"How many enemies can you pick up so far?" Shige-H turned back to look at Mana, who stayed in the center of the formation. Some may have considered it safer for Mana not to enter the enemy base at all, but leaving her all by herself outside may have been even more dangerous if one of the rogues managed to give the peacekeepers and Allied Ninja the slip.
"It's tough to say. The enemy is using some sort of masking ability. This entire cave is filled with chakra that's radiating off of these very halls," Mana looked around. Despite their best efforts and wary stares, neither of the ninja made anything notable out about the hallways leading deeper into the mountain caves that the arrived ninja party roamed.
In a shady moment, when the peacekeepers and Stars alike passed through a certain point in the hallway ceiling, the entire stony fabric bubbled like the surface of a rustled lake. Stone turned to wet, droopy sludge as an arm reached out from the ceiling bog before regaining toughness and becoming rock-solid. The black decorations underneath separate, jigsaw-like elements comprising the limb suggested that it was made of an obsidian or coal core with additional chunks of fine-polished Earth Release added as a layer of external armor.
Endo's blade flashed in a circle with a lustrous silver shine. Limbs fell with a stony thud, detached from the platforms that supported them to which they sought to drag anyone they grabbed into. Alarmed by this emergence of the enemy, the rest of the ninja readied themselves for a tough time to reach the core of the enemy base.
"It's those sludge monsters again…" Shige-H observed from above a slashed stone hand before Prism-S crushed it with a stomp and extended cerulean-colored lightning from his entire body to reach into the surrounding hallways and pull stones it could use to batter at the enemy.
"Luna Style: Umbral Collapse!" Prism-S chanted out, activating his Advanced Bloodline ability by propelling the stones onward as projectiles coated in cerulean-colored lightning. The projectiles hissed and fired off hot-red sparks upon contact with anything that wasn't just drab stone walls. The whole corridor that the peacekeepers were heading through rumbled from the peacekeeper's attack.
"Well, shit…" a masculine voice filled the corridor. It was immensely difficult to tell where it had been coming from as the sludge monsters drowned the whole hallway in a chakra smokescreen. With the very walls giving birth to hundreds of faceless mud-men each second, looking for anything rough or jagged to use as makeshift tools for murder and violence and attaching that which they found to their body, it became next to impossible to tell where exactly Selsig was speaking from. "Just when I thought I had learned to play around Konoha Sorceress' ability…"
"You may have adapted to Mana's sensory, but you won't fool the heart's eye of a swordsman…" Endo drew a second blade and pointed it at the darkness. It was tough to say if he could perceive the true location of the enemy or if this was just a vain threat, as with Endo, it could easily have been both. "If I were you, this was when I'd have attacked too, which is why my instincts helped me intercept you."
"How did you know I was lurking and looking for a strike, though?" Selsig wondered with his curious tone filling the hallway.
"The trick you employed to blind Mana's sensory, of course. You thought you had blinded her, but her blindness told us more than enough by itself," the right side of Endo's lips formed a crooked grin.
"I've no clue how you lot found us, but you will all die in here and all the way out here, no one will know Allied Ninja were ever here. Meanwhile, everyone will only cheer at the sight of gnawed peacekeeper bones. Even Konoha's Sorceress will be forgotten about in time, without new performances to spark people's curiosity…" Selsig's prophecy filled the straight hallway of an underground labyrinth leading to the main chamber where the rogue ninja gathered to discuss the most important matters.
"Wow, you're way off on your shit-talking game. Not even an actual cripple is afraid of you…" Endo hissed back and took a bold sword-fighting stance. The swordfighter leaned his upper body forward while drawing his hips back like a wild animal ready to pounce while two naked blades reflected the limited lighting from the torches and Prim-S' Advanced Bloodline technique.
