The Stars lined up around the opening near the shrine where the meeting between Hanada's men and Ijiki's mercenaries took place. Endo turned his head to Damisan, ready to mock the prosthetics user for his heavy and loud landing that, as he had expected, would either leave a hefty thump or break the branch that the self-puppeteering ninja landed on. However, the samurai apprentice just grimaced and turned his attention back to the forest shrine. Damisan had moved as quietly as any other ninja with his prosthetic limbs, landing with a muzzled, rubbery hum that was almost pleasant to the ears of the few who heard it.
"Something's wrong…" Skaven whispered.
"You think?" Endo sneered at the Nara. "Your pals betrayed Hanada's guys and left them in a body pile. How close exactly were you back in the day?"
"Come on, Endo, Ijiki's mercenaries tried to kill Skaven on sight. There's no need to lump him in with the rest of them…" Shige-H tried to reason with her fellow Stars member.
"All isn't as simple as a deal gone wrong, little dudes…" Shitaka sighed. "Those mercs rocked those Hanada's men good, but they didn't take the tissue sample, nor did they move from the scene of their betrayal. Why would they do that?"
"Something's definitely fishy here…" Skaven grit his teeth as his face grew dire. "Raitoncide isn't the type of guy to scheme something like this. One can penetrate his plans by one's first look, most of the time…"
"Maybe he's ranked up in the world since you've left the criminal ranks?" Endo tilted an eyebrow. "Either way, it only makes things easier that he didn't leave–makes it really easy to go down there and kill them both then get the sample and leave this mess for Konoha's Black Ops to sort out."
"It seems that way," Shige-H bit her lip. "Can we really ignore such an obvious opportunity to claim what we've come here for? I'm afraid this is a risk we might need to take…"
"Even if this is a trap," little Tomi growled out. "We've got the numbers and superior strength on our side."
The bald and cut-up mercenary jumped off of the pile of bodies he was sitting and pondering on as if shocked by his own crackling aura of Lightning Release chakra. He sustained a flight via separate lightning jolts emanating from his hands and propelling him off of a golden field of static electricity on the ground. A resonating pulse of electricity passed through the ground when Raitoncide landed on both his feet and raised a vial over his head.
"Alright, you stupid Allied Ninja shits, I know you're out there, somewhere, watching and shaking your little legs, weak in the knees, like always! I'm gonna make this shit real simple for you! You come out and I don't smash this vial and fry whatever's inside!" Raitoncide let a jolt pass his body upward from down below, passing and crackling off of the vial he held in his hands, making it difficult to say just how much more of this unstable and destructive voltage the sample could take.
"W-What!?" Skaven lost his cool. "Why would he be willing to destroy this sample!? What're you two really after?"
A weighty whistling noise filled the air, followed by a wooden bump. The vial fell out of Raitoncide's hands and rolled to the side while the mercenary with an electric personality let out a painful grunt but then transitioned into a chuckle. He looked up to where little Tomi flung her boomerang at him and raised his arm up while his other arm weaved a couple of one-handed hand seal variants.
The boomerang smacked Raitoncide's hand on its way back as the little beast-girl burst from the cover of the leaves and grabbed the returning boomerang out of the air and landed on the ground in plain sight. Endo joined the friend to all animals and connected two of the crossed blades behind his back to a single, double-bladed sword before coating it in Lightning Release chakra.
"How did he know we were here?" Skaven still struggled to understand this new version of a rather unimpressive pair of criminals that he once knew.
"Hm…" Damisan raised and bent his prosthetic hand, opening up a compartment inside it from which he pulled out a square, handheld gadget with a twisted, spring-like antenna on the top. "I'm picking up a powerful radio signal. He must communicate with someone. It's quite impressive that he can sustain all that lightning without it interfering with his communication device…"
"I see… You should try to complete the main objective, little dudes, I'll check out if I can rock 'n roll with whoever is playing the strings here," Shitaka stuck out his tongue while crossing two hand-formed devil horns and flickered away into thin air. In a combined feat of hi-speed movement, the rest of the Stars joined the impatient duo that had engaged the enemy first.
"Leader…" Endo noted the complete formation of this new roster of Stars with a slight hint of mockery behind the chosen term.
"We take care of these two goons as fast and possible, then we move on to assist Shitaka-senpai with whatever he's dug up," Shige-H updated their mission objective.
"Heh, so you're the friends of Konoha's Sorceress…" Raitoncide mocked the gathered squad with an ecstatic smirk. His entire body seemed to light up with a field of electricity that would have made it difficult to approach the man up close without a stronger Lightning Release technique to control it.
"He knows about Mana, about our mission?" Skaven shook his head in surprise. The more cards Raitoncide revealed, the less the Nara recruit liked this engagement.
