Kiyomi clenched her kunai blade tightly. Her body ached from the little bruises she got from being thrown around by a compact yet immensely powerful explosion. Whatever that combination was – it was made to kill ninja. Crafted to overload a small area with awesome explosive power, created to exploit the moment of a downed guard. An exploitative measure.
"Mana?" the Yamanaka uttered, her voice was too weak to reach anyone in the thick forest surrounding her and the slowly burning inn behind her. Kiyomi was too worried about her friend's well-being to have her voice listen to her commands.
The only reason her friend even got involved in this was that the blonde was so desperate to kill those that placed a bounty on her head herself, as well as those that came to cash in. She was no lousy target for anyone to put a price on, she was someone who wanted nothing more but to punish people like those that put a price on her head and those that allowed their moral norms to be suspended indefinitely just after seeing a bunch of zeroes with a ryo mark close to them.
Still, even if Kiyomi didn't see her fault in all of this she felt bad, she felt like Mana's disappearance was somehow on her. The absurdity of it all only added to her anger, her desperation. She was a cornered animal who was both afraid and angry at the same time. Maybe that was why this assassin didn't dare show their face?
Kiyomi turned aside to avoid a kunai thrown at her from a dark upper layer of trees, the firelight danced on the steel blade's surface giving her a visual cue, the Yamanaka knew how this technique worked, it was just like before. She had seen an Uchiha teammate of hers use such a technique in the past. It was supposed to be one of their signature Fire Release techniques.
The blonde grabbed at a point slightly further away, farther from the tip of the kunai grabbing hold of steel wire and with a confident smile she wrapped it around her arm. Concentrating all of her anger and feelings she yanked the steel wire augmenting her palm so that the steel wire didn't cut into her flesh opening up grievous wounds. With that gut-wrenching sound of reeling string, a figure flew out from the trees flying straight at her.
Kiyomi made her set of hand seals, her speed has improved enough to allow her to perform several hand seals fast enough for the yanked ragdoll of an opponent to reach her.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!" she chanted out releasing a powerful gust of wind blasting straight in the assailant's face in concussive force strong enough to dent even the toughest steel or that with chakra augmentations inferior to the strength of the technique. A loud bang sound made anyone in the nearest vicinity want to cover their ears, the sound of concussive force from the gust of wind blasting the enemy away with enough force to grind toughest minerals of the mountains into dust hit the armor of the bounty hunter.
"Die!" a cybernetic sounding voice, edited through artificial sound enhancers, without a doubt came from the attacker's body. Kiyomi realized too late that it was too easy – why would she get attacked from the front? Why would the attacker maintain hold of the kunai string if it got caught? The bounty hunter made too many amateur mistakes to be forgiven, they must've been made on purpose to lure her in.
Only then did Kiyomi's lagging perception notice that her gust of wind wasn't blowing at the assassin's face or chest – he had lifted his knees and pressed them against his chest slamming into the wall of concussive winds with his boots. The bounty hunter pressed against a specific trigger on his boots making a crimson sealing symbol light up on his boots.
A powerful deafening explosion sent Kiyomi and her attacker away. The bounty hunter had sealed a Fire Release technique into his boots to use as a make-shift jetpack, by unleashing it right at the last moment when his boots hit the powerful Wind Release ninjutsu technique the bounty hunter ensured a volatile chain reaction – one he must've felt like his armor could withstand whereas the light treads of the Yamanaka heiress would not.
The bounty hunter stumbled back on his feet, the blow really hit his armor, it shook his body inside of it like canned meat inside its container. Screeching noises and bleeding ears, dizzy head and lack of balance, blurry vision – all of those things were battlefield reality, one the man had been used to already. In the brief patch of clearing smoke, the man saw his prize – the unconscious Yamanaka heiress, her clothes torn up suggesting that her chakra augmentations were pierced through, her face half singed.
