Climbing Together 12 (Patreon)

Can’t program, can’t draw.  Ergo, don’t own the original of any of this. 

So I decided I wasn’t giving enough gravitas to the two villains I was going to introduce in this chapter, and thus dealing with them – and setting some things up for future chapters – took the majority of this chapter, and thus we didn’t get to the Cologne/Mousse segment I wanted to.  That will be in the next chapter, along with some more training, explanations and ROMANCE time.  This one is more martial arts zaniness and combat than anything else.

It has been looked over by Hiryo, but hasn't been Grammarlied... at least I don't think it has been? That would have taken the rest of the day and killed my soul to the degree I wouldn't get anything else done today. I don't wish to put myself through that pain. Despite that, I hope that you enjoy.

Chapter 12: The Problem with Ghosts

The eating competition was being held in a park, set alongside the cliff overlooking the port at the other end of the town from the hotel, although not quite as high up in the cliff-like area the town had been built in. The whole park had been set up for the event, with a few small food carts lining the small pedestrian-only roads leading into it, while an area inside the park had been cordoned off with an even dozen picnic tables set up in rows facing an open kitchen built around what looked, to Mai, like an American BBQ griller.

“That probably bodes well for the kind of food you’ll be gorging yourself on, little piggy,” Mai snickered, pulling very gently at Ranma’s pigtail. “Honestly, while the money’s enticing, and I know you’re going to enjoy this, that’s why I organized this stop, after all, don’t expect me or Shampoo to like watching this contest of yours. You had also better remember your manners, Ranma. No trying to create Anything Goes Gluttony Arts.”

The term ‘little piggy’ caused Ranma to twitch, staring wildly around him for a second, while Shampoo snickered at Mai’s naming sense. Seeing Ranma’s reaction, Mai blinked, as that had not been the response she had been expecting. “What’s wrong?”

“Er…well you remember Ryoga, right? That kind of line is just asking him to show up.”

Shampoo and Mai exchanged a glance, and while Mai looked thoughtful, Shampoo just shook her head. “…Considering my village lives alongside Jusenkyo and its curses, I won’t throw stones at the whole ‘speak and he shall appear’ thing.”

Mai pulled Shampoo into a sideways hug, smirking. “You’ve got a point, and I remember what you told me about Ryoga’s directional issues. Although, that kind of thing sounds more like a curse than even your own issue.” She winked at Ranma. Mai and Shampoo had gone out of their way to make certain that Ranma knew they were fine with his curse while on the boat, and, had done just about everything they could with Ranma’s female form that didn’t involve going underneath Ranma’s boxers.

Ranma categorically refused to use panties except at that time of the month, thus, boxers.

“Huh…” Ranma blinked, as if that idea hadn’t occurred to him before but after a moment, he had to nod. “Come to think of it, yeah, I guess it does.

Still smiling, Mai pulled Ranma into a sideways hug with her free arm, her smile widening as she felt one of his arms join one of Shampoo’s around her middle. Mai still had flashes of simple giddiness at the fact the three of them were together like this. Maybe in a few more months he’d get over it, but for now, she was just damn happy that everything after her realization about how she felt about these two had gone so well.

“Actually, bringing Ryoga’s directional troubles to mind, reminds me of this time Jubei was challenged by this weird married couple around… I want to say seven years ago?” Mai mused, not releasing her hugs just yet, ignoring with ease the looks the trio were getting, as did her two lovers. “They were tied together by a thick chain around their ankles, and I thought it was a weird addition to their personal style. They were both superstrong and pretty durable too, but not very maneuverable, and eventually Jubei sent them both through the back wall of the dojo. When Jubei went out after them, they had disappeared.”

Ranma thought for a moment, trying to remember any pictures he’d ever seen in Ryoga’s house the times he’d walked the guy home. He couldn’t remember any, unfortunately. The only things he could remember clearly were the many strings and signs everywhere to help the family find their way around. “Um… was one like huge? Like Honda-san in height? And the other um… around four feet tall?”

“Since I remember the lady being as tall as I was at the time, yeah, that part at least is right,” Mai laughed. “I didn’t stop growing in height for a while. The rest of this came in first.” She pulled out of the hug, gesturing to herself, feeling a thrill as both Shampoo and Ranma’s eyes trailed down to her chest as she had intended. She wasn’t dressed in her traditional combat suit, but the tight blouse did hug her curves to good effect, even if the skirt kept her legs hidden.

“So you were a shortstack?” Shampoo giggled, thrusting out her own chest, enjoying, as Shampoo did, the way Ranma’s eyes seemingly acted of their own accord for a moment, dipping down and then over and back again. Like two little ping pong balls, hehe. Well, don’t worry Airen, after this contest, Mai and I will be sure to put all those calories you’ll have taken in to good use.

“Yeah, I was. And oh, did I hate it for a while.” Mai scowled a little before her face cleared. “Anyway, yeah, I think I might have met this Ryoga guy’s parents. I wonder what kind of magic they’ve run into that stole their sense of direction to that extent? That’s some powerful magic.”

“Yeah… and yeah, I suppose I’d choose my curse over just disappearing from one place to another whenever I go around a corner,” Ranma answered, internally adding, And after everything Shampoo and now Mai have done to make it clear my curse isn’t important to them, I’ll take turning into a girl over what amounts to a meal on tiny legs any day. “Anyway, have you decided if you’re going to head to the library or watch the eating competition?”

“Library.” Shampoo shrugged, tapping the pocket on her leggings where her ki space was. “I’d really like to see if I can translate something on those manuscripts, and sorry, Airen, but watching you gorge yourself isn’t going to be attractive.”

“Hah, um, yeah I can see that. Er, sometimes food can be sexy, you two make eatin’ ice cream or pancakes seem to be, anyway.” As his two girlfriends flushed a bit and remembered a particular morning where they’d attempted to have sticky-type adult only fun only to realize sticky really wasn’t all that fun, Ranma frowned a little. “But are ya sure we’re far enough away from our last stop? That local garrison and it’s lord high idiot might have sent out pictures of us.”

“I doubt it.” Shampoo looked around and leaned in, whispering. “I might not have much good to say about the ‘People’s Party’ but one thing they are very good at is creating a lot of paperwork for their officers. If that local bully tried to put out an, an…”

“APB?” Mai supplied. “Don’t ask me what it stands for though. I’ve just seen that phrase used a lot in American police dramas.”

“That or just wanted posters for us, he’d have to write things out in triplicate, come up with an excuse to why he wanted three cute girls hunted down, and why had hadn’t been able to deal with us. That’s a lot of work for something so petty. Not even mentioning how much face he’d lose for not being able to deal with three girls in the first place. Chauvinism is well and truly part of Chinese culture, after all.”

“Yeah, but we’ve all got experience with petty people,” Ranma snorted. “And we were just talking about how weird our lives can be.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. We should be good,” Shampoo repeated. “And I’ve already learned where the local library is. This town’s only got the one, and it’s right near the temple to the local cat spirit.”

Shrugging, Ranma conceded the point, and the trio went around to grab some drinks and food, even Ranma. He didn’t think this competition would challenge the Saotome stomach enough for a single skewer to matter. Besides, the whole festival thing and more importantly the number of carts was making him a little nostalgic. I wonder what U-chan’s up to. I mean, I know enough about my old man now to know he was probably stealing their cart, although why the hell he did so is beyond me. But I gotta think her old man was a good enough cook to let the pair of them land on their feet.

After a bit, Ranma wandered over and signed up for the contest. With that done, they had an hour to kill before it started, and Mai led the trio off into the town, wanting to add to the map of the coast, they had been working from before this. Finding nautical style maps of the shoreline took a bit, but they eventually found a few more detailed ones that would allow them to carry on south.

After that, Mai decided to head back to the hotel. Like Shampoo, she had no desire to watch Ranma gorging himself, although she did promise to come and watch the end of the competition. “It should last what, two hours? I just want a shower and some me time.”

“In other words our ninja girl snuck off in the last town somehow to buy some new underwear and wants to try it out tonight,” Shampoo snickered, poking Mai in the cheek, “you think y, you’re so sl, slick…” Shampoo’s words broke off into a whimper as Mai, quick as a snake, twitched her head around to catch her poking finger in her mouth.

Watching Mai hold Shampoo’s hand and gently suck on her finger, Ranma’s eyes glazed over, and he shook his head, trying and failing to not let his eyes wander down his girlfriends’ bodies, fighting back a blush with all his available willpower. “You know, as fun as I think the eating competition is, that um, that sounds way better. Er. Maybe we all should just…”

“Nope!” Mai giggled, pulling back from her work on Shampoo’s finger, well pleased with herself. “Fifty-thousand Yuan is too good for us to pass up. Besides…” She leaned in, giving Ranma a long, sensual lick of his ear. “If we start that kind of… heh, calisthenics, I’ll miss tonight’s competition too. That Cat and the Hot Coal Contest sounds like a lot of fun. There’ll be time in the future for you to see me wearing all sorts of frilly things.”

“Before we peel them off you with our teeth,” Shampoo breathed, face flushed before she decided to get in on the teasing, leaning into Ranma’s side, her breasts pressing into his arm and side. “Just remember to tell this one about which pairs you’d actually like to keep. Our lover here has gotten into the habit of just tearing our underwear off us a little too eagerly...”

That did it. What self-control he had disappeared like water in a desert and Ranma blushed to the point it almost looked like he was an apple. Tellingly, he didn’t argue. Shampoo was right, after all. Oh, the trio didn’t make love every night (just most of them) since coming aboard their little ship/home. But the times they had, Ranma had indeed torn at least one article of clothing off the girls in his haste to get to what lay beneath.

Still laughing, Mai and Shampoo linked arms, walking with Ranma to the area set up for the contest, ignoring the looks and blushing stares the three were receiving. It was a general rule in China that PDA was frowned upon, but the Joketsuzoku had never particularly cared what lowlanders thought, and Mai’s generation in Japan had made it appoint of throwing off that and other social norms as best they could.

Whereas Ranma just didn’t notice. He was too busy sizing up the competition as he entered the area set up with picnic tables and more.

Watching him, both girls were amused to see how serious Ranma suddenly became. His face closed down a bit, becoming the same lazy, confident air Ranma assumed in any martial arts match rather than the warm, inviting one he’d worn a moment before, his eyes flicking everywhere while seeming to be focused on what was in front of him. In particular, he looked at the two teens from before, then another man.

The newcomer was no type of martial artist. He looked like a European, dressed in khaki pants and a button down shirt that he somehow seemed to wear as if it was a uniform, with a wide, well-trimmed mustache, a pair of small glasses on his face and a face which ad several ages lines on it, matching his white hair. He looked somewhat like an elderly grandfather mixed with a stern teacher or something similar, and honestly, the girls though they looked more like a strong wind could knock him over than he could eat a lot. He was fit, yes, but he seemed far too skinny to be in this competition.

Yet Ranma and the man stared at one another, before exchanging grudging nods.

Seeing the confused looks on his girlfriends’ faces Ranma smirked a bit. “Heh. Professional eaters know one another. I don’t know where he puts it all, but yeah, he’s gonna be a contender.”

“Right, well, you have fun, Ranma. I’ll be back by the time the finals start.” With that, Mai kissed Ranma on the cheek and stepped back, waiting for Shampoo.

Shampoo also prepared to leave, leaning in to give Ranma a kiss on the lips, snickering. “Just remember, whatever you eat, floss, brush teeth and mouthwash before we meet up again, or else this will be the last kiss you get for a while, Ranma. I know that at least part of this contest is going to deal with crazy type food and not just huge amounts of it, so you better believe I will not be happy if I smell anything weird on you.”

“Shower and full mouth purge, got it,” Ranma quipped, grinning before he turned and hopped lightly over the rope separating the contestants’ area from the slowly gathering crowd. The girls left Ranma then, exchanging smirks with Li Xiangfei, the girl who’d talked smack along with her boyfriend down at the beach, as they went. The other Chinese girl, despite being dressed in a very traditional cheongsam and with her hair done up in equally old-fashioned braids, didn’t seem anymore traditional in her actions than Shampoo, as she leaned forward, sticking her tongue out at Mai and Shampoo.

Neither girl responded verbally, instead, simply smirking back with Shampoo stretching ostentatiously, thrusting her chest out as Mai crossed her arms under her own prodigious breasts. That caused the other girl to twitch, her face turning furious. Whatever she was going to say, though, was lost when Mai and Shampoo turned and just walked away.

Snarling, Xiangfei whirled, pointing an accusing finger at Ranma. “You! You are so going down! And then I’m going to rub it in your stupid girlfriends’ boobs and laugh!”

Blinking, Ranma stared back. “Er, isn’t it normally the face you say you’re gonna rub someone’s loss into?”

“No! Boobs. Those honking titties that can’t possibly be natural! I’ma gonna win this, then I’m going to laugh, HA HA HA!” Xiangfei shifted over to one of the picnic tables, still cackling in a manner that made Ranma think of both the rich ojou-sama anime trope and Naga the white serpent. Ironic considering why she’s so pissed. Huh, come to think of it, I wonder if Shampoo and Mai are fans of Slayers? The combats crap, but the comedies golden. Could be a nice at-home type date.

“Heh, sorry bud, but your friends just mashed one of Xiangfei’s buttons. She’s normally really easy-going, but we’re gonna have to go all out now,” Kensou said with a grin, following after her. “If I don’t I’ll never heard the end of it.”

“Meh, if your girlfriend wasn’t going to take this seriously, I’d be disappointed,” Ranma shot back.

“She’s not my girlfriend, just my traveling companion. But ya don’t have to worry about us not giving this our all. The food and the money’s too good to resist.” Kensou waved Ranma off, moving to follow Xiangfei.

Shaking his head at that, Ranma looked around for a moment and finding one of the organizers, headed over to ask if they could just sit wherever they wanted and if there was a set menu they could look at. The man told him about the menu bit, but Ranma’s follow-up question on weird food did earn him a snort and a sly grin, which was as good as a verbal response. As to the sitting, that also was fine, as they would only be assigned numbers once the contest started.

That made sense to Ranma, and he shifted to the back of the area settling into a picnic table that didn’t have anyone at it yet. There, he waited, staring out over the ocean. Gotta say, this whole town has got one hell of a view. Neat. Although, now that I’m alone, I gotta think more about exercising and stuff while aboard our ship. Sparring and the workarounds we’ve come up with are good, but there needs to be some kind of way to better build up muscles than swimming with weights. That’s kind of dangerous for the girls, and I’m not getting nearly enough out of it. UGH, which doesn’t’ even mention the need to continue our toughness training!

The area quickly filled up and gathered a crowd, more people than Ranma had expected to be honest. Several of them were foreigners too, which made Ranma’s brows furrow in confusion. His table partner was a local, who noticed Ranma’s look and gestured down and one side in the direction of the port. “You’re not the only outsider who came into town for this contest. There are a few small tour boats that come to Mo Lin for this contest and the Cat and the Hot Coal Contest. You should see the people when they come in, two very different groups.”

“Hah, yeah, I can picture that,” Ranma snickered, staring at the number of immensely overweight people were sitting around the area. “Let me guess, athletic types, dancers or gymnasts on the one hand, and this lot on the other?” I wonder if that old guy came in with the rest of the… huh, can I use the term foreigner, since I am one too?

“Exactly,” the man sitting beside Ranma stated, pulling him back to the here and now. “There are a few like you and the other youngsters, as well as that elderly man, but you’re the minority. Not that their weight will give them any leg up in this competition.”

Ranma agreed with that, and put the size of the event out of his mind, waiting. Eventually, a gong sounded, and someone with a microphone announced they would be starting the competition soon. That was a good thing, as the smell coming out of the open-air kitchen and the massive grill thing was really enticing, and there might’ve been a riot if they had kept people waiting.

Soon, the contest’s speaker, Ranma knew the guy had some fancy title but didn’t care to learn it, had stepped up onto a small podium near the kitchen, facing into the area with the picnic tables. The speaker wore the male version of a cheongsam and had thick glasses. He stood with his hands in his sleeves, looking almost like a caricature of a street hawker, but judging by the shouts and cheers from the locals among the crowd, he was apparently popular. Ranma tuned the guy’s actual words out for a bit before he finally got to the rules of the contest. Those Ranma listened to carefully, knowing that sometimes places like this would be looking to throw out strangers for not following the smallest of rules.

As was traditional with eating contests like this one in most places in Asia, the first round was devoted to dumplings. It was your choice whether or not you wanted to dip them in anything, eat them with your hands, or with chopsticks, although one of the contestants who were obviously foreigners protested about not getting a fork, which had him get sneered at by everyone else there.

For his part, Ranma decided on chopsticks, along with the majority of people there. This first round had a twenty-minute window, during which the contestants had to eat at least forty dumplings which was child’s play for Ranma, to qualify for the next round. You also couldn’t get any food onto your clothing or touch your fellow contestants in anyway. Beyond that, anything was fair game.

Several tables ahead of Ranma, he saw Xiangfei nodding sagely at that, elbowing her friend in the side, causing him to roll his eyes at some shared memory as he moved further away from her. At the same time, Ranma overheard two of the fatter contestants chortling about how the fact they were so big they got their own picnic tables meant they didn’t need to care about that. That was the very definition of a weird flex to Ranma, but considering he had very early on in life decided he never wanted to look like his old man, who was quite small in comparison to these people, he also didn’t really care.

Ranma waited for the signal to go, then waited for a heartbeat after before starting. A lot of these contests have judges just looking for excuses to disqualify outsiders.

This wasn’t Ranma’s first rodeo. He and his father had entered a lot of eating competitions over the years. It was a cheap, easy way to get their fill, just like all-you-can-eat restaurants without the need to dine and dash. This time, though, Ranma was going for the gold, not just the meal.

Splitting his chopsticks open with one hand, he brought the plate of dumplings up to his mouth with the other, and began to stuff them in quickly. The dumplings were of a size that you needed two bites to really eat one of them cleanly, but they were tasty, well-made and very nice. Not as good as Shampoo’s, but perhaps a little better than Mai’s, Ranma mused as he finished off his fifth dumpling and set it down in front of them.

Every four picnic tables had a single server and a judge, who nodded as Ranma reached for another plate of dumplings from the multitude lining the center of the picnic table. Each plate had five dumplings on them and the contestants needed to have eight stacked up in front of them in the time allotted to go on.

Before that time had passed the halfway mark, Ranma was done, and leaned back, crossing his arms lightly over his chest, looking around at the other competitors. He saw that Xiangfei and Kensou had both also finished quickly, although Ranma was amused to note that Xiangfei had decided to go for the hands-on method. She looked to have finished even faster than Ranma, but Ranma was fine with that. Speed wasn’t everything. It would be the combination of speed and amount that would win the day.

Ranma was further amused when he saw several of the fatter contestants unable to finish the amount of dumplings needed in the time allotted, as they kept on taking penalties for not having finished the full dumpling, being too messy or, in the case of one of them, being too loud. Still, very few people actually dropped out. Only two younger kids, who were laughing and joking with one another even as they walked away, evidently having just entered the competition for a bit of fun, and one of the foreigners who muttered something in English about never taking a dare again.

The pigtailed martial artist was also interested to note that the skinny guy had finished. His manners also seem to be impeccable, as he dabbed at his face now, removing a bit of sauce from his mustache and even asking the judges to pass on his compliments to the chefs. Something odd is going on with him. Not just where he’s putting all the food, I ain’t about to throw stones there. No, there’s something weird about his speed.

