"I thought I'd knock you out with that last attack, I take no pleasure in hurting you like this. Not while you still feel pain…" Axolkin scratched the side of his head. For what it was worth, at least he seemed truthful. That did not make him any less dangerous.
This fight was pointless. After this last exchange, Mana has finally come to realize it. She has fought opponents that initially seemed unbeatable and out of her league but this was one of the times where no matter how naïve she was walking in – she couldn't overcome these crazy odds. Not taking this guy head-on.
If she were to simply attack this man with force and play the ramming game, she'd get pushed back and swatted aside. It was unlikely that Axolkin would mess the next attempt to knock her out. If Mana were to try and stall this man out, she'd run out of chakra trying to survive his endless attacks far faster than her opponent would run out of his trying to knock her out. There was no attack in her arsenal strong enough to somehow pull her out.
"I can see from your face, Mana-sama, you're still considering continuing this fight. That is very unfortunate, do not do this. Don't make me hurt you any more. I may just need to remove your arms and legs before bringing you to Ayushi-sama, for your own good." Axolkin began picking up the pace.
Mana's mind raced through her options. Axolkin flipped in mid-air, throwing his extended foot forward like a guillotine blade aimed right at Mana's shoulder. The magician's eyes opened up wide while showers of red scattered across the laboratory. Rose petals spun around in a wild vortex greatly confusing the Spliced ninja, soon enough, both the magician and the arm that Axolkin thought he had severed dispersed into petals.
That kick was mighty. It split open the steel floor and covered the entire laboratory with cracks and the force was all perfectly contained. This went far beyond even the world-ending power of a ninja, this man was truly a monster. It was a serious statement from Ayushi's part to produce someone like this, an army of Spliced ninja like Axolkin could have truly challenged the might of ninja villages.
"You are wasting time, Mana-sama. You cannot hurt me, I am part man, part axolotl. My spliced relatives are masters of regeneration, my immortality far transcends even that of the other Spliced." Axolkin expressed his annoyance while his attention wandered across the dark and devastated laboratory. Mana managed to slip away from his sight with that last illusion, it was a new approach, one that the Spliced ninja was not used to facing. Who would have known that ninja would wield more success by hiding in the shadows?
Mana sat perfectly content in her hiding spot, hugging the shadows behind a busted test tube. The broken glass pressed uncomfortably against her feet, Mana had ditched her sandals so that she did not alert the Spliced ninja. Her mind returned back to the Academy, back to the stealth lessons and reminded her of the miles she walked stepping on her own palms to muzzle sound coming from her steps and learning to step heel-first, in a perfectly controlled manner.
Mana was never too great at stealth but this time her life and that of these poor Congregation people depended on it.
Lucky. Axolkin walked off to the other side of the laboratory. Strange… For a man so fast and familiar with the place he could probably scout this entire area in just a second, moving so fast he filled the entire laboratory in a moment in time. Mana may have managed to escaped any attacks he would have used following up such an innovative attack but she would not have eluded his sight.
A mighty rumble shook the entire laboratory. What was that!? Mana fumbled all over the broken glass, just barely managing to toughen her body up so that she did not open herself up everywhere and bled out on the busted steel floor, killed by some strange earthquake…
"So they've totaled the whole shop, huh?" Axolkin nonchalantly looked at the dirt falling through the cracks of the reinforced walls of the laboratory they were in. "Luckily for us, it would take a cosmic level calamity to bury us underground. The work done here was simply too import…"
Before that sentence could be finished, a lump of flesh tore his way through the reinforced walls like sheets of paper, leaping in with a mighty roar and blood-red eyes. Slobbering all over the dirty floor and burying through ground, minerals, reinforced steel and anyone unfortunate enough to stand in his way alike. A rotten, almost green monstrosity with the voice of a baby and a lack of restraint to match…
"L-Little Honda!" Axolkin yelled out but by the time he got his balance back it was too late, Honda simply buried right through the salamander-man, tearing him apart and stomping right through him as if the chakra augmented flesh of this Spliced ninja offered as little resistance as water or air he was drawing into his lungs. Mana had never seen anything like this, Honda simply buried through the unfortunate jailer of his only to disappear in a man-sized pipe he was clearly too large for.
While the battle quarrel between Mana and Axolkin, followed by the explosive resolution of the conflict between the Spliced ninja and the Allied Ninja, followed and surpassed by Honda's awakening and escape from the underground complex he was being kept at had significantly tore up the underground facility, it was actually the leaking sewer fluids that truly provided Mana with a sense of urgency. She now had a ticking time bomb that most likely smelled of feces hanging over her head…
"H-Honda has escaped…" Axolkin grumbled through pain, his speech was slurry and filled with wet, slurping noises. It was evident that he did not wait until his body grew fully back together before speaking up. "You know not what you're doing and yet… You've caused this much trouble…"
He was actually getting angry. It was inevitable really; all of the radically religious types had a brick wall somewhere deep inside, one that they considered the bottom of the well but one that hid a nasty layer of sludge right under the cross-painted brick barrier. It was only once that bottom wall shattered that the true man surfaced, the parts that one wished to hide and in the process only made reek with more revulsion to it.
