Truth Part 3[P]

Halloween Event 2021  - Doing the Truth Part 3

Part 1
Part 2

Zaibatsu had finally found what he had been looking for, thanks to his contact within the cult. What he was looking at right now was a long staircase heading up towards complete darkness. It seemed that there was nothing up there, as if the space seemed strange. Usually when one walked into an area, they had a bit of a feeling on how big the space around them was, but for some reason when Zaibatsu stepped onto the first step going up the staircase, he felt like he stepped onto nothingness, as if the next steps on the stairs did not exist, and if he walked onto them, his body would simply sink in, and he would fall into the void. This was one of the strangest feelings that he had ever felt, and it caused him to pause for a second or two, before trying to step down onto the next step cautiously. There was no cause for concern it seemed, as he stepped onto the next step and it was as solid as a hewn stone could be, and so he simply carefully made his way up the rest of the steps. This was pretty easy to disguise, considering everyone in this building likes to go really slowly and do everything slowly as well. His apprehension for stepping on the stairs could easily be played off as him being slow, and so he decided to keep up that slow pace throughout the entirety of the walk up the stairs. As he was walking up the stairs, he saw a couple of people walk past him, and they were fairly spaced out, as if they had exited the room above a couple of seconds after each other and kept the same monotonous pace throughout the walk down the stairs. These people all seemed like they were robots, set on a certain pattern that caused them to be on some sort of rail system, as if they had simply gotten onto an escalator and then waited for it to bring them everywhere. He knew that they were all going slow on purpose, but he wanted to understand why they all seemed to go the same speed as each other as well, as different heights and people made it so that each person had their own gait to which they walked, meaning that the people should be walking at different speeds, and yet they were not doing that. This was also a strange revelation to Zaibatsu, as it seemed to almost confirm something that he had been thinking of for a while, and that was that these people were somehow programmed to do certain things, or they could have easily have been fake people, or artificial people. This would explain their strange stances, movement, and other things that seemed to follow a certain robotic rhythm. Zaibatsu could not be sure of his theories of course, but he had to keep it in the back of his mind, as if these people were artificial, that might mean that they could not feel pain as well as he could, and they might come after him as if they had no care for their own life or their own safety.

This would definitely be an uphill battle against them if that were to happen, but at least he was able to sit at the top of the stairs and funnel them into a small space, meaning he would only have to fight maybe one or two at a time, which would be the only way he could see himself coming out of this alive should a fight actually end up happening when he actually made it to the top of these dark stairs. As he was walking, he thought for a moment, and realized that this was the longest that he had walked since coming to this area, which did not make sense to him, as the stairs were going up. If they were actually going up and he had been walking for the amount of time that he believed he was walking, then he would definitely be above ground level right now, but that was not the case, as he was certain that he did not see anything above the ground level to indicate that there was another room here, not even a large boulder that could have potentially hidden the room. This meant that there was probably some dumb and strange space and time tomfoolery going on, but Zaibatsu could not care less about this, unless the opponents he was going to face would have some sort of power over space and time too. This would cause him a lot of undue stress, as he was a big burly man that used his fists to do the talking, so there was not much of a way for him to get around any space bending powers, as it were. He would just hope that they spent all of their resources on making this room and building have space bending powers, and that they could not use those types of things themselves, especially not in battle. Zaibatsu was getting a bit annoyed at how much he was actually having to walk in their god forsaken place, as he had no idea what the hell these people were thinking. These hallways could have been a lot shorter, especially because the people here were walking and just moving very slowly in general. Either that, or these people needed to hurry up and move around faster, either or would have been fine for Zaibatsu, but the combination of both would be the best. Instead, he got the worst of both worlds, where the people were walking slowly and the hallways were incredibly long. This annoyance was building on him quite fiercely, and he was about ready to just start sprinting through the halls, but he knew that he needed to at least get to his destination before he started doing those types of things, and soon he had to take a deep breath and let it out, as he was afraid that the next person that he walked into was going to get snapped in half. As he walked up the stairs once more, he finally found what he was looking for. Above his normal line of sight, he started to see the floor of another room, as well as what appeared to be a large door. This door had the symbol of Jashin on it just like the staircase, except this one was huge, covering the entire door in its large art style, giving off a feeling of dread when one looked at it. This thing was fairly massive, even for a person as large as Zaibatsu, and he looked at it in slight, but genuine, awe. As he did so, he saw that there were two people flanking the door, making sure to look at everyone who wanted to get in. As Zaibatsu walked up to it, he knew that this was the place he needed to get into, even if it meant blowing his cover. This was the main goal, and apparently something bad would have happened if they warned the people inside here about his coming before he actually got here.

