The second, wheel-shaped puppet, to which Buhakim referred to as "the Solitary Awakening" began emitting odd sounds. In a way, they were rather displeasing for they reminded of the stomach growling sounds or one's own innards shifting inside one's own body in a case of bowel unrest. The central parts of each of the puppet's arm handle popped open, releasing a handful of strings, likely chakra conductive ones, like the ones used in the puppetry technique.

"Puppetry Technique: Solitary Awakening"! Buhakim muttered out, humming his words through his teeth like a prayer as the countless strands of wire were launched at Jean-D's general direction.

The skilled kunoichi fought the advancing strings off rather valiantly, her movements were swift and precise and she struck with the full knowledge that the puppetry strings could not be cut unless chakra imbuement of higher concentration was used. Eventually, it became evident that the wired offensive was simply too overwhelming and wide ranged for it to be avoided, then something incredible happened – the knives of Jean-D lit up with blueish base chakra colored flares, visible even to non-sensors. Apparently, Jean-D had the ability to imbue her knives with chakra.

With a swift X-shaped slash with both of her long knives, Jean-D cut through the puppetry wires, separating the chakra channeling coming from the Solitary Awakening and making the separated surrounding wire collapse on the floor around the girl like flabby wet noodles. Jean-D sighed easier before charging at her opponent with a strong slash at the puppeteer a crimson line opened up on Buhakim's chest with a weak spray of blood following right after, slightly tainting the spiritual and composed look of the golden haired youth.

"Puppetry Technique: Vehicle of Disciples"! Buhakim chanted out in prayer again as his fingers moved at an incredible speed. Even to Mana, someone who focused on quick sleight of hand tricks as a part of her living, Buhakim's fingers appeared blurry and difficult to follow. That must have been the skill of a well-trained puppeteer…

The grotesque molded shape of multiple faceless bodies stuck together began erratically flipping and rolling around, striking with all of its limbs at the same time. Whereas normally such a wild attack would have been somewhat easy to read, creating a profile of such an abomination of nature would have been impossible. It was just a mad combination of blank faces, arms, and legs.

Slowly, one by one, Jean-D danced around the puppet, slashing and cutting at it as she found herself too overwhelmed by the highly unorthodox fighting style of the puppet to properly focus on rushing down the puppeteer. Anyone, who graduated the Ninja Academy, would have remembered that engaging the puppets and playing the puppeteer's game was the worst mistake one could have made against the puppeteer. As satisfying as the idea of destroying one's precious tools of combat and leaving them defenseless was, it was simply an inefficient way of combat as most puppeteers had entire arsenals of puppets in reserve, also the Puppetry Jutsu cost much less to maintain than pretty much anything one would've used to destroy these puppets, even if its strain on the user slowly increased as time of use went on.

Something odd happened in the middle of the ceaseless string of strikes, Jean-D got hit out of the blue, when just a moment later she appeared to have total control. Again and again, she continued to skip strikes before letting up and getting pummeled ceaselessly by the grotesque abomination of artistic liberties. Luckily enough, the kunoichi still had enough in her lungs to manage a quick evasive action that put some space in between her and the puppeteer.

"Dimensional Blade"! Jean-D shouted out as she thrust her knife into thin air, still lighted up with base chakra flare of blue.

A knife with all of its channeled chakra flow intact pierced Buhakim's chest from behind, making the young man's body bend backward in a grisly manner as his body collapsed lifelessly like a sack of potatoes before puffing into a cloud of smoke. The flashy show revealed that the object impaled through a dimensional rift was not Buhakim himself but his Solitary Awakening puppet.

"Puppet Replacement Jutsu"! Buhakim chanted out in prayer as the Solitary Awakening dropped a couple of pieces before spinning wildly and locking the knife in place, inside the dimensional rift.

A loud and popping clang echoed throughout the hall signaling the immensely powerful reaction from the knife stuck in between dimensions snapping in half. Whereas normally a chakra channeled tool would be nearly indestructible, save by impacts of more intensely channeled tool, with the blade being stuck in between two dimensions and the Dimensional Blade jutsu only being able to keep the invisible rift open for moments at best, this limitation was overcome by the Uber Spiritual One.

