Kiyomi gave the falling meteors a passing glare. Almost instantly after letting her eyes move away from her opponent, a handful of Yordalarans leaped at her from behind. Without Meiko to hold all of them at bay, the violently confused mob rushed right at Kiyomi. Tight arms wrapped around the young woman, placing her in a full nelson lock. The Yamanaka crossed her hands as fast as she could and moved to the side of the assailant. A handful of painful blows and kicks counted down the time that it took for her to escape.
From the side of the Yordalaran that applied the hold on her, Kiyomi leaned down and lifted the man up, slamming him into the ground with a side slam. It was so often that her mother told the Yamanaka that she was better off tending to family garden than reading wrestling magazines and, more recently, watching wrestling television. Right now it kind of saved her from a nasty beating, then again, she did fall to the ground together with the man that grabbed her from behind, leaving her down with a whole bunch of furious and confused Yordalarans around her.
They were too many and too numerous. Even if Kiyomi wasted almost no time getting out from the lock, she couldn't power out from the mob of hundreds of Yordalarans stomping, kicking and punching the life out of her. One rather thick man-cube decided to jump on top of the kunoichi and start smacking and clawing at her upper body. The blonde felt a warm trickle of blood running down her cracked forehead, her daffodil hair was temporarily stained with some red, giving it a pinkish hue.
"Dammit, Meiko… The meteors…" Kiyomi grunted to herself, running through the back of her mind the two things that made staying down here and getting pummeled absolutely not an option. More so, who knew what that nasty mind-controlling spy was doing this very moment while Kiyomi was not keeping him on his toes?
A thunderous crash temporarily raised Kiyomi's back off the ground from the resonating force, it could not have been the meteors, that would have left nothing but destruction in its wake, these people, as sturdy, fast and strong as they were, may not even survive both of the meteors hitting the ground this close to them. It would be fiery mayhem, certainly not a dull and spine-chilling thud like this one.
"Meiko…" Kiyomi realized. Strength flowed through her body once more. She had to get to her, she had to see how Meiko was. If she needed help or if she was even alive… The grim prospect of that last thought made Kiyomi let loose. Her feet wrapped around the nearest neck and drove that person over her head, right into the ground while she used the momentum to roll on top. After getting on top of the man she had flipped over, the Yamanaka delivered a pair of palm smacks at their neck before slipping off and charging at the crowd in front of her, at the direction where she heard Meiko crash into the ground.
"The meteors…" Kiyomi thought to herself shortly before she closed her wet eyes, kicked and elbowed a bunch of Yordalarans that attempted to surround her and get her back into a similar disadvantageous position like before. Did these people not know some of them might soon die? What did that spy do to them?
Meiko was conscious, the blacksmith was pulling herself back up, by the time that Kiyomi got to the redhead, she was already on her bottom and trying to make her head stop spinning. From the way she landed, she was lucky that her neck didn't snap instantly…
"Snuggle later…" Meiko mumbled, she sounded dizzy, judging from how hard she hit the ground she must have felt that way too. "We need to… Stop…"
"Trust me," Kiyomi whispered before placing her hands in a signature Yamanaka hijutsu hand seal position.
"Wait, no, you'll transfer your…" Meiko tried to object before Kiyomi switched her mind into the blacksmith's body. She did not use the more advanced Mind Body Disturbance. That'd have left Meiko paralyzed inside her own body, feeling every little detail of the pain and dizziness that she was about to experience. By using Mind Body Switch Kiyomi made sure to shoulder all of those pains onto herself.
"What are you doing? You'll leave your body unprotected, they'll kill you! You can't augment your body while your mind is in mine!" Meiko was almost screaming inside her own mind. A little voice that the Yamanaka could do nothing about. The blacksmith's mind was tempered by constant training with Kiyomi, too powerful to try and shut down, moreover, there wasn't even time to try.
"I'm the team leader, remember? It is the leader's responsibility to take up these things on their shoulders." Kiyomi tried expressing her thoughts in a joyful manner, a mental equivalent of a little sunshine. It did little to break through Meiko's gloom though. "This was the only way, my mind can still work your body while you're dizzy. Don't worry, I'm not a complete idiot…"
While these thoughts echoed inside Meiko's mental space, the blacksmith's body darted about the battlefield smacking and kicking Yordalarans about. She had a couple of milliseconds before the sky turned dark and before the heat from the meteors would make breathing tough. At that moment she'd have to move out and do what had to be done, hope these confused bastards were still into the whole self-preservation thing more than they were into killing and maiming…
After doing her best to jet around in a ring, kick and bash the rushing mob about as best as she could for the moment, Kiyomi directed Meiko at a crash course towards the two meteors.
"You do know it'll hurt like hell, right?" Meiko warned her teammate realizing she had little say at this point in the Yamanaka's plan.
"That's why there are the two of us in one body, to hold each other's hand through it." Kiyomi tried playing the severity of the oncoming supersized danger pair off. "Your hands are pretty busted. You've smashed too many already using just your fists, that must be why they gave in."
