With the Tailed Beast Bomb still accumulating might and further escalating Mana's already hectic heartbeat toward a point where it would burst out from her chest, the titanic rampaging ape scooped up Damisan with its hand and swung him around, cradling the beaten young man inside his hand before slamming him into the ground again. Sparks and steel shards flew out in all directions from Damisan's smashed to bits equipment. The airborne steel turned crimson from the splatters of blood in the air.
"Move!" Mana commanded herself. As ordered, her legs sprung into motion, albeit still shaky enough to drop her at any point. Even if she had full control over her frightened, whimpering limbs, what use would they serve?
Neither one of the potential outcomes before her was acceptable. If she didn't intervene and take the Four-Tails' attention off Damisan–he'd die for sure. He was half-dead already and all of his prosthetic limbs had been impressively devastated and scattered throughout the gruesome and bloody battlefield. Then again, intervening on Damisan's behalf wasn't enough–if the Tailed Beast charges up its apocalyptic technique that is driving Mana insane merely by being charged up, they'll all be dead, no matter if she saves Damisan or not.
"Royal Flush Clone Jutsu!" Mana chanted, weaving a hand seal and waving goodbye to almost half of her chakra. She hadn't been driven to the point of chakra exhaustion for a while, that feeling of pressure around her eyes and blurry vision had become almost alien to her since the magician trained her chakra capacity to become inferior to very few ninja in the world through her unique, meditative methods of self-control.
As the Tailed Beast hurled its fist to hammer it down and leave nothing but a bloody stain of the impaired shinobi laying unconscious, bruised and bloody before it, a pair of Mana's doppelgangers flew in from the side, crackling with Magician's Touch Jutsu while delivering their strongest hooks to both of the Four-Tails' jaws. As the high-ranking Lightning Release chakra resonated through the chakra monster's body, one could almost believe it to have caused some sort of impact. It did not. The infuriated monkey slammed both of its hands together, clapping the clones to their demise.
A ground-shaking explosion parted the monster's arms open as a bright flash swallowed the Four-Tails. The Wind Release and Fire Release Shadow Clones reacted to one another as they dispelled into their respective violent elemental reactions, one enhancing the other and creating something devastating together. A spherical marble of a fiery inferno that howled and boomed in its destructive path, engulfing the monster of living chakra whole.
"C'mere, you…" Mana's clone mumbled while scooping Damisan off the ground. He was wet and felt incredibly soft in her hands. His clothes and skin had been drowning in blood and had the impaired ninja any semblance of consciousness left, the fractured bones might have given him a puncturing warning after Mana moved him away from the sudden death zone so rudely and swiftly.
Mana had been right to place absolutely no hopes in her impressive combo of different nature affinity Shadow Clones and their highly destructive chain reactions amounting to much in the end. More and more pixel-like obsidian chakra dots began flowing into the sphere that had been expanding in between the upper and lower jaws of the hectic monkey chakra beast. As the smoke clear, the beast browsed its immediate surroundings for victims to smash but could find none.
The beast's nostrils twitched. It turned around and dragged its mountainous fingers over the battlefield floor, dislodging a colossal boulder from the floor, and lobbing it toward an area diagonally behind it. Mana's image froze still, petrified as the unexpected flying mountain plateau swallowed all semblances of light before landing right on top of her where she had attempted to draw out the third pillar. The dislodged rocky projectile landed with a resounding, authoritative thud. A splitting fissure of Wind Release blades ravaged the mountainous surface, an aftereffect of an elemental release Shadow Clone being dispelled.
The bestial monster pounded its chest, raising the tremendous Tailed Beast Bomb over its head as it could no longer fit in between both of the titan's considerable jaws. Mana let go of the blood-soaked collar of Damisan's clothes. The shattered pieces of her friend's precious cylinder laid all over the place yet the magician couldn't gaze at Damisan's exposed face both out of respect to someone who had always respected her feeling and because whatever disfigurement he was so embarrassed about, a rampaging Four-Tails charging up a motherlode of all Tailed Beast bombs was just much more attention-grabbing at that moment.
