章 348: Venom
"There are no words. Nothing I can say, but I'm gonna do my best to try and tell you anyway. You deserve to know how much you've changed my li-i-i-ife. How impossible and magical it feels to be your wife…"
Akane sighed happily, swaying with her wife's song behind the Phoenix' service bar. It never failed to take her mind back to the first time she had heard it, when a sobbing Ranko choked it out alone on stage on their wedding night.
I am so in love with that girl.
Her sentiment was not shared by the crowd of just shy of three hundred, who were getting a little restless after Ranko had opened her set with back-to-back-to-back ballads: first You're My Song, then Nothing, and now There Are No Words. Even the performance itself felt muted. Ranko wore a long, conservative pastel blue wrap dress that fell all the way to her ankles with full-length sleeves, and Hitomi and Emi were not even on stage with the band. The redhead stood rail-straight on the stage, having not performed a single dance step yet in the evening's performance.
"I'm out of here," a gruff, athletic-looking man in his late twenties said, grumbling at his waitress as he stood from his table. "This is just boring as shit tonight."
Mei smirked, shaking her head and grabbing the Watch Your Hands cocktail from her tray, carefully pinching it by the top of the spike-rimmed highball glass as she set it on the round cherry table in front of the frustrated patron. "Here. Give it five more minutes. Have a drink on the house. Trust me on this."
"Why, you think I'm gonna nod off or something?" The man sighed. "Whatever. The show sucks tonight, but free booze is free booze, I guess." He slumped back into his chair, setting about unsnapping the leather bracelet that armored his cocktail.
"I gotta say, he's not wrong. This… is kinda weak tonight," Yui said, sighing up at the stage as Mei returned to the bar. "But don't tell her I said so. I guess I need to make a new drink for table nine, huh?"
Mei nodded, her electric blue pigtails bobbing on her shoulders. They were left bare by the sparkly red tank top she'd paired with a black denim miniskirt. "Would you, please?"
Yui reached into her well, pulling out her bottle of Jack Daniels. It was such a relief to be able to hold it in her hand and not ache for it as much as she once did, when it was the only thing dulling the pain of her long separation from her now-wife. I think I'd probably be okay now if I had a drink once in a while. It was never the booze I was addicted to. It was just… the not wanting to feel anything. I'm not ready to risk it just yet, though. She turned the bottle over a new highball glass, counting out the beats as her pour spout measured the liquor into the glass. "What the hell's gotten into her tonight?"
The younger girl giggled. "Oh, I forgot! You and Sakura weren't here for rehearsal!"
With a chuckle, Yui shook her head. "Look, me and Sakura aren't taking a honeymoon. We went to the fucking movies for a couple hours. Sue me. So, what's the deal with Ranko and the Diazepam Dragons?"
"Oh, no, no, no," Mei said with another bright laugh. "If you don't show up for rehearsal, you find out along with everybody else. That's the rules."
A smattering of polite applause dotted the room as Ranko finished her third ballad of the evening, a disquieted murmur rising from the crowd. Mei reached over the bar, nudging Yui in the ribs as she added the honey to the cocktail she was building. "Here we go."
Ranko sighed sadly as she looked out over the dissatisfied audience. "I'm sorry, guys." Her shoulders slumped, and she brushed a strand of loose hair from her eyes with her left hand. In addition to her wedding ring, she wore a pair of costume pearl rings with gold bands on her middle and index fingers, and the wisp of red hair briefly coiled between them as her fingers moved through it. "The thing is… it's my record label. They want me to clean up the act. I've gotta be a good girl from now on. That means just the sweet stuff, I'm afraid. No more Not Yours, Don't Touch."
"Nooooo!" came the most passionate response the bargoers had uttered all night.
"No more Sneak." Ranko shook her head, a grimace on her face. As she did, Crash reached down into the crowd behind her. From the floor, Seiichi reached up, offering him a small, oblong orange device. With a nod of thanks, Crash turned back to the back of the stage, unplugging the cable connecting his guitar to the amplifier.
"Come on," came a disgusted shout from a young woman in the back, standing by the hostess stand with her friends in a black cocktail dress. Given the slurring of her words, Mei made a mental note not to serve her any more drinks.
