"They're both waiting for us on the bridge." Mana established through the use of her chakra sensory. "Their chakra sizes are moderate, about the size of any one of us if you exclude Hanshin-san."

Good, that means we can kick their ass easily, we have the numbers on them!" Meiko exclaimed. She raised her fist in the excitement of a favorable brawl.

"Chakra size is rarely an accurate measurement for skill." Mana tried cooling Meiko down. "They seem to be under the impression that we will be passing the Kannabi Bridge, we don't really have to though. We can easily bypass them by dashing around the place."

"That's if we don't fall for another trap," Kiyomi noted. "I'd say it would be safer to just kill them and be done with it, that way even if we do fall for a trap, we can just get out of it and continue on our way. What if the reason they're waiting at the bridge is that every other passageway across is trapped?"

"Can you sense any of the traps?" Hanshin wondered, turning at Mana.

"I can sense plenty of small signatures all around but they may not be traps. I can't sense anything that's not purely chakra-based so if they set an explosive note or something similar, I'll only sense it when it activates, seconds before it's off." Mana shrugged.

"Hmph, for someone who played them and forced them to back off, you're awfully hesitant to engage them." Kiyomi grinned at Mana. "If they're pestering travelers, I thought you'd want to stop them."

"We don't absolutely have to fight them, that means we shouldn't." Mana voiced her position. "If we're careful enough, we can avoid the traps they've set around the bridge, given they're even there."

"Awww, come on, they clearly wanted to kill us, aren't you a little bit curious as to why?" Meiko leaned back, for someone who was willing to engage a pair of rogue Uchiha ninja, she was awfully relaxed.

"There's been a price on my head ever since I became a chuunin, there's a great one on Hanshin-san's. They did appear interested in Kiyomi though…" Mana tried playing Meiko's appeal to Mana's curiosity, a powerful stimulus for certain, but then she herself appeared to contradict her own feeble effort to downplay the allure of curiosity.

"It does not matter if Mana's curious or not, we're going." Hanshin declared. "We don't know if these losers are in cahoots with the foreign spies trying to rile up Yordalar. They may know something and I have two skilled interrogators on my team. Plus, they're Red Hawk scumbags and killing them for the Uchiha would be just a show of good faith."

Kiyomi extended her tongue, making a gagging mimic at her two teammates while Hanshin played being oblivious to the goofy reaction of the Yamanaka heiress. Mana sighed and placed her hands in the pockets of her blazer, raising her shoulders up in objection to what her team was about to do as if she was outside and underdressed in mid-winter. The four figures of the newly assembled squad heading to Yordalar disappeared after their targets, covering the entire distance in a nearly instantaneous dash forward.

"Oh… You're really cocky to engage us in an open field." The first Uchiha teased the emerging Konoha party.

"We both know the Kannabi Bridge cannot be covered from any of the treelines. The only way through is across." Hanshin stroke his hair, breathing in the fresh edge of the Fire Country air while his chest lifted up and expanded vastly, the man tensed up his entire body as if showing it off in an effective showy pose.

"That's not the only reason why we chose to stop you here." The second Uchiha hit a smirk and glanced at his partner.

The first Uchiha swung his hands around in a circular motion as if channeling his chakra but as Mana's sensory tipped her off – that was not it. He was not molding anything inside his body, there was something else to be afraid of but given how nobody appeared to have a solid clue about what it was, Mana decided to stay on her toes. She would not want to use Flower Petal Sanctuary again, using that illusion twice before she even arrived at the mission destination would be a lousy start for something as important and dangerous as the road ahead.

Something popped on the first Uchiha's wrist. Something that sounded familiar to Mana, in fact, she wore something very similar on her forearms right above the wrists – springing mechanisms. Mana's expelled cards, ones she could have flung at the enemy as if shooting them from a cannon like one of the weapon dispensers she saw the Syndicate use before. It appeared that the ones this Uchiha nukenin used expelled steel wire, that must have been how he made that impressive wire trap before.

This one was no mere trap, at least not one of the passive kind – he was firing off a web formation as if attempting to scoop the opposing party up in his net. That did not seem good at all. The steel wire bent and twisted around Hanshin's body, Mana's glance sharpened when she noticed it – even if the man kept his ability invisible, her sensory tipped the magician off immediately. At this point, Mana was skilled enough to use it as a second set of eyes – she saw the armor clear as day even when she could not actually see it.

Meiko dashed backward, she tried outracing the steel wire but she underestimated the lack of space that the Kannabi Bridge offered for maneuvering. Just when Mana thought about how novice Meiko's mistake was, the blacksmith's shoes lit up with actual blazes of Fire Release chakra, launching the young woman like a rocket at a diagonal backward direction. It appeared that Meiko would have the raw speed to escape the snapping trap. Or, at least, she would have… But the strings connected with something barely visible. Something attached to Meiko's shin. A piece of wire that was left there since the first trap she fell for, with a scooping motion of the falling wire trap, the blacksmith found herself engulfed in the imbued with chakra steel wire net.

