The wind, the endless wind for which the country was named, blew across the desert, sending the dunes sifting an shifting before it. The dunes were dyed blue-white in the full moon's light. A lone figure traversed the serpentine sway of the dunetops, ringed, silvery eyes occasionally catching the moonlight's gleam. She bore ragged clothing, burnt and darkened in several places by dried bloodstains. Walking barefoot through the dunes, she wandered in the general direction from which the madwoman whose body she wore had come when originally she'd attacked. She still wasn't sure what precisely she hoped to come out of the attempt, but she had literally no clues regarding the nature of her assailants, save that her lingering anxiety and a lifetime's worth of assassin's instinct would not allow her rule out the prospect of pursuit or (at the minimum) concentrated malfeasance being behind the assault upon the dunes.
At worst, nothing would happen. At best, she would gain leads on either whomever sent the rampaging jinchuuriki after her or some lead upon the whereabouts of the spirit which had formerly possessed the body she now occupied. She had yet to determine her plan for dealing with the serpentine metal monstrosity, but this body had been unable to sleep and agitated by the faint burning sensation that occasionally plagued her feet and nose. So she paced the dunes, continuing to move to distract from the pain and trying hard to calm the racing of her heart. She sent the top of the dune she'd just crested exploding away from her, venting her spiraling anxieties on the sands. Unable to control it, she found herself doubled over laughing and unable to stop. She was furious, and she wanted nothing more than to stop, but she was unable. Distracted as he was by the uncontrollable outburst, she almost failed to catch the grunt of surprise from mere paces away. Still laughing in spite of the sudden spike of terror that ran through her, she forced herself to stumble upright and dash to the side, away from the dark, sand-spattered silhouette before her.
The figure, male from their voice, towered above even the taller body of the former jinchuuriki. Akane's original body would have been utterly eclipsed. Glaring furiously at the immense, armored shadow for all her laughter, she slowly circled to place the moon behind her, leaving his features visible in the pale glow. He was heavily muscled and clad in an unusual suit of black plate-mail. It was scalloped, with an angular appearance and an enlarged gorget which tapered like a jaw, complete with triangular points like the teeth of some sort of beast. He wore a long, tatter-tipped cloak of the same color, and between it and his back, he bore a blade as large as he was, the hilt of which protruded above the upper hem of his cloak and above his head. Massive, thick, heavy and far too rough, it was too big to be called a sword. More like a heap of raw iron. His eyes, one narrowed, one shut, were affixed on her with an intensity she had rarely seen before.
He regarded her curiously, head cocked to the side, then spoke words that sank icy claws right into her heart."Huh. Camellia doesn't lie about what she sees. Guess you're as good as they say, Rose."
Calling up a scouring stream of sand directed straight at his face, she launched herself into an arcing backward flip. There was only one way he could know to call her that. She was up against her step-father's pet monsters, his menagerie, his garden, as he called them. It had been his pet name for her. Rose, for her hair's color and the thorniness of her demeanor. Beautiful but dangerous he'd always called her. She hated that nickname. Sublimating her fear beneath a tidal wave of all-too-ready fury, she sent a quintet of sand-serpents lashing forward to strike him, only to find to her dismay that he decapitated them all with a single, jarring slash of his absurdly-sized blade. Seeing his lips peel back into a horrible rictus grin, she summoned up a cloud of sand to bear her aloft, just managing to clear the upper arc of his blade's reach in time for it leave only a minute scratch upon the underside of her platform. Unable to cut her down from her position over twelve feet in the air, he cursed vehemently then aimed what she had at first thought to simply be another of the plate's gauntlets at her, firing off a barrage of numerous crossbow bolts.
Mentally commanding the sand to hold onto her, she tilted the cloud over to interpose its body between her and the bolts, leaving them to stud the underside uselessly. Even as he ran around her, firing again from a different angle, the sands came up reflexively, halting the projectiles in mid-flight. Grimacing, he aimed the gauntlet directly at her, causing her every instinct to scream at her to move. Not hesitating, she commanded the sand to sling her away from the spot, and cleared her former position just as a miniature cannonball scattered the sand-cloud and sent her flying to the ground and rolling down the dune's side in to end sprawled at its foot. A canny fighter, her foe didn't grant her any reprieve, and even as she forced herself to her feet, she was forced to launch further streams of sand to intercept another powerful swing from his colossal blade. Unable to stop it entirely, she was forced to dodge to the side, a move only made possible by the sand's efforts. Noticing the fell chakra radiating off him and the bleeding, lambent mark upon his neck, she attempted to process that information, only to be jarred from the thought by the crunch of her foot being smashed beneath the blade's backswing. She saw to her satisfaction that the swing, which should not have been possible at that speed, broke the man's arm in several places, blood trickling from beneath his vambraces. She was horrified to see the limb suddenly right itself with a sickening pop and crunch.
Spurred by desperation, she recalled the transformation the madwoman had used against her prior to the rampage of the mercurial monstrosity bound to her life, and called up an immense shell of chakra-laden Sand. So surrounded, she focused on the technique, letting her focus drown out the jarring impacts of his blade against the shielding sand. Just as she began to form the many hyrda-heads she'd seen the jinchuuriki use, they suddenly all exploded, detonating in a rippling concatenation of concussions. Her jutsu undone thusly, she was forced to face a cold realization: she might not survive this. Reasoning that he knew what to expect from the jinchuuriki's abilities, she instead threw herself through a rapid series of handseals, preparing a blow of her own. As he rushed in, sword bearing down upon her heart like a sandwyrm gone berserk, she prepared another stream of sands to deflect the blow ever so slightly, and, resolving herself to the hit, thrush her right hand, which screamed with the voices of a thousand birds, in and through his chest, obliterating his heart.
Panting and trying to mentally drown out the agony of her broken foot and shattered left arm, she withdrew her hale arm from the hole in his chest, calling up a cushion of sand to bear the both of them back toward the Toraono clan dojo. She hoped they had sufficient refrigerator facilities to keep the corpse from decomposing. Though she tried to stop it, she found herself sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks and snot beginning to run from her too-red nose. Cursing as she sobbed, she resolved herself to finding a way to fix the body she was in...and to repair the one she'd just acquired, before subjecting herself to the dictates of its damage.
WC: 1340, MFT [Topic Left]