"I did not originally intend on causing you this much pain, Mana-san, but your resistance has forced my hand. I will now come at you with my full intent on taking you down and I apologize for the consequences up front." Ayushi declared. His face turned grim and serious as if to emphasize the weight of his declaration.
The Guru stretched his body out, flexing out his tattooed body and gaining a decent amount of bulk in the process while he strained his bodily systems to work with much vaster amounts of chakra than he usually needed to. The man placed his hands in a position one would have taken before a prayer. While streams of chakra drove out through Ayushi's pores and rotated into solid spheres just outside the man's body, floating like miniature satellites, positioned from the left shoulder to the right.
"Rasengan Riot!" Ayushi growled through his teeth while the spheres obtained an azure, polished glow and stabilized in size.
The Guru wasted no time employing his new technique, within an instant after its completion, one of the spiraling spheres drove off into the ground behind and underneath Ayushi's feet. The resulting blast sent the legendary medical ninja shooting forward. While Mana had no chance tracking the not just superhuman but super-shinobi speed of Ayushi, she could have identified the telltale signs of a devastating kick before Ayushi's forms blurred.
Mana's hands moved fast enough for her to be proud of her, she no longer had the comfort of relying on gadgets to pull out different cards and decks and she had no more luxury of precision switching but one functionality must have remained the same – violent release. Using the tossing motion with her right and whatever remained of the damaged gadget in her tattered sleeve with her left, the magician sent entire decks of random cards floating and scattering at Ayushi just when the monk signed the resolution of charging at the kunoichi but before he truly executed his movement.
"Mere child, playing with toys!" Ayushi taunted Mana as he powered through the Lightning Release crackles, the sleeping gas, the tear gas, the blinding flashes of light, fire and water alike. Ayushi's devastating kick persevered but Mana's obstacle had served its purpose. It distracted the Guru so that he did not notice his opponent leaving his sight.
It was dangerous approaching the man with eight of these Rasengan still floating around him. Mana had no doubts that he had utter control of when and how they left his "orbit", so to speak, if she tried coming at him from the back, he'd just send one after her and it would be troublesome. More likely than not, the jutsu was mighty but not immediately lethal. If Ayushi truly intended to wear on Mana's willpower, he'd bust her ribcage, break her limbs but keep her alive, so that the Merchant did not heal her and reset his progress.
For the mental trauma to be at its maximum efficiency, one needed to keep their opponent suffering for as long as possible. This was perhaps the most violent and twisted competition for world peace in existence, all of the irony acknowledged.
Mana had no precision in her cards anymore, with the sleeves of her uniform busted and the gadgets bent out of shape, releasing all of her decks was a good choice but now she was missing a useful asset in her arsenal. Somehow, she would have to keep moving forward and improvise. These Rasengan…
Mana's hands worked at hand seals, she could feel the fatigue building up, the searing sensation in her wrists that suggested that it may have been a good idea to stop relying on precise arm movements for a short while. That would have been the sound decision but no one has ever accused Mana of being that.
"Naïve!" another Rasengan slammed against the ground, sending Ayushi flying the opposite direction. What first seemed like an opening turned into doors slammed into Mana's face within an instant. Before the magician could complete the final hand seal, Ayushi slammed his body into the magician with a shoulder slam and grabbed her arm, using Mana's faltered balance, the Guru swung the magician over his shoulder, instead of driving her into the ground, however, he kicked her at the center of the exposed back, sending Mana flying.
Something was wrong… The feeling of weightlessness, shifted into a sharp, overwhelming sensation as if a knife had been put in between two of her spinal cords and twisted. Mana writhed, ignoring the taste of blood in her mouth and trying to power through the sense of vulnerability and creeping death. Her entire body felt numb… God. Could she even move after that last blow? Ignoring the blurry vision, the young woman glared at her bloody hand, smeared with red after wiping her lips felt numbness all over. At least she could still move. Full-body paralysis would have been the worst case scenario at that moment.
Ayushi roared, his remaining Rasengan bombarded the area where Mana laid knocked down flat, surrounded by the hazy shrouds as she had flown a considerable distance. His aim was less than precise but when he carried such dominating power, aim was more of a recommendation. A sledgehammer could have unlocked the door in its own ways, just as a key could have.
"That's the second time that you use your flower petal escape technique. It must feel tiring, why go through this struggle? Yours is the destiny of giving birth to a peaceful world! Why do you defy that when that's all you've ever wanted?" Ayushi spoke. Previously the kunoichi would have liked him to lash out, she wanted an excuse to hurt him for what he did to her father but… Now, after taking this many hits, she kind of preferred him to talk for at least a little while.
