|
|
Sink to the Bottom With You
Chapter Ten
Revenge is Sweet
"Do your ancestors proud, Yuffie
Kisaragi." Vincent Valentine
"Hey, Vinnie! I just realized something!"
"What is it, Yuffie?"
"My damn headband is missing!"
Vincent didn't bother to reply to Yuffie's
insipid chatter. Instead, he gripped
the reins of their rented chocobo named Olive and urged the yellow bird faster
with a gentle kick of his heel. Olive
reluctantly increased her speed to a trot, struggling slightly under the
combined weight of her two riders. The
bird's large feet sank into the mud that bubbled out between the green grass,
leaving a trail of footprints that marked their passing. Vincent wasn't particularly happy about
leaving such an obvious trail, or about the fact that the rain and thunder kept
drowning out all other sounds, greatly deterring his ability to hear impending
danger, which he felt was very near.
Pivoting around in the saddle, being extra
careful not to upset the wet and miserable Yuffie sitting in front of him,
Vincent took in the entire view of the mountains and hills around him, searching
for anything that appeared to be out of place or threatening in nature. Ever since they had departed from Junon
early that morning, Vincent couldn't shake the feeling that some unseen enemy
was following them. His paranoia
manifested itself in a peculiar itch between his shoulder blades that he kept
reaching back to scratch repeatedly throughout their homeward journey to
Kalm. His head felt unnaturally heavy,
a sensation that he had always attributed to a danger that was waiting to
surprise him in the near future.
Dissatisfied with the perfectly normal
surroundings that he saw around them, Vincent turned his attention back to the
trail and scratched his back with his metal claw while firmly gripping the
reins with his right hand.
"Why do you keep scratching, Vinnie?" Yuffie
suddenly demanded, her sour mood making her words harsh. "You have fleas or something?"
Vincent's only reply was to spur the chocobo
into a faster trot, its feet squishing in the waterlogged grass that was filled
with the rain the earth had gotten sick of absorbing and decided to spit
out. Yuffie had been in a bad mood all
morning. All traces of the frail young
woman that had shared a bed with him last night and fallen asleep in the crook
of his arm after she had shed tears for a monster that loathed his own nature ?
that young woman had vanished the moment they had started out in the ceaseless
rain. Vincent felt another strange
burst of emotions as he recalled the peculiar serenity he had felt the night
before, falling asleep with her in his arms.
The heat of her flesh had seeped through her covering of blankets as he
lay curled up against her, feeling that sweet warmth spread to his own body
like a wild forest fire. The scent of
her clean skin and recently washed hair had haunted his dreams like a most
welcome phantom, triggering off emotions that had gone unfelt for years. Vincent was at an utter loss to explain the
things he felt, so he locked them up for safekeeping, an addition to the nest
of cherished memories that would probably reawaken when Yuffie was already a
grown woman with a husband and children of her own. By that time, she would have already forgotten about the morbid,
self-loathing man/monster who had held her as she slept against him one dark,
stormy night.
"Vinnie!" Yuffie suddenly snapped, jolting
him out of his thoughts.
Vincent glanced down at the top of her head,
which was resting underneath his chin.
"Yes, Yuffie?"
"Are we there yet?"
The dark gunslinger rolled his eyes. "What do you think, Yuffie?"
Her head shifted as she glanced around at
her surroundings, which were composed of green, rolling hills that were already
starting to overflow with water and huge heaps of mud that the violent rains
had washed down during their siege on the earth. At the current moment, the two world-weary travelers were moving
through a valley-like depression between two sharply rising hills, rain
pounding their already thoroughly rain-pounded bodies like a warrior's
battering ram. The bruise on Yuffie's
cheekbone was aching something terrible and the beginning of a headache was
starting to form at her temples. She
was in no mood to be admiring scenery at Vincent's request.
"I don't know where we are," she grumbled
moodily, folding her slender arms across her chest. "I wasn't paying attention."
"We just passed the Chocobo Ranch," Vincent
explained, red eyes roving over the hills with obvious mistrust as they
passed. "We should be coming up on Kalm
in a little while."
"Good," Yuffie said with a satisfied
tone. "I don't know how much more of
this I can take with the rain and this slow-ass chocobo and you all tense and
stuff."
"What?" Vincent asked in surprise.
"You're tense," Yuffie announced
impatiently, clearly not happy about having to repeat herself.
"How can you tell?" he demanded, not liking
to think that he could be read so easily.
Yuffie rolled her stormy gray eyes. "C'mon, Vincent. You may think I'm pretty stupid, but I'm smarter than I
look. I'm practically sitting in your
lap here, and you're wandering how I know you're worried about something? Your muscles are all bunched up in your
stomach, and you're holding the reins too tight. There are knots in your legs too." She tapped his thighs with her palms as if to prove this
point. "You need to loosen up, Vinnie. You said yourself; we're almost home."
Vincent didn't reply, silently impressed at
how much she had been able to discern about his state of mind just by taking
note of his body's condition. No one
had pulled that number on him in years...
Yuffie sensed that her dark companion wasn't
relaxing and twisted in the saddle so that she could look up at his face. The effort nearly dislocated the upper part
of her body, but when she saw the intense look on Vincent's face as he glared
off into the distance, trying hard to see something that he knew must be there,
she realized that he was more than tense ? he was actually jittery, a
trait she had never seen before in Vincent.
"What's wrong, Vinnie?" she asked
softly. "Is there something out there?"
