"Hey, you…" the younger hunter with a punkish look to him addressed Meiko, earning a wayward glance from the redhead in his direction. "You are opposed to that stinky old fart, let's work together and make him gone."
"Huh? No way, look at all the cool tech all over him. I wanna see what it can do!" Meiko objected, turning to Kawaki with passionate expression.
"Garo may as well be wearing a garbage bucket on his head, compared to the rest of Kara. Don't waste your time on him." The young man objected, looking frustrated with Meiko's refusal to eliminate his own comrade alongside him.
"You fucking mongrel!" Garo swung both of his clawed mechanized arms behind him and charged at the pair, Meiko bit her lip as she examined every tiniest bit of her opponent's tech, forcing the bratty hunter to interfere on her behalf and knock her opponent aside for her or to push her away from hits that'd have blown her away. "If only you weren't meant to be the leader's vessel…"
The young man threw a pair of spinning kicks at Garo's direction that clanged at his staunch blocks. Garo's heavy feet dug deep into the basis of the Amaguriama shop, demolishing the wooden tiles underneath and digging all the way to the foundation as he delivered an uppercut that shot the boy through the roof. The imposing cyborg veteran prepared to vault after the brat but then felt a disproportionate boost of weight around his left arm.
Upon visual inspection, the man's beady eyes widened when he saw Meiko wrapped around his arm like a monkey, pulling on metal plates and examining the craftsmanship that she exposed.
"Yo, you wouldn't mind if I yoinked this, right?" Meiko smirked, looking a bit abashed due to the fact she was noticed.
"Of all the irritating, little…" Garo flexed his left arm, forcing jets of fire to vent through a couple of openings and force Meiko to leap off, patting her thigh that had caught fire. With teary eyes, Meiko blew at her leg and rubbed it to take the tiny blaze out.
"I'm taking it outside, you know!" Naruto declared, smacking his own chest with the bottom of his fist to cement that promise.
"Don't you even think about it!" Kiyomi objected, "We keep the fight here and contained before more of them join in."
"But Meiko's just getting thrown around 'cause she refuses to fight seriously, she's endangering that other kid too, you know…" Naruto turned back to argue.
While the remaining pair of Team Hokage argued about how they should approach this, a pair of supersized arms slammed through the walls of the sweets and tea shop to crush Garo in between them. Kiyomi had seen similar techniques before, her first instinct was to suspect that a genin of the Akimichi clan came to help but then she noticed a peculiar detail – the massive hands were comprised of hundreds of slamming hands, almost as if they were multiplied and cultivated on a single body.
"No!" Meiko objected, reaching out at the epicenter of the slam with her quaking hand, distressed at the demise of her new, mechanized passion.
"M… Most impressive…" a husky declaration came from in between the two slamming arms while the arms parted, shaking as they struggled against Garo's own mechanical might. "This universe… It's like I don't even need my mechanical enhancements anymore…"
With a decisive, metallic shriek, Garo's arms had pushed the two clashing arms open and forced them to collapse into lifeless husks and draw back to their source. A huffing boy walked in through one of the holes he had created with a streak of blood running down the left side of his face. It was the same "vessel" boy whom the man had flung out before.
"He's injured from such a puny attack, you know?" Naruto turned his head in bemusement, his curiosity over the supposed weakness of these hunters overpowered his need to win the petty quarrel with Kiyomi.
"You dumbass, ninja bimbo, I'm asking you to help me murder the shit out of this geezer so that I don't have to go back with him, back to that Hell!" the punk growled while huffing, his exposed arms that had torn out of his clothes to accomplish the feat they have accomplished earlier appeared strangely layered and were of darker color compared to the pale color of his face.
"Heh, you should know better than to ask her for help, vessel. Then again, maybe you shouldn't… After all, how would you know that a ninja only moves their finger for money if you've never left the lab?" Garo mocked the boy while raising his right hand and cocking it with his left.
Meiko chuckled into her hand. Even Garo halted his attack temporarily to stare at the redhead kunoichi in disbelief.
"What's so fucking funny!?" the younger hunter broke out into an outrage, "I'm spillin' the contents of my heart out in the open here!"
"Utsuwa* sounds like a girl's name…" Meiko found it much harder to contain her chuckles while she had to talk, letting out a few rather undignified and unintelligible noises alongside her explanation of what she found so funny.
"Wh-What the fuck!?" the boy whited out in a mixture of both aggression and disbelief. "That's not my name, I'm Kawaki!"
"If you asked me, naming something that's just a vessel to someone far greater than himself is pointless, for that reason, you shall only be known as a vessel!" Garo gave Kawaki a scolding glare as he channeled another blazing blast in his mechanical arm.
"Hmph… I do see what Meiko sees in those…" Kiyomi had to admit. "They do seem similar to her own Reactor Gauntlets, perhaps she could upgrade them if she had those arms of his with her…"
Kiyomi turned to Naruto because the young man beside her had been uncharacteristically quiet, he didn't even argue that the pair would attack one or both of the hunters but now Naruto just stood hunched over with his head down before looking up with an expression that showed his grit teeth and furious eyes on full display. Kiyomi had never seen Naruto this angry before without his eyes turning red and his entire body adopting wild features but he seemed to be much more in control of himself at the moment.
