The next morning both Mana and Kiyomi went to see Meiko. Mana had not had the chance to see her friend while she was awake since the Chuunin Exams. The blacksmith appeared to be in a very odd mood that happened to change from time to time from one side of the radical emotional spectrum to another. When Mana and Kiyomi first entered the ward, the blacksmith was just blankly staring through the window. A moment later, she was stuffing her face with some chicken and rice like she had not a care in the world…
"So I lost, huh"? Meiko wheezed out with a husky tone.
"Yeah, but you did really well", Mana tried consoling her friend's doubts.
"You pushed yourself way too far though, Meiko. The medical ninja told me you may not walk for up to a whole week and even when you stand back up, it might take a couple of months until you're up on your feet and fighting like you used to", Kiyomi expressed her worries, pressing Meiko. This may have been the wrong approach in all the wrong ways. Then again, given what Mana heard last night this may have been understandable…
"I… I just tried being like you two. This Salnisa girl that had her acid burns treated here earlier told me you two plowed through your opponents all by yourself", Meiko gloomily jumbled some words up.
Mana sighed, "Look, the difference between ninja ranks is tremendous. A young genin is merely just a kid out of the Academy, by the time they become chuunin they're a legitimate threat to their entire world. Jounin are stronger than chuunin proportionately, Sannin and Kage level ninja blow even those amazing ninja away. It is said that a ninja who opens all Eight Gates is capable of competing with and beating a Kage level ninja, no matter their rank. The person you faced was someone who opened three out of the eight gates, still, that person didn't beat you – it was a draw between you two. You have nothing to be ashamed of".
Meiko just glared at Mana with wet shimmering eyes before jumping back to her food. The fact that she felt hungry again and wasn't just rolling around in her bed feeling pity for herself was something that relieved Mana greatly.
"So, these Team Phobos guys… Kiyomi told me yesterday you'll be facing that chick from that team, right? Got any plans yet?" Meiko wondered with a mouth full of rice before she got a chicken bone in her throat and, in a very messy manner, coughed it out.
"It's nothing, I'll think of something. I've got full five weeks for that, it's an exciting challenge really – I know her fighting style, now all I need to do is break through it", Mana dismissed her friend's worries. As simple and naïve Meiko was, even she knew that Mana's match-up five weeks from now was trouble. By confronting it and encouraging the magician to do the same she displayed more maturity than Mana did, who until now has pushed the grim thoughts of the upcoming match deeper down.
Once Mana returned home, her father turned to the door, his eyes blanked out before he jumped up on his feet and began pointing at Mana like he had seen a ghost. For a moment, the magician felt a bit confused and raised an eyebrow.
"Who's this intruder in hospital-borrowed clothes"!? The man shouted out, "Someone call the Police Force"!
Mana's eyes softened before her little pouty lips turned into a warm smile.
"Very funny, dad".
"So, you're just going to disappear again then? Where are you headed off to now? Another country, another planet, another universe or dimension? I sure hope that place has mail"! Mana's father cheeked the magician again after turning off the wooden box he had for a television in this household and sitting down at the other end of the armchair.
"So you've heard", Mana closed her eyes, she kind of wanted to surprise her parents by relaying the news about her successful Chuunin Exams.
"Oh, yeah, plenty of my old comrades are working on keeping that whole thing running. They told me the whole thing, about how amazing my girl was, beating both opponents alongside her trusty rabbit pal… "Rabbit pal" was what I asked myself because I had no idea my little girl was hanging around with rabbits", father said.
Mana breathed in and out before dropping onto the armchair, closing her eyes and realizing that she was home. Nothing but the assignment five weeks from now…
"So, look, I know that they don't really let all the microbe sharing thing happen in the hospital…" father began a topic that was about to get really painful.
"Kouta broke it off with me", Mana sighed, pressing her hand against her closed eyes so that she did not erupt into a fit of tears. She did not want to talk about it but, honestly, she should have told her parents immediately after it happened. This was on her postponing doing what had to be done.
"Oh… That's odd. Oh well, that's his loss", father cut it silent for a while until it got awkward. "Don't worry, me and your mother cut it off multiple times, once for a seemingly unrepairable reason. In fact, ours was a relationship born out of some of the least functional properties there are so don't model yours after ours. What I'm trying to say is… Just don't think this is the end of the world".
"Dad… I've seen a colossal pirate man literally try to crush the world in between his hands, I kind of know what the end of the world looks like", Mana was glad to be able to successfully change the topic. "I think I'm going to go get a shower".
"Oh, that's not working, I sort of broke it with my clunky insensitive lumps of flesh and… Well… I'm not in any capacity to fix it", father looked at his scarred hands that were shaking just from the brief contact with open air and truly did not look fit for any sort of delicate labor.
"Oh… Well, I'll think of something. It's cold season, the lakes and rivers in the edge of the village are completely empty", Mana sighed.
