Vance looked over at Suzume. "Ah hello there, Suzume right? Well lets see. After my head got blow clean off I have no Idea. I woke up far away. Apparently washed down river. Managed to make my way here completely by accident. I guess I was blown apart again, probably pretty messy judging by the condition of my body when I woke up." Vance laughs a little. "As for everyone else, there all inside the temple near as I can tell. Except for Takin." A small pop is heard below decks followed by Takin's profane cursing. "He's...keeping me company." Vance says as a smile brightens his face.

"So what happened to you? The same?"

Suzume looked at Vance kind of awkwardly when he talked about being killed so casually. He hadn't been around when he'd explained to everyone that he could regenerate, so it still was very odd to him. He pushed it aside though, and answered his last question.

"Well, at the end of the fight, I got blown back into the ship rather hard. Right on my head. Knocked me out cold for... I don't know how long, but I feel like crap. Anyway, I don't think Takin would like the dent I probably made, if he finds it."

Suzume looked around at the ship. I felt really odd being alone in this strange contraption.

"Ah well, might as well talk," he thought harmlessly.

"You got the name right though. And yours is Vance, isn't it?"

Yaburu and Chikane stalked through the shadowed halls. To one side was a door. She signalled to Yaburu to stop, and the susurrant chanting from within wafted out. She tried the handle. It turned easily, without much sound. The priestess turned to the fallen monk, and her hands spoke where her tongue would have been inappropriate.

On my signal, break this wall down.

Yaburu nodded, and Chikane closed her eyes, calling to the ambient fire kami, tempting them with the promise of burning and the joy of consumption. As they gathered into her hand as a ball of swirling flame, she mouthed the words to another unspoken prayer under her breath, calling to the air kami this time.

Her eyes snapped open, and as they did, the world fell silent. With slick, fluid grace, she flung the door open, tossed the ball of fire in, then slammed it shut without a sound.

Tongues of flame spurted from the gaps in the timbers and under the door with eerie silence, and Chikane turned to Yaburu.

Now.

The wall crumbled to powder as Yaburu's fist connected, and quicker than she expected, he was already inside the flaming ruin of the prayer room. The first confused and burning monk to meet him received a Tekken Semehorobosu to the chest. He convulsed, sternum rippling, before collapsing to the ground, spewing blood from his mouth.

Outside, Chikane had her bow ready, and when one of the monks Yaburu had missed stumbled out through the door, she kicked it into his face, knocking him back in, then entered the room and ended his suffering with a lethally precise shot to the head.

It was over in less than ten seconds. The monks who had survived the firebombing were dispatched either by Chikane's bowshots, or by crushing blows from Yaburu's fists. As Yaburu moved to finish off the final, quivering monk, Chikane, fired a shot across his front. Yaburu froze, then turned to regard the priestess.

Questioning, she mimed.

Yaburu nodded and backed away, leaving Chikane free to advance on the wounded man and plant a tabi-clad foot on his chest.

OOC:Vance actually never did explain it, he just lets people figure it out as they go.

"Yes indeed, Vance is my name, at least thats what my mother told me. I wouldn't worry too much about Takin being upset about a dent. He seems quite occupied with the inside. As for time, I think its been around two days, maybe three sense the fight. I really can't tell." Vance thought about what had happened. "I am worried there is an evil Daemon on the Island. I don't think monks would kill me in such a way. But, it's hard to remember. Usually my memories are perfect in clarity." Vance shrugs. "As soon as I'm better I intend to explore the Island again."

With a wave of her hand, Chikane dismissed the air kami, and sound returned to their ears once more. She pressed her weight on his chest, and he tried to scrabble up, but a quick kick from Yaburu dissuaded him of that idea. She nodded to Yaburu, then withdrew a prayer strip from her sleeve and stabbed it into the luckless monk's forehead with a sharpened fingernail. Instantly, his limbs grew powerless and weak, and the monk's eyes clouded over with fear.

"You worthless sack of shit, you exist now because you are of use to me. Tell me where the Shield Master is, and I won't keep you from your nirvana."

The monk trembled, then squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them ,there was a new strength in his gaze, and he spat a bloody gobbet at Chikane.

