"Mana… Is she…?" Damisan still stood in place, shaken. One would think that the appearance of a Sky Clansman that thought of himself as some divine entity compared to the Earth Clansmen that lived on Earth would have such an effect. Truth was that it was instead the haunting disappearance of his friend and not the appearance of the enemy that shook the self-built ninja.
"Don't lose your cool! This must be just another one of her illusions!" Endo pulled out two swords and connected them by their hilts to form a sword-staff and prepare to engage this Moon-based entity that acted as if the entire universe belonged to him and his peers.
"I don't really see how. She just went up and into a swarm of bugs out of nowhere. This doesn't look like Flower Petal Sanctuary to me," Skaven said with bitterness in his voice. Despite displaying it the least, the few cracks of distress in his voice when he spoke up betrayed the true extent to which Mana's disappearance had bothered him.
"Mana can make-up and alternate her illusions on the fly. With any luck, she's done so just now, too. Even if I wish she gave us a sign, we have to rely on her and our skill and keep our heads in the game," Shige-H encouraged the Stars by clutching her fists and igniting the flares of Chakra Enhanced Strength in them.
A silky membrane wrapped around the brilliant compound eyes that looked like rocks of a shimmering diamond from further away and rested inside of a mask of orderly, positioned in a web-like pattern of black face paint. A handful of the black beetles scurried to collide with one another, mashing into a chitinous blade that was not at all different from the scythe that the Sky Clansman wielded, forming a mantis-like dual-wielding stance.
"Your friend has withered away into nothingness. I am Mushen of the Sky Clan and the Yin Release allows me to control the universal force of decay," Mushen declared while swiping his twin scythes and making the black and white swarms of wing-flapping beetles behind him all whipped up.
"Ninja Style: Rocket Punch!" Damisan gritted his teeth and launched both of his arms flying toward his opponent. The damaged Toneri puppetry parts lit up with blue rings in the gaps between separate pieces before careening off toward the enemy to batter him in a simplistic manner of bashing into him at hi-velocity.
The distraught divine beetles submerged Mushen in their splendor of contrasting colors as Damisan's puppetry plunged into their fray, only to never return to their master who needed them to build his artificial limbs out of. Only sand-like dust shimmered in the air as each separate beetle from the swarm produced one individual speck of produce of a different color from that of their own before letting it sprinkle and reflect the pleasant sunlight caressing the Moon's surface with shiny colors.
"Man, I really needed those back!" Damisan staggered back, effectively armless.
"Short-term thinking. Typical of the Earth Clan. Dust needs nothing," Mushen raised his hand and aimed it at Damisan.
"G-Guys… I feel… W-Wobbly…" Damisan muttered. His voice became split apart as if multiple Damisan had spoken at the same time from the single location and their voices formed a harmony together.
"Shadow Push Jutsu!" Skaven grunted, taking a knee as a dark tendril extended over the ground and sprung forth from the Moon's surface as a giant, pushing shadow palm. The shadowy palm slammed right into the vain Moon inhabitant and forced him to undo whatever grasp he had over Damisan at once. "Saw that trick already, not a fan,"
"Th-Thanks…" Damisan panted, struggling to stay on his prosthetic feet. "For a second there I thought I'd turn to bugs like Mana…"
"Hm…" Skaven grumbled while looking at the opponent he had just punched. His gaze sharpened when he saw Mushen's image rippling like a wave of smaller objects taking human form. The impact of his Shadow Push had rattled his opponent, but it only caused him to disperse into another blinding swarm of black and white beetles that seemed to drown out the entire sky overhead.
"Is there no end to your hubris? You are faced by that which you weaved your myths around, you dirt-people. I am decay itself! A force of nature you cannot fight against," Mushen's croaky, elderly voice sprung from each individual beetle in synchrony, each note just a few milliseconds behind the last for the cosmic magnificence of the Stars' enemy to translate better.
