Bandit Raid [Hilde, Argon, Naitome, Frozen]

[Frozen]

Setting: A sparsely populated village that's being attacked by bandits.

Elsa sat with her back to a waist high stone wall, leaning slightly to the side so that her head was hidden from the oncoming spray of arrows. Civilians, mostly women and children screamed and ran away in fear as fighting broke out on the open streets of the village. Elsa looked to the world before her, watching each person who ran away disappear around some corner or duck into a subway or a building. The arrows intensified for a moment - focusing on the wall Elsa had hiding behind - before it stopped. Elsa nearly had a chance to turn and look at what was happening when the ominous sound of metal hitting concrete dimly bounced in her ear.

Elsa quickly turned and tried to run from her hiding spot, only to retreat back as the bandits fired explosive arrowheads all over the small village. Elsa tried to grab one without thinking and hurled it as far away as she could, but she had waited too long for this course of action and the arrowhead exploded a mere ten inches from where the lone princess was entrenched. Elsa barely covered her face with her arms as a storm of shrapnel rain down on her, slicing and burning her clothes in its fury.

Where were the samurai when you really needed them?

[Haru]

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Wolf and sparrow, an admixture of frost and warmth, incised their way through broken lands, beneath eyes and ears, beyond thought. They were we as we made our way, making in a way unsensed and unincensed. But that would change. It already had, in truth. Smoke ran across the horizon, noise following in its wake, attesting to some unruly happening in some place distant. I could intuit a shift in the atmosphere, a fall from tranquility into the abyss. Curious eyes met hers, Ayma, who by now had traipsed past for a closer look before turning her head back toward me. My lips made a pale line; my shoulders rose in shrugging uncertainty. It could have been a mere quotidian affair—a house fire, a domestic dispute, anything—but the echoes relaying screams through our company spoke of some terror that belied such an easy reading.

“They will be here before long,” the girl warned, “if it doesn't quiet soon, things may get dangerous.”

There was silence.

“Inu..? Inu, we hav—”

“Okay. We will.”

I let out a sigh, gathering myself. In seconds, a walk of innocuity had become a walk toward death. Life.

“Let’s silence them.”

And then we were away. A sparse sequence of moments and the threadbare settlement lay before two figures, both our eyes peering and our minds nowhere else. The screaming disguised our still-furtive movements, and made actual our premonitions. Cries rang from the depths of their being, subverting the Symbolic for the Real in its pure, undifferentiated chaos. The repetitive, foreboding clangor of what sounded like metal colliding with structures of lesser atomic density dissonated and disharmonized, complementing chilling scenes. I was only a selective choice of steps. I slithered beneath shadows, opening my spirit to the force of the dreadful ambience. My cohort fled in the opposite direction, attuned to the setting the same. The space between my motioning displaced itself gradually, negatively. I began to hurry. While this mist-filled land afforded its inhabitants a guarantee of sound’s ineffectuality in traversing long distances, these beings who stalked us and who we in turn stalked could never be held accountable to the constancies of nature. When we estimated them in the way we estimated one another, we died. They were something else. Or thus it seemed, with recourse solely to what of their kind I’d experienced. Regardless, the movement of time, or its acknowledgement, rather, was the only linchpin through which my own movements could be made sensible, as I pressed myself against the side of a building nearby and motioned to the rhythm of the arrows’ thudding.

The situation gave itself to understanding as I surreptitiously maneuvered about. They were mere outlaws, it appeared. An impetuous, rotten pack of animals merely seeking an obedient meal; and now, they would confront the meal of a lifetime. I would slaughter them just like the livestock they sought. And devour them whole. My teeth clicked in anticipation, and force began to pulsate within my form. And it was then that I struck. One appeared as I rounded the corner, opening myself to a concourse abraded by ammunition. He only had time to look before bone met bone. My blade, a deathly beauty of pure white, composed of wyvern-bone, hilt-and-all, slid through his heart and out the other end, appearing there a length of alabaster and liquid crimson before returning through his limpness. I noticed a woman as he fell in front of me. She sat behind a wall, her seeming lack of fear catching my attention and communicating something mutual. A shinobi? I watched her, looking to make my next move as I remained vigilant and lightly shaded. Death was alive in the air.