With the first round, which was more of a test run to make sure everyone understood the rules and could be expected to be, generally speaking, clean about things, out of the way, the competition began in earnest. After dumplings, there came a local delicacy, a fish and shrimp stew. This one had a time limit of forty minutes, and the contestants needed to reach at least thirty-four bowls in that time to qualify for the next round.

This one knocked out a lot of the so-called tourists. The stew was quite thick, and while Ranma thought it tasty, the impact of so much on the pallet could be quite harsh. Many of the tourists gave up a little under halfway through, complaining about the taste, the texture and other things of that nature. The judges however ignored their complaints, while the more serious contestants just rolled their eyes at what they thought of as sore losers and they left in a huff.

Really, the most interesting thing for Ranma was the fact that Xiangfei again beat him in terms of reaching the necessary thirty-four bowls. Even stranger, the old foreigner had beaten her too, finishing within an insane ten minutes. Okay, odder question than where he’s putting it all, how is he eating so quick?! It’s like he just slurped the whole soup down, chunks of fish and shrimp and all.

This round was followed by a short break, where the contestants could take a bathroom break, while a few of the picnic tables were removed. The contestants were then all brought together, and, as the barbecue grill opened for the first time as the cooks went to work on whatever was cooking within, the bizarre portion of the competition Ranma had been fearing began.

In the announcer’s words, “Here at Mo Lin village, we don’t just test you for speed and the ability to put it away, we test your gag reflexes! We test your sense of smell, and we demand you push through and you break the norm to continue!”

The bowl of what looked like simple fried rice just didn’t look right. All the bits were there, but there was something off about it. Ranma had no idea how, but he decided very firmly that he didn’t want to know how the cooks had created that effect. Hesitantly, Ranma took a bite with his chopsticks, grimacing a bit. “Damn, that feels like you mixed in natto with fermented chicken feed…” He paused, chewing thoughtfully before swallowing. “And I have no idea how you guys made it even slimier than natto can make something but you did.”

The judge in front of Roma’s table chuckled at that but said nothing. For this round, it lasted only twenty minutes, but you had to eat five bowls worth of ‘mystery rice,’ which was a hard sell to everyone there. Everyone but Ranma and the thin, elderly man, anyway. Both of them finished within ten minutes, and as he put his last bowl into his stack, Ranma had to shake his head. Okay, I know my stomach’s been trained by my Old Man off and on for years and even that brat Akane’s cooking a few times when I lived at the Tendo place. How is that old man dealing with this so easily.

Ranma was very unsurprised to see that this round knocked out the majority of the remaining foreigners. Few of them even tried after a bite or two and soon, practically every overweight person there left bar two. This left those two, Xiangfei, Kensou, the thin elderly man and two locals in the competition.

At that point, Ranma noticed that Mai had returned. She was now wearing what Ranma supposed she’d wear to the Cat and the Hot Coal Contest later that evening. This consisted of long yoga pants that looked like they were painted on paired with a tucked in t-shirt, which was quite baggy and loose. More than one man in the audience was looking at her in awe, and Ranma couldn’t argue with that reaction. Damn, both Shampoo and Mai are just amazing. I can’t blame these guys for drooling, although if any of them go beyond that and try to flirt or touch, I will laugh my ass off when Mai deals with them.

As the area was once more getting reorganized, Ranma moved over to her, shaking his head. “I think I found the one thing that in the kitchen would make me want to break up with you and Shampoo. Making fried rice slimy. And I’m not talking about mixing it with too much egg or natto slimy, I’m talking about it felt like I was eating a slug slimy. Slimy, clumpy and altogether revolting.”

Mai chuckled at that, shaking her head. “Considering how much of the rice cooking I leave to Shampoo, you’ll have take that up with her. How did you get through it? It sounds as if the moment I put some like that in them my mouth, I’d give up right away. And don’t just say that you’ve eaten worse.”

“I really have though,” Ranma snickered. “Several times we were on the road, Pops would get drunk and then decide it would be a great idea to make up some weird concoction with our supplies. We couldn’t, you know, turn around and find other supplies, especially if we were far away from civilization, so we had to eat stuff like mushy yeast soup, which was just sake mixed with rice, and then there was…”

Mai put her hand over Ranma’s mouth for a second, shaking her head. “Never mind, forget I asked. I’m surprised that that little girl is still here, though. I would’ve thought she was the kind to be all bark and no bite.”

When Mai pulled her hand back, Ranma shrugged. “She’s actually one of the better contestants. I think Kensou is going to be the first of us to bow out in this next round, as he’s showing signs of being full, and looked really green by the time that last round ended. But it might come down to Xiangfei, me and that thin guy.”

“Hmmm… I still wonder where that thin guy is putting it all. He looks as if I could breathe on him and he’d fall down.”

Ranma tried, he really tried but he couldn’t stop the words coming out as his eyes flicked down to her chest. “Er, would ya be leaning over as you do it, because if so, a lot of guys would probably collapse, from blood loss more than anything else.”

“Smooth,” Mai teased, wanting to give Ranma a kiss on the cheek, but being in full agreement with Shampoo. There would be no romance or kissing of any kind after this competition until Ranma did everything he could to excise any hint of the competition from his mouth and breath.

Ranma’s attention was drawn back to the man in charge as he shouted for everyone’s attention. “Please take your positions as designated by the numbers we placed on the two remaining picnic tables. There are four of you to a table.”

Ranma moved over until he saw the number that he had been given after the first round, and found himself sitting across from Kensou, with the thin man beside him. The thin man and Ranma exchanged nods, nonverbal good lucks from one strong competitor to another, while across the way at the other table, Xiangfei simply smirked, and stretched, cracking her fingers excitedly. “Ready to give up yet?”

“Heck no, I’m just getting started. The Saotome stomach is like that monster from Star Wars…” Ranma trailed off, frowning. “What was its name, the big one in the ground…”

“Sarlaac?” Xiangfei said, giving the monster its English name, chuckling a little despite herself.

To Ranma’s left side, the thin, elderly European man’s eyes narrowed speculatively, as if he had heard the name Saotome before. However, he said nothing, and both Ranma and Mai missed it and a second later, the eight remaining contestants turned their attention on the manager.

“We’re going to start with ribs, and every third bowl of ribs is going to be interrupted by one bowl of fried rice accompanied by a water bottle. That’ll let us keep the food coming, and if you feel the need to hydrate you can do it at intervals. You’ll note that there’s buckets placed by your seats, each of them labeled with the same number as the contestant it’s assigned to. Make certain that, if you feel sick and can’t get away from the table, you use the right bucket. We wouldn’t want a hurling cascade, would we?”

Wondering what that was, Ranma shook his head, while the onlooking crowd groaned or laughed. At the same time, a large whiteboard was rolled out from behind the area behind the open-air kitchen. On it was all the names of the contestants. To one side was the number they had been assigned, while below that was the score of the various contestants. Some had lost points along the way for not finishing bowls completely, lack of manners, or dropping food. Xiangfei had apparently gotten points off for lack of manners and the two locals had dropped food.

Ranma and the thin foreigner hadn’t lost any points along the way, and Ranma looked to the number corresponding with the elderly man, taking in its name. Butler? In English and that last name,? Is That French? That has to be some kind of alias.

Xiangfei, Kensou and one of the other contestants were also looking at the thin man speculatively, and Xiangfei surprised Ranma by apparently knowing how to read French. “Really? Your Name’s is Butler the Dust Killer? Really?”

The elderly gentleman shrugged his shoulders, speaking in heavily accented Chinese, although his actual word choices and vocabulary seemed to be quite good. “No one said that you have to use your real names, miss. I’m on vacation, and I have no desire whatsoever to allow the household which employs me, as it has my family for several generations, to know I am taking part in such a ‘lowbrow’ competition, as my Master would put it.”

That made sense, although Xiangfei kept on looking at the guy speculatively, until the announcer had finished outlining the rules for this round and the food began to arrive. At that point, all of them had more important things to concentrate on.

Ranma had tasted Chinese barbecue ribs before. Shampoo had made them one time while they were going through the toughness training the first time, just the two of them. He had to admit these were good. They didn’t hold a candle to Shampoo’s cooking though, nor the one time Mai had made American-style barbecue. She’d learned how to cook American style in an attempt to interest Andy, but Ranma was more than willing to reap the benefits of that moron not only in the bedroom but also in the kitchen.

I still can’t believe Andy didn’t man up and just tell Mai that her body type had developed too much for him to find sexy. I mean it’s kind of understandable, if you are fucking blind anyway. I won’t say anything about him finding Mai’s attitude and her outwardly sexy manner as a turn off, that’s a personal preference, and I can understand it but her body being a turn off?! Mai and Shampoo both have bodies of freaking goddesses, and I have to smack myself on a nearly daily basis to make sure I’m not dreaming. Ranma thought, even as he continued to gorge himself.

At this point, the contest was mostly about what you could put away. Still, as there was a time limit of an hour and a half, the contestants couldn’t afford to fall too far behind the others,

Huh, come to think of it, I wonder where Shampoo is? Blinking a little, Ranma placed a bowl of ribs down, and waited until the fried rice was set in front of him, taking the time to look around the audience. He caught Mai’s eyes and made a point of glancing around her, before shrugging his shoulders in confusion.

Mai was a lot better at picking up on nonverbal communication like that than Ranma was, and she instantly understood what he was asking. She held up her phone, pointing at it with a smile.  Realizing what that meant after a few seconds, Ranma stopped worrying about their absent lover. Despite his earlier words about being concerned someone might’ve placed a bounty on them after they dealt with the idiots from the local garrison in the previous town, Ranma really wasn’t concerned about any trouble they’d run into here

Shaking his head, Ranma realized that he’d fallen behind the others and began to speed up. However, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that ‘Butler’ was eating even faster than Ranma could at his Amaguriken best. In fact, it looked almost as if the old man had somehow practiced the same enhanced speed technique that Ranma had learned from Shampoo. I guess it makes sense for other schools to have some kind of speed training equal to the Amaguriken, but there seems to be more to this.

A few minutes later, Ranma allowed himself to pause in eating his next bowl of ribs, his eyes flicking sideways at just the right moment to watch the man lift up another bowl of ribs to his face. He watched the man’s jaw work and instantly realized very something very strange was going on there. I might not be as good about the jaw muscles, and how they should move as I am about the rest of the body, but it almost looks like his jaw shifted into the bowl. Could that be some kind of physical change technique? Weird. And am I hearing something like a slurping noise?

Across the aisle at the other table, Xiangfei kept up and indeed looked to be ahead of Ranma by several bowls now. Seeing that, Ranma shook his head and bent to his food again. And within a few minutes, he had finished three more bowls, catching up with the other contestants in the lead.

In the next half hour, the contestants who Ranma hadn’t bothered with analyzing bowed out one after another. One local was the first, bowing out gracefully, pushing away from the table and holding up his hand, his other placed against his stomach. The last exceptionally overweight contestant did the same, actually getting up rather daintily for all his size, but he also grabbed two of the buckets from the picnic table and took them with him for a moment.

He was followed by the last tourist. The second man fell away from the table falling to his hands and knees, dry heaving but thankfully not throwing up. He remained there for a second before a few judges came over to help him out to another area, one of them holding a bucket, the other a bottle of antacids while the crowd jeered and cheered.

Honestly, Mai was somewhat surprised. Not by who was left, it being Xiangfei, Kensou, Ranma, Butler and one of the locals. No, what surprised her was the crowd. Mai hadn’t though an eating competition could garner so much interest, but they seemed really into it. Some had even started shouting encouragement for their favorites, while others cheered at seeing how green the guy who had just quit looked.

Soon, the local and Kensou both began to slow down. The local simply looked as if he ate more slowly and was called sharply to attention by the judge wandering the table for setting a few bowls into his stack with food still inside them. If any food was left, the bowl didn’t count and would be set aside. The person wouldn’t lose points for that at this point, but they also wouldn’t gain any.

Meanwhile, Kensou’s body seemed to change. His stomach was becoming bloated as Ranma watched, as well as his face. Soon, his speed began to slow to the point where the judge began to call him out on it, although he also finished every bowl completely.

Kensou kept at it, although looking over at Xiangfei, he could see that his friend was also flagging although her body didn’t seem to be changing quite as much from taking on so much food. The look she sent back was a telling one, and she twitched her head towards Ranma. Kensou frowned, not getting it, and Xiangfei paused for a moment, pushing away a finished bowl of fried rice and grabbing up some of the water they’d brought with it. She took a brief second to massage her forehead, while glaring over at Kensou, who finally got what she was hinting at.

That caused Kensou to frown and shake his head, but Xiangfei’s glare intensified, and Kensou remembered that they hadn’t entered this competition just for the fun of it, or because Xiangfei had developed an irrational anger towards the pigtailed man’s companions. Oh, that had become a major part of Xiangfei’s personal motivation, to be sure, but more importantly, they needed the money.

For one thing, their van was practically out of gas, and none of the locals been able to tell them how far would be before they were could reach the next town. Neither of them had credit cards, and they hadn’t realized before setting off on this trip how expensive gas could be if you kept moving for long periods of time. It had drained the money they’d been given by Kensou’s senior, Athena and their Master Gentsai. Even worse, we need to keep moving, drat it, or else we’ll be late for out meeting with Master Athena.

With a sigh, Kensou nodded, and still eating very slowly, stared across at Ranma, composing himself as he reached for his psychic powers.

Kensou was not a simple, everyday martial artist. His school was called the Dragon Spirit School, and it taught a lot of strange, esoteric abilities, based almost entirely around the use of Yin, or spiritual and mental energy. The Dragon Spirit School concentrated so much on that side of qi that practitioners could control their inner energies to the point where they could use that energy to influence other people’s minds. While Kensou was in no way as good as Athena, the schools senior student, he could do that much, as well as few other tricks.

This Kensou began to do now, whispering a mental apology to his master for using his teachings in such a duplicitous manner. But we need that money to keep going to meet up with you and Athena, sir, and there is no way I’m going to make Athena wait for me! Not now, not ever!

Kensou had been telling the truth that he and Xiangfei were not an item earlier for a very simple reason. He had a crush on someone else. That person was Athena. A Japanese native, who had come to China to learn from the master of the Dragon Spirit School, wasn’t with them as she was actually quite a famous person in China. Athena had become a singer early on in life, and now at eighteen she had begun to earn some real national attention recently in the idol scene.

Despite that, though, Athena’s real love was the Art, and she had learned so much from Master Gentsai that she was almost ready to graduate from the school and be declared a master in her own right. In fact, Xiangfei, a practitioner of the physical side of the school, and Kensou were due to meet in the city of Xi’an for the graduation rite in a week. The two younger students had been sent on a two-month training journey while Master Gentsai prepared for the rite and Athena was busy with her job as an idol.

Kensou would do anything to not be late to that meeting if he could help it, and that included using his psychic powers. Sorry my pigtailed adversary, but I doubt you need the money nearly as much as the two of us do!

While Ranma had made good inroads into correcting the imbalance between his Yin and Yang ki since his time traveling with his father, he was far away from being a master of the mental aspect of martial arts. After his conversations with Jubei and Master Oro, he had begun to build up some mental structure, yet at the moment, Ranma had no ability to sense what was going on as Kensou concentrated, nor any way to actively defend against it.

Sending out a thin tendril of his own inner ki towards Ranma, invisible to all but those who had senses attuned to the psychic sphere, it arched out from Kensou’s mind across the table, connecting their minds for a brief moment with a tentacle of energy that looked almost like a pink vine to Kensou.

No, he had no idea why psychic energy was either dark pink or light purple. Yes, it annoyed him occasionally.

Once that tendril was connected, Kensou began to feed suggestions into Ranma’s mind. “You’re getting full, you’re getting full. This is feeling more and more like a chore. You don’t want to eat anymore, you don’t want to eat more. Does the money really matter? Do you really need to do this to yourself? You can feel your stomach rebelling against you.”

Unfortunately for Kensou’s efforts, while Ranma had barely begun to build his mental defenses, the type that would allow him to figure out something was going on and keep out such mental suggestions, Ranma did have a lot of self-knowledge. And despite the competition up to this point, Ranma was nowhere near full. So Ranma simply ignored the thoughts for a while. As the thoughts continued and began to try to convince him that his stomach was hurting, through, Ranma realized something was going on.

Huh, why am I thinking that, of all things? This food is pretty good, not as good as Shampoo or Mai’s sure, but as good as a restaurant’s food could be anyway. The money does matter. Why did I just think it didn’t? And what am I doing to myself? What the heck does that mean? Ranma wasn’t doing anything to himself right now that he wasn’t also enjoying, and now began to feel a sliver of panic. What’s going on?

While Kensou was a practitioner of telepathy, he wasn’t all that good at it just yet. He’d only recently acquired the Dragon Spirit necessary for a man to be able to use yang energy like this without a lifetime’s worth of study and ascetism from Master Gentsai. So, while he could pass on subliminal messages to someone, he couldn’t really read their minds or take control of someone. Thus, Kensou was blissfully unaware of Ranma’s growing concern, as he began to look around, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully even as his hands and mouth kept working.

While Ranma didn’t have any kind of sense is able to discover the use of psychic, or Yin, energy, Mai did. Her general ki sense was actually quite good, although she had only recently begun to expand from that into the purely spiritual side of things. Now, she could sense that someone was using psychic power nearby.

From where she had been watching from within the crowd, (and idly smacking aside hands trying to reach for a quick grope,) Mai frowned, pulling out a fan absentmindedly from the pocket of her yoga pants. Tapping it gently against her outer thigh for a moment, she looked around, her eyes flashing just a bit with ki, something that Ranma had noticed on the boat.

At first, she thought it might be Xiangfei, but when she looked at the younger woman, she couldn’t sense anything unusual going on there. Oh, the short girl was certainly putting it away, but Mai had seen Ranma and Shampoo do much the same throughout their friendship, so the sight of a short girl putting away even more than a large, overweight European didn’t bother her all that much.

When Mai switched her examination to Kensou on the other hand, she realized instantly that he was the source of the odd feeling she was getting. The boy seemed to be staring clandestinely at Ranma, his own eating slowing almost to the pace where he’d be called out on it by one of the judges and asked if he was quitting.

Concentrating hard, Mai could just barely feel something from him. I can’t feel any kind of shape to the energy, but there is something weird going on there. I wonder what it is. What is he doing… wait… could he be attacking Ranma somehow mentally?! But I thought those kinds of attacks were more on the spiritual, yin side of things. Damn it.

From where she was in the audience, Mai couldn’t really do anything without being obvious about it, but thankfully, Ranma was already suspicious. Now, he looked around wildly before he caught Mai’s eye. With a nod, she jerked her head toward Kensou.

At first, Ranma didn’t realize what she meant, but then it dawned on him. Kensou’s the one messing with my mind? God that’s creepy! I always thought those American comic books with telepaths in them were weird, and knowing that kind of thing was possible only made them worse. Like, that can be the most overdone power, or the most bizarrely weak one. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem as if Kensou is able to take control of me or anything like that, but still, trying to manipulate my mind like that, fuck that.

He looked across at Kensou, and found himself meeting the younger boy’s own gaze, causing Ranma to scowl in irritation. When the youth didn’t seem to take notice, possibly because he was still being forced to eat and had waited far too long to use this technique, Ranma shrugged. Well, I tried the nonviolent approach.

