"Humph, what a disgusting lot. Just look at what they've done with this place… It's about time that someone judged these scums rightfully for what they've done." Endo stared at the surrounding mosaics and various displays of mangled and torn human bodies.
"I sincerely hope that they truly are ogres and not humans. It's hard to imagine that a human would be capable of such cruelty." Shige's voice trembled as she gave each gruesome artifact of artistic expression its own due time. Mana just closed her eyes and attempted to walk by the display without looking at either expression of it. Being the supreme authority on herself, the magician just knew that she'd lose it after gazing at one of these grotesque showcases once more and she'd be of no help to anyone while unstable and out for punishment.
This may have been the first time that what she saw around her reminded Mana of her nightmarish meeting with Guru Ayushi and made her feel like she was back in Jigoku again. This region of the desert, decorated with flayed, cut apart, and staked human bodies and separate body parts with sand soaked with blood that had become thick and spread its putrid stuffiness all around looked just as maddening and unbelievable as the landscape of the worst prison in the world.
"Can you scope out how many of them there are?" Kakashi turned to Mana.
"It's going to be… Disgusting but… I think I can." Mana sighed, closing her eyes and carefully reaching out with her essence toward the center of the horrid chakra signature in the center of the nearby manor standing out on the horizon. "There are four of them. Their chakra signatures are B-Rank in size but… The corruption and dark feeling of apathy and hopelessness are present… If we underestimate them for a second, our bodies will decorate this desert alongside these people."
Mana clutched her abdomen as it had begun rustling with bubbly unease. The magician leaned over to vomit, but she realized she didn't have any control over her body anymore. With a violent jerk, Mana's spine snapped backward and as her vomit burst forth in an upward shower, it turned solid and… Almost metal-like. A resonance of pain passed down Mana's body as the magician's soul seemed to float off separately from her body. The horror of her body impaled on a stake from the bottom all the way up and hanging out to dry, still half-alive and twitching, made Mana shiver and open her eyes.
"What happened? You just collapsed there for a second…" Skaven leaned down to help Mana get up.
"These chakra signatures are like nothing else I've sensed before. Reaching out to them doesn't come without its own consequences. You have to face the absolute certainty of your death every time you try to look at them." Mana explained while trying to wipe the phantom upchuck she could still feel on her lip despite it being absolutely dry and there not seeming to be even a trace of it in her mouth.
"Get yourself together, Mana." Endo looked down at the rising kunoichi with a strict glare. "We'll need your help to punish this bane of humankind and wipe them out. If you can't guarantee that you can be at your best, you better stay back."
"This isn't the first time that I'll be facing an overwhelming enemy with my chakra sensory working against me," Mana replied with her mind returning to the finals of the Chuunin Exams and her time in the Jigoku prison that still felt like a fever dream. "Fortunately for me, we won't be able to kill anything here."
"Come again?" Endo raised an eyebrow. "I'm fine with you and your nindo, Mana. You can choose to spare as many lives as you want. Your signature kind of merciful sadism even feels right in this case. But don't presume for a second to be in any position to tell us how to proceed and deal with these monsters."
"That's not what I meant." Mana shook her head. "If these are indeed ogres that we're dealing with, you literally cannot kill them. You can only seal them away."
"That's some useful information that I am very glad we are getting right now instead of in the heat of battle," Damisan raised his finger up as a wave of surprise washed over him. "That being said, do any of you have any methods of sealing people?"
"I have a few sealing techniques." Kakashi nodded. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see if they are suitable for dealing with monsters like these. It would help to know better what we're about to deal with, Mana."
"Please, Kakashi-san, don't tell me you believe in all that hogwash about ogres!" Temari raised an eyebrow.
"Back when Pain attacked Konoha, there were reports about him pulling people's very souls out from their bodies. I also have quite vivid dreams of visiting the Pure Lands myself once, dreams I very much believe in since my deadly experience facing off against Pain. I suppose while we are hard at work looking for the Bag of Fujin so that our friends here can travel back through time, the concept of evil spirits doesn't sound all that farfetched anymore." Kakashi replied.
"Ogres are said to be abominations of mixed flesh. Specifically, the flesh of a cannibal and its victim. The act of cannibalism forges an unholy, almost ritualistic contract between the victim and its devourer. If at that moment there is ever a demon so vile that it is not allowed through the Demon Gate in the Pure Lands, they can enter and malform both bodies, merging them together into a twisted amalgamation of sadism and torment alike. Or at least that's what the mythology scrolls in the Konoha Archives suggest." Mana shrugged. It was difficult not to shiver while explaining all that, all the while, the sensation of being beaten within an inch of her life and impaled still lingered fresh in her mind after the vision.
"I see, in that case, there's no reason merely destroying their bodies shouldn't work in the worst-case scenario. It'd merely leave the demon stranded and very much vexed, I'd imagine." Kakashi shrugged. "But let's agree to only resort to that if sealing fails."
