"You left all the other Congregation groups all by themselves. You could have captured them, saved them all." Mana complained vocally while Rushira let the magician slip from her hold.

"Maybe, we needed to confirm your connection and get right to the point of our investigation. These guys showed interest in you before and rescue missions would have only been a distraction." Cailar replied.

"To be fair, we expected to get some more info, since the horn-armor dude was so generous with the beans if you catch my cold." S-Crew scratched his neck showing a little embarrassment but only for getting caught and not for what was questionable about the call the Allied Ninja made.

"It's fine, it was always a risky plan trying to follow a sensor. Suppressing chakra while using Hiding Mole Jutsu was troublesome enough." Junichi tried shutting this subject down with a firm tone. Mana was about to have none of it. She's long passed the point where the endless bounds of respect for these Allied Ninja made her get modest and nervous when talking to them.

Still, she had to hand it to the Allied Ninja, they played their stealth cards just fine. Managing to use a lower-ranking Earth Release technique to hide them underground while suppressing their chakra to an average rank while in the middle of a ninja village. Even if Mana had caught a whiff of their signatures before, they'd mix right into the endless crowd of ninja whose chakra Mana also had sensed before, without focusing and trying to single them out, it'd have been near impossible to notice them.

But she did, eventually. Even with their impressive attempts to hide from Mana's sensory, even while she purposefully restrained its range inside this shop, she still picked them out. Mana was growing strong. She'd have lied if she had ever belittled her ability to find out she's being followed.

"You really have little reason to be mad at us, Mana. You sensed us for a while, didn't you? You could have exposed us much longer and not played along and have the enemy Spliced give us everything. Still, you did the right thing. You played the expectations of these lunatics and helped us with our investigation." Rushira tried getting Mana back on her side, or, if that did not work, point out that the magician was on no moral high-ground here with how she justified the plan of the Allied Ninja with her actions after she found them out.

"Not to mention, you've cleared your own name," Junichi affirmed with a confident nod. "Now we know why these people knew you and you're under no fire from us."

"Well, they're coming." Mana turned at Junichi with angered eyes. "The Congregation you ignored are returning with a company."

"B-But how?" S-Crew flipped out, "They were supposed to wait, we were supposed to have more time!"

A cackle of laughter silenced the Kumogakure native while life returned to the eyes of Buberuri and his awfully mangled body lifted off the ground as if yanked by some twisted puppet-master that refused to let his toy die. Dislocated and broken limbs put themselves back into place letting out gruesome snapping and churning sounds while cream-colored dust formed complicated webs over Buberuri's skin and hardened again.

The jelly-man nearby Buberuri was also slowly putting himself together, chunks of jelly slid back into a singular mass that was just rustling restlessly and beginning to take the shape it once had. The one before it was blown to bits by Cailar's jutsu.

"Thank you for not betraying the Congregation's movements, Mana-sama. They may look pitiful but they are very easy to ignore and miss but you sensed them, right? Your heart is still lingering between our side and that of your village, right?" Buberuri spoke his first words after his rebirth.

"Village? These ninja aren't village ninja… A lot of village ninja hate them, distrust them just as they would a foreigner ninja. Ninja that know no boundaries know no loyalties either and very few Kage trust unconditionally, without expecting loyalty in return." Mana replied. "Take me to Guru now."

"I'm afraid we may have our hands full, Mana-sama. It is doubtful that we can protect you." The jelly-man blurbed out from his newly reformed blob of a head.

The Allied Ninja continued to stare at Mana with betrayal, anger or disbelief. Even when one member of the international ninja organization settled on an emotion, their thoughts of the magician's words and actions changed drastically the at the moment to come.

A handful of ninja, all looking just as odd as Buberuri and his jelly-comrade blitzed into the experimentation and operating room, surrounding the Allied Ninja and cutting them off from the exit. Amongst them was a golden-skinned shinobi with black, round eyes and pronounced lips, almost like those of an amphibian, a female ninja with spiky, falling strands of orange hair resting on a very coral-shaded skin and a berserk looking ninja with a protruding lower face and razor-sharp teeth that briefly exposed themselves as their owner breathed in an out.

"Sorry that we're late, Colceli." The one of golden and greasy-wet looking skin spoke up, flapping his massive lips awkwardly as he did so.

"These assholes kinda tricked us…" the coral-colored kunoichi cursed with irritation in her voice.

"Hey, who's watching Little Honda if you're fighting?" the feral one with sharp teeth finally revealed the inner workings of his bestial jaws. "He's pretty important, you know! We are disposable, he is not."

"This should be the least of your worries." Junichi strictly exclaimed. "Once we start raising a little hell inside a ninja village, this place will be swarming with ninja."

"And who do you think they'll be after first? Known and established hard-workers for our own village or some international randos?" the jelly-man who was previously referred to as Colceli asked a question that shut Junichi up for a short while.

