The archive room where Joshi Senju took them for their extra test was a problematic environment to fight in. It only hit Mana it was so when she decided to start things out with a Fire Release technique and displace her opponents, throw them out of their comfort zone, and split them further apart from one another. She couldn't risk it. Everywhere around her were scrolls and posters with valuable information. Information that she'd need and so would the other recruits.
Who cared if she and Damisan passed this test if they'd fail the final exam anyway and, alongside with the rest of the recruits, got held back for six more months?
It was because of this hesitation to act that Uppity-J got the first move. He appeared to be completely unimpeded by any doubts. Not even Pairte looked excited to see this much initiative and an almost maddening devotion to bash the enemy with a ceaseless combination of attacks. The cards, floating in mid-air, danced in a hectic aerial shuffle before Uppity weaved his fingers in a hand seal.
"Ninja Style: Destiny Row!" Uppity-J chanted out like speaking a prayer as five, seemingly random cards lined out in front of him. They were all lighted up with chakra signatures, so there was not a single lingering doubt that those weren't ordinary cards. Uppity-J pressed his hand to the back of one card and it opened up.
As the card revealed itself, it displayed the Magician arcana before lighting up with a flash as intense as a beacon.
"It's a sealing glyph!" Mana warned Damisan as the card fell to the ground and disappeared in ripples as if the entire floor turned wet as a surface of a bottomless lake. As impressive as this technique appeared, being the master of illusions herself, Mana didn't waste time considering this to be an illusion.
"Magician Arcana Seal: Release!" Uppity-J proclaimed with an authoritative tone. As impressive as his technique looked, it was beyond flashy and rather clunky to execute. That might have been why Damisan found the time to raise his hand and attempt to interrupt the technique.
"Puppet Technique: Reeling Hook!" Damisan yelled out as he shot his mechanical forearm off of his right arm prosthetic, though it was not merely a rocket punch technique. The ear-raking string reeling sound filled the air as the forearm hurried toward the ninja fortune teller attached to strings of steel wire.
It was a pity that Damisan missed his target entirely. While a rather embarrassing display of combat potential, this stunned Pairte in place as she blinked twice while following Damisan's rocketing hook blitz in between the two ninja and hook onto a bookshelf.
"Don't pull it!" Mana warned her partner, wasting her own chance to think up of a counterattack before Uppity-J's attack hit them. It was just fortunate that the two of them had experience working alongside each other as Stars members. It might have been because of that experience that Damisan heard Mana out and released the clenching grip of his mechanical forearm hook, retracting his arm back and securing it in place.
The rippling floor turned black like oil. The oily surface bubbled and splashed, spouting out rainbow-gleaming, fist-sized bubbles that appeared to be soapy in consistency. With Uppity-J weaving another hand seal and releasing his technique, this network of floating bubbles took off in a pelting barrage, smashing into everything in their way. Her own puny whimper reached Mana's ears as the bubbles packed a bigger wallop than if Uppity-J would have punched them himself.
"The Water Balloon Jutsu. That is a technique of Kirigakure ninja, it's not a jutsu taught outside the village!" Pairte exclaimed, pointing her finger at Uppity-J. "How the hell do you have it in your collection!?"
"You are looking at this entirely wrong, partner," Uppity-J swiped his hand, shuffling his deck in mid-air once more before resting his deck of cards in his open palm, now–one card fewer in the deck. "I am not a collector of techniques but merely a fortune teller."
"Are you okay, Mana?" Damisan turned to the magician, releasing the chakra shield that he had formed out of his springing prosthetic arms that spread out like an umbrella to shield him but also as much of the archive room behind him as possible. "I had figured that you'd use this opportunity to slip away from harm with your illusions."
"Sorry, I…" Mana wanted to admit that she might have some issues she is yet to resolve after her meeting with the Empress persona inside her mind, but Damisan clapped his hands in a resounding metallic clang.
"I see! You've used your body to shield the invaluable scrolls behind us… You're way ahead of me, Mana! That's impressive. But next time leave it to me, you've just recently recovered from your injury, after all." Damisan nodded his head, wobbling the large cylinder obstructing his view and making seeing inside this dim room difficult for the self-puppeteering desert ninja.
Instead of arguing with her partner, Mana just signed and tried relaxing her body from the battered stiffness she felt all over the pelting barrage of the hardened oil bubbles that overwhelmed them both just now. Usually, techniques with such wide of a range packed a measly punch to precise points it hit, sacrificing power for range. She lucked out in regard, at least.
"Illusions," Mana thought to herself. "They won't wreck the room too much. They must be our key to victory here."
