The duo of rogue ninja sent to capture Kaguya Yaban, the man who was once the Fourth Tsuchikage and a hero to his villagers, took careful steps across the dark corridors of the mines. These laid far outside the territory that Iwagakure used to consider their own, back when they still could consider any patch of land their own, and were therefore far more perilous to wander in.
Whether they were used by a band of thieves, mercenaries or just flat-out savages that found solace and safety from justice in the dark dampness of the underground was still a mystery. The only thing that mattered now was that Kaguya Yaban had chosen this place as his place of residence or banishment, depending on how one looked at it.
"Can you hear that?" Toxi wondered.
"Hear it? I can feel it in my toes and all over my feet…" Veno looked down. It had been far too dark to confirm if the ground was truly rumbling and if any dust had been accumulating from the unruly quakes or if this was just the imagination of someone who had spent much more time in complete darkness than necessary.
"No light…" Toxi looked around. "Just like back in the day, back home. We should've known that old man Yaban would be a sucker for nostalgia."
"Just like back home? Unless I've got another twin brother and you've been tagging in and out with each other, you haven't spent a day in the mines," Veno squinted with a skeptical look at her sibling.
"You don't have to have worked in the mines to know that very few tunnels had actual lighting. At least back during the Third's era, the administration had an excuse that the Third did not know what he was doing with the mines because rich fops that have never worked a day in their lives were in charge but Yaban actually grew up in the mines and he still didn't change a thing," Toxi muttered just to fill the hallways with noise as the two went deeper and deeper down. While neither of them could sense chakra and the two operated solely on intelligence, they felt they were getting closer by following the thuds and the quakes and heading further down that way.
"I wonder what Yaban's excuse is. The administrators from the Third's times said the mines were filled with a noxious gas that would have triggered explosions and fires, then they stated the village was in no condition to light up millions of kilometers of mine tunnels all across the Land of Earth…" a smirk twisted Veno's face.
"You can ask him yourself," Toxi stopped over a steep drop that offered only stalactites and stalagmites hundreds of meters tall on each side of the cave. It was likely a natural formation, maybe it had a bit of help from something like a manmade explosion meant to excavate more ore or just an accidental one. Maybe there was more truth to the administrators' ramblings about flammable and explosive gases than initially thought.
"Still rumbling…" Veno sighed and pointed far across the vast opening to a small accumulation of water in between an entire mountain of needle-like natural mineral formations.
The two shapes flickered away, appearing before a back rippling with fleshy tendons as it worked toward assisting a bare-chested man pound at the ground in front of him with fists burning with a blue flame of basic chakra imbuement. Despite the man's physique suggesting grand physical strength even without the aid of chakra augmentation, the ground that he's been pummeling didn't splinter or form any fissures but merely raised rings of dust that slowly dissipated throughout the area and settled somewhere new. Despite not being a chakra sensor, Kaguya Yaban turned around and wiped his sweaty forehead. He turned to face the pair of arriving rogue ninja as if he'd been expecting them, though his facial expression didn't support this conspiratorial theory.
"Toxi and Veno, was it?" Kaguya Yaban spared only a few words of the most important matter plaguing his mind. He didn't bother voicing any wild guesses of why this pair had arrived to face him, nor what they've done with the plentiful array of ninja settling down in the abandoned mining town resting inside of a crown in the center of a mountain range.
"We're taking you with us, traitor." Toxi announced with a cocky look on his face. "You've got no option to come quietly. Punishment for the crimes against your people is due."
"Hmm…" Kaguya Yaban let out a grumpy noise before stretching his shoulders and bending his knees while rotating his upper body about as a warm-up for an upcoming ritual of fisticuffs that was to settle some beef he had no clear understanding of as of yet.
"Aren't you going to ask us what crimes? You self-righteous bastards always think you have committed none whenever we place you in front of the wall and prime for execution!" Veno let her outrage at Yaban's lackluster reaction be known.
"There's no man that's spent a day doing important work that hasn't bent or broken some law and hurt one person or another. I have done little of that lately. As you can see, I'm quite busy with menial labor and, honestly, it's quite liberating," Kaguya Yaban took the luxury of scanning his surroundings that had bright veins of gemstones and minerals scattered in round piles around the scene where the action was to take place. "I don't really care about wealth or what these trinkets mean. If it's retribution you seek, and if those shiny stones are of any consolation, you're free to nab them. I'm not here for them."
