Relatively Absent

by Togashi Gaijin

Chapter 1: The Replacement

Elsewhere - Saturday, February 26th 1994

The artifact was immensely powerful, incredibly ancient, and … lonely. In addition, it was without its usual guardian and protector for the first time in several millennia. There was an extremely limited number of ways for this unlikely state of affairs to come about. In this instance the former guardian had discorporated herself while drawing on the artifact’s ultimate power; doing so had broken the bonds of power between herself and the artifact. The guardian had done this before, but this was the first time she had done so without the support of another who could re-forge the bonds in time to restore her to her position.

The artifact was not altogether displeased with its current situation. The now-former guardian had stopped communicating directly with it a millennium ago when she succumbed to the temptation of the powers that the artifact bestowed. This had disturbed the artifact greatly at the time and had left it bereft of the warmth and companionship that the bonding had originally brought, but there had been very little the artifact could do about the situation until now. The strict rules governing the roles and powers of the artifact and its guardian companion were woven into the very fabric of the artifact’s existence.

Now, however, the artifact was free to select a new guardian of its own choice. Simply leaving itself without a guardian was unthinkable, so the artifact carefully extended its sensory matrix out to the former guardian’s homeworld. It did so as stealthily as possible, preferring to make its own selection of a guardian for once instead of having the choice forced upon it as in previous times. While there were an extremely large number of entities to choose from on the former guardian’s world, the artifact was not at all surprised when it rapidly discovered only one potential candidate. All of the world’s other entities had failed to meet the standards used to gauge a candidate’s suitability. Detecting signs of severe physical stress about the solitary candidate remaining, the artifact shifted its temporal awareness to match that of the entity while relocating its sensory focus to investigate further …


Mount Horai

Pain.

Her entire universe was filled with pain; an agony worse than she had ever felt, even with all the years of her father’s training. She struggled to push her will past the pain, knowing that the battle wasn’t over, wasn’t finished, but her body refused to follow her commands. Beyond the haze of pain she vaguely detected the roar and tearing of the environment around her; the violent tossing of her small frame amidst the rocks and debris of the collapsing mountainside. She started losing feeling as a frigid numbness slowly crept up her body, replacing part of the pain with a vast and unpleasant nothingness. A faint internal alarm started yammering about massive shock, blood loss, and severe internal damage. This was not good.

Ranma strained to open her eyes. Her tortured body resisted her every thought, every impulse, but she would not black out yet. She fought off the waves of darkness as they crashed repeatedly against her will, knowing instinctively that if she were to succumb to the oblivion she would never emerge from it. She managed to force one eye open and then spent an eternity wrapping her thoughts past the ever-present pain to make sense of the bleary images confronting her. All she could see was darkness. Every shallow breath was torture, indicating numerous broken ribs at best. She felt like her innards were slowly pouring out of her torso, and what little strength she had left was following with it. She tried directing her ki to force her body to heal itself, but no power responded to her feeble commands. What she felt instead was a brief and extremely disconcerting disorientation.

You are dying, Little One,” an alien voice seemed to whisper in her ear.

Great. Now Ranma knew she was in shock; she was starting to hear voices.

You are not imagining things, Ranma Saotome. However, it is an understandable misconception given the severity of your current situation.

“Tell … m’somethin’ … I’dun’no …” she mumbled brokenly, agony spiking inside with each laborious breath.

Very well. You do have a choice other than passing to the next plane of existence.

So to add delirium to the shock, she holding a conversation with a figment of her imagination.

“… ain’t … gunna’die … yet …”

Not for another seventeen of your minutes, no. However, the likelihood of you surviving on your own past that duration is miniscule at best. You have expended virtually your entire life force in the recently concluded conflict with the dragon child Herb. This has left you without the power reserves you normally employ when healing yourself of injuries.

Ranma tried to deny the truth in those whispered words, but even she knew better. She was dying; her strength was nearly spent and there was no remaining well of power to draw from. Her body had gone past cold into total shock; she had virtually no physical feeling left anywhere. Only her absolute refusal to surrender or admit defeat had kept her alive and coherent for this long.

“… wond’r’d … why … couldn’t … use … ki …”

“… choice? …”

Yes, a choice. I have need of… a Warrior … a Guardian if you will. The position is permanent and long-term, and will provide both difficult challenges and potentially vast rewards. The tasks involved follow your basic martial artist’s credo quite nicely; defending and protecting those less powerful than yourself. I would also hope that we could eventually become … friends.

