the crescent blade back, and a jerk of the chain made the whole thing snap wildly, a metal serpent that darted away from the wall and sliced a sinuous path back the way it had come, the teeth of the blade snapping a vicious half-circle precisely where the mad scientist's neck would have been.

Gojyo didn't wait to take a second shot at the man, who'd flattened himself against the other wall with a respectful look of surprise. Gojyo just ran right past him, grabbed Hakkai by his dead left arm, and started pulling.

"Take a rain check, Hakkai, there's a fucking mob back there!" Gojyo shouted at him, and Hakkai discovered he wasn't nearly as averse to running as he'd thought. There was cowardice and there was prudence, and brawling with a rogue Sanzo when their Sanzo was probably in need of assistance was simple foolishness.

"Was that guy wearing a sutra?" Gojyo asked as they ran, casting an uncertain glance over his shoulder.

"Unfortunately, yes. We knew someone trained 'Kami-sama'; that might have been the priest Sanzo told us--"

They almost tripped over the first bodies, which saved them from being brained from Nyoi-Bo, at least.

"There you are!" Goku said, lighting up with a smile from the middle of a pile of youkai. The smile faded in seconds as he realized there were only two of them. "Where's Sanzo? I thought he was with you!"

Hakkai had just opened his mouth to say he'd hoped the same when something up ahead went 'crash.'

"That way," Gojyo said tightly, nodding down the empty corridor.

It was as good a direction as any, and far too likely a prediction for anyone's peace of mind.

Goku had to force himself not to outdistance the others, his need to get to Sanzo right now nearly the only thought in his mind.

It was the other thought, Sanzo yelling at him to think ahead, that forced him to go no faster than Hakkai or Gojyo. Hakkai was nearly exhausted, maybe wounded, and Goku couldn't leave him behind. What if Sanzo needed Hakkai's help, or what if Goku took a wrong turn Hakkai would have seen through? And anyway, Hakkai was his friend. Hakkai wouldn't have left him.

If anything happened to Sanzo, though, he definitely wouldn't forgive himself.

I'm coming, Sanzo, he promised silently, I'm coming, so just wait for me. Don't you dare go anywhere I can't follow.

"Goku!" Hakkai shouted, and Goku felt Gojyo grab him by the shoulder with his free hand, turning him away from the corridor that smelled so temptingly of the upper levels and towards the straight track, the one Sanzo would, of course, have followed. Sanzo had a lot of talents, but a youkai's sense of smell wasn't one of them. Goku knew that, damn it. Sanzo's griping about forethought was starting to make a certain kind of sense.

A few more turns down the corridor was enough to remind him of just how useless human noses were.

"Oh, yuck," he groaned, his nose crinkling up in disgust, and even Hakkai coughed politely, his good hand covering his face for a moment.

"I agree. That's quite...overpowering, isn't it?"

"Smells like something curled up and died in there," Gojyo added, which made it unanimous. "Any bets against Sanzo being right on top of it?"

"Pass."

"Ha-ha." It wasn't funny, though. That smell gave him the creeps.

Up ahead, the corridor ended in an open archway, and even above the sound of their running footsteps, he could hear the clear, ringing voice that meant his world was still in one piece.

"He's here!" he heard himself cry, and there was no hanging back now. Pouring on the speed, he raced through the door and called Nyoi-Bo to him at the same time, intending to take out whatever was messing with his Sanzo in one blow, damn it, just one. And then maybe he'd ask who the other guy was, not the big one that was obviously the bad guy, but the little one, kid-sized, who was standing between Sanzo and the monster, taking Goku's place. Maybe later he'd be really mad about that, but right now...right now....

He was still running until he saw that strange kid's face, the fine, doll-like features bright with fierce concentration and pain. He didn't will his feet to slow; it just happened, and it wasn't until he realized he'd stopped dead in his tracks that he also realized he knew that small fighter, that he remembered this person...from before. Before-before. Before the cave but not, somehow, before Sanzo.

"Nataku?" Goku said, his voice faint, the name rising through the sediment of centuries, locked away until now.

