Chapter 672.1: Not So Dull After All
- Location
- USA
A couple minutes after tossing the misterators into the crack of the cave, Noburi declared the all clear.
Hazō seemed to shake off whatever contemplation he'd been stuck in and asked, "Did you get enough chakra to compensate for summons?"
Noburi laughed. "Nowhere close. A few little beasts in a tiny room like this wouldn't pay for an academy student's substitution, much less a decent combat summon."
Hazō sighed. "I'd hoped for more. How come the beasts in these 'chakra-dense' areas don't have more chakra to them?"
"They do, I think," Noburi said. "But it's still not that much per beast."
"I think it makes sense," Mari said. "We spend years and years training our reserves to make them as big as possible, but chakra beasts don't do that. If you compared their natural reserves to what a civilian has, they'd probably be enormous, right?"
"That sounds right," Noburi said.
"Well, I guess we'll be a bit lower on chakra today," Hazō said. "Shall we?"
"Summoning Technique: Panashe!"
"Summoning Technique: Candoru!"
"Shadow Clone Technique!"
"Shadow Clone Technique!"
Puffs of smoke surrounded the team as the bulk of the cave-expedition's fighting force appeared from the aether. Most notable were the clones of Yuno, who were looking around in momentary confusion (Mari's clones were clearly much more used to immediately grabbing seals and moving into a formation).
Ah, Yuno had shadow clones now. Not only did that mean that his wife was safer, it meant that he had more pleasant faces to gaze at.
Oh no. What would Yuno think about looking at another woman that she knew he was attracted to, even if that other woman was a clone of herself? Could he afford to show affection to her clones if he wanted to stay in one piece? Could he afford to show affection to Yuno, when the Yuno clones were clearly each carrying their own little Satsuko-clones?
What if her clones came to him for physical affection (which they expected, being cognitively identical to Yuno herself!) and he shunned them? She'd receive the memories of being ignored by him and who knew if that would set her off.
Noburi quickly looked away from the small crowd of Yunos. Some questions didn't need to be answered.
Panashe was here for general utility and scouting, Candoru was here so that Hazō could feel like he was contributing, and the shadow clones of the team's two jōnin were here to provide infinitely more combat power than the cave could handle, on the off chance anything survived Noburi's mist drain and attacked.
Noburi quickly did his rounds, rebalancing chakra within the team so that everyone was at around half their reserves and he felt like he was pretty close to full.
The mist from the misterator had long since settled out of the air, so he popped another one and checked his sense of chakra through the mist again to confirm that there was nothing living with chakra within twenty meters of the cave's mouth. His senses reached farther than he could drain, so he could sense chakra deeper within the cave that he couldn't quite grasp and pull on, but he could tell it was there. Once they got in there, he'd need to call out each and every one of the beasts that he could sense but couldn't drain to make sure that the jōnin knew about the potential threats long before they made themselves into actual threats. Of course, those things would ideally be dead long before they even knew that they needed to fight back.
"Alright, we're good now," Noburi said. "Going in. I'll meet you all, my fellow meat-people, at the pool."
With that, he wrapped his hand around his barrel so it wouldn't knock against the narrow walls of the cave's opening, and ducked his way inside.
Two minutes later, after a frankly inordinate amount of chastising about letting the shadow clones and summons go first, he actually went in for real.
"I don't know why Noburi even has to be in here physically," he heard Yuno saying. To whom she was talking, he didn't know. Maybe Mari, or one of the summons. Maybe another one of the Yunos?
Noburi pulled out his Daybright Lantern seal (attached to the base of a small metal cup so that it only shined light in one direction) and pointed it at where he remembered sensing chakra sources in the room. The light refracted through the thin mist, but not enough to keep the team from seeing the six torso-sized lizards piled up dead at a point where the tunnel turned.
He redirected the light to point at a pair of dead snakes in a crack in the wall – four feet long and striped in bright red and orange – then to a nest of forearm-sized scorpions whose corpses were somehow still stuck to the ceiling.
