"Okay, so… While he's going nuts, what's this guy's deal?" Skaven turned to Mana while she stretched her joints and prepared herself to resume the fight for all their lives.
"You'll only hurt him with weaponry-based attacks. He drains chakra through contact and it feels like he's always augmented by it. In other words, the more chakra he has–the faster and stronger he naturally is," Mana said, doing her best to be brief. The Stars could hear all about how they came back from their wipeout or who exactly they were facing here after this entire affair was over with.
"I can't help but notice the Moon ninja queued up there. I assume they're allied?" Shige-H found it in her to glance back while the enemy flexed and bulked up, becoming a surreal masterpiece slathered on the fabric of reality.
"Ignore them for now. They're incredibly powerful sources of chakra for the Chaser, so it's better that he drains one of us instead of them," Mana dismissed the matter.
"I guess we're lucky he was such an avid gourmet of your chakra then…" Endo gripped his separated swords tighter. He made the right call at keeping them separate. His dual-wielding style would have allowed for a greater range compared to using them as a sword-staff. Range management was key here. If they manage their range right–they may just live, if they don't–the end won't come too quickly though it'll be certain.
"Guys…" Damisan's voice came from behind the group. "I'm…" he started a sentence he just wouldn't finish.
"Yeah, yeah… We get it, man, you're happy to be here…" Skaven waved his hand in dismissal before a hand of bone, flesh, and blood and even a layer of silky skin pressed against Skaven's shoulder. The Nara's eyes soured at first, but then they snapped open with the punkish ninja jumping up startled and turning behind him.
Behind him stood a tanned young man in his mid-twenties with a mohawk and a razor-disc tattoo on the right side of his head. He wore the same cloak that Damisan used to hide his scarred body under, except now he let the cape rustle behind him more like a cape than a sheet he wrapped himself into. A tanned and well-conditioned body gleamed through from underneath the cover once in a while. Damisan's tiger-colored eyes sparkled with glee that made both ends of his limbs shake in excitement.
"Damisan?" Shige-H gasped.
"Holy shit, you ain't a freak anymore!" Endo smirked and placed one of his swords over his shoulder. Despite his ceaseless, crude teasing and generally insufferable behavior, Endo's look of satisfaction relayed how happy he was for his fellow Stars member.
"Maybe you should descend to the Sky Clan and take refuge there?" Mana wondered, wiping crystal specks from the corners of her own eye. Seikuwo didn't need to go above and beyond like that. Heck, she didn't even count on him putting the Stars back together from swarms of bugs they've turned into until after the battle, but it meant the world for her he did this.
"No way! I was a ninja before the accident too!" Damisan clenched his fist. "Don't worry about me, I'll be useful to the team, even if I can't use my prosthetics anymore."
"You heard the man," Shige-H turned to the Chaser, who still flexed his body and watched what the newly mixed cocktail of Sky Clan and Earth Clan chakra would make of him. With a completely black and shapeless upper body and wild black hair floating behind him, the chakra parasite roared out, leaning forward and toward the Stars.
"Not enough, more chakra!" he grumbled before taking off of his platform. Mana still wasn't used to how insanely fast the man had become for his considerable size and bulk. While she had drawn a mental profile of his moves, the drastic shifts in speed every time he drained or wasted chakra made it complicated to navigate around him perfectly and made perfect evasion near impossible.
It was lucky for her that a gentle thread pulled from behind her, swiping her aside, but not crudely. The thread didn't treat her like a rag doll. Damisan was gentle in his human puppetry as he moved the Stars aside from harm. Without sparing the time to watch the massive clog breaking apart and falling into the bottom of the golden orb they were fighting in, Damisan hastened the Stars' response by observing their moves and assisting them from memory.
Endo swirled in, driving the blade of his sword straight into the center of the Chaser's belfry and the thick layer of blackness that covered it. Like ink, the rot splattered aside but Endo spun around, buzzing and switching between the swords he attacked with. Damisan's threads assisted the velocity of the diagonal spinning slash combination by pulling on just the right side. The Chaser grumbled but recovered with a swipe of both hands. Endo was no longer where the Chaser sought to find him.
