Mana moved around the area with a swift foot, pressing her palm to each of the Allied Ninja and dispelling the illusion affecting their perception of the environment at once. While she did so, Junichi watched her back just in case the cackling hag hiding in the mist decided to try and get a pound of Mana's flesh. He did not need to intervene as the woman did not allow herself to get psyched out and did not show her hand just yet.
"You were supposed to wander in circles for hours. Naughty, naughty…" the hag taunted the Allied Ninja from within the mist. Normally it would take Mana no time at all to sniff her out even inside mist comprised of chakra entirely. The chakra of a decent ninja would have stood out like a street light in an evening haze. However, with the Ten-Tails' residual chakra all around her – she was as good as blind in terms of chakra sensory.
"Too bad for you, we've decided to avoid shady inns," Junichi replied to the shapeless voice in the mist. "Your attempt to lure us inside is misguided."
"That's just rocking, Mana!" Shitaka gave the magician an energetic thumb up when she dispelled the illusion shrouding him in fake and hazy visions. "Thanks!"
Sweat was breaking through her forehead and intense pressure formed around Mana's eyes. At the time it didn't seem like that bad of an idea to squeeze a quick nap in and her hands felt intensely heavy. The young woman nodded with a pale face, her long hair fell over her face due to a sloppy motion of her head that prompted a swat of the unruly strands off of obstructing her view.
"I'll just have to trust you guys now," Mana admitted that she was too exhausted to keep fighting alongside them with a nod of her head.
"Oh, your words wound us, magician girl, it's not as if to ensure your safe arrival to the HQ is our mission or anything…" Cailar pressed the back of his hand to his face, making a jest at Mana's expense.
Mollay nodded his head in Mana's direction. It was his own way of expressing gratitude while the ninja prepared themselves to eliminate the enemy. They weren't sure how many opponents there were. So far only one old lady had spoken up from the mist but mists were notorious for their ability to hide all sorts of things. It would have been a very ninja thing to do for some deceitful lowlife to be hiding and keeping their presence away from recognition in there while he let the old woman spin a web of deceit around the Allied Ninja.
"Oh? And for how long can you wander around in circles, eventually running into my lovely little manor before you come running back to auntie Rokane? An hour? Three hours? Seven? A day?" the old hag cackled inside the mist. She spoke with assurance, suggesting that this was not her first time trapping people into such a trap. The confidence in her voice let it be known that eventually, all lost souls ended up in her nightmare house.
"I'm rather low on kunai at the moment, boss," Cailar looked at Junichi's side. "I'm afraid I'll have to improvise to hook and reel this fish in,"
"Be careful. This woman is the user of this mist, meaning she's accustomed to fighting inside it whereas we only encounter such a tactic occasionally," Junichi warned his comrade.
"Ugh… Truly it is our final day if our well-being is of your concern…" Cailar jabbed in Junichi's direction before raising his hands up and revealing flashy teeth made of steel attached to metal gadgets that had steel wire wrapped around them. The Allied Ninja gave his comrades a wayward glance before leaping off of the branch and swinging his metal yo-yos around, using the steel wires on them to make them buzz and shred through the woods that came in their way.
Despite having little to no vision of his opponent, the wide-reaching range of Cailar's attack would have made it difficult to avoid it altogether and with the old woman being quite talkative he had a vague clue as to where it was best to position the beginning of his yo-yo rush. Trees came tumbling down, bleeding splinters and wood chips in all directions and throwing shrapnel of broken branches in their downward trajectory.
"Close, but no cigar…" the old woman declared. Her hesitation to engage the enemy and savor their hopelessness seemed to lull the Allied Ninja into a false sense of security. Cailar gasped in surprise when something tight wrapped around his abdomen followed by thin yet muscular, shriveled hands restraining his upper body as the smell of rotten flesh and blood lingered by his face.