He glanced down at her with those burning
eyes of his, searching her face to see whether or not she was sincere. Yuffie stared up at him worriedly, her bad
mood evaporating in the face of her friend's anxiety.
Vincent stared at her a moment longer before
returning his attention to their surroundings, scanning them relentlessly. "I sense...something. I'm not sure what it is, but I don't like
it."
"Is it dangerous?" Yuffie asked, miming
Vincent's actions and examining the valley they were passing through.
"I don't know," he answered quietly. "Just keep your eyes open."
Yuffie nodded in agreement, her right hand
dropping down to rest on the Conformer, which was strapped to the chocobo's
flank. Since Vincent was holding
Olive's reins, she had to be on special lookout. If trouble just dropped in on them, Yuffie was ready to react
quickly in case her companion couldn't get to his gun in time to deal with the
threat.
Another fifteen minutes of riding passed
with nothing out of the norm happening.
Both Vincent and Yuffie were on high alert, all their physical
discomfort forgotten as they kept a constant watch for any impending
threats. Yuffie pushed at her hair
impatiently as it fell into her eyes, dripping with rain like a waterfall of
silent teardrops from the heavens. Her
keen gray eyes squinted to keep rain from seeping into them as they roved over
the hills on either side of them. Now
that she was looking closer, she did recognize this place. She, Tifa, and Cloud had raced chocobos down
this valley before (Cloud won because he cheated, that little turd). Yuffie was silently shocked at how different
this sun-kissed valley looked in the middle of a thunderstorm that never seemed
to end.
The young ninja was so absorbed with her
surroundings that she nearly fell off the chocobo when Vincent suddenly reined
it in sharply, earning an unhappy wark from Olive.
"Damn," he muttered, so low that his voice
could barely be heard over the thunder and rain.
"Crap," Yuffie agreed when she saw what he
was looking at.
They had come to a dip in the valley. It was a shallow dip and not very
threatening when riding on a chocobo or in the buggy. Yuffie had always enjoyed driving the buggy into this particular
depression in the land, making her fellow riders woozy with the undulating motions
as she whizzed into the dip going at top speed. But now the dip didn't look so fun, particularly because it was
filled to the brim with swampy looking water that made Yuffie's stomach churn
with disgust. She didn't even want to
think about what might be hiding in those murky depths.
"What a predicament," she grumped, glaring
at the water as if she could evaporate it with the fire in her angry gaze. "Can choco-butt here make it across?"
Vincent hesitated, then shook his dark head,
oblivious to the strands of hair that were obscuring his vision. "No, I think that water's too deep. Olive's just your average chocobo. She'll probably get stuck in the mud that
has to be hiding down there."
"So we're gonna go around it?"
He nodded.
"That seems to be the more preferable course of action...unless, of
course, you want to try and swim across ourselves."
Yuffie shuddered as she gazed at the
gross-looking water. "I think I'll pass
on that one. So, how are we gonna get
around it?"
Vincent glanced warily at their
surroundings. "We'll have to climb up
one of these hills and go around the pool from above before we get back on the
ground on the other side."
She examined the hills that looked climbable
and spotted one that looked friendlier than the rest. She pointed to her right.
"How about that one?"
Vincent followed the direction of her finger
and nodded in agreement. "Good eye,
Yuffie."
The young woman flushed under the unexpected
praise, glad that he couldn't see her beet red face.
Vincent managed to maneuver the somewhat
apprehensive Olive halfway up the face of the muddy hill before one of her feet
got stuck, and she began to wark plaintively.
The two riders disembarked and worked the kinks out of their stiff joints
before turning their attention to Olive.
Yuffie grabbed the reins and tugged while Vincent worked on freeing the
chocobo's stuck leg, being careful not to let the bird kick him in the
face. Together, the two AVALANCHE
members hauled the chocobo the rest of the way up the hill with Yuffie leading
the yellow bird and Vincent playing drogue, one hand resting instinctively on
the Death Penalty as he glanced with intense suspicion at the land they now
stood over.
Something was there; he knew it.
All he had to do was wait for the threat to show itself, something that
he hated doing. He would have much
preferred it if he had the element of surprise, but he also knew that as long
as they were ready for danger, their odds of surviving an attack were good. And he had the feeling that the attack would
be coming soon; their unseen enemy couldn't stay hidden forever.
Yuffie waited with uncharacteristic patience
as Vincent vaulted nimbly up onto the grassy ledge of the hill, which should
probably more accurately be called a miniature mountain due to its height. The wide, grass-covered ledge that they now
stood on was just one of the many smaller levels that seemed to wrap around the
whole hill until the summit, which towered a good one hundred feet above their
heads.
Gesturing to his left, Vincent said calmly,
"Let's go. If we follow this path, we
should be able to come down on the other side, close to Kalm."
"Can we rest under that overhang first?"
Yuffie asked cautiously, knowing that he was anxious to get going. "Bird brain here has mud in between her toes."
Olive warked pitifully and held up her right
foot, which was caked with mud.
Vincent stared at the girl and bird before
answering reluctantly, "I suppose, but only for a little while."
Yuffie nodded, her hair flopping down into
her eyes. "Of course."
