Joseph vs Ninjutsu

I raise my arm and a vine extends from my palm.  Large as a tree, it fills the space between my curled fingers and falls with all the weight of one.  I lower my own arm and the appendage snaps forth with enough force to cripple the average tree.

“Water style: Water whip!”

“Wood release: Vine whip!”

The two streams collided half-way between us.  The serpent does not break to any element.  It throttled the body of water.  The trailing end trashed and spat across my face with a heavy impact, but I'd taken as much damage from a thrown water balloon.

The reaping vine persisted however, and drove the water user back in an effort to grab them.  Disrupting a few of their comrades in the process.

“Yin release: Shadow sense”

I glanced to confirm the identity of a stalker and dismissed the serpent.  The vine imploded with a menacing hiss, and I tasted a surge in chakra as I inhaled, bringing my hands into the ram seal.

“Water prison technique.”

The assassin’s eyes widened.  Their sword embedded in a sphere of revolving water.

“Blades of water.”

The sphere cracked, and several portions jutted out toward the shinobi.  Somewhere between the first instinct and taking the brunt of the attack they might have released their sword but the vortex held them in fast all the same.  Hammered back into the trunk of a tree, the shinobi gasped for air.  Soaked and haggard, they looked up defiantly and froze as I finished a series of hand seals not three paces away.

“Water style: Shadow clone jutsu.”

The water that hadn’t soaked into the ground rose to form shins and thighs.  A form that loomed over the ninja, siphoning their chakra, and drew water from across the area of engagement.

Muttering a curse, The ninja launched a kunai into the shoulder of the clone.  The blade speared through the body and expelled the water around it… but the body as a whole didn’t falter.

The ninja sputtered as two yellow eyes gazed from within.  The only defining features the creature had.

“What- What is that!?”  His words muffled as the creature descended on him.

~Technically, I’m an elemental.  Thanks for the food!~

---

A soft ringing of sand.  A rumble like distant thunder.  Black dust writhed beneath my feet, several tongues of it swirling around them.

“Don’t think it will be so easy to interfere.  No matter how hard you try, you can’t provide more than a distraction to the master’s plans.” The hunter licked their blade and reached for the pouch on their hip.  Flicking through hand seals as they went.  I could see it in the way they held their blade and expanded their stance.  I didn’t see a sensor’s technique to see the power coiling through their body.

My right foot dragged back.  My left shimmed as I lowered myself, halfway to a running start.

The first shuriken floated lazily.  A second and third came faster.  A wall of steel stars rushing toward me.  Behind it all, a wave of pressure built.  Chakra rippled and exploded forth, capturing the wind.

And stirring the air around me.  Instinct blazed, a desperate decree to cut through the iron wall.  I reached forward, fear rippling in protest beneath my skin.

~Phantom touch: Sixteen palms~

Cold ghastly columns exploded from my skin.  Shuriken swerved as I angled between them.  Lurching and twisting as they spun out in my wake.

Two, four, eight and sixteen palms together captured them there and slowly burned the edges from the steel.  An orb appeared in the palm of my hand, and four rotating fan blades funneled into it.  An homage to the form they once held.

The ninja blinked and scowled.  Drawing a pouch of dust from their hip, they formed seals again and gouts of the stuff leapt into the air.  Finishing those seals a wave of black particles approached.  There was a spark.  The flat of their kunai struck their bracer and a gasp of fire flooded the trailing end of a wind technique. 

Flame leached out in bolts, snarling fractal claws shone, like cornered feral cats leaping forth.  The dust tickled my skin as the first tongues of fire met with the retreating limbs of my other half.  Pressure and heat swept my skin and waves.  Like a hot bath, pouring around the contours of my flesh.  

I bore the sudden heat despite the gnashing humidity of the forest.  Fangs tore through my sleeves and seared the skin around my wrist, pinning the sphere in place from above and below.

Veins glowed above my person, hot as molten iron.  Flames flowered in their air around me as ghastly palms rode the drafts, spreading and feeding flaming dust and fanning the white hot flames down the roots.  Gouts of fire leapt at the fan blades, tearing and reshaping them before retreating beneath the surface yet again.  The air around my left side darkened as the smoke from my feet joined the steel of the shuriken.  A black smoke shrouded my body.  I could only ‘see’ my arm for the glowing veins of fire peeking from within.

The firestorm settles with a cloud of steam.  I could feel the hands retreat beneath my skin, pressure filling the corners of my mind.  I took a deep breath, thankful for the lacking sulfurous odor.

The ninja blinked in realization and tossed his kunai.  My eyes widened and my palm became flat.  The blade disappeared before me, thrusting out behind my back and catching a tree with a sound thud.

“An illusion.  Such a stupid trick.  Enjoying the show are you?”  Bolts of black powder twisted in the air.  Metals shavings sparking within.

Unfortunately there is a limit to how far an effective illusory clone can be.  The subconscious mind can have them interacting with the physical world provided there’s a line of sight or some other grasp of the surroundings, but errors start to pile up.  There’s also a hard limit, where the environment is so different that the chakra flow between the user and clone is cut off.  Specialists can work around this, conditioning their chakra to form routing nodes.

But I digress.

“Yeah?  You know, it’s not everyday you see someone mixing materials like that.”

