"You think our job is hard? All we have to do is shoot people and get shot at. Who I feel sorry for are the guys in charge of getting us to stop."
- Kyle Tekai

Black Dragon Productions presents...
A Guardian sequel/spinoff...
Which also happens to be a Sailor Moon crossover...

All characters not created by me don't belong to me. Like, duh. This chapter features prominent Warhammer references, specifically of the Chaos variety. You don't need to know all the particulars to enjoy or understand the story, but a few hours on Wikipedia can explain quite a bit if you're curious.
Knowledge of Guardian is required for full enjoyment of this fanfic. An unstable mind fueled by black rage and madness is NOT required, but recommended nonetheless.
Notes: Story may contain references to stuff in Guardian that haven't happened yet. To answer any and all inquiries to this effect, YES, that stuff will eventually happen.
Other Notes: Sounds, computer readouts, 'thoughts', (side comments)

Millennium
Chapter 12
Red Awakening
*****************************************************************************

It was a bright, clear day in a newly rejuvenated Tokyo that saw a pair of private detectives chugging along with the morning traffic as they made their way to the local doughnut shop.

Business was brisk for detectives nowadays. The older of the two men, an ex-CSI officer in his forties named Kouno Wachizu, had just been asked by a friend of his to try and locate her teenage son that had gone missing over a week ago, and he'd turned up precious few leads.

A case without any good trails was common. Unfortunately, jobs involving inexplicable disappearing teenagers were also becoming common. Not to mention increasingly bloody.

There was a day, Kouno recalled, when such cases involved simple runaway cases or, at worst, a young girl getting entangled with forces beyond human comprehension and being conscripted by arcane powers to save the world. Those were the good old days.

His last case had led him to the pile of rubble that used to be a dance club before it had been bombarded with artillery. Tokyo had never been a boring city, but such things were enough to rattle even a hardened old man like himself.

And Kouno couldn't afford to waste too much time on cases that went nowhere, even if they were for friends. After the sky had briefly and inexplicably been blanketed by an enormous pall of darkness that had, for a few moments, encompassed the entire world, people had become a lot more nervous and were being far more responsive and sensitive. Over half the cases he had gotten in the last few days had been cancelled as the concerned parties admitted to panicking when their loved ones were simply staying out past curfew or out of contact due to a dead cell phone.

"It's weird, isn't it Neida? A week ago we had artillery firing on the city, buildings being bombed, and the world sheathed in darkness... and now it's all so calm, like nothing ever happened."

The other man in the car, a much younger one that was constantly taking and observing photographs with some top-model digital camera, nodded absently. Neida Honshou almost never spoke unless he was asked a question. It was nice in some ways but made conversation pointless.

"Well, I suppose to other people it's like nothing's ever happened. God knows I have enough paperwork to remind me," the detective mumbled as he turned the corner. "But still, this all just seems wrong, somehow... something big has happened, and things have changed. The fact that everything seems the same has me worried."

Seeing that the parking spaces in front of the shop were all full - no surprise, at this time of day - Kouno checked for police cruisers and then double-parked near the entrance as soon as he confirmed there were none.

He stepped out of the car, and Neida did the same on the other side. "After we get something to eat we should check with Misato and see-"

"HALT, EVIL-DOERS!!"


Kouno and Neida flinched, their hearts leaping into their throats as a voice boomed from behind and above them. "Wh-What? Who-"

"Traffic laws are made for the safety and convenience of ALL people!" Standing atop a streetlight overlooking the shop stood Usagi, posing splendidly in her trademark blue DAPC body armor and non-regulation matching skirt (Junko's work, of course). "For your callous and selfish disregard for the public welfare, you will NOT be forgiven! I am Tsukino Usagi, for minor traffic justice, I will punish YOU!"

There was a slight whirring noise as Neida took a picture, probably just as a reflex; otherwise the two men were stunned by the display.

"Uh... well..." Kouno glanced over at the car, then up to the unreasonably angry young woman. "Couldn't we just... you know... move it?"

Usagi straightened and planted her hands on her hips. "Very well! For today I will overlook your vile misdeeds and let you off with a verbal warning! But should you ever-"

The cyborg was cut off by the squeal of tires as the detectives took off down the street. Frowning, she immediately switched on her targetting computer and mentally requested a velocity tag on the vehicle as it accelerated.

'Rising... rising... almost... ah, okay, I think they're slowing down.' Usagi relaxed as the car was forced to slow down to re-enter traffic, barely keeping it below the speed limit and barely saving its occupants from another lecture.

"Now that's an interesting way to cut down on paperwork," Ranma mumbled as he stepped out of the doughnut shop carrying a stack of three large boxes; containing enough fried bread and sugar for two ordinary police departments, when split between the two eating machines that were Ranma and Usagi (literally, in Usagi's case) it was just enough to keep the pair from fighting each other over the food.

Neither one wanted that. Usagi didn't like fighting, after all, but tended to lose herself in the carnal whirlwind of sugar consumption. Ranma, for his part, didn't like hot, searing plasma, and tended to lose important organs when faced with a storm of overwhelming force and heat.

Usagi hopped off of the streetlight, her booster jets bulging up out of her back and pushing up special hinged panels in the back of her armor as she slowly lowered herself onto the ground below. Seras had been working a lot lately, and had managed to come up with a custom armor design that would allow Usagi to use some of her more common modules while wearing the armor vest, and also making the armor resistant to the intense heat that some of those modules generated.

Most wondered why she even bothered with the vest, as it couldn't really protect her against anything strong enough to actually damage the cyborg, but she was still playing Cyber Moon as her superhero identity, and that meant that she needed a regular uniform for her civilian identity that wouldn't stand out.

That she would stand out anyway using booster rockets and mini-missiles obviously hadn't occurred to her.

"Have you given a look through the DAPC operations handbook yet?" Ranma asked, walking along next to Usagi as she ferociously attacked the doughnuts.

The blonde shook her head as she swallowed the first one, going for the chocolate and sprinkle-covered ones first. "No, not yet. Is it that important?"

Ranma thought that over as he took a maple bar and destroyed it in two bites. "Not most of it, no. I mean, you've done plenty of fighting monsters and you have more tools that the rest of us." Of course, the whole POINT of the handbook was to allow officers to use their tools more effectively, but Ranma Saotome, genius of improvisation and adaptability, could easily sympathize with the young cyborg. "But you should definitely read the section on keeping Snake from killing you."

Usagi blanched, but managed to continue eating nonstop in a truly heroic feat of appetite. "But isn't he on our side?"

"Hey, if you're willing to trust your life to a technicality like that, fine. Your skin can block shrapnel. And hopefully, anti-material rifle rounds." Ranma looked at the girl dubiously. He had never been struck by an anti-armor rifle - thanks only to considerable effort on his part - so he didn't know for sure, but Usagi didn't seem much tougher than a light APC to him.

"I don't understand why everybody's so mean to Snake!" Usagi grumbled in-between doughnuts.

"Well, we don't understand why you're not terrified of him, so I guess we're even," Ranma mumbled, opening a small carton of milk and gulping some down. "He did shoot you in the head once, after all."

"That was my fault, though!" She protested.

"Most people wouldn't be so understanding," Ranma mumbled, picking up a sugar doughnut, "or, you know, ALIVE."

Usagi rolled her eyes. "For all of everyone's complaining, I've never heard of Snake actually shooting someone on his side." She hesitated. "Well, besides me, I mean."

Ranma raised an eyebrow. "You haven't?" Seeing the blonde shake her head, he pressed a little further. "When was the last time you saw that guy in the mask and top hat?"

"Tuxedo Kamen? I haven't seen him since the fight in the mortuary," Usagi said. Now that she thought about it, she had almost forgotten about her destined lover entirely ever since joining the DAPC. So much had happened to her in such a short span of time that her most recent break-up with Mamoru had simply slipped her mind. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason. Forget it," Ranma said. If Usagi wanted to pretend Snake was a sane and sensible human being, hey, who was he to stop her?

Usagi polished off the last of the doughnuts, her robot arms unfolding from her shoulders to shovel them into her mouth at a rate that matched Ranma's. "Gulp! Ah, those were good!" Undoing a strap on her side, she peeled open the front plate of her body armor and pulled her shirt up under her breasts, her stomach/fridge opening. "Ranma-kun, could you get us some milk?"

Feeling somewhat amazed that Usagi had adjusted so well to being part appliance, the pigtailed man reached into her body and started searching through the bottles he could find. "Uh... it looks like there's nothing but liquor in here, actually."

"What?" Usagi frowned cutely. "Dang it! Who keeps doing that?"

Ami frowned in annoyance as she drank the last of her milk, pushing the empty container aside once she was done with it. "I was really under the impression that Usagi-chan would be around the HQ more often. It seems to me that she's packing an awful lot of firepower to be patrolling the city looking for traffic violations and purse-snatchers."

After finishing her complaint, she went back to typing away at the Mercury computer, which was displaying a number of energy wavelengths as rapidly quivering lines rolling across a moving grid.

Across the table from her, Kyle shrugged. "Well, the captain thought it would be fine since both she and Ranma can get around quickly without a vehicle."

"I understand the tactical implications, but still," Ami mumbled, rubbing her forehead.

"So, what are you doing again?"

Ami frowned at her computer display. "I'm searching for Sailor Saturn," she explained, "and having bloody little luck with it."

The Senshi hadn't told the DAPC any details about Hotaru's disappearance, seeing how it was their problem and out of the DA's jurisdiction; though Usagi felt sure that the police officers would have offered to help if they could, Ami figured there was precious little they could do, so there was no point in dumping bad news and new concerns on them.

Well, that, and Haruka seemed more suspicious than ever about the DAPC's apparent alliance with the Senshi. Oddly enough, Michiru's opinion had softened considerably, and the aqua-haired woman had even made a few trips to the station to visit on her own. Ami felt that there was something significant hidden among these facts, but put it aside as unimportant for now.

In fact, the only real reason Ami was doing her search at the DAPC headquarters was to avoid Luna and Artemis. Luna in particular had been insufferable ever since hearing about the vampire incident and Hotaru's disappearance, and the only way to keep the feline advisors quiet was to either avoid them or stick around people they didn't trust. The work Ami was doing was important enough that both measures seemed warranted.

Kyle eventually spoke up again after a few moments. "So how are you searching for her? You looking for notices on the Internet or something?"

Ami shook her head, letting the blond man draw her out of her thoughts; she had spent so long endlessly grinding data at this point that she was glad for the distraction of having someone to talk to. "No, I'm fairly certain that the Internet wouldn't have the information I'm looking for."

"Not even Google?"

Ami smiled slightly. "No, not even Google. This computer is capable of scanning local energy patterns and detecting Silver Millennium power signatures. I'm trying to put together the data from that."

Kyle didn't know what any of that meant, so he decided to move the conversation along. "So did you find what you were looking for?"

"Yes and no," Ami said, sighing wearily. "Each of the Senshi have a connection to the Ginzuisho, and that wavelength is secure and stable, so I'm reasonably certain Saturn is neither dead nor dying. But no matter what I try, I can't track the source of the wavelength. And the other data I have is just confusing."

She hit a button on the Mercury computer and then turned it around for Kyle to see. "Saturn was last detected here, around Okinawa. The energy signature is so faint that I can't even get a precise reading from where she used to be. After she disappeared, I found another burst of energy from a teleport that Saturn apparently attempted on her own. Luckily the Mercury computer automatically scans and records such things on its own, so I don't have to worry about faded energy signatures..."

Kyle zoned out as Ami continued speaking, doing his best to look concerned while the blue-haired girl went into further detail. He was concerned for the apparently missing Senshi, he really was, but his specialty was taking impacts that could smash steel and carrying things too heavy for most industrial machines. He didn't see any way he could help Ami make sense of magical energy waves, or whatever she was going on about.

"... no matter how I calibrate it, I can't make any sense of the signal resonation," Ami mumbled, massaging her forehead. "Not only can I not lock onto where Saturn is, I can't even pinpoint where she was or where she was going, and the worst part is that I can't even figure out why. It could be jamming, a spell failure, hell, I wouldn't even rule out a computer virus at this point!" the bluette complained, slumping back in her chair.

"Oh. That's... rough," Kyle said cautiously, silently appreciative of the way Ami had concluded her difficulties in terminology easy enough for him to understand.

"Yeah, it is," Ami grumbled, "but I have to keep at it. So far the kooky divinations haven't had any luck, and that means it's back to good old technology. Which means everybody's counting on me."

"I see..." Kyle mumbled, rubbing his chin and trying to think of a way he or anyone he knew could assist the Genius Senshi.

After thinking failed him (as usual), Kyle shrugged. "Hey, wanna play Guilty Gear?"

Ami's head shot up immediately. "What version?"

"Accent Core, on the PS2," Kyle answered, smiling.

"Dibs on Slayer."

Seras Tuko yawned as he took the elevator down into the sub-levels, and then glanced down at the nearly-empty bottle of brandy in his hand.

"Why is it that I have to spend all day working while Kyle plays video games with the captain's cousin?" The drunk mumbled irritably, swaying slightly. He had spied the pair on the way to the elevator, laughing it up as they discussed which video game characters had the silliest powers. There had been some program running on the computer on the desk, but Seras had no idea what it was for. Judging by the data running wildly across the screen, the program was just repeating the same data on infinite loop, indicating that a psionic energy wavelength had intercepted and redirected a materialization particle codex somewhere. Whatever THAT was all about. He would have asked what kind of stupid program just kept repeating such meaningless data over and over, but decided that if it was meaningless enough for Mizuno to put it aside for her silly games, then it certainly wasn't important enough to take up HIS time.

The elevator completed its trip to the second floor of the sub-level, and Seras continued on to the second vault cell block. While this area used to be cluttered with old storage crates and unidentified wreckage from ancient shrines and junked space vessels, it had been cleared away and replaced with old furniture and some Shinto paraphanelia, along with a bookcase full of scrolls and dusty books on vampiric and religious lore, as well as copy of Twilight buried under other books in the vain hope nobody would spot it.

What dominated the room, however, was the large coffin in the middle of it.

Seras hadn't been at the mortuary when the Senshi and DAPC had attacked it, but those who had could say that it perfectly resembled the one that Rei had first emerged from as the Archon of Flames. It had a beautiful black lacquer finish, and its design had obscure runes, pentagrams, and a few unnaturally creepy drawings all lovingly and expertly crafted so that they folded and curved around the coffin and detracted nothing from the overall decoration. On the face of the lid, where a cross would normally be placed, the sigil of Mars instead shone brilliantly with supernatural light, positively glowing in the dim lighting of the sub-levels. The entire coffin was also wrapped in thick, rusty iron chains, with a massive and archaic padlock on one side.

Of course, if anyone had asked Rei herself, she would have happily told them that the coffin in fact WAS the same one from the mortuary that Ranma had blown apart with a stray shot and then wrecked with a tornado. Frankly though, that night had been harrowing and turbulent enough that nobody gave such an unimportant detail any notice.

Seras walked up to the coffin and guzzled the last of his liquor before wiping his chin and setting the empty bottle down on the floor. Producing a wrought iron key from his pocket, he worked it into the padlock and then twisted, causing the lock to spring open and the chains to collapse loosely, many of them spilling onto the floor.

Then he raised a fist and rapped his knuckles against the heavy wooden lid.

Klok! Klok! Klok! "Wakey wakey! It's a beautiful evening and I've got a fresh bag of disgusting bodily fluids for you!"

There were a few moments of silence as Seras backed away, and then the lid of the coffin shifted to the side, eventually sliding off completely.

Rei yawned and rubbed her eyes as she sat up, consciousness finally returning to her as her enhanced vampiric senses started flooding her waking mind with information like a river overrunning a dam.

After a few seconds her mind was up to speed with her surroundings, and then she gave the man next to her a bored look. "Oh. It's you."

"Yes, today was my day to wake up and feed the monsters. Here you are," the failure of a doctor took out a plastic bag full of blood and tossed it haphazardly into the coffin.

"Do I get some?" A forlorn voice came from one of the vaults, and Seras rolled his eyes before taking out another blood bag, this one only a fifth full.

"Yes, yes, shut up. Just a minute."


Rei grunted as she picked up the blood bag, shooting a glare at Seras' back as he opened the vault door. The annoying drunk was easily her second least favorite person in the DAPC, and every time he was in charge of unlocking her coffin and feeding her, she was reminded why. He was rude, insensitive, prejudiced, inexplicably arrogant, and didn't make any attempt to hide any of it. To say nothing of his alcohol-laced odor; if her vampiric sense of smell wasn't coupled with the fact that she didn't technically need to breathe, the man's breath could have suffocated her.

That said, her least favorite person in the DAPC was, of course, Snake. When he was responsible for waking her, Rei had to seriously consider whether it was worth getting out of her coffin in the evening.

Thus far, nobody had managed to impress upon the American that her ability to regenerate in seconds was NOT an invitation to blow her up just for kicks.

Rei unconsciously sharpened a nail to a knife's edge, and then cut a slit into a corner of the blood bag before she stuck that corner into her mouth and started to suck on it. As usual, Seras hadn't brought her a straw as she always requested, the little prick.


"Whose blood is this? The pigtailed man's?" Garo asked hopefully as Seras tossed him the bag.

"Of course it's not. I've told you before; we're not wasting any more of the good stuff on YOU until you're useful to us," Seras said, snorting disdainfully.

"And how, pray tell, am I to be useful to you when all you do is leave me trapped in this blasted prison?" Garo snarled back.

It had been more than a week since he had heard news of the defeat of Ran and the annihilation of the majority of his species, and days of meditation on the subject, as well as the occasional glimpse of a comely vampire on the other side of his prison door, had led him to seriously consider a re-evaluation of his loyalties and priorities.

Unfortunately, he had found rather quickly that the humans had totally lost interest in him as anything more than a prisoner to be kept alive, and definitely didn't trust him one iota. And although he attributed this mostly to the humans' insensible prejudice and ignorant fear, there was one small part of his mind that insisted this was at least partially his fault for being a murdering asshole.

Seeing his captor ignore his question and close the vault door, Garo sighed and picked up his meal, recognizing that he had been given yet another lonely evening to reflect upon the quandary.


"So, explain to me again why you guys keep my coffin chained up during the daytime? It's not like I'm going to go out for a stroll in the daylight," Rei groused as the vault slowly closed and locked itself.

