Rangers Endgame

Yakeru called forth every drop of radiance he had left, amber smearing over his aching body in flickering patches.

It barely offered any protection. If anything, his innards screamed.

His eyes jumped to Fuyumi; horror wrenched her out of her rage-induced trance. A blood serpent surged, crushing the ground where she stood as she dodged. Barely.

Then, everything flashed red. For a second, pain didn’t exist. Even the fiery agony from scouring his reserves seemed to plunge into a comfortable numbness. Then came the pressure, like an unseen finger pressing into his chest.

Everything rushed back in at once. Through the glimpses of his flickering vision, the ruined field shot farther from him, wind whistling in his ringing ears. The ground beneath him was gone. There was no time to process what had happened before the spire neighboring the cliff he was once on rushed to meet him.

His back crashed into its jagged surface, lightning bolts of agony racing through his spine as he felt something snap. Feeling ceased in his bottom half. Fuyumi sped towards the edge, the bloodhound tending to its wound.

The world blurred. Wind sliced against his face as he careened towards the earth. The icy lake below burst into view before he met it with a crystalline detonation.

Everything went black.

He didn’t know how long he’d been out for, but when he came to again, a figure—he couldn’t tell what—rushed down the cliff face, leaping from cavity to cavity. Debris meteored around the crater.

“—keru!” a distant voice cried.

The sky blurred back into reality, and the figure's silhouette slid over him. His mind lagged when piecing together their features: wild silver hair, terrified blue eyes.

Fuyumi.

She examined his condition. His eyes trailed down to what was in his field of view.

The behemoth armor absorbed some of the damage, but the rest of it…

The impact left his right hand crushed and pulverized his left arm into a mangled ribbon. His right leg cracked sideways below the knee, his femur protruding. A river of red spewed from a gap in his chestplate.

His body ignited into a blinding hot furnace of agony. He didn't even have the luxury to dampen it with a gut-wrenching scream.

“Hey, stay with me,” she gasped, pushing wet hair from his face, color drained from hers.

His skin had already paled. He tried forming words between shallow, broken breaths, but could only manage to vomit blood.

Another flicker of black. Then his surroundings focused again. Barely.

She fumbled with her belt, with the vials she carried. A cracked one slipped and shattered uselessly against the ice. She gripped the last one with quaking hands and forced it between his lips, tilting his head back, willing him to swallow. A blade of pain carved into the side of his neck at the slight motion.

She’d ignored her own injuries.

“Come on, come on…”

A few drops made it inside. Most didn’t.

Warmth clashed with the intensifying cold as the elixir hurried to his wounds. Gashes wriggled in response. The bleeding slowed but still flowed.

Then nothing. No further changes. No breaths drawn deeper. No strength returning. Just pain flooding back in.

“No, no…” Her voice splintered under the weight of it all. “You can’t—I won’t let you.”

She scoured his satchel, tossing rolls of bandages, discarding hardened bread, rifling through everything with none of her usual precision.

Her rushing hands froze, and her breath caught. She grabbed something tucked deeper inside and pulled it out.

At first, the insistent darkness smothering the edges of his vision didn’t allow for a clear picture. His eyes focused for a split second, but it was enough to tell what it was.

A small, unimpressive box, scratched and dented, that’d miraculously survived the attack and fall. She undid the latch, exposing what was inside to the frigid air.

The Lazarus Fruit.

He’d forgotten about it, hoped he’d never have to use it.

Its surface glistened, as if gently urging her to hurry. Her gaze snapped back to him.

Yakeru reached inside, carefully navigating around jagged breaths, to find his voice again.

“Ca—” he choked, dark red pushing from his mouth. When it felt safe to speak, he gambled again. “Ca—n’t… ch… che—w…”

Her eyes went to the Lazarus Fruit, then back to him. Through the rampant turmoil in her features flashed a resolve he recognized from their time together. She nodded firmly and scarfed it.

