Mana, Meiko and Kouta were making a wild dash towards the exit to the camp. They decided to take their chances and bet on Shimo’s distrust of the Justicars in general to make the young Yuki quite capable of not getting himself captured. Moments before making a turn Kouta’s hand rose and rudely slammed Mana against a rocky wall making her grunt out in pain and almost question the young man’s rude expression but then his hand continued to slam her mouth closed and cover it up. Meiko was too obsessed with staring strangely to speak a word but after a moment she got the clue and also hid behind the sharp turn. Slowly the trio walked back before they found multiple corners and crevices to hide in.
Within mere seconds after Mana hid into a small crevice just barely large enough to hide half of her petite frame a march of angry men running through the tunnel broke the silence as they rushed to the place where their comrades were soundly beaten. It could’ve been well over fifty men, all of them wore exquisite yet ancient and long out of production armors and weapons far too large for comfortable murdering.
“They’re mobilizing…” Kouta silently noted.
“What about Shimo?” Mana wondered.
“He’s a tough guy, he can handle himself” Meiko assured the team.
“We don’t know if these men are here for us or the dwellers. If these are here to kill us and hide our bodies inside the caves that’s one thing. If this is just a daily hunting party that means that the Justicars are still unaware that we know of their game, that would mean that Shimo is alright” Kouta tried to sum his thoughts up and make up a way that’d help them decide on what to do next.
What the young Juugo said made some sense, if they somehow could manage to find out just what the intentions of these men were it could help them a great deal. Furthermore it’d help them better make up a plan of how to save everyone. That was the goal, that was always the goal.
“We’ll track them, see where they go, what they do. If they are actively looking for us we’ll know that they’re after us, if they attack the dwellers at one of their favorite hiding spots we’ll know that our cover is still safe. I don’t think that our brief encounter gave us up already, they have no reason to believe that we’re onto them” Mana concluded.
Meiko and Kouta nodded and the three slowly began creeping at the general direction of the noises. After a short while they managed to catch up to the group. It appeared that far too many of these men was mobilized, Mana couldn’t accurately tell but from a rough estimation she would’ve bet that this was most if not the entire group. They were preparing for some serious justice dealing. Or what these sick people made out to be justice, anyways.
“Mana-chan…” Kouta softly spoke up, carefully that his voice didn’t echo hard enough through the caves to be heard by the Justicars on ahead. The magician soft and turned at him.
“Look, we found out some really sensitive and important information here “ whoever is making people disappear close to the village is possibly also involved in whatever’s gone on with those settlers. It’s a decent suspicion and the village should know about it” Kouta whispered.
“Your point?” Mana didn’t like the direction where this was going. She had a rough suspicion as to where the boy wanted to take it.
“Well… It means we have to prioritize our survival at all costs, we need to let the village know that the bastard may not be just a maniac who kills people or something. He’s into some seriously messed up and important crimes” Kouta concluded.
He was right. Mana hated when people she disagreed with were actually right. She knew that not only according to the mission protocol but also a much more logical thing to do was to prioritize their survival at all costs. They’d potentially save more lives than just some ugly abominations of nature, monstrosities created by splicing science with ninjutsu or whatever that person did to them.
Mana didn’t answer, she didn’t want to go that path, the path of agreeing to condemn a bunch of unfortunate people to death just so they could save more people in the long run by shocking the village enough to take the threat more seriously. To send their best ninja after the perp and comb the forests, burn them and smoke the bastard out if needed. She couldn’t in conscious mind tell herself that condemning those people could’ve actually been the right thing to do but deep in her heart she knew that it was.
“Why would they be so cruel” Mana wondered, “Why would they go so far to kill some unfortunate people that already had their lives ruined following some blind code?” that was when Meiko touched her shoulder.
“The Justicar Code” the blacksmith answered
“What do you mean?” Mana wondered.
“A wild cat that does not kill dies of starvation” Meiko quoted. Since Mana continued to stare at the blacksmith indifferently the redhead scratched her forehead and explained, “The Justicars operate with a bushido-like code. Those that do not serve their ideals must commit suicide. That’s why in that lie that the Justicar leader made up he claimed that he was keeping the group frozen in procession, a state where they neither failed justice nor upheld it”
Mana looked onward as she noticed the feint lights began to disappear into the cave. The group picked up the pace a little. What sort of sick ideals were those? To live by such a stupid code? Then again, was her own conviction any better? Mana herself was ready to die upholding her own ideals. She had no right to judge those people or feel surprised when she herself gave up her life protecting a criminal just because she thought he didn’t deserve death. To think that Kiyomi idolized these people just as much as Meiko appeared to… Why did people follow those blind icons of street justice when justice had nothing to do with what was right?