"No more Hey, Jerk! and no more You Don't Know Me, either. I'm really sorry, guys. You understand how it is when the corporate suits get involved." The redhead on the stage shrugged mournfully, taking a step forward on the stage.
Crash bent down, plugging the device into the cable that he'd disconnected from his guitar. He then ran a new black cable he'd retrieved from the equipment shelf behind the curtain from his guitar down into the little box, leaving it lying out of the way on the stage floor.
A loud boooooooooo rained down on Ranko from all directions as she spoke. Yui's heart broke for her sister at the sound of rejection and disappointment rising around her. At least, it did, until she looked up from the drink she'd just finished building and saw the look in Ranko's eyes. It was not the defeated, dejected look she expected when she heard the crowd begin to voice its displeasure. Rather, there was a deviant spark behind the blue pools half-obscured by Ranko's loose, wavy red hair.
"She's up to something, isn't she?"
Mei smirked, picking up the new cocktail for table nine. "It's Ranko. When isn't she?"
"So, I guess that leaves us just one question," the musical firebrand mused into her headset microphone with a dejected sigh over the disaffected murmurs of the crowd.
"You guys didn't actually believe I'd go along with that shit, didja?"
Ranko flashed a playful wink in the direction of the VIP table, the corner of her mouth curling into the beginnings of a mischievous smile as the crowd whipped into an immediate frenzy. Down at the round table to stage left, Ken Hirata leaned back in his chair, holding up his Voodoo Brew cocktail with a loud whoop.
We're gonna give you a good sendoff tonight, buddy, Ranko thought. I promise. Get ready. We're gonna show you we're gonna be okay, so you can go fight your own fight. And we're both gonna fucking win.
Ranko reached down to her waist, unbuckling the wide black leather belt encircling her hips. Already, the previously-despondent crowd had been whipped into a furor by her declaration of defiance, but the building shook as she pulled apart the sides of her wrap dress and tossed it to the floor at Ken's feet.
Underneath it, Ranko wore what was barely more than a bra, in a bright fuschia. The straps and trim were caked in layer upon layer of silver glitter. Below her waist, she had on a skirt that looked as if it were made of liquid glitter. It was a bright metallic silver from her waist to her knees, where it slowly transitioned into a matching fuschia as if it had been dunked in pink glitter paint. In addition to her silver dragon bracelet, several plain brass bands were stacked on each of her wrists. Her short silver heels were barely visible under the gold trim of her sparkling skirt.
Draped over each of her arms was a bit of sheer pink cloth that moved with her arms as she raised them behind her head, pulling the white ribbon from her hair and tossing it to the floor. She shook her head, letting her wavy curls bounce free from their prison and dance on her shoulders.
Behind her, new Dapper Dragons drummer Zoe King slammed the backs of their clear acrylic drumsticks down on their thighs, and the sticks began to glow in a neon pink as if they were lightsabers from Star Wars. With a grin up at Jacob, they began a slow, rhythmic banging on the tom-toms, kicking at the bass drum every four beats.
With no other instruments playing, Ranko began to dance to the repetitive drumbeat. She moved as if her spine had been liquefied, her hips sloshing side to side wherever she went. She swirled her arms around her face, letting the sheer cloth drag over her exposed skin as she kicked her heels backward off the floor. Her arms swayed like a hula dancer's, pausing only when she slid her fingers up her bare skin and willing herself not to shiver at her own touch.
"Akane? Honey?" Yui reached over the bar and tapped her sister on the shoulder, a bemused smile on her flushed cheeks as she passed her a white paper cocktail napkin. "You're… umm… you're kinda, um… drooling a little bit."
After a full forty seconds of Ranko tantalizingly swaying to the sound of Zoe pounding the drum set Ken had just an hour earlier officially relinquished command of, the new drummer's boyfriend began to tickle his keyboard with his fingers. The synthesizer emitted a breathy wind sound, reminiscent of an Indian pungi. The wooden flute tone was playful and seemed to sway with a mind of its own, evoking the image of those old men who would sit on the dusty ground in some middle-eastern country and charm the cobras with their flutes.
