Laoch didn't wait for his opponent to figure out a way to beat him. After Tsuru so nearly turned his pressure around on him before, he gave her no single chance to do that. The armored ninja flew across the battlefield, aiming his right arm at Tsuru and spraying a stream of kunai knives from a dispenser in his armor piece. He made sure to fire them through the streams of flames that he left in the air too, heating the drizzling kunai up and coating them with flaming chakra on their way to their goal.
Tsuru jumped back, fully aware that hidden mines laid scattered across the battlefield. It was for that purpose that the young kunoichi threw a kunai behind her to the nearest wall of the arena and pulled on a string of steel wire attached to it in order to zip herself closer to the wall. Sticking to the round walls of the arena, taking it to the trees on the western side, all were viable options to avoid triggering the mines.
The girl dashed across the wall, running away from the downpour of flaming kunai coming her way. Laoch was no slouch, he controlled his location in the air perfectly, never letting himself get in range for Tsuru's hair to grab onto. The kunai and steel wire combo didn't frighten him nearly as much, plus, he still needed for Tsuru to stay in the range of a kunai projectile so that he could attack her too. A few kunai nicked her thighs and back. Tsuru stumbled on her long haul and for a moment made the audience question if she had the inner fortitude and stamina left to avoid the rest of the oncoming barrage but she did, resuming her run with bleeding thighs and a cut jacket that had trails of red on the backside.
"Hair Needle Senbon!" Tsuru Itoi yelled out, taking aim and firing strands of her hardened hair. By the time that Laoch realized that the kunoichi was aiming for a specific part of his armor, it was too late. The pieces of armor around his left arm broke and detached from formation and the body weave underneath offered no protection from what remained of the relentless shower of hair needles.
"Not bad, I'd have never expected an onslaught of focused hair senbon to be enough to break my armor," Laoch commended his opponent who hurried to complete the lap across the arena. While the armored shinobi got used to the redistributed balance in mid-air after a decent chunk of his weight just fell off of his left arm, Tsuru used her hair to swing onto and hide in the trees on the west side.
"A neat move – heading for the trees. You think you're safe in there but you're not!" Laoch yelled out, light formations ran across the visor of his helmet showing him the exact location of the nearest chakra signature and its relative size compared to what it put out before. With his balance regained and an enemy who falsely believed herself to be safe in his sight, Laoch fired on the forest area of the arena with his burst of burning kunai.
The relentless series of kunai automated fire tore through the leafage, cut through the leaner branches and smashed through the thicker ones. Each kunai showed the full capability of penetrating an entire tree, lacking the cutting power to take it down only due to lacking size as the surface it had to enact its force was not sufficient enough to cut it down. The additional fire element set the entire place ablaze, sinking it in flames. The loud and pain-ridden grunts betrayed Tsuru's emergence from the forested area, clutching the burns on her right side. The burning leafage blocked off the possibility of sticking back to the walls – out and on the ground was the only option left for her.
Given that she fled from desperation to avoid more burns and without forethought guiding her steps, it was inevitable that Tsuru would trigger a mine. A resonating explosion deafened the audience's ears and made the half of them that were closer to the action cover up their faces to block off dirt and debris. The detonating mine triggered a chain reaction littering the field in resonating, pillar-shaped blasts that sent shockwaves across the ground sufficient enough to trigger every other surrounding mine with their shock.
"Not good enough, huh?" Laoch bit his cheek on the inner side, disappointed by the fact that his visor showed off his opponent being relatively unharmed though her chakra signature having taken a decent dip, suggesting that she pulled a defensive technique of some sort to evade damage. Even with the barriers of dust and rubble littering the area, Laoch adjusted the aim of his flaming kunai accordingly to the readings his helmet showed him.
A blinding flash of light made the genin spectating the match from the sidelines wince while the audience reeled back. If the constant, lingering dust around them wasn't enough of an irritator to their eyes, the detonating flash bomb made observing the match unbearable to them. Laoch struggled and turned his helmet to rub his irritated eyes, shifting the positioning of his helmet on his head about. He didn't see how and when he lost his helmet though Laoch did feel a significant amount of weight slipping off his head and realized that he lost another armor piece – his scouting visor and the helmet he had attached it to.
While he was beginning to feel pestered by his opponent, when he saw Tsuru stuck with multiple of his kunai and reeling in pain, having reacted with her improvised plan to remove the helmet out of sheer instinct, regardless of the fearsome automated kunai fire she took, Laoch's desperation had eased somewhat. That much was evident when one observed his now exposed head and a lighter look in his eyes. The girl barely had the strength to keep sticking to the wall she was on, her elongated braid still clutched to the helmet she had removed. Tsuru was pale from the blood she had lost and she had about a dozen kunai sticking out, at this point, it was only chakra augmentation that kept her going as the moment she'd have let go of sustaining her body that way, she'd have passed out.
