"It's a tad boring when you're being this quiet." Ume winked at her opponent while pressing her free hand to her hip and continuing to pose and play around with her wand.
"I'd rather just fight." Quill B cut it short. He did not attack, however, instead the Kumogakure swordsman carefully examined the moves of his opponent, observing the precise movements and the general appearance of his opponent's movement style in order to better understand what he could have expected to see from her in the future.
"So dull…" Ume teased Quill B again and flicked the hand that she had just pressed to her hip, having used the excuse of a harmless motion to slip out a tool from her pouch. The orb seemed to stop in the middle of its journey as its pink color soon changed into a bright glow shortly before the bomb Ume used burst.
Unlike normal flash bombs, the bomb Ume used appeared to be custom made. Though the unusual shell casing of the gadget was a dead giveaway of that fact already. Instead of just popping with a burst of blinding light and a disorienting sound, this bomb detonated in a pleasant bling noise while spreading what appeared to be streamers and confetti though the usual blast of light was still present. In fact, a pair of flash cores appeared to be present held in separate inner casings, one with a bubble gum pink light and another with sky-blue one.
It was a questionable decision to employ a flash bomb against somebody using goggles with darkened lenses akin to shades. The pop of the customized flash bomb only aggravated Quill B and prompted him to attack again. Ume hurried to defend herself with a slight flush on her cheeks, having just realized her blunder when her opponent charged through right at her.
"She's nimble!" Meiko noted after a whistle to express her admiration in the skill of her opponent. As a testament to that observation, Ume vaulted and flipped around her opponent as he continued to juggle swords from his multiple sheathes like a madman, though that was just the initial impression as there very much was a method to his one-edged madness.
"All dazzle, no substance…" Kiyomi waved her hand at the match in dismissal and walked away from the screen to go to the bathroom instead.
"There's nothing wrong with a little bit of dazzle, I mean!" Boruto exclaimed by pointing at himself with his thumb as if he took Kiyomi's words a bit too deep to heart.
"Not at all, though it helps for that dazzle to be meaningful." Tsuru Itoi, another examinee from Boruto's own universe and timeline pointed out. "Dazzle and trickery direct attention but you have to show something meaningful to justify that attention. If you make a mistake, that's all you'll be directing your attention to."
Almost as if the dark-haired girl from Konoha possessed some gift of psychic foresight, the sword of Quill B scratched at the exposed gut of his opponent when she tried vaulting back and away from his spinning slash. He must have identified the fact that his sword met significant resistance in the body of his opponent, as Quill B stopped attacking immediately after, ready to provide emergency aid to his opponent if she needed some.
Instead, a spray of clean water burst forth from her exposed stomach, splashing against the face of Quill B and washing away any hints of precision in his vision, even if his goggles once again protected him from being caught off guard. While Ume's moves were highly acrobatic, they were also very risky as they left plenty of her body exposed and with someone with so many sharp objects moving at every moment in time, Quill B was not the right opponent to gamble against.
Quill B appeared off guard regardless of how useful his goggles have proven to be so far. It wasn't the splash of cold water aimed at his eyes that distracted him, it was the fact that despite he saw through the flash bomb, he didn't see when exactly his opponent had replaced herself with the Water Clone. And yet… Here she was standing before him while the clone he gutted was no more, but a shapeless puddle on the dirt.
"Tough crowd…" Ume pulled on the beak of her hat, looking a tad grumpy that her opponent didn't even ask her how she pulled the switch off or when she did so. "Go figure…"
Quill B leaned forward, placing most of his weight on his right leg which he turned sideways while extending the left one outward. Meiko thought that it was an odd stance but it was simple to read the fact that it was meant to supplement a sword thrust. It was bold to declare one's intent that way unless one was either such a master of swordsmanship that they challenged their opponent to deal with the upcoming attack or if they trusted their speed to make opponent's knowledge of the upcoming attack irrelevant.
"One Spike: Grenade!" Quill B muttered to himself as he dragged his glove across the short surface of his blade and charged onward with a thrust aimed at his opponent.
Ume attempted to move, using her wand as support to fire off her body bottom-first in a skyward direction. It was there that Quill B's mastery with his short blades showed, he had enough foresight and force left to redirect his motion, switching the dominant foot into his left one so that he could redirect his thrust up. A rather appalling grunt filled the stage, filling the audience with gasps. Ume fell awkwardly from her soar with a short sword embedded in her side. The sword's lack of size or weight wouldn't have made such a wound deadly though it should have been battle-ending in most cases. Quill B, however, was of a different opinion as he made sure to clear the area as fast as possible and retreat to a safe distance.
"What's he doing? His opponent is a medical ninja, she'll cover that wound up." Tala objected from the sidelines. This folly seemed significant enough to make even one as quiet and cold such as him to speak up.
