"Endo, wait, they might have some more intel on this situation. They must know who masterminded this affair and prompted them to betray Hanada's men," Skaven yelled out, but his words smashed into a brick wall and scattered all over the floor in disarray.
His coated with lightning blade etched into Geppo's armor with a dull and low-pitched thud. A spray of blood covered the chest of Geppo's equipment but the mercenary still brimmed with life as evidenced by the painful and filled with scorn expression that he offered. A painful grunt filled the air when both sides of Endo's blade browsed for openings in the armors to sever the mercenary's limbs but ended up cutting into something too hard to slice with unfocused and widespread slashes.
Despite his pitiful attempts to crawl back in retreat and salvage his life and what remained of his future combat potential, Skaven's shadow held Geppo stationary, ignoring his most genuine attempts to fall down. Endo, however, allowed himself the luxury to forget the fact that Geppo wasn't standing because he still intended to oppose the Allied Ninja recruits but did so because Skaven's technique compelled him to.
Growing increasingly frustrated at what he saw as Geppo's toughness resisting his blows, Endo wound up for a focused power slash that he meant to split the cut-up and bleeding mercenary clean into two with, right through his heavy gear if his blade ended up meeting some of it in its path. A resonating slice of Lightning Release chakra split the ground where Endo hit it, missing his mark by what seemed like a mile. Skaven breathed one out, feeling pressure rolling off his chest.
It was once Endo continued to wail, swing and slash at what he saw as Geppo's weak points and ended up swiping around and cutting thin air, spreading that dreadful, electric hum wherever his chakra coated weapon went, that the Nara realized what was truly going on. His ally wasn't at all showing mercy to his opponent, it was just that, one reason or another, he was incapable of hitting Geppo anymore.
"What's going on?" Shige-H turned to the confused Nara.
"I'm… Not sure…" Skaven shook his head.
"That noise," Damisan noted, throwing his masked head around in search for its source. "Like whistling air or something… No. It's not just that, it's being filtered, or something like that."
"Sound?" Skaven turned his head around in search of what Damisan was talking about. As far as he was concerned–everything was dead silent until Endo didn't fill the air with his wrathful grunts and that noise of a double-bladed sword swinging through the air and hitting nothing but dirt. Geppo's wincing and whines also stood out, but Skaven couldn't pick up anything like that which Damisan described.
"This must be what that bastard gave us, huh? That voice box?" Raitoncide turned to his bleeding out and severely injured comrade with an energetic smirk. "Atta boy, you don't need your hands or the use of your body to spread your sound waves, do you? How about you raise some ruckus and break those shadow lines connecting to us, huh?"
"I… I can't, he cut up my gear… This is all that I can make out right now!" Geppo yelled out a whiny complaint.
"So, it is his doing…" Skaven bit the right side of his lip in frustration. "He's spreading sound waves indistinguishable to most of us, that disorient us and make us see things. Even with his limbs chopped up and useless, all he needs is to use his voice."
"His voice? I can cut that too!" Endo growled in frustration, slashing again at where he saw an opening to Geppo's throat, but his blade once again only cut thin air and the samurai apprentice stumbled, failing to maintain his own body's weight. "What the…?" he cursed upon realizing he needed to stab one side of his sword into the ground just to keep himself upright.
"Don't lose your cool. He's just disorienting you. Back up, Endo." Skaven once again appealed to his comrade.
"It's no ordinary illusion," Shige-H said. "We can't just dispel it. It's not just a sound-based illusion like Mana's Sweet Lullaby Jutsu. It doesn't require you to perceive it or hear it distinctly. It surpasses the audible spectrum and simply disorients the targets."
"Even so," Skaven switched the position of his hand seal, sending a shadowy ripple across the line connecting him to the pair of his opponents. "We're still in possession of the enemy. I can choke them out and disable them for questioning later."
"I wonder about that, brat…" Raitoncide chuckled. "Sure, that could have been the case. But what makes you so certain about the position of your body?"