"Is that a fact? Because we're pretty feisty!" Shige-H clenched her fist and kicked off the ground in a ring-shaped shock wave splintering the surface around her as she charged toward the swarm. Her glowing fists began emanating with emerald light as she leveled up her Chakra Enhanced Strength to Unmaker Fist to see which force truly commanded decay better.
The medical kunoichi met no resistance as the endless cloud swarm parted where she attempted to blast through and enclosed around her from the sides. A washing wave of beetles connected together to reveal the upper half of Mushen who swiped his mantis scythe blades at Shige-H, slashing her back down but the kunoichi's body augmented her endurance through an auto-pilot response so that the self-proclaimed mythical ninja did not carve her heart right out of her chest. Shige-H let out a haunting scream before smacking against the rupturing surface of the Moon.
Damisan tried running up and checking on his leader, but an irksome cloud of contrasting beetles persisted around her, undoing small patches of skin and flesh into sprinkling stardust and letting them scatter with each passing blink.
"Pay attention," Skaven commanded the rest of the Stars who were losing willpower and focus in the face of overwhelming adversity. "This man is showing his ability off to us. He has the power to scatter us into bugs as he did with Mana, then why hasn't he yet?"
"Didn't you hear his self-important speech about punishment?" Endo grit his teeth, failing to find an opening to attack with those cosmic decay insects storming all over the place.
"That's bullshit. He believes what he said, that much I can agree with, but he's concealing something. His ability is crazy. It doesn't seem to be tied with any Nature Release that we know of, but it has a weakness. We just need him to give us a few more clues and figure it out," Skaven tried setting a game plan.
"Shit…" Endo cursed. "I'm supposed to be Number One and here some self-proclaimed god-assholes show up and tell me I also have to show them up too! I won't stand it!"
The swordsman thrust his weapon into the Moon's surface as he performed the hand seals for his technique and extended his hands out. "Lightning Release: Electromagnetic Murder!" he chanted out as a wave of unruly electricity shot out from his hands, forming a three-dimensional network of lightning bolts that the plentiful divine beetles found impossible to evade.
"Lightning?" Mushen's voice filled the skies again as the beetles connected into an insectoid form of a human face depicted in the wall of the endless swarm. "You send mere crackles of lightning to hurt the Gods? You are an embarrassment to your ancestors that waged war against us, filth."
Even Endo lost his will to fight upon seeing each separate beetle coated with an ethereal, translucent bubble of energy that appeared to absorb and nullify his technique while the insects absorbing the jutsu merely floated in place as a fence protecting the manifestation of Mushen's mockery-spouting face from the Stars.
"The reason…" a voice lingered in the air once Endo's Lightning Release jutsu died out. Its sentence remained unfinished, but the tone and pitch of that voice were familiar to the Stars.
"Mana?" Damisan jumped up and began frantically turning around, using his thighs to direct his body. The puppeteer looked like a T-Rex searching for its prey that way.
"The reason he doesn't scatter…" Mana's voice filled the airwaves again as a separate cloud of black and white beetles began twirling around in place, forming a contrasting vortex of swarming life.
"Impossible…!" Mushen said. Almost immediately, as if prompted by the sudden signal of the impending rebirth of the ninja magician, the Sky Clansman ordered all of his beetles to gather into a singular living mass that descended on the ground in a tornado-like cone from which he once again took solid form.
"What's going on here, Mushen? Just what did you do to Mana? What was she talking about?" Shige-H demanded answers while rising off the ground with entire patches of her flesh missing and blood vessels spitting up blood where nothing connected them together anymore.
"I've dispersed your ally into the swarm of the divine agents of decay. I've reduced her to the primal ingredient of the universal cooking pot. She's gone and you can kiss hopes of ever setting sights on her goodbye!" Mushen flipped out, swiping his mantis blades aside in an aggressive gesture that suggested that he wanted this topic closed.
