Bare-handed, Mizumi Kesho charged forward, eager to tear the toy man apart limb by bouncing limb, but he collided with something large and solid midway to him. A tall statue of a dolphin horse slammed its front with a tackle, forcing the two of them into a power struggle. Kesho slammed both of his arms together, like attempting to bell clap the statue and litter the head of the Five-Tails' statue with nasty cracks. It took the intense focus of Mana's spiritual chakra to keep her head intact, with only a few handfuls of pebbles chipping off from the side.
The revenant grabbed the statue's snout and wrestled Mana to the ground, pressing her head with an open palm and putting up a tremendous squeeze that'd have crushed any less focused head. Priskom's unwound arms wrapped around Mizumi Kesho like bands and secured a tight squeeze with the leader of the Chaos Factor spinning the undead serial killer around and crashing him through as many obstacles as he could find before vaulting him overhead and slamming him head-first into the arena floor.
"Those eyes… So, I guess the speculations really were true," Mana huffed while rising off the ground. Her spiritual chakra defined every incorporeal aspect of what she was, her very essence, and here this juggernaut forced her to use it to fortify this loathsome body that the Conductor trapped her in just to keep that primal essence alive and existing.
"What are you talking about?" Priskom turned to Mana while loosening the binding around Kesho's body and beginning to wind up his arms. "If you know something else about this man that could help us beat him, you've got to let us know."
"There is nothing that can beat him," Mana replied with a bold statement while the two observed Drasko's storm of scrap peeling chunks of flesh and muscle off of the monstrous man only for bubbling black ooze to restore what he lost out of mucky withered paper tags. "He is immortal until the end of time, he possesses infinite stamina and limitless chakra resources. The only thing preventing him from taking over the world is the fact that he is neither bright nor talented enough to use most ninjutsu abilities and utilize his endless chakra supply."
"The power of an undead god given to a common settlement farmer? Spill the beans before I shatter your body and spill your soul out in the open, just what is this thing?" Drasko's helmet hovered by Mana and Priskom's side.
Slithering as the serpent eternalized in the statue her spirit was trapped in, Vatee applied a terrifying constricting hold by wrapping her stone body all around the serial killer, restraining every single limb he had under multiple loops as she formed many layers around his considerable bulk. With her opponent restrained, the serpentine Statuman opened her mouth directly above him.
"Spirit Flame!" she hissed out, spewing a jet of burgundy-colored fire from her mouth that engulfed both her own body and that of the revenant serial killer she had captured. Her body became red hot as it approached melting temperatures, despite her spiritual chakra augmentations bolstering her endurance. Overcome by the peerless wave of heat washing over him and reducing his body to smoldering cinders upon the meekest of touches, Mizumi Kesho collapsed into a blizzard of ash while Vatee slithered away to cool her body off from being so sizzling it shrieked in pulsing hotness.
"Spirit Twister!" Galdva released a potent telekinetic pulse, as he opened his mouth and spewed out an ethereal periwinkle vortex of spiritual chakra-infused wind from his mouth. Upon contact with the clump of cinders and ash, the gust expanded to a sky-scraping tornado and shredded the pile with cosmic-scale howling winds while splitting them all over the arena.
"Spirit of Life!" Poru struck a tense and straight-back pose, elevating his right hand over his head and raising his left knee to his chest as the totem-like Statuman struck a chanting pose. Poru lit up with a pale lime glow that burst into a pillar of aura and sprung forth from his body in the shape of a down-pouring rain of tiny blasts that struck every single paper tag from the scattered pile. The audience and the announcer alike exclaimed in shock as a luscious forest of young trees began budding in the war-torn arena with each tree growing from an incinerated, shredded, and discarded piece of remains of Mizumi Kesho.
Mana observed the Chaos Factor with fearful respect. While these people were skilled in some manner of combat, she wasn't entirely sure if they were all ninja before the Conductor tore their souls from their bodies and misplaced them in these statues and oversized action figures. And yet each of them had such a profound level of spiritual chakra manipulation that they could perform special techniques solely from the spiritual aspect of what made chakra be. It was a level that Mana never even imagined for herself as her mastery over spiritual chakra mostly amounted to burning it away as an aura to prevent the Five-Tails statue she inhabited from falling apart.
"See? Wasn't so bad… You should trust us more, kid," Vatee slithered behind Mana, placing her upper body over the Five-Tails' back as she neared her head to the face of the statue the Conductor placed Mana's spirit and mind into.
Mana stared at the many quivering young trees that shook and rattled in the merciless tear of the sandstorm, wondering if this was truly the last that anyone's ever heard of Mizumi Kesho.
Murky yale blue sandals touched a few tree sides. Unlike most woods, the Rice Country was a massive swampland with trees overgrown with moss. Some of them may have had hanging ivy vines or wet leafage that reached all the way to the wet mud pits of the country floor, but none of them had solid enough branches to touch and take off, which left any ninja traveling around the place with very few options of how to make haste in this place. An option was to dash to the side of the tree, sticking to it with an application of chakra to the tips of one's fingers and one's feet, then dash off to another tree surface.
