The escalation of the talking stage to when the team sparring session broke out came without any bells ringing or clear cut lines. Before Mana would even properly enter her fighting stance and properly evaluate the scuffle she got herself into she felt that familiar feeling of disruption in her own chakra pathways, not only that – she sensed it also in Kouta's system. Yushijin had activated his Last Resort genjutsu again, this time, without warning.
Even if they proved to be completely ineffective fighting together, just having Kouta beside her helped Mana a great deal as it gave her another target to identify potential genjutsu on. Even as a sensor, Mana could not sense her own chakra per se unless she controlled it in a very specific way to where so much of it leaked out that she could pick up on the leaking signature. By having Kouta there beside her, she would have a blank slate to go by.
Busting through Yushijin's illusion came more and more naturally, Mana had almost expected to catch her opponent unprepared by managing to shatter it for both her and Kouta with a disrupting influx of mental and physical energy flowing through her body, in just the right amounts to derail Yushijin's influence on her and Kouta's system too.
Something was wrong. Yushijin had not advanced one step forward, surely he had a short opening while he activated his illusion and before Mana had dispelled it. While it may not have been enough to exploit properly, even with Yushijin's speed, he should not have known that… Unless… Just blindly swiping his still sheathed sword to bust some bones was not his intention.
"Thanks for that!" Kouta declared and shifted his stance into a more offensive one, preparing to commit the greatest mistake in the last couple of hours. Mana threw her hand back to press it against his chest and stop him.
"Stop." She uttered.
"What's wrong? Let's go at it. If you don't want to fight you can just stay behind me and break Yushijin's illusions, that will be profoundly useful all in itself." Kouta objected. Since when did they question each other's judgments?
"Where is Erumo right now?" Mana tried to make her eager to rampage boyfriend think.
"Hmmm… Good call…" Kouta finally realized after looking around with a frantic look, wishing nothing more than to verify Erumo's location so his charge would be justified but after failing to find them and realizing the danger of not knowing for certain where his teammate was, calmed down somewhat.
"It appears we've entered a stalemate… Neither of us will advance…" Yushijin grinned.
He wished it was so. Sure, he was smarter than to attack one against two when his ability to handle Mana alone was still in question, obviously neither Mana nor Kouta will attack while the second incarnation of Konoha's Great Trapster in the making was still lost, regardless, every second wasted standing around was time given for Erumo to set up for her favored type of battle.
"Can you do something for me?" Mana asked Kouta without turning her eyes away from the direction of the enemy. Her sensory could vaguely track Erumo's location despite her greatly improved skill at concealing her presence visually, minimizing the sounds she made and neutralizing her smell completely in just the brief split-second it took for Yushijin to distract the two opponents of his.
"So… Are you going to tell me what?" Kouta raised an eyebrow. "I can't read your mind, you know…" he uttered after an awkward pause in between anyone speaking up.
"Sorry about that, to think that I'd get used to the mental link after just one mission…" Mana cracked a grin to compliment her genuine apology. "I'd like you to distract him".
"B-But I thought I wasn't to…"
"Long-range…" Mana whispered, Kouta may have been a goof at times but he appeared to read her lips just fine and nod in excitement. The Juugo halfling aimed his extended hand at the enemy allowing its shape to shift into that of a large cannon from the elbow down, dyeing almost wooden in texture but Mana knew from experience that the material that the Juugo skin morphed into was incalculably sturdier than mere wood.
"Chakra Accelerator Beam!" Kouta chanted out while his body continued to gather the dust of chakra that burst from his pores and concentrate them into a single mass somewhere deep inside that cannon of his. The technique did not feel all too powerful so how exactly would he distract anyone with it? Also… Mana felt a bit confused about her boyfriend standing with his cannon firmly aimed at her as if intending to blast through her to get to the opponent despite such a motion being fruitless.
A deluge of light made the magician cover up, too sudden to dodge, too unexpected to even comprehend to try doing so, so warm and bright and yet… Despite the warmth all around her, Mana didn't really feel all too hurt by the beam that was undoubtedly blasting right at her. Like a burst of light, it split around Mana and converged behind her to travel at the enemy once more.
Yushijin appeared much more used to this technique. He just examined it with smugness, closing his eyes while lowering his chin and resting his body easier. The swordsman must have expected a much more solid attack to come but the name of Kouta's jutsu calmed the squad leader down.
"You do know I've seen you use this jutsu, right?" he taunted Kouta. Yushijin's familiarity with the jutsu was remarkable as he managed to exactly pinpoint the moment when the light stopped bothering his eyes and when it was comfortable to open them back up.
While the Konohagakure chuunin appeared confident and faked some smugness about his teammate's technique, in part he was rushing to open his eyes because of the irksome lightning crackling sound. It was after Yushijin gazed at the direction in which the beam flowed through before that he saw his fears verified – Mana standing in a low stance with intense lightning jolts branching out from the overpowering aura of Lightning Release chakra emitted from around her body.
