Mana waved her hand, leaving a withered, grey slather in the fabric of the mental plane before reaching inside her sleeve and pulling out a brush. A few strokes completing hieroglyphs on the grey fracture as if it was an unraveled scroll did the trick. The schism began expanding and swallowing up the grisly battlefield scene until the corpses of Rakugi's teammates turned to exactly what they were–a terrible memory.
Fulfilling her request for the scene containing the next finger of the Five Pillar Seal, the scene shifted drastically to a somber scene of a group of people dressed in black gathered in a familiar location to Mana–the Konohagakure Cemetary. For a pair of unfortunate youths, the crowd gathered to see them off to the Pure Land was notable. It was possible that their deaths sparked some sort of outrage, maybe it was a beginning of a political grievance of a sort. Matters such as those made these deaths feel more important while simultaneously objectifying them at the same time.
Rakugi's mentor stood out in front of the crowd. Behind him laid subtle monuments on top of two cemented gravesites. They awarded monuments of rotating flames of black obsidian to distinguished ninja, mostly. Either those two young ninja garnered an impressive array of accomplishments for their age or they truly were just being made an example out of. People wanted to feel like these two deaths mattered and the administration was all too happy to hand them out a "hero's" burial.
"My students, Bayushi and Soshi, were all promise. They were remarkable ninja that would have only grown stronger and better given time. It's unfortunate to see them plucked like this. I take full responsibility for their deaths as their team leader. If it weren't for Rakugi's heroism in the face of death, at a time when nihilism and despair felt at their strongest and not even I expected to make it out of that encounter alive, I would not have been able to give this speech here today. The marble factory would have been taken and nukenin would have had an entire facility worth of explosive projectiles on their hands." Rakugi's teacher, whom Mana had only seen a brief glimpse of after Rakugi helped free him, said.
Rakugi himself stood there and stared at his own two sandals, it seemed. Mana wasn't sure about the timeline, but it didn't seem like he already had the Curse Seal placed on him so these events that she had witnessed occurred in the same week. The fateful day must have been coming close, though.
"When the village puts three genin at the care of a jounin ninja, the village places a certain expectation, responsibility on us to guide these bright children through this rough life and make sure they learn the ropes before flying off on their own. I could not fulfill that promise to the Lady Third and Konoha itself. It would be honorable of me to end my own life and wipe this dishonor clean but I have settled on taking responsibility into my own hands differently–from this point on, I resign as the leader of Team Aspen and the rank of Konoha jounin. I intend to work from the bottom-up, making up for this misfortune with hard work and productivity instead of more death. Lady Third and I agree over this," the spiky night-blue-haired man said. To the north-east of the cluster of people, a short and elderly woman of silver hair fluffed up in the back and longer around the nape of her neck with large, twisting bangs falling over her face nodded with a soft and melancholic look on her face.
There didn't appear to be a sparkle of the familiar emerald shine anywhere. Mana straightened her back, pulling out in front of a network of computer monitors placed one beside another in a long line of tables as she breathed the damp air of an enclosed, dimly lit office building and scanned the various monitors. Each monitor depicted a different scene of the funeral, with the last one showing Rakugi walking away alone with his head sunken down low. Just to be sure, Mana extended her hand toward the second to last monitor.
The monitor screen rippled, expanding like a gooey mass looking to envelop and digest all as the damp and dark monitoring office was no more, and Mana stood in an empty cemetery. Rakugi and his sensei stood in front of one another, though neither one had the strength to look the other into their eyes. Rakugi's mentor stared off into the distance while Rakugi himself couldn't tilt his eyes back up, just gazing down with a stare of someone who wanted they'd have died and been laying in one of those gravesites instead.
"I hope you understand and will come to respect my decision, Rakugi," the jounin said in a reserved tone.
"You know, this team, the missions we went on, the friendships, rivalries, and enemies we made along the way. It felt like a whole different life. I always felt like I was just a bird trapped in a cage when I was home or living my life as a Hyuuga. Here, with you guys, it was different. It was like the main house, the branch house, the heiress, the Curse Seal, the lifelong servitude, like none of that ever existed. Like it was just an awful nightmare…" Rakugi muttered with a hollow voice. The voice of someone who just didn't have the strength to keep on going.
"Maybe that's why you were so good at it. To most ninja, work is just a means to get through the times and make a living. To some, it's just a triviality to gain the strength and notoriety for the life they truly desire. You saw this life as the authentic life you always wanted and viewed your life back in your clan district as the big distraction instead." Rakugi's mentor sighed, pocketing his hands, weakened but standing firmly by his decision to walk away.
"And now I'm all alone and the life I've always wanted to live crumbled before me. Now the nightmare is all I've got left…" Rakugi said.
"I'm sorry," the jounin slowly shook his head and began walking away from the scene. Despite gaining distance from the young man, Rakugi's memories of him persisted up even when he walked out into the void of static.
