Welcome to Gaia! ::

Short teal hair over deep teal eyes with the Cheshire Cat's own smile. Morigana Westly wore different clothing than usual, though his opponent had no real idea what sort of fashion was "normal" for Westly. Heather grays and pale blues predominated. A long-sleeved shirt, a vest with many pockets, and a pair of pants with many more. Westly bore no weapon and carried no equipment that the eye could see, only countless places to conceal them.

Westly looked at his opponent curiously. Who the heck is this guy? Some newbie, or is it another old face that just came back out of hiding for the tournament? He shrugged.

"Hey! You, over there! I'll give you twenty bucks if you yield."

Westly sighed and rubbed his eyes. "And so, once again, I'm forced to pummel one of my own allies into submission and crush his dreams for the future so my own can be fulfilled. Ugh. Who the hell designed this system? Shouldn't we be getting promoted based on, oh, I don't know, successfully completing missions, defending the village above and beyond the call of duty, you know, that sort of thing? This is madness."

He adopted a defensive stance. "Fine, whatever, let's just get this over with. The sooner I rank up, the sooner I can try to change things, anyway."

Westly took a step back, letting the shuriken strike the ground harmlessly.

The standoff continued.

Westly made a mildly annoyed noise. A defensive fighter, he'd rather been hoping Kaole would, in fact, make the first move, but now that Westly had been forced to show him a little something, why not show him a little more?

He blocked the shuriken with his forearm. It made an odd "thunk" sound that was definitely not what steel hitting flesh was supposed to sound like. More like steel hitting wood. Clearly, Westly had successfully researched a log-based substitution jutsu of such potency that it could take several hits before fully activating!

...or he was wearing bracers under his sleeves. You know, one or the other.

Westly pulled the shuriken out and threw it right back at Kaole with one hand and tossed a light blue ball in his general direction with the other. Every once in a blue moon, Westly would encounter a smart aleck or two who could do some nasty tricks if you were carrying things that belonged to them, and it wasn't like he really needed a used shuriken.

As for the ball, that was something Westly used in almost all his fights. Westly's chakra element was Mist. Not Water, Mist. Water was, and I quote, "too heavy". He wasn't quite sure how other people justified it, but Westly was known for his great chakra control primarily because his chakra strength was abysmal. Less chakra means less to control. On the flipside, that meant he couldn't really afford to waste chakra on something as basic as conjuring a large cloud of obscuring mist, so he prepared them in advance and sealed them into those rubber balls. "Mist Beads", he called them, since the end result kind of looked like an oversized bath bead.

He took a few steps and faded out of sight into the mist.

Two interesting facts: one, Westly could see just fine in his own mist. Maybe less so in mist conjured by others, he suspected, but he'd yet to meet another mist-nin so he could test that hypothesis. Two, Westly was unusually skilled at academy-level techniques. This included, for example, transformation disguises, walking on surfaces that shouldn't be able to support his weight, and sealing weapons and gear into items.

Westly drew a full-sized loaded crossbow from a pocket just large enough to hold a pack of gum, carefully took aim, and fired at Kaole.

He tended to bleed his opponents until they collapsed from the pain and the blood loss. He didn't fight honorably. There was no such thing as fighting honorably. People who claimed to fight honorably made him sick to his stomach because that meant they thought there was at least one way of killing a man that wasn't morally reprehensible. The truth was, there weren't any. Violence was a sin no matter how you did it. So why discriminate? Ultimately, blood loss hurt less and healed faster than the alternatives, like being chopped to pieces or burned alive.

(( Ah, okay. The description of what direction Kaole was facing wasn't particularly clear. Now I see what you meant. Edited out the "apostrophe s back". I mean, "torso" would've worked regardless of facing, but it's kind of a clunky word. ))

(( ...and so the one time I don't completely describe how Westly "sees" in his mist is the one time it's actually important. Hokay. So. Westly can sense where the mist is, and by extension, he can sense where it isn't. Thus, he sees people and objects as outlines, or negative space where the mist isn't. I'm familiar with how Blood of the Assassin: Ketushai works. It hides the user from sight and hearing. It doesn't allow the user to walk through the mist without displacing it anymore than it would allow them to walk through walls.

So the short of it is, Westly can see Kaole just fine. Since Kaole has no real way of knowing this in-character, I don't think any rules have been violated, but I don't want to seem rude for not telling you these things in advance. ))

The moment Kaole vanished from the substitution, Westly dropped the crossbow and made a handseal and held it. He seemed to be scanning the place where Kaole had been up to a minute ago. As for the handseal, it was for a weak genjutsu--just a stationary visual illusion of himself. Westly placed it exactly where he was standing posed exactly as he was posed. In other words, until Westly moved, there was no evidence that anything had happened.

When Kaole came up to stab Westly in the back, Westly spun quickly and stabbed back at him through the illusion with a katar hidden up his sleeves. Kaole had thought he'd been invisible, so being attacked was startling to begin with, but in the haziness of the mist, it looked like Westly had just sprouted a third arm from his spine, which was really freaking creepy.