Mana blinked a few times before the proverbial weight of the hooded woman's words finally started burning her shoulders and brought the kunoichi down to reality where she had to deal with those words. Ironically, while it was those same words that knocked Mana off-world, it was the pain from those words that made her come back.
"One of yours, what do you mean?" Mana struggled to find which one of the gathered secret organization members handled this to focus her eyes on them.
"Exactly what it sounds like," the silver-bearded man replied in a strict tone, almost as if they had done nothing to blame and felt offended by how Mana reacted to this news. "Skaven was a plant from our organization. We sent him to infiltrate the Allied Ninja and work from within. He wasn't a mole or a double agent per se. His objective was not to report to us or to undo the Allied Ninja. It was to protect your life at all costs."
"Skaven was a lousy agent," one of the bowl-cut crew muttered with an apathetic expression. "He shouldn't have gotten so close to you. Normally, any of us would have operated from a safe distance, tried to keep you unaware of our presence because awareness and proximity only threaten the secrecy of the mission. If his status would have been discovered because of this, the Curse Seal would have claimed his life."
"He was a resourceful agent, though," another bowl-cut ninja proclaimed. "Somehow, despite coming closer to his VIP, he protected his status as a secret organization plant."
A lot of things began making a bit more sense to Mana now. Why Skaven was so resistant to the idea of joining the Stars at first–he was acting just how these creepy youths stated they would have acted. Also, why Skaven asked Mana to wipe that part of his memory–he wanted to avoid a situation where he'd have gotten captured or incapacitated and Mana might have wandered into his mind, stumbling into his secret by accident. Still…
"So…" Mana said, feeling stuck as she stumbled and tripped over words. "All those memories of yours we visited together, all of that was fake?"
"No," the hooded old woman shook her head. "We did not implant any fake memories into Skaven. He was a punk rogue ninja who knocked on our door for protection from the darker rogue element that exists in the shadows of the world in exchange for the heads of those more valuable to us than him. His cutthroat instinct and the ability to sell people impressed our organization. He sold out people he spent half his life with without hesitation. Skaven was useful to us, so we took him in and he certainly had some profound skills to exploit. Though his loss wouldn't have been painful enough to us to warrant the trouble of implanting fake memories. A very messy thing… Can go wrong in so many ways."
"Mana… This is new to me too," Skaven pocketed his hands. Despite there being validity to his claim, he still looked like he had sold everyone out again.
"Yes, I know. That's the memory you asked me to wipe…" Mana rubbed her tired eyes.
"And a quality slice it was," the old woman said after a brief and subdued cackle. "If you trained some more with the Intelligence Division, polished your skills some more, we'd have use for your particular skill at wiping minds."
"Just… Forget it," Mana threw her hands up in the air and left the cell, fully intending to just leave the Police Force building and these sneaky bastards that seemed to always be there when Mana's life turned for the worse, despite claiming they were there to protect her. "You know, I'm beginning to seriously not like you guys, so you better practice that sneaking skill of yours really well because if I find out you have any more agents following me–I'll wipe their memory and free them too."
"There's no need to seed bad blood between us, Mana," the hooded man turned around with the platoon of bowl-cuts lining up in front of the ninja magician and cutting her off from the staircase. "You need to understand–you are a treasured asset for protecting Konoha, which is our one and only goal. You've done this village a profound service and all of us owe you our lives for preventing a potential world war. We just wanted to make sure that no harm falls to you while you're with the Allied Ninja. Our agents had a role to play in securing the Ayushi Cells that brought you back from the brink of death."
"Wait, what?" Mana blinked a few times.
"Yeah, we weren't going to tell Mana that…" Skaven slapped his forehead.
"Unbelievable…" Mana stepped up to the line of bowl-cuts and looked the one in front of her in the eyes. She would not trap someone in a genjutsu just for standing in her way, no matter how livid Mana felt, but just that prospect would have frightened most local ninja from avoiding her gaze. This one… Didn't as much as flinch.
"Stand down," the hooded man ordered the lined-out row of his subordinates, who all promptly parted in two directions, splitting by the middle and making way for Mana to leave. The magician turned around with a bemused look in her eyes.
"Aren't you coming, Skaven?" she asked.
"Wait… What?" Skaven's lips stretched out in a goofy expression while he pointed at himself. "Are you talking to me?"
"He is not. He is our subordinate, and we have other uses for him. You've made it quite clear that you don't want our presence in your life anymore. We'll do our best to respect that, Konoha's Sorceress," the old lady tapped her heel onto the stone floor.
"He's a Star. He's got other engagements," Mana insisted.
"I'm afraid this is not negotiable, Sorceress," the hooded man wriggled his head. "Skaven is our agent. Now that his status has become clear, due to no fault of his own, we have other assignments for him. You can carry on with your business. We've settled the matters between the Police Force and the Allied Ninja. Though the Hokage might still think it is being settled for a few more weeks. I wouldn't parade around the village for too much longer if I were you. It would cause some inconvenience to us if the Hokage found out that his own Police Force had released the troubling party of Allied Ninja without his knowledge. He already suspects there are things in this village he doesn't know about."
"He became a Star after being our member," the old woman said. "His previous allegiances take priority. Skaven's feelings notwithstanding."
"Unbelievable…" Mana gnashed her teeth and pressed her knuckles to her thighs as she strut out the Police Force basement level containment facility and into the busy offices where ninja with green flak jackets rubbed shoulders and scurried around like busy bees that they were.
