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Chapter 63 - Arc 4 - Brawling in the Streets: Terror
🕑 Added 2024-07-26 19:38:33 +0000 UTCAnd this chapter you see why last chapter, we had a whole Fierro scene. It needed to set up a scene in this one, and several future scenes.
But mostly this one. A certain something makes no sense at all, if it hasn't been really ground in that they're horrified about Sakura, and actively disobeying orders to take her down.
Anyway, here's the chapter.
I had fun with this one.
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The ground quickly leaves the territory of the town as they continue walking in the direction the dungeon leads them. The world behind them fades, and the path in front of them twists into colored sand. The colors fade from the world with each step, until eventually she’s overcome with a feeling of nostalgia, and the land around them has turned sepia. She can’t help but notice ghostly images passing them by.
“Why are you following me?” Sakura turns, but it’s not Tenten or Neji talking, it’s a ghostly figure with long pointy ears, and a hateful scowl on her face. It’s the ghost of an elf, but elves don’t exist, so it’s not important. Even as the figure, and another continue to talk, she forms a Genjutsu release seal and tries to tune them out when that doesn’t work. She has to focus on the important details. They’re in enemy territory, and she has no time to pay attention to illusions or dynamic storytelling.
“Neji, are you paying attention?” She asks with exasperation when she notices the boy looking behind them, leave it to him to not be the type to skip boring cutscenes.
“I do believe that’s Fierro,” he explains, “her manner of speaking is accurate to the way the text has been written on the research papers.”
“Fierro’s a freaking elf?” Sakura can’t help but shake her head, “you get how stupid that sounds?”
“She’s currently threatening to murder a guy and then resurrect him as her slave if he doesn’t leave her alone, pay attention.” He scoffs at her.
“No!” Sakura huffs, looking at Tenten for support, only to find her clearly hanging on every word with bated breath.
If the dungeon wants to regale her with the story of their enemy, it can do it in a way that matters to her. Illusions and shadows are bad enough in games, especially when they slow you to a walk and stop your progress while they play around you. Luckily for her, they’re not slowed at all, and she can sprint away from them!
Neji’s listening, he’ll tell her if something important happens.
Still it’s very good to know that this dungeon is sympathetic to Fierro’s tale, or at least wants her to be. There’s something more to this than a crazy resident evil plot. Giving her a success objective that relies on killing them all is very confusing though, is it having a change of heart?
It won’t stop her from removing her head from her shoulders though, the evil mastermind needs to die, it’s that simple… Unless Neji tells her otherwise, then it’s not that simple. Maybe it’ll change her quest if that happens?
But Neji’s not gonna do that, because he’s spent the last several days straight reading the ramblings of a madwoman, he’s not about to care that she’s having some illusionary lovers spat in front of them.
Well, not enough to change his mind on their duty. She chances a look back, and sees neither of them have caught up to her. “You’re both seriously watching that!?”
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“Up ahead, sixteen people.” Neji throws his hand out to signal them to stop mid-step, just as they come into view of a set of six tall and square buildings side by side - three to each side of the walkway - where an ambushing group is more than likely to be waiting on the roofs.
“Sixteen- how in the actual hell do we deal with sixteen people?” Sakura spins in place, taking a look around just in case there’s more. There’s not, Neji’s good enough, but her nerves are on fire. “They could be academy students, we’d still be overrun and beat to death.”
“Trash is trash,” Neji shakes his head, “we can deal with an endless horde of trash.”
“That you can say that with confidence terrifies me.” Sakura allows her tone to fall into a bit of an exaggeratedly dead one. She looks to Tenten with begging eyes, “be a voice of reason, will you?”
Tenten, is already readying something from a large scroll, pulling out what looks like- “the freaking rifle? That’s your answer?”
“I can probably take out a few before they even realize they’re under attack, if we can find a good vantage point. Then I can continue to take some out while you two take aggro.” The weapon mistress says, holding up her recently looted glory. “If it works how I think, I don’t think this’ll be a problem at all.”
“... Okay then, sure.” Sakura looks down at her armored clothes, smoothing out the wrinkles and taking some comfort in the way the chain mesh clinks oh so gently when she shakes it. “So we need to be huge distractions while Tenten takes them out, does she even have it in her to kill this many people?”
“No, but she doesn’t have to, neither of us have any problems eliminating attackers, and even if she only kills a few, the morale loss will be substantial. Many will duck for cover in fear, and ducking behind cover matters very little when two melee fighters are also behind your cover.”
“You have a point, let’s get into position I guess.” Sakura shrugs, knowing damn well this is about to suck really, really bad.
“You walk into the trap, I’ll try to sneak onto the roofs first, you join me once they turn on me.” He says.
“Understood, but where is Tenten going to-” A look back reveals she’s already quite far away, running towards a set of buildings about half a minute back.
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Walking into a trap intentionally feels so awkward, but she has to do it. While Neji trusts his speed, she trusts something else entirely, her trait. The moment the very first kunai flies down at her, she can feel her sword react on its own and knock it out of the air.
Then the next.
Then the next.
Then the next-
“Oh fuck.”
It’s horrifying, the air is converted to metal in a second. They clearly anticipated this and decided to take her out before she could possibly react. She’s the priority above all else, that much has been made clear, and that she’s only finding out so late sucks. It’s so fast she can’t even change her mind and reorganize her plan of action. She can’t see the sky past the volley of death flying at her, the world turning to darkness within an instant.
