"What are you doing?" Endo asked, having stumbled onto the scene of Damisan standing surrounded by a handful of puppets. "It's not like you to spar without Mana lately."
"That's because I was helping her polish up her prosthetic puppetry. This isn't about improving her skills, it's about improving mine," Damisan replied, twitching his left hand which sent Chaff Mercury into a dashing blitz. The puppet homed in on its master in a straight, gold-tipped line with a violent hypersonic shock wave bursting halfway. Chaff Mercury tossed a wild flurry of hundreds of punches a millisecond but Damisan's footwork appeared impeccable. The puppeteer may not have been swift enough to evade the puppet's onslaught, but he avoided taking a beating through careful space management instead.
Urchin Pluto began buzzing in place with a roll that revealed the jagged scrap edges sticking out from its back. The rolling buzzard flew at its master like a cannonball but Damisan fell sideways to the floor, anticipating the attack as he wrapped his legs around those of Chaff Mercury and turned them to flop the speedster puppet right in Urchin Pluto's way.
A flock of sparks flew out, accompanying a revolting scrap shriek as the garbage laying the foundation of Urchin Pluto contacted the higher-grade alloy used in reinforcing Chaff Mercury's frame. This collision resulted in both the dents of Chaff Mercury's reinforcing plates and the bending of the blades comprising Urchin Pluto's built-in defenses.
A wooden humanoid with a long trident arm and another one reinforced and flattened to resemble a shield charged forward with rapid thrusts of its trident arm. This newly built puppet was slow and methodical enough for Damisan to lean out of its way. Without warning, the puppeteer exploded into a high-flying backflip, grabbing hold of the frame of an oval-shaped flat puppet comprising a gelatinous surface of liquid metal and a containment frame with a pair of decorative bronze arms and legs for support.
"Hmph…" Damisan grumbled, unimpressed with his teammate's display. "I thought that the Sun Disc will allow you to use your puppets. What is the point of training yourself against them?"
"We don't know that for certain. Besides, puppetry is a popular fighting style in the Land of Wind. In fact, it is rarely seen in ninja raised outside the country, so plenty of warriors will have countermeasures against it, I'm sure. I need to learn to fight my own battles if I have to. Not to mention, my puppets are still relatively new and I hadn't had the chance to build incredibly strong ones yet or install plenty of reinforcing upgrades into these ones. They're a poor measurement of my skill," Damisan exhaled forcefully with a show of light fatigue as he stretched his numbing muscles.
"You're wasting your time with this ridiculous training," Endo scoffed. "It hardly tests you and pushes you. As you've said–these puppets don't translate the entirety of your skill as a puppeteer. Not to mention, you're the one sending them after yourself so you know where they're coming from at all times. That's not how a battle is going to be. You need to stop embarrassing us as a team with this display and start building better puppets already. Play to your strengths instead of cowering to cover for your weaknesses."
"If the Sheikh insists that you fight bare-handed, could you do it?" Damisan wondered while doing some light stretches to ease the numbing.
"I'd much rather join Asuka in cutting down every inconvenient competitor behind the scenes," Endo admitted.
"It's not like you to show fear," Damisan smirked with a light tease.
"Who said I'm afraid?" Endo instantly bit the hook, as he was known to do.
"Someone tells you to fight bare-handed, you throw the competition and start cutting people behind the scenes. Sorry, but to me, this tells you're afraid of a bare-handed fight," Damisan shrugged with faked innocence.
"You want a go, smartass?" Endo rolled the sleeves of his red kimono with white decorative lines and black lotus decorations back, exposing his fit forearms.
"They're here…" Mana stopped, pointing at a bloody crime scene of blood, cloth, hair, and teeth scattered all over the place. The magician closed her eyes in a discontent look while Shige-H crossed her arms up and approached the kneeling and panting duo.