Something wicked his way came and prepared to take a chunk out of the throat of the vibrant and flippant Allied Ninja's throat but the wayward glance he threw in his comrades' direction before attacking was not for naught. The old woman croaked in pain when a boulder of sharpened edges blasted her in the back and sent her hissing and tumbling down into the mist while Cailar used steel wire to swing over the branch he just stood on and returned back to his position.
"Freaky old hag…" Cailar sighed in relief that his head remained intact. "Did you guys see those teeth? Like she's like a decrepit angler fish that one…"
"Her anatomy is certainly inhuman. Most ninja would be broken and willing to flee a battlefield after taking a hit like that directly to their spine, this woman, however… I can still feel her foul stench around. It reeks of blood and corpses…" it was rare for Mollay to express fear this way but that was very much what he was doing at the moment.
Mana found herself looking around frantically and scolded herself for this primal surrender to fear. She forced her stiff and frozen hand down from covering her own throat and closer to her hip, letting her middle and index finger twitch closer to the spring mechanism inside her sleeve that would let her blow something nasty in the woman's jaw if she ever threatened her directly. Such a possibility would have been unlikely as the Allied Ninja positioned themselves in a circle around her and it would take a madwoman to charge through skilled ninja, completely ignoring their presence like that. That was, after all, what lead to the hag getting a sharp-edged boulder slammed into her back in the first place.
"I know that voice…" Mana muttered. "That grey hair, that pattern of movement and that hunger for human flesh. She was in the captive's memories. She's with the Nine Tales gang too…"
"Those guys just don't give up, do they?" Junichi grunted, punching an open palm and leaning down on his branch. He positioned his palm on the branch for balance before charging onward in an attempt to lure his opponent out. If the woman would latch onto him next, one of the Allied Ninja would get another shot at her.
"Give me a break, at this pace we'll kill all nine of them before we get to the border…" Cailar sighed. "Do you know much of her abilities, Mana?"
"Not really, even genjutsu is a new revelation to me. I only saw her bite through a clone's throat with those teeth of hers. She walked in crutches in that memory but she was deceitfully fast, throwing her body around like a fish jumping out of the water almost…" Mana tried to describe the nightmarish sights of the Nine Tales gang meeting she got the chance to visit inside of the captive's mind.
A stick hurled through the air, slamming against a clinging metallic object and deflected it with a noisy clang. The sounds of rattling chains preceded the swift withdrawal of the unorthodox tool for murder that the impaired rogue ninja used against her enemy. It looked like a piece of stone. The stone hung as the end of a long and thick chain and had rings hammered through it. Hanging from the rings was a handful of hooked blades that appeared to be easily capable of hooking and ripping human flesh off of the bone without much effort.
"Are you sure this is worth it?" Mana yelled out into the thickness of the fog. "To waste the head of the leader for a bounty, just let it go!"
"Leader? Girlie, you think I'm the leader of the gang?" the voice replied from deep within the fog. "You might have probed one of our minds but it appears you're just oblivious to our entire operation. That innocence, that fear you irradiate… Makes my mouth water!"
Mana couldn't sense it but she somehow knew that the woman would pounce at her at once, she did so from the front, utilizing the opening where Junichi moved away to try and lure her out. It was a reckless charge, she still had Cailar to deal with on her right and Mollay standing from Mana's own right. The magician could trace the bloodthirsty hag charging from in front of her but her body felt like a chunk of lead and just wouldn't move.
The hag gasped and threw her hands about as her throat became stuck in Mollay's grasp. The Allied Ninja moved in front of Mana and scooped the reckless murderer right out of the thin air, choking her out over his head. Indeed the old hag appeared to be senseless in her lower body as any futile motions she performed with her lower body came from the tensing of her upper body. She smacked her weightless legs at the enemy like a wet towel. Her unique and macabre devices of murder hung from her shoulders and clanged down onto the ground. She must have used them as hooks to move around with instead of her crutches while in combat.
