Mana knew that she could not allow Konoha to dictate the terms of their battle. Even with Usubane by her side, someone who may have covered the close-range reasonably well, there was too much at risk to not keep the woman on her heels before she understands just what it is that the rabbit and her summoner are trying to do.
The magician moved her head forward, letting her hat roll off of her head, Mana could not allow it to move as slowly as it would have taken for gravity to demand its toll so she picked the hat up with her own quick swipe of the hand. It was a distraction, however, there was nothing inside the hat but inside the sleeves of Mana, a flurry of explosive tags.
Konoha took a step back. She noticed the range that the explosive tags scattered by Mana covered. The rather small size of the dimension that the mysterious flower stored its pollen in now worked against the rogue ninja, caging her to where she'd need to dive and power through explosive tags to land a hit. One of Mana's free hands quickly went through a bundle of hand seals.
"Friendly Gust Jutsu!" Mana chanted out while the air in her lungs quickly molded with chakra flowing through her system and turned into a strong gust of Wind Release chakra on its way out, driving the cloud of explosive tags toward the enemy.
A chain of explosions littered the sealing dimension. The pollen in the air lit on flames and quickly burnt up, the entire dimension should have turned a bit brighter but it stayed as black and hazy as it always has been, even when the explosive reaction greatly reduced the amount of pollen remaining in it.
Konoha looked from her spontaneous blocking position, her stealthy attire was beginning to slowly singe off with her cape slipping off and smoldering into bits just like the bits of pollen had not too long ago. The fact that her clothes took some damage suggested that either Konoha messed up with her augmentations, which suggested a lot of things all of itself, or that she was just preserving chakra on purpose, that may have been terrifying.
Anything that Konoha felt was worth getting a bit banged and burnt up for frightened the magician if even a little.
Usubane had already disappeared, rushing toward the edge of the sealing dimension, ready to give the wall her best shot. Usually, it may have been dangerous to bust through dimensions like this, only the stronger ninja could have even managed it, but what laid beside those walls was tough to tell. One could have ended up on another dimension entirely or they could have gotten themselves stuck in between, the containment medium that holds every one of the infinite sealing dimensions within its endless vastness.
"Ninja Art: Formidable Will!" words rang out from Konoha's direction, the majority of her body still covered in smoke and slightly trembling from stiffness. Yet another puff of smoke concealed her even more, one emanating from her own ninjutsu this time. Mana could not make out what came from the loud pop of Konoha's technique nor had she heard of such a jutsu. She tried vocally warning Usubane but events went on before she could.
"Ninja Art: Leaf Blade!" the woman grunted out following her previous technique. Usubane's pain-ridden voice echoed through the smoke. Mana did not feel the rabbit's chakra take too much of a dip, what was wrong? Did she purposefully not augment her abilities against an opponent such as this?
This was dangerous, Usubane may have been cornered in between the dimensional wall and the enemy and wounded. Wounded because of a strategic call that Mana had made… She needed to do something, yes but… Konoha's bloodshot eyes glared back at Mana from a brief narrowing in the smoke. The magician's movements froze, she was supposed to be in an advantage – the enemy was sandwiched between her and Usubane but…
"Ninja Art:…" Mana heard Konoha's voice ringing from the cloud of smoke before getting sunken out in a loud rumble of rising walls of dirt and rock. The magician looked behind her in disbelief.
"Human Bullet Grinder!" Chominu's voice roared out loud while a human size ball of flesh slammed from high above into the closed-in cage of dirt walls, grinding anyone unfortunate enough to have remained inside just as the name of the technique suggested.
Using the aftermath of the tremendous momentum he had gathered with this slam of his hidden Akimichi clan technique, Chominu leaped out from the crumbling prison of earth walls and ran up to Mana. There was still shortness in his breath but his condition appeared to be much better.
"Thanks for the assist." Mana nodded, feeling Usubane once again gathering all of her strength for a decisive blow. Now all that was required was to provide the required time and keep Konoha's attention all to herself.