A red-skinned mountain of muscle sat perched on a pile of bones as he stared at a beaten feminine shape in his hands. The poor thing had her limbs snapped and mangled in all directions, so even if she had been conscious and alive, she'd have had very few options but to lament her inevitable demise. The captive of the inhabitants of this outlandish manor didn't wake up or show any signs of awareness by the time that the slobbering face of demonic features and a psychotic grin, decorated with curved fangs, descended to devour it.
While the body of the captive dissolved into just a runny puddle of blood and guts and sifted through the fingers of the red-skinned ogre that was in the middle of greedily devouring it, another, blue-skin giant stood over a pile of dismembered and murdered bodies and just bashed them with a kanabo repeatedly. There didn't seem to be any purpose to this violence. The blue-skinned monster just liked how hammered human flesh sounded, the cracks and churns of bones and the wet, chunky splatter when the hardwood and nails slammed against battered human flesh.
There was no use interfering and trying to pull off a daring rescue, for there was nothing left to salvage. The beasts had killed everyone in their sights and passing by before having their way with the remains. The occupied ogre that seemed so invested in devouring the droopy corpse looked up with grand surprise in its goofy eyes. Before him stood another ogre, just like him but of blue skin, and stared at him and the remains of the puddle that he held in his hands.
The abomination bellowed with a rumbling shock wave and instantly focused his gaze on the ninja magician standing in front of him, believing herself hidden under the guise of her illusion that should have generated a worthy mental foe for her opponent to tire themselves out against. Mana gasped before the hard edge of a kanabo swung at her head, leaving just a headless stump that soon dissolved into electricity that ran up the wood and engulfed the abominable ogre, shocking it from toes to its scalp.
Although the tower of bones and muscle twitched and jerked with such intensity and force that it should have dislocated all of its joints at once and stressed its most sensitive bones to the point of cracking, it didn't seem like this at all affected the evil spirit occupying the merged remains of multiple bodies at once. The ogre bellowed again, showing itself off in all of its nightmarish grandeur. Hair growing in and out around it and etching into the flesh like needle and thread connected the places where muscle and limbs of separate bodies had been stitched together. Because of the unique composition of this entity, its eyes and teeth were all of different sizes. It may have been that a few of these ogres may not have been composed of just two bodies, suggesting that their hosts had been engaged in quite the feast before their possession.
"Genjutsu doesn't seem to work on these lumps. Just as I thought, they are merely evil spirits occupying a multitude of dead bodies. If they haven't got a functional brain of a working chakra system and are fueled by the spiritual parasite inside them, there's no use in either type of genjutsu." Mana sighed.
"I see," Kakashi sighed. "Well then, let's give it a proper go then…"
The Stars and the Konoha ninja all took off at once to confront the ogres. The ruckus of the red-skinned ogre had caused a commotion within the manor halls and, judging by the rumbling noises in the upper half of the manor, the two remaining ogres would soon join the scuffle as well.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu!" Kakashi chanted out, going through the hand seals and blowing into an opening between his finger sign, expelling a large sphere of solid flames that escalated like a fiery bomb toward the red-skinned ogre and slammed into it, splashing some of its heated flames upon impact. The concentrated state of the fireball made it drive the tall beast to the ground, struggling against it.
"Wind Release: Great Sickle Weasel Jutsu!" Temari swung her fan upward, creating a blinding mass of heavy air currents that both slammed into the ogre, undoing its attempts at struggling against Kakashi's Great Fireball and collided with the Great Fireball, causing a grand, explosive reaction that blasted the roof off of the manor and made its ancient walls scatter outward like weightless scrap inside of a turbulent tornado.
Kakashi pulled out a scroll and rolled it across the ground, shuffling through hand seals before he slammed his hand onto the scroll. "Sealing Technique: Enclosing Jutsu!" Kakashi chanted, creating a swooping force of attraction that scooped air and everything around it up, calling it forth toward the center of the scroll. A bestial arm dived out from the smoke and slammed its open palm where Kakashi had been kneeling over the scroll.
As the snarling ogre pulled its hand away, it could only see Kakashi's tattered scroll with Kakashi himself, having substituted with a piece of ruined manor rubble and hanging atop of a diagonally staggering wall that found its rest against a pillar of sandstone.
"What was wrong? Did the seal not work?" Temari grit her teeth, swinging her fan again to create a protective gale and reflect the beast's attempts to scoop her up and squeeze her guts through every crevice of her body in its grip.
"No, it may just be that the ogre was too vigorous to be sealed," Kakashi replied, going through the hand seals, then taking a sip from his water flask and inhaling deep. "Water Style: Water Dragon Jutsu!" he gargled up with the gulp of water lingering stuck in his airway before the man that had ascended to the rank of the Sixth Hokage in this universe expelled it all, drastically expanded from a mere gulp he took in. The mass of water transformed into the shape of a coiling dragon mid-flight.
Endo dashed away from the blue ogre as the crashing Water Dragon Jutsu washed against it and staggered it to the garden of dismembered and desecrated bodies. As the ogre stumbled and extended its hand to prevent its fall, it crushed a handful of bodies into wet puddles that mixed with the coarse grains of sand underneath.
