A shadowy flash, faster than most eyes could track, telegraphed the hasty movement of a pair through the worn out settlement. Yordalar was smoking, full of empty houses with what few of its people remained conscious patrolling the streets and looking for a potential scapegoat that this tragedy could have been pinned on. To people that have lost so much in just one evening, it would not have mattered if the foreigners they found were from Iwagakure or Konoha…
"It is likely that we will get into a fight here. Given how those last guys were just a distraction, it would be reasonable to assume that these spies will be more powerful than the pair we fought as a distraction." Mana looked at Meiko with worry. While Mana was engaged in the interrogation a group of Yordalarans had found them and the blacksmith was forced to fight them off. A couple of nasty bumps and bruises covered the blacksmith's face and sides but even in her worn out state she managed to knock the search party out.
"What I'm more worried about is that spy waking up and attacking us from behind. You looked really happy, for whatever reason, I don't think him giving you the kind of news he gave you would make you smile…" Meiko shook her head, attempting to shake off Mana's concern the same way.
"What happened there was nothing short of a miracle. Things just went really well for once… Because of it, I believe that we can do this." Mana looked at the chaotic cushion of pillars skewering a smaller mound of dirt and dried out grass whereas a much more massive one laid right behind it. The metallic pillars that comprised the Eternal Fire were covered with staircases and other accessories from the outside that appeared to go nowhere and just go on for meters on end before simply ending.
"We'd stand a better chance at "doing it" if we found Kiyomi and Hanshin. I know you said we're on a very tight schedule but…" Meiko brought the more pressing issue up, only for Mana to express her hopeful state with another confident smile.
"That's why we're standing about talking right now – they'll catch up to us in a moment. I don't know how but they must have learned of the same information just a little bit later." Mana declared only for Kiyomi and Hanshin flicker in around the two. Kiyomi's chakra signature felt notably smaller than what it was before and had barely even begun to recover, Hanshin was in the best state out of the lot.
"Meiko, are you okay? I can't believe Mana didn't watch over your back!" Kiyomi examined the black bruises over Meiko's face before glaring at Mana in a way that allowed the magician to understand that this was just a joke and she did not truly blame her teammate for the beating Meiko took.
"Actually, I watched hers." Meiko grinned with pride, one of her eyes looked a little bit swollen which made only one half of the intended grin to properly translate whereas the entire right side of the blacksmith's face appeared completely lifeless.
"Yeah, that's about right…" Kiyomi sighed.
"Let Hanshin tell you something, this is enough chit-chat, we're sensitive on time. We need to prevent all the documents from being signed. In the worst case scenario, we will require to destroy those documents and kill all the witnesses that knew of them being signed." Hanshin took the time to explain the team their new field objective. For the first time in a while, he was behaving like a leader…
"That's not an option," Mana stated bluntly. She expected the special jounin in charge of their squad to make fun of her for this resolution but he merely placed his palm onto his face and stroke it gently, as if massaging it.
"In that case, I suggest you hurry the hell up." He taunted the team. The quartet charged on ahead only for a mighty blast of air pressure to scatter them apart before a rushing whirlpool washed them all away even further. Mana sensed it, but she sensed it too late. Whoever did this, they were fast and quite skilled, nobody to take lightly, as most gatekeepers would have been.
After rising above the surface, Mana channeled the chakra through her feet to stick to the water surface and not have to fight this first enemy while swimming about. Walking on water may have been an elementary chakra mastery technique, one that Mana did not herself invent, but it was primitive enough to where the magician considered it more of a concept than an actual jutsu and found it in her to use whereas normally she'd have had doubts about plagiarizing someone else's hard work.
The enemy that kept the Konoha team was a lone woman of long, flowing black hair and an aquamarine dress. Large ring earrings hung from her ears, not unlike those that the Yordalaran women wore making the magician a little hesitant to engage the woman as she may have been a Yordalaran. Hanshin shared no such hesitations, he leaped at the woman, bursting from underwater and soaring at the staircase on which she resided like a sky-splitting arrow tip.
"Water Style: Crystal Lake Drill!" the woman chanted out in a rather low-pitched tone for a woman, although still feminine enough to not be mistaken for that of a man's. Hanshin threw his fist forward, the entire arm of Black Vicious materialized from behind him while the legs appeared as well and stretched out downward, throwing intense jets of Fire Release chakra to keep driving the special jounin forward.
Hanshin must have known he had superior sheer strength and therefore intended to utilize these advantages to close in on the Water Style ninjutsu user. She made quite a costly effort to keep this battle at a long range from the get-go, that was a strong enough hint that if the Konoha ninja were to beat her and advance to the Eternal Flame, they needed to close the range right up to the face of the enemy kunoichi.
