Mana's breathing continuously slowed down to a crawl before stopping completely. After her vision began returning from the complete eye-scratching dark red agony into bright blurs she saw that the two ninja that were looking to hunt her down had passed her current position and were now walking further, filtering through their surroundings step by step.

If only Mana could fight back, resist in any way. At this point her ninja tool supply was nearly emptied, her chakra resources strained to such an extent that she lucked out to not pass out after saving her own life. That last saving grace left the magician in a state of exhaustion that left her completely incapable of moving a muscle. Just the little involuntary twitches of her aching muscles or her bleeding abdomen or her chest when it began frantically lifting up and sucking in air.

There was this strange reaction to exhaustion when one's chakra was approaching the edge of complete depletion that one's lungs began working overtime. The body began taking in air as if breathing in so much air that it bloated out one's chest would somehow help replenish one's chakra reserves. Mana tried moving her head in a way that'd have allowed her to see Kiyomi but she couldn't. Her neck simply wouldn't bend backwards that much.


Meanwhile, the blonde's vision was similarly beginning to return. That being said, with her body being paralyzed and unable to protect or rub her eyes from the immense pain that the flash of light ninjutsu technique before caused made the girl's eyes teary and slightly swollen. It looked like she had been crying for hours on end. As the vision finally returned, in limited blurry shapes and forms, Kiyomi finally saw the mysterious assailant that attacked her and Mana for seemingly no reason at all.

It was a young Nara clan member of average height and frail build. That much was evident from his dark hair tied into the spiky ponytail mostly seen on Nara clan members. He also wore silver earrings with the kanji symbol for "deer" on it, something that, as a Yamanaka, Kiyomi also had a general read about. He worked with the members of Akimichi and Yamanaka clans, these three clans had a very close relationship and whenever the members of their clans were placed in a single team they always symbolled that momentous bond spanning generations with the silver earrings with kanji symbols of "boar" for the Yamanaka member, "deer" for the Nara member and "butterfly" for the Akimichi member.

"That's rich, you bastard!" Kiyomi growled angrily showing off her teeth like a wild animal. At that moment she was truly ready to claw the frail Nara's eyes out with her bare hands. "Attacking a Yamanaka member with the fucking Ino-Shika-Cho earrings, that takes fucking nerve!"

The Nara didn't reply but from what little Kiyomi could tell, with her still barely functioning eyesight, his face did undergo a painful and worried reaction – the clan traditions still meant something to him, evidently. As seconds passed, the Nara refused to honor Kiyomi with a reply or even a version of a pathetic excuse as to why he attacked a Yamanaka member. As more and more of Kiyomi's vision started to return, the return being accelerated by Kiyomi's mostly completely peaked chakra resources, she could identify more and more details about the bright blue jumpsuit wearing oddball of the Nara clan.

One of the more important details of the Nara's attire was the Hoshigakure headband tied directly onto his forehead, like most ninja on the field usually wore them. This traditional approach to the ninja attire pissed Kiyomi off even more. This guy looked like a pretty mindful and submissive to the clan rules individual and yet this collection of details on him when paired with his behavior kept on rubbing off on Kiyomi in all the wrong ways.

"Hoshigakure?" Kiyomi grunted out, "I wasn't even aware Nara had members in that village. You sure as hell won't anymore after this shit. I'm Yamanaka Kiyomi – member of the Konoha's elite Yamanaka branch, future heiress of the Yamanaka clan. I don't care what pity grievances you have with my team, they end here and now, let us go!" she commanded the Nara who appeared to be somewhat troubled by the revelation.

"Faeino, we've got a big problem!" he yelled out looking over Kiyomi's shoulder as if trying to pick up sight of his teammates. Then his eyes widened even more and his entire body froze. Kiyomi could tell that the boy saw something really interesting as her own body mirrored his actions perfectly while she was bound by the Shadow Possession Jutsu.