"I'll never tell you, you wit-"

And then the end of his sentence was lost forever as CHikane reached down, into his robe, under his loincloth, and squeezed a very sensitive part of him, fingernails first. The scream that left the monk could barely be described as human as Chikane crushed his testicles to a bloody pulp, and it took a quick tug to snap him out of the agony.

"I won't ask again. Where is he?"

When the monk finally replied, it was in a voice several octaves higher.

"...left... three doors down... right... first to the right... it hurts..."

Chikane tore the man's genitalia off, then tossed the bloody mess onto his face with a wet splat. She wiped her hands clean with summoned water, and turned to Yaburu.

"He might have been lying. Men will say anything to end their suffering."

"If that was the case, I'll come back for his spirit and torture him forever."

"Would there be a point? He wouldn't be useful anyway."

"Oh yes, he would. Both as practice... and as stress relief. Let's go."

They left the ruins of the prayer room behind them.

Sanjuro followed the monk with a giddy smile across his face. "So say another one of those things you say."

The monk seemed quite irritated as he walked through the forest, sighing as he replied, "Do you truly wish to hear what I have to say, or do you want to listen to whats in your heart?"

"OH MAN THAT'S THE MOST AWESOME THING I EVER HEARD!" Sanjuro proudly exclaimed.

"More awesome that the last five awesome things you heard?" He replied rather angrily for a monk.

"Most definately. Because you see the first thing was like wow, while the second thing was whoa, and the third made me say wow-" Sanjuro spoke as though he could have kept on like that for a good while so the monk quickly interjected.

"As you see my friend we have reached the road. So it is time for us to part ways, you can follow that path out of the forest and I will return to the temple."

"But the temple is where we are headed." Sanjuro responds starting down the path to the temple quickly.

"No you need to stop, you can't go to the barrier only special people are allowed in." The monk was pleading as he followed the skinny boy attempting any way he could to reason with the boy.

"Well the man with the sword of fire seems pretty special," The monk replied with only a blank look, Sanjuro continued his explanation of Kurama with his rendition of the Dangik "He was all like fwah and the sword went all kablam, frrrhhhhhhhhh and then all this stuff was gone!"

This boy, could he know the legendary warrior's successor? the monk thought, "Could you take me to this man. I'd like to speak to him."

"Alright, but you go to slow." Grabbing the old man and hoisting him on to his shoulder Sanjuro started running down the path back towards the ship. "This'll be fun, funny talk man will talk to fire sword dude."

"My name isn't funny talk man, my name is Kambei and please be more respectful of your elders."

"You got it Elder Kambei." The monk sighed deeply as he tried to stabilize himself as the teen carried him down the path.

The monk lay dead, his left foot and head sawed clean off, the two wires set in the tunnel not dripping of blood. It was one of the traps White Kimono was taught by Lady Shizuka. Set a wire where the victim would trip, then set another farther ahead and at midsection level so it catches the victim in the throat as they fall forward, the momentum enough to decapitate the person, and usually also enough to slice off the foot that tripped. Tsubasa had rigged up a few traps for patrols in the caves to keep the enemy off of her friend's backsides. The dim lighting made it difficult to detect the traps until it was too late. "Spending all their lives going through these caves, never thinking that one day, the tunnels will become their tombs."
Tsubasa was using a tunnel that dead ended to house the bodies. This particular victim was the fourth of such unwary guards, and the second to die in the same manner, though not by the same wires. A third was killed by a variant of the first trap, the difference being that there was a third wire placed vertically that intersected the mid-level one, effectively bisecting the head as it was removed. The fourth tripped on a low wire and fell into a bed of other low wires, slicing him up in most places and cutting off parts in the other places. White Kimono worked carefully to avoid getting blood all over herself, especially her clothes as she dumped the bodies in the small deadend room.

Garud reached for a lemon, and took a bite out of it.

"Very sour. Like me."

Garud swallowed hard, and screwed up his face.

"Y'know, that reminds me of something funny that heppened with your ancestor. He was drunk beyond belief, to the point where he constantly switched between agressive and giggly. Anyway, I decided to teach him a lesson so while he was delirious, i put him over my shoulder and threw him into the bay."