A vivid and concentrated stream of water burst from the woman's mouth, a shower that would have easily sliced through just about any material that could have existed. However, Black Vicious proved to be slightly superior, the fist continued to clench in pressure and keep driving on, piercing right through the stream and close the distance up. It was not an effortless venture, however, as Black Vicious' arm hung busted up and emitted troubling flares of base chakra release through the cracks.
"This woman… I don't think she's a Yordalaran collaborator at all." Mana shook her head. She spoke verbally as Kiyomi was saving the chakra for the time when she would need to fight. Seeing a ninja like this guarding the entryway made all three young ladies worried. Neither of the three was in any state to fight at their very best and there was certainly nothing average about this enemy.
"She does look like a Yordalaran." Kiyomi sighed. "I figured that was why you didn't jump into Hanshin's aid. You're in the best condition to fight out of the three of us and it's not like you to not throw yourself like a sacrificial lamb out first."
"This jutsu she used… It looks like something ideal for cutting through stone, minerals and various other hardened substances that a miner of Iwagakure would be required to precisely remove without damaging the mountain it came from too much. She is from Iwagakure, most likely." Mana voiced her theory while continuing to observe the clash between Hanshin and the woman.
While Kiyomi's remark was not in any way a demeaning one and just intended to cheek Mana's usual behavior in similar situations, at least the way in which the Yamanaka girl saw it, the magician actually found it quite to the point. Looking at Hanshin throwing fists and kicks and having them perfectly matched and then returned back to him by the woman he was fighting, revealing that this kunoichi was surprisingly adept at close-range as well, Mana leaped forward, using the blind spot of the woman being engaged with Hanshin to approach the fighting range.
"Hanshin-sensei! Leave this woman to me, you're the strongest out of the four of us and easily a match to the three of us combined. You need to save your strength on their strongest ninja. I am the least worn out of the ninja we have to spare, it is only fair that I take this woman on!" Mana shouted out. "Don't waste chakra on repairing your armor, just retreat and go on ahead!"
"Go on ahead?" Meiko questioned Mana's plan. "That's the most reckless strategy I've ever heard. We should just all take this woman on and keep moving on the same way as we go ahead!"
"No, she's right, if you're out for moving as fast as you can, that is," Hanshin spoke up, having jumped back and retreated to the other two kunoichi and left the Water Style ninjutsu user all for Mana to deal with. "This girl… She may just be a more reckless leader than Hanshin would ever be. Ready to sacrifice herself and the entire team, risk the success of the mission just so she doesn't have to kill anyone."
"One occupies the enemy while the rest move on? That's a risky way to fight, but it's just like Mana." Kiyomi grinned while looking for an opening so that the four could slip through and move on ahead.
It was immensely risky. It would have been even riskier if Mana could not sense the flaring up chakra signatures from inside the Eternal Flame. If the team rushing on ahead suddenly encountered a resistance vastly outnumbering their own numbers and got wiped out. In this case, the spies weren't all that numerous and had stretched out thin, one in each room, all leading to the meeting hall at the top floor, where there were multiple smaller chakra signatures – likely the collaborator politicians who were submitting the autonomy rights of Yordalar to Iwagakure at this very moment.
Mana threw a palm out in front, channeling Lightning Release chakra through it and forming it into the shape of rods that floated vertically above the two clashing kunoichi. Upon Mana's signal, the rods of Lightning Release chakra drove down into the wall and the staircase around the pair, electrifying the steel structure while still maintaining their form and discharging lightning bolts.
"Lightning Style: Magic Skewer Jutsu!" Mana yelled out, it was not that she was not skilled enough to use this jutsu without uttering its name. The call was made to alert her team – this was their cue to move.
"Hmph…" the enemy kunoichi lowered her chin and looked down. "You must think you're so smart, walling me off from attacking your team with those lightning rods of yours…"
Mana did not respond. Any attempt to power through the magician's jutsu would have shocked the Iwagakure kunoichi. While a C-Rank jutsu was a long shot from a significant blow to someone of her weight class but it was still augmentation of one's own endurance and pain one could avoid. If the woman used one of her long-range Water Style ninjutsu, she'd only aggravate the situation by giving the lightning rods something else to channel to her through.
For now, the Iwagakure kunoichi stood still, her eyes kept focused on the magician and not her team that flickered out and into the building in an instant. The moment the opening that Mana had provided her team was not needed – it dissolved into lightning sparks.
Facing this woman alone was a rushed decision. The Iwagakure ninja was in better physical condition, while normally Mana would have likely had a greater chakra reserve than her opponent, now even her chakra was drained out by a noticeable margin. Mana was at a disadvantage in pretty much every way it mattered. It would take an outright miracle to win this fight and remain in a suitable condition to assist her team any further.