“It’s the bees and the hornets all over again…” Mana laughed out. Kouta looked at her uneasily, he must’ve known that the magician’s laughter was just a façade of her sadness and wish to know what to do. She thought up of a nightmare scenario and here it was transpiring right in front of her. Two sides that lived by what they did, one side that had to kill to survive due to their own foolish convictions and people who probably wanted to rather be dead due to what happened to them. To stop either side was to doom the other…
“I really hope you’ve found the answer…” Kouta answered trying to come closer to Mana and ease up her inner struggle but the magician slowed down a little, then stopped and sat down wrapping her head around with her arms. She was afraid, confused and had no idea what to do.
“Bees and hornets?” Meiko blinked a couple of times, stopping and following Mana before picking her up and carrying the magician in her own hands as if nothing happened. Her speed didn’t even drop a tiny bit.
“A hypothetical situation, Mana-chan was worried that at some point she’d encounter a situation where she’d be stuck between two sides the survival of which hindered on exterminating the other. It’s her worst fear because she placed the responsibility of troubling herself with every smallest conflict, she didn’t know what she’d do in that situation…” Kouta explained looking at his collapsed friend. Mana looked really out of it all.
Meiko smiled cheerfully, “What a dolt, she can fight a full arena of trained martial artists wishing to kill her but she collapses because of something dumb like this”
“It’s not dumb, it’s important to her…” Kouta tried to object but then fell silent when he realized that the Justicars stopped. They must’ve found what they were looking for.
Meiko placed Mana on the ground gently and proceeded to close in on the Justicars, both ninja decided to utilize their element of surprise and get a drop on the enemy.
“That’s it, freaks, you have nowhere left to run!” one of the Justicars yelled out
“You’ll all be slain for your crimes of being tainted by a criminal! This world has no place for victims, only the evil and the justice that cleanses it” another one laughed out as followed with a metallic shriek he drew out his sword from a sheathe on his back, the swords these men and women carried were far too great to be carried by their sides so most of them carried their weapons on their backs.
“Why you kill us? What we do?” the dweller who has spoken to Mana asked walking out in front of his people, he appeared alone but Meiko and Kouta knew that all of the others were hiding with their eyes closed by the walls.
“Oh, look at that, they’ve learned to speak! Good, I could use some screams from the evil that I slay, clacking just sounds like I’m chopping wood” a large brute thundered out with a rocky voice as he removed his axe from his back and let its natural weight slam down onto the rocky floor shaking the entire tunnel structure. It may have weighed thousands of tons to have caused such a violent reaction to the integrity of the massive system.
“Heh, what did you do? You mean besides being pathetic and miserable ugly bastards who fell victims to criminal scum? All of you are just blisters of our society, you carry the ugliness of the injustice that touched you” a woman Justicar yelled out removing two long knives and brandishing them against each other.
The woman lunged at the man wielding her knives but with a reddish and black flash she was sent back crashing into a wall and shaking up the entire tunnel system again. At the very least it held quite firmly as it was based on some tough and quite ancient system of roots. Kouta stood up from his leg swipe position and looked at the rest of the Justicars angrily.
“Enough” was all he said.
“Ninja Style: Windmill Buzzsaw!” Meiko chanted out the name of her technique as she appeared out of nowhere and after a nasty flesh slashing sound a whole bunch of Justicars fell to the ground stricken down by two windmill shuriken that she wielded masterfully attached to string wire. With a flick of her wrist the armored kunoichi returned the shuriken to her hands and placed them back onto her back.
“You… Konoha ninja defend these freaks!? These monstrosities, these…” a Justicar opened his mouth to speak angrily gripping his large axe.
“Victims of a crime against humanity committed by a criminal? The man you all should be chasing instead if you had any integrity at all?” Mana’s voice reached the group as it turned around to see the magician walking through their group and calmly joining her friends standing in between the Justicar and the tunnel dwellers.
“Mana…” Kouta acknowledged the magician’s decision to choose a side whether she had an answer or not. To stand together with her friends when faced with her worst fear, her total nightmare scenario when no one in their right mind would’ve walked out there and faced their fears.
“Have you found an answer then?” Meiko looked at the magician questioningly.
“I don’t think there is an answer. I’ve decided that no matter what situation I’ll just always do what I think is the right thing to do. The one thing that would not be right is to let these people slaughter the dwellers just because they look ugly and are victims of a crime forced into hiding. The right thing to do is to break every bone in the body of every Justicar so that they cannot kill themselves when we stop them from harming these people” Mana calmly explained before giving each of the Justicars in front of her an angry stare.
“Thee shall bury any well spit in by a poisonous hag” a Justicar said taking a step closer and gripping his war-hammer more tightly in his hands.
“A wolf that croaks like the ugliest toad is no wolf and will drown when it tries to swim” another woman drew her sword and stepped forward. Mana didn’t even need translation to the last line of the Justicar code, it was supposed to mean that they were now just as much criminals in the eyes of the Justicars as the dwellers were and if that was what it meant to be a criminal Mana would’ve more rather been the worst kind of criminal there was than let those poor people get slaughtered. A word criminal is an empty label when thrown around meaninglessly.
