Description: For Yoko Kasagi, there are two kinds of law: the law that she as a policewoman must fight to protect -- the law that, in Southtown, sometimes seems a bit of a joke -- and then the law that rules what she as a mother must fight to protect. And /that/ law, as the blood ninja Kanji finds, is no laughing matter. Extreme SC vs OC battling!
Sigh.
Only an internal sigh, of course, but a sigh where it counts all the same. She's not the type to sigh audibly, not with other people around; in fact, she used to be the type to never sigh at all, ever. But somehow, that has been slipping recently, and her passion for what she does is dwindling. Is she just getting old? Maybe. But she's probably been old all along, and can't imagine that a few more years would make a difference. More likely it's that, so used to being on the beat, being in charge in a more -- what's a good word? informal? -- /flexible/ setting, this sort of desk work is... different somehow. It's not the paperwork of setting down in record the stuff she's done. She's good at that. It's the paperwork of reading about what other people have done...
...and they haven't done enough.
Sure, Metro City was perhaps a tougher place than Southtown, at least /overtly/. But that's the key, there. Crime here isn't just organized, it's subsumed in the very political structure of the city, so far as she can tell. She can't /do/ anything about it. They -- the "criminal element" keep it battened down, make her look good and make the majority of people safe, and every once in a while the police do something apparently clever, and it all works out fine. And that's the thing, isn't it? The majority of people are safe. Safer than they'd be if crime was loose and disorganized, and the police were a genuine organization fighting to protect, fighting criminals and politicians and all too often itself. Like in Metro City.
Yoko Kasagi looks up, those dark eyes clear as ever as she surveys the policemen conversing lightly outside the windows of her office, and the constant light stream of traffic in and out of the STPD station.
Of course, she can never go back.
And she must provide for her children, now...
Yoko lowers her head and turns a page.
...sigh.
It's not a good day for Yoko.
Certainly not.
But not everyone in the station today is so mired in depression, so consumed with doubt and questions. There's at least one person who's free of such concerns...more than one, actually. Because the one who's just arrived has come to join his brethren.
Round the back of the station, there's a set of doors not accessible to the general public. A loading bay entrance just off the garage. It's in use, now, an ambulance parked, idle, as its crew deals with the police. The occupant of said ambulance...he's the reason they came here. And he's being escorted down the hall by a pair of Yoko Kasagi's colleagues. Not patrolmen, though, hardly not. These officers work for the morgue and forensics lab.
Because the man they're bringing into the station doesn't seem to be in the land of the living. The zipped-up body-bag lying motionless on the gurney is a dead giveaway. Pun unintended.
The wheels of the gurney squeak, squeak, squeak, as it rolls down the corridor. The morgue guys exchange small talk, sports, the weather...as they push their charge into the elevator, one of them touching the button for the basement level. The doors close, the lift descends.
Then there's a strange series of muffled thumps, echoing up the elevator shaft.
"Ma'am!"
Yoko looks up, face professional as ever at the saluting officer. It's not a mask; she's a professional person, and always will be. Stoic and rarely expressive. For these reasons, saying she's "depressed" right now is a bit of a misnomer -- but she's definitely starting to question her own motivations for what may, in fact, really be the first time. However, there is very little that could pierce that hard of hers -- just as the man before her, despite knowing her for months now, can't help but feel himself stiffen as her steely gaze meets is. It's not an unfriendly look.
This is just how she always is.
"Report," Chief Inspector Yoko Kasagi says calmly.
"It's another one of those bizarre ritualistic murders," says the junior officer. "We've got the body in now, and we're going to take a look at it. Still no idea where the culprit is, so... we're hoping that maybe this one will give us a few clues. We were wondering, ma'am, if you'd like to see it this time."
Yoko pauses for a moment, ready to refuse. But... it's been a while since...
"Alright," she says, rising from her chair and picking up her jacket.
The two of them head for the lift, and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Because, despite the buttonbeing pressed, the lift seems quite firmly stopped at the basement floor.
