"Okay… So now everybody knows…" Shige-H sighed as a brush of fresh air hit everyone's cheeks in a welcome change compared to the unattended Boulder Town Police Force HQ facility they've spent the last hour in.
"That feels like a tiny dramatization and at least a little overblown… Kumogakure knows. Iwagakure might know. Unless I can talk Prabba-san into not disclosing this information. I saved her life. That has to account for something, right?" Mana tried seeing a bright side in the recent developments.
"Man, this fresh air just hits different. It smells so much like piss and vomit in there…" Endo belched, pinching his nose before realizing he was no longer in the holding cell, at which point the swordsman began drawing breaths rapidly and taking deep and satisfying gulps.
"Well, when you've got ninja coming and going, everyone imagines themselves a grand warrior and no one quite sees themselves as a toilet cleaner…" Prabba spoke with a husky tone as she left the defunct Police Force HQ right after the Stars. "I didn't mean to stalk you guys. I just wanted to talk, and I overheard what Mana said. I'm willing not to omit this information we've obtained from my reports to Iwagakure. Not only because of gratitude about Mana saving my life. I want to work alongside you and help you solve this mystery of yours."
"We are short on people. Desperately. We just lost someone we have been forced to rely on and then found out that we're actually shorter on hands than we initially thought when we still had that unreliable party with us," Shige-H groaned, placing her hands on her hips while she tapped her foot trying to come up with a plan of action.
"We'd be honored to work alongside you, Prabba-san. We may need to talk the rest of the peacekeepers, as many as possible, into assisting us as well," Mana nodded her head respectfully.
"I don't like it. Most of them acted like self-righteous fops…" Endo grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest and looking away.
"Please understand that to many of them, this is an undignified assignment. As I've said before, many ninja assigned to this town see themselves as elites with the capacity to change the world. Being assigned to serve as the peacekeeper of a town that belongs to another country, a country inhabited by people of a different skin tone who have just lost a swift yet grisly war where one must put their skills to serve those people and not fight them… It's a tough pill to swallow to many," Prabba explained.
"I see. Well, difficult or not, we simply must try reaching out to as many as we can," Mana insisted.
Before the Stars could come up with a plan of action, the door to the defunct Police Force HQ burst open with a handful of ninja in Kumogakure uniforms rushing out. Denkka, the Kumogakure kunoichi whom the Stars have already met, separated from the flock to approach the confused party and sighed in frustration before gathering the strength to speak up.
"Look, you guys are here to look into the business of some nuke ninja group, right? You may want to come with us on this. Apparently, the body of the guy that's been causing a mess this whole day disappeared from the morgue," Denkka forced out with a light growl to her voice.
"If they wanted their guy back, maybe they shouldn't have killed him off in the first place…" Endo rolled his eyes. From the looks of it, he wasn't overly fond of the idea of working alongside the local peacekeepers. Then again, the list of things Endo was not overly fond of was ever-expanding and spanned many volumes if penned down. The Stars were usually wiser and more successful working around his likes and dislikes. Though they've never been as few as they were now.
"This doesn't necessarily have to be our group," Shige-H shrugged. "If Krown is a ninja notable enough to have taken part in the battlefield of the Coltan Conflict, infamous for his crimes before the war and a member of a rogue ninja group, he'll have a notable bounty on his head on the Black Market. It's more than likely that a coroner has decided to make a living off of this one head and wrote the world's grisliest "I quit" note."
"That's what we're going to find out," Denkka nodded with an uneasy look on her face. "Look, this entire business with this rogue group and Kaguya Yaban and you, Konoha's Sorceress, it's not something that this town can handle. If some real shit was to hit the fan, those snotty-nosed brats are going to get wiped out. That's why I'm willing to overlook the temptation of reporting this gig of yours to Kumogakure if you take it to mind and keep your battles contained. Leave the peacekeepers out of it."
"Well… If, to quote you, "shit was to hit the fan", we'd certainly get wiped out too," Mana replied, while Shige-H and Prabba looked uneasy and hesitant to speak their mind. "That was why we need as many capable hands assisting us as possible. The enemy outnumbers us and, from the looks of it, they employ soldiers that are used to violence and are proficient at it. For someone who acts and looks like a crazy person, their leader is surprisingly adept at pulling their strings too. She's playing chess here, and it feels like we're five moves behind at all times."
