A desert cottontail tilted its head and turned it around. The creature was used to being exceptionally wary, yet the certain shade of boldness in the approaching figure made it refrain from digging under the sands and acting like it wasn't there. Usually, predators prowled and sneaked around. This man of two legs strut with confidence. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and was headed that way.
Somehow, the cottontail had a feeling that the approaching wraith of the sandy dunes wouldn't do harm to it. The reason was simple–the little rodent was too meek and insignificant and the man's interests laid elsewhere entirely. The petite furball and all of his oversized ears wouldn't even give him enough sustenance to pace over another dune. The man wore a thick poncho that fluttered in the pelting sandy blizzards of the deserts. Just like a phantom, this figure floated around the dunes, instead of competing against them, much like a skilled vessel picked the waves it wanted to ride instead of picking a fight with the torrential perils of the storm.
A red balaclava with simplistic green symbols and mosaics flapped about over the man's face. It was only when the enigmatic man approached the vermin and flicked his oversized, uber-wide-brimmed hat with a pointed upward crown, even the man's face was invisible to make out. Without the humanity in his eyes, it would have been impossible to tell this wandering specter from just a poncho being carried by the desert gale.
For whatever reason, despite it making absolutely no sense, the long-haired individual stared at the cottontail for what seemed like an awkward amount of time, even to the little critter. Where initially it jumped up and froze from being picked out as a notable detail in the boundless ocean of Wind Country sands, the stare had extended to where even the cottontail let out a meek cry. It was as if he hastened the desert's shadow to devour it if that was to be its fate. The little critter reared its teeth with frightened and wide eyes.
A series of low-pitched noises came out from underneath the strip of cloth cloaking the man's face. He was laughing. Not manically so. Something about the ordinary desert critter amused him mildly and after he was done admiring it, the figure walked on, drifting alongside the apron of the dune, seeking to walk around it while enjoying the moderate cover from the heatwave blasting in his face. He was happy to pay the cost of extra sand pelting him at all times for it if need be.
The desert wanderer stopped for a moment to tip the brim of his hat and stare ahead. Directly in front of him laid a round stack of pointed wooden sticks. Wood wasn't very common in the desert. It usually grew around oases and the last time that the phantom had visited his home, there were no such protections around it. His home had been dug into a wall of sandstone and relied on it to protect it from the constant shower of sand. This was an early warning to anyone coming to this outer region of the desert with intentions to flip it over on its head–whoever was in charge was influential enough to control enough oases to ruin them and rip its trees out with their roots, reshaping them to ramparts that protected even irrelevant buffer shantytowns like this one.
Then again, a conqueror like Fennec would've had to flaunt his would-be power and influence to the Sheikhs and their spoiled hogs, lest they came to take a premature piece of what Fennec would bring to them all the same. In due time.
The long-haired man haunted the entryway of the desert town, floating across it like a ghost. The desert's specter turned his eye to the right, seeing a horrified expression of a handling head, still attached to a bloody stain of its guts after something massive had stepped on them. The wanderer looked to the left, as he passed right past the crushed bodies to see human scarecrows with bare and dry ribcages that were squeezed open and relieved of their precious and beating prize. The mangled remains hung with similar haunting expressions, overlooking the entrants to the town.
The poncho ghost approached the rattling ribcages, hopping up lightly. The figure didn't land back on its baggy leather boots but instead ended up on a simulation of a rice cake with an upside-down pan for a helmet. The rice cake had simulated human eyes made of carbon polymer panels, it had limbs with moderately adequate articulation though their frames were made of polished wood and its joints were just gear work. The reason the cartoonish bundle reminded an objective observer of a rice cake was that it donned a camouflage coat of carefully maintained hay stuck to its inner frame. The color of dry grass reminded many people of pressed curry rice. Especially if they were starving.
With a brush of his gloved hand, the man standing atop an upside-down pan decorating a man-sized rice cake decoration closed the eyes of the unfortunate men and women that ended up as a warning about being in Fennec's way or just having worked for one of the Sheikhs at any point in one's life and refusing to repent for it. Refusing to sign oneself off as a piece of trash, worth less than the hay that the sombrero ghost stood on.
