With a triumphant look Clarmac leaned in for a crushing move. Laoch aimed his heavy cannon hands at Mana as well. It only made sense that he'd target her, after all – she was the target of Clarmac's to begin with. Mana tried to force herself to move, she could. The magician stood back up on her feet and prepared to defend herself but her movements were so clumsy and slow. Her body didn't respond to impulses to augment herself willingly, still, it'd likely have augmented her unwillingly with a much higher chakra cost.
"It's too bad that no surrender rule was established. It'd have spared you of this…" Deargli lamented before Clarmac's feet kicked off of the ground and he began rotating.
"Kraken Fang!" he yelled out enthusiastically, feeling almost sure about his victory. A strong elbow strike to his cheek cancelled out the rotating watery drill technique sending the Inuzuka crashing through the trees aside and leaving a large track of devastation behind him.
"He… Is he OK!?" Kiyomi wept out loud without even bothering to contain her cries of sadness. At this point everything saddened her. Mana couldn't understand just what on Earth could the deal behind her own apathy, Meiko's fear and Kiyomi's sadness have been.
With a bloody forehead mixed into her messy front hair that fell all over her beaten and crimson face Meiko stood in front of Mana with her elbow raised and staring angrily at Deargli and Laoch who just stared at the blacksmith completely shocked. Deargli was particularly having trouble dealing with the fact that the blacksmith managed to intervene.
Just about then Mana realized that it was Deargli's technique before. The one that just dissolved right in front of their faces without inflicting damage. Somehow that ninjutsu must've affected their emotions, it wouldn't be an impossible concept for a ninjutsu technique – smells, pinches at certain brain centers as well as tastes could've achieved subtle mood manipulation. Who knew if given enough chakra same couldn't have been amplified a dozen times over. Granted, such effects would've rather be left for a genjutsu technique as it had more diverse points of entry into the opponent's chakra system for a more guaranteed effect but, if Deargli lacked the skill for it, ninjutsu would've been a fine substitute.
"Impossible… The chakra I seal is filled to the brim with my darkest feelings and emotions. It is built to instill matching dark emotions into my opponent! Pain matching my own, no one can overcome those emotions!" Deargli angrily yelled out punching air at her right side.
"I am afraid…" Meiko grumbled, "Afraid to disappoint my team, afraid that after everything they did for me I won't be able to pay them back. Afraid that Mana recommended me for no reason and that I'm unable to match her expectations. That very fear makes me fight to my limits and beyond!" a declaration cleared the air and killed all other sounds in the area.
"I see…" Deargli giggled, soon her lovely restrained chuckle exploded into a confident and somewhat alluring laughter. "So my jutsu worked, it's just that the emotions that the presence of my dark chakra in your system invited plays into the action of fighting back."
"What does that mean? Did she overcome your abilities?" Laoch wondered.
"By no means. I was scared for a moment but it appears I've only lost the dice roll." The strange headdress wearing medical kunoichi explained.
"I see…" Laoch grinned before firing his cannons without any signal or telegraphed motion to read his attack.
As the smoke cleared it appeared like the tree that the Team Hokage were positioned on had been trashed and completely incinerated all the way to the smallest dust. In its place, however, stood another pillar, one of very impressively stacked rocks. The rocky pillar looked like it was built in a rising circular pattern. After its purpose was served the first couple of stones began falling from the top and crumbling on the ground.
With a loud and maddening battle cry Meiko burst from the rocky wall, her boots flaring with blueish chakra flame as she burst towards her opponent giving him a strong cross from the weaker numbed arm side of Laoch. The armored genin flipped gracelessly in his journey wherever the force of the impact carried him off to.
"B-But how!?" Deargli lost her composure after seeing the rocky pillar beginning to collapse again.
"Seeing Meiko hurt would make me even sadder…" Kiyomi cried out pathetically, she had managed to pull off an Earth Release ninjutsu that raised chunks of dirt and smaller rocks into the air with a burst of explosive force below it, transferring her chakra through the tree she was on and through its age old roots and into the minerals, such was Mana's guess, at least.
