Yae Mochizuki vs. Kozue Kaburagi - Twin Shadows

Uuuuuuuuuh. She was so going to catch hell from Beni when she got home for this. Hell, she was probably already hitting her phone up backstage, making it vibrate with multiple texts, filled with explanations on her fault and what training she’d have to do make up for it. Something to look forward to, at least.

It was a fun little thought for the back of her mind. Now, though, she just needed to focus on getting back up. As much as that sucked it wasn’t anything she couldn’t live through. She wasn’t pinnable yet. Just had to focus on getting back up, if Yae would give her a second to do that. Which she wasn’t going to do, because Yae wasn’t a moron. Shit, she needed to wrestle more stupid people.

She’d just started to lift up when the woman came flipping over her, coming down by her after a flourishing flip. At first, Kozue thought she was just going to go for a pin, and she probably could’ve gotten a decent two-count...but nope, that was not the plan. Yae had something worse in mind.

”Guh, fu-” Kozue took in a deep breath, the last good one she’d have for a while, as the legs clamped down around her throat like a smooth, creamy trap. Tight and constricting, but with some real power behind them, they sunk deep into her throat, leaving her gasping and croaking as she squirmed around on the floor. She reached up and pawed at her thighs, pulling on them for an ounce of fresh oxygen, but she wasn’t getting much in the way of results.

”Kozue!” The referee stood over them, looking into the New Jersey Ninja’s eyes. ”Kozue, do you give up?”

The answer to that was ‘fuck you’, but she didn’t have the air for it at the moment. She was rapidly losing her reserves, and she needed an out - aside from the obvious. Going for the ropes would’ve been fine in any other match, but after getting duped like that by a fellow ninja, there was no way she was taking the easy way. She had to think. Had to get a little creative. Think back to her training, her techniques, like…

”Heh.” Even with all the pain, Kozue managed a grin. ”Nice shoes.”

Kozue reached out and wrapped her fists around the middle and pinky toe of the leg that was closest to her, wrenching and pulling them apart with extreme torque, giving Yae some good incentive to let go. One of the her master’s rarer techniques, one she hadn’t expected to get mileage out of so soon.

The Woxi Toe Hold.

Oh crap. This was the first time she was going to make someone pass out with just her legs. That was...kind of sad, in hindsight.

Shinobi 101 wasn’t exactly particular about how you put someone down, but the experience was always what mattered most to her. That was especially true since she established her private practice. It was pretty important for her to have a nice and lengthy CV to reference. She could turn invisible, run on ropes, and shoot a bird out of the air, but couldn't boast about breaking a neck with just her quads? How could she even call herself a professional?

Thankfully Kozue was here to right such a terrible injustice. Granted, she wasn't looking all that hype about the idea.

Actually, she was handling it pretty well as far as strangleholds went. Yae actually had to lean back and pull back a bit further on the leg catching the throat. She was expecting gags and sputters, at the very least some thrashing. Kozue's composure was actually making her start to doubt her own judgment. Oxygen deprivation had to be among the worst tortures a functioning mind could endure, yet here she was taking it in stride. Like a bath that was just a little too hot. Wherever she trained, it must have been pretty damn hardcore.

That killer's smirk was starting to come back. The violet kunoichi was just about to really up the pressure when Kozue's comment gave her pause. Because it wasn't at all true. These shoes sucked. Her mouth opened to respond, all that came out was a scream.

"Cunt!" Her feet unraveled and kicked Kozue’s back as she rolled herself away. She sat crisscrossed with her back to the ropes, but her eyes were only fixed on her right foot. Her fingers pinched at each of her searing digits from middle to pinky, throbbing and already starting to turn red. It was like the worst rug burn she’d never had. They felt broken, but they weren’t. How did that even work?

Any port in a storm, right? If there was one thing Benikage taught her, it was how to seize an opportunity. How many times had she thought she had the elder kunoichi in their spars, only to get slipped up because of the smallest, inconsequential thing? Anything was fair game.

So she had no shame - zero, zilch, nada - over using gratuitous toe torture to escape Yae’s hellish leglock. It worked, after all. Even got her a special name for the effort. ‘Bitch’ was something she heard lobbed her way all the time, but ‘cunt’? That was rarer, these days. Meant she was breaking new ground.

”Heh.” Kozue chuckled through her coughs, even as she was kicking off and went rolling away. ”Yeah, pretty much.”

