A wave of chakra signatures moved back from the wall. This felt suspicious. So far Erumo's traps have been fairly effective and while the kunoichi had to restrain her imagination to what she could achieve with the resources she had, the people that the settlement gave her and the number of traps required, she still excelled. Retreat from the wall suggested that the dispensers either did not work or were ineffective.
A good couple of dozens of invaders wearing animal pelts that could have used a more skillful removal method alongside their bones and other bodily accessories, donning and stitching their impressive array of adornments all over their makeshift attires rushed into the settlement. The employed trap-makers all fled for their lives, the brutish all-out offensive without a moment for flinching or mourning for the fallen comrades of the tribesmen forced even Erumo to retreat.
A young man with shoddy clothes and petrified eyes that looked as if they had attempted to crawl out of the young man's skull in order to get ahead of his terrified fleeing body made a run for his life. A meaty giant wearing a multitude of stitched together bear furs rushed at him from behind with a mace made of somebody's hefty bones.
The skull-crushing swing that was meant to finish off the fleeing worker met stiff yet reliable resistance of Usuzoku's sword while Mana rushed on ahead with a dash, taking a second to hook the bear-man's neck with her thigh and push it down into the dirt with enough force to break his face but not kill him. Knowing exactly how powerful each one of her opponents was helped a great deal to know exactly how much force was needed to dispose of any of them.
"T-Thanks!" the man yelled out.
"Go. Don't worry about helping others, I'll take care of that." Mana hurried the lucky worker. Immediately after she evaded a pair of rounded, bony hooks that a handful of tribesmen attempted to use to tear muscle and flesh off her bones. These were crude and brutal weapons, left grisly injuries. From the looks of it, they were not efficient weapons in the slightest and would have left one with a torturous yet certain end.
While simultaneously evading the shoddy attempts at placing the magician into an hours-lasting agony with their primitive tools for murder, the Konoha kunoichi drew blood from her thumb and weaved a good dozen of hand seals in the time that it took one of these men to swing one of their hooks. A self-preservation instinct made the magician freeze before placing her palm onto the ground. Luckily for her, the instinct proved correct.
A sharpened and modified skull of some massive herbivore smashed into the area where Mana had intended to place her palm and summon another partner. The skull was the end of an impressive if somber mid-to-long range weapon that was made out of connected vertebrae with the smashing skull at the end. The horns and tusks present at the sides would have served the same flesh-tearing and penetrative function while the thickness of the bone would have smashed one's head like a melon if given the chance.
In a flash of silver, Usuzoku disposed of all of the surrounding tribesmen allowing Mana to complete her summoning technique unimpeded. A goofy-looking white rabbit with a tongue so long and slobbery that he appeared like out of a cartoon that provided a grim contrast to the attempted scene of macabre slaughter all around the settlement.
"Little blasts only, protect the people, cripple the enemy," Mana instructed Usujitsa with a strict tone. In her years of training in the new Rabbit Caves, she had found out that the terrorist was mostly a braindead idiot and whenever one spoke at a decently authoritative tone to him and the rabbit kind of respected the person speaking – he was obedient like a toddler. Granted, a toddler was possibly Usujitsa's superior in the intelligence department yet possessed none of Usujitsa's potential for untold calamity which was why Mana rarely, if ever relied on the rabbit terrorist's services.
It was just that, in this case, his ability to multiply without a known limit and detonate with unmatched intensity would prove beneficial in ending this threat while protecting as many people as possible.
"Ji-Ji!" Usujitsa flapped his lips, slobbering all over the ground below. While for a brief moment Mana felt worried that the walking catastrophe was too hungry to respond to commands, in a blink of an eye, he did.
A round wall of white lit up the sky, the voiceless bodies of the tribesmen separated from their makeshift outfits of fleshy accessories and pelts littered the sky, thrown around like pins after an impressive strike from a rolling ball. Erumo's reflective barriers appeared to be more effective in the east compared to her spear and arrow riddling dispensers as well as the mid-range spike walls that came out from underground and left anyone rushing without a thinking head on their shoulders impaled and unable to move.
"Ye idiot!" Usuzoku grumbled. A strong shock shoved Mana aside, forcing the magician to tumble backward while a prolonged and sharpened beam of metal that was once looted from a settlement and reworked the best these savages could to serve as a long-range weapon pierced Usuzoku and immediately dispersed the rabbit.
With infuriated and watery eyes, Mana turned at the direction of the arrows. Due to the massive loss of life from the invading side and the powerful flares of Erumo's seals the magician had managed to miss one of the supposed generals of the invading force approaching her. It would not have taken a chakra sensor to identify the infinitely greater importance to the proud warrior approaching her to the mindless drones that once crippled or impaled on a trap continued to squirm and fight it until an end about as painful as the one they wished to inflict upon the defenseless settlers.