With Yuffie leading the way, the trio strode
to the overhang with their feet sloshing in the wet grass, which was literally
drowning with water. The overhang
wasn't very big, but it provided a little shelter from the pouring rain despite
the fact that the area under it was already soaked from last night's
downpour. Yuffie immediately strode
over to a large rock and plopped down, narrowly avoiding sliding down its wet
surface, and set to work getting the mud from between Olive's toes. The chocobo, which was very placid and
obedient for an average "do-do bird" as Reno called them, stood patiently as
Yuffie tended to her. Vincent didn't
seek the shelter of the overhang, preferring instead to stand outside in the rain
to keep watch, his hand resting on the Death Penalty. The path had taken them to a place about twenty feet directly
above the swampy pool, which churned restlessly as the rain pounded it with
unstinting ruthlessness. Vincent
narrowed his luminescent red eyes, trying to see what lie at the bottom of the
pool, but the water was thick with mud and grass, preventing him from catching
a glimpse of the murky depths.
Under the overhang, Yuffie finished cleaning
Olive's feet and gave the chocobo a pat on the neck, leaving a muddy handprint
behind on the wet yellow feathers.
Olive warked softly and nibbled Yuffie's hair in some sort of chocobo
gratitude. Laughing, Yuffie shooed the
chocobo's beak away and pulled out a bundle of greens to give to the bird,
which immediately transferred her affections to the leafy greens.
The young woman watched Olive eat for while
before glancing over to see that Vincent was standing unnaturally still in the
rain, a dark sentry with unsurpassed majesty, a refugee from another life and
time. His long hair, dyed an even
deeper shade of black from the falling rain, hung down his back like a dark
waterfall, showing up vividly against the blood-red cloak that reached to the
backs of his knees.
"Hey Vinnie!" Yuffie called suddenly.
"Yes, Yuffie?" he responded without turning.
"Get out of the rain before you catch a
cold!"
"I'm fine," he answered.
"If this hidden enemy has remained hidden
this long, do you really think they're going to come waltzing out just because
you decided to stand like a numbnut in the rain waiting for them?"
Vincent turned to stare at her calmly.
Yuffie patted the rock beside her. "C'mere and sit down. Me and Olive have run out of things to talk
about."
Vincent hesitated, taking one last long look
at the valley below before giving up and taking a seat next to her on the rock,
his leg pressed against hers. Yuffie
jumped slightly at the warmth that seeped through his waterlogged pant leg, but
soon recovered and leaned against him slightly, her bare arm brushing his. There they sat in a strangely comfortable
silence with Olive munching happily on her greens and Yuffie enjoying Vincent's
company.
"How's your shoulder?" he suddenly asked,
ruby red eyes focused on the falling rain.
"Oh," Yuffie said dumbly, surprised that he
was instigating conversation. Her hand
instinctively went to her left shoulder, which was still wrapped in his
bandana. "It's a little sore," she
replied. "And there's a really gross
scar there, but it's not infected or anything.
Why, did you want your headband back?"
He shook his head. "No. You can keep it."
"Okay," Yuffie said, strangely pleased. "Thanks.
Sort a souvenir of our little adventure together, huh?"
Vincent turned his head to stare at her, and
Yuffie flushed when she realized how absurd and wistful her statement had sounded,
like she didn't want all this pain and strife to end just so she could keep him
around a little longer. The words "our"
and "together" made it sound as if her time spent with him chasing the Running
Man and being chased by the Faceless Men was among her most cherished
memories. And, she suddenly realized
with a start, it was, but not because she could go back to the bar and brag
about how she had survived through thick and thin. No, the events of the past few days were special to her because
she had shared them with Vincent and Vincent alone.
It wouldn't have been the same if it had
been Tifa with her, or Reno, or even Cloud.
There was something about Vincent that was starting to draw her to him
like a moth to a flame. She couldn't
stop what she was feeling. Moreover,
she didn't want to stop it. Even
years from now, if she was married and had kids, and Vincent had disappeared
like a shadow into the night, never to be seen again, she would always remember
falling asleep in arms as the Black Stinger zipped across a turbulent, hungry
ocean that had tried to devour her whole.
She would always remember how she had wept for him as she lie next to
him in bed and how he had come up behind her, holding her to his body so
gently, so sweetly, his chest against her back and his knees touching the backs
of hers, his hair tickling her ear...
My God, what's happening to me?
This new string of thoughts deepened her
blush, and she looked away from Vincent's burning gaze, staring at her yellow
sneakers as water from the ground seeped into them. "Uh, sorry," she stammered, more embarrassed than she ever been
in her entire life. "That didn't come
out the right way."
But she was lying, and she knew it. The words had come out exactly the way she
had wanted them to, at least in her heart.
But she couldn't tell him that.
Vincent was silent for a long time, and
Yuffie was about to hastily suggest that they be on their way again when she
suddenly felt his cold, rain-sodden fingers touch her chin and apply gentle
pressure, turning her face towards him.
Reluctantly, she raised her gray eyes to focus on his face, her heart
thundering in her chest with some nameless emotion.
Garnet eyes accented by flowing black hair
and pale skin stared down at her upturned face with uncharacteristic tenderness
that had virtually no roots in a soul warped and frozen from blood and
heartbreak. Yuffie knew that time had
not eased the suffering of Vincent Valentine, nor thawed out the frozen
wasteland that had killed his heart and body, trapping him in the guise of a 27
year old man and making him believe that he was a monster, the ultimate crime
against a man who had committed many in his life for reasons that were his
own. Anyone else would have said that
Vincent deserved all that had befallen him.