The cascades of fireflies as far as the eye could see. The first time that Uchiha Hakari had set eyes on them, she couldn't turn them away and a smile just couldn't slip off her ecstatic face. At some points, the glee of this stupendous sight drove her to the point of drooling over herself. Though when one traveled this place for hours, the miraculous light show lost most of its splendor and one began bumping into the sizeable insects head-on, feeling like these fireflies weren't so different from thumb-sized flies and massive mosquitoes inhabiting the area that became all too apparent deeper into the country.
Hakari had never seen people growing rice in a thick swampland. It wasn't entirely clear just how clean the water was, but the ground was certainly too mushy to walk on. Regardless of either of these facts, rice plants taller and thicker than anything the young woman had seen before decorated the lower swampland with dark green. Some weaker stalks didn't grow to burst through the mush, remaining underwater and coloring the swampland's lower levels salad-green. This and the reflected light from the dancing fireflies gave Rice Country a certain celery-colored atmosphere at every sight around.
The young woman's blood-red irises locked onto an object, moving at her at high velocity in mid-air. The world around her began moving in slow motion as Hakari vaulted with an evasive roll, touching the surface of a different tree while a round blade with a rolling belt of jagged teeth around it slammed into the tree she was just sticking to and busted it down. Oversized mantis arms clasped around Hakari's arms from behind. Their striking speed surpassed that which even her immature Sharingan could register. The tree she stuck to wasn't a tree at all, but a massive ninja mantis mimicking a tree with its own appearance. An elderly red-haired woman riding a ninja grasshopper appeared before Hakari.
"That was Kusaru's sword! What did you do to him!?" Hakari demanded an answer from the hick rogue ninja company that she and her team were supposed to capture or kill as per the orders of the First Hokage–Senju Gan.
"My pretties ate his fricking head off!" the red-haired crone said in a voice that suggested she could not control when she was shrieking and when she needed to stay more subtle. "You know, my girls often eat the heads of their mates off, so the runt must've been ugly as a bug for them to take him for one of their own!"
"As for your other friend, she agreed to join our crew after a little deliberation…" a bulky man with a torn white shirt and a strange, rotten yellow hue to his skin said. This one had a grey-colored mane, whereas he may have compared himself to a proud lion, a king of his own pride, to Hakari, he looked more like a sunflower of greasy grey hair. Chunks of half what he had eaten this month were still stuck all around it. The man must've been a messy eater.
"That's right, hun, yer all alone now!" another yellow-skinned, square-headed ninja with a cloak made from leafage and moss stood up from the dirty ground layer. When he remained stationary and floated underwater, one could've easily mistaken his cloak for a natural layer of leaves and moss floating around. "And, before you ask, our crew's all full so you can't join either!"
"As if I'd ever…!" Hakari gritted her teeth and struggled in vain as the jagged spikes sticking out from the ninja mantis' arms holding her still dug deeper into hers. Something black and wicked seeped from those arms and into her, squirting warm blood. Crimson turned a twinge of cherry red from the rot entering her bloodstream and corrupting it.
"This'll be the first test of your devotion, girl!" the red-haired crone yelled, turning around with a house-sized cockroach crawling through the trees. After descending to the very bottom of the tree, the roach moved its steel-hard armored wings aside, exposing a pulsing, white pustule that had thick goop washing up and down. After a few circulations, the pustule burst, releasing the slime outward alongside a beaten and lacerated woman with messy, curly brown hair. Only one of the woman's eyes was still intact, with the other one being sunken in blood and party hidden underneath the wild hair sticking to her blood-soaked face. The lone eye shivered in terror, as did her pale lips. "Kill your friend!"
"Supoka…" Hakari muttered, feeling sorry for her friend and all the torture and brainwashing she must've gone through to end up in her current state. Her friend couldn't have been captured more than a few hours, and yet they've driven her to this miserable state. While all of this started as yet another job, now she truly saw with her own two eyes why these people had to die.
A thunderous blast resonated through the swampland, pulling trees off with their roots and tossing them about like toothpicks in all directions. Soaked in blood, and hair feeling sticky, Uchiha Hakari floated on the surface of the marsh face-down while the company of rogue ninja lined up ready to finish the Konohagakure kunoichi off.
"She has to be pulling her punches, right?" the nukenin cloaked in moss and leafage turned to the grey-maned ninja with hopeful eyes. He expected to be allowed to kill both kunoichi.
"Doesn't look like it," the rogue ninja with a thick mane shook his head in a vehement protest. "Though the girl is weak enough already. Finish this with one more blow. If you cannot, you'll be too weak to be of any use to us."
"Wait!" the floating nukenin yelled out in a high-pitched tone for a grown man. "I've seen those red eyes of this girly. They're one of them special eyes. Can I take her and poke them eyes, see what makes them special?"
