Chapter 646: A Ravening of Dragons, Part 1
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Been a minute," Tsunade said, rolling her shoulders.
"Nagi," Orochimaru reminded her, swinging his arms to loosen up.
"Pfft."
Orochimaru nodded, starting a series of torso twists. A moment passed before he picked up the thread again. "More like West Gap."
She nodded, the details of the long-gone battle unspooling through her memory. "Not quite as many targets this time."
"These are a bit bigger."
"True."
He chinned over her shoulder. "A few more of us, at least."
She glanced back at where two score Orochimaru and Tsunade Shadow Clones were stretching. She turned back and folded herself over, placing her elbows on the ground. "Two out of three ain't bad," she said, trying and failing to inject enthusiasm into her tone.
"Three of three would be better."
"Yeah." She widened her stance, sliding smoothly down into a straddle split. "All of you get filled up from the kid?"
"The medic boy?" he asked, twisting down into a pretzel stretch. "Yes. Time consuming. He needed to shuttle back and forth to Leaf multiple times. You?"
"Same. Oh, speaking of the Gōketsu family, I saw your 'nephew' take Enma and Cannai aside earlier. Any idea what that was about?"
He brushed the question aside with a shrug and a wave of his hand, not deigning to acknowledge the teasing about 'nephew' at all. "I understand that you summarily dismissed the medic."
She had sat down, feet stretched out in front of her with her forehead on her knees. She picked her head up to meet his eyes, one fine blonde eyebrow raised.
"His brother mentioned it," Orochimaru said, a tiny bit of defensiveness creeping into his voice.
"Are you seriously speaking up for some bratty teenager?"
"Are you seriously being a dismissive idiot?"
She laughed. "You're only advocating for him because I called you out on it, aren't you? You don't give a shit about some kid."
"True. Still, now that the subject has come up… His brother is competent, and Jiraiya rarely chose poor students."
She rolled her eyes. "He didn't choose the kid as a student, he chose him as a political maneuver. But, fine. If we survive this, maybe I'll talk to him."
"'If' we survive this?" He snorted. "Sensei would thrash you."
"Yeah, yeah."
"Your attention, if please you it does," called Kumokōgō, her mental voice echoing across the field. "Time it is for departing. Please to gather?"
Tsunade rolled up to her feet as Orochimaru uncoiled and straightened. Together, the forty-two of them moved over to where the Arachnid Empress and the other Seventh Path people waited. She was currently twenty feet tall, her legs bouncing slightly in what might have been nervous anticipation.
"Lady Conjura, Uchiha Itachi, bait squadron prepared is," the Empress said. "Ready you are?"
"I am," Conjura said, her tone that of a monarch. She turned her head with the jerky alacrity of all birds, sweeping a glance over the gathered forces of the Crusade.
"I wish you all good fortune." She paused. "Even you, Pantsā."
The enormous pangolin nodded. "And you."
She nodded and flipped her wings and bent her knees until her chest was almost on the ground. "Come, human. It is time."
Itachi jumped to her knee, then turned and nodded to the rest of the force before looking to one member in particular. "Orochimaru."
The Snake Sannin nodded. "Uchiha. Try not to die before you kill it."
Itachi's lips curled up very slightly. "I would suggest that you try not to die at all, but that's the only thing you care about." Before Orochimaru could say anything, Itachi turned and jumped to Conjura's shoulder, then up to her back. He nestled into the feathers of her neck ruff as she straightened; a moment later they were gone. Conjura didn't so much as raise her wings, she simply vanished.
"Hornet Squadrons, with you your Queen's pride goes. Confident in you she is. She has named you the best of the hive."
"BZZZT!" the hornets buzzed in excitement. Moments later they leaped into the air, flying in careful formation as each group peeled off to approach the butte from a different direction.
The Empress watched for a calm sixty count as the hornets disappeared into the distance. Finally, she turned to the assembled Clans. "Lords, Ladies, King. We go now to war. Proud am I that you answered my call. Clans of the Seventh Path a fractious lot are. To set aside all differences, all prickly pride and dissonant doubt...a great thing today is, even though the occasion is of horror. Perhaps a birthing this moment may be. Always welcome here in Arachnid, all of you. Long the journey may be, but I hope this will not be the only time that my lands may host such powerful and honorable people."
Most of the rulers of the various clans managed to hold on to their gravitas, but their various elite soldiers and champions felt no such need. Cheers went up from the throats of multiple nations and, for one moment, generations of rivalry were set aside.