"It's a tough thing, losing your team," a voice muttered right to Mana's ear, making the magician jump up and turn to her left side. Could someone have found her out? Who? Another infiltrator? That should have been impossible.
The one that spoke was a man in a black coat who would have looked shady on a normal day but looked perfectly normal during a funeral. He shuffled with a weathered step, face carved with scars and a hedged, even and orderly haircut, with strands of grey stretching out on the sides. While Mana's heart continued to skip beats for a few more paces, the further the man walked toward Rakugi, the clearer it became that he didn't see Mana and that he was just another participant of this memory and not an outside factor for the ninja magician to take into consideration.
He was so stealthy that Mana couldn't even notice him, despite being an outside spectator to this dream-like memory with full access and control over Rakugi's mind. She could only guess if Rakugi himself had noticed the man until the old veteran wanted to be noticed. The man in a black coat stood beside Rakugi and stared at the obsidian flame monument standing behind the tombstones of Rakugi's teammates.
"I've lost my team too. My sensei as well. For the longest time, I felt like I was forgotten. The village didn't assign me to another team or anything. It was like I just… Existed. Like a ghost almost, wandering and haunting the village, people covering up and whispering wherever I went. Pointed their fingers at me. "Look at the sad boy. The poor boy", they said…" the man spoke in a strict tone that seemed all too truthful. Mana had felt like she'd taken enough shit from village loyalists and yes-men of the Hokage throughout her life to sniff bullshit out, and this wasn't it.
"This is the last couple of days of freedom I will have, old man. I'd rather not spend them listening to your useless tales." Rakugi let out a grumble.
"Yes, I know about your supposed future, boy. It's why I approach you right now, during the funeral of your teammates and the hardest time. It's because the luxury of tomorrow might not be there for you. That was one heck of a stunt you pulled out there. Killed a few missing ninja that outranked you. I'm interested in just how you accomplished that," the man said, his stare still fixed on the obsidian flames as if they were challenging him, a sharp and glistening offense to the life that the old-timer has led until that point.
"My clan lied to me. Should I even be surprised? Scum that would indenture a child into servitude of a spoiled toddler, handing that brat the keys to the very life of somebody. Why should they value the truth? They never told me you could see so much with the Byakugan. All the weaknesses, all those targets to exploit. If the part of the job as a ninja is to kill, why hide such an ability and never use it? The Gentle Fist of the main house is a joke compared to this," Rakugi looked up at the obsidian flame monument as if trying to see the same thing that the man in a black coat saw.
"Interesting. You said you don't care to know my story, but I think you do, you just don't know it yet. What helped me become the man I am today from a little, sad ghost boy, was a group of similarly suffering talented individuals. Ones that found use in my ghost-like abilities and turned me into a real specter as opposed to just a spiteful brat nobody wanted to have business with and everyone pitied." The veteran ninja said.
"A group? What sort of group functioning inside Konoha has use for cold-blooded, efficient killers and ghost-men? The Black Ops?" Rakugi turned to the man who closed his eyes and pulled out a smoke, flicking a flare from a silver lighter and taking the moment to absorb some sweet poison into his lungs before pocketing his hands and gazing at the monument with a fresh pair of eyes.
"The ANBU? No. Konoha is like an enormous tree, you know. A strong and stout oak tree, more like it. The Hokage feels like a monkey sitting at whichever branch it goddamn pleases, flinging fruits and stones at others that would approach that tree. ANBU is like the shadow of that tree. The frightening darkness that purveys just how massive and powerful that tree is and obstructs those that would threaten the tree from the hope of sunlight ever reaching them again. We are neither the leaves nor the fruit of that tree nor are we the shadow. My organization is like the roots of that tree, sunken underground. Providing our fine oak with the sustenance it needs to survive and making sure that monkey can spend the rest of its days on that tree it calls home. We also wrap and sever the roots of other trees that would take minerals and water from our soil when we need to, get what I'm saying here?" the man turned to Rakugi, who just gulped down and turned his eyes away. The young ninja couldn't handle the mass of the man's stare.
"I'm… Not sure I do. But if you want to use me for your goals, it sure as heck beats listening to what some brat has to say. I'm currently short of a life so I could use the sight of something over my head to know which way is up and where I should swim for a breath when the sludge I'm in gets over my head," Rakugi scratched the back of his head.
"That's good. That's very good, young man. But I'm afraid we're not the type of organization to shelter hopeless children, even talented ones. As you've said, you've still got a life, you're still just a leaf on the tree, a tad dried out and about to fall but a leaf can't quite be a root. Only that which lies on the bottom of the ground can burrow deep down under." the man closed his eyes and pulled his hands out of his pocket to raise his collar so that it protected his old and scarred cheeks from the harsh autumnal elements.
