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[color=yellow][h2][center]Hokkaido- Asarigawa Hot Springs[/center][/h2][/color][hr]Returning to her home country after the grueling, body breaking battle in Rio had turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant one. Made only more pleasant by the fact that, for one rare instance in her life, she had actual money of her own. Great quantities of currency with relatively little human blood on them. The majority deposited in an account Jonas had insisted she set up, instead of carrying around the money with her. Leaving her with a simple plastic card and a thick handful of bills she insisted on keeping.	

	As soon as they set foot on the soil of Japan, Brown had limped her way to the nearest convenience store to spend her hard earned money for the first time. Buying enough packaged melon bread to fill the entire back seating area of Jonas's jeep, to the point the seats themselves could not be seen.

	Sinking into the pile of delicious bread, Brown simply sat back, relaxed, and ate as they road along. Loaf after succulent loaf of melon bread disappeared past her lips as the soft air of her homeland swept past her face. Though her body still ached and popped from the sheer strain she had put it through, Brown was almost entirely at peace.

	 It felt too much like a dream, traveling without walking alongside people that she had come to consider her friends. Part of Brown became frightened, unwilling to close her eyes even for even the briefest of moments for fear of waking up.

	When the jeep finally came to a stop Brown remained firmly seated, willfully ignoring Jonas’s insistence she clean up the sea of wrappers that had collected in the wake of her melon bread genocide. Pressing the last survivors of her treat massacre down her gullet Brown dusted off her hands and climbed out of the jeep, trailing stray melon bread wrappers behind her as she moved.

	The announcement reached her ears quickly and she turned to Jonas and Otsuna.

	[color=800000]“Why did we come all the way out here to the hot springs and we going to some stupid debriefing? I like hot springs, but robots don’t use hot springs, and I thought we came here to kill more robots.”[/color] Brown asked as she approached the two, annoyance and impatience creeping into every word she directed at them. 
	
	[color=800000]“MAVERICK is just going to get in the way, along with all the other Nomads. If they know where the robots are let’s just find out and leave so we can kill the robots before anyone else can!”[/color]

	Brown slammed her knuckles into one another, immediately wincing as last remaining remnants of her injuries crept up on her.[hr]
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[color=yellow][h2][center]Tokyo- Stadium[/center][/h2][/color][hr]
	It had been some time since she left the forest. 

	Part of Matsu still couldn't believe how much Japan had changed since she was a child. In her youth she had spend decades trekking across the mountains and hills of Japan, so much that at one point she was sure she swore she could never become lost. 

	Yet walking the rain laden streets of Tokyo the kitsune women found that notion challenged. As she struggled to connect where she had been so many years prior to where she stood.

	Open fields of the deepest emerald green grass and villages of thatched roofed homes had been replaced with a twisting maze of asphalt, steel, and neon lights. A transformation so extreme that it was as wondrous as it was frightening. 

	Many Yokai were torn on the matter, utterly despising how Japan had changed and continued to change. Matsu found herself torn on the matter. The modern cities she was familiar with had their own cold beauty to them, with buildings that towered into the heavens in a chillingly casual fashion all the while complex systems snaked beneath the stone where they walked. 

	Compared to what Tokyo had been like before, it was a stunning sight.

	Yet, Matsu missed the quiet tranquility and carefully garnered beauty that had seemed so much more prevalent before. It pained her to see less and less of the land she was familiar with, and more and more ugly foreign buildings 

	[color=DAA520][i]"If Japan is a garden, it certainly feels like I'm being forced to watch my favorite flowers ripped from the bed to make room for ugly vegetables..."[/i][/color] Matsu sighed, captured in the brief melancholy of her thoughts before shaking her head. Rain was thrown from her golden hair and golden furred ears atop her head. 

	Normally a fox-eared women walking the streets of Tokyo would attract the eyes of every passerby. However to those around her she looked like a normal women, albeit with blond hair and drabber robes. 

	[color=DAA520]"That is one thing that hasn't changed."[/color] Matsu said comfortingly to herself. [color=DAA520]"Even if my ancestors and blood bemoan the changes going on, humans have ultimately stayed the same. They're as easy to trick and upset as ever. Well--[i]most[/i] of them are anyway."[/color]

	Matsu's thoughts began to drift. A smile crossed her face as the warm memory of a brown haired girl coiling around the trunk, and her deep insistence that the tree was the fox women in disguise, flooded back to her.  

	Before she could properly lose herself in the memory however something reached her ears. 

	Matsu stopped cold in the middle of the sidewalk, her ears flicking up as she was bombarded by noise. Even as rain fell hard around her and the flow of traffic and sidewalk travelers drifted past, the sound of of thousands of heavy feet thundering across the ground was rendered clear in her senses. 

	Among the movement there was the distant shattering of stone, the rending of steel, and-

	[i]The death cries of countless people.[/i]

	In an instant Matsu kicked off the ground and threw herself onto the side of the nearest building. With a swish of her twin tails the wind beneath her blew upwards, boosting her momentum and carrying her up the entire length of the building until she reached the rooftop. Standing on the edge, high above the streets with rain and wind pelting her face, Matsu looked out across Tokyo with golden eyes. 

	In the distance she could see smoke, dust, and pulsating lines of [i]things[/i] funneling into the stadium like living rivers of murderous stone. 

	Throwing herself forward Matsu began to jump, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop, clearing the expanses between the increasingly taller buildings until she was perched on a office building just across from the stadium.

	As soon as she saw the thundering, moving [i]things[/i] moving below the Kitsune felt her heart stop for a moment.

	[color=DAA520]"Those horns-! Are they Oni? No, they can't be. They're all supposed to be-"[/color]

	Matsu stopped, her ears tilting upwards once again as a new, subtler noise reached her. Up above, moving through the rain and the wind, something approached the stadium...

	[color=DAA520]"I can't waste anymore time."[/color] Matsu cursed under her breath and swished her tails, kicking off the edge of the roof and riding the wind to the top of the stadium. Where she looked down and tried to make out what was going on in the interior...