Seras rolled his eyes. "We don't know that, so we're not going to take any chances. Tsukino-san and Saotome-san trust you completely. Nobody else does. And since we couldn't really stop you from wandering around at night if we tried, we'll settle for restricting your actions during the day. For now, at least."

"Okay, I can respect that," Rei said irritably. "Frankly, if you were turned I wouldn't hesitate to stake you, so it's fine. But are the chains really necessary?"

"Not at all," Seras admitted, looking rather put off by Rei's rationalization, "but it's appropriately dramatic and gothic-themed, so we use them anyway."

Rei blinked, and then turned toward her desk. "Is THAT why Yamazaki-san got me human skulls with candles on them when I asked him for a desk lamp?"

"Yes. Do you have any more stupid questions for me, or can I go now? Not all of us are nocturnal, you know."

Rei growled slightly, repressing a sudden, carnal urge to tear the man's heart out and eat it like an apple. 'Would probably taste better than this stale, refrigerated junk, too,' she considered, feeling wildly conflicted emotions at the thought.

Seeing the vampiric Senshi hesitate, Seras turned away and began walking out. "By the way, Tsukino will probably meet you later and say this herself, but she was hoping you could try one of your silly magic divination things later."

Rei frowned, and stopped drinking. "I'll need a sacred fire for that, though..."

Seras stopped and fought down a chuckle. "A sacred fire? You? Wouldn't a cursed fire be more appropriate?"

Rei was about to snap at him angrily, but actually stopped to consider this before she frowned and crossed her arms under her breasts. "You know... I have no idea. You might be right. But in either case, I'll need supplies."

The medical officer shrugged and waved her off. "Talk to Saotome or the captain if you need something. I don't have time for your nonsense."

Rei's eyes flared a deep red as she glared at the man's back, trying her best to light him aflame with just her gaze.

Fwoom! "Ow! Ow! Hey! Stop that!" Seras shouted, diving onto the floor and rolling about to put out the cinder on his shirt collar.

'Oops. I forgot I actually CAN light people on fire by glaring at them.' Rei winced, immediately feeling guilty and putting out the flame.

Seras glared at the vampiress as he stood up, but said nothing as he stalked out of the room and toward the elevator; inwardly he was rather amazed that he could say that much to the midian and get away with nothing but a little burn, but he wasn't about to let the undead girl know that.


Seeing the mortal step into the elevator, Rei finished off her blood bag and then debated what to do that night. There was a fifty-fifty chance that Usagi would be around and awake, although spending the night with the cyborg girl was never productive. Rei wasn't sure whether Usagi was just trying to protect her feelings or if the blonde's friendship was really so pure and unconditional, but Usagi's mannerisms toward her hadn't changed at all. The ditzy cyborg still wanted to go see movies and read manga and talk about boy bands, and she spoke of Rei's vampirism as if it was simply a unique character trait rather than a curse or an abomination against nature. In truth, Rei had trouble deciding whether that attitude annoyed or soothed her; it seemed that no matter what happened to them, Usagi was still good at twisting her emotions into knots.

Putting aside the option of playing with her friend, Rei decided that she'd try to work up a divination ritual to replace her older one. The only other options were reading all night, which didn't seem very productive, especially when her genre kept drifting from ancient gothic lore to vampiric teenage romance, or taking a trip around the city at night, which wasn't productive at all, and made her feel vaguely uncomfortable.

"Rei-hime..."

Rei's eyes narrowed as she heard the muffled voice from within the vault. "What do you want, scumbag?" she snapped, in no mood to converse with the other vampire after having to put up with Seras.

Talking to Garo always irritated her to no end because everything about the conversations reminded her that she was no longer human. She hated Garo as much as anyone else, and the male vampire always seemed confused as to why, as if he expected some sort of kinship with her. The idea made her sick, and she took every opportunity to inform him of that.

"If the human has departed, I should like to-"

"That human has a name, you know," Rei snapped, floating up out of her coffin and promptly noticing the empty bottle sitting next to it. "A name I'll be bringing up the next time I see Asuka-san. I mean, I'll put up with a lot from that guy, but littering? I've warned him about leaving his junk around here!"

Garo's voice was absent for a long moment. "Forgive me for not memorizing the names of our captors, Rei-hime," he began, only to be cut off again.

"No. Now shut up," Rei said simply, turning toward her book shelf.

Her "conversations" with Garo were usually like this; he'd start off cautiously, lavishing her with respect and deference... and then within a few sentences he'd casually say something that she didn't like, usually in a subtle attempt to portray himself as her ally.

On the plus side, he always fell silent after she told him to, which she very much appreciated.

"Hmmm... I think this will do." Taking out a musty old tome, she blasted the dust off with a brief telekinetic burst and then opened it up, flipping to the relevant page.

After looking it over, Rei nodded and then laid it on the table, idly lighting one of the candles with a thought. Although she could see just fine in total darkness, she found the light comforting; darkvision portrayed everything in a grainy black and white, like an old video, and she found it rather unpleasant.

"Hmm?" Rei suddenly turned her head sharply. "What was that?"

Silence greeted her question. As far as she could tell, the only movement in the room were the particles of dust falling onto the floor.

"That's strange. I thought I saw something..." she mumbled to herself. Sniffing the air, Rei could detect... well, she detected SOMETHING unfamiliar in the air. Hell if she knew what, though.

An ever-so-slight slithering noise alerted her senses, and she turned around just in time to see a shadow move into the hall behind her that led deeper into the sub-level.

'Wait, that couldn't have been a shadow, there's no light over there,' Rei remembered, becoming even more annoyed with her unwanted powers. 'But then what was it?'

She was tempted to turn around and alert whatever officers were in headquarters that they had something besides nosferatu running loose in their underground prison, but her curiosity and determination won out over caution, and she darted through the air after the disturbance.


Rei had never explored the DAPC's underground facilities before. She had never been given a complete tour of the building despite being set up to live there, and although she'd never been banned from looking around the place, she had been far more interested and occupied with the new and involuntarily changes to her body than she was interested in the menagerie of weirdness that the DA kept locked up and forgotten.

Now that she was actively following the bizarre scent through the darkened hallways, she was finding it hard to focus on her quarry and not get sidetracked.

"There! Stop!" Rei shouted as she saw... whatever it was she was chasing slip behind a corner.

Darting through the air, she rounded the corner herself, and then her eyes narrowed.

The hallway led to a single door, obviously heavily reinforced. She could see no sign of whatever she had been chasing, though.

The door was covered in warning signs, which gave Rei pause. They covered everything from "Danger!" and "Don't EVER open! Seriously!" to a far more cryptic "Cut off their limbs".

Touching the door gently, Rei confirmed that it was primarily steel, and didn't contain any lead, silver, or anything else that could prevent her from phasing through it.

'A little peek couldn't hurt as long as I don't open the door,' she decided, slowly sticking her face into the wall of steel as a ring of arcane symbols appeared around the point of contact.

It took a few seconds for her face to emerge on the other side of the barrier, and Rei grimaced as she made sure to get her head all the way through before she opened her eyes; she had learned fairly quickly that trying to use her normal sensory organs while parts of her brain were discorporated into magical essence was confusing at best, though Ranma suggested she just needed more practice.

Once she had opened her eyes to the interior of the room, Rei promptly closed them again, and then tried opening them once more in the hope that the first image was some sort of fluke.

Unfortunately, it was not. In retrospect she would consider it ironic and unseemly that a vampire should be so shocked at the sight of blood, even if it was streaked across the wall in horrific messages and cryptic patterns, but at that particular moment all she could do was gape at the gore that decorated the room.

"Hrrrraugh..."

Rei reflexively glanced down at the noise, and she winced at the sight of several corpses lying on the floor.

One of which was raising its head and snarling at her.

The midian's eyes bulged. The creature resembled some sort of mutated ghoul, with its hands twisted into long, bony scythes, and its lower torso missing. Instead of legs, its spine had lengthened and thickened, and the foul appendage slowly rose into the air to reveal a slimy, twisted spike at the end, similar to a scorpion's tail.

"SHYAE!"

Rei quickly pulled her head out of the door as the monster leapt for her, wincing as she heard the sound of bone scraping against steel on the other side.

"Okay... that... was not what I was chasing," the vampiress mumbled shakily, moving away from the doorway. She had seen enough ghouls such that the disgusting creatures didn't alarm her anymore, but that... thing had attacked with a vicious intelligence and carnal hatred that she'd never sensed from a ghoul.

Suddenly, she caught sight of something moving out of the corner of her eye, and Rei whirled about in the air. "You're not getting away!"

Zooming after her quarry once again, she saw a dark blur vanish under another door, and levitated to the floor in front of it.

Looking at the door suspiciously, she was relieved to find that this one only had a warning that the interior was kept cold at all times, represented by a little generic stick-figure man wearing a parka. Below that the room was labeled "Small Organism Cryogenic Storage".

Quickly phasing through the door entirely, Rei immediately stretched out her senses. A moment later she retracted them, wincing slightly. Not only had she been unable to sense her target, but many of the things that were being frozen here had powerful psychic emanations even while they were frozen, and some of the energies were almost painful to absorb.

Glancing around the lab as she searched, Rei eventually got bored of looking over the floor constantly and finally took notice of the creatures entombed in the lab. Many of the cryogenic containers were labeled, and some of them flickered or sparked dangerously, as if they were on the verge of breaking.

"Hmm... 'Dire Rat'... 'Goa'uld'... 'Mini-Cthulu'... 'Talking Ermine/Panty Thief'... 'Chucky the Killer Doll'..." Giving a grunt of disgust at the excessively scarred face of the homicidal toy, as well as a slight shudder at the waves of psionic hatred emanating from its frozen prison, Rei tore her eyes away and turned to another pair of containers behind her.

Her eyes nearly popped out of her head when she saw two Silver Millennium-pattern cryo-stasis tanks mounted on the wall, each with a moon cat inside. Below the tanks was a name plate that read: "Mau (Warning: Subjects are intelligent and capable of EXCESSIVE verbal communication)"

Rei walked up to the tanks, almost disbelieving as she stared at them. "I don't believe it... more moon cats? Here? How long have these little guys been frozen? Where did they come from?"

Predictably, there was no one present to answer her questions, and frankly, no one that currently worked for the DAPC knew or cared about the various critters that they kept refrigerated down in the vaults.

Glancing around, and completely forgetting her original purpose for entering this room, Rei moved to scrape the frost off one of the stasis units, revealing some controls and a name plate.

"Hmmm... Nova? Okay, now how do you work this thing?" Hoping that the stasis tanks didn't have any function to self-destruct or cut off life support to the subject, Rei pushed a large red button on the side of the device.


Pshooooo! Crk! Gases gushed from the vents on top of the tank before the stasis unit started to heat up, causing the ice covering the device to crack and fall off bit by bit.

Before long, the body underneath the glass started to twitch, and then the glass tube suddenly popped open, allowing the rust-colored moon cat inside to roll forward and tumble out onto the counter in a heap.

"Ow! Wh... What..."

Rei simply stood over the groggy alien, her expression curious. 'Huh. Sounds like a girl,' she noted.

Nova shook her head rapidly to try and clear away the cobwebs. "Huh? Where am I?"

"You're in a police building in Tokyo," Rei explained, tilting her head to one side. "How are you feeling?"

The moon cat looked startled. "A police building? What'd I do? You can't just lock me up like this, you got nothin' on me!"

Rei sweatdropped as the cat bristled, looking at her suspiciously. "Uh... calm down, please. You're not under arrest or anything. This is just where I found you. Are you here to help the Sailor Senshi?"

"The Senshi?" Nova scoffed. "Screw the Senshi!"

The sweatdrop was replaced by a vein popping up. "Excuse me?"

"Military thugs is what they are!" Nova growled, her tail swaying irritably as she idly pawed at her damp fur to smooth it. "They're just tools of the monarchy to keep the people down! But let me tell you girlfriend, the people CAN'T be silenced! Fight the power!"

Rei's eyebrow twitched. "I... think I see what's happening here. So... are you a rebel, or-"

"I'm not a rebel, I'm a liberator!" The reddish feline declared. "Rebels fight against a legitimate authority! I didn't vote for Serenity, did you?"

"Uh... well, I wasn't-"

"Exactly! You didn't vote for her because she's part of the imperialist matriarchal society that puts their little dictators into power without the people's permission! It's the duty of each and every citizen to resist the authoritarian regime and stick it the Woman! Vov ho revoluten!"

Rei's brow creased as she fought to keep from sighing. "Okay, fine. Ho revoluten. What's the last thing you remember?"

Nova stopped talking briefly, and spent a few seconds grooming her fur as she concentrated. "Well... I think I was thawed out a few times since I was originally frozen, but my memories of those incidents are pretty hazy. Like college. Did you know that Neptune Central Academy has the BEST void shrooms this side of-"

"Do you remember how or why you were frozen?" The vampiress interrupted, trying to keep the new moon cat on a potentially useful topic. "I can figure that you're definitely not a royal attendant."

Nova snorted. "Of course that's what you'd think, huh? Only the rich, lazy, privileged snobs from the stupid moon castle get sent forward in stasis. The hard-working people that actually keep the empire-"

"Please, just... don't," Rei mumbled, massaging her forehead. "Seriously. When were you frozen?"

"Oh, right. Well, that's a funny story, actually," Nova admitted, her whiskers twitching. "I was at a Youma Lords' Death Knell concert, and the main thumper went into an awesome eight-minute solo jam. I'm guessing I scored some bad 'nip, because things started to go a little prismatic, and-"

"Some bad 'nip'?" Rei asked incredulously.

"It's medicinal!" The rust-colored mau hissed, her tail standing straight up. "I have stress issues! Don't judge me! ANYWAY, next thing I knew, I was being restrained by a bunch of angry Lunar Marines on a frigate outgoing from Mercury. I'm not sure what was going on, but apparently there was some kind of major uprising going on." Nova calmed considerably, and then looked slightly embarrassed. "Considering where I was, it definitely wasn't a good idea to respond with 'Cool! Are they winning?' There was a lot of angry shouting, and I think somebody tazed me. And here I am."

There was a moment of silence as the vampiric Senshi stared down at the moon cat, who stared back up at her.

"So!" Nova said excitedly, "who won?"

Instead of answering, Rei swiftly grabbed the moon cat and shoved her back into the capsule, shutting the door before Nova could protest.

Slamming her hand on a blue button, the nosferatu sighed in relief as the device gave out a hiss before it began the freezing process once again, muffling and finally silencing the moon cat's angry yowling.


"I really don't know what I was thinking," Rei mumbled as she ran a hand through her hair. "As if we really need another moon cat around." Although slightly curious as to what the other one, Orion judging by the nameplate, would be like, the vampiress turned away and made to leave the storage area.

"Guh?" Rei gasped as she felt something touch her leg, and then stiffened as a paralyzing tingle tore through her body. "Wh-What?!"

Her eyes boggled as a psychic pulse bombarded her, and she felt a surge of emotion brush against her mind. Desperation... fear... hunger... need... curiosity... loneliness... sorrow...

And then, in an instant, the presence was gone, the cacophony of feelings fading away rapidly as her paralysis vanished.

Rei promptly shot up into the air, tucking her legs under her as she rapidly searched the floor for any sign of what had touched her.

The vampiress growled when she found nothing, baring her fangs in frustration. This evening had gotten off to a bad start, and her little adventure in the forgotten prisons of the DAPC wasn't improving matters.

Suddenly, Rei felt a tingle in the back of her mind, and after a moment she realized that someone was approaching her coffin.

Glancing around one last time to ensure she couldn't find anything out of place, Rei summoned her energies to her and materialized a pair of magic circles that spun around her body rapidly. After a moment, the vampiress vanished in a burst of flame, the eldritch symbols fading away after her.

Ranma blinked as a pair of magic circles appeared over the giant coffin, and idly stroked the handle of the Jackal as his possessed handgun snarled in irritation.

Fwoosh! Rei appeared in a puff of fire, and the vampiress glanced down at Ranma approvingly. "Ranma-kun, hello. I'm surprised to see you."

Ranma nodded pleasantly. "I took a nap during the afternoon, so I figured I could spend the evening with you. I imagine it gets pretty lonely down here with nothing but that idiot to talk to." He shoved a thumb toward Garo's prison.

Rei nodded hesitantly, not because she in any way doubted that the other midian was an idiot, but rather because she was trying to work out how serious her earlier chase was. She was very pleased that the pigtailed cop had decided to spend time with her for no apparent reason, and she actually debated putting the matter aside so as not to ruin the mood. "Listen, Ranma-kun... there's something down here."

The pigtailed man looked at her strangely. "What do you mean by that?"

"Earlier, after I woke up. I saw something moving through the halls, and I chased it around for a while," Rei admitted, standing in the air as she rubbed her chin. "I didn't get a good look at it, but from what I could tell it was almost like a shadow... except that I don't SEE shadows, so I suppose you could think of it as a... pool of darkness, maybe?"

Ranma frowned, his eyes narrowing. He was uncomfortably familiar with a technique similar to what Rei was describing. "So what happened?"

"Well, I chased it into a room, and then I got distracted - you don't want to know the details, trust me - and then I think it touched my leg." The vampiress frowned. "I felt a psychic pulse, and then it escaped. I couldn't find any way to track it."

Ranma thought this over for a moment, and then turned toward the vault that held the other vampire currently in the DAPC's custody. "Hey, freak! You hearing this?"

There was a moment of silence before Garo's voice answered. "This freak has a name, officer," came the sardonic reply, mimicking Rei's earlier rebuke.

Rei crossed her arms over her chest. "Respect IS a two-way street, it's true." And then her eyes narrowed. "Unfortunately, your side of the street is barricaded by a giant metal wall. Don't be a smartass."

Giving the vampiress an appreciative smirk, Ranma raised his voice again. "I remember that one of the bloodsuckers that broke into the HQ could turn into a puddle of shadow... or something like that. I don't remember seeing it from any of the other freaks, though. What kind of trick was it?"

No reply came immediately, and after a moment Rei growled. "Answer the question, Garo!"

"Shadow manipulation magic is a very difficult and... unusual ability. It takes considerable study and practice, and does not develop naturally. I imagine even Rei-hime could not manage it without the proper materials and a competent instructor." The voice was reluctant and resigned.

