Mana sipped on some cold cocoa. It felt gooey and bitter in its current temperature but somehow it felt fitting. It was just as difficult to swallow and just as punishing as the news that kept the young woman awake and sitting in the reception room of the inn, sipping on the hot cocoa that the kind yet rather silent receptionist of the inn had made for her.
Judging by how reserved and minding their own business these people were, it felt unlikely that the old man would have made Mana cocoa had it not been the part of the deal and, based on the fact that the old man sheltered a pair of locals fleeing from the blizzard outside, he was likely only active at this time of night because he was working overnight that day.
The magician heard a door open on the second floor. The tired and used up wood that served as a barrier between the two floors bellowed in pain that the boots treading them caused through the sheer pressure of the total mass they were carrying. Mana missed the days when she could not immediately tell just who had just turned active and decided to walk downstairs in the middle of the night. There was no longer any mystery, no more detective work or reading the way that the footsteps sounded.
Then again, judging by how mellow the steps were, how eager the man walking must have felt to seem like a big and sure of himself man but felt like anything but deep inside, making his steps as soft as that of a kitten before the master of those steps squashed the instinct and created an act in each individual step, forcing their foot down to yet another bellowing, yet another creak.
"Can't sleep?" Yushijin mumbled out with a strong tone. The tone of his voice implied more a sense of confusion rather than a genuine need to know, ultimately creating the impression that the question was rhetorical.
"It is tough to sleep…" just like the soft and a bit moldy buns from before, the magician bit the last end of the sentence she had first visualized off. It just seemed less of a hassle that way as it denied the team leader the information that may have caused said hassle.
"I assumed that you would take the news badly. When one can make these sorts of predictions about one's character, it means that they know that person." Yushijin somehow mustered up a tired smile. From the way it looked, the leader of Team Fir was not losing sleep because he wasn't tired. That confused the magician a little.
It was a little bit strange seeing Yushijin with just a sleeveless shirt. Without his massive sword weighing in from behind the young man, he almost looked bare. Sometimes when Mana left or lost her sealing hat she felt bare too, which was why she had drawn that comparison. The swordsman must have left his lumbering blade back in the room – he hadn't left for good nor did he leave for long.
"So… What's making you lose your beauty sleep?" Yushijin sat near Mana, the receptionist glared at the young man, questioning him with just a look if he wanted anything that the employee could have provided him with. Yushijin remained oblivious to that question. He still looked as if he had not gotten used to the way that people around these parts communicate with each other.
"You just hit it head-on. Just leave it at that, no need to delve further." Mana sighed, placing the cold cocoa with just a handful of sips left in the cup back on the table. The bleak clouds of lingering sadness had not yet vacated Mana's sky.
"Any chance you're willing to tag me out as the leader?" Yushijin cut it short and straight, it was a habit with this one.
"I didn't sit out of the opportunity to lead the team because I felt pity. You were at the time, and still are, the best option to lead the team. I have neither the skill nor the passion to lead. Things always get too personal with me, it's not a good quality for a leader." Mana replied with a dull and longing tone.
"That's a strange attitude for a chuunin…" the Konoha swordsman grinned, as Mana noticed with the edge of her glance, her companion shared her tendency to hide behind the cover of her long hair when she wanted to barricade away inside herself. In a similar notion, Yushijin's hair sank away the upper parts of his face, most importantly, the window to his soul, up until the point they got rarer and split apart the farther down they fell.
"I didn't become a chuunin because I always wanted to lead. Truthfully, I find these parts of the job, let alone managing my own team of genin as a jounin, terrifying. I don't think anyone likes the entirety of their job. You know when you've hit the nail on the head when the good parts outweigh the bad, that is all." Mana shrugged.
"I see. I don't understand what you see to gain in the career of a ninja – a chuunin must be able to lead a team, a jounin manages a team of Academy graduates, the Hokage leads the entire village. The rest of the rise is all about leadership. Then again, if it is better to be adequate while you dislike leadership or to accept it and fail at it, remains to be seen." Yushijin admitted. The magician noticed similar notes of disappointment and somberness in Yushijin's voice.
