Weak lights flickered in a dark room of a castle located somewhere deep in the eastern Land of Fire. An old pile of bricks and pretty much nothing else. Every other piece of material was located on the inside and could have been considered a luxury. The stony collection of repulsive walls and brutish teeth of cinderblocks was located in a pocket surrounded by forested mountains. The natural contrast of highs and lows allowed the castle the small luxury of camouflage to an overseeing eye that knew not exactly what it was looking for and where.
Just about the only parts of the castle with any soul to them were the bird statues decorating just about any crevice or corner that the lazy architect managed to stuff them into. Griffons on the frontal towers, magpies littering the ramparts, and a six-winged vulture proudly displayed its preying nature while the claws of its four frontal legs served as a portcullis protecting the entrance.
The castle interior was a little more welcoming. A carpet of red and gold rested on most pathways and corridors, even those in the lower, endless dungeon labyrinths. Even the rooms each had a square cut-out of the red and gold carpet placed in the center whereas in every pathway the covering bled freely. A young man ventured through the corridors, meeting no servants or guards beside the inhospitable exterior of the structure and the slightly creepy landscape, devoid of any fauna usually inhibiting the areas of southern Land of Fire.
Jagaimo stepped under a doorway leading into faintly lit bedroom even by the standards of the stony fort that lacked any lighting save for the few torches and candles and the natural sunlight that at times found a crack to bleed through inside the fortifications. The young man wanted to wait for the owner of the castle to show themselves, his heart was thumping the whole time, damn… He couldn't help it, if he was to die in the most horrific way possible, he may as well have gotten it over with.
"I failed. We didn't get the confirmation but a whole week after the Summit and… Nothing. The ninja system is still kicking." Jagaimo spoke up.
A pair of red stars lit up in the farther corners of the room, breaking through not only the shadows that the owner of said lights rested in but also the shroud that covered the bed that he was sitting on. Jagaimo could hear long and bony legs slipping out from under silken covers, a suede coat moving up the long and drained, skeletal body while a pale finger bent out from the shade and into the beam of sunlight coming through one of the openings to the outside. Nothing but a murder hole to fire arrows through.
A tiny magpie landed onto the edge of the murder hole, the little cutest thing bent its head about in infinite curiosity of the two, crimson twinkles in the shadowy contrast of the sunny day that the bird was enjoying beforehand. It was like two bloody rubies, the bird's favorite and as of yet unclaimed treasure. The little thing hopped forward, flapping its little wings just a couple of times as the distance between the murder hole and the elongated, bony finger was covered in a single bound.
"Oh well…" an eerie, cadaverous face turned right at Jagaimo, as the gleaming, ruby eyes penetrated him with but their gaze, the young man froze in fear. "Our takeover was never to be a peaceful one…"
A chill ran down Jagaimo's back while he saw the magpie blast through the murder hole with all its tiny might. The absolute horror emanating from the awakened Bird of Death, the owner of this castle, was mightier than any instincts or desires that the magpie may have fostered. Until the day of its end, it would never crave for anything else ever again because it had faced true horror and swooped away from its clutch with its life.
The Kirigakure street rat had counted on dying, dying quickly after having failed this man would have almost been preferable to living in his servitude and debt for years on end. Dying… Dying just so that this crappy feeling of standing in this man's presence could end… No. Sadly, unless Jagaimo managed to obtain the guts needed to let his own slip out all over the fancy carpet and the cold, stone floor, he'd be doomed to live as long as the Bird of Death has some use of him.
A kunai knife bounced off of a wooden target, only managing to move the darned, floppy thing back from the kinetic energy it packed without sticking into the board. Maybe the angle was off, maybe the strength was too great or too weak to plant the blade into the target. Sometimes this still happened… Not every time, Mana had hit the last three targets just fine but sometimes, seemingly completely at random, she'd flunk it.
"Wow, that must be shameful…" Kouta teased the magician before taking a huge gulp from his shake. "Cheer up, it's not like you're a ninja or anything…"
"None of us would be ninja if I didn't…" Mana grumbled, because of her tone and her mumbling over her words one after another in a barely intelligible manner she couldn't get through half of the sentence before Kouta interrupted her for clarification.
"What was that?"
"Nothing… Your turn." The magician sighed. Kouta pecked the top of Mana's head while the two changed spots. He never used to be so daring and physical while showing his affections, his father's character must have been rubbing off on the Jugo, the two have been spending loads of time training together these last couple of years. While it was something unexpected that the young woman had noticed in her boyfriend, she kind of liked it about him…
Kouta spun the kunai, sticking his index finger into the ring at the end and spinning the knife like a little buzzsaw before launching it at a blinding velocity right at the target. One moment the knife was buzzing in his hand, the other it was firmly planted into the wooden board, outracing, it seemed, even the thud it made upon impact.