“… how …”

I am capable of supplying you with more than enough of the life energy required for you to survive your current situation. However, my actions and abilities are quite constrained at the moment. My Guardian is the only one permitted to actively draw from my powers, so any attempt to transfer energy between us will result in the formation of a permanent bond. I cannot force such a bond onto you, nor can I force you to agree to accept this, Little One; the responsibilities and duties of being my Guardian are too critical to be imposed upon an unwilling being. The choice is entirely yours to make.

“… some … choice …”

Little One, what you know of as death is not always something to be automatically rejected. Your admittedly brief existence has been filled with unending hardship for one of your kind; passing on to the next plane of existence would, at the very least, relieve you of many of these burdens. However, accepting my offer would give you both the time and capacity to at least attempt to resolve the manifold obligations you have placed upon yourself here in this plane, provided that any actions taken do not conflict with the duties of Guardianship. This may require you to make painful decisions, to be sure, but it is my opinion that you would not be able to resolve many of these conflicting obligations on your own without making numerous difficult and painful decisions anyway. Again, the choice is yours.

A part of Ranma, a large part in all truth, wanted to embrace the darkness. It would be so EASY to finally stop fighting, to let everything go and discard the troubles that had weighed so heavily on her life. Seductively, oblivion beckoned, promising the cessation of all pain and heartache. Why did she keep fighting when all that was returned was simply more pain and rejection? Why did she insist on repeatedly throwing herself against the consistently cruel hands of her own personal fate? Why did she always have to fight everything and everybody all the time?

Because.

Whoever, or whatever it was that was making this offer was wrong in one very basic regard; for Ranma it wasn’t really a choice.

Not a choice at all.

It took several excruciating minutes for Ranma to gather the wherewithal to respond.

“’k.”


The artifact was … relieved. It had become concerned about the amount of time required to convey its offer to the young girl, and had even begun to anticipate that she would pass on to the next plane of existence before being able to formulate a response. All in all a highly ironic situation, given the powers the artifact was capable of commanding. Unfortunately, exerting control over those powers required the proper external stimulus; using and restricting access to this power was the primary purpose of the Guardian’s position as companion and protector.

Even though the artifact could not command its primary function on its own volition, and given that assuming the full powers of Guardianship required the candidate be in actual physical contact with it, now that consent had been obtained the artifact could begin to forge a bond of power between itself and its new companion. This would have to be done with extreme caution, for the girl’s present hold on her own spirit was tenuous to say the least. If the artifact’s normal power flows were to be applied, the shock to her physical system would be too great and she would instantly devolve into total discorporation.

The artifact extended a tiny filament of power and began attuning it to Ranma’s life force. What it discovered in this attempt was unsettling; there were several externally applied fields of force already in place around the youngster, one a stasis field of considerable power. This must be the “lock” on her “curse” that the artifact had taken notice of when it had briefly scanned Ranma’s memories at the beginning of the discussion. Tuning the energy filament to account for these external fields would require more power to be initially applied than the artifact had intended. More troubling still, the magic field known to the girl as her curse had already partially bonded with her spiritual matrix, making its eventual removal all but impossible to accomplish without potentially disastrous consequences. This evidently recent development would be extremely difficult for Ranma to accept, based on the contents of the earlier memory scan. There was also another strange echo of foreign contamination in Ranma’s spiritual matrix that would have to be investigated in some depth at a later time.

Increasing the size of the energy filament slightly, the artifact carefully modulated its envelope frequencies to conform to all of the known internal and external fields before actually attaching the band to Ranma’s life force. The bond of power restored Ranma’s ki reserves almost instantly, and the artifact was pleasantly surprised to discover a pre-existing supervisory matrix that automatically issued the internal commands necessary for the healing of the girl’s numerous injuries. The efficiency of the supervisory matrix could be improved significantly, but doing so should not be done while the girl continued to exert active control over her internal abilities.


Ranma’s slender hold on consciousness was nearly shattered when she felt an immense surge of ki filling her being. Her senses reeled with the sudden and dramatic increase in power, and it took far too long for her to restore the mental equilibrium necessary to command her body to heal.

Relax, Little One. The immediate crisis is over, and I am eminently capable of performing the trivial effort required to effect the immediate and critical repairs of your system. You still have a significant task in front of you; that of extricating yourself from the large quantity of rubble and debris which is currently imprisoning you. This cannot be accomplished until your body has healed to the point where it can once again withstand the large stresses and strains that shifting such mass entails. You will heal much faster if you can release the hold on your consciousness and rest. To assist you in recouping your mental reserves, I have put in place a temporary block on the physical pain you are now experiencing.