"I don't care about becoming Hokage. Even if I ever became a person worthy of that seat, I'd refuse a thousand times out of the thousand I would be asked to take the position… You, on the other hand, I feel are selling yourself short." Mana shrugged.
"I led my team into a fight they had no right to be in. I gambled with your lives for a quarrel completely unrelated to the mission objective. Then I lost all of my teammates in an instant and had to gather you guys one by one, hoping that nothing bad happened to you because if it had, I'd have never forgiven myself." Yushijin was getting worked up. Despite hating the noise of it, Mana thought that cutting loose a little was good for him. As if conjured up, a yawn from Yushijin validated the magician's thoughts.
"I don't know. I think you compromised, Kouta wanted a fight, I was starting uneasy about just passing through myself. Two out of four teammates not being onboard is just a bad board. Even if you had to take detours, your choice to get everybody onboard was justified. Whether it was correct or not, I think the judgment is too subjective to call, as are most things, as I'm noticing lately." Mana said. In her current state she'd have thought to be the least willing and able to comfort her team leader, or anyone at all for that matter, and yet, it was at her own most forlorn that Mana found comforting the easiest.
All she needed to say was what she herself wanted to hear from anyone but herself.
Yushijin let the words linger with a drawn-out pause. Staring at a blank point in the room, then switching to the fire crackling fire. Its blazing light was quite attractive and hypnotic, perfect for deep and meaningful considerations at such a point of the night.
"I'm… I'm trying to make what I'm about to ask sound less selfish but… I don't think I can. Maybe it's possible but… Never was one to bullshit with the double meanings of words. Do you think you could tell me what's troubling you, I mean what's really troubling you right now?" Yushijin asked out of the blue.
"How is that selfish?" Mana turned at the fellow shinobi. In her confused state, her expression had managed to let some surprise gleam through the dim and dreary that she's been working with the whole night.
"A good leader needs to help his teammates. Make sure they're "onboard" as you worded it." Yushijin closed his eyes and took a deep breath in. The way in which the Konoha swordsman saw the world around him always provided with some curious insights into how the light of life could be bent and broken after passing through the right prism.
"In my experience, I've only found one way to make whatever plagues I'm under go away." Mana picked up her detestably cold cup of cocoa and downed it. The expression on her face right after would have made one believe she'd downed a similarly sized cup of sake. What she was about to suggest was dumb enough that Mana wanted she'd have been drinking sake instead…
"I'm not sure I like where I think this is going but… Please continue." Yushijin said in a state of agitation.
"The only thought that makes me move away from the dread of my past failures is the necessity to not cause new ones." Mana extended her hands, reaching them over Yushijin's hair and gently letting them move it to open up a clear path to the forehead of the young man, at which point, the magician placed her right palm onto Yushijin's face.
A sense of dread and loss of balance, the maddening sensation of aimless falling and the natural terror of vanished sensory input. All of these were natural to Mana but they could not have been for Yushijin. Perhaps she should have explained her point, her actions better but just as much as the young woman could have used her friend not resisting her mental interrogation attempt, she needed the practice at this skill she failed more than she succeeded in.
A violent jerk threw Mana at the edge of her sensory deprived tunnel. Her face bashed through what seemed a falling wall of liquid and into an endless void of starlight outside. Through immense mental force, the magician forced her mind to streamline and use the tunnel of transference to finish the trip inside Yushijin's mental fort. She expected instinctual opposition but what she did not expect was for Yushijin's fight to be so strong and violent.
He must have not only realized what Mana was up to, but he was also actively trying to oppose it and doing so with all of his heart put into the effort. That was why the magician so nearly got thrown out the mental railway and into a week-long migraine following an unsuccessful and shameful end to the interrogation session.
Mana's feet landed soft, ripples of sapphire highlights made the space-reflecting lake that the magician and the other party of the interrogation stood on stand out a bit more in between the two sides of the coin. The entirety of what appeared like deep space was just a mental realm that rested in between the totality of the bosom of a cosmic, feminine figure, textured as space itself and floating in the shapeless black void and her cupped palms.
