"Can you sense Purini-D anywhere, Mana?" Shige-H turned to the magician who kept on turning her irises in each direction. It was both because she expected the far goofier ripoff of her own gig to jump out from any corner with an attack and because she found this specific chosen battlefield to be quite interesting. Every time her eyes settled on a rundown prop, she became entranced by thoughts of how one could have used that prop for some fine stage magic.
It's been far too long since she's been on the stage, and Mana longed for it to where it was distracting her.
"Yeah. He's using clones. Purini-D's signature's all over the place." Mana replied.
A flash of light so candy-red that even without its shocking luminosity it would have etched into one's eye merely because of the shade of its color alone stopped the group in their path. Mana had heard the noise that followed before. She knew that noise to define steel-tipped cards whizzing in the air though, judging by their noise, they weren't coming anywhere near the dazed Stars.
"Ninja Style: Suppression Arrows!" a sharp voice pierced the grave silence that reigned in once the blinding flash took hold of the ninja and they realized that with their eyes shut they'd need to guide themselves through other senses which was why they didn't obstruct each other by talking. The cards lit up with sealing glyphs in a tactic that was not alien to Mana's own fighting style.
Instead of a low-ranking jutsu or some other effect, however, the cards all collectively unsealed a blitzing arrow that buzzed down to pin the nearest target. Mana's body stiffened as she stared down at a hole inside of her abdomen where the arrow penetrated and etched itself into the floor. This revealed itself to be an illusion as the body stiffened in agony soon dispersed into flower petals that scattered all throughout the room.
A powerful bubble of emerald chakra burst forth from Shige-H. The green energy that could have only been some sort of modification on the Mystical Palm technique that medical ninja used reduced the arrows into rusty tips that clanged onto the floor useless as their wooden shafts turned to dust. Resonant metallic scrapes and thuds came from Damisan's direction as the puppeteer used his prosthetic limbs to shield himself from harm using their stalwart blocks. Despite his wide-reaching guard, his limbs received some mean-looking scrapes as a monument of blocking Purini's attack.
Tomi whizzed a pair of long bolas before her. The rope Tomi tied them out from and their velocity proved sufficient to shield the young lady from the downpour of arrows homing in on her. Purini-D became exposed by using a sealing technique right in front of them. His primary candy-red flash only kept him safe for so long and with Mana's illusionary rose petals flooding the backstage battlefield he was open for assault.
"Petal Shuriken Jutsu!" Mana clapped her hands together after half of her shape manifested from a whirl of moving airborne rose petals. The scattered remnants of gorgeous flowers transformed themselves into shuriken as they all spun in pursuit of Purini-D who remained stuck upright to the ceiling. The man screamed out and covered himself up as the illusionary shuriken skewered his body. While neither the shuriken nor the flower petals they came from were real–Purini-D's body very much believed them to be.
"Eek!" the riddled with shuriken man exclaimed before collapsing to the floor and gasping in pain. He would take far less time to identify an illusion given how this might have been a clone of his, and it hadn't suffered enough damage to dispel. "As expected from Konoha's Sorceress, as I expected," the copycat whined out.
"Don't undersell yourself, you've still got us in for a loop, don't you–this is just a clone, after all," Mana shrugged as the remaining flower petals whirled into a vortex that revealed her true shape once she undid the illusion.
"Correct, though you're not the only one up to my mind games, you are not. I am also aware that once I dispel this clone, the stress and mental damage from your illusions shall return to the host body as do all the experiences of shadow clones, they will do that," Purini-D smirked with a smile that twisted out the skull-motif of his make-up leaving it as something unrecognizable.
"You're wasting our time!" little Tomi yelled out, leaping with a ferocious charge with her boomerang in hand and driving the tool right into the man's forehead hard enough to crack his skull and etch half of her weapon inside of it. This ruthless blow left Purini-D with no option of keeping his clone intact and forced it to dispel. "Serves you right, that verbal tick of yours was seriously pissing me off!" the wild girl stuck out her tongue to where the subdued clone once laid.
