A young Uchiha grumped out with annoyance when a whole batch of shuriken bounced off the seemingly invincible wall of ninja cockroaches that her opponent put up. Normally, one wouldn't have imagined cockroaches being the ideal insect to rely on defending themselves, they didn't even have wings like the usual Aburame chakra leeching insects, even with that natural shortcoming, however, the roaches managed to form structures like shield and insect waves by simply crawling on each other's backs. The teen Uchiha named Aisha let her hands flow through a bunch of hand seals before she let even a larger cloud of shuriken loose.
"Multi-Shuriken Jutsu!" she yelled out feeling a little strain as the number of shuriken she cloned out of the existing barrage was more than a usual genin could put up. Even with her extra effort put into the technique, the weapons simply bounced off the insect wall like the insects were made out of tougher steel.
"Hmph... You've got to be kidding me..." the young woman grunted and slapped her forehead with her palm, letting it stroke down a bunch of sweat off of it. This fight was straining her more than the young one was willing to admit and she still couldn't manage to find any holes in her opponent's invincible defense. Her only way out was to try and talk, stall the man for some time, try to change her approach.
"So... Roaches, huh? What made you wake up one day and make that decision? Cockroaches aren't the species of insects that Aburame are given at birth, the process of switching the species must've been grueling and could not have been worth the trouble..." Aisha smiled and stretched her tired muscles out, fighting this sandstorm was tough enough without having to worry about her opponent, some time-off talking may have suited her well, especially when her opponent was doing nothing else but defending himself.
"Ninja-roaches are actually more majestic and godly than it would seem at first glance. Yes, the process of switching the usual Kidaichu for roaches was grueling, after all, the insects are resting inside one's skin, an Aburame member is a living nest for the insects so removing the ones I was given was not simple. Managing to maintain two species within my body was even tougher, the two were constantly at odds with each other which is why I chose to eventually deposit the nano-insects within Mardith's body" the Aburame member explained. Now that his insects were riled up they were crawling all over his bare chest and his face, his expensive looking hairdo was literally rustling around and looked like it was about to burst with insects swarming out of it.
"Cockroaches? Majestic? That's a fancy way of saying totally icky!" Aisha yelled out letting her tongue slip out in disgust. She had to admit that one of the most efficient parts of her opponent's defense was how those roaches frantically swarmed around the man's entire body making the teen rather hesitant to approach him in close distance as she was quite creeped out by those bugs and the potential disgusting abilities they may possess together with their indestructibility.
"No, you see, these insects seem casual and parasitic but... Once a member accepts the ninja-roaches and lets them nest inside their bodies, they teach their host a new thing about the origin of chakra and how it works, not directly, but just by observing them it grants them a revelation." The man smiled extending his hand forward and letting the insects swarm around his arm, he then swiped it to the side letting a whole bunch of those things fly in Aisha's direction as projectiles. The distracted teen leaped out of the way as her Sharingan flared red throughout the cover of the sandstorm even. The teen used all of her abilities to avoid being as much as touched by those bugs.
"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!" Aisha yelled out as her hands went through a couple of hand seals and her chest bloated up before she spat out a giant burst of flames from her mouth, it was a bit too erratic for her to shape this flaming inferno into a proper exploding fireball but a flamethrower shape would have to do for now. The thought was that fire was supposed to be an insect's natural enemy, maybe it would've roasted them. As the man extended his arm forward and let a flowing wave of insects bash right into the flames clashing with them this theory was quickly proven wrong.
Aisha kept on breathing, blowing all the air from her lungs out just to try and burn everything around the man to crisps but the Aburame just continued to stand there as insects flowed endlessly from his sleeves and from his shirt, also from his hair and even his mouth. The endless swarm was like a living weapon and within just mere moments the teen realized that her stream of flames was diminishing, she had felt that before, that terrifying sensation of her technique being completely ineffective, not only that but also boosting the enemy's abilities...
The overflowing stream of swarming and marching on insects soon extinguished Aisha's flames by literally eating them away.
"Parasitic Destruction Insect Technique!" Gokibure yelled out forcing his swarm of ninja-roaches to burst through the flame and eat it up to the finish before the swarm enveloped the young Uchiha teen. "Insect Tomb!" Gokibure slapped his hands together into a hand seal that ceased his endless stream of insects rushing forward as the cockroaches closed Aisha into a sphere that quickly filled up with cockroaches. Soon the sphere collapsed exploding into a rain of insects that briefly matched the sandstorm around them.
"I know you substituted yourself with some random piece of debris. My cockroaches eat everything that they touch up. To be closed into a tomb like this with them would've made you scream without a doubt..." Gokibure yelled out into the storm as the roaches spread into a wide field around him. To approach anywhere within the range of at least hundred meters around the man would've meant to sink in a mass of these all-devouring insects.
