Chapter 9: Ambush in Graphite
"Don't take this the wrong way, but," said Tenten, "I wasn't expecting a Sage to be so tired after one battle. Though granted none of us are at one hundred percent after all that salt."
Hitomi looked up from pulling on her socks, tried not to feel ruffled. "Well, it's mostly because I'm not technically a Sage, as you may know it. Outside of the Shining Week - until the colony awakens - my stamina is limited. As Neji pointed out," she added more quietly, "I do not have the experience that the three of you have." Her voice strengthened again as she stood up and unfolded her hakama to step into them, "That's also why I don't use a Summoning outside of that week."
Tenten tied the knots of her blouse and made an intrigued noise. "So if the Takara moths are asleep right now, what about the one that was on your face this morning? And the others when we first met you?"
"Normal moths," Hitomi nodded. "They're not strictly-speaking Takara moths, but since I have an affinity for them I can use them as chakra conduits of sorts to help me channel natural energy outside of the Shining Week." She knotted her belt.
"Why do they call it the Shining Week, anyway?" Tenten ran her fingers through her hair and quickly tied it back up into two buns.
Hitomi hadn't considered this before. "I'm not sure, to be honest with you. I suppose it's more of a metaphor for strength - a single week that's a flash of activity and power. Something like that. The moths only live for one week."
Tenten turned to her, confused. "Only a week? Every hundred years, right? Then how were you trained?"
Hitomi hesitated, then supposed there was little harm in telling her now - the Shining Week was upon them anyhow. It was easier to talk to Tenten, too. "There's one moth that's chosen at the end of the Shining Week by the colony's apostles, called the Kantoku - the Warden - who is given the power to live outside of that week in order to find new apostles and protect the new larvae while they sleep and mature."
Her brow was still furrowed. "So -"
"Tenten! Are you and Miss Hitomi ready yet?!" Lee called through the door, making Tenten sigh. "Neji is getting impatient!"
"He's always impatient!" Tenten called back. "We're coming."
Mention of his name made Hitomi bristle, but she hurried to finish dressing nonetheless. Although not fully certain of who had brought her inside the night before - and she'd felt awkward asking when they all awoke and embarrassed to have fallen asleep out there at all - she had a feeling she knew who it was.
Lee made some half-intelligible enthusing over the virtues of each gender that made Tenten sigh again more wearily. "One day I would like to have a conversation without inter-"
Something impacted the wooden frame of the inn, making it judder. A second later and the room was shot through with pitch-black veins and the building began to moan, splinter, and collapse. Hitomi grabbed her katana and Tenten her scroll, and they bolted into the hall, immediately having to duck as the ceiling suddenly dropped - Lee caught a rafter with both hands and held it, gritting his teeth.
"Go!" he said.
"Outside, outside! The pier!" Tenten grabbed and pushed at Hitomi as they struggled to navigate the collapse. They heard a crash and Lee followed them. More of the black veins flurried underfoot and struck through the walls, making them duck, jump and dodge. When the door to outside wouldn't budge they had to ram through it with their shoulders.
The pier was crackling underfoot like straw; the veins of black were rapidly retreating in the direction of the courtyard in the front of the inn.
"What are they?" Lee asked and lifted his foot as one darted underneath it. A trail of black dust was left in the worm-eaten wood.
"More importantly we need to find Neji," Tenten said. "Lee, stay with Hitomi." She took the opportunity to fasten her scroll to the small of her back before darting around the ruined building.
Hitomi tied her katana to her belt and, noting that her sandals were among those buried irretrievably in the inn, tugged off her socks once more and discarded them. She ran a finger over the black residue and inspected it, rubbing it between her fingers. "It's like soot," she said. When Lee didn't respond, she glanced at him. He was bouncing slightly and anxiously looking at the point where Tenten had disappeared. "We should assist them," she suggested.
This got his attention. "No! This is an enemy attack and they're probably looking for you. We should stay out of sight." He tugged her under the curtains of the willow boughs and up into the tree. From this vantage point they could see over the rubble.
Many of the street's other buildings were collapsed, with gradually-thickening veins of black running through and over the ground from the rubble to the middle of the courtyard where stood a young figure wearing goggles and a respirator, in the company of Arata. The veins were coiling into six unstable-looking, mantis-like creatures the size of mules surrounding the pair and, once fully-formed, sprung forward with lightning speed. Townsfolk screamed, more buildings exploded under their force.
Hitomi watched the way the creatures seemed to spring from one spot to another, shriveling it and leaving it blackened in their wake. It wasn't long before there was a smoky smell in the hot air. Tenten sprang out of nowhere and knocked one with her bo in midair, shattering it. Once it touched the ground, however, it reformed as a series of shifting planes until it was back as a mantis again, and chasing her.
"It's carbon," Hitomi said quietly. "Graphite."
"But the buildings -" Lee began.
"Carbon's in everything - living or inanimate. That kid is leaching the carbon out of the immediate area and turning it into those things," she said. "And Arata's here."