Just when the magician thought it was about time she herself worked on a strategy to avoid capture, She felt dozens of individual strings pulling her towards the net. While Mana's Flower Petal Sanctuary fooled the two before, she didn't quite avoid having leftovers stick to her body, ones that she did not notice or thought being relevant before they lit up with chakra signals like little beams and extended to connect with the larger net being cast. Before she knew it, Mana was completely encased in the net.

"What the shit? Not this again!" Kiyomi grumped, wrestling with the net again. In this terrain, surrounded by a canyon from every direction and a narrow, dying vein of water deep below, with her skillset in mind, the Yamanaka had few options to avoid the chakra net herself.

While the strings still lingered and brimmed with chakra, extending from the long sleeves of the first Red Hawk member, the Uchiha weaved a collection of hand seals. Mana felt an amount of chakra rising from within the depths of the enemy's network, unlike anything she's felt before. It was like clusters of stars all exploded in synchrony, a combination of explosive pillars all about to erupt into a singular jutsu. It was clear that the Uchiha did not mean to devastate and leave the entire quadrant of existence just as an empty void so the technique's destructive power had to be massively compressed and channeled. The amount of control necessary for such a feat was almost too much to believe achievable. Then again, if someone was capable of such a feat, it would have been the Uchiha…

"Fire Style: Great Dragon Howitzer!" the Uchiha roared out, flares of flames burst from inside his mouth when he spoke even before he expunged the colossal ocean of flames. Instead of spreading over the canyon and the country beyond, leaving the surrounding battlefield as nothing but a field of raining ash in its rampaging path, the chakra imbued steel wire appeared to absorb and guide the technique into a singular, direct path.

And thus the reason why these two chose to fight on a bridge – a straight and narrow passageway became evident. The mother technique of this jutsu was capable of untold, cosmic scale devastation, it required unmatched, almost legendary skill to contain but together with the skilled use of steel wire, it formed a mighty combination of a guided, all-incinerating pathway, almost like a cannon blast that seemed impossible to survive.

"Black Vicious: Into the Fire!" Hanshin smacked his palms together, forming his Black Vicious armor while the flames had managed to spread barely an inch after being unleashed from their master's mouth. The disembodied hands covering and attempting to peel bits of Black Vicious' flesh off pulled and tore the armor open, revealing glowing openings in the armor that fired off streams of blazing-red flames at the focused Fire Release attack.

The attacks clashed together, pushing the other back before switching the roles and giving way. For a brief moment it had appeared like a deadlock but just as it had appeared that Hanshin's Black Vicious would lose the struggle, the armor clapped its hands together and more hands peeled more pieces of the armor away, letting showering streams of water free from within the armor, just like the flames had come before. With the pumping jets of water weakening the opposing technique, Hanshin's Black Vicious had managed to overcome the enemy and push the directed yet greatly weakened river of flames back.

"Black Vicious: The Rain Technique!" Hanshin roughed out through great effort.

Mana had noticed a red flare in the eyes of the second Uchiha, the partner Red Hawk grabbed his worn out by the power struggle friend by his waist and swung out of the way using a piece of steel wire that he had improvised a zip-line out of. While the second Uchiha was unlikely to possess the skill in steel wire use matching that of his peer, he had the infernal Sharingan eye that allowed him to nab simple techniques such as these and use them when needed after they were borrowed.

"Get out of these bindings. Do not drag Hanshin down or I shall dispose of you next." The special jounin gave the trio a mean glare. Mana couldn't stomach the fact that her hesitance to go all-out on a battle she wasn't preparing for almost cost her and her friends her life, she couldn't truly meet her superior's gaze for a couple of moments after the blazes had cleared out in the air. Meiko appeared to be amused if nothing else, just laughing it off as a form of a friendly apology.

The Yamanaka heiress looked irritated but nowhere near as much as Mana had thought she'd be irked by this capture. The old Kiyomi would have been sent into a fury that'd have left her chakra control unorganized and sent the blonde into a fit of a mighty yet unfocused rampage. There was no way that the Kiyomi Mana used to know would have taken being outwitted and played by an Uchiha as kindly as this new and improved young woman did. She was almost behaving like a mature and conserved kunoichi.

"You've got some nerve, you bastard! Coming at us, the only true inheritors of the Uchiha name with a technique like that!" the wire-using Uchiha took a step forward that looked more like an enraged stomp. "You dare mock our ancient and revered legends of the Tempestuous God of Valor – the Susanoo with this cheap copycat technique!?"

"Calm yourself, Nashi. This is not an opponent we can just lash out at lightly. You could not overcome him with your best shot when he was alone and we were fortunate enough to restrain his team, now, with their aid, we need to play this perfectly." His partner tried to step in before Nashi Uchiha did something that would get both of the two Uchiha killed.

"The Rain Technique?" Mana heard a mocking sentiment resonate within the mental link, the thoughts rang with Kiyomi's voice.

