"Protect Mana-chan!" Kouta ordered waving at Meiko before rushing forward. His speed was incredible, even with all of her recently acquired mastery over physical chakra Mana had no idea what was going on or how fast the medical ninja was going. He just disappeared and reappeared with his elbow deep inside one of the creature's abdomen. He punched so hard that even with all the force absorbed the thing pitifully lifted off the floor giving Kouta a chance to follow up his offensive with a sideways jump kick flinging the creature aside.

The medical Juugo prodigy proceeded to bash and dominate his opponent with a combination of quick straight strikes to the creature's abdomen and only after the poor thing was down and out shrieking in pain and spitting up blood pathetically did some of the others get the idea to interfere, Kouta was taking them out and stringing combinations faster than thoughts manifested in the minds of these creatures, faster than their brains passed the appropriate signals around. Mana wondered if Kouta was actually augmenting his abilities the dangerous way.

There had to be some explanation to Kouta's incredible growth, before leaving the village the boy admitted to never having been able to morph his body once using the Juugo bloodline however after leaving he soon learned to do so and after a brief moment managed to control the ability quite potently. His medical skills also grown exponentially matching that of an average medical ninja whereas before they were lacking and only slightly enhanced the natural bodily healing processes. This strength and speed wasn't the medical ninja strength enhancement technique, it had to be Kouta betting his very chakra on the line, the very thing that cost Mana hers...

With a lightning fast combination of kicks, Kouta kicked the whole bunch of these things around like ragdolls, kicking them up in the air before leaping up to them and whirling with his legs upright sending the cave dwellers crashing down into the cave floor. Several of the beaten creatures burst into clouds of smoke, some sort of self-defense mechanism that filled the entire section of the cave with smokescreens forcing Mana and Meiko to cover up themselves so that it didn't force into their lungs and make their eyes itch.

"Stop, you're gonna tear down the whole cave on us!" Mana shouted out prompting the rampaging medical ninja to calm down somewhat.

More of the cave dwellers began leaping off the walls of the tunnels trying to claw Mana's and Meiko's eyes out. Meiko easily caught them by their wrists slamming them together or swinging them around and tossing them before dashing from behind the flying things and kicking them downwards so that they didn't slam into the tunnel walls and further unbalance the tunnel system. She fought with such control and thought that it was scary to think that it was the carefree and goofy Meiko doing it.

"Mana-chan!" Kouta yelled out trying to dash up closer to her but Mana's kicks took the things pursuing her down after bursts of reddish chakra began coming out from her body pores. She had to tap into the physical chakra to defend herself, it wasn't something she wanted to abuse but it made her leagues and bounds beyond the abilities that these cave dwellers showed.

After a couple of moments, Mana memorized their moves, their primitive bloodthirsty leaps and turned her augmentation off allowing her natural flowing movements and pitch-perfect prediction of these creatures' movements to allow her to perfectly avoid and counter each blow. With each strike, an arm was broken at the joint, at each kick the base leg was tripped and the fallen body was stomped, with each attempted bite the head was caught between Mana's elbow and her knee. She didn't see their movements either, she didn't have to, even if their surrounding was bright enough to see her opponents more clearly their speed would've been beyond Mana's eyesight to follow and yet it made absolutely no difference.

"I don't need you rushing to my aid," she grunted at Kouta who looked in awe at Mana masterfully switching between the use of her physical chakra that allowed her to surpass the speed she had even at her peak back when she was still a proper ninja and just sheer martial art skill.

"Clearly..." Kouta agreed with a smile as dozens of his kicks overwhelmed another crawler before his leg wrapped around its neck while another one kicked it after uncomfortably bending right in the middle knocking the creature out. The cave was dark, to begin with, and then there was all of this smoke coming out from somewhere... Mana had to admit that it was getting hard to keep up and yet she was probably doing the best despite being possibly one of the weakest members of the trio. Meiko and Kouta relied overly on their ninja senses and superior augmented stats to fare too well in such a battle so they began skipping some blows, getting marked by attacks they could've easily dodged if they saw them coming.

Mana shouted in desperation tossing forward a couple of her cards that unsealed as they touched the ground unleashing a flash of light that most common flash bombs used by most ninja could do. The creatures didn't look affected by it at all but when the light cleared Mana and her friends were gone.

"Why did we run? We could've won that battle..." Meiko objected with a gentle whisper while the three were hiding behind a sharp rocky turn.

"Something's odd..." Kouta objected looking at the wandering ground of the creatures while Mana nodded.

"It is, these things aren't the creatures we're looking for," she agreed.

"They aren't?" Meiko appeared completely lost, "So there are two different kinds of creatures underground in here?"