"What Mana is trying to say is… We need help. We're even willing to deal with the fallout of you relaying the entire situation as is, background on Mana's World Magic Tour and all, to Kumogakure, in exchange for some reinforcements," Shige-H proposed. That was why she was the leader. Mana would have never had the stones to propose something as mad as this, but when faced with a wipeout and potential war, one had to pick the hill they were willing to die on and be willing to make sacrifices.
"I'll fight alongside you then," Denkka nodded. "It may not look like it, but I've been part of the Imarizu once and old-man commander thinks highly of Konoha's Sorceress' skills and guts."
Endo whistled. The name of the Imarizu hadn't eluded even an apprentice swordsman brought up in a cage complex atop of an active volcano. The Raikage's personal trustiest squad of whatever their master needed them to be. Mana had once crossed paths with the squad when Kiyomi ended up with a sizeable bounty on her own head and the Imarizu found themselves involved in a grand beach fight.
"I was wondering about the lack of an additive to your name…" Shige-H turned the corner of her lips upward. The ex-Kumogakure kunoichi wondered what to make of this revelation and where it fit in alongside the rest of the news.
The Stars alongside the honorary one-time members of the peacekeepers of Boulder Town flickered away, chasing after the party of peacekeepers that took off to investigate the arrogant act of corpse-stealing.
"How does a member of the Imarizu end up on a peacekeeping mission on Boulder Town?" Shige-H wondered while the ninja made haste to their destination. Because Denkka was the one who knew the exact location, the Stars were forced to move a bit behind the woman to follow her and the peacekeeper wasn't exactly racing with the speed of light to get there. It had been a long day for the peacekeepers…
"When the leader of the Imarizu changes, usually so do the members. The bond of trust between the head and their squad is almost as important as the trust between the Raikage and the Imarizu. More so now than ever…" Denkka replied.
"What does that mean?" Mana wondered.
"Lady Fifth isn't the type to employ a personal hit-squad. She's a lot more hands-on than any of our previous leaders, especially Lord Fourth. Whereas Lord Forth was the most eager to employ the Imarizu in a variety of ways that quickly surpassed what the Imarizu thought their competence touched on, Lady Fifth may as well have forgotten the group exists," Denkka explained.
"It's ironic, a samurai who forgets that a sword earns its shine, drawing blood and slicing fat," Endo spoke up. It was only now that it dawned on Mana that Endo was merely an infinitely less successful version of the Fifth Raikage, a woman who was brought up by a God Sword and became the leader of her own village despite the inherent tension related to her place of origins and skin tone, whereas Endo was… Well, Endo.
"What happens in such instances is… In the absence of a powerful leader, overlooking the group, assigning new members, and concerning themselves with management, a new head takes place. Well… It was a long time coming for the old man to step down and a new, rasher head to take his place. I just happened to be tight with the old geezer, so I had to taste the boot or feel it punting me from behind. It punted so hard that I ended up in Boulder Town…" Denkka sighed, still feeling the proverbial aches in her backside, apparently.
"How many people work in this morgue?" Mana asked, switching the subject while staring ahead with an ominous look on her face.
"Just the coroner with a handful of assistants. If something happened there, the staff should have evacuated. Why?" Denkka wondered.
"Something's wrong. There are far too many chakra signatures at the place," Mana gnashed her teeth as the Stars and peacekeepers alike hastened their step.
A pillow of a passing wind current accompanied the light feet of the ninja as they assembled in front of an unimpressive building that resembled more of a rectangular shack, supported by a pair of wayward boulders than an integral establishment of the settlement. Despite wanting to enter the place and scope it out more than anything, the Stars and the peacekeepers waited for Mana's call as her sensory abilities would have relayed more details now that they've gotten closer to the location.
"Inside, hurry!" Mana's eyes gapped to where the vessels feeding them threatened to burst. Endo bashed at the tin door with his shoulder, sending it flying to the other end of the entryway as the party of ninja stumbled into a bloodbath. Open ribcages laying in puddles of viscera with blood having showered the place with such intensity that it was still dripping from the ceiling and drooling over the walls.
