A weighty thud pushed out a hawk with his wings pressed to its sides. A living tip of an arrow, coated with the radiance of basic chakra and spiraling through the air toward its destination. The distance of twelve kilometers covered in a third of a second as the bird's beak met its fleshy goal. Mana let out a husky grunt as the hawk left a jarring hole in her chest and straightened out its trajectory in an arc that tested the bird's integrity. The bird of prey lingered in the air, observing the young woman fall on her front with an obliviated expression reflecting only a void of any signs of life.
Ion's sandals clicked against the stone plateaus a couple of times as the second-generation assassin rushed in to confirm her kill. She wasn't a sensor so knowing if Nakotsumi Mana was dead or not was a troubling matter. One made even more troubling having in mind that the young woman was a potent ninja. Ninja had metabolisms and vitality that defied reason, a person without breath in their lungs could have been alive and sustained through only drawing vague breaths every twenty minutes.
"Is she dead?" the hawk wondered, the weight of the impressive flight and synchrony with the heavyweight artillery that the Snipe Hawker employed taxed the bird and one could have been able to tell from his voice alone.
"Maybe, maybe not. She's got a hand-sized hole in her chest, even if she's not dead yet, she'll soon be," Ion replied. She was in a rush. It was possible that nobody would have noticed that booming sound far off in the rocky wasteland and nobody from inside that building would miss the magician, of that the assassin had made sure already. Still, if the magician was just playing a mind game with her, it was dangerous to approach this corpse without being fully sure.
"Mana!" a blood-curdling scream pierced the training grounds. Ion's heart shuddered as her eyes scanned the surrounding, she was looking for a spy. Someone hiding their face behind the brushes of the stone pillars but that was not what she got in return. Shige-H rushed through, ignoring all reason and danger of rushing out to a stiffening corpse of one's ally out in the open with the killer standing right before them.
"I'll make you wish you hadn't done that," a whisper crept up from behind Ion, making the assassin jump up. It wasn't stealth but the speed that did her in as Araki Endo had blitzed right behind her and decided to skip the mourning process and simply tear the assassin limb from limb in an act of self-justified vengeance. It was a simple emotion, primeval almost, she should have seen it coming.
Ion leaned to the side. Her father had polished her martial arts skills plenty. She's been knife-fighting and performing feats of gymnastics and life or death evasive action since she knew how to walk. Someone who struck from afar like the Snipe Hawker would have exhumed a simple weakness of being easy to shred apart at close range and father made good on his proclamation of trapping a simple-minded opponent in their basic line of thinking. Ion vaulted backward and pushed her body off of the plateau, landing in between the rushing Stars members.
What is the meaning of this? She had infiltrated the Stars, hasn't she? She made sure to learn about the type of person Mana was and manipulated her into shutting herself off of all of the friends she had made here. She was supposed to be alone, that was an integral piece of Ion's plan. An emerald gleam beaming out from her backside made Ion's sandals shift uneasy, grinding the gravel under her feet.
"Can you help her?" Damisan turned to Shige-H who was leaning over the hopeless case of a magician without a chest cavity with freaked out, moist eyes.
"I… Who knows… I can't heal THAT, that much is for sure…" Shige-H cried out in desperation. Good. This was the first time that Ion had heard the leader of the Stars this freaked out. She usually maintained her composure and whenever it was not so – the outburst of feelings that Shige-H displayed was clearly played. Ion was too much a faker herself to be played Shige-H's act though her gang was played. Gullible fools, maybe their natures could still have been appealed to?
"Guys, wait…" Ion extended her hand. "It wasn't me, I rushed here just like you all did. I'm your friend, remember? I… Mana and I didn't get off right and I just wanted to see what she was doing and maybe if I could… You know…?"
