The mercenary Geppo widened the spread of his legs, lowering his point of balance in the process as his arms adopted a position of a wide guard. Air howled as it flowed inside the multiple open tubes and stressed the rubbery artificial veins of storing and circulating it inside of the complex gear the mercenary wore. Because of the ever-amassing influx of air, wherever the suit found its pathway to bloat and expand–it took it.
Zokaka, the towering, quadruped elephant raised its trunk up and honked. Because of its size and thickness, the ninja animal was far less affected by the previous shock that had reduced the rest of the Stars to their knees. In such a way, the ninja elephant sent a straight aerial ripple to Geppo. The cocky mercenary thought so much of his newly obtained abilities that he made a mistake of just running out in front of a group of enemies and beginning to channel his technique.
The transparent sonic howl shot out from Zokaka's trunk slammed right into Geppo's chest, making the shocked mercenary wheeze. As the quick yet robust sound wave continued to drill against the mercenary's body, it shoved all the pent-up sonic waves from the ventilation openings in his gear like pressing a tube of toothpaste. Geppo had turned around vertically a handful of times, clockwise, on his path down and on his back. Little Tomi clapped with Zokaka's trunk after standing up and pulled out a pair of boomerangs from a pouch of cloth on her waist.
"Nice work, Zokaka," she commended the colossal ninja animal.
"I don't understand…" Geppo wheezed, still rubbing his chest and feeling up his busted up ribs.
"You dumbass, just 'cause the assassin gave us his good shit, that doesn't make you a peerless warrior. You still need to know how and when to use it," Raitoncide shook his head in disappointment with his partner. "Stop messing around, the elephant just sent you a little nudge to interrupt your attack, it couldn't have been anything strong. Pick yourself up and let's finish those kids off."
"I see…" Skaven muttered.
"What's that? You know something about this "assassin" that they spoke of?" Shige-H wondered.
"No. I was wondering why Geppo would gain this much confidence. Usually, he was the type to bully ordinary civilians around, but when he met his match, he started to get salty and demand help, even in fights he could perfectly win by himself. These two were given something by a third party–likely they are the ringleader but what could they have offered these two to make Geppo betray Ijiki?" Skaven scratched his chin, still trying to figure out the bigger picture before allowing himself to become absorbed in this battle.
"Who cares!?" Endo growled. "These two are just criminal scum, they need little incentive to betray and stab their own brothers in the back!"
The fearsome samurai apprentice twirled his sword behind him, charging head-first into battle. Raitoncide clapped his hands together, preparing a repeat of Endo's first failed attempt to attack the rogue ninja up close. But this time things went different. The apprentice samurai disappeared, taking a steep plunge upward and to the leafage. Upon his disappearance, the image of Damisan standing behind his fellow Stars member became clear. The prosthetics-user had his artificial arms crossed up as a faint glow of blue illuminated steel wire he used to manipulate the body of his ally.
Raitoncide's technique lashed and hissed before running out of range and becoming harmless while the opening persisted. Damisan spread out his prosthetic hands and then swung them in a single direction, like a gift of a constipated pigeon Endo swooped down with a ruthless slash of his sword, trusting the timing of his unattractive teammate. Raitoncide coughed blood out as he staggered back with unbelieving eyes. The part of his black jumpsuit underneath the wide laceration peeled off under the demand of gravity, prompting the rogue ninja to tear the other half off as well, though that was hardly his most pressing concern.
Because of the nature of his weapon and the aggravated toxicity of his character, Endo never attacked just once or twice. Now that his ally had provided him with an opening, the apprentice samurai served a flurry of death from multiple sides and angles, infusing his feet and head into the fold as the rough nature of the life that the young man had led toughened his noggin up for just this sort of test of its integrity.
A low-pitched crack filled the air, sending shrieking reverberations when an intense aura of Lightning Release extended from Raitoncide's hands, expanding as living blades adding to the length of his arm and proving to be intense enough to block the rush of Araki Endo's chakra-coated double-bladed weapon. With each blocked strike, Raitoncide's Lightning Release technique burst into sparks, but reignited before the rogue ninja welcomed the next strike.
