Kei had no idea how two ninja and three pangolin warriors, one of them the size of a small house, could manage to get close enough to a ship to touch it without being spotted. It didn't say much for the lookout, but it certainly made life easier for her so she wasn't going to complain.

They stayed close, letting the ship dance joyously past them, the water lifted smoothly aside from her hull. Kei checked in with her squadmates by eye; each nodded back. They were ready.

The stern of the ship arrived, a cone of white sea foam spreading behind it. Panjadrum knew his job and needed no orders; he reached out and slammed his claws into the massive rudder, wrenching it to the side with all the power of his enormous frame.

The Racer flipped sideways, showing the top of her keel like a street harlot flashing her panties. The strike team was in motion even before she began to tip; Pankurashun casually tore a hole in the thick planking of the hull and flickered inside to rampage belowdecks.

"Go go go!" Kei shouted as she and Noburi triggered the seals they had carefully attached to the pangolins' heads while waiting for the ship. Fog blasted out, spraying everywhere as the pangolins stormed up and over the ship's railing like twin thunderbolts of destruction.

"There," Noburi whispered, pointing through the opalescent murk. "Big group, standing by the railing. Checking...yes, two of them have ninja reserves."

The world was split by a thundercrack and the momentary smell of ozone almost knocked both genin off their feet as Panjadrum's cry of surprise was cut off mid-note.

Noburi's eyes went wide. "Crap, they just one-shotted the big guy."

Kei resisted the urge to waste time looking up; she could barely see her hand at arm's length, much less the rest of the team on their skywalkers up in the sky. "The others will be here momentarily," she noted with a calm that she was very far from feeling. "We need to contain this situation before then or they will die."

"I'm working on it! Give me a second!"

o-o-o-o​

The wind tore at Hazō's hair as he fell feet-first towards the tiny ship a thousand feet below. He flicked the skywalkers on and off, on and off, absorbing each impact with his knees and slowing his fall just enough that he wouldn't be killed when he finally landed. Akane plunged beside him, whooping joyously as she fell. Kagome kept pace just above them, his blast rings already extended and a fierce expression on his face. Behind all of them, Minami shrieked a most un-chūnin-like "aaaaaaiiiieeeeeee!" Hazō put her out of his thoughts; let her deal with her own fear of heights. She had made this bed but he and the team were the ones who had to lie in it. If she had to endure some pants-wetting terror, good.

He was only about a hundred feet up now and, as expected, the ship had vanished into a temporary cloud. Keiko and the rest of the assault team had triggered half a dozen misterators, covering the entire area in a fog thick enough to chew. That left the question: try to land on the ship and risk breaking a leg by hitting earlier than he expected, or land on the water outside the cloud and spend precious seconds getting to the ship?

An ear-shattering blast of thunder splitting the air, a massive flash of lightning momentarily turning the ship-sized cloud into a spill of diamonds, and Panjandrum's basso profundo scream cutting off in the middle decided him. He aimed for the center of the cloud and pulsed his skywalkers more rapidly, running down the air like a set of stairs.

As expected, the ship came up faster than expected. First there was nothing but damp whiteness and then suddenly there was rough-grained wooden decking. He turned his run into a tumble, rolling across the deck to absorb the impact. The tumble became a sprawl when he slammed into a cluster of unconscious sailors. He scrambled to push himself back to his feet, stumbling and staggering awkwardly across the carpet of bodies until he could catch his balance.

"Hey, everybody! Team Uplift and Pangolins rule, yakuza drool! Stand down!" Noburi shouted. "Everyone's down. Pankurashun is at the front of the ship coming this way, everyone else aboard is unconscious or dead. Just hold on, the mist should clear off soon."

Hazō crouched down, looking around carefully. The rule/drool codephrase was juvenile but it was the expected authentication, so that probably wasn't an impostor. Still, it was always possible that Noburi could be wrong about what was out there. There could be something dangerous in the fog that he couldn't sense, or that he misinterpreted. Best to be careful.

Slowly, the sea breeze carried off the fog, revealing the wreckage of their battle. The deck of the Sunset Racer was demolished, planks and deck-level rigging torn up or smoldering. Unmoving bodies were littered around, as well as wide-sprayed red slush that had probably been a few more bodies at some point in the past.

Minami, Akane, and Kagome were a few yards away, clearly having landed more gracefully than he had. Panjadrum was gone and Pankurashun was apparently still belowdecks. Panchipāma stood near the largest pile of bodies, glaring down at the unmoving forms of what were undoubtedly Goda's flash girls. The pangolin brawler was covered in blood and gore, her chest heaving and claws reflexively clicking open and shut as she surveyed her downed opponents. Hazō watched as she deliberately pulled her foot back and booted one of the unconscious flash girls in the ribs, then turned away with a grunt of discontent.

A foot deliberately scuffing on decking pulled Hazō's gaze over to where Noburi and Keiko were clambering over the ship's railing. Noburi flourished an overdone bow towards Minami and gestured broadly.

"My dear Captain Minami," he said gradiosely, "I give you the more-or-less intact Sunset Racer, as well as her mostly-still-living crew and passengers. None of whom had the time to see our faces, or anything more than a pair of giant chakra monsters wrapped in fog. I'm pretty sure that's Goda there."

Minami was distracted, looking around at the carpet of slow-breathing bodies. "This went way smoother than I expected," she said.

Noburi shrugged. "We aim to please. So, Keiko and I can pick up Goda if you want to start killing everyone. Are you going to stab them each in the face, drown them, or what?"

Minami's eyes narrowed. "What did you say?"

Hazō hurried to interject. "I think what Noburi meant was that the battle is over and he's confirmed that there's no conscious people aboard except for us. What are your orders?"

"Indeed," Pankurashun said calmly, climbing up through a deck hatch and walking slowly towards them while stepping delicately around the fallen humans. "It is said among the pangolin that the true measure of a commander is not what happens during the battle, but what happens afterwards. I will be interested to hear how a human leader deals with captives after a politically-significant battle such as this."

Minami looked around at her theoretical subordinates. The Cold Stone Killers, now augmented by lethal killing machines from another universe, waited with expressions of calm politeness to see if she would order a massacre. She had no idea what they would do if she did, and even less idea what they would do if she didn't.