The swordsman let out a valiant battle cry as he charged onward with his Sword of the Thunder God in hand, slashing at the beast's foot and both separating the rest of the ogre's body from it and shocking the abomination in sync with Kakashi's Water Dragon.
"Sealing Technique: Cylindrical Seal!" Mana rolled her top hat off her head and pointed it at the blue-skinned ogre. The monstrous golem of flesh snarled and aimed its dismembered leg, squirting a hose-worth of blood at Mana and washing the ninja magician away while she was vulnerable and preparing to seal it away. Mana squirmed and shivered, soaked with blood. Even if she worked faster with overcoming the shock of being swatted aside disturbingly like that, the manor floor had been similarly soaked and this made getting back up a daunting and slippery task.
"Unmaker Fist!" Shige-H yelled out, slamming at the back of the blue-skinned ogre's head with a soaring right hook. The ogre's head simply unraveled with a chunky shower of dissolving flesh, popping from within like a balloon while the abomination staggered forward, trying to touch and feel its head that was no longer there.
"Homing Rocket Arrow Barrage!" Damisan chanted out, raising his arm and allowing his changed prosthetic to unravel with missiles sticking out from all directions in the hidden compartments comprising what would have looked like the skin of his hand. The missiles all homed in on the opening in the ogre's demolished head and burrowed within its innards, exploding from within and splattering the fleshy remains of the ogre all across the manor.
"Sealing Technique: Enclosing Jutsu!" Kakashi grumbled after falling on his knees and opening up another storage scroll to seal up the splattered remains of the ogre before he revived as the myths and legends of ogres suggested it would. This time, the smoky vortex encompassed the ogre's remains and slurped them up within the scroll.
Kakashi turned his head up, widening his gaze as the inevitable sight of a kanabo rushing in to splatter him homed in on his location in a wide, horizontal swing.
"Wind Release: Great Wind Protective Wall!" Temari yelled out, swinging her fan to expel a powerful wall of solid wind gales to deflect the ogre's kanabo with force matching if not surpassing that of the ogre. The red-skinned ogre roared and pounded its face with the side of its own fist and began thrashing with its wood and metal mace all over the place.
"They're too strong and unflinching to seal them away while they're whole. Destroy their bodies and seal their remains away before they revive!" Kakashi issued a crucial piece of mid-battle advice while the Allied Ninja and the Konoha ninja alike gave the thrashing monster of myth and legend its space. A fleshy thud sent Kakashi fumbling forward as a large sickle-blade stabbed through Kakashi's back, dulling the ninja's gaze out and drowning his face mask with red stains.
A black-skinned ogre that had joined the scuffle from the feast on the higher floors snarled with a massive chained sickle in hand. One side of the sickle had been what impaled Kakashi after the monstrosity hooked the blade while the Konoha ninja occupied themselves with its green-skinned pal. Damisan dashed in and thrust his fist in between the chain links, preventing the black-skinned ogre from reeling Kakashi in for a couple of savoring chomps.
Damisan wrapped the chain around his prosthetic arms and took off with a stream of chakra jets erupting from his legs, snapping the chain links apart and rolling around the red-skinned ogre to retrieve the injured Kakashi and bring him closer to Shige-H who could have treated something like impalement in just a few minutes.
"Loving these upgrades, don't know if I would have had the juice otherwise…" Damisan snickered after placing Kakashi down and scanning the battlefield that had become more hectic after the second pair of ogres joined in.
"Look, Mana, is that the bag we're looking for?" Endo pointed at a green ogre with a full beard and long, silver hair. The long-haired ogre had a half-broken elephant skull decorating the upper half of his face, though its own fangs stuck out from underneath instead of the lost tusks. It clenched an ivory mace in its right hand and a leathery bag attached to a handful of pipes loosely hanging from underneath the ogre's armpit.
"It has to be. Though, if the ogre has the mental capacity to control it, we're in for a tough time." Mana replied.
"Less talking, more sealing!" Skaven barked out while taking the knee and extending a shadowy line across the manor floor and around each Allied or Konoha ninja, headed toward the red-skinned ogre. The black and green ogres both charged at once, but Temari swung her fan, expelling a rough gale that held both titans in place and even pushed them skidding back a few paces.
The ogre stuffed its kanabo into the ground, forcing a connection between its shadow and Skaven's Shadow Possession that way and forcefully closing the link. With a roaring push kick, the beast sent its kanabo rolling around the floor like a buzz saw. Mana clapped her hands together.
A blue flame of base chakra, lacking any nature, burnt in a cylindrical shape, resembling a top hat with its opening aimed at the incoming weapon. The chakra construct swallowed up the buzzing kanabo before popping from the force of impact and leaving the massive weapon skidding aside across the floor harmlessly. Skaven, Shige-H, and Damisan all turned to Mana with surprise, never having seen anything like that. It had been as if the magician had manifested a chakra construct out of thin air without casting a jutsu.
"That's about as far as I've come to take my armor ninjutsu…" Mana admitted. "Not quite an armor, but it gets most jobs done, and it's almost as strong as one."