Grabbing two of the collapsed gear pieces, Shige-H swooped from down below, delivering a combination of blows while Damisan's Puppetry Jutsu allowed her to float in mid-air. Because her skin didn't contact the Chaser directly, the parasite never got a whiff of Shige's chakra. When the roaring monstrosity spun around with an attempt to lariat the leader of Stars, Damisan's threads led her out of the way in an unnatural evasive maneuver that only worked because a ninja was puppeteering Shige's evasion.
Mana's teeth clenched the uppermost layer of a white glove and slid it off her hand. She flung the glove up and drew blood from her right hand before performing a dozen hand seals shoving it into her hat. Accompanied with colorful smoke and Lightning Release sparks, Usuzoku swooped out, charging at the Chaser like a rabbit missile. He didn't have any of Damisan's threads controlling him from afar yet, so the danger to his life may have been grander than that of either of the Stars.
"Fake-Out!" Usuzoku chanted out, stopping in mid-air before the Chaser as he prepared to draw his claymore and test its mettle. Before the Chaser could respond and prepare for an attack from the right, Usuzoku kicked his right paw down and felt gentle support from a Wind Release wind current of Mana's making, switching his direction and drawing from the left instead.
A thunderous clang signaled the Chaser stumbling to the side in shock of the clamorous impact. With his enemy stunned, Usuzoku sheathed his claymore again behind his back. The Chaser recovered sooner than anybody could have expected. A shadowy tendril extended down the metal pole, keeping the gear that served as the platform to ground the fight secure. It wasn't targeting the Chaser and feeding him, however, with the sudden collapse of the gear, it was revealed that Skaven instead used the Shadow Tendril Nara hijutsu to unscrew the gear and leave the Chaser hanging weightless.
"Double-Draw!" Usuzoku yelled out, drawing both his claymore and the scabbard and slashing with them both. The combined force left a cross-shaped combo on the Chaser's chest with a blunt force trauma from the right and a shallow gash from the left. The impact was so hard that its backlash shattered Usuzoku's scabbard to minute wooden bits hanging by torn leather scraps. Skaven's shadowy tendrils wrapped around the rabbit's torso and pulled him out of harm's way while the injured Chaser plummeted down.
"Some balls ye have, hatchling!" Usuzoku grumbled, shaking his paw over his head while sneering at Mana and puffing passionate smoke from his nostrils out of spite aimed at his summoner. "After ignoring us fer so long, then treatin' us as some shits an' giggles act, I hope yer gonna butter yerself up and start bowin'!"
"Zoku-chan, I have a dire need for your swordsmanship skill right now," Mana clapped her hands together and bowed with a hopeful expression to accompany her polite request.
"Have yeh no pride at all? She actually went straight ta beggin'…" Usuzoku freaked out before Skaven's shadowy tendril found another gear to place the rabbit swordsman on to.
"You've brought back her allies? These Allied Ninja?" Tairunto turned to Seikuwo with bafflement in her look. Because of her ability to see through any claim, any emotion, she wasn't used to having to request an explanation from someone.
"I did. Not because I believe they can win, it's because the Chaser had multiple opportunities to come after us while pushing Mana back, but he did no such thing. In fact, he seems possessed with the Earth Clan now, despite our chakra leaving theirs as mere specks of dust before a star," Seikuwo nodded, crossing his arms while observing the heated battle over their heads. The whole Sky Clan party found its place atop Fuyumara's Bailong.
"You mean…?" Ishikeru turned to his superior in terror.
"That's right, I think that there might be more to Chaser's motives than to just absorb power like a parasite and become powerful himself. It seems like chakra is something truly more akin to food to him. Once he tastes a type he likes – it's like he can see nothing else. No matter how much of a more deluxe dish is in the vicinity," Seikuwo nodded. He wanted to observe that side of the Chaser some more while using Mana and the Stars as his test subjects. His keen attention to the battle at hand relayed just how attentively he wished to locate the method behind Chaser's madness and how he worked exactly.