But Yuffie didn't think that way. If Vincent was cold, heartless, and dead
inside, then why was he staring at her like this? His red eyes, usually as cold as the bitterest winter, had a
peculiar intensity to them now that made her breath catch in her throat. They bathed her in a gentle light, making
her forget about her aching shoulder and soaking wet clothes. His long eyelashes were wet from the rain,
tiny droplets shining on the ends of them like miniature crystals.
Yuffie's heart thundered in her ears as that
all-too-familiar heat spread across her body.
She couldn't stop staring up at him, suddenly as fascinated by the
porcelain color of his skin as she was with the unnamable color of his ebony
hair. She was shaking slightly,
trembling...what was this she was feeling?
His face was suddenly so close to hers, his warm breath touching her
cheek gently.
A wark suddenly interrupted them, shattering
the spell that had been wrapping them together. That one screeching sound of alarm brought the two companions
back into the world of thundering rain, missing comrades, and aching pains.
Vincent drew back abruptly, a wall slamming
down between them as his garnet eyes froze over again, all the gentle humanity
in that gaze wiped out just as abruptly as it had come. Yuffie blinked, trying to discern whether or
not what she had seen in his eyes just a few seconds ago had been real or just
some fantasy of hers.
She wasn't given much time to contemplate
this abrupt metamorphosis, however, because Olive suddenly rushed by in a
panic, warking loudly and trailing her reins behind her.
Yuffie instinctively leapt to her feet
calling, "Hey, bird-brain! Get back
here!"
But as she reached for the dragging reins,
Vincent suddenly rose to his feet, narrowly avoiding whacking his head on the
top of the overhang, and grabbed her arm in an iron grip. Yuffie looked up at him in surprise.
"Let her go," he said quietly, red eyes
distant as he apparently focused on something that Yuffie couldn't hear.
"But?" she started feebly, watching as Olive
sped off down the hill like a bat out of hell, flapping her useless wings in
fright and running back in the direction they had come from. The bird appeared to be in a major state of
panic, and Yuffie was at a loss to explain why.
"Quiet," Vincent ordered softly, squeezing
her arm slightly for emphasis. "This
way."
He released his grip on her arm and took the
Death Penalty from its holster, cocking the rifle with a hollow click that
immediately sent Yuffie into instant battle mode. She reached over and grabbed her Conformer from where it had
fallen in the mud after that stupid bird had taken off. Walking as quietly as she could and trying
to ignore the rain pounding on the back of her head, she followed Vincent to
the edge of the hill's ledge, stopping short for some reason as if below the
ledge, she would see into the fiery pits of Hell.
Vincent peered over the edge, looking down
into the valley. His back suddenly
stiffened, and he tightened his grip on the Death Penalty.
"Yuffie," he said quietly. "I think you'd better see this."
Gulping, the ninja walked over to the edge
beside Vincent and peered down...
"No way!" she shrieked, her voice rising
shrilly even over the sound of the thunder.
"No freaking way! This is
impossible! Vincent, what are we gonna
do?!"
Vincent didn't reply, his mind trying to
process the fact that he had failed miserably at his task the night
before. A shot missed during a sniping
order. A mission failed. Fellow colleagues endangered. Unacceptable.
Five men were climbing up the face of the
hill.
Five Faceless Men.
Yuffie's heart leapt into her throat as she
beheld her opponents of the night before when they had been blasting across the
dark sea on the Black Stinger. Though
the faceless freaks were still obviously mobile, they had come up on the short
end of the stick. Vincent may not have
been able to kill them, but the force of their jet skis exploding from
underneath them had certainly crippled them.
Most of the flesh on their bodies was now blackened and charred, some
skin even falling off as they stubbornly climbed up the hill, slipping and
sliding in the mud. Three of the
Faceless Men were missing either their entire or more than half of one of their
arms, making their climbing slow but steady as they made good use of their
remaining arm and their legs. One of
the other Faceless Men was climbing as soundly as his companions in spite of
the fact that he was missing a leg. The
one remaining Faceless Man had no absent appendages, but was very badly burnt,
his dark clothes falling off his fleshly form and taking chunks of charred,
pink skin with it.
All in all, they were a pitiful but
terrifying sight.
"What are we gonna do, Vinnie?!" Yuffie
cried again, fidgeting with her hands, as the approaching monstrosities got
steadily closer. "If they can survive
having their jet skis blown up from under them, what else can kill them?"
Instead of answering, Vincent aimed
downwards with the Death Penalty and fired at the nearest Faceless Man, who was
ten feet below him. Vincent's aim was,
of course, flawless and impeccable, but even in its crippled condition, the
Faceless Man still managed to dodge the bullet, jerking its entire body to the
left while maintaining its balance. As
if that wasn't bad enough, just as Vincent was preparing to fire again, the
Legless Faceless Man and the Crispy Faceless Man reached behind their backs in
unison and...pulled out their submachine guns!
Yuffie's mouth dropped open. "Oh hell no! How did they managed to hold onto those things?!"
Vincent grabbed her around the waist and
yanked her away from the edge just as a stream of bullets tore into the spot
where Yuffie had been standing a millisecond earlier.
"Come on!" he yelled, running along the
ledge with his cape flapping behind him.
Yuffie followed him, rain slapping against
her face. "Where are we going? Let's run to Kalm and get the others! It's not that far away now!"
Vincent glanced behind him to see that the
Faceless Men still had yet to emerge from the valley and climb up on the ledge
he and Yuffie were on. "We can't go to
Kalm," he told his young companion.