He fought to keep his eyes open, but they didn't obey, closing for the last time. His muddled mind went to his sister. He wished he could’ve said goodbye and apologized for putting her through so much. His mentor’s booming voice ghosted in his ear. “Stay awake!” it warned. But Yakeru deliberately paid it no heed. Kenji, his oldest friend in the business, shouted the same thing.

He tried, but his eyes no longer responded.

Tendrils of deathly black strangled his consciousness to pull him under. Withered will tugged back but failed to break its hold. Scraps of strength failed to find purchase. Pulled closer to the inevitable, death opened its door wide, accepting its most infuriating, elusive soul.

At the very least, Fuyumi would heal. At the very least, it wouldn’t have her.

However, before his consciousness could drift into something darker, something soft pressed against his lips.

His eyes snapped open to find Fuyumi’s mouth locked with his, her face bright red. He reflexively tried pulling away, but his fractured neck made it impossible.

Her hair pooled around their faces like a silver curtain. For a moment, everything went still, and all of his pain wisped away—or more like he’d forgotten about it.

He almost didn’t notice the warm liquid sliding down his throat, the taste electrifying and jump-starting his senses.

A comfortable heat bloomed through his ruined body, gathering at the grotesque sites. Bones shifted back into place, ruptured veins knitted, joints reset, discolored skin stitched and evened out. The Lazarus Fruit’s effects worked at an effortless speed that put even the health elixir to shame, as if reading catastrophic injuries as mere shallow cuts.

However, the fog clouding his mind didn’t budge. Though his body was mending as if time had reversed, exhaustion bore down on him even harder. His body went slack, like a storm that’d burnt itself out.

Fuyumi slowly pulled back, face still crimson.

She waited.

“H-hey, you with me?” Her voice wavered as she unconsciously sifted a quivering hand through his hair. “Say something.”

A tiredness weighed down his eyes, and he allowed them to close. His ears snagged on her distant calls, his body shaking as she tried stirring him to awareness again.

Then nothing.

*****

Warmth caressed his skin before his eyes opened, and the distant howl of wind reached his ears. The world blurred into being when the strength in his lids came back. A rough ceiling came into focus, the cold still lingering in his bones, and the scent of dry stone registered in the air.

He didn't move for a while. Didn't think. Just waited for his body to catch up.

Fractured memories slipped into place—impact, ice, paralysis.

Paralysis…

He carefully glanced down at his legs—the sharpness in his neck gone—and flexed his foot. It responded.

A slight shuffle brought his attention to the right.

Fuyumi sat a short distance away, knees up to her chest, her unfocused gaze fixed ahead at the building wind outside. Their heating artifact hummed between them, three of its lights still active.

He shifted slightly. It was enough to make her head snap up.

She stared for a few seconds, as if unsure what she saw was real. Then she was at his side, pressing a light hand on his shoulder when he tried to sit up.

“Don’t even think about it.” Her voice was steady. Almost.

He ignored her, moving his hair aside as his eyes went to the rest of her. With a tentative hand, he touched her arm and angled his inspecting gaze around her shoulders and ribs, but her wounds had already sealed.

“I took the last elixir you had,” she explained, gently taking his hand to give it back. “So stop this terrible habit of checking others after you almost just—” she paused, letting out a breath. “You need to rest.”

Resigning, he laid his head back on the stone. “Where are we?”

“I found this place an hour south of the lake. I had to drag you. Marrow Village shouldn’t be too far now.” She slid next to him. “But that’s beside the point. How are you feeling?”

He flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulder, and stretched his neck a bit farther. No pain. No injuries. Like they never were.

“Better, after you…”

“It was necessary,” she answered when he trailed off.

Necessary.

The word landed flat between them.

“Right… thanks.”

She was careful to keep her eyes forward. “Yeah.”

The silence that followed was worse than he’d experienced with her. Even the winds outside did nothing to dampen it. Neither spoke up. Only listened to the whistling elements.