"Can you… Teach me that a little, maybe?" Mana rubbed the back of her elbow, rolling up the sleeve of her blazer and her shirt while doing so. She didn't like asking for something like this, not of Kouta, not during the time as intimate as this.
"Like… Now?" Kouta rubbed the back of his messy and dark hair, making an even greater chaos of the hectic hairdo he usually atop of his head. "After all this time?"
"I… I really need it," Mana mumbled it out. "It's a part of a plan I'm making, a pretty important plan. That's why I was so glad you asked to take me to knife throwing for our date. You know I'd kill at Kingyo Sukui."
Kouta sighed. "I don't think I'm that good at it, really. It's kind of a practice thing, if you need a more technical advice, you should ask a ninja specializing in weaponry. I mean… It's not like you'll die if you can't throw a knife for a perfect score, right?"
"I… I think it is." Mana looked down, then away. "Let's go to the Training Grounds. I'll show you…"
Konoha had changed a little over these three years. The technical advancements and the booming modernization had changed the village's architecture to where it was effortless to notice. Before every building in the village used to be built of wood, frames and all. That way, if they were toppled down and destroyed, rebuilding it would be easy. Quite literally, the entire village could have crumbled down like a house of cards hit by a brick and rebuilt over a handful of weeks.
Now the buildings had steel bars and support beams and all the fancy advancements in architecture. It was like a breathing testament, a promise from the Hokage that the village would not fall, that the Honda incident would not repeat ever again.
And yet, despite all the changes, the training grounds barely changed one bit. Some more grounds were added to the massive field of training grounds: a barren, sandy wasteland with rocky structures filled with holes from the Inuzuka clansmen that loved to drill holes in all the rocky mountains using their signature clan techniques. A more urban training ground with a handful of simple residential buildings surrounding it, for the more purposeful and better-defined training sessions, some more refined and better protected full-out modern village environments that one could have found in any of the massive ninja villages, a great handful of emulated natural landscapes to train in.
Despite that, nothing beat the classic that never seemed to change – Training Grounds No. 3.
Despite the fact that the Jugo showed little interest in coming here, during a date of all things, once he entered the Third Training Ground he was taken aback by the memories that the place and how little it had changed filled him with. Memories of rather painful survival training drills, memories of sparring and training until utter exhaustion, past the point of logic. Maybe it was a form of Stockholm syndrome but… Painful memories like these invited a certain flare of warmth in their remembrance. Almost like one longed for them, despite hating every moment of them at the time.
Without wasting too much time on nostalgia herself, Mana stepped out and performed a rather sizeable array of hand seals. Whereas usually, the unnatural speed at which ninja weaved them seemed like a blur, when someone as skilled at making hand seals as Mana did it, the molding time was almost non-existent, whereas now a noticeable lag and a blurry mess of hand seals still busted through. The magician thrust her hand forward, almost like intending to show off a seal on her palm.
Kouta blinked once, expecting to see something cool but looking slightly surprised when nothing appeared to happen for a blink. Massive surges of Lightning Release chakra erupted from Mana, splitting off into thunderbolts and lightning aura sparking off from her. Had Mana thrown a punch with this much lightning chakra compressed and surrounding her, she'd bust and melt any material, no matter how dense or thick. The energy surging from her at that moment was something that shocked even Kouta and made the young man step back a pair of times and cover up his face as the intense light emanating from the magician threatened to blind him if he stayed exposed to it for too long.
"Supreme…" Mana uttered through great effort. Despite having honed this jutsu ever since recovering from the injuries that the monster Honda left her with, she still struggled with it and it was not a technique she could use with great practical use in a heated battle. It was more of a benchmark of her abilities. All the lightning chakra channeled into a singular sphere right around her extended palm, with a gut-wrenching, thunderous sound the sphere expanded as more chakra flowed through and through it, expanding the sphere multiple times.
"Magic…" Mana uttered once again, the sphere burst, finally unable to maintain its shape and stable state with so much chakra flowing through it. The thundering sounds emanating through the training grounds and beyond to seemingly no endpoint, the rumbling ground beneath her feet, all testaments of the magician's lack of total control and mastery over the technique. The darting off beams of lightning formed into a dozen sword-shaped constructs.
"Pierce!" the magician exhaled, with a final burst of chakra, the shape of the lightning swords became more refined and controlled. The chakra she put into the technique finally stopped ripping the world around her apart and Mana managed to contain the leaking out fundamental forces that held the entire universe together inside the swords that floated around her, leashed by thunderbolts that connected to the slight aura of Lightning Release chakra that still emanated around the magician.
In a blink, just as suddenly as the technique spiraled out of control, it was all gone.
