This mysterious burglar being a part of the Diamond Ring was something Mana could not have predicted. Everything about her crime seemed so sloppy and too on the nose to be applied to someone of such secrecy and proficiency in the art of crime that the Diamond Hand displayed. That changed all plans, Mana needed to first make this woman leak information. Fortunately enough, she was almost begging to tell the magician all about her amazing plan and how, the burglar thought, she had played the kunoichi.
"Alright, you've got my attention. Speak", Mana said.
"Awww, come on. I like to dance while I sing." A reply came not too soon and not too long after.
The burglar moved fast, she certainly had some kind of training and while she may not have known what chakra was or how it worked, someone had explained to her how to make herself stronger by training it. Mana heard the tension on the floor beneath her feet, back in the Rabbit Caves she had learned to fight in complete darkness by picking up on just such details while suffocating on blazing air and occasional noxious gas leaks.
The woman was trying her thing – use the Shadow of the Dancing Leaf to move in behind Mana and then knock her out with a single strike to a vital on the back of her neck. Cutting off the flow of blood as well as the flow of chakra around that area and disrupting the entire network for a good while, depending on the strength of the strike and the augmentation resistance to the impact.
While Mana was struck with a sour case of a surprise that her opponent had mastered the Shadow of the Dancing Leaf to the extent where she did not need to even utter the name of the technique anymore, the burglar was slow and predictable. With a controlled motion, purposefully restricting her speed to an irrelevant fraction of it so that her opponent was not scared off from the attack before it concluded, Mana locked her arm around that of her opponent's at the elbow before snapping the burglar's arm to break backwards.
Where usually the blood-chilling screams of pain followed such a counter, accompanied with the unnerving racket of snapping bones and blood of an open fracture being splattered across the surrounding walls, the limb of the burglar merely bent backward like an elastic sandbag. With a strong yank, the burglar had pulled her arm out of Mana's lock before her fleeing body was cornered by the wall where the safe was located in.
The cruel irony was that while the object inside the safe was seemingly everything that the woman had wanted, she could not leave with it even if Mana gave her enough time to extract it without going through the stage magician.
Those arms were something Mana had not seen, something that surprised her but not enough to break the magician's composure or cost her anything too pricey. "I hope you sing better than you dance." Mana taunted her opponent, she had no doubts that the burglar had already hammered into her skull just how outmatched she was and that she would have been completely crippled by a single exchange of blows had she not possessed those weird enhancements.
"Well, well… Maybe I have been a bit too ambitious, planning to both kill you off and loot the necklace right from your cold dead hands." The burglar-lady exclaimed in unease.
"Those were body augmentations, weren't they? Where did you get them?" Mana pressed on with the questions. Her opponent was unusual in terms of her physical condition but the magician saw no problem in holding her here and keeping her occupied while the woman talked.
"Why? Jealous? I can introduce you to my guy in Otogakure." The playful tone of the woman's voice echoed from around the room as she had leaped up and stuck to the walls. Initially, it had appeared that she was using the Art of Tree Climbing to stick to the hard surfaces but an odd clang noise reached Mana's ears making the magician suspect a sharp weapon attached to both the hands and feet of the highly elastic woman to be at play.
The clacking noise rang all around Mana, the woman tried to confuse the magician with her speed and crawling prowess, scaling around the walls and the ceiling, transitioning from the floor and the top of the room while wasting no time at all. Almost like a swift spider hunting its prey. Except Mana was no helpless prey.
In a lazy motion, the magician thrust her palm down, shifting her weight and body in a vault forward while her feet drove right in the back of the chin of the diving assailant. Mana could feel the woman's neck dragging and snapping back, an impact like that should have paralyzed her for life and yet the elastic burglar just rolled back on her feet. That blasted clacking steel claws noise told Mana that much, it then proceeded to betray the woman further as she started scaling the walls again until she hid in a corner, hanging stuck to it and observing Mana from what she thought as a safe retreat.
