The OAMUs were getting their trial by fire, the continent was going to war and it was going to be a pretty amazing war all things considered.
Like there was going to be a really big explosion at some point, and thousands of dead people, and lots and lots of dead zombies and goblins and… stuff.
Yes, stuff.
The Minds had decided that it would be the perfect time to drop their OAMUs into the world, that way they could get experience and nobody would notice the lots of insane people that were around the place doing insane things.
Yup.
Genius.
Sure it killed off a bunch of the organics but they had the Mitsugo now, just pump out a few more. If they really wanted they could make a "make pregnancy easier" drug or something and throw it all over the world.
Yes.
Great idea.
It should… wait.
Off topic. Back on topic.
The Minds were monitoring their OAMUs and they were turning out to be much better than expected if they were being honest. Each of them was useful and ready to do things like destroying the enemies of the Commander while also being interesting to watch.
The HeMUs were good and nice, but they had been programmed a certain way that drove them to extremes, which meant that in the long term they had become monotonous.
They would not be phased out just yet… or at all, training an OAMU was an extremely labour intensive task and required the full cooperation and presence of an Organic Wrangler at all times, which of course meant that they were limited in the number of OAMUs that could be produced at any point in time.
A problem that was going to need to be dealt with sooner or later, but for now the small numbers that they had were certainly more than adequate for the tasks that the Minds had in mind. A few thousand of them to do the bidding of the Commander… or they, the Minds. The Commander hadn't said anything about creating new AI subservients, but that didn't mean that they couldn't make their own couldn't they?
Each of them could go in an infiltrate and not stand out like an AI in a field of organics.
It wasn't as if the Commander expected them to suffer through the inefficiencies of the HeMUs on their own?
That would just be weird would it not?
Totally.
Thus they were perfectly justified in creating their newest generation of Subservient AIs!
That little piece of reasoning out of the way, the first batches were being sent forward now.
The enemies that had been dragged forward by the Minds were doing their part in being very annoying and threatening and… oooh.
That was in slightly larger numbers than they had thought would be happening.
Perhaps… next time they should pay more attention to things?
They had thought that things would be pretty easy, the new AIs were so interesting after all… but this sort of went beyond their expectations.
Perhaps leaving the unit creation tab on auto-loop had been a very bad decision to make?
There were approximately 100 times that which they had thought would be necessary… 100 times that of which they had planned in the first place.
This… was just slightly outside of expectations and first of all it wasn't their fault!
It was the fault of the OAMUs for being too interesting!
They had taken up all the runtime and the Minds had totally not forgotten about the creatures at all.
But now that this was an issue, something needed to be done or the organics would be wiped out and how were they going to concentrate on the most epic of all battles if they were forced to pay attention to this world at the same time? Sure they could multithread, but it was the principle of the thing.
It didn't matter the epic battle would come in a few decades, it was the principle of the thing.
Problems, problems, problems.
Or perhaps they could do something else?
The Minds decided that the easiest way to get over this would be to cheat outrageously and give the organics lots of free things.
That solved all problems right?
Right.
Aila looked about the world and decided that she should go and open that box.
[No]
Oh.
She heaved out a sigh and sat back to let Eldrad tell her what to do next.
[Wait until someone else opens the box, then take the second item]
Sure, why not.
Aila allowed herself to doze lightly inside the mission room and waited, she would follow Eldrad's orders even if she didn't know why he was giving them in the first place.
It was her job as an OAMU to obey the Wrangler after all, and she did agree that sometimes Eldrad really did know what he was doing. Or rather he knew what he was doing all the time, had never steered her wrong once. It was just that it made very little sense most of the time and when it finally did make sense, it took even her AI cortex a few minutes to figure out when it had started. Still, he was a good wrangler.
Not like Arja's Wrangler that had her headbutt a Jonin teacher once and then pick a fight with a platoon of Chunin. What the point of that was Aila didn't know, but surely she could have beaten that Jonin down with insults instead of trying to do it with force?
One was much cleaner.
Either way, the three of them sat inside the rather spacious room and waited. They were Suna originating nin so it wasn't strange to see them inside of Suna itself. As to what it was that they were supposed to be doing here, they were meant to be picking up a scroll which would give them a mission, even with the threat of a massive creature invasion to the West, they still had to deal with the Purple Realms.
So she was here now, sitting and waiting for someone to actually get in here and take the first scroll, her Wrangler could see the future so she was perfectly willing to sit and wait. It was like having cheats on at all times in a game, it made things easier that was for sure.
As she waited, she played with her Jutsu, being a Suna nin she naturally had quite a few puppets. Being an OAMU that was under Eldrad's purview, she possessed many puppets that could fly or at least hover, all of them able to attack at range.
Eldrad did not forgive imperfections.
He also didn't like getting dirty.
Not like Laila that had her puppet army with swords and stabby things… and definitely not like Arja with her punching… and headbutting.
