"The mercenaries have calmed down." Waiso sighed easier after a moment of silence spent listening in to the noises below.
"They are a primal bunch. Meiko kicking the ass of their biggest and meanest must have spoiled their mood. I'd be surprised if they still stayed at the inn to party after that." Kiyomi began her speech with a bitter expression, transitioning into a reserved and gleeful snickering as she went on to recall the separate, specific details of the fight.
"Was it really all that impressive?" Hanasaku expressed her curiosity in a tone that resembled a toddler inquiring about what the particular type of food being sold in a vendor was.
"I have to say it was. I never thought Meiko could be this strategic and impressive." Waiso vouched for it. The youth took off his glasses and placed them in a nearby cabinet. After stretching out on the bed he closed his eyes trying to cushion himself in the newly won tranquility of the inn.
"Well… In that case… Good job?" Hanasaku congratulated her student on a well-done job, with a hint of doubt in her voice. The woman felt confident about the fact she needed to congratulate the girl but still checked the pages of her book for a clarification. "Also… Don't get cocky and let this victory lull you." She added after reading from a page.
"Thanks. I know." Meiko nodded a pair of times before sitting up and crossing her legs. Trying to imitate the meditative position that Mana used to sit in when training her concentration. Her memory did not recall all of the specific details of the girl's position but she figured that some clarity was better than nothing was.
"Hey, wanna train tonight, Meiko? I need a partner…" Kiyomi inquired with a restrained and a tad bit embarrassed tone. "Maybe we can help each other out. I'm no concentration expert but I also dabble in genjutsu that require a decent amount of it."
"Yeah!" Meiko shot her eyes open and jumped off the bed. She did not achieve any progress in soothing her psyche and calming her thoughts, which kept on feeding the circle of desperation and mental anguish. "Maybe that's what I need…"
The pathway that lead further to the outskirts of the Fire Country besides the inn was all muddy and filled with large tracks. Shortly after being humiliated, the mercenaries must have all left at once. The girls moved to the little natural garden located behind the inn to the side of the forest, leaving the messed up road behind for the natural progression of time and more reserved travelers to fix.
The girls started out on some lazy exchanges of blows, just to get their blood pumping and bodies in an active condition.
"You're pretty good. I forgot how good." Meiko grinned after noticing just how many blows she had to block instead of avoiding. Kiyomi, on the other hand, parried almost every blow following each avoided strike with a slowed down and muzzled response of her own.
The wind howled as it picked up after each one of Meiko's immensely powerful but whiffed strikes while Kiyomi's weakened and slowed down responses resonated with a husky thud. After a short session of trading blows, the girls took a moment to calm their breathing a bit.
"So what are you working on these days?" Meiko smiled.
"I've learned while preparing for the Chuunin Exams that I know all of the clan hidden techniques already. What separates the good Yamanaka from the exceptional is inventing new, signature jutsu that defy the user. That's what I'm trying to achieve." Kiyomi sighed.
"You could show me the progress you've made so far. It'll be fun, I love hypnotizing tricks." Meiko grinned with confidence.
"First you should practice your chakra imbuement, my jutsu may be painful to the receiving party." Kiyomi scratched her head with a hesitance to even attempt this type of training, even though sparring was by far the most efficient way of learning and mastering new techniques also noticing and fixing their inherent flaws and weaknesses before it was too late.
Meiko unsealed her father's sword again. She placed it in front of her in a balanced and basic sword-fighting stance. The blacksmith closed her eyes, doing her best to concentrate on every cell, every piece of the sword and trying to make her body and mind truly one with it. This was no fight like before. This was just training. That allowed Meiko a greater amount of time more freedom to take her mind and eyes away.
Separate little flames of dim blue sparked up in separate sections of the blade but could not connect with one another. The chakra cloak could not extend and cover the entire blade.
"Even after all the training with Mana, after my father crafted me a special training sword to help me channel chakra and weeks of training…" Meiko sighed. "I tried focusing on my work. On the tinkering just to condition my mind of focusing on things… None of it works. I just wish Mana was around to finish my training, you know. I'm not ready without finishing those lessons we did."
"Maybe you are strong enough. Maybe it's just your mind holding you back?" Kiyomi wondered.
Meiko looked at the cloudy night sky. The only sign that the world was not ending at that very moment, sinking into oblivion that kept on creeping and wrapping its tendrils around the Earth was the shining of the moon covered up by the illuminated clouds.
"I remember back when I traveled with Mana, Kouta, and Shimo to the Wind Country, Kouta said something interesting. He told us about how painful it must feel knowing that the only reason you can't do something is your own mind. That maybe you just don't want it hard enough, that you're not trying hard enough. I think I may now understand what he meant by that." Meiko's face turned sour and filled with melancholy. "Can we try your thing now?"
"I don't know, it might be kind of painful, even if I do tone it down." Kiyomi started to have doubts.
"Now you got me interested." Meiko clenched her fists and shook them like a capricious child. "What's this new jutsu you're working on!?"
