Stray bolts of lightning lashed in random directions as Raitoncide rose from the dirt. As was clear from his state, Damisan's technique had peeled off the layer of electric armor off of his skin, though the rampant electric fields weaved it back together from minute strands of flashing Lightning Release chakra weaves. The self-proclaimed Thunder God had his arms hanging beside him, too heavy to move at that moment, and he struggled to rise back to his feet and even a few moments after returning to his feet it took a brief pause for him to engage in his electromagnetic levitation again.
"Shitaka-senpai is taking an awful amount of time to check back with us," Shige-H grit her teeth, using this temporary pause that gave them all a chance to catch their breaths to worry about their superior who was supposed to check up on the true mastermind behind this plot of betrayal. Even if Shitaka couldn't find anything or anyone else, he'd have long since returned, as this brawl was getting far too wild to ignore.
"Is he really our problem?" Endo panted, building the strength back up to lift his sword off the ground. Finding his own movements too sloppy, the young swordsman split his weapon in half at the center and sheathed one half of the blade by his side.
"He is. I need you to check up on him," Shige-H looked to Endo with strength and authority behind her look. A look that she meant to show Endo that she wasn't ready to fool around and won't take Endo's usual antics from him with.
"Wait, me!?" Endo flipped out. "Why me? I don't give a shit about that guy…"
"You're also by far the closest to death out of all of us. I've healed you up, I know your exact state. If you get hit again–there's no guarantee that your chakra augmentations will hold. I'm not asking you to engage the enemy if you find it. I know also that you won't just sit still even for a second so I'm asking you to be useful differently instead of just rushing at the enemy and getting yourself killed," Shige-H replied.
"You know that I can use Wind Release ninjutsu, right?" Endo beamed a seething glare at his team leader.
"That's right, but I'm tuck to hide this ace away so I don't lose it forever." Shige-H said, standing her ground.
"Fine. But I can't promise you I won't kill the enemy that's keeping Shitaka occupied," Endo pointed his thumb at him, making a tough guy grimace before taking off.
"That is exactly what I told him not to do…" Shige-H sighed while the rest of the Stars prepared to take on their rising enemy once again, hoping to stop him this time.
"Do we have an actual plan?" Damisan wondered. "I'm not sure how many more shots of Spiral Burst I've got in me, it's possible that it's fewer than it might take to take this guy out."
"Honestly, I've got nothing. I'm willing to jump in and give my best shot, I will not ask you for anything more than that either. It feels like a simple either we all die or we take him down kind of situation," Shige-H looked on to Raitoncide as he hovered over the Stars and his missing patch of Lightning Armor reassembled, coating his entire body once more in an azure hue.
An authoritative thunderbolt slammed against the ground in between the Stars, scattering the young adults and tossing them about by its sheer, dominant power alone. Raitoncide had slammed against the ground in between the group as if he had become lightning itself, quickly regaining his humanoid form once he landed and spread his arms out.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Current!" Raitoncide yelled out as the entire area submerged in an expanding electrical field. Rampant and intense.
Shige-H screamed out. There was no resisting or escaping this expanding field of electricity. It was as if the entire area had been filled to the brim with an interconnected network of lightning jolts, evading even a single strand seemed impossible and every strand of the rampant electricity carried the entire voltage flowing from the newly garnered divine power of the rogue ninja.
A shocking, popping noise made Shige-H struggle through the overwhelming pain and see that the electricity had lifted all of them above ground, as if the unstable electromagnetic fields had completely robbed the entire area of the forest of gravity. The noise came from Damisan's side, the masked ninja tried to shield himself from the cruel attack by expanding his arms in a net and coating them with chakra but his arm prosthetics seemed to pop and shatter in shambles from the force that Raitoncide hit them with.
Little Tomi's cries uttered from within a furry body shield surrounding her as the ninja panda, rich with fighting spirit had enveloped the young kunoichi with its body to keep her from grievous bodily harm, however, it didn't feel like he had achieved much as its own body served as an ample conductor and much if not most of the voltage ended up transferred onto little Tomi merely through contact with her partner.
"And thus, it reveals your true nature. Once a scum, always a scum…" Raitoncide muttered while landing in between the fallen Stars members and staring at Skaven who raised himself lightly above ground and wrapped himself in a bubble of shadows, a result of his Shadow Prison Jutsu that he used both offensively and defensively. This time with much better results than earlier, when he tried subduing Raitoncide with it.
"You're delirious, Raitoncide. You've always been a little unhinged, but all this power snapped it completely," Skaven hissed once he hopped out of the collapsing bubble of shadows that protected him.
"Your ninjutsu can't hurt me, do you think your pathetic attempts at insults can?" Raitoncide smirked, feeling oh-so proud of himself and the crippling power he had achieved as he looked over the fallen Stars members, smoking and writhing in pain, stuck in between consciousness and oblivion. "Look at those kids, Skaven, you could have shielded them too, just like you've covered yourself up. And yet… I was too fast, wasn't I? It's okay to admit it, you didn't act out of reaction, you relied on instinct and the first instinct of a man such as yourself is to always look out for yourself."
