"Kakashi is down for a few secs, Mana, you'll have to take over the sealing duty for now," Shige-H declared after leaning over Kakashi's perforated body and hovering her hands over the wound.
Mana did not reply, but her face showed not a single sign of happiness. She was never too trusting in her sealing techniques. Back in her early days, it was indeed her father who took care of the seal he gifted Mana in her hat. Since that time, Mana learned to manage that particular seal rather well, though she still considered herself a novice in the craft. Ninjutsu was like languages, knowing just a couple of jutsu was like knowing a few words in that way.
Smelling the reek of the humans' hesitation, the black-skinned ogre forced its way through the manor's fortifications and grabbed hold of a barrel, lifting it over its head and gulping rich amounts of liquid within. Thick, black drops ran down its jaw, chin, and down its body when the goop within that quarrel could no longer be contained in just the bestial jaw of the black ogre.
Damisan raised his left arm and clocked it with a mechanical reloading sound. The prosthetic's base dug into the artificial join it used to connect to the body and once it dug out, it spread like a pair of scissors. A pulse of flames left the puppeteer's prosthetic feet as he jumped to action. The black ogre coughed and nearly choked on the goop it was downing in surprise that this meek, half-metallic man would attack him so recklessly.
The green-skinned ogre swung its sickle chains, slashing in mid-air in an attempt to catch Damisan off-guard in mid-flight but the self-puppeteering ninja maneuvered around the blades with elegant precision and blasted in a direct, arrow-like path to his opponent. The ogre grinned, rearing its chipped chompers and brutish fangs, as the sickle blades weren't the only danger in this situation. A grip of chains locked around Damisan, halting him still and shocking his fleshy parts because of the sudden stoppage of his blasting motion.
"Shadow Strangulation Jutsu!" Skaven chanted out, sending a wave of shadowy tendrils toward his struggling, subdued pal. An entire crowd of arms split off from the main tendril and crawled up the chain links, wrapping their fingers around the chains like it would have gripped the tender necks of Skaven's enemies. It only took a meek amount of pressure to make the chains click and scatter in detached links.
Riding the high of his initial dash, Damisan soared up to the recovering ogre that still tried gulping down the liquid it was gorging on before. One of the best-equipped shinobi in the Allied Ninja smashed his scissor-shaped hand at the mouth of his enemy, squeezing the jaw of the black-skinned ogre shut by slamming the two scissor parts shut over it. The distressed ogre shook and tried to wrestle out of the pliers-like lock over his jaw as the kerosene it had been downing began filling its lungs and innards as it had nowhere else to go.
The ogre's stress had been so intense that the goop sprayed from the bodily crevices and various places on its body, where separate chunks of flesh connected. Damisan wound up his right arm and snapped his elbow open, letting a satisfying hiss of steam out from a tube inside. The red-skinned ogre swung its limbs in a mad dash to its kanabo, but Mana clapped her hands together, shuffling the armor ninjutsu cylinder constructs around and making a few more that she mixed into the fold.
Not being the brightest light in the house, the red-skinned ogre bawled in wrath and began kicking random cylinders, unable to bash through them but what the beast lacked in focused force, it compensated with relentless wrath meant for every angle and every direction around it.
"Thruster Bullet!" Damisan said, releasing a focused stream of steam from the back of his elbow as the hydraulic system that both he and the Scientific Ninja Weapons Team came up with thrust repeatedly like a mechanical sledgehammer stamping gruesome tears and holes in the ogre's flesh as the series of punches left the sinful case of demonic possession wobbly on its feet. "Now!" Damisan signaled, taking a blast up in the air while Mana shuffled through hand seals.
"Fire Style: Immolation!" Mana yelled out, blowing out a heated breath of Fire Release chakra that shot out in a concentrated stream but expanded into a full-out twister of flames that blasted through the remains of the manor's roof. The jutsu would have surrounded the ogre with flames even normally, now it had the alarming amounts of kerosene that the ogre had ingested to deal with too. What the ogre undoubtedly meant to use as an aide to incinerate the human guests of its den, ended up undoing its own body as the abomination immolated from inside out within a matter of a few blinks.
"Sealing Technique: Cylindrical Seal!" After raising her top hat, Mana shouted and revealed the glowing glyph at its bottom stuck to a paper tag. The flames, bones and ash alike, all swooped into the opening of the top hat, slurping inside like a bowl of souped noodles disappeared into a hungry mouth. "One of these days I might need to do some inventory management inside there…" Mana lamented playfully, swinging the hat back on while the oaf ogre still bashed at the cylinders, sometimes sending them sliding but never breaking through or finding what it sought for.
Endo roared, charging past Mana just inches shy from pushing her aside with his shoulder. He pulled out the ancient-looking handle and activated the Sword of the Thunder God, preparing to slice through the very confused ogre but an overwhelming force blasted him aside as a wall of wind, decorated with dazzling, almost tale-like clouds threw him aside.
