"If you think I'm letting you kill us both, think again," the Empress exclaimed while weaving a hand seal and vanishing into a pink, illusory haze. A translucent, vaguely shaped humanoid doppelgänger charged at Mana at a ludicrous speed that felt almost too fast to respond. It was only because Mana was familiar with the Haze genjutsu technique that she knew not to fall for the obvious trap and let the incoming vague blur disorient her.

As expected, instead of crashing into Mana. The illusory clone burst into a shower of cherry blossom petals with a pair of Scarlet clones emerging from the petal storm, approaching Mana under the illusion's cover. Given how elementary Haze was, Mana didn't want to divert her focus or stamina into dispelling it, choosing rather to suffer through the illusion and instead stay focused on the malicious persona that tried to prevent Mana from committing to her choice to pass away.

"Spear Kick!" both Scarlet clones performed a diving kick from mid-air, attempting to stomp Mana into the ethereal void that the two clashing personalities hovered in. Before they even collided with Mana's body, Mana burst into cerulean flames, erupting into a pillar of dancing flames which, immediately after swallowing the incoming Scarlets, swirled inside of Mana's hat.

As she twitched her wrist backward, further away from the exuberant scene of battle, using steel wire to reel her hat back into her hand, Mana placed her hat back onto her head and began scanning this unusual mental landscape for traces of Scarlet. It was during moments like this, when Mana lost direct contact with her opponent, that Scarlet could have rushed for the shimmering jewel sky over their heads and tried claiming Mana's body as her own.

As a reflection of Mana's inner turmoil and unease, fueled by the fact that she could have lost control over her body and mind and become confined to it as a prisoner in her own body, yet again, the admirable scenery of Konoha beneath and around her began to shift. Konoha, its buildings, monuments, and evening skies turned into a murky whirlpool and this visual cacophony started irking Mana's eyes and distracting her.

An azure firenado of Shura Release blasted off from a remote point, at last revealing Scarlet's play. She wasn't rushing for the gemstone skies, as Mana thought she'd be. It appeared that her malevolent alter-self signed up to crush Mana before claiming what she thought was hers. After shooting off into the air and gaining sufficient elevation, still blazing with blue flames, Scarlet transitioned her momentum into a flying Spear Kick. As an answer, Mana set off the Mystical Wings Jutsu and shot off into the air after the self-proclaimed Empress.

As the murky whirlpool of memories around the colliding personalities settled down and revealed the image of an old and abandoned oriental village district, laden with scrap and throwaway heaps of garbage, Mana and Scarlet clashed their Spear Kicks in mid-air. Unlike Scarlet, who winced in pain and let out a grunt, tormented by the physical strain of the exchange, Mana threw the kick using her prosthetic leg, taking very little blowback as Damisan had done a remarkable job making the prosthetic amortize and absorb shock. The images of the Konohagakure Junkyard District solidified as rain began pouring down from the evening sky and a handful of buildings caught fire.

A bubbling shockwave of concussive force resonated stronger and stronger from the epicenter of the power struggle of the two personas fighting for the right to decide over the fate of the body they both shared. Wild jolts of lightning fired in all directions. Translations of the immense leaking chakra that each of the struggling personas staked in this clash. The heated atmosphere arced with dancing jets of flames. Then the dreadful crack eased the tension in Mana's shaking prosthetic leg, making the magician exclaim in terror all too late.

A deafening pop served as a wicked emissary of the dire news that Mana's prosthetic leg shattered into tiny splinters and her body was rag dolled away into the infinite recreation of the Junkyard District drawn from Mana's memories. Before Mana could stabilize herself, Scarlet came in swinging with a flying roundhouse kick, riding the Shura Release jet of flames to grant her a boost in speed and force of impact.

"It's pointless for us to fight! You're just as smart as I am, so you should be well aware of that!" Scarlet proclaimed before the version of her that attacked Mana ripped with a violent blue flare explosion, revealing it to have been a Shura Clone. Another Scarlet caught Mana from behind with another roundhouse, just rag-dolling the magician around and doing her best to exploit the opening she'd created after the failure of Mana's prosthetic leg.

Scarlet had a point. Because Mana always imagined herself to have never lost her leg if only she'd been more ruthless and didn't watch out for the lives of her opponents, Mana's physical handicaps didn't burden Scarlet. No matter how good of an engineer and puppeteer Damisan was, his puppet prosthetics would always be just chakra conductive replaceable artificial scrap. Scarlet was all-natural, unhinged, bloodthirsty, and willing to do whatever she had to to win. No matter how much Mana wanted to believe that she still stood a chance, there was a reason subconsciously she always returned to the ideal image of Scarlet in her mind, before she consciously forbade herself entry into that room of her mental palace.