"Mana…" she realized what the Nara must've seen.

"Look, I don't care what your stupid names are, your entire village's Nara population will be murdered if something happens to me here. The Nara, the Akimichi, the Yamanaka will all rather choose to cut off their black sheep branches in their entirety than risk their long lasting tradition of cooperation. Hoshigakure will never see a member of those clans working for them ever again." Kiyomi spilled words out in a hurry, trying to overload the mind of the worried Nara with words so that he couldn't alert his teammates to the exact location of Mana. By now the Yamanaka believed her friend was in plain sight, Kiyomi's worried heart just worried that her friend wouldn't be knocked out.

"Faeino, Saol, BIG problem!" the Nara shouted out grabbing his hair with his hands before pulling on them so hard that he actually let his shoulder long dark hair loose, tearing a fair chunk of hair out in the process. Kiyomi's body mirrored those motions perfectly, grabbing her own hair and sifting through them with her fingers.

He must not have known that Kiyomi was a part of Team Hokage when he took up whatever this was. Kiyomi's mind raced trying to put together what exactly could've been their problem with Team Hokage. Technically Mana helped out Team Cephei of Hoshigakure by weakening the team she stole pills from, allowing them to get eliminated. Then again, the three of the Team Hokage did eliminate Team Sagitarii – the team of Clarmac Inuzuka who targeted Mana, could this have been about that?

"Shit… Sorry, I'll need to take you out and hide your body. I won't kill you, just eliminate you so that the staff can remove you from the exam." The worried Nara explained with his voice slowly heightening in pitch and his forehead beginning to sweat more and more. "Shadow-Neck Binding Jutsu!" he shouted out weaving his hand seals to command the shadow that binds Kiyomi to reach out and suffocate her until she passed out.

For a moment the two ninja stood in place and stared at each other, then Kiyomi's eyes began to gleefully glow to match her triumphant smile as the Nara realized that his body was completely paralyzed and unable to move whereas the Yamanaka was completely free of his restraints. Even his Shadow-Neck Binding technique was interrupted before the second hand seal could have been formed.

"Chakra Hair Trap Jutsu!" Kiyomi declared as the hair traces on the ground lit up with strands of blue glowing base chakra color reaching out into a long channel from Kiyomi all the way to the paralyzed Nara.

"W-When?" the frail youth exclaimed. "When did you tore strands of your hair out?"

"Back when you did. My actions mirror yours, remember?" Kiyomi smiled. "That's why the Konoha branch of Ino-Shika-Cho is the elite one and the Hoshigakure one is just a bunch of exiles and runaways. Mind Body Switch!" she chanted as her mind exited her own body with a loud howl and entered that of the Nara, completely taking it over. Almost immediately Kiyomi, in the Nara's body, rushed in to grab her own limp body and place it in a safer angle and position, preventing it from tumbling down.


"There's nothing here, not even any blood!" the Akimichi complained as at that point the two felt like they've wandered off too far for further search to make sense.

"Shit!" the girl who was referred to as Faeino cursed, "Could you shut your stupid mouth for one moment! I thought I hated you when you're stuffing your stupid face but it's worse when you talk!" she waved her hands frantically jumping right at his face.

"I'm not wrong though…" he let that last noise drag on for a while.

"No… You're right…" Faeino slapped her forehead. "I can't believe a blind, wounded and tired girl escaped us." She began furiously rubbing her face in annoyance.

"Yeah, but if we eliminate both of her teammates – that's still fine. We'll still get the bounty…" the Akimichi tried to calm his teammate down by softly tapping her back.

"No, Saol, no we won't, because how will we do that when there's only two of them here, Saol?! How will we do that, Saol!? When there's only two of them here, Saol!?" the girl began losing it and pulling the skin and muscle, pinching and scratching her teammate all over his body to which he appeared to be almost indifferent due to his large and strong build, he just slowly contemplated what was said as it appeared the young Akimichi was slightly slow to understand things.

