The Wolf, the Physicist, and the Medic [Sal, Jace]

Sal snatched the clipping of the herb from Ayame, saying something about not being their sniffer-dog, and crushed part of it in his fist. The girl got all flustered and defensive like she normally did at that point, but the boy's basically ignored that. Sal shifted quickly into his wolven form and then led the trio towards the cave system nearby in which the herb would be found. Upon arriving, Salzem would warn the group that there were people inside. Ayame simply suggested that they might need the herb too, which seemed extremely plausible considering the gravity of the disease that was spreading.

Apparently Ayame had some good eyes as well. She mentioned seeing a few small 'auras' up ahead, whatever that meant. There was also mention of some large reptile that might possibly be guarding its eggs, as well as a few worms and snakes. No plants just yet though. "Right. Just keep your senses peeled guys. I can't see much in this darkness." Jace answered. His sharingan wasn't very helpful in this situation. There was little to no light in the cave and he started to feel practically useless. It was too bad he hadn't thought to bring any torches or lanterns. They would have been a huge help.

He just continued to follow the two others since they seemed to have a better grasp of what was ahead and what wasn't. It wasn't like he couldn't see at all in the caves, he just couldn't see very far. Hopefully whatever dangers they might face would have some form of chakra signature that he would be able to pick up on, whether that be with his sharingan or basic chakra sensory didnt really matter.

wc: 560
TWC: 1,214

Salzem obviously knew Ayame wasn't trying to get on his nerves again. It was clear as day what she intended so he didn't think anything needed to be said regarding her further explanation. Instead, he only grinned to himself as they made their way to the cave. After giving his warning and the trio moved in a little further, Ayame commented how there was some kind of big reptilian monster in the center, curled around something, persumably eggs. She then went on to comment almost casually that there were GIANT WORMS AND SNAKES slithering about the interior of the cave's tunnels looking for a meal. How she managed to maintain such integrity in the face of something so disgusting was beyond him, but somehow... she managed. The lycan shivered in revoltion at such a thought... before all that giving way to confusion at what she said next: She didn't see any humans down there. ...What...? He could clearly smell them (As stated in my last post) and hear footfalls that could only belong to something like them so why couldn't she SEE them with her aura-sensing eyes? Perhaps they had some armor that deflected such things or maybe... maybe she just got them mixed up with the massive reptile, eggs, and worse things slithering about down there... What did he care? They'd find what they're looking for eventually and Salzem could return to his bed and forget this mission entirely.

"If you want..." Salzem whispered, looking back at the rest of his group. "I could level this entire cave and everything in it." Of course, he didn't mean this offer... that would mean losing the herbs inside and if what he saw in the sand meant anything... it was that they didn't have a whole lot of spare time... Salzem sensed that the giant reptile was deeper in the cave than they were, perhaps several dozen meters within... but that was also where the smell of the herbs were strongest.... So help him if this thing made it's nest in a grove of the herbs they just so happened to need.... Salzem would be frustrated... The cave was as dank and dark as he remembered which was to say... very. He figured that if they put water collectors all about the interior of this cave, the Kazakage would be bringing back water by the bag-full, if it were a little dirty. Despite their best efforts at stealth, nothing would quiet the sloshing and splashing of their feet within the tiny puddles inside, no doubt adding to Jace's further insecurities... He could feel something near them now... watching but with no eyes... It's warmth so close, Salzem felt revolted beyond words...

Ayame followed silently behind the boy as he chuckled and noted that he could level the entire cave. "Seems a bit counterproductive" she would mutter attempting to be his eyes as best as she could.

The ground suddenly rumbled making the girl stop in her tracks and look around. There was nothing around capable of making that noise, and the Gila Monster was much too far away to even have noticed them yet.

Ayame even checked behind Jace. Nothing. So whatever it was, it was coming from above or below the ground. Best bet would be below, as they were in a cave system. The rumbling came again, this time causing Ayame to lose her balance and fall back on her butt. As she hurried to get onto her feet,  A gigantic worm burst from the cave floor where she previously had been.

