Mana’s eyes softly clapped as the first sight they saw after she came to her senses was Meiko’s silly ear to ear grin above her head. Right after the blacksmith noticed the girl’s recovery she alerted everyone else and Shimo helped Mana sit back up while Kouta did some quick medical check-ups that made him calm down about her overall condition.
“I didn’t have much chakra to work with and I’ve never just repurposed someone else’s chakra like that, I need to make sure everything went fine” he explained.
“So that woman in the red dress with the sand and genjutsu, did she hurt you, should we have kicked her ass?” Meiko asked sitting down closer to Mana.
“She did intend to hurt me if I didn’t help her but… At some point she seemed to have changed. After I told her that I was willing to sacrifice my wish to help her she just froze up and said something about how much she changed and how much she hated that, what happened to her?” the magician asked. For a moment the others looked rather surprise by Mana’s revelation but then none of them really dared to say anything.
“She kicked our asses then left, told us to not leave through the main entrance and use the underground tunnels for some reason. Then she made such a huge ruckus that the lower floors of the castle are completely overtaken by sand. I’m not sure how we’d leave through there in the first place” Shimo complained a little or at least his tone made it clear that it was supposed to be a complaint. “On top of that, Kouta’s crazy dad is still probably after us”
“She didn’t look like a bad person, she held back the whole time and tried to calm us down but after seeing the state you were in we couldn’t think clear. She knew that my chakra was at a low so she didn’t hurt us too bad, she used illusions to subdue us and they wore off a little later for some reason” Kouta said as he carefully applied a bandage over Mana’s scraped abdomen.
The magician sighed. “She decided to confront the man she and her family were running from, if the illusions wore off within an hour with no effort from your part to deal with them it probably means she either left the effective range or died…”
“Hey, don’t get all depressed on us about losing someone again, we don’t know if she died or not yet… She was tough enough to grant the benefit of the doubt” Shimo growled knowing Mana’s personality too well.
“Yeah, thanks…” Mana thanked her old time teammate, she really needed at least a spoken statement that there may have still been hope that she didn’t completely screw it all up again.
“We messed up, we had to protect you but we were too weak. We got our asses kicked by everyone we fought and all we could do was survive. I’m done living this stupid rogue life of just surviving, Mana, next time we’ll protect you properly. I swear!” Shimo angrily exclaimed carefully punching the wall and looking at his friend with an angry glare. The magician had never seen her friend look at her with those eyes, he used to endlessly praise her for no reason and watch out for her just because she belonged to the gender he swore to pamper, then he started to get annoyed by her protective and needlessly selfless personality but something changed after this encounter.
“It’s fine… You had no way of fighting those guys, Kouta’s father is at least a Jounin level ninja, those people from the Sand Village were on the other level entirely. We weren’t and could not have been ready. Also, Meiko, thanks for saving everybody when I asked you to” Mana smiled at her friend, her face hurt like she’d have been bashed with a rock for hours and her eye still felt swollen so Kouta must not have had enough chakra to deal with those injuries, just the life threatening ones.
“Well I mean… You told us to and… You’re not our leader but your calls tend to be the right ones or at least pull us through most of the time and that’s good enough” the blacksmith blushed, her shame wouldn’t have been visible due to poor fire lighting had it not been so overblown.
“No, you were the best anyone could’ve asked you to be. Leaving your friend behind can’t be something that comes easy but it was the right thing to do and you didn’t hesitate” Mana sighed and looked down, her left eye could barely see right as it was hard pressed by the swellings all over it, it felt like a blown up bump shooting out from her face and she must’ve looked horrible.
“So is our mission a bust? We’ve heard the woman in red say that the box wasn’t here?” Shimo asked but before Mana could give him her answer the castle floor started shaking. Without hesitation Meiko grabbed Mana in her arms and bolted towards the door followed by the others, as a feat of inhuman reaction the magician slipped out of her teammate’s hands and crawled up to the small sphere that was inside the throne. Her covered in dried blood fingers wrapped around the sphere before she tried standing up but Meiko once again grabbed her and pulled her aside from the falling roof.