So far, it had been a bit nerve wracking not being able to just meandre his way through the whole place, and he kept feeling stifled in his act. He wanted to punch something already, and this gave him a bit of a chance to do so, and he was greatly excited at the prospect, and so he started walking towards the door. The people that were flanking the door stepped out in front of him and simply shook their heads. This was essentially telling him that he was not allotted in this most sacred chamber, and to turn back. Zaibatsu ignored them and simply kept walking towards the door, which prompted the two guards there to wear a surprised face before pulling out a sword each. Zaibatsu nodded at the attempt to intimidate, but simply reached out and grabbed the man on the right in the face, palming his face. The guard did not think that the fairly small man in front of him would be able to simply grab his face, and no matter what he did to try and escape the iron grip, it was to no avail, the grip was like that of a hydraulic press. The other guard started to panic and swung his sword towards Zaibatsu, but he simply flexed his muscles, the sword hitting him and simply had a light thunk sound, before all of the momentum of the sword was stopped. Zaibatsu felt it was pointless to stay in this transformation, so he simply undid the jutsu, letting his true form come out, and suddenly he was there, towering over the two people who were now in absolute shock. Zaibatsu had no qualms about what he was going to do, he was a trained killer, and so with a light squeeze, the man’s head that was now in his large hand was squashed and popped almost like a spaghetti filled balloon, while the other person started to gasp. It seemed like the silence on this place was some sort of effect, and one that Zaibatsu had not noticed before because there was no reason for him to test it by making a loud enough noise, but now he noticed the man was screaming, but it was still a hushed whisper. He thought it was interesting, and the man simply threw one more hail mary swing with his sword as Zaibatsu made his way towards him to try and stop him from doing what he was about to do. This time, Zaibatsu decided to dodge to the side a bit, as although the sword was not going to make him hurt too much, he still did not like the idea of letting the man hit him for free. His swordsmanship was fairly bland, and it seemed like they just had high quality steel swords but were swinging them around like children, so the threat factor of what was happening was very little for someone like Zaibatsu. They might be a threat and a bit of a challenge to some genin that just got out of the ninja academy, but to a slightly more experienced genin, they were just cannon fodder to him. As he approached the man after dodging the wild sword swing, Zaibatsu then immediately grabbed him and pulled, the man acting more like some sort of ragdoll than a person, as Zaibatsu was just horrendously strong. Zaibatsu essentially gave the man a bear hug, and the silence really helped here as the man was slowly rendered unconscious from nto being able to breathe, the sounds of him gasping for breath muffled out by the strange effect that was plastered onto this place. Now with the two guards incapacitated, he switched to what he was going to do with the rest of this place. He needed to go into the door, but he also needed somewhere to hide the bodies in case more people came up here. It was only a matter of time before people showed up here, but that was not his primary concern right now. They would eventually figure out what the hell was going on with all of this, but before they did, Zaibatsu was going to make sure that at least the bodies were hidden. He used one of the guys’ clothing to clean up the blood and other things that were on the floor as best he could, before grabbing both of them and wrapping them up into their own clothing. It was a bit of a gruesome job, as he had to snap a couple of bones to get them to fit into the strange wrapping that he had made with their clothing. After they were both wrapped up, Zaibatsu jumped and tried to dig his fingers into the side of the building he was next to, and this was a success.