Now, this wasn't just an ordinary earthworm. No, it was at least 20 meters in Length and had an opening on its face with Razor sharp teeth, and two pores the size of basket balls on either side of its head that each housed a tympanum. This beast used the ground it was encased in to support its body weight and prevent it from flopping over. It could feel and track the vibrations of the ground as well as follow voices to attack, but unless someone did extensive research into the beasts of Suna, it is unlikely that they would have known.

Drool dripped from its mouth as it listened for the slightest noise to attack. Ayame could see that the worm was unfriendly, and unfortunately, due to the way it had come forth from the ground, she was on one side of it with Salzem (the side that would lead further into the Cave) and then Jace was on the other side.

Ayame didn't know how much the others could see, especially Salzem without him having a dojutsu.

Ayame turned her head to keep an eye on Sals Aura, and she searched for Jace's past the worm. They were still okay as far as she was aware.

"Is he blind?" Ayame would state as quiet as she could watching the worms odd behaviour, but as soon as the first word had left her mouth the beast had swiveled, his thick skin protecting his squishy body from the impact of the ground as it attempted to smash Ayame.

Aya would hop backward a few times, but as soon as she touched down, the worm would head for her location. The beast roared in frustration as it missed each time. This roar caused some rocks to fall from the ceiling, allowing for the perfect distraction for her to be able to change her location without the brute noticing.

WC: 462
TWC: 1455

As the trio made their way deeper into the cave, Jace focused on mainly using his other senses aside from his eyes. Sure, he could see his teammates' chakra signatures well enough thanks to the shraingan, but he couldn't actually see. It was beginning to be very frustrating. He could make out chakra signatures of differing sizes throughout the cave system, each moving about casually as if nothing were amiss. Not long after they had entered, Salzem had jokingly offered to destroy the entire cave system. Jace smiled at the thought, even though the others probably didn't see it due to them being in front of him. 'At least he has a sense of humor.' he thought to himself. 

Unfortunately it wasn't long after that that Jace spotted an enormous mass of chakra underneath the ground heading straight for them. It was surprisingly fast. Too fast for him to give ample warning before it erupted from the ground between him and his two teammates. "Damnit!" The swore came out rather unintentionally, and louder than it probably should have. He could still make out Sal and Ayame's chakra on the opposite side of the enormous worm, but that didn't tell him if they were actually ok. Just that they weren't dead. 

The worm swiveled and lunged at Ayame, the girl backpedaling a few times to escape the attack. Immediately Jace decided to take action. Gripping the hilt of his sword, which was protruding over his right shoulder, he used his right hand to infuse the weapon with some of his lightning chakra as he focused in on the massive, slimy, obnoxious enemy worm in front of him. He focused as much chakra as he could into the soles of his feet, releasing it in an instant as he darted forward past the worm's left side. As he did so, he used the momentum of his first step along with the added sharpness of his blade due to infusing his chakra to slice clean through the creature. The immense scream that followed was probably enough to wake every creature in the damn cave system and alert them to the ninja's presence. But it quickly stopped as the top half of the worm came toppling down to the cave floor, missing Ayame and Salzem by about a foot.

"That thing was huge. Are you guys ok? I wonder how many more of these thi-"

He was cut off mid sentence as three more of the giant worm creatures all erupted from the ground a few meters in front of them, each of their slimy heads swiveling back and forth as if trying to locate what they probably assumed would be their next meal. "This just keeps getting better and better." the blonde muttered to himself as he prepared for whatever came next.

TWC: 1,683

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a coagulation of massive worms erupted from inside the group, scattering them in more than one way. While one cut Salzem off from from Jace, another spit Ayame off from the rest of the group, attempting to push her further inside, sensing that she must've been the weakest of the three.... Salzem did his best not to let out a roar or yelp for fear of drawing more of those titanic creepy-crawlies their way, but Jace was way ahead (or behind...?) him on that one, immediately unleashing profanity in surprise and frustration.

