TCoW Chapter 4

XXX

"Honestly, I'm surprised it took us this long." Ranma admitted, dodging out of the way of some pretty nasty-looking magic.

"What, to get into a fight?" Eva scoffed, sending more of those icicle-spears that turned the things they touched into icicles too, in the direction of their attackers. "We've gotten into plenty of fights before this one."

Which was true, they'd been in Mundus Magicus for nearly a week, and there'd been magic thrown around in fights since about five minutes into entering what was an entirely separated planet. Something about 'Evangeline AK McDowell' being officially known as the full name of 'the Dark Evangel', and how Eva hadn't really bothered to be subtle with her passport. As in, someone had tried to arrest her for her heinous crimes, and she blasted them through a wall until they stopped sending reinforcement after them.

But no, that was one thing. That was just Eva reminding everyone that there was a reason that nobody ever actually tried to arrest her – despite the sizable bounty on her head.

This was another thing entirely. This was a bunch of crazies who wanted to end the world or some such nonsense.

Now, Ranma didn't have the most experience with crazies who didn't want to get into his pants, but crazies were still crazies, and this was all very nostalgic-feeling.

"No, I mean-..." Ranma smacked away one guy who clearly didn't know how to throw a punch. "That was just law-enforcement being annoying! Running from them is old hat!" He dodged another nasty-looking spell, frowning a bit at how very good at running away that particular mage was. Really made it hard to stop them from throwing those spells around. "This? This is the crazies, Eva! I bet you a Kuno runs this whole shebang!"

Eva nearly tripped over nothing, turning around to glare at him. "Don't jinx it!"

"We're the Cosmo Entelecheia! We do this because it's the only way to save the world, and we can't have the Dark Evangel throwing off our plans!" Some faceless mook said, which kind of just proved Ranma's point.

If they hadn't wanted to get Eva involved, they should've just pretended that she wasn't around. This was exactly the kind of tactic a Kuno would think of.

It was still a fun fight though, so Ranma wasn't going to complain overly much.

XXX

"Isn't this a bit excessive?" Ranma nudged a cultist-member with his toe, not particularly concerned.

Eva glanced up at him from where she was sprawled across the couch that had somehow miraculously survived their most recent fight against the Cosmo-whatchits-people. "They attacked us first."

Oh, Ranma wasn't complaining about the violence. "No, no." Ranma shook his head, motioning instead towards the whole building. "I mean, are we seriously going to hunt down this entire cult of crazies just because they attacked us that one time?"

It'd been nearly two months, and they very much hadn't stopped yet.

"Did you have anything else planned?" Eva huffed at him, slumping back into her sprawl once she realized that he wasn't criticizing the fact that there were bodies strewn all across the place.

He hadn't. But still-... "Are we doing this just so you can prove that it isn't a Kuno in charge?"

There was a suspiciously long moment of silence. "You can't prove anything."

Well, if she was going to play that card, then Ranma was going to play the brain-bleach card. Just because he could. "I'm pretty sure Chachazero would be included in a Kuno's strike-zone."

There was a twitch from Eva that was very likely to be a horrified shudder. Ranma could feel a smirk building on his face.

"Why, a Kuno would probably have enough money to throw at the problem that they could figure out how to have kids with her." Ranma continued, eyes sparkling with carefully hidden sadistic glee.

"Right." Eva launched herself to her feet, kicked the closest still-breathing body over so that it was face-up, and leaned in very close to their face. "You're alive, right? Tell me everything about your boss, or I'll rip out your entrails through your nose."

"I won't-...!"

Eva sighed and interrupted the defiance by stepping on the poor sod's crotch. Hard. "Great. You're loyal. I don't care. I need the idiot over there to stop talking, and the only chance of that ever happening is a good fight or better food." She glanced around herself meaningfully. "And none of you look particularly tasty."

There were a few other noises of protest from the cultist Eva was interrogating, but it all amounted to getting stomped on the crotch a few more times until they submitted.

"To inspire such immediate violence." Chachazero sighed, a little forlorn. "Truly, how could I stand between it?" She turned her creepy little doll eyes to Ranma, expression still frozen in that creepy smile of hers. "Does that make you my daddy?"

"Gah!"

Ranma wasn't entirely sure if it was himself or Eva who said it. It might even have been the cultist who'd been reflexively stomped in the crotch again. Either way, he wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment.

