"Maybe it would be better if you stayed here. This place looks like a hive and I suspect all the hornets will only come out buzzing once I step a foot out there," Andes said softly while perched atop a moist and sludgy grass hill beside his newfound slender and innocent companion.
He was looking at a militarized shoreline. It was likely the same one where the Kirigakure ninja landed when they invaded this island of the Archipelago and where they took hold and commanded it from. All across the beach of gray and drab sand and colorless, foaming sea were cross-shaped stands supporting barbed wire labyrinths and bunkers stacked across the shore at intermittent intervals of distance from one another. Since Andes didn't believe it was possible to rule an overtaken island from a bunch of bunkers, he assumed that the real headquarters of the occupying force extended underground.
"Not a chance! Big brother is down below those bunkers somewhere and we need to get him," the teen squeaked out, equal part horrified and determined to rescue the man she owed her almost short-lived freedom to.
"Very well, in that case, try to not stay too far behind," Andes grumbled before taking off in a flicker. His powerful feet sent the Sky Warrior soaring atop the skies while the startled girl jumped onto his hovering bicycle and began peddling the best her exhausted frame allowed her to.
"Huh…?" a fully equipped soldier with a heavy military-style helmet and a thick leather raincoat turned around only to receive a powerful kick to the face from the titanic Sky Warrior. Shooting into the sky, Andes grabbed hold of the soldier by the helmet and spun him around mid-air, smashing him down into the weaves of barbed wire while landing atop the unfortunate soldier and then taking off.
True to Andes' predictions, the watchdogs in the bunkers noticed his flashy and loud entrance and turned their heavy dispensers firing windmill shuriken at close to the speed of sound ripping and buzzing, shredding through the barbed wire and causing deafening bangs and blasts of sand to kick up where the buzzards missed their mark.
Having given the red-haired girl his poncho, Andes didn't have as much aerial mobility, forcing him to rely more on his muscles to take bountiful leaps and crash down with his tremendous body weight, aiding the peerless strength in his pounds. With a thunderous double-foot dive from above, Andes blew up a bunker with the sheer force of its implosion, collapsing armored and nigh-impenetrable rubble over the unfortunate souls assisting the occupying force.
With a grunt signifying considerable physical effort, the Sky Warrior ripped out the broken windmill shuriken dispenser and heaved it out from the ruins of the bunker, taking aim and sending perilous sawing discs hurling toward the other bunkers. This proved to be a futile effort, as the layer of armor protecting the hill bunkers was simply too thick to penetrate or slice through, causing a shriek of steel when the shuriken hit them and for the cleaving discs to ricochet and begin a slowed-down dance across the entire beach, slicing through emergent soldiers' limbs and entire bodies.
Blood showered the drab sand, splashing an intriguing smear of crimson that at long last gave the militaristic outpost some character. The beach became cluttered with haunting screams of men cleaved into two vertically or horizontally and collapsing only to perish before they could fully comprehend the degree to which their bodies had been irreparably mangled by their own heavy weaponry utilized by one man with a death wish that could only be sated through blood, whether it be blood of his enemy or that of his own.
Andes' eyes, fully submerged in the madness of a battlefield, turned to the overwhelmed teen girl, cycling through the sky to the best of her abilities. While earlier the soldiers displayed the preference for taking the girl in alive, currently, with their ranks being thoroughly cleaved through and smashed to bits by an unexpected enemy force, they were less discrete and were perfectly content merely slinging death-inducing projectiles at anything that moved.
This infuriated the Sky Warrior, causing him to take off from place and smash into the nearest bunker with a shoulder rush, tackling and busting through it with little issue. The militarized structure collapsed onto the side, crushing the dozen soldiers hiding from the widespread carnage therein and finding only a similarly gruesome death by crushing. Swimming through the wreckage, gore, and severed human parts, Andes emerged only to meet the sight of a lone man emerging atop the hill from another bunker.
