Toxi began snapping out of his daze just in time to see the floating debris of the shattered mountain slowly begin to regain its proper weight and accumulate speed while plummeting down like a meteor storm. The taijutsu specialist didn't have enough time to formulate a complicated battle plan, all he knew was that he had been too swatted, battered, and tossed about just to punch and kick the meteor storm away.
"Earth Style: Ridge Dance!" Veno chanted out, putting together a couple of hand seals in the few blinks that the twins still had to defend themselves from the mountain crumbling back together into a pile of debris. A similar one to how it once rested, though far more unruly this time around.
Sharp stone pillars shot out, surrounding Toxi and Veno, spinning around the two as the name of the ninjutsu suggested. Though, from the devastating pop and the crumbling noise of stone being reduced to mere pebbles, it became apparent that the pair's best shot was all for naught as the mountain continued to crumble down into a massive pile of rocks.
Only a single stone float lingered in the air, atop of which Kaguya Yaban stood and observed the cataclysmic rockfall, drowning his opponents out with crossed arms and a disgruntled look. While the Lightweight Boulder Jutsu allowed the user to fly freely by manipulating their own weight to being less than that of the air, such a measure made one significantly easier to hurt and defeat as losing one's own mass also made one far weaker. Just like amping the weight of one's fists made them pack a significantly more meaningful wallop.
Kaguya Yaban's bulky and refined body had been littered with a network of lacerations and deep gashes from which the poison escaped his body. One of his eyes lurked in the shade of his hair and a dark bloodstain obscuring a troublesome wound while the Fourth Tsuchikage had to restrain his own blood flow actively, using chakra augmentation from bleeding out on the spot.
The white-haired brawler plunged down, jumping off of the stone he used to surf the skies to smash into the pile already covering his downed enemies. Bit by bit, the foundations of the crumbled pile of boulders shifted, suggesting that the twins had been working to surface. Before they could make strides with that goal, Kaguya Yaban smashed into the mountain, stomping both his feet down firmly while a visible bright outline surrounded his entire body. A cerulean light that lustered even from his eyes, beaming through even the one that had been splattered out of the socket.
The exiled Tsuchikage purged his luster, transferring his overflowing chakra throughout the shattered mountain and once again restoring the weightlessness of the entire pile of boulders. The overwhelmed twins found themselves floating in mid-air while weightless boulders hurled upward, defying gravity from an elementary first look, though, given their mass, they were actually working alongside the laws of nature that have simply been altered and not against them.
With a low-pitched grumble, Yaban kicked off of the ground and scooped an airborne, weightless boulder, spinning around with it in hand as if it had weighed nothing at all. Then, the infuriated S-Rank ninja slammed the boulder, which appeared a dozen times the size of Toxi, straight at him, resuming the structure to its ordinary weight and even multiplying it tenfold at the very instance of contact. The rogue ninja swooped down like an arrow shot from the heavens and meaning to punish the Earth. On his path, Toxi smashed through a whole queue of boulders before being granted the mercy of a cruel splat so deafening and painful that his body bounced off the ground four whole meters.
Scooping up boulders and punting them like weightless balls of rag, Kaguya Yaban hurled his punishment in a ruthless barrage like a vengeful god sent their thunderbolts. One by one, just like divine thunders, those boulders crashed and let out a booming thud as they shattered to minuscule pebbles, unable to contain the bubbling and shifting forces of gravity, escalations in mass, and tremendous shocks.
"Until now, I've been just scratching the surface of how frightening I can be. The man you saw before was on the level of your average Kage. Someone who comes from the nameless rabble of the mines needs hundreds of times that level of power to stand out and shut the naysayers up," Kaguya Yaban landed on the ruined ground with his legs spread around Toxi, looming over the unconscious and wrecked young man. "If you truly have sent your parents to the afterlife, a rotten scumbag like you is outside my realm to judge. Luckily, I can still send you to them and hand your eternal fate into their hands."
"Water Style: Crescent Crash!" Veno's voice came from further away as a man-sized sphere of compressed water hurled in a crescent swing, carrying a watery tail behind it, homing in on Kaguya Yaban. Once the Water Release ninjutsu slammed into the self-exile and once he turned his mocking expression to acknowledge the woman's failure in moving him one inch, Veno gasped. Not knowing a Venom Release technique that could come out fast enough to prevent Yaban from smashing her twin brother's head in, she pulled a kunai and charged at him.
Yaban turned around, dodging Veno's slashes and the follow-up combinations of kicks, vaults, and rolling strikes without stepping off of his position of towering over her brother. The exiled Tsuchikage gently slapped Veno's shoulder. In an instant, it felt like her body had been too hefty for her feeble legs to carry. With a chilling snap resonating in her knees and a splash of blood from her popping joints, the kunoichi collapsed to the ground. Just this didn't seem like enough punishment as her mass continued to escalate for a little while, even after leaving Yaban's touch. Just like with the boulders, it took a few seconds of no-contact for the mass to revert to its original value.
