"Wow, you guys are such a flashy bunch!" Kakashi slapped his concealed cheek, faking shock, though even while his physical reaction felt one meant to showcase his surprise, his eyes looked as blunt and nonchalant as ever. "Though… I suppose, if all of you are standing out–neither of you are. Still, in our universe, ninja tend to do their best to conceal themselves."
"A flak jacket won't hide you from me." Mana crossed her arms and raised a scorned eyebrow. As someone who reveled in being seen and flashy in both her professions, she opposed similar sentiments even if they came from the right place.
"Yeah, what exactly did you mean?" Endo wondered.
"My, my…" Kakashi tried pacifying the situation. "I apologize if I came off as offensive. It probably won't be a problem since we're not gathering intelligence or something like that. I was just trying to make an observation to break the ice. This young lady would look like a butler if it weren't for her figure and long hair. That one over there is wearing a fur coat. Do you really need a fur coat in Konoha? We are headed to a desert, you know… And that guy over there seriously freaks me out. He looks like a human puppet or something."
"It's because he is." Endo winked one eye, turning his lips up with a deviant scowl aimed at this Konoha ninja trying to cause trouble and make fun of his squad after holding them up for several hours by being late.
"Do you want to put them through the bell test or something Kakashi-san? Are you doubting their abilities?" Temari gave the jonin a devilish smirk. Judging by her malicious expression, a part of her actually wanted to see some action and one of the two parties embarrassing themselves. Whichever did so. It was fine for Temari's amusement either way.
"By no means. I am well aware of how powerful ninja from this particular universe are." Kakashi shook his head. "Even though I believe there to be more to efficiency than raw power, I don't think that they lack skill at all. As I've said, I was just breaking some ice."
The assemblage of the task force moving in to retrieve an artifact capable of controlling the Sands of Time and using it to traverse through time started off on a wrong foot.
"It's so lonely and peaceful out here…" Mana noted while the ninja soared through the leafage with powerful and swift dashes. While the pace of Temari and Kakashi would have led to them only reaching the Wind Country in the evening of that day, the Allied Ninja enjoyed a tad slower pace as it meant they didn't spend too much of their stamina on merely traversing around the world.
"Well, this is a middle of nowhere, Mana-san." Kakashi shrugged with a bored look on his face. "What did you expect?"
"Back home, whenever you venture outside the village walls, all you can sense is bandits and mercenaries testing the waters. Taking minor peeks and calculating their odds. They check up on your age, size, numbers and judge your potential level of experience. No matter where you go, you're always in someone's eyesight. Even if they don't know that they're also in mine." Mana explained. "Out here… There's nothing of the sort. It's so peaceful."
"I wouldn't quite say that. My son's gotten himself into a few scuffles on his missions and bandits haven't really gone anywhere just because we've achieved world peace." Temari replied in a grungy tone, projecting moderate irritation. It didn't feel like she was irked by what Mana had said or implied, or at least Mana didn't think so.
"You must be so worried about him," Shige-H turned back. "Even if you know your son can handle a few bandits, it never gets easier."
"You speak almost as if it's from your own experience." Temari looked at Shige-H.
"Not at all. Though sometimes I feel about my Stars that way. Every time I can't support them when we're not fighting together or they get caught and held up somewhere… I worry. It's natural to worry when you're a medical ninja, I suppose. It's one thing to lose people when you're just a common ninja, it's another when you have the power to save their lives and you fail them." Shige-H said, explaining where she was coming from.
"You really are young and naïve if you think those two feelings are the same." Temari closed her eyes and extended his lips across the entirety of her lower face, tipping their corners upward just a bit.
"How have you come to achieve this peace?" Mana wondered, turning to Kakashi who, despite maintaining his disinterested expression, kept on staring ahead with focus and attention unbefitting a bored man.
"We've fought a world war," Kakashi replied. "After the Fourth Great Ninja War, a clash in which everyone had a personal stake in, a fight for the fate of the entire world, I guess that everyone just had enough fighting for a while. The figureheads of the Akatsuki, the organization we fought against, claimed that violence and death invited only more conflict and kept the circle of hatred going, but the pain of grief and the relief of victory ended up uniting us all in the end."
"I see…" Mana turned her eyes back on the road ahead. "Even though I'd very much like to bring peace like this back to our universe, I wouldn't allow the world to sink to war. We'll just have to achieve that peace a different way."
Kakashi chuckled. Mana glared at him, challenging him to voice what he found so laughable.
"Your nindo… It sounds absolutely ridiculous. So did Naruto's, back in the day. I'm a little afraid that you guys might achieve peace by offering nothing in return and leave us in the dust and incredibly jealous." Kakashi explained his laughter, making Mana smile with just a corner of her lips too.
Eventually, the towering trees and thick leafage became rarer and rarer and grains of sand began shuffling into the gentle, rustling blades of grass on the ground level. It became easier and easier to notice it since, little by little, the task force had to descend to lower and lower levels to travel with both efficiency and relative concealment.
