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The Ark
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha > General
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Chapter List
- 28
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- 30
Slightly revised version of Battlefield 1542's first chapter.
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Redemption Awaits Them
Act I: Operation Abdication
Chapter I: Reconnaissance
~Location unknown, 2078 Common Era~
Heaven.
That was a name that conjured up all sorts of outlandish imagery in the minds of many humans on Earth. White, puffy clouds, gleaming, golden gates and spires, huge castles - this is what such people dreamt of when Heaven crossed their mind. They also believed it to be the place they ventured to to receive their just reward for their good deeds in the world of their birth.

Well, they were half right, at least.

Heaven was indeed the destination for those good men and women after death, but the glamorous visages that were frequently associated with it were nothing more than a romantic's silly, half-baked notions, concocted from a mix of philosophical imagination and a few, lazy, summer afternoons.

"Heaven" was a place in the corporeal realm, a vaunted and storied one, but a place, like any other. Contrary to both popular and idealistic belief, it was not some perfect utopia. It did not simply exist; it was run, like a business, for lack of a more poetic term. Entering at one end, the souls of the dead were identified, logged, and recorded by a massive otherworldly workforce, its ranks numbering at least five-hundred-million demons, or youkai. Such youkai analyzed each soul and scrutinized its history, determining the appropriate reward - or punishment - for it, forwarding the resulting, printed analysis to a behemoth known simply as Enma Daio, who in turn stamped his official seal on the final documents, sending their subject to one of two, vastly different realms. Upstanding citizens were ferried to the "Heaven" portion of the afterlife, while the sinful ones were cast down to Hell. However, since relatively honorable individuals, such as the members of the long-dead Shichinin-tai and the various, belief-driven soldiers of the Red Ribbon Army, were neither deserving of residence in Heaven nor fit to burn in a lake of eternal fire, Hell was sub-divided into seven levels of progressive-increasing disciplinary severity, so as to ensure that Hell was torturous to the forever black-hearted, and fair to those simply caught on the "wrong side of the fence".

Situated at one end of the vast Snake Way and poking up through an seemingly-endless plane of puffy, canary yellow clouds stood Enma Daio's administrative compound, a giant, sprawling castle with a tall, multi-floored steeple acting as its front gate. As per a usual business day, it was swamped with both soul and their accompanying paperwork. Blue-skinned demon workers, each wearing his hair neatly slicked-back, dressed like a mundane office worker, and shouting in various human and alien languages through a hand-held megaphone, guided and directed the endless line of formless spirits through the main gate and to a huge, fifteen-foot-high desk in the lobby, where Enma stamped each soul's documents and sent them on their way, wherever that might lead them.

Enma himself was a bull-demon, a daiyoukai, to be exact. He was the absolute most powerful of his type, and his humanoid form, towering above all others at twenty-five feet in height, was merely an abridged version of his full-power state. If he transformed into his true, animal form, he would easily stand as tall as a healthy brachiosaur. Incredible spiritual and physical power dwelled within him, and he was able to go head to head with the Inu no Taisho himself in most instances, not that he would consider such a thing, though, as the resulting battle would probably trash both Heaven and Hell.

The thick-haired, ogre-like demon lord sat in his massive leather chair as usual, wearing his two-piece, blood-red business suit, twisting a few, heavy strands of his black, silky beard around a thick, plum-skinned finger as he stamped away at the forms that came his way.

