Swiping with his primal, bony hammers that had formed over his forearms and his hands, Rukan lashed at little Tomi. The young lady seethed with silent rage as she rolled aside, dragging her hand across one of the two kunai-shaped, sharpened stone knives, and left a smear on the grass and dirt below her. The Allied Ninja recruit flung the stone knife at the object of her hatred, who only deflected it with a swipe of his ax-tail.
Hitting him with the knife was not what Tomi was looking to accomplish here. It was to buy herself a few moments to weave her hand seals and place her cut open hand onto the ground again to call forth her contract. An armored ground-crawler with a good pair of dozens of sharp limbs emerged from the smoke with a tail matching that which Rukan donned.
The scorpion's tail rammed the ground where Rukan was standing, knocking the prowling mercenary on his back as the metallic tail extended, spreading a dreadful clanging noise as the separate chunks of its tough as steel armor rubbed against each other as well against the dirt it worked to borrow through. With his enemy having fallen down, the many-legged, giant scorpion crawler began scurrying with a creepy tatter of its many limbs to position itself over the enemy of his summoner.
"Don't get too excited, Sasoseki, the ninja scorpions aren't the only ones that this man is mocking," little Tomi pressed her hand against the top of the giant scorpion's frontal armor piece making the upward-pointed eyes blink a few times. As the creature blinked, armored layers moved over its eyes and back like a biological shield that it could raise and lower when needed. Every time the armored eyelid close, it clicked with a metallic rattle.
Rubbing her bleeding hand across the scorpion's upper shell, Tomi summoned again. Revealing a bipedal, feline warrior with streaming, spiky hair of glistening mahogany shade that looked almost like a showy headpiece of feathers to be inside the cloud of smoke. The warrior let out an irritated growl and clanged two scimitars that it clenched in its hands as it began looking for its opponent.
The cheetah-warrior leaped and thrust its blades at the prone mercenary, swinging its swords that, while on the shorter side, looked like they could chop a man up to a salad sum of its limbs. Crawling like a frightened insect, the transformed mercenary fled underneath the armored scorpion himself. Because of how close its belly was to the ground, Rukan must have thought that the ninja cheetah would not have followed him down under.
He was right, in a manner of speaking. He did not find ninja cheetahs underneath that ninja scorpion though, if his blood-curdling scream was of any sign, he found a death more horrible than the one he sought to escape from. Tomi jumped off of the scorpion partner of hers and pat its front while rubbing the chin of the ninja cheetah with the other hand. Both of her partners seemed to enjoy it with the ninja cheetah, even leaning down for a more efficient scratch.
"Thank you, Sasoseki, Hyota. Let's play after this mission is over, okay?" Tomi's voice softened and the ire that she once blazed with disappeared from her soft and childish gaze that only became more serious and bitterer than anyone her age had a reason to be when she turned back at her peers.
"Tomi-chan can be seriously scary sometimes. I'm glad I didn't insist on her giving me food now…" Damisan seemed to shake underneath the rugged cloak of his and rub his scarred skin from frightful itches that plagued him after imagining just what it was that Rukan found underneath that scorpion's belly.
"And you know all of their names?" Endo leaned his head to the side, raising an eyebrow as he inquired this of little Tomi.
"Of course, they're not my tools, they're my friends. Don't you know the names of everyone dear to you?" Tomi replied, missing any of the childlike wonder that she had when talking to her partners.
"I have no need. Names mask that which people truly are. I call them how I see them–a scoundrel, a witch, a freak and…" Endo listed, pointing to Shige with the first descriptor, implying Mana with the second before pointing to Damisan and stopping at Tomi. It seemed like the samurai apprentice struggled to find a suitable way to describe the girl before he settled on one in a state of enlightenment. "A brat."
"You might need to figure our new descriptors soon enough," Shige-H nodded her head, acknowledging the hard work that her team put in to defeat the group of mercenaries attacking them before turning her head to Skaven who just ran his hand through his hair. The Stars had caught him in a moment of longing as he stared on ahead into the thick shade of the forest, as if seeing his acquaintances off into the afterlife and lamenting their passing.
"It sounded to me like you knew where their ringleader was, Skaven," Shitaka landed behind the small circle that the Stars had formed.
