| [May. 8th, 2014|03:44 am] |
Beyond them, in the rain, Kakashi and Iebara blazed.
Ryouma struggled up to his elbow and twisted to see over his left shoulder. Stormclouds still darkened the moon, but the unearthly glow of chakra-edged weapons chased blurring lines through the field and beneath the trees. Two white-glowing kunai for Kakashi, Ryouma saw in a brief moment of stillness, when the combatants landed crouched on tree branches at the edge of the copse. The steel blades looked like they were already beginning to deform with chakra-heat. Iebara had blades of blood again, casting a faint red light like a reflection from the pit of hell.
Iebara struck, and Kakashi was no longer there. He'd fled further back into the trees, forcing Iebara to pursue. Drawing him off.
Trying to protect Ryouma and Genma. So far, they'd been nothing but a liability for him.
They were both still bleeding, though the rain did its best to wash the trails away. A vicious slash angled high on Genma's right shoulder, dark on pale skin. Its twin burned on Ryouma's arm, just above his ANBU tattoo. He drew a final rasping breath and tried to speak. "Can you seal the cuts?"
Genma's shadowed head dipped in a nod above him. "In a sec. We need blood pills." He sounded a little breathless, as well as hoarse. "Don't know how much he got out of you, but I'm feeling pretty light-headed. Seeing haloes." He shifted, reaching into his hip-pouch, and drew out a small metal canister. The hunch of his shoulders offered a little protection from the driving rain as he twisted the top off and shook pills out into his gloved palm. "Can you get that down?"
Ryouma's left arm hurt to move, but if he could push through seals he could pick up one pill. He wasn't going to lip it off Genma's palm, at any rate. The pill tasted of salt and copper, already beginning to dissolve from the wet. For a moment he choked on an vicious flare of fear, but he swallowed it down.
The lieutenant swallowed his own blood pill and chased it with a soldier pill, then tipped his mask back down. He looked up, over Ryouma's head. "Those bastards are just standing there. What're they waiting for?"
The Kiri captain and her two subordinates seemed to have moved further away from the woodline, though distance wasn't easy to judge in the dark and the rain, through broken lightning flashes. They stood stiff-backed in the downpour, just out of shuriken range. The captain had crossed her arms over her chest. The stocky orange-haired man was spinning one of Kiri's viciously pronged kunai around his finger, while the other woman simply stood still, loose-jointed, with her hands in her pockets.
If they cared about Genma's guarding clones, they didn't show it.
"Their captain didn't want a fight," Ryouma said, dazedly. He had to stop when Genma set the open mouth of a canteen to his lips, but the warm water soothed his throat and helped clear his thoughts. "You were talking sense to her. She didn't want a fight, she yelled after him, but she didn't chase him down. No way our taichou'd let that stand. So she's scared of him. 'Cause he won't hesitate to turn on them, I bet, if they got in his way."
Genma took a long pull at his canteen and then capped and stowed it. He fumbled in the muddy dark for a moment and came up with the pale glimmer of Ryouma's mask, bloodless, clean. He didn't press it to Ryouma's face, just held it out. After a moment Ryouma steeled himself, and took it.
"I'm scared of him, too," Genma said, low, "but fuck that." He shaped a dizzying sequence of seals and lifted a green-lit hand to his injured shoulder. "We're taking him down, and the rest of them, too, if we have to. Hound's not the only one in this fight with a bounty on his head. I don't want to fight that Kiri bastard, but if he insists, I'll be happy to move his page to the back tab of my Bingo Book." |
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