"We're not in my mind…" Yushijin stated the obvious, inspecting the curious sights that Mana was showing him.
"No. We're in mine," Mana explained. "This is the heart of my mental universe, the core of my mind. The first time I started exploring it, this weird cosmic brat was just a single star, now she's a whole… Cluster, I guess."
"What does it mean?" Yushijin wondered.
"I don't know," Mana admitted.
"What do you mean you don't know? It's your mind, isn't it?" Yushijin spoke with a much brighter tone, now that he realized that his mind was not the one being probed.
"One thing you learn about the human mind when studying intelligence is that not everything about people is rational. Things don't always make sense. A lot of things do but sometimes the most fundamental things are emotion based or they just plain do not dovetail." Mana grinned while looking up and ahead, up until the very edges of her mental fort which was beginning to become larger than one's entire scope. Soon enough, all visitors of her mind would see would be a universe, unaware that there's a shape to the space madness.
"It's a nice trick, almost distracted me from the fact you've tried to probe my mind," Yushijin admitted.
"Magic is the art of distraction, then again, distraction wasn't my intention," Mana said. "You see, that whole ordeal with you making what you consider questionable choices just doesn't click with me. You've fought through that, faced opponents stronger than any broken man could survive, let alone excel against. It was not until you've seen Chiya-san's illusion that you've become shut-in by your alleged failures as a leader."
Yushijin stayed silent throughout. He chose to stonewall Mana's words which only suggested heavily to the magician that they may have hit close to home.
"As I've said, the only way to distract me, do some leader magic of your own, so to say, is to make me focus on helping someone else. I'm offering you a trade, you experience my nightmares exploring my mental fort, in return, I get to see the illusion that's caused you so much pain." Mana extended her hand.
"It won't scare you. It will only confuse you…" Yushijin dismissed it by softly pushing it aside with the back of his own hand.
"That's why you will be there with me. Help me understand." Mana said, raising her hand back up. She met Yushijin's stare, filled to the brim with consideration and heavy pondering if he should take the magician up on her offer.
Yushijin grabbed her hand, it was sudden and unexpected. The journey was shaky and full of ethereal and disturbing noises. Sounds of a broken, woodwind instrument. It was no clean and driven melody – it was a slur. A trippy and monstrous tune that served no purpose nor had any artistic meaning. From rising shrouds and smoke, formed walls of green, woolen texture covered with checkered burgundy. It was no room, it was a corridor.
The corridor extended onward like a snake, coiling upward in a steep, wooden staircase. Mana felt an innate urge to run onward. Just when she realized that urge, she noticed an inhumanly slim and long leg disappearing behind the wall of the rising staircase. The magician turned back, something felt wrong. She was being watched, something was chasing after her, just like she wanted to run after the slender giant that ran up the stairs.
It was not the abysmal tune that made the magician feel uneasy, it was the slowly surfacing figure behind her of a woman with a shadowy face and almost cartoonish, round, black and white eyes and a mouth that molded with flesh, the only freedom that oxygen found to enter this figure's airways came through the tears in the skin membrane that covered her face. Just before the magician could see the wrinkled visage of her pursuer up close in the flannel corridor, the whole thing tore to bits, just like a wallpaper that was torn apart in a scornful action.
"That's how you remember your family?" Mana exclaimed through all the trouble that witnessing that confusing chaos caused for her breathing.
"You said it best. Not everything about people is rational." Yushijin shrugged. "That's my mental fort, I guess… For better or worse. My package, my nightmare…"
This simple notion of shrugging shoulders showed acceptance and inner strength of the kind of a person that may have been able to help Mana deal with her inner demons. Or, perhaps, none of their demons could have been helped with, but living with them could have been made easier by simply sharing them with souls self-loathing and choked by their self-placed responsibilities hard enough to go through them together with somebody else.
"I guess I owe you my end of the bargain…" Mana stated as a fact. No smiling, no excitement about what she was about to share. Yushijin was strong in ways that she had not realized, the least she could have done was to satisfy the need for a rivalry that the Konoha swordsman weaved and tangled her into. She needed to be strong with him, strong enough to live through her worst fears and accept them, even if overcoming them at that single moment was impossible.
