The soft soughing sound calmed Shibari down greatly. During moments like this when there was no action to be seen, only relaxing sounds around her, she could just sit down and float away. Just let her consciousness fade and slip into a sweet cottony dream.
"Ma'am, we've got action between Team Hokage and the Rogue Element." a strict masculine voice reported, he sat slouched over, shoulders narrowed and his neck combatted the weight of the heavy visual equipment on his head. A concoction of steel and glass, a combination of visual monitors and a combat helmet.
Clacking the heels of her sandals against the rough stony forest outskirts Shibari made her way to the sensory mechanism and observed the problem point for a brief moment. She was biting her lip subconsciously, nibbling on the inner soft skin in her mouth while the woman stared blankly at the watery orb and symbols on it.
"Shall we send someone to collect the nuke and her accomplices?" a different chuunin asked for further orders as, in case of a positive answer, starting earlier on opening the communication programs from inside his helmet was in order and would've greatly diminished the amount of work he had to do.
"If I wanted her arrested I wouldn't have let her in there in the first place. It's fun shaking the boring games up with a Rogue Element once in a while." Shibari smiled to the man, something he could not see given the excessive headgear placed on his shoulders.
"As you say, ma'am."
"What about the other teams? I assume you are ready to report grievous injuries and takedowns, Konoha High?" the woman asked with disdain and somewhat of a playful tease towards the educational institution that the chuunin came recommended from as an intern.
"Yes, ma'am! There are no relevant injuries to speak of yet. No contacts so far, the situation at the entrance is mostly resolved, the wildlife is returning to its rightful habitat."
"Nice work, Intent Ops…" Shibari sighed before walking further off and observing the entirety of the messy looking liquid orb, her lips sharpened and ducked out from her mouth in concentration.
"Ma'am!" a squad of chuunin not wearing any headgear working by a fancy looking green and rotten grey scroll let out as a collective unit affirmed their acknowledgment of her compliment.
"Let me know when the Rogue Element is taken out. I'll go in and take the trash out personally." Shibari gave a knowingly unseen glance at the sensory team positioned by specific corners of the sensory mechanism and overseeing their own attributed patches of the Forest of Death battlefield.
Galateia's blade was caught by Meiko's arms, with a cheeky smile the blonde pressed her sword's handle harder attempting to force it through. A wound like that would've certainly made the blacksmith's day worse, right on the center of her chest, from one shoulder to the pelvis.
"You seemed to have more fighting spirit during our first meeting." The rogue ninja noted.
"That was different. I was just training, eager to push myself to the limits to move past them. Here I must preserve my resources…" Meiko grunted as her opponent's physical pressure was formidable.
The redhead growled in pain and tiredness as she pushed the blade's edge to the shoulder plate – one of the more armored parts of the body of both of the kunoichi. The heat and flashing light of the sparks that fired out as Galateia's blade slipped through the plating and smashed into the ground blinded Meiko temporarily and made her flinch. It was a wonderful thing, however, as she instinctively closed her eyes and avoided them being filled with dirt and wood chips from the ground Galateia's sword busted open.
The loud clang of Meiko's armored foot stamping right in the weight center of the sword combined with the pain and tension on Galateia's wrist from her holding the blade disarmed the girl. The blacksmith tossed a good pair of punches that'd have cracked the whole world in two but it appeared this nuke's jaw was tougher than that. Each time she was hit, Galateia turned back with an almost psycho smile. She didn't enjoy the process of being hit, she didn't like pain, clearly. She enjoyed the overall process of fighting, facing an opponent who disarmed her and exploited her openings.
The redhead just cursed aside over her left shoulder and raised her arms up, her left palm reached over the wristguard just to be able to unseal one of her bucklers if she needed to.
Galateia's response was quick, after picking her weapon back up, she slid her palm over the handle of the longsword, twisting it like a spinning toy horizontally. The blasted thing rotated so fast that a howling sound smit the blacksmith's ears, just after the nukenin's vertical palm thrust at the end of the handle of her sword Meiko realized she hadn't enough air for a proper dodge. Struggling with a bleeding nose spouting blood both on the outside and inside was more troublesome than she had initially predicted it to be.
"Sunray!" Galateia shouted as she pressed her second palm against the first, despite it being quick and barely noticeable, Meiko could pick up on her focusing significant force into her feet. A great amount of force now flowed through her entire body, perfect footing and perfect channeling of the force from her feet to the palms resulted in a kenjutsu technique that utilized a longsword like a spear.
A sharp pain in the gut shocked the blacksmith, it was so similar to cutting oneself or smashing one's own finger with the hammer as it had so often happened to the blacksmith kunoichi. However it didn't feel like getting impaled all the way through, so much pain meant only that her body hadn't gone into shock and soon enough the visual aspect of things caught up to the physical pain that Galateia's attack made Meiko go through. This darned nukenin was just so damned fast!
