The assailants all flung themselves at Rakugi at once. From the initial spark that marked the ignition of this conflict, Mana noted something peculiar that undoubtedly Rakugi had also picked up on, though by the time he did, it was too late. How these Hyuuga clansmen moved seemed far too synchronized. From the looks of it, this group comprising the Imbrium–a group of elite ninja, a personal Black Ops to the Hyuuga clan, and common chuunin and yet they moved almost the same.
Same speed. Matching stances and manners in which these enemies delivered their strikes. This appeared to have caught Rakugi off-guard. It was one of a couple of things to be fair. These ninja rushed in on the assassin all the way up to his face despite the enormous weapon he wielded with grand grace and experience. It was as if they had thrown caution away entirely. Not even the most brainwashed clan yes-men were capable of such profound devotion.
To make matters even more complicated, there was another feeling. One that Mana felt was validated when Rakugi's blade became stuck in the core of a Hyuuga ninja's abdomen, prompting the about to become deceased ninja to lock the blade in the core of their guts while they vomited blood, leaving the sword stuck as the rest of the ninja rained down a whole blizzard of palm strikes. Rakugi grunted and covered up. These strikes truly tested the mettle of his armor and shed more than a few plates he used to protect his tenketsu from being shut down.
What the grizzled veteran in the art of assassination took as a mere run-of-the-mill assault on his life and reputation became a genuine assassination attempt on his own head with its own twisted yarn of mystery to it. Just which part of this killer would have centered on the most to associate the final Five Pillars Seal part to it? Mana would have believed that the man would have bonded the last part with the last time he had seen his daughter or something sentimental like that. So far, this memory hardly seemed to suffice with the sentimental value needed for such an important bond.
"Interesting..." Rakugi cackled out a wet wheeze from the depths of his throat as he engaged the suicidal, hive-minded group of Hyuuga in hand-to-hand combat but the unorthodox fighting style of these men and women had the assassin cornered.
A handful of Imbrium assassins vaulted to the back of the cave, thrusting their open palm forward and sending tunneling shock waves of gale-force toward the cornered and oppressed killer they were after. Rakugi grunted and grumbled as more and more of his armor unraveled. It seemed odd how effective these ninja were at subduing an opponent that nearly demanded the Stars their lives to defeat all together. Then again, the Rakugi they faced differed from this man. Blinded, therefore weaker for one, focused and well-researched on their abilities, therefore stronger a great deal as well. It just showed how much importance battle conditions had as opposed to mere strength and speed.
The flak jacket Hyuuga all swarmed around Rakugi, throwing flurries of palm strikes and hammering everywhere, at each tenketsu that they could make out, each little bee in this twisted hive throwing thousands of palm strikes each second as their combined clangs and thuds became hardly bearable to listen to in this dark and moist cave. An explosion sent the accumulating body pile away as Rakugi rose from a messy cluster of the shed and torn steel, emerging bare and battered but alive as he picked up some of the stray armor parts and used them to hammer at his enemies while plowing through their stunned ranks with his bare hands.
With the initial shock of the mysterious and suicidal fighting style and one-track-mind attitude of this team having worn off, Rakugi's fists laid a valiant siege to their ranks, tearing and blasting through them with each strike leaving gaping holes in the enemy bodies. The ruthless assassin punched right through each target, striking precisely at their tenketsu and their vital organs, decimating the body to where, even if the target survived the attack, they'd die not too long after.
Rakugi jumped up, touching his feet to the short ceiling of the caves and shuffling into the jagged ranks of the stalactites above. The assassin plunged down below with a dive kick, stomping a poor Hyuuga into the rocky floor and submerging their crunched and caved-in face under the shallow surface of a cave puddle. Based on the noise that the victim's jaw made upon impact, perhaps it had been for the better. A power-cross ripped through the chest of a nearby ninja as Rakugi threw a sole butt to another, sending them flying and impaling them on a stalagmite further down the cave.
There wasn't much space to navigate in, though this only served the one who was outnumbered and taken aback by the odd fighting style of his enemies. Hurling and rolling through the air like a cannonball, Rakugi moved dead-silent before whipping his leg to snap a Hyuuga's neck and then unleash a targeted, annihilating combination of precise, shooting punches that rattled a lined-up group of ninja and sent them collapsing down. With a hooked kick, Rakugi sent a ninja sneaking up behind him in the way of an oncoming Hyuuga Empty Palm airwave. It didn't look like one of the flak jacket folk could entirely take what their superiors at Imbrium had been dishing out as the battered one collapsed in an awkward sprawl with fractures all over their body.
