Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto in any way and make no claim on its copyright or any characters from the series. Original characters are my own property.
Author's Notes: Well, I have another chapter, it's a long one, and well, if anyone's been wondering when things would start to get appropriately messy in this story, right about now would be good. Oh, and I finally get to show off some of the cool insect based jutsus I've been devising for this story. I hope people like them.
Thanks for all reviews!
Other Gifts Continues
On the south side of a high mountain, in the northern end of a snow blanketed valley, two ninja struggled through waist deep snow, fighting to keep the bitterness from their minds. It was not easy. The cold chilled thought, and slowed the world somewhat, but beneath gray sky in a forest almost completely silent with icy air, there was little distraction. Nothing to hinder the mind from recognizing that this, the afternoon on the fourth day, represented the last section of the valley to cover, and once covered, they would have spent four days finding absolutely nothing. At least, they had not found their quarry. Kuroari had found her ants on the eastern glacial edge on the second day, and they were interesting creatures certainly. A micro-colony now scrambled about in an insulated box of Kuroari's, but further study would wait until they returned to Iwa village, and without the ants to spur them on the fruitless search had become particularly onerous to continue.
Suzumebachi had tried to view it as a training exercise after the first day, when it became clear there were no obvious signs to be found. After all, her troubles stemmed largely from a failure in tracking in the first place, so it was not hard to focus on improvement in such an arena, but there was nothing to find. Not during the day, nor in the twilight hours when she forced herself to head out again, pushing as she knew Chul'To would demand, only long empty footfalls across great white snowbanks.
It had not taken long for the cousins to become convinced the villagers were chasing shadows and exaggerating their fears. There had been no incidents since they arrived, and apparently none since before the blizzard. It seemed as if the trouble, if there had been any to begin with, had finished or moved on. So now, on the fourth day, they marched in snaking trails up the mountainside toward the barren glacial edge out of habit more than any other motive.
Soon enough they reached the edge of the trees.
On this north slope the boundary between treeline and glacier was not gradual, but sudden. With the sun to the south trees grew almost up to the very foot of the advancing icewall. Shattered branches and stumps bore marked witness to the ice's advancing power, as the glacial took more and more of the hillside every year.
The wall of ice was perhaps ten feet high at its edge and sloping higher beyond that, a massive glacier pressing on toward the skies. Snow had drifted against it, but it was still a formidable obstacle. "Do you want to climb up cousin?" Kuroari asked without enthusiasm.
"There's surely nothing much alive past this," Suzumebachi remarked sourly. "But we should go up, so we can say we did, and we might get a view of something in the forest below."
"Fine, let's look for an easy route," Kuroari returned. "No reason to waste chakra."
There certainly wasn't that, chakra was useful for warmth, and recovered only slowly on cold nights in their freezing tent when sleep was restless. Suzumebachi nodded, and headed to the left, leaving her cousin to take the other direction along the edge.
She traveled slowly, carefully examining the path up, searching for something they could ascend without resorting to heavy chakra use or driving spikes into the wall of ice. After walking only a short distance, and finding nothing promising, Suzumebachi heard Kuroari call to her.
"Cousin! You'd better come here," the ant ninja's voice held a far more serious concern than the cold merited. Suzumebachi hurried back to her, leaping from footprint to footprint two at a time.
She found her cousin standing in a small grove of fir trees, marked by several massive ant mounds. The mounds were not at all uncommon on the slopes of this pine forest, though they were rarely found so high, so Suzumebachi wondered what had caused the concern. "What is it?" she asked, curious, and somewhat irritated.
"There's something wrong here…" Kuroari wasn't focusing on Suzumebachi, but looking at each of the snow-covered mounds.
Not an ant specialist, Suzumebachi had little idea what her cousin saw in massive piles of ant construction, now mostly dormant for the cold months.
With a sudden swiftness Kuroari strode to the nearest mound, put her left palm on the surface, and then plunged her right arm into the structure, burying it almost to the shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Suzumebachi gasped, recognizing that such a reckless action was a foolish way to acquire hundreds of bites, as ants disturbed so abruptly would attack even a Kamizuru.
