"Yeah, I know… Wait, what do you mean you'll have nothing to do with it!?" Kiyomi flipped out mentally, some of her anger may have slipped out on the physical plane as well. "Don't you want to get back into sync?"
"Don't you wanna train with us?" Meiko asked. Her tone sounded as the auditory equivalent of puppy eyes. Whether she was trying to guilt trip the magician or was genuinely frustrated to not get to play around back to back with her best friend was still up in the air.
"I do. I am not going to fight though. There are few things more stupid than challenging someone like Hanshin-san on the eve of a responsible and dangerous mission, what if you get hurt?" the magician brushed it off.
"We won't. And even if we will, we'll handle it. Come on, it will be fun!" Meiko tried playing the devil on Mana's left shoulder. "We'll be kicking ass and taking names like old times and we can definitely use you out there."
"I have spent three years of training preparing for a certain battle with a certain someone. I see no use in fighting anyone else but that man." Mana spoke out loud, closing her mind off from Kiyomi's communication. All the mental training in the Intel Division allowed the magician to ward off her mind from Kiyomi's attempts to reestablish her telepathic communication.
It was easy to see from Kiyomi's face that the kunoichi was pleasantly surprised by Mana's efficiency in this specific area. It was clearly not something that the Yamanaka heiress expected the magician train at, it was something so specific that it invited a conclusion that Mana trained with the Intel Division to learn how to fight Kiyomi. The thought that Mana was taking time to prepare for such a fight, even if it was never said out loud and was just a conclusion to which Kiyomi had come all by herself, was viewed as a compliment by the blond kunoichi.
Hanshin did not wait around and look at the three momentarily frozen young women, he had gone off ahead to the training grounds. He had no quarrels to fight or matters to attend to. Mana was graciously gifted this one last night before tomorrow's departure, she felt adamant not spending it licking wounds after a pointless fight in which she had nothing to prove. There was only one clash that mattered and Mana felt increasingly less and less invested in taking part in anything other than her fated clash with Ayushi.
"Do you think we can do it?" Meiko's lips managed to turn to a smile even while her upper face showed nothing less than total seriousness. "Without Mana, I mean."
"Screw her." Kiyomi punched her own fist before taking a fighting stance. "She's always been hesitant to spar and fight but… Never to this extent. I swear, if she pulls this bullshit on the actual mission, I'll slap some sense into her."
Hanshin either did not have a fighting pose or he merely not offer the luxury of showing his sparring partners one. Nor did he bow or take part in any other honorary ninja kumite rituals. That was just fine though as Kiyomi was too pissed at how badly her squad leader treated Meiko whereas the blacksmith was too thick-headed to know and follow any kumite etiquette. Hanshin bent his knees while twisting his pressed together legs, he was showing off thousands of openings, as if taunting the two kunoichi.
Kiyomi was the first one to make a move. Her hand seals were significantly faster than ever before and the simplicity of the jutsu she has chosen meant there would not be too many of them required. After just a split-second delay of weaving a handful of hand seals, the kunoichi's chest greatly inflated as her head moved back before all of the built-in air pressure erupted through her mouth.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!" she chanted out after the built-up gust of wind left her body and covered the frontal area of the training grounds, heading straight for Hanshin.
"What is this?" the special jounin covered his face, at the mid-range he was in, Kiyomi's technique offered little to no danger and merely brazing for the tremendous physical force was enough for the experienced ninja to withstand the destructive power of the technique.
Little did Hanshin know, that Great Breakthrough was no attempt to hurt him, it was a distraction. Even after three years, Kiyomi and Meiko worked just as well together as if they had never parted, to begin with. Just as the uncertainty about his opponents' manner of attack began clawing its way out the chest of the handsome shinobi, he noticed a small scroll rolling and flapping about right by his feet.
Just as Hanshin managed to regain his footing and lift his head, he noticed another, similar scroll resting in Meiko's hands.
"C-Rank Storage Seal: Release!" Meiko yelled out while the scroll on the ground unveiled itself. Hanshin was in the middle of dashing back from being close enough to the scroll that the surprise which came out of it would catch him inside of its range. Still, he was not fast enough, no, it did not appear like he tried to be. Hanshin was moving with fluid motions but he seemed almost… Lazy. He was half-assing it the whole way.
A rising storm of weaponry furled and raged, rotating upward with enough mass and intensity to rip flesh from the bone and grind mountains to dust. Something was wrong. A myriad of bright flashes followed by thunderous clangs signaled that Meiko's storm of rising blades met an invisible barrier right up before tearing into Hanshin. Something strong and fast enough to deflect every single blade in the combo and have them uselessly scatter about on the ground. Meiko bit her lip in frustration.
"Weapon Transformation!" she chanted out, the scattered steel all transformed into a field of explosive tags on the ground. One on which Hanshin was just about to land while still in mid-air after an attempt to put some distance in between himself and the rushing weaponry.
This time there was nothing that could have stood in between Hanshin and the minefield. All of the set explosive tags detonated in synchrony, a brilliant chain reaction of certain destruction. As the smoke cleared, only Hanshin in a cocky, invisible-hat-tipping pose remained while the field of the natural, emerald green turned to soggy dirt.