He counted on her running away, that was what Mana always did while slipping under the illusion of Flower Petal Sanctuary, create an illusionary replica of herself and then, utilizing the illusionary invisibility of her real body to anyone affected by her genjutsu, she ran, repositioned or planned out the next steps. That was what Ayushi thought she'd do now. He thought she was an open book, after reading that she'd use Flower Petal Sanctuary to escape his Rasengan Riot attack, he thought himself invincible.
A spinning elbow strike from Mana, manifesting right up in Ayushi's face must have proven him something else, resonating torment made the kunoichi scream out as her elbow hit what seemed like an impenetrable brick wall. Ayushi had so much chakra to waste on augmentations that his body neither moved nor flinched even the tiniest bit after a strike that carried all of Mana's inner scorn for her father's pain.
Everything went black. Overpowering and confusing Mana's perception, the white turned to silver while voices familiar to her spoke gibberish all around, running one over another in a cacophony that Mana wanted to run away from, at first. The more she stayed in this majestic and surreal surrounding, the more she wanted to stay. A deafening and petrifying howl brought her back to life.
Mana was on her knees, Ayushi stood where he was before he had knocked her back, his foot raised in the air and frozen in that position. A kick. It was a kick that sent Mana sliding back on her knees and left a trail of blood smeared across the rustling and waving field of fingers and hands. Mana's exposed legs were covered with small scratches from where the nails of those arms had scratched her up in her unfortunate slide down on her knees back. Only after the magician returned to the cruel reality she was in did Ayushi place his foot down, breathed out and began walking up to her.
The violence behind Ayushi's intent exploded out of nowhere, the Guru took a soaring leap into the air and proceeded down with a divekick. Mana tried raising her hands up to resist but her legs were trashed and her hands filled like they were comprised entirely out of lead inside a bag of skin. There was no pain, for whatever reason, when Ayushi stomped her down and then used that same leg to throw Mana up and over.
Air brushed against the magician's cheeks, she could feel a maddening presence around her, deep down she knew that she flew high enough to leave the protection of the shroud but her mind was wandering too far away for anything to come out of that realization. It took the kunoichi a good handful of seconds to realize that the second interval of wind rustling her hair and scrappy clothes was a mere application of the principle that the thing which soars must also come down.
It would not be the landing that finished the young woman off. Mana was not sure if it was the strike itself or her body busting through the Merchant of Souls, flying at it in breakneck velocity, but something killed her for sure. And just like clockwork, she rose back up to see the Merchant's busted pieces floating around, maintained in relative harmony by a supernatural force, that same force that stuck the epic-size colossus back together.
"It is easy to dismiss death when you have never once experienced it. I assure you, death is no child's play. Even the staunchest wills break after experiencing it once or twice…" Ayushi spoke with grim bitterness to his voice. He did not enjoy scratching the first line on his side of the scoreboard but he did what he had to.
"Dismiss?" Mana replied with life, newly breathed into her. She did not waste too much time before rushing off at Ayushi and using her drastically buffed up lower body to dash at speeds she had never even dreamed of being capable of before. All while her hands worked their own little sparks of magic.
"Fire Style: Smak's Claw!" she chanted out while letting out all of the air she had breathed in prior to the dash, all infused with Fire Release chakra. With a slap of her hand, the shapeless mass of flames transformed into three, sharp and elongated streaks of flames so compressed that its tongues were actually sharp enough to cut.
Ayushi coughed out blood and cried out in pain, Mana's technique was as dangerous as a triple sword drawing slash but her jutsu fit her arsenal perfectly since it also instantly cauterized every wound it created due to sheer heat of the cuts. While it would not have mattered in the long run, given how Ayushi would regenerate any, even the most irrelevant damage that the Merchant of Souls would not treat, for what he did to her father and all the other people that fell for his drug scam, or those he experimented on, or those he had kidnapped and stacked in a pile nearby, he had to suffer.
Abiding by Meiko's taijutsu lessons, she preserved the force of the momentum and turned her body around after the smack, repurposing that force into a knife-edge chop at the front of Ayushi's neck, straight into his Adam's apple. The magician had wished that Ayushi somehow preserved the color of his eyes just so she could see them blank out in pain. Kicks again, as many and as fast as she could. The Merchant paid her with new life, she would have been wise to utilize all that stamina and life force she's been sold for bargaining with her soul.
The last kick of the fold was a stiff rising kick to the chin. It went in so deep and hard that Mana actually saw Ayushi's jaw flatten at the lower end. That much pent up force sent the man flying a good fifty meters, a long shot from the flight that the Guru had granted Mana before extinguishing her life for the first time but just enough to keep him awake through her blazing new resolve in life.
Mana leaned her body back, throwing her palms back before shooting both of them out, flickering with built up Lightning Release chakra. A surge of Magician's Touch passed down her body, much shorter than she's ever used it but in its brevity, it was given enough strength to cause the entirety of its damage in a blink. The violent electric shock sent Ayushi flying backward.
