Several drops of a purple gooey liquid fell to the sand below, Mana turned the limb of the insect equipped with a sting on each leg around the green torches to examine it. In the other hand she held one of the cysts she ripped off of the insect’s face. Before she attacked those things and started swinging she needed to examine these creatures. She needed to understand these primitive yet terrifying insectoid hunters, the magician needed to understand what made them so effective at what they did.
Close to Mana’s feet laid a pile of small rodents that Mana impaled with the limb, they weren’t dead nor were they even bleeding. The girl wished to understand what the poison was doing exactly before she started digging deeper into why she wasn’t affected by it. Judging from the results the magician would also find out just how much time she has to put a plan together, if her friends were indeed captured she needed to know how these hunters feed, do they kill and eat their prey immediately or do they just paralyze it and have some further goals to fulfil with the carcasses of their prey.
So far judging from the delirious and disabled yet hyperventilating rodents it seemed like the poison merely paralyzed the prey and caused excessive fever. Mana was not completely sure why these insects would not kill their prey immediately or how do they actually finish it off once their ulterior goals are fulfilled. She had no time to find out. Understanding the mechanisms that made these things work had the priority…
*****
Meiko’s eyelids clapped heavily, it felt similarly to how it felt awakening from a heavy beating. Her entire body was paralyzed and the blacksmith felt sticky and hard surfaces beneath her, she wasn’t laying on sand, she knew that smell “ it was blood. The genin tried to squirm and shake but something shaped like a rib just dug deep into her back, all of her effort only made her move a single muscle. Whatever these insects injected in her was very potent…
Sounds of squirming and clacking of chitin shells against the stone and bones took over the place. Meiko’s heart started pounding harder, as always she tried to overpower the poison but that was simply not enough. Once again she found herself just a little bit short of sheer power. She was so strong, she yearned to be even stronger and yet she wasn’t able to be strong enough anytime she needed to. She couldn’t beat that totem using guy in the desert, she wasn’t able to resist the trap of those things and now she’ll end up in some insectoid intestines…
One of the insects crawled right up to Meiko, the blacksmith angrily struggled trying to overcome that numbness of her body but nothing worked, she heard some bone cracking sounds to her side so Shimo and Kouta must’ve been resisting those insects as well.
“I feel my chakra… Back…” Shimo grunted angrily, his voice was filled with pain and made the effort in trying to break free quite clear.
“Yeah, we must’ve been out overnight, maybe even longer” Kouta agreed, “It’s no use, even with all of my chakra enhancements I can’t break out… I don’t think it can be broken out of with strength alone”
The insectoid’s creepy eyes leaned up to Meiko’s face. The insect lifted one of its creepy limbs and penetrated one of their cysts with it squirting an entirely different cloud of gas as the chemical compound in their poison reacted with the gas stored in those blobs on their faces, one of pinkish red shades of color. Meiko coughed, her mind was starting to feel hazy, her pupils simply faded from her eyes as her irises were all that distinguished her eye from being completely whited out.
“Meiko! Damn, they must’ve hypnotized her or something!” Shimo grunted. Another insect crawled up to his face and spat the cloud of gas out into his face as well. The genin tried to reach out and bite into the cyst, defying the gas’s effects.
“How did you not get hypnotized like Meiko?” Kouta asked yelling out loud and scared as another one of the insectoid hunters was climbing up to his face to try and numb his mind and body as well.
“It’s genjutsu, just keep focused on the fact that what they do is genjutsu to keep identifying it and keep applying chakra to dispel it!” Shimo answered.
“Genjutsu? How could insects…?” Kouta tried to fight back but then his eyes started acting weird, his mind started dulling and fading so the boy simply burst his chakra from his body accelerating its flow and breaking out of the illusion. He couldn’t keep that up forever, dispelling genjutsu cost chakra, the more intense the illusion, the more strain fighting it placed.
The insect that knocked Meiko out crawled up to her face as if it wanted to sit on it. Its shell opened revealing a rather squishy and pudgy torso that was strangely glowing in the rather shady cave, most likely due to the substances stored inside its blobby bodies.
“Why didn’t you tell us earlier, Meiko may have saved herself too?” Kouta angrily scolded the ex-rogue swordsman.
