"How did that guy even sneak up on you? I thought you sensed all of his puppets," Endo grumbled, turning to Mana. Mana looked away. Her response got stuck on something in her throat and she felt blood building up in her facial muscles.
"It wasn't Mana's fault, look…" Damisan pointed at a handful of Toneri's mysterious puppets just lying on the ground as if any semblance of chakra that once gave them life had been absent from them.
"So what? Those things are all over the place," Endo replied.
"You twit," Skaven rolled his eyes. "Look over there," the Nara pointed at a line of puppets standing and staring at a blank point in space and time. It was just how the puppets engaging the Stars that they've left behind behaved too. "Those lying puppets aren't doing the same thing as the ones caught in Mana's trick. That means that Toneri isn't using all of them at once. He must be able to switch between the puppets he controls and when he's not using a puppet – it's not emitting any chakra for Mana to sense. We should stop relying on Mana's chakra sensory not to get caught off-guard and use our own heads for once."
Having the real reason for their blunder explained by such a logical reason helped Mana's feeling of inadequacy and inner embarrassment, but it didn't quash it completely. Even though it probably should have. Still, feelings were rarely, if ever, rational. It didn't take the end of the world for one to feel like their world was ending.
"So, should we use the chakra tunnel now?" Damisan turned to the back of Shige-H, addressing his leader.
"No, not yet. We may be on the Moon, but we're not sure where exactly on the Moon we are. If the Moon is hollow and we're somehow inside of it, we can't be sure that the Moon in our universe is hollow too. We may end up transporting into solid rock and beaming a crater into the surface of the Moon beyond repair," Shige-H shook her head.
"Maybe we should," Endo grumbled. "Those Moon Clan guys just invaded our planet and took the Allied Ninja workers for themselves. They've kidnapped our people, so I say we boom right into their home and tear it to bits. Blast a hole through the surface of the Moon, leave the Moon Clan battered and bruised, and make sure they never mess with Earth again!"
"Endo…" Mana mumbled out. The blues she felt deep down after lulling her team into a false sense of security earlier made her tone lower in pitch and weaker in volume.
"What? I thought about your feelings too, Mana. We won't kill them," Endo shrugged as if he was excusing himself somehow with that remark.
"As much forethought as you may have put into that plan of yours, we're ninja, Endo. We don't kick the door down, ruin people's homes and break everything and everyone in sight. As long as I'm still the leader, we move in, we take our workers and we get out," Shige-H glanced back at her feisty teammate.
"Could have fooled me…" Endo sighed. He didn't need to declare that his mind returned to the giant, scorched ring patterns in the Kusagakure grasslands back on Earth and the decimated Allied Ninja party that was watching over the workers.
"Do you think there's even a way out of this place? Even if there is, how are we supposed to find it? This place is as massive as Konoha…" Skaven observed, turning his head to scan the seemingly limitless horizon of the forest ruins that Toneri had built inside of the Moon.
"In that way, we'll just need to make one!" Shige-H proclaimed, cocking back her fist as an emerald shine lit up around her fist that changed colors as the kunoichi molded and morphed her chakra. Just as she would have thrust her fist and propelled a shock wave to bust through the edges of this inner biome, one of Toneri's puppets wrapped itself around Shige's arm and applied a hold on it that prevented her from doing so.
"Wow, that's really ninja of you, leader…" Endo smirked, having found his opportunity to bite his leader as he placed his hands over the hilts of his two sheathed katana by his sides.
"Endo, we can't beat Toneri," Mana warned the swordsman again, at which point he just sighed and kicked up a staff in his hands instead.
"Right, right…" he muttered dryly while twirling the staff over his head and using his old sword-staff skills to fend off the oncoming swarm of puppets. This time they came with tiny orbs of hypnotic green chakra in between their swarm. These spheres sought for their opportunity to bomb the Allied Ninja and while they weren't able to deal much damage to them, they still were quite a nuisance and sabotaged Endo's impressive restraint by breaking his stick, too.
"Megaton Rocket Punch!" Damisan grumbled, raising Sasori's puppet arms and shooting off their forearms as a ring of blue flames shot out from the point where the forearms connected to the upper arm by the elbow. The jets of blue flames carried the accelerating rocket punches all the way to the edge of the forest ruins where they collided with something solid.