Ignoring the fact that doing so had simply meant a glare, Ranma planned out his next move quickly. No one messes with my mind, that’s like, that’s as slimy as whatever they did to the rice earlier! When he next finished the bowl of fried rice, he set it down harder than he had before on the table, sending the spoon in it flying, smacking into Kensou’s forehead with enough force to leave a bruise on a normal person. “Oops, sorry about that.”

One of the judges came over and warned Ranma that if he did something like that again, they would assume that it was deliberate and he was trying to disturb Kensou’s efforts. Meanwhile, Kensou rubbed at the spot on his forehead. That spoon had carried a decent amount of force to it, like being flicked in the forehead by Master Gentsai and had snapped him out of his psychic technique.

Now able to concentrate on more than moving his hands, chewing and the technique, Kensou realized with a scowl that it had failed. What the hell, none of my suggestions worked?! How the heck… were they all just wrong enough to cause this guy to ignore them? Or, or was that deliberate? Did Saotome know what I was doing the whole time? But if so, why wait to try and stop me from influencing him?

Still wondering about that, Kensou sent an apologetic look towards Xiangfei, who scowled back at him, yet there was nothing he could do. Worse, if I eat another bite I’m going to freaking burst. With that thought, Kensou threw in the towel, raising his hands and clapping them above his head, the symbol for dropping out.

The last of the locals quickly followed to the jeers and shouts of derision from the crowd. He’d been the local favorite, and knowing now that left only Ranma, Butler and Xiangfei.

To her chagrin, Xiangfei could tell she was close to the end of her endurance. Looking over at the other table, she could see that Butler and Ranma were still going strong.

That was, until Butler’s simply shook his head, pushed the final finished bowl away from him and raised his hands in the same gesture Kensou had done ten minutes before. “Alas, my martial arts school is more based around speed eating other than mass eating. If I were a few years younger, I’d keep going. But as it is, this has been a most amusing diversion.”

Butler had been keeping track of the points as he ate. He was at least twelve bowls ahead of Xiangfei or Ranma but knew there was a legitimate chance that either one of them would be able to pass them by if they kept going. However, the money really didn’t matter much at all to him. While he was not a member of the noble family he served, Butler was paid extremely well for his services. The food had been the main thing for this excursion.

And unless I am very much mistaken, the name Saotome is known to me. Known to me via a family in Japan that the old master had dealings with before young Master Picolet was born. I cannot quite recall what those dealings were right now, but I can at least ask the youth if he recognizes our martial arts school in return, Butler, or rather, Jacques Dumorne of La Belle France Culinary School of Martial Arts, thought.

With that, Jacques stood up from the chair and left the area. From within the crowd, he watched as Xiangfei and Ranma continued to battle, but it was obvious that Xiangfei was flagging badly.

Eventually, Xiangfei was forced to bow out, groaning and pushing yourself away from the table. Ranma kept going until he had beaten Butler’s score by one, then stopped as the judges shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!”

While Ranma went up to take his prize, Mai began sidling through the crowd to where the now somewhat rotund Kensou had pushed his way through the crowd. By the time she caught up to him, he was a ways away from the rapidly dispersing crowd, sitting on the ground, his back against a tree. “What were you trying to do, Kensou? That’s your name, right?”

Opening his eyes from where he’d closed them to concentrate on his inner qi, Kensou looked up. His eyes bulged as he took in the extremely attractive-looking woman in yoga pants, and he had to fight hard to keep a blush off his face. Athena might be hotter, but damn if this girl doesn’t dress to impress!

Actually, Mai wasn’t dressed to impress at the moment. She was simply dressed in something that she could hop around poles on, without giving people any upskirt shots. Similarly, she had a heavy sports bra under her clothing so she didn’t bounce as much as she often did. There was a time to use her sexiness to her advantage, and a simple non-violent competition was not one of them.

So flustered was he that it took Kensou a moment to actually take in what Mai had said. “Um, yeah, that’s my name, but I, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered, looking away guiltily.

“I think you do. You were doing something, I could feel the buildup of energy inside you. Yin energy I think it was, but I couldn’t figure out what you were trying to do,” Mai said, crossing her arms over her chest, not under. Under was for if she wanted someone to be flustered and distracted. Over was when she was serious. “The obvious answer is you were trying to mess with Ranma in some fashion. So, why shouldn’t Ranma and me beat you down like the cheat you are?”

At that, Kensou lost his flustered expression for a second, putting on a thoughtful expression for a second, before clapping his hands together and inhaling. Ugh, I hate showing off like this, but if I’m faced with a fight, there’s no way I can fight in the shape, heh, I’m in now. As he did, Kensou called upon the Dragon Spirit within, murmuring, “Dragon’s Appetite: Restoration.”

Ranma had just pushed through the crowd to where he had spotted Mai, whose hair at the very least always stood out above a crowd given how tall she was. He now stopped and stared as Kensou’s whole body seemed to glow for a second. While he had a limited sense of the spiritual side of things, Ranma had developed a pretty decent ki sense, and he could feel a sudden ripple of energy pulsing within Kensou. Weird, what’s he up to?

Soon that energy became visible as a glow coming from Kensou’s body as if he’d suddenly transformed into a flashlight. Seeing the glow out of the corner of their eyes, several nearby people turned, and many a gasp of “what the—” was heard.

As Ranma and the crowd watched, Kensou’s body suddenly shifted. Where before he had seemingly gained at least sixty pounds during the eating contest, all of that weight seemed to disappear. When the glow faded, Kensou was back to normal. None of the massive amount of food he’d eaten in evidence any longer.

He sprang to his feet, grinning and cracking his knuckles. “Look lady, I don’t know what you think you saw, but if it’s a fight you want, that I’m more than willing to give you! We needed that cash, and your friend beat us to it!”

“Actually, both me and ‘Butler’ beat Xiangfei,” Ranma deadpanned as he moved to stand beside Mai, while the crowd around them started to shift away, with some of them muttering to one another about whether or not this was some kind of show, while others simply watched on. Gawking was a particularly well evolved skill in Asia, regardless of the actual country, and this looked like something martial arts related. Much like in Japan, that meant a good show for normal people nearby.

“That is indeed true,” a cultured voice intoned, its owner, Butler (Jacques) soon shifting out from the crowd to stand between the two possible combatants. “Young lady, I do not believe that I know what exactly is going on here, oh but if you are accusing this young man of cheating, do you have any means to back up that assertion?” Butler gazed at Kensou speculatively. “This young man could’ve used the technique he just did during the competition, and nothing would’ve happened to him. That flies in the face of your accusation.”

“Butler’s right, Mai, much as I don’t like it. I felt something messing with my mind sure, but proving it was Kensou?” Ranma whispered. He wasn’t one to back down from a fight, indeed the Anything Goes School emphasized taking on any challenge regardless of where it came from, but Xiangfei was nowhere in sight, having left the park in a huff after losing. Which meant it would be two on one. That didn’t sit right with Ranma, not about something that hadn’t worked in the first place.

He said so aloud, and the wind seemed to go out of Kensou’s sails a bit. He looked around the crowd, and then stepped forward, whispering. “Look, I… I’m sorry. It didn’t work regardless, but I’m sorry I even tried it in the first place. It’s just, we really needed the money.”

“You do know there are a lot of other ways for martial artists to earn money quickly right?” Mai growled, while Ranma scowled. Similarly, Butler had taken a sharp step backward, looking between the two younger men in concern and skepticism, as if he didn’t believe what he was hearing. “If your school has any kind of physical component to it, you’re probably far stronger than you look. You and Xiangfei could volunteer to do some fetch and carry-style construction work. Maybe put on a show, or something similar. Another major thing that you could do is have Xiangfei act as a waitress or something similar for a few days. If Xiangfei used some martial arts moves, balancing acts, even something simple like juggling, she’ll bring in tons of tips.”

Mai knew that had been what Shampoo had been doing most of the time, while on the road before she met Ranma to earn money, culminating in getting a job on a cruise ship of some kind going from Chine to Japan. While Xiangfei was certainly a little plainer looking than Shampoo with her striking hair and more fully formed body, she would still be raking in the tips for server. The rest were things that Mai had just thought up on the fly. And that’s not even considering Ranma’s lessons about living off the land by praying on idiots.

By the look in his face, Kensou hadn’t thought of any of that. After a few seconds, he shook himself and scratching at the back of his head looked a little sheepish, turning his eyes down to the ground instead of up at the three older martial artists, Butler having moved to join the other two, although his eyes were on Ranma. “I guess, I guess we both sort of well, we’ve used this method every time we’ve needed food or money before this. Both of us are kind of, well, bottomless pits when it comes to food, and eating contests like this also take away the need to actually pay for food as well as gas. Still, I suppose you’re right. I shouldn’t have let Xiangfei push me into acting that way.”

Mai was still angry, but she understood the power of peer pressure and instead of letting the younger man have it (after all, he had just admitted to the fact he had tried to mess with Ranma’s mind) she stayed silent, looking over at Ranma, who simply shrugged.

For his part, while Ranma had been freaked out at the time to a certain degree, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t realized what was going on. It felt to him that Kensou’s control of his telepathy was weak, or there was a limit to what the technique could accomplish. It was still scary, but more for its implications than actual impact. “How the heck does a guy younger than us even able to do something like that anyway?”

“Heh, now that I can’t tell you. It’s a secret from my martial arts school, the Dragon Spirit School. If senior apprentice Athena or Master Gentsai tells me to share it with someone, I can, but until then no dice,” Kensou said, his face firming noticeably.  Kensou didn’t take much seriously, thinking life was too short for such things. But he did feel his word meant something, and he was loyal to his school.

That made sense to both Ranma and Mai, but Ranma still wanted at least a little more information. I figure he owes it to me for even trying to mess with my mind, the little ass! “If you can’t tell me how you’re doing it, do you know how to defend against attacks like that? I mean I could tell you were doing something, simply because of how wrong the thoughts ya were pushing were in comparison to what I knew was the truth. But I have to imagine that someone subtler with that kind of thing, especially someone who could use it in a fight could do a lot of damage.”

“They can, although not always. Instinctual type fighters are impossible to influence. One of the worst beat downs I’ve ever had was against a martial artist to style came from studying mountain lions and fighting like them,” Kensou answered authoritatively. “As for defending against it with your own qi I don’t know, sorry. My school, well, again I can’t really share much. Sorry.”

And he was really sorry about things now.  Kensou had let peer pressure and his desire to earn an easy yuan push him into what he now realized was a dishonorable act.  But that didn’t mean he was going to turn around and share more about his martial arts school than he had already.

Ironically, if Ranma or Mai had thought to drop Master Oro’s name as the name of the man who had taught them about the use of yin energy, Kensou might have told them more. The Rising Dragon School had been founded by one of Master Oro’s former pupils, who was the current Master’s, Gentsai’s father. As it was, he refused to share the secrets of their school lest it fall into the wrong hands.

“That’s somewhat frustrating,” Ranma admitted, but then shrugged. “Still, I can’t blame you for being loyal to your school or whatever.”

“So are we good?” Kensou asked.

“Sure, but you have to do one thing for me,” Ranma said, smirking suddenly. “Tell Xiangfei better luck next time.”

Kensou groaned, but even his lips twitched as Mai giggled and even the watching Butler allowed a little chuckle to escape. “She’ll hate that, but yeah, sure.” With that, and a final nod towards Ranma, Kensou turned and moved through the park, heading out and away to find his friend. One moneymaking scheme might have failed, but he’d just been given a lot of other ideas for more.

One of which at least should have occurred to Xiangfei before this. Honestly, I know she hates waitressing given the past few years where she’s needed to do it to pay for her apartment, the prideful little… gah, I know she hates handouts and all, but has it never occurred to her to use her martial arts talent while doing it? Even I can tell that kind of thing would be a major draw.

Behind him, Jacques turned to Ranma, nodding his head politely to the younger man. By this point, the butler of the Chardin family had remembered where he had heard Ranma’s last name before and knew he had to take this opportunity to question Ranma about his family. “Now that that is all settled, might I ask something of you, young Ranma. I didn’t stay around just to watch that confrontation after all. You see, your last name is known to me…”

Ranma’s eyes instantly narrowed, and he slid back subtly, his balance poised on his back foot, his arms tensing as his eyes locked on Butler while Mai shifted similarly to one side. “If this has anything to do with marriage agreements or anything like that, take them up with my old man. I’ve made a clean break from him. I might still be a part of the Anything Goes School, and I could be convinced to pay back anything stolen by my father or his own master, but I am making my own style at this point, and won’t be tied down by honor agreements or anything similar.”

“Hmmm…” Jacques’ eyes narrowed speculatively. “Well, while fascinating to hear of a young man such as yourself attempting such, I was not actually interested in you. Although I don’t suppose you could tell me if you have a sister?”

Mai was on guard at this point, and when a young boy behind them tripped and sent his cup flying towards Ranma’s back, while that wasn’t why she was on guard, Mai still reacted instantly. She twisted, bringing around her fan up and into the burst of liquid that would’ve hit Ranma in the back of the head and shoulders. The sticky soda splashed against her fan, going everywhere but towards Ranma.

Blinking, Ranma looked over at her, giving Mai the kind of look that was normally reserved for objects of worship or bedroom time. She grinned back, winking as if to say ‘I’ve got your back’ before Ranma, with a grin on his face, turned back to Butler, who’d watch this display with a smirk, not understanding the significance but appreciative of Mai’s speed.

“No, sorry, I don’t have a sister. Although, judging by that, I’d assume you really are talking to me because my old man arranged some kind of contract between our families?” Ranma stated more than asked, an urge to groan and curse alike rising inside.

“With either a daughter of the Saotome or Tendo lines yes,” Jacques agreed. “The original contract did not specify a name or which family, only your generation.”

I really shouldn’t. I really really shouldn’t, Ranma thought, a certain vindictive glee replacing his earlier annoyance. “What exactly is your school anyway?”

“Ah, forgive me. I should’ve introduced the family’s school right away. I am a butler in the house of Chardin, and we, servants and masters alike, are connoisseurs of the style of La Belle France, a culinary-based school of martial arts. For we well know that any table can become a battlefield, and we are masters of that battlefield,” Jacques answered proudly.

“Huh… Never heard of it. Although I’d assume it has something to do with fighting in enclosed spaces, restaurants, stuff like that? Maybe keeping your combat movements hidden?” Ranma analyzed.

Jacques nodded, somewhat impressed. “That, and always appearing gentile and elegant, an important phrase. Elegance is everything, after all!”

The fact the older man nearly bellowed that last line threw Ranma, but he decided to still go through with what he was about to do. “OOookay, Well, I can’t help you with you know finding a sister or anything, but I do know where the Tendo’s live.” And if my old man has somehow made his way back to his friend, and begun to influence Soun again, this might be a way to keep them both too busy to come after us again. It has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of like Butler matching up with someone like Kurumi, the only girl I know for a fact could beat me in an all-you-can-eat competition, Ranma thought, grinning cheerfully to himself.

“In fact, I know that the Tendo’s have five different daughters,” he said aloud. “Two of them are martial artists close to my level, while the others aren’t for various reasons.”

“Fascinating! A single family blessed with such abundance, magnificent,” Jacques exclaimed in real delight. It was remarkably hard for anyone from La Belle France to find husbands or wives for various reasons, and knowing that the young master had five women to choose from made him very happy indeed. “And you know where the Tendos reside?”

“The Tendos have a dojo in Nerima, Tokyo,” Ranma answered, rattling off the precise address while beside him, Mai bit her lip to keep from laughing. “The two martial artists are named Natsume and Kurumi. I doubt that Natsume, the older one, would be very much interested in arranged marriages or anything of that nature. But Kurumi and Akane, another girl who calls herself a martial artist but isn’t on their level, might be. Kurumi might even fit in with a martial arts style based off eating a lot of food quickly as she’s already something of an expert at using their school’s style to do just that.”

Jacques nodded. Not knowing anything about Ranma’s personality, he was unaware of why Ranma was being so helpful.  He simply thought the young man was doing so as it was a matter of honor dealing with an agreement with his martial art’s school if not Ranma personally. “Excellent. In that case, for me, this is been a day well spent and I will bid you ado.”

“Actually, I had a question. How were you able to eat so quickly? I could track the movement of your hands, and you weren’t moving any faster than I was between grabbing up a bowl and putting it up to your face. But the moment you did, you ate far, far faster. If you could put away as much as I could, I would never’ve been able to catch up with you. I saw you doing something, your jaw moving strangely, but that was all I could make out.”

Jacques smiled cheerfully, and the smile widened, then widened still more, until he looked almost as if a human being had suddenly begun to transform into a frog. “And even that is more than most would be able to say. After all, it isn’t elegant for someone to be able to see you chewing, let alone taking a bite. Elegance is everything. Have a nice day, young man.”

A moment later, the older man’s face shifted back to normal, and he bowed before the two dumbstruck younger martial artists, and made his way out of the park.

Ranma and Mai stared after him, silent until Ranma said, “You know I’m suddenly feeling a lot more guilty about sending him the Tendo’s way. I just hope Kurumi will forgive me… I also kinda wanna know what her reaction to being hooked up with some guy who could imitate a frog at a moment’s notice would be.”

“Heh, I wager it’d be like a train crash, horrible, but you just can’t turn away.  Personally, I’d be willing to wager that Kurumi and Natsume between them will figure out a way to beat this challenge,” Mai said, shaking her head. “Not before some shenanigans, though.  And maybe that Akane bitch being humbled again. I still remember her tantrum in my family’s dojo and the damage it caused.”

The two of them kept on staring until Butler was out of sight, then Ranma shook himself, turning back to Mai. “By the way, where’s Shampoo? I thought she’d be joining you to watch the finals at least.”

Mai held up her phone. “She texted me, said she had met a local librarian who was helping her to translate and transcribe one of the scrolls. I asked Shampoo if it was costing her money, and she said she only needed to help him around the house, which I assume means construction of some kind, or maybe cooking and cleaning.”

“Huh… Well, that’s lucky, I guess. Although, if that did mean she was doing construction, I’m surprised Sham-chan didn’t call me in. I mean, I know she learned a lot watching me and the martial arts construction guys, but I was the one actually being taught by them,” Ranma mused, before shrugging. “Regardless, Shampoo can look after herself.”

“True. Now come on, it’s time for the Cat and the Hot Coal Contest.” With that, Mai looped an arm around one of Ranma’s, and the two walked off, heading down towards the beach.

OOOOOOO

At around the same time that the second round of the eating competition was going on, Shampoo sighed, leaned back in her chair and kneaded her nose in irritation. Of course the languages used in these scrolls are too old for anything in a modern library to help me with. UGH. That one science book I found that listed a few ways archeologists and historians preserve old documents was a good find for when we crack the glass. But the few books here on ancient Chinese languages didn’t really help, drat it. The Internet was a little more helpful. I could wish we had better internet access while out at sea but it is what it is.

China’s internet wasn’t exactly new, but it also wasn’t exactly robust in how far it went either. The same went for cellular services, even if, as Mai had, you bought access. Funny to think that is such a crass commercial idea in a nation that supposedly espouses communism. Oh, and then there’s the fact I feel as if someone’s looking over my shoulder whenever I go online.

Regardless, the fact was, Shampoo wasn’t getting anywhere. Her desire to teach herself how to read the ancient language, something she had been somewhat flippant about when she spoke about it to Mai and Ranma, before cracking open the scroll’s protections was not going to happen, at least not quickly. That annoyed her a lot, that the ancient language’s spelling had changed so much from what she had been taught in the village. Preserving the scrolls or even transcribing what lay within is good, but pointless if I can’t read the blasted things when we do.