"Uber Spiritual Puppetry Technique: Enlightenment Mind"! Buhakim chanted out in prayer as the cracked and breaking apart wheel of Solitary Awakening once again sent its strings at the now weakened and partly disarmed kunoichi opponent.

The kunoichi roared out loud from the depths of her chest, gripping the handle of her last remaining knife in two hands and raising it above her head as if she was wielding a two-handed sword.

"Dimensional Slash"! she shouted out as she kept up her chakra channeling, despite, as Mana could sense, it taking more and more of her chakra as time went on, similarly to how Mana's own Flower Petal Sanctuary jutsu continued to increase in strain over time.

The strings sent by the Solitary Awakening parted ways as the base chakra projectile fired off from the powerful swing of Jean-D's knife split them apart before disappearing half way, leaving the string mass split in the middle in a V-shaped formation.

The Vehicle of Disciples puppet moved in from behind Buhakim, to block an incoming projectile that had traveled through another dimensional rift to appear back in its original dimension, but behind Buhakim. By now the puppeteer was able to read his opponent's intents and moves somewhat, partly due to the ever increasing desperation of Jean's strategies since her drastically shrinking chakra pool made her attempt and solve the battle as quickly as possible.

As blood sprayed wildly from Buhakim's back, the eyes of the young man opened wide in shock. He remained turned, with his back open to the projectile attack, sending his puppet to block it and thinking that'd be enough, had he turned around he'd have witnessed the Vehicle of Disciples being split in two and shattered by the immensely powerful chakra channeling sword fighting and ninjutsu combination.

Buhakim fell flat right on his face as his simple clothes dyed blood red on his back side as well. Jean-D huffed heavily as her forehead began to sweat profusely and black circles and bags started to form around and under her eyes – typical telltale signs of chakra shortage. She must've been slowly approaching the limit she actually required for sustained life and any other jutsu may have lead to her just passing out at this point.

"That was reckless of you, sister. It was my jutsu you just revealed with your cheap imitation", Jon-D angrily crossed his arms over his chest, grumbling. "I mean what am I going to do now during my match"?

"It's not my fault your ace technique is so basic I can imitate it with a little practice", the knife fighting kunoichi pouted her lips before wiping the sweat from her forehead with her backhand. "Plus, that useless dead weight teammate of mine has made my situation very desperate here, I'm being pushed to my limits. I was not very lucky in my draws, I am afraid".

Mana's eyes almost instantly wandered to Gentib who continued to angrily grind his teeth and attempt to incinerate the young woman with his stare alone. She had to admit, she had taken Jean-D and her brother for better people than demeaning dead partners that literally gave up their lives for the Chuunin Exams. Still, in a way, the magician got Jean-D's point. Both Buhakim and Kres-T were amazing genin in their own right, some of the favorites to advance to the final exam. Jean-D, while a powerful competitor in her own right, was certainly unlucky in that regard…

"Examinee Buhakim is still able to fight, please finish the match", the overseer ruled after checking Buhakim's vitals. The Uber Spiritual one rose on his feet, failing to even reach the deep cut in his back that had taken him down unexpectedly and undoubtedly cost him a whole lot of chakra in chakra augmentation efforts to not get cut in two himself.

"Oh, come on"! Jean-D grumbled, "What in the Hell can you still do? One of your puppets is sliced in two, the other one is falling apart as we speak".

"There is one thing…" Buhakim shook his head as he also appeared to have been in a lot of pain from his injuries. "The most Uber Spiritual manifestation of my puppets."

"I thought the whole point of your Uber Spirituality thing was that it's a sham"? Jean-D wondered, feeling quite glad in an opportunity to catch her breath and run her mouth for a short while.

"That's right. However, just like with all of my Uber Spirituality rulings, this one has a faux-spiritual explanation. My ultimate puppet – Bodhisattva is a combination of Vehicle of Disciples and Solitary Awakening, awakened further to the next and final level through an Enlightened Mind", Buhakim explained, as he did, he was giving more and more time to his opponent to gather herself together.

