"That thing Mana said, I think we need to change how we confront the enemy," Skaven declared as the two remaining Stars rushed ahead of the hectic backstage corridor that has become a setting of a genuine nightmare for the squad.
"Damisan fell for the trap too, and that was after we warned each other to be more careful," Shige-H replied in a quiet, reflective tone.
"Damisan acted as a protector for the dolls. He hadn't changed his approach to how he acts on the battlefield or adapted his approach at all. We need to be better," Skaven said.
"But we're the only two left," Shige-H responded after a moment of awkward silence between the two. It was apparent that both young ninja knew what this meant, though Shige-H spoke up just to set it in stone and extract Skaven's promise.
"Yeah, I guess I must take charge then," Skaven nodded with a hefty sigh.
"Okay, I'll stay behind you. Watch out and don't hit the enemy by accident. I can treat the knife wounds, you know." Shige-H stalled a bit to fall behind the Nara as the two rushed faster and faster toward what they could have sworn was a looping bunch of corridors as they took random turns every time. Regardless of this dire approach to pathfinding, they took their turns together without questioning each other or bickering about it.
"No, you stay behind in battle already. You need to step out and cause havoc. Break free, whoop-ass for once. Fight like it's your last day to do so and like you're willing to enjoy every last bit of it," Skaven denied Shige-H's request.
"Well, I guess you're the leader for now, so…" Shige-H was the one sighing now.
A wall of grinning, red-eyed shadow clones of Purini-D with knives and curtains in hands blocked off their paths. Cackling emanated from the walls themselves as the two prepared for what might have become the Stars' last stand to decide their ultimate score of this exercise. Chakra flares lit up around Shige-H's fists and blew up in size, changing color to an emerald hue of her Unmaker Fist that reverses the effects of a healing ninjutsu technique.
"Genjutsu: Bearer of Darkness!" a version of Purini-D yelled out in a visceral tone after weaving a single Tiger hand seal. Shige-H's fighting spirit faltered as she backed up a few steps. The woman looked around as the dimly lit room around her became darker and darker still until she couldn't see anything other than blackness.
"Don't lose your head. This illusion only covers up one sense, you can still sense the other clones in different ways," Skaven barked out directions as a genuine leader would.
"I don't need to!" Shige-H yelled out from the bottom of her chest as she slammed her burning arms together, causing an eruption of an emerald shock wave around her that passed through Skaven like thin smoke, expanding all over the place to cover up as much of the room as possible.
"That's reckless, you might hit a clone with the seal trap!" Skaven reacted, but Shige-H shook her head.
"That's fine. The range of this attack is insane, so if I hit the right one–it won't matter. Remember what Mana said, the user of this technique needs to be conscious and focused for it to work," Shige-H replied as the frightened clones all vaulted over the expanding destructive ring. Despite passing through an entire mass of inanimate objects, the shock wave barely showcased any of its effects just yet, though the clones and Purini-D himself knew better than to lower their guard just because of that.
Medical ninjutsu wasn't meant for inanimate objects. Neither could reverse medical ninjutsu show off the true fearsomeness of its effects against them.
A version of Purini-D, true or false became impossible to tell without Mana's chakra sensory on their side, vaulted over the Stars, flinging a handful of tomato-sized and shaped sizzling objects at them before shooting up its arms with knives from behind its back and sticking them into the ceiling to stay above the opposition. The tomato-bombs splattered, as squishy vegetables were known to do, but it wasn't healthy and pudgy innards of one that spilled on the floor, rather a wine-colored gas cloud filled the entire space.
"Dammit, the place is too cramped!" Skaven began coughing in pain as the gas that hit them wasn't toxic, or else they'd have long since collapsed, instead, they seemed to be something akin to powerful pepper gas. It wasn't any of the cheap stuff either as the Nara collapsed on his knees with sweat he couldn't even feel dripping off of his face in what seemed like torrents. The spiciness of the gas rocketed the Stars' body temperatures by several degrees while they rendered all feeling inside their airways numb from the burning sensation that had long since transcended pain.
Skaven knew what the opponent was doing, but he couldn't talk anymore. Dryness filled his throat, and he needed humidity to wash away the burn, but all liquids seemed to pour out his eyes. Eyes that couldn't see anything anyway, though, with this now stacked on top, even if he went through the hassle of dispelling an A-Rank illusion affecting the two of them, they'd still have to work through this ridiculous pepper gas choking them up.
Something loud, low-pitched, and filled with wooden rattling filled the air. A muzzled and irritated grunt came from Shige-H's side, and the shaken clones replied with a petrified shriek as they scattered. The kunoichi had slammed the ground beneath her feet, throwing Skaven down and leaving him working up the strength and willpower to pick himself back up as she desperately tried swinging wide enough to free-up the path for Skaven–the new field leader of the Stars.
More than a few of the clones shrieked out in terror and poofed away. Skaven began expecting his comrade to fall down as her transformation into a doll of wood and straw began, but nothing of the sort ever took place. She continued swinging and hammering away, sending violent shocks toward the enemy with no adverse effect reaching her. Whether this was because she wasn't contacting the enemy nor were any of her weapons, or because Purini-D had realized that the Stars had adapted to their new roles and changed up their approach and withheld the technique on purpose as a reward remained unclear.
