The heavy tolls of Mana's respiration silenced all the other measly sounds on the battlefield around her. Her heavy breaths came like bells and her chest was a very energetic ringer. She was decently battle worn, sustained notable damage in this scuffle and was surrounded by enemies whereas her allies were still recovering. Things could've been better than they were at that moment.

That being said, they could've also been worse. Mana had the intelligence on her enemies, she noticed a couple of weaknesses in them. Some of them were sustained and originated from this battle and some of them were innate and born from the nature of their abilities.

Deargli was very similar to Mana in some cases: she used ninjutsu and supportive healing techniques. That made her overly reliant on hand seals and the protection of her teammates at close range. Mana knew her own hand seal speed completely left Deargli's in the dust, with moderate chakra enhancements her kicking speed would knock the medical kunoichi down before she concluded her dangerous techniques.

Laoch was dangerous, beyond just dangerous. His armor was thick enough to brush off Mana's strikes. She knew a bit more than a handful of ninjutsu techniques, most of them created by Mana long ago when she was still studying ninjutsu and chakra control from textbooks. They were all just inconveniences, smoke and mirror, all look and no punch. None of them would leave a dent on him at all. That being said, his numbed arm was certainly something to exploit with high chance of success.

Clarmac was a match for Mana. If both of them were at their full potential with their bodies and minds completely rejuvenated they'd put up a good fight. That being said, his Inuzuka nin-taijutsu relied on his team's distrations to hit his opponent. If Mana managed to beat Noji way back when she was still not enhanced by the tremendous boost of chakra and skill during the quest for the Box of Ultimate Bliss, she'd take Clarmac as well. Even more, currently Clarmac was beaten and bruised to a very alluring degree and if fight broke out he'd likely be Mana's prime target.

Laoch charged again. He aimed to just bash and throw Mana around until she either passed out or gave up. Given the short time to get her mind together, provided to her during the time Team Sagitarii ganged up and regrouped, the magician was ready for him. She leaped up placing her feet firmly against the armored genin's broad shoulders before relaxing and plunging down while grabbing his weakened arm by its upper armor piece and pulling it.

Yelling in pain the armored genin shook it rapidly but Mana wrapped her legs around it and kept on yanking it and pulling it off its socket. Very uncomfortable sounds kept coming from inside, like the tender meat of a turtle being grinded inside its still intact and very thick shell.

A fresh breeze went past Mana's ears fondling her hair as a feeling of weightlessness instilled fear in her heart. Laoch lifted her body up for an attack by one of his teammates. That was her signal to get off. Using the large genin's weakened and numb arm as a very flimsy pole the magician extended her feet and kicked at the back side of Clarmac's head as he attempted to leap in and strike her down and off of his teammate's arm.

The Inuzuka boy's jacket and shirt torn off as his body hit the ground. Normally one's body would've augmented itself and withstood such damage. This slip that left a bloody puddle on the dirt informed the magician that her hunter had taken significant damage, so much so that his augmentations weren't completely reliable and were beginning to slip and skip some blows.

Deargli didn't attack, just as it could've been predicted. She instead dashed wildly to Clarmac's side. Medical ninja always looked for opportunities to do what medical ninja did best. Gathering the final ounces of breath in her lungs before she'd need a breather Mana kicked off the ground shortly after landing aiming to plant her foot into that grotesque headdress of the Team Sagitarii kunoichi.

No firm shock to her joints. Mana's kick missed its mark as the evasive medical ninja ducked at the last moment avoiding getting kicked right in the sweetest part of her cheek. It was nothing to be surprised at – medical ninja were possibly the most evasion focused field of ninja art mastery, Mana herself studied evasion from Kouta, a fairly decent medical ninja on his own feet.

The magician tossed a pair of cards at her target trying to prevent her from reaching out and healing Clarmac. The damage that the Inuzuka had sustained so far was her only shining star of hope, if he was somehow treated to any extent and the finishing line raced on ahead Mana's hopes and dreams would sink under all the way to the bottom.

