Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

Dancing with Pirates

The fingers of Hachiro's mechanical puppet arm twitched emitting barely intelligible squeaks. The darned thing was busted up and cracked, a little bit more beating it into Read's chakra augmentations would've busted it into tiniest shatters. Slowly, to the degree where the Uchiha was unable to sense its flow, the puppet limb, borrowed from Read's ship, was sapping his chakra. The loss was minuscule really, not at all something to worry about. A civilian may have been troubled and exhausted for wearing the thing throughout the day but someone trained in managing chakra and building their inner pools up wouldn't even have noticed such minUscule losses. It wasn't the chakra spending aspect of the puppet limb that worried Hachiro, more the near busted state of it.

The Uchiha was having his hands full with the pirate captain. If once again he was left one handed he'd be crushed much faster than he'd run out of stamina normally. Still, it was a losing battle either way. Hachiro knew it for a long time but he was just not fond of either alternative: letting go of the battle and dying went against every instinct of self-preservation he had developed over the years and moving aside and letting Mana die would only make his death come later and incomparably more painfully, even more – more sacrilegiously. The madman was known for not respecting death or the dead. Hachiro's rest would not be eternal in that case...

"Your stolen arm looks pathetic. Matching its wearer I must add!" Read tried to mock the Uchiha, without a doubt she tried intimidating him and making him end this fight early by fleeing. She still must not have cared about the Uchiha that much and just wanted retribution from the Konoha kids that played her.

"Coming from a woman who has her sister literally stuck to her back this is rich..." Hachiro replied back stretching the squeaking fingers out. This was bad, the speed of his two-handed hand seals would've been greatly diminished just when he regained the ability to weave them again. One-handed seals rarely worked on high ranking techniques, the more complex the technique the less the probability it'd work.

A loud bang interrupted Hachiro's battle planning – a chakra imbued kunai pierced through the tree behind her. Slowly the large natural pillar of wood began toppling on top of the two. This was just a distraction, these two moved so astonishingly fast that a falling tree would have posed no threat. It may as well have been a turtle's pace.

Hachiro's body moved aside only to see Read moving in from the side. The Uchiha's eyes were too fast-tracking and analytical of every smallest happening on the battlefield for him not to notice the woman dashing in from the side.

"Tortuga Sword Style: Dance of Kali" Read announced the name of the technique as her blades attacked all at once, both Read and Bonny slashed at their opponent fast and precisely in lightning swift and wide-reaching strikes that left little to no chance for evasion. It was a total overwhelming of the Uchiha's Sharingan sensory inputs. Four slashes with trajectories so wide and all reaching and coming so fast that anyone would've taken at the very least a single deep and conclusive slash.

Hachiro's body got severed into several large chunks that then instantly turned into water and collapsed watering the jungle floor that the water clone was cut down on. It was a thing of technical beauty – weaving the hand seal for the Water Clone jutsu and then quickly substituting oneself with it. Everything transpired so fast that not even a skilled swordswoman striking at speeds that make a bolt of lightning look like a snail moving in tar was able to pick anything up at all.

Now was Hachiro's chance – the woman was occupied with her attack, her highly coordinated and synced up with her sister dance. Now that her momentum and body was invested fully into the attack was the rogue's opening. Hachiro's hands went through a tirade of hand seals. The mechanical puppet arm on the man's arm worked a couple of corks slow and fired off sparks emitting very troubling sounds that may have alerted the woman, not that any of it mattered.