Hakkai and Gojyo ran past him on either side, and though he rocked slightly on his feet from the clap on the shoulder Gojyo gave him to wake him up, he couldn't seem to move his legs at all.

Nataku, Nataku was here, Nataku was alive....

But Nataku was dead. Wasn't he?

Their eyes met for just a moment, and the deadly resolve in Nataku's warmed in an instant, greeting and welcoming him without words. It made his heart clench hard in his chest, and he stumbled forward a pace without realizing it, his hands clenching on Nyoi-Bo's haft.

"Nataku," he repeated wonderingly and threw himself into the fight as half a hundred soldiers poured in through the door at his back.

Sanzo couldn't spare much concentration for the outside world when he was reciting a tantra, not because he wasn't capable of splitting his attention, but because the entire point of it was in the concentration. Any fool could babble a prayer, but without a sharpened will behind it, it was all just empty noise.

Even so, he retained enough awareness to be deeply impressed. War Prince Nataku was nearly as strong as Goku and even quicker. Sanzo wouldn't have thought it was possible, but he was seeing it, so it must be true.

He noticed it when Hakkai and Gojyo joined him on either side, was perfectly aware of having Goku at his back, but his tantra was nearly finished, and he couldn't be bothered with them now. Not when the castle guards had apparently found them again, and not when something...something unpleasant...was coming his way.

There was a word of power, a word his master had been careful to pass on when the subject of the scriptures and the art of wielding them came up. It wasn't spoken of amongst laymen or even the other, more ordinary monks, but his master had made certain he knew it. It was the only thing that could break the power of a tantra without breaking the chanter as well, even a tantra recited from one of the Tenchi Kaigen scriptures. In a perfect world, it gave a Sanzo the opportunity to think better of whatever he was about to unleash on a suddenly-repentant populace, even up to the last syllable, because the word was a breaking, a closing of song.

"Apagayata!" someone cried out behind him, and the words died on his lips, simple shock silencing him more thoroughly than the breaking of his chant.

Whipping around, he saw Goku and Gojyo turning back an endless tide of soldiers, Hakkai wounded and still guarding his back with a barrier that flickered ominously at the edges...and a smiling man in a blood-spattered lab coat, one of the Five Sutras wrapped casually around his shoulders.

"Hey, Kouryuu," the man said, lifting a careless hand in greeting. "Long time no see."

So it was this guy. Ukoku Sanzo Houshi, the heretic, 'Kami-sama's' master. Somehow he wasn't surprised in the slightest. Everyone else's past tended to crop up on a regular basis, so he was probably about due for another turn.

"That's not my name," Sanzo said coldly, and drew his gun.

And tossed it to Hakkai, who caught it neatly and began firing with a sniper's precision into the mob. There were only six shots in the chambers, but that was six less for the other two to deal with. Sometimes every little bit counted.

"Oh? Mine's changed too these days, as it happens. You can call me Ni Jianyi, if you like. I already know you're going to be interesting."

"Are you some kind of pervert?" Sanzo demanded, curling his lip at the suggestive purr in the man's voice.

Ni Jianyi only laughed, shaking his head and glancing sideways at Hakkai. "You people. You're just never happy with what you're given, are you?"

Hakkai only glanced once over his shoulder at Sanzo when Ni started towards him, and Sanzo nodded shortly. Let him through.

Folding his hands in a mocking show of piety, Ni began chanting a binding, a cigarette wobbling negligently in the corner of his mouth. He was strong, Sanzo had to give him that. The man's will made itself felt after only a few words, Sanzo's limbs going heavy and still. Not bad, but not really dangerous either, not when it was only his body that was effected, not his spirit and not his mouth. He could have used the same breaking technique Ni had, but they'd never get anywhere that way.

He didn't bother with raising a barrier to protect himself or trying to reverse the binding. He didn't know what was in the sutra draped over that smirking asshole's shoulders, and he didn't care. His scripture liked to smash things into tiny pieces, then reach out for anything that might have escaped and reel them in to smash them too. If a sutra could be said to have a personality, then his was a youkai with its limiters off, fierce and pitiless.