"No, no… I think I found a pretty helpful concoction of herbs for my hands. This asthmatic and frail young bald man is selling them under the counter, he works night shifts on Wednesdays", father sighed. "So just wait until evening for all your showering needs, I'll be fixing plumbing like in my old days soon".
"I don't know, if that guy is that promising of a healer, he'd do something about his asthma, frailness, and baldness", Mana pouted, it was just her way of softly objecting about her father buying some unheard of medicine from some odd-looking men.
"Look, kid, I worked plenty of shifts watching the Konoha gates in my days. I also patrolled the village and with the regulations and the security in place, he couldn't sell anything less than stellar in quality and, therefore, sky-high in price in this village", father came back at the magician with a fairly solid argument. Smuggling something inside the village with all the barriers and Village Protection Services officers patrolling the streets would be too difficult for a reasonable profit to be made out of it.
A couple of days passed with Mana doing nothing in particular but recovering from after her grueling match in the semi-finals. By that time, the magician was preparing to train and was beginning to come up with a plan of doing so in a remarkable and efficient way. That was when she found out that Meiko was being released from the hospital, still unable to walk around but otherwise having completely recovered.
After the ordinary morning rituals, Mana rushed to the hospital to see her friend getting released and being sent back home. It was impossible to miss the blacksmith's parents waiting, especially the girl's father who, despite being a pretty massive brute all by himself, also had a very distinctive wheeled contraption with him.
Once Meiko was lead downstairs by some medical ninja and driven to her parents and all the soft and mushy family reunion rituals finished, the blacksmith was quickly repositioned from the hospital's wheelchair into that made by Meiko's father.
"You know, this isn't really necessary", the medical ninja objected, "We are borrowing those to our patients that require them for the short duration of their need".
"Nonsense", Meiko's father rumbled with an authoritative tone in his odd northern dialect and speech pattern, "Daughter wheels around in my wheels, if trouble happens she drives away in under 1267 kilometers per hour using chakra storage seals in exhaust pipes"!
"Awesome"! Meiko shrieked out like a material girl having found the perfect outfit. "Look how smooth the metal-work is! Look how crude the handles are, just imagine how much I can strengthen my upper body using these rough handles at full speed"!
"Meiko is the only person excited to drive around in a wheelchair", Kiyomi rubbed her temples in gentle irritation.
"True, that's why we love her", Mana smiled looking at her friend performing sick and menacing to the passers-by tricks with her hi-speed wheelchair before circling the block and stopping just in time in front of her family and friends.
At some point, Mana had to confront that whole finals of the Chuunin Exams thing. With the lightning-fast speed of her recovery, she only had a couple of days as an excuse to keep pushing it away. The tremendous challenge of figuring out a way to confront and defeat her opponent was just too big for the magician's head not to start spinning every time she thought of it.
Mana sat down by her desk and began scribbling on a piece of paper. Writing down every jutsu she knew, starting from her starting dozen of almost useless light show tricks to her most recent powerful additions. She then stroke out any damaging moves because they would only be storage for her opponent to use. Mana still wondered just what kind of jutsu Stea's ultimate technique she did not get to use in her battle was, likely it'd have been something highly offensive since from what Mana had seen, the mysterious kunoichi lacked such a technique.
It was not tough to figure out that this ultimate technique of Stea's used the damage stored in her seals in some way. In the most predictable case – it would have been a big blast of some sort, increasing in power the more damage she stored, and with her healing capabilities in mind, Stea had the potential to store a seemingly infinite amount of damage.
"Chakra is a possible weakness", Mana spoke to herself, chewing on her pencil, deep in thought, "Stea's signature dipped significantly in her last fight. If I hit her with an illusion, she'll be forced to dispel it which will cost additional chakra, pushing her to the limit. No, that's stupid…"
Mana was no fool. She wasn't going to fall for such a simple mistake – clearly, Stea will find out from Gasco about Mana's tremendous chakra signature and know about her own shortcomings. The Getsugakure kunoichi was fairly intelligent to have studied and learned medical ninjutsu effectively at her age. She'll put two on top of two and will see through Mana's training focus if this would indeed be it, she'd improve herself in that area in five weeks, no doubt.
Figuring that one was the only one training during these five weeks was one of the most elementary mistakes to make…
Moreover, even if Mana does force Stea on the defensive chakra-wise, she will still need to drive her opponent to heal a couple of times for that to happen. That will just give the starry-eyed opponent of hers additional damage storage. Not to mention the stupid loophole Mana hadn't noticed – what shall she do after Stea falls under a genjutsu? It's not like Mana can force someone to surrender, controlling their mind, like Kiyomi can, nor can she just kill her opponent while they're down like Hisako would've. All Mana could do was to beat on her opponent which meant kept fattening her damage storage.
This was hopeless…
"But then… What about… No… What was that guy's name, the one who died using Mysterious Peacock"? Mana thought to herself before sighing and changing her clothes quickly. She just could not keep on working now that the brave sacrifice of the young man was on her mind, she needed to vent her head, to read up on his country and, maybe find out what she always wanted to – if his sacrifice meant something.