The focus of the Sky Warrior's attention was a tall and slender man, lean and fit of frame with a long, rectangular face of pronounced cheekbones and piercing narrow eyes that made chills run down Andes' back when they scanned him with visible disdain. The man donned a gray button-up uniform of an intelligence division officer of a ninja village with a Kirigakure headband over on his forehead and a flowing black trench coat with silver buttons flapping behind him in the pelting shoreline drizzle.
The reason this man instantly registered on Andes' radar despite the Sky Warrior being surrounded by much nearer and more immediate targets was this man's look. How he carried himself in such extreme conditions as if this was yet another day of a never-ending war this man experienced every day. Moreover, the cold absence of love or appreciation for any life, even that of his own, was permanently sealed inside this man's eyes. To say that this man projected hatred would've been to lie. This man's eyes were incapable of releasing anything, for they only sucked light in to be sealed inside perpetual darkness where it would be snuffed out in its own apathy.
The Kirigakure intelligence division officer weaved a handful of hand seals and crouched down. The direction in which he was facing alarmed Andes, it took almost no time for the Sky Warrior to fend off raincoat drones throwing themselves at him in an attempt to slow him down and keep him grounded long enough for the bunker weaponry to shred him to pieces to realize the true target of this emotionless officer. He was aiming for the girl!
"Wings!" Andes cried out, hesitating for just a snap since he realized he didn't ask for the girl's name before rushing out to engage a Kirigakure military establishment, hoping to find another wearer of the Great Red Dragon's mark.
An icy spike shot from the puddle of blood, filtering out the water from the nutrients and other elements and freezing in an instant. The spike rammed against the back wheel of the bicycle, causing the steam built up in its back to overload and explode, throwing the red-haired girl flying through the sky and slamming into the sandy shoreline, getting snagged in the barbed wire and then torn to strips of flesh as steel wire and razor blades prevailed over a slender and starving human teen body hurling toward it at high speed.
"Collect her, bring her to the field medics, and stitch her together. Keep her alive," the intelligence division officer instructed one of the handful of troops standing guard around him. The brave soul skidded off the hill and took off in a mad sprint through the ricocheting windmill shuriken and steel wire, navigating around the entrapment and defensive lines and taking cover at just the right time.
With a mindless roar, Andes launched himself at the intelligence division ninja, prompting the other soldiers to intervene and attempt to hold the raging Sky Warrior back. Grumbling and cursing, Andes grabbed the bodies of the enemy soldiers and turned them into maces, using them to swat aside other soldiers until the intelligence division officer pulled out a tanto blade from underneath his trench coat, rushing in and slicing the heaving bodies of his own troops used as battering rams into pieces mid-air.
The sharpness of his opponent's blade, performing these ludicrous cuts through flesh and bone like it was cutting through the paper and adjusting its lacking length, revealed to Andes that he was dealing with a chakra-coated blade. Andes flung the severed halves of human bodies he used to thwack the surrounding soldiers away and threw himself at the enemy, frothing from the gnashed teeth mouth, with bloodshot and bulged eyes, raging like an ogre. Like a chess grandmaster finishing a match he had played out minutes ago, the Kirigakure officer weaved a one-handed hand seal.
"Ice Release: Sure-Kill Ice Spears," the man muttered.
Before Andes could get his hands on the gaunt and murderous man, he felt twinges of pain that were too overwhelming and nerve-racking to brush and power through. Massive ice spikes emerging from the splattering insides of the very bodies he just discarded had Andes skewered and the tendons of his key muscle groups severed.
No matter how much Andes wanted to power through the pain and the injury and tear the emotionless man standing with his back straight and his arms crossed behind his back after having sheathed his tanto, the Sky Warrior could only collapse when the steel-hard ice spikes produced from the blood of the bodies the field commander ruthlessly cut through to create this blood splatter in the first place turned to water.