"Yep…" Skaven straightened his own back too and flexed his numb neck while returning to an apathetic look after Mana's disappearance had rattled him earlier. "Sounds more right to me the louder you yell it. It's beginning to feel you haven't even convinced yourself of that, let alone us."
"Yeah, haven't you committed it to memory after spying on us from all the way up here?" Endo smirked, tapping his forehead. "We're kind of stubborn like that. Just like that woman, we refuse to die. Just like all of us here, we refuse to give up on our mission or our teammates too."
"I see. How about we put that to the test then?" Mushen undid his mantis blades and staggered forward, raising both of his arms and splitting his ceaseless mass of beetles. The Stars all wobbled on unsteady legs, prompting Damisan to jump up and ignite his prosthetic jet boots to resist the uncontrollable earthquake.
"G-Guys… Something's… Not really right…" Damisan muttered, feeling like, despite his best attempts to gain altitude, he just couldn't gain any distance from his initial location. A simple visual inspection of his teammates revealed to him they too felt these adverse effects. A static field kept them frozen in place while black marbles of oblivion tore up with sparkling stardust rotating around its edges and producing rotating jets to the dark orbs.
"Yin Release: Hive of Decay!" Mushen clapped his hands together. The flow of stardust from within the singularities he had just produced became more intense, like pulsing blood that spilled from a wound. However, instead of gore and guts spilling out alongside it, only greater masses of the divine beetles emerged from their gravitational centers.
"M-More of those guys?" Endo said while still struggling against the stranglehold of gravity in what felt like a rather lightweight gravitational environment on the Moon's surface.
"The Shinkyochu are the agents of universal decay. All life springs from nothingness and the Shinkyochu ensure that to nothingness it also returns so that from that nothingness something new can originate," Mushen spread his arms out, commanding the Shinkyochu under his employ to feast upon the enemy. "The Earth Clan is nothing but rotten wheat that must be culled and tossed aside so that it can give birth to something more worthwhile. All you know is war and violence and you demonstrated it to us by sending that beastly man to us. His is the face of your punishment, not mine."
"That beastly man?" Shige-H wondered out loud as the Shinkyochu began enclosing closer and closer around them.
"Shadow Pri…" Skaven struggled against the immense gravitational pressure that kept him static in place as a certain plunge into oblivion came closer and closer to fruition. Despite his valiant effort, the overflowing wave of the Shinkyochu enclosed like the true prison, unlike that which the Nara clansman sought to create. Once the Shinkyochu had completed their natural task of withering all matter into a more fundamental and primal mode of being, they dispersed, leaving nothing but sparkling silver dust in their wake.
"Humph… To think that they had attempted to use the Nara hijutsu to protect themselves. The most primitive form of Yin Release imaginable against a divine force of nature such as the Shinkyochu," Mushen looked down as if disappointed by the meek resistance that the enemy mustered up before their premature decay into the primal building block of the universe. "As to be expected from the lowest form of life."
Mushen turned away, recalling a handful of the Shinkyochu to infuse with his cloak and produce a pair of armored beetle wings that sprung to life while his cloak rattled like a featherlight membrane and elevated the man to hover in the air so that he didn't need to trouble his aching knees. Mushen froze in place as a roaring pillar of energy burst from underground, roaring like a majestic dragon in form and coiling in complex, serpentine shapes before slamming against the area right before Mushen.
Once the pillar of light died out, a lone woman stood where it had landed, with her arms positioned behind her in a stout, militaristic stance. She was a fair member of the Sky Clan, looking rather similar to an ordinary human except with skin as pale as her silks. Obsidian energy constructs coated the shoulders, chest, abdomen, and every other vital of this woman while wild black hair flapped about freely from where they found freedom under the ethereal helmet of pure energy the woman donned on her upper face.
"What was the meaning of all that ruckus, Mushen?" the woman inquired with a strict voice.