"You take that back, you know!" Naruto growled out at the cybernetically enhanced old man.
"What's that? Does another brat want to get some? Fine, I can evaporate you first, if you'd like!" Garo turned his gauntlet but then realized that Naruto was right up in his face. Panicking due to the unnatural speed of his opponent, Garo stumbled back but then raised his arm up and fired anyway. Naruto slid back from the blast zone, smoking and smoldering but mostly unharmed and raised his stare back up at his opponent.
"Nobody's just a thing for someone else to use. Everyone can be a person that they choose to be, don't you dare talk about anybody like they're just a toy of somebody else!" Naruto growled through the smoke and fading flames. He darted out of his predicament, leaving a long, tracing trail of smoke behind him as he winded up a punch and delivered it right to Garo's jaw before the cyborg could even put his hands up to defend himself.
"A puppet is a puppet. As far as I'm concerned, a vessel is just a suit of armor that our leader will wear." Garo spread his arms out, while his right cheek donned a nasty bruise, Kiyomi noted how little balance the man had lost after being punched by someone like Naruto who was going through a raised emotional state in which he was in at the moment.
"Shut up!" Naruto cut the lingering atmosphere into two with his demand. "Nobody is someone else's toy, not Kawaki, not Sasuke!"
"So that's what it's all about…" Kiyomi mumbled to herself, realizing what in that bullshit Garo was spouting drove Naruto into such a frenzy.
"Sorry, Kiyomi, I will absolutely kick this guy's ass and it might just get messy, you know!" Naruto glanced back at the Yamanaka who just sighed and shrugged. If even more hunters come rushing, at least the odds that they would be cybernetically enhanced Meiko's wet dreams would be lower than ever before.
"So it's three against one then? Interesting… Come at me, trash, I'll dispose of all of you and then carry the vessel back to Kara on my shoulders…" Garo tuned up his arm again and took a lowered fighting stance, letting his right arm hang down with all of its metallic weight while his right one bent over his face to block any follow-up rush-attacks from Naruto.
"If anybody's killing this old fucktard, it's me!" Kawaki yelled out and charged at Garo. Despite his fighting stance being little more than just grunts and roars of an enraged animal, there was a semblance of a method to his close-range attacks, Kiyomi had to note. Garo's mechanical claws locked around Kawaki's wrists, flipping him over the cyborg's shoulder and slamming him through a table. A mechanical wind-up suggested that the Kara hunter would attempt this same manner of attack again.
Instead of another gasp of triumph, a husky grunt of pain left Garo's voicebox as Meiko driving her buckler into his back and driving the cyborg to his knees knocked the sense out of the mechanical veteran temporarily. With Garo having lost his balance, Naruto charged in with taijutsu strikes. Garo's Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlets fired off their claws as chains of interconnected, metallic segments stuck together by an odd, bio-organic weave. The chains wrapped around Naruto, giving him a viable distraction to worry about instead of punching Garo's face at that moment.
Grabbing a pair of dislodged table legs, Kawaki charged at the old man, throwing them with considerable skill, enough for Kiyomi to consider that he had training in weapon-fighting, likely to temper his body to be a more suitable vessel for whoever has decided to reside in the boy's body. Despite outmaneuvering Garo at every point and turn, Kawaki's table-leg flurry reached limited to no success due to the fact that his hits just brushed off of the cybernetic veteran.
Garo let the claws of his other Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlet to wrap around Kawaki and heat up momentarily, enveloping the boy in smoke in seconds while he shook and twitched from something resembling an electric shock violently jerking all traces of life out of him. Naturally, Garo must have been controlling himself as he did need Kawaki as a vessel still.
"Yoink!" Meiko let out the most underwhelming battle cry ever as her two-edged sword cleaved Kawaki's bindings clean off, forcing the damaged Type-5 gauntlet to spit out sparks like wild. Garo stumbled back, staring at the stumps that were once the proud claws of his gauntlet.
"H-How… Did you…" he muttered.
"You idiot, you didn't think this is all of our power, do you?" Meiko taunted the man with a sheepish smile as she patted her own shoulder with the blunt side of her sword. "We're trying to stay low-profile here, plus, your tech is impressive enough for me to want to disassemble you piece by piece instead of just cutting you up."
"Don't you joke around with me, as if you could even do that!" Garo objected. Despite his high and mighty act, this was clearly the denial stage of defeat taking over.
"Sure I can, didn't you see me go earlier?" Meiko smirked as her blade lit up with weak, blue light, tipping Garo off to the chakra cloak that she used.
"L-Look… I… We really don't need to fight each other. All I need from this place is to return with the vessel. That's why we were here, to begin with… So that this dumb brat can calm down…" Garo began bargaining. It should have come at some point. May as well have been the point when he noticed that Meiko could have sliced him up like a sausage using a power he had no defense against.
"Naruto, destroy his other arm. Meiko only needs one anyway." Kiyomi yelled out.
"Hey, I like her…" Kawaki looked back from a kneeling position. "Why isn't she fighting with us?"
