"Damn! Not a scratch on it!" Kankuro grumbled, sending a banshee-like puppet of six limbs and a pig-like, wooden face on an air raid, shooting streams of flames from its snout while its central compartment dropped wooden balls stuck with explosive paper tags.
Because of the massive size of the roaming colossus and the limited range of Kankuro's puppetry, the Sand ninja could only reach up to around the giant's heel and lower calf. Despite that, it didn't seem that either the fire or the explosives left a dent either. While the Colossus' heel became smoldering red from the pumping heat, it was just as quick to cool back off to a state of stony black.
"Let's work together on this!" Damisan called out to Kankuro. The Sunagakure puppeteer had his puppet swoop down while Damisan raised his arms and unraveled rings and hidden compartments with missile-like projectiles. With a crude yank, Damisan loaded his arsenal onto the compartments of Kankuro's puppets while the modified shinobi leaned down and picked up disc-shaped tools that gleamed as cybernetic patterns around his calves and his thighs, placing them onto Kankuro's salamander-like puppet down on the ground.
The Colossus of the Covenant turned around and cocked its fist, ready to smash it into the general vicinity of its attackers. The rough evening clouds had masked the giant's face as even after he had kneeled, the massive shape measured itself up in the lower levels of the atmosphere. Airstreams and blazing rings surrounded the town-sized fist as it threatened to flatten the surface of the world and shatter the entire world to a blizzard of smoldering cosmic pebbles.
"Don't let it punch the ground!" Gaara shouted, raising his hands and accumulating all the sand present in his gourd and the additional masses of sand surrounding him in the desert. The Kazekage formed all the sand into an airborne shield to coat the entire area and protect it from devastation.
A thunderous crack signaled Colossus' fist blasting right through the wall of sand with no trouble. Where Gaara had gathered the dome of sand to protect the entire world from the Colossus' wrath, after the behemoth punched right through, it only added to the calamity by shooting down below in a vicious and crude downpour. The effects on Gaara were even more severe as blood shot out from the Kazekage's mouth and sprayed through his clenched teeth while his eyes rolled back and his neat, red hair spiked up from the stress of feeling that impact on his chakra network.
Damisan's feet lit up with blazes. The self-puppeteering ninja dived forward in a mad dash and erected his arms, letting his unraveled arm prosthetics split into separate hammering support poles and slam against the ground while his feet also widened and undergone a similar transformation by flattening and enveloping with thick layers of rubber. Damisan became more of a cushioning station than a man in shape. He held a pair of his cybernetic mine discs in his hands where the impact should have taken place as well.
The moment that the Colossus' fist met Damisan's opposition, the mines went off with beams of azure plasma shining up into the skies. The counterforce halted the Colossus' fist somewhat after Gaara's best effort had played its role to halt the punch as much as possible. Damisan's entire frame rippled with pressure rims burst and cracked all over, wires popped and began shooting off steam and leaking oil and other support fluids. Despite all that, once Damisan crumbled into the shape of a broken toy dropped on the ground, the Colossus' punch had been stopped.
Kankuro sent Crow soaring through the sky, dropping Damisan's missiles onto the wide-open Colossus while Salamander crept up under the giant's feet and opened up its compartment, revealing the supply of mines that Damisan had loaded into it. As the giant stepped onto the Salamander, grinding it into splinters, nuts, and bolts, the mines detonated all at once, lifting bits of the Colossus' feet up from the ground slightly but ending up just resonating through his heel with passing concussive force instead of making the great, roaming statue crumble.
"Nothing we do leaves a mark, so far only the foreigners have opposed the Colossus meaningfully," a Sunagakure Black Ops ninja muttered as he sent an iron chain from under his sleeve wrapping around Gaara's waist and pulled his superior from harm's way while another Black Ops ninja prepared to treat the Kazekage's injuries.
"Shit… All that outstanding tech and I couldn't last more than one punch?" Damisan grumbled while lying on the ground. Every single artificial piece of his handicapped body had been malfunctioning and refusing to work. Kankuro's sandals tapped lightly by Damisan's side as the puppeteer leaned down to his collapsed ally.
"I have some more puppets to spare but… They won't do anything to this goliath. Someone give us some cover!" Kankuro yelled out, wrapping his puppetry strings around Damisan's collapsed body as he moved both of them away from the immediate harm's way.