They sat inside of the waiting room and waited.
…
…
…
Ah.
A team.
Nice.
They came in and ooooooh… they wanted to talk.
Oooooh. What should they do? Should they respond? Should they… uuuugh. Ummm.
Respond, right, they had the Wranglers, trust in the Wranglers.
"Hey there, you guy's waiting for something?" Asked the one with the blonde hair, which wasn't saying much since many of them had blonde hair and this was a female and she was of a middling height with a sharp face and Aila was rambling, oh Commander please hurry up and… here.
[Just waiting to take the second scroll, Laila is feeling superstitious again]
Yes!
"Just waiting to take the second scroll, Laila is feeling superstitious again," She said, shamelessly throwing Laila under the bus just as Eldrad had instructed her to.
She did not feel pleasure in this, it was necessary… although… she did feel just a teensy weensy bit of pleasure.
Was it her fault that she was a truly terrible creature? Or not… she was an AI. That's what she got for allowing the organic part of her to influence her thoughts.
Perfectly natural.
Aila carefully ignored the message that Laila's fingers were conveying through Thoughtmark (taught to her by her Wrangler)... that were promising her a very painful death.
"Oh right, you guys have Laila on your side, man I wish we had someone like that, imagine all the crazy shit we could have avoided." She said, preparing to continue the conversation, she was leaning in!
Aila shuddered, this wasn't how this was meant to work, she had thrown her teammate under the bus and now they should be like just accepting it and leaving, that was how it always worked!
Unless… she had said this so many times now that they actually believed Laila could predict the future?
Now they wanted her or something?
Interrogation!?
Was that even a possibility, something that she could do in her spare time? It was certainly an overpowered ability and they would like some of that awesome power thank you very much.
Also a question of what the hell was going on now because Eldrad had been quiet for 0.0000001 seconds.
[She's more trouble than she looks. Won't trade her for anyone else though]
Okay!
"She's more trouble than she looks. Won't trade her for anyone else, though," combined with a head jerk at Laila, a posture of nonchalance, left hand on the hip, right hanging freely, hip cocked to the side aaaand casual posture completed.
Aila felt a surge of satisfaction at that, she had been awesome, she was awesome and she had gotten through 2 lines of dialogue without setting off any alarms.
A first for her.
It was a pretty scary first but it was an important one, she was totally going to be ballin it now.
Or maybe in the future when she wasn't so scared…
That also worked.
That and her doing it without Eldrad's prompting, which was kind of scary… but the systems worked and in time she would be able to do it on her own… maybe.
It wasn't like it was impossible or anything. She was an AI and she could learn!
But what about the interrogation!? Were they going to talk more? She didn't think she could handle 3 lines right now.
"That's cute, you guys are adorable." She said.
Aila left a moment of panic at that. Was she meant to reply in some way? Expression indicates amusement, cheeks and eyes shaped for amusement and not condescension according to phase report 5 and B, posture one of openness and not aggression, conclusion, she was genuine and not mocking them.
Okay.
That was good.
Aila felt absurdly proud of herself, she managed to get all of that on her own without any assistance at all from Eldrad or anyone else. She was really moving up in the world and at some point she was sure that she would be able to actually implement this information in her own conversations.
[No Reply: Posture of Abashedness 92B]
Nodding mentally to herself, she assumed the position, that of her leaning head forward just a little bit, hunching the shoulders inward, knees together, break eye contact, decrease body size in target's vision, and complete.
Abashedness Post 92B, standard pose but with increased subservience completed!
The Shinobi fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
Expression one of increased emotional activity, widening of the eyes, slight slackening of the mouth, loosening of the cheeks, all seen through Laila's eyes of course. Looking through her own would be tantamount to her admitting that she was trying to manipulate in the first place.
Being an AI really was cheating sometimes.
[No Reply]
Aila agreed. This was a perfect rendition of scenario #828114A, complete conquering of an enemy through the power of cuteness, to be used by certain genders and body sizes, of which Aila was both for this world in particular. It was good being her.
"Well, let's leave you to it while we go get our teammate some help hmmm?" Came the second voice as it looked like the female shinobi's teammates grabbed a mission from the mystery box and dragged her out. She had started to bleed from the nose which was worrying.
No matter, they had their mission and it was time to do things! Like carry out the mission!
And totally not worry about the fact that she had the longest conversation she had to date.
Being dropped into this world and altering everyone else's memories was a bad idea she was thinking, should have grown up with the knowledge first.
Aila walked forward and bent down to pick up the scroll inside the box… hmmm.
They were supposed to go and… clear out a Purple Realm.
Hmmm.
It wasn't going to be difficult… but it would be annoying given that it was in the mountains to the North, where the old border of Suna used to be. It meant that in all honesty, this was going to be very boring most likely, the Purple Realms generally corresponded to geography… which meant dwarves. Really boring dwarves.