"Become stone, abominable witch of the woods," Mollay cursed at the struggling woman as her most dangerous asset – her teeth became useless once her throat was restrained. Before the gleam from Mollay's hand could flash up and his Bloodline Selection ability could initiate, however, the chain-linked hooks belonging to auntie Rokane flung up the tree that Mollay stood on and pierced through his feet, pinning the thick Allied Ninja down to the ground and shocking him with tremendous pain.
"I like you… You're fat. I like 'em dripping with fat as they simmer," the woman hissed while blowing hot cinders in a cloud of ash she pulled out from sash in her pocket once Mollay's grip loosened just a tad bit. Mollay cried out in pain and was forced to unhand the slippery woman who once against slithered into the cover of fog with a mad cackle. The chubby Allied Ninja worked on wiping the ash and red-hot cinders from his watery and red eyes.
"By sending me here, Vernos is telling you that he's letting you go, girlie…" auntie Rokane laughed out from the cover of the haze. "Because you see… I have a 0% bounty capture rate."
"I'm not sure that's something we were meant to know…" Cailar observed.
"No, you don't get it, I never cash in a bounty because there is nothing left of their body once I'm through with them. Nothing at all to cash in…" the hag hissed from the mist. "You see, I eat them all up!"
Mollay cursed in pain once Rokane's hooked tool for disembowelment and flesh carving unhooked from his foot and released him from his torment, clinging back into the haze. Shitaka once again threw a branch that he had dislodged from the tree he stood on as his supply of miscellaneous chemicals was beginning to run thin. Using the direction where the grisly weapon slithered off to, the ninja chemist had thought that he'd nail the enemy but the branch just swung off into the brushes and appeared to hit nothing in particular.
"Are any of you Wind Release users?" Mana turned for the bunch of Allied Ninja. If one of them had the ability to use a Wind Release jutsu that was stronger than the rank of the mist covering the area, they should have been able to blow it away, no matter if they hit auntie Rokane or not.
"Fire and Lightning Release…" Junichi admitted, looking a tad ashamed.
"Just Lightning Release, sadly…" Cailar sighed.
"Wind ain't rocking at all! I got that Fire Release on lock though!" Shitaka rocked out. At least the prospect of being simmered and eaten in a stew did nothing to affect his rebellious and energetic mood.
"Yes, my Transmogrification Release is comprised of three elemental natures, Wind Release, Lightning Release, and Earth Release," Mollay nodded his head, speaking through a great deal of pain. Mana didn't like to rely on a ninja injured as much as Mollay was but that was their only hope of moving ahead in this battle. "That is a good idea, I'll try it at once…" the Allied Ninja nodded in acknowledgment as he struggled against the crippling pain of his shattered and skewered foot.
"Come to auntie Rokane!" an improvised paw of hooked blades shot out in Mollay's direction but bounced off of seemingly thin air. The irritated cannibal hissed from inside the safety of the fog, vexed by the fact that Mollay still worked on his hand seals at a turtle's pace, compared to his prime combat shape.
"You moronic gorgon, do you think my yo-yos were just to try and blindly cut you in the obscurity of your mist?" Cailar mocked his opponent, dashing across the distance between him and Mollay to come in to his ally's support. "I've used them to swing around the battlefield and cover it in steel wire. You've shot yourself in the foot by obscuring the view and now you can't see much of it. You should be more careful, your wide-reaching flesh renders might get entangled in that wire for good, leaving you your useless, freaky, crippled self at our mercy."
"You fucking popinjay, I'll be nibbling on your bones for dinner!" the hag screamed out in absolute fury, losing all traces of cool and restraint. Tempting her fate, she charged through, forcing her way through the fog and rushing at all of the Allied Ninja at once. She retracted her chained weaponry and held them in her hands so that she reduced the possibility of them getting obstructed in steel wire to a minimum and chose to role her dice.