One jutsu. All that Skaven needed was to connect, and yet, it just so happened that the enemy fought dirty and made it as difficult as possible to do just that. Purini-D let out a huff, and a warning sound of something heavy cutting through the air froze Skaven's heart up. The sound was far enough away to where he didn't freeze up as he wasn't the intended target, but he needed Shige-H if he was to land his jutsu and execute his plan successfully.
A low-pitched gurgle came from Shige-H's side. She got hit by something and something massive. This was ridiculous. If one jutsu was all that Skaven needed, he'd need to stop pissing his pants and start taking his chances. Still, if he could better his odds as much as possible, that would have been preferable to shooting from the hip in the pitch black.
"Dispel!" he yelled out, sending a visible, white pulse of light out from him but, much to his chagrin, his attempts at ceasing the blinding illusion prematurely weren't successful. Despite a visible ripple and the surface of blackness devouring his eyesight shaking up, his eyes remained in the dark. Only a visible lightness in terms of chakra wasted this way, and shattered pride remained.
With a light tapping noise of dripping blood, Shige-H roared somewhere diagonally to Skaven's location. The walls of the corridor shook violently, spilling its useless props all over the floor as the piles of trash moved in response to the resonant quaking. A familiar, flesh rending sound and Purini-D's scream of pain joined in. The illusion wavered, something that Shige-H did must have given the Stars their opening, lifting the illusion for a mere moment, but that was all that Skaven thought he needed.
As he opened his watering eyes, letting the tears that irked him from the tomato bombs flow freely, the sight of a large battle-ax stuck in Shige-H's shoulder halfway to her armpit greeted Skaven's eyes. Despite the horrendous physical torment, Shige-H drove her body alongside the version of Purini-D that delivered the ax and etched it into her into the wall, splitting the clone into two parts with the other side of his own ax. The clone poofed away while Shige-H collapsed on the ground and reached to treat her wound and work on healing her severed major vessels as much as possible before she removed the weapon.
She hit the ground in the form of a wooden doll of subtle features resembling the Stars' leader before she could finish. It was only then that Skaven realized that it wasn't something they did that canceled the Bearer of Darkness technique–it was the fact that Purini-D couldn't split his focus between maintaining the illusion and turning someone into a doll. Still, this was as nice of an opening as he'd get. The odds couldn't get any more favorable than this!
Skaven took the knee, placed his hands in the Nara clan hijutsu position, but his heart stopped. For the life of him, he couldn't mutter the words of the jutsu with his dried out and burning up mouth. He wasn't familiar enough even with the most basic Nara clan technique–the Shadow Possession Jutsu to cast it without speaking its name. His father would have chortled until the morning at the irony. Pissed beyond belief, Skaven stood up and flipped the nearest clone of Purini-D's off, sticking out his dry as a year-old sponge tongue out for good measure.
"Ninja Style: Multi-Kunai Jutsu!" Purini-D flicked his hands, emerging handfuls of knives from under his sleeve, inside of his suit pockets, wherever he could find them. Using this basic genin-level technique, he threw so many knives all at once that they approached a number early into the four digits. The Nara took more than a few, he fostered no illusions of grandeur but the sharp twingling cracking up his body as he froze up writhing on the ground so he didn't plunge one of the knives sticking out any further was nothing compared to knowing that he had achieved the intended effect.
A couple of shocked clones on the other side gargled in pain, spitting up blood as the immense number of knives skewered them thoroughly and pinned them either to coffins or drawers filling the perpetual backstage corridor area. Purini-D gasped in terror as the pinned down clones lit up with candy-red light and beamed up toward him.
"Yeah, figured that your jutsu works both ways…" Skaven grunted, finally feeling the savory wetness of blood gifting him speech back from the depths of his throat.
"Your victory is but an illusion, young boy, it's just an illusion!" Purini-D seethed from the shocking aura of candy-red light enveloping and radiating off of him to transform him into a doll. "I've devised measures against this very outcome, I did!"
"I'm sure you did," Skaven smirked as his opponent weaved a hand seal and dispelled the crackling candy-red light from claiming his body as well. Shadows shifted in the dimly lit corridor around the original Purini-D as determined to where all the candy-red lights concentrated toward. "Though I wonder if those countermeasures don't also work both ways."
Purini-D posed proudly, showing off his feat of avoiding being turned to a doll before his right eye twitched twice at the same time as the realization of what Skaven's words might have meant. The frightened stage magician turned around, hearing the noise of a lone water drop hitting and rippling a shallow surface inside of a void of complete darkness. Chains burst from underneath the shallow waters, hooking up to Purini-D's wrists, his heels, his thighs, calves, forearms, and biceps.
"Genjutsu: Black Magical Box!" Mana's voice spread through the air, enhanced by superhuman qualities as the illusionary void was entirely hers to control. Four walls of old tree dyed plague-black slammed the terrified stage magician shut inside of a decorated coffin with a convenient hole in the upper front for Purini-D's face. A lone gust carrying rose petals whirled in front of the shut and chained up coffin, revealing Mana's shape standing in front of the subdued ninja.