"Going to Heaven." Enma said, his booming, god-like voice seeming a tad bit bored. He slammed the correponding stamp handle down onto the table, emblazoning his official seal in bright-red ink on top of the paper underneath. "Going to Hell." he said again, this time switching stamps. "Going to Heaven, going to Heaven, going to Heaven, going to Hell, going to Hell, going to Heaven, Heaven, Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell, Heav - ah, wait, no, Hell."
Enma let out a breath of exertion as he continued to process the records that flooded his way. Normally, he only had time to read the bottom-most lines of each form, which contained the final destination suggested to him by the demon workers that did the actual reviewing of the paperwork. Occasionally, though, he could catch a glimpse at the other details, items like cause of death, deeds and misdeeds done in life, planet of origin, and various other notations that described the existence of the spirit in question, but such respites, though already small, were rare. Busy days like this made the bull-demon long to live in the days when sentient life in the Milky Way had still been young and the populations had been low, days when he felt like he was doing some actual work, instead of behaving like some sort of assembly-line robot that cranked out automotive license plates. Back then, the death rate in the galaxy had been sufficiently small enough to allow Enma to review each case unassisted, then escort that spirit to their final destination, personally. Presently, though, a group of lesser youkai did the reviewing, and Spirit World's airlines took care of the ferrying, all due to the sheer mathematical infeasibility of personal attendance; Enma had been reduced to more of a figurehead when it came to Spirit World's affairs.
Though the workload was quite heavy and mind-numbingly mundane, the bull-demon really couldn't complain about his situation, because once-upon-a-time, most of the papers that landed on his desk originated from a little planet named Earth.

To Enma, it seemed that every time he turned his attention to that gleaming, bright-blue world, a newer, stronger, and more galaxy-threatening menace had arisen on it and set about to cause general havoc not only there, but in the vast parsecs of space that lay all around. First, the Saiya-jin arrived, then the Saiya-jin became Freezer, Freezer turned into Doctor Gero's androids, the androids gave rise to Cell, then Cell turned over to Majin Buu, Majin Buu to Baby, Baby to Super Android Seventeen, and so on, so forth. Millions of humans seemed to die each time such villains reared their head, only to be revived by a wish from the Dragonballs, killed again by the next foe, revived by the Dragonballs immediately afterward, then thrown into the same loop of death and revival over, and over, and over. Enma figured that there was just something wrong with the little planet; normal worlds didn't endure the damned Apocalypse every three years, did they? If he could, Enma would have just ignored the planet and left it be, but when Cell learned how to cross vast expanses of interstellar space by copying Goku's teleportation technique, the threat that was once contained to one world could reach into neighboring star systems, and by the time Buu made his appearance, that same threat of destruction could reach all the way to Kaio-sei, the Kaioshin homeworld itself. One could not ignore an enemy at his own gates, could he?
Thus, Enma was extremely grateful to Son Goku and the warriors that the incredibly powerful saiya-jin called his friends. Almost entirely by themselves, they had managed to put down every single enemy that faced them, including Majin Buu, a monster whom the Kaioshins themselves had been unable to stop and a monster that possessed both the range and the unspeakable power necessary to completely destroy the realm of Heaven. By ridding the universe of such malevolent beings personally, they made it far, far easier for the bull-demon ferryman to sort out the chaotic disarray that usually ensued. Furthermore, doing so saved Spirit World from literal destruction, and doing this kept Enma himself from harm, along with all of the other ranking gods. After all, even deities need saving, sometimes, and this truth was not lost on Enma Daio himself nor any of the Kaios.
The last major galactic threat, one posed by a band of seven twisted, perverted versions of Shenron, the Eternal Dragon, had been put down for good on Earth over forty years ago, and Enma Daio couldn't possibly be any happier. For the forty, peaceful years that followed, he had enjoyed normal paperwork, documents marked by beings that died natural deaths. Afterlife, so to speak, was good.
Eventually, closing time came for Spirit World's halfway house, and another demon laborer, again dressed like an everyday office worker, emerged from the doorway at the top floor of the gate's steeple, holding a cloth-covered gong handle. The accompanying gong, constructed of forged brass with the mark of Enma stamped on it, stood next to the door. The demon worker raised his hammer, rooted his feet snugly against the wooden floor, and struck that giant alarm as hard as he could, the oscillating sound of its report filling the whole building. The demons manning the megaphones below then announced the sound's meaning to the seemingly-infinite stream of disembodied spirits.

"Attention, all souls! The Spirit Annex is now closing!" one worker said, his voice amplified and slightly-distorted by the electronic device in his hand. "No more spirits will be admitted today. We will reopen in twelve hours, and you are to remain here until then!"

