Chapter 11

Tea Capital
Ryoma, Recently Promoted Ninja

The Wood Dragoon was a combat-capable prototype at best. It was a proof of concept pushed out a year or two too early to get something out to get ahead of the increasingly dangerous missions he was being forced on thanks to the slowly decreasing number of active suna ninja. This decrease in active personnel caused by the ongoing war, which he was an active participant in and held a distinct disadvantage thanks to both being a child and not any particular breed of prodigy.

The Mk1 design was clunky, slow, highly visible, held limited mobility and safety features, low quality material, limited battlefield endurance, generally poor craftsmanship, and a great many other negative traits that he could list off if he had the time. He wasn’t even sure if he would call it a prototype, more of a test type really, with features put together piecemeal, lacking both maturity and proper integration between disparate parts. The only part he was somewhat proud of was the giant mask that covered the front, both as added protection and intimidation.

The rest of it? If anyone else knew how ramshackle the thing was, they’d be laughing it off. “Guard the clients.” He declared, finger twitching to open wooden vents mounted on the ‘backpack’ of the puppetarmor. Slits near the base, part of the lower combatpack assembly, opened up as a seal-cylinder within rotated out.

The fact that he had to use a combatpack at all was a bandage over a failure to integrate those features into the mainframe. It was heavy and threw off his balance if he didn’t constantly compensate for it. He rotated one foot, provoking the Dragoon to crouch in preparation for a leap off the roof.

Another finger twitch and the combatpack seal-cylinder activated, releasing the wind-jutsu within. Great Breakthrough, channeled through a trio of vents.

A howl of hurricane-force wind exploded out of the improvised thruster pack, in time with another rotation of the foot to make the giant wooden puppet jump up and forwards. His allies made various bothered noises as the shockwave threw them off balance, noises that faded quickly as the thousand-pound frame rose high into the night air.

He had been aiming for thirty meters of distance on a parabolic curve when he had planned the system out on a notepad a few years back, a notebook that Sasori had read through and laughed at more than once. He had never quite been able to hit that thirty meter mark, more like twenty in ideal conditions. Landing was also problematic, he’d normally need to burn another thruster-charge to safely break his fall, and he only had three of those total.

That meant one and a half jumps, normally, which presented fairly obvious problems.

It was a bit hard to see his target through the puppet-eyes of the Wood Dragoon, the resolution of the image being hard to work through from time to time. Lucky that his current target was visible enough to be almost impossible to actually miss.

The giant glowing moth in the middle of the air wasn’t really close enough for him to jump to, even with the jumppack, but it was close enough for it to be within range of another one of his systems. His fingers curled, the arms of the Wood Dragoon raising up with three-clawed hands spread out.

A twitch, and the hands shot out like rockets, racing forwards and latching onto the giant glowing moth-shape, connected by a woven twine of ninja-wire. Normally used for cutting things like cheese and flesh, the wires were a common ninja tool that was significantly less useful for cutting when woven like this, but much more durable. This was a requirement as he rewound the internal cranks in the arms and started pulling the hands back to his wrists.

The giant moth let out a panicked moth-scream as he dragged it down from the sky, a new thousand-pound weight attached to its limbs and wings. It sounded something like a donkey that just swallowed a dial-up modem.

Piloting the Wood Dragoon was tricky, the sound was muffled, the center of gravity was off, and the visuals were substandard. His feet rotated as he prepared to land, widening his stance as best he could and bracing for the impact. He was falling fast enough to cause structural wear, but not fast enough to actually break anything thanks to the moth he was latched onto struggling to stay in the air.

Operating a puppet with your feet was a pain in the ass, the soles of the feet being just about the worst place in the body in terms of ‘chakra connectivity’. In order to even start, you needed to first become proficient with both normal strings and wall walking. By circling chakra through the soles of your feet, you could ‘stick’ to surfaces, letting a ninja walk up and down horizontal surfaces. This was the hardest place of the body to actually do this, which made it a popular chakra control exercise.

Operating chakra-strings through the soles would theoretically give a puppeteer more than ten strings to work with, but most didn’t need all ten strings anyways. The only reason you’d want to do it is if you had too many systems in one platform and needed to dedicate some features to their own dedicated limbs.

Like him. He was that person. He operated the legs and balance of the Dragoon through the short, fat chakra strings coming from the soles of his feet. Everything else was operated by his fingers, freeing him up to occasionally perform a critical, life-saving jutsu in the safety of his wooden shell and not fall over in the process.

He did that once and he almost died for it, controlling those two things through his feet was an actual, critical part of operating a full-scale puppetarmor like this. He didn’t have enough space in the design to fit all the features he needed, which meant he needed to occasionally use ninjutsu to compensate. He didn’t have the ability to form handseals while operating the puppetarmor, which meant he needed to control at least the basic mobility through his feet.