Kuroari pulled her arm out slowly, covered now with dirt, grit, and many red and black spots, twisting feebly, a sample of the ants of the mound. She gave her arm a quick scan, and then shook her head. Turning to Suzumebachi she removed the mask over her eyes, revealing an expression of deep sadness. "This colony's dead cousin."
"What…"
"There are no queens," Kuroari explained, her sad look only deepening, and she held out her arm to Suzumebachi. "You can see it I'm sure, probably feel it too."
Suzumebachi grasped her cousin's arm softly, taking a careful look. Red and black workers toiled slowly to wake from their cold-induced lethargy, but they were no greater creatures among them, no bloated queens, and she could indeed feel the chill black foreboding of death upon them.
As Suzumebachi felt the sensation of the colony's slow demise for the first time her senses seemed to expand, recognizing the scent of death on these ants, and following it outward, from colony to colony it traveled, each bearing the same grim and hopeless fragrance, doom to come. Millions upon millions of workers, all living out the remainder of their life with no purpose, there were no queens in the entire clearing, and well beyond. All the ants with reach of her senses were living dead.
"How could such a thing happen?" Suzumebachi asked out loud, prying her thoughts away from the touch of death for the moment.
"I don't know…" Kuroari appeared almost on the verge of tears. "Something's not right here, those villagers were right after all, there's something bad in this valley."
"Stay focused, cousin," Suzumebachi reminded Kuroari. "I believe you, but we need to maintain our-" she stopped in mid-phrase, hearing something strange from the way she had come before.
There were many odd sounds in the snowy forest, for snow interacted with the regular activities of nature to produce strange tones and odd amplifications, but this was a particularly unusual noise. Suzumebachi could not describe it as anything other than a sort of crinkling, similar to the sound made when rolling a great ball of snow together to make a snow man, but such a sound made no sense here.
Kuroari looked at Suzumebachi, and without speaking they made a decision. In a flash each ninja took up position behind one of the firs on opposite sides of the clearing. They no longer trod through snow, but stood loosely atop it by the grace of their chakra. Suzumebachi's tanto was in her gloved hand, and Kuroari held a kunai, both waited ready for the very worst.
They could never have expected what they would see.
Snake-like it came, and yet not, a massive image of red and black, it was two meters or more in width, but not more than a half-meter tall, and stretched back into the snow for a great distance, twenty meters or more surely. It did not travel over the snow, but neither did it sink through it completely. Instead, many legs supported the creature as it crinkled along, leaving the shallowest of furrows before it. When it entered the circle of trees the front turned straight toward Suzumebachi, and revealed the head.
It was a centipede.
Antennae swayed before the head, several meters in length, leading down to an armored forehead, beneath which lurked thin and trembling mouthparts, to feel and handle prey, and below those waited the massive killing fangs. Seeing those appendages, as long as Suzumebachi's legs and just as thick, laden with killing poison, and sharp enough to glimmer in the little light reflected off the glacial wall onto their black chitin, the Kamizuru's blood seemed to freeze.
For an endless second nothing happened. The centipede knew Suzumebachi's whereabouts, she was certain of that, there was no way the fir tree hid her scent, not with all the sweating she had done trudging through the snow. It had good eyes, but it would not need to use them to kill here. That it was here to kill them Suzumebachi never doubted. Centipedes were predators, deadly ones, and to summon a creature of this size would take a ninja of considerable power. The situation, only moments ago merely chilling, was now unmistakably grave. Faced with that black and red non-face, Suzumebachi froze, unable to think of a reaction.
The centipede struck.
It was blindingly fast, myriad legs churning through the snow with radial power, throwing the smooth, segmented body forward. The head spun parallel to the ground effortlessly, and slashed around the tree trunk separating it from Suzumebachi without slowing in the slightest. The left fang came in to spit her, a giant's spear.
Reacting on instinct alone Suzumebachi parried, her tanto meeting the end of the fang, black acid spilling from it at contact, with all her strength locked behind it.
She was thrown straight backward, arcing not at all in her path, to slam into an ant mound half again the centipede's length away. The snow and her insulated clothing cushioned the blow, but her whole body rang with the impact, and the air was crushed from her lungs.
