Parrot dives for cover in a parking garage as high-velocity rounds puncture the concrete wall around his head; however, he crawls out of the sniper's line of sight into an ambush. Parrot decapitates the mutants with his sword, but another grabs him. He holds back the abomination's face as it bites and snaps at him. He twists its neck 180° before kicking the mutant over a ledge.
The mutants, Parrot behead, wrestle him to the ground. He hits his head on a curb but impales one of them upon a jagged pipe protruding from a wall. The remaining mutant suffocates Parrot with its inhuman strength. Despair lies heavy upon him; a horde swarms the entrances. He's alone, fading in and out of consciousness; his muscles are fatiguing.
The mutants close in; Parrot screams and begs for help, realizing they'll be biting and tearing into his flesh. A security shutter opens; a hand with an iron grip yanks him and the headless mutant across the factory floor.
"Shit! Hyena, help me pull this freak off him!" a gruff masculine voice barks. Hyena crushes a mutant's skull with the security shutter, then assists Pelican with prying away the headless abomination. Pelican throws the mutant off Parrot, but it lunges at Hyena. She dislocates both the mutant's legs knocking it over; the abomination continues limping after her despite its broken limbs. Pelican dropkicks the mutant onto a conveyor belt that pulls it into a waste grinder, splattering bloody chunks everywhere. The shutter bends and deforms; Parrot sits up, but the gash on his head leaves him unsteady.
"Get up! Get the fuck up, Parrot!" Hyena yells, "we need to get out of here!" she pulls Parrot to his feet, but vertigo causes him to collapse. The mutants crash through the skylights and break through the security shutter.
"God damn it!" Pelican lifts Parrot using the fireman's carry, then dashes through an assembly line with Hyena. The thousands of groans and wails outside the factory drown out the whirring machinery and biohazard alarm blaring throughout the complex. The mutants scale the walls breaking through the windows and upper floors.
Escape becomes uncertain; the Anbu fight for their lives using the equipment and tools littering the ground as improvised weapons. With nowhere else to run, they decide to take their chances outside. Hyena destroys a weak section of the wall using fire jutsu. They escape down an alley; Hyena takes point, clearing out any mutants obstructing their path, while Pelican carries Parrot. Parrot awakens from unconsciousness; though dizzy, he can somewhat stand without assistance.
"Well fuck-a-doodle-doo, look who's awake!" Hyena jests.
"Screw you, ya know," Parrot slurs, "the hell's goin' on!?"
"We're about fifty shades of fucked unless you use your fūinjutsu (sealing techniques) to unseal that damn door!"
"Alright, alright—just buy me some time!"
"Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall!" Pelican's jutsu takes its toll on his remaining chakra reserves. His breathing becomes hoarse as he struggles to stand; the mutants are already chipping away at the rocky wall with their freakish strength.
Hyena shifts through a chain of hand seals, "Lava Release: Volcanic Vexation!" A magma wall gushes onto the mutants slowing them down, yet they continue crawling from the lava and through the rock wall. "Hurry the hell up! We can't hold out much longer!" Hyena says, cutting down a mutant with molten stone covering its body.
Parrot has difficulty translating the foreign letter keys but types with haste on the terminal. He uses Fūinjutsu to replicate and decode the sealing matrix, bypass the blast door's security measures, and disengage the locks. However, the PRCB (Photonic Resonance Chakra Barrier) requires an access code in a language he doesn't understand.
"Fuck this, ya know!" Parrot punches through the wall below the terminal, ripping out its circuitry. He sends a jolt of chakra into the electronics overloading the security seals, which deactivates the barrier, "yours truly can't hold it open for long!" Pelican and Hyena rush through the entrance; Parrot pulls his arm from the wall, then dives into the bunker before the chakra barrier reseals.
The three Anbu personnel approach the bunker's main elevator; the blood dripping from Parrot's head leaves a trail that Hyena and Pelican can no longer ignore.
Pelican places his hand on Parrot's shoulder, "we're patching you up before advancing further."
Parrot sighs but agrees, "all right but make it quick; we only have so much time before those Cronenbergs find us again." The Anbu descends the lower levels of the bunker to an old bomb shelter. They search the control room; the terminals and mainframes are dysfunctional and unsalvagable. The armory is full of empty crates void of any weapons or supplies. Pelican discovers an office around the rearmost gun rack. He kicks down the office door; inside, an enemy Admiral's corpse with both its eyes missing remains sitting at a desk. A chill shoots up his spine as he recognizes the Admiral. Pelican flips through his Bingo Book to confirm the body's identity.
"Holy fuck! It's him!" Pelican blurts.
Parrot rushes into the office with Hyena, "the hell's goin' on here—Shit! What the fuck!?"
Hyena almost leaps out of her skin, "what!? How? Why would he just? Is it him!?"
Pelican tosses the book at Hyena, "yep, that's him, alright. Vice Admiral Gunsche Alcubierre Lecarde the Butcherer of the Land of the Sky."
"The same bastard that kicked our asses all up n' down the Land of Snow? The same bastard that fucking fought Izuna and Tobirama at the same time and handed them their ass!?"
Parrot scoffs, "hell, I ain't complainin'! Least we're not dealin' with this psychopath, you know."
Despite the bloodstains on the wall and the bullet hole on the Admiral's peaked cap, Pelican takes it as a souvenir, "mine now, you genocidal fuck!"
Hyena searches the corpse; she takes the Admiral's pistol, then a keycard from one of his pockets which Hyena hands to Parrot. Parrot rummages through the desks, file cabinets, and safes, looking for any intel to aid the ASF's war effort but comes up short. Nothing of importance is available; the computer's hard drive is missing. Furthermore, the documents are in a language he doesn't understand. Parrot seals the papers in a scroll, then the Admiral's corpse into another; however, he doubts the body's usefulness without an intact brain.