A deafening crack filled the artificial ruins as everyone clutched for their ears to protect themselves from the resonance that seemed to pass through their bodily fluids themselves with their potent waves. What looked to be just a sky with clouds fissured with black cracks and the sky began falling apart, with building-sized shards raining from above. Once whatever method Toneri or his ancestors used to simulate these worlds inside of the hollow Moon ended, the falling shards of the collapsing sphere revealed themselves to be just a crack of gold comprising a golden sphere. If one were to look up and peek through the hole in the sky that Damisan had left, they'd have seen nothing but empty space and golden, city-sized spheres floating inside. Like an inner universe hidden underneath the crust of the moon.
"You dare desecrate that which the Ootsutsuki clan took generations to build!?" Toneri lost his cool as one of his puppets tore off its turban to reveal luscious and curly white locks. His eyes remained closed, however. Mana wasn't entirely sure what was the deal with that, though the size of Toneri's chakra signature wasn't all that impressive. From how Naruto relayed that story, Toneri was meant to be a challenge to him back in the day, but this Toneri felt like a weakened husk and would have posed little challenge even to the weakest of Naruto's efforts. "Loathsome Earthlings! You use Hagoromo's gift of Ninshu only on destruction and violence! You deserve to be plucked out and trampled by my hand!"
Now that he knew which puppet not to target, Endo pulled out his katana swords and connected them by the hilts, using his improvised weapon to fend off a much greater number of swarming puppets than he should have under normal circumstances wielding a more ordinary blade.
"History… Did we ruin it?" Shige-H turned to Mana.
"I'm not sure. I think Toneri-san was always meant to hate the Earth ninja," Mana shrugged. "Even if he wants revenge with greater passion now, if we deal enough damage to the Ootsutsuki temples and cities and all this mechanical wonder, we'll set him back far enough to where he won't be able to retaliate for years."
"You heard her," Shige-H turned to Damisan with a nod.
"Shadow Mandala Jutsu!" Skaven chanted out, taking it on one knee to spread his shadowy tendrils out far and wide in a circular pattern that reminded of a complex, solar-themed mosaic and produced solid, shadowy constructs that wrapped around any puppets it could get a hold of and held them tightly in place.
Not even Toneri's attempts to use the explosive, emerald fragments of his own life that he used to transfer bits of his own life force into puppets earlier and breathe life into his puppet army couldn't defeat these shadowy tentacles and even the real Toneri became entangled by a whole handful of them that he had no hope of escaping from.
Riding the powerful burst of chakra from the boots that were a prosthetic mixture of Toneri's and Sasori's puppets alike, Damisan took it to the skies and splintered his prosthetic body parts into belts that holstered explosives. A storm of speeding explosive barrages coming from all prosthetic body parts fired in all directions, targeting all the golden spheres hosting different cities and facilities inside the hollow Moon. Toneri cried out in horror as Damisan's explosive barrage decimated their intended targets, with each little rocket carrying more than enough wallop to level one completely.
Grabbing Shige and Endo, Mana took off with a weave of a hand seal that activated her Mystical Wings Jutsu while Damisan scooped Skaven up after looping back down for just that purpose and the Stars left the crushed Toneri to wallow in his misery. The white-haired Ootsutsuki bawled and whined with bloody tears bursting from his blind eyes, forcing through his eyelids and seeping through the cracks even though they remained closed.
"Wow, I kind of feel like an asshole now," Damisan sighed. He had lost the greater part of his arsenal and there was almost nothing left of his Sasori parts, only what he scrounged together as an improvised puppetry armor from the remains of Toneri's puppets earlier.
"We've destroyed the legacy of this man's clan. They took their entire history to build all of this here, inside the hollow Moon and we've taken it all away from him," Mana shook her head. She allowed herself the luxury to close her eyes for just one long blink before focusing back on the path ahead.
"Better to wreck his family home than to wreck the entirety of history and let everything end in complete cosmic collapse. I'd say this is the best we could have done for now," Skaven tried to ease Damisan's consciousness.
