Mana's eyes burst open, covered in a bloody web of vessels ravaging them from their edges all the way to the iris. The blood made for a grisly contrast with the pure white but the Stars didn't get to marvel at their awakened friend for too long before Mana sat up and rubbed her aching forehead before struggling against gravity and rampant earthquakes from far away in the distance to get back on her feet.
"What happened in there?" Shige-H asked, approaching Mana and helping her maintain a steady balance on her feet.
"No time. Have to seal away the Four-Tails," Mana grunted. Her hands pushed Shige-H with moderate restraint, both because the magician felt weakened after her grueling quest inside of Rakugi's mind and her distaste for the idea of pushing her friend away for real.
"I guess she found it. Way to go, Mana!" Damisan pumped his sparking arm in the air. His artificial limb jammed a few times mid-pump, leaving the self-built man no other choice but to force his pump half the way through and guide the gesture with his free hand.
"Good, you're finally out of there…" Endo picked up a broken-off part of his blade off the ground and approached the sprawled-out assassin doomed to live out the rest of his days as a vegetable, reliving an artificial memory of training lovingly with his daughter–something that had never even happened exactly for the lack of trying on his part.
Maybe now that there won't be a world for Rakugi to protect Ion from, he'll be a gentler father even if it won't amount to much in the end. Either way, it just felt right giving him that chance. When Endo raised his arm up to drive the broken piece of the blade through Rakugi's eye, his wrist stopped in mid-air. A trickle of blood ran down the swordsman's wrist and he looked up at it with a curious gap to his stare.
Mana's wrist twitched, holding a loop of steel wire in the hand. She pulled on it gently so that she didn't cut too deep into her ally's hand or disarm him in a more literal sense. Endo took a few seconds to realize that there could have only been one person to stop him from killing this ruthless killer.
"You, of all people?" Endo wheezed out in disbelief. "He wanted to eviscerate you more than most of us and I actually killed his daughter!"
"Stand down," Mana said it plain and simple. "If you want to be useful, help me seal the Four-Tails."
"Aren't you a bit on a timer here? While we're bickering here, people are dying out there. Good people, Allied Ninja!" Endo pointed his arm toward the emerald flashes in the horizon and the titanic beast trampling and bashing people into bloodstains and ravaging the landscape.
"That's exactly why I won't discuss this with you. If you insist, I'll take you down too." Mana replied with a strict glare. Blood ran down her forehead and down from her nostrils now that she got back up on her feet and glared right at the fellow Star.
"You know I'd love nothing more than to show you your place…" Endo relaxed his hand and let go of the chipped-off blade. As his muscles loosened, so did the adamant grip of the steel wire as the loop limped down and slipped off of the young man's arm. Though instead of pressing on his claim to Rakugi's life, Endo approached Mana so that the two could stare at each other eye-to-eye.
It was only when the samurai apprentice approached the ninja magician that the size difference between them became even more apparent. Endo wasn't really a bulky fellow, athletic and fit for sure, above average in height though he was larger than Mana by his entire head and yet Mana didn't flinch or twitch. The young woman just raised her head to follow the line of eyes closing in on her.
"You didn't beat him. His life isn't yours to take or decide over," the two were so close to one another that Mana could mutter and Endo would have heard her perfectly.
"Neither did you. We all beat him." Endo leaned in, but Mana's head didn't budge. His forehead was just a hair away from slamming into Mana's.
"Great, we can vote on it. Right now, I'm not in a mood to cast my vote so we'll have to vote later, after the place is secure." Mana shrugged and walked away, looking around the place for something that she just couldn't find.
"I thought you don't force your beliefs onto other people." Endo crossed his arms with a squint. "That you let other people decide if they want to kill their enemies or not after hearing you out?"
"Heroes that let criminals decide if they want to hurt people or not aren't all that heroic, in my experience, it never worked out too well," Mana shook her head and kicked off the ground, picking up a wall of dust, severed blades of grass and gravel as she weaved a few hand seals in mid-air and took off with a sonic blast, hurling toward the Four-Tails as she rode the air currents of the Mystical Wings jutsu.