"Skaven, ain't it a surprise, seeing you here?" Geppo noted the presence of a longtime acquaintance of his as he joined his partner side by side, the electrical field engulfed him and lightning sparks passed up and down the mercenary's body however it didn't seem to harm him. It might have been that despite the flash and the flair, the resulting built up expulsion of chakra emanating from Raitoncide's body wasn't as deadly as the jutsu he produced from the chakra he molded up.
"Geppo, Raitoncide, who are you working for now?" Skaven asked.
"Now why would you care, you rat? I'm gonna make you choke on the smoke that's coming from your mouth as you fry!" Raitoncide put his hands together, forming a hand seal to prepare for an impending attack.
"You can question him all you want once I remove his limbs. Will be much easier that way," Endo butt in before charging at the pair with a twirl of his double-bladed sword behind his back. Raitoncide extended his hands out.
"Lightning Style: Mouth of the Storm!" he yelled out, unleashing a sparky field of electricity that was too shapeless to dodge precisely. Endo spun his double-bladed sword like a ventilator to absorb as much of the shock into his coated weapon as he could, but there was too much energy coming at him all at once. It was too shapeless and unfocused.
As more and more electric coils caught on to the samurai apprentice and began lifting him off the ground as the Lightning Release chakra pumped through his body, Raitoncide continued to amp up his technique with more and more insertion of chakra into it as he raised the surprised opponent up in the air and aimed to amp up the technique into a single pulse that was as powerful as he could make it, given the technique he was using.
"Ninja Style: Rocket Punch!" Damisan yelled out, extending his prosthetic arm forward and lighting up a flare of blue glow around his wrist. The prosthetic fist of his arm took off by itself, blasting at the focused opponent like a rocket. The metallic fist let out a gruesome thud as it hit Raitoncide square in the face, sending the rogue flying back in multiple flips and cancelling out his electrical field at once.
Shige-H dashed up to Endo and placed her hands over her teammate, releasing a quick emerald glow while she moved her arms all over his body, quickly patching up the burns and fractures from both this battle and the ones from before where she saved up some chakra where it wasn't necessary to spend it.
"There, almost as good as new…" Shige-H gave her friend a gift of a warm smile as he rose to his feet.
"You shouldn't have bothered, I only grow fiercer the closer I am to death," Endo growled, but there was a deeper tone of emotion in his voice that he tried to keep buried underneath layers and layers of his false courage and vanity. Something resembling gratitude, though it was more than enough for the leader of Stars.
"Summoning Jutsu!" Tomi chanted out after drawing blood from her finger and throwing her open palm to the ground. Seeing a target before him, Geppo raised his hands and unleashed a pair of invisible shock waves of rippling air at the summoning kunoichi. Tomi's shocked expression looked up, realizing that she had invested too much motion to cancel out her technique now, and that there was little she could have done to avoid it now.
Darkness enveloped little Tomi like a bubble. It wasn't the darkness of her own eyes being shut or her consciousness fading as the young kunoichi could still feel her own head looking around in a sense of wonder. It was as if a shadowy blob had enveloped her and it seemed to ripple like the surface of water as Geppo's Decapitating Airwaves merely bounced off of its protective surface.
"Shadow Prison Jutsu complete!" Skaven sighed easier as he canceled out his technique by rising from his kneeling position. The bubble of ethereal darkness bloated and threatened to burst from inside before it faded out, as little Tomi had completed her Summoning Jutsu successfully because of Skaven's timely intervention.
A pair of enraged elephants, looking like they were ready to wage war, rushed out from the smoke and ruckus. One of them was a towering, purple animal of majestic proportions and tribal, red war paint decorating its entire body in kanji symbols. The other one was a bipedal elephant of a sage-green color in skin and whited out eyes. Both war beasts looked like they had served and tasted their own share of battle as their rough experiences had left one of their tusks chipped off. Even the second full one seemed cracked and about to break at any moment.
Geppo pointed his arms down below and used his resonating sound waves to propel himself over the trunk swipe of the massive, purple elephant. By the time that the airborne ninja noticed the fact that a torn-out tree was coming at him like a speeding bullet train, it was too late. While he still aimed his arms down at it, the sound waves didn't come out by the time that the tree projectile smashed into him and took him away with it.
"Nice one, Zokaka, Zomiti…" Tomi pumped her fist in encouragement of her two emerging powerhouse partners. Both of the gigantic beasts blared their trunks as a proud war cry. The smaller, bipedal elephant flexed his biceps as it was him who ripped out and flung the tree at the airborne opponent and it didn't seem like he wanted everyone to forget it.
