| [May. 8th, 2014|03:57 am] |
When the lightning struck in the trees it blinded all of them. Ryouma used that moment of white, deafening earth-shaking to kill.
The tall woman with the bandage-masked face had turned out to be a kenjutsu user. She'd nearly taken Ryouma's head off when he first burst out of the trees, and his armguards were notched and scarred from blocking. He couldn't close with her, until Kakashi brought the sky down on the woods behind them. She struck wildly, blind and deafened, and the sword lodged in the thick reinforced strap over his shoulder. He seized the blade with one hand and found her side with the other, and then it was all over but the screaming.
When he could see again, the kunoichi was writhing at his feet, and the two shinobi tag-teaming Genma — the ponytailed captain and the orange-haired man — had taken advantage of the strike to close inside the defensive circle Genma had created with his viciously accurate senbon strikes. Genma slapped a pair of kunai up out of his leg holster, but the left-hand dagger shattered with the captain's first blow. The orange-haired man grinned viciously and stepped in.
Genma met him with fire. The Kiri shinobi called up a shield of water from the rain, but the storm was moving on, its wild strength spent, and the rain sizzled away. Ryouma closed in, circling to flank the two Kiri nin. The woman whose side he'd rotted away was still whimpering, but she wouldn't be for long. The captain's pale eyes kept dropping to her, and then jerking back up.
Chakra flared like a firestorm, back in the trees, and abruptly went out.
That had felt like Kakashi's cold sunlight-on-steel chakra, wrapped up and twisted in Iebara's bloody massacre of a jutsu, and now Ryouma couldn't feel either of them anymore. He shouted into his radio mic, "Hound!" and heard nothing but a static hiss.
Of course Kakashi's lightning jutsu must have fried their circuits. That was a better thought than Kakashi dead or dying, his radio crushed beneath his shattered body, and Genma was hurt and weary and Ryouma couldn't help either of them—
The Kiri captain breathed, "Iebara." And then she was gone, arrowing through the trees.
Ryouma bolted at her heels.
Genma was holding his own against the orange-haired nin, anyway. Without the Kiri captain double-teaming him, he'd be fine. And he couldn't have run fast enough; his leg would slow him down. Kakashi was the one in danger. Ryouma was right to run. |
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