After he finished speaking, a sweeping, high-pitched groan of dejection rose up from each squiggling mass of energy, every single one of them annoyed by the prospect of hovering in a row on the narrow, celestial catwalk of Snake Way for twelve hours.

When the gong struck, Enma jolted in his seat out of surprise, and missed the paper he had targeted with his stamp by nearly two feet, imprinting the symbol for heavenly ascent on the table's wood instead. He frowned at this, for this was the kind of ink that absolutely nothing could erase. It was a super form of permanent, spiritually permanent. In all actuality, Spirit World was just a tangible and painstakingly-crafted facade to a far less tangible plane of existence, and everything, right down to the damned stamps, behaved far differently than their counterparts on mortal worlds. The giant sighed, stamped that last form, and when he was sure that no one was looking, he snickered as he moved the outgoing mail box over the red mark that blemished the table. Enma then set the Heaven and Hell stamps in their respective ink pools and sat back in his chair, the automotive suspension used to cushion it creaking under the pressure of his weight.

Enma relaxed for a few moments, then leaned back down and opened his top desk drawer, pulling out an enormous cigar, one measuring five feet long and two feet thick. He flipped a switch underneath his desk, and the battery of industrial strength ventilation fans mounted in the ceiling whirred to life, roaring like an old piston-engined bomber from a long-finished air war.

He motioned for his personal cigar lighter, a demon worker armed with a kerosene-fueled flamethrower, to come forward. The comparatively-tiny demon climbed a ladder to get on top of Enma's desk, and he set the fuel switches on the tank on his back, letting highly flammable kerosene flood into the nozzle of the flamethrower. He pulled out a cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket, lit the pilot light on the flame gun's muzzle, then flipped his gas mask down. Enma held out his cigar, squinting and leaning his head back to get as much distance between the cigar and his face as possible.

The demon worker pulled the trigger on his weapon, and a long, smoky plume of blazing, yellow-orange flame shot out from the flamethrower, bathing the tip of Enma's cigar with its staunch heat. Soon, the massive stogie was alight. Enma nodded and dismissed his heavily-armed assistant, then leaned back in his chair and took a few puffs of of his cigar, blowing wide smoke circles into the air and watching them disintegrate in the ceiling fans.
After a few moments of quiet day-dreaming, Enma Daio took one last, long drag off of his cigar then set it in the his sandbox-sized steel ashtray, which had to be specially weighted on one side to counter its unusual payload of tobacco. He switched the ventilation fans off, stacked all the papers on his desk neatly, and put his stamps away inside one of the desk's drawers; the work day was done. Just as he scooted his chair back and stood up in order to leave, however, he froze on the spot, hearing the nervous, panic-stricken voices of the Spirit Annex's demon personnel rise up around him. The giant bull-demon turned torward the source of the outcry, then gritted his teeth in horror as a gust of freak, phantom wind filled the hall, two crackling, wailing orbs of bright and gleaming electromagnetic energy bursting into sudden existence just in front of his desk.
The shocked demon lord cursed his rotten luck mentally. Such violent and unexpected atmospheric phenomena within Spirit World could mean only one thing: the Soul Divide had ruptured! At that moment, the spiritual energy of millions of humans and demons could be clashing with one another, tearing the very fabric of reality into tiny, little, irreparable pieces in the process!
Enma concluded hastily that the Annex was no longer a safe place to linger near, presently, and those who labored within were in terrible danger of being erased from their current plane of existence. "Everyone, get out of the building, immediately!" the demon lord roared.
Needing no further encouragement, all of the cavernous lobby's demon workers turned away from the screaming spatial fissures, then bolted away as fast as they could in the exact opposite direction, scrambling out of the Spirit Annex through any and every exit they could find. Enma himself stayed behind, for he knew that he was the only one that possessed the ability to contain these metaphysical wrinkles in time. Even after doing so, though, he would still have to tend to the fallen energy barrier of the Soul Divide, and that task alone would be a near-vertical uphill battle in itself.

