A bitter mouthful of water got tossed out violently from Meiko's lungs after an erratic series of coughing. Had Kiyomi looked back she'd have noticed that a considerable amount of blood was present in the water running down Meiko's body, clothes and out from inside her body. It was tough to see exactly how much blood was present for Meiko as well seeing how the beating she took made her right eye well swollen up and her entire face was busted in several places, her messed up ribs made breathing hurt.
"Thanks…" Meiko gathered enough air in her lungs at last to let out an expression of gratitude. After all, Team Walnut was after her all along. "Pulled my butt out of the fire", she admitted.
"You probably could've taken Chominu, when the others interfered it just got too hot for that", Kiyomi angrily dismissed her teammate's sensitive moment.
Meiko looked up sadly at her friend who was just looking away at a random point in the moist cave system, occasionally the blonde reached her hand up to wipe her nose or to get her wet loose hair out of her face. The blacksmith stood back up, staggering considerably as she did so before reaching out and touching Kiyomi's damp cold shoulder.
"I know what this meant for you. You really wanted to show up that Lithia girl but you chose to run away to save me. Thanks for that", Meiko quietly muttered before scratching the itchy cold swelling on her eye.
"Whatever, I'd be a lousy leader if I couldn't step over petty nonsense for my own team", the Yamanaka dismissed the notion on the outside, even if she clearly still hated herself internally.
Little by little, Kiyomi was beginning to understand what being a leader was all about. Often in her past she had to step up to do the right thing properly when her own sensei messed up or simply didn't know how to do the right thing, still, this exam and her stepping up during it gave the girl perspective. Another point of view about how difficult things would be from here on out, after she became a chuunin.
"So… What now? They may come after us", Meiko wondered before looking around. The cave system they'd ended up in looked pretty narrow and straightforward. The ravine's lake of water appeared to have a channel that lead into a long submerged tunnel, which dropped water on the lower level of the underground caves. The room where the girls were in was a round cave with only two ways out - to swim and scale up to the fall the stream tossed them out from, swim upstream through the tunnel or head onwards through the caves.
Looking ahead through the darkness ahead Meiko blinked a couple of times rapidly before looking up. The redhead then looked down at her clenched fist.
"You know, I could probably bust us out. Probably wouldn't even need augmentation, my natural strength should easily bust through a good kilometer of rock", the blacksmith suggested.
"No. We'd cause a downfall of the whole thing. Maurlon's bugs have already weakened the soil as it is. You'd cause a ruckus that'd attract attention and we'd risk getting buried under the rubble. Having in mind that a large amount of teams wants us dead… Well, you know…", Kiyomi shook her head before looking on ahead to properly weigh all of the options.
"Yeah, I guess my idea sucked", Meiko bit her lip.
"It was a good idea just… Don't rush this, you've taken a beating, focus on getting through this and resting up", Kiyomi sighed after seeing Meiko frown a bit too much for her liking. The redhead was by far at her strongest and most beastly when she was enthusiastic and not looking down on herself, that was the version of Meiko that Kiyomi wanted to have around about now.
"Alright, let's go on ahead then, we don't want to sit around here and get followed", Meiko sighed before slowly walking up ahead and into the tunnel, walking far enough for the complete darkness of the cave to envelop her and too far on ahead for Kiyomi's enhanced ninja vision to be able to track her sufficiently.
Before rushing on ahead after her teammate the blonde frowned and looked up and to her back. Where she had imagined Mana to lay out cold. Having been left all alone and by herself she was probably already taken in by the Konohagakure staff. These were the odds, as a leader she knew them. That was the reality on the battlefield as well - sometimes not everyone made it. In the real world her comrades won't just get eliminated, they'll get taken out permanently. This was the part of ninja life she had to accept, something she had to own up to as a soon-to-be squad leader.
"Keep your ears stretched out and your eyes open", Kiyomi warned her teammate as the two carefully treaded ahead through the long and narrow cave corridor. It looked a bit too small to be made for all the massive underground denizens of the Forest of Death. Something about it really smelled suspicious, it looked just too fitting for human shapes to tread through.