"And why the hell not?!" she demanded half
in fear and half in anger. "We're
completely worn out, Vinnie! Your
bullets aren't working and I'm going to have to throw left-handed! Cloud and his big ass sword need to get down
here and do the work for us!"
"We can't lead these monsters into Kalm," he
said flatly.
Yuffie shut her mouth, feeling her heart
sink to her feet. Vincent was right;
they could run away to Kalm and risk dozens of innocents being killed by a
stray bullet or by the fantastical strength of the Faceless Men. She and Vincent were going to have to kill
these monsters, right here, right now, before they could hurt anyone else. But...god, why did life have to suck to so bad
sometimes?!
Vincent turned around a bend in the ledge's
pathway and pressed himself against the wall.
Yuffie joined him just as a stream of bullets whizzed past her head, so
close that she could hear the air scream as they flew by.
"What are we gonna do, Vinnie?" she asked,
pressing herself against the muddy wall next to her companion.
Vincent chanced a look around the corner of
the wall before turning back to Yuffie.
"This wall should provide us with some cover for a short while. Only two of them have their guns, and
they're remaining in one place to fire them.
The other three are approaching us as we speak. We need to engage these things in close
combat for our attacks to be effective."
"Guess it sucks that we both use long-range
weapons," Yuffie commented weakly.
"We're gonna die."
Vincent suddenly grabbed her by the
shoulders and shook her slightly, surprising her so much that all she could do
was stare up at him dumbly. "Yuffie,"
he said firmly, red eyes boring into hers.
"Get a hold of yourself. We are
going to end this right here, right now.
Now, I'm going to fire around the corner and try to disarm the two with
guns. If the other three make it around
the corner, you have to deal with them, hand to hand, understand?"
"Why me?" she whined.
"You're better at close range combat than I
am," he said seriously.
Now that surprised her; she had never
even thought that Vincent noticed her style of fighting, much less thought it
to be better than his. "What makes you
say that?"
"You're a ninja, aren't you? Of the Kisaragi-Chao bloodline?"
She squared her shoulders proudly at the
mention of her family's line of ninjas.
"Yes, I am."
Vincent nodded, and released his grip on her
shoulders, gently touching her cheek with his gloved hand, an indiscernible
emotion in his red eyes. "Do your
ancestors proud, Yuffie Kisaragi," he said softly.
She nodded gravely. Vincent nodded in return, then whirled away
from her, cocking his rifle and scooting closer to the edge. His face turned grim, cold, and hard ? the
face of the Turk assassin he used to be 28 years ago. Yuffie glanced wistfully at her Conformer before strapping it
onto her back, where it wouldn't get in the way. Her "ultimate" weapon wouldn't be much use in this battle.
Vincent waited only one second before firing
around the edge of the mud wall with the Death Penalty, taking great care not
to get his arm clipped off in the stream of bullets that flew past the wall
like a colony of angry bees. Yuffie
waited anxiously, stretching her arms and legs absently to prepare herself to
do her part in the upcoming battle.
She didn't have to wait long.
One of the Armless Faceless Men suddenly
came rushing around the wall, his burnt clothes and pink-and-black skin
glistening with rain. Before he could
turn his attention to Vincent, however, Yuffie rushed forward and kicked him in
the gut.
"Come one, you faceless freak!" she taunted,
not knowing if he could understand her and not caring either way. Battle adrenaline coursed through her body
like wildfire, sharpening her senses and quickening her reflexes.
The Faceless Man lurched forward and swung
his remaining arm at her head in a right cross. Yuffie ducked easily and swept his legs out from under him just
as his two companions came running around the corner, as if sensing their
brother's plight.
Yuffie's stormy gray eyes darted coldly back
and forth between the two newcomers.
"Okay, which one of you bastards is the one that shot me in the
shoulder? Or is the prick back there
with his little pop gun?"
The Faceless Men didn't respond, but
advanced on her even though Vincent was standing unprotected a few inches away
from them. Either they weren't the
sharpest tools in the shed, or they were ordered to attack whichever of their
opponents posed the great threat.
Yuffie backed up a few steps as the Faceless Man she had knocked over
lurched to his feet and joined his comrades in their upcoming attack on
her. Yuffie continued to retreat
backwards, trying to draw them away from Vincent while matching their imposing
pace step for step.
One of them suddenly lunged for her with a
speed that she hadn't, even with her past experience fighting in close range
with these things, been expecting.
Yuffie let out a cry of surprise and barely managed to evade the attack,
doing a couple of rapid back handsprings to increase the distance between her
and her attackers. She noticed in
passing that she was moving in a sort of uphill direction, but being that she
was very busy, it didn't click in her mind that she might be leading herself
into a trap.
She held her ground grimly as the Faceless
Men bore down on her, looking like matching triplets from hell with their
tattered clothes and missing arms. Her
eyes hardened. Focusing on the
Lightening materia she had fitted into a slot in her Conformer, Yuffie made the
conjuring motions, lifting her arms and tucking one of her feet behind the back
of her opposite knee.
"Bolt 3!" she cried. No sooner had the words left her lips than
Lightening eagerly rained down from the turbulent skies, only too happy to
oblige her summons. The magic leapt
onto the Faceless Men, super-powered bolts of pure nature's electricity
crisping their flesh even more as they staggered underneath the devastating
blow that the mastered materia had dealt them.
Yuffie's heart sank when she saw that the
attack hadn't even injured the Faceless Men, only slowed them down for a
second. They soon were striding towards
her once again in that cruel, relentless way of theirs, stonily silent, as
always, but possessing an extreme aura of menace.
