"An Advanced Bloodline? I've been trying to pull it off for a while now but I've not gone one step further than where I've started at. It might just be that I'm not talented enough for it," Mana replied to Shige's seemingly preposterous proposition. "I've even asked around of other ninja with Advanced Bloodlines and it hasn't really cleared up for me."
"Nonsense!" Shige-H flexed her arm with a cheerful expression. "How many Nature Releases have you picked up on by now?"
"Three…" Mana scratched the back of her elbow, looking away. While she knew that having control over three entire elements in ninjutsu was not a common trait amongst ninja, where many struggled to master one and the more experienced ninja settled on two, somehow this only made her feel worse about it. Almost as if nature dealt a much better hand to her than most and still failed to even begin touching up on her Advanced Bloodline ability.
"And, if memory serves, your Elemental Affinity is Fire Release, right? And yet it was the last Nature Release you've picked up on… That means that you've learned two whole Nature Releases other than the ones you had an affinity for before you've tapped into the right one." Shige-H pointed out. "That's basically unheard of amongst ninja."
"Yeah, I've had a lot of trouble picking up ninjutsu. I've been pretty average in the Academy and even after I've graduated it took me a long time for my ninjutsu to be anything but flash and smoke," Mana shrugged, still failing to find Shige's eyes. "Others seemed to pick up on a handful of ninjutsu techniques, even a few of their Elemental Affinity right out of the gate whereas I've been hanging my head against the wall up until the last days in the Academy."
"But you broke through that wall! Not only did you tear that wall down, but you also did it in style. You've picked up on two whole elements and you didn't let a ridiculous rule like your distaste for jutsu other people created get in the way!" Shige-H raised her hands over her head. This must have been the first time that she has worked so hard to convince someone to let her teach them something as incredible as an Advanced Bloodline.
"Sure, I've had over a dozen jutsu thought up after the Academy, but it took all the way until the finals of the Chuunin Exams for me to polish them. They were just a child's first, smoked pancake in the pan. I couldn't stop myself from nearly getting killed or even worse–getting someone else killed." Mana shrugged it off. She looked down and to the right, tracking an invisible dotted line up to the murky skies as she wondered why she was resisting this much against something she wanted so hard.
Maybe it was just that this is the closest she's ever gotten to professional help in the subject. If this fails–that would seal the deal. That would mean that Mana was officially useless in this department and that an Advanced Bloodline simply wasn't in the cards for her. It wasn't like her genetics were entirely a dead-end. She was, after all, a sensor ninja. Several Nature Releases available to ninja were also part of their genetics as well, at least half as much as talent and hard work was. And yet... An Advanced Bloodline was a gold nugget of a whole other category to those things.
"It doesn't matter, you were barely ten when you worked on those jutsu, of course, they'd be a bit lacking by your current standards! My points still stand, Mana, like it or not–you're crazy talented and you're a hard worker too! The sky's the limit in where you can get. Just because you're not a part of some amazing clan doesn't mean you can't be amazing in your own right. Everyone's born a little amazing in some way. Being born plain is about as unlikely as being born a once-in-a-generation genius. Don't lose faith in yourself and your abilities." Shige reached out to Mana.
"When I've spoken to Mollay-san, he taught me a thing or two on where to start with Advanced Bloodlines. He told me that in order to even begin training an Advanced Bloodline, one must master the composing elements to where using them is like waving your hand. I've been honing my elemental ninjutsu during training but… It just doesn't feel like I'm much further than I've been six months ago." Mana pouted, shutting in on herself.
"That's because you've been doing this all wrong, sister!" Shige-H winked. "Mollay misjudged your abilities. Your fundamentals are already solid and he told you to polish that which is already a work of art. I see that you've been polishing your statue hard enough to chip off its nose, you've lost your confidence, and that's why you can't proceed. You're already way past that stage, Mana. You need to start on the next one."
"The next one?" Mana widened her eyes, failing to close her lips as they continued to hang half-parted, even when her mouth had already closed.
"Yeah, you can train your Nature Releases all you want and it won't amount to anything. You need to visualize what you're trying to accomplish with your Advanced Bloodline, create a concept that molds together two properties of the comprising elements, and then bring it to life. It's a lot easier when you're basing your element on something like Lava–it has the consistency of Earth Release and the blaze of Fire Release, it's easy to visualize so it is the child's play of Advanced Bloodlines to make happen to some shape or form." Shige-H explained.
"I see… Two properties…" Mana muttered, staring down at her hands as she tried to wrap her head around this new hurdle in her way.
"It doesn't have to be just two properties. It's going to be tougher to combine multiple properties though. Just try to look at it this way–you know how to employ fire already. You know how to employ wind too. So, you can just try to imagine what it is like to create heat while you use the widespread range and consistency of the wind to create a scorching airwave and call it Heatwave Release, or something…" Shige-H suggested with an example.