Kiyomi darted off Meiko's body with her shoulder raised and aimed at the meteor. "Blockbuster!" Kiyomi and Meiko yelled out in unison inside the blacksmith's mind as the pair crashed into the first massive rock, stopping it in mid-air but it failed to blow up into small, dusty chunks like those before it did. The meteor merely split into two and then, due to the air pressure into more, no less dangerous parts.
"Your move failed to bust this block…" Kiyomi grunted in pain and tear. Now all of the wounds Meiko had before as well as the newly acquired ones all settled on her shoulders for as long as she chose to operate the body.
"You didn't pass out after the hit, that meant you were holding something back. You need to stop being afraid and questioning how it'll go, just ram it!" Meiko yelled out. At this point she worried less about her good friend being inside her own body, taking away the pain, exhaustion, and dizziness that were hers to bear.
"Fair enough…" Kiyomi sighed. She reached for Meiko's thigh to unseal a quiver of arrows and then behind her to the back plates of the armor to unseal the bow. "Giving my all would have made it difficult to do this though!"
With Fire Release chakra flowing through Meiko's body, fueled by the pain, the desperation and an almost aggressive need to destroy these shattered, falling rocks before they killed someone, the Yamanaka, still in charge of Meiko's body, launched a flurry of chakra-coated arrows that precisely hit each and every splintered rock and blew it up in mid-air. The fiery resonance burnt set some solitary patches of dry grass aflame, shook some of the flimsy buildings that the refuging settlers had built here but both the settlement and its inhabitants were saved!
"Now it's just the spies…" Kiyomi uttered, somewhat hesitant to come back to her body, which she wasn't sure the precise condition of as of yet.
"And Mana…" Meiko's gloomy thoughts continued to cloud her usually cheerful mental space.
"And Mana…" Kiyomi sighed as well. Shortly after these final thoughts resonated, Meiko felt all alone again in the only place she was supposed to normally feel alone and yet… She was so used to Kiyomi's mental link that no tampering with her mind felt almost… Lonely.
A pair of gauntlets caught the skeletal rod. More and more gauntlets appeared out of thin air to wrap their obsidian fingers with golden rings around the shards of rock that rotated at great speed around the rod, looking to shred anything that came within its range. Hanshin posed a pair of times, letting his invisible chakra armor deliver the strikes for him.
The murmuring spy turned around a pair of times waving his curious weapon about. Trying to let the crazy compensate for skill. Hanshin broke his pose, a pair of times his armor clashing with the enemy sent ripples of chakra that cut into his chest. This was the first time his blood was drawn in a while. Just about notable enough to get serious. The foreign spy flipped over a bunch of time, swinging his shredding tool of murder about as he did so. There was less and less crazy behind these movements. It was impossible for someone as experienced as Hanshin to miss the fact that the ground was approaching immensely fast and add two on top of two to realize that the enemy was trying to drive him into it before shredding him to stringy bits.
Hanshin's image blurred past the enemy. Even if his mouth was covered, the widened in surprise eyes betrayed his emotions just fine. The fancy and exotic weapon fell out of the spy's hands while he fumbled and fell over. Blood burst from under the cover of cloth that covered the man's face. Hanshin had delivered a pair of pretty nasty blows while using his impressive speed to pass around his opponent and avoid trouble.
The man looked around, noticing Kiyomi and Meiko helping each other stand up with moderate difficulty. Another turn of his head revealed Mana's violent struggle against the Yordalarans. Little by little, the magician's movements dulled and slowed down. Humanity returned to her eyes as the young woman started blinking again. Her eye movements stopped seeming cold and calculated and she allowed her curiosity the luxury of engaging itself in meaningless and disadvantageous glares. After a couple of seconds more of fighting out of pure instinct, merely because she was fighting when she woke up, Mana snapped out and dashed back, deflecting a handful of chasers to where they fell over due to magician's skilled use of playing their own weight against them.
"No time to fool around anymore. You can't tell Hanshin anything useful, it seems, maybe your partner will be more talkative…" Hanshin sighed before turning back at his opponent. The man was no longer where the Konoha special jounin had left him, the spy charged at Hanshin with his rod in hand, aiming to drive it right through Hanshin's chest, without turning off whatever techniques made his weapon behave the way it did before.
Hanshin gracefully hopped aside, measuring the opponent and winding up his fist. The Konoha ninja dug it deep into the enemy's back, hard enough to crush a kidney whole. The spy fell to the ground on his front as if was running on electricity and had just been turned off. Despite the tremendous pain and the better instinct of his body to shut down and adamantly refuse to get up, the spy wriggled back to his feet. He grabbed the piece of cloth that covered the bottom of his face and tore it off to let the blood from his insides flow freely.
"How disgraceful…" Hanshin pressed his relaxed palm to his temples and his forehead after witnessing the reason why the enemy wore that mask to begin with – the fact that he was missing a lower jaw and his tongue just hung around unless the cloth bag was tied under it and held it in place. "You three, hurry up and catch that diplomat!"