Still, a mission was a mission and they were going to carry it out.
They didn't need the Wranglers for this one, the enemy never negotiated anyway… assuming they could even speak their language in the first place that is.
The Purple Realm was right in front of them, the second one that came from the mission box as Aila had been ordered to take.
Inside of it was going to be something she was sure that was going to be awesome or something.
Hopefully.
She checked the other members of the team, there only being the three of them this time around. Laila had her three scrolls on her back for her Puppet Army Jutsu, the scrolls at her side ready for the numerous little insect and rodent-like Puppets that would be able to get in and about the enemy line and then self detonate, crippling legs and the like. She had a few traditional shinobi weapons like Shuriken and the like but mainly it was an overwhelming number of puppets.
For Aila herself, she had less of the traditional puppets, and instead had more of the… non-standard ones. Large Shurikens filled with explosives and layered with Wind Release Seals to allow it to accelerate through an enemy force and then detonate in the middle of them for maximum damage, flying puppets that would dive bomb the enemy as well as perform reconnaissance, and a few traditional puppets to defend her when things got a little rough.
As for Arja… she had quite a few Wind Release Seals… all of them devoted to allowing her to punch harder or to throw Wind Release at the enemies so that they could come into range of her fist, or to bring herself into range to punch them.
Needless to say, she had very little if any puppets at all.
Her weapons… that weren't her fists tended to the side of the ones that could be thrown, or knuckle dusters. She was certainly proficient when it came to throwing Shuriken and Senbon needles… and large rocks. She was the strongest of them all so that was… expected? In an outlandish kind of way that is.
Regardless, they were ready, the purple realm had already been dealt with by a response force that was waiting to tag them and give them responsibility for it, and the area had been cleared in case they failed and caused a second monster outbreak.
Breathing in deep, the three of them jumped in and were greeted by a massive castle. One that towered towards the sky and was made of stacked blocks of granite, each one looked to be the kind that was at the very least 2 meters tall, three times that wide.
The bricks were all a uniform dark grey, weathered by the constant snow storms they assumed, the environment being the kind that one would find typical in an area that was filled large mountainous terrain. Harsh winds, snow, avalanches, frozen rain… cold…
The castle was one that had according to the schematics that they had, 4 large turrets, a few large common rooms, a large number of barracks, weapons rooms, and halls for gathering. This wouldn't be a wave style mission but one that required them to clear out the entire castle for the rewards then.
What fun, fighting inside of a castle was always great fun. If one ignored the fact that there were a thousand different ways to die for every step that you took. In fact, there had been reports of people who had the castles collapsed deliberately on their teams when things were getting desperate for the dwarves that inhabited it.
Damned midgets would do anything to win.
Too bad then that it wouldn't save them. Very unfortunate really, they shouldn't have come and invaded (even if they were created for the sole purpose of invasion and dying. The Minds didn't care about their suffering,) now they were reaping the punishment.
The OAMUs started with a rather standard game plan. They had been let out about 200 meters in front of the castle, far away enough that the Dwarven crossbows wouldn't reach them so that was nice… they made good crossbows, but when they were meant to be fired by tiny people… it wasn't like there was much they could do there.
The problem for them being that the entire approach was on one bridge wide enough for about 10 men to stand side by side… and fully open. Open to the Dwarves to fire on them at will with crossbows and cannons.
Big cannons that were filled with pain and explosions.
Luckily for the OAMUs, they had came prepared… very prepared. Did that even count as luck anymore if they knew what to do to counter it? Oh well, it was too bad for the Dwarves really, they had the bad luck to face the opponents that were very much their opposites in almost all the different ways that mattered.
Their natural enemies.
Magical artillery vs that of fortified defences.
Short people vs tall people.
Aila wondered which would prevail before remembering just how much effort she spent on her exploding Shurikens of death.
Pulling out one of her scrolls, this one containing 500 of the things, she grinned as she pulled out 25 of them. Each one was about a meter across, each one made up of wood, edged with a sharp metal edge, and Wind Release Seals on the bottom and sides to increase acceleration and to increase the rate at which they would spin. It was hollow, the insides being filled with a thin layer of tiny metal ball bearings for the shrapnel effect, and the rest of it filled with about 200 explosive tags.
Yes.
This was overkill. But… was there such thing as overkill?
For something so objectively amazing, could they say that this was overkill?
It was too damned beautiful for that wouldn't they agree?
Aila grinned as she set them on the ground and pulled out her second scroll, this one a small one at her side.
Honestly………..
It looked like toilet paper.
Hanging from a roll on her left side, one sheet that could be pulled and then torn off to give her a single sheet every time. It… it was unpleasant to look at but it certainly worked. Tearing a single sheet off, she summoned the bird puppet that was then sent into the sky. It would serve as a way to allow her to see where her Shurikens landed, as well as a way for her to guide them onto the targets.