The centipede did not stop, but came on with unerring swiftness, attempting to spit Suzumebachi once more.
Darts of metal struck the massive creature in the side, as Kuroari hurled a pair of kunai, but the weapons, deadly against humans, and guided through the lashing guard of the many legs by Kuroari's sure hands, simply glanced off the thick black chitin exoskeleton, the centipede did not even register the strikes.
Suzumebachi, breathless and with blurred vision, had only a moment to react. Thankfully the oncoming blackness of the centipede's head was a sure signal even to her befuddled mind. She seized on the first possibility to streak through her thoughts.
She jumped.
Recklessly, harshly channeling chakra into her legs, pain revealing her uncertain control, she launched herself upward in a prodigious leap. The canopy extracted a lashing caress from its branches as she passed, but winter clothes served well enough to protect her from true harm.
The centipede, never losing its scent track on its prey, turned and lurched upward, somehow separating almost three-quarters of its many segments from the ground, reaching skyward.
The wasp ninja rose above it, and came down with focus, landing on the upper branches of a towering ancient spruce. Suzumebachi's control had returned, and her tanto was held firmly in her right hand. Heart pounding, she considered what she might do.
"How do we fight this thing?" Kuroari's shout carried clear to Suzumebachi's ears. Her cousin had emulated her own action and taken to the trees, jumping away from the centipede, the creature apparently confused for the moment.
Their myriapod enemy did not give them time to consider. Its legs dug into the truck of a massive spruce, and the great body shot upward in a seemingly impossible motion. Legs pushed off and the centipede arched through the air, its head seeking still for Suzumebachi.
Seizing on a reflexive plan, the wasp ninja leaped upward, passing over the centipede's head. It spun in the air, trying to stab at her, but though an antenna struck her body, she avoided the deadly mouth.
Suzumebachi landed on the back of the centipede's long body. She struck hard, really the pain as her arms connected with the chitin, and then sliding on, for there was no purchase on the smooth segmented chitin, only a slide down to the snow, and certain death when the centipede coiled about her.
However, Suzumebachi had never lost hold of her tanto, and now she gathered all her strength in her arm and slammed the blade into the centipede.
Chitin screamed, resisted, and then was punctured, as the razor sharp azure edge bit into the centipede. The creature did not make a sound, but its whole body jerked, sending a series of vibrations down its segments that came very close to throwing Suzumebachi free. She held the hilt with both hands now, augmented by chakra, but it was still a struggle.
As the centipede tried to throw her off Suzumebachi recognized the truth of the matter. Her blade had penetrated the exoskeleton true, but hardly deep at all. Eleven inches of slender steel could pass all the way through a man when buried to the hilt, but this creature was barely injured by any measure. A strike like this was little more than an irritant to it, and like most arthropods there were very few vulnerable points. A human had many organs to puncture to insure a quick kill, but an insect's body was not structured the same. Only the brain could be struck down in such a fashion, and it was several meters in front of her.
"Cousin!" Kuroari's warning snapped Suzumebachi's focus back wider.
The irritant having refused to be shaken off, the centipede had simply dropped down in the snow and proceeded to circle about itself. It would take only a moment for its head to pass over the spot where Suzumebachi hung.
The wasp ninja pulled up on her tanto, but it stuck, and her mind would not even contemplate running away with the knife left behind. Instead she slashed her finger across the raised bit of blade, cutting through the thick glove material and drawing a slender rivulet of blood.
Hands churned through seals and then slammed down on the centipede's carapace even as its head surged forward.
"Konchuu Yobidasu no Jutsu! Vesp!"
In the events that followed Suzumebachi distantly heard her cousin's gasp, but for the rest it appeared as if the world had fallen silent. The familiar form of Chul'To coalesced between her eyes and the onrushing red and black vision of death represented by the centipede's head. The Vesp battlemaster asked no questions and took no discernable time to measure the situation, only dug chitin claws against chitin carapace, snapped out shining glassy wings, and met the surge head on.
Chul'To's long curved blade of white ceramic came down to smash straight into the center of centipede's head.
