The Kumo stronghold clung to the jagged, storm-battered cliffs like a barnacle on a leviathan's flank. Perched high above the churning grey fury of the sea, its stone walls, slick with salt spray and recent rain, should have been impregnable.
Watchtowers pierced the low-hanging clouds, their braziers casting flickering, inadequate light against the pre-dawn gloom. Below, the narrow cove entrance was choked with sharp, black rocks, treacherous even without the churning water. It was a fortress designed to weather storms and repel invaders, Kiri Invaders to be specific.
Tonight, it weathered a different kind of storm.
They came not from the sea, but with it. Five figures materialized from the dense, salt-laden fog rolling off the water, silent as ghosts, their presence announced only by the sudden, violent cessation of the sentries' heartbeats on the outermost patrol.
The Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist had arrived.
Tengan Nobuyuki moved first, a spectre in dark blue robes. His massive, bandaged cleavers, Hiramekarei, pulsed with a sickly green chakra even before he drew them.
He didn't sprint; he flowed towards the main gate, where two burly Kumo chuunin, alerted by the death silence, were shouting alarms. Their hands flew through seals – Raiton: Gian!
Twin bolts of lightning speared towards Tengan.
A slow, almost languid smile spread across Tengan's face. He crossed Hiramekarei before him.
"Release: Twin Dragons!"
The bandages unwound with a whispering hiss, revealing not blades, but twin pillars of swirling pressurized green chakra. The lightning bolts struck the chakra field and splattered, absorbed and dissipated like rain on hot stone.
The Kumo chuunin gaped. Tengan didn't break stride. He thrust the crossed hilts forward.
"Bind!"
The chakra pillars lashed out like emerald vipers, wrapping around the chuunin before they could react.
"SNAP-CRUNCH!"
The sound was horrifyingly wet and final as the constricting energy crushed bone and pulped organs. Tengan flicked his wrists, the chakra dissolving, leaving only broken, twitching forms on the wet stone. He sighed, a sound of deep contentment.
"Too quick," he murmured, his eyes already scanning for more substantial prey as Hiramekarei's chakra swirled eagerly around him.
Sakurai Yuji was a blur of controlled frenzy.
Twin bolts of living lightning, the swords Kiba, crackled in his hands, casting strobing blue-white light that cut through the fog and painted the fortress walls in stark, terrifying relief. He didn't bother with gates. A Kumo jounin, alerted by the commotion, leapt down from a battlement, kunai flashing.
"CLANG-SPARK!"
Yuji met him mid-air, Kiba intercepting the kunai with a shower of electric sparks that made the jounin's arm spasm.
"Dance of the Thunder God!" Yuji cackled a high-pitched, manic sound. He became pure motion, "ZZZT-SLASH!"
The jounin parried desperately, but Yuji was faster, his movements amplified by the lightning chakra flowing through him and the swords. "ZZAP-THUD!"
One Kiba blade pierced the jounin's shoulder, the paralyzing current locking his muscles.
"Gotcha!" Yuji grinned, wide and feral. The second Kiba blade came down in a blinding arc, cleaving through the paralyzed man's raised defence and splitting him from collar to sternum. Yuji landed lightly, flicking gore from Kiba's humming blades, his laughter echoing unnervingly off the stone walls.
"Feels good!" he shouted to no one in particular, already darting towards the sound of fighting, leaving a smoking corpse behind.
Konno Momoe was a study in brutal efficiency.
The Kubikiribōchō, the Executioner's Blade, looked impossibly large strapped to her back, a slab of blackened steel wider than her torso. She didn't run; she walked with deliberate, ground-shaking steps towards a group of five Kumo shinobi forming a defensive line near the inner courtyard.
They saw her coming – the lone woman with the monstrous sword – and sneered, raising weapons.
Their first Mistake.
Momoe didn't break stride. Her hand closed on the worn leather hilt. With a grunt of effort that sounded almost casual, she unsheathed the Kubikiribōchō in a single, terrifyingly smooth arc.
"WHOOSH-CLANG!"
The sheer displacement of air buffeted the defenders. The first Kumo nin, a spearman, lunged. Momoe simply brought the flat of the massive blade down like a falling tree.
"CRUNCH!"
The spear shattered, and the man vanished beneath the steel, reduced to a crimson smear on the cobblestones. The others froze, horror dawning. Momoe reversed the swing horizontally. The blade bisected two chuunin at the waist before they could scream. Blood fountained, drenching the remaining two.
One turned to flee; Momoe took a single step forward and thrust the point of the Kubikiribōchō straight through his back and out his chest, pinning him to the fortress wall like a grotesque insect.
"SCHLICK!"
She ripped the blade free, the edge gleaming wetly. The last Kumo nin, trembling, raised his kunai. Momoe looked at him, her expression impassive. She flicked the massive blade, sending a cascade of blood and gore splattering against the wall. The edge, where it had chipped slightly against the stone, seemed to ripple, the steel flowing and reforming instantly. She hefted the freshly restored blade. The remaining ninja whimpered. Momoe ended him with a simple, vertical chop.
