Following the Nine Tails into the deepest parts of its lair hidden deep below the mines was not as tough as it may have been considered for it to be. Tired and struggling with severe starvation and malnutrition the monstrous Tailed Beast ran slow, sometimes bumping into the rocks or tripping over. While the four genin could not confirm that fact, the vicious quakes and roars of the beast confirmed at least that much.
“Mana… Are you sure about this?” Shimo grunted finally gathering the courage needed to once again question the client’s actions.
“I’m really not. None of this makes any sense and I cannot make a proper plan without understanding why everything is so convoluted…” Mana shook her head angrily. “That being said I feel that saving the Nine Tails is the right thing to do, even if it is just a rampaging force of nature. Our predecessors tolerated its existence, the greatest of all ninja gave it life in the first place. It must exist and it must serve its role in this world whatever role it may be”
“What did you mean when you said that none of this makes sense?” Kouta curiously inquired once the beast shook the ground below them keeping them rooted firmly onto the rocky floor while the tremors ceased.
“The Nine Tails appeared to eat people, thing is that Tailed Beasts shouldn’t feed at all, it’s unnatural. It was never recorded in known history to feed on anything. They are living constructs of pure chakra given conscience and life, they are destructive in nature and malevolent because they are beings nor of Earth nor of Moon that feel out of place everywhere. They were the bridge connecting Moon and Earth as the Ten Tails so now they feel a huge gap and desire to fulfil some sort of purpose yet they’re unable to do so which is why they’re so angry, at least that’s the theory most commonly discussed in ancient scrolls…”
“Well, it looked pretty darned hungry to me back when we tangoed with it the first time…” Meiko nodded to herself looking on forward trying to see the end to the spiral rising tunnels they were roaming looking for both the Nine Tails and an exit. At their current location the ground appeared to have already been stable and nothing was falling from the ceiling aiming to crush them so that was already an improvement.
“Also, since they do not feed, their chakra should automatically rejuvenate every couple of days, just like it does for ninja under normal resting conditions. Their levels of chakra are nearly infinite, they can rampage around the world for weeks or months firing beams of concentrated chakra and never tire… The fact that it is so severely exhausted is just so odd, truth be told such degree of exhaustion should be completely impossible to someone with such vast supply of chakra…” the magician grinded it out through her teeth again. She didn’t like to be completely unable to understand just what was going on there.
“Well, let’s just ask it when we see it, maybe if you tell it that it doesn’t have to eat “ it won’t munch us like all those remains of all the mobsters on the floor back there…” the Yuki swordsman snapped back at Mana with a certain shade of sarcasm and irritation in his voice. He clearly didn’t fancy the idea of confronting the Tailed Beast, he may have fancied it more if sneaking past it was their idea and not clearly confronting it.
Finally, the four left the endless halls and tunnels only to enter into what appeared to be an improvised temple, some sort of man-made lair with four tunnels leading up to a large platform in the center, strangely enough it also had the same belts of carts and steel beams viciously torn up and tossed all over the place.
“I think it was tied down by those things, why else would they be torn apart…” Mana noticed and directed her gaze at the ruined track system.
“Yeah, makes sense. That’s why they didn’t normally use the belt system and carried the ore out by hand, it must’ve been used to detain the Tailed Beast in here and when Kouta’s father activated them they must’ve tensed up and forced the Tailed Beast to break free. Whether he knew it or not the man caused a lot of trouble…” Shimo nodded looking at the ruined cart system from afar.
The Nine Tails turned around. It was like it knew exactly where the four were the whole time, it must’ve known, judging from its apparent pride in the ability to sense negative emotions and all. It wouldn’t have been too foolish to assume that everyone felt really terrified for their lives.
The beast swung its arm around and smacked it into the central platform. All of a sudden the platform cracked, shattered and the entire structure started digging in deeper into whatever surface it stood on way down below. The four bridge structures at different sides to the central platform just crumbled and started falling to the black abyss below like a biscuit smashed with a hammer. Meiko grabbed Mana and activated the seals in her boots, blue chakra flames fired off as the armored kunoichi carried the magician and herself onto the unstable and shaking central platform “ the only safe spot in the whole cave system however at the same time the most horrifying “ they were all within reaching distance by the colossal fox demon.