"Not bad." Hanshin grinned with half of his mouth. "Hanshin had to actually try to withstand this one."
Even when the quirky special jounin complimented the two kunoichi he sounded like a full of himself prick. His compliments in this instance were nothing but an acknowledgment of minimal effort from his part being required to avoid the moderate amount of injuries that Meiko's lethal battlefield altering combo would have left on someone of his rank.
"Tsk…" Kiyomi expressed her frustration vocally. "No intel at all… What his fighting style is, how much chakra did he spend to withstand my Great Breakthrough or how exactly he survived your minefield… Mana would have been able to tell us all of those things, she would have sensed if we left a dent in his overall signature or not." She let the source for her frustration be known to her teammate on the mental link.
"You should be very careful, diverting your attention like that." Hanshin taunted with a threatening and purposefully creepy-sounding tone. In a single, bountiful and very extravagantly performed leap, the special jounin had closed the gap between the two kunoichi and had completely winded up a pretty powerful-looking punch.
Meiko and Kiyomi both leaned back and to their respective sides as an attempt to avoid their opponent's attack. Meiko appeared to be fast enough to have completely moved out of the way, with the extremely lazy manner in which Hanshin has been moving around the blacksmith may just have outpaced the special jounin in a close-range brawl if these speeds were compared. Kiyomi received a light brush at her cheek but avoided most of the strike that was directed primarily in her direction.
It was such an odd manner of attack, it was like Hanshin intended to hit both young women with a single, direct shot right in between them, curving his punch ever so slightly at Kiyomi's direction as his hand moved back into a defensive position, preparing to defend himself from close-range counterattacks. For a brief moment, the entire training ground got covered in an eye of a storm as overwhelming silence took dominion of it. Then, a loud cracking noise followed, sending both young women down on the ground and sliding through the mushed dirt that Meiko had created.
"You OK?" Meiko's voice run inside Kiyomi's head, alongside hundreds of thoughts and speculations about what had just happened. The blacksmith was quick to get back on her feet and run after the special jounin, all in an attempt to divert his attention from exploiting the opening he had created.
"Yeah… I'm not sure what that invisible strike to both directions was but I blocked most of it." Kiyomi let the blacksmith know as she herself got back on her knees to catch a brief breath and wait until her forearms that had absorbed most of the blow stopped feeling numb from the tremendous blow they've just taken.
Meiko was dancing out there. Pulling out tools from her pockets and unsealing them from her armor at breakneck speeds before effortlessly transforming them into other tools. Offensive weaponry turned to utility tools and then back at offensive gear before turning into shields and armor pieces to protect the blacksmith at the same time. As amazing as it was, the redhead completely managed to keep up with Hanshin one on one in a taijutsu engagement, maybe it was because of her heavily armed approach which forced the special jounin more on the defensive and made him very careful with potentially overextending his limbs.
And yet, even while Meiko managed to stand her ground, blitzing and clashing in the air, exchanging hundreds of thousands of strikes with each passing clash, she failed to land a single blow. There were some nice openings, openings that the blacksmith exploited but… It was like the strikes had slipped off something solid, something that simply wasn't there.
"Dimension Sealing!" Meiko chanted out, pulling on a string of steel wire with her teeth, one she unveiled from under her armor somewhere, finally using the scroll she was clutching in her other hand and holding this entire time, the one she intended to use in the first attack on Hanshin but appeared to reconsider. A pair of metallic-colored flashed fired off into a violet blur of light that emanated from the scroll Meiko had just unveiled. The kunai then appeared from the scroll that the blacksmith had previously used to attack Hanshin with her rising stream of blades, hammers, and projectiles.
The pair of kunai were launched at an astonishing amount of accuracy, even when Meiko had to literally transport her projectile through a pair of dimensional rift connected between two sealing scrolls, she managed to aim them just right to potentially hit her airborne and moving at superhuman speeds opponent.
"He's going to block that again…" Kiyomi realized. She placed her Yamanaka hand seal at the area where she had read her opponent to land. It did not seem like any amount of physical harm could break through whatever uncanny jutsu Hanshin was using, if the physical approach was pointless, maybe a mental attack was the breakthrough that would help Kiyomi wipe the floor with this smug bastard.
Strangely enough, the kunai did not bounce off of the kooky, invisible defenses of their opponent, Hanshin merely struck a ridiculous pose in mid-air, bending his body and contorting it like a classical sculptural masterpiece, just enough for the kunai to completely whiff their target and fly off further before detonating after they hit the first piece of rocky debris in their path of destruction. The horrifying string reeling sound suggested the use of the "String Reeling Jutsu" to position Hanshin to a different location and surely enough, the special jounin zipped away from Kiyomi's intended to hit location.
This placed a frustrating complication, whether to risk using her ace at a much greater distance than initially intended, more so, on an aware and perplexingly nimble opponent or to try and regroup with Meiko, make another plan for attack. It did not matter… Whatever plans for attack Meiko and Kiyomi would make, they would be made fools of until they could have figured out exactly what they were fighting. What was the invisible force that Hanshin used to not only deflect impressive and numerous physical attacks with but also offensively?
