˗ˏˋdialogue : breaking upˎˊ˗

• “we need to talk.”
• “i’m sorry, but i can’t keep this up.”
• “i could never hate you, i just can’t be with you.”
• “it’s not you, it’s me.”
• “maybe we can still be friends?”
• “are you saying what i think you’re saying?”
• “after all we’ve been through?”
• “you can’t be serious.”
• “you’re all i have left!”
• “i need you!”
• “it’s not me, it’s you.”
• “all we do is fight!”
• “you’re so fucking toxic… and you’ll never change.”
• “this was doomed from the beginning.”
• “i could never be with you.”
• “after everything i’ve done for you, this is what i get?”
• “you’re nothing without me.”
• “who else would wanna be with you?”
• “i’m the best you’re gonna get.”
• “about time. you’ve been holding me back.”
• “what about the kids?”
• “i need to focus on school/my career.”
• “and you say this a month before our wedding?!”
• “i was a kid, i didn’t know better.”
• “can i kiss you one last time then?”

˗ˏˋprompts : meet cuteˎˊ˗

• A fell asleep on public transport. B is sitting right next to them, and as they see the next stop coming up, they wake A up to ask if it’s their stop. (bonus points if Bcaught glimpses of them while they slept, adoring how peaceful they looked!)

• A lost something in public and is freaking out. that is, until Bfound whatAwas looking for, and asks if it’s theirs.

• it’s raining/snowing and BnoticedAis without proper clothing/equipment, like an umbrella or a jacket. so what does B do? they ask if A wants their only jacket/asks A if they want to share an umbrella.

• AandB get paired up for a boring project, but together they make it fun!

• the classic “the parents dragged AandB to a boring party and they become friends.”
• B gets something tasty looking from a restaurant/cafe/etc. and, despite A being shy or nervous, they ask what it is.

• A wants the last of something (ex. a donut or bag) but they and B grab it simultaneously. now they stare at each other for a little too long before B frantically says, “you can have it!” and then they go back and forth insisting the other can have it. (bonus points if their hands touch!)

• AandB are sitting next to each other on a long flight. despite them going to the same place, it’s for completely different reasons. A is going for a funeral, and B is going for a friend’s wedding. out of nowhere, A starts crying, and though it’s hardly audible, B notices and starts comforting Aimmediately.by the end of the flight, they both have each other’s numbers!

• no one said these had to be realistic, right? perfect. A is out in public and sees a familiar figure. the thing is, A is mistaking B, a stranger A has never saw until now, for their best friend. A quickens their walking to catch up with their “best friend.” when they eventually do, they scare them from the back, but when B turns around, A’s smile falls. AexpectsB to get reasonably upset, but instead, B laughs. a strong friendship (maybe even a romantic relationship?) ensues.

• again, might be unrealistic yet adorable! A finds a cat/dog on the street, but they don’t have a collar, so A starts treating them as their own. that is until B starts knocking on people’s doors, describing the pet and asking if anyone has seen them. when B gets to A’sdoor,A immediately knows they have that exact pet. depending on who you portray A to be, they may consider lying and saying they don’t have it, but in the end, they end up giving the pet back. the pet, however, is very attached to A, and tries to stay. B notices this and tells A that they can keep the pet, just as long as they stay in contact so B can visit it whenever! a strong relationship between AandB ensues :)

saltwaffle:

full offense but none of you would have ever survived fanfiction.net in 2009

You say this like I didn’t join ff.n in 2007 and continue posting there until 2019, only stopping because reader interaction dropped way down and they removed our ability to moderate our reviews or block anons. Gods, anyone else remember the days when you could say you were holding the next chapter of a fic hostage until you got a certain number of reviews on the latest chapter and it worked? That was nice. I’m happier on AO3 these days, but there is a certain nostalgia for those lawless, traumatizing, magnificent early days…

CHAPTER UPDATE|chapter two: i will do anything for you

… “So am I, mi pequeña luciérnaga, it’s the last gift we’re going to have until all of you are grown and have your own kids!”

“That’s gonna be a long time, papá,” Moerai says in awe, eyes going wide as she pulls away from him.

Her papá chuckles “Indeed it is, Moe, but it’ll be worth the wait.”

Moerai nods in agreement “My kids will have the neatest gifts!”… .“

READ HERE ON AO3||WATTPAD||FFN

(message me if you want to be added! ) tag list:@ocfairygodmother@lost-in-the-shelves@farfallasunicas@claryxjackson@ocappreciationtag@toalltheocsivelovedbefore@giveourfuckingflamingosback

Every review on fanfiction.net has an associated timestamp telling us exactly when it was posted, or so we thought. When trying to find the hours of peak review activity across different fanfiction.net fandoms, I saw some fandoms with very uneven review count distributions (shown below). 

What made this even more confusing was that some of the fandoms had much more pronounced spikes at 7 and 8 UTC. I compared the fandoms with large spikes to those without. I noticed that ones with spikes tended to be fandoms with many reviews in the early 2000s. I wanted to look at how the distribution of review time changed over each year. I chose to make a heat map of the average daily distribution by year. I did some data wrangling so that I could put year on the Y axis and hour of review on the X- axis. Below is the result.

First Exploratory Visualization:

The resulting visualization made the situation much clearer. Every year should look like the ones between 2012 and 2017, where reviews are relatively evenly spread across the day with small variations at peak hours.  Before 2012 we see very different behavior. Around 60% of reviews have a time stamp of 7 UTC, and the other 40% have a timestamp with 8 UTC. We see absolutely no reviews with timestamps for other hours. 2011 is a unique case where we have almost all reviews posted during the 7-8 UTC with less than 1% posted at other hours. To get a closer look at 2011, I filtered the data to just 2011 and used months instead of years on the Y-axis.

Second Exploratory Visualization:

This graph reveals two important clues as to what is wrong with the dataset. The first is what the split between 7 and 8 values is from. 7 and 8 values each have a specific time of year where they are the only review time, switching in March and November. I realized that something else important happens with dates in March and November, daylight-savings time. I looked up the daylight-saving times for 2011 and it was from March 14th to November 6th we see those dates reflected exactly in the data. We even see that March is evenly split because the 14th is close to the middle of the month. In November  the 6th is close to the beginning so we see an uneven split. The other thing that this graph shows us is that at some point in December the dates started to match the expected values. To get the most accurate value of the date that this happened I had to switch to looking at the day instead of month, and found that on December 27th all dates are 0 UTC and then after that they seem to be accurate to the minute.

Now that I had the issue clearly defined, I had to figure out why this was an issue in our data in the first place, and hopefully fix it. Instead of exploring our collected data, I saved a lot of time by going right to the source. I went on fanfiction.net, found some old reviews, inspected the webpage to find the UTC time stamp, and converted the timestamps into datetimes. I found that all the old reviews on the site were either 7 or 8 pm. I wasn’t able to find an exact reason that the site is inaccurate, but I believe that when the ff.net backend was built in 2000 they decided to save some hard drive space by only saving dates by the day. 

Here is 2015, a typical year, showing what the review distribution should look like. We can see people reviewing later in the day during summer and winter break. 8 UTC is midnight Pacific and 3 am Eastern, we see the lowest usage during the three following hours when many of the US reviewers are sleeping. 

While creating these visualisations I learned: 

1. Visualise both before and after processing data. Before calculating the month from the date, the visualisations didn’t discover the inaccuracies. After splitting date into the year and hour of the day variables, the visualisations showed the problems with the dates.

2. Look deeper if something seems weird. When I first saw the problem by accident I almost dismissed it. Going off on a tangent ended up making a discovery that will be helpful for future research with this dataset.

3. Creating a presentation can help with findings. When creating a presentation to the group I built an interactive version of the graph (linked below). The interactive version showed that the data was missing a lot of reviews from when we were scraping the site in late 2016 to early 2017, another important thing to know when using this dataset.  

You can see the code to create the visualizations here: https://travisneils.github.io/dates/dates_vis.html

You can find an interactive version here:  https://travisneils.github.io/dates/date_chart.html

fanfictiondatascience:

Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human-Centered Data Science Lab investigating people’s participation in online fan communities like Fanfiction.net to better understand how people form communities in online environments. We’d love to have you participate in our new survey.

Fanfiction Survey Link

We’re looking for Fanfiction.net users aged 13 and above. We’re interested in hearing from anyone who has used Fanfiction.net to read, review, or post fanfiction stories. You don’t need to be a current user of Fanfiction.net - we’re also interested in hearing from people who used the site in the past. The survey contains 14 questions and you are not required to answer every question. 

All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we may publish aggregated results. You may exit the survey at any time. 

For questions about our research, contact Niamh Froelich at [email protected].

Thank you for your participation!

We have over 300 responses already!! Thank you so much everyone. This survey is still open if you haven’t had a chance to answer!

Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human-Centered Data Science Lab investigating people’s participation in online fan communities like Fanfiction.net to better understand how people form communities in online environments. We’d love to have you participate in our new survey.

Fanfiction Survey Link

We’re looking for Fanfiction.net users aged 13 and above. We’re interested in hearing from anyone who has used Fanfiction.net to read, review, or post fanfiction stories. You don’t need to be a current user of Fanfiction.net - we’re also interested in hearing from people who used the site in the past. The survey contains 14 questions and you are not required to answer every question. 

All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we may publish aggregated results. You may exit the survey at any time. 

For questions about our research, contact Niamh Froelich at [email protected].

Thank you for your participation!

A study on fanfiction stories’ update frequency and number of reviews received

As a grad student, I often find myself debating over finishing tasks all at once or spacing them out over a reasonable time period. In the fanfiction community, we have seen stories where multiple chapters are posted on the same day, while others are updated every few months or even years. As authors, if our goal is to attract readers and reviews, how long should we wait between chapters? Is it better off to satisfy our readers with content all at once, or to keep them hooked by posting a bit at a time?

Our Approach

To answer these questions, we defined the “frequency” of updates in a story as the average number of days between chapters posted, and looked at stories with more than one chapter and at least one review from fanfiction.net during the period of 1997 to 2017. In this particular study, we are considering the first story posted by each author to avoid miscalculating the accumulated review count for their subsequent stories. Note that the original chapter publish date/time was not available in the dataset so researchers estimated it from either the story publish time or time of the first review. As a result, this dataset is representative of stories with more reviews. 

What We Found

In this graph, each data point is a story mapped to the total number of reviews received (y-axis) and average days between chapters posted (x-axis). The x-axis is then divided into 14 bins, to represent “buckets” of stories where chapters were posted every 1, 2, 3… 14 days on average. While there are quite a few stories with up to hundreds of reviews, the median line plotted for each bin indicates that the data is skewed to the right. 

My initial guess was that stories with chapters posted 3-4 days between each other might receive the most reviews, as readers are likely to revisit the same story for updates every few days. This graph seems to be consistent with this speculation and shows that the first peak is at five days. This means that half of the stories with chapters published five days between each other are observed to have 9 reviews. Other peaks are observed at ten and thirteen days.

Your Thoughts?

How often do YOU update a story? What factors do you consider when planning to post a new chapter? As a reader, would you prefer coming back every few days to read the new chapter and review, or reading them all at once? We look forward to seeing your comments and learning more on this topic! 

Author: Sourojit Ghosh

As a creative writer myself, I’ve always been anxious about getting reviews on the content I put out there. As I’m sure others who publish any form of writing can attest to, reviews form an integral part of our development as writers. However, I also find myself paying attention to not just what a review says, but also how it is said. Specifically, the emotions expressed in a review often shape my interpretation of it.

With that in mind, we at the University of Washington Human-Centered Data Science Lab (UW-HDSL) are interested in researching the emotions present in the multitude of reviews by the fanfiction community. By investigating a correlation between the lengths of reviews and the emotions expressed in them, we aim to understand the growth of relationships between members of the community as they share likes and dislikes.

Introduction

Our previous research with the fanfiction community has found widespread encouragement for budding relationships in its distributed-mentoring setting. The members of the community, mostly young adults from all over the world, are incredibly expressive in their words and often eager to support each other in the writing process. Most of the reviews we have seen in the community are rife with emotion, with the words jumping off the page with their expressiveness. This collectively supportive environment not only seeks to bring out the best in each individual but also to form meaningful relationships that extend beyond that of anonymous writers and readers of fanfiction.

Methods and Findings

For this exploration, we examined 1000 reviews of various fanfiction stories published on the site. We decided to classify them as exhibiting one of 11 emotions: Like, Joy/Happiness, Anticipation/Hope, Dislike, Discomfort/Disgust, Anger/Frustration, Sadness, Surprise, Confused,  Unknown, and No Emotion. Figure 1 shows an example of a review coded in this way using TextPrizm, a  web tool developed by members of the UW-HDSL.

Figure 1: An example of a review being coded for emotions

By coding these reviews for emotions, we are trying to gain a better understanding of the trends in emotions expressed by reviewers across the community. By identifying such trends, we hope to learn how relationships are formed between users sharing common interests and having similar reactions to certain content.  