“Someone must’ve moved the foundation!” Kouta yelled out over the sound of falling debris.
Mana was taken over by the feeling of absolute dread and helplessness, she was powerless and then beaten to a pulp, one of her eyes barely worked and even the one that did was almost blinded by the lack of lighting and everything around her was falling down on her and her friends whom she wished to protect.
“Jump down there!” Shimo yelled out as he took a leap of faith, Kouta remained standing but Meiko turned at him and explained.
“The corridor that leads to the tunnels is down there on the first floor, we saw it on the run from your father, remember?” the blacksmith finished explaining and followed Shimo.
“I’m pretty sure I was still passed out at that point…” the medical ninja scratched the back of his head before following.
A blueish flash of light echoed and then Shimo’s loud roar of anger, Mana shook in surprise and tried to see what was going on below but Meiko pressed her harder so that the magician didn’t slip out of her grip and plummet below.
“It’s fine, Shimo just froze a bunch of sand and sliced a tunnel through them with that totally awesome Audra blade” the blacksmith girl giggled in awe when talking about that sword which made Mana realize that this was no dream. One couldn’t have been too sure about what was a dream or an illusion but Meiko’s childish glee when talking about weapons couldn’t have been emulated with any illusion of a sane individual.
A strong and quite painful splash made Mana yell out in shock as cold water filled her lungs. Meiko quickly pulled the girl out of the water and then pressed her chest to help the magician cough it all out. Not too long later Kouta splashed and swam to the rocky edge himself.
“Wow, the water is hot!” he yelled out quickly rolling out.
“What are you talking about, it was cold as shit, look at Mana, she’s shaking…” Meiko looked at the medical ninja funny.
“It was boiling actually, I froze it but the temperature seems to change quite rapidly… It boils and evaporates but then falls back down because of vast differences in temperature here and up in the shade of the castle at night. The rocks on the bottom must be really heated by the desert rocks and sand” Shimo said removing the upper part of his desert cloak and placing it on Mana’s shoulders.
“Well, the tunnel’s right here, we can leave the castle or go wherever it leads and hope it’s in better condition than this but what’s our plan?” Meiko asked looking at Mana. Kouta sat down and looked at the magician questioningly as well, Shimo pressed his naked back against the rocky wall and crossed his arms on his chest looking at Mana too as if waiting for her decision.
“What do you mean? Our mission is over, there’s no Box, even if it exists it isn’t here and we don’t have any authority to look for it. We’re done, let’s go home…” Mana mumbled out, speech came a little weird as she must’ve been missing some teeth.
“Wait… But, what about your chakra? You were all crushed and ruined before, it clearly means the world to you, I mean no one would subject themselves to Meiko’s training unless being strong was essential to them” Kouta gently touched Mana’s shoulder making the girl shake his hand off as it hurt her cracked bones and blunt traumas everywhere.
“Wait, what is that supposed to mean… I mean… Yeah, you wanted your chakra back hard enough to go behind the village’s authority. You were ready to be labeled a traitor, you subjected yourself to this cruel world by leaving in your frail state and now you’re just giving up?” Meiko couldn’t understand the magician’s decision either.
“Mana, don’t give us your shit. Tell it how it is, what made you change your mind? Surely that sphere thing must have something important for you to risk getting squished by a whole castle going down. I won’t have it with you lying to yourself. If you tell us to go back we’ll do that and that’ll be the end of it but if you want to go on, if you have any hints or clues or any ideas how to find that box or get your chakra back we’re going with you, you’re far too puny to let you wander the world at your current state” Shimo angrily shouted out at Mana.
“I don’t know what it is, it is just filled with random numbers one to six that don’t seem to make much sense. I just thought that the numbers being written in modern scripture and not Anansu dialect like everything else from this castle’s time period was odd. I grabbed it because it was interesting, out of instinct not clear mind, truth be told I’ve never felt like under so many concussions as I do right now so my mind can’t be further from being clear” the girl answered in a silent and oppressed tone.