"That's why," he heard a Mari say. "Guess you haven't seen Noburi in action before? Trust me, we're going to have a very easy time of things here."
"I don't believe you," Candoru said. "Hazō only summons me to die in dramatic ways, and I'm pretty sure that there's something in here that's going to fuck me up in ways that even this guy can't prevent."
"Perhaps the problem is your insufficient combat skill," Yuno said. "You should request Hazō summon you more often so that you get more experience fighting chakra beasts."
"What she said," Panashe said. "Though, I guess this explains why we're rolling through the Dogs we find so easily, if you're all too lazy to even consider training against unconventional enemies."
"Listen here you scaley bitch," Candorui said, "I'm going to take your tongue and-"
"Hey!" Noburi said. "You're on a mission right now! Focus! We're on a timer since Yuno's clones don't last that long yet. Can I get more mist moving forward?"
"And more light," Mari said. "These things are well camouflaged, and we didn't spot those beasts without movement. That's unacceptable."
Moments later, the cave was far better lit and a pair of Yunos were advancing with misterators spitting their thin haze ahead of them.
Their advance was slow compared to a ninja run, and insanely fast by the standards of any chakra beast hunter. At one point, one of the lead Yunos dropped her misterators to raise her axe to intercept a pouncing spider/cat thing, only for it to lose consciousness mid-pounce and get itself chopped in half in a spray of blood.
The flipside of the beasts having barely any chakra in them meant that Noburi could drain them dry in an eyeblink. He could sense dozens of beasts within the cave as it opened up, far more than he would have expected to find (maybe there was something to be said for Hazō's 'chakra-dense locations'), but they didn't pose any threat to the team. As soon as they got within a couple dozen meters, Noburi pulled the chakra out of them and out they went. He didn't hold back either. Each pull had a little twist at the end as he pulled out the last dregs of life-sustaining chakra from within them, leaving them dead where they lay.
He wondered if he was impressing Yuno. From the front of the formation, she could see the occasional beast decide to attack the intruders, only to collapse dead the instant they entered Noburi's range.
Working with Tsunade really had taught him so much about sensing and draining with his bloodline. Even through the thin mist, he could feel a group of eleven beasts with a bit more chakra than they'd encountered so far, as well as some sort of Fire Element ability. He pointed, Mari threw a misterator, and he sensed the creatures get up and run away deeper into the cave. Whatever. If they didn't stick around so he could kill them later, they'd run into the skyslicers on their way out and kill themselves.
A Yuno popped. Her seals, embedded in Kagome's signature wooden disks, clattered to the stone. One of the Yunos opened her mouth to say something, but if she (or any of her fellows) got anything out, it was muffled by the repeated staccato popping of the rest of the Yunos.
"Huh," Noburi said, stopping his advance. "Yuno said she could sustain clones for about ten minutes, right? I didn't think it had been that long."
"It hasn't, I'm pretty sure," Mari said. "Maybe she messed up casting the technique. She's definitely had way less practice with it than I have."
Mari's head snapped to the side at another staccato thumping noise.
"Sorry," Noburi said. "Bat swarm was flying this way to investigate. Dead now. You were saying?"
"Well, we knew Yuno's clones weren't going to last that long anyway. Let's continue."
Mari redistributed her clones, moving a couple to the front of the formation while a couple stayed by Noburi's side as insurance against some incredibly improbable events.
They took three steps forward before a Mari popped.
"Huh," the other Mari in the front of the formation said. "I don't know-"
And she, along with the rest of the Maris, disappeared in their own clouds of smoke.
Noburi leaned back into a combat stance and saw the two summons ahead of him doing the same. Something was wrong.
He looked left and right, but saw nothing. The cave was filled with mist, so he should have been able to sense if there was anything nearby, but he felt nothing.
"What was that!?" Candoru said. "She wasn't supposed to disappear, right?"
"No, she wasn't," Noburi said. "We've hit unexpected problems. Time to retreat and regroup; see what Mari and Yuno felt when their clones popped. Let's back it up."
"Sounds good," Candoru said, and Panashe quickly signaled orders received.
