Hoshido took a step. Face stone-cold. With the first twitch of his foot, Skaven's shadowy tendril wrapped around his body with the Nara ninja taking the knee and weaving a signature Nara Clan hijutsu hand seal while the Shadow Strangulation Jutsu wrapped all around Hoshido's hulking body but stopped a few inches away from Hoshido's throat where the hold was supposed to lock-in.
With another step, Hoshido tore through the shadowy stranglehold, freeing himself out from the shadowy grasp by simply walking it off. Everything went black around Skaven's face as the massive hand of his brutal opponent wrapped around his face and the hick thrust Skaven into the ceiling, smashing him through while he dragged Skaven's body across the crumbling ceiling and smashed him back into the ground face-first. Skaven's feet locked around Hoshido's wrist, stomping it a few times.
The pressure against the giant's nerves caused a nervous twitch that awarded Skaven with a couple of precious seconds to slither out of his opponent's control. Skaven's right hand shot down to support his plummeting weight while his left went for his tool pouch. He spun with overhead kicks while freeing a kunai from his holster. A pair of silvery blurs colored the intense atmosphere against the two colliding ninja leaving grievous but shallow scratches on Hoshido's waist and his face while Skaven propelled himself off the floor and spun around with his kunai in hand.
Hoshido let out a prolonged grunt while the image of his disgruntled expression solidified in Skaven's weary senses. Skaven didn't have the time to exclaim something ironic as the hick just roared out and charged at him with his arms spread out wide and just ran Skaven over, taking him along for the ride as the wild bruiser slammed through walls of wood and plaster like it was a sheet of wallpaper.
Once Hoshido settled down with his outrage, the brute looked down at a wooden frame that fell down off of his chest. A piece of the structural integrity of the building that Skaven had substituted himself with in order to avoid being taken for a ride. "Shadow Sewing Jutsu!" Skaven's voice resonated from a darker corner of a shadowy attic that had half fallen apart during Hoshido's rampage. A washing tidal wave of sharp shadowy tendrils erupted from the dark corner, skewering at the burly bumpkin.
"What are you made of?" Skaven muttered to himself as he felt his shadowy tendrils merely cutting into Hoshido's flesh or inflicting very shallow puncture wounds. Hoshido bellowed, his hefty hands grabbed hold of the shadowy tendrils and ripped them apart, snapping them and dissolving them at once as the brute freed himself and dripped with thin lines of dripping blood, coloring him from his wounds.
The hick jumped up and grabbed hold of the attic, with a powerful yank, Hoshido slammed the whole floor down by ripping it down atop of himself but all that he could care about was that the annoying rat hiding inside of the shadows and bombarding him from his perch-point was now out in the light. As Skaven dug through and did his best to crawl away from the slowly advancing threat of violent obliteration, Hoshido merely walked toward him menacingly.
Skaven rolled back, trying to get back on his feet, but a stray wooden frame hit him straight in the head. Everything went black for a second. Once Skaven's vision returned, he was staring at droplets of blood gathering in a threatening puddle as his head hung down and his hair obstructed the limited lighting in the room. Everything blacked out again when Hoshido push-kicked Skaven through a couple more rooms and walked menacingly toward his opponent.
As Skaven coughed up blood and clutched at his busted ribs, his vision settled on the advancing threat of glorified violence, who ripped out a broken wooden frame of the building and stared at its chipped off upper part for a few seconds. When Skaven's vision returned to him in its full efficiency, the Nara might have wanted it to have taken some sweet time as he witnessed Hoshido slamming his head into the sharp, wooden shreds, looking back up and smirking at Skaven with a face full of splinter shrapnel. One of the wooden spikes was sticking out from Hoshido's eye, and when the giant pulled it out, his eye burst into a bloody spit.
"Shadow Wave Jutsu!" Skaven grunted, taking one knee and weaving the Nara hijutsu's hand seal as a shadowy arm filled the room and smacked his opponent to the back wall. Once the hand dissolved, Hoshido dislodged himself from the wall three rooms back and stumbled, a tad hazed from the violent impact. "Shadow Assault Jutsu!" Skaven yelled out with brutality oozing from his voice as a tendril of shadows extended underneath his feet.