“With her chakra control she wouldn’t have been able to fight off genjutsu anyways. She packs a mean punch and can swordfight with the best of them but her skills managing chakra aren’t the sharpest. Also we need those insects thinking they can actually knock us out, if they get annoyed by our resistance they might just kill us immediately and be done with it. Eventually we’ll need to give in too…” the swordsman grunted out annoyed by his current situation.
“I wonder what they want with us…” Kouta just barely lifted his head up looking at the insect pressing its squishy inner body against Meiko. A sharp sting burst out from the insect’s intestines making blood squirt out together with it and forcing the insect to violently twitch and shake in pain stabbing out powerfully against the floor surrounding Meiko with its stinger limbs.
A large sticky fluid shot out covering the insectoid hunter and pulling it to the wall upwards. The insect exploded in a mass of goo and separated chitin shell parts as a gigantic spider pulled its prey from the ceiling of the cave lair and crushed its entire body in its massive mouth.
“It’s trying to lay eggs in your guts” Mana’s voice echoed through the cave lair. Slowly the girl walked out into the light from the corridor making all the insects in the cave turn at her and lunge at the girl’s direction. The magician closed her eyes and grabbed hold tighter of her two torches that were her only defense besides the gigantic spider chowing those insectoid nightmares down one by one.
A deafening hiss interrupted Mana’s attempt to explain Shimo and Kouta what was happening and to calm them down. All of these insects launched their gas illusions at once.
“Damn it, Mana-chan can’t control chakra so she won’t be able to resist those illusions and cancel them out!” Kouta yelled out in fear.
Mana just continued to walk on forward, slowly but without making her face twitch even once.
“As you’ve correctly concluded the cysts on these insects’ faces emit gases that cause illusions, they seem to be chakra induced so they do qualify as genjutsu of quite sophisticated nature.” Mana calmly explained as illusions of her friends and her past enemies appeared in front of her, all of them spilling questions trying to confuse her.
“Most simple genjutsu are initiated through what is called a “genjutsu focus”, it could be a sound or a certain visual stimulus, this one is initiated through gas but this isn’t a simple illusion because it attacks a person’s brain center and not their chakra flow. It doesn’t require someone to possess a working chakra flow, just a functional brain. That’s how these hunters must’ve hunted for thousands of years before intricate chakra networks became a common evolutionary trait among the species” the girl spoke without bothering to combat the illusions. The insects all approached her slowly completely captivated by the defenseless girl and oblivious to the fact that they were hunted out one by one by a giant predator above them.
“Mana, damn it, stop fooling around, fight them or run!” Shimo yelled out as more than a dozen of insects surrounded the girl and all grabbed and lifted her in the air.
“You see the most common illusion consists of a person in your memories asking a question the answer to which exists in your memories. Answering it correctly stimulates that part of the brain and cancels the illusions, answering it wrong wastes time and lets these things close in on you…” Mana kept on talking as the insects kept stinging her with their stings two at a time. The magician squirmed and yelled out in pain before finally pulling out something out of her pocket and drinking it before spitting it out on her torches.
The flammable liquid extracted from the smelly glands of the insects burst into flames in a wild firestorm setting all the insects around her on fire. The predators kept on shaking back and falling to their backs, their legs twitched still squirting the poison around as they died out one by one. Satisfied by the successful hunt the gigantic spider quickly left as well. Mana slowly crept up to Kouta and Shimo and cut them lose. The magician then fell on her knee and threw up. Holding that smelly liquid in her mouth even for a couple of moments was really disgusting, especially when combined with what she had to chow down to maintain immunity to the poison.
Kouta gently laid Mana down and gave her some water, he also mixed in some spruce thorns extract meant for combating infections just to kill her nasty breath. The rodent from which the magician extracted the highly flammable substance defended itself by squirting it using it as a smelly self-defense weapon.
“Is Meiko OK?” Mana smiled, her body felt like she could walk or do nothing more. Like she was all out. Honestly she could’ve fought those things and not just take their stings but she had no more strength. All the research, all that effort and all-night planning, all the previously sustained wounds…
“Yeah, she’s fine, don’t worry, Mana-chan, my chakra returned, I can finish treating you. I’ll treat everything so just relax and rest… After I’m done you’ll be good as new” the boy softly stroke her hair out of Mana’s way pressing his hand against the lump of swollen flesh by her eye and green light burst from his hand. Initially the girl could not see it but then the overwhelming green made her slightly shake her head in discomfort. If it hurt that much to heal her swollen beatings just how badly would it hurt to regrow half of her teeth and heal her ribs? Bones were always the most painful to heal…
“How did you find us?” Shimo asked slapping Meiko around a couple of times, then pressing his hand against her back and sending a pulse of chakra that shocked her out of her illusion and broke it for her.