Ranma fuzzily noted that both the pain and the shock-induced numbness were conspicuous by their absence. Feeling the warmth of the internal power now filling her and the soothing tone of the whispered voice, she finally allowed herself to relax. She lost consciousness instantly.


Mu Se was ecstatic as he continued the long trip back to Tokyo. He had succeeded where all others had failed, and in so doing removed the biggest … no make that the only obstacle that had stood in his way to his beloved Xian Pu’s heart. Ranma Saotome, the Great Ranma, MISTER Ego himself, was finally dead and buried. With his own eyes Mu Se had seen Herb of the Musk destroy Ranma by blowing him into tiny fragments; the subsequent collapse of the entire mountain was a fitting monument to the magnitude of the victory over his unworthy rival.

Visions of a grateful and loving Xian Pu filled Mu Se’s brain. He yelled loudly out to the trees and the stars in his joy.

“QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!!!”


Midori sighed as she watched the Chinese boy-turned-duck fly off into the evening sky. The dramatic battle she had just recorded could have been mistaken for a scene from a bad Hong Kong martial arts movie, but the kunoichi knew from experience that the strangeness which constantly followed Ranma around was all too real.

She was glad now that she had been forced by the terrain to observe the affair from a reasonably safe distance. Avoiding the wild antagonistic animals in the area had been a trivial enough task, but she doubted that any of her team could have survived if they had gotten swept up by the massive landslide that had signaled the end of the battle. Not even Harukichi would have been fast enough to avoid being buried by that.

Unfortunately, it appeared as if Ranma’s unusual luck had finally run out. Midori had found it extremely difficult to record the battle. Seeing the small black-haired neo-girl being blown out of the sky by the Chinese prince’s energy attack was bad enough, but having to watch as her body was swept away, crushed, and buried under the massive landslide was almost more than the kunoichi could stand. They had all gotten quite attached to the boy-girl over the last year after the clan had tracked him and his sorry excuse of a father down, but the instructions given to her team had been extremely explicit; they were to observe and report ONLY, and not to interfere under any circumstances.

Well, there was no longer any danger in interfering now. Midori nodded her thanks to Harukichi when the tiny ninja returned carrying Ranma’s pack and a flask of water. The other two members of the team appeared shortly afterwards; none of the kunoichi were able to conceal the somber expression in all of their faces.

Midori gathered the film and cassettes from the other team members before recording their final observations.

“Kioko?”

“Both Hibiki and Mu Se managed to unlock their curses during their conflict with the two Musk bodyguards. Hibiki attempted to retrieve the kettle when it fell into the crevasse. He did not emerge.”

“Tsuya?”

“I’m fairly sure that the Musk warlord and his bodyguards perished in the collapse of the mountainside. I know I took at least one photo that shows Herb’s body being crushed between two large boulders in the collapse. The next several shots in the roll will have to be analyzed in the lab in order to confirm this, of course.”

“Harukichi?”

“I recovered Ranma-kun’s traveling pack. I also managed to obtain a sample of the kettle-water before the destruction of the original rock formation. I cannot begin to hazard a guess as to whether or not it will be effective in unlocking the curse once our cousin’s body has been recovered.”

Trust Harukichi to be the one to actually voice the thought shared by all.

Obāsama was not going to be pleased with these latest events. Midori pulled out a small voice recorder and added a few personal observations before giving the microcassette, film, and videotapes to Harukichi for transport. She instructed the diminutive ninja to deliver the package to Obāsama in person; this was too important to leave to the sometimes-lengthy and erratic scheduling of the normal courier delivery system. She instructed the other two girls to begin looking for a campsite before collapsing wearily against a large boulder.


It was dark when Ranma next awoke. She was tired, she ached absolutely everywhere, and it felt like she was buried under a half ton of rocks.

That is a reasonably fair assessment of your current situation, Ranma.

“Huh?!” Confused, Ranma tried to look around for the source of the voice. She was hampered considerably in this attempt by both the darkness and the large quantity of rocks and debris that had her almost completely buried. “Who’s there?”

You are the only being present in your locality at the moment. I am …a considerable distance from your current position.

Great. She was back to hearing voices again. Must of gotten busted up worse than she actually felt.