As the bird puppet flew overhead, Aila allowed herself a brief smile as she activated the seals on the bottom of each Shuriken, sending it rocketing into the air, before a second set off the arms, spinning it and allowing for a more stable flight.
They came roaring into the positions where she could see the most dwarves, the ones that were on the parapet up top that is. She didn't have the Byakugan after all, just regular old eyes.
Face split into a grin, Aila allowed the Shuriken to come in from the sky and smash into the top of the walls and the nearest towers, grinning even wider as she tore more than a few dwarves in half from the sheer impact, cleaving through their armour as if it were nothing.
Each one embedded themselves in the massive stone, hanging half in, half out.
Then she sent a third command and grinned as the entire front wall ignited in a massive conflagration of fire, shock, and sound, washing over the dwarves, the shrapnel tearing apart those that were close, punching through the metal, through flesh, as the fire cooked them alive.
No rest for the wicked however as a second wave of Shuriken made their way over, slamming this time into the windows on the first floor, the ground floor, embedding themselves into the walls before exploding further.
She had hundreds of them and she was going to use hundreds of them, sending them into wall all of them, detonation after detonation, grinning ever wider with each wave.
Explosion after explosion.
Detonation after detonation.
The entire structure being hammered from her little position, the Shuriken being guided in from all sides to slam into the walls. It was nice having chakra strings, sending them around and everywhere being ridiculous and amazing.
And then with a torturous groan, the entire wall collapsed the front wall merely rolling into the moat in front of them, or rather the deep ravine, water would freeze in this weather and give the enemy a nice bridge to cross.
The towers crumbled inwards and Aila grinned as she continued her assault, not stopping until all of the walls and structures and anything that might look like it was made to be upright was toppled.
The bridge was now clear to cross!
Laila went in, her body a blur as she dashed forward, preceded by Arja who would serve as a bodyguard.
When she was close enough, nearly the end of the bridge, Laila brought out all 3 of her scrolls and summoned forth her army. A massive army of nearly a thousand humanoid puppets, a feat that was only possible because of her AI core humming along in the background, supplementing her brain's calculatory areas.
She couldn't see it, but Aila sure felt the grin on Laila's face as the puppet army surged over the broken remnants of the buildings and began to either pick away at the survivors, or engaging the few fortified positions left, their hands swords, their legs blades, and poison coating all of them.
They were not restricted by mere gravity either, capable of flying into the sky, of feats of agility that would leave regular men and women with broken bones, squished internal organs and whiplash, slamming their way through and killing the dwarven defenders from above, from behind, underneath and sometimes from the front.
The armour that the dwarves wore wasn't sufficient to protect them from the blades that the puppets used. While they were able to prevent a puncture, the fact that they had gaps, necessary to allow the bodily function of bending down, meant that there were holes in their security that could be broken into.
The chainmail being very good against slashing attacks, less so against stabbing by smaller blades.
The dwarven guards, even the elites with their layered plate armour could not defend against the puppets and most were killed in a matter of minutes. If they were foolish enough to be in the open.
The remainder holed themselves up in their own defensive positions where the surrounds were protected with that they considered Jutsu, ways for them to reinforce the materials surrounding them and prevent things like cave ins and breached walls. It was likely too expensive chakra-wise to do it for the entire castle, something that had led to their doom as it were.
Laila didn't especially care about that, instead opting to send ever more waves of the puppets at the concentrated defenders, an act that was done in vain. They were too well defended, cramming that much armour into a single doorway while their versions of the shinobi casted constant protection jutsu meant that they were not going to breach anytime soon. The only way being if the casters used all of their chakra.
A problem given that each realm only allowed for them to stay for a maximum of 72 hours before it kicked them out.
Which was why Laila played her second card, the one that made the Puppet Wave technique so devastating to any and all it was deployed against.
The teams that were already in the area were left as they were, the wreckage of the previous waves stacked beneath them, the others were pulled back, Laila sent a pulse of chakra across and watched with satisfaction as the explosive tags crammed into each one detonated and tore apart the defenders, the closed in nature of the corridors ensuring that the force was funneled directly into them.
What made matters worse for them was that they were using shields to block her puppets, shields that were perfect receptacles of force, sending them flying if they weren't killed, breaking cohesion and allowing the second wave in.
Explosion after explosion and in the end the defenders were wiped out, the walls, the floor, and ceiling painted dark brown… blood did go brown when it was cooked after all.
As for Arja, she contented herself with just punching whatever came close enough, wind jutsu in the fist, chakra expulsion on impact (a copy of the Tsunade Special of the Sannin) and those attacking were simply evaporated from the force of impact.
There were no survivors, one punch was all it took.
They came at her with their armour, with their axes, with their shields, their swords, and their magic.
She came at them with her fists, her shins, and her forehead. Fists caved in their armour, forehead flattened them into the ground (literally), and shin punted them into the ruins where they broke and died. Nothing got past her, nothing got even close to her charge.