Mana did not linger or try to speak to the tribesman. She knew better than that. All throughout the battle, even as they were subjected to the worst kind of pain imaginable, these men and women did not grunt, moan or, let alone, shout or scream. The best one could expect from them was a grunt or some other primitive growl in the midst of an especially intense battle. The magician did not expect this man's life story, all she could see in him was that he was trouble.
The general bringing his tribesmen from the north dwarfed his peers in the decorative desire to make the most impressive type of fleshy armor imaginable as much as he did in sheer strength and speed. This was a man who had killed hundreds of horses to pull off their limbs and attach them to his own sides and create a centaur-shaped movement mechanism that he controlled with his own thighs, moving both pairs of the amputated limbs with just his own legs, which let him enjoy greater elevation in battle and made him generally dwarf average and even some tall-sized opponents.
All throughout the man's impressive skin and fursuit were undoubtedly looted accessories of metal, bronze, and fine steel. The horse's head that was missing its body and had been for a good handful of years was held together to the suit, pinned with shards of steel that were long enough to extend into a crown over the makeshift helmet of a dead mammal. Both the massive buster knuckles that the man wielded and his back appeared the same, like a half-sunken sun in the horizon except instead of rays of light there were sharp and blood-dripping spikes of steel. One of these spikes found their way through Usuzoku, forcing the rabbit to return to the caves from where he was summoned.
It was something Mana intended to make this man pay for, general or not.
The magician fired off at the walking fleshy armor showcase like an arrow. The lumbering general could not react to her at all, this threw Mana off for a moment. Her illusionary self that the magician was prepared to fake the opponent out with faded away like a mirage while the real magician leaped in from the general's right with a Spear Kick to his core body. Despite the additional leverage that the man possessed with all of the removed horse limbs that he attached to his skin-costume, the man collapsed into the dirt. The entire animalistic façade of his armor crumbled away into the broken pieces and strips of thick and stringy skin that the entire costume collapsed into.
A successful retreat of the men working on the trap holes in the south distracted Mana but the magician knew better by now than to look away from her opponent. It was just like Kouta suggested. These men and women were not stronger or faster physically nor did they possess any uncanny skills that would have made them a threat. This man was one of the strongest within their ranks and he failed to even fall for Mana's Flower Petal Sanctuary properly, the illusionary clone dwarfed the opponent's reaction time.
It was their way of thinking, their unstoppable aggression and complete lack of fear or self-preservation that made these people scary. Even now, when the magician could sense chakra signatures previously unfamiliar to her in massive enough piles to make their presence known to her, despite being solely physical and therefore tougher to pick up on, it did not look like the tribe was preparing to flee at all. They were going to go at it until the end, it seemed.
A dark flash made Mana jump backward, she felt a searing pain in her center and her cheek. She had managed to bend her neck and protrude her head in the way that made the strike miss her neck but scrape her chest and her cheek a bit. Digging through the ruin of his animal persona, the tribesman emerged from the tatters and the collapsed carcass he walked inside of with much greater speed but diminished power.
With relentless pressure, the general attempted to repeat the successful tag that he managed to place on the magician but his large, bow-shaped and riddled with blades, knuckle duster could not as much as rustle the magician's coat.
With a cock of her head forward, the magician let her hat roll from her head onto her shoulder while she moved forward, evading her opponent's thrust and moving behind him as a result. It was true that her opponent's speed multiplied several times once the colossal horse carcass was ditched and it was because of that massive boost in speed that Mana got surprised but even with the boost, the man was not at the level where Mana's evasive training could not allow her to slip from trouble.
One thing that the magician noticed as she rolled her entire body forward, throwing both of her knees and legs, adding to her rolling, aerial kick the gravity of her own weight as an additional additive to its punch, was the absence of intervention in this brief encounter. There were too few of the enemy left, what few there were left perfectly occupied her allies. Nobody's signatures appeared overly strained.
Something gave way in the skull of the general that fashioned himself as some centaur-bowman even though he lacked the know-how of how to build a proper bow. With whited out eyes that greatly contrasted the gore and dried out blood covering the man's true skin, with a particularly ugly cave in on the front of the man's skull and a completely relaxed body, the general of the raiding party collapsed. His chakra signature was so weak that it took a brief moment of concentration to even pick it up but such was the nature of warriors that were essentially civilians if it was not for their particular affinity for the physicality that boosted their abilities to the superhuman step.
The magician turned away, preparing to look for the next optimal thing to do in this invasion. Perhaps there was still a larger party of the invaders that could have been led to the unused cluster of traps? A crunchy popping sound followed by a warm sensation of a goopy liquid splashing all over Mana's lower body, luckily protected by her winter coat, made the magician turn around at the enemy she had just thought to have defeated.