No, that was not enough, Mana needed to relax, all those things: break-up with Kouta, Meiko's injury, her opponent in the finals, the death of that poor youth… It all kept stacking up. She needed to cool off and there was only one way Mana could cool off – magic. She will go to Hiro's Hall, ask Mr. Hiro to get a spot to perform this evening and magic the shit out of her problems.
Mana may have been a martial artist, more exactly – had formal martial arts training, but she didn't have a warrior's heart. Fighting didn't calm her down, it only made it all worse. Performing on stage was the passion that never ceased to entertain both her audience and Mana herself. There was nothing more calming and pleasing than seeing a child's eyes upon laying his eyes on magic trick…
Quickly, using the rooftops, poles and wires – the standard ninja method of travel in Konoha, Mana dashed to Hiro's Hall and met up with Mr. Hiro, arranging an impromptu magic show. He didn't want to host it initially – Mana was a big earner, she deserved a week-long advertising and promotion before each show. Such an erratic show will barely gather half the audience she usually gathered and Hiro could only fit Mana into a late evening hour. None of those things mattered, as long as Mana could perform on stage that day and clear her head.
Then the magician rushed to the Konoha southern gate and read the posters on the info board. Apart from loads and stacks of posters about missing people, a problem to worry about for another time, one that plagued the village for quite a while, as Mana could recall, there was a big flashy poster advertising the Chuunin Exams and the match ups:
1. Roh-D from Kumogakure V.S. Aozora Yushijin from Konohagakure
2. Dhaogu from Sunagakure V.S. Gasco Patura from Getsugakure
3. Buhakim from Sunagakure V.S. Nanaba Aomyaku from Konohagakure
4. Nara Sugemi from Konohagakure V.S. Vinda Calkem from Getsugakure
5. Yamanaka Kiyomi from Konohagakure V.S. Tanko Shigin from Konohagakure
6. Erumo Budoki from Konohagakure V.S. Jekleifer Kaguya from Konohagakure
7. Gentib de Vitt from Hoshigakure V.S. Kres-T from Kumogakure
8. Nakotsumi Mana from Konohagakure V.S. Stea Tesprea from Getsugakure
Mana's match was last. that meant it would have been the main draw of the event. It was no surprise that it was positioned in a flashy background and there were more separate posters with Mana's and Stea's faces for promotional material against each other. The magician had spent enough time around show business to know how to promote a big event. So if Mana royally flops on her face, it will be on the grandest stage in her village and failing the hype of everyone gathered there from every village and corner of the world. Having no heart-crushing pressure on one's chest seemed to be a luxury these days…
It was not like Kiyomi had things that much better – she'll be facing the unspoken about monster in Shigin. He was always very faintly whispered about in the Forest of Death, his invincibility ability was continuously scared with like some sort of boogeyman for ninja. But, it wasn't until the semi-finals of the Chuunin Exams that the ability truly was comprehended by the competitors. Mana only wished to have been able to see it first-hand, must have been quite impressive.
With mixed thoughts, but having finally seen the final match-ups table, Mana rushed to the Konoha Archives to read up a little bit. As expected, there was little to nothing to research about these "damage seals", however, they weren't the prime interest that drew the magician into the archives. It was the political standing of Hoshigakure that did.
From what she could've figured out from a bunch of old de-classified intelligence gathering mission debriefings, Hoshigakure was founded in a crater of a large meteor strike, right on top of the irradiated soil. Apparently, a shard of that meteor had fallen off in mid-air and fallen further west to the village, later located by the villagers of the newly established village. The ninja that spied on Hoshigakure reported that the meteorite shard found there was valued for its radioactive properties and that plenty of ninja, with authorization from the local authority, calling themselves the Hoshikage, could train and meditate in the presence of the stone.
If that was true, it may have explained why the users of this Mysterious Peacock Method jutsu were able to tap into radioactive chakra. However, it also greatly crushed Mana internally. The Hoshikage was not loyal or acknowledged as a leader by most other villages or any Feudal Lord. The only reasons why the village was not swept away in the first place, despite being located in Fire Lord's property, was because the irradiated land was fairly useless to the Lord and not worth the squabble.
All that this information meant was that poor Gorm Cleiti died for nothing. His death may have alerted the officials of the other countries that the Mysterious Peacock Method had a weakness but what it did not do was have any meaning to it. No village will bargain with a renegade leader of an unrecognized land to ban the only technique that keeps them on the map. It was the diplomatic disaster to even try. Gorm Cleiti died to no avail and so will more and more youths with bright pink dreams of standing in front of strange space rock to gain its powers…
Mana pushed her chair back before she weightlessly slumped in it and laid seemingly lifeless for a while. All she wanted to know was if Gorm's death will possibly save some lives in the future, which now she found out that it won't. This was the last thing she needed on her consciousness when already struggling to think straight and prepare for the biggest match of her life.
Gorm's death was entirely pointless unless someone makes it mean something…