Twisted Pinwheel

[Chibi-Reaper]

"Uh. Hey?" you say, uncertainly. "Listen, it's neat that you could grab me before I could tell you were there and all, but I'm not exactly impressed, and I'm going to start screaming 'rape' in a second now."

"Oh noooo..." the masked man says, tone patently false. "I'll need to finish quickly, then-"

Normally you might make a crack about 'finishing quickly', but this is turning into an alarmingly serious situation, and you suck in a breath to yell. You don't know the guard patrols too well, but someone has to be close by, right?

You don't get a chance, only give in to the sudden overwhelming need to move, and then realize that you're feeling woozy and your side is all wet.

You don't understand it at first. But it's because your arm is off. A little above the elbow, in fact, and blood is spurting out of the stump before you get a grip on it and hold the flow shut.

"Whoops. Missed." the masked man says, not seeming to be at all put out by that.

It's the sort of chilling cavalier attitude that says either he doesn't care if this is interrupted, or he knows the patrol routes a lot better than you do, and it won't be. Neither are good things.

Even so... you feel the actual, real coils in your body, that you were born with, starting to wither off in that arm. But the fake ones, the ones that you created... they're still there, pumping chakra through the severed limb. A finger twitches in response to your focused will.

Then, brow drenched in sweat, your arm grabs at the masked man's throat.

"Wha-?" he says in response.

It doesn't have anything special going for it, as an arm, aside from being yours. And you don't have the leverage or power to actually strangle him with it. But it serves as a distraction for you to get off the roof, flickering down to ground level where there might be- where there is not a single bystander to be found, apparently!?

"Someone help!" you yell, as phantom pains shoot along your missing arm and the crackling, burning limb is dropped to the ground.

"Tricky!" the masked man says, almost approvingly. "This is almost a shame..."

You flicker just out of his grasping reach, again and again, the two of you playing a malevolent game of tag, for keeps. The second he grabs you, you already know it's all going to be over. It was and should have been all over from the moment that you saw the funny mask, and if you were an ordinary academy student then you'd be dead a dozen times over by now.

Even your escape.... He's not struggling to keep up. He's not exerting himself to catch up, either. He's letting you run yourself out until you fall, for his own amusement.

How the hell did a monster like this get inside of Konoha's walls?

You eventually see a pedestrian and for a fleeting moment you think that you might have made it. As if bystanders and witnesses might change the outcome of this.

"Help!" you yell.

... Not one person turns their head. Nobody, walking down the street, seems to see you at all.

"Please..." you whisper, realizing the situation with a dull spike of fear in your gut. Genjutsu.

"Did you hear something, mama?" a curious child asks her parent, as you drop to your knees in a small pool of blood.

"...? Hear what, honey?" the mother answers.

The masked man lifts you up, from behind and by the back of your shirt.

"And that..." he says, as the world slowly swirls away, to be replaced by a bizarre, dark expanse of crystalline blocks and prisms, sparkling ominously. "... is that. I don't know where you learned puppeteering, but being able to sneak little tricks like that... it really is better for me to cut this off short."

You struggle, kicking and thrashing, and almost slip your shirt off before the man changes his grip to your neck.

"Don't be so glum, chum! You're not going to die right away." he says, bringing you up to one of the prisons, and then slowly forcing you... into it, and through it, in some way you don't understand. His voice from outside takes on an echoing and nearly indistinguishable tone.

"I might need your eyes for later, after all, and I don't have the preservatives ready yet. Just sit tight for now." he says, and disappears.

It's cold.

It's cold and dark.

You're... scared. The bleeding... it's slowed, in this thing. You can't... can only move a very little at a time. And the struggle is exhausting. There's a heavy pall over the area, a weight dragging you down.

As if... you should just... sleep....

... You can't give into it yet. You struggle with all your might, to no avail. What can you do with only one arm?

Maybe... you don't need it, to escape. Maybe. You have only one shot at this. If you're unlucky... then you might just die anyway.