"Pick this man up. Bring him to the field medics, patch him up, and keep him restrained and his chakra sealed," the Kirigakure ninja instructed the soldiers that flocked to their commander to replace those that their commander dispatched of himself as tools, not too different from kunai or shuriken fired from a dispenser of used in combat and discarded when they dulled or got lost.
"Sir, this man possesses tremendous physical strength even with his chakra sealed!" a soldier warned, humming with an artificial voice enhanced by a voicebox.
"So it is. This is a Sky Warrior. A ninja from the Land of Sky, in other words. I've fought them on Taro Island once. Their tremendous physical force comes from the kinetic energy and momentum they build up. Even if the field medics heal his injuries, he'll only be able to generate meaningless flicks of force when fully restrained," the intelligence officer rebuked his subordinate.
Andes woke up suspended above the ground like a block of chopped-up pork hung in the freezer. Immediately after waking up, the Sky Warrior made the metal restraints with chakra suppression sealing rags placed in a consistent formation around the metallic plates rumble and clang. The noise of his thrashing and attempted restraint echoed through the entire shadowy room. It was only when Andes felt the noise reverberating around him he switched his focus from the moot task of attempting to break out to the rest of the room he was in.
The Kirigakure ninja had placed him in some kind of underground laboratory. Andes hadn't been to too many containment facilities used by continental folks or islanders, but this looked more like a place one would use for extensive medical and scientific research than a place one would contain a raging bull like how these soldiers must have perceived the captured Sky Warrior.
A light lit up in the far-off end of the room, revealing that the specific corner received power shortly before the door of a metallic frame and plastic slid off to the side, allowing the plain-looking intelligence officer with the eyes of a hardened killer to walk in with the company of a handful of troops he could sacrifice for a water source to fuel his Water Release and Ice Release techniques. The Kirigakure officer stopped in front of Andes and crossed his arms behind his back while staring up at the suspended behemoth with a strict glare and stiffly pressed lips.
"You've treated my wounds. You shouldn't have. Although I presume that's to aid my torture later…" Andes replied with defiance, once again shaking the restraints that had him thoroughly sealed with a violent rumble. He fostered no false hope of being able to break out, but he wanted to get a flinch out of this immovable and emotionless black hole of a man.
"Do not be ridiculous, Sky Warrior," the man turned around and walked a few steps back before pressing his rear against the corner of a table. He pressed his fingers against his forehead and closed his eyes, wincing with moderate force behind this squint, almost as if he was struggling with a headache. "You've told enough to the girl, she was so distraught over the fate of her "big brother" and the state of her body that her shattered mind proved to be a poor fort for the protection of that information. You should be more demanding of the people you keep as company. That is the only reason you've been captured."
"What did you do to little Wings!" Andes growled, spitting out slobber as his mindless wrath didn't let him concern himself with his speaking manners. "If you did anything to her or her big brother…"
"Let's make one thing very clear, Mr. Sky Warrior…" the intelligence officer pushed himself off the table corner and faced Andes again. "You are in no position to make any demands here, nor do you have any leverage to bargain with us. If you were to spend some time here, you'd know that this is a facility that takes pride in its efficiency. After all, it takes a significant amount of resources and manpower to occupy another island and keep a steady supply of materials and goods flowing to the mainland. The only reason we do anything we do and treat you the way we do is because that is simply the best way to waste the least amount of time."
Andes shut up and adopted the approach of trying to glare a hole through the skull of the hated Kirigakure ninja instead.
"As far as your question was concerned, we did to the little girl the same thing we did to the young man marked with the Claws mark. The same thing we do to anyone that's marked–we remove that mark," the Kirigakure ninja said while stroking his right temple with his index and middle finger. "Well, we removed the Claws mark by removing the arms upon which the mark was carved, with your little rebellious companion–the barbed wire did enough damage to her entire body for the Wings mark to be completely unrecognizable. We didn't need to flay her back like we originally intended."
"You cut off that man's arms, you would have maimed that little girl… Why!?" Andes gasped with a stare blank with befuddlement at the cruelty with which these militarized Kirigakure industrialists acted.
