Chapter 21: The Passive Battle Through Illusions
'Shit,' Takezushi thought to himself as moved to get a bit closer to Hagakure. Less than ten seconds had passed into his Battle Trial and his heightened sense could already sense a debilitating cold begin to penetrate from the ground. With his eyes changing into a fully matured Base Sharingan, a pulse of energy escaped from his eyes as he muttered, "Genjutsu: False Flames."
Around himself and Hagakure, a ring of translucent blue flames stopped the invading freezing ice from continuing. "Strange, Todoroki's ice only reached up to the upper ends of the walls. This is only the second floor..." Takezushi had a look of understanding cross his eyes as he turned to Hagakure and said, "It must be Shoji! He must have detected our location through the walls. Now that I know, however, he'll be in quite the pinch if he tries that again..."
Reaching out his hand, another pulse of Yin chakra escaped from Takezushi's eyes before he said, "Hagakure, right now you're the key to winning this battle trial so I'm going to need you to stand up and use this..." Handing over his set of capture tape, Talezushi added, "I'll support you with sense altering illusions, so do your best to ambush our opponents." He had been restricted to a purely supportive role, so any moves he made had to be either defensive or auxiliary in nature; Takezushi had no use for his stock of capture tape.
Still flustered, Hagakure understood how seriously Takezushi was taking the battle trial so she could only bite her lip and take the temporary embarrassment to try her best. After taking off her shoes and gloves to become completely invisible to the normal human eye and after taking Takezushi's capture tape, she flashed a look of embarrassed determination that only Takezushi could see.
Takezushi returned a nod and summoned a new set of False Flames to clear a path for himself and Hagakure to exit the now frozen and slippery room. Upon making it over to the exit and entering another room, the villain team lied in wait for the heroes to make their move. Around half a minute passed and Todoroki's lone figure could be seen making its way up to the second floor where the bomb was located.
As he reached the second floor and found a trail of melted ice, Todoroki grew wary. Instead of advancing to the room to the left that Shoji had told him held the mock nuke, he first went to the room to the right as he could see that the trial of melted ice led in that direction. Upon entering the room, he was met with Takezushi standing in plain view in the center of the room.
Checking his left and then right, Todoroki assured himself that Takezushi was the only present before trying a long-range blast of ice to incapacitate him. Responding to the blast of ice by running to the right and approaching Todoroki, Takezushi ended up being hit by the ice attack as he had been limited to less than 5% of his regular speed.
However, as Todoroki stopped the advance of his ice attack after thinking that Takezushi had taken a hard hit, he found to his horror that Takezushi's body had been pierced by the sharp end of the ice and looked to be hanging either dead or in a near-dead state. Feeling a building pressure of disgust as he thought he had just accidentally killed his own classmate, he barely even reacted as Hagakure wrapped him with capture tape.
Only after All Might's voice announced, "Todoroki has been captured," did the corpse-like body that hung from Todoroki's ice attack begin to fade and the real Takezushi make his appearance known to the disturbed teen. However, the battle trial was far from ending as he was stacked against two other heroes that would soon arrive. So after morphing his Sharingan into a new variant that looked like a curved three-pointed pinwheel, Takezushi called, "Tsukuyomi!"
In the span of a fraction of a second in reality, he explained to Todoroki that what he had seen was an Illusion Art within his Tsukuyomi's world. He also explained that he was currently within another powerful illusion that warped both the target and user's sense of time to explain everything and after coming out of the Tsukuyomi Genjutsu, Todoroki blacked out.
"Perfect, now let's go back to the core and react to the situation as it presents itself..." After praising Hagakure for getting their group's first capture, Takezushi took her to the room where they had left the mock-nuke. After melting the rest of the ice in the room, they set up another ambush and lay in wait. Whether or not the two remaining heroes came together would dictate their next course of strategy.
In any case, Takezushi decided to look directly at Hagakure before casting one final preparatory Genjutsu before putting himself up as the final obstruction between the heroes and the mock-nuke.
A minute later, after Ojiro and Shoji managed to slowly make their way through the still-frozen ground floor and stairs, they make it to the second floor. Following Shoji, who had ears and eyes manifested at the tips of his tentacle-like arms, Ojiro held a proper defensive martial arts stance. The two went into the room to the left where Shoji had originally detected Takezushi and Hagakure hiding and after coming into contact with Takezushi, who could only stand there in the open, a serious air of tension developed.
As one of Shoji's eye-tentacles morphed into a mouth, it said, "Watch out, I can hear Hagakure breathing in the room behind us." Ojiro quickly flipped to cover his back, and though he couldn't see any traces of her, he stood on guard.
