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

Kryptonite of the Polite People

"Mana!" Hanshin called out to the magician. It was not common of him to request back-up so one would have been smart and felt honored when they were called forth.

"On it." The Mana replied. It took Hanshin a good few dashes forward before he realized that the magician was not backing him up but instead working with the crowd. Had the special jounin bothered to learn more about his team, perhaps he'd have known Mana's priorities in each given situation.

"Heh, typical... Don't worry, I got you!" Meiko cheered while looking at Mana avoiding and tipping over multiple opponents. The Yordalarans were insanely strong for civilians, to begin with, then there was the crazy strength stacked on top of them when none of the usual morals or physical limiters that a body placed on itself when a strenuous action was performed applied.

"Be careful, don't engage that psycho-haired guy, there's something about him I don't like!" Kiyomi warned her team on the link, doing her best to stay on the behind lines and attempting to snipe the odd-factor out from afar. It was an old method of fighting, one she thought she'd abandoned after getting stronger and becoming more than a match for her peers in close distance, regardless, the respect that lingered in her chest for that grinning diplomat forced Kiyomi to stay back.

A mindless, unintelligible scream echoed from behind Hanshin. A man with a miner's helmet and a cloth that covered his face all the way from the nose down. Hanshin's eyes moved before his body, almost fast enough to face a braid of bony rods wrapped around each other with a peculiar aura of chakra coating it. Instead of just serving as a coat, the chakra aura split into small branches that grabbed large chunks of dirt and stone and instantly hardened and sharpened them into rocky teeth that rotated all around the two-handed bony contraption.

A flock of sparks shot out from a point in the air where Hanshin's chakra armor greeted his opponent's attack. Finally, one of the foreign spies revealed themselves. The gaunt figure stumbled back, holding his weapon in a deceitful manner that made it look like it was struggling to hold it but the ease in his hands could not fool an observer as skilled in the art of swordsmanship as Meiko and as experienced as Hanshin.

"Finally, the spiders reveal themselves. Let Hanshin tell you something, enough of these pesky webs!" Hanshin covered his face with the tips of his fingers as if lamenting the loss of a dear one before peeking from the very edge of his hand to reveal a gleeful stare.

"I'll keep the Yordalarans off of you, deal with this guy," Meiko suggested before unsealing a buckler from one of her chest armor pieces and coating it with chakra. Whenever a Yordalaran attempted to interrupt the fight or bring their crazy moshpit of violence to the brawling ninja, Meiko would swat or shove them aside. Given how she was taking on a significant chunk of an entire country, gathered to elect a new leader and gone absolutely wild, the very feat of her managing to give Hanshin and his opponent some peace of mind was astounding.

The man in a miner's helmet looked up at his comrade as if calling out to him. The diplomat only nodded before widening his grin.

"But of course, fight to your heart's extent..." he declared as if he could somehow understand the muffled and unintelligible babble coming out from his friend's mouth.

The permission to let loose appeared to make the muffled one exceptionally happy as the man swung his odd weapon in the air like a madman, turning his neutral chakra coating to one colored a watery red where the strands of chakra that formed the rocky teeth before now turned to blazes that jet off freely in every direction.

It was a while since Mana has had a flexing workout quite like this. Usually, when fighting a singular opponent her dance was split into two parts – avoid and counterattack, usually both at the same time as splitting the two often proved to be simply too slow. It required two independent thoughts and such lethargy was not tolerated on a high-caliber battlefield. This time, there was no break in between the movement. Movement was all there was.