The more time Mana spent figuring out her options, the less she liked the situation she was in. It felt almost like Stea had planned on being in this highly disadvantageous position the whole time, almost like she preferred it. With each consecutive illusion Mana would use, the damage inflicted upon the mental health of her opponent would keep on corroding until… One of few worse scenarios would occur.
"Polymorphy Jutsu!" Mana chanted out, requiring to utter the name of her illusion yet having mastered the illusion to the point where a wave of her palm was enough to initiate the illusion and no hand seals were required.
Stea's body became locked down, momentarily the veins on her forehead began shooting out as if the mother of all migraines had locked her up before the rustling silver locks hid the hideous signs of tremendous mental strain inflicted to her psyche. The girl fell on all fours, shaking and rustling like a little possum. Mana raised her arms up, attempting to intimidate the little "critter" that Stea saw herself transformed into but instead of scurrying outside the battlefield, the kunoichi fell on her back and rolled her hands and feet up in front of her.
"A possum, huh?" Mana mumbled to herself, smacking her forehead since the trick she intended to use did not work, given Stea's illusionary transformation. A rat would have scurried away, a rabbit would have hopped off without looking back, away meaning outside the battlefield. A possum would have played dead until at least parts of Stea's psyche would return.
This was indeed a problem, given the damage already inflicted upon Stea's mind up to now, Mana had a limited handful of illusions she could use before she drove her opponent mad completely or made her go comatose. She would be of no help to her villagers in that state, nor would she get promoted and the Getsugakure villagers were the entire reason Mana even fought this battle.
And yet, seeing Stea play possum before bits and pieces of her human mind returned and her weak genjutsu began timing out, bit by bit, Mana noticed something interesting. A lot of what exact animal one saw themselves transformed into when under the effects of Polymorphy Jutsu depended on the animal on their mind. Their behavior also was influenced by what the victim knew of the animal in question.
The fact that Stea transformed into a possum and played dead when threatened could have been a coincidence, but it also could have meant that the idiom may have run its course in the mind of the Getsugakure kunoichi. In that case, she was well aware of what was happening with her body and purposefully heading the battle that direction.
With a wave of her wand, Mana canceled the illusion herself. There was no use continuing it, given that the magician could not have exploited the opening she was given without storing damage in Stea's seals. She was locked on a crash course – each illusion she weaved continued to damage her opponent's mind and head her towards potential madness or total collapse. Soon physical battle, something that meant certain defeat, would have been all Mana had to do.
"You're doing this on purpose, aren't you?" Mana asked with bitterness and desperation. "That headache, the fever, the symptoms of dawning madness don't matter to you then?"
Stea laughed out, through pain, through tremendously disadvantageous to her battle, she laughed still.
"I know who you are, Nakotsumi Mana. I know my enemy, I know that you have the chakra and mastery over those illusions to wave them around the whole day but you won't, once things will get dangerous – you'll lock yourself down and fight the battle on my terms. It will be a losing battle, make no mistake." Stea grunted as she returned to her feet. "You could have killed me while I was under your illusions but you didn't, because that's who you are. There are no risks involved for me fighting this way because I know you."
Firestorms began raging inside Mana's gut, firestorms of anger, worry and betrayal. Her opponent did not care about putting up a good battle for both kunoichi, Stea could not have cared less if Mana looked good in front of the council and she had the options to fight such a battle. Instead, Stea took the safest, most ninja path out – play dirty all the way to the end and gamble with her nindo.
"Does it make you mad?" Stea calmly asked Mana. Why would she care? Previously Mana made Stea mad because angry opponents were easy to read. Perhaps Stea purposefully played Mana attempting to infuriate her?
"You're playing dice with your nindo, what if I make a mistake, what if your mind is weaker than I give it credit for and you slip into madness or coma? You won't be able to help all those people then!" Mana responded, as much as she tried, she could not hide her feelings at all. She blazed in anger and desperation. For the first time in a while, she had no idea how she should fight. She was completely confused.
Stea was not just a powerful kunoichi. She was madly intelligent too. She completely crushed Mana's mind with that approach, broke any strategies that Mana prepared for the battle and to the magician this was a whole new experience. She was used to having a plan for everything, yes, occasionally they went wrong, often those plans ended before the battle did but at that point, she was always better off ahead. Now, it seemed like Stea broke Mana from the first few steps of the battle.