"Did you think I would be hopeless fighting in close distance?" Raitoncide scoffed at his adversary. Endo performed a kata with his sword to return to a defensive stance as he found himself at a disadvantageous position. "Defend yourself!"
The rogue ninja moved his hands to his pouches, pulling out a pair of custom-made kunai knives made of chakra-conductive materials. The rogue ninja took no time coating them with Lightning Release chakra before attempting to carve something out of Endo. Despite matching ferocity in battle, Endo walled the relentless stabbing parade, proving it to be entirely fruitless. Having driven his opponent to a point of losing his composure, Endo danced aside upon reading a particularly nasty blow and tripped Raitoncide up before attempting to press a side of his coated blade to Raitoncide's neck and clipping it. The rogue had read Endo's desperate need to kill him and the greed in his movement, putting up his coated knives just in time to block the clipping motion.
The rogue ninja rolled aside as sharp, metallic cling filled the air. The upper halves of his custom knives twirled in mid-air, snapped off of the base of the blade. Endo pursued his opponent but felt a strong yank on his back and submitted to it. A tunneling sound wave passed where the apprentice samurai would have been if he pursued Raitoncide as Geppo found some space to join in on the battle.
"Zomiti, Zokaka, keep that human occupied!" little Tomi asked of her partners. Zomiti nodded and began rushing through the trees, cutting them in half with sick lariats as it approached a tall and chiseled boulder. The mint-colored elephant wrapped its hunky arms around the boulder, taxing its biceps some but ended up pulling it out and placing it under its armpit like a bludgeoning tool as it gave the mercenary Geppo a dead-eye stare.
Not being one of complex tool usage of intricate battle tactics, Zokaka charged on ahead, looking to stampede all over the opposing force. Geppo dashed and leaped aside in avoidance of certain flattening under the colossal elephant's foot but found Zomiti on his back, swiping with his large boulder as if it was a weapon and preventing Geppo from gaining distance. It was just a matter of a few failed stomps until the shadow of Zokaka's gargantuan foot lingered above Geppo and drowned out his immediate surroundings in shade.
A sharp-pitched howl filled the air as a bubble of living noise resisted Zokaka's attempt to stomp the mercenary. Geppo leaned down on one knee to get a more balanced foothold as he intensified the sound wave and used both of his arms to push Zokaka's stampede off of his schedule of troubles.
"Decapitating Airwave!" Geppo yelled out, sending a pump of pent-up air out from the rubbery tubes inside of his suit that enveloped Zokaka's foot and left lacerations around it as the airwave climbed higher and higher toward the elephant's head.
Just as a sly smirk colored Geppo's face, a ruthless smack from a boulder art piece sent him flying weightless and smashing through a centuries-old tree and struggling to maintain his consciousness. Zomiti signaled from his trunk, being an eager troubadour of his own success. Zokaka stumbled back in pain and let out a pitiful grumble that resonated throughout the area. Yet the elephant veteran had suffered far worse injuries back in its heyday.
"Raitoncide has picked up a few tricks. He was the one I was the least familiar with back in the day and unlike the rest, he always worked to improve his skills and learn new techniques," Skaven noted as the Stars exploited the opening that Tomi's elephants provided them with, moving in to all attack Raitoncide before he shows another landscape-affecting technique.
Little Tomi took it up, leaping easily twice her own size in altitude as she twirled around and lobbed a pair of boomerangs right at Raitoncide, adamant to snap his neck or to behead him outright with two sharpened pieces of hefty wood. Even as the ruthless rogue ninja leaned and ducked out of the way, a dancing trail of shadows moved across the ground, coming alive in the shape of shadowy arms that grabbed hold of Tomi's boomerangs and flung them right back at Raitoncide. This combination between Tomi and Skaven scored a nasty-sounding thud at the center of Raitoncide's spine.