"Bravo, Konoha's Sorceress! The showmanship, the flair!" Purini-D exclaimed in ecstasy as his eyes rolled up.
"That's the purpose for the face-hole. So you don't miss what happens next…" Mana closed her eyes with a smirk as a knife ripped through her avatar, disrupting and dissolving it into petals again as it slammed into the coffin. The chopper had a chain attached to its backside, but it hit the coffin as if encouraged further by a sledgehammer. It penetrated the entire way through, leaving Purini-D no other course of action than to exclaim in shock as his neurons hurried to share this illusionary dread as very real and very dangerous.
All the blackness, the coffin, the torment disappeared at once, torn up like a sheet of paper rolled out and stuck to a wall like a background decoration. The arms of a bipedal ape lifted Purini-D off the ground and slammed him against the warehouse wall with a dominating roar as it lifted its arms over its head, preparing to smash the stage magician's head like a watermelon now that he had canceled out his own technique and Mana shook up his inner world enough to send his biological systems into overdrive with panic.
"You got me, you do!" Purini-D stuck out his tongue, giving the infuriated ninja ape his thumb up. It didn't seem to have much of an effect until Tomi pressed her hand to the ape's back and nuzzled it, causing the ape to lose all interest and turn to burrow around the heaps of junk all around them.
"That's it? You've called me just to roughhouse around a bit, pipsqueak?" the ape looked grumpy, though something in its body language showed that it knew better than to put up any meaningful objections. Unlike Mana and the ninja rabbits, Tomi seemed to have unwavering love and support of all the species of ninja animals she commanded almost to the point of brainwashing.
And here Mana thought if she was ready to train at the Sage Arts with the ninja rabbits. Despite the breakthroughs between the Chuunin Exams and now, there was still a long and perilous journey between them, especially after Mana just upped and disappeared during her stay in prison.
"Sorry, Sarutan!" Tomi winked and clapped her palms together, bowing in apology. "I wasn't sure this punk would skip his beating like that. He looked spry and really fired up for it, to a disturbing degree, honestly."
"I'm not sure I'd qualify that performance as mind-blowing as I had expected from a group as familiar between yourselves as the Stars, but… It definitely was flashy and you succeeded at your task. I'd say it's a job well done!" tutor Kushon nodded with a smile though her eyes remained closed almost as if she had to force it. "I could have used an exercise or two without taking anyone to the infirmary though, Purini-D."
"If I held back an ounce, it would have been me hitting the infirmary, it truly would have been!" Purini-D cackled into his open hand, somewhat unlike the skull-faced appearance that he carried himself around with. "I am so very blown away though! I've always wanted to experience the style difference between me and Konoha's Sorceress. I tend to dress more exuberantly while my act is all cold, steel business whereas she's the exact opposite. It was heaps of fun encountering, I'll say!"
"The Ruby Supernova…" Endo clenched his fist as he simmered in disappointment and anger. "The crown to label me as the best. It somehow feels like we've cheated our way through."
"By beating a jounin? If anything, we took the harder path," little Tomi turned her nose up and blew out her lips.
"Skaven, you should really go to the infirmary, you've got knives sticking out…" Shige-H turned back as she stumbled alongside a few volunteering recruits to take her for a quick Mystical Palm patch-up.
"The lecture isn't over yet," Skaven replied, crossing his arms as he sat down on the grass and looked up as the tutor for further guidance while the shaken woman covered up her face, looking like she was pushing through sea-sickness.
"Look at that cocky bastard, acting like he's too cool for bleeding out!" Endo ground his teeth, rolling back his sleeves. When Mana's chilly hand touched his exposed forearm gently to settle him down, he looked away and groaned but reconsidered, pounding the Nara a few times.
The same volunteers rushed back to lift Skaven up and drag him to Shige-H, who grabbed the doorway for support, glaring at her rebellious comrade with a smirk of someone who was embarrassed to know this person. While Skaven objected to leaving before the lecture officially ended before, he didn't resist the volunteering recruits lifting him up and dragging him out, however.
"Look at that guy, must think he's too cool to start shit with other recruits, even if he doesn't want to leave," Endo crossed his arms and turned away with a disapproving scowl.
"You know, Skaven stepped over himself back there," Mana turned to her feisty and obnoxious person she felt obliged to share a room with. "He doesn't enjoy hanging around other people, but he returned to work with us and did exactly that. If anyone here deserved that ruby, it would have been him. He did exactly what tutor Kushon asked of us."
"Wait for us back at the room, guys. We'll be resuming training from where we left off yesterday after we're back on our feet!" Shige-H displayed a vigorous fist to the other recruits with a look of confidence.
"Did she just bark out an order?" Tomi leaned back on her crossed arms, winking her right eye as if to see better.
"I think she did. Just like leaders would…" Mana cracked in a subtle chuckle.
"What? No vote of voting on how we feel about a vote for or against training first!?" Endo taunted the leader being led away to the infirmary.