Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Ranma ½ and its characters and settings belong to Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Kitty, and Viz Video. Oh, My Goddess © Fujishima Kosuke, Kodansha, TBS and KSS films; Animeigo, Studio Proteus, and Dark Horse Comics.

Author's notes: This was my first published fic, so please don't be too harsh. C&C welcome at dark_phoneix@hotmail.com.

I almost forgot, this is gonna be dark, and possibly violent.

With a gasp, Ranma woke from the nightmare, trembling and covered in sweat. He almost cried when he recalled the vivid dream, only one of the nightly terrors he now encountered whenever he slept. They had started almost a month before, when he had been feeling particularly down, immersed in a depression so great that Ryoga had taken one look at him and apologized for threatening to kill him.

[Flashback]

Ranma and Akane were walking to school the first day the failed wedding. He looked down to see his fiancée and sorta love interest scowling mightily at only something she could see.

"Hey, what's botherin' you," he asked as cheerfully as possible. It didn't come across as cheerful though, at least not to Akane, whose rather warped view of Ranma took the question as some sort of insult.

She turned an accusing glare to Ranma, and with venom-laced words said, "What is there that could possibly be bothering me, Ranma? I mean here we are, walking to school like it's nothing. Do you know how much crap I'm going to have to deal with when we get to school? You and your pervert friends will probably just laugh it up, right? Talking about what would have happened if we got married!"

"What do you mean 'me and my perverted friends'? I don't have any perverted friends… well, maybe Hiroshi and Daisuke, but what would I tell them happened?" he asked, then muttered under his voice, "stupid tomboy."

‘Could he really not know?’ Akane asked herself. Just when the anger was about to be reined in, she heard the 'tomboy' comment and immediately summoned forth a mallet. "Why, you—" she stopped mid-tirade as a familiar sound flitted through her ears,

*Ring*Ring*

Ranma found himself planted conveniently in the ground as Shampoo's bicycle tire impacted his head, then, after a moment of hesitation, Akane's mallet.

"Airen! Shampoo so happy see! Glad violent girl not kill!" Shampoo fairly bubbled with excitement. Just as Ranma pried himself free and stood, she was latched onto him like her life depended on it. "Airen miss Shampoo? Take Shampoo on date?"

Unnoticed by victim or assailant, Akane had a concrete melting battle aura going and a barrel-sized glowing mallet raised above her head.

Ranma himself was tempted to let his own aura free and incinerate the Amazon. He was sure he could make it look like an accident. Who would believe that he had burnt her up with his own life force besides Nerimans? –‘Where the hell had those thoughts come from?’ he asked himself fearfully.

Shampoo thinking that her airen's lack of resistance for the half-second that he had thought of killing her was a sign of acceptance, increased her hold and slipped a hand down to his crotch.

"Gah! Shampoo, what the hell do you think you're doing?!" Ranma finally managed to demand, trying to distance himself from the amorous Amazon by pushing against the nearest objects.

"Oh, Airen!" exclaimed Shampoo as Ranma's hands enclosed her breasts.

[At this time, we zoom to an overhead view, thirty feet above the scene.]

Deafening explosion.

A luminous azure blue lit the street with an unnatural and slightly hazy light. Concrete pealed from the ground in great chunks and was sent flying in all directions. The fence that separated the canal from pedestrians crumpled under strain, and a purple-haired girl went flying into the water below. A boy used to constant threats to his life automatically took a combat stance, and brought just enough of his battle aura up to resist the force of his attacker's. Combat-hardened eyes swept the area, and just for an instant he prepared to strike out with a debilitating blow, but when his main vision caught up with the peripheral and he saw the source of the ki, he lost all pretenses of defense and took on a confused, tilt-headed posture.

[Back to ground level.]

‘What the fuck?’ was going through Ranma's mind. He'd thought that Ryouga had come after him again; the ki had that feel of extreme anger to it, but no depression, similar to what Ryouga felt like when he was in one of those berserker rages. But Akane?