"I wouldn't talk so much if I were you. You'll run yourself out of breath," Skaven smirked, even if he couldn't feel it, his feet dragged back on the dirt trying to bring him further away from imminent death that lied behind Raitoncide and this new power he had gained.
"That is impossible. I am no longer a man, I am lightning, I am energy, I am a force of nature. What's wrong? I thought you Nara were supposed to be a bunch of smartasses, don't you remember about the Six Paths from the Academy? It is a power that surpasses ninjutsu itself, even a rogue cutthroat such as the man I used to be knew that," Raitoncide took some sweet moments to admire his own splendor.
"Maybe if you did truly attain the power of Six Paths, that'd be the case, but you didn't. For the sake of old times, I'd power down and walk away. I'm still offering you that option right now. You drew that power out of a paper tag, do you really think you're in any sort of control over it? It'll suck you dry and burn you up, you fool!" Skaven grunted out.
"Ridiculous… The words of a mere dog, groveling before a god." Raitoncide posed in front of Skaven as he took it to the air again, channeling his Six Paths, blue lightning throughout his entire body to do away with his enemies.
"Think about where you've got it from. Do you really believe that the man that gave you this sealing tag gives enough of a shit about you to offer you this sort of power and intend to preserve your life? He knows that you'll burn out, he knows it'll kill you, he's hoping that both you and our group will kill each other," Skaven scolded the self-proclaimed god while he flexed before him.
"Perhaps it is so, though I think I've got enough jolt left to kill you lot and have a bit of a reserve to power down with. I fully intend on saving some of it for Konoha's Sorceress after all… Without the cannon-arms of that burnt up guy, you Allied Ninja have nothing to threaten me with," Raitoncide pointed at the useless scraps that littered around Damisan who laid down face-down and armless.
Without even needing to turn his head, a stray jolt of electricity parted off of the intense aura coating Raitoncide and engulfed a stone spear flying in his direction. While Tomi panted on her knees, the amped up voltage reduced her weapon to woodchips and pebble dust and scattered it before the crushed teen.
"You hurt my panda!" Tomi roared out the first instance of air that she drew into her lungs.
"Do you really think I wouldn't kill a child?" Raitoncide turned to his side and raised his hand, firing off a testament of his wrath that he meant to fry little Tomi with, but the child was no longer where she yelled at him from once the lightning hit the ground.
"Thanks, Skaven, that's a neat plan you've come up with," Shige-H smirked while she put Tomi down on the ground and stretched her stiff neck and knuckles out.
"Plan?" Raitoncide wondered.
"Yeah, it was right there in your little banter. For someone who claims to be a god, you should really be a bit more perceptive…" Shige-H smirked.
"You're the medical ninja of this squad, aren't you? Well, you're in for the most horrific time of your life then," Raitoncide muttered, raising his hand and turning to Skaven. "Lightning Style: Lightning Javelin!"
A concentrated beam of solidified lightning current going well into hundreds of thousands of megavolts pierced the distance between the self-proclaimed god and Skaven. A blitzing beam of light that saw a body of another ninja in its way, not at all an obstacle worth noting as it merely shined its way through Skaven with a grisly hiss. Skaven's body disappeared in a poof as a broken metallic leg took its place and fell apart into red-hot pieces.
"A Substitution Jutsu?" Raitoncide muttered. "So human that it's disgusting. Clinging to your illusion of importance. A scum who's always looking out for yourself shouldn't be selling your soul and struggling so hard to survive. You should accept your rotten nature and just die."
"Thanks for letting me use your leg to save my life," Skaven turned to Damisan, who writhed and panted down on his back, completely armless and now missing a leg too.
"Any time, pal…" Damisan tilted his cylinder that masked his face and gave the mohawk-donning Nara a mechanical thumb up. "Just glad to help."
"You talk high and mighty, but you've failed to eliminate me. As far as I'm concerned, you're a really lousy god. At this pace, you'll run out of your god-juice before punishing a single man. It'd be just like you to waste your godhood. No wonder Mana kicked your ass all by herself…" Skaven looked to Raitoncide with scornful eyes which Shige-H had never seen the shady Nara adopt.
Raitoncide just floated there, riding currents of lightning jolts waving and arcing from the ground and sustaining the crazy electrical fields running rampant in the area. He wanted to say something wicked and profane. It was at the tip of his tongue. As he simmered in his wrath, it became apparent that he had to say those things or else he'd burn up in them. And yet… Raitoncide failed to put the exact hatred he felt at that moment into words, and thus his lightning gradually changed color again.
Azure turned to silver that continued to blaze on into orange, ranging on accursed reddish as the would-be Thunder God extended a finger toward Skaven, as if sentencing him to death. The reason for this peculiar method of attack became apparent when the majestic cloak of living lightning that coated Raitoncide transitioned into his finger, focusing into a single point and beaming out toward Skaven while the Nara clapped his hands together in a race to shield himself in a shadowy bubble again.