Like a whirlwind, Rakugi rolled into the midst of Imbrium ninja and unleashed a hail of blows and kicks in all directions. The true aim of his charge became apparent once the assassin disarmed an Imbrium assassin and slashed upward, opening up one of the higher-ranking ninja from the gut up and leaving them peeled open in two, flopping lifeless to the ground. Spinning in place with his newly gained sword and that which the diced Hyuuga carried on their back, Rakugi created a circle of death around him, prompting his assailants to back off or face obliteration of what little remained of the attacking squad.
"I've sliced thousands of people. I'm missing the warm shower of blood when I cut someone open. You guys won't let me in on your little secret, will you?" Rakugi grumbled out as his Byakugan rapidly scanned his enemies. Neither the scanning assassin nor Mana who saw through his eyes witnessed anything irregular or out of the ordinary which was outlandish, given all the red flags that this bunch waved so far.
The Imbrium and the lower-ranking Hyuuga all attacked at once. That once again baffled both Mana and Rakugi as the Imbrium drew their swords, creating a network of steel whizzing about which was dangerous for close-range specialists of lesser experience to navigate through and yet the flak jacket folk all rushed in without care for their lives. The outcome was as predictable as it should have been. Invisible grates of flashing, metallic hues, and fleshy slumps all around of people being cut down before they even reached their intended target.
And yet. Mana noticed a few awkward ticks in Rakugi's movements. Around his joints. Something was wrong, the man himself tried to pay them no mind for any attention he directed there wouldn't have been paid to the battle at hand though the first few splatters of blood coming from absolutely nowhere around his joins in his elbows and his knees warranted a shocked look which only earned him a more thorough beat down. While Rakugi's experience carried him through the minefield of whizzing blades all around him, the assassin's movements became stiff. Mana had seen similar limb motions to those of the surviving Hyuuga. She'd seen it used by spiders weaving around their prey.
"Steel wire? Since when do the Hyuuga play with steel wire?" Rakugi spat a tooth in a mouthful of blood aside as he struggled against the bonds, concealed in darkness, that wrapped tightly around his body in multiple compressed and adamant loops.
"For your sins against the Hyuuga, for the murder of our heiress Lady Hissho thirty-five years ago. For defying the established clan order and escaping from your duty as a branch house member to protect and serve the main house. You shall drown in obscurity. Your fate and the fact that you existed will remain known only to the Imbrium, and those that issued us the task for your elimination. But first…" an Imbrium member with a bloody face proclaimed before removing a scroll from the back of his belt and unraveling it before his subdued target.
A pair of surviving Imbrium, a male Hyuuga with strands of magenta hair running down his long hair, and a short-haired, petite woman pulled their hands back. While an elementary look suggested that their hands were empty, it had only been the cover of darkness that disguised the steel wire they've held on to. With a bloody gargle and pain-ridden grunt, Rakugi collapsed to his knees, completely entangled. The central Imbrium member nicked his thumb and drew blood across the scroll, sinking the cave in a cloud of irritating dust.
There it was. The jade gleam at the end of a long, steel rod. As the Imbrium approached Rakugi and pressed the glowing, jade end to the assassin's eyes, prompting an ungodly scream from his victim, Mana realized Rakugi had associated the Five Pillars Seal with this item because it had been the last item that he could see before the Imbrium robbed him of his Byakugan forever. They didn't claim it as the Uchiha did with their deceased ninja; the Hyuuga chose to outright destroy their most valuable asset. A Byakugan died alongside its owner. That was their stance on this matter, it seemed.
Mana grabbed hold of her right eye, feeling a hot sting at it. As she opened the eye up, she realized that her field of vision had shrunken down and her depth perception became almost non-existent. If there was a time to grab that Five Pillars Seal part–it was now, before the Imbrium robbed Rakugi of the rest of his sight and Mana would have to navigate the memories of a blind man how they experienced them without their skill and experience in doing so. She's been lucky that Rakugi had tied these parts to memories of his life back when he could still see.
A jolt of lightning burst forth from a stalactite over Mana's head, slamming into the haunting scene of the Imbrium's punishment and stopping the flow of time within the memory as Mana approached the Imbrium leader and grabbed the tip of the prod he used to burn Rakugi's ocular area with and create the horrid injuries that the assassin carried on throughout his life. Once Mana removed the fifth pillar and looked down at it, the golden syllables of "Mitra svaha" shining etched onto the jade finger, the ritual staff used by the Imbrium revealed itself to be a naginata with the bladed tip so hot that it didn't resemble a steel blade at all, instead shining with a bright blaze like it was fire and heat itself.