Akane had little on her mind but inflicting pain on Ranma and Shampoo as she saw them embracing. Not even two full days after literally bombing Akane's wedding, and here Shampoo was trying to get into Ranma's pants in the street. Then Shampoo grabbed Ranma's crotch, and he her breasts. Rational thought left her then; to be replaced with something she'd never before known. Killing rage. The kind that mothers get when they see their children killed before their very eyes, or when junkies need that one hit to get them by until tomorrow. ‘Ranma must die’ she realized. ‘Shampoo must die’ came next.

The power exploded forth from her. Some deep part of her mind, still sentient, wondered if this was what it felt like for Ranma when he had fought against and killed Saffron. The moment when perfect clarity was reached, and you drew power from your very soul. It must be. The ki, her life force, her soul; it was like a caged tiger, ready to strike and devour its meal. Without thought, incapable of thought, she turned her tiger loose. It was bliss, the feeling of wholeness she felt as it rushed from her body; unfocused, yet of a power few could ever hope to achieve, much less survive.

His battle aura, still present through bodily instinct, not will, was the only thing keeping the flesh from being flayed from his bones. Ranma stood stock still while the storm of ki raged around him, eating away at the surrounding area, bringing memories of another time when death sought him and should have taken him, but was denied. Then he had lashed out with his soul, the desperation clouding his judgment, and like watching from outside of his body, he, Ranma Saotome, had felled a god. But now the very person that he had sacrificed his innocence for— the one person in the world that he would give up his honor for— Akane, the most precious thing in his existence, had turned against him, and he knew in his bones he would die if he didn't defend himself. How could he? It felt wrong somehow. Not just like his heart told him that it was wrong and that he would die to make her happy, but that he simply could not do it, even if he wanted to.

[Momentary Recess]

Now let us consider for a moment, from an objective standpoint, what makes a fighter of Ranma's class. Healing: somewhere around twenty times normal human average. Learning Curve: would make Edison weep with envy. Skill: an equal or better of masters three hundred years his senior. Ki: learned to project it in days; defeated a dragon's descendant who was himself a virtual living reactor, and a phoenix, a being of legend and awe. These are not natural. Oh, and he survived the Nekoken training with his sanity intact. Okay, you say, what about his opponents? Ryouga: a brutish and unbalanced maniac, with a special technique that, while powerful and hard to learn, barely puts him on the playing field with Ranma. His skill is non-existent comparatively, and his ki is derived from his own knowledge of just how pathetic he is. Happosai and Cologne, while both powerful, have not fought all-out against Ranma, and neither has he against them. They don't believe that he would stand a chance, and he knows that they couldn't hold a candle if he let go. You may not believe it, but the truth seldom is taken to heart.

[We now resume our regularly scheduled program.]

Once again it came to him. He remembered now. Knew who he was. Knew why he couldn't strike out at Akane. He saw her for what she was, and the spell she didn't even know she held over him. And he knew what he was. He didn't reject it now; he embraced it, and when he did the world opened to his view. Ki, black as death itself, rose and coiled itself around him. Ranma's solid black eyes seemed to dim the light of the tempest around him, and the moment that the serpent was about to strike and end the threat, the object of its hate, the one being that it would happily torture for all of its remaining days, a single green bolt of ki no bigger than a finger punched its way through the violent outpouring of anger and struck its target in the neck. She slumped to the ground unconscious. At that moment, the storm was gone and the threat with it, but as it left, so too left the blackness and the memories. They howled with a life of their own as they were once again buried under mental shields older than his physical body. Though gone, mostly, a piece had remained. The feelings of hate and revulsion; the need to kill, and the will to do it. Ranma himself howled in misery at the thought of himself killing Akane, and nearly collapsed under the strain it placed on his, at present, delicate psyche.