Holding Ni's eyes squarely, he didn't blink when he began chanting a tantra for pain, smiling icily when Ni's eyes widened in surprise before the man broke off his own chant himself.

"Somehow, I don't think Koumyou taught you that, kid," Ni said disapprovingly, clicking his tongue. "All right, no more warning shots."

The next thing he knew, Sanzo was all alone in the empty chamber, his ears ringing as sudden silence crashed down all around. There were no more screaming soldiers, no chanting ex-Sanzo, no badly-resurrected youkai king stomping around at his back, only the sound of his own voice. If he wove a chant of pain with no one else around, would he be the one to feel it?

This isn't real, he told himself harshly, knowing it was so. But did he believe it?

Fuck what he believed. He'd keep chanting for sheer stubborn spite, just on the off-chance that intent would do the trick where belief couldn't.

Closing his eyes, he held Ni Jianyi's face fixed firmly in his mind and poured everything he had into his voice.

Nataku lifted his sword, caught a slash meant to decapitate him and pushed it back, his teeth buried in his lip. He'd told the Bosatsu he was ready, and he'd promised he'd protect Konzen, and he didn't intend to make a liar of himself. He just hadn't expected five centuries to have taken their toll on him so fiercely.

His endurance wasn't what it should be; that was the first thing he'd noticed. He felt weaker than he remembered as well, and though his speed was at least up to standard, his body didn't seem quite as quick to absorb the blows it took as it used to be. He'd almost think he'd gotten old, except that time didn't exist in Heaven, not in that sense. He'd gotten rusty, that was all, and it was humbling to know that the skill he'd despised and neglected in his long sleep was the one thing he most desperately wished to have at this moment.

What saved him and Konzen both--Sanzo, he reminded himself; he calls himself Sanzo now--was that Gyumaoh wasn't at his best either, nor was he focused on Nataku. Nataku had his attention as long as he kept attacking, but it was Sanzo the monster was after, and Sanzo didn't even know it. He was too busy dueling with the other priest, and the others were distracted by soldiers, and that left Nataku to hold the Ox King off.

Only Nataku was starting to tire, slowly but surely.

Gyumaoh edged left, trying to get around him once again, and Nataku drove him back towards the wreckage in the corner in a flurry of blows. Gyumaoh's eyes kept wavering between Nataku and Sanzo, confusion and cunning eclipsed in turns by a hunger so intense it was chilling. Kanzeon hadn't been exaggerating when se said Gyumaoh wanted to devour hir nephew's soul. What disturbed him even more was realizing se'd been serious about everything, from Konzen's death to Goku's madness. And if all that were true--

Falling back suddenly, Gyumaoh retreated without being forced, the great sword dipping in his hand as he crouched, regarding Nataku with mad, resentful eyes and a lowered head. Nataku hesitated only a moment, suspicious, before taking a cautious step to follow the giant.

Like the ox he was named for, Gyumaoh charged with all his massive weight and strength behind his sword, an inexorable force bent on trampling everything in his path. The only smart thing would be to get out of his way and attack while he was overextended, but there was Konzen at his back, and Kenren and Tenpou, and Goku.

Centering himself in the instant he had left, Nataku charged to meet the giant instead, determined to stop the creature in its tracks.

He saw Gyumaoh's blade sweep under like a scythe, lifted his own to meet it, and--

He felt the shock as they connected, saw the Ox King stagger back once more, but this time he was the one knocked flying. All that ground he'd won was gone in an instant, and he saw Konzen's startled face as he landed practically at the man's feet and skidded across the stone floor.

He could still move, though, so he got up, ignored the pain, and limped determinedly back the way he'd come.

When he saw Gyumaoh's blade arch up against the vaulted roof, realized the dead king's huge bulk was right there at Konzen's back, it didn't seem quite real.

And Konzen was shouting his name.