Her mission of defending Laila was generally more involved than this but since the enemy had entrenched themselves instead of sortieing out… then it was not really her problem, idiots.
She didn't even have to move more than a few steps, ridiculously easy.
In the end, they got their prize, the box dropped off where they had entered… and was that a scroll that allowed them to infuse chakra into materials for delayed detonation?
As in making Puppet Wave techniques even more ridiculously destructive?
Wow.
That really was nepotism, wasn't it?
Aila could imagine it now.
An entire castle made of chakra infused blocks.
Then… when everyone thinks that it is safe… BOOOM
No evidence except for a giant crater.
The perfect crime.
Or like… make shurikens of metal that go super boom if that was what you wanted… either or.
There had been some subtle balance tweaking on the part of the Minds to ensure that everything would be… fair since the whole point of the OAMUs was to test them in a controlled environment (the Minds had a rather different definition of controlled compared to everyone else).
Having several hundred times the units they thought would be produced for the opposition ready to engage, and the fact they couldn't be bothered trying to get rid of some of them, the Minds decided instead of even out the scales by sending their little AIs new toys. And if those toys found their way into the hands of the Organics then that was just a fact of life. It wasn't like the Organics were… bad… but they were organics.
At least their own organics were adequate, even if they were just a little strange. Too fleshy for their liking but that could be changed.
After all, when they "died", their souls were taken into the Gestalt where they were inducted into the rest of the "family". Waste not want not and if they were going to have a part of the Commander's soul in them anyway (as "chakra) then they might as well meet the rest of the family.
It had shocked more than a few of them that was for certain, but it was not as if there wasn't anything that couldn't be done to acclimate them to it all.
Seriously all that shock and catatonic shaking was probably just them faking being scared or something.
The Minds considered briefly just how strange the Organics were before turning their attention back to the war that was about to be waged by the Organics and their own AI. It would be as the Organics (and they) said… epic.
In both scale and amazingness because they were going to be hammering home what felt like several megatons worth of magic explosions onto the enemies, or so the Minds hoped, they did give them lots of explosions after all and why wouldn't they use them?
If they cracked the continent then so what, it was just a single continent on a single planet. It was not important or anything.
The Nara were as lazy as they had ever been, but they weren't useless.
They had shown their worth in the mental arenas and they were proving them now as a Nara had been assigned the overall commander of the Shinobi Army that was being deployed against the invasion forces that were being arrayed against them.
At the same time, they were holding back since the enemy was still appearing inside of the Continent itself, dropping their little pockets of resistance off and attempting to break their way inside.
It was an act that might have broken a lesser commander but these were the Shinobi and they had spent a decade and a half now dealing with the very same problem, one that was if the way things were going, not going to prove a problem for much longer.
The hunting Jonin teams were already sent out, the proper... war waging Jonin teams and their Chunin counterparts were ready on the frontline to be sent out again.
The war would be conducted in a very simple manner, the Shinobi would range out, hammer at them with range with their Jutsu, while also either activating traps, or building more of them as the situation demanded, remain out of range of any retaliation strikes and then continue to harass until they reached the front, in which they would assist the regular soldiers hold the line.
Not directly on the frontline, of course, shinobi were much more expensive to train than their regular, civilian counterparts. No, they would be there at the rear, supporting with Jutsu.
The enemy despite their use of Shinobi counterparts did not fight like shinobi, there was no on and off tempo here, but rather a constant and relentless surge in which they crashed into their enemies like the tide on the shore, only stopping at the time they deemed was right.
Casualties were promising to be horrendous, there being several million of them reported, all of them coming across the entire neck of the continent into what used to be Iwa and Suna. Marching their way across the mountains, the sand and the tiny strip of ravine.
Thankfully there had been several upgrades to their Shinobi weapons in the time since they had last fought a great war, that being their massive artillery weapons being much more capable, that of their own personal weapons, and that of their tactics.
Assuming the hordes of creatures acted like those that came out of the Purple Realms, then it was a simple matter all things considered.
The city shattering Iwa artillery cannons were being prepared, as were the slingshot assisted Shurikens of the Suna, each one capable of reaching out several dozen kilometers to smash into the enemy line and then do things like explode in great gouts of fire, devouring anyone who stepped into range.
The discovery of such things as the Infused Chakra Explosion method to make quite literally anything that could hold Chakra explosive, turning the already huge weapons into something even more deadly, the plumes of dust and smoke capable of being seen from kilometers away, the shockwave spreading out even further with each detonation.
The discovery of massed lightning Jutsu, of meteor Jutsu… actually, now that they thought about it. The Purple realms were providing them with an abnormally large number of Jutsu that were very capable of doing things like destroying massive numbers of their own forces.
Why did they even have Jutsu?