"Hmm… It's going to be tough coming up with a combination that works. Obviously, I will not go for the easy opportunities or steal your idea…" Mana scratched her chin.
"Why is that even a worry you have…?" Shige's eye twitched.
"I'd like to try something out but even if I would pull something off, it would be meaningless unless I can use it in battle. Would you please spar with me again as I try to discover my Advanced Bloodline ability?" Mana clapped her hands together and bowed.
"Sure, I'm not holding back though for those mean bumps you gave me earlier!" Shige-H beamed out an ecstatic smile. "With you working through the creative process in the heat of our sparring, I can finally wail on you and put some of my own licks in!"
Skaven stood atop of a freshly repaired wooden bridge hanging over a dug-out ridge for a little creek to run under it. The entire field around him looked rather barren and also… Quite orderly and militaristic. What with all the trees neatly planted in a perfect square, lined up both vertically and horizontally, but nothing came of them yet. Just sprouts. In a few years, this place might prove a serene retreat, just like it once was.
"I figured I'd find you here," a voice lingered in the air before a light tap of leather boots snuffed it out and a figure in a white coat that encompassed its entire body landed at the southern edge of the bridge. As the man straightened himself out, he fixed his coat a bit. The man's gloved hands brushed through his ivory-colored vest and a black shirt, moving the coat back as preparation for vexatious physical activity that might prove it to be too hot for him otherwise.
"Really? Right where you asked me to come in your love letter or whatever…? What a surprise…" Skaven rolled his eyes as he pulled out an envelope and shook it in front of him before flinging it aside, flapping it onto the surface of the creek, and letting the water carry the envelope away and dissolve it at the same time.
"It's a challenge!" the masked man objected, passionately raising his fist and removing a cowboy-style hat to let his shoulder-long red hair fall over his shoulders. Since the man's beak-shaped mask only covered the top half of his face, his light stubble was available to anyone that cared to admire it. "I challenged you to a one-on-one fight. An honorable duel until one of us can't or doesn't want to go on!"
"You know, I kind of thought it would be one of the Allied Ninja to send this challenge. After all, who else would have the ability to roam freely around the compound while it is at its hottest? I came here to tell them to go fuck themselves in person. Me not recognizing a single feature in you is pretty interesting though, I won't lie…" Skaven rustled his wild, greasy hair while his eyes drew a gulp of vigor that they rarely see. "Fine. If I beat you, you'll tell me who you are and if you have anything to do with the memories that I asked Mana to delete. Something about what that assassin said to me keeps me up at night. I don't remember being a part of the Black Ops and yet… He was really persistent."
"Deal." The masked man nodded and adopted a wide fighting stance, hopping and switching between two legs as to which served as the dominant one while the man held his hands raised to his chest and stretched out just wide enough for this openness to serve as a challenge to lunge toward the open center.
"Humph…" Skaven mumbled before leaning down. "Shadow Clutch Jutsu!" he chanted out as his shadow extended outward, expanding into a goopy mass that then became a large, vertical hand reaching out to grab the mysterious challenger whole.
Even as Skaven saw his shadowy hand grab hold of the man and clutch him like a frightened critter inside. Instead of a pleasant, bony crunch, he heard a loud pop and sifting smoke. The Nara clansman didn't linger on his failed attack, choosing to undo his jutsu to regain full mobility instead. As the hand collapsed like a melting chocolate construct, a lone hat twirled out from its grasp, the object with which the enigmatic challenger substituted himself with.
This challenger showed off a desire not to showcase any of his abilities, which intrigued Skaven, and the Nara punk was not an easy man to intrigue or even interest, for that matter. Most ninja reserved the Substitution Jutsu as their clutch card. Their hidden ace. Substitution was a low-ranking, extremely useful jutsu that any ninja right out of the Academy knew. It was tremendously handy, but it also was only usable once in a while because of the requirement of a specific object to replace oneself with and the strain on one's muscles when skipping and hopping through space to replace oneself with said object.
For this masked dandy to use the Substitution Jutsu right out of the gate, it was an odd fighting style, to say the least.
The sound of fluttering came first. It was an alarm that gave Skaven ample time to backflip and roll aside and avoid the diving kick and the following up flurry of strikes from the attacker. Despite how hefty and awkward this long coat looked and how clunky it must have been to fight with it, the masked man still wore it and the reason soon became apparent to Skaven when the edge of the coat flashed just a tad over his head, splitting a few of his hairs which prompted the Nara to put an even greater width of space between the two dueling ninja.
"If you're going to hold back, why challenge me in the first place?" Skaven groaned while stretching his neck out. "There's no way you became this skilled at taijutsu and this fast by just swatting at people with a blade-tipped coat."
"Well, you've already crumbled my hat." The challenger admitted, adopting a different fighting stance now, placing his right leg forward while he bent his hands by the elbow and held his forearms up, the right one out in the front and ahead of the left one.