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[Frozen]

Elsa fought the urge to rise to her feet and run and took advantage of the smoke screen that had been thrown up by the small explosion. One archer in particulary walked lazily through the light haze completely oblivious to the young Hyuuga as he fired even more arrows into the air. His face, smug from the sounds of crying women, found itself frozen in pain as life was quite literally torn from his chest. Elsa had feinted the last time she had witnessed a killing and felt an excess of oxygen rush into her brain as her breathing intensified. This coupled with her steady stream of tears made her wish she was anywhere else.

Almost subconsciously, the young princess’ hands touched one another in six handseals as the surrounding air started to chill. The almost instantly, the ground throughout most of the village turned glossy as it was covered in a 0.5” thick sheet of ice. When Elsa opened her eyes she found that she had stood up and was walking towards whatever had killed the bandit.

“You fight well,” she would mention as she recounted the boy’s fluid movements and surmised that he must have been a physical-based shinobi at some point in his life. One look at his eyes would tell her that he was young, much too young to be killing. But that was besides the point. They were both in the same boat here, unfortunate passersby caught up in a seldom patrolled area of the water country. As the last of the icy tears were wiped from her face, the princess would speak again, “I am Elsa. Might I propose we team up to save these innocent villagers?”

Ten seconds would pass before an 8 foot tall towering freak of nature would be seen approaching from the same direction as the archer had come from. It would be clear that he was having trouble standing due to the ice which was Elsa’s plan: stall until help arrived. With some effort, the man growled angrily and started stomping as hard as he could into the ground, essentially breaking the ice as he walked and called out, “you okay Moe? You run out of arrows again?”

Several miles away a samurai watchman would see the fires and signal off an alarm. The samurai would arrive… eventually. But would they actually be helpful?

[Planning on samurai arriving in a few posts, so there will be some time lapse after this big guy is taken care of. Spoiler alert: the samurai will want to kill everyone save the women and children since signs of ninjutsu will be present.]

[Once the others join we'll follow post order]

[Naitome]

---

Feet, too fast to follow, a silent percuss that blears the shadow vista. He approaches like nightfall, inescapable. Naitome, hidden dahlia cantering, runs with his arms back. He is a death in progress.

Some giant of a man stomps before what appear to be a pair of white haired children, standing thick in the sudden ice and bandit gore bleb. The town is a tragedy. Arrows redesign rooftops in quills of veiling flame, smoke replaces air and the broken foundations of a thousand bland homes default to a rock-ribbed bath of collapse. This is a destruction of civilized living. An anarchy and a culling.

Along rooftops bent beneath stone tatters, stepping onto pillars of new ruin, pushing off the sideways bracing now valance for graveyard-buildings, so fast. His purpose overcomes his gait in a hushed reckoning. Behind his prey, angling closer to the vast body. It spoke, but the words meant nothing. Naitome careened. Deft, parlous bedim through the butchery song of the falling city. Ten meters, five meters, became less. With no weapon but his own clawed hands, Naitome came to slide behind a man-sized chimney framed in metal canopied over gloom, a roof ten meters above and two meters to the south-east of the sizable aggressor, otherwise preoccupied with a companion. He crouched to leave no parts of him visible from the other side, peering from behind, below, primed to slither back should his target leer upwards. The two young ones did not seem to notice Naitome's presence either, and he watched the situation without further disturbing his environment, still cautious of areas further out from his observational vantage.

He lay in wait. Predator king of the carnage frost quag. Alert and nigh away.

---

[Kaeda Izumi]

Bandit Raid

Izumi wanted to be just be passing through, she'd done some lumber work earlier, as well as helped a local boy hunt. Her reward was a warm meal and the potential of cheap bed for the night, if not the illusion of a free hay-bale bed was made as well. These offers by kind non-ninja folk were all false promises though, Izumi had the luxury of starting her meal, but it wasn't shortly after she'd taken a few bites that the world broke into chaos. An arrow even went through the small house piercing the bowl Izumi ate from, her hands tilting it so she could pour the contents into her mouth. She'd splash some on her blouse and lips, as she'd drop the bowl letting it shatter all the way. She didn't want to be found out, but she couldn't sit in this village as it burned to the ground.

