Enjoy!

All eyes were upon Mamban, and he finally felt like the star of the show. With his body doused in a black robe and his stature framed by the decayed, graying wood of Tenzo's attempt to surprise him, he properly felt like he was taking a bow upon a stage. His right arm was newly revealed and still fresh, its skin intact but blackening as its own curse mark began to spread. The risky operation had been a success; Goda's limb was now attached to Mamban from the shoulder joint downward. "Now then...this barrier of yours has always kept the bad guys out, hasn't it...?" Mamban began, slithering his tongue around behind his mask as he spoke. The wet sound of insanity echoed through the village. After the first four had tried to attack, the rest of the amateurish Truth Village fighters backed down.

From inside the small barrier, Susumu looked toward his old friend. The vanquished leader—ex-leader, but his own decree—was looking on helplessly toward the red mask that represented the chaos of the outside world. He had thought it would be the Leaf that rose against him, that it would have been the coming intruders like Kakashi that were his enemies...but it was not so. "Mamban...you would do this now?" he strained to say, his chest wound still gaping and losing blood after Kaine withdrew the impaling blade. Susumu was working hard to heal himself, but an open wound was so much more taxing than a bruise or sprain; it closed, but closed slowly and left a bloody hole behind in his blue vest, allowing it to match Kaine's purplish tint a bit better with the saturation of crimson fluid.

Mamban took his left hand and slashed it at the barrier a second time, coating it with a thick, dribbling layer of his deep green acid. Again, it sizzled as if it were landing on hot coals, but the barrier bubbled it away uselessly. "Is there a better time than the present to do anything, Susumu my old friend? Your barrier has always intrigued me...I wonder, how has it been so powerful all this time? It was a talent of yours that I envied...but there are other powers that I envied more greatly. How lucky Goda had been to obtain this explosive punch, for example, but as it was always intended to become, it is mine now..." Mamban reeled his right arm back, flexing its stolen muscles and tendons and straining his breath.

"Shouldn't we stop him!?" Rika looked to Tenzo in a panic, expecting him to have the answer.

Akemi did the same; they were both heeding to the older man's decision, but he was overcome by the choices he could have made. Tenzo exhaled roughly and heaved a growl of impotent but temporary surrender. "We can't get to him from here...the barrier is too strong, too wide, and too transparent. He'll see us coming before we can put our hands on him. Besides," he recalled, looking to the ruins of his previous attempt; the tips of some leftover branches were crumbling into dust at their enemy's back. "He's not going to be taken easily." Tenzo considered a larger scale earth technique; it was well within his scope to open enormous fissures and produce small mountains with a clap of his hands, but such techniques were no good in such a precarious situation. There were too many people in the village, let alone the two who were trapped inside Susumu's barrier.

Medo was looking to Tenzo with a confusion that bothered him under the cozy blankets of his worldview. Susumu had said something about poison; about having guilt when it wore off. He couldn't imagine why he would feel guilty, but there was something even deeper tugging at his thoughts. He wasn't just picturing a way to save Susumu or Kaine, as was his duty as part of the village. The unspoken hesitation was making it tough to breathe. "What's he going to do? If we can't get to him because of the barrier, he can't get past it to hurt us, either, right?" Medo asked from the side. Whatever it was that weighed on him, he turned to the one with the calmest head to try to dispel his worries.

"I don't know...he seems like he's going to try to come through it..." Tenzo squinted; it was tough to see through the cloudy haze of the energy construct that kept him from engaging his enemy, but the faintest details of a curse mark were present on a bare shoulder. Mamban's words had been cryptic at first, but as time ticked by, they began to lock into their intended focus. With a falling jaw and widening eyes, Tenzo looked to Akemi. "Help me protect them!" Then he looked to the rest, calling out more broadly. "Everybody down!"

Susumu gave a plea for sanity, but it went unheard. His pragmatic, merciless friend no longer existed—perhaps of all the survivors from his youth, Mamban was the only one who had truly become something else, something that was inarguable and irredeemable. The fallen Hyuga reached out a strong hand, but he could not clutch the chaotic being's sanity. "Mamban, no! Stop!"

Just as the panicked, uncertain masses heeded Tenzo's frenzied warning to duck down, Mamban's drawn arm was shoved forward in spite of Susumu's desperate words. Energy was collected along Mamban's knuckles, refined to a thickness less than a fly's wing and fully condensed. The strength of a city-shaking explosion was packed into the head of a thumbtack and forced into the edge of the barrier, riding on the tip of Mamban's repurposed limb. His whole body rotated along his heels and hips, turning every muscle into a jackhammer and giving the ultimate impact of his strike the power it needed in order to oppose Susumu's unbreakable barrier. With a howl of delight, Mamban felt the energy prism resist his initial contact, scorching the short hairs along Goda's old fingers...and then the gathered power exploded forward off the end of his fist, blasting the smokey wall with a deafening kaboom.