The library was near the center of town, well away from the shoreline where the hotel was and where the two contests were occurring. That area of the town, the segments built directly into the hills and cliffs along the shore, was set up to be a mix of tourist-style zone and traditional dockyard area built around fishing. The rest of the town was deeper into the hills, and had everything a small town like this needed: schools, library, utilities and so forth.

The library was small, but well maintained, with three workers there at the time she arrived along with a few locals, including a group of children. Shampoo had quickly found herself a nice table out of the way of the rest of the library to begin her work.

Well, once she had shut down one of the librarian’s attempt to flirt with her anyway. And unfortunately, while her table was away from the small children’s area and its noise, it didn’t exactly make Shampoo turn invisible. Which would’ve been very nice for Shampoo considering the gazes she was getting from a group of teens who should’ve been working on some kind of project together even now. Instead, every few moments, one of them would look over at Shampoo then the group would hastily go into a conversation of some kind.

Several times, one of the boys had attempted to strike up a conversation with Shampoo. Shampoo’s glare and the irritated wave had worked for the first one. The second one, she’d had to get a little more forceful with, although not to the point of outright violence. Simply ‘accidentally’ losing her pencil underneath the table, then lifting the table a heavy wooden construction, along with the books she’d gotten and everything else on it out of the way with one hand had sufficed.

Glancing in the direction of that table now, Shampoo bit back a snort of derision. As if any of these boys have enough strength to interest me. Not like Ranma, or even Mai. She allowed a small smile to appear on her face at the thought of her two lovers, a smile that turned into a smirk as she wondered what Mai had planned for the night. Mai was far more into clothing type play than Shampoo, and some of her underwear had surprised even Shampoo. She’d even hinted about cosplay and playacting, which Shampoo found fascinating.

Although, while I admit Ranma would make a good Tenchi, I don’t want to pull off a good Ayeka, ugh. I know that we’ve got the same hair color but that’s all I have in common with that inbred snot. Maybe a Sailor Moon character? Mai could put a pull off a good Rei I suppose, but I don’t think there was a purple haired Sailor Moon character was there? Still, I wouldn’t be against the idea of dying my hair for a night… Although admittedly, any kind of play we make up with Sailor Moon we would need a good deal more space to do than me have on board the ship. Maybe a chase over the rooftops of the cityscape, and then some… Public type play.

That was Shampoo’s particular interest. Not so much exhibitionism as making out, among other things, in unusual places. The time that she and Ranma had made out after fighting Kodachi on top of a random roof had been fun. Mixing that up with different clothing, and maybe a little bit of acting? That could be a lot of fun. But it would take a lot of prep time as well. Although I suppose now isn’t the time to think of such things.

Reluctantly shrugging those pink-tinted thoughts off, Shampoo sighed. I’m not going to get anywhere further here. Time to head out and, ugh, watch Ranma win that eating contest. I hope he remembers Mai’s admonishment about his manners. Ugh. With that, Shampoo began to pick up the books she’d been using, moving around the library and putting them back where she’d gotten them before heading out the door, tucking her notebook into her ki space the moment no one was around.

Outside, Shampoo oriented herself for a moment, before heading along the road back the way she’d come towards the dockyard area, a little skip in her step as her mind wandered again to what the three of them would be getting up to that night. Maybe I should make my own preparations. Mai obviously has something to spice things up when it we get to that point, but she’ll be busy with the competition, and I doubt either of them will be in the mood for anything food-related. Maybe some candlelight, preparing the hotel room a little bit, making it more romantic? That sounds like a good idea, along with getting myself a little something to eat too. Hehe, waiting for Ranma to plan out dates is nice, but I do like making my own plans like this.

So concentrated on her internal thoughts was the young Amazon, that Shampoo didn’t really notice that there weren’t any people around on the streets, as there should have been at merely six in the evening. Then a voice spoke from one side of her, startling Shampoo out of her thoughts. “You hold something that is not yours Amazon, something of ancient power.”

Shampoo was already whirling in the direction of that voice when another voice spoke from almost directly behind her. “We will have that. Give it to us, and this does not need to become violent…yet.”

From either direction came two men in their twenties. They looked alike enough that Shampoo supposed they were related. The older of the two was the most unusual looking of the pair, in that he had hair that looked like it had been electrocuted as it was standing straight up from his head, and that there were two lightning-like bolts of blonde color amidst the black. He was tall, taller than Mai or Ranma and broader in the shoulders than Shampoo’s boyfriend was. The way his hair stood up made his face look more austere, pointed and, combined with the sneer on his face, made him look quite villainous.

He wore set of pants and a shirt with blue coloring and golden embroidery, the style looking like that of a Qing-era emperor, as if he had just stepped out of a painting of the imperial court. Judging by the callouses on his palms that Shampoo spotted as he waved a hand in her direction, the older man was a palm-based strike-type of fighter. At present that, and the fact he moved extremely lightly on his feet, was the only thing that Shampoo could say about his combat style.

The other man wore the same outfit but in red and gold rather than blue and gold. Beyond that, he was obviously at least three or four years younger as his face was a more childlike, despite deep-set black eyes with no iris to speak of. Indeed, Shampoo thought he looked a bit younger than her or Ranma. Those eyes tried to give him as evil a look as the older brother, but it didn’t quite work with that face, despite the excited, almost manic smile that accompanied them. The hair too, wasn’t what Shampoo would call unusual. A simple mop of brown hair cut to lay loose to right below his ears. It was actually slightly girly, in her opinion, although it was the only truly girly thing about him.

There was also something almost inherently creepy about them. Not their movements, although their movements also niggled something in Shampoo’s mind, nor their faces. No, the feeling was just that, a feeling that Shampoo sensed on a level she didn’t quite understand. It wasn’t anything to do with her ki skills, her ability to sense it in other people, as she had been able to do for barley a month at this point and that in a very limited fashion. No, this was purely the primal portion of her brain’s reaction to something unusual below the surface.

It almost reminded Shampoo of the feeling she had gotten near Yamazaki. It wasn’t quite the same, but her brain was telling her to be wary of these two.

Despite that, there was only one response to such words. Her two chui instantly came out of her ki space even as she backed away to keep both of them in her line of sight without turning her head over much. “I don’t know either of you, and I have nothing on me that some random person could claim as theirs. If you want something from this Amazon, then you’d best be prepared to take it by force!” she growled.

“Silly little Joketsuzoku,” the older one stated, shaking his head. “Of course we’re prepared to do just that.”

Without warning, the younger attacker launched a ki blast towards Shampoo of all things.

Shampoo’s eyes widened in shock but her chui came up, smashing into the ki blast, dissipating it. The impact was enough to nearly knock her chui out of her hand and it did succeed in pushing her off balance for a brief second before she corrected. Fuck! That was nasty, so quick to launch a ki attack and it was a strong one too. Fuck, is this really another Mad Dragon issue, only there’s two of them now?!

The other closed quickly, lashing out with a kick that almost caught Shampoo in the center of her chest, but she twisted to one side, bringing up her second chui into the side of his body with enough force to shatter the bones of a normal person. As it was, he took the blow without even a grunt, then blinked as she moved into his range, the chui’s head skittering along his back, causing him to automatically try to grab the shaft. He did so, but ate an elbow for his trouble as she released the shaft, then as he stumbled back from the blow to his face lashed out with a kick that caught him in the center of his chest before he could dodge.

Shampoo’s kick sent him flying, but at the same time, she had to grimace. Damn, that was like kicking Airen, only worse. Whoever these two are, they are immensely durable!

Before Shampoo could pull her leg back, the second attacker was on her, and she twisted around a blow from a fist glowing with dark purple energy that would’ve taken her in the side of her head. A second blow landed even as she turned, causing Shampoo to grunt in pain. Despite that, she kicked the chui she had dropped up and into the face of the younger of the two attackers. This caught the man by surprise, and he stumbled back, his black eyes narrowing even as the chui to the face hadn’t seemed to do any damage.

Whirling around underneath a roundhouse kick, she lashed out with both hands, palms slamming into the man’s center of mass, hurling him off his feet and away just as the first attacker closed again. He rolled with it, attacking her with lashing blast of life energy, which Shampoo, busy as she was with her second opponent, couldn’t dodge.

It crashed into her side, hitting her shoulder and upper arm with enough force to smash her off of her feet in turn and onto her side. While her own toughness training meant the strike didn’t do more than bruise, it also burned, searing away a segment of her clothing and even her hair, although the flame didn’t spread, thankfully, as she rolled along the ground. Still rolling, Shampoo shifted into a full cartwheel, lashing out and kicking the same mace she’d used moments before in the same manner again up into the face of one attacker as she whirled around the attacks of the other, her second mace jabbing out.

For several seconds, she and the older attacker danced around one another, blows flying fast and furious, with the older one using ki to enhance his attacks up to his elbow. At first, Shampoo thought she was getting the better of the exchange as her blows were getting through, then a ki blast at point blank range caught her in the head, causing Shampoos had to go flying backwards and for her to be blinded for a second.

Several more hard blows hammered into her chest and stomach before the spots cleared from her vision, while none of her own hasty, unnamed blows landed. As her vision cleared, Shampoo found her hand grabbed, and pulled into an arm bar across her neck. Kicking off of the ground, Shampoo flipped herself up and over the man, forcing him to break his grip, then kicked him in the back, sending him stumbling when the kick should have been enough to crush bone, before another blow landed on the side of her head, sending her stumbling sideways.

Another ki blast slammed into her chest, hurling her backward and into the wall of a building, then she found herself grabbed by some kind of rope around one arm, tugged up and onto the rooftop of the building.

The reason for that was simple, as people were beginning to come out of buildings all around.

Qin Konglong and Qin Hailong had planned out this attack carefully. While the two of them were powerful, there was no need to take unnecessary risks, not when they were so close to gathering enough Yin energy to fully invest the bodies they were in, imposing their spirits onto the flesh of their foolish descendants who had called on them for instruction of all things. Masters of esoteric arts, the spirits had thus gone to the effort of putting down what were called wards in modern parlance. Powered by their Yin energy, the complex markers kept people inside or away from the area as they dealt with Shampoo.

Nevertheless, the amount of effort they were putting out to bring Shampoo down was beginning to fray those wards. “We need to get her away from other people, blasts it all. This Amazon must be a storied warrior of her folk despite her age, to be so durable and quick.”

“True. There is a row of old, abandoned houses waiting renovation a block from here. Drive her there,” the older spirit, Qin Konglong, ordered.

Working together, the two of them dragged and pushed Shampoo, not giving her a moment’s respite. The only reason she was even able to withstand their attacks was thanks to the chui in her hand and the fact she was marginally faster. Both of her attackers were, in martial arts parlance, artillery units. Slow, but heavy hitting and doing their best damage at range. Unfortunately one would always pull back if she closed, continuing to drive her.

Soon, Shampoo found herself crashing down into what looked like someone’s private garden, one that hadn’t seen much care for a number of years, the knee of one of her attackers embedded in her chest. Even as she gasped out air and a bit of blood, Shampoo brought her fists in on either side slamming his knee.

For the first time in this fight one of her attackers released a noise, this one of shock and fury as the knee shattered. “Ahh, you bitch!”

He rolled off of her, his hands going to his knee, but Shampoo grabbed his arm as he did, pulling him into a punch that she put everything she had into. The blow nearly broke his jaw, hurling him up and into the other attacker’s incoming ki blast, which sent him flying over Shampoo’s head.

Yet the man was still aware, and didn’t even seem to be in pain, which was worrisome, although not so much as the small ki blast that caught Shampoo in her elbow as she tried to push herself to her feet. A kick to the head from the older attacker came next which she could barely block, followed by another blast of ki slammed that into Shampoo, searing still more of her clothing away.

At this point, she was nearly naked from the waist up bar a sleeve that refused to slide off, although the bruises covering her body took away any sense of nakedness. Despite that, Shampoo she still pushed herself to her feet just in time to catch another kick with one hand, twisting and pulling.

The second attacker found himself up and in the air, then tossed into the wall of the small garden, the iron fence coming apart under his weight and the momentum of the throat. As she released his leg, Shampoo pulled out a needle, hissing in fury. Oh, I hope this works! A second later, the needle flew, multiplying in midair as Shampoo had copied a bit of Mai’s Shadow Fan technique.

The man’s eyes widened, but a blast of ki took out most of the shadow needles, with only a few remaining. Luckily, one of those few was the second needle Shampoo had released an instant after the first, which stabbed into the man’s forearm. It stuck deep there, proving once and for all whatever training these two had wasn’t the Toughness Training as the Amazons taught it.

Even as the needle the older attacker’s arm, the man lashed out with another blast of ki, causing Shampoo to curse it even as she dodged one side. How much ki do these two have?!

Even as she watched, their bodies began to heal. It didn’t look like when Ranma or Shampoos bodies did, not a body regenerating from its injuries. Rather, shafts of dark purple ki began to crackle around the wounds, a color Shampoo had never seen before, darker even than their attacks. The ki slowly knit the wounds together, rather than regenerating them. What I the world is that technique? It almost looks artificial… and, and where is the blood? I don’t even see any from my needle attack. As she watched, Shampoo’s needle was pushed out of the older man’s arm, although she hoped that it had worked despite that and the whole lack of blood thing.

The next second a kick to the stomach caught Shampoo, and her return blow went wild as the younger attacker danced around her just as a ki blast form the older slammed into her shoulder, blinding her and searing away the last bit of her shirt. Another kick caught her in the back, followed by a blast of ki slamming into the back of her head before she could turn around.

She stumbled, then counter charged back into the attacker from behind, catching him by surprise, her arms wrapping up around his middle, pinning his own arms to his side. As monstrously powerful as these two were in ki, speed and skill, they didn’t quite match Shampoo in strength, and the man couldn’t break out without leverage.

“AIYAAA!” with a cry Shampoo twirled, using the man to bat aside another blast of energy from the second attacker, before the older one then closed quickly. Her attempts to use the younger man as a flail failed, as the man slid below her strikes, kicking her legs out from under her.

The fall dislodged her hold around the first attacker enough for him to break out and roll away, followed by two consecutive blasts of ki coming from the pair, slamming into Shampoo even as she tried to dodge. She staggered, her attempt to pick up her chui again failing. The younger attacker came down from on high, his knees slamming into her shoulders, driving her down to the ground, even as he pummeled her head once, twice, then five times in quick succession with almost chestnut roasting speed.

That did it. Her accumulated injuries finally caught up to Shampoo despite the toughness training, and her world went black as she slumped unconscious to the grass.

Huffing, Hailong pushed to his feet, staring down at the half-naked Joketsuzoku. “That was far more difficult than it should have been, curse these weak bodies.”

“Do not blame the tools for an enemy who was more dangerous than we assumed,” Konglong growled out. “Her toughness, durability and limited ki attacks were things we had not thought to face. We will need to be aware of that going forward. For now, we must get out of here before someone comes to investigate the noise. Even in this area of this town such noise will have brought some gawkers out.”

Hailong grumpily moved forward, his knee still not moving quite right, nor did his face seem to have healed quite right. The wounds were gone, to be sure, but it was as if both the wounds and the repairs had been to a corpse, a body that was intact, but quite dead. As Shampoo had noticed, no blood had flown. Nor would she have been able to feel any heartbeat.

For the two bodies were those of jiangshi, zombies. Bodies of living people inhabited by spirits, who had pushed out the original soul. This process had, in the terms that Ranma and his ladies would understand, had pushed out the original owners, the Yang energy within the body, essentially replacing it with the Yin, or spiritual energy, of the two ancient ghosts.

Those owners had been two descendants of the Qin line, making their bodies spiritually and physically compatible with the ghosts of their ancient ancestors, although the process wasn’t quite complete. The souls of the original owners, Jin Chonrei and Chonshu were gone, but the bodies had yet to transform into the forms of their new owners. That was what the pair of ancient specters wished to gather more yin-type energy to do.

Hailong picked up Shampoo and the two of them raced off along the rooftops, putting some distance between them and the fight. With no one actually having witnessed the battle either the start or the finish that hopefully would be enough, although both had become aware of a yin energy user somewhere in the town.

Moments later, they stopped on top of one of the many small houses in a residential area of the town. This area was dominated by such small houses along with smaller roads, and lots of children and other people were moving around below at this time of the evening. None of those townsfolk noticed the two zombies or their burden.

Hailong looked down at Shampoo where he had dumped the body on top of the roofer second, before very scientifically smashing his head his fist into the back of her head several times, making certain she would remain unconscious. “She was amazingly durable, and those weapons of hers allowed her to deflect or block most of our ki attacks at first. I was not prepared for that,” he admitted, admitting without addressing it that Konglong had been right moments before about how the battle had almost gotten away from them.

To that Konglong simply nodded, moving to kneel beside the body on the other side. He reached into her pockets, his eyes widening. “Well, that explains much. She does indeed know quite a bit about ki and has a very large ki space here.”

Such creations would remain in place for as long as they are near the body of the creator. However, it would only respond to the individual whose ki had created it, meaning that searching such spaces became a bit of a pain.

He pulled out a few things, several articles of clothing, numerous magazines, a notebook some pens, strange knickknacks, and finally something that rang to his senses as filled with ancient energy. When he pulled it out, his eyes lit up. “A journal from that monster, Lu Bu! An amazing find, as even now I can sense some ancient energy within it on top of whatever secrets it might contain as to the source of his strength.”

Konglong’s hands glowed dark purple for a moment, trying to reach into the case, but then his face fell. “Dammit! These protective glasses don’t work as a medium. We would need to open these scrolls up and drain them by touching them directly. And if we do that, we might not get much energy out of them before they crumble. Blast it!”

The scroll radiated to the two’s senses with Yin energy, the spirit of the person who had written in it, but that energy wouldn’t allow the scrolls to be touched directly for very long. “Still, we can drain this bitch, at least.”

“She doesn’t have nearly as much energy as the other one,” Hailong warned.

“Still, every little bit helps,” Konglong retorted.

The two took turns touching Shampoo’s breasts, taking a moment to fondle them, lips twisted in shared amusement even as they drained her ki as much as they could. Draining both sides of her ki, the Yang and Yin, wasn’t possible at present because they were not alive, and thus could not connect to the Yang energy that fueled Shampoo’s body on the basic level, only her spirit. This meant Shampoo would recover in time, although she would have a migraine to end all migraines for days, and would be unable to call upon yin energy for a while, until it recovered.

Humming and giving the Joketsuzoku’s admittedly amazing tit another squeeze, uncaring of the groan of pain this resulted as he groped the badly bruised flesh, Konglong only reluctantly removed his hands, looking over at his younger cousin only to blink as Hailong held the girl’s phone to her hand. “What are you doing with that?”

“I’ve learned these new-fangled phones are locked by the fingers of the person who owns them.” He smirked in triumph a second later, looking over at his brother. “We don’t want our other prey to know that anything is wrong, so I thought to lay down a false narrative.”

“Sound thinking,” Konglong agreed.

With that, the younger of the two Qin family ghosts began to send a few messages to one of the other contacts on the phone, thankful that the phone was an advanced one, which came complete with pictures for the profiles, as he had no idea of the names of the Joketsuzoku’s companions.

After a few moments, Hailong nodded and placed the phone in his pocket. “I told them a story about how this one found a local that could help her translate that scroll.” He smirked then, chuckling. “That is even the truth, since we both could read it easily enough. Not that we have any interest in actually helping her, of course.”

