While the round fiery light moved along its cycle, Damisan checked his puppetry scrolls one by one. During some downtime he had in between his return to Earth and him leaving Allied Ninja, as well as during his trip back to Wind Country throughout most of the continent, Damisan rebuilt a few of his puppets from scrap and higher-grade materials he could barter from traveling salesmen. The re-inventions of his past laid sealed within scrolls positioned around his waist.
Almost like he could feel Shakhra approaching the gate, Damisan picked up his step, hearing the uneasy rumbling behind him as more and more settlers picked up their farm tools and prepared to join Damisan in attacking Fahzad. Then came the rowdy rumbling of shifting gears and the gate budged. The hefty rectangular stone blocks that would've been just essentially a wall had they not been parted and been augmented with gearwork that moved them to open and slam them shut, dragged back, leaving a grievous ridge of lacerated sand tracks on the ground.
Shakhra's rich face peeked from the right, leaning from the side, before springing out in the open to greet Damisan and the approaching bunch of settlers that looked as terrified as they were determined to earn their freedom and the dreamy "good old life". Just as Damisan was about to ask Shakhra about how things were going, he saw the fires and heard clangs in the distance. Sparks of supersonic warriors clashing against one another hundreds of times each second before one of them fell, or the two found themselves on equal ground and parted to greet other assailants.
Fahzad was in the middle of fighting for survival. More than the iron clangs, the sounds of fleshy scratches and gargles stood out the most to Damisan. A handful of injured, bandaged grunts rolled up a long cannon and aimed it at the rushing group of settlers. Judging from their sloppy body builds, lack of signature weaponry, and bitter expressions, they were settlers of Fahzad that bargained for their lives by accepting them back as a loan.
Damisan pulled out a scroll placed inside of an iron lid that required a twist and a pull from both sides to free it. Like a yolk inside of an iron egg. Spinning the tool around in his arm to get a better grip on it, the puppeteer flung his sealed scroll into the barrel of the cannon, blocking it off and causing a misfire that sent the already battered settlers flying about like sacks of bricks. They grunted and moaned and checked their busted ribs and backs. They didn't look like they could get back on their feet, but they were alive. They'd stay that way if the rushing settler brigade would let them keep their lives.
"See? I still have friends at Fahzad. You're welcome…" Shakhra teased Damisan after seeing him dispatch the immediate danger to the entire settler platoon rushing inside the lower town.
No reply returned to her. Damisan's eyes were already scanning the enormous mountain and various structures embedded in it. A hanging artificial garden oasis, a bath complex that its architects modeled after a colossal seashell. Damisan leaned down to build up force in his calves and shot off into the air. The puppeteer's feet stuck to the wall of a hall building and Damisan darted off higher while keeping his eyes open for a following point of interest that'd have helped him climb.
"Should've asked Mana to teach me Mystical Wings, seemed like a simple enough jutsu. Didn't she say she learned it before graduating from the Ninja Academy or something?" Damisan mumbled to himself before casting out a loop of his puppetry strings. The chakra-enhanced strings wrapped around a column, letting Damisan zip himself closer to it and swoop onto the platform. It looked like an open tunnel with a perpetual staircase leading up to some building higher up.
Almost immediately, three better-armed grunts ran down the stairs and brandished their weapons at Damisan. These were better armored and better armed than the poor settlers down on the ground level. The one with a spear thrust it at Damisan, but the puppeteer vaulted over it by pushing himself off of it while redirecting the thrust into the floor. Damisan's feet slammed into the grunt's face, dropping him. The toughness that met his feet suggested to Damisan that these warriors were capable of chakra augmentation to some degree. These three would've easily kept a genin occupied in a fight for their life.
A pair of Fennec's raiders tried rushing at Damisan from the sides by slashing at him with their curved scimitars. Damisan smashed a smoke ball in his hand, drowning the entire staircase in smoke while he rolled back and unraveled a scroll from his belt section. A steel-plate enforced puppet whizzed past the pair, beating them down thoroughly with its gauntlets while buzzing about on a set of six fiery jets attached to its back. Pulling out a kunai from his pouch, Damisan cut the strings holding a steel chest plate together and ripped the plate off while casting his puppetry strings to attach to his puppet.
The flexible steel-plated speedster dashed up to the side of the wall and began dashing up at neck-breaking speeds while Damisan stepped onto the steel plate and rode it like a skateboard up the steps. On his way up, the puppeteer had to make a few quick adjustments to dispatch of additional raiders rushing downstairs to assist their fallen pals. A hop with vertical double kick dispatched of a pair, jumping up and positioning the chest plate as a ram took down a couple more and before the rest had an answer ready, Damisan had already whizzed long past them.
The speedster puppet puffed into smoke and returned to its scroll, which Damisan re-sealed and stuffed back in his scroll-rich belt. The puppeteer approached the rail and leaned over the edge to look around and try to adjust his rise. Out in front of him, there were a few observation towers that looked like they would've helped Damisan close up to the Sheikh's vault. It was always the vault with this sort of guys. Damisan had not a clue of where he could find Fennec, but he could definitely find one of his stronger, more loyal goons in the vault and none of them would flee and just hand it to him. That'd be where he'll corner one and find out what he has to know.