"That was dirty!" Damisan shook his fist over his head, addressing Uppity-J next. "You knew that we wouldn't risk substituting with any of these books and scrolls, who knows which ones might be really important?"
"That is a limited frame of mind of a confused soul," Uppity-J objected. "Your fates have already been decided at birth. No card that I could have pulled can change our fates. If it is written in the cards for this room to be destroyed in the scuffle, then there is nothing we can do to change it."
"Uppity-J is a dangerous opponent," Mana said. "This mindset of his is incredibly troublesome for us. Leave him to me. You try to engage Pairte, both of you share a concern for this archive room so it will be a simpler engagement."
"Leave it to me!" Damisan nodded, barking it out with enthusiasm as he aimed and shot off his hand, attached to the steel wire, and grabbed hold of the top of the bookshelf behind his opponents. The desert ninja pulled himself up to the top of the bookshelf and balanced atop of it as the entire structure shook up after his graceful landing. It was too hasty of an assault for Uppity-J to respond, so the fortune-telling ninja didn't even react to it, leaving the puppetry-user to his partner and answering Mana's challenge.
"I am intrigued by why you took the challenge of fate. You've struck me as a sensitive and an insecure girl, fate's dark twists are not for the weak minds, I'm warning you!" Uppity-J proclaimed, extending his open palm out while his free right hand struck a hand seal and began shuffling his deck again.
"You're a sham!" Mana stated, raising her finger. She now knew exactly how much time she had to interfere with Uppity-J's techniques, which allowed her to cast her illusion. The magician sunk inside a sharp flash of champagne-colored light, one that appeared to disrupt Uppity-J's card drawing process. Doppelgangers appeared around the fortune-reading ninja in an attempt to psyche him out and throw him off-guard, but Uppity-J's heart didn't waver for a second.
Even when Mana slipped into the fold of her own illusionary clones and more and more of them emerged from the bright light which was necessary as a medium of her genjutsu, even as she struck Uppity-J, swatted and locked his arm from drawing his cards and continued to both punch him with palm strikes and kick him with her stiffest shots before slipping back into the fold of her illusionary doubles, Uppity-J didn't waver.
"These cards you use and claim to read our destinies with are just improvised sealing tags for ninjutsu that somebody let you seal inside them. They don't tell anybody's destiny, you're just drawing your seals at random and proclaim that's our destiny!" Mana taunted her opponent from inside her flock of clones while switching in between concealment and attacking.
"Ninja Style: Destiny Row!" Uppity-J chanted out, forming another row of five face-down cards before him, with no need for him to draw the cards. "The World Arcana Seal: Release!" Uppity-J reached his open palm over a face-down card as it opened up for Mana and lit up with bright light, telegraphing the release of the jutsu sealed inside of it.
A barrage of Wind Release projectiles shaped like blue, slashing blades emerged from the card. It took Mana all of her evasive talent to evade them, but by far the greatest asset was her Many-Faced Jutsu illusion. It was because of that jutsu that Uppity-J tried his best, slashing as many doppelgangers of Mana as he could, missing out on the real one as a result.
A mistake very nearly followed as Mana took it down on the ground at the first wave of scorching heat pulsing from inside of the still lively World Arcana card. A booming stream of flames followed the barrage of slashing Wind Release projectiles and swallowed them up, exploding into a firestorm that exploding in an expanding ring of flames just a few meters over the bookshelves. Mana's heart froze solid at the sight of the flames very nearly touching the scrolls but she sighed with ease after the heat blast subsided without inflicting too much damage on the scrolls, just rustling a few corners of the tips of a few scrolls on the highest shelves.
"You are wrong, but you are also a hypocrite, Mana," Uppity-J stated, pointing an accusatory finger to the ninja magician. "You also claim to be a magician, yet you do not cast any real spells nor do you perform actual magic. Those tricks of yours are merely ninjutsu and genjutsu. And yet they have greater significance, don't they? You invent all of your jutsu yourself, which is why they dazzle your opponents similarly, like what they perceive as magic or don't understand dazzles a civilian."
"Are you saying your deck of seals serves a similar purpose?" Mana wondered.
"That's right," Uppity-J nodded. "I will show it to you and make you understand fate, and it's crushing power through our confrontation. I will teach you to leave concerns like the test we're fighting for behind, for if fate truly intends for you to pass that test–you shall. Concern is meaningless, fear, and resistance to fate's will shall undo your effort."