This was a stupid game. Snipe Hawker needed a body to present to the Nine Tales gang and Mana stiffening up in the Allied Ninja HQ won't do. Though maybe they'd lower their guard long enough for her to give the Stars a slip. Shige-H was too distraught by the graphic nature of the magician's wound and the next to impossible chances of her survival and with Mana being one leg already inside of a cold grave the leader of Stars was the most dangerous member to watch out for.
"What's that hawk doing then?" Endo pointed at the bird floating over the battlefield giving the Stars mean stares and wondering when his mistress would command it to claw some eyes out at last.
"I called for Takanoku to scan the area. I'm no medical ninja so I couldn't have helped Mana but I thought that maybe the assassin was still in the area. I told him to keep looking out. I figured that the hit didn't happen too long ago given that there wasn't too much blood back then…" Ion put on her best tormented girl out of her depth mask and acted her heart out. Takanoku was sharp enough to catch on and tucked in its claws, turning them away from the agitated gang.
"If you can't heal Mana-san, we need to bring her to the infirmary at the HQ. She… If she can make it through this, she'll need everyone with any medical ninjutsu knowledge," Damisan swiped his impressive, prosthetic arm in a plead to attract Shige's attention as the leader of Stars was losing it all before them. Nobody had ever seen Shige-H this perturbed and pale. She looked like a banshee with all of that blood over her cheeks, fur coat, and hands.
"Is Mana-san going to be okay?" Tomi's face twisted in the all too familiar childish cocktail of anxiety and terror. She was dealing with the very likely chance of death better than anybody might have counted a young teen her age to do, suggesting that this might not have been the first time she had encountered death head-on, but the girl's youth still dominated her reaction.
"She's gonna need more than just green light show, she'll need a fucking chest cavity if she's gonna make it," Endo cleared his throat, doing his best to not help in any way whatsoever in regarding the fact that the magician's survival this far with a chest wound that should have left her clean in two was a feat of its own.
"We can't carry her anywhere, if I stop sustaining her life for one more second, she might die on the spot. Moving her is an absolute death sentence. Who knows how she's clung on for this long… Fuck… She's got no heart, where is this goddamn blood coming from!?" Shige-H screamed out as she was beginning to feel like Mana's life was fleeting even her life-sustaining hands. It was the absolute worst experience one could go through as a medical ninja and yet it was one that most medical ninja went through quite often – friends and allies, casual acquaintances and people one never met yet yearned to save nevertheless dying while one struggled against fate itself to keep them alive.
They could not have carried Mana away, nabbing her stiff from these buffoons was one thing, taking her away from the safekeeping of hundreds of skilled and experienced Allied Ninja who drew experience for their skillsets from the entire world was to straight out cross out her most promising job off her resume. Nobody would take her seriously after a failure like that, father would off her on the spot if she came back empty-handed. A failure like that reflected negatively on his flawless reputation as well, whether he liked it or not, they were related and that fact was public knowledge on the black market.
A beam of light filled the battlefield. A flashbang that Ion crushed in her hand to give her a few seconds. The uniformed, double-faced assassin rushed on alongside Takanoku to scoop Mana's body up. It was a way to shoot down two whole sweet and juicy birds. Shige-H confirmed that moving the magician would spell out death for her while Ion also needed to take her to Fire Country and hand her body to the Nine Tales gang. Finishing off the victim and securing her body, it was the optimal move.
"Decided to reveal your true face?" a tight, metallic grip locked over Ion's hand so hard that it should have crushed it. Almost at the same time, Takanoku squawked in a painful plead for its life and dispersed into a cloud of smoke as Damisan's elbow dug into its beak and knocked it down and out. The Wind Country refugee flicked at his cylinder, reminding Ion that his reliance over vision was limited due to him constantly working on concealing his face from the judging eyes of the people around him. "How could you do this? Why?"
"You freak, who do you think put your plastic stumps together?" Ion hissed at the impaired shinobi, turning and twisting her arm to stress just the right joints and gears in the construction of Damisan's prosthetic limbs to have them fall apart as if they weren't stuck together in any way whatsoever.
