"Is there going to be any groundwork?" Mana wondered as she entered a default defensive stance. She had seen Yushijin fight before, she knew exactly how to stand for the best chance of evading each and every blow from his massive sword or any surprise tackles, feints and kicks he might use to try and spice his style up. There's only so much "spicing up" one can come up with when they're holding a claymore that occupies both of their arms most of the time.
"None yet. I will purposefully slow my pace down for you, try to feel and understand what I'm doing. I'm sure that a prodigy of illusions should get the basic idea in a blink. Execution and mastery are wholly different things altogether…" Yushijin replied. He raised two of his fingers up, Mana felt the intrusion of his chakra within her system but she did not resist. Truth be told, there was little she could have done to resist genjutsu in the first stages of it being used. One could not lay some sort of chakra barrier or shield themselves from illusions completely. Even if they busted an illusion up with their own flow manipulation, the initial stages of the genjutsu technique would have gone on unimpeded.
One could not wall off a rushing river without getting at least a little bit wet.
The next thing Mana felt was a light tap on her shoulder. Perhaps she let up too much. Delayed shattering Yushijin's illusion. She wanted the most time possible to read into it. It was like staring at an ancient scroll, filled with priceless information that was written down in a language Mana could just barely understand while being submerged underwater. Even if she was beginning to choke up and the threat of a watery grave loomed closer and closer, the magician lingered and stared at the tablet, trying to win just a few more seconds to read it, up until it was too late…
It was not a mistake she should make in a battle. Then again, in a battle, she was quite unlikely to study her opponent this way. She would try to understand them but not learn their craft.
"Took your sweet time. Well, learned anything useful?" Yushijin wondered. He was teasing, he must have seen it from Mana's eyes. The magician would not have allowed herself to be completely drowned out in a genjutsu technique unless she intended to read it in its entirety and had a pretty good chance of doing it.
"Your flow is weak at the entry point. Subtle as a tick, if you hadn't used a hand seal, I'd have never felt it enter, just felt that it's already entered my network. From then on you subtly drive the chakra up all the way to the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum, from there you pinch it in all the right ways to play with how the target perceives time." Mana reported.
"W-Wow… Just like that, you've learned the fundamentals of temporal illusions. I'm shocked, you're not just a natural, you're a genius. It took my entire early career to learn just this one illusion and you've captured seven years of training in just seeing the completed illusion once." Yushijin commended Mana with his arms locked over his chest. He let down his guard from the surprise of his student's skill.
"Not quite. Just this much is pretty much useless." Mana shook her head. Yushijin needed to give her more credit than the condescension he gave her in return to her fundamental analysis. "Just knowing which areas of the brain to pinch and how to better do so does not help me. I still need countless hours of practice to work out how different touches make a target's brain react. How and where exactly I need to pinch to accelerate or rewind one's perception of time."
"You forgot stopping it." Yushijin grinned.
"I did not. Stopping it must be the simplest thing to do of all – you've done it as a child. If I had a knife to my throat and was forced to guess, I'd say it's as simple and squeezing the whole thing hard by accelerating and forcing the flow as hard as possible." Mana smiled in return.
"W-Wow… I know we're talking about a jutsu I've been working with as a child and it should not take too much for a skilled ninja to repeat my results but… Do you think you could replicate it right now? Your theoretical knowledge seems more than enough to pull "Genjutsu: Last Resort" off." Yushijin stepped up and began pushing his student in the psychological sense.
"If I fail, I just risk damaging your brain, what's the worst that can happen?" Mana threw a strand of her hair back.
Yushijin was about to reply something, judging from his face he must have realized that he's been pressuring his student a bit too early, a result from getting overly excited but, much to his surprise, Mana weaved an untraditional hand seal of two fingers of each hand crossed up.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!" the magician chanted out, manifesting a single shadow clone. Mana felt a cruel cut at her chakra resources. As a child the dreadful feeling of half of one's spiritual and physical essence getting ripped out petrified and made Mana pass out, now she knew that halving her chakra was only temporary, just as long as her clone remained active.
"You can do Shadow Clones?" Yushijin asked in a more rhetorical sense. Even if he was much less impressed by this than he was with Mana's aptitude for illusions from before, it was still a notable technique, although probably more so due to its status than actual power.
"It's more than just showing off, although I don't like using other people's techniques so I only use it for training. I'd appreciate you didn't tell anyone I've done this, I have a reputation to keep after all. In any case, even if I damage my clone's brain, after I practice illusions on it, I will know exactly what I'm doing wrong." Mana pointed out.
"What do you mean?" Yushijin asked. The prospect of learning to use Shadow Clones for training himself began tempting the Konoha chuunin as well. It was so just due to how little he knew of the jutsu's risks and the strain it posed.
"I'm not sure how to explain it but… When I kill my clone, I sort of come to learn what it knew. As if it passes down its experience to me after it's gone." Mana explained herself.
"I see, and because you're naturally sharp at reading illusions, your own clone is a perfect partner to survey what you're doing wrong…" Yushijin nodded.