Izumi shot from her seat inside the strangers house, as her hands dug into her two clay pouch bags, each hand would wolf down a blob of clay as she'd focus one hand to forming herself some birds, as her other hand went a head and started crafting snakes. She'd put on her serious face as she'd stomp over to the door out. Arrows stopped whisking through the roof and walls as explosions were heard, even if Izumi wanted to stay out of the little conflict the house now caught fire and left her with little options. She'd pout as she'd step forward and with all her force kick the door, it was a structurally sound door though, so Izumi only found herself hoping on one foot as she'd cradle the kicking leg.

It only took a second of growing flames and ambition to get Izumi over her foot, as she'd pull open the door this time, charging out for combat. "EH!" She'd scream as the ground betrayed her feet immediately, "When did it snow?!" She'd exclaim immediately slipping upon the ice, her face landing sideways onto the cold hard ice, so when she lifted her face her nose was bleeding. She'd glance over to the woman who'd made the ice, then past her to the dead archer and the shinobi who killed him. Then she'd peak over the girls other shoulder over at the large plus plus sized man. She'd gulp trying to pull herself up only to find herself in immediate pain, she'd look down to find the tongue in her right hand had somehow frozen to the ice when she'd fallen. "Ah-haha... no fair..." She'd laugh in a whining tone, as she'd wiggle her hand lightly over the ice and stare at her stuck frozen tongue. She'd pant hot air under her hand and pout in growing rage.

[Haru]

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Her look bemused me. I was held still. There was something elliptical in her manner, some wholly inscrutable thing. It played across her features, that feeling, redolent of another land, and another me.

There was but a lone, fire-worn and ever-corroding wall that held before the beckoning of the beyond. A single bastion vertical before death, holding her life still like frigid hands covering a candle under a moonless night, and she the flickering fire, threatening to become smoke and ash in a whisper, without will. And still, beneath the deafening call of oblivion, she would shed tears for these arbiters of hell. While they would melt her into nothing, destining glaciers disappear into the interminable nether-ocean, and consume her essence in a lake of flame, she played for them dulcet tones, the euphony of quiet water dropping from pallid cheeks, their beatific truth lost on the blustering and filthy, whose barbaric fatuousness made for her nothing gentle or pure, but who saw in her only another nonentity to be riven and razed. It held me still. For a bewildered moment time lost continuity, and I was only, and there was only what I beheld.

And then explosions devoured the air like a bouquet of sunflowers lit afire, pouring a flood of smoke and dust into the sides of stone buildings. Opaque greys collided with diaphanous greys that enveloped and obscured them. Materiality committed acts of terror against itself, digging through its core and wresting from it whatever remained from past plundering. The fiery procession sang to me, within my own core, drawing me closer to its bacchanal truth. It had been so long since I'd last felt such sublime exhilaration.  

Through the dense space I could see thin fingers interweaving themselves, signifying the coming into being of whatever had been sheltered inside. It fled across the floor, cooling my legs and below, beseeching my caution. Warm blood puddling from the opened cadaver became calm, and his confused expression was crystallized in place. The endless clangor continued to resonate deep within my being. It imploded space, the grisly cacophony, symbolizing the opening of a portal into some other dimension. Souls were vacuumed en masse. Cries were displaced by silence, abrupt and sudden. Listless expressions were piled atop one another, hearts cooling and still beside one another, and hands were outstretched like a hundred pendulous branches sprouting from a tree trunk made of flesh. A more nescient spirit may have succumbed beneath the weight of such macabre scenes, but these were not my first, and the angel of death, their condition, had long since become an acquaintance. I was as much at home amidst the panoplies of carnage evincing war as I was laid near the placid lake beside the lulling stream. And thus a deathly calm covered my form as her's drew nearer. Aplomb before the crimson tempest, I would step twice from shadow, allowing the sun to illuminate my tranquility, allay my secrecy, and bolster my awareness. 