Shimo once again used the combination of his Water Release technique and his Glaciation technique to create a sliding platform for him to slide down and reach the ruined central platform, Kouta focused his chakra and kicked off of the falling bridge structure, it took a lot of focused chakra enhancement to make such a powerful leap but the medical ninja managed to barely pull it off, he landed solidly onto the central platform. With a loud rumble the edges of the platform cracked off and fell down below, quickly Kouta made a small hop forward to avoid losing his balance and falling down. There was no end in sight to wherever the bridges fell…
This time the Nine Tailed Fox looked so much different “ its fur was far less shining and its eyes no longer glowed red, they had the signature red irises that the Tailed Beast was known for in the tales, but they no longer displayed that strange maddening glow. And yet still it was dried up and thin as if the fur and skin covered only a half-dead skeleton of the once majestic Tailed Beast. The Nine Tails’ snout snapped open as a large red colored ball of pure chakra fired off from its mouth, Meiko once again grabbed Mana and moved the girl away, Shimo used his incredible speed to avoid the projectile and Kouta leaped back, hanging down on the edge but narrowly avoiding the projectile that slammed into the wall making a crater at least fifty meters wide and deep.
“Wait!” Mana screamed out trying to communicate with this much more ordinary looking Tailed Beast. “We’re not here to hurt you, we’re here to set you free!” she tried to explain when suddenly she realized that she was no longer where she was a second ago.
The magician was standing on a large lake of some sort, surrounded by total darkness and the fox standing right in front of her in all its glory. It took the confused girl a moment to realize that the Nine Tails must’ve invaded her mind somehow.
“Hurt me?!” the beast laughed out sending crashing waves and ripples at Mana that tossed her around like a ragdoll. This was so odd, despite the waves being twice her size the magician didn’t feel wet or hurt when they dragged her under this strange murky water nor when their smashing awesome might crushed her chest taking all oxygen out of there. It felt horrible, uncomfortable and very unpleasant but it wasn’t the real thing.
“Well… We’re not here to fight, anyways…” Mana realized the wild assumption she had made previously just assuming that the four of them could’ve as much as scratched the demon fox even in its weakest stage.
“Hmph, that’s what everyone say… That’s what the old man said… Then again, a frog doesn’t pick a fight with a stork, does it? Yet they all lie: “We’re going to live here from now on, Foxie”, he said, “it’s just so that we can’t hurt anyone else…” but he only wanted for me to suffer surrounded by those infernal walls!” the Nine Tails replied, Mana stood back on her feet finally managing to settle on the uneasy waters. It was strange, despite not being a ninja anymore she could still stand on top of the surface, just like she used to be able to in the real world.
“Okay… What is this? I never thought you could invade minds… Why did you do it in the first place if you just want to eat us?” Mana asked for a little clarification before she tried to reason with the beast to help them set it free.
“I normally cannot, my sight usually crushes people mentally, paralyzes them in fear or outright makes them go insane. It’s always the same, everyone screams until they pass out every time I look at them, your mind, however, feels strangely… Trained. Nowhere near as messy as that of the others and you don’t seem to be afraid of me, more of what I can do to those you love and care about. As you may have seen previously, even weakened, just my mere voice can level mountains and I can’t seem to get it under control in this cursed cave so I decided to try this mental communication instead…”
Mana closed her eyes and tried to settle down, it appeared that the beast was in quite fitting condition to negotiate at that moment, also it just so happened that her entire life devoted to meditation and mental training managed to make her mind strong enough to not be crushed by the mere sight of the Nine Tails and helped the fox communicate with her.
“Well then, as I’ve said, we want to set you free…” Mana confirmed her previous statement, “But first I’d like a little bit of clarification because there are things happening here I still cannot understand, what exactly happened there? How did you end up down here, how did those mobsters manage to place you here and keep you chained by something like steel beams and carts? Also why are you eating people, I thought Tailed Beasts don’t really need to feed?”
The Nine Tails leaned up to Mana, its gigantic eyes were level with the girl’s entire body, its red irises and bloodshot eyes stared right at the magician. “The old man settled down here, my, as you call them, “Jinchuuriki”. Way before his death… I once managed to take control over his body, he leaked too much of my chakra and we destroyed a small village in the process. The man decided to fight my influence by hiding in a cave down here, he placed bunch of seals on his own body and then he stuck his hands into these rails before his death so that once I broke free I stayed stuck. I kept waiting to regain my strength after his death but it never came back… Once in a while I feel those… Urges to kill, to tear things apart! But I’m so weak! So damned weak in this blasted cave! It’s like poison itself seeps from the walls, like those strange blue stones and the light they make burn me!”