"Lightning Style: Shadow Clone Jutsu!" Pairte weaved her hand seals, emerging from a cloud of smoke a handful of her own alternate versions that rushed right at Damisan but the self-puppeteering ninja took it to one knee and raised his arm, pointing all of his right-arm fingers at the rushing line of clones as he grabbed over his wrist with his left hand.
"Puppetry Technique: Finger Scattershot!" Damisan yelled out as the upper parts of his prosthetic fingers took off with jet flames, shooting them out in a scattershot formation at the oncoming rush of clones. A pair of the clones gargled blood as the fingers drilled into their ribcages and dissolved them, the real Pairte grunted in pain as she rolled back as well, hardening her ribcage with chakra augmentation so she didn't find a drilling finger bullet shattering her chest and ending up stuck in her heart. Even in gloomy lighting, when the fingers scattered in a wider area, Damisan didn't need precision aiming for such a move.
As another pair of clones grabbed hold of Damisan's arms, the impaired shinobi slammed them one into another as hydraulic press expelled smoke from an area where his arms connected to his fleshy body and his arms hummed with an overflowing force that could have overcome even a much more physically demanding task than throwing a bunch of clones about.
"Got you!" Pairte smirked as the clones dissolved not in a loud pop and a cloud of smoke like ordinary Shadow Clones but instead into a small lightning storm that engulfed Damisan's prosthetic arms but didn't seem to transfer the electric charge much further. Much to the shock of his opponent, the prosthetics-user just moved his neck around and boxed with his prosthetic arms like nothing had happened.
"Amazing, isn't it? After my last mission, I realized that Lightning Release can be a problem, especially in really insane voltages so I insulated my next prosthetics model as much as possible!" Damisan put up a peace sign with two raised fingers as the finger tops he just shot off popped out from within his prosthetic arms, effectively reloading his hands for another use of his technique.
"I guess I'll just have to switch to another nature release for my clones, huh?" Pairte stood up and cracked her own neck and knuckles before taking a grappling-type fighting stance.
"Another nature release?" Damisan whistled out in awe.
"That's right, I might be a one-trick pony, but devoting your life to just one fighting style lets you really crack it beyond anyone's expectations," Pairte nodded while forming a clone-technique signature hand seal. "Water Release: Shadow Clones!" she chanted out, multiplying once more.
"Damisan…" Mana glanced over Uppity-J's shoulder, seeing her fellow Stars member geeking out over his own progress of improving his body. Her stumped glare softened for a moment. He was right to be this enthusiastic, he truly was amazing. Very few people would have kept going and gotten up on their figurative feet in life with the hand that fate dealt them, none would have gotten as far as Damisan had gone.
"Hmm… Your oddity of a partner shows my case better than any fancy words of wisdom I might offer you." Uppity-J glanced back as well. The fortune-telling ninja raised his hand up, aiming face down as his deck shuffled in mid-air once again in a hectic dance. "People claim that they are free to act as they please, that they guide their own fate through something they claim to be free will but free will is but an illusion. How can we be free to act however we please, how can we truly be free and how can you deny fate when the circumstances of our lives, our upbringing are so different? If I was born with a different color of skin in my country, I'd have been an outcast, I'd have gotten vastly different chances in life than I did. That is natural, for I would have been different and therefore my fate would have been different as well."
"So what? You just stop caring? Stop trying to change anything?" Mana wondered with a troubled tone of her voice. "Can't you see how irresponsible and lazy your nihilism is?"
It was a rare occasion that someone or something got Mana riled up, but once in a blue moon someone dismissing the value of human life or demeaning it openly appeared and did the remarkable. As much as the magician hated admitting it to herself, Uppity-J and his bleak and grey attitude toward all aspects of life ticked her off just the same way.
"Lazy? Perhaps. But if all of your hard work is pointless, if nobody is listening to you complain about your fate, isn't there more point in accepting fate? In my help of telling people what fate might have in store for them, I help prepare them for it. I ease their suffering for when the inevitable hard-hitting blows of fate come while people like you, hard workers, and strugglers only offer them illusions of choice. You tell them if they work hard enough that they can do anything when deep down you know that no matter what you do–fate is ultimate and immovable. Struggle only makes it more capricious and its bite more venomous. The strugglers are the immature ones." Uppity-J spit back to Mana, raising his hand over his deck once more "Ninja Style: Destiny Row!"
"Damisan and I… We both started out with bad hands. I struggled with comprehending the world around me as a child, I had no talents and nothing special about me in a world that praises the worth of a person for their bloodline and genius. There are people who were born sick, people raised in corrupting and hateful environments. I refuse to believe that they are doomed for the destiny that they've been born into. They have the power to rise above that." Mana claimed, standing still as Uppity-J prepared to showcase her fate for her for the third time.