She stopped on her side and saw Yae not too far away, nursing her toe, wide open - that wouldn’t last for long, though. She was tempted to try and tag her with her secret technique - Killer Bee Killed. But that was something she wanted to save for a last resort, and she wasn’t even sure she could muster the strength to hit it, now. If the spacing was off, even a little…

No. She had to go for something safer, here, and something fast. After a quick breath to refill her lung, Kozue popped to her feet and rushed forward at full speed, scrambling to her feet and not even bothering to stand straight before she charged. When she was close enough, she leaped forward, but she wasn’t aiming to crash into Yae - no, she dove through the top and middle ropes behind her, flying out of the ring.

The only trick was that she tried to reach over with her arm and tried to grab Yae’s head as she flew. So, while she’d be tumbling out of the ring, the back of her opponent’s would be snapped against the ropes, a rebound that would send her flopping forward. Hard.

Part of Yae was really glad to hear that Kozue was used to some foul language here and there. She had a strong feeling the Jersey girl would be, but it could always be kind of a toss-up with these things how her opponent was going to react and it could be really easy to kill the mood that way. A gut reaction, nothing serious about it. That was all. Cool? Cool.

Now she could focus on how much her goddamn toes hurt. Jesus. Could be tried at the Hague for this shit.

That was pretty much where the entirety of her attention was while she gave her toes a few tentative rubs with her index finger, assessing the pain while also trying to figure out what might be going on beneath the surface. The discomfort came in pulses and didn’t seem to want to stop anytime soon. For a moment, Yae was beside herself with anger at getting so easily tripped up like that.

But almost in that same exact moment, the Iga ninja’s frustration was superseded with a near-whimsical sense of fascination. An usual smile started creeping its way across her face. It was such a small movement but there was a hidden technique behind it, the kind that only came from an experienced hand. Kozue wasn’t just grasping for strings. She got each and every one of the tendons, pinched the nerve clusters together between the bones, and twisted it all together right at the base. If that wasn’t bad enough, the coarse texture of her glove left behind a searing rug burn all along the top. She would be feeling this one for a few days at least. God damn, that move was cool. Wonder if she could-was that an arm?

For a brief instant in time, Yae forgot she was dealing with a ninja. Shouldn’t have been surprised that was the same moment she lost her life. Or, as it would happen in a wrestling ring, the moment she was in for a world of pain. She caught the faint streak of blue soaring past her out of the corner of her eye before the arm wrapping around her head blinded her eyes to the world and yanked her back-first into the abyss. It was enough to tell what was going on but she was in no position to do anything except girt her teeth.

Yae expected to hit the ground first, so when the back of her neck rebounded off the middle rope, she gasped hard. A brief opening in her guard that made the facefirst slam into the floor suck all the worse. Her head bounced off the floor, leaving her down and dazed with her feet hanging out off the side of the ring.

This wasn’t exactly a technique that Benikage had taught her, and it wasn’t something she could pick up from the wrestling school, either. It was just something she did on the fly, and that was part of her training - learning how to think on her feet, using the ring as a weapon, taking advantage of her opponent’s position. She would have to come up with a good name for it when she wasn’t in the midst of all this, but for now she was happy with the results.

Kozue went sailing through the ropes, whipped her legs around and came down on the floor with a three point landing. While she couldn’t see the move in action with the way she’d came, a quick look over her shoulder showed how effective it was, leaving Yae laid out and the crowd applauding.

”Thank you, thank you.” Kozue took a hot second to bow to the crowd, soaking in the moment. She tried to take a deep breath, but it was caught up in a cough - still feeling the effects of that choke. A reminder of how dangerous Yae could be, and why she couldn't give her° foe too much leeway. Keep the pain coming. ”Back at it.”

With Yae’s legs hanging off the apron, she was already half out of the ring, and Kozue decided she might as well help her get all the way there. She grabbed her opponent by the ankle, took a hard step back, and yanked her clear out of the ring, letting gravity do the rest from there.

But she wasn’t done with just that.

The moment Yae would hit the floor, Kozue would hop to the side and leap up. She spun through the air once, then twice, before she came down hard on her foe, crashing their backs together with a Standing 630° Senton.

She could faintly hear the applause collecting around her, but Yae sincerely doubted that it was all for her. What with her face being halfway stuck in the canvas at the moment.