"I don't care about anything anymore… May as well fight to the end." Mana sighed indifferently as her own Rebellious Twist Jutsu created a gust of Wind Release chakra that rotated just strong enough to focus Kiyomi's dirt and rocks into a rising pillar pattern that matched the vortex of wind that she had created.
None of this would've been enough without Meiko's input as well, it was just a stacked pile of rocks the way it was after Mana and Meiko matched their techniques together but it was Meiko who sealed chakra from inside the wall to transform the messy and shaky pillar of dirt and rocks into an actual barrier technique that held together using her sealing jutsu prowess. It was an actual three-way combination technique, each girl useful in her own special way and it all adding up to a defensive sarcophagus strong enough to withstand even Laoch's powerful cannon blasts.
Deargli's infuriated facial expression betrayed that the kunoichi actually understood how the trio had overcome their emotional distress. They had given purpose for the desired actions given the context of their disarrayed emotional state, assigning a justification for each action from the point of view of a person feeling that particular emotion. It required maturity and understanding of one's own personality and feelings in order to pull something like this off.
"I don't care what you feel like…" Mana mumbled out to herself as her hands flashed through a combination of hand seals. The magician's eyes flashed with a blinding yet momentary burst of light, a result of great amount of chakra focused straight into her eyes.
Usually genjutsu techniques required some sort of a very loosely defined condition to be fulfilled. It was a method of placing one's chakra into their opponent's body, one of the methods was the opponent looking into one's eyes or a specific object the user had, them hearing a sound that the user makes was another. It was a slightly higher level of a genjutsu user to specifically allure one's opponent into fulfilling that condition with another visual or auditory tick.
"Polymorphy Jutsu!" Mana shouted out the name of an old favorite of hers which she hadn't used for a long time. It was a bit too goofy and random to be chosen as a technique of choice but given her current state of overflowing apathy there were no more shame or limiters to hear out.
Deargli straightened out her spine and bent her arms over, her eyes squinted for a moment before starting to racing across, turning and bending. The kunoichi bent her knees and stood in a firm standing position before beginning to lightly hop on her feet while holding her arms bent over as if they were completely busted or too weak to use.
"Huh?" Meiko wondered curiously over the strange behavior of her opponent. It was a very bad choice of actions as the blacksmith quickly got socked in the teeth, albeit not too strong, by the "polymorphed" opponent.
"It's my illusion… She believes she's an animal of some sort, it's a random choice of something she had witnessed in her life." Mana explained.
"That's a weird illusion. Granted, that doesn't look like any animal I've seen, I've seen so few animals, it's so sad!" Kiyomi once again burst into tears.
"I really don't care what animal this is." Mana shrugged before allowing her eyes to wander off.
Deargli began hopping around like a kangaroo before tripping and beginning to fall all the way down. Meiko quickly followed her falling opponent to give her a few good hits. One couldn't be sure if the medical ninja could augment herself properly in her confused animal state, it didn't last too long anyways as eventually anyone would get a little used to the different point of view and soon awoken from the feeling of dreamy confusion before remembering that they were human and the illusion ending. One of few of Mana's genjutsu that ended naturally after a minute or several, depending on the opponent's mastery over their own will and the ability to remain lucid in the dreamy state.
Mana and Kiyomi followed Meiko and the falling Deargli into the crater caused by the initial Laoch's explosive pillar blast. Meiko wiped blood off her lip.
"Goddamn it, I think she boxes better in this state than she did normally…" the blacksmith noted.
"Well… Sometimes behaving like an animal changes one's behavior, their strengths and weaknesses. Like I care…" Mana sighed with a shrug.
"She's wasting chakra augmenting her punches and push kicks… So sad!" Kiyomi whined out.
"Hey, it's an illusion I came up with together with a textbook as a child. Not that it matters…" Mana replied. She was beginning to feel the bitter apathy in her chest slowly letting go. Whatever intense sensations Deargli's dark chakra nature made her go through were beginning to fade. Her thoughts were becoming clearer and clearer.
