Meiko took a quick step forward, moving her body in front of Kiyomi while she reached behind her back. These two have fought together and trained alongside one another for so long that they knew perfectly how to act in any given situation. Right now, Meiko realized that the two lacked a proper battle plan and gave Kiyomi time to establish a mental link between the two.
While the Yamanaka spent precious moments doing so, Meiko worked on a distraction as her guess that the old man would once again attempt to use his elongated limbs to strike at them was justified.
The one removed arm on Togure's body began bubbling before a slightly more pale and slimmer stump appeared in its place. Meiko had foolishly expected that by throwing the man's removed limb into space she'd prevent him from growing it back.
Somewhere deep in her mind a thought was sparking up, a memory, a fading spark that lit up before dying out again that reminded her of the ability of these disappearing people that have reappeared to shape and mold their bodies. So far, Togure was the only one who could flat out create new substances on his body whereas the other one Meiko had seen appeared to be only able to shift their body around without creating new cells.
Before Togure could attack, Meiko flung a windmill shuriken his way, attached to a steel wire through which she could channel chakra to imbue the weapon with. While she still kept hold of the tool, it would act like a yo-yo or an improvised ranged projectile and its chakra coating would prove useful against defenses lacking matching chakra values.
Togure's hand extended with a raised palm, the shuriken sliced through it without any resistance at all. It was a like a buzzsaw working through plasticine. Togure's arm split open in the middle while the windmill shuriken and its wicked blade dance continued its destructive path.
Then, right when it would have buzzed right through Togure's neck, removing his head, the shuriken changed directions and missed the man. Instead just narrowly leaving a cut in the gummy part that held his head on his shoulders. It was a loss of balance that made Meiko miss her mark, the grip she could not notice before, holding her leg by its lower parts, strengthened making the blacksmith finally notice it.
Through brute strength, Togure dragged the blacksmith underground using his other elongated limb that he managed to slip underground during Meiko's attack and tunneled right under her.
The old geezer dragged his opponent through the dirt and pulled her in closer. Meiko tried to respond but the physical injuries she sustained during the clash with nukenin before took their toll on her making her too weak to resist the man's pull or kick out from his grip. To top it off, her augmentations were slipping too. An occasional rock bashed her in the face underground as, it seemed, Togure smashed her through the harder minerals he felt intentionally before unearthing her and pulling Meiko up close. He did so only to deliver a pair of mocking smacks and a strong finishing punch to send the blacksmith flying.
"You done yet?" Meiko thought to herself, focusing her thoughts in a way that would make Kiyomi hear them if she was finished with setting up a line.
"Yeah, remember when fights were so sluggish it seemed this jutsu was instantaneous?" A somewhat bittersweet signal pulsed inside Meiko's brain.
"Set-up something to substitute with, this guy hits like a truck, even when he doesn't mean to," Meiko advised while she charged back into the battlefield just so her opponent did not get the bright idea to try and attack Kiyomi or, even worse – Hanasaku. Truth be told, she was better off following her own advice, her sides were burning and the taste of blood just could not leave Meiko's mouth.
The blacksmith's boots lit up with chakra flares sending the girl rocketing towards her enemy and slamming right into the back of his body with a shoulder tackle. It was like hitting an iron wall! All of a sudden, the man's body felt hard as a figurative brick whereas before he seemed all elastic and gummy.
"You kidding? With all the downed trees and debris in here? We're good…" Kiyomi reminded her more battle-focused and forgetful friend before she finished her hand seals and sent a large boulder rolling at her opponent.
"Earth Style: Boulder Rush!" Kiyomi chanted out right before the boulder slammed into Togure, splattering him all over the battlefield only to recollect into his previous shape.
"Thanks, I don't think I can take that much more of this, what's our plan?" Meiko rolled and dashed back to her teammate like a little monkey with a fruit in hand fleeing from a stalking predator.
"The plan's always been to catch him with one of my jutsu. You think you can set me up with something?" Kiyomi thought while the two girls took a momentary breather while their shapeless opponent reformed back around a small ball of grey bio-material through which an edge of the containment jar peeked until the man who shoved it into where his brain was supposed to be reformed.
"Sure. You think one of your jutsu can stop him? Didn't you have a problem controlling Shigin before?" Meiko thought while she worked through hand seals and slammed both of her palms on the ground.
"Yeah, it's gonna be tough and it will hurt. These guys are tricky, it's like their entire bodies are comprised of solitary cells that are their own separate organisms that form a singular hive in the shape of a person. It's billions, if not more simplistic minds to wrap my head around and all of them reek of something wicked. It sucks but… That's our only way to win." Kiyomi replied with a thought.
If only Meiko could have felt Kiyomi's recollection of what it felt like to try and affect one of these people with her techniques. A very thought of such a feat still made phantom migraines light up in Kiyomi's mind. Had those micro-organisms not been so simplistic and so synchronized in their instincts and thoughts, it would be an impossible feat.
