A Drop in the Bucket

 He fell.

The wind rushed past him, his insides flew up like a kite on a string, a searing jolt of heat hissing close enough to singe his eyebrows.

He swore he could feel it burning his hands even through his yuurei. Or maybe that was the knife twisting around in his ribcage. Made it hard to think.

His eyelids fluttered open, orange-silver clouds blurring at the end of a tunnel, glittering windows and rich lantern-lights flashing past, his foot clipping a wire and sending him tumbling in a dizzying kaleidoscope of dulled-sky and dark asphalt. Flickers of leaves and startled faces.

Would hitting from this height hurt? A screaming part of his brain howled yes. Though a bullet barely tickled, and cracking through a swooping balcony eave's edge only took a chunk out of the building.

He remembered slamming into the ground, once. Shoulderblades and the back of his skull cracking on a shiny floor. Hadn't really felt it past the teeth in his throat, though.

As if summoned, teeth flashed for him, big as a lion's had been to a skinny sixteen-year-old.

Oh God my life's flashing before my eyes already.

Except his insides abruptly jolted back where they belonged in a flash of grey scales yanking him out of the sky. Dragon. He choked on what should've been a breath, giddy delirium swirling through his head. Cavalry'd arrived to fly him through the sunset.

"Never been happier to see a dragon in my life." Sounded like he was rattling rocks inside a leaky balloon, and he fought back a cough. How long would it take for this thing to dissipate?

The dragon rumbled something that sounded awfully distant and had a few swears flung in that'd never come out of a Nihonjin mouth. Must've been in Angaelic. Funny that he couldn't tell. Couldn't really tell what exactly he said, either. Could've been a question.

His body twitched randomly, a stream of red raining out below and spattering onto the white flat in the middle of a dark-tiled rooftop. All the roofs from this angle weirdly enough reminded him of a cauliflower. Hadn't seen a proper lettuce in years.

Getting slammed down into a back alley carpark drove thoughts of cauliflowers straight out of his head, along with most of the air in his lungs and a worrying amount of blood. A dragon yelling in his face about keeping his yuurei up didn't give him much room for consideration, either.

"Bloody— hell," he spat out between fighting for air and glaring up at a watery muzzle baring ugly teeth in his face. "Having a damn knife... in your chest is bad enough... without getting thrown around. Have a little—" He dug a hand flickering between misted and not into his ribs and gritted his teeth— "little pity before you wind up killing me."

Apparently killing him was the logical response to that, because before he could twitch, claws had stabbed him right through.

And tore back out again clutching a bloodied obsidian shard and chunks he'd rather have inside him.

He swore violently, curling up on the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, clenching at a hole in his chest that was almost gone by the time his shaking hand pressed into it. Goddammit.

"And now you don't have a knife in your chest."

He cursed the maniac to have the devil splinter his legs, break his spine, and make a ladder out of it, spitting a wad of blood at his scuffed boots for good measure. Because damn bloody feckin' hell.

"What happened?"

The snap of Ariake's voice entered the picture, and he groaned between his teeth, rolling over to contemplate the sky.

"Masked yakuza with a shard."

"No," Lachlan gritted out, "a godawful attempt at a field surgery happened."

"...What did he say?"

Lachlan took a deep breath through his nose, scraped the remains of his violently shaken jar of marbles together, and repeated himself. In Nihonjin, this time.

"The yakuza put a knife in him." He squinted his eyes open to see the bloody shard waving around in Drake's hand and Ariake's face turn an ashen green.

"Could you not wave that thing around?" He levered himself up on an elbow, gingerly prodding at ribs that didn't hurt a bit, though he could still feel a faint sizzling further in. A leftover kind of ache as his abilities worked on the glimmer scars left behind. Should heal eventually, at least. Unlike a beam spewing energy everywhere, that shard looked pretty solid. "It's still got bits of me on it."

"Give that to me." Eden did his appearing from nowhere trick and snatched the shard, shattering the thing somehow, his glare encompassing all of them as the light motes scattered and winked out. "He may not be able to see it, but he could still manipulate it blindly, and none of us want to end up like the idiot gaijin."

"No sympathy." He pushed himself to his feet, wincing at an almost-twinge as he exhaled. "But I wouldn't have wanted to end up like me either. It's good the gang's all back together. How'd we do?"

They all looked at him like he was crazy. "Apart from being found out, attacked, and beaten within an inch of our lives in your case?"

Good point. "I think finding out they really do have a fight-club up there and someone who managed to get his hands on Ki makes up for it, don't you?"

"Ki?" Ariake sputtered at the same time Eden snapped the full force of his stare into place. "That yakuza was using Ki?"

Was it just him, or were the walls whirling a little? "Had a suit, one that uses Ki somehow. Don't ask me how, I don't know. Don't know how else to explain how they use a Ki shot." Damn, his hands wouldn't stop shaking, either, a red smear coming off on the back of his right as he wiped it over his mouth, flickering between scars and fur like a faulty light. "Has runes like a Samurai and everything."

Drake—returned to his normal self somewhere in there, peered at him. "Are you okay?"

He closed his eyes, leaning back against the alley wall and cracking a smirk. "Could do with some glimmer."

Eden sighed, and he opened his eyes just in time to nearly miss a jar thrown at him, somehow managing to fumble it into a catch. "Here."

"Thanks." He cracked the lid and downed it like a pint of beer, belatedly peering at the jar itself as the rush snapped his foggy mind back into focus. "Wait, where'd you get a jar from?"

It promptly puffed away like smoke in his hand, leaving him wondering vaguely if he was still hallucinating.

"Jars can be created out of glimmer, gaijin. Did he put a shard in your skull, as well?"

"I've just had my insides torn to pieces," he muttered, gingerly releasing his yuurei and thankfully not immediately collapsing, "cut a man some slack."

"In any case, this is a problem. No one but the SC should have access to raw Ki, let alone methods of channelling it. How he got his hands on this... suit is cause for worry."

"It shouldn't work, anyway," Ariake put in. "You can't just slap Ki on like glimmer. We use the cores for a reason."

"There were rumours of certain elements in Rhinan developing methods of utilising it in a physical suit."

"It's been used before," Lachlan broke in. "Not sure if any of you've heard of the Wren Day Massacre, but that was carried out by members of a group in Midlem using special suits. From the reports, it sounded a lot like the kind of things Samurai can do."

Eden looked at him sharply. "The Wren Day Massacre, of course."

"Wait, so one of them's out here?" Ariake flicked a look between them.

"Sure, a terrorist from six years ago marched all the way from Wilind to get here without anyone noticing." He puffed out a breath, relenting as Ariake squinted at him. "So far as I know, they all died, anyway. Those suits did something that made them go crazy and explode. If the police didn't get them first."

Or someone else. He didn't mention that.

"They must have overloaded," Eden said. "It would be hard to build controls into something like that. The excess power would have torn them apart."

Well, now that he'd experienced a little of that himself, at least he knew they'd died in agony, then. "What're the odds of Snakebite-san smuggling something in from Rhinan?"

"There are yakuza in Shang. They have more reach than you think."

That might be true. Might not be. "Well, in any case, it's a mystery for the Guardians to solve." He pushed up off the wall, a dull headache making itself known behind his eyes. "Time for us to put in our report and collect our points. Should put us in reach of Hirano, with any luck."

In spite of his own words, he knew he wouldn't be forgetting about this anytime soon. Not with that mask haunting the space behind his eyelids.