Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul

Problem Stridin'

The talisman user Omase raised her hands up and pointed them forward, aiming them at Kiyomi. Her long black sleeves with dark green, shiny stones sewn into gold-colored embroideries on them attracted Kiyomi's attention. These long sleeves would have served as a much finer hiding spot for the woman's talismans.

A powerful wave of wind raised dirt, small stones, and other similar rubble, mixing them inside of its tight, rotating embrace and escalating them at an intense speed that not even the largest tornado could have dreamed about. The tight compression of the wall of air gave it its greatest power as any blade of grass could have easily opened large wounds and pebbles could have passed right through flesh and bone inside that wall of raging wind.

The weightlessness inside the pocket of gusts raised Kiyomi's body in the air as dancing grass cut her open in multiple areas and smaller rubble riddled her body passing in and through her body clean. Omase was wiser than to trust her opponent's demise with such a simple frontal assault. Had the kid really been enveloped by this wave of air, she'd have augmented her endurance out of fear of death and made her flesh tough as nails, to the point where the leaves and grass blades would have only cut her skin and the pebbles would have left minor bruises instead of punching entire holes in the girl.

A simple poof revealed this gruesome image of Kiyomi slowly being tortured inside the wall of wind being nothing more than the dead corpse of the bird she used to transfer her consciousness into previously, sadly crushed by her opponent before it could make its escape after planting the explosives on the talisman user. Omase's clever eyes instantly looked down, following the noise of the shifting ground beneath her feet, the woman let her enhanced perception do the tracking.

A loud burst of ground preceded Kiyomi's surfacing from underground. The Yamanaka leaped at her opponent with her kunai in hand, just like in their previous encounter, using her Earth Release techniques to close distance safer to this long-ranged opponent.

Omase swung her arms aside, at the direction of the rushing opponent. The air where the tips of her sleeves traveled caught flames and started popping like miniature explosions were released into the air where those sleeves swung. There was a pungent odor of gunpowder moments before the barrage of explosions reached that area.

Differently than before, the explosions appeared to merely phase through Kiyomi's image and the explosions did not bear much fruit. From inside the tunnel burrowed by Kiyomi's illusory image an explosive pouch flew out, aiming to hit her opponent right in the face before detonating with all of its explosive tag containing might.

Omase took wild and acrobatic vaults back to minimize the damage but the power of the explosion caught her and tossed her backward with a violent jerk. The woman smacked into the wall and bounced off of it like a ragdoll. Had it not been for the power of her own explosion, Kiyomi may have considered following her opponent and attempting to finish her while she was down. By the time the destructive force calmed it was too late.

"Did you really think I'd rush at you the same way as before and risk being tagged by your stupid talismans?" Kiyomi grunted. The thought that Omase really got fooled by that idea offended her a little. The fact that her opponent thought so little of her and the time she had to think that fight through. She may have been just a genin but she was one of the, if not the, strongest genin in the village, if not the world. This lowly criminal was pissing Kiyomi off more than criminals usually did.

"You used a simple Clone Jutsu to attack me but you actually burrowed the hole to disguise the fact that clones made by the Clone Jutsu leave no imprint to the environment. Then, you used that same hole for safety from your own blast." Omase wiped the blood from her mouth, feeling intense pain in her chest where her armored vest was covering her silky robe before. Now only her bare, bandaged chest remained as her clothes that covered it tattered in the wind, bits, and pieces of it still slowly singed with glowing blaze-orange.