A flurry of Ion's limbs sent Damisan packing, the prosthetics-user tried shielding himself from a beating by putting up his prosthetic limbs but they met the same shameful fate as the previous sabotaged limb. With a single push kick to Damisan's chest, Ion sent the self-puppeteering ninja skidding across the gravel as she rushed in to resume her rush for Mana.
Time seemed to free in the precious, golden moment of triumph. Ion's saber was rushing right in between Shige-H's eyes as even with her gazers closed the ebony medical ninja worked on sustaining the life of her dying gang member. The fool treasured the life of this magician more than her own it seemed as she didn't skip a heartbeat to put up any defenses against Ion's blade. Maybe she'd just end up rushing to the undertaker faster than her friend?
A stout and disciplined swing of a blade deflected Ion's saber and threw it to stab into the ground. Araki Endo, the youth that used to be an apprentice of one of the four God Swords took his place in defense of the two young women with his eyes still irritated and watering. He moved through impeccable muscle memory and instinct of a swordsman alone. His sword-fighting easily matched that of Ion's if not surpassed it though the assassin didn't intend on fighting him long enough to find out. Avoiding the ruthless twirling of his death-chopper was troublesome enough.
Blood poured from Ion's face when the middle-handle of Endo's two-bladed sword hit the assassin right in the nose and a brutal kick sent her flat on her back. Her plan was crumbling to pieces, the magician was on death's door but even without her heart intact, something was still beating and keeping her alive and Endo was already airborne to skewer the fallen assassin with a side of his blade. He didn't intend on taking any prisoners. Ion rolled back and avoided a thrust through her heart that would have ended her.
"Shit… Why did you do this, Ion? What did Mana do to you?" Damisan pleaded with the young woman he considered his friend. With his limbs broken before him, it seemed like his pride and any semblance of fighting spirit had shattered alongside them. Though Ion knew how to work people well enough to know it wasn't the mere reduction to his powerless and disgusting self that broke the man, it was the fact that he felt something deeper with Ion. The assassin knew that acceptance and tolerance were the most important, key values to this one and she made sure to emphasize it and double down on those sentiments.
She crafted an intricate illusion of her own, one that not even a genius illusionist like Nakotsumi Mana could have accomplished. In just one night she made this slobbering imbecile believe that she liked him.
"Endo…" Shige-H muttered with a husky tone, having recovered enough of her senses to realize that the swordsman had jumped in to her and Mana's protection.
"We're a gang. We help out each other," Endo stated without wasting the time to even look back at his troubled allies. "I think I sort of understand what Mana was doing by befriending a monster like Damisan and giving a dumbass like me her notes even though she doesn't like the fact that I'd have liked to slay her with my own hands."
"Ion…" Snipe Hawker stood on her both feet, straightening her back and driving her hand through her scattering hair as her military-style hat had been lost somewhere during her clash of blades with Endo. "Who's that?" she mocked Damisan by revealing just how little he truly knew about her.
"Whatever your real name is, you hurt Mana-nee and I'm gonna make you hurt for this!" Tomi cried out as she drove the entire upper row of her teeth into her fingers and drove her bleeding palm into the ground. The girl cried out after her hand slammed not into the ground but a layer of makibishi spikes and the pain and puncture wounds made her lose the concentration for her "Multi-Summoning Jutsu".
This was going just fine, as long as Tomi, Damisan, and Shige-H weren't causing a ruckus, the staff won't know that this is even taking place. All the noise that her cannon made spread far away from the actual training grounds and nobody watched over this place the entire day. Snipe Hawker still had time to disassemble and murder this foul lot. With one of her hands skewered, little Tomi was just one hand away from being helpless as well, Damisan was down and out. Endo was trouble, though he'd have to be dealt with the last.
And just like with everybody else, Snipe Hawker had just the ace to deal with him.
