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Battlefield 1542
By : Dunkelgelb
Category: InuYasha > General
Views: 1935 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.
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Battlefield 1542
Chapter II: Across the Soul Divide

The giant bull demon nearly fell over in his chair.

"Oh, no! I am not asking him for help!" Yamma shouted, his fingers digging into the upholstery of his seat.

"Come on! It wouldn't make sense to send anybody else, and besides, no one would want to return to Earth in anything but their own body!" Kibito-kai said, holding out his hands in an effort to convince King Yamma of his plan.

"It's a matter of pride, Kib! I can't ask him to do this!"

"He died sixty years ago. I think he's over your little oversight by now." the Kaioshin scolded.

"It wasn't an oversight; I was trying to protect Heaven's integrity, and I should never have to take back my word or apologize to anyone for anything!" Yamma growled, rising out of his chair and looming over the Kaioshin, visibly angry with the comparatively diminutive deity.

"You'll just have to apologize to him this one time, that's all! Surely, the great King Yamma can ask forgiveness from one mortal at least once every millenium, right?"

"Android Seventeen is a uniquely cocky individual. I would never hear the end of it." Yamma grunted.

"Yes, you would, because he'd be on Earth and away from you for a long, long time, that is, unless you can't summon the courage to humble yourself to him," Kib mocked.

"You think I'm scared of one little android?" Yamma pushed.

"Perhaps," the Kaioshin muttered, holding back a smile, as Yamma was an easy one to provoke.

"Allright, fine! Go ahead and get him, then! You'll see how much of a jackass he is!"

Kibito-kai spun on his heel and smirked lightly, for Kibito's guile and the Supreme Kai's ability to negotiate had combined and made him surprisingly manipulative, though he did so only as a last resort. He looked down to Shippo, who was sitting on the edge of Yamma's incoming mail box, chewing on a stick of strawberry pocky while fiddling with his assault rifle.

"Come on, Shippo, we've got work to do."

The kitsune angled his eyes up torward the awaiting Kaioshin, swallowed the remnants of his pocky, then gathered his gear together. He then stood up and placed a hand on Kib's shoulder, asserting the link needed in order to transport both the fox and god to their destination, via the Kai's ability to teleport from place to place.

"Where're we going?" Shippo asked.

"The Soul Divide."

The image of the both Shippo and Kibito-kai flickered intermittently, then in an instant, the two disappeared completely, leaving empty space behind and embarking on their journey across the heavens. Satisfied that his superior and underling had gone, Yamma grunted his disgust, then slumped back into his chair and reached for his telephone, punching in a series of numbers and bringing the receiver to his ear. The phone on the other end rang for a few moments, ending abruptly as someone picked up, and a soft, feminine voice arose, with the muffled sound of a roaring cheer interfering slightly.

"Hello?" the woman asked, speaking up above the noise of the nearby audience.

