Another One Bites The Dust [P]

"No longer...... drink water exclusively, but use......... a little wine.............for the sake of your stomach................ and your frequent ailments." A tall young handsome man muttered oddly in a deep, coarse voice under his breath as he slowly made his way through the scorching desert in his wooden sandals. He was carrying on his shoulder a white cloth sack on a long wooden stick, about one meter in length. On his oval head, he wore a brown decorative crown of thorns that cleanly banded his thick, flowing dark brown hair. On his face, he wore a thick and long dark brown beard, matching in color to the hair on his head, which made him look plenty older than his young ripe age of 22. His bronzed body was shirtless, the many cuts on his lean bronzed body on display. A white robe was wrapped around his waist, and wooden sandals dragged beneath his feet as he dragged them, kicking up sandy dust along the way. Abruptly, he stopped in his tracks and turned around to whence he came. He was far from the comforts of the air conditioning facilities available in the main streets and hub of Sunagakure. The mid day heat in the arid desert was disorienting. The large dome that oversaw the bustling village was no longer in sight. Around him in every direction, stretched miles and miles of sand and dust. Directly overhead, the Sun looked over the young man and the barren desert, casting down its endless love, light and heat on the peculiar shinobi. Basked in his own sweat, his muscular body reflected the light from the Sun, shining brightly in the shimmering light. Clutching the wooden stick on his back with his left hand, he raised his right one up towards the Sun, so as to shield his eyes from some of its blinding rays. On his palm, the insignia of Jashin was imprinted in white ink - an upside down triangle inscribed within a perfect circle. The beam of light from the Star penetrated right through a gaping hole on the young man's disfigured hand, and shone on his light brown eyes, causing them to glisten and glow. He let out a deep, heavy disgruntled sigh and set the sack on the stick on his back on the sandy desert ground in front of him. From within the sack, he took out an unopened glass bottle of red wine and cracked it open with his teeth. He placed its mouth on his bottom lip and tipping the bottle over, he started to chug uninhibitedly straight from the bottle. And he chugged. And chugged. And chugged. Ditching what was now dead weight to him, he left the empty glass bottle behind in his wake, in the desert sand. Yet in his sack, the sound of glass rung with his every step. Clink. Clink. Clink.

 It was early in the morning, only a few hours prior, when Jupiter Yamanaka was in a local bar in Sunagakure no Sato, overhearing the conversation of two old talkative shinobi who were chattering behind him about the fabled way of the Drunken Fist. According to what was said at the bar on that particular morning, there exists seasoned masters of Taijutsu who, before fighting, would get intoxicated with alcohol and fight with a ferocious vigor, much more effectively than when they were sober. The drunken masters would be unpredictable in their movements, and uninhibited in their expression of the art that was Taijutsu. They were more agile in their steps and found impossible angles through which they struck their opponents with a fierce invigorated strength. Until then, Jupiter had never heard of such a thing as the way of the Drunken Fist. The Chuunin Exams were coming up and the young shinobi was keen to participate, to test his own strength. He was actively on the hunt for ways to get stronger in time for his trials ahead. As an avid drinker of red wine, a man keen on seeking adventures and testing novel methods, and a dabbler of Taijutsu, the brown haired shinobi was compelled to find out for himself, what exactly he might be able to achieve if he were to try his own hand at the art of the Drunken Fist. Ever the pacifist, his plan was simple. He would go out far into the desert on foot, and venture out as far as possible, while the Sun was still up in the desert sky. He would carry with him an ample amount of wine, but no water whatsoever. When the Sun eventually sets and the sky turns dark, he would turn around and walk back to the village. If he reaches the same bar he was at earlier before the Sun rises halfway to directly overhead for the second time, he had passed. Perceiving this plan as a profound and God given thought, he had stood up behind the counter, towering over the bartender and the two youth behind him who were discussing the Drunken Fist. Buying as much wine as he could buy, and possibly a little more than he could afford, "I will go East!" he had declared, baffling the others in the bar with him as no one had asked. "I know you're in there. Witness me. Witness me. Witness me!" He muttered shortly after under his breath as he began his journey from the bar and started his trek going slowly East, towards the rising Sun.

