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The tokubetsu jonin had just gotten off the ship that had dropped him off in the Land of Lightning, running forward and following his hawk's lead, as only Hawky knew the scent of Lord Buma and could use it to locate him and his manor. Professor Ivan of Diamond Heights University, one of the five masters of the Order of the White Lotus, had received a distress message earlier from Lord Buma, another one of the five masters, that Ivan did not brief Kashizudoto further about, only mentioning that they have totally lost contact with the manor before sending him and his hawk on a mission for the Order to travel to Lord Buma's manor and aid him and the people in his manor in whatever way he could.

He ran through the stormy mountainous region of the Land of Lightning, wearing his normal attire consisting of a black swordsman's robe embroidered with gold patterns on the edges, a gift from Master Piandao; a bamboo sheath on his left hip which contained his Tentetsutou, a black katana which he had forged out of a four billion year old meteorite during his apprenticeship under Piandao; a fifty foot coil of wire, a shinobi utility that had helped him in multiple occasions, a versatile one that was becoming decreasingly popular as the ages progressed; and a holster on his left upper thigh containing one kunai knife and three shuriken, basic weaponry that wasn't all that handy anymore but was kept just in case.

Within a few hours, they would approach what seemed to be a rural farmland, except that the houses were desolate, the crops were unattended and shriveling, and the people were, it seemed to be, dead. He could see bodies strewn all over the field, a sight that would no doubt make him shiver, yet there wasn't much blood or any evidence of weaponry. He could still see external bruising all over their bodies though, yet there was no trace left behind of anything that could have caused that kind of damage to them... or who could have caused it. Still, they weren't at the manor yet: maybe if they went their directly, they'd have answers. That is, if the people in the manor were still alive... Maybe they had suffered the same fate as these farm folk. Hopefully not.

He proceeded to follow his hawk, coming across many similar sights along the way that only served to anger him more and more. Who or what could have done this to these folk? He found a civil war out of the question because of the fact that no weaponry, even makeshift, was left behind; this was for certain an outside force that had some kind of special offense. Why were they killing these innocent rural folk though?

Soon enough, after quite a bit of following his hawk through the barren and morbid landscape of abandoned, bloody farmland of corpses, he would stumble across the first forms of life that he'd seen in a while, as well as a sizable castle guarded by a moat and gated by a drawbridge. Fifteen samurai stood in front of the moat; there was a pair on top of the castle walls itself that presumably had control over the drawbridge in some form. Still, they looked a little short on men for such a large castle. Either way, it was reassuring to see life after striding through a lifeless landscape.

WC: 583

"Halt, stranger!" one of the samurai yelled, "Excuse us for the rudeness, but you need to identify yourself and drop your weapons if you're going to enter this manor!" He couldn't blame them for being suspicious of any entrants into their manor; if there really was some sort of attack and this was the only bastion of human life still standing within the next few kilometers of him, of course they'd want to screen anyone coming in.

"I assume you are samurai working under Lord Buma, are you not?" the tokubetsu jonin spoke, "No need to fear. I'm hear to help, but I'll surrender my weapons as you've asked. I'd like an explanation of what's going on here though." He took out his sword, much to the uneasiness of the samurai, but then dropped it down on the ground along with his coil of wire and holster for basic projectiles. The samurai took out a scroll and sealed it with some basic fuuinjutsu; impressive that a samurai was able to use a shinobi technique, even an E-rank jutsu taught in the Academy.

"Yes, Lord Buma taught us this basic item sealing, in fact," the samurai explained as he finished rolling up the scroll, "It's hard to believe that our land was attacked by... those ghosts. We don't even know why they're raiding our lands, but we trust that Lord Buma will keep us safe in our last stand against them. We've only been able to send one distress call safely, that's all, apparently to a contact in Iwa who Lord Buma has a lot of trust in; the rest of our messenger hawks have been killed by those fiends, just like those innocent people you must have seen in the rural landscape. If you're here to help, we thank you so much; however, standard protocol is that we must take your weapons before we let you in. Lower the drawbridge!" With that, the two samurai on top lowered down the drawbridge to reveal an impoverished, crowded castle. Upon entering, the first thing he noticed was the sharp odor of rats. He could only feel bad for the people there, yet, with the expression on their faces, he could still sense hope. The samurai from outside followed him in and led him through the castle all the way to the throne room to see a languid looking fellow with white hair and black skin, like most natives of Kumogakure, with a twig of some sort in his mouth.

