Ghosting through the canopy, Pakura adjusted the uniform and ANBU mask which she had scavenged off a Konoha jonin who wouldn’t be needing things such as garments any longer.

It was slightly tight at the chest.

Shrugging to loosen her limbs, she drew a kunai in preparation for combat as the sand floating around her informed her of the enemy’s position. She confirmed it again with her sensory jutsu, the gentle winds bringing tidings of the swordsman’s approach.

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the red-haired man who had introduced her to the broader universe… it was just her ingrained training kicking in. In a land where people could change their appearances at will and create clones of themselves, you could never have enough information.

As the maxim went, a complacent ninja was a dead ninja.

She entered a relatively dense patch of vegetation, in the projected route of the wielder of the Executioner’s blade, that would limit the use of the large cleaver.

Creating an illusory clone, she transformed it into a bird.

She layered it with genjutsu that upon meeting the most common sensory jutsu returned the contour, odour and auditory response likely for the yellow-billed cuckoos that were ubiquitous to this area.

To make the illusion more deceptive, she extracted a nest from the storage scroll which held the props necessary for her camouflage missions and put in three more illusory clones of herself, transformed into chicks.

She had no delusions of deceiving the legendary shinobi with a paltry illusion. Cuckoos were birds that made no nests of their own and laid their eggs in that of others’. She hoped that the swordsman would notice the discrepancy and the mixture of truth and deceit would be enough to give him pause.

A pause fatal against a kunoichi of her calibre.

Erasing her presence as completely as possible, she settled down to wait in the hollow of a tree opposite to her bait.

Very soon, tendrils of mist swept across her ambush spot, exploring ahead for their master.

A six-foot five giant of a man, carrying a gigantic cleaver on his back and obscured by a shroud of fog, emerged from the woods like a spectre.

The branches he stepped off hardly showed signs of his passing, proclaiming his proficiency in the art of lightening.

His eyes seemed to shoot electricity as he scanned his surroundings for threats while moving as fast and as stealthily as he possibly could in order to shake off the pursuit of the Konoha trackers.

His injuries from the shockwave from the eighth gate seemed to have been temporarily suppressed by some drug or a medical seal. Yet, intense combat so soon wouldn’t be the brightest of ideas.

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True to her prediction, his steps stagnated as he detected the oddity of her camouflaged clones. Vigilant, he immediately began hand signs for the Hidden in the Mist technique… which was what she had been waiting for as she exploded out of her ambush, accelerating herself with explosive bursts of flame.

The response of the man was like lightning, spinning on his heel, he managed to stagger their bodies, avoiding the kunai thrust to his heart.

The short blade sliced through the bindings that held the Executioner’s blade to his shoulder and scored a gash along his flank.

Pakura spun around, shooting off blades of wind into his face as he countered by spitting out viscous blobs of water.

The blobs were split up by the wind blades, neutralizing them in the process. From where they landed on the ground, gelatinous humanoid figures rose, condensing into eight water clones that immediately went on the offensive.

The original swordsman hopped down from the tree, stanching his wound with an application of his chakra and landing beside the blade which had been buried up to its hilt in the soft marshy soil.

Pakura ducked and wove among the clones, avoiding their mechanical pre-programmed attacks with ease as she dispatched them swiftly with impeccably timed wind edges from her two palm-sized metallic folding fans and kicks from her bladed boots.

Deciding that she was too skilled for him, in his injured state, to dispatch swiftly enough to avoid the following pursuit, the swordsman grabbed the hilt of the blade, to pull it out and make his getaway while she was still occupied by his clones.

His eyes widened as the sword refused to budge, unbalancing him. He dived out of the way of a fireball from Pakura and rolled away from the blade, distressed.

Having dispatched the clones, she advanced on him, swirling and pirouetting in an intricate dance, the fans in her hands guiding the currents of air into an ever-growing typhoon that merged with the incandescent stream of flame from her mouth, forming a storm of pale yellow fire that desiccated the surroundings, evaporating the moisture from whatever it contacted in a flash leaving dry inflammable husks that caught fire with consummate ease.

Soon the Kiri shinobi was faced with an advancing wall of fire and smoke that threatened to consume the entire mangrove.

His attempts to call upon the mist were met with failure as the moisture in the air couldn’t stand up to the intensity of the flames of the scorch style.

He coughed out blood, as his injuries played up. The blood was immediately vaporized by the heat as it left the protection of his coating of water natured chakra. Even through it, he felt his eyebrows and hair get singed.

Clenching his teeth, he decisively gave up on his attempts to retrieve the sword and disappeared into the thick smoke that was filling the forest from the rapidly expanding fire.

The fire split like a subject before its emperor as Pakura walked up to the Executioner’s blade and pulled it out of the bindings of the sand which had held it in place.

Hefting the unwieldy blade strenuously, despite her better than average proficiency in body strengthening, she sealed it away in a prepared scroll and made a sign at the inconspicuous eyeball of sand that had been hovering in the canopy.

Tendrils of sand cocooned her and with a fluctuation of Void Force, she was gone, leaving the uncontrolled flames behind.

The scorching flames spread from tree to tree evaporating the moisture of the marsh. It lit up the forest with an infernal glow, filling it with smoke and driving its fauna into a frenzy in their bid to escape.

The Leaf ninja had to abort their pursuit to deal with the flames that could otherwise immolate their camp.

The smoke and confusion hid the traces of the swordsmen, allowing them to escape.

Now that the wielder of the Executioner’s blade had a personal run in with a ‘Konoha shinobi’ aiming at capturing his sword, he would act as a testimony to the Leaf’s covetousness towards the legendary artefacts.

Pakura had let him off in the hopes that this information would spark a comprehensive war amongst the two villages, opening up avenues for Suna to profit as a third party in the dispute.

The rising column of smoke obscured the moon, casting deeper shadows upon the land.

Dawn was a long way away.