Just when it appeared that the Akimichi was ready to speak he began consulting his hands in the complicated calculation of how many Team Hokage members he had just attacked.

"I can't believe how stupid you are, Saol! Can't believe it, how stupid you actually are, that's what I can't believe, Saol! If there's only one thing I can't believe, it'd be how stupid you are, Saol!" Faeino yelled out as she smacked her foot right into the left temple of her teammate. The tall and gentle fatso just kept on counting things with his hands continuously bending and straightening out fingers.

"You're doing it all wrong. This is how it's done!" an angered voice came from the side before a sound of a chakra flare emanating from the blacksmith's boots, followed Meiko's foot digging deep into Saol's cheek followed. The redhead's foot disappeared almost halfway into her opponent's cheek before the laws of physics demanded to be listened to and the Akimichi's body got sent crashing, rolling and tumbling to the other side of the woods.

Meiko had arrived to the battlefield to rejoin the Team Hokage!


With a pair of strong leaps Kiyomi closed the distance between Mana's lifeless looking body and where she took over the Nara's body. It seemed odd to the Yamanaka that the two enemies missed the magician just laying out in the open like that and barely even moving, it appeared that she was completely drained of chakra and wouldn't have been able to protect herself from pretty much any kind of assault.

Mana's eyes widened as she saw the enemy land close to her. Her mind raced through a whole bunch of possible scenarios as to what could've happened to Kiyomi. Her only exposure to the Nara tactics was her own past teammate – Sugemi. The one member who went out of his way to spit in the face to the usual way that the Nara fought and devolved most of his battles into fistfights so she had few things to work with trying to understand this guy's abilities.

"Relax, it's me." The Nara said as he kneeled down to Mana and picked her up. The young man appeared to be troubled while doing it, the body she changed into must've been less than physically fit.

"What's the plan?" Mana asked, for the first time in a while she had no ideas of her own and felt completely powerless. She could barely even move at that point.

"I can't let him go and return to my body, if I do he'll come after us. I could try to move this body as far away as I can but if I try to the others might come back here and finish you off as well as my powerless real body." Kiyomi began thinking out loud as she moved Mana's immobile body into a more hidden and safer location. "It's good that I know of the Nara techniques and how they're performed. I may use the element of confusion and surprise to catch those two losers un…"

A loud rumbling noise followed by the thundering sound of trees falling and clouds of dust and tree chips whizzing by interrupted the blonde's train of thought.

"I think someone's fighting them." Mana wheezed out through pain.

"Shit. I need to see what's going on there." Kiyomi cursed before running off.


Meiko's quick combination of strikes overwhelmed the Yamanaka's defenses. All semblances of oxygen instantly left the girl's body after being hit as well as greatly shaking up her chakra network as it struggled to keep her body intact. The blonde didn't look like someone keeping up with her physical training or placing great importance on her endurance training which forced her to use the risky tactic of chakra augmentation to withstand Meiko's ground shaking blows. Seeing the advantage she had on her hands and a successful offensive pressure at play, Meiko pressed on harder, finishing her lightning quick combination with a spinning back elbow strike that even while blocked sent the opponent flying back.

The flares on Meiko's boots lit up with chakra flares as the blacksmith launched herself in a mad chasing dash after her airborne opponent. The blacksmith knew that in a battle against an opponent like this, someone frail, someone likely to possess weird abilities, similar to the kind Mana and Kiyomi had in their arsenal, she needed to not hold back. Press on, keep punching, just keep punching. A single breath caught, a single moment of hesitation or a microsecond for her opponent to recover and the redhead could've found herself caught in a fearsome ninjutsu technique she had no capability of escaping from.