The Arachnid Empress watched, then dipped her body in acknowledgement. "Come," she said. "The Clans go to war."
o-o-o-o
The plan was simple: six groups of hornets would blind themselves and do a rapid pass across the butte, baiting the Dragons into the air and attempting to split them up. Each bait team would undoubtedly die within moments but other squadrons would be waiting, these far enough away that they didn't need to blind themselves because their strange hornet vision couldn't clearly see the top of the butte. With the advantage of sight they could launch ranged attacks against the Dragons, harassing them enough to—hopefully—make them each follow a different squadron. Each squadron was flying in a carefully-spaced open formation, a spider-silk netting held spread between them. Once their Dragon was sufficiently committed they would activate the seals they carried, locking the nigh-invisible netting in place so that the pursuing Dragon killed itself.
Failing that, dozens of other skyslicers had been positioned around the butte at various altitudes to turn them into julienned eldritch meat.
Failing that, multiple pairs of hornets were positioned high in the sky, each with a long wooden board suspended in a harness between them. Near each end of the board was one element of a two-element Earth Dome seal. The hornets would dive at the Dragons from above and activate the seal just before impact, conjuring into temporary existence something that, although in truth a chakra construct, looked like, and weighed as much as, a ten-foot-wide granite dome. At the speed of a diving hornet the dome would hit like an Earth Bullet jutsu fired by a bijū. Hopefully a dozen of those per Dragon would be enough to break the monsters.
Failing that, the hornet squadrons would fly at the Dragons directly, attempting to get into their eyes and noses. (Granted, no one could be sure that all of the Dragons had eyes or noses.) Half of the hornets were carrying hundreds of mites each while the other half carried Gōketsu-provided seal weaponry: Goo Bombs, implosion bombs, (obviously) explosives, and whatever else Hazō thought had the slightest chance of harming the creatures from beyond the world. (He had set teams to make frameworks that would support a Force Wall seal, but eventually gave it up after they couldn't find anything rigid enough to keep the seals in alignment and light enough for a pair of hornets to carry.)
Failing all of that, the hornets would lead the Dragons, hopefully one at a time, to where the Crusade lay in wait.
'The kami mock the lord who plans,' said philosophers who had never come near a battlefield. Actual team leaders who led teams into battle said 'no plan survives contact with the enemy.' Actual field ninja who didn't care about anything but the actual fighting said 'shit always goes bad fast.'
In this case, things went bad fast.
o-o-o-o
Contakote disappeared from the spot nestled in her feathers, crossing to the Human Path at the call of their summoner. That would be the first omen.
"Dragon has engaged at site three," said Contakote, returning to existence.
"I still see nothing here," said the human on Conjura's back. "Site three is a skyslicer site, but I suggest we still go to gather information."
Conjura hummed noncommittally. The words had been carefully chosen to avoid being a command. Yet, humans always wanted their words spoken first, their preferences obeyed. Anyone could bend chakra to their will, but they sought to control others, not just themselves.
Conjura dismissed the thought. The necessity of cooperating with Pantsā, however temporarily, had soured her mood. Focus was required, not idle philosophizing. If all went well, Pantsā would be consumed by the Dragons, returning her land unto her and freeing the Pangolin territories for her to claim as weregild. She twitched her feathers and claws to twist a path through space. Her next wingbeat brought them to the location where her clan's summoner had sighted one of the Dragons.
The behemoth was indescribable. A mass of twisting flesh, all wings and claws and jaws, filled with rows upon rows of jagged teeth, nearly glowing as its brightly colored scales reflected the daylight in its breakneck flight. The eyes. Conductor above, she had arrived and it immediately turned every last one of its thousands of eyes upon her. Conjura brought her wings forward to stop her momentum, but the monstrosity hadn't turned its flight towards her. Her chakra twitched, seeking to create a path to take her away from the abomination, but she calmed it. She was fast, faster than any mere beast could imagine. They didn't need to risk drawing it away from its demise.
The swarm of elite warriors from the Hornet clan were barely outflying the leviathan, and that only because it was focusing less on flight and more on picking the hornets out of the air with snaps of its shark-like jaws. They were scattered, moving independently, so clearly the skyslicer net they carried had been fruitlessly expended. Now, however, they adopted formation and flew through a patch of air that looked like any other. Conjura focused and barely felt the grid of powerful distortions in spacetime before the Dragon flew through it.
Severed heads and wings rained down, masses of flesh sloughing off its right side. The wings on the left side of its body beat to keep it aloft, but they could not do it alone. The Dragon spiraled as it fell to the ground.
