Ice Man slowly straightened, despite, or perhaps because of, the greivious wounds inflicted by pickled one. Blood trickled from his mouth, left over debris from his injured lungs.
"Show me then . . . ," barked the Admin. "Show me just how determined you are to prove your worth."
Ice Man reached deep inside himself, and found rage to mix with his chakra.
"I'll show you, I'll show everybody . . . "
The world slowed down once again for the power of one who can shape destiny, and this time even Cucumba was caught in the wake. In the time it took the admin's smile to die away, the Nin was already airborn, an explosion of dust and debris beneath him. The ANBU member slammed into the Jade Behemoth fist first, knocking the admin clean off his feet. The Nin could not afford to stop, or slow down, in the slightest. He continued his attack, alternating hands and feet, aiming sometimes for the midsection and sometimes for the head. In the blur of blows, Ice Man saw Cucumba's jacket flying apart.
It was breaking up into little black winged demons without faces . . . in fact, Cucumba was breaking up too.
The replacement technique, puzzled Ice Man.
In the dark skies, the creatures spread out and darted to the four winds, dancing with the lightning and loosing their horrible shreiks in the thunder. Ice Man quickly felt around for the jade behemoth's massive Chakra but couldn't locate it.
This was bad, and he knew it, Cucumba was too dangerous of an opponent to lose track of. How can he do this, his Chakra is too massive to hide.
Partly on instinct, partly because he knew he was going to be attacked, Ice Man dodged out of the way. Cucumba slammed his massive fist into the faded paint of the street just as the Nin vacated the area. The ground buckled and gave, and the crater rippled out in the asphalt causing the cars to jump from their resting places. The hellish cacaphony resonated in the empty city. Ice Man watched in horror . . . he knew Cucumba was strong, but this strong?
Cucumba smiled with that unhinged smile again, and blurred into a leap, catching up to Ice Man in no time at all. Ice Man scrambled to defense, and narrowly redirected Cucumba's lethal round house kick. The Nin lept away by pushing off of the admin's leg. Using his Chakra to cling to a building face, he looked over his shoulder to see another glass and steel monstrosity. Cucumba followed his own trajectory, and landed on the face of another building, an old decrepit bank, complete with gargoyles. The admin grinned again, and lept into the air, transforming once again into the horrid swarm. Ice acted once again on instinct, knowing that the Green Devil could come from only one direction. He flipped up and into a tight loop, crashing down on the admin's back as he appeared.
"NOW IT'S MY TURN," roared Ice Man.
The Nin began to mercilessly pound the admin with his fist, aiming for the small of the back and back of the head. After falling 20 stories, the admin's body fell face first through the street, and into the abandoned subways. Ice jumped off at the last moment, pulling on the chakra in his feet untill he stuck to the ceiling. He observed the debris patiently, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike and end this as he had planned. Cucumba waded out of the smoke and dust, wobbling and shaking his head, with a cut in his forehead.
Ice Man charged in, doing a front handspring and gluing himself with chakra to halt his momentum on the second handspring.
"WINDBREAKER!"
He twisted his arm, and torqued his waist, nailing Cucumba with a chain of vicious kicks as he began to spin. Then he dropped low, sweeping out the wounded admin's legs. The ancient spam bane hung in the air but a moment before being kicked skyward by a powerfull spinning back kick. Cucumba grunted from the pain, and tried to right himself, only to be caught about the waist by the ANBU member. Before the green devil could react, he was driven head first into a cab, from a hundred feet in the air.
"That, you bastard, was my Ice Shaker, how did it feel?"
The car blasted off the ground in response. Cucumba's body was glowing with energy, and the chakra Ice Man saw, was flowing into a collumn of writhing spectral tentilces, comeplete with a starry whirlpool of space. In the dark shadows of the green devil's brow, Ice Man could see that his glasses had been knocked loose. And in that darkness, the Nin could see glowing points of hate embedded in a sea of madness . . . such was the image of Cucumba's gaze.
"Since you are so insistant, I will show you a glimpse of the real me," threatened Cucumba. "I am not from the stars, but the places between them, I am the madness that once clouded the world and danced in the chaos of the old ones who were, who are, and who will be again . . . and you are nothing but a lick of flame in the presence of a Tsunami."
"Eh, alot of talk for someone who's bleeding profusely," snipped Ice Man. "Show me what you have, stop holding back . . Or I'll kill you."
"Kill me? I cannot die, death does not know my name, nor does it hold sway over me. Bloodline Limit! ONIGAN!"
With that, Cucumba rapidly formed seals with his hands . . . Ice Man watched in awe, not quite sure what this Demon Eye technique would do.
Cucumba began to shake with the power flowing through him, and for a maddening second, Ice Man peered upon madness it's self; for in the Chakra, Cucatoth itsefl breifly showed it's face in the dancing green flames. Ice Man tore himself away, fearing that his sanity would shut down completely, and stared at the horrible creature before him. Cucumba had grown a third eye, and with his glasses knocked off, he could clearly see all three glowing bright green. When the Green Devil spoke, it was three voices, on of his own, that of another, and the last of which seemed to be unintelligeable yet unequivably evil. The Chakra was a burning hurricane around Cucumba now.
"NOW YOU SEE, NOW YOU KNOW WHAT POWER IS . . . THIS IS THE ULTIMATE DEFENCE TECHNIQUE. ONIGAN ALLOWS ME TO SEE NOT ONLY THROUGH CHEAP TRICKS LIKE YOUR GENJUTSU, BUT ALLOWS ME TO SEE AHEAD IN TIME. THERE IS NO MOVE YOU CAN PLAN THAT I CANNOT ANTICIPATE, COMBINED WITH MY FORCE SENSE, YOU CANNOT WIN."