Kiyomi and Meiko looked around the battlefield still having a participating and conscious mob of Yordalarans looking to get them. In perfect sync, the two took fighting positions and jumped to answer their calls for a riot.
"Can't believe it this is how we're settling this!" Kiyomi grumbled, her body still felt fatigued and stiff from all the free shots, stomps and punches she took while she was out in Meiko's body. While the millisecond she spared to clean up a bit and the chaotic explosion of the meteors above forced some instinct of self-preservation into the minds of the Yordalarans, minimizing the time they spent kicking the shit out of Kiyomi's mindless and collapsed body, she still took more punishment than she was used to taking.
"No, this is fine." Mana joined in with the three, throwing wide air slaps about that sent a handful of Lightning Release spheres after each flap of her arm. She used to use the Audra wand for this sort of channeling motion but unfortunate circumstances had forced her to learn to work with what she had, or rather without what she did not have. "This only means that the mind-controlling spy is still in range. He's using something inside of his coat to control people, that means he has to be close somewhere."
"Well… You're our sensor…" Meiko murmured to herself while a dozen of Yordalarans charged at her with a tackle and ground the blacksmith in a power struggle with each side attempting to push the other over.
If the conscious remains of the Yordalaran mob were any stronger, faster, more ruthless, it may have been difficult to track using her sensory while fighting at the same time. However, Mana managed to move around a pair of rushing brawlers and step onto the end of a fork while stomping her foot down to get the tool stuck firmly into the dirt. The speed and invested force from the fork thrust was so considerable that the poor Yordalaran flipping right over and slid face-first a decent distance through their home soil.
"I can't sense him. He didn't run, he hid. He must be suppressing his chakra." The magician concluded from what she felt.
"How is that possible?" Kiyomi grunted, powering through the crowd of enemies and smacking at them with mean chops. The Yamanaka held back so that her chops did not cut through the enemy like a sword, leaving them in pieces, but she aimed at the joints, effectively disabling those she hit until they got medical attention.
"One might suppress their chakra with a ninjutsu technique, that will make them effectively useless in battle because they can no longer use their chakra for augmentation or ninjutsu but it will help one hide." Mana relayed the information back.
Due to the Yordalarans kept piling atop of one another, they managed to push Meiko back and within an instant got on top of her, stomping and kicking the blacksmith as they did for Kiyomi, hoping that the sum of their relentless attacks together with the blacksmith's injuries shall finally take the Konoha kunoichi down.
"Earth Style: Boulder Rush!" Kiyomi yelled out while slamming her palms into the ground and channeling her chakra through the soil. The molding chakra mingled with the minerals and dirt present in the Yordalaran soil and formed a large boulder that clever manipulation of the dirt under it allowed the kunoichi to extract to the surface. With the arm of the Yamanaka heiress glowing faint blue from the chakra she focused into her fist, the blonde decked the boulder with her honest effort which sent the mass tumbling at the group of Yordalarans on top of Meiko, blasting them aside like pins.
"If you can't sense him, you should be able to sense the object inside his body, the one that he's using to control people's minds," Kiyomi advised while helping Meiko get back up. The two were decently worn out by the scuffle in which they constantly had to watch over the well-being of their endless opponents as well as that of their own and thus they decided to stick together for a while. This would have meant that the horde of enemies around them would pool as well but they would gain more as a skilled team than lose by uniting a bunch of mind-controlled settlers that barely know each other.
Mana's emerald eyes shot open, she could sense it! The man had suppressed his chakra to a level matching that of the average Yordalaran but he was still using his technique to some extent. It was not enough to maintain his hold on Mana but it was enough to keep the Yordalarans he had captured in his hold. The magician's lips blew out a melody of whistles while her arms formed a hand seal in an instant.
"Sweet Lullaby." Mana chanted out while the Yordalarans around Kiyomi, Meiko and her jerked a bit and collapsed onto the mixture of dirt and blood that they have ground together by stomping the ground beneath their feet this much. The magician ceased her melody barely seconds in. Her teammates turned at her, they were questioning her with a glare as they could have certainly used some more time to catch their breaths. Especially when Mana now knew how to exclude targets she did not want from her illusion, whereas some time before she cast it on everybody hearing the sound of her tunes.
"Just watch." Mana murmured, observing in content while the Yordalarans slowly got back to their feet and looked at each other with surprise.
Barely fifty meters to the west, the invisible arm of Hanshin's armor tripped over his powerless opponent while a large, gold and obsidian gauntlet formed right above of the jawless man. With a blood-freezing thud, the gauntlet crushed the man to the ground beneath him, not unlike how the spy planned to defeat Hanshin not too long ago himself. After glaring at his unconscious opponent for a while, Hanshin turned back to his team.
"Using genjutsu as a chakra signal jammer. That's clever, Hanshin must admit." The special jounin grinned while looking at Mana. "Hey, you, get out from wherever you're hiding. Now that we know how to break your tricks, you won't control anyone ever again!"
Hanshin's words got scattered by the howling wind of the Yordalaran plains but to no reply.