Having found a moment when her opponent looked stunned and out of his own body, Shige-H let out a vicious battle cry as her arms lit up with vibrant, blue glow. The medical kunoichi rushed in for a beat down, but Raitoncide was made of sterner stuff as he ducked and weaved out of each successive strike, observing Shige's loud wind-ups with crazed eyes. The sharp noise of reeling wire filled the air as Damisan's fingers had shot out from their sockets, splitting and segmenting, revealing them to contain miles upon miles of steel wire as the segmented fingers wrapped the wire around Raitoncide's limbs and tied him down.
The prosthetics-using self-puppeteering ninja swung his subdued opponent around and over his head, disabling his hands from connecting so he could no longer mold chakra or use his Lightning Release ninjutsu as Damisan slammed Raitoncide right behind him, as if using him like a hammer that should have shattered the Earth's crust while Endo was already skyborne and aiming for a finishing thrust with his double-bladed sword.
The rogue ninja swung his legs around like the blades of a helicopter, kicking himself up to life and deflecting the thrust of Endo's sword in the process while imbedding the sword in the ground. It took Raitoncide a good few moments in wiggling some freedom in his fingers and some of his limbs. His right arm came free first. The rogue ninja weaved a single hand seal and enveloped himself in his own Lightning Pillar, singing off the steel wire and emerging shocked and lightly scorched up by his own technique but still hungry for more violence. As long as the young Allied Ninja recruits were the ones on the receiving end.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Stream!" Raitoncide yelled out, channeling a mass of Lightning Release chakra into the tip of his palm before lowering it and pulsing it outside throughout his entire body. Because of the slower build-up of the technique and the fact that the rogue ninja had to generate the focal first part of the technique inside of his hand, the Stars retreated wide enough to leave his range.
With the use of both of his hands returned to him and all of his foes outside of the range where they could have intercepted the use of his hands, Raitoncide immersed himself in weaving more than a few hand seals all at once before raising his right palm and enveloping it in a blinding crackle of Lightning Release chakra. The rogue ninja then connected both of his hands, dipping the left one inside of that mass of electricity before duplicating the awesome voltage with his left and forming a super-sized clump of Lightning Release chakra and extending both his arms, aiming for Shige-H.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Javelin!" Raitoncide howled out with a megalomaniacal shriek as the pent-up voltage all blasted outward toward Shige-H in a super-heated stream that resembled plasma a lot more than a jolt of lightning.
Shige's body reacted on its own. Moving through sheer instinct at just the right time, mere blink before the javelin left a hole in her gut and left her a bleeding out and whimpering would-be corpse on the forest floor. A light tremble emanated through the entire body of Shige-H as she stood back up on both feet and realized how close she was to an injury that would have soured the Stars' day and possibly doomed their chances of obtaining the Ayushi tissue sample for their injured friend.
"Nice instincts…" Raitoncide commended. "Though, of course, I'd have appreciated it more if you stopped struggling and just died. You going around healing away all the hard work I'm putting into this is a real hassle, you know."
"You might think you're being smart, targeting a medical ninja, but evasion is one aspect of our physical skill we've ironed out to perfection. I assure you that you will find me the toughest target to nail down and kill." Shige-H responded with a light shake to her voice. It was not that lingering sense of impending doom that made Raitoncide smirk, however, it was the sight of Shige's fur coat that failed to race fast enough after its mistress and burnt away from her shoulder blades and below.
The Lightning Javelin had pierced it in the center, leaving a hole with smoldering edges so hot that the surrounding fur instantly caught fire and singed until the coat's integrity forced it to collapse and cut off the blazing part, separating it from the remains of the coat.
"Geppo! How hard can it be to fuck up two elephants?" Raitoncide yelled out, addressing his partner but refusing to move his eyes away from the ninja queued up in front of him.