Mana's lips went pale and she couldn't help but shiver her following breath, covering up her mouth while everyone dealt with this nightmarish sight in their own way. Endo's eyes raced across the surrounding hallways, looking for something to cut. When faced with his own failure, the swordsman sought for something physical to cut down as if it would have excused it. Prabba covered up her mouth and searched for clues while Denkka proceeded through the room of her peers without a twitch to her lashes.
"They're all dead," she stated the obvious. "Not just the Kumogakure peacekeepers either, the locals too."
"Mana…" Shige-H turned to the magician.
"Not everyone is dead. There are some familiar signatures on the basement level. I can't sense whoever did this. There is a miasma of chakra lingering all over the place, but nothing concrete. No specific point where it's all focused. It's a lot like the Hidden Mist technique Kirigakure ninja use. A smokescreen of pure chakra essence," Mana pointed out. She had seen phantasms of wickedness such as this every day in Jigoku, but she had hoped to never have to see something like this ever again.
Then something more solid. The lingering shroud of chakra began swirling toward a single object — a heap of stray bandages everyone had ignored before. Sludge of a shade of hickory surged and slurped, drawing in droplets of blood and gore across its journey to the wrappings that served as a frame to give the filth shape. Before the humanoid mud-creature could fully form, Mana clapped her palms.
"Serenity Arcana!" she chanted out as her armor ninjutsu formed into a hail of knife-shaped projectile chakra constructs and skewered the rising creature. It was unclear which one of hundreds of chakra blades did the trick, but the humanoid filth collapsed into the sludge that gave it birth with the frame of bandages giving it human shape scattering into a shredded litter.
"You've named your armor ninjutsu…" Shige-H sighed in relief before realizing that the first riser was just a herald of the snapping bear trap. Sludge began pouring out from within the corpses of the peacekeepers, drawers and ventilation and body storage compartments and gathering strips of bandage. Their faces never formed, except for a mess of teeth formed out of chipped bones of their victims that hardly would've served for the task teeth were meant for.
"Helps speed it up," Mana finished the impromptu conversation while the ninja engaged the surprising enemy that had claimed the lives of the disappointed and bored peacekeepers. It hurt Mana to think that these poor men and women laid their lives feeling in a hopeless, perpetual corner that prevented their natural progress. If one was to die, no one preferred dying while feeling caged and living a pointless life. And yet no matter how hard it hurt, Mana's thoughts just couldn't stay away from it as Serenity Arcana formed a mirror image of the Audra steel wand she once waved and buzzed across the hallway in front of her, beheading the rising mud-walkers.
Endo covered the entire hallway in a single leap. Blinding slashes made shinier and more marvelous by the limited, blinking shine of a weathered ceiling light reflecting off of his well-maintained blade spread in a deadly crescent. A single blitz slash reduced a handful of sludge creatures to a mucky mess, while Endo avoided getting any gunk on him because of impeccable footwork.
A surge of golden lightning surrounded Denkka as she kicked at the wall of a nearby administration room that had a dead body of a peacekeeper hanging halfway busted through the tempered sheet of glass. Vaulting over the gap, Denkka began swinging and kicking with what seemed like Konoha's Strong Fist style of taijutsu while entirely enveloped with Lightning Release chakra aura. A single punch resonated with shocking bursts that made the mud-walkers explode on contact with surging electricity shooting out from their splatters.
"What… Is this shit?" Denkka grumbled while feeling the sludge covering her body and encumbering her at the joints and limbs. When smashed to bits, the remains of the sludge humanoids crawled up one's body at a sluggish pace and halted over their joints and pressure points to make movement heftier. Fortunately for the veteran kunoichi, a wrathful expulsion escalating the output of her Lightning Armor tossed the sludge entrapment covering her aside.
"This might be how these things overwhelmed the peacekeepers…" Shige-H weaved around, avoiding the swings and lunges of the enemy as she realized that her close-combat favoring style would leave her highly susceptible to this form of enemy. With the shine of Chakra Enhanced Strength gleaming over her fists, Shige-H slammed her hands together, expelling a shock wave that splattered the surrounding mud-walkers and littered the walls with cracks.
