"There's no use in engaging these mercenaries." Skaven turned to the few Stars members he could find. Whereas Shige-H appeared to agree with him, Endo showed his grit teeth as a coating of Lightning Release surrounded both blades comprising his weapon.
"Defending your pals, are we?" Endo mocked the Nara recruit before leaping into action. A shine of two red eyes lurking in the forest's depth did not escape Endo's notice, and so the two warriors primed for an inevitable clash.
A pale human face of sharp features peeked from the leafage, one donning a breathing apparatus of some sort and clad in a wrap of cloth. A bald head with a thick ponytail pointed the way for this enigmatic mercenary as he extended his cloth wings and swooped down in a controlled glide, revealing steel hooks for fingers and boots to be hiding underneath his wrapping attire.
The swoop happened in a blink, as if the gliding mercenary had accumulated speed and all of it just exploded in a one mean dash. Endo grunted in pain as the force from the resulting clash flipped him over and sent him falling down while the mercenary dug his hooks into the bark and looked down at the falling Allied Ninja recruit.
"Here's a little something to remember me by," the mercenary chuckled as he pulled out a round ball and flung it in an arc to follow Endo on his path down.
"Haga is an explosive user!" Skaven warned his team. True to his word, the red, handheld sphere sent a deafening bang somewhere in between the gliding mercenary and the ninja he had chosen as his target.
"Skaven, dear boy!" the flak jacket wearing man who stood atop of his own spear called out to his target before hopping up and kicking off of the tree he stalked on, grabbing his spear on his way down to the Nara. "Don't tell me you'd do us dirty like that and skedaddle?"
An animalistic growl came from down below, where the spear-using mercenary found the point of his spear to be as the sight of a berserk young girl holding a simplistic spear of her own, composed of a stone tied to a stick and coated with chakra, revealed why the mercenary had missed his mark. Little Tomi worked that spear like a living wonder, using her bare feet to move it around in ways in which spears weren't meant to be used, switching and angles and altitudes several times before the stone tip ended up plunging right into the chest of the bald mercenary.
"Bummer that!" the long facial hair wriggled, accompanying the defining words of the spear-wielding mercenary that followed him as the man plummeted down with a grievous wound on the center of his chest.
"Bye, Rukan," Skaven sighed before nodding in gratitude at little Tomi. The little wildling just growled, her eyes still not quite back to their serene state and racing across the battlefield in search of more enemies to dispose of.
"Well, with Endo getting injured, there's no more use in running," Shige-H shrugged her shoulders. "May as well conclude this business now. There's no way these mercenaries would let us sit still during an escape to heal Endo."
Before Skaven could reply, the handful of trees that the trio found themselves on began swirling and shaking as the shifting ground began swallowing the woods up and throwing it out in chippers. Skaven was about to yell something out to Shitaka before a black swoop removed him from the point in mid-air where he was just a moment earlier.
The mercenary known as Haga had found his chance to scoop Skaven up and bring him over the tree line, tossing him away and then flinging a couple of bombs for good measure. Despite appearing to agree with the sentiment that this attack was not personal, Haga took a few moments to observe the smoke-engulfed fireball swallowing Skaven up.
The mercenary ended up paying for that as a cloth-tearing sound filled the air and overpowered the metallic buzz of a hurling double-bladed weapon passing him by. The screech of reeling steel wire overcame even that more notable noise, however, as Endo returned his lightning-clad sword-staff back to his hands from a perch point of one of the Land of Fire's mighty oaks.
"You've chosen me as your enemy, you won't get rid of me that easily, mercenary!" Endo taunted the plummeting crook as Haga found his cloth wings torn up and useless now, which in term made bombarding the battlefield from above and disrupting the enemy with aerial raids next to impossible.
Trail of goopy crimson sprayed in the air, accompanying the howling fall of the terrified mercenary who dug his hooks into the tree bark, nearly skinning and separating the tree into several pieces just to halt his fall. The merc's own crooked tools for clawing back into Haga's hands as the mercenary did not intend to use them this way, in such situations.
Shitaka continued to aggravate the grounded, muscle-headed mercenary, leaping from one tree to another as the mercenary attempted to draw the Allied Ninja back on to the ground level by reducing trees thick as houses to an upward shower of sawdust and shreds in mere seconds. The Allied Ninja flung a bottle filled with odorous, swampy goop before flinging another one, filled with a transparent liquid that smelled of alcohol.
Despite a very clear glass shattering noise and a visual sign that both the highly flammable goop and the chemical that ignited upon coming into contact with oxygen connected with the intended target, it only appeared to have pissed off the mercenary whom Skaven called Natsu earlier. The reason how it was possible did not cause prolonged contemplation as the sunlight-bright flames exposed a coarse layer of brown to be burning instead of human flesh.
"Ninjutsu from a mercenary? I've not heard of that before…" Shitaka pondered to himself out loud, letting either Skaven or one of the other Stars pitch some ideas how this might have been possible.
"Yeah!" Shige-H grunted before dashing out from behind Natsu and delivering a running right hook that took the beefy mercenary off his feet and give Shitaka some leeway. "They're way tougher than someone who doesn't use chakra should be!"