"Wow, Jace." Salzem grunted, sinking his claws into a writhing worm with one hand while pummeling what he thought was it's head with the other. "You kiss... uh... anyone with that mouth?" He smirked to himself, quite proud of that one before being slammed into the stone wall to the side with a mighty tail-slap (or was it a headbutt...?). Recovering quickly thanks to his lycan regeneration, he was able to regain his focus and clear his head just as the worm's muscly, slimy body wrapped around Salzem's stomach, intent on strangling the strength out of him before devouring him whole... Smart on the level that it didn't want to be torn inside out, stupid because now all the worm's vitals were in arm's reach. Again, Salzem went to work on his worm, biting, ripping and tearing until it literally was torn to shreds at his feet, the smell of worm-blood making the lycan gag in disgust... What was worse was when he recovered from that experiance, he was met with he sight of half of the worm dragging itself further into the tunnels, its innards dragging along behind it on the ground... Okay... that was it... The lycan took a moment to dry-heave over the stone as Jace finished off the first of the of his worms only to be met with another... and another... and yet another. A grand total of three new ones erupted all around them, another one slithering off to death with Ayame while the other two stood their ground against the lycan and Uchiha.

"Vile, aren't they?" Salzem commented, slashing his claws across the beast's face only to be met with a screech that was disgustingly inhuman. "I'll never be able to get the stench of that thing out of my nose..."

(Okay for sake of simplicity, I'm just going to assume that you each had a worm and that the other one sprouted near me, as the positioning is awkward due to the beginning of sal's post claiming one popped up near me, splitting me off from them, and then at the end it assumes something different (two worms between the two boys with the third having previously been in front of Sal, slithering toward Ayame.). I'm just going with the first because that's how I see it and assume that the one Sal cut down headed off in a different direction into the cave)

Ayame was shocked that another came so quickly, splitting her off from salzem and Jace. It was almost as if they knew that the trio were coming and were lying in ambush. Odd.

Aya proceeded to make hand signs, being about 60 meters away from the boys, using her clan Jutsu on the worm while the two were farther away (enough to be well out of range). She would use Somnolent no Jutsu, putting her worm to sleep with ease.

When two more popped up after it and tried waking it, which they could not, one of the beasts emitted a guttural noise that was somewhere between a roar and a screech and making the whole cave shake. The noise was so loud next to Ayame that her ears felt like they were being penetrated by kunai.

Aya grasped her ears as the cave shook from the roar, some stalactites falling near the boys and not hitting their worms. She nearly screamed at the noise with the amount of pain she was in and stumbled backward as the cave shook from the intensity and loudness of the noise. She attempted to keep her footing, not realizing that she was on the edge of a cliff falling deeper into the cave. As Aya attempted to sturdy herself, the vibrations became stronger causing her to stumble off the edge of the cave's drop off, the cave still rumbling. Ayame thought quickly as she started to fall and grabbed onto a rock that had been wedged in the side of the cliff.

Then suddenly the screeching stopped as she was hanging there, so Ayame called out for help. Just before she had fallen, she had seen Sal's aura next to the aura of a severely injured worm, while Jace was dealing with his worm, so she called out for him seeing he would be free. "Sal, help!" she screamed in a considerable amount of pain from her arm hitting the stone so hard. It was likely that her wrist at the very least was broken, but she still hung on, desperate to not die.

Then all the remaining worms started screeching causing rocks to fall from the ceiling blocking off some of the other passageways, but not the exit, nor their path to the cliff. Unfortunately for Aya, it caused the rock she had been clinging to fall with her following it down into the depths of the cave.

~

When Ayame came to, there were a group of people she didn't know surrounding her, some with torches that were running very low. A healer was working over her body as they sat next to a pool of water that Ayame must have fallen in. There were no noises down here, but there were some mosses and herbs growing down this far.