The candy-red light aura enveloped Tomi, freezing her in a stiff pose of her arms and legs spread out as her entire body began convulsing wildly. The candy aura shocked in flashing jolts, emitting stray bolts outward as little Tomi began shrinking down. That was not the sum of her changes, however. Tomi's very skin texture began shifting to something resembling wood more rather than human skin while her dull and greyed out eyes lost their irises completely and became replaced by nacre buttons. Tomi's lifeless doll body clacked once when it hit the ground.
"Tomi!" Shige-H yelled out, rushing up to her ally and picking her off the ground to inspire some signs of life back into her doll friend. "What happened, is this an illusion?"
"Unlikely." Mana shook her head. She was second to very few in identifying and weaving illusions and a technique that made everyone around a person believe that their friend had turned into a doll was not entirely impossible though it didn't felt practical enough for the hassle that such a technique would require to pull off. "This reminds me more of the Yamanaka clan sealing techniques. Members of the Yamanaka clan can trigger their mind-swapping jutsu using seals, often resulting in switching their opponents' minds with common objects, such as dolls."
"You think that Purini-D might be a member of the Yamanaka clan? Feels unlikely…" Damisan shook his head, taking the doll away from Shige-H's trembling hands and placing the doll inside a compartment of his prosthetic limbs on his right forearm, where Tomi's doll body would be safe from harm for a while. "I'm sure that he'd have a lot more going on with his life than putting on a flashy, striped suit and playing a stage magician in that case, no offense, Mana."
"I am familiar with this method of techniques. I've been experimenting with a similar jutsu myself lately." Mana crossed her arms, turning her eyes away and wondering just how comfortable she was with admitting that this copycat had applied to practical use something she was just toying around with. "He might have used a seal that works similarly to genjutsu–invades the user's chakra network, but instead of causing the usual genjutsu effects, it forces the chakra system to react in a certain way–like perform a forced transformation."
"Forced transformation?" Damisan wondered, fixing the cylinder hanging over his head as it had dangled on the side a little in the heat of the battle.
"Yeah. A technique called Polymorphy Jutsu was one of the first jutsu I have ever learned. It was a genjutsu technique that took an animal that the target thought of and made them believe they've transformed into that animal. It was a very impractical technique for what it was so I've been working on improving it in just such a way–forcing my opponent to transform into an actual animal that way using their own Transformation Jutsu on my command." Mana explained. "I might force Purini-D to undo the technique if we get our hands on him."
"So Purini-D has sealed just such a technique inside of his clones. This is dangerous! We need to warn Skaven and Endo!" Shige-H turned to the depths of the cluttered backstage corridors, only to hear a husky response coming back her way.
"A bit too late for that, I'm afraid," Skaven emerged with his hands pocketed. Hanging by his belt, attached to it, was Endo's likeness, which Purini-D had turned into a doll as well.
"Endo too?" Damisan grabbed hold of his cylinder as he would have freaked out if he'd have exposed his face and if he actually had a pair of arms.
"Is it that hard to believe that Endo, of all people, would have lunged himself straight at one of those clones and gotten himself turned into a doll?" Skaven sighed. He didn't need a reply to that question, and everybody accepted that eventuality. Mana slowly approached the Nara and leaned up to his face to where even the usually apathetic punk became a tad flustered by the closeness of their faces.
"He's not Purini-D's transformation. We're clear." Mana noted having sensed up Skaven's signature and found it to be no different from Skaven's actual chakra signature.
"I thought you didn't need to be this close. You told me once that you can sense precise details about a chakra signature from a kilometer away." Shige-H threw shade at Mana while the magician just shrugged.
"I know, I just enjoyed seeing him blush for once," she answered.