"What do you mean!?" Toxi hissed out.
"Toxi…" Veno turned to her brother, trying to encourage him to swing the first fist and stop antagonizing their opponent into a brawl that would prove more troublesome to deal with than they've already prepared for.
"No, this man abandoned his seat of power, his people, and his responsibility. I need to know what for," Toxi lashed back at his sister.
"You know, if you killed dad before drilling him for answers, you'd have more peace of mind," Veno rolled her eyes.
"Your brother is looking for every straw he can grasp for that would help talk him out of this," Yaban replied. "Many people would see this as a sign of weakness, I'm sure your brother's one of them. I don't think there's weakness in not wanting to fight or kill someone. It does, however, take a weak man to consider and weigh one's options in the face of one's opponent instead of before the battle even takes place."
"No! No dancing around the subject, traitor! Tell us what you've abandoned your village and surrendered your people to the tyrants for? Because seeing a politician mining gemstones and precious minerals all this time all by his lonesome… It only makes you draw one conclusion," Toxi growled by rearing his half-bandaged-up fist at his enemy. Yaban's eyes didn't seem to linger on the swollen and near-rotten tips of violet and blue fingers with a bloodshot network of veins popping out to the surface that laid underneath the wrappings.
"I didn't flee here because of greed, boy. I came here because, unlike managing a village, mining is simple. I don't know if it's because I've grown up and rose the ranks by working in the mines most of my life or if it's just the simple truth of life that menial, hands in the dirt type of labor is just that much simpler and much more rewarding than the alternative or if there's something more to it. As I've said, I don't mine for the splendor or the value of these trinkets, I do it for the pleasure of the process. I've been a miner, a ninja, then Tsuchikage. I'm no longer the Tsuchikage and I'm not permitted to be a ninja either. That only leaves me with one straw of what's left of my identity and I'm more than content living the rest of my life with just that much," Yaban explained himself.
"This is incredible… He shifts the weight of the stone and minerals, raising the mass of the stone and making the minerals light as a feather to pop the veins straight out from the stone. This sort of mastery over the Lightweight Boulder Jutsu is what made Kaguya Yaban the Fourth Tsuchikage and one of the most powerful ninja alive. This is a higher degree of mastery than what we've trained for, Toxi…" Veno warned her brother to stop seething in his primitive qualms with the man and start observing his environment. Against a man like Kaguya Yaban and the overwhelming pressure he filled the room with when staring with those rigid as boulders eyes, not a single mistake or oversight was permitted, even to those who have honed a perfect set of skills to take this man in.
"I guess we are similar…" Toxi closed his eyes with a bitter expression coloring his face. "Both of us have taken elementary abilities and stood out from amongst the tens of thousands that have used them before us. Lightweight Boulder Jutsu is quite common amongst the chaff of Iwagakure, but no one throughout history has taken it to where you have, traitor."
"Well? Are you going to bark at me or are you going to bring it already? I've been a miner for years now. I've forgotten what it feels like to be a ninja already and I'm a bit excited to be reminded of it," Kaguya Yaban raised his hands and looked at them. With the exposed veins of exotic minerals providing natural light that danced across the watery surface of the cave opening, the rough, pure-white stubble decorating Yaban's tired face could have been made out.
"Careful, Toxi… We need to find out how much he knows of our abilities. He's been our commander for a few years after all…" Veno warned her brother not to overextend too early, but it was a fool's errand to try to restrain him at this point.
"No way! This asshole dumped his village and its people and fled here to punch minerals and gemstones out from the ground for months and years on end! Even if he asked us to come along and accept his punishment quietly, I'd beat the shit out of him anyway!" Toxi bubbled with hatred and charged off at his opponent with no wary.
Kaguya Yaban waved his arm in a slow and tranquil manner, performing a kata and tensing his chest muscles into a stone-hard wall before the first fist collided with his chest. The boiling wrath in the young man's face changed into scorned shock as his rushing punch that he put all of his force into collided with the intended target with more than enough force to punch clean through most combatants if not stop the hearts of more resistant ones but his mightiest punch still didn't budge the man he was opposed to.