"Ugh… She can fly…" Shige-H groaned, rubbing her tired eyes.
"That's okay, I can fly a little too, I'll check up on her," Damisan nodded, performing a light hop as he ignited unruly jets of steel blue from his artificial feet and took off after Mana.
"Well, I guess I can leap up to the location eventually," Shige-H sighed and leaned in for the first leap. "You guys coming?"
"I'll let Mana handle it," Skaven sighed and sat by a tree, running a hand up his greasy and blood-covered hair.
"I'll see how my friends are holding up, then I'll swing by," Tomi nodded.
"Taking on the Four-Tails? Wouldn't want to miss that!" Endo grinned with a psychotic mouth of full teeth. Blood from his cracked lips and gums soaked them, giving him a mean, bruiser-like look.
"Really? How do you plan on getting there?" Skaven wiped the rich handful of hair off of his face as he taunted his more aggressive teammate.
"How else? I'm going to run at him!" Endo clenched his fists and turned toward the Four-Tails wreaking havoc on the horizon as he prepared to dash off the large hill and toward the decimated, pooling with blood and bodies battlefield, hoping to find something sharp to pick up and swing at the chakra monster by the time he gets to it.
"Yeah, sounds about right…" Skaven nodded and kept his chin dug into his chest as he began to nod off.
Being a sensor presented a whole extra bag of problems. The worst of them all was that Mana could sense every little flame flickering away as more and more people died. With each swipe, each smash of the massive ape's fists, more and more bright wisps fizzled out and wouldn't ignite again. With each flame, it was as if the monster had swiped with a careless hand, swatting cups and plates off of a prepared table and leaving nothing but shatters in its childish, rampant wake.
Mountain-sized boulders covered up the emerald light from the flames that the Four-Tails breathed out from its mouth and jet from its man-sized nostrils. Mana shifted her body around, taking a plunge down and under the massive pile of rock that would have knocked her out of the sky and flattened her. It wasn't even a willful fling yet, just a stray pile erupting and shooting from underground from the incredible force that the beast ravaged the landscape with.
Once Mana felt like she had avoided the stone, she shifted her weight again and propelled herself in a spin onward, swooping back up. Now the beast had noticed her. There weren't many who were trying to keep up with it at the level of its own eyes. Those that did were the first ones to get incinerated or flattened or smashed. The monstrous titan turned its head halfway to Mana and let out a roar from its mouth. Wrath seeped out from its jade-colored eyes that flared up with the same manner of flames that the beast had leaked out.
Mana braced for impact, knowing just how overwhelming the roar of a Tailed Beast was after having once met the Nine-Tails. She crossed her arms up and raised her knees, adopting a fetal position and giving in to the forceful push. Mana blasted away like a cannonball but quickly regained her composure and her balance, unraveling and pointing her feet behind her to arrow straight toward the beast again. The monster had thought that it had gotten rid of Mana as it had of everyone else it faced, more so, with the few moments of the beast's distraction, a barrage of fireballs, thunderbolts, and crashing waves came from down below and fissures split underground to open the rocky wasteland whole and gobble the fearsome giant up.
"So, what's the plan?" Damisan's voice came from the right as the busted-up, self-puppeteering young man closed in on the magician. The poster that he kept nailed to his cylinder had ripped off from the wind pressure, which was preferable, as it had been bloodied and singed up a decent bit, anyway.
"I crash into it, seal it, save everyone," Mana replied.
"Doesn't sound like much of a plan, more like a general guideline around which you form a plan." Damisan waved his sparking and disobeying prosthetic arms about, trying to get them working and fully under his control before he ends up having to clash with a Tailed Beast.
"It works for me. You don't have to follow it if you don't like it." Mana kept it simple.
"You know me, I…"
"Like to be included, I know…" Mana smirked. "Do me a solid and help me pull as many people out of the battlefield. I'll want some privacy if this is to work."