Meiko was broken out of her thought process as her body slammed against the ground with its back heavily. It appeared like the drilling stab had merely tossed Meiko backwards after opening a nasty pelvic wound. Like a turtle struggling to stand back on her feet the blacksmith rolled on her front and pushed against the firm ground strong enough to push her body off of it. That allowed the redhead to avoid Galateia's jumping stab at the ground and the follow-up quick horizontal slash that quickly split a handful of trees in two de-foresting a decent patch of land and cutting the grass of at least five meters in radius clean.
"Pull out your sword, Meiko." Galateia ordered like she had some authority of the situation. "I took you for more than your lowly witch companion, swords are meant to allow light to dance on their surfaces, not be hidden in pocket sealing dimensions."
"You know how seals work then? That's a first… I'd have taken you for someone who'd think it's witchery." Meiko forced a smile even though her eyes were clearly relaying a message of great pain and one of her arms had to constantly be held on the abdomen wound, at least until her ninja metabolism quickly stopped the bleeding.
"The fencing master of the peculiar "rapeer" blade from Land of Snow taught me a bit about them, she suggested I carried my own blade sealed. Negotiations ended when I showed no talent for it."
"I had expected to be able to keep some of my chakra for later. My team had done so much for me in the previous exam that this one is all mine, I must pay my dues for my team. That means I cannot fail them. I'll just have to settle for being tired now and skipping one round, rather than getting shamefully beaten whole way through." Meiko growled before touching both of her shoulder armor pieces. The damaged one from the time before when the redhead sacrificed it for Galateia's blade just spouted out a handful of sparks and the glyph faded. One less seal to maintain…
"C-Rank Seal: Release!" Meiko chanted pulling out a buckler from the armor piece and slinging at like a frisbee, right after the plate of steel left the blacksmith's hand she engaged into hand seals, hoping to make it in time. That was not the only worry on the blacksmith's mind – chakra control was an equal enemy of hers to the blonde in front of her.
Meiko made more hand seals than Substitution Jutsu needed, she made more for pure concentration, get her body in the right mind set. Knowing how easily she could've messed up such simple techniques made her wish to be absolutely certain with this.
A deep lung filling whoosh of air alerted the blacksmith that it worked, she had successfully replaced her body with the tool she just threw before she touched her armored boots in mid-air, unsealing them too. The pure base chakra lacking any elemental nature burst through launching Meiko in a mad dive down, like a fish underwater she rotated her entire body to spin over the quick desperation thrust made by her opponent.
A pillar of smoke and brutal shockwaves erupting and tossing trees, dirt and rock aside fired out from the ground as Meiko slammed at her opponent's throat, aiming to crush it with her own forearm and leave the nukenin just as struggling to breathe as the blacksmith was so shortly ago. It took a while for the murmuring and rustling to settle down and for the dust and rubble to clear.
Meiko didn't think about how tired she was, how difficult it was to lift her opponent off the ground and throw her into the air before reaching for the belt pieces of her armor and the buckle protecting her lower abdomen and upper thighs. Even more chakra got sucked right out, felt like long and thick needles being driven under her skin and sucking lifeforce itself right out. This had to work!
With handful of tools Meiko unleashed a prideful barrage of shuriken and kunai, custom made thrown knives that were more aerodynamic than the kunai most ninja used, boomerangs, tomahawks, circular blades of sharpened outer edge, smaller javelins that were meant for quick throwing right after they were unsealed, darts, throwing knives with three different sharpened blades that pointed upwards and to each side respectively appearing almost fork-like in shape.
The absolutely overwhelming storm of weaponry coming at her opponent would undoubtedly missed their mark, there were simply too many of them, thrown too fast and without focus or aiming. Meiko was a skilled weapon user, as she was skilled at making them, but her marksmanship was not the greatest in the village. After Galateia's eyes finally opened in mid-air she braced for impact. Obviously she expected most of the weaponry to just whizz past her barely grazing her.
A blue sealing glyph lit up on the blonde's chest, the spot where Meiko grabbed onto to throw her into the air. The points of each of the thrown weapons directed themselves onto the sealing glyph correcting their shoddy trajectory and hitting their mark.
The sound of steel hitting steel of Galateia's armor as well as weaponry banding together into a focused stream of edges and pure death was unbearable. The noise of thousand men screaming in agony. Meiko tried to come up with a cool sounding name for this technique she came up with after returning from the quest for Box of Ultimate Bliss with Mana, something that reflected the abhorrent noise it made when all of those weapons collided with each other with force enough to focus them all into a stream of steel. Nothing really came to mind at that moment of its discovery or in this particular moment.
