Be it unwavering bravery or battle madness, but Endo didn't back down from the insurmountable challenge posed in front of him. Instead, the swordsman took a low stance, bringing his body closer to the decorated and curved golden floor and spreading his legs out to bring his balance as low as possible and make it as difficult for his towering opponent to manhandle him as possible.
With a snort, the Chaser clapped his hands together, emitting a strident shock wave and sending Endo rolling back like a rag doll. The parasite vanished at once, appearing directly behind the swordsman in a blink and welcoming Endo as he rolled right into the leech's embrace. What began as a crafty way to suck the life out from the swordsman turned into a bloody cough for the tall, chakra-leeching monster as Endo had turned his swords backward and drove their tips into the Chaser's gut in a moment of an excellent read of moves and intentions.
With a swinging tap of his feet against the leech's face, Endo shoved off of his opponent with a kangaroo roll and prepared to engage his enemy from a low stance once more. This time, he wouldn't have to do it alone. Having grabbed other massive gears with her chakra enhanced strength, Shige-H swung in with an aerial double lariat aimed to flatten the Chaser, but the monstrous individual raised his hand and stopped the swinging gear with one hand, halting Shige's entire swing.
The chakra parasite shot his knee up. Shige-H blocked it with her other hand. The pressure of the Chaser's knee strike tore the gear asunder like a sheet of paper and sent blunt shrapnel of its teeth flying about. More than a handful of them chipped in to Shige's flesh and the young woman rode the force of the shock wave with a humbled backward slide.
Skaven flung a couple of kunai, obstructing the Chaser's hungry charge toward Shige-H. Their tails sizzled, which was what made the Chaser respect the ninja weaponry more than not at all. The sizzling tails burst into a wall of flames and smoke in a resonant blast though, despite a slight struggle against its tide, the Chaser stepped out from the wall of destruction with a mere cover of his hand over his whited out and abstractly shaped eyes.
Just as the monster reached out to grab Shige-H by her hair and pull her in closer, Skaven swooped overhead, controlled by Damisan's puppetry strings, as he littered the battlefield with explosive orbs that pulsed with heat at once. The first thought that came into the Chaser's mind was confusion as to why the Stars member would put his leader in danger like that as well. It was that thought that prevented the man-beast from reacting in time as the battlefield resonated with bubbly blasts of blaze while Damisan's threads pulled Shige-H out from the fire.
"An entire Moon of gods to the likes of you failed to prevent the satisfaction of my hunger…" the Chaser spoke up as he walked out from the flame wiping the black, gooey rot from his upper body that dripped on the ground like slithering oil. In his current transformed shape, it didn't appear as if the monster even had blood to bleed and provide temporary relief to the Stars with that the Chaser could even be stopped. That which doesn't bleed cannot be killed.
"I'm afraid he's right," Mana joined her fellow Stars without a salvo to announce her arrival as she had already spent out all of her options to combat this unnatural walking calamity. "Most of our arsenals are only bolstering him, whereas what we can actually throw at him will never be enough to put him down. Even now… He may have been in an exhausted and hungry state when he woke up, but he already drained a few of the Sky Clan ninja. Even one of them puts him beyond our league…"
"Then go and kneel before him, maybe he'll snap your neck quickly and be done with it?" Endo cursed in mockery of Mana's admission.
"That's not what I mean," Mana shook her head as the unstoppable man continued to approach the grouped-up team. "What I meant by that is that merely brawling against him is pointless–we'll all just get killed and drained. We need a solution, not a big swing at him."
"Well, you've wasted our one solution!" Endo objected. "Maybe we shouldn't have handed our precious time and space connecting quantum tunneling device to someone that doesn't wear any trousers?"
"I would hardly call dumping him another universe and calling it their problem a solution…" Mana beamed lightning bolts in Endo's direction before Skaven's sighs broke the two out of their quarreling stupor.
"Chakra…" the leech bellowed out before striking in a rushing double lariat, but Endo rolled under it while Mana pulled a handful of steel wire to use it for a slide under the giant's arm and then transitioned into an overhead swing. The magician teased the chakra leech with a tap on her bottom, prompting a swing of his hand as if trying to swat a fly. Following this up, Mana rolled over the parasite's back and pulled the steel wire to press the monster's own hand against his throat.
"Neat! Maybe he can drain himself!?" Damisan cheered on Mana's improvised thought. The leech seemed surprised for a blink, but then he only dyed his face with a toothless and abstract, sadistic smile and pulled his hand backward with unmatched brute force.
Endo's swords blitzed in mid-air, severing the strings before the Chaser could pull Mana in for a dry drain. The swordsman then made the surrounding air glittered with silver crescent-slashes as he danced with all his skill, all his speed and brutality, and his very will to be the greatest ever given shape to dye the monstrous man red. While it hardly beat the man-beast, it made him stagger back as whatever leaked from his eyes, nostrils, and mouth to cover the entirety of his upper body splattered aside like blood.