"It's all my fault, Mana-sama, ALL MY FAULT!" Axolkin howled out with his face varnished with crazy. The magician's mind raced through her available set of techniques. There was no way she'd have enough time to summon one of the rabbits, even if she did, she'd only doom them for death or a grave beating. After all, Axolkin would have had no reservations about killing them immediately…
Any jutsu Mana could throw right now, it would either be too weak or she'd not make it in time to use it before Axolkin rushes in… The worst thing about adrenaline rushing through one's system while a ninja enhanced their perception to its very peak was seeing one's impending doom dragged out across what seemed like eternity… Thinking and evaluating the fact that one had no more options left and experiencing the desperation and fear for far longer than it was necessary.
Mana was so invested in what she could do that she did not notice the fumbling busybodies stepping right in front of her from right by her side. It was only when the tunnel vision cleared out and Axolkin froze in shock that the Congregation stepped in to protect Mana that the kunoichi saw her trembling hand reaching out for the poor, rotting lab-rats.
Even as she herself glared at her own trembling and bloodied hand it looked gruesome and shocking. The sight of a teen with bloodshot, horrified eyes, trembling and begging the universe around them for life was not something that was easily ignored. Morality required in these situations was a universal law that transcended sides and ideals. It took priority over everything else.
"Mana…" a rotting body of the Congregation group mumbled out.
"Mana…" another one spoke up.
"Mana…" an entire handful joined into the chanting in-sync.
"I know but…" Axolkin stepped forward, he clearly intended for the Congregation to move aside after he stepped forward but the rotting bodies did not move an inch. Several of them exposed their teeth hiding behind feeble and decomposed gums that barely held the chompers together. "Ayushi-sama needs Mana by his side, I need to hurt her just a little to take her in."
Mana was so enthralled by the utter glee that the sight of these people stepping up to protect an injured and afraid person in need, without focusing too much on the fact that this person in need was her, that she almost forgot how convenient of a distraction this event proved to be. Axolkin was confused, he could have easily swatted all of the Congregation aside but both Ayushi's need for these laborers and his own religious ties to the group held him from lashing out at them and forced him into the path of reason.
Fumbling and letting her wounds drip clean, Mana stood up and raised her hands up front. The jutsu she thought of using was one she was accustomed to using. So much so that it no longer demanded the use of hand seals from her to use, as long as she properly focused on molding and channeling her chakra. The use of Audra wand used to help with that some but now Mana would have to make do.
"Magic Spark Barrage!" the magician yelled out, not because she needed it to properly use the technique but because she wanted it. Just as she thought it might, the noise of Mana using a ninjutsu technique bemused Axolkin and made him lean back, back off slightly from the living wall of the Congregation stepping up and over one another to protect Mana.
"You'd attack over these people you wanted to save to defeat me!?" Axolkin grumbled in bitter shock. That was before the fist-sized blasts of Lightning Release chakra spread out their barrage streams all over the laboratory, blasting at the ceiling and dislodging the cracked tiles, leaving small craters of cinders from the steel tiles on the floor and smashing the many massive test tubes leaving whatever was rotting within them to flop on the ground.
The wave of liquids bursting from the smashed test tubes and chemicals carefully placed on stands formed a singular, swamp-colored wave that washed away at the entire laboratory, covering Mana, the Congregation and Axolkin in toxic waste head to toe, it mixed horribly with the already flooding the facility cocktail of sewer sludge.
Mana closed her eyes, to stay in the laboratory and inside this burning and slimy mess that she has created was lunacy. She threw her hands frantically at the direction where she recalled the entrance to the sewer to be. There had to be some time to pull out two cards from her sleeves and press them against the wall that separated the sewer pipeline from the laboratory. If she removed her hand from the wall and let go of the cards, they'd get washed away so Mana had to use her own body as a tunnel for the explosive power of her card.
When the explosive wave hit the magician right in the chest, the girl coughed up, still submerged. The grueling taste of burning waste and her own blood did not let Mana forget that she was in one of her less desirable situations and places to die in. Despite that, the young kunoichi just let go and let the rapid stream of toxic waste and sewer water wash her through the pipeline, bashing against the metallic walls before plummeting a good bunch and hitting a grate.
It was a while before the girl felt bold enough to breathe. Initially, telling if she was still submerged in waste or not was quite impossible but once she began feeling the burning waste drying out and realized that she could wipe it off somewhat and greatly reduce the nasty itching and corrosiveness of the material that she was just swimming in and taking into her lungs a whole mouthful, Mana was careful to cough it all out and wipe it from her nostrils.