"Are you a gravedigger or the undertaker?" a voice of someone who had drank marinated camel stomach extract for three days straight and screamed their lungs out alongside fellow co-drunkards asked. The poncho specter turned around, his wide, white eyes gazed right back at the rundown desert dweller. They held no wrath or pity from the get-go. They were blank as blank could be.
"I just like action," the specter hopped off of its artificial rice cake buddy and patted its head with its right hand while staring right back at the bald, gaunt figure that bothered him. Little by little, people were peeking and slipping out of their homes. "It looks to me like whatever tragic festivities had caught this quaint little town had gone on ahead without me, and that's a pity. I really like to be included in things."
"If you're neither a gravedigger to quell the stench of this froth nor a reaper to deliver swift death upon us, well, Mr… This is a bad town to be walking around and messing with things in," a much more booming and fearsome tone of a well-fed bruiser pounding his own open palm and carrying a lump of steel that had slashed and bashed through so much flesh it had grown dull years ago and then kept smashing and gnashing still spread through the little park of the town's horrors that the desert wanderer found himself in.
"This used to be such a pretty little gem in the desert crown. An agate, maybe, but a gemstone nonetheless. Those are some fine trees walling around the village. If I walked around it, I'd have almost believed that this was some fine barracks of some kind. It's too bad that the crown decorates a gangrenous scalp," the phantom reached for the crown of his hat and tilted it, letting a stream of dark, spiky curls loose from under it. With the other hand, the wanderer slipped his balaclava off to hang over his chin.
"No way!" the bald drunkard shrieked out. He jumped up and staggered back as if the appearance of the wanderer had physically scolded him like boiling water. "You truly are a vengeful spirit!"
"Vengeful. Not a spirit yet though," Damisan flicked his sombrero aside to spin around a wooden tool stuck in the ground where a tent was supposed to be based. A tent that more likely than not belonged to one of the unfortunate souls on display as scarecrows. A tent these people didn't feel like keeping. The bulky townsman charged right ahead at Damisan from the right. He wouldn't even see Damisan's finger flicking when an oval-shaped mirror with a steampunk outline burst from underneath the sand and slammed right at its face, knocking the goliath on his rear.
"Thing is… I don't much like vengeance. It's bitter, and it makes you wallow in the past's sadness. So I'm working on that aspect too," the ground underneath Damisan's feet rattled as a whole bunker emerged from underground right where Damisan had stood. The bunker then intensified the quaking dozenfold, as a humanoid frame of steel beams and bricks, a living fortress rose from underneath, with the bunker area serving merely as its head. Just the tip of a colossal iceberg. "Clay Venus here comes from underground but it's not looking to take anything down with it, so you're wrong about that too."
"You bastard… How did you get your ugly face back in order?" the burly town bruiser stumbled back while glancing at his raised fist and comparing its size to the looming humanoid fortress in front of him. Damisan knew men like Sakral. They placed all bets on their physical bulk. It wasn't a bad outlook toward life in a small town such as this where one could have their way by simply bullying and overpowering everyone into it but when one like Sakral met someone stronger, their entire life direction just crumbled and folded up a hundred times over.
"That doesn't matter," said a feeble old man, balancing his entire body on a lone cane stuck on the sand by a flat wooden platform on its lower end to help him support his weight better. "The only thing that matters now is the reason Damisan returned to our town. Did you come back to punish us all for the pain we've inflicted upon you and the betrayal you felt when we didn't stand up and protect you from Fennec and his men?"
