Casual, easy going breaths kept Len Sosu's heart and mind steady. Though he stood in the heart of enemy territory (kind of), and was surrounded by (mostly defeated) foes, he wouldn't let it get to him. No, not wouldn't. Couldn't. Len Sosu wasn't like these flimsy tents or broken bodies. He was unbreakable.
Well, unbreakable or not, he still had to take precautions. His posture and position drew tighter as he edged backwards towards the compound's iron wall. A regular plebeian like the already beaten guards wouldn’t have given him any trouble at all, but you could never quite anticipate what craziness Agents from other countries might have up their sleeve. Who was this new guy? Did he possess a concealment jutsu? A burrowing ability? Motonubu said there were a couple people capable of flight on the island- Len Sosu kept glancing upwards just to be safe As a stale breeze wafted through the battlefield as he tuned in his ears and eyes to look at every detail. For a second, he even stopped breathing.
Like a flash of lightning, he saw it! If there was one thing Len Sosu excelled at (and Len Sosu excelled at a bunch of things, make no mistake about it), it was keeping careful watch on his opponent’s body. A physical fighter like himself could easily make out every muscle twitch and subtle body shift a foe might make. On the edge of his vision was where just such observation jumped out at him. It came from one of the fallen, seemingly unconscious or dead bodes splayed out among the others. Though they laid face down an errant spasm on the back of the neck gave Len Sosu all the info he needed to know. He had his man!
Before the stranger could wheeze out his next taunt Len Sosu gave a skillful kick at his feet to retrieve one of the spears left behind by the fallen guards. The boy put his amazing martial powers to work again as he unskillfully and not very accurately hurled the spear with a springy snap of his arm.
The projectile zipped through the air just as clumsily as his earlier attempt had and crashed into its target sideways, looking less like the of a precision dart throw, and more like a drunk hurling a beer bottle. Yet the force from the blow alone sent a cloud of dust and debris into the air as the wooden shaft of the weapon exploded on impact, sending the still apparently comatose body hurtling away. A direct hit! Not a peep came from the forlorn body as it tumbled and rolled away like a ragdoll. Len Sosu for the dust to settle, confident at having dispatched the menace. That would teach that disembodied voice to issue whispery insults that it couldn't back up!
The camp fell silent again as if to reaffirm the crushing victory. He nodded with self-assured satisfaction. Just another chapter in the book of wins for the blessed Len Sosu!
Well, it was time to retrieve that artifact then, wasn’t it! A triumphant aura surrounded the teenager as strolled towards the tent holding his prize. He didn’t even bother stepping around the bodies, instead opting to trod upon them as was his right to do so. As he drew closer to the tent he began stomping on the fallen even harder. Chalk that one up to a little bit of paranoia. If anyone still lying around was thinking about talking trash, it would be much harder to do through a mouthful of dirt.
His deliberate double checking of all the bodies paid off right as he drew nearer his target. Seconds before bringing his foot down on another nondescript looking guard, the body jerked and rolled away. Len Sosu's foot hit nothing but dirt and the impact even left quite a nice sized crater. This sudden movement didn’t phase Len Sosu in the slightest. Rather, it was expected! Fooling Len Sosu twice simply didn’t happen! As the not-quite-dead-yet body attempted to stagger to its feet Len Sosu planted a quick knee right into the man’s chest. As before the otherwise simple blow completely overwhelmed even the sizable mass of this survivor, and with a gush of spittle and bile from his mouth the unfortunate man was sent careening away, tumbling head over foot some distance before it collapsed atop another pile of similarly stationary bodies.
“Are all you Fenshingiri idiots that easy to read?” Len Sosu cracked his knuckles, never one to let a chance to gloat escape. “If any more of you morons are pretending to nap, you’ll end up just like your friend there. Stand up again and I'll put you down for good!” He turned around to jab his accusing finger at the fallen he had just finished treading upon.
Instead of being greeted by a field of unresponsive bodies, Len Sosu instead stared at dozens of lifeless eyes glowering back at him. Nearly every warm body he just got done destroying (and then curb stomping for good measure) now stood on two legs again. Or one leg and one cracked remnant of a leg, if they’d been unlucky. Len Sosu hadn’t even heard them stand up!
Though maybe that had more to do with all the shouting and stomping he'd been doing. He'd have to remember to shout quieter next time he wanted to taunt the dead.
Was there even anything to worry about, though? Len Sosu put these grunts down once already. An encore performance wasn’t that bad, it actually sounded kind of exciting! But of course nothing on Jinchi was ever so simple. Because while these men now stood with some renewed vigor, these were absolutely not the same people who Len Sosu defeated earlier. There were several subtle clues that tipped Len Sosu to this off, which only a career soldier of much experience could have carefully discerned.
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“What the hell,” he gawked, right before the mass of flesh dog-piled him. “You all look super gross!”