Garud laughed around another chunk of lemon.

"The look on his face was priceless. He had no memory of what happened whatsoever, and he was bewildered asking how he got there."

Garud finished his lemon and moved on to an apple.

"Anyway, knowing Tama, it's probably very straitforward, and you guys are looking too deep."

Ishumo waited in the hallway where he had left his spike traps. The next monk that came down the hallway stepped on the spikes. While the monk was distracted, Ishumo glided forward, spear in hand, removing any spikes that were in his way. Then he brought down the head of his spear on the monk head. As the monk fell to the ground unconscious, Ishumo went forward and took the monks robes, leaving him in his small clothes. He tied up his own robes so that it would not show, and put on the monk’s robes, he had to alter them a bit, as they were too big. He gave the monk a quick stab in the throat, and walked around in the area where Team Evil were taking care not to be attacked by them or fall into on of their traps.

Raikotsu flowed smoothly down the hallway, the faint blur in the air that signified Ayame's presence moving beside, and slightly behind, him. He had passed several Monks already...and killed most of them in the same manner he intended to kill this one.

Standing idly outside another meditation room, the Monk's eyes snapped open as something grated across his consciousness, a feeling of approaching evil. He felt a strange wind across his face, one that shouldn't have been present in these closed-off halls, and saw a blurring of the air. Aiming instinctively for the blur, his hand shot into his tunic, grabbing an Ofuda.

That was the last mistake the poor monk would ever make.

Suddenly, he felt the wind again...though this time, it struck behind a hardened mass, hitting him in the stomach and knocking the wind out of him.

Raikotsu kept part of his airy mass hardened as he immediately poured into the monk's mouth, forming a plug of hardened air in the man's windpipe. The monk coughed, trying to remove it, his face turning red as he frantically struggled for breath.

He fell to his hands and knees, his face and neck turning a rather interesting shade of mauve as he choked. There was a meditation that allowed a skilled monk to slow their breathing...but nothing to protect one from a total lack of air.

The monk's vision seemed to tunnel, blackness seeping around the edges, and he realized suddenly that he had to warn his comrades...however, he realized a fraction of a second later that he could no longer move, and was lying face-down on the ground. His vision now showing only tiny pinpoints of light amidst the dizzying blackness, the monk made a final, pathetic effort to cough up Raikotsu...before everything went black, and he collapsed.

The hardened air became a gas again, winding its way out of the dead monk, and reforming to become solid Raikotsu again, since he knew that he would need his full range of abilities to take on the entire room full of monks. He knelt down, focusing on the air circulating beneath the door, shaping it into a supercompressed ball of hardened air.

Opening the door, he casually hurled it into the center of the room...and put up an air wall in front of himself. The ball exploded with the force of a firebomb, and a rain of ultrasharp needles of hardened air in all directions.

The flechettes tore apart the closest monks in a shower of blood and gore, at which Raikotsu shook his head, since it would be difficult to clean later. The next closest monks were nearly as bloody, having scores of tiny holes torn through every portion of their bodies. The remainder, along with the bodies of their comrades, were hurled backwards by the shockwave, and pinned to the wall by the razor-sharp fusillade. Only an unlucky few escaped swift death, pinned to the wall or floor, moaning in terrible agony as they struggled to move their shattered, horrifically maimed bodies.

One, a more powerful monk judging by his age, and the fact that he was trying to move without screaming despite having the muscles in his arms, legs, and lower torso torn to bits...with wounds in his chest that would clearly kill him soon.

Dispelling the wall of hardened air, Raikotsu saluted the doughty monk with his Hurricane Lance, granting him a warrior's death with a single thrust of the ranseur through his heart.

Opening the door to a nearly empty storage room, the Air Demon used his powers to lift the mangled corpses and chunks of human flesh, including the asphyxiated monk outside the room, and deposit them in the storeroom, then scoured the blood from the floor and walls...creating a sanguine cloud, heavy with crimson rain, that he allowed to downpour over the pile of corpses, until all of the blood had been dealt with.

Shutting the door to the storeroom, he had to concentrate hard to reassume the form of wind...it was never easy, despite his innate connection to the element.