Damisan watched over the unconscious body of his friend. It hadn't been so long ago that Skaven did him one of the greatest solids that anyone had ever done for him. Few experiences felt as crippling as being so confident in one's skill, smart enough to outplay a lousy fate that robbed Damisan of his limbs his skin only to see that all of his skills amounted to nothing with his friend sleeping peacefully in front of him.
This serenity was a farce. Skaven didn't react to Damisan's voice. Nor did he pick up on anything else. The medical ninja insisted that he's going to be just fine and will recover in time though they were just as eager to let him because Skaven didn't feel the injections from the medicine they administered or the torment of the medical ninja shifting his bones back into place underneath his skin and his flesh.
"Hey…" a voice reached Damisan from behind him. It was a familiar, strong, though still on the range of feminine vocal tones, call. With metallic thuds, Damisan turned around and flashed the appearance of a metallic mask covering over his head like a mask. The puppeteer hadn't figured out how best to attach a poster to this facial accessory so he just had a paint job of a daisy done over the front. Both Shige-H and Mana told him it sort of killed the cool tone of his skull-like mask.
"Leader!" Damisan stiffened, clicking his heels together and forcing his prosthetics to drag and rub against the floor with a metallic shriek. "I thought you were training with Mana."
"I was. Teaching an Advanced Bloodline is a slow process. It won't come immediately, it may not come to her at all. Then again, Mana is talented, certainly deserving the title of the best, amongst the select few…" Shige-H rubbed her chin.
"Leader… Did you come here to check in on Skaven?" Damisan wondered.
"What? No. The medical ninja said that his condition won't change, isn't that right? There's no use in just standing here drooling over his unconscious body. He'll come back to his senses when he does." Shige-H waved her hand away at the static body of her comrade.
"Did everything go well with the training? You're acting a bit… Strange…" Damisan leaned his head to the side.
"The training went fine. I expected slow progress all along. Mana will do fine with the few pointers I left her with. She should just work them out by herself. I've been meaning to talk and train with you today, Damisan." Shige-H looked up right at the hardened white plastic concealing Damisan's surprised eyes that laid underneath the skull mask of steel.
"Me?" Damisan pointed to himself with his mechanical index. The self-puppeteering ninja did a remarkable job rebuilding his artificial limbs as his finger and his joints let out a pleasant hum when they bent. "That's such a strange request…"
"Strange? How so?" the leader of Stars bent her head to the side as well, putting her ally on the spot like that. "We're crewmates, there's nothing unusual in us training together. We've done so many times all throughout the past six months. Granted, this wouldn't be like those team-building exercises, this'd be a more… Personal time for us."
"P-Personal…? I'm not sure you're aware of it, leader… But… You're kind of sending me mixed signals here and you're lucky I get what you mean because that's one thing you're not allowed to be confusing on…" Damisan rubbed his prosthetic fingers on the pristine mask he donned instead of the old and dangling cylinder that used to get stolen and held hostage against him all the time. This was the reason he substituted it in the first place.
"I'm sorry, I just figured you'd be… You know… Happy to be included. Either way, calling me leader all the time sounds like a mouthful, doesn't it? You can call me just Shige." Shige-H pointed to herself with a thumb while gleefully turning her mouth upward and showing off her pearly whites.
"Eh… But I thought that shortening one's name is reserved for very special and close relationships for Kumogakure ninja…" Damisan rubbed the back of his head, pulling back his hood by a decent chunk and revealing more and more of the polished craftsmanship caging his disfigured face.
"Oh…? Aren't we just that type of close friends, though? We've known each other and have been saving each other's lives for over six months now. How much closer can people get?" Shige-H crossed her arms, putting Damisan on the spot again with a squinting expression. The prosthetically enhanced ninja shook his arms out in front of him to pacify the situation, babbling unintelligible excuses.
"S-Sorry, leader… Shige-H… It's just… Sure, I am glad to be included! I'd love to train with you seriously!" Damisan bowed excessively and a whole bevy of times. The upset ninja rushed after his leader as she turned tail and dashed off further away from the big encampment and toward the ruins of the old headquarters building.
"This place… Is it really the best for training? It's all that's left of our old headquarters. Some people still search for memorabilia here every day." Damisan pointed out as he scanned the place and let the stream of memories relating to every remaining quarter of every wing course through him.
"I've been meaning to do this for a little while now, Damisan." Shige-H turned her head down, letting her flashy, dyed curls slip over her face and conceal her eyes while the Kumogakure native made her lips stiffen into a strict pout. "Those prosthetic limbs of yours, they keep getting wrecked every time. They may get us all killed one day, you know."
"Shige-H…" Damisan muttered, slipping his hood off of his mask as he lifted his prosthetic hand to reveal it from under his cloak as he sifted through its various triggers and went through basic pre-battle maintenance with his other prosthetic hand before shifting sides. "Where did this come from?"