Meanwhile, out in the main station floor, a phone rings. Quickly answered by one of the low-ranking men assigned to such things. The bored-looking desk sergeant picks up the receiver - and quickly yanks it away from his ear, facial features scrunching into a wince. Covering the phone with a hand, he looks up, and yells to the office in general: "HEY! DID ONE OF YOU WISEGUYS PRANK KUROKAWA AGAIN?" A ragged chorus of denials come in, as various cops proclaim their innocence. The sergeant grumbles. "Alright, because he's screaming about a moving body here, and you jokers...bah..." He gingerly places the receiver back to his ear. "...alright, calm down. Kurokawa? Kurokawa?"
The sergeant stares at the dead line, oddly.
Yoko stands, calmly watching the closed door of the lift, while the junior officer looks over his shoulder and raises his eyebrows at the commotion behind them. "What's all this about...?" he mutters to himself. "Sheesh, some people don't know when to be serious."
"The stairs."
He turns with a "What?" and sees Yoko opening a door a little ways down the hall. She glances once over her shoulder at him, disinterestedly.
"We'll take the stairs."
She vanishes, and slightly startled, the other officer follows her. They make their way down several flights -- the Chief Inspector, the other officer notes absently, moving rather fast for some reason -- and finally get down to the morgue level, whereupon Yoko calmly pushes open the doors to the main entry room--
--coming face to face with one of her colleagues, one of the current shift workers in the crime lab. She's dressed in work gear, a clean coat and gloves over civilian wear. A bespectacled woman, with a look of fear on her face. Fear and pain, because she seems to be momentarily frozen in mid-step...as if she was trying to run, but didn't quite manage to do so. She remains like this, still, as Yoko and the officer accompanying her first enter the hall...before slowly, very slowly, toppling forward. Falling to the ground. But her body moves strangely, very strangely. As if it were stiff, stiffer than it should be. And on her back, on the base of her spine...is a strip of yellowing paper, strange characters painted upon it in spidery lines of red-brown. A strip of paper, with the edges beginning to curl, blacken, wisps of smoke rising...now that the woman is lying face down.
Beyond her, down the hall, are a set of double doors, leading to the morgue and lab rooms...a set of doors swinging on their hinges. The corridor beyond it...should be lit, would normally be lit...but there's just flickering, now, a weak strobe, and shadow. Making it difficult to see what's beyond.
Though there -is- a sound.
A gurney with a squeaky wheel.
Squeak.
Squeak squeak.
"Tsukamoto-san...!"
It is the junior officer who speaks, but both rush towards her, and Yoko is the first to live the woman's arm lightly and press her fingers against the limp wrist. "She has a pulse," she murmurs quickly, "but doesn't appear to be breathing. Toshiro," she says, head snapping up to the other officer who reflexively salutes at her tone, "make the call, get us some backup. Go!"
And as he blinks and then rushes to the phone to call the upstairs, Yoko Kasagi, appearing the essence of calm, sprints down the hallway, lightly loosing her service pistol in its holster as she goes.
She shoves the doors open with her left shoulder, and charges.
The doors swing. Yoko lunges.
And a voice, in stark opposition to the adrenaline-filled energy coursing through the policewoman...murmurs, in a calm, urbane tone:
"Oh, don't bother, Chief Inspector. I believe...Toshiro will find the phones aren't working."
The voice is male. Not so much deep as hoarse, a strange whisper. Pleasant, all the same, but still...rasping, with sibilant intonation.
It belongs to a man, now approaching from the other end of the corridor, wheeling a gurney. The gurney doesn't have a body on it...it has bodies, -plural-, naked and semiclothed forms in various states of autopsy lashed to the top in a macabre display. The man, the person who spoke, stands behind it...pushing the gurney like some kind of grotesque supermarket trolley. Just out of the meat section.
"Granted, your colleagues upstairs will probably come looking down here, shortly...but..."
The man makes a little wave of the hand, while continuing to push the trolley with his other. A trickle of fresh blood oozes from his sleeve, as he does so - blood not his own, as it seems to cover a white lab coat that doesn't -quite- fit him...bearing the name tag of the morgue supervisor. Beneath the garment is a black kimono. And the man...a tall, sallow-faced individual, with long black hair...and red, bloodshot eyes.
Two other sounds.
First: *thapthapthap* The sound of Toshiro rushing up the stairs as quickly as he can to get backup, swearing quietly to himself as he goes, apparently either overwhelmed enough to have forgotten Yoko or implicitly trusting in her ability to take care of herself. Maybe both.