Meiko's boots lit up once more, throwing the blacksmith spiraling forward. The redhead felt her chakra resources draining. She was not like Mana, she did not rely on powerful techniques that drained titanic chakra resources to use but when she used her more primitive jutsu and augmentations in such rapid succession, and in combinations, it would have proven to achieve just the same effect.
Togure's fist grew at least a dozen times in size and covered in fingers all over. Almost like it was a dandelion with the fingers surrounding it like its fluffs. Within an instant, these fingers turned to sharp spikes and Meiko did not doubt that as they did so, Togure's body became solid and hard, just like it was when she tackled him. Fortunately, attacking the man head-on was not her intention.
Meiko stopped right in front of the man and, instead of trying to hit him while his massive "mace" construct of flesh and goop was falling on top of her, the redhead merely drove her palms on the ground before the massive improvised assault of Togure's crushed Meiko. The resulting impact sent ripples of force waves across the surrounding ground and pulling trees out from underground with their roots severed and shredded with sheer force.
After Togure lifted his hands just to see the extent of damage that his smash left the weakened opponent with, only a piece of debris from the damaged black market point building remained, smashed into stone dust.
"Displacement Seal!" Meiko huffed through great effort, standing right behind her opponent, having taken Kiyomi's clue about possible substitution targets and used it to avoid getting smashed to bits while at the same time placing the entrance seal.
"W-What sort of…?" Togure shouted out, feeling the entrance seal suck him up in a vortex of rubble, flesh, and goop before spitting him out at the exit seal that Meiko placed right in front of Kiyomi. There was no way that the man could avoid getting hit with the Yamanaka's hijutsu from point-blank while still shaken up from the journey.
"Mind Switch: Art of Catastrophe!" Kiyomi declared while the uncanny howling sound telegraphed the immediate activation of her technique. The shape of Togure's head began shifting as if there was a large parasite wrangling inside it. Unlike the head of a normal human, this man's head had the potential to expand and change its consistency forcing Kiyomi to apply an even greater push of chakra.
This would truly be the test of her having mastered this technique!
Togure yelled out in pain while his head exploded off of his body. The remaining parts of the man just twitched with the shock of the unbelievable that has just happened. Shards of broken reinforced glass and a beginning to decompose human head with raven black hair laid in a puddle of containment fluid beside the twitching remains of a father who overly relied on a miracle.
Kiyomi shuffled back and fell on her behind. She could feel her own body doing some twitching of its own and more and more breaths managed to escape her body making her ventilation erratic. All signs of her chakra being pushed to its limits, her own body signaling that it may have been time to end this fight but the fight was already over…
The head of the deceased Uchiha was damaged beyond repair together with its containment jar. Even if enough of his eyes remained connected to the sum of its strands, it would have merely been fitting as an organ transplant with the Sharingan remaining closed forever.
"What have you done?" Meiko sent a powerful signal that momentarily overwhelmed Kiyomi's already strained mind.
Togure roared in rage at the first sight of the pathetic sight of the head rolling around in busted dirt and grass. Seeing the precious proteins inside the Uchiha's eyes leak out with whatever else leaked from the damaged and now useless part of the corpse. The man's rage soon transformed into despair as he crumbled on his knees and cried out, dragging his elastic arms and fingers across the dirt as if trying to tear flesh from his bones. Forgetting that such self-penance was now impossible.
"Why?" Meiko mumbled out loud, realizing that Kiyomi had closed the link after her previous show to both save chakra and give herself some chance to recover. Both genin were quite worn out by the endless mess that had transpired over this accursed set of eyes. A human life reduced to something as pitiful as a sum of its part, a pair of meaty spheres…
"That was the only way to beat him," Kiyomi explained herself staring with a blank expression at the father who was switching between weeping over the destroyed Uchiha head and screaming into the sky as if someone was listening to his despair and considering if it was worthy of their pity.
"This means we failed our mission," Meiko spoke up, it was a bland statement of the fact but some part of the girl hoped that there was more she did not take into account. Kiyomi was smarter than her, some part of Meiko wondered that maybe she knew something that Meiko did not and that secretly this move of hers was smarter than Meiko initially took it for.
"We can't stop him, not without killing him. We cannot kill him without destroying the reason for him to live." Kiyomi stated. She extended her hands forward in the Yamanaka hijutsu hand seal position. "Feel free to try and dodge this, criminal. If you have any willpower left to do so, that is."
Please stop… I think I get the general idea." Mana stopped Meiko's energetic storytelling just to give herself a break.
By this point, she had been glad that she was not present in this mission for longer than she than she was not. She would have caused so many conflicts with her teammates and mentor that this entire mission would have gone haywire much earlier than it normally did.
"You know, you never used to go out of your way to kill criminals before." Mana tried to speak with a softer and less accusatory tone, try and sound like she was not blaming Kiyomi for the failure of the mission but she knew immediately that she failed. Lying was not Mana's strong suit.
"Are you serious? I don't regret for a moment forcing that asshole shoot himself into space and choke on it. He was a criminal. Rogues get executed on sight, that's the way things work. Sixth agreed with me. He understood." Kiyomi crossed her hands over her chest, turning away from Mana to look at the gloomy final kicks of the winter outside.