“Something must’ve happened, something made you give up on your wish to get your chakra control back, what was it?” Shimo repeated his question.
“I… Well… It’s something that woman told me, she told me that my chakra manipulation isn’t gone because of my chakra network being messed up, she said it was working just fine. She said there’s… Some mental block to it and now I don’t know if I even know what I want anymore, I don’t know if my body even wants me to get better. What if what I considered being one half of my identity is something that doesn’t belong there” Mana explained saddened and hiding behind her messy and sticky from blood hair.
Meiko, Kouta and Shimo all looked at each other with odd stares and kept on switching from each other.
“Guys?” Mana suddenly started realizing something was off.
Kouta leaned down on his knee and wiped hair out of Mana’s face making the girl slip out of his hands again and hide her messed up face behind them again. She didn’t want Kouta to see her banged up like that.
“Look, Mana… We… Back when you trained with Meiko we… We kinda scanned your body and I did the diagnostic check that you refused in the village” the young man quietly revealed.
“You… You looked into my body? You’ve… Had no right” Mana’s whiny and almost weeping voice made the young man turn back at Meiko who was just looking at the ground like she was a toddler being busted for breaking a vase.
“Well, I…” Kouta tried to explain something but Shimo took that responsibility over from him.
“He didn’t want to do it, we pretty much bullied him into it. This whole time behind your back we were discussing some sort of excuses if you ever found out but you don’t deserve that bullshit. Yes, we wanted to know what was wrong with you for sure and if there was a potential for you to get better without the Box because none of us except Meiko really believed that Box of Ultimate Bliss was real in the first place”
“You didn’t?” Meiko squinted at the two, she seemed to genuinely have believed in the box’s existence.
“What Kouta found was identical to what that woman told you “ it’s your mind that still blocks your chakra control, not your body. That chakra augmentation mess up was big but it only injured you for a brief period of time, at some point down the line your network repaired itself” the swordsman explained, his face didn’t suggest any regret for his actions.
Mana stood back on her feet and walked up to him, she didn’t care that her thighs were burning up from fatigue, that her feet had open bleeding wounds from the endless walking having covered one fourth of the world’s longitude over almost a week on foot. Mana didn’t care that only one eye of hers could see, that when she spoke bloody slobber spat out from her mouth through a gap between her broken or busted out teeth. She didn’t care that her hands were stomped and had to hold her entire body weight during a raging sandstorm while she climbed those rocky castle walls and were still covered with bruises and wounds. She punched Shimo right in the jaw using the lower part of her palm while also shoving her slightly grown fingernails straight into the young man’s cheek drawing squirts of blood. He didn’t even augment his body and just took the hit despite having every tool in his arsenal to dodge it or counter it.
“You had no right!” she screamed out until her voice broke down from the several blows to her throat that Kusagoro managed to land and from when he tried to choke her out.
“Mana…” Kouta tried to calm her down by coming closer to her.
“Go home” the magician cried out. “This sign says that the straight path of this tunnel leads you right to Sunagakure’s gate, I’ll take whichever one doesn’t go there”
“Wait, Mana, this is stupid, even if we do let you go back to Konoha alone you’ll get raided and killed before the end of the first day on the surface” Meiko almost laughed out as she still believed that this breaking out was just a joke of some sort.
“Your mission is over, report to Konoha from Sunagakure by sending a message and then head home after you recovered, you told me you respect my call, that is it” Mana quietly whined out while slowly limping to the tunnel that still had brief lighting every couple of steps from eternally burning torches that burnt with some strange green flame. Must’ve been some Fire Style technique that couldn’t have been put out by water and humidity and consumed no oxygen, it just burnt for as long as it had to, just to light the way of anyone needing its light.
“But… Where will you go?” Meiko’s voice trembled as a clear sign of the blacksmith realizing that this conflict was no joke.
Mana’s beaten face turned back with tears all over it, the tears picked up and washed some dried out blood that her brief dip into the frozen boiling lake didn’t wash off making the tears appear almost bloody. She sniffed her running nose.
“I don’t know…” the girl said and kept on limping forward.