Even before being launched, the ace jutsu of the Tailed Beasts was already dismantling any potential game plan against it. The ground had been shaking and rupturing all around Mana, hurling in concentrated, tunneled jets of howling air pressure and disappearing with a puny sizzle inside the vast, obsidian energy ball that generated all this overwhelming gravitational field around it. The evening skies had turned entirely black with choking clouds of noxious gas, the violent lashes of azure lightning were the only illumination that the apocalyptic sight provided apart from the strangely luminescent with black Tailed Beast Bomb that may have ended it all for how immense it had become.
A familiar chakra signature just a few hundred meters away. Mana almost missed it over this calamitous disarray. She had been doing her best to shut down her chakra sensory, as right now it had been doing more harm than good. After this was all over, if there was still a world to admire her image in, Mana would be shocked if her hair hadn't turned grey over this perilous feeling of the absolute, immovable nova of chakra before her while she lived in a world of mere candles.
"Unmaker Fist!" Shige-H roared out, throwing a flying punch from miles away from where the monster had been charging up the world's end. A stream of cyan shroud left as a straight gale emanating from her fist and socking right at the upper jaw of the monster, attempting to either unmake the Four-Tails' brain itself or to just slam its upper jaw shut, prompting a premature detonation of the Tailed Beast Bomb inside the Four-Tails' mouth.
Shige-H flickered away, dodging out of an unexpected tail swipe as the monster that she had attempted to undo wiped its four tails like feather dusters wiping away dust, stone, and human bones alike and leaving the stained puddle of blood accumulated on the battlefield ground as a filthy smear shaped like a crescent. Shige-H appeared once more at the top of the first of the Five Pillars that Mana had erected before flickering away again and appearing beside Mana.
"I can't believe it… The Unmaker Fist that destabilizes anything on an atomic scale and sends the particles scattering to dust is absolutely useless!" Shige-H ground her teeth, pressing her hand to her chest just to feel her pounding heart. "This is a hopeless struggle. What's taking you so long?"
"I can't as much as peek out," Mana admitted. "I've somehow raised two pillars out of five but… I think some part of it knows what I'm trying to do here."
"Why is that monster immune to my Advanced Bloodline, I don't understand…" Shige-H dragged her hand across her hair, Mana noted a quiver to the Stars' leader's hand as it moved. "It's powerful and all but… How could the very laws of physics not work on it?"
"It's not that you're not unmaking it, it's that it's too good at remaking itself. The regenerative abilities of a Tailed Beast are second to none. Also, the Tailed Beasts are composed of chakra itself. They're essentially chakra titans. Chakra is a form of energy and you cannot delete energy–just transform it." Mana stood up, ready to act before the Four-Tails detonates the Tailed Beast Bomb and makes Iwagakure's disaster look like the popping of a soap bubble in comparison.
"Do you have any idea how to stall it?" Shige-H wondered.
"I've got… A theory." Mana sighed. She grabbed hold of her trembling right arm and did her best to ease her unsteady breathing. She'd need as much focus as she can get once she reveals herself and there is no place for failure and no second chances here. It's do or get obliterated.
"Mana… You can't… You're the only one with a connection to the seal," Shige-H tried raising an objection.
"If my theory is correct, I am also the only one that can stall this monster and prevent it from taking a chunk out of this planet with this bomb. If… If it doesn't work, Skaven can claim the bond from my body, if there's a body left…" curious questions flooded Mana's head about how recovering the Five Pillars Seal from an obliterated body would work but there was no time entertaining her thoughts and curiosities.
Mana ran out into the open. A colossal shadow loomed over the scurrying magician before a hammering thud splattered her whole, but what came out from the splatter wasn't blood and guts. It was a soft pack of bunnies. A single clump that continued to grow and escalate, throwing the Four-Tails for a loop while Mana hurried off. Shige-H glanced from behind the pillar with a baffled stare. She could see everything just fine but all signs pointed to the Four-Tails falling victim to genjutsu as it had been fighting and trying to scrape off that which simply didn't exist.