"You fired him into space?" Mana sighed.
"Yeah, she took over his mind and just made his body coil like a spring and whoosh he went." Meiko turned her lips to the side, like a kid telling on her little sister eating all the cookies. "I thought we were totally screwed. The mission was a total shitshow but the Sixth took it a bit easy on us. He told us that stuff like this happens, that the mission kind of went off the rails…"
"He had his bio-goop planted on the jar. We couldn't have just picked it up and fled – he'd have followed us anywhere we went. We had to fight him and we had to stop him for good." Kiyomi objected, still refusing to look back at Mana. Frankly, the magician felt a little surprised that Kiyomi did not see Mana's reaction coming, with the two having worked together on multiple occasions she should have known better.
Something about the Yamanaka just really did not feel right. Like there was something unnatural about her and the way she's been thinking. Her thoughts were still her own, this was undoubtedly Kiyomi making these odd calls but the way that she herself interpreted those thoughts and acted on her emotions was completely different.
"Yeah I… I wasn't there. I'm in no position to judge or anything." Mana tried defusing the tension that took over the ward and it did appear to work somewhat. After a sigh, the blonde turned back to her friends. "I'm not surprised that Lord Sixth had few problems with the way things went. Given his background and all."
"Oh, Kiyomi did get some shit." Meiko grinned, once again reminding more of a child who was gleeful that their parents weren't yelling at them for once.
"It's just because the Uchiha are breathing on the Sixth's back. They'll be giving him a hard time for losing a perfectly fine set of eyes and letting me off the hook without getting a Tribunal hearing. Recovering in the hospital is the least of my worries." Kiyomi sighed.
"Why would the Uchiha need those eyes that much? Would they not care more that one of their own got killed and want an honorable burial and all that? I thought their main problem would be that the body was desecrated, not that the Sharingan was lost." Mana wondered.
"I don't know why they're being assholes over things they're being assholes about. It's a whole thing, they want developed sets of eyes of their own back. Some inner clan matters, most likely." Kiyomi clutched her bed cover in her hands in anger. Even talking about the Uchiha appeared to make the girl uneasy now, her emotional instability was very clearly escalating as her tough feelings towards the clan were at the worst they've ever been.
"Hmmm… It only now occurred to me that you never told us about what you've been doing. We've spent all this time just talking about our thing… As a chuunin, you probably had a way more insane adventure!" Meiko blew her hands out like trying to wrap them around a balloon.
"Oh, I just went to Shukuba to uncover where the Fire Lord's money was disappearing, fought a bunch of criminals and assassins and came back. There were some complications so the whole thing lasted over a week." Mana smiled while quickly recounting the story. She did not really feel like going into more detail with the emotional struggles that the mission brought up. She's already been treading pretty thin ice with her friends and the last thing the magician needed was losing the few real friends she had.
Meiko laughed out gleefully like a little peach.
"You suck at telling stories." She noted.
"Yeah, nowhere near your level." Mana nodded feeling glad that her vagueness went over well with her friends. Something kept pinching Mana's side telling her that if she went into detail and started explaining her doubts about reforming the Shukuba Security and all the destabilizing motions that came with it and how much time she spent thinking she made everything worse by being involved she'd just stay on the topic of morality and politics.
Those two topics had to go when friendships were involved. It was something very new to Mana, something that made her feel a little bit lonely inside because she realized that she may never be able to share those things with anyone without causing schisms to open up or deepen. Even now, when Mana just vaguely dismissed the topic, Kiyomi was still looking pretty down.
"Is Hanasaku-sensei in the hospital too? She sounded pretty hurt in your story." Mana wondered.
"Yeah, I think she's on the floor above." Meiko nodded.
"Great, I'll go pay her a visit and maybe redeem myself for not bringing you anything. Flowers and some food, I guess…" the magician stood up just to stretch her limbs a bit. She's been sitting in that chair for quite a while and there was probably not too much time left before the visiting hours would have ended.
"Aw, cool, there are these awesome chicken sandwiches they're selling from the vending machine on the fourth floor. Do you think you can get some of that? Oh, and chips too!" Meiko looked quite excited, that was the way Mana preferred to keep her.
"I hate flowers…" Kiyomi mumbled to herself before looking back up at Mana with a much brighter look, "Chicken sandwiches and chips do sound nice though. The hospital food could use some work."
"Right, be back soon." Mana bowed before stepping out at a quick pace to find Hanasaku's ward and those food vendors Meiko mentioned. "It's not like Hanasaku-sensei will be too overjoyed to see me, I guess." She mumbled to herself while ascending the stairs one more floor and following the queue of people to where she guessed Hanasaku's ward would be.
The woman was the Fifth Hokage for a time and while those with any political sense in their bones may not have been overly fond of her rather bumbling policies and decisions, she was quite a beloved and popular leader regardless. Her charm and carefree attitude just made her that much more charismatic and sometimes charisma was just enough for a leader to make their mark.
Waiting to see the woman may have taken more time than Mana counted on it taking.