Infinite Tenka Yazui?!

"This is spoken dialogue."
"This is internal dialogue."

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Yazui would walk through the long hallway leading to the training room with measured, deliberate steps. This morning, an unexpected messenger had arrived at his door. A small owl, much like the one he had seen Mizuki summon during his first day here. The owl had a messenger to him from the Kyuketsuki called Arantima for a training session together. Yazui had been anticipating this moment; Arantima had mentioned wanting to spar with each of the newcomers the very day they arrived. Now that the moment was here, Yazui felt nervous. His fighting skills were rusty and he knew it, and Arantima came off as something of a hardass. The Tenka wasn’t expecting to flat-out win, but he at least wanted to leave a good impression and not be humiliated.

As Yazui would come closer to the entrance of the room, his footsteps would begin to echo from its barren walls. A moment later, the man would walk into the room. He would take a few steps from the entrance, stopping at two meters from the entrance. His eyes would glide across it before finally landing on Arantima who had been standing at the exact center of the room facing the entrance.

“Heh… well, it’s not like I could ambush you even if I wanted to…”  Yazui thought this in regards to the barren, one-entrance room as much as the lack of faith he had in his own abilities right now compared to the demon.

“Good morning.”, he would say to greet Arantima. If the demon would take his time to observe his opponent, he would be able to see how Yazui was wearing the exact same clothes he had been wearing earlier; a red traveling cloak, beige kimono shirt, dark, baggy pants and boots. His round, reflective sunglasses rested on his face and around his neck was a scarf. All these articles of clothing had been present the first time the two met, yet if the demon was observant he would notice how they looked a lot cleaner than before. The same went for Yazui himself who had lost the layer of grime that was so telling of the years he had spent on the run.

“So, you wanna get right into it?”, Yazui would say with a smirk as he began performing a side arm stretch on his left arm. For all the doubt he was feeling, outwardly he appeared quite confident and relaxed.

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406/406

Yazui was content with Arantima asking his question first. If anything, his suggestion to get right to it wasn’t impatience but more an attempt to sound confident as well as allowing Arantima to decide the flow of this encounter. Where he was at now, the Tenka felt more comfortable letting others act and observe and react rather than take the initiative. This was part of his personality in general, but the fact that he was unfamiliar with Arantima both as a shinobi and as a person made it a logical approach. Not so long ago, this man had been glaring daggers at Kinko and Yazui and had been perfectly willing to murder them. While Arantima had accepted Yazui as part of Yugure for the time being, likely due to Mizuki having expressed her trust in him, Yazui was still on his guard in regards to this man.

He would cross his arms as he let the man say what he had to say. His expression was blank and his body language closed off but otherwise neutral. A quick glance at the ceiling at hearing Arantima’s question would indicate that he was pondering his answer. He would wait until the Kyuketsuki was completely finished before answering.

“My focus…. I suppose I want to be part of something greater than myself.” It wasn’t a lie. In comparison to the rest of Yugure, Yazui at first glance had the least reason to be here since he lacked the blood relationship to Mizuki and the rest. He felt that if he wanted these Kyuketsuki to trust him, he would have to convince them he was as much a member of Yugure as they were.
“In regards to this room….”, he would say while looking across it. “I’d say it’s a training room. And judging by the likes of dummies, targets and obstacles or anything to hide behind, I’d say it’s exclusively designed for sparring matches with an emphasis on straightforward combat.”

Finally, he would move on to the subject of combat. “As for our match, I merely wish to find out where I stand and improve from there. As long as we don’t kill each other or inflict any sort of lasting damage or handicap, I have no rules to suggest. If during this fight I encounter a technique that would have killed me in a real fight, it just means I’ve been given the chance to prepare for the next time I see it.”

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411/817

At hearing Arantima’s words, Yazui first felt a chill running up his spine. The difference between these Kyuketsuki and himself had never been mentioned so explicitly, yet it had always been on the back of his mind. It had been something of an unspoken threat. Yazui had blood. The Kyuketsuki drank blood. Now that Arantima had made this explicit threat, it was like confirming the nagging fear that had been in the back of his mind.

However, the chill passed. And what replaced it was a sharp red hotness in the back of his head. Anger at the guts of this man to refer to him as mere prey. Yazui wasn’t an ordinary man. He was a shinobi. He was out of practice, but he had sharpened his teeth in the trenches of war. He had taken lives, he had tortured. He had seem allies die around him. He was a soldier. And now, he was a member of Yugure. Even if he wouldn’t be able to defeat Arantima flat-out, he wasn’t going to hide like some scared rabbit.

And so, after a brief hesitation, Yazui would coldly glare back at the deranged looking individual. His head tilted slightly forward, which would allow Arantima to see the icy blue eyes behind the glasses leering into his own.