"That was a nicely executed substitution though you've removed my helmet a bit too late. Had I not had it when you backed into the rubble, I'd have never hit you so many times." Laoch observed and raised his right arm up to aim at his forlorn opponent.
A compartment in his armor piece slid back, raising up a steel ring of a sharpened edge, roughly ten centimeters in diameter. A quartet of blades popped out from the different sides of the ring, forming a windmill shuriken. A press against the center of his palm with Laoch's middle and ring fingers triggered a speedy release of the weapon.
"Needle Jizo!" Tsuru grumbled out through tremendous pain, elongating her loose black hair to surround her body and harden, forming a protective layer around her with their tips sharpening into spikes. The kunoichi did leave a tiny gap to see through as deriving herself of vision would have been entirely reckless from her part. It was because of that reason that she saw the buzzing windmill shuriken stop in mid-air after Laoch yanked on a piece of steel wire attached to the projectile and slip its four blades back to their earlier place.
The remaining ring expanded in size, using the blade parts for additional ring length while it slipped over the concealed Tsuru and her hair and locked her in. After the first restraining ring was locked into place, Laoch fired a handful more from his right arm and secured them around Tsuru's neck and legs as well. It didn't seem like his opponent could sustain her defensive hair technique for long and so they deflated and returned to their normal length while the restrained kunoichi flopped to the dirt, lacking any resolve to struggle in her iron restraints.
"That's gonna score him some points!" Toroi, a thick in body youngling ninja from Kumogakure donning a pair of spectacles on him, declared. "He didn't just defeat his opponent, he captured her. That would be highly valuable on the battlefield."
"Damn, even Tsuru lost, I mean…" Boruto grumbled to himself. While he didn't seem at all glad about that, neither did he seem too angry at her opponent, given all the trouble he went through to subdue her without aggravating her already critical injuries.
"That was not an entirely one-sided match, though it was crystal clear which examinee had years of extra experience on the other!" Moegi declared on the commentary. "I will hand it to young Tsuru that she showed an excellent performance here today but her opponent just didn't give her much room to breathe."
"You're absolutely right, Moegi. It's hard to imagine the Ninja Council promoting young Tsuru just yet, even after some quick thinking on her feet in the early stages of the match." Udon agreed.
"Welp, it's time for my match to hatch / My new rhymes form a rather nasty batch!" Ripper Inaba looked around for his opponent but it seemed like Tala took it to the stadium the moment that the previous match concluded.
"Way to spin a rhyme, brother, I'm sure that Killer B is watching somewhere in the crowd!" Toroi cheered on a fellow Kumogakure ninja, even though he was from another universe.
"Killer B? Who's that? / I don't know who you're talking 'bout, you fell flat!" Ripper Inaba mumbled to himself before running off.
"What the…? You mean your universe doesn't have a Killer B?" Toroi stood there and stared at the empty doorway for some time after Ripper Inaba ran off. For whatever reason, the chubby had trouble believing that someone might have just picked up sloppy rhyming without being inspired by someone.
"I'm not sure about whoever this Killer B is, Ripper Inaba uses his rhymes as a medium to transfer his genjutsu though. It has nothing to do with inspiration," Meiko explained. It helped that Mana had explained to her about genjutsu a little bit and how they worked. Had she not had this experience, it would have been tough to understand Ripper's fighting style.
"Huh… Weird names and fighting styles all around… Kumogakure in this universe is even wilder than back home," Toroi decided and turned back to spectate the upcoming match on the screen.
"Is your Kumogakure a war-mongering tyrant too?" Relta Ginn wondered. She gave Gurker Gliesse, an Iwagakure ninja a wayward look but it seemed that the Iwagakure native was too off-put by something boiling down to participate in the conversation. The young man paled out and coughed when he was first caught unaware by the sudden eruption of the topic but then played it off as if nothing had happened and nobody was talking about it.
"We still have the strongest military, if that's what you mean!" Toroi argued with some passion behind his words. He was ready to start brawling right there in the waiting room.
"There seems to be some sort of a hold on the next match…" Konohamaru scratched his chin. "What was it supposed to be again? Tala from Sunagakure against Ripper Inaba from Kumogakure…"
"Well, young Tala has already made his way, we're just waiting for Ripper Inaba," Moegi shrugged.
"Hardly the first match that is held off due to belated arrivals, huh? The first match of Shinki from Sunagakure against Blusckel Steinck from Iwagakure has been postponed as well since young Blusckel hadn't arrived yet. It was meant to be the very first match…" Udon kept the commentary line busy until Ripper Inaba hurried onto the stage, rubbing his belly with a frown on his face. Once Ripper stepped within a fighting distance from Tala, he pulled his beanie down to cover up more of his face from the numerous stares across the stadium.
"Hmph… What's wrong? Scared?" Tala taunted his opponent. "If you show up late and look like a chicken, it doesn't improve much on if you don't show up at all and concede defeat."
