"What've we got here, eh? Another harlot walking the streets late at night?" a loud voice would ask as Hina would be carried into the metal building, finding herself in a large, spacious room dimly lit by crystals of some sort. The man who had spoken wore black robes and had an innumerable amount of piercings dotting his face, accompanied by red eyes and black markings on his teeth. In short, he looked like a whole bundle of poor life choices. He looked at the kidnapper who still held the woman over their shoulder, prompting him to lower his mask.

"How many more do we need? We got the daimyo. Why the hell are we wasting our time with all these small fry?" a feminine voice asked. A woman's face appeared, with black hair and dark eyes, glaring at the leader of this strange band of captives. She looked to Hina, slapping her bum as it sat on her shoulder before speaking again, "It's a shame to be getting rid of all these Frost villagers. They'd fetch a nice price on the black market, or even for the Raikage" she commented.

"Lord Jashin will take care of this one better than even Lord Hastur can. Soon, with this country in paranoid chaos, Kumogakure will be able to invade and easily take control. Calm yourself, Haru" the lead cultist explained, walking around behind where the Kumo-nin stood and inspecting the bound Hina. He frowned, holding her face and wheeks with his hand and appraising her. "She'll do nicely. Go set her in the cathedral with the others, the sermon is already in progress" they said, earning a subservient bow from the Kumo-nin.

"As you wish, Father Yoru" Haru said, briskly walking down one of the hallways of the large metal building, moving towards where the sound of music and groaning could be heard.

"So, girly, are you prepared to face Lord Jashin? You should be honored. You will be in his presence for all eternity, one of his handmaidens, no doubt" Haru asked, her voice dripping with sadism as she slapped Hina again. "Damn you're heavy, you know that?" she asked, likely not realizing such weight came form the muscular form of a kunoichi like Hina.

She was close now, close to the rest of the kidnapped hostages, even if it meant being on the verge of being sacrificed to a dark god!

---

Yojo watched silently from atop the metal rafters of the large building. His sharingan idly watched the chakra signatures of those beneath as a short exchange of words unfolded. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but so long as he saw Hina was unharmed, he felt no need to break his cover. Stealth might not have been his favored type of shinobi work, but he was doing a well enough job to get by. One thing was for sure though, that man in the black robes was giving him all sorts of bad vibes. As the female captor carried Hina down a large hallway, Yojo would be silently following, just out of sight walking on the ceiling in the darkness, waiting to see where they brought the Genin.

540/540

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Yojo watched from the rafters of the spacious room as the kidnapper held Hina on their shoulder, talking loudly with what seemed to be their leader about some important matter. Yojo struggled to hear what they were saying, his sharingan humming with chakra as he watched them both, but he could gleam the general idea of what was going on her- and boy, it was a lot more fatalistic than he originally thought. These people, these kidnappers, were cultists of Jashin. Yojo had only heard urban legends about them, terrifying stories that mothers would tell their children about to make them behave out of fear. To actually see one in the flesh was somewhat disturbing, particularly with the large amount of piercings that were dotting the lead cultist's body. What's more, from what he could gather, these cultists were causing instability within Frost Country on behalf of Kumogakure. Dropping the Raikage's name in the short conversation certainly surprised Yojo. He hadn't expected a kidnapping operation to be this entrenched and well funded. Unless he and Hina did something to stop all of this, it would just continue ad infinitum!

He watched the female kidnapper carry Hina off down one of the hallways. Silently, Yojo followed, watching idly as the woman talked some mean smack about lord Jashin. Hina seemed unphased by this shenaniganry though, instead literally stripping down to just her underwear and proudly displaying herself right on death's doorstep. It was so jarring, so unexpected, that Yojo partially thought the kunoichi had mentally snapped under the pressure. The large executioner with the scythe shouted for her to put back on her clothes. There was a commotion as some of the other worshippers stopped what they were doing to help restrain the angry woman, leaving the prisoners chained together alone. It was an opening he could use. In a flash, Yojo lept down from the ceiling, spinning behind where the executioner stood and unsheathing his blade to the sound of 1000 chirping birds. A burst of light accompanied the sound of energy on steel, leading the executioner's head to fall onto the floor in front of him, followed by his bloody body.

