Discount Word Emporium

So, apparently a while ago (as in, at least two years, ulp) I was prompted to write a Saiyuki space AU? And apparently I even wrote a piece of it, mostly, before I forgot about it completely. Ah, the things you discover when you clean out your inbox....

"What do you mean we're out of gas? Our spaceship is a giant freaking alien, what, his wings are broken?"

Hakkai's too-bright smile make Gojyo wince and wish he'd kept his mouth shut. "He's tired, Gojyo, and hungry. Perhaps you'd like offer up yourself as a snack to keep him going?"

"Save it," Sanzo snapped, glaring out the front viewport. "We've got company."

Gojyo glanced out the viewscreen to see a dozen tiny flares spreading out in a wide fan, headed their way: youkai gunners. "Seriously?! Again?" And them stuck floating while their ship soaked up starlight or whatever the hell else it ate out in the middle of nothingness. Perfect fucking timing.

"Go wake up the monkey." Sanzo was already on his way to his favourite gun turret, the twitching of his eyelid proclaiming louder than words that he was not in the mood for this, damn it. Rolling his eyes at Sanzo's departing back, Gojyo nevertheless started for his own little ship, hollering for Goku on the way and leaving Hakkai to plug himself into the dash and power up the mana rifles.

Where the fuck do these guys keep coming from? Gojyo wondered as he slid down a ladder. Obviously, the further they went into the Western Territories, the more youkai they ran into, that was kind of the point of going there in the first place. The whole reason they were stuck together in a tempermental alien ship was to search for the youkai home planet and take care of whatever was making its inhabitants go bugfuck crazy over half the galaxy. So, yeah, it stood to reason that the closer they got, the more youkai they'd have to fight off.

But the tiny one-youkai ships they kept running into were just a fraction of the size of Hakuryuu, just guns with wings and a bubble to breathe in, they shouldn't have been able to go so far out into the black by themselves. When you're obsessed with tracking down a certain homicidal priest, apparently little things like the possibility of stranding yourself and slowly suffocating or freezing to death didn't matter.

Gojyo was still strapping himself in when he heard Goku's whoop over the comm-line, indicating that the boy had already launched and was probably crushing a path through their foes at that very moment. Gojyo growled, sealed the last lock and hit his own release lever, sending his ship rocketing out to join the party. A subtle glow across the nose of his ship let him know that Hakkai's shields were already up; a muted whump and a quickly-gone explosion off to one side spoke of Sanzo using his stupid oversized peashooter to good effect.

"More closing in behind the first wave," Hakkai's voice said over the comm, and Gojyo shrugged. If they were going to keep on coming, he would keep on fighting. Nothing else for it.