Her words contrasted the bullish atmosphere, inflecting a pleasant mixture of elegance and alacrity that reflected her lithe figure, and to which I required no labor in contemplating.

“Inu,” I would respond, nodding, “and that we may.”

Ice could be heard splintering in the distance, even as my words moved, bespeaking what soon appeared in the offing as an entity of cyclopean scale; vigil eyes afforded a reciprocation of its impudence. Aspects facing east accoutered still the length of matte white, though other hues made movements utterly un-still.

There were three concomitant happenings, each central, and each an undoing. Threading, clasping, twirling, my fingers became celerity incarnate, blurring behind my front, beneath light. Simultaneously, chakra was pulsating, escalating in temper through my form before finding repose up high. The world metamorphosed, the smoky haze became nothing, a preternatural clarity befell my vicinity, finitude turned to infinitude, and I became all-seeing¹. And the instrument redolent of death’s skeleton rose, appearing parallel with my chest, and my forearm thus upright and aiming. Only seconds, then. Another of his gauche steps and a blur of silver pierced the air, rocketing toward the creature’s heart. I remained watchful—watchful of the thing there, watchful of Elsa, watchful of the others who only now made themselves perceptible, and watchful of Ayma, whose auxiliary assault was imminent. Ice was filling my soul; the void called this man.

                                                          

¹ Byakugan, (Low).

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[Frozen]

Elsa barely had enough time to gauge how large this man truly was before the smoke cleared. There was sudden movement to the side, which turned out to be a girl that had somehow gotten her hand stuck on the ice. "What in the world is that attached to her hand," the princess would wonder as she turned her head turned back to the titan. What she saw prompted her to yell at the top of her lungs, "Look out!!!"

The titan had likewise noticed the teenager and had picked up a flaming wooden plank. With a hearty grin he threw the flaming mass at Kaeda who would have to do something fast! Elsa cursed herself for not being able to help, but she had other things to worry about. The gargantuan had turned his attention back to the pair and the now visible dead bandit. His grinning face turned furious in an instant as he yelled “Archers to my position!”

After shouting his command, the large man would stomp on over towards Elsa and Inu and start swinging wildly in an attempt to crush them with his immensely powerful blows. Elsa found it trivial to perform a single handseal and grab at Inu in an attempt to pull him with her as she got out of the way. Chakra now lined the bottom of her shoes allowing her to nimbly slip out of the danger zone and get in a few strikes to the enemy’s rock hard legs… not that they did any noticeable damage. Hopefully one of the others packed more of a punch. "What happened to Inu’s eyes? This town is full of oddballs…"

Should anyone have been paying close attention, the sound of careful footsteps could be heard as three archers approached from different directions and took aim at Elsa and Inu. Perhaps it was good that they had arrived; nobody would be keeping watch. Nobody would see the samurai that were approaching the village…

[Naitome]

---

Another joined the fray, female, small, with gauche fumbling that crusted a tongue in the new tundra. The boy-child had fired a senbon that impacted against a slant of the giant's sparse armor with no effect. In response, the behemoth had thrown burning ferrule timber at the maladroit lass, the newcomer, used his girth as if it were a weapon, sent in a chemical drove the stench of intimidation as he swung at them.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

At the barking command for archers, three of his warrior-fellows made their presence plain. To the hulking attacker's left flank, his south-west, west, and the narrow strip of avoided debris between, they moved carefully from the cover of addling slag and knocked arrows behind bows gross with confidence. Each took aim. Each could hit their targets, who seemed perfectly numbered for the occasion, and were sliding over the crisp cool with blurring steps or novice inelegance or the calm of one who has seen too many bleed to react with despair. Naitome considered himself lucky. To compete with the soot-choked screams and fleeing as it melded and still be heard by his comrades, they were thus not so far away that they could see the Jonin come for them. This was his moment to act.

