The Hinomoto Rebellion
Book One of the Aka Ryuu Chronicles
Elizabeth Staley
The Hinomoto Rebellion
All Rights Reserved © 2009 Elizabeth Staley
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval
Printed in the United States of America This book is dedicated to my Mother. She never let me give up on my creativity and she let me talk incessantly about my stories and art without getting annoyed by it. Thank you, Mom, I love you.
Never forget the Yellow Plank.
I’d like to also give thanks to all the people that have inspired me over the ten years I’ve been writing this story. Without them, I wouldn’t have created these characters and this world. Thank you to everyone who has been with me for the past ten years, to everyone who has ridden this roller coaster with me, and to all those who kept coming back for more.
When I first began writing this story back in 1999-2000, I talked a lot about it with various internet friends I had at the time. Back then this was going to be my animated series, not a published novel, and some of my friends suggested characters to use in the story. I’ve since lost touch with most of the people that inspired a few of the characters that populate the world of the Aka Ryuu, but they deserve acknowledgement specifically and a special note of thanks.
So, to those friends from long ago that gave me the inspiration for D, Ryoku, 26, Fushicho, and Aki (who was named Akito at the time), thank you. Though the characters have changed greatly over time and are very different from how they started out 10 years ago, I have never forgotten their origins. I hope that their creators enjoy how far the ideas they gave me have come, and that they know I wouldn’t have made anything like this without their help and the permission they gave me back then to get inspired by them. Many thanks to all of you!
PrologueThe night was calm, with just a few clouds floating across a dark, moonless sky. The wind rustled calmly through the trees surrounding the grounds of a huge estate, complete with a white bricked and red trimmed mansion sitting at the end of a mile-long driveway. A bronze fountain sat, silent, waiting to be turned on in the morning to greet visitors with its cheerful bubbling.
Then the house stirred. A light came on and several figures burst out of a side entrance, rushing after four people that were running across the lawn for the cover of the landscaped trees. They were clad in black from head to toe, including black hoods over their heads that let only their eyes show.
The four intruders dove for cover as bullets rocketed past their heads. Ear-piercing sirens cut through the muggy night air like a blade. Spotlights focused on the four people cringing on the meticulously tended lawn.
“Go! Go!” The tallest of the four black-clad figures yelled as there was a break in the gunfire, scrambling to get up off the grass as he shouted. Behind the fleeing group, men with guns were rushing out of the mansion. More guards on the roof were swinging spotlights around, trying to follow the intruders in the darkness.
“Stop! Stop or we’ll shoot!” Ten guards gave chase to the fleeing intruders, the spotlights picking out their every detail against the open expanse of lawn. The recently mowed grass crunched under their feet as they ran.
One of the figures dressed in black leaped into the air, unfurling large wings from her back. With a few flaps she had doubled back and was diving toward the group’s pursuers.
The guards panicked, taking a few wild shots that hit air. They dove to the lawn with a collective shout of surprise as the winged figure did a strafing run just a few inches above them, two sets of black claws extending from her reaching fingers. 26 doubled back again, dodging fire from the guards on top of the house and heading back to the group, which was now diving into a small cluster of trees less than 30 meters away.
The spotlights fell on the foliage, the tight cover of leaves too much for the powerful light to penetrate. The winged figure soared overhead, dropping gently to the ground on the opposite side of a tall fence just as the remaining three members came crashing in to view. The tallest quickly grabbed the smallest and hefted her up, tossing her over the top of the fence. Once the small girl was safely over, the remaining two clambered up and over the chain links. They hit the ground running and were across the road and securely into the cover of more trees before their pursuers had made it to the fence.
On the other side of the great city known as Shibasaki, on one end of a 140 acre park that had long been allowed to fall in to disrepair and overgrowth by the plant life, sat an ancient temple near a lake. The temple was made of rotting wood that had been damaged by the elements over the years, turning it silver. Red streaks ran down the outside walls from the nails rusting in the rain. The U-shaped temple once had a grand paved courtyard sitting in the center of it, surrounded on three sides by the building, but over the years the paving stones had been cracked and shifted by plants and trees growing up between them. Ivy crawled over the walls and the stones, obscuring the outlines of the building in green foliage. Behind the temple was a large manmade lake with a curved footbridge over the water. Sitting on the other side, half buried in the tree line, was a much smaller wooden building with ivy crawling over the walls and across the roof.