"What exactly is our goal once we get to the Wind Country. Since it doesn't seem to wait for us too far ahead, it might be smart to set things straight." Kakashi brought it up.
"We need to find an artifact capable of channeling the power of the Sands of Time. Without the artifact, the power of the Sands would annihilate us." Temari gave the simple answer, one which everyone already knew.
"Okay, but what does that mean exactly?" Endo wondered. "How do we go around finding one?"
"More importantly, how do we find the Sands after we have the artifact? This seems like a lot of wandering around aimlessly. Aren't the Sands just a force of nature? Appearing and disappearing at once with hectic abandon?" Damisan added.
"Oh, it does far more than that…" Temari grinned. "The Sands are so unstable that their very presence is impossible to prove. They rip the moment in time in which they exist right out of the timeline, meaning that, technically, they don't exist at any single point in time."
"Great, so this is just a massive fucking waste of time, then?" Endo scowled. "What are we breaking ourselves backward over if the Sands don't even exist?"
"I don't think you understand, Endo." Skaven shook his head. "Think of all of time-space as one pie. If the Sands of Time is a worm ripping through that pie and eating it away, just because it rips holes into that pie and hides in them, it doesn't mean that the worm isn't there. All you need is tweezers small enough to slip into the hole and pull it out."
"I don't think that metaphor entirely holds up but… You're not really wrong either." Kakashi nodded. "The troublesome part is finding the artifact we need. The Wind Country desert is riddled with ancient ruins and temples consumed by sands and buried down under. It is entirely possible that the artifact we're looking for could be in any of them."
"I know of at least three," Temari said. "The Bag of Fujin, The Golden Locket of Sotatsu and The Tail of Zahhak."
"The Bag of Fujin? That sounds like the most troublesome and powerful thing to find…" Kakashi shrugged. He appeared to have only been familiar with this one artifact and only because of it being a reference to the Shinto mythology.
"I've never heard of any of these artifacts…" Mana scratched her neck. It was an uncomfortable thing to admit as she'd spent plenty of time researching the lore, history, and legends of the ninja world and she took moderate pride in her knowledge of various items and weapons of legend present in the world around her. She thought she was capable to speculate about their location with the best of them, though it seemed like either her research was still thoroughly lacking or a different universe warranted for unique history and lore.
"It might be. Because it is an artifact with such… Public reputation, it is more than likely that someone had already found it. The other two are far more obscure, though, as to the second one. While I am certain that it exists, its properties of controlling the Sands of Time are part of a children's fairy tale. They may exist, they may not exist." Temari shrugged.
"And what about the third one? This Tail of Zahhak?" Mana wondered.
"That one may not even exist at all. The tale in question is about an artist Sotatsu embarking on a quest to witness and depict the gods themselves in his paintings." Temari explained.
"Sort of like a zoologist for gods, then?" Kakashi looked mighty proud of his joke.
"You could see it that way, yes. Sotatsu had depicted all the gods that he could over his journey, encountering and dealing with them all one by one. Outsmarting some, impressing the others, and being granted permission to draw them. However, Sotatsu grew old and on the verge of his last hours. On his deathbed, he had a delirious dream of a god lurking at the end of time, or rather, the entirety of time being a god in of itself. This god is devouring its own tail at the point of the end of time, and that is what lurks in the end–Zahhak's jaws and then the timeline is reset again." Temari explained.
"This tale…" Mana scratched her chin. "It's… Remarkable."
"Huh? It's just a children's bedtime story. A man drawing the gods sounds pretty impressive, just the type of thing a snot-nosed brat needs to go to sleep. It's easy to tell too–everything remarkable that happens you can just brush off as being the will of the gods or something. It's a mother's lifeline, honestly…" Temari shrugged with a hint of pink flushing at her cheeks.
"No, you see… I've noticed differences between your and our own universes. The name Zahhak… It sounds highly unnatural." Mana pointed out. "Just listen to it, even in a whole another country, the names of the key figures in your universe are still the same as it would be in the Land of Fire–you're talking about Fujin and Sotatsu, right? Those are Land of Fire names. Zahhak, on the other hand, is a very unnatural name. It stands out."
"Okay, so it's fancy. What of it?" Endo crossed his arms with a grumpy pout.
"Can't you see? It's more than likely that Zahhak surpasses the realm of this very universe. It sounds like something that would come from our universe. This name is more natural to our universe and our timeline!" Mana tried explaining her point and what she found so spectacular about this tale. "That means that Zahhak might not only exist since his concept surpasses that of a mere figment of the imagination of this universe's fanciest yarn-spinners, but Zahhak's existence is so grand that it surpasses universes themselves. Zahhak exists between the universes, maybe even beyond them all. There is an infinite number of universes, but only one Zahhak for them all."