One's chakra was essentially everything the person themselves were. If that person's specific trait perfectly defined them – even one's chakra color signature could've changed completely. A bright and cheerful person would've had a bright and yellow chakra signature. A gloomy sadist would've had a dark chakra signature of murky or black colors. Since chakra was pretty much the essence of everything around, having to deal with different feeling chakra affected one's mood. Consciously or subconsciously and the sensors had it the worst of all. Just for now Mana had to feel thankful that her sensory abilities hadn't fully developed or else she'd have been completely broken by Deargli's tainted chakra containing all of her darkest thoughts and experiences.
"Want to see a magic trick?" Mana playfully asked her opponent, it may not have been a good strategy to reveal the fact she was overcoming her emotional duress but it appeared to work for Meiko. After all, this revelation appeared to have some sort of shock value for Deargli before. The magician flicked the cufflinks sideways before pressing on them slipping out a deck of cards that she shuffled and played with so fast that it was nothing else but colored blurs mixed in with Mana's stained and dirtied white gloves. The magician pressed on her shuffled deck harder shooting off a mess of cards at Deargli, as those cards floated in mid-air she made more hand seals.
"Friendly Gust Jutsu!" Mana chanted as the blasting gust of wind thrust the cards expulsed from her deck right at her opponent at high speed. Deargli raised her arms up, crooked and strangely contorted as they were to cover up her face. She emitted a strange murmur as the steel tipped orange and red cards whizzed past her leaving cuts all over before landing right behind her. Momentarily the cards exploded with the shockwave tossing Deargli forward, right into Meiko's combination of blows and the blacksmith was rushing in, almost like she was waiting for Mana's part of the combination to play out.
Sadly the teamwork of the three was nowhere near perfect, Meiko hesitated maybe for an insignificant part of the second before realizing it was her turn to rush in and that Mana's "magic trick" was just a mean to blast her opponent into the air and right at Meiko, disabling any chance for the medical ninja to defend herself or dodge the redhead's strikes. That microsecond of hesitation made a powerful blast of chakra overwhelm Meiko before she could conclude the Mana-Meiko combination and toss her away like a lifeless sack. All the way to the other side of the crater.
Laoch burst into the air, his shoulder cannon reshaped again, instead moving behind him and the chakra blasts served instead as a jet blast throwing him upwards in much greater speeds than he could muster up before. The genin weaved a pair of hand seals relatively quickly before placing his palm onto his chest revealing a lighting up sealing glyph on his armor which the armored genin turned clockwise. After a loud poof a flock of rotund falling devices separated from the young man's armor in great quantities yet speed so lacking that it became instantly clear they weren't meant to be projectiles.
"Sealing Technique: Field of Ragnarok" Laoch grumbled to himself as he carefully landed below.
Upon the technique concluding the fallen rotund devices lit up with bright yellow light and began blinking on and off.
"It's clearly a minefield technique. Be careful." Mana warned her friends.
Deargli's crimson lips twisted and turned into a shape of a sick smile before her own hands began weaving seals. Mana realized how bad this situation was – the three were stuck completely paralyzed from movement in a battlefield full of mines, which left them totally open for another emotional distress ninjutsu from Deargli's arsenal. So much displacement and stunning in the strategies of Team Sagitarii.
"Tainted Sealing Method: Great Sphere Release!" Deargli declared a different variant of her technique, instead of just releasing a shapeless mass of her tainted chakra she compressed it all into a watermelon sized sphere. The sphere was crackling with red lightning much more intensely than the other variants did before.
The blast was completely physical and very real this time. Even Mana's illusionary clone was completely overwhelmed and dissolved into flower petals, there was no such completely overwhelming effect of physical damage before. Kiyomi and Meiko got blasted aside from the shockwave as well. Upon the quite undignified landings of the two kunoichi the field mines detonated. They were not overly powerful explosions but Mana realized that it would've chipped quite properly at her teammates' augmentations. Kiyomi was not getting up, while still unseen by her opponent who only saw an illusionary clone from Mana's Flower Petal Sanctuary genjutsu, the magician felt up her friend's chakra.