"It'll be too much of a bother. I won't have you messing around with your experiments instead of doing what I tell you. Kill her," the largest of the rogue ninja turned to the brainwashed Konoha kunoichi, who kept scratching her celery-colored skin with horrific black veins littering every patch of exposed skin. Shivering, the young woman approached her fallen friend and raised her hand over her head, ready to finish Hakari off.
A wooden stake punched through the last remaining eye of the tortured and brainwashed Konoha kunoichi, making her relax at last and look almost thankful as she collapsed to her knees and then disappeared into the muddy surface of the bog. Before the rogue ninja could turn around, a bulldozer blade-sized wooden arm grabbed hold of the square-shaped head of the cloaked nukenin and smashed it like a pimple. The two remaining rogue ninja dashed back, making way for a gray-haired man in a plain rice farmer's attire with a right arm entirely replaced by a wooden frame of an arm that was shaped like a digging machine's stick and bucket.
"You're in my land, stomping all over my rice…" the man said in a thundering and displeased tone.
"Damn, we didn't notice!" the red-haired woman riding a massive grasshopper offered a piss-poor explanation. "We was chasing them Konoha ninja, you know how they are! They don't know whose land they wander into…"
"This woman…" the digging-arm farmer extended his wooden arm and scooped Hakari out from the water. "She's in my land, she is mine. Do any of you have a problem with that?"
The grey-maned missing ninja clenched his teeth, truly considering taking on the wooden-armed farmer in a fight. After realizing that it wasn't worth going through all this trouble over some half-dead Konoha kunoichi they could kill at any point they wanted to, the rogue ninja turned around.
"As Kaori pointed out, we didn't mean to trespass. We'll be leaving you to tend to your rice then…" the rogue ninja said before vanishing. Startled, as if a wave of boiling water just ran down her back, the redhead turned her massive grasshopper and took a bountiful dive through the marsh while the disappearing cockroach and mantis provided them with ample smokescreen to cover their tracks.
The next time Hakari opened her eyes, she was covered in something itchy, almost head to toe. Her pile of black hair had the entire miserable village bed sunken, though most of her skin had been coated with silver-colored moss. It had an odd, minty smell to it but was itchy to the touch, which made being awake underneath all of it a vexing experience. The Konoha kunoichi sat up and looked around. She couldn't remember much after Supoka began beating her down.
Her own friend, someone she knew since the Academy days. Hakari covered her lone eye that wasn't coated in a layer of silver moss and felt warmth spraying through her fingers. Given the nightmarish experience she's had until now, Hakari pulled her hand away as if she had scolded it but she couldn't see any blood on it. Just tears. Supoka had lost her younger brother to rogue ninja. It was because of that loss that she was so eager to become stronger and make the world safer. Kusaru may have been a loose cannon who enjoyed the carnage of battle, but both of Hakari's teammates shared the level of disdain for criminals trying to subjugate countries through power.
"Don't you be crying now," a firm, masculine voice came from behind a thrashed wooden door before it opened and the armless settler walked in. "You'd better let the moss do its thing and rid your body of poison. It was a bad idea getting poisoned. Didn't you know you'd die?"
"Those rogue ninja didn't offer me much of a choice," Hakari grit her teeth, wondering how this hick could be this oblivious to her situation.
"Well then, why are you here?" the settler wondered. Hakari was about to snap at him, but then she noticed genuine confusion in his eyes. He actually couldn't fathom why someone would end up in a situation where someone stronger than them could force their will upon them.
"Because, in case you've never left this settlement of yours, that's how the world works these days. People ganging up, making lines on the sand… Or mud… Claiming that land is theirs and that they are free to do as they please on that land," Hakari squeezed the sheets of the bed, leaving traces of dirt on it as some of her hands had been coated with patches of moss too.
"Them crooks said you was a Leaf ninja…" the settler said in a tone that was confirming something more than it was asking.
"I don't see how that's of any…" Hakari was about to object before she realized what the man meant. "Oh… Well, the Hokage is different. The Hokage isn't just banding people together and claiming land to do whatever he pleases in it. The Kage embody a greater idea that the villages they've founded could be places where people could find a better, peaceful life. Where they wouldn't need to fear for their lives. The Hokage doesn't want to take over the Rice Country, he sent us here to eradicate that gang and let you local settlers live in peace."
"I already live in peace," the baffled settler shrugged. He turned around and left the room. Based on the chunky slam of the wooden door of the wooden cabin, he left the house entirely. The ground rumbled and shifted underneath, making the bed Hakari was sleeping on shake from the shifting foundations underneath it. All this quaking was solely because the settler picked up the massive wooden arm and went to work on his rice fields.
"He… Just left…?" Hakari blinked a couple of times. Then she realized–he became bored with the conversation with someone he didn't understand, so he left without feeling indebted to telling her anything at all. What a fascinating man!