"The names of your puppetry arts…" Jean-D noticed.

"That's right. A spiritual person would say that I merely believe that before I use the Bodhisattva, I intend to play out all of my puppetry arts. Like a spiritual ritual of a sinner's prayer. Truth be told, I just need my puppets in pieces before they can be molded together", Buhakim smiled innocently before lifting his right hand up, with the puppetry strings still attached, yet lacking their blue base chakra glow.

"Why is he giving her time to recover"? Mana began getting irked, deep inside she began rooting for Buhakim as she didn't want someone as disrespectful to human life as Jean-D getting a shot at becoming a chuunin.

"Because he needs it himself, it's a compromise, haven't you faced puppet users before"? Kiyomi explained.

"I mean… I may have, I can't remember any off the top of my head though. I only know the basics about the Puppetry Technique from the Academy", Mana admitted a bit shyly.

"They've both used techniques that begin draining chakra at increasing rates with time. At some time, these techniques need to be halted so that the chakra flow can repair itself and the technique's strain returns to normal. They both need some time to get themselves together and use their respective techniques with the much more economic starting chakra strain and not the procedurally increasing one". Kiyomi must have felt really proud of herself, having found one area where she was more experienced than Mana in and where she could actually sound like a smartass and not be smartass'ed at.

"I see", Mana scratched her chin, trying to memorize as much about this flaw of the Puppetry Technique as she could. It was a much more practical thing to know compared to the common knowledge from the Academy she was equipped with.

"Hanasaku-sensei and my last team spent some time in Sunagakure on a mission once, we fought several puppeteers there. That's where this experience comes from", Kiyomi rubbed her nose proudly.

Buhakim's strings lit up with chakra flares again as his Puppetry Technique initiated again. Giving life to the crushed and plenty damaged puppets he controlled and making the bits and pieces raise in the air and reconfigure. Instead of the puppets repairing themselves, they were becoming something else altogether with both puppets shattering into the pieces they started as and reconfiguring again with the parts of the destroyed puppet merging with the verily damaged one.

"Ninja Style: Bodhisattva", Buhakim prayed out as the puppets combined into a new shape, one of a large faceless humanoid, towering so large that he didn't even fit into the arena and had to bend its upper body forwards as additional parts began flowing from the scrolls that were used to unseal Vehicle of Disciples and Solitary Awakening before. The newly built puppet had multiple faceless heads stacked on top of one another, each smaller than the other, unlike the previously more abstract shapes, this one had precisely six arms and two crossed over legs as the only way it could properly fit into the hall was if it sat in a meditative position.

Jean-D, overwhelmed by the most powerful and the final puppet in her opponent's arsenal, reactivated her own chakra channeling through her one remaining knife. Mana could sense that she didn't have that much chakra left and the only way she could've tricked her opponent like she did before was if her Dimensional Slash derivative jutsu could cut through this odd, massive puppet.

"Dimensional Slash"! Jean-D grunted out, risking her remaining chakra on a technique she merely imitated from sight, wielding her last remaining knife in two hands and swinging upwards, aiming the off-shooting chakra crescent-shaped projectile at one of the faceless heads of the puppet.

"She's aiming at the control bar"! Kiyomi shouted out, realizing this odd trajectory of the strike.

Buhakim moved his hands around, manipulating the strings in his hands all of whom lead up to an area of the largest faceless heads on Bodhisattva's body.

"Puppetry Technique: Six Perfections"! Buhakim prayed out before shifting his hands around again. The massive six arms of his puppet began slowly cranking and moving, throwing splinters and wood chips with each movement as the puppet must not have been perfectly polished and used that often.

The hands, each of which had a different hieroglyph symbol on the palm, each of which had a different virtue listed on it: generosity, morality, patience, vigor, contemplation, insight, moved to work, mainly, to intercept the crescent-shaped chakra slash projectile.

