Ayushi's chakra, usually brimming with swampy greens, decorated with more emerald shade of crystal stars all over, turned to shiny amethyst on sight. What was more, the legendary ninja was manifesting the entire molding of his chakra, the entire circulation system outside his body, like an aura, to where it was visible to the naked eye. Mana was so used to sensing chakra that it took her a couple of blinks to notice that Ayushi had turned his chakra visible.
That was meant to be quite a feat. Even the deadliest, most complicated and sung of techniques could only briefly turn chakra visible or form it outside one's body. Manipulating water was one thing, manifesting Water Release chakra as it turned to water and doing so outside the body where the process was supposed to happen was just showing off.
It did not come easy to the man, Guru hunched and bent his knees, pushing them to the side as his body slumped forward. Veins littered him like a network of shadows. His muscles tensed up like he was taxing them to their limit and they were about to burst.
"You sly weasel, you…" Ayushi murmured. Despite his somewhat lacking in volume manner of speech, due to the threatening predicament she was in, Mana could hear it all just fine. "Soul Release is not something I use against opponents I respect or fear. The build-up is too slow, the techniques can still be dealt with and… Most importantly, as per its namesake, it feels like shaving my own soul every time I use it. No. Soul Release is usually reserved for fools who jump above their weight class. Not like you are right now, but arrogant idiots that need to be put in their place."
If this manner of ninjutsu was this taxing on the user, if it devastated Ayushi's body this much, the true destructive power of the technique would have been a marvel to those that marveled destruction. The hottest flames were always ones that burnt the user too, the deadliest whirlpools were those that threatened to drown the user when he unleashed them. This was not the matter of unskilled use, it was the case purely when speaking of experienced users that respected and feared the force of nature type of their own abilities.
Ayushi forced his arm up, bent his palm at the position of a lion's paw while he used his other hand to hold his own palm from shaking.
"Soul Release: Homing Skull Blast!" he grunted out while jets of his intense Soul Release aura circulated around the center of his extended palm and formed an imperfect skull that radiated Soul Release chakra of its own around it of far looser concentration than the one Ayushi built it out of.
Ayushi emitted a battle shout while his skull, covered with Soul Release flamed darted off at Mana at around the speed matching Ayushi's punches from earlier. The speed of the jutsu confused the magician as she had expected the dreaded Soul Release to be far faster. With grace and care, Mana moved aside with perfect timing, feeling like she had enough time to observe the skull coming at her and examine Soul Release's properties from a far closer range after the projectile had left its master's hands.
The skull blitzed onward, Mana stayed on her toes, figuring that the skull would behave erratic and do something troublesome like home in on her, as the name of the jutsu suggested, oddly enough, it just moved onward, splitting the shroud wherever it traveled. Ayushi grunted once more, gesturing his active hand with two fingers pointing down. As instructed by its master, the skull took a sudden dive down.
A twister of cinders and ashes rose from where the skull had hit the lifeless limbs scattered across the Juhiru dimension. Mana's eyes twitched a pair of times. That skull was light-years away from hitting her but… What Ayushi had created was effectively a one-hundred-percent lethality rate triple mixture of elements. A technique so destructive in its fundamental nature must have required mastery of Fire and Lightning Releases. Who knew what the third nature was...
Now Mana understood better what Ayushi had told her earlier. An arrogant fool would have attempted to block this jutsu or to swat it aside. Such a meager display would have inspired buckets of false confidence and the poor soul attempting to defend from the Soul Release would have found themselves disintegrated to ash upon mere contact.
"Were you perhaps disappointed by this?" Ayushi panted. The Soul Release aura still circulated around his body but nowhere near with the same intensity as before. The Guru was saving chakra and stamina in his downtime. May have been smart…
"Are you kidding? All of this… The Juhiru dimension, the Merchant of Souls totem, Soul Release… It's something I would have only read about in tales of old veterans and dismissed it as lies, just like the rest of their likely false stories. Seeing these remarkable gems of the life I thought I had figured out. It's all so exciting!" Mana clenched her frail fists and raised them to their face. "The irony doesn't escape me but your jutsu, that was meant to destroy everything it touched, made me want to live on more than ever before. Just so I could see what else might be hidden out there."
Ayushi bit his own cheek on the inside of his mouth. Was that conflict still simmering inside the man? Whatever flame lit up within the once brilliant mind of the Guru, died down just as fast. Ayushi slumped down and began charging his Soul Release again. The aura of his unique and mixed chakra nature intensified and erupted in violent outbursts.
Someone, at some point, must have tried intercepting the Soul Release. The weakness of the charge-up time was too obvious and yet… Ayushi was still alive. Mana took flight into the air, flipped over her front and dived down with a driving Spear Kick. Something was wrong, her foot went nowhere near the man and the Soul Release aura had stopped her like a layer of jelly. A force capable of stopping anything pushing through, absolute in its resistance and its destructiveness.