"Zokaka!" Tomi shrieked out, driving her hands through her hair and undoing her pigtails at once. Geppo had positioned himself firmly atop of Zokaka's head and had a firm grip over the elephant's trunk as he pounded Zokaka into a kneeling position. Zomiti laid on his back further to the right, his chunky belly lifted in a slumbering rhythm suggested that the enemy knocked him out not too long ago. "That's enough, please!" she pleaded.
"Don't lose your cool, brat. Ninja animals poof away when they take too much damage to prevent them from dying. If your knuckleheads are still taking a beating–they're willing to go on," Endo tried to prevent Tomi from making a mistake that he always ends up making. It was tough to say if that was because of a genuine care for the well-being of his teammate or if he merely considered holding some sort of copyright over such reckless behavior and didn't want Tomi copying him.
"Shut up!" Tomi yelled out. "Zokaka and Zomiti are my friends, they would never give up on a job I ask them to do! Don't you understand, they'll never back out, not until they can't anymore…"
"Leave this to me," Skaven muttered without a second's delay, taking it to one knee and expanding a cluster of shadowy tendrils from underneath his feet. Raitoncide tittered in mockery over Skaven, making the same mistake that Geppo had made just a minute earlier as he raced through hand seals.
"Lightning Style: Mouth of the Storm!" he muttered, releasing a contained lightning storm in Skaven's general direction. Damisan moved first, stepping out in front of the kneeling Nara and opening up his prosthetic limbs, spreading them out like umbrellas, interconnected via metallic rims and coated with membrane of base chakra coating.
"Shadow Possession Jutsu–Complete!" Skaven reported as both enemy ninja exclaimed in shock, reacting to how fast Skaven paralyzed them both with such a simplistic technique.
"H-How… I was… Looking out for your tendril…" Raitoncide cursed and grumbled to himself unintelligible swear words as the possessive paralysis of the Shadow Possession Jutsu kept him and his partner in place.
With Geppo no longer keeping hold of Zokaka's trunk and pummeling his skull with vicious strikes, the elephant slumped on the ground, spreading his fours to the side as he smashed against the forest floor lifeless. Geppo twitched twice while attempting to move away, but failed as Skaven had his shadowy tendril locked with Geppo's shadow.
"I had noticed that it becomes significantly easier to stretch out my shadow when you're using your Lightning Release jutsu. It's only natural as they're their own source of light. I guess it's the same effect as if when you use a flashbang–everything becomes enveloped in the light's shadow for a few moments. As for Geppo, it felt dangerous to connect with him earlier as his sound waves had double the range of my shadows. That's why it's quite convenient that I found the shadows of those elephants and could use their shadows as mediums," Skaven explained before turning to his fellow Stars. "I must admit, there are more than a few ways our abilities can work together."
While Geppo's eyes remained paralyzed, the mercenary looked by moving his eyes alone to see Skaven's shadowy tendril entering the pool of Zokaka's shadow before darting off of it and connecting to Geppo. It helped that the enemy perched on to the ninja animal at the point when the shadows connected.
"Skaven, you fucking rat!" Geppo cursed. "This has nothing to do with you, never had. You chose to fuck with us, remember that!"
"That's right, I did…" Skaven stood up and scratched his neck, looking more hassled rather than worried or afraid about the coming consequences. "That's the whole point though, I couldn't stand staying idle in relation to things that don't concern me. I care about Mana and I want to see her get better, no matter how little her injury concerns me, I want to get involved and make her return to form happen. I guess you could say that sort of stuff's my Ninja Way now."
Raitoncide looked like he was foaming his wrath from his mouth as both his and Geppo's bodies moved to repeat the motions that Skaven did with his body. Tomi dashed off to undo the summoning technique forcefully and send her injured friends back for some treatment while Damisan blitzed away to look for the sample they've all came here to get.
"I might not get so lucky as to catch them both again. May as well knock them out now," Skaven suggested.
"Knocking 'em out is too risky, I intend on settling this in a more permanent way," Endo declared, spinning his sword over his head and pointing it out in front of him in preparation to do away with the paralyzed enemies.