Neji had appeared now, too, running from between two rubble piles to attack the jutsu user; Arata unsurprisingly moved to the defense. Tenten meanwhile was attempting to lure the creatures away from the pier, but Arata seemed to notice this - he said something to the jutsu user, and the creatures began to race over the wreckage in Hitomi and Lee's direction.
Lee tutted and clenched a fist. "Stay here, Miss Hitomi."
He made to leap at them, but Hitomi grabbed his shoulder. "No, we have to retreat. The odds aren't good and the Glade is just across the river. We can't defeat two elemental users as we are. Get the message to the others and I can disguise us."
"How?"
Hitomi smiled.
Through his Byakugan Neji saw two moths dart out of a willow behind the inn at a surprisingly human speed - he dodged a swipe from Arata's sickle and deactivated it for a moment, looking again. The moths looked like Hitomi and Lee, and the black creatures seemed fooled by the genjutsu too and chased after them. The real Lee then emerged from the tree and caught up with Tenten at the nearest edge of the pier, saying something to her, and kept running toward him. Tenten fled back toward Hitomi's tree.
"Jurou, recall your pets," Arata said. He was looking at the tree.
Neji didn't need Lee to tell him what the plan was. She assessed this correctly, he thought and darted away. Lee reversed his step and met him midway, and Hitomi and Tenten were already bolting for the river. The black creatures bellowed and reversed their course.
"Miss Hitomi believes the odds are not in our favor, and that these things are made of carbon!" Lee called to him as they ran. "She says we should retreat to the Glade immediately!"
He did not want to admit agreement, but was more preoccupied with the scrambling masses of black that were about to cut them off. They leapt; the creatures blocked out the sun - they glistened and were jagged like shards of obsidian, and though faceless an unnerving grating and screeching sound came from them. Though Neji and Lee jolted to a stop, it was not quick enough to avoid impact. The creatures were mineral rather than animal, and cleaved and reformed themselves in order to move and avoid strikes; when they were struck, however, they were brittle and shattered easily, even if they did reform. However, penetrating blows on the part of either Neji and Lee or the creatures themselves resulted in the substance strengthening and attempting to bond with the new substance.
Neji dealt a palm strike to a spiky limb. It shattered, but the pieces spat at him like dozens of thorns and embedded themselves in his hands and forearms. He tried to swipe them off but now they may as well have been iron rather than straw. "Blunt strikes only!" he told Lee. "Keep moving!"
The creatures attempted to surround them, and the immediate area was becoming rapidly enclosed by walls of salt - the briney smell was back in the air.
"Keep moving!" Neji commanded again and they fought their way through what little space remained.
They were on the fragile pier, now, and ahead of them Tenten and Hitomi were standing on the water in the middle of the river, the latter with a cluster of moths fluttering behind her head. The pair jumped for some reason, and it took Neji a second to realize why - his and Lee's first steps off the pier were not onto water, but onto a layer of salt so thick it was as though the river had frozen over. He had been hoping that the water would slow the creatures down. They kept running, and Hitomi turned to take the lead. Her moths scattered.
"They won't be fooled by the same trick twice!" Neji told her. He heard the carbon creatures skittering on the salt.
"It won't be the same trick," she said. "Follow me."
The far side of the river had an eroded cliff-face for a bank and they were forced up the seventy-degree angle of its sparsely-wooded slope, attempting not to slip on loose leafmould and scree as the creatures chased after them. Salt senbons impacted the trees and flew by their ears. Neji didn't have the luxury of looking behind them to determine what Hitomi's new trick might be. Judging by the way the ground crackled and trees erupted in black, the other jutsu user - Jurou - was following them too, and his creatures were leaping upward and slamming down between them, attempting to separate and corner them. Amidst pummeling through them they tore through the undergrowth, trying to keep Hitomi in sight.
Neji leapt over one creature, his foot crunching slightly on its powdery back like newly-fallen snow. From this brief height he saw an ancient cedar - mostly a trunk with pale and red bark, like a scar - twisted by the elements sprouting from a slab of bedrock jutting out of the mountainside. Hitomi seemed to be heading for it. When they were a few meters from it, she suddenly lurched to a halt and turned around.
"The cedar - run up it!" she commanded and began to make a series of hand signs. They passed her; as Neji did so he heard her intone, "Mimesis," and he saw the familiar pale brown moth lift away from her collar. A faint tickle on the back of his neck told him instinctively that the same had happened to him and, glancing ahead of him, the same happened to Lee and Tenten.
A dark cloud of charcoal billowed overhead - presumably another jutsu. Simultaneously, the four moths drifted up to meet it and exploded with amber, gold, and scarlet chakra that faded into an iridescent, partially-translucent sheen; their tiny bodies unfolded like origami, and tessellated and joined into an angular screen that held back the cloud. The black creatures abruptly stopped and diverted their course as four shimmers traveled in different directions across the screen.
A genjutsu diversion. Neji looked away. His feet were on the trunk of the great cedar, and Hitomi caught up with them. He thought they would stop at the topmost boughs but somehow, she ran ahead and kept going until she disappeared in an unexpected haze of blue. They followed her without question. He leapt…