Then she saw it... right by the water's edge was the herb they needed. If there was water, that must have meant she was down really far given that they were in the desert. The pain was nearly unbearable but was being helped. Her wrist and one of her legs had been damaged by the fall, but they were reasonably fixable. She was lucky to have landed in the water and survived the fall at all.

WC: 648
TWC: 2103

The three worms that had suddenly arrived became a bigger problem than they should have almost immediately. Because of the way that they were placed, Jace was cut off from both of his teammates. His vision was obscured and his ability to remove his student or Sal from danger effectively cut off. The young Chuunin team leader began to become overly anxious now, his worry for Ayame distracting him long enough for the worm he was fighting to hit him hard in the abdomen and causing him to fly backwards two feet and slam into the wall of the cave. He fell quickly to his knees and rolled to the left to avoid another blow from the worm.

Jace risked a quick look around to see how his teammates were doing. It seemed like Sal was holding his own which wasn't really surprising. Ayame had managed to take out one of the worms on her own. It was followed quickly by a blood curdling screech so loud it shook the cave and loosened large portions of rock from the ceiling that fell and cut off all passages except the one behind them. The sound was too loud and too close. Jace's first reaction was to cover his ears. He was helpless as he saw Ayame stumbling backward before falling out of sight completely into a drop off that he hadn't realized was there. "Ayame!!" the boy shouted as he quickly created a single hand seal and let loose a large fireball that engulfed the worm in front of him. It screamed in agony and writhed on the ground as it tried to put out the flames to no avail. The fireball quickly deteriorated the worm into a burnt husk.

He could feel his heart racing, sweat covering his body as he heard Ayame yell out for Sal to help her before another ear-splitting screech was let loose drowning out the sound of her voice and sending even more stalagmites and portions of rock down on top of where she would be. His body moved on it's own, giving no time for thought. In seconds he was at the edge of the drop off looking down into pitch black nothingness. If there was a bottom it was too far for him to see. Tears began to roll down his cheeks, his fists slamming into the ground next to him. "No! Ayame! Please answer me! AYAME!" the terror and anguish in his voice was undeniable. It felt like his chest was going to explode, his body was shaking and the tears in his eyes made his vision blurry. 

"No...How could I have let this happen. SAL!" he cried out, no longer caring about the worms surrounding them. "Sal it's Ayame...she...she fell down this hole in the floor and..and..." he said through his tears. He was afraid to put what he was thinking into words. The worst couldn't have happened. This couldn't be real. It wasn't supposed to be like this. "I can't see or sense her chakra signature..." The blonde Uchiha didn't want to admit that the girl was probably dead. 'Dead'. The thought was so terrible, terrible because it was probably true. Tears of blood streamed down his cheeks now, the normal 3 tomoe pattern of his eyes swirling and taking on a new form. He hadn't realized it yet, the shock of what just happened still immobilizing him, but he had awakened a new power within him. One that was closely guarded within the Uchiha. So closely guarded that he himself wasn't even aware that it existed. The Mangekyo Sharingan.


TWC: 2,214
not counting the strikethrough words cuz idek if its legit or not XD

As Salzem dealt with his worm, ripping it apart with visceral ease, his ears almost bled with the horrendous noise generated by one of the subterranean creatures, the strength of which was so powerful it made the lycan take a step back, clenching his massive clawed palms over his ears in pain, reeling from the evil sound. Despite his best efforts, Salzem heard something snap in his head and all sound faded to white noise... Ayame's pleads for help... Jace's struggles with his worms... It was all deafened substantially He couldn't even hear his own breath nor the tearing-out of his own fur as he attempted to block out the pain of having his ear-drums busted... Blood pooled from his ears and Salzem opened one eye to see Jace burning his worm alive with a fire-ball, a fire that somehow managed not to blast through the entire cave-system and burn them all to cinders... Stalagtites fell from the ceiling as the cave was proven to be unstable, cutting off anymore conventional routes downward... and striking Salzem in the back of the head... With his sudden and debilitating loss of hearing, he might as well have lost both his arms, but even then he would've been more useful... He didn't sense the approach of the falling stone in time and the pack-leader went down hard, bashing his forehead against the stone floor of the cave for further damage...

