"Kouta?" Mana uttered, still doubting if she heard it right. The young man she still had feelings for and whom she had a particularly spiritually eviscerating break-up with.
"Yeah, I'm going to reach for your blindfold now, don't punch me in the face please." He shyly asked the magician as Mana felt the tight pressure on her temples and her hair loosen, she closed her eyes but that did not prevent from her eyes exploding into a flood of tears and sparks of painful itching and irritation. Then something plastic and light touched Mana's nose and the unpleasant sensations lightened up somewhat.
"You can open your eyes now", Mana could hear Kouta take a couple of steps back after he said that. Uneasily and slowly, the magician let her eyes open up just for a moment before closing them again, then repeating this process a couple of times before she could open them up a bit easier as the irritation was no longer as prevalent as it used to be whenever the magician tried opening them up before.
Kouta had put the shades he was carrying around on Mana.
"Wow, thanks, that's much better, I can almost see like this", the kunoichi turned around a couple of times, examining everything around her as closely as her dark and shady glasses allowed her. It has been a while since she could see this clearly… Just the sweet spot of where she missed being able to see but have not yet forgotten how amazing it was. The vision of ninja rabbits was really amazing if they did not suffer any of these symptoms. Then again, most of the rabbits that left the caves were adults, they younglings most likely underwent training to prevent just this same kind of outcome from happening.
"Do you have everything you need? I can still make a run for supplies…" Kouta wondered.
"What is this?" Mana calmly confronted him. "What are you doing exactly? Your own teammate is up next. You should be encouraging her."
"Have you even seen Erumo? She needs no encouragement, she was the only out of the three of us that never struggled with self-confidence." Kouta rubbed the back of his head, "Plus… Shit, I told her I wouldn't tell you this but… Those two kind of forced me to come see you."
"Wow. Okay…" Mana lowered her head before turning back and heading for the staircase that lead back up to the girls' observatory. Over the five months, she spent training in the rabbit caves she could navigate steps and stuffy, hard caves in total darkness. Now, with these shades, it'd be a cakewalk. She could probably put up a respectable effort against Stea with them…
"No, wait, it's… Not like that." Kouta reached out to stop Mana from leaving. "I kind of… I wanted to tell myself that I had no baggage from before but… They opened my eyes. I was so adamant to finish my shift in the hospital before coming here and yet I went out of my way to get those glasses for you. You see, the problem was that you kept changing in between two extremes, complete illumination or total darkness and you need to ease your eyes up…"
"You're babbling", Mana cut her beloved one down.
"Sorry. I guess I wasn't exactly without baggage. I guess I always thought I'd have no problem thinking of you as a friend but…" Kouta tried putting something cohesive together but he was too shy and too unfocused in his own feelings to say anything within a respectable timeframe.
"That's impossible?" Mana suggested a possible conclusion for him to draw.
"Right. No matter how cool I think I am, how completely devoid of bad karma between us I think I am… I can't ignore what happened. I don't hate you, I don't blame you, strangely, neither do Erumo and Yushijin but… I just can't think of you as just my friend. That's why I kept on avoiding you. I should have been there in the semi-finals, I should have known better than to let you tackle it all alone after having your feelings crushed. I need to clean that house." Kouta finally began making sense.
"Why are you telling me all of that? Yeah, it hurt having to compete being completely broken inside but I never waited for any apology from you. You're still my friend, right?" Mana hopefully wondered.
"I'm… I'm leaving the hospital, I'll enroll into Konoha High to become an ANBU, like my father." Kouta put his fingers around his eyes, he had difficulty admitting this to Mana.
"You'll become a killer?" Mana repurposed Kouta's words into something blunter and to the point.
Mana tried but she could not take it as anything but a slap in her face and a stab in the back while she was flinching over it. A young man she loved decided to break up with her and, because he could not handle it himself, go against his nature to destroy it and become a killer.
"I finished my medical ninja studies. That path is still open to me but I need to work on my nature. I need to learn to control my feelings and ANBU is the way of doing that." Kouta firmly replied, such stubbornness and firm grip onto something was not usually Kouta's way. He was quite shy and usually very submissive to debate, this was one of the few issues he really felt firmly about and it did not look like he was ready to change that.
Usually, Mana did not pry into people's choices and their souls. She was someone who swore to never take lives but she tended to overlook other people taking lives because she thought that was their way, their choice to make. She dreamed of being the kind of hero that would inspire and convince everyone to make those choices for themselves and refuse taking lives all of their own free will but… This… She could not let this go.