You have to bet everything on everything falling just into place. Perfectly. That the actual flesh of your hand isn't important for making hand-signs. That the fake coils you made with that arm are close enough to the real coils. That you can survive this kind of an escape route.

Over what seems like the course of hundreds of years of painful struggle, you bring your hand and false coils together, forming seals slower than you ever have in your life, even back when you hardly understood what a hand-seal was.

Boar. Dog. Bird. Monkey. Ram.

And you leave your prison behind.

But as you look across the endless expanses of light mist, withered and gnarled trees, and the blood dripping from your arm mingles with the blood trickling across the stones and broken blades that make up the ground, flowing into a river of red under a red sky, you wonder if this is any better.

There's a skittering clicking sound nearby, as something moves through the mist. In the distance there are howls and wails. Something big looms up behind you, and you move, flickering away from the point of impact and up a dead tree.

Then, from a little distance away, you watch as the great and dusty skeleton of something too big to be a man and something like the centipedes from the forest of Death, but with the head and face of a human crash together, the skeleton's blade chipping away chitin and the monster's claw not finding purchase on dry bones.

They scream at each other and start fighting.

And you can't think of any word to describe the place that you've summoned yourself to that fits better than 'hell'.

---

Early End Arc 1: The sweetly fleeting Springtime of Youth.

Beginning Arc 2: Flower of Yomi's Hundred-Demon night parade.

---

The problem with summoning blind was that you would practically only ever see two results: either return as a contracted summoner of some kind, or you would not return at all. Of those two, the second was a more likely result by far.

It left you stuck in a situation where you could only go home by proving yourself suitable to contract with, but unable to determine how to prove it, or to who, much less if you even could. In this realm of blood and malevolence, how...?

The first weeks of surviving the place were... a trial. But while blood did not quench your thirst as well as water, and you were far from anything resembling a friendly diner or food stall, there was... enough to subsist.

You survived. If barely. And in surviving you managed to stay just a little bit ahead of the vast and disquieting assortment of things that wanted to eat you.

There was no chance of rescue coming. Rescuing yourself... might even be impossible, if you couldn't forge a contract with something.

In a place like this, you had to first focus on surviving each day as it came, and leave the possibility of going home for if the opportunity came.

For now, you had to make and meet smaller goals.

-

[ ] You needed to find, or take, a better place to rest than snatched fitful naps in the boughs of dead and dying trees.
[ ] You needed to fix or replace your arm, somehow. You'd managed to keep infection from setting in, but even so...
[ ] You needed to find a better source of food and drink than licking trickles of blood off the ground and eating maggots and worms.
[ ] ??

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

The arm.

That's what your thoughts keep circling around to. It's...

... Well, it's not nearly as crippling and potentially life-threatening both directly and indirectly as it might be for another academy student. Not for you. You've... it seems like you've managed to keep the coils that used to be in your arm, ripped them right out when you ran and that guy set it on fire. They're a lot clumsier than your fake coils, and those aren't exactly dextrous themselves, but you can still sort of make the hand-signs to use jutsu with.

So you aren't helpless and defenseless, here, with only scavenged and cracked blades to defend yourself with.

That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

You tried just fighting with your eyes. That's something high-level Uchiha are supposed to be able to do. Particularly, Genjutsu is sort of the clan's thing, even if fire is also your thing, and much showier.

So you're supposed to be able to hypnotize things on eye contact.

... it's the sort of thing that might require training, actually knowing Genjutsu, or at minimum a lot of practice throwing enough Chakra to brute-force the issue. Because you tried that. Picked a dumb looking... Oni, you guess. Wrinkled, distorted face, horns and tusks, shaggy hair, fur cloth, lots of muscles and scars, and carrying a big club.

You looked it dead in the eye, gathered almost all the chakra you could spare, and then did your best to force it out through your eyes and into his.

"You want to help me." you'd said, fingers on your physical hand crossed.

"... Not really. I mostly just want to eat you." the Oni had replied.

Then it raised its club, and you had to devote the rest of your chakra to giving it the slip again.