Indeed, Ranko's movements were almost serpentine in their fluidity. She flowed ceaselessly this way and that without ever seeming to take a rigid form, as if she had forgotten she had a spine. The transparent pink silks dangling from her forearms almost constantly obscured her face from the crowd as she moved, with whichever hand that was not currently in the air playfully holding her scintillating skirt up out of the way of her feet.
With a loud slam from the bass drum, both instruments ceased, with Ranko bent so far backward on the stage that her hair touched the floor. She remained there for a full ten seconds, soaking in the applause of the crowd over the silence of her band.
Zoe reached down to the floor, picking up a pair of wooden maracas and shaking them in front of the microphone mounted over the drum set. The sound could easily have been mistaken for the threatening rattle of a venomous snake.
"Aaaaaaaaaahh-ahaahhaaahhh," came a deep bass rumble from the throat of Shinji Yokota, and both instruments resumed as Shinji continued to vocalize in a maqam that sounded like something out of an Arabian Nights film. Crash began to pluck at his guitar, but it did not sing in its usual voice. The device Seiichi had loaned him altered the tone of his instrument as the signal passed through it, and what poured out of the speakers sounded less like an electric guitar, and instead almost identical to a traditional Indian sitar.
It was at that moment that the side door to the Phoenix' narrow kitchen burst open, and Hitomi and Emi emerged from it. Both wore long pants made of the same sheer material as Ranko's arm silks that billowed around their legs - light blue for Hitomi, light green for Emi. Only what amounted to bikini bottoms in the same colors protected the backup dancers' modesty under them. Both women were barefoot, and wore tops that were naught more than sparkly strapless bras in colors matching their flowing pants. Additionally, the girls wore thin, transparent veils covering their faces from the bridges of their noses down, and both had done their eyeshadow and mascara to greatly emphasize their eyes. Emi's long blonde hair was pulled back in a high ponytail secured with several brass rings to make it almost stand on end at the top of her scalp, like something out of that old American television show, I Dream of Jeannie.
The girls split as they ran around the VIP table to access the stairs and ascend to the stage, Emi dragging her fingernails softly over Ken's back in silent greeting as she passed him. They joined Ranko on her left and right respectively, immediately picking up the same choreography she was already executing.
Shinji leaned close to his stand microphone, emitting what could only be described as a menacing hiss. As he did, Ranko snapped up from her position coiled halfway around Emi, and stared out at the crowd with an icy glare. She licked her cherry red lips seductively, and only then - a full two minutes and ten seconds after the song began - did she finally open her mouth to sing. When she did, her voice was affected with a bit of a twang befitting the middle-eastern influence of the song, but there was no shortage of her signature spunk in it.
"So! They want a girl who fawns over her boyfriend, like some idol?"
Hitomi and Emi both covered their veils with their open left hands, letting their jaws hang agape behind them as if they were shocked by something. Ranko chuckled darkly into her headset microphone.
"They'd best ask somebody else, 'cause on a mic, I'm homicidal!"
The already-apoplectic crowd erupted.
"The censor's crying stop…"
Emi and Hitomi extended their left arms forward, their elbows locked as they held their palms up toward the crowd.
"... but I'm impossible to box in. All the skeptics getting septic off my tantalizing toxin."
As she sang the final two words, Ranko turned her backside to the crowd, shaking it emphatically in her shimmery skirt. She turned back to face the crowd, crossing her wrists high above her head. The loose brass rings around her arms slid down almost to her elbows, save her silver dragon that was too tight-fitting to move and expose the scar on her left wrist.
Don't crack a smile. Gotta be serious. Badass girl time now, gigglestick later. Fuck, I should have tested these out before the show. These silk things are tickly as shit on my arms.
She rolled her hips constantly, slowly stepping to her right to rotate in place as she did, as if she were in some sort of display case and being inspected from every angle.
"Won't sit in my basket and dance to their flute, the cobra to their charmer. Try to make me follow suit…"
The redhead took a huge step forward with her right foot, her left still planted, bending both her knees to almost ninety degree angles. She held out her left arm with a bent elbow and an open, upturned palm at waist level. Her right arm was at eye level, her elbow slightly bent, extending her fingers toward the crowd with her palm turned down.