"Come on!" Mana rolled forward and planted her palms to the ground, shooting off the third pillar skyward and forming three out of five sealing pillars around the Four-Tails. The Tailed Beast Bomb began shrinking down, Shige-H initially cheered, thinking it to be an effect of the genjutsu that Mana cast on the Tailed Beast to win herself a pocket of time to raise the next pillar but when the leader of the Stars saw Mana's pale and petrified expression, she realized that this compression was anything but a good thing.
"Summoning: Food Cart Destroyer!" Tomi's voice slashed through the gravitational howls and rocky grunge of the collapsing earth and the lashing lightning. A tortoise of mythic proportions dropped on top of the Four-Tails, shaking up the monster that was just twice the tortoise's size but once seven more Ninja Elephants dropped on the back of the massive tortoise, the Four-Tails collapsed on the ground at last under the combined weight.
A beam of black rose as a heaven-splitting pillar, engulfing the summoned animals and reducing them to dust instantly. As Tomi landed before the collapsed Four-Tails, ready to issue orders to her friends and direct the course of this battle until Mana sealed the beast away, the eyes of the wildling teen sunk in tears and blanked out. Eight of her friends blinked out in an instant. She never needed to worry about any of their well-being. It was usually the other way around and now… Now they were gone…
"Get out of there!" Mana yelled out, waving her hand, but Tomi had turned off and stopped registering anything. She was just a bag bloated with grief and laying helpless and useless before the enemy as if begging to be put down like the monster had mercilessly plowed through her friends. There was no way for Mana to cast another illusion with the Four-Tails, not even looking at her or hearing anything that the magician was saying. It was as if the mad monster was in a realm of its own. A realm of chaos, violence, and rabidness.
"Unmaker Fist Flurry!" Shige-H yelled out, rolling out of cover and throwing fists gleaming with cyan flames, overflowing with the energy of unmaking from her body to where the gleam spilled out from her eyes and her mouth, switching the very color of Shige-H's eyes thusly. The cyan beams slammed into the Four-Tails' jaw and ravaged its entire body, but didn't appear to move it at all.
Now that its Tailed Beast Bomb was gone, the Four-Tails could breathe its merciless, all-devouring emerald flames once more. Recalling of that gift that had claimed the lives of tens of thousands that very same day, the massive monkey drew breath in and bloated out its chest, as if preparing to unleash a hail of flames that would incinerate both Shige-H and Tomi.
"Mana, the pillars…" Shige-H whimpered out before the four-tailed titan blew out a stream of emerald flames in an all-encompassing tongue. Mana stared in absolute abhorrence as the emerald field of flames surrounded the jade sealing pillars like a tidal wave. A final grunt transitioned into a blood-curdling scream when Shige-H flew out from the infernal depths in a tunnel of air and slammed into the top of the sealing pillar, hitting it just right to stay awkwardly dangling over the edge.
Shige's skin had been scorched as there seemed to be just a few patches of healthy flesh as opposed to the burns. The grand field of fire had immolated half her hair and clothes in a blink before whatever force had flung her out from the inferno saved her life. Tomi hadn't been so fortunate. Once the emerald flames cleared out, a short skeleton crumbled. It was still rustling with specks of flames while absolutely lifeless. The shock of hitting the floor crumbled it into dust.
Tomi was gone.
"Stop…" Mana muttered once the silence reigned in. The Four-Tails turned its attention to Mana, looming as an approaching existential threat as it approached the risen pillar on which Mana stood before the approaching titan. Its mindless eyes had been mocking her. Even a thoughtless beast that knew only rampage and the orders that the original user of the seal had given it knew that there was nothing to stop doing at this point–Tomi was gone, along with a chunk of her summoned partners.
Extinguished in a blink. That was what would happen to all of them if Mana didn't act now. She still has two more pillars to raise. Just how many more sacrifices will this laborious task call for? What was even the point of subduing the beast if it would kill her friends, anyway?
