The humidity felt like a moist cloth smacking in the face and lingering for an uncomfortable period, just long enough for its chilly mop water to run down one's face and drip under one's collar and leave one shivering before one's own body warmed the droplets up to bodily temperature. Once one wiped the wet rag away, another one that was cursed to take its place splat right back into one's face.
Dark and chilly, the mental fort of Ion's father appeared to be modeled after a dark and abandoned city. It looked nothing like Konoha's village streets. There wasn't a bud of a plant in miles. Just towering steel mills, power plants, and factories and just lifeless spikes and towers of steel that had absolutely nothing inside. Mana approached one and glared through its window. Oddly enough, there didn't appear to be anything inside, just complete darkness, and none of the buildings had any doors to them.
"Imagination wasn't your strong suit, huh?" Mana sighed, turning to the confusing layout of empty streets ahead of her. Mental forts might have ranged in on being various degrees of massive. It depended entirely on how much experience and memories one's mind held or how many treasured corners of one's mind it protected, and how many fake rooms one generated to keep probing eyes and minds away from. Mental training had a grand role to play as well.
Then there was the fact that the assassin that had caused so much trouble to the Stars and nearly wiped out all the Allied Ninja all by himself had been drifting in and out of consciousness, which meant that his subconscious was taking over more and more of the fort. This was both good and bad. Subconscious had a mean habit of being all over the place and hectic, though it was less focused and much softer than the piercing arrow of focused willpower. Willpower was everything on the mental plane. While subconscious had plenty of ways to surprise and catch one unaware, it sort of lacked the focus to make that chaos work in one's favor.
A heavy rumbling noise joined in on the howling winds brushing against polished, damp steel beams and jittery glass panels. Mana turned toward it. Was it a meaningful attempt to protect the mental fort against her or just a manifestation of the chaotic subconscious? It depended on what shape the interloper would have taken: if it was an avatar of similar appearance to its master, it'd have been the first, if it was an ice cream man with a mop for a face and teddy-bear hands, handing out crossword magazines–it'd have been the second.
Mana's lips stretched down, forming a downward aiming crescent while her eyes jarred when the ground shook and a rumbling lump of heavy machinery showcased its mechanical glory from around the corner, scraping a handful of buildings as it rolled in on crawler belts easily thirty times Mana's size in total length and the growling machine busted a nearby building as it turned the corner and aimed its main gun barrel down, straight toward Mana.
The house-sized tank had been a willful creation. It modeled itself after the vizor-down version of the heavy metal helmet that Ion's father donned, complete with a set of three glowing goggle lenses positioned in a triangular shape around the mantlet. Mana snapped her fingers, testing the mettle of her willpower against that of the enemy's. Cuddly bunnies began sprouting from the end of the barrel as the tank began grumbling and shaking about while hopping mammals overtook it from within its hollowed shell. The ground rumbled again as the lash of a thunderbolt would have been a mere whisper compared to the resonant blast that decimated the spot where Mana stood before the tank.
The bunnies that hopped out from the tank all cuddled together, forming a humanoid shape that solidified back into Mana as the previous avatar of her probing willpower had been utterly torn asunder. The magician's eyes raced across the complicated clutter of busy city streets as steel birds began circling around the main square up in the sky. As their gut opened, they dropped some hefty steel boxes, and it had been one of them that caused the rupturing detonation that had rocked Mana before.
The magician stumbled from a punch at her back. She looked down only to see a gaping hole in her gut. Faceless, rubber-donning grunts speaking unintelligible hogwash with a cybernetically altered and low-pitched tone that sounded most at all like utter static flooded the streets. The bunch took aim at Mana and unleashed hell, while the main tank opened up more than a handful of hatches and stuck out more barrels ready to open fire at Mana. All the faceless, rubbery soldiers carried two-handed kunai dispensers. They carried quite the punch too.
Mana clapped her hands. The soldiers fired blinding barrages of metallic static at her, kunai knives launched at a blinding speed that not even a highly trained ninja could match, kicked toward her at an automated rate. Reality folded like a mirror, bending and rippling until it settled down into a two-dimensional field of playing cards set face down and extending up, down, and to both sides ad infinitum. Once the cards revealed themselves by flipping over, the entire military resistance of the will of Ion's father had been gone, and Mana was the only one standing in the center of the square.
The entire mental fort had changed as well, morphing into a sunny field on grassy plains and an amusement park standing tall before Mana made of hundreds of vendors and a Ferris Wheel modeled after a cherry blossom with a pink-colored rim and darker, boxes spinning as the Ferris Wheel did its thing. A husky blowing noise filled the air as within the vendors and attractions, all over the Ferris Wheel and the attraction park itself balloon-men of thousands of different colors blew up from flabby, lifeless hump of plastic into a humanoid shape filled with imaginary air.
