"So… What's up with you?" Prim-S turned to Mana while the two observed the busy warehouse housing people who came here to stack up while the Allied Ninja waited for the impending attack.
"What do you mean?" Mana asked in return.
"I mean, your skin looks almost normal. Why have you moved in with the Allied Ninja and haven't returned to your people?" Prim-S shrugged.
"Excuse me?" Mana's right eyebrow stiffened while her eye squinted in a cocktail of confusion and aversion.
"I mean… You're not native, that's for sure, but one of your parents is from Kumogakure, right? If Konoha sent you away to the Allied Ninja, they either wanted to get rid of you or they didn't much care about you enough to approve your application to leave to join the Allied Ninja. Either way, why didn't you return home to Kumogakure?" Prim-S looked like he was quite content with how clearly he worded his question, almost as if it had become even remotely decent because of it.
"I'm not from Kumogakure. My mother was a part of the Wandering Ninja, so that side of my family has a diverse background, likely related to Kumogakure in some way. So far, my only relation to Kumogakure is my revulsion of their pride in their military strength and casual racism," Mana knew the minefield she was walking into yet she felt almost pride to risk her limb in it. Almost as if she dared the mines to go off.
"Right… You're one of those people… Poor, innocent Iwagakure. Bullied by the warmongering, bloodthirsty cannibals from Kumogakure…" Prim-S rolled his eyes. "Remind me again which village spawned the extremist trash we have our hands full of right now? Having grown up in Kumogakure and poured my sweat and blood all across the Land of Lightning, I can assure you that no mind born in the Cloud can produce abominable nightmares like what we've seen in just the past few days."
"That's not what I meant. I know the Coltan Conflict had nothing to do with the survival of either village. It was a war of interest and only meant to secure immense profit. Regardless, that was not how it ended. I detest the very fact that a war took place for monetary gain, but the fact that it had to end with almost total obliteration of a village full of people outright makes me nauseous," Mana pointed out. She closed her eyes and extended the reaches of her sensory as far as she could while staying on her feet and taking part in an awfully bothersome conversation.
"And you think Konoha wouldn't have done the same if they had a weapon in their hands comparable to the Chakra Diffusion Wave Cannon? I'm not surprised that the other countries can't see the nobility behind Lady Raikage's actions. If the war continued without conclusive action, countless more ninja and civilians alike would have died. If you're as concerned about the cost of human life as you make yourself out to be, you'd see reason in decisive action," Prim-S crossed his arms and turned his nose away, acting interested in the issues of people whom he looked at as if they were actual aliens from another planet.
Prim-S and a few other peacekeepers Mana had met during her time in Boulder Town looked at the locals like farmers looking at cattle. They saw value in their flock, but they wouldn't have eaten from the same table and would've seen their loss only as what it reflected as on their wallet. How had it come to Mana actually wanting the enemy to attack sooner to put an end to this small talk, she'll never know.
"Yes, I'm sure it quite surprised you to see such nobility in someone you'd see as having unusually colored skin…" Mana rolled her eyes. "I'm not particularly fond of samurai either, but samurai would never sign off on a death toll their mind couldn't quantify and that they could not accept the weight of by seeing every single casualty off into the afterlife themselves. The Raikage neither knew the people she obliterated nor could she understand the weight of her actions because the human mind hadn't evolved to the level of savagery necessary to comprehend losses of that magnitude. Maybe that's why it was so easy for her to be so noble…"
"Don't you dare insult Lady Raikage in front of me! You Allied Ninja only live and work where you are because the Raikage allows it," Prim-S hissed while Mana vaulted over the railing and landed in front of the bustling crowd, selecting free goods off of a pile. The hotheaded peacekeeper vaulted over the railing too, flickering away and joining Mana's side in a single blitz. "I'm not done talking to you, you don't get to just walk away after saying something like that. Kumogakure may differ from what you would like it to be, but we answer for the birds that take flight off of our tongues."
"Sure, we can fight it out… Or we can do our jobs," Mana sighed. How could she have been so naïve as to think that Endo would be the worst person she'd ever have to deal with? Here she was being proven wrong twice in the same week.
"You mean…" Prim-S blanked out before his eyes became the sharpest they've ever been. As immature as Mana would've pegged this peacekeeper, he knew how to redirect his frustration toward a more productive goal, it seemed. Or, at the very least, he still held a greater grudge toward the master of those mud-men that hurt him than he did against Mana.
"Yes, the enemy must not be too far away. Do you know where Denkka-san is?" Mana asked.