Fast forward to the present, Jupiter treaded slowly on the soft desert sand. From a distance far reaching into the outskirts of the desert, the sound of a newborn baby wailing would grow louder and louder, and higher in pitch from all directions with every step. The unbearable cry would grow louder and louder, until the sound of desert winds was no longer audible over it. The shrill, sharp screeching sound would cause Jupiter to pause for a moment and look around - to find nothing but miles of sand in all directions around him. "A baby? No, I must be hallucinating.... Are you there?" He spoke under his breath in a dry, raspy voice to himself as he kept walking forward, maintaining the same pace though his bronzed face showed all the signs of exhaustion. The sweat on his brow dripped as he walked, his plump purple lips were cracked like fissures in the sand and his breath was loud, uncontrolled and heavy. As he walked, pebbles around his feet seemed to morph into countless little dark cockroaches. The ones with the long legs. Jupiter winced and rubbed his eyes as he kept treading, kicking away his visions of cockroaches with his feet and waving his hand in front of him as some of them took flight. One of them seemed to pass through the wound on his hand. And another. And another. and another. Trying to smack another, his forearm went right through the envisioned insect. "I knew it, they're not real.. It's all in my head. The heat, it's messing with me." He assured himself as he cracked a grin, feeling as though his perception allowed him to flawlessly see right through the mirage in front of him. As he walked, from specks of dust around him in the air formed a massive swarm of mosquitoes, buzzing all around him, and they seemed to sting him, this time he could vividly feel the pain from every sting, but there was not a speck of blood that spilled from his body, yet. Walking onward, the shinobi broke into a loud, erratic and manic laughter, and cracked open another bottle of red wine, diabolically chugging half of it in one go as he carried on unfazed - his visions of mosquitoes, cockroaches and the wailing baby all having failed to cease at all. "I can do all things.." He declared as he walked in a straight line, relentless in his strife. 

 The dry incessant heat had greatly disoriented Jupiter's sense of the passing of time. The Sun seemed to fill the entirety of the sky, and the horizon in every direction, making it impossible to decipher what stage of the day it was. The vivid hallucinations of mosquitoes, cockroaches and shrill screeching babies had now dulled down. The same horrific hallucinations recurred in the shinobi's mind with the same intensity, but he was now less sensitive to their effects. In his conscious mind, the dust was once again dust alone. The persistent shinobi wore a solemn, unfazed expression on his face, looking visibly numb. Right then, his face would be stroked by a cool gentle breeze. And another. And another. And another. Soon, he was in an oasis. Patches of vegetation lay scattered in front of him, around a large pond. Within it, floated a bouquet of lotuses big enough to step on.  The barrage of cool winds would continue while he peered inside to find a school of vividly colored fish swimming back and forth in a figure eight pattern. His pupils were dilated as he reached into the pond with his right hand - as though his limb was moving on its own. In a swift swipe, the shinobi snatched one of the colorful specimen right from the water, gripping it tight in his balled fist. He stared intensely at the prey in his grip and wiped the sweat off of his brow. Leaning in, he stuck his tongue out and licked the fish from its snout to its tail. The tip of his tongue slithered over its gills - which he would find out were actually quite sharp. He winced as they cut his tongue, and the fish slipped out from his grip and hopped out back into the pond. Jupiter reached out to grab it again, but found that there was no pond there at all. He was now staring at a pit of sand. None of the other fish were to be found. A few feet away, he heard a loud, distinct croak. There it was, a large toad with the very same colors of jade, cyan and turquoise as the specimen he had cleaned with his tongue just moments prior. "What the fuck..." Jupiter croaked, wiping his tongue with his hands getting sand on it before spitting out and coughing. He gagged but he could not puke. The fresh breeze that he had felt earlier was now pelting him with sharp grains of sand from all sides. He turned his sore eyes upwards at a forty five degree angle, and there it was. Several dust storms converging together at an odd fixed point in the sky, coming together from impossible angles. The grains formed the shape of an enormous skull with two long horns protruding from above its ears. He could hear it. It was laughing down in a deep loud thundering voice at the slipping shinobi. He could hear the laughter ringing in his bones. "So you've come." Jupiter looked up at the horned skull of sand in the sky, but there was no response. Jupiter exhaled sharply from his nose and poured what was left of his second bottle of red wine down his throat, regurgitating to chew and swallow it twice, making sure he got all of it. "Get out of my way. I must go East till sundown."