The following moments of treading further and further into the backstage corridors that almost seemed to loop around had it not been for the differing junk and props littering the place were full of impending dread and constant worry. The recruits felt like the enemy could have been anywhere and was everywhere at once, and just one careless response to his attacks could have resulted in their transformation into a helpless doll.
"You know, he looks all goofy and over the top but… I like you way better as a stage magician, Mana. Something about turning people into dolls and then popping their heads off in battle just feels really creepy." Damisan noted, shivering by himself.
"Thanks, I appreciate it." Mana nodded.
"I'm very glad you returned to the group, Skaven." Shige-H turned to the Nara who kept on shuffling in between the front and back of the Stars without a care in the world. "I will do my best to make sure that you don't regret it and trust us more in the future as well."
"Whatever. It's not like running off by himself did Endo any good," Skaven rolled his eyes. He must have thought that Shige-H was making way too big of a deal out of this.
Before the conversation could proceed any further, a chill ran down the back of Mana's spine. It was an uneasy noise of junk switching and falling off of one another. It was an uneasy category of background noise that usually was all over the place and used to tick the Stars' radars off at first but then they just learned to deal with it and ignore it because it was just too common and pointless of an occurrence to pay any mind. This time was different–loads of chakra was lurking behind it.
A skull-decorated comb fell from atop of the junk pile, grabbing hold of some useless rag and engulfing it with enough static electricity to stay clung on to the comb and ruffle in mid-air as the comb floated suspended by the tremendous chakra it irradiated in all directions. With the rustling cloth flipping up and to the side, a smirking visage of Purini-D with hands full of knives emerged from behind the curtain where before was mere emptiness. With two energetic swipes, the dreadful stage magician flung his tools of the trade toward the recruits before disappearing behind the curtain again.
Mana ran out in front of the group, extending her hands to the side and expanding her Magic Bubble Jutsu. The round gust of Wind Release chakra was more than enough to deflect mere handheld projectiles. What Mana did not expect was the gust blowing the curtain off aside and Purini-D emerging from behind it once more, as if he could somehow freely transport himself from one location to the other using this curtain, and aiming his hand at Mana with a sealing glyph beaming with a red light on the center of his palm.
"Sealing Technique: A Call To Darkness!" Purini-D chanted out, emitting a jolt of ethereal, candy-red energy from his palm that struck Mana square in the chest and engulfed her. Whatever weight she felt like she had, whatever forces beckoned her to stay on the ground lost their power. The radiant, crimson energy lifted her off the ground. Mana's body convulsed, but it didn't hurt at all. It twitched as if being shocked, but no electric charges passed through her body. The vision became blurry, then–all black. In the beginning few moments, no air could enter her lungs, it was as if her mouth, her chest, and everything she held inside became solid and filled up.
Then it struck Mana–she didn't really need to breathe anymore. The magician's doll body hit the floor with a light tap of a wooden doll being carelessly flopped on its back. Urged by this emergency development, Damisan shot out his hand attached to a steel wire to scoop his friend's doll body off the ground and pull it into his control, where he could put Mana carefully inside his left prosthetic compartment for safety.
"Shit, he can pull off the switcheroo trick on command too?" Skaven grit his teeth. It was rare to see the Nara care too much about that many things though seeing Mana turned into a doll appeared to throw him into a mosh pit of anger and despair just like the one he experienced when describing innocents being murdered when discussing the memories of his criminal past.
"It cost us Mana to figure that out." Shige-H shook her head.
"Mana said that she was working on executing such a jutsu on command, maybe it was naïve of us to assume that Purini-D only had one way of executing his switch trick too?" Damisan shook his head inside of his oversized cylinder, causing it to flop and shake around. "But she did everything right, she protected us just like she always does."
"Maybe… Maybe that's the problem?" Shige-H snapped her fingers, returning to what Mana had said in the beginning of the exercise. "Purini-D isn't actually fighting us–he's disrupting our strategies instead. He's testing if we're capable of switching our roles in a team. It's because Tomi rushed at him like the ferocious animal she likes to act as on the battlefield and because Mana tried protecting us from harm like she always does that they turned into dolls."
