Leap by leap, Team Hokage was traversing through the Forest of Death towards the region where Team Dunyazad was last seen in. It would've only taken about half an hour to cover the entire distance, the trio didn't want to spend chakra on going any faster. Maybe if they focused hard and decided on wearing themselves out they could've covered the distance of over hundred kilometers momentarily, still, given their situation it would've been less than reasonable.
"I still think we should've fought that bear…" Meiko pouted, killing the silence that had reigned for most of the early morning.
"It had an arm taller than an oak and many times thicker. Its claws were twice the length of a banana. It'd have taken too much effort." Mana firmly shut her down.
"Yeah, but we left so fast that I left my bag behind…" Meiko whined.
"Your bag!?" Kiyomi flipped out, "You mean the one with the map and your spare ninja tools and supplies?"
"No. That's my main bag, I'm talking about my beef bag." Meiko smiled.
"Mana was preparing for you out of her own supplies for two nights already, I've stored water for you in condoms! You didn't tell us you had a bag full of beef." Kiyomi launched herself at a diagonal angle to slam her shoulder at Meiko and throw her off balance, the blacksmith just kicked off of a nearby tree and launched herself back at her rushing teammates rejoining the formation.
"Now that I think of it, it sounds like something Meiko would do. We should've seen it coming." Mana smiled. It may have been the short moments of bliss watching her friends behave like people that knew no sorrow and fooling around with each other that made her this ignorant to the troubles she went through to satisfy Meiko's hunger but something left just that kind of an effect.
"So you admit it then!" Meiko yelled out, "It was condoms!"
Mana was surprised that she was able to hear the sound of Kiyomi's teeth being grinded. While the blonde blushed and really didn't look like she took the right things from all of this situation, allowing herself to be dragged down into an immature game Meiko played to make everyone forget her own offense of hiding food, the magician found it as just kind of hilarious.
"Although, I have to admit – Mana's cooking kind of got awesome all of a sudden!" Meiko vibrantly cheered for her teammate.
"It was one of the several things I've trained during the whole Yamanaka clan affair." Mana shrugged.
"How much further ahead?" Kiyomi looked around before Mana stopped, only for the rest to follow.
"Not sure… It'd be naïve to expect to find Tala, Menna and Tiwul in the same spot they were last seen in. That being said, I believe that they may not have changed their quadrant. Moving around so drastically is just looking for trouble, as we've found out…" the magician scratched the back of her head before settling down and preparing to meditate.
"Is this gonna work? Will you be able to recognize their chakra signatures?" her armored friend raised an interesting conundrum.
"Obviously not, still, we'll head towards the nearest signature I can find." Mana shrugged.
Once again it took her a good while to calm herself and reach the right degree of concentration. It took longer still to reach out with her entire consciousness to the environment around her and until all of the chakra stars flared up in her imaginary visualization of the chakra sensory ability. It was such a flawed and early stage of the ability, Mana would've liked to devote so much more time into this genetic trait, at least as much as it'd take for her to sniff chakra signatures out as easily as she could tell smells.
"There are six signatures that way, they're really close to where we were told Team Dunyazad last was. It must be them…" Mana jumped back on her feet before beginning to move that direction.
"Oh… We lucked out, maybe if we help them with their fight, they'll help us with the information trade?" Kiyomi shrugged, the two teammates quickly joined Mana moving to a location nearby.
Tiwul's long and round bottom bashed into the face of a handsome tanned blond male who appeared to have been caught unprepared by the highly unnatural manner of attack. The chubby young lady lifted her arm up and, like clockwork, a handle of a weapon poked out from her large metallic backpack which she pulled out and revealed to be a scythe.
"Ninja Style: Tool Expansion Jutsu!" she yelled out in a tired and resentful tone that so immensely contrasted her usual cheerful tone. The scythe expanded to tremendous size dwarfing its primary shape at least several dozens of times and extending in its massiveness way past the proportions defined as "necessary". With a graceful guiding of its path to absolute destruction, the massive tool slammed into the ground where the shaken handsome shinobi previously was.
After the ginormous cloud of dust, wood chips and torn leaves settled and the gigantic ninja tool returned to the size of an ordinary scythe and got placed back into the bag, after being minimized to the size of a toy a little doll would wield, the tanned blond opponent of Team Dunyazad was revealed to be completely out. His forehead was cracked and the poor young man was bleeding profusely from his busted forehead.
