The talisman user Omase raised her hands up and pointed them forward, aiming them at Kiyomi. Her long black sleeves with dark green, shiny stones sewn into gold-colored embroideries on them attracted Kiyomi's attention. These long sleeves would have served as a much finer hiding spot for the woman's talismans.

A powerful wave of wind raised dirt, small stones, and other similar rubble, mixing them inside of its tight, rotating embrace and escalating them at an intense speed that not even the largest tornado could have dreamed about. The tight compression of the wall of air gave it its greatest power as any blade of grass could have easily opened large wounds and pebbles could have passed right through flesh and bone inside that wall of raging wind.

The weightlessness inside the pocket of gusts raised Kiyomi's body in the air as dancing grass cut her open in multiple areas and smaller rubble riddled her body passing in and through her body clean. Omase was wiser than to trust her opponent's demise with such a simple frontal assault. Had the kid really been enveloped by this wave of air, she'd have augmented her endurance out of fear of death and made her flesh tough as nails, to the point where the leaves and grass blades would have only cut her skin and the pebbles would have left minor bruises instead of punching entire holes in the girl.

A simple poof revealed this gruesome image of Kiyomi slowly being tortured inside the wall of wind being nothing more than the dead corpse of the bird she used to transfer her consciousness into previously, sadly crushed by her opponent before it could make its escape after planting the explosives on the talisman user. Omase's clever eyes instantly looked down, following the noise of the shifting ground beneath her feet, the woman let her enhanced perception do the tracking.

A loud burst of ground preceded Kiyomi's surfacing from underground. The Yamanaka leaped at her opponent with her kunai in hand, just like in their previous encounter, using her Earth Release techniques to close distance safer to this long-ranged opponent.

Omase swung her arms aside, at the direction of the rushing opponent. The air where the tips of her sleeves traveled caught flames and started popping like miniature explosions were released into the air where those sleeves swung. There was a pungent odor of gunpowder moments before the barrage of explosions reached that area.

Differently than before, the explosions appeared to merely phase through Kiyomi's image and the explosions did not bear much fruit. From inside the tunnel burrowed by Kiyomi's illusory image an explosive pouch flew out, aiming to hit her opponent right in the face before detonating with all of its explosive tag containing might.

Omase took wild and acrobatic vaults back to minimize the damage but the power of the explosion caught her and tossed her backward with a violent jerk. The woman smacked into the wall and bounced off of it like a ragdoll. Had it not been for the power of her own explosion, Kiyomi may have considered following her opponent and attempting to finish her while she was down. By the time the destructive force calmed it was too late.

"Did you really think I'd rush at you the same way as before and risk being tagged by your stupid talismans?" Kiyomi grunted. The thought that Omase really got fooled by that idea offended her a little. The fact that her opponent thought so little of her and the time she had to think that fight through. She may have been just a genin but she was one of the, if not the, strongest genin in the village, if not the world. This lowly criminal was pissing Kiyomi off more than criminals usually did.

"You used a simple Clone Jutsu to attack me but you actually burrowed the hole to disguise the fact that clones made by the Clone Jutsu leave no imprint to the environment. Then, you used that same hole for safety from your own blast." Omase wiped the blood from her mouth, feeling intense pain in her chest where her armored vest was covering her silky robe before. Now only her bare, bandaged chest remained as her clothes that covered it tattered in the wind, bits, and pieces of it still slowly singed with glowing blaze-orange.

"It's your fault that you did not take someone stating they were going to kill you seriously," Kiyomi replied with a confident and annoyed smirk.

"It cost you a lot of chakra to attack me this way. You used a combination of at least three techniques just to land this one hit on me. Just to piss me off enough to where I can take you seriously." Omase gruffed, still busy wiping the blood off her mouth from the internal injuries that troubled her.

