"Ji-Ji!" Usujitsa bawled out as smoke and snappy popping noises filled the tense atmosphere. A whirlwind carrying jets of flames around surrounded a sudden emergence of rabbit clones that threatened to ride the vortex all the way to the top and then spill over, bombarding the battlefield into a charred wasteland. Gloyfan extended her hands, letting them dissolve into a swarm of butterflies from the elbow down and surround the whirlwind as well.
"I don't think just putting them to sleep will do much!" Selsig barked out at his comrade. But, while Gloyfan appeared stressed by the exertion of casting an illusion of such a wide range and such a potent medium, she also looked confident in her ability to stop the rabbit's wild bombardment plans.
Indeed, just as the woman seemed to have planned, the wild and unpredictable stares of the Usujitsa's clones turned swirly and dazed and the fiery hurricane they've formed that was meant to scatter them across the battlefield seemed to die down almost at once. Instead of scattering out wide, the clones all flopped face first, one onto another. The flop seemed soft enough for the enemy group to have prevented Usujitsa's manic tendencies from coming to fruition.
"Flowies…" Gwirlon chuckled with a goofy tone as he reeled his metal arm back and folded the tools that comprised it back into a ring-shaped combination assemblage over the fleshy carvings on his arm. Where he once held and threatened to squeeze the life out of Mana, now flowed merely stray pink and silky flower petals.
"You jawless nitwit!" Gloyfan screamed out. "She was right in your grasp. This is an illusion. She has gone nowhere!"
"Well… She sure as heck went somewhere now…" Selsig snarled, scanning across the battlefield. The two ninja with the adequate amount of forethought focused on the areas where the wind carried the illusionary flower petals that Mana falsely displayed to have dissolved into. It only felt right that with the enemy having a decent illusionist of their own right, they'd be able to figure out the nature behind Mana's Flower Petal Sanctuary.
"She can't have gone too far. The muttonhead busted her ribs and pretty much everything else with his rocky grip. She didn't strike me as the tough and agile type," Gloyfan added while staying on her toes and trying to determine which direction their target intended to flee the unfavorable battlefield in.
"Genjutsu: Flower Shuriken Jutsu!" Mana's voice pierced the silent emptiness that the two ninja attentively scanned as the airborne petals that amused Gwirlon so halted in mid-motion and unraveled into a sharp, shuriken shape before solidifying. It didn't take as long as a single snap for Selsig and Gloyfan to realize Mana has trapped them. Gloyfan's hands raced to clap her hands and prepare to dispel the illusion, as there was no workable way for illusionary flower petals to become solid shuriken–the follow-up had to be an illusion.
"She… That bitch! She didn't bolt anywhere!?" Selsig bawled out in shock as the shuriken all took off toward him, skewering him like a pincushion. The muscular ninja halted in a paralyzed and twisted stance as his limbs and eyes twitched frantically from phantom pain coursing through his entire body.
A following gust of wind brought with it another flow of pink, white and azure petals but when Mana's shape solidified from thin air and she spun in a roundhouse kick, seeking Selsig's jaw and a grievous concussion on her enemy, Gwirlon's hand caught Mana's heel in mid-air. Sharp and jagged teeth burst from the wrist of the dim-witted enemy ninja before a bear trap snapped shut, ripping through Gwirlon's own flesh and snapping around the ankle that he had locked his grip onto.
Unlike the feeble-minded brute who seemed to be utterly unaffected by the pain of a bear trap he had implanted into his own wrist ripping through his own flesh to snap shut over the enemy's leg, Mana screamed her lungs out in pain the likes of which she hadn't felt since Jigoku. She couldn't even think up of a response nor did she dream of it, flapping down with her arms over her head and writhing in mid-air while swinging helplessly in the enemy's grip.
"Well… I guess now she won't be able to escape and that nincompoop won't be able to let go of her again…" Gloyfan sighed in relief.
"Still…" Selsig wheezed out, still overcome by terror and pain that a body experienced when being utterly devastated by thousands of shuriken skewering it from all directions until Gloyfan freed him from the illusion with a dispelling pulse of chakra. "To think that she'd be this obsessed with defeating me, that she'd waste a chance to flee and avoid capture… She's either intensely driven or absolutely insane."