Figures 2 and 3 display our preliminary results so far. Figure 2 represents the number of reviews being classified as having each emotion, while Figure 3 shows the average lengths of reviews in the dataset expressing each emotion.

Figure 2: A bar graph showing the no. of reviews each emotion was assigned to.

Figure 3: A bar graph showing the average no. of words in a review expressing each emotion.

The high number of reviews expressing Joy / Happiness and Like is an encouraging indication of the fact that most users took adequate time to express their positivity and support towards the writers. Another emerging trend can be seen in the reviews marked as No Emotion. This small number of reviews averaging at about 80 words per review was found to contain thoughtful discussions on global issues like religious tensions and sexual violence. While the previously discussed reviews highlight the positivity inherent in the community, these reviews remind us of the incredible maturity and depth of thought that the members also possess, a fact even more inspiring given that the community is mostly comprised of young adults.  

Conclusion and Future Work

This initial examination of a small set of reviews offers some insight into the correlations between emotions and review length. An exploration of a larger set of reviews may offer some basis for providing statistically significant findings along the lines of the currently observed trends and can provide further insight into the ways in which reviews are integral in the process of users on relationship building on Fanfiction.net.

We would love to hear from you, members of the fanfiction community, about what you think of our work and how you view the emotions expressed in reviews of your writing. At the same time, we would also be interested in knowing if you express certain emotions in your reviews more extensively than others! If you have any questions or concerns about our data, feel free to respond to this post or send up an ask, and we would be happy to get back to you. And, as always, stay tuned for our future work with your wonderful fanfiction community!

Acknowledgments

We are incredibly grateful to Dr. Cecilia Aragon and undergraduate researcher Niamh Froelich at the UW Human-Centered Data Science Lab for the initial ideas behind the project, their insightful feedback, and constant support throughout the process. We are also grateful for the fantastic Fanfiction.net community, which continues to prosper each day and exist as a positively supportive environment for budding and seasoned writers alike.

A time-shifted serial correlation analysis of reviewing and being reviewed.

Acknowledgements: Investigation by Arthur Liu with thanks to Dr. Cecilia Aragon and Jenna Frens for feedback and editing and also to team lead Niamh Froelich.

Is it true that giving someone a review will make that person more likely to write reviews as well? Conversely, is it true instead that writing more reviews yourself will help you get more reviews from others?

In this post, we explore one avenue of reciprocity by analyzing the time series of reviews given vs. reviews received. 

Of course, you have to be careful with this technique. The inspiration of the analysis we utilized comes partly from Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations site (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) where he shows interesting correlations between clearly unrelated events. With a humorous perspective, he reminds us that correlation is not evidence of causation (since sociology doctorates and rocket launches are totally coincidental), but the analysis techniques here are an interesting technique to investigate potential relationships between two different time series.

Back to our topic of reciprocity, we wanted to investigate the relationship between reviews given and reviews received. We had two hypotheses that we were interested in testing: first, we were curious if users who received more reviews would be more inclined to give reviews themselves. Second, we were curious if giving reviews would help increase the number of reviews you personally received.

To get into specifics, here is an example plot of a real user’s review activity.

Let’s break it down. This plot follows the activity of a single user over the course of several years. It plots the total amount of reviews that they gave (in red) and also the total number of reviews that they had received on their fan fictions (in blue). What this chart shows us is that this is a user who has had a very consistent amount of activity in terms of giving out reviews. It also captures spikes in the number of reviews received (blue) which may correspond to having released a new chapter.

If there was a strong link between reviews given and reviews received in either direction, we would expect to see that increases in one is followed by increases in the other. Here is an example where we witness such a relationship:

Since it is harder to analyze the change in activity level from these cumulative plots, we then looked at the total number of reviews given each month. Here’s what that looks like for the same person:

This time, it is more apparent that there is a similar pattern in the activity behavior for the reviews given and reviews received. For this example, that similarity is a similar spiking pattern.

From Vigen’s website, we could naively apply a correlation calculation here, but there is a glaring flaw: one of the time series is clearly ahead of the other. So, what if we just shifted one of the time series so they overlapped and then computed the correlation? This is the basic intuition of serial correlation: we apply a range of possible shifts and then compute the correlation between these shifted graphs. The one with the highest correlation would be the one with the best match.

The results for different shifts:

The best shift of “11 frames”:

In other words, for this person, giving a lot of reviews correlates well with receiving a lot of reviews roughly 11 months later. Of course, this doesn’t prove any sort of causation, but we can speculate that the increased amount of reviews this user gave helped boost the amount of reviews they got later!

From this analysis of an individual person, we were curious how this extended to the larger community to see if these same trends existed! The short answer, “eh, not really,” but it is interesting to see why this cool pattern might not generalize adequately.

1. Not all individuals get reviews and give reviews at the same scale

Some users just like to give reviews and some users just like to write reviews!

For instance, here is someone who gives a lot of reviews and didn’t get many themselves.

Here is someone who gave some reviews, but then focused on writing stories and received a lot more reviews instead!

For graphs like these, it is hard to apply the analysis we did earlier because the relationship is likely a lot weaker or there might just not be enough data points to capture it anyway.

We can summarize these examples for the overall population by looking at the ratio between reviews given to reviews received.

For this sample of 10k users, we see that those who primarily receive reviews will have a larger ratio (right), and users who primarily give reviews will have a smaller ratio (left). In more detail, a ratio of 1.0 means that they only received reviews. For example: 10 reviews received / (10 reviews received + 0 reviews given) = 1. For a ratio of 0.0, it means they received no reviews. For each ratio, the graph shows the total count of the 10k users who had that ratio.

To address issue (1), we reduced the scope down to users who had a relatively equal ratio of reviews given vs. reviews received.

Additionally, we pruned for users who had received at least 10 reviews. This way, we would have enough data points to use for our analysis. In fact, this is also why there is a large spike in the 0.5 ratio which consisted of a lot of users who had written one or two reviews and received an equal amount.

With this cleaned up, we also computed the lags on a finer scale–weeks–instead of months since we noticed that months were not granular enough. We computed the most common lags, and here is a plot of the results. This lag is the shift applied to received reviews, and the correlation is how well the two series correlated with each other after the shift. A correlation of 1 means that as one increased, the other increased as well, a correlation of -1 means that as one decreased, the other increased, and smaller values such as 0.8 mean that the correlation was positive, but less strong.

So the result here is both a little messier and structured than we had hoped from our hypothesis, but that’s part of the research process!

To elaborate, in the X dimension, the lag, there isn’t a particular range that was significantly denser than the rest. In fact, if we looked at the histogram, we see something like this:

So we lied a little, it looks like that last lag of +20 weeks looks really popular, but this is actually an artifact caused by the serial correlation process. If you recall this graph:

The red line is the chosen lag at the peak. In this case, the shifting actually peaked, but if we had truncated the graph at 5, it would have simply picked that highest shift.

Not convinced? Here’s the same analytics, but now we calculated up to a lag of 40.

Looks like the 20 bucket wasn’t particularly special after all.

So ignoring this last bucket (and the first bucket for a similar reason), we notice that our histogram matches this noisiness that we observed for the lags.

What does this mean? It suggests that there is no general pattern that can succinctly summarize the larger population, and that we are unable to conclude that there is a common average positive or negative lag relationship between the number of reviews someone has given and the number of reviews that they have received. Some authors sent more reviews after receiving more reviews (positive lags), some authors received more reviews after getting reviews (negative lags), and some authors did not exhibit much of a relationship either way (the first and last buckets which didn’t find a reasonable shift). Although these relationships do exist, the timing was not consistent overall so we can’t say anything about fanfiction.net authors in general.

So…

2. Looking across users, we do not see consistent behavior in a time-shifted relationship between a person’s received and given review count

Even when we look at the lags with the highest correlation (r > 0.7), we see that this even distribution of lags still holds.

In summary, this isn’t the dead end! (With research, it rarely is!) But it helps paint a better picture of the users in the community and why this approach may not be well suited to encapsulate it well. We see that the relationship between reviews received and given doesn’t follow a necessarily time-shifted relationship and that in fact, this shift can go either direction. Try taking a look at your own reviewing trends, and see where you would be located within these graphs! Are you someone who has a positive shift or a negative time shift… or no strong correlation at all?

In the meanwhile, we’re still exploring some other interesting approaches in reciprocity! Stay tuned :)

Introduction

One of the questions we occasionally get from authors is: “What kinds of submissions get the most reviews?” We think this is a really interesting question and we’ve started doing some exploratory analyses related to the quantity of reviews that authors receive based on a variety of factors. One of the factors that we decided to check out was the number of words in a chapter. We were curious: Would shorter chapters get more reviews because they might take less time to read? Or longer chapters because there is more for reviewers to dig into? Or maybe there’s a sweet spot somewhere in between?

Methods

To look into this we took a random subset of 10,000 authors from FanFiction.net with chapter publications over a 20 year period from 1997 to 2017. We then created a scatterplot with each point being one of these 10,000 authors, the x-axis showing the median number of words across their published chapters, and the y-axis showing the median number of reviews received on those chapters. The points are segmented into six groups based on percentile of the total number of reviews received on all chapters they have ever published. We then put trendlines in for each of these segments, so we can more easily observe if there are any relationships between chapter length and reviews received across each of these groups. We also performed this analysis at the chapter with similar findings. The results are preliminary and warrant further exploration, but we’ll share what we’ve found so far. 

Results

It turns out that the small number of most highly reviewed authors in the top 1% saw an increase in reviews received up until chapters of almost 5,000 words in length, at which point their chapters began to receive fewer reviews on average.

For those authors whose works are in the top 25% of reviews received (excluding the top 1%), as chapter length increases, the number of reviews received on those chapters does as well. Interestingly, there does not appear to be the same drop off in reviews received for longer stories for these authors as there was for the authors in the top 1% of reviews received.

On the other hand, the remaining authors whose chapters are less highly reviewed saw little change in the length of chapter published with the number of reviews received.

Conclusion

These preliminary results point to some interesting potential implications on how an author might be able to get the most reviews. For the most highly reviewed authors, shooting for a chapter of around 5,000 words in length is most likely to result in the highest levels of engagement. However, for the vast majority of authors, writing longer chapters is not likely to have a negative impact on engagement from reviewers, and may even result in more reviews. 

How about you?

What are your experiences with receiving or providing reviews based on chapter length? We’d love to hear whether this is a factor that motivates you or something that you consider when writing or reviewing!

Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human Centered Data Science Lab, where we study fandom and fanfiction communities in order to better understand how people interact and engage with others in online environments. We’ve built a survey, and we’d love you all to participate!

Fanfiction Survey Link!

We’re looking for both readers and writers!

All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey.    

Anyone 13 years old or above can participate. You may stop participating in the survey at any time. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we will publish aggregated results. Also, we’ll ask if you are interested in a follow-up interview. 

This survey will ask you about your participation in fanfiction communities. You will also be asked some basic demographic questions at the end of the survey. The survey contains 11 to 13 questions in total depending on your answers. You are not required to answer every question.

For questions about our research, send us an ask or contact Ruby Davis at [email protected].

Thank you for your participation!!

mintenochian:

AND IT’S JUST MMM BOI

BC IT’S GOT GOOD GRAMMAR AND SPELLING

AND THE PLOT MAKES SENSE

AND THE CHARACTERS ARE WELL WRITTEN

AND YOU CAN HEAR THEM SAYING THE LINES IN YOUR HEAD

AND IT’S NOT A ONE SHOT

IT HAS CHAPTERS

AND JUST THE LITTLE THINGS IN IT THAT MAKES IT SUCH A DISTINCT STANDOUT

YOU KNOW WHAT I FUCKING MEAN

ADDED SHIT BC…

WHEN SAID FIC ALSO HAS THAT FUCKING AUTHOR

THE ONE WHO IS JUST SUCH A BEAN NUGGET

AND THEY ALSO WROTE LIKE TEN MORE BOOKS IN THE SERIES

THANK YOU TO THOSE FUCKING BEAN NUGGET AUTHORS

My laptop’s in the shop, so I’m posting chapter chunks wholesale in the meantime.

The rest of the chapters of my Rurouni Kenshin fan fiction are available here. Enjoy.

Back at the exterior facade of the Minakata moneychanger office building…

Three things happened within the span of five seconds.

Five long seconds that seemingly went into slow motion for all those concerned.

As Kai Hidaka of the Fuuma Ninja forcefully pulled at the speared Satoru Sakaguchi, he intended to either use him as an anchor to leap away from the attacking Kinta Minakata or as a meat shield if the lieutenant got dragged towards him instead.

Lieutenant Sakaguchi, thinking quickly, opted to allow Hidaka to pull at him instead to prevent his escape from Kinta.