Ranma nodded to himself. He didn't know why the other vampire called Rei "hime" or why he would spill his guts to the vampiric Senshi and not his actual captors, but he wasn't going to complain so long as they could extract answers without also having to extract his blood. "Go on."

"I do not know much more about the ability, but the only vampires I know of that were at all accomplished in such techniques were Ran-sama and Yamato-senpai. Both of whom are dead, or so you tell me."

"They're the only ones?" Ranma asked skeptically.

"They're the only ones I know of," Garo corrected. "I do not presume to know every vampire in Japan, much less their abilities. I can offer only what I know."

Rei snorted. "Useless twit."

Ranma frowned. "So, putting aside whether or not there are mystery vampires running around, do you have any idea what it was that Rei-chan saw?"

Another pause. "I do not. I am not very old, in terms of vampires, and was raised in modern times. I'm hardly very well-versed in strange creatures or abilities."

Rei snorted again. "Told you."

"Just thought I'd ask," Ranma admitted shrugging. "Thanks, fangs. I'll think about pricking my finger and sticking it into your meal next time I bring you food."

Ignoring the appreciative sounds from the other side of the vault door, Ranma gestured for Rei to follow him toward the elevator.


Rei frowned as they took the elevator up to the main floor. She had several questions and concerns at the moment, but one tugged at her curiosity hard enough for her to put aside the sudden and unexplained attack in the DAPC headquarters.

"You know, I've been meaning to ask this for a while, but... what's the deal with your blood?" Rei blurted.

Ranma looked surprised by the question, and then frowned as he scratched his head. Come to think of it, he didn't really know why vampires loved his blood so much. He knew he was much healthier and stronger than everybody else, and that Seras could convert his blood into medicine, but how did that make it addictively delicious?

Quickly deciding that honesty was pointless if it didn't provide an answer, he fell back on his stand-by conversation strategy: boasting.

"It's due to the elevated Awesome levels in my DNA," Ranma said seriously, as if admitting a precious secret.

"The elevated what." Rei deadpanned, her eyes going flat.

"It's true," Ranma said solemnly, crossing his arms over his chest. "My blood has one hundred times the Awesome of a normal person. When you get right down to it, I'm SO Awesome that I barely qualify as a human. You could actually consider me some kind of mutant, like Kyle, except instead of being super strong - actually, scratch that, I'm super strong too - I'm super Awesome."

"Uh huh," Rei said, clearly annoyed by the absurd explanation. "And all the Awesome makes your blood irresistible to parasites?"

"I haven't heard a better explanation," Ranma said smugly, smirking.

Rei's lips twitched into a smile. "Well then, why don't I take a taste and find out for myself?"

Ranma was immediately on guard, his eyes narrowing. "Hey, stop kidding around."

"What?" Rei asked innocently, her expression shifting into a lazy smirk as she stepped toward the pigtailed man. "I'm not going to drain you or anything. Just a little sip."

Ranma took a step back even as he tried to look apathetic. "Knock it off, Rei-chan. You're not fooling me." He hoped the sweat trickling down his forehead didn't give him away. To his knowledge, Rei had never fed from an actual human before, but he didn't actually know her well enough to pin down her behavior as just teasing.

"What are you saying?" Rei ask sadly, drawing even closer. "You mean that you'd give your Awesome blood to that idiot in the vault but not me?"

"Hey, it's not like I'm just handing it out to everyone who asks," Ranma said defensively, trying desperately not to let nervousness enter his voice as he tried to step back again, only to find himself stuck in the corner of the elevator. "I only give some to the freak when he's actually helpful!"

Finally, Rei simply fell against the pigtailed man, giving him a sultry gaze as she draped her arms around her neck. "So if I... give you something... you'll let me have a taste?"

Then, without letting her victim respond, Rei stuck her face under his chin and licked him, running the full length of her tongue (a bit longer than it used to be when she was human) over his throat.

If asked about such behavior, Rei really couldn't explain what had possessed her to do such a thing; even if she enjoyed teasing people as much as anyone else, such flirty sexual posturing was far more Makoto's style, not hers. At the moment though, regardless of how much sense it made, the vampiric Senshi was thoroughly enjoying Ranma's stunned reaction.

She was enjoying it so much, in fact, that she didn't even notice when the elevator door finally opened.


"Ewww. Necrophilia doesn't suit you, Saotome," Snake said, sticking his tongue out in disgust.

Rei certainly took offense to that. She knew that she was a very attractive woman and that being a vampire, whatever else she could say about it, had only ramped up her looks to drop-dead sexy. Being able to selectively and permanently alter small portions of her body had seen to that, and it didn't hurt that she was perpetually wearing what amounted to a slutty prom outfit. Certainly any man should have overjoyed to even briefly entertain the IDEA of being with her, vampire or not.

But then, it was hard to express all that when you were trying your level best not to literally burn up from embarrassment.

Asuka and Ami stood to the side of the DA's weapons expert, each of them gaping and the younger of them flushing considerably. Neither said a word, caught completely flat-footed.

After a few seconds passed with everyone else frozen in stunned silence, Snake decided to speak again.

"If you need more time, feel free to head back down," he drawled. "We'll wait."

Rei actually considered the idea just to escape the looks she was getting as she quickly pushed herself off of Ranma, and only refused to do so because she knew the action would be misinterpreted. "Th-This is... it isn't... I wasn't trying to..."

Finally, Asuka seemed to snap out of her daze, turning sharply toward Ranma. "Saotome-kun, I know it's difficult for you, but try to refrain from seducing every female organism that we take in."

The pigtailed man cringed. "I d-don't do it on purpose!"

"Hey! I am NOT an 'organism'!" Rei growled. She would have tried denying that she'd been "seduced" too, but honestly, she didn't have a better explanation handy, so she'd let the assumption stand.

Without waiting for the others to crack more jokes about it, the nosferatu grabbed Snake's arm and practically threw him into the elevator as she stepped out of it.

"As long as you're here, make yourself useful. There's something creepy skulking around in the sub-levels."

Snake didn't seem to care one way the other about being yanked around by the midian, and turned lazily after he was in the elevator. "Something creepier than a pair of blood-sucking corpses?"

Rei promptly phased her arm through the section of the elevator above the control panel and hit the button to send the elevator on its way. "Just get out of here!"

"Yesss, Missstresss," Snake hissed mockingly, bowing deeply as the elevator doors closed, separating him and a still-subdued Ranma from the women.


Rei clenched her jaw tightly as she yanked her arm out of the wall, feeling her teeth lengthen and sharpen unconsciously as she struggled with her anger. "WHY do you put up with that man?"

Asuka shrugged. "Because as much as I'd like to be part of a department tasked with making polite small talk and being nice to everybody, our job has more to do with killing things. And that, simply enough, is where Snake excels."

Then the captain shook her head. "But never mind that. We have more important things to discuss than the men. Come with me."

She turned sharply on her heel, and Rei followed after a moment of hesitation. Ami, who had been utterly speechless since she'd appeared, almost stumbled to keep up after she realized that she was being left behind.

"Ah, R-Rei-chan, good evening," the genius Senshi said lamely, and considerably late.

Rei forced herself to smile back. "Good evening, Ami-chan. How was your day?" It wasn't that she wasn't happy to see Ami, but her current stress levels just didn't allow for genuine pleasantries.

"Not as productive as I'd hoped," the blue-haired girl mumbled, feeling her some of her tension and embarrassment drain away. "I can't get a bead on Hotaru at all, and all I've been able to figure out is that wherever she is, she's probably alive, probably in Senshi form, and she teleported there."

"Well, that's something," Rei said. "I've actually been doing some thinking on the problem myself, and I may be able to help in searching at least a little."

"Really?" Ami perked up curiously, and Asuka promptly glanced back at them.

"I've been doing a little experimenting with familiars," Rei explained, gesturing to a window. It promptly slid open noisily. "Most vampires use bats, for reasons I'm not completely clear on. Some get other familiars eventually, but bats are the standard."

The vampiress shrugged and raised a hand as a small black shape dove in through the window, causing Asuka's hand to twitch toward the pistol in its holster.

"I prefer crows," the vampire princess said simply as the black bird alighted on her wrist, an unnatural red glimmer in its eyes. "I doubt it will be much help, but I can have a few murders comb the area where Hotaru vanished."

Asuka nodded slowly, the gears in her head turning as she rapidly worked through the innumerable strategic applications of having a horde of inconspicuous flying spies and decoys available.

Although it was easy to appreciate how similar the women were, Ami's mental gears whirled in a different direction, as always more practical than tactical. "Aren't crows diurnal?"

Rei sweatdropped. "Uh... yes. Very much so. And they never get tired of whining to me about it, either."

"That's probably why the others use bats," Asuka explained helpfully.

Rei twitched. "Ah. Okay, that makes sense."

"Caw," said the crow gently, ruffling its feathers.

Neither of the other girls knew what the crow had said, or in fact if the crow had actually communicated in any meaningful way, but they were mildly alarmed when Rei suddenly smacked the bird with her free hand, looking quite upset and baring her lengthened fangs.

"Shut up before I feed you to the alien," the vampiress snapped, her eyes glowing briefly.

When it came to her familiars, it wasn't that she was a particularly vindictive or cruel master, and she had no particular desire for birds to submit to absolute, unwavering servitude as her unquestioning slaves.

But she was quickly learning that most crows had VERY filthy mouths. Or rather, beaks. Was that right? Thoughts, then.

Whatever. The point was that even a sailor (the sailing ones, not the magical ones) wouldn't have put up with them for long if he could have understood what they were saying.

"That's all well and good, but if we can move past your sexual harassment of my men and the physical harassment of the local wildlife, I have a very serious proposition for you, Hino-san." Asuka said, reaching the door to the briefing room and holding the entrance open.

Rei's face was a brilliant red as she hastily stepped past the shorter girl and into the room.


"I'm going to be blunt, Hino-san," Asuka said as Ami took her chair next to her friend, "I want you working for the DAPC."

Rei blinked.

"And I mean as a full employee, not a battle-beast like Hunter. Meaning a full salary, benefits, shift duties, taking orders, the whole thing," the police captain continued onward.

The vampiress cocked her head to one side in contemplation. Although it wasn't quite right to say that she had been expecting this, the sudden request didn't exactly take her by surprise, either. "Why do you want me working here?"

"Do you want the real reasons or the diplomatic-sounding reasons?" Asuka asked promptly.

Rei couldn't help but smile at the woman's honesty; out of all the DAPC officers, Asuka was easily her favorite. It was just impossible for her not to respect the woman. "Well, you can start with the diplomatic reasons. Let you butter me up first," she drawled, leaning back in her chair.

"Sure. Strategically, there's no reason NOT to want you working for us," Asuka reasoned as she started ticking off points on her fingers. "You're powerful, you're highly mobile, you're practically unkillable, you're active when most of my officers want to be asleep, and apparently you have a small army of personal spies and drones at your command. You have your tactical weaknesses too, and the rate at which we're going through transfusion blood makes me uneasy, but that's nothing. Whether we like it or not Hino-san, you are Ran's legacy, his superweapon, and currently you spend every night reading or kicking back with Tsukino-san. I want to put you to use."

Rei nodded, liking the no-nonsense tone. She didn't really like the idea of being thought of as a weapon, but it was much preferable to being treated as a monster. "Now give me the real reason."

"I need to control you," Asuka said, her gaze and tone hardening. "Or, at the very least, I need to make sure you're controlled. Right now Tsukino-san can do it, but we all know she thinks with her heart and not her head." Rei clearly didn't like this line of reasoning, but the police captain kept going. "The reason is simple: Like Tsukino-san, you've spontaneously become very powerful, to the point that it will be very difficult to stop you if you decide to go on a rampage. More to the point, you're also in a similar position in that we don't know how much control you exercise over your own actions; both of you have been in enemy hands and emerged completely different, and it would be irresponsible and stupid of me to assume your free will and good conscience has been completely untouched."

Asuka took a deep breath, and then pointed at Rei, who was frowning at her. "In addition, you find yourself in the... awkward position of being part of a species that eats humans. The vampires that we've seen turned in the past have shown little to no aversion to murder and what is, in a way, cannibalism. I can only guess that there's some mechanism in the transformation that causes this, something that can turn an ordinary, harmless human into a bloodthirsty killing machine after a few days and a tiny burst of eldritch power. You, thankfully, don't seem to have been affected, or at least resist the effect admirably."

Rei was proud of the fact that she didn't wince at that. She HAD been affected, but luckily it was a lot easier to ignore the craving for human blood when the humans surrounding you were some of your dearest friends. Still, it proved to be a problem when people like Seras were around, and she didn't want ANYONE to know that.

"I have no reason to believe you'll suddenly break down into a murderous beast, but at the same time, I don't have adequate assurance that you won't fly around eating random people if we just leave you alone every night with nothing to do. It is my hope that the discipline and time required for normal police duty will keep you out of any trouble and convince me once and for all that you don't pose a threat to innocent people."

Rei kept her face carefully neutral as a wide range of emotions surged through her at the suggestion. Fear, anger, sorrow, and disgust all featured prominently, but there was also a considerable measure of pride and hope. Pride that she, who had fallen so far, who had become less than human and was chained up in the basement daily, was being treated as an equal despite her undeath. And hope that maybe, if she was careful, it would stay that way.

"Okay, I understand your point," Rei drawled, "but that doesn't mean I like it." Her eyes narrowed. "Also, I don't relish the idea of becoming a special weapon for a government agency. Especially not the DAPC. You guys are nuts, and you actually ARRESTED us. The Sailor Senshi!"

"I make no apologies for that. You spent but a few hours in jail and then everything was sorted out," Asuka said evenly. "I was doing my job and you were doing yours. At the time, there was a conflict with that. There is none now, so I'm calling it water under the bridge."

"And about you being nuts?" Rei deadpanned.

"I WILL apologize for that," the older woman said, sighing, "but it's not as if it helps. And nuts or not, our assistance was pivotal in your recovery."

"You have a point," Rei began slowly, "But I need some more convincing. What are you going to do for me if I join up?"

Asuka's eyes narrowed. If that's how it was going to be... fine. She had a solid budget surplus anyway. "How about I give you a special bonus so that you can furnish a decent bedroom in the sub-levels?"

Rei raised an eyebrow. That actually didn't sound half bad. "As long as it doesn't have to be tomb-themed."

Asuka frowned. "Okay, how about I give you an annual budget for it, but it DOES have to be tomb-themed."

The vampiress waited for the blue-haired woman to admit she was joking, but nothing came. Eventually, she shrugged; sometimes compromise was simply unavoidable. "Fine. Next, I want Snake executed."

Both women felt a pleasurable tremor run through their bodies at the very thought of seeing the American reduced to a blood stain on the wall. Ami, predictably, looked horrified.

Soon enough, however, Asuka had to let reality intrude on her imagination. "Impossible. Tempting, but ultimately impossible. I'll make sure he's never in charge of waking you up anymore, though."

Rei nodded. She didn't really think that last one would have worked out anyway. "Worth a shot. Actually, can you just have Ranma-kun and Usagi-chan do it? I really don't like putting up with Tuko-san or Yamazaki-san, and the last time Tekai-san did it he broke the key and decided to just rip my coffin in half."

Asuka raised an eyebrow. No complaints about her wake-up calls or Junko's, and yet only Ranma and Usagi made Rei's "approved" list. Interesting. "Anything else, your highness?"

"Yes, actually. When I'm hired, I want to start as a sergeant," Rei said seriously.

Ami and Asuka blinked, not having expected that at all. "What? Why?" The latter asked.

Rei smirked, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands. "Well, that would make me Usagi-chan's superior, wouldn't it?"

The two blue-haired women shared a glance.

Ami wanted to groan at Rei's pettiness. The Fire Senshi loved Usagi as much as everyone - considerably MORE than most, some suggested - but didn't much like taking orders from her. Although Rei had no real aspirations for leadership herself, she would leap at the chance to boss her princess around just for fun.

Asuka wasn't aware of Rei's turbulent history with Usagi, but it didn't take someone as smart as she was to see that Rei wasn't asking for a promotion because wanted higher pay or enjoyed greater responsibility. This was a joke to her.

"That's... possible," the older bluette mumbled, "but problematic."

"Why? Because I'm a vampire?" Rei asked, false indignation decorating her voice.

"I think it has more to do with you never even attending a police academy or anything of the sort," Ami offered.

"Actually," Asuka said, chewing her lip, "the problem is that a rank of sergeant would make you Saotome-kun's superior as well..."

The younger women stared at her, uncomprehending.

"Now, I can look the other way if you're going to be sucking face - or neck, or whatever - with a cadet, but fraternizing with a subordinate is a much more complicated matter." Asuka looked grave about the matter as she scratched her chin.

Rei looked livid. "That was... No! I'm not! We're not! It was just-"

"I mean, it's enough that you're cornering him in enclosed spaces and jumping him. What would you do if you had actual authority over Saotome-kun?" Asuka wondered aloud.

"All right! All right! Never mind!" Rei shouted, her face an almost solid red. "You win! I'll join! Just... stop!" Dammit, it was quickly becoming obvious that she'd never hear the end of this. If she ever managed to figure out that memory-erasing trick she'd read about, then the elevator incident was getting top priority.

Asuka tried hard not to smirk as she pulled out a folder and handed her a pen. "Paperwork. Should take about half an hour. We'll take care of outfitting and a little bit of formal training later, but for now I just want it official that you're with the DAPC. I'll be back in a bit."

Rei frowned at the police captain as she left, and then frowned even deeper as she flipped through the stack of papers. The crow from earlier landed on the desk in front of her, idly pecking at the pen.

The vampiress snatched it away, glaring at the avian as she pulled out one form in particular.

"Hmmm... medical history, huh? This one might be tricky," Rei mumbled, frowning at all the questions and little boxes that had been printed under the not-unreasonable assumption that the applicant was alive and human. "Ami-chan, do you think you can help me out with this?"

The Genius Senshi nodded immediately, taking the sheet of paper and looking it over briefly. "Ah, Rei-chan..."

Rei turned her attention back toward Ami, noting that her cheeks were partially flushed, and she seemed uncertain. "Yes? What is it?"

"So... were you... tasting Saotome-san, or...?"

Rei's cry of frustration and subsequent string of profanity had the crow cawing in what Ami swore sounded almost like a laugh.

"Where is it, where is it..." Makoto mumbled to herself as she flipped rapidly through a stack of envelopes and documents.