That voice chuckled out, brimming with tones of coy satisfcation. It came from the one location Len Sosu really didn't want to hear it from; it came out of the tent he'd been spending all morning trying to reach. “Garion recruits are dumb as ever, I see.” This was definitely the same voice, but now it was stronger.
No, not stronger. The voice was more clear now, because it was more alive.
The mob of reanimated flesh surged forth at once, not like military unit but like a seething colony of insects. Several thousand pounds of skin and bone and muscle bore down on Len Sosu at once as the revived bodies swarmed him like ants on a fallen droplet of honey. His vision grew dark as the pile grew larger, clambering over and atop him even as Len Sosu tried to throw them off. His powerful strikes still hit just as hard yet he couldn’t send these puppets flying away like usual. There was simply too many to punch through! It was like trying to smash his way out of a pool of water. As soon as he knocked one away, another flowed in to take it's place. Within minutes the boy found himself overwhelmed and buried in the relentless tide.
As Len Sosu heaved his chest to lift up the hangers-on trying to push him down from above, he felt a warm, vile fluid dripping out of the skin of his aggressors. Like a fruit left out too long that started to grow a fuzzy coating, a thin, disgusting goo coated the 'men' who now accosted him. He could feel something nasty crawling within that slime as well- what he thought were maggots, but what might have been more accurately described as tiny worms. Putting those two very important details together Len Sosu came to a startling conclusion: he might be in a tiny amount of trouble. It was a bit difficult to punch a zombie plague into submission.
“Bravo, though. Really. Splendid effort.” The unseen voice echoed as it now came from a multitude of locations at once. Len Sosu identified the sources as each word wheezed out- the bodies around him were speaking! “All the weeks of prep I spent here, undone in almost an instant by some buffoon with an ugly haircut. You aren't even worth infecting. I think I'll just let you suffocate in there.”
Taking a hint, Len Sosu tightly closed his mouth, not wanting any of the gross viscera that now fell on all sides to work its way in. The hopelessness of the situation grew each time he threw off another body or lashed out with a mighty kick or punch. Every blow he landed only caused more tainted body fluids to spray out, and before long he would be swimming in a nasty maggot soup. This was all Motonubu's fault! Why hadn't that awful Agent mentioned crazy necromancer lords as a possible threat? How long could Len Sosu deal with something this gross?
Until he won, of course! Len Sosu hadn’t gotten this far on the back of his good looks and superior intellect alone. After taking a minute to make sure he didn't accidentally swallow anything nasty, Len Sosu enacted his foolproof plan. He closed his eyes, quickly shoved some pieces of torn fabric into his nostrils and ears, and put on as smug of a smile as he could.With every (reasonable) orifice filled none of the nasty body fluids he was about to send splattering about could possibly infect him! He was a genius! A prodigy! Fighting diseases was just like fighting people- if you didn’t have any openings, then they couldn’t get in!
Then the biting started and Len Sosu quietly wailed. Why didn't anyone fight fair anymore?!
Although surrounded Len Sosu’s incredible strength still managed to pushed back wave after wave of bodies. As soon as they fell it only took a few moments for them to rise again and repeat the advance, but each time the boy lost a little more ground. Since his eyes and ears were both out of commission, Len Sosu didn’t give much notice to what was happening at his feet eotjer. It wasn’t until a peculiar itching at his ankles that he thought to take a moment to consider what was going on between his toes. He stopped his furious struggling for only a moment to try and determine what was going on down there.
Sure enough, right below him lay a writhing carpet of the hairlike maggots, growing ever thicker with every pulped foe. As an immovable rock of battle, Len Sosu was (in this particular conflict) only digging himself in deeper. When he tried to raise a foot for a kick, he couldn’t. Try as he might to pull his feet up from the earth, they simply refused to budge, as if the soles of his feet were embedded in concrete. This, on top of everything else, was a bit concerning.
“I would say it's been a pleasure, but I'm actually pretty bored over here.” The voices returned, the apparent result of the worm-man’s control of the remaining bodies’ vocal chords. “Don't you want to beg for mercy? Insult me with your last dying breath? I was hoping for a bigger spectacle after all that bragging you did earlier.”
The taunting was pretty pointless seeing how Len Sosu’s ears were plugged up, but it wasn’t as if the assassin would know that with the hundreds of pounds of bodies still piled atop Len Sosu. At this point the boy's focus honed down to a single, razor sharp point- victory. Even with that thought though, his blows continued to grow weaker as the tide of bodies continued its onslaught. The crowd drew tighter and tighter. The noose closed around him.
From the outside it looked as though the fortress was collapsing. The voice grew more bold in direct proportion to the heavier the load on Len Sosu weighed. “You know, I might spare you. I've heard Garion is gathering artifacts, like the dagger you came to get. Maybe if you talk now, your death won't be quite as gruesome as I'm planning to make it.” As before this demand fell onto literally deaf ears. Len Sosu couldn't respond even if he wanted to. That only made things worse, as the silence was interpreted as defiance. “Have it your way then, you daft little man.”