"That's what you get for hurting Menna, you mean bastard!" the chubby young lady panted. She herself was not holding on her most gracious and strongest legs. Her usual lovely bandana was missing as it was recently completely incinerated, the young lady was beaten around and bruised up, her tomboyish futon t-shirt was torn up together with her strapped jeans.
Tala slid back beside her, having been tossed backwards by some considerable impact force but somehow managing to maintain his upwards stance and remain on his own two feet. He angrily glared at his teammate.
"Don't stop moving! Do you want to get taken out like Menna!?" he shouted out ferociously as if he was scolding a person he actually hated the guts of.
Tiwul's eyes wandered briefly at her knocked out friend by her side, seeing his whited out eyes and grit together in a painful expression teeth made her chest burn up with anger and fear for her own well-being, but also rage and desire to pay back the pain caused to her friend.
A strong impact at her chest sent Tiwul tumbling back, had the hit not been tremendously soft and coming from a cotton ball she'd have tumbled over and flew crashing through multiple trees way back.
"Don't move your eyes away, Tiwul…" a blonde, glasses wearing kunoichi with a white coat covering her shoulders uttered in a mocking tone.
"You do realize you've just hit me with a cotton ball, right?" Tiwul snapped back at her opponent before charging at her with a jumping kick. The powerful and highly unpredictably manner upper thigh kick caught the opponent medical ninja by surprise knocking her aside and giving her a nasty nosebleed. Just barely did the young lady manage to regain her consciousness and balance and recover with a backflip.
"I think I'll be just fine…" the chubby Sunagakure kunoichi grinned at her opponent with an equally cheeky manner, even going out of her way to make an offensive facial gesture her way.
Without uttering a word, the enemy medical ninja smacked her hands together in a hand seal making the cotton ball explode into smaller cotton balls that continuously flew around and bashed at various openings they could find in Tiwul's larger than average frame which struggled to keep up with the intensity and number of the attacks.
"This… Doesn't hurt… Dammit!" Tiwul kept on shrugging the balls off before she realized that the balls were too painless to be the young kunoichi's main mean of attack. The more the Sunagakure weapon puppeteer tried to remove those cotton balls off of her body the quicker they rolled aside and less success she had at pulling them off their skin as they got stuck to it like leeches.
"Hmph… I figured a larger person like you would require higher number of attacks as compared to singular more powerful attack." The opponent mocked Tiwul who lazily ran at her with a running strike. The cotton balls stuck to Tiwul's body rolled onto her eyes making her miss the enemy's counter attack of lazy pair of slaps at her sides. They were incredibly weak but soon the Sunagakure kunoichi realized that she had several more cotton balls stuck to her body.
"What kind of retarded-ass strategy is this? What happened to you, Dubia, you graduated the Academy with amazing grades!" Tiwul tried attack her enemy with words. She needed to catch some of her lost breath back and think of a way of getting these off of her skin as they were moving nowhere peacefully. They also quickly relocated onto her other body parts. As the weaponry user of Sunagakure opened her mouth, one even tried to even roll into her mouth and try suffocating her from inside her throat.
"What's wrong? Feeling tired yet?" the blonde who was revealed to be a fellow Sunagakure kunoichi fixed her glasses while she triumphantly stared at her worn out opponent who was getting more and more pulled to the ground. "These cotton spheres are a newer jutsu of mine. They are a ninja tool used by medical ninja to drain blood off of a wound quickly, they use the residual chakra inside the blood traces to fuel their usage."
"But… I'm… Not… Bleeding…" Tiwul panted as she fell to her knees.
"No, but you're sweating. Profusely. This effect is magnified on someone of a more muscular or chubbier body build. Your build is great for manipulating greater weights but it doesn't conserve energy too well, now does it?" the opponent taunted Tiwul. "Soon enough you'll fall ill to extreme dehydration of the body, not to mention tremendous chakra loss of your ninja metabolism trying to compensate the incredible strain your body is going through."
Farther away Tala kept on firing bullet sized capsules of Wind Release chakra at his opponent. The young man that the red headed conservative Sunagakure ninja was fighting was an odd looking one, wearing vibrant colors and a humongous ribbon on his neck. He also appeared to use an electronic keyboard instead of a sword or a similar tool suited for battle.