There was a noise so shrill it seemed born of an impossible hell where stone grated endlessly against metal and flesh.
The falchion exploded into a thousand pieces.
No other word sufficed, the blade was at one moment whole, and in another splinters flying in all directions. Some struck the centipede, some struck Chul'To, most struck snow, and a few even managed to pass through the wide spaces in the Vesp's legs to lodge in Suzumebachi's clothes.
Bereft of her blade, Chul'To's motion changed with a swiftness Suzumebachi, who already considered the Vesp terribly fast, had not known she possessed. All six legs slammed down against the centipede's head, avoiding being stuck like a pin by the sheer virtue of their long thin length, flexed, and pushed away.
Airborne for a moment, two pairs of wings flexed and surged, but too slow, and seemingly weighted.
Unable to take wing, Chul'To angled her wings and spun through the air, so she landed upright.
Suzumebachi had not paused in the moments since the falchion shattered, but had wrenched her own tanto free and jumped clear of the centipede. The creature was now bringing its back segments under it, and would soon be just as mobile as before. The ceramic shards sticking out of its face did not appear to harm it in the slightest.
"Kuroari, we must get away!" Suzumebachi called to her cousin. "We need to make up a plan!"
Level-headed, Kuroari asked no irrelevant questions. "It's faster than we can possibly run!" she replied even as she attempted to run around behind it.
"So distract it somehow!" Suzumebachi replied as she leapt aside from sharp-edged legs as the centipede passed by, the massive creature aiming now for Chul'To.
The Vesp battlemaster was sunk up to her abdomen in the snow, barely able to move, holding only her ceramic shield. "Fool!" Chul'To called her words as uninflected as ever, but their native harshness now a brutal rebuke to Suzumebachi's ears. "What use am I in this? Dismiss me! For the cold summon a Gryllo!"
Chul'To made no move as the centipede came on beyond raising her shield, but it was clear that even if the creature did not spit her on its fangs the shear force of being thrown back against the weight of the snow would rip all six legs clear off.
Shame raging through her veins like ice Suzumebachi raised her hand and muttered a single word. "Revoke."
The centipede slashed through empty air, but it did not paused, smoothly turning as it went, to come around once again. It was a cold predator, and the long chase was not about to frustrate it.
Suzumebachi stared into the red black face again, knowing she had no time to do anything but try and dodge once more. "Kuroari!"
"Forgive me my friends," she heard her cousin say. "Unshuu Hazerou no Jutsu!"
The ground turned from white to red and black.
Ants covered the clearing, surging out from their mounds in numbers so massive as to unhinge the mind. All at once they swarmed, crawling, running, leaping forward, a tide of formicid mass boiling about the centipede, coating it. On and on they piled, surging from mound after mound, red and black wood ants and all their lesser cousins, black, brown, yellow, red, multitudinous and varied, obeying the command to charge.
The centipede was beset on all sides by tiny creatures, its senses obscured by their shear numbers coating eyes and antennae, their numberless bodies restricting movement as they mashed between its segment joints. Confused it thrashed and lashed, but though it crushed them in great numbers it had not the dexterity to remove creatures so small from its body.
Suzumebachi was already moving when her cousin cried out. "Hurry, they will freeze before long, and they cannot harm that creature," there was sadness in Kuroari's voice. A sadness Suzumebachi shared in lesser proportions. She had not her cousin's love for ants, but it was never a happy moment to watch others sacrifice themselves for your preservation, even such mindless living dead as those workers.
The two Kamizuru ninja ran through the trees side by side, dashing over the snow in great bounds, knowing that speed was essential now, leaving a trail bore no bearing on this chase. Suzumebachi knew the centipede was behind them, she could almost feel the creature's presence, a malicious scent in the back of her mind. However, she pushed it away, it could not be allowed to distract. They needed a plan.
"My tanto can barely harm it, and we have no more penetrating weapons," Suzumebachi called out as she ran.
"True," Kuroari replied, her voice empty. "Normal ants cannot harm that creature and even summoning something larger would hardly help. Insects are disadvantaged in the cold."