Maybe the Kiyomi prior to the experience and training with the Yamanaka clan would have rushed on ahead, launched her Mind Body Switch haphazardly. Then stood still after whiffing her ace technique, waiting for her wandering consciousness to return to her body, open for a counterattack while threatening Meiko's safety as well. There was no doubt that the blacksmith would have once more engaged an opponent that was an enigma to both of them hand to hand just to protect Kiyomi while her consciousness returned back to her body after whiffing.
Not this time. Kiyomi had a better idea, just because they didn't have Mana here with her stupid book-smarts to tell them all about this hot yet smug bastard's ability, she could have begun figuring Hanshin out. There was one way to affirm what exactly this technique was and whether it was a technique at all and not a streak of bad luck.
"Beast Tearing Palm!" Kiyomi grunted out while swiping her arm to the side, massive amounts of Wind Release chakra passed through her entire body, leaving through Kiyomi's sleeves while taking in the natural passage of air built up inside her long sleeves before applying the enhancements that Kiyomi's chakra made to the Wind Release chakra. A slicing projectile of azure Wind Release chakra burst through, heading straight at Hanshin where he was standing.
The handsome shinobi did not fall for Kiyomi's temptation, instead of using his ability, he merely leaped backward in an impressive flip. His movements started out graceful and quick but ended up exchanging all of the speed for more elegance while the special jounin twirled, flipped and danced in mid-air, almost mocking the two kunoichi. Sadly, it was him that underestimated the two…
Kiyomi smiled, swiping her hand left and right again at least a handful of times, sending repeating projectiles of slicing Wind Release chakra. In mid-air, twirling like that, it was beyond easy to read Hanshin's movements. There was no way for him to dodge these attacks now, he'd be forced to use his ability again, giving Kiyomi and Meiko another glimpse at what exactly they were fighting against.
With a hollow, devastating note, Kiyomi's mid to long-range Wind Release ninjutsu shattered into pieces, scattering downward like floaty pieces of a glass chalice which was deflected with a mace with a downward strike. Another projectile burst into sparks violently, as if it had hit an immensely focused and hard resisting force it could not overcome, one that mere eyes could not perceive, however, it then flew aside at massively dropped velocity, suggesting it was deflected.
"It's chakra…" Kiyomi's thoughts signaled to Meiko. "Only chakra of greater intensity can protect against or deflect chakra. It's a ninjutsu technique that he's using."
"So that's why you attacked him…" Meiko replied. "Still, if it is chakra, we should be able to see it."
"Not quite, not if it is sufficiently toned down. Believe it or not, it takes a technique of astounding intensity for chakra to manifest on the outside of one's body. If the variation of his technique entered the upper ranks of ninjutsu ranking, we'd be able to see it, I think he's keeping it down low so that we cannot." Kiyomi explained her conclusions.
"It is an armor then… An armor of chakra, weak enough not to show up for us. At this point, only a sensor would be able to follow the armor's movements." Meiko put together.
"The armor only very quickly manifests when it contacts something strong. I saw a modest flash of blue where the armor hit my jutsu for a brief period. How do you know its shape though?" Kiyomi wondered. She wanted to make no false assumptions, for one, because she did not want to be wrong and have those assumptions cost her the entire sparring session, more importantly, she did not wish to fail and have Meiko fail as well in front of someone as vain and rotten on the inside as this incredibly handsome man was.
"Because he's using it as an armor. It is clearly blunt, deflecting attacks through sheer force, it is clearly not sharp as it has hit us before. He's not wielding it like a sword nor like a shield, he's fighting with it more like a puppeteer, someone with an invisible armor on the outside of their body." Meiko explained. Even if the redhead could sometimes seem dense, when push came to shove on certain subjects, she did excel and had valuable insights to share even around Mana and Kiyomi.
"Not just outside, he's coated his body with it to protect him from the minefield explosion too. It's because of how weak and low-ranking his technique is that it is so versatile, he doesn't require hand seals to use it, he doesn't need to speak the name of the technique or build up chakra before using it at all. He can coat himself or extend the armor to a greater range. If we can show him we can break his armor, we can force him to use his jutsu on a higher rank, making his armor visible to us and something we can deal with easier." Kiyomi suggested a course of action.
"Only you would consider a stronger version of the armor as something to "deal with easier"!" Meiko chuckled on the physical plane even while she exuded her cheer mentally as well.
"I'd rather deal with a technique that can kill me if it hits me dead-on but is visible and has limiters and weaknesses than something like the version he is using now." Kiyomi couldn't keep herself from grinning as well. Fighting alongside Meiko just had that kind of effect on her.
"Alright then, let's put on some pressure!" Meiko punched her own palm, preparing to take off. Even if a direct attack against someone with Hanshin's ability seemed suicidal, Meiko was the perfect suicidal idiot to force her blunt head through and place the much-needed pressure. She was the hammer of the team and sometimes a hammer was needed to bend and break the steel plating and break the ribs under them so that the scalpel could operate…
