It was a weak, unhealthy throb of Prana, a death-star that was bringing them to the centre of the Howling Peaks. The air became thin, sharp with a cold that penetrated beyond the temperature, it was a cold that percolated into the spirit and sucked the warm out of body and aura. The golden cloak that Naruto had worn, and which was normally a raving inferno of power, was flickering as though it was attempting to breathe. The cold face of Sasuke was sculpted out of ice. The bio-armor in Sakura could be heard whirring and the internal heaters were overworking.
It is coming out of that valley I said, and the signal is coming from that valley, and the breath of the signal plumes in the air, and it is a holographic map that I see fluttering on my gauntlet. "But the readings are... chaotic. It is as though the Prana there were being shredded.
They reached a ridge, and the view below took the breath out of their bodies.
It was some little mountain village, and between the sheltering arms of two glaciers. Or it had been. It was an icy nightmare scene now. The ice was prismatic and jet-black; it covered houses, trees and even the air. The silhouettes of villagers flying in the middle of the air were trapped there as insects in the amber. No life, no movement, no sound. It was nothing, just an immense, and gulp- swallow silence.
"What... what is this?" What is that, you utter, it is horrible, I am going to choke, said Naruto, and his voice was cracking with a horror that had nothing to do with the cold.
A message, Sasuke replied, and his Ultra Sharingan Instinct was already surveyed of the surroundings, cutting the energy into slices. "And a trap."
The trap was sprung with grace of the alien manner.
The shadows on their feet, the pale sun casting them on the snow, were not within their movement. Rather, they combined, intensified and ascended. A figure thus streamed out of the great depths of darkness--to begin with a pillar of black water, and hardening into a sort of semi-transluent ice and solidified shadow. Janebasame was a man with ice purple eyes which curled like diminutive galaxies, and clawed hands with prismatic shards at their tips.
He did not speak. He simply raised a hand.
The world erupted.
Staunchesworthy black ice sprouts out of the ground below them. Not only on one side, but out of the dark places between rocks, the dark sides of their own footprint. Naruto and Sasuke fly into action a golden and blue streak respectively, destroying the projectiles. Sakura threw a barrage of BurstCapsules and the explosions thinned the ice away in concussive fore waves of pink energy.
But the battle-field was Janebasame. His body melted down in a matter of a heartbeat. When Sasuke was cut by Blaze Fang through his torso, it went through dark liquid that instantly stretched back. Dashing close with a Spirit Rasengan Naruto found himself surrounded by a puddle, to which the blow fell with a harmless boom against the mountain-side beyond where he had been.
He was reappearing behind Sakura, his shape forming itself out of the shadow of her own MedCapsule drone. One of the claws of solid ice swung towards her neck. She just just caught time to bring her forearms across her armor, and the shock hurled her screeching away on a tearing metal.
Sasuke growled, and followed the impossible, flowing motions with his eyes. "Testing our reflexes. Our techniques."
In response, the head of Janebasame tilted. He stared beyond them, to the still dead village. There was a rather artistic interest in his alien eyes.
This time he lifted both hands, and not towards them, but towards the encircled hamlet.
A tidal wave of silent, vast liquid poured out of his body. It was not an assault, it was a revolution. The wave swept the village, and in the places it touched the black ice had hardened, and was filled with an evil violet light. The weak, near-death Prana traces that the sensors of Sakura had made in the lost villagers... flicked out. One by one. Extinguished.
"NO!" Naruto screamed and his presence was flaming like a supernova. Strategy was no longer of interest to him. He threw himself forward, a comet of pure rage, gold.
Janebasame even made no movement to counter. He merely stared at Naruto and the distance between them was closed. There opened a dimensional rift, like a heat haze, before the advancing Saiyan. The fist that Naruto was about to deal Janebasame on the face with had struck a portal that reflected his own destructive power against him. The burst of golden energy threw him falling back to the ground.
Janebasame brought his hands down. The display was over. His test was complete.
He stepped back, and his figure started to dissolve into the shadow which he had blended with, and melted away into the infinity of the twilight of the mountains.
"Stop! You coward!" Naruto screamed and forced himself up out of the snow.
Janebasame hesitated with his half-man half-shadowed form. He was talking to her first time, and his voice was the noise of glaciers melting, hard and remote.
"The storm... devours all."
And then he was gone. The sole testimony he had ever had to its having been there was the cold silence, the mutilated scenery and the village now forever welded in its Frozen Abyss Prison the monument of their failure, and a fearful reminder of the economy which it now confronted.