The fingers went in due to how strong he was, and he started to hang from it like a monkey. He climbed a bit higher than normal, before essentially scooping out some of the wall, crushing the stone into powder as he ripped chunks out of it. With that out of the way, he grabbed the bodies of the two guards and essentially stuffed them into this hole he made in the wall. He made sure to use the dust he had made from the wall to sprinkle onto the blood, which soaked up a bit of the blood on the ground, and then he sort of just brushed it off into a corner. If people were paying a lot of attention, there would be signs that something happened here, but for now he thought it would at least buy him some time while he investigated what was going on in this room beyond the giant door decorated with the symbol of Jashin. He had no idea or clue about what the cult of Jashin was at this time, he simply knew they were a cult, and cults were evil almost one hundred percent of the time, so he thought he might as well just start killing them all when he walked into the room. As he got up to the door, there was a strange force on the door, and Zaibatsu, not being an extremely cautious person when it came to his own safety, immediately tried to push the door open with both of his hands. As he did so, he felt a minor pushback or resistance, as if there was some sort of invisible adhesive or glue keeping the door shut, but this was minor. He heard a very quiet snapping sound coming from the door, before the door pushed open. If it was anyone with a lot less strength than he had, they would have never gotten the door open without rifling through the pockets of the guards and finding a special key with a symbol on it and solving a small puzzle in regards to how to use the key. Zaibatsu had neither the inclination nor the patience to try something like that, and simply brute forced his way into the area, which usually worked out for him. It worked out for him again in this instance, as he easily got the door open and peered inside. There was more black to be seen, and somehow even less of a feeling that there was some sort of floor here, which messed with Zaibatsu’s bearings a bit, but he stepped into the room a bit, pressing his foot onto the ground to make sure it was actually there and actually really sturdy. As he did so, he found nothing amiss, and so he simply stepped into the chamber beyond, and, like another well beaten dead horse, the door swung shut behind him and slammed, the loudest noise he had heard so far in this facility. He ignored that though and started walking towards where he believed the center of the room was, but it was hard to accurately get his bearing in the pitch darkness, as well as the area seeming to have no floor, so it was messing with his equilibrium a slight amount, but it was enough to make it so he could not walk in a straight line while he was in complete darkness. As he wandered around a bit more, suddenly he saw some sort of faint light in the distance, a soft glow that could not have been from anything that was greater than a candle. He decided to head towards it, as wandering through the darkness like a chicken with its head cut off was doing nothing for him, and he even wondered if he would be able to make it back to the entrance, even if he wanted to leave after. He was glad he had found something, and that something was finally going to get punched. The light was a lot further than it had looked at the beginning, and as Zaibatsu was walking towards it, he noticed that it was in fact getting larger in his field of view, just very slowly. This was really strange, as there was no reason this should have happened, but here it was, happening to him.

He was completely unsure whether or not he was actually going to be able to get to this thing, but eventually he could see some sort of figure sitting or standing in front of the soft glow of the light, Zaibatsu could not tell which it was. As he saw the person, he decided to pick up the pace. Whatever he had to do here involved killing all of these people and stopping whatever ritual that they were trying to conduct, so there was no reason for him to continue being slow. Because of the size of this room, or the space distortions, whichever one it was, there was no way that any guards would be notified at all, and even if they eventually were notified, there was no way they would get here in time, as Zaibatsu would have already killed the people that were all around here doing the ritual. As he walked further and further, closer and closer, inching towards this light and the person that was standing in front of it, Zaibatsu had finally figured out that there were multiple people, all in some priest or cultist robes. The robes were hiding any facial and body features, and there were a couple of them, that seemed a lot larger than the rest, just slightly shorter than Zaibatsu himself,  which shocked him. He wondered if there were some of the scattered Ajin people here, as he had only heard of them being so large in the past, and he was living proof of this. As he walked closer and closer, he noticed that he was now suddenly within twenty feet of all of these cultists, as the space suddenly got short. It was as if he had suddenly hit an invisible wall that teleported him forward, closer to them within a specific number of feet. As he got this close, he could finally see them at this distance, and there were eight of them surrounding a person in the middle of some sort of blood circle. The person in the middle was standing up, facing away from Zaibatsu with his hands to his sides but raised up, as if he was looking at and praising something in the sky. This naturally brought Zaibatsu’s eyes up to the ceiling, and there he could see the moon, almost completely covered in the blood color that denoted the blood moon. There was something wrong with the moon, and Zaibatsu assumed he had a couple of minutes to stop them before whatever ritual they were doing was complete, and whatever they were trying to do happened. Zaibatsu was not going to let this happen, and so he started walking closer to them. Some of them started to realize his presence, and started yelling at each other that there was an intruder. It was not so much of a yell, however, as much like everywhere else in this facility, there was some sort of noise dampening energy here, preventing the sound from exceeding a harsh whisper. As they did so, it seemed like the eight people all looked up and towards Zaibatsu as Zaibatsu was stretching his neck and cracking his knuckles. He was ready to tear into these people, and it was going to be fun. He had been stifling his emotions and personality all night, and now he was going to one hundred percent unleash himself on these people, and he was almost drooling in anticipation from it. The man in the center was the only one that completely ignored everything that was going on around him, and simply kept whispering some chant, seemingly to himself as he gazed at the moon. Zaibatsu figured that he was going to be the person that needed to go down first, and so he started to walk faster towards them. The larger two people of the eight started to stand up, and immediately got into a battle mode by taking off their cowls, revealing their faces.