"Yeah it does, it's just my stomach's a bit abuzz / All the fizz makes me feel like just before a quiz…" Ripper rubbed his abdomen as if he about to hurl up.
"Well, I guess if you just conceded defeat, I'd be snubbed of my promotion so I guess it is great that you showed up," Tala smirked and raised his hands, extending his index fingers and raising his thumbs up. It was an odd fighting stance to be certain.
"Hmph, what took him so long? I only kept him for a second…" Toroi scratched the back of his head in the waiting room.
"The guy's clearly a bit shaken, can you blame him?" Sunny-Lee sighed before continuing to observe the rest of the match with an empathetic smile on her face.
"If my rhymes were anywhere near like his, I'd probably get anxious about stepping onto the stage too…" Relta Ginn shook her head, looking more troubled by the behavior of the Kumogakure genin rather than empathetic toward his struggles.
"He's improvising, I wonder how he'll do with that in front of a crowd…" Meiko smirked, looking entertained by the match already despite the match not having even started yet. She had met both genin though quite briefly, she didn't much like Tala and she hadn't met Ripper for long enough to form a complete opinion on him either so it was still unclear on just who she should cheer for.
This match was also not one where the examinees took their sweet time before starting off. The moment that it kicked off, Tala aimed his index fingers to the ground and took a diagonal dive to the right. Just when it seemed that he would hit the ground, an invisible platform of air held him in place and propelled him further to the side while he took aim at his opponent who seemed to just realize his state of laziness and angst.
"Whoa! Floating in mid-air like a one-man flotilla, / This guy's got no chill like a pissed gorilla!" Ripper Inaba flipped out after stumbling back and seeing Tala's bubbles of pressurized air miss him by several inches.
Tala froze in place and rolled back to his left, it must have been something that he saw further in the direction that he was riding in but, as much as the audience and the commentators squinted at their screens, no one could make out what it was that he had seen. All that was clear at this point of the match was that something had shaken the red-haired Sunagakure ninja and forced him to flee in panic.
"Aw, man, fleeing from my beast's so vanilla, / And here you were talking like a real killer!" Ripper Inaba posed and weaved at Tala who fell to the ground. It wasn't a trip or a dive, the young man just planted with a stiff and joint-grinding slam, as if his body had seen something smash him in that direction and decided to realize that hazy dream, no matter how unnatural that would have made him move.
"Now, to all of the confused spectators in the audience, examinee Ripper Inaba is a very skilled young man from Kumogakure who uses his rhymes as a medium to transfer his genjutsu. Now, genjutsu is not a very engaging ninja art to spectate, seeing how all the flare and the dazzle is reserved only to the sufferer of the technique but we are seeing how effective it can be," Konohamaru decided to educate the audience with his commentary.
"We've seen examinee Tala try to draw the first blood before, he appears to have been too slow and Ripper Inaba managed to open his mouth and speak the medium for his illusionary techniques," Moegi added.
"That's right, if you know that Tala uses bubbles of pressurized air to move sand around and throw it like lofty, aerial bullets, you might understand the shortcoming a bit better. If you visualize the arena a little bit, there is no desert in there to exploit and pack into his capsules of pressurized air." Udon pointed out.
"So, I assume that gives Tala a disadvantage then?" Moegi asked, turning at her colleague at commentary.
"That's right, it reduces the weight and density of each projectile and it just makes them not hit nearly as hard or fast," Udon explained.
"Yo, dog, we've just started the brawl / And even though I'm not the one to drawl / I'm gonna have to make you fall / I won't even have to maul 'cause rhyme's all I need to enthrall," Ripper made sure to exploit the slow and shaky rise of his opponent by applying another genjutsu on top of the last one. Just when it seemed that Tala would rise from his collapse and begin mounting a counter-attack, his feet got wobbly and the young man fumbled again.
"He's messing with Tala's sense of balance," Meiko recognized the method behind an illusion.
"Wow, there's just not much you can do against a guy like this…" Kiyomi gawked at the screen. "If he opens his mouth first – you're sort of done with. He'll apply an illusion on top of illusion, you'll never see the end of it…"
"You can break out of an illusion, dispel it," Temari objected.
"It's a tough thing to do. You'll keep returning spare change to a guy paying you with sheets of paper with his own face on it," Kiyomi showed how little she cared for the objection.
With the Yamanaka heiress being a competent genjutsu user herself and both Kiyomi and Meiko having worked alongside one of the village's most promising young prospects in the craft, they knew how dangerous an illusionist with enough practice to not need to speak the names of his illusions, just spit bad rhymes to transfer them, was.
Tala pressed to the ground, hunkering down from the dreadful feeling of the world relentlessly spinning around him while whatever nightmares Ripper showed him in the beginning continued to haunt him as well. It remained to be seen if the Sunagakure genin would overcome his opponent and his endlessly stacking layers of illusions or collapse under their weight in the end.