"There's no need to pack your things just yet. I've booked a couple of nights for us here." Yushijin surprised Team Fir the next morning.
"I know we don't have a time limit or anything but… Aren't we sort of in a hurry? Isn't the tribe plaguing the Land of Snow settlements hurting the locals? Every day we spend sitting tight is a day we aren't hunting the tribe that can hurt a bunch of people tomorrow." Kouta shrugged shortly after looking at Mana who was sulking nearby. While the Juugo was not the most observant person around, even he noticed the fact that the magician barely did anything of note and just kept on staring at her toes the whole morning.
"Maybe. Or the same tribe can attack this very settlement and save us the work. Either way, we can gamble and try to hit the right settlement, predicting their attack or we can scope the places out. Hear out some rumors, what the locals know, hit our enemy in a location we know they could be in with all the possible information already at our disposal." Yushijin voiced the reasons for his decision.
"It would be great to know a thing or two about the enemy for once." Erumo shrugged and nodded in agreement. Then again, whenever Yushijin brought something up, the trapster tended to agree with him on most problems.
"Exactly. Which is why I need you two to gather that intelligence." Yushijin crossed his arms over his chest after referring to Kouta and Erumo, closed his eyes and turned his expression to stone. He did so as if knowing full well the eyebrows that this would raise.
"Wait… Us? That seems so… Random." Kouta cocked his head sideways in confusion like a puppy.
"Just because you can't understand my reasons, it does not make them random," Yushijin replied with the strictness of a true leader in his voice. "Judging from what I heard yesterday, you had moderate success making these oddly mannered people talk. That's a moderate amount more than any success any of us had. Booking this room and finding this inn was a nightmare. Erumo is also the best out of us four at gathering intelligence, granted, I'm not too familiar with the extent of Mana's skill but…"
The three looked at the magician, waiting for the young woman to object or to question Yushijin's assumptions but the young woman continued to mope about for a brief second. She did notice how silent the room had gotten all of a sudden and her sulking face changed to a more surprised one. Quickly, the magician tumbled over the social hurdles and found some words in the pockets of her coat.
"Sure. Isn't Erumo sort of a specialist in that field? That makes her leagues above what I'm capable of." Mana replied with a bland and raspy version of her own voice.
"And, I assume, the two of you have tasks of your own that will help us fulfill our mission objective and serve to our mutual benefit as a team?" Kouta pouted his lips at his team leader while raising his eyebrow comically high up.
"Well… In a way. We will be training." Yushijin shrugged.
"Training?" it was now Erumo that questioned Yushijin's plan. She did not sound opposed to his plan for the day but she was curious and when people as intelligent and crafty as Erumo were curious, they asked questions.
"That's right. You see, from what little we know of our enemy, they are very primitive in their skillset. They are most likely to be using a physical fighting style, meaning they would be Kouta's equals in terms of a match-up. Erumo might be able to trip them up, to look at it vaguely, but she is not a combat-type ninja and prefers a more supportive role. I would like to have a ready ace that we could rely on and that would maximize our chances for success. Against an opponent such as this tribe, I'd wager on genjutsu being that sort of an ace." Yushijin said.
Neither Erumo nor Kouta liked what they heard. Kouta's mouth opened and closed in rapid succession, gobbling something up like a fish looking for some water to breathe in the fisherman's boat but he couldn't find any flaws in the team leader's plans that he could expose. Just fifteen minutes later the room turned much more silent and Mana found herself standing in front of her training partner.
"I don't remember if I ever promised to teach you the fundamentals of temporal illusions, or not, but I might need what someone as skilled as you can do with that class of jutsu…" Yushijin stated, moving his massive sword off of his back and letting its tip slam into the frozen lawn, digging up a foot-long crater from its sheer weight alone. "Even if you won't have the time to create a new technique or to learn time-perception manipulation right now, you might catch on to some helpful principles to polish your current illusions."