"A mad bitch like that will be tough to keep leashed. Toxi and Veno are already after Yagan. Maybe we should just finish her off and be done with this? If any peacekeepers survive your little mud-men army, that blast that destroyed our war machine might have earned us their attention," Gloyfan approached Mana and pulled her head closer by pinching the ninja magician by her jaws and slapping them lightly in mockery with the front and back of her hand.
"No. She's just as important as Yagan. Plus, our new ally has expressed interest in this woman too. If we are to secure Kirigakure's support in our cause and become a real player on the political scene and not just some ragtag group of rebels, we need this woman alive and under our control," Selsig disagreed while his body went pale the moment he came within an arm's reach of Mana, prompting him to keep her a few paces away at all times out of respectful fear of the magician's obsession. "Soften her up some more, you brainless dumbass. I'll take care of that sleepyhead rabbit psycho."
With unintelligible gibberish leaving his mouth, Gwirlon swung Mana about while keeping her in his iron-clad grip and slammed her to the ground on the other side of him. The magician's head bounced off of the ground like a football while brutal reverberations ran up and down what remained of her skeleton. Everything went white, but then, with an oozing wash, Mana returned to reality while blood from her wound ran up her ankle and thigh and splattered all around the surrounding scrapyard.
In a rare moment of clarity, Mana saw her top hat somewhere off in the distance. She couldn't dispel or activate any seals placed on it. She plainly lucked out that Usujitsa's clones began popping one by one, dispelling in a fiery blaze or a contained whirlwind and forcing Selsig to grab hold of a nearby chunk of scrap and shield himself behind it.
"Tsk… The damned little monster got away back to whatever hole he came from. Did you guys see his eyes? He'd have blown us all to bits without a moment's hesitation. Where do you even find ninja rabbits, anyway?" Selsig panted with his back against the chunk of half-dislodged debris while sharing attention with both of his comrades. Gloyfan, who seemed to be busy panting and tending to her wounds herself and Gwirlon, who still swung and thrashed Mana about like a rag doll.
"Careful, you shit-brain, don't snap her neck or something. If she's not in tippy-top shape, her village won't give a flying fuck about her to wage war with us," Gloyfan mocked her comrade again with a scolding tone.
"You'll… You'll let her… Treat you this way?" Mana coughed out through blood and stuck pockets of air, looking to escape her battered and flattened lungs.
"She not dead. She still talk," Gwirlon waggled Mana around in front of his teammates like a key chain.
"That's a nice try, girl, but you should just stop wasting your breath and answer the call to pass out that your body's frantically sending you out. Gwirlon's been abused and treated like the tool that he is since childhood. Being a tool is the only life he knows. Human Swiss-Knife, they called him in the mines and in the army," Selsig sighed, running his hand over his limited patches of hair. It was self-evident that as long as Mana kept her eyes even remotely open, he wouldn't feel safe, given the magician's obsession with ending his jutsu prematurely.
"Hm…" Gloyfan moaned out loud.
"What the fuck is your problem now?" Selsig turned to his teammate while Gwirlon worked on knocking Mana out or render her so battered and helpless that she wouldn't cause problems while being taken back to the enemy headquarters. "Our target literally presented herself to us. I doubt she'll risk that highly destructive jutsu she used to blow our war machine at this range. As absolutely nuts as she is, she's not a suicidal type of nut job."
"I just now realized I won't be able to scalp her for a wig. I bet the village needs her looking pretty, scalp on her head and all…" Gloyfan complained.
"I guess… Doesn't she wear a hat, though? Maybe they won't notice the difference?" Selsig scratched the back of his head.
"No… No…" Gloyfan deflated, collapsing by a nearby storage drawer that had been flung all the way there from the explosion site. "A stage personality needs to look pristine. Trust me, I've been looking into that career option a lot, I'd know. I guess the scalp stays on, boring…"
Gwirlon scooped up a nearby piece of debris with his free arm. After smashing the ninja magician rag doll on her backside, he slammed the debris onto her, sandwiching her in between the debris and the rocky ground. A tiny trail of blood leaked out from under the piece of busted debris while the dim-witted giant crushed it with his entire arm and kicked it away like a tin can. Everything felt too floaty for Mana to do anything. Even if she tried to, it didn't feel like she could form a single hand seal right in this state. And yet she still defiantly held on to her conscience.