Right before the slashing projectile would have split the massive structure comprised of faceless heads of decreasing sizes, it simply faded away, only to burst from the underground and aim straight at Buhakim's upper body. Jean-D's last resort followed the typical Academy teachings – attack the puppeteer, not the puppet, since the puppeteers were frail and defenseless when they were occupied with controlling their puppets.

A powerful explosion echoed throughout the hall, contained within the barrier placed around the arena, yet the raging shockwaves, dust and rubble made seeing anything but the edges of Bodhisattva's massive body impossible.

"So she wasn't going for the control bar, she went for the puppeteer, pretty predictable", Kiyomi sighed, "I guess if she placed that many dormant seals around during her clash with Kres-T, she can't be blamed for wanting to utilize all of them…"

"What's this control bar you're talking about"? Mana wondered.

"You see, some puppets are too complex to be controlled by the puppeteer's hands alone. The strings would be too long and numerous and they would tangle too much, the puppet may be too massive. That's why more skilled puppeteers place a control bar inside their puppets with strings inside of it, they don't control the puppet itself, they merely control the control bar that controls the puppet remotely. It usually only takes one conductive string to fully control a control bar so more complex puppets may have entire control bars for each of their limbs alone", Kiyomi grinned, once again feeling proud of her experience fighting puppeteers.

"So Bodhisattva's control bar is in its head"? Mana asked without hoping to get a clear answer just yet. "I wonder what lead Jean-D to that conclusion".

Once the smoke and rubble cleared out, Bodhisattva sat completely unharmed with Buhakim squeezed tightly in between its two hands, whereas the other four were resting where the arena once stood. Jean-D was kneeling on the now destroyed area of the arena, sneering at the massive puppet and hyperventilating from the exhaustion as Buhakim peeked through the spaces between Bodhisattva's fingers at his opponent.

"Contestant Jean-D – ring out. Your team is eliminated", the overseer ruled as Bodhisattva poofed into a rain of parts. Before they could scatter senselessly around the hall and possibly annoy or injure someone, the Uber Spiritual One bit his thumb, drawing blood from it and dragged the blood across both of his scrolls initiating a vacuuming wave that drew all of the parts back into his scrolls.

"I bet Buhakim didn't count on having to use Bodhisattva", Kiyomi grinned, "Now that we've seen him, we can begin planning on taking that thing out".

"My father's a really skilled engineer. Maybe if I gave him the sketch of the thing he'd give me possible optimal locations for a control bar to be located. If I assume correctly, if you take that thing out – the whole puppet stops working, right"? Mana wondered to which the Yamanaka heiress just nodded in agreement.

"Alright, let's announce the next match before going into a break, this one will take full fifteen minutes, the whole arena will have to be rebuilt from scratch and we'll consider adding some improvements to its integrity", the overseer sighed before raising his hand, pointing at the screen. Even if he did appear a bit frustrated, no one looked more frustrated than Dorimi – the jounin in charge of rebuilding and making the arena out of scratch.

A whole mess of names shifted through the screen before it settled onto two teams, one of the names looked eerily familiar to Mana before her mind completely comprehended all four names announced to be competing next:

"Roh-D (Team Stratus/Kumogakure) & Nakotsumi Mana (Team Hokage/Konohagakure) VS Jon-D (Team Nimbus/Kumogakure) & Oto-B (Team Alto/Kumogakure)"

"You're next, huh"? Kiyomi softly stated the obvious. "Your opponents look… Strong, don't you think"?

Saying so was an understatement. Jon-D, without a doubt, would have had everything to prove after both of his teammates were already eliminated. Team Alto was described as monsters on par with Team Phobos by a source of intelligence in the Forest of Death as well. Both Team Nimbus and Team Alto were amongst the more fearsome teams that have dominated and trounced their way through the Forest of Death whereas Team Hokage somehow stumbled their way through with Mana still feeling as if she had somehow cheated by being allowed to continue in that one instance of her getting encased in crystal.

What laid ahead may have been the scariest and the most difficult trial yet in Mana's ninja career and her entire life. Even worse yet, she'll have to walk with that feeling of butterflies in her stomach and neck breaking long and cold fingers of fear creeping up for fifteen more minutes before the test even starts…