"True. Although it is taxing enough to create the clone, let alone use various jutsu I'm not even good at controlling yet. I can usually do this course correction only a handful of times throughout a single day." Mana shrugged before raising her hand up in the mirrored hand seal position to that which she saw Yushijin use before.
The eyes of the clone changed from its usual emerald green to dulled out grey, clone Mana's irises faded out into the whites as the poor thing stumbled back. Mana released the clone in an instant to see what it had learned. It was not all too useful to keep it going any longer – not too long after succumbing to the illusion it would only see the time that it considered having stopped.
"Well?" Yushijin got his hopes up.
"I was a bit too rough, probably. I got the right area but the wrong kind of pinch. May have sent the poor thing comatose if I squeezed any harder. A useful trick for the future…" Mana sighed with her hands weighing down. She could feel them getting heavier as if filling with grains of lead each passing moment of blood passing through them.
"Well… Don't get winded just yet. We've got a long day ahead of us. We'll probably be training a bit on the road too." Yushijin warned the magician. He did not need chakra sensory to see Mana skipping breaths.
"While we're at it, we can improve your illusions too. There's a handy trick I've learned in the caverns of Land of Wind, you are sort of already using it without knowing it but if you have some control and knowledge over it, you might improve your one-trick style." Mana warmed her arms up by rotating them around and entering a default defensive stance.
"Ouch…" Yushijin smirked before repeating the same. His stance was modified from what stances the magician had seen from the youth before. His right reached for the sword but his body was not leaned in to best utilize the weight of his own momentum for the swing – he was preparing a defensive draw, likely something to keep his opponent at a distance. The stance was interesting if appearing a little conceived on the fly, but it was too easy to read just what the Konoha chuunin had on his mind.
"Are you quite done yet?" Erumo groaned, finishing her rather well-brewed cup of coffee. Right in front of her, Kouta was eating bacon and steaks like it was his job. Before visiting the Land of Snow, the trapster hadn't even known that people wrapped steaks around with bacon. While it made sense for someone living in such frigid conditions to eat this plentiful and this rich in fat and content, it made much less sense for someone who could have effortlessly survived without food for weeks on end just due to his metabolism alone to abandon their immediate objective to chow down on something.
Erumo regretted asking almost instantly as Kouta managed to get a string of bacon of an alarming size get stuck in his throat and began bashing his own chest with strength only available on-hand to a Juugo to try and get it unstuck. For someone who was so polite and reserved most of the time, Kouta sure ate like a barbarian.
"Where are you rushing? We've got enough intel, we could return right now and we'd all be done." The medical ninja shrugged before resuming his devouring activities.
"We know that the raider tribe comes from far north, somewhere from the mountain range. That's almost eighty kilometers of possible locations. I'm pretty sure Yushijin would like us to narrow it down a little bit more than that, genius." Erumo placed her cheek on her enclosed fist so that she did not drive it into Kouta's face in a fit of rage instead.
Somehow the medical ninja managed to swallow a chunk of meat the size of his own fist without even chewing it. As it became clear, it was because he was in a rush to share something.
"They don't live on a mountain, they live inside or under it. Mana is a sensor, she can sniff them out if we get close enough. With proper focus and meditation, her sensory range stretches out quite a lot." Kouta pointed out.
"I can't believe it how half-assedly you're taking this assignment." Erumo sighed, surrendering to the fact that she'd be spending most of the midday in this joint that looked like somebody's poor home kitchen and smelled of smoke, grease and garlic that was hung up over pretty much the entire place as the joint was too small to have its own warehouse meaning that most of the spices were drying right up above everybody's heads and all the food was pretty much being prepared right in front of the client.
"You just hate it that we're coming to the enemy and not the other way around. Meaning you won't get to lay any traps for anyone, heck, we'll probably fall for some of their traps…" Kouta shrugged. He wiped his face with an old but washed hanky and placed it back near the salt and pepper, likely to be rewashed and used again.
Erumo expressed her irritation with a tsk while crossing her arms and trying to find a more soothing sight to direct her stare at rather than look at her teammate. From the look of a neutral observer, it may have appeared like the two were related. One often got vexed by the other but both shared a certain bond of kinship that, at the end of the day, let one walk past minor grievances and quarrels and stand as one. While the core observation would have been wrong, the cause for such a rushed conclusion was actually correct – it was exactly because Erumo felt certain bonds towards her team that she chose to cease this bickering.
The sooner Kouta was done with this minor distraction – the sooner they'd be back on track.
After what seemed like an eternity to anyone who was not eating, the pair left the unimpressive food joint and decided to get back to questioning. Deep inside Erumo could understand Kouta's hesitation, talking to these shut-in and one-word-answering folks were painful. Every single detail had to be dragged out, sometimes they just flat out ignored questions for the sole reason of not wanting to be bothered. Some of the Land of Snow locals just kept on walking despite Erumo and Kouta asking them for a few words, acting as if they hadn't heard anything or anyone calling them out.
After some point of this pointless crusade for leftover bits of intelligence, the duo decided to take turns. One questioned as many people as they could for a handful of minutes while the other refreshed themselves and got back into the groove for questioning, brushed the frustration and got their aggravation back in check. Having noticed that Kouta had a natural talent of talking to stoic people, Erumo began giving him double and triple shifts. Surely the Juugo must have noticed that but given how he did not complain, the trapster just kept giving him more and more time to work his own particular brand of magic.
