Mana's eyes fluttered. Vision still felt blurry and something burning irritated her chest, encouraging the magician to cough her lungs out freely. Had Sore-T not maintained a tight grip around Mana's wrist, she may have tried escaping and gaining some space. She could not use Flower Petal Sanctuary and disperse to safety while the enemy had a grip on the real her. Well… Technically she could have… It just would have been all sorts of pointless.
"Keep holding on to her. We'll take care of her teammates." Uru-V grinned as if he held all of the aces in his hands.
"Guys. Stop this now, there's no point to feuding with Konoha when we can be working together." Ara-K tried getting up in between Uru-V and the Konoha ninja.
"So… You're not faking." Mana's weak voice uttered through the small cave, soon to be drowned out by the overwhelming rumble of feet, the brushing of thick fur and the bumping of bones touching against the surfaces of the cave walls while the rushing hordes of tribesmen struggled to choose which ones of them would make their way to the invaders the first.
"W-What?" Ara-K looked at Mana with confusion.
A burst of lightning passed through Mana's body. She would have been an idiot to devise a jutsu that worked to deter the enemy from attacking at close distance and then failed to cast that jutsu when put in a hold. The flicker of Magician's Touch caught Sore-T unprepared. The giant roared out in pain, the irises of his eyes greyed out and turned blank while his voice weakened. Even after Mana had ceased her jutsu, smoke still lingered from the powerhouse's hunched and weakened body.
A disturbing humming noise moved toward Mana. One as if a giant bee possessing millions of pairs of wings decided to move them all at once. It was surrounded by this noise that Hagi-S' victims met their grisly fates.
"Lightning Style: Perun's Judgment!" Hagi-S yelled out, intensifying the stream of Lightning Release chakra, adding an additional layer of ninjutsu atop of the chakra coating that he applied to his conductive whips.
Mana had first considered attempting to avoid the lash of the storming whips but as if prompted by fighting instinct about the limited space and the skill of her opponent, in addition, the complications of dodging a flexible, long-range weapon such as the whip in such close distance, she chose a different method to deal with the enemy.
The Konoha kunoichi raised her hand up, letting her Magician's Touch pass through not her entire body but just her arm, from the elbow to the nail, by applying a Lightning Release ninjutsu of similar strength, the magician effectively cancelled out the Lightning Release coatings of the whip and allowed the weapon to wrap around her hand harmlessly.
"You were testing me?" Ara-K wondered.
"Not really. I was caught unprepared right then, that's true, I just felt a bit curious to see if your kind nature was all an act. I am very glad to know that it was not." Mana smiled with a taste of her own warmth at the Kumogakure ninja.
"One of us did not think this through the whole way!" Hagi-S taunted Mana while he stepped atop of his neutralized whip and pulled the magician, manipulating the pair of lashers to subdue the magician in bindings. Mana couldn't help but grunt in pain as the pressure built up and forced her into rather uncomfortable positions. She was too inexperienced in combating this sort of weapon to reposition herself with total efficiency, all she could do was do her best to not open herself up too much.
"About time somebody shuts you…" Uru-V grumbled. His entire body froze in mid-charge.
"V?" Kari-E called out to her teammate who did not as much as blink for the momentary pause in his movements. In a mighty dash, Yushijin passed through and behind the wide open competitor. Yushijin's sword remained in its horizontal position, even in limited space to use his weapon, the Konoha swordsman knew the perfect way to utilize his weapon, instead of messing himself up with wide-reaching swings he used his claymore more like a spear.
"Lightning Shimmer!" Kari-E cried out while a more intense aura of lightning surrounded her and then ate her up, creating an intense armor coating of Lightning Release chakra that dwarfed out even her previous display. It was self-evident that the Yamanaka was holding back earlier to better keep the deal she struck. Now all the gloves appeared off. The Yamanaka turned her attention to her teammate beside her, apparently, the blonde missed the long-range support that her teammate used to provide on the battlefield, one that has proven to be super effective in the limited space of a corridor in-between two caves.