Suzumebachi only nodded, that much had been made very clear to her. "We need some other trick, but I can't think of any jutsus useful against something so massive and so armored."
Kuroari nodded in return, and the two ran silently for a moment. After a time she offered. "We could just keep running."
"Huh?" the remark took Suzumebachi by surprise.
"Think about it," Kuroari replied coolly. "It's clearly a summons, but there's no sign of a master nearby. It can't persist forever; maybe a few hours at most, so all we have to do is avoid it in these trees and gullies and it will dissipate."
"But the master can summon it again soon enough," Suzumebachi countered.
"Yes, but another one could be summoned anyway," Kuroari countered. "If we go back to the village we can make spears to kill it with."
Her cousin's point was a good one, Suzumebachi decided after a moment's thought. They could indeed make spears, or likely the villages even had some already, and with such weapons they could punch through the thick chitin. Then, suddenly, she felt something, and heard distant noise.
"We can't go back to the village," Suzumebachi told Kuroari darkly.
"What, why?"
"There are two more centipedes, closing from the front on the left and right. We're trapped inside a triangle," her voice took on resignation of its own accord.
Kuroari slammed to a stop, plowing a short furrow in the snow. She put her ear to the snowpack a moment later, and with her mask down to let her face suck in air, her expression went grim. "You're right, we're trapped. Damn, there must be a way…" Kuroari's face tightened, and she held a breath. Suzumebachi watched her cousin carefully, hoping for an idea. "Damn it!" Kuroari spat out her exhalation. "If only we had spears!"
"We could tie kunai to branches," Suzumebachi offered, feeling the uselessness of such an idea the moment it left her mouth.
"Won't work, we couldn't make something strong enough to push on through beyond the blade length with these lousy conifers. It's not length but penetrating power that matters now," Kuroari shook her head violently. "Damn, it we were up by the glacier still we could use icicles maybe, damn!"
"Icicles," it was an ironic thought, to stab something with a cone of ice, but Suzumebachi recognized bitterly that it might indeed have served as a spear. Then suddenly she stumbled over the thought again. A cone…
"The fangs," the words burst out of her.
"What?" Kuroari looked at her cousin incredulously.
"The centipede's fangs," Suzumebachi explained. "We can cut one off and use it as a spear."
"I suppose that could work…" Kuroari managed. "But how do we cut it off?"
"Use this," Suzumebachi handed her tanto, hilt first, to her cousin. "Put all your strength into a single strike and push straight through, then toss me the fang."
"How will I get such an opportunity?"
"I'll distract it, I've got something that will work," Suzumebachi managed to say the words with a lot more confidence than she felt, though she doubted Kuroari was convinced. "Just be ready to act, there will only be a second."
"Fine, let's do it," her cousin answered. "We need to attack one now before they all converge at once."
"Right," Suzumebachi could almost feel the centipedes closing in now, the predator's seeking antennae reaching out to detect her. She picked the left-hand direction, down slope, and darted across the snow at full speed.
Running full speed it was only a moment before Suzumebachi could see the centipede. It glided through the top of the snow as before, a truly graceful motion, if horrifying in its predatory rapidity. Her whole body seemed to turn to ice as she tore into its path, a living missile.
The centipede never paused. The creature was fully aware of the size disparity, if Suzumebachi struck it at such a speed she would hardly damage the great predator, but her own body would be destroyed even if the fangs missed her completely.
Instead, when she judged the centipede was not more than a few seconds away, Suzumebachi stopped dead. She forced chakra into her legs and went utterly rigid, holding absolutely in place.
Her blood seemed frozen, and time dilated before her, stretching the moment out as she contemplated what must be done. It was a move she knew in concept, understanding the seals perfectly, knowing the method, but she was far from certain she could pull it off in this situation, forced to wait until the very last moment.
Suzumebachi slid the chakra into place, holding the mental sequence in her mind, but not moving at all, not daring, until the centipede was impossibly close, inches away. Then she let everything go.
What followed was a terrible sensation of dislocation.
One moment Suzumebachi stood on the ground, a massive centipede bearing down on her body, instants only from crushing her to pieces. The next, without a transition she was aware of, not even in her memory, she was high in the air, above not just the centipede, but the trees as well, many times her own height above the ground.
