Another few days had passed, and Kannin was beginning to lose it. He had stayed awake this entire time, waiting to be released. Just when he thought his mind was going to slip away from him, the entire cell shook as though an earthquake came through. Dust trickled down from the ceiling, and Kannin wobbled in the center of the room, his chains clinking as the rattled.
'Interesting...' Kannin thought, a delirious looking grin spreading across his face, 'I wonder how soon it'll be...'
He put his attention back to the walls, and noticed that their chakra suppressing effect was beginning to falter.
'Things are really starting to go my way,' he thought.
-
If any of the combatants in the real world had the time to look down at the block of jade, they would notice that the deep black ink sprawling across was beginning to faintly pulse with an icy blue light, but as things were, they were too busy battling.
Warai had been locked in battle with Bird ever since she broke of her genjutsu. The battle should have been easier given Bird's skills, but it seemed like she was trained to fight against the Sharingan.
After making the mistake of looking Warai in the eye the first time, Bird had been careful not to do it again, instead looking down a little at Warai's chest and legs. Her spiderwebs had given her a distinct advantage at limiting Warai's mobility, but Warai's proficiency with Fire Release kept her from being totally immobilized.
'Damn,' Warai thought, 'I have no tools on me. Kannin really had to get kidnapped as I was making lunch'
She summoned a field of mud under the feet of the Bird mask before moving in with a breath of flame.
Mouse, on the other hand, had been tangled with Tetsu for the majority of the fight. His specialty of sealing jutsu and shuriken jutsu had him in a tough spot against the close-combat style of the Rabbit mask. Every swipe with a kunai was skillfully met with a parry, and every attempt to slap a sealing formula on his skin was blasted away with a gust of wind.
Tetsu had learned a technique which coated his hands in wind chakra, enhancing his taijutsu skills both in power and in range, as well as boosting his speed. The Mouse Anbu was quite skilled, however, and was able to deflect most of his deadly attacks at the expense of taking less serious injuries.
Bruises were piling up on the arms and legs of Mouse, and blood was trickling from his forehead, where the once whole porcelain mask was now cracked and sunken in. He had a few more cards to play before his legs gave out beneath him, and he was banking on them pulling through.
On the other, other hand, Dog was fighting Cat just near the sealing block. As the fight progressed, they were inching closer and closer to the fissure in the ground Tetsu had made in the beginning, but Kakashi was careful to keep himself between Dog and the sealing stone.
Dog had a strange jutsu which created a watery substance which quickly hardened into a greenish jade. Dog's creativity with this jutsu was troublesome to say the least, he would block most energy-type attacks with a wall of jade, trap limbs in a block of it like with Kannin, or, as Kakashi had found most annoying, coat his own body in a skin of semi-liquid jade, making him immune to most attacks.
Kakashi had tried and failed many times to break his defense, all to no avail. He had been thinking this whole time on how to bypass Dog's defenses, when a plan struck him.
'When he's in his jade armor, he probably can't see all that well' Kakashi thought, the plan of action coming into focus.
With that, he leapt towards Dog, wielding his father's signature White Chakra Sabre. Dog grunted and once again summoned a veil of jade to cover his body as the sabre embedded itself a centimeters into the armor, like an axe's first chop into a tree trunk. What Dog didn't see was Kakashi creating a lightning clone, and maneuver his real body behind Dog.
When Dog released his armor, he was none the wiser, seeing Cat mask in front of him, a red glow emanating from his left eye socket. He started weaving hand signs, as he was getting a little sick of being on defense the whole time, when suddenly two kunai embedded themselves in his back. As he fell to the ground, he looked back and saw a carbon copy of the Anbu he had just been fighting twirling two more kunai in his hands.
With a swift motion, Kakashi nailed Dog's hands into a tree root in the ground with the next two kunai, and headed back over to where his comrades were fighting.
-
When Tetsu went in for his next assault, Mouse made a risky move. Taking out a special sealing tag from his pocket and sidestepped Tetsu's punch, whirling around his body and slapping the tag on his lower spine. Tetsu did manage to elbow Mouse in the sternum, which cracked loudly on impact, but when the sealing tag touched him, he suddenly lost sensation beneath his hips.
Mouse stumbled back after being struck in the chest, nursing his shattered breastbone, while Tetsu crumpled to the floor, his legs rendered useless. Coughing up blood, Mouse ran over to his comrades, seeing the Cat mask running back at the same moment.
While Warai and Bird were still locked in battle, neither managing to take the upper hand, Kakashi, Mouse, and Tetsu, still on the ground noticed a bright light emanating from the jade block left on the ground. They were all a little confused at the sight, as none of them had seen a seal break from the inside, but Mouse was a scared more than anything. He knew that the seal could theoretically be broken from the inside, but it would take an immense amount of patience and the ability to erode the chakra which constituted the seal.
Time seemed to slow down as the pulsing blue light sped up, glowing faster and faster until the black ink evaporated. When the last drop of ink vanished off the block, time slowed to a stop, and the scene was strangled with a silence unlike anything they'd ever felt before.
They all looked over at the block with wide eyes, until their vision was blinded with a flash of pure white light