"It's something I've never seen anyone in my clan do even though it seems kind of obvious. You know how the Yamanaka transfer their mental projections onto other people? The mental projection usually stays inside someone's mind without wandering anywhere so I'm trying to turn it into something more solid, something like a mind mine that travels through the opponent's body." Kiyomi explained feeling really dumb about asking her teammate to train taking a hit like that.
"That's pretty cool! Sounds dangerous but if you focused your mind on… Say, my little finger, you could just break that, right?" Meiko lifted up and clenched her little finger, making it wriggle like a worm before making a bunch of awkward noises that the blacksmith thought worms made while burrowing.
"That's… I guess it could work." Kiyomi wondered.
"See? No danger at all! Plus, Hanasaku-sensei is a medical ninja, isn't she? She'll heal us up if something goes wrong!" Meiko laughed out. Kiyomi noticed something flickering through her friend's face just for a moment, the way Meiko's eyes were while her mouth smiled. The blacksmith still felt sad about her failure and the lack of progress she made. Maybe… Maybe if she felt like she helped someone that would pass, then again, was it right to exploit her friend's suicidal desire to help someone and feel useful?
"Alright, prepare yourself then." Kiyomi decided. She raised her hands up in the typical hand position. "Mind Switch: Art of Catastrophe!" she shouted out, sending her mental projection out with a ghastly howl. Using the jutsu felt just like using her Art of War technique, hence the similar name, Kiyomi thought it would be like that ever since the early conception stages of the technique.
Meiko closed her eyes, waiting for her finger to break or otherwise burst with blood by having a mental image overcharged with chakra burst inside it. Kiyomi may have had a killer technique there, even Meiko who was usually rather absent-minded about these things felt it. If the jutsu was detonated right in her mind where it originated, it could have left brain damage, make blood burst through her eyes and nose and otherwise inflict heavy damage if not kill by crushing one's mind outright.
And yet nothing happened. Meiko felt an alien influence busting around her mind as if she was about to have it taken over, the two had experienced each other's techniques during training many times. It felt similar to when Kiyomi was able to read Meiko's mind when Meiko failed to hide them during telepathic link. Kiyomi was just inside Meiko's head but she hesitated to do anything. In a moment, Meiko just opened her eyes and looked at her embarrassed friend.
"Whatever. I think it failed. Let's just train a little longer then go back inside." Kiyomi pouted her lips and looked away.
No one could have known just how difficult entering the new stage would be. How much mastery over one's body and mind standing on that stage required. They may not have admitted it outright, but both girls were starting to feel a little bit grateful that they still had time to mess about in the genin missions instead of being thrown into the adult work that chuunin did.
Their bodies and mind may not have been as one as they thought them to be.
Tomorrow morning was bright and sunny, it seemed like the spring would come early as the thin layers of snow started dripping and melting away in the late stages of winter. It was quite a normal occurrence around these parts, spring differed so little from the way autumn was in the Fire Country that it seemed that it was always either spring or a very hot spring, apart from the few months of winter that chilled the bones of the unused to the cold locals.
"Say, Chestnut Hanasaku is a very famous figure in the Ninja World. What exactly are her abilities in combat? I did not get to see her fight last night." Waiso wondered, his thick eyebrows curled in a manner that suggested regret. Kiyomi found it odd that the geeky kid showed interest in the aspects of violence when he found roughhousing repulsive last evening.
"Why don't you ask her?" Meiko bent her tall body around doing early stretches. She did not want to get into the drawn-out topic of what exactly Hanasaku's abilities were even if briefing their teammate on them, especially one so smart on his feet and capable of devising strategies on the fly, would have been a wise choice.
"Lady Fifth did not strike me as the kind of person to explain them to me in the required detail." Waiso's eyebrows shifted into the diagonal, apologetic expression. With the Sun blasting right at his glasses, Kiyomi found it difficult to perceive much of the boy's face but his dark, bushy eyebrows sometimes.
"That is true. I just do things as I see them in need to be done. I let the others worry about what I can and cannot do." Chestnut Hanasaku grinned, blushing her aged cheeks slightly.
"And you've never failed to do what you want to?" Waiso expressed great surprise, opening his mouth and letting out a deep impression of shock.
"Never." Hanasaku gave the young man a thumb up. "If I had gotten involved last night, the results would have been the same. In all honesty, this mission is a piece of cake. It is as much to me about training my students along the way as it is about completing it."
"My God, you were in charge of our village for… A year?" Waiso smacked his cheeks in an almost cartoonish manner. Kiyomi liked the expressiveness of this boy, it made him easier to read.
It was not like it was creepy – trying to read into one's teammate…
"Yes, it is," Mana objected.
It was not like it was anything creepy at all – reading into one's teammate. Being involved in a team had a great number of various social and professional implications and understanding what one's teammate was like as a person was essential for the successful operation on the field.