Stepping around his desk and discarding his gigantic, parachute-sized jacket, Enma rolled up the white cloth of his sleeves and made certain that his suspenders were securely attached to his pants as he sidled up next to the raging maelstroms of pulsating light. Rooting the heels of his giant shoes securely against the floor and extending his arms far out from his body in a slight curvature, he was about to create a spherical barrier of his own demon energy to encapsulate the swirling vortexes before him, when, at that point, he noticed a humanoid shape begin to form inside the fissure nearest him.
Seeing this, Enma Daio loosened his stance and breathed a heavy sigh of relief, for these energy masses that he previously thought to be rips in the fabric of space itself were actually the end-points of someone's long-range teleportation arc. The bull-demon backed up a bit and folded his arms across his barrel-like chest in wait, greatly relieved yet highly intent on finding out just who could have learned to teleport with such an utter and shameful lack of finesse.
Definition began to come to the vaguely humanoid shape within the slowly-calming energy orb, its edges becoming sharper and easier to make out through the heavily-translucent electromagnetic mist. All of a sudden, that mist dropped away into clear air, and the garbled image of the being behind it transformed into the figure of a humanoid male, one sporting an almost mane-like length of thick, coarse, and ghostly-white hair, the folds of his loose-fitting, robin's-egg-blue trousers and the forked tail of his crimson, armor-like vest flailing in the miniature hurricane that surrounded him.