"Don't… Please. You're a kind and strong young man. To squash your nature is not the same as to control it. Don't let them make you into just a mindless tool", Mana could her pleading in her own voice. She did not care about pride or similar things but she never resorted to something of this nature. She never pleaded people to reconsider, even if she tried to make them reconsider she always tried reasoning. Pleading seemed so… Petty, so pointless.
Kouta stood his ground and just looked back at Mana's dark, reflective, plastic gaze. His pressed together lips quivered as if he was about to break but his eyes were tough, eyes of a fighter who has decided what he would be fighting for.
"I thought you'd react differently, I thought you'd eventually come to see the things my way. Weren't you the one who helped me embrace my Juugo legacy?" Kouta replied with just as much wavering and uncertainty, even if his eyes were firm about having decided to study for eventually making it to ANBU.
The path was still long for him: years to study specialized ANBU skills and jutsu, techniques of stealth and murder, then emotional and mental tempering to make him into a perfect tool for his village to send away and have dirty work done. He would still need to rank up a couple of times before he actually made the list but…
"Really? You truly thought that I would approve of you striving to burn down orphanages and kill people for the village? I guess then you never knew me at all", Mana snapped. A vocal part of her own mind instantly demanded that she apologized but some other part of her, a more devious one just ordered to keep on attacking. To let everything out and test the boy's hardness and preparedness for ANBU life truly.
Mana ran away.
She could not do either. She knew that she was in the wrong, at least she thought she was. Nothing really made sense, like it usually did, when Kouta was involved. She wavered and questioned the very fundamentals of what she believed. She crossed every line she swore she would never cross when he was looking at her… She pleaded him and tried to convince him to change his mind in all the ways she would never do usually. This was the man she loved declaring that he wanted to drown his life in blood and build his home of bones of the people he killed. He told HER that, of all people, right in her face…
For the whichever time, as far as heartbreaks with Kouta were concerned, Mana slammed her back against the wall halfway to the observatory and slid down on her bottom, crying. Letting tears run freely was so easy. It was almost like all the built up pain and stress in her troubled eyes had finally found a way to be released.
For the second time in a row, Kouta broke her heart right before some of the most important moments to come in her life. If the magician did not know any better, she would think he did it on purpose…
"So, what did I miss?" Mana sniffed while returning back to the observatory platform. In her worst daydreams, these couple of remaining battles would have unexpectedly concluded and she was about to go next. Of all times, now she was in no mood or preparation to fight in one of the most important battles of her life, especially one where lives of so many people may have theoretically, in a very detached manner, been on the line.
"Not much, they just gathered in the arena and the hyping up has already concluded. Erumo and Jekleifer had already clashed a pair of times and used their substitutions already…" Kiyomi briefed Mana quickly and efficiently. Luckily enough, none of the girls appeared to even notice Mana's shades that have effectively hidden the signs of her emotional disarray. The magician wanted to talk about this with her friends the least, at least at the moment.
"String Reeling Jutsu!" Erumo yelled out letting the screeching sound of dragging steel wire drag her out of danger, like a clutch zip-line. Mana could barely see the specifics as the shades skipped a very limited amount of light and with the winter days being rather gloomy as they were. However, she did make out the surprise and shock of the audience and noticed how quickly the string reeling pulled Erumo out of the incredibly dangerous and fast clash with Jekleifer Kaguya from Iwagakure.
Regardless of how fast and efficiently the technique was pulled off, as if a significant amount of focus was placed on this jutsu used in a defensive zip-lining manner during the five week training, the more impressive feat was how little the zipping appeared to wear on Erumo.
For someone with such a limited and mostly supportive role in her team, focusing on setups and clever trapping of her opponents, as opposed to directly confronting them, Erumo was doing remarkably well, having survived this long against a Kaguya clansman.
Jekleifer worked on approaching his opponent physically, wielding erupting shoulder to elbow long swords made of his own immensely tough and sharp bones as only his clan bloodline permitted him to fight. Erumo appeared to be prepared for just such an outcome, the young lady was removing a small scroll from her ninja pouch even before her opponent went after her, as if she knew just how he'd go on attacking her.
With a loud grunt, signifying the strain that the sudden unsealing of her ninja tool caused, Erumo unsealed a large umbrella in a horizontal, spinning position. In an instant the umbrella opened up, firing a shower of senbon needles at the kunoichi's opponent. This was not her main manner of attack, clearly, one would have been quite foolish to rely solely on something like this…
Jekleifer covered himself with a quickly put together block. Regardless of his careless defense, loud clanging sounds echoed when the storm of senbon attempted to tear through the Kaguya's flesh as they hit the bone plates quickly grown underneath Jekleifer's skin. Despite the senbon having little to no effect and being just a minor distraction, it was evident that it was all that Erumo wanted them to be.