During this stare-off, Yazui would count the square tiles leading up to Arantima and beyond. Forty in total. With Yazui having moved two tiles into the room and Arantima being in the center, this left eighteen meters in between the two. There was silence as the two stared at each other. Meanwhile the wheels in Yazui were turning, trying to figure out the best first move. The first step would be to find out how Arantima preferred to attack or react to incoming moves. A genjutsu would work just fine, with the added bonus of straining the demon’s chakra reserves.

”Alright then… lets see how you react… to this..”

The man would suddenly throw a single kunai at Arantima. The blade would travel at 40 speed and 20 range. Immediately afterwards, Yazui would form the monkey, ox, snake and rat seals. Upon forming the final seal, Arantima would begin to feel overwhelming fear. Paralyzing fear. The fear that caused night terrors. Like there was a raging, feral dragon facing him instead of a short, hippy-looking dude wearing old traveling clothes. And as the demon was paralyzed, Yazui couldn’t help but wonder how it was for him to feel like prey.

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Just as the kunai left Yazui’s hand, Arantima counterattacked with a volley of his own projectiles. One was on a direct collision course with the kunai, the others heading for different parts of his body. Knowing his paralysis genjutsu would lock him in place as well, Yazui would cancel his string of handseals before the jutsu was even complete and would instead sidestep two meters to his right. He would see the makibishi that was aimed for the kunai smash right through it. This posed a problem. The man’s proficiency with thrown weapons was clear, so attacking him from a distance with thrown weapons was pointless. He would just counterattack with more speed and power.

Unless he could catch him off guard.

After stepping out of the way of the makibishi, Yazui would dash 8 meters forward. His hands would form another string of hand seals as he was moving, his eyes would be fixed on Arantima, his body ready to react to any counterattack that would come in the meantime. The hand seals would finish while Yazui was fourteen meters from Arantima. A lens of water would form halfway between the duo at seven meters from Arantima’s location. This lens was rigged with a genjutsu; if Arantima would look into the lens, he would suddenly see ten exact copies of Yazui form within ten meters of him. These ten clones would seemingly form out of the environment, rising from between the ground like liquid shadows. They would surround Arantima, not forming a perfect circle but still covering all his sides and giving him seemingly no chance to escape without colliding with one of them. They would stumble towards the demon at ten speed. Three of these copies would be lined up diagonally to the right of the lens, blocking Arantima’s view of that area.

After casting the lens, if uninterrupted, Yazui would sidestep one meter to his right. From behind the clones he would throw two shuriken. The first one was clearly visible and, the second was hidden in the first one’s shadow forming the true attack of this gambit. If left uninterrupted they would both dig into Arantima’s upper right leg, hurting him and crippling the leg in question for the remainder of the fight. Both would travel towards Arantima at forty speed.

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385/1592

Yazui wasn’t surprised that while he was closing the distance, Arantima was making some moves of his own. Enemies don’t just stand still while you launch your attacks. Part of combat and part of this training was seeing how he would adapt to the constant changes and shifts on the battlefield. Focusing his attention on Arantima’s newly made clone, he would see it swipe one of the shuriken out of the air. The remaining one would still be on a crash course with Arantima’s leg, but Yazui already had a feeling it wouldn’t land. His opponent was fast both in movement and reaction and even with the genjutsu distracting him would be able to spot the shuriken heading towards him.

A moment later, he could feel Arantima breaking his genjutsu. He gave a wry smile as his second gambit had failed, yet he wouldn’t give up yet. He would hear Arantima talk about his clone being on a more even footing with him and it awakened something in him. His competitive streak was coming up. He suspected from the start that he wouldn’t be able to take on the demon in a fair fight based on the speed of his movement, but that didn’t mean he would get stuck fighting some clone. Judging from his words that Arantima would stay on the background while letting the clone do the dirty work, Yazui felt the freedom to focus fully on taking the thing down. He was still keeping the real Arantima in his periphery at all times should he still make a move himself.

After having thrown his shuriken, Yazui would have drawn two kunai from his pouch, one held in each hand. He would adopt a boxing stance, raising the two kunai near his face and appearing to brace himself to face the approaching clone in melee combat. He would wait until the clone was two meters away from him. He then took a single step forward with his right foot, a feint, before pushing back with the same foot and dashing half a meter back. He would then sprint to his left at 81 speed, circling around the still remaining water lens. If the clone would follow him with its eyes, it would gaze into the lens once more and be subjected to the same illusion as its creator. This time, ten copies would surround the clone with three of them in a cluster to the right of the lens at the side where Yazui would emerge. He would then charge at the clone. He would throw the first kunai, in his right hand, at one and a half meters distance at the clone’s head before lowering his body. Once he would come into range he would use the other kunai to open the clone’s torso from above the left hip across its stomach to the right side of its chest.

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Editors note: When I started the thread I had miscalculated the total AP I had at the time, updated all posts with actual AP