"Hello, Miss Izayoi. This is King Yamma. I would like to speak with your mate."

~~~~~~~~~~

The second Shippo and Kibito-kai burst out of their teleport, the fox-demon immediately crumpled to his knees and fell to one side onto the grassy ground of the hill they had appeared on, clutching his stomach while his face turned a twinge of green. Leaping from tree limb to tree limb at breakneck speed was one thing; disappearing, traveling through some unheard of dimension, and reappearing five-hundred miles away less than a second later was something else entirely. Shippo groaned and moaned at the unholy sensations that beat at his stomach.

"Ooooooh......I hate that teleporting thing of yours, Kibito-kai."

"Airsickness, huh?" the Kai joked.

The kitsune groaned again, and the fused Kaioshin gently picked him up and set him on his feet.

"Don't worry, you'll have plenty of time to recover. I've taken you as far as I can, but someone will be along shortly to take you the rest of the way."

Shippo still reeled from lightspeed nausea, so the lavender-skinned deity pulled one of the demon's arms over his shoulder and carried him up to the crest of the grassy hill. When the kitsune saw what lay on the other side, all thoughts of sickness immediately gave way to amazement. The kitsune spy was no stranger to this part of Spirit World, but he could not quite get used to the shock of seeing it.

It was the land of demons, the section of Heaven set aside for just for Earth's living and dead youkai. After the spider-demon Naraku was defeated at the closing stages of the legendary Battle of the Shikon Jewel in the mid-sixteenth century, the Kais, the beings governing Spirit World, concluded that keeping such powerful beings in the midst of comparatively weak ones was an inherently bad idea. As humans were generally dinner courses for low-level youkai and scornbearers for the high-level ones, leaving humans and demons together practically invited future war, with especially catastrophic conflict a possibility as humanity's technological ability grew. Acting upon this conclusion, nearly all youkai were removed from Earth and resituated into Heaven, as the vast majority of the high-intelligence demons were honorable beings and good at heart, though they sometimes locked horns with their mortal neighbors.

Shortly afterward, the human Renaissance hit at full force.

However, even with humans and demons separated down on Earth, a problem reared its head. In the living world, the spirits of both living human and living demon remained confined within the body, and did not contact each other regularly. The spirits of the dead, however, were represented by their original physical form but not contained to it. Their spirit energies expanded in death, and because of the inherent differences between ki and youki, humans and demons clashed once more. King Yamma and his assistants had one Hell of a time trying to figure out what was going on, because gravity was inverting, matter was transmuting into unrecognizable forms, and the dead were returning to life, in the most extreme instances. It was not until a certain Kaioshin spoke up that the cause was determined.

To solve these troubles, the Soul Divide was created.

Shippo's eyes followed the swaying grass down to the bottom of the hill that he and Kibito-kai stood on, where it abruptly ended and turned into tall ridges made of red sand and dusty rock. The Soul Divide was a spiritual barrier emplaced as a border between the two realms, further separating them with a spirit-tight seal. It had the side effect of completely transforming the landscape that it enveloped. The Dust Bowl, as the youkai residents called it, looked much like the surface of Mars, the only differences being the luminescent yellow clouds that sprawled across the sky and the curious masses of reddish-brown rock that floated without support anywhere from feet to miles above the surface.

It was an impressive sight to behold. Six-hundred fifty miles in diameter and at least two miles deep, the Dust Bowl was aptly named, for it was an enormously huge, circular, and slightly concave depression in the heavenly ground. Even with his long-range youkai vision, Shippo still couldn't focus his eyes accurately on the far side of the Bowl, and the heat waves that wafted up from the sand blurred the image even further.

"So.....what am I doing here?" Shippo asked, standing on his own feet again and holding a hand over his eyes to get a better view of the crater-like realm in front of him.

"You're going in to find Android Seventeen and bring him back to King Yamma," the Kaioshin answered.

"What's he doing in the demon afterlife? He did start out as a human, right?"

"That's all correct, but he had a bit of a dispute with King Yamma a while back, and decided to live under the Inu no Taisho's watch rather than Yamma's."

"He gave up Heaven because of a little disagreement? Even InuYasha isn't that stubborn," Shippo thought.

The Kaioshin smiled slightly, hearing Shippo's mental voice in his own mind.

"Stubborn, maybe, but I think you would be a little irritated too, if you were accused of another's crime and nearly sent to Hell."

Shippo's eyes widened at the Kai's statement, partly because he hadn't said anything aloud. However, that thought gave way to a question: how was he expected to find one man in a huge place like the Dust Bowl? Once again, the deity answered without hearing.

"Don't worry, Seventeen will be quite easy to track down. Head to the Youkai Budokai stadium; he's scheduled to fight there today, and among the youkai, he's a real standout."

"Are you going to teleport us there, because three-hundred miles is a long way on foot, even for a demon," Shippo asked, combing a clawed hand through his wild, fiery red hair.