It was as grand of a distraction as any to alter one's mental fort like this. Mana wondered just how much resistance the man could put in when his entire mental realm had been altered like this. It was as antonymous and drastic of a change as it got, and there was no way that the man of the hour wasn't doing his best attempt at screaming in pain inside of the confines of his own mind. Mana hadn't quite experienced mental violation of such a scale, though what little atrocities her teachers in the Intelligence Division committed didn't feel too dignified. Having someone probing and molding one's mind as they saw fit felt like being groped and inspected by a crude hand, except you were powerless to resist and speak against it. It had only been imaginary too, mental, for all intents and purposes, but all too real to the only two people that were involved.
Still, this would provide Mana with just enough control over the plane to find what she needed to find. Scanning the hole in her gut and healing it by making it evaporate like a mirage with a mere suggestive thought that she wasn't truly hurt, Mana stepped into a Ferris Wheel to look around the totality of the killer's mental fort. She needed to locate the source of the connection of Ion's father to the Five Pillars Seal, and she had a hunch that the man kept it bonded to some more important memories and corners of his mental field.
The Ferris Wheel let out an epic shriek as the mettle of its metal had been tested, Mana glanced down to note that howitzer cannons had surrounded it and aimed up at her. What a detestable manner to protect oneself against her–to use that which nearly had murdered Mana before, Ion's hawk-launching cannon in vast numbers to psyche Mana out. Before the howitzers even launched one squawking bird of prey, homing in on a whirling air tunnel that would rip Mana apart with massive air pressure and shoot her down, the howitzers turned into googly-eyed snakes that bounced around like coiled-springs and scattered all across the amusement park.
Ion's father had tremendous will to fight back, even in his current state. Mana would have had absolutely no chance of probing his mind if he was completely conscious and not just somewhat lucid in his efforts at expelling her out of his mind. Far away in the distance, there was a familiar sight–a district that stuck out in the grassland like a sore thumb. A myriad of wooden buildings of the oriental, classical style all too familiar to Mana and inspiring flashbacks to home. She had seen those buildings and those streets more than a few times, though only in pictures.
The Hyuuga weren't too fond of clanless grey matter, roaming their esteemed district of high tradition and noteworthy historical significance to the village. The remaining cabins of the Ferris Wheel became filled with the faceless rubbery soldiers, taking aim at Mana's cabin but once their fired, they only riddled one of their own with their barrage of kunai knives, the poor perforated dummy fell over the rail and splat down onto the pavement, barely distracting the lifeless glee of the colorful balloon men, women and children below.
Confused, the soldiers began looking around as one by one they lit up with electrical crackles until only one remained. Once warm and soft feminine hands touched the shoulder of the last soldier, the mystery of how the rest were dispatched of clarified although it had been far too late for that as the reformed faceless soldier fell and turned to a cough-inducing cloud of dust. Mana peeked over to the side, looking up at the buzzing noises as the remnants of Ion's father's willpower did its best to reform the bird-like drones dropping explosive packages from its compartmentalized insides.
The drones began their dreadful task at decimating the disgrace that Mana had left of Ion's father's mental fort. Their sheer numbers made it seem like they'd be trouble though Ion's father appeared to have been more focused on undoing what Mana had done with his mental fort by stretching his drone squadron out and just flat out decimating as much of the amusement park and the sorry, flapping balloon people as possible.
The support of the Ferris Wheel became unruly as Mana grabbed hold over the side, the wheel rumbled and shook left and right, uncertain in which direction it should have fallen over, though for a second its support kept a hold of the entire shifting structure. A crude, explosive force vaulted Mana right out of the Ferris Wheel and sent her flying while the Ferris Wheel came to life and freed itself from its containment.
The magician rolled over the ash and dust-ridden floor to get back on her feet as more and more bombs threw her about like a helpless rag doll in a raging storm. Once Mana finally got back on her feet, the Ferris Wheel had turned black and dropped its carriers, adopting jet engines instead and spitting blasts of flame while its steel frame restructured itself to turn spikier. Ion's father took his sweet time to focus his strength and push back but as Mana looked around at the decimated amusement park becoming a post-apocalyptic landscape and the bird-like drones parading the skies and the titanic wheel of flames, spikes, and destruction before her, she had to hand it to the old man–he was giving Mana more resistance than she counted on.
At that moment, Mana dreamed of being a Yamanaka and needing none of this hassle to extract information or subjugate people's minds.
Mana's own scream filled her ears as a crude yank from behind her from a detonating bomb flung her onward while the growling, motorized Ferris Wheel rolled right over the avatar of Mana's stumbled willpower in a fiery trail of destruction, erecting branched towers of black steel spikes around it while it formed a junction to roll around in. As the magician opened her eyes and glimpsed at her mental image, it had been flickering, so Mana closed her eyes and worked on her focus.
Cold air brushed against her cheeks as a curious tickle in her gut caught ahold of the magician. Mana opened her eyes, seeing one drone having swept down and shut its open gut around her while it lifted off high into the air. The drone rocked its captive around, trying its best to wear her fortitude out like a weary rider of an unruly, wild horse before floating over the spiky towers bursting from the ground around the pathway of the demonic Ferris Wheel and dropping Mana down.