"Goddamn!" Yuffie cursed angrily. "Don't you guys ever give up?!"
The Faceless Men's only reply was to bear
down on her faster.
"I'll take that as a 'no,'" she muttered,
backing up.
A quick glance behind her opponents showed
that Vincent had succeeded in disarming the remaining two Faceless Men. However, they had decided that the dark
gunman needed a lesson in manners and were now engaging him in close range
combat, every bit as nimble and powerful as he was. Knowing that Vincent could take care of himself, Yuffie turned
quickly and darted away from her pursuers, wanting to fight them on the open
ground she hoped was at the top of the hill.
Stopping only to cast Bolt 3 a couple of
more time, to no effect, of course, Yuffie scaled the top of the hill, heedless
to the pounding rain and the thunder that was now so much louder than it had
been in the valley. Her heart thundered
in her chest, filling her entire body with adrenaline and blood, her steady,
unhurried breaths pumping in and out of her lungs and fueling her body with
their airy sustenance.
"Oh crap!" she cursed as she reached the top
of the hill, seeing a death drop into the ocean ten feet in front of her, a
plummet to some nasty, jagged looking rocks on her right, and a muddy hillside
to her left. Not only were all her
escape routes cut off, but the space on top of the hill was not even as big as
the front room as Tifa's bar. Yuffie's
bedroom at Wutai was bigger than this!
How was she supposed to fight three nearly indestructible men in such
conditions?
Whirling around and nearly slipping on the
wet grass, she saw that the three Faceless Men were still coming on strong,
intent on her small but determined figure on top of the hill. Yuffie gulped and quickly cast another Bolt
3 with the vain hope that this one would blow them to smithereens and she would
emerge from the battle victorious.
No such luck. The three Faceless Men shrugged off this attack like they had
done all her others. They were only ten
feet away from her now.
Taking a deep breath, Yuffie fell into a
battle stance and screamed, "Come on, bastards! Bring it on!"
The Faceless Men were too happy to
oblige. The one in the middle suddenly
sprung at her with a feline ease that would have given Red a run for his
money. The agility and speed of the
airborne attack surprised Yuffie, barely giving her time to leap to the left
side of the hill before the Faceless Man came crashing down in the very spot
she had just been standing on, landing nimbly on his booted feet in a crouch.
Sobered by her close call, Yuffie wrestled
to her feet just as the other two men cleared the top of the hill to join their
companion. Together, they started to
advance on her in a single, threatening row.
I can't let them back me up too far, she told herself. They'll probably try and force me off the cliff. On the other hand, if I can get them to
lunge for me, then they'll be ones to fall off of the cliff and go SPLAT on the
rocks! Squashed tomatoes!
Yuffie wasn't given any more time to devise
a strategy, however, because one of her opponents suddenly executed the attack
she had been dreading. He lunged
forward like a football player, with his head lowered for maximum impact. Reflexes kicked in, and Yuffie dodged to the
left...just in time to see another of Faceless Men heading towards her in the
same lunge!
Letting out a cry of surprise and cursing
herself that she hadn't figured that they would attack one right after the
other, she rolled desperately across the wet grass, avoiding the second attack
by the skin of her teeth. The third
one, however, never came, but instead of being suspicious as to why her
remaining opponent hadn't attacked her, she lurched to her feet for fear that
she would roll off the edge and down the muddy hill.
A huge ball of pain suddenly exploded in her
stomach, knocking the wind out of her as she fell to the wet grass, sliding
across its slippery surface until she felt one of her arms dangling over the
side of the cliff. It took a few
moments for her head to clear, and it was only then that Yuffie realized the
third Faceless Man had tackled her. She
was now lying on her back in the wet grass with the humanoid creature on top of
her, inches away from the 50 foot fall down a muddy hill.
"Get off me!" she wheezed, air whooshing
back into her lungs. Thrashing from
side to side, trying to the throw the Faceless Man off of her, she pummeled it
desperately with her fists, but, like her Bolt 3 attacks, her efforts seemed to
have absolutely no effect on her opponent.
Her lashing punches only met slippery resistance on its smooth pink
skin.
Yuffie screamed in pain as she felt the
Faceless Man's only remaining fist bury itself in her side like a battering
ram. Multicolored spots danced in front
her vision, but she viciously shoved them away. Burning with rage, she raised her arms above the monstrosity,
laced her fingers together and brought them down as hard as she could on the
Faceless Man's bald head. It was like
hitting a brick wall. Pain shot up her
arms, not stopping until it reached her shoulders. Unfazed by her attack, the creature punched her in the stomach,
and this time Yuffie nearly blacked out from the pain.
A gunshot suddenly spit the air, and
something wet that was definitely not rain splattered her face. The Faceless Man sagged forward, its
nonexistent face striking the wet grass next to her own head, the charred smell
of its burnt flesh filling her nose.
She let out a screech of pure disgust and
beat on the thing with her fists, realizing belatedly that the creature was
dead. Twisting out from under the
monstrosity, Yuffie gritted her teeth against the pain in her body and leapt to
her feet, giving the dead thing a good kick in the gut as she did so.
Clutching her side in pain, she turned to see
Vincent standing a few feet away from her, his cape torn and the Death Penalty
trained on the sprawled figures of the other two Faceless Men who had pursued
Yuffie up the hill. Some sort of sticky
web had bound the two monstrosities together, and they were the process of
trying to break free.