"Are you kidding? I should be thanking you…" the young Akimichi coughed and wheezed while still wiping the snot bursting from his nostrils although appearing in much finer condition for movement and battle than before. "Burning up all that pollen like that."
"No. I have done no such thing. Soon the pollen from the other side will flow to this side as well and the amount of pollen on each side will balance out. We're working on a better solution." Mana replied while keeping her eyes and sensory peeled open.
Finally, the smoke was beginning to clear a little. Konoha was sprawled out and ground into the bottom of the sealing dimension, white, shining with bright light cracks were separating like a web from the epicenter of Chominu's slam. Even while half-shocked by his allergies the Akimichi was still a physical marvel… He may have delivered a slight shock to the dimensional walls himself.
"Let's go!" Usubane roared out, forcing the pain that burnt up from deep within her body out and using that flame as fuel for her fiery taijutsu combination. The rabbit quickly delivered a combination of kicks and punches before finishing with a powerful double-handed slam at the wall. Flames burst from the ends of her limbs venom came from the fangs of a snake when it bit resulting in quite a blazing spectacle.
"Hot Rabbit Combo!" she yelled out while finishing her relentless assault on the dimensional wall with a high-reaching blazing kick. The walls lit up with more and more cracks and webs of blinding white light but they did not shatter.
"You…" Konoha's raspy and irritated tone echoed through the haze of the pollen dimension forcing Usubane to swiftly recover from her on the knees huffing and face the enemy. The poor thing was covered with deep cuts all over her body, it must have come from the leaves that Konoha attacked Usubane with before.
It was an impressive manner of attack. It appeared that the Ninja Art: Leaf Blade required the leaves to already be present in the environment, maybe that was why this technique was invented and almost entirely used by Konoha specialist ninja who worked inside of the village surrounded by endless stretches of thick forest wilderness on every side. The woman used her previous technique to summon those leaves from another sealing dimension, wherever she was, rendering this weakness obsolete, as long as Konoha had the chakra required to use both of these jutsu in tandem.
Leaf Blade was also a different thing entirely. Mana realized just what made this jutsu so dangerous, something she could not do by examining Kidenshi's injuries before. The boy had cuts when Mana found him but the reasonable assumption was to be made he was simply cut by an actual blade, not ninjutsu. By the time she realized what she was looking at, Kidenshi's cuts were all healed.
The jutsu was so precise and small-scale, so sharp that it appeared to cut through most chakra augmentations. By using a smaller object in high quantities it managed to bypass the most common ninja defensive mechanism. A man who could withstand a thousand planets exploding in his face could still be killed by a little leaf slicing his throat while he was not aware just how dangerous such a leaf was. It only made sense that specialist ninja: barrier corps, black ops and intelligence ninja would have used such a dangerous technique.
"There is no escape. No busting out for you or Konoha… Not me, the village!" the woman broke her threatening in the middle for the clarification she felt needed to provide. "The world will be as green as it once used to be and it will be beautiful!"
The woman pulled out a hand-sized scroll from under her singing and damaged cloak and unveiled it, tossing it at Mana's direction. The magician had only a second to react to this odd way of attack. Was this a feint or did the scroll contain something truly dangerous? It could have had a great number of things, ranging from one of Konoha's own more pricey jutsu sealed for a more convenient use or one of her teammates to be used when they were not around.
Mana called Konoha's bluff, she swatted the scroll aside letting it unimpressively roll aside all folded up and messy. A loud popping sound and a cloud of smoke not too long after informed the magician that the scroll was far from being empty. A brief glance at what had surfaced from yet another sealing dimension inside the scroll revealed that it was one of those pumpkin lanterns from before.
Even before the magician's memory could tip her off to how dangerous this situation was, the pumpkin lantern erupted with vines and wooden roots that only grew longer and thicker in size with time. Mana could not allow this, she'd have to sweat for it as much as possible. She did her best dance around the growing threat and with the first chakra-draining vine to wrap around her throat, the magician's entire body dissolved into petals and away from the immediate threat she could not have dealt with alone.