... that hasn't worked out as well as you'd hoped. He keeps showing up now, like a particularly persistent but not very bright hunting dog that keeps picking the trail back up. Every few days, as best you can track the passing of days here. Not on a regular schedule. One day after another, or waiting a week before arriving again. Sporadic. You were already sleeping little, and lightly, but him smashing down the tree you pick to sleep in hasn't done much for your rest.

You're going to call him Dummy, you think. Privately, and in your head. Maybe outside of it too, he already wants to eat you. And hopefully kill you first.

He could want to kill you more, you guess. So maybe not.

In any case, he's not a fight you can win. Not directly, not as things stand, and not with one arm. If you had the materials to set traps... then maybe. But on the other hand, maybe not, because Dummy's brought a landslide, cliff, and fallen tree down on himself, and shrugged all of it off. You aren't sure how much exploding tags would do in the face of that, even if you sort of wish you'd at any point looked up how to draw exploding tags. Or had something to write them with. And on.

So over the last couple weeks of the several you've been here, it's become quickly clear to you that the missing arm is a problem.

A problem that needs to be fixed.

Floppy, clumsy coils and tendrils of chakra aren't going to work. You need an arm.

And in this situation, that means you either need to make an arm from the materials available... or take one of about the right size and shape.

---

[ ] Make. You have everything you need, probably.
- [ ] About all there is around here seems to be stone and dead trees. Can't be that hard to put a prosthetic together, right? Straight bit, bendy bit, fiddly gripping bits...
- [ ] The other thing that's here in abundance? Skeletons. Dusty, broken, but only sometimes walking around, but as a plus they generally have the right anatomy, less flesh.
- [ ] What you need to do is to make the chakra denser. Make it physical. Bijuu do it, why can't... you might be a little insane. But that doesn't mean it won't work.
[ ] Take. Plenty of arms about, attached to other things.
- [ ] There are impish little oni-like figures, Amanojaku that entertain themselves in tricking bigger and dumber monsters into fighting one another. Sometimes they laugh heartily from a distance at the show. Other times they are mangled for their trouble. Not all of their bodies are ruined, though...
- [ ] The spider that walks in the shape of a woman makes you shudder when she calls, and when she sings, to lure her prey nearer and nearer... until it is bound up in thread it does not and cannot see. She takes her time in eating them, when entrapped, and shares it bountifully out among lesser spiders. She has many arms to spare, though you doubt she will be eager to give one away...
- [ ] The bound corpse, chained and marked with ancient and crumbling sealing wards, even now seems to be reaching out from its still and permanent repose. One arm outstretched... the only portion that has not yet rotten away, but even so as black as ink or pitch and seeming like stone, with thin cracks...

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

You need an arm. Need it.

Making it would take time that you don't have, fitted away in between fitful naps, licking blood up off the rocks, scrabbling in the dirt for worms, and running away from Dummy.

You need to take an arm, or something already in the right shape.

The trick is just in finding it.

You don't know how long passes before you find it. It could be anywhere from weeks to months, blurring together in a haze of just managing to survive, as you're forced to bypass options, or are denied them.

The big monsters are often just too big. Even if you could bring one down, their arm would be ungainly and clumsy. Not useless for your purposes, but too much effort for too little result.

The spider woman? That one has plenty of arms to spare, and they're at leas sometimes of close to the right shape and size. Enough that you can grow into them, anyway. But the trouble there is that you doubt she'll hand one over willingly, and venturing through her cratered home... the whole area is a trap comprised of smaller traps which link together to funnel victims toward the ultimate end.

You spent a couple hours observing it from a distance, but then moved on. The spider woman could pass through her own traps in a way that nothing else could, and without that ability the whole place didn't have any openings large enough to pass more than a fist through without starting to accumulate the silken threads that spelled doom.

You might be able to move through. If you had that spider woman's ability. If you could fly. Or if you sent something much bigger through first, to clear a path. With none of those, the only solution that comes to mind is to burn it all, and the resulting conflagration wouldn't be at all useful for finding a suitable replacement arm.

You considered the amanojaku for a time.