The green ogre stood with a malicious look on its face, snarling with its slobbering fangs for all to see as he pointed an end of his bag toward the Konoha and Allied Ninja. While the ogre had lost one of its weapons, it found another one that one of his fellows had left discarded after he had been sealed.
"Damn, he got the bag!" Damisan pointed at the ogre, stating the obvious.
"Seal the other. This one's going to require all of our attention!" Skaven yelled out, kneeling as he weaved his fingers together. "Shadow Prison Jutsu!"
The new owner of the Bag of Fujin popped the cork off again, creating a horizontal vortex comparable to a tornado wave that dismantled every single bit and piece of the manor, swooping upward as it sought for a better place to disperse than the place the ogres used to call their lair.
"The storm… It isn't stopping!" Skaven yelled out. Mana only barely heard him, swinging like a wet rag past her friend.
"At this pace, it'll fling us right to space!" Damisan covered up, unraveling his prosthetic tools, forming umbrella-shaped shields and various other combat tool formations that could have helped him gain some more space to cover and help him resist the ripping force of the gale. Not even his chakra jet feet helped him maintain balance.
A flash, then another… Mana saw flickers of triple purple moons before feeling a confident grip on her wrist. Temari needed some additional help to get Mana pulled on her fan, which she rode spread wide-open. She didn't seem to struggle at all and just rode the wind current down like a surfer going down the whirlpool.
"That's a neat trick…" Kakashi muttered, still holding his aching head after sitting up on Temari's spread fan. It was just his way to show that he had been back in combat.
"Big deal, I use my fan to ride my own whirlwinds all the time." Temari cringed, striking a flashy pose and browsing for their targets beneath them. "So that bag can create storms. It's like my own fans but way amped up."
"One thing for sure, that bastard won't let us just seal his pal. We may need to deal with him sooner rather than later." Endo grumbled.
"Wind Release is weak against Fire Release." Kakashi reminded everyone. "If the storm from the bag can ride all the way into the atmosphere, there's no reason it shouldn't also guide our flames all the way down."
"I don't have any Fire Release Jutsu with this much range…" Mana admitted. Just as everyone had settled on finding a different way to stop the gale slowly sending them to the atmosphere, Mana snapped her fingers and weaved a Clone Technique hand seal. "Fire Release: Shadow Clone Jutsu!" she chanted.
After popping into existence, Mana's clone took a leap of faith off of the corner of Temari's hat, finding a comfortable wind current and riding it all the way downward. Because she was just a Fire Release construct, this allowed her to move through the wind currents with even greater gusto and precision than before, as the wind basically guided the clone to its source.
Silence reigned in before the rumbling boom. Flames crawled through every tiny caprice of the whirlwind, hurling outward from the Bag of Fujin and looking to break through to the heavens. The dissolve of Mana's Fire Release Shadow Clone colored the entire crescent-shaped gale in flames.
"Problem is… Now we're all going to die!" Temari gulped, looking down at the approaching inferno but Damisan popped his wrists in and out, transforming not his entire arms but just his hands into far smaller sets of pliers that firmly locked into each steel blade on each end of the fan while he scooped himself over the edge, hanging downward.
"I agree, we should sacrifice the freak first…" Endo nodded, despite his proclamation. The sarcastic tone and the bitter admission of defeat in his face suggested he didn't really want to let Damisan just jump to his own doom. The approaching holocaust quaked the steady fan and pushed it out from the storm's path while the entire whirlwind burnt up as the flames ended up eating the earthborn, cosmic-scale storm up, leaving only sparks and smoke powder in the air.
"My, my… Seeing this makes me regret all the times I've given Tono-san such a hard time about his Scientific Ninja Tools…" Kakashi closed his eyes, concealing a polite smile underneath his face mask after looking down and seeing Damisan's lower body having spread into an aerodynamic spinning-top bottom that shielded both the modified ninja and those directly above him.
"My fan's almost totaled," Temari grumbled, doing her best to direct the smoldering weapon of hers to slam down onto the sands without too much shaking, but despite her valiant efforts, just about everyone ended up scattered while rolling aside over the dunes.
"There's no way I'll buy that you're only using the one." Endo turned his nose up and away, focusing on the pair of ogres, the one holding the Bag of Fujin, taking the worse of the blast as it still was just a powder of ashes before its singed-up brother in arms.
"It looks like they're both pretty shaken, Mana?" Kakashi unraveled another storage scroll while the ninja magician crawled up to where her hat had ended up to pick it up and show the glow of the sealing glyph drawn on the bottom while her free arm weaved one-handed seals.
"Sealing Technique: Enclosing Jutsu!" Kakashi's voice spread with booming authority.
"Sealing Technique: Cylindrical Seal!" Mana joined in, crossing the streams of the two seals, working simultaneously to scoop up one of each ogre before they returned to fighting shape. The pile of ashes swirled up and sealed into Kakashi's storage seal while the other singed up and partly flayed ogre obeyed the pull and disappeared within Mana's hat.
The Bag of Fujin spun on its rear for a few more spins before settling down on the desert sands and gathering new grains atop of it that would have buried it once more under layers and layers of the desert's only currency and merchandise.