Prabba pulled out a handful of arrows, rolling back and firing all of them at once. The tips had been stuck with some sort of dark-tinted mineral that made them flat-out drill through the advancing soldiers with little resistance. The advancing mud-men affected by them froze in mid-air while a gaping hole jarred in their cores. And yet the kunoichi had controlled too few enemies for her own safety as a dozen more advanced toward her for every handful she punched through. Despite her acrobatic and swift retreat and skilled distance control, it was just a few blinks before a mud-men sat atop of the fallen kunoichi while a pair reared their rotten teeth from behind it.
Mana wasn't sure what had gotten over her. Abandoning her self-preservation instinct, she fled from the safety of the Manju formation and sprung onto the offensive against the mud-men, flashing back at all the gore she saw at the mortician's office and all the dread these creatures drove into her that led to her obsession against Selsig during the attack on Boulder Town a few days back. An azure boot punted the mud-man into a shower of shattered pebbles and splattered sludge.
As the sludge slapped against Prabba's body, the fallen kunoichi missed out on a flurry of elegant kicks that reduced the wall of mud-men into waste. When the kunoichi wiped the gunk from her face and eyes, Mana stood on one leg with her crippled one raised to her chest and bent by the knee. A decorative, ethereal armor boot shined at the lower end of the amputated leg. A temporary armor ninjutsu replacement.
"Mana-san… Your leg…" Prabba rolled backward, finishing her evasive action with a vault while grabbing her fallen bow and reloading it with another handful of arrows again to not get caught off-guard by these sludge monsters again.
"It's a desperation move at best…" the crippled kunoichi breathed out, hitching a ride on a wind current again as the ethereal boot became more and more transparent before utterly vanishing from view. A crude shock hit the magician from behind, suggesting that she may have canceled her technique to preserve stamina and limited chakra resources prematurely. Another handful of sludge monsters flapped atop of Mana, stomping her back to the ground with all the mass of a rockslide while their sludgy protrusions carried sharp ridges of rock capable of bashing flesh to a squashed mess.
A handful of arrows punctured the armored shells, bolstering the defenses of the mud-men before something else entirely punched out through the sides of the skewered mud-men. Pointy rock formations grew from the sealing tags attached to the ends of Prabba's arrows, escaping the enemy's body from within and splattering their remains all across the hallway. With dirty hair and soaked with dirty sludge, Mana rose from the ground thankful for the repaid favor.
"I wouldn't mind you watching my back, Mana-san…" Prabba suggested, turning her side to signal a new position for Mana.
"Don't hold back just to make me feel better, it's okay if you leave me in the dust," Mana smiled gently while gliding across and pressing her back to Prabba's. It was one of those rare occasions that Mana felt grateful for her subtle height as she'd have bumped her head against the ceiling non-stop had she been just a dozen centimeters taller.
Prim-S slipped a pair of Shuko gauntlets out and onto his wrists. This time he'd not find himself caught unaware by the human-wave tactics of a relentless enemy. Knowing full-well that while his Luna Style was a mighty combination between Lightning and Earth Releases, but the enemy tactics allowed them to overwhelm Prim-S in-between casting of separate techniques, the peacekeeper imbued his Shuko with Lightning Release chakra and sprung into action, dispatching of handfuls upon handfuls of enemies with each slice.
It was a new feeling to hardly be able to see anything that a highly skilled ninja did. Or rather, it was a feeling Mana used to experience, though since then she had forgotten it as she used to be one of those highly skilled and stunning ninja herself. Seeing Prim-S dash like a streak of lightning, maximizing his movements and strikes so as to impress even the decent martial artists in the Sun Disc arena, was an unruly sensation. It was marvelous to witness a virtuoso of slashing in action, though it was a bittersweet marvel as Mana felt slammed back to reality by the realization that she may never fight on that level herself again.
"What is going on?" Mana wondered as she did her best to keep up with Prabba's movements, syncing up with her partner while gliding across the hallway on Wind Release currents and using her healthy leg for stiff kicks and her arms to bash the enemy with the makeshift weapons they themselves created and dropped as Mana had abandoned her ninja magician arsenal back in the hospital, thinking she had no further use for it at the time of depression. "The enemy's making the same mistake I did back then. They're obsessing over a single strategy that's clearly not working out for them… Almost like they're not trying to win."