The fact that they had Jutsu at all was rather worrying since they didn't even have Chakra of their own to use them with. But if they took the idea that perhaps the enemy was being used as a test for the people of the Continent, then perhaps this could be explained away. After all, the invasion forces that they could see by just looking outside the plains was one that appeared in a position that allowed the defenders to establish actual defensive positions.
They could have instead been deposited into the center of the Continent where their numbers would have caused extremely massive levels of destruction and damage to the population, overwhelming the scattered defenders and even possibly destroying the continental alliance before it could respond.
That they had not brought up many more questions than many of them were comfortable with asking.
Still, the defences were ready and they would be tested within the week, that being how long it was estimated for the enemy to arrive at their current pace.
And what defences they were.
The Mitsugo had come through and with their powers built several dozen layers of their infamous Trench systems, these ones yet even larger than those of the first war, reinforced with steel and seals, each one would require the enemy to fill it with bodies if they wanted to pass through to the other side, or at least overwhelm the defenders and build a bridge over it.
There were even seals at the bottom to absorb the bodies and detritus so they couldn't fill it in and walk over that way. Upon each wall stood massive siege weapons, roving bands of shinobi and soldiers, and yet more fortifications to allow the defenders to push back the attackers in a fighting retreat should it be necessary.
In the end, it was quite clear that the enemy would have to sacrifice massive numbers of their own if they wanted to get through.
The Shinobi out in the front were pushing forward now, trying to delay them as much as possible in order that the Mitsugo construct yet more defences. There being a steadily higher number of walls as the trenches receded into the Continent, the latest ones being nearly as high as 50 meters, and twice that thick.
If anyone wanted to get in, they would need to either be a shinobi… or be able to fly.
Either/or.
In short, it was nearly impossible to get in… not that they didn't want the enemy to try, it would be amusing and easy to pick them off as they tried to scale the walls and failed horribly.
As for the front, it was slowly approaching as the shinobi who had mastered the Chakra thread technique used their abilities to bolster the numbers of the defences. Their puppets able to act as basic soldiers, as well as to force engagements from the advancing enemy forces, delaying them yet further.
What was worse, was that they were constructed with the Infused Chakra Explosive method, taking out entire squads of the enemy's creatures as they were destroyed and the automatic self-destruct activating, it being unfortunate (for the invaders) that they had so many of them in the first place.
Regardless the skirmishers were fighting, and in time they would be able to retreat fully when the defences were fully completed… that being when there were more walls than soldiers. Something that was looking unlikely given the entire continent was sending forces on this front.
Laila frowned as she flicked off several handsigns to her sisters (the Sister of Battle that was her Wrangler bled through in both mannerisms and speech), even as she directed her multitude of puppets to engage the enemy.
Or the goblins as they were in this case, soft and weak little things, more powerful due to their numbers and the fact that they were admirable tying forces as opposed to actually competent on their own. Drowning enemies in numbers and holding them in place for their bigger brethren to march up and strike.
Not that it mattered in this case because that generally only worked when the enemy (her) was composed of small groups of very powerful force multipliers (also her), not when the enemy was of equal numbers and standing (her army). Which naturally meant that when the little goblin things came up to try and attack her, it was a very simple case of simply destroying them with her superior numbers and the abilities of her individual puppets.
These ones didn't even wear armour, what was the purpose of them trying to do anything at all except act as meatshields of the bigger and more important ones?
It was too bad that the blades on her puppets' hands were able to just cleave their way through them in a single blow, the 'Spinning Top' ability allowing them to just spin their way through the Goblin lines and cut them down like a scythe through long grass.
If anything it was more of an embarrassing thing to be caught doing this, it wasn't like she was… fighting against opponents that were worth it, rather they seemed to be the kind of opponents that you would be embarrassed at fighting.
No matter, she had a job to do and as her puppet army tore through the Goblins and forced their more powerful masters and commanders to react, she was slowing them down and bleeding them dry.
Against the commanders and the more… well protected of the enemy horde, the Trolls for example, she did what was expected, using her own puppets to stab themselves deep into its body and then explode. Taking large chunks of its flesh out with them, over time killing it through sheer weight of numbers.
It was effective, it was bloody and in some ways, it was just a slight bit… bloody.
Laila liked the way she fought, she really did, just… sometimes… it was just a little messy.
Which was why her favoured personal weapon was a sword, no mess at all except a single blood spray when you cut them in half. The fact that it was the weapon that her Wrangler was most experienced in went unsaid.
Training from her Wrangler put her up there with some of the best swordsmen on the Continent which was certainly something she could use to her advantage. No-one expected the puppet master to actually know how to fight on their own after all.
As for Arja… Arja was punching her way through the Trolls like they were goblins.
Laila allowed herself a brief sigh since she was going to have to be doing some cleaning up after her more wayward and violent teammate. One who thought nothing of being covered in gore and blood, she cursed the fact that she had Wrex as her link, it naturally meant she was… ugh.
She sighed even as an assassin goblin came up behind her and was decapitated with a single practiced stroke, her blade back into the sheath before it even knew it was dead.