Second: *clickchuck* The sound as Yoko calmly cocks her pistol and aims it unerringly at Kanji's face. She doesn't look scared, but she doesn't look confident, either. She's a cop in a world where sometimes criminals are... especially tough... and knows as much as anyone that depending on how serious this guy is, it won't have the same effect as usual. But it's one of those things that must be done.
These days, that's all there is... but all the same...
"Civilians aren't allowed in here without an escort," Yoko says with her usual serious calm, seeming unaffected by any of the circumstances at all, nor does she appear surprised at being recognized. "Put down the bodies, put your hands up, and surrender yourself quietly." Her stance is straight and strong, her grip and positioning perfect for a clean shot. High-ranking officer she may now be, she clearly has not lost any of her marksmanship abilities.
"/Now/."
~ Is he the one...? ~
A dry chuckle escapes the man's lips, his eyes closing with mirth. He stops the gurney, and raises his hands. It doesn't, though, at all seem like a gesture of surrender. Rather one of amusement, his hands turned, palms up, facing the ceiling. The ceiling crowned, now, by flickering lights.
"Firstly, Chief Inspector...I am clearly escorted, by my friends here..."
He nods to the corpses strewn on the gurney.
"...second, I am hardly -carrying- them...third, my hands are raised, and fourth..."
A smile.
"...you're as demanding as your daughter, aren't you?"
His hands move, then. Coming forward, fingers opening, -flicking-, his palms swinging in line toward Yoko - over the pile of bodies still resting before him. And, with the movement...the bloodstained sleeves of the ill-fitting coat he wears...-tear apart-, shredding - from the inside, as a fluttering -storm- bursts free. Dancing crazily in the flickering light. Paper talismans, like the one which disabled, perhaps killed, the woman Yoko and her companion first encountered when they came in from the stairs...except dozens of them, dozens upon dozens, filling the corridor, rushing forward like the wind...
COMBATSYS: Kanji has started a fight here.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Yoko has joined the fight here.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "...GO FOR BROKE."
COMBATSYS: Yoko dodges Kanji's Thousand Cranes.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "Yosh!"
[OOC] Kanji says, "THE EXPLOSIVE POWER OF MOTHERHOOD."
"..ergh...!"
She had been perfectly calm as usual for the majority of what the man said. But then, for the first time, Yoko's eyes flicker... when he mentions her daughter. Only that gets her...
But if Kanji thought that flicker meant she was distracted, he had another thing coming. Her will only reinforced, Yoko utilizes naturally superior reflexes and hurls herself towards the door, rolling as several cranes fly overhead, and then twisting and kicking the doors closed behind her so they swing in the opposite direction, deflecting Kanji's attack. The doors continue in their swing--
--and Yoko twists and fires, feeling her vision narrow and her body tighten with surging adrenaline as she aims three bullets in a quick popping rhythm at the strange man.
"Hrn...!"
There's no time to think. If he survives, maybe then he can surrender, eh?
COMBATSYS: Kanji dodges Yoko's Crack Shot.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|-------\-------\0 Yoko
"Tsk," comes the man's voice, "temper temper, Chief Inspector."
A voice wholely unpeturbed by the gunshots. Through the doors, Yoko can see him. Still standing, beyond the gurney. Having simply turned the heavily-laden stack of corpses into the path of the bullets, pulling it briefly onto two wheels...a feat of strength that shouldn't be possible for someone with such a frail-looking build. He might be tall, but he's almost skeletally gaunt...
Not that it stops him from deflecting those bullets, absorbing them in a shield of meat and bone.
Paper talismans, some still rectangles, some incongruously folded into the shape of delicate origami paper cranes...flutter down. Littering the corridor, around the door. A few have slipped through, passing by before Yoko shut it in their path, a few fluttering past when it swung back open, allowing her to return fire...
...paper that now smoulders. Smoulders, with rising curls of sweet-smelling smoke. A cloying scent, almost vomit-inducing.
"After all, this is merely a social call...I came to see you, Ms. Kasagi...surely you aren't so ungrateful as to not appreciate this display, my gift to you?"
A shake of the head. "Tsk."