The general's head was nothing more but a wet stain, erupting outwards as if its brain had wanted to get out but used a stick of dynamite to get the great prison break started.
"Don't look so shocked, don't you have a Yamanaka member on your team, Nakotsumi Mana from Konoha's Team Hokage?" A young lady with tanned skin and a contrasting ocean of curly, blond hair grinned at the magician from atop the roof of a small local house. The magician would have been much more confused by the appearance of this kunoichi had it not been for the Kumogakure headband tied around the right arm and over her coat.
"You know my name and a great deal of other things about me, you know my skills and how to bypass them, given how you've used suppression of your chakra signature to approach me, yet you don't know how fussy I am about people killing other people?" Mana granted the cocky Kumogakure kunoichi the entirety of her attention. With the general of the tribesmen suddenly removed from the equation and the signatures of physical chakra of the other generals fading drastically, there was nobody else that could have snuck up on Mana with fruitful results.
"Oh, I knew, I just didn't care. You've graduated to the rank of chuunin during the last exams yet you've failed to grow up enough to realize that the world isn't all about what you think? Tsk, tsk…" the Yamanaka girl from Kumogakure teased Mana. She had much more information on the Konoha kunoichi than the magician had on this curious young lady and the Kumogakure ninja appeared to revel in that superiority of her situation.
"Do you plan on causing me trouble?" Mana raised an eyebrow.
"Shorter fuse than Inaba and Junipu reported…" the Kumogakure kunoichi wondered. "R went out of her way to emphasize how nice and willing to compromise you were. Then again, she did get eliminated by you, right?"
"If you are so proud of possessing intelligence that's more than three years old, I guess you won't cause me trouble after all." Mana replied while turning towards where she sensed Kouta and a cluster of civilians large enough to be picked up by her from a considerable distance were all ganged up.
This Yamanaka was not the only foreign element on the field. There was yet another notable signature to the north, most likely placed there to contain the enemy and to block off their escape. That suggested that these Kumogakure ninja were here to eliminate the tribesmen and not the Konoha ninja. Also, it suggested that they did not do their homework as these tribesmen were clearly not the thinking, fleeing kind. Even now, the last remnants of the invaders engaged the Konoha ninja and two more signatures that were balanced and large enough to belong to two more Kumogakure ninja – four in total…
A sharp feeling in her gut made Mana turn towards her side. Flashes of light and dead, dismembered bodies flying about, their pelt and skin suits burning up in thin air from the heat of the Lightning Release whips that the Kumogakure ninja wielded. There was no other way to Kouta but around this interloper. The troubling thing was that this one was incredibly agile and fast, matching if not surpassing Mana in evasive skill. At least the magician drew those conclusions from how the enemy surpassed her in speed, whether the speed he was needlessly flaunting to the inferior enemy was his full speed or not.
The magician soon lamented that fact for the lightning crackles flew more to her direction and wrapped around trees and various details of the architecture without dealing any damage to them. The heat of the whips appeared to vary based on the user's intent to cause harm.
"We're here to help, don't worry!" the bald Kumogakure ninja with extensive and colorful facial tattoos and energy whips he could use to move around as well as bloody slaughter declared.
"Is that why your squad has been assembled to counter us, not the enemy? Is that why you've engaged the enemy while being clearly unfamiliar with their behavior and fighting style? If a teammate of mine decided to throw a punch your way, I'd hesitate to stop their fist." Mana replied. She was somewhat flexible with the decision of other people to take lives, it was just the benefit of the doubt she herself always wanted to be shown extended to different-minded people. What she disliked was people that took lives without even giving the deed a second thought, willful, considered and even a hint regretful decision to take the enemy's life felt much more deserving of respect than careless flaunting of one's strength that resulted in merciless overkill.
"Oh… I guess you're one of the fussy ones… Tried it, didn't like it when it turned out that I was wrong and recalled myself being a dick to everyone around me!" the dark-skinned baldy tried to downplay Mana's suspicions to being just something humorous.
"Four Kumogakure ninja snagging the half-completed mission objective from the nose of four Konoha ninja, a team assembled not of ninja capable of best complete the objective but possessing intelligence on the Konoha ninja in question as well as the ability to counter their skillset. Sorry if I left my sense of humor at home." Mana replied while looking the zipping by Kumogakure ninja straight in the eyes.
"Damn… That's so cool, are you sure you're not from Kumogakure, haven't met any paleskin as smooth as you, just saying…" the tattooed baldy shrugged while following Mana around like a leaf stuck to a wet turd hanging from the bottom of a sheep.