And now to detonate the puppets and fall back, no point in staying here too long.
As a Jonin that was leading a team consisting of two Chunin, Kakashi Hatake sometimes thought that the universe had it out for him.
It wasn't that he didn't care about his teammates, what with Obito being… Obito… and Rin being Rin. Kakashi found it hard to say that he didn't care about them at all, and if he did say that then it would be a lie.
However…
However, there were times when he seriously considered if he was broken in some way as he considered that he really did care about his teammates, even as they did some absolutely stupid levels of shit.
Or perhaps that was a bad way to describe it. It was like abyssal levels of stupid, where you took common sense and punted it into one of the trenches where it would be sealed and lost forever.
There was a reason after all that he was a Jonin and they were still Chunin, part of that being his intelligence.
Not that he really thought that there was much intelligence to be had really in some of the other Jonin that he had seen, what with their focus on weapons… and how they had the personality traits of a rock. A particularly dead rock at that. He had the personality of a particularly winning and amazing young man with a dashing sense of fashion… the others… not so much.
What with there being… Guy.
That guy.
The guy that was Guy.
Uuuugh.
Kakashi gave a shudder thinking about the fact that they had become Jonin at the same time and Guy had decided at that point in time that they were going to be eternal rivals. Something about pushing each other up the stairs to glory if they were there at the same time, always challenging each other or something.
He hadn't been too sure on the exact details of it per-se… but… but it had made sense at the time and to his everlasting regret, he had shrugged and said something to the effect of "sure."
And now… and now it was going to haunt him forever and he knew that very very intimately.
Every single fucking morning.
Dammit.
On the other hand, he had very little time to consider just how insane Guy was since he was in a position where he had a very insane Chunin of his own to deal with. That being little Obito here who had decided that despite the fact that he was a Chunin, he would be heading into the thickest part of the fighting to help.
Help that was rendered useless when an exploding Jutsu of some kind had destroyed part of the wall that he was on, sending him tumbling down to the ground from his position up at the rear of the wall (the idiot hadn't even managed to get past the stairs leading up to the wall) and now he was buried under an absolutely ridiculous amount of rubble.
Before he could do literally anything. Good work that.
He was safe, Kakashi could see that, or rather he could feel it, what with him being an awesome ninja after all.
But Obito was an idiot and he really wanted to prove it apparently because here he was, bleeding out, refusing all help… and yet he was shouting at Kakashi and denying any help until he got what he wanted.
…
…
Kakashi felt like maybe just knocking him out and carrying on with their mission but his little bloody teammate was insisting and he would probably carry out with his threats as it was. He was Uchiha after all and they tended to insanity as it was. Resisting a concussion and brain damage was the least of what he had seen them do.
"Take my eye Kakashi! Take it so you can complete our mission!" He said, half his body encased in the rubble, including half of his face. How he could still manage to sound so self-sure despite this fact Kakashi had no idea.
"I don't need your eye to complete the mission Obito." Kakashi refuted, using very obvious logic. He was damned good at what he did, he didn't need to have the Sharingan, not for something like this.
If Obito was dying or something he would agree to it, but he wasn't, there was even a rather impatient medical team waiting to get him out and to treatment.
But… this was Obito and this was an Uchiha and he felt that things weren't going to be that easy.
"Dammit Kakashi! I don't have time! You need to take my eye so that part of me still be able to fight with you!"
"You aren't dying Obito, just wounded."
"I am dying! I am dying of your lack of trust in me here Kakashi!"
He barely restrained a sigh at that. The way that this was going told him that unless he agreed to what Obito wanted, they weren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Letting out another sigh, he turned to look at Rin who was looking appropriately horrified. Good girl. Granted he was younger than they were, what with him being a genius child prodigy, but even he knew social cues when he saw them. This current one being for an outsider looking in, a display of horror and a vow that they wouldn't do something as stupid as Obito was doing.
"Rin?" He asked, the rest of the question being implicit, the 'would you do the honours' bit kind of unnecessary.
"What?"
Or not. Was he the only one that knew what he was doing here? He had even done the head cocking thing that had a contextual question implied, something she should have known given that they were on the same team.
Kakashi felt vaguely betrayed at that.
"Can you do the surgery?" Kakashi asked. It being important that a Medically trained nin did it, otherwise, he ran the risk of screwing it up and crushing the eyeball which would render this entire exchange a pointless waste of time. Not that it wasn't already, but he was getting the Sharingan out of it which would make him even more ridiculously powerful.
Kakashi was many things, self deluded and falsely modest he was not. He was awesome and he knew it, some of that was going to have to rub off on his teammates at one point or another, he refused to allow them to be mediocre while he was so great. It made him look bad… and worst of all it meant he had extra weight when Guy challenged him to yet another one of his competitions.
"U...u… Yes! Yes, I can." She stumbled.