"The numbers are decent enough, we can spare someone to lead Mana-sama and the Congregation away." Buberuri declared. "Axolkin, you're the newest of us and the most successful, Guru will have the most use from your samples. Survive by moving Mana-sama away from here and bring her to Guru."

"You think I'll just let ya!?" S-Crew winded up his arm for a strong blow of an invisible heatwave before his arm was stopped in mid-air by Junichi.

"Don't expose an opening. We don't need to give our enemy any advantages, these Spliced are more troublesome than we thought they might be." Junichi said while not moving his eyes away from Buberuri and Colceli. These two recovering from Cailar's Karakuri Thunderball technique visibly impressed the Konoha veteran.

"Needless to remind you, you're all tuckered out too." Cailar teased his teammate to which S-Crew just started throwing air fists.

Mana turned around and started walking off further into the depths of the laboratories and operating rooms installed in this underground tunnel. These tunnels must have connected with the Konoha sewers. That would explain how the Congregation managed to slip away and scatter all over the village, alerting the other Spliced so quickly and efficiently to return to their headquarters.

"Mana!" Rushira yelled out. "If you're walking away now, you're just confirming to us that you're with them, that you're an enemy of the Allied Ninja!"

"You turned your backs at innocent people, misguided and lost. I want people like you as my enemies." Mana replied while giving the Allied Ninja a cold and spiteful glare and walking off with a group of the Congregation mumbling unintelligibly and muttering her name over and over again. The boldest ones tried touching the girl or rubbing their long fingers or hands against her hair or her clothes gently, just for the future knowledge that they got as close to the person who inspired Guru Ayushi to change the world as possible.

The one with the flappy and sizable lips and golden, wet skin blitzed forward in a sideways, swimming motion. As if he worked his way through air how and underwater amphibian would have pedaled through water except infinitely faster than their counterparts.

"Let's go, Mana-sama…" he uttered.


The feral one with scaly skin, long claws, and sharp teeth made the first move. Throwing his jaw back and forth in a wild charge at the Allied Ninja and an attempt to chomp a chunk of their flesh out. Given the durability that the Spliced were known to have, it was quite expected of him to throw all caution into the wind like this.

Blood and strips of cloth scattered over the underground laboratory as the lightning-swift and deadly Spliced ninja worked his magic. His movements were too animalistic to predict or properly read, any attempts to counterattack were answered with an almost instantaneous recovery and a bounce-back into the fight, that meant yet another wild bite and another grievous wound…

Junichi was the first one to break the ranks and leave a nasty opening in the formations of the Allied Ninja. The Konoha veteran rushed forward, sliding on horizontally placed blades that formed around his feet after a puff of smoke, as the Allied Ninja moved forward with his fist raised and tensed up, only a metallic blur could have been made out in the limited underground lighting and due to his impressive speed.

The lizard-like ninja stumbled back, shocked by the sudden outburst of brutality and lethal intent from his opponent. He could not help but open his numb jaw, blood spurted from his gaping mouth before the ninja realized he was completely beheaded in an instant. The headless body of the lizard-ninja slumped like a bag, showing why normally it would have been a bad idea to just charge randomly at a squad of opponents of superior skill.

The lifeless, scale-covered husk twitched a bunch like a sack containing a bunch of enraged cats within. Not too long after, with a burst of washed up and watered down with some sort of secretion blood, a faceless husk burst out from within the body where the lizard man's head once was. Such was the nature and purpose of all Spliced, created from Guru Ayushi's intense desire to use the clues given to him by the animal kingdom to eliminate the pain and death of the unfortunate man.

The rest of the Spliced quickly followed their teammate's unexpected resurrection, utilizing the moment of opening and shock to launch an effective assault on the Allied Ninja. Buberuri launched himself in a mighty tackle, air and light broke around the lightning-swift and rock-hard movements of the attacking ninja. Luckily enough, Cailar managed to pitch in and weave a handful of hand seals before Buberuri could crash into the group with enough power to cave the entire world in on itself confined in a single tackle.

"Ninja Style: Lightning Net!" the wire-using and endlessly stylish Allied Ninja grunted out, using steel wire and his own chakra cloaking to create a horizontally placed net of pure Lightning Release chakra that absorbed, reflected as well as used its own shocking properties and mighty cutting potential to bash back at the attacking Spliced ninja.

Buberuri cried out in pain while his body flew back from the rebound force of the net responding to his mighty charge in less than kind. The impressive armor net on his skin shattered into pieces yet again while his exposed skin filled with new stripes of crimson and black from where the effective enemy counterattack landed.

The rest of the Spliced were working their own magic in order to attack the Allied Ninja and not give their enemies a chance to breathe and plot a counterattack strategy. It was a clever use of their apparent immortality, they may have been weaker collectively as well as individually but given their apparent immortality they had much more space to make mistakes and suffer the consequences before bouncing back at the enemy much to the enemy's frustration.