A moist grunt shook Shige-H from her chest to her knees. The leader of the Stars charged on ahead to Skaven as the shadowy blob enveloping him deflated and ran off like black sludge and exposed her squad member with a black wound on the right side of his chest and blood trickling down from his mouth. The focused beam of Raitoncide's ultimate punishment as an ascended ninja of the Six Paths penetrated the Shadow Prison Jutsu and ended up tagging Skaven.
"Sorry… Leader… My mind started shooting blanks. He… Still had strength left and… One of us would have gotten tagged…" Skaven muttered with a bloody mouth and a weak tone while Shige-H cradled him in her hands and worked on healing his wound.
"You're going to be fine. He got you, but it's not a deadly wound. Stop making it worse for yourself with your apologies," Shige-H smiled, rubbing her wrist across her eyes to wipe some premature grieving tears that had proven themselves to be misplaced after a quick scan of Skaven's condition.
"You hurt my panda, you bastard!" little Tomi yelled out, whacking the fallen and very surprised Raitoncide that had run out of whatever chakra he had drawn from the sealing tags and ended up burnt out and powerless with her boomerang and knocking him out.
"Jeez, you almost caved his head in with that…" Damisan muttered after using his one remaining prosthetic leg to flip over on his belly and start his attempts to pick himself back up. Despite losing most of his prosthetics, Damisan seemed adept at moving around with just one remaining leg.
"Leader… This is… Important… I shielded myself with… My jutsu… Because…" Skaven tried talking through excessive coughs of scarlet before Shige-H beamed a mortifying look down at him.
"Stop talking!" Shige-H made Skaven's face go pale, though not for his blood loss but because of her terrifying expression. "It's the strongest when shielding in close range. It was the only way to use that technique and protect someone. You wouldn't have made it if you tried shielding one of us and even if you did–the jutsu wouldn't have held it either way."
"I guess… You really studied us…" Skaven muttered and closed his eyes to rest a bit.
"That bossy bitch!" Endo cursed to himself as he took a leap across the tree line and looked around. "Just like Tomoe-dono… I bet that worthless dumbass is just smoking on his own supply, or drinking…"
There was a noticeable reek of tobacco lingering in the air. While Endo followed just random chance for the first few dashes, he stumbled into an ever-strengthening scent of tobacco that became taking a much grimmer reek familiar to the apprentice samurai only from memories that he could access in his worst nightmares.
"Thank God you came!" an elderly man of balding top of the head but lively, long, grey hair and a dirty kimono raised his hand up and waved at Endo when the apprentice samurai followed the grisly scents to a scene he did not expect. "This man appears to have been murdered…"
Shitaka was not just murdered. His murderer had beheaded him clean. There were no signs of a battle. Had the Allied Ninja met his end in a battle, such a battle would have still been in progress. Neither did the killer merely beat Shitaka. Shitaka's murderer had fooled him, assassinated him in the proper meaning of that word. The old man sat by a mossy rock nearby the grotesque scene of a headless Allied Ninja and smoked from his pipe. His straw hat laid down beside him. Had it not been for the subtle frame of this man and his crooked posture, Endo would have cut him down at the spot.
"And you decided this was a good time for a smoke?" Endo wondered, landing beside the scene, allowing the headless body of his superior to lie in between him and this curious old man. "Give me a fucking break. Your shit may have fooled a dumbass like Shitaka, but I'm seeing right through it!"
"But Sir Ninja, I am but an old man heading to harvest my potatoes!" the old man shook his hands out in front of him, grabbing his straw hat and placing it out in front of him, as if it could shield him from Endo's sword. He acted so stupid that Endo almost bought into his act for a second and hesitated to attack immediately.
Endo leaped at the old man, flipping over Shitaka's headless body and slamming with the right side of his double-bladed sword. A thunderous hum filled the air when Endo's sword hit something solid in mid-air. Something that burnt through the alloy of its blade within seconds and clanged the falling sword into two, prompting Endo to dash back and draw the second half of his sword. Just so he didn't lose this half as well, the samurai apprentice coated it in Lightning Release chakra.
"What is that sword?" Endo hissed out.
"The Sword of the Thunder God…" the old man replied. As he lowered the ancient-looking hilt from which his sword appeared from thin air, the sword let out an electrical hum. The face of the old man had shifted in the flash of their collision. This was no longer the face of a frightened old man but that of a hardened warrior that matched if not surpassed Endo in experience. He left the young swordsman in the dust in terms of his equipment.
"You should not have wandered off from the battlefield, young one," Shitaka's murderer proclaimed while he extended his hand still holding his Sword of the Thunder God as a declaration for his intent to kill the young swordsman now that he has discovered the assassin. "It would be unfortunate if the rest of your allies came here to join you as well. I'd much rather kill you all on different terms."