The bounty hunter didn't rush, he examined his own armor before activating wrist blades that extended into claw-like triple blades, two from the upper wrist and one from the lower wrist. Calmly the assassin approached his knocked out prey examining her face, he needed no confirmation, even if half of this young woman's face was peeled off to the bone and burnt off – she was Yamanaka Kiyomi, a face he had plenty chances to commit into his memory, like a torturer's blade cutting that dreadful image of deceitful beauty into his brain.
The bounty hunter thrust his blade piercing nothing but air as the unconscious young woman disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Before the assassin got a chance to react, the ground beneath the dummy's previous location split open allowing Kiyomi to leap out.
"Earth Style: Hiding Like a Mole Jutsu!" she yelled out giving the man an uppercut after revealing herself having performed an elementary Earth Release technique – shifting the dirt beneath her feet to become light and shifting like quicksand until it swallowed her up – allowing her to leave a disguised as unconscious clone of hers behind.
The bounty hunters upper body continued to commit to his previous stab, now clearly aware of the fact that he overcommitted to what was supposed to be the execution move. The girl's attack was clever, it preyed on him overcommitting and opening himself for her counterattack – the moment right before the finishing strike was when the winner was the most vulnerable. However, he was taught better than to let this young woman bully him around like that...
The bounty hunter's body kept moving, shifting his weight and lowering his head, turning around her uppercut and delivering a swift spinning ground kick while throwing his free hand forward and slamming it against the ground for support – else his supporting leg would've snapped from the force and the weight placed on it by such a risky and very exotic martial arts maneuver.
Kiyomi grunted as she was tossed back and slid back before tumbling down into the same drag marks she left before.
She was surprised by this game of chess. This bounty hunter was incredibly skilled, she had underestimated just how crafty the people coming after her may have been. She expected bandits, lowly thugs too dumb to take the hook and pissing off one of the most influential and powerful clans in Konoha, scratch that – the world. Even in Kirigakure, the Yamanaka clan branches were in most councils and seats of power, what little power the village still kept to itself or salvaged after its fiasco. No bounty hunter with enough brain to be a challenge should've taken this job!
A good fifty meters farther from the young lady, the bounty hunter was scolding himself for appearing to his prey. He underestimated her in his hatred for the young woman, he reveled in how much he was taught since the two had last met, back when he was but a fledgling kitten, unable to hunt even a sickly little bird. Now he was trained by the real deal, he was supposed to be better than this, better than to assume such a tremendous gap in the skill between the two.
The bounty hunter's visor initiated, a bunch of numbers ran down displaying his prey's stats, the rough estimation of the rank of her leaking out chakra, analyzing her fighting stance and suggesting a possible angle of attack. Searching information from the database to display on the Yamanaka clan, their techniques and how they could have been combatted.
The girl's breathing was irregular, her heartbeat very intense – she was afraid, she was tired by the sudden outburst of action right after a moment of peace. A lot of ninja knew how to fight for days on end but only if the strain was stable and balanced out, many hatchlings fell for the strain if it came suddenly and overtaxed their abilities all at once. Or maybe she was worried about her friend? Maybe disobeying the professional ethics of his order and taking the girl's life would've been the right thing to do – before his visor suggested that there should've been no one in the second floor, no one else but these two. Maybe had he showed this Yamanaka the head of her comrade she'd have lost her sanity and ran head first into a trap?
No. His order and his teachings did not kill those that they were not paid to kill. To kill someone whom he wasn't supposed to kill was to take away the potential business offer. What if that oddly dressed dark skinned girl was someone of profound worth in the future? What if her own bounty grows to make for an exciting hunt in the future? If he killed her here his superiors would be disappointed in him, his training would end prematurely and he'd no longer be able to delve into these secret teachings – he had to know more. The magician girl had to live.