Lying all around her were several large folders and shoeboxes that had been opened and searched already, and stacks of papers, photos, and small objects were scattered all around the closet space where she was searching.

Anyone who knew much about Makoto could tell by looking that everything she was rooting through seemed to be articles and artifacts from her childhood, all part of a life that had been cruelly cut short by the freak plane crash that killed her parents. Photos of her parents and their friends, old drawings she had done in the years of childish innocence, death certificates, newspaper clippings about a certain plane crash, her parents' will and other legal documents...

Like her past, her belongings were firmly separated into two groups; the things associated with her life going forward, and the things associated with the life she had left behind... or rather, the life that had left HER behind. The former she kept around like anybody else to be used or consulted when convenient. The latter she kept filed away in a pile of dusty boxes in her closet, wishing to forget them entirely but knowing that she could not.

As one would expect, she rarely went through the boxes without good reason; the mementos were important to her but at the same time painful to look at. In fact, it had taken her over a week to finally convince herself that the idle thoughts tugging at the edge of her memory really warranted this kind of investigation.

Even now, as she skimmed over another stack of old photographs, the ponytailed girl couldn't help but wince painfully and wonder why she should even bother with this.

"Hey, Kino-san? You still up?" Came the voice of her roommate.

"Yeah, I'm almost done though. You can turn in if you'd like!" She answered back.

Makoto always found it unusual how her roommate would be so formal with someone she lived with, but then, they had never really bonded at all. Makoto's friendship and camaraderie with the Senshi just made her relationships with others seem so... temporary and shallow, sometimes. In fact, it was one of Makoto's favorite theories on why she and Minako couldn't keep a steady boyfriend.

She sighed as she opened the next envelope, revealing a photo of her parents posing next to another couple. Makoto's father was looking goofy and cheerful in the photo, contrasting sharply with the somber dignity of the man standing next to him, wearing a large golden crucifix that advertised his faith.

Makoto quickly dismissed the photo, not recognizing the people in it.

At least, she didn't until she pulled it aside, revealing the next photograph in the stack. Her eyes bugged out of her head as she stared at the image in front of her, and she felt a dozen puzzle pieces fall into place.

"It... It's him... It was him all along..." she mumbled, shaking her head. She didn't know what to feel at the moment. Excitement? Shock? Trepidation?

She checked her watch, and shook her head as she realized it was too late to call her friends. Well, too late for most of them, anyway; late evening was like late morning to Rei now that she was a vampire. Nonetheless, she pocketed the photo and decided to wait before bringing her news to the others. She had a lot to think about, after all.

"Congratulations Hino-san," Asuka said smugly, flipping through the papers, "from this point on it's official. You are an honorable member of the Department of Abnormal Phenomenae Containment."

Kyle and Usagi clapped enthusiastically from where they were standing behind Rei and Ami.

"This is so cool! Now we can work together!" Usagi cheered, practically giddy.

"And you'll be doing so right away," Asuka mumbled as she got to the last few pages. "We need to... wait, what's this?"

Ami flushed slightly, having expected the reaction. "That's, uh, Rei-chan's medical information. A lot of it is either not applicable or speculatory. Not to mention irrelevant, if the information is mostly for insurance purposes; I'm pretty sure vampires can't get sick."

Asuka frowned at the paper, and then shrugged. "I'll just staple a copy of her death certificate to the page. That should work."

"Death certificate? You actually applied for one for me?" Rei mumbled, feeling mildly uncomfortable with the idea. "Huh. Do I get a funeral, too?"

"Only if you're willing to sit through it," the police captain deadpanned.

Rei looked fairly disgusted by the idea, so Asuka moved right along.

"Putting that aside, we have work. Hino-san, your first mission is going to be recon. You will be joined in this task by Tsukino and Saotome."

Rei turned her head about, her long, jet black hair whipping about behind her. "Then shouldn't Ranma be here too?"

Asuka nodded, frowning. "Yes, he should. I already called him up several-"

"Heeeeeeaaarh!" The police captain was interrupted as a throaty hiss came from the other end of the hallway, and everyone turned to look as the source of the noise scrambled around the corner and rushed toward them.

Everyone's eyes widened as the legless, zombie-like monstrosity that Rei recognized from her brief jaunt around the sub-levels slithered toward them across the floor, its scythe-like arms pulling its body along at remarkable speed as its sharpened, jagged teeth clenched in a fearsome scowl.

Time almost seemed to slow down as the beast charged.

Asuka's first reaction was to go for her pistol.

Ami's first reaction was to consider that she should really start hanging around the DAPC HQ in Senshi form. Her second reaction was to freeze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car.

Usagi's first reaction was to scream at the sight of the horrid creature, but luckily her battle computer had already switched on and caused her combat bracers to activate instead.

Kyle's first reaction was to order pizza. Of course, that was his first impulse in response to nearly everything that happened to him, so he had gotten used to ignoring it.

Rei's first reaction was a mental command to her crow familiar to intercept the monster as she wreathed the bird in magical flame.

The crow's first reaction was to send its master a reply viciously disparaging her ancestry, quite upset that Rei's first reaction involved lighting it on fire.


"Got it!" Ranma's rounded the corner a split-second later, immediately leaping for the monster as Asuka, Usagi and Rei all hesitated in their attacks.

"Pin her down!" Snake yelled, rounding the corner just as the pigtailed man tackled the creature to the floor.

"HYEEEEE!" The vile aberration hissed as it curled its blade-tipped tail up to skewer the man holding it to the floor.

Snake grabbed hold of the dangerous appendage, and then pulled hard, dragging the creature away from the others and eliciting an enraged screech from his captive.

"Easy there, Nancy! Down, girl!" The American shouted, making sure he had a firm grip on the slimy, sharp-edged vertebrae that made up the creature's tail. "Okay, I think we've got her!"

Rei took a moment to glare at her familiar (which had doubled around and landed on her shoulder, no longer immolated), and then turned a much shakier gaze on the monster and its captors. "What IS that thing?"

"Necromorph," Snake said obliviously as he held the creature's tail down near the end, keeping the blade from thrashing about. "Don't worry, she's not as dangerous as she looks."

"Heearaagaaargh!" the necromorph howled, its pointed teeth snapping viciously as it tried to bite Ranma's hands.

"It's... It's a 'she'?" Ami asked numbly. Really, there was a lot of better questions she wanted to ask, but it was the only thing she could currently think of while staring at the terrifying beast.

"Well, it was, at least. Say good night to the nice folks, Nancy, you're going back to your room!" Snake admonished. "Anyway, we checked the sub-levels pretty thoroughly, but we didn't find jack so far... hey, little help, Commander?"

Kyle, who looked to be completely unaffected by the whole incident, finally took action, walking up to the necromorph and carelessly grabbing one of its wrists.

Asuka, who had decided not to comment on any of this and just pretend like it never happened, called out as the three men started hauling the monstrosity back toward the elevator. "Saotome-kun, you're staying here. I have a job for you."

"Huh? Oh, sure," Ranma stumbled away as he let go of the alien-infested corpse, dodging awkwardly as it lashed out at him the moment it was free. He got away unscathed though, and cast a worried glance back at Kyle, who didn't seem to notice when the creature bit onto his leg and started chewing.


Once Snake, Kyle, and the space zombie that she absolutely REFUSED to acknowledge (the thought of zombie aliens was far too ridiculous) had left, she cleared her throat meaningfully. "Now that all three of you are here, Saotome, Tsukino, and Hino, I can brief you on your first mission. Follow me, please."

The police captain turned and went back into the briefing room, and was soon followed by everyone else, although Usagi and Ami still looked a bit shaken.

"This is going to be your target," Asuka said, bringing up two images on the projector screen on the wall. One was an image of a building taken from an attractive angle that Ami recognized from the Wraith Labs company web site. The other was a map of downtown Tokyo, where the lab was located.

"Take note of the road map and plot your course of travel. Your mission is extensive recon of Wraith Laboratories' corporate headquarters. Your mission will be complete when you feel you've gathered enough data about the level and quality of their defenses, as well as identified any obvious terrorist activity around the building. Your secondary objective will be to access the structure itself and get information about the whereabouts of Alexandra Tokima, any of their top scientists, or General Igov Yuchtzky."

Asuka hit a button, and images of the former and latter individuals appeared on the screen over the previous pictures. "Do you all remember these individuals?"

Ranma, Ami and Rei nodded, while Usagi frowned at the picture of Alexandra.

"I remember the Russian guy, but not her," Usagi said, pointing at the image in question.

"We've never actually met her before, but that's General Tokima of the Freedom's Angels," Ami explained.

Usagi nodded in understanding. "Ah, I see! So...the Freedom's Angels are the bad guys, right?"

Everyone turned to stare at her.

"Usagi-chan," Rei said in that trembling voice of hers that let everyone know she was seconds away from throttling somebody, "those are the bastards that turned you into a cyborg, remember? This is all part of the plan to get back at them."

Usagi's eyes widened. "OH! Them! I'd completely forgotten!"

WHAM! Rei slammed her forehead on the table as Ami groaned, and her crow familiar cawed loudly.

"Honestly, I'm completely over it," Usagi said, raising one fist into the air and gripping her bicep. "It was a difficult adjustment, obviously, but being a cyborg is really a lot of fun once you get used to it!"

"What about your boyfriend?" Ranma said dubiously, remembering that her break-up had been one of the things she was most distraught about previously.

"Saotome-san is right," Ami said urgently, "I haven't seen Mamoru around nearly as much since the conversion. What are you going to do about him?"

Usagi shrugged. "I'm sure if I just give him enough time to himself he'll come around. I'm still me, after all! Besides, if my destiny to be with him were endangered at all, Setsuna would be all over it."

"Get Whack! off Whack! of Whack! me Whack! you Whack! Warp Whack! spawned Whack! pervert!" Sailor Pluto snarled, punctuating each word with a punishing swing as she clubbed the tentacle wrapped around her leg with the Garnet Rod.

"Well, be that as it may," Asuka finally interrupted, looking annoyed, "this plan has been some time in the making, and the data that needs to be recovered will be invaluable for DAPC operations as well. So if you don't mind, I'm going to move forward with the briefing."

Everyone nodded hastily.

"During this mission, stealth is a top priority, which is why I'm sending you three. Tsukino-san, you have a cloaking module, correct?"

Usagi nodded happily, always pleased whenever she got to be useful.

"Excellent. These are the mission parameters: you are not authorized to use lethal force on this mission. Not everyone who works for Wraith is a bad guy, and not all of the bad guys at Wraith are terrorists, so you do not have permission to end anyone's life. This is STRICTLY recon. On that note, the mission will be aborted at once if any sort of alarm is sounded. Understood?"

The three officers nodded. Then Ami cleared her throat.

"If it's all right, I'd like to accompany them, Captain," the genius Senshi said softly.

Asuka frowned. Not because of the request, but rather because her own cousin was addressing her more formally than Usagi, her subordinate, did. "Do you have any notable stealth abilities?"

"No, but I can gather intel from a distance and coordinate them with my computer," Ami explained. "I won't have to get any closer than a few buildings away."

"Sounds good," Asuka said cautiously, "although you recognize that you're going in your capacity as a vigilante, not as an officer. If you get into trouble, my subordinates will NOT risk their own lives to save you."

Ami blinked, and then glanced over to the others before turning her gaze back to her cousin. "Actually, I'm pretty sure they would."

"Of course!" Usagi said brightly.

"You can bet on it," Rei nodded.

"It's kind of what I do," Ranma agreed, shrugging.

Asuka gave them an annoyed glance, though it was difficult to be too upset about them being unwilling to leave a friend behind to die. It was the principle of the thing, damn it! "Okay, fine. Do what you want. But Ami-chan's assistance aside, you three will be on your own for this operation; I need to get some sleep, so I can't be there to micromanage you, but I have full faith that you'll be able to pull through this operation without a hitch."

Rei and Ranma looked surprised at the idea, while Usagi puffed up her chest with pride.

Asuka stared at them for a moment, and then shook her head. "Okay, that was a lie. But I DO have full faith that when you screw up, Saotome-kun will manage to get everybody out of there safely."

Ranma nodded approvingly as the girls deflated. "Yeah, I'm pretty good at that." His record wasn't QUITE one hundred percent; Rei was undead proof of that, but that hadn't turned out TOO badly in his opinion.

"All right, briefing's over! I want you suited up and on the streets, pronto! Go!"

It was almost nine o'clock in the evening when Rayden Shikodan stepped up to the front gates of the Fifth National Church of Christ, a fairly large church that served a district on the edge of Tokyo proper.

If anyone had asked Rayden for details, he honestly couldn't have given them; he hadn't been directed to this place, but rather he was... guided. As if something was calling to him.

After looking the place over for a few seconds, it was obvious, to him at least, why he had come. The holy temple had been ransacked and desecrated, with the gates and a few monuments sitting in the small yard in front of the temple cracked and twisted. The streetlights in the area surrounding the church had been shattered, cloaking the the house of worship in an eerie and isolated darkness. A police cruiser was parked on the side of the road, its lights active as they splashed the shadows intermittedly with red and blue. It was not lost on him that there were no police in sight, and that the building interior was dark.

But what was most damning - and that was the exact word that the gunman used in his head - was that every cross on the premises had been defiled; the crosses had either been destroyed, or they had twisted bits of metal added to them in various ways, attached diagonally across the center of the crosses.

To that effect, most of the crosses now resembled star-shapes with eight points.

Rayden hefted Judgment over his shoulder and grasped the crucifix hanging from his neck as he approached the heavy, partially splintered doors of the church and kicked them open.


Crack! The door fell apart instantly, reduced to shattered planks and wood shards that scattered across the floor of the temple.

Rayden showed no hesitation stepping into the building, his eyes narrowing even as he peered into the blackness in front of him.

Foof! Foof! Foof! Two by two, candles mounted on the ends of each row of pews started spontaneously lighting up across the church, starting with the rows nearest Rayden, gradually bringing the level of light from nil to dim.

Seeing a scene such as the one before him would have shaken any sensible man, courageous or cowardly, but fear was beneath Rayden, a privilege of the innocent and weak. His expression did not change, and his heartbeat remained steady.

The entire interior of the church had been thoroughly desecrated, and not in the sense of simple vandalism or mindless destruction; no, the forces at work here had much darker designs that vandalism, and were very far from mindless.

Blood and human remains were strewn across the floor in almost, but not quite, random patterns, leaving great streaks of blood and gore that decorated the stone floor of the holy place. The walls had been similarly decorated, but far more carefully, with messages scrawled in blood all over. Half of them were in Japanese, but seemed to be insensible, grammarless rantings, while the other half were drawn in symbols that were clearly not belonging to any of the major Asian writing systems.

Interspersed with the writings were many symbols that Rayden recognized instantly, though he had seen it only once before, right before Ran had been consumed by dark power: an eight-spoked wheel with the spokes ending in arrows.

But even more disturbing than the state of the church interior were the only two living creatures that dwelt within, each of them seeming to ignore Rayden's entrance in favor of their current activities.

One was clearly a monster of some sort. It resembled an enormous wolverine, easily four feet in height and twice that in length. Its fur was thick and firm to the point that the bristles resembled thin needles, and its eyes were perfect, glossy black orbs within its slightly misshapen sockets. The beast was laying in a pile of torn and chewed-up human corpses, and was currently busying itself shredding the flesh of an arm that had been removed from its owner, hopefully post-mortem. Rayden noticed that there were a pair of police hats among its feed pile.

Despite the obvious threat posed by the monster, Rayden immediately decided that the second occupant of the room was far more dangerous. At the far end of the church, kneeling at the altar, was a young nun who looked to be no more than fourteen years of age. She wore a habit typical of women in her profession, although it was slightly torn and spattered with blood.

Of course, what made her most ominous, besides the almost palpable aura of hate and darkness swirling around her, was the altar she was kneeling in front of.

Like the other crosses on the premises, this one had been converted to the strange and repellant eight-spoked wheel, and it was obvious that the likeness of Jesus that was attached to the symbol had been torn off and discarded. Aside from that, three symbols had been scorched into the pillars surrounding the altar, each one burning with a flame that defied any attempt by Rayden to determine its color.

One was an X with a horizontal line through the middle, and a block underneath, making it vaguely resemble a skull.

One was a hook with the top trailing off in a wavering curl, like a flame.

The final one was a simple patern of three blazing circles, arranged in a triangle.


"Grrh... nhhrg..." the daemon finally finished its latest feast, and its blood-stained, dagger like teeth clenched as it pushed away the bone and scraps with its snout.

Rayden stepped forward, and the daemon promptly stood up before stepping out into the center aisle, growling ferociously.

The Catholic gunman seemed to take no notice of the beast, and continued forward with his eyes locked on the nun's back.

After several seconds of Rayden approaching and the monster snarling, the daemon started to back away, its eyes seeming to shrink in their sockets.

"It's afraid of you," the nun said suddenly, standing up. "How amusing..."

Rayden stopped dead at the sound of her voice, halting just a few rows of pews from the altar. The daemon stood in front of him just out of arm's reach, bristling and baring its bloody teeth.

"All who would do this should fear retribution," the vigilante said grimly, "whether mortal or divine, vengeance will be had for this affront, I assure you."

"Ah, it seems you're a true believer. Interesting," the girl said conversationally, still facing away from the intruder.

Rayden cast a gaze down at the daemonic beast standing in his way, and then snorted contemptuously before glancing back up at the nun. The daemon flinched at the dismissal, almost seeming hurt by it.

"It seems you were once a true believer as well. Tell me child, how does one fall so far as to take to butchering her peers in their place of worship and summoning fell beasts?"

"It doesn't take much," the nun answered, finally turning around. "The voices were there, offering me the truth. I simply had to stop begging at the feet of worthless idols and listen."

The girl's face was far too human for Rayden's liking. She had simple brown hair cut to just above her shoulders, and an unblemished, heart-shaped face. Even in the middle of this slaughter, after having accomplished such evil, she looked no different from hundreds of nuns that Rayden had met, save for the blood on her dress and her eyes.

Her eyes... seemed human at first, but were tinted yellow, and the outside edge of the iris was frayed, as if the yellow taint was spreading to the rest of the organ. And that was merely the strict visual interpretation; within the depths of those eyes was an intelligence and will that no human should possess. Her eyes looked over the Russian orphan... and then looked into, and finally THROUGH him. After one sweeping glance, Rayden could tell, this girl knew him inside and out, her gaze having unraveled his mind and soul.