"Silence. While Hanshin was learning this technique, Hanshin needed a placeholder name. Sadly, by the time Hanshin had come up with a better name, his body was too used to the mantra of the placeholder name which would have made learning to use the technique while chanting the correct name take a whole more year. Hanshin has no such time to waste on trivialities such as these…" the team leader replied on the mental link, for a second Mana felt surprised to hear the team leader's thoughts on the mental link. It used to be something that Kiyomi would only extend to the three of the Team Hokage but it had seemed like the Yamanaka had drawn similar conclusions to Mana – rationality and an all-out approach was what was needed here.

Sentiments and quirks would only get them all killed and none of them had the luxury of dying here.

"As for you! Let Hanshin tell you something, Red Hawk scumbag…" Hanshin pointed his finger at Nashi while stroking his hair with the other hand and bending his knees to the side to show off the behind parts of his body better. "Hanshin doesn't need to mock anything, you two losers do that fine all by yourselves. Don't think I haven't noticed you innovating on an old bitch of a jutsu there… What would your Red Hawk pals say if they found out you doing something like that?"

"What does he mean?" Meiko's thoughts resonated through the mental link.

"The jutsu that Nashi used was Fire Style: Great Fire Annihilation. It is a sacred Uchiha technique because it was invented by Uchiha Hakari – the Second Hokage. It seems like Nashi had used it together with his strings, just like the Fire Style: Dragon Flame Jutsu, combining the two is a surprisingly powerful yet a very unorthodox combination for the Uchiha." Mana replied.

"Yeah, Uchiha tend to think everything they do is perfect the way it is. They jutsu need no innovation, their eyes can overcome any obstacle and their attitudes are just fine the way it is. Since these Red Hawks broke off because they weren't liking the way their clan was handling matters, they're likely to be even more conservative. A combo like that coming from a Red Hawk really caught me by surprise myself." Kiyomi joined in.

Mana's hands lit up with lightning crackles around the palms while she took a fighting stance and prepared to truly fight for the first time in a long while. It would have been foolish to say that she had gotten rusty, these past three years it was nothing but ceaseless training, strategies, and preparation for the only fight that mattered but it would all be for naught if she did not live to see it. Meiko dragged her arm across the plates of armor covering her arm so swiftly and hard that her gauntlets dragging across her arm formed small sparks which only strengthened the popping effect from when the blacksmith unsealed her short sword and ignited it with blazing flames so intense and sizeable that they easily doubled the sword's length.

"I'm off," Kiyomi announced all of a sudden before flickering away in a blitz. Mana and Meiko followed their retreating comrade with calm eyes.

"W-Wait…" the second Uchiha extended his large hand forward as if attempting to stop the long overdue departure of the Yamanaka heiress.

"Now you're the one breaking formation, Gubezuri," Nashi warned his larger comrade.

"B-But if we can't kill the Yamanaka heiress that symbolizes our clan's weakness, what has all this been for?" Gubezuri finally showed a fanatic chink in his armor of calm and reservation.

"It's fine if she runs away. The only reason why these four would come here in the first place is that they need passage. If she tucks her tail and runs away – they'll fail their mission. That means the village will have to punish her, they won't, our weakling peers will do nothing and further showcase how weak they've gotten. More people will see that we're right. She'll probably do more good by living through and failing than if we just kill her here, come to think of it."

Meiko and Mana simultaneously charged ahead. It was a foolish move, to charge at two protectors of this narrow space that negated the numbers advantage as well as granted them the advantage of terrain as they were undoubtedly bolstering their skillset to fight exactly in this terrain. The only sensible way to fight here would have been to wait for the enemy to open up, to run at them first and show their hand. As long as the enemy did not choose a method for an attack, they had an infinite possibility of cards they could put on the table, the moment they played their cards, they only had those they played. Things were no different in combat.

Meiko shot her right foot out forward, stopping her quick advance and swiping her blazing sword in a horizontal slash well out of the range of even her chakra coated gladius. Regardless, the chakra coat ignited the air that the blade cut through, creating explosive pockets of air brimming with firestorms. Regardless, both of the Uchiha took a leap off of the bridge, using the string reeling devices on their wrists to swing under the bridge and avoid the exploding and flaming air pockets that Meiko sent their way.

The two Uchiha used the momentum of their swing to attempt and launch them onto the bridge again, this time with swords in their hand that laid under their cloaks this entire time, aiming to impale both kunoichi simultaneously. Just as they showed their faces over the bridge, a pair of large feet dug in deep into their jawlines simultaneously instead, sending both Uchiha rocketing back and down into the bottom of the canyon below.

"How're ye assholes doin'?" Usuzoku taunted the Uchiha that quite obviously could no longer hear him.

"I bet they're thinking, "I only took my eyes off of the enemy for a second", huh?" Usubane hopped, overflowing with energy on her feet.

"Don't repeat the enemy's mistake, you two, their Sharingan were off, they did not wish to strain them due to previous use," Mana warned the two rabbits she had summoned during the brief second she was gifted while the enemy tried to swing under the bridge and therefore did not see the magician pull out her rabbits. "It won't be nearly as easy to keep landing blows on them."