The door to the ancient temple slid open and the four figures dressed in black entered the narrow hallway. The inside of the temple was only slightly better than the outside. The walls and floor were made of planks of wood, some of which were warped and coming away from others. Along the hall were a few threadbare tapestries that were faded from time and covered in dust. The corners had cobwebs in most of them with long dead insects hanging in the threads. Not far from the entrance there was another room that lead off to the right, a long dining hall with a kitchen off the end of it. At one time it had a sliding door with delicate designs on the rice paper panels, but the door was broken and hanging crooked, the panels ripped to shreds and water damaged from a leak in the ceiling. There was some electricity in the place still, and the tallest of the black-clad figures reached up to flick on a bare light bulb above their heads that threw weak light down in the entryway.
The lead figure pulled off her hood, brilliant red hair falling down around her face as she tossed the hood aside. Her orange and yellow eyes flashed with anger. “Well, that was a complete waste of time!” She was a little over a meter and a half tall, with a thin, lithe build that complimented her hourglass figure well. Her face was heartshaped and framed by her long bangs and shoulder-length hair.
The tallest pulled off his own cowl, revealing the face of a brown-haired man with green eyes. “Okay, so it could have been better, but I wouldn’t say it was a waste.” Kanjou countered, tossing the black hood to the floor. He pulled out a red strip of cloth from a pocket and tied it around his head, spiking his hair up over it as he adjusted the headband. He was the largest of the group at nearly 2 meters tall and easily 100 kilograms of pure muscle. His shoulders were broad, his chest tapering down slightly to a perfectly proportioned waist. His legs were long and lean, built like a comic book superhero. His face was kind, but well defined and sharply chiseled, with deep green eyes that sparkled in contrast to the brown bangs that hung down in to his face and over his thick eyebrows.
The other two members had removed their own dark head coverings. A girl with purple hair looked up at the man. “What did we do wrong?” Roni asked, her violet eyes wide. She was the shortest of them all, barely 1.3 meters tall. At 14 years old she still had some childhood softness to her body and hadn’t started developing yet, but the grace with which she held herself showed that she had some training in sports of one shape or another. Her lavender hair came down to the bottoms of her shoulder blades in soft waves as she brushed her bangs across her forehead in an attempt to fluff them back up after being crushed in the hood.
The one with wings put a hand on her hip, scowling from behind her teal colored bangs. “Besides not being organized?” 26 quipped. She was 1.7 meters tall, with the torso and arms of a normal, amply endowed woman. However, she was covered in short, light brown fur all over her body, and her legs were the digitigrade ones of a wolf. Swishing across the floor behind her was a long bushy tail that was ringed with two darker brown stripes near the end. She had two bat-like wings coming out of her back, each with a dark blue membrane stretched between black “fingers”. Her face had a wolfish muzzle with a dark nose at the end, and her eyes were yellow-green. She had two ears that drooped back on the sides of her head, and her teal hair spiked up wildly on the top of her head and fell down behind her ears to her shoulders. “And the fact that we were unarmed and they had guns?”
Kanjou turned, slicing his hand through the air horizontally to cut 26 off. “No! We’ve all talked about this, and we’re not using guns. We can’t afford to look like we’re on the same level as the police. We have to be stronger than they are, we have to be,” he thought for a moment, “Superhuman. If we can’t do this with Martial Arts, then we won’t do it at all. But we’re not stooping to their level, we’ll never gain any trust if we do.” He sighed. “Besides, the point tonight was to not get caught. If we hadn’t gotten caught, we would have been in and out with no problems, despite them having guns.”
“Well, we obviously weren’t good enough for that. We’ll just have to wait until the conference.” The red-headed girl pulled off the black long-sleeve shirt she was wearing and tossed it aside angrily, revealing a purple tank top underneath. On her right shoulder was a pink scar that was shaped like a phoenix. “I’m going to bed. God, we suck,” she said in disgust as she turned and walked off down the hallway, vanishing around a corner.