The problem was that Mother Earth seemed to share Veno's plight and begin to welcome the young woman within its embrace, even though she found her to be entirely too heavy to keep. Veno grunted, then flat out screamed as she crumbled anything beneath her to dust with her supermassive weight on her journey, burrowing deeper and deeper down until her weight returned to normal and she was left utterly powerless inside of a crater of her own making.
"You seem to think that if I kept on fighting, that Iwagakure would have been better off, right? But has it ever occurred to you that if you fought harder and if you were stronger, maybe I wouldn't have needed to make that hard choice in the first place?" Kaguya Yaban stared at Toxi, who still laid beneath him with his mouth open and his eyes rolled back, awkwardly sprawled out and barely even registering the countless broken bones anymore. "When you become as strong as I am, you learn that strength alone is pointless without a good reason to use it for. Back when I was the Tsuchikage, that reason was my people. Their well-being defined when I would use it for, but also… When it was time for me to not use it ever again."
"Coward!" Toxi yelled out, still barely half-conscious but bubbling from sheer instinct to hurt, maim, and kill. A fighting mode that helped him make it out alive during the Coltan Conflict. "Earth Release: Mud Shot!"
Yaban grabbed hold of his eyes instinctively as a mouthful of heavy mud shot out from Toxi's mouth and slapped against it, covering not only the eyes but Yaban's entire face and sinking into his nostrils and his airways, almost as if it had been programmed to make as much of a mess of it as possible. With Toxi gaining a precious few moments, he decided to best use those moments by rolling onto all-fours and shooting out a punch into Yaban's gut. This decisive shot spread out a network of blackened veins and left Yaban's abdomen a violet and rotten mess, resuming the terrifying envenomation of Toxi's Venom Fist style taijutsu.
By the time that Yaban reduced the weight of the gunk covering his face and eyes and blew it out from his airways like a booger on an autumnal evening, the sight that met his eyes was Veno hanging over Toxi's shoulder with her hands pressed against her brother's chest, shining emerald green.
"Should've guessed I'm a medical ninja after I extracted venom, traitor…" Veno teased her opponent with a snicker and a stuck-out tongue. Even through a busted and blood-soaked face, the woman acted defiantly to all authority. Even the authority of the absolute tyranny that power had on a battlefield that was all too familiar to her.
"I did, I just don't care," Yaban growled, pulling his fists back and preparing to tear the two obnoxious punks apart limb from limb with his bare hands if he had to. After all, if he got his hands on them, he could make them weigh far less than a teddy bear, which, in terms, would make them as simply to rip apart as one too.
The big man swung his foot overhead before slamming it back down. The stomp emitted a radiant blue pulse across the ground, shooting off the stone pillar that Veno stood on into the sky. The fact that Kaguya Yaban had affected a platform that he wasn't touching directly made Toxi freeze up and question everything he had just learned from this clash. Yaban didn't freeze, however, the exiled Tsuchikage soared upward and swung his foot over the head before stomping it back down and smashing the rogue medical kunoichi through the boulder she's been floating atop of.
Because of the swift ascension of the boulder and the drastic shift in the gravitational force, the woman found herself almost fully paralyzed, merely able to adjust her balance. Yaban's kick formed a white pillar of an air tunnel through which his target swooped back down and crashed with a rather unimpressive and dull thud. It was only after a few more blinks and the proper dissipation of energy that the entire mountain range began roaring and crumbling apart into a deeper crater. The aftereffect of Yaban's kick had thoroughly decimated the entire landscape and left it as just a bland crater full of crumbled rocks.
"Veno…!" Toxi cried out, holding the head of his twin sister that didn't resist his hold and felt so numb and helpless. A trickle of blood went down the kunoichi's nose and there were wet slurps in her chest, suggesting that she couldn't breathe right. Whether it was because of a broken spine or a handful of rib shrapnel perforating the lungs or both, was yet unclear. "I don't understand! He didn't touch the rock!"
"Chain… He chains the effect… Just like Chynfon does…" Veno spoke with soft and subtle movements of her lips, the best she could. Whenever she forced air to leave her airways, something wet got in the way but the kunoichi forced it out in the end.
"What the fuck? You mean this asshole's just tapping into the ability of our leader on the side like it's no big deal without even knowing her? This is… All of this is so fucking stupid, we weren't ready for this, we've got to retreat!" tears began pouring down Toxi's eyes as the hopelessness of seeing his beloved twin utterly crippled and helpless and an immovable stone wall descending over them like an iron shroud that prevents their retreat and her recovery set in.
"No… This is a good thing… If we… If we win… That means we could've killed her… All along… Just like father… He was too strong for either of us but… Together… Together we killed him…" Veno squeezed out a smile before Toxi couldn't hear the muffled, wet, and bubbly breathing anymore, and the woman's eyes that shut closed to form her warming smile never opened back again.
"Veno…" Toxi shook his sister's body, finding no reaction. "Veno…!" he yelled out. Kaguya Yaban stuffed his index finger into his ear and wobbled it up and down, wincing from the volume of the grief-stricken shout as he stood over the edge of the calamitous crater, ready to continue his rampage whenever he felt like it.