"... they're gonna need a suit of armor!"
Akane laughed, shaking her head as she leaned on the wall and watched the love of her life perform. Whoever needed a drink refill could wait a damn minute; magic was happening on that little stage in the harbor district of Minato that night, and she would not ignore it for a moment.
Of course she would. Of fucking course she would integrate snake-style kung fu into the choreography for this song.
Ranko popped up to a standing position, crossing her ankles as she advanced forward. Both of her arms flowed around her like serpents rearing back to attack, the pink silks dangling from her forearms refracting the stage lights as they swirled at her sides. She leapt from the floor, throwing both her arms high above her head to increase her upward momentum as she kicked her left leg up a little, and then her right leg all the way to eye level, waving the sparkly fabric hanging from her right arm over her foot as it snapped upward.
"I'm not some shrinking violet; I'm a warrior who sings. I mean, a snake is just a dragon pissed 'cause someone stole her wings!"
As Ranko seamlessly blended her nearly two decades of martial arts mastery into every step of her choreography, Hitomi and Emi torqued their hips side to side, running their hands seductively through their hair as they dipped their shoulders in whatever direction their waists were moving at the time.
"They're 'bout to get a demonstration of my vile verbosity…"
The redhead crouched low with her knees bent, sweeping over the stage floor with her arm low enough that the pink fabric flowing from her forearm dragged on the wooden surface. She swooped upward from the motion, windmilling both of her arms widely at her sides in the kung fu form transition until she locked her elbow with her left arm extended in a clawlike motion, as if her middle and index fingers were fangs on the head of a serpent.
"They're gonna need an amputation if they raise a hand to me!"
All three girls on stage bopped forward playfully, seeming for all the world to be celebrating Ranko's threat, as if her victory were a foregone conclusion. They kicked their feet upward off the stage as they hopped forward, Ranko holding her glittery skirt out of the way of her shoes.
Again, Shinji hissed into his microphone, and Zoe shook the twin maracas into theirs.
"Yeah, this girl's a viper, coiled up to strike!"
The jilted songstress raised her arms wide over her head, tauntingly rocking her hips as she did. It was as if she reveled in her declaration of independence.
Because she did.
"Deadly as a sniper on a rhythm and a mic!"
Ranko giggled loudly into her microphone as Hitomi pressed against her back. She wiggled her backside against her friend, playfully swishing her skirt around her legs with her hands like something out of Snow White.
"You think I'm cute and innocent, but mess with me, and then I'm up here rockin' like a moccasin, injecting verbal venom!"
She popped herself away from Hitomi's body with a thrust of her shoulders back into Hitomi's breasts, snapping her hand forward at lightning speed with her outstretched fingers in a wushu snake kung fu strike.
"Spitting like a cobra…"
Ranko crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself as her hips swung left and right, making the whole of her shimmery silver skirt rock at her waist like a ringing iron bell of warning. Indeed, alarm bells would have been blaring in the nearby Shibuya district that night, if the people sitting around the Yokai Records boardroom table could have seen the sultry declaration of war their leading lady was issuing from her own personal stage on that Friday evening in early June.
"Crushing like a python…"
All three girls placed their hands on their hips, shimmying at the waists with their arms extended to their sides. Emi's sheer green harem pants ballooned around her pale, slender legs as she moved.
"Badder than an adder…"
The house lights in the Phoenix blinked out in an instant, and a cascade of colored can lights flickered one after the other in rapid succession in the direction of the stage, no one of them staying lit for more than an eighth of a second. Ranko's arms rose high over her head, and she positioned her hands a few centimeters apart with her fingers extended like claws. The silhouette cast on the wall behind her, surrounded by the stage light flickering in every color of the rainbow, looked like a giant shadow puppet of a hissing serpent rising from her shoulders.
"... when the stage hands turn the lights on!"
The house lights came back up to reveal Ranko holding up her sparkly skirt in the pinched fingers of her right hand in almost a curtsey as she kicked her heel back behind herself. She arched her back until her hair touched the heel of her sparkly silver sandal, flashing a thousand-watt smile up at the crowd.