"No. These things must be fakes. What if someone transformed into these creatures using the Transformation technique for some reason, that's where the smoke comes from, usually you can keep the technique up after being hit but when the user is knocked out it ends in a puff of smoke that can't circulate in this depth. For creatures that lived in a cave for most of their lives they didn't look that troubled by the flash of light which seemed odd to me." Mana was breathing heavily, she wasn't happy by how much effort it took her to fight those things as they weren't really that strong, it must've been the sudden switching between the physical chakra and back. It must've been more stressful to her body and overall exhausting to fight that way than to just fight using one of the two all the time. Or maybe she was afraid of her own new power too much to teach her body how to deal with that stress properly.

After a loud combination of clacking and rumbling sounds the creatures left. Mana breathed out more easily only to look at her side and notice another creature staring right at her – different and uglier than the ones they fought. This one hung onto the ceiling but looked more like a mixture of a human, a rat, and a mole. It had rough patches of really greasy and nasty looking fur and its jaw as well as its snout were torn in multiple places making it look really deformed. It was much less refined and less well shaped and built when compared to the previous dwellers. These other ones were hunters, this one was a pitiful abomination that looked like it was going to die if left be due to its own pitifulness.

Meiko and Kouta simultaneously turned at Mana wondering about her silence before screaming wildly, after a brief moment the blacksmith shook Mana's shoulder wildly and asked.

"Why aren't you screaming!?"

"Told you, I'm only afraid of ghosts, not body horror," Mana shrugged resuming her match of stares with this pathetic caprice of nature that was soon followed by more glowing eye shapes opening up inside the cave. It appeared that the skins of these creatures were so rough and ragged and dong brown that they could've perfectly stayed hidden standing next to a wall of the tunnel while merely closing their eyes.

These creatures also appeared to possess eyes, the one that came up closer to Mana and decided to reveal itself first clacked up a series of twelve strange different toned clacks in a manner nearly identical to how those previous creatures communicated.

Kouta swung a half-assed punch at the creature hanging at the top of the cave but Mana's elbow met the boy's hand at its center. The girl cried out in pain as Kouta's physical strength even when he didn't really mean it almost tore her own hand out of her socket and almost dislocated her shoulder.

"These ones don't seem aggressive," she replied looking back at the highly curious cave dweller who met her stare and placed its nose closer to Mana's face, clacking rapidly right at her face by grinding its blunt dirty teeth together.

"Twelve again..." Mana mumbled to herself to which Meiko and Kouta just looked at the magician and back at the abomination trying to chew her face off apparently as its ugly mug was almost touching Mana's, several of its hairs rubbed against Mana's face making the girl freak out a little and close her eyes in disgust but she tried to keep up her composure.

"Spermatophyte – Holton – Pidgeon – Bagging – Snappy – Tarbes – Decibar – Outtorn – Incardinating – Rapeoil – Nondiathermanous – Etonian." She spoke a confusing jumble of words as the creature jumped back and scratched its malformed filled with random bumps head with one eye three times larger than the other closing its toothed clacking mouth behind the pair of rather luscious yet very unattractive lips.

"I lack the ability to clack like you, perhaps we can communicate in my language?" Mana asked speaking her words slowly and articulating them clearly to the short rodent-like abomination that just scratched its head again peeling layers of skin off of it and sending it down to the ground.

"Yes," the creature spoke in a very strange dialect, its pronunciation suggested it had just learned the language right now and was surprised by itself that it could speak it.

"What the?" Meiko's jaw opened wide, Mana smiled as she turned back at her friends.

"The twelve clicks that the creature said previously was the Woodarthon Code, a suggested combination of words that in theory is enough for a linguist to understand the speaker's language's basic concepts and teach it to them on a basic level. The creature moved in closer because it wasn't sure if I heard it the first time, these things are actually really smart for mindless things we made them out to be... Were you a linguist by any chance at some point?" Mana wondered looking at the pitiful creature gnawing on its own longer ear than its sister.

"Yes," it answered.

"No offense, sir, but you really shouldn't have tried it. Not everyone knows the Woodar... Whatever code, definitely not the kind of people that tread down here looking for trouble, that's for sure." Kouta uncomfortably smiled at the monstrosity.

"How you know code?" The creature whined out in a sorry voice to which Mana just awkwardly laughed and scratched her head.

"I read a lot during my free time, recently I've had much more time to read as I've been less occupied by... Other things... These things we fought before, ideally the two different representatives would exchange the code upon meeting each other and it consists of twelve words which may have any number of pronounced symbols so it might be pretty confusing to hear it at first. When I heard the creature speak the system of twelve differently pitched clacks I started to get it together but it didn't make sense that someone trying to kill someone would use the Woodarthon Code, the code of a man who tried to encourage peace and understanding between different nations and possibly even species." The magician explained.

"Almost like they were repeating what they heard someone else say..." Kouta brought up, "What if those things are actually someone trying to incriminate these dwellers for something using their patterns of speech that they heard during their first contact which was coincidentally the... Code thing".