"When you first sacrificed your own arms and legs during the War Game, I thought it was crazy-cool. You've got no arms or legs, you're basically as close to a caterpillar-man, a mere writhing worm that we have. But then your stubs just kept on breaking again and again and again and again… At some point–you're just a lousy engineer, you know that?" Shige-H sifted her head nearer to her right shoulder as she beamed a mean-looking grin and blew her eyes out into a psychotic stare from underneath her shifting curls. This looked beyond unnatural on the face of the Stars' leader.
"Who are you?" Damisan raised his arm, tapping his forearm with the left to pop out a collection of belts containing ninja weaponry attached to sensitive triggers that would send it all flying toward his target at his slightest whim or misjudgment of the precision of his movements. "What did you do to Shige-H?"
"Shige-H? Nothing. It's not her turn yet. I've left the toughest challenges for last. Don't sell yourself short though, the fact that I'm challenging you at all means that I consider you to have a stake in being the best. That sort of cred means we've got a score to settle, you know?" the young woman that looked like Shige-H just a moment ago sunk into a cloud of murky dust after a loud popping noise. What appeared right after the dust settled was a dapper gentleman with shoulder-length tiger-shade hair and chops of matching color. The mysterious man struck a flashy pose with a walking cane in hand before rolling it about masterfully and pointing it at Damisan as a challenge.
"A score? I don't remember meeting you once in my life. Though I suspect you had something to do with Skaven's injury, didn't you?" Damisan's voice became bitterer with each word he offered.
"That's right, Skaven was another challenge. Now it's your turn and declining isn't an option. We're going to settle this here and now. Which one of us is the best. You better fight me seriously though, or else you'll make me really pissed. Might not measure my shots right when I get pissed and overdo it a bit as I overdid it with Skaven, I'll admit." The man shrugged and parted his hands with a guilty smile.
"Oh, don't worry about that…" Damisan muttered as he unleashed a flurry of blades homing in on the challenger's location. With bountiful, dance-like dashes backward, the dapper gent bounced away from harm while smacking the rushing blade flurries aside with his cane that lit up with an adamant chakra coating. "As if I'd ever hold back against the scum that beat up my friend!"
"Good. I'm glad we're on the same page here…" the gambler rolled his white hat down to his hand and flung it away with a light pant. Evading and deflecting Damisan's opening move gave him more trouble than he'd care to admit to.
Without further warning, the challenger dashed onward with his cane-wielding arm dragged back to such a drastic extent that it seemed like his shoulder should have popped out of the socket to position his arm that way. The enigmatic man was either that nimble or had tolerance for painful strains to match his thirst for violence and competition. The dandy thrust his cane in between Damisan's blocking arms, sending the self-puppeteering ninja dragging back across the old headquarters yard.
When Damisan next tilted his head up and emerged from his cross-armed blocking stance, his opponent was all over in his face again. That was either an extremely lucky guess, or he might have known a bit more about Damisan than he let in on. He already knew a suspicious amount about the inner relationships between Stars members and could fake a quite convincing Stars member before his true, violent nature reared its repulsive head.
The dapper man jumped up, grabbing the back of his cane and swinging it upward as wide as he could. Damisan's head rattled inside of its stalwart steel mask like a yolk, looking to break out, just as his brain rattled inside of his own skull. The man had considerable skill with that thing. A handful more impacts from every direction made Damisan grunt in pain, the rattle to his brain from the first upswing was already enough to leave him all confused so now he couldn't tell where the swings were even coming from, up or down, left or right, even when they whipped him and rattled his bones from within, let alone before they connected. Intercepting these wild swings felt like a wild dream.
The cane-man fixed his silver-colored tie before driving his cane into the ground and expelling a violent pulse of chakra from the other end. The repulsive aftershock sent him soaring high enough to headbutt Damisan and knock him truly flying, while the dapper brawler swung his cane downward, expelling a crescent slash from it that propelled him in pursuit of his target. Damisan caught a few glimpses of his opponent in mid-air, his wild eyes that matched Shige-H's sadistic glare from before, the rich ear-to-ear grin, and the blood-thirst in each move that made the man tremble in excitement with each swing he battered Damisan with.
A skull-splitting crack from the top, twin swings from left and right, then another rising swing from the bottom, going up. The sadist swung so wide and with so much brute force that he flipped his own airborne body from the mere inertia of his own swings. Just as gravity claimed its own share, the man put his arm up and sent a couple of colorful strings slip out from his sleeve and wrap around Damisan. They were just as durable as ordinary hankies tied together, but once a resonance of chakra coating went through them; they hardened tougher than titanium coils. Tougher than rattled Damisan could overcome in the microseconds between when the challenger trapped him and when he swung his airborne target overhead and slammed him into the ground, head-first, feet left twitching in the air.
