Mana and Kouta ran into Usuzoku somewhere on their way to the Rabbit Caves. The rabbit warrior must have been coming to their aid. He was carrying a sizeable bag alongside his too massive for his size sword. Once the two blitzed the rabbit and kept on moving the opposite direction, Usuzoku quickly changed directions and caught up with them.
"What happened out dere?" He growled out. The mammal was visibly peeved by the fact that he was left behind in this battle.
"This Brownback was the snake that attacked the bunnies earlier. He was toying with the kits he'd kidnapped in the abandoned caves. He was incredibly rude as someone close to another animals' borders." Mana recounted.
"Brownback, huh? I guess dere's no use ta da poisons I took." Usuzoku grunted to himself. "Brownback's a pretty nasty specimen. Yer mate's a pretty tough guy to slay him. You were right to select him from the rest."
Despite her irritation at the topic of romance being brought up this way and in this context, Mana somehow managed to swallow it and focus on more important topics.
"That's not the point. The snakes appear to completely defy any decency or your borders. They're right in your backyard this time. Brownback mentioned that he listens to Yamata no Orochi but something like this does not sound like something he'd order." Mana replied.
"Yer right. Seems a bit beneath de big serpent." Usuzoku nodded with an unintelligible grumble.
"Who is this Yamata no Orochi?" Kouta wondered. He looked a little surprised to see Mana mention him meaning he expected that when Brownback mentioned him the first time, it was the first time both of them had heard of the name. Then again, being completely out of the loop was a social hazard of hanging around her.
"Da big king 'a da snakes." Usuzoku's eyes turned grimly sour just after a thought of the man. "Usually a ninja animal species has one or two big guys: A-Rank or even S-Rank monsters dat make them a force ta be reckoned with. Snakes are one of the more revered species so they have a lot more dan usual, Yamata no Orochi is da worst of dem all".
"It is a serpent that is so massive it sleeps inside the planetary mantle and its outer core. Its heads span across the entire world, all eight of them. If it ever took steps on the surface it would most likely ring in the end of days." Mana shared Usuzoku's respectful awe at merely the tales of the legendary beast.
"I guess I know why you poor things give snakes this much leeway. If I was bullied by people who were friends with an eight-headed world serpent, I'd be pretty scared too…" Kouta exclaimed in surprise.
"Why didn't you contact me and tell me things were this dire?" Mana turned at Usuzoku with a stern look.
"Cause it's nothing new for us. We've been pushed deeper 'n deeper every time someone wandered further into our territory." Usuzoku stonewalled Mana's sternness with a cold dismissal.
Something about this still didn't make sense to the magician. If this was the same old tale, why didn't the rabbits pack up and move against earlier, not when one of the more established minions of Yamata no Orochi was sacking their borders and eating their young whole.
A whole pack of rabbits met the returning trio. Some of them looked happy to see Mana, Kouta and Usuzoku return. Others looked afraid, most likely by the implications what this clash with Brownback would bring. The most dominant emotion in the eyes of everyone was the irritation. These poor mammals looked like classmates scolding their troublemaking peer after the whole class got punished.
"May you explain what happened out there?" An older rabbit of bright yellow fur that was no longer as slick and fluffy as even that of middle-aged ninja rabbits in their prime was hopped out in front.
"Hatchlin' 'n her mate killed Brownback," Usuzoku replied. Almost as soon as words ceased leaving his mouth, the elder was already right in front of the rabbit with a powerful kick from one of his impressively trained feet. The impact sent Usuzoku crashing into the caves and demolished one of the domiciles that the rabbits had carved into the minerals.
Kouta stepped in front to object but Mana stopped him by raising her hand. "It's okay, this happens a lot." She tried to calm the young man down but the worry in her own voice over the situation betrayed her true feelings.
"Mana… Why?" The elder leaned at the magician, making her lean back uncomfortably. Then the rabbit backed down with disappointment before the girl could even answer and hopped back in front of the gathered rabbits. "This is a bad time to start a feud with the Ninja Snakes… The worst…"
"This has nothing to do with the Ninja Snakes." Mana cut down. "Yamata no Orochi could not have sent Brownback, this was too petty for him. It was evident that Brownback was acting on his own impulsive nature".
"What does it matter?" The yellow rabbit sighed. He kept on pulling his ears and the flesh on his saggy face in frustration. "Even if Yamata no Orochi did not intend on causing harm to us and it was business as usual, now that we killed his minion we're going extinct…"
These words hit Mana pretty heavy in the chest. Usuzoku finally hopped back to where he was standing about before being kicked aside. "Whatever, ye knew it was gonna happen one a dose days, old-timer. One a dese days da snakes were gonna come and we were gonna have nowhere else left to go and da only choice would be war."
"That's all you want… That's all that's on your mind…" The elder lamented. "When Mana-chan signed with us I thought it could have been the rebirth of our species… I was a foolish old geezer. There's no coming back for us…"
"The only foolishness in your head is the naïve belief that you could have pushed this matter away until you were no longer there to deal with it as the leader of your group!" Mana intervened.