Enma Daio recognized this lavender-skinned fellow immediately; he was known as Kibito-Shin, the fusion of the East Kaioshin and his bodyguard, Kibito. Once, long ago, the two had been unwitting participants in a demonstration of a little-known fusion technique, and they had, quite unintentionally, become permanently joined into one being. As this Kibito-Shin's body emerged from the obscurity of the peculiar, semi-transparent energy field that surrounded him, Enma noticed that the superior deity had hunkered down into a low, crouching kneel, his left arm curled tightly around his head. It seemed as if he trying to hide, trying to shield himself from some sort of deadly, incoming projectile. He had extended his right arm far out from his body, though, pressing his widely-spread, lavender-skinned palm up against some unseen object that lay within the second, shimmering electro-magnetic disturbance.
That second orb, rather than falling away to reveal some kind of recognizable shape, like Kibito-Shin's had done, instead began to expand rapidly, growing large in both diameter and in height. It rose high up torward the ceiling, its apex coming to rest just shy of twenty feet, roughly the same level as Enma Daio's gargantuan shoulders. Only then did the haze of teleportation lift, revealing its contents to the attentive demon lord.
Of all of the things that could have existed within that second portal, Enma laid eyes upon nothing else but a damned oak tree, one replete with healthy leaves of green, possibly even a few squirrels, for good measure. Suddenly, the entire situation, to this gatekeeper of Heaven, had become totally surreal and absolutely bizarre, bordering on all-out absurdity. There he stood, half-expecting the very essence of the universe to come crashing down in screaming flames upon his tusked head, when out from a literal nowhere, one of the last Kaioshins in existence, crouching down and curled around himself for dear life, brought an specimen of simple vegetation all the way to Spirit World from places unknown and for reasons unknown.
How could a tree grow out of a laminated hardwood floor, anyway?
Total silence filled the Spirit Annex for some, long moments as the violent stirrings of hasty teleportation faded away into a combination of still air and the haughty stench of freshly-electrolyzed ozone, and Kibito-Shin lowered his left arm away from his face by a few, timid inches, peeking out over the loose, blue cloth of his sleeve and quickly analyzing his surroundings. His heart pounding furiously inside of his chest from a recent, fear-induced rush of adrenaline, the deity released a deep breath of anxiety, taking comfort in the fact that he was back within the safety of Spirit World and not standing on the hostile-soldier-filled plain that was the Russian steppe. Not two seconds after that, though, he yanked his hand away from the oak tree that he had brought along with him and called out concernedly to it.
"Shippo? Shippo, are you all right?" the Kaioshin pressed. "Shippo, answer me, please!
The tall tree's leaves rustled without the impulse of any moving air, then its branches twitched visibly, as if flailing out an answer. "Don't worry, Kibito-sama! I'm fine!" its slightly high-pitched masculine voice replied.
Enma raised an eyebrow at this verbal exchange between mortal florae and immortal faunae, thinking for a moment that he and the Kaioshin had gone temporarily insane; Kibito-Shin was talking to damned tree, and Heaven help him, Enma could hear the tree talking right back!
At that moment, what only seemed to be an oak tree rotated in place, turned to the tensely-worried Kaioshin, hopped up a few feet into the air, and with a moist and highly-audible pop, completely vanished into a thick cloud of white smoke. Out of that smoke cloud and onto the floor dropped a certain, copper-haired fox-demon trickster, curiously grown-up into a fully-adult kitsune.
His name:Shippo.
Kibito-Shin, standing at over six-and-a-half feet in height and towering above the still relatively-short Shippo by over a foot, loomed over the much shorter kitsune with fists firmly entrenched on his hips, fret and anger mixed and swirling together inside of the deep obsidian pools that were his eyes. "Do you have any idea how close you came to getting yourself killed, Shippo?" Kibito-Shin shouted, right into Shippo's face. "Do you have any idea how close you came to getting me killed?"
Shippo cowered guiltily before the angered deity; he knew that he had fouled up badly down on Earth, but he was unused to seeing this side of the Kaioshin. Normally, Kibito-Shin appeared as quiet, polite, and slightly shy, but because he was a fusion of two separate beings - the benevolent East Kaioshin and the stern, sometimes severe Kibito - he could alternate between their respective personalities at will, with little or no warning to those around him.
