"Earth Release: Earthquake Slam!" Baiso grunted, slamming his open palm into the ground and rumbling the ground beneath his feet as the pent-up tension forced the ground to erupt with a jet of pressurized force that continued to split the ground as it raced toward Endo, causing violent earthquakes that made avoiding the rushing force that much more problematic.
Endo focused his chakra into the soles of his feet, propelling him into a great height up and over the rushing jutsu and the ravaging quakes as he tossed his two fractured blades up to free his arms for hand seals. Endo was not the type of ninja to employ ninjutsu often, preferring to punish his opponent with his blade rather than fight like a ninja, though given how his bruiser of an opponent just employed a powerful ninjutsu technique, it was up to him to follow that up accordingly.
"Wind Release: Great Breakthrough!" Endo yelled out, blowing out a powerful wave of air from his lungs that was meant to crash into Baiso and grind him with the stone that was underneath his feet though the enemy was surprisingly tough. The misfit brute just raised his hand up and pushed through the oncoming gust, remaining on his feet and stone-walling Endo's attack.
With a falling kick to Baiso's rocker, Endo shook the giant and left him on wobbly feet as the Allied Ninja recruit then reached out with his hands only for his separated blades to land into them at the right time for him to begin his sadistic dance around the enemy, slashing and dashing past him with his blades in hand, utilizing both the strength of his entire body when he swung but also the building up force of acceleration as he moved around the battlefield to prevent Baiso from pinning him down. The brawler growled and grunted as his measly black bodysuit parted and split, sinking in squirts of blood where Endo managed to get past his wobbly defenses.
The pain must have only aggravated it all. Baiso charged with his shoulder put up and blasted Endo onto the ground. A burning sensation filled the young man's lungs and escalated throughout his body as a visual inspection revealed a bloody trail where his body skid across the hardened cement as a signifier that his chakra augmentations were beginning to fail and he would take more damage to his body from subsequent attacks than he'd want to take ideally.
"Whole 'nother class, runt!" Baiso snarled as he punched his own open palm. Even with all the shiners he took from Endo, with all of the apprentice samurai's attempts at putting him down and working with his broken weapon, it only seemed to drive Baiso more insane in the end. This one wasn't much for technical prowess but he was an abominable physical juggernaut.
"Wind Release: Storm's Grip!" Endo grunted, weaved a single hand seal, and extending his hands out while he blew air from his lungs. As the current of air passed the triangle formed with his index and middle fingers as well as his thumb, it became a powerful force of gale that picked even the burly Baiso off his feet and lifted him up into the air, surrounding him entirely in a perpetual cyclone that seemed to leave the fearsome brute clawing at the air and his own throat as the gale prison began feeding on the oxygen within Baiso's lungs to sustain itself longer.
Baiso smashed both of his fists against his chest, popping the Storm's Grip like a bubble as he plummeted to the ground wheezing for air. In his bloodshot eyes, it was easy to make out that the brawler wanted nothing less than to tear the apprentice samurai apart with his bare hands but with all of his air being sucked out of his lungs he could no longer breathe.
With a crazed grunt, Endo flung his two blades spinning at his opponent while he rushed toward him to engage him with his bare hands. Baiso jumped back, covering the entirety of their battlefield arena in the process due to unnatural bulk and power, focused in his lower body before the burly brute launched himself across the entirety of the open prison ground with a spinning kick again, shooting right at Endo's chest and sending him flying into the far-off makeshift prison facility with enough pent-up energy to blast a pillar of a pressurized shockwave through the building's roof upon Endo's entry.
"Punk thinks he's hardcore…" Baiso grunted to himself, cracking his knuckles and neck, continuously wondering why this mad youth would continuously throw himself at insurmountable odds and opponents vastly larger and stronger than him. "Ain't nobody more hardcore than me…" the burly brute muttered, spitting blood and teeth aside, still feeling aching in his lungs and chest as well as his mouth which he used to bite through a chakra coated weapon.
"Now, where the heck is that guppy informant?" the brawler mumbled to himself as he walked through the hole of his own making and looked around the dimly-lit prison. As he stepped passed the rubble of his own making, looking for the informant dummy he was meant to find in one of the cells, he couldn't quite make out the crackles of lightning surging up around him nor could he make out the scent of boiling blood reeking throughout the entire building due to his concentration on the search.
"I have a feeling that you have some unprocessed anxiety toward me…" Shige-H wheezed in pain as she moved her hands armed with an emerald glow over her body ravaged by stabbing wounds that enclosed to the size of small cuts as he waved her arms over them. "Cause that was a bit vicious."
"Konoha's Sorceress was our friend, you have no right to take her away from our crew!" Shogito clanged his four steel appendages by their scythe blade parts in front of himself as a warning of the pain that would come if Shige-H would continue this struggle. "Just when we were beginning to form a bond, you took her away from us!"
"Bond? That's funny, you don't even seem to know her real name," Shige-H pulled the wrist of her sleeveless, pink glove to tighten the glove's grip over her hand as she prepared to engage the leader of what would have been a group of her upperclassmen.
