| [Sep. 20th, 2013|10:31 pm] |
Plate-armor cracked, but didn’t break. He couldn’t get enough force behind it. He threw more chakra into the jutsu, until the birdsong was a scream, but he couldn’t feel his coils well enough to focus it. Streaks of blue lightning crackled across thick black chitinous plates, grounding uselessly into nothing.
The mother-demon twisted like a snake and flung him off. Smoking blood sprayed from her beheaded tail, smearing the cavern’s stone floor in oily yellow streaks. She screamed again, raging agony, and the crowded demon children echoed her.
In a second, she’d attack again.
Kakashi dragged himself off the floor, hammered a little more chakra down his arm, and poured a last breath of life into his jutsu. He couldn’t hurt her again, but she didn’t know that. She was smart enough to hide her chakra. Smart creatures knew what fear was.
The colossal head swung back around. Pincered jaws spread. Kakashi draw a breath and threw himself at her face, screaming his own stupid, violent challenge to the mother of monsters.
He got close enough to see blue lightning reflected in six liquid-yellow eyes, then the giant demon reared back, knocked him out of the air, and backed away. She scrambled up towards the ceiling, clawing into a tunnel much broader than the one Kakashi had fallen through. Soft earth and hunks of rock rained down as she clawed the sides, crushing smaller demons, filling the air with dust. In barely a moment, the bleeding tail tip vanished.
Chest heaving, Kakashi levered himself up to one knee, then to his feet, and looked at the wide circle of half-grown demons around him. Maybe thirty of them, none of them bigger than a german shepherd.
He’d pushed it this far.
“Well?,” he demanded, voice rasping.
It was probably the mother-demon’s retreat that had done it, not him, but there was something immensely gratifying about the way they slunk back into holes and tunnels, withdrawing from the dying circle of blue-white light. Their chakra signatures faded upwards, following the mother.
Towards the surface.
Where the others were.
“Crap,” Kakashi panted, and yanked up a quick water jutsu to sluice the venom away before staggering as fast as he could towards Genma’s spark. Technicolor afterimages from the Raikiri left red and white blotches across his regular vision, but the Sharingan had no problems picking out the weak human chakra signature trapped down in a bedrock seam.
Hidey-hole or demon larder? Either way, it was half-buried beneath chunks of fallen earth and slab-stone. Kakashi hit his knees and scrabbled one-handed to clear the rubble, tearing his fingertips on sharp stone edges.
“Tanuki?” he yelled, hauling a table-sized chunk aside. “Tanuki! You better not be dead or pregnant—”
A ratcheting cough echoed dully under the dust clouds.
Kakashi flung himself down on his belly, stretching down into the dark until his groping hand found the smooth ceramic of an arm-guard. He gripped a hand, feeling fever-hot fingers spasm fitfully, and followed the arm up to a shoulder, and then a shoulder-strap. As good an anchor as any. He grabbed it, set himself, and hauled.
Nothing happened.
Kakashi took an adrenaline-shivery breath, put more muscle into it, and tried again. This time, Genma jerked, slid an inch, caught on something, jerked again, and finally came free, slithering out of the ground like—nothing Kakashi wanted to think about. He pulled up twin seeds of chakra, lighting his hands with it for better vision.
Genma was covered in blood, all of it red.
“Goddammit, Shiranui,” Kakashi hissed, forgetting mask name protocol in the clanging panic of losing another teammate to a rockfall on a first mission. He yanked Genma’s mask off, half-expecting to see a crushed skull, leaking brain matter.
Yellow-brown eyes blinked up at him, two of them. |
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