“That spider-like-thing is the natural predator to those insects. Strangely enough it grows from a maggot the size of a brick, since that thing hunts those insects it is immune to the paralyzing effects of their poison and I happened to eat one maggot when I was hungry before by sheer luck. That’s how I didn’t get captured, I found one grown up version of that maggot and stabbed it with the detached version of that sting to find out if its immune, then simply hid from it and followed where it’d go. It found you guys and brought me with it”
Meiko screamed out after seeing Mana and her face that was slowly starting to resemble her previous state. The blacksmith jumped up to Mana and hugged the magician screaming in joy. “You’re back!” the genin yelled out. Angrily Kouta yanked Meiko off Mana and continued his treatment.
“You did all this planning and risked your life coming to the nest of these things? There had to be a lot of variables that simply aligned properly…” Shimo coldly exclaimed. He must’ve been suggesting that Mana may not have been in it to save everybody because she take a lot of time and relied on a lot of questionable factors where she simply lucked out.
“Not really…” the magician shook her head softly, “This nest is one of many, we weren’t too far away from each other when we were attacked since this cave system is massive. It only made sense for those insects to carry you to the closest nest to where they got you and that would’ve been the nest the spider found during its hunt”
“And what if we got killed while you did all that research?” Shimo squinted at her.
“You wouldn’t have, the insects wanted your bodies for nesting purposes so you were safe for possibly days if not weeks or entire months. They are predators that eat flesh but they need that flesh molten and mushed up, usually their eggs burrowing from your bodies would do that, if they’re desperate they also can overdose you with the poison and melt your flesh from the inside” Mana started feeling like she was being interrogated. Did Shimo really suspect that she may not have wanted to save them and was only in it for her own interest?
“Wow, Mana-chan, you could’ve died from so many stings, it was like your entire body was skewered by them!” Kouta exclaimed ripping Mana’s raggy desert cloak off to see the pulsing wounds still dripping poison from them.
“It wasn’t life threatening, I gorged on a bunch of those maggots and applied their goo on my skin so that the spider didn’t feel suspicious around me. The poison also works as an anticoagulant so it kept my blood inside. It hurt and probably poked some organs but it wasn’t something I’d die immediately from, also I needed them all in one place, I wasn’t strong enough to fight all of them even while their ranks were compromised by the spider-like-thing” Mana complained looking at the pulsing purplish swellings all over her abdomen that leaked a drop or two of the black poison.
“Holy shit, Mana, holy shit…” Meiko grinned with her full smile, that girl sometimes really confused the magician. Just a couple of moments ago her face was almost flooded with insect eggs that would’ve moved to her innards and then started growing. Mana suspected the possibility that her friends may have already been laid eggs in but she counted that Shimo or Kouta would’ve had something to say about that. Maybe Kouta would’ve been able to surgically remove them once they reached Sunagakure or Shimo could freeze those areas slowing down their development. And yet the blacksmith just laughed and looked excited as always.
“You’ve changed…” Shimo closed his eyes and lowered his head but then smiled and looked back at his old teammate, “I think for the better. The old Mana wouldn’t have been brave or confident enough to use all of that big head on her shoulders or play it like that, not to mention totally murdering a bunch of bugs”
Mana screamed out in pain as Kouta finally finished healing her facial scratches and her teeth and moved to her ribs. Those were probably the most intense part to be healed.
“They’re not people, their own brains aren’t complicated enough to be affected by their own illusions. They don’t understand or comprehend anything, they just live and do what they do by instinct. They don’t understand self-preservation and just kill, mate and lay eggs…” Mana closed her eyes, she’d have much rather have found a peaceful solution but those things weren’t really people nor were they things capable of understanding what death was.