"Shut up! I've been following Konoha's Sorceress ever since she's first appeared on the Avalon magazine!" Shogito exclaimed, pulling his hands in as the chakra coating around the steel wire used to puppeteer his mechanical limbs became intense enough to be visible for just one moment. Two of his mechanical appendages dropped their scythe blade ends and left them hanging at the end of a string of wire as they were left with an empty opening that soon lit up with a flashing, golden light.
"Self-Puppetry Secret Art: Taser Flash!" he grunted as a jolt of electricity left each one of his appendages and, in the limited space of an underground tunnel leaving little place for Shige-H to move around in.
"Lightning Release: Static Field!" Shige-H spread her arms out, emitting a vociferous buzz that filled the endless halls of the secret underground tunnels with noise comparable to a thousand swarms of giant hornets all flapping theirs as fast as they could at once while a barely visible field of static electricity blew Shige-H's hair out even more than the mess that they already were.
The taser blast from Shogito's direction seemed to disappear as the static field absorbed them in their entirety while Shige-H moved in on her opponent, delivering a combination of empowered blows that forced Shogito to offer his two tasing limbs as a sacrifice so that they prevented the rushing powerhouse from pummeling him up close. Shige's blows tore through his hardened and constantly upgraded puppetry appendages as an industrial buzzsaw tore through a sheet of paper while the medical ninja leaped over the bottom two appendages to move in on her opponent with a risky maneuver.
The entire tunnel structure rumbled as both combatants collapsed onto a lower floor of the tunnels located beneath them. A floor they'd have ended up finding had they navigated the confusing tunnels long enough to discover one of several staircases though they now ended up having taken the quicker path. Shogito cowered underneath Shige's feet, desperately crawling back with a broken nose and busted goggles as the ex-Kumogakure kunoichi loomed over him, preparing to strike the finishing blow.
"What you don't understand is that you've never had a bond with Mana. You know nothing about her, none of her likes, you don't care about her weaknesses or why she's here to join the Allied Ninja. You don't offer her anything nor do you particularly need anything from her besides the great and flashy Konoha's Sorceress being your friend. She's just a showy figurine in your collection," Shige-H scolded Shogito with disgust seeping through her voice.
"And you're any different?" Shogito finally found the footing to get back on his feet and a crouching position at least while his mechanical limbs recovered from the stress of having taken a mean blow fueled by Chakra Enhanced Strength and blasted through the entire floor of rubble. "What the heck do you know about Konoha's Sorceress that makes you so much better friend to her than us, how come you're so high and mighty and don't presume to just be using her?"
"Because I've taken the time to assemble my crew. I don't lie to my crew about us not being friends. Though, maybe, in time, we will become more fond of each other. We're all ninja gathered together to make something more out of ourselves than we'd be apart. Mana offers plenty to my crew so yes, I do believe she is incredibly useful and handy in most situations but I also realize that's exactly what she needs right now," Shige-H reached out to rip the remaining two mechanical limbs apart, they lashed out at the medical ninja, stabbing through her calves but after wincing in pain, the medical kunoichi pulled them out and ripped them apart like mere strings and tossed them aside while she leaned down to tend to her wounds.
"What the heck are you on about!?" Shogito jumped up to his feet, removing his backpack and pulling on a special string attached to a ring sticking out to it which made a steel bar burst from the shredded-up backpack and transform into a staff with a circle of rotator blades at the end. "You've just admitted that you're gonna use Mana too but you're justifying it as if she wants that? Then you have the gall to act like you're so much better than us!"
"Our crew is not better or worse than yours. The fact of the matter is that I know where Mana comes from. I know that her entire world got pulled out from under her feet recently and that she's an individual who wants to do right and be a hero in this often cruel world. Helping and being useful to my crew will make her feel safe again, it will make her believe in herself again. Also, there are a few other things that she wants and I can teach her," the eyes of the curly-haired medical ninja lit up with bright flashes though, unlike the usual Lightning Release chakra that burst out from one's body, this outburst of chakra emitted not jolts and sparks of electricity but square pixels that dissolved into bright, smaller cubes after momentary exposure to air.
"And what's that?" Shogito exclaimed with a mocking tone.
"Plasma Release: Power Sight!" Shige-H chanted out, pressing her middle and index fingers to her eyelids and pulling them down slightly. Concentrated beams of what seemed like a very unstable radiance of lightning that behaved more like a stream of flames burst out from the eyes of the young woman, Shogito lowered his improvised helicopter staff and activated the rotation of its blades to block the plasma eyebeams, cowering in the pulsing heat of the white blaze.
Once the beam stopped, Shogito could no longer hold his own weapon in his hands for more than half of it had melted away while the lower, remaining half had become so hot that it made the thick, insulated gloves that Shogito wore burn out into fragile, black coal and scatter on the ground in powder shape.
"An advanced bloodline…" Shogito muttered finding himself short of weapons.