"Sounds crazy to want privacy with that thing but you're the one operating an ancient sealing artifact of incredible power after bonding with it inside of a mind of a psychotic killer. I've taken a beating but I'll do my best." Damisan nodded, almost losing his dome off of his head while the two began closing in on the beast.
The massive ape had noticed the two irksome gnats homing in on its zone of rampage. Mana and Damisan had to make sure that they had adequate time and space to land before the monster and that it didn't intercept them. Since both of them thought of the same thing at once, they didn't need to get each other on the same page and worked in sync.
Mana's arms waved frantically, flinging handfuls of cards with sealing glyphs on them before weaving a few hand seals and directing them toward the titanic enemy with a Friendly Gust jutsu while Damisan directed his feet toward the enemy and halted himself in a controlled hover while raising his sparking arms up and shooting them off of his body with jets of flames separating the prosthetics from Damisan's shoulders as the two arms homed in on the rabid chakra beast like twin missiles, detonating at once.
"I've seen you throw faster, I've seen you throw more," Damisan grunted while the two observed the massive cloud of smoke covering the Four-Tails carefully, waiting for their cue to dodge the incoming counterattack that was all but inevitable.
"It's on days like this I miss my old uniform, it did a lot of flinging and card slipping for me," Mana bit her lip while the cloud of dust lit up with a jade light. This was way too fast! By the time that the pair realized that the cloud had lit up–the flames were already more than halfway engulfing them and the immediate space around them in a vast expanse. It left dodging them not much of an option. Damisan skid out in front of Mana, covering the magician up with his shoulder ready to serve as a human shield while another shadow flashed in before the two young ninja, preventing Damisan's sacrifice that wouldn't have amounted to much in the end, anyway.
"Are you assholes fucking nuts!?" the Supreme Leader grumbled as hexagonal rings whizzed in from her right shoulder side and formed a shielding formation, igniting an olive-colored force field between them that directed the stream of flames around the three cowering ninja in a tunnel as more and more rings buzzed in and connected to the network, guiding the obliterating blaze around the trio of ninja.
The woman had seen better days. Her military uniform was in tatters, and her hat had been gone. Her face looked pummeled, and she was covered with burns all over. Even if she seemed somewhat able to guide and control these blazes, not even a ninja of her caliber could have been able to keep herself safe forever against a monstrous entity such as the Four-Tails.
"We've figured out why the Four-Tails is here. Mana can send it off just like the man responsible sent it after us," Damisan pointed out.
The trio scattered, Mana blasted off on her Mystical Wings, Damisan jetted off on his chakra jet-boots while the Supreme Leader skid off on a tunnel of the rushing hexagonal rings connecting to each other with a chakra force field in avoidance of the ape's smashing fist. The beast was just throwing hands in all directions, completely out of control.
"Is that true!?" the Supreme Leader yelled out.
"Yeah, evacuate everyone. I'd also like a hat too. I can't find mine anywhere. It has to be in blazes at this point!" Mana shouted back.
"A fucking hat, are you fucking kidding me, can't you just order it to go fuck itself!?" the Supreme Leader, clearly at her wit's end, even if she wasn't all too stable of a woman, to begin with, roared through the entire battlefield as a stream of emerald flames colored it with putrid death.
"I could, but then it would just hurt someone else somewhere else. I'm going to deal with it for good." Mana declared.
"Fuck! I don't have the fucking time to… Anyone! Does anyone have a fucking hat!?" the Supreme Leader's voice rung far and wide, reaching most of the combatants.
"A hat is this a joke!?"
"Fine, clear out your people, Supreme Leader. I'll deal with this monster alone." Mana shook her head. This was an enormous problem. She wasn't all that good with sealing techniques, as it was always more her father's and Meiko's specialty. By now she had learned only one sealing technique that well–the one that her father used to store items and weaponry inside of her hat. She wasn't fully sure if it had to be a hat specifically, but she'd just have to wing it. Either way, nobody else could die from this point on.
"It's your funeral, brat, we're just getting fucking wiped out here anyway… Fuckwads, clear the place out, we're scattering!" the Supreme Leader ordered the surviving Allied Ninja as all the injured and recruits that could have been helped had been cleared out of the disaster zone. The Tailed Beast couldn't have been driven away, no matter how much the international ninja organization threw at it. They had to be the ones to retreat. Unless, of course, Mana wasn't completely full of herself.