"So… Are those ogres now sealed alongside the Four-Tails?" Damisan wondered, bowing down while riding the spinning-top bottom that his lower body remained stuck in because of severe damage from the boom and the rampant grains of sand clogging his machinery up and demanding maintenance. "I was wondering."
"Different seals–different sealing dimensions." Mana reminded. "I could still unseal them if I ever felt like getting ripped apart by demons too nasty to be welcomed into hell wearing cannibal skinsuits."
"The Four-Tails?" Kakashi turned to Mana.
"Wait, you're a Jinchuuriki?" Temari wondered with much more shock in her expression, even though Kakashi may have been more worried. He was just better at hiding the source of his worry.
"Not quite…" Mana scratched her cheek shyly. "It's a long story. An assassin from our universe had used a sealing technique to enslave the Four-Tails' will, so I had to override his own sealing technique by stealing its key from within his own mind to use it again to make it stop its rampage."
"How am I supposed to respond to that?" Temari squinted at Mana with suspicion.
"Wow, you Allied Ninja deal with some strange cases…" Kakashi smiled underneath his mask again. "That sword you used. It's the Sword of the Thunder God, isn't it?" the silver-haired veteran of the ninja world turned to Endo.
"Yeah, I picked it up from the same guy, believe it or not," Endo replied, looking a bit suspicious about the jounin pestering him with questions that Endo deemed to be none of his business.
"The blade was destroyed in our universe. That's why it was so strange to see it." Kakashi explained the source of his interest.
"Destroyed? How does one even go around doing that?" Endo wondered. "The blade is a construct of lightning."
"I'm not entirely sure, we'd have to ask Naruto and Sasuke about that. I'd reckon that you have to destroy that old hilt instead of targeting the blade." Kakashi replied, scratching the back of his head.
Mana turned around, still holding the Bag of Fujin in her hands. They were far better off storing an artifact as well-known around these parts as this into a scroll, not to mention the maintenance that Damisan's body still needed. Still, she could hardly blame everyone for choosing to walk away from all this devastation and a trail of mutilated bodies before licking their wounds.
"You're still lugging that busted thing?" Damisan playfully pointed at the broken and singed-up fan hanging over Temari's back. After all the punishment it had endured riding the worst storms that Fujin's bag could muster and enduring the leftover inferno that snuffed them out, the thing couldn't even close right so it hung in a pair of half-screwed iron blades with the cloth hanging loosely with head-sized holes and dire burns that rendered the tool utterly unusable.
"I don't know. You seem to still be rolling around and don't just drop dead. Why don't you?" Temari, who still hurt from the weight and discomfort of dragging her ruined giant fan on her back all this way, beamed a disgruntled look in Damisan's direction.
"Because if I die, I'll miss out on all the fun you guys will get into without me." Damisan shrugged and hurried along, not only keeping up with the slowly advancing task force but also moving ahead of it to scout ahead some.
"Gets on your nerves, doesn't he?" Endo hissed, but then opened his right eye while focusing it on Temari's tired and slouching posture. "He raises a fine point, though. If this fan is your only means of fighting, you should head back. You've already served your part here."
"Come to think of it, I've never seen you use anything else but that fan…" Kakashi turned to the grumbling young woman. "We're not too far away from Sunagakure. Maybe we should stop by and drop you off? I'm sure the Kazekage will thoroughly enjoy your visit and will offer a safe escort back to Konoha after you're sick of your home village again."
"Ugh…" Temari grunted, slipping the ruined and unfolding fan off her back and pulling a pair of shiny, obsidian edges to a pair of much smaller fans underneath her beige belt. "I'm far from toothless, alright. Why don't you guys stick to your own business? A woman only gets that many chances to get a break from her family life, so she has to relish every chance she gets."
"I see…" Kakashi noted Temari's response with a pleasant expression, once again emoting with his eyes. "We should stop by Sunagakure in any case. It's by far the largest center of civilization in these parts, so we may find more information about where we can look for the locket next."
"Hopefully, not at the end of time where Zahhak is devouring its own tail. That's where Sotatsu was last, right?" Skaven muttered, leaning on his crossed arms like a pillow. Once his hands got numb, he pocketed them again. This indifference to two young women dragging their fair share of weight right beside him, with Mana carrying the Bag of Fujin and Temari dragging the remains of her flag, made for a comedic view.
Damisan cracked a grin after rolling back past the task force. After taking a sharp turn and rolling forth and overtaking them again, the handicapped ninja was flat out guffawing to himself. Everyone's first instinct was to cover up from the handfuls of sand that such an odd method of movement tossed their way each time that Damisan whizzed past them, but the reason for his laughter ranked quite high up there as well.
"Zahhak devouring his tail, us needing the Locket to use the Sands to get where the Locket is in the first place. It'd be a cursed loop!" Damisan explained after turning around to face his allies.
"I'm glad this is all so hilarious to you." Mana rolled her eyes, realizing how screwed they would be and wishing that it never got to this nightmarish scenario.