It was hard for her to remember exactly how she got into this position in the first place. She remembered there being an arm and her eyes were bugging her now, but nothing else beyond that. There were few things on this planet that the Iga ninja could count as too fast for her eyes and she didn’t expect to add another notch to that list in this federation of all places on Earth. Even with her face searing in pain, she couldn't help but let a muffled chuckle slip-free. This is why she just couldn’t give up this life. Not in a million years. Not while people like Kozue were in it.

That being said, Yae couldn’t keep her princess waiting. She wasn’t born to be someone else’s #2 and that wasn’t starting today.

The fight started when she got back up. She tucked her legs in and...well, she tried at least. Suddenly there was a grip on her ankle and the ground was pulled out from under her in a flash, leaving her falling towards the ring apron in slow motion. When the impact came, it was about as pleasant as it looked for everyone else. Face stung, boobs ached, knees scabbed. Yeah, she was over heights for the rest of her life.

With an ear close to the ground, she could still feel movement close. The kunoichi had a feeling that Kozue wasn’t going to be done with just that, like she was setting her up for something, and the vibrations close to her fingers confirmed it even if she didn’t have the perfect view of her foe right now. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ninjette leap. What that meant, how much time she had to react, if Yae even had a chance to avoid it; none of it mattered. Her mind was already working on an escape route.

Her hand reached out and grabbed the curtain just in front of her. With a kick to the floor, Yae yanked it forward and sent herself into a deft forward roll right on the floor, disappearing into the shadows under the ring and leaving the Jersey Girl - and her butt - to their fate.

There were pros and cons to a move like this. Kozue knew that when she went for it, but wrestling came down to throwing the dice, sometimes.

Pros: It had a lot of impact on it. The turning motion really amped up the damage you could do like this, and when you factored in the height she got for it, it would’ve gotten her a long way to taking the lead.  It also just looked cool and got her style points. Very important for the mind games in a match like this. Or something like that.

Cons: Well, it could miss, that was always a possibility. But Kozue figured there was a low chance of that happening, since Yae was on her back and already hurting.

Her inkling turned out to be wrong. She saw Yae sliding away while she rotated, but by then all she could do was brace for impact.

She came out of the rotation with a hard splat on the floor, one that immediately had her flopping away and rubbing her back as she hissed in pain. ’Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Fuck.” She gritted her teeth and sat up, looking around for her opponent, only to find...nothing. She was alone for the moment - if you didn’t include the crowd and the referee. Speaking of which…

”1!”

Kozue looked up at her and bit her lip, weighing her options for half a second. The smart, tactical thing was to just get in the ring. This wasn’t a hardcore match, she couldn’t bring any weapons out. In ten long seconds, Yae would either have to lose to the ten count or come sliding in the ring, where Kozue could stomp the crap out of her before she stood back up. There was no good reason to go chasing her under the ring.

Except for one: What kind of ninjas avoids the shadows?

That reason alone proved to be enough. She lifted up the skirt and slid in, even as the referee continued her count, and scanned around the gloom. ”So you’re a ‘lights off’ kind of girl, huh?” She sniffed the air and let the apron fall behind her. ”Figures.”

There was little more than silence and shadows waiting for Kozue on the other end of the curtain. At a glance, it seemed like a domain of ghosts. Yae was undoubtedly down here, with theoretically not too much space to move around, but without a scrap of light to illuminate their surroundings the subtle depth of the blackness could play tricks on the untrained eye. It would take special eyesight to find where the predator amongst it might be stalking. Yae knew that. That was why she couldn’t resist the urge to have a little fun out of it.

"Three!" When a voice replied, it was with a long and earnest chuckle that was somehow different from the one from before. The voice echoed in nearly a whisper. Though an untold distance separated them, they were spoken with all the care of a caressing lover's lips close to the ear. Silent and patient.

"True. But it wasn't like it was my choice." Her voice seemed to carry far beyond the confines of this tiny ring space. In the endless darkness around them, it seemed to come from everywhere all at once in every inch of pitch black. "I don't think I saw the miracles of electricity until I was twenty. I wrote my letters with hawk feathers and cold ink by candlelight. I slept underneath a starless sky and drifted off watching the shifting shades of night, swirling around a void universe."