"Tell us," Mana requested of the Chaser. "Do you even know why you're so interested in our chakra? The Sky Clan's chakra surpasses that of our own an insurmountable number of times, and yet you seem completely possessed…"
"A simpleton wouldn't understand, but all chakra has a taste. Theirs is vast and quite sophisticated, but it's nothing like yours…" the Chaser snarled while leaning back into the fight and stomping the ground to cause a rampant earthquake that split the entire golden orb into open cracks and shot out a storm of chipped gold streams wherever the golden orb failed to contain his craving.
"You're right, I really don't understand!" Endo grumbled, allowing Damisan to pull all the Stars he had a hold on into the air to avoid the stunning effects of the quake that would have grounded all of them for the Chaser's finishing touches.
"No… I think I do…" Mana said. "He's talking about chakra aura. He must be able to feel it too when he feeds on someone."
"Chakra aura? Is that a sensor thing?" Shige-H wondered.
"It is. When a person has an extremely powerful emotion or part of their essence that defines their very being, it changes the very composition of their chakra. Murderous filth colors it black and vile to feel. Greed makes it swampy green while bright and cheerful people gleam gold. This is what the Chaser is reacting to. None of the Sky Clan ninja he must have drained must have felt like anything to him, besides their vast chakra level and their majestic type of chakra available to them," Mana recounted what she had learned since awakening her chakra sensory. The ability to sense chakra made her better understand what she was standing in front of. In a lot of ways, it also made him feel more alien than ever.
"So… It's his taste of someone with this sublime chakra aura that caused this obsession and transformation…" Seikuwo grumbled from the background. "If that is true, the more of those Earth Clan ninja with chakra aura he feasts on, the closer to a complete transformation he will go."
"If that is true, we must kill the Earth Clan ninja at once!" the ethereal archer ninja of the Sky Clan turned to his leader. "We may have been able to contain the Chaser before, but if he was incomplete this entire time… We cannot allow him to complete his transformation!"
"No! You can't kill Mana-sensei!" Ishikeru objected. "She came here to help!"
"She came here to retrieve her people from our employ," Tairunto reminded.
"I can have Taiyosei devour them all," Fuyumara, the Sky Clan in control of the illustrious white dragon–Bailong, suggested.
"No…" the Seikuwo shook his head. "If we did that, we'd act in no way superior to the lowly Earth Clan grunts we loathe. We, the Sky Clan, need to be better than that, or else we are no gods to the earthworms that we treat ourselves as. We need to fight, all together, alongside the Earth Clan."
"Yes!" Ishikeru pumped his stony fist. Without waiting for additional encouragement, the walking mountain of the Sky Clan took a bountiful leap skyward, almost touching the golden ceiling of the ravaged orb and preparing to do his part at long last.
"What's going on here…?" Damisan freaked out when a blazing dragon made of nothing but physical chakra and a Sky Clan woman riding in its jaws with a flying kick blitzed past him. Joshila of the Sky Clan drove her foot into the Leech's chest, but the monstrous man only turned his head to the side like a curious puppy and grabbed hold of her heel.
With one motion, he ripped the leg clean off and slammed the woman down with it, hammering down again and again as black ink sprayed from the woman's corpse. The Leech's chakra actually jumped upward and his muscles visibly bulked up from having taken a physical hit.
"The Sky Clan… No…" Mana gasped.
"You stupid assholes! You're undoing all progress we've made and then some!" Endo shook his fist over his head as a woman of pale skin and short dress of black and red blitzed past him alongside comet tails of burning gas that dragged alongside them other golden orbs, just like the one that comprised the miniature world in which this very calamitous battle was taking place.
As nine entire golden planetoids collided with the Chaser, one on top of the other, the Leech gargled with black filth and heaved outside the boundaries of the Hollow Moon and onto its surface. Mana and the rest of the weary Stars turned for the rushing army of the entire Sky Clan's greatest warriors all of whom rushed to their potential end to join the Chaser on the surface of the Moon and finish this war that started years ago when this demon landed on their serene little Moon.
"Seikuwo-san, you can't win against him. We need… We need to seal him or… Or to remove him. Fling him into space. There's no life out there. He'll have nothing to feed on and no way to return here or to Earth from deeper space," Mana pleaded with the leader of the Sky Clan as he slowly advanced alongside his rushing army. By the end of that day, the Chaser would have plowed through them all with his bare hands and only gone stronger from it.
"Yes, that could work…" Seikuwo nodded.
"I have an idea on how to do that, please, just listen to me…" Mana walked up to the draconic-looking ninja and stepped up to speak into his ear. When Seikuwo pondered on her suggestion and nodded, she waved to Damisan, who was also an essential part of this plan. While the Moon ninja kept the Chaser occupied by throwing themselves at him and offering their very lives, Damisan landed nearby to hear Mana's proposition out.
"That's crazy!" Damisan gasped. "You know that's crazy, right?"
"We don't have any time. We can discuss this later, after we remove this Leech from the Moon and liberate the Sky Clan from a problem we dumped on their home," Mana stood her ground.