XXX

The thing about fighting, now that Ranma was undead, was that it was... all very different from how it used to be.

Oh, there were the more obvious differences in how Ranma could have his limbs chopped off and feel about as concerned as if a limb had decided to fall asleep on him – with about an equal amount of danger associated with it. But there were other things too.

Since learning the Amaguriken, punching like that had almost just become the natural way to punch. That was how deeply he'd ingrained it into his fighting-style. Unfortunately, he couldn't really perform it without chi.

Sure, there was probably some kind of magical-chi workaround, but Ranma had only just gotten a decent handle on instant movement, and the idea of trying to actually replicate a proper chi-technique using only magic felt very much like the kind of thing that would maybe be on the table a decade-or-so down the line. Sometime after he stopped instinctively trying to replicate the chi-way of doing it, at least.

Right now, if Ranma wanted to punch someone, he'd have to do it without the Amaguriken.

Unfortunately, that's what his body reached for any time he tried to throw a punch, and so he couldn't really... throw a punch, anymore.

It wasn't like he was entirely useless though. It just meant that he had to rely a bit more on things like kicks. On the plus side, he could use instant movement to kick people in the throat at supersonic speeds, and fighting that kind of handicap meant that fighting their way through a somewhat unimaginative magical cult was still a lot of fun.

A bit repetitive, sometimes, but still a good opportunity to practice.

He could do without this particular weirdo though.

Built like a brick wall or not, there was really no reason to wear clothes flimsy enough that just flexing caused them to dissolve. With weirdos like this involved, the boss-man being a Kuno of some sort was sounding ever-more plausible.

"We will prevail! Even in the face of this, we shall rise again-!" The weirdo cut off as Ranma's foot impacted his throat, instead making a funny little gurgling-noise.

Thank god. Ranma had been trying to shut him up ever since he first started ranting about some 'Ala Rubra'-people hunting them down and how much he hated them. The weirdo had sounded far too much like one of Ranma's old rivals for comfort.

And then of course, everything went to hell.

Ranma didn't really have a good view of it from where he'd suddenly found himself imbedded in a cliff-side, but from the amount of lightning-bolts and ice being thrown around, he could guess that Eva was at least having fun.

Also, he could actually hear her having fun too.

"Hahaha! I don't know why you're wearing that face, but that's great! I've been wanting to grind that fucker into the dirt for ages!" And then there was a lot more ice, and some darkness, and a very insistent feeling of immediately impending doom.

Eva always felt a bit like doom when she got serious. Ranma hadn't managed to get her to that point more than... maybe a handful of times? Not including that one time when he convinced her to turn him into a vampire, because that time had been... a lot more tangible than a mere lingering feeling of doom.

So it probably wasn't anything to be overly worried about. Instead, Ranma focused on prying himself out of the solid stone he'd been imbedded into. He was sure that it'd be a pretty amazing fight to see, so there was that, but mainly he was hurrying with it because if Eva saw him stuck there she might have Chachazero 'keep him company'.

Ranma really hated that evil little doll.

XXX

By the time Ranma managed to crawl out of the Ranma-shaped crater, they'd started to draw a crowd.

Which was a bit-... Ranma was never entirely sure if the people cheerfully deciding to watch fights were entirely right in the head. Ranma would do it, but that's because Ranma was perfectly capable of at the very least surviving should the participants throw their fireworks-or-what-not his way. Normal non-martial-artist people were a bit squishier than him, even if they never really seemed to realize that.

Then again, it was one hell of a fight, what with the massive storm-clouds raining down lightning as if it was water, and glaciers springing into existence at the flick of a wrist. The howling winds and dark shapes just made it all the more impressive, really. How the hell either of the two managed to stay flying through that kind of mess, Ranma didn't know.

He was pretty sure he could've pulled it off, if he really wanted to, but it didn't exactly look easy.

Despite all of that, Eva had not only not slowed down, her voice was still entirely audible as she cursed out whoever the apparent boss-man was. She seemed to know the guy. As in, she was certainly carrying a long-time grudge associated with him, rather than anything more recent.

It didn't really click just who it could be, until Eva started shouting about 'ten years in hell' and how he shouldn't 'fake his death like a shit-for-brains coward'.

Ranma frowned a little bit thoughtfully. He supposed the boss-man's face looked a bit on the pretty side, even if his expression was this weirdly blank thing that just made him look like he was wearing a human-face-mask.

