„You damn, dirty snake, I'ma make your slimy fangs ache!" Inaba angrily grunted holding his fist up and tensing himself up. The only reason why he didn't lash out and strike at Mana was because her teammates were close enough and Meiko has proven herself to be fast enough to intercept him midway.

"So that's your plan…" Kiyomi thought out loud before shrugging her shoulders lazily and looking around at the wildly unstable Kumogakure shortie and his darker tanned teammate who just calmly observed Mana's further actions.

"If you want me, you should've let them beat us up. Just watch us lose to them. What gives?" Junipu-R squinted angrily at Mana, stabbing with her eyes like they possessed the ability to poison somebody.

"It's pretty simple, really. I want to change the world, make it value life as something magical, just like I do. I hate causing people pain, I hate fighting meaningless battles…" Mana began explaining.

"So you're guilt tripping Junipu-R into fighting you alone. Just because you helped her and because accepting this deal can spare our participation in the exams further…" Quill-B grinded through his teeth. It was clear as day that his opinion of Mana changed from when he first saw her.

"I'm not manipulating anything. I just wanted to give Junipu-R an option to settle this by ourselves and spare our teammates the trouble. The participation of the Iwagakure alliance would've ruined that idea. By now you guys must know that three on three battles are terribly wasteful." Mana shook her head beginning to plead Junipu, her tone softened to match her lowered position somewhat.

"I don't think you know how this ninja thing works, you need to take your X out, no fireworks!" Inaba grinded his teeth again, like a dog ready to pounce but still restrained by the leader of his pack. Judging from the eyes of Team Cirrus, as Mana observed them, that was Quill-B.

"Jeez… She once stole a bag of food pills and she still won't let that go, if she stabbed someone in the back while they're peeing, or something, we'd never hear the end of it!" Kiyomi groaned.

Both Inaba and Junipu were switching their sights from Mana to Quill-B, watching both. One deserved a portion of their attention just to have her actions surveyed, the other, meanwhile, called most of the shots in Team Cirrus. Quill instead chose to look calmly at Junipu-R and ask a simple question.

"Do you think you can do it?"

Junipu lowered her head submissively before her eyes wandered off aside. She was clearly unsure, Mana didn't show her abilities off too much so it was tough for a non-sensor kunoichi to just go on a hunch. Mana, on the other hand, saw a general skeleton of R's abilities. She could begin formulating a plan, figuring out ways of how to overcome the Kumogakure kunoichi.

"It doesn't matter if I can or cannot do it. I need to." Junipu-R firmly declared by nodding her head.

"But you provide our team support, fighting head-on isn't your forte!" Inaba looked hopelessly at his teammate.

Just looking at all the emotions in the eyes of the Kumogakure ninja made Mana feel like scum. And yet it couldn't have been helped – she needed to fight, she needed to win. It wasn't a fight she was used to, not like the others. Mana wasn't fighting for someone's life or a chance to save it, she was protecting absolutely no one. This fight was bloody and dirty and completely selfish – just a primitive need to further herself in the competition and advance to a higher rank. It made the magician feel dirty and made her want to clean herself for hours after this, not even for the reasons of personal hygiene after being stuck in the Forest of Death for so long.

Honestly, it shouldn't have felt this bad. Mana didn't like that feeling of guilt crawling up from inside her lungs and all the way up to her throat before locking it with a cold and strangling grip. She went out of her way to give R an option to leave her teammates out of this, to have her team still survive in the exams even she lost, have them remain completely unharmed in this battle.

Steinck carefully placed his unconscious friends nearby and settled down. "We've raised some noise to these parts, if an enemy comes looking we'll help keep this matter between the two of them." The giant declared after looking at Corot who also nodded in agreement.

"Fine. We'll make it a sparring match." Junipu-R nodded. "A one on one fight until one of us is knocked out and unable to battle. I don't think either of us would trust each other with a surrender clause?"

"I would've…" Mana shyly admitted before rubbing her itchy nose, allowing her dark hair to cover her blushed face.

"Wanna call the countdown, Inaba?" Junipu-R looked at her teammate curiously.

"Are you speaking seriously? Asking a rapper to count down is total idiocy" Inaba crossed his arms around his chest.

"You're not a real rapper, Inaba, no one trusts you with a microphone back home." Quill-B rubbed his temples before calmly walking a few steps back and settling down on a larger stone. An old and mossy testament of an old structure that got totaled around these parts with a part of it landing all the way there.

"I'll do it!" Meiko ecstatically jumped up, "Finally taking on one of our targets is a refreshing change of pace for us!" she chuckled before extending her hand forward.

After the redhead finished counting down from three to one and swiped her hand signaling the beginning of the sparring fight Junipu took a wild dive sideways, shooting her arm out to calm her momentum down and steady her aim. Mana hadn't yet seen this movements and aiming this unorthodox, instinctively she reached for her cufflink trying to pull out a pair of clutch bladed cards to deflect any ninja tools being thrown her way.

Nothing slipped out.

