Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ THE WOLVES OF MUSHIYORI CITY ❯ Seven The Hard Way ( Chapter 5 )

CHAPTER 5: SEVEN THE HARD WAY

 

 

Mitarai didn't know he had company on the balcony of Yu Kaito's apartment until he smelled tobacco mixed in with wet grass from the rain.

He looked up from the notebook which held his attention to the man leaning over the railing with a far off look and a cigarette dangling between his fingers.

"It never fails. Every rainy night you can't sleep and end up smoking out here."

"I pride myself on my consistency," Kaito said as he snuffed out his cigarette. "Have you managed a plan of defense yet?"

"Sort of," Mitarai said, holding his notebook out to show Kaito a crude map of the city with two circles parallel to Irima cave where most of the demons would make it through. "Irima cave is a maze of tunnels so a lot of them won't be making it out. Still, it's where the barrier is the weakest and where most will end up. It seems to be the perfect place to fight since it's out of the way so the regular people won't be too freaked out. The thing is, any demon who isn't a complete imbecile is going to avoid that place simply because of those two reasons. They'll want something close to the food....that being us." He ripped the map page from his notebook and crumpled it up into a ball. "Screw it, it's all moot anyway. I can't make a plan until I see what we're dealing with."

 

The Spirit Detective smirked as he looked at his watch. "Five in the morning. I was going to go to sleep but I guess there's no point if we're all meeting at noon. I'm useless with less than ten hours of sleep. By the way, you know history, right? Has anyone ever defended a city with just six people, Yu?"

"There is some precedent, I believe."

"I mean defended successfully."

Kaito paused to think of a diplomatic answer. "None that I can recall. But keep in mind that it's very late and I'm very tired. As you said, until you can gauge our resources making suppositions would only be counter-productive."

Mitarai groaned as he stood. "I like it when you paraphrase me. You always make me sound smarter than I am. I'm going to bed, after all. Think you can..."

 

As usual, Kaito caught Mitarai's dangling sentence. "I'll have a mostly to scale map done for you before noon." He debated lighting up another cigarette but instead opted for staring into the rainy night as sleep was no longer an option. After a twenty minute reverie Yu re-entered his apartment and laid out a long sheet of paper on his coffee table and began to sketch a map of Mushiyori City.

After the first one was finished he started on another. By the time his doorbell rang at fifteen past noon he had made four redundant maps of the city.

 

"Nice place, Kaito," Hannah said as she stepped into his apartment. "This sure beats Mitarai's rat nest of an apartment." After surveying the rest of the apartment and noticing she and Kaito were the only ones there she felt compelled to ask if the other psychics had already left.

"They weren't picked for their punctuality."

"Yeah, and obviously not their fighting skills either," Hannah said.

Kaito began to defend his friends' fighting prowess but stopped when he felt he couldn't do it adequately. "Asato is useful, at least,"

Hannah thought back to her fight with Asato Kido and conceded. "Too bad he's not coming."

 

Once Mitarai appeared in a blue robe with a dazed look Hannah shot a worried look to Kaito. "Kiyoshi isn't a morning person."

Mitarai sat down at Kaito's coffee table across from Hannah with a cup of hot tea. "I guess we have time to kill. Do you play dominoes, Shepherd?"

Hannah mustered up as much goodwill as she could to say: "You can call me Hannah." She then handed Mitarai a Third Bass album she bought at a second hand store. "Here. Since we're going to spend a lot of time together we might as well try to get along."

Mitarai gingerly took the cd and looked down at it and up at Hannah then down and up again. He chewed his upper lip and sighed as he debated himself on how to react.

"Thanks."

 

Hannah anticipated a month of hell due to Mitarai's muted reaction until she saw Yu Kaito over Mitarai's shoulder grinning and giving her an "O.K." sign before sitting down and spreading the dominoes onto the table.

Over the next hour Kaito won the next three games while Mitarai and Hannah waited for the others to get there.

Then came a series of weak bangs at the door.

"Kaito, open this fucking door!"

 

Mitarai and Kaito exchanged odd looks and then smiles before Kaito opened the door where an exhausted Asato Kido almost fell inside.

"Elevator....broken...."

Kaito and Mitarai helped Asato to Kaito's couch.

"Here," Asato said, handing Mitarai a cd. "Your Ice Cube cd. I've had it for something like two years." He looked around to see Hannah with a concerned expression. "I'd like to see how you look after climbing two flights of stairs with crutches and limited use of your legs." He turned his attention to Mitarai who tried to look busy examining the album he was returned. "I just came to return that. I'm not helping you again. But...I might as well stick around and see what lame plan you're going to think up to get everyone killed."

 

Hannah examined everyone's faces to find them relieved and even glad. It became apparent that they had a form of communication that she'd have to learn if she didn't want to be constantly in the dark.

Within an hour of Asato's appearance Yana and Sniper came followed by Amanuma.

 

"Good. Everyone's here and only two hours late," Mitarai said as everyone settled. He laid out Kaito's hand drawn map of the city onto his table and took out a map compass. "As you can see we don't have enough people to cover the whole city." Nobody looked at the map but took his word for it. "All we can do is protect the most populated parts. If someone has any idea of how we can expand our defenses please speak up now."

Even though he knew almost for certain no one had any ideas he had hoped that someone would say something.

 

"How big can you make your psychic territory, Amanuma?"