Maybe the man had thought that he was given time to recover but, whatever the case of his thoughts was, the metallic sound of steel wire reeling about tipped the man to a different case entirely. With a strong yank on steel wire loops wrapped around the man during their close range encounter, even employing the magician's teeth, pulling hard enough for the wire to cut into her gums and her fingers, Mana rolled Ayushi back at her like a yo-yo and jumped into the air to meet him with a crushing chop at his temple.
The Guru's face smashed into the dirt first, leaving the rest of his body slightly lagging behind and causing immense strain of the man's neck having to maintain that awkward position. Without mercy, Mana finished whatever few breaths of vigor she had left in her with a thoughtless combination of strikes and kicks at the half-fallen opponent before finishing it with a high heel stomp at the back of Guru's head and stumbling back without an ounce of breath.
It was dangerous to invest this much into the offense. Had Ayushi used Substitution or any different defensive jutsu anywhere in the middle of that furious and vengeful combo, he'd have surely caught Mana open and killed her again. Whether it was because he did not think much of Mana's advance, or because he thought it to be longer and end in something more... Destructive… Ayushi had kept his defensive measures to himself and remained down on his face for a surprising length, for him at least.
"Is this your strategy?" there it was… His inevitable rise. "To throw as many blows at me as possible. Blows that aren't meant to finish me off outright, just to torture me. Then, when you tire, go through rebirth to refuel your vengeance?"
"You said that I dismiss the meaning of death," Mana growled back at the rising titan. "It drove me nearly past the line again, I admit. Everything I do is because I fear death every second. Not necessarily my own, but there may not be a person alive that thinks of death more than I do."
Who knew? Maybe Ayushi was right attempting to convince Mana to spare herself the torment and surrender. Everything here was going against her: she was the only one bleeding chakra with every offensive or defensive assault. Soon enough she'd be dying again and again from the lightest touch because she'll have nothing to spare on augmentations or illusions to aid her escape. Ayushi regenerated every ounce of damage he took, that was enough to prevent anything but an absolute declaration of murder from Mana's part – instant death which she was hesitant to grant.
Even now…
Ayushi laughed. Truly. Hilarity itself oozed from his eyes as if he had just looked in the face of total absurd. The man looked down at his own hands as if examining them for blood that could not have been there and then looked back at Mana.
"Even when playing the Game of Souls, you haven't killed me once. I was hesitant to draw the conclusions at first, thought maybe you could not go that far with your lacking experience and lesser skill but… That last attack made me realize – you could have killed me with ease. Angle the static high kick differently to snap my neck, position the chop further to the back of my head and crack my skull while scrambling the brain at the same time… At any point, you could have used those flashy swords of yours as well to penetrate the necessary brain centers. You know where they are, don't you?" he revealed the secret of what amused him so much.
"You must know every vital point in one's body to avoid hitting them." Mana closed her eyes. She had not faced humiliation and ridicule for what she'd believed in since the Ninja Academy, much less from a man who used to be as exalted as Guru Ayushi.
"That's remarkable. You've gone down your own path much further to where I can barely see your silhouette anymore." Ayushi wiped his face with the back of his fist, still amused. "May I ask why though? Do you, perhaps, have false hopes of capturing me alive still? Me – an S-Rank medical ninja, Senju Ayushi?"
"S-Rank medical ninja…" Mana muttered in response. "You said it, not me. The rank of your skill in medical ninjutsu indeed goes above and beyond the S-Rank. If such rank existed, you'd certainly be described as an S+ Rank medical ninja. However, you aren't an S-Rank ninja, are you? Your combat skill can't be higher than A-Rank for you to have only killed me once yet. It confused me when you refused to approach me with the Chakra Enhanced Strength, now I've figured out why."
Ayushi smirked. He nodded like a madman, what started as a gentle expression of agreement turned into an almost violent head jerk.
"You are right and wrong at the same time. My combat skill is categorized as S-Rank too, but only due to a single skill that I possess. What I have shown you up until now is my true strength, I cannot deny that or lie that I have been holding back, however, I have not used the jutsu that is my very soul." Ayushi spread his arms out.
"Your soul? Don't tell me you've…" Mana found herself at a loss for words.
"Well… No. I cannot manipulate the human soul. I've tried to learn that subject but I have not found a way of doing that besides possessing the Rinnegan or using something like the Merchant of Souls. The skill that I am talking of is something I have accomplished as an inspiration, overcome by the muse of researching about the human soul and its value. It is a Kekkei Tota technique, a mixture of elements with their most destructive tendencies brought to the forefront until the mix becomes destruction itself, I named it after the subject that inspired it, even if it has little to do with the human soul – the Soul Release." Ayushi jerked his head aside, overflowing with confidence.