Finally, she realized why the rabbits were so hesitant to deal with Brownback even if they may have had the force to do so. Why now, of all times, they were being this passive. They had nowhere else to go. Any inch below them was the liquid metal flows of the outer core and they had no time to create new caves further west.
"You were supposed to ensure the survival of our species, not its extinction." The elder kept talking to himself. Mana was not too angry at him, if he had at any point seen the absolute horror of the Yamata no Orochi up close, it would have been a life-changing experience one would have done repugnant things to avoid ever reliving.
"No, I'm going to ensure its survival. Everyone pack your things!" Mana declared out loud to the entire group. "We're moving away before Yamata no Orochi swallows these caverns whole with one bite or sends his other goons for a more torturous extinction."
The rabbits were quivering, objecting and scattering. Could they have really been blamed? Such was their nature all along. The way they were programmed: the rabbits were the prey, all they could have ever done was run. Their ability to flee was unparalleled in the entire ninja world. No other ninja animal had lower bodies as well trained as that of the Ninja Rabbits.
"Wait, everyone, please, at least hear Mana-chan out!" Kouta pleaded with the rabbits. None of them were listening. The boy's voice was still too harmless and lacked some of his father's authority and presence. The young man was there in terms of his heart but his confidence was simply not in the same place.
Why would a bunch of naturally designed cowards listen to an outsider telling them to listen to another outsider telling them to face their fears? Usuzoku looked at the two of his human companions looking absolutely pitiful and flipped his shit with the most blood-curdling battle cry aimed at his own people.
The only reason why the scattering rabbits stopped and all turned their heads and ears at the trio telling them to confront their fears was because of their fear. Rabbits were born programmed to freeze and listen well to anything that sounded threatening to their well-being and Usuzoku made sure to be loud and scary enough with his crazy yell to seem very much that way.
"Pack your things. Instead of sitting here and acting like you can hide away forever, follow me." Mana pleaded with the rabbits. She needed to convey her idea to the summoned animals as fast as possible. The finer details could have been worked out later on.
"Follow you where? Which way?" the petrified rabbits kept on mumbling one after the other creating a wave of fearful questions.
"To Konoha, to the Forest of Death. It was a much smaller cave system but the Ninja Snakes there will not risk pissing off the Hokage by threatening the ecosystem on Konoha's doorstep." Mana replied.
"Madness, we'd be heading the exact other way. We'd be heading towards the snakes for the most of the way. If Yamata no Orochi decided to attack us – we'd be right there for him, we'd have to pass him to reach Konoha." The yellow elder rabbit flipped his hands in the air.
"You're already right here for him. He quite literally covers the entire world, nothing stops him from opening one of his jowls and swallowing this cavern whole but his own distaste for eating a bunch of rock with you." Mana tried to reason with the frightened mind. "Out there you'd be a moving target in a small and compact cave system, full of other Ninja Snakes he'd not risk to devour in one gulp. Right now you will only last until the news of Brownhead's demise reach him because in this corner you're all packed up and wrapped for him".
"Running away by running toward the thing that's chasing you – that makes no sense!" The rabbits kept on abandoning the large flock and heading their own way before Kouta finally lost it. Black tattoos covered his entire body while his eyes blacked out and lit up with a bright, golden iris in the center. His mouth twisted into a sadistic smile as his entire stance shifted to that of a complete, frightening psychopath.
Mana took a frightful step backward, she could not believe that the malice that was leaking out and petrifying her from the bottom of her core outward was coming from her own boyfriend. The young man she loved for years now. The sheer, unadulterated evil was flowing through his system like blood flowed through a person's veins. His heart was beating pure murder and this was just the first stage of his Cursed Seal.
"If you don't listen to Mana-chan, I'll kill all of you right here!" The gentle medical ninja, turned a trigger-happy psycho, screamed out licking his own twitching fingers as if enjoying the malice that left his pores and crawled up his skin in the shape of the expanding Curse Seal marks all over his body.
Mana wanted to speak, to reason with her boyfriend or maybe try and play along with his idea to intimidate the group of rabbits but… She was too frightened to speak. Just what kind of a hero was she if she blamed these poor things for being afraid when she herself froze after just a whiff of the taint lying inside Kouta's own genes. Inside the bestial nature she would have to foster soon enough.
"Running towards one's prey is still running away when you think about it…" The skeptical rabbit from before reconsidered in the face of a more immediate threat right in front of him.
"Y-Yeah… We're pretty good at running away. That's something we can do!" Another one joined his fold.
"Plus, we'd be running away from this scary guy as well. It's like… Running away squared…" A female rabbit stepped in front of the two with her own excuse as to why changing their opinion was perfectly justified.
"Let's all run away!" The rabbits collectively chanted while Kouta struggled to restrain his Curse Seal and return to his base state.
A slithering noise preceded a fall of a pebble that echoed throughout a rocky tunnel. Two elongated heads of a reptilian animal wrapped around each other and produced an uncomfortable scratching sound as its tough scales brushed against themselves during their intimate contact.
