Miu
Some time after Clementia left, Miu awakened to find Okimi smoking meat over the fire.
Kurotenshi was there as well, enjoying a meat skewer and a drinking from one of the canteens Okimi had been refilling with her water release.
"Where'd you get all that food?" Miu asked.
Okimi gave Kurotenshi a side-eyed glance which he didn't seem to notice, then said "I convinced Clementia to give us more food."
"It's good that we decided to save Clementia and her people. I was worried we'd have to eat monster meat."
"We would definitely become corrupted probably," Okimi said.
Kurotenshi looked at Okimi quizzically
Miu awakened in a panic. She jumped to her feet and pulled out a kunai. But there were no monsters around her, only Kurotenshi keeping watch and Okimi asleep.
How long had it been? There was no day or night in the Corruption. In one zone the sky was a heavy red fog, in another it was pitch black except for hundreds of enormous eyeballs staring down at them.
As time dragged on, the constant fighting for her life had made her anxious. Waking up and immediately fighting had become the norm.
Okimi had told Miu to keep count of their number of sleeps. They had slept 1267 times. If that represented days, it would mean around four years had passed. But Miu didn't think it had been that long and the three of them didn't really look eighteen. So, their sleep cycle must have become a total mess.
They had taken time to train when they could. Miu had advanced her use of wood release. She didn't have the knowledge base to draw from here, as she had in Konoha, so she'd been creating her own techniques.
She'd also heard Okimi complain once about not having her jutsu scroll. Okimi had taken the souls of more Corruption monsters than Miu could keep track of over the…years? She'd done a lot of experiments on them, but Miu didn't like to watch that.
Kurotenshi had created some new fire jutsu, but… he'd fallen behind. He didn't seem as motivated to improve as he'd once been. Miu couldn't blame him. He was too vulnerable in the wheelchair so Miu and Okimi had done almost all of the fighting.
Okimi had always found more food. Whenever they ran into a group of people, she'd always turn up with meat after they left.
Miu had been suspicious from the beginning and she wondered how long Kurotenshi would buy Okimi's lies.
As they ventured forth into the desolate expanse known as the black desert, a gnawing sense of trepidation gripped Miu's very soul. The oppressive stillness hung heavy in the air, suffocating any remnants of hope that dared to linger. The very essence of this forsaken place seemed to exude an aura of cosmic malevolence, as if the fabric of reality itself recoiled in fear.
The sand beneath her feet, black as the void, shifted with a sinister purpose.
The twisted shadows danced along the dunes, contorting and elongating with a spectral grace. They seemed to writhe with an unnatural energy, as if they were tendrils of an ancient and forgotten deity, stirring in slumber.
The crimson sky above bore witness to an abomination of nature, an everlasting twilight that cast an eerie glow upon the desolation. It was a bloodthirsty pallor, an otherworldly luminescence that defied the laws of the known cosmos. The celestial canopy twisted and writhed, a tapestry of unfathomable horrors that seared into Miu's sanity.
Miu looked away. She mostly stared at the ground as they ventured into this area.
No signs of life could be found in this wretched realm. No vegetation dared to sprout from the tainted soil, no creatures scurried amidst the dunes. It was a desolation that defied the natural order, a testament to the abhorrent forces that lurked beyond the boundaries of human comprehension.
There were four corpses in front of them, all ANBU from konoha. Okimi was sifting through their packs.
"Nada," she said. "From the lack of food, I'd say they starved to death."
This was neither surprising nor the first time they'd come across victims of starvation. It was the main cause of death for those strong enough to not die to monsters.
Okimi sat on a sand dune in a meditative pose. Miu knew that even if she called out or shook her, Okimi wouldn't snap out of it. Her soul had gone off to scout the ice sheets ahead. A clone could scout, but it might alert the monsters to their presence, and Okimi could send out some other soul, but she got the best information if she did it herself.