Ara-K weaved hand seals, Mana noted that while the power of Ara-K's ninjutsu techniques was considerable, her hand seal speed left plenty to be desired. Despite her building up a mighty technique, the magician did not feel any immediate necessity to intercept and take out the glass cannon just yet. Had Ara-K wished to attack Mana or any of her teammates, she would not have built her techniques up this way and molded her chakra so slowly. She was preparing for something different entirely…
"Lightning Style: Lightning Dragon Jutsu!" Ara-K turned behind to launch a blinding flash of dragon head-shaped light. The jolt filled the entire cave corridor and exploded into a mighty thunderstorm at the end on the other side, firing off expansive lightning bolts the opposite direction that lightning bolts were meant to come down in.
"I held back, Mana," Ara-K stated while looking right at the struggling for freedom of movement magician.
"I know…" Mana sighed. As if her reply was meant to signal something, Kouta and Erumo both lunged at the creepy baldy with the mission of freeing their subdued teammate in mind.
"This has to be some bad jo…" Hagi-S prepared to taunt his Konoha opponents by slipping the looped whips off of Mana's arms and then reigniting them to rip the Konoha pair to a pile of limbs and slices. Before he could, however, he felt the gentle yet cold touch of Mana's arm placed to his forehead and the magician's cold eyes staring right back at him.
In a desperate attempt to push Mana away and keep her from using her Magician's Touch to seriously fry Hagi-S' brain, Kari-E lunged at Mana with her full might. Using her best evasive effort, Mana managed to avoid her opponent. She could not counterattack, given how Kari-E was coated with billions upon billions of volts and because of that her martial arts style felt somewhat incomplete, it almost threw off Mana's rhythm but if having her rhythm thrown off would have meant Mana's ultimate failure all by itself, she'd have never become the champion of the Sun Disc arena.
At last an opening presented itself to Mana, having found her opponent open, after Kari-E performed a jumping kick far too ambitious, the magician extended her arm forward, clutched in a lion's paw position and applied the Magician's Touch to her entire body, neutralizing both techniques as they were about equal in rank and power.
With Kari-E wide open, Mana prepared a stiff and decisive strike. Before she could perform the same mistake as her opponent and get ambitious, however, the magician stopped. A trident attached to what seemed like somebody's throat cords strung together into a sort of improvised, bungee rope. Had Mana attacked her opponent blindly, she'd have been tagged with enough intensity to rip off the whole arm of a lesser ninja. With a powerful yank, the trident came rotating back to its owner's hand as some sick yo-yo.
"You can't both fight both us and the tribesmen while protecting the tribesmen." Kari-E grinned. Mana saw it in her eyes – it was not the fact that she would get to kill a whole lot of somebodies that made Kari-E excited. To the Yamanaka – murder was just part of a job, cold and impersonal. What did seem personal was the enjoyment of Mana's failure, not the murder itself.
Kouta, Erumo and Yushijin and looked at Mana, worried that at the moment when failure presented itself with such insolence, the magician would freeze or cave in and endanger her safety while surrounded with enemies. In a blink, Kouta and Erumo resumed their battle, Hagi-S and Sore-T began pressing a powerful offensive on the pair, too powerful to be disrespected by distractions.
Yushijin thrust his sword forward, pinning Uru-V to the cold and moist stone on its tip and making the feather-donning Kumogakure shinobi grunt in pain and swear bloody murder at the Konoha's illusionary swordsman. Despite Uru-V swearing vengeance through a blood oath, Yushijin appeared mighty disinterested in Uru-V's vendetta.
Kari-E did not even attack anymore. She was just shown how pointless it was to match up against Mana as the magician had an effective out to Kari-E's most powerful, weakness-neutralizing technique. While her Yamanaka hijutsu might have still been somewhat effective, Kari-E must have known from the intel she received from the genin who took part in the Chuunin Exams where Mana was promoted that the magician was working with a very well-known Yamanaka so she must have known an out for most Yamanaka hijutsu because of that common training the pair did.
She was not entirely wrong either.