"Because this whole visit is stupid and I want nothing to do with it. My job is to guide my team through this stage and I'm going to do it and I'm not going to do it picking meaningless battles against walking lumps of tin." Kiyomi groaned.
"Hey, you're just gonna let her bark orders at you?" Kawaki turned to Naruto who just closed his eyes and smirked. Before the boy could even register, Naruto had weaved a hand seal and created a Shadow Clone right behind him that assisted him in molding chakra.
"I've got no choice, you know… I sorta pissed her off by going rogue earlier… May as well make it up with this," Naruto declared while rushing at Garo with a Rasengan storming in spherical form, perfectly contained inside Naruto's hand.
Garo raised his arm up, letting out another powerful jet of flames that was considerable enough to erect an incinerating wall of flames in front of him. This time the Fire Release attacks didn't just break the building that the group was in but set it ablaze, decimating the sweets scattered all over the floor and dooming the whole shop for an infernal blaze. Despite that, Naruto pushed through the wall of flames and drove his spiraling sphere right into the middle of Garo's mechanical arm, letting the unleashed storm contained within tear to shreds the mechanical claws and detonate the Fire Release spreading source within the Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlet.
With a shocked expression and face splashed with blood as well as something black and sticky coming out of the destroyed mechanical parts that Naruto tore through, Garo collapsed on the floor. He had tried picking himself back up but he was used to accomplishing that using his arms of which he now had only one, or rather, half of it since Meiko did clip his claws some.
"I… I was wrong… I was wrong to treat the ves… I mean Kawaki as just a leader's doll… I see that now… I'm sorry!" Garo began groveling in front of Naruto's feet while the blond genin himself turned away in disinterest.
"Don't apologize to me, you know… Your life isn't in my hands…" Naruto turned back at Garo only briefly while Garo realized that of the three people he took on at once there was just one who hadn't claimed his pound of flesh just yet. Using his busted up gauntlet, Garo peeled his pathetic face off the ground and prepared to defend himself against Kawaki.
"Ves… Kawaki… You're a good boy, I know that, remember when you socked me and took my jaw right off…" Garo faked a peal of revolting laughter, sounding even less genuine that it truly was due to the fact it was voiced by the mechanical voice of the voicebox he donned where Kawaki had "taken off" his jaw. "You apologized to me back then, remember? You did… You're a nice boy, there's no need to…"
Garo froze and stopped speaking, realizing he could no longer move his arm. He turned with a face frozen in panic only to notice Meiko's ecstatic grin holding his remaining Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlet. While Meiko usually smiled sheepishly or even like a little monkey, this time her smirk appeared almost creepy due to the implications of what she was about to do.
"Yoink…" she muttered while pulling the Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlet, or what remained of it, right off. No blood came out from where the prosthetic was removed, revealing a stump that had long since been there as Garo's face was decorated with scars far older than the ones littering his exposed and torn up body at the moment.
"I may have given a rat's ass about what happened to you Garo. That is if you didn't tick me off enough to show my tats… You know how difficult I find myself to control once they come out, don't you?" Kawaki declared while staring at the defeated old man with cold eyes. True to his words, markings of mysterious nature covered his body as he approached Garo. A shockwave of solid sound tore the cloth off of Garo's voicebox, revealing a last-ditch effort weapon meant for just these kinds of cases but Kawaki walked right through it and grabbed a tight hold of Garo's body.
A sphere of white rose in the Amaguriama district. A circle of destruction itself that left nothing but ashes in its wake as even rubble it had raised turned to its simplest form before the wind scattered it away. Kawaki laid on his knees in front of what seemed like absolutely nothing where once was a man too arrogant and angry for his own good. Naruto, Meiko, and Kiyomi uncovered themselves, staring at Kawaki spitting in the face of their plan to maintain a low profile and the devastation that they'd caused.
"Damn… He's lucky I managed to seal the Type-5 Shinobi Gauntlet away in time…" Meiko sighed.
"Tsk… He didn't have to do it, Garo was already beaten, you know…" Naruto grumbled while staring at Kawaki who was slumped over on his knees in a state in between consciousness and the alternative.
"I can understand laying waste to that cyber-bastard but why the hell did he have to be this loud?" Kiyomi smacked her face in frustration and turned to bolt to the nearest cover that may as well have been three or four blocks away. "We'll be lucky to reach cover without running into anyone now!"
"We can't just leave him here though…" Meiko turned to Kawaki.
"You've got to be kidding me…" Kiyomi sighed. "There's no time for me to tell you how wrong you are, you're carrying him! You two are dango-buddies after all."
"I'll do it, you know…" Naruto made a handful of clones that picked Kawaki up. "Let's just move now!"
Hoping that they wouldn't run into the party of hunters that were the first to respond to this devastating calling card, begging for some action and challenging all that had a functional pair of eyes, Team Hokage and extra baggage took off toward the southern side of the crater Kawaki had just created.
Author's Note: To those who didn't get it, Meiko thought that Kawaki's name was "Utsuwa", the word meaning "vessel" by which the Kara refer to Kawaki in the Boruto manga. That was why she made that remark.