Looking down Suzumebachi saw, as she had expected, the centipede had stopped suddenly. She had expected it might be confused by having something seemingly disappear utterly from its senses; it was a hesitation she was counting on.
Kuroari streaked in, even as Suzumebachi tumbled through the air. The azure-edge of her tanto flashed, and it struck into the great fang on the right side of the centipede's head.
The slice was clean, there was no scraping noise, only the seeping of white fluid as the fang came free in the same moment Suzumebachi landed on the centipede's carapace.
"Kuroari!"
Her cousin lifted the severed fang with her left hand, throwing it even as the centipede, all hesitation gone, slammed its attacker aside with the snap of a pair of legs.
Kuroari was thrown back, and she struck hard into the snow, but her throw was true.
Suzumebachi spun, reaching out to grasp the fang, headless of the dripping white hemolymph, or the darker poison secretions coating it. The centipede's bucking threatened to throw her off, but stubbornly the wasp ninja funneled her chakra and clung on. She held the fang in both hand, point downward behind the first segment, the head.
With all her own substantial chakra-supported strength Suzumebachi brought the fang down.
Chitin cracked and broke, and the still-living spear plunged down into the head it had only a few short seconds ago been attached to. It passed through chitin, muscle, and then the brain, stopped only when it lodged in the carapace on the bottom, having cleaved through the whole flat thickness of the centipede.
The mighty predator did not die easily. Its brain was destroyed, and its hemolymph, the lifeblood of such a creature, was pouring out of the massive hole in the head, but it was not so easily killed. The rest of its many segments were a ways from acknowledging their death, and thrashing without overriding commands, Suzumebachi was thrown completely free.
She landed in the snow, and was forced to scramble away blind with whiteness covering her eyes as she heard the centipede's body slam into the ground near where she lay. Rolling and spinning, rubbing snow from her eyes with her sleeve to clear the snow, it was a harrowing few moments until the centipede's exertions moderated and then finally ceased.
Suzumebachi rolled upright in the deep snow to see Kuroari standing there, carefully holding out her tanto.
Grasping the blade in one hand, she took her cousin's hand in the other, pulling herself up.
"What did you do?" Kuroari asked. "One second you were there, the next you were in midair. There's no way you just jumped."
"No," Suzumebachi replied as she walked over to the fallen centipede. "That's Tobimushi no Tobu no Jutsu."
"You can actually do something like that?" Kuroari couldn't keep the surprise from her voice. "Where'd you learn it? For that matter what about the talking wasp with the sword?"
"Later," Suzumebachi slashed her hand through the air. When she caught Kuroari's eyes, she reiterated. "Later, I promise, but we still have two centipedes to kill."
"That's true," her cousin's tone shifted, but it was clear she had only banked away her curiosity. "Are you going to use that fang again?"
Suzumebachi was already leveraging the severed appendage out of the ruin of the centipede's head. "Do we have time for anything else? Besides, this will serve as a spear."
"Well, then I'll handle the distraction this time," Kuroari told her cousin. "There's no need for excessive acrobatics."
Chuckling slightly, Suzumebachi fell silent immediately when she heard the sound of another oncoming centipede.
"Get to a tree!" Kuroari shouted, as she ran to the back of the fallen centipede.
Suzumebachi did as her cousin suggested, running up a tall snag, the openness providing her with room to jump. She held the fang in both hands, planning to repeat the strategy from before. She was not intimidated anymore. The centipedes were impressive, that much she freely acknowledged of the powerful predators, but they were only normal predators, simply hunting. The wasp ninja had looked into the eyes of much fiercer creatures and lived, no simple predator would bring her down, and no unnatural terror from insects and their kin lurked inside her Kamizuru bones.
Kuroari stood before the oncoming centipede likewise un-intimidated. She held her hands out, pre-forming a seal, clearly judging the distance.
It was not nearly so close as Suzumebachi had been, but close enough to make her fear for her cousin, when Kuroari acted. Her hands burst through a sequence of seals, culminating in her holding her left hand curled below her mouth. "Gisan Sutingaa no Jutsu!"
