"Is this where you ask me to hand you the seal and leave nicely just because you've pushed me into a corner?" Ion's father wondered with quills of mockery sticking out in his tone.
"I can't let you do that either. We both know that your life beyond this pointless revenge quest revolves around killing people. I'm not letting that continue either," Mana shook her head as a handful of Usujitsa clones hopped up closer to her. A pair of them looked to their summoner with goofy and thoughtless expressions, but once the strictness in Mana's face washed over them, they turned away and looked down in submission.
"Interesting… That's not the answer I was expecting. Especially not from someone who's resulted in more casualties until now than the total of successful, high-profile hits I've completed. That's right, Konoha's Sorceress, I've researched your past failures. I know the name of every single person you've ever let down, anyone that's ever trusted you to save them whom you failed. Do their faces still linger with you or have you failed so many of them by now that they're just a meaningless, grey mass that means nothing to you anymore?"
This unnerved Mana. As uncomfortable as she was admitting it, it made something boil deep down. There couldn't have been any more hiding behind her illusions. Mana didn't want to zap or burn this man. She wanted to pant and wheeze that frustration out and translate it into punishment. She knew it was a trap, that her opponent was vastly more skilled at taijutsu or armed combat, that he was a master of emotionally manipulating his marks, and that by his own admission he'd studied Mana for this exact purpose. None of it mattered.
Riding the gale of her Mystical Wings Jutsu, Mana shot herself toward the beaten man in front of her as he got off the ground and lifted his sword to fight back. To duck the first diving kick, the killer had to fall down and thrust his sword into the ground for support so that he didn't fumble. His hand locked around Mana's wrist as she slashed with a steel-tipped card in her hand. Seeing him move from so close was like real magic, in the sense that Mana had absolutely no idea what was going on. He was too close for his motions to make any semblance of sense.
The assassin threw his diamond-shaped sword behind him, absorbing Usubane's dropkick. Still manipulating Mana's limb and flinging her around as he secured his armlock, the man swatted Usuzoku and Usukari aside while Usujitsa clones dived to bomb him once again. Mana activated her Mystical Wings to flip over her opponent and thrust her boots in his back. A loud snap rung in her ears, but she still had a few twitches of time before the pain of her snapping wrist set in. The assassin put up his arm, lighting his forearm up with a sealing glyph that unleashed a torrent of ninja tool projectiles, skewering Usujitsa clones and detonating them mid-flight before he returned to focus back on Mana.
With one of the magician's wrists broken, the man backflipped, sending his sharp, armored boots into the crux of Mana's chin. Everything blacked out for a blink. The rush of air all around her confused Mana for a second. She knew that every microsecond that the man's sword was out of her sight was a matter of life or death. Still, with her wrist burning up to her elbow and it being impossible to tell which side was up and which was down, the creeping terror in her chest made Mana wonder if this might have been how she'd die.
White. A crescent-shaped flash of red slashed through the haze and bled just like the blood streaming down the shallow slash on Mana's chest. "This is it, just you and me, just how it should have been, I'm glad you agree…" Ion's father swung his sword around him, covering Zokaka's entire body with crosses and slashes of crimson and sending the bellowing elephant down. Tomi screamed out in panic, jumping off the branch she perched on to after her fallen friend. Mana knew that scream, that tone of utter decimation. She didn't blame Tomi for losing her will to fight any longer.
"You should have never gotten your friends involved, but it couldn't have been helped, I suppose. They involved themselves without asking permission, and now it's too late. They're too deep in, my daughter's blood is on their hands too," the assassin flicked a marble over his head that exploded spreading a corrosive liquid around him that sizzled and spread noxious vapors upon contacting the ground but it appeared to provide a ring-shaped barrier around him that blocked off the connection of Skaven's shadow to his by surrounding the man's shadow with a ring of fuming liquid that the shadow appeared to be incapable of passing.
The man knew her too well; he knew all of them too well, even with Mana trying to slip in a one-armed illusion hand seal a painful twinge made her eyes widen when a knife stuck through her free wrist, sinking Mana's arm back down as it twitched uncontrollably, pulsing with puny chugs of blood from the wound. Flipping over the ring of shadowy protection, the man bolted up to Skaven, outrunning the shadow racing behind him and vaulted over Skaven after reaching him, making the racing shadow return to its owner while the man mashed Skaven's face in with his bare hands, pushing and kicking in some blades still sticking out from the young Nara punk before cutting him down with his sword and performing a roundhouse kick to send Shige-H flying back and slamming into a nearby boulder too.
By then the Stars leader had pulled out some ninja tools that the assassin stuck in her and healed some of her own wounds, but all of their chakra was running low on both sides. Even the blinding flashes of the Four-Tails plowing through the Allied Ninja forces in the horizon became rarer, the screams were slowly dying out and becoming rarer with the periods of silence in between drawing longer.