Once the black line reached Hoshido's relative location, it expanded into a pool of black from which smaller, shadow hands burst forth, delivering an unrelenting beat down from all sides and holding nothing back. Shadowy fists sticking themselves into Hoshido's meaty frame from the front, back, hitting him high and low, fists for his joints, fists for his ugly, broken mug and fists for his knee caps, fists hammering Hoshido's feet and hands grabbing hold and yanking his fingers.
"Shadow Strangulation Jutsu!" Skaven yelled out, feeling the wear settling on his chakra pool as the miniature fists all unified into larger hands crawling across Hoshido's body and surrounding his entire body, creeping up around Hoshido's hulking frame and circling his throat like a ring of shadowy petals. This time–they did their job.
A smirk colored Hoshido's face that was turning blue. The limbering hick struggled and struggled on, but he couldn't quite shake the dark restraints. The floor underneath him, however, got the hint. With a wooden snap and deafening rumbling, Hoshido disappeared underground as his floor gave way. Skaven yelled in severe physical pain as his entire body stiffened and the feeling of his muscles tearing bit by bit took control.
"N-No way… You… Hung… Yourself, you… Madman?" Skaven wheezed and croaked out as, bit by bit, the pull of the hole began dragging him to it. His opponent had fallen through, ending up hanging by shadowy arms, essentially, but the switch in position had caused incredible tension on Skaven, forcing the Nara to let go and catch a breath before his entire body rips to shreds on the inside.
Skaven rolled back, having learned his lesson about the way this human juggernaut operated, this instinctual feat of evasion allowed him to avoid Hoshido diving from underground with a shoulder charge, collapsing the entire floor they were on and causing a downfall of debris that shook the foundations of the entire building. As Skaven's sense of balance still felt woozy, his opponent reached out for a grab with his light-obstructing right hand. Before he grabbed and flung Skaven through some walls, however, a shadowy tendril wrapped around Hoshido's wrist, pulling his grabbing hand down and opening him up for a beat down from all sides from Skaven's part.
With the steel kunai ceasing its buzzing inside Skaven's hand and his fingers finally locking around the handle, the Nara trust it somewhere in the general vicinity of his opponent's face. The physical resistance reverberated through Skaven's arm, forcing the rebellious Nara to stumble back in pain. Before Hoshido could return on both feet, however, crazed by the bloody manner of this brawl, Skaven grabbed hold of a wooden board and slammed it a few times, hammering the kunai deeper in to crack through the adamantine noggin of his unstoppable assailant.
Before the fourteenth slam could register in place, Skaven's board hit something farther from its goal–Hoshido's open hand. The colossal bumpkin didn't even need to crush or break the board, it folded into wooden strings and chips merely from his fingers wrapping around it, and Skaven once again found himself unarmed against a half-blinded and crazed opponent of unnatural strength.
Skaven didn't even realize it when the sense of weightlessness hit him as he was already over Hoshido's head. A brutal driver delivered from an overhead, body-slamming position drilled through the cement floor with Skaven's own head coloring the pale cement in blood-red. Just this one slam wouldn't do, however, as Skaven still counted stars and tried to walk toward the voices that were the only change of pace in the void of all-white that he found himself in, Hoshido's hands locked around Skaven's heels, flipping him over like a rag doll and slamming him about the warehouse. Whatever appliances, gadgets, and tools the Allied Ninja stored there, they were gone, broken and dusted by the shock wave and thunderous force of the brute.
Seeing Skaven writhing on the floor seemingly senseless, Hoshido lifted his foot to stomp his opponent's consciousness away, but before his foot landed on the squishy mush of his opponent's caving-face, it met a solid resistance of a shadowy bubble. Skaven had encased himself in his signature Shadow Prison Jutsu and shielded himself from the stomp. Now that he had gained one quarter, Skaven would not give up. The black tendrils wrapped around Hoshido's foot, locking him in place as the prison transferred from Skaven onto his opponent.