"Piandao's kid, eh?"

WC: 1019

"Yamato, give him his weapons back," Lord Buma spoke, using the samurai's name when addressing him, "He's a friend. If you don't mind, I'd like to speak in private with the child." Buma could probably tell that Kashizudoto was affiliated with Piandao via the robe that he had given him; it was a replica of Piandao's own robe, just a little smaller to fit his young student. The samurai obeyed Buma's orders with loyalty, unsealed Kashizudoto's weapons and items, handed them over to the boy who promptly put them back in place, and then left the room; the samurai had no reason to deny his lord any service when he treated him with enough respect and dignity to refer to him by name even with all the samurai wearing gas masks and armor that made them hard to differentiate. That was leadership right there.

"I can already guess your affiliation, no need to tell me," Lord Buma explained after the samurai had left, "Welcome to the Order by the way, I'm sure your induction wasn't too long ago. I owe you an explanation for what's going on. As you probably know, I'm one of the masters of the Order, but I'm also the lord of quite a large expanse of land. A new organization has recently come out that calls themselves the Black Dawn; they have a few extremely strong human members who you could consider their leaders, but their primary force is composed of ghosts that they call 'lost souls'. We're not sure why, but all they seek is death, indiscriminately, of any nature, even indirectly. Anyway, the White Lotus has been conducting operations against them in whatever way we can, so that's why they've specifically targeted their lost souls to besiege my manor. They attacked the countryside so much that we eventually had to evacuate whatever remaining rural folk were alive into the castle. At this point, we're running low on basic supplies and need to push back their advance. My samurai and I have tried to take on the lost souls ourselves; however, they are commanded by a powerful man, General Kitsune, who can match up to my skill level. You may prove to be a good counterbalance, if you're good enough for Ivan to send you here. He knows what he's doing, after all." This sounded like a horror story more than anything, ghosts coming in and taking lives for no reason at all. But there had to be some underlying cause, and he would want to find it.

An explosion would suddenly rack their eardrums. Was there an attack on the castle itself? Both of them ran over to the drawbridge in haste; they found the chains holding up the drawbridge shattered, the drawbridge itself fallen onto the moat as a result, the fifteen samurai guarding it all dead, and ghosts that Kashizudoto could infer were those "lost souls" flooding into the area. As they rushed into the castle, he could tell that this small wave of about twenty lost souls was only the beginning of a larger invasion, considering the coordination that it must have required to kill all those people in the farmland.

WC: 1567

The lost souls, who numbered at about twenty, flooded through the open gate now that the drawbridge had fallen. They formed some kind of unstable, dark chakra mass in their hands, firing it indiscriminately at the fleeing people. Buma, without even a word, charged away in a flicker of lightning to defend people on the right side. So that meant Kashizudoto would take the left...

He unsheathed his black katana; as these orbs of chakra were especially unstable for some reason or other, he could easily slash through them to destroy them. Perhaps these lost souls had trouble molding their own chakra. Once he was comfortable slicing through the balls of chakra that the lost souls were firing, he charged in himself to slice through the lost souls with his blade. These entities themselves seemed rather unstable and dispersed with the katana ripping through them like cotton candy, really dark cotton candy, that is. He would block their offenses with his blade, doing a series of moves to eventually finish off ten of them. Meanwhile, Lord Buma had destroyed the other ten. But this was all just a distraction for the real invasion...