"He's killed many of us before, but this is the first time he's gone through a transformation like that. Do you think it's because he took some of the Earth woman's power? Is there truly something more special in her than all of us, the Sky Clan's finest warriors?" a Sky Clan woman in a white and black kimono, pale of skin, with hair weaved into a decorative bun and a feminine kabuki mask hanging over her head inquired of Seikuwo.
"That I truly do not know," Seikuwo closed his eyes for a moment as his confusion.
"I've gazed deeper into Mana's soul than any of you. There is nothing special about her except for her spirit and the depth she's willing to sink to for her nindo," Tairunto grumbled. The warrior woman joined her superior in keeping closer attention to the bout.
The Chaser bellowed, flinging a building-sized gear at absolutely nothing from sheer wrath. Despite aiming at nothing concrete, Skaven and Endo had to dodge out of the way lest they would have had to deal with the oncoming piece of debris. The chakra leech approached one of few colossal rods rising to the top of the golden world-orb and etched his fingers into it like the Sky Clan had made it of paper. Thusly the monstrous man began scaling the entire way he'd fallen like a spider.
"It doesn't look like those wounds are doing anything to him. We're kind of just breaching his skin here…" Endo cursed after landing on another gear platform and taking a dual-wielding stance.
"I know it might seem cruel, but we might want to consider sending this guy to Xeno Naruto and Xeno Sasuke to deal with. Or pretty much anywhere else but here. We still have the remote universe tunneling technology, right?" Shige-H pressed her feet against another metal rod hosting several wooden and metal platforms and gears over it and branching out to several complex patterns and branches on both sides.
"I already tried that," Mana shook her head, opening the wound on her thumb with her teeth again to pull out another rabbit from her hat. "Summoning: Usukari!"
"Goddang it, hatchling!" Usuzoku cursed. "Now yer takin' da piss outta me! Of all da rabbits… Why her?"
"Kari-chan's All-Mirage has sealing properties that might help us," Mana objected.
"Mana-san, it's an honor ta serve ye!" Usukari bowed with respect after slipping out of Mana's hat.
The Chaser roared again and charged at the central pillar. Neither one of the Stars was there, but from its support platforms, one could reach either in just one blink. Given the Chaser's impressive speed, that task would have been even simpler. Shige-H plunged down, throwing a straight right hand down into the very core of the charging enemy and making the parasite gargle and hiss. Chaser shot down like a rocket while Shige-H's improvised gauntlet exploded from the force of impact too, rendering the kunoichi's right arm a bit numb for a time.
"Holy crap, I think you cracked him right out through the shell…" Damisan grabbed hold of his head. His overacted, nigh-cartoonish emotional reactions were just the same as they were in his scarred and handicapped body, which was just another feature by which one could identify him in his current recovered state.
"No!" Seikuwo said, breaking composure. "If he got out, that means he might reach any golden orb inside the entire Hollow Moon!"
"I'll get my hands on you!" a grumble echoed throughout the entire orb before a rampant quake took over the pressed everyone kneeling to whatever they were standing on. It took grand imagination to realize what exactly was happening but once the entire golden structure rumbled and tilted like a bell being tolled, the frightening picture became clear–the Chaser had picked up the entire golden orb from outside and sought to fling it or to extract everyone inside it like a prize inside of a bingo ball.
"What do you mean, you've already tried that? What happened?" Skaven yelled out. Horror tainted even his usually nonchalant expression after witnessing the Chaser pulling a feat such as this pulled off so easily.
"Kari-chan, Zoku-chan, I'd rather the Chaser didn't punt us outside of the Moon's orbit. I don't much believe in aliens, so I'd rather not become one. I'm leaving this to you," Mana turned to her partners, who quaked and rumbled but found the strength inside them to slip off the platform and plunge toward the hole that Shige-H blasted the Chaser out through.
"Stop avoiding it, Mana!" Shige-H turned to the ninja magician while shaking her numb punching hand with scraped knuckles. "What happened?"
"The remote tunneling gadget… It's… It's gone. I'm not sure how, I'm not sure where," Mana shook her head with a phantom of the previous failure looming over her like a dark cloud.
"What do you mean it's gone!?" Endo freaked out. "How did it disappear? Did you lose it?"