Konglong chuckled at that, then nodded. However, noises from below and a voice shouting, “I know I heard someone talking just now!” caused both of them to twitch. The pair grabbed up their prisoner again, and raced off, eventually heading towards the small temple area that was one of the town’s oldest area.

There, they found a small copse of trees, and with evening coming on, there was no one else around just now, which let them dump their prisoner again on the ground, which was followed by Hailong, who was a bit more vindictive than Konglong, slamming her head down again to make certain Shampoo remained unconscious.

As that was going on, Konglong looked around, frowning pensively. “The cat spirit we came here to gorge ourselves on is aware of its surroundings to a certain degree, although I doubt it can recognize the threat we could pose to it. An animal indeed.” He glanced over at Hailong. “Do not kill her. The spirit might be able to sense that, and become leery. Remember the other girl doesn’t have enough yin energy for our purposes, we must pull that spirit out of hiding and drain it directly.”

Scowling, the younger nodded, and the two of them went to work tying Shampoo’s legs together, her arms behind her back using a trick they had seen on a police broadcast of some kind, using what modern people called small zip ties to do it. “It amazes me how far humanity has come in the area of materials like this. Yet they have forgotten just as much in terms of the Art, and of what lies beyond the material, mortal plane. Soon, soon we will be strong enough to make these bodies our own permanently, able to handle our full power, and then, then we will see if this so-called Communist Government can face two trueborn nobles of the Qin.”

Konglong laughed at that, nodding his head in agreement. “I think I will keep a hold of that scroll for now. Who knows, perhaps we will discover some means of preserving is long enough for us to drain it as well as a local spirit and that woman. For now, let us plan out or next ambush. We will need to make certain the woman comes to us here, where we can ambush her without the locals interfering, if they have the will to do so.”

“I will remind you it’s doubtful she will come alone. That young man with her is also a formidable fighter, and if both are as dangerous as this one proved to be, that will be a tough battle. These bodies are not nearly as durable as they should be,” the younger jiangshi worried.

“Yet we were able to win against this one handily. I believe the other two can be overcome just as well,” Konglong said, with a shrug. “Besides, we are so close to accumulating enough power to truly make these bodies live again as our own. Now is the time to take a little risk, no?”

OOOOOOO

As they wound their way along the docks towards the beach where the pole competition was due to begin, the two immediately began to see the large crowd that had begun to gather. Many of the tourists that Ranma had been warned would be there, mingling around with what Ranma thought of as more serious competitors, one of whom was Xiangfei, looking none the worse for wear for how much food she’d put away any longer. A few of those tourists looked as if they were going to take it seriously at least: gymnasts stretching and warming up, or low-tier martial artists doing squats and pushups as they stared up at the polls. A few hopped up and down on the sand, frowning a little, before resolutely banishing their fears of what falling might feel like.

Beside him, Mai had just finished typing a reply, the gist of which Ranma couldn’t make out on her screen before she put the phone away in one of her pockets. The only thing he could make out was a heart emoji, and he smirked. You know, I need to get a handle on texting and using my phone at some point. Being able ta contact Shampoo or Mai when we’re apart is too good to ignore.

“Well, it looks as if Shampoo isn’t going to be coming. She said she’s making a lot of progress and wants to transcribe as much as she can before we leave,” Mai sighed, shaking her head. “It would’ve been nice to have her in the crowd along with you.”

“You’re telling me,” Ranma snorted, also a little saddened that Shampoo had decided not to join them for this. Watching Mai perform her own aerial style was probably going to be about as sexy as something could be in public in Ranma’s opinion, but it could also simply be purely fun considering how many other competitors there were. Still, just watching wasn’t Ranma’s style. “If I had known Shampoo would be joining us, I might’ve signed up for this too. But I’ll wager anything that they’re not taking any light applications.”

This turned out to be the case when Ranma asked a moment later. The organizers informed him, not without shocked looks considering his role in the eating competition, that they already had too many competitors. “Frankly, we’re happy that a few of the tourists decided to bow out of the last moment,” one of them admitted. “Sorry, sir.”

“Well, that’s a pity. Dancing on top of those polls would’ve been an interesting time. Heck, if there weren’t so many people around, I’d almost call that kind of thing a date,” Ranma said, while Mai limbered up next to them.

“OOOh, a dance type date? That sounds like fun. I’ve never been the kind to enjoy going to concerts, I’ve always thought they were too loud and too crowded, and far too rowdy in an unpleasant kind of way. The same thing goes for nightclubs. I can appreciate some of the music they play and the décor was interesting the one time I saw inside a nightclub, but in TV shows they’re always seemed too loud, and I think all of them would react badly to the strobing lights.”

Mai thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe mix in something like this competition again later on? Make our own little pole training area, or do you think that would cut out Shampoo a little too much?”

When Ranma nodded to her question about cutting out Shampoo, Mai frowned a little. “Then maybe find a rooftop near a concert, near enough we can make at the music and far enough away that no one notices us, and we can dance the night away just the three of us.”

“Now that’s a nice idea. Although, if you do ever wanna just investigate what a nightclub is really like, we can always break in after hours. Places like that do have after hours, right?”

“Yes, it’s called the daytime,” Mai chortled, then paused as the same announcer from the eating competition shouted for attention from the crowd. She winked at Ranma, then joined the other competitors as they moved forwards into the area marked out by a rope around the dozens of poles stuck into the sand, each of them moving to a different pole.

The area was decently large. Ranma estimated around the size of half a soccer field maybe, and filled with bamboo poles that reminded Ranma again, strongly of the Jusenkyo. Luckily, there was no curse nor spring here, and when the announcer shouted for all of the competitors to jump up onto the polls, practically everyone was able to do so without harming themselves. Only two of the tourists weren’t able to get up onto the pole in the first place, although Ranma had to admit they definitely tried their best. Honestly, he was surprised that so many of the competitors were actually able to do it in the first place, so there was no onus on the two of them in Ranma’s mind.

The rest of the competitors landed on top of their polls, balancing there, with many of them showing the same amount of balancing as Mai did, which again surprised Ranma somewhat. He was also surprised that when the music began, it was an American song, one he recognized, but with Chinese lyrics. The Chinese lyrics really didn’t work with the background music, not quite matching the tempo of the song, and at least one of the tourists laughed hard enough to fall off her pole before the competition could even begin.

She was however allowed to scramble back up on top of it, although her funny bone seemed to have greatly affected her sense of balance. There was a bit of a break before the announcer shouted at the person playing the music to, “Choose something slower to start with, and actually intelligible,” to the laughter of much of the crowd, and then, a new song came on and he bellowed for the contest to start.

As they had been told, the contestants had to keep on moving, and had to not only move but also do so in a ‘graceful manner’ as befit a dance. Something the announcer was quick to pick up on, shouting out the names of this or that contestant when he thought they weren’t moving as gracefully as they should.

Again, Ranma was surprised. Several of the tourists were able to do so relatively well. Two gymnasts in particular, a man and a woman pair, flowed from one pole to another, not even seeming to jump, simply gliding almost, staying together or near one another but not quite touching, as that was against the rules even if you entered as a pair. The rest were able to move well enough. He doubted they’d be able to do so at a faster pace, or if the poles were a little further apart, but at the moment, they were keeping up.

I wonder how many of those tourists actually know about the whole destined lovers and the bells thing, Ranma mused internally, crossing his arms. He tried to watch the whole competition, in particular Xiangfei. He was kind of concerned that the girl would try to throw down somehow with Mai. Even if you weren’t allowed to touch one another in this competition, that probably only meant you couldn’t be caught.

However, no matter how hard he tried to watch the crowd of competitors, he found his eyes zeroing in on Mai.

Mai didn’t move nearly as quickly as some of the other contestants. Her footing didn’t seem to be quite as good as some of the gymnasts, yet it was good enough to help her stay on top of the poles. When she moved, Mai showed all of the flare and spark that came from her family’s style. Instead of simply jumping from one pole to another with the music, she flipped through the air. Instead of jumping up over one frantic contestant about to lose her balance, she did a barrel roll in midair, landing daintily on one foot, slowly twirling in place, her fans appearing as she did.

Mai shifted from that pole to another, twirling again, her fans out, then disappearing as she landed, crouching for a second, almost like she was perching there like a gargoyle, before flipping over to the next one, landing with her hands down, pressing into the top of the pole as she balanced there, her legs straight up, then folding down, before flipping herself upright, her face a mask of concentration as she landed on one foot. All of those moves were things that she had done hundreds, thousands of times before, but doing them as you leapt from one pole barely an inch across to another was another thing entirely.

There was also the fact that she had to dodge the other contestants. This quickly proved to be an issue for many of her opponents. Two in particular smacked into one another midair, their jumps crisscrossing one another, and they fell to the sand with groans of pain.

Those groans and the yell of pain from one of them as he apparently fell on his leg wrong caused another contestant to falter midleap, and instead of jumping across to the next pole, they simply fell off the pole they had already been on. Then, as Mai dodged over another contestant as their paths also crisscrossed, changing trajectory midair and almost seemingly gliding over the man, three others, who had been too busy watching her, fell off of their polls when the judges shouted at them to start moving, none of them able to jump to the nearest open pole.

By the end of the fourth song, about eighteen minutes in, the number of contestants had been whittled down to the point where there were no longer any concerns about midair collisions. Each of the dancers, all of them getting used to the movements, stuck to themselves now, picking out their own separate areas.

Two of the male tourists in particular began to impress Ranma. Not only were they not ogling Mai or the other girls, they seemed concentrated to the point where Ranma could practically feel it from where he was standing in the crowd. One was a martial artist, a practitioner of Pencak Silat if Ranma was any judge (and he was), while the other was the male side of the gymnast pair Ranma had noticed before.

Their movements weren’t anything to write home about, simply jumping from one pole to the other, and they always needed to land and regain their balance for second before moving on, but they were still moving at a relatively brisk pace, keeping in time with the movements of the music. Ranma doubted that if they remained on the pole after the hour was up, they’d be declared winners, as they weren’t exactly doing anything flashy, but they were still there, and that was enough to win Ranma’s respect.

On the other hand, Xiangfei had definitely got into the groove of things by this point. Like Ranma, she seemed completely fine with the amount of food she had taken an earlier, something that the announcer shouted about. “And in that corner by the waves, ladies and gentlemen, is Li Xiangfei. She was a contestant from the eating competition held earlier today. How is she doing this, is anyone’s guess. How was she able to not only put away so much food as to be one of the finalists, but do so without her body showing any sign of it? It’s amazing, magnificent! Could we here in this simple village be seeing the next stage in human evolution?”

That caused Ranma to smirk a little, the line reminding him of an anime he had once seen. So Xiangfei is the Chinese equivalent of that Danish guy from Samurai Champloo? That’s a hilarious image.

Yet as good as Xiangfei was, Ranma’s eyes simply could not keep away from Mai for very long. He watched as she twirled, twisted, jumped, leapt, flowed through the air. She wasn’t quite as at home in the air itself as Ranma was, nor did she have mastery of the Aerial Style like he did, able to stay in the air for long periods of time with the slightest bit of impetus.

Mai certainly had the same flare as Ranma knew he had, and damn was she making it look good! Indeed, a lot of the onlookers were cheering for her now, simply because of how good Mai was doing, with Xiangfei garnering a smaller following, and one of the men still competing drawing most of the girls among the crowd.

Nor was it only the crowd that noticed how Mai was basically upstaging the competition now that she was used to the balance necessary to make a landing on the poles. Xiangfei was also doing the same thing, and quickly began to match her moves.

Yet after a few moments, Xiangfei had to concede the point and she did so far more gracefully than Ranma or Mai would have expected. As she and Mai passed close by one another, she yelled out, “Dammit girl, you’re making this look easy! A rocking body, a hot boyfriend who can eat all that food we ate earlier and not gain a pound, and now you’re good at martial arts too? Are you trying to be an idol like Athena-Laoshi?”

While the name Athena didn’t mean anything to Mai, bar of course the fact that she knew that the name was that given to an ancient Greek goddess, the compliment at least was nice, and she smiled over at the other girl. Shifting, she moved to actually dance alongside Xiangfei’s position for second, the two of them moving from one pole to another almost in sync, with Mai matching her movements to the shorter girls, her ponytail flying behind her. “Actually, I was having a lot of trouble up here at first. If they had demanded that we match our movements to the music, I would’ve been lost for the first few songs, and it would’ve been way worse, if the first few songs were at a faster tempo, like what the organizers are using now. And you’re doing an amazing job too, you know.”

Mai laughed then, twirling back and away from Xiangfei to dodge around one of the boys in the competition. His eyes widened, tracking to one side as she did, his eyes most obviously, to her anyway, locked on her boobs as she moved, so much so that his own jump to the next pole failed. Instead of sticking the landing, he missed to the point where he smacked his shoulder into it as he fell, causing him to cry out in pain and for some of the watching judges to rush forward to help him up as he landed.

“Hot boyfriend thing though I will grant you,” Mai giggled. You have no idea how lucky I am in that area.”

“Alright you’re definitely bragging now! Come on, girl!” Xiangfei shouted back.

“No, that was legitimately more admitting than bragging,” Mai answered back. I don’t know what I did to have Amaterasu bless me as she has with Shampoo and Ranma accepting my feelings, but I am never going to be anything less than grateful.

The two of them kept up a dialogue as they moved, with Mai introducing herself to the other girl, and mentioning her martial arts style, and the fact that she, Ranma and Shampoo were on a training journey. “Well, we call it a journey, but frankly, none of us are looking to settle down anytime soon, so this journey might last us a lifetime. There’s so much to see in this world and I’m looking forward to seeing as much of it as I can.”

“Heh, me and Kensou are on something of the same kind of journey. Master Gentsai thought we both needed some more knowledge of the world, and with Athena off doing her idol thing, he decided we could use that time to ‘enrich’ ourselves,” Xiangfei mused, almost fumbling the next jump, but landing it. She then took a page out of Mai’s book as she flipped through the air landing hands first on the next pole, then twirled several times in midair before landing on the next one, foot first.

Eventually, the other contestants’ endurance began to flag. They flubbed jumps that they had been making earlier, and more than one of them ate sand. Soon, only the one man and the two girls were left, and eventually, he too fell, his foot slipping off the side of a pole as he landed, sending him crashing sideways into the sand below, where his partner ran over to help him to his feet.

As an American song began to play in the background, the announcer shouted, We’re coming up on time ladies and gentlemen, and there are still two contestants remaining! It’s going down to the wire. Who is going to win the prize, the prize of the chance at eternal love with their destined one as chosen by the bells of Mao Mo Lin?!”

His words rang through the background music and the cheers of the crowd and Xiangfei blinked. “Wait, what’s all that about?”

“You didn’t look into the prize before entering the competition? There’s this whole history about these little bells they hand out. They are supposedly trinkets, but apparently there’s some legend about loves seeking one another out over destiny or something,” Mai said, not having memorized the story, and not really caring for it either.

Xiangfei on the other hand, paled noticeably. While she didn’t study the mystic/psychic side of the Dragon Spirit School, she knew more than enough about that side of things to know that curses and what most people might think of as magic did exist. “What the heck?! Oh heck no, I am not interested in getting near anything that might have magic in it.”

“I honestly don’t think there’s anything to those stories,” Mai laughed. “It wouldn’t be the strangest thing if there was, but I don’t think there is. Plus, I was told you can refuse to take the bell if you win.”

“Yeah, but you’re not exactly an expert are you? Even if you can refuse the bells, I’m not going to take that chance,” Xiangfei said, shaking her head and hopping off of the pole she had been standing on. Besides, I know Kensou said something about there being some kind of weird energy coming from somewhere in this town, and I’d rather not run into that kind of thing, even with him around to help.

Along with his actual psychic powers, Kensou was more open to sensing spiritual energy of all sorts. Kensou had sensed something strange within the town the moment they arrived but hadn’t been able to localize where it came from. The pair then got sidetracked when they saw the posters about the eating competition, and then Cat and the Hot Coal Contest after that.

Knowing now that there was a local tale about this kind of thing, well, she was no longer interested in winning. What a letdown! Admittedly, this competition didn’t have any cash prize, but still, I thought those bells looked like they would go great with my normal hairstyle.

With that, Xiangfei hopped off of her pole, landing lightly on her feet, before dropping onto her rear with a laugh. Kensou moved out of the crowd, causing Ranma to twitch, as he hadn’t even noticed the other guy arrived. However, he ignored the pair of them, watching as Mai did one final leap from one pole to the next, before hopping off to face the announcer as he shouted, “The winner is the gorgeous and beautiful girl from Japan, Mai Shiranui!”

There was a lot of cheering, and some people moved through the crowd to try to backslap Mai in congratulations, but Ranma reached her before they could, putting an arm around her shoulders. “That was incredible to watch. And you’re right, I think that kind of thing would make for both a good date, and good practice. Maybe while Shampoo is throwing things at us, or we’re forced to attack her in some way? Er, in training I mean, not on the date.”

“Heh, sounds like fun, whichever idea we go for,” Mai giggled, putting an arm around his waist, laying her head on his shoulder.

The announcer noticed and called out a second later. “Well folks, it looks as if this young couple doesn’t need the extra power of the bells, but Ms. Shiranui still won fair and square.” He gestured, and a priest came forward, holding a small box in his hands.

The priest was an older man whose head was completely bald, although considering the worry lines on his face and the way his shoulder stooped, Ranma couldn’t tell if that was from age, worry, or ascetism. Regardless, he looked a little harried, and his eyes flicked to Ranma with something that could have been annoyance maybe, before his face settled into a smile as he held out the box to Mai.

There was only one bell in the box, which caused Mai to frown. It looked like silver or burnished steel, she wasn’t certain which and was small enough to fit in the palm of her hand or be tied into a girl’s hair, but didn’t look remarkable. Which matches what we were told earlier about the whole bell thing, but shouldn’t there be two of them? “I thought that the prize were two bells, one for the person who won, and one that he or she would give to their chosen lover.”

The announcer harrumphed a bit, shaking his head. “Normally, it would just be the woman searching for a husband, but no, the mayor and his council decided we should open the competition to men too. I’ll admit that it worked out well last year to bring in more interest even if none of the men lasted more than half an hour, but it’s still unusual to me.”

He shook himself before answering Mai’s question. “I don’t know where you got that information, but that’s actually kind of false. These bells are tied to bells held at the temple. You have to go there to pick up the second one.”

“I’d rather just give this bell back to you, frankly,” Mai answered bluntly. “I entered for the fun and the training, not because of the story behind the whole finding your destined one story.”

At that, the priest who was holding up the bell seemed to twitch a little, looking even more haggard than before. “B, be that as it may, I must insist that you at least stop by the temple to enter your name into our records as a winner. You can have the bell and then, if you wish, but we like to keep track of the winners of this competition, even if they don’t desire to take the prize. You write down your name, and you ring the temple’s bell. T, that’s it. You don’t have to take the smaller bell paired bell with you.”

Mai’s eyes narrowed a little, while Ranma didn’t see any big deal about that .Even if he thought the guy was acting nervous for some reason, he put it down to the priest being face-to chest with Mai. For her part, Mai thought he was a little pushy, but she had known priests who didn’t like things to be out of place or change overmuch, so she understood. “Fine, we’ll be by tomorrow morning. It’s getting late, after all.”

This was true, as it was about nine at night by this point. Unlike what they had been told that afternoon, the contest had lasted for two hours, testing the endurance of the contestants as well as their agility and balance.