"Vinnie!" Yuffie wheezed, relieved to see
that he was still alive. He had
obviously been the one who had killed her attacker. If he hadn't been there...
Vincent turned to stare at her, and the
young ninja was shocked to see that her companion had a split lip that was
bleeding freely. His clothes were
ripped in several places, exposing his porcelain skin to the elements. Even in their physically taxing travels with
AVALANCHE a year before, she had never seen her friend look so ravaged.
"Are you alright, Yuffie?" he asked calmly.
She managed a painful nod, hunched over
slightly. "What happened to the other
two?" she asked.
"Dead," Vincent said simply, keeping his
eyes trained on the struggling Faceless Men.
"Are you sure?" she asked fearfully.
"As sure as I'm going to be," he
replied. "We need to get off this
hill."
Yuffie glanced around incredulously, not
sure she had heard him correctly. There
were death drops on three sides of them, and the Faceless Men were blocking the
path she had used to get to the top of the hill. There was no way out.
"Are you kidding me?" she shrieked. "We can't get off this hill! We'll die if we go down any of the sides and
those freaks will grab us if we try and jump over them to get to the path!"
Vincent looked around calmly, surveying his
surroundings. "We can't fight up here,"
he said. "Eventually, they're going to
knock one of us off of the cliff. We
can go down that way, however." He
pointed behind Yuffie.
Whirling around to see what he was looking
at, she saw that he was gesturing to the humongous mud wall that made up one
side of the hill. The dark mud was
loose and slippery from the endless rain, some of it sliding down the hill in
an eager avalanche, reminding her suddenly of the turbulent sea they had braved
the night before.
Her mouth dropped open as Vincent came up
beside her, studying the mudslide thoughtfully. "No way, Vinnie!" she exclaimed.
"I'm not going down that way! Do
you see how steep it is?! We'll die!"
He turned to stare at her calmly, red eyes
glittering. "We're going down."
Yuffie gulped, glancing at the Faceless Men,
who had managed to get most of themselves disentangled from the web. Then she looked back at the mudslide that
was her only chance of escape. She
couldn't do it; she hadn't the strength or the endurance. But just because she was a coward didn't
mean that she had the right to keep Vincent behind due to her lack of
valor.
"You go," she said bravely, managing to
speak past the lump in her throat. "Go
to Kalm and bring the others back. I'll
stall them as long as I can."
She turned to see Vincent still gazing at
her with a strange expression on his face.
For a moment, even with the rain running down his face like silent
teardrops and the strands of dark hair plastered across his pale skin, she
received the weirdest impression that he was almost smiled.
Then, without another word, he grabbed her
around the waist, pulled her against him, and jumped onto the mud wall.
Vincent's feet immediately went out from
under him as they struck the sludgy hill, but he had been expecting that. He pulled a still stunned Yuffie into his
lap, wrapping his arms around her. Wet
mud sloshed against his back and hair as he curled up around the young woman, seeking
to protect her fragile form from the ordeal they were about to endure. Vincent made a valiant effort to keep
sliding down on his back, but soon their momentum picked up considerably, and
he began to tumble head over feet down the muddy hill, with Yuffie held tightly
in his arms.
Pain flared in every part of Vincent's body,
but he ignored it with the ease of long practice and concentrated on keeping
Yuffie from getting pinned underneath his weight as they tumbled down the
hill. Mud soon coated every inch of his
body like a shroud, weighing down his cloak and seeping into some of his open
wounds. He shut his eyes tightly as
some of the foul-smelling substance sought to blind him. Yuffie, amazingly enough, still hadn't made
a sound. Her muscles were rigid,
though, as she lay curled up against him.
He knew he was going to get hell for this later on.
It seemed they rolled down the hill for an
eternity, sharp rocks that protruded from the mud cutting into his pale flesh
and battering his body. He was in so
much pain that he barely noticed when the ground suddenly leveled off, and they
began sliding across the mud instead of rolling. Vincent just happened to be sprawled on his back with Yuffie
facing skyward. He offered a silent
thanks to gods he no longer believed in that their positions hadn't been
reversed. Yuffie would have surely been
crushed underneath his weight. A small,
slender 114-pound girl and a 168-pound man/monster with a metal arm and
abnormal resistance to pain just couldn't compare. He instinctively dug his heels into the squishy mud, but instead
of coming to a gentle stop like he had been hoping, his right shoulder suddenly
struck another one of those damn rocks with enough jarring force to make him
cry out in pain. Yuffie went flying
from his arms to roll to a muddy stop a few feet from where he was lying on the
ground.
Making a point to ignore the pain in his
aching shoulder, Vincent wiped the mud from his eyes with his equally muddy
right hand and lurched to his feet, wobbling a bit, just in time to see Yuffie
scamper up to him, her face as dark as a storm cloud and her gray eyes
simmering beautifully with anger even through all the mud caked on her
face. Vincent stared at her calmly, blinking
mud from his eyes, knowing that she was about to start another one of her angry
spiels.
She suddenly slapped him hard on the face,
making his head snap to the side as sharp pain flared in his cheek. "Don't you ever do that again, Vincent Orion
Valentine!" she raged, clenching her small hands into fists. "Or I'll kick your ass all the way to
kingdom come!"
How did she know Orion was my middle name? Vincent wondered vaguely as he continued to
stare impassively down at her.
She suddenly jumped forward, and he braced
himself for another assault only to feel her slender arms encircle his waist as
she laid her head on his mud-covered chest.