Deargli simply flipped over the projectiles. Her limbs stuck to her body and under the cloak she really did look like a grisly and slimy spirit of some kind, without a doubt a distracting tactic of intimidation was a part of her attire. Mana's own dressing code would've been deemed weird even by somehow as eccentric as Deargli but even it had its own functions.

As the medical ninja's arms extended over her friend Mana hopped in right at her. Deargli may have been evasive but she needed to stay in place to heal the Inuzuka and knowing where she'd need to stay gave the magician an advantage. It would've been more efficient and much smarter to use illusions or ninjutsu but Mana didn't want to use that much chakra. She'd need every ounce she has if she got hit again or needed a clutch Flower Petal Sanctuary escape.

Right in the middle of her graceful leap the magician shoved her feet down, the noise of steel clanging against itself and those disgusting metallic screeches made her identify a nearby threat and stop herself from getting clotheslined by Laoch. The giant genin held his weaker arm bent and pressed against himself while he threw strong punches and kicks at the magician trying to keep her away from his teammates.

It would've been so easy to just bypass him, leap away and gain some distance on him… That would've been foolish however. She was lucky that Laoch decided to involve himself personally and physically and not just blast Mana away. He must've been preserving chakra as well, or maybe possibly he was running out of chakra he had sealed away. For someone reliant on sealed chakra resources to run out of it in the first fight for the target would've been catastrophic. It would've taken days to regain one's natural resources and then weeks if not months to resupply those seals.

And so Mana was stuck in a loop of dodging and redirecting while still trying to stay closer to her enemy, just close enough for him not to consider using his more destructive blasts. It kept her away from the enemy, however. The nagging feeling of her consciousness eating at her for not managing to keep Deargli away from Clarmac annoyed the magician to no end. Even if she couldn't feel Clarmac's body being healed or his chakra being somehow restored or boosted, the phantom feeling of her opponent growing stronger every passing moment persisted.

"Mystical Sealing Variant Palm" Deargli's voice echoed around the fairly wide crater that Laoch's initial offensive had created.

Enraged Mana leaped in the air and kicked with surprising devotion to her move aiming right at Laoch's elbow. She herself felt a little relieved that her opponent weaved back and retreated as the kick could've severed a broken arm all by itself. At a certain degree of damage to a broken limb it would've been impossible to augment it anymore and at that point even the measliest of kicks and punches would've severed those limbs completely. Mana would've hated ruining her opponent's life like that…

Clarmac stood back on his feet and cracked his knuckles, working out his neck and his numb limbs at the same time and warming up. Mana's eyes widened in shock, Clarmac's body looked almost halfway back to its full health. While medical ninja of higher rank were quite capable of high caliber healing techniques that'd have quickly placed an incapacitated ninja back on their feet, genin should've taken half an hour to a whole hour to heal someone completely. The entire exchange between her and Laoch couldn't have taken more than a second or so…

"What is this?" she grumbled in disbelief. Bitterness was beginning to take over her voice. At this point her hopes of solitary victory were beginning to get choked out, by now, if they were a choking victim they'd have let go and went to peaceful eternal slumber. Mana felt her hands shaking having realized that half of the entire damage sustained by her opponent was just magically shaken away like it had never happened. Quietly the girl moved them into her pockets, acting like she was preparing for an attack whereas she just didn't want to tell her opponents she was scared.

The weak tapping noises of Deargli's bleeding gut wound focused the magician's attention. It was the one element of the entire battle that made no sense – the young lady seemed fairly excited to get hurt, she didn't move away from that attack of Meiko's and took a whole giant shuriken to the gut. She didn't even spend time healing that damage at all, her bleeding was being controlled through chakra sustenance payment alone. She devoted a small burst of chakra to that area with each heartbeat to keep herself from bleeding out – she wanted that injury there. She was willing to struggle with the pain of such an injury, tolerating it while in the middle of a battle.

