Damisan braced for impact and erected the wall of his raised forearms in front of the electrified shock wave. He grunted in pain and let the vibrant airwave carry him all the way back, rolling on his back. Trickles and minute semblances of the electric crackles persisted around his arms, suggesting that the prosthetic limbs did a fair job of softening the blow for the man wrapped in his own flesh, as was partly their function.
"I appreciate you trying to show me that things are different," the cocky gentleman strut onward, playing with his cane as he did so. "That you can fight without wrecking your own limbs, but this is looking embarrassing for you. Just break loose, blast your entire body to hell, and don't give a damn. It's part of why I admire you. It is that feature of yours that makes me relate to you so well."
"If you're here to beat me up and feel better about yourself, you're wasting your time with all the talking…" Damisan wiped the light touches of blood on his lip and wrapped his tongue around in his mouth to lick away the revolting taste he felt on the inside. The damp and stuffy feeling, the iron aroma came from within his body and that part wasn't something that was so easy to just swat away.
Seeing his opponent weave an all too familiar bunch of hand seals, itching for another go for the jutsu that sent Damisan flying the first time, just another wave of torment, the self-puppeteering ninja raised his arm up and allowed the plates that symbolized and defined his muscles to unravel in protective rows shaped similarly to flow petal rings. Once the electrical shock wave washed over him again, the expanded, protective layer softened the kick of it, allowing Damisan ample time to set up his own technique.
"Sun Lotus Bloom!" Damisan yelled out with a rough tone, signifying his struggle against the hefty push backward as his spread-out left arm coughed up a fusillade of ninja tools from the open tool belt rings, emptying his entire arm's arsenal at once.
The gent's eyes followed the spark that spat out an entire swarm of ninja tools, though the spread seemed needlessly wide and hectic for this manner of attack to be of any use. That was when a dull thud came out from Damisan's arm, shooting out a round and flat magnetic plate of coarse texture and obsidian black color. As if they had sprung to life, the ninja tools followed the plate, homing in on the surprised challenger.
The man sprung into action, flexing his entire body and putting his agility and acrobatic skill to the test as his pulling and turning limbs stressed his stretched formal attire, tearing it places where the stress was too much as the rain of steel grazed and cut the man forcing him to employ his substantial skill in cane combat as he worked the entirety of his magic on to the rain of cold steel and, despite it being not nearly enough to ward off harm, it allowed the man to remain on both feet after he had weathered the storm of pointy steel.
"Yeah… That's better…" the challenger growled through ache as his tensed body twitched, leaking trickles of red where he had been cut, grazed, and scraped and marked by this combat challenge at long last. "It won't feel like I'm the best if it isn't a fight for my life. It won't feel right!"
The three dashed at each other, Damisan carried by his jet flame-spitting boots while the enemy rode only his own fury, swinging in mid-air as he prepared to whack his cane with full force against the enemy. The two collided with a sonic boom as the aftereffect of the crash sent the dapper challenger skidding away on his back, face perplexed by shock and pain while Damisan pushed on.
With the fiery jets of chakra erupting from the soles of his prosthetic calves and feet once more, Damisan skid across the floor, returning his opponent back on to his feet by force as the prosthetics-using ninja threatened to bulldoze his opponent's legs. With his opponent back on wobbly feet, Damisan whipped his own calves at those of his opponent's, testing the mettle of his prosthetics against flesh, bone, and sinew, and, judging by the grungy cracks, his adamant materials and craftsmanship had prevailed. The self-puppeteer pushed his foot into the face of his dazed opponent, sending him tumbling and turning around while Damisan raised his right arm and allowed it to transform in the meantime.
Damisan's arm cocked and unraveled, switching its appearance from a mere emulation of a fit human arm and becoming something more akin to a bludgeoning mace that vibrated with a satisfying grunge of a jackhammer as Damisan thrust it into his opponent's chest, forcing the red-haired fop to cough up blood and ripping his black shirt and red tie and the ivory vest off with a quick and turbulent shred as the vibrating pulse of the transformed hand hit the enemy head-on.
"Ninja Art: Jackhammer Vibration Drill!" Damisan yelled out as he pulled on the puppetry strings attached to his arm with his teeth to de-transform his tool back into the shape of a human arm as this transformation fit only one purpose only and would have been impractical for further combat.
This was exactly the chance that his opponent needed, however, as the raining thud from above cracked at the steel skull accessory guarding Damisan's head from above. Damisan seemed just as dazed by the brutality of the overhead impact as he was by the toughness of his opponent who just grit this life-altering beat down through and jumped right back at him in the next blink.