Her eyes went to her dagger—Bloodhound Fang—pretending to inspect it, making sure to keep her face hidden.

“I misjudged its resilience,” she said after a while, keeping her gaze down. “There’s not much time. It’ll track down the village eventually. So I'll intercept it.”

He frowned. “We'll intercept it.”

“No.” The word came too fast. “I'll do it alone.”

That got his full attention. “Since when do you make that call for both of us?”

“Since now,” she answered, turning a tad further away.

“So your plan is to charge in while I stand idle? The first time that happened, you almost lost your life. Not happening,” he rejected. “You need to keep a lid on that anger of yours.”

“That's not it. You saw what it did. It almost—” her voice caught on something sharper and nearly broke on it. She breathed, forcing it flat again. “You’ll stay out of it.”

Frustration boiled over into his voice, fist tightening around a rock. “Stay out of it? We couldn’t even beat it together, and you want me to stay out of it? Not an option.”

She whirled back to him, finally, but the cold mask she usually wore wasn't there. Raw and unhidden fear took its place. Furious in the way only fear can be when it has nowhere safe to go.

“And neither is losing someone else to that thing,” she snapped, voice quivering. She tried holding it steady, but it fell apart with a shaky breath. “I won’t. Not again.”

Her honest words hit him like a sack of bricks. Yakeru could only stare, fist loosening. She was always the distant one, burying feelings until only something simmering remained. He'd never seen her so… small.

She gripped a torn strip of her coat. “That was our only Lazarus Fruit. The next time we fight it…”

He pushed himself against the wall to sit with her. She didn’t move, her head hanging now. Not in defeat, but a plea for him to agree to her condition.

His mind went back to their time with the Bison Clan. It felt so distant now, but so close at the same time.

“Fuyumi,” he said, quieter this time as he recalled a painful memory.

She acknowledged him with a glance.

“The mine shaft. That… thing that waited for us down there,” he strained, but managed to hold it together without triggering an episode.

Her eyes flickered. Briefly.

“I sometimes debate whether I was lucky or not.” His gaze fell to his arm, the bandages wrapping it the only thing keeping his eyes from revisiting the gruesome aftermath. “The tremors, the nightmares… You know what I carry, but you never once looked the other way.”

Her hand stilled on the blade, and she went quiet.

“You’ve sat with me through my night terrors,” he continued. “Heard me talk about it. Or not talk about it. You’ve pulled me out of the abyss. Bore what I carried just to anchor me.” He didn’t mean to, but his mouth curled into a faint smile at the kindness she likely didn’t know she had. “And I never asked you to do that. But it didn’t matter to you.”

She looked away and whispered, “This is different.”

“It isn’t,” he refuted. “Because you’re afraid, too.”

She turned back and opened her mouth to deny it, but the words died somewhere on her tongue. All that came out was a sigh, almost in resignation.

“And that’s okay,” he assured, chest braced with determination. “Because I’m not going to look the other way either.”

A loose stone at the mouth of the cave rattled under the howling wind. She stared at him, something vulnerable surfacing on her features at his declaration.

He tore a piece of tattered fabric from his coat and tied his hair back again, letting a bang fall freely. Tentatively, he brought his knees up to his chest to test them. When they didn’t complain, he slowly put weight on his legs, the wall there as support if needed.

She watched him.

“I told you to rest,” she said, but there was less conviction this time.

“I did,” he answered, looking at the heating artifact. One of its lights had just winked out, leaving only two left. “For four hours, apparently.”

He held out a hand to her, one willing to shoulder the burden with her. “Come on. There’s a bloodhound that still needs hunting.”

She looked at it for a long while, contemplating. Her hand rose to take it, but hesitated. He didn’t rush her. Didn’t push. Just waited. Patient.

After a minute, she finally shook free from her hesitation, then committed, slipping her hand into his.