"Shit… Give me a second, at least for my head to stop ringing…" Skaven stumbled on his feet as a shadowy bubble wobbled and thick lumps from within it resonated throughout but failed to break the malleable containment of natural expression of darkness that Hoshido found himself in. "Any normal day, any other occasion, I'd have long since nope'd out of this one. Wouldn't even have come to blows with a lump of meat like you. That's just asking for trouble. But one thing I've come to realize today is that some fights are just worth fighting, some matters are worth involving yourself in. Sometimes it's good to be included in other people's business. That's tough luck for you, yokel, 'cause when we Nara put our brain and brawn into it and get motivated–we're kinda strong."
Skaven weaved a Nara hijutsu hand seal, "Shadow Sewing Jutsu!" Skaven wheezed out through the burning ribs to skewer the shadowy prison from inside out with black spikes sticking out from within and another batch of sewing tendrils poking like through from the outside. The complete assault on the bubble's integrity forced the Shadow Prison to burst from a minute, black singularity, flinging Hoshido right out, somehow, in one piece.
Hoshido grunted, standing up with his right eye blood-red, his entire rough frame littered with tears and scrapes, both of the constant bashing and rushing through construction material and shadows stitching him up constantly. While Skaven's will to fight and ability to stand lingered like never before, it was now only the sight of the giant wobbly on his feet and dripping blood in large, droopy pillars that still kept Skaven going.
The hick's lips twisted in an upward crescent. His grumpy eyes gleamed with an almost ecstatic state of utter psychopathy as he refused to utter a single word. Hoshido licked the blood off of his lips, but the blood soon soaked them again. Why the brute wanted a taste of his blood when his entire mouth drowned in bleeding gums and tearing from his internal injuries was beyond Skaven.
Without a particular rush to his movement, the bumpkin pulled out a knife that utterly drowned inside of his hand. Only a measly tip of his kunai could have been visible from the massive hand that enveloped it, but Hoshido approached his opponent with it, regardless. Skaven wobbled, wondering what his best option was. As absolute death approached him with a menacing, psychopathic grin on his face, the Nara went through his options.
He had gone through more than half of his chakra and it failed to down one man. This bout had weakened both of them, but this mostly harmed Skaven, as this meant he might not resist his opponent meaningfully now. In around a couple of minutes, he'd regain enough stamina to substitute again, but that would have required time sitting still. Even if he applied the Shadow Possession on Hoshido, it would be a struggle and hardly comparable to moments of actual rest. No, there'd be no rest as long as this relentless ogre was on his tail.
Skaven leaned back, avoiding a slash. This was feint, but Skaven read it. He dived underneath Hoshido's grab with the free arm without even having to see the arm behind him. If he'd have gotten grabbed–Hoshido would have gutted and flayed him alive. With those eyes, that look on his face, the troll hadn't seen a challenge like this in a long time and he thrived in this violence now. His entire life had frozen still and only this meeting, only this brawl now mattered. Skaven thrust his foot into the side of Hoshido's knee. A churning snap followed it as Hoshido collapsed and gave Skaven a way to roll over the hick's back and put some distance between them.
As much as Skaven wanted to attack–he just couldn't. All he could do was stumble helplessly. His face and everything underneath simply burned, and that pain was preferable to when it all gone down numb and Skaven just couldn't feel anything under his neck, relying on muscle memory and instinct alone to manipulate his body through chakra application as it felt like the next best thing to being paralyzed.
Hoshido growled in a satisfied snarl and turned around and flung the knife right at Skaven. It was half-assed fling as he wasn't even aiming, but it wasn't the knife that Hoshido meant to hit Skaven with. No, it was the chilling, sizzling sound that filled the air that mattered. The ogre had used his massive hand to fold and hide the explosive tag attached to the other end of the kunai. A silent and deadly hissing noise chilled Skaven to the bone–a gas leak!?