He shrugged. "Uh....fifty feet maybe."

Mitarai adjusted the compass and drew a circle the scale circumference of fifty feet onto the map and held it up. "Okay, see this area. This is your territory. Get down there and see how about how many citizens we're dealing with and think of the right game to defend it with. What about you, Sniper? How much space can you take up?"

"About seven hundred yards. I'll need a good line of sight on the target, though. Oh, and Yana did mention that I won't kill anything, right?"

Mitarai sighed and hung his head. "Yeah, fine. You can still knock out a demon or break it's legs, right?"

"Sure."

"Find yourself a nice nest to snipe from." Mitarai handed Amanuma and Sniper two toy walkie talkies and told them to report once they arrived at their designated areas.

"How come we don't get those cool communication mirrors like you and Kuwabara?" Amanuma asked.

"They're not in the budget."

 

Mitarai drew a third circle to represent Yu Kaito's territory which was the most populated. "Okay, everything outside these three circles is up to the rest of us. There's a gym on the other side of the building where we can train and not look completely crazy."

 

"It pays to have friends with good jobs," Mitarai said gesturing to the plush, well-stocked gym on the grounds of Kaito's apartment building.

When the only one who decided to use the equipment rather than the sauna or the swimming pool was Hannah, Mitarai felt that his idea of using the gym was redundant.

 

Mitarai stared into the hot tub next to the pool and scanned the area for strangers before cutting his finger with a pocket knife and dripping blood into the water.

The hot water whirlpool spun faster and rose until his became a steaming cyclone. When he noticed everyone else staring he let the water loudly splash back into the tub and smiled embarassedly.

"Sorry. Just experimenting."

 

Yana and Kaito gave up on the gym and left Mitarai, Hannah and Asato alone.

Asato slowly and painfully made his way to the leg extension machine next to Hannah who was in the middle of rounds on the heavy bag.

"Personally, I think you guys are fucked. You and Kuwabara are the only real fighters."

Hannah tried to chuckle in between pants but only managed a weak cough. "More fucked than you know. Kazuma told me Mitarai doesn't want him doing any fighting."

Asato sighed and looked over at Mitarai who was shaping the water in the hot tub into different shapes. "Arrogant prick! It exactly that kind of shit that got me wheelchair-bound for four months."

 

Hannah tried to take Asato's criticism with a grain of salt since as Yana told her most of his anger toward Mitarai was due to his fear of being injured again, but even taking that under consideration it didn't seem to her that they had any chance of surviving being lead by Kiyoshi Mitarai.

 

Her mental timer went off and she put her reservations to the back of her mind for the next three minute round on the heavy bag.

As the rounds went on things looked more and more grim on her one minute rests in between rounds.

She laid on her back and saw Mitarai looking down on her.

"Are you seeing Kuwabara tonight?"

Hannah exagerated her panting to give her time to think of something non-confrontational to say.

"If you do, tell him I need to see him. No hurry."

 

After finishing their respective workouts Hannah and Asato trudged back to Kaito's apartment but paused at the foot of the stairs.

"I didn't mean to freak you out earlier....about Mitarai, I mean," Asato said after settling down on the concrete. "It's just that when Mitarai works with others he tends to see them as expendable. He started out hating the whole human race then went to being so racked with guilt he tried everything to help. Now....I just don't know. Forget I said anything and help me up the stairs."

 

At first glance it seemed that Yu Kaito's apartment was filled with young men doing nothing in particular instead of psychics gearing up for a demonic invasion. Amanuma and Yanagisawa sat entranced in front of the television playing a video game, Hagiri was throwing playing cards into a hat across the living room while Kaito and Mitarai played dominoes.

 

Hearing stories of the previous Spirit Detective and his rekei tantei from her boyfriend, Hannah tried to contain her dissapointment with the new detective and his cohorts. After twenty minutes of observation of her new teammates it became astoundingly obvious that even mediocre psychics could be grossly mismanaged.

She tapped Mitarai on the shoulder.

"We need to talk."

Mitarai gladly shoved his dominoes back into the draw pile and forfeited his losing game. "Sure."

 

Hannah closed the door to Yu's bedroom once Mitarai entered. "I'm going to be blunt-"

"Blunt? Don't tell me that you were being tactful before."

"You're a weak psychic. I know it, you know it. I was okay with taking orders from someone weaker as long as they seemed like they knew what they were doing. You don't seem to have the slightest idea of what to do, though. All hell is going to literally break loose in about three weeks and look at our only line of defense. Not training. Not strategizing. Nothing. This just screams: 'Vacume in leadership' to me."

Mitarai shrugged. "If you want to lead go on ahead. I don't need the stress."

"You know they won't accept me right off. Take two of them and I'll take two. We'll have a two team training excercise. Winner leads. Agreed."

Mitarai shrugged again. "Sure."

 

Mitarai's seeming indifference to the possibility of losing his leadership position only served to anger Hannah and further cement her opinion that he wasn't fit for the job of protecting the city much less the title of Spirit Detective.

"Let's have this resolved by tomorrow night, okay?" Hannah asked as she opened the door and rejoined the other psychics.

 

The part of Mitarai Kiyoshi that desperately hated his job wished Hannah good luck and victory. The more pragmatic part knew that he couldn't shed the burden of leadership just yet no matter how much he'd rather take orders.