A thwack from the side made Damisan hear the grazing of his own teeth from the inside of his mask and a splatter of blood forced its way through the crack in the center that split his mask into two and made it possible to put it on and take it off. Carrying the weight of his entire body, the torn and bare-chested gentleman flipped sideways and backward as he carried his cane upward and flung Damisan into the air with its rising smash.
A pleasant hum reverberated through the cane as the challenger switched holding positions and tossed it up a fair bit, only to catch it at the other end. It would have hurt if used against any ordinary opponent, though less so against Damisan, yet the opponent used the elongated and sharpened hook coating of pure chakra flowing over his cane to hook the opponent's calf by driving his hooked end through it and flinging his airborne and entrapped opponent overhead only to smash him face-first into the ground on the other end.
No matter how much the world around his mask spun around and how uneasy the ground underneath him felt, how difficult it was to tell the up from the down, Damisan moved his arms to where the nearest solid surface was and blew a pulse of chakra out his prosthetic forearms through the open vents, pushing himself back on both legs albeit only to receive a grievous slash from both sides that peeled grazes across both sides of his mask as the chakra coating around the cane of the enemy flowed more vibrantly and became sharper, bright and crackling like a sword.
It was then that it hit Damisan, fighting with a cane that he enhanced with his chakra wasn't the usual fighting style to this person. That being said, it wasn't a weaker fighting style. The man was a swordsman, and he used a cane that he held in one hand as a substitute for a blade using the coating of chakra to emulate the sword that he usually relied on, whether to off-put his opponents or to conceal his true skill set as a swordsman.
With a crescent-moon slash, vaulting backward and over, the cane-totting swordsman swatted Damisan into the air again, bending the body of the handicapped ninja backward from the sheer force of his strike to the bottom of Damisan's chin. The whiplash at the back of his neck made Damisan feel like he'd have lost his head or snapped it if he wasn't as tough as he was. Once again, his opponent hooked Damisan's other leg but this time he didn't use it to slam the self-puppeteering ninja into the ground, merely to glide and position his opponent in a proper position for a home run swing with his cane. Everything went white and Damisan couldn't recall or feel flopping against and through the wreckage of what remained of the Allied Ninja headquarters.
"It seems like you're just about there, ripe for the finishing strokes. What a disappointment…" the mystery man sighed as he grabbed Damisan's skull mask through the hole at the top and peeled the face of his wounded adversary off the ground, taking a moment to marvel at the drooling blood puddle accumulating underneath him. "All this studying, all this preparation, and making sure I faced you recovered after taking on the Nara, a ridiculous waste of time."
Damisan roared, forcing the gargling of blood to clear his throat as he reached out with his hand to grab his challenger's face. It was as if his opponent read Damisan's Sun Lotus Arm like an open book. He thrust his two fingers with a pinch inside of an unraveled opening and into a vent and opened the arm up before pinching with his other arm at the other side and making the arm disassemble into separate lightly battle-worn pieces.
"That's…!" Damisan's gasped in disbelief.
"You seem to have somewhat increased the difficulty in accomplishing this, though the fact you keep an option to disassemble your prosthetics for yourself means that a knowledgeable foe can exploit them too." The enemy taunted Damisan, smashing his mask into the floor and littering it with cracks that brought it dangerously close to breaking it. "This… It can't be… Mana left you catatonic…"
"Oh…? Do you think you've figured out what I am now? That's right. I know everything that makes you lot tick, so taking you guys out one by one is something I can accomplish. Still, it's the best and most worthwhile challenge a man can take up. You should have finished me off when you had the chance, tell your friends that when they pick up your pieces."
With a blinding series of smashes, hammering the head down into the stone and devastated wasteland rock, the bare-chested challenger shattered Damisan's mask, leaving his busted and bleeding true face exposed to the elements. Shock and dread took the poor man over as his eyes whited out and his mouth began gasping for oxygen as a fish pulled out of water.
"Does it feel like a living nightmare? Do you wonder why no one has noticed you getting beat down by their own prisoner in the middle of the day despite the sensory field? Maybe you should have thought about that when you left a master assassin alive to come after you lot and pick you out. Personally. In a way most hurtful to each of you." The ginger gent teased the shaking ninja who was undergoing a mental collapse as he punched Damisan's face a few more times before hitting something solid. Not just solid–adamant. Something so hard that it reverberated throughout the flesh and bone on the inside.
Damisan had caught his punch with his other hand. "Sun Lotus Arm!" he bellowed, detonating it point-blank and sending both men rolling aside near-lifeless.
"Not bad…" the man coughed up as he rolled over and onto his front, trembling from the burns he had suffered and the shrapnel of steel sticking out from his entire body as he pushed himself off the ground. Despite the rather grisly injuries, Damisan had suffered the same blowback from detonating his limb and his challenger knew it about as well as he knew everything else there was to know about the Stars. "See? When you throw caution into the wind and really cut loose. When you don't give a shit about how you look to people around you and embrace the freak of nature that you are–you're more trouble than you're worth even to me and I mean it as the highest sort of praise I can give you."