"Four!" Thin trails of smoke slowly reached their way out all around the darkness, rising like a plume and sprouting off in several different directions. Those stems all seemed to lead towards the center of the ring, converging on one point as one drew near. A faint spark slit a dull ember in mid-air, caressed in some unseen hand before it was suddenly thrown Kozue’s way. At first glance, the tiny red carton that fed the held the ember seemed to be little more than a tiny matchbook. Then why the flames? And why did they have such an odd sound? Not so much burning as it was crackling...

“Light isn’t a bastion, Ninjette...It’s a trick.” A series of small eruptions followed thereafter from the matchbook. Though they could fit in the palm of a hand, in the confined space beneath the ring the sound would be deafening and the flashes of light bright enough to pierce the dark from end to end. In the brief flashes of illumination revealed the iron framework of the ring all around them, discarded tools, some unused cloth on the floor, and a kunoichi dashing straight at Kozue.

Between flashes of light, Yae seemed to jump with each step, approaching too fast for the natural eye to catch. Her eyes kept straight ahead at her target and her hands clasped at her side, jutting an elbow out to spear her rival clean through the sternum. It was the best she could do without a kunai.

Smell. Listen. Taste. Feel.

The days of Kozue relying on her sight over the other four senses were long gone. One of the first lessons that Benikage had beaten over her head was to stop relying so much on what she saw and learn to interpret the world with all of her body’s tools, and to that end, she’d spent no small percentage of her time with the woman blindfolded. She took care as she moved through the darkness, avoiding the beams, stepping over some electric cables, sliding a chair out of the way with her feet. Learning the way sound bounced around metal, feeling the vibrations through the floor, and the subtle smell of human body that wasn’t hers in the vicinity, an organic scent wafting its way through the metal...that, and another smell, a stronger one. Smoke, thick and heady, wafting through the dead air.

And that voice and those words and that light. It was all familiar, so much so that she mouthed along with Yae as she said those final words. It was all right out of her teacher’s playbook, and that meant she could see this for what it was - a distraction. But a distraction from what?

That answer came soon enough. Flickering lights, flashes in the gloom, and through it she could see a figure rapidly approaching. Yae was coming. Coming fast.

She tried to draw a bead on her as she approached, but the bursts of light and sound made that impossible until it was too late, and Yae’s elbow was buried deep in her stomach. In this particular moment, she was glad that she hadn’t slacked off on the crunches since coming back to the modern world - that blow still sucked, but not quite as bad as it would’ve in her old days. She could survive it...and maybe give back a little something, too.

She turned herself into a trap. As she fell back from the blow, Kozue threw out the chain she’d grabbed a moment ago and swung it around where she guessed Yae’s neck was, looking to loop it around her throat and pull it tight. At the same time, she opened her legs and brought them around her foe’s midsection for a bodyscissors - one that would end up with Yae on top, but with her in control.

Did she seriously brace for that? Wow. Yae didn't have anywhere near enough fingers to tell how many times she'd nailed this blow before, and more than half the time it was under broad daylight. It was hardly a technique meant to maim, but it was good for putting down the occasional street tough. It was always useful for the bodyguard that was noticing her a little too closely, or that person on shift change that just arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was quick, subtle. Not once had someone that saw it coming been able to do anything about it and unlike them Kozue was riding blind. Yet she didn't just take the blow, she minimized the pain and rolled with it.

“Five!” Yae knew something was wrong the instant she didn't get that haggard rasp from a punctured lung, but it was too late to do anything about it. Something steel coiled around her neck. Her hands immediately reached up for the chain, leaving her midsection open for a lithe pair of legs to reach around and crush. She even managed to get a tight noose with a double wrap, even when she was 99% sure she couldn't see it.

That was because Kozue wasn't using her eyes. She remembered Yae's height. Her figure, her outline, her smell, her voice, every last detail to the point she wouldn't need her eyes. It was the same exact training she'd put her students through and now she finally found herself on the other end of her own trick. Even in the pitch-black surrounding them, the white gleam of her stretched smile was impossible to miss.

"Well...look at you." She tried to chuckle but the sound only got halfway out before it was abruptly cut off with another clamp from the thighs around her ribcage. Stuck between the crunching pressure on her lungs and the steel constriction around her throat, Yae wouldn't last too long without a way out, but it wasn’t like she had to. “Six!”

Yae got to work on the legs first. Her elbow came up and started slamming down on Kozue’s quads, slamming the bony point as close to the pressure points as she could again and again.