And that's when the paper bursts into flame. Flames of pure crimson - not yellow-red, not orange, but -crimson-, through and through.
COMBATSYS: Yoko blocks Kanji's Incense Paper.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|==-----\-------\0 Yoko
"Eh...!?"
Yoko is forced to let go of her gun with her left hand, still maintaining a steady aim with her right, to lift up the collar of her shirt over her nose and mouth, leaning over as she begins to cough violently, squinting through the haze -- and then, instincts screaming at her, she leaps forward just as the papers begin to burst into flame, ignoring the cloying incense now to cross her arms in front of her face and get through those doors again.
"What do you want?" she barks, even as she rushes to the side to find cover again, kicking over a table and aiming once -- feeling her vision do that strange rushing thing, feeling her mind close in on the target as it always used to do -- and shooting at Kanji's face before ducking behind the table. She doesn't sound desperate, able to maintain her cool despite the oppressive environment. There is beginning to be a sound of commotion from above, however...
"Are you the one who has been committing the ritualistic murders?" she asks, invisible behind the kicked-over table as she exchanges clips quietly.
COMBATSYS: Yoko successfully hits Kanji with Dead Aim.
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Kanji 0/-------/-----==|===----\-------\0 Yoko
"Why, yes," the man replies, "though I fear you're rather missing the point..."
He doesn't -sound- like someone who's been shot in the head.
Though he certainly -has-. The bullet, after all, seems lodged in his cheek, a ragged mess of red, a violent fresh wound, bleeding down the side of his face. But this fact doesn't seem to concern him. And his voice...is remarkably clear, the damage not seeming to impede his ability to move his jaw, or form words in that strange voice of his.
"...murders are a rather strong word...I merely try to arrange my gifts to best pique the interest of whoever I'm visiting. Far better than a humble bottle of wine, wouldn't you say?"
As he speaks, the strange crimson flames continue to rage...growing in intensity. Curling round, sweeping the room, moving with an unearthly fluidity, hissing and spitting like a living thing. They move, flowing -past- Yoko's makeshift cover. But not touching her, no. They engulf the staircase, the elevator doors, forming a barrier, almost a wall...cutting off escape, for Yoko. And not coincidentally, potential avenues of immediate help from her colleagues.
"After all," the man continues, "you are a remarkable woman - you must be, to have such children...mn?"
COMBATSYS: Kanji focuses on his next action.
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Kanji 0/-------/-----==|===----\-------\0 Yoko
"Kh..."
Again, it's come to something like this. First, that insane woman that her own son had to save her from. Her own son, forced to put himself in danger to save /her/... no matter how powerful they are, they are not adults. No matter what their strength, they cannot yet take care of themselves. Yoko Kasagi believes this with all her heart, even if she believes little else.
Whichever of her children made this enemy... she will take responsibility.
From behind the table, she flinches away from the flames, and would rather try to get her breath back -- but staying still could be fatal. She leaps from cover, hurling herself to the side in preparation for a shoulder roll, and incredibly, manages to snap off two quick shots in mid-leap before she hits the ground skillfully and rolls behind a desk, aiming for the disturbingly bullet-resistant man.
She has to stall him.
"If you came to talk to me about my children," she says from behind her new cover, "you've made a mistake."
COMBATSYS: Kanji fails to reflect Quick Draw from Yoko with Curse Seal.
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Kanji 0/-------/----===|====---\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "Bam!"
[OOC] Kanji LAUGHS.
Two shots. Two to the centre of mass. The abdomen and ribcage. The man shudders, once...but remains standing. He steps forward, emerging fully from the partial cover of his corpse-laden gurney. Stepping through the lingering flames round the corridor double-doors. Calmly entering the antechamber containing the elevator and staircase door, slowly approaching where Yoko lies. Heedless of the gun still pointed in his direction. The fresh bullet wounds...are not immediately visible, but even now the blood begins to ooze through the black fabric of his kimono. Not that this fazes him, in the slightest. "Mn...I'm afraid you misunderstand, again..."
He tilts his head, his bloodied expression solemn, in the ghostly red light cast by the flames. The room, even now, becoming uncomfortably warm.