Before more reinforcements could come, Damisan vaulted over the rail and kicked off of it to soar closer toward the tower. Damisan extended his hand, sending a handful of puppetry wires to wrap around the tower and zip him up to it. The puppeteer dashed on the side of the wall, casting wires to attach to various roof accessories or windowsills and flag poles to assist his swinging dashes. Each observation tower was within a shinobi's leap distance from each other, letting Damisan adjust and move from the smaller towers to the taller ones as he ascended the Fahzad palace complex.
Hearing rumbling in the palace's direction, Damisan stopped and pressed his upper body to the wall to help him maintain balance as he browsed his scroll belt for a puppet. Unsealing a scroll and unraveling it, Damisan called forth the pan-headed Chaff Mercury rolled off like a cannonball before concluding his impressive flight with a haymaker to the palace wall that easily crumbled it. Damisan recalled Chaff Mercury before re-sealing him in the scroll and casting his puppetry wires to help him zip to the hole in the wall.
Without skipping a beat, Damisan darted through the staircase toward the vault chamber. They had sealed it off from the corridor Damisan ran through by an iron bar door. It wasn't a traditional way to keep people out of the vault. The corridor Damisan smashed into it must've been some sort of secret entrance, whereas the main hallway would've been better protected. This was just one advantage of having the ability to scale walls, swing poles, and punch through solid walls easily.
The iron bars didn't fare too well against Damisan. Saving his stamina, the puppeteer slid his hand across the bars, leaving a paper tag stuck to it. Damisan stepped back and weaved a hand seal, detonating the explosive tag and blasting the iron bar door down. The bare-chested puppeteer flickered into the vault and landed on a flat stone platform that towered above an entire colossal chamber drowning in gold coins, arms, and various accessories. Overseeing the whole treasure vault was a chunky stone statue of the Sheikh that measured a good eight hundred meters in height.
"Why would someone have a giant statue of themselves indoors? Then again, I guess people would think the Sheikh's full of himself if this thing was down in the town square… Man, you just can't win with giant statues of yourself…" Damisan scratched his back and looked around. He had expected to collide with someone here and yet nobody was there to greet him.
There was a moment of hesitation when not even a single drop of moisture dropped on a lone coin in an immeasurable pile. It was at that moment that Damisan heard a vivid pop and moved his upper body to the side. A kunai shot coating in a tunneling airwave, flying much faster than it usually would've to where it produced a sonic boom before thumping into the platform that Damisan stood on. By that time, the sniper knew he had missed and began firing from his kunai dispenser rapidly.
For someone going for desperate correction shots, he was surprisingly on-point as Damisan had to vault sideways to avoid a few more thumping kunai blades, pull out the sealed scroll from the bunch lined up around his middle section and deflect another one before he unsealed Chaff Mercury again and positioned the puppet in between him and the sniper.
"Hot-damn, dodged my kunai after I had fired it by reacting to the noise… Color me impressed," Fennec's raider straightened his back out and tilted the messy cloth wrapped over his head to show off a pair of lines of piss-colored teeth. He raised a modified kunai dispenser with a much longer barrel than the ones that Damisan had seen.
"Must be tough, shooting at skilled ninja instead of civilians," Damisan taunted the man with the dispenser before sending his Chaff Mercury after him. The sniper sent a kunai attached to a steel wire to imbed into the ceiling or the walls and then reeled himself closer to it by zipping around the vault much like Damisan had done when scaling the palace complex. In retaliation, the fleeing raider fired a few shots at Damisan, but Chaff Mercury buzzed in between him and the sniper and positioned the other side of the pan on its head to deflect the supersonic kunai.
"Chaff Mercury: Spring Fists!" Damisan chanted, instructing his puppet to attack while he had the opening. Chaff Mercury withdrew its tiny arms, letting them curl inward around thick springs before shooting back out in a highly unpredictable trajectory and hypersonic velocity. The sniper flew back and slammed against the vault wall, dropping his weapon into the blinding golden luster below. "I figured that if I cornered one of you in the vault, you'd be unable to run away and hide behind helpless and terrified civilians. After all, you can't just walk up to Fennec and tell him you left the vault to be taken."
"I bet you think you're so smart…" Fennec's goon pulled out a whip from his backside and swung it over his head. Having no more modified long-range kunai dispenser to rely on, he had to improvise with a different sort of weapon. Judging from his moves though, it was one he had training with.
A cascade of lashes surrounded Chaff Mercury. The whip was snappy, and the collision ignited sparks around the area where they pummeled the puppet, but it wasn't enough to deal lasting damage to it. Despite that, the sniper whipped at the handle of the Sheikh's statue's sword and swung himself around to attack Damisan instead of Chaff Mercury. With his hands being engaged in controlling the puppet, Damisan found no better way to answer the surprise attack but to raise his right and absorb the shock while skidding a few steps back from the push.