"You know, if we remove a limb or two… No… I guess Konoha will want to see her with both arms and legs… Fuck, this is such a pickle! Why won't you just pass out!?" Gloyfan dragged her hands through her head with a mad groan. It seemed like she was growing more and more frustrated, just like her less articulate ally.
A warm wave of blood washed over Mana's face. Even if she could still see straight, the hindrance of trickling, gushing red made her close her eyes out of instinct. The magician almost caught herself slipping a few times. No! She couldn't go out. She could neither die nor get captured as long as the enemy's mud-men technique continues. Selsig had to go down. Then she could've died or passed out. Mana wouldn't have cared what would happen then, as long as that man could not keep his jutsu going. Just this once, just this once, she wanted to save everyone.
"Well, fuck… I guess you underestimated her, Gloyfan. She is the tough type," Selsig blew out a load of cool air from his lungs and turned away from the gruesome splatter of blood that came after another slam.
"No way, she's not fighting back, she's just… I don't know… All of this is just so pathetic…" Gloyfan stood up only to tap her fingers at a nearby cracked panel of tempered glass and then cross her arms as they've been overstaying their welcome here. "Maybe we should just leave it be and drag her along like this?"
"What, are you fucking kidding me? One illusion out of her and we're all fucking dead and all of our fucking throats are slit. She's gotta be sleeping cold, the next best thing besides her being six feet under!" Selsig vehemently objected. "Your pretty ass ain't the one this bitch is after…"
"Then just cancel the fucking jutsu and let her pass out in peace!" Gloyfan pushed her rear off of the support of the chunk of debris while she approached her comrade, ready to argue until this matter was resolved.
"No way! You heard me! That town is full of both Kumogakure scumbags and sellout collaborating fucks! It all goes down and I'm proud to be the guy to do it!" Selsig objected with just as much passion. "We need the rest of this country to know that we mean business. No, the whole damn world! We're getting the power back and we'll build an Iwagakure that the rest of the world will have no other option but to respect!"
An arrow whizzed past where Selsig would have pointed his finger and prodded it straight into his ally's chest. It slashed a chunk of muscular flesh, ripping past a few tendons and opening a rather shallow wound. Before either of the two ninja could turn to where the arrow came from, a piece of steel wire that was attached to the other end of the arrow lit up with a thunderous blue while a lone flash blitzed to the left, yanking the steel wire and slicing Selsig's arm clean off.
"Huh… I guess Mana pushed these guys to use their substitutions out recently. There's no way you'd have just let that happen…" Endo turned back with an emotionless stare, chilling the arm-less Selsig straight to the heart.
"Guillotine Knife-Edge Chop!" a shout filled the air while what seemed to be a living lightning bolt crashed down from a nearby rocky pillar. Gwirlon cried and whined out, staggering back as he stared at a stump that only lasted from his shoulder to his elbow. Denkka straightened her back out while Shige-H moved in from behind, scooping Mana and her entrapment up and retreating to free her from it and treat her wounds.
"The peacekeepers and… Allied Ninja? Just like that woman reported…" Gloyfan hissed out, pressing her back against a wall of scrap as she had little space to flee to. The previous battle had done a number on all three of them and Gwirlon may have been too dimwitted to retreat properly in general. Back in the day during the war, it only served as an advantage as it made the Human Swiss-Knife that much more devoted to his objective. Now it came off as a shortcoming of him as a battlefield unit.
"That woman? She must be talking about Asuka," Endo pointed one of his swords at Gloyfan while turning to Prabba and Prim-S, who lurked on a perch point of a nearby mountain pillar. The same one from which Prabba launched her arrow earlier. By now, the woman had replaced it with another and stood ready to support the makeshift squad of peacekeepers and Allied Ninja from afar. "So… Asuka found you guys. That's quite fortunate. This way we'll get to chop up all of you at once without wasting extra time."