Ranma really wished he could un-remember all of that stuff about face-stealers that Eva had lying around in her library. He'd only gone looking through her books to try and get a chi-perspective on the magic-stuff, not to be mentally scarred for life from some crazy-person deciding to actually paint what the damn thing looked like.

But yeah no, that was definitely a person. A creepy kind of person. And maybe a little bit messed up, chi-wise, from what little Ranma could sense from where he was. But definitely a person.

And from how very furious Eva was getting at the man's non-answers about leaving her to rot in a hell-hole, he was definitely the Thousand Master.

"And if you say it was for tax-evasion, I will eat your goddamn heart, you son of a bitch!"

Ranma watched another glacier get split apart as it nearly landed on the Thousand Master. It would've absolutely turned everything to paste, from how quickly it'd been falling, but this wasn't the first time Eva's glaciers had been blocked by the man, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

Ranma briefly considered if he should help her out, then kind of shrugged, and settled back down to watch.

He should let Eva get it out of her system. It wasn't good to go around bottling up all that frustration. Who knew, maybe she'd channel it into creating an army of Chachazero-dolls in order to drown the world in hate and suffering.

Ranma couldn't take that risk.

XXX

It took the better part of an hour before the creepy-face-guy started actually talking, but the fight didn't really stop for that.

The basics of it seemed to be that the Thousand Master had defeated the leader of the magic-cult way back in the day, when they'd secretly been fueling both sides of a massive war. However, upon defeating them, he'd been 'infected' by a very logical-sounding voice that explained how the world was slowly draining of magic and that they needed to save the world before it died out completely.

The Thousand Master had figured that their grand war had been some kind of messed-up attempt at population-control, and had at least decided that that was taking it way too far. Instead, he'd managed to think up the idea of trapping everyone in a forever-happy magical dream, where the magic they actually used would only be a fraction of what they did currently.

Course set and personal ethics taken care of, the Thousand Master had finally been 'overtaken' by the logical-sounding voice in his head, and had become the new boss of the magic-cult.

Ranma guessed that it kind of made a bit of sense. Eva, not so much.

"You stupid bloody quack!" She threw a few more glaciers his way. "Combating the entropy of magic?! Don't make me laugh, you dumbass! Magic ain't got shit to do with physics! It's goddamn magic! If you don't want it to drain away, just make more of it!"

Ranma wasn't super well-versed in the details of how magic actually worked, what with only barely having a grasp of how to use it, but if he had to agree with anyone he'd very much rather agree with the centuries-old magical vampire than the strong mage who'd defeated her by dropping her in a pit of garlic.

He still thought that the garlic-pit was hilarious, and even if it'd never work against her again, he was still going to hold it over her head for the rest of forever. But then she was going to do much the same about him and the Nekoken, so they mostly canceled each other out.

"You 'don't think'?! Obviously not!" Eva did some weird dark-sphere thing and transformed into literal ice. She started hurling glaciers both at the Thousand Master and at herself, absorbing the ice without a glance. "I figured this out in the first century of my life! Look at it! I'm using my own magic to absorb my own magic to make more magic! Magical entropy doesn't fucking work! It's fucking magic, I ain't got to explain shit!"

Ranma briefly tried to imagine being able to absorb his own magic as he used it, and came to the conclusion that his skin was itching far too much as it was, even without adding more magic to the mix. Maybe in a century or two.

The Thousand Master definitely seemed to be losing steam, but Eva clearly wasn't. If Ranma was a betting-man he'd probably give the guy another hour, max, before he got turned into frozen paste under Eva's bare feet.

It was nice to see her so enthusiastic about stuff.

XXX

"You're a bad influence to Master's vocabulary." Chachazero commented with her usual fixed smile, tinged with something like disapproval. "When she's angry, she just swears now, instead of describing how she's going to do horrible things to people. It's very lackluster."

Ranma looked at the doll for a long moment. "You do know that she was on TV, right? They did that magical-video thing for pretty much the whole fight."

Chachazero's eyes narrowed, but her creepy smile didn't falter. "What of it?"

"For the rest of the week, every kid in the world is going to end up having their mouth washed with soap." Ranma told the doll.

Ranma wasn't the best at social stuff, but he very much remembered his pops griping on about his 'parroting phase' as a kid. Mainly because it was why he'd very quickly decided to never tell Ranma anything incriminating, ever.