"The only reason I'm wasting time with you is that you know if Fennec is here or not. If you talk now, I'll spare you and give you a chance to flee. I don't care about anyone other than him," Damisan taunted the skilled raider, but the man just swung the whip over his head to prepare for another series of attacks.
"We both know that ain't true," he answered before sending another confusing pattern of pummeling lashes Damisan's way. The puppeteer hauled Chaff Mercury back in front of him in an instant. The raider's whip had shown itself to be unable to damage even a C-Rank puppet like Chaff Mercury, let alone Damisan's more complex configurations.
And yet, this choice of strategy appeared to cheer the mook up as he moved his wrist with some higher skill than someone who just abused lowly settlers. The skilled wrist movement commanded the whip to curve around Chaff Mercury and instead move for the puppeteer supposedly hiding behind it. It seemed as if the raider stiffened up his entire body, waiting patiently for the excitement of hearing his opponent cry out in pain and experiencing the exhilaration of his whip lashing against unprotected skin. What came to him instead was a peculiar clang.
"What…!?" the raider barked out when he realized his whip was stuck in place and he could no longer manipulate it. Damisan slowly stepped out from behind Chaff Mercury, revealing that he had another hand raised and more puppetry strings glowed with chakra coating from the tips of his fingers.
"Tin Mars: Skid Mark…" Damisan chanted out while moving his fingers in a complex pattern that left even virtuoso pianists in the dust. The tin-man with an oval-shaped helmet and six chakra jets at the back leaned forward and shot in a fiery hypersonic tunnel of acceleration toward the shocked raider, leaving him no chance of reacting to it.
Instead of Damisan, it was the whipping raider that yelled out in pain and took off on a wild flight off the platform. He stopped only when the leather of his own whip looped around his throat as it was Tin Mars' scrappy forearm that blocked his earlier whip strike and let the whip wrap around it. With a step lacking any semblance of rushing to it, Damisan approached the edge of the platform and looked down at the kicking raider.
"I figured you could handle the fall without having your neck break. Still, I believe the difference in our strengths is obvious. I may use low-ranking puppets I built from leftover scrap, but that's more than it'll take for a ninja of my level to stand up to your ranks. Now, unless you want to piss yourself hanging over all that gold down there, you'll tell me where Fennec is so I can end this nonsense bloody crusade of his," Damisan reached out to take the whip restraints over from his puppet, pulling it toward himself to tighten the stranglehold and make the raider croak.
He was being cruel, maybe even as cruel as these grunts were to the settlers, and approaching the level of cruelty Fennec meant to the Sheikhs and the Kazekage's men. Still, here Damisan had a chance to meet the one man responsible for all this mess in the first place, so he was ready to step over many lines to end this bloody scuffle prematurely by murdering just one more man.
"The… Throne… Room…" the grunt wheezed out. Damisan's glare sharpened with focus. Why would he sell his shot-caller out like that? Fennec saw anyone who refused his requests and orders as someone loyal to the Kazekage and the Sheikhs and lumped those two categories under being the true enemies of the country to be rooted out and made an example of. Sure, he hung over a certain, slow and painful death, but it should've taken more "convincing" than that. Usually, their mortality only kicked in to this sort of scum right before the end. They felt invincible until just the final few blinks.
"Are you a mercenary?" Damisan asked, having reeled the man back onto the stone platform and rolling his whip into a ring before him while the grunt coughed and wheezed. The man gorged on every sip of oxygen he could get, no matter how much it burnt his strained and injured airways.
"Used to be…" the man replied without even looking up. He just wheezed and sweated. Still, him talking anything other than shit to Damisan without the need of threats of painful murder was an improvement.
"Used to be? If you were a mercenary and Fennec was just the man paying you, it'd make sense you'd sell him out like that. And the fact you've got this much skill," Damisan replied. "What does "used to be" even mean?"
"I just… Roll with Fennec now… I stopped… Doing jobs for money… Now I just… Do what he says…" the sniper straightened his back though remained on his knees so as not to aggravate Damisan into resuming his attacks. Damisan recalled both puppets back into their scrolls. "Aren't you in a hurry to take him on? You sounded… Obsessed with Fennec…"
"I am in a hurry, just not to run straight into a trap," Damisan replied. "I've already been overpowered by an entire crew of his mooks once and I was at my peak back then. My current arsenal may not measure up against a serious band of mercs and raiders at this moment, so I need to know what I'm walking into."
"If you want him… He's there… Probably still whipping the Sheikh or something," the sniper finally got over the stress on his throat and stood up though he didn't make any sudden moves nor did his body language suggest he was interested in restarting the scrap. "Yeah, he's got plenty of guys stronger than me watching his back and enjoying the fun. The question is how much do you want to…"
Before the raider could finish his sentence, Damisan's body had flickered away from the vault. Tin Mars bashed through another wall in his way and the puppeteer zipped himself out from the vault room onto a staircase leading straight to the throne room, if the map Damisan had made of the place in his head was right.
Finally, he'd have a chance to end all of this.