Another path

The Swamp - 2nd day

< Hi everyone, I hope you're all doing well ! Finally !! I'm finally on freaking holidays !!! I'm gonna recover all the sleep I missed !
Anyway, I'm glad to be back on track and to see that there are still people who enjoy reading this story, so thank you as always, I hope you'll enjoy and take care !

I added a map of the Swamps in case you want to visualize it better.

I still don't own Naruto, not gonna any time soon... >
_____
Dawn had always been Tetsuya's favorite part of the day. It felt so serene and the soft shades of the sky were dazzling. It remind him of the times he would run out in the garden to play in the grass damped by the morning dew, unbeknownst to anyone as even his mother would still be sleeping. Now he wished his sister could have been there with him...

Nostalgia washed over him but the red head quickly discarded the feeling, focusing on the task at hand : finding food. Even with his tremendous stamina, one can only go so far on an empty stomach. He had smelled blood earlier, maybe there was a wounded animal nearby... However, that was a risky bet : there was always a chance other animals or even shinobi might have noticed it as well.
Worse, it might even be an injured shinobi and in that case, fleeing as far away from this area was his top priority.

Tetsuya heightened his senses to their very best and searched for an abnormal presence, anything that moved too quickly, too fluidly or too precisely. Anything that couldn't be an animal. When he found nothing but presences he had already spotted earlier, he started walking in the direction of the smell.
An interesting point was that he could feel remnants of the presence of a shinobi and of many attackers : a sand golem, one of the Kitsune and some wild animals. That was a lot of damage... It was quite scary how so much could go down just under one's nose.

Halfway to his destination, he finally recognized the chakra of the shinobi that had been attacked.

"So that was Ino... It makes sense she would be at a huge disadvantage against so many opponents but what troubles me is how she even got spotted in the first place..."

His question was answered when he noticed a strange smell among the components of her blood. One that he was sure shouldn't ever be in a human body.

"Has she been poisoned ? This fog in the distance, is it poisonous gas ? I'd better stay away from there in that case..."

That's when Tetsuya noticed a few birds fly by. They didn't seem put off by the possibility that predators and scavengers might still roam the area. Further observing them, Tetsuya noticed that all these birds were going back to their nests. He concluded that the birds must have fled when the commotion occurred and came back now that they were sure they wouldn't be attacked.
Well, too bad for them.

***

Sakuya was mildly pleased with her discovery. On one hand, the shinobi currently dying in front of her had avoided her the same fate by jumping head first into the trap. On the other hand, she knew for a fact that a summon would soon arrive to retrieve them and that was a problem for her. Indeed, she had to escape the area but that would prove quite hard.
Not only that, but witnessing a human being being emptied of their blood by leeches was gross, not matter what you've seen before.
Sakuya sighed as she ran further down to the south. She had noticed some peculiar trees in the distance but strangely they didn't seem harmful unlike all the others she had seen.

She quickly came to a halt as she felt the ground growing slightly softer. She jumped up in a tree and hid in the branches to watch what would happen below.
It proved to be a lifesaving reflex as suddenly the soil began to collapse on itself, akin to quicksands. While it was a possibility for loam to turn into the aforementioned quicksands, the suddenness of the phenomenon disturbed the silver haired jōnin.
As if on cue, an Earth golem sprouted from the middle of the quicksand, its body almost completely merged with the dirt. It looked around like it was searching for something but then just kept going forward, disappearing from Sakuya's view field.

" That thing must have sensed my footsteps through the ground. After all, sound waves are better reverberated in liquids and solids than in gases. Even my footsteps are too light to be heard above the ground, it's not the case underground... It seems as though I'll have to travel in the trees from now on."

Tate Ebizô : Crippled.

***

The Marsh : a zone which reaches from the middle up to the north of the swamps. It's located on the east of the Rat Trap and forms a long band of loamy soil with islets of Raijin trees. Inoffensive trees also grow here and are adapted to the soft ground of the marsh. Said ground is prone to forming quicksands though due to the viscous nature of the dirt, fully sinking takes much longer than usual. However, in addition to its already complicated terrain, the marsh is also home to some deadly species like the previously mentioned Raijin trees or leeches. Those animals prey on the birds that are too reckless or on the chicks that fall off their nest. When a bigger animal wanders in there, instead of being scared, the leeches will attack them with renewed energy. Proceed with extreme caution in this area for even the smallest mistake can be fatal.

***

Fū was having the time of her life up there ! Well yes, of course, Fū being herself, she decided to travel by flying from an area to another. Walking is so main stream after all... So far, she had left some creepy area with a lot of different poisonous trees and waters, had passed over a loamy area, crossed through a forest with some weird white gas at the bottom, visited a forest with gnarled trees whose branches had snatched and crushed a few birds - she had had to fly higher because one almost managed to snatch her and that would have been no good - and then flew other some pretty trees that seemed to be cleaning a nearby water stream. Eventually, she had started feeling tired and had decided to find a place to rest. She found a forest with regular trees and it didn't look too cramped so she had settled there. She had actually slept for three hours through small naps before going to gather some food - namely berries - to start her day. And now, she was back to her roaming. She was some fun trees that seemed to be emitting electricity within their trunk but to her disappointment, she didn't get shocked when she touched it. She kept flying toward the northeast and found some actual swamps but she couldn't get too close as one of A's summons, a Lightning beast, was there. Having seen about everything in this part of the Swamps, she figured out she'd visit the western part.
Really, Fū was just having so much fun in here !

***

Heavy pants could be heard, as well as the sound of water dripping and tired footsteps.

"-Shit ! Why did it have to go like this ?!"

The person currently raging over their situation was being incredibly imprudent, talking so loud and barely hiding. However, in their state, it was a miracle they could even stand in the first place. They were limping their way to a tree, sighing in relief upon reaching it. Shifting their weight to lean on the trunk, they tried to rest their sore limbs before having to keep going.

" A whole day... It took me a whole day to escape those goddamn swamps... With those summons roaming the area and all the godforsaken pests that live in there, it's been such a pain to get through the damn place ! Why did I have to land in a place like this ?!"

Still ranting in their mind, they could barely kee their eyes open. They tried to reach for the lowest branches of a tree to climb to safety but even that proved to be too much and they collapsed with a heavy thud.

Feeling all of her energy abandon her body, Sakura couldn't help but fear what might happen to her as she was asleep. Yet at this point, her mind had grown too foggy for her to formulate any coherent thought. She lost consciousness right then and there, under the curious gaze of the small birds and squirrels that lived safely off the ground.

***

2nd day :

Unnoticed : 22

Survived : 13

Knocked out : 2

Crippled : 1

Dead : 2

Remaining contestants : 35 out of 40