"So, we've been pushed around by a senior blind guy," Skaven scratched the back of his head, looking visibly distraught. "Makes me feel lousy…"
"Not me, I've got no arms or legs…" Damisan pointed out. "If anything, this fight just proves the value of never giving up, even with a bad hand."
The killer with a face to his impressive gear turned his head, listening in not only on the small-talk that had been occurring in between the beats of the battle but also the subtle signs that betrayed everyone's location. His entire body appeared to be working toward that goal. He was damn good at it too, if the precursor to this moment was a sign of anything.
It was indeed the veteran's own hand that moved first, grabbing hold of one of many scrolls that comprised an impressive belt crossing over his front and back, over the shoulder, and down his chest toward the opposite hip on both sides. As Stars and their summoned allies attacked to interrupt the man, he flicked his hand while holding an end to a scroll, scattering paper sheets that whirled out from the seal drawn onto the scroll he had just revealed.
The paper tags burst with miniature flashes of light, together creating a harmonious blinding wall to which only he himself was immune to. While the Stars and their allies reeled in mid-assault, caught unprepared by this curious technique, the killer drew and brandished his triangular diamond formation shaped sword. A loud and hefty rustling noise met the Stars that cared to listen in. The assassin had removed yet another scroll, though this time he raised his sword over his head while unsealing yet another wave of these paper sheets.
"Hurts, doesn't it? Blindness. Which is worse, the pain and irritation or the fear that follows? Don't worry, this first flash was just to disorient you lot. This one is for real, though. If only the main family had figured out such a humane way of blinding someone when executing judgment upon me," the assassin grunted while weaving a hand seal and forming a turbulent vortex of Wind Release chakra around him, just to guide his seals into an orderly whirlwind formation.
"Stop!" Mana's voice pierced the grueling silence while the Stars worked to overcome their temporary blindness before their enemy could hurt their eyes for real with this curious seal he used.
"Nice try, kid. You've wasted your chance to surrender quietly though, now you and your friends will pay the price," the assassin raised his triple diamond shaped sword over his head to catch the rays of intense flashing and direct them in a way that sealed the temporary blindness in those that caught glimpse of his technique.
A wooden thud snapped the man out of the haze as he tried moving his head out of instinct just to look around and understand what had happened to him. He couldn't see anything, but a subtle noise of dripping water accompanied him from nearby. The screaming and grunting, the cursing of one's cruel fate to end up against a Tailed Beast and the crashing violence, the deadly chaos that the Four-Tails wrought had been absent from the symphony of noises around him. Just eerie silence, the dangling of chains and that accursed, dripping water.
The water rippled in unease, something sharp clacked against its surface. Had the trapped assassin the ability to turn his head to listen in–he'd have done so. No matter. Mana helped him out by speaking before he could reveal that he had put two on top of two already.
"We both know I can't let you do that," Mana stated after stopping in front of an old, black coffin made of solid steel, incrusted in fine silver and covered in a glistening, razor-sharp cross in the middle with the helpless face of her opponent stuck in her illusion looking through the cross' center.
"Auditory tick… You weren't pleading for your lives, you were casting the medium of your genjutsu through noise," the assassin smirked. Even when trapped inside of a steel cage and stuck under layers on top of layers of Mana's highest-ranking illusions, he still looked with that smug expression that challenged Mana to do her worst. A face with the smugness that proclaimed he'd be back no matter how hard he's hit for his vengeance.
"When you spend enough time in hell, it teaches you the futility of begging for your life. That's fine, I'll make every killer like you respect that again in time," Mana calmly replied while chains shot out from underwater and hooked onto the steel coffin, raising it into the air before the magician inside of her illusionary dimension of pitch black and nothing but shallow water stretching out into the dark horizon. It wasn't like her opponent could appreciate the artistry of her illusion. A pity.
"You think you've experienced hell?" the killer smirked. He growled and rumbled, tensing up his body and expelling a burst of chakra from his pores. A sharp shatter of the illusionary dimension collapsing followed. Fresh air hit the assassin's nostrils again as he used the standard dispelling jutsu to escape certain punishment at the hands of one of Konoha's best genjutsu specialists.
He was just in time as Usubane's kick dug into the man's cheek, sending him sliding back while Usuzoku and Usukari blitzed and crisscrossed with one another to slash at the man trying to kill their summoner with the best of his ability from opposite sides. A revolting nails-to-the-blackboard shriek filled the sanctuary of the wounded as both Usukari and Usuzoku slashed with a cross-slash, passing by one another with their enemy caught in between. Their swords dragged across the adamant armor that the assassin donned, damaging the belts where he stored his weaponry and artifacts and leaving the armor scraped and ridged.