"Multi Bomb Jutsu!" The kunoichi smacked her hands together about the same instant that the umbrella was beginning to run out of smoke. She was putting a lot of chakra into these jutsu, just to survive, just to keep her opponent away but it could not have been any other way. She was frail, slow and rather physically average whereas her opponent was a force of nature in terms of physicality, unpredictable techniques and skill of wielding his bone weapons. She was a little bee, trying to sting the elephant in front of her enough times to make him back off… Such was the difference in their power.
The visibly straining ninjutsu that Erumo used appeared to multiply the amount of the marble-shaped bombs she had used by a large amount. Mana could recall Shimo using a similar jutsu way back, it barely multiplied the number of kunai he used a handful of times. This was an entire swarm of little marbles, all buzzing right at Jekleifer's face.
For a brief moment Mana thought the kunoichi mad for multiplying the her explosives this way. She'd hurt herself, she'd obliterate what little remains of the arena and create one large acid pool she herself would have significant trouble navigating. Then another thought popped into Mana's mind, just fast enough to theorize about what Erumo was doing before it happened but too late for her to have been able to do something about it if she had been down there in the battlefield, facing off against the trapster herself.
Instead of what the audience expecting – that being an endless chain of devastating explosions erupting, the bombs that Erumo multiplied all popped releasing blinding, black clouds of smoke, covering the entire arena in darkness, with only the protective barriers containing the widespread dark reaches of irritating smoke.
It was not that tough to imagine why the girl who strived to shove it down Mana's throat that she was about to follow the steps of the magician's father, employing traps in her arsenal instead of confronting her opponent face-to-face like the magician and most other ninja did used such a tactic. Neither of the girls in the observatory questioned it either.
Still, once the black tar of smoke cleared out, both the people in the audience, the observatories and Jekleifer himself looked impressed. The arena looked pristine clean and almost like Erumo had restored it and covered the place with bright sand and little blades of tidily cut grass.
"So you have setup your traps, support ninja?" Jekleifer grinned with a reserved expression of content.
"Yeah, I don't foster that much hopes of winning this match but it is like Oke-san said – I am a support ninja and that's what the Ninja Council expects of me. No one would demand the same standards from support ninja as they do from powerhouses like you, nor would they of medical ninja. The Council sees how well each of us fulfill our own roles instead of blindly throwing us into the same basket." Erumo smiled before taunting her opponent with a hand gesture, "Come now, take a step."
"As you wish", Jekleifer quickly opened his eyes, revealing a ferocious glare as he charged forward. "Dance of the Tulip!" he roared out in both pain and physical strain as his chakra aided his body in forming new bones as well as breaking the old ones and having them burst in a bloody and disturbing fashion from under his biceps. It would have resulted in an impressive high-stance combination of strikes.
In a quick swoop, Jekleifer disappeared underground, collapsing into a concealed pool of acid that appeared to be covered up with a strange cloth, one that was colored similarly to its surroundings, conveying an illusion that it was solid ground. A clever spin on the usual Cloak of Invisibility jutsu, where instead of concealing oneself, Erumo chose to cover up a previously created trap instead. Also it was a relatively clever way to utilize the remains of the environmental destruction left behind after Vinda's match.
Jekleifer burst from under the acid pool, overflowing with bursting chakra aimed at dispelling the corrosive effects, covered in patches of singed off flesh that only revealed plates of bone, completely unharmed by the acid residing under it. The hair of the young man had also broken loose as the ties that bind it had corroded away, together with his top and part of his lower clothes.
"What's the matter? Hesitant to move?" Erumo taunted her opponent before swiping her kunai at the side, severing a piece of wire that set off another one of her traps – a part of broken wood fired off by a sealing tag that emanated a pulse of chakra upon being set-off by the cut wire setting off the lighter placed below it.
Jekleifer blitzed like lightning, remaining in place and slicing through the flying cut down tree, shredding it to smallest chips and pieces before placing his hands forward.
"Ten-Finger Drilling Bullets!" Jekleifer roared out in pain as the bones in his fingers burst through from the tips and fired off like bullets aimed at his opponent. Erumo was clearly unprepared for a long-range attack of such manner. There was her mistake, at least the way Mana could see it, she was too busy preparing for this match herself that she neglected trying to predict how her opponent would be preparing for his match as well. After all, the five weeks to train were meant for both combatants, not just her.
A wide-spread arc of blood splattered all over the ground, shot from both Erumo's shoulder, her arms, legs and lower body where the bone shred through her flesh and left her body, breaking bones where it met it, leaving gruesome entry and exit wounds. The kunoichi stumbled before falling down and planting her face into the ground as a small pool of blood started accumulating from her wounds.