Jupiter locked eyes with the horned sand devil, whom he believed to be a manifestation of Jashin in the third dimension. The God of Death and Destruction had been haunting Jupiter for most of his life, which did not help him eliminate his drinking problem. Within his short lifespan, Jupiter had witnessed the various powers of Jashin firsthand. The God of Death had appeared to him in many forms and tormented him, held him captive, and he had even once banished him to hell. Ever the realist, Jupiter was a believer in what he could see, hear, and experience. The skull opened its mouth to reveal an endless pit of darkness, and from within, stuck out a thick tongue of sand with a silhouette of a lean muscular man, about the same height as Jupiter, who was stood on the tongue, being showered in endless sand. From the open mouth, an endless scream would ring without cessation. All the shinobi could do was stare in awe. As the sand spilled onto and from the silhouette's head from the roof of the skull's mouth, to the silhoutte's feet, his face was revealed. He had the very same face as the shinobi that was facing him - except, half of his face was torn off, exposing his skull. As the rest of his body unsheathed from behind the sand, half of his ribs would be revealed - his bones sticking out. His skin melted into a gross, gooey mould and washed away into the piling sand. One of his arms was concealed by the teeth of the sand skull. He lifted the other arm up towards the shinobi - his arm was ripped up, bones showing on his fingers and forearm. Jupiter was unfazed for almost every step of the spectacle, but for a brief moment as he locked eyes with himself, a thought about the feeling of fear escaped his mind, and it showed on his face for but a split second. Almost immediately, the massive skull of sand crashed down on the disfigured version of Jupiter - who would turn into a devilish apparition of a black silhouette with white tribal paintings marking his bones for a brief moment, just long enough for the shinobi to catch a subtle glimpse - pelting his skin making him bleed before the massive weight of the sand would borrow a hole in the ground and take the massive sandy horned skull along with it. A deep haunting howl would follow as the sand swallowed the massive spectacle back into the ground. Watching on, Jupiter's scars opened up with identical cuts, his skin seemingly pierced by sand but physically, visibly untouched by any physical object except for the blood that spilled out from his own body and spewed. And spewed. And spewed. He groaned and looked at his hands - to find blood, all over them both. The smell and sight of blood heightened his senses - he could even taste it - before the crushing weight of the sand that crushed his voodoo doll would translate into the same force coming down from above on Jupiter, and with the enormous weight, he was forced to get down on his knees. Around him, the edges of a pit of sand began to form as his feet sunk into the ground below. His vision blurred as he fixed his gaze on the blood all over his immobilized body, looking at his hands and the 'red' that filled his vision until he blacked out, losing his awareness of both his thoughts and his body.  

A tall young man with blood on his ripped bronzed body dragged a large beast by its jaw through the sand in the deserts of Sunagakure. His eyes were fixed straight ahead and into the horizon, his pace was constant without any signs of slowing down. His face and body were bruised and cut. The Sun was still ever shining in the sky - its bright luminosity disguised its position making it impossible to decipher the time of day just by looking. With his free hand, he carried bottles of red wine in a white cloth sack on a wooden stick. Upon looking down at the frothing mouth of the beast, the man stopped in his tracks. "A polar bear? In the desert? That is polarizing.." Jupiter was talking to himself to remain sane during his long journey through the scorching heat. He leaned down on one knee and placed two fingers on the bear's neck to check its pulse. "Oh, it's dead, it's dead, it's dead.." Just as he uttered these words, he would see the animal blood on the beast's neck, and he was startled.  There were three holes in its skull, one going right through the roof of its mouth. The very next moment, Jupiter would be laying on his back, looking up at a familiar apparition. It was himself. Not just any version of himself, but the very same version he once saw in the mouth of a skull of sand in the desert - fractured and in places without skin or flesh. "Good job." The apparition spoke down at him, "You're dead." It spoke once but he heard its voice thrice - "You're dead, you're dead, you're dead." - and as soon as he sat up, the apparition was no longer present in the pit with him. He looked around but it had left no visible trace of it ever being there at all. He shuddered, and looked up to see that he was now underground. There was no sign of the sky, and sand fell down into the pit like waterfalls. Next to him, his wine was safe in the glass bottles he packed in his white cloth sack - the sand had broken the fall. Cautiously, he took a bottle from the stash and stood up, and stepped forward, wandering into the abyss carrying the rest of his wine on the stick over his back. He chugged as he kept walking towards a light emanating from a tunnel ahead. As he marched, innumerous voices around him chanted in unison but he could not quite make out where the voices were coming from, or who was chanting, "You have arrived, you have arrived, you have arrived."