"That's because they're not…" Denkka grunted with a glance back at Mana before skipping a nasty slam of a makeshift flint pickaxe to the face that left a gash and a mean-looking graze across her temple that spat trickles of blood over her right side of the face. "The enemy is clearly stalling for time…" the woman ignited the Lightning Release Armor around her while her hair spiked up to respond to the static field erected around her.
The sludge monsters just tossed themselves at Denkka. Almost as if they've realized she may have been preparing for something major and explosive and they saw no better way at impeding her assault than to throw themselves face-first at her only to receive an electrified pounding fist to the face that splattered the sludge monsters into pieces. A clump of mud-men smashed together. The outer layer of stone rumbled in a grunge while the monsters collided into a single, misshapen and faceless abomination filling the entire hallway with its mouth as the worm-shaped monstrosity sought to devour the peacekeepers and the Stars alike.
Denkka charged forward, winding a punch up, and disappeared inside of the innards of the fused together creature. Mana didn't like the hastiness of the ex-Imarizu kunoichi, as she underestimated just how little internal damage mattered to these creatures. They had no organs to damage, so rupturing their innards would've done little good unless one caused enough damage to the whole body to put them down. Problem was that with a bigger body came a higher degree of devastation necessary to put it down.
"It's not working. That thing's still coming at us!" Endo growled before coating his swords with chakra and slashing at the nearby wall. At that point, it was just one push kick away from collapsing into another hallway of a complex underground corridor system.
"Asuka's chakra is that way!" Mana pointed to the north. The direction she pointed to had a wall blocking the direct pathway, though with enough turns they'd probably still reach the main hall. Supposed those mud-men actually stopped hassling them.
"Which way?" Prim-S scratched his head as both the left and the right turns seemed to lead to dragged-out hallways that both turned in the same direction. This odd planning made Mana wonder if, eventually, all roads led to the main hall.
"No time!" Shige-H rushed past Prim-S with a handful of stunned mud-men hanging at the other ends of her fists, having collided with them before only to get carried away by the brute force of the medical kunoichi. Shige's fists slammed against the wall, sending cracks across the entire place and forcing the hallway to begin slowly collapsing in on itself as stone chunks began peeling off the ceiling and crashing down.
"Now we're on the clock…" a muzzled voice came from the backside before another wall broke down from the right, Denkka walked in covered with wet mud and carrying a mammoth-like tusk that the fused mud-creature used as tools to gore with. She ripped one out after punching out from the sludge worm that had gobbled her up the entire way through.
"We always were on the clock. The enemy must be making a sacrificial play to cover for their leader's retreat," Mana said while Denkka intensified the crackling aura around her while her hair spiked up even taller, with even less restraint to them. The Lightning Release aura became so intense around the kunoichi that it covered the entire hallway section she was in and threatened to zap anyone coming close to her. The woman leaned down as if preparing for a bolt forward even though she was aiming down at a wall.
"Shoulder Block Charge!" Denkka yelled out, rushing onward in a blink and expelling a violent shock wave at where she took off from that spread even further than the crash through the sound barrier may have usually spread due to electrified air. Denkka punched through barriers and hallways, burrowing like an arrow and any attempts of Selsig's creatures to stand in her way ended up with them being sucked into the focused beam of her rushing crash and obliterated immediately. So strong was the resonance that it spread through the corridor halls, disabling the mud-men lurking in them.
"After you…" Prim-S scratched his head, gesturing at the hole headed diagonally down that pointed right to where Mana directed the team earlier. Though Denkka had no feeling of when she should've stopped charging, she must've noticed a lack of resistance and halted on her feet at some point, as Mana could see torches far on the other end of the hallway.