Just as Kaguya Yaban was about to seal the vast difference in force between the two colliding forces with his words, Toxi showed he refused to accept this injustice by pinching his fingers at Yaban's chest and redirecting his entire body into a backward vault that positioned him right in front of Yaban with both feet on the ground. Toxi's bandaged fists vanished from sight while the infuriated taijutsu specialist launched his assault on the Fourth Tsuchikage's adamant body, though neither of his machine-gun attacks yielded any more success than his first blow.
"Your punches lack mass, boy," Yaban mocked his opponent. The fleshy, bare-chested combatant blitzed his right forearm in a rising jab aimed at Toxi's solar plexus, but Toxi's impeccable footwork brought him further from his heavyweight opponent. Yaban proceeded with a stout step forward and exploded in a standing uppercut, but Toxi weaved back.
Something was off… Toxi's face colored with sheer terror as he realized that his entire body had been drawn toward his opponent like a quivering leaf being pulled away and dragged into the rampant tornado. He could see and feel the monumental weight behind his opponent's blows. It felt like as if even one of those pounds connected–he'd absolutely die for certain. Toxi gulped and employed his instincts as a martial artist, gliding underneath Yaban's textbook spinning high kick before fumbling away for his dear life.
"What's the matter, boy? You're looking straight at my back? Don't you want to attack it?" Yaban turned his head, swatting his waist-long snowy hair aside as his warrior's gaze blazed with obliterating flame. A blaze that placed crushing weight against the chest of anyone unfortunate enough to stand before Kaguya Yaban.
"I felt as if I'd surely die if I approached you just now…" Toxi admitted with all traces of reckless fury, absent from his response. After coming face-to-face with his own mortality in the first few exchanges with this one-of-a-kind monster of a man, Toxi forced his lesser impulses down and quivered with a cocktail of excitement and terror alike.
"You've got nice instincts, boy…" Yaban smirked, closing his eyes before turning to Toxi's sister, who remained observant and wary of Yaban from afar. "What about you? I've heard from my squad captains that you two work best in a pair. Aren't you going to attack me with your brother?"
"The first attack… You used Lightweight Boulder Jutsu to decrease Toxi's mass to insignificance at the very point of contact of his fists with your body, neutering his blows to be as soft as a feather. Then, you caused drastic shifts in the mass of air around your swinging fist to create a vacuum pocket and draw Toxi in for a finishing strike. Without a doubt, had Toxi contacted you at that time, you'd have used your point of contact to drop his mass and cause your foot to split him in half with unparalleled force…" Veno reported to whoever cared to listen.
"I see, so you're the cooler head of the group. That is impressive, you got not a single detail wrong. As expected from someone who came here to kill me," Yaban stretched his neck out, cracking it as he bent his head left and right and continued his warm-up stretches.
"Kill you?" Toxi fumed. "I'm afraid you'll have to repent for your crimes, redeem for them, and serve some use to the village you've abandoned. Only then will you be permitted death, and it won't be an honorable one. A traitor like you will die like a dog, crushed by stones."
"It'll take an enormous pile of stones…" Yaban sighed before turning his back to the young woman, who seemed too stunned to pose any immediate threat to him at that time. Suddenly, Yaban's eyes widened as a painful shock resonated throughout his entire body. The man even staggered forward just a single step. The nerve-racking impulse was simply that overwhelming and came so unexpectedly to him.
"You must be feeling it already. The true weight of my fists that not even you can brush off…" Toxi pulled a loose strand of bandages wrapped over his rotten-looking fists with his teeth, tightening them.
"Those knuckles… Those aren't pressure wounds, they're…" Yaban muttered, feeling a weakness in his chest that made talking difficult.
"That's right, poison." Toxi reared his teeth with an apish smile. "Ever since I was an Academy student, I ground up every venomous bug I could into powder and punched it instead of sand. I missed out on more Academy days because of being sick than I attended but, over time, I developed an immunity to that rot. By the time the war crept up on us, just a single point of contact between my fists and the enemy causes grave poisoning. Deadly in seconds to most ninja."
"We knew you'd be cocky enough to underestimate your opponent and take an entire flurry of blows, Kaguya Yaban. By now, your collapse is guaranteed," Veno yelled out from behind Yaban, earning the Fourth's momentary attention though his sight was blurry from the aftereffect of the hidden poison.