Ripper Inaba was about to speak up, no doubt in rhyme as was his quaint gimmick, however, before he could, an explosion as potent as one explosive note one slipped onto a blade's surface while dragging one's arm across it before the charge sunk the fallen kunoichi in dirt and smoke.
"The art of Quill's Grenade is confidential / His swords are his credentials / His style makes them essential / It means breaking them is on the schedule." Ripper Inaba made sure to slip his rhyme at the moment that someone tuned the noise of the screen down a little to better deal with the fact they just heard an explosion live.
"Hmm… Sticking an explosive note on a sword is just nasty. Even if it doesn't ruin your sword, it'll damage it for sure." Meiko sighed. It hurt her heart to see such misuse of a sword as a blacksmith but she couldn't deny the fact that Quill B might have won a match by breaking just one of his sword. It was the fact that his technique was premeditated as evidenced by Ripper, his teammate, knowing about his technique, that disturbed her.
Ume dived right out from the smoke, a full-hand-sized chunk of gummy, red material patch sticking out on her gut and her hat was missing but Tala's prediction appeared to be true even if there was an additional explosive element to Quill's attack. Quill B raced for two more blades, he attempted to spin around like a whirligig and cut the rushing kunoichi in two but his spin got blocked be her wand while Ume threw the other end of her wand straight to the nose of Quill B, making it stream red.
The water rushed from the end of her weapon back into the dust cloud that Quill had raised and that fact did not elude the attention of the Kumogakure swordsman, making him bead surprised eyes at the version of Ume that stood in front of him. The water clone rushing at him blew an air kiss at Quill B before dissolving into a wide pool of water, reaching out over Quill B like a crashing wave though Quill B managed to roll back and evade the wave before it pulled him into the round, watery mass that the dissolving clone formed.
"Serves you right to be such a pooper…" Ume spun her wand around her front and back, appearing from the smoke with the water that her clone sent back to heal her inside the cloud of dust coating her wound and making it match the grisly yet harmless and sweet appearance of the wound her clone carried earlier. "I'd have told you all you wanted to know about my fighting style and what I'm about to do if you just asked nicely…" she pouted her lips pointing the end of her wand at Quill B who reeled on one knee with busted goggles and bleeding nose.
"That joker isn't dead yet?" Kiyomi grunted after appearing from the bathroom.
"That's way too short of a time for a leak, what did you really do in there?" Meiko crossed her arms over her chest.
"That's none of your business, why would you even ask somebody that?" Kiyomi shook her head by trying to cover up her face in embarrassment.
"She isn't half bad, you know," Relta Ginn pointed at the screen, encouraging Kiyomi to give the genin she had written off as toothless another chance. "She's actually got the advantage now. The way she controls the battle is quite something."
"Maybe she has talent but she'd rather waste it all showing off anyway. That makes her even worse than an untalented hack, she's someone that could have been something but chose to instead fool around and waste that talent." Kiyomi sat down on a bench so that the back of Teclaim Laoch blocked off the screen from her view.
"Sure, she's a little bit goofy, with all the dancing and prancing around but… She's not just winning, she's controlling the field and putting on a good show at the same time. She might not only get that promotion but also entertain a few people and make their lives better on the side, there's nothing wrong with that." Meiko objected.
Quill B stood back on both feet and stretched his legs out to the sides. He pulled out a sword and placed it in his teeth while positioning his hands over the handles of two other swords. Ume stopped all motion. For a blink, she did consider the idea of trying to find an opening and striking though she recalled the speed and skill of her opponent and reconsidered it instead.
"Hold on now / My boy's gonna show us some class / This is the stance of his coup de grace / Though to spit some class / This is one jutsu he should give a pass." Ripper Inaba didn't look like he expected this technique to be dusted off. Kiyomi did sit up from her bench and approach the screen to see this jutsu, intrigued by the respect that the bumbling lyricist was giving it.
"Really? What kind of a jutsu is it, I mean?" Boruto looked at the rhyming shinobi of the Cloud.
Ripper Inaba looked up and began mumbling to himself. There could have been no doubt that he was looking for the right words to make his reply into a rhyme which made Boruto flip out.
"You don't have to rhyme everything, I mean!" he growled at the pale shinobi of Kumogakure.
The laser focus of Quill B shattered like stoned glass. He looked up at the Ninja Council observing his performance, all seated in a single line and abandoned his stance, choosing to flick the blade in his mouth back to its sheath and crouch to the ground while he placed both of his arms onto the handles of the same two blades.
"Never mind / My man left his ace jutsu behind / He's now going for two swords / A less risky jutsu to earn his awards." Ripper Inaba breathed a large gasp of air that he had swelling in his chest throughout the entire time of Quill B winding up for his secret technique.
Quill did not announce the name of his technique before attacking this time. In a blink, he was behind his opponent with his swords crossed in front of him. The Kumogakure swordsman turned them around in his hands and slipped them into their sheaths. Only once all the moves of his technique were completed did he stand up and look back to examine his results.