"You had an option to stop all of that. If only you acted as honorable as you pretend to be, you could have saved so many lives. Not those of your friends, maybe, but definitely those of the Allied Ninja. Then again, you're not one of them, are you? What do you care?" the assassin swiped his massive sword to the side, splattering the trickles of blood stuck to the edge of its blade as he approached Mana. A starlit flash of light with a shrieking howl stopped the man in his tracks. He may not have cared too much for the flash, but he cared more than enough for the noise to pull one's ears off.
Mana's clutch sealing card tool acting like a mixture of a standard ninja flash bomb with extra on top came in for the save. It wasn't much, but it gave Mana a way to fight back. It bought her friends time to recover. Just because her wrists were ravaged and she could barely move her arms, it didn't mean that she was helpless. Mana assaulted the lethal avenger with a flurry of kicks, so many that it seemed like the magician had grown seven extra limbs and kicked with all of them at once. The skill of her opponent had been unparalleled, for he raised his forearm and absorbed every kick Mana threw his way. Before slashing upward with his sword and opening a gash at Mana's thigh as both of them vaulted into the air.
The head-splitting sear in her thigh almost helped Mana deal with the stopping power of two knives etching into her gut from a mid-air position. How deadly accurate the enemy was while being blind felt almost completely unfair, and yet it was all of them who were fighting a blinded opponent. A warm and sticky feeling touched her hair from underneath Mana. It was a feeling that she had been used to but hasn't felt in a while. Out of sheer instinct, Mana tried to crawl back to avoid the finishing stroke, but her helpless wrists just spouted more blood and refused to listen.
"Come on," the killer swung his sword in an aerial eight in preparation to finish his prone and helpless opponent off. "Give that useless line about how killing you won't bring my daughter back."
"I'm not the one who killed all the people that died today. Whether or not I surrendered to your execution, their lives would have been on you either way." Mana fell flat, accepting the fact that she couldn't do much of anything. With a lowly grunt, her would-be executioner flipped his sword over his head and deflected Usubane's attacks before kicking her aside as Mana's rabbits attacked the killer at a time he would have been the most vulnerable–just before the coup de grâce. Had the man not read them like an open book, they'd have succeeded too…
"Hatchling!" Usuzoku's grunt still reached Mana as the beaten rabbit quivered on the ground while the enemy had robbed him of his claymore and flung him aside at hand-to-hand combat. The man didn't rush to eliminate Mana even then, turning his back on the magician to deflect an oncoming boomerang with a deafening clang of chakra-imbued hardwood clashing with steel and nearly busting through.
"I won't let you kill Mana-nee!" Tomi grumbled, overcoming her panic of losing Zokaka and Zomiti as the two injured elephants disappeared in a puff of smoke, finally accepting the fact that their presence and further injury would have only hurt their mistress rather than serve her. The killer's fingers wrapped around Tomi's throat, stopping her in mid-pounce as he prepared to impale the girl.
Mana's whipping leg slammed into the back of the man's knees, throwing him off balance and prompting little Tomi to kick her feet into both sides of his elbow joint while she crawled his muscular limb like a wildcat and bashed him in the head with another boomerang she clutched tightly in her arms. With blood spraying from a gash in his battered eye, the killer staggered back with little Tomi landing before him and growling at him as she slipped her arms back and attached clawed gauntlets, much more primal and subtle in design to the chunkier ones that the assassin had used earlier but ones that looked like they could do the job.
"Summoning Jutsu!" Tomi yelled out, as the man flung his hand forward, sending a spray of makibishi spikes to coat the floor. The savage girl stopped her palm plant halfway, fully predicting the same method of counterattack that had stopped her last time as she launched her full body into a charging, head-first tackle but the assassin's rising knee knocked Tomi flying like a rag doll. Grabbing the wild kunoichi by her hair, the assassin pummeled her gut a few times before punching her into the face and sending the battered kunoichi down like a wet rag before pulling his sword out of the ground again and returning to his immediate mission objective of snuffing out the ninja stage magician.
Without reviewing Mana's last words that came earlier, the man swung his sword, aiming to split her head open, without considering that he still needed to provide said head for the bounty that his daughter was seeking before her death. An electrical lash and a downfall of gold-colored sparks flew off in all directions as a chakra-coated double-blade sword intervened and deflected the assassin's blade while the sword fighter holding it twirled it onward with an offensive flurry.
Mana's savior clashed with her would-be executioner, exchanging blows though despite the assassin's vast injuries and the aggressive sword-fighting style of the double-blade wielder, neither man gained any progress as the disciplined and stalwart defense allowed Ion's father to deflect or evade every single strike through clever space management and only choosing to block or deflect the strikes he couldn't otherwise deal with, which allowed him to better manage Endo's aggressive sword-fighting style in a way very few swordsmen would have been able to.
"Endo…" Mana muttered as she wrestled herself back on her bottom just so this douchebag savior of hers doesn't see her in the compromised and weak position she was in before he came to her aid.
"You guys really are hopeless," Endo claimed with no hint of betrayal of the emotions that were running through his mind, seeing his entire team dismantled like that. "I had figured that you'd handle this guy when taking him on all together so I worked on saving the Allied Ninja where I could, but I guess this needs the attention of the No. 1 personally."
