Mana's hands raced to perform hand seals. While she has resigned herself to putting an end to Endo's ambition and beating him here and now felt like an efficient method to put a stop to it, that didn't mean she had to allow this to extend into a drawn-out maddening brawl. If she could put Endo into a strong genjutsu and beat him quickly while he's dazed, she'd be able to end it efficiently.
A wave of pain resonated through Mana's arms and went down to her core, through her shoulders. Her eyes widened as she looked down to the epicenter of where the pain came from and saw a few shuriken sticking out from her hands. Even confirming what had happened to her hands froze Mana enough for the focus necessary for her illusion to all vanish, and Endo was now all over her.
Finding enough time for only one desperation technique with her body all off-put by the torment from her skewered hands, Mana clapped her hands and extended them, forming a protective Wind Release bubble around her. Despite her Magic Bubble jutsu, Endo's Sword of the Thunder God carved right through it, though it didn't graze Mana beyond just a shallow cut.
Despite that fact, an electromagnetic jolt resonated from the supercharged blade of the weapon and shocked Mana, bringing her up into the air alongside the man wielding the sword. Endo rolled in mid-air, positioning his sword over his head to form a buzzing, vertical disc that spun toward Mana in the air in pursuit of her. A storm of paper tags erupted from Mana's sleeves, forming a clone that grabbed hold of the magician's hand and spun her away from harm while Endo carved through the clone mercilessly, reducing her to twin sliced halves that bled paper tags that burnt up before they reached the ground.
Just as Endo's feet touched the ground from the spin, he rotated toward Mana like a human drill. This was ambitious. Mana had removed the shuriken etched in her hands and weathered the trickles of blood that they left behind. Despite the aggravated bleeding, just removing the uncomfortable, alien object from her body made her hands cooperate a little better. Mana flicked her hand, pointing a playing card with bloodstains on it in Endo's direction and as the swordsman's eyes met the skull-shaped symbol in the center of the card, his gaze became duller and he flopped to the ground, skidding past Mana awkwardly as he left a skidding trail of blood while grazing on the passageway of the old headquarters ruins.
"Hell's Attraction Jutsu…" Mana chanted to herself, completing the illusion, the initial effects of which had already disabled Endo.
"Wh… What… What is… That?" Endo hissed, trying to muster up the strength to just push his hands down against the floor and peel himself off the ground. But he appeared helpless in that task.
"Genjutsu usually attacks your chakra circulation system, but there is another, more ancient way of performing genjutsu that overrides your blood circulation by forcing my chakra to coarse through your body and pinch your brain centers. Amongst other things, one's sense of balance depends on the brain, so if I pinch it the right way–you won't even be able to get up on your knees." Mana answered, cracking a thunderous chop to the back of Endo's skull before waving her hand and slipping a playing card from her sleeve that unsealed a Wind Release nature whirlwind from within and sent Endo flying while completely powerless to resist the gale's demands.
Returning to her days in the Sun Disc arena, Mana kicked with her left foot in a manner reminding of how a valiant fencer thrust, slashed, and jabbed with their rapier. Once she felt the impact of her kicks weaken, the ninja magician switched dominant legs and repeated the process. Once the second leg became tired, Mana slipped another Wind Release sealed playing card down under her own feet and propelled herself into the air with a rushing bicycle kick that finished with Mana repeatedly stomping Endo into the narrow passageway.
This returned offensive made the bridge between the two wings of the ruins crumble and plummet down. Mana planted her feet against one of the falling chunks of rubble and made them fix onto it with chakra control. Kicking off of the rubble with her full balance behind it, Mana drove her palms into Endo's chest. The disguised swordsman coughed up in pain as Mana's own palms didn't quite come into contact with his body. There was a thin layer of steel between them and Endo felt its cold rub against him. By the time that the steel heated up and burst, unsealing the explosive potency sealed within the two cards that Mana slammed into Endo's chest, both the ninja magician and her opponent flew back, rolling in mid-air. Though where Mana landed with her feet pressed against a falling rubble platform, Endo slammed and crashed through every chunk of debris he encountered in his path.
"Magical Twist Jutsu!" Mana chanted out, calling out to one of her earliest experimental techniques and forming a relatively tame vortex of Wind Release chakra around herself, which carried her across the distance between her and Endo. Once she approached her winded and dazed opponent once more, Mana cracked at the back of Endo's head with another chop before extending both of her hands out.
"Royal Flush!" she yelled out, reaching for a little strand of steel wire attached to a rubber ring behind her collar and Mana yanked on it with her teeth, blasting entire decks worth of her sealed cards from point-blank range straight at Endo when his sense of balance was at the absolute worst state a human's sense of balance can be and his mind was too busy feeling sorry for how nauseating this entire experience was as opposed to thinking up of ways to escape Mana's offensive.