The sound of cracking glass reached the ears before distorted rings of force began to flow through the sturdy barrier. Within the span of a half-second, the gyrating body of the cubed prison was turned to an oval, then a triangle, then a smoothed cone, then it snapped back into a rectangular shape and its temporary elasticity was turned into a splintering fracture. The notoriously powerful barrier began to shatter apart, its restrained chakra being released into a devastating explosion; it was like cracking a dam that had been holding back the weight of all the world's oceans.

A gargantuan wave of concussive force was propelled from the ruined barrier. From the outside looking in, the distortion in the air was visible as an expanding dome. Following the monumental impact, flinging cacophonously in all outward directions, there was an instant coverage of dust, wind, leaves, and even uprooted trees. Visibility was zero. A howling tornado took shape above the training field and all the gathered debris was launched into the air in the shape of a volcanic eruption before dispersing outward and rising into the air.

Even the clouds were scared away by the unspeakable fury of the winds. A pristine and clear blue sky was the result for miles around, but the Truth Village itself was blanketed by fog and dirt, leafy flakes turning around carelessly as they fell to settle on the ground. At sea level, the cataclysm was thorough. Dust was kicked a thousand feet high, blocking all vision from the outside in, or the inside out. After the earth-shaking calamity passed, there was a conspicuous silence. The only noise to be heard was the pitter patter of dirty chunks falling back to the earth after their skyward journey. The distant splash of full-sized trees colliding with dirty ocean water reached the shores after several seconds.

At the epicenter of the destruction, Mamban stood firm with his right arm outstretched and its fingers intact. He was panting massively, so much energy exerted that he had lost his own thoughts to the ecstasy of activity. The air began to clear around him, and he gave casual glances left and right and forward; there was no sign of the barrier or much of anything else. The shield's whole self had been dismantled and dispersed; the ground that it had sunk into was upturned and fresh, looking richly brown and full of worms that were now dead. Further, the air became minutely clearer, and the white glisten of ice was visible across the way. Seshu had erected a layer of frozen fortitude to protect himself and Cassy, just as expected, and it held firm—Mamban wouldn't have knowingly risked their lives, even with how insane his 'test' had turned out to be.

Mamban's pleasure was so monumental that he was trembling from ankle to fingertip, his mask the only piece of himself that wasn't moving. He had bested Susumu's barrier with his own raw power; it was the achievement that would define the rest of his existence. He didn't care how long it took, how many bones he left behind when he finally wasted away—he was ready to go to hell with that single gold star pasted onto his record. As the brown torrent in the air began to thin and resettle, the absolute cratering of the area was revealed. Much of the Truth Village had been annihilated by the single thrust of its greatest enemy's fist.

Much to the destroyer's dismay, however, the brown tint in the air had been hiding the disappointing details across the field—there were thick domes of wood and earth erected around where the crowd had been ducking. Tenzo and Akemi had been fast enough to avert a total massacre, but they had not saved everyone—a few bodies were seen impaled over tree branches or bent awkwardly between fallen buildings. Most were in black robes, Mamban's expendable soldiers, but a few were in plain vests as part of the Truth's military.

Tenzo was sprawled out on all fours, arms spread as far as they could reach and slammed deep into the dirt; though the ground had been fully shaken and upheaved, his wooden domes were rooted far into the earth until they found bedrock and had taken aggressive root within. In front, he could only see the damp interior of the half-sphere, and behind him there was a conical streak of unblemished ground. He had made the largest defense he could summon up, encompassing all of the villagers that were beside him. Once the noise had settled, he tentatively lowered the individual strips of heavy lumber that kneaded together to form the thick blockade. He coughed as dust found its way into his lungs, but he didn't let the fit distract his attention—his eyes stung in the particle-dense atmosphere, but he kept them open. He re-adjusted the orientation of his faceplate, pulling his chin-cover up a bit further to keep his skin protected from minor annoyances.

"Akemi! Rika!" Tenzo called for them both; he had lost sight of them when the barrier broke, but he had seen them run off to cover where his wood couldn't reach just before the impact hit. No doubt they were heading off to try to save the ones who had been out of his rach. He saw the carnage over his shoulder, trees decorated with a few corpses like a string of cheap, faulty holiday lights. He clenched his teeth and fists, getting rid of his shellshock with tight shakes of his head and focusing on the sounds that were coming into equilibrium around him. He hadn't even heard himself speak, but as the ringing subsided he could hear the rustling of survivors around him. Even though he had shielded many with his dome, they were seemingly still knocked unconscious by the flurry of sound and the vacuum of air pressure that formed behind them as wind surged through.

