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The Ark
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha > General
Views: 2034 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.
Chapter List
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This an abandoned chapter in which Android Seventeen and Kouga were to fight each other in a grand tournament, then end up having to defend the tournament stadium from Naraku. It doesn't fit the mood I'm trying to set up, so I've ditched it. Furthermore, the Iron Maiden song I quoted at the beginning is waaaaay too happy and uplifting. Oh, well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ready to start, the duel begins
The best man wins in the end
A lunge and a feint, a parry too late
A cut to the chest and you're down
Seeing the stain then feeling the pain
Feeling the sweat on your brow
Oh, oh! Fight for the Honor
Fight for the Splendor
Fight for the Pleasure
Oh, oh! Fight for the Honor
Fight for the Splendor
Fight for your Life!
-Iron Maiden, The Duellists
Battlefield 1542
Act I: Operation Abdication
Chapter V: Blue-Eyed Murder

The Youkai Budokai stadium's basement, a wide, looped, below-ground hallway situated directly underneath the bottom spectator deck, served as a training area for the tournament's contenders. It was jam-packed with exercise equipment; bench presses, leg presses, and pull-up bars lined the entire perimeter, save for the four, foam rubber safety mats placed at each of the four navigational extremes.

Normally, on the day of the tournament, this training room would be completely unoccupied, as all participants would be amassed above, busy watching the fighting and studying their opponent's tactics and battle style. For the most part, it was empty, save for two, lone, ookami youkai warriors, one holding onto and the other busy pounding away at a sand-filled training bag suspended from the ceiling by a latticework of steel wire.

"Come on! Is that all you've got?" one taunted playfully, bracing his lean, well-muscled legs against the foam mat, adjusting his stance to better absorb his female teammate's blows as their kinetic energy passed through the punching bag and into him.

"You're one to talk!," the other rasped between quick, labored breaths, the heavy, crunching thud of her slender, yet rock-solid fists impacting harshly against the sandbag filling the training hall, "You're the one that Juunanagou keeps on beating the tar out of, remember?"

Kouga scoffed and smirked from both amusement and the intoxicating anticipation of long-sought victory as Ayame continued to pummel the sandbag before him, his ice-blue eyes narrowing thoughtfully as he turned his copper-haired love's pithy comeback over in his mind. The obscene winning streak of that amusingly, almost endearingly damnable jinzo-ningen would be coming to an end quite soon. Only a few, scant hours remained until Blue-Eyed Murder, and after that measly time period passed, everyone would see that Clan Wolf alone was the most powerful fighting force in the entirety of the Dust Bowl.

Besides, Kouga didn't enjoy losing, and to his discontent, he had lost many a match to Juunanagou. However, the wolf found some reassurance that he wasn't the only one who had been defeated in battle by the raven-haired android.

Compared to the vast majority of youkai that inhabited the Dust Bowl, Juunanagou, or Number Seventeen, was extremely young. Time anywhere on the mortal plane and time behind the Soul Divide behaved according to the governing physics of two radically different dimensions, but barring any qualitative or quantitative incompatibility, the android had resided inside the Dust Bowl for roughly forty Earth years, and since Day One of his first tournament, he had torn up the competition like a hand grenade wrapped up in a sheet of waterlogged newspaper.

Kouga frowned in thought as he contemplated the android's ability. Juunanagou's arrival in the Dust Bowl, back in the year 2041, had been a relatively quiet one, and though the Inu no Taisho had stirred up a bit of controversy among the masses by bringing a ningen to a land designed and reserved exclusively for youkai, protest remained limited to the intellectuals that pointed out potential problems with the Soul Divide's stability when human energy and demonic energy contacted one another, such as Ryukotsusei, and outright bigotry from the overly-active mouths of the infinitely less couth, such as Shyushu. Ryukotsusei's concerns proved to be good-intentioned and inherently valid, but only on a large scale, and no one really listened to Shyushu, anyway, so Seventeen remained, and participated in the Youkai Budokai that very same year.

What a year that had been.

Juunanagou laid waste to everyone in his path, plowing through the whole elimination bracket and claiming the title of Champion on the shoulders of effortless victory after effortless victory. Hardly any of the tournament's warriors were capable of slowing him down, let alone stop him. Even Shyushu himself, second in power only to his brother, the Inu no Taisho himself, fell as easy prey to the android's lightning speed. The dog-demon's sheer, unbridled arrogance, when it came to his delusions of overt superiority to the "pathetic humans", made him more vulnerable than anyone, in the end.

To Kouga, Android Seventeen's success epitomized the resurgence of good, old, simple sportsmanship in a tournament that had been wracked by the suffocating, oppressive stranglehold of bloodthirsty malice, the dark shroud of which had been pulled over the heads of all involved by Shyushu's long, razor-sharp talons. The Budokai was meant to be a game, a sport that the Dust Bowl's inhabitants could enjoy without work or worry, but Shyushu, however, corrupted the light-hearted spirit that had once shone throughout the games. The battles that once raged proudly inside the Budokai stadium had become inundated with tension and apprehension, and the uneasiness that each fighter felt when they battled one another turned into raw, gnawing desperation when they came up against Shyushu on the arena floor. Victories against him became the stuff of legends and losses became the somber tales of the broken, battered, and defeated. It was all just supposed to be a game, but whenever Shyushu reared his maniacally-grinning head, it became a war, and Naraku had been producing enough of his war to last an eternity.