Damisan caught his returning prosthetic fist and attached it back to his arm before releasing a pulse of his chakra jets from his replacement legs and launched his body at Raitoncide while the Lightning Release user was down. The first two attacks seemed to rock the faltered and dazed rogue ninja, but he recovered and began beaming intense electrical aura from his body before long. The prosthetics user extended his arms to swim through the intense electrical currents as his hand-crafted limbs appeared to offer him some protection and dampening against Lightning Release but the spreading shock waves seemed to push Damisan away further than he could gain that distance back by powering through.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Pillar!" Raitoncide weaved a pair of hand seals before crossing his arms over his chest and his shoulders as a collection of intense jolts burst forth from underground where the Allied Ninja had resonating nerve impulses to attract them, almost like a living magnet.
While the Allied Ninja shuffled and dashed around, avoiding the booming upward lightning by switching their positions at the very last moment, when the pent-up electrical current couldn't correct its target, the pillars continued to surface again and again. One by one, all the Allied Ninja recruits tasted the burning and shocking lash of the lightning pillars and temporarily reeled on the ground.
"Yeah! That edgelord asshole was talking out of his ass!" Raitoncide flexed his hands out, admiring the handful of ninja he laid out all by himself. "I don't need any of that good shit of his. I can just save it up for when I finally bump into that magician bitch again!"
"M-Mana? How do you know her?" Skaven wondered, rising back on his feet after the painful shock. It didn't seem all too powerful because of how spread out and continuous it was, though if these jolts built up to higher numbers, they might just amount to being enough to take down sterner ninja than them.
"You dumbass, haven't I ever told you? She's the one that put me behind bars back when I was making a blast with my other gig in Shukuba Town!" Raitoncide yelled out as if he was seeing Mana before him and was trying to vent his frustrations.
"I see…" Skaven finally put down an answer on one of several dotted lines. "So that is why you're so determined to keep this sample out of our hands. You want to let Mana die?"
"What the fuck are you on about?" Raitoncide put his hands together, preparing for another collection of hand seals and a follow-up technique to send all the rising Allied Ninja recruits back down.
"Mana is injured really bad." Shige-H explained. "We need that sample to bring her back from a brink of death. Her condition is stable, but she might never wake up again without this sample."
A booming noise reached the battlefield from the distance as the tree that had slammed against Geppo tore to tiny shreds from an intense sound wave while the armored mercenary left the rubble, wiping sawdust out of his gear.
"You shouldn't have told Raitoncide that, right?" Geppo turned to his partner who stared at the vial just laying further by his left side where it ended up rolling off to after he dropped it.
"You know, I thought I wanted nothing more than to make the head of Konoha's Sorceress burst off her body or leave her just a smoking pile of coal after she ruined my life. Even now, I wouldn't mind frying her even as a vegetable… But… Leaving her all helpless and pathetic, unable to piss by herself or clean her own snot, that sounds like a sense of poetic justice to me too!" Raitoncide smirked with glee after he weaved a few hand seals and extended his hands toward the vial.
Skaven cursed his body with every fragment of his expression, he could see every twitch of his muscles, every tiny strand of the shadows extending through the floor and racing toward Raitoncide as he knew even before he launched his hidden Nara clan technique that he'd be too late.
"Wind Style: Friendly Gust Jutsu!" Endo's voice filled the air as a light wind wall made of Wind Release chakra threw the vial rolling off into the woods while snapping the coiling lightning net into powerless sparks that dissipated within mere moments after being hit. "Your entire arsenal is just Lightning Release ninjutsu, right? It would be such a pity if you bumped into someone with an affinity for Wind Release techniques–your natural weakness, wouldn't it?"
"That was Mana's jutsu…" Shige-H pointed out with a surprised expression. "You picked it up from our brief training sessions?"
"Please, she created it as a child just out of the Academy. Her techniques are a matter of literal child's play." Endo smirked, enjoying what he took as a compliment for snagging a simpler one of his fellow Stars member's techniques.
"You wouldn't happen to have also taken Mana's peerless skills in genjutsu, have you?" Skaven sighed, knowing full-well what the answer to his question would be.
"Shut up…" Endo turned his eyes away. "If you want to be useful–go find the vial. I don't want to be distracted by the enemy using it as leverage against us again."
"And what are you going to do? Run at the enemy and get your shit kicked in again?" Damisan interfered. "Let's work together this time, just like we took down that flying mutant guy back then."
"Fine, I suppose if you cannot fight by yourself, I will help you by joining you and seeing to it that you don't embarrass yourself," Endo nodded, changing the wording and the narrative of what it was that Damisan suggested.
"You have the absolute most infuriating way of agreeing with someone, you know that?" Damisan said in frustration.
"Just come and try it, it worked really fucking peachy last time, didn't it?" Raitoncide mocked his opponents before Geppo stepped out in front of him. "Hey, what the fuck?" the rogue ninja flipped out at his partner.
"Just stay behind me. I'm gonna try to see just how good the stuff that assassin gave us is," Geppo turned back to give his partner a look of pure thrill in his eyes. It was exhilaration that even a toxic personality like.