Prompt: "Write about a last stand." (Thank you Zero!)

Naruto and its characters do not belong to me.

Demon in My Chariot

Part 10: A Last Stand

"No. We're not doing this. Definitely not." Neji planted his feet on the glittering asphalt, folded his arms across his chest.

Next to him, Tenten smirked. "You just don't think we'll succeed. But we will."

"This doesn't even have anything to do with our mission!"

"Chicken nuggets have everything to do with our mission."

"How, pray tell?" He glared at her, thin lips pressed into a tight line.

"They'll give me peace of mind. You know how that goes," Tenten said brightly, waving her arms to prove her point. "Chicken nuggets sustain me. When I have sustenance, I have energy to move. When I have energy to move, I have time to focus on our mission."

"And how would a chicken nugget factory help with that?" Neji snapped.

Because that was where they were. In the parking lot of the McDevil's chicken nugget factory. Beneath the glow of the full moon, the smooth-walled buildings were towering, bone-white and silent. Huge, trundling trucks had long since left the boundaries of the chicken wire fence, and there were only the small cars of employees left now—just a handful of them. White smoke rose from some of the chimneys further away, and the entire place smelled faintly like stale oil and processed chicken.

Neji had the brief urge to throw up.

"There's millions of chicken nuggets here! Can you imagine how much energy that'll give me? I could last for days! Months! Years!"

"You're going to suffer a massive bout of indigestion and be bedridden for a week," he answered flatly. "No. We aren't filling my car up with chicken nuggets. You left enough crumbs in there the last time."

Tenten flicked a sly look at him. "You're still sour about that, huh? I didn't think an angel would be so particular about crumbs in his chariot."

"It's my car." Arguing with demons was pointless; he should have known that by now.

"But in here, they're freshly fried," she cooed. Her dark eyes darted around for an entrance into the factory. "Golden, delicious chicken giblets! It's making my mouth water."

She swallowed loudly. Neji winced.

"I think I see an opening." Tenten took off, and he was forced to follow in her footsteps. If anything happened to her, he was the one left with the entire mission on his shoulders. And it was trouble enough without putting himself through more.

They got into the factory somehow. It turned out that the demon was deft at picking locks (Neji worried about the integrity of his car), and they slipped in through a tiny door. Past that was a dimly-lit hallway lined with closed wooden doors. The first door had an etched gold sign reading "Accounting", the second read "HR".

"I wonder what 'HR' means," Tenten said, skipping down the corridor. "I don't smell chicken nuggets in here."

Neji tried very hard not to roll his eyes. Instead, he focused on keeping an eye out around them. "It means 'Human Resources'. Stop, there's a security camera there! Stop!"

Tenten halted right at the corner of the corridor, and Neji had a moment to be thankful. He didn't think they were in any sort of trouble... yet.

"Do they use humans as resources? For the nuggets?" Tenten gasped and turned back to him. "Are there human brains in it too?"

Neji wanted to be violently sick. "You deserve a D in your understanding of this world."

She shrugged. "Anyway. You mentioned a security camera."

"It's right above us. I think we should start shutting them down before the entire security team is upon us."

"Oh." Tenten slanted a mischievous look at him. "I didn't know the great angel Neji was afraid of the security team."

"I just don't want more interruptions than we already have." He glanced sullenly at her. "Put a confounding spell on it, if you have one."

Tenten did exactly that without batting an eyelid, though he was certain that they had been captured on the video feeds anyway. It would be some time before they were caught, though, and he intended to hustle his mission partner through this.

They made their way through the maze-like corridors, headed down one way until they realized that they'd reached a dead end, before retracing their steps. It seemed like forever and many confounded security cameras before they arrived at the nugget processing plant—what looked like a square mile of white walls, meandering conveyor belts that passed through all sorts of large metal ovens, steel industrial mixers that were mixing chicken bits and flour, and many other metallic appliances that were beyond their understanding.

Fortunately (or otherwise), Tenten did not dally. They sneaked around humming pieces of machinery and agreed that the workers had to be lured away. Neji grudgingly volunteered for the job.

It beat finding Tenten in his bed chomping down on chicken nuggets. If she had enough of nuggets, then she wouldn't leave crumbs all over his belongings again.

His hope for that flickered dangerously while he lured workers away from their stations, one at a time, to the manager's office at the back of the facilities. Throughout, he glimpsed parts of the nugget production process—pink bits of chicken being ground into tiny pieces, then mixed into a dough, which was squeezed into molds and then marched down conveyor belts through a fryer.

Where they collected to cool before being frozen, Tenten had taken up position.

He saw her squashing handfuls of nuggets into her mouth.

He hurried the last of the staff to the manager's office while under a superficial disguise, feeling a foreboding weight on his shoulders the entire time. This was trespassing and robbery—was Kakashi going to have his head for it?

When he returned to Tenten, she looked a little sick in the face. She'd put an arm out to stopper the flow of glistening, golden chicken nuggets, and they were accumulating along her arm into a growing pile that was beginning to spill over the thin steel barriers on either side of the conveyor belt.

"There's too many of them," she said around her mouthful of chicken nuggets and pointed to a large, full sack behind her. (Where had she found that?) The sack was darkened with oil in various places, and bumpy with what was probably a thousand nuggets. "I can't finish them all! I've filled my bag. And my stomach. Eat some! We can't win like this!"

"Win?" he echoed dumbly.

"It's a war against the chicken giblets!" Tenten sent him a look that said she clearly thought he was daft. "I was so close to winning, too!"

Neji let his gaze follow the long, long line of nuggets marching through the factory, still running, and shook his head. She never stood a chance. "You're insane."

She was still eating, and her face was looking increasingly green.

He really, really did not want puke all over the inside of his car.

And the staff he'd locked in the manager's office were starting to pound on the door. There was no way he was dealing with them when they broke out.

"We have to fall back," he said. "There's too many of them."

"I can finish this!"

"No," he said, grabbed her oily arm away from the conveyor belt so the nuggets began to march along again.

"We can't! That was my last stand!"

"We're going." Neji watched as the door to the manager's office burst open, and factory staff began streaming out. "Hurry!"

Tenten pouted at him, her face pale and sickly. She grabbed the neck of her sack with inhuman strength, though, and he pulled her through the clutter of nugget-making machines. From the corner of his eye, Neji saw the pile of nuggets on the conveyor belt wedging itself into the too-small opening of the next machine. More nuggets were beginning to pile up.

A worker spied them and shouted; they began to sprint, the angel, the demon, and the sack of chicken nuggets trailing along behind them.

A security guard blocked their exit on one corridor. They were forced to double back and try another corridor (all the hallways looked the same), and there were footsteps and shouts closing in.

Tenten, green in the face, jerked her hand out of Neji's. Her fingertip ignited with a blue-green fire. She drew a portal into the air ahead of them.

"Go first," she said, looking back warily.

It wasn't the best option they had, but they were running out of time. Neji held his breath, stepped into the dark, echoing chill, and watched as Tenten shoved her sack of nuggets in before she followed.

Then, they were enveloped in darkness.

A/N: one word: LOL

Seriously though, I couldn't write about a real last stand since there's been hardly any mention of threats or enemies. So, the next closest thing would have been Neji's longstanding feud with the chicken nuggets. ;) You know someone's been watching entirely too many "How It's Made" videos. ;)

No, I don't know where they're going or what's going to happen, either. ;) Are there people still following this fic? It seems as though the fandom has shrunk lately ;)