"If the enemy is close, we should head out to take them on!" Prim-S objected. With stiffness and some light grunting, he slipped his hand underneath his flak jacket and removed a bloody fold of bandages off of the wound on his shoulder. "What if they make it into the vicinity of the town and start taking poor, innocent Boulder Town civilian lives?" for whatever reason, Prim-S put a mocking emphasis on the last part.
"Something's wrong. Something just doesn't feel right here," Mana shook her head while staring down while her forehead felt like it had begun to strain physically from the grilling that was going on inside. "I'm afraid that this entire thing might be a diversion."
"A diversion? For what?" Prim-S shook his head in disbelief. "What are you saying? That we should just leave the enemy to reign free here?"
"Obviously not," Mana raised her voice, growing frustrated with the amount of antagonizing that was going on here. "But Denkka-san and Shige-san need to know about this. They're the leaders of this entire venture. They need to figure something out."
"Hmph… Typical. Looking to chicken out when things get really messy. I should've known with all that babble about pacifism and posturing about the virtue of human life… I should've known that you were no different from the likes of horse's bones that work inside of a village's civilian council," Prim-S clenched his fists. "Go look for your leaders, then. Talk all you want. I and the rest plan on catching up with the enemy and making them pay for our fallen comrades, and the hurt they've put us through. With that high and mighty talk about wiping this town out, they've made an enemy out of Kumogakure ninja and that's still the world's most powerful enemy to make!"
"No, Prim-S, stay put!" Mana was about to dash off before turning around and raising her hands to hold the hothead down from prematurely rushing at the enemy. "Don't lead the other peacekeepers into a premature engagement. We can afford to fight the enemy inside the town. We've evacuated it for that exact reason!"
"Well… What do you know? She actually cares for the warmongering lives of Kumo ninja too…" Prim-S crossed his arms. It pleasantly surprised Mana not to hear an objection but a verbal thrust at her expense, but she'd make herself out as a complete donkey in public rather than see any more lives being thrown away.
"Always… All lives… Haven't you been paying attention?" Mana tried reaching out to the peacekeeper, despite their mutual distaste and differences. "You've lost enough, you've shed enough blood. It will be tight, and I'm burning precious time just standing here arguing with you but… All I want is for all of you to go back home and have a chance to live your lives and serve the rest of your days as ninja or retire in peace."
Maybe it was reason budding in Prim-S, the sum of pain from all of his scrapes, cuts, and bruises from the last few days telling him that neither he nor the rest of his crew was immortal. Maybe it was the honesty in Mana's voice that reached him. But the bratty Kumogakure ninja just pouted his lips and looked away with a sassy and unimpressed expression.
"Well, what are you waiting for, then? Don't let me hold you up too long…" Prim-S grumbled out. He was anything but content, but the reflections present in his tone betrayed that he won't be running off and challenging the enemy alone. "Just know that we sabertooth savages from the Land of Lightning thirst for innocent blood at all times. If we happen to see anything unusual to us attack this warehouse, we'll put them to death immediately as the xenophobic monsters that we are."
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but… I'm counting on it," Mana sighed, cracking through the indecent lake of sarcasm and mockery offered to her.
Mana's feet skid across the dirt as her thighs stiffened up and froze her lower body in place. As she stared to the north-eastern road leading from Boulder Town toward a mountainous patch of grasslands, a colossal black figure loomed on the horizon. It breathed and vented noxious smoke from where its joints would have been, but one thing could have been for certain–an egg-shaped, mechanical vessel of obsidian was floating in the air, supported by semi-articulate pillars under its bottom.
Had the ninja magician seen this nightmarish sight inside of an oceanic morning mist, witnessing a war machine so vast that it had been carried by legs that could both touch the bottom of the deep and keep the vessel itself suspended enough to strain one's neck to look at, she'd have become a believer in sea monsters. There was no wonder that so many seamen lost their minds and wandered off and away from the path of this roaming monolith.
Her fears and worries about the enemy would have to wait. This walking calamity demanded the entirety of Mana's attention. The magician's eyes turned to the left, where she had run off from Prim-S' company and the bunch of peacekeepers that were in no condition to take something like that on. Then again, to say so was to suggest that there was a condition to tackle such an advance on. To her right, farther toward the Boulder Town clinic, Shige-H and Denkka were still discussing defense plans. They must've stayed indoors for the duration since it would have been impossible to miss the mind-boggling sight at this point from outside.
Soon enough, the ground would begin shaking. This was Mana's chance. Her chance to make everything right while threatening no lives needlessly. The magician closed her eyes and weathered the uncomfortable bubbling in her chest that came with the recollection of her promises to Shige and their mutual plans. Mana's emerald eyes shot wide open before she flickered off toward the northern section of Boulder Town.
