| [Sep. 20th, 2013|10:30 pm] |
The tunnel was dark and silent. Kakashi paused, cut the light-jutsu, and pulled his emotions back beneath his skin, quieting rage and harp-string tension. Slowly, carefully, he let his chakra unfurl, senses expanding.
Below, there were more demons. He couldn’t get an accurate count on them; their signatures were a tangled rat’s nest. But buried down somewhere in the center, there was the faintest glint of an ANBU spark.
Okay, Shiranui, perhaps that tracker was useful.
He had no idea which branching set of tunnels would lead him to his teammate, but down seemed like the obvious choice. Kakashi pulled his chakra back, conserving what was left, and set off again. He considered one of the soldier pills rattling in the silver tube tucked into a belt-pouch, but the extra stress would be murder on already-strained chakra coils.
On the other hand, that was a lot of demons.
He freed a pill and tucked it between two back molars, ready to crack, just in case.
The tunnel spiralled down, smooth-sided and increasingly filled with a strong stink of sulphur and iron and dead things. A building sinus headache was starting to make his teeth ache. He took a left at one fork, based on the sharper incline; took a right at the next one, always moving down. Chakra signatures rippled closer, small but strong. Another right—
The tunnel dropped away.
Kakashi took a running step, and suddenly there was nothing to stand on. He twisted, grabbed for the wall, missed it by inches, and hurtled down into the empty dark.
Screaming did not actually help much.
Wind was his weakest affinity, but nothing else would work. He yanked up the first stolen jutsu he could think of, and forced his hands and a roughly accurate amount of chakra through it. A swirling dust devil grabbed him and slowed the fall, spinning the world into a dizzy kaleidoscope.
The narrow chute widened abruptly out, sound echoing off much more distant walls. He dropped another ten pounding heartbeats, and slammed down onto the hard, warm back of something living.
Something big.
Pain shot through the side of his jaw where Raidou had punched him. The rest of his bones bowed and ached like he’d introduced them too quickly to slab concrete, but nothing snapped. The soldier pill crunched between his teeth, jolting a hot slap of raw energy into his coils. And somewhere up above, three illusory clones died.
That woke him up.
Dizzy, confused, and highly annoyed, Kakashi scrambled upright just as something giant whistled over his head, missing his hair by a breath. He threw himself sideways and found yet more plate-armor back beneath his feet. The same attack came again, slicing through the air. He ducked and it missed, but something viscous splattered onto his bare biceps, which went numb.
That was a tail?
He wrenched the Sharingan open. Beneath his feet, a lake’s worth of chakra lit up dark red and terrifying, outlining the inner shape of a much, much bigger demon.
Eggs, it occurred to him, needed something to lay them.
Buried beneath the—call it a mother-demon—Genma’s faint spark winked fitfully. At least Kakashi had found him. Saving him, on the other hand—
The tail lashed back. Kakashi yanked his scattered wits about him, poured his chakra into his hands, and met it with a Raikiri. The Sharingan gave him the extra millisecond he needed to slide around the sting, avoiding the poisoned tip. He slammed his fist through the joint at the base of the bulb, meeting steely resistance before something crunched and gave. The bulb shattered, splattering clear venom over his arm up to the shoulder, then sheared cleanly away.
The mother-demon gave a sawing screech which rolled around the cavern and made Kakashi’s head ring. He staggered as she bucked beneath him, yanked sideways by the awkward weight of his deadened arm. Lightning still burned at the fingertips, but he couldn’t feel it.
He grabbed his own arm at the elbow and slammed it straight down, burying the remains of the Raikiri in the mother’s back. |
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