"Sorry, but no. The Taisho is extremely territorial when it comes to foreign deities, so I can't come with you. However, King Yamma called ahead, and one of the Taisho's messengers should be along in a few minutes to pick you up," Kibito-kai explained.

Indeed, the messenger came. Shippo squinted and peered closely at the flickering horizon. A black and brown blur was flying torwards he and the Kaioshin with extreme velocity, a semi-transparent energy field surrounding it, like an aura of youki. It drew closer, and the blur morphed into a body, with arms, legs, a huge, voluminous torso, and a head of almost equal size. Eventually, the figure's face became visible, its bulbous, perpetually forward-staring pools of black and gaping, tooth-filled maw leaving no room to speculate as to just who this being was.

Rouyakan.

The eight-foot tall wolf demon streaked across the heavenly sky and dropped down to the curved ground in mere seconds, braking on a cushion of his own energy and grinding to a halt on a sand dune just a yard short of the wall of youki that was the Soul Divide. He called up to the waiting kitsune and Kaioshin.

"Shippo! Kibito-kai! Good to see you two again!" the wolf shouted, waving a furred hand at them.

Shippo grinned back. He always enjoyed seeing old acquaintances again, and he noted how little the gigantic Rouyakan had changed. He still wore his blue haori and accompanying hakama, along with his black steel breastplate, looking exactly as he did five-hundred years before. The only thing really different about him was his ability to fly, the concept behind which Shippo never learned.

"Taisho-sama said that you need a lift to the stadium. Care for a ride?" Rouyakan offered.

"Sure, thanks."

"Well then, let's get going. We shouldn't keep Lord Taisho waiting, should we?"

"No, of course not."

Just to be sure, Kibito-kai reminded Shippo of his mission.

"Remember, Shippo, even though the passage of time is a relative thing here in the spirit world, hurry up with finding Seventeen and bring him back here as soon as you can. Yamma wants to get this over with quickly," the Kai said, a stern look in his black eyes.

"I understand, Kibito-kai."

The Kai waved him off and disappeared into his teleport, while Rouyakan shuffled up the sandy slope and slowly pressed a brown, furry hand through the Dust Bowl's encasing energy barrier, causing it to shimmer with a bluish violet glow and ripple in concentric, circular waves.

"Take my hand, Shippo, and I'll pull you through," Rouyakan said.

Shippo nodded then leapt down from the hill on which he stood, coming to rest a few feet away from Rouyakan. He gave the wolf a nervous look.

"Will this hurt?"

"Heh, only if you stand on both sides at once."

Shippo extended his hand and abruptly, Rouyakan seized it and yanked Shippo through the Soul Divide, a shockwave coursing over its surface as a result of the intrusion by an external body. However, Shippo didn't see the wave, he only saw a blinding flash of pure white light wash over his eyes, with the sensation of untold millions of tiny ice cubes shooting through every nerve. He yelped and clung close to the sand for fear of falling somewhere, as his head was reeling from sudden shock. As soon as his senses returned, though, he was nearly overwhelmed again, this time by the sheer scale of the demon realm. It was no wonder he couldn't see the opposite side of the Bowl; it had merely been an optical illusion created by the spirit barrier. That obstruction gone, much more became visible.

Whereas Shippo could only see a few floating mountains and a giant plain of sand fromn the outside, he could now see everything.
He raised his eyebrows in amazement when he saw that some of those mountains were actually sky cities under construction, as great chunks of rock had been carved away and replaced with the template frames of tall skyscrapers. Viciously yawning canyons wove their way around the surface in giant, empty circuits, steel suspension bridges crossing them at several points. The most prominent feature, though, was Shippo's destination, the Budokai stadium, a gleaming steel dome that sat surrounded by a lake at the center of the Bowl.

Shippo broke out of his reverie when Rouyakan's back stiffened and he growled, looking about him for some unseen presence. He stared down at the ground, as it was the source of a low, basslike, and almost inaudible rumble.

The alarmed wolf demon snarled and grabbed Shippo by the collar firmly and blasted off into high-speed flight straight up into the air as the sand beneath them caved in and exploded outwards, an unholy, squealing roar piercing the air. Shippo screeched at the sudden movement.

"Hey! What's the big idea?" the kitsune shouted.

"Saimyosho. They're getting more audacious with their attacks."

Shippo's green eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in bottled-up horror at the mention of that one, ominous word, one that harkened back to dark times thought to have ended five centuries prior. He looked down to the newly-created hole as he hung from Rouyakan's grip, and saw truth to the wolf's words. An insect, a brown and fifteen-foot tall beetle, thrust its giant pincers through the sand, thrashing about while letting its sickening roar bubble up. Shippo looked up to the youkai that held him, and with a quivering, cracking voice, pleaded a simple request to him.

"Say it isn't so, Rouyakan......."

"I can't, Shippo. Naraku is still alive."
- To be continued-
- 2
- 3
- 4
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Battlefield 1542	By : Dunkelgelb Category: InuYasha > General Views: 1935 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.

Battlefield 1542