She hugged him tightly, and he bit back a yelp as his battered body
screamed in protest.
"Thanks for saving me, Vincent," she
whispered, so softly that even he could barely hear her over the rain. "That's yet another one I owe you."
Though he was a bit taken aback by her
seemingly fickle shows of emotions, he sighed and wrapped his arms around her
slender shoulders, holding her close for a few moments before saying, "We're
not in the clear yet."
Yuffie shifted slightly in the circle of his
arms, as if reluctant to let anything interrupt this moment. "What is it?" she asked.
Vincent released her and stepped back,
gesturing towards the top of the hill they had just skidded down. Already the rain was erasing the evidence of
Vincent and Yuffie's passage, washing it away as if all their pain and strife
were nothing to it. And at the top of
the hill, two pink, fleshly figures with charred flesh and the remains of black
clothing hanging stubbornly on to their ravaged forms, were rolling down the
hill bowling ball style.
"Ah!" Yuffie screamed, burying her muddy
fingers in her equally muddy hair.
"Just give up!" she called up to the tumbling forms of the Faceless Men. "Don't you bastards ever get tired?!"
Vincent coldly surveyed the approaching
Faceless Men with his callous garnet eyes before reaching into his waterlogged
pocket and pulling out a Swift Bolt.
Pulling his arm back as far as his aching muscles would allow, he
launched the orb filled with compressed Lightening magic at the spot he
predicted it would impact the rolling Faceless Men. Vincent's aim would have done any major league pitcher proud; the
orb struck the first Faceless Man dead on, the Lightening magic exploding out
of the orb and erupting onto the figures of their opponents like angry
wildfire. The mud all around them
simmered with the heat from the electric blast, tendrils of smoke rising up to
the stormy sky. The Faceless Men,
however, just kept right on coming.
"That crap doesn't work, Vinnie!" Yuffie
exclaimed from somewhere behind him. He
hadn't even seen her move away.
"Step back!" she urged. "Let me try something!"
Vincent whirled to see orange and yellow
lights blazing around her small figure like a fiery shroud, their reflections
dancing in her gray eyes. As she pulled
the Conformer off her back, he realized what she was about to do and hurriedly
backed away, careful not the slip in the mud.
Concentrating, Yuffie spread her arms wide,
then crossed them in front of her Conformer, the oversized shuriken hiding her
face from view. Intense purple-red
light began to blaze around her intertwined hands.
"ALL CREATION!" she cried, voice rising to a
fearsome level as the prodigious iridescent energy, more powerful than any
Ultima, a power that every Wutainese ninja dreamed of wielding, exploded from
her small figure in a tremendous funnel, blinding Vincent as it blew past him
and hit the Faceless Men dead on, engulfing their rolling forms in its
otherworldly light.
Then the radiance faded from view,
dissipating in the distance as Yuffie lowered her hands and waited anxiously
for the afterimage of her Limit Break to stop burning in her eyes so that she
could see what its effect had been on the Faceless Men. Even Sephiroth's One Winged Angel form had
shuddered slightly underneath the barrage of pure energy she had just
unleashed, and what were two faceless freaks when compared to the might of that
megalomaniac Sephiroth? Surely they
wouldn't be able to withstand the intensity of the attack.
But the Faceless Men were unlike any
creature ever known to man. They were
things out of nature, monstrosities that the Planet had never meant to exist.
All Creation had no effect on them except to
burn shreds of their deteriorating black clothes off. On and on, faster and faster, they came, oblivious to the mud and
cuts that they received from the mischievous mud hill. They were unstoppable.
Yuffie screamed in frustration when she saw
her most powerful attack had barely fazed them. Vincent raised his Death
Penalty and started firing wildly, his bullets sometimes striking the mud
around their opponents and occasionally piercing their charred pink flesh,
opening up new wounds that the Faceless Men paid absolutely no heed to. These creatures were smarter than both of
them had ever expected; they knew to keep their heads covered so that the
high-powered bullets the Death Penalty spewed forth would be unable to harm
them.
Now in a slight state of panic after her
ultimate Limit Break and Vincent's impeccable aim were having zero effect on
the Faceless Men, Yuffie mentally racked all the materia she had in her
Conformer and her Crystal Bangle, trying to find something that could be of use
to them. Lightening? Nope, been there, done that. Fire?
No way. Fire and rain are not
friends. Exit? I wish, but can't do that. Lucky Plus?
I think that damn thing is broken, anyways. Haven't been having much luck.
Deathblow? Not from this
range. God, this sucks! I've got crappy materia!
Then her eyes fell on the last orb
glittering patiently in the remaining slot of her Conformer, rain beading on
its ruby red surface. It glowed
steadily and proudly, knowing that it was the one materia she had refused to
part with, no matter how much Barret had cussed at her and told her she was
being a greedy, little thief for hogging it to herself.
If this doesn't work...
"Stand back, Vinnie!" she cried desperately
as she began the conjuring motions, glowing runes of all different colors
appearing around her transparent form.
Vincent stepped back obediently as his figure too turned transparent and
she said the words that would hopefully bring about the...
"ULIMATE END!!!!!"
Author's Note: Whoa, I think I made this
chapter way too long. And the weirdest thing
was that it was practically all battle, and I hate writing battle scenes! I'm just no good at them, but at least I
tried. Guess I did some overkill on
this one. Oh well...
e-mail catalina2717@go.com