The kitsune bowed his head in shame. "I'm sorry, Kibito-sama. I didn't think the base would have a silent alarm," Shippo said quietly.
Since Kibito-Shin was pre-disposed to a rather cheery attitude, he found it impossibly difficult to raise his voice to any significantly intimidating volume and remain angry with the kitsune before him, even if Shippo had, however accidentally, transformed a quiet, covert exfiltration from a Russian military facility into a mad dash for safety amidst a veritable hailstorm of searing, copper-jacketed slugs of lead. The deity fusion sighed as he forced himself to let go of his anger, closing his eyes for a moment and softening his expression as he ran a hand through his long, white hair. After all, both he and the fox-demon were alive, unharmed, and successful with their recent mission's primary objective: to discover the nature of the latest and greatest Russian super-weapon.
"Well, you're just lucky that you're good at dodging bullets and disguising yourself as foliage," Kibito-Shin scolded, jokingly. "Your brilliant use of camoflauge aside, I think we need to take a break from this espionage business, for a while, you know?"
Shippo smiled nervously. "That," the fox-demon said, "Sounds pretty good, right about now."
At that moment, Enma Daio coughed forcedly, gaining both Shippo and Kibito-Shin's attention. "Kibito-dono, would you mind telling me what exactly is going on? You scared the living daylights out of me and everyone else in here with that little light-show of yours; I thought that the damned Soul Divide had imploded!" Enma decried.
"Ah, yes. I apologize for that, but it takes a tremendous amount of mental focus to perform a neat teleportation to Spirit World, all the way from Earth," Kibito-Shin explained, rolling his eyes uneasily. "I find it extremely difficult to focus while I am being shot at."
Frowning at that statement, Enma leaned down to the floor and snagged up his suit jacket, then walked around his desk and sank down into his leather-upholstered chair. He chided himself, for he had nearly forgotten all about Shippo and Kibito-Shin, and their business down on Earth. After witnessing Son Goku and Majin Buu's spectacular hand-to-hand battle on Kaio-sei, Shippo had requested of the bull-demon gatekeeper that he be sent back down to Earth, so that he could send advance warning to Spirit World should another enemy arise there.
Enma agreed to do this for Shippo, but not for the reason that the kitsune had suggested.
The bull-demon lord had sent Shippo to Earth as a spy not because he could be a useful asset as the bearer of advance warning; Earth's Guardian, the Nameku-jin Dende, with his ability to communicate with Spirit World telepathically at a single moment's notice, was, by far, the best qualified being on Earth for that task. Enma had deployed Shippo on Earth because the kitsune was absolutely bored out of his mind.
The daiyoukai could tell that, after five-hundred years of wandering aimlessly and exploring Spirit World's many holy planets, including Kaio-sei, Shippo had become jaded with his existence in Heaven. All that the fox-demon really wanted was to feel useful again; after spending so much time and effort hunting down the fragments of the once-shattered Shikon no Tama as a child, along with his older friends, Shippo felt as if he were wasting away by just moping around from world to world. Enma sympathized with the kit completely, in that regard; the gatekeeper felt less and less useful as time dragged on, for all he was really doing was sitting in a chair and stamping forms, not greeting the dead and guiding them to the ever-after, as he had once done, long ago. He often found himself speculating as to how long it would be before he himself was no longer needed.
Kibito-Shin had shared such sentiments, also.
As one of the Kaioshins, the most powerful deities in all of Spirit World, Kibito-Shin's primary task as a holy being, unlike Enma Daio and his associates, who concerned themselves with the logistics behind Heaven's upkeep, was to defend the galaxy from attack and destruction through the force of personal combat. However, due to the rise of Son Goku, Vegeta, and all of the other, insanely powerful saiya-jin of the Earth, the Kaioshin fusion realized that he had become obsolete in the very task that he had been created to carry out. Although he had played a pivotal role in freeing Earth from Baby's mind control and assisted with the planet's subsequent evacuation, he hadn't been strong enough to fight alongside Goku and the others in any of the following battles. Throughout the peaceful decades that ensued after the renegade Eternal Dragons had been destroyed, Kibito-Shin found himself simply moping around Kaio-sei, with only the Dai Kaioshin as meager company and little or nothing with which to distract himself.