With there being no time or proper balancing to her body, Mana covered up her face with her arm feeling sharp pain in her mid and lower arm. It was just senbon… While needles this long and this sharp penetrating her flesh and hitting the bone with their tips, damaging them ever so slightly, hurt immensely, Mana wondered why would Junipu-R use such a weak manner of attack for what basically ended up a free hit. She hadn't anticipated her card reserves having run down so drastically after taking down Clarmac with her newly improvised move.

A painful blast of force sent the magician rolling forward on the ground and struggle to pick herself up. The Kumogakure kunoichi had used the opening to move behind Mana with what she thought as a strong knockout kick to the back of her head. Sadly, Junipu's taijutsu skill, precision and chakra level was nowhere near the level needed to knock someone as experienced and skilled as Mana out immediately. Not that the magician didn't momentarily regret not having been knocked out as her busted and bleeding head let droplets of blood run down her sticky dark hair.

"You're lucky not to have blocked that kick…" Junipu smiled. It was a confident smile of a girl who thought she had the control of the battle, then again, while Mana felt like this display of force and exploit of an opening gave her confidence in the fact that she could eventually take Junipu-R down, R very much was in control so far.

Mana's eyes lingered down on the bunch of senbon still sticking deep in her arm. The girl's eyes widened for a moment before she pulled them out in a hurry, Junipu-R probably meant to drive them in and through the magician's bone by having Mana block her slow and relatively well telegraphed kick with the same arm. That'd have likely disabled her arm completely for the duration of the exam. As the bloody senbon hit the wet grass, clinging against each other in a high pitch, Kiyomi's pleading voice reached Mana.

"Get yourself together! What was that?"

She must've been confused, rightly so. Mana she knew was faster, smarter, stronger, more elusive. That one hitch with the missing cards threw the magician's entire fight out of its rhythm. It couldn't have happened again, it won't.

The girl's hand dragged through the bloody and wet grass picking up her fallen hat. Junipu once again tried to intercept the magician's actions with a well-placed barrage of shuriken. After the ninja tools left the kunoichi's hands they instantly raced to weave a bunch of hand seals.

"Multi-Shuriken Jutsu!" she chanted out as the shuriken multiplied four times over and expanded into a cloud of steel which all of itself was a pretty serious threat to Mana's health and, quite possibly, her life.

A metallic sounding chain of clangs symbolled the fact that the shuriken incoming at the magician got completely deflected by Meiko's masterfully crafted wand of Audra steel which was gifted to Mana and came out from the seal in the magician's hat. The girl's heart skipped a couple of beats, she had never before deflected this many tools with this much success. Only when she realized that it wasn't too much different from redirecting strikes and counter attacking, treating the wand as an extension of her own body, that Mana realized she could do it.

Without wasting any time, Mana extended the wand while weaving hand seals with her free hand.

"Magical Shock Jutsu!" she chanted out as a beam of lightning chakra channeled through the chakra conductive Audra wand fired off at Junipu-R's general direction. Had it connected it'd have meant a painful shock for her opponent, also a temporary opening for Mana's more powerful attacks to come. After all, while she did successfully invent about a dozen techniques as a child, with this one being one of them, neither of them was of much actual use besides being flashy distractions.

The poor Kumogakure girl extended her arm forward, like a primitive self-defense instinct as the beam passed through and into her body. It was not a piercing lightning chakra projectile, merely a jolt of electricity capable only of painfully shocking the enemy. Still… When the other part of the beam exited through Junipu's other hand and blasted into the air before dissolving a pair of meters higher Mana's jaw opened up. That was no primitive covering oneself up, it was a controlled sealing technique transferring the jutsu upwards.

"It's that transportation seal she used before…" the magician realized before finally observing the small glyphs on Junipu's hands. "It was performed imperfectly though, she probably strained her chakra network with that. There were no hand seals, no name for the jutsu to help her body cope with the strain."

"Don't do that again!" Mana angrily scolded her opponent.

Junipu curiously raised her eyebrow.

"Don't treat your body like a rag like that! Don't abuse your network and spit at all rules of control. You can tear your entire network apart and it might ruin your life!" Mana pleaded with her opponent. Granted, she did so out of her own personal experience. It was she herself, after all, who abused chakra augmentation, something most genin should've had nothing to do with, to the point where it tore her system apart once.

Junipu's face changed into a warmer smile. "You're not a bad person, I can tell. You really were concerned about my team before, weren't you?"

"I'm not just picking on you. Obviously, I don't want both of us to fight needlessly beyond the point of reason. We've already been through a fight like that…"

The Kumogakure kunoichi then swiftly moved her hands into a hand seal position. Mana just prepared herself for an upcoming attack, having realized that she had little to no ninja tools to waste on simple distractions. The magician decided to instead rely on her evasive skills rather than get lured into an overly aggressive attack while trying to interrupt her opponent's hand seals.

"Transportation Seal!" Junipu-R yelled out as bright circular glyphs of much larger size and intensity extended around her hands as discs. Junipu placed one of them on the ground while throwing the other one Mana's general direction. The magician just smiled faintly.