The policeman charged and went into iaijutsu position, intending to attack the rope-slinging brigand rather than be used as a pawn or collateral damage against Minakata.

Kinta now had no choice but to halt his momentum to prevent him from slashing both Satoru and Kai apart with the Mangetsu O Tsuku Nari (Full Moon Slash).

That was the leeway Kai was searching for as he timed a jump at the last second before Lieutenant Sakaguchi released his blade for a Half Moon Slash, his saber clashing against Minakata’s Akatsuki sword at the location where Hidaka was a split second earlier.

By the time the Fuuma Clan Ninja reached the apex of his jump, he’d twisted and wrapped his body around a rope spear he’d shot into the ground below him. Then he twisted towards the other direction, releasing all the potential energy he’d stored from coiling himself up like a mummy.

***

Rurouni Yahiko

A Rurouni Kenshin Continuation Fan Fiction Story by Chester Castañeda

The Brigands are closing in on their Minakata V.I.P. targets. Can Yahiko and the Sakaguchis do anything against them?

Disclaimer:All characters used in this fanfic (save some others) are the rightful property of Nobuhiro Watsuki, Shueisha, Shonen Jump, Viz, Sony Studios, Fuji TV, Studio Gallup, Studio Deen, and ADV. This disclaimer also covers all the other copyrighted materials that are far too many to mention here. Don’t sue me please, I’m very poor.

***

Chapter 57: The Chinese Parade

***

He twirled like a top that’d been released after being wrapped-up in rope, intending to kill two birds with one stone with the whirling dervish that was him and his dual-wielded blades.

Only for Minakata to shift his weight on his lead foot to pivot and avoid Satoru altogether. His back foot then turned into his lead foot after doing his pivot, giving him leverage for the last few supersonic strikes of the Tsunami.

From there, he moved past Lieutenant Sakaguchi and charged at the spinning Kai, barely losing any of his momentum. He then adjusted the trajectory of his sword to slash at Kai’s revolving blades without missing a beat.

‘Kinta-kun…!’ thought Satoru, who himself turned to face the Mimawarigumi Battousai clashing blades with the Brigand’s resident ninja.

Kai scowled. Dammit. The Kagemusha did it again. He found a way.

Hidaka used the recoil from his blades clashing hard against Kinta’s Full Moon Slash to rebound back to the sky to avoid the Blue Moon Slash he knew was coming.

He then pirouetted his body to land behind Satoru, using him as his human shield against Kinta like he had originally intended.

“DIE, SEIRYU CLAN!” Kai cried out, which surprised both Kinta and Satoru.

'Seiryu Clan, huh?’ they thought in unison.

Hmmm. They were the Seiryu Clan, weren’t they? Both of them knew the Brigand Guild member had a point. It had a nice ring to it too.

This clan was indeed the partnership between a high-ranked hatamoto samurai who only answered to the daimyo and low-ranked subordinate samurai under them.

Kai Hidaka had intended for Minakata to use up the last of his stamina to make himself easy pickings for himself or by Kinta’s half-brother Lucas Grant, the man who proposed that their guild take this dangerous mission in the first place.

A mission close to Lucas’s heart. For the Prodigal Son, this time it was personal. Perhaps for Kai, it was a personal mission as well.

Hidaka then noticed that Satoru fell into the infamous Waning Stance. The defensive stance of Musou Madden Ryu.

As usual. How typical of Lieutenant Satoru Sakaguchi. The sidekick of Kinta. The Kagemusha of the Kagemusha.

An ordinary police officer stuck into extraordinary circumstances that somehow ended up with a wife and daughter to boot.

Or an about-to-be widow and her daughter, at any rate.

Hidaka knew that the Waning Stance was simply the Waxing Stance seen from behind.

Attacks happened much slower from the Waning Stance because the point of release happened from the front of the quick-draw swordsman and had to loop around to his back at the resulting follow-through.

This defensive stance hid the trajectory of the sword, allowing for a 360-degree quick-draw slash that depended more on timing than speed to work.

Regardless, Kai almost stabbed through Satoru in order to get to Kinta and injure him or at least distract him enough to the point of making a mistake.

Well, almost.

***

A banker, a ninja, and a samurai all gather at the front porch of the Minakata moneychanger building, only for thick wooden doors to burst open long after they had closed them, as though demanding they come back inside.

No, that wasn’t the start of a joke. However, the ridiculous circumstances did push them to the brink of hilarity in the point of view of situational irony.

Thusly, none of them understood the resulting punch line.

The jaws of Yahiko Myojin, Kaita of the Sanada Ninja Clan, and Tatsuya Minakata figuratively dropped on the floor at the sight before them. A sight to cause sore eyes on the part of Tatsuya, for sure.

Despite their best efforts, The Faceless—also known as Seth Merrick, John Rathbone, or even Fabian La Cerca—had breached through the defenses of the Sanada Ninja that ran interference for them, driving the bloody bat-themed spy through the door with a rapier stab.

Like Hajime Saito would with his fearsome Gatotsu stabbing technique.

“Baku!” said Kaita, serving as the first time Yahiko heard the invisible ninja raise his voice. The master of camouflage seemed more like the quiet type, so the shout surprised the Tokyo Samurai Descendant a tiny bit.

Wide-eyed, Yahiko witnessed the bat-themed ninja screech and holler a war cry, a haunting noise which made him realize the inhuman screams he heard from before was actually the shadow warrior all along.

Aloud, the teenaged samurai said to Kaita, “The ninja uses screams to mess with his target somehow, right? Like maybe burst his eardrum or give him vertigo?”

He based this on his experience with Kenshin Himura fighting Enishi Yukishiro. Kenshin defeated Enishi’s “Nerves of Insanity” by supersonic sheathing of his sword that burst the wattoujutsu expert’s eardrum with a high-pitched sound.

From behind Yahiko, Kaita said, “You’re on the right track. Baku’s screams disrupts a swordsman’s ability to read kenki (swordsman presence) and sakki(bloodlust) by using infrasound vibrations.”

Indeed, Yahiko couldn’t clearly get a read on the intentions of Baku even from that distance, his bloodlust and swordsman presence masked with distracting supersonic sound.

Like how the Kekkai no Mori (SealingForest) sealed away Kenshin’s ability to detect bloodlust by the strange magnetic field surrounding it when he faced off against the Yaminobu.

Kaita frowned, his kunai at the ready. Originally, Baku used his shrieks in order to strike fear in his targets and echolocate them from a distance or even in pitch-black darkness like bats would.

Baku trained for years to turn his screams into kenki disruptors, getting him on equal footing with the likes of the sharpshooter ninja Zan.

“However, the foreigner’s swordsmanship style probably doesn’t sense bloodlust the way Japanese swordsmen do, so Baku instead used his infrasound screams to disrupt his rhythm.”

However, the steadfast ninja

“A shadow dares defeat me?”

“The only shadow allowed to defeat me is the Kagemusha.”

“I found a horseman!” said Kaita, who popped out of nowhere with a previously escaping driver of the Minakatas whom he held at kunai-point (or ku-knife-point, as Gan would say).

“I found one of your horses!” said Yahiko, who held the reins of the beast of burden, pulling him back to the stables. Thankfully, this stallion wasn’t too spooked or wild.

“There’s a horse-drawn carriage here that hasn’t been sabotaged or had its wheel axels removed!” confirmed Tatsuya Minakata, who was sweating bullets at this point. “Perfect! Let’s go! I don’t want to spend another minute at this hellhole!”

***

Hidaka had anticipated the Full Moon Slash from the Waning Stance from the police officer, so he stabbed Satoru instead of slashed him since that was a quicker attack.

However, Kai merely clipped the turning back of the policeman in order to avoid a dual exchange. As expected, contact with the ninja’s blade made Satoru move like a booby trap that had been tripped.

The acrobatic Fuuma ninja sidestepped the resulting slash by reflex as soon as he saw the glinting blade appear in the moonlight, figuring out its trajectory by sight.

Hidaka then attacked with another lunging stab, knowing full well that Satoru was no Kinta and wasn’t capable of the Blue Moon Slash (or Double Full Moon Slash).

The shadow warrior now had leverage against Kinta and his supersonic slashes while also buying himself time until Lucas arrived.

'What…?! Impossible!’ thought Hidaka, who almost got bisected into halves with a Full Moon Slash.

A Double Full Moon Slash? A Blue Moon Slash?! The mere copper was capable of this advanced technique?!

Unbeknownst to him though, Satoru had one more trick up his sleeve.

Instead of doing the Full Moon Slash twice, Satoru instead did the Waning Gibbous Moon Slash, allowing him a slightly faster recovery time than the much harder to execute Blue Moon Slash.

Even though Satoru could not do a Blue Moon Slash like Kinta could, he could fake the technique by instead doing a Waning Gibbous Slash that resembled a Full Moon Slash, allowing him a quick follow through of a real Full Moon Slash soon after.

Thus, the opening that the Fuuma ninja thought was there got him slashed apart instead with an actual Full Moon Slash.

Such was the power of the SuigetsuO Tsuku Nari (Illusion Moon Slash). Like the reflection of the moon on the water, Satoru fooled Kai into thinking his Waning Gibbous Moon Slash and Full Moon Slash combo was the Blue Moon Slash.

It took advantage of the fact that the preparatory motion for all the slashes of Musou Madden Ryu remained the same until release.

Hidaka fell for the Illusion Moon Slash hook, line, and sinker.

***

***

Lucas then said, “Don’t make my life difficult and I won’t make your life short.”

“It kind of irritates me that you’re as good as you are despite being given everything in the world,” confessed Lucas.

They clashed swords again. The Akatsuki held true, but it could not stave off the longer reach and thicker steel of Lucas’s bastard sword.

“I didn’t know what to expect. A spoiled little rich boy, maybe? Someone who has no idea how cruel the world can be. But you’re something else, Big Brother.”

***

In the middle of Chinatown…

***

To Be Continued…

Beware of those Chinese parades, man. They’re a riot.

As a by-the-way, Lucas Grant’s first name is taken from George Lucas, who famously created the Star Wars franchise that started with a movie about an orphan forced to fight a relative in the backdrop of an intergalactic war.

Also, thusly, Lucas is using Form IV (Ataru) of Lightsaber Combat when fighting against his half-brother’s more precise and rigid iaijutsu reminiscent of Form II (Makashi) of Lightsaber Combat.

Danke,
Abdiel

“I have achieved my goal, but what next? Victory is just a bright flash, leaving sadness and emptiness behind.” – Doraku Akatsuki

https://gabriel-gabdiel.tumblr.com/post/650974220026773504/draftrurouni-yahiko-chapter-56-the-sanada

Ren (Serpentor), Zan (Bulls Eye), and Baku (Banshee Batman) (Sanada Ninjas)

Three Sanada Demons

Baku sound emissions and communicates to bats. (Produce Vibrations with Screaming). It messes with the senses of a swordsman, making him miss and limit his moves to long-range ones.

Humans can only hear sound waves between 20 and 20,000 Hz, but sound waves can still affect us below that threshold. If you sit in front of a subwoofer with the frequency at 19 Hz, even with the volume turned up to 100 dB, you won’t hear anything — but you’ll feel the vibrations.

In fact, at 19 Hz, your eyes start to go all wonky because that happens to be the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. If you’re exposed to 177 dB sound waves at 0.5 to 8 Hz, it can start messing with your lungs, making your breathing erratic and literally shaking your bones around. Short-term exposure can damage your joints, but the effects of chronic exposure can include nausea and visual impairment [source: Horowitz].

Ren Snake Whips. (Produce Vibrations with Whips and Whiplash). Whipcracking is the act of producing a cracking sound through the use of a whip. Used during livestock driving and horse riding, it has also become an art. A rhythmic whipcracking belongs to the traditional culture among various Germanic peoples of Bavaria (Goaßlschnalzen), various Alpine areas (Aperschnalzen), Austria, and Hungary (Ostorozás).

He can crack the whip strong enough to neutralize the Dou Ryu Sen.

Zan with the War Tuning Fork. (Uses Vibrations like sonar to Accurately Aim and Shoot). He is able to use almost any object as a lethal projectile, be it weapons like shuriken and sai or seemingly harmless objects like playing cards and pencils. His marksmanship is uncanny, at a nearly supernatural level.

The European Space Agency (ESA) claims that if you somehow got accidentally locked inside their Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) for testing the acoustic resiliency of their satellites, you wouldn’t survive the sonic onslaught.

A key factor here is that you’d be in an enclosed space. Outside, sound waves disperse and dissipate too quickly to reach lethal levels. That hasn’t stopped researchers from investigating the use of sound as a weapon. It’s been calculated, for instance, that it would require 240 dB to make a human head explode.

That’s a whole lot of decibels. It would be next to impossible to generate this level of noise. Even when the ESA’s LEAF cranks its sound up to peak intensity, it’s only putting out around 154 dB [source: ESA].