"Because that's where they were marked, Mr. Sky Warrior…" the intelligence officer waved at his guard, signaling for the soldiers to step to the very back of the room and line up there and making adequate space for him to sit down, revealing that this little talk of theirs might take some time. Something that Andes found odd, given this man's insistence on wasting as little time as possible. There must have been a reason they kept Andes alive all this time and why they were indulging his curiosity.
"The Great Red Dragon… Smak… It's real!" Andes exclaimed, almost as surprised at this revelation as he was at the ruthlessness of these industrialists.
"That isn't exactly what I'd call a fact," the Kirigakure ninja raised his feet over the table and weaved his fingers over his waist, stretching out and making himself comfortable during their little talk. "However, the legend of this Great Red Dragon has some actual power amongst the surviving natives of this island. Enough so for them to mark newborns and carve these ridiculous symbols with these savage methods again and again as if they're truly counting on this Great Red Dragon to save them."
"Then you're afraid of it! You're afraid that if it were summoned, the Great Red Dragon Smak would smash your armies and annihilate you all!" Andes exclaimed. He wasn't fully certain why he was so overjoyed about the existence of this Great Red Dragon being confirmed. The Sky People have known different species of dragons to be real and inhabit the world's atmosphere for a long time now.
"Nothing like that, although…" the intelligence officer sank his chin closer to his chest and looked away. "We've noticed an incredibly peculiar thing. Whenever we kill one of these marked individuals, it's as if the surviving locals know this. They mark another with the same mark as the person we've executed. There is no way for them to know that we've executed one of the marked ones, or which one we killed. Besides that, we never find new marks or people marked with the same marks as the ones we've captured… This, and some other eerie details, makes me respect the legend of the Great Red Dragon to an extent. Enough to divert some of our resources into researching this phenomenon."
"Is that why you keep them alive?" Andes hissed with a tone full of spite for the newly met shinobi.
"Indeed. To prevent newly marked ones from appearing, as well as to study them. It's quite intriguing what exactly makes a person worthy of a mark. The locals don't mark random people, you see. Our reports of this behavior have interested the Mizukage enough to send some additional science personnel here to study what might be an additional source of power for Kirigakure to help establish us as a major military force again after the blunder at the Kage Summit years ago and losing our sovereignty…" the Kirigakure shinobi said before standing up and approaching a blank white plastic screen, positioned in front of a large black projector with a box of film tapes stacked inside placed beside it.
"Then why keep me alive and why bother my head with any of this?" Andes admitted what still had him stumped about this whole charade.
"You've come here for your Sky Walk, seeking the Great Red Dragon as inspiration for your bird suit… Or rather… A winged beast suit," the intelligence division officer reported. Nothing about this statement sounded like a question. He was merely flexing the information he possessed after breaching the poor Wings' mind. "Not to mention, as a Sky Warrior of the Land of Sky, killing you might cause us needless trouble and conflict against the Land of Sky, making holding this place more trouble than it is worth. Not even the mainland wants to contend with the Land of Sky and its fabled flying platoons that can bypass the ocean that's served as our main guard from military invasion for our nation's entire history entirely. That is why you are alive, that is why we will satisfy your curiosity and send you on your merry way to continue your personal journey."
"You'll let me go?" Andes shook his head in confusion. "The islanders are even more stupid than I'd have thought. In the heart of your operations, standing right in front of you, I'll crush you where you stand and rip every one of your soldiers apart with my bare hands."
"You could do that…" the intelligence officer sighed, stroking his brow before standing up and approaching the projector, then activating it. The device cast a ray of light that illuminated the whiteboard and lit it up with colorless, staticky-changing pictures. "Or, instead, you could witness and listen to the information we have and leave on peaceful terms. You came to this island to find inspiration for your Sky Walk, we can provide you with it…"
The confused Sky Warrior turned his head toward the image screen, observing with a shaken disposition the shifting images of thick mist enveloping the very shores in which he did battle the last time his memory served. From the big black techno box stuffed underneath the film projector came eerie sounds of high-pitched, almost siren-like mechanical howling that seemed otherworldly. Then Andes gasped, seeing vague reflections in the mist. Lines of solid light drawn across, of something absolutely gigantic lurking far away in the mist. The source of all that roaring and rumbling.
