“The fuck?!” gasped the burly pimp as his body lurched to the side with Tomo’s hip-check and he fell against a pile of decaying plastic garbage bags. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash of golden hair and a woman’s shape flitting by. Cursing and covered with vile-smelling slime, he got to his feet and drew a butterfly knife which flicked into position instantly. Tomo, savoring the moment, blew him a raspberry. “Bitch! I’ll cut your tits off!” he growled, starting after the golden-haired assailant…
The pimp's vision suddenly darkened and his muscles loosened, along with his bowels, as Haruna's grasp sucked enough life force out to render him unconscious for days. Similarly, the woman he had been beating now felt her body suffuse with healing warmth. Not being a shinobi herself, however, she also lost consciousness, although her recovery would be faster than her would-be attacker's.
The Man in White, meanwhile, inhaled sharply at the exchange of chakra and life energy taking place. It was too much to ignore. A pity, because part of him had wished to test the three women's capacity for stealth and discretion. The Cronopolis was a terrible place, but sometimes the dictates of the mission outweighed the need to do good.
"I'll have to find quieter
Giri-Bannin next time," he muttered to himself, before rounding a corner and disappearing. His chakra signature also vanished - he was gone.
[spoilername="Redacted"]Suddenly, a feeling of indescribable agony lanced from his forearm all the way through his body, causing all of his muscles to spontaneously contract and locking him in place. From where Haruna now grasped him, the skin covering his extremity started to literally bubble and boil off, revealing pulsating raw flesh underneath that also followed with the same fate moments later as the process continued up the arm and entered the man’s torso. Flesh started to slough off in steaming sheets, leaving exposed bone that started to wither and crack from the mere effort of supporting gravity. The pimp’s face, caught in a horrific rictus of agony, melted into goo and the eyeballs ruptured violently, sending hissing streams of boiling vitreous gel splattering on the street.
Haruna was an Abomination – a creature that could dissolve anyone’s flesh near-instantly through enzymatic degradation. The pimp formerly known as “Tito” was now reduced to a pair of leather boots that stood comically in the street, leaking black sludge that used to be feet. The rest of the man, however, was now absorbed into Haruna’s own body – no longer really him, however, but rather his component proteins, sugars, and lipids.
The woman he had beaten so mercilessly before looked upon this and started to scream.
“Here, let me heal you,” said the Abomination, advancing toward her as she continued to scream and attempt to crawl away. Haruna grasped her by the arm as well, and started to inject the former pimp’s essence into her.
The woman had no registered last name, as was common with the underclass employed in the sex trade. Only known by her first name, “Risa,” she like many others had been enticed to go to Kumogakure by one of the many “Snakeheads” working across the country who targeted young girls with no prospects and offered them a way out of certain poverty. She had been told she would find work as a maid or even a nanny for a rich clan of shinobi, and that she would make enough in her first month to not only pay the Snakehead back for transporting her but also enough to let her family in the backwater village she came from eat like nobles for a year. Of course, once she actually arrived she was quickly told that there was no maid job for her and that the only way she could earn anything and prevent her family’s throats from being slit back home by the Snakehead’s associates was to earn her keep in the brothels, and failing that, the streets.
The Pimp kept everything she earned, of course, promising that he was helping her pay the Snakehead back. She never saw any more than enough Yen to buy cheap makeup to cover the bruises and scratches and premature aging, and certainly not enough to go to the Aesculapium and be treated by a mednin. And now the Pimp was literally dissolving in front of her like an image right out of a recurring nightmare and a strange creature was grasping her arm…
At first, Risa’s arm started to feel warm – comfortingly so, and the feeling quickly spread to her chest, suffusing her body with a cozy feeling that she had not experienced since the earliest days back in the little hamlet she grew up in. But as she gasped in awe and happiness, the warmth quickly started to grow unbearably hot, and within milliseconds, her entire consciousness was on fire. Haruna had neglected to take into account the fact that her Abomination abilities could only heal those beings able to tolerate the process in the first place. One needed to be a shinobi with a cursed seal engraved into his or her flesh in order to receive any benefit at all. Anyone else, even a “normal” shinobi, was doomed.
“P-please, it burns…” croaked Risa moments before her blood began to boil inside her veins and her brain function ceased. Although Haruna would likely have let go at this point, it was far too late. The woman’s body started to expand, her skin stretching ludicrously like an overinflated balloon, her tongue swelling to the size of a cat and dislocating her jaw, and her eyes inflating to the size of grapefruits. For a single, horrific millisecond, the distorted body teetered around on its feet almost as if she were still alive, before it burst.
Searing-hot ichor splattered the entire alleyway with a thick coat of dark red and a cloud of pink mist shot into the sky. Haruna herself was covered in liquefied flesh as if she had been hit with an entire bakery’s worth of cherry pies.
The Man in White whirled around in alarm and blinked under his sunglasses at the sight of the pink explosion nearby, and bolted away for a few steps before rounding a corner. Ayumi’s clay grasshopper set off in pursuit and zipped around to attempt to intercept the man at the exit, only to encounter an alley full of nothing. His chakra signature had disappeared as well. He was gone.
Within a few minutes, the team was quickly surrounded by five others, who wore the unmistakable cuirasses and masks of the Kumogakure ANBU. One of them pushed her mask aside, surveying the scene with her own eye, the other being covered by a patch. Making a visible effort not to gag, she addressed the team.
“I am Buntaichou Natsume Eru of the ANBU. What the hell happened here, nee-sans?” she asked the team.[/spoilername]
Mission Failure.
Post edited after discussion with Haruna. The Pimp is now unconscious and the prostitute is healed. There is no ANBU team arriving. The Man in White has still fled, however.
Bottom line is that the scene of the pimp attacking the hooker was a red herring that the team unfortunately fell for. Your primary mission was to track down and contact the Man in White, not to prevent street crime from taking place. The correct course of action would have been to either ignore the situation or respond to it very minimally, as Tomo attempted to do and almost failed at. However, when Haruna took direct action using her weapon-ability on the Pimp, it was too much for the Man in White to ignore. For now, you have lost him. This mission might become available at another point in the future.
Right now, you are eligible for half-rate rewards for a failed mission.
The context of this all is that you're performing the most mundane of daily Main Branch tasks, which is to literally go around and eavesdrop in various shady locations within Kumo to gather information to report back to your superiors [The Spymaster and Sennin]. It's boring, drudge-filled work performed by shinobi who aren't on an assigned mission. However, there may be a lead to follow here...