"W-WHAT THE? RAISE THE ALARM!" one of the worshipers shouted, letting go of Hina and making a bolt for the entrance of the sacraficial chamber. Yojo raised his sword behind him at seeing the attempt to flee. His cover had been blown, but he couldn't let things escalate too quickly to the point where he'd lose control of the situation. "Hina! Hit the ground!" He shouted as he slashed the air in front of him, launching a shockwave of Futonacross the hall at a blistering pace. The tornado of wind chakra threw the worshippers and guards into the air, cutting them mercilessly whilst the prisoners along the side of the room in a circle were spared the worst of the damage.

The sacraficial chamber was in shambles, leaving Yojo and Hina as the two shinobi still standing. They had completed their initial task, they had found the kidnapped Frost villagers. Now, they just had to get them all out of here alive, as well as destroy this place until not even its foundations remained. "Quick! Get the villagers unchianed and back on their feet!" Yojo said, watching the hallway they had both come down. His sharingan looked for more chakra signatures approaching. That loud booming shockwave of wind certainly woul dhave woken up the rest of the base, someone was bound to come running soon to check and see what was going on. By that point, it would all become a matter of fight and flight.

"Now would be a good time to ask what jutsu you can use" he asked Hina, keeping his gaze ahead of him, his sword at the ready. He didn't know what kind of calibre of shinobi he might face here. No one had seen him come in, and yet at the same time, he couldn't be certain that these enemies were weak because of that.

684/1224

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Yojo looked ahead as he saw the shadows of some of the escaping cultists disappear down the hallways, yelling for help. Well, there went the neighbourhood. Instead, he was presented with a new dilema: the fact that, to put it simply, Hina was useless. Her presentation of her own skill in jutsu didn't exactly alleviate his fears. What did she mean that she didn't know any jutsu besides a few Genin-level gen? Didn't she have some kind of training by the time she'd graduated from the academy? Suddenly, instead of being the valuable asset that he'd be hoping she was once she'd been freed, Hina was starting to look more like dead weight carrying him down. With her and who knew how many prisoners moving toward the entrance where he already stood, Yojo was hard pressed to come up with a new plan on the fly to try and get them out of this jam. "Give me a sec! Alright?" he shouted, his sharingan active as he saw silhouetted chakra signatures running toward him from the lobby where he and Hina had entered. Was there really no other way out? God, this place really was just a killing room, wasn't it? He held his sword up and back again, winding up and collecting a great deal of Futon along his blades before slashing in front of him, watching the first wave of guards come into his view.

The scent of flowers might have confused the guards, but boy oh boy, they were still coming down the halls, unpertubed by the floral hijinks. "Just make sure the prisoners don't do anything stupid!" Yojo called out, shrugging as he stepped into the hallway again, letting go another tornado-shockwave of Futon that shook the foundations of the building. He broke out into a jog, knocking the normal guards as they came along, occasionally looking over his shoulder to make sure that Hina and the villagers were managing to keep pace with him. "So, uhh, any of you know how to get us back to the village?" Yojo asked, yelling over the sounds of men being thrown every which way by wind. He'd been tracking the path they'd taken going down, but certainly not going 'up'!  "I-I think so!" one of the faceless prisoners said, nervously looking at Yojo as they cowered in terror from the fighting going on ahead of them.

"Right! You take the others and head back up to the village..." Yojo commanded as they all appeared within the lobby of the outpost. The place seemed quiet. He heard the villagers shuffle in fear away from him and Hina, running to the entrance of the building and throwing the doors open. They spilled outside, with some of the older ones guiding them back to the tunnels that would lead up toward the surface. "We can't leave yet. We have to destroy this place, starting with the pierced freak" he explained, looking toward the other side of the lobby, away from the hallway they'd come out of. A series of large oak doors were present, with a flickering light inside visible to both him and his partner.

"You have my back?" Yojo asked, looking to Hina to make sure she was focused. Even if her genjutsu wasn't all too useful, a second pair of eyes was never something to be underestimated. Whatever was behind those doors would be part of their final fight, the end to this bizzare side-quest beneath the earth! God, with all this constant back and forth fighting, Yojo was ready to just kill this sunova bish and be done with it all.