"Tenzo!" Akemi yelled out, her hand clutching Rika's and leading her through the warped terrain. "Are you alright!? Is Kaine alright!?" she plead for an answer but only received silence. She had erected a thick wall of earth to protect the other half of the crowd, the half that Tenzo wasn't able to conceal. He had asked for her help, and she gave it, but it cost her a lot of chakra to provide enough coverage, and on top of that her walls were not as durable as Tenzo's wood. Though she deflected the worst of the blast, her earth eventually crumbled and she was sent back with Rika in her arms to smack into a tree. She didn't know where she was, anymore—she looked around, but the village was hardly a village at all. Remnants of homes and trees were all she could make out.

It was all too familiar. War had come for her again, but that time she thought she was ready. As she unwillingly drank up the taste of death and fear, she fell down to her knees and clutched at the dirt. Rika was wobbly at her side, disoriented by the pain of being thrown away by the blast, and then she fell down as well, onto her back with her arms clutching her stomach. Rika's black curls had almost gone straight beneath the oppressive weight of the air, and its color was brought closer to brown as she was a surface for dirt to settle upon.

Though Rika didn't feel any pain, she felt a wetness at her stomach and raised her hand with squinted eyes to see what it was. Fresh red blood was lining her fingers, and she looked in shock to where the sticky warmth had come from. She screeched without meaning to, seeing a dark splotch on her brown used-to-be dress, feeling around for an opening in herself. She didn't find one; Akemi had protected her from the worst of it. Baffled, then, she looked up to spot a robed body dangling high over her head and dripping its freshly-spilled essence down upon her. She didn't like that very much, either, closing her eyes and whimpering.

Akemi was still coming to terms with what had happened. She heard Rika's screech but knew for sure that the other girl wasn't hurt—she knew it because she was the one who was hurt. There were a few sharp splinters jammed into her outer thigh and her lower back. They sank an inch or two into flesh, dangerous wounds if left unattended, but she wasn't willing to quit the fight and run away, even though every instinct she could still hear was trying to coerce her into doing just that. When she regained all her senses, her sight included, she blinked and rubbed her eyes to clear them of gunk and then wriggled her hands to shake the loose gravel out of her fingerless gloves.

"You're fine, Rika," Aki told the terrified girl in a daze, reaching her hand over to clutch Rika's shoulder and turn her out of the flow of blood—the rookie had been too frozen with fear and shock to do it herself. "You're fine; and you're gonna be fine...remember what I promised." She ran fingers through her own hair, clearing it just as she cleared her gloves, then she secured her Leaf headband in place. The Village Hidden by Truth wasn't exactly her village any longer, officially, but it was her home for as long as she could remember and the last thing she wanted to see was its total devastation. She wanted to blame Tenzo, or Kakashi, or Kaine, or Minoru for the damage, but it was Mamban's actions alone. That much, at least, she knew for sure.

There was no avoiding the ultimate outcome. Their innocent little mission to capture Susumu and bring him back to the Leaf in a quick snatch-and-grab had gone up in smoke the very moment that Kaine did whatever dumb thing he had done to find himself locked in a barrier with Susumu Hyuga in a fight to the 'death.' She wondered morbidly if the fight had turned out to be a draw, thanks to Mamban's unscheduled interference. Would that make her the leader of the ruined village, per Susumu's final wishes? She didn't want that kind of responsibility. It was difficult enough to bear the weight of her promise. Feeling around her back, she began plucking out the slender splinters that were pinching between flesh and digging into muscle.

"You saved me, Aki," Rika acknowledge, coughing up a mouthful of dirt that she didn't know she had been chewing on. She beat her chest with a balled fist and fought to bring herself up to her feet again before falling back onto her rump instead. "What happened...where are we?"

"The village, Rika...it's gone. Right now, we're by the hospital, I think—I mean, we're where it used to be," Akemi replied, shaking her head and clearing her traumatic memories. She was thinking of her old home and comparing it to the ruins it had become, but rather than think of the buildings and the death, she thought of Rika, the person who needed her in that living, breathing moment. "Let's get back to the field...Tenzo's probably still there with Mamban."

"R-right," Rika staggered, climbing up with the help of a dangling branch. Just as she got on her feet, the twig snapped off and crumbled away in her vice-grip. Her knuckles were white and she felt like she had been hit by a rolling boulder, but she otherwise felt fine. "Do you think Kaine's okay?"

Akemi didn't want to say what was on her mind—of course he wasn't okay—so she answered in a kind way that avoided the certainty she had in her cynical head. "He's Kaine Hamasaki; he survives everything."

Tenzo could see more clearly and finally had his bearings again. The hills that used to surround the training field were turned into a deep bowl with evenly graded slopes all around; the whole area that had been a flat plain was then a crater that dipped lower as it got closer to the epicenter. Akemi and Rika weren't responding, Medo was knocked out but breathing, and various other unrecognized faces were immobile. "Damn it!" Tenzo raged, hearing himself echo off of the gentle slopes. He knew that his indecision would cost them all, but he also knew that none of his quick plans would have been enough to stop the events from happening. He could have delayed them for precious seconds, perhaps, but the barrier was going to break. Tenzo freed himself from guilt, focusing instead on the present like a shinobi was often forced to do: "Is anybody still awake out here?" he surveyed in a firm voice.

