| [May. 8th, 2014|03:59 am] |
Genma flung a handful of senbon at his opponent and cursed. Kakashi was down, Ryouma was no medic, and this fight needed to be over, but the orange-haired Mist ninja was relentless.
Orangy raised a muddy tsunami from the saturated ground in a two-pronged assault. Shuriken flew out of the wave faster than Genma could dodge. He blocked instead, grabbing instinctively for kunai and crossing his arms in front of his throat as knife-edged stars raked furrows across his shoulders.
He felt the impacts in his palms with each shuriken that cracked against his blades. One kunai fractured almost to the hilt, weakened by the iron-stealing jutsu he'd used on Iebara’s blood blades, but the other held.
As the jutsu wave crested he threw broken and intact kunai at the enemy ninja and dove for the ground, opening the earth with a moguragakure technique. Relying on chakra sense to tell him where his quarry lay, Genma surged up from below and hurled a poison-tipped senbon straight for his opponent's face.
The jutsu-sabotaged steel failed, shattering on impact.
Orangy cursed, leaping back. There were a dozen fresh cuts on his face where senbon shrapnel had hit him, but if he’d gotten a dose of Genma’s poison, he didn’t show it. Chakra flared, and a cannon blast of icy wind hit Genma in the face, throwing him to the ground. His mask slammed against his nose and cheeks, splinter-cracking under the onslaught before the jutsu died. Bone crunched, and his head rang as sparks bloomed behind his eyelids. He hurled himself blindly to one side before Orangy could strike again.
With untrustworthy senbon, accuracy was critical, and a moving target hard to hit. Genma tucked into a roll, twisting fingers through seals to cast a fresh jutsu of his own. Manacles of hardened mud locked around Orangy’s ankles, and Genma unleashed a fresh volley.
Two of the senbon broke, but a third sank home, delivering its payload. Orangy gasped, raising a hand too late to block, and fell with his legs still encased in Genma’s muddy shackles, choking on a last breath as he died.
Genma sprinted for the trees. When he tried to vault over the body of the tall woman Ryouma’d taken down, his injured leg buckled; he fell almost on top of her. Her ribcage was half-rotted away, with macerated viscera spilling out. Ryouma’s jutsu continued to eat into her corpse, feeding on the residual chakra of recent death.
He gagged on the stench and shoved himself to his feet, forcing his leg to hold just a little longer.
There were still three chakra signatures in the trees. Two ANBU sparks made a beacon to navigate by. As a slow roll of thunder pealed overhead, Genma ran.
In the devastated grove of trees, Ryouma knelt over Kakashi’s unnaturally still body. Both shinobi had lost their masks; Ryouma was bent so low their foreheads touched. It looked terrifyingly like a man mourning a fallen comrade, but Genma could feel the sputtering flame of Kakashi’s chakra, and the current of a transfusion flowing from Ryouma.
At the bottom of a scorched crater, the Mist captain groaned and gasped, dying by degrees from whatever wounds she’d incurred. Iebara was nowhere; his brackish chakra had disappeared in that lightning strike. Genma extended his chakra sense, but there was still no sign of the enemy. He went to one knee next to his comrades. “Ram, what’s the status?”
Ryouma didn’t move. “I'm not hurt,” he said, tight with concentration. “Hound's a mess, but I don't think he's bleeding out. Passed out from chakra depletion.”
“Iebara?”
“Hound copied his jutsu and killed him with it,” Ryouma answered. He maintained his focus on the task of transfusing Kakashi, but there was a thread of fierce pleasure in his voice. |
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