After the fox finished talking an awesome stream of breath escaped its snout blowing Mana off her feet and sending her rolling backwards on the surface of the water, it was relatively painful and the girl almost passed out. This must’ve been only a visual illusion her mind made up to explain the overwhelming crushing presence that the Fox’s mind had on the girl’s human mind. Despite her “hospitable” mind, Mana’s psyche was still slowly getting torn apart by the Fox’s presence. It appeared that the beast realized it already and started to withdraw. The colossal figure of the fox started slowly turning into orange foam, large bubbles formed where its glowing fur once was, the entire frame was slowly disappearing under the surface of the mental waters.
“I would have liked to apologize for my actions but I don’t feel bad about blowing you brats up at all. I know you feel bad about it, you’re kids with childish lives and families and all those futures ahead of you and you feel like I’m evil or something for disintegrating you where you stand. The thing is that I am not evil, the very concept of evil is what I am, I am defined by it because it’s just the way that I was made. I am a world breaker, I kill and destroy, it’s what I am, I don’t care why…” the demonic thundering authoritative voice of the Nine Tails rumbled out as the entire foamy carcass disappeared under Mana’s mental waters and suddenly the girl snapped out of this weird sensation back where she stood before.
“Meiko! I need you to take your armor off now!” she screamed out. “I know what’s going on here, we have a chance to survive it but we need to move fast!” Mana pleaded desperately but her friend appeared to simply stand there completely still, almost like she was dead or just trapped in her own mind.
The magician grunted and looked at the others, Kouta was also standing there with his eyes rolled up and his mouth open, only his pounding heart alerted the magician that the Fox’s sight didn’t kill her friend of sheer terror. Shimo was also stuck on his knees, he must’ve been in a middle of a mad dash, some sort of attempt to attack the fox but he was caught before his attack could start.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Mana’s heart pounded, beat against her ribs like it had never beaten before. The fear inside of her was so intense and the adrenaline rush was so real that her entire gut felt like it wrapped around her throat internally and started to choke her out. The magician tore the countless belts around Meiko’s armor, trying to figure out just how to use them, how all of this complicated system of belts and screws worked. One by one the magician tore the armor pieces off, feeling intense heat and hearing the most dreadful sound behind her “ the shrieking sound of a chakra blast charging up.
This was a hopeless idea “ Mana had no idea just how potent the seals in Meiko’s armor were, she had no means of activating them or anything of the sort. Slowly the magician’s mind realized that the chances of this day ending in utter disintegration were becoming so very overwhelming that just thinking about them almost made her drop down on her knees and accept demise. With a loud roar Mana pulled off the final strap making Meiko’s heavy chestplate fall onto the ground. The girl whined as assembled the armor and piled it back one piece on another, she placed her arm on the back of it. There it was… If only she could use her chakra again… She could’ve at least tried activating Meiko’s seals, tried to absorb as much of the Nine Tails’ blast as she could into Meiko’s storage seals so that… What was she even trying to achieve?
Mana’s watering eyes looked to the side, she saw the red chakra ball in the Nine Tails’ mouth become larger and larger and larger but her eyes wandered off to her friends. Frozen in time, could they even see what was going on? The worst possible scenario would’ve been if they actually saw what was going on, saw their impending doom but had no way of moving, no way of controlling their body and the last thing they saw was their friend who doomed them like this in the first place letting them down.
The girl’s hand started slowly slipping down Meiko’s armor as she tried her best not to collapse on her knees in complete mental devastation. She failed everyone! She brought them here trying to prevent suffering of the people converted into monsters here, people who had to endure steel particles being infused into their very skin, a process so painful it made their minds shut down and made them into bumbling rage monsters. She wanted to release an ancient fox demon just because she wanted for it to stop being so lonely, stop suffering inside those Audra particle infused walls…
Finally the shrieking sound shut up and with a final boom the giant red ball of chakra was released. It was like time slowed down… Almost like Mana saw the blast coming at them, a blast powerful enough to not even leave a single cell of them there, powerful enough to destroy the very platform where the Nine Tails and the four were standing on sending the Fox down into the abyss itself. The magician looked at her friends whom she disappointed and doomed to death…
“Storage Seal: Open” she uttered, knowing well it wouldn’t work “ she had no chakra to spare either way, she couldn’t control her chakra so she’d fail even at using basic Academy level sealing technique…
Everything whited out. Mana could feel heat scorching her skin, her ears got overwhelmed by sound to the point where she felt blood firing off from her eardrums like a bursting volcano. Intense pressure blew the girl back, for a moment she thought that she was actually flying before the magician felt hitting the stone wall. The white in her eyes didn’t let her see her friends at their final moments… The pain and overwhelming heat and the pressure were too much… The girl’s mind let go… Farewell…
*****
“So should we tell her what she did?” weak remnants of Kouta’s voice somehow broke through the kunoichi’s conscience.