This fight was clearly going to be big-time news, which meant that it'd be available to be seen by lots of people who'd want to see it. Even if they tried to limit the age-admission. In fact, especially if they tried to limit the age-admission. So kids would be watching the fight, and then blurt out everything that'd come out of Eva's mouth in that fight, for at least a week.

And parents were big on washing mouths with soap as punishment for swearing, right? Ranma couldn't ever recall that happening to him, but he'd certainly gotten punted into enough lakes and rivers to imply it. It wasn't like his pops remembered to stock up on soap all the time.

Chachazero stared at him for a long moment, a hint of an edge in her eyes that reminded him of Nabiki staring at a pile of money. "Daddy?"

"Gah!" Ranma flinched away from the doll, and he could hear his cry echoed a bit away at a slightly higher pitch. Apparently Eva had caught at least that much of the conversation.

"Quit calling me that!"

XXX

It was kind of hilarious, watching people bend over backwards to do stupid shit like giving Eva a parade she didn't want, all because apparently she was the first one to ever completely violate the laws of entropy with magic. Or something.

Ranma had admittedly been struck by the slowly dawning realization that all of the fancy food that was being served in celebration actually tasted about as exciting as plain rice. It was edible, but it wasn't filling either.

At the beginning he'd wondered if perhaps there were just a lot of really crappy chefs, but then there was the fact that he kept getting peckishly thirsty. As if he was using the fancy food to work up an appetite.

It wasn't the first time he'd been faced with things that he'd given up in order to escape all of the complicated stuff with the Amazons, and it really couldn't compare to his chi being replaced with magic. But he'd been expecting his chi to get messed up, he hadn't really considered that his taste-buds would also change around.

It was a... mostly sad, realization.

On the plus side, he'd have an excuse to avoid eating anything that Akane ever cooked, but then he didn't really plan on spending the rest of his life with Akane. That'd been why he'd gone through with it, after all.

Chachazero was thankfully distracted elsewhere, standing next to Eva and making gleeful threats at the well-wishers that her irritable master wasn't quite drunk enough to make herself.

On the slightly more interesting side of the spectrum, with his appetite growing in the middle of a crowded ballroom, Ranma was starting to notice that certain people just looked... 'tastier' than others.

He wasn't going to do anything about it – he was peckish, not starving – but it was a weird kind of thing to notice. He'd have expected to need to actually drink their blood to be able to determine that sort of stuff, not just pass them by in a crowded room.

Anyway, with the extremely public fight with the Thousand Master, and the facts revealed in that fight, a lot of the governments' apparent attempts at keeping the 'magical crisis' secret had instead been blown wide open.

Which meant that lots of people were now working to replicate Eva's entropy-defying feat all across Magicus Mundus, in order to give them better insight into how to make a planet-sized anti-entropy magic-catcher. Or something. Ranma hadn't been paying too much attention.

He'd honestly mostly been paying attention to Eva dressing up in weird clothing and then discarding it, and then dressing up in other weird clothing before discarding that. It was kind of fun to see her try out different 'looks', even if half the time she always seemed to default back to wandering around barefoot in her underwear.

Ranma was pretty sure that she'd considered attending the party in only her underwear, and he was a little bit curious about why she'd decided not to. It clearly wouldn't have been for the sake of anyone else's prudishness, so it was either because she wanted to make a particular impression, or she wanted to avoid making a different kind of impression.

Ranma didn't have the faintest clue what any of those impressions might be, but clearly this was the kind of stuff that Eva thought about when considering her wardrobe.

Ranma mostly just defaulted back to something that was easy to move around in, but considering how Eva tended to have her clothes exploded whenever she didn't bother to dodge attacks that wouldn't actually hurt her, she clearly didn't put a lot of thought into the practicality of an outfit for fighting in.

No, Eva was all about making an impression on people. Hell if Ranma had the faintest clue what kind of impression she was planning to make with whatever outfit she decided on, but that was clearly what she was aiming for.

Chachazero was a bit more sensible, what with literally having only the single outfit to choose from. Or variants of the single outfit. Ranma was sure that he'd seen that dress splattered with enough blood to be impossible to laundry out, and yet it was as pristine as ever. Creepy little doll.