"Hmph… This bothersome lug better be the indestructible master-machine of warfare you've advertised it as and more. It's taking forever!" a young woman of profound attractiveness, a thick layer of colorful make-up, yet plain in her preferred style of clothing, rolled her eyes, moving the falling half of her short periwinkle-colored hair behind her ear.
"I should have your legs chewed off to your knees for this. Do you have any idea what sorts of contacts I had to reach out to and the sort of dangerous people that I had to get in touch with to secure this machine?" a man with a sleeveless zip-up jumpsuit turned to his female colleague with an angry glare. The woman looked away to stare at the marvelous panorama outside the tempered, stained-glass panels to the outside just to look away from the sausage-shaped head of her ally that, to stay even truer to the initial comparison, had scars covering the entire muscular growth of his belfry just like the cuts left on sausages so that they absorbed more spices.
The supposed headmaster of this wandering behemoth had very limited patches of shoulder-length hair falling wild where scar tissue from burns, blunt force battery, and cuts didn't leave bald spots. With the alarming and somewhat disturbing level of hair loss that the man had been through because of the state of his body, he would never look what society deemed normal until he shaved the straggling jets of messy dark brown hair clean off.
"Yes, what a wonder of the natural world, one that couldn't move across the mountains so we had to sail to meet your contact in the seas and then walk this pain all across the sea to the land we could have reached in four minutes otherwise," the woman rolled her eyes. "Not to mention the ugly design of this entire botheration."
"Let me guess, you'd have had it designed as a butterfly?" the sausage-shaped man looked up with a snort of his nose that would have made one eager to bet on if it was chopped off or chewed off as it appeared to be stuck somewhere in between.
"Naturally…" the woman struck an exuberant pose. "At the very least, a butterfly war machine would have been able to fly over the mountain peaks instead of having to crawl at a snail's pace."
"Well, I'll have you know that with your silly obsession with butterflies, you'd have been made a fool of. This war machine is one of a few owned by my contact amongst some very influential people. He is an artisan of the craft of war who has taken part in every war since the dawn of the ninja. If this goliath would have been better off in shaped like a butterfly, he'd have made it as such," the sitting ninja replied with passion and pride behind his voice.
"Hmm…" the kunoichi passed a ceiling-reaching giant who stood idly and stared at a single point outside the window with a childish drool and sat down in front of the control panel of the sky-reaching war machine. "How did you come to know a guy like that, anyway? Why didn't he help us out against the Kumogakure? Wait… Don't tell me! He's from Kumogakure!?"
"Don't be silly. My contact works alongside some very secretive and powerful people, as I've said. They only pitch in when they want to and there must have been nothing to gain from salvaging Iwagakure from the jaws of defeat. He seemed awfully excited to repay his debt to me from a long time ago with this here machine when I mentioned the capture of Konoha's Sorceress though," the ninja seated on the ground beside an entire queue of leather chairs turned to his ally.
"Oh… She's such a popular figure. I'm so jealous of her!" the rogue kunoichi of periwinkle hair groaned out. "If I had been born somewhere cool, I'd have been a big superstar just like her too!"
"Wait, what? What's wrong with being born in Iwagakure?" the sausage-shaped man stood up and approached his ally, leaning her chair down with force to make her dangle an inch short of a potentially painful drop on her back and head.
"Are you kidding me?" the kunoichi lashed out spitting venom from her tongue as she kicked off of the chair to gain a complete footing and approached the seemingly lifeless, bare-chested drooling giant in the middle of the command center of the war machine they've been traveling in. "It's an awful curse to be born a gorgeous woman in Iwagakure. This is all you've got to look forward to! Drooling imbeciles. It's either join the mines or become a baby factory of potential mine workers and ruin your hot bod!"
"I'm going to pretend you didn't just insult our beloved home, but only to hear the reasons why you've been fighting so passionately on our side and joined our group despite that cowardly asshole Yaban throwing in the towel? Seems like a perilous position to take if you hate Iwagakure… You do realize our goal is to have Iwagakure get back on its feet and that the Land of Earth properly declares war on Land of Lightning, right?"
"Of course…" the woman shrugged. "That's the whole point, don't you get it? If we win the war–we conquer Kumogakure and I can finally move there and become a hot sensation, just like that Sorceress girl."