Blood sprayed from the two separate cuts across each of Ume's shoulders. Judging from their positioning and depth, her chakra-coated wand had managed to block some of the impending damage and prevent a fully-carved cross-shaped slash across her chest but her block was hardly flawless.
"What kind of a jutsu is that secret technique of his?" Temari turned to the pale-skinned thug from Kumogakure.
"It's a jutsu where he skewers the enemy with all his blades / For its deadliness it deserves the highest grades," Ripper Inaba explained with a soft freestyle.
"Why would he not choose to use something of that, only ramping it up to using two swords?" Temari wondered.
"He's trying to prove himself resourceful to the council," Kiyomi explained. "Out there it isn't enough to just win. He might have gambled it all on an all-or-nothing jutsu and won but gambling one's victory on a turn of a card is dangerous and reckless on the field. He'd have never seen that promotion if he won that way."
"It'd be bummer to get screwed after making here to the finals all this way, you mean…" Boruto scratched his chin, looking sour just after a thought on this subject.
"Yeah… Bummer…" Kiyomi closed her eyes and swallowed her own sourness. While Meiko knew how Kiyomi felt deep down repeating those words since she felt the same, the flawless concealment of those feelings had to be both admired and feared at the same time.
"You'll forgive me if I try to wrap this up already…" Ume grunted. The movements of her wand no longer as elegant as before, pain splattered disgusting, grey paint all over the canvas of her motion. "Playing off of my opponent's charm is the only way I know and you're not giving me much charm to work with here."
Quill B twitched one of his shoulders and rolled forward, using his right arm as a platform for securing his upside-down hang, he let one of his blades slip out from the sheath behind his back while he concluded his vault and caught the falling blade with the tip of his heel, gently flipping it up in the air where he caught it off the air with his teeth and secured his hands on the handles of a pair of swords on his back.
"Going for three swords now / Styling on him is something my man won't allow," Ripper Inaba smirked.
Meiko had to admit that she found Ume's choice to attack her opponent to be a curious one, given that she needed some more time to recover from her wounds at the moment and recovery was something she was quite capable of at that moment. Then again, given that Quill B was faster and she, despite her impressive agility, could not have kept up with all of his swords until more of them broke down, perhaps she was right to ditch the attempt for control of the field and didn't waste chakra on a heal that might have gotten interrupted and punished.
That was her MO so far, hit and heal, hitting being a mean to give the enemy something else to think about instead of stopping her healing.
Gripping her wand with both hands and waving it like a fan, Ume focused the flow of the water coating her wand into the upper tip and made it expand at a rapid state while booming at her opponent like a reverse cone of crashing water. Quill B kicked off the ground, spinning with two swords in his hands, pressed to his wrists while he swung the sword in his teeth like a whirligig as well. The three swords formation helped him drill through a layer of water but he was just an inch of it short and the remainder of the watery mass gripping his heel sunk him back down into the cylindrical prison of containment.
"Alright, time for a little bit of punishment to begin!" Ume cheered on herself while she coated her wand with water again and spun it around, letting a blob of it to splash off of the wand and rain down on her shoulders, filling the wounds with cranberry-shade foam while her wounds continued to slowly close down.
"It's a jutsu I call Water Cylinder Prison," Ume explained to her powerless opponent who continued to attempt to swim upward or to push himself out of the cylinder's containment only to find himself entrapped in the water as if it had attained some sort of transparent, gelatinous shape. "Unless swords are everything you've got to show, you're not gonna get out of it. It's too bad, nobody's gonna hear you cry uncle from inside of it either…"
Ume leaned to the floating cylinder and pressed her index finger to her lips, acting out a difficult moral conundrum while her opponent continued to struggle before crossing his arms and legs to preserve his strength until he could figure a way out of his containment.
"You're right, keeping this jutsu up like this does strain me a bit and I don't think I'd manage to drown you with it due to that strain. Then again, I do have better methods of hurting you inside that thing!" Ume pumped her fist and threw a wicked slam of her coated wand against the wall of the cylinder.
The gelatinous cylinder began reverberating from the rude contact with the aquatic surface. It spread a hum out that seemed subtle on the outside but it was something that the cameras filming the battle picked up on as well, suggesting that their true volume was much more deceptive. The vibrations inside must have been brutal, or so Quill B showed them to be as his concentration broke in a snap of fingers and he covered his ears but continued to writhe in pain regardless.
"Don't even bother. Your entire body can "hear" these vibrations for you. And guess what, the blob retains all of the vibrations I hit it with, meaning that each successive hit will only make them worse. You can't exactly surrender from inside it but a few more should make you pass out anyway." Ume styled around the blobby cylinder with her wand, marching about while juggling her combat tool in the air at the same time.
Quill B needed to find a way out, or else he'd have found himself and his struggle for control over this match in vain after just a few more pounds on the walls of his prison