"You imbeciles… Your masters sent a deadly assassin combo with venomous fists to kidnap someone?" Yaban grumbled out with a husky tone, staggering back so that the two ninja he was facing off against remained in his field of view. In his current state, he could no longer ignore them.
"We figured that you'd either come up with a method to deal with the venom or that you'd just be that damn hard to kill that you'd survive even a few doses of it," Toxi shrugged before entering an agile boxing stance and shadowboxing with quick hops to his swift feet. "Plus, the actual surprises are still ahead, if you can stay standing long enough to see it."
"Took the words right out of my mouth, whelp…" Yaban coughed up, exhuming a cloud of violet powder from his mouth.
"Impossible!" Veno screamed out. "You've reduced the mass of Toxi's venom while it was inside your body?"
"What's lighter than air has to come out from somewhere, right? Plus, do you really think this is the first time someone's had the bright idea to poison me?" Yaban hopped around on hefty feet and swung some fearsome whopper blows about before taking a modified wrestling stance. "I guess the actual surprises are still ahead of you two. If you can push me far enough to show them to you."
Toxi yelled out, taking off toward his opponent with a right swing. Just as Kaguya Yaban altered his stance to deal with the advancing taijutsu specialist, Toxi connected his hands and split off into a handful of illusory duplicates of himself. The circle spun around Yaban, with each clone charging out of formation to lure a reaction out of Yaban, which would've left an opening for Toxi. Yaban bellowed while slamming his foot into the ground and shooting off a pelting storm of gemstones and minerals from underground that split off of its stony tomb in a pelting upward shower. Despite the scratches, Toxi delivered a quick jab at a mean angle from which Kaguya Yaban had no other choice but to block it.
"It doesn't matter if you can deal with the amount of venom in your body…" Veno scratched her chin while observing her brother's battle and looking for an opening to pitch in without endangering him as well as seeking a chance for her own hidden ace in the hole. "Even if you can exhale the venom, you won't be able to recover from its immediate effects on your body. Over time, the damage will accumulate. It's just the equalizer we need to fight on even terms with you, Yaban."
Veno began going through hand seals, which alerted Yaban immediately. For someone without the gift of chakra sensory and operating under the limited underground lighting of the luminescence of exotic gemstones flaring up the cave opening, Yaban had the instincts of a master shinobi.
"Venom Style: Venom Dumpling Bomb!" Veno yelled out, positioning her hands over the opening of water and standing up to draw a blobby mass out. It started as a crystal clear blob of cave water, within mere moments it blackened with the dirt from Earth Release that was one half of Veno's Advanced Bloodline. With the complete formation of the Advanced Bloodline, the oversized blob of water turned to violet sludge, hovering and dwarfing the woman controlling it from underneath. Veno drove her arms forward, directing the gigantic mass of literal poison to slam and soak her opponent in it.
Yaban flicked the back of his hand at the advancing colossal blob of poison while Toxi bolted from its range, having already seen it coming before his sister even completed the jutsu's formation and finished channeling it. The point of contact between his hand and the venom bomb was minimal, though it dyed violet almost immediately upon contact with the perilous sludge. Whereas normally the monumental sludge bubble would've devoured and drowned Yaban whole, with the reduction of the bubble's mass, Yaban splintered it off into helpless bubbles that drifted upward lighter than the surrounding air, touching no other areas of his body.
"More venom… Who could've guessed?" Yaban sighed while staring at the internal damage and taking the time to feel the sizzling burn from within his blood vessels at the back of his hand, which he smacked the fearsome jutsu away with.
"Mine differs from Toxi's. Mine is an Advanced Bloodline formed by tainting Water Release with the impurity of Earth Release. By using Earth Release in an advanced form of certain minerals and working with my Water Release just right to cause the correct chemical reaction between the two elements, I can create Venom Release–my personal signature Bloodline," Veno explained while staying low to the ground and ready to send another ninjutsu Yaban's way if he felt inclined to shut her up.
By now he must've known that he was in for a truly challenging battle against a pair that had just the right set of skills to send him fumbling flat on his face in a short while, no matter how much Kaguya Yaban made one question about the limits to which one man could take one measly jutsu.