Most of the jolts connected together and formed one solid, sword-shaped Lightning Release projectile after another. By the time Yushijin opened his eyes, the fifth sword had formed and floated around Mana, held suspended only by the connected stream of lightning that fed chakra from the aura exuded from Mana right into the sword.
"H-Hey now…" Yushijin expressed his respectful fear of the magician's technique. It did not require a genius to identify an absolutely ridiculous jutsu to be hit by and this definitely looked like it. Yushijin surely was experienced enough to realize that the jutsu was a clear A-Rank.
"Lightning Style: Supreme Magic Pierce!" Mana chanted out while directing her palm in a chopping motion at the area where Yushijin was standing. Her mastery over this jutsu was questionable but the danger behind it was precision – the ability to focus the entirety of absolute power of A-Rank ninjutsu into sword-shaped projectiles capable of delivering them with pinpoint accuracy.
The swords thundered on ahead, losing their shape a little to gain a small lightning tail at their tip while they spiraled onward at the intended target, skewering the area around Yushijin. The eyes of the Konoha swordsman lagged behind the projectiles, noticing them only once the swords were embedded into the soil halfway and were about to dissolve into jolts of lightning.
Had Mana aimed her swords at Yushijin, she might have killed him outright, depending on the areas hit. Even if everything that she was taught by Chestnut Hanasaku screamed in her ear to not look down at her opponent this way and trust their strength in being able to survive this technique, this was one chance she did not take. There was another that this technique was meant for.
The discharge from the dissolving swords shocked Yushijin as it was near-impossible to avoid even after the projectiles completely missed. The charges weren't powerful ones but they were extending widely and acted violently, branching out into multiple intertwined nets of lightning that had the nasty tendency to track for other electric signatures. Such as the impulses of neurons in one's body.
Yushijin grunted in pain, his body came dangerously close to collapsing but the ninja did not surrender himself to the allure of gravity. Stumbling as his stance was, he was upright after taking something like that and that in itself was impressive.
"Combo for a combo, guess none of us is completely hoping at working together…" Kouta grinned, his effective distraction was part of why Mana managed to channel the Supreme Magic Pierce. And to think that she very nearly missed the chance by getting all worked up over her boyfriend's technique, she actually needed to trust him more. It was an odd thing to say about someone so close to Mana's heart as this young man was.
"Oh, but you haven't still seen ours…" Yushijin closed his eyes, Mana noted how the swordsman was still slouched over. Surely he couldn't have been hit that hard…
"Move, now!" Mana yelled out, turning to Kouta. The Juugo was already busy blasting away from his current location, his heels morphed into jets that fired out wild chakra flares from somewhere within Kouta's body to accelerate the young man away.
Mana moved, just narrowly slipping out of a loop of steel wire that rose up after Yushijin had yanked on another one on his end. Erumo was smart. She knew that Mana was a sensor and would have been able to sense the complicated patterns of her steel wire as long as any chakra was channeled through it so she left it cold on purpose. When exactly did she poke out an end for Yushijin to pull on? How were those two communicating? Was the connection between them really this strong?
"Chakra Colt!" Kouta growled out while extending one of his hand forward, still in-motion from avoiding the attempt to entangle him with strings, the extended arm morphed into a cannon that, unlike other Juugo techniques Mana had seen did not expand the size of Kouta's arm but merely changed it into a tube-like shape. A handful of chakra spheres fired from the morphed chakra cannon flying right at Yushijin.
The ninja swordsman danced around his teammate's attack, blurring in and out of vision as he moved. While Kouta's attack seemed pointless and something he fired dragged on his tongue by his reckless desire to lose control in battle, it did show Mana something interesting – Yushijin's speed was much more than what she initially perceived it to be. It could have led to a nasty surprise. Yushijin only attacked her with wide dashes, mid to long range, but when his body needed to move while standing around or moving in incredibly short distances it excelled.
"You're wasting chakra, I was unable to follow up on that…" Mana let her teammate know.
"You could have attacked alone then." Kouta pouted his lips. His expression suggested that the young man knew he was wrong yet chose to object regardless just out of the displeasure of admitting it.
"I'd have wasted my chakra too then." The magician replied.
There it was again. That irksome sensation of Yushijin's chakra entering their systems. He was doing it again! It was even more blunt and fruitless than Kouta's attack was… What was he trying to achieve here? Mana dispelled the illusion near-effortlessly. It cost more effort to dispel an illusion that it did to cast it, even more, if the illusion was of higher rank but Mana had much more chakra than Yushijin, to begin with so she could spare it. It was safe to say that no victory would be achieved by Yushijin relying on his Last Resort so…
"He's buying Erumo more time to set up her traps! We need to take 'em out quick!" Kouta growled out again. Black marks started crawling up his skin from under his clothes where Mana assumed they were festering and his skin was completely black. The immense chakra beaming out from the young man as he lost a little bit more of his control made the black marks light up with a flame-like blazing glow. Kouta's widened eyes and his petrifying pupils raced across the entire battlefield like those of a madman that had an itch he wanted to scratch but he could not find it.
