"Fennec!" Damisan yelled, standing at the end of a collapsed staircase, gazing through the wrecked hole into the sum of the collapsed ruins of the palace before him. It was a detestable idea that he relied on the sadism and vengeful tendencies of his opponent right now. This was utterly ridiculous, Fennec was so cautious, he'd never charge back into the heat of the battle and expose himself again.
His chance was lost…
Although… This was more than just a battleground for Fennec. This was his statement, which he spent entire years of tyrannical work preparing for. The moment Fennec took over an actual Sheikhate, everything changed. He entered a whole different field of warfare. From a thug band leader, he became a conqueror and a direct competitor of the Kazekage and the Sheikhs, which made him a viable target to direct serious military force against. In other words, this had to work for Fennec. If this failed, he'd have returned to square one to lick his wounds for entire years.
His reputation amongst the desert thugs and raiders as a flawless conqueror that makes no mistakes and is on his way to a methodical takedown of the entire country settlement and raider camp by settlement and raider camp on a staircase leading to power would be in shambles. Damisan had to gamble his faith in the fact that this still mattered to the monster or else he'd be all out of options. What a ridiculous joke, Fennec could've beaten him yet again by just running away like a coward and fleeing into the desert. Burrowing in his dunes and caves, wherever he went back to hide, and not peeking his nose until he's ready for another major takeover in a couple of years.
Damisan placed his hand over his eyes, peering into the horizon as he couldn't have helped but noticed a rowdy column of sand. A natural hurricane, but not the kind that was native to the Wind Country. This was different, this was the signal of a marching band. An army. But what kind of army? Fennec's reinforcements? No. The idea that the conqueror would've had enough scoundrels to boss around to take over a capital of a quarter of a country, a patch of land spanning a sixteenth of the whole continent, and then had the forces necessary to make the desert foam and spew heated sands like this seemed ludicrous.
No one but the Sheikhs or the Kage would've had the military power to amass this kind of force. But the Sheikhs were known to be frisky, Type-A personalities. Each of them with their own kind of messed up, yet each of them controlled power that was rivaled only by other Feudal Lords of other nations. Not unlike the Feudal Lords, these guys sometimes licked their lips at the thought of someone snubbing out one of their peers. That may have made all the more land and pristine jewels of the desert to claim for themselves. The Kazekage had voiced his dream of replacing the Sheikhs with an actual Feudal Lord long ago, leaving the Sheikhs as a more figurehead piece, swimming in their fortune but having no real political power. Therefore, the Iron Shogun had reasons to want a Sheikh gone too.
Whose feet were trampling that much sand?
A vulture squawked too close for Damisan's comfort. It was a massive thing, the size of a pterodactyl, and flung an egg the size of a washing machine. Knowing that nothing good could've come of it, Damisan relaxed his body and dropped from the edge, thrusting his feet into the tower wall and sliding down. An ear-popping blast resonated overhead and sent a shower of rubble and dust. The dust settled in Damisan's hair; the shrapnel cracked his forehead and scalp in a few places. Despite the bloody disturbance, Damisan felt lucky to have kept himself stuck to the tower side.
"The observation tower, huh? I guess you've got plenty left to observe with that army rushing in from the west…" Damisan muttered to himself while observing the super-sized avian swoop in between two columns of the tallest observation tower that still stood. It wasn't just an observation tower. Structures like these proved just how old the Sheikhate palaces were as they saw the days of the earliest rulers of the desert that still prayed to the rising sun. These towers were meant to be so tall that the local priests would've been the first ones to greet the sun each morning and the last to see it off.
When people stopped praying to the cosmic objects, it must've felt like a real waste to topple down these massive towers, so they used them for observation. Instead of priests, military scouts occupied them most of the time. That was in spite of the fact that no arrow could ever reach whoever they scouted and very few hawkeyes could've even traced something that far away without some serious chakra augmentation. If these towers ever felt impractical to the local soldiers, the fact that they came for a whole different sort of purpose was exactly why.
"Fennec…" Damisan said with a stern yet much more restrained tone. He no longer needed to shout when the man he's been obsessed with for years stood right before him, at the other side of the tower. Right in the middle of it was a massive, round hole with a single ladder that helped one reach the sky-high staircase leading up the tower. It was a perilous walk each morning, especially since both the priests and scouts made it half-asleep before the rest of the planet even saw the shining halo of light from beyond the horizon.