"Nah, as I've said, I've learned to hate being vengeful from someone special. Say, elder, is Fennec here by any chance?" Damisan focused his glare on the old man who didn't falter in front of the grand sight of Clay Venus. "It'd save me a good rampage all across the desert and spare plenty of mean people their lives…"
"You're a fool if you think Fennec spends his days here. We're just a buffer town. The only reason he claimed us as part of his dominion is that Kazekage's dogs like you were interested in it!" Sakral yelled out, showing remarkable courage in front of Clay Venus too. Damisan knew that feeling he saw in the townsfolk of his birth home, for he felt it himself not too long ago while fighting alongside the Stars on the Moon. To stand in front of something so powerful and so massive that fear became irrelevant because if that thing wanted you splattered into a bloody stain–it'd have it and there'd be nothing you can do to stop it so there was simply no use in fearing it anymore.
"That's too bad, anyway, if you could all step aside and let Fennec's dogs come out already… I don't intend on fighting anyone but them," Damisan sighed in disappointment. He knew that Fennec's men were still in this town. The locals were fearful, and they'd have adopted any ideology a tyrant asked them to, as long as he provided them with the right incentive. Still, they weren't anywhere near cruel enough to punish people how this town's been "decorated". Those atrocities came entirely out of Fennec's bag of incentives.
"Too bad for you! They have no interest in someone as pitiful and ragged as you, Damisan! You should just turn tail and walk back to where you ran off to!" Sakral yelled out, pointing his finger toward where Damisan wandered into the town from.
"I see… So, they've hidden themselves and sent you all to fight me in their stead. They're using you all as meat shields, thinking they can avoid punishment by shoving all of you in my way…" Damisan sighed. "Is this really okay with you lot? Are you really willing to all just die for those horrible people? To sacrifice every pebble, every brick of sandstone, and every little hill of sand in this town for them? To sink to oblivion just so they could scatter unharmed?" Damisan scanned his hometown but just like that tragic day when he suffered the sharpest edge of their fear and the searing sting of Fennec's punishment, these people wavered, some of them cried and quivered, but their consciences were long since sold. Or rather, loaned away for a promise to avoid the punishment that'd come later.
"You should have never returned to the Wind Country, Damisan. Go back to whatever sanctuary you've found that gifted you your arms and legs back. Don't throw your life away again in pursuit of violence," the elder's voice broke through the wistful silence. Then came the clanging. Chains burst from a nearby block of a square-shaped sandstone building and wrapped around the old man.
"Elder!" Damisan yelled out, but it was too late. A gauntlet of hooking steel claws locked around his throat with the front blades digging deep into it. It was merely stinging and uncomfortable on its way in, but gruesome and lethal on the way out. With a shower of crimson that came in a snap, the locals found out exactly how grisly the punishment of Fennec's men could be. "You…" Damisan's eyes sank under the front locks of his hair. He couldn't quite have Clay Venus do anything without leveling the entire desert town.
"Look at what you did… Just like before, you're an omen of tragedy to our town!" Sakral bellowed from the bottom of his lungs with his eyes sinking in tears. "You made the old fool's heart soften and in Fennec's domain, there is no place for softness! Not for Kazekage's dogs or the swine oinking for the Sheikhs…"
"Well said…" a grumbling voice came from the tent. "Fennec really appreciated the loyalty of your town. Do you think he'd have surrounded you, a pathetic little clump of scrap sheets and rock at the border of the Wind Country, in the middle of nowhere, with a wall of palm trees if he didn't? Come home and arm yourselves. Fennec gave this runt his chance to repent and the Kazekage's lapdog surprisingly did. He survived his penance and lived on to serve the domain, but now he's back, the scars of his hubris gone, and yet again he barks the song of the Iron Shogun and rears his fangs. Arm yourselves, arm yourselves, and drive this punk out of your desert or join him in misery."
"You cowards! Stop hiding behind innocent townsfolk and fight your fights!" Damisan roared, hopping up and letting Clay Venus vanish into a sky-scraping pillar of smoke. He figured it indicated the difference in their power that made the Fennec's hyenas hide behind common, terrified townsfolk.
Damisan's shouts fell on deaf ears as men, women, and children all floated to their homes, where malicious and hungry eyes followed their quest to retrieve anything sharp or heavy to use against the traveler. Damisan clenched his fists and gnashed his teeth, feeling astounding strength surging through his body but realizing that all that power lacked the relevance needed to change anything.