They started backtracking through the cave and made it maybe thirty meters to a more open region of the cave when Candoru spoke.
"Hey, I think I feel-"
The Dog puffed into nonexistence. Simultaneously, Noburi heard a thunk of stone hitting stone in a cavern nook to the side.
"Water Element: Water Whip!" Noburi said.
"Well, he spoke the Pantokrator's will into existence, didn't he?" Panashe asked. "He did end up dying in some new way."
"Quiet," Noburi said. "We don't know what's causing that, and we need to be cautious. I heard a sound over that way, Panashe, go and take a look." As he spoke, he gestured with the whip to the side nook where the noise had come from.
"I'll note that you tall monkeys are still the ones with the good vision," Panashe said as she softly stepped in that direction.
Noburi swore. He needed intel, and that nook was closed off. There shouldn't be anything living in there. He followed after Panashe.
"Watch out," he heard Panashe say as he wallwalked up the side of the cave to look into the nook. "There's something in here that survived your jutsu."
Noburi raised his Daybright Lantern light to shine it into the nook.
Within, a pair of creatures floated in the air. They looked like river otters, if river otters were twice as big and covered in short gray fur and hovered two feet above the ground. Their eyes snapped towards Noburi as he shined the light on them. The pair had been gathered around… a gray stone statue of another otter, lying on the floor of this nook?
Noburi backed away, sticking to the walls as he looked at the creatures, but they didn't attack. They didn't look aggressive at all, in fact. They had no claws or fangs or anything of the sort that would mark a chakra beast as threatening.
What had caused that thunk of stone against stone? And why couldn't his bloodline sense these weird otter-like creatures?
Noburi took the risk and closed his eyes, focusing entirely on his sense of chakra in the thin mist that still filled the cavern. His senses were coarse, but that didn't mean that, with focus, he couldn't pick out details.
Noburi (Vampiric Dew): 50 + 6 = 56
At first he still felt nothing, so he narrowed his attention down to the otters themselves, barely a couple meters away from him.
…he felt it. Strange, negative spaces in the soft static that normally filled his chakra sense when there was nothing there. He struggled to perceive it, adapting his sense to see a creature that could only be noticed by noticing where he felt nothing at all.
Those otters were parts of a larger something. He could feel them, several of them, looming over him. They were tentacular, like some sort of octopus, and he could feel those tentacles moving. The otters were somewhere near the heart of the creature, but he didn't know if they were the heart of the creature.
Those tentacles were reaching towards him. He backed away.
No, the tentacles were already attached to him. Or rather, his barrel. He could feel three, no, four of the negative spaces stretching from his barrel to the shadow cast by the otters.
Those spaces weren't fully negative. There was chakra there. His chakra, being pulled out of the barrel and along the tentacles of these creatures.
They were draining him. They'd drained the shadow clones into nonexistence, and soon they'd do to him exactly what he'd done to the beasts in the cave. He had more chakra than them, but in the end that wouldn't matter. He'd go unconscious, then his life would be extinguished like a candle going out.
"Panashe, run!" Noburi said as he turned to sprint his way out of the cave.
Noburi has given you the action report of the above, corroborated by Panashe.
Mari and Yuno both collapsed a few minutes after the cave exploration team went in, Yuno first, then Mari. Hazō and Kei initially suspected psychic attacks, but Noburi was able to confirm that they had somehow been put under extreme chakra drain and woke them up with a small chakra transfusion. They both report noticing their reserves being precipitously low moments before passing out, so the drain on them must have been fairly fast. Noburi reports that the drain on his barrel felt fairly slow.
Noburi notes that while their coils might have been temporarily damaged, it was thankfully probably impossible for the Primes to die as Prime going unconscious pops the clones that were the conduit by which the weird tentacle-otter-chakra-draining things were draining Prime.
Candoru refuses Hazō's attempt at resummoning. When Hazō travels to the Seventh Path, Candoru says that he felt "the worst thing ever, like having your soul yanked out of your body by cold, wet, slimy paws." He doesn't want to go back into this particular cave.
Voting remains open.
