Conservation Of Ninjutsu / Fan Works

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• In Black Flames Dance in the Wind: Rise of Naruto, a demonic genjutsu brings people's worst fears to life as corporeal monsters. When killed, the power sustaining each monster is divided among the remaining ones, so while the monsters are initially mere Mooks, the final one is so power it takes Hiruzen to kill.
• Constantly mentioned by Leo in Brave New World.
• Devil's Diary: Averted. Individually, the X-Men weren't rival to Magneto. But their teamwork was good enough to drive him away.
  "Except these yearlings had power. None of them equal to mine, individually. But they knew how to effectively combine what they had."
• Discussed and averted in An Entry with a Bang!!. It takes a lot of Clancy-Earth planes working together to bring down one BattleTech aerospace fighter, and that's only because they were fighting separately. The analysts realise that against a proper House or Comstar ASF unit trained to fight together, C-Earth will be in big trouble.
• Done in Eroninja. Nagato, using more efficient chakra receivers and a mind-controlled Shukaku, invades Konoha with 200 Paths of Pain. However, despite having the chakra to power them all, the bodies are lower quality and Nagato can only split his attention so many ways. So instead of six invaders each easily kage level, it becomes more a battalion of elite jounin.
• In Executive Stress, the G-Force team finds themselves accidentally Storming the Castle and become separated. Keyop, who is trying to get Security Chief Anderson and his bodyguards to safety, finds himself confronted with an elite Blackbird. The party, which has just played the trope straight with several squads of mooks, are well aware that the odds are now against them and about to attempt a zerg rush with little hope of success when Mark fells the Blackbird from behind using his sonic boomerang. Meanwhile, Princess also plays the trope straight to reach them. The chapter title is this trope.
• Invoked in Farce of the Three Kingdoms. When Zhao Yun stands alone against hundreds of enemy redshirts, they immediately conclude that he must be a main character and thus they have no chance, and run away.
• In Fate/Long Night, this is justified with Robert Baratheon. As a Servant, one of his special abilities is to get stronger the more enemies he is fighting. Two enemies and his strength doubles. Three enemies and his strength triples, etc.
• Fate of the Clans says that during The Cattle Raid of Cooley, Cú Chulainn killed approximately 5,000 in Medb's army per day. Then it was changed to one-on-one fights. Even if it only took the guy seconds to win each one at least it lowered his daily kills.
• Inverted in I Did Not Want To Die.
• At one point of Supergirl story Hellsister Trilogy, Superman, Supergirl and a third Kryptonian face down to 1,000 Darkseid's Parademons... and win.
• Averted in A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action Please. While the Justice League are the ones who eventually defeated the Imperium, before that, scores of heroes and villains around the world fought desperately just to hold off the alien invasion.
• Averted in A New Order by the Dark Kingdom. When the senshi start getting more competent they send multiple youma at once, which makes the battles harder.
• Jaune lampshades in Pineapple that fighting the entirety of Team BRNZ by himself was easier than fighting Mercury Black one on one, though part of it is that everyone knows not to underestimate him by that point.
• The Dashverse: The Mane Six have a much easier time fighting the amassed forces of Sombra's minions once they're stormed his castle than they did fighting the smaller groups they'd encountered on the way there.
• This Bites!: In the Enies Lobby arc, two of the Straw Hats face off against two Marine Captains. The two Captains push them to their limits and beyond. Later in the arc, the crew goes up against two hundred Marine Captains. The Captains go down as easily as foot soldiers.
• ToyHammer refers to this as the inverse daemon effect—daemons that attempt a Battle in the Center of the Mind call upon a single reservoir of warp-essence, and as they fall in battle, each survivor has more to draw from. They could attack one at a time, but that's rather more strategy than their ruined minds can comprehend.
• The Triptych Continuum has a racial variant of this trope for cattle. Cattle are what is called a tenant species: a race which, while technically sapient, is still so ruled by their instincts that they are unable to maintain a civilization of their own and have to be integrated into the civilizations of the fully sapient to survive. However, the specific flaw that dooms cattle is herd instinct. A single cow or bull, cut off from the rest of their race, becomes fully sapient and competent to manage their own life... but only as long as they remain isolated. If they return to the company of other cattle, they will regress to incompetence, become nothing more than part of the herd.
• Played and lampshaded over and over again in Uninvited Guests, not only with actual ninjas, but with the Espada.
• White Devil of the Moon has the fight in Beryl's throne room, where a just-kidnapped Miyuki Takamachi takes on the assembled youma there (which are legitimately dangerous and cannot be permanently harmed without magic) and, due to her own fighting skill and the monsters getting into each others' way, manages to actually cut Beryl once before being overwhelmed. Double points for Miyuki being in fact a descendant of a ninja clan herself.
• In a Digimon fan fiction Zero 2: A Revision, Umbradevimon and Demon have both invaded the Real World at the same time and ended up competing with each other for dominance. While the former uses as many as 1 million Black Gear controlled Digimon of various levels, the latter uses 10,000 well-trained Bakemon along with his Black Generals Ladydevimon, Deathmon, Marinedevimon, and Colonel Soulmon aided by his own Archfiend Castle and the Typhoon of Flame. By the time Demon managed to repel Umbradevimon from the Real World, their forces dwindled down approximately the same amount as each other which means Demon easily won against Umbradevimon.
• Captain Unohana in Vow of the King slaughters her way through dozens of clones of herself with her most grievous injury being a single lost arm^note Contrast her first fight with Ichigo where he hacks off dozens of her limbs.. Justified given that the one who created them, Szayel, can't make clones stronger than himself and he's far weaker than she is.
• Inverted in Wonderful (Mazinja). Each individual Wonderous One gets more powerful the more other Wonderous Ones are active, and a significant number of Wonderous Ones must work together to use the Unite Morphs.

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