They'd been in this zone for a couple of hours and nothing had bothered them, but… the unnatural shifting of the sand continued to bother her.
The shifting that was… now converging beneath Kurotenshi.
Miu used her wood release and Kurotenshi's chair became a tree that pushed him laterally across the sand.
Then the sand began taking form. Up, up, and up the massive form rose, and then it took shape, the shape of a colossal tanuki.
Miu didn't stop and gape as she once would have. The horrors of this place had ceased to surprise her.
This was the same as the ninetales, a corrupted Bijuu. This one only had one tail, though. Did that mean it was the weakest? Even so, it was a Bijuu. Now more than ever, she wished she'd had access to Konoha's knowledge. There was a wood technique specifically for dealing with Bijuu.
Miu pulled out a rose she'd been wearing in her hair, then gave it a flick. It extended. It grew into a thorny vine that rose above the corrupted Shukaku's head.
In a lightning-fast motion, she swung it. The flurry of slashes digging into the Shukaku. She wasn't able to get through the thick of it, but that didn't matter. She shaved off chunk by chunk and slashed the giant Tanuki to pieces.
But each chunk of sand, as it hit the ground, then formed into a smaller version of the One Tails. There were around forty and each was twenty feet tall.
They came at her, all at once, hurling sand that became a massive wave.
She rode a tree up as the wave crashed over its trunk. But the sand immediately formed tendrils and began snaking up the tree towards her.
Up here, it was hard not to look at the sky.
The sand tendrils became black slimy tentacles and her tree became a spire of skulls.
She shook her head vigorously. She was losing her mind. She had been ever since they'd come into this area.
She could lengthen the tree and get away from these tentacles. No, from the sand. But she couldn't do that forever. Creating such large trees just consumed too much chakra. She had to think of something. She wished Okimi were here.
The tendrils of sand halted.
Miu looked over to where she saw a blast of fire had hit one of the Shukaku, drawing its attention. Kurotenshi was lying on the sand and had launched an attack. What was he doing!? He could barely move.
One of the Shukaku grabbed Kurotenshi. He reached an arm out and Kurotenshi began sinking into it.
There were only two things Miu could think to do in this situation. One was to activate her cursed seal. She'd certainly become corrupted, but she could use the extra chakra to launch a massive attack, enough to hopefully allow them to escape… if she didn't lose her legs like Kurotenshi had.
The other was a complete wildcard and might also corrupt her.
She'd take a chance, then. She drew the two blades she'd taken from the junk golem. She could feel them, hungry for chakra, her chakra. So, she let it flow into them and the dark root-like patterns running across glowed bright green.
She hurled one at the Shukaku that had taken in Kurotenshi.
The blade cut through the Shukaku. Then, crimson flowers burst from its skin and all of its eyes.
A pain like nothing she'd ever felt before cut through Miu's flesh. She grabbed at her torso, but there was no blood, no wound.
The Shukaku she had cut wasn't moving. She felt that she was in control, though. She told it mentally to release Kurotenshi and he was expelled from its sand hand.
The other Shukaku were staring at her now, though, and the sand tendrils continued their ascent.
Miu threw the second blade, aimed to cut through several Shukaku. It made it through 4 before it caught inside of a fifth, but flowers burst through all 6.
The pain that surged through Miu's body was mind-breaking. She barely noticed herself screaming under the tidal wave of pain.
Her vision went blurry and she noticed after a few seconds that she was falling.
Giant clown heads laughed and distorted as they swallowed her again and again. Inside each clown head was an ever larger space with more clowns.
The very fabric of space warped and twisted, distorting her surroundings into grotesque and impossible geometries. The laws of physics became a mockery as gravity pulled at her from every direction, defying reason. Reality fractured into fragmented shards, each shard a prism of distorted visions that mocked her fragile grasp on reality. Each sharp plunging into Miu's flesh to exacerbate her suffering.
The last thing she saw before passing out was a flash of white hair.