When Seventeen blasted Shyushu out of the tournament fighting ring and into the out-of-bounds zone with a staunch-legged roundhouse one day, he transformed from the ningen underdog into the Budokai's hero, the Dust Bowl's savior, Messiah, Golden One, but above all else, instrument of Shyushu's defeat. At that moment, everyone could at least some solace in the fact that if the tournament regulars didn't take Shyushu down during the course of the event, Seventeen would. Although that dog-demon continued to fight in the tournament, he never won another title.

Kouga found a kind of peace for his mind while fighting against Juunanagou. The wolf was highly powerful when attacking and impressively quick in his movements, but up until Seventeen's advent, the only truly legitimate challenge, as far as sanctioned tournament fighting was concerned, was Shyushu, and Kouga loathed fighting him. He didn't loathe it because of fear or an inability to front a decent fight, he hated it because that whenever he locked "horns" with the inu-youkai, he felt as if he was carrying the hopes and dreams of everyone watching along with him, with catastrophic consequences a distinct possibility should he lose such a battle. He felt no such constrictions when he came up against the android, however, only the thrill that the prospect of being defeated fair-and-square brought along with it. That thrill was precisely what made the tournament fun again.

However, when it came to opposing the jinzo-ningen, not all were nearly as qualified as the wolf.

Android Seventeen's swift speed, bruising strength, and acrobatic finesse were not entirely unheard of inside the Dust Bowl, especially when that realm pledged allegiance in one form or another to none other but the Inu no Taisho himself, but never before had all three traits been interwoven so seamlessly into one form. Thus, the tournament participants had quite a learning curve catapaulted into their hands, and they found it difficult to adapt to the android. Soon, it became readily apparent to the Taisho that Seventeen was fast becoming another nigh-on unstoppable juggernaut, like Shyushu, however more pleasant he may have been, and if left unchecked, he too would come to drive away the competition.

Enter Blue-Eyed Murder.

The Inu no Taisho knew that realistically and for the forseeable future, Kouga and Shyushu would be the only demons capable of fighting Android Seventeen effectively, and since neither Kouga nor Seventeen "played well" with his younger brother due to his unpleasant demeanor and
hardly-restrained vehemence torward any human, no matter how artificially altered he or she may have been, the great inu-youkai gave Kouga and Seventeen their own, specialized tournament event: Blue-Eyed Murder.

The moniker had been something invented by the crowd themselves after Kouga and Seventeen's first match against each other during the 2024 Budokai, stemming from their roughly similar physical appearance; both possessed raven-black hair and piercing, ice-blue eyes, though Seventeen was nearly a foot shorter and not quite as muscular. The battle between the two had been a swirling maelstrom of lightning-fast punches and the occasional energy blast, but Kouga finally folded underneath Seventeen's perpetual mental and physical focus. Regardless of whoever won or lost between the wolf-demon and the modified human, though, the devastating battles that they staged against each other in the following years came to be known simply as blue-eyed murder, and that term proved particularly apt as the name for an establisment dedicated solely to Kouga-versus-Seventeen.

This line of thinking brought the wolf-demon to the present.

Kouga's last few battles against the android had made it painfully obvious to him that his tactics were in need of significant redesign; Seventeen's straightforward, unwavering methods, combined with his mobility and the relative crampedness of the tournament arena, made skirting around him for flank attacks nearly impossible, so the only option left to the wolf was to take the battle head-on. Unfortunately, Kouga's great speed was focused primarily in his legs; his upper body was not nearly as quick, and because of that comparative sluggishness, it took him a great deal of strained effort to simply block Juunanagou's punches. Fighting back was different affair, altogether, and though Kouga could get a few good blows in on the android here and there, Seventeen afforded decidedly little opening with which the wolf could use to capitalize upon his own, already sparsely-effective attacks.

This impass, the inability to fight back whilst defending, led the wolf straight back to an epiphany that had once struck him, long ago: instead of giving up the initiative by blocking Android Seventeen's attacks and waiting for a opening in the jinzo-ningen's defenses, he ought to be avoiding them entirely, thus giving himself better ability to mount an effective counter-assault. Of course, to an external observer, this was an obvious conclusion, but to Kouga, it had been dead-end reasoning for what seemed like eons. Dodging a fist back during the old days, days marked by battles against fools like the Shichinin-tai and good, old, mutt-face InuYasha, was like stepping over a dead body, when compared to the supersonic power instilled within the neatly-aligned knuckles of Seventeen's right hook, that is. The android was just so damned fast, and he was so fast, in fact, that the simple task of seeing him when he lunged transformed from a subconscious and arbitrary objective into a bizarre form of art.