The priest looked as if he wanted them to come with him now, but nodded, and stepped back, leaving Mai still in possession of the bell. The priest’s eyes were locked on it, and as Mai and Ranma turned away, and almost desperate look came over his face. Please, please! Let this one take. I know it’s blasphemous, but I can’t keep putting up with that stupid cat any longer!

For a little while, Mai was subsumed by well-wishers and back slappers, but eventually, the crowd began to dissipate taking with it Kensou and Xiangfei, as well as several of the judges and the priest. Soon after that, Mai was able to get away from the last well-wishers, a few of the tourists who wanted her to join up with them. Apparently, they were part of a traveling circus that was practically world-famous, and they had come to this competition fully expecting to win it, but having been shown up by Mai, they wanted to recruit her instead.

It sounded like fun to Mai, and if Ranma, Shampoo and Mai didn’t have their own ship, and their own plans, she might’ve been tempted. But as it was, she laughingly refused, stating that she was more into martial arts than just gymnastics and performing for a crowd.

With Ranma walking hand-in-hand, they made their way up towards the hotel. They walked slowly, simply enjoying one another’s company, with Mai pulling out her phone and texting Shampoo to see if she was back at the hotel.

Neither lover noticed that they were being watched from a distant rooftop. Nor could even Ranma have seen the faint glow of a phone from this far away.

A moment later, Shampoo responded, and Mai frowned a little. “Well, it looks as if Shampoo is nearly done with what she was doing, apparently they were able to not only start translating one of the scrolls, but also figure out a way to preserve the scrolls when we take them out of their containers, but they don’t have some of the ingredients for the concoction they’ll need. She was sent to the temple to ask, and was given the runaround for a bit but is on her way back now. Do you think we should go and meet her?”

Ranma thought for a moment, then nodded firmly. “Yeah, I don’t think you know, going back to the hotel and um, starting the night’s festivities without her would be all that kind you know? Honestly, at this point Shampoo’s the only one who’s been doing real work today.”

“Hey now, that competition was hard!” Mai whined, shaking her head. “A time or two I actually hurt my hands when I did handstands on those bamboo poles. We need to do some more targeted toughness training. And at first a lot of those moves I was doing were a lot harder than they might’ve looked.”

“Heh, sure, Miss Swan, I believe you,” Ranma teased. “But yeah, let’s head over in that direction. Heck, you can get this whole signing your name down on the books of the temple and ringing their bell out of the way too. That way we can leave first thing in the morning… or whenever we actually wake up.”

Mai blinked, “Miss Swan? Is that a ballet reference, because I don’t think any of the moves I did on those poles was ballet worthy.”

The two of them began to work their way back down the hill, heading deeper into the town as Ranma laughed, shaking his head. “No, it’s in reference to how graceful and cool swans look like when they’re on the water. But when you look underneath, there’s a whole lot of paddling going on. In your case, there was a whole lot of thinking and worrying. Same thing.”

“…eh… Three out of ten,” Mai said, shaking her head. “I get where you were going with that joke, but it just wasn’t all that funny. Applicable, sure, but not funny.”

Ranma mimed being hit in the chest, which Mai complied with a second later, her fist thumping into his chest with enough force to send him stumbling, causing both of them to laugh. Ranma then caught her hand in his, bringing it up to kiss the back of it, before pulling her into a sideways hug. Such things would’ve never even occurred to him to do before he and Shampoo started dating/traveling together. Since then, Shampoo had slowly eroded Ranma’s resistance to displays of affection of all sorts, and since there was no one around at the moment, Ranma felt fully willing to show such affection.

Despite having the twin competitions, the hotel and a few other places designed to attract visitors, this town was still mainly a town that made its living through fishing and farming. As such, when the night came, most of the town shut down. The exception was near the port, which Mai and Ranma left behind quickly.

The quietness of the rest of the town was somewhat startling in comparison to the noise of the crowd and everything else with the competition, but welcome for all that. The pair of them walked onto the night, not hurrying, simply basking in the silence after so many hours of music and revelry. Neither Ranma nor Mai or Shampoo were the type to enjoy such scenes for very long, if at all. This moment was made better by the fact they were together, something that Mai still reveled in and which made Ranma smile, especially considering they were on their way to meet his first lady love.

The silence of the night was so nice to that it took them both a while to realize that perhaps it was a little too quiet. Indeed, when they realized something was going on, it wasn’t the darkness of the village at night or the quietness that warned them. Rather, it was Ranma’s sixth sense, warning him that someone was watching him. He paused in place as they turned onto the road that would take them up another hill to the temple, staring all around them for a moment as Mai, pausing too, looked around in confusion, before her eyes hardened. “Is someone there?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Ranma drawled, stepping to one side, letting his rope dart fall out of his ki space. Grasping the end of it he began twirling it slowly, staring all around them.

Before either could say anything more, blasts of energy erupted from either side of them.

Those blasts of energy were wild and massive. Three of them looked almost shaped, zipping through the air, the energy at the end of the attack formed to resemble that of a dragon’s head at the front, something that had Ranma staring in shock, but not for long enough that the energy blasts hit him. Similarly, Mai ducked to one side as a more esoteric looking beam of energy flashed through where she had been.

It wasn’t shaped at all but was at least twice the size of the slimmer dragon-headed beams. “What the hell?! Who is strong enough to throw out blasts of energy like that right at the start of a fight?”

“Someone who wanted to go full force from the start? Maybe someone hoping to finish this quickly,” Mai supplied, as the two attackers appeared out of the darkness, their bodies sparkling with dark purple energy.

“Like lambs you have come to the slaughter,” one of them said, staring not at Ranma as Ranma had supposed. After all, being attacked like this out of the blue was something far more in keeping with his own adventures than Mai’s before they met.

The second attacker’s words though threw the idea that Ranma was the main target of this assault overboard. “We have need of the woman. You, pigtailed warrior from Nippon, may excuse yourself. But if you continue to stand with her, you will die. While we need her alive to drain, your life has no inherent value to us.”

The strangely arrogant phrasing and the accent of the words meant that Ranma didn’t quite understand what was being said for a few moments, but when he did, he snorted, shaking his head firmly. “If you think I’m just going to stand aside as you attack Mai-chan, then you are stupider than a rock!”

Even before he had finished speaking, Ranma attacked, launching his rope dart forward with punishing force, although he was unsurprised to see the attack dodged at this range. Still, that hadn’t been the point. The point had been to cover Mai, who twirled around Ranma’s position, leaping up high as she launched her fans towards the two attackers.

Those fans erupted into flame midair, and she shouted out one of her special techniques even as they multiplied. “Burst Fan!”

Despite there now being two dozen fans in the air, the attackers, who had to be brothers given how they were dressed, dodged easily, launching further energy attacks. This in turn let Ranma close the distance. His rope dart whirling around his wrist and forearm, he sent it sideways it towards one of the attackers, having closed with the other, lashing out with a kick. The rope dart disrupted the other man’s ki attack long enough for Mai to get in close, and the four of them began to exchange punches and kicks, with the two attackers still lashing out with more energy blasts at point blank range, making Ranma wonder where the hell they were getting so much energy from.

Still, Ranma could see their moves coming, the pair telegraphing them just a little bit. “So, like, what’s this all about?” he quipped. “Did Mai’s family wrong yours in the past, are you a fiancé looking to ‘claim’ her, or what?”

Ranma got a blow through the man’s defenses at that point, only to frown. The guy stumbled back from the impact, but didn’t even release a huff of air, let alone anything else. Fuck, don’t tell me this guy is as durable as Yamazaki?

Barely dodging a strike that would have seared his head off his shoulders, Ranma caught the man in the side with a kick, before he took a kick to the head that sent him backwards. Using his rope dart, Ranma pulled himself to the side, grabbing and whirling away from the second attacker with May in his arms. She lashed out at both attackers, fireball-fans exploding under their return blasts of ki. “What the hell?! How are they throwing out so many ki blasts so fast?!”

“No idea, but we better come up with a plan quick,” Mai grumbled. “I wasn’t getting anywhere against the older looking asshole. I couldn’t even get one strike through his defenses.”

“I did, and there’s something weird going on there. I thought at first it was some kind of Toughness Training that let him tank my attacks, but it wasn’t. I felt his ribs go, but it was like it didn’t matter at all. No blood, no yell of pain, no reaction at all. He was effected by the momentum of the hits but doesn’t seem to feel the injuries at all, let alone be slowed down by them.”

Mai grimaced at that, but before she could respond, another pair of ki blasts came from one of the attackers.

The two lovers parted at that point with Mai rolling to the right, and Ranma leaping up into the air over the attacks, snarling in fury as a thought occurred to him. If these two are attacking us here, then where’s Shampoo? Did they do something to her?!

At that moment, Shampoo was actually just waking up from her beating-induced unconsciousness. She found herself half-naked and tied up, which would have been bad, but she also found herself alone. Better, the beating had left her with enough basic ki to call upon. Pulling on it felt weird, and the sliver of ki Shampoo called to appear underneath one of the zip ties came out instead as a diffuse wave, with no kind of cutting edge to it as she had learned to create during the training with Master Nawa. A second attempt had her ki blade appearing out of her palm, again with no cutting element. Shampoo could instead feel the zip tie starting to melt, making her hiss in pain at the touch of the red-hot plastic. “…This might take a while.”

Back in the fight, Mai was able to respond to the incoming attack with her fireballs, leery of getting close again, but Ranma had yet to really develop a long-range ki attack he could use without any buildup. However, Ranma did have his rope dart, and used it to pull himself sideways by wrapping the edge around a nearby lamppost. Whirling around it, Ranma launched himself towards one of the attackers from the side, the older one in this case.

The older one turned in his direction as the other faced towards Mai. The pair then held up their hands, blasting out further energy blasts, forcing Mai to leap away. Ranma, however, tanked the blast, groaning in pain as it struck, but he survived it, letting it carry him back into a wall to one side. Shifting the momentum upwards, Ranma was in the air again.

This time he was able to close, his foot lashing out into the side of the older attacker. This sent the man stumbling back, and Ranma remained in the air, the momentum of that kick hitting easily turned to serving his purpose, letting Ranma remain in midair. This seemed to confuse the guy with lightning bolts in his hair, and his attempt to grab at Ranma didn’t work at all, letting Ranma grab at his forearm in turn. Ranma lashed out with several kicks at Amaguriken speed, but even as the man reeled back, he sneered at Ranma’s attempts.

Even losing a tooth didn’t seem to matter again, and Ranma’s eyes widened, as there didn’t seem to be any blood even as that tooth flew. “What the fuck?”

Ranma shock at that was enough to break his concentration, and the next thing he knew he was being pulled down into a rising uppercut that crashed into his chest. The hit was accompanied by a blast of ki which reminded him of Ken’s attack back when they spared, only far stronger. The hit hurled Ranma away to slam into and through the outer wall of the temple.

Meanwhile, Mai had her hands full with the second attacker. Like the older one, the somewhat baby-faced younger man could threw out ki blasts as if they were going out of style. But unlike Ranma, Mai could sense the buildup of energy coming.

Weird, she mused, dodging one such attack, and frowning a bit as she concentrated on that sense rather than trying to read her enemy’s body language. She couldn’t tell much from the merely physical. There’s something odd there, their attacks don’t build up through their bodies as they should. Are these attacks even simple ki? Where is the energy coming from, and…

Darting forward instead of back as she had before, Mai sliced one fan along the inner arm of her enemy as she dodged around his strike, ignoring the blast of energy that flew by her. Her attack was only skin-deep and couldn’t really do more than draw blood but to her surprise, even that didn’t happen. The wound remained there for a moment, but no blood came out, and a second later, black-purple energy of some kind began to knit the skin together.

Not regenerate the wound. Knit it together, pulling the skin together like sutures made out of energy. What the heck?!

Kicking out hard, Mai caught the man as he charged, catching him in the groin, and nothing happened, just the man barely grunting and being pushed back by the attack. “Okay now that’s just freaky!” And I for sure didn’t feel a cup of any kind there!

Forced to retreat from another blast of energy, Mai leaped up over the outer wall of the temple. It was small, but well cared for, although it didn’t look overly used, either. A small pond lay to one side, in which Ranma was slowly pushing herself to her feet, grimacing, while in the front of the temple a large temple that matched the one Mai still had on her belt sat. There was no sign of the priest, which at the moment, Mai was very thankful for. “So, precisely at what point did we lose control here?”

“We weren’t in control at any point, Mai-chan,” Ranma retorted. “Have you noticed something unusual about our enemies? Like, beyond even that Yamazaki asshat bizarre?”

“They’re jiangshi,” Mai answered, shaking her head as she realized what they were facing, although knowing they didn’t have time to go into a full explanation, she dumbed it down quickly. “Think of them as immortal zombies. Undead.”

“Well, at least I know we don’t need to hold back,” Ranma answered, her eyes wide as the two attackers hoped over the temple’s outer wall, instantly lashing out with their weird energy attacks. Both Mai and Ranma dodged, but the two closed in, trying to squeeze the pair, cutting down on their room to maneuver.

This didn’t work very well, as both Mai and her currently female paramour were far too mobile. It did work in separating the pair, but Ranma was once more able to close with one of their attackers, the younger one this time. A ki blast flashed over her head, the youngster having aimed high, probably to keep Ranma from taking to the air. That was smart, but Ranma’s rope dart flashed out, grabbing the red-garbed attacker’s leg. Before he could launch another attack, Ranma pulled, and the attacker found his back slamming into the ground.

A second later, a blast of ki nearly hit Ranma but she dodged to the side. A spinning kick was blocked, but Ranma grinned. “Undertow!” As he had done in the fight against Ryuji, Ranma’s ki acted like a siphon, pulling in the ki of his enemy. Indeed, it seemed to work even better than he expected, as if the enemy’s power was flowing better into Ranma’s female form than the Dark Hado infected energy of the Mad Dragon Had.

Regardless, Ranma wasn’t so interested in taking in her enemy’s ki just then. The angle was all wrong to instantly shift from Undertow to Blue Burst. The technique worked in gluing their bodies together for a brief instant before she cancelled the technique, lunging into a punch, catching the off-balance youth in the side of the head hurling him away before he could recover his balance.

As Ranma had expected, this didn’t seem to matter much, and Ranma acknowledged the fact he’d have to switch entirely to Amaguriken type attacks from now on. However, while the blow might not have mattered at all to his enemy, he was still furious as he pushed his way out of the outer wall of the temple, having put another hole in the construct. “You, you dare! I know not what you are, woman or man, cursed or no, but I, Qin Hailong, will not allow this effrontery!”

With a roar, the youth charged in, his whole body glowing with dark purple energy, a full-scale blast of ki flashing out like a battering ram ahead of him. Ranma was able to dodge the blast, but this time it was Hailong who closed with Ranma, seemingly too furious to simply keep his distance and batter Ranma down with ki attacks.

That was just fine to the redhead, who blocked the first few strikes, using Undertow in minute instances. This was something that Ranma had practiced against Shampoo and Mai on the ship, and she had come a long way since first ‘perfecting’ the first technique of his (at the time) Blue Wave attack back against Yamazaki. However, this time, Hailong was aware of what was going on, and quickly pulled his energy back to himself.

As that energy was in fact a jiangshi’s very being on a level that even a normal person’s ki would not be, he was able to do so, even pulling the energy back out of Ranma’s body, causing Ranma to grit her teeth in pain, as the process of that energy returning to Hailong wasn’t pleasant to say the least. Yet it slowed him down, and Ranma, her whole body moving at Amaguriken level speed now was moving far, far faster.

Better for Ranma, Hailong wasn’t an instinct based fighter like Yamazaki. Ranma could say yes style there, one based off of strong punches and counters without any combination moves. With that knowledge came the ability to counter it. The jiangshi began to be pummeled, despite his glowing aura. A series of jabs got through his defenses, hammering into his diaphragm, then a chop, or rather a series of chops crashed into his neck and collarbone. Even as that arm became almost useless and the man’s head almost began to hang off his shoulders unnaturally, however, the jiangshi lashed out with a point-blank ki blast, which crashed into Ranma’s stomach, picking her up and hurling her away.

Ranma found herself slamming into and through the wall of the temple this time, rolling to a stop in front of a giant furry demon statue. Luckily, just the sight of a statue of a furry demon wasn’t enough to cause her to panic, although the sight of Hailong coming through the wall after him, his body already repaired and a sneer on his face did not make the redhead very happy at present. “I have taken your measure now, cursed one. I will not be caught by surprise again.”

“We’ll see about that, asshole,” Ranma grunted, pushing herself to her feet not as an attempt to just get to her feet, but in a lunge, catching the suddenly charging Hailong by surprise. Both of their blows missed, but Hailong’s attempt to redirect his blow allowed Ranma to push up off his fist into the air.

As the battle between Hailong and Ranma resumed in the temple, outside, Mai was finding it harder than Ranma to get a handle on her enemy as they exchanged blows. The older, blue-garbed attacker was somewhat slower to resort to overwhelming force, but when he launched a ki attack, it was far better aimed. His defense and speed were also equal to Mai’s, which had her taking several hard blows from the man when she closed.

Despite this, like Ranma, Mai knew that keeping the fight close was probably her best bet at victory, and she kept it close for several moments, the two of them exchanging punches, kicks and knee and elbow strikes, with Mai getting the better of her enemy on a pure skill basis, although her attacks truly didn’t seem to be doing much. Worse, Mai’s spiritually enhanced fan-based attacks just weren’t capable yet of doing enough damage to matter, not to a jiangshi. Fire wouldn’t take on their bodies, explosions just threw the blue-clad man around, doing nothing, not even singing his clothing.

No, Mai slowly realized that if she wanted to win this fight, she needed to do a lot of damage in a very short amount of time.

Luckily, Mai had her fans and manriki. Working on creating ki spaces in her pockets for when she couldn’t rely on the Shiranui School’s Boob Window version had been a great little pastime on the ship, and now even as the blue-clad jiangshi tore one fan apart with his hand, Mai’s other hand pulled another out of her pocket. I could wish I had worn long sleeves, but needs must! She thought, the fan coming up in an arc.

Like Shampoo, Mai had learned a lot about short-range ki shaping. That is, she had learned to give something an edge and then enhance that edge with ki-infused cutting force or to create short blades of ki during her training at Musubime Osoroshi Hotojutsu. This she did now, and when the tip of her closed fan came up into the wrist of her opponent, the glowing fang of ki at its tip stabbed deeply into undead flesh. There was no blood, but the blow carried that arm out of position, allowing Mai to get in a kick that blasted into the man’s center.

The man, having been pulled a little off balance, went stumbling backwards, allowing the ki fang in his wrist to do still more damage, tearing out a line that went into the man’s palm. But then a short blast of ki from the older attacker’s other hand caught Mai, hurling her back with a cry of pain. “ARGH!”

She rolled as she hit, staggering blearily, noting idly that she had been hurled back out of the temple. That fucking hurt! Mai had only gone through the toughness training during the winter, she, the two abandoned Tendo girls, Ranma and Shampoo had stayed in the state park. As such, she wasn’t as durable as either of her lovers, so that ki blast had hurt like a bitch. I am going to be a walking bruise by the time this is over.

Two fans were in her hands a second later as the blue clad attacker came out of the temple. She waited, crouching, then dodged to the side, keeping her movements to a minimum to let the attack pass her by. Need to close again, Mai thought, noting the wounds to the man’s hand wasn’t healing as well as they should. The man hadn’t seemed to notice but it was something.