"Just me," came the mocking abrasiveness of a man who was regrettably familiar. "You remember, right?" he followed up, stepping into vision through the foggy air. As layers continued to settle, more fell from higher in the sky.

"Seshu, wasn't it?" Tenzo gave the courtesy of a response, not knowing exactly how the other man had survived, but knowing already that his sparkling, icy hair had been part of the crowd. "How did you survive?"

"The short version of the story is that you can't kill ice," Seshu said with a cryptic smirk, looking off to his left where the majority of the blast had emerged from. "I guess I'm not surprised that you managed to stay alive after all that, but I've gotta admit that I'm impressed that you haven't even got a scratch on you."

"You haven't got any either, though, isn't that right?" Tenzo asked back, reaching to his hip and hoping he was distracting his unwanted conversation mate well enough. "You're a mystery, Seshu; why would a guy like you go rogue?"

Seshu shrugged, brushing off his shoulder. "Yeah, well, my ice is about as hard to crack as your wood," said the threatening man with the black streaks along his cheek that sank down past the neckline of his robe. "But you ask why I'd go rogue? What about me would lead you to think I wouldn't go rogue, Kinoe?"

"You've got power that others will want...others like Mamban, in fact." Tenzo gave a glance over, seeing the outline of the cause of the decimation. The man in the small red mask was flexing his right hand, a limb that obviously did not belong to him, initially. Tenzo had seen the original right arm ripped away by Kakashi's eye power. "I'm surprised you've still got all your parts with a madman like him breathing down your neck...and what about the girl? Who are you two to him; what makes you so damned willing to lay your lives in the line for a maniac?"

Seshu shrugged, waving a hand over his shoulder as he turned to walk past Tenzo and get away from the sprinkling earth. "Come with me, and I'll tell you all about it...this place is feeling a bit gloomy all of a sudden, don't you think?"

Tenzo had little choice but to follow; he wouldn't allow himself to risk letting a dangerous guy like Seshu roam free in the low visibility. If he ever got out of sight, he would likely come back to strike at a rather inopportune moment. With Mamban seemingly lost on some whimsical train of thought, there was a breather between conflicts. "Are you looking to settle the score between us?" Tenzo asked, wanting to keep the other one talking.

"That's right. I owe you a pierced heart, at least." Seshu wasn't looking back, his hands closed together at the base of the rear of his neck and the sleeves of his arms draped down as if to meaningfully disrupt his vision. He was taunting his passenger into attacking; did he have something to prove? Whether it was a trap or not, Tenzo chose to spring it by fishing out the explosive tag that he had been thumbing since the white-headed menace showed himself. It was flung expertly, sailing through the air and catching aflame as it left Tenzo's skilled hand. He leaped back to create some distance between himself and the expected explosion, but it never came.

The tag had gotten close to Seshu and instantly frozen over, slowed to a stop and then falling to the dirt to collapse into a dozen equally-sized pieces. "Come on, you know that's not gonna work, right?" He sounded bored, actually, like he was just passing time. He turned to kneel over and pick up one piece of the tag, crunching it between his thumb and forefinger until it fell into even smaller bits of pure, clear ice. The paper had ceased to exist, turning into water as it melted against the hot dirt. "I'd expect a bit more creativity from you, Kinoe."

Tenzo had indeed known that it wouldn't work, but it was worth an attempt. He had plenty of bombs in his pouches, after all. "As long as we're being candid, I was hoping for your freezing aura to be down." He looked down to his hand, remembering the sensation of cold that had sunken into him during their previous encounter. He wasn't looking forward to feeling that again. "Where are we headed?"

Seshu shrugged again, moseying around in a broad circle, "I don't know yet, I'm not in any hurry to finish you off this time. I wanted you dead so I could move on to Kakashi, before, so I might've gotten hasty. Now that you're on my turf and there's nothing you can do to hurt me, I've got nothing but time. Go ahead, throw everything you've got at me; I can take it, I promise. Do your water trick again."

Tenzo narrowed his eyes suspiciously. He didn't like the sound of being encouraged to utilize his previous ace; the battle would have been Seshu's to win if not for the lucky side-effect of trapping himself in ice if he ever went for a swim. "If you're just going to lead me in circles, I should be getting back to Mamban...he's not the kind of man who should be left unattended, is he?" Tenzo turned to move away quickly, deciding that Seshu could wait after all. In a flash of movement, Tenzo blurred the world around himself with raw speed, wanting to create some distance—but Seshu wound up in front of his line of sight with an open, gloved palm ready to catch his face.

Tenzo stopped in an instant, one foot skidding through the fresh, moist soil as he tried to halt his momentum, taking a rolling dive backward to keep himself out of range of his enemy. "Not going to let me pass, then? That's a shame."