"Yes. His hideout was our original destination, before these guys attacked us," Skaven nodded. "He has something to do with the Guru Ayushi tissue black market dealings. I've no doubt about it that something as dire as the transformations that those mercenaries had undergone could only be possible with the help of experimentation of Ayushi cells."
"Let me patch you up some, Endo," Shige-H approached the tattered and gleaming with red, streaking shiners sword fighter, who turned his nose up and to the right. He did not outright decline the woman's help, however, and thus with a brief shine of the Mystical Palm jutsu she closed most of his grievous wounds.
"I only gave you an immediate battlefield treatment. I'll look at your wounds when we're at a safer location and have more time and the tissues we've come here to get," Shige-H said.
"That's just fine. I need a little soreness in my bones to get me going and keep me straight," Endo smirked. This time there was not a trace of lying in the young man's eyes. This was neither a lie to himself nor one for the medical kunoichi.
"Should Shige-H preserve her chakra? How much trouble can we expect from this Ijiki fellow?" Shitaka wondered.
"Your guess is as good as mine. Ijiki isn't much of a brawler himself, he can catch and dissect you while you're unaware and he is undoubtedly a dangerous man, but he thinks himself above petty brawling. With most of his mercenaries unavailable–he'll at the very least be willing to talk it out before trying to kill us," Skaven shrugged.
"You said that there should have been two more mercenaries…" Shige-H recalled.
"Yeah, this group usually fights as five. The fact they're not here gives me the feeling that they're involved in a deal for more Ayushi cells." Skaven replied.
"With how much this Ijiki relies on these cells, we should press him to the wall and squeeze something soft. He'll likely drop us a decent chunk of those cells himself," Endo beamed a malicious smirk. It was an apparent attempt at volunteering to be the one doing the squeezing.
"Hm… So, someone experiments on these men to become animal like?" Tomi leaned down to examine the pudgy, pulsing flesh chunks scattered on the ground that were slowly undergoing unclear chemical processes as if they were attempting to grow the body they were missing back from their measly current form. "Can't we just bring Mana-nee one of those chunks, then?"
"Unlikely. Ijiki is the type to look down on genius of anyone else rather than his own. He wouldn't just use the Guru Ayushi cells in an elementary method, he'd likely genetically engineer them front and backward to where they no longer resemble what they once were. We need a clear sample, not whatever Ijiki did with it." Skaven shook his head and took a leap onto the branch up above, pointing for the rest toward the direction they needed to head toward. The Stars followed without objections.
It wasn't a prolonged trip until the Stars bumped into a forest clearing surrounding an old, abandoned building. One surrounded by a field of fleshy scarecrows. Masses of living, twitching muscle with random organs, eyes, mouths and teeth scattered across them, tied together and made sense of by mere wooden boards to serve as frame. A fundamental skeleton to hold these sorry fleshings in place.
"Now I'm definitely glad I didn't help myself to Tomi-chan's food…" Damisan shoved his metal prosthetics underneath his cylinder to cover up his mouth.
"I thought you said this Ijiki guy was a genius? His medicinal and puppetry skills appear to be no more advanced than those of a self-taught farmer…" Shige-H turned to Skaven with a distraught look. Even the leader of Stars, who acted as the spine of the team, support to draw courage and inspiration from looked disturbed by this field of wood and flesh.
"That's because that's exactly what Ijiki is. Everyone had a life before discovering who they truly want to be in life. Also, I never said that Ijiki was a genius, only that he thinks he is," Skaven sighed. While the shock frozen on his face suggested that this was the first time he saw this field or learned of its existence, Skaven didn't seem like denouncing it outright or questioning it all that hard. Deep down, he knew one should expect to see something like this when Ijiki is in the equation.
A sound of crackling lightning made the already jumpy Stars turn to the right, startled. Endo took a leap from his position, attacking one of the fleshy scarecrows and slicing it up with a twirl of his lightning-cloaked two-bladed weapon.
"Endo…" Shige-H stopped, stuck in between yelling and whispering with the tone of her speech.
"No, this is just fine." Skaven shook his head. "Ijiki would not have given these scarecrows frames if he didn't intend for them to move."