While an army of black and white, exotic and majestic Sky Clan ninja joined their ultimate menace on the surface of their home. The Chaser had been sitting on a stone with a lifeless body in his grip. A half-insect, half old man Sky Clansman with a whited-out stare, dried out and puny as his balding head with a bony horn fit neatly in the Chaser's hand. Once the other Sky Clan ninja emerged, the Chaser pressed his crushing grip, smashing Mushen's head into an inky splatter as he stood tall in front of a blinding array of the godlike ninja.
"Finally, I got bored with waiting already…" the Chaser spread his arms out. "Let me rip and cleave through the lot of you so I can proceed to the deluxe dessert of the Earth Clan ninja sooner."
"You've grown more eloquent as you feasted on more and more of our own!" a fairy-like Sky Clan kunoichi donning a short, black and white dress and a golden belt with a star-shaped buckle and a crescent moon insignia in the center and a black leaf-like growth that fell on her upper face like a strand of hair while the rest of her head settled for black blades of grass-like growths to simulate hair pointed an accusatory index finger at the Leech while spinning a wooden staff in her hand.
"You Sky Clansmen always think so highly of yourselves. You're tasty, sure, but I'm feeling like neither one nor the other fully sustains me. I think I need a balance… Yes… A balance in my diet…" The Chaser posed, inviting the Moon woman to come and test her luck. Test her luck she did, alongside another Sky Clansman with obsidian metallic scales covering his entire body and a beak of white ivory. The two both wielded impressive staves and rushed at the savage demon rampaging across their home. With both his hands, the Chaser caught hold of the staves and pulled them from their hands.
"Both of you must be ninjutsu users first and foremost, correct? Just because you have a weapon, doesn't mean that you can stand up to me with one…" the Chaser taunted the two before fending off a rush of fellow Sky Clansmen and cleaving the pair in half with their own staves as if they were blades. As he fended off the impending reinforcements that swarmed like insects around him, the demonic leech stomped out both halves of the bodies of the fallen godly Moon ninja into inky mush.
"You… I remember you from before, scythe-man…" the Chaser pointed at a haunting shape of an ethereal spirit inside of a cloak with a horned hood on top. As the beastly man approached the ninja alien with a thunderous and hammering step that made the entire Moon quake in terror of his carnage, a plain-looking ninja slammed into the Chaser with a spearing tackle.
"An Earth Clansman?" the Chaser exclaimed in shock at the naivete and stupidity of his foes. They truly must have been desperate to send the one thing against him he wanted to suck dry in the first place. "I'll enjoy taking away all of your chakra and seeing your body crumble as your essence leaves your body."
"Yeah, been through the whole crumbling and rotting thing… Not a fan, would not do it again!" Damisan grumbled as he struggled against an immovable object, shifting his force from straight onward to down and diagonally up as his feet dug into the moondust underneath them. "Hit it, dragon-man!"
Ishikeru and Seikuwo both made their presences known as their eyes blazed with unique dojutsu techniques and stony pillars burst forth from underground to slam into Damisan's back and push him upward while Seikuwo's matter-shifting ability transformed them into lifeless engines. This was where Damisan's puppetry technique came into play as chakra strands extended from his sleeves and connected to the puppetry parts that Seikuwo and Ishikeru just produced for him, unloading with a strident blaze that left a hole in the surface of the Moon, the two ninja engaged in a draining power struggle took off.
"Humph… You're not as delectable as that waitress-woman but you'll have to do…" the Chaser grumbled before realizing that Damisan had tackled him off the surface of the Moon and the two had been drilling toward open space now. With Damisan's chakra jet puppetry pieces, they've been accumulating immense speed as well. "It's noble to sacrifice yourself like this, but… All you've won is a prolonged demise. I won't let you die on me and leave me without a food source, so you better be ready for a lifetime as my appetizer."
"This should be far enough… Let's just hope substitution reaches this far…" Damisan grumbled to himself as he felt Chaser's draining on him weakening, betraying the Chaser's intention to savor him until he returned either to Earth or the Moon.
"Far enough?" the Chaser wondered. A pop startled him as Damisan disappeared in a cloud of smoke and what remained in his hands now was Mana. This revelation seemed to earn a peal of manic laughter as the monstrous leech wrapped his hands and legs around his sought-after prey, digging his fingers into her flesh and he wanted to drain from deeper and deeper within and truly have an unmatched feast. Screw savoring, screw the future, just have a bash of his life right now…
The Chaser yelled out in pain as Mana's clone tased him, earning the two a few more seconds of propelling toward empty and inhospitable space while riding across the fading puppetry engines. Mana didn't have to substitute Damisan with a Lightning Release clone, though she wanted Damisan to have as brief of a contact with this monster as possible.
"A little jolt for the trip… What a tease… Let's meet again sometime," the Chaser burst into an absolute bawl in defeat as he scurried across black space without as much as a dot visible of either the Earth or the Moon.
The Chaser was now the universe's problem…