The instant of landing was immediately an afterthought, it happened beyond fast. He was just on the ground, then seconds later, a swirling eructation of snow coughing out a swift roundhouse embedded along the back of the furthest archers exposed hand, concurrent with the point all three archers turned to address his approach. The kick lowered his initial adversaries aim, the contraction of bone begrudging muscle that followed forced the arrow to fire against its wielders will, too soon, and at the wrong location. As he'd been twisting, the arrowhead was pointed directly at the second archer, whistling through the man's wrist and forcing him to release his own arrow prematurely, in shock. The second archer's altered position, pivoting to face Naitome's rotating assault, meant that as his wrist spasmed, releasing his ammunition, his arrow sailed through the eye of the third. The third archer in turn, released his arrow too soon, but rocked by the force of his sudden injury, accidentally shot while falling, allowing the thin metal dart to pierce through the first and second archer's head and throat, respectively, as they died. Naitome had kept low to the ground, steadying his balance with his left hand as his kick spun round, shielding him in crushed rock ice and detritus, and by the end of his odd flexure, was in a prime location to rip a lone arrow from the bodies before they landed.

Thud.

The noise was heavy enough to make anyone turn around, but though the giant would still stand unharmed, his 'back-up' had fallen. Naitome had been sure to keep enough distance that, should the giant turn, his gaze would not be able to follow Naitome's chakra-fueled dash back up the nearby building's roof, disappearing into the shadow of derelict obstruction before those present could confirm they'd really heard anything. How they dealt with their single remaining foe was on them. The chill of his violent dance wailed slowly into focus. Ice? Had one of them somehow created it? He knew it would require serious mastery of both Suiton and Fuuton to achieve such a thing, but, amongst these striplings? This close to the Mizu No Kuni mainlands it would be a danger to have a Kekkei Genkai of that nature free and roaming. Especially if whomever possessed it had managed to become a target for the Land of Iron.

He gripped the arrow tighter, clung to the disphotic tumor bludgeoning horizon in a rooftop jig. He felt that the worst of whatever they were facing, was yet to come.

---

[Kaeda Izumi]

Bandit Raid

It didn't look good for the small kunoichi as a giant piece of flaming debris was launched at her. This excessively large many was nearer another shinobi, who'd just done away with one of giants accomplices and a taller woman stood before Izumi as well, but instead of attacking either of them he'd thrown his ammo at her. She didn't have a smart situation to deal with the floor being Ice, she'd never expected that to happen especially since their wasn't any before she'd entered the building not an hour ago. Without a good decision to make Izumi launched herself forward with her feet, a small pink piece of flesh left where she'd been stuck, as her hand now dripped with blood.

Her annoyance turned into an expression of pure rage, she didn't follow Elsa's immediate retreat reaction, she'd look at the human behemoth with merciless glare of death. "You're going to pay for this!" She'd exclaimed holding a hand full of blood red clay birds, she'd only throw one at her incredibly large target. Her hands dropping the remaining clay objects into her pouches, as she'd clap her hands together to transform her clay construction. The small red clay bird exploded into a cloud of smoke, which a much more animated dog sized red clay bird would fly out of, it'd immediately latch itself to the giants face wrapping it's wings around the mans head.

"KATSU!" She'd exclaim with an evil gaze as the mans head turned into a sudden blinding flash of light. The light filled about a 2m radius before launching dust air and human debris from the center of a very powerful explosion. It'd surely decapitate the man, if not turning his whole giant form into a puddle of human waste. It was surely one of the more morbid ways to go out, but it was a quick way to way and a fairly epic one in Izumi's eyes. She'd gleam with a smile and slight laugh, as the wind pushed from the blast whistled by her face. Her eyes still sparkling with the specs of light damage burned to her retinas from watching the intense heated blast happen.