The musician moved quite skillfully and his evasion skills were certainly not lacking. However Tala's skill in cornering his opponent soon forced the young man to drag his arm through his electronic keyboard playing a bunch of its black and white, well maintained keys and spreading a melody of deplorable quality. Each of the keys had a yellow colored hieroglyph on them which served as a visual aid for the boy himself for the correct use of his ability.
"Genjutsu: Bandit Jig!" the enigmatic young gent sung out.
Tala's hands shaped into a pistol hand sign and firing off a stream of wind bullets at his opponent froze before beginning to shake. The red haired shinobi soon found his feet shaking similarly as well. Against his will his right leg began to tap the ground, soon the left leg joined in. It was just a diversion for the dark haired musician to pull off his ace ninjutsu. As Tala was immersed into the illusion of being placed in front of a live audience in a theatre far far away and feeling obliged to dance, the musician bit his thumb and flashed through a handful of hand seals.
"Summoning Jutsu!" he chanted after slamming his hand to the ground.
As Tala's iron will finally understood the absurdity of dancing in front of a live audience and how against his character it was and forced his hands to make a hand seal required to dispel illusions, the very ground beneath his feet began to shake as from the massive cloud of smoke a bunch of green, human sized ogres started charging at the Sunagakure ninja, armed with scimitars, clubs and even large boulders tied around their arms – hand to elbow.
The forty summoned ogre soldiers began charging at Tala who had no time to prepare sufficiently for their cruel horde rush. Surprisingly enough, they didn't attack him, instead they started scattering wildly, so close to the young man's face that he could feel their foul stench as they ran across or aside him, all over the battlefield and slashing at bushes, trees and anything but something living. The red haired Sunagakure ninja just observed the mindless rampage of the ogres in confusion, was it within his character to giggle, the sight of an ogre smashing a little daisy with a giant rock tied around his arms over and over again would've certainly invited such a reaction.
"I apologize for the stupendous idiocy of my summons…" the musician shrugged. "For a more lethal jig, a more hands-on approach is needed…" he smiled before pulling his hand out of the pockets of his cartoonishly oversized purple tuxedo and beginning to play his electronic keyboard, this time with sufficiently more skill.
"Demonic Keyboard: Illusionary Bandit Manipulating Melody!" he sung out as the forty well, as well as significantly less well, armed ogres started rushing at Tala with a ferocious frenzy and thirst for blood matching their past desire of destroying pretty flowers and bushes.
"Wind Style: Jet Surfing!" Tala chanted out managing to push in a pair of hand seals in between his mad evasive maneuvers as he avoided getting completely surrounded and overwhelmed just by the skin of his teeth. A strong gust of wind picked the young man up and blew him to a more remote and farther place where all forty of his assailants had to chase after him.
"Wind Style: Automaton!" Tala shouted out as the relentless barrage of cutting wind bullets started firing upon the ogres. The beasts just covered themselves up with their weapons. The rocks easily got penetrated, the swords got shattered and several ogres got immediately taken down. Had they been their usual stupid selves, they'd have continued to try and find cover, block or otherwise defend against Tala's offensive. However with a cruel stroke of some more electric keyboard keys the entire horde was sent in a suicidal rush that'd have destroyed more ogres but also allowed them to reach Tala.
A loud howling sound made the Sunagakure's redhead shinobi look at his right, then to the left frantically as the battlefield around him appeared to have frozen. After looking behind him Tala noticed that the cotton balls had fallen off of Tiwul's body and laid peacefully by her side, twitching but not moving any bit more. After turning at his electric keyboard using enemy the young ninja, much to his surprise, saw his opponent grinning with astounding idiocy and hopping around on all fours, scratching the divide of his behind frantically before smelling his finger and making odd sounds of an exotic ape.
"Double takedown!" Meiko cheerfully chanted from high above as Mana and Kiyomi landed down and revealed themselves. Kiyomi still held her arms up in the hand seal she used to cast the Yamanaka clan technique to take over the medical kunoichi's mind, similarly, Mana also held her right hand up in a modified, one handed, hand seal position, having just successfully cast her illusion on the electric keyboard player.
"We probably shouldn't have waited this long…" Kiyomi smiled with the edge of her lips.