"Rocking, now you're talking my language dude!" Shitaka crossed a pair of devil horns gestures he made with his hands and stuck out his tongue before pulling out a few glass flasks from inside of his coat and flinging them at the field. One of them shattered releasing some pudgy, pink slime that appeared to grow larger from contact with oxygen while the other appeared to be empty, until it shattered and spread a field of a roaring lightning storm as it contacted with the rubbery slime and their interaction burnt the pudgy catalyst up to a crisp.
Skaven's gut feeling revealed itself to have been right when the fleshy scarecrows came to life. Elementary, momentary twitches at first, struggling to move their limbs restrained inside wooden frames and working on pulling their wooden stands out from the ground.
"And, of course, we have to fight them all…" little Tomi sighed, taken aback by this grisly sight of life finding a way where it absolutely should have given up.
"Just stand back, Tomi," Shige-H turned back to her fellow Stars member with a polite smirk as she leaned down and held the little girl's hand. "You've done plenty already, you need to conserve your strength."
"I… I'm not afraid!" Tomi yelled out with almost tearing up eyes. She wasn't the best of liars.
"I'm not saying that you are. I'm saying that we will need you in far worse fights than this. Keep your animal friends safe and let them rest through this one, okay?" Shige-H stood up and took a backwards plunge down before spinning with a rolling lariat as she took a pair of the framed fleshings down.
Almost immediately, Shige-H realized that problem of engaging something like that. It didn't have any clear weaknesses. No brain to shake or bash, no heart to thrust through, its eyes were too many and too random or it had none. Even with the first few hammering strikes, a random mouth opened up and dug into her bicep where there absolutely should not have been a mouth and where the other fleshings hadn't developed a mouth. When Shige-H grunted in pain and lifted the fleshling over her head to rip it up with her bare hands, it was no mouth that bit her. Just an opening with rows of uneven teeth that she slammed her arm into.
Fighting them normally would have been a disaster. It would have demanded too much skill to accomplish flawlessly, too much focus to keep up and too much stupid luck not to fall into a ridiculous blunder like getting whacked by a wooden limb from behind or failing to take into consideration just how tough these living masses of mutated flesh were. Frankly, some of them didn't feel all that tough, it felt like they were rather random in when they decided they had enough whereas some of them withered away and stopped moving from a few good hits and slashes, some of them just refused to end their miserable existence no matter what.
It was only when Shitaka realized that lobbing acid at them and corroding the fleshings faster than they could patch themselves together and grow new tissue with additional mutations sprinkled on top that the field of horrors finally began shrinking down.
"That's a very alarming amount of acid for one man to carry…" Damisan noted when the grassy plane of the forest clearing eroded into gravel from the showering layer of thick, acidic cocktail of molten flesh and acid that had dissolved it. Not being ones to waste needless chakra on augmentation, the Stars alongside Shitaka leaped onto the barks of the trees to avoid needing to augment themselves actively to avoid meeting a similar fate to their dissolving nightmares.
"Hey, I've got pockets with no bottom to 'em, dude." Shitaka opened up his leather coat, revealing sealing tags inside, sticking up on top of pockets of flasks he wanted to have on his body at all times.
"What are the odds that Ijiki hadn't turned himself into some horrible mutant abomination?" Endo cursed, spitting down at the melting mass below. His spit sizzled up a meek trail of vapor.
"Let's go and ask him if he did," Skaven ran his hand across his hair to keep them from obstructing his view as the Stars took a daring leap over the swamp of molten flesh and closer to the entrance to the abandoned building. One like many others scattered across the Fire Country where there were many legitimate and less so institutions and only experience or knowledge could help a wary traveler tell between a welcoming inn and an underground laboratory of a black-market dealer.
"This place is a dump," Endo observed with a mocking sneer. There was more to this statement than Endo's usual hatred of everything. It was subtext that was not lost on anyone within the Stars or Shitaka leading them out in front. Endo was right–for a secret, underground laboratory where Ijiki would have brought all of his expensive spoils and performed his experiments. There was no security other than that abominable field outside and the mercenary gang entertaining themselves in the area.