Since Kouga knew that wolves, in general, and wolf-demons, in particular, had inherently keen and flexible eyesight, he figured that he might as well fight blindfolded, for all the good that his sharp visual acuity did him in battles against artificially-enhanced super-humans, anyway. If he was going to take Seventeen down, he would need another way of sensing him as he moved.

He found the optimum method buried within his own spiritual energy: his youki.

However, youki was not an aspect of the demon body that came easily to Kouga. A wolf-demon prince, he prided himself entirely on the ability of his physical form alone, a certain vanity on his part, but one shared by others of his kind. In his mind, a good alpha-male was supposed to be fast, cunning, and above all else, strengthy with his body and fang. A weak-bodied male could not protect his pack from its enemies, or gather food for the females and their young. Likewise, it was his belief that any self-respecting wolf-demon ought to keep himself or herself at top physical condition at all times, and when it came down to killing something, that wolf should either beat the enemy down or, at the very least, cut it into tiny pieces. Youki existed only as a bunch of cheap parlor tricks, as far as he was concerned, although Sesshoumaru's youki-based poison whip was rather impressive.

Despite the theological conflict that burned within Kouga, though, the peculiarities of Android Seventeen's existence inside of the Dust Bowl made him uniquely vulnerable to those in tune with their inner ki, and Kouga knew that if he managed to tap into the extra-sensory perceptions lying in wait just beneath the surface of his own, demon soul, he could bypass the limitations of visual sight, exploit Seventeen's vulnerability, and regain combative parity with him. It was an opportunity that the wolf couldn't pass up.

Though a good number of his internal organs had been brutally ripped out, discarded like rotten, stinking meat, and surgically-replaced with the cold, sterile, maliciously-efficient mechanizations of the brilliant, ruthless, and pathologically-vengeful Russian cyberneticist Iskendervich Gero, Android Seventeen was, at the very core of his perversely and harshly cobbled-together being, a human. During his relatively short lifetime, his ki - although artificially-concealed to external detection by everything but electromagnetic radar, through the intervention of Gero's sinister electronic engineering - remained bottled-up inside of his body by the gentle pull of his living spirit. After he was killed in a battle on Earth while unwillingly-fused with Hell Fighter Seventeen, a carbon-copy of himself, his normally, tightly-contracted aura expanded its borders to lie outside the confinement of his flesh, as if it were a volume of highly-compressed liquid oxygen, suddenly released from its container and allowed to evaporate. This expansion of the spirit after death held true for youkai, as well, and because a demon's aura was so fundamentally dissimilar to that of a human, their respective energies clashed and ground against one another, vying, violently, sometimes, for the same, three-dimensional space inside of Spirit World.

On a large scale, to the order of around five-hundred million dead youkai stacked against one or two billion dead ningen, this volatility between auras would possess enough momentum to warp the very fabric of reality itself both inside and outside of Spirit World's vast borders. The metaphysical upheaval that Enma Daio and the Kaioshins experienced when they moved all living youkai from Earth to Heaven was just a taste of the apocalypticity that was actually possible. Wisely, they had acted with great haste in remedying that dire situation with the devision of the Soul Divide, so the most that had happened was a temporary and thankfully-slight inversion of gravity, plus a few, scattered, and completely random point-to-point teleportations of a number of the Spirit Annex's management personnel.

The Soul Divide, the energy barrier cordoning off the vast expanse of Heaven that came to be known as the Dust Bowl, was erected by the Kaioshins with the exact objective of preventing such large-scale contact between human aura and demon aura, thus allowing both ningen and youkai to reside in Heaven without interfering with one another. Conversely, small-scale contact, such as the energy of a large group of demons paired with the energy of one dead human, was miniscule in its impact, and hence, justifiably negligible in the eyes of the Kaioshins.

This quiet, heavily-muted contrast of energies became precisely Kouga's secret weapon in his upcoming battle against Android Seventeen.

Through a bit of rather-exhaustive research into the particularities of the Soul Divide, the reasons for its conception, and the nature of its existence, Kouga found that Seventeen's ki aura, while surrounded by the energy of the thousands of demons that comprised the Budokai's audience, would behave quite similarly to a drop of cooking oil submerged in a glass of water; two incarnations of matter and energy, similar in physical behavior yet distinctly-separated by liquid density, would brush past each other and press against their shared, asymptotically-minute boundary, to be, evermore, co-existent but never co-incident.

By sensing this intersection between Seventeen's aura and the combined aura of each demon spectator, then extrapolating both of them with relation to his own, Kouga was convinced that he could triangulate Android Seventeen's exact position at all times, without even having to keep his eyes open. If he could pull it off, he knew that

of preventing such heaven-rattling cataclysms in mind. Allowing the spirits of dead ningen and dead youkai to was simply too dangerous an affair to leave unchecked. Conversely, the contact between the auras of a large group of dead demons with the aura of one dead human was negligible in its effect, and this heavily-muted contrast of energies became precisely Kouga's method of sensing Android Seventeen's movements.
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The Ark	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha > General Views: 2034 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.

The Ark