"No, I had it in my hands one second and then the next… It was… Gone. Like it was never there, to begin with," Mana shook her head. Even if the thought crossed her own mind, it'd have taken a bunch of hefty proof for her to admit having lost some of the most groundbreaking pieces of technology in the world. Likely even the Moon too.
"Humph… This chakra won't do…" a resonant hiss came from down below as the chakra leech leaned in through the hole while holding both Usuzoku and Usukari unconscious in his grasp. Still draining them of all that they had remaining and prompting Mana to recall them back to the New Rabbit Caves by force.
"Even All-Mirage…?" Mana cursed in her mind while letting out a grumble of surprise.
"You mean that sword your rabbit friend dropped?" Endo pointed at the discarded shape vaguely resembling a horn. The fallen weapon was composed of spiraling vine-like strands made of sapphire-colored alloy with an obsidian core in the middle and decorations of majestic white mixed in between the sapphire strands. "Is it something special?"
"Special is putting it mildly. It's sacred to the ninja rabbits. It's a mythical weapon to them, akin to how we see Ranma, Kinshu, or Chie. Anyone and anything cut by it is sealed away to suffer eternal punishment inside a remote sealing dimension from which there is no escape," Mana explained the weapon the best she knew how to and the best she could relay, given the limited time they had.
"Cut him with it, got it," Endo beamed a cocky grin and vaulted over his front. Mana weaved a single-handed hand seal to provide her ally with an aerial Wind Release current pillow to kick off from and the swordsman shot off like a blitzing arrow toward the Chaser. Despite his limit-breaking speed, it didn't look like the Chaser was too impressed as he cocked his right arm back by the elbow and prepared to crash his fist into the face of the speeding swordsman.
Damisan's strings halted Endo just a flick short from having his head blown clean off. The swordsman glanced back at the rebuilt puppeteer with a snarky expression. "I almost thought you'd let him splatter me…" Endo admitted with a teasing tone.
"I may want to get back at you for all those hurtful words you've said to me over all this time, but that would have been too harsh, don't you think?" Damisan tipped the right corner of his own lip up before biting into a puppetry string and pulling it back to reel his ally to the side. One thing he mastered during the time of his handicap was how to use his entire body to control puppets, as opposed to just his hands and fingers.
Endo twirled by the fallen sword and kicked it up to his hand before flinging the katana in his right at the Chaser's face as a diversion. With the All-Mirage in his right hand, Endo charged onward with no hint of fear of the overwhelming pressure of his opponent. This was by far Endo's most remarkable quality, as Mana couldn't have imagined being so calm and chipper, so close to the certain doom that the Chaser represented. She'd have been trembling like aspen even if she had everything to lose and lives to protect, which was when she felt her strongest.
Like clockwork, the Chaser deflected Endo's katana with a light crimson dot opening up on his backhand. By far, the more precious opening was on his right side, with which he had deflected the katana. That was where Endo thrust the mythical rabbit weapon and slashed the Chaser's cheek. Almost immediately the swordsman pulled back as the emerging rift of consuming blackness and sizzling violet drove respectful fear even into Endo's eyes.
"This again…?" the Chaser muttered before his entire backside disappeared inside of the devouring rift between the All-Mirage storage space and the material world. Despite the grand might of the suction that devoured even light, the Chaser grabbed a firm hold of the rift's edges and grumbled in physical effort persevering the monumental sealing technique. "I thought you knew already that chakra only serves to nourish me."
With that response, the Chaser slipped right out from the rift through sheer force and feeding off of the All-Mirage's own sealing technique to overcome it. Once he had fully freed his backside, the fearsome man even dived back for seconds, plunging his left forearm into the All-Mirage's rift while his left and his right foot kept the rift wide-open until he had fully nourished himself from it and stood tall before stunned Endo without as much as a scratch from the previous scuffle.
"The rabbits may revere that tool, but its chakra is so so. Just like those Moon people, it's powerful and ancient but… It only makes me crave something meek and simple that much more," the Chaser declared while dusting off his hands and preparing to put them all over Endo, refusing to let go until the swordsman was just dust scattered by the air.