"Ironically enough, you're crowding my ears with your mommying", Meiko pouted giving her teammate an angry stare back.
"Mommying isn't a real word, even if it was, I'm not mommying"
"It is totally a word and you totally are"!
A loud wooden popping sound interrupted the quarrel of the two girls. From underground a bunch of rods with kunai blades attached to the tips shot out. Just due to their superhuman reaction time and vision did the two girls manage to bend and twist their bodies in ways that allowed them to avoid getting skewered and impaled on them, twisting and turning their bodies to only receive minor scratches where they were unavoidable and avoiding a single makeshift spear from impaling them. This was no trap for a ninja, this was either a warning sign of something meant to hunt down animals and this corridor didn't look like it could fit any animals that lived down here.
"You know I saw this horror movie once, this brings up memories of it", Meiko's grumpy voice informed her teammate before both girls tensed up their muscles and broke the spears around them giving them some freedom.
"I find myself too hard to scare watching those, I mean they really lost their effect about by the time I learned to control other people's bodies remotely", Kiyomi smiled as the two walked onwards.
"Shit"! Meiko yelled out as she tripped over something and fell down. Having in mind that they were just narrowly almost skewered by a death trap, Kiyomi's mind worked lightning fast. Her arms worked through myriad of hand seals and she slammed her hand to the ground.
"Earth Style: Rock Shelter"! Kiyomi grunted out fast enough to create a formation of rocks and dirt from around her, forming a dome around her and Meiko that deflected the seemingly ceaseless barrage of kunai that got launched from the second deathtrap triggered by the steel wire that Meiko tripped over.
"I didn't know you could use Earth Release too"! Meiko shouted out in surprise.
"I'm pretty sure I told you when we were training together, it's my secondary elemental affinity. I don't know too many jutsu though. Normally you'd have been fast enough to catch one of the kunai and deflect the others even in total darkness but since you so hilariously ate shit on the floor I had to step up", Kiyomi teased her friend before letting the dome collapse into a lifeless pile of rock and dirt.
"I dunno, my eye's really messed up so I may have missed some", Meiko shrugged, "It's good enough that you decided to pull this out of nowhere…"
"I told you already, I didn't hide it from you or Mana"! Kiyomi complained out loud waving her hands in the air frantically as the two girls made their way out of the narrow cave corridor.
Right as the corridor was about to widen up and the cave to which the long and narrow tunnel lead to expanded into a massive structure full of Snapper Ant eggs that glowed in the dark with an almost phosphoric blue hue Meiko noticed someone, or rather something that looked out of order.
"Those Snapper Ants, they're all knocked out", Meiko pointed at a bunch of massively sized insects stuck to the walls by some white cotton-like substance.
"I knew we were walking into a fight", Kiyomi grunted before looking around, trying to locate anyone or anything out of ordinary.
"Hey, look over there, it's someone's puppet armor completely not making any effort to hide and completely in plain view"! Meiko shouted out with excitement as she rushed on ahead. The gear-headed heart of the blacksmith demanded that she conducted a thorough and long investigation of the two times larger green metallic and mechanical structure.
Right before the redhead closed in on the puppet armor, the blue glowing orb on the center of its head part lit up and the thing extended its arm firing off a large rocket propelled fist attached to a long metallic wires strung together and wrapped around each other for density and greater thickness. The blacksmith braced herself and blocked the hit, the force of impact sent her sliding back and staggering at the end of the slide as her shaken brain struggled to keep her body upright and balanced.
"For your information, fair maden, I was blending into the environment!" a completely human voice, unaltered by a cybernetic voicebox which sort of was expected from someone hiding inside a puppet armor, thundered out. "You see, it is completely normal for ninja to look for what is hidden underneath, so normal that it is not unusual for them to miss something in plain view"!
"Yeah, that's stupid, I mean maybe if you were a cloaked man standing by the rocky wall in the darkness, I guess… But you're a large green robotic puppet with armor, it sort of stands out", Kiyomi scratched the back of her head feeling a bit mixed feelings about this odd man in the armor. There were too many questions to simply attack him outright.
