Mana hated running off on Kouta, especially so when she hadn't quite been the ideal dating partner and when they had to substitute the more casual dating activities for training. Even if Kouta ended up enjoying it more than initially expected, in the end, it still felt really scummy of her to pull that and just disappear. Still, the summon from the Konoha Administration sounded rather urgent. It's been a while since Mana received a term of appearing as soon as possible to receive her objectives along with the summon. Not to mention one so tight…
A combo of familiar chakra signatures hit her field of sensory, as much as Mana would have liked to say her hellos to Kiyomi and Meiko, she should have probably just hurried on ahead and seen what Lord Seventh had to say so urgently. Why were those two hanging out together anyway? Usually, when they hung out they at the very least invited Mana out as well.
Talk about bad timing. Just on the day when Mana scheduled her comeback magic show… If the mission was this urgent to be taken off the village's hands, it likely had a very tight deadline. Those had the nasty habit of not leaving any time for side activities like magic shows and entertaining the village.
Kiyomi and Meiko were moving in a rather odd trajectory… Mana stopped on top of a transmission tower and looked at the direction far behind her. Where her friends were, had the magician chosen to take a huge, diagonal nosedive in that direction. The two were not hurrying but they almost certainly were headed towards the Administration as well. Could it be? No. If they were issued the same mission, they'd surely have picked up the pace…
Mana blitzed away, appearing by the Administration's doorstep almost instantly now that no buildings or peaceful civilians laid in her way. When the whole journey was just to dash forward and she did not have to mind what's in her way. Inside the village, she could let loose a little, while the distances that required traveling weren't all that impressive, there were no ninja that could have picked up on a high-velocity target and gotten curious or traps laid out all over the place. The sensory units in the Hokage Mountain may have picked up a spike in Mana's chakra activity but they would not pay it any heed, just a ninja on a rush to get somewhere fast, that was all it was…
Usually, the magician would not have registered a presence of an unfamiliar chakra signature as anything of note, the Administration was buzzing with people whom Mana did not know nor had a chance to be around their chakra signatures to get fond of them and familiarize with their feel. This one… This one burned and blazed, it was massive and it was… Rotten. No. That wasn't it. It was black but it was not evil. This was such an odd sensation, such a peculiar combination of mixed feelings that the chakra put out that Mana stopped in her tracks and blanked out for a second.
"Hey! Mana's here!" Meiko's voice broke the magician out of her trance. "Don't tell me Team Hokage's back together!"
"Maybe she'll be leading our squad, now that she's a big and fancy chuunin and all…" Kiyomi teased the magician.
Meiko wrapped her elbow around Mana and handled her around as if the blacksmith was wrestling an alligator before removing the magician's hat, placing it on top of her own long, red locks and rubbing the top of magician's head enough to cause irritation and a little pain but nowhere close to hurting the young woman seriously.
"I have no problem with Mana leading us, she's pretty brainy after all!" the blacksmith smiled with her trademark, carefree and almost monkey-like grin.
"You guys are here on a mission too? That doesn't necessarily mean we're on the same mission. Mine has a tight deadline which I'm… Missing…" Mana just realized before turning to the direction of the Hokage office.
"Yeah, ours has one too, that's why we figured you'd be leading us. The big man wouldn't just let us out on something important like that without a higher ranking leader to watch over us and, face it, we just work together like a charm…" Kiyomi shrugged. As much as Mana's instincts yelled at her to hurry up and ask the two to let her talk to Lord Seventh first, given the tight term she was issued, the magician just relented and followed the short trek upstairs with her friends. Closer to that dark but oddly neutral-feeling blaze…
What a peculiar chakra signature. It was dark and all-reaching, it spread and attempted to cover up everything around it but it did not incinerate or devour that which it reached. It merely desired to encompass it, as if to own it by imprinting on it and then protecting it with its superheated, pitch-black might.
"You feel kind of odd, all spaced out and stuff…" Meiko noticed, leaning back on her hands as if attempting to stretch out and rest on an air-bed.
"You goof, Mana's had to deal with that creepy Honda thing three years ago! Messed up stuff like that changes people… Especially those that think that everything that's wrong around them is their fault." Kiyomi looked at Mana with empathy in her softened eyes. "I should have been here, loads of Yamanaka paid for their devotion to the village and its people with their lives. Some clan heiress I turned out to be…"
"I would have liked to punch that asshole too." Meiko got at least half-serious. "Someone who's all monstrous and then has the gall to whine and punish other people for it just grinds my gears. Got pretty pissy when I first heard about it. Kept nagging Hokage-sensei to turn back and head to Konoha as fast as we could to check it out when we first heard about it but… By that point, the whole thing was over anyway."