“More so, their existence is only because of us tampering with their habitats, the ancient people dug up these caves and let them take them over, they placed these torches all around that helped them find this place as their new home as the world around them evolved. Truth be told, they live in a world that is no longer theirs, ideally they should all be allowed to just pass on to the species succeeding them. That’s what the First People did, wasn’t it? Died out and left chakra mastery for us allowing people to inherit it and succeed them” the magician looked away at the rustling salad flame behind her, she focused on the one point in space and time to avoid having to think about the pain she was feeling while her gut was healed and all those penetrating wounds and the insects’ poison were healed and extracted.
Meiko didn’t let Mana rest, she knelt up to the magician and looked her in the eyes, the blacksmith’s eyes were sad and filled with regret.
“So, when we will heal you, will you leave us again?” Meiko asked, “I probably could’ve dealt with those illusions but they showed you to me and I forgot the right answer and… I just felt like reliving that moment again, that moment of letting a friend down, messing up again”
Mana tried to force a smile through her face as being healed wasn’t as peaceful as she remembered it being, Kouta was a young and inexperienced medical ninja so his treatment was not nearly as precise and quick and painless as an experienced medical ninja in the Konoha Hospital could’ve done it.
“No. I returned because I still care about you guys, I care about everyone and it is as I told Tanshu-sensei once. I have the most responsibilities in the world because I must protect it whenever I can, also I won’t allow myself to take any lives while doing it. Sometimes my enemies won’t play fair, they’ll exploit me and my weaknesses and sometimes people dear to me will annoy me, let me down or abandon me but even so I must be better than to abandon and give up on them. I’m sorry, guys…” Mana sadly exclaimed.
Shimo sat down closer to the magician and closed his eyes, he was checking out some of the insects’ chitin plates that they wore as shells but then he deemed it too weak and tossed it aside.
“So, what’s next?” he asked directly.
“We head to Sunagakure, report to Konoha…” Mana tried to cut it short but her friend didn’t let up.
“They’ll tell us to go back. If you still want to hunt the Box you need solid reasons to ask for the mission objective to be extended due to unforeseen circumstances” Shimo shook his head. He was right, after coming back he was so often right but very brutish about the way he was right in.
“Well, before I was attacked I took a look at the sphere, it was one of the only things I took with me when I left you guys… It’s covered with numbers, the first two numbers say “4/4” and then it’s just endless streaks of three random numbers one to six ending with a bar” Mana sighed.
“Maybe it’s a puzzle of some sort? Maybe it’s a clue to where the Box was taken to after the person found it but lacked the balls to use it? I mean the Box does carry some risks, that whole bit about the wish needing to be selfless, right? So what if the original finder just sold it to someone for a lot of money?” Kouta wondered as he kept on healing Mana, the magician suspected that she’ll need plenty of healing and that they should’ve found a better place to stay.
“It’s a music puzzle!” Meiko cheerfully yelled out.
Everyone looked at her curiously, Mana even lifted her head out of shock to look at her friend. Nobody expected Meiko of all people to solve it. The blacksmith was an unmatched crafter and a great fighter but not much of a puzzle solver most of the time.
“What? I like music…” the girl shrugged as response to everyone’s stares.
Meiko took the sphere and turned it around, “You see, the 4/4 tells you how many beats there are per bar, each number must indicate some sort of a note or a beat but there are only three beats per bar in every section meaning each bar is missing one beat. It is a music puzzle, you need to insert a beat to each bar to make it all make sense…” the blacksmith explained.
Shimo looked at Meiko with a sarcastic squint, “I don’t suppose you can solve it too?” he asked with a certain tongue of wit behind his words.
“I said I like music, I don’t write it. We need someone good with that to complete it, a composer or something…” Meiko shrugged and handed the sphere back to Mana.
“When the puzzle is solved the bars must indicate some sort of coordinates-based clue to the Box’s location… That was amazing, Meiko! That’s definitely enough for us to ask for an objective extension” Mana finally had a reason to smile.
“Well, we’ll still need to drop by the Sand Village to inform Konoha and give them a partial report. We can use the Sunagakure Aviary to send a coded message, we’ll also use that time to sell off all we got from the raider camps and all of this insane journey and buy more supplies. We’ll need clothes and food and to restock our ninja kits and fix our weapons” Shimo thought out loud, “But in general this can still work…”
The quest for Bliss was not yet complete but it was just resurrected back to life. For once there was still hope that things could still turn out OK. After that gruesome nightmare in the caves the team would finally catch a break and refill their empty and depressed by defeat hearts with some semblance of hope!
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