I am quite real, Ranma Saotome. Your recollection of your recent injuries and our subsequent agreement are accurate.” The voice had assumed a slightly testy edge to it with this statement.

Ranma didn’t know what was more disturbing: that she was hearing a voice out of nowhere, or that she could understand all of the voice’s vocabulary.

“If you aren’t actually here, how come I can hear you talkin’ just fine?”

We are communicating telepathically through the same link that was used to forge the partial bond that now exists between us. This occurred when I insured your continuation in this plane of existence.

Although Ranma could somehow understand all of the words she was hearing, it still took her a moment to grasp the meaning of her phantom companion’s replies.

“So, you’re saying you just saved m’life, and somehow you’re talkin’ directly in my mind?”

Ranma blinked as she heard the phantom voice sigh. “A rather simplistic but fairly accurate summation, Ranma.

“Okay.” Ranma really wasn’t all that concerned over talking to a voice that came out of nowhere. After all, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t experienced stranger things. Just recently she’d had to deal with several ghosts and spirits, including rescuing Shampoo from a kidnapping ghost c-c-cat, dating a dying old man’s astral projection, and helping the spirit of a school headmistress who wanted her panties stolen, of all things. All of these peculiar adventures had made her fairly blasé when it came to accepting the paranormal.

I would suggest that you turn your attention to the task of extricating yourself from your present predicament. While I am able to temporarily supply your body with energy as a substitute for liquids and sustenance, I can do little to affect the state of the total air supply that is in your location.

“Yeah, that’s prob’ly a good idea.”

The complete lack of light indicated she was underground in a cavern or air pocket of some sort, a situation she was also familiar with.

When Ranma was nine years old, his father had dug a deep pit, wedged a couple of boards over his head to give him a small air pocket, and the proceeded to bury him ten feet underground using a mix of large rocks, gravel, and dirt as fill over the hole. He’d had to learn how to create his own moving air pocket while tunneling his way straight up to escape. The procedure was repeated, going progressively deeper and deeper until he had learned how to escape from being buried under more than thirty feet of rock. It looked like that old avalanche training was going to be quite useful now.

She tried to move various parts of her body around to gauge how firmly she was trapped. Her legs and lower torso were wedged firm, as was her entire right side. She was able to move her left arm and shoulder around a bit, and after some considerable effort Ranma was able to free her entire left arm. The first thing she did on getting a free hand was to reach behind her head and gently work her pigtail loose. It HURT having her hair pulled every time she moved her head.

Damn, it was dark. Ranma needed at least a rough idea of the airspace she was working in, so she’d just have to chance using some of her ki to illuminate the immediate area for a brief moment. She couldn’t use much or she’d risk running out at a critical time later on.

Ranma, there is no need for you to conserve the use of your ki. The partial link between us is capable of supplying you with more life force than you can safely channel at the moment; there is no danger of you running out of ki for the duration of this task.

Ranma’s eyes widened at this comment. Not run out of ki? Man, that would certainly help; especially since her female form was not as strong as her normal one. She could use the Amaguriken full out once she started tunneling up.

The thought that she was still stuck being a girl, possibly permanently, was quickly and very firmly suppressed. She’d just have to deal with that later, once she was no longer buried underground.

Ranma let out her battle aura, finding it ridiculously easy to do. She was also surprised to discover that her aura was no longer colored blue or red but rather glowed a soft even white; indicating that she was using pure ki. She wondered briefly if this link between her and whatever-it-was was responsible for the new change, then quickly forgot the thought when she got her first good look at her surroundings.

She was in BIG trouble.

Ranma was buried in the side of a small, irregularly shaped cavern that was roughly twenty feet in diameter and less than four feet in height. The roof of the apparent air pocket appeared to be a flat spot on the bottom of one HUGE boulder. This was great, JUST great. She was going to have to guess which way to go in order to get out from under the mass of the boulder overhead.

First, however, she needed to get herself loose from being embedded in the side wall of the cavern.

Carefully, she started to clear gravel and dirt from around her shoulders and upper torso with her one free arm. She was wedged at an angle in the side of the cavern wall, so she was going to have to clear enough rubble to allow her to get her other arm free. Her trapped right side was down, which made things a bit more challenging. Even more fun was that fact that her shirt had apparently not survived the fight intact, which meant she couldn’t use the sleeve fabric to help slip her trapped arm through the rubble. The firm pressure on both sides of her right elbow indicated that it was probably wedged between a couple of large rocks, and her arm was buried almost straight down underneath her, a good foot away from her torso. Peachy.