The Allied Ninja had no such luxury and that was the factor that evened the odds. Every move they made had to be carefully plotted out and compared to the whole picture, every step out of the ranks had to be measured against the drawback of exposing weak-spots and blind-spots where the entire team could have been snuffed out by a well-placed attack. Even punishing the enemy's overextension became a cruel game as the Allied Ninja could not know that the expenditures of such a punishment would not result in their own loss when the enemy simply bounces back into the battle.

Rushira slammed her hands together. She had waited long enough before using this move, it was dangerous to her own allies for it would have covered this entire dungeon with water.

"Water Prison: Dance of Rue!" Rushira chanted out. A powerful burst of water erupted from her mouth, from inside of her body that appeared to be completely endless and unrestrained by the limited capacity of Rushira's body storage. It was as if every breath of air the woman took completely replenished the supply of water allowing her to keep spitting it out in a violent surge that quickly flooded the entire place. It would not have been too long before water started bursting and leaking from the fruit shop used as a front for this entire operation.

The Spliced appeared to be as slow and powerless as slugs underwater, just like most ninja were. A ninja was able to use their chakra augmentations to fight underwater without taking in breaths for well over twenty minutes if they were around the rank of an average ninja, that did not mean that their moves were not massively slowed down and made sluggish at the same time. Rushira was different, she was skilled and used at working underwater.

Cailar once more moved his hands in a synchronized and mindful set of motions, laying an underwater trap of steel wire, limiting the space left to move for the enemy even more. Rushira was dancing like an arrow in the flooded dungeon of operating rooms and laboratories. Whizzing past and by the Spliced ninja, knocking them around with her superhuman strength, tackles, and clotheslines as she did so. They must have been considerable too as any single blow to any given Spliced ninja took them down in one hit, crushing their bodies entirely and leaving them a bloody pulp.

No matter how often Buberuri was hit, only minor blunt trauma remained while his armor net of whatever tissue it was that covered him reformed soon enough to protect the knocked out ninja, revitalizing the Spliced for a new fight once more. Whenever the feral lizard man got hit, his body split into pieces, his limbs fell off and it looked as if Rushira's blows were a cannon blast eviscerating him but the limbs soon grew back in smaller and weaker stumps that gained strength and aged a thousand times faster than they should have.

The rest were not that much more fruitful to attack. The pink-skinned female Spliced crumbled like chalk upon being hit but the dusty material she collapsed into quickly reassembled itself into the strangely crusty substance that the female Spliced was made of. Colceli did not appear to be affected by the attacks at all, if anything he thrived underwater, he flowed and adapted like a jellyfish, avoiding Rushira's blows with grace.

The lack of hesitation and subtlety behind Rushira's fighting style forced the rest of the Allied Ninja to fight underwater now. Rushira may have been a superstar of underwater combat, moving like a high-velocity arrow splitting the oceans in a split-second and having little to no trouble sustaining herself underwater, having mastered the necessary chakra augmentations to such an extent that they barely cost Rushira a dime to sustain. Her teammates were not as skilled, however…

Colceli's jelly limbs extended forward, they appeared to be endlessly malleable and extendable without a defined limit, underwater they also were immensely difficult to tell apart from water. It was a clever way to make the best out of the bad situation for the Spliced ninja as Colceli's limbs rushed at the Allied Ninja.

Even when the thrusts of the jelly-man's limbs missed, the electric currents present within and transferred through his transparent chakra system lit the underground, flooded dungeon up and shocked the Allied Ninja, making connecting with his blows completely irrelevant for the immortal jelly ninja. Rushira quickly realized just how potent her opponent was underwater, just how much power to shape and manipulate his body she granted him by flooding the place with water and canceled her technique that usually granted her uncanny advantage in combat.

The moment that the water level lowered, finding smaller crevices to flow into and open spaces to leak out from, S-Crew responded with a quick heatwave of his own aimed at Buberuri. The armored Spliced grunted in pain but the heatwave left little to no damage on his body, just cracked the armored area it hit, something that the regeneration of Buberuri's armor tissue quickly fixed.

"Very nicely done!" Cailar mocked his ally in his signature, teasing manner but Junichi shook his head, water dripping from the veteran's body and his aged lungs struggling to keep up with the shift in the fighting environment while also granting him proper ability to breathe and keep up with the pace of battle.

"No, it's clever. The rest appear to be quite skilled at regeneration but not this one." Junichi grumped out, still struggling to catch his breath. "His previous wounds remain, only his armor layer regenerates. His abilities must have been gained from the ability of deer to regrow their horns quickly. That is the nature of his armor layer."

"It is decided then." Rushira nodded with youthful vigor and raised her powerful fist up. "We focus our team effort on that guy!"

"Not just that. We stop fighting randomly and continue to shift targets with purpose. With enough luck, we can overwhelm their regeneration factors by just relentlessly taxing them. Every jutsu, every bloodline must have a drawback, a cost, most of the times it is the strain on one's chakra." Junichi declared, it did not matter if the enemy listened in, as long as they lacked the power needed to change something that is.