"What!?" Skaven muttered, looking down and seeing just rippling mirages. Vision of his body doubled, tripled and continued to multiply in blurry hallucinations that displayed hundreds of unique positions to each one of his limb. The Nara could no longer trust his own body or tell if he was sitting or standing, or kneeling. What's the most important–he didn't know if he still held the hand seal to keep his enemies paralyzed anymore.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Javelin!" Raitoncide yelled out, extending one of his hand as it formed a crackling construct of Lightning Release knife over his palm and extended in distance to an intense beam that emitted a ghastly hiss as it penetrated in between Endo's chest and his abdomen and sent the young swordsman down and on his back with a visible hole in his body.
"Endo!" Shige-H screamed out, rushing after her fallen fellow Stars member. Upon reaching her fallen ally, the young woman immediately enlightened her hands with emerald light meant to treat the horrific injury that the wrathful swordsman had sustained.
"Careful, we're not sure if the illusion is over yet!" Skaven warned the leader of Stars but Damisan moved in to his side, preparing to fight alongside the Nara if the necessity came.
"It has to be–since it's no genjutsu technique, it must have affected everyone within the sound's range. If Raitoncide hit his intended target–that meant that he had perfect control over his body. We're free, for now, at least," Damisan said.
"We need to disable Geppo. It's unclear how much control he has over this technique of his and we can't press on our advantage against Raitoncide with the possibility of that technique lingering in the air," Skaven turned the corners of his eyes to the masked self-puppeteering ninja.
"Got it," Damisan nodded and took a stalwart fighting pose, winding back his right hand as pulsating chakra jets lit up on the other ends of his prosthetic legs, propelling him to soar onward.
Geppo staggered back, falling flat on his face as he flapped his cut-up arms around and smacking himself in the face in his attempt to cover up and protect his head. Damisan swung and rotated out of balance, hitting a nearby oak head-first and splitting it horizontally in two. Geppo's technique had set in again, telegraphing that he, at the very least, had partial control of it.
"Shadow Strangulation Jutsu!" Skaven dashed back a few paces before taking it to one knee again and sending a shadowy line across the ground. Instead of merely touching with his opponent's shadow and bonding the two of them in a possessive connection, however, a living, shadowy hand emerged from the other end of the shadowy line, looking to wrap around Geppo's body from afar, where the noise would have had a weakened effect.
"Just where are you aiming?" Raitoncide smirked at Skaven's attempt to halt his comrade's technique. Geppo seemed to halt it himself just in time for Raitoncide to finish his hand seals and position his palms to the ground, sending a collection of Lightning Pillars bursting from the ground. Shige-H dashed aside from the patient she was treating, beaming a petrified glare at the bursting electricity engulfing Endo and just barely missing her.
Further to the south of her position, the beaming pillar engulfed and burnt up the fallen tree where Damisan slammed into, swallowing up and shocking the disoriented Stars member as well. Grunting in pain and covered with trailing smoke, the self-puppeteering ninja struggled to rise back on his feet.
"That's some good shit, Geppo. Keep at it and we're gonna fry all of them!" Raitoncide pumped his fists and turned to his chopped-up ally, who only barely mustered up a nod with a pale face.
"Lightning Release: Electromagnetic Murder!" Endo's howl filled the air as a jolt of electricity came this time from the location of the Stars, aiming at Raitoncide himself. The rogue ninja crossed his hands and formed a pair of knife-shaped constructs of Lightning Release chakra around his hands, absorbing and nullifying the weaker in rank technique. "I've noticed you like Lightning Release techniques. Two can play that game."
"Endo, what are you doing? He's going to kill you!" Shige-H screamed out, panic-stricken over her comrade's complete ignorance of his own bodily condition and just how close he was to dying already. She had closed up his wound from Lightning Javelin halfway before Raitoncide's pillars shocked him back into consciousness.
"If my master failed to finish me off, there's nothing this guy can do to me to keep me down…" Endo wheezed as he stood to his feet. His own weapon appeared to drag the young man down and draw him to flop onto his face. It was only because of most of the young swordsman's efforts that he could stay on both feet.