"I may not have shut up that irritating howling, but you must admit, your current volume is a drastic improvement," Fennec shrugged before flinging a chunk of dead flesh to his half-raptor avian friend. The semi-reptilian slammed his beak like two rocks slamming against each other and that was the last anyone's ever seen of that stiff limb.
"Why am I not surprised you've signed a Summoning Contract with Ninja Vultures?" Damisan breathed out. His climb was excruciating in both ways: the sense of how much physical torment it put Damisan through to tax his skewered and broken body for the task and the breath that it robbed from his lungs. He could've used a little breather, therefore.
"That is your biggest mistake. You underestimate me by assuming me to be as shallow as the first impression makes me out to be," Fennec reached for the nearby window and picked up a large broadsword that stood supported by the wall. It seemed pointless to task his fragile arms like that, only to point the broadsword at Damisan and order his pet to attack.
Even if Damisan expected violence, he didn't expect this level of ferocity as the beast squawked in a mixture of typical avian screech and a raptor-like roar and kicked itself off the floor. Its wings spread nearly through the entire room, yet they were strong enough to cleave right through the pillars in its way and slam right into Damisan with a reckless tackle.
As the reptilian scavenger took it to the skies around the tower grounds, carrying the impaled victim on its beak like a victorious knight that tried carrying the laurel crown to his chosen lady, the avian's attempts to remove Damisan's body from its beak to devour it looked almost comical from the side. Damisan released the poor thing from its wicked temptation by dispelling the illusion behind his Substitution Jutsu and revealing the victim to be just a piece of collapsed tower column. Regardless of the revelation, the soaring ninja vulture crumbled the building accessory in its beak anyway.
"Huh… I guess they really do eat anything…" Damisan grumbled to himself while struggling to maintain his balance atop the avian. He had expected to see Fennec on it too, but, for whatever reason, the cowardly tyrant stayed in the collapsed tower room. Then again, all his beast did was lower the roof a bit, so perhaps those accommodations were preferable to a one-on-one meeting with Damisan in his current emotional state.
"Let's see what can be done about controlling you…" Damisan said to himself, casting a handful of sharpened steel rods on all sides with steel wire attached to the other end. The beast squawked in a vexing cramp as the rods pierced its wings and the steel wires attached to them lit up with a chakra gleam. While a wild idea in its conception, it seemed to work like a charm as the vulture turned and swerved exactly as ordered.
Fennec's dandy mug revealed itself from a space in between the fallen columns. He weaved a single hand seal and Damisan realized his blunder. He directed the vulture into a torpedo dive toward the tower, hoping to get it as close as possible, but the feathered reptilian vanished in mid-air, leaving nothing but smoke and a lot of thin air under Damisan's feet.
"Come on, now…" Damisan yelled out to himself, dragging a scroll from the bunch around his waist and unraveling it underneath him. Tin Mars did whatever it could, blasting off the jets behind its back and soaring onward at the same time as the two were plummeting down. This changed Damisan's trajectory from straight down to flopping against the center of the observation tower. "I'm sorry, man…" Damisan whispered to himself after seeing the damage Tin Mars' head suffered from the grievous drag alongside the building wall as well as all the damage it had suffered previously.
Yet another thing Fennec had to pay for.
Damisan bit his lip to try and cause enough pain to distract him from the bite in his heels. He never thought that he'd have to resort to this, but he had to pull his own strings again just like the times when he had lost his limbs and had to puppeteer prosthetics. Except this time it wasn't because he didn't have limbs, but because they wouldn't move right. It was much easier to puppeteer an arm that had knives sticking out of it to move than it was to move it with one's own will. Much more precise too.
With a slight limp to his step and a pain-ridden expression, Damisan approached the edge of the collapsed tower roof to scan the area. With his nemesis gone and hidden again, Damisan had to resort to dashing from one tall location to another and scanning the surroundings. The battle was still raging on the streets. Even with the clear victory of Fahzad's revived resistance, alongside the joined settler force, overpowering the terrified locals that had switched to Fennec's side, the collaborators still fought on.
Even in the face of overwhelming odds, they collaborated with a tyrant out of fear that when he returns with another force, he won't be here to "liberate" them from the Sheikh's "oppression" but to raze Fahzad to the ground and to decorate its tomb with their corpses like the sites of horror he left behind him in settlements and raider camps that were especially defiant in their resistance or were actively supporting the empires of the Sheikhs and the authority of the Kazekage.