The fists and most of her exposed body lit up with traces of bland, blue aura that signaled the activation of the Chakra Enhanced Strength ability that most medical ninja could put to use. With when her fists connected with Natsu's back, a folding flash of white alerted the leader of the Stars, revealing a couple of sealing tags the mercenary attached to select areas of Natsu's armor. Tags that seemed to deal well, even with being doused in flammable liquid and set alight.
"Attacking from the back, tsk, tsk, tsk, young lady…" the sassy Rukan emerged from a nearby bush, attacking Shige-H with a rush of chops and kicks all of which the medical kunoichi successfully evaded before realizing that she was engaging a pair out of the three mercenaries that felt quite confident with engaging six Allied Ninja all by themselves.
"Livelier too…" Shige-H panted, observing the wound in Rukan's chest that bled and looked as bad as a sharp stone shoved through someone's chest cavity should have looked yet the bald-headed mercenary of flawless facial hair seemed to be unaffected by it.
"Well, in order to take out super-powered ninja such as yourself, we need to find different methods of keeping up with you. Methods that need getting adjusted to, to be fair…" Rukan grunted, scratching his wound before his entire body began convulsing and his forearms and his hands began swelling atrociously with flesh ripping forth from its skin imprisonment and continuing to swell to a violet state as bony protrusions burst forth from areas where, as a medical kunoichi Shige-H could confirm, there was not supposed to be any bone.
Besides that, Rukan's entire posture shifted, his waist lengthened while his legs took a more goat-shaped form while remaining to display overgrown muscle tissue on top. The mercenary's spine began emerging from where his tailbone was and enveloping in rapidly growing muscle tissue while a bony, ax-shaped blade formed at the very end of the protrusion.
From a leafy and wooden grave, Haga took flight once more, riding atop of muscle tissue wings covered with bony spikes as the mercenary still clung to the bomb-carrying belts that he had underneath the cloth he used to use for gliding before. Using his unnaturally grown wings, Haga engaged Endo in battle once more by swooping back up to the top level of the treetops and trying to slash at the samurai apprentice with either his hands, his feet or his spiky wings. Had Endo not wielded such a wide weapon nor carried sufficient skill to wield it well, there was no doubt in mind that Haga would have done him in like that.
Natsu smashed his fists together, ridding himself of the layer of dirt that shielded him from the flammable chemicals at once as his arms began enveloping completely in cartilage, one layer over another until two massive spears substituted what Natsu used for bulky arms. The bony weapons must have been four times thicker and six times longer than the muscle-head's usually already quite bulky arms.
With his newly developed weapons, Natsu was about to lunge at Shige-H before he realized that he a shadowy connection froze him in place. A long and curling trail of a shadowy line extending over the ground led all the way to Skaven kneeling on one knee, bruised and his clothes torn up, though very much alive and in fighting shape.
"I was going to suggest soaking Natsu's antlion holes with water as it softens the ground he uses for grinding and makes his jutsu inert, then removing the sealing tags from his armor by hand, but those transformations are new to me," Skaven admitted observing the new states of the people he once relied on and made shady dealings with. "My guess is that Ijiki had something to do with this, probably spared some supply he's been making a killing from on the black market on his own men."
"W-What did you do?" little Tomi shook while standing atop of a thick, lower tree branch and quivering in observation of the transformed mercenaries.
"Tomi?" Shige-H turned to her friend, confused what might have unhinged the young one so much in this sight. It was an unnatural sight to be sure, but ninja had to deal with far worse and while Tomi was quite young, she was an experienced enough kunoichi to have found her way to the Allied Ninja.
"Some kind of sick scorpion-cheetah thing… A mantis shrimp and a bat of some sort…" Tomi grit her teeth as her pupils changed shape again, taking a more slanted, feline look as wrath filled the young kunoichi to the brink and threatened to flip the lid off. "How dare you imitate animals!?"
The young one reached for her waist, removing a handful of boomerangs that lit up with a Lightning Release crackle as she flung them at the two grounded mercenaries together at once. The Lightning Release coating surrounding the boomerangs reached out and intertwined, forming a net between the two that rapidly changed angles and position because of the irregular movement of the boomerangs.
"Ha!" Rukan exclaimed as he thrust his bladed arms into the ground and flipped over his head and swatted the boomerangs aside while grounding the electrical charge and using his experimental, animalistic physiology to withstand the charge passing through his body. "I think you will find that we have far transcended mere animals, mon bébé!"
This sent Tomi into a state of frenzy. She flung the spear ahead of herself, imbuing it with Lightning Release chakra to create a massive space-splitting arrow, but Rukan swung his tail around the spear. With an unnatural flow of movements for a man, the transformed mercenary swung around the spear as it imbedded into the ground like a pole before pulling it out from the ground and breaking it in between his bony blades.
"How dare you!?" Tomi growled out, pulling out a pair of sharpened stones just like the ones she used for the tip of her spear from behind her as she lunged right at the transformed mercenary looking like she wanted to take entire bites out of him before gouging his eyes out. "Animals are pure, cute and innocent, humans are cruel and deceitful, they've no right to imitate that purity, they don't deserve it!"