As the explosion cleared the atmosphere suddenly calmed, weren't there suppose to be archers firing?

two times low used to craft 3 snakes and 2 birds. 2x clay used as well

[Haru]

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A viscid substance adhered to his movement, pressing against the faint quaver beneath his breastplate as my instrument lie in forfeiture, having capitulated to the ogre’s arrant implacability; and there, that substance was my self-extension, intangible, immanent within every atom delimiting its boundary—my sight. It fell over them all, like an ocean. It washed through them, awash with each mote intricacy. It was said that the ordinary sensory apparatus only ever reckoned with a minute fraction of what was ever there to be reckoned with, yet extra-ordinarily, bequeathed to me was the sensible in its entirety. Quarks and what comprised them, fractals reflected within themselves, endless. Incomprehensibly complex structures forming for the blind, stone and rock, fire and ash, betraying and withholding their depth before the rest. I perceived within them infinitude—the grand truth instantiated everywhere. I was everywhere.

It was intuitive by now, this sensing. The telltale signs evincing a flaring motor cortex, the tightening of his muscular tissue, was to be witnessed even before his cloddishness lifted itself from the tundra below. There was no thought; I felt the signal and reacted. My stimuli, he continued away, reaching for something and whatever else, making for the brazen youth before reminding himself of whatever. I was gone by then, opposite Elsa’s grasp and motion, back from whence I arose, through shadow and stealth and skeleton.

Steel pierced flesh above in an abrupt eruption of movement—I spectated, clinging to the dark below, with a curious wonder as the crimson sluiced from them, and down. All but one succumbed; all but the one who had actuated their ritual ablutions, washing them in consternation, and baptism, inundating their eyes, ears, and mouths in blood. I kept my thought on that stranger until another was discovered through the stone edifice vertical between our forms. He bore no knowledge of his discovery, of course, but that was of no meaning, and I would fortune upon him as he, desiring to flank his chanced enemy, crept around the corner. His expression enlivened in perturbation as it met my own, indiscernible beneath the awning; he reached. I could see within, the fingers collapsing, withering, divested of their sanguinity as what reached fell to the dusty earth, and his hand lie then, quiet at his feet. My blade was level with his sight now, and below a sliced appendage gushed and poured. I was surgical. Even as he struggled, swiping and writhing with the hapless desperation of the soon-dead, in that unbecoming way, my sclera pinpointed rectilinear lines-of-flight, and through the form and through again I went, I was, was death. 

Segmented remains were abandoned as an incandescent glare howled luminous, illuminating my vision through the stone structure separating our appearances. The monster's face caught fire, shattering in liquid heat; the blast made of his body a melted nothing, and made of the air surrounding smoke. Gone. My attention was then directed outside, moving beyond to more pertinent matters, where a confluence of calm resolution and undiluted fury found itself amid a company of our execrators. They were close.

I turned the corner once more, appearing before the volatile one and Elsa.

“They know,” I spoke softly, inflecting an admonitory tone, “and they're coming . . . we have minutes.”

                                                          

¹ⁱ Byakugan, (Low).
^{Ch (i)} 260.
^1a ________
^{Ch (a)} 200.

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[Frozen]

So much had happened so fast that Elsa was left standing around, useless as ever.. Her own attacks had been so ineffectual that she was impressed that the shinobi were able to down the behemoth. The concussive blast to his head had been enough to send him into a literally blind fury. That combined with the sliced appendage left him completely helpless as he crashed into the ground spewing dark blood everywhere. Feeling the hot liquid splash on her dress, Elsa turned to see several more dead bodies that weren’t there before. Who had killed them?

What was more, the sword wielder had informed the bunch that more were approaching. Elsa’s fight or flight reflexes kicked in and she just wanted to run far away. She was completely outclassed by this level of enemy and if others were coming then she wanted out. This feeling was exacerbated by the distant shriek “Samurai! Retreat!” was heard. But it was too late. The samurai would enter the village shortly. There was no running from these speed demons.

The ninjutsu users would have enough time to exchange a few thoughts and perhaps take better positioning for the inevitable fight.
“What… What do we do?”

“It looks as though Ninjutsu was used here,” Nao said to her subordinates, twenty in total. “Surround the village and make sure nobody escapes. We will torch this place to the ground.” Lawful in nature, Nao was disgusted by the chaos that was presented before her. How dare these renegade shinobi tear down the order the samurai had worked so hard to build up over the years. ”At least I’ll be able to end these lowlifes here and now."

SPOILER: Click to show

S rank'd raid boss. 20 D-C fodder.