Both combatants raised their hands up going through a bunch of handseals, the bounty hunter's visor analyzed the hand seals and worked to extract the technique hidden behind them from the database. That was useless to the man behind the mask, by the time the search would've concluded the exchange would've been over – it would've been too late to make a proper response. He was better off going with his gut and countering her strategy than analyzing her technique before acting.
Kiyomi threw a bunch of shuriken moving sideways, rushing for the forest. Clearly an intent to look for her teammate, as a running target she was much more to the bounty hunter's liking. The bounty hunter's image blinked and glitched allowing the ninja tools phase right through him, he had dropped a little ninja tool which he had activated forming a hologram-like image.
The bounty hunter appeared right behind Kiyomi thrusting the bladed glove through her back and opening three deep wounds, with a powerful downwards swipe he opened up grievous wounds that were only fixable by more advanced medical ninjutsu – not something this young lady would have access here. She screamed in pain as Kiyomi's body split open in three parts where the blades cut her body apart but then something unusual happened.
The body exploded with a loud pop, crescent projectiles of slicing wind bashed right into the bounty hunter's armor as he was too close to the clone's dispelling radius. This was a different kind of clone – one not only capable of using simple ninja tools but also possessing the Wind Release nature of dispelling counterattack. While he was thrown off balance and felt warm blood squirt from a couple of wounds where the chakra cut through his armor the bounty hunter fired off a grappling hook that zipped him away from his location to where he could examine his wounds and recover.
Now he had no idea where the young heiress was. She somehow managed to slip out of his line of sight, she outsmarted him by leaving that highly advanced clone behind. That must've been at least a B-Rank technique to create a clone with a dispelling mechanism such as that. It was capable enough to cut through his armor and leave painful wounds – something that the bounty hunter hasn't experienced yet – he has taken blows from chuunin tough enough to punch a hole all the way through the planet, the steel dented but never tore like a tin can... That technique was controlled, concentrated and focused. This blonde was beyond the level of a genin, so far, beyond that, the intelligence he was given would've compelled him to retreat and reconsider his strategy. Make another move later.
He couldn't do that.
He couldn't do that.
This young woman had resisted him just like she did back then. He was supposed to be stronger than her back then and he underestimated her back then. He lost back then and he's doing the same now. With all the immense training he did, all of his power-ups he had acquired all those crazy skills he had honed and he still couldn't change that outcome! How was this possible? No matter how much better he got, she still outplayed him. Her growth in this time period couldn't have possibly rivaled his!
"Hey, asshole! You're standing in fire! Aren't you hurt at all?" Kiyomi shouted out looking right at him.
No way! She couldn't have seen him, she couldn't have seen him, no one saw him when he moved – he was the stealthiest of all in the order. No one, even the far more skilled assassins moved quieter than him! She couldn't have seen him... She must've been bluffing or...
The assassin placed his arms together in a hand seal. "Dispel" he shouted out revealing that the tree he was standing on was just an illusion – he had zipped right on top of the building he had blown up before and landed right in the open – in the middle of raging flames consuming the wooden structure. His body was so honed, his remaining armor was so durable that he couldn't feel being burnt alive. Only once he saw his body standing in the fire did the bounty hunter realize that his body was augmenting itself to protect him from the flame.
"You are pretty skilled but you fell for a genjutsu as simple as False Surroundings technique... That's a pretty low ranking illusion. Mana really hit the nail on the head when she began focusing on illusions, people just don't know how to deal with them." Kiyomi taunted him. She taunted him of all people. The bounty hunter emerged from the flames and landed right in front of her. This made absolutely no sense – she should've stood no chance against him. The assassin clenched his steel gloves allowing them to once again pop out his wrist blades preparing to bathe in the girl's blood but then he closed his eyes and calmed down. It was how he lost to this girl before.
The bounty hunter popped back the claws and raised his wrist, Kiyomi prepared to counter-attack but her bluff was already analyzed by his armor. She was bluffing, that last technique made her body irradiate more and more chakra meaning it was in stress – she was afraid, both for her life and that of her friend's, she was also now beginning to feel physically tired as well as running out of gas to go on. That clone technique before really must've cost her...