"Fuck…" Selsig cursed, laying straight on his back battered as dozens of his mud-men laid in various conditions of degradation and demise all around him. "I really thought I could hold 'em off…"
"Hmm… With three of our members having left for Ishigakure to seize the opportunity of correcting Toxi and Veno's failure. I sense that this is no coincidence," a petite woman with violet hair spiked to the sides as they extended just barely past her shoulders jumped up with a manic smirk. After swooping down the burrowed tunnel and landing on a Wind Release current, Mana could have sworn she saw the woman feeling up the tall throne of grey stone behind her decorated with hieroglyphs and decorations that piqued the interest of the historian in Mana. "That's something just twisted enough for the occupying tyrants to pull off…" the woman licked her lips, slowly turning to the assembling party of ninja.
"She's the leader of the group. In Krown's memories, I saw her handing out tasks to the group," Mana informed the others. This was major, if they could overcome whatever strength still rustled in Selsig after his sacrificial and draining play earlier, then this woman and Asuka, they could complete this mission at last and prevent a war from erupting across the entire continent. Peace was so close now…
"Asuka… I'll make you wish you got captured and tortured by Ishigakure ninja with the attempted kidnappers trying to infiltrate the village the Tsuchikage stumbled off to," Endo pointed one of his swords at Asuka who just stared at the swordsman with a dull and unimpressed look from the right side of the throne that had been large enough to host a grown woman on it.
"Okay, newbie, it seems like you've got some history with these ninja. It's about time you prove to us you know your stuff and that you're no traitor by killing these ninja that know you," the woman pointed at Endo before drawing a pair of daggers and rolling them around in her hands playfully. Judging from how she handled those, she must've been a better acquaintance to such tools than a mere butcher or a sneaky spy.
"You're the boss, boss…" Asuka blew at the left side of her hair, puffing it out of the way of her face before picking up a pair of bamboo sticks from the ground with cloth attachments to the front ends and ropes stretching all throughout.
This confused Mana. It needed no further proving that Asuka may have wanted Mana dead, but she'd not make the sacrificial play for people she hardly knew or that she only joined to get to Mana. Something here didn't smell right. Just because of the fluttery-jittery feeling she had bubbling up in her gut, Mana closed her eyes and felt up the battlefield, extending her sensory as far as she could under heated battlefield conditions in just a blink. There was nothing surrounding them that alerted of reinforcements, and Selsig's horde had thinned out enough for their masses to no longer disturb Mana's sensory by serving as a chakra smokescreen to it.
"Endo, something about this feels odd. Asuka wouldn't just stand against us unless she thought she could win," Mana tried talking some sense into the least stable and reserved member of the party, but it was like trying to talk to a brick wall. Just after she was done talking, the swordsman turned to Shige.
"You and Denkka can have the leader. Either of you alone could probably handle her. The rest of the chaff can finish off the suicidal pawn, Asuka is mine," Endo stated with an expression that suggested that he was more telling people how he'd have it go rather than asking for permission.
"Heed Mana's warning and stay on guard though," Shige-H replied while the peacekeepers and the Stars all assembled in preparation to collide with the enemy at last. "I agree with her, Asuka had some excellent knowledge of Mana's abilities as she's been trying to assassinate her. She should have been smarter than to forget Mana was a chakra sensor, even if she may have underestimated Mana's range."
"Of course," Endo smirked, restraining his first instinct to jump into the fray against three lined-up foes and providing them with easy access to him out in the open and away from his squad. "By now, I've become aware that Mana's gut is ahead of the curve more often than not. At least as far as my reckless nature is concerned…"
"Stay safe," Shige-H turned to Mana. "I'm entrusting you to watch her back," the medical kunoichi turned to Prabba too.
"Right, I'm better suited for long-range attacks anyway so I'm fine staying in the back," Prabba nodded while Prim-S brandished his clawed gauntlets and positioned himself in front of the two women and in-between them and the fallen Selsig who only now picked himself back up from the ground. Almost immediately upon his ascent, Mana sensed a resonance spreading across the hallway and soaking the wide halls and natural pillars of stone holding it together. Even drained of a lot of his chakra, Selsig was up to his old tricks until the end.
The final push for peace was about to take place.