"Shura Release: Head-Splitting Pain!" Scarlet chanted from out of nowhere, spitting out a condensed blue fireball right at Mana from up above. After a little help stabilizing her into a parallel pose, Mana clapped her hands together before spreading them out toward the incoming blue firebomb.

"Serenity Arcana: Hat Trick!" Mana chanted out, forging a hat-shaped chakra construct that let the incoming firestorm swirl inside on one end with another chakra hat parallel to it, releasing it right back at Scarlet.

"This trick's getting old! I thought you don't like encores!" Scarlet mocked Mana, clapping her hands together and creating a massive hourglass-shaped chakra hourglass construct. Just before the firebomb could reach Scarlet and detonate, the hourglass turned horizontally, revealing a glowing chakra sealing glyph on the top, similar to Mana's Hat Trick technique. The upper surface of Scarlet's hourglass swallowed Head-Splitting Pain inside and turned it into a blizzard of cinders that swarmed at the top and slowly dwindled as the hourglass reset itself.

"With you as an opponent, every technique I know is an encore," Mana admitted. She didn't want to rush into trouble and risk triggering a violent and unforeseen response by this hourglass jutsu she'd never seen. Meanwhile, attacking Scarlet from a range would have resulted in Mana's jutsu getting absorbed into the hourglass, just like the reflected firestorm was. This was an immensely powerful and advanced stage of chakra armor. It must have come from Mana's own latent killing intent, but Mana had little to no comprehension of how it worked.

The magician's own mind was playing tricks on her. Then again, it wasn't like Mana ever allowed herself to process and confront these dark thoughts. Instead, she saw them all as a mere indulgence she had no control over. Something to hide away in shame and shun away from. Maybe if she confronted those thoughts before they formed the Empress personality, she'd have had more information about what she was facing right now…

The mindscape began shifting again, swirling around them while Scarlet's perfected chakra armor construct finally finished spilling over cinders into the lower half of the hourglass. Upon completion, the hourglass burst open, unleashing a halo-shaped firestorm in all directions and forcing Mana to scramble and brace for trouble. Strangely, the expulsion of flames didn't hurt that badly, a mere lick of chakra augmentation was enough to avoid damage and Mana preferred it to more desperate evasion methods like Flower Petal Sanctuary.

Meanwhile, the flames appeared to center all around Scarlet, booming skyward in the shape of a flaming tower while it surged around the levitating Empress as her fiery aura. Mana's chakra sensory relayed the uncomfortable truth that Scarlet was replenishing her chakra. It was a terrifying method of recouping on the chakra strain of forging a perfected chakra armor technique as well as using a heavy-hitting Advanced Bloodline jutsu.

By the time the blazing chaos subsided, the mindscape around Mana and Scarlet turned into the all too familiar image of the Forest of Death. Mana's mind raced through different strategies she could try, however, she was quick to dismiss them as Scarlet now had far too many advantages over Mana to keep track of. Ruthlessness, boundless ambition, a terrifying amount of arrogance, a complete set of limbs, and, as of now, an almost fully replenished chakra pool. Mana wasn't in an abyss of trouble yet, she's made some good calls by playing conservatively until now. Still, challenging Scarlet directly was a suicidal play.

What was the absolute worst–Mana didn't have the luxury of reaching out for the brilliant sky. That would cause her to return to her body, which wasn't Mana's goal. Then again, making more of a fool of herself and her dream and failing more people was a preferable alternative to letting Scarlet win and ruining even the few successes Mana has achieved by tainting Mana's reputation forever. In the end, the sacrificial play might not have been what Mana originally thought it to be. It seemed like in this case, she'd have to become a martyr by living on, as long as it meant keeping Scarlet at bay from taking control.

The two different personas of the same kunoichi, the Magician and the Empress alike, began weaving hand seals at the same time. A concentrated cluster of lightning began chirping around their hands as both personas thrust their arms out. "Lightning Release: Supreme Magic Pierce Jutsu!" they both chanted in unison as a sharp, concentrated beam of condensed lightning took off from their hands, speeding toward the other and threatening to meet down the middle like two lances of knights charging past one another.