As the memory faded, Mana realized that she still hadn't found which part of it had been tied to the Five Pillars Seal. There wasn't a single shimmer of that jade glow in sight, and she had a hunch that the connection had revealed itself. She just had become too invested in the conversation at hand to notice it. This man that reached out to Rakugi seemed all too similar to Overcoat and other agents of the organization that struck the fateful Faustian bargain with Mana. Did they consider her their agent too? Was she already working for them without knowing it, or did she fail the test that's been put in front of Rakugi? If so, how could she fail it when she cast away her entire life for them, not that Mana wanted to be a part of an organization that seemed to take pride in eliminating unwanted people and working from the shadows but the entire concept of their selection process felt odd.
In the eyes of this enigmatic man whom Mana tried to pierce through with her scoping gaze, she found the jade gleam that she was looking for. The ninja magician looked to the obsidian flame monument and approached it, looking deeper into its black coil and noticing a polished jade finger with a part of a mantra spelling out "Padme" on it. Mana picked it up and stuffed it down the top hat that she produced out of thin air with the wave of her hand, where the rest of the fingers laid.
A world-ending explosion lit and spread across, one that tore the entire memory asunder, and as Mana stepped out from the harmless to her blaze, she walked out at the all too familiar streets of the Hyuuga District. She didn't expect to see these streets so much that she threw her gaze around, trying to determine if she regressed back to the original memory that produced the first finger. It was only when a hefty thud dropped a Hyuuga guard in a ceremonial kimono and pinned them to the floor that Mana clapped her eyelids a few times more in shock and turned to the rooftop from which the deadly arrow came from.
The first instinct of the remaining Hyuuga guard who accompanied his friend was the one that proved to be his undoing as the man leaned down to examine the corpse of his friend instead of instantly calling out or fleeing for cover. A steel arrow pierced all the way through the man's throat, leaving just a gaping hole that spouted blood as the second watchdog fell on the front and bled out in an accumulating pool, jerking uncontrollably.
Mana's eyes couldn't quite reach Rakugi from all the way back where he was picking these Hyuuga clansmen off from but some supernatural knowledge of his presence accompanied her. His skill at long-range assassinations hadn't yet developed to what he had taught his daughter in the future but it was already something of note as he picked off two distinguished Hyuuga ninja without breaking a sweat, using nothing but a custom-built bow that could fling projectiles across the entire district and chakra-coated, solid steel arrows.
Rakugi wasn't just an effective killer, but also ruthless to the point of brutishness. Even if he wanted to claim that this was just a way for him to cast out the old world and submerge into complete aporia before embracing his new life, the size of these arrows and how hard he sent them thundering at his enemies proved Rakugi had a deep-seated hatred for every person he would kill. Mana had a nasty feeling that she'd witness the death of a girl that would only turn three in a couple of days, though she was several decades too late to save her.
Seeing Rakugi clad in his first set of armor protecting his chest and his shoulders and moving through the rooftops with pulsing and hateful purpose in his mind made Mana certain that this man won't fail. Not just that, he couldn't have failed. Knowing that he aligned himself with an organization that even the Black Ops of Konoha considered a fringe, Black Ops splinter group amongst themselves and some considered being nothing more than a myth would explain the grand efficiency in bloodshed and mayhem that Rakugi has gained over the years.
The young man kicked the bodies of one of the fallen men and took his robe, slipping it over his armor as he let his own hair flow freely behind his back. He needed a few seconds of deception. When he'd open this door and walk through them, he'd only fool those that would cast their looks at him for a brief second, but it'd be enough. Nobody expected an assassination of the Hyuuga heiress within the beating heart of Konoha. It was such a horrific thing that nobody would have even wanted it to happen to such an extent that very few would believe it to be occurring even when signs introduced themselves to them kindly.
Splatters of blood colored the wooden and silken doors as Rakugi made his way through the principal building. He wasn't ready to take on the entire clan, but he wouldn't need to. Just a handful of good guards that thought nothing bad would happen, who considered to just be here to marvel at a miraculous heiress that came when she wasn't expected. Mana found it ironic how hard Rakugi struggled to escape servitude straight into the welcoming embrace of a different servitude. She stepped over the fallen corpses with a lamenting gaze.
A contained massacre some thirty years ago that she could do nothing about but keep watching. Not just experience–she had to pay close attention or else she'd miss the one artifact she came here to locate and she'd have to live through this dread all over again. One thing she didn't expect was to bump straight into Rakugi, who stood stationary as if deciding to freeze his bloody quest in the middle of it as he stood in the main hall room of the building.
"Father… Step aside," Rakugi said with an apathetic voice. It was a tone that would not offer another warning and only offered the first one as a common courtesy because of the blood relation that he shared with the servant.
"You call me your father again, scum, see what happens," the man Mana saw in Rakugi's memories before and knew to be his father declared, gently shoving a frightened and crying three-year-old girl behind his lap.
Rakugi raised his sword-wielding hand and took a sword-fighting stance. He'd carve his way to that child even if he needed to take the life of the man involved in granting him his, it seemed.