"Croak for me some more," Cailar smirked as he sent a toothed yo-yo spinning right in the old woman's face, hitting a potential hole in his wire through which the woman might have charged through if she got lucky and hitting the nail dead on the head. "Your wrath gives me the shivers, hag. I'm just that kind of emotionally draining guy, you see…"
"Wind Style: Passing Typhoon!" Mollay yelled out, blowing a great amount of air out from his inflated chest and forming a gust of wind which blew away the mist with such efficiency that it almost seemed like the jutsu was created specifically for that purpose alone.
Auntie Rokane hissed at the Allied Ninja as if her flesh would have been scolded by exposure to their eyes. She let her chained renders fall to her feet as the bloodthirsty hag appeared to be too lost in her own cravings for the flesh to be able to assess the risk of engaging the enemy with these odds in mind. She sent one of the two hooked stones toward the nearby tree and zipped her impaired body to the upper levels of elevation, pulling the weapon out and then swinging the pair of them again. With Cailar's steel wire traps now in full view, Rokane could better position her swings without much worry of them being entrapped.
The woman gasped in shock as a glass jar smacked at her face and spilled white, milky fluid all over her shriveled and twisted face. She hissed as the liquid blinded her and bellowed in pain as she plummeted back down, flopping and hitting a bunch of branches but in her painful struggle against the liquid's irritation she writhed off of the branches that stopped her fall and continued to tumble down.
"What was that? Acid?" Mana wondered as it looked painful.
"A chemical I use for washing my leather clothes. My own concoction, it ain't corrosive but it sure as hell packs a rocking itch for scratching, I'd say. I don't carry acid in glass jars, what if it busts in my pocket? That's just begging for trouble…" Shitaka shrugged, caressing his throwing hand with the care that wouldn't have made it surprising if he went ahead and started kissing the thing soon enough.
Mollay raised his hands up but winced in pain over his bleeding and busted open foot. Junichi pressed his hand against his ally's shoulder and relieved him of the duty of following up Shitaka's attack. Having taken the task up on himself, the veteran plunged down and began slowly trailing the crawling and bellowing cannibal as she continued to scream in pain from the blinding chemical that made her scratch her own skin off and the aching ribs that she busted from the fall.
Junichi froze in fear when he saw the old hag smile with a crooked smirk, combined with her bleeding eyes that she almost carved out herself it made for quite a macabre sight. Realizing that the woman had him in her own trap, Junichi turned behind him but it was too late. Rokane's renders dug and hooked deep into his calves, locking onto the veteran's flesh and muscle just as they were intended to. The woman charged blindly at the direction she heard the grunt from and dug her teeth into Junichi's knee, forcing the veteran to bellow in a wild roar that Mana wouldn't have imagined a man being capable of producing.
Despite the knee cap producing some fearsome resistance to being nibbled on, the shifty cannibal persisted and continued her attempts to crumble the bone with her teeth which was the source for Junichi's agony. She screamed out as a warning to Mollay who forced himself up in an attempt to come to his leader's aid.
"Don't you come a step closer, or I'll have my chains rip the muscle right out of your friend's leg. I doubt he'll be able to walk if I do that. He'll then know the life that I've lived, the disappointment in my own body that I've faced in a world of ninja. I doubt that he'll have an ounce of my will to go on," Rokane hissed at the troubled Allied Ninja up above. The woman recalled the free chain back to her hand in preparation to block any defensive strikes that Junichi might have tried pulling on her in an attempt to fight her off.
"And you… If you try any of your macho roughhousing on me, you might force me to tear something I don't mean to tear out just yet. My hooks are built to hold onto flesh and rip it out but if you force them out wrong – you'll bleed out in seconds so I suggest you just accept your fate as either a cripple of my afternoon snack!" Rokane chuckled, gazing up at where she thought Junichi was with a swollen and shriveled face that bled from her eyes and a strong jaw filled with inhuman teeth that chomped on plenty of human flesh in their heyday.