The two had long snouts and fur on their faces, and it seemed that they were some sort of wolf creature. A low growling noise happened before the two guys suddenly bounded towards Zaibatsu. They were surprisingly quick on their feet, and raced over to him, but Zaibatsu had always relied on brute strength, and so he decided that he was going to just muddle through things. These two things were werewolves, and he was unsure if he was up to date on his supernatural fiction, but he had always thought that vampires and werewolves were sworn enemies, and he was pretty certain already that some of these people were vampires, so he wondered what was going on for a split second, before telling himself to forget about it and simply crush them. As they were rushing towards him, Zaibatsu got ready for a hit, and simpl;y braced himself for impact. He made sure that he moved to the side a little before doing so, as this would allow him to have both of them hit him at the same time. This would be a very poor tactic for other people, but for him it was fine, simple because he was going to negate one of their attacks by blocking it using a special taijutsu technique he knew, and the other was going to get punched by him, since it seemed that they simply wanted to tackle him so that they could start biting or clawing him. Trying to use their body size and brute strength against someone like Zaibatsu was asking for trouble, but he enjoyed it a lot. He felt this was the pinnacle of combat, throwing each other at one another, violently attacking until one of you fell over, this was something amazing to him and something that his people venerated quite heavily. Seeing as this was perfect, he let them both slam into his body while he simply slammed back, but he was ready to follow up with a punch with his right side, as that was the side that had the person that he did not use the move to block. The left one slammed into him, feeling as if it had just slammed into a slab of metal or the side of a building, as Zaibatsu barely moved an inch or two away from both of them. As the one on his right side slammed into him, Zaibatsu was already ready for a counter, and slammed his fist into the werewolf’s stomach, causing a large sound of a meat tenderizer hitting some beef, and this caused the werewolf to keel over a bit, not expecting the amount of damage that Zaibatsu could inflict upon him. They both simply thought that they were just going to bring him down and then claw and bite him to death, and they were both confused when that did not happen. The one on the right felt like his slam actually did something, but Zaibatsu simply looked at him as if he was playing with a couple of children. These werewolves most likely weighed somewhere along the lines of two hundred kilograms, but Zaibatsu’s massive and inhuman strength allowed him to suddenly grab both of them by the faces, and pick them up. They struggled and thrashed wildly, but before they could do much damage to his forearms and chest, Zaibatsu brought them down hard, slamming them into the ground multiple times with as much force as he could. There was some banging, and the sound of this banging was even putting the noise dampening effect through its paces, as you could still hear it over the chanting of the man in the center of the collection of cultists. The other six men thought that this was impossible, and they could simply continue the ritual with the two large burly werewolves taking care of it, but this seemed to not be the case, as suddenly they also took off their cowls and bared their fangs. All of these people were vampires.