The blood red on her face and fists. The slouched and vulnerable pose… This nukenin was good. She knew Kiyomi was out to kill her so she lured the girl in with that façade of vulnerability. If Kiyomi was a good year less experienced, she'd have fallen for it and charged right at a long-range ninja who trained their entire lives to keep their opponents away. She'd be rushing at her doom.

It troubled Kiyomi a little that Omase still tried a psychological trick like this. That meant she was still fostering some sort of hope, she had not yet lost her confidence, she took some injuries but they did not wear her down as much as Kiyomi had counted on. It was perhaps now that Omase was at her most dangerous and she now showed that she was confident to match that dangerousness. Kiyomi needed to tighten the loop a little lest she missed another psychological cue and got outplayed, she needed to unnerve her opponent and do it quick.

"I know your trick. That whole sealed Fire Release and Wind Release jutsu play is just for show. I know your real fighting style." Kiyomi informed her opponent. "I know that you have no access to it here, you're weaker here than you were before, even if your outfit now is more suitable for your fighting style. Because of that, I will kill you."

"Oh? So you've figured out the secret of that place we attacked you in?" Omase raised an eyebrow, dropping her vulnerable play instantly after the Yamanaka informed her it would not work.

"Yeah. Got to admit, it took me a while. If Mana, my past teammate was still with our team, she'd have told us about it, she's a history buff. That last area was a battlefield in the Second Great Ninja War. A minor one but still…" Kiyomi admitted.

"That's right? Doesn't the thought of letting that same ground that claimed your village's heroes swallow you up sound exciting?" Omase taunted her opponent. It only seemed fair for a village ninja that despised criminals to hear similar disdain from nukenin towards village ninja. From their sick and twisted point of view, village ninja would have been just lapdogs.

"Don't derail the topic, scum. I wondered why would those command talismans you used on me earlier be used? Sure a simple command to disrupt a motion sounded kind of cool but not to a ninja of your rank. Someone like you should have used it to more avail than that." Kiyomi pondered out loud. "That was when it hit me – you were using it on the dead bodies to animate them and fight for you. The problem with living targets is that they can override your commands after a momentary lag, even remove your talisman eventually. Not dead targets though."

Omase looked at Kiyomi with a cold glare. Maybe the woman tried shielding from the fact that Kiyomi just figured her out after a night of meditation and intense training, maybe she truly was unfazed. Who could have known for sure? Criminals hid their true selves, their weaknesses for so long that they became different beings entirely, lesser than human. Still, discarding humanity was their choice alone. Choices had consequences.

"Here you have no dead bodies to manipulate. This place is no battlefield and any bodies from older times would have already been decomposed to the point of uselessness to you. The soil here is unlike that of our previous clash location. There are no underground layers of peat to conserve them like that." Kiyomi grinned.

She had Omase now. Just now, she felt it – she could win.


The armored nukenin charged at Meiko, the blacksmith evaded his strikes looking for openings to strike. She appeared to have no qualms about letting the man up close. He was faster now, much more focused and careless than before, killing Meiko must have been his prime goal now. That was just fine. Meiko was not of the people that liked freebies.

With an eye-catching crimson streak of a cut on her cheek, Meiko swung her sword back at the man, aiming to hit him in the chest – the very core of where all of his armor pieces connected. While this did appear to confuse her opponent, he crossed his claw gauntlets to block the strike and see what he could have done to trap Meiko's weapon. If it was trapped in between chakra imbued blades, a simple twist and any amount of pressure could have snapped it like a twig.

A thunderous clang. Meiko's blade was trapped. Her opponent tried snapping it in two but it did not budge. Meiko leaped forward, attempting to drive her knee into the face of her opponent and busting up his nose to the point where fighting onward would be torturous to him. The armored rogue turned his head to the side, letting the blacksmith hit only cloaked armor pieces on the side of his head that held his long hair from interfering with his fighting.

The blacksmith dashed back clenching her knee with tears squirting from her eyes. It felt like hitting something absolutely invincible.