"Well… I guess Hanasaku-sensei can… Hey, look, a dango vendor!" Meiko yelled out. Her speech was interrupted by the new roster of Team Hokage walking out into a clearing of the forest. The place was just a ring of emerald grass patches rustling peacefully in the spring wind, almost untouched by winter's grasp, almost magical that way. For its special appearance, a small sweets vendor has chosen it as the place of selling their goods there.
There was nothing unusual about a dango vendor offering their goods on the roadside. Even though the crew was heading toward the Fire Temple on smaller, rougher forest paths than the large official roads, the path taken was known well enough for the vendor's location to not appear the least bit suspicious.
"I'll buy a handful! How many dango can I get for this money!?" Meiko shoved her handful of ryo at the faces of the confused vendors, a short woman of short, dark green hair and a tall and bulky man with features similar to the northerners from the Snow Country. The two just looked at each other and handed Meiko a bunch of sticks with sweets on them, after the woman had taken her sweet time counting the money offered by her client.
After being handed the treats, Meiko attempted to gorge it all down. The fewer gulps it all went down in, the better. Right before crushing and grinding the first bite of the sweets, the blacksmith's glare turned sharpened, like she was in a middle of a raging battlefield. She turned and swiped her hand up, slinging the treats upward like projectile weapons.
Upon reaching a certain altitude, the dango detonated and erupted in a mighty blast wave that ruffled and pulled out some grass patches with dirt intact and toppled the shoddy dango vendor. Kiyomi and Waiso, being unprepared for that which came up, bent their bodies to stay on their feet and protect from the blast wave tossing them down.
"These dango did not smell like any dango I've eaten. They smelled of cheap factory paper, soaked with perfume." Meiko pouted her lips and let her expression betray just how serious and angry she was about being tricked with food like that.
The vendor owners took a quick dash back, the vendor girl moved her hands inside her uniform opening to remove a bunch of talisman tags and hold them up in her hands like weapons. These two must have wrapped those dango in some of these explosive talismans to make that trap.
"You've got a sharp nose, girl." The northern man nodded his head before tearing off his silly uniform and revealing leather armor underneath. He placed a helmet that was placed inside the vendor and which the man dragged out from the rubble before moving back atop of his head, securing it to protect his face, then placed on two gauntlets with blades from his back.
The blades on the gauntlets that the assailant wielded lit up with a base chakra colored glow. The man was capable of imbuing his weapons with a cloak of chakra, it seemed.
"Meiko, please do not fight these opponents. It would be the smartest to let Kiyomi and Hanasaku fight them." Waiso suggested.
"Why both of us? I could take them out myself, they probably did not know I was here, to begin with." Hanasaku scratched her head.
"It's too dangerous, as powerful as you are, we cannot take risks. You do not know their abilities yet." Waiso insisted.
"It's fine!" Meiko grunted out. "I'll fight. One of you can join me if you want but this fight is something I have to take care of!"
"B-But…" Waiso was growing frustrated.
"Are you trying to say that I can't!?" Meiko growled with rage after turning back. Waiso took a pair of frightened steps back. He was not expecting such a violent and almost personal reaction.
"It is better that Meiko does this, trust me." Kiyomi patted the shoulder of her scared teammate. The blonde turned her bright blue eyes at her mentor as if asking for permission to step up. With Chestnut Hanasaku nodding, she got it.
Kiyomi did not rush to take her place beside her friend. She wanted to give Meiko some time to think up about how she would attack, as she would undoubtedly want to go on the offensive here. It was not as bland as just a matter of wasted food. That much was obvious, that man, whoever he was, was a wall, which Meiko wanted and needed to overcome. It was not like she did not need to observe her opponents carefully and make her own plan either…
"Don't get reckless now. I'm here to help you out so don't make my job too hard." Kiyomi muttered only for her partner to hear.
"Right. I'm glad it was you. We've trained together before, we work together just fine." Meiko nodded, never for a moment dropping the seriousness of her expression.
By dragging her arm over the seals and weaving a hand seal over them, Meiko unsealed a wooden buckler. After letting the tool slip from her hand and grabbing it by the edge, the blacksmith flung it like a frisbee at her opponent. The female assailant swung her talisman wielding arms around, letting a pair of them slip from her grip and light up in mid-air. A ground-splitting jet of rock pillars walled her partner from the incoming shield before turning at Meiko. A disgusting and metallic noise of reeling string informed Kiyomi that her partner was fine when Meiko recalled her buckler using the steel wire attached to it, almost invisible unless one knew what to look for.
Using the buckler, Meiko protected herself against the blunt blow of rocks coming from underground in the odd shape. Seeing the chakra-imbued gauntlet opponent charging at Meiko from behind, Kiyomi weaved a pair of hand seals of her own.
"Earth Style: Travelling Rock Pillar!" she yelled out letting out a formation of rock of her own wall Meiko off from the rushing attacker. By the time that the attacking man split the rock into bits and sent Kiyomi's wall crumbling down, Meiko had escaped the compromised situation to safety.
These two were formidable. But, then again, Meiko knew this when she challenged the man who was capable of something she wanted so very much but was unable to pull off.