Using genjutsu as a heat flare for the chakra-hungry vines and the observant eyes of the enemy was a clever way to survive, but it was a very short-term one. Even before Mana became visible to Konoha and the rest affected by the illusion who have seen the magician disperse, she felt a surge of chakra moving up right to her. Her moves felt awkward but the enemy did not see that. Mana just narrowly evaded a thrust of Konoha's blade she pulled out once more.
"Can't you show some new tricks?" the rogue grinned, met with Mana's distressed and slightly terrified look when the magician reappeared a bit farther away from where she avoided getting skewered and did her best to gain some distance. "Your old routine is getting stale."
Konoha was impressive with that sword. She knew exactly where Mana would be going while disguised by the illusion just through sheer experience alone. Mana may have made a slight mistake of hiding in an illusion a bit too quickly before the anticipated impact, leaving her little time to move her real body away, but that alone was not enough for an opponent to trace her this accurately. It had to be a sign of skill from Konoha's part.
A bit farther away, Pompomaru continued to blitz around Kidenshi's body, building up momentum for when the Inuzuka actually decided to use that canine partner of his. To knock an impressive giant like this one off his boots would have called for an impressive blow so time was needed.
There was a problem with that part, however, Kidenshi was quite nimble himself but he could not adequately hold his opponent off all by himself and Lithia was… Well… Lithia. She had those impressive eyes of her but also a very nasty personality to boot and she outright refused to place herself in even the slightest amount of danger for the good of her team, leaving Kidenshi to fend himself all by his lonesome.
Just when he could have used a good distraction to give Pompomaru time to build his speed up even a little…
Konoha's partner charged forward, placing his shoulder up front in an attempt to blast Kidenshi away and knock him on his back. He was hitting the boy a bit easier, knowing that, at any time, he could have harmed his dog as well and the man appeared to be serious about his intention not to harm the Pomeranian seriously.
The boy grunted in pain as a powerful force blew him off his boots, he may have been nimble but he was not agile enough to avoid even the more force-focused fighting style of this man. Again and again, he ended up on the ground and getting back up was getting more and more difficult each time. The cuts over his body from before were now healed up but they still pulsed with odd needle-like sensations whenever he got knocked down.
Knowing full well about what his partner was all about, the Inuzuka did not even growl or scoff at her. He would not give her the satisfaction and would rather spare himself of the petty and immensely arrogant excuses of why she just let him get smacked around while she avoided any attacks using those amazing eyes of hers.
Again and again, Pompomaru hopped right back onto Kidenshi's body and started his run all over. If anything, in these desperate moments, Kidenshi could only feel grateful to the deepest bottoms of his heart to his lifelong partner for being this persistent. Konoha's partner appeared to be getting a bit bored by his successful charges, he cracked his knuckle a couple of time while he approached Kidenshi with a different manner of attack in mind.
If he decided to attack more precisely, grapple Kidenshi or get rid of Pompomaru before attacking the Inuzuka, the boy may have been as good as dead and that realization shook him to the bottom of his boots. Regardless, undaunted by his opponent's bold and slow advance filled with gestures meant to intimidate him, the boy took a defensive stance and felt Pompomaru's signals, he'd have to use it, all the force build up by his partner to save his life…
Before that could happen, Lithia stepped up in front of the man, just as slowly and boldly as the man's own advance and just slapped him with an open hand.
"Defend yourself, peasant!" she demanded.
"What the fuck, Lithia!? Now you decide to interfere!?" Kidenshi growled.
"Do not distract me, I was resting my esteemed eyes for they become sore and I get tired after a while. You have bought me time well, asset." Lithia explained nonchalantly.
"I was fighting for my life!" Kidenshi yelled out.
"Did not look like it, you just got smacked around so I thought you were in on my excellent plan." Lithia shrugged.