"Please, come in!" Kuribira Mikapen, the Lord Seventh's assistant, invited the three young women inside. She had heard their voices outside the office, no doubt. The door to the Seventh's office was oddly open already as if the man was waiting for someone and quite welcoming to the arrival of the said group. The impression that the Team Hokage was back together strengthened almost immediately within Mana's gut.
"It's good that you all came here as soon as you did." Lord Seventh nodded to himself while following the trio of kunoichi entering his open office with a hint of polite hesitation. The man was almost as polite as someone who hadn't summoned the three with a term of appearance, suggesting a necessity for haste. With those words, the man confirmed the fact that Kiyomi and Meiko were also summoned.
"If you two were summoned, you'd think you two would have hurried here at least a little…" Mana squinted at her two friends. Kiyomi completely ignored the remark whereas Meiko grinned and snickered, choosing to laugh the implication of irresponsibility on her part off.
"We got here just barely later than you did. What were you, on a date or something?" Kiyomi whispered back.
Mana looked down and then aside shyly. From how flustered the magician got all of a sudden, Kiyomi smiled as if she'd just discovered a motherlode of all treasures to draw jokes and teasing from. Even if her reaction was in no way up to her control, Mana felt like she'd regret betraying her dating status to her best friends like that.
"Hmph… These three, huh…" a tall and picturesque man noted, turning back at the three kneeling young women before the trio were excused and told to stand up at ease with an effortless hand gesture of Lord Seventh.
"I know this guy's like… Twice our age but… He's so HOT!" Kiyomi's signals beamed through Mana's mind. Mental communication appeared to be almost effortless for the Yamanaka heiress this time, no hand seals, not even a twitch in her eye while initiating. Complete mastery and control over it, as long as the target was unaware of the incoming communication or welcoming it… These two must have improved by leaps and bounds over these years, perhaps even more than Mana did.
Mana had to admit, she hadn't felt warm bubbling quite like this since that time she had met Justicars during the search for the Box of Ultimate Bliss. That time it was supernatural, their Intents were what caused such a violently passionate effect, this time, it was all just the natural gifts of this man. He was tall, not quite a juggernaut in terms of physical build but above decently athletic and fit, the curly, dark hair running down his face, with only his almost royal-looking, violet eyes that were beaming with emotion as if a miniature star was positioned inside them, they penetrated the gloom and the shadow, as well as the black cover of the man's hair and appeared to penetrate to the very soul.
"This mission is one of great importance. I had hoped that you would agree to work with these three. They are ninja of great esteem and the village has invested a lot into their training, they show even more promise than the already remarkable results they've yielded." Seventh praised the three, making Mana pout her lips a bit. She never could just shrug off praise like that. It always made her feel awkward to just stand and take it. She had taken a thousand beatings in the over five years she's been an active ninja and she'd always choose one over a handful of minutes of compliments.
"I thought I'd already told you…" the well-endowed one pointed his finger at the Hokage, turning his body sideways and bending his lower back in while he formed a small but almost artistic curve on his upper back, all just to accentuate his remarkable hips and bottom cheeks. This specimen was so tall that even while he slightly bent his knees for a better-looking pose, he was easily the tallest one in the room.
"Hanshin could do this mission all by himself. If Lord Seventh wishes to send these three with me, that's just a sweet cherry on top, but it won't change a thing. These three will suffice, Hanshin has noted their skill and he will work with them." The demigod declared, pointing his thumb at his face while he struck a confident yet cool smirk for his boss.
"I don't get it, who's Hanshin? Is this guy his manager or something?" Meiko wondered on the mental link. Perhaps it was preferable that she did not share these thoughts aloud, it was a lucky wonder that she was as used to communicating online as she was. This Hanshin fellow appeared like someone with massive ego issues and may have easily taken this the wrong way, if they were to all work together on an important and dangerous mission, it was for the better if they weren't at each other's throats for the duration of it all.
"No, he's referring to himself in the third person," Mana replied.
"Oh, so it has a name, this thing he does… I guess it's normal…" Meiko hummed, letting the final part of her thought linger on.
"It is most definitely not normal… But I'm strangely okay with that…" Kiyomi's thoughts pulsed and gleamed with warm sensations. It was not uncommon for one's thoughts to reflect one's feelings like that, almost like one's tone would when talking vocally, although for them to be this easy to pick up for visitors of a mental link, it would have had to be quite a powerful rush.
"Very well…" Lord Seventh nodded with a polite smile, enjoying Hanshin's confidence and energy even while his "shtick" may have irritated him somewhat, as evidenced by a slight twitch in his eye, only noticeable for a brief second. "Then you three should get yourselves familiar with the mission objective. I am well aware that two of you girls are still genin and this mission is something that a squad of jounin and chuunin would work on, normally, but… We all know you two are well beyond what a genin is capable of. I shall entrust for the two higher ranking ninja in the squad to cover the lapses in judgment and experience that may differentiate you two from actual genin and leave it up to you."