"I see…" Mana closed her eyes and lowered her head finally having realized something about Deargli's medical abilities. Something she had already seen in Team Phobos of Getsugakure. Deargli stored the pain and negative emotions converted into a unique mixture of bodily and spiritual chakra and the remnants of chakra used to injure her away into damage seals, similarly to how Team Phobos utilized damage seals in their fight before. Once those seals were filled they appeared to augment Deargli's medical abilities which meant that she healed more potently the more injury she herself sustained in battle.

It was a very lethal ability for a supportive ninja, medical ninja and support role ninja were the main targets in a fight. Even their own first instinct was to target Deargli because she was so hesitant to fight that her hesitance was mistaken for weakness or lack in useful techniques. This was hopeless. Damage seals were at least a B-Rank concept, genin usually couldn't use such difficult sealing techniques because sustaining injuries disturbed one's concentration all by itself. It was immensely complex to maintain full control of one's chakra in pain.

Clarmac leaned to his all fours as chakra began leaking out from his body, his facial features became more defined and primal, his fangs sharpened and elongated and his hair began growing a couple of inches on sight. His eyes widened and his irises began thinning down to a rather savage look.

"Four Legs Jutsu" he roared out before launching himself at Mana. A loud crack in her mind almost made the magician turn off. It was like a firecracker had been blown up right by her ear when in fact it was just the sound of world cracking blows planting themselves in her jaw at barely even traceable to her speed.

A powerful shock to Mana's side pushed her away, the magician's mind was beginning to fade in and out as she rolled aside like a lifeless sack before finally gathering the strength to lift her bloody face and push aside her sticky hair to see.

Roaring like a madman in her sadistic cruelty, still affected by Deargli's emotional distress ability, Kiyomi matched Clarmac claw to a kunai knife. Kiyomi always was a better hand to hand or knife to knife combatant than Mana and even if the blonde had much more severe injuries than Mana, even now, her complete berserk rage made her push past the pain and try to stab the Inuzuka's eyes out with her knife.

This was stupid. Clarmac was a mixed taijutsu - ninjutsu user, he'd have eventually gained an upper hand even on bloodthirsty Kiyomi and slashed her down. The Yamanaka would've been better off using her clan techniques but her cruel mind didn't want anything to do with tactical thinking – she was all rage and madness. That needed to end. Looking at Meiko, the girl was still wrapped with her own arms and cowering in her crippling loneliness as well.

Shouting loudly to brave herself up Mana leaped in between Clarmac's claws and Kiyomi's knife. In total shock both of the two stopped their attacks, Mana could feel the sharpness of the Inuzuka's paws scratching against her bruised and beaten body in the back and the coldness of Kiyomi's kunai by her throat.

"Move aside!" Kiyomi roared like a wild animal. "I need to kill them all!"

"Not before you kill me. I'm a criminal, remember? I stole those pills from some those genin before. What about your hatred for criminals? Your Aku-Soku-Zan?" Mana played with fire there. So much so that Clarmac backed up grasping at a pair of fresh scratches at his side where Kiyomi successfully grazed him. He had decided to use this moment to have Deargli heal him some more. That was just too troublesome of a turn to permit but Kiyomi and Meiko's minds came first.

Shaking in her hand the kunai broke as the girl's pressure to the handle was too great. The blonde collapsed on her knees before picking herself up again. There Mana heard that familiar respiration in Kiyomi's own lungs, the two stood by each other's side and now the blonde no longer looked around frantically with racing bloodshot eyes looking for a victim to kill.

"She used the instilled emotion to force her friend into an illogical action she stands against with all her essence. Essentially she shut her friend's mind down out of internal conflict between the instilled emotion and her own will before it rebooted itself. I've never seen such a weakness of my techniques before." Deargli peacefully commented while continuing to heal Clarmac's injuries even more.

"And yet this is the second gap in your jutsu that these three found. Don't use it again, soon it'll be completely ineffective against these girls and it wastes chakra you could use on healing us. Once this fight ends it'll be a much more integral ability." Laoch grunted angrily while carefully warming up his numbed and busted arm but failing to do any difficult and precise motions with it.

"I've gotta say, for a moment there I believed you'd cut my throat open…" Mana sighed with a smile.