"Mana, Fire Release!" Kakashi yelled out.
"Fire Style: Burning Soul!" Mana chanted after forming a trio of hand seals. The ninja magician breathed out a relatively tame mass of flames that wrapped into a head-sized sphere, which whizzed toward the Colossus of the Covenant like a skyward comet. The magician added a few more improvised hand seals after the technique had formed, commanding the sphere to alter its course after being launched, which was the key feature of this ninjutsu technique.
"Wind Style: Pressure Damage!" Kakashi chanted after weaving hand seals and expelling a tornado-like mass that was quick to catch up to Mana's technique after a brief pursuit of it. It made the task even simpler when the magician could control the pacing, trajectory, and direction of her technique with additional hand seals. The expanding tornado dome made Mana's Burning Soul howl with a wild shriek and inflate tenfold.
The subtle fireball exploded into a gigantic firestorm and spread all over the lower part of the Colossus, lighting up the sky with a crimson blaze. Mana had never seen her Fire Style act so destructive. For a blink, she winced, as if fearing for the fate of her opponent and the surrounding land, but her chakra sensory had long since tipped her off they weren't up against a breathing being, but a golem of sorts.
"That was an impressive combination," Mana admitted.
"A rogue ninja once used this combo against me. He called it "Fire Style: Searing Migraine"," Kakashi nodded in acknowledgment of the exceptional destructive potential that the two ninja working together could pull off.
Jolts of resonant lightning passed up the Colossus of the Covenant, ripping through the desert floor and sending the ninja facing off against it into a desperate tumble for their lives. It was a sign that the Colossus had truly awakened and was ready to wreak havoc again. The shadow of its fist over the clouds loomed over the entire desert. The thundering aura of electricity around it and spiraling jets of lightning surrounding the incoming tremendous pound made it appear almost as if the sun had risen to the middle of its journey in a blink.
"I'll need some cover, Mana, I could use a Lightning Release jutsu!" Kakashi ordered up. Without needing to be asked twice, Endo shuffled past the veteran ninja while forming hand seals and sent an expansive barrier of Wind Release at the incoming, world-ending blow.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!" Endo yelled out before reaching for the hilt of the Sword of the Thunder God and igniting it again. The swordsman raised the thunderous blade up and pointed it at the incoming pound. The turbulent jets and streams of electricity began wavering before switching their direction toward Endo's blade, which concentrated all the electricity in the area and began sapping the Colossus' own strength.
Endo kicked off the ground with a gust of wind, sending piles of sand blasting in all directions. The wrathful swordsman must have been as mad as his reputation suggested him to be to swing his super-sized Sword of the Thunder God right toward the crux of the incoming blow. Endo changed his stance into a full-body thrusting stance in mid-air and drove the Sword of the Thunder God in between the Colossus' middle and ring fingers. The collision sent a rumbling shock wave and shrieking electrical crackles as an immovable, adamantine fist met an all-piercing horn of the Sword of the Thunder God's super-charged thrust.
"It worked!" Temari gasped, pointing at the Colossus' fist that had stopped and lingered above the ground over a kilometer in the air. "He stopped the blow! I think he even hurt that thing!"
"This isn't the time to stop!" Kakashi grumbled, finally having completed over eighty hand seals. The veteran shinobi reached for his water flask and emptied it all out at once while his belly suddenly inflated as if he had drunk gallons upon gallons of water from it. Kakashi's glove moved his mask for only a second to spit out the gigantic mass of water as a crashing tidal wave as the water seemed to multiply exponentially still. "Water Style: Twin Dragon Bullet Jutsu!"
The tidal wave of water that Kakashi had created blossomed into the form of twin dragons, rising from its depths and taking in all the multiplied water into their shapes. The dragons seemed to feed off of the water mass like living whirlpools and so they became as towering as measuring up to the Colossus' knees as they rocketed up through the clouds to chase after the behemoth's weak spots.
"Lightning Style: Heinous Shock Jutsu!" Mana chanted out, placing her right hand forward as she wrapped her left hand around her right wrist, expelling a stream of Lightning Release chakra from her palm that contacted the crashing wave of water and enveloped it with electricity almost in a blink. The electricity had taken a purplish hue as it traveled all the way up the bodies of the rising dragons and, upon becoming coated with an aura of purple lightning, the dragons bit into the Colossus.