The pointy tips of the spikes looked so close and as gravity took hold they only got closer. Mana did her best to focus her fleeting and tolled willpower into flight but her body slumped onto the spikes with a mean crunch, flopping and driving the spiky peaks of the tower even deeper through as the shock of impact reverberated through the young woman's body. The avian drones lowered to examine Mana's mental representation to see if their job protecting the mental fort was done and if the magician had been removed from the mental plane, but there didn't seem to be any body impaled on the tower peak anymore.
With papery rustling, cardboard walls shut around the entire squadron of drones as colorful ribbons weaved over and under the boxes, wrapping them up as presents and scattering them all across the battlefield as Mana descended from up above with a black umbrella with woolen embroidery decorating it with rings. Once the magician's feet touched the ground, she glared up at the rumbling, demonic Ferris Wheel as it flipped its jets up and aimed them at Mana, lighting up the murky skies with fireballs flung her way.
Mana tilted her umbrella up and spun it about, deflecting the fireballs to scatter about but the Ferris Wheel kicked itself into high gear and dashed with nitrous wrath toward the magician, flattening her alongside her umbrella in a fiery path while the deflected fireballs scattered across the mental fort, igniting it. The ground rumbled underneath Mana, as another spiky, black, steel tower burst forth from underneath, entangling her in its hedge-like protrusions and leaving her subdued in a vertical sprawl by the tower's walls as spiky tendrils wrapped around Mana and etched into her skins like black barbed wire.
The Ferris Wheel roared its engines again, spitting flames in all directions as it prepared to flatten the magician. The wheel dashed and slammed into the tower, tipping it over, but it just couldn't perceive that satisfying crunch of a human body being crushed and rolled over and squeezed outward against its will. The dimensional fabric rippled as if a surface of a disturbed lake as Mana took the fallen tower into her hands like a baseball bat.
The entire perspective of the mental plane had shifted with the Ferris Wheel appearing to be the size of a ball of rags as Mana kicked it up with her feet and swatted it aside with her stick that had just served as her towering prison. Mana extended her hands, with more and more arms emerging from the pockets of her corset and sprouting from her clothes, expelling playing cards that buzzed in all directions and sliced through the spiky towers that had littered the vast landscape of the mental realm of Ion's father.
With the towers now standing about as tall as blades of unruly grass, they fell down and evaporated into oblivion just the same as they rose. Mana stretched her neck and sighed. She waved her hand, returning to the luscious grasslands, and then looked up to see the murky clouds parting ways as sunlight broke through and took a competent hold over the land. She extended her hand and pulled on it, like attempting to remove a shroud from a cloaked presence as looped herself closer to the Hyuuga district within the assassin's mind that she identified earlier.
It was a key location in the killer's mind, likely containing some powerful memories that he didn't want to be forgotten, which meant that Mana had a very strong chance of finding similarly important to the man whose mental resistances she just beat.
"Whoa! What's going on?" Damisan rushed up to Mana, who had flopped face-first onto the ground and begun writhing. The mental clash had twisted her face in pain and blood poured down her nose and from her eyes in the shape of tears.
"I warned her that the old runt would be harder to crack. He's hitting her with everything he's got left. Mana isn't really a skilled mental interrogator, she's talented and her imagination is impressive, her focus makes her a good student but she lacks experience and a bit of cruelty that's needed to subjugate someone," Skaven pointed out, running his hand through his greasy hair as his attention switched between his tormented friend and the pointless struggle against a colossal force of nature in the distance.
The killer's body stretched its abdomen out, raising it above ground as it groaned with a husky moan. The man's eyes opened wide and rolled back to his skull so suddenly and with such violent force that some eye muscle must've torn and burst open with a torrent of blood as the man's tongue stuck out and drool began seeping out his mouth as the shaking man foamed for a few seconds before slumping lifeless.
"Did she…?" Shige-H gasped.
"You can't kill someone inside of their mind. She got as close as you can get though–she broke him. You don't recover from that, this guy's gonna stay this way until the end of his days." Skaven sighed. "Well, well… I didn't think our Mana had the guts to shatter a man's mind like this…"
"Humph… I won't even grant this ass the mercy of death." Endo turned away from the fallen assassin as Shige-H pulled off of him and smiled with a tease, having just finished treating his injuries.
"Why? Mana's Ninja Way finally won you over, or are you growing fonder of her to where you don't want to see her upset?" she said.
"Don't be ridiculous, I just figured that this will be a fitting punishment to this guy. To keep him apart from his bitch daughter for as long as possible. It suits what he deserves," Endo grumbled with a twitch of his upper cheek muscles.
"Well, it's safe to say that she won't be running into any more resistance in there. The guy's body and mind are an open book. Let's just hope that Mana will find what she's looking for and that she'll make it quick," Skaven groaned, running his hand over his forehead and combing his hair with his fingers again.