"If you believe that you have me cornered, ninja, I assure you you have bamboozled yourselves in thinking so. Cultivating a field of scrap to protect me like the one you've encountered takes no time at all," a short and plump man in a lab coat and thick glasses that completely obstructed his eyes turned from the other side of the eerie mixture between a butchery and a laboratory.
"We're not here for you, Ijiki!" Skaven yelled out. "We're under no orders to hurt you or to destroy your operation."
"That has never stopped me before…" Endo closed his eyes, looking proud of this statement.
"Ah, if this isn't Skaven. I've heard that you've ditched the Hellhounds. Hm. I had thought that you would have run off to work for another crew but it seems you've legitimized yourself…" Ijiki seemed to speak with a great deal of enthusiasm and underlying respect at first, but it all spoiled by the end of that sentence. The Stars froze in front of a large lab table with a handful of glass lab tubes containing cultivars with plants and flesh samples.
"Criminal life just wasn't for me. I can't stand watching innocent people getting caught in our dealings and hurt," Skaven replied.
"We could discuss the ethics of both of our sides here for years, boy. You have come here with force and numbers sufficient to make it here and speak to me. Perhaps if you were alone I'd be interested in the meager price, I'd score selling your unremarkable organs, but there's no use in me trying to take on all of you. What is your business here, Allied Ninja?" Ijiki fixed his glasses, looking more like a displeased landlord who found unwanted guests in his apartment rather than a rat of the criminal underbelly with a tail caught underneath someone's boot that was larger than the rat itself.
"Do you have a pure sample of Guru Ayushi's tissue?" Skaven asked straight.
"I do not. It is a material of great expense, demanding all of my side hustles to struggle at their utmost efficiency so I can make do with its outlandish price though it does not stay pure for long when I get my hands on it," Ijiki seemed outraged that Skaven would even imply that he would have such a thing on his hands.
"It's a utopic panacea…" Shige-H muttered. "It's a nibble of flesh that can heal all wounds and cure all sicknesses. I'll leave alone the absolute horror that you shady underbelly types use it for black market dealings and not medicine to help people, but why spoil it with your tampering?"
"Spoil it!?" the mad dealer raised an eyebrow. "I'll have you know that I only improve upon everything I buy. Healing all wounds, all sicknesses, is useless. No gang looks more serious, and no mercenary is more effective being able to heal any injury at the cost of a sample that costs more than an entire settlement. I can work something as useless as that and make it grant people power, I can sell a gang the numbers that they so desperately crave. Why heal a limb when you can have it mutate into something way better?"
"Something unoriginal…" Tomi bit her lower lip, almost walking out in front of the Stars to hurt the man, but Skaven raised his arm and held the wild girl back.
"Maybe you're right, we could discuss ethics and differences here for hours, but we need a pure sample. I know that Raitoncide and Geppo are buying it for you right now. We'll be snagging this one, but you can keep the money you'd have paid for it. That's the best deal I can offer you," Skaven said.
"Oh, Skaven… Little boy, grown up amongst dogs and you think you know how the dragons split their dinner. It's almost adorable how out of the loop you are. Very well, the deal is transpiring in the east wing alleyway of the Tanzaku Castle," Ijiki chuckled to himself.
"Are we meant to believe that you would give us the location just like that, that it's not some wild goose chase!?" Endo growled, rushing to the overweight shorty in an intention of bullying him before a dozen of thin, steel links unraveled from inside of Ijiki's cloak with a tiny blade of a scalpel attached to the end of each one. The net of intertwining medical tools was too troublesome even for a madman like Endo to rush through, so he stopped before it, seething with the need to hurt this loathsome man.
"Frankly, I don't care what you believe. If it gives you any peace of mind, you may want to know that the more of Katsuo's men you take out, the closer I can move in to controlling the supply of Ayushi cells. Surely, even a handful of do-gooders like you can understand the weight of one's own benefit in such a matter, right?" Ijiki fixed his thick glasses with his own stubby hands.
"Let's go," Skaven looked down. He was still wrestling with the sum of the intel that Ijiki gave them and the manner in which he delivered it to them as his head hung down heavy on his shoulders and his expression looked grim but with the initiator of this entire operation losing interest in this underground dealer, so did the interest of the Stars in him fade.