"Wow… I think you're genuinely a bigger clodpoll than even Gwirlon," the rogue ninja scratched his half-bald, overly muscular lump of a head in severe frustration. "I mean… No one's even talking about occupation spanning all the way to Kumogakure. Even if that ridiculous dream came true, they wouldn't suddenly forget their isolationist cock ways and accept you as one of their own. Plus, I thought you hated the mountains and wanted to escape them to a "dreamier" place? I mean, you're an awful, awful person, but you're actually so confusing that I can't even kill you for the things you say."
"True, Kumogakure is a mountainous territory, just like Iwagakure, though they've got an entire layer of society and high-class culture in what they call the Peaks," the kunoichi slammed her hands across the table, looking eager to defend her position.
"Yeah, well… It's a good thing your pale, underground-dwelling cheeks would never make it there. It'd be the deepest pisshole of the Summits for the likes of you, even if you came from Iwagakure, that's the occupying force in this flat-out unbelievable scenario," her aggravated ally argued.
"No way, Kumo changed. Haven't you heard? They don't oppress their pale-skinned population anymore and they've even got a pale-skinned Raikage…" the woman insisted on defending her dream.
"Heh, yeah… Because she's from the Land of Iron, the first place with pale-skinned folks to contact Kumogakure after they've been cornered off for centuries of isolation. She's a samurai too. Kumogakure has a rich history and culture of swordsmanship, so that scored her some points too," the almost-hairless numb-skull dismissed his ally with a wave of his hand.
"Ugh… When are we going to get there? It's infuriating to be confined to this lug and have to listen to this abuse…" the woman jumped up and shoved the chair with her bottom, rushing up to the window to make something out of the unbelievable aerial view. "It's all just goddamn mountains and grass… What a big fucking surprise… This whole damned country is just goddamn mountains and grass!"
"You're the weirdest freedom fighter I've ever met, I swear…" her lumpy ally shook his head in disbelief. A childish cackle came from the side of the drooling, stationary giant who only seemed to have learned to wear trousers. In a strange and horrid way, the man reminded of a malformed baby. Though his body had been chunky and massive and littered with muscles, his head was round and only had fuzzy baby hair in a few patches as his face had a similar ailment as his arms did–being composed of flesh, peeled off and wrapped all over the bloody stump as if someone tried making a human drum out of him but forgot to scoop out the innards from his skull.
"A monkey…" the mentally impaired giant pointed his index finger at a point on the horizon.
"Shut up, you smooth-chinned moron, there are no monkeys anywhere near us and we're not plunging down to see any either," the kunoichi turned around and pressed her hands to her hips, missing out on a flash of emerald and black interchanging rays of light and a colossal hand with three raised fingers emerging from dark flames.
"Monkey…" the giant licked his lips with a tongue that looked to be cartoonishly too large for his round head, but it was only so because of how his stripped coating of human leather had shrunk around his compressed skull.
"No, you nincompoop, there are no monkeys here. As a matter of fact, let me tell you why. It's because monkeys live either on the ground or in fucking trees, of which there are none growing here, sixty thousand meters in the fucking sky!" the other rogue ninja joined in on yelling at his comrade, unaware that the three-fingered ethereal hand had just bent a finger with only two remaining, leaving the haunting shape in a twisted "peace" sign before it burnt up to cinders.
A howl drowned out Gwirlon repeating the word "monkey" again. A beam bright enough to drown out any other source of light or gloom in the vicinity engulfed the vessel point of the roaming war machine. A right side of the vessel coughed out a fireball blast, but what did the machine in was not the Tailed Beast Ball beam blasting it head-on. It was the pushing force of the beam that bent the machine backward and left the inarticulate legs no other option but to cough out a snap at the joints while the entire machine shrieked and spat fire and smoke from every crevice it had while collapsing from the skies in a chain reaction of blasts as every system keeping it functional failed the supposedly invincible colossus at the same time.
The Four-Tails thrashed madly, looking to smash Mana with a hammer strike but the disappearing demonic arms manifested energy constructs in the shape of blazing chains that wrapped around its limbs and throat and dragged it down under it disappeared back inside the seal of Mana's hat. The magician flipped it back over her head and flickered away to dash straight to the crash zone and make sure that the enemy had been subdued and couldn't threaten any innocent lives anymore.
She wondered if using the Four-Tails was adequate here, feared for the enemy lives all throughout the Four-Tail's appearance but after seeing how little damage the roaming arachnid goliath had taken, she was worried that the enemy would just resume their attack on-foot now that their war machine had failed. Mana had given away another finger of the seal keeping Four-Tails detained and under her control to prevent that. She was ready to risk anything else to keep it from happening.