She prepares to be turned into squishy substance as the massive weight comes crashing down on her, but the only thing that touches her are sparks from metal on metal. Her body moves automatically without strain or care. She feels like some kind of mech from a game, reacting to the attack with scanners and precision that no human could ever match. She can tell the people above on top of the building are very confused, and that causes her a wicked grin through her own crippling fears.
The thing about having a volley of attacks thrown at you like this, is that blocking them all should be basically impossible without extremely high level skills. Her sword needs to be in multiple places at once, and with every block she should lose enough force that even if she was fast enough, the weight alone would eventually crush her. The screech of metal is deafening and puts Tenten’s weapons to shame, but her ears don’t hurt, and her senses are somehow sharper for the molten red mulch she’s creating above her. Every automatic movement reorganizes reality, superheating the air and breaking the sound barrier hard enough she’s not surprised when the sand beneath her is sent flying in all directions and she’s left falling as if she was standing on a trap that’s now been released. She’s moving so fast she can’t see her own movements, and she’s awed by her own impossible reflexes taking form and forcing her reality upon the world.
She didn’t think her skill worked this way, she thought it considered context and reacted to an instance of attacks. What she’s dealing with is definitely a Jonin level problem, so her skill shouldn’t be able to react to it at all. None of this should be happening. Their plan failed, they didn’t consider that they might try to kill her above all else, even checking their surroundings. They were supposed to throw a few attacks on her while her teammates took a few out, and then she’d dart in to get up top and start taking them out too. Instead, she should be finding out if she truly has a respawn mechanic. This is everything Kakashi told her not to end up in, and yet here she is.
But her skill doesn’t work that way. It’s considering every single one of these kunai individual attacks, and reacting to them on a conceptual level. She’s not deflecting one conglomeration of academy grade throwing weapons, she’s not even blocking one massive cooperative technique, she is individually responding to thousands of attacks in rapid succession that are below the bar of automatic success, and therefore she is succeeding. Reality, intentions, teamwork, physics, none of that matters.
It’s that realization that makes something else occur to her.
They can’t hurt her.
Thousands of movements in less than one second, and she’s not winded. None of these attacks are high enough level to matter, so her stamina isn’t altered. None of these attacks are strong enough to hurt her, she doesn’t even have to block.
So she doesn’t.
A hint of madness takes over her, as she lets her sword fall, and she lets the rain of burning slag land on her face. She stands still, while enough metal and fire falls upon her to level a street.
She laughs out to the world, unharmed and without the slightest out of place strand of hair, as their greatest efforts are washed aside and the very ground beneath her turns to glass from the heat of her movements kicking in and the displacement of everything she moved slamming together at once.
They focus on her, throwing more kunai and tools uselessly and ignoring Neji. Hundreds more blades fall on her, and she smiles.
She watches with a grin, while a lucky kunai slams directly into her eye, and bounces off like it never existed.
She’s forgotten about Genin Constitution, she’s forgotten the very reasons she was confident in the first place. Gato messed her up, the dungeon level skewed her mind, the fight with Neji, that guy that took her hand, it all made her forget that Neji’s right; trash is trash.
She likely could have walked through the zombies like they were nothing.
She didn’t, she wasted energy, she wasted time, she let her old skills fade away because she had a cool hammer, and a cool new team she wanted to impress, and cool new ideas to play with. Suddenly people mattered to her because her charm was higher, and somehow that shifted her priorities. She became superficial, she forgot her strengths.
She’s not a twisted person, she’s effective, and her goal shouldn’t be about changing who she is, it should be about recognizing the impacts she has on others and not being a jerk when she wants to be nice.
Right now, she recognizes what she’s causing. She can see the faces of those looking over the rooftop down at her. She can feel it in the air, with every attack, with every worthless waste of breath. She can hear it as they scream and beg her to die, and their ragged cries become hoarse and painful and they bargain with the universe to just let her die.
Terror, she is causing Terror. Standing in the magma caused by their failed attempt to kill her unharmed and uncaring, she is terrifying them.
That’s a good thing. She raises her arms, and splays them out for all to see, laughing just a little harder, and drawing every panicked eye to her. She watches as they shake, one guy even turns his blade on his own throat, as if expecting her to do something worse to him than kill him. He’s right, she might.
Heads explode from Tenten’s shots, and bodies slump over and fall off the roof while Neji has his way.
“You’re all dead.” She proclaims, telling them the truth with a glint in her glowing red eyes. They believe her. She watches resignation come over some of their gazes, cloudiness and a loss of will to even move, a disease of shattered morale and broken fools. She doesn’t bother to knock aside the few desperate weapons still thrown at her from the walking corpses about to be shown the wrath of a pissed off Hyuga. They’re so focused on her for some unknown reason that they’re not responding to the guillotine behind them. They’re so sure she’s the only real threat, that they’ll all fall before they take their eyes off of her. She’ll never need to touch any of them, the splatter will never reach her.
But that’s fine
She just cleaned her clothes anyway.
Comments
Christopher Cummins
Sometimes you just gotta keep stabbing.
Mest450
Sakura went full psycho for a second there. Might have been on par with the mindless dead body stabbing.
Dopplerdee
Being able to write a character being wrong when you know the right answer and having it be believable is an important writing skill.
Christopher Cummins
Yeah, it was really awkward writing her actually caring about the zombies while knowing for a fact they can't hurt her.
Dopplerdee
Oh neat, she reached an understanding about who she is as a person. Also she figured out she's immune to mooks.