Damisan buzzed about like a fly. He lacked the arms necessary to launch an actual attack at the enemy, but it wasn't like any of his attacks would have registered to begin with. Distracting the rampaging chakra monster was the best that he could have hoped for. His constant pestering and bright buzzing provided the Allied Ninja with some brief blink to tap out and scatter with Body Flickers while only the two ninja remained to bully the immovable titan into submission or die trying.
"Okay, now what? I'm feeling way more heat up my bum than I like and I don't enjoy feeling any heat down there at all!" Damisan shrieked out in panic as he hurled himself far off into the mid-air evading a constant, showering stream of all-disintegrating, noxious flames.
"I need to erect the Five Pillars. I'll need a bit of time," Mana pressed her hand to her chest, trying to find the connection to the mythical Five Pillars Seal within her as she leaped across the field to a south-eastern position and placed her arms on the ground. Like clockwork, a booming pillar that rose all the way to the clouds burst forth from underground, the color of jade and seemingly chiseled out of the precious mineral in its entirety with one-fifth of the mantra etched onto it in golden symbols.
The sight of the jade pillar appeared to have made the Four-Tails go berserk. He stopped paying any mind toward Damisan even as the arms-less ninja began dive kicking and trying to shove explosive kunai down its nostrils. The monstrous titan just roared and bellowed and threw mad fists toward the risen pillar, push-kicked it, and sent emerald flames pouring down its mouth in a rush toward it, but nothing at all seemed to affect the pillar. Mana, who pressed her back against the pillar from behind it couldn't even feel any semblance of heat coming off from the pillar.
It made sense that the beast that got itself trapped twice in recorded history already within this seal wouldn't be able to harm it. Though it could have still beaten Mana into a pulp or burnt her up before she erected the full thing. Mana weaved a clone jutsu hand seal, sending off a handful of clones rushing in all directions, riding the wind currents, and meeting a grisly fate. The original swooped down and raced across the ground, rushing to the easternmost position and placing her hands on the ground again to force another jade pillar out, identical to the first in all but the mantra etched into it.
The titan of chakra widened its abyssal jaw as a stable stream of black particles began washing inward and morphing into a single obsidian sphere of chakra. Black yet still luminous, albeit in its blackness rather than light. It had been the first time that Mana had witnessed something black to be capable of luminosity but the chakra accumulating within that tiny sphere felt like it could stop Mana's heart at that very moment and it would only grow larger and larger at an impossible rate.
With shaking hands, Mana collapsed on her knees. "What's wrong? What are you waiting for? Erect the other pillars!" Damisan's voice rung in Mana's ears but she couldn't move. All that she could do was tremble and feel overwhelmed and absolutely helpless. Tremble in her knees, tremble her wrists as her pale hand clutched her chest and couldn't let go. Skin felt like it was boiling to where the fearful huffs from Mana's mouth actually felt chilly and cooling to her panic fever. She had never felt such monumental chakra in her entire life. It had been ages since chakra could send her into a panic, but then again–she was facing the biggest source of chakra in existence.
"I… I can't do it…" Mana muttered as she writhed and crawled to a pillar, pressing her back behind it as the Four-Tails continued to blow her mind with further accumulation of chakra within its impending Tailed Beast Bomb. "Not me… I… I can't…" she kept whimpering as a mantra. Her sensory abilities. It was all because of them. It wasn't her fault, she just… She couldn't do it.
"Mana!" a blood-curdling grunt reached the magician as she peeked through the jade pillar. The beast had smacked Damisan out of the air with a backhand slam and turned its attention toward the fallen ninja as the obsidian chakra ball continued to build up inside its mouth.
Mana needed to move. She needed to move now, or her friend was dead.
P.S. Sorry about a long time without updates. My laptop had to be resuscitated back to life the whole last week. Everything's okay now. The schedule's back on track and I can write again.