"Seriously, you two… What the heck were you thinking? Our break's finished and we need to move out if we're to reach Amegakure by nightfall and you got yourselves banged up and now I'll need to waste more of our time patching you up!" Shige-H placed her hands on her hips while scanning the two battered and swollen men, each frothing with blood and slobber from their mouth as if trying to spit the venom of their rivalry at each other.
"I'm No. 1!" Endo yelled out with a hardly intelligible slur because of his swollen gums and many missing teeth. Even if Mana didn't approve of the ridiculous show of machismo of the two during their training, the knowledge of how painful regrowing missing teeth will be for these two appeased her somewhat as a fitting punishment for their recklessness. "Your back and shoulders touched the ground first!"
"I didn't stay down. That means nothing," Damisan shook his head, looking parched and dragged through mud and hellfire itself.
Mana turned away from the grisly scene of mutual assault and battery, looking at the ruins of dome-shaped clay houses around them. These were the outskirts of Amegakure, where plenty of battles took place during the Second Great Ninja War. Amegakure was in a sensitive position in between both Lands of Earth, Wind, and Fire, and it was Suna and Iwa who took the worst beating in that war to where their status as the Great Ninja Villages was threatened after the conflict ended because of the extent of their losses and the destruction of their infrastructure and economy.
Seeing these two numbskulls pummeled like this, they mixed right into the hectic war zone of the past, still ridden with craters and demolished houses with massive holes covered with the black ash of people that failed to escape the breakthrough of the war in time. Some of them may have been caught unaware, meanwhile, others knew that the war was coming to them but had nowhere to go. Others ended up pinned down in the wreckage, whether it be by human bodies or the ruins of their own home, and were forced to starve to death slowly pinned down by the wreckage and drinking filthy rainwater off the puddles to postpone their deaths for as long as possible even at the cost of grievous and undignified sickness.
Still, this haunting zone of death and loss sealed into its permanently infertile soil only meant that Amegakure was up ahead. Just like the grimness of war were the clouds that hid the bright and warm sunlight behind them, this depressing battlefield hid behind it a flashy and exuberant ninja village that was rebuilt after the war from the ground up and continuously being improved and built upon by a new generation of differently minded Amegakure villagers. They had the somberness and grimness to define them, but they translated it into fine art and booming industrial achievements instead of letting it sink them into the tar pit of doom and gloom.
"Whoa…" Damisan stopped to take a good glimpse of the village up ahead as the Stars walked forth through a long bridge leading up to the Amegakure grounds. It was the sky-reaching, fuming, industrial-style buildings with tall and rectangular neon signs and posters that were meant to catch one's eye even in the gloomy rain that caused such a reaction.
"I wonder how much of this shitty weather is because of the junk they throw into their atmosphere…" Asuka rolled her eyes after crossing her arms and taking a moment to count the pointy roofs of every building dumping trails of chemical waste fuming out into the clouds. It only took her a few dozens before she realized the fruitlessness of keeping count.
"In this part of the world, it rains roughly 84% of the entire year," Mana said in a reserved tone, almost like she was saying it to herself. It wasn't easy to describe Amegakure's mood with words. It was like the spring gloom season all year long. Even during the few patches of days when it wasn't raining 24 hours straight, the skies rarely, if ever, cleared up from the ashy clouds.
"It's like the sky itself is still crying over the bloodshed that took place here," Endo noted with a poeticism that wasn't much like him.
Once in a while, the sight of sculptures of decorations caught the eye. Sculptures matching the industrial skyscrapers in size of ogres of asura rearing their teeth and displaying their fists. Unlike the rest of the village, these artsy displays raked one's eye with color. Then there were instances of buildings and complex pipeline systems being dyed over with graffiti to resemble similar statues when the artist lacked the skill or permission from the village's administration to craft one of these sky-reaching demonic pieces of art.
"Huh, I guess the local leaders are pretty soft on crime. You wouldn't imagine seeing someone painting this shit over the Hokage Mountain," Endo noted, pointing at the sprayed-on buildings and industrial pipeline systems.