The cave that appeared to have ended before in a rather abrupt dead-end came to life. Where the cave's end previously laid now opened an eye of sky-reaching proportions, only a small part of which was visible to the twin-headed snake that was intending to report the news to its massive superior. Only the part one could see from the cave that lead into a much more massive cavern where the entire head of the eight-headed world serpent rested.
"I'm sure that Yamata-sama heard you coming without you needing to resort to that noise…" A fellow slithering reptile besides the twin-headed one grumbled.
Both of these serpents were quite massive by themselves but even their titanic proportions paled when confronted by just a portion of an eye of the eight-headed one. The companion of the twin-headed snake was much slicker and black, dark purple sprouts of puffy feather-like growths covered its entire bodily length from place to place. Together with the golden shade of brown that the twin-headed snake had, the two looked in quite a sharp contrast to one another.
"Regardless, we bring news, Yamata-sama. Brownback has died, we're not sure who exactly killed him but he was last sighted near the Rabbit Caves." The twin-headed snake reported. Each one of the two heads spoke interrupting the other, it may have seemed that they tried to speak in perfect sync but it appeared that they have not yet perfected this feat as one often interrupted the other in mid-word.
"You woke me up for this?" A lowly whisper of the Yamata no Orochi rung out but echoed through kilometers upon kilometers of the caves surrounding the system where one of its eight heads laid dormant. "My single heartbeat makes the world unstable, my fully spoken words make volcanoes erupt and shake the ground beneath the humans' feet".
While the eight-headed world serpent offered few whispers, his subordinates understood the meaning behind them. It was a danger for their master to remain awake. Every passing moment that their master spent living large, feeding and the sort, was a moment when the humans may have found the eight-headed serpent too troublesome to keep alive. Yamata spent his entire existence learning to suppress his hunger, his heartbeat, and his whispers and permanently moved underground so that his existence did not cause his children's extinction.
"We figured you'd…" The twin-headed snake mumbled.
"Would want to know? Yes, I guess I would… Brownback's death is a tragedy. It is easy to make a child, infinitely harder it is to lead them through the ranks as they grow. The more time you buy for them to live, the larger they become, the higher their hunger, the greater their ambition." Yamata whispered again, the sound waves of his grief spread throughout cave systems that covered the entire country. It was like every time the titan spoke, he did so to his entire kind.
"So you'll do nothing? You'll just let the rabbits free for killing one of your own? Brownback had a couple more years before he'd have become an A-Rank asset to our group." The dark serpent beside the twin-headed messenger got unruly. While most of the snakes shared the common bond of being siblings and the children of the Yamata no Orochi, the dark serpent was closer to Brownback than his other siblings.
"The rabbits are meaningless. I gave Brownback no order to mess with them. He did so because he wanted to. I never fed you, you always found your own food. It is, therefore, none of my concern that someone of Brownback's age and maturity failed to outgrow the childish bite size of feeding on rabbits." Yamata replied before closing its eye once more. It appeared that the world serpent was done speaking.
"I smell weakness all over, I challenge you!" the dark snake hissed out in a much lower pitched tone before charging at the closed eye of his patriarch. A loud thud echoed through the cave when the beast's fangs met the eye of his father to no avail.
"Gorgon, no!" the twin-headed companion of the dark serpent tried to calm his sister before the foolishness could have ceased.
Unfazed by the lack of success at penetrating his father's closed eye, Gorgon slithered back and opened his eyes wide open. A yellow glow began penetrating the darkness of the cave and illuminating Yamata no Orochi's closed eye.
"If you're so stubborn at doing nothing and lying here, may as well become a stone on a molecular level!" The dark snake laughed out in a sinister manner only it was capable of. Corrosive venom dripped from its happy tongue as it slithered out and waved about while the snake enjoyed hitting his father of size too immense to avoid his certain-death technique more than any child should have.
"Foolish hatchling… Who do you think you've inherited this jutsu from?" Yamata opened his eye again. With a ghastly, blood-freezing flat out scream, Gorgon instantaneously became stone himself and within mere moments of petrification collapsed into clouds of dust, smaller than even the eyes of his twin-headed companion could see. Once the massive king of serpents spoke again, the gusts coming from its whispers scattered the turned to dust daughter of his across the labyrinths of the caves.
"I-I did not challenge you, Yamata-sama!" Both heads of the twin-headed one sunk to the rocky floor. "It was all Gorgon's idea, she never told me about it"!
"It feels bad to lose a daughter who had awakened one of my abilities already. If you wish to avenge Brownback, by all means, do whatever you want. Rabbits are the food of the young. It is just sandbox banter if you let them concern you." Whispers echoed in all directions from the point where the massive eye still stared at the two-headed messenger.
The voice of the patriarch spread far and wide, maybe such was the world serpent's intention, maybe not. Most of the slitherers hiding out in the darkness of the caves could hear what the wind blew their direction and would have soon let the more adventurous reptiles on the surface know as well. Yamata's washing of his hands soon became a call to action to anyone awakened from their deep slumber.