Smaller, oni-like figures. They seem to grow bored easily, and spend any time not trying to sniff you out and eat you in taunting and attempting to trick larger and more dangerous things into fighting each other.

Sometimes it works, which prompts possibilities for the future. But the times it doesnt strike those possibilities clean through. The broken and ruined bodies of amanojaku just translate in your head too easily to broken and ruined bodies of Mio.

It might have been a convenient way to snap up an arm, but considering the monsters around here seem to have no compunctions about eating one another, there's usually very little left. Definitely not a full replacement arm. Since bits are sometimes left behind, it might have been a possible avenue, if you could snatch a corpse before the bigger demons started eating, but....

Then you found the corpse.

-

Chained up and in sealing wards that appear to do nothing, it seems to be exactly what you need. One dinged and slightly battered arm outstretched from a withered and contained corpse.

It looks in good condition. You mean, comparatively. It's just what you need. In a blur of mental stress and fatigue, you put one foot against the corpse's face, grab hold of the wrist with your remaining hand, and pull.

It wrenches off easily, though you belatedly realize that it won't do at all. Not only does it separate below the elbow, it's the wrong arm entire-...

You blink and rub your eyes.

Correct arm now. Ending at the right place despite... yeah, despite that the chained up corpse still has both elbows of its own.

"Well, this idea just went from okay-ish to probably terrible, but all right then." you mutter to yourself.

Then you jam the arm to your partially healed stump.

... You don't even need to do much after that, as though the limb was just waiting for the opportunity. It's excruciatingly painful, but it seems to be driving tendrils back in your flesh every bit as much as you're streaming real and fake chakra coils into it. The pain is joined by a sensation of befuddlement.

Then that's replaced with the urge to go find the nearest thing, and kill it.

"Listen. I am way ahead of you there." you say aloud. "Drop in the bucket, buddy."

The mental pressure redoubles, tendrils of force and will seeming to sink into your brain.

You mentally set them on fire. Which. It... seems to work, which you weren't entirely expecting but at the same time aren't completely surprised by either. Chakra's components are physical and mental energy, right? And you've got, for various reasons, more chakra than average for a passable academy student of your age.

There's a sensation of confusion and outrage demanding your submission and you're pretty sure now that you've grafted some kind of demon world parasite onto yourself. Arm's working like a perfectly normal arm, if colored and with the sheen of volcanic glass, but there's mental contamination.

"Nah." you reply aloud.

And then Dummy crashes down from the sky like a fucking meteor, club first, and your will and the parasites becomes united in the decision to be anywhere else, quickly.

... It takes you a couple of days to give Dummy the slip this time. He's getting persistent.

Now then.

---

[ ] You need to find better sustenance than blood licking and worm sucking.
[ ] You need to find better shelter than tree branches and nothing.
[ ] You need to practice using your arm for ninja-ing. Get the kinks out.
[ ] You need to beat the will behind your new arm into submission, somehow.

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

As problems go, mental contamination is no fucking joke.

You live in a village with the Yamanaka clan. They do not like to talk about it, but... stuff happens. Compounded with Konoha's generally unobtrusive quiet-type genjutsu users, and... well.

Strictly speaking, 'I thought I was someone or something else at the time' isn't the most solid of legal defenses, but it's reeeeeal hard to be disproven and generally ends up lightening sentences, if not having them dismissed entirely. Pisses off the clan head and acting police chief something fierce every time someone pulls that one.

In some cases, for some kinds of crimes, the slick shit has an accident later on. No foul play involved whatsoever. The police do a thorough sweep and give an all-clear and everything. It's just that kind of bad luck that makes people less willing to pull the genjutsu argument unless they have corroborating evidence or witnesses that say they were actually under one.

That said? When it's actually the case... things get messy. You've heard rumors that there's an entire wing of the torture and interrogation department devoted to protecting Konoha from the risk of Konoha shinobi that have been... tampered with.

Rumors only. The kind that are laughed at. Because everyone knows that ninjutsu is the way to go, when Genjutsu is so easily detected and broken, good only for use on civilians. Having been on the receiving end of a genjutsu used on mostly civilians to great effect and your own detriment...