Shaking from pain and dripping wild with blood, Damisan returned to his feet. A pathetic steel frame of a skeletal stubble on his disassembled arm reeled steel wires that reassembled his scattered hand, showing to the surprised enemy that the puppeteer had worked on countermeasures for this very way in which Rakugi had embarrassed him on the battlefield before.
"That's the brilliant thing with you, brainiacs. You keep on developing, even faster than us brawn-heads." The challenger smirked as he picked up his cane and flung it at Damisan. Damisan swatted the cane aside, feeling the significant shock reverberating throughout his entire body as the man had flung his cane with enough force for it to matter. The cane etched into the ground halfway and stayed there while its owner worked through a myriad of hand seals while the cane distracted his opponent.
"Lightning Style: Grand Dragon Thunder!" he yelled out clapping his hands together and expelling a jolt of enigmatic brilliance from his body, shining with a whole spectrum of colors as it formed blasts of electrified air, albeit, this time, far grander than the previous version. The aerial pockets took themselves after heads of wild dragons, roaring with the clap of thunder and reaching to gobble its opponent with the sting of lightning as they sunk the entire battlefield in white.
Mana could sense that something was wrong just about the moment she set foot back into the encampment. She could sense Damisan's chakra exhausted a fair bit and a bunch of larger chakra signatures surrounding him, including Shige-H. She rushed on to the scene, knowing that most likely she'd just get in the way again and that they'd just ask her to leave her injured friend alone, just as they did with Skaven.
How did this happen again? This couldn't have been just another accident, while it felt like it was impossible to tell what was going on with just Skaven getting injured, two out of five was already a pattern. The Stars were being targeted. Mana approached the tent, slowing down her approach to a crawl as she wasn't sure what she'd see when she peeked inside and if it was okay to do so. In the end, her curiosity over the matter prevailed and peeked in.
Shige-H slipped out of the tent, leaving the rest of the medical ninja to do their thing. She looked more vexed than terrified which, strangely enough, calmed Mana down some. Shige-H cared about the lives of the Stars about as much as Mana cared about people's lives. If Damisan's life would have been in any sort of immediate danger, she'd have been beside herself.
"What happened?" Mana wondered.
"The same thing as with the others," Shige-H scratched her neck and moved her tired head around. Judging from their brief talk that morning, she had been training before she came back and walked into this situation.
"The others? This has to be a hit against the Stars, right?" Mana looked up.
"Not necessarily. Skaven and Damisan aren't the only ones battered and beaten up. While I think this is the same thing, Damisan, and the others aren't even beaten nearly as hard as Skaven was." Shige-H sunk her head down, letting her curls fall over her head at which point she forced her head back up and wiped the hair off of her face with a drag of her hand.
"There are others hit by this?" Mana looked back.
"Yeah. All of them are survivors of the Four-Tails' attack and all of them are from this class of prep course recruits, though. That's the only thing they all have in common…" Shige-H replied.
"The sensory field has to be in full effect again after the attack by now. The security should be back to normal…" Mana scratched her chin.
"It's actually better than it was supposed to be. The sensory field is up, everyone extra jumpy and trigger-happy. It's just hard to imagine anyone slipping in and pulling something like this off. Even worse… Mana… Damisan kept mumbling something about Rakugi in delirium…" Shige-H looked uncomfortable to inform the ninja magician of this.
"That's impossible. His mind is in shatters. He is alive only in the vague definition of the word, trapped in a dream he'll never wake up from. That's if the Allied Ninja don't end up settling on the fact that he's too much trouble to look after and execute him…" Mana rubbed her elbow.
"I know how tough you are on this. The Allied Ninja are too grateful to you for helping them live through the Four-Tails' attack. They won't just kill Rakugi, but… Maybe check up on him, just in case? If he's as helpless as you think, it won't hurt checking up on him in that sweet dream of his, right?" Shige shrugged. "This is our friends we're talking about Mana. And be careful. You or I might be next, we both fit the criteria of who's being targeted."
Mana knew this was ridiculous. Her face might have shown it a bit too clearly to Shige before the two parted ways. Still, if Damisan mumbles Rakugi's name and throws him around as the perpetrator, it's only a matter of time before desperation and fear undo every bit of gratitude that the Allied Ninja feel for Mana and they'll behead the assassin.
Her Advanced Bloodline training would have to wait. There was work to be done finding this assailant before Rakugi ended up paying the price for the intricate tale that he's crafted and the nifty little lies he planted in Damisan's head.