"So you did achieve some heights in cloaking your blade? Imbuing your sword with chakra would have been the only thing to save it…" the rogue swung Meiko's sword in his hands for a while, admiring the craftsmanship. That of Meiko's father was pretty much next to none in these parts.

"I'd appreciate if you gave this back. You have no use for it anyway." Meiko pressed her lips in a serious expression despite her most genuine wish to smirk.

"That is true. But I think it would be better if I did this…" the rogue pressed had at both ends of Meiko's blade and busted it to bits, now that the blacksmith's hands were no longer on it. Her father's gift was now just a pile of shards of steel. "Perhaps then you will stop fostering useless hopes about fighting us and flee."

Something snapped in Meiko's chest. Sometimes she forgot that she fought criminals at times, people who were just mean. Hell, she could get it, sometimes life just made one end up on the wrong side of it. But no one had an excuse for being an utter asshole and doing something like this. Meiko ground her teeth before reaching for the back plate of her armor and pulling out another short sword.

Slowly, from the tip to the bottom of the hilt, crackling sparks began forming the silhouette of a cloak around the blade's edge and hilt before a single forceful press of concentration and anger ignited the sword with spirited flames that did not merely cloak the sword with chakra. They simmered and rotated around it like a belt of a chainsaw. Shimmering with the faint blue of base chakra used at imbuing the weapon.

"Oh. I guess you did learn to imbue your blade. You merely waited for the right opportunity to reveal that to me. I apologize if that sword meant something to you but…"

A windmill shuriken, glowing with chakra flames smashed one of its blades right into the center of the rogue's frontal helmet plate and silenced the man. Throwing the man's head back like a ball after someone had kicked it with all their might. A thin steel wire that transferred Meiko's chakra held the shuriken all the way from the end that held it on to the one attached to the shuriken's ring. The cloak may not have been focused enough to pierce the plate and cut into the rogue's skull but it at the very least knocked him down and made him dizzy.

With a yank of the steel wire, Meiko recalled her windmill shuriken and hid the blades behind the one that whacked her opponent in the forehead and sealed it back into her left chest plate, where it came from in a fraction of a moment.


Hihei downed another pair of gulps from his water bottle before reluctantly stepping up. He waved his arms aside, splitting his poncho and letting it float in the air, like a ghostly apparition, while his arm sent the fabric floating aside to land on the ground. A strange gurgling sound accompanied a grotesque sight of bloating flesh on the upper part of the rogue's flesh.

Blades of water burst in jets through his flesh, similarly as they started flooding from his feet. It was a simplistic jutsu, creating blades shaped constructs of water and using water streams from one's feet, controlling their flow as necessary to control one's speed of movement made for a B-Rank jutsu to be generous. That being said, the rogue had sufficient mastery of it to do it freely, without hand seals or even referring to the technique. His concentration and experience was a weapon to be feared.

"Before we begin, can we clear one thing up?" Hanasaku closed one of her eyes and bent her head to the side as she pondered on an idea. "You said that Sin-Eater guy of yours is what is keeping the Sharingan in working condition, right?"

"Yeah. If Nejin dies, the Uchiha's eyes and the rest of his body would begin to rot away." Hihei smiled. "He is sealed inside a scroll now but if you killed Nejin you would just trap the body in a loop of pointlessness. It would be doomed to stay sealed or else it would be rendered useless and begin decaying the moment it was unsealed."

"And don't even try being smart about it. Even if your finest seal masters tried sealing someone inside the scroll to try and remove the eyes without unsealing the body, it would take you millennia to find the correct sealing dimension and then you'd still have to find the body floating in its infinite vastness." Yutsubu showed her teeth to Hanasaku as if taunting her.

"Sheesh, I get it, don't kill the creepy guy…" Hanasaku moaned in pain of the overly elaborate explanation she was given yet could not completely wrap her mind around.

Hihei charged forward, followed by his oversized comrade. Hanasaku thrust her own arms to intercept those of Hihei without letting the blades touch her. She cleverly manipulated and entrapped her opponent's wrist-focused weaponry by controlling the arms of her opponent and the space between them. Hihei was fast and it did not look like his fighting style left that much of a strain on him.