"You're an interesting one. It's rare to find faith so... flawed, yet resolute. Chaos will find no purchase on your soul," she said, still keeping her tone maddeningly pleasant.

"It is a shame it found purchase within yours," Rayden murmured, still not stepping forward.

The nun shrugged. "I grew tired of calling upon stone idols and empty air to fix my problems," she explained as she stepped down off the altar, coming up behind the daemon beast and running a hand down its back. "It's not complicated. Your god does not exist. My gods do. I call to them and they answer. I give to them and they give back. I do their bidding and they reward me with power."

"I would rather pray to my own imagination than the monstrosities that call upon you to do... this," Rayden nudged his chin slightly. "Your gods, real or not, are mad."

The nun raised an eyebrow, and then her lips curled into a smirk as she started chuckling. "Heh heh heh! Mad? You know nothing of madness!" And then her mirth ceased, and she stared at Rayden seriously. "You may be a deluded paladin of a dead order, but your strength is at least worth noting, if not your sense. I am Yumika, Herald of Chaos. And tonight, Shikodan-san, you get to live. It is a gift I reserve only for the strong... and even then, not something I offer lightly."

The fallen nun moved past the daemon, shifting casually to one side to pass by the Russian super-soldier.

Rayden tensed as Yumika stepped past him, feeling the urge to attack the girl, to punish her for what she had done.

Ultimately, however, he did nothing as she stepped past.

The reason was simple: he couldn't beat her. His mind, his soul, even his unshakable faith all screamed at him that an attack upon the herald would be a useless gesture, much like a dog biting at a tank. The simple logic of it scalded him, rooting him to the spot and preventing him from lifting a finger. And so he let her go, fuming wordlessly at his helplessness as the instigator of this atrocity strolled outside.

The candles flickered briefly, and the daemon in front of him growled loudly. Staring up at the altar, Rayden watched as the flames the made up the various Chaos symbols died, their energies spent.

"This place will have to be cleansed," the gunman mumbled, flipping one of his miniature bombs into his palm. "I may not be able to stop the girl, but there are still many things to be done." Finally, he regarded the daemon, his eyes narrowing. "Your destruction among them. Come, beast. You have blighted this world long enough."

The daemon lunged.

"Cyber Moon to Flame Fangs, this is Cyber Moon to Flame Fangs, do you read me? Over," Cyber Moon said, her sensor fins-slash-bunny ears twitching as they relayed her radio signal.

"Usagi, stop that," Rei replied, irritably adjusting her radio headset.

"Negative Flame Fangs, I do not copy. Please repeat, over."

Rei's eyebrow twitched at the sound of Usagi's voice crackling in her ears. "Stop CALLING me that."

"You should end your messages with over, over," the cyborg responded.

"Cyber Moon, stop using your radio," Ranma deadpanned. "We're right next to you."

Finally turning her head toward the others, Cyber Moon pouted. "I was just practicing!"

As Sailor Mercury shook her head, the four of them made a particularly tall leap to the next building, landing next to a large, delicate-looking skylight.

Well, Mercury and Ranma leapt. Cyber Moon and Rei simply flew, and it was only due to a quick yank by the latter that the former didn't accidentally land on the skylight and crash through it.

Sailor Mercury glanced around briefly. "All right, we're almost there. I'll do a scan before we go any further; it's possible that they have something deployed that can detect our approach." She pulled out her computer and went to work.

"Good, so long as we have a moment..." Rei said, turning to glare at Usagi. "'Flame Fangs'? 'FLAME FANGS'? I am NOT going to let you call me that!"

Cyber Moon blinked. "Okay, well, what should we call you, then? Firebat? Sailor Blood? Draculass?"

Ranma winced as Rei obviously struggled to restrain her urge to maim her friend.

"I'm Sailor Mars! If I absolutely HAVE to have a stupid superhero name, Sailor Mars is fine!" The vampiress insisted.

"But you're not Sailor Mars anymore! We can't call you that!" The blonde insisted, her expression unusually firm. "And you definitely need a code name! What if the bad guys use your real name to track down where you live?"

Rei glared at her.

"Oh. Right," Cyber Moon mumbled sheepishly, remembering that the nosferatu currently rested underneath the DAPC HQ. "What if they use your identity to find your family?"

Rei kept glaring.

"Oh. Right. Uh... I was sorry to hear about your grandfather, by the way. The man was like a second father to me, really," the cyborg babbled, sweat starting to appear on her forehead. She had completely forgotten that the elder Hino had passed away months ago, and the rest of Rei's family might as well have gone with him for all the communication Rei had with them.

"Moon, maybe Rei doesn't need a code name just yet," Ranma offered, noting that the undead Senshi's stress seemed to have been building continuously since she got up that evening; he had dealt with the gifted midian's temper before, and was in no rush to do so again. "Now really isn't the time to deal with that, anyway."

Cyber Moon frowned. "Well, you DEFINITELY need to get a new outfit," she admonished, her gaze running up and down the vampiress. "Running around fighting in a slinky evening gown is fine for villains, but you're a police officer now! I mean, look at us!"

Cyber Moon, was, naturally, in her wetsuit-like combat outfit with her bracers already activated and ready for use. Ranma was dressed in a suspiciously similar outfit that he had called a "Manta Suit," and seemed to be a much thicker, but still form-fitting bodysuit with one of the DAPC's distinctive blue armor vests strapped on over it, along with his normal assortment of gear. He was also wearing the rebreather mask and extrasensory goggles that the girls remembered him wearing at the mortuary confrontation.

Rei actually dropped her glare to consider this. "You have a point, actually. Hold on."

Compared to her old transformation, or even Usagi's new one, the process of Rei changing her clothes was fast and simple. The woman was suddenly shrouded by flame, and before Moon even had time to yelp in surprise, the fire had vanished, leaving Rei's new outfit and a wisp of smoke.

"Hmm... how's this?" Rei asked, smiling slightly as she turned her head. The long dress had been replaced by a miniskirt, though it was still split on the side like the dress to show as much thigh as possible. Her upper body was covered, more or less, by a short vest that seemed to be an approximation of the standard DAPC officer's jacket, complete with the numerous pockets and patches but missing the sleeves and a good third of its material, leaving her arms and belly exposed. Her high heels had been replaced by far more comfortable, simple shoes with a short heel, which everybody present found ironic since she could now fly at will.

On top of that... well, there was nothing on top of that. That was it. The outfit was entirely blue, matching the color of Ranma's chest armor, and easily exposed more skin than Sailor Mercury did. The vest wasn't even zipped up all the way and clung tightly around Rei's breasts, showing impressive amounts of cleavage.

Of course Ranma was the first one to speak, his brain deciding right away that it had been too long since he'd said something stupid. "You look like a stripper."

Fwoosh!

Moon and Mercury winced as Ranma shouted and flailed about, trying to put out the fire on his arm.

Sailor Mercury decided that Ranma's line of thought did warrant some kind of explanation, though she made sure to be more diplomatic about it. "Well, it is rather... daring. As was your other outfit, actually. If you can manfiest whatever clothes you want, why do you choose clothing that's so... immodest?"

Rei frowned as she glanced down at herself. "I spent more than half a decade fighting evil in high heels and a miniskirt. It comes naturally to me at this point."

For the life of them, the other two women couldn't think of anything to say to that.

"So what's the status on the enemy base?" Ranma asked irritably, smoke still wafting off of his left hand.

Sailor Mercury blinked as she remembered what she had been doing. "Oh! Right. I'm actually reading a number of contacts on the buildings surrounding the corporate headquarters. They're hard to detect, so I can't figure out exactly what they are, but I'm reading a constant data feed back to the building. Whatever they are, they're connected to Wraith, and they'll probably sound an alarm if they sight you or the data feed suddenly stops."

"So we can't let 'em catch us and we can't take 'em out, huh? No problem," Ranma said, smirking. "Can you two do your thing from here, or do you need to be closer?" he asked, looking at Mercury and Rei.

"I'm fine where I am," the Senshi of ice assured him.

Rei still looked miffed, but nodded silently.

"Good. You ready to go, Cyber-chan?"

Cyber Moon saluted eagerly, her sensor fins perking up. A moment later several matchbook-sized nodes started sliding out of compartments on various points on her body. A moment after that, the blonde's cloak activated, and her body vanished into a barely discernable shimmer.

Sailor Mercury nodded approvingly, adjusting the radio headset that she had obtained for this mission. "All right, then we're all set. Good luck, you two."

"Thanks," Ranma said before turning toward Rei.

"What?" The vampiress asked irritably.

"Geez, did it bother you THAT much?" the pigtailed man asked. "I was just kidding around."

Rei looked conflicted. "Well..."

"If it makes you feel any better, you make a really cute stripper."

This time Ranma managed to dodge the retaliatory fireball, slipping into the Umi-sen Ken cloak as he chuckled under his mask.

Snake shook his head as he looked over the racks of inert alien eggs, not seeing anything out of the ordinary.

Or, at least, nothing more out of the ordinary than the normal assortment of abominations that were stored in the sub-levels.

"Well, I haven't seen a thing and I'm out of ideas on where to look. We've got nothing," the American said, scratching the back of his head.

Kyle nodded drowsily. "Can we leave yet? It's cold down here and I'm getting sleepy."

Snake frowned, not turning away from the storage area. "Yeah, it's fine. I'll be right behind you."

As Kyle left for the elevator, Snake started moving down the entire row of unhatched monstrosities, poking them one at a time and watching carefully for a reaction.

"I swear, Hino should be ashamed," Snake mumbled, tapping three eggs in quick succession and getting no response. "One of the most powerful undead beings in existence, and she's jumping at shadows and sending us down here to hunt down bogeymen. Lame."

Grimacing, he tapped the last egg in the row, only to freeze when it twitched in response.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

Snake raised his sidearm so that he could observe what used to be a complete egg, the only sound in the room being the soft clink of spent ammo casings bouncing along the floor.

Seeing that there wasn't much left of the egg besides bits of bony shell and gobs of green goo mixed with what he assumed was flesh, Snake turned on his heel and started to walk away.

"Hey, what's with the shooting?" Shouted Kyle's voice from the next hall.

"It's nothing!" Snake replied. "Just some... huh?"

Snake froze in place, feeling a bizarre tingling on his ankle. At the same time, he felt a... presence in the back of his mind, like a voice whispering serenely to him.

His eyes narrowed, and the voice elicited the mental approximation of a fearful gasp.

Snake whirled around as the presence vanished, his pistol in one hand and his combat knife in the other.

To his annoyance, he found nothing. He was in the middle of the room, surrounded by empty floor, with nothing around to touch him and nothing close enough to provide any sort of cover for something to ambush him.

Except, perhaps, for the water drain next to his foot.

The American frowned.

It was getting desperate. Very desperate.

At this rate, it wasn't even sure how much longer it could survive without sustenance, although it didn't really think about it in such... complex terms.

All it knew was the hunger. The need for a body. The feeling of incompleteness that gnawed at it constantly, leaving a bigger and bigger hole with every passing moment.

This place was full of bodies, full of creatures, but they were... odd. Many of them felt unusual or unsuitable, and most of them were either comatose or dead.

It had been very confused when it first made contact with a body that was not comatose, but turned out to be dead. It was a bizarre feeling to sense this, but it became less bizarre as it found others that were similar.

It was forced to leave its first contact, as it was unsuitable. Dead flesh could not sustain it. The mind had been interesting, strong, and somewhat sympathetic, but this was a matter of survival.

And then, mere seconds ago, it had finally found a suitable creature... or so it had thought before making contact.

Dark, obscene bloodlust beyond anything it had known or imagined had surged through it when it had touched its potential host's mind, and for the first time in its existence, it knew fear. Not the fear of another creature, sensed on the edge of its perception, but fear for its own life, its own survival. One glance into that twisted mind, and it knew forevermore that it was mortal, that it was hunted, and that its time was rapidly approaching.

It wanted nothing more to do with that mind, even if the potential host would have it. It was likewise unsuitable. In some ways, more unsuitable than the walking dead.

A sudden disturbance!

It could feel something falling down toward it, tumbling through the narrow tube where it hid from the dark mind.

Something landed on it. An inorganic object. Hard. Thoughtless. Useless.

And very, VERY hot, all of a sudden.

Snake smiled to himself as the muffled explosion from the frag grenade faded from his ears, and then he replaced the drain cover over the drain hole.

"Hey! You coming or what?" Kyle shouted.

"Yeah, I'm coming! Calm down, already!" The American shouted back, dashing down the halls as smoke rose from the holes in the drain.

Cyber Moon peered cautiously over the edge of the roof, discretely searching for any sign of the objects that Mercury had detected before.

She found the "object" immediately. In the middle of the roof was one of the shapely android women that the Senshi had fought before, standing absolutely still as it stared off into the distance.

Scanning... Mk. II all-purpose android. Combat threat: minor. Armaments: Enhanced limb strength thanks to hardened alloys and enhanced servo-motors in joints. Possesses low-grade impact armor and limited combat programming. This unit is currently in low-power mode, although its sensors are active.

Cyber Moon quickly ducked beneath the edge of the roof and then lowered herself down the wall, her hands and feet sticking to the wall with ease.

Once she felt she was a good distance away, she activated her internal communicator. "Hey, I found what's defending the HQ! It's those android girls!" She whispered excitedly. "They're in some kind of power-save mode, but they're still watching for trouble. Over."

Androids? Kind of an expensive substitute for cameras, don't you think? Asked Rei incredulously.

Mercury's voice followed a moment later. True, but cameras may be difficult to place and hide on buildings that don't belong to Wraith. In addition using combat droids means that their sensor net doubles as their first line of defense.

Cyber Moon pouted. "You guys! You're supposed to say 'over' at the end! Over."

She heard a pair of sighs, and then Mercury spoke again, ignoring her.

Saotome-san, what's your status? What does the building perimeter look like?

Silence.

Saotome-san? Are you there? Ranma, come in! The Senshi of ice's voice grew increasingly distressed as she got no response.

Quiet...

The voice was so weak that Moon mentally decided to crank up the volume a bit.

"Ranma-kun, are you okay? Over."

Y-Yeah... uh... I'm in, actually... Came Ranma's response, only barely more audible now that it was louder.

Cyber Moon blinked. 'That was fast.' "Where are you now? Over."

Um... not important. Can't talk now. Later.

As Ranma's trembling hand switched off his radio headset, one thought was at the forefront of his mind, throbbing in tune with his panicked heartbeat.

'How the HELL do I keep ending up here?' He asked himself, his face pale beneath the goggles and mask, themselves cloaked by the Umi-sen Ken.

Above his crouched body was an open window, roughly three feet by three feet in its parameters, which had been his obvious point of entry. He had worried, in fact, that it was too obvious. What if it led into a chemical storage bay or some kind of mutant pen to kill any would-be infiltrators?

Of course, Ranma could have handled either of those things, so he barely hesitated. As it turned out, however, the window led to somewhere much, much worse.

Which is why Ranma once again found himself in the women's locker room.

In a corporate headquarters.

That was nearly full of women changing their clothes and showering.

At nine o'clock at night.

'This is ridiculous! Aren't these people afraid to go home at this time of night? It wasn't THAT long ago that we had vampires running around eating people!' Ranma thought, feeling terror and a smidge of arousal surge through him at the dozens of bodies clad only in their underwear, if even that much. 'Why would they even HAVE a locker room in an office building? And why would the most accessible window on the ground floor lead to it? This makes no sense! This is-'

"Hey, who opened the window?" A woman in her thirties asked as she stepped out of a nearby shower stall, her towel in her hand. "It's too cold for that," she declared, reaching up to close it.

Ranma cringed as his first escape route was closed off, and then had to press his back firmly against the wall as the woman stepped by him.

He immediately tried to shake the image that had just been burned into his retinas as he slowly stood up, deciding that if he was going to sneak through the room, then he'd do so standing. Crouching made his profile smaller and made sneaking easier, but it also put his eyes roughly at groin level with a standing person. He REALLY didn't need that right now.

'Think quiet thoughts... sneaky thoughts... CLEAN thoughts...'

Ranma tiptoed past a few women putting on their skirts, and then froze as a feminine cry of surprise rang out.

"Hey! Gimme back my panties!" A younger woman shouted as a tall brunette held a pair of stringy black lace panties up in the air.

"Look everybody! Kana-chan has some sexy lingerie today! Got a date you'd like to tell us about?"

"It's none of your business! Give 'em back! I didn't bring any other underwear!"

"Not unless you spill!" The brunette laughed. "Ninomia, catch!" With that, she tossed the pilfered panties across the locker room.

Before the article got very far, it suddenly snapped back through the air, reversing direction and landing on its owner's shoulder.

There was a room-wide, synchronized blink.

"What the hell was that?" The brunette asked, perplexed.

Slam! Everyone jumped in surprise as the door suddenly opened and closed rapidly, followed by more confused blinking.

The younger woman clutching her underwear frowned. "Did anybody else feel a sudden surge of unexplained feminine rage?"

There was much nodding.

"Huh. Weird."

Ranma swiftly moved away from the door to the hated chamber of pain and temptation, his hand moving up to his headset to switch the radio back on.

"Yo, Ranma here. I'm in the building and more or less safe now."

Got it. For future reference, what entrance did you use? Mercury asked.

Ranma winced. "Uh... the... emergency exit," he lied.

What? Those doors have alarms, Ranma! Rei chastised.

"Yeah. But... I silenced the alarms... using various amazing martial arts moves," he said quickly, lowering his voice as he saw an office worker emerge from a room ahead of him and turn away before walking down the hall.

Martial arts moves? For neutralizing electronic alarms? That's ludicrous, suggested Sailor Mercury.

"Says the magical tech lady to the invisible Karate cop," Ranma deadpanned, stepping into the vacated office.

Oh. Uh... point taken, the Senshi of ice said. Ranma could almost hear her embarrassed blush over the headset. He almost felt bad that she was actually right. Almost.

So, seriously, nobody knows how to use walkie-talkies right except me? Over. Cyber Moon griped.

Ranma switched off the headset.

"Hmmm... what do we have here?" Ranma mumbled quietly to himself as he moved through the darkened office, finally allowing his cloak to drop in order to let his body recover from the constant strain.

Turning on his goggles to low-light mode, he gently started shifting through the files on the desk.