The creature had twitched right before it impacted the skyslicer, nearly getting itself clear of the instant-kill effect. Had it somehow sensed the spacetime distortions? It was still moving, twitching on the ground, but her Wings of Liberty and the Hornet Clan's elite turned to rain ninjutsu down upon the grounded colossus. Without its flight, it would not be a threat - even if their ninjutsu did not kill it, the remaining Bosses could put it down at their leisure.
Another of her condors disappeared from her back, returning a moment later. Another Dragon sighted at site four. She raised her wings to carve the path, but the human on her back spoke. "Wait. It's not dead."
"It will be," Conjura replied. "A fruit of opportunity falls from the branch elsewhere, we must catch it before it strikes the ground, not dally over that which our brothers have already collected."
"No," he said. "Look."
She looked and, by the light of two clans' worth of ninjutsu striking the Dragon, she saw the juggernaut's flesh shifting.
"It's regenerating," she said, a drop of fear falling upon her heart.
"Not regenerating," the human said. "Reconfiguring. It will move its wings until it can fight again. Stop the attack."
Space disappeared, and she was in the sky above the Hornets and her Wings of Liberty. She called out, and they paused their attack to gaze up at her. The battlefield grew quiet for a fraction of a second, and then the human spoke once more. A single word in a tone of infinite certainty.
"Amaterasu."
Black flame appeared upon the Dragon. It did not travel there by any means Conjura could sense - it simply appeared in an instant. She beat her wings to keep steady as the fire spread. The Dragon thrashed as the flames took it but it was still struggling, so the human swept his gaze back and forth, coating the Dragon in wretched black flames. It raised a broad wing to cover itself from above, but her Wings of Liberty were adept, and Contorite severed the flame-weakened wing with a ninjutsu. It lashed out at him, sending spines faster than sound through the air, but he had already twisted himself out of range. With the obscuring wing removed, the human cast more of his blasphemous flames at the creature, coating its body.
The Dragon roared, a wave of force both psychic and physical that sent Conjura reeling back and knocked several of her Wings out of the air, letting them fall for seconds before they caught themselves.
The Dragon pulsed—no, beat its flame-covered wings and took to the air again. Jaws lashed out at hornets and condors, but it was slowed, weakened, and even the hornets' weaker ninjutsu were stripping its heads off.
The Dragon fell. Its wingbeats grew weaker and its wings were clipped one-by-one until it plowed into the ground a second time. Attacks continued to rain down into it, but Conjura watched carefully through the chaos. There was no movement from the abomination any more.
"Site four," the human said. He sounded calm. "From a distance. We took longer than expected here, and the site may no longer be safe."
Conjura was already sacrificing so much to the human. He had agreed to exclude himself from the main battle so that no one, leader, warrior, or summoner, needed to hold back their best techniques. Yet, he needed a way to safely and rapidly travel miles to cull the Dragons before the battle began, and who could aid him but Conjura?
At least he had promised his service to her in exchange. If he could destroy a Dragon with a glance, he could be a weapon against Pantsā for her—at least, unless he wished Karanium to disavow him as a summoner. It was a battle, she would forgive an order.
She reached out and drew site four before them.
Time slowed as she scanned the horizon. The creature they needed—the red, amorphous blob—was in the air, propagating towards where the Crusade had massed. Elsewhere, farther away but still visible, there was…
Conjura looked away and the blackness cleared from her vision. In that direction, there was only the night.
"Amaterasu."
The red blob turned black as flames coated it. It didn't thrash like the other one, instead it—
She beat her wings to dodge out of the way of a lashing appendage. Conjura dived under another attack, then backed away to get out of range.
The Dragon's body bubbled, as if the goop it was made of was boiling from the intensity of the flames. Was it going to die under the human's gaze as the other had? He had stopped his attack already, far more quickly than before.
The Dragon exploded in a spray of red mist. An instant later, Conjura perceived it shrinking, shedding mass as it propagated rapidly towards them. Tons of red-black matter fell to the ground, leaving the Dragon's main body intact.
"The others have turned towards us," the human said, words cutting in and out as Conjura's wings took them away from the amorphous abomination. The creature had cleared out of the way of its own falling body and was now growing again. "I can use this technique once more. Can you get us closer?"
Conjura didn't grant him a response. Her wings would not be sufficient so close to the pursuing beast. She backed away and shrugged off the lesser condors holding on to her back, twitching her claws to prepare a nexus of paths around the Dragon that she could travel along in a thought. An instant later, she was within a wingspan of the beast.
"A-"
The Dragon struck at her, and she was somewhere else.
"Ma-"
Another tendril lashed out, and she moved again, only to find herself in the heart of a network of threads.