It was strange. Ni had never fought anyone like this before, someone whose mind could be turned inside out and who would still continue doggedly on with exactly what he'd been doing, as if he wasn't tied to his senses at all. It was as if Genjyo Sanzo had internalized the idea of having no attachments and had bent it to his own thoughts, as if he had truly disconnected from the Illusion and could no longer be moved by it.

Only that wasn't possible, because that would make him something rather more than human, wouldn't it?

And Genjyo Sanzo was very human, human enough to have no qualms about using the very worst in his arsenal, skills Gyokumen's spies had never even suspected. It was all very, very interesting, but Ni suspected that he didn't want to find out who could hold out the longest and that getting into a pissing contest over who had the biggest scripture was beneath him.

So. Enough chanting and enough games. If Genjyo Sanzo wanted to play nasty, then he might as well oblige.

Gathering his will and focusing it all in the tips of his fingers, he judged the distance between them with a smile. "Time to say goodbye, Kouryuu," he murmured to himself--

--and hesitated, surprised, as the strange kid who'd been fighting Gyumaoh was knocked halfway across the chamber, skidding to a stop almost at his feet. The kid was a puzzle, one no one knew anything about, a complete surprise and an unwelcome one. If it wasn't for the boy, Sanzo would have been cut to ribbons already by Gyumaoh's sword.

With Sanzo dead, the last scripture would be his.

Ni's eyes flicked up, saw Gyumaoh trudging ponderously into position, sword arcing up with aching slowness. Then they flicked down, seeing the strange boy struggle determinedly to his feet, hurt but determined.

It was a very simple choice, really.

"Nataku!" Sanzo shouted, but the warning came far too late.

Goku smashed Nyoi-Bo into another youkai's head, kicked the crumpling body aside, and wondered just how many more youkai could possibly be in the castle. He was surprised the last ones didn't have mops and skillets in their hands and more wrinkles than Gojyo's laundry. If there was only a break in their numbers, or if Hakkai were fully recovered, then he could go help Sanzo and Nataku. Surely with Gyumaoh dead it would all be over, wouldn't it?

When he heard Sanzo's shout, raw and warning, he whipped around without thinking twice. Sanzo never sounded like that unless it was important, the life or death kind, and Goku could no more ignore that voice than he could stop the sun from rising.

He took it all in between the space of two breaths: Nataku's pained slump as he stood with his back to that creepy Ni Jianyi guy, Ni's glowing hands outstretched, Sanzo's horrified expression and the looming shape of the Ox King poised just behind.

There were two choices he could have made, but he didn't realize that until later.

"Sanzo!" he screamed, and then he was moving, faster than he ever had before, and when the Ox King's sword came down, he met it with Nyoi-Bo and held, held fast. And didn't break. From somewhere far distant, he heard the sizzle and shock of Ni Jianyi's power releasing, but what mattered was the slow breath Sanzo took behind him, exhaled on the first syllable of a tantra. He'd never heard anything like Sanzo's voice when Sanzo spoke in power, clear and ringing and deep, vibrant as the sun.

The only thing that mattered in the world was that he keep hearing that voice, uplifted in words that burned in the air as Goku drove the dead king's sword back, and back again.

Sanzo watched Nataku turn, but not in time. The flare of Ni's power outlined the kid with a nimbus of light, white and cold, and Nataku jerked and fell like a broken doll.

Nataku looked even smaller than Goku ever had, half-drowned in his robes, his eyes open wide and staring.

"That's one," Ni said lightly. "You really should stop surrounding yourself with children, Kouryuu. It's not healthy for them."

Something inside Sanzo got very quiet. He was aware of Goku at his back now, defending him against the gods-knew-what, without ever being asked. He hadn't asked for Goku, either...but some things you couldn't get by asking for them, not if you bitched and complained for a thousand years.

Inside him, the quiet spread. He took a breath, held it, and released it on a word, a word with power.