Cards that exploded with pressurized bubbles of water, cards that erupted with crackling jolts of lightning, explosive cards and cards with licking fireballs booming out of them, cards with rushing blizzards of stone pebbles, and cards with shock waves strong enough to cause earthquakes if they touched the ground all laid their siege on Endo's body, whiting the young man out and leaving him crashing far away into the ground. Mana couldn't perform a visual inspection of how Endo handled her beat down as the young man sunk in a cloud of dust with his Transformation Jutsu disappearing after he had suffered so much damage is such a short amount of time.
Mana breathed a deep gulp of air out, feeling a resonating sense of numbness in her muscles before she tapped into the real depths of her chakra resources. With the immense stress of the Four-Tails' attack and the Advanced Bloodline training that Mana was going through recently, she was used to putting her body through a bit of a strain and tapping into the full extent of her vast chakra resources. With the amount of high ranking and demanding jutsu she performed, Mana couldn't have functioned on a battlefield without such grand chakra resources, even though her physical stamina might have still lagged behind from her more physical peers.
Endo stumbled out from the smoke, covered with scrapes and bruises with his kimono singed off of Endo's chest as the maddened by the tide of battle swordsman tumbled, tripped, and rolled toward Mana. Distressed by the hardiness of her opponent, Mana activated her Mystical Wings Jutsu and flipped in mid-air, diving with her feet stomping at the back of Endo's head. A deafening stomp so powerful that it cracked the ground underneath and forced Endo to bounce off of the earth into the air a few meters with a busted nose that spread blood in a wide arc.
The ninja magician soared up again, thrusting her spear-shaped palm into the center point between both of Endo's eyes and in between his brows and the upper nose. This impact made Endo white-out again while Mana stopped the call of gravity with her Mystical Wings once more to thrust her palm into Endo's belly and drive him down to the ground. Endo bounced off of the ground again, leaving nasty cracks in the rocky surface of the wasteland while Mana produced a steel-tipped card from her sleeve and slashed with it multiple times, aiming nowhere in particular and avoiding any major arteries. With how shaken her opponent was, Mana grabbed hold of Endo's cheeks and pulled his dazed face in for a closer glare, eye-to-eye while Mana's bleeding left hand weaved one-handed seals.
Endo's eyes rolled all over, still struggling to maintain his balance but also suffering the tremendous after effect of the beat down he had taken until now. Mana's eyes, however, widened in shock as the Sword of the Thunder God ignited by her right side and Endo carved it through her diagonally up to her left shoulder before putting his own stumbling body weight behind a few more slashes. The essence of Mana that had been cut up exploded violently, throwing Endo rolling back and forcing him to drive his sword into the ground and struggle to get back up on both feet as he wiped the blood off of his face from getting in his eyes and making it difficult for him to breathe.
"It's hard to contact someone's eyes when they're still janky after you kick their ass…" Endo taunted Mana, making a few sword katas just to show that despite his extensive wear and tear, he was still eager for the battle to go on. "Isn't it? Or maybe you're afraid to meet my eyes for good because you're afraid of how much more resolve they have than you do?"
Mana positioned her hands in a preparatory position for hand seals. Her injuries had slowed down her sleight of hand potential a grand deal, it was, undoubtedly, one of a few ways in which Endo had planned to even the playing field against Mana a little when the two came to blows as without the use of her hand seals Mana would only have had her C or D-Rank ninjutsu techniques to rely on. Just the ones that she had perfected in the Rabbit Caves years ago. The rest of her arsenal wasn't quite as polished yet.
"That's right, Mana. Your resolve is much weaker than mine! You're afraid to live your own life which is why you're standing back right now and planning to wither at me from a long-range, cripple me as much as you can before you can move in for the finishing stroke when you can wrap it up without a doubt!" Endo proclaimed as he clapped his own hands together.
"Ninjutsu?" Mana gasped. While she knew Endo to be capable of ninjutsu, she wouldn't have guessed that he'd be bold enough to try it against her when she had superior ninjutsu strength, usage speed, and a broader arsenal. It would have to be a technique she hadn't seen Endo perform before…
"Lightning Style: Magical Punishment Jutsu!" Mana proclaimed, performing a trio of hand seals and extending her hand, all in-between Endo's own hand seals. A bolt of lightning shot out from Mana's open palm, racing across the space between her and Endo but it strayed and hit Endo's Sword of the Thunder God that he had embedded into the ground, serving effectively as a lightning rod for absorbing and neutering Mana's technique.
"Wind Style: Nightmare Eater!" Endo began drawing air in, stressing his cracked ribs and grunting in pain as his body inflated like a balloon to an unnatural extent. An unparalleled suction force dragged Mana in closer to Endo with such dominating attraction that Mana couldn't even get accustomed to this suctioning effect quickly enough to make one move before Endo's hand grabbed her by the throat and pulled her in. Just as the magician expected an attempted impalement or a close-range, one-inch punch, Endo's blood filled her mouth when the mad brawler pulled her in for a full-contact kiss and shoved her aside.
"What the…" Mana muttered, shaking as she picked herself off the ground. It wasn't some sort of technique or a curse seal or some other physical affliction that had plagued her and left her shaking and slow to return to her feet. It was the shock and confusion from what had just happened.