Cologne was going about her business as usual. There really wasn't much more to do. The entire restaurant had taken little more than two minutes to clean, and with Shampoo gone she could meditate a bit. Mousse wasn't stupid enough to interrupt her… On second thought, maybe he was. A quick ward ensured that the door would open for none but the strongest of individuals. Cologne stripped herself of the confining robe, crouched down as best as her little body could, and seemed to fold out of a cocoon. Her entire body elongated and wrinkles disappeared, hair gone white with age returned to its natural black, and with a final touch of magic, a dress of some material finer than silk but with the look of something durable beyond compare appeared. Her face revealed odd markings, two small circles at the corners of her eyes and a larger one in the center of her forehead, all of which were green.

She took a lotus position in the air above her bed matting just in case. Whenever she had to shield her son-in-law, her mana levels were heavily drained, and falling on her ass wasn't the greatest thing to do when the body she was using had no martial arts training and the fall was a good five feet. Previously, her shields had held for months at a time, but for a week now, ever since that unfortunate incident with Saffron, Son-in-law had required everyday attention. Thinking of the object of her concern brought about another wave of sorrow. Shampoo was know bound in marriage to the reincarnation of chaos and destruction— more accurately, the mortal incarnation of the evil demon-god of chaos and destruction— and when not in her goddess form, she didn't even know it herself. She sighed wearily as she began the spells, weaving magic into intricate weaves and patterns… only to be struck with a wave of such raw unadulterated evil that she lost consciousness, automatically reverting to her Cologne form. Without the knowledge of why she had to go to her son-in-law, but with an overpowering compulsion to do so, Cologne reached out with her aura to find him. She found an explosion of anger-fueled ki from Akane so strong that her own ire rose just from mental contact with it; and opposing it was blackness infinitely more dangerous. It was her son-in-law, in all his evil glory.

Cologne assumed that he had been possessed by some sort of oni that was perverting Ranma's soul, and Akane was coming along for the ride, trapped in an induced state of rage that would eventually drain her body of even the small amount of energy needed to maintain brain activity. In a blur of motion, she reacquired her staff. She didn't remember leaving it by the door, and that ward wasn’t there when she came in. ‘Must be the excitement getting to me,’ she thought. Another blur, and the sound of a pogo-staff hitting a solid surface such as concrete or asphalt hundreds of times a minute, signaled her departure.

The sight of battle— if it could be called that— brought fear to the old woman's heart. Akane stood with a huge mallet held at her side, with ki raging uncontrolled around her. The storm formed an odd bubble nearly seventy feet in circumference around the girl, with the only untouched areas being a small patch of pristine sidewalk around Akane and Ranma. And… ‘Goddess protect us all,’ thought Cologne in horror as she looked upon Ranma. There were ancient stories that told of men who looked like that; they were used to scare little children. They also said to run like your hair was on fire if you saw one. Her theory switched from oni-possession of Ranma, and Akane going crazy in a magic-induced rage, to oni-possession of Akane, and Ranma embracing darkness.

Oni possessed or not, her body could not function beyond normal life support if its ki flows were radically scrambled. As her one and only hope, Cologne focused nearly all of her ki, leaving just enough to maintain her ancient body until she could rest, and formed it into a projectile no more than three inches in length and a third that in width. She fired it from her cupped hands directly at the pressure point on Akane's neck that would render her unconscious. It barely made it through intact and nearly all of its power was gone, but the tiny ki blast served its purpose, as it struck true.

Not two seconds later, Cologne looked from her rooftop perch upon a much-changed landscape. Gone were the pyrotechnics that would make that James Cameron man, who made those movies she loved, salivate. Now Akane, her face gaunt and pale, slumped to the ground, sleeping peacefully. Ranma, in his own little patch of paradise, bellowed in rage… or sorrow, it was too hard to tell for certain.

To be continued.

Author's note: Send me some C&C on this little tidbit and I may make some changes or something, you know; reader input actually being listened to and stuff.

Webmaster: Larry F
Last revision: May 21, 2007