"It's just as Mana said, even if we've screwed up and Toneri hates the Earthling ninja far more than he originally did, he won't have the means to lash out earlier than he did in the original timeline now," Shige-H grumbled. As the leader of the Stars, she felt the greatest burden every time that her squad had to do something as heinous as this. Thusly, she had to work the hardest to ease that inner pressure as well.
"Well, I'm not sorry for that asshole one bit. He attacked us right from the get-go. He put some giant crab monster to guard the entryway and he could have trapped us in his weird illusion bubbles, too. Fuck that guy, fuck his home, and double-fuck his clan," Endo nodded to himself, looking like he felt no semblance of guilt about what the Stars had done on the Moon. "Now, let's just get on to the surface so that we can port to our home universe and get our workers home at last."
Mana swung Shige-H around, flinging her toward the edge of gloom. Shige-H lit up her fist with Chakra Enhanced Strength and blasted right through the Moon's shell, busting a colossal crater through which the Stars could have left and finally touched their feet onto the surface.
Something didn't quite feel right. Ever since Mana's feet touched the dusty surface of the Moon, she felt a choking pressure around her throat. It wasn't just that there was no air on the Moon. It felt like something had been actively sucking oxygen right out of her lungs while the magician tried storing it there for safekeeping and temporary sustenance of her bodily systems. A ninja could have lasted a good twenty minutes without breathing with chakra augmentation. Maybe even longer, depending on the skill of said ninja. Though Mana couldn't even imagine pushing twenty minutes on this ruinous rock.
Mana wanted to ponder out loud if maybe Damisan had destroyed one of the mechanical stations that simulated gravity and a hospitable atmosphere on the Moon, but her voice didn't come out either. It was like trying to spit with a dried-out mouth in the middle of the day out in the desert. Mana grabbed the remote universe tunneling gadget that Naruto's universe designed for them and input the home coordinates of their own universe.
It didn't seem to work at first, then electrical crackles began accumulating over the heads of the Allied Ninja. As they gazed upon the millions of bright sparkles of light that they've named their own squad after, the crackles became a radiant lightning storm, which melded into a singular energy beam of glistening white and engulfed the Stars whole.
"Traveling between universes and timelines is such a bitch. You can never be too sure if it worked," Skaven muttered, scratching the back of his head as he looked around.
"It had to have worked. We can breathe and talk here," Mana replied, working on getting back to her graces and ready for the upcoming rescue mission. "Our fears seem to have been vain. This Moon must be just as hollow as that of the Naruto universe. Although… I can't seem to sense any chakra here."
"Huh… This place looks so weird…" Damisan took a few steps to the side to examine the Moon's surface and comb the space dust through his fingers. "My body feels so light here too."
"What do you mean, you can't sense any chakra? Shouldn't the workers we're looking for have chakra signatures?" Endo ground his teeth. "Plus, I thought those self-proclaimed ninja gods from the sky were supposed to be tough enough to wipe out entire squads by themselves."
"The Moon is pretty large, Endo. The workers are not too potent as chakra beacons. It is entirely possible that the Sky Clan are holding them somewhere outside of the sensory range," Shige-H pointed out. "Let us know if you get something, Mana."
"Guys, this place is so weird… It's like… A little, dirty honeycomb or something. Those cute little holes…" Damisan leaned down, correcting the prosthetic finger on his lone and hardly functional prosthetic hand he looted off of a Toneri puppet to poke holes in the Moon's surface. "So, how do we get down to those golden world-spheres? I mean, the workers have got to be inside one of them, right? Do we just bust through the crust again and move down?"
"That'll be too loud. These won't be blind Ootsutsuki clansmen from Naruto's universe we'll be dealing with here. They'll be the Sky Clan ninja that have pushed our own ancestors to near extinction in the past. Not to mention, we're in their territory now," Mana explained. "We'd best try to avoid meeting even one of them in battle, if possible."
"That's lame!" Endo voiced his vociferous complaint. "If we just pick our guys up and go back to Earth, nothing will stop them from going back down and kidnapping them again. We need to teach them a lesson!"
"Teach us a lesson, mortal?" a voice resonated through the entire surface of the Moon, freezing everyone's blood all the way down at their heels. "The only ones learning a lesson in hubris shall be you."