“We don’t know if she did it… It could’ve been a great many things… Fuck… She released the goddamn Nine Tails… Well now the world is fucked…” Shimo’s voice which sounded much louder than the voice of the medical ninja broke through again, powerful sensation of pain shut up around Mana’s head on the sides almost as if a bear trap snapped shut around her head forcing the girl’s eyes to slightly peek open.
“The world will be fine… I mean it existed for so long before the Nine Tails was imprisoned. But why did she have to use my armor… Look at it, it’s completely molten and messed up, I can pretty much just leave it behind” Meiko’s playful sniffles completely woke Mana up forcing the magician’s eyes to open back for good.
“Ugh… What happened…” her weak and pain ridden voice uttered. She felt… Cold… Probably because the heat almost burnt off her clothes and the Land of Rivers at night was quite chilly, despite its warm resort like look during the day.
“Well… Somehow you managed to use Meiko’s armor to overload the capacity of the storage seals with Nine Tails’ weakened chakra, you sealed away parts of the blast and the part that hit us was mostly a concussive blast” Shimo explained helping Mana get back up. The girl looked at the smoking black remains of Meiko’s armor. It was almost like it molted into a shape of strange sticks and then solidified again into solid coal, or something similar to coal. It was also smoking and looked quite brittle. Meiko was wearing a green tracksuit and crying over the remains.
“Which raises two problems: first being how did Meiko’s armor have enough storage capacity to store away such excessive amount of chakra, isn’t the Nine Tails strong enough to destroy the world and then keep going? Also how on Earth did you open those seals up if you can’t use chakra? Maybe your control is returning? I’ll need to examine you once I recover, healing the burns of you guys and all the broken bones from when we got sent out that giant hole sucked the last of my chakra out…” Kouta complained pointing at a giant crater. What appeared to have once been a mine. The Nine Tails blast must’ve bypassed Mana and the others with Meiko’s armor working as an improvised barrier absorbing the demon’s chakra while the walls behind were blown up and the concussive force tossed the genin outside.
“Hey, you didn’t have to scale the platforms around the whole damned mine to collect everyone’s unconscious bodies!” Shimo growled angrily at Kouta who apologized and laughed out uncomfortably.
“It was the mine itself. I’ve been wondering for a while as to how exactly the mobsters made the Audra steel, I mean to craft such excessive amounts they’d have needed to use the Nine Tails’ own chakra, its own genetic material and infuse it into stone via some Kirikuzu master blacksmith’s aid. The entire mine had a strange radiating glow to it. Those walls must’ve emitted some sort of weird vibe that weakened the Nine Tails and made it act out of its mind. Almost like the entire mine was poisonous to the Nine Tails but not poisonous enough to kill it for good, just to keep it at half-dead state, almost like a weakening allergic reaction for Tailed Beasts…” Mana explained.
Kouta nodded, “Well that makes just about as much sense as everything we’ve seen in that mine… Anyways, mind if I quickly scan you? I mean you just used chakra, didn’t you?” the medical ninja stood up and tried to place his hands above Mana’s body but the girl stood up and pushed them away.
“You will do no such thing…” she uttered with a much ruder tone than she usually used, Kouta was one of the people she spoke especially softly to but it appeared that the magician was quite adamant to avoid a scan. She was just afraid of getting the final answer that much, even when she just got a sign that things may not have been as final as she once thought them to be.
Meiko, Kouta and Shimo looked at each other awkwardly, almost as if they knew something that Mana didn’t. The three just gulped and slowly followed the magician back to the Land of Rivers settlement where they could’ve stayed for a while and examined their wounds.
Whatever Kouta’s initial scan back in Shukuba town showed seemed to unify the magician’s teammates, that uncomfortable secret that needed for the speaker to admit that they went behind one’s back to fully be explained seemed to haunt the three before other thoughts finally pushed it away and everyone started to act like it was business as usual.
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