Lophin was standing knee-deep in blood, rotting flesh, and discarded boxes and metal. The dump around him wreaked something powerful and its piles of trash reached as high as twenty feet into the air. Scaling down the rickety mountain cautiously, his feet eventually touched solid ground once more. He started on his walk back into Kaiton's marketplace. However, with his chakra exhausted, he had no way to traverse the road- block of rubble up ahead. Its walls were much more closely packed--and where they weren't, they were extremely unstable. Lophin sat upon the dry ground staring at the mammoth obstacle, wondering what to do next. He decided to go around it and ended up inside a forest a few miles away from Kaiton. It seemed whoever had built that alleged wall had been exasperatingly thorough in their work. In fact he only found a breach in the towering monolith when he was halfway through the forest, and even this it seemed had been guarded. Lophin quickly mounted a tree branch and waited till the opportune moment to rush his unsuspecting hindrances. After the guards were taken care of, Lophin began his long trek back into Kaiton. Upon his arrival, nothing had happened. No alarm had been sounded, no reinforcements alerted, no warning blared. This was something he was not accustomed to, and so he wandered aimlessly along its streets, pondering the reason for such an occurrence. It was then that he passed a pond and realized the reason. His whole face was disfigured from the as of yet unhealed wounds, providing a grotesque disguise. Under this guise, he browsed through every shop window and stand with a carefree attitude. He even stopped to steal a few kunai and some food; his movements had been too subtle to notice. With a long-empty stomach now full, Lophin sought a place to finally get some real sleep. He eventually chose a place on a back porch.
The first thing that graced his vision was the blessing of healed wounds. "Wait! My wounds have healed! Shit!" Lophin thought to himself. "I guess I have no choice but to leave now...Well perhaps after I pay Kaiser and his friends another visit."
Stalking a cart carrying a delivery to the palace, Lophin eventually found himself at its gates. The palace was much like Snow's had been, without its present graphiti and torn down walls. Just seeing this gave Lophin flashbacks and got his blood boiling. "Fire Jutsu, Candle-wax," he whispered. Tiny flames enveloped his right hand's fingertips. Using the cover provided by burning cargo, Lophin invaded the palace through a window. He landed in a handstand so as to set the wood floor aflame as well. Lophin took a pot from one of the walls and placed it squarely over the flame, then began navigating the hallways. Each corridor seemed to take him to a dead-end, but finally he found what he was looking for, a leader's office. Perusing the plaque, he discovered that he had made his way into Karin's chamber. Instead of stopping and doing something dumb and perverse, he searched through the files on her desk, being careful to only use his left hand. Eventually he discovered his own file, and in context the vile deed his adversaries were planning. He put the file in his pocket along with a few record files and once again roamed the halls, this time in search of a specific goal, Kaiser's meeting room. After about thirty tries, he came across what he was searching for.
Lophin picked up a loudspeaker and used a great quantity of chakra to distort his voice. "All troops assemble behind the palace!" Lophin ordered in Kaiser's booming tone. He heard the sound of the pot cracking and jumped out the window into a crowd of disgruntled soldiers. The surprised men of valor and chivalry panicked from seeing a presumed to be dead man falling from thirty feet in the sky towards them. Upon landing, Lophin used the rest of his chakra in a powerful fire ninjutsu.
"Chakra Conversion, Fire Style, Magma!" was heard as Lophin pulled his hand upward from the ground in a motion mimicking that of a scythe. Shortly following his hand came a wave of molten rock, burning many of the unsuspecting militants. Lophin ran directly through the remaining ninja and ran a straight course northwest to his village.
The bewildered people knew not how to report the situation to the other half of the army that had just checked on the billowing smoke coming from a front room in the palace. They were unable to put out the flames as they knew little water jutsu and so the palace was razed to the ground, anyone foolish enough to remain perishing in the fire. Eyes blazing with hatred, Kaiser had arrived to a scene of wreck and ruin where his mighty fortress had once stood. He focused his chakra in his eyes. "Foresight!" he shouted. His eyes were flooded with a vision of every occurrence since that morning. "He's still alive! We must set out now and get after him, after this he will have no chakra left! We cannot let such shame befall us!" Kaiton's fastest ninja, including Karin, left in Lophin's pursuit, while Kaiser remained to muse over his next move. Lophin had indeed played a powerful hand, despite his own efforts. Left without a headquarters, a home, nor a development lab, Kaiser ordered his men to pitch their tents; they would be sleeping around the smoldering ashes that night. Kaiser could not sleep; his mind was filled to the brim with exciting visions of him securing his goal. Lophin had taken his turn; now Kaiser would just have to bring something better to the card table if his plans were to remain constant...
Mirror: LeafTalon had experienced a full recovery one week after Lophin had been captured and had assumed his spot as star student of the village once more. He passed the genin exams with flying colors and was given their best jounin as a private tutor, in addition to a team sensei. His private tutor's name was Ahime, a strict general who was very knowledgeable in the realm of taijutsu. His team's instructor, Ahime's son Jion, was comparable to his father, but excelled in ninjutsu more than taijutsu. Even Talon's teammates had been handpicked, as he had been given the second two best graduates, Feyn and Tir. Feyn was an acknowledged and renowned swordsman, whereas Tir was best at genjutsu. Feyn was a boy who had been held back in the academy for one year because he had studied his sword techniques more than his assignments. Tir was a beautiful girl whose family consisted of a long line of torture specialists, all leaving their victim at least partially broken.
The top-notch training Talon had received furthered his skills to the point where entrance into the chuunin exams was already being considered. Feyn and Tir had also shown amazing growth, their strengths almost art forms because of their swiftness deadly precision. Jion was beginning to get cocky of his first team, and began to brag about their abilities. Jion was constantly being chided by his father for showing such blatant arrogance, claiming that it would be his downfall. Jion paid no heed and died in a violent occurrence outside a bar after bragging about his team to another teacher. Ahime became Talon's team's new sensei, a morose cloud hanging over them all and hindering their work.