"I'm glad that it got your juices flowing, Mana, but… How does that help us?" Shige-H wondered.
"I see…" Kakashi muttered. "I believe what Mana-san means, if she could work over her own excitement to explain it properly, is–The Tail of Zahhak exists for sure. Therefore, Temari shouldn't doubt its existence and just treat it as just as real as the rest of the artifacts."
"Well, if that is the case, the Tail of Zahhak is still the most difficult thing to find…" Temari took a brief pause to digest this whole discussion before realizing something. "The Tail of Zahhak is that which Zahhak is devouring at the end of time itself. That means that to get it, we would have to travel to the end of time itself and claim it before Zahhak devours it."
"Wait, if Zahhak devours his tail at the end of time, doesn't that mean that it still exists right now, that is to say, far away from the end of time?" Shige-H wondered.
"No, you don't understand. Zahhak is perpetually devouring his tail. The time starts when Zahhak eats the first scale of its tail, the time moves on as the beast devours its tail, and when the beast finishes–the time resets and it starts it feast all over again." Temari pointed out.
"That raises so many questions…" a clang came from Damisan's direction as the living Scientific Ninja Tool palmed his own face. "What happens to the tail if Zahhak eats it up? How much of it is considered the Tail of Zahhak? Like… Do we need to take just a tip from the very beginning of time or the whole, massive thing? More importantly, how do we go to the end of time? Aren't we looking for a way of jumping just a few decades into the past? Isn't that already the problem?"
"I agree, The Tail of Zahhak is by far the longest shot." Skaven nodded. "Though, I assume, that since time-space itself exists within Zahhak's tail, that would mean that its tail itself should exist in the physical world too somehow. If all of us exist within the confines of time-space, and time-space is Zahhak's Tail which it is devouring, wouldn't that mean that the artifact of its tail should also exist here instead of in whatever godly plane Zahhak lives in?"
"What happened next in the tale, Temari-san? Maybe the rest of the story will help us understand which is the best artifact for us to hunt down?" Shige-H turned to Temari.
"Well… Obviously enough, Sotatsu died. His spirit met the Gods in the Pure Land. Since he had been a good friend to some of the Gods, they granted Sotatsu's spirit a locket to permit his spirit to venture to the end of time to meet Zahhak, because Sotatsu could not rest before drawing all the Gods." Temari explained.
"The Golden Locket of Sotatsu…" Mana muttered to herself, identifying the origins of the second artifact of great interest to the Allied Ninja if they sought for the Sands of Time.
"Yeah…" Temari nodded. "In theory, it should let one travel to the plane where Sands of Time exist though it's a stretch to say that the locket could somehow control them. Hence my warning earlier."
"So did that painter find and draw Zahhak?" Endo wondered, hesitant to admit that he liked the story. It wasn't difficult to see why–the story of a determined man with a mission, someone who's essentially a lowborn nobody, an artist meeting the Gods and fulfilling his goal in life was just what Endo needed and wanted to hear about.
"Who knows?" Temari shrugged with a sheepish smirk. "That's the hook of the tale. The end of time hasn't happened yet so nobody knows if Sotatsu found and drew Zahhak. Supposedly Sotatsu's spirit never returned from that point to tell us if he drew him or not, but the end of time is as close to the point of no return as it comes. It's up to you to decide what you believe, it's up to you to reach for your goals with as much determination as Sotatsu. With enough willpower and effort, even a mere mortal man can stand before Zahhak and ask to draw him, even long after his own death."
"A story with a moral to it. As expected from a bedtime story," Kakashi smiled politely.
"Okay, I suppose I might see how the Tail of Zahhak and the Golden Locket of Sotatsu can help, but… I don't recall your story involving Fujin or his bag in any way." Damisan said.
"I mean… Fujin is the God of wind. Winds handle sandstorms so his power to control the wind should be capable of managing even supernatural sandstorm like the Sands of Time." Temari pointed out.
"Man, I kind of hoped that the Sands of Time would have a more direct way of managing them," Shige-H admitted. "It seems like all three artifacts aren't at all related to the Sands of Time, they're just powerful artifacts in their own right."
"That's how it usually goes with mythology. Seeing how the Sands of Time are a chaotic force of nature, it makes sense that nothing directly controls them, just a superior, divine force that can help with the task," Mana said. "Though, judging from Temari-san's wonderful tale, we will need two of these artifacts."
"Two?" most of the task force turned to Mana.
"I see, the Golden Locket of Sotatsu to find the Sands of Time in their dimension, then the Bag of Fujin to control them." Kakashi seemed to catch on immediately. Likely he had been considering a similar thought in his own head, just hadn't shaped it enough to voice it just yet.
"All this just to get to the moon…" Skaven shook his head, looking like he regretted ever joining the Stars.
"At least we're doing it all together!" Damisan pumped his fist to encourage his squad.