"That voice!" Shige-H grabbed hold of her ears to weaken its volume as it seemed like something booming from the entire Moon itself. As if each little pore on the Moon's surface served as a noise-augmenting speaker system to the Sky Clan member. "Where is it coming from, Mana?"
"Don't bother answering, puny little Earth Clan sensor. She can't sense me. We are everywhere, but we can be nowhere too, as far as the rest of the universe that doesn't know any better is aware. Those are the values you treasure as so-called ninja, aren't they?" the thunderous voice of the Sky Clansman spread with impunity.
"He's right, I can't sense anything!" Mana yelled out. Shige could only hear her ally because of how close the two were to one another.
"Close your eyes and concentrate. We need any kind of information. We can't let them dictate the terms!" Shige-H placed her hand on Mana's shoulder.
Even if Shige decided that the Stars could have used Mana's abilities as a sensor far more than her combat prowess right now, which was something Mana wasn't sure she agreed with, the ninja magician settled down and crossed her legs. She felt a familiar, coarse rub underneath her bottom, which distracted her from focusing. Mana brushed her hand across and realized what she was feeling. It was sand. Just a mass of ordinary Earthling sand that had found itself all the way up here on the Moon somehow.
Mana closed her eyes. But even as her sensory range expanded tenfold compared to how it was when she was fully aware of the physical senses and her spiritual ones–not much changed. Only a couple of measly tickles from a handful of signatures entire kilometers below the ground. Mana's eyes shot wide open, and she hurried back to her feet. The magician turned to Shige-H immediately. The leader of the Stars couldn't waste the time to stop trying to scan her environment and look back at her teammate.
"I know where the workers are!" Mana declared. "Their signatures were really weak but I could just barely make them out."
"That's great! Though… Not to burst your bubble…" Damisan tried sounding cheerful, though the terror he felt from the booming voice and the haunting presence of the Sky Clansman harassing them kept a tight hold on his emotions.
"The workers are kind of not the immediate problem right now!" Endo finished Damisan's sentence. "We were hoping you could point which direction to run and yell in."
"Oh? You've caught a sense of them? Impressive, your range must have surpassed tens of kilometers by now. Meditation must have improved your chakra sensory abilities. I've never seen something like this before. I suppose it is time to stop playing around and end you for good…"
Mana panted and stumbled. She reached out for the first thing she could touch and felt Endo's shoulder. The swordsman turned around and stabbed his sword-staff into the ground, trying to grab Mana as she fell. Vision doubled, tripled, and continued to multiply until it felt like she had so many eyes that her mind just couldn't keep up with all the input. Her body felt so light… Oh… There it was… Falling slowly and daintily through the air. It was as if Mana could see her own body falling from far, far away. Like she was just a little spirit watching from the sky.
"Mana!" Endo bellowed as the magician's body dispersed into thousands of black and white beetles and brushed through him, as they swarmed into a contrasting mass of light and darkness before becoming a vortex spinning before the terrified Stars.
A vague, humanoid shape could have been made out inside the cosmic typhoon of godly beetles that Mana's body withered into. A crooked and slim old man descended from the center of the vortex to the ground. His appearance became easier to make out as more and more of the beetles cleared the path for the old-timer.
The feet of the old Sky Clansman only had three fingers, two pincer-like claws in the front, and one behind him. Up to his knees, they looked chitinous yet slick. A white cloak covered up his thighs partly as well as the man's hunching body. His head looked oddly hive-shaped, oval, and round only at the center. Wrinkly and touched by the centuries of the Sky Clansman's existence. A bony horn wrapped around his balding head, making an appearance of a receding hairline look a little draconic that way. The man supported himself on the other end of a scythe that looked like he had ripped it from a black and metallic praying mantis.
"Even though we didn't intend on punishing you any further to honor the covenant between the Earth and Sky Clans, I am glad you came here to serve as the scapegoats for your entire arrogant species. For your transgressions against us and the ruination of our entire way of life, you can wither away and become one with the cosmos like your friend has," the Sky Clansman declared, pointing the blade of his walking stick at all the stunned Stars who still struggled to cope with the idea that their ally had just collapsed into a mass of beetles and completely vanished without even a body to bring back home.