"It'll truly be quite sad to kill such a young flower so gruesomely before she has a chance to bloom, I usually refrain from such brutalities, I'm more of a lover than a fighter, perhaps we can somehow talk this out?" the gentleman looked around the perimeter trying to spot his female opponent but it was like she completely disappeared from his sight.
Suddenly Aisha appeared out of the blue, leaping at the man from an unknown length of distance aiming to cut him down with her cleaving blades. The girl didn't wear the usual native blades that most ninja wore, her weapons appeared to be much better suited for dismemberment as they were quite flat and very ellipse-shaped. They weren't long blades but their short size allowed Aisha to wield two of those.
"Parasitic Insect: Arena Trap!" Gokibure chanted out as the cockroaches instantly shaped two meter sized spikes all around the perimeter they were spread in, several enveloped Aisha and devoured her, this time the man heard the scream he longed for but also a loud popping sound alerting him that what he had just killed was just a clone. The cockroaches even ate up the residual sand that the clone left behind as unknown to Gokibure it was not just a simple Shadow Clone, it was a Sand Clone.
"You're wasting quite some chakra, to make a Shadow Clone just to fake out an attack and not follow it up..." the Aburame taunted his opponent but suddenly he noticed what he failed to notice before – the infernal Sharingan of the Uchiha glowing blood red from several meters further from the farthest reach of where the insects still covered the area.
"To think that I had to waste my Sharingan analyzing a stupid ability like this..." Aisha cursed as the red eyes blurred signaling that she was on the move, quickly leaping around the ruins of the small shanty town around the castle, Gokibure tightened his insects' patrol by gathering them up close to him. He wasn't sure just what exactly the teen's game was but she proved to be rather resourceful and underestimating an Uchiha was generally never a great idea.
"I see... So she analyzed my technique and the chakra flow involved by seeing how I dispatch of the clone... That isn't too stupid at all..." Gokibure mumbled to himself as he started admiring the young lady a little bit, he felt great pity that she like most women he tried talking to despised cockroaches, perhaps in time she could've been shown how truly awe-inspiring these insects were.
Aisha in the meanwhile was resting on top of the tallest ruin she could find. Observing her opponent and the swarming insects around him, knowing quite well that the moment she tried to close in these bugs would cover her up and eat her and even if she managed to land a blow on them they'd be near invincible as she's not yet seen one insect die or get injured.
"You know now how my technique works, it must reveal a lot to you about how chakra works in general, right? If you are as perceptive as your Sharingan allows you to be you must've realized by now that you cannot win. My ninja-roaches use a form of chakra augmentation to survive any attack together they can share the chakra they devour making a living network of chakra augmented armor, almost like insect-chainmail, each small chain in the link shares its input and once the initial blow is deflected they eat everything they can get to up, leaving nothing behind" Gokibure explained.
Aisha gripped her cleaver swords tighter, she was getting more and more pissed the more she found out about this man's ability and just how those insects worked. Why would those insects have so much chakra, to begin with? There must've been a finite number of them, how could they have acquired so much chakra and replenished their resources from eating literally anything around them? Wasn't chakra only inside people?
That would've meant that either chakra was not nearly as exceptional to humans as Aisha may have believed or that these insects possessed the ability to convert anything into chakra, but for that to happen the things they eat must have some primal source of chakra, some particle that is converted into chakra as they process that particle... Aisha just saw those insects devour just smoke and sand that her "Sand Clone" technique released and refill with chakra, what could this have meant?
"I'll take your refusal to attack as a sign that you're confused about what you just saw. Yes, it is as confusing as it seems, it should be to anyone who was told in the Academy that the First People granted us chakra and that it was exclusive to humans and certain species of animals. These insects I wield are ancient and their workings are beyond my comprehension, they work as machines with instinct instead of programming and they devour anything they see in the way and convert it into chakra, they existed before even the First People and coexisted together with the First People. Observing them could teach us a lot about how chakra works and what it actually is..."
A red flare lit up from behind the man, Gokibure turned around as he felt the immediate reaction from his cockroaches that squirmed and begged him to swarm the area where the chakra just flared up. The Aburame could not peek into the brief semblance of crimson flare within the blinding cover of the sandstorm, as he did he felt like he was frozen in place. Soon the surrounding turned completely dark and large stakes fell from the sky-piercing his body and sticking it to the ground. His insects were nowhere to be seen.
"Sharingan: Genjutsu!" Aisha chanted out quietly releasing the hand seal and gripping her blade tighter to leap forward. The young lady spun around in mid-leap, she only had one chance at this, one chance to destroy her enemy by removing the man's head. Now that he had no control over his insects because of his mind that was crippled by the illusion she cast using her Sharingan she could finally end this.