Where the rundown morgue had scrap for wall patches, they popped and unraveled from resonating pressure while every sheet of tempered glass in the vicinity shattered. The dead body hanging over halfway in and out of the room where Denkka had been fighting off these deadly assailants collapsed into two pieces, the top half out of the room while the lower half–inside. The revolting scenery of its slipping innards didn't grace the view for too long as the guts began bubbling up before bursting with sludge that had been moving within the corpse, emerging as more of the same-old nightmare.
"Luna Style: Umbral Ring!" a raspy yell came from a dark staircase leading down into the more private and closed-off sections of the morgue. A boulder enveloped by a vertical donut of cerulean chakra that let out a gentle hum in passing bashed into the wall of the room where Denkka was hiding in. The ring surrounding the boulder lingered long past the rock shattered. Denkka grabbed hold of the doorframe of the collapsing room while the sludge humanoids surrounding her slurped up toward the center of the chakra ring. Then, in an eerie hoot, the ring expanded in a horizontal blast shock wave that splattered everything it had drawn into its center into a hail of brown mass.
"Prim-S, you've survived," Denkka walked out of the administration room and assisted the green-haired young man to finish climbing the staircase. He had a chomp on his shoulder that splashed with blood. Shige-H rushed to his aid while Mana and Endo returned to the center of the entryway to regroup after they had cleaned out the floor.
"Piece of cake…" Prim-S gave the woman a thumb up, though he smiled with a crimson grin that gave way to a bloody drool the moment his lips parted. An emerald shine soon eased the spout of blood over his shoulder, though it quickly stopped with Shige-H pulling out a kunai from her pouch.
"That's a nasty piece of work you've earned there. Would've killed you if it wasn't for your flak jacket stopping the chomp an inch short of the artery. I can't just treat it, I'll need to remove the bone chips from your flesh before I seal the wound," Shige-H gave the young man a worried look, portraying just how uncomfortable it'll get for him before he can raise an arm over his head again.
"How bad is the situation down there? There's bound to be some medical tools in the dissection chambers, right?" Endo disconnected his sword-staff and sheathed both swords.
"We've almost taken care of everything down there. I was the only one able to walk, so it was up to me to fetch help…" Prim-S winced in pain as Shige-H took him over her shoulders like a whiny little brother and sat him over her back for an easier carrying position. "You…" Prim-S called out to Mana. "It's those same assholes that want to nab you. They left a message for you."
"A message?" Mana squinted with her right eye.
The Stars and the peacekeepers descended to the service rooms where Prim-S led them to where the rest of the survivors had holed up. It was a large body storage room with a central dissection table. The cut-up bodies of nurses and the coroner laid with haunting visages of pre-mortal agony frozen in their expressions.
"This isn't the work of those same freaks," Endo noted. "A skilled hand chopped these guys up clean. No faceless sludge monster gnawed them up."
"The first one burst from this body," Prim-S pointed with his good arm at an overweight man laying with his ribcage open on the dissection table. The surviving peacekeepers pressed their backs to the corner, still looking mortified by the sudden torrent of horrors that washed over them, picking most of them off while leaving everlasting chilling impressions on the rest of them. "It all started when we just walked into the room."
"This man…" a Kumogakure kunoichi pressing her own share of what would make for haunting scars in the future spoke up. "He's not from this village."
"There goes the theory about the coroner wanting in on the Black Market loot…" Denkka rolled her eyes, approaching the bloated corpse with the open ribcage and focusing her stare to a point that most squeamish human beings would prefer to look away from. "There it is, your message."
The peacekeeper kunoichi pulled out a scroll wrapped in human skin patches that appeared stapled together. That was one way of keeping the scroll from soiling inside of a corpse. Yet again, feeling fortunate for her lack of a sense of smell, Mana picked the scroll up and unraveled it. Someone had gone through a tremendous amount of bloody horrid work to assemble this theatre for her to see. Despite a subtle case of shaky hands and quivering lower lip, Mana pulled on the nostril stitched on the end of the scroll that let her yank the scroll open.
"Konoha's Sorceress, don't go anywhere. We're coming to get you. Leave at Boulder Town's peril." Mana read off of the scroll.
"What assholes…" Endo snorted. "They had to have killed like a dozen people to get this much skin off of 'em. All that just to write a few sentences and waste most of the scroll."