"Isn't that exactly what you are doing every time you gamble with your life in the field?" Stea replied with a crushing blow. "How exactly do you plan on changing the world around you if you keep on standing on a narrower ledge every passing day? Don't you now see how mindless your "all or nothing", "limit breaking" approach is?"
Mana smiled. Her eyes were closed, her raven dark hair streamed over her face and thrown about by the cold winter breeze of an approaching evening. This was not the kind of battle this audience was used to seeing. They have seen plenty of those battles already. This one was as much about breaking your opponent mentally as it was about actually winning because pushing your opponent into fighting the battle on one's own terms literally meant one's victory.
"It makes you powerful, doesn't it?" The magician finally explained the stream of thoughts that served as the source of her smile. "This gambling approach, putting everything on the line. You have adopted it and you are winning. Bit by bit, you're forcing me into fighting the battle that means my own defeat. But I have changed you, did I not? Now, when you become a chuunin, you will be the kind of ninja I inspired you to be, the ninja that forced me to fight you on your terms, the better ninja."
Stea could not reply with anything but silence. This was possibly the first time that the magician found out Stea's true state of mind and began pushing back her impositions. Mana's training was more than just physical. Suffering heat, pain and lack of oxygen as deep underground as deep underground went, the magician had plenty of time to think her reasons and inspirations through and temper her resolve.
"Plus, I wouldn't go as far as to say that you know me… You take me for some naïve, good, little girl. The only reservations I have concern killing, anything else is fair game…" Mana bluffed, waving her wand again and setting off the only thing in her arsenal that even remotely pissed her opponent off and actually got deep to her heart.
Stea's eyes darted around as whatever horrors of her past that terrified her before, brought to life by the magician's illusions, resumed. Her hands moved backward as if they were being bent that way and broken. The gaze of the petrified girl raced all around her, like she was literally drowning in her own worst nightmares. Mana could only imagine the ghastly sights of starving people, on the verge of death, wrapping their long and fragile fingers all over Stea's body. The nightmares must have been properly asphyxiating as well, seeing how not much more than lowly gasps for air escaped the girl's throat.
This was no act before, the girl was properly terrified of facing these horrors and it only was about to get worse, given her creeping about madness, fatigue, migraines, and fever in mind.
"Valor…" the girl gasped as if she was begging almost. "Valor…" it came out again.
Mana placed her hand on her mouth, she felt like the emotional nausea was about to turn to very much real spasms of the stomach variety as she ceased the illusion. She should have let it go on, by all means, she should have. But… Seeing her opponent literally begging for the determination required to persevere the illusions just broke the magician. She was not nearly as ruthless as she thought she was.
Mana took a defensive fighting stance, one comprised of many fighting styles she had learned in the Sun Disc arena. A very crude and default stance that would have allowed to defend against very basic attacks of any style but masterful of none. Still, it would have done the deed of helping the magician draw a fighting style profile of her opponent and, eventually, she would be untouchable.
Not that it mattered… Mana caved in to her own morals, she was preparing to fight Stea the way she always fought, the way she always dominated and defeated her opponents.
"You're quite bad at reading people", Stea rushed at Mana, giving the magician a long and stiff kick but only cutting through the air with her elegant and graceful movements as Mana moved about with quick hops that allowed her to avoid her opponent's kicks with the minimal breaking of her stance.
"You mean you were bluffing!?" Mana shouted out in shock as her mind just blanked out, her leg moved by itself, delivering a strong kick into Stea's abdomen and sending her opponent sliding and tumbling back before she fell on her knees.
"Did you really think that the sights of people dying of starvation, breaking my arms and legs, strangling me and blaming me for their deaths have any effect on me anymore? It's a foolish thought, given how those horrors defined the better part of my life and the woman I am now, don't you think?" Stea grunted as she wiped the little trickle of blood that spouted out from her gut after Mana's kick.
The young woman was quite content with herself, she finally received payment to feed her damage seals. The starvation would finally cease, the figurative one quite literally, the literal one being a work in progress…
"I know it did affect you", Mana confidently raised her desperate face and faced Stea's glare with that same flare of strength and noble defiance. "My genjutsu does not show people things that are meaningless to them. People do not beg for valor when faced with useless nightmares".