"Yeah, well...with Goda gone, Cassy wants me to make you and Kakashi into frozen sculptures so you can decorate his grave site." Seshu sighed like he had a regret. "I promised her I'd get it done, and you know how it is with women and promises: if I don't deliver, she's gonna eat my heart...and that might sound like an exaggeration, but Cassy's a special kind of thing. It's only fair either way; I do kind of owe my heart to her, since she's the one who sewed it back together after you ruined it."

"She's some kind of surgeon, then? I've never met her, only heard the story of how Kaine gave her a bit of singed hair." Tenzo put his hands together before he even finished talking, kneading his chakra into water and having it rise up at Seshu's feet from under the steaming earth; the heat of the explosion was slowly fading, but the water was still very nearly boiling after Tenzo forced his chakra through the earth to form an impromptu river. Seshu's feet were caught in the water, and Tenzo hadn't seen the enemy use his seal to undo the icy aura, so he had assumed it was a clean catch.

Seshu sighed with boredom again, feet deeply wading through the muddy water beneath him as he took a few casual steps closer to Tenzo. "Well, looks like I'm not going to fall for that one, this time. So, what's your plan? Going to surrender and make this easier on both of us, Kinoe?" Despite the water at his feet remaining hot and liquified, Seshu's fingers had ice forming around their tips when he reached across the gap between himself and Tenzo, taking advantage of the latter's surprise to get a grip on his vest collar.

Ice began to creep across the green flak jacket, and Tenzo acted quickly to grab a kunai from his hip pouch and slice into the material of the vest, severing it and tearing himself out of the freezing encasement. He took another hop backward, his feet balancing easily on the jagged terrain. He watched as his vest crumbled the same way as his explosive tag a moment before in Seshu's hand. Still, the water at the iceman's feet was unfrozen. Tenzo realized that he was at a disadvantage: So he's figured out a way to control the range and focus of his freezing aura...that's not good for me. That curse mark is going to keep giving him chakra, and anything I throw at him is just going to be turned to ice.

"You're awfully quiet," Seshu taunted, reaching his hand into the water at his feet and flexing his fingers around the liquid. A segment of the dirty moisture turned to ice but the surrounding area remained warm as he pulled out a new weapon, brown and mucky. He spun it around his neck and over his shoulders, getting used to the new tool's weight. "Want me to end it quick, or is it alright if I play around for a while?"

Tenzo hardened his expression, putting his hands together and producing a spear for himself. He certainly wasn't going to go down without a fight. "No matter what you decide, I'm not the one who's going down today." Tenzo skipped the theatrics, holding his weapon out with its sharpened point facing his frozen, pupil-less rival. "Really, you had no business getting back up in the first place...I'm surprised that you were brave enough to pick another fight with me so soon after how our last meeting ended."

"Without your water shenanigans, what have you got to show me, Kinoe? Your wood is full of water, so I can freeze it like nothing...you'd be better off using something made of steel...oh, but you didn't bring any steel, did you? I take it that you were afraid of Susumu's pitiful Magnet Release, so you left it at home, yeah?" Seshu took a swift testing jab at Tenzo with his weapon, but the tip of his icy pike was knocked away without much difficulty. "So, what'll it be? Am I gonna stab you in the heart as payback, or am I gonna freeze you without any holes so Cassy is more impre—"

As Seshu was gloating, Tenzo was acting—a huge tremor shook the crumpled earth and a massive slab of it rose on both sides of the intended victim. The slabs crammed together with mighty speed, faster than it could be frozen thanks to the lingering heat of the exploding barrier a few dozen yards from where they stood. Whatever Seshu had been saying, he didn't get to finish his thought, as the heavy earth—several tons of it on each side—sandwiched him snugly in place. "I think we'll play a bit of hide and seek," Tenzo said, weaving a single sign and bringing up fresh wood to tightly bind the earthen shell, clamping it down tightly. It won't be enough to kill him, but it will buy me some time, Tenzo thought as he weaved one more layer to the prison and turned on his heels to run with nimble footing, deciding not to head toward Mamban after all, instead finding a good place of uprooted earth to tuck himself away and hope for a chance to make a surprise attack against Seshu when he inevitably emerged in a rage. I just need to generate enough heat to slow his freezing down...

Susumu's eyes shot open, and he looked to his immediate right to find Kaine Hamasaki lying unconscious there beside him. They were both in the center of the blast, but the barrier's design was special—it was the same as the one that had initially been intended to protect the village itself, so inherent in its design was a failsafe that directed the energy outward rather than inward in the event of instability.

He hadn't expected Mamban to shatter its structure so conclusively, but as it happened, he dove onto Kaine to tip him over and keep his head down. It wasn't enough; the air pressure within the barrier was still sufficient to knock the wind out of somebody who didn't happen to have the fortitude of a curse mark. It may have been odd that the loser of their 'battle to the death' proved to be the first one to stand, but the Hyuga clutched his throbbing skull and felt blood running down his unprotected forehead when he tasted dusty air higher above the ground level.