"Whom are you trying to fool?" she asked with a mocking tone, breaking her impeccable sword-fighting stance to show Endo that she meant to talk to him. The uncontrollable berserker was having none of it, he twirled right in, disarming the assassin with a strong slash of his two-sided sword before turning with his entire body to gain enough momentum and split the loathsome assassin woman in two right through her chakra augmentations.
"You don't care about Stars nor do you care about the Allied Ninja…" she was weaving her complex web that should have been enough to have Endo. With a leaning turn Snipe Hawker evaded the lethal slash but she screamed out in shock and stiffened. Not a single word could leave her body anymore and with a quivering facial expression of terror, the assassin looked down to witness the other side of Endo's sword having gone through her gut as the vicious sword-fighter had thrust it backward right after the first key slash failed.
His sword was too unnatural to predict something like this…! A thousand of regretful thoughts, scoldings that came in her own voice as well as her father's ran through the Snipe Hawker's mind at that agonizing moment when Endo took a stout step forward and pulled the blade out.
"I told you I'd make you wish you hadn't done that…" Endo reminded the stumbling young woman who clutched her bleeding gut and struggled to contain the blood rushing out through her mouth too much to keep up her fighting spirit. "Whatever you wanted to tell me, keep it and take it to your grave."
Snipe Hawker fell on her front, stopping her fall with her knee while Endo swung his two-bladed sword to behead the humbled assassin but his blade hit something that let out a hefty clang and made it bounce off. Smoke filled the immediate range between Endo and his injured opponent as when the crazed ronin cut through the smoke he came face-to-face with a massive cannon aimed right at his face.
Who knew if it could have been salvaged anymore? She hadn't lost too much blood yet, chakra augmentations could carry her on for a few more moments and coming face-to-face with supermassive artillery would make anyone shit their boots enough to hear out a few words. Hawker didn't even need to shoot the thing and alert the whole HQ to her presence.
"All you want out of life is some meaning. You want to belong somewhere, to be needed. You didn't get that from Gozen so you bolted from that infernal cage of his and came here. Fuck this place and fuck those dorks. Come with me and train with my father, become an assassin, and put those skills of yours to good use. My father's no Gozen, he's far, far worse but to him a valuable vessel to imprint his skills onto means everything in the world. That's just what you want, isn't it?" Snipe Hawker finished spinning her yarn at gunpoint. Struggling and forcing her speech through intense pain, the young woman came to realize what her father meant when he mocked her for taking a perfectionist approach to planning things out and hoping that everything would go like clockwork.
He was a rotten bastard but he knew that plans went tits up and he hardened his daughter up to tough it through when it inevitably did. One couldn't blame a man for that, at least. That only left almost every other possible parenting problem one could think of to blame him for.
"Wind Style: Violent Whirlwind!" Endo chanted out after weaving a hand seal with his one, free hand. The technique produced a horizontal stream of wind from his mouth that blasted into the opening of the cannon and traveled in through the barrel, producing violent rips in it on various sides and rendering the weapon ultimately inoperable. The assassin seated in a compartment behind it screamed out as a dull concussive blast threw her out of the collapsing structure as the metallic mess fell apart cut and bashed to separate, busted parts.
"You're a rotten bitch, laying traps for each and every one of us just to screw with us. All just to kill Mana. You've clearly planned this out ahead of time, observed us, and made plans to overcome every one of us. You've countered Tomi, busted up Damisan's limbs, and made sure that Shige-H can't snap you like the twig that you are in an instant but you cannot prepare for me. I am righteous wrath, I am violence. That is the purpose that I have chosen and I don't need anything else. Apprentice assassin? Don't make me laugh!" Endo proclaimed, pointing the tip of his blade at the crawling and injured assassin. "You've schemed and plotted, you took care of everyone but me, now it's time you fight because the only way you walk out of this is by beating me until I can't try over and over again to snuff you out as you deserve."
As much as Snipe Hawker dreaded the thought, the terror in her eyes revealed that she knew this to be true.