"I guess I'll have to plunge my entire hand into your chest and make sure your heart stops beating manually!" Raitoncide howled as he jumped up and released a pair of lightning jolts from his shoulder blades, elevating himself with a Lightning Release channeling exercise just as he used to do when just walking around with his partner in-between assignments.
The rogue ninja sped up to the risen swordsman as if he was riding an actual thunderbolt, extending his hand that still pulsed with vibrant electricity as if to signify that he meant every tiniest bit of his words and that he'd truly shorten Endo's heart out with his bare hand. Before he could do so, however, a black and white, furry paw smacked him in the jaw and sent him careening off to the right.
"You were involved in a survival exercise with your master in a steel cage inside of a volcano every day, jeez, Endo, we get it already!" little Tomi smirked standing atop of a tree branch with a test tube in hand while a heavyweight panda with eyes of blood-red roared out, throwing its furry fists around as a warning that it would smack aside anyone to come in its way just as it did to Raitoncide just now.
"Tomi…" Skaven looked up at the youngest and shortest member of Stars, making her return to the battlefield.
"I found the sample, and I recalled Zokaka and Zomiti," little Tomi exclaimed with a lively pumping of her fist while she leaped up and flipped in mid-air to land beside the awestruck Nara. "Thanks for helping me protect them, Skaven."
"Right…" Skaven nodded. "We could use your help with Geppo–his sound-based disorientation technique is throwing us all for a loop."
"On it!" Tomi nodded, drawing blood from her thumb and pressing her hand to the ground. A blood-curdling squeaking noise sent Geppo writhing and crawling back in terror long before a bat twice his size lunged out from the smoke and grabbed hold of him, taking him with him to the depths of the forest and the peaks of the tallest trees where he couldn't trouble his summoner anymore. "Komonoi and other ninja bats have special protections to their inner ear that lets them block and filter sounds. I could have called on some ninja snakes, but they'd have eaten Geppo up…"
"That's great, now we've got just one headache to worry about," Skaven turned his attention to Raitoncide, who looked a bit loopy after the bone-shattering hit he took right to the face. It was just unfortunate that he was a rogue ninja capable of chakra augmentation and not some mercenary with technology worth more than their services.
Shige-H held her hands over the panting Endo, finishing the job of closing up the Lightning Javelin wound in his abdomen and patch up some beatings, cuts and bruises that he'd accumulated over this entire trip that left his body and frightening mess even for a relatively conditioned medical ninja such as Shige-H.
"You need to take care of yourself better. Let someone else take the lead until you fully recover and stop giving me such a scare," Shige-H tried reasoning with her teammate using her best attempt at a soft, motherly voice, but Endo seemed to just scoff and turn away. He sat still and let her heal him, however. That was already more than he'd have done a few weeks back.
"I'm at my strongest when I'm beaten past the point of reason and pass out, anyway. I've got warrior's spirit in me that's burning up the strongest when I'm past my limit," Endo bragged.
"That may be so, but that doesn't mean you've got to flirt with death in every brawl you have. Keep that bottled up for a darker day is all I'm saying." Shige-H replied.
"Heh…" Raitoncide felt up his aching jaw and stared at his shaky hands. "It's a good thing that I held myself back from using the good shit that armored guy gave us. My juice is getting a bit low, Geppo's fucked up like always. Now's the best time to take some of that good shit for myself. If it made someone scary out of a goon like Geppo, just imagine what it'll do to me!"
"The good stuff?" Damisan muttered to himself while wrestling himself out of the wreckage he had brought onto himself. "What are you talking about?"
"The armored guy? Who gave you that stuff? Who taught Geppo to fight like that?" Skaven pressed on this same line of questioning.
"It won't matter, not to you guys." Raitoncide revealed a sealing tag with a glyph painted on it and pressed it, clutching it in his hand while his left hand weaved a one-handed unsealing hand seal. "I've no idea where that guy got his hand on something crazy like this, but it's just what I need to kill all of you. Maybe I'll use this new, good jolt and defibrillate that bitch back to life only to show her your crispy bodies and make her beg finish her off again!"