"Was that… The Great Red Dragon!?" Andes exclaimed in disbelief, sweat pouring down his face as he had never heard of a dragon like that. To be fair, the red dragons lived in the skies of volcanic islands and found a home in grand sources of volcanic ash. If Smak was a red dragon–a Danlong, he shouldn't have been anywhere near a drab, cold, moist, and desolate island such as this.
"Who's to say…?" the intelligence officer shrugged, approaching the corner of the table and observing the images reflected on the screen from up closer. He pressed his finger against the screen and dragged it across as if pointing something out. "Look at these lines. They're like constellations, don't you think? They show you the general shape of this creature. It's because of these flares, these wisps of mystical light that this mysterious creature west of this island is more than just a morning mirage. It's something ludicrously colossal, it's loud, and, based on its chakra signature–incredibly powerful. An engine of pure destruction and power. If it is the Great Red Dragon, then perhaps these marks call it here? As I've said–who knows? However… If you leave this place on peaceful terms, you might find out."
"And if I refuse?" Andes sneered at the cruel and emotionless man.
"We'll keep you alive and restrained here until someone from Land of Sky comes to claim you. We'll inform them how much trouble you were causing and why we couldn't release you. You'll go free all the same, except you'll have lost your chance of encountering whatever lurks in that mist for your Sky Walk. Oh, well… You can always get inspired by a parrot or something…" The man ran his hand across his neatly trimmed buff-colored hair. "As I've said before, we don't waste our time, Mr. Sky Warrior. That is why we'll need your answer now. Rot here, or go free. It's your choice. Please keep in mind that if you cause us any trouble during the release process, we'll just subdue you again and we won't be as kind about the state we keep you in this time."
Gnashing his teeth in desperation, Andes let his head sink and his hair fall over his face. There was little he could do, given the circumstances. As powerful as he was, he stood no chance of escaping on his own. Even if he employed deceit and lied to these people until they removed the chakra suppression seals and gave him space to build up momentum and power for a proper brawl, Andes had to admit to himself with bitterness that this man would most likely be able to subdue him again because of the bloodshed such a fight would cause and the peculiarities of his fighting style which handed him the advantage under these conditions.
However, nothing prevented Andes from attaining the strength of the Great Red Dragon and returning to this island wielding that power, then wiping the Kirigakure military off the face of this island and liberating it. After all, the Sky Warrior did more than just copy the object of their Sky Walk pilgrimage. They became inspired by them; they adopted the mentality and adapted to the lifestyle of the object of their study. Andes hated the thought of leaving Wings and Claws here to rot and suffer all this time, but…
The Great Red Dragon would save this place again, in due time.
"Very well, release me and I will leave this island and plunge into the mist. I shall find this Great Red Dragon, or whatever winged titan lurks in the shrouds surrounding this island, and I shall become it for my Sky Walk!" Andes declared proudly.
"I've suspected that your people were more than musclebound savages… I am glad we could come to an understanding," the intelligence officer nodded with a subtle smirk. Andes grit his teeth, biting into his cheeks and squeezing his fists in an attempt to restrain himself from lunging at this man immediately after he was released. That smug grin he adopted had a subtle hint of superiority to it. The bastard enjoyed Andes' response as an admission of the Sky Warrior's submission to the will of the Kirigakure ninja.
Whatever trials studying the monster of these mists would provide, Andes would complete his Sky Walk and make this asshole show this smug grin again right before Andes crushes his skull and spills his brain and teeth all across the sandy shores of this island! For Little Wings, for Claws…