"It's all gone," Susumu murmured to himself as he activated his Byakugan. His vision expanded from the base of his nose, swelling out in every direction to encompass the whole radius of his village. He could see the trees along its very outskirts, the trunks marked with the word 'truth' now standing as perhaps the only testament to the village's compromised existence. Most if not all of the homes and storehouses had been turned to rubble beneath the vortex of the eruption.

The obliteration wasn't only due to his barrier's destruction; the sheer enormity of Mamban's single punch amplified the recoil five fold and projected what could have been a minor burst into a full-blown village-breaker. If the two of them had chosen to work together again, it may have proven to be a potent combination attack against their enemies, but it would never be so. The man named Minoru would have certainly used the recent discovery to his advantage, but Minoru as a persona had vanished even more quickly than he had initially appeared. Susumu looked to his own grown-up body with mild disbelief. Flexing his own hands, seeing through his own eyes, he felt like he was waking up from a long nap. He had missed so many years, all spent wasting away in a dark metal chamber, wallowing in his losses and guilt.

"The village is gone, Mamban," Susumu mumbled, standing in a patch of largely-undisturbed earth at the new center of his ruined territory. His newly christened worst enemy was standing where he had been standing when the punch was delivered. "You've destroyed it all; you have ended lives and hopes, dispelled dreams and imprisoned ambitions," Susumu seethed, his canines showing ferociously when he scowled in Mamban's direction.

"Lighten up, Susumu; you've been doing the same thing for over a decade, I only did it faster!" Mamban replied with an easy giggle, childish as ever despite his enormous leap in power. "Oh, what a mess you made of things," the red mask unflinchingly spoke. "But it's alright; I've finally come to claim what should always have been mine."

Susumu was strong on his feet despite being rammed into the dirt and stabbed through the chest. His wounds were healing with the help of his cursed chakra and natural skill with the Yin element. His tissue repaired itself more quickly than average on its own, but when focused he could approach legitimate levels of standing regeneration. "You don't deserve to live, Mamban," the Hyuga pronounced openly, surrounded on all sides by appropriated soldiers wearing unified white masks and dark robes. "You and all of your puppets will ultimately die in the carcass of this village..."

Mamban chortled, rolling his shoulders back and turning the eye-slits of his mask toward the sky to enjoy the unnaturally clear blue. The clouds had retreated and seemingly refused to return, fearful of what might happen if they did. "You couldn't even defeat the Hamasaki boy, Susumu; I was certainly expecting you to emerge with a victory...if I had laid down a bet on that match, I would have lost all my life's savings."

"And how do you measure those savings? Do you count the living souls you've enslaved, or the lifeless bodies you've left behind on your path?" Susumu challenged his counterpart, turning and raising his hands as if ready to pick a fresh fight using a worn body. He was breathing heavily but he stood himself between Mamban and Kaine, leaving his unconscious successor protected with his own ragged body. "Leave the survivors out of this...surely you'd rather take me, and only me."

Mamban clapped his hands, one gloved and one not, creating a leathery slap against living flesh. "Since when did you turn all selfless again, Susumu? This isn't the person you told me you had become...goodness, your heart is so fickle! It bounces left and right and up and down, diagonal and curved, you don't even know your own soul any longer!" Mamban flexed his right arm, its corded muscles pressing against elastic skin. "I, however, feel perfectly clear...I am my own soul, I am Goda's soul, I am the soul of Sava, of Lakio, of all the victims left behind by your cowardly escape...but do not worry, Susumu Hyuga the Despicable Traitor! I will obtain your soul and add it to my collection; we will be as one again, and you will have your chance to apologize to those whom you've wronged..."

Susumu shook his head violently to the side, his hair thrashing in the gentle breeze of the day. "You don't understand the evils you've committed, the mistakes you've made...we are both monsters in the dark, whispers on the wind, legends to be buried and forgotten. We are stories told to children; beasts of lore that will be erased as the young world grows into maturity. When peace becomes reality, we will have vanished forever. And so I ask you, Mamban...wouldn't you rather die in peace than dissolve in futile agony?"

"There's no such thing as a peaceful death for any of us anymore, Susumu. You've personally made peace impossible...you've brought the Leaf here through your agent, Kaine Hamasaki! He's the one to blame for my presence here, as well...The marvelous Lord Danzo Shimura discovered that he was alive, subtly called him back to the Leaf, tried to suck him back into the folds of Root...but you were there to dispel the influence exerted upon the little jerk. It was that moment of lost control that sparked the lord's memory! Lord Danzo's genjutsu is no laughing matter; to have it removed from his pawns is a grievous sin and an impossible task...except for a user of sacred eyes! In time and with perhaps a bit of intel from me, he remembered the Hyuga boy from the old days, the one presumed dead for over a decade...he put the pieces together quickly; he arranged for my team to be the first arrivals in this region...and for Kakashi and Kinoe to be sent as an independent team shortly after. You see, my dearest friend Susumu, this is all a part of Lord Danzo's grand scheming."