Coughing up from the immense pressure of the crossing swords hitting his chest and spine and nearly severing him into two, the assassin still found the strength to roll onward and take a handstand while spinning his still armored legs to deflect a rain of knives from Usuvilme. He had taken Mana up on her challenge, overpowering an A-Rank genjutsu with an ordinary dispelling method, cost an arm and a leg in terms of chakra. It was reckless, but the man had nothing left to be worried or caring for.
Shige-H scrambled up to the grizzled assassin with her Unmaker Fist wound back and ready to unmake either the man or his fancy suit of armor. Wanting exactly nothing to do with this hellish young woman, the blind man took a dive, as if smelling her there, and sent her fumbling in mid-air with a leg sweep. Instead of simply palm-striking or kicking her away, the assassin yanked another scroll from his back, unsealing a street light like a rod from inside him as he pointed it to Shige-H and sent her flying with a singular, pink pulse of chakra emitted from its front end.
Just like that, the killer sealed his gravitational pulse-inducing street light back where he holstered it in to unleash a mad flurry of ninja tools. Focused and on-point, even a masterful combatant wouldn't have been able to aim this well, let alone a blind ninja, then again, a mere masterful combatant would have only had an ounce of concentrated hatred stew that brewed within Ion's father. Shige-H hit the floor a good dozen of kilos heavier from the knives and shuriken sticking out of her while the rest of the washing wave of steel missed her and arced off toward the steep drop to the field of fire and destruction below.
Damisan launched himself with his prosthetic feet, erupting with unsealed chakra jets that carried him across the distance between him and his opponent. The self-puppeteering ninja drove his right hand down with a hammer strike to catch his blind opponent unaware, but the armored assassin spun around his foe, moving in from behind. The assassin vaulted into the air, rolling at the peak of his jump as he pushed both his feet back to stomp at the back of Damisan's head, while the handicapped ninja turned to face his swift opponent, which only made him receive the double stomp to his face.
Swinging his heavy armored arms like hammers in a manner, not unlike that of Damisan's own taijutsu style, the armored killer smacked the top of Damisan's head, cracking his cylinder in a few places before thrusting his foot in a roundhouse kick and repeating the same move twice to send Damisan flying at a nearby rock with enough force to bounce the handicapped ninja off of it while the killer slashed upward with his diamond sword and splattered blood in an arc across the grimy and washed out patches of grass around the place.
Ion's father yanked his arm back, alerting the rest of the rushing Stars to a specific steel wire reeling sound as he hooked Damisan back toward him and jumped up to intercept the wounded ninja again while he vaulted over his front with his sword performing a vertical frontal slash and driving Damisan into the floor. The killer's blade work was second to none, all Stars or animals alike that approached him received dozens of slashes in the blink of an eye, Tomi's elephants staggered back tooting their trunks in pain while the rest grunted and flew back like rag dolls, clutching over their wounds.
The blind killer focused his ire on Damisan, who was left alone to receive it all. The veteran's diamond blade danced and blitzed around, sending shallow splatters of blood around as Damisan's body did its best to augment itself and not permit any deeper wounds. This skill of swordsmanship was unparalleled. Despite being blind, he seemed to easily maneuver a blade even of his own impressive size around Damisan's prosthetic limbs and slash at the man behind them with only moderate effort visible on his face.
"Shadow Tendril!" Skaven yelled out as a black tentacle wrapped around the man's throat and pulled him back, slamming him about before flinging him away from Damisan.
"I can only assume what your assignment here is, ANBU…" the assassin grumbled as he worked toward rising back on his feet. Due to him having already taken a rather mean beat down and still being bogged down by that large suit of armor he needed to survive this grueling clash of fates, he took extra time and panting to do so. "Are you bodyguarding this girl or are you watching over her so that she spills none of Konoha's secrets to the Allied Ninja? If it's the latter, you'd have accomplished your goal by just slitting her throat in the night. Would have saved both of us a heap of work."
"ANBU…?" Skaven grumbled, grabbing hold of his head as something about that insinuation didn't quite sit well with his head, causing quite the pounding inside. "What are you talking about?"
"Humph… Did they mind wipe you or something so that you don't let something slip? You must be quite the reject to be handed such a revolting assignment, and to think that they wiped your mind because your village didn't trust you over something so trivial too." The assassin raised his blade and entered a sword-fighting stance. It took a man of a certain madness to raise his sword so casually while being so certain that he is facing a disguised member of Konoha Black Ops.
"I changed my mind," Skaven smacked his palms together, shuffling out the Nara hijutsu hand seal from a mangled mess of fingers as his shadow extended from underneath him into two separate lines that connected to two separate boulders on each side and enveloped them whole. "I'd rather you stopped talking, Shadow Prison Jutsu!"