"You… Were rescuing Allied Ninja?" Mana dropped her jaw, forgetting the wince-inducing pain in her wrists and broken ribs and the pulsing nervous burn from her gut where two kunai were still sticking out from.
"Naturally. After all, I still intend on defeating them myself to cement my position as No. 1 and claim tutor Kushon's Ruby Supernova as a testament to me becoming No. 1. Do you have any idea how many recruits I've worked so hard to settle things with you've killed today with this stupid, drama queen stunt of yours, you asshole?" Endo beamed a wrathful gaze at the killer. Mana noted how only Endo's left arm was grasping his double-bladed sword and he seemed to only fight with that one hand while his right hung down, as if it had been paralyzed or wounded somehow. Endo might have been a temporary distraction. The Stars needed to get back on their feet and press on with their advantage again.
"No. 1?" the assassin swung his blade over his head and lowered it to a neutral position. This must have been a part of the total equation he had not yet been familiar with. So far, their enemy had been making strides, but only because he was so good at predicting exactly what the Stars would do and when.
Something soft and fuzzy but strong enough to lift her off the ground pulled Mana up. It was Usuvilme and Usukari as they dashed aside to bring Mana to Shige-H so that the Stars' leader could tend to Mana's wounds. The sound of rabbit's feet rustling through the sandy stone of the wasteland floor must have burnt through the assassin's mind like boiling water as he launched himself toward them in a wild charge, but Endo once again was there to intercept the man. This time Ion's father lit up his own sword with a chakra coating that he reserved before to preserve chakra, which he'd have already wasted plenty on dispelling Mana's high-ranking illusions. This allowed the assassin to crack Endo's sword and split it into two while slashing at Endo's chest for a deadly strike.
A bright flash made Mana wince as she had paid close attention to that engagement, worried that she might have lost another friend that day but something humming and electric blocked the assassin's deadly strike aimed toward Endo's heart again, despite his double-bladed sword collapsing and breaking in half. A weathered, stony sword hilt rested in Endo's hand while it lit up with a blade of pure Lightning Release chakra and ignited the sword fast enough to block what would have been a deadly strike.
"You've attached a steel wire to the handle, waiting for a moment to reel the Sword of the Thunder God in for a finishing blow?" the assassin commended Endo's killer instinct while backing off as he hadn't been expecting anything that came from the direction of the aggressive samurai apprentice.
"Yeah, it would have worked too if my useless sword didn't shatter again…" Endo grit his teeth as he examined the humming, electric stream flowing in blade-like shape off of the ancient hilt of an artifact he had just secured off the ground before entering the battle. "I may just have to switch my weapon to this old heap of junk."
"Do you have any idea the amount of trouble I had to go through to secure this sword? It's irritating how it accepts just about anyone now. That's not how it used to be, you see, before it used to accept only the man I took it away from. The rules became complicated when the man I was supposed to bring it to betrayed me since he didn't plan on paying me for the hit either way," Ion's father groaned, dragging his blood-soaked hand down his forehead and leaving a greasy, burgundy stain on his face.
"I see. So the sword's loyalty became stuck between the man that had murdered its previous owner and the man it belonged to the entire time? Tsk, I'm fighting using damaged goods, is what you're saying, essentially?" Endo examined the perfectly channeled stream of Lightning Release chakra and the handiwork of the ancient, glyph-incrusted hilt that channeled it.
"It is still a legendary, one-of-a-kind weapon, so I will take it off your body. Maybe since the sword accepts you, I'll gain full ownership again once I loot it off of your cold, dead fingers?" the assassin turned his back on Endo, preparing to dash off to intercept Mana being brought to Shige-H. Seeing his opponent turn his back pissed Endo off, the young man launched himself at the enemy again but received a handful of kunai for his trouble.
Endo collapsed on his knee, the Sword of the Thunder God died out in a moment of its owner's weakness as blood streamed down the cuts and scrapes that the samurai apprentice had accumulated as even with his back turned it felt like this enemy had his full attention on either enemy. With the rabbits too invested in moving their summoner, Shige-H being too rocked up and Mana being almost useless for the moment, Endo had to stop the killer himself before he kills both the leader and the heaviest hitter of the Stars at once.
"Hey, bastard, where are you going!? I'm the one who killed your bitch daughter, remember!?" Endo grunted out, picking himself back off the ground and igniting the Sword of the Thunder God as he rose back up. "All this talk about revenge and you're just gonna turn your back on me? I'm glad that tart got to kick the dust before seeing her toothless old man being such a little sissy!"
This time it was Ion's father who froze in place, his chin digging in between the bottom of his neck and the beginning of his chest as he slowly turned around and struggled to remain a cool rhythm of breathing. Mana winced in pain once the rabbits set her down and helped Shige-H get over her head trauma to treat Mana's injuries while Endo did what he did best and piss people off. Shige-H truly must have been a genius leader for realizing that Stars would need a person like that amongst them, a genius beyond her time and age.