Mikapen picked up three mission files and handed them out to the three kunoichi. The entire file was sealed with a protection seal that had to be undone by a signature sealing technique that would have been immensely complicated had it not required to draw one's blood. It would have taken an A-Rank sealing master ninja to crack into such a protection seal but a genin with blood identified as that of a Konoha ninja could have merely pressed their bleeding thumb to the seal and unlocked it.
The more difficult part of accessing the well-guarded file were the endless protective seals placed upon a bunch of pages of the file, each one of them shrouded certain words with blood-colored, smoky shroud that only covered a small area around each confidential word or sentence. Every page with these seals had to be unlocked, however, these seals were much simpler to work with, compared to the first protective seal and could have been bypassed by any C-Rank ninja without much effort or chakra spent in removing these seals.
For a moment, Mana thought she may have been reading a conspiracy theory or a fictional political novel. Not because of the way that the mission objective was worded within the file in particular, but because she had neither seen nor heard about the small settlement spoken of within the file. Not having heard about a name of a whole settlement was troubling to Mana as a lore and history buff. Then again, anything was possible with settlements being built and disappearing into nothing every couple of years. Anything outside a village wall was as chaotic as the imagination could take one when the word was spoken.
Yordalar was a small settlement of people that have left the Wind Country and obtained some semblance of freedom and political sanctuary inside Fire Country's walls. Something like this immediately raised Mana's suspicions as there did not appear to be any particular reason as to why the Fire Lord may have gone out of his way to potentially piss off the Sheikh or Kage or even the Feudal Lord that these people previously answered to. They may not have been overly involved with the greater politics but they were still lost manpower.
"Can someone explain this to me afterward? All of this is way too confusing…" Meiko's thoughts echoed inside Mana's mind.
"Good old Meiko…" Kiyomi's reply was not too far behind.
"I mean… I've learned to concentrate better, I swear I have, it's just… There are so many words and so many blocks of sentences… All of them related to one another." Meiko groaned internally.
"I know, confusing, right?" Kiyomi teased her friend. "I'm sure Mana can tell us the short version from her notes, right?"
"I'm afraid this is the first time that I hear of this Yordalar." The magician cut it short but honest. "It's kind of scary, really."
"I'm surprised that guy is studying it so accurately." Meiko lifted her eyes up, focusing them at the specimen of masculine perfection that allowed his eyes skim through the contents of the file. Meiko was right, for the arrogant prick that Haishin made out of himself while studying the material for the mission ahead he was serious and composed.
"Hmph… Very well then…" the special jounin declared. It didn't look like his gaze had changed in any way. He was neither excited for the prospect of upcoming violence nor was he annoyed or afraid of it. He looked at the task ahead in a similar manner that a gardener looked at weed with – just a chore to occupy one's afternoon.
"Excuse me, I'm not sure I understand the objective completely." Meiko stepped up in front of the squad leader with a grin. "It has a whole bunch of confusing elements to it and I'm worried I'm going to knock out the wrong person or something."
Hanshin looked down at the relatively tall blacksmith from his impressive height, his eyes appeared to spill boiling water at the young woman. For a split-second, the spark of violence ignited in his eyes and Mana felt almost certain he'd strike the blacksmith but after giving Lord Seventh behind him a second glance, Hanshin settled down and merely brushed the redhead aside. It was not easy to move Meiko when she did not want to be moved so it must have taken considerable effort.
"You're in Hanshin's way. Hanshin's staircase leads straight to heaven and heaven is not a place people like to be delayed getting to." The man pointed his finger up to the ceiling, due to his height, the handsome shinobi easily touched the ceiling just by extending his limb in its direction.
"Wow, what an asshole!" Kiyomi's mind emitted these thoughts like a transmitter signal.
"You three are excused, I hope you can work your problems out by tomorrow morning when you depart." Lord Seventh excused the young women. Kiyomi darted off after Hanshin almost immediately after being excused.
"Hey, hey you!" she yelled in rudeness that was not commonly seen in her. "Don't tell me you won't train with us even once! What kind of a team leader are you?!"
"What are you doing?" Mana sent a warning thought Kiyomi's way. Messing with someone as experienced, high-ranking and volatile as Hanshin may not have been the best idea.
"He offended Meiko, I'm pretty sure, if you looked at it really the wrong way, he kind of groped her, I'm not letting this slide, this is our chance to kick his ass and make him more tolerable for a change." The Yamanaka heiress replied. She must have had a lot of trust in her strength to challenge a special jounin like that.
"Very well, but this is your fight that you are picking. I will have none of it." Mana sighed out loud, even if she was transmitting her speech through Kiyomi's mental link instead of talking.