Calling forth the rest of the fingers from her mind's hat, Mana formed the complete Five Pillars Seal and saw all the jade fingers merge into a singular shape. Holding the upward-pointing hand that seemed frozen in a pose as if sifting through evening sands and filtering its infinite grains, Mana sealed the completed bond with the seal away in her mind's hat again while she looked up at Rakugi, frozen in his final, most memorable moment in life.
It felt pitiful that all this man delved on was the pain of his fated imprisonment at the hands of the main house, the death of his teammates and their funeral, his killing of his own father and the young Hyuuga heiress and his own blinding. The thought had occurred to Mana to shroud the man's mind in this memory, to relive his blinding repeatedly as his crushed will would never awaken, truly forming a fate worse than death for him.
After all, Rakugi had been a reprehensible, pathetic excuse of a man who killed his own father and a three-year-old child with little remorse shown and didn't treasure the memory of his daughter enough to entrust these memories a part of the seal but delved further into his hatred by connecting it to the moment of his torment and crippling. The man had been nothing but cold to his daughter even if he showed care if she lived or died, though he conditioned her to become just as spiteful and pitiful of a woman as he was as a man. Someone whose kill count would one day surpass that of her old man's. This was a killer who had studied Mana for months, followed her footsteps, and learned what made her tick and how to best kill her and her friends amongst the Stars. A vengeful fool who had bound a Tailed Beast to his will and nearly wiped out the Allied Ninja, all in the name of retribution he thought rightful, even though it was anything but.
And yet still… Mana felt pity for the man. She released the hold she had over the memory, deciding to see how the man had survived this perilous pinch before settling down on what to leave Rakugi with as his eventual fate. After all, even if he was to be executed not too long after Mana left his mind, to him, inside his mental plane it would still feel like an eternity had passed since Mana reshaped his mind into an apt prison for his crushed consciousness and his head was split from his shoulders.
As expected, the Imbrium had pressed the blade to the second eye as well before making sure and dragging the heated blade across the assassin's face in a straight line. Though just as the Imbrium leader tilted his ritualistic weapon over his head to finish the man off, Rakugi seemed to spring back to life, thrusting his fist into the gut of his would-be executioner. Even though the killer lacked the strength to punch clean through like he used to, his fist still drilled right in and sent the Hyuuga gargling and vomiting blood until he collapsed and died of a blown-up liver on the spot.
"How? The sheer pain of our sacred ritual would kill any man all by itself, let alone the fact that blindness hasn't hampered your precision!?" the female Imbrium yelled out in shock but a handful of throwing knives stuck into her chest in a blink, leaving her crumbling and folding to the ground as her bodily functions slowly turned off leaving her incapable of continuing the fight any longer.
The last survivor of the Imbrium rushed onward with his sword over his head. Rakugi lifted his arm up, augmenting the part of the forearm that collided with the blade, and even as his flesh split open and threw a splash of blood, his forearm had stopped the blade with only a fracture of his arm instead of a complete loss of it. The torrent of blood splashed into the eyes of the Imbrium, who seemed to rely far more on his Byakugan for fighting than the assassin did. Rakugi jumped at the blinded assassin, wrapping his arms around his head and snapping the man's neck so thoroughly that it turned entirely to the other side.
"Pain? Don't make me laugh…" Rakugi wheezed out in a tormented hiss. "Eyes? I'd have raked them out myself and handed them to you if you promised not to come after my daughter. Though I see now that it is impossible. After all, she is a daughter of the Hyuuga even if she's unable to use her Byakugan. You guys are real sticklers about executing all those lost children, aren't you?"
The fallen woman slowly drowned in her own blood while Rakugi leaned down to her and grabbed her by the hair, smacking her feeble attempts at hand-to-hand combat aside as he augmented the grip of his right hand to shatter the woman's forearms so that she couldn't fight him off any longer.
"I don't need my eyes to kill you. I've killed enough people to where murder is mere muscle memory to me. All I need is just to let go of my control and there I go, killing again. That's fine with me though, I get paid for it handsomely after all." Rakugi grumbled as he pulled out one knife he stuck in his last surviving victim and slashed her throat with it before pushing his knee into the blade to behead the woman as he stumbled to a stone with the scrolls, led merely by the memory of where his scrolls were.
The killer unsealed a containment jar and stuck the woman's head inside, sealing it down and feeling a chill in his cheek that Mana could feel from all the way where she stood in her own cheeks as well. In a world of darkness, it was subtle hints like these that helped one see the path forward. The containment jar had a layer of frost cover it from inside, preserving the head for when the assassin would present it to the black market dealer. Still, he had killed plenty of the Imbrium that day, so even while blinded, he still had work to do for his grand payday. The flak jacket chaff weren't worth anything to someone of his caliber. What would the dealers even think of him after finding out he killed a bunch of nobodies just for fun? Kills beneath his paygrade did him no service after all.