Mana's right leg began splintering, glowing red cracks covered her from foot to thigh, extending higher up until it went up to her neck and began decorating her face. Another shockwave emanating naturally from the Soul Release user blasted Mana into a shower of cinders. Cinders that turned to flower petals that rushed back to where the magician stood a moment ago and revealed the real Mana to have never left her position.
She could not help herself – she had to at least try exploiting a weakness when she saw one, even if it was deceptive. It turned out that the aura of Soul Release was just as devastating as the jutsu is created. That made closing in on a Soul Release user a very bad idea. Combined with Ayushi being a little tease… It was too grand an idea to have ever worked.
"Soul Release: Homing Skull Blast!" Ayushi croaked while another burning skull shape formed in his extended palm. While the limb trembled with extreme pressure, the man moved his other arm away, leaving his tired palm unsupported while the other palm moved to his side.
Mana moved aside, letting the skull whizz just past her. A disgusting tearing sound followed by a burning sensation made the magician blank out for a moment. Gasping in surprise, she stumbled aside and looked at the skull that had moved on past to the vast expanses of Juhiru, once again splitting the mysterious shrouds as if they were just common water vapor that required a stronger huff to disperse.
She dodged that. She absolutely dodged it! Then how… Even more – it touched the real her. Fear lit up in Mana heart as she wondered for the few passing moments if that was it. If she'd die again just like that.
"Heh, you dodged it… Good. I'd hate you to disintegrate just like that." Ayushi huffed while throwing his winded up palm out up front and unleashing a second skull. This time Mana kicked off the ground and leaped up as high as she could. Her tattering uniform rustled with an irritating buzz to the shuffling cloth. It distracted her thinking. Mana was too overwhelmed to even check on the wound she had just suffered. Merchant appeared to be in no rush to fix it, meaning it was not fatal but…
It felt like she was dragged over pavement naked while sixteen horses dragged her for a week straight, the feeling comprised in a blink of a moment. The pain numbed as seconds went past but… Could the destructive properties of Soul Release be so intense that they damaged an opponent even if they dodged unless they dodged the technique by a whole mile?
Ayushi's arms moved like an automaton. Shooting and winding up for more skulls. Mana had never been thankful for her naïve childish self, thinking that one day she could fly freely through the sky and inventing a floating jutsu that she eventually realized her dreams with. Wind currents gathered beneath Mana and kept her up, more importantly, they kept the magician moving around Ayushi's skulls. She managed to move around in sufficient distance to avoid any damage. It was easier to pull off in the air where she had a whole another dimension to employ.
The skulls were tricky. They were so deceitful not only because of their absolute lethality and excruciating reward of dodging them, they were nasty because of how slow they were. Fighting was always a timing, rhythm game. Two skilled martial artists could have stood in front of one another and danced at their top speeds for days on end until one of them got exhausted and skipped the fatal blow. The end to the fighting usually came much earlier than that, however, it was because the fighters were skilled enough to toy with the rhythm, with the sense of the enemy's timing.
Ayushi was not messing with Mana's timing but his techniques had that sort of effect by accident, purely because of how they were put together and what they were made of.
He was going mad with the skulls, drowning out the entire sky until it was nothing but blackness littered with violet dots. Breathing became difficult, the pace intensified with time. Almost as if the shaving of his soul reminded Ayushi of who he once was, woke him up more and more. Scratches and burns became the new routine. Mana had no time to wince or whine, she had to keep on moving because if even one of those skulls hit her, as much as actually grazed her, the result would have been complete disintegration.
A blaring roar sent resonating shockwaves, strong enough to shock Mana and knock her out of the sky. The magician fell down like a goose skewered with an arrow. She could barely remember the slam into the ground. Due to what it was made of, it felt like having the shit punched out of her even if the arms barely ever moved.
"What was that?" Mana grunted while standing up. She had to stand up, downtime lying on her face gave Ayushi more time to gather his strength and focus.
"Do you think the abominations residing in this realm are immune to my Soul Release? They've been observing us for quite some time now, like people looking at ants. Unlike the ants, I have a way of hurting them. As long as it is made of matter, Soul Release will be their antimatter." Ayushi huffed, his hands hung heavily beside him as the man looked void of any strength left. The Soul Release aura around him was gone. Mana scurried back on her feet and stumbled at the man like mad. On her way there, she grabbed a steel-tipped card stuck in one of the lifeless arms rustling like spring grass.