Skaven's shadowy lines lifted the two boulders up after drowning them out in shadowy mass and slammed them toward one another, aiming to smash the blind assassin in between the two boulders. Slashes of silver and diamond brightened up the blackened stone as the assassin jumped up and spun his blade around to slice both boulders into a blizzard of mere pebbles before his feet landed on the ground once more. Skaven leaned to the side to avoid a kunai blitzing past his cheek, it flew at a peculiar trajectory, however, dangling down as weight and wrapping a string of steel wire on the other end around the Nara as the assassin pulled him in for a jumping roundhouse kick.
With the disgruntled Nara taking off, the killer's hands became blurry as he unleashed another hail of kunai and shuriken at his floating target. While the ruthless assassin couldn't see the shadow over him from a charging elephant, he could certainly hear the tooting monstrosity approaching which shortened the number of projectiles he meant to stick into his airborne opponent and forced him to grab ahold of his massive sword and swing right at the charging threat. A titanic elephant against a blind and weary man wasn't much of a competition.
Ion's father croaked in pain as he took off the ground, swatted aside by a trunk his own size while Tomi let out a wild chant from atop of her elephant friend and hurled a pair of boomerangs that socked the airborne enemy on their cross front and back before returning to the girl's hands. From up above, Zomiti dived with a boulder in its gigantic hands, smashing from up above to slam the floating assassin with a hammering strike and drill him into the dirt. While it didn't seem like the assassin could avoid getting hit, he manipulated himself in mid-air to direct his feet toward the boulder and let out a blast of base chakra jet from storage seals on his feet that softened the hit somewhat.
Once the dust cleared out and the last remains of the giant boulder slamming down in Zomiti's hands rolled aside, the assassin finally flopped in a more comfortable position compared to the awkward upside-down dangle he landed in. The man caressed the back of his neck while getting back on his feet. His knees shook, and he had to wheeze and pant and grit his teeth to rise back up, but he did so without complaining. He even put his sword back up and challenged the Stars for another round.
The man's armor was a wreck. Detached pieces laid scattered all over the place. What remained had been torn, dented, and totaled. And yet Ion's father pushed through. Ever as determined to see this confrontation through until the end. He'd hurt someone before dying a martyr's death this way. His valiant challenge to the entire Allied Ninja and near-victory would be hailed amongst the black-market clientele. Maybe he even craved it to an extent. For his legacy to be that of what he had created here and not the blunder of his daughter.
"Your daughter was a much more skilled killer than you," Mana's words pierced the grueling silence.
"Don't you dare talk about her," The man warned her.
"You were right earlier–she did everything right. Separated me from everyone, made me feel alone again. She researched the range of my sensory by getting close to those I trained with and took her shot from not one but ten whole paces away from the edge–just to be sure. Ion hit me in a way that'd only take one shot…" Mana kept pushing her luck. She needed to force the man into a very specific challenge. He showed before how reckless he was willing to be when he measured his own chakra pool against Mana's. Maybe he'd be willing to take that gamble again and waste his chakra away in a hopeless dispelling struggle?
"I said, don't talk about her! Not you! Not ever!" the man roared out, dashing right at Mana with his sword swinging wildly in front of him as he meant to decapitate the magician while gliding behind her. Mana's head took off her shoulders before the man's feet touched the ground, but it dissolved into white fluffs. An unintelligible sound came from within the furballs. A sound that made the ninja rabbits gasp and take a step back as it was familiar to them.
"Ji-Ji!" the sound became clearer once the furballs burst open, revealing handfuls upon handfuls of Usujitsa clones in a peculiar illusion. The killer may have been aware of Mana's Flower Petal Sanctuary, but this was something else entirely–a combination of both an illusion, the space-time aspect of substitution, and the summoning technique alike.
"Genjutsu: Rabbit Escape!" Mana's voice rung somewhere away in the distance, gaining a deceitful, multiplying effect while it emanated within the realm of illusion and Usujitsa sent its clones for a suicidal bombardment task. The man weaved a hand seal, exploding in a booming aura of chakra as he attempted to dispel the technique, but this was more than a mere illusion as illusion was but a mere aspect of it. Had the killer's eyes worked, they'd have picked up on Mana's form rippling into his field of vision, but for now, the circumstances left him only with the painful shock of living rabbit bombardment.
When the smoke cleared, there was no longer a single plate connected to another plate. Just a tattered black and red bodysuit loosely hanging from a collapsed masculine shape that was now littered with burns, not unlike the grievous patch of scar tissue across the man's eyes. Using genjutsu against a blind man was a tough challenge, but one Mana enjoyed to an extent. It reminded her of the stage and audience members that proved to be more difficult to impress with each passing show, as she had to get creative to claim their acknowledgment.
All gear was stripped, all plans wrecked. Now it was just a bare-chested man and his skill against the rest of the Stars' willpower. Ion's father proved himself a tough nut to crack, but even if the outer shell cost the Stars a pound of their shell to bust through–they've done so and the battle reached its ultimate stages. With the lives of the entire Allied Ninja corps on the line, failure was simply never an option they entertained.