"...I'm not talking about your children. Certainly not your son, the last time I saw him he was beaten and unconscious in Ankor Wat. Terrible conversationalist. But no...I'm not here to talk about them..."
He spreads his hands, still clad in shredded sleeves, from the lab coat still draped about his frame. "...I'm hear to send a message - to your youngest."
COMBATSYS: Kanji takes a breather.
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Kanji 0/-------/----===|====---\-------\0 Yoko
Quietly, Yoko rises from the desk. Her gun remains trained on him, but she does not shoot. It's impossible to tell from that steely calm expression what she might be thinking -- but just between you and me, she's not showing mercy. She'd shoot to kill right now, if she thought she could. But she can't. And she won't do anyone any good dying here...
"..."
She waits. One assumes she's listening.
COMBATSYS: Yoko takes a breather.
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Kanji 0/-------/----===|====---\-------\0 Yoko
The man called Kanji smiles. It's hard to tell, what with the bullet still in his head...the expression on his ruined face is hardly a comforting sight. His hands remain open, slightly raised, as if appealing, imploring.
He arches an eyebrow. "Hn. Listening, are we? Good..."
Kanji looks Yoko in the eye. "Now, it transpires your daughter...has been attacking people. Some friends to her, no doubt, but also innocent strangers...like me. She seems under the delusion that she is a magical girl on a quest, to defeat guardian avatars of evil...myself being one, of course. Or so she claimed when she attacked me, without apparent provocation, in public..."
A pause. Smile.
Kanji seems unpeturbed by the gun pointed at him. He merely continues his calm explanation...the crimson flames still lighting the room...dancing around, their sound, the sweet smell, a counterpoint to his words. "...but I did say I wasn't here to discuss your children. A -message-, I said...and so...I'm sure you've noticed the recent...well, ritualistic murders, you called them? Mmn..."
He leans forward, a fraction. "...I wish to tell your daughter this: I have decided to make her dreams...reality."
Innocent strangers...
Yoko listens calmly, expression unchanging. And then?
She /smiles/.
"If someone attacks you in the street," she says, "you should call the police."
And then she fires.
Again and again. She fires repeatedly at his face, the smile instantly vanishing as her jaw clenches and her eyes gleam with the strange surging effort that is required for her superior aim.
She doesn't even need to speak. Her stance, her eyes, her very aura (if it is fair to say so) burns with fury, the fury of a mother bear caught with someone in the way of getting to her cub. Words are unnecessarily for a message like this.
~ STAY AWAY FROM MY CHILDREN. ~
COMBATSYS: Yoko successfully hits Kanji with Dead Aim.
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Kanji 0/-------/--=====|=====--\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Kanji cackles.
[OOC] Kanji says, "Mimiru is right, I'm weak to Kasagi."
"I'm afraid," comes a dry voice, "that you still misunderstand."
Kanji turns his head, looking straight on at Yoko. Unblinking. His face, now, a mask of crimson. From the gunshots, point blank. Painful, painful-looking wounds, from that proximity...and yet, he's still standing. And the wounds, grotesque as they are...do not seem to concern him, in the slightest. "You misunderstand," he repeats, "this is not a debate..."
Viper-fast, he shoots an arm out, lunging forward. Palm open, the base of his hand rushing to meet Yoko's abdomen. The ethereal fire wreathing the room...roaring, shrieking, as he moves. "...it is a message."
COMBATSYS: Yoko fails to interrupt Quick Punch from Kanji with Crack Shot.
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Kanji 0/-------/-======|======-\-------\0 Yoko
"Hh--"
On the defensive, Yoko can't get the rushing edge she usually has, and her reflexes are too slow this time. She grunts and staggers back, aim thrown off now, and finds herself with her back to the wall, coughing. That's no good.
She hears the shouts of her fellow officers from behind the flame-wreathed door, but...
"You're right," the older woman manages, wiping her lips with the back of her hand, face not betraying whatever pain she might feel. "There is no debate." Her eyes narrow slightly, but her voice is as calm as ever. "You're under arrest."
Kanji's blood-slicked lips twitch, his mouth widening in a nightmare version of a Cheshire-Cat grin. He draws his arm back, the same arm he used to strike Yoko...as he steps round her makeshift barricades. Approaching the woman, unhurried...but relentless. With that same hand, he reaches for her neck, aiming to press her to the wall - while tightening fingers round her windpipe.