The Juugo extended his morphed hands down as more and more tubes formed all over his changing limbs. The wooden texture of his shifting skin ascended all the way up to his shoulders with a couple of streaks stretching out to his chin. Tiny chakra dust started flowing into the exposed tubes while a robust glow beamed from the hollow depths of Kouta's morphed limbs.
"No more hiding, I'll blast it all away!" Kouta pretty much screamed out maniacally as he directed his transformed arms right at the ground beneath his feet. Normally, Mana would have considered such a mad and destructive strategy a bluff but, given the drastic transformation that the Juugo had gone through, at the moment she didn't even doubt that Kouta truly intended to destroy all of the ground beneath their feet to where every tool and trap hidden would be completely obliterated.
A gentle melody filled the air. Kouta's eyes widened even more from the maniacal high they were stuck in to the point where the blood vessels around his eyes became dangerously apparent as they stretched out in eggplant-colored branching patterns all across the face of the young man. Similarly, Yushijin froze in place while his body became paralyzed with the shock of immense pleasure surging up and down his system, overtaxing every neuron in his body as both pleasing sights, heavenly smells and soothing melodies drove the bodily systems of everyone hearing Mana's whistled melody into a nearly trance-like state.
"Genjutsu: Sweet Lullaby." Mana sang out, still keeping her illusion up. After seeing Kouta's eyes squint and close in fatigue as the body of the transformed Juugo became too worn out to contain the combat between his raging murderous instincts that the transformation brought out in him and the serenity that Mana's illusion originated within him, she finally decided that it was enough.
Kouta peeled his face off the ground and laughed out with an ignorant smile and apologetic eyes. He knew that he lost control there but he felt too bad about it to even apologize. Mana sighed, she was not a hundred percent sure that her illusion would have that sort of effect on the Juugo. The wild transformation that the Juugo went through was a total mystery to the magician and illusions were fickle things. If the voices in Kouta's head screaming bloody murder snapped him out too early – both Mana and everyone else around the reckless Kouta would have been in trouble.
Yushijin flipped over on his back. Mana noticed that the squad leader did not even attempt to sleep, choosing instead to just stare at the sky for a while. After noticing that something around the camp was odd, Yushijin flipped back onto the other side and then lifted his head only to meet Mana's look with his own baffled eyes.
"Nightmares…" Mana uttered, doing her best not to wake up Kouta who slept like a baby by her side, thinking that it was her body that his hands were wrapping over when in fact he was about to start snuggling with a log. Erumo kind of botched her substitution during the training. She had a clever idea that Mana had not yet figured, she sealed a bunch of useless objects into sealing tags to be used for substitution if she did not have anything proper in mind when she needed it.
Granted, only someone with a very setup oriented fighting style like Erumo could have utilized that sort of trick. Nobody else had the time to plant and unseal all the logs, bags and frying pans that the trapster had stored in her pouch in the form of sealing tags. Not that it served much use even when it was used – Erumo didn't know that you couldn't just substitute out of most illusions, still, she found out that day and that was what training was for, ultimately.
At least now the log served as companionship for Kouta and a source for smiling to Mana. Yushijin stood up and quietly walked up to the tree that Mana was sitting by. Erumo lifted her head up, observing Yushijin walk past her but after a gesture from the squad leader to go back to resting she hesitantly did just that. They didn't decide on who was on duty, there probably wasn't supposed to be anyone on duty, or Mana should have been automatically since she was the only sensor in the team.
"She must have thought you were watching the camp…" Yushijin whispered after pointing at Erumo's direction with his chin. "Does it get tiring? I bet you have to stay and guard the camp all the time as a sensor…"
"Not really. Most of the time I work alone and to truly be effective at sensing far enough a sensor has to concentrate and expand their sensory further… It's pretty soothing, closes out your other senses so it drives you to sleep instantly." Mana admitted.
"Speaking from experience?" Yushijin wondered.
"No, I mostly worked alone. The few times I did not, things just worked out…" Mana admitted.
"It's great having you with us. I've never seen anyone calm Kouta just like that." Yushijin said.
"Truth be told, I feel like we could have done way better… Makes me realize how little we've actually worked together with him." Mana sighed. "Most of the time we were stumbling over one another, our teamwork was a mess. His fighting style changed completely after these three years."
"He's been missing out on team training just to train or work with his father, that's probably why." Yushijin looked at his teammate with sympathetic eyes.
"It means a lot to Kouta that his father acknowledges him. Him being back in the village used to be such a big deal to him." Mana smiled while looking at the careless slumber of the young man beside her. Not even two people whispering right beside him couldn't as much as disturb him.
"Don't be so hard on yourself, you did well. A couple of reliable combinations is enough. At least after today, you're no longer a stranger to Team Fir, I guess you could say you're an honorary member." The right side of Yushijin's face lifted up slightly in a reserved half-smile.
There were no signatures anywhere around the camp. Just crickets chirping somewhere within an arm's reach.