"And Purini-D ended up punking Endo too because he acted just like Endo usually does." Skaven looked down at the doll of a scowling samurai apprentice dangling on his belt. "It makes some sense."
"We need to switch our roles next time we confront Purini-D. I can't be the one calling the shots, you two can't be fighting him the same way you always are." Shige-H instructed the two.
"But you're kind of bossing us around right now…" Damisan noted, crossing his prosthetic arms up and out from under his cloak. "Old habits are tough to break, huh?" he chuckled with his usual good vibes energy.
The remaining trio of Stars rushed on ahead toward wherever the backstage corridor room of horrors led them to. Manic laughter soaked with Purini-D's voice filled the endless corridors, stunning the remaining active Stars temporarily as they looked and felt around to determine where their enemy could strike from again. With his hit-and-run mentality, there was little to no way of pinning the jounin down and landing a solid hit on him.
More and more cackles came from closer and closer to them. Skaven looked around, gritting his teeth while Shige-H lit up her fists with chakra flares, signaling that whoever receives the next punch from her would feel a world of hurt. It would have all been in vain and deep down the leader of Stars might have known it as striking the clones that flooded the corridor would have been equal to signing herself away to becoming a doll.
With the first silver-colored flash slicing through the gloomy atmosphere of nightmares, the relentless pelting of knives from the ceiling began with clones pestering the Stars with no countermeasure from the Stars' side being possible. Taking a plunge from up above and landing right in front of the Stars and their attempts to take evasive action without devoting all of their momentum into one protective motion to prevent them from getting caught in Purini-D's doll technique.
"Genjutsu: Field of Swords!" Purini-D chanted out, weaving a couple of hand seals and positioning his hands onto the cluttered floor, forcing hundreds of swords to sprout as they rushed toward the evasive Stars, leaving them no room in the stuffy corridor to maneuver themselves out of harm's way.
Damisan leaned his body to the wall, using his elbows to swat aside the needless props. While a handful of down-pouring knives cut through the cloth that he covered up his scarred body and prosthetic replacements with, he avoided the rising row of swords that were bursting from the ground and whatever stressful effects that illusion would have caused. Purini-D chuckled, his cackling filled the nightmarish corridor space.
"Sealing Technique: Dark Toy Box!" Purini-D chanted out, clapping his hands. A tremor shook the floor of the battlefield, shifting the cluttering props and junk around and revealing Damisan to be pressing his back to an open coffin. Chains burst forth and tied themselves around the prosthetic limbs and worst yet–the cylinder of Damisan and began reeling him into the coffin before its door slammed shut.
"You fool! Drop the prosthetics already!" Skaven yelled out with a shaken stare, knowing full-well that it was too late for his ally to free himself now. "He was holding Mana's doll."
As the quaking coffin streamed with candy-red light and opened back up, three dolls fell out from its inner section. That of Damisan, Mana, and Tomi. Yet another method for Purini-D to achieve the sought after result of transforming his trapped enemy into a doll.
"Yeah, Tomi's too. If you knew Damisan and I do, you'd have known that he can't ever drop that cylinder covering up his face. Maybe he'd have sacrificed that principle for the sake of his friends if given enough time, but… This was too sudden. Give it up. It's just the two of us now." Shige-H pressed her hand to Skaven's shoulder as the cackling clones retreated into the darkness. Their whites somehow peered through the dimly lit shadows of the ceiling and dark corners, filling their targets' hearts with the dread of their everlasting presence and knowledge that they were being watched at all times.
"Yeah, it's just the two of us. Let's go." Skaven nodded, straightening himself out and looking on ahead to wherever this corridor led. Whether it be the ruby prize that Endo sought after or another chance at confronting their tricky opponent, the eventuality was another chance at solving this assignment and getting themselves out of trouble.
What lay ahead was the return to normal for the Stars whom the enemy had turned into dolls.