As Jupiter approached the tunnel and passed through, icy winds would blow in his direction, until their frigidity would freeze droplets of ice on the stick that he carried on his back. Alarmed, he would appear baffled as he checked his hands once again, to see blood rushing to his palms. His cuts from earlier had already clotted, but now he was in danger of catching a frostbite. "Is this.. Genjutsu..?" He gritted his teeth, augmenting the robe around his waist to cover his upper body as well to adapt to the cold. Looking down below, his wooden sandals were now planted on a thin block of ice in a body of water. As soon as he noticed, the block would slightly tilt, causing him to instinctively leap laterally to land on a thicker block of ice, to find that he was now on the thickest block in the vicinity, his sandals dug deep into thick slippery white snow. Above, there was no sign of the Sun, but it looked as though it was daytime and the sky was light blue, pristine and clear. His jaw dropped when he looked further ahead to find an imposing, 3 meter tall polar bear about ten meters ahead, its eyes fixed in his direction. On its furry white back were three steel arrows, lodged deep into its flesh. It roared loudly at the baffled shinobi, causing him to tense up and clutch onto his waving robe. The bear stepped gracefully with its heavy paws, moving slightly to the side as it approached Jupiter, sizing him up. The shinobi would instinctively back off at first, but then move laterally in the opposite direction, carefully watching the beast's movements. It was aggressive - he could tell. "I don't want to hurt you." He spoke slowly, with a calm but cautious demeanor. The base of his wooden sandals slipped against the ice as he waved his arms by his sides to regain his balance. The bear was not amused. With an unbridled, impressive leap forward to close the distance, the massive furry beast swiped its right claw down at the shinobi's face.

In his attempt to dodge the lethal blow, Jupiter stepped laterally, but his sandal would slip once again on the ice below him, exposing one side of his face to the massive, sharp claw of the swiping bear as it came down and ripped the skin and flesh of half of his face right off of his skull. Blood spewed from the side of his face as he made his leap sideways, carrying his sack on his back, looking at the bear from his good eye as his other had been badly compromised with the wicked blow that he had endured. He touched his face as he leapt, looking at the fragments of his own face that had been torn off as they scattered into the ice. Landing a few feet away from the bear, he set his sack of wine on the ice below. Blood dripped freely into the ice from his skull as he held his face, looking down. "Good grief.." He exhaled and let out a deep disgruntled sigh before he picked up and downed the rest of the bottle that he had cracked open before he passed through the tunnel. "Come on then, motherfucker." He slurred at the bear, taking his stance. At this point, he was sufficiently drunk. The world around him spun, and so did his perception of his own body's configuration within the third dimensional space around it. He struggled to trace the position of his own limbs as he placed his left forearm in front of his stomach, and clenched his right fist, raising it up and forward in the direction of the beast. Yet, when he took his stance, his struggle seemed careful and deliberate. The man uncharacteristically smiled from ear to ear, wearing a look of insatiable bloodlust on his scarred, disfigured face.