Just mere centimeters before touching each other and skidding just past the tip of the blitzing lightning blade, each beam took upward and then dissolved into a batch of sword-shaped lightning constructs that burst far and wide to where the entire sky had been filled with these lightning swords hanging above each persona's head. Having flooded the battlefield with sparking blades, yelling from the bottom of their chest with neither persona backing down, the two dashed at each other while lightning swords began raining down around them.

Because of the handicap of missing a leg and constantly struggling with proper balance, Mana had to use Mystical Wings to hover and maintain balance. That was just a cheaper alternative to building a leg replacement out of armor ninjutsu. Pulling her saw-sword, the Empress spun around with a growl as she slashed with it so intensely that the blade produced a white flash by sawing through the air and becoming just a meek blur while in motion.

Mana soared like a swallow, tipping upward and avoiding the incoming slash while dodging the downpour of Lightning Release swords from above. Grunting from the physical effort the task demanded, Scarlet fended the downpour off with brutish swipes of her massive saw-blade swords while Mana elegantly weaved around them in the air. There it was. Her chance. Mana's eyes raced across, imagining herself in different positions, trying to stuff her body in between the swords and produce some kind of pose she could still attack from.

Turning with her legs spread wide, Mana socked in the back of Scarlet's head, making the Empress stumble forward. With the tip of the lightning blade nearly skimming the tips of her hair, Scarlet exclaimed vocally while turning her body around in a microsecond and swatting the blade aside, only for it to dissolve into sparks and a field of static crackles. A handful of steel-tipped cards stabbed into Scarlet's wide-open chest with a slick rub of metal against flesh.

Immediately, one of the cards unsealed a ridiculous shower of water while another burst with white jolts of electricity, and the third one added to the oomph of the explosion with a blast of its own. A loud pop and a cloud of smoke revealed that Scarlet had substituted herself with one of the incoming chakra sword constructs before vaulting over Mana's head with a nimble pirouette while working on more hand seals. Mana repeated Scarlet's hand seals, albeit with a minimal delay as she only mirrored her alter persona's movements after putting together her plan from the jutsu of Scarlet's choice.

"Magical Shock Jutsu!" Scarlet chanted out, firing a lashing thunderbolt toward one of the plunging skyward swords that attempted to skewer each persona. The shock of lightning merged with the sword, like a belt wrapping around it. Yanking the chakra sword, Scarlet pulled it toward her and grabbed its handle to slam it against Mana, who repeated Scarlet's movements just in the nick of time, answering Scarlet's slash of Supreme Magical Pierce sword with that of her own, also lashed by Magical Shock Jutsu's thunderbolt.

The two personas that shot figurative thunderbolts from their eyes at one another had no time at all to linger with their power struggle, as the plunging lightning swords became even more vicious and forced them to dash, dance, flip, roll, and weave around them, all the while repeating lashes of Magical Shock to pull in more and more swords to clash with one another mid-motion. It was a sick ballet of elegant evasion interweaved with fits of vicious violence directed at one another. A dance that could not have lasted more than a few heartbeats, yet in the beating hearts of both Mana and Scarlet, it expanded into what they perceived as hours, days, and weeks…

"I acknowledge your struggle, Magician, that's why all I want for you is to have your deserved rest while I state our claim to the throne at the top of the world where we belong! I don't want to eliminate you, but I will if I have to!" Scarlet barked out as their everlasting collision left Mana in mid-air, plunging toward Scarlet while the Empress was in a prime position to impale the incoming magician with her leashed chakra lightning sword.

"I've failed too many people too many times! I won't fail to stop you here!" Mana defied Scarlet's warning and continued to plunge toward her opponent recklessly. At the same time, the shifting mindscape surrounded the two with the image of the Chuunin Exams arena with faceless people cheering for no one knew what. They clapped in a restrained and eerie fashion, however, they were dead silent and their faceless stretches of skin stared off into the blank void.

"I truly am sorry!" Scarlet said what she believed to be her last words to the Magician persona, who would end up impaled on the Supreme Magic Pierce sword, at which point Scarlet swore to herself she'd make it quick, slicing Mana up into minuscule strings her mind would never weave itself together from.

"Spellword Jutsu!" Mana exclaimed, casting an early Wind Release jutsu from her childhood. One of the fifteen core techniques she perfected before the Chuunin Exams finals fight against Stea to where she could use them without the aid of hand seals or chanting their name. The shout left Mana's lungs with a potent gale that slammed against the Lightning Release tip of the Supreme Magic Pierce lightning sword and dissolved it into a harmless field of static electricity.