"That's… Shape and Nature Manipulation all at once… It's an A-Rank technique." Kouta shook in disbelief, talking to himself while he witnessed the current point of the magician's journey.
"Maybe, but it does not matter if I can't use it. Supreme Magic Pierce isn't like your techniques, I can't just fling them at the general direction and expect results. I need precision, some real brain surgery type of thing." Mana explained.
"Hmmm… It didn't seem like you need to be that precise. It seemed to me like you can just fling them at the enemy and they'd get skewered, honestly. With how much chakra you've managed to compress into those swords, they'd like murder just about everything I've ever met on discharge…" Kouta pouted. He had a point, the amount of chakra that Mana packed into this technique was insane, hitting even an advanced ninja with something like this would have threatened them with the endgame. Regardless, Kouta did not know the exact use to which Mana created this technique. It was a very important part of her plan, the final fight she was planning out for three whole years and a precision strike was an integral part of that sequence of planned moves.
"Please?" Mana made the puppy eyes. Kouta was known for dropping all of his weaponry upon hitting a wall of puppy eyes.
"Fine… I guess we could train for a while, but… I'm not standing at the other end of that." The Jugo exclaimed.
It hurt asking Kouta this instead of something more normal for their first date in a while. It wasn't like he was the only person capable of helping Mana with precision training but… What other options did Mana have? Asking someone else for this and alienate the young man she loved even further?
Kouta ended up enjoying this more than the magician had initially thought. He did have the blood of Jugo coursing through his veins after all so perhaps it was not something to be surprised of. He really took the training seriously and the two managed to combine their expressions of fondness to each other with training by staying in close contact, whether when Mana placed her chin atop of Kouta's shoulder as an attempt to psyche him out or when Kouta physically positioned Mana's body into a perfect throwing stance.
A tall and strapping man approached a small vendor selling newspapers and magazines. Despite choosing to inform the surrounding folks about his ninja status, the three-meter, majestic specimen of sinew and physical human perfection did not wear the typical Konoha ninja uniform. He stood in a remarkably short line consisting of an old lady in front of him and himself. The eyes of the majestic one graced the feeble and aged plague of society in front of him, just short enough to fit under his foot.
"Oh… Jeez…" the old lady croaked, browsing her things for the spare change that it cost to pay up for her crossword magazine. "Young man, could you help me count? I can't tell the 200 ryo coin from the 500…"
The superhuman display of victory in the genetic dice roll leaned up to the old lady with his eyebrow raised, the man's curly, shoulder-length dark hair slipped all over his face and his flaring, violet colored eyes. The old lady leaned back and uttered a feeble "Oh my," noting the dismissive facial gestures of the man behind her in the line, his was the face that failed to believe in the fact that he was just asked for help of someone who was of no use and just slowed down other people trying to make something of their lives.
A decisive thud preceded the visual of the godly individual raising his foot and slamming it against the old lady's face. The poor, decrepit thing was so short and hunched over that the man had to raise his foot up vertically, then bend it downwards just so his foot could properly position itself in the desired, sweet jackpot and push the old lady away in the most demeaning way possible. Despite the highly improper behavior and the brutish manner of reply to the desperate plead of help by the gray woman, after the mischievous response she received she did not fall or fly backward but instead gently rolled back, flipping and rolling about like a barrel set to roll on a line of mattresses before hitting the wall.
"Help? Why would I, Hanshin, help you?" the improper physical demigod stroke a pose that, in his mind, best showed off the natural gifts that he was given but also perfected through grueling and meaningful training. He then hit a perfect 180 turn and scattered a handful of ryo on the stand of the magazine vendor, winking at the confused salesman. "Give Hanshin this month's "Icha-Icha-Boy", a thinking and strapping man's publication!"
A myriad of flashing colors alerted all of the participants in this most bizarre scene, the exemplary specimen of all the best that manhood had to offer turned a full 180 again, only to reach into the pocket he could have reached into anyway and remove a pager from it. One that called for the man to report to the Konohagakure Administration as fast as possible.
"Never mind that…" the Adonis lamented, making a pose comparable to that of a fainting maiden who was just told that her beloved childhood friend had died in the war. "It appears that Hanshin shall not be able to enjoy the hills and ridges of another man's sweat-work…"
"Are you sure? The magazine's right here, you already gave me the money. All you need is just take it…" the short and pudgy magazine salesman scratched the back of his greasy, balding head.
"Hmmm… You strike a tempting bargain, you devil, you…" Hanshin smirked with a wink on top, turning almost completely around his axis on his higher body and pointing at the shorty with both of his index fingers. Without uttering another word but breaking his extremely photogenic pose, the example of male excellence swiped the erotic magazine and strut his way towards the northern districts of the village.