Disclaimer: For this chapter and all chapters that follow, I own neither the plotline nor the characters nor anything else of Yu Yu Hakusho. However, the plotline of this story is my own and so are any characters that do not ever appear in YYH, which makes them original and mine.

Horror Beyond Belief

"THERE'S TOO MANY!" Yusuke yelled frantically to Hiei, firing his spirit gun at the quickly advancing row of demons quickly surrounding the team of him, Hiei, Kurama, Kuwabara, and Genkai. "WE CAN'T FIGHT THEM ALL!"

"YUSUKE, WE HAVE TO!" Kuwabara's panicked voice sounded out. "WE HAVE TO LIVE! WE HAVE TO KILL THEM!"

"Remember what I taught you, boy." Genkai said harshly, her voice trembling slightly out of fear. "You have to believe that we can win or we'll never get through this!" Genkai trailed off, as her golden energy blasts, usually so deadly, merely greatly angered about three of the beastly creatures with their long whipping tentacles. She continued to attack valiantly. "Help the others! I'm okay!"

Yusuke looked for the other 3. Kuwabara, who had yelled moments ago, was nowhere to be seen. Hiei, ever-silent, nodded at him and vanished from his right side and came down upon a single demon about to swallow Genkai, it's gaping mouth wide open, landing on it's head area, narrowly missing the hole. He began to violently slash at it, causing it pain but having no effect. They ferociously wrestled in the air.

There was a strangled yell from behind him, tearing his attention away. Yusuke whirled around to see Kurama being gripped by a huge slimy tentacle. Kurama, green eyes wide in panic, and missing his rose whip, fired random death plant seeds into the flesh—slime—of the monster, but the seeds were simply absorbed by the demon's power and disintegrated upon impact. Kurama tried to struggle as a last resort, but the slime simply oozed up his thin body and began to cover him. Completely helpless, it inched towards his head and entered through his mouth. Kurama's eyes rolled up in his head.

"KURAMA!" Yusuke screamed, and fired blue energy blasts into the demon's flesh, but it did about as much as Genkai's did. Nothing. Yusuke kept firing, feeling his strength fading with every blast, but the blasts were still absorbed by the gross yellow creature. It clenched Kurama hard, dropping his broken, severely slimed body on the ground, and turned toward Yusuke. Yusuke's blasts dimmed in power as he began to run out of spirit energy.

Yusuke felt something slimy wrap around him from behind. In the midst of the chaos, he had forgotten his own guard. The slime shot up him and slid inside his mouth as he opened it to scream for something to help, making him violently sick as it oozed down his throat, suffocating him…

It was over. They had truly, finally lost. Yusuke shut his eyes and waited for death…

Lost, lost, lost, lost, lostlostlostlostlost…

"It's working." A deep male voice said.

"It's what!"

"Atsuko Urameshi, your boy is waking up!"

"WHAT? YUSUKE?" A woman's shrill voice yelled, right in my ear.

Some part of me heard this, but I was thinking jumbled and confused thoughts, and my brain didn't quite register what the man and woman were talking about.

All I knew was that I had to save Kurama. Kuwabara. Genkai. Hiei.

I vaguely felt a hand on my shoulder, which shook me hard. "YUSUKE?"

It was the woman. She had a cool, thin hand. I didn't know how I knew, but the information was there just the same.

Slowly, I opened his eyes to a plain room that I thought had to be part of a house. No, it couldn't be. There was ivory wallpaper, ivory beds with sick, pale people in them, ivory tables with surgical tools on them, and many men and women in ivory jackets. My eyes opened wider, and I saw one of those men standing over me. He had small eyes and very tanned skin, from the sliver of face that wasn't hidden behind a white mask.

I rotated my head. To my right, a rather tall woman stood. Exactly where Hiei had stood. Where was Hiei? And who was this woman? She had long brown hair and a thin face and was dressed in a skimpy green shirt with jeans. She peered over me anxiously, as though not trusting herself about what she was seeing.

I sat up and looked at them both. They seemed to be holding their breath.

Something told me they were waiting for me to talk. I cleared my throat and realized there was something hard on my mouth that was preventing movement. I peeled it off and saw that it was an oxygen mask. Disgusted, I dropped it down on the bed next to me.

I studied the woman some more. She looked very familiar. Where had I seen her before? And more importantly, where was I? I had no recollection of ever seeing this room before.

"Where…am…I?" I asked, and I then noticed that my voice was a low rumble. It surely had not been that way when I was fighting alongside the others. Where was I? What had happened to my voice? When had it grown so rusty and aged?

At once, as soon as I said something to prove that I was indeed alive, the familiar woman jumped up and flung her arms around me. I was really too shocked to do anything. I just sat there and the woman began sobbing into my shoulder. I sat, rigid as a board, blinking, and I watched the man in the white coat. His eyes told me he was smiling. Why was he smiling?