“You are only delaying the inevitable, woman. I have need of your yin energy, and I will have it,” he growled. “Qin Konglong will return to full life, and then all the Middle Kingdom will tremble!”

Mai dodged another attack rushing forward, then rolling to the side before kicking off the gravel of the road to avoid two more blasts. “Oh joy, you’re not only a jiangshi but you’re a megalomaniacal one. What a lovely combination!”

Gritting her teeth, Mai enlarged one of her fans via her ki, a technique that, again, she had learned from Master Nawa. In Musubime Osoroshi Hotojutsu it was used to simply lengthen or otherwise enhance the rope weapons they used, but the same skill worked just as well on Mai’s fans, although it took a good deal of effort, practically when Mai had to dodge her enemy’s attacks at the same time. Imbuing them with cutting force was also not very easy, and Mai was only able to do so to one of her fans before she was forced to launch it forward then jump up and over another incoming attack.

Konglong held up his wounded hand, before blinking, only seeming to notice it was still injured now. Regardless, he still used it to bat her fan away, or rather tried to. He lost a few fingers to its cutting edge, and the surprise of that opened him up to the following trio of Shadow Fans Mai had launched behind her initial attack. Though they only impacted with a third of the force of a real hurled fan, they still caused him to stagger.

Then Mai was coming down on the man with all the panache of a hunting hawk. Her manriki in hand, she lashed out with punishing blows against his head and shoulders’ forcing him further back, before dropping to her knees to duck under a ki blast from the man’s other hand. However, she ate a blow from the man’s knee, which segued into a roundhouse kick before she could recover. Her manriki blocked the kick, but the momentum of it sent her skittering to one side, before a wave-like ki blast nearly caught her. Only a desperate roll to the side kept her from being nailed by the attack.

A moment later, Mai dropped two smoke pellets from her pocket. The smoke pellets enveloped the area in smoke, allowing Mai to get to her feet and charge forward to where her opponent had been a moment before. Mai had noticed that both jiangshi were far more sedentary fighters than Mai or Ranma before this, even more so than Shampoo, who was the only purely land-based fighter of the trio.

As she charged, Mai suddenly had the same thought that Ranma had earlier. Wait, if, fuck, if these two were waiting here, does that mean those texts from Shampoo’s phone weren’t from her?! Where is she, then?!

The next second Mai’s eyes widened as a blast taking to Ranma’s Blue Burst technique boomed out from Konglong. It caught Mai mid thrust, hurling her backwards with another cry of pain, her manriki hurtling another way as her hands opened convulsively.

When she landed, Mai found herself where the fight had begun. She even saw where she had dropped the little silver bell, not that this was the most important thing right now. No, that lay with the amount of pain Mai was in currently. Holy flipping fuck that hurt! She groaned, trying to push herself to her feet and failing. Her body didn’t feel as if she had any broken bones, but the overall damage was as if someone had just tossed her off a twenty-story building.

Yes, that had happened once. Martial Arts competitions often happened in weird places. Yes, it had hurt.

Even so, she palmed the bell, a plan forming in her mind. Mai played possum for a second, trying and very obviously failing to get to her feet as she gathered her ki. She didn’t look up as heavy footfalls announced Konglong coming towards her. Instead, she waited.

“Your Yin energy is mine!” Konglong growled out only to cut off as he was forced to dodge something hurled at his head.

The next instant Mai had surged up from the ground into a shoulder lunge, which caught the man with a boom, her gathered ki pushing her to well above Amaguriken speeds. Normally, this move would be accompanied by Mai surrounding herself with an aura of fire but she had seen already that her spirit fire had no impact on the jiangshi. Thus, she had simply used her ki to add to her momentum and striking power, the ki gathered over her shoulder exploding on impact.

The attack hurled Konglong backward, but Mai didn’t let up. Using the momentum from the hit, she pushed herself off and into the air, then, using a technique she had learned from Ranma, seemed to almost bounce off a portion of the air. “Musasabi no Mai!”

Her elbow struck with all the force that Mai could impart, and once more Konglong was hurled off his feet. The jiangshi tried to lash out with a blast of power in midair from both his hands, but the injured hand didn’t channel the energy was well as it should have, weakening the attack severely and even as it struck Mai, who was unable to dodge in time, Konglong felt her leg connect again with his shoulder. She had been aiming for his arm, but her aim shifted as she saw the blast from Konglong coming and tried to dodge at the same time. “RAGGH!!”

Konglong hit the ground with enough force to cause a crater, the impact accompanied by a loud booming noise that reverberated around the area, but Mai, in turn was picked up out of the air and hurled back towards the temple. She bounced off the top of the wall in an uncontrolled tumble, landing on its other side, one of her legs almost undoubtedly broken.

Ugh, now would be a really good time to have developed some ki healing of my own! Mai groaned.

While Mai had made inroads into that automatic usage of ki, she hadn’t yet gotten to the point where she could heal from such things. Fuck, come on, come on, get up!

Before she could push through the pain of a broken thigh, Konglong appeared, hopping up and over the wall. His shoulder looked much the worse for wear, Mai’s strike having hit with enough force to shatter not just break his toughened bones. Yet even as he moved towards her, the jiangshi’s energy began it’s work, pulling the shattered remnants of his shoulder together like a jigsaw puzzle. “Well… fuck.”

Konglong snarled at her, his hands glowing with energy, before a large, make shift mace composed of a street lamp and a chunk of concrete came out of the sky like a meteor, slamming into his back and sending him hurling forward. A second later, Shampoo, snarling like a tigress, landed on the top of the temple’s outer wall, her eyes flashing.

Mai stared at her lover, delight filling her for a moment at seeing that Shampoo was alive, before that segued into worry as she saw that not only was Shampoo’s clothing in even worse disrepair than Mai’s - she hadn’t really cared to notice, but the ki blasts of her enemy had occasionally had a fiery tinge to them, burning segments of her clothing away so that it looked like her sports pants and shirt had been burned away, up to both her sleeves and most of her shirt’s midriff being just gone– but that her body was a mass of bruises, visible even in the light of the moon above and the few lights around the area. “Sham-chan, are you okay?!”

“Mai-Airen, you should look to yourself first. At least I’ve got four fully working limbs,” Shampoo retorted, hopping over to her and standing in front of Mai for a second as she looked to where Konglong had been thrown.

“You’ve got a point,” Mai grimaced, trying to get to her feet again, hopping on one foot essentially. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do much but provide long range cover. And my normal fire and explosive type attacks don’t do anything. We need to pile on the damage, override Konglong and his companion’s spirits. Do enough damage, and they won’t be able to inhabit those bodies anymore.”

“It sounds like you know more about these attackers than I figured out before they knocked me out. I feel… off-balance, a bit wonky, almost, but I’ve still got endurance to spare, and my bruises aren’t nearly as bad now as they were when I woke up. Just don’t expect me to do any ki tricks. My control’s fried for some reason. I could barely form a cutting edge an inch wide, and that took me a good fifteen minutes, and gave me a headache something fierce,” Shampoo grumbled, before both girls whirled towards the temple, as there was a blast of blue energy within.

A moment later, Ranma was sent hurtling out of the temple, a segment of yet another of its walls shattering as she passed through it, slamming to the ground nearby. The redhead rolled with it, hopping to her feet a moment later. Despite blood seeping from numerous cuts and her clothing being even more tattered than Mai’s, she seemed to be in fighting shape.

The same could not be said for his opponent, Hailong. As he followed his opponent out of the ruined temple, a monk hiding behind him, his eyes wide, Mai and Shampoo alike saw that his right side and much of his right thigh were just gone. There didn’t seem to be enough flesh and bone for the undead energy of the jiangshi to knit it back together. Instead, that energy had simply filled in the hole, so to speak, a pulsing web of dark purple energy just holding Hailong’s body together.

“You… you have made me use more energy than I look to gain from draining your ponytailed slattern!” Hailong howled, as Konglong pushed himself to his feet, his own body slowly being knitted back together. “I will eat your fucking soul, harlot!”

“Huh, no longer caring about if I’m really a guy or girl, huh?” Ranma grunted, his eyes flicking over Shampoo, a wide smile of relief coming to her face. “Hey, Shampoo, let me guess, trouble came knocking?”

Whatever quip Shampoo might have made was interrupted as both jiangshi leaped to attack, and two more newcomers arrived on the scene. Xiangfei and Kensou charged in through one of the holes in the small temple’s outer wall, and to Ranma and Mai’s surprise, Kensou attacked almost immediately. Balls of light blue- and purple-colored bolts flew from his hands as an aura the same color enveloped him. Those attacks were launched towards Konglong, who hastily dodged or battered them aside with his own dark purple glowing hands, but once more, Mai noticed that one of those hands didn’t seem to be funneling energy as well as the other.

Shampoo also saw that, and her grunt of satisfaction had Mai raising an eyebrow at the girl through the pain of her shattered thigh. However, neither of them had time to exchange information as Kensou shouted, “What are we dealing with here? I can sense some kind of spiritual presence coming from both of them and something else nearby, but that’s all I can tell,” while lashing out with small balls of blue and light purple bolts of energy.

That was actually a lot more than he had been able to tell at a distance. After the Cat and the Hot Coal Contest, Kensou and Xiangfei had headed out to where they had ‘parked’ their van in the outskirts of town. They had been discussing what to do to earn money to continue their journey when someone began throwing around a ton of spiritual energy within the town. It had taken Kensou a bit to figure out where and then even longer for the pair to travel through the town. Although, thankfully the locals who were near enough to hear the noise going on had decided to stay indoors, which at least meant no civilians, well-meaning or just gawking, had gotten underfoot just yet bar the temple’s lone priest.

“Two jiangshi, both of them powerful, and nasty. We need to keep doing enough damage so they can no longer sustain their connection to the corpses they took over,” Mai shot back.

“Two? Fine, good,” Kensou breathed a tiny bit easier, knowing that whatever third spirit he could sense wasn’t part of this night’s business. On the other hand… Two fucking jiangshi?! Where is Athena-Laoshi when we need her? Or better yet, Master Gentsai!”

Despite his misgivings, Kensou continued to pepper the two jiangshi with light blue and purple bolts of psychic energy. As his attacks were closer to the same wavelength, so to speak as the undead horror’s own power, they actually hurt more than the pure ki attacks Ranma and the others had been using up to this point, despite being nowhere near as powerful as Ranma’s Blue Burst.

However, Konglong had just about enough of being attacked with impunity at this point. HE responded with a roar, blasting out towards Kensou with an attack so wide that Kensou couldn’t dodge. He was forced to try to jump over the attack, and couldn’t quite reach the height to do so.

The attack slammed into Kensou’s legs like a runaway cart, upending Kensou for a second, and causing him to feel as if he’d sunburned his legs pretty badly, searing away most of his pants, at the same time but doing no real damage. Ranma, in contrast, leaped over the same attack that would otherwise have also hit him.

Meanwhile, Xiangfei, who would otherwise have been caught on the fringe of that attack, leapt inside the temple, rolling as she hit, coming up next to the priest. She couldn’t imbue her attacks with more than basic ki and knew that doing so would be less than useless against an undead monster. Instead, she concentrated on getting the one civilian in the area out of there. And if any other civilians, like police or whatever are going to start responding to this, which I really think they should be any moment now, I can stop them before they become casualties! The young girl thought to herself as she heaved the priest to his feet, despite his quaking legs. “Come on old-timer, let’s get you out of here!”

“I would resent being called old, but I fully agree with everything else you just said!” the middle-aged man retorted, his voice more squeak than anything else. He allowed Xiangfei to help him along, his legs so badly he probably wouldn’t have been able to support himself from the sheer amount of energies that were being exchanged outside.

Outside, Mai was unable to dodge away as Hailong closed attempting to grab onto her, a wild vicious snarl on his face and a desire to drain her yin energy to make keeping himself within the corpse of his descendent easier. When he went to grab her, a heavy needle made of a shard of stone slammed into his forearm. He pulled back, thrusting out a punch that caught Shampoo in the jaw, sending her skittering back.

Grimacing, Mai hopped up onto her foot, then lashed out with a mule kick, catching the man in the center of his chest before she landed back on her foot, hopping there for a second, her other leg almost completely useless thanks to the break in her thigh bone. Luckily, Mai was no stranger to pain, and could deal with it now. “Thanks for the save, Shampoo!”

“It wasn’t an acupuncture needle, but it was still useful for a second, and have you noticed the other one’s arm?” Shampoo said, her voice low but not wanting to say more, even as she batted aside a blow from Hailong, returning a blow that he was forced to block, before ducking under and around a series of blows. The two of them began to exchange Amaguriken-level strikes, while Mai hopped around as best she could, looking for an opening, and keeping away from any grasping hands Hailong thrust her way, one of her few remaining fans in hand.

As blasts of ki went off nearby, Kensou jumped over the pond to land next to the combative trio, his hands glowing with a light purple and blue color. While Hailong was able to quickly twirl around and bat aside one blow, the other got through, hammering not into his physical side, but into the energy matrix holding the other side of Hailong’s body where Ranma’s Blue Burst had caught him.

For the first time in the fight Hailong screamed in real pain, no, agony. “AIEYYYYEEEEEE!!!”

This was like having your soul punched, quite literally. Unlike the attacks of Mai and Ranma before this, Kensou’s psychic attacks had just enough in common with the jiangshi’s own true being to truly hurt. The pain was so much that Hailong nearly collapsed, although he was able to strike back with a kick that Kensou barely blocked with his forearm, grimacing at the strength of it.

Meanwhile, Ranma had closed with Konglong when he’d jumped over the wide-angle attack that Konglong had sent out towards her and Kensou. Konglong’s attempt to block one of her blows simply allowed Ranma to stay in the air, which seemed to negate a portion of Konglong’s style. To fight someone in midair, an enemy needed combination-type strikes, as well as an ability to shift their position quickly along the ground. Konglong didn’t seem to have that, and Ranma dodged and ducked under or around the ki blasts that Konglong sent his way.

Konglong was also getting frustrated as he’d finally realized that one of his hands was not responding to the jiangshi’s demands, as it should. Something had happened to his forearm there, something that he didn’t understand. Whatever it was, it was stopping Konglong’s energy from flowing through the corpse he was inhabiting as well as it could.

The reason for this was simple. In Shampoo’s last truly offensive strike of the battle, she’d waged against these two earlier that night, the purple-haired woman had gambled. Knowing what she did about acupuncture, she had hoped to disrupt the flow of energy through their bodies. Whatever kind of energy a person was using, it flowed through the same veins in the body. A man and a woman might generate energy in different places of the body, but the energy traveled the same manner.

Shampoo hadn’t quite succeeded, not having been able to throw the needle hard enough to truly embedded completely through the pressure point, but she had done enough that Konglong’s forearm had become permanently injured in a way that Konglong, who had no knowledge of such things, could heal.

Every kind of healing the jiangshis were forced to do to one to their bodies was something that the two spirits had to consciously direct. This was the exact opposite of real ki healing as Ranma used it.

A second later, Ranma grabbed onto that arm, using Undertow to stick the arm for a second, grinning as she felt Konglong’s energy surging into him for a brief second before Konglong, his eyes wide, pulled it back out with a furious snarl. That snarl disappeared as Ranma double kicked his head, then flipped upright, her other arm coming down in a series of Amaguriken-level blows.

However, here, Ranma made a mistake. Thinking to make his enemy so furious he began to lose what little sense remained to him, Ranma used Undertow again on the same arm. However, Konglong overreacted in turn. Thoroughly frustrated by the weakness in his hand, Konglong simply surged his life force into that arm where they were connected. Ranma felt the surge coming, but couldn’t cancel undertow fast enough, and faced the backlash just as Konglong’s forearm simply blew up, as if someone has replaced his bones with TNT.

For Ranma, it was like being hit by her own Blue Burst technique, coupled with a feeling of being electrocuted from the inside. The explosion hurled an already screaming Ranma away like a red-haired doll that some child had just broken, both arms broken up to the shoulders along with several ribs, her nose and jaw.

However, the impact on Konglong wasn’t exactly much better. Forcing that much of his spiritual power through an avenue that had been halfway closed had simply removed Konglong’s forearm, turning that forearm into so many chunks of rapidly decaying offal.

So great was the damage that there was nothing Konglong’s spiritual energies could do, and Konglong stumbled, staring down at where his forearm had once been. “No, no! My body, ruined! No amount of Shape Manipulation will allow me to recreate a whole arm!” He turned and stared at where Ranma had just hit the ground and rolled, her body broken, his eyes widen and manic. “That technique, how have you recreated Chíxù Yǒng Dòng (Unrelenting Surge) style?!”

Shaking his head, Konglong looked back down at his arm, his face set in a rictus snarl as spiritual energy began to mold itself around the stump, shifting, changing, trying to form into an arm, but failing. Like his brother, Konglong could not simply re-create flesh that had been torn away from his body. Nor could the jiangshi’s powers re-create a physical arm.

Perhaps if his hand had survived, Konglong could connect it to his upper in the same kind of network of spiritual energy that his cousin was using to keep his stolen body intact at present. Yet such a thing would be horrendously easy to disrupt, as Hailong had recently found out. Indeed, Konglong knew that Hailong would almost certainly need to take over another body after this battle.

Similarly, Konglong also knew that he would need to do the same if he wanted to have two arms in the future. This night’s work had turned horribly against the Qin brethren, costing them far, far more than they had been willing to pay. Even once they were able to draw out the ghost and drain it of energy, it was doubtful that even Konglong would be able to fully resurrect himself in the body of his descendent, to no longer be simply tied to this body spiritually, but to be alive in truth.

These fools might have thwarted our plans with their constant fighting against our inevitable victory but that will make slaying each and every one of them all the sweeter! Konglong snarled mentally, then charged forwards, his body lined with dark purple energy.

Mai and Shampoo tried their best, but both of them were feeling it by this point. Shampoo didn’t have Ranma’s level of ki healing, and she had taken a horrendous battering prior to arriving at the temple. Mai didn’t even have that and was basically hopping around on one leg like a demented Jack-in-the-Box. This meant that, with Ranma only slowly stirring from where she had been flung, Kensou was the only true threat.

Now, Hailong and Konglong began to attack him viciously, despite everything that Shampoo and Mai could do to help.

Mai caught Hailong in the face with a hurled fan, which opened up a long gash under his eyes, the attempt forcing him to turn his head away to avoid losing his eyes, allowing Kensou to get in another jab at his energy network attached side. The upshot of this was another scream of agony from Hailong, but Kensou had overextended, opening himself up to being brutally slammed into the ground with an overhead strike from Konglong, which caught him in the back of the head. The next second, a kick from Konglong caught Shampoo, sending her stumbling back.

“Hey purple hair! Is this yours?”

The shout drew Shampoo’s attention to the side only to see her makeshift chui whirling in midair, flung her away by Xiangfei with some difficulty. She caught the makeshift weapon just as another ki attack crashed into Mai, hurling her back and into the side of the temple causing her to gasp in agony. Then Shampoo whirled, concentrating on pushing her ki into the concrete head of her mace. The blow caught Konglong in the chest, shattering bone and tissue and hurling him away from Mai and Kensou both, allowing Kensou to concentrate on Hailong for a few seconds, during which he hammered the wavering jiangshi hard.