The entire building lit up, balls of flames drove out from each available window, and what wasn't available faced obliteration in the face of the shock wave and rushing infernal destruction. The tower rumbled and shook by its very foundation. It had been on wobbly legs before, but now it had no foundation to crutch to and thus down it went. Dust and shrapnel washed away like torrential waves of brown, choking corruption. Regimental Commander Harcel waved his hand before him and coughed.
A black blur alerted the eyes of an old veteran as he looked to Skaven, landing right beside him on both feet after a supersonic dash, though the Nara had not found the Regimental Commander of his own volition. The explosion of the tower had ripped off the top of the Nara's clothes and left his body with significant wear and tear - patches of burnt flesh as he raced to outrun an explosion from point-blank range while within the verge of collapse already. The fact that this young man even reeled on his knees beside the Regimental Commander given the circumstances made Harcel draw air from both his nostrils and his mouth with gleeful excitement.
"Well, well… Recruit Skaven, I took you for a punk, yet here you are, blowing me old away with the resolve and strength you have within you. At least one solid warrior will graduate from this rotten generation of useless weaklings. Perhaps this Stars group warrants another look, after all, with the strength of Konoha's Sorceress and now you, maybe I was too quick to judge the group?" Harcel crossed his arms while his black and red coat rustled behind him, thrown about by the violent gales of the wildfire raging in the training grounds.
Skaven winced in pain and looked up at the walking tank puppet that was just inches away from the tower. While the tower was down, which was a part of the Siege Team's aim, they did not secure the scrolls prior to toppling it down. Technically, that made both of them fail. Though this test wasn't what was important here. It was just a pretext for the two groups to settle their differences.
"Damisan…" Skaven tried standing up, but he fell right back down, tearing a wound that had already clotted by that time and colored the ground underneath him in a wet, red stain as the Nara realized he lacked the strength to even walk up to that moving tower, attacking it was a different matter entirely.
A loud pop followed by the sound of thrashing wood and rumbling, bricks falling apart and breaking made Skaven turn to his right. With a roaring punch that sounded more like an explosion all of its own category, Hoshido punched his way out from underneath the rubble, walking out from an entire tower falling on top of him.
"Well, well… Will nothing put this recruit down for good? I may have underestimated both parties here. When my eyes first met recruit Hoshido, I took him for an ordinary countryside settler. Working the farm his entire life in the Snow Country, incapable of using ninjutsu or genjutsu of any kind, lacking formal ninjutsu education of a Ninja Academy… And yet… I am yet to see what it takes to put this man down." Regimental Commander Harcel clapped to himself. Step by step, Hoshido walked toward the fallen Skaven like a man-possessed, determined to rip his enemy limb from limb because with how close the Nara has come to doing the impossible–he made it all personal.
Now Hoshido was beyond the point of reason, beyond all sense of control, and beyond orders. Now he was just a living vessel for the violence that beat in his heart and flowed through his veins. Skaven grit his teeth and crawled a few feet toward the advancing monster, doing his best to peel his bleeding, burnt and battered body off the ground for a last couple of rounds, but he found himself utterly helpless from the waist down.
Hoshido's thunderous fist shook the ground underneath where he pounded the dirt and left a house-wide crater in it. Skaven had rolled aside, but the collapsing ground drew him back to his pursuer who would not stop, who needed no rest or quarter. With a slick, metallic wisp, a kunai from Skaven's pouch found its way underneath Hoshido's kneecap and the Nara wrangled and mess the blade up after stabbing it. As bubbly crimson sprayed from the injured knee and Hoshido fell to one knee, the two engaged in some last resort wrestling in the ditch of Hoshido's making. Skaven weaved out of the way of Hoshido's hammering pounds and jabbed to whichever weak link he found in the giant's body–his bleeding eyes, his throat, his stuck up joints. A war of overwhelming power against deceitful and precise serpentine blows.
A powerhouse packing force to conclude the battle with one punch against an experienced ex-criminal fully capable of sustaining this war of attrition. Harcel's eyes marveled at this lowly, dirty struggle between the two young men like two amethysts. All the while, another battle raged atop of the walking structure of a building-sized tank-puppet where Damisan faced his abuser in a battlefield of the bully's choosing.