Leaving wasn't an option. After seeing what he saw here, Damisan just couldn't stand up and leave with this town utterly under the control of cowardly Fennec's grunts that wouldn't show their faces and whom Damisan couldn't attack without destroying his birth town. And so the specter of the desert tightened his glove and pressed his palm against the ground, letting a web-shaped network of sealing glyphs shoot out from his hand.
"Puppetry Art: Urchin Pluto!" Damisan chanted as another cloud of dust submerged the entire sandy town in it before the one from Clay Venus entirely cleared out. Confused townsfolk rushed at Damisan wielding forks, cleavers, and kitchen knives, some of them owned actual low-grade weapons. Farm tools were notoriously easy to convert to deadly weapons, as the earliest shinobi in history evidenced it.
Damisan used the shroud of stealth that his own cloud provided him with, sneaking around the confused and blinded townsfolk swinging wildly at anything in their path. Dreadful screams filled the town, as many of the especially bloodthirsty or eager to prove their loyalty to the desert conqueror accidentally slain or maimed their own. A round urchin made of longer stacks of hay that had a constant stream of chakra running through it and keeping the quills of dried hay stiff hopped about the place on leather boots. Urchin Pluto only added to the bloodshed and chaos while Damisan sought to get his hands on one of Damisan's men.
By the time the dust settled, the desert shantytown was just a macabre and gravely silent mess of blood and dead bodies staring at a blank point in space. Damisan looked around the empty buildings, looking to quench his thirst for punishment for the bloody massacre that these foul mercenaries and bandits forced upon these poor people, but they must've fled in all the chaos. Damisan sighed and stuck his finger through his poncho. Someone had slashed his chest and opened the cloth up but failed to find the puppeteer's skin.
Dropping his coat like a floating autumnal leaf, Damisan unraveled a scroll and sealed back Chaff Mercury and Urchin Pluto. He looked around for people that yet could have been saved but sought only those that have been lucky to have died before they realized the extent of their sickening maiming or those that were still choking on the crimson foam still in their mouths. Based on his admittedly half-assed and haunting first inspection, there was not a single child cowering in the wardrobes. Everyone Damisan knew was accounted for, everyone died with a farming tool in their hand, whether it be from Damisan's puppets protecting him from being swarmed by opponents he wished no part in facing or from the chaos of everyone waving their arms madly around the square.
A lone young woman laid in a kitchen of an abandoned home of old stone that, surprisingly enough, didn't look like sandstone but instead was colored grey like stone that could've been found in the Fire or Earth Countries. Stone like this was more common in buffer towns closer to the border such as this, but this construction looked natural. The woman was unconscious, but her injuries appeared manageable by someone with Damisan's skills. The puppeteer sat down and pulled a thick needle and some threads while browsing for the medical supplies he took when leaving the Allied Ninja.
Even if this lady just tried to kill him, Damisan felt like he couldn't just leave her to bleed out from a fork stab in the stomach. Right now, his thoughts still floated around the horrible tragedy of this town that he was a part of. As much as he tried to ease his way into the scalding water of the weight of this massacre with thoughts that this would be a natural occurrence until he removes Fennec from the equation, the only ray of brightness he could still see were the self-admonishment that Mana was right and the hope of still rescuing this one settler so that his one-man war against Fennec wouldn't feel like entirely hopeless.
Damisan still framed this as a war in his mind, but in the wars he learned about in the Ninja Academy, shinobi fought against other shinobi. Here, combatants fled the battlefield, abandoning crazed and frightened settlers to butcher each other like they were some expendable prey. This was Fennec. This was the war Damisan wanted. The puppeteer heard voices outside. People wandering about and examining the grisly scene of a massacre that Damisan had sheltered away from. He couldn't confront them because right now this young woman needed his help, but if there were still other survivors, there could still have been hope.
Wherever they were, hiding in the dried-out wells or the rotten toilets, shutting themselves off in warehouses or risking execution at the hands of Fennec's men rather than join the mindless exercise in violence… Damisan was thankful to these people for being there and for being alive.