"Really? And how do you mean...to enforce that?"
COMBATSYS: Yoko blocks Kanji's Quick Throw.
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Kanji 0/-------/-======|=======\-------\1 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "Exhaustion ftw"
Yoko grimaces as the man moves to press her against the wall--
--and her eyes snap wide, as the normally eminently calm woman unleashes a roar of defiance. Of desperation, yes, but not of fear. Of rage and fury, of defiance at her own inability to defeat this enemy that would harm her children.
Bestial instincts taking over, her vision blurs... until she can see only the enemy.
And she tears his hand away, twists her hand, and fires.
COMBATSYS: Yoko successfully hits Kanji with Tunnel Vision.
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Kanji 1/-------/=======|-------\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "Awesome."
[OOC] Kanji LAUGHS.
[OOC] Kanji says, "Yoko is so mighty she's breaking theme just by existing. =D"
Blood. Flecks of crimson. Splattering against the ground, splattering against -Yoko-...Kanji coughs blood. And locked in proximity, as he is, to the woman...more than a little of it finds her.
More blood, too, decorating his sternum...his chest, ribcage, where Yoko's latest shot found its mark. The bullet lodging home, fired, as it was, with the muzzle nearly flush against Kanji's skin.
And yet, he's still standing.
That shouldn't be possible. At least not for anyone even remotely ordinary.
Not a phrase that applies to Kanji, though.
"Hn," he whispers, pulling back. Drifting away from the feral Yoko, composing his ruined features into an approximation of calm. His feet glide, ghostlike. It's like they hardly even touch the ground.
Behind him, lit by the dancing red light suffusing the scene...the gurney Kanji was pushing, the one piled high with corpses liberated from the station morgue...glides forward. Kanji turns, on a heel, and begins walking away. The gurney travelling past him, as he does.
Back towards Yoko, now, he brings his hands together. Forming a seal.
No words, no pithy remarks.
Just an explosion, as the corpses atop the gurney tear themselves apart, bits of flesh, shards of bone...and a writhing, twisting column of energy, hitting the ceiling, blasting a whole in the roof, rising to the next level...
Almost coincidentally, catching Yoko at ground zero of this blast of chi.
COMBATSYS: Yoko fails to interrupt Eightfold Path from Kanji with Crack Shot.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|=====--\-------\0 Yoko
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi says, "(it was better than my defense chances)"
Yoko's chest heaves as, completely exhausted now, she staggers away from the wall, eyes wide and blazing, teeth bared as though they were fangs, gun clutched tightly. Her whole body trembles, but her arms, somehow, do not.
"STOP!" she half-shouts, half-screams. "IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!"
And she tries -- oh, she tries -- to hit him just once before this power unleashes... but to no avail. With a real, genuine scream this time, Yoko is hit by the powerful blood magic and goes flying back, crashing into the desk she had been hiding behind before and splintering it under the force of the attack. Groaning, a trail of blood now emerging from between her lips, she twitches her head and struggles to keep her eyes open, glaring at her enemy fiercely as she wills her body with all her might to /move/...
She can't let him get away...!
Debris settles, falling from the ceiling. A ceiling now sporting a hole in it, leading up a couple storeys, clean out of the basement to the ground floor. A fact that, given the size of the explosion...should be quite noticable to Yoko's colleagues. Of course, they're probably still -stunned-, as well...
...and there's the fact that the jagged edges of concrete and steel left by the blast holes...are still burning in spots, with glowing traces of that crimson flame.
Meanwhile, Kanji stands...the only one unaffected by all this. Because he set it off.
There aren't any more bodies on the gurney, just shredded flesh and chunks of bone - the corpses having been more than adequately strewn across the room, or outright incinerated by the blast. The odour of that wafts through the space...the metal gurney itself is cinged, faintly twisted. But on its blackened, bloody surface...there's something still visible, etched in the metal. An intricate ritual sigal.
Kanji smiles, thinly, as he walks around his handiwork, up to Yoko. He flicks a hand, and a thin strip of paper appears in his palm. A Shinto ofuda, this one. Edges faintly outlined in that same shining red.