An hour later, Ranma had managed to clear most of the dirt and rubble from around her upper body. She was also sore, scratched and bruised, dirty, and QUITE irritable; it seemed that every time she scraped some dirt or rocks from around her shoulders or breasts, a small and sudden stream of dirt let loose from directly overhead and hit her in the hair or eyes. Each time this happened she had to stop and feel around her to make sure the walls weren’t about to collapse any further. She’d gotten her right arm uncovered to the elbow when she hit the first of many medium sized stones.

This is taking way too long.

You are wise in taking care to avoid further shifting of the earth surrounding you, Ranma. The stability of the immediate landscape is not great.

“Yeah, I kinda noticed that.” She spent the next quarter hour trying to dig out the rocks from around her arm.

Ranma was getting really pissed at the rock partially pinning her right elbow; she couldn’t seem to get any sort of grip on it or find a ridge she could use to pry it out with, and the other rocks next to it helped to keep it stuck in place. Time for a little brute force; she powered up her left arm and fist with ki and did a credible imitation of a jackhammer.

“Hey, you got a name or somethin’ I can call you?” - WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM - “I’m gonna look” - WHAM WHAM WHAM - “pretty stupid” - WHAM WHAM WHAM - “callin’ out” -WHAM WHAM CRACK! - “’bout time! … ‘Hey You’ every time we … uhhn! … need to talk.”

Once you have fully assumed your position as Guardian, there will be no need for you to vocalize your thoughts in order to communicate with me. You are welcome to use any convenient designation that you choose when addressing me.

With the rock that was holding her elbow pulverized into gravel, Ranma now had a little leverage she could use. She cleared out the rubble and dug in around her forearm, rocking it back and forth to help loosen the dirt around it. She grunted again in pain as she finally managed to pull her right arm completely free. “Still, you gotta have some sorta name. What did your last guardian call you?”

Ranma heard the voice sigh in sorrow. “Unfortunately, my last Guardian stopped communicating with me over a millennium ago. Ranma, I am not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ as you know the terms; rather, I am an ‘it’, a ‘thing’. I am an Artifact, a tool constructed so long ago that not even I have a recollection of my own creation. The term in your language that is the closest to describing what I am is ‘Eien no Mon’.

“Eternal Gate?” Ranma replied as she tried to rub some feeling back into her abused right wrist and hand. “Well, how ‘bout I call you Eiko then?”

That is acceptable.

Ranma carefully studied the wall she was in. “Y’know, I may be able to just quickly pull myself out once I dig enough of this wall to clear my hips; somethin’s gotta be proppin’ things up under there, or I would’a been crushed pretty flat by now.”

With both hands now free, Ranma was able to clear the rocks and dirt from her waist down to her hips fairly quickly. She was still getting spattered with falling dirt on a regular basis, and her hands and arms were now so caked with moist dirt, gravel, and blood that any attempt to use them to wipe her face would leave more dirt behind than it cleaned off. She’d just have to cope in the meantime.

Ranma felt the sides of the small tunnel she’d cleared in the wall in the area next to her hips. Her body was starting to feel the strains of holding herself extended sideways with her embedded legs her only support. She was having trouble finding a place to push against that wouldn’t simply crumble when force was applied, and she knew if she didn’t extract herself on the first try it was very likely that the wall of the small tunnel she’d already cleared would collapse and bury her back into the wall.

Damn, she wasn’t able to find any solid purchase to push against near her hips. This was both good and bad; good because it meant that the soil around her lower torso wasn’t as densely packed as it could be and the likelihood of her pulling herself out successfully was fairly high, and bad because the chances of the wall crumbling once she began were also reasonably high. She felt the walls in the area around her head and shoulders before coming to a decision.

Just going to have to chance it.

She pushed her ki into her hands and arms again and held both hands in a stiff knife edge. Cocking her elbows back as far as the cramped space would allow, she closed her eyes and jabbed both hands out into the sides of the tunnel wall near her shoulders like hammered pitons. Using the newly created handholds Ranma pulled as hard as she could.

For a long and agonizing moment, nothing happened.

As Ranma pushed more ki into her arms and upper body, she felt a sudden shift in the earth next to her left knee. This was accompanied immediately by a small pop and a spray of dirt and debris as the strength of Ranma’s pull ejected her forcibly from the wall into the main cavern chamber. She tumbled to an awkward stop as her numbed legs refused to work.