'Accounting records, accounting records, expense reports, finance papers... great. Just some pencil-pusher's paperwork.'

He was about to go invisible and move on, but stopped. This mission was going to take all night if he had to search for relevant information room by room.

'Maybe this'll work?' He thought to himself, picking up a folder labeled "Payroll Breakdown". 'I'm supposed to find info on their workers, right? It's better than nothing.'

Taking the folder and storing it away, Ranma activated his cloak again and moved on.

Cyber Moon grunted as she climbed up the side of the office building, finally reaching the very top floor and not looking very enthusiastic about the feat.

Of course, she could have flown there easily, but Sailor Mercury had noted that the noise from her boosters would get her noticed easily, even if her cloak managed to hide the flare from the rocket engines.

Rei could have flown here easily AND noiselessly, but invisibility wasn't among the vampire's powers, apparently.

Which meant that she had no choice but to scale the thirty-story building. True, it was easy enough, but it was taking so long that she had finally gotten sick of having the Mission Impossible theme playing in her ear on infinite loop, and had turned it off. That alone made the whole infiltration much less exciting.

"All right... now what..." The cyborg Senshi was pressed flat against a large window that seemed to overlook the rest of the city, and on the other side was a lavish office full of expensive-looking devices and exquisite furnishings; in all likelihood the CEO's office.

Click! Whrrrr... A pair of mechanical arms slid out of Cyber Moon's shoulders, each tipped with a tapered rod that ended in a shaped red lens. Not that they were visible at the moment.

Fshzt! The laser cutters went to work, slowly slicing a fairly large plane of glass out of the window.

Cyber Moon cringed as the cloak shimmered unsteadily, the energy surges disrupting her invisibility slightly.

And then, after about twenty seconds, the laser cutters pulled away, sliding back into her shoulders.

Pressing her hand against the glass, the blonde cyborg stuck her palm to it, and then pushed the cut-out pane forward, sliding it free of the rest of the panel before gently lowering it onto the floor of the office.


Once inside, Cyber Moon breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, that wasn't too hard. Now what? Over."

Look for a computer terminal. Also make sure to check the drawers and take any documents that look even remotely suspicious. Sailor Mercury said. Once you're into the computer, begin a full download. Especially make sure to ferret out any hidden drives or encrypted data.

Isn't that theft? Asked Rei's voice. I mean, criminals are supposed to have rights and stuff related to searches and evidence seizures, right?

Cyber Moon stopped, thinking it over. "Yes. So what?"

Just making conversation, Rei admitted. Uh oh... the crows see some heavy equipment being moved around by the loading dock. It looks like some kind of robot. Guns are definitely a little big for corporate security.

Cyber Moon listened carefully to Rei's update as she walked up to the desk, noting the sleek, cutting-edge monitor hanging from the ceiling and a touchpad keyboard built into the desk surface.

Finding a large circular button that looked important, she tapped it gently, and then smiled as the monitor promptly lit up.

Huh... that's weird... I don't think the cargo is the robots themselves... there's something else that's being moved, and it looks like the bots are covering the delivery.

Cyber Moon stared blankly at the screen as it asked for a password, and then took a moment to recall what Ami had told her about using computers as a cyborg.

Smiling, she reached up into one of her hair buns and pulled out a USB cable before plugging it into a slot in the surface of the desk.

Damn it, the jerk's trying to shoo the crow away. It can't get a good look at what's being transported. Some sort of machine.

Cyber Moon smiled as the password screen vanished on command, and she idly popped a Pez into her mouth as the monitor listed files for downloading. After a moment, she located several hidden drives behind layers of access codes that she didn't bother decoding, and then promptly added them to the list. Within seconds, dozens of progress bars filled the monitor screen.

Whoa, something's got all the guys at the dock on their toes. Big guy coming through, Rei continued with her monitoring.

Cyber Moon finished the download, and then smiled happily as she began a program upload, idly tearing open the drawers of the desk and stuffing whatever was inside into her stomach compartment, deciding to sort them out later.

Huh. Looks like a foreigner... wait... is that... Moon could almost FEEL the grimace on the other end of the communication. Aw, crap! It's Yuchtzky!

Bzrt! Sparks burst from the USB plug as it was yanked from the port, and Cyber Moon promptly dashed for the hole in the window.

"Well, is he DOING anything, or is he just grandstanding about while monologuing to himself?" Ranma asked as he stepped lightly through the halls.

He was fairly tired at this point from the constant need for stealth, so he had actually dropped the Umi-sen Ken and was using more mundane sneaking tactics, relying on his senses to warn him if he was about to run into somebody.

I think he's inspecting whatever it is that they're transporting, Rei answered. Hell, you know what? Screw it. I'm sending a bird down there. What're they gonna do, gun it down?

Ranma stopped and considered the question.

Then he moved faster.

Igov's cybernetic eye glowed in the dim light that illuminated the loading dock as he glanced over the device that was being carefully held up by two muscle-bound, genetically enhanced terrorists.

"Igov see no apparent damage. There were no impact during transport?" The cyborg asked.

"No, Sir. We kept it nice 'n steady, just as we were told."

Igov's scanners went active, inspecting the miniature chronosphere for any sign of tampering or damage.

After a few seconds of every human in the area standing nervously at attention, the Russian spoke again. "Very good. Take device to-"

"Craw! Craw!"

Igov blinked as a crow angled down over the top of the truck, flapping its wings wildly to slow its descent before landing right on top of the boxed chronosphere, its dark eyes staring up at Igov curiously.

"What the hell is with all these birds?" One of the guards mumbled, glancing to the side. "I can see three more watching from the wall. It's kinda creepy."

Igov's eyebrow rose. "Is... unusual to see bird late at night, no?"

"I guess," another terrorist mumbled, scratching the back of his head. "Not that we get a lot of crows in downtown Tokyo even in the daytime."

"Ah. Igov understand," the Russian said calmly, smiling down at the avian.

Shwok! The men all blinked as the bird seemed to explode into blood and black feathers, courtesy of a lightning-fast backhand from their general.

"Uh... what was THAT about?" One of the men asked. "I mean, I don't like the filthy scavengers either, but-"

"I've no time," Igov said, snapping his hand repeatedly to the side to shake off some of the blood. "Take device inside. My aide will tell you where. Igov have... things to do."

Rei blinked repeatedly. "Huh. Well... glad I haven't started naming them yet," she said somewhat nervously.

Rei, is something wrong? Sailor Mercury asked nervously. What's the General's status?

"Pissed off," Rei said promptly. "Also, and this is just a distant possibility, he MIGHT suspect that MAYBE all of the crows sitting around watching him aren't COMPLETELY innocent."

All at once, the nervous warnings of dozens of crows filled Rei's head as the androids on the roofs started to move.

"Okay, yeah. He's onto us. Ranma, Moon, get your asses out here!" She shouted into her headset.

I'm out! Came Cyber Moon's voice. It'll take some time to get down, though! Over!

Damn, I have to find another way out, Ranma groused.

"Can't you leave the way you came in?" Rei suggested reasonably.

No way! They'd kill me!

Rei blinked. "Who would kill you?"

Er... N-Nobody...

The vampiress might have pressed the matter, except that her visions from the crows watching Igov had informed her that the man had vanished in a burst of blue and white light.

"All right, I lost him. He could show up anywhere, now. Mercury, I'm heading for you."

Tak! Rei whirled about as she heard something land softly behind her, and her eyes narrowed as one of the android women slowly stood up, staring at her dispassionately.

"Okay, I guess that's not happening. One of the tin women here wants to play," Rei growled.

Rei, no! We're supposed to retreat after we're discovered! And you're not authorized to use lethal force!

"Not against humans, no," Rei admitted, smirking. "I'll just be taking out some trash while we wait for the others to get clear."

Clink! Rei glanced over her shoulder as another android landed behind her.

Rei, I'm serious! We don't know what they can deploy now that the alarm has gone off!

"That's what we were here to find out, right?" Rei asked, relaxing her body as a third android bounded up onto the edge of the roof. "You worry about yourself, Mercury. You're still alive." Without waiting for a response, she turned off her headset.


"You girls are a bit high up to be taking a late-night stroll, aren't you?" Rei asked, crossing her arms under her breasts.

"Unit faction identified: DAPC. Delta-class security threat," one of the androids said, her voice perfectly human-sounding even if the words and tone were precise and robotic.

"Unit identity unknown. Containment questionable. Awaiting response..." the android behind her said.

"Unknown unit type identified," the third android said, her voice gaining a sudden edge to it. "Midian. Executing extermination protocol seven-two-two."

"Sheesh, I feel like I'm not even part of this conversation," Rei mumbled, glancing down at her open palm as a small, flickering flame appeared within it.

As one, the androids bolted forward, blades emerging from their wrists.

Rei promptly shot up into the air, the flame in her palm staying behind near the roof as the cybernetic assassins drew close.

FWOOM! The flickering blaze suddenly expanded into a considerable fireball, and the androids immediately dove away even as the flame lashed out at them. Ultimately they all escaped serious damage, and promptly scattered again to divide up Rei's attentions.

The vampiress quickly summoned two crows to her, the dark birds circling briefly before they were both suddenly engulfed in flames. The creatures didn't seem to be in any pain from being immolated (though Rei would inform anyone who asked that they absolutely HATED being on fire), and they promptly dove toward two of the androids as Rei shot through the sky toward the third one.

She doubted the familiars would do much more than stall the other robots, but Rei wasn't worried. She had been wanting to test her powers against something that she actually wouldn't mind killing, and a bunch of expendable enemy machines were just about perfect.

The android leapt back as a trio of burning talons sliced through the air, creating three thick scorch marks across her chest. The moment it touched the roof again it surged forward, its body twisting to add power to the lunge.

Rei had been caught slightly off-guard by the instant reversal in movement, but managed to turn so that the blades on the cyborg's wrist stabbed deep into her abdoment rather than her heart.

She didn't waste time wondering that the machines apparently knew a vampire's weak point, and instead grabbed hold of the android's arms with her own, seemingly unaffected by her wound.

Rei's eyes flashed crimson. "Too easy." HWOOOSH!

As she stared smugly into the massive pyre that had engulfed her opponent, she was informed by her earlier distractions - via a burst of pain and a string of profanities - that the other androids were charging for her again, having dealt with her familiars.

Rei turned to face them still holding her victim, the smoking column of flames rotating around her body even as burnt pieces of metal and bits of melted plastics fell to the roof from the conflagration.

"Here. Catch."

BOOM! Suddenly the body she was holding exploded toward the other two androids, sending a shallow burst of flame and several burning limbs and pieces of machinery flying at them.

The robots battered away the projectiles, advancing methodically even as their clothes crumbled to ash and areas of their faux flesh bubbled and melted away.

Before the pair could get into striking distance, Rei bolted backward through the air again, one arm drawn back as the other pointed toward her foes.

Fwoosh! A lance of flame swirled into being across her cheek, appearing in the air between her two hands.

Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Fwoosh! Almost as an afterthought, nine more appeared all around her, one by one, holding in the air parallel to the first.

"Blazing Rain!" The vampiress shouted, the firebolts suddenly launching forward.

The androids' responses were instantaneous, and suddenly the two mechanical women were dashing away as the burning projectiles curled through air to home in on them.

With five arrows to a target, it didn't seem like either of the androids had much hope, but the first one suddenly twisted and jumped just as the first of the arrows was almost on her, launching herself into the air and tucking her body into a somersault as the fiery missiles curved and snaked uselessly to try and tag their prey. As the android finished her stunt and landed in a crouch, the fire arrows seemed to lose their sense of where their target was, and most of them swerved pointlessly and exploded against the roof while a few zoomed off into the air as they dissipated.

The other android wasn't nearly so lucky, and one of the projectiles stabbed into its leg as it tried to dive over the edge of the roof. As the impacted limb exploded in a burst of fire and scorched machinery, the other four fire arrows converged into the android's back.

Rei didn't bother watching the second robot's fiery end, keeping her eyes locked on the survivor. "Well, you're a tricky one, aren't you? How to take you down... fire talons? Fire gate? Or maybe I'll just grab you and tear you limb... from..." she trailed off as the android suddenly turned away and jumped, obviously in full retreat.

"The hell? Did they program those things with self-preservation instincts or something?" the undead Senshi wondered.

"C-Caw..."

Rei's eyes widened, and she whirled around.


Standing at the edge of the adjacent roof was Igov, looking as implacable as ever as he gazed at the nosferatu before him. In his hand one of Rei's crow familiars gasped from within the Russian's grasp, too weak to do much more than uselessly question the general's sexuality.

Crack! As Igov idly crushed his captive into a feathery pulp, Rei had to struggle to dredge up some sympathy for her helpless servant; honestly, she might have done the same thing if such a comment was directed at her.

Still, the birds WERE on her side, and she was fairly certain that Igov couldn't have understood it anyway, so she made a good attempt at being outraged as her eyes narrowed.

Igov, for his part, had no idea what to make of what he was seeing. He had only really suspected something because he had accidentally scanned the crow that had landed in front of him with the same sensors he used to check the chronosphere, detecting a string of inexplicable energies he was utterly unfamiliar with.

He hadn't taken the idea that the birds were being used as spies seriously. Obviously, that was a mistake.

However, the concern of little animals intruding upon important secrets seemed paltry and insignificant compared to what he was seeing now.

He was looking at a vampire.

Who was also, if his scanners and memory were correct, a Senshi.

And judging by her rather scandalous uniform, she was also a member of the DAPC.

His week had been going so WELL, too...


"It seem that DAPC hiring practice has changed," the general said suddenly, sighing as he fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket. The fact that the hand he was using was still sticky with avian blood didn't seem to bother him. "Now they recruit witch and corpse to their side. Inconvenient."

"Inconvenient? INCONVENIENT?" Rei repeated, baring her fangs as she snarled. "That doesn't even BEGIN to describe what I'm going to do to you, bastard!" Rings of arcane script, written in flame that glowed fiercely in the moonlight, appeared around her arms as the seething furnace within her soul burned hotter, demanding destruction.

Igov calmly turned to the side as a trembling beam of hot plasma blasted by him, scorching his coat and tearing into the roof he was standing on, carving a path of molten rubble. As the light faded, he idly stuck his cigarette into the superheated air the attack had left behind, smirking when the tip promptly lit ablaze.

"Interesting. You seek to challenge me? Here?" Igov took one look at the woman's suddenly uncertain look and shook his head, sticking the cigarette between his lips. "Igov wonder how many more rodents scurry about in shadows, waiting for ambush."

"Only one way to find out, right?" Rei taunted, her hand lighting ablaze. 'Let's see... he can teleport, but his reaction time is slow. If I just stay out of grappling range...'

Blowing out a cloud of smoke, Igov thrust his right hand out toward the vampiress, activating his stasis module.

Rei, for her part, wasn't sure exactly what happened. The world seemed to go gray for a moment, and then suddenly Igov was a blur, his left arm bursting apart and reforming into a Gatling gun faster than she could track.

By the time the vampiress was moving to launch her fireball and evade the imminent burst of gunfire, the weapon had already finished warming up and then spat hundreds of bullets into her to rip apart strengthened flesh and send churned-up gore out her back.

When the color finally seeped back into the world and Igov's gun had stopped spinning, Rei was falling to the roof in pieces, her eyes wide and seemingly frozen in her head.

And then, in a burst of eldritch flame, she was gone.


Igov frowned as he raised his Gatling gun, reaching over to the elbow and releasing the switch that spilled out a waterfall of spent casings onto the roof he was standing on.

The flame that had surrounded his opponent had left a very deliberate and ominous-looking scorch mark on the roof where her remains had fallen, looking like some sort of arcane circle drawn in black soot. Aside from the burn marks and the lingering heat, there was no sign of his target save a simple radio headset.

"Hmph. The parasite escapes." Igov crushed the device under his boot, puffing on his cigarette as he organized the data from the androids that were still searching the area.

'I cannot risk a full-scale engagement so close to the office. If I have driven them back, that will have to do for now,' the Russian groused in his head, turning on his heel. 'As much as I would like to pursue the bloodsucker, it is likely she has allies nearby. This is a bad fight at a bad time.'

He took an especially long drag from his cigarette, slightly annoyed that it had burned down to the butt already; that plasma beam had burnt half of the stick away in the process of lighting it.

'Besides, the presence of a vampire working under the DAPC changes things. Considerably. I will not be caught unprepared again...'

With that thought, and a quick sweep of his cybernetic eye over the surrounding streets, Igov activated his chronosphere and vanished in a burst of light.

Sailor Mercury chewed her lip anxiously as she kept taking in readings from the surrounding area, her body hunched low next to an air conditioning unit to better hide from one of the androids that had leapt past a few seconds ago.

"Damn it, if she's going to be a police officer, Asuka had better pound some discipline into her! There's nothing stealthy about setting off explosions and lighting bonfires on top of buildings!"

After thinking about it for a few seconds, the genius Senshi groaned. Given the rest of the DAPC, actually, this sort of behavior seemed to be par for course, and she seriously doubted Asuka could reign in her hot-tempered comrade so easily.

'The worst part is that she turned off her headset, too! I can't even contact her to ask her what's happening! All I know is that she kept expending more and more power, and then her energy signature suddenly dropped to almost nothing! I can't even pinpoint her anymore!'

"Moon, Saotome, we have a problem," Mercury said anxiously, peeking out from behind her cover to see if there were any more androids jumping about.

Does it involve huge beams of fire that turn night into day? Ranma asked over the radio. Seriously, that one almost burned my eyes out before I managed to turn my goggles off!

"You can see the battle? Saotome-san, I need you to go extract Rei. I don't know what happened to her, but we need to get out of here, and fast."

Sure thing. See you in a bit.

Mercury found his casual tone somewhat grating, but pushed it out of her mind. "Cyber Moon, what's your status?"

I'm almost there! The cyborg said.

Sailor Mercury blinked and stood up fully, looking all around. "Almost here? I don't see-"

KROOM! The Senshi of Ice staggered and windmilled her arms as the ground next to her suddenly cracked, leaving an impact crater that quite obviously threatened the structural integrity of the roof.

"Gah! Moon, is that you?" Mercury demanded, regaining her balance.

"What? Of course it is... oh, right! Invisible! Duh." The distortion standing in the middle of the crater shimmered before revealing the cyborg Senshi looking embarrassed and scratching the back of her head.