604/1828

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Yojo looked through the doorway into the inner sanctum of the Jashin cultist's lair. It was dark, lit by flames, and decorated by the scattered corpses of naive followers who had likely had their souls sucked out of their bodies to empower their leader. The man with a million piercings was doing some strange preparation, absorbing energy that flowed freely into him. It coursed through the cultist's veins, pumping with terrible and etherial energy. All in all, it wasn't a very pleasant scene. "Right, let's go about this slowly. I'll go head on while yo-," oh god she was running stright at him, she was just charging headlong at him as fast as she could. The sight stunned Yojo, what was she thinking? Was she insane? He watched, shocked by the rush as the ominous cultist lashed out with a sickle attached to a chain, narrowly avoiding bisecting Hina's head from her shoulders. Yojo recollected himself, focusing in on the cultist as he espoused crap about feeding his Lord Jashin by bringing him more and more sacrafices from the people of the Land of Frost. This, in all honesty, was probably the closest thing that Yojo would ever get to staring evil directly in the face. The politics of the shinobi world could certainly be thorny and decisive, but there was always a layer of gray to it all. That gray was absent here.

Yojo channeled his Yin chakra as he saw the cultist manage to wrap his chains around Hina's legs. A stream shot outwards, quickly ensnaring the cultist in a genjutsu. The cultist froze up as he prepared to deliver a finishing blow, their eyes growing wide. In the real world, nothing seemed out of the ordinary save for an extreme fear coming over the cultist that kept them paralyzed. In this illusion, though, a kabuki doppleganger had materialized, pulling the cultist into a stormcloud wherein they could see themselves being tortured. It would last long enough for Hina to free herself from the chains binding her legs together, and for Yojo, who had brought his blade to a ready position, to deliver a killing blow. "Chidori!" Yojo shouted, prompting Raiton to crackle up and down the blade of the sword, the sound of a thousand chirping birds filling the inner sanctum. Dashing forwards, Yojo kept his gaze on the cultist, at last slashing with the enhanced sword, watching the Chidori cut through the cultist's petrified neck in a sudden cleaving motion. The head popped off the pierced man's shoulders, falling down limply to the wayside, as did his body shortly after. The green energy in the cultist's body disappeared, leaving the bloody corpse laying at the center of the room.

"Are you okay?" he asked Hina, looking up to her to see how she was holding up. She didn't seem damaged, thankfully. She might've been shaken up, but hopefully she'd still be able to walk. "For real though, why were you naked all this time?" he asked, tilting his head as the blood of the slain cultist dripped from his blade onto the floor of the sanctum. "You did good, either way. I'll put in a good word for you at the village when it comes time for promotions" he said, giving a small nod of thanks for her assistance. He certainly wouldn't have been able to get to the bottom of this whole mess without her help, even if it meant for her to be captured and be rather useless for the majority of the action taking place. He motioned back through the doors they came through and to the front of the building. "We should get out of here. I'll bring this place down with my Futon, but I'd prefer not to be buried by rubble when I do so" he said, turning to leave the building, hopefully with his partner in tow. "So, your a genjutsu user, eh?" he asked, trying to hopefully keep her calm as they walked past the numerous corpses and dead bodies. "If I were you, I'd try and find a good paralysis technique, something to pull the wool over a person's eyes" he reccomended, though, in truth it was basic advice. Genjutsu was a subjective thing, it varied wildly.

Once outside, Yojo turned around and wound up with one of his swords. Unleashing the built up Futon, he watched as a tornado of chakra rushed forward, crashing into the outpost and tearing through it with its sheer force and cutting power. Again and again he launched tornado after tornado, making sure that the whole building was ripped up from its foundations. It took a bit of time, and it took quite a bit more chakra, but the deed was done. Yojo and Hina were left alone, standing near the entrance to the tunnels of the subterranean system. "I pray I don't have to come back to this country. The Land of Frost is under the Raikage's thumb, I suppose the rumors about Hastur following Jashin must be true" he commented, a troubling revelation. He looked back to Hina, "Let's get you home. Preferably, somewhere warm" he stated, beginning the walk back to the Village Hidden in Frost, eager to put memories of this coutnry behind him. They had succeeded in their mission.

905/2733

Total WC: 2733

• Training B-rank Jutsu, 'Heavy Sigh of the Sky King': 1500/1500
  
• Saving 1233 WC for senjutsu
  

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