"Hierophant Arcana Seal: Release!" Uppity-J proclaimed, opening up a card with a sealed ninjutsu technique that showered the archive room with cherry blossom petals, utterly sinking it in them to where they filled the space thick as a blinding, lingering fog. A jolt of lightning split the pink veil, delivering judgment to where he thought Mana to be struggling against the fate that Uppity-J had read to her.
It was, however, that the jolt hit nothing. The cherry blossom petals settled down on the floor and burnt up in azure flames as Uppity-J observed a flock of rose petals of different colors filling the room in a much wider formation and hurling around him like a vortex. One by one the flower petals landed on top of him, without the fortune-reading shinobi being able to shake or tear them off of him. The silky-smooth petals coated his entire body before a sizzling sound reached Uppity's ears, and he realized that the flower petals that covered him were explosive tags ready to blow.
"You don't accept fate either. You don't take your own nihilism pill. Your cards don't ready fate, they're just tools for you to struggle and fight on just like the rest of us do. Your worth in this world isn't measured by some lousy fate that dooms you to be sickly and weak, but in your desire to accomplish something and the skills of reaching that goal. Giving up on a goal because of fate is just lazy because only by struggling and acting can you achieve anything. Desire and resolve are anything but meaningless, they're what truly makes outcomes happen, not fate." Mana stated, manifesting from a spinning vortex of flower petals before her opponent as she undid the illusion before its climax would send him to a comatose state.
Uppity-J fell to his knees, sweating profusely to where his sweat dripped onto the ground and made the burning up cherry blossom petals from his Hierophant Arcana Seal technique sizzle when they came into contact.
"Both of us have a gift for making people's lives better. I can dazzle them, make them forget their troubles, if only for a little while. You can give people hope that their wishes aren't pointless and give them the power to defy their fate and achieve something great or fail, but grow as better people along the way. Telling people that something is against their fate is just bound to give birth to more misery and despair, and there's enough of that going around as it is." Mana leaned down, offering Uppity-J a hand. Judging by how the fortune-telling ninja couldn't even keep his deck of cards from littering the ground with a few of the cards catching aflame, he wasn't in much of a state to keep resisting.
"Nakotsumi… Mana…" Uppity-J muttered, accepting Mana's help in getting up. As they touched their hands, Mana noted how Uppity-J's body shook in the shock that he just went through under her illusion. Resisting something like that was beyond just being tough or cool. No matter how stone-hard Uppity-J's convictions were, fear of death on a level as primal as the one Mana invoked, it was universal among people. He completely folded under the pressure and it might have taken an incredible medical ninja to wake him from the genjutsu coma that Mana's illusion would have caused had she continued it.
"Say, you've burnt up your Magician Arcana to a crisp, didn't you? Those seals seemed like a one-time deal… Can I offer you one of my techniques for the new Magician Arcana?" Mana smiled, helping her opponent walk up to the table where tutor Joshi was penning something down.
"That would be great, thank you…" Uppity-J nodded while looking on ahead with dulled out eyes. Ironically enough, he looked by far duller and more apathetic once he finally accepted the worth of struggling, skill, and desire.
"Whoa, you've finished up before me?" Damisan stumbled back to the table with shoddy and banged up prosthetics. His left leg one had something stuck in the knee and didn't appear to bend by the center. Pairte was back in the western section of the archive, surrounded by fallen but still functional scrolls and paper sheets, laid out.
"Okay then, nice work, you two. I'll give you a 20/20 for this special test, that still means you have to pass the final exam next month, got it?" Joshi sighed and closed up a scroll he was working on beside a glowing, handheld pumpkin candle. "Good, now you guys can go ahead and fix this mess you've made." The tutor scratched the back of his neck after the trio nodded.
"Man, winning a fight has never felt this much like a loss," Damisan laughed out to himself as he picked up a scroll that Mana rolled up and tossed to him to put back in its place at the upper sections of the shelf. "I mean, I guess Pairte and Uppity-J didn't look like they were up for the clean-up job but still… Winners shouldn't be doing clean-up."
"Damisan," Mana called out for the masked ninja to look down at her, bending his head so that Mana couldn't peek underneath his cylinder and see even a section of his face. "I really love your positivity. It's inspiring, really. Hearing you being so proud of your own talent and your own skill, I know that you're still not completely secure with your own body and how it looks, but seeing you work with it… It helps me do my best too. Thank you."
"Sure thing!" Damisan chuckled, saluting Mana with his bent out of shape prosthetic fingers that he'd still have to work for hours on back in their room to fix. "Just glad to help."