"That's how bold and uncaring, uncompromising I am, Mana!" Endo struck a cocky pose as his battered physical body appeared to loom and tower over Mana, despite her having a decisive advantage in this duel. "I'm not afraid to take my shots, to confront life and I never stop! Even if my opponent wins, I simply choose to refuse to lose because it is a man like that who deserves the title to be the best!"
"Why? Why is it so important to you to be the best? What do you care if you're the very best or not?" Mana called her friend out with an elevated tone as this shocking last action of his forced her shaken mind to request some time before it could get back at her and work in sync with her body.
"Because…!" Endo clenched his fists. His tone softened as if he'd peeled the protective layer off of his sensitive core and exposed his nerve knots to the aggravating elements outside. "Being the best validates the type of person I am! I'm cocky and I don't treat other people too nice. I'm willing to kill people for the slightest step outside the strict definition of the norm. Only the very best at what he does may act that way, only the best of the best can crave the finest food and drinks, only the best can indulge themselves and make decisions that impact other people's lives, and only for the best ever is that sort of existence permissible. If I am not the best… Then I have no right to exist the way I am, then for the person that I am… I should just die…"
"Endo, you don't need justification for being born!" Mana made a passionate objection. "Nor do you need to prove anything to earn the right to live. Just you being alive is amazing and enough justification to warrant you a happy and satisfying life. You can be a very annoying and toxic person sometimes but you don't earn yourself permission to be this way by just climbing to the top of your field–you face those issues and you do your best to overcome them. For all the talk about being bold you do, it feels to me like you're afraid to face your flaws and that is why you'd rather crawl through a carpet of barbed wire and rusty nails to become No. 1 than just work on yourself and self-reflect."
Endo's manic glare softened. He smirked with a genuine smile resting on an uncomfortable face that saw the truth and knew full-well what it was but refused to open that door and walk through it, regardless. "I kissed you just now because I wanted to show you how bold I am in living my life but… No I kind of wish to kiss you for real."
"Endo, it's not too late for you to stop this nonsense. Come back to the camp and get your wounds looked at. They'll kick you out if they find out…" Mana tried to make her plight.
"They won't throw me out. We're no longer recruits that aren't allowed to fight each other. The Allied Ninja are short of hands right now and they won't have the guts to throw out someone that has claimed the title of the best!" Endo stared right back at her, returning to his earlier stare of a hardened warrior amid a life-defining battle. Ruthless and headstrong. "I am just a peasant with a fancy sword, son of field worker settlers, who has completed nothing nor claimed any titles in his life. My master threw me away and dismissed me so I cannot claim to be a samurai and I am only a ninja because I've graduated as an Allied Ninja. Only a No. 1 ninja can be worth the attention of a high-caliber kunoichi and a world-renowned entertainer."
"That's… Not how that works…" Mana squinted and rubbed her temples with her fingers.
"I swear to you, Mana, I will become the best and I will earn the acknowledgment and respect that I require!" Endo bellowed as he charged forward with an Arabian flip and a slash with his Sword of the Thunder God mixed in. Mana's body froze in a state of stiff panic as a golden gash dragged across her body, but it only evaporated into flower petals. The apprentice samurai stabbed into the ground, expelling a violent ring of electricity all around him as his own chakra fueled the blade's instability.
Mana couldn't help but cover-up as the electricity passed through her body, leaving it numb and slow to respond to her commands. Endo vaulted in the air once more, kicking her twice, once with each airborne foot, before shooting her up in the air with a rising horse-style kick to the bottom of Mana's chin. Endo rushed upward with a rising slash of his Sword of the Thunder God, humming with vigor in his hand. The golden gleam overwhelmed Mana as her senses went numb for a moment. When vision returned, Mana saw a black gash stretching diagonally across her body that singed off parts of her shirt and melted the area of her jacket where the Sword of the Thunder God contacted it. She was fortunate that the heat and nature of the blade immediately cauterized the injury, despite the entirety of the damage persisting on the inside of her body and being aggravated by the effects of the blinding heat of the blade, at least she didn't need to worry about bleeding out just yet.
Endo's form blitzed in right in front of Mana as he thrust the disabled hilt of his Sword of the Thunder God right into her nose, sending Mana spinning down out of control and flopping down on her front. Her vision was blurry and the constant tears from the head-splitting headache didn't help. Drops of blood tested the waters if they could come out, soon becoming goopier and thicker trickles that Mana had to deal with by augmenting her endurance with chakra and doing her best to keep it in and keeping her airways as open as she could.
"I've heard you, Mana. You think everyone should just live their lives and that no one needs to justify their own existence or the type of person that they are, but I believe otherwise and I hope you can understand that as well. I cannot feel whole and I cannot feel confident and enjoy my life if I am not No. 1. I have to know, we have to settle this." Endo declared, pointing the fabled sword that he took from Rakugi down at Mana while the magician picked herself back up and readied to conclude her duel with her friend and fellow Stars member.