Damisan sat in the middle of the town square that had just hosted the greatest massacre it had ever seen. Blinded and afraid, the villagers had butchered each other, unable to tell friend from foe, and Damisan took a key part in it. He didn't even try to stop them. Worse, he actually struck a handful of people down with full intent of getting them out of his way just so he could get to Fennec's men that fled into the sandy blizzard content with what they've sown, fostered, and reaped here.
The desert wanderer sat with his back pressed against a wooden pole that had a human ribcage and a mortified head decorating its peak. The barbs of the wire he had loosely wrapped around himself to stop himself from making any sudden moves he'd later regret dug into his skin lightly every time that he drew breath. The survivors moved around to remove the gore and the viscera from their town the best they could. Plenty of them still carried injuries.
"I thought you worked for the Kazekage…" a strong and rather husky for what was essentially a feminine voice reached Damisan. His stare stayed hazed and focused on a blank point, but some of his consciousness emerged to the here and now by using that voice as an anchor to the horrific present.
"I used to," Damisan replied.
"What does that mean, you used to? Have you gone rogue then? If you have, your actions in liberating this town don't quite make much sense," the woman walked out in front of Damisan and crossed her arms. It was the same young lady that Damisan found lying around with a handful of puncture wounds in her abdomen with grievous blood loss during the battle. There was a thick layer of bandage over her exposed mid-riff and her bodysuit was torn in many places, suggesting that she had been involved in something violent here too.
It was just that Damisan lacked the fight in him to burrow deeper and pull that truth out. Right now, he felt sick to the core and just wanted this all to be done with. Mana told him he was making a mistake in coming here. She may have been wrong about the reason, but Damisan was having the nastiest feeling that she was right about the conclusion she's drawn.
"I volunteered to come here and gather intelligence on Fennec's activities in this town. I knew the locals would recognize me, I've grown up in this town. What I didn't expect back then was that they'd sell me out and then just watch Fennec have his way," Damisan recounted the memories that still felt like reflections from a surface of a pulsing clot that spewed blood and puss and made his stomach wrench each time they came up. The twinging and searing in his face, crawling to his neck and throat and then resonating through the nervous system all across his body, the quartering… It all felt like a distant dream ever since the Sky Clan accidentally restored his old body back to form but actually his new body, ability to do whatever he used to be able to, and freedom to do those things were the real dream.
It took all this bloodshed for Damisan to begin to wake up from that dream.
"You mean Fennec discovered you were working for the Kazekage and you survived? That's impressive. You don't see any of those folks having survived, then again, seeing their states, maybe the madman went soft on you?" the woman tilted a ring of loose barbed wire and moved it away so that she could sit beside Damisan without cutting herself.
"You mean…" Damisan muttered.
"That's right. All of those body horror shows around you are either Kazekage's agents or those of the Sheikhs. At this point, all of them recognize Fennec as a vital threat to the Wind Country's future," the woman ran her hand over her luscious brown hair and moved them back from obstructing her face, revealing shades of dark yet paled from blood loss skin underneath.
"And which one were you?" Damisan wondered.
"Were? I am Shakhra, an agent of the Fahzad Sheikhate. My torture and injuries don't make me less loyal to the Sheikh. You didn't answer my previous question, though. Fennec's dog said that you've redeemed yourself after his punishment, what does that mean? I thought it meant you turned to his side, but then your actions here three days ago wouldn't make sense. Just who are you really?" Shakhra leaned forward and turned to look into Damisan's eyes to find any traces of falsehood in his response.
"I used to work for the Kazekage. After Fennec's punishment, I lost my arms and legs. My identity melted and ran off on the ground alongside my face. I wasn't sure who I was or what my goal was. Then, I ended up joining the Allied Ninja, just about the only place that'd accept me looking like that and disabled to where I had to puppeteer my own wriggling body," Damisan replied with a husky tone before looking up. "I still have a goal to free the Wind Country of Fennec, but… After the massacre…"
"No!" Shakhra dragged her rear across the warm sand and moved in front of Damisan, tilting his head by his chin gently so that their eyes would meet. "This is what he does. This is how he wins. Neither the Sheikhs nor the Kazekage can make the bold moves that are necessary to deal with him. The best they can do is send Black Ops agents and assassins, hoping one of them succeeds, but Fennec is aware of all of our methods. He may have been one of our own at some point himself, most likely."
"Fennec… A Black Ops ninja?" Damisan said. His lips moved slowly, lacking any vigor to them. He had heard theories amongst the Sunagakure ninja working on his case that he may have been a ninja loyal to Sunagakure, but there were no records of him and no one knew or remembered who he was. The alias didn't stick on any notable ninja of the past. If he truly was a Black Ops ninja, that'd explain why his identity was so tough to pin down and why he had no records of his name or his face anywhere in the village archives.
