| [Dec. 16th, 2009|03:02 am] |
So much for stealthy. Ryouma shook black slime off his hands, eased the ruined corpses down onto the floor, and followed at Katsuko's heels. At a turn in the passageway, where the corridor connected to a wider hall, he passed her. He'd probably survive a sword in the back, if he had to stop fast, but she wouldn't have a chance against the touch of putrid chakra.
The fortress guards didn't, either. They met the next pair at the top of the narrow spiraling stair that led, according to the blueprints, down to Masahiko's quarters. The difference in height, as the guards raced up the steps, was just enough that Ryouma could slap the first man in the face and leave oozing black ruin behind. Katsuko's sword slid under his arm to slice the second guard nearly in half. Both bodies tumbled down the stairs, tripping the men who came dashing up after them. One of the new arrivals nearly gutted himself on his own sword. They barely needed Ryouma and Katsuko's help to finish them off, but the sprawling corpses choked the narrow stone curve, and left the stairs slippery with blood and rot.
Ryouma lit his feet with chakra and took to the wall, and Katsuko followed. He could feel her at his back, brimming with chakra like a forestfire, breathing like a woman ready to laugh. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to turn and kiss her, too, but that could wait for when they weren't racing sideways down a spiraling staircase toward the sound of more men beginning the climb. He hadn't had a mission like this--death and glory and nothing else that mattered--for longer than he cared to remember, and he wasn't sure he'd ever had a mission partner like her.
Maybe Misao...
Thought drowned in a welter of blood as they met the next band of guards, almost at the foot of the stairs. Katsuko spun into her dance of steel and death, and Ryouma's mouth stretched in a fierce, fixed grin. This was easy. This was almost fun. The quarters were too cramped for the guards' long swords; Katsuko was relying almost exclusively on her shorter kodachi now, and Ryouma could duck in and out of reach as the enclosing walls and struggling bodies hampered the guards' swing. He left a blackened handprint on one man's cheek, spun to block a strike with the side of his palm against the inside of another man's elbow, and barely felt the glancing blow against his hip as Katsuko took down the man who'd just tried to gut him.
Something slithered down his legs. He spared one half-glance--but it was his belt huddling blood-spattered around his feet, not his guts. He kicked it aside and dodged under the next swinging sword, sacrificing a narrow slice on his shoulder for the satisfaction of his palm grounding in the unprotected flesh under his victim's arm. They were already halfway down the hallway he'd seen on the blueprints; that door on the right would open into Masahiko's aide's bedroom, and beyond that were the quarters of the target himself...
The door exploded outwards in a hurricane of lightning and wind and fury. Former Cloud-nin, Ryouma remembered abruptly, in the after-shock. The man he'd just hit--the man whose sword was still red with Ryouma's blood--sank slowly to the floor, his mouth open in surprise. The rot hadn't killed him yet; the arm-length splinter impaling his back did it first. Cloud-nin. I should've--.
He barely even saw the white light gathering at the fingertips of the tall man framed in the doorway before lightning arced. Hands still haloed with the gangrenous glow of the Nikutai Tokasu lifted far, far too late to form the seals for a counter-jutsu. The lightning jutsu smashed him into the wall, and he lost breath, and light, and time. |
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