Thus, when Shippo asked of Enma Daio to be sent to Earth, the Kaioshin had been more than eager to tag along. Boredom, it seemed, had become an epidemic inside of Heaven's calm expanses.
To be honest with himself, Enma did not anticipate that Shippo and Kibito-Shin would uncover anything of real importance on Earth, much less be in any actual danger whilst doing so. Armed with that confidence, the demon lord had sent the Kaioshin and kitsune on their way, dismissing whatever seemingly-negligible consequences lay in wait. Presently, however, Enma was beginning to think that letting Shippo have his fun and play "lookout" on Earth, even with Kibito-Shin providing his supervision, hadn't been such a good idea. Had he known that the both of them would be fighting for their very lives and scrambling for safety on hostile soil, he knew that he would never have agreed to begin with.
With a great, bounding leap, both Shippo and Kibito-Shin sprung into the air and easily surmounted the fifteen-foot-high ledge of Enma Daio's desk, landing atop it and gaining some parity in height with which to communicate with the giant demon lord more effectively. "Sir Enma, we have a problem, down on Earth," Kibito-Shin said.
"Well, it certainly cannot be worse than a ruptured Soul Divide, can it?" Enma posed, almost amusedly so, as he shifted forward in his chair to bring himself closer to the two, comparatively-tiny beings standing on his desk.
The Kaioshin raised an eyebrow. "Perspectively, no, but what Shippo has discovered could spell disaster, in its own right," he said.
"All right, then. What did you find out, Shippo?" Enma asked.
Promptly, Shippo slipped his pack off of his back and dumped it onto the huge desk on which he stood, zipping it open and rifling through its contents. He withdrew a Japanese newspaper, one printed in Tokyo and dated the fourteenth of October, 2078, just four days prior, then spread it open and lay it flat upon the desk for Enma to see, as the sheer size of the daiyoukai's fingers prevented him from physically manipulating the newspaper on his own.
"Read the front page," Shippo said.
Reaching down and pulling a brass-framed magnifying glass from out of the center drawer of his desk, Enma zeroed in on the main headline of the newspaper's front page, then raised an eyebrow at its curious meaning. "A civil war in Russia?" the daiyoukai queried. "I can see that this may be a cause for alarm on Earth, but how does this affect Spirit World?"
"The government in Russia, these days, is notoriously authoritarian," Kibito-Shin explained. "It tolerates absolutely no action against its rule, so when two of its southern provinces took up arms and made a grab for independence, the general, international consensus was that both uprisings were totally doomed, doomed to be crushed swiftly through excessive military force."
"And?"
"So far, the Russian army hasn't fired a single shot," the Kaioshin fusion said. "It is biding its time, because it has a new, secret weapon coming to the end of the prototype-phase, and those two breakaway republics will be the guinea pigs for this weapon's very first test."
Enma shifted in his seat, uncomfortably. It always un-nerved him to learn of the lurid weaponry that mortal worlds had devised; bigger, meaner weapons meant steeper body counts, certainly, which translated into more and more form-stamping for him, in the end. "So," Enma gulped, knowing full well that ignorance was, in fact, bliss. "Is it some kind of super bomb?"
"No," Kibito-Shin denied. "It's a jinzo-ningen."
The daiyoukai jerked, cocking his head to one side and raising an eyebrow. He found himself at something of a loss, considerably underwhelmed by the apparent nature of what he had, just moments before, perceived to be some sort of apocalyptic doomsday machine, whose perilous advent could be thwarted only through an amount his own, divine intervention. In Enma's mind, a jinzo-ningen, or artificial human, was not such an ominous entity, and the individuals best able to combat one were living on Earth itself, not in Spirit World. Furthermore, it was the admitted profession of the Kaioshins to eradicate whatever entity that they deemed threatening to the well-being of the universe; destroying rampant jinzo-ningen was their job.
"Well, then, why in the cosmos did you come to me?" Enma asked, scratching one of his horns as he glanced back and forth from the kitsune and the Kaioshin. "The last time I checked, Kibito-dono, you yourself were one of the most powerful beings around these parts; why do you need my help? If this android is as much of a problem on Earth as you seem to suggest, would it not be advisable for you to eliminate it?"
Kibito-Shin shrugged his shoulders. "From a tactical standpoint, yes, but I find the act of killing to be an absolutely dreadful business, at any rate," he said. "Besides, from what Shippo and I gather to be the nature of this new jinzo-ningen, killing it will not be necessary."
"What do you mean?" Enma questioned, folding his arms.
Kibito-Shin turned to Shippo, gesturing towards the kit's backpack and twitching his fingers inward. "Hand me the documents," he said.
Shippo nodded at this, then reached into his pack and pulled out a well-worn manilla folder, one filled to the brim with a hastily cobbled-together stack of various papers and photographs. In reality, this bulging, seemingly-innocuous volume was the bauble of his joint venture with Kibito-Shin on Earth: the complete research and development record of what the Russian army had dubbed Operation Shadows Fall: the suppression of any and all provincial rebellion via the power of a brand new army, an army comprised entirely of freshly-cloned, technologically-enhanced jinzo-ningen.
The kitsune handed the folder off to Kibito-Shin, and Kibito-Shin, in turn, rifled through its contents quickly, coming to rest on a large, laminated photograph that he had dog-eared earlier. He withdrew it, looked it over for a short moment, then laid it down for Enma to see. Using one of his fingernail's rounded tips, Enma pulled the photo closer to him, taking care to avoid damaging it with the bulk of his digits and bringing it into focus with his magnifying glass.
The slightly-faded color print of the photo depicted the rusted innards of an aging military base, the small room that was pictured coming off as some sort of secret, clandestine research laboratory - the bulkhead-like configuration and overt structural reinforcement of its riveted, steel walls placed it somewhere deep underground. From wall to wall, this gloomy, scientific enclave was packed up to its very light fixtures with quite possibly every single electronic device ever conceived; cross-wired personal computers, carbon-fouled soldering kits, and even an improvised electromagnetic radar array, just to name a few. However, Enma
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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