"So you're a part of the Diamond Hand then? What sort of part? Just a hired hand or a footman?" Mana closed her eyes to try and focus on her sensory and the noises that she heard as keeping them open in an almost completely sunken in darkness room was wasteful.
"We have a structure. The each… Department is called the "Fingers of the Diamond Hand", with each commander serving as a Ring of their Finger. I am the Ring of the Thumb." The woman bragged while Mana worked trying to pick up the slightest noise of her crawling. Curiously enough, there were no clacking sounds until it was too late.
It was like this Ring of the Thumb woman was completely lacking any joints or restrictions of movement. Whatever her weaponry was, she had disabled it which had confused Mana in the beginning, before the magician had caught on with the fact but by that time it was too late. The burglar had wrapped her body tightly around Mana's body like a constrictor but instead of continuing to apply pressure, that dreaded metallic clang ringed, telegraphic that she had triggered her weaponry again.
Sharp metallic hooks shot out wherever the impossibly elastic burglar had her hands and feet around Mana while the criminal leaped off of the magician's body. The four hooks attached to her palms and her feet made sure to leave dragging marks as they moved towards the magician's neck, looking to cut her throat open. She moved both like a bird of prey, a snake and an arachnid at the same time.
Mana gripped the front and the sides of her throat, somehow managing to encompass all three shallow cuts around her neck and felt the weak pressure of blood trickling down her fingers that tried to contain the cuts. Naturally, Mana's chakra augmentations had kicked in, leaving her much inferior physically and spiritually opponent no chance of tearing Mana's throat open lethally, as she may have intended, but she still had left some narrow cuts across it.
The fighting style of this burglar was so unusual, her elasticity made her moves so unpredictable that Mana may have had some trouble keeping up with her even if she was fighting seriously. Now she was just toying with the burglar for the sake of any information she could muster. The reason why fighting this woman normally would have been difficult was because this burglar was no fighter, she ran and hid before she saw her opponent leave her an opening, then, she focused all of her augmentations into one quick crawl or a swoop, wrapping her body all around her prey as she sunk the hooks into them. Had Mana not completely outmatched her opponent, this one attack may have even been lethal.
Still, for now, this annoying hit-and-run style was very useful for Mana's goal of fishing for information. The burglar thought she had Mana cornered and that there was no way for the magician to utilize her natural advantages as a well-trained ninja of Konohagakure and not slightly tutored on ninjutsu, surgically enhanced burglar.
"I see… A whole Ring? In that case, there are four more of you. I don't see you five sharing the leadership over the organization so one of you is calling the shots over the other Rings – a Ringleader." Mana stated, needing or waiting for no verification. Her suspicions of a person X were confirmed just like that. "I'd imagine that woman from two days ago was a Ring as well?"
"Huh? Oh, the Index Ring? Yeah, she's actually the leader of the Index Finger, the assassins of our syndicate." The burglar ran her mouth. That was good, she was opening up more and more, likely proportionately to how her odds of leaving Mana dying and drowning in her own blood increased in her mind.
The Thumb Ring tried her luck attacking again, this time Mana knew not to solely rely on her hearing and the clacking of the woman's steel, crooked nails. The magician danced around her assailant's attacks and silly attempts to grab hold of her again, Mana's hands locked around her own back, not because she didn't want to counterattack her opponent but because she did not wish to grant her opponent extra spaces to wrap herself around.
Mana could feel the sharp pain rise up in her neck and the warm feeling of several drops of blood trickling down the shallow cuts and down to her collar. It may have been wise not to keep this going any longer. She had already thrown out the hint that the magician had more in her than she had initially shown to her opponent.
"When Okasune-san saw that other woman, the Index Ring, she said something interesting about this Yokotomo Donyoku guy. I think I'll look into him after I capture you." Mana threw a bait out to lure her opponent into a preemptive strike.
