The junk golem was tough. Its blade arms had made short work of Miu's attempts to trap it, while It wasn't allowing Okimi to get close enough to use that sword of hers, that could cut through anything it seemed.
Kurotenshi used his fireball jutsu, blasting the golem with fire, but this did little more than melt heat the metal pipes that made up its legs. He needed to give it more chakra. Well. There was the thing Okimi gave him. But had it come to that?
The golem managed to catch Miu in one of its crane claws and threw her into a pile of junk. She tumbled over sharp metal down to the ground where she lay, covered in cuts.
It had come to that.
The cursed seal began to spread across his body and Kurotenshi felt an influx of chakra. But something was wrong. This chakra. It felt the same as the corruption. Kurotenshi felt the bones in his legs become brittle, then fade entirely.
He threw out his hands and caught himself before he hit the ground. He looked back over his shoulder. His leg! What was this? Besides feeling completely limp, they were now purple and excretion green slime. He wanted to vomit. He wanted them off of his body. He wanted his legs back.
The cursed seal had faded. The Golem was rearing down with its blade.
Okimi grabbed Kurotenshi and leapt out of the way.
"What did you do to me, Okimi!?"
"I.." She said looking down at his legs with guilt in her eyes. "I don't know. Cursed Seals don't do this. I… really don't understand them completely. This has got to be the corruption. It's like when it interfered with summoning, but worse, much worse "
"You used a jutsu you didn't understand on me!?"
'I'm sorry. This wasn't supposed to happen."
Another blade came down. Okimi barely dodged it. No! It grazed her leg.
"Put me down, Okimi. You can't carry me and dodge with that leg of yours."
"Don't underestimate me, Kurotenshi. We're about to kill this thing." Okimi raised her eye patch. "Sharingan, now."
He didn't know what he was supposed to do without legs, but he was sure Okimi had a plan. He activated his sharingan.
Okimi was tilting her body left, then right. It seemed like she was reacting to small movements in the golem's shoulders.
"I have prediction, not reflexes. Get ready to grab the claw, at your 10 O'Clock." Okimi said.
Okimi dodged before it even threw the claw at them. It was just as she'd said. He grabbed the steel cord that connected the claw to the arm.
As it pulled its arm back, it took Kurotenshi and Okimi with it. It moved its blade arm to intercept. The cord was retracting straight towards that spinning blade, with them on it!
A ghostly white lightning crackled in Okimi's one free hand. She grabbed the cord and the lightning ran up it.
The arm stopped retracting. The creature stood still.
Okimi was pulling her hand off of the cord with great struggle as the spark between her hand and the cord seemed to pull back. She yanked her arm back and the lighting came with it.
The golem collapsed into a heap of parts.
Okimi landed and dropped Kurotenshi. The mass of lighting had formed an almost spherical shape that seemed to be struggling to break free of Okimi's grip.
"What did you do?" Kurotenshi said, sitting up.
"Isn't it obvious? I ripped its soul out. Now, go heal Miu before it breaks free."
She wasn't too far. Kurotenshi dragged himself across the ground as quickly as he could, giving himself scrapes and bruises.
He laid a hand over Miu and used his mystical palm technique to heal her wounds.
Miu open her eyes and groaned, then flinched as she seemed to remember where she was.
She saw Okimi struggling with the soul lightning and ran towards her as she made hand signs, then created a mass of trees that surrounded it, and closed tight.
Okimi pulled out a paper seal and placed it on Miu's tree trap, then breathed a sigh of relief.
They all took a moment to catch their breath. Miu created a wooden wheelchair for Kurotenshi while Okimi was fiddling with the soul prison.
Kurotenshi rolled over towards where the golem hand fallen apart.
He pointed out a large rotating blade to Miu. She handed it to him. On closer examination, there were dark purple pulsating veins running through the rusted steel. He felt as if the weapon were calling to him.
"It's corrupted," Kurotenshi said. We should destroy it.
"Why?" Miu said. "Everything here is corrupted."
"I… Don't like how it makes me feel," Kurotenshi said. "I think it might have some power."
"Then I'll hang onto it. If it comes down to it, we might need it," Miu said.
"'You're starting to talk like Okimi. But I listened to her and look what it got me." Kurotenshi looked down at his legs then glared over at Okimi.