Ni's eyes narrowed with suspicion, but maybe he didn't know this tantra, couldn't know it. Ni was a Sanzo who'd given up his position, who stood with a scripture on his shoulders but wore it like an indifferent cloak, who'd mastered the mind but completely ignored the soul. Sanzo's own soul was a pretty pitiful thing, stained where it wasn't ragged, a fucking nuisance he wouldn't choose to touch even with a very long stick, but he knew better than to discount it entirely. Everything living had a soul, and some people's definition of 'living' was broader than others.

"Hey...I'm over here, Kouryuu," Ni called out mockingly, waiting for an attack that hadn't come. Sanzo's mouth curved up slowly, knowing Ni would catch on too late, and raised his hand, his voice filling the air, and called. Called them to him, speaking right to the soul, called them all together at once.

Ni jerked in startlement when the scripture slung listlessly around his shoulders twitched, rippled, and flickered suddenly to life in a solid rope of white fire.

"What--"

Too late. The fire hissed away from him like a serpent, rippling through the air in a lazy 'S' to twine its glittering brilliance around Sanzo's upraised fist. The Maten Sutra joined it only an instant later, a cloud of flame that lifted from Sanzo's shoulders reluctantly, leaving bright streamers behind that had to be gathered in like the long feathers of a phoenix.

"What are you doing?" Ni demanded, honest confusion in his voice, but Sanzo didn't spare him the breath for an explanation. If he was too stupid to get it by now, then explaining would be wasted on him anyway. Ni could ask his spoiled brat of a student when he saw the idiot in Hell.

When the first whip of fire came through the far door and lashed over the heads of the youkai soldiers, those at the rear lost their nerve and turned to run. Sanzo didn't know the sutra that joined the other two, but he could feel the difference through his skin as the radiance he held redoubled. This one was as warm as the one Ni had held was cold, and it curved itself around his fingertips with the sweet, fleeting touch of a lover.

"Apagayata!" Ni called out with all his will behind it. "Apagayata!"

Sanzo would have laughed if he could. He wasn't working any miracle or performing any wonder; he was only calling his kin to come home.

Another banner of fire answered him, one that didn't care to use the door. Something beyond the crowded chamber roared like a dragon, and it wasn't until half the eastern wall exploded to show a line of devastation beyond that Sanzo realized it was the scream of stone being pulverized that he heard. Shrieking through the air, it came like lightning, diving towards its brothers with the fury of an attack, but when it struck the others, the ferocity Sanzo felt was all joy.

Goku, he thought, his eyes half-closing with a smile, this one's like Goku.

But it was still a stranger. Not like the last one that came.

Much the same as its impatient brother, it was a straight path of light that did not deviate, but neither did it destroy. It looked more like water than flame, a fluid shimmer whose grace disguised its speed as it approached. Sanzo knew this aura, would have remembered it even if he'd forgotten everything else, because it had once been a part of his master's.

"On ma ni hatsu mei un," he murmured when all five were in his hand, half his arm encased in fire. "Makai Tenjyo!"

There were only a few youkai left in the chamber by then, but it was too late for them to flee. Brightness exploded from Sanzo's hand in searing ribbons as the Tenchi Kaigen scriptures answered his prayer, unfurling in their primal states and destroying everything they struck. He saw snakes of flame weave through the loops of Gojyo's shakujou chain and coil around Hakkai and leave them untouched, saw those same flames burn through youkai flesh and bone like a knife dipping into water. Ni Jianyi threw both hands up before his face with a harsh cry of effort, but the barrier he raised was cracked in a heartbeat, a lash of fire scourging him with a casual flick like an afterthought. Sanzo didn't know what happened behind him, but he heard Goku yelp a curse of deep admiration followed by the boom of a massive displacement of air.

When there was nothing left in the room to purify, the sinuous streams of light merely curled back in on themselves, retreating meekly to Sanzo's hand where they took shape once more. The Maten Sutra lowered itself in a bright veil to rest again on his shoulders, but the Seiten Sutra joined it nearly as quickly, the two settling together almost indistinguishably. In his hand he held the other three scrolls, rolled neatly and sealed with knotted cords, deceptively mundane.