XXX

"Right. Let's go." Ranma promptly grabbed Eva around the waist like a sack of potatoes, and took off, ignoring any protest either she or the stuffy man she'd been talking to made.

It'd been nearly a full month of Eva beating the theory of her 'grand miracle' into the heads of every academic who wanted to know, and by now it was clear that anybody who still wanted to know about it could just pick it up from someone else.

So they were leaving, before Eva could decide to go ballistic on someone for their inane questions, or Ranma started to climb the walls and punch politicians in the face out of boredom.

Chachazero was technically also a factor, but she'd been threatening homicide within the first five minutes, so she didn't really count.

They'd barely managed to explore anything at all of Magicus Mundus before the magical cultists had made a nuisance of themselves, and when tracking down those guys for fights a lot of the good 'wandering aimlessly across the wilderness' had fallen completely by the wayside.

Ranma had been stuck in Nerima for nearly three years, Eva had been stuck in Mahora for eight, and they really needed a better vacation than barely a month spent hunting down a bunch of cultists.

Eva stopped struggling about halfway out of the city, which was great because it meant that Ranma could reapply the gag he'd given Chachazero to keep her from squealing cheerfully in his ear as they flew through the air.

And by the time they hit the road on the outskirts, Eva twisted out of his grip and started to walk on her own.

"Idiot dumbass." Was her full comment on it, but she didn't actually argue.

Ranma smiled at her back, before falling into step with her.

It was good to be back on the road.

XXX

Epilogue

Several years later

XXX

Takamichi wasn't the best teacher.

Ignoring the fact that he still struggled with keeping students from acting out without planting their faces into the dirt, he'd spent a lot of time and energy on his work outside of Mahora's walls.

He didn't regret it, by any means, but it meant that he found himself slightly humbled at times by how very dedicated the more regular members of the Mahora staff was.

That didn't mean he wasn't going to remember a certain day of chaos and mayhem whenever a certain math-teacher decided to drone on, or find himself appreciating the full extent of this particular math-teacher's situation in the aftermath of aforementioned day. But it did mean that he wouldn't try to replicate it, even if he was sometimes tempted.

Still, today was the first day of the first Mahora Festival since Negi Springfield joined the faculty. Needless to say, the boy-teacher was clearly both very nervous and very excited.

It was kind of adorable.

And then of course things started to go a bit weird.

"Put some clothes on!" A very nostalgic female voice hissed angrily.

"I don't want to hear that from you." A male voice responded, sounding like they were just doing it to pick a fight.

"Daddy has become an exhibitionist too!" A brightly echoey voice that could only belong to a certain doll piped up.

There was a very audible sound of a full-body shiver. "Don't call me that, you creep!"

Rounding the corner, Takamichi was treated to the sight of a young man without a shirt on, a blonde girl who was making a very non-girlish face of annoyance, and a doll that could walk on its own.

"But isn't mommy and daddy going to make lots and lots of babies?" The doll continued with cheerful abandon. "Isn't that why you're always shouting in the bedroom?"

Evangeline grabbed the doll by the head, lifting it into the air, her face red to the very tip of her ears. "You know, now that you mention it, I've been thinking about making a new doll. A better doll." She growled at it, fangs flashing.

"Heh." The young man tried to stifle a snicker.

Evangeline's head snapped over towards him, murder in her eyes. "Did you hear something funny, Ranma?"

"Is someone embarrassed that she couldn't keep her voice down?" Ranma grinned at her, sounding positively gleeful about it.

And that was the story of how the first day of the Mahora Festival included a very extensive display of 'technology', where ice was scattered all across the campus as if it was a gigantic fireworks-display.

And at least one particular math-teacher locked themselves in their apartment for a week and refused to leave, classes or no.

XXX

A/n: The Thousand Master here was... kind of a hostage, kind of not. Basically, it's a halfway cross between magical possession and Stockholm-syndrome, where Nagi was the one who came up with the idea of dumping everyone in a "happy dream", whereas Cosmo Entelecheia were still voting for the "drown the world in a ceaseless population-limiting war"-option.

Also, I don't... really dislike Nagi. I think he's a bit of an idiot. A charming kind of guy who doesn't think things through, and kind of just wings it basically all the time. And, with that description, I perfectly understand why he gets along so well with Rakan. But yeah, he definitely deserves getting punched in the face, at least.

But yeah, this was a lot of fun to write, and I hope that it was fun to read too.