"You're deluded if you think you can escape here alive to try that!" the Thumb Ring shouted out, she was clearly smelling the blood in the air, however, she should have known that attacking when she was being lulled into it was a bad strategy. Her hands and feet wrapped around Mana's body, pressing tightly.
"I may not be able to cut deep enough into your neck but I can easily suffocate you to death, crushing you more and more with every breath that leaves your chest." She declared triumphantly as if it was something that changed the entire mechanic of the battle.
"Lightning Style: Magician's Touch!" Mana huffed out as lightning sparks crackled and ran up and down her body, exuding powerful lightning shocks from her body.
Stunned and overwhelmed by the Lightning Release technique, the Thumb Ring fell to the ground, her eyes white as the pale moon that occasionally peaked its sharp crescent forms from the murky clouds in the sky above. Using a bit higher rank technique on the woman burglar may have been slightly excessive but Mana needed an efficient way of disabling her. Deciding what to do with her now was much more complicated: she was elastic enough to escape through bars or handcuffs and she could have been able to use the Rope Escape Jutsu that even Academy Students could have used.
It took hours after the Ring's muscles stopped shuddering for any signs of life to kick in. This entire time Mana just calmly observed the woman from her seat, carefully sensing her chakra signature to avoid being duped. A skilled ninja could have easily slipped away, leaving a fake body with an illusion similar to Mana's own Fancy Trick jutsu while she silently removed the necklace from the safe currently behind Mana.
Not too far away from dawn, the Ring's eyes started fluttering and the space under her eyes twitched, suggesting that she was beginning to snap back and would awaken shortly. This woman would have served as a fair challenge to Mana before she lost her chakra control, facing someone this much weaker to her yet still so remarkably strong was a relatively fresh experience. Magician's Touch was never intended to be an ace technique, just a powerful surge of electricity, powerful enough to restrain trained ninja temporarily and yet… Both times it was used it knocked out the opponent.
"Speak. What does the Diamond Hand want with the necklace?" Mana inquired in a strict tone upon the first opening of the Ring's eyes.
After grunting over her aching head for a while, the woman started chuckling. She may have been relatively weak compared to the ninja Mana had faced in the Chuunin Exams but she was not dangerous because of her chakra level or her overall strength, the burglar's most dangerous trait was her unorthodox but effective fighting style that would have bought her several seconds even if Mana fought seriously before.
"How's your neck? I guess you'll have to postpone some shows now, that or rebrand yourself as the Wonderful Fish Girl." The woman tried taunting Mana. Her words did bite a little, she at the very least could get into someone's mind effectively by analyzing who their conversant was and what such a person would be afraid of. More importantly, she declared her intention of not telling Mana anything.
The thing that was the scariest of all was that the first idea that popped into Mana's mind was torture. She could have easily tortured the information out of the woman, whether by using Hisako's blade-to-the-gums method or a more illusionary, fear-based mental torture. She could even wear on the woman's brain with illusions like Mana did in her match with Stea.
No. Even if that method would have granted Mana the information she needed to save lives, the magician had already reached the conclusion that she's been straying from her code and looking sideways for too long up to now. She would do this thing her way or no way at all, in which case, she'd accept the consequences as they came.
"And here I thought you were itching to tell me everything, brag about how wonderfully you've played everyone. I assume your "plan" duped the other Rings as well? I can only imagine how they'll reward your betrayal and failure, given Okasune-san's fate." Mana, fortunately for her, was also a dabbler in the arts of biting someone where it hurt. She had to be, when torture and other methods of effective interrogation were out the window, talking her enemies into talking back was her only way of obtaining intel.
"Then I was fairly certain that you were already dead. No one has any qualms about telling dead people secrets." The Ring grunted as she picked herself off the ground and rammed her back against the radiator. Mana was at the very least kind enough to push the woman's unconscious body closer to it before the wait started as the winter's bite was the sharpest in these night-to-morning hours.