"THUD!"
Silence.
Kubota Jurou worked with methodical, unsettling precision. He didn't engage the front lines; he slipped through the chaos like a shadow, the needle-like blade of Nuibari gleaming faintly in the dim light.
His spool of nearly invisible chakra wire, "Sewing Needle," was his true weapon.
He found a squad of three Kumo nin trying to flank Yuji, who was gleefully electrocuting another group near the barracks. Jurou smiled, a thin, unpleasant curve of the lips. His fingers flickered.
"ZIP-ZIP-ZIP!"
Strands of wire, thin as spider silk but strong as steel, shot out, guided by his chakra. One strand looped around an ankle, another snaked around a wrist, the third encircled a throat before they even sensed him.
"Thread the Needle," Jurou whispered. A flick of Nuibari.
"SNAP-THWACK!" The wires pulled taut instantly.
"CRACK!" The ankle snapped. The wrist tendons severed. The wire garroted the third, cutting off his choked cry. They collapsed, tangled and screaming, a macabre puppet show of agony.
He didn't finish them quickly. With meticulous, almost surgical movements, he used Nuibari and his wires to sew. He stitched a screaming man's lips shut with brutal efficiency.
He sewed another's flailing hand to the stone floor. He worked silently, his face a mask of detached concentration, enjoying the desperate struggles and muffled screams as he immobilized and mutilated them with his grotesque stitching.
Kase Seiji was the storm's calm, terrifying eye. He strode through the fortress grounds, Samehada strapped across his back, its bandages seeming to writhe and pulse with hungry anticipation.
He didn't seek combat; he drew it like a magnet. A Kumo jounin, seeing the legendary shark-skin sword, launched a desperate, high-level Raiton technique:
"Raiton: Gian no Yaiba!" (Lightning Release: False Darkness Blade).
A massive, crackling sword of pure lightning formed and slashed down towards Seiji. Seiji didn't flinch. He simply reached back, his hand closing on Samehada's hilt. The bandages exploded off in a shower of tatters. Samehada awoke.
As the lightning blade descended, Seiji swung Samehada upwards. Instead of clashing, the sword opened. Its maw gaped wide and swallowed the entire Raiton construct whole.
"CRACKLE-FIZZLE!"
The terrifying lightning blade vanished into the shark-skin sword, absorbed in an instant. Seiji took a single, powerful step forward and swung Samehada horizontally.
"WHOOSH-SHUNK!" The sword didn't just cut; it shredded. The scales tore through the jounin's hastily raised arms and into his torso, ripping flesh and bone apart with horrific ease.
Samehada feasted on the spilt chakra and life force, its growl deepening into a contented purr as the mangled body fell. Seiji moved on, Samehada writhing slightly in his grip, seeking its next meal. Wherever he walked, Kumo Ninja faltered.
The assault was swift, brutal, and utterly one-sided. The Kumo stronghold, designed to withstand sieges, was torn apart from within by five walking calamities.
Within minutes, the organized defence had shattered into pockets of desperate, doomed resistance, quickly silenced. The air hung thick with the coppery stench of blood, the ozone tang of Yuji's lightning, the metallic bite of Momoe's cleaving, and the strange, wet-dog smell emanating from Samehada.
As the last Kumo defender fell the Swordsmen converged in the central courtyard, now slick with gore. Tengan calmly rewrapped Hiramekarei, the green chakra fading. Yuji twirled Kiba, the lightning crackling softly, a manic grin still plastered on his face. Momoe wiped Kubikiribōchō's massive blade clean on a fallen Kumo banner, her expression unreadable. Jurou meticulously coiled his wire, ignoring the muffled whimpers from a man he'd sewn to a post. Seiji stood impassive, Samehada now quiet and bandaged once more, though it seemed bulkier, sated.
The silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It was the silence of a slaughterhouse.
Then, a new presence materialized at the shattered main gate. He didn't walk through; he seemed to coalesce from the lingering mist and shadows.
Jinpachi Ryusuke.
His face was a roadmap of violence, crisscrossed with thick, pale scars that pulled at his features, giving him a permanent, lopsided snarl. One eye was milky white and blind; the other, a dark, pitiless orb, scanned the courtyard and its occupants. He wore simple, dark Mist attire, and no visible weapon, yet an aura of cold, brutal authority radiated from him, thicker than the fog. He moved with the heavy, deliberate gait of a predator surveying its territory.
The Swordsmen, masters of death who had just culled a fortress garrison with casual brutality, stiffened almost imperceptibly. The casual arrogance, the enjoyment of the kill – it vanished, replaced by a palpable tension, a deep-seated wariness that bordered on fear.
Ryusuke stopped a few paces away, his good eye sweeping over each of them, lingering for a moment on the blood soaking their clothes and weapons, on the devastation surrounding them.
"Onto, the Next." He flatly said.