Instead, Kari-E chose to turn away from Mana and lunge at the tribesmen. A handful of fur-wearing strongmen launched themselves off of the higher layers of the caves and slammed Kari-E to the ground, attempting to ravage the Yamanaka with the gauntlets made hollowed bear arms, claws ripped out and replaced with gruesome-looking chunks of bent steel. The tribesmen were nothing if not environmentally friendly with their recycle everything looted lifestyle…
There came that repulsive humming and buzzing sound, the tribesmen collapsed into chunks of superheated meat without as much as a grunt, let alone a scream. Mana's eyes began getting wet and her vision blurred from it realizing that what Kari-E said was right. Her entire life Mana declared herself capable of protecting everything and defeating anyone who was appalling enough to threaten other lives, she extended herself to try and rescue everyone and only suffered in return, in an attempt to save everybody like a hero from all those stories she read as a child, she ended up saving nobody while getting crippled in the process.
With a chilling turn, Mana looked at Yushijin. "She's right…" the magician uttered before charging out and disappearing somewhere into the shadows of the caves where the tribesmen were flooding from in droves.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Vortex!" Ara-K yelled out with great triumph in her voice, a trust in her own strength and that trust was not ill-founded. Jolts of lightning erupted from within the body of the Kumogakure kunoichi that all converged into a singular lightning storm that fired off separate, supercharged bolts of lightning in every direction. The mass was like the body of a twelve-headed dragon and the bolts it unleashed that fried anyone it came into contact with was the dragon's punishment.
"She was right, what the hell does that mean!?" Kouta grumbled while both the Kumogakure and Konoha parties started shifting their focus onto the flooding tribesmen. Kari-E recovered from the body pile of strongmen leaping on top of her, covered in scratches and bruises but the small injuries appeared to have only managed to piss the Yamanaka off.
"Mind-Switch: Rebus." The young woman grunted while pointing her arms, hands placed together in the position of the Yamanaka hijutsu while she allowed a powerful pulse of chakra leave her body with the sound of a ghastly whistle and blast one of the more ferocious tribesmen who wore somebody's detached tail as a type of mohawk atop of his head.
Emphasized by a mighty and heart-churning pop, the tribesman's head popped like a crushed grape. His peers were not turned off in the slightest by the grisly end of their powerful and respected friend, they only roared and growled louder, it appeared that the concept of loss only served to embolden and reduce whatever integral parts of humanity these tribesmen had managed to preserve after their upbringing. Not too much unlike the Konoha and Kumogakure ninja fighting against them.
With grit teeth, cursed with the requirement to feel every loss on the battlefield she was powerless to prevent, Mana charged onward, something pudgy and colored like pus landed in front of her, it was hard to make out in the shadows that the cave system was sunken in but with brief flashes of lightning from behind the magician lighting up a decent chunk of the corridor to come, the magician could make out its off-putting shapes.
The pus ball exploded, throwing goop that sizzled and burnt through solid rock. Mana screamed out in pain while the pus-covered her entire body, the magician just jerked a pair of times as the pus simply burnt into her flesh too fast and too strong to be removed, even water would have only served to make the acidic goop softer but would have served off little use in washing it away. The macabre scene of Mana's disfigurement turned to a magic show of fluttering flower petals while the magician's true shape reformed a bit further up front, having snuck past the hairless elderly woman with rotten teeth throwing these pus balls.
This tribeswoman seemed troublesome. She may have caught one of her friends unprepared but every distraction cost Mana so many lives. With an absolutely petrifying scream, the woman turned to Mana and threw her hands up into the air, holding two handfuls of her annoying biological weapons. With a graceful dash, the magician avoided yet another one of the old hag's puss balls, having half-turned back, Mana removed a steel-tipped card from her sleeve and flung it at the lower parts of the old woman's body. In her age, in this lighting, there could not have been a way for the stick in the wheel to avoid the injury.
A stringy tear in the woman's flesh suggested that the magician had hit her mark. Mana straightened her back out and got off of the awkward, one-knee bending position that she landed to. The old hag pulled a knife made of bloodied and sharpened stone, having possibly run out of her acidic goop projectiles to fling, she attempted to charge at Mana, only for blood to squirt from her heel and, exclaiming in shock of the unexpected pain signal and inability to use her supporting leg, the woman collapsed.