"Earth Clansmen. A handful has snuck into our home. As usual, they only brought war and violence with them so I had to spread them like seeds across the universe to sow something more worthwhile," Mushen replied with a shaking voice. The stern look of the warrior woman in front of him had shattered his high and mighty facade that he donned in the face of the Earth Clan.
"You and your obsession with gardening life. You wield Yin Release. Your nature lies in darkness and oblivion. Death and shadows should have been your allies, Mushen. It's no wonder why you are the weakest out of all the Sky Clansmen. Fit only for playing with your little yardwork on the surface with all your bugs!" the woman scolded Mushen. "Your silly game has endangered us all! The Chaser that the Earth Clan has sent to us has awoken from all the shaking and quaking. You better pray that Seikuwo handles that demon before he tears us apart as the Earth Clan intended it to!"
"I apologize, Joshila," Mushen fell on all fours and leveled his head to the spongy surface, groveling before the armored woman in apology. "I offer my assistance in subduing the Chaser if that would redeem my transgression!"
"You would only serve to strengthen the Chaser if you showed your face anywhere near its dimension. Have you forgotten that the accursed Earth Clan hunter drains all whom he touches, even our unmatched divine brilliance?" Joshila's wrath continued to boil for a little while before the topic turned to the Earth-born demon whom all the Sky Clan seemed to speak of with despair. "We used to flourish in this bountiful place. Now there's only a sprinkle over a hundred of us left."
"J-Just over a hundred?" Mushen raised his dirty forehead off the ground in shock, still kneeling. "I was not aware of how bad it has become. If only Seikuwo allowed me to help the rest of the Sky Clan down below the surface…"
"Make no mistake. Even with just a bit out of a hundred of us left, you're still the weakest bug out of all of us. Stick to your little gardening games and bark at the comets and asteroids passing by like a good little guard dog that you are, Mushen. Let the real gods handle the divine business," Joshila turned around, becoming one with the sky-bound, heavenly beam of ethereal light that took a draconic shape once again and slammed into the ground, seeping through its many cracks and pores like the rays of light that composed it and traveling to the golden marble under the Moon's surface that Joshila governed over.
Mushen turned to the marvelous blue and green planet looming on the horizon, hiding underneath a veil of clouds, and looked down at it with profound sadness. The Sky Clan had once been content with calling this Moon their home. No one could have argued that they have gotten the shorter end of the stick with the Earth Clan settling down on Earth that was many times larger than the desolate place that the Sky Clan received from their peace treaty.
Still, they had hope in their hands. A prospect for a gold-paved future. If anyone could make anything out of such a desolate and inhospitable place, lingering halfway over in the cold and cruel cosmos that sowed only death and cosmic nightmares everywhere, it was the Sky Clan. And as the Sun was their witness, they did their best. Mastering the Moon's surface, eventually realizing that to truly domesticate this place, they'd have to hollow it out and create smaller worlds, dimensions encased inside of artificial protective domes underneath its mantle. And they accomplished even that.
But the Earth Clan just couldn't sit still and live with their vast and fertile Earth. As long as there was life somewhere out there, no matter how oppressed, no matter how beautiful and how struggling and wonderful by its marvelous capacity to overcome the odds. The Earth would still send their weapons of destruction to them. Just like they sent their mausoleum of golden sand and that demonic Chaser encased inside it. That living parasite had been so efficient in wiping out life and devouring the divine essence of the Sky Clan that it could only have been a deliberate attack.
The only mystery was how people as meek as the Earth Clan could produce a demon as abominable as that Leech. Mushen shuddered in terror before becoming just a cloud of Shinkyochu that each found their own little pore in the ground to nest in and cradle its spark of stardust into something new and beautiful. Joshila was right, Mushen couldn't create any life himself, just cause decay, but he could send it out into the universe where it could be born into something truly wonderful. That Mushen believed firmly.
Faced with terror, plague, and death, his unfounded belief was all that Mushen could find solace in.