*****
Kusagoro growled as he dug through endless walls of sand. His mad swings pushed entire tons of sand pushing him forward hard enough for the sand passing him to actually hurt. He used his angry punch to bust through the damn thing but all it did was form a crystal wall of sand by superheating the sand from the energy that the punch put out. He didn’t even mean for it to be too strong, he wanted to preserve the castle but as Kusagoro’s slightly injured body swam out and emerged outside the castle he saw the blasted thing collapse and fall down.
“Son…” he wondered if his boy made it out before that. He wasn’t sure where his son was or what his further goals were. Most likely he’d return to the village now that the mission was over together with that traitorous girl, Kusaguro no longer gave a crap about exposing or beheading her. He looked back and saw a bloody hand in the sand. The Juugo brute pulled on the hand and dragged out a corpse of his friend Remashi with eyes filled with horror and a gapping hole in her body as large as a thick log. He gently placed the body of his friend down and closed her eyes with a soft stroke, the all seeing Byakugan snuffed out, finally getting a chance to rest…
The man tore off his friend’s bowtie and tied it around his arm, he looked around and found the body of his other friend “ Gokibure. His body was for once lacking the insects rushing all over it with the ancient buggers having abandoned their host at some point after his death. What remained of him was only his lower body, Kusagoro wasn’t sure where the upper parts went. The man pulled out a bloodied white rose that his friend carried around in his pocket and handed to various women he tried to seduce, all of whom rejected his advances due to the man’s symbiotic relationship with his insects.
Kusagoro pressed the ring of the flower in his hands and let the petals slip from his hands and be carried away with the desert winds. It took a little longer for Kouta’s father to find Mardith, the man was also a bloody stain, carefully the man removed Mardith’s mask which he wore on his neck and put on his face when he needed protection from water or toxic gas. Kusagoro tore the upper google part of the mask and took off his headband replacing it with his friend’s googles.
“I’ll avenge your deaths…” he uttered in the wind before seeing the floating body of the woman responsible “ the woman in red. Her eyes were peacefully closed and she was quite clearly dead. So the bitch died too? Kusagoro roared into the endless sky letting his raging chakra bursts pick up and throw sand around the place. The man lifted the woman’s body up by her hair and effortlessly flipped it over his shoulders to carry around. Further there laid another young teen, Kusagoro didn’t give her much attention though, maybe it was because of her age that reminded him of his own kid, maybe he just couldn’t place the hatchling behind being able to kill any of his friends.
There he stood with all of his friends, the people who saw him as a friend ever since his early days, the people that were through soft and hard with him, hot and cold. All dead and no one to exact his vengeance upon. He used to think things were easy “ if someone killed someone you care about, you kill that person. This was so ironic and so annoying…
“Remashi… I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad that you died without actually eating anyone’s face off, maybe we should’ve gotten drunk and tried it just to know for sure if you were half as sick as you said you were”
“Mardith… Your bullshit rituals pissed me off and I often killed you just because I knew I could with you coming back. Guess a man can only pull death’s skirt for so long before the bitch kicks back, huh?”
“Gokibure… You were a creepy bastard but all you wanted was to be loved by someone. Love is bullshit but since you were my friend I would’ve handed it to you even if I had to force a bitch to go out with you myself but you didn’t want it, you wanted the real deal. Hope there’s a woman that finds you loveable wherever you are”
After giving a couple of words to each one of his dead friends the man just looked up into the sky. For a moment he almost begged the sky for a downpour.
“What’s the matter, Big Guys? Can’t spare a single tear to weep over my friends? Well fuck you too…” Kusagoro cursed and pressed his knuckles into fists as hard as he could until he drew blood from his own fingernails digging into his own flesh. He wanted revenge but revenge on who? He could submit the corpse of this bitch to Hokage, see if she’s worth anything as a ninja from another village, there was something odd with her so maybe the brainiacs in the medical center could’ve used her DNA. It was either that or the bounty hunters…
[Reviews - 0]Chapter or Story
Table of Contents
- Text Size +