Names for techniques usually allowed for a ninja to focus their mind. It was like a code for their body to move a certain way, an instinctual lock that was unlocked once those usually cheesy and strange words were uttered. They allowed for chakra to be concentrated more successfully and with greater ease, they allowed the body to move faster and more fluently performing them. This particular jutsu needed a name…
Galateia's body weightlessly slammed to the ground together with the emptied weaponry reserves of Meiko. She was covered with grazes, slashes and cuts. For her thumb-skulled brain she managed to focus her remaining chakra resources into to limited patch of her body where the seal was applied flawlessly. It hardened up the muscles and the skin and anything underneath to deflect the weaponry but as it slid past or got deflected by her body they grazed and cut open any other fleshy bits they passed by.
She probably wouldn't get an option to use this jutsu again, not until her entire reserves are replenished and that'd take some time.
"What was that?" Mana's shocked voice ringed in Meiko's ears, parts of it still got lost in the ringing clangs deep in her ears that invited the unwelcome guest of motherlode of all migraines.
"Tons of awesome, that's what it was!" Kiyomi's cheers were tough not to identify. Sometimes the Yamanaka's voice was deep and sad but whenever she spoke of Meiko or her abilities her voice changed into something of a pile miserably full of hype.
"Teia!" Aoi yelled out as he floated to the criminal. Mana looked at Meiko questioningly. The magician had no idea about Meiko's stance on killing, she had never seen the blacksmith restrain herself purposefully in order to preserve the life of her opponent or knew any reasons why she'd do it.
The redhead didn't want her friend to be disappointed in her. In a way, after their initial meeting the two lived in a constant cycle of mutual approval. Each tried to make the other happy by hitting the strings that rang the most sensitively for each other. Meiko worked on Mana's custom stage magic show orders, the magician appealed to Meiko's love for crafting and legendary artifacts… Even if Meiko had no conscious desire to preserve her opponent's life, because of that she'd do it subconsciously.
This time she may just have overdone it… With great self-scolding the blacksmith just shrugged and looked onto her opponent's body that just casually extended her arms forward and leaped back on her feet like she was just simply decked in the nose.
Meiko had to hand it to the blonde, she was very persistent and incredibly vital. It was like being cut dozens of thousands of times all over her body meant nothing to her, she even had the audacity to grin foolishly as her golden hair drowned in her own blood beginning to lose their appealing and exotic color.
The curious visual orbs of the nukenin swordswoman glared in confusion at Meiko who did her best to collect as many of her thrown and undamaged tools and seal them back to their rightful places – a less dignified and spoken about process of Meiko's battles.
"What's wrong? Do you surrender?" the swordswoman uttered.
"What? Have you even seen yourself?! Get yourself treated, I don't care how. This is done, I have no need to continue this any further and end up killing you…" Meiko angrily replied.
The blacksmith gave her magician friend a glance back, Mana tried to mask it but she approved of the blacksmith's decision and was greatly pleased by it. Her wish to hide her approval of Meiko's non-lethal approach was not something that the armored kunoichi understood, not really. Didn't she wish to lead through example? Maybe she just didn't want to be too preachy? That permission of Mana's for her friends to choose their own path made her way more alluring for the blacksmith but also it made the chances of success seem even more pitiful.
The ground beneath Meiko's feet disappeared. A foul stench assaulted her nose as the sight of an underground great snake trying to dive out from underground and swallow her whole met the blacksmith's eyes. As fast as her abilities and fatigued physique allowed the redhead reached for her chest plate removing a palm sized rod that extended into a steel bo staff and drove into the snake's mouth keeping the jaws open.
With a quick yank the armored kunoichi leaped out from the predator's mouth where Mana tackled her further from the snake's mouth using her own levitation jutsu – the Mystical Wings technique.
Further away Aoi pointed his arms towards the surfaced tail of the reptile aiming to smash the criminals and Gwido to a bloody stain.
"Glaciation Jutsu!" he shouted out freezing the humidity of the air around the snake's limb as well as the liquids inside it. The blond swordsman leaped up into the air.
"Sunray Kick!" she shouted out through pain and battle fatigue as her swift kick shattered the snake's tail to pieces.
The ground beneath began to rumble and shake, tunnels of raised dirt pillars began appearing from below signaling that more of these must've been on their way. They were nowhere as large as the usual underground snakes living in the Forest of Death but the fact they were so young and relatively small made them travel and hunt in larger packs.
"Must be the runt from the litter!" Kiyomi gritted through her teeth before gesturing to get as far away from the battlefield as possible.
With Galateia's blank stare, her eyes being the one of the few white and clean bits of her blood soaked and cut up face, being the last sight Meiko saw before dashing off and away from the troublesome pack of snakes the Team Hokage bolted away. Their supernatural speed allowed them to simply disappear from any senses of these underground predators and Aoi with Galateia soon followed, heading the opposite direction. It couldn't have been too comfortable for Gwido to travel being constantly held by his back collar like some ragdoll…
And thus this brief engagement came to an interrupted and quick ending!