"Your only chance at survival is me. The faster I take your colleagues down, the faster you are safe from their wrath and you are only prolonging that by staying silent." Mana tried reason once again. Honestly, she was not sure what she'd have to try if that failed.
"Tsk… You think you're so cool and strong… The Index Ring is much faster and stronger than me. She's also not just light shows and smoke like you, pure business. Even if you took her on one on one, you'd probably die." It became evident that the Ring was aware of her butt-on-fire situation, regardless, she was still on the fence about the success rate of cooperating with Mana as opposed to running away and using all of her skillset as a trained burglar to hide from the Diamond Hand's retribution.
"I don't think you're evaluating this situation right. You are currently severely weakened as your nerves are overloaded with the shock you've just received. Your moves will feel numb and lazy for quite a while, meanwhile, I've clearly shown you I am faster even than your best showings. Even if you are not tied up, as inefficient as that would be, you are going nowhere from this office. Your running and hiding skills could not be any less relevant here so I am your only hope." Mana laid the situation out as she saw it.
The Ring, with her full face now visible and uncovered by the black mask that covered the lower half of her face before, pouted and bit her lip, considering her options. At the very least she had to see and appreciate the fact that Mana was truthful and honest about it.
"The Diamond Hand just needed the necklace for money. You've cut off a pretty important supply of it by hitting us at the movie business, there's a reason why Okasune tried to hit us there before her departure – it's because it was a very powerful hit. The Pinky Ring – the guy behind the financial crimes and the leader of the Pinky Finger is working overtime already to compensate for the loss of money." The burglar explained.
"I see, so you've screwed your team in a quite powerful way by deciding to abandon your assignment."
"That's right. In my defense, I thought that I could take care of two of our problems that way – kill you and take the necklace off of you after it was transferred here. I wasn't certain if the snob would even think up of transferring it to your protection, even if he hadn't – I'd have just completed the job the next night so it would have been no harm done either way." The woman was becoming quite talkative and quite useful. Mana's sensory began stretching out in an attempt to scope out her surroundings so that some annoying assassination attempt, just like all those irritating scenes in the crime movies her father liked, wouldn't interrupt this precious moment.
Movies appeared to be quite stupid as there was nothing within Mana's sensory range that could pose even a remote threat. The magician felt confident in her ability to stop a more powerful long-range kunai dispenser blade before it reached her conversant, frankly, the woman was powerful enough to survive such an attack in the first place.
At long last, she will know everything about the Diamond Hand. A strong breakthrough was at hand, it was just about the only thing Mana could smell these days.
Author's Note: The name of the "Diamond Hand" is initially based on an old Soviet movie - "Diamond Arm", although not completely, it's a bit more complicated than that. You see, due to that movie, plenty of post-soviet countries have adopted the idiom of sorts that a "Diamond Arm" is someone mysterious, with a lot of power sitting behind all the conspiracies and someone who in the end will have everything to gain from everything bad that's being described. They're the untouchable schemer of sorts. You could call Lex Luthor the "Diamond Arm" of the Superman mythos, at least until he is found out and identified. I suppose it is not due to that movie itself, but due to the strong imprint it left on the language and creativity of the people who have seen it that I adopted and slightly modified the name.
Whereas the movie is called "Diamond Arm", because diamonds are being stored and hidden in the arm of the main character of that movie, the organization is called "Diamond Hand", because just like the antagonist of that movie, the main honcho of the "Diamond Hand" is a rich and powerful observant and puppeteer of everything transpiring around him while the only way he is known to the readership is through limited glimpses onto their activities. The antagonist of the "Diamond Arm" is revealed only at the very end of the movie, whereas during most of it he is only seen as a frail hand covered with luxurious rings, which strongly inspired the whole "Diamond Hand" organizational structure.
Leaving small bits of inspiration and rambling about such stuff is why I started leaving these Author's Notes, to begin with (also because someone asked me on PMs to do something of the sort, like work on a Databook on the universe of sorts or something similar). Hope you guys like them!
Once again, much love 3
Thanks for reading