Up on the walls of the castle, he could see the lost souls scaling down, hovering over the sides of the walls. So it appeared that these ghosts were able to scale vertical surfaces; the drawbridge opening was only intended to distract the samurai dispersed in the city standing guard. Indeed, it did  attract the attention of twenty samurai guarding various points in the castle who had come to help deal with the lost souls once they heard the explosion. So now the civilians were exposed to lost soul invasion without any protection; they had to help soon.

"Let's split up," Buma announced, "You and the samurai go in one group. I'll go alone." The tokubetsu jonin had no opposition to this; after all, his skills were inferior to the masters of the Order of the White Lotus.

He led the group of samurai throughout the city, finding lost souls, ordering the samurai to use their katanas to block the chakra masses that the lost souls fired from harming the civilians, charging at the lost souls, and dispatching them with his katana. In this fashion, he and the samurai defeated about fifty of the lost souls, as they were simply unstable masses of chakra. The only thing they had going for them were their immense numbers; however, with Kashizudoto's sudden aid, they'd be easier to clean up. Yet it would seem that this, too, was a distraction for something bigger...

He suddenly heard screams coming from the drawbridge, ordering the samurai to disperse and guard civilians from any other attacks in case this was a distraction. He resolved to handle this part alone, as, if this were a distraction, those samurai were needed in other parts of the castle.

WC: 2053

He arrived on the scene to see Lord Buma confronting a man in a brown robe, with long, braided white hair. Was this one of the people in the Black Dawn who Buma was talking about earlier? General Kitsune, right? Behind this ominous man were thirty lost souls, except these seemed stronger than the last ones, though their chakra was just as unstable.

"Black Raiton: Divine Lance!" Lord Buma yelled before firing out what seemed to be a lance made out of pure black lightning straight for Kitsune, burning his hands severely as recoil. So he had a price to pay for using these jutsu?

"Kuchiyose: Triple Rashemon!" Kitsune yelled before pressing his arms to the ground and summoning three giant gates in front of him which had creepy faces. Certainly the black lightning spear would not be able to pierce through those; the best it could do would be to

With little trouble, the lightning spear raced through the first gate and the next gate. It would be tested and tried at the third and final gate, or so the tokubetsu jonin thought. Lord Buma smirked as his spear of black lightning raced right through the last gate, stabbing through Kitsune in the abdomen, but it wasn't fatal.

"I trust you can take on the lost souls," Lord Buma spoke as he withdrew his spear and the gates collapsed into the ground and poofed away. He still had some fighting to do.

"It's not over yet!" Kitsune screeched as he put his hands on the ground one more time, "Kuchiyose: Great Dove!" With that, he summoned a giant dove to serve him; compared to that thing, Kashizudoto's hawk was tiny.

"Well Hawky," Kashizudoto spoke to his hawk as he jumped in the air with him on his shoulder, "You know what we need to do." Thirty lost souls were gathered all around them, charging up more unstable chakra masses; however, their jutsu would devour them...

Kashizudoto gathered katon chakra in his mouth while Hawky gathered fuuton chakra in his; they both shot out their respective jutsu in different directions, trying to get the most spread to disperse as many lost souls as possible. The boy shot out a great fireball in the form of a Chinese Dragon Head while the hawk shot out a small ball of wind which quickly expanded to its full radius of 10.5 meters in the open air; each jutsu devoured ten lost souls each. But there were others that they failed to hit all at once. As gravity pulled them down from the air, Hawky grabbed Kashizudoto and began flying. Soon, the remaining lost souls fired their chakra masses at the pair, which were either dodged by Hawky pulling Kashizudoto in the air with him or sliced by the boy's blade. They made an excellent team. Soon, with a combination of Hawky's aerial prowess to maneuver him around in the air and Kashizudoto's swordsmanship, they were able to destroy the lost souls in their entirety. Meanwhile, Kitsune retreated on his giant dove. They had "won" this battle, but the castle and its denizens had taken major losses. They needed to end this siege once and for all; Buma's castle, no matter how headstrong the people, could not stand much more of this onslaught.

Kashizudoto Chakra:

Hawky Chakra:

WC: 2610

[Exit]

A-rank Mission: 2500/2500