He then turned into Conde (Count) Fabian La Cerca. The Spanish count who shared names with his adoptive daughter, Abelia Le Cerca.

This personality of The Faceless knew not of fencing but instead of Spanish swordsmanship with a rapier and dagger. Or espada y daga (sword and dagger).

• baku defeated     by the faceless and ren defeated by lucas (2,500)
• ren holding     his own against hidaka then helps baku (2,500)

• Kinta     vs.  Ren and Zan and Satoru vs. Kai Hidaka (2,500)

• Zan     and Baku vs. The Faceless (2,500)

• Yahiko and Kaita vs. The Faceless     (Rescued by Sanbaka) (2,500)

Yahiko Myojin remembered the first time Yutaro “Cat Eyes” Tsukayama came back to the Kamiya Dojo.

Yutaro was supposed to be injured by his traitorous “master”, Raijuta Isurugi. He went overseas for treatment, which enabled him to regain use of his right arm for the most part but he still went “southpaw” or left handed during sparring matches.

Yes, that was right. Mr. Tsukayama had decided to still practice kendo instead of retire. Inspired by this, Mr. Myojin promised to give his rival the match of his life, showing off his past battle experiences.

When they had their first sparring match in years, Yahiko expected to blow the one-armed Yutaro out of the water, only for Yutaro, with a one-handed handicap, end up making the fight close.

The goddamn magnificent bastard really was a kendo prodigy. Yutaro made Yahiko second guess his shots and miss his attacks from the Jodan-no-Kamae (Earth Stance).

Feeling indignant by these turn of events since he went through so much more than him after they last met, Yahiko dug deep into his soul in order to summon his past battle experiences into the match point blow that literally blasted Tsukayama’s helmet off of his head.

He rocked his socks off and then some.

However, to Myojin’s annoyance, he had to do his best against the one-armed student.

Not only did he remember what little kendo instruction he got from Kaoru Kamiya. He expanded his knowledge somehow when he went overseas to get his arm treated.

He did not waste his time while undergoing treatment and rehabilitation for his nerve-damaged right arm that Raijuta had nearly lopped off.

The cunning “Cat Eyes” somehow added western martial arts and weapon techniques to his solid kendo arsenal, somehow merging east and west together to form a truly unique repertoire.

It took some time for Yahiko to figure out how Yutaro bested him half of the time, but he eventually realized that Cat Eyes was using  mind games and what was known as the “Tactical Wheel” to outsmart him at every other match.

It was from this flashback that Yahiko figured out what this Brigands Guild member’s sword techniques reminded him of.

***

Rurouni Yahiko

A Rurouni Kenshin Continuation Fan Fiction Story by Chester Castañeda

The Swallow Return makes an appearance after Kinta is pushed into a corner.

Disclaimer:All characters used in this fanfic (save some others) are the rightful property of Nobuhiro Watsuki, Shueisha, Shonen Jump, Viz, Sony Studios, Fuji TV, Studio Gallup, Studio Deen, and ADV. This disclaimer also covers all the other copyrighted material that are far too many to mention here. Don’t sue me please, I’m very poor.

***

Chapter 58: Déjà Vu

***

Many years ago, during dinner with Kinta’s late grandfather, Toshiro Minakata…

Both Toshiro and Kinta Minakata ate in silence at the long western-style high table in contrast to the smaller traditional family table of the Japanese.

The strict Toshiro was a vanguard among samurai. Realizing that the samurai after the Sengoku Era and during the Tokugawa Shogunate Era were essentially soldiers without a war to wage, he tried his hand at business and trade.

He worked to make the Minakata coffers and fortune grow even as many impoverished samurai ended up seeing the merchant class rise and become more powerful during this period of peace.

Toshiro really was ahead of the curve, even though he was cut-throat enough to resell the confiscated black market opium of Wokou pirates to his fellow Japanese citizens or export them back to China.

He found ways to thrive in both wartime or peacetime. Like a rat or a cockroach. Crafty as a fox, he was.

“I’ve heard you’ve been picked for the Mimawarigumi,” probed Toshiro.

“Yes, Grandfather,” answered a young Kinta.

“How are your studies?”

“There are no issues.”

“That’s fine. Keep doing both like you used to.”

“Being well-versed in letters and arms, a man from the Minakata Family must excel in all fields. My eldest and your uncle, Tatsuya, became a banker. My second child, Kaneda, became a lawyer. Your mother, the youngest…”

Toshiro trailed off while Kinta stared at him, unblinking. Pretending he didn’t notice his grandfather’s pause.

“Remember, the strongest of people are born from the strongest of adversities,” his grandfather said with such confidence, Kinta knew that he was speaking from experience.

Whether it was him taking on Wokou pirates in the China Sea or dealing with local Tokugawa Era politics like he was Julius Caesar amidst the Roman senate.

He did everything he could to keep himself from swimming in the middle of a sea of daggers and his own blood, whether in the hands of criminals or politicians.

Toshiro continued. “Bring honor back to the Minakata Family. Honor both your father and your mother. Erase any stains the name might have by excelling in what you do. Prove yourself to be a worthy heir of the name and the fortune of the Minakata Family, Grandson.”

“I will, Grandfather.”

As far as the Minakatas were concerned, winning was everything. The world was composed of winners and everyone else.

***

Rurouni Yahiko

A Rurouni Kenshin Continuation Fan Fiction Story by Chester Castañeda

The Swallow Return makes an appearance after Kinta is pushed into a corner.

Disclaimer:All characters used in this fanfic (save some others) are the rightful property of Nobuhiro Watsuki, Shueisha, Shonen Jump, Viz, Sony Studios, Fuji TV, Studio Gallup, Studio Deen, and ADV. This disclaimer also covers all the other copyrighted material that are far too many to mention here. Don’t sue me please, I’m very poor.

***

Chapter XX: The Swallow Return

***

Back inside the memories that Kinta Minakata had of his grandfather Toshiro Minakata…

Kinta’s grandfather told him long ago the following.

“The world is a tough, unforgiving place, Kinta. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. In an eye blink, a king can become a pauper and a pauper can become a king. Those who survive the most consistently in a merciless world that’s always changing are those that are adaptable. Today, we eat like royalty. But tomorrow, what if the bakufu were to lose power? What would happen to the hatamoto class?”

Kinta answered, “We would become nothing.”

Toshiro nodded. “Yes. That’s why I’m building our family fortunes. So that the Minakatas can survive the dawn of a new century or even a new millennium. If tomorrow, samurai ceased to exist and all our political connections became moot, our wealth will keep us afloat. Always remember to keep moving forward and changing with the times, grandson.”

In order to remain on the top of the food chain and survive, one must win. Always win in everything they did.

In their world, the winner was acknowledged and the loser was disavowed. The clan of defeated ochimusha (defeated samurai during the Sengoku Era considered as low class citizens) that stole away the Minakata name and valor knew as much.

To the ears of any member of the Minakata Clan, what Kinta’s grandfather Toshiro was implying was crystal clear.

His orders were to erase the shameful actions of Kinta’s shameless mother by becoming a standout among the Mimawarigumi ranks.

Just like how their ochimusha ancestors became hatamoto retainers to the Tokugawa Shogunate, so too should Kinta remove from memory the embarrassment of having an adulteress for a mother and a cuckold for a father.

Winning was the only thing that mattered.

Kinta simply had to win. That was all he needed to do.

Because he was victorious over all, he deserved to win.

“Keep on winning, Kinta. Keep on winning because you’re a Minakata. And Minakatas are born winners, through hell or high water. Even despite of fate itself conspiring against us,” his grandfather would always say.

There was nothing more important than winning at all costs. This was how the Minakatas survived through centuries. Millennia. Ages.

This was how Kinta earned his place at the Minakata table despite his uncles despising him, his father committing suicide, and his mother bringing shame to the name.

He looked at the pristine chinaware where he ate foreign food like Salisbury steak.

If it were broken, it’d be thrown away.

A plate could never be restored once it had a crack. But if it was still usable, what you had would suffice.

Besides which, winning was the liquid gold that helped glue together even broken pottery or ceramics, thus making it whole and beautiful again in its own right.

That was the art of Kintsukuroi (Gold Repair), after all.

***

https://www.infobloom.com/what-is-microfiche.htm

In temperature-controlled storage, microfiche lasts up to 500 years.

John Benjamin Dancer, an optician by trade and inventor by hobby, began producing microphotographs in England in 1839. He was able to realize a 160:1 reduction ratio, but he viewed his own work as nothing more than a novelty.

The microfilming process was standardized and patented in 1859 by French optician René Dagron.

One of the first practical uses of microphotography involved carrier pigeons. In the 1870s during the Franco-Prussian War, Dagron created microphotographs of official documents and private messages and sent them across enemy lines to Paris in small tubes affixed to a pigeon’s wing.

While Dagron’s microfilmed messages were viewed with a rudimentary 19th-century projector (a “magic lantern”), there are now specialized machines called microfiche readers. Also called microform readers, these devices magnify and project microform images on a screen for the user to view. Most microfiche readers allow the user to adjust the zoom, change the focus, and rotate the images. Some readers also have printing capability.

Most fighters maintain a steady rhythm when they fought. This meant moving in a certain cadence or tempo. If a swordsman remained in-sync with his opponent, it’d be difficult to land attacks because his offensive movements can be easily tracked by the defensive movements of the opponent.

Yahiko realized that John Rathbone controlled the rhythm of the fight. Or rather, he had broken rhythm. This kept Myojin from timing a counterattack or avoiding his attacks even with his own trump card, the Hadome-Hawatari, keeping him from getting skewered like a pig.

Nippon, Shogun, Fujiyama, Geisha. Do you want to get it on?

To know more about the Sanada Demons (yes, they’re canon in the anime fillers, but not in the manga), just click here. They have pages for Ren,Zan, and Baku.

The rest of the chapters of my Rurouni Kenshin fan fiction are available here. Enjoy.

Back inside the moneychanger affiliate offices of the Minakatas…

The Faceless was able to fence and stab his way out of the small room where he couldn’t kill that one samurai boy and his one sword-catching move. Hadome (Sword Halt), was it?

How exciting! He’d heard of samurai catching blades by their bare hands before, but he thought it was all hype and myth. Until now.

He couldn’t wait to face off against that boy. ‘However, first thing’s first.’

The Faceless’s duelist personality or disguise—John Rathbone—had specifically been parrying and thrusting with his trusty rapier against a trio of surprisingly strong ninjas.

Ah yes. Ninjas. Shinobi. The Japanese version of government spies or secret agents.

Even in an era where war was waged with guns, rifles, trenches, and bombs, spies and intelligence gatherers remain the most important weapon.

Especially all these shinobi before him who could fight in the most underhanded of ways.

The ogre, the snake, and the bat.

He couldn’t quite explain it but somehow, the bat ninja handled him in close quarters with his distracting screams, the snake ninja whipped him from constant whip cracks from long range, and the ogre stabbed at him from afar with frightening accuracy using his war fork.

They intended to push him into a corner and triple team him from there.

The Faceless chuckled. As if.

“Was sort of gutless kenjutsssu(ssswordsmanship) is thisss? You’re doing more running away than ssstriking! Fight like a man, coward!” said the lispy snake man ninja of the swordsmanship bible’s impenetrable defense and elusive movement.

“This isn’t kenjutsu. This is fencing,” calmly explained Rathbone to the most violent and rambunctious ninja of the trio. “And this is a rapier. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Far better than a brittle katana.”

He’d been through tougher battles than this. He survived entire wars and even accomplished more dangerous political assassinations that paid even more handsomely than this grudge his protégé had over the family that abandoned him.

More than a king’s ransom (because he was paid for a king’s head instead).

However, using his Tactical Wheel and his mind games, he was able to push them away and exit the room in order to pursue the escaping Minakatas.

Maybe even kill that other shadow ninja he faced off in the Minakata’s East-West Fusion Mansion. Or kill the blade catcher samurai boy.

He was especially dangerous when he combined forces with either Kai Hidaka or Lucas Grant, which he supposed was what they were intending to prevent in the first place.

The pile of rubble and debris where Luke had been buried into then stirred.

The Prodigal Son was awake.

“Dammit. I’ll be back,” said Ren the snake ninja, who ran back in the room to deal with the strong, tall half-blooded swordsman with the bastard sword. “Take care of the gaijin for me!”

“Why is there only two of you now?” The Faceless mocked in fluent Japanese, knowing exactly why one of them had to leave. “I miss the other guy. Bring him back.”

It was because the Prodigal Son was on the prowl, the Sanyoukai (Three Demons) of the Sanada Ninja Clan had to split off to prevent Lucas and Rathbone from joining forces and becoming more of a problem. They could even fight along with Kai Hidaka for good measure.

Kinta Minakata could handle either The Faceless or Grant alone. However, even he—the Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior) and the Mimawarigumi Battousai—would be pushed into the corner himself when facing two or more Brigand Guild members at the same time.