Mana was just about prepared to dash away. She had wasted enough time dealing with this old tribeswoman and her dealings have cost these tribesmen their lives. They would not stop coming, they would not surrender even when their very survival was in question. If this imminent slaughter was to be stopped, Mana needed to commit herself to some drastic measures and do what she knew would plague her for the rest of her life – leave the tribesmen charging at the Konoha and Kumogakure ninja be.
She needed to defeat the black scorpion woman. The one from the tribesman's mind. It was evident that she took an incredibly important part in this society for her presence dominated all else. It was after the demise of the black scorpion that the tribesman's will caved in. If only that woman could have been beaten and stripped of her war-suit… Maybe the remaining tribesmen would listen to reason, maybe the resulting destruction of their willpower would prove devastating enough for the whole bunch to flee whether deeper into the mountains or into the freezing tundra of the deep Land of Snow.
A chilling cackle forced Mana to turn back. The collapsed old lady was almost screaming out her laughter like bloody murder. The magician had not yet heard these people laugh, the only emotion they showed to her was pure instinct. Laughing felt personal, too emotional to be shown to outsiders and yet… The woman snapped her fingers, lighting up a spark between some metallic hooks in her nails. The spark lit something up, something natural and something that Mana did not sense whatsoever, making the entire corridor erupt in a wild, compressed blast that spread equally in every direction.
Rumbling and this dark mist covered the cave. Mana's vision was blurry enough as it was from the unexpected blast force. She was uninjured from what she could feel but the blast did knock her on her back and shake her senses a fair bit, even if not a scratch was left on her augmented body. The magician looked up, realized that she was laying flat and picked herself back up as fast as she could. The cave corridor was shifting, puddles of blood spread from where the old hag was left laying before with the mountain itself having crushed the old timer in the embrace of its top and its bottom.
The longer Mana stayed, the more the mountain threatened to embrace her as well.
This was madness. It felt like being subjected to hell itself. Any attempt to save anybody, any struggle to injure, to disable, every application of Mana's usual combat method only resulted in an escalation of the conflict with the people the magician wanted to save dying while Mana's actions indirectly fueled a situation where more people got put in danger. It truly was Mana's own personal City of Dis.
There was no time to burn in the flames of self-pity. At least the process of self-immolation may have gone on while the magician was moving ahead. More and more tribesmen decided to dig in the approaching kunoichi, charging at her without a care for their own lives, unafraid of the opponent of superior strength, speed, and skill or the collapsing mountain. It was not like these tribesmen were marvelous prodigies of architecture and never have they suffered a battle in their own backyard. Maybe if they had, they'd have known that a single powerful blast was enough to resonate through the whole mountain, to shake the already shaken foundations and cause the downfall of anyone foolish enough to reside within.
That was why the Ninja Rabbits preferred caves instead of mountains.
With swift palm strikes and precise kicks, Mana dispatched of the oncoming assailants and observed in great despair as many more have been taken out by the collapsing mountain. The magician could recall a situation as dire as this one back in the day, one where she felt obliged to save a collection of scorned and plagued individuals but failed to do so because her teammates have decided to keep her back from even trying.
The newly set ablaze vigor within Mana's core fueled her charge towards the source of where the tribesmen were rushing at her from. The fights against the protectors of the hive became almost driven by instinct. Mana's palms smashed the opposition to walls, her knees broke backs and joints of her opponents leaving them crippled or merely unable to follow and keep up with Mana's mad dash. Those that she could reasonably avoid, she did so.
Every life left hanging and crippled in the corridors of a collapsing mountain cave system thudded against the soul scale of the magician, weighing the scale strictly in one direction and the knives attached to its lower end dug deep into the heart the scale was standing on. Not unlike these men and women during times of battle, Mana forced through the inner pain and despair and willed herself on.
The magician felt that perhaps she had lost her mind, that she was just moving onward in one direction, not because of a particular reason but because she did so before her mind had shattered. Whichever the case, the mindlessness and instinct-driven struggle for the hive of the tribesmen was nearly complete and with the complete collapse of deeper thought assisted Mana to keep pressing on and into the brief opening.
She was there.