"We had to find a perfect opportunity." Mana shrugged.
"So, what now, kill them?" Meiko wondered.
"You can't!" Tala energetically opposed to the idea, rushing up to the armored genin and grabbing her by the shoulders.
"Don't worry, I was just fooling around…" Meiko apologized before getting out of the weak hold of her opponent by herself.
"They may be scum but they are still Sunagakure ninja… I won't advocate the spilling of another comrade's blood." Tala growled out as a warning.
Mana lowered her hand seal before gesturing with her chin for Kiyomi to do the same. The blonde questioned Mana's decision and quite clearly opposed it for a brief while but then, with a disappointing sigh, let down her hands letting the medical ninja slip out from her control and the temporary paralysis she placed the medical ninja in.
"Scram!" Tala angrily warned the enemy team who appeared to have weighed the pros and cons of fighting five enemy ninja at once before picking up their unconscious pretty boy of a teammate and fleeing.
"Wow… Thanks!" Tiwul smiled, still too tired to stand back up on her feet.
"Hmph… We could've handled it by ourselves. Matters of Sunagakure do not concern you three." Tala objected softly, knowing him, Mana took it as a sign of gratitude.
"This goes beyond matters of any single village. This is the Chuunin Exams, I don't think you've noticed it yet…" Kiyomi objected.
"Don't listen to that pouty-face. We're grateful you pulled us out, wait… Where's Kouta and Shimo!? Is this your actual team?" Tiwul wondered.
Shimo… Mana turned away after a mere mention of him. She could stomach the topic being brought up, she cried too many tears over her friend to break down every time people spoke of him but it never got any easier…
"He umm…" Meiko looked at Mana uneasily, it was easy to tell that she wasn't sure if she should even say it out loud.
"Got eliminated already, huh? What about Kouta?"
"Actually… Shimo died. At the very end, just when we found what we've been looking for. Kouta's been eliminated already, he's on another team." Mana somehow toughed it out to utter those words.
"He was… A good friend. He appeared to be lost in many ways when we met but… I just hope he could find who he was before it happened." Tala sat down, his face softened up somewhat. Whenever a sip of sadness entered a face of absolute anger and strictness, it couldn't be helped but change a little bit. "This damned exam… Comrades turned against each other. Pisses me off." He changed the subject. He probably wanted to do something good with that.
Mana kneeled by Menna and checked out his injuries. Even she could tell that these burns and deep marks on his body weren't going to end up bringing anything good. Her arm lingered on the bag of medical food pills by her side. With the inevitable regret of her own actions, not due to the fact that she was treating someone, the fact that she was doing it with stolen supplies, the magician pulled out a pair of red food pills and placed them by Menna's mouth. Opening it through his intensely grinded teeth was troublesome.
"Don't bother." Tala angrily cut her down. "He's injured well past what a single red pill can solve. Even if you gave him two – he'd only recover enough to drag us down and suffer more."
After a sigh Mana placed one red food pill back into the bag and pressed Menna's nose forcing the knocked out shinobi to shortly loosen the lock of his teeth just enough to push a mashed pill down into his mouth.
"It'll ease his pain, at least…" Mana observed after looking at the burns and dark grievous injuries all over his chest. His entire top was signed and blown off, must've been quite the powerful blast he got caught in.
"Tsk. Sentimental as always…" Tala sighed in annoyance.
"What's wrong with you!? She's trying to help!" Tiwul yelled at her teammate.
"She's being pretentious, acting like the boundaries of villages don't matter. One day she'll die just like the rest of us and her ideals will die with her. It's easier to just hate the others. People will be at each other's throats just because the other was born in another village. People will sack entire villages just because they're defenseless. Her pretentiousness won't change a thing." the Sunagakure shinobi pushed his friend aside rudely before jumping up and sticking to the side of a tree before dashing up to the top.
"What's that guy's problem?" Kiyomi whispered into Mana's ear.
The magician just sighed. She knew that it was because of young Tala hearing about the recent history of his village in the Sunagakure Academy and feeling appalled by the behavior of "civilized" ninja villages jumping at Sunagakure's throat just because the war weakened it sufficiently enough for a finishing blow. Frankly, she understood the young man's character and anger perfectly, even if she couldn't really relate to such nationalist feelings.