As the fight continued, Ranma, her body having slowly begun to heal itself, tried to push to her feet, only to stumble back to her knees. The explosion had done a number on her both in terms of her bones and her insides, and it was taking a long while for her ki healing to deal with all the damage even to the point where she could move, let alone anything else. Damn, that fight with Yamazaki better not have been the start of a trend! she thought to herself, muttering aloud, “We need more toughness training. Gotta make it through the entire body, not just skin deep and a couple layers.”

Blearily, the redhead opened her eyes, then tried again to push herself to her feet, only for one of her hands to push on what felt like something small and spherical for a second, nearly causing her to collapse forward even as her hand automatically grasped whatever it was. She looked down at it blearily, then as it jingled, realized it was the same bell that Mai had been carrying before the fight began.

As Ranma blearily wondered how the hell the bell had found its way there, Kensou found himself flung sideways and away from Hailong with a ki blast. Unable to do anything in midair like Ranma and Mai could have, the younger martial artist found himself slamming into the side of the giant bell with bone-breaking force.

Before this, oddly, that bell had gone unmolested. The fight went around and above it, but never actually hit the bell or the portion of the temple that housed it. Now, the sound of that large bell rang through the night, a surprisingly dulcet “Jingle, jingle, jingle” noise for all its size.

Outside, watching this battle through a hole in his temples will outer wall, the priest blinked, then stared as a mist began to form under the bell. “Oh. I… have no idea how this is going to go, but I can almost definitely say this Mao Mo Lin bell will complicate things.”

The priest had, quite literally, no idea.

Even as Hailong and Konglong paused and Shampoo, Kensou and Mai tried to push themselves to their feet, a spirit formed underneath the bell. A ghost, which quickly took physical form, showing an amount of psychic and spiritual energy that both jiangshi instantly felt intense envy and eager desire over.

That physical form was in this form of a large almost cartoonish looking cat. It was the same size as a normal human being, with an overlarge face, big ears, swishing tail, and big yellow-slitted eyes along with everything else to make up a cat, if a rather fat one.

Ranma found herself staring into the eyes of her worst nightmare, her body too battered to allow her to move away before the ghost cat locked its eyes on the bell in Ranma’s hands, and leaped forward, meowing loudly and happily. “My bride! And she’s a looker this time! I’ve never seen someone with red hair before, but I can get used to it. My bride!”

Before Ranma could do anything, she found herself glomped by the ancient cat spirit, pulled into a hug that for all its friendliness did absolutely nothing to alleviate her terror. Ranma’s eyes were wide and unseeing as the ghost rubbed his face against hers, then snarled angrily over at the two jiangshi.

His fur began to stand straight, and it growled, “I don’t know what the heck you two are here for, and I don’t care! Get out of my territory, or I’ll kill you both for hurting my bride!” With that, the cat spirit puffed itself up still further, its back claws elongating as he raised one hand away from Ranma and hissed, making a clawing motion with his other hand.

This was, in fact, a bluff. The moment that Maomolin had fully formed, his senses had told the ghost that these two were deadlier than him. Maomolin might be strong on the spiritual level, but he wasn’t a fighter. He was a lover, and these two terrified him. Don’t call my bluff, don’t call my bluff, don’t call my bluff! Please don’t call my bluff!

The two battered jiangshi looked at one another, then grinned evilly. Their hands began to glow dark purple, and they shifted towards the spirit. “The rest of you will have to wait for inevitable demise. The main meal has arrived,” Hailong drawled, even as he continued forcing some of his spiritual energy keep his physical body intact.

However, their march towards the spirit, who rapidly began backing away, was stopped by a growl. One that didn’t come from Maomolin, but rather the redhead that he was still clutching to his person.

Shampoo, who had just pushed herself to her feet, blinked, then leaned heavily on her mace, staring. “Well, this is going to be interesting.”

Ranma’s thoughts when the Neko-Ken took over his mind were never what anyone would call normal. Not for a cat, not for a human. When Ranma was in his female form, that issue was taken to a whole other level. It was very strange to be a female cat who knew he was very much a tom. On top of that, at the moment, female Ranma knew she was in a fight, which had already injured both of his mates, which was completely unacceptable!

A fight between tom’s was one thing. You would beat on one another, the winner would send the loser skittering away, happy to allow the loser to live and know he was a loser. Nor would Ranma ever get involved in a fight that his mates were already handling. It would be pointless, and show the mates that Neko-Ranma thought they were weak, which was in no way the case. This wasn’t a normal fight. It was a fight against creatures that smelled of death, creatures that had hurt Neko-Ranma’s mates, had hurt Neko-Ranma.

Thus, what wrenched itself out of the large overweight rival’s grip was not a happy-go-lucky cat, looking to play or cuddle in equal measure. Instead, it was a cat looking to kill.

Kicking off of Maomolin’s fat stomach, Neko-Ranma broke the ghost’s one-armed grip on her, and hurtled herself towards the two jiangshi. As battered as they were, only Konglong was able to get out of the way, and the first slash nearly tore Hailong into pieces, sending him backward with a howl of shock.

While Neko-Ranma’s ki claws were not anywhere near the same wavelength as the two jiangshi’s spiritual energy like Kensou’s attacks were, they were far more powerful, and far more well-shaped to cut. Whatever powerful durability being basically a puppet on a string had given the two jiangshi’s bodies had no chance against this.

Konglong leaped forward, lashing out with a kick and a punch, making Neko-Ranma dodge away, lashing out at one of his kicks Konglong was just a little too slow to pull back. A blast of spiritual energy from the other foot sent Konglong skittering backward and away from the strike, but he still lost a portion of his shoe and foot, causing him to grimace.

That was next to nothing, though, as Mai joined in, she had been able to pull one final fan out of her ki space and now, after filling it with ki and giving it an edge hurled it at the slowly recovering Hailong. Before Hailong could do anything, the fan struck his neck, imbued with as much cutting force as Mai could put into it.

“N, no… not back to limbo… I…” Hailong’s eyes were wide and staring as he looked at his cousin, then, his head fell off his shoulders as Kensou followed up with a kick, decapitating the undead jiangshi.

Even cutting a jiangshi’s neck off might not have been enough without that kick, but removing the head from the body was enough to catastrophically disrupt the network of energy the spirit had used to move it’s puppet around. There was a booming noise as that occurred, a slew of energy erupting from the stump where Hailong’s neck had once been, as the network keeping the jiangshi’s side intact collapsed, leaving the body to slump to the ground, already beginning to wither away without the jiangshi’s spirit animating it.

Not that Kensou took the time to watch this occur as he landed on the other side of Hailong, then whirled into an attack on Konglong. Konglong barely blocked it in time but then found his side slashed open by Neko-Ranma, then his leg taking a hit from Shampoo’s weapon as she charged in from the other side.

Before he could recover, Neko-Ranma removed a tremendous chunk of his face with a series of slices, with Kensou following up with a ki-enhanced blow to the spiritual energy that began to try to repair the damage. This was followed by a blow from Shampoo’s makeshift chui to the head, which crumbled it and a slash from Neko-Ranma that nearly tore the jiangshi in half.

Again, there was a blast of energy that sent all three of the combatants skittering backwards. Then Konglong’s body folded, collapsing in on itself, skin and bone turning to dust as they watched.

Shampoo stared for a moment, while Neko-Ranma went over to sniff at it, her face wrinkling up into a mew of pure disgust, before looking down at her clothing for a moment. She seemed to debate something, then shook herself as Shampoo laid a gentle hand on her head. Neko-Ranma looked up at her mate, her first mate, the purple haired one with a love of metal weapons and nuzzles, and chirped happily, leaning into her Shampoo’s side, completely ignorant of the fact that Shampoo was halfway naked, as was Neko-Ranma and the nearby Mai.

Shampoo slumped down, and as Mai watched, Neko-Ranma settled into her lap, nuzzling in, causing Shampoo to hiss a little at the pain of having her naked and extremely battered breasts nuzzled against like that. “I think Ranma said that hot water or cold water would bring him out of this, but right now, I just don’t have enough energy to move.”

She looked over at the spirit animal, who was looking between the two women, his eyes wide, a cat caught in a fight or flight instinct moment. Before Maomolin made a choice one way or another, Kensou smacked a ki-infused chop on the top of its head. “Back in the bell you go! I didn’t come to this town to exorcise you, but I can make an exception.”

Snarling, Neko-Ranma bared her teeth at the fat tom. Only Shampoo’s soothing scratches at the back of Neko-Ranma’s neck keeping her from leaping to attack the fat, useless tom now that she remembered it was there.

Seeing that and feeling the strength of Kensou’s blow, Maomolin yowled, then disappeared into fog, which shifted up and into the still-intact bell

Kensou sagged in relief, but kept his eyes upward as he turned to look at the three girls, blushing slightly as, now that the battle was over, he had the opportunity to take in this state of dress, in many cases, the state of undress of all three of the women there. “So, er, am I off the hook for earlier?”

“Get us all a change of clothes, and we’ll call it even,” Mai said, as she began to hobble her way over towards Shampoo and Neko-Ranma. Collapsing against Shampoo’s side, Mai stuck her wounded leg out and away from her with a grimace.

“Deal.”

OOOOOOO

With none of the others in any shape to deal with the locals, that fell to the priest and Xiangfei. Luckily, it worked out quite well, as the Dragon Spirit School was well known as demon and ghost hunters, even if Xiangfei didn’t practice that side of things. In point of fact, neither Xiangfei nor Kensou had actually ever been on a ghost hunting expedition before on their own, but Kensou had accompanied Master Gentsai and Athena several times on such.

With Kensou helping to explain some of the terms, and the fact that there had been two dangerous spirits here looking for a third that was somewhat benevolent, the police and the locals stopped asking questions about what actually happened. Added to this was that Kensou came up with a lie on the spot to explain away Mai, Ranma and Shampoo, saying that they were a ghost hunting team from Japan. They didn’t have any local paperwork like Xiangfei and Kensou did, yes, ghost hunters did have paperwork in China, as they had actually been there on vacation and only had stumbled into events last night.

With a somewhat pale-faced priest corroborating his words, that was enough to get the three lovers off any kind of hook with the locals, with Ranma adding to it the moment he was once more awake and healed from his injuries. Which took about the rest of the night, but that had been about it. Ranma had eaten a ton of food before the fight at the eating competition and turning that into ki had been its normal insanely quick process for his body, so the battle last night hadn’t actually been all that wearing, in that area at least.

Ranma’s volunteering to repair everything, and his quick repair of one of the segments of the temple’s walls had made the locals more than happy to allow him to repair the rest of the damages. After the police inspector and the local Communist Party member representative (no, Ranma had not bothered to learn his exact title, nor had he cared) left, the priest turned to Kensou and the others, watching for a moment as Ranma turned away and began to work on a second portion of the temple’s outer wall.

“Please, please, take Maomolin away with you. He’s not duplicitous, conniving or dangerous, but every time he can’t find a mate, he comes out for weeks on end eating all of our food, causing little bits of trouble all across town as he eats away his so-called broken heart, while haunting whichever man or boy has been given a bell.”

“Pay us 1,500 Yuan and we’ll take his giant bell with us, I presume that’s his foci?” Kensou answered instantly. Dealing with ghosts peaceably by simply relocating them someplace else was always better than trying to fight them, although he wondered if the ghost cat would regain his courage after a few days enough to make trouble for them. On the other hand, having a Spirit around to well maybe help with a few shows along the way could be a great way to earn some money without forcing Xiangfei to take up waitressing again. The face she made when I suggested it...

“I agree, we’ll take him along. Maomolin was kind of cute actually,” Xiangfei said, to which the bell inside the temple rang a little, a distant “Nya?!” echoing, almost unheard. At that, Xiangfei twitched a little, remembering what the priest had told them earlier about the real reasoning behind the whole Cat and the Hot Coal Contest. How or why the couples that had gotten together because of the strange bells had kept the trouble they ran into with the ghost cat a secret she had no idea, nor any desire to ask. However, there had to be one thing said right now. “I’m not into furries, though.”

Shaking his head, Ranma moved out of hearing range at that point. Whatever happened with the strange ancient furry-demon ghost, he did not care one bit. What he did care was getting this job done and heading back to his girls so he could pamper Shampoo and Mai properly.

Currently, the two of them were convalescing in the hotel. After all, they’d already paid for the room for the night, and putting some of the 50,000 Yuan that Ranma had earned down for another night wasn’t exactly hardship at this point.

In terms of injuries, Mai had broken her thighbone pretty cleanly. She’d had to have it set and a cast applied, something she had been quietly annoyed by. Beyond that, she had broken a rib at some point and had second-degree burns on quite a bit of her arms, legs and chest. This was somewhat similar to Shampoo, who on top of having numerous burn marks, had basically been pounded into a giant black and blue bruise from the waist up, including a rather large bruise at the back of her head, and had suffered what one of the doctors who had seen to them insisted was a concussion. Since she wasn’t throwing up and didn’t look all that out of it, Ranma wasn’t certain on that score, but Shampoo had definitely complained of a massive headache as the two of them had been loaded onto rickshaws and carried over towards the hotel.

Normally, they would’ve been loaded into an ambulance, obviously. However, the majority of the street in Mo Lin, indeed, nearly all of them, were too small for normal car traffic. Although honestly, Ranma would probably have just taken them over to the hotel after their injuries it’s been seen to by a doctor, but both of them had been adamant that he should get started on the repair projects quickly, and that they were not “Wilting flowers that need you around to take care of us,” in Mai’s words.

This was instantly spoiled by Shampoo, who winked, laughed and pulled Ranma into a kiss that had the matronly doctor who had been seeing to their injuries scowling a little at the impropriety. When she pulled back, Shampoo had whispered against Ranma’s lips, “You can leave the pampering before when were on the boat and can… take such things to their proper conclusion.”

How that would work with Mai’s broken leg or Shampoo’s migraine if it stuck around, Ranma had no idea, but he was looking forward to finding out.

Regardless, Ranma was able to finish the repairs in two days, and the trio was gone from Mo Lin village by the third, well after Kensou and Xiangfei had left with the bell of Mao Mo Lin tied to the top of their van. Shampoo, Mai and Ranma had been there to see them off. The group even exchanged phone number addresses, although Ranma could not stop himself from snickering the moment the van was out of sight, pointing after it along the sole real road into the town. “Mai, you’d know, wouldn’t you? That van, it reminds me of some American cartoon, something with a dog in it, right?”

“Scooby Doo. Yep. And if they decide to continue the whole ghost hunting business into the future, well, I will laugh my rear off,” Mai supplied, giggling.

Out at sea, the three of them decided that they’d earned a break from training for a few days, with the two women in particular just resting and recuperating from the ordeal. While, yes, Ranma waited on them hand and foot, something both of them enjoyed greatly. Especially Shampoo, whose migraine had, as Ranma had been worried about, decided to stick around.

They also talked about the battle against the two undead. Afterwards, all three came away with that pleased with how their styles had begun to mix, making all three of them more formidable, while also acknowledging that they had more to do in the future, especially in terms of incorporating some of their new skills into their everyday style.

This, of course, led to a discussion on the Neko-Ken. To say Mai was horrified at the full story, which she hadn’t heard before this, was an understatement.  What they could do about it, Mai wasn’t certain, but she was certain both the mental trauma and everything else that came with the Neko-Ken needed to be talked about going forward.

Beyond that, all three felt they needed to return to the Toughness Training, and Mai needed to learn Ranma’s ki healing, while Shampoo needed to get a better handle on it. Luckily, meditation did help for that so Mai could make progress on it while still dealing with her current injuries.

Five days passed at sea, before they put into the port at Xuwen, the last port on mainland China they would be stopping in on this journey. For the next leg out to Hainan, they would need food and other supplies, including some clothing for Shampoo. They hadn’t been able to find where most of the stuff that had been in her ki space had been dumped by the two jiangshi. Although, Shampoo had made a point of searching their bodies for the training manual with Lu Bu’s name on it, and had, thankfully, left the other one, the one that mentioned her clan, back on the ship. It was far too valuable to her clan to keep on her person.

Ranma had also been able to recover her phone. While repairing the temple, he’d spotted it on a nearby rooftop. Ranma had also seen a weird drawing there, which looked like some kind of strange sigil, and had wondered idly if maybe that had been some kind of magic thing that the two spirits had done to keep the locals from coming out or otherwise interfering at the start of the battle. “After all, given how often they let loose ki blasts, I think that they were definitely pushing into the simple magic territory rather than something that can be explained away through the use of terms like ki or Yin and Yang type energy.”

That minor ministry however would go unsolved, as neither Kensou nor Xiangfei knew anything about those sigils, nor did Shampoo and Mai.

Regardless, the only thing that they had been able to retain from Shampoo’s ki space had been her phone. Not even her chui had turned up while they were in town, and Shampoo, who by that point had been relatively recovered, hadn’t been willing to spend any longer there to look for them.

Unfortunately, Mai was still in crutches when they arrived in Xuwen, and would remain so for another few weeks unless she made a breakthrough in ki healing. Regardless, she refused to remain behind on the boat and stomped along behind Shampoo and Ranma as they walked arm in arm off of the dock, heading into the city proper.

However, they hadn’t gone very far when Ranma stopped, frowning and looking around. Given what happened a few days ago, Mai instantly closed her eyes, using her rudimentary ki sense as Shampoo did the same. A moment later, Shampoo whirled around, as the feeling of being watched faded, and a voice shouted out, “There you are, granddaughter. You’ve kept me waiting a few days. I wonder if you’ve gotten slow moving around with these outsiders.”

Mai and Ranma blinked, while Shampoo squealed happily and launched herself forward, her arms outstretched, as she grabbed up the small wrinkles looking old woman who had just hopped down from a nearby rooftop in a hug. “Grandmother! If I had known you wanted to meet me here, I would’ve hurried us along of course! But the village doesn’t have any cell phones.”

“Of course not, child. How could we get coverage up there?” Ke Lun scoffed while Ranma and Mai looked on.

“Huh, she really does look like a Baba Yaga doesn’t she?” Ranma asked sotto voce to Mai, who nodded, stifling her own giggles at the description that Shampoo had once given them of her grandmother and the other elders of the Joketsuzoku.

Luckily for the pair of them, Ke Lun didn’t hear them, instead gesturing them forward. “Come here, let me get a glimpse of my granddaughter’s husband and their… companion. Your messages to the clan caused quite a stir, let me tell you.”

Blinking, Ranma and Mai exchanged glances, then moved forward, bowing to the elder, wondering how this was going to go. All of them were unaware that Ranma’s earlier sixth sense had been warning about more than one watcher. The second watcher’s gaze was nowhere near as friendly as the elders were, as he watched the elder, Shampoo and the two outsiders, planning his next move.

End Chapter

Hope you enjoyed this chapter!  I wanted to show more of the yin energy usage of ki here, what it was good for, and the whole connection to the spiritual side of things.  I will be going into greater detail on this and explanations of that which tie in only slightly to the Dark Hado in the next chapter with Cologne being the explainer. She isn't an expert, but she gives a more learned response to that and a secret about the Dragon Spirit School.

Hope you all enjoyed this folks! Effect is finished and off to Hiryo, so I will be posting that here and over on Fanfic tomorrow night. I want to give Hiryo enough time to try and get the chapter back to me before I post it.

I will be trying to get out a short SW/HP blurb for my HP fans tomorrow to round out the month, then work on FILFy for the rest of this week. No promises there. Magic-based combat is always tough. OH, and I will be posting the Patron Only poll shortly, so be on the lookout for that. The HP poll will be up tomorrow.