“Are you sure you can take me on with only two of you? You need all three just to keep up,” needled Rathbone further, who could now pick apart the occasional stabs and strikes from long distance that the ogre ninja did now that the snake ninja didn’t put the pressure on with his constant whipping.

“Do we now?” said Zan the oni(ogre) ninja with the red ogre mask and war fork. “You sound full of yourself for a gaijin(outsider) piece of shit. If you truly can take us on, I better see it first with my own eyes. Don’t just tell us about it.”

Instead of echoing Zan’s retort, Baku the bat ninja merely screamed what John could only describe as a banshee’s wail at his face, distracting him enough to nearly lose his rapier from the hard parry he had to do against Zan’s twin-pronged war fork.

***

Rurouni Yahiko

A Rurouni Kenshin Continuation Fan Fiction Story by Chester Castañeda

The foreign invaders of the Brigands Guild discover that it’s not so easy dealing with the persistent warriors of Japan, particularly their noble samurais and their backstabbing ninjas.

Disclaimer:All characters used in this fanfic (save some others) are the rightful property of Nobuhiro Watsuki, Shueisha, Shonen Jump, Viz, Sony Studios, Fuji TV, Studio Gallup, Studio Deen, and ADV. This disclaimer also covers all the other copyrighted material that are far too many to mention here. Don’t sue me please, I’m very poor.

***

Chapter 56: The Sanada Demons

***

At the gates of the Minakata affiliate office…

Yahiko Myojin and Kaita served as Tatsuya Minakata’s escorts, only for them to find out that the nearby stables had all their horses released and all the carriage drivers missing. Maybe even dead.

Dammit. Now what? Were they supposed to escape Chinatown on foot?

Whoever the Brigands Guild were, they really had it in for the Minakatas. Wait, what was he even thinking?

'Of course they have it in for them. Their leader or whoever is the bastard child they disowned and threw away along with his mother,’ though Yahiko, berating himself.

This Takuto Minakata or Lucas Grant character kind of reminded him of himself.

Yahiko wasn’t abandoned by his family or anything, but it certainly felt like the world abandoned them instead during the Bakumatsu.

Regardless, so many people were dying to save two of the V.I.P.s they were supposed to protect. Was this even worth it?

Kaita reappeared behind them and said, “It might be best for us to stay in the office after all.”

“What are you talking about, Shorty?” asked Myojin.

“Yes. Why in Buddha’s fat ass should I stay here where the assassins are?” demanded Tatsuya. “Let me out.”

Kaita sighed. “There might be more of them outside and you’re safer here because we have the Sanada Demons on guard.”

“D-Demons? Are you out of your mind, you costumed freak?!” shouted Tatsuya. “This isn’t the Edo Period! Spare me this talk of superstition and ninja lore! Get me the police and have those murderers arrested!”

This gave Yahiko pause. Wasn’t Kaita one of the Minakatas’ trusted ninjas? Why was he resistant to his advice? Why didn’t he know about the Sanada Ninja Clan’s Sanyoukai?

***

Meanwhile, while Ren kept the Prodigal Son at bay inside that room next to the main office…

Luke’s body was already in rough shape before he got whipped and scourged like a criminal or a slave by the boa constrictor taxidermy whips of the creepy snake ninja.

It only got worse when he again went one-on-one and face-to-face with the snake shinobi.

Grant laughed. This guy again. He was a shinobi, wasn’t he? What an annoying prick.

“For a snake-themed ninja, I’m surprised you don’t use poison in your arsenal,” Lucas said in remembrance of his fellow Brigands Guild member Cain Merrick.

“Are you a child? Just because I’m a sssnake ninja, it doesn’t mean I use sssnake venom like some sort of coward!” scoffed Ren, getting angrier and angrier.

The Prodigal Son didn’t know how to retort to that, mainly in light of how cowardly he though Cain was for using poisons, venoms, and toxins as his main means of fighting. He was every bit as underhanded as these ninjas.

Regardless, Ren kept whipping Lucas from afar and every time he got near, he used thattechnique again. A ranged attack that struck the ground that sent earthen debris with knockout force.

Grant managed to stab Ren once with his longsword, only for it to get deflected by the thick snakeskin hide of his leather armor. It was like trying to stab a helix of coiled snakes.

How did the snake man keep doing it? Wait.  It was like an extra-large whip crack. A whip produced the cracking noise whenever it traveled faster than the speed of sound.

The snake ninja combined his bullwhips (or snake whips) together to create twin whip cracks strong enough and fast enough to break the sound barrier and create a blast of air powerful enough to tear through the ground.

Essentially, Ren whipped his twin weapons together with resonating shockwaves from extra large whip cracks that their resulting combined air vibrations exploded like a peal of lightning that blasted through the ground.

Moreover, his snake armor probably kept him from tearing himself apart with his own whips and help him survive the bone-crushing force of his induced earth-shattering vibrations.

Impressive. The snake man’s fighting technique was more straightforward than most ninjas he’d heard about, who were infamous for their dirty tactics.

Regardless, Lucas grabbed hold of his bastard sword (or one-and-half-hand sword) and started parrying the cracking whips away with strong one-handed swings so that he wouldn’t get further ripped apart by them with its flesh-cutting slashes.

He then crossed his arms together and braced himself for the reverberation of air that tore through the floorboards and walls like consecutive exploding landmines. Or the dust storm version of a tidal wave. One after another.

'What a tough opponent,’ thought Lucas. 'I thought murdering the Minakatas was going to be a cakewalk, but my brother found himself some decent shinobi for me to play around with. Thanks, Kagemusha.’

Lucas thusly split the shockwave in half by slicing his bastard sword into the floor so fast he also broke the sound barrier himself, thus neutralizing the attack with his own sonic boom.

“What the hell…?” yelped Ren. “SSStupid gaijin. Learn to accept a lossss and die!”

Lucas attempted to chop instead of stab the thick armor with his bastard sword, only for Ren to wrap himself in his snake whips, thus shielding him from the cutting power of the high-grade steel.

'Dammit,’ thought Grant, his sword again bouncing off the snake ninja. 'He’s devious like all the rest of the ninjas after all.’

The smirking Ren then jumped, twisting his body to unwind the whips around him. This resulted in a spiral of whip strikes that assaulted Lucas like a razor-sharp cyclone.

Lucas bathed in his own blood from the whiplashes. However, proving himself more cold-blooded than the dead reptiles Ren used for weapons, he managed to wrap one of the snake whips around his arm.

The way Ren fought reminded him of the way Kai Hidaka fought. 'You’ve seen one ninja, you’ve seen them all.’

He then pulled hard at Ren’s whip, intending to catch him flat-footed so that he could chop him in half.

However, Ren stopped resisting and allowed himself to get pulled intentionally. He did a flying headbutt on the gaijin’s noggin, who didn’t expect the sudden release that snapped the whip back to him like a rubber band.

“Don’t you dare underestimate Japanese ninjutsu, you gaijin piece of shit!” shouted Ren. He had the upper hand now! He’d become a hero of the clan for taking out this monster!

***

As for the double team of Baku and Zan against The Faceless…

These underhanded Japanese spies were up to something.

A little while ago, John Rathbone still feinted, countered, and landed with regularity against the Sanada Demons while he himself used his footwork to slip, parry, block, and outright evade their own attacks from high and low.

He kept making them second-guess his next move in the Tactical Wheel of Simple Attack, Parry and Riposte, Compound Attack, and Counter Attack.

However, the three also kept intercepting the riposte thrusts and counter slashes of his rapier to save each other. Whenever he zeroed in on one of them, the other two either blocked or countered themselves.

Now there were only two of them, which meant he could pressure them further to move back, allowing him to attack the Minakatas and fulfill his mission. The lack of a third man cut their offensive power by a third.

However, something strange happened.

His attacks kept missing. Every thrust and slash from various angles somehow missed or wasn’t timed to hit its target.

It didn’t help that his normally 20/20 vision blurred from time to time, like some sort of haze came over it.

His attacks missed before because of how fast both Zan and Baku reacted to his stabs even though he kept breaking his rhythm to keep them guessing when he was going to attack with his Beat Parry Riposte.

Rathbone did notice how Zan kept banging his war fork unto the ground in order to make it vibrate like a tuning fork. Did this help the ninja dodge his fencing attacks better?

But he already getting their timing down pat the longer they fought, thus allowing him to counter them as they charged, which made it harder for them to evade or sidestep.

Only for him to start missing during those vulnerable moments as well. His timing was off somehow.

His breathing also became more erratic even though he hadn’t exactly burned out his stamina yet. He hadn’t even broken a sweat, but he had trouble taking breaths.

He glared at the twin ninja demons. “What did you do to me?!”

“I was worried for a minute there,” said Zan to Baku. “The gaijin has no concept of sakki (bloodlust) and how to read it, so I was worried for a minute there that his swordsmanship could deal with your high-pitched sound technique.”

Baku chuckled. “Even if he can’t detect bloodlust, his moves are all rhythm-based. Break his rhythm and his so-called fencing will end up like trash.”

What did they mean by that? What was going on? They were doing something to him, but he didn’t quite know what. Did they poison him or something?

No, wait. It was the bat ninja and his screams that were doing this to him! Whatever thiswas.

Baku kept distracting John with his high-pitched screeching. Or so the duelist thought. 'So it wasn’t just a distraction…?’

Something about those sounds he produced was making him miss his Simple Attacks or Compound Attacks (attacks with feints or switching a missed attack to a parry or a different attack).

“Just a little more,” said Baku to Zan. “He’s on his way to self-destructing. Finish him off as soon as he makes a mistake.”

Zan harrumphed. 'Easier said than done.’

Despite the fencer’s exposure to Baku’s screams that messed with his body in various indescribable ways, he kept following up his misses with ripostes in fluid succession, like he meant to miss to draw them out to another counterattack.

His misses also became hits, which forced the ninja sharpshooter with the war fork to hesitate and not overextend himself for a possible counterstrike.

'So this is western kenjutsu,’ thought the sharpshooter ninja with a long-range weapon like Satsuki Sakaguchi. ’Fencing, was it? It’s a legitimate bujutsu (martial art) in its own right.’

Rathbone frowned as a missed slash caused deeper and deeper cuts to appear on his body. They weren’t yet lacerations, but he was missing more and more badly.

He could not afford having his ripostes or even his parries miss like this.

This was why he hated facing off against sneaky ninjas like Kai Hidaka.

***

Back to Ren versus Lucas…

Lucas reeled, his head throbbing with a splitting headache. 'Another sneak attack! Damn the Japanese…!’

Another snake whip sonic boom hit Grant like an earth-shattering landslide. Or even an avalanche.  However, he noticed that the repeated vibrations mostly traveled through the ground rather than in the air.

Predictably on the ground. Ren probably aimed his resonating whip vibrations directly back to earth for maximum impact, like the difference between a bomb and a shrapnel bomb.

The sonic boom shockwave probably traveled a shorter distance in the air compared to the path of destruction it left on the ground, the concussive force turning everything in its path into a landslide full of sharp rock shards.

Therefore, attacking in the air made more sense than attacking on the ground.

Lucas grabbed his bastard sword with both hands and leaped into the sky, gliding towards Ren while the shockwave harmlessly traveled below him.

The snake ninja ground his teeth enamel to powder and wrapped his snake whips around his body again, intending to protect himself from the sword chop he knew was coming then retaliating with his topsy-turvy whirling typhoon of snake whips afterwards.

However, Ren letting Lucas hit him at all instead of dodging then countering with his whips proved to be a big mistake.

Instead of the bastard sword bouncing harmlessly off of his snake-whip-covered body, Grant released enough extra torque from his two-handed sword swing to drive the snake ninja right into the ground.

Although the sword didn’t cut through the snake armor, it broke Ren’s arm and several of ribs by force of impact alone. He wasn’t able to uncoil the snake whips in time, which would’ve torn apart the jumping foreigner in a typhoon of whips.

Ren struggled to get up, tied up in his own whips, looking the fool against this half-blooded rejected bastard son with the bastard sword.

Lucas exhaled deeply and grinned at the snake man. “That was a good fight. Because of that, I’ll spare you. Get strong and maybe we can fight again!”

“DON’T GIVE ME THAT BULLSHIT!” spat Ren before turning the handle of his snake whips, which retracted a hidden toxin-tipped blade that he stabbed right into the foot of Lucas.

“Ow! What the hell did you do, you cowardly ninja piece of shit?” Lucas cried out in pain. “Also, what happened to your lisp? It’s completely gone now.”

“Shut up and die, basssstard!” said Ren, overcompensating with how long he drew his ’S’ sound on that last word. “That hidden blade is tipped with poison. You’re as good as dead now.”

“Hey, I thought you said you didn’t use snake venom!”

“IDIOT! I’m a ninja! Of course I lied!”

Uwah. Ninjas truly were the worst.