Ice Man rushed the maelstrom, pouring on enough speed to drag the nearest cars with him, and tore up the road as he flew over it. Much to his horror, Cucumba had already guessed his course of action and was defending there. Ice Man switched tactics, and spun over Cucumba's other shoulder. The Nin charged in for a rear elbow strike, only to be nailed by an elbow to the back of the head for his troubles. The ANBU member struggled to maintain balance, and bounced lightly off of a nearby truck.
Cucumba kept his pace, smashing into Ice Man's ribs with a titanic knee strike. Blood once again spurted from Ice Man's mouth and the Nin began to fall. Cucumba was not yet done.
The green machine plowed a spinning hook kick into Ice Man's head, knocking him for a tight spiral in the air, then round house kicked him towards the center of the intersection. Ice Man was floating and he knew that it wasn't a good sensation.
He hit the top of a minivan, tearing through the rusted sheet metal, and tumbling over the top of a dead SUV. He then bounced up and over a bus after hitting the center bar of the windshield and finally seemed to be coming to a stop as he rolled of the back of the bus's roof.
But there, at the end of his journey, Cucumba lie in wait.
The admin lifted his hands over his head, and brought both fists down on Ice Man's back mercilessly, ramming through the asphalt, pipes, powerlines, subway tubes and rock. When Ice Man lifted his head again, his body felt broken and twisted, lieing in a pile of shattered debris at the bottom of a sewer canal that now only moved rainwater out of the city streets. Cucumba walked towards Ice Man slowly, his ghostly green ki illuminating the passageway.
The eons of rot had not been kind to the sewer. Rust ate the metal doors, lids and pipes like a creeping doom, entropy incarnate. And the brick was crumbling into powder beneath the weight of the dead city that was once the Spam section of Forumscant.
"Do you know what this place once was," queried the Admin in his horrid trio of voices. "This was a thriving city of spam once, a place full of freedom and life . . . and I carried that freedom and life to it's destruction. The spamites here built massive buildings honoring their gods of nonsense, and I brough them logic and order. Unquestionable AUPs, and rules that they could not break. I brought the lands of Off-Topic peace by destroying this place, now I will destroy you to bring peace to me."
Cucumba roared as he flew forward, once again ripping the earth beneath him like lean-to's in a hurricane. Ice Man feebily stood and lifted his arms in defense, blood flowing from his brow and mouth. The green devil ripped into him at full speed, landing a vicious combination of punches, and finishing with a spinning back kick that drilled Ice through the ceiling and into the basement of a building near the intersection. Cucumba quickly followed Ice Man, leaping into the tunnel made with the Nin's head. When Cuc found the place of Ice Man's resting, all he found was dummy made to look like the ANBU member.
Cucumba couldn't help but smile at the cleverness of Ice Man's deception. The basement was some sort of parking deck, and there were plenty of pillars and abandoned cars. Where could the Nin have been hiding? The green machine smiled and pulled his ban saber from it's place of peace. Just as Ice Man attacked, Cucumba lept to the side, and threw the glowing weapon through several pillars, chopping down the building's aging supports. The green devil rolled to a stop, stood and then dissapeared into the horrid swarm once again. Ice Man watched in horror as the building above him began to collapse.
Outside, Cucumba watched from the granite, gothic bank building once again, smiling his terrible, unhinged smile.
The building collapsed awkwardly, falling sideways, with the running Ice Man in it's shadow. Ice lept rooftop to rooftop, trying to evacuate from the shadow of the falling structure. He could hear the crushing rain of debris and chunks of glass and steel falling right behind him, but emerged safely from the cloud.
"It's time to die now, Jounin."
". . . AN . . . BU . . you son of a *****."
Cucumba prepared himself in an instant, and launched a flurry of spear hand strikes, hitting the Nin in his pressure points. Ice Man attempted to block, but found his hands stopped at every turn, or found himself to slow to catch them in the first place. Finally, Cucumba slapped his hands together, and drew a line from Ice Man's nose to his knees, where he seperated his hands violently, striking two pressure points on the inside of Ice's knees.
"Fist of the bloody southern cross, multiple shadow strike combination, the ultimate offense."
Ice Man could not respond, he felt all his gates and his chakra holes damaged and under control of the alien chakra.
Then, as he watched, four shadowy images of Cucumba appeared, and lept in for the kill. In the space of a second, all four admins struck in perfect harmony. One struck the chin with a spinning back kick, another struck the head from above and behind with a butterfly kick, the third and fourth struck the temples. Ice realized, with a brief moment of fear, that this was the same feeling from the green devil's previous resonating shadow strike. With no time to ponder further, he felt the vicious chakra criss cross in his mind, from all four directions.
Ice Man fell to the floor, and blacked out as blood poured like geysers from the southern cross strike wounds.
<HR>
When Ice Man opened his eyes again, He could see the last fraction of a second of Cucumba's third eye closing. Much to his suprise, he was not covered in blood, and not badly injured.
"When you closed your eyes to begin your Curse of the Ice, I used the hypnotic power of the Onigan to play out the fight in your mind. Be thankful for my mercy and leave this place," said the admin in low tones.
Ice Man shook his head, rubbed his eyes and left; he was not ready after all. There was much training to be done, and much to learn before attempting this again.
Cucumba lept to the top of the gothic tower and watched Ice Man leave as he clung to the antenna at the pinnacle, a bemused smile on his face. The smile quickly faded and the green devil was alone once again with the city he destroyed, illuminated by the lightning, and buffeted with the sound of thunder meant to strike at the bravery of the foolhardy.