"Either that or they've got a soft heart for down-on-their-luck street urchin punks," Shige-H replied with her best guess.
"At least finding a place to spend the night in won't be difficult," Damisan pointed at many illuminated neon signs that showed no sign of a struggle in breaking through the gloom of the village.
"Hey, was this statue always open-mouthed?" Mana pointed at an ash-skinned fatso with rich and extravagant facial hair and fiery lanterns for eyes. A tall Babylon-shaped tower of six floors in size rested atop the statue's head alongside two extended pipelines that vented boiling smoke from each of their ends.
Without warning, the statue spewed out pebbles and dust and slammed its chompers shut with a thud that would've robbed Mana of her pointing hand if the magician didn't pull it back just in time to avoid definitive disarmament. The startled magician dashed back from the towering head that ascended in a vortex of howling gales.
Red light lit up in the blank, fiery eyes of the rising statue's head just a moment before a red, super-heated beam of light shot at Mana only for the magician to spread her legs to the sides and avoid losing them from the knee down. These beams appeared to be a concentrated jet of flame as the moment they stopped beaming, they burst outward like a flamethrower spit. The raging flames ignited the vortex that the statue head rode on, creating an image of a wrathful firestorm that made everyone brace themselves to avoid incineration.
A maddening feminine shriek preceded a snake-like jab from the side of a demonic woman's head atop of a long body of a giant onyx-colored interconnected tomoe chain. Asuka tossed a long rod from her back into her hand, instantly unraveling it into the shape of a spread umbrella and offering it as a tribute to the charging statuesque demon snake. The rushing demonic reptile slammed its face against the umbrella, swallowing it whole but finding none of the blond young woman she intended to devour alongside it. With a smirk, Asuka pulled her hand and set off something in her umbrella that burst with sharp razor blades from each of its segments and began spinning inside the snake statue's mouth. This caused the demonic serpent to howl and scream in an augmented feminine shriek.
A red and silver humanoid shape blitzed in from the right, faster than Damisan could react to it, digging its right cross into the side of his jaw and making it malform to the fist's influence before shooting the puppeteer off wildly as a cannonball shot out from the barrel. The shape posed with its punching arm socked out of shape and smoldering with smoke but the faceless, mouth-only humanoid of pale skin and a black helmet fitting over most of its head save for the head reloaded his forearm by screwing it back into place. Despite emulating cloth and buttons, the silver lining over the artificial humanoid shape was entirely made of tempered steel alloys and decorated with a blood-red plating over its entire body.
"Damn it, get off my back, will you?" Asuka bit her lip in frustration as the seemingly immortal serpentine beast coiled and chased after her. It lunged repeatedly without stopping or offering any moments of respite that the elusive kunoichi needed to weigh her options and consider a plan of action. Whoever these assailants were, they didn't even give the Stars a moment to regroup, splitting them apart and taking them on one by one.
"Sorry, I may have eternal life, but taking my time just ain't my style…" the serpentine statue head smiled with a battered and cut-up mouth missing a few decorative pieces before snapping back and beginning lunging rapidly at the Stars member that had already offered up her weaponized umbrella for her survival and was running out of breath from how efficient this living statue was at pressing her back to the wall with relentless and ceaselessly aggressive attacks.
Even if Asuka eluded every charge and thrust and avoided being swallowed up by the statuesque assailant, even spending her substitution with a piece of the snake's own chipped-off mouthpiece, she grunted in pain when the giant tomoe beads slammed in her rear and planted the blond kunoichi into the side wall of an industrial building from which she fumbled down knocking into and bouncing off of any pipes and wires along the way to the bottom.