She completely lacked skill in this sensory thing. Despite a certainly grisly appearance of her friend having taken damage: bloodied and torn clothes, bruised and bashed about face and exposed skin and messy hair, Kiyomi's chakra signature appeared to be burning like a faintly dimmed star still. The Yamanaka's fortitude didn't surprise Mana at all, the blonde was long since on the chuunin level experience wise and trained for several years longer than Mana or any other genin in the Exams likely has.
Much to Mana's surprise, once the magician returned to her more physical senses instead of focusing on the chakra sensory, Kiyomi began trembling before picking herself off the ground. A small puddle of blood remained where Kiyomi picked herself up and wiped her face. By that point it was a given that Team Hokage would spend those medical food pills to survive this exam, much to Mana's disappointment as on some degree she had hoped that they'd succeed at somehow paying the team she stole those from back for the longest time.
"I'll kill you! All of you!" the Yamanaka laughed out maniacally. Once again Deargli's emotional dice roll proved to be somewhat unlucky for her as Kiyomi's psychotic edginess would prove a very useful distraction for Mana. It'd also give Team Sagitarii plenty to have their hands full of. It was just unfortunate that Mana had to use Flower Petal Sanctuary again and reset the timer on the cost increase again. The cost kept on growing and growing every time the jutsu was used and it only reset after at least a good couple of days.
"You guys… You're here but are you really there for me? I just feel… So lonely…" Meiko wrapped her arms around herself as she sulked aside from Kiyomi. With a loud and frankly quite bold roar the blonde rushed at her opponents head-on. Her strangely dark emotion of cruelty must've impacted her decision making as well. Just as Kiyomi was about to deck Deargli, Clarmac dashed up from behind, having recovered from a very powerful and direct hit and ready to get back into the fight.
The Inuzuka kicked Kiyomi at the back of her knees sending her kneeling down. The future Yamanaka heiress yelled out like a rabid dog and continued to swing around madly before the combined might of the three opponents overwhelmed her with taijutsu combinations and blows. Even if the chaotic cruelty felt by the Yamanaka granted her the vitality and sheer bloodlust to try and block most of the strikes, even the blocked ones looked like they hurt. Mana wanted to scope the situation out, find a better chance to strike once Clarmac's defenses were down but…
Kiyomi was in trouble and Meiko was overcome by her own imposed loneliness which, ironically enough, prevented her from helping out a friend right in front of her. Laoch growled to warn his friends of Mana who was rushing in and weaving hand seals, the moment that her mind began concentrating on another chakra utilizing technique her illusionary invisibility ended and Mana just faded into the full view.
"Hell Skewer Jutsu!" Mana shouted out as Clarmac's body bent over strangely and crooked over. The sight and feeling of him getting skewered by dozens of swords that just materialized above his head and rained stabbing at the dirt was too much to take. The magician bought herself a distraction and some time, this had to work, or else the situation would've been too desperate – just her against a team that wanted her out cold.
"Spear Kick!" Mana shouted out as she leaped in the air and pushed her foot against Clarmac's gut before stomping him into the ground. Something soft and gurgling shifted in the young man's stomach, he had taken so much damage from Meiko's previous attack. Mana was right to target him – all the damage he had sustained and chakra he had wasted on all the failed Kraken Fangs instead of protecting himself had finally begun to really mess things up for the young Inuzuka. He couldn't have been more than a couple of good strikes away from passing out.
Pain. Bright lights began flashing all around as Mana realized she was knocked down, it was difficult to see exactly what did so. If she had to guess, Laoch's shoulder charge betrayed by his kneeling current stance must've had something to do with it. Damn it. She was so close… And still, she couldn't take on the entire Team Sagitarii all by herself.
She needed to persevere until Kiyomi and Meiko's emotional disarray ended.
Just survive… Somehow!