"Moon, you have to be more careful about long falls from now on!" Mercury scolded. "You're in no danger, but you weigh too much to be leaping around like that!"

Cyber Moon's cheeks went pink as she adopted an almost painfully cute "angry" expression. "Don't call me fat!"

"I didn't call you fat, I said that..." Sailor Mercury trailed off and shook her head. "Oh, never mind. Just be on your guard and ready to fight or run at a moment's notice. Saotome-san is collecting Rei-chan," after turning away, she mumbled "Hopefully."

Moon's anger dissipated rapidly once it was obvious her fellow Senshi didn't want to press the issue, and she slowly turned back toward the Wraith HQ building, her eyes glowing a soft blue.

"Huh. It looks like the androids are going back to sleep," she mumbled.

Sailor Mercury quirked an eyebrow at her. "Really? After all this?"

"Uh... well... it looks like there are a lot more of them now," the cyborg girl said uneasily, "but they're not going anywhere. I guess they're afraid to chase us?"

"More like they're letting us go," Mercury quipped. "They have most of the advantages in this area, but the long-term consequences of deploying all their forces probably aren't worth the chance of killing us."

"Geez, don't be such a downer," came a muffled voice from behind the genius Senshi, causing her to flinch in surprise.

Mercury whirled around and leveled a tense stare at Ranma, who was standing on the edge of the roof holding Rei in his arms. The vampiress was trying her very best to look dignified, which was hard enough to do in her current outfit without also being carried around by the masked police officer.

"Rei-chan, are you all right?" Cyber Moon asked, rushing up to the new arrivals. Certainly the woman looked fine, with no visible wounds or even a blemish, but she figured there must have been SOME reason why Ranma was carrying her.

"I'm fine! Fine!" Rei replied, though her reply was so agitated that it was hard to believe her. "The bastard just took me by surprise, that's all!"

"Bastard?" Mercury questioned uneasily as she vaulted off the roof and started moving away from their target, the others following immediately.

"She ran into Big Red himself back there. Didn't do so well," Ranma explained curtly, earning himself a fist on the head from the woman in his arms.

"Y-You fought Yuchtzky by yourself?" Cyber Moon stuttered, flying above the others at a constant altitude a few meters overhead.

"Hey, he's the one who attacked me!" Rei protested. "Well... sort of. I mean, he definitely would've attacked first if I hadn't."

"Rei-chan, that was incredibly reckless," Sailor Mercury admonished. "We were here to gather information, not pick fights with the enemy leaders."

Rei growled through clenched teeth. "You can't be serious! Did you really think I was going to let that asshole go when I got the chance to take him down?"

The other girls certainly seemed ready to protest, but Ranma's voice cut them off.

"I hear ya. If you'd managed to surprise him instead of the other way around, then we'd all be a lot better off," Ranma agreed, surprising everyone present.

Mercury frowned. "We were warned specifically AGAINST engaging the enemy here, never mind an enemy leader that's taken on all the Inner Senshi at once before. She-"

"Aw, relax, it all turned out okay, didn't it? She 'aint any deader," Ranma said, ignoring the vexed look from Mercury and the confused one from Rei. "The important thing is that the mission's done and we got what we wanted."

"That type of attitude is the reason my cousin drinks, you know," Sailor Mercury mumbled.

Rei snorted. "That's her excuse. What's yours?"

The genius Senshi flushed as she winced.

Ranma landed on the roof of a shop that had closed for the day, and then turned toward the women following him. "I'm gonna take Rei-chan back to HQ; you two should head home. The captain's gonna want to debrief you pretty early in the morning, so you need to get some sleep. I'll probably crash at HQ tonight."

Sailor Mercury spent a good long time analyzing the logic of that argument before she relented, nodding silently and taking off toward the college.

Cyber Moon hesitated, and then frowned at her two fellow officers. "Are you sure you should go back by yourselves? I could come too..." for some reason, seeing the vampiress in Ranma's arms like this, she didn't want the two to be alone together. She wasn't quite sure why.

"No reason for that," Ranma said, brushing aside her offer. "Besides, Hunter's at home tonight, so one of us needs to feed him tomorrow morning."

The blonde cyborg cringed at the thought, and then hung her head as she blasted away toward the house she and Ranma shared.


"You know, you can put me down at any time," Rei mumbled, casting a wary glance at her princess as she rocketed off into the distance.

"If you're sure," Ranma said casually, letting his arms drop.

He was honestly surprised when Rei dropped straight onto the roof with a yelp, landing painfully on her rear.

"Hey! What the hell was that?" The vampiress demanded, staring up into the bulky goggles protecting Ranma's eyes as she got to her feet.

"Uh... can't you fly? Like, at will?" Ranma asked, obviously perplexed that gravity had suddenly become an issue.

Rei fumed silently for several seconds before she snapped her head away, her long, night-black hair whipping around behind her. "Flying takes up a lot of energy and concentration, you know. I'll be fine on foot."

Without waiting for the pigtailed man to respond, Rei vaulted from the roof, landing on the building across the street. Then she broke out into a full sprint, bounding from roof to roof back toward the headquarters.


It didn't take much longer for Rei to make it to the DAPC headquarters, and she landed lightly in front of the steps leading up to the main lobby.

Walking up the stairs, she grabbed hold of the door handle and pulled, frowning when it didn't budge.

'Oh. Locked. Of course they would lock it if no one else was here, wouldn't they?' Rei thought, feeling a bit embarrassed.

"So I was right."

Rei turned her head to stare over her shoulder, her brow creasing as Ranma stood behind her, arms crossed over his chest. He had pulled off the goggles and the rebreather at this point, and Rei was inwardly relieved that she wouldn't have to keep staring into the glowing green lenses of those creepy goggles.

"Right about what? That I don't have a key yet?" The vampiress asked, annoyed.

"Key? Why wouldn't you just slip through the wall like normal?" Ranma asked, raising an eyebrow as he approached the midian. "If the fight took that much out of you, you shoulda said so."

"What? What makes you say that?" Rei asked warily, her hackles rising. It annoyed her to no end that Ranma could be so perceptive about certain things and so maddeningly oblivious to others.

"Normally you fly around like it's nothing," Ranma explained, pulling out his own key and unlocking the door, "and suddenly now you decide to stick to walking and jumping? And then there's the door. You can't hide it. Getting wasted like that took a lot out of you."

Rei snorted, though she could feel the facade crumbling. "Please. You think a hundred or so bullets could slow me down for long? Kimiko took way more than that and practically laughed it off, to hear Ami-chan tell it."

"Which is why I'm worried," Ranma said, opening the door for Rei to step through and following her.

"You didn't seem worried earlier," the vampiress mumbled, feeling her emotions swirling inside her. She didn't know whether to be mad, scared, or relieved that Ranma was talking to her about this. "Speaking of which, what was with you earlier? The first time we met, you were talking down to us about how big and bad Igov was and how we should just stay away from him! Now I try and roast him on my own and that's okay?"

Ranma scrubbed his head with his hand as he sighed. "Well, if you want me to be honest, I really don't think it's okay at all. But I've seen what you're capable of first-hand now. You can take care of yourself. Hell, you're the only one of us that can just regenerate and get right back up after she's ground to a bloody pulp! You don't need ME to look after you."

Rei frowned immediately. She didn't like the idea that Ranma wouldn't be protecting her. Nor did she like the idea that she didn't like the idea that Ranma wouldn't be protecting her. A rather annoying emotional paradox, to be sure.

"... Or that's what I thought at first," Ranma finally amended, shaking his head. "That fight was real short, and you're almost completely drained. And I think I know why."

The vampiress said nothing, meeting the man's eyes.

And then her eyes widened as he suddenly tugged on the collar of the manta suit he was wearing, pulling down the spandex-like material to expose his neck.

"Go ahead and have some. But not too much," he said, looking only slightly nervous.

Rei, for her part, looked absolutely shocked. "Wh-What? No! I'm not going to bite you! I was just joking in the elevator, there's no way!"

"I know you were teasing, but this is important," Ranma snapped. "Look, I'm no expert, but it sure seems to me that the cold stuff you get in the blood bags is nothing compared to fresh blood from a living body. Sure, it satisfies your hunger and keeps you going day to day, but you need more than that, Rei-chan."

The undead Senshi said nothing, simply gaping at the man in front of her. She got a terrible feeling he was right, but desperately tried to firm herself against the logic, trying to deny the unpleasant truth.

"I noticed it with Garo. When he actually took a bite out of ME, the guy went from barely conscious to supercharged in seconds. When he was drinking out of vials, he was just as happy, but there was no burst of energy. Transfusion blood isn't good enough for you, Rei-chan. Not if you want to stay strong enough to fight."

Rei trembled as she backed away from the pigtailed man, feeling surges of desire shoot through her. She knew he was right. It all made sense. She had suspected as much long before this talk. But that didn't make it right.

"No..." she whispered painfully, shaking her head. "I'm not going to do it. Not to you."

"Who else is there?" Ranma asked, obviously annoyed. "With your kind of power, you'd need to spend all night sucking people dry to keep yourself at full strength!"

"Then I won't fight at full strength!" Rei snapped back, gripping her hands into fists.

"Then you'll probably end up dead for real," Ranma growled, "and I 'aint gonna let that happen. So you can either drink my blood here, or you can see it splashed all over the ground after I save your ass."

Rei's expression was horrified, almost haunted. She knew what he said was true; he constantly wounded himself rescuing or taking hits for others, and had done so in his attempt to keep Ran from kidnapping her. There was hardly much need for Ranma to do that for someone who could regenerate from nearly anything, but as Rei had found out first-hand, the vampire's power was far from limitless.

"Why..." she whispered, hanging her head. "Why are you doing this? I haven't done anything but make your life and your job harder. I tried to KILL you, Ranma. Maybe I wasn't in the best state of mind then, but... I would've ended your life without a thought. What could make you go through all this for me?"

Ranma smirked. "I'm the best."

Rei blinked as she raised her head. "What?"

"You heard me," Ranma said haughtily. "I'm just the best there is. Fighting vampires, saving vampires, feeding vampires, whatever. I'll do it all and I'll still be there to help out everyone else, too. Because I'm the best, and I'll do whatever it takes to prove it." His expression turned more serious. "I said I'd take responsibility for what happened to you. That's not 'cause I feel sorry for you or because I think it was my fault you got turned. It's 'cause I wasn't good enough to come through when it counted. I'm doing all this because I want to prove myself."

Rei found herself stunned silent once again. The explanation was... unexpected, to say the least. It seemed incredibly shallow and arrogant at first, but when she actually thought of the sacrifices Ranma had made and the good he was doing it was rather difficult to accuse him of being self-serving.

Finally, she locked eyes with the pigtailed man and spoke. "Honestly... I was just hoping you were in love with me or something."

Ranma sweatdropped. "Uh... no. Not in love with you." He shook off the comment quickly, and then tugged on his collar again. "So, whaddya say?"

Rei gulped nervously as she approached him, her entire body heating up as she stared at his pulsing jugular. "J-Just tell me if I start drawing too much, okay?"

Her hands were trembling as she took hold of his shoulders, and she gave him an annoyed look as she realized that he didn't seem nearly as nervous, despite being the one about to have his blood sucked. "And I want you to promise me that you won't tell ANYONE about this."

"Yeah, yeah, I promise," he said negligently. "Let's hurry up, I'm a bit tired and this'll probably do me in for the night."


Rei was expecting to hesitate, to have to force her own mouth open to take the next step that would forever seal another part of her past as a human being. But her body reacted where her mind resisted, and before she had even realized it, her fangs gently sunk into Ranma's neck.

Ranma forced himself to relax past the initial pain of being bitten, and then calmly put his arms around the woman in front of him without really thinking about it.

The only way Rei could possibly describe the current situation was nirvana. Like before, her expectations had fallen far, far short of reality. She had been expecting blood to taste the same as it had before she was turned, except perhaps a bit more palatable. She had also been expecting her first feeding to be an awkward, unpleasant experience as she struggled with the thought of draining another person's lifeblood.

As it happened, however, the feeding was clean and sensual, as if she had done it a hundred times before. The blood itself didn't have a taste as she understood it from eating as a human; rather than having real flavor, the blood seemed to simply taste... euphoric. As if the crude mechanisms for sensing flavors and relaying information to the brain had been stepped over in favor of simply bombarding her brain with pleasure. She could honestly say that drinking blood from a person, or rather drinking blood from Ranma, was the most pleasurable, wonderful, and satisfying experience she'd ever imagined.

It was so amazing, in fact, that it completely distracted her from the fact that Ranma was gasping painfully and trying to gently pull her head away.

Rei quickly withdrew her fangs from the wound in his neck, although she hadn't pulled away before her donor stopped struggling and sighed in relief. Before she could really think about what she was doing, the vampiress started licking the wound clean, reveling in the wonderful taste.

"Ahhh... you... you done?" Ranma managed to gasp out, his body swaying dizzily. Rei had taken to her first feeding very enthusiastically, and he had been very reluctant in forcing her to stop. Given that (for once) he hadn't been injured at all during the mission, she had actually taken quite a good percentage of his total blood capacity, far more than Garo or Kimiko had managed. Such as it was, the sensation of her licking and kissing his neck was barely noticeable, and his mind was swimming under a curtain of crushing fatigue.

Rei reluctantly drew her lips away from his neck, and then released a shuddering breath as she glanced at the two holes that had already closed themselves up to prevent further blood loss.

"Y-Yes. I'm... I'm fine." She said carefully.

That was a lie, of course. Saying she was fine was like saying that the Pacific was damp. Not untrue, perhaps, but completely misrepresenting reality.

Rei felt PERFECT. As if all her doubts and concerns and problems, physical or otherwise, had been washed away in a crimson tide, leaving her truly complete for the first time in her life.

Her strength had returned above and beyond what she had felt when Ran had first granted her his power, and she had to quash an initial urge to immediately teleport back to Wraith Labs and reduce the entire building to smoking cinders, cyborgs and all.

As the man with his arms around her wobbled uncertainly, she felt a second urge strike her and decided that it was harmless enough to act on.

Without waiting for Ranma to regain his senses, Rei cupped his cheeks with her hands and then kissed him.

It wasn't a nervous kiss or a particularly passionate one, but rather... exploratory. Rei's tongue rolled about the interior of Ranma's mouth, tasting him carefully as she wrapped one arm around his back and the other around his head.

After several seconds of this the vampiress withdrew her lips, a sense of excitement fluttering in her chest coupled with a nagging disappointment.

'I thought he'd be a better kisser than that,' she admitted, sighing as Ranma's head slumped against her shoulder. 'Well, I guess I did catch him by surprise. Actually, I kind of caught myself by surprise, too. Still, you'd think he'd put a little more effort into it! I didn't HAVE to reward him like that, and it's not like he...'

It was about at this point that Rei noticed Ranma was unconscious.

Asuka yawned as she stepped out of the elevator and back onto the ground floor of the HQ, stalling her for a few seconds before she turned sharply to the right and headed toward her office and her precious, precious coffee.

It seemed apparent, after debriefing Rei, that the recon mission had gone well. Not great, but better than she had expected, really. Over the course of dealing with Snake and Ranma as her most capable officers, she had learned to stop giving them missions that required subtlety rather than destructive force.

Not that Ranma couldn't do subtle, but it wasn't his strongest suit, and he tended to end up in bizarre and explosive situations. Snake could do subtle... in the sense that if he tried REALLY hard, he could kill everyone with one big explosion rather than lots of little ones.

Her new officers opened up new possibilities and given her new tools and options to leverage. Obviously Rei wasn't one for subtlety any more than Snake, even though her abilities as a vampire were well matched to sneakier tactics. In contrast, Usagi didn't like violence and was reluctant to unleash fiery explosive hell even though her body was clearly designed for such rampant devastation.

Not ideal, but dealing with the flaws in her people was just another job when you're the leader.

Asuka paused after passing by the couch in the secondary office that her men had converted into a living room. Ranma was laid out over it, sleeping soundly.

She frowned. Asuka had no problem with Ranma sleeping in headquarters, but he was still in full gear, including the manta suit he had "borrowed" from his brief employment with Core. Strange.

Tiro had evidently arrived while she had been busy chaining up Rei's coffin, and was watching the news as he sat on the floor in front of the couch.

It was revealed just a few days ago that the legislature has been preparing to take steps to significantly increase its military spending in light of the numerous disturbances within Tokyo.

Officials explained that much of the international aversion to allowing Japan to re-arm has weakened after the bizarre and unexplained occurences two weeks ago in which massive, dark cloud cover spread all over the planet, now referred to as "Black Dawn". Although the phenomenon quickly abated, the fact that scientists have been unable to make any sense of the Black Dawn thus far - thanks in no small part by the Japanese government's reluctance to release details of the incident - has created growing international pressure for Japan to better contain its own national security issues.

"Of course we wouldn't get credit for that," Tiro mumbled as he took a sip of his own coffee.

"Of course," Asuka deadpanned. "The government's gotten lazy. They'd rather throw things at our feet and then point to us when strange things happen rather than understand the situation themselves. Still, at least they seem to be making some attempt to deal with this problem to prevent panic."

"Well, why don't they give US more money and personnel, then? We're the ones that always take care of things," Tiro griped.

Asuka chose not to point out that Tiro was hardly one to complain about credit being given where it wasn't due; it wasn't due to any effort on his part that the DAPC had muscled through every major obstacle that had been set in its path, yet he got paid all the same.

"It's much easier, and politically expedient, to work toward the full resurrection of Japan's military than it is to pour men and money into a singularly unpopular department," Asuka said simply. "Either way, this is good for us. If Core actually gets enough resources and full strategic support, they can finally sweep the Freedom's Angels from Japan once and for all. That will take a huge burden off of our operations."

Finance Minister Tana Hikoshi has been an outspoken and valuable supporter of the military spending bills in the legislature ever since the Black Dawn, giving numerous speeches and holding many high-level meetings in order to gather support. He had this to say at a recent government rally:

"I have seen first-hand the threats that haunt this city! I have seen first-hand the struggle that our fine defenders face in the line of duty! It's time for us to stop taking our security for granted and stand up to our enemies with the full might of this great nation!"

Asuka raised an eyebrow. "That the guy Snake and Kyle 'escorted'?"

Tiro nodded. "It's nice to see that he lived through the experience."