Before the two could settle their dispute, Konoha's large partner drove his hands downward in a smashing motion. Before it concluded with the much-awaited destruction of his opponent by the complete shattering of her spine into dusty bits, Lithia was no longer where she was expected to be. From the right side, the girl vaulted in the air and threw a lazy kick aimed at a precise area of the opponent's neck and giving him another kick while she was spinning after the first one.
The precision of these impacts that looked quite weak appeared to have left their mark. The lumbering rogue stumbled back dazed and grunting in pain. Whatever protective fortitude these "tattoos" of this man provided, it appeared that Lithia's eyes managed to completely bypass it by just seeing through them and attacking the man precisely where there were none to soften the impact.
A bright flash following a wall of heat rushing their way interrupted all but Pompomaru who was far too invested in his dashing and circles to notice the heated up atmosphere around him. Lithia's eyes wandered away to see the flaming devastation of Mana's attack burning up a large amount of pollen. Her eyes snapped open wider in shock, she quickly turned back at the enemy biting her lip in frustration that she got distracted but noticed that the giant was similarly bedazzled by the light show.
"Hmph… Those eyes of yours are pretty impressive." The enemy praised Lithia, praising her ability to see through his ability which allowed her to land some damage on him. "I indeed have covered my body with sealing glyphs that use the chakra stored within to soften hits of all kinds in specific areas."
"It is quite a work of art. If the requirement for what is needed to make it happen was not absolutely disgusting, and if everybody else could see it, I'd hang it in my father's gallery." Lithia commended the artistic craftsmanship of the man's work.
"It's not just art." He grumbled. "It is perfectly measured to cover large enough areas of my skin to not require a complete coating, most forces emanate and spread their impact, the way these tattoos are drawn, they soften most impacts even bypassing them by luck."
"Yes, I'd assume a complete coating would not be that efficient, given the amount of chakra it would take, to apply repeatedly and all that…" Lithia nodded.
"It also reminds me of my favorite natural structure – the reef…" the man looked somewhere at a blank space, looking back at some past memories, no doubt. "Wearing this protection reminds me of what I am fighting for, if ever the sacrifice seemed not worth it, this art would remind me otherwise."
"Are you quite done? Because my teammate there is storing a lot of momentum and I should not be telling you this but your rambling and the time it is buying is making this affair quite sad." Lithia pointed at Kidenshi.
"What the fuck, Lithia!?" Kidenshi growled again. "He was giving you time!"
"It does not matter. Whatever you two have to bring my way, I shall take it, like an ancient oak that has withstood thousands of windstorms in its time. I am simply stronger than the two of you, in the nature, strength makes law…" the man replied. "In fact, I trust my victory so much that I am willing to tell you my name, something we usually do not do – name's Dill."
Without replying anything, Lithia rushed forward with an attempt to attack her opponent while her Sharingan did not tire her too much in its constantly activated state. A slow but wide-reaching cross prevented her from entering but her trusty crimson eyes warned her of the dangers if she was to try and bypass the massive arm of her opponent and still try to get in close, because of that, she quickly dashed back.
It was not stupidity that led Lithia to try and drive her opponent mad and desperate by pointing out a key element of Team Walnut's plan. It was her own self-preservation instinct. She relied immensely on her Sharingan to fight at close-range and she could not allow the man to just hang back and talk to her while her Sharingan was active. In its current state, it'd take too long to switch it on and off on a whim, meaning she needed to manage it more cleverly.
For once, Lithia may have realized that there may have been things she still needed improvement on.
Hey, guys, quick author's note just to let you know, I'm putting the story on a short hiatus while I'm working on Tales of a Ninja Magician Annual #3. Just like the first year, I couldn't manage to conclude the ongoing arc before stopping to work on it but I'm not sure even I have the required micromanagement skills to pull that off consistently :D
In any case, the annual comes out at 06-25, after that, the story picks back up at its usual pace.