"Where am I?" I asked again, louder and more confidently, sounding a lot more like the person I thought I was. "WHERE AM I?" A sense of urgency was growing in me as I grew more and more awake. I threw the woman off of me, almost tipping her right over backwards, and she regained her balance just in time by grabbing onto the edge of the white bed I was in and stared at me in shock, leaning on the bed. The white man's smile had gone and was replaced by concern.

"Here, Mrs. Urameshi, let me help you—"

Urameshi? My last name? I suddenly realized where I'd seen her before. The man started to help her up. My mom. "Mom?" I asked.

My mother stared at me, and her shocked tearstained face turned once again to incredible joy. "Oh, darling—" She started to wrench her arm out of the man's hand again, but he caught her and held her back.

I stared at him, starting to get really pissed off. "Get off my mom." I told him angrily.

He reluctantly complied, and my mom threw herself at me again, and I tried to hold her back, but my arm was so skinny and pale and weak. I couldn't believe it. I used to be so incredibly strong!

So, having won, she hugged me again, and when the man glared at her, she stopped and bounced on her feet, smiling at me. "You're alive!"

I glared at him right back, ignoring her. "Where am I? Where're the others?" My low voice startled me again.

The man removed his mask and forced a smile with crooked teeth at me while keeping his distance. "In answer to your first question, you're at the Tokyo Hospital. Who are these others you mean?"

I suddenly realized what had happened. The Earthen Tokyo Hospital. Somehow, inexplicably, we'd been rescued. We had all survived. It was a true miracle.

"Where're Hiei, Kurama, Kuwabara, and Genkai?" I asked excitedly. "Are they here too?" I had to confirm it. It all seemed too good to be true.

The man gave me a funny look. "Who?"

I blinked, confused. "Of course they're here." Maybe I just had to give their last names and he'd know. "Hiei Jaganshi, Kur—Shuuichi Minamino, Genkai…" I didn't know her last name. "And Kazuma Kuwabara."

He looked at me, and then gave a coded look to a passing nurse. She came over and he repeated the names to her. She nodded and left to go out of a door next to a great potted plant.

My mother stepped forward and smiled at me in the same fake way the man did. "Who are these people?" She asked quietly.

By now, I was experiencing a mental breakdown. They had to be here. They had to. "The people I was fighting with! When you guys rescued me, you must have found all of us, right?"

"When you were hit by the car?" The man asked me. "You were the only one hit—"

"No!" I said in a loud voice, and a nurse from the other side of the room shushed me. "When you found us defeated by those demon forces!"

The man and woman stared at me, and then, understanding crossed his face. He looked at me and couldn't even conjure up a smile. He just looked really tired of me. "Why don't you tell us what happened, son? From the beginning. Whatever you remember."

Gladly, I started off. "Well, I was the top punk at Sarayashiki Junior High, and then I was hit by a car, and Botan rescued me—" God, I'm already out of breath. What has happened to me to make me so weak? "She took me to Koenma, the spirit god, and he made me his spirit detective paired with Kuwabara, Hiei, Kurama, and Genkai." I looked at them meaningfully. "I took on all sorts of tasks. The Dark Tournament, random demons, Genkai's training…Then, last I remember, we were fighting a spirit world invasion of demons and we were getting creamed, and I woke up here."

The man looked at me, and I suddenly connected that because he was in a hospital, he must be a doctor. I also realized that he had whipped off a pen and paper from one of those tables next to me and was scribbling furiously on this tiny little sheet. "And how long did this take?"

"I guess…about two years, if you add it all up."

"I see." He wrote even faster.

"What does it even matter? Where are they?" I leaned up closer and took the front of his shirt in my right fist, pulling him closer to me. The man dropped his papers, which scattered all over me, and I pulled him so close that we were nose to nose, really straining my skinny arm. "Where have you put them? Take me to them now."

My mother made to pry us off, and being so weak, I had no resistance to put up. She laid me back on the bed and the doctor brushed himself off and snorted and picked up his papers. Then, he sat on the edge of my bed and rubbed his forehead. He waited for a few minutes, and when my patience was growing so thin that it was half nonexistent, the nurse came back. She frowned, shaking her head and muttering in a low voice to him. She showed him a paper with printed things on them. I was too far away to read it.

He looked the paper over, nodded, and dismissed her to take care of someone else in a bed with a huge tank hooked up to a hole in his neck. He sighed and told me something that truly turned me upside down. "Yusuke, how do I say this? These—these people you keep talking about don't exist. There's no record of them at the hospital or anywhere else. Nurse Yumiko just showed me the results."

I blinked. "But that's not possible." I said, with such strong conviction. "I was with them a few minutes ago. I can tell you that!"

He sighed again. "But that can't be possible. None of your story can be possible."

"It's not story, it's truth!" I said loudly. "Of course it's possible! It really happened!"

"It didn't, Yusuke." My mother cut in, turning my face towards her own serious one. "You haven't been fighting any demons, or being a spirit detective, for two years. You've been in a coma for two years."

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Evil cliffy! Do you like this new story? Do you think I should continue? Please review!