"No… You're like my little sister, remember, I've lost a sibling already, I will not lose another." Kiyomi shook her head, still breathing heavily and her voice a bit tired over all the shouting and all the crazy obscenities she yelled out so recently. "Have any idea how to snap Meiko out?"

"Sorry…"

"Well, I wish I could tell you to sit back and let me take this over for a while but… I'll need you in this." Kiyomi looked on ahead, Deargli quickly moved away from Clarmac to free up his space for movement if he was targeted.

"Twin Rabbit Blitz!"

A silver and pink blur flashed right past Mana's eyes before a spray of crimson red flew in the air, like petals of roses scattered in the wind. Laoch stumbled forward before he realized that his impressive armor was cut into four big chunks that one by one fell off his body as a large rabbit landed in front of the three genin holding his sword by his shoulder as it was too large to hold anyhow else.

"Missed me, ye losers?" Usuzoku angrily exclaimed before turning his eyes fiery with rage at the Inuzuka. "Go pick up yer filthy mutt, ye asshole. Teach 'em somethin' else dan just runnin' away, I had ta take a breather chasin' after 'em"

"Zoku-chan…" Mana's pale lips turned into a smile before the tip of the rabbit's long sword pointed at her face, just a thumb's length away from digging into the girl's eye.

"Call me that again, ye filthy hatchlin', I dare ye!" he yelled out. Laoch grunted out loud charging after Usuzoku but with a careless swing of the blunt side of his blade the rabbit knocked the now unarmored genin away and down to the dirt. The large young man spat out a fair amount of blood and teeth as a bonus of the fall, his own chakra augmentations were beginning to skip some beats as well.

Showing the two middle fingers on each of his paw to everyone around him Usuzoku poofed into a cloud of smoke, now having fulfilled his goal of kicking an Inuzuka's ninja hound's teeth in and feeling content with the battle, or rather the chase he went through.

"This is weird. He doesn't have thumbs so the whole concept of flipping someone off doesn't really work on him. I get it when he wields his sword with his ears sometimes, that's bypassing natural thumblessness like a boss, but flipping the bird just looks hokey on him…" Meiko's lazy voice made Mana and Kiyomi rapidly turn around and hug their friend who appeared to have overcome her crisis of loneliness in the middle of a busy battlefield.

"Both of our sides are injured. We'll both need to hide and lick our wounds after this, avoid battle for a long time… We aren't even your targets. Just give Mana up, you're wounded much worse than us and one good hit would keep any of your three down for the count." Clarmac growled out.

"I can attest to that…" Deargli lifted her palm up.

"There's no need to keep this up and risk more grievous injury or even death. Mana, be reasonable and give yourself up for your team." Clarmac looked the magician right in the eyes. "All three of them are going through injury that'll minimize their chances once they'll need to fight for their targets, you're being selfish clinging to survival this hard. If you just walked out the front gate now and gave up, your friends would only need to fight two times instead of three – you'll redeem the pain you put them through right now for your own survival."

Mana lowered her head, her black sticky from the blood hair slipped all over her face and down her shoulders. She looked like a creepy vengeful spirit of some sort as her head slowly and gently moved to the left and to the right in denial.

"I'm sorry. I have a nindo to live up to and I've no safety net to back down on. I have no more team if I fail and it'll take too many years to try this again if I fail. People who take this long to rank up to chuunin aren't the ones that change the world, they aren't the heroic examples that people would follow. I'm sorry, Kiyomi, Meiko, please allow me to be selfish just this once…" the magician smiled as she lifted her head and looked at her teammates.

Vertigo took Mana's perception over, all ground began shifting from under feet and Meiko grabbed Mana's head into a headlock and began painfully rubbing the top of her head and pulling on her hair like a violent older sister.

"She grew up so fast…" Kiyomi grinned. "It seems our common sense is rubbing off on the stupid little Mana who would've ran off alone to fight a chuunin all by herself or taken on a member of the Imarizu one on one." The Yamanaka laughed it off.