***

At the gates of the Minakata subsidiary office building…

The Fuuma Ninja Clan’s Kai Hidaka was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Well, no. Not really.

Rather, he was stuck between Lieutenant Satoru Sakaguchi (with his recovering daughter by his side) on one end and Kinta Minakata on another end.

The choice to where he should go couldn’t be more obvious, but he also had a mission to fulfill.

Even though Kinta was the more dangerous and immediate threat, he was also the Brigands Guild’s biggest target.

Besides which, while murdering both of the weakest Musou Madden Ryu practitioners should help him survive in the short term, he didn’t want a master swordsman like Kinta hunting him down for revenge like the Kagemusha that he was in the long term.

It was in his best interest to finish off the Minakata heir sooner rather than later.

Judging by how long his half-brother nurtured his grudge against their petty family—his whole life—this desire for revenge was probably in their blood.

Perhaps even in-fighting among family members too, seeing how soured the relationship between Kinta and Tatsuya was.

It was so bad that Kinta and “Takuto” felt more like family than nephew and uncle.

Hell, Hidaka was merely lurking outside and he could hear how much the two hated each other, judging from their shouting match (or rather, from Tatsuya shouting alone and Kinta curtly shutting him down every time).

In light of his fight-or-flight instinct screaming at him to find an avenue of escape, he willed himself to fight the Mimawarigumi Battousai instead, hoping against hope that either The Faceless or Lucas Grant would aid him sooner rather than later.

'Kinta-kun,’ thought Satoru, holding his gasping daughter’s shoulders firmly. 'Please finish that son of a bitch off!’

***

Back to Ren versus Lucas…

In sheer frustration, Ren attempted a whip crack at Lucas’s face as he got up, but the blond swordsman caught it by his fist.

Lucas certainly looked like he was about to vomit. Or even shit all over himself.

As expected. He had his hidden dagger tipped with the concentrated “poison” (really, snake venom) of various local snakes all over Japan, like the mamushi that belongs to the family of pit vipers.

Stabbing a persistent enemy who survived Ren’s whiplashes with the venomous or poisonous dagger served as the snake man’s ace in his sleeve. His trump card. Typically, the stab site swelled and reddened with a blister.

The attacker then slowed down and fell ill, unable to continue fighting. Ren then finished the person off with either grave injuries and lacerations compounded by snake venom coursing through his veins, killing him slowly but surely.

Either that or Ren bit the bullet and just choked the bitch with his snake whips. His enemies either died by his own hands or by the venom he injected unto them.

Just as Luke was about to look like he was about to empty all the contents of his stomach unto the ground, he grinned and winked at Ren. “Just kidding.”

The snake whip’s tail wrapped all around Luke’s arm.

“Jokes on you, asshole. One of the Brigands is an expert in poisons and toxins. He’s helped me develop immunity to most deadly organic and inorganic chemicals for years.”

From there, Lucas did to Ren was Ren did to Lucas earlier—he pulled the whip then allowed himself to leap along with the recoil or snapback of the taxidermy snake, hammering the injured snake man ninja’s head with a devastating headbutt of his own.

Bam. Their heads smashed against each other with a heavy, sickening thud.

Ren felt his brain slosh inside his skull. Grant might’ve even cracked his noggin altogether, shattering his nose and drawing blood.

How strong was this kid?! He really did seem immune to the snake venom!

As expected of a Minakata spawn. Perhaps his bloodline from his father’s side, the Grants, also had monstrous strength in their genetics.

Grant then gave Ren the coup-de-grace blow of driving him right into the nearest wall with a sword stab that finally penetrated through the snake armor, drawing blood.

What was worse for Ren was that Lucas had been planning for this final strike of his from the start.

The whole room soon collapsed all over the snake man, weakened by the numerous sonic booms produced by supersonic snake whips. The Prodigal Son had been baiting the snake ninja to blast him with shockwaves at strategic points of the room.

The final leap and blow then shook the room enough to make its already weakened and compromised foundations break and collapse directly on top of the ninja.

Before Ren knew it, it was already “checkmate” for him.

***

Back at the three-way impasse deep in the offices of the moneychanger building…

“You two don’t fight like gentlemen at all. You’re like savages instead,” said John Rathbone to the animal-themed masked ninjas from the Sanada Clan with an upturned nose.

These honorless ninjas and their ambush-style attacks reminded John of the time when Britain colonized Africa.

Britain observed the rules of engagement against the African natives, declaring war on them and challenging them on the battlefield.

The Africans were supposed to engage them in battle on the trenches until a side won.

However, the tribes of Africa had no concept of how war was supposed to be engaged in the west and thusly ambushed the British camps without warning, like they would when they were fighting amongst themselves.

These Japanese natives, or at least their ninjas, were the same savages as the African natives. To them, all was fair in war or love.

Wait a minute. Samurais had bushido(the code of the warrior). Ninjas followed no such code of honor. They were so unlike their honor-bound samurai counterparts.

Both the oni (ogre) ninja Zan and John exchanged thrusts and stabs, probing each other’s defenses.

Throughout the exchange, Rathbone noticed how Zan allowed his war fork to get parried by John’s rapier, which made the unusual weapon vibrate like a tuning fork instead.

The demonic goblin ninja also only really attacked whenever he made his tuning war fork vibrate.

'Hmmm,’ thought John. 'Curiouser and curiouser.’

Rathbone feinted a thrust one… two… three times at Zan and Baku, jabbing his undulating sword arm with motionless jabs of his rapier that went to and fro between the masked ninjas.

Like a pendulum on a Grandfather Clock.

He actually attacked the fourth time with a thrust but stopped himself short, intending to do a recovery afterwards as soon as either shadow warrior reacted and made him miss.

They barely even blinked. Their hair-trigger reflexes remembered him doing the same “ultimate” feint earlier to draw out attacks he could counter, so they weren’t fooled.

They moved a half-beat earlier than John, intercepting his attack before he could do his recovery and counterstrike.

Thusly, The Faceless had his sword thrust parried by Baku’s metal arm bracelets with hooks on the side and countered by Zan’s war fork.

However, Rathbone himself sidestepped in time to turn the two-pronged stab into a slash that left a gash over his bodyguard vest.

Zan clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. He almost got the slippery fencer. John Rathbone was every bit as evasive and untouchable as a medieval ninja from Japan!

The two were about to follow up their own Parry Riposte with a finishing chain attack but stopped short when they heard the rumblings of the other room, followed by screams.

It wasn’t Baku’s screaming. Nor was it Lucas.

They recognized the voice. It was instead from their comrade, Ren the Snake Ninja with the taxidermy boa whips.

The bat ninja then told the ogre ninja, “I’m fine, Zan. Go help the Minakatas or Ren. The Faceless is mine. I’ve figured him out.”

“Oh, did you now, Baku?” said Zan, the ninja with the red ogre mask and war fork. “All right. I’ll be back to finish this gaijin off if you haven’t killed him by the time I return.”

Zan then made his exit, hiding himself in smoke bombs that Rathbone stabbed through regardless, only for his rapier to get blocked by Baku’s hooked bracelets.

John harrumphed, stabbing repeatedly at the weaponless ninja to stave him off. “Do you really think you can take me on alone, you cowardly ninja?”

The grim bat-themed shadow warrior merely adopted a karate stance and said, “Come forward, gaijin (outsider). Get a taste of Yamato Damashi (Japanese Spirit).”

“You’re delusional.” Smirking, Rathbone murmured to himself, “Once more unto the breech, dear fool.”

Baku then screeched like the legendary banshees of Irish folklore. A haunting, bloodcurdling cry that reached all the way to the pits of The Faceless’ stomach. Or even the insides of his bones, right down to the bone marrow.

'Strange. Is his incessant, irritating screaming part of his trick?’ thought Rathbone as he backpedaled from the bat ninja, only to end up back in his en garde position because Baku chased after him immediately.

What was worse was that John felt like vomiting until his stomach turned inside out the more he fought this ninja.

As sickening as these deceitful and sly cowards were when it came to their dirty fighting tactics, it wasn’t enough for him to literally feel like puking in disgust.

***

Back at the front portion of the moneychanger affiliate office building…

Kai Hidaka threw himself at Kinta Minakata, hoping against hope that Lucas Grant wasn’t too busy to actually handle his business with the goddamn Mimawarigumi Battousai himself.

Sheesh. Kinta was Lucas’shalf-brother, not Kai’s. Let Lucas handle his own sibling. He (Kai) was not his (Lucas’s) brother’s keeper, after all.

Nevertheless, a strange thing happened.

There was something different about the Kinta that Kai faced today compared to the one he clashed swords with at Kaneda Minakata’s Eastern-Western Fusion Mansion.

As usual, like in their first encounter, Kai had to scramble, duck, and sway his body like a lithe dancer in order to avoid the surgically accurate slashes and attacks of the infamous Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior) of Shogo Amakusa.

Kinta’s accuracy hadn’t gone down. Not really.

Minakata merely missed Hidaka by hairbreadths or by a razor’s edge, the fidgety ninja spurred by adrenalin and twitch reflexes to avoid the iaijutsu (quick-draw) sword strikes with the nimble elusiveness of a fly.

However, Kinta’s hack and slash output had gone down drastically.

Even though Kai knew that Kinta favored accuracy over volume, the swordsman was nevertheless a lot more conservative with his attacks now.

Almost as conservative as The Faceless when he fenced under his John Rathbone persona. John barely ever missed because he never took a stab or thrust unless he was 100 percent sure he’d get the hit.

As though he was conserving his energy.

Wait a minute.

The eyes behind Hidaka’s goggled mask narrowed as he let out a long exhale. 'Huh. So fighting Lucas had an effect on him after all. That boy is a persistent one, after all.’

Even Lieutenant Satoru Sakaguchi noticed something was amiss. 'Kinta-kun…?’

It was the lack of sword slashes and pressure that allowed the nimble Kai to feint an attack, only for him to shoot his rope spear in between the eyes of Satoru.

To be clear, the rope spear flew at longer distances compared to his rope darts, which he used for closer targets.

The flying acrobatic ninja figured out that Kinta was conserving his strength after going through the stamina monster that was Lucas.

When Kai first met the half-breed, he couldn’t touch him with a bastard sword, a longsword, or even a shortsword. Hidaka was too fast and too nimble for the kid to take down.

However, like a hunter-gatherer caveman during the Stone Age, Lucas took down faster prey by tiring them out and pursuing them ceaselessly. Over and over. Like an unstoppable force of nature you couldn’t outrun.

No wonder Kinta looked like he’d just run a marathon despite having not one mark or cut on him.

While under pressure, Minakata was also probably worried about the wellbeing of the Sakaguchis. He would’ve gotten the adrenalin rush needed to save father and daughter.

However, when Kinta himself was attacked, he let his guard down and became unaware of his surroundings.

Kai noticed as much when he fought the swordsman the first time. This went double now that he’d been tired down by the implacable Lucas Grant.

How ironic for the Sakaguchi Family to end up being the liabilities even though they were supposed to be there to protect the Minakata Family.

That split second of distraction and scrambling towards Satoru and Kyoko was the window of opportunity Hidaka needed to finish what Lucas had started.

***

Back at the rear exit of the moneychanger affiliate office building…

John Rathbone switched tactics yet again. He couldn’t counter off of Baku’s attacks, who patiently lay in wait and ambushed him in the darkness at every turn.

If one or two probing strikes with his rapier wasn’t enough, then a complicated series of them—a truly Compound Attack—was in order.

Only problem was that Baku danced around the strikes with the same deft skill that Kai Hidaka, a ninja in his own right, did.

Even though the bat ninja was more of a projectile thrower than a weapons expert like Zan, he combined the rain of kunai(daggers) and shuriken (ninja stars) at John with karate punches and kicks.

John got nailed with a couple of punches that he had to take over the shuriken and kunai. He did this by experience, remembering how his own estranged son Cain Merrick would use bladed weapons to poison him and others.

The duelist scowled and narrowed his eyes. Was that what this walking freak show doing to him?

It was the screams, wasn’t it? Baku was shrieking like a nimbus cloud of bats all this while. Shrieking like a bat.

In fact, Baku turned the tables on John, with him dictating the pace and forcing him to attack at every turn, only to block with his hooked arm bracelets, blind him with smoke bombs, or injure him with knives and metal shards.

They were chipping away at each other’s defenses, but Baku had the upper hand. And the momentum.

Thankfully, Rathbone’s uncharacteristic aggression with close-call near-misses (or near-hits, as the case might be) and follow-throughs served as his defense against a significant blow or counter.

“You’ll never figure out what I’m doing in a million years,” boasted Baku after nailing the fencer with an elbow this time, followed by a slash from his arm brace hooks.

Blimey, did Rathbone hate ninjas. At least ordinary thieves and ruffians were too unskilled and imbecilic to pull the wool over John’s world-weary eyes.