Mana was surprised by how much sense the theory made but it still didn't form a firm foundation for an actual picture of just what was going on.

"The surface justice men make look like us to make us look bad," the dweller said unexpectedly.

"What?" Mana didn't really believe it at first. The more she thought about it the more sense it made.

"We met them when they came here first, down here, they no speak, just kill, kill all they see... They want kill all us." The rodent abomination spoke again making Mana more and more confused.

"But... We left Shimo with them, is he going to be OK? Why would they strike this deal with us then? What's their gain?" Meiko wondered but her speech was without much emotion, almost like she just wondering when she was going to get the chance to fight someone again. All this hard thinking was probably getting to her already.

"They lead us down here and then lied about the disappearing party who in terms transformed into those creatures, the best they could do to replicate them. They may not have gotten a good look initially so that's why the two looked so different and why the Justicars weren't afraid of the light flash. They do wish for us to slaughter these things for them, I only assume that Shimo will be used as a bargaining chip in case their plan fails." Kouta kept on trying to help Mana understand what was going on.

"Logically they couldn't have foreseen us managing to find a common speech with the creatures, they counted on us being repulsed and afraid by their looks and strange behavior, it makes sense. But why would they wish to kill these things?" Mana couldn't understand it, one answered or theorized question only raised another couple of them in its place. Things needed to be properly thought out before a definitive action could have been made or else Shimo or these people could've been in danger.

"Wait... Woodarthon Code is meant to communicate between different dialects, that was its main use of conception because our entire world speaks a single universal language, the one that the First People left behind for us. I'm not sure if it would've taught a being unfamiliar with our language's basic concepts the whole thing. You guys then said that one of you was a linguist at some point, just who are you guys?" Mana asked the rodent men directly, the dwellers just scurried and quickly gathered around the crew, Meiko and Kouta were slowly getting twitchy while even Mana, who was really tolerant towards their deformities was getting on edge.

"We livers of small wood houses. Settle-ments." The linguist spoke up. "One day, man come to settle-ment, say he heal pain and death, he did this to us. We could no live in the light, we run here and justice men run after us, chase us here and try smoke us like dogs".

"Livers? You mean settlers? Oh, so you've had remnants of the language in your head, it just took triggers to unlock them. Also... Heal pain and death? What could that mean?" Mana thought up scratching her chin almost to the point of irritation and minor bleeding.

"Whoever that man who came to their settlement was, if he's a rogue in the Justicars' sights, that'd make these people their targets too," Kouta voiced his thoughts.

""Thee shall bury any well spit in by a poisonous snake hag" says the Justicar code," Meiko shrugged. "Anyone touched or affected by the rogue's jutsu is to be slain in case some wicked seal was left inside of them that'd set off even after the user's death".

Mana and Kouta looked at Meiko curiously, they expected the girl to be the last person to know the Justicar Code by heart. It was a quite complex set of strange metaphors that was supposed to have answers to any situation. Just like that time when Meiko surprised everyone by knowing quite much about music the blacksmith proved that she wasn't really a thick-skulled idiot, just really distracted in matters she cared little about. Seeing how hyped Meiko was after seeing the Justicars even admiring their looks and the gear that they used it was of little surprise to hear that Meiko may have taken an interest in the order at some point and learned about it to an obsessive degree.

"Well then, let's get out there and kick their asses. Let's show them what real justice is all about," Kouta pounded his own fists together looking pumped to finally leave this cave, and to be honest these unlucky and miserable people behind. Mana looked down before kneeling up to the unfortunate monstrosities of science and ninjutsu and gently touched the linguist's face, Meiko twisted her face in disgust and Mana resisted the urge to do the same as it turned out that the abomination's face was really slimy and greasy.

"It pains me greatly knowing how many injustices in this world I am still too weak to fix... Fennec in the Wind Desert, that thing we ran from in Roiyaru road or those ninja that took on Kouta's father's squad. All we can do in our present state is run from those people and hear all about the atrocities they commit while we run but... One day, I promise there will be no more running. I will regain my chakra manipulation and become strong enough to have words with the man who did this to you so that he isn't able to do this to anyone else." Mana spoke looking at the one overly large eye and another squinted one staring at her creepily.

"Yes," the strange dweller replied looking at Mana more confused than he was sad or happy. Whatever that rogue did to them must've also meddled with their brains, taken away more than just their bodies but also their minds and personalities. There were times like this when Mana realized just how true Tanshu's last words to her was and how cruel and terrible the real world outside the village walls could've been to people who deserved it the least.

Mana felt Meiko's soft tap at her shoulder, "Come on, we have some good looking faces to bash in..." she asked Mana to move on and not get overly emotional over this horror. Sometimes Mana forgot just how kind and smart Meiko really was, the blacksmith saw how painful it was to Mana to see these things so she did her best to turn the magician further away from them despite her hottest desire to rub her face into the horror she failed to stop by not being strong and inspiring enough.