"They want me to be all soft, and sweet, and bubbly, and fake?"
The young redhead shrugged cutely at the crowd with her palms upturned, rocking her shoulders side to side like something out of the music video for Walk Like an Egyptian. Hitomi and Emi, meanwhile, both cowered at her sides as if they expected she would lash out at them at any moment.
"If they can't handle the sssssssssnakebite…"
Ranko snapped her arm outward, making a claw with her left hand. The long fingernails of only her thumb, middle and index fingers were painted in a pearlescent silver and filed to points, with just the slightest outline of deep red at the tips and up the outer edges. The effect gave her clawed fingers the appearance of fangs dripping with blood. The large twin faux pearls on the rings she wore on her index and middle fingers were painted with a single vertical yellow line on each. They resembled beady eyes that glinted with danger in the green-tinged light from the stage floor. The combined effect made the whole of her arm look like a serpent striking out at its prey with the almost imperceptible speed of motion that only the Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire technique could produce. As her arm rocketed forward, a deep, threatening hiss slithered through Shinji's microphone and Zoe's maracas added a menacing rattle.
"... they should not fuck with the sssssssnake!"
The redhead bopped playfully around the edge of the stage, swaying her hips as she giggled and framed her face with her hands. The juxtaposition of her easy, playful frolicking and the vitriol dripping from the lyrics was jarring, but it was exactly the point she was trying to make. She rolled her hips forward, her firm midsection seeming to slither upward from her waist to her shoulders as she gyrated in time with the drums Zoe had just inherited from one of Ranko's best friends.
I can be fun, and cute - my way - and everybody wins, or you can fight me, and lose. Your move, assholes.
As Shinji vocalized another deep maqam into his microphone, Ranko whirled on her heel into a high kick, using the momentum to propel herself into a leap. She extended her left leg forward and right leg back as far as they would go, then switching them before she landed.
That's right. Burlesque, to kung fu, to ballet, in a second and a half. Anything-goes musical arts, final attack, bitches. Suck on that, Amaya.
She rocked her shoulders forward and back, shaking her chest out as she stalked the length of the stage. Her arms never stopped moving, swinging high over her head as she all but skipped across the raised platform. Her waist was in constant motion as well. Her smile was infectious, and she moved as if she was having the time of her life dancing with her friends. The appearance was intentional, and it had the added benefit of being true. There was an unabashedly sultry overtone to her every movement, and not even Hitomi and Emi echoing her movements at her sides in their own revealing costumes could divert the audiences' eyes for long.
"My rhyme's intoxicating, any way you wanna look at it. There ain't no antidote for every note of it I'm gonna spit. Every single cypher is all uncontrolled and raw."
She rocked the whole of her body to the left, shaking her hands as if they held invisible maracas as she bounced them up and down at her sides. Her grin could have outshone the sun.
"I'm pretty, fun, and hyper…"
Her hands flattened out and she rocketed them forward in three poking strikes with her outstretched fingers; they would have been a flurry of punches had her fingers not been extended.
"... packing venom in my jaws! They're like…"
Ranko raised her left hand up, again forming it in the form of a claw as she faced the mock snake's face toward the audience. She faced it toward herself and moved her thumb up and down as she sang, almost using her hand as a sock puppet as if it were singing the lyrics in a conversation with her.
"Dang, that girl's got fangs…"
She flashed her hand outward at lightning speed, closing it in a fist. Her index and middle fingers overlapped her thumb, giving the impression that the "snake's" jaws had clamped shut.
"... when I snap at 'em like a taipan."
Ranko crossed her wrists over her head, undulating her belly like a burlesque dancer, painfully slowly and deliberately.
"Who's got the slither with her? Who can bite 'em? Smite 'em?" She pointed to herself with both of her thumbs, flashing another bright smile at her audience. "I can!"
Ranko reached out, grabbing at the side of Hitomi's neck with her "fanged" left hand. The brunette cringed, sticking out her tongue and unfocusing her eyes. She slumped to her side, dangling her neck loosely as if she had just died.