"Tsk…" Selsig grumbled and grunted, weaving a one-handed hand seal while surrounding wet mud surged under his trousers and crawled up his body, becoming a mass of sludge over the area where he had just lost his arm with a quick replacement. A temporary one too. "Gwirlon, hold the line!"
With Gwirlon staggered out in between the reinforcements and the enemy group, willing to serve as a human shield and aid their retreat without a second thought, a triplet of bolts buzzed past him and planted behind the lumbering one-armed giant. Rumbling blasts resonated from the tips of the armed arrows when the tags attached to their ends ceased sizzling, tossing Gloyfan and Selsig back and preventing their retreat this time.
"Honestly, guys, you're embarrassing yourselves," Prabba taunted the enemy while loading a new quintet of arrows and preparing them to fire at once. Just like the previous batch, these had sealing tags attached to them and glyphs drawn on their tips.
"It looks like you've got things covered here," Prim-S turned to the perched kunoichi by his side before flickering away to join the battlefield at a closer range.
"This doesn't look good. I need you to put them under an illusion to give us an escape window. Your illusions should reach far enough to affect even the collaborator archer," Selsig glanced at his partner.
"This won't work. She's the farthest away from us. She'll be the first one to recover when we flee!" Gloyfan snapped back at him, visibly distraught by the pinch they've ended up in.
Selsig crept his hand up, weaving a kumite sign. The rest of the peacekeepers and Allied Ninja prepared themselves for an incoming attack, as it usually gestured an invitation for an honorable fight. Without proper knowledge of the enemy's abilities, except that he could manifest the same mud-men he used against Boulder Town before, the Boulder Town's protectors stayed at a safe range and deal with the attack as it came at them, giving themselves the highest amount of time to react and deal with it.
None of them expected an arm to prompt from the bubbling bog underneath that grabbed hold of Gloyfan's ankle. Neither, it seemed, the illusionist herself. With the half-formed mud-man emerging from underground and adopting chipped off teeth of saw blades and other scrapped junk that littered the area, it chomped and held the rogue kunoichi down. Gloyfan cried out to the degree of nearly losing her voice, both out of shock and the intolerable twinge of the impure bite.
"I guess you'll have to stay still then," Selsig bit his partner one last time before the shape of his body became transparent and blurry as he intended to flicker away. Because of Mana having drawn out his substitution some time before and his body still suffering from the strain of the hi-speed replacement, and because of the totality of the injuries he had suffered on the battlefield, Selsig still showed some trouble doing so.
"Damn it…" Gloyfan clapped her hands together, summoning a wave of butterflies that sought to catch the enemies and trap them under an illusion. Endo thrust one of his blades to slash himself in the thigh and force the haziness out while he raced across the battlefield. While he could thrust one of his swords through the rogue kunoichi's chest with a back thrust as passed her, he ran just a few inches short of slashing Selsig before he flickered away.
"What the fuck!?" Endo yelled out as he grabbed hold of Gloyfan's hair and pulled her in as if he intended to yell so intensely that the boom of his voice tore the skin off of the woman's face off. "Why the fuck would you sacrifice yourself for a backstabbing shit-stain like that?"
"Heh…" Gloyfan cracked a bloody smile before spitting blood at Endo's face. "I guess in the end… Me and Konoha's Sorceress had something in common. Both of our legs got chomped up…"
Having run out of breath and strength to continue and seeing no use in further augmenting her body to push through her grievous injuries, Gloyfan gave in and collapsed on her side with no traces of life while Endo crudely yanked his blade out of her body and swiping it to splatter the blood off of its edge on the nearby junkyard before sheathing it again.
Boulder Town may have stood tall and safe, but one enemy still lived to tell the tale, which wasn't something that sat well with the rough swordsman of the Allied Ninja. He turned to the last remaining enemy seeking validation in a brutal and satisfying brawl, but it seemed like the giant just stood there staring blankly straight toward nowhere without even bothering to cradle his removed arm.
"Don't even think about it," Denkka stepped in between Endo and the unresisting enemy. "We need this one alive. For however much he'll be able to give us."