You need to find a place to take care of this.

Obviously, you can't sit down and try to meditate in the open. Aside from the fact that you're just not very good at it, it leaves you highly visible and unguarded from every direction. You have to find somewhere that is at least a little secure...

What you find is the great skeleton of some kind of massive winged lizard, easily of a size to be a boss summon.

That's something for you to think of as well. All in all, you don't want to stay here forever, and there's two ways out of a summon's realm. Walking far enough from their hidden lands for space and nature to bend about you and leave you in the elemental nations proper, or getting sent back by a summon that can do it. That's usually the boss, and maybe one or two others.

You don't know what might count as the boss of this place, filled with countless different monsters, all eagerly feeding on one another. You aren't sure if there is a boss, or that you want to know what it is if there is one.

With a grunt, you settle down inside the great skull nestled in the ribcage. No good for proper rest, but sufficient to sit a short while, until the ridges and prongs of bone start to get too bothersome.

"Okay, you." you address the arm, feeling a sullen and bitter sensation in response. "Listen. Look at me. None of the sass, now, I'm talking. Look." you say, as a spike of indignation echoes through your teeth.

There's a wet, nasty noise as a line appears in your new wrist and then parts, opening up to show the whirling spin of a blood-red sharingan, tomoe swirling uselessly.

This just got really uncomfortable, very quickly. It doesn't seem like the arm has any idea what to do with an eye like that, though, except glare. Which is... a good thing? You guess.

"All right, I'm going to be real honest and admit that I didn't expect you to actually look at me. That said, makes this easier." you say, forcing chakra out of your eyes and into its. This didn't really work on Dummy. But if at first you don't succeed...

---

[ ] You follow the chakra in.
[ ] You bind it tightly shut.

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

This is a lot easier than with Dummy, you realize as you slip into the arm's mind.

Maybe the Oni is just naturally resistant to Genjutsu? Or you're just enough of a genius that after one failure and no other practice or instruction, you pulled off a success. The other option you can think of, that the arm having its own sharingan but not knowing how it works, or how to use it, made it easier is... just ridiculous. Extremely so. Not even worth thinking about.

Not when you instantly have to focus on the squamous mass of... flesh and stuff that's the arm's mental representation of itself, wriggling and howling with madness.

"MEEEEAT!? HOW DAAAAARE YOOOOOOOU!" The arm-thing howls.

"Again, not what I expected." you mumble wryly, having mentally pictured... maybe a bigger arm?

"SUBMIT! SUBMIIIIIT!" it continues howling, lengths of... lengths stretching towards you, with cruel barbs, teeth, and bulbous growths.

Obviously, you dodge them.

This is going just great. You expected... you don't know. Some kind of hypnotic effect, to lull the thing into sleep, or at least quiet it down? Instead, you're getting a full on fight against a parasite monster.

And your arms back off. Fun.

On the plus side, you're pretty sure that everything in here works by dint of willing it to be so, and you've always been headstrong. A blade appears in your hand and you cut off the screaming thing's nearest... appendage. It starts to grow back towards the main mass, but then you will it to be on fire, and that happens.

No chakra use here. Just force of will. You can do this.

---

[ ] Your guest is moving around a lot. Need to stuff it in a bottle or something.
[ ] 'Submit'? No, you. Keep cutting bits off and smacking it around until that happens.
[ ] You've been eating a lot of nasty things lately. You're gonna eat this too.
[ ] ??

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

It's a wriggling, squirming, thrashing and disgusting thing.

But so, when it comes down to it, are the worms and maggots that you have been subsisting on. And though nothing here is particularly real, it's real enough that the hunger crawling in your gut for so long outside has a reflection even here.

You've been eating a lot of nasty things to get by. If this is going to give you problems, well, then you'll eat it too.

... It doesn't seem to understand what's happening, not at first. Then the screams begin anew, with genuine horror flavoring the outrage.

This isn't the normal 'unnatural order of things'.

You're supposed to be the meat.