Once she managed to open her eyes, the girl felt glad, for the first time in her life, to be in a large sewer area where multiple tunnels interconnected and several pipelines dumped their content to a central dump below, content that was then superheated and filtered to be cleansed. Despite there only being sewer water and heavy machinery around her, given the situation she just escaped from Mana felt like bathing in pre-cleansed sewer water was quite alluring.
The Congregation were raining from the sky, some of them bashed right where Mana fell and hit the large, central grate, some of them fell down into the sewer water and surfaced while flapping about in an improvised self-preserving manner of swimming. The magician extended her sensory as far as she could to check if any of the poor rotten folk had fallen and drowned under deep enough to get caught into the large rotator that performed the initial water filtering but only a handful seemed stuck down there.
Pushing her sticky body with her burning from fatigue arms, Mana slid over the edge and dived underwater. It felt sticky and this was certainly one of the rare instances where Mana felt glad she had lost her sense of smell. The Congregation were strong, underwater they did not seem to feel or appreciate the fact that it was indeed Mana who was rescuing them and started clawing and kicking at the magician wildly.
There was no time to reason, no opportunity to fool around. All of her remaining willpower had to form a ramp through which all of her desire to save these people had to launch. No one would die, no matter how badly they were fighting to go in that direction. Painful cuts resonated all over, tearing sounds suggested that Mana's clothes tore instead of letting her get dragged under.
If she had opened her eyes they'd have burnt up with irritation from the dirt in the water. Chakra sensory was the only sense that Mana could rely on, she had to swallow any remaining bits of her dignity and pride and just keep on fighting. Spare herself of the mental breakdown of letting the dark taint of the Congregation's chakra signatures sicken her. There was only this much farther that one could have been sickened when they were washing off toxic waste with sewer water.
The sinking Congregation floated up like living rockets. Mana was quick to grab and thrust the lodged or stuck rotting bodies up, she even managed to evade the filtering rotator herself and surface. Chakra flowed through Mana's feet and her palms helping her climb the surface of the hollow steel platform covered with the grate she and most of those washed out from the laboratory by Mana's explosive escape fell onto.
Axolkin was wheezing with the fear for his life in his eyes. No matter how much sludge he coughed out from his insides he always had a handful more, ignoring the toxic waste he was utterly drenched in. It may have been safer to just walk up to him and knock him out with a good barefoot kick in the face but… Mana flipped on her back and stretched her limbs out just to soothe the burning fatigue in her. Axolkin won't be going anywhere now…
"H-How…" the Spliced ninja muttered, the color of his skin was turning slightly to the taffy side while the consistency of his wet skin surface became covered with nasty, white boils. Bit by bit, the majestic Spliced ninja began turning to the same kind of abomination that this cult made Little Honda into. "You missed every single shot, on purpose!"
"Lightning wouldn't have done a single thing." Mana huffed out. Her face twisted by the heaviness on her chest and her trembling muscles, just this once it was not because of overwhelming fear but because she had very little left to offer. "You played yourself by revealing the animal your cells have been spliced with."
"The axolotl?" Axolkin turned at Mana, falling on his size while toxic waste continued to leak from his flappy, open mouth. The painful shock of being covered in the blasted thing must have led the Spliced ninja to chug down a great deal of the vile substances he marinated subjects in. "It's the king of regeneration…"
"It's also extremely rare and on the verge of extinction. It only lives in one batch of islands in the Archipelago, pollution has made its population dwindle and now it can only make it in the least touched by man corners of the world. Its extreme vulnerability to pollution was what did you in." Mana grinned through her pain-ridden face before gathering enough strength to get back on all fours and stop lying on the soaked in sewer water grate.
"You were truly incredible. You deserve this victory over me." Axolkin admitted after a short while of just laying powerless in the pool of toxic waste that was accumulating under him. Toxic waste was beginning to leak from the pores of his body as his skin was extremely wet and likely used to breathe and spread mucus filled with various kinds of cells beforehand. Now it became a dumping system for the poison all throughout his body.
"It always has to be "the king" with you guys…" Mana grumbled while she looked at the Congregation who were gathering in a circle around the two ninja and quivering in a cowardly fashion. "If it was not the most infamously rare species of salamander alive, I may not have been aware of just what it was and what made it so special."
"I had no choice of the animal I would be spliced with…" Axolkin exclaimed almost as an excuse while Mana grabbed him by his hair and prepared to drag him behind her.
"My point exactly…" the magician calmly replied while she prepared for a mad leap to the nearest pipeline she could use to find the closest ladder to the surface. After Mana began moving with Axolkin in his diminishing condition in her hands, the Congregation silently followed her every step. Leaving them all in the hospital to get help without her being present will be a pain…