Susumu squinted, keeping his blessed eyes open and expansive, watching closely for ambushes. Some of his own people were awakening behind him, courtesy of Tenzo and Akemi's split-second protection. "Danzo Shimura's grand scheming, you say?"

Mamban nodded his mask. "That's right; you get it now! He wanted you all, and the four of us were to be his instruments—Mamban, Goda, Seshu, Cassy! A dynamic unit gifted with unique powers from our Lord's bosom buddy Orochimaru! So simple, so elegant...all a setup, all for the sake of retrieving Kakashi's Sharingan, Kinoe's genes, and your Byakugan in a single, well-placed move...all for the glory of Root, for the glory of Lord Danzo! It was an impeccable plan until I realized one simple fact..."

"Oh, do enlighten me..." Susumu said through bared fangs. He wasn't any happier to hear the other man's voice by the end of his exposition. "What's this simple fact?"

"The most important fact: we don't need Lord Danzo's involvement to carry out the plan we had been made a part of. His confinement to the Leaf prevented him from overseeing us directly. His scouts and messengers were mysteriously slain in transit, though I made good use of them as a part of my growing army. I never took care to learn the names of my disposable minions, but I'm quite sure that you would recognize a handful of them from your days amongst the Leaf, yourself. I must admit that my marks are not as pristine as Orochimaru's work, but they are enough to instill a certain sense of...submission. I had wanted to put you in my collection, Susumu, but my mark would not overcome the one you already bear. Unfortunate; you would make a lovely living trophy...but no matter, a mounted head is as good a prize as anything." Mamban snapped his gloved fingers, and Cassy dutifully dropped to the ground at his side, her maskless face grinning and her eyes half-closed with a seductive interest.

"You called, Master Mamban?" Cassy purred, looking up at him from a slanted position, legs spread slightly and one hand dipped forward to touch her fingers to the ground. Her back was arched forward in a way that accentuated the slope of her rear, as if she couldn't resist the urge to present herself in alluring ways. "Has Kakashi arrived yet?"

Mamban shook his head. "No, he's not here...play with Susumu and his brat in the mean time. I have a few escaped trophies I need to re-wrangle..." Rather abruptly, Mamban left, and Susumu made an attempt to follow behind him but was stopped by the lashing of three chakra threads. They were curled toward his neck, trying to choke him, but his Byakugan gave him clear vision of their path and their nature. With his hands layered with chakra, he swatted the prehensile strands away from him and severed their bonds at the halfway point.

"Cassy, you've done something rather brilliant..." Susumu couldn't help but compliment her creativity as his hands rose up with wind chakra coating his fingers, smacking away the strings. They had a peculiar color to them; the typical threads used by the Hidden Sand's puppeteers were blue, but Cassy's threads had a strange greenish tint to them; it was the color of her personal chakra, the element she held strongest. "You've created your threads out of the wind element to give them a slicing force. I wonder, have you ever had any puppets of your own, or are your weapons merely the strings themselves?"

Cassy turned her shoulder to the side, canting her head back and smirking. Her pointed chin led up to the rest of her face, lips puffed out and nose sharply angled. "I'll make you my puppet, sweetheart," she said with genuine affection. "It's been too long since we've really talked...I've missed you for so many years...have you found somebody else, or will I always be your girl?"

Susumu scoffed, turning his scowl into an aggressive grin, seeking to shatter the woman's delusion. "You were always his infatuation, not mine...your silly games cannot deter me. Think hard before you answer this question, but: will you truly try to stop me from pursuing Mamban?"

"It's all I'm here for...'sides, you and me have a little bit of a score to settle. It's been a long time, but you left us all behind to die in that prison up the hill from here...and even though I lived, I'm still pissed about it...so we're gonna go ahead and have a nice, long chat about our futures together..." Cassy made a sly approach, one foot in front of the other on high-heeled boots, navigating the only flat terrain for a mile with a steamy walk. "Earlier, I had my eye on the brat, but if you're on the menu, too, then I say 'yes, please, I'll have some of that'..."

"Rethink your position, Cassy...you're following a madman into the mouth of hell. I'll send you through the gates, myself, if I must...but I'm begging you not to force my hand." Susumu's voice was even and his stance was statue-still, but on the inside he could feel himself burning. Though he had not gone completely all-out against Kaine, he had still taken an honest beating and been stabbed through his chest all the same. "Tell me the truth...are you willing to die with him? Not for him, but with him? He has been on borrowed time since he grafted that arm to his body, and I know that you must have realized that before you helped him..."