Kouta roared proudly in rage as his Juugo instincts kicked in, sending the boy into a furious rage, leaping into the whole bunch and pounding any Justicar that got in his way without restraining any smallest bit of his strength. Punching people through rocks and into the air and out of the tunnel system, throwing people around using the combination of his medical chakra enhanced strength technique as well as his unmatched chakra control that allowed him to augment his strength and speed more efficiently.
The young man’s fists danced on the muscular and good looking bodies of the Justicar peeling through the hardest and most dense plates of armor, breaking their shields and weapons and breaking the body of each Justicar with a single softest touch, blowing away any attempts of these glorified mercenaries to augment their endurance as his physical strength blew away all of that. Just a single stare at the rampaging Kouta made Mana realize just how similar the boy was to his father. She even got a shiver remembering the man’s face as he beat her down mercilessly back in the ruins of the Wind Desert.
And yet despite the awesome strength the boy began finding his match more and more amongst the Justicar, after a couple of the first moments of unstoppable rampage Kouta had to restrain his augmentations in order to not damage his own chakra system. So his blows no longer sent people flying, he had to attack more often, more skillfully, use taijutsu combinations, block, dodge and weave around using technical abilities and he wasn’t always successful in doing so. A powerful mercenary cleaved through at least a dozen of Justicars just to land a shallow cut on Kouta, the man then rushed with his shoulder and grabbed the boy’s face slamming it into his knee.
Meiko unsealed a one handed sword and a small buckler, the buckler was used more defensively as she charged around or tossed it as a projectile meanwhile her much leaner and more dynamic blade made most gracious art on the bodies of battlefield hardened Justicars. Sometimes Meiko hit something too hard to cut, sometimes blows and kicks or even slashes from those colossal weapons forced her own gear out of her hands. That was when the blacksmith showed her brute physical prowess that was just an inch or two behind Kouta’s who was a purely physical brawler. Both Kouta and Meiko were restrained to some extent “ Kouta couldn’t use his Juugo bloodline chakra cannons in fear of destroying the tunnels, Meiko couldn’t use her more destructive seals as well.
That didn’t mean that the blacksmith didn’t use her sealing abilities. With something as subtle as a hand seal with one hand and a touch of another with the ground or a wall the kunoichi formed explosive seals that exploded in relatively small power and disrupted or threw the enemies off balance. Oftentimes when meeting a hardened and heavy and clunky plate armor wearing person she didn’t wish to bother with the blacksmith simply created a seal of explosive nature onto the person’s armor blowing his armor to bits. Ancient armors meant to withstand the most amazing blows from the most powerful warriors of history offered little protection to a tall and buff she-devil blacksmith of Konohagakure and her crafty combination of swordplay and sealing techniques.
Despite being surrounded by fighters none of them managed to as much as lay a hand on Mana. The magician was burning her body out by exploding with as much physical chakra as she could “ that was the only way because the speed of these Justicar was insanely powerful. They were fit to compete with lower ranking ninja, even blow most early career genin out of the water completely. They were able to move in immeasurable speeds, possessed unimaginable reaction time and each blow would’ve been enough to cleave through even the densest substances in the universe. Then again, Mana was not surprised by the immense strength of this army of savage murderers, they had to be this strong to survive killing criminals, people that gave ninja trouble.
At some point the magician noticed the Justicar asking for reinforcements, none of them no matter how hard they tried could land a blow and she was not responding in kind. Mana was using all of her tricks immediately, the combined fighting style of dodging, reflecting what she couldn’t dodge and countering immediately after. She broke bones, disarmed and used the disarmed weapons against the users. She was fighting beings that would’ve been considered gods in other places and outnumbered severely and yet she was holding her own quite decently. If she was to ignore her burning pain that was already forcing Mana’s heart to pound ten thousand times its normal rate, she was literally killing herself by breaking her own body. Despite not being hit once Mana worked up the maddest nose bleed as well as a headache matching the pain of having her head split open with one of those thousand ton axes. Her heart felt like it was trying to use explosives to blow its way out of the girl's heart and yet… She didn’t care if she’d die, she just tried to do what needed to be done, what she thought was right. She was fighting in the middle of a battlefield without as much as a single injury, she was once again what she craved to be “ a ninja. Even if it’d end up killing her, Mana didn’t care how many years she was shaving off her lifespan with each dodged punch, one, ten or a hundred. All she cared about was that once again she was defending people that needed her help, people who would’ve been slaughtered for their horrible luck and their physical repulsive looks.
Such couldn’t happen. Such will never happen as long as Mana’s tearing and crying with blood heart still pounded in her chest cavity.
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