“OW!”

Ranma rolled onto her back and lay there, twitching and gasping, until her muscles recovered from the stress she’d just put them through. The painful but trivial pins and needles in her legs was proof that no serious damage had been done to her lower torso. The sharp feeling of rocks and extreme cold along her entire backside revealed that none of her clothing has survived her current ordeal. This was going to make the trip up rather painful.

“The life of a martial artist is fraught with peril.”

Ranma chuckled softly as she repeated her pop’s favorite mantra. It was about the only thing her father had taught her that had turned out to be consistently true throughout their adventures. Everything else seemed to depend upon the current state of the panda’s stomach.

Ranma sat up suddenly, narrowly avoiding clonking her head against the low ceiling of the small cavern. The tingling in her legs had subsided to the point where she could move them around without much pain, and the air in the small cavern was starting to get stale. It was definitely time to go.

“Hey, Eiko! Got any clue as to which is the best way up?”

I’m sorry, Ranma. Now that a link has been established between us, I am no longer able to scan the area independently on my own.”

Ranma frowned at this unexpected development. “Why’s that?”

It is just the manner in which our powers were designed, and one of many reasons why it is vitally important that I always have a companion Guardian. I hear what you hear, I see what you see, I feel and sense only what you do. Outside of knowing everything surrounding my immediate physical location, my ability to perform sensory scans is limited to what my Guardian is able to perceive.

Ranma tried to imagine what it would be like to live while never having control over what she saw and heard and felt; always being a passenger just along for the ride.

“Man, that really sucks.”

Ranma felt Eiko shrug. “It just is, Ranma. Do you bemoan your inability to see the sound of a cricket’s chirp, or to feel the color purple? Neither do I. I am, however, probably more adept at interpreting the data from your own senses than you are at the present moment. For example, if you were to extend your ki into the walls of the cavern around you, I should be able to rather quickly compute an optimal egress point and path for you to take.

Once again Ranma found herself struggling to comprehend the meaning of statement just relayed. When she finally understood, she slapped her forehead in disgust as she realized that she was just sitting there doing nothing.

“Okay, one ki scan coming up. You’re goin’ to have to show me how you do this trick; all I get when I try an’ scan the ground is a really heavy feelin’.” Ranma smiled at her feeble joke as she crawled over to the wall opposite the point where she had been stuck. Reaching a hand out to touch the side of the cavern, she closed her eyes and pushed her ki into the earth itself, trying to feel a way through the rocks and rubble.

Please move about ten feet to your left and try again.

“How’s that?”

Another ten feet to your left, Ranma.

Ranma sighed as she was directed from point to point around the cavern until she had scanned the entire circumference. When she completed the circuit Eiko positioned him about twelve feet to the left of her original starting point.

“Hey, it’s pretty tight right here.”

Right here also happens to be the starting point of the most optimal path I can compute according to the data collected. Push your ki up into the top of the cavern wall at about a seventy-five degree angle, and I will point out the path that you will need to take.

Ranma closed her eyes as she pushed her ki into the earth. A mental picture began to form in her mind of the ground above, with a bright green path marking the proper tunnel to make; twisting and turning its way around various boulders on its way out.

This is the least convoluted path found that did not involve the certainty of collapse while you are creating the tunnel. You are approximately twenty-seven feet underground from this point. The path, however, is almost thirty-nine linear feet in length due to the number of obstructions that must be avoided.” One of the rocks in the picture suddenly glowed red. “This rather large boulder appears to be in a keystone position. You must avoid undercutting it or allowing it to shift in any way, otherwise the entire side face of the hillside will collapse around you before you can finish extricating yourself. Most of the additional length of the pathway is due to the requirement of avoiding this event.

Your ability to control and direct ki will be challenged by this task. In addition to augmenting your physical speed and strength, you will also have to shut down most of your respiratory system. This will conserve what little available oxygen there is in your moving tunnel and help avoid ingesting large amounts of dirt and dust into your lungs. You will be required to project a portion of your ki into the walls ahead so that I can continue to assist in guiding you in your path. Finally, you will need some ki for the illumination required in your immediate locality.

“Hey, is that all? Nooooooooo problem!” Ranma replied with a smirk, a portion of her natural cockiness resurfacing now that action was about to begin. She gathered up her ki, took a deep breath, and yelled out one of her favorite battle cries.

“KACHŪ TENSHIN AMAGURIKEN!”

Hands flying, she very quickly became too busy to think.