The bear launched its massive muscular body forward, charging at the shinobi in its attempt to overwhelm him with brute force. Jupiter turned his body to evade its swiping claw before striking its snout with his sharp right elbow and even followed up with a quick swift uppercut with his clenched left fist to strike its snout a second time. As the beast threw its weight downwards to pin Jupiter to the ice, he skipped to the side to evade its slam. Before it could get back up, the drunken shinobi was now quick enough to launch his body feet first at the bear's skull, striking its snout again with the heels of both his feet to deliver a brutal double kick - the rest of his body grazing against the bear as he took flight away into the ice, sliding on it, creating distance between himself and the bear after his kick. He landed on the floor on his stomach. There, he waited on his stomach,  looking up at the bear with the what was left of his face patiently waiting for his next opportunity to strike. The taste of blood was mixed in with the after taste of the diabolic amount of wine that he had already consumed. The massive beast leapt forward, beelining for a second time at the shinobi who struck him so fiercely on his snout.

As the penumbra of the shadow of the bear touched his own, Jupiter rolled to the side and lifted his body up upside down finding himself in a one handed handstand - planting his right hand on the cold ice below. He was too drunk and rushed with adrenaline to feel the freezing ice prickling his palm. Next to him, a pocket-sized opening between him and the bear allowed him to spin forcefully to strike the beast once again with two quick hard successive kicks, one after the other, the second knocking the bear down in the direction of his kick - cutting its face wide open. The shinobi landed on both his hands and his feet, with his back towards the ground and his hips thrust up towards the sky, looking at the bear from below with his upside-down face - his long flowing hair resting on the ice. Like a spider, he crawled nimbly, laterally and then towards the knocked down bear with an uncanny quickness, still on his feet and hands and upside down. He licked his lips with the same bloodlust visible on his face from before. He could hear the beating heart of the bear, and smell the blood that he spilled with his kick. The bear stared back, growling with its gritted fangs visibly shaking under its bleeding snout.

The bear roared before it got up, signalling its move to the shinobi, who managed to spin out of the way with his skull in the same place in space, striking the bear from below with a deliberate sweeping kick, knocking it back down on its other side. Visibly overcome by his excitement and enthusiasm for the bloody fighting that was taking place, Jupiter straddled the polar bear, and grabbed its throat with his left hand, trying to choke it out while he mercilessly battered its skull with his clenched right fist over and over, laughing manically. The bear roared under him before easily tearing off half of the flesh on his back with its claw, from under him, exposing his ribs, causing Jupiter to flinch and cough up blood before falling over next to the beast. In an unsurprising turn of events, the bear was quickly on top of the man that straddled it, and the shinobi coughed up more blood while cowering, tucking what was left of his head behind his elbows as the beast roared and clamped its fangs down over and over. He managed to avoid the most lethal of the beast's swipes with his speed and his drunken grace, but he was losing blood quickly - and with every moment, another mass of his flesh was getting ripped right out of his bones by the menacing claws of the furious beast. It was looking bleak for the shinobi. "You got a little ahead of yourself, didn't you?" A deep dark voice rang in his bones. Fighting for his life, Jupiter yelled out and stopped cowering. "Witness me!" He dared to grab the beast's jaws with both his hands - shoving both hands right into the mouth of the beast. Its teeth scraped against his forearms as he exerted force against the clamping jaw of the beast in both directions, his legs wrapped around the bear's neck to keep it from getting away. Holding its upper jaw in place, he used all of his strength to pull down at its lower jaw, pulling them apart until its deadly lower jaw snapped out of its socket. In its struggle, the beast wailed and picked the shinobi up and slammed him down into the ice, this time breaking it, causing the two to dive deep into the icy cold water below.