Speaking of Okimi, she was currently zapping the the soul prison with her spiritual lightning.
"What are you doing?" Kurotenshi said. "Nothing good is going to come with fiddling with these corruption creatures, Okimi"
"Did you forget what Kihaku said?" Okimi said. "Someone in the corruption figured out how to disperse it. So yes, something very good could come of fiddling with the corruption.
"I've been attacking with my soul, over and over and I've been gaining more and more control. But my soul and body both need time to recover." He could seen Okimi's eyelids were hanging low. That's right. She had been the one to stay up all night while they slept.
"...so you're torturing it until it obeys you?" Kurotenshi said with a frown.
"Sleep. Now."
"Go to sleep. I'll keep watch this time," Miu said.
A week passed and still no sign of Takara. They'd gone back to that zone as stealthily as possible, but all they'd found was a massive crater. Some of the mountains were gone or cleaved in half.
The zones around this area had very few corruption monsters. She really had killed them all. Maybe she'd gone through one of the one-way exits and gotten lost.
Eventually, Kurotenshi and Okimi found themselves in a graveyard.
The ground beneath Kurotenshi's feet was soft and marshy, with patches of twisted, blackened grass and weeds sprouting up amidst the damp earth.
The gravestones that rose up from the ground like jagged teeth were all twisted and warped, their inscriptions unreadable and their surfaces pitted and eroded by some unknown, corrosive force. Some of the stones were massive, looming up like monolithic slabs of obsidian, while others were small and decrepit, barely visible beneath the tangled undergrowth that choked the graveyard.
But it was not just the gravestones that gave Kurotenshi pause. In the shadows between the stones, he could see a few wandering, living corpses, their flesh pale and bloated, their eyes sunken and empty. They seemed to be searching for something, their movements jerky and uncoordinated, as though their minds had been rotted away by the corruption that hung over the graveyard like a shroud.
Every so often one noticed them and came at them, but they were destroyed easily enough. Every time they killed a corruption creature, Okimi took its soul. These souls didn't fight back much like the golem had. Was that really okay? Even if they had been twisted into these horrid forms, didn't they at least deserve to rest in peace?
Kurotenshi could feel a cold, creeping fear taking hold of him as he moved deeper into the graveyard. He knew that he was in a place not meant for the living.
Miu returned from scouting ahead. "There are people!" She said, "There are people still alive up ahead. A large group of living dead have cut them off. I don't think they're going to last long."
"We have to go help them, quick," Kurotenshi said.
"What kind of people?" Okimi asked.
Miu said, "One of them was a missing ninja with a powerful corrupted arm. She was holding them off. I don't think the others were shinobi."
Okimi said, "Missing ninja are supposed to be executed anyway. They aren't our people. We shouldn't risk it for them."
"What about the others!? And if she's protecting those people, she must not be a bad person. At least she's human." Kurotenshi said.
"You're so naive." Okimi stood in between him and the way Miu had come, her arms crossed. "I know they're slow, but In large numbers, these living dead might give us real problems."
Kurotenshi looked down at his legs, withered and useless dangling from the wheelchair. He drew a kunai and activated his sharingan. "I'm not taking your orders anymore, Okimi."
Okimi drew her Kusanagi from her throat and the two stared each other down. Then Okimi turned towards where Miu had come from. "You think so? Well, I order you to save those people."
Kurotenshi squinched his eyebrows. "You know what, fine." He sighed and turned his wheels, moving the chair forward.
Okimi glanced back over her shoulder. "But Kurotenshi, stay in the back. If you are overrun with your limited mobility, you really will die here." He'd had started to think Okimi was totally rotten, but did she actually care for him?
Okimi followed Miu with Kurotenshi lagging behind. He couldn't keep up with them at all, but kept moving as fast as he could.
He said he wanted to protect those people. He hadn't thought about what would happen before. But he had really just forced his squad to go fight his battle. Could he really survive out here without his legs? Sometimes he just wanted to punch Okimi in the face. He had to keep reminding himself that she couldn't have predicted this with his legs.
By the time Kurotenshi arrived, they were already finishing the corrupted dead off. Miu slashed through a group of them with a thorny vine whip. The missing ninja had a large shadowy clawed hand. She placed it over the last remaining zombie and absorbed it with a crunching noise. She was wearing an Amegakure headband with a slash through it.