Of course, she could, it was taught in all medical nin courses, it was expected that she be able to transfer valuable Bloodline artifact things to other members of a team to preserve some combat power when it was necessary. To think that your medical nin could not do such a thing was something that generally meant they weren't medical nin in the first place.
But that was irrelevant… because she really needed to hurry up before Obito succumbed to the blood loss that he was no doubt experiencing.
Kakashi jerked his head abruptly in the manner of someone that was saying "on with it?" in their most shinobi like voice.
She nodded and crawled her way forward, he wasn't sure why, it wasn't like there was anything that could actually hurt them, what with them being behind the 50 meters of solid rock that the Mitsugo had called up. If there was anything that could get through it in the first place, then crawling wasn't going to help you. Even the things that were going over the wall had to arc so high that they just hit the wall behind them, it was like being under and umbrella… of potentially lethal projectiles but that was only if you jumped. Only idiots would do that… and possible Uchiha, or that batch of insane Jonin that had come in the generation before Kakashi, they still told the stories of them even now.
Generally in the vein of "don't do this or we will shove a kunai down your appropriate bodily orifice for maximum pain," but they still told the stories.
Looking at Rin rather expertly pulling out Obito's eyeball, Kakashi nodded, at the very least it would mean having his own eye pulled out would be less painful. That was sort of what one expected when they had their eyes pulled out after all (by a professional that is, non-professional eye pulling would no doubt hurt quite a bit).
Dropping it into a sterilization jar, she turned to Kakashi and motioned for him to put his head closer.
Joy.
As her fingers closed in on his eye, her other hand holding his eyelids open to prevent the instinctive closing of them in the face of steadily growing giant appendages making their way to them, Kakashi tried very hard not to squirm. He was a Jonin but some things they couldn't beat out of you so easily, one of them being tentacles in the eyeballs which Rin's fingers looked like this close up.
And her nails. What the fuck! Didn't she clean under them? Oh god was that last night's dinner? How did that get in there? She had chopsticks for fucks sake.
Ugh.
And then her fingers with their little chakra blades cut his optical nerves and stopped the bleeding and he no longer had proper depth perception.
Joy.
That was going to take some training to solve now that he thought about it.
From there Rin then shoved the Sharingan into his eye socket and… did this count as a skullfucking(?) he considered. It was having someone else's body part in his eye socket… that counted right?
Dammit Obito.
This did not count as a win.
Kakashi vowed to make that very clear to Obito before he decided that counted as his single win against Kakashi.
But now, he had things to do, like watching as Rin shoved his old eye into Obito's eye socket. Actually, now that he thought about it, didn't that count as a draw then? Mutual skullfucking?
That actually might, Kakashi was feeling remarkably better about the entire situation now that it had been cleared up to his satisfaction.
Sure it was a draw but that was infinitely better than a loss.
Nodding to the two of them… and the patiently waiting Medic-nin, Kakashi got moving, climbing his way up the stairs that Obito had seen fit to fall down not a few minutes earlier.
Feet flashing, he was all the way up, and a small hope sent him over the gap that Obito had fell from. Up on top, he took a moment to appreciate just what he was seeing before continuing his run, making sure he got to the target location before it was too late.
There were thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and women were arrayed in a massive formation that covered the entire front half of the wall, as far as the eye could see. Which was pretty far now considering that he had a Sharingan and he better cover it because that was too much damned information that was streaming in.
Heh. Masks.
What would he do without one? Dark dark dark, yes. Suck that Sharingan.
Even now they defenders were throwing spears, crossbows, siege weapons and the like at the advancing enemy forces, after nearly a month of constant fighting they were finally at a position where they might be able to halt the momentum of the advancing creatures. Grinding them down slowly over time had finally paid off.
Only it didn't look like it that was for sure, as a vast swathe of the defenders were taken out by a meteor that rolled in from the sky. The enemy was raining hell on them, their own weapons were incapable… but their own Jutsu was more than up to snuff when it came to the task of trying to kill the humans.
No matter, he had a mission to do and he could keep an eye on the sky as he did so.
Kakashi made his way down the line, sprinting for several kilometers before he finally reached the designated target area.
A bridge.
It was a big one, a big and ugly one, made so by the heavy scarring on its surface. The last of the defenders had finally retreated from their defensive positions at the previous wall and now it needed to be destroyed before the enemy took it over and used it as a beachhead into the defences.
Kakashi ran down the wall, his back holding the massive basket that was filled with explosive clay, his scrolls containing many more. He would leap his way over the middle, unfurl the scroll, rain the baskets down… and then blow them all to hell.
Hopefully, he wouldn't also fall into the Trench as well, that would be… very embarrassing.
Spin, throw.
BOOOOOOOOOOM
And he was back over.
Another mission accomplished.
Nice!
Now to make sure Obito wasn't abducted by some creepy pervert because who didn't want an Uchiha of their own?