"You're no Black Ops, that much is for certain, yet you're going through way too much trouble to hide everything about your true skills and identity. The mystery and suspense are the only things still keeping me here with the disrespect you've shown to me until now," Skaven complained while kneeling on his left leg and preparing to engage his enemy when they would collide again.
"Oh? What gave me away?" the challenger tipped the left side of his lips.
"A Black Ops member would never agree to tell anything about themselves. Black Ops restrain their members with Curse Seals of silence so a Black Ops would have immediately let me know that. Sure, you could make the case that one could have just lied, but if Ion's father was true and I was a Black Ops and you were another agent confronting me about that business, you'd have had no reason not to be honest with me." Skaven pointed out.
"That's a fair point, I'll have to remember this in the future…" the challenger grinned.
"The future?" Skaven wondered, but it was too late. By that point the masked challenger had lunged right at him, chopping and kicking at him, but Skaven's own forearms and calves met his challenger every time with equal force. "Shadow Clone Possession Jutsu!" Skaven chanted out as the version of him that was engaging his challenger bubbled and rustled as if filled with hot air from within.
Alarmed, the masked challenger took it on his back foot but he was too late as the shadow clone sealed with Nara hijutsu burst and created a shadowy blob on the ground that stretched out in a line that cut right past the challenger's shadow until it connected with Skaven's own shadow, right behind the challenger who stood in between Skaven's true self and his shadowy shadow clone. With that chain of shadows intertwining, the masked attacker was completely under Skaven's control.
"You're not going to win if you don't fight seriously, with your actual fighting style. If you want to lose and tell me what I want to know so much, may as well just give up and tell me." Skaven rubbed his neck while rolling his eyes.
"I said… We will fight until… One of us either can't… Or doesn't want to…" the masked challenger growled through the effort required of him to move.
"Suit yourself, man…" Skaven groaned as he dived right up to the masked man and swatted upward with his palm. The Nara's hand was stiff enough to send his opponent off the ground a few meters while Skaven jumped off and spun around, adding a bit more momentum to the flying kick straight to the middle of the enigmatic dandy's spine.
While this aerial attack interrupted the shadow possession, the damage and the rampant nervous impulses in his opponent's spine made the man's movements rather sluggish and imprecise. It was because of that that Skaven rushed in right in front of his fallen opponent and punt him right to the lower chin, which raised the masked man off the ground slightly and prepared him to go all across the peaceful retreat. Skaven added on to this process, however, with a turning butt of his sole to the core of the man's face, which smashed his mask and sent him flying back and crashing through a handful of feeble, young trees.
The Nara dived on his left knee, extending a line of shadowy hands that pushed his fallen opponent off the ground just hard enough to stand him back up while still as wobbly as ever. Using this opportunity, Skaven dashed in for a few more precise chops to the neck and abdomen of his opponent, before he turned around, smacking his opponent in the throat as if his hands and forearms were blades. Cartwheeling back, Skaven flung his stunned opponent off the ground before kneeling on his left and weaving his fingers together.
"Shadow Prison Jutsu!" he yelled out as his signature shadowy bubble surrounded his dazed opponent in mid-air, leaving him suspended and unable to move without expending a grand deal of stamina and wearying his focus to the edge. A focused stream of light penetrated through the shadow as a potent beam but died out soon thereafter. The challenger flopped down on the ground with a busted nose and looked back up at his opponent.
"Not bad. But not quite the best either, was it?" the challenger muttered. A large, scorched hole beamed in the side pocket of his coat, suggesting that it was from within that pocket that this powerful beam of light burst through.
"You've shown it. For a second there. Your true colors." Skaven took a fighting stance again, one mirroring the one that his opponent took the last time. The stance of a taijutsu style taught amongst the Allied Ninja though one native to Kirigakure–the Sharp Palm. A more elegant and deceitful counterpart to Konoha's own Strong Fist style of taijutsu.
This man could have only been an Allied Ninja or an agent of Kirigakure, and he was not an Allied Ninja that Skaven had seen before. As unlikely as it might have seemed for a Kirigakure ninja to have snuck into the Allied Ninja compound at this time, it was a more likely choice compared to there being an Allied Ninja whom Skaven was entirely unfamiliar with, not even with their face. Everything about this masked challenger was an enigma, and it was that detective mystery that kept Skaven engaged through and through.
"The Sharp Palm is an assassination taijutsu style. Yet you use a modified form of it, you're not going for the kill here even though you do not know who I am and I might be dangerous to you and your organization. That is why you lack the properties of what defines the best." The masked challenger claimed.
"From what few moves you showed me, you use the same modified form. That is why we were evenly matched when we first clashed. As long as I have my true fighting style to rely on while you try to conceal yours, I'll always beat you to the punch, though. I have no reason to try to kill you because you pose no threat to either me or the Allied Ninja," Skaven replied as the two prepared to settle their matter.