"I don't even know if my home still stands," Shakhra moved back to press her back against another pole, fostering another poor soul that suffered the worst atrocities available in the entire world before being fortunate enough to pass away. "Before I departed for this town, Fennec's men were knocking at our gates already. They said they were welcoming the peasants and the military into their ranks, they acted as liberators. Their only demand was that the Sheikh and his court be surrendered to them to deal with as they please. The aristocracy was living on borrowed time already."
"Those people had the fear of death in them. A person determined to spare themselves and their family of a fate that Fennec's dogs deliver would do anything under the sun, as we've witnessed three days ago," Damisan noted out loud though he spoke mostly to illustrate his own thought process as he was working through it.
"That was when intelligence reached the Sheikh's spies. Intelligence that the Fennec's men knocking on our gates were severely lacking in manpower. That Fennec and his most loyal mutts were all here, in this town, enjoying themselves at the very edge of the desert. It made sense, at least to a mortified mind of a court pale in terror of the fate Fennec usually brings about. This town would place Fennec at the very outer edge of the desert, where none of the Kazekage's or none of the Sheikhates' agents could reach him," Shakhra spoke while staring up at the clear blue sky through the filter of brown sand grains dancing around them constantly.
"Judging from these bodies of spies and infiltrators, the other Sheikhs and the Kazekage all got the same intel," Damisan nudged his bare chest against the barbs hard enough to draw a few trickles of blood as he looked up at the unfortunate men and women that have become grotesque decorations. The survivors of the massacre didn't get to removing them yet, prioritizing dealing with the freshly slain first until the vultures and the rotting stench drive all life away from this town and claim it for good.
"That's why I've got a feeling that Fennec was one of us–a man of the shadows. He knows how information travels, he lives and breathes fear tactics. His handbook isn't quite our own, but it may have started as a copy of ours before he added his own signature flair to it," Shakhra explained while standing up with pain-ridden grunts and still clutching her abdomen. "If I were you, I'd focus on the fact that I'd have been one of these decorations in a few more hours. I survived longer than the others, who knows, maybe "redemption" was in my destiny too? Either way, Fennec makes you fear making a move against him, he makes you your own worst enemy, which is why he still draws breath. It takes a determined, avenging soul that won't stop at anything until Fennec is dead to deal with him. It takes a specific kind of person, a man from the shadows, a hero nobody will know and those who do will hate. Are you such a man, or am I to pick up arms and head to Fahzad alone?"
"You still mean to fight Fennec and his men?" Damisan looked at the woman with bafflement. "Doesn't all this around you bother you at all? They may force you to cause something like all this, slay people you grew up around, people who now are so mortified they'd sell you out before blinking twice."
"It's not like I've got many choices," Shakhra replied by letting her chin sink down so low that her hair flopped over her face again and obstructed her stern eyes. "Just when I dealt with the fact that they captured me, that they'd torture and mangle me for hours before they'd make me into their sick showcase that'd work for that jackal as his corpse scarecrow, you came along and saved me. Now I've got nothing better to do than to try to pick up the shattered pieces of what remains and see if I can put them together into something resembling anything that has a shape. If Fahzad still stands, I will fight for it."
"Hey, mean-lady? You're off to fight Fennec? We're coming with you!" someone from the massacre survivors yelled out. Damisan raised his eyes, scanning all of them while looking amazed at their determination. They were brushing the remains of their family friends and neighbors off of the sandstone one moment, then they declared that they wanted to fight a bloody affair and risk going through the fates of those spies and agents that served as a warning to the rest. Just where did that sort of courage come from?
"You? Forget it, all of you are just commoner townfolk rabble. You'll get butchered just like those poor people," Shakhra shook her head.
"What other choice do we have? If we clean the brains and the guts off of our town and try to carry on living, eventually, Fennec and his men will be back and they'll see all of us as traitors. If we fight now, at least it'll be a fight he won't see coming,"
"If Fennec comes back for us, it won't be a battle, it'll be an execution,"
"They will hear our voices in our defiance as we die in battle. We are people, not animals to be butchered!"
It seemed like hearing the collective voices of those she saw as commoner rabble eased Shakhra's sternness somewhat. She staggered back and sat onto a small stone platform, walling off the territory of one home from the rest of the desert town as she gazed at Damisan.
"Well, wanderer? Will you take us alongside you to Fahzad, or will you just stay here and wither away in self-pity instead?" Shakhra tilted her chin slightly in encouragement. "You've brought the battle to Fennec here. It was clear those vermin were afraid of you. I've never seen a puppeteer command a walking fortress into battle, either. That'll put the fear of the Sun into those bastards when they see it knocking at the gate."
"I… I don't know. I don't know if I'm willing to become like Fennec to kill him," Damisan's head sank down into the cradle of his own two hands. "We both know he'll test our resolve every step of the way, he'll put us through the worst kind of psychological, guerilla warfare there is. He'll make us hate our own guts, just like I hate mine right now."