A negligent twist, as he knees, driving it down toward Yoko's fallen body like a dagger, aimed at her ribs. "I'm sorry, Chief Inspector...but no."
COMBATSYS: Yoko blocks Kanji's Talisman.
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Kanji 0/-------/-------|=====--\-------\0 Yoko
"Grrah!"
With a fierce grunt, Yoko just barely manages to shove Kanji's hand aside, staggering and rolling clumsily away from the wrecked desk as the shouts of recovering officers emerge from the above floors. Completely exhausted, running purely on fast-fading adrenaline, Yoko somehow, impossibly, manages to raise her hand once last time, to shoot that goddamn man till he's dead--
*click* *click*
...
Foggily, it occurs to her that maybe she shouldn't've gotten so carried away.
But then she just roars again, eyes now bloodshot just like Kanji's, and rears to feet -- seriously, that mother bear analogy is still really fitting here, she even seems taller than before now -- and drops her gun to grab the metal chair that sat behind the now-destroyed desk... and swing it mightly at Kanji's head.
Dammit, people are supposed to die from multiple head injuries!
"AAAARGHH!"
"Chief Inspector? Chief Inspector!?" come the faint voices, growing closer...
COMBATSYS: Kanji interrupts Random Weapon from Yoko with Quick Punch.
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Kanji 0/-------/-----==|=======\-------\1 Yoko
Kanji remains crouched on the ground, near Yoko. A smirk on his face. He remains there, as she comes at him, swinging the chair. He smiles, smiles...and then, viper-quick...even as the chair slams into his skull...thrusts an arm out, hammering like a piston into the policewoman's body. Flinging her away from him - and likely, into another wall.
Kanji straightens. His wounds, by now...are considerable. He shouldn't be standing. But again, he is...and the way he moves, it's like he doesn't feel the pain all logic says MUST be shrieking through his nerves. No. He stands. Smiles.
"Remember the message, Chief Inspector. I trust you won't forget."
Then he -jumps-, leaping up, through the hole he blew through the ceiling.
As Kanji leaves through the ceiling, the flames of his magic begin to die, and the sound of police officers gathered around the doors gets louder and louder as they try to push through. And Yoko--
--tears beading around her eyes as she collapses to her knees, her head snaps up as Kanji leaps impossibly high. She gasps a shuddering breath as she feels unconsciousness and exhaustion reach out to claim her, even the incredible ferocity of a mother trying to protect her young not enough to overcome an obstacle like this.
She teeters dangerously, eyes closing--
--and with blinding speed withdraws one bullet, slaps it into the chamber of her pistol, and aiming straight into the air, she looks up. She sees only a haze, only the gathering the darkness, only... THERE!
One last time, she fires...
[OOC] Yoko Kasagi :D "Reserve: 0%"
[OOC] Charlie O.o
COMBATSYS: Kanji blocks Yoko's Tunnel Vision.
[ \\\\\\\\\ < > //// ]
Kanji 0/-------/----===|-------\-------\0 Yoko
...and with a final shuddering gasp, falls forward and collapses in a heap, the gun dropping from her now unfeeling fingers.
The gun...followed, a second later, by the bullet. The bullet falling from -Kanji's- fingers, caught, as it was, in one blood-streaked palm.
An irony there, Kanji muses, that Yoko Kasagi probably wouldn't appreciate...
...since that was one of her -son's- tricks.
Crouched on the lip of the jagged hole in the basement ceiling, Kanji finishes tossing the bullet after Yoko. Making sure it clatters to the ground, spins to a halt beside her. Spotted with the blood from his hand, perhaps, but otherwise serving as mute testimony.
Like the throwing of a light switch...all the lingering flame, the walls of fire cutting Yoko off from her colleagues...melt into the ether. Leaving just their voices, shouts, cries...
Kanji smirks. And turns, moving into the corridors of the station. On his way out. Little chance they'll stop him; few in Southtown's police are as capable as Ms. Kasagi...
...and there really isn't a need for further violence.
He's left his message.
COMBATSYS: Kanji has left the fight here.
[ \\\\ <
Yoko 0/-------/-------|
COMBATSYS: Yoko has ended the fight here.
Log created by Yoko, and last modified on 02:40:28 01/21/2006.