The bright, white lightning around Raitoncide got an azure hue, as it drew energy from the reverberating might inside of the sealing tag he clenched in his right hand. It seemed to coat his entire skin with a glistening, almost metallic texture of cerulean, as if a living and crackling armor that covered the rogue ninja up, changing the very color of his Lightning Release technique.
"Yeah… This is the good shit alright…" Raitoncide muttered with a voice that broke and scattered in the intense electric aura that surrounded his body, reverberating off of the layer of lightning coating he covered himself with. "Finally, I've ranked up in life!"
"We need a few seconds so that leader can finish patching Endo up. As much of a pain as that guy is, he's the only one persistent enough to run at Raitoncide and hand him some pressure. We might just need someone as crazy as him to bust through whatever he just did." Skaven said. "Buy her some time!"
Intending to lead through example, the Nara took to one knee and reached out with a shadowy tendril. The light show that changed the color of Raitoncide's lightning had provided him with ample light to amplify his shadows with. A tall, washing wave of darkness rose from behind the rogue ninja, looking to envelop him whole in a bubble of complete shade.
"Are you fucking kidding me!?" Raitoncide sneered at Skaven, taking off the ground as if some magnetic force repulsed him off of it and erupting with bright and sparking spikes protruding off of his entire body as part of his intensifying Lightning Release aura and skewering Skaven's ace technique. The riddled shadows dissolved and burnt up on sight, flapping on the side like a burst balloon. "I'm juicing myself up with some actual Six-Paths chakra and you're trying that pathetic Nara shit on me?"
Raitoncide clenched his fist and extended it in Skaven's direction. Out of sheer instinct, the Allied Ninja recruit rolled aside and within mere blink felt grateful that he did. Another spike of pure lightning so intense and channeled that it was actually solid burst from underground, much like his Lightning Pillar technique from earlier. After failing to impale the Nara immediately, the lightning spike trickled down into amped up electrical field and dissolved.
"What kind of a hand seal was that?" Tomi freaked out, flinging a pair of sharpened stone knives at her opponent. Raitoncide straightened his clenched fist into a palm, releasing a network of intertwined electrical threads that seemed to halt the stone knives in mid-air via some sort of electromagnetism.
"Hand seals? Get the fuck out of here with that shit! I'm beyond that fundamental shit! I'm like a fucking Thunder God now! Raitoncide was a kick-ass name of a chump I was earlier but now I'm so much more… Raiden… Raijin… Who the fuck cares, I can brainstorm my new alias for me whole day after I fry all of you!" Raitoncide cackled to himself like a child while he elevated himself off the ground and marveled at his own booming power.
"Wind Style: Spiral Burst!" Damisan took it to his knees while his leg prosthetics disassembled to give him a wide frame of support while his arm prosthetics molded into a cannon-shaped rim for his technique. The intense amount of chakra that the Allied Ninja recruit channeled into the tip of his fleshy stumps that were once his arms positioned onto the cannon-shaped frame and took a bluish tint, elevating one rank beyond just being translucent wind currents.
"Are you fucking dense, you skinny, chopped-up freak?" Raitoncide turned his attention to the channeling shinobi, who raised the fused frame of his prosthetic arms higher for a better shot. It didn't look like the self-proclaimed Thunder God even cared to intercept a technique he considered so beneath him. He did so at his own peril, however, as once the charged-up sphere of Wind Release chakra boomed out to a beam, filling up the steel frame and beaming off toward its intended target, it seemed to sock him like a sledgehammer and send Raitoncide flipping and swinging back down on the ground.
"What the heck? Go, Damisan!" Tomi cheered on her comrade, looking baffled by how effective the self-built ninja's attack was against their seemingly invincible opponent.
"Wind Release… Of course, Wind Release is naturally strong against Lightning Release. If he's no longer just channeling Lightning Release techniques and using natural, Six-Paths lightning, he'd also be especially susceptible to its weaknesses. Wind Release ninjutsu might be our key to victory!" Skaven stumbled onto something profound after just observing what felt like a fruitless struggle for time yield them with significant results.