He wasn’t good enough at designing and building puppets to fit everything in and he wasn’t good enough at jutsu to do them without handseals- it was a skill issue either way he cut it.

The ground shook as the Wood Dragoon landed- vibration rippling through the wooden frame and shaking him about in the cramped piloting chamber he was currently stuffed in. The sound of stone cracking echoed faintly through his frame, muffled by the shell of wood and metal. A moment later- the ground shook again as the massive moth crashed into it, shattering pavement tiles beneath its bulk.

His omnidirectional visuals told him that he was currently in the middle of the clone-army, in the middle of the lower courtyard, and far from any allies. Just about perfect really, he didn’t have to worry about collateral like this. The claws of the Wood Dragoon unlatched and continued to wind in as he moved a chakra string to the upper combatpack and twitched a finger.

Just as the blurry forms of the clones were starting to jump at him, a missile-silo type structure on the back of the Wood Dragoon fired an umbrella high into the air above them, the launcher adding a spin to the missile as it rose.

Then it opened, and thousands of poisoned senbon began to rain down around him, propelled by the force of their own launcher-seals mounted on the underside of the umbrella. .

He saw this trick once, and copied it shamelessly.

Clones began to recoil and burst in puffs of smoke as senbon strong enough to punch through thin armor and most people rained down like sharp, poisoned hail. Many of these senbon thunked into his own armor, deep enough into the metal plating to stick but not deep enough to do anything more than prick the underlying wooden frame. This was the primary reason the metal plating was important, because without it there was a good chance that the senbon would stab him in the brain whenever he deployed an umbrella.

…No, they weren’t bursting into smoke, a transformation was being dispelled. Corpses of various shapes and sizes were falling around him as the senbon-rain continued in an outwards spiral.

“Hah-hahaheheh~ What the hell is that?! Hahahah!” A voice called out as a figure jumped away from the back of the giant moth, which shrieked as a rain of poisoned steel barbs reached it. A few moments after, it vanished in a tremendous plume of actual smoke, returning to wherever it had been summoned from before fatal damage could be sustained.

Ryoma knew from experience that trying his normal lies and tricks through the cockpit of the Wood Dragoon didn’t usually work out, mostly because he had to yell for anyone to actually hear him and the tone of a yell didn’t lend itself towards that.

Silently, the Wood Dragoon rose from its crouched stance, woodenly rising to its full height and focusing on the blurry shape of enemy ninja. The night combined with the puppet-eyes made visibility near-zero, he really wished he had some night-vision optics right now.

He needed to even their visibility out. His fingers pulled back from the chakra strings and flew through handseals, utterly invisible inside the frame.

“Wind Release : Dust Cloud Technique.” He announced calmly, going without interruption. Twenty-three.

All of the ash and soot created by the initial firebomb, along with any other sand or loose dirt in the courtyard, was kicked into the air. The blurry enemy shape was even further obscured, disappearing with hands raised in the expanding cloud of particulate matter.

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Another set of handseals.

“Earth Release : Sand Transformation.” Twenty-one motes until he needed to tap into his personal chakra.

The surface of the Wood Dragoon blurred as the ash and soot around it condensed, drawn towards its form and layering the surface in a dense layer of dark-grey. He didn’t bother making a more fancy appearance, keeping the dark grey layer as it was. There was no real way to disguise the Wood Dragoon as something else, but adding camouflage was downright easy.

From the outside, the Wood Dragoon disappeared in a cloud of ash and emerged with a new dark color scheme, blending into the night.

A thump-thump impacted the side of his frame. A physical strike against the frame while he was setting up, a strike that did very little through the three layers of armor-shell now enveloping him.

The Wood Dragoon rotated on its hips, a full spin with arm outspread that ended with a puppet-fist smashing into a blurry shape. A burst of smoke and a meaty crunch as the body flew back and disappeared into the night. He returned to a forwards-position, rotating his feet to start stomping forwards. His fingers flexed to recreate a set of chakra strings, taking control of the upper frame once more.

Low visibility made things difficult- he wanted to learn sensor-jutsu to make up for this but he hadn’t had the time yet. It made the Wood Dragoon a tactically inflexible design. In the meanwhile, the best option he had was another bolt-on component.

He twitched a finger, the bolt-on firework launcher mounted on the side of the combatpack triggered, shooting a payload high into the air above them.

A few moments later, the payload exploded into a long-burning, bright-red flare to illuminate the entire battlefield. He only had two of those, so he’d need to end the fight before they both expired. Omnidirectional visuals allowed him to check the state of the battlefield- and the fights going on upon the rooftops.

Gaku and Mari were hanging back to provide peppering long-range support to the genin, who in turn were fighting off yet more… corpse-clones, or whatever they were. The other ninja that were still present seemed to be holding out.