A blur of red flashed right up Aisha's eyes, she broke her perfect aerodynamic leap and fell close to the man and groaned as she hit the sand with her head and upper body first, her blades slipped out from her hands. This thing she saw... It was interfering with her memories, this revelation about chakra she saw inside those insects confused her. What if... That man also was like those insects? What if the man chasing them could also be sated by other sources and didn't have to suck them dry every time? What if he wasn't a force of nature, a predator of ninja as he claimed to but just a sick man who kills people and tortures them for fun?
Even more gruesome memories flashed by Aisha's eyes. Images of her beaten self-being held in the air, that crippling feeling of chakra being sapped from her body by just a touch, almost like her whole soul was being pulled violently, yanked out from her body and eaten right in front of her. That all crushing fear, that agonizing realization that her life could've ended at any time that made sleeping out for information not only soft by comparison but also preferable over life cowering in fear for the shadow man with the crimson eyes... No. She had to push those images away! Aisha grabbed her cleaver blades, the sand squirmed between her fingers as she grabbed the sandy handles and swung the blades cutting through.
Blackness surrounded Aisha, she was suddenly drowning in some black itchy substance, it was then that she realized – the man she cast the genjutsu on was not actually the one she cut down. Her hesitation, the panic fear placed inside of her by the man who was torturing her and punishing her existence and that of her whole family for years on end, ever since that fateful day when she was still a child, ever since her brother met that bitch Regalia... She brought this to them, it was because of her that their parents were dead, it was because of her that this demonic man was pursuing them, it was because of that woman that she was now surrounded and covered by those insects...
That brief moment of hesitation allowed Gokibure to slip out, no, it must've been before that, he made a living clone made out of insects before that and replaced himself with it without Aisha noticing. She felt the man being affected by the illusion so the real him must've also been affected but it didn't matter because she attacked the wrong target, she cut down the clone. Aisha covered her body and rolled into a ball, she was surprised that she still was not eaten alive, the insects were just rubbing together squirming, that unbearable noise of their backs rubbing against each other...
All of a sudden the girl felt the heat all around her, even greater than the one in the desert, she was someone born and raised in Sunagakure, she knew what the desert heat was like and the heat she was surrounded by was like she was shut in an oven and being cooked alive... Aisha screamed out and desperately tried to burst out from the invulnerable sphere of insects she was surrounded by but the sphere expanded, the squirming of the roaches became more rapid, more layers of squirmers was added and so the heat levels sky-rocketed. Aisha gasped for air one last time before passing out. It was then that the insects suddenly spread out leaving an unconscious body of a girl laying on the sand.
The roaches gathered around the real Gokibure surrounding him and going back into their lairs, some hid inside his hair, some went into his nose or inside his shirt, inside his sleeves and feet. The insects went inside the man's body and some burrowed into his skin leaving large bumps where they lurked. The roaches weren't happy, then again, they never were – they lacked the emotional complexity to be happy or sad but they were really acting up, angry perhaps that their master didn't let them eat the girl? Or maybe because on top of that they had to inject their chakra and share it with their host so that he broke out of the illusion cast by the young teen.
Gokibure blinked and stretched his arms and legs out. He examined his body for holes but saw none. That illusion was so powerful, he felt the pain of being skewered by stakes, he felt fear and desperation as members of the Aburame clan were never used to feeling so alone. They had swarms of bugs around them and inside them at all times so the feeling of loneliness was the least known but also the most painful and fearful to them.
The man approached the unconscious girl and felt her neck for a pulse, she was alive. Almost cooking her alive by making his cockroaches close in and rub against each other tightly was a cruel technique but it quickly made her pass out, he was surprised she didn't try to consume her chakra by augmenting her abilities and try to outlast it, the feeling of that intense heat was either that overwhelming or she just was too stressed out to think of that.
Ninja could survive heats much more intense than the one possibly generated by those bugs but... The pulse was too slow and weak, she couldn't have faked it. Just in case Gokibure extended his hand and let his insects form a structure that reminded an arm form and lift her off the ground. Her cleaver blades got left behind to be covered with endless layers of sand from the sandstorm. She'll have no use for that in captivity...
"Yeah... I know... We better check on Remashi, a gentleman must always swoop in to save a lady when she's in trouble..." Gokibure mumbled to himself, almost like he was talking to someone but his companions were too primal to understand basic speech. They were ordered around by chakra movement, almost like a carrot in front of a pig. Sometimes a gent like Gokibure just liked to talk to himself, apparently.
Further to the west of Gokibure's location, another battle was closing in to its conclusion, to the east of his location, however, Mardith was already killed by Regalia, the outcome was still unknown to the Aburame, nor were the further actions of the woman in red. The brief scuffle of the two squads was just about to reach its climax. If his only remaining opponents would be men, Gokibure would feel no shame in going all out, to begin with, and letting his roaches devour them quickly so they could go help Kusagoro out to catch those kids and find that Box.