A stream of sticky, globby fluid burst from Kuroari's mouth, to catch the centipede full on in the face, and fan out all before her.
The predator reared up, its antennae twitching wildly, spastically.
Suzumebachi saw her chance. She jumped.
It went just as before, though this time Kuroari was able to catch Suzumebachi as she was flung through the air, sparing them both additional bruises.
"Formic acid?" Suzumebachi shouted over the centipede's dying spasms.
"What else?"
"Nice," Suzumebachi replied, indeed impressed, for it was a powerful technique, and would be far more dangerous against a creature not armored with thick chitin. "Now help cut the other fang off the first one. There won't be time to pry it back out of this one before the last arrives."
"Right," Kuroari was already moving. "Same plan?"
"If you're up for it."
"You're the one riding the damn things."
Suzumebachi took that as a yes, and a few minutes later two battered but whole Kamizuru ninja sat in the snow staring at three massive centipede corpses.
The wasp ninja took a moment to marvel at it all, but her cousin was not so easily satisfied. Instead she went and tapped on the chitin skeletons, listening, and her expression went quickly sour. "They're not dissipating."
"What?" Suzumebachi questioned.
"These things, they're obviously summoned, so they should dissipate upon death, but there's no sign of disillusion," Kuroari explained.
Suzumebachi understood of course, and berated herself for not recognizing the same thing sooner. "But that's impossible, isn't it?"
"I thought so," Kuroari replied. "I suppose dissipation could take a long time if you had somehow made the whole summoning period last even longer, but it would have to be on the order of weeks."
"Weeks?" Suzumebachi started to say something derogatory, but then stopped. "But then, the reports from the village…"
"Damn!" Kuroari exclaimed. "I wasn't even thinking quite that far. It could all have been conducted by summons like these then, perhaps, no probably, by these three specifically. There can't be many more, they'd eat too much."
"So someone has managed to make giant centipedes persist for weeks or months instead of minutes or hours?" Suzumebachi couldn't believe it. "That doesn't seem right, and these things, they felt so like death, even more than usual combat summoned beasts."
"Death…" Kuroari's face went from grim to sad. "I had almost forgotten, but it could be…"
"What?"
"Remember the queen-less mounds?"
"You can't mean to say that it was those mounds that allowed this," Suzumebachi couldn't believe it.
"No," Kuroari replied. "It couldn't have been so specific, but what if the centipedes could maintain themselves by somehow consuming chakra from things? That would explain why only the queens were gone, their chakra is orders of magnitude greater than any of the workers."
"Damn," Suzumebachi echoed her cousin's response. Then she paused. "We need to get back to the village. We've fulfilled our mission, but I think we need to tell those people and head back to Iwa right away."
"Indeed," Kuroari replied. "And you can explain what you've really been doing on the way down."
Her cousin's eyes were steel, and Suzumebachi, looking into them with the evidence of their near death wrapping about the clearing, held no power to refuse them. Instead she began walking, searching for a place to begin.
Jutsu Notes
Unshuu Hazerou no Jutsu: translated as "Swarm Burst" this technique calls forth all the insects in an area (in this case the massive numbers of wood ants) to simply charge a single location. They aren't actually attacking, but the shear mass can prove a serious impediment.
Tobimushi no Tobu no Jutsu: translated as, ideally "Leap of the Springtail." Springtails (order collembola) are minute, wingless insects that have a feature called the furcula that hooks into place and can be released to propel prodigious leaps (Suzumebachi mimics the posture by bending her knees tightly and kicking out against the ground). The truly useful part is that, owing to modifications of the nerve cells, a springtail's leap takes only 4 milliseconds, faster than the eye can follow and actually faster than the speed of human thought (which is governed by how fast neurons can transmit information).
Gisan Sutingaa no Jutsu: translated as "Formic Acid Stinger." Ants of the subfamily Formicinae don't sting, but spray formic acid at enemies, at extremely high concentrations. While not powerful enough to eat through chitin, it would do very bad things to human skin and more vulnerable features and can seriously aggravate wounds, as well as being a powerful irritant.