A boom of skipping heart left Mana stumbling back as she threw her head around in terror. Something was wrong. It must have been something that Rakugi felt as well. The bodies. The Imbrium weren't where he left them anymore. Mana couldn't hear any heartbeats. That meant that neither could Rakugi and he could trace them even while he could see clearly. It was as if someone had robbed the assassin of his prey.
"Sorry, man, I just can't let you take my puppets. I've worked too hard on them, even if they are worthless trash. You've done a delicate job and you've suffered enough, so I'll let you keep that one's head. I feel obliged to warn you though, your black market dealer might not like the fact that I've stuffed her brain and all that. Still, the flesh and the skull are all how they're supposed to be so don't let him rip you off, haggle for the right price, will you? Well… Whom am I kidding, you're a professional anyway…" a voice rung in Mana's ears as she was sure it did in Rakugi's.
"I knew something was fishy with the way these punks fought." Rakugi forced air out of his lungs to speak up. He sounded way too weary and tormented to face a puppeteer on a scale to architect something like this, but given the fact it was Rakugi, he'd have given the bastard a fair fight on his way out.
"My bad. My bad entirely. Human puppets are kind of my thing." The mysterious puppeteer stated in a cheery tone. "I can see why the leader would want to recruit you, you've got that badass headhunter vibe going around you and you're the only one to get away from the Root alive."
"What is this about? Are you a bounty hunter?" Rakugi wobbled on his feet. Even if he wouldn't have admitted it, the pain and exhaustion and the sum of his injuries were stacking up, and even talking to this man felt troublesome.
"Bounty hunter? Wrong. I come from a group called Parabrahma. We're looking out for clan rejects and people with no place to go in the world. We've intercepted these jokers on route to assassinate you and your kid so we figured we'd do you a solid." The man spoke. His voice came from a different direction. Either he used more puppets to speak through, or he just switched locations so that Rakugi didn't track him down and engage him.
"Gee, thanks…" Rakugi muttered, sarcastic venom dripping from his tone.
"Heh, though I guess those punks wouldn't have done anywhere near this number on you, huh? Thing is, I don't particularly want you amongst us. People like you, elitist pricks with talent just piss me off. So sorry for blinding you, but, honestly, it's for your own good. The way you are now, I could actually stomach having you around our ranks. Having to work hard and struggle for once and not see through some stupid, fancy eyes. Think about it…"
"I think I'll pass…" Rakugi cut it short.
"Right, I guess you still have your kid. It's hard to see you as someone who has nowhere better to go and nothing better to do, huh?" the man cackled to himself.
"If you come for my daughter, I'll…" Rakugi took a brief pause to take in enough air to finish his threat, but his companion cut it short.
"Oh, don't worry, as I've said, if we were to have you, I had to make sure I make a few corrections so that I don't have to kill you myself later on because you piss me off so much. If you don't wanna buddy-up and would much rather do your own thing–feel free. I was just getting some insurance, you see? Figured that dispatching those Hyuuga grunts for you would kind of make-up for blinding you in the end, if you joined us."
"Not really. I'd rather you'd get gone before I kill you too." Rakugi hissed at the man but no reply came back. It was as if he wasn't there anymore. Who knew? Maybe he was never there, to begin with, and it had just been Rakugi being delirious from the escalating fever and the pain in his seared-out eyes and the molten flesh that was covering the brutal scorches up to the best of its capacity.
Mana sighed. With a snap of her fingers, four walls of a wooden box snapped shut around her. When she next snapped her fingers, the walls opened up outward, revealing a training ground with beaten stumps and training dummies. One similar to hundreds of training grounds around Konohagakure outskirts. Rakugi in full armor stood in front of a training dummy, throwing a couple of weak jabs at it and moving back, letting adolescent Ion step up from behind his lap and repeat the combination of blows that her father had just shown.
Rakugi took a few steps back, looked down at his daughter's eyes, and nodded. Mana turned around, gazing at mountain ranges surrounding the training ground without a single person in sight in this imaginary world of memories that didn't exist that she's created for the man who tried unraveling her life on as personal of a level as possible. Now that Rakugi had the option of living out the rest of his days trapped inside his own mind with the idealistic memories of his daughter, Mana still had an international ninja organization to salvage and a Tailed Beast of mass destruction to subdue.