"Is that who you think Valor was?" Stea mumbled in confusion, keeping her words mostly to herself and Mana, as they were a bit too quiet for the limestone to channel them properly for the audience to hear.
"Who?" Mana wondered to herself, raising a doubtful eyebrow.
The Getsugakure genin stood calmly, channeling her chakra, most likely. Mana could almost feel the pressure oozing from her, just how much did that simple slipped out kick store in those seals of her? The magician closed her eyes, her teeth ground against each other. She needed to know, she needed to feel Stea's chakra fluctuations in order to properly fight her but… If only she could filter, restrain her chakra sensory somewhat.
"I'll enroll into Konoha High to become an ANBU, like my father", Kouta's voice ringed in Mana's ears. That fool, he is no killer, he's a sweet and kind person. He will need to completely crush everything human about him if he is to become an ANBU, he will have to become everything he used to despise about his father's heritage to succeed… If only Mana could have made him see that.
Mana kept on suppressing her chakra sensory, without her eyes, without her sensory, there was nothing but complete darkness all around. A vague, mirage-like shape resonated through Mana's mind before a beam of darkness pierced its chest, pulling it deep into the darkness' grasp. Shimo… There was nothing Mana could have done but… Maybe if she did anything, what ended up happening would have been different?
Mana's chakra reached out, her sensory enveloped like a scroll, releasing its contents upon the world in a wide, uncontrollable flood. The magician tried to tunnel it, restrain it like Gasco was able to do, focus it into one point only, ignoring the massive signatures that made her so anxious.
A frightening surge of intense fear sunk its fangs into Mana's chest making the magician's eyes white out. Shocked by the sudden change in the state of her opponent, Stea took a pair of careful steps back, wondering if this was another technique in her opponent's arsenal but the pathetic whimpering and the overwhelming fear that Mana's body irradiated tipped the true reason of the magician's change off. The Getsugakure kunoichi had seen her teammate struggle with similar difficulties a long time before.
"You fool!" Stea yelled out charging in with a chop aimed at the magician's neck. Her body emanated with the flowing supercharged chakra sourced from the what little damage she had stored inside her seals, empowering the young Getsugakure woman. Mana's neck bent awkwardly once the chop of her opponent smacked into it like a sword aiming to behead the girl. While the magician's spine held firmly and did not allow the gruesome outcome to come to pass, it was unclear just what the difference between the attacking might of chakra augmentations and the defensive force was.
"You can't just attempt something like that on the most important battlefield of your life! You're just a brat, you're nothing special… There are no chosen one of no prophecies, like all those characters from your Konoha movies, no one believes you stand a chance, you're just… Just you!" Stea continued to scold Mana's foolish and desperate attempt to control her sensory right then and there, on the battlefield.
The young woman continued to chop at her opponent, smacking Mana at her temples, her neck, her chest and her various joints before turning around with a backhanded slap that sent Mana tumbling down and back on the dirt. Stea's own hand was shaking. Her forehead was sweaty and blushed from the fever of the moderate brain damage she had sustained early on in the battle, her speed was clearly affected by that but she still hit strong.
Yet it was not Stea who felt like she was going crazy. Mana curled on the ground before fumbling back on her knees, she tried to fight back the feelings of slipping control, the overwhelming fear of dying or passing out on the spot, the urging desire to escape the arena she was fighting in, where all those scary gigantic chakra signatures were located.
"What the…" Stea mumbled to herself, seeing the symptoms of Mana's sensory overload-induced anxiety not fading. The Getsugakure genin was clever enough to realize what that meant – Mana was learning to deal with the anxiety of sensing a humongous chakra signature using the cold turkey method.
The Getsugakure kunoichi stretched her legs out wide, bending them at the knees and bringing her balance center lower to the ground. Her right hand moved back while she forced her left elbow forward before lunging at the magician with a blindingly furious and swift barrage of chops, so fast that it would have appeared she had adapted various knife-fighting styles into a hand-to-hand martial art of her own.
Mana screamed out in pain as she could barely even count the amount of blindingly fast and deceptive chops that attacked her all over her body, and that was just one of Stea's arms, the second one kept on the winded back with an extended palm, ready to shoot out and help the kunoichi defend herself. Soon, Stea's long and slender legs joined into the offensive as with a powerful jump kick straight to Mana's cheek the magician was sent down again, then, with a powerful flipping leg slam she was attacked once more while down. Stea immediately settled her flowing wildly dress upon landing down on her own two feet with elegance and grace.