"Wind Release?" Scarlet muttered to herself, realizing that she'd devoted too much to this attack she thought would seal the deal. Like the crafty little fox she was, Mana waited until the very last moment, when Scarlet couldn't foster any hopes of a counter-counter attack before executing her perfect answer to Scarlet's finishing move. The properties of Wind Release ninjutsu rendered Lightning Release obsolete, as long as the jutsu were of a similar rank and potency.

While Supreme Magic Pierce was an A-Rank jutsu, it produced a cluster of much weaker individual chakra swords that cut through the opponent like a true sword would but dissolved into a sizzling shock that also stunned the opponent afterward. Mana's single and polished C-Rank technique managed to call forth the reaction of wind against lightning while engaging and beating an individual Supreme Magic Pierce sword in the exchange.

Having earned her one-in-a-million opening and a free shot at Scarlet, Mana would not waste it, for there may not have been another. Mana clapped her hands together, pushing her meek stump leg out toward the stunned Scarlet.

"Serenity Arcana: Cabaret Kickline!" Mana chanted out, producing a massive leg construct of solid chakra as a show of her skill in armor ninjutsu, that socked Scarlet aside after the Empress expected an immediate finishing move yet flinched up after Mana faked her out with a kick from her stump. Just as Scarlet was about to recover, the armor ninjutsu leg grew a dozen times larger still, and stamped down on top of the Empress, repeating the stamp routine with cabaret-style kicks.

Meanwhile, Mana clenched her arms to her side and took off, putting her Mystical Wing Jutsu to work as she soared toward the gem glistening in the sky at the point where it seemed that the Soul Sapphire shine had almost wholly devoured the Soul Ruby. The sapphire sky felt so close that Mana could reach it. Only when the sky was within an arm's reach did the realization of what she was signing herself up for hit Mana like a brick, however, continuing to fight through the misery beat letting Scarlet take her best shot and ruining everything Mana's worked so hard for in one fell swoop.

A sharp pain rocked Mana straight in her face, sending the magician slamming back down as a long and segmented line of interconnected squares, decorated with numbers and stretching out like a snake spiraled down through a flashy rift that suddenly burst open in the jewel sky. It was a colorful, numbered road atop which rode a metal Phaeton-style convertible that, because of its wholly metallic build, didn't move, however, it rode the spiraling colorful road all the way down to the level of the void where Mana and Empress both writhed in pain in.

"Damn it… What is this?" Mana turned to the Empress with a spiteful look, hating to admit that she was genuinely stumped how her alter self-produced this convertible-seated man with an almost fully split head that was held together by band-aids and had a wild, spiky hairdo of greasy dark hair curling in all directions.

"Me? Look at this guy, he's a fully grown actual man! That's not a jutsu!" Scarlet barked back at Mana while Bogemu Uneyotsu hopped out of his metallic toy convertible Phaeton and looked around at the two almost identical-looking young women with a vastly distinct taste in make-up and clothing. The board game magician was almost as baffled by this curious meeting as the two personas were to see him.

"This is… Odd…" Bogemu Uneyotsu scratched his chin, looking around to understand where exactly he ended up after attempting to interact with the Soul Gem.

"You're in the way of something here, die!" the Empress barked out, manifesting her sawing sword from solid chakra using armor ninjutsu as it hurled at Bogemu Uneyotsu.

"You dumb bitch, NO!" Bogemu almost screamed out in a state of panic. Time seemed to freeze and a mass of depressing blackness expanded and consumed all of Mana's inner mindscape, transporting everyone inside into Bogemu's board game and deleting everything obsolete.


"Do you think he's gonna be okay?" Asuka leaned down to Damisan who laid flat on his back with rolled-back eyes and a twitching, open lower jaw, foaming from the mouth after taking one kick to the gonads too many and collapsing to his knees, at which point Bogemu finished him with a stamp kick to the face.

"Damisan is not the one I'm worried about," Shige-H turned to the spaced-out Bogemu who clutched the Soul Gem, which, out of nowhere, reverted to being a Soul Sapphire again. Bogemu warned them after stepping over Damisan that trying something stupid would have meant throwing away their lives as they wouldn't have bought any amount of time whatsoever for their friend, they'd have just joined the countless people lost in Bogemu's spell. "I guess you'll just have to play his game, Mana. Thankfully, there's no better person to beat him at it than you. Give him hell and come back to us."