Ayushi's hands gleamed violet before Mana could close the distance. She was too slow! With a roar, Ayushi decked Mana straight in the face with all of his Soul Release imbued might. The next thing Mana knew, she was gasping on her knees, black again. She was on her back. Cinders of what used to be her just seconds earlier floated about in a cloud. With a decimating barrage of blows, Ayushi extinguished life after life of Mana's each with a single blow until not a single ray of violet gleamed from his body. Until his body looked heavy enough to make him collapse on top of her.
"It's over, Mana… I don't want to see you go mad after you've experienced a thousand deaths in one day. That's enough…" the Guru leaned in on the whimpering magician and wiped a tear off of her face that Mana did not even know was going down her cheeks. He was right… Her body was breaking down, she could barely even form a solid thought. Every time she tried thinking straight, a ringing sensation of shattering glass somewhere in her deeper consciousness distracted her.
Mana's hand reached out. Crackling with Lightning Release chakra it touched Ayushi's forehead, frying his mind with a jolt of Magician's Touch. The man grunted out, trying to reserve all the dignity he could but ending up in a mad roll back as he gurgled and screamed for his sanity. Mana picked herself off the ground. She thought that after dying a couple of times she'd stop being afraid of death but… Her body quivered like a frail leaf. A leaf that could have been taken off of the branch and thrown to the dirt with any upcoming gust of wind.
The only thing giving Mana solace was that Guru Ayushi was in not too much better condition. After using Soul Release his body was still worn out as it was supposed to. His regeneration healed his injuries, not so much the innate fatigue and chakra loss that hit him after shaving at his own soul to perform his flashiest trick. Even the infinite resources of Guru Ayushi had a wall they could have hit.
"Resourceful…" he uttered. "You'd like me to kill myself then? Reset my body, I suppose."
Mana did not speak. She barely had a word in her to speak but she figured that those few words she had the strength left to say were better left for the finishing moments. The vision was blurry, whenever she tried forming concrete sentences out of the fragments of her shattered mind, nothing came out. Before she blasted Ayushi off of herself, she was just about ready to beg the man so that he did not shatter her into any more pieces. The Merchant brought back her body when he healed her but something else entirely, a piece integral to Mana's essence yet so difficult to define remained lost forever.
"You think it was Soul Release that has carried me through endless wars? Please… Something so draining, so uncivilized. You've never even been to a real war, have you, Mana-san? That's where the two of us are different. That was what broke me in the beginning, what forced me to subscribe to the life of a Guru and declare using my abilities for good as pointless. In the war, the only way to survive is to let the war sustain itself, instead of feeding off of you." Ayushi looked to have dropped down on his knees. Through struggle, he managed to push his knees off the ground though and only left his palms caressing the dead hands of the Juhiru dimension's floor.
The ground beneath Mana's feet shifted, fissures began opening up but they were not too deep, the magician was more shocked by the fact that in his worn out state Guru Ayushi would attempt such a weak technique rather than troubled by anything this tiny quake had caused. It was only when streaming aurora of indigo and emerald green burst forth from the fissures that Mana noticed the matching emerald glow around Ayushi's hands. The glow that was much brighter and had hints of indigo mixed in to be the painfully familiar shade of the Mystical Palm Jutsu.
The magician turned back to where the shine ultimately head to. Her vision was just not serving Mana right, the whole world remained shaky even when the actual quakes had halted and every passing moment Mana felt like she'd throw up in just a moment. It was not the fact that Ayushi had reanimated the not even dead yet hostages he had captured and commanded his own twisted will through their subconscious bodies, using them all as puppets that pained Mana. Nor was it the rising body pile of people she could under no circumstances hurt, given how they were her reason for fighting on this long, her need for winning the Game of Souls.
It was that Ayushi's jutsu was so familiar to the Guru that he did not even need to utter its name or weave any hand seals to use it. If Ayushi's previous declaration held true, he used this jutsu only in the most maddening wars and only to push through another day of senseless fighting, sending a little bit of war right back at it.
"Do not be mistaken for a moment, Mana-san. I did not lie when I told you that these people were alive. I did not bring them back to life, the only jutsu capable of such a thing demand too high a cost that ultimately makes the goal pointless. I merely imposed some of my own will to these people. They were senseless tools under my command, able to feel pain but unable to act on it themselves." Ayushi rose from his stumble slowly.
"You would use such a jutsu, you monster!" Mana screamed out.
"Of course, normally, I would use it only on dead bodies. Bodies without a will of their own and not just unconscious ones. This breaks every moral norm I used to foster as a medical ninja but… To win the Game of Souls, to create the Ultimate Honda and ensure the world peace itself, yes, yes I would." Ayushi yelled back with matching passion to that of Mana's own halfway to insanesville mind.
"We both know that I could kill you over and over and over again using Soul Release but it would only continue to torment you to no end. You'd go insane, too far gone to where you can even surrender this game. Using a dirty ace such as this is the only way to ensure my goal!" Ayushi declared.