"Yeah, but I had to point at him before you noticed", Meiko grinned teasing Kiyomi.
"I was getting to him, also, shut up", the blonde grumpily snapped back at her friend.
The cracked and bruised steel all over the robotic body of the gear puppet lit up in the cracks and spaces between the steel plates and gears. That must've been the sign of the puppet being activated and prepared for combat use. The more focused and intense lighting also allowed Kiyomi and Meiko to observe the oddity in its full appearance. It was a peculiar construction of thick and large, even sluggishly looking steel plates on its feet, groin, body and chest as well as head and its lower arms. There were bent arm sized gears sticking out of the armor in the places where joints were supposed to be.
"This isn't very functional, you know", Meiko pointed out addressing the puppet-master inside the armor. "Those gears are too sluggish for quick and precise movements, they're also all exposed making them one foreign object away from clogging and getting stuck. Those tied wires around your arms, neck and legs also don't look comfortable, in battle they'd rub against your clothes and skin and irritate them."
"Look… This isn't the point", Kiyomi grinned after hearing Meiko disassemble the strange robotic armor standing in front of them. "We're not here looking for a fight, in fact, we're running away from one. All we need is to find a way to the surface. If possible, we could also trade information".
"I am well aware of the problems with the armor. I am the one wearing it, after all. The functionality and efficiency of the armor doesn't bother me. It has a more personal value to me" the puppet-master spoke.
"You mean how it's a complete rip-off of Gear-Man from Gear-Man Z manga"? Meiko squinted suspiciously at her new acquaintance.
"It's like none of them are even listening to me at this point", Kiyomi smacked her face in frustration.
"That's right, it is indeed heavily based on Gear-Man from Gear-Man Z", the puppet-master admitted after a heavy sigh.
"A complete rip-off", Meiko didn't relent. "It's like I'm looking at the full-page panel or a cover art right now".
"Look, it's not about what it is, it's about what the armor means to me."
"Not to mention how it defies the very function of puppet armors, those are usually used to trick the opponent and provide protection for the sensitive and frail puppet-user. Looking at Gear-Man here, one would instantly figure you out as a puppet-armor", Meiko shrugged continuing to argue with the man inside the shell of gears and steel.
"Gear-Man is not just a puppet"! the puppet-master exclaimed. "It is a personal hero of mine. The symbol of my outer layer of physical strength with my own sensitive inner core resting inside. I do not care if it is useful or not, I do not care if it is functional or not. For what Gear-Man means to me, I simply cannot choose another way to fight"!
"So you admit it then", Meiko cheeked the large gear-bot.
"Yes. It does take the shape of Gear-Man, with all of his abilities and gadgets recreated as accurately as I could pull it off. Obviously, the Gearbeam couldn't have been actually shaped like a gear, I do not possess the needed chakra shape transformation skills yet. That being said, my Z-rangs are a superior copy even to those used in that terrible Gear-Man movie"! The young man explained before reaching for a section of the armor protecting his thigh, which opened up and allowed him to remove golden colored Z-shaped boomerangs.
"I mean… I do myself often rebuild weapons and tools from stories and manga and I love cosplaying within the confines of my own room, so… I guess you're alright, Gear-Man", Meiko smiled kindly.
"And now she's befriended Gear-Man", Kiyomi rubbed her forehead in irritation.
"Make no mistake, I do not call myself Gear-Man, my name is Masen-Z from Team Cumulus, Kumogakure. My team is now resting in a cave nearby here and I am tasked with protecting them and standing guard. That is my job in the team, as a true Mechanical Hero of Maximum Justice"! Masen stroke a heroic pose standing up straight and placing his hands by his sides.
"Dude, I think your team is just abusing you so that you could stay on duty all the time", Meiko approached the robotic armor and jumped up so she could pet its shoulder softly.
"Wait, Team Cumulus!?" Kiyomi shrieked out.