The fatso was deceitfully quick as well. In just a blink Hihei's feint faded from Hanasaku's visual register and was replaced by Chitabo's massive frame aiming to smack her again. The Sannin vanished before reappearing right in front of the giant's face and throwing her leg vertically upward. The powerful impact should have sent the man blasting off into the depths of space, crashing through and demolishing any objects he came through on his journey to the oblivion's edge but he remained firmly on the ground. The robust shockwave emanating from Hanasaku's kick only phased through the colossus, flying off into space to wreak havoc on a cosmic scale somewhere lightyears away.

Chitabo leaped back to wipe slobber and blood off his face. Troubled by the success that the woman's counter-offense wielded, Hihei ceased his attack and let the jets of water just let him float in the air slightly, instead of using them for aided, skating-like movement.

"My pupil once told me that a man cannot phase through attacks. Since that day I cannot seem to access that ability. I am glad to have been informed that she was wrong." Hanasaku grinned looking at the fumbling and still dazed giant who only took a very insignificant fraction of that kick's intended force, letting the rest phase through his impossible to forcefully accelerate frame somehow.

"Oh, my elders told me that a Senju who does not possess the Earth Release elemental affinity is a disgrace and shall never amount to much. They told me that, just with the Water Release nature, mine is a disgraceful existence and if I had any shame left in me after daring to be born this way I should snuff it out." Hihei smiled, "You should care a bit less about what people tell you, really…"

"I see." Hanasaku closed her eyes.

Surprised by this sudden opening that they were provided, Hihei and Chotabo unleashed their synchronized assault together. Chotabo rushed in first, smacking both of his tremendous palms from two sides like two crushing boulders in a vain attempt to crush Hanasaku. A split moment after his crushing palms opened up, Hihei with a rotating slash from up above attempted to cut Hanasaku in half with his Water Release blades as well. Despite the fact that the duo was confused by their lack of success, they parted ways to the opposite sides allowing little Yutsubu to finish off their combination attack.

"Degeneration Art: Decay Cannonball!" she yelled out, firing a much larger black sphere from her palm, the size of at least a larger rag ball like the ones kids were kicking about in the streets. The ball simply went right through Hanasaku and almost hit Meiko and her opponent who were clashing behind the Sannin.

"Sorry, Inaka!" the old woman in the little girl's body yelled when an angry glare of her comrade scolded her for almost hitting him and his opponent with that mysterious technique.

"That's amazing!" Hihei laughed out, he canceled his jets of water that formed the wrist blades on his arms and the skate blades on his feet. "You completely copied Chitabo's technique? What an act!" the man smacked his knee in complete amusement.

"Stop goofing off!" Yutsubu ground her teeth in anger. "Can't you see how much trouble we are in!? I've fired my Degeneration Art at her twice already and missed both times. How much more are you willing to make me mess up my cells for that? Do you want me to become an infant?" Yutsubu let her scorn be known by her leader.

Chitabo just foolishly rubbed his temple in confusion. He appeared to be baffled not only by the fact that Hanasaku completely phased through his attempts to crush her but also through Hihei's and Yutsubu's attacks as well. His eyes were this way ever since he himself first saved himself by letting Hanasaku's Ozone BB jutsu phase through him so his own ability must have seemed just as confusing to him.

"Maybe then you wouldn't yell at me so much," Hihei rubbed the back of his head with a stupid grin on his face. "Don't worry your meaty head too much, big guy. We'll just keep hitting her like we always do and eventually things will turn out just fine for us, I'm sure of it."

"Hmmm, I guess Meiko was mistaken, humans can phase through attacks coming at them," Hanasaku noted after opening her eyes and finding herself surprised by the fact that she was completely untouched by the combination attack of the enemy.

The very laws of reality were continuously being pushed to the brink of breaking the further the scuffle by the black market point went on.