"The Sun had melted your face clean off, boy," a man approached Damisan and began lifting the loops of barbed wire off of him one by one to liberate him from his self-imposed prison of discomfort. "Then it gave it back to you and gave you back to us. That's a sign that it's ready to boil the sands and scold that rodent off of its domain. Help us, because we'll try to help ourselves, whether with you or without you."
Damisan sat with his head sunken in the cradle of his hands without a response. The townsfolk stared at him, waiting for his reply for a little while before shifting their focus and turning to the injured agent of the Sheikh. The woman reached for a pouch on her rear and pulled out a pair of brass knuckles with shimmering rubies for knuckles that had a supernatural luster to them, which suggested that they were chakra conductive to some extent. Upon slipping them on, Shakhra pounded her fists together, producing a scarlet shock wave with a bright red flash.
"We move to Fahzad. Fennec was already knocking on the gate when I departed for this town a week ago. The battle may still be alive, the enemy might still lurk at the gate or the Sheikhate may have fallen. Neither of those outcomes prevents us from killing Fennec. As commoners, I'm sure you're all willing to bear the price of losing a Sheikh's court or two without losing much sleep but you also fight for terrified commoners, just like your own people that were ready to cut through their own to survive and extend the lives of their families even if just for a day longer," Shakhra reported while slowly limping to the western end of the square which led straight to the eastern exit and further into the heart of the desert. "If the fox claims Fahzad, he won't be too far away from Sunagakure. If a Great Ninja Village falls, I'm sure the international community will send help but they'll only be interested in helping us as they've helped Kirigakure after the Summit–foreigner boots will walk on our sands and we may never see the end of it this time."
"Stop!" an authoritative yell made the woman's stare blank out and forced her to turn around and see a bare-chested man in dark, long, and spiky hair stand up and move toward the group. "You just want to save your home. I want to kill Fennec. I should carry this the rest of the way while you focus on salvaging Fahzad."
"I knew my speech would make you get your act together. I'm a pretty talented speaker," Shakhra gave Damisan a sassy smile, looking pleased that he joined them. He may have been the difference between a suicide mission and a nightmarish campaign.
"Don't flatter yourself. I saw all of you taking up arms and bustling together, shoulder to shoulder… I just couldn't help but join you. After all, I love to be included in things," Damisan nodded to Shakhra with a face that quelled any doubts the woman may have had about this wanderer lacking the determination to see things through.
Fahzad was an assemblage of quartz sights. The palace complex stood atop a rocky, mountainous plateau that may have raised it a good eighty meters above the town on the ground level around the mountain. When Fahzad was in its infancy, the palace may have seen just a single ring of buildings down below, but as the Sheikhate grew, the town expanded further and further out into the desert until it now commanded an unbroken field. The different levels of expansion throughout Fahzad's history made it so the city had at least eleven different walled gates of varied size and advancement, though all of them had been made of colossal blocks of quartz.
The Fahzad palace complex had a lone tower that seemed to scrape the very clouds in the sky, while the rest of the complex was a lot tamer in comparison. At least so much could've been taken from a sandstone plateau far away from the Sheikhate that exposed the entire field it loomed on out in the open. All the additional buildings of the palace complex had rectangular blocks rising up, and the temple had a few observatory towers of its own with torches of flames so intense and large that even the townsfolk accompanying Damisan and Shakhra could make them out as being lit up at the very moment of observation.
"The army isn't at the gate. That means they can only be inside…" Shakhra gnashed her teeth. During the few days of walking from Damisan's hometown to the Fahzad Sheikhate, her injuries had recovered moderately, but she was still far from the perfect fighting condition.
"There are signs of fires inside. Flames are visible and smoke corrupts the evening sky…" a townsman pointed at several points of interest.
"It's too bad that Mana isn't with us. I kept taking her chakra sensory for granted because people still snuck up on us sometimes, but I could really use some intel about now. We don't know if Fennec is here or not," Damisan pointed out.
"Does it make a difference?" Shakhra turned to Damisan.
"To you–no. Your goal is to save Fahzad. To me–it makes all the difference in the world. That's because part of why I took this battle up is that it might end up sparing a prolonged campaign of countless civilian casualties if we meet and kill Fennec here," Damisan replied.
"Stay here, I'll see what I can do about that gate," Shakhra turned around to the pair and vanished in a flicker that raised the surrounding sands into a howl. Damisan covered his face up and spat a mouthful of sand out while turning to the townsfolk.
"Restrain your camels. They won't serve you much use in battle. Take only what you can use. No use bogging yourself down with anything more than leather armor. The enemy will carve anything up with little effort, but you picked this fight so just try to focus on pacifying the local townsfolk and leave the mercenaries and the rogue ninja to us," Damisan instructed the brave folks accompanying him this far. Even if their pace bogged them down, even while mounted, the departed Allied Ninja still felt glad to have them with him. Who knew, maybe they'd find a new, better home here after the dust of the battle settles?
Home is where the people are, after all.