A miracle on a lesser scale, however, than the one that Mana managed to pull off. A miracle of shocking a man just the right way to delete a specific pinch of memories while keeping the rest intact, while inside that man's own mind and lacking the necessary focus to properly utilize the jutsu in the first place.
Even if that one fortune's smile used out the entirety of Mana's luck reserve she had for the rest of her life, it was a miracle that made the magician believe in miracles. It was something that made Mana look forward more favorably toward a battle still ahead. A meeting that made dying here, fighting this woman absolutely not an option.
The two kunoichi stood and stared at each other. Technically, only Mana was at a disadvantage by merely standing and observing her opponent, the Iwagakure spy could have done this whole day. She was hardly a necessary participant in the signing of the documents in the meeting room of the Eternal Flame. Regardless of the disadvantage, making a move now would betray her fighting style, her stance and her moves to the opponent whereas without showing off too much she still could have surprised the woman and pulled off a quick and decisive victory if the surprise factor was utilized correctly.
The two were like two samurai locked in a standoff and waiting for the Sun to disappear under the horizon and signal the unavoidable resolution. Unlike how it was in the analogy, the Sun was hidden behind a shroud of gloom, it was only when the Iwagakure spy made the first move that the clash started out for real. Instead of engaging the woman, Mana flipped back and started plummeting down the staircase that led to nowhere, using the attraction of gravity itself to her advantage in order to gain some more range.
Perhaps she could have raced with the Iwagakure woman, tried and squeezed in a jutsu of her own in between the time when she noticed the twitch in her opponent's muscles and when the final hand seal was formed. Still, she did not know just what kind of techniques this kunoichi used, how many hand seals they required and what was the case with the woman's chakra control. Could she cast jutsu one-handed or by overcoming the need for hand seals completely through experience and training. All of those factors could have ended the battle prematurely. It would have been stupid to clash with this woman directly when Mana was losing in both the physical and stamina departments at the moment.
"Water Style: Great Waterfall Jutsu!" the woman declared with an authoritative tone unfit for a lowly spy. Mana's eyes twitched in surprise. This was a well-known to most Water Style users, therefore ninja from most of the ninja villages, ninjutsu technique. Why would the woman pick this technique? It was cumbersome to use, cost a load of chakra and was better suited for attacking a large number of weakened enemies and washing them away, not trying to pin down a single opponent.
Water surged from the woman's mouth, expanding exponentially in size, violence, and mass. Where it only came out as a single spray, about as sizeable as a spit-up mouthful, just meters away from its caster, the technique turned into a ferocious whirlpool that threatened to submerge the entire battlefield underwater. Wind currents formed around under Mana's feet, pushing the magician further away from the Eternal Flame walls and allowing the magician to evade the rushing waterfall in a crescent-shaped soaring flight using her Mystical Wings Jutsu.
The hungry whirlpools consumed the entire area underneath, forming a small lake, a couple of meters deep own below and washing away an entire district of the settlement with effortless grace to its destructive might. A shocking realization hit Mana, it was not a direct hit that the woman required with this technique, it was to create a viable water source for the battle ahead. The few techniques she had used did not require a water source – they both could have been spit up from the mouth, using the natural hydration resources of the user and vastly augmenting them with chakra. Now, by creating this lake, the woman removed a very nasty weakness that most Water Style users shared – the need for a water source while using their ninjutsu.
Mana scolded herself for not realizing this sooner. Had she called this instantly, right when the battle started, she'd have been able to not worry about being hit with the jutsu and simply used her own techniques in response. Knowing that the enemy was planning such a cumbersome technique for a setup would have allowed her to win the battle outright, then again, if she made such a call and was wrong, she'd have lost it and died just as easily…
No. She should have known. There was no way that this woman was a skilled enough Water Style user to be able to form perfect Water Style ninjutsu just out of the humidity in the air or to simply create them out of nothing. It demanded an elite rank of ninja and this spy in the middle of a Yordalar takeover operation who served as a sacrificial gatekeeper could not have been it.
"It was a good call to have your teammates make it inside. A moment longer and I would have washed them all away…" the Iwagakure woman taunted Mana. At least she was oblivious to the mind games and planning that the magician was going through.
"By spreading out the range of your flood, you drastically lost most of its destructive power. If you focused this jutsu into a vortex, you may have threatened one of us. The way this jutsu is now, it would have done nothing but refresh my friends and washed their wounds." Mana shot back while working through a further plan of action. With the enemy having formed their water source, she needed to gain an advantage of her own of equal or greater value if she was to not get wrecked by the drastically empowered potential of the woman's Water Style ninjutsu.