Ninjas, on the other hand, thought just like him. Who knew honorless secret agents would have something in common with a gentleman thief like him?

Again, Baku hid in the darkness, screeched, avoided or blocked a myriad of ripostes and sword thrusts, and then kicked, punched, or threw Rathbone around like a rag doll in order to open him up to a fatal stab wound or slash.

Meanwhile, Rathbone couldn’t hit him back himself. He always somehow missed by a nose hair or cilia.  Like his internal rhythm or reflexes were off.

***

Meanwhile, at the entrance of the moneychanger building, near the stables where the Minakata’s carriage was parked…

“I found a horseman!” said Kaita, who popped out of nowhere with a previously escaping driver of the Minakatas whom he held at kunai-point (or ku-knife-point, as Gan would say).

“I found one of your horses!” said Yahiko, who held the reins of the beast of burden, pulling him back to the stables. Thankfully, this stallion wasn’t too spooked or wild.

“There’s a horse-drawn carriage here that hasn’t been sabotaged or had its wheel axels removed!” confirmed Tatsuya Minakata, who was sweating bullets at this point. “Perfect! Let’s go! I don’t want to spend another minute at this hellhole!”

“Wait, we’re just going to leave? Your nephew is still out there,” pointed out Myojin, only for him to get taken aback by Tatsuya’s glare. “Fine. You go home to Mommy with your personal ninja. I’ll stay here and look out for your nephew.”

With a sourpuss look reminiscent of someone biting into a lemon or smelling garbage, Tatsuya looked back and forth between Kaita and Yahiko before relenting, “Fine. We’ll wait for my stupid nephew to come back.”

The Sanada Ninja and the Tokyo Samurai exchanged looks. Should they have escaped with the uncle or were they making a mistake?

Yahiko took a deep breath. He’d deal with the consequences later. The cast was drawn. They’d made their decision, whether it was the right one or not.

They slightly regretted not escaping then and there when the doors, doorway, and door burst rather than swung open before them in splinters like a tinderbox.  

***

The kunai slashes and shuriken cuts were getting closer, sharper, and deeper. Death by a thousand cuts. Or maybe a million.  

A million bats shrieking, clawing, and biting at him in the darkness of the mansion.

Bats, huh? Baku even shot his kunai in order to snuff out the flames of every last candle and lamp in the moneychanger office building, thus covering them in darkness with the barest sliver of moonlight from the windows.

He really was bat-like. He wasn’t blind as a bat but he didn’t need his vision as much as a bat would.

A headbutt from Baku cracked The Faceless’ mask but kept his own horrifying bat mask intact.

Aside from distracting him with loud screeches, Baku the Bat-Man might also be using supersonic screams to locate John’s position every time.

He’d read about this before. Bats were able to exist nocturnally and move in low light through echolocation.

These animals screamed at high pitches then were able to judge distance or what they were flying through by the amount of time their screams bounced back to them.

In other words, it was possible that the Baku and Zan tandem were able to read through Rathbone’s change of pace or sudden counters and ripostes off of the steady rhythm of his pendulum-swing jabs by their hair-trigger senses and superhuman senses.

Come to think of it, didn’t Zan have a two-pronged war fork that could’ve doubled as a tuning fork? He might’ve used the vibrations from that fork as his means of sonar or echolocation.

Also, judging by the obliterating vibrations done by the snake ninja known as Ren, that ninja also probably used resonating whip cracks to create a sonic boom as his means of attack.

Ren, Baku, and Zan. They were animal-themed ninjas but they had another thing in common—their abilities based on supersonic sound and vibration.

Jesus Christ.

These goddamn ninjas were so unfair but their unfairness required a high skill level that you couldn’t help but bitterly laugh at it all.

They were consummate cheaters that would stab your back like the cowards that they were. They did anything to win.

“Kill all invaders! Protect the emperor from the barbarians! All hail to the Empire of Japan! Sonno Joi!” rambled Baku, his terseness disappearing as he smelled blood and went into a feeding frenzy against his prey.

Rathbone again did his strongest feint—an actual attack cut short then recovered into a different counterattack—but this time he was armed with the knowledge of how Baku was making him miss.

Baku again blocked with his arm bracelets in order to do an early Parry and Riposte of his own to cut off the follow-up Recovery Attack.

However, Rathbone expected that and countered off of that instead, swaying his body at an awkward angle and slipping from the arm bracelet guard in order to skewer the ninja right in his heart.

He felt vibrations in his body and a second later, he missed Baku’s chest and merely left a flesh wound on it instead of a stab before getting kneed in the gut for his trouble.

Bloody hell. John winced and gnashed his teeth.

Why did he still miss? Baku was wide open! He fell for his bait! His supersonic trip-mine could only tell when he actually attacked instead of what sort of attack he’d do! It was perfect! Why did he fail…?

Wait a minute. Baku wasn’t just using echolocation or his own version of sonar, was he?

'That was close,’ Baku the Bat Ninja was forced to admit to himself. 'This man, The Faceless, is too dangerous to be left alive!’

John Rathbone—or rather, The Faceless—chuckled to himself. “I understand your secrets now, you Yellow Peril!”

“You don’t understand a thing. Go back to the barbaric west where you belong, waito piggu (white pig)!”

***

In between the realms of the conscious and unconscious lay a subconscious Kyoko.

She’d almost been hung to death by the Brigands Guild ninja, Kai Hidaka of the Fuuma Clan.

A forgotten memory from her childhood surfaced as she swam between the converging seas of wakefulness and slumber.

It was one where she was insistently asking his grandfather about how dashing the samurai were when he was a child.

Were they as honorable, loyal, noble, and heroic as the hatamoto-class samurai they worked for were, the Minakatas?

To be more specific, were they as handsome and dreamy as Kinta Minakata? Or his silent but kind father, Azuma Minakata? Or even his scary grandfather, Toshiro Minakata?

Chuckling, her Grandpa Genzo Sakaguchi told her while she sat on his knee, “Not all samurai  are like Kinta or Azuma. They’re more like politicians or policemen. Some good, some bad. Maybe even more bad than good.’

'Huh. So samurais were more like Grandpa Toshiro then?’ was the question Kyoko had enough sense not to ask her own grandfather.

The old man then turned serious and said, "Samurais aren’t what they’re all cracked up to be, Kyoko-chan.”

Kyoko tilted her head in askance. “What do you mean?”

“For example, there’s such a thing as Uchi-sute.”

“'Uchi-sute?’” repeated Kyoko. “What is that?”

“It’s also known as kiri-sute gomen.”

“Kiru… nani? Gomen? Eh?” Kyoko’s blew her cheeks up like a chipmunk. “So? What does it mean, Grandpa?!”

This only made Grandpa Genzo chuckle.

Uchi-sute(To strike and abandon) or burei-sute(To offend and strike) were concepts dating back to the feudal era collectively known later on as kiri-sute gomen (The right to cut and leave).

They referred to an old Japanese expression about the right to strike or the right of samurai to kill commoners for perceived affronts. Samurai had the right to strike with sword at anyone of a lower class who compromised their honor.

“It’s the right of a samurai to kill commoners if they were embarrassed by them,” was how Genzo phrased it. “We live in a society where a military aristocracy had the license to kill another human being just because he’s of a lower class than him.”

Naively, Kyoko blinked and said, “But isn’t it okay for samurai to do it? Are we not samurai?”

“Listen carefully, child. No one has the right to kill another, whether they’re kings or paupers. The emperor himself or the village idiot. Murder is murder. You have no right to kill someone over a slight as though you’re better than them.”

Kyoko’s eyebrows furrowed cutely. “So higher class samurai like Kinta-chama can kill me because I’m lower class than him?”

“The courts would rule it as self-defense, but no. He doesn’t have the right to do it. You can defend yourself as a lower class samurai with a wakizashi, but the whole thing is bogus. If an affront has been committed, let everyone equally have their day in court instead of having samurai have the right to kill anyone who annoys them!”

Nonoko chided in the background, “Father, what are you teaching that poor kid? Sheesh. She’s just a child.”

Genzo cackled in an old mannish sort of way and told Kyoko’s mother, “I’m teaching her about real life.”

***

Earlier, just as Rathbone was about to finish off Baku, he felt the silent vibrations seep deep into his very bones, making his joints ache.

Aside from shrieks he and Baku could hear, the ninja was screeching sounds beyond the human range of hearing!

Humans could only hear sound waves between 20 Hertz (Hz) to 20,000 Hertz. However, sound waves below that threshold could affect any person.

Even if you sit in front of something producing a frequency of 19 Hz or infrasound level, even if you couldn’t hear anything you could still feel its vibrations. Like how the deaf could feel sound even if they couldn’t hear it necessarily.

At 19 Hz, humans could end up with wonky vision because 19 Hz was the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.

When exposed to 177 dB sound waves at 0.5 to 8 Hz, it can start messing with your lungs. Your breathing could end up erratic as your bones start shaking around.

Short-term exposure to such sounds could damage your joints even. Chronic exposure to them can end up resulting in visual impairment or outright nausea.

However, these effects to infrasound weren’t uniform to all people exposed across the board. It’d take constant resonant exposure to the sound to mess with your internal organs, joints, or vision.

Besides which, it wasn’t as if Rathbone was sitting still while getting exposed to the supersonic screeches. He dodged and moved around a lot, plus they were making a lot of other noises that covered the infrasound as well.

Baku was using his shrill shrieks for another purpose, its effects being more immediate than making Rathbone’s various organs feel “funny” or “off”.

There was also the fact that countering and hitting a target was all about having your body memorize a rhythm and timing in order to align your attacks to every last opening the opponent had.

Whether you were an expert marksman with a gun, prizefighter with thudding fists, or a swordsman with a sharp blade, hitting the target involved timing your shot, punch, or slash at the right tempo or rhythm.

If you were off by a hair or an inch, you’d still miss badly.

And this was all thanks to Baku’s supersonic or infrasound screeches.

Like a singer who was off-tune, Baku kept hitting the wrong notes even though he was close to the right ones, creating a dissonant if almost accurate tune.

Over and over he kept getting away with it, but John was getting used to the rhythm of the bat. However, he couldn’t achieve enough resonance in his counters to match Baku’s rhythm, so he was the one who kept missing and getting his advance checked.

Baku’s supersonic “singing” wasn’t only a method of echolocation that acted like a trip-hammer or landmine on whether Rathbone was feinting or attacking for real.

The bat-man ninja sung a song of the damned that ruined Rathbone’s innate abilities to discover and exploit the rhythm of his opponent, solve them like a puzzle, and open them up to counterattacks or ripostes.

It also set up a beat and tempo different but nearly the same as the rhythm of Rathbone’s fencing counters. Like a terrible singer messing up a proper singer with his off-key singing.

So on top of having hair-trigger reflexes aided by superhuman senses and echolocation, Baku could also use his supersonic screeching to disrupt Rathbone’s counterstriking rhythm.

A two-pronged attack if he’d ever seen one. Like the two-pronged war fork of Zan himself. Or like a classic pincer attack from Ancient Roman military strategy.

'Hmmm. Pincer, eh?’ thought Rathbone with a growing smirk on the edges of his unseen mouth.

***

Satoru scrambled for his saber as soon as he saw the rope spear fly from behind the acrobatic ninja of the Brigands Guild.

Shit.

He had set his still out-of-breath daughter down on a nearby statue in a sitting position while looking for an appropriate avenue of escape for the both of them as afforded by the appearance of Kinta.

Only for Kai Hidaka to have other ideas.

The ninja’s flight-or-fight instincts went into full gear, attacking Kinta for fear of him countering him if he had attacked the Sakaguchis.

Only for him to use that as a distraction to attack the Sakaguchis anyway.

'He’s slow,’ thought Kai after the lieutenant deflected the rope spear with a sheathed saber, unable to draw his sword on time. 'He’s easier to take down compared to the likes of the Kagemusha. He hasn’t really changed much after all these years, huh? Still the weak link.’

However, as expected, Kinta leaped forward into action to save Satoru from harm even as Kai whipped his missed rope dart between the eyes in order to redirect it towards Satoru’s shoulder instead.

“AAUGGH!” Satoru cried out, which stirred the half-unconscious Kyoko awake.

This was what Kai wanted. When he attacked Kinta in panic, he was the one at risk.

This time around, he forced the surgical-precise Mimawarigumi Battousai to attack him in panic instead.

Under his terms. In a very predicable manner. Open to ripostes of his own.

“You’re wide open, Kagemusha!” said Kai as he threw multiple rope darts at Kinta, intending to ensnare him into his web.

Meanwhile, waiting on standby from the side was the “fish-hooked” Satoru, whom Hidaka could always tug towards him to use as a meat shield against Kinta’s signature Full Moon Slash or Double Full Moon Slash (also known as the Blue Moon Slash).

To Kai’s chagrin, the Mimawarigumi Battousai went above and beyond with his sword slashes.  