A myriad of clangs met Damisan's ear. He leaned down and slipped off of the roof to land in a round artificial garden spanning all of a couple of square meters. Just a handful of palms around a circular, sky-blue fountain. The showering splashes of water smeared some of the dried bloodstains across Damisan's body. A man in an exuberant robe had been fighting a woman in a nearby chamber. The noises of their clash emanated through a sizeable balcony. Damisan asked his left hand to move his right in just the right way to order Chaff Mercury to offer its pan-covered head as support and jump at the right time to fling Damisan up to the balcony's corner.
Damisan made the leap with a vault and rushed through the curtains, spoiling their silky, transparent white innocence with the coating of the fountain's water, sweat, and blood that covered him from the head down. On the floor laid a handful of men and a couple of women. All armored with bands and scrap, all of them dressed like some of the desert raider gangs, so their allegiances were to Fennec. The man in question had been squaring off against a feisty vixen that adopted the entire room to try to claim his life. Shakhra's feet bounced off of the floor, the walls, and the ceiling as she tried to cut and take a pound of the tyrant's flesh with each pounce.
The puppeteer leaned his head to the side, narrowly avoiding a stray chakram alongside a pair that had been bouncing all around the room at dangerous angles. They only stopped once they found something soft to imbed into: the frame of the deluxe bed or one of a handful of corpses inhabiting the room. Damisan grunted in pain as he leaned to pick up a scimitar off the ground but received a slam to the jaw for it.
Shaking his head, still seeing things in a blur of multiples, Damisan tried to snap out of it, but all he could see was Fennec's doppelgänger sneaking up from behind Shakhra while the original seemed obsessed with slashing her to bits with his broadsword. Shakhra recalled her chakram, looking proud of her strategy and feeling like she had nailed the over-extending opponent of hers, but her confident smirk was reflected in Fennec's face. The robed dandy leaned down, narrowly avoiding the chakram, and Shakhra's eyes widened. She dived for an evasive move, but… Her long black hair was stuck in something. The tight grip of a man's hand.
The chakra-coated chakram let out a meaty sonority that was so sharp, just its noise cut through Damisan's nerve strings and freed him from the daze he found himself in. Shakhra's body laid near him, spouting blood from her neck while a tongue of dancing flames began incinerating the lavish chamber this violence occurred in. Fennec's Fire Release clone had sacrificed itself to ensure that Shakhra took the brunt of her own chakram trap. The woman had been so obsessed with the opening she saw in Fennec's violent greed in battle that she didn't notice death's fingers wrapping around her throat. Even as the clone dispersed and Shakhra's head flopped into the flames to melt and wither away, her eyes were still full of surprise.
The original Fennec covered his jaw up, retreating from the flames that had been taking over the room. Damisan scrambled to return to his feet, willing to cut through the smoke and power through the choking embrace of death-inducing gas filling the air. He'd have seen his flesh melting from his bones for the second time in his life if it meant that Fennec would've experienced the same.
The tyrant dashed back, slamming his shoulder into the wall as he dashed into the hallway outside. Damisan thrust his scimitar into the ground and began weaving the fingers of his right hand erratically while he yelled in pain, fighting through the torment of bending his left hand through willpower rather than control. The flames engulfed the entire room before demanding more fuel and exploding out into the hallway in a haggard blaze.
Fennec cantered through the hallway, looking back at the flames that weren't really displaying any ambition of catching up to him. The robed tyrant's eyes flashed open as he didn't expect a pair of feet to land in front of him. His terror subsided after he identified a familiar dagger-wielding commander of his brandishing his knives amongst a circle of disemboweled bodies.
"Saqir, I thought you were dead…" Fennec panted as the oxygen wasn't as plentiful as an apt note of their reunion required it to be.
"The Kazekage's army is knocking on the gate. Let's go," the knife-fighting with the chimera-style helmet waved for Fennec to follow him before turning around. This was a feint, however, the moment Fennec lowered his guard and stepped toward his commander, Saqir turned around and thrust a dagger straight into his heart.
"What…!? Saqir…!" Fennec gargled and made noises Damisan had never heard before. Though, all things considered, Damisan loved hearing his hated enemy reduced to these pathetic yelps and wet, asphyxiated hissing. As the transformation undid itself in an azure-colored sizzle, revealing a bare-chested and battle-worn, long-haired ninja underneath, Damisan dragged the dagger down to carve through Fennec's ribcage before kicking the dandy down on the stairs.
"Mana…" Damisan removed a scroll from his impressive belt around the waist and gazed at the sealing tag placed inside its contents. "I know that you'd have never wanted your gift for me to be used to taking people's lives, but… I'm sorry… To end all this… It was worth it."