Damisan tried wriggling himself out. He knew he had to move, but he just wasn't fast enough; the ground shook as the challenger kicked himself off of the ground and rushed at his fallen and embedded into the ground opponent, swinging far and wide and knocking Damisan away like a wild ball after a swing for the home run. Another rope of hankies tied around Damisan's mid-section as the challenger pulled him back in, the crude lash of the neck from the conflicting forces sent Damisan soaring in an arc and his opponent leaped up in the air with an overhead slam of his cane, roaring mad and loud as he once more tested the mettle of Damisan's skull with an attempt to split it.
As rough ground caressed Damisan while he tried getting back up, a myriad of steel-tipped cards littered the surrounding battlefield, shocking the self-puppeteering ninja as everything turned white at once. Those were steel-tipped cards with explosive seals on them, just like the paper tags commonly attached to kunai. That was Mana's method of using those tools. Did this man perchance know of the Konoha's Sorceress or had met her in battle at one time, was his mission to batter and break the Stars was some misguided revenge attempt?
Blood and his own teeth all over Damisan's mouth and there was nowhere he could spit it all out. That was one advantage of having a loosely hanging cylinder over one's head as opposed to a locked shut steel skull mask. His cloak was in tatters. It just got in the way, so Damisan rolled over on his side and tore it off while peeling his bloodied body off the ground, leaving trails of goopy crimson in small puddles after him.
"You can certainly take a nice beating, I don't think Skaven would have kept going after this much pummeling. That much is for sure. Although, he would have never allowed himself to get pummeled that way." The well-dressed gentleman mocked his opponent with taps to the side of his head with his index and middle finger. "Still, despite my dandy appearance and subtle frame, your endurance makes you a man very much after my own style…"
"Your existence… If we hadn't put an end to the delusional quest for justice of Ion's father, it would seem a lot more logical. Just how many people know about our existence, our abilities, and ways to counter them?" Damisan shook his head and smacked the front of his mask, letting a tiny crack in his mask let some of the blood out before it would have become a problem.
"Yeah, the mystery aspect of it all plagued Skaven until the punch that turned his lights out too. I advise you to have some fun and just relax!" the man toyed with his cane before it ended up underneath his sleeve while the man in question bowed with a rich smile. "Surely someone of your appearance has ample steam to let out. Why not use this opportunity to do so?"
"Puppetry Art: Hook Reeling!" Damisan yelled out, extending his prosthetic arm. The hand at the end made a spear-like stiffened formation before an electric impulse passed down the entire prosthetic limb and stiffened it into place. Once the hand shot out, attached to multiple ropes of intertwined steel wire that intertwined against each other, forming a near impossible to tear formation, it was ready to shoot through and hook up anything it met in its path.
"Then again, perhaps it isn't fair comparing you to Skaven solely on your performances… After all, I've become far more accustomed to this fighting style after Skaven's observations during our fight." The challenger scooped Damisan's hand out of thin air after leaning down under it using his cane and hooked it on the other end, pulling his opponent in. Damisan dug his feet into the ground, forcing his joints to reel the steel wire and his hand back in with an automated and unopposable force which made his opponent switch his approach by grabbing hold of his prosthetic arm for just a second before flinging his cane straight at Damisan's face with a deafening thud that forced the cane to bounce off of the solid surface of the mask where the cane-man could salvage it from after he rode the force of the hand's retraction back to the prosthetic.
"This fighting style…?" Damisan shook his head, coughing up in shock of the migraine that the collision with the cane made him go through and the stress his neck went through after the impact to keep his head from pulling off his shoulders alongside the flying cane.
"Again with you and the mystery… Can't you just fight it out and find out who's the best once and for all instead all this wondering and head-scratching?" the dandy challenger smacked the other end of his cane to the ground while grabbing hold of the hooked upper end with both his hands.
"Yeah, no, sorry, finding out who might have beat the crap out of a treasured friend of mine will never leave my mind!" Damisan growled while letting out a burst of chakra flames from the soles of his prosthetic feet that carried him all the way to his opponent in an instant with a tackle. The dapper gent proved to be more slippery than Damisan had predicted him to be, as he rolled aside and hooked Damisan's foot with his cane, flinging the now-weightless ninja overhead and slamming him on the other side.
The slam had knocked the air right out of Damisan's body. The neutered scar tissue that covered his skin could barely relay what terrain he had been laying on. Everything was muddled and blurry, and Damisan's guts felt like they'd almost spill out through his throat and mouth at any second. The rising ninja had to shake his head straight to register that his opponent had been weaving hand seals.
"Lightning Style: Dragon Thunder!" A jolt of lightning left the sparkly aura of radiance that surrounded the enigmatic challenger, it imbued the Dragon hand seal that the man held out in front of him fully, forming a vibrant, electric crackle around it before exploding in a shapeless blast of electrified air.
Author's Notes: Sorry for no chapter on Saturday. I got my vaccine shot on Friday and really didn't feel in a very productive mood the whole day on Saturday. The good news is: it's still two and a half months until my second shot so there shouldn't be any misses in the nearest future, at least until I take a break to work on the 6th Annual!