A barrage of small explosions made Kiyomi jump on her feet and look around in panic – a bunch of small but loud modified smoke bombs that the bounty hunter had concealed in the bushes blew up covering the place in smoke. The Yamanaka began holding her breath – she wasn't sure if this was some toxic gas or just simple smoke. The smoke was a weird mixture of purple and black suggesting that it had some toxins in it. The typical teaching of Hanasaku – a medical ninja came into the girl's mind. Any poison affecting a chakra user is colored purple or a shade of it meaning that the fog definitely had something shady going on with it.
Kiyomi leaped up, began running up a tree trying to fake out an attempted escape – she knew she'd get attacked so she backflipped off of it half-way and for good measure – the tree exploded getting hit by the same combination that took off the roof of the inn. The genin went through some hand seals of her own.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!" she shouted out feeling her chakra begin to sap out, the smoke began clearing as the technique emitted a strong enough gust to completely scatter the smoke and any semblance of gas away. Any Wind Release user had a natural counter to smoke bombs or gas based techniques.
What Kiyomi was not prepared for however was her opponent appearing right in front of her – using the dispelling clouds of smoke to creep up to her completely undetected with a wild upwards slash. Instinctively Kiyomi leaned back and tried to jump back and avoid it. A painful sensation on her chest let the girl know that she got tagged, the feeling of warm blood running down her chest and smoking her clothes was similarly a very unwelcome feeling.
The assailant continued to press on an offensive raising his blade up and aiming for Kiyomi's eye. The pain and shock of getting cut made her body freeze – it disrupted the natural flow, she was good enough to hold the hunter back for a moment but not match him hand to hand. The Yamanaka smacked his hand away leaving a painful and pretty deep cut on her cheek instead of having the blades lodge in her face killing her instantly.
The manner in which these blades were cutting her like butter – without resistance. The assassin must've been imbuing his blades with chakra - that was a pretty advanced technique. At least he wasn't doing it on a powerful enough level for the enhancement to be visible. Kiyomi could still work with this. Her hands worked overtime, desperately moving any strikes away from vitals where the assailant was aiming.
She ran out of options – the man closed in the distance and locked her into a lethal dance of blades she was destined to lose. She had no way to match his skill, she could just redirect his blows where it left painful gashes and cuts but didn't outright kill her. By keeping this dance up the man was torturing her, disguising it like a battle. This was no battle – it was a dragged out execution. Kiyomi's mind raced trying to find an opening or a way to get away from this flurry of blades and her own blood covering the bounty hunter's armor and weapons.
"Get away! Just get away!" she almost began yelling at herself but the man didn't let up.
A card lodged into the man's helmet, right in the center – had the man's visors not been tougher it'd have gone right in between his eyes and through his nose. The assassin leaped back with a cracked visor and a banged up helmet. Kiyomi looked back clutching at her bleeding injuries so enjoying this moment that she almost shouted out in joy. Her friend had finally decided to come and help!
"I locked you up in twelve bolas with the capacity of each to adapt to strain – no force in the universe can peel them open with strength alone, be it a being of infinite strength." the cybernetic voice finally once again graced the two young women with its presence. Now it was messed up, broken and even huskier, the tones and strength of the volume shifted. It was clear that whatever tech the bounty had with him was beginning to fail him.
"I'm a stage magician." Mana smiled benevolently. "Escaping traps is what I do for a living, I could've escaped those mecha-bolas when I was four years old."
"Yet you couldn't have done it sooner?" Kiyomi complained but truthfully she was glad that her friend was alive and well.
"I'm a magician, not a miracle worker, plus a good entertainer keeps the suspense alive." Mana shrugged with an apologetic expression. "Seriously though it was really dark in there..."
Mana and Kiyomi finally were a team again and it seemed like there was no one they couldn't beat when working together!