The skies turned purple as down-pouring rain of artificially created water began showering the Wind Country desert for the first time in eight months. Flashes of violet light had enveloped the Colossus of the Covenant fully while the vicious storm of purple lightning sent Endo plummeting down, only for Temari to wave her twin fans to create a cushioning air pocket and make Endo land softly on the ground. A vociferous rumble shook the ground below, reducing all the ninja facing off against the goliath to stumbling dolls before the majesty of the unscathed Colossus.
"This… This is hard to take in for certain…" Kakashi muttered, covering up his eyes as the flashing light of purple lightning met the Colossus' own booming aura of power, creating a streaming light show in the sky. "These ninja from another universe have chakra many times over surpassing that of any Ootsutsuki and yet even their super-charged toughest jutsu can't scratch this thing. It makes Naruto and Sasuke's efforts back then feel childish…"
"It's not like you to give up yet, Kakashi!" Kankuro smirked while giving Damisan a pat on the shoulder as the two rejoined the fray.
"Damisan…" Kakashi muttered, observing Kankuro's spare parts, scrap and pieces of his destroyed puppets, and the Sasori puppet decorating Damisan and barely holding him together.
"Come on, Temari, Shige!" Damisan yelled out, taking a knee and connecting his hands together into a tube-like shape. The frame of his combined arm prosthetics appeared almost like a catapult tube. "If not even Mana's supercharged jutsu can't cut it, why don't we try unmaking this thing?"
"Unmaking?" Temari gulped.
"Right…" Shige-H nodded, vaulting over the top of the frame of Damisan's tube and slipping in while Damisan positioned it to aim the leader of Stars to fly as high as the name of her team suggested.
"I'll be trusting you to navigate me around the Colossus' defenses, Temari," Shige-H turned to the blonde with a hopeful look. Temari nodded and gulped again, giving the looming and flexing Colossus a dire look.
"Ninja Art: Human Catapult!" Damisan yelled out, shooting a stream of air from the back of his modified tube and flames from Kankuro's additions to his arsenal while sending Shige-H soaring into the sky like a living arrow. The medical kunoichi groaned and growled in pain as the concussive force of Damisan's Human Catapult had done a number on her ribs and joints and the flames left more than one mean patch of torched skin over Shige-H's exposed body.
Just as it dawned to Shige-H about how bad of an idea this entire thing was, the invisible gale generated by Temari helped her stay in mid-air and gave her some time to start a Mystical Palm Jutsu and treat herself up before igniting her Unmaker Fist. Using her much smaller twin fans, Temari created horizontal vortexes and gust tunnels that carried Shige-H around the Colossus' wails and smacks and helped to better position her for each successive blow.
"It's working!" Kankuro exclaimed in shock, pointing at the dust and pebble-sized debris breaking off of the Colossus. "She's doing damage!"
"While impressive, this won't help us win," a Sunagakure Black Ops ninja observed. "The damage that the foreigner inflicts only scrapes the outermost layer of the Colossus of the Covenant. She deals some damage, sure, but Temari-san, as well as the foreigner, will have long since run out of chakra before they can deliver any notable cracks."
"We can't… Stop fighting…" Gaara wiped the blood off his lips, leaving nasty smears over his face. "If we do, the Colossus will connect with one of its world-shattering punches and it'll all be over for everyone. I'm sorry, I put the entire world in jeopardy and I didn't even consider the worst-case scenario."
"With all due respect, Kazekage-sama, if we die here fighting this golem, the outcome will be the same as if we had fled. Shige-san needs to keep swinging. At least it's keeping the Colossus occupied for now," Mana observed.
"Naturally, but we need to find another way to deal with this thing in the meantime. Don't we have any more devastating jutsu to attempt?" Gaara wondered. "The golem's frame must be weaker now than before. Perhaps a Searing Migraine performed by Mana would do it now?"
"No, I might pull off a Searing Migraine combination alone now that I know how it's done, but… It won't make any difference. I'd just waste chakra. It's not a living creature either, genjutsu won't work on it at all…" Mana crossed her arms and sunk her chin down. "If only I had polished my Advanced Bloodline ability by now… No matter if the opponent was a cosmic-scale colossus or the Gods themselves, I'd have made them feel it."