"A little gets inside you, and your system is in shock! Call the ranger, 'cause there's danger…"
She stalked toward Shinji as he hissed into his microphone. Zoe's maracas rattled again as she approached him.
"... hiding under all this rock!" Ranko shouted the last word into Shin's stand microphone, but her headset picked it up as well. The effect was that her voice echoed through the little bar with a quarter of a second delay between her own microphone and Shinji's.
The redhead giggled into her mic as she turned her back to Shinji, finding Emi standing right behind her. She dragged her hand down Emi's chest as the blonde backed up, Ranko chasing after her stride for stride. Both girls flailed their arms showily as they moved in wide, sweeping motions, Ranko's arm silks flapping behind her elbows.
"A sweet and sexy melody with too much poison in it, lyrics biting fast as lightning…"
Ranko stopped moving, but let Emi take a few more steps backward to ensure she was out of the redhead's reach. Once she was at a safe distance, Ranko began firing her snakelike palms in her direction with the speed of the most deadly art she knew. The one that, but for the timely intervention of a half-blind Amazon boy, would have killed Ranko Tendo before she'd had a chance to be reborn.
"... at two hundred beats per minute!"
Ranko whipped her glittery silver skirt into a high spinning kick, letting herself fall backward once her leg was fully extended. Hitomi caught her, and Emi grabbed her feet, lifting the girl off the floor and holding her parallel with the stage as she flourished about herself with her arms and sang.
"Yeah, this girl's a viper, coiled up to strike. Deadly as a sniper on a rhythm and a mic."
Ranko's friends deposited her gently on her knees on the stage. She gave the crowd a bright, innocent smile with starry, dreamy eyes, clasping her hands sweetly under her chin.
"You think I'm cute and innocent, but mess with me, and then I'm…"
She launched herself upward from her knees, uppercutting the air. Even with the violence of her explosion from the floor, her hips still rolled seductively.
"... up here rockin' like a moccasin, injectin' verbal venom!"
The lithe redhead pressed her palms together under her chin, dancing in place with a skip in her step as her conjoined hands moved left and right against her chest.
"Spitting like a cobra. Crushing like a python. I'm badder than an adder when the stage hands turn the lights on!"
She lifted her shimmering skirt until the hem tickled her knees, arching her left leg backward until the sole of her shoe touched her hair. The briefest flash of black around her calves was visible as her skirt slid back into place. Ranko effected a little giggle in her voice, letting her hair dangle over her right shoulder as the pink sheer material dangling from her forearms tickled her left.
"They want me to be all soft, and sweet, and bubbly, and fake."
Emi and Hitomi flanked her, bracing their left arms at the elbows in their right palms. They let their left forearms sway side-to-side, their wrists limp, invoking the image of cobras enthralled by the sound of a charmer's flute.
"If they can't handle the ssssssssssnakebite," both of the Dapper Dragons' backup dancers sang in harmony, extending the hissing sound of the last word.
"They should not FUCK with the SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSNAKE," Ranko spat as she crossed her ankles and whirled into another wushu kung fu form, the silks on her forearms forming a tornadic pair of arcs orbiting her spinning form.
All three of the girls raised their arms above their heads, crossing their wrists as if they'd been bound together. Crash and Jake both silenced their instruments, and to the sound of only Shinji's bass guitar and a furious drumbeat, Ranko and her friends began to move as one. Every twist of a waist, every wave of a hand, and every kick of a foot was in perfect unison with the other two women on the stage, as if they'd been practicing the choreography together in some faraway harem cloister for decades. In reality, Ranko had scripted it only four days ago.
As the redhead walked past Shinji, he bent down, hissing loudly into his stand microphone again. Both Hitomi and Emi jumped back with loud screeches, as if they had nearly stepped on a moccasin with their bare feet, but Ranko turned on them, baring her teeth and stomping forward menacingly in their direction with her back to Shinji.
"So, push me if you dare. C'mon and test me if you wanna, but your struggle makes me stronger, like a fucking anaconda! Yeah, if you try to challenge me, I'm gonna be the victor! Squeeze the breath out of your body like a damned boa constrictor!"
