Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Toxins And Venom

The duo of rogue ninja sent to capture Kaguya Yaban, the man who was once the Fourth Tsuchikage and a hero to his villagers, took careful steps across the dark corridors of the mines. These laid far outside the territory that Iwagakure used to consider their own, back when they still could consider any patch of land their own, and were therefore far more perilous to wander in.

Whether they were used by a band of thieves, mercenaries or just flat-out savages that found solace and safety from justice in the dark dampness of the underground was still a mystery. The only thing that mattered now was that Kaguya Yaban had chosen this place as his place of residence or banishment, depending on how one looked at it.

"Can you hear that?" Toxi wondered.

"Hear it? I can feel it in my toes and all over my feet..." Veno looked down. It had been far too dark to confirm if the ground was truly rumbling and if any dust had been accumulating from the unruly quakes or if this was just the imagination of someone who had spent much more time in complete darkness than necessary.

"No light..." Toxi looked around. "Just like back in the day, back home. We should've known that old man Yaban would be a sucker for nostalgia."

"Just like back home? Unless I've got another twin brother and you've been tagging in and out with each other, you haven't spent a day in the mines," Veno squinted with a skeptical look at her sibling.

"You don't have to have worked in the mines to know that very few tunnels had actual lighting. At least back during the Third's era, the administration had an excuse that the Third did not know what he was doing with the mines because rich fops that have never worked a day in their lives were in charge but Yaban actually grew up in the mines and he still didn't change a thing," Toxi muttered just to fill the hallways with noise as the two went deeper and deeper down. While neither of them could sense chakra and the two operated solely on intelligence, they felt they were getting closer by following the thuds and the quakes and heading further down that way.

"I wonder what Yaban's excuse is. The administrators from the Third's times said the mines were filled with a noxious gas that would have triggered explosions and fires, then they stated the village was in no condition to light up millions of kilometers of mine tunnels all across the Land of Earth..." a smirk twisted Veno's face.

"You can ask him yourself," Toxi stopped over a steep drop that offered only stalactites and stalagmites hundreds of meters tall on each side of the cave. It was likely a natural formation, maybe it had a bit of help from something like a manmade explosion meant to excavate more ore or just an accidental one. Maybe there was more truth to the administrators' ramblings about flammable and explosive gases than initially thought.

"Still rumbling..." Veno sighed and pointed far across the vast opening to a small accumulation of water in between an entire mountain of needle-like natural mineral formations.

The two shapes flickered away, appearing before a back rippling with fleshy tendons as it worked toward assisting a bare-chested man pound at the ground in front of him with fists burning with a blue flame of basic chakra imbuement. Despite the man's physique suggesting grand physical strength even without the aid of chakra augmentation, the ground that he's been pummeling didn't splinter or form any fissures but merely raised rings of dust that slowly dissipated throughout the area and settled somewhere new. Despite not being a chakra sensor, Kaguya Yaban turned around and wiped his sweaty forehead. He turned to face the pair of arriving rogue ninja as if he'd been expecting them, though his facial expression didn't support this conspiratorial theory.

"Toxi and Veno, was it?" Kaguya Yaban spared only a few words of the most important matter plaguing his mind. He didn't bother voicing any wild guesses of why this pair had arrived to face him, nor what they've done with the plentiful array of ninja settling down in the abandoned mining town resting inside of a crown in the center of a mountain range.