Eighteen

Chapter 18

Out of the Labyrinth and Into Hell

His eyes opened with a thin crust over both of them. Sweat and blood stained his face and a numbness was all over his body, he felt nothing but knew he had been through the wringer. Yato tried to sit up only to get to a position where his elbows served as supports, the numb feeling did not shake either as he stared forward at the white lit stairway that led up to a door.

'Is that the exit?' he asked himself switching his arms to push up from the ground. He looked down at his fingernails, their edges were frayed and stained with dirt and blood as if they had scraped against something. With a shake and sudden filling of vigor he rose to his feet, the legs were shaky and atrophied from some time of being laid out.

'Has to be. Its the only thing that I can make out,' he responded noting a prominent lack of the primal or crazed person from what felt like forever ago. Shaking, his right hand touching the wall, it was cold and damp, water had flowed behind or over it recently. Still quivering in shock he took the initiative to climb the steps, each one becoming more and more easy to overcome.

Upon reaching the twelfth and final stair he heard noises on the other side of the thick metallic door. The loud and hurried footsteps of living beings charging forward towards something, armed with heavy weaponry that clicked as bullets were slid into the chambers. Guns? That meant the CCG gotten there, a lot sooner than expected or he had been out way longer than he thought.

With a solid right hand the door dented and fell from its rusty hinges. It dropped to the ground on the other side of itself into the middle of a busy hallway. Yato looked out over the hall and saw masked and unmasked Ghouls all aiming out the window at a large series of flashing red and blue lights. Then some turned to him weapons all drawn pointing at his black cloaked frame in attire that unfortunately matched that of the CCG men and women outside.

Both eyes closed as triggers began to be pressed in, when they opened his kakugan had been activated and the stirrings of his dual kagune began to expand out. In a flash all of the weapons pointed at him were slammed down by small crystalline projectiles that were fired from his Ukaku, that proved that he indeed was a Ghoul at least to most of them.

'Thud!' the butt of one of the semi-automatic guns smashed into the side of his face. It turned his head to the opposite side, the left, and left him there glaring back at the panicked young Ghoul, bullets were starting to leave the chambers in the background.

"Nervous? Then run. Get out of here as soon as possible they'll kill you," Yato commented his head still cocked to the side. He indeed was nervous too but he knew that some twelve year old holding a gun would be pretty easy to kill.

"We don't like runners! He'll rat us out!" another Ghoul said turning from the firing lines their kagune exploding out, a Rinkaku. The Ghoul was fully masked but it was clear he had now clue about the former Reaper of the Three Blade's gang as he had no fear.

"Rat you out to who? All of them are standing right there. I'm only here to get a friend from your compound but if you want to fight me go ahead," he said arrogantly, something that had not come of his since becoming a Ghoul in the first place. Something about the looming swarm outside and the fact that his best friend's body was possibly somewhere on the residence filled him with adrenaline. This fight was going to be over rather quickly.

The foolish Ghoul charged as something indescribable came from a megaphone outside of the building. Bullets hailed out from the windows down towards the mass below, the war had just begun. His tail came crashing down and it was caught between the for tail-like prongs of Yato's own variant of the kagune-type, it was pieced a second later leaving him stationary as the bullets fired out still.