The ninja cocked an eyebrow and turned their attention back to me, “Eh?”  The smoldering spears turned toward me, “What are you playing at?”

Something more than a distraction.  The air around me cracked - like plasma arcing through a vacuum - as the folding shell dispersed.  Gray stubs rose through the spine of my cloak, and a wreath of flaming yellow orange had crept up my brow.

“Fire breathing metal spitting.”  I rolled my eyes back and drove my heels into the earth.  Kicking up and pressing a chunk of clay into the sphere in my hand, “Funny thing.  This technique typically forces me to stay put.  Good thing you were looking for a distraction, cause I think we’re just about ready.”  I cupped my hands out in front of me, and drew them back to one side.

“Steel creation: Katana.”

Wisps of smoke and veins of glowing metal decorated the summoned sword.

“Adamantine folding shell: Acceleration.”

I stepped forward.  Dirt appeared in the air like confetti.  The next few steps were similar and brought me astride the would-be assassin.  They blinked and turn their head, only just recognizing that I was moving.

“Adamantine folding shell: Bubble blade!”

I swung the katana.  The blade detached itself at several points, dissolving into thin air leaving only the hilt and tip to glide past the ninja’s torso.  The vanished portion of the blade reappeared connecting the two, but not before a chorus of snipping shears.

The ninja’s kit fell to pieces.

I ducked and blocked a downward strike, dropping down to one knee to buy the time needed to cushion the blow.  The ninja rounded on me, aiming to follow up.  I tilted back and kicked out at one of their shins, breaking their root.  The ninja danced precariously as I rolled away with half as much elegance.

A flash of steel met my eyes and a kunai flew through my chest.  I screamed in surprise, clutching my ribs where anxious briars ripped through me.  The sheer dissonance of forcing my lungs and heart to scroll between dimensions was jarring.  I couldn’t avoid some of the displacement around the border, and the warping of space around my vitals is pathologically strange.  Coupled with the generic sense of surprise, I wasn’t happy.

Well, can’t blame ‘em for trying.

---

Something’s… off.

He counted his kunai.  It was an exercise of restraint that taught him how to gauge distances and meet a target with the minimum necessary force.  Some targets involved losses, to soften them up and persuade them into more vulnerable positions.

But it shouldn’t have taken this long.  At the rookie’s speed, two to three volleys, and yet this was the fifth.

…wasn’t it?

Something was off indeed.  The space in his kunai pouch was two tight.  Gaps were missing.  He flexed his palm and measured the size of the pouch, subconsciously brushing the rings and coming up with an unbelievable tally.

Two kunai.  Only two were missing.  His last maneuver required three to perform from start to finish, and it wasn’t the first.  His fingers still buzzed from the force, eliminating the possibility of an illusion.

Worse still, his eyes were playing tricks.  The second, third and fifth blades had seemed true, up until the last moment where they vanished into the rookie’s shadow.  Some slight of hand-

But no, half of the kunai he thought he used were still there, still lining his pouch.  He raised another kunai, formed a handseal and braced his throwing arm.  He would take a step outside of his protocols and use three knives in conjunction.  Rather than guard, he used his spare hand to count the blades as he withdrew them, keeping tabs on the next in line.  On a whim, he also knocked it askew.

Basking in the shameful form, he launched a series of attacks to stymie rather than disable.  One kunai vanished into the shadow of the rookie, then the next.  The third was on track however…

No no, wait, that wasn’t right.  The first two were placed too far apart for a genin to intercept, let alone a greenhorn trainee.  His movements didn’t track either.  While the boy looked pressured enough when he avoided the third blade, he was far too mobile.  Kunai were heavy, both to penetrate and to stun.

The boy’s form was loose.  Too loose.  The masters were supposed to drill that out of them.  His guard left small openings and soft spots, and yet the rookie was concentrating on them.  It was likely a special technique, but not one he was familiar with.  Konoha’s main forces compartmentalized information.  Root did not.  There were some techniques that were outside his understanding, but cues to various martial arts were drilled into the corps routinely.

This was something else.  He checked his kunai pouch again and his eyes widened in realization.  Two of the kunai had returned to his pouch.  The third-  He turned his gaze.  The one the kid avoided was there, embedded in the ground.

The boy shouted, bringing his arm down with a chop.  For a second, it looked like he was trying to perform a wind technique.  From his outstretched fingertips, a kunai knife appeared.  It was fast too.

The air screamed as it passed, sucked in and twisted like a physical blow.  Worse still, it disturbed his chakra, sending ripples out across his cheek.

Part of him cursed, thinking for a split second that it had been that close.  But no.  He felt something amiss with his own affinity.  That wasn’t a run of the mill projectile technique.

The rookie hissed bitterly, and drew another blade by hand.  It hovered beneath his palm.  In the shadow of his throwing arm, there was a puff of blue.

Powder!?  He dodged urgently.  Was the boy trying to use poison?  To get through the tournament, it wasn’t a bad idea.  Still, his application was too flashy.  No ninja worth their salt would leave such obvious fingerprints.

Tiny impacts - like hail - showered his torso.  One - larger - dug deep into his abdomen.  His visions swam.  His chakra began flowing in two directions, wrecking his sense of control.  His arms shook, and his footing overextended.  The pulsing reached his head before he could regain his bearings, and the ground hurled towards him.

This is…