"Just… Who are you… Speaking to…!? Fool… Nothing's… Over…" a wet and high-pitched gargle came from the pathetic fading body by Damisan's feet. The puppeteer had only moved his eyes away from the vanishing tyrant for a second and the moment he looked back, someone else had laid in his robes, decorated with the same injuries. A weasel-like, slim, and balding fellow with a brush-style mustache, wide and bulged out eyes, and square and prominent line of teeth.
Damisan sat on a staircase leading out of a saloon, cradling his hopeless head in his hands. The saloon had, ironically enough, been empty and the only place deprived of dead bodies at this time of the day. His hunch was right, it was the Kazekage's men that had come to Fahzad's aid. Conveniently too late to save the Sheikh, or so they thought they'd be, but just in time to exterminate the survivors of the Fennec's hordes and his zombified settler group. The Sunagakure ninja didn't appear to share any of Damisan's scruples. Anyone still brandishing a weapon, anyone with a hint of fear for their life, not at the Kazekage's hand, but that of Fennec's, soon joined the grime and grit flooding the desert town and making the scorching sand mushy and bog-like.
A lone hawk swooped down into the hectic butcher shop. It didn't fear the spare ribs sticking out from the ground, nor it seemed to fear the wretched stench. The airborne smoke and cinders did nothing for the marvelous animal with tiger and black-colored feathers. Damisan gazed at the hawk, confused, as the animal seemed to land on the promotional poster sign and just gawk at him, turning its head left and right. Occasionally, it let out a squawk to catch Damisan's attention.
It was one of the Allied Ninja messenger hawks. The vibrant color scheme suggested it to not be one of the locals that blended in with the sand-shrouded skies. Damisan's right reached out. At the first flare of pain, he shivered and let his arm flab helplessly by his side. This couldn't have gone worse. So many of the settlers from his hometown–dead. His hometown turned into a ghost town. Shakhra was slain before his very eyes and the man whose blood was supposed to redeem all of this death and misery was just another decoy.
Damisan bellowed and winced in pain, but he reached for the message that the hawk carried. It simply won't go away until it had done its job and the last thing the puppeteer wanted was yet another dead friend on his tally. With a paled skin and shaking fingers, Damisan removed the message from his foot and unraveled it before his eyes. His eyes briefly skimmed through its contents before he let the paper crinkle in his clenched fist and slip onto the grime beneath, where it became soaked with blood instantly. As if someone had leaned down and breathed new life into his unconscious, stupid face, Damisan stood up and began heading for the Fahzad gate.
"Hey, didn't you say you were a Sunagakure ninja earlier?" a Sunagakure ninja stopped him by reaching out to him with an open palm. "Just where do you think you're going?"
"Oh, right…" Damisan muttered, reaching for his back pouch and removing an Allied Ninja headband that had a carving out in the middle of it. "I'm an Allied Ninja. I'm headed back to the HQ, my friend needs my help. You know how it is, you get another mission while amidst all this… Mess…"
"Oh…" the Sunagakure ninja peered into the Allied Ninja insignia, questioning the fact that the headband had been carved, signifying one's departure from the organization and a breach of any allegiances one had with the group. He didn't pay it too much mind, however. The Allied Ninja had better things to do with their limited manpower than pursue their own rogues. "Well, you know how it is… That's just how war is. It'll get a whole lot worse before it gets better, but… We'll get our hands on the bastard one day. This is just the dirty war he fights and we can't let him terrorize us into fearing him. When we punish the bastard under the dawn's sun, all the things we lost in the pursuit of him will be worth it."
"Yeah…" Damisan sighed. "Yeah… I used to think so too… Anyway, I think I'm done here. It's back to HQ for me."
"Hey, you were amid things here, right? You Allied Ninja are pretty badass, maybe they should send more of you guys to join in on the hunt? It's a worthy cause, ain't it?" the Suna ninja asked Damisan while the wanderer walked off through the open gate, waving with the back of his hand despite the pain it caused. Sunagakure only brought soldiers. Not a single medical ninja in sight… This showed the sort of plans they had for the place.
"A worthy cause is where I'm headed off to," Damisan mumbled to himself, already dreading when he decides to stop to patch his wounds up. The art of puppetry involved being a savant of the human anatomy too, to create lifelike and functional puppets and know worthy targets and various manners of poisons one could mix to use them efficiently. That meant that Damisan knew just how much trouble patching himself up will be when he acts upon choosing life over walking the same perilous and bloody path he's walked so far.
Just how did Mana end up losing a leg anyway?