"Heh, guess we'll have to get a bit creative," Takezushi said, as he flashed a single hand sign and sent out another pulse of Yin-transformed chakra to create a ring of fire between the bomb and himself.
"Fire? Ojiro, It seems we'll have to take him down before approaching the bomb… Those blue flames seem like they're thousands of degrees hot, so we can't touch them..." As Shoji's tactile sense for temperature had been stimulated with Takezushi's Genjutsu, he truly felt that the flames were real. In actuality, while the flames may be hot enough to consume Todoroki's approaching ice while being galvanized, it was actually far from being dangerous to even regular Quirkless humans if Takezushi made it so.
As a Yin construct it was after all technically an illusion. Though because Takezushi's mastery of Yin was approaching completion, he could slightly cross the threshold for his illusions to become one with reality.
Shoji charged Takezushi and after coming into fighting distance, he started attacking with just his regular arms. Naturally, Takezushi redirected his attacks or dodged as even if he was limited to Quirkless-tier strength and a strictly supportive role, it didn't mean he couldn't defend himself. Moreover, as someone who had trained against himself in the form of clones to master several styles of Taijutsu, even in his current weakened state he could do more than just merely defend himself against Shoji.
Takezushi had stalled for about another minute as Shoji tried punching and kicking him into submission. Even after he started manifesting additional appendages like arms and legs to corner Takezushi, the horned celestial youth barely had to exert himself to counter. After all, just because his physical strength and speed had been regulated, it didn't change the fact that Takezushi's reaction time and experience were countless times superior to the rest of his peers.
By taking care to not force himself into a head-on battle, Takezushi easily managed to predict and avoid being captured or harmed by Shoji. Thus, as time passed and Shoji grew desperate, he couldn't help but ask Ojiro for help. The tailed hero-in-training couldn't help but grow depressed after being asked for help. All this time, he had been trying to bypass Takezushi to capture the mock-nuke, yet Takezushi would always find a way to bar him from crossing the ring of flames.
Whether it be through knocking Shoji into his teammate or slipping in an attack himself to stop Ojiro from jumping or climbing his way past the ring of flames, Takezushi never gave Ojiro a chance. Even when he couldn't physically stop Ojiro from surmounting the barrier he set up around the flames, Takezushi only had to use a subtle Genjutsu to make him believe he would be attacked to get him to back off.
Alas, things became tricky as Ojiro gave up trying to bypass Takezushi and instead joined Shoji in fighting. Unlike Shoji who was obviously new to fighting with his straightforward attacks and nonexistent strategy, Ojiro clearly had an extensive amount of knowledge and experience with martial arts. Ojiro was so proficient in fighting, that even though he was much physically weaker than Shoji, he made Takezushi strain himself to a much larger degree.
Surprising literally everyone present to witness his martial arts, Takezushi, Shoji, and even the people in the building's basement who watched through the cameras, looked at Ojiro in a new light. Sadly, against Genjutsu and Takezushi's precognitive abilities with the Sharingan, it still wasn't enough to completely beat him in a two-on-one battle. Moreover, as time kept passing and the heroes became more anxious to secure victory, they became sloppy.
In a moment of desperation, when there was only about a minute left, Shoji fled from the battle in an effort to reach the mock-nuke. It was at that precise moment that the battle was decided, as Takezushi smirked to signal Hagakure. His smirk came as a surprise to Ojiro and those watching through cameras as they never would have imagined seeing such an expression on Takezushi's face. But in the next moment, that surprise turned into shock as a bundle of capture tape appeared just a couple centimeters away from completely taking Ojiro out of the battle.
Stunned, Ojiro used his tail to swipe away the capture tape before it surrounded his chest, but to his disbelief, he had swiped at thin air as Hagakure's real capture tape tied him from the waist. Meanwhile, on Shoji's front, as he was about to land on the mock nuke after climbing over the ring of flames through the roof and dropping down, he found to his dismay that he had fallen right through the construct.
"What!?" Now panicking, Shoji morphed one of his tentacles into an ear and pressed it against the floor, while another tentacle turned into an arm that struck ground to mimic sonar detection. Takezushi understood what he was doing, but with only a couple seconds on the clock, all he did was run over to the real mock nuke to defend it as Shoji came to look in his direction in defeat.
"The Time Limit is up!" All Might announced.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
Vermillion_Yormsky
Vermillion_Yormsky At this point, I've transcended sadness and shame for getting so many bad reviews. Now, I'm just going to keep writing as close to the edge as possible and I'll think about starting with using Mangekyo abilities for the most mundane purposes. Take this use of Tsukuyomi for instance; I had the MC use it purely to take advantage of the time perception difference to tell his classmate something. So much for an ultimate Genjutsu, Hahaha...
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