"Magical Sparks Jutsu!" she chanted out firing a flock of her own Lightning Release chakra sparks through the secondary seal which closed down after absorbing most of them with the sparks blasting out from the one below Junipu-R. While Mana's technique wasn't overly damaging it still knocked the girl off her feet forcing her to roll backwards and prepare a kunai knife in her hand and get ready to defend from follow-up attacks which didn't come.

"The weakness of your technique is that your opponent can use it, if they know how it works…" Mana calmly stated while standing still.

"You didn't attack me just now, then you also failed to block that attack before…" Junipu-R mumbled to herself but Mana's superhuman ninja perception allowed her to pick up on bits and pieces of it. The Kumogakure kunoichi jumped at Mana with the kunai in her hand having come to the conclusion that Mana's poor hand to hand showings and reluctance to engage in close distance combat must've meant her lack of skill in it.

The magician leaned aside avoiding a simple strike and gently redirected Junipu's kick to where it threw the girl off of her balance and she stumbled. When Mana leaped in to exploit this opening by cracking at Junipu's knees from the side, effectively crippling the opponent temporarily, the Kumogakure kunoichi pushed off her body with her arms kicking at Mana's barely timed block.

Mana jumped back, she wasn't used to blocking. Blocking just a single strike by even a less physical opponent made her forearms twitch with pain before going numb. Exploiting this brief moment of numbness Junipu leaped in with swift jump kicks and palm strikes. Interestingly enough, this Kumogakure youngster had a very similar fighting style to what Mana used to use before learning her improvised newer one. One key difference was her unorthodox movements on the ground, using her arms and legs to spin around, almost like an entire dance on the floor turned to a fighting style.

Mana couldn't compete with those fast strikes, spin sweeps and rising palm strikes. Not with her numbed arms so she tried weaving away but for each one of her movements was a well-timed rolling kick or a strange headspin kick. It reminded the magician of Quill-B's style of swordsmanship. This must've been native to the region, this curious case of floor dancing.

"Mana is getting tagged, that's pretty impressive…" Meiko smiled after relaxing her aching neck and stretching out.

"Yet you seem awfully confident and relaxed, pale-skin" Quill-B noticed coldly.

"Sure, Junipu-R is clearly an unskilled and untrained taijutsu combatant. Mana hasn't really fought someone like that, she hasn't seen these wild strings and random strikes so her defensive style sort of falls short. Once Mana will see all of Junipu's moves she'll map them out and beat her easily. Anyways, which one of you likes instant spaghetti?" the redhead carelessly waved her arm.

Inaba raised his hand.

"Wanna share some, beanie guy?" Meiko winked his way.

"Are you crazy or do you just not care? Instant food is useless without boiling water. That's how it's best to be prepared, instant spaghetti ain't no simple matter." Inaba cheeked at the girl who just waved her hand.

"Just throw me a pack, scrub." She bellowed.

Mana fell on her back again and only avoided getting painfully grinded to the dirt because her opponent who couldn't even breathe properly when throwing strikes ran out of breath. The magician rolled back clutching at her aching ribs, cracked teeth and bleeding nose. Her right eye felt like just about swelling up. She couldn't believe that she still couldn't properly weigh and map out Junipu's style. She skipped so many blows and her moves were almost impossible to read. She could've sworn she faced some Kumogakure martial artists in the Sun Disc arena and none of them fought this way. It must've been a signature style of the newer generation, half dance, half fighting style.

"At this rate I may need to spit at my own advice and start augmenting myself more intensely instead of relying on my natural strength." Mana realized as the natural fear of losing her chakra control sparked in her chest again. She would've rather died than felt so powerless again, so crippled and unable to live up to her dream.

Mana's hands weaved a single hand seal as she tried catching her opponent's gaze with the tip of her wand. When Junipu's head began turning left and right in panic and she desperately tried to avoid thin air Mana knew that her illusion connected.

"Hell Skewer Jutsu!" she mumbled out to herself. It was such a simple illusion – appearance of decorative swords, similar to ones Mana used as stage props during her magic shows. She had seen that image so often, hundreds if not thousands of times that she's been able to recreate it with extra accuracy and lifelike qualities. She's been accidentally cut so many times by failing to do a trick just right, making the audience member's heart skip wondering if they've finally witnessed a trick going wrong, that she's been able to perfectly recreate the pain of those swords grazing her. Such a simple illusion was difficult to tell from reality.

Mana's hands raced through more hand seals. The swords that grazed and penetrated her opponent forcing wild screams of pain to come from her chest evaporated in thin air as the magician chose to dispel the illusion herself. She extended her wand forward again.

"Finger of Fate Jutsu!" the magician chanted out as she pointed her wand forward and a gust of wind extended onwards from the tip, aimed right at the center of Junipu's thigh. Thinking it was another illusion and not wanting to be caught in a chain of genjutsu that'd have worn her down to no end the Kumogakure ninja instinctively weaved the dispelling hand seal and tried dispelling it.

As the weak cutting blast of wind chakra pierced Junipu's thigh about as strongly and deeply as a kunai knife would've the young kunoichi must've realized that this technique was no illusion. Clutching her bleeding thigh the girl collapsed on her knee realizing that her odd taijutsu style may be immensely more difficult to rely on with this injury.