Nevertheless, Parrot finds amusement, imagining the Yamanaka try unscrambling what's left of it. "Creepy mindreading cocksuckers," he mumbles, scraping the brain matter off the wall into a zip-lock bag.
Hyena examines the duel-barrel handgun; she presses a switch causing one of its magazines to fall onto the desk.
"Have you figured out how that thing works?" Pelican asks.
"Sort of," Hyena replies, "both magazines are empty, and there aren't any more bullets lying around."
"What about the ammunition you found in the armory?"
"Though it would be nice, twelve-gauge won't work with this type of weapon. I'll need 9mm or 357-magnum for it to function."
"Damn, I was hoping you found one of those directed chakra-based weapons some of those Syndi-officers carry."
"If you find one, it's best not to pick those up," Parrot warns, "they typically have seals that activate the moment anyone, but the intended user touches it. You're lucky that weapon didn't do the same or worse!" Parrot accesses a hidden room behind a bookshelf with the Admiral's keycard. He examines a terminal within the room but discovers its administrative files have been wiped clean and formatted. However, Parrot is successful in hacking the surveillance network.
The monitors reveal various locations throughout the city, surprising Pelican, "what the hell is all of this?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out, you know. It's probably how those Syndi-guerrillas constantly know when and where to ambush us at the worst possible time."
"Maybe there's a way to contact the ASF here. Maybe if we tell them how FUBAR the situation is, they'll cancel the invasion and have the jinchūriki (Power of Human Sacrifice) nuke the rest of this godforsaken continent into oblivion!"
"That was the first thing yours truly thought of, but most of the city's COMMS towers are heavily damaged or offline."
"Damn! We only need one functional tower; can't we repair any from here?"
"Negative, they're in various locations throughout the city; the only available tower is at a police station… on the other side of town."
Hyena sighs, staring at the monitors, "assuming we make it there, we still have to worry about our target, pickin' us off from the rooftops."
An image on the screen draws Pelican's attention, "not necessarily, look!"
Parrot zooms in, focusing on the image, "as expected, Slug and Captain Raven have Malkhaz on the run. Perhaps gettin' that COMMS tower up n' runnin' ain't so far-fetched."
"What about that other sniper Raven spotted with her Sharingan (Copy/Mirror Wheel Eye)?" Hyena asks, "I doubt it'll be a cakewalk."
"It's now possible to flank the enemy, "Parrot pulls up another screen on the monitor, "we know exactly where that son-of-a-bitch is thanks to the surveillance network."
"Still, it's risky," Pelican says, "their weapons can annihilate a target beyond a Hyūga's field of vision."
"We can't attack from below," Hyena adds, "the streets are crawling with those things."
"Can't strike from the side, can't strike from below."
"So we'll hit that mother fucker from above!" Parrot declares. "As long as we stay on the topmost levels of those oversized buildings, we can avoid being eaten alive and mitigate our chances of running into the enemy's crosshairs."
After careful planning and consideration, the Anbu devise a workable means of attack. They reach the upper floors through a hidden stairwell and keep their distance from any windows or broken sections of the walls to avoid drawing sniper fire. Despite Pelican disarming the traps, the mutants lurking in the shadows remain the leading concern in each skyscraper. The mutants track the Anbu down, regardless of where they retreat.
"Damn, if this continues, they'll give away our pos-" a round embeds itself into the wall forcing Pelican to dive for cover; another round destroys an adjacent stone pillar.
"So much for the element of surprise," Hyena sputters, "those things led that bitch right to us!"
"But this works in our favor."
Hyena looks at Pelican like he grew a second head, "the fuck? How?"
"We know where the sniper is; all we need to do is lure these rabid fiends toward our target and let them do the rest."
"Hmm, I see," Parrot concurs, "they'll flood the building cutting off any avenues of escape while getting rid of the traps for us."
Pelican snaps his fingers and points at Parrot, "bingo, we may even capture the sniper—alive."
Hyena cracks her knuckles, "I'll lead the interrogation."
"All I ask is five minutes alone with the enemy. My arm may be intact, but I haven't forgotten," Pelican avows, massaging the scar on his new arm.
"Hey hey hey! Yours truly gets a turn, too, you know! I want to make sure that piece-a-shit pays for killing Hawk!" Parrot asserts.
The Anbu navigates through the concrete jungle using the smoke and ruins as cover. After reaching their destination, the mutants swarm the entrances then all hell breaks loose.
Explosions tremble the skyscraper in ascending order as the hoards climb each floor. Random body parts and furniture fly in the air. Spring-loaded metal spikes swing out, smashing into the mutants wandering by, sending handfuls of them crashing through the windows. Some of the mutants hang outside, sticking to the rebar steaks. Steel girders crash through every other window throwing dozens of them from the openings. With most abominations set ablaze, erratic rocky pikes erupt outward from various building sections skewering rows of burning corpses.
The hoard wanders into an ambush of lightning seals illuminating the interior disintegrating and launching scorched, mangled bodies in every direction. Sizeable stone lances with rows of charred bodies (many still twitching) puncture the building's walls. Rows of glowing hot electrified rebar impale the mutants scaling the surfaces, hurling them through the air before bursting like overheating hotdogs in a microwave.
The skyscraper resembles a giant blazing Tesla coil rising from hell's deepest depths discharging arks of electricity with ceaseless explosions throughout each floor. The chaos dies; the burning hoard lights up the pitch-black upper floors. Blood splatters onto the unbroken windows shattering the brief silence. Parrot, Pelican, and Hyena observe this new soundless mayhem from an adjacent skyscraper.