"You know what, she could've healed herself instead of wasting her strength on you and she may have survived this kick…" Yaban's bitter and apathetic, husky voice reached Toxi who let his sister's lifeless body slip from his grip and smack against the rough floor as he stood with shaking fists. His own blood mixed in with the rotting powder he coated his skin with, causing the blood to sizzle when it hit the dry mountain debris.
Images flashed through Toxi's eyes with none of his input. The young man looked up with a skewering gaze and pouted lips, wishing death upon Kaguya Yaban with all of his essence. Despite the overwhelming odds and helplessness he went through, Toxi took a step forward toward the frightening man that had just killed his sister after her last act of kindness of having given him a fighting chance by mending some of his wounds. Things were never this bad. Even in the worst of times, they were always together. They always had each other.
"So… Now's the real test, boy. Which one of us loves our village more?" Yaban bent his head to the side, letting the strand of white hair stained with dried blood flop off of the bashed eyehole through which an excess of blood burst forth a few minutes earlier. "After seeing me kill your precious sister, can you still bring me back alive even if you take me down? These are the choices a Tsuchikage must know how to make, this is the type of selflessness that a leader has to show."
"I don't care…" Toxi's shaken voice interrupted Yaban as he was about to keep on talking in an attempt to say the most words he's ever spoken at once. "This village… This country… This world… All of them can drown in venom and choke on it."
"Seems to me like you're in an awful position to judge my leadership skills then, boy…" Yaban crossed his arms.
"Our parents always wanted a kid…" Toxi glanced back at the serene and smiling corpse of his sister. "They didn't want twins however, the economy just wasn't good enough for a mine worker's family to support two whole children. My father was a stern man, he figured if he gave us both the cold shoulder… Well… Eventually, one of us would kind of… Fuck off and die, so to speak. The more time went on, the sicker and direr our family's plight to kill one of us off without actually doing the deed became. Our family funds desperately needed a dead kid to alleviate the pressure, so things sort of became unbearable."
"I'm guessing your father wasn't the miner of the family. I've worked with many people but that sort of gutlessness just isn't inherent in someone working on the Iwa mines," Yaban crouched down, panting from the pain of the accumulated damage all over his body. He could rather use a story, good or bad, a story meant a little breather.
"No. Our old man was a ninja. Our mother wasn't strong, she wasn't too smart, she wasn't anything. She was the one working in the mines because that was the only way she knew how to contribute to the family. He was a tough guy, our old man. Still a genin but one of the higher-ranking ones. He liked to brag about the fact that the only reason he wasn't a chuunin or a jounin was that our country was too poor to afford to host the Chuunin Exams. Neither of us two would've stood a chance…" Toxi shook, doing his best to accept the new, cold and lonely reality of the world he would live the rest of his life in, however long that would be.
"I'm guessing your pops got the same treatment I got?" Yaban stood up and cracked his neck, stretching out his numb limbs. Even if he hurried up the effect of the venom in his blood this way, he had to get the feel of his own extremities back, or else he would've truly passed out.
"He was the first one…" Toxi looked up before putting up his dukes. The Chakra Absorption Jutsu lit up around both his fists in preparation for the inevitable exchange that could very much have brought him all the way to his sister.
"Well… He sure sounded like a ninja in terms of his character and gut fiber. If it's any consolation to you, it's a nasty way to go. I kind of would like to have gone off that way myself right now…" Yaban pressed his hand to the stone platform underneath his feet, dislodging it by letting it become lighter than air and for the wind to carry it like a surfboard over the young man he sought to finish off.
"Yabaaan!" Toxi roared out, winding his fist back and focusing all of his Chakra Absorption into a single hand, expanding the flame around his fist to twice the size while he taxed his chakra augmentation overtime as well. Toxi was fully prepared to augment his fist to such inconceivable force of wallop that he'd never be able to punch again in his life. With a boundless leap, he sought to bring his body closer to the man he would destroy.
A skyward arrow sent a pressurized airwave through the clouds above and howled into the empty vastness of space until the hopeless vacuum choked it out. Toxi's limitless fist was met with Yaban's expansion of the stone board's mass to an unfathomable pinnacle. The backlash of his own force ruptured the flesh and shattered Toxi's arm bones, skewering his own limb from within as the rocky surfboard didn't move one inch. With a push of his feet, Kaguya Yaban forced the stone platform down to the ground. Unlike before, he stayed on top of the boulder, making sure that it sank as deep down as it could until the world itself bled molten wet blazes.
The bruised and blackened hand of Kaguya Yaban grabbed hold of a stone ridge, pulling the rest of his wrecked body back as he rolled onto the platform and stretched out. The man panted for a little while into the sky that wouldn't offer him a sprinkle of rain despite the doom and gloom. The exiled Tsuchikage rolled onto his side and puked out black bile alongside some of his organs that let themselves be mashed into a thick smoothy that tasted of blood and bitterness.
"Chynfon, huh?" Yaban muttered to himself, barely scrounging himself back on his wobbly feet. "Your lapdogs wrecked my new life, may as well pay you a visit." he sighed. Talking to himself had become second nature to the man after his exile and thus the Tsuchikage didn't waste any time self-reflecting on that fact now.