Meiko's rampaging fists tried their best to tear through the Yamanaka's abdomen and punch a hole in her opponent. Try as hard as the blacksmith did, the blonde's augmentations proved mighty and she just got flung higher and higher up forcing the blacksmith to try and smash her back down before reaching the highest levels of the Forest of Death, even though the possibility to try and amp her fists up to the limit and punching her opponent into the atmosphere did tempt the redhead.

Faeino covered up the top of her head to avoid having her skull smashed by Meiko's ruthless finishing blow. Something of that intensity and limitless physical might would've undoubtedly cracked the whole round earthly orb into pieces and the Yamanaka didn't believe her head to be able to withstand something of that might in a healthy state. Like a piercing arrow from the heavens the Yamanaka plummeted down, Meiko pointed her feet upwards before firing off another pulse of chakra from the seals placed on her boots to jet after her plummeting opponent for another finisher.

Just as the Yamanaka's body appeared to be in sight, just as Meiko's eyes locked onto the injured and defenseless target and just as her strongest punch was ready to knock the enemy out her punch met something soft and something large. As Meiko's own perception caught up to the present she found her fist being caught and stopped in place by the Akimichi who had recovered and rejoined the battle.

With a busted up head and lower lip, missing a few teeth, battered and bruised the Yamanaka girl of Hoshigakure picked herself up and began yelling at her teammate.

"You idiot! Could you not have joined in faster? She's been beating on me for a damned while, you idiot, how about joining in on it faster? To maybe stop having her kick me around like a ragdoll, do you know for how long she's been kicking me around? Pretty damned long. It'd have been a lot less long if you joined in sooner…" Faeino kept on shouting at her large teammate who tried smashing Meiko to the ground after swinging her around by her entrapped fist, only for the blacksmith's hand to stop her fall and her two feet push her opponent further away and free her tightly squeezed in her opponent's enlarged hand fist.

"You're an Akimichi? I've seen a guy like you before…" Meiko noted before looking at the Yamanaka girl, "Your teammate talks weird and repeats things a lot."

"Faeino speaks that way when she's really angry." The Akimichi smiled before his hand returned to normal size, normal relatively to his clan.

"Shadow Possession Jutsu!" a loud yell alerted the entire battlefield. Seeing how it was familiar voice coming from a friendly face the enemy team didn't bother to avoid the technique that followed. Meiko, on the other hand, was too surprised and confused by the appearance of another opponent to properly avoid the technique. Luckily for her the shadows didn't tie her down but instead her opponents – both of the Nara's own teammates.

"What the hell, Rarifa! You stupid asshole, you're supposed to restrain her, not us, that's how your technique works – it paralyzes the enemy, it's not a support technique, you idiot! You're supposed to target the enemy and then the shadow ties them down by connecting to their shadow! Does all this dark gloom mess up your shadows' aim that much? That's not how your technique works, Rarifa!" Faeino kept on freaking out.

"What are you doing, you cuddly goof!" the Nara scolded Meiko who looked completely oblivious to anything that's happening. "Stop fighting those guys, we don't need them, just run!"

"Wait… Why are you giving me orders?" Meiko scratched her blushed cheek as something inside compelled her to obey but her rational mind was still completely confused.

"Oh… I get it! So the Yamanaka-like looking girl in their team is actually a Yamanaka and is now Rarifa and her real body is unconscious somewhere because her mind is in Rarifa's body!" the Akimichi vibrantly declared before giggling goofily.

"Oh, wow, really? You caught on? How cute… You're so damn smart…" Faeino squinted her eyes in annoyance as if her sarcasm actually physically hurt her. Her facial muscles were the only part of her body that could move properly.

"Look, just head the direction I just came from, grab my body as well as that of Mana's, she's hidden in a bush near a pool of blood, right below my own body. Then head as far away as possible. I'll leave this mind when it becomes too difficult to hold them here and fight off the Nara trying to regain control of his own mind." Kiyomi, in Rarifa's body, explained to Meiko who just nodded and dashed off as fast as she could to pick up the bodies of her teammates.