This defies everything.

That and more. The wriggler screams so many things as you eat it, one methodical mouthful ripped free from the main mass at a time. It howls in horror, rage, disgust, and defiance.

To the end, it never breaks down and begs you to stop.

You'll give it that. It's not accepting of this end, but it doesn't seem like it's afraid of dying. Though, it's not particularly a smart move either. If it surrendered, pleaded for you to stop, you'd feel bad about this. Maybe you'd let it live on.

Well, maybe not, too.

Once the last scrap of its mental presence in your new arm is ripped apart and subsumed, crushed with your own power and will, you slip back out of the already fading hellish mental landscape and back to the normal hellish landscape.

.... You feel really... different. More energized. You're still hungry, but it's settled from a constant gnaw at your gut to be ignored as you scavenge enough, just, to keep yourself alive to a duller 'I wonder what's for dinner' ache.

More concerningly, there's physical changes to account for.

The nails of both your hands are... thicker. Heavier. The black sheen to the new one is gone, color faded to match the rest of your body. There's a taste of blood in your mouth, and as you bring your tongue up to incautiously check, it gets cut on the pointed tips of very sharp teeth.

Some shinobi file theirs, to have a more menacing appearance and keep a last ditch desperation weapon ready. You didn't intend to do that. These seem... like it's just how your teeth are now.

Your scalp itches.

Before you have a good grip on how things are now, a big and meaty hand settles down around one of the teeth in the jaw of this massive lizard thing's skull. A foot presses down on another.

And then, rather than breaking an opening loose in the row of teeth that's large enough for the Oni to pass through after you, Dummy heaves a little bit and the top of the skull slowly grinds upwards.

The Oni pauses when he gets a good look at you, and then a thread of confusion, followed by another of slight interest, joins his grin of predatory and carnivorous intent.

"That's something you don't see every century." he says, seeming to recognize that something is different. "But I'm still gonna eatcha."

---

[ ] ??

 

[Chibi-Reaper]

"Foooooolish oni. MIO is the one who will do the eating!" you declare, pulling all the strands of your chakra close into your body as you leap to the attack.

Dummy responds to your attack reflexively, truly without thought. Rather than catching you, which would have served the purpose of holding you in place for eating, he instantly swings that great club of his.

He seems to realize the mistake too late to do anything about it, with a frowned and muttering 'oops'. Then...

... It's a good thing you've got the chakra all drawn close to your body. There's enough that the energy has become physically dense, and it can't really be damaged the same way as actually physical materials.

If you'd just leapt to the attack, like you're newly... carnivorous? Instincts had driven you to do... well, you think that would have less been crushed by the club and more have splashed apart, like a water balloon used for kenjutsu target practice with one of Fuki's wooden swords.

As things stand, your chakra serves as a deforming, rubber-ish kind of armor, which means that when the impact hits you, it doesn't break you.

Carrying on the metaphor, it means that you respond to the blow like a rubber bouncing ball instead of a water balloon.

You have the barest instant of realizing the impact before you smash outwards through the giant skull and keep on flying...

... Really, truly, disgustingly far through the air. The landscape is blurring around you. You hit... something, you don't know what, but it comes apart in a squawking cloud of feathers and blood that doesn't slow you down at all and your altitude is still increasing.

Why the hell is this your life?

At some point your altitude peaks, and then you start to fall, and you realize you've still got a long way to go before you-

Impact.

---

[ ] Splashing violently down into an inky black and eerily silent sea. You feel wood for a moment, as water rushes back in. There's a skull glowing in the dark. They aren't supposed to do that, right?
[ ] Tearing through spider webs that obviously aren't supposed to tear. It's uncomfortable and sticky and that's a lot of spiders. Way too many spiders, and these webs are supposed to catch dinner for them.
[ ] You smash through a castle wall. Ceiling. Floors too. On the one hand, civilization? On the other, from the looks of this dungeon the owner is going to be either really unhappy or creepily pleased to see you.
[ ] You landed on clouds. And are standing on clouds. Literal sky clouds. Why?