"That is correct, what is the source of your surprise, maiden?" Masen inquired, clearly taken aback by Kiyomi's surprise of just stumbling into the team member of her target by accident.
"Well, never-mind…" the gear giant dismissed the notion as quickly as he brought it up before turning back at Meiko, who looked forgetful enough to have forgotten that Team Cumulus was the team Kiyomi needed to locate. Had she known or remembered halfway, she'd have undoubtedly let it slip out in one context or another, so maybe it was for the better that she was forgetful.
"Indeed my comrades are using me for all sorts of things. Othello G is constantly trying to wrestle my armor while I am outside it, using it as a dummy and constantly performing only his sickest suplexes and leg drops on it, Sunny-Lee keeps trying to power my armor using her cotton discharges when it's not even electricity based". Masen sat down on a nearby rock only for Meiko to follow him and settle down nearby while Kiyomi was left to try and come up with something resembling a plan.
How was she supposed to think when everything was constantly hitting her with all of its worst right in her face like this? Mana got knocked out after a combination of misfortunes and misunderstandings, bad calls from all teams involved. Lithia and her team were possibly chasing after Kiyomi and Meiko, seeing how Meiko was Chominu's target. Meanwhile, while on the run they run into the team which Kiyomi needed most of all, yet found in the worst of times.
Should she engage Masen right now? No, that would take too much time, fighting anyone here and now will cause Lithia's Team Walnut to catch up to her in the most inconvenient moments, as usual. Not to mention the remaining members of Team Cumulus which were resting somewhere nearby… This Masen person looked like a loser who cares more about being faithful to his stupid manga hero than making a functional armor but the rest of Team Cumulus may have been too strong for tired and busted up Meiko and Kiyomi to handle by themselves. Being a leader and calling the shots sucked! No wonder it tore Mana to pieces internally…
"But then again, such is the nature of man. Being but a machine, a robot of clockwork and gears, grinding without emotion to the outside world of other gear-men and robots. We are all just steel masks of functionality, hiding our true souls inside but we are too afraid to reveal them or we simply don't know how. That, in my mind, what Gear-Man Z is actually all about and that's what I represent as the real life Gear-Man! That's why I chose "Z" as my nickname as well, wearing it beside my first name proudly!" Masen declared as he once again stroke a heroic pose much to Meiko's clapping amusement.
"Earth Style: Rock Avalanche"! the familiar slurry voice of Lithia's overweight teammate finally made Kiyomi realize her time for decisions had officially ran out and the decision was about to be made for her.
The Yamanaka turned in desperation at her blacksmith friend standing beside Masen-Z. The desperation came from the realization that Meiko was bit too far from Kiyomi's protective Earth Release techniques to reach. Once the smoke and rubble cleared the powerful Gear-Man armor pushed the stones that he had protected Meiko from off of his raised chakra barrier.
"Blue-Gear Formation: Protective Hero's Barrier of Maximum Justice"! Masen-Z chanted out the name of his technique before turning to Meiko. "I have to say the name of the technique after I perform it, because it's too long and if I try to say it while I'm doing it, I'm a bit too slow and if I try to speak as fast as ninja do during battle my tongue gets twisted".
"It's fine, you just need practice, Gear-Man"! Meiko cheered on the brave young man who loved a hero from the comic books he was passionate about and recreated it in real life.
"Foul villains, you have attacked my recently met friend, Meiko. If you target Meiko, you pick fight with Gear-Man"! Masen boldly declared shaking fears into… Someone's heart, somewhere.
"Yeah… Maybe don't go around yelling Gear-Man's name out loud… That's kind of a lawsuit waiting to happen. I heard those became pretty common after the movie industry bloomed." Meiko warned her new friend.
Kiyomi laughed out, realizing that this weirdo may have been an ace up their sleeve after all. She quickly dashed up to the crafty duo of Meiko and Masen before turning at the Kumogakure craftsman with a cheerful grin.
"You're pretty alright, Gear-Man, you're pretty alright!" she over-joyingly declared both to herself and to her newly met friend.