"Mercy. You don't deserve it," Mana cried out as her trembling hands clenched into furious fists. Somehow it didn't much matter that she lacked the strength to even make the titanic calamity feel a thousand of her punches delivered at once. All she wanted was a pound of flesh.
The Four-Tails breathed in again. It knew that it stood no chance of damaging the primeval sealing pillars, but it could have easily burnt the young woman standing on it and challenging it. A thunderous tackle sent the Four-Tails sliding to the side. As the fallen monkey tried getting up, a tiger-colored, furry fist slammed its face down to the floor, hammering again and again as wild canine eyes testified Mana's wrath for the ninja magician. The Nine-Tails continued to pound, slam and stomp, bash and blast the fallen Four-Tails into the dirt without offering the Tailed Beast any hint of resistance.
It wasn't real. The Nine-Tails wouldn't have offered a single hair on its body to burn for Mana, despite the magician having once set it free. These beasts were just that–monsters. There wasn't a hint of soul or humanity inside them and if Mana could kill them–she would have. Her ninja way only prohibited her from killing humans, after all. There was nothing human about these living calamities. It might have taken a few minutes for the Four-Tails to realize that it was under a mere B-Rank illusion that made it believe to be involved in a worthy fight against what it thought to be a valiant challenger, but minutes were an eternity to a ninja.
Mana took off from her pillar after enjoying the Four-Tails wrestling air and getting the crap kicked out of it in its imagination. She could only have dreamed to know just what sort of violence this monster that only knew devastation and brutality imagined upon itself. Mana pressed her hands to the ground and raised the fourth pillar. The Four-Tails breathed fire all over the place. Its competition with a worthy foe of its own imagination had been considerable. A wind dissolved Mana into flower petals as she hurried across to the fallen and injured comrade of hers. Mana moved Shige-H away and placed her beside Damisan, behind the pillar where it was the least likely for the world-shaking battle to reach them.
"What are you doing?" a familiar condescending voice reached Mana, so she peeked from behind the first pillar. The magician's displeased glare settled on Endo having finally run up to the battlefield and found himself before the calamitous clash between the Four-Tails and its imaginary opponent. With a single, bellowing roar, the titanic ape monster had broken Mana's illusion, sending the magician flying back with violent force emanating from deep within her own chest.
The unfair competition of the Tailed Beast's booming chakra and Mana's genjutsu was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being used to smash through candy glass. There could have been no doubt that such irregularity would have broken it out of the Worthy Foe Jutsu.
"I've run this far…" Endo growled, swiping the tip and blade of the sword he had looted off of the fallen assassin aside and preparing to charge right toward the beast. "It'd suck not to run the entire way!" he seemed to pump himself up for this mad charge.
What an absolutely insane individual!
"Endo! Substitution!" Mana yelled out. As if they were kindred souls, they moved in sync. Each one using the substitution technique to replace themselves with the other, effectively switching each other's positions and leaving Endo safeguarding the injured Stars survivors while Mana glared up at the scowl of the Four-Tails.
The beast roared before throwing a cross and smashing Mana to bits. As it tilted its fist off the ground, an awkwardly sprawled out, the bloody pulp of a body remained buried underneath the rocks while the Four-Tails continued to shove its fists, grinding the corpse further and further into the dirt and leaving a more and more miserable bloody stain out of it.
"Stop hitting dirt, you fucking jackass!" Endo taunted the monster though by the time it took the appropriate time to breathe out and realize it was under another illusion and had been expressing its grievances at absolutely nothing but an illusionary corpse, Mana stood atop of a raised fifth pillar.
Rushing to correct its mistake, the Four-Tails swiftly breathed out a nova of emerald flames at Mana, but the flames merely rotated in a dome shape and dissipated off of the magician harmlessly. With all five pillars being raised, a jutsu that protected Mana was more ancient and fearsome than even the might of a Tailed Beast could break.
The Five Pillars Seal was complete! And as golden, ethereal arrows shot out from the peaks of each pillar, penetrating the Four-Tails and locking it down in place signified–this last breath of devastating, toxic flames sealed the beast's fate and trapped it inside the seal once more.