Ni Jianyi was still on his feet, a miracle that lifted one of Sanzo's brows in grudging respect. Ni's clothes were singed, his face blistered, and he wavered on his feet like a drunken man for a long moment before he convinced his mouth to work.

"I see it...but I don't...."

When he toppled, Sanzo was finally able to breathe. And shout.

"Hakkai!" he yelled, and went to kneel without much hope beside Nataku's broken form.

Goku felt sick, but he had to watch, and more than that, he had to keep a tight rein on everything inside him, because this...this was bad.

Sweat poured from Hakkai's face, but even Gojyo didn't try to stop him or tell him to ease up. Kneeling beside the fallen war god, Hakkai probed with his chi for the damaged things inside, his hands lit a faded green where they rested on Nataku's chest. Even Goku could tell Hakkai didn't have enough energy left in him to fix anybody, much less someone as hurt as Nataku, but he held on to his hope with both hands until Hakkai slumped, the light in his hands going dim.

"I'm sorry," Hakkai said hoarsely. "His body...he's been mangled inside, and he's so different...I barely know where to begin."

Goku tried to bite the words back, but they escaped anyway. "But can't you--"

"Goku."

His mouth snapped shut at the sound of that voice, but it wasn't Sanzo's this time, it was Nataku's. He hadn't expected Nataku to wake if Hakkai couldn't fix him all the way, and now he couldn't help wondering if they'd made it worse, if Nataku was hurting all over again when he could have just died in peace. Nataku's eyes were dark, the faint hint of violet completely faded from the washed-out blue, but they knew him, and that left him helplessly, miserably happy.

"I remember you," he said, figuring that was the most important thing of all. "I didn't remember anything for the longest time, and I still don't remember much, but I remember you, Nataku. We were going to go exploring. You were going to show me the best trees to climb. Remember?"

"I remember," Nataku said, and his small, quiet smile made Goku's heart hurt the way only Sanzo ever had before.

When Nataku reached for his hand, Goku grabbed it hard and held on tight.

The others were talking about him, but Nataku was used to that, and he didn't even mind it, considering who they were. These people...these people had never tried to use him, like they had never tried to use Goku. A Heaven that would kick them out wasn't worth going back to.

"What do you mean, 'different?' Is it something we can help with? 'Cause if it's a question of energy, can't you find some way to just...drain one of us?"

"No, Gojyo, it's...even if I had the power, I have no idea how to fix him. He's not like a human or a youkai. Maybe the gods are just beyond our comprehension."

"Fuck that," the General spat, frustration clear in his voice. Nataku smiled. Kenren always had been a soft touch. "Look, we know a god, don't we? C'mon, Sanzo--can't you pray up a Bosatsu for us?"

"That useless hag?"

"Se fixed you, didn't se?"

Goku was still holding on to his hand, his face so miserable it was making Nataku sad just to look at him. He wished now that he'd answered the Bosatsu earlier. Maybe then they would have had time enough to do all the things he'd promised they would.

"Hey," he said, mildly disgusted with how weak his voice sounded when it emerged. "Goku. Don't go nuts over this, okay? This was my choice."

"But it's my fault," Goku said, his voice wobbling as he clutched Nataku's hand more tightly. "If I'd just--"

"No," Nataku said, holding Goku's eyes intently. "I meant to protect Konzen, and I did."

"Kon--?"

Goku's voice started out confused--Sanzo, Nataku reminded himself with an inner groan--but then Goku's eyes snapped up to Sanzo's with sudden understanding. Maybe Goku remembered that name and maybe he didn't, but he knew, at least, who Nataku had meant.

"It was important," Nataku said simply, and Goku bowed his head, shoulders slumping with defeat.

"Nataku...I'm so...so sorry."

"Don't be," Nataku said, smiling still. "The others came back...I think I will too. And he's your sun. Remember? He always was...."

"Nataku? Nataku! Hakkai, do something!"

The last thing he felt was Goku's hand locked with his, someone else's tears on cheeks that had always been dry, and then the darkness closed over his head like a warm, comforting cloak.