She turned her back to the crowd, resting her hands on the hips of her sparkling silver-and-pink skirt. Ranko wiggled her backside emphatically, bending her knees a bit as she did to emphasize her curves. As she did, Zoe's maracas lent a rattling sound to the music, which had once again been rejoined by all four performers.
"Set to battle, bring the rattle when I start shakin' my tail…"
Ranko turned such that her left side faced the crowd, running her fingers ever so slowly down her exposed upper arm. The dangling sheer fabric slid across her skin agonizingly delicately, and it was all the young, hypersensitive singer could do not to moan into her microphone. The arousing sensation did inject a bit of extra sultriness to her motion, not that it needed it.
"Skin like butter, but I utter poison…"
She bent her knees slowly, rocking her backside left and right as she bent deeper, her skirt pooling on the stage floor until her butt was mere centimeters from it.
"... sliding down the scales."
With her back to the crowd, Hitomi threw back a shot of 151 rum that she'd collected from the top of Jacob's synthesizer casing. It burned her tongue, but she only needed to hold it in her mouth for a moment. She turned, and while Ranko still was nearly sitting on the stage, she spat the liquor toward the crowd over her head. As she did, she flicked the disposable cigarette lighter concealed in her hand, and the rum ignited into a jet of blue flame roaring from her lips.
"Lyrics burn you going down like they're a shot without a chaser," Ranko sang, staying low until the blast of fire cleared her head. "Moves are rotten as a cottonmouth, and quicker than a racer."
The lead singer launched herself back to her feet, swaying with her arms extended. Akane recognized it as another snake kung fu form, but the way Ranko performed it in time with the music, it could easily have been mistaken as a hula or something out of a burlesque show.
"Sultry like some R&B, and spicy as a samba."
As Ranko made a bubbly laugh into her microphone, Hitomi closed on her from her left, singing into her headset. "First the giggle…"
Ranko slammed her hips left and right as forcefully as she could manage as Emi joined her on the right, resting her hand on the redhead's waist. "Then the wiggle," Emi sang.
"Then, too late!" Emi and Hitomi sang together as each of them grabbed one side of Ranko's waistband and pulled back, tearing her glittery silver skirt in half. Underneath, Ranko was wearing a pair of leggings that extended just past her knees. They were composed of thousands of jet-black sequins in several layers, giving the appearance of dark snakeskin scales as they moved along her legs.
"Here comes the mamba," Ranko sang over the thunderous roar of her legion of Firebirds. They certainly seem to like it when parts of my clothes come off, she noted with a smirk.
"Yeah, this girl's a viper, coiled up to strike!" All three of the girls stepped forward, throwing high kicks in the air with their arms windmilling around them at their sides. Akane wondered if either Hitomi or Emi had any idea that the bubbly pop star between them had taught them one of the most advanced techniques in kung fu, under the guise of an impressive dance step.
"Deadly as a sniper on a rhythm and a mic," Hitomi and Emi added as one as Ranko launched herself into a back handspring, finding the mobility to do so easier to come by after being freed of her ankle-length skirt.
"Spitting like a cobra," Emi sang as Ranko stomped forward, thrusting her head toward the crowd as if expelling venom from her throat at them.
"Crushing like a python," Hitomi added as Ranko crossed her arms over her chest, writhing this way and that as if trying to escape from an invisible straight jacket.
"She's badder than an adder when the stage hands turn the lights on," both backup singers sang together as Ranko strode the edge of the stage from right to left, reaching down and letting the sheer pink silks flowing from her forearms slide over the heads of the first row of patrons standing at the edge of the stage.
"They want us to be all soft and sweet, and bubbly, and fake," the three girls sang together, framing their faces in their hands like some sort of cutesy manga girls who had just been praised by some sexy upperclassman boy.
Ranko flashed a smirk down to the VIP table, where a latecomer had joined Ken. The slender brunette raised her half-empty Regular Girl cocktail in the air, tipping it in the direction of the woman who was about to lead the Dapper Dragons to war.
I sure hope you know what you're doing, Nabiki, Ranko thought as she glared confidently up at the crowd.
"If you can't handle the sssssssssssnakebite, then DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SNAKE!"
週次パワーステータス
-- 推薦
ランキング 
-- 推薦
チケット