Cassy bit her lower lip, the playfulness softening into concern as she turned her head and lifted a hand to brush the bangs out of her eyes. They had grown a little too long, and the black tips were falling into the corners of her vision more often than she liked. When she talked that time, she didn't have the coy, sultry murmur, but a small, childish voice like a daughter fearing for her father: "I tried to tell him, Susumu, but he didn't care...I don't think he's on the same wavelength as the rest of us anymore, you know? But it doesn't matter to me—I do what he wants me to do because I owe him my life, and yes...yes, I will die with him, because it's the only choice I have. Don't you get it? We betrayed Danzo Shimura; we've been acting on our own for weeks. I want to die here so I don't have to die there..." Cassy shivered as she thought of the things that would be done to her if she was captured. "But, no offense to you, I want to die at Kakashi's hands instead of yours..."

"I'm afraid you won't be given such a luxury...Come at me, and I will put you to rest like the proper warrior you have become..." Susumu's eyes allowed him to see in every direction, but his focus was upon the young woman standing in front of him. She was shaken; he could see it as she trembled beneath her form-fitting robe. Subtle twitches, little palpitations in her heart; she was terrified, but it wasn't a fear of fighting; rather, it was a fear of losing something precious—something like Mamban was to her. "I am sorry for everything that has happened, Cassy, but I cannot let you stand in my way. He is going to hurt more people who matter to me."

Cassy sighed, rubbing her hand along her forehead and then over her eyes, wiping away a tear that must have formed because of the lingering pollutants in the air. "Yeah, well...Mamban matters to me more than anybody does, so I'll do what it takes to see that his life goes how he wants it to go. I'll stand here in your way while he runs off to play with his new girls. He's a beautiful creature with a will of his own and a poetic sense of wonder about this pathetic rock we dwell upon..."

"You've been misguided for so long, Cassy; I know the feeling of being lost...but do you feel lost, yet?" Susumu extended a hand toward her, open palmed and fingers curled in an invitation. "We both know that Mamban is gone forever; he is never again going to be who he once was, but you can still be retrieved from this pit you've stumbled into...as can Seshu. Come to me, take my hand...together, we can find you again."

"I'm already me, Susumu...if you don't like it, then let's just get this over with..." Cassy shivered regretfully as she threw her arms out to either side and spread all her fingers apart, a string sprouting out of the tip of every single digit. "Don't you dare underestimate me, either...I won't hesitate to cut you apart just because you saved me once."

Mamban found them quickly, thanks to his network of unfeeling informants perched through the trees and fulfilling their duties unflinchingly. They were like the little birds that were always blamed for spreading secrets. "Ahh, there you are!" Mamban called out with a bold wave of his arm. "I've been looking everywhere for the two of you..."

Akemi turned first, Rika second, and their eyes grew wide together and in unison. They each felt a peculiar burning sensation kicking in at their necks, a reminder of the pinkish scars that bound them together and signified their second chances at life. Akemi took Rika by the shoulder and pushed her back and behind; she barked out an order. "Run, Rika. Run out of this place and don't stop until you've gotten yourself home."

"No!" Rika countered, stomping her foot to the ground. "You promised that we'd both survive, so don't you even think about trying to sacrifice yourself to give me time to run like a coward!"

Akemi reached her hand up and grabbed Rika by the thick curls, pulling her into a firm kiss upon the lips, then broke away and gave a hard stare to punctuate it. "It's not a request, Rika. Either you run, or I throw you away from here with my own hands...Don't argue with me on this, alright?"

Rika wasn't budging. "I thought you knew me better than that...you aren't going to be able convince me that it's alright to leave you by yourself..."

Akemi gave a frustrated huff, palming her face and scratching down the side of her left cheek. "Gah, damn it Rika...you're so difficult sometimes." She sounded irritated, but she was relieved in an odd way. She wanted Rika to be safe, but also wanted her to be nearby. "Just try not to get hurt too badly, or Kaine's going to give me a bunch of grief over letting his little girlfriend's sister break a nail..." she winked over her shoulder, but she didn't turn far enough to let Mamban out of her sight. She knew better than to give him any chances.

Mamban yawned from the side. "Well, now, this is awkward...should I come back later?" he gestured over his shoulder with a pointed thumb, then snickered to himself. "On second thought, I think this is a very good time...Come here, children, and help me put something to the test..." Mamban was beginning to step gracefully in a trapezoid pattern, drawing a solid line with his footprints as he twirled and skidded along the dirt in his spontaneous dance. He snapped his fingers with a resounding crack, much louder than it should have been, and the trees began to rustle violently with movement.

Rika blinked, and by the time her eyes were opened again, the bare branches of the trees that had survived the obliteration were lined with Mamban's obedient soldiers. Their leader clapped his hands together, tossing out a sing-songy command: "Get them for me, my pets; add them to my reservoir!" At the end of his clap, and after a single moment of utter silence, more than a dozen of the soldiers pounced toward the surrounded pair of newly-appointed Leaf Genin below.

Next chapter coming soon!