Evening came early in around these parts. A couple of times Kouta had returned with snacks, maybe Erumo should have gotten the hint that time was passing by when the term of an assignment loomed in the nearby horizons. Puny streetlights and fires lit up the small settlement before too long. Erumo's sights began wandering around, admiring the evening lights instead of the monotony of Kouta's hard work of filling himself. Her eye settled on a seated body that did not display any signs of life. The back of the lifeless body was placed to a trash can that seemed half full yet the can did not get toppled by the weight of the cadaver which Erumo found a little odd. For a corpse, the body appeared to be seated remarkably gracefully and laid enveloped in darkness, just in a dark embrace of the shade where the fields of two streetlights failed to touch each other.
With a sigh that was supposed to even out her breathing and calm her escalating sense of dread, Erumo stepped into the alleyway to examine the body. At that moment she wished that she had the unnatural chakra-sensing abilities that Mana had. It was at moments like this that one came to appreciate such abilities. At any point, something could blow up or a sealing tag could open up a gate to another sealing dimension full of acid that would strip the flesh off of one's bones, a bear trap coated with chakra could bust one's leg or well-placed kunai dispensers could have riddled one's careless body with blades. Sensing the minuscule traces of chakra in such devices would have been a godsend in Erumo's line of work.
All she had to rely on were her natural senses. Little good did those do in the natural darkness of the early and long evenings plaguing these parts of the world whole year long. Erumo's best attempts at an inspection did not reveal anything unusual, she went as far as to augment her perception as best as she could without risking severing her network to try and take in as much as she could. This was one of those times that the kunoichi had all the time in the world yet required maximum vigilance as well.
As far as the trapster's senses tipped her off to, there did not appear to be any natural threats around the body, yet the Sin Eater's service would have been the best shot at being absolutely sure. Regardless, given how Erumo craved for more intelligence than the pair had at the time, the young woman decided to risk it. With a wary step, she approached the corpse.
From the look of it, it looked as good as any corpse of a middle aged woman but something about it seemed… Off. Even if Erumo couldn't see any telltale signs of something more akin to her line of work and specialty, something about the corpse kept forcing the trapster to re-examine it from a respectable distance over and over again. After the n'teenth scan, the young woman got bolder, fear and shock turned to custom, the body in an alleyway was beginning to lose its flair.
"Holy…!" Kouta's expression of agitation made Erumo jump and then freeze on her toes. With an infuriated expression, she turned at her overly excitable teammate with clenched fists but then tossed aside any dreams of pummeling her friend for giving her such a scare.
"Yeah…" Erumo breathed out the influx of air in her chest that the scare made burrow even deeper down instead.
"That's a body…" Kouta whispered, if someone noticed the pair whispering over this gruesome sight, they'd probably assume that the two had something to do with it. Luckily enough, they were in a location that wanted the least possible thing to do with other people's business. Something made Erumo dread that even if this scene was transpiring in the middle of the settlement's central square, the interest from the locals would be just about the same.
"So do you want your Sin Eater license now or would you be pleased with a ceremony back in the village?" Erumo raised her eyebrow at her slow to catch on and move ahead teammate.
"Is it trapped?" Kouta looked at his teammate. Erumo closed her eyes and tried breathing calmer for a handful of moments.
"That's what I was trying to find out before you startled me…" she explained.
"Well, is it?" Kouta wondered.
Emboldened by her teammate's aggressive approach and almost infuriating desire to find out what Erumo was so careful to sneak around, the trapster leaned in to the body for a more careful inspection. The emerald orbs of the young woman shot open as she jumped back on her feet and began looking around, as if expecting an ambush to follow any second now.
"W-What's wrong?" Kouta tried calming his teammate down by gently touching her shoulder.
"This corpse… It's not just any corpse it's… Sewn up, or something. Something really fishy is going down here. Not sure if the tribe we're looking for is involved but… We might need to examine this body more than not at all if we're to find out." Erumo's expression turned grim and serious all of a sudden once the initial shock of noticing the stitches all over the deceased woman's body calmed.
"Alrighty then…" Kouta sighed. He reached out to lift the body and flip it over his shoulders. Before Erumo could scold her teammate about how reckless his decision was, the body twitched, instantly grabbing the attention of both ninja, before something shifty transpiring inside the body. It appeared as if whatever innards the body still possessed were moving around inside the cadaver. The stitches covering the body began stressing out before tearing up and in a bloody display of erupting blood and guts, a bestial figure the size of a small child burst from inside the body.
Kouta and Erumo took wide dashes back, leaning their bodies aside to avoid the bronze-colored blurs of rusty artificial claws trying to slash their eyes out. Almost instantly after appearing from inside the body where it had resided previously, the blood-covered furry took a charge further down the alleyway, jumping and dashing across the walls in an attempt to evade the fields of light projected by the streetlights.
"Well… That… Just happened…" Kouta tumbled over words.
"What are you waiting for? After it!" Erumo scolded the young man who was equally shocked as the Konoha trapster was.