Like a lightning strike, his sword flashed and streaked across the air as it got drawn out in supersonic speed.

“Tsuanmi(Tidal Wave),” he murmured his words of malice, the glint of his blade becoming an afterimage of moonlight.

The first slash from the Waxing Stance—a Young Moon Slash—cut apart the first few strands of darts headed towards him before they could hook themselves into the ground on his flesh in order to form an ensnaring net.

The follow-up combo of the Waxing Crescent Moon to Waxing Half Moon (First Quarter) Slash came twice as fast as the first Young Moon Slash. These slashes ripped apart the ropes into confetti.

However, Kai anticipated as much. As expected of the man who went toe-to-toe against Gensai Kawakami of the Ishin Shishi’s Four Butchers and lived to tell the tale.

Hidaka had seen this technique before from Kinta’s fellow Musou Madden Ryu practitioner, Sho Kojima. He thusly knew how it worked.

The Tsunami was a series of slashes chained together from weakest to strongest that started slowly and went fast in the final few slashes. It worked based on momentum.

Its timing went 1 (pause) 2, 3, then 4567. Like how the turning tides started as a shallow low tide weak only to end up becoming a deep and strong high tide at their apex.

There were several ways to counter this.

The first was to block, evade, or counter the first few slow slashes in order to not fall for the rest of the even faster slashes. If he confirmed the hit, he’d do the rest of the combo.

Like getting out of the beach during the low tide to get to higher ground or far away from shore in order to avoid getting swept up by the waves come high tide.

However, the Mimawarigumi Battousai solved this by gauging the distance and doing the first few slashes on the rope darts before charging forward exactly to where Kai was  and executing the supersonic slashes like a building deluge of high-pressure waves.

Had he acted this urgently back when he faced off against his half-brother, he might have even killed him then and there. Maybe.

The second (more difficult) way to counter the Tsunami was this.

Using a “lifesaver” or boat against the upcoming tides in order to ride the wave.

“GET OVER HERE!” shouted Kai as he pulled and dragged Satoru towards the incoming whirling sea of steel.

Dragging him deep into the waters of Kinta’s unstoppable tidal waves of doom.

***

In response to getting nearly hit to the heart by his rapier, Baku the Bat-Man Ninja sunk into the darkness further, blending into his environment and hiding his presence.

He opted to ambush John Rathbone at blind spots or while unseen, with his cloak helping obscure his figure. Slowly cornering the duelist swordsman until he had no where to hide.

Thusly, Rathbone had trouble with depth perception fighting in the dark with what little moonlight was out there. He couldn’t see the walls, floor, or anything, so when Baku backed away from the light, it looked like he merely shrunk.

And whenever he avoided the light altogether, it looked like he got swallowed by the sea of blackness.

So The Faceless decided to adapt a new personality the same way a normal person would discard one set of clothes to another set in order to fit the occasion. It started by taking off his masquerade ball mask and swapping it for a different face mask.

A plain all-white porcelain face mask with no mouth and eye holes. The mask of another swordsman. A Spaniard swordsman, to be exact.

He unsheathed a hidden dagger in his person, dual-wielding an espada y daga (sword and dagger).

“Hola. (Hello). We haven’t met yet, but I’m Fabian La Cerca. You are a dishonorable coward. Tonto de culo (Idiot of the ass).Prepare to die.”

Baku harrumphed, unimpressed. “So you 'transformed’ yourself from one colonizer to another? You’re all the same to me, gaijin,” said the bat-man ninja before letting out another one of his dissonant screams.

***

Its vibrations reached La Cerca to his very core like a loud, deafening rumble of thunder after a lightning strike.

They clashed weapons with each other. It was then that Fabian decided to talk. He was more talkative than his Rathbone persona for sure.

“I understand why Japan instituted the Sakoku(Locked Country) policy. You didn’t want foreign influence to taint your culture before being colonized. Every neighbor of Japan had been colonized by western powers through religion or trade. Invaded and conquered by the superior civilizations.”

“….”

As usual, like with Rathbone, La Cerca jabbed his sword and circled around blind spots whenever Baku decided to ambush him with hand-to-hand combat, grappling, throws, or projectile weapons.

Baku’s perfect pitch went higher and higher until it seemed like the bat-man had lost his voice. But he actually didn’t. The soundless scream vibrated through the air, beyond the scope of human hearing.

“The Tokugawas distanced Japan from the west, thinking them as a destabilizing force. And you know what? They were absolutely right. These colonizers used religious and/or brute force to divide and conquer pieces of east from themselves.”

However, Fabian was able to feel the infrasound resonate—or rather, dissonate—into his internal organs. Like tremors from an earthquake or within a carriage going through a bumpy road.

Or an extra loud heartbeat that pulsed all over his veins, from the center of his body all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes.

“Spain got Mexico and the Philippines. Britain got Hong Kong and India while also humiliating China. Even a young country like the United States of America was able to humiliate the Tokugawas, making them lose face and instigating the Bakumatsu (End of the Shogunate).”

Baku intensified his attacks, covering his shuriken or kunai throws with his cape or his sleight of hand to make their trajectory less visible or predictable. The ninja also attacked from behind, forcing La Cerca to turn and pivot in order to delay his reactions.

“…Japan’s justified fear of foreigners and all things foreign led to the persecution of Christians and the country under lock down, but this also resulted in your nation becoming weak and backwards while the rest of the world progressed.”

Baku couldn’t believe it. Even in the cover of darkness, this La Cerca version of The Faceless kept catching his ambushes. Like he could see in the darkness himself.

What changed from before? The effects of his infrasound shouts to Fabian’s ear should still leave him disoriented and out-of-sync with his counters. How was he able to do counters now?

“In the world stage, Japan has been humiliated by the United States of America and Britain. You’ve been exposed as a backwards country with primitive technology. Japan could not defeat the U.S.A. Isolation has left you frozen in time.”

The Faceless’s joints had started to ache from all his exposure to the bat-man’s infrasound screams, but Fabian kept pushing forward regardless. His pseudo-arthritis be damned.

Baku then realized something.

The infrasound screaming disrupted Fabian’s rhythm and tempo. However, the dissonance was only slight and he merely missed by mere inches or millimeters. Sometimes by a hairbreadth or by a fraction of a millisecond.

Now that Fabian was dual-wielding two weapons, could use the first strike from his lead hand to gauge the distance and the second strike to his rear hand to make up for the miss.

Also, was La Cerca talking all this propaganda garbage in order to disrupt Baku’s infrasound screams that kept messing the rhythm of his counters? Also, did he have echolocation abilities himself?

Or maybe he gauged when Baku was near by the growing effects of his infrasound screams were on him, notifying him of when to attack!

How dare he use his own screams against him! He was a clever bastard, that Faceless person. Just like Zan.

“However, resistance is futile. Thanks to the black ships of Commodore Matthew Perry, your country has opened up to reality. Ninjas and samurais are relics of the past. The bygone age of just 20 years ago now feels like it was 100 years ago, wasn’t it?”

Baku’s pivoting, camouflage, and ambush tactics paired with his sonar echolocation paid dividends, with him delaying La Cerca’s reactions enough to occasionally hit him with punches, kicks, projectiles, or stabs with his hooked gauntlets.  

Fabian La Cerca answered by dancing around Baku in circles, chaining his attacks together, and reacting faster and faster, stabbing in the darkness and getting almost hits more and more.

A stab to the thigh later and Baku understood what had changed in The Faceless.

His Fabian personality was hitting his counters now despite being out-of-rhythm because every time his rapier missed, his dagger on his other hand allowed him to fill in the gaps where he’d otherwise be open.

His rapier indeed served as his range finder to hit his target despite being a second out of beat.

“Don’t you get it? The existence of the Meiji Era is proof that the West won. You are now a colony of Western Superpowers,” said Fabian. “You played chicken with the West and blinked. Now you’re our bitch.”

An attempt to pierce a cornered Baku’s eye with his rapier that missed ended up becoming a dagger slash to the belly. However, the ninja had one more trick up his sleeve.

Baku the Bat-Man flew. Or rather, he jumped and glided in the air, with his cape serving as both his wings and his parachute. The ninja couldn’t get cornered.

“How about that? All your posturing is for nothing, outsider. You can’t even hit me now.”

This only made La Cerca chuckle.

“You think just because you can tell when I’m attacking, you can counter me? Or fly away? Fine. I’ll do you one better. I’ll tell you exactly what I’m about to do so you can stop me better. I dare you to stop me.”

“Just shut up and fight! You talk too much, you foolish gaijin!” spat Baku, who sunk into the darkness once more in order to hide his presence and attack at a blind spot.

Fabian then said, “I’m going to corner you, which will make you fly. I’ll then stab you while you’re in midair, unable to dodge.”

And then he did just that.

La Cerca predicted the ninja would feint attacking from behind, only to fly above his head and swoop down as he turned around, stabbing him at the back regardless.

He figured that the ninja would do something as tricky as set up an obvious pattern to counter as bait for him.

Regardless, Fabian feinted falling for the feint and instead stabbed Baku as he flew. Just like he said.

“Now I’ll fight you without the rapier. Just the dagger,” boasted La Cerca. “I’m saving the dagger for a worthy challenger. Like that other ninja, Zan.”

“DIIIIIIE!” cried the bleeding, desperate flying bat-man ninja, his gauntlets at the ready to block the dagger stabs, only for him to get run through with the rapier.

“Sorry, I lied,” said the cheeky Fabian, driving the flabbergasted ninja out of the office entrance and into the exterior compound where Yahiko Myojin, Tatsuya Minakata, and Kaita were.

“This is Manifest Destiny. Bow down to your superiors, small fry! I am the Western Superpower!”

***

To Be Continued…

Remember the Sanada Demons? Yeah, me neither. Still, I’m going to attempt to squeeze out the best parts out of these infamous filler episode villains the same way I incorporated Shogo Amakusa as a major character in this fanfic.

That sounds on-brand for Rurouni Yahiko.

The trash talking of La Cerca is done as homage to the trash talking of Larry Bird, particularly when he told his opponents what he was going to do before doing it.

Danke,
Abdiel

P.S. also FU Wattpad for effing up the emoji uses and dropkicking your pm off a cliff and cursing the entire universe with the update from last year no one likes watching 2-3 unskippable ads after every chapter in a fanfiction and I used to be able to download my entire library for FREE when I joined can the old Wattpad come to the phone RN??? I don’t why I cried but I think it’s cuz I remembered for the first time since I hated you that I used to love you will the real slim watty please stand up

callmearcturus:

for real, if you see a fic that seems abandoned but you really want to see if it might be completed

i would genuinely suggest not mentioning the fact its abandoned at all. instead, just leave the most effusive comment you can. tell the author specifically what you liked. if they are in a position they might continue it, you might remind them what they liked about the story, and thus maybe revive it.

that is probably your best bet to get a story finished, much more than asking “hey is this abandoned” or asking for it to be continued.

This

Uploading a story to another platform for a false sense of productivity be like

So was anyone else roleplaying on Fanfiction.net forums, because I had a large forum with different genres of role plays one that I was really proud of was a Christmas Carol one. ( It was called 1776 because it was based on Liberty Kids + 1776 musical)

I played Emily Cratchit, and the girl that played Bob was amazing, but anyway if I ever rp’d with you.

You guys were awesome and Merry Christmas

Welcome Home: Chapter 64

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13375872/64/Welcome-Home

There’s a lot of stuff that’ll be happening in these next few chapters. Stay tuned!

Angry

Okay so as some of you may know the FF.Net app is being really fucky, especially recently. The update makes it so that I can’t write on a document I have without it glitching up the doc so I have to write all on computer now :,D

Welp, the apocalypse is upon us as Rudy Ska has, after a year of fanfic hiatus, killed two chapters WITHIN THE SAME MONTH!!! Whoda thought I’d be getting back into the swing of this so quickly. Please tell me what you think of my SWEET LINKAGE.

AO3   |   Fanfiction   |   Wattpad

Idunno about you guys, but i think this is leading somewhere. maybe like a foreshadow of something to happen later mayhaps. BUT I’m not giving anything away so if you’re intrigued, you’re gonna have to wait until the next update which, if we keep up this pace, will be on its way out soon…..ish. Shhhhhh, I got a life too. (Shameless plug for my twitch stream twitch.tv/Rudy_Ska hell yeah)

I LIVE!!! …again. I swore to myself that I would post a new chapter before the last one is officially a year old and I’ve completed that task 3 WEEKS BEFORE I WAS A LIAR!!!!!! Life getting in the way is the worst feeling but I’m making it work! Time for some LINKS!

Fanfiction | AO3 | Wattpad

So, it’s probs gonna be a while until another chapter goes up. Basically, nature of the beast here. Not saying it’s gonna be another year before I hit up the ol fanfic update again… but I’m not, NOT saying it. Anyhoozles, go read. It’s definitely not what youd expect a years worth of work to be…