Love Through Negotiation «COMPLETED»

Chapter 9

Kurotsuchi shook her head to get rid of the fuzzies and turned around to glare at the individual still standing tall and proud in front of her. There was a dribble of blood coming down from the corner of her forehead. The scratch was superficial, but it was bleeding a lot. Her worst injury was the disorientation from having just been exploded in front of. If she were a foot closer to the puppet when it detonated, her injuries would have been a lot worse.

Spitting the bile that had accumulated in her mouth out, Kurotsuchi braced herself and held her katana in front of her body as straight as she could. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see civilians fleeing the scene, holding themselves up and dusting each other off as they fled. It made her feel good that she was of some help, but up against exploding automatons… well, that wasn't exactly something she had braced herself before when training her skills. There wasn't much she could do to incapacitate a walking bomb.

Not unless she got real crafty.

Its mouth clacked open and she was immediately assaulted with poisoned needles. Faster than her brain could think, Kurotsuchi's hands were on the ground with chakra flowing through them. A wall of earth came up just in time to stop the first needles from hitting her. With not even time to let go of the breath she had been holding, a hand grabbed the edge of her wall and flung the rest of its body around, other arm outreached with a wicked dagger in its hand. Kurotsuchi grabbed her sword from the ground and brought it up to parry away the dagger.

Again and again, it came at her with a suicidal glee that was gone from most other opponents. She could only barely avoid the dagger that came at her, the poisoned needles that launched from various points on its body, and the wood reinforced punches and kicks that came from it like a tidal wave. She could barely get an attack out and eventually felt herself being backed up against the wall to a residence.

There were a few things she had gleaned from her dance with the first puppet. The first being that they didn't take environmental factors into mind when attacking.

Kurotsuchi ducked underneath a jab and before it could react, grabbed the handle of the door she was pressed next to, and turned it down. When the puppet wound up to stab her, she flung the door open and clocked it in the side. Despite its mechanical nature, whenever it was presented with new information it would stall out for a fraction of a second. Kurotsuchi used this short period of time to whip her sword around, cutting both of its arms off at the elbow, and kicked it in the chest. It flew back to the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust, completely unable to right itself.

The second thing she gleaned was that the puppets tended towards the nuclear option when threatened.

She slapped both her palms to the ground as quick as she could and turned the earth underneath both dismembered arms into a quicksand-like substance, then solidified the earth as soon as they were submerged. The arms exploded, but at least the impact was directed upwards instead of outwards this time, sparing Kurotsuchi more consternation.

When she turned around to face the hobbling remainder of the puppet, she re-steadied her form. This time, her arms weren't shaking as her chest swelled with newfound confidence. She was ready for battle. She was ready to bury that fucking puppet.

What she wasn't ready for was for it to cock its head to the side and for its mouth to clack shut. Its eyes went from unfocused and dull to almost humanlike. "Hmm…" it droned out mechanically. "You're one of the girls aren't you?"

Her eyes widened from surprise. "How…" she said slowly, very wary of every movement it made. "No, what do you know?"

There was a sick mechanical crunching whir as its chest shuddered. It took Kurotsuchi a second to realize it was laughing. "About as much as the layman. Enough to know that you're… special."