In truth, the new release didn't clash with her existing arsenal at all.
It completed it perfectly.
It didn't replace anything she already had; it made everything else land better.
Enemies became easier to hit, easier to unbalance, and easier to punish the moment they slipped.
Defensively, it covered a gap that nothing else she possessed could.
Her Yang Gentle Fist of Healing could heal, restore, and stabilize, but healing was not prevention.
This was.
This replaced the large Rotation with a compressed, always-on defensive field, ideal for close combat.
It also blurred her presence, distorted her perception, and made her harder to read even before the first strike landed.
It also flipped around her body, repelling surrounding air and generating frictionless bursts of motion.
And once it passed into an opponent, once their internal flow was disrupted and turned against itself, it opened windows.
Clean ones.
Windows, something her Yang Parasitic Overgrowth, for example, could exploit without resistance.
So if such an opening ever appeared, in this fight as well, then she would take it, without hesitation.
But Yin gen-taijutsu wasn't it, for example, for this current moment and opponent, she knew it.
With the two elder toads fused into his chakra network, ready to snap him awake the instant his mind wavered, using it now would be a waste of a rare, decisive window.
Likewise, with her Byakugan dissecting illusions both externally and from within before they could even take hold, he didn't bother attempting the toads' genjutsu chants at all, either.
This wasn't a battle of tricks.
Jiraiya also didn't rush her.
That alone told Emi he understood the danger now.
He slid backward instead, sandals scraping stone, distance opening between them as his hands moved through seals too smooth to be hurried, once he was recharged.
Natural energy thickened around him, not swelling, but spreading, diffused on purpose.
She knew a shinobi as seasoned as Jiraiya would have grasped it almost immediately, that his chakra reserves dwarfed hers even at baseline, and that the disparity only grew more severe now that Sage Mode was in effect.
Attrition.
He was steering the fight there deliberately, easing away from close combat, conceding the space not out of fear, but calculation.
"So that's how you want it," Emi said, almost amused.
The ground buckled.
Mud surged upward, dark and heavy, but it didn't simply swallow the street this time.
It crawled. Reached.
Flowed in branching currents that tried to anticipate her steps rather than react to them.
Sage Art: Swamp of Living Mud
It was an enhanced senjutsu version of Jiraiya's Earth Release: Swamp of the Underworld.
Emi clicked her tongue softly and vanished sideways.
Not a body flicker.
The air itself shoved her.
She reappeared at a slanted angle, feet barely touching ground before she was already moving again, another sharp change in direction snapping her trajectory mid-step.
Polarity Release: Charge Step
It was a short burst movement using repulsion between Emi and the surrounding air.
The mud lunged where she had been, closing on empty space.
Jiraiya's brows rose despite himself.
"Tch… figures."
A second burst of mud surged up, then a third, each trying to cut off her approach rather than chase it outright.
She answered by rotating.
Not wide. Not dramatic.
The tight polarity field bloomed around her again like a compressed storm, charged wind grinding against itself.
Polarity Rotation: Current Veil
The mud hit the boundary and didn't splash.
It recoiled.
The mass shuddered, lost cohesion, then folded back into itself as its own momentum was rejected and fed outward.
The sentient flow hesitated, confused by a force that didn't block it, but told it to go somewhere else.
Jiraiya exhaled sharply and clapped his hands alongside his two small frogs.
Sound hit her next.
Not loud.
Deep.
A layered vibration that made the air feel wrong, like her bones were hearing something her ears couldn't.
Sage Art: Harmonic Chant.
It was a sonic-based senjutsu technique performed in unison by him and mainly the elder toads.
It emitted a focused soundwave infused with natural energy that destabilized chakra structures.
The polarity field trembled.
Not broken, but rattled, its internal rhythm disrupted as the soundwave itself pressed against the charged air, trying to force everything back into sync.
Emi saw it immediately with her Byakugan. Adjusted.
Following her enhanced vision, she stepped through the edge of the wave instead of fighting it head-on, palms snapping forward as she closed distance under the cover of the distortion.
"This won't work well on her, Jiraiya-boy," Fukasaku muttered under his breath after their chant fizzled.
"She can see the outlines. And this sort of thing works best on solid constructs, not pure abstract chakra like that."
Jiraiya clicked his tongue, eyes never leaving Emi as he gave a small nod.
"Yeah," he said under his breath. "I understand that now."
Meanwhile, Emi ionized the air around her as she moved, just enough to bend light and erase the cues his instincts relied on.
Polarity Field: Ion Mirage
Not genjutsu.
Just physics turned hostile.
Distance collapsed in a blink, her approach masked until she was already near his body.
Then her palm snapped forward.
Vacuum Polarity Palm.
The blast wasn't flat.
It twisted.
Charged pressure collapsed inward and detonated forward at the same time, slamming into Jiraiya's guard and tearing at the natural energy coating his arms.
The impact threw him backward, sandals carving trenches as he skidded, disturbing their strange chant.
He twisted with it, rolling the force off his body, but his breath hitched anyway.
Not from pain.
From feedback.
"…Damn it," he muttered.
His chakra stuttered again, polarity slipping through his new Amphibian Skin membrane instead of dispersing cleanly.
It was very effective against cutting, piercing, and lightning-based attacks.
Less effective against purely physical force or techniques reinforced by external natural energy.
The technique softened the blow considerably, but the charge didn't vanish.
It crawled.
Emi was already there.
Her fingers flickered across his chest and shoulder in a blur, tenketsu strikes landing too lightly to bruise, too fast to block.
Polarity Gentle Fist: Thunder Vein Lock.
In theory, it was a rapid cascade of tenketsu strikes that imprinted alternating polarity directly into the opponent's chakra pathways.
In practice, she was attempting it for the first time.
An evolved application of the Eight Trigrams, not designed to simply seal tenketsu or halt circulation, but to desynchronize it, layering opposing pulls into the chakra network until the flow began to tear against itself, the imbalance compounding with every successive strike.
Jiraiya's muscles seized for half a heartbeat, not freezing, but misfiring, his chakra snapping forward, then pulling back, then surging again without rhythm.