Damisan called out for his puppets, triggering a seal that lit up with a bright red glyph on Chaff Mercury's back and disassembled the puppet. The disassembled greaves fit over Damisan's own legs with backward pointed exhaust fumes, while the puppeteer slipped his forearms inside of the detached gauntlets of his puppet and slammed them against one another with impressive concussive force. Having bolstered himself, Damisan kicked off the watery ground level of the flooded Amegakure and took off at the incoming crimson assailant. The two collided and exchanged a few blows with Damisan blocking the worst of the incoming exchange while only Chaff Mercury's gauntlets took damage.
Seizing the moment when the assailant's arms unraveled once more, requiring a manual reload to resume the overwhelming battery, Damisan turned around and replied with a flurry of speedy kicks from Chaff Mercury's mechanical greaves. The oppressive attacker turned to the offensive with unscrewed forearms that didn't seem to fit well for defense. With the overwhelming speed of Damisan's bolstered flurry, inevitably, a kick would catch his attacker right in the mouth. This sent him rolling backwards through the air as his head unscrewed from the shoulders in the same manner that his arms did after expending all of their force.
"What the heck is going on?" Damisan wondered to himself while spitting blood and wiping it off of his crimson face. "These guys aren't human. They're behaving almost like… Puppets… But there aren't any strings nor a puppeteer in the vicinity."
A moving and fighting piece of armor with clawed gauntlets engaged Endo in a one-on-one clash. While its initial unexpected spurt pushed the swordsman back all across the Amegakure rooftops, with the added swiftness and ferocity of a clawed arm attack and ruthless aggression that let the living armor move in to an overly close distance to Endo proving exceptionally troublesome, once the swordsman got his bearings, he realized that he actually had the range and power advantage and began pushing his opponent back. Endo's Sword of the Thunder God and Sword of Thorns left cross-shaped golden and black gashes across the armor's core that sent it skidding backward.
As an added insult to injury, obsidian thorns burst out from the black gash like a tree sprouting from the ground in a feat of instantaneous growth. Just as Endo dashed in at his off-balance opponent for a finishing slash, the living armor detached its head and leg pieces with them, re-configuring and returning for a configuration of a diamond-shaped obstacle. Not even the combined cross-shaped slash of both of Endo's finest swords left a graze in it. The diamond-shaped armor stump reconfigured in a snap and punished Endo's offensive with an upward swipe from his blade gauntlet that ripped apart Endo's kimono and left him with a triple gash on his chest.
A walking, colorful Tiki totem traded a few blows with Shige-H. With the Chakra Enhanced Strength completely suppressed as the Stars' leader struggled to keep up with the shifting segments of the Tiki puppet's body and six whole arms to deal with, it didn't take long before the Tiki totem found an opening and head-butted Shige-H away with its horned head. The decorative, lifeless eyes burst with flames, setting the falling medical kunoichi on fire as she plummeted down to the lower dumps of the village.
Mana became distracted by the incoming chakra signatures nearby. The Babel-head statue floating atop a whirlwind noticed this. Slowly and with thunderous quakes, the statue head settled back into place where it laid while setting the trap up for the Stars. It drew the howling whirlwind in and blew it out of its mouth. Combined with this blowing blast, the fiery eyes lit up and fired the beaming blazes. In combination with the blowing winds from the mouth, this created a chain fusillade of combustions and devastated the rooftop.
"The Amegakure ninja are coming. Pick up what we need and go!" the statue head boomed with an augmented voice. It only then occurred to Mana when her body reassembled from flower petals surrounding the blaze that the statue-head sent her way that she couldn't quite hear this booming voice vocally but heard it in her mind. This gave her flashbacks to the mental network that Kiyomi could establish.
A sharp twinge made Mana scream out. She blanked out for just a blink after thinking of Kiyomi and home and the next she knew it, a stone fang was sticking out through her shoulder. "Venom?" she wondered, realizing that something alien had been causing instant havoc to her body. It wouldn't have been the first time that toxic strategies would've been employed on puppets. Problem was that she didn't have the opening to meditate and halt the venom's progress.
Everything turned blurry for a second until it all turned black instead of settling back into place.