"Gods…" Kakashi scratched his head, pulling off a scroll from his back and unraveling it. After a hand seal and a pop, a bagpipe-like, saggy tool laid before the silver-haired ninja. "When humans run out of things to try, they pray to the Gods for help." Kakashi joked with a delightful smirk visible only in his closed eyes.
"The Bag of Fujin…" Endo sneered. "I don't know. We beat that ogre when it was using it, didn't we?"
"If there is anything we can yet try, please…" Gaara pressed his palms together as if begging Kakashi to use the divine tool that the Konoha and Allied Ninja have salvaged during their quest.
"Okay, here goes… Temari, get Shige-H out of the way," Kakashi glanced at his ally who nodded in acknowledgment and swung her fans to the side, making the wind tunnel pull a sharp U-turn and get Shige-H far away from the colossal entity she tried punching to minuscule success.
"Bag of Fujin!" Kakashi yelled out, uncorking the dusty old bag and unleashing a turbulent, emerald vortex from inside it that howled in a straight line toward the Colossus. It smashed right into the goliath, dragging it back with a violent push that left canyon-sized ridges on the ground, and shiny, ethereal blades of vacuum sent sparks all across the colossal body of the Iwagakure's greatest and the most terrifying creation.
"It felt it," Endo chuckled. "Keep it up!"
Wrestling against the divine power dwarfing even the most turbulent of cosmic storms found in the universe, the Colossus of the Covenant shoved its palm into the fray, blocking the immediate blast of the gale and slowly gaining its position back by dragging its supermassive body forward.
"Well, well… This thing's really tough on the arms, isn't it?" Kakashi winced in torment as his arms grew numb from struggling to keep the leaking divine power focused on the enemy. Just as they had gained some hope that Fujin's power would blow the Colossus straight out from the face of the Earth, careening into space where it couldn't have harmed anyone, the Colossus of the Covenant seemed to have drawn its second wind when Kakashi's stamina had dwindled to a single twig.
The bag slipped out from Kakashi's grasp, falling on the ground and sending a flux of desert sand blasting toward the advancing Colossus, making the monstrous goliath fumble. Without someone to control and streamline its power, the Bag of Fujin had been acting wild, sending unimaginable storms in all directions while the Sunagakure, Konohagakure, and the Allied Ninja alike tried to get closer to the bag to cork it again.
"Enough!" Gaara yelled out, reaching out for the Bag of Fujin and sending a jet of sand to grab the cork and push it in. With the bag corked again, the sands had an easier time to bring the Bag of Fujin to Gaara, as the Kazekage had slipped his gourd of sand off and placed the Bag of Fujin over his back as a replacement. Hoping that while wielding it this way, he could better withstand the divine backlash of the bag's power by putting all of his body and not just the arms into it.
"Gaara, no! You'll bust your spine in half!" Kankuro warned his brother.
"I am… The Kazekage. I have driven this colossus into the frenzy that it is in now. Stopping it and preventing the destruction of the entire world is my responsibility and mine alone. I'd rather break my back in half than die knowing that the world is doomed because of the actions of a Kazekage!" Gaara clenched his fist while blood dripped from his nose onto it. Sand from around Gaara wrapped around the cork, ready to pop it off again while the Kazekage aimed the bag right at the Colossus of the Covenant again.
Seeing the resolve in the Kazekage's eyes gave Mana an idea. She ripped the ribbon on her collar off and undid the top of her collar, pulling the Golden Locket of Sotatsu out and throwing it to Gaara only for a jet of sand to rise from the ground to catch it.
"Call forth for the Sands of Time using the Golden Locket of Sotatsu. Then use the Bag of Fujin to control the power of the Sands," Mana shouted out through the Colossus' rumbling and preparations to obliterate the annoying gnats trying to destroy it and the feeble world they called their home. "You've been controlling sand your entire life. You're the best suited to wield this power."
Gaara stared at the Golden Locket in his hand, then looked back up to Mana and nodded with a surprised look before turning his attention back to the Colossus of the Covenant as it wound back its fist. It was time for the Kazekage to correct his mistake and save both his country and his world, for that matter.