Rukan extended his ax-tipped tail to try to impale the charging youth on its spiky tip but Tomi spun like a little buzz-saw, slashing over and under the tail and slicing it to blood-spouting ribbons as she closed the distance between the two in a blink. Unlike ever before, Tomi felt inclined to fight this battle herself and not call upon any of her contracted allies as this mercenary seemed to challenge her personally, try to pull the soft rugs of her entire life's beliefs from down under her and spit in her face as little Tomi fell flat on her butt because of it.
"There go our chances for a retreat before this is over…" Shige-H sighed, erupting in an emerald gleam that substituted the blue glow of Chakra Enhanced Strength before it turned to a cyan shroud emanating as an ethereal aura from the select group of the woman's pores. "Might as well hurry it up and get this over with."
Natsu bellowed, overpowering Skaven's hold and charging at Shige-H like a rhinoceros looking to gore someone that intruded into its personal space but with a mere smack with the back of her hand, Shige-H deflected the tip of the spear-arm and sent it crashing into the ground. The layers upon layers of bony tissue that comprised the frightening jousting weapon began evaporating into floating, pearly dust and unraveling from Natsu's limbs, leaving the mercenary profoundly dismayed.
"M-My arms… They're… They're supposed to grow back!" he bewailed, lamenting the loss of his main bread-earning limbs.
"An interesting thing, those Advanced Bloodlines…" Shige-H cracked her neck and warmed up her shimmering body in preparation to attack the indisposed opponent once more. "It appears that one can combine not only a pair of different Nature Affinities but also different aspects of one's abilities. Such is the case here, a combination of destructive, superhuman strength with the healing abilities of a medical ninja. The result is a touch that reversely heals you–unmakes you, if you will."
"D-Don't come any closer!" Natsu cried out, taking rapid steps back as he observed his arms unraveling before him. The skin floating off in weightless chunks while his connective tissue snapping and undoing itself while bones withered away once exposed to the open elements and blood dried out splattered in a translucent, baser liquid state.
Skaven took it to one knee, wrapping a shadowy arm around his comrade's body that attempted to reach for his throat, but the numb-skull struggled out of its hold, turning tail and taking off. That was before a boomerang didn't imbed itself into Natsu's back, sending the frightened and armless giant down on his front with whited out eyes, paralyzed for life if he survived the hit. Tomi sneered and blew air from her nose in pure wrath, wanting to do away with this entire trio, having flung the decisive projectile at the fleeing enemy.
"You fool…" Skaven lamented the likely death for his past acquaintance. "I tried saving your life by choking you out."
"You're holding back. That's nice and all but these men want to kill you, one of the Stars, while simultaneously offending Tomi-chan. I'd let go and finish them off if I were you," Shige-H turned back intending to aid Tomi in her struggle against Rukan.
A fusillade of bombs fell atop of the clenched together formation of the Stars, but Damisan's umbrella-prosthesis shielded them from most of the devastation once more as the avian mercenary flapped his unnatural wings. It was no longer mere bombs that he flung at his intended prey. Haga had ripped open his own guts with his steel claws and began ripping pustules, glowing with a golden liquid inside that seemed to be even more destructive and noxious than the bombs he used earlier.
"I can give you a hand with this," Damisan suggested, using his prosthetic arm to zip himself closer to Endo and targeting the airborne saboteur alongside his fellow Stars member.
"Humph, that's hardly imaginable since you don't have a hand of your own to give," Endo mocked his ally with a scowl of a bruised and bleeding face as he was on the losing side of this engagement, having taken more than a fair share of point-blank bomb blasts and slashes from some many limbs of mercenary Haga.
"Come on, man…" Damisan shook his head before raising his hand up and letting a ring of flames erupt from the line where his wrist connected his forearm section to his artificial hand. "Ninja Style: Rocket Punch!"
Damisan's hand took off in a racketeering flight toward his enemy, lightly guided by a braid of steel wire layers attached to the other end. The punch changed directions a few times in mid-air, losing some of its momentum, but it still socked Haga in the ribs and made him whine out in pain while the soaring mercenary began taking a plunge.
With his double-bladed sword in one hand and a kunai tied to a steel wire in another, Endo spun around the falling enemy wildly, slashing and thrusting his favored weapon and removing both of Haga's wings one by one before throwing his blade and piercing it through Haga's transformed, muscular chest and pinning the mercenary to the ground who could only emit a feeble squawk of agony before Endo landed with a knee pressing to Haga's neck and snapped it, finishing the mercenary off.
"Jeez, that was brutal… I just decked him good but you like… Cut off his wings and stuff, stabbed him through the heart and snapped his neck? Jeez, man, that's hardcore, you need to stop being so intense and mean all the time…" Damisan advised his fellow Stars member shortly after landing by his side.
"What's the matter? Seeing his flappers getting cut off summoned some dark memories?" Endo cheeked his ally while he pulled out his sword and twirled it until it ended up split into two and crossed over on Endo's back.