"Te-"
She beat her wings to let out disruptive pulses, shredding and severing the tendrils. They closed in on her nonetheless.
"Ra-"
She cut a hole through space, evading the impossible.
"Su."
Flame blossomed once more in the heart of the Dragon, within the deep scars cut by Conjura's beating wings. It was just another hit, would the beast not just shed it again? Conjura backed out of reach, to where mere wingbeats would keep her safe.
The beast exploded again, releasing the burning mass, and Conjura dove away.
"Back to the others," the human said.
Conjura had enough distance. As the beast closed down on her, she crumpled space again to take them towards the massed forces of the Seventh Path.
"I saw it," the human continued. "Within the Dragon. There are cores, seed-shaped things about as large as a man, from which the red mass spewed."
"Why are we returning then?" Conjura asked. "Draw deeper into your reserves. I will cut through it to expose the cores, and you will destroy it."
"I cannot," he said, the words tight with suppressed pain. Conjura turned her head and saw drops of blood falling from his eyes. "Even this could be too much. I no long have a way to contribute; the other Clan Lords forbade my presence at the battle lest I steal their techniques, and I cannot unsummon myself lest my Shadow Clones dispel. Leave me here and convey this information to the others. Tell them that I do not know how else that creature can be killed."
His polite words had quickly become outright orders, but the battle was going to be upon them in an instant. The last four Dragons had joined together and were now bearing towards them. Conjura was faster, but the remainder of the Seventh Path was now on an inevitable collision course with the abominations.
"Very well, Uchiha," Conjura said as she descended towards the Conclave. "I trust you will remember our deal."
"I shall," he said. "Fight well, Queen of the Condors."
She scoffed and inclined herself, letting the human roll off into the desert behind the crusaders, before another beat of her powerful wings took her towards the readying Bosses.
Author's Note: A huge thank you to @Paperclipped who wrote the Conjura/Itachi scene. I edited it lightly, so anything wrong with it is my fault and anything good is his. Sadly, the chapter is breaking here.
XP will be awarded later. Voting remains closed.
EDIT: I would like to expose the behind-the-scenes for this battle a bit, simply to head off future salt. First, we came up with a flow chart to determine the overall course of the battle. Did the Dragons spot the Crusade coming and attack before the Crusade was ready? Did any of the Dragons get skysliced before the battle was joined? And so on. We also discussed what would happen if a Clan Boss got eaten by a Dragon—how long would it take for the members of that clan to become non-sapient, how long would it be before the Dragon in question was powered up, etc. We discussed the fact that if the Crusade lost this fight it would essentially mean the removal of the Seventh Path from the narrative, since the Dragons would be unstoppable and all the Clans we care about would be destroyed.
Fortunately, the Crusade got lucky and was able to choose when to kick the fight off.
Then we started in on the fighting. This battle obviously involves too many participants to model out with full Fated to Die mechanics. As such, we used the same simulator program that we used for the Battle of the Heavens (Conjura vs Kei, Ami, and Naruto) and the Battle of the Gods (Nagi Island). It works at a higher level of abstraction that makes things more manageable.
For this occasion we come up with 'character sheets' for each participant, which really means a handful of numbers that quantify their attack strength, defense, XP total, etc. We plugged them into the simulator and ran it a dozen or so times to make sure that the software wasn't showing any bugs and that we had more or less matched things up as expected. Then we said "okay, this is the one, we stick with whatever happens" and ran it one last time.
The results were an extreme outlier. On the plus side, you got very lucky that the Hydra dragon was taken out on the first turn. On the down side... Well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You'll see as soon as Part 2 is ready.
Fortunately, the Crusade got lucky and was able to choose when to kick the fight off.
Then we started in on the fighting. This battle obviously involves too many participants to model out with full Fated to Die mechanics. As such, we used the same simulator program that we used for the Battle of the Heavens (Conjura vs Kei, Ami, and Naruto) and the Battle of the Gods (Nagi Island). It works at a higher level of abstraction that makes things more manageable.
For this occasion we come up with 'character sheets' for each participant, which really means a handful of numbers that quantify their attack strength, defense, XP total, etc. We plugged them into the simulator and ran it a dozen or so times to make sure that the software wasn't showing any bugs and that we had more or less matched things up as expected. Then we said "okay, this is the one, we stick with whatever happens" and ran it one last time.
The results were an extreme outlier. On the plus side, you got very lucky that the Hydra dragon was taken out on the first turn. On the down side... Well, I don't want to spoil it for you. You'll see as soon as Part 2 is ready.
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