Stea watched the magician struggle with newfound respect. It was clear that the Getsugakure genin had empathy for Mana's situation – her genjutsu was completely disabled due to magician's own morals and the very reason she was fighting in the first place. Then there was that foolish persistence to keep her chakra sensory free, instead of suppressing her. Even if it was suppressed, what exactly were Mana's options anyways? To fight Stea and fuel her damage seals, even more, make her medical ninjutsu and taijutsu attacks more powerful? That was no answer.
One was clear, however, to Stea, to Mana, to the Ninja Council. By witnessing how Stea effectively locked down Mana's options and read the magician's character like an open book, the Konohagakure kunoichi had shown off her opponent in the best of colors. Perhaps it was gratitude for that very thing that prevented Stea from continuously kicking and stomping Mana while she kept writhing on the ground, dealing with her own racing heart and dizziness, not to mention the internal bleeding from all of Stea's attacks and dizziness from important blood vessels getting chopped pretty strong and damaged.
"Get up…" Stea mumbled quietly, Mana could barely hear the voice of the young woman in the darkness and the blur of dizziness that violently kept her eyes shut and her body trembling like a leaf. "You will get promoted, you will show them your fighting spirit, I will repay your favor, so get up."
Pale and huffing heavily due to the anxiety of the massive chakra signatures present above in the Ninja Council lodge, Mana fumbled back up on her feet. Her knees shook like an aspen in turbulent, stormy winds.
Nothing but darkness all around her. Little, bright specks of space dust surrounded her by dozens of thousands, then, massive quasars and blazars, star giants unlike any that Mana has read about floated right beside her. The magician felt like she would go mad if she would as much as turn her head to feast her eyes at them. Kouta and Shimo floated right beside her, one continued to sever his bonds with Mana before fading away, only to return to repeat the cycle and the other kept getting skewered by the darkness surrounding Mana.
Pain. More of it all over her body, Mana kept on burning up inside while it was freezing on the outside. Just where was all this pain coming from? The sight of dirt met Mana's opening eyes for a moment before her eyes whited out again, cold snowflakes gently rubbed against the girl's cheeks but it didn't help Mana's tired bumping heart or the internal fever.
She was in an endless void of oblivion… Mana grabbed her own throat, ripping her collar open and tossing the bowtie that tied around her neck flowing aside in the cold winter breeze, it faded away in the darkness just like Shimo's dying body. Even as she continued to choke, a powerful blow to her abdomen sent Mana crouching over and falling on her knees. Where was this pain coming from? What was going on? Was she going mad?
Again, something fast and hard smacked her across her cheek, almost ripping her jaw apart and sending her flying past the mirage of Shimo's dying body, right as it faded away in agony. She needed to float away, leave all this behind. No. She's been taking this fear of being exposed to all the chakra around her for so long, she had nothing to shut it all down for. She had no other options but to open her eyes right, or not at all.
Mana's hand slowly raised up, catching some invisible, silky limb and stopping it in its path. A feminine figure slowly formed out of stardust thrown off by all the massive phenomena nearby, the magician focused on the feminine shape before a powerful palm strike sent her tumbling back. A warm, wet feeling of blood busting out from her nose broke Mana out of the anxiety induced sensation of fear.
She could see her, no, she could feel her. Stea. The Getsugakure genin was standing with her elbow pointing forward and her other hand winded up, her palm placed in a defensive vertical state while her legs were spread out wide. The vast darkness of space faded, the stardust took thousands of shapes, those of people while Mana restrained her sensory, reducing its range instead of tunneling it, Stea was right to a point, she was no prodigy so she had to fight cleverly and differently instead of try to talent her way out of every problem. Even reducing her sensory range came through tremendous difficulties, tunneling with full range intact? That was still a little bit outside her reach.
"Welcome back, I kind of missed you." Stea smiled with a playful tease as Mana took a small handful of snow off the ground, using it to wipe the blood off her face and hands as her chakra augmentations did what they could to temporarily prevent her nose busting out in crimson showers again. It would not need to do so for long, soon the blood would stop all by its own.
