Ami/Miroku: Personality Clash!

[RyderHakubi]

Ryder nodded and headed into the forest aa bit... not too much, but just enough for her to change in relative modesty.  After all, she might be a guy, but there was no way Ryder was going to flash herself for the whole world with a long and mostly unesscessary transformation sequence...

"MERCURY CRYSTAL POWER... MAKE UP!!"

Once again skipping the transformation, Sailor Mercury hopped on a tree branch and started tree hopping to catch up with Kwok, moving close enough to the path to see him...

"This is not good... if that dream means what I think it does, we've got problems..."

[Kwokinator]

Kwok blinked.

"What dream?" he asked, not even pausing slightly from his run. "What'd you dream about?"

[RyderHakubi]

Not breaking stride from her branch hopping, Ryder asked, "Kwok... you watched Rurouni Kenshin, correct?  If you didn't, explaining this becomes harder, and we might not have the time for it..."

[Kwokinator]

"Nope," Kwok shaked his head as he ran. "I've got most of the anime and the entire manga, but never got around to reading or watching it.  Why?"

[RyderHakubi]

"Well... You probably at least know a little about it, right?" Ryder asked as she continued her jumping... the flames of the village coming closer, but yet still far.

[Kwokinator]

"Not really," Kwok shook his head. "Only read a couple of volumes.  Just say it and see if I understand it."

[RyderHakubi]

Ryder sighed and replied, "Two words: Makoto Shishio..."

[Kwokinator]

"Nope!" Kwok answered cheerfully. "Not a clue who he is!"

"I've heard of the name though."

[RyderHakubi]

"To make a long story short, he replaced Kenshin as the Battosai... Was almost killed when the revolutionaries betrayed him.  He survived, and is a very powerful swordsman trying to take over the Japanese Government... Kenshin's going to try and stop him.  But, something's VERY different about this... I can't put my finger on it though." Ryder explained...

"I'm praying to Kami-sama that this isn't him..."

[Kwokinator]

Kwok blinked.

"But what we've been fighting as nothing to do with swords.  These are magical creatures, not swordsmen."

[RyderHakubi]

"I know that already... that's why it isn't making any sense." Ryder said as she shook her head...

"Let's worry about it later... we've got more important things to deal with, like this fire up ahead."

[Carthrat]

The disfunctional duo reached the villiage gate. From here, they could see a great deal.

And what they saw wasn't pretty.

The entire place was up in flames, and the corpses of villiagers lay all over, along with a small group of Japanese policemen.

A few more villiagers were still running around, but were being butchered before they could make it halfway to the gate.

And what they were being butchered by was disturbing.

Packs of red, glowing dogs with abnormally long teeth were rushing around the villiage, tearing apart anything that moved. A group of five swordsmen killed anyone the dogs failed to reach.

And in the center of it all was a tall figure with literally flaming hair, wreathed in red flames which leapt to each house in turn...

[Kwokinator]

Kwok's eyes widened at the chaos developing in front of them.

"Shit!" he cursed. "We gotta stop them, Ryder!  Let's move!"

"No wait," he halted. "I'm barehanded.  I need something."

He looked around on the ground for a possible weapon.

"Can you freeze that," he pointed at a long, thick branch lying on the ground, "into something hard enough to be used as a weapon?"

[RyderHakubi]

Ryder nodded and cast a tiny Mercury Aqua Rhapsody on the branch...

"I don't know if this can hold or not... after all, you'll be fighting beings that use fire." Ryder warned as she leaped back onto a branch and pulled down her visor to get a reading on the flaming haired man...

[Carthrat]

The visor provided a fair chunk of information to Ami.

A large chunk of it was statistics on exactly how hot the man was, what colour the fire was, but more interestingly, what made the man burn.

It seemed that the man was no monster or youkai, as she may have originally suspected, but simply a man who was infected by some kind of magical disease. The exact nature of the disease, in fact, was recorded within the computer.

Pages and pages of information scrolled down, far too quickly for Ami to quickly read, She did, however, catch a few things.

The disease itself was called "Flamewreath", and it apparently killed it's victim within a month by slowly causing the air around them to become hotter and hotter. They gained immunity from heat, but it wasn't the fire that killed them; it was the fact that fire ate up all the oxygen around them, making it somewhat difficult for them to breathe.

Apparently, this particular man had decided to spend his last days on a killing rampage. The disease had no known cure.

The flame surrounding the man was not particularly hot as far as fires go.

Interestingly enough, the visor also showed that the mans movements were somewhat sluggish, and he didn't seem to be actually walking from his spot, merely throwing balls of flaming pitch at the houses which he took from a large pack on his back instead of 'casting' them towards people.