Everything was spinning... the room... him... his stomach... all in different directions... He couldn't tell what was down, what was the floor and for a moment, he even forgot who he was. As if on instinct, detecting the damage within himself, his healing factor began to kick in, repairing his ears, the now bloody spot above his left eye, and the gash on the back of his head, his senses and abilities returning to him too late... MUCH too late... By the time Salzem got up and looked around, he saw Jace staring into the ground (or rather, a sizable hole in it), crying his eyes out like he'd just watched a comrade die, all the while being surrounded, the space around him slowly constricted by the vile, slithering forms of the worms. Letting out a roar of anger, Salzem would tear into the beasts, ripping them apart, to pieces, before they could let out another screech... Jace would only kneel there at the edge of the pit, staring into the abyss as it seemed to stare back.

"What's wrong with you?" He asked, perhaps a bit too carelessly, completely oblivious to the criticality of the situation. It was as he walked up beside Jace and looked into his (misshapen sharingan?) eyes did he realize something was wrong. Tears (and blood?) flowed down his cheeks as he stared into the dark... and Ayame was nowhere to be seen or smelt. Salzem looked from Jace, to the hole, to Jace again, the pieces finally falling into place...

"No..." His heart-rate picked up as he stared into the dark, desperately trying to peer into the bottom. "No!" He growled more angrily, staring accusingly at Jace as if his belief would make it real. "She's NOT dead." And with that... he jumped down into the hole, his claws digging and cutting into the stone wall as he made his decent, slowing it down to a reasonable pace. Salzem refused to yell any further for fear of bringing more of the roof down and possibly killing them all. And speaking of killing... when he got down there, if anything dared to hurt her... he'd rip their eyes out...

By the time Sal had reached the bottom of the drop-off, Ayame would have been moved to a much safer location than where she had fallen originally. The area in which she had landed would have a fair amount of blood pooled. there would be some drag marks in one direction but it would stop shortly after.

The cave was unsteady. As soon as Ayame had harvested some of the herbs, being careful enough not to kill the plants themselves, she realized this. What would happen if the cave were to be destroyed entirely?

Ayame began investigating the plant more and more, searching each one until she found what she was looking for. Seed pods. she would harvest a few and share them with the people she was with.

Maybe Sunas soil wouldn't be good for cultivating this herb, but it was damned well worth a try. She packed a couple into her spare weapons pouch, and shared some with the other people, being sure to leave most of them intact on their plants so that they could still reproduce.

Ayame followed the group up where they came but the way was blocked off, so they began searching for another way out whilst trying not to bring the whole cave down on them. Ayame did worry that without a medic, Sal and Jace might end up hurt... or worse, dead. The thought terrified her and kept her noticeably distracted as she hovered around with the group through several twisty and rickety pathways that the cave took.

WC: 258
TWC: 2361

Jace's grief for the lost of his student was mirrored in Salzem's utter denial. The blonde watched as his friend and teammate jumped down into the enormous hole in front of them. Now he was alone. He couldn't let Sal continue on his own through the cave, no matter how incapable Jace was feeling at the moment. He would not let Sal meet the same fate that Ayame had. Finally rousing himself into action, Jace concentrated his chakra onto the soles of his feet and made his way down the sidewall of the drop off after Sal. His body was still shaking from the fear and loss that he had just experienced. It was only worsened by the massive amount of blood pooling on the floor of the cavern that he had finally reached. Drag marks lead off in a single direction, stopping suddenly as if whatever had made it just simply disappeared. There was no way Ayame could have survived a fall from that height. "Sal...what do we do now.." he asked quietly, hoping for some ray of hope in this darkness.