"That's right, a combination of both Lightning and Fire Releases, I've heard from Junichi-san that Mana has the ability to mold three Nature Affinities. That way she possesses more talent than she herself ever admits," Shige-H replied as her eyes settled down, red veins had shot out in the whites of her eye while her face still had bright light gleaming in the vessels leading up to her eyes that took additional few moments to subside and settle down, suggesting that this advanced bloodline was far less stable and polished than Shige-H would have admitted openly.
"That research… You've dug through the backgrounds of all of your crew members like that?" Shogito wondered, horrified as he was slowly walking back at a pace matching that which Shige-H was advancing toward him with.
"Not just all of my crewmates. I've done extensive background checks and research of over a hundred and fifty ninja, all of the current recruits being prepped for the field included and narrowed my ideal crew to the five that I've chosen. I find them to be ideal, not just because of their abilities but who they are as people, the troubles that hold them down. You see, I'm more than a medical ninja, I like healing people in more ways than one," Shige-H cocked up her fist, declaring that she'll do anything but that to the leader of the challenging upperclassmen if he continues to stand in her way.
Shogito turned around, ripping his bodysuit open and exposing six, small metal tubes scattered over his body as he looked up and behind him. Preceded by a chunky thud, a resonance of explosions shook the weathered tunnels as a barrage of explosive kunai fired from the surprising body modifications that the Allied Ninja recruit had done on him which gave him both a diversion and created an opportunity for him to flee.
The leader of her own crew approached the hole that her opponent had blasted in the ceiling. She could hear loud taps from her opponent's rubber boots slamming against the stone tiles as he desperately fled the scene, aiming to retreat from this battlefield and bolster his crewmates' efforts elsewhere instead though, with him needing to resort to such drastic measures to slip away, he must have reached into the bottom of his barrel and that made Shige-H wonder just how much more use he could have provided to his friends.
Stein clamped his hands together and spat out a handful of stone shards capable of fitting inside his mouth toward his opponent who rested on a wooden construction structure. Despite the fact that this was an Earth Release ninjutsu technique, he did not seem to need to speak any words which was both a testament of how much this young man had worked on cementing his fighting style to where he didn't need the additional support of speaking the name of his jutsu to use it but also worked as a handicap for him as it completely sheltered off any possibility of him using any jutsu of A-Rank or higher as doing that without being able to speak the name of the technique would have ranged on being impossible.
Damisan prepared to deflect the stone bullet but something struck him as odd about its angle. It was only when he noticed that the bullet was aimed beneath even his feet that he realized that the enemy was aiming at the platform he stood on and shattered the wooden beam, hardened by supplementary steel plates, that the impaired ninja stood on. Having lost his footing, Damisan plunged down, Stein fired an additional handful of bullets his way while Damisan was in mid-air, hitting him straight in the chest and leaving hand-sized holes in Damisan's cloak.
The cardboard platform on which Damisan had landed one floor lower shook under his feet and was about to tear open before the self-puppeteering ninja raised his prosthetic arm and shot out his hand attached to steel wire to hook him up to another wood and steel beam and yoink him up higher again. Once he raised himself up to the top floor of the construction project again, he looked down at his opponent.
"You know, I figured that as handicapped ninja we would kind of understand each other and that you wouldn't try to wreck my mask or cloak too badly… I don't like anyone else seeing what's hiding underneath, you see," Damisan complained, sticking the plastic finger of his prosthetic hand through one of few holes made by Stein's stone bullets.
He knew very well what his opponent was trying to do. By staying on the construction project and above ground, Damisan left his Earth Style ninjutsu favoring opponent at a disadvantage. While Stein looked like was capable in taijutsu as well from the side, Damisan had confidence that he'd still hold the edge in that department due to his prosthetic enhancements. As long as he stayed with a cool head and didn't play the game by the rules dictated by his opponent – he was golden.
Stein went through a myriad of hand seals before driving his hands down onto the ground. A pillar of dirt built up in front of him as if something was accumulating to burst from underground and it was causing undue pressure onto the soil from down below. The primal instinct proved itself to be the right call for the risen mound of dirt burst open, launching multiple stone pillars that came right toward the key bits and pieces of the incomplete building.
There were too many pillars and they were too widespread to counter them. The construction project shook and fumbled, leaving few to none platforms for Damisan to hook himself on to. The prosthetic-wielding ninja extended his hand and shot it out to the side, grabbing hold of a stone wall that had walled off this entire area and pulled himself up to that area instead, so that he does not end up under all of the rubble. It had been made of bricks and stone, leaving it malleable to a skilled Earth Release user but it sure beat landing on the ground where Stein had a whole myriad of ways to disable him.
That was close – had Damisan ended up under all of the rubble, he'd have been in real trouble as not only he'd have been underground but he'd have also had an entire building to worry about. Just as Damisan finished patting himself on the shoulder for surviving this attack and maintaining as good of a position as he could he noticed his opponent having walked up to the rubble and examining it.
"That bastard!" Damisan grunted as he realized that by bringing the whole building down, Stein had made it impossible for him to fulfill his objective without landing his feet firmly on the floor and examining the wreckage for the gadget he was meant to find inside that wrecked building. Not until his enemy was taken care of and not capable of threatening him or his crew in this war game.