If the various spending bills pass the legislature, spending on the Central Organized Response Echelon will increase by over one thousand percent, and other cities will be granted formal budgets to shift local JSDF forces into their own local defense departments. While many cities already have municipal defense forces that operate in a manner similar to Core, they lack the funding and military expertise given to Tokyo's elite fighting force. In preparation for the bills, however, many municipalities are preparing their own legislature to reorganize and modernize their local forces to Core's standards.

"Glad to hear it," Asuka mumbled, turning away from the TV and casting a final annoyed glance at the sleeping Ranma. "Leaving now. Need coffee."


Half an hour later the police captain was leaning back in her chair, a blissful smile on her face as she clasped the steaming hot mug in her hands.

"Coffee has to be mankind's crowning achievement by far," the bluette mumbled dreamily. "Sliced bread? Electricity? The Internet? Electromagnetic rail guns? Feh."

Just as she was settling into what was arguably the high point of her day, an overly-cheery voice came from the lobby.

"Asuka-chan! Where are you? We're here!"

The police captain grumbled at Usagi's maddening persistence in using "Asuka-chan" as she stepped out of her office. "All right, all right, I'm coming. Hold on..."

Turning out of the hall, Asuka noted that Usagi, Ami, and Minako were all standing over the couch, with the former leaning over the top of the couch and poking Ranma's sleeping form with one of the cybernetic arms that unfolded from her shoulders.

Annoyingly enough, it was the woman who didn't really belong there that spoke first.

"Hi Asuka-chan! Is Snake-senpai on duty yet?" Minako asked brightly.

Asuka's eyebrow twitched at the honorifics. So now Snake was "senpai," was he? And it seemed as if Usagi's penchant for addressing her like one of her girlfriends was rubbing off, too.

"No, he's not. He won't be here for some time, actually," Asuka admitted. Minako promptly deflated.

Ami was about to speak, but to everyone's surprise, the police captain kept going.

"It doesn't need to be said that I fully respect your privacy, and any relationship you have with my Lieutenant is none of my business," she said firmly, her expression stern. "However, if I may, I suggest that you speak to Chikiko if you insist on... pursuing him." Asuka had said the word "pursuing" distastefully, as if the idea of someone wanting Snake was atrocious in and of itself.

Minako, however, seemed to brighten considerably at the advice. "That's a good idea! She probably knows the guys best, huh?"

"Maybe," Asuka said, shrugging, "but more importantly, she's a licensed psychiatrist."

Leaving the blonde to twitch irritably, Asuka turned toward her cousin. "Do you have the data from last night's recon?"

Ami nodded immediately. "I haven't spent too much time analyzing what information I've found, nor have I taken a crack at the data Usagi managed to acquire. I'll have to leave it all to you, unfortunately."

"You're not staying to help analyze the information?" Asuka asked, trying hard not to sound disappointed. After all, it wasn't like she paid Ami or anything, so she had no right to consume so much of her time.

"I'd like to stay and help, but I have other work to do," the genius Senshi said vaguely. Not that she was likely at all to make any progress on finding Hotaru, but she wasn't about to explain to Haruka that she didn't have any new information because she had been busy unraveling a terrorist defense network.

"Did you find anything on Hotaru-chan?" Usagi asked immediately, shifting over next to Ami in seconds.

Ami sighed. "No, but I'm still searching. It's just... it seems so HOPELESS sometimes, you know?"

Asuka frowned. "I'm still not completely clear on who this person is that you're searching for. You were talking about her with Hino-san last night, correct?"

"It's a problem that we have to deal with," Ami said, and not for the first time. Asuka had gently expressed her desire to help before, but Ami brushed her concern aside. The DAPC couldn't do anything to help, and if they tried that would just get Haruka worked up. "It's Senshi business."

Even as Asuka shrugged, Usagi sniffled and one of her shoulder-mounted cybernetic arms dabbed at her eyes. "It's so sad! It's been so long since she disappeared now! What if she's trapped or lost in some horrible cavern or something! All alone, helpless, hungry and thirsty! It must be torture!"

Dah-duhn duuuhn... Dah-duhn duuhn...

Hotaru dashed across the cave interior, occasionally reaching an open magma pit and somersaulting over it.

Dah-duhn duuuhn... Dah-duhn duuhn...

Standing in place and closing her eyes, Hotaru slowly raised her hand into the air, causing a fairly large rock across the cavern to rise up at the same rate.

Dah dah dah dah-dah-dah...

Hotaru gasped as she did push-ups as quickly as possible, sweat beading on her forehead due to the surrounding magma pools.

Duh duh duhn da-duhn da-duhn!

"Nal-sensei, I don't really mind constantly switching between dozens of different exercises after doing each one for a few seconds," Hotaru gasped out as she stood on her hands, holding her balance upside-down, "but do you have to play that 'Rocky training montage' music in the background? It's rather annoying."

"It is... necessary," Nal'Shek said vaguely, watching the young woman exercise as he floated above the offending music player.

"Hey Cap," Snake said suddenly, alerting the various officers and Senshi to his presence as he strolled toward the elevator. "Hey Cap's cousin. Hey Yamazaki. Hey Tsukino. Hey Orange Skirt."

Usagi greeted the American back cheerfully while Minako merely stared at Snake with little hearts in her eyes, either not noticing or not caring that he wasn't addressing her by name.

Asuka raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing here so early, Lieutenant? Your shift doesn't start until noon today."

"It's my turn to wake up Hino," Snake explained, smiling happily.

"It's still morning," Ami pointed out helpfully.

"I need time to prepare it," he reasoned, "and time to take the measure on the vault doors to check how much kinetic force they can withstand. Wouldn't want to let the bad bloodsucker go."

The blondes blinked cluelessly at the explanation as Ami's eye twitched.

Asuka rolled her eyes. "Forget it Lieutenant. As of last night you're permanently off of vampire feeding duty."

Snake jerked to a stop, stunned. "Wh-What? Why? Why would you do that?" He hesitated for a moment as he actually thought about the question. "Oh... right."

"Furthermore, Hino-san is now formally a member of the DAPC. I expect you to pretend as if that matters to you."

Snake saluted seriously. "Of course, Captain! I would never, EVER bring intentional harm to my subordinates!" He said enthusiastically. Then he coughed and mumbled under his breath, "Unless they're walking abominations against nature, maybe."

"What?" Asked Usagi, blinking.

"I said 'Why is Ranma sleeping here?'" he lied. "Looks kinda pale, too."

"I don't know, actually," Usagi asked, frowning. "He was fine last night; he shouldn't be THIS tired. And he does look kind of... drained..." For some reason that word taunted her, as if she was on the edge of an epiphany, but for the life of her she couldn't figure out what it was.


Seeing that the conversation wasn't going anywhere useful, Asuka decided to steer back on track.

"Tsukino-kun, do you have the data you downloaded last night?"

Usagi pushed her concerns for Ranma aside as she turned toward her superior. "Yup! I managed to get everything from the boss's computer! Even a bunch of secret files!"

Snake tired of the conversation quickly and moved to sit next to Tiro to watch the news. Minako followed as expected.

"Secret files? That sounds good. Have you had any time to peruse them?" The police captain asked.

"No, but-"

Before the blonde cyborg could explain further, the front door to the building was suddenly thrown open with force and fanfare that far exceeded the others' entrances.


Makoto commanded the attention of the entire room and the one adjacent as she stepped into the lobby, her posture as proud as could be. "You guys, you're not going to believe who I found!"

"Setsuna?" guessed Ami.

"Hotaru?" guessed Usagi.

"Tokima?" guessed Asuka.

"Waldo?" guessed Snake.

"It's Waldo, isn't it?" asked Minako, promptly changing her guess.

Makoto gave Snake a dirty look, despite the fact that the American hadn't even turned his eyes away from the television since she had arrived. "No! I finally found my old senpai!"

Asuka turned away from the taller woman at that, having immediately lost interest. The reactions from the rest of the girls were mixed. Usagi looked surprised, Minako looked overjoyed, and Ami rolled her eyes wearily.

"You're kidding! Who is it?" Minako demanded.

Makoto wasn't about to spill everything so quickly however, and pulled a photo out of her pocket before holding it up with the backside facing her friends. "I just spent a few days going through my old pictures on a hunch until I finally found a good one of him. I wasn't really holding out much hope that it was really him, but as amazing as it seems, it was! He's changed so much since I last saw him!"

By this time Minako and Usagi were eyeing the photograph almost frantically, and Usagi unfolded her cybernetic arms out of her shoulders as she started to advance on the poytailed girl in step with the other blonde. Even Ami had to admit that her curiosity was slowly overwhelming her commitment to the more serious issues at hand here.

Makoto grinned as she let Usagi snatch the photo from her fingers with one of the robotic claws. "Take a look!"

The cybernetic arm pulled the photograph closer as the claw rotated, turning the picture around for the three curious Senshi to see.

Silence reigned in the building for several seconds as the three women carefully inspected the photograph.

Finally, Usagi spoke. "Mako-chan... you're a liar."

"Eh?" Makoto blinked, not having expected that. "No, he really is! I'm sure of it!"

"That's not what she meant," Ami deadpanned. "Somehow, despite the sheer statistical improbability of it, NONE of the men you've crushed on over the years look AT ALL like Rayden Shikodan."

The name sent a shock wave through the DAPC, and Asuka flinched in surprise as Tiro sprayed a burst of coffee from his mouth and started coughing. Snake's expression turned completely blank, and even Ranma, who was still asleep, twitched uncomfortably and then turned over.

Makoto frowned, scratching her cheek. "Really? You don't think so?"

"Rayd-are you serious?" Asuka demanded, suddenly sticking her head over Ami's shoulder to look at the photo. It was a picture of a rather burly teenager by a pool looking over his shoulder at the camera. He had a small smile on his face, which at first made it absolutely impossible for Asuka to reconcile the boy with the image of the grim Catholic until her eyes were drawn to the tattoo of "091" on his left shoulder.

Further scrutiny revealed that, save the cautiously happy expression, the individual in the photo really did seem to be a younger Rayden; the face was the same and his body was that of a competition bodybuilder, bulging with muscle.

Tiro was aghast. "He actually had a girlfriend?"

Asuka, for her part, was equally floored. "He can actually SMILE?"

Makoto gave the police officers annoyed looks. "Of course he can. Shiko-chan just gets... moody sometimes."

"From what I've seen, he has exactly two moods," Snake volunteered from where he was still watching TV, "cold and murderous, and frigid and grumpy." Then he shrugged. "Not that I'm criticizing. He's not a bad guy at all. But he IS kind of a cold-blooded killing machine."

Makoto fumed. "No he isn't! You just don't know the REAL Shiko-chan! The one that I knew before his parents died!"

"He's an orphan like you?" Minako asked, still eyeing the picture critically. Personally, she was incredibly disappointed. Rayden was not particularly good-looking at all, and from what she was hearing, had the personality of a lead weight. This was the man Makoto was always pining for?

Makoto nodded sadly at Minako's question. "It was much worse for him, though. His parents were murdered in their home while he was away on a school trip. The house had been looted afterward, so the police thought they had been killed as part of a robbery, but as far as I know the perpetrators were never found."

"Not by the police, maybe," Tiro mumbled, shivering. "Shikodan-san's pretty good at the whole 'vigilante' thing, so I'll bet he's already taken care of things."

"After his parents were killed, he suddenly vanished a few days later, before the funerals were held. I never saw him again until recently," Makoto said softly.

Ami still looked skeptical. "So you didn't recognize him or his name until you matched the tattoo you saw with the one in the picture?"

"Well, this is a bit embarrassing to say, but... I never knew his given name," Makoto said nervously. "He never used or gave it. Nobody did. To most people he was just 'Shikodan' and to the people who weren't too scared of him he was 'Shiko-chan'. He didn't talk about it too much, but whenever somebody brought up his name, he just mumbled something about leaving the past behind and then changed the subject."

"So... why do you like him, again?" Minako asked tactlessly.

The ponytailed girl sighed wistfully. "I know that Shiko-chan was never the most expressive boy or the most handsome, but he was so... reliable and safe. He was one of the most polite and well-meaning people I've ever known, and wouldn't hesitate to stand up to bullies. It's thanks to him that I decided to learn martial arts and stand up for people who couldn't do so for themselves."

The various women remained silent, accepting the reasoning as sound. Even Minako had to admit that there was obviously more to the man than met the eye, and she started to feel a bit guilty that she had been acting so shallow.

Tiro had no such concerns. "You DO know that he's a Russian super-soldier who's been slaughtering heinous criminals for the past five years, right? I think that's important to note."

"Well, I'm a magical girl demon hunter who's been demolishing monsters for just as long, so what's the difference?" Makoto reasoned, crossing her arms over her chest.

"So, are you going to try to get back together with him?" Usagi asked, fighting off a frown. For some reason the thought of the creepy foreign gunman with a girlfriend just seemed so... wrong. She wasn't sure why.

Makoto, for her part, chewed her lip nervously at the question. "Well, I haven't really decided on anything like that," she hedged, scratching the back of her head under her ponytail. "But I do want to get to know him better now that I've found him again."

"Very well!"


Everyone blinked in surprise as Snake suddenly stood up, his arms crossed over his chest.

"Your tale has moved me, Green Skirt! Thus, I've decided that I'll help you in this pursuit of the heart!" The American said dramatically, his face utterly serious as he raised a fist in front of him.

Everybody else save the girl in question was fairly stunned by the admission.

"What do you mean 'help'? What are you going to do?" Makoto asked suspiciously.

"One of the primary obstacles in any relationship with Shikodan is that, as a dangerous, wanted vigilante, he's rather hard to find. I'll flush him out and then bring him here for you, so that at last you can be reunited!" He said firmly, almost shouting.

Snake got more suspicious glances after that. "Why would you do something like that?" Asuka wondered.

The weapons expert snorted. "What kind of man would I be if I just sat around and ignored a young woman's heartfelt plea to be reunited with her lover when I'm in a position to help her? Nobody can ignore a woman in love and call himself a man! Don't take me so lightly!"

Minako's eyes lit up. "So, then-"

"Not now Orange Skirt, I'm busy making dreams come true, here," Snake interrupted, briskly walking past the girls and stepping outside before anything more could be made of his uncharacteristic decision to help.


When the door shut behind Snake, Asuka turned rigidly toward Usagi. "For the sake of plausible deniability, as well as my general psychological well-being, I'm going to pretend that whole conversation never happened."

Ami winced as the other Senshi shared confused glances. "I think she's implying that someone should really stop him."

"If you want. Personally, I have too much trouble reigning him in when he's on duty to worry about whatever messes he makes on his own time," the police captain groused. "But like I said, from this point on that officially never happened. Tsukino!"

Usagi squawked in surprised as she stood rigidly. "Yes?"

"We're going to start analyzing the computer files now. You said you managed to get everything?" Asuka demanded.

"Well, everything on that computer," Usagi clarified. "I even had time to leave something behind!"

Asuka blinked. "Leave something behind? Like what?"

"From the initial reports, it seems that there was no actual damage to the facility itself, Tokima-sama," Bei Takana said as she followed Alexandra Tokima out into the hall outside the CEO's office.

"No damage at all?" the terrorist leader asked skeptically as she pushed in the keycode to access her office, followed by a quick swipe to have her fingerprint verified.

"Well, actually," Bei winced as the doors slid open, revealing the CEO's office... and the large hole that had been cut out of the window. "There was some... minor, isolated damage..."

Alexandra's face twisted into a scowl. "I see. There was no sign of any break-ins besides my office?"

"That's correct, Tokima-sama. General Yuchtzky believes that HQ was the target of a two-pronged reconnaissance operation. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of infiltration anywhere besides your office, though. It's possible the mission was aborted when the general drove off the... officer."

Alex bit her lip anxiously at Bei's hesitation. It surprised everyone that the DAPC had stooped to using vampires as weapons before the Freedom's Angels could. Of course, there was a chance that the midian Igov fought was just wearing a disguise, perhaps to provoke the two powers most threatening to the vampires into attacking each other, but she very much doubted it. All perceptible signs of vampire activity had ceased after the Black Dawn, and she found it hard to believe that any vampire remnants were more interested in revenge than survival. Pissing off the Freedom's Angels in order to agitate the DAPC was hardly productive if one wanted to avoid oblivion.

No, it was much easier to believe that the infuriatingly effective fools had simply recruited a vampire, much like they had mysteriously acquired that armored alien beast. And it irritated Alex to no end that she was apparently losing an arms race to a bunch of incompetent police officers.

"Have the chronospheres moved immediately. And the T-virus mutagens. They're not safe here any longer. And make sure they're moved during the DAY," the brunette commanded, walking around her desk and scowling at seeing the locks on her desk drawers ripped apart. "This could be very bad. If they got into my files, they could have detailed information on several of our projects, as well as where they're being housed."

Alexandra tapped her desk lightly, and the monitor overhead flickered as the computer started up.

"We may have to organize a massive shift in resources from Wraith properties to those in sector-"

The terrorist general was cut off as the computer finished starting up, presenting her with not a password screen, but rather an image of a young, unfamiliar blonde woman with her hair in twin ponytails and a black bodysuit on.

Halt, evildoer! The image said, suddenly pointing a finger at Alex. Computers are tools for the betterment of all people, not weapons for your evil schemes! For the act of plotting against the innocent people of Tokyo, you will not be forgiven! I am Cyber Moon! For great justice, I will punish YOU!

Bei gaped openly at the monitor as the image glared in a manner that was far more cute than intimidating.

Then the image vanished, and was replaced by the normal password entry screen.

Alexandra was silent for several long moments before she finally spoke again. "Bei."

"Y-Yes?" the younger woman asked, straightening.

"These devices connect to a computer tower locked up on the fifth floor, in the far left corner of the mainframe storage center," Alex explain calmly. "Find that computer, take it to the testing fields in the basement levels, and then have it shot."

Bei blinked. "You want me to... execute your computer?"

"An example must be made," the terrorist general said, summoning considerable dignity around her for what could only be described as a silly task, "so that everyone knows that we do not tolerate betrayal." Then she frowned. "Or... whatever this is, exactly."

"Uh... right. Right away, Tokima-sama."

Androids scrapped: 2
Crows crushed: 6
Machines dispatched via firing squad: 1
Victories using Slayer: 9 out of 22
Missions complete: 1
Moon cats ignored: 2

End Chapter 12