"The wine!" Jupiter wailed as he was dragged into the water. Gritting his teeth, he kept pushing the jaw of the bear both up and down as they wrestled in the water, causing water to go down the beast's throat, entering its windpipe and its lungs. He was now trying to drown the bear, tightening his clasp on its throat with his legs as he clawed at its snout. The two spun and struggled all the way down to the sandy bed of the icy cold water. As the water washed their blood away, the bear was unconscious. Jupiter broke free, looking down at the bleeding bear on the seabed. He descended to the bed next to the bear and took out one of the three arrows on its back, gripping it tight. Grinning wide as ever, he impaled the bear in the throat with the arrow. "Die!" Laughing manically underwater, he pulled out the two other arrows and pierced the bear two more times through its skull, ensuring that it was indeed dead. "Die, die, die!" He kept spiking the bear with the last arrow, disfiguring its face into bits and pieces, unbridled and unrestrained in his rampant thrusts of the arrow, growing more and more ecstatic with every stab. As the young scarred shinobi mercilessly carried out his brutal execution of the beast that had attacked him, the water around him started to lift up from the ocean into the sky, turning into vapor, blowing away like dust storms in the desert. As he kept stabbing the corpse of the bear, the sand below sunk even deeper into the ocean floor, flowing like a waterfall into the abyss below. Jupiter was still unconscious in his sadistic indulgence to the point that he was not even fazed by the bizarre events taking place above and below him. Left with nowhere to go, the shinobi and the bear remained on the seabed while the sand engulfed the both of them. 

Above ground, grains of sand lifted up from their bases to the air. Dust storms came together from impossible angles. Dense at some points, more spaced out in some spaces, the particles came together to form the shape of a massive skull with two long horns protruding from above its ears. A deep endless howl thundered over the sound of the sandy winds. Suddenly, there was light. Jupiter was standing in a shelter of sand, under the roof of the mouth of the sandy skull, on a dune that formed its tongue. On his body, sand flowed from his head to his toes. Looking ahead, he saw a shinobi coming towards him. In his own fist, Jupiter clenched the jaw of the bear that he had slaughtered. Bewildered, he opened his mouth but he was unable to speak. Looking on, he recognized the shinobi wearing the clear, unscarred face which was none other than his very own. His pupils dilated as he quietly gasped, though his gasp would go unheard in the endless humming wail of the sand devil around him. He reached out with his spare arm, trying to warn the shinobi. "Turn around. Turn around. Turn around." He spoke, but he would go unheard in the louder, deafening hum around him. The shinobi locked eyes with him, and then the tomb of sand around Jupiter collapsed, showering him with the rest of the sand from above.

As the sand collapsed into the ground below, Jupiter emerged from within, still clutching the jaw of the beast he had slain. Looking at his hand - it was no longer torn up. He touched his face, and his bones were now tucked behind his flesh and skin, untouched. His scars from his childhood were still present on his body, like the gaping holes in his hands, but all the injuries caused to him by the bear in his grip just moments prior were entirely removed - it was as though that brutal fight in the snow and the sea had never happened. He looked ahead to see no sign of the shinobi that had previously come trekking his way. He stumbled forward, and saw his wine, neatly wrapped in the same white sack on his stick, on the sand next to his feet. He bent down to pick it up before he looked up to see the Sun, visibly starting to descend West, but it had a long way to go. Turning around to face East again, his senses numbed as he took the first step, dragging the bear as proof of his experience, while struggling desperately to try and understand the experience that he had just had.

His recollection of his encounter and the events that had just taken place were beginning to get jumbled. The thin veil between what was real, and what was a hallucination, had been lost to him somewhere along his journey in the desert. Dragging a beast through the sand, struggling to remember why he needed the carcass, he paused in his tracks to try and remember - to see if he could accurately piece together the events that had transpired leading up to this point in his quest. Looking down at his fist, still clutching the jaw of a dead wild animal with a balled fist, he got down on one knee to examine the creature. "A polar bear? In the desert? That is polarizing.." He said out loud and leaned down to check its pulse. "It's dead! It's dead! It's dead!" He could hear an ominous voice chanting all around him as he checked. He looked around, but there was nothing but sand all around him in every direction. As he looked on, the white fur on the deceased animal turned sandy brown, before turning into grains of sand and dust, and dissipating into the earth and into the wind before his eyes. "Oh.. It was a grisly bear."  Jupiter tried to hold onto his grip on reality as he got back up on two feet, clutching the stick on his sack. He looked up once again into the sky to confirm that he was indeed still walking East, but now it was pitch black. The crescent moon shone its silver light on the desert dunes, making the sand and the dust look like ashes and smoke. There was no sign of the Sun.

Claiming: 

+33 str

+22 speed

Drunken Fist (2500/5500)

Jotun Grip (B) (4000/5500)

Block (5500/5500)