They all rushed him, and Zaibatsu immediately threw one of the werewolves towards the larger group of them, two of them dodging but another two getting hit by the body and flying backwards. The other four jumped at him, and immediately started swiping at him. At first, the hardened skin of Zaibatsu was doing perfectly fine, and only strange light marks were getting placed upon his skin, and while he was swinging normally, the creatures were fast enough to dodge out of the way of his normal wild swing. He would have to think about it, as although the scratches were not too bad now, he could tell that when they hit the same spot on his forearms and such when he blocked, it was starting to sting. It was only a matter of time before they started drawing blood, and after that it would be a pretty bad battle of attrition. Zaibatsu also saw that the other two that were smashed by the werewolf corpse had gotten up and were coming over. He did not think he would have to do anything fancy, but it seemed that these speedsters were a bit annoying in their ability to dodge, and he would have to switch tactics. As he was getting attacked, he figured out that the slashes were actually pretty deep, or at least they tried to be deep in their attack, which meant that they were putting a lot of their weight into the attack. This meant that Zaibatsu could fight them with the purest form of his being, which was hitting them when they hit him. A good old fashioned slugfest, much like he wanted. As soon as another came over to slash him, he ignored the other ones, usually he would try to block them so that his vital areas like his chest and kidneys were not scratched, but this time he ignored it. The other two had gotten here as well, and were in the process of circling him right now to start slashing at his back. As the slash came down on his forearm, Zaibatsu leaned his body forward, which added a bit more to the force of the slash, which actually drew blood this time. That did not matter to him, however, as his leaning forward smashed into the vampire, which shattered his arm, his ulna and radius popping out of his arm, which prompted him to scream. He knew that it was a pretty macabre thing to laugh at, but Zaibatsu could not help but laugh at the strange muffled scream of pain that came out of the vampire’s throat. Zaibatsu would never let a golden opportunity like this go away without capitalising on it, and so Zaibatsu immediately grabbed the vampire that was shocked in pain, and snapped his neck in his palm. After he did this, Zaibatsu grabbed the vampire’s ankle and swung him towards the other one with full force. Now, Zaibatsu usually had to hold back, as his full powered swing left him a little too open, and he would miss more often than he would not, but now he had the range. This added range was something that the vampires, although speedy, would not be able to fully dodge, and soon two more vampires were smashed to smithereens, them being split in half as the vampire in his hand simply shattered into bits and pieces of gore. Now, there were only three vampires left, and one of them was still injured from getting hit by the werewolf body earlier.

Zaibatsu could tell that the vampire that was hit with the werewolf was healing rapidly, his large bruises now only moderate ones, and if Zaibatsu watched him closely, he could see the bruises getting smaller at visible speeds. Zaibatsu nodded, knowing that he would need to one hit kill these vampires so that he would have a chance to win. As he was fighting, he noticed that the volume of the room had slightly increased, as he could now hear the heavy breathing of himself and the enemies, as well as the previously inaudible snarls from them, as they thirsted for his blood. He also noticed that they were now almost ravenously heading for the wounds that were bleeding, and almost ignoring the others. This made it easy to grab their heads when they went for the wounds. The vampires seemed almost shocked that their faces had been palmed like a basketball, and some clarity reappeared in their faces as they realized what was about to happen. Zaibatsu simply squeezed his palm, and the skulls shattered. With one vampire left, the last one seemed to still be in a ravenous blood frenzy, as if his two comrades had not died from making that terrible mistake. He soon fell to the same fate, and was squished. Zaibatsu was now a bit more calm, as he was always in a blood frenzy when he was fighting, and he looked at his body. His wounds were pretty bad looking, but it was mostly blood loss, which would be fixed soon enough anyways. The Ajin people were very hardy like that. Zaibatsu watched as the person in the center of the circle was still chanting, now with increased fervor, while Zaibatsu made his way over to him. As the man was chanting, the blood moon was almost fully engulfed, and the volume had essentially returned to normal, the man’s chanting so loud that it drowned everything else out. Zaibatsu was getting a headache, and reached his hands over, grabbed the man’s head, and twisted it. There was a sickening crack, much louder than anything that Zaibatsu had ever heard, and suddenly he woke up in his bed in a cold sweat, back in Kirigakure.

EXIT
WC: 5036/5000
Claiming 12,600 ryo from mission and genin
Claiming 63 ap
Claiming 49 Speed 1 Vigor
Claiming Extreme Realm of Force
Claiming World of Glass
Claiming Gate of Pain with 412 words - Previous Training
Putting 124 words towards Cosmos Stride 124/1500
Claiming 12 Event Tickets
Claiming 1 Golden Ticket

Approved