As much as she wanted to challenge everyone and everything, she still had a modicum of reason that prevailed. What was she going to do? Attack the Black Ops of the Black Ops in the basement of the Police Force HQ? When she was pegged as a suspicious individual up to some suspicious activity already? That would have triggered an all-out war in the middle of the village and would've been an act of terror. Worst of all, people might have gotten injured or died in such an engagement. Mana's hands were tied with this. For now.
"Mana…" Shige-H turned to face the magician as she left the Police Force building with her hands in her pockets, looking like she just sold her parents' house to settle all of her debts. "We have to talk."
"Skaven's staying behind," Mana sighed. "He's a double agent of a local secret organization. Like a Black Ops of the Black Ops. He always has been."
"Well, I, for one, am not surprised in the slightest," Endo crossed his arms. "Although, I had expected him to be a double agent of some criminal organization and not Black Ops. I may have underestimated him a little there."
"Wow, went right ahead and admitted that, didn't you? That's remarkable modesty coming from you…" Damisan placed his new arms of flesh and blood over his hips as he gave Endo a snappy stare.
"I wish I could call you a freak but… You were actually quite a physical specimen and a stud before being mangled…" Endo looked away.
"Holy crap, did some Yamanaka enter your mind during the interrogation or something?" Damisan joked, nudging Endo with his elbow, which received only a maddened hiss of a reaction in return.
"Wow… I…" Shige-H didn't know what to say from the looks of it. Either she was an excellent actress, or she was being genuine with her disbelief. It was a rare thing to find out something that Shige-H had not thoroughly researched and known all along before assembling the team.
"Yeah, what did you want to talk about?" Mana tried changing the subject as she was growing sick of the old one. Her helplessness to pull Skaven out from his shady background and just flat out being out of the loop throughout made it too frustrating to linger on it.
"Something went horribly wrong during our time on the Moon," Endo spoke up when Shige-H still struggled to deal with the news that a secret underground Black Ops unit wouldn't give their member back to them.
"Yeah, a whole lot of people died. Not the ones we needed to save though, so…" Mana began looking around, wondering where they were to pick up their rescued engineers and architects from.
"Not that Moon, Mana…" Shige-H scratched the back of her elbow. It took the magician more than a few seconds to understand what the Stars meant by that.
"Toneri's Moon? In the past of Naruto's universe?" Mana's eyes widened.
"Yep. We know exactly why the remote interuniversal bridge device vanished. It's because it was never created in the first place," Damisan pointed out. "I'm not sure about how the whole thing works. But we might be in for a whole world of problems, or we might not be in any problems at all and this whole thing is nothing. I don't know, I'm not some time-engineer or time-travel scientist."
"I see…" Mana rubbed her chin as she tried to connect the dots in her head. "We changed something about Toneri's plan, meaning that it caused changes to the timeline that led to the Naruto's universe and ours never interacting. Holy… That means…"
"Yep, no more time or interuniversal travel for us. It simply doesn't exist. The Intelligence Division probed our minds, but they pegged all the intel in our brains as trash, because they couldn't identify any of it. Our memories didn't correspond to the current reality we occupy," Endo crossed his arms with a grumpy look. "There's no multiversal traveling, we've never contacted different universes and the Interuniversal Chuunin Exams, apparently, were just normal Chuunin Exams that took place in Kirigakure."
"Question is, why do we still remember everything and what will happen to us?" Shige-H sighed.
"Our memories are anomalous. We've experienced the original timeline, which is why we remember everything. At least… At least this isn't a complete crapshoot and we don't co-exist with different versions of ourselves from this reality, right? Right?" Mana's eyes scurried to scan all of her friends, who seemed relatively calm about this.
"Yeah, as far as we're aware, there isn't another you running around," Shige-H nodded, looking less dire about the whole situation after finding out a thing to be thankful for in this entire predicament.
Mana closed her eyes, extending her chakra sensory while trying to flush out a chakra signature she'd feel familiar to. There was a problem with that. Mana had never quite felt her own identical chakra signature. It was impossible to feel one's own chakra without meditational introspection. Mana just settled for trying to scout out for something that felt similar to her clones, but with a heftier chakra capacity.
"Nope… Thanks to all that is sacred, I can't sense anything," Mana sighed in relief. "I guess we'll just have to settle into this new reality. Good thing is, I've sustained two entire conversations without finding out that something was off, so very few things must have changed. Mainly just everything related to different universes and timelines."
"I guess that scroll vanished from your pocket because the time shift just caught up with it at that exact moment. I wonder if we too will forget that we could travel through time and different universes one day?" Damisan looked back and at the Hokage Monument to peer into the near future.
"We'd have probably already forgotten it," Endo looked up as well. "Can't we just rebuild it, anyway?"
"No way," Mana shook her head. "The Advanced Technology Research Institute of the Naruto universe made the first prototype based on the technology of omniversal travelers. Naruto's universe went through over a decade of peace and prosperity, so their scientific advances are far beyond our universe's, not to mention, we don't have the samples of their technology anymore. I'm not sure how the omniversal travelers' conflict went in this reality, but I seem to have survived it so…"
"We'll just have to take slow steps," Shige-H concluded the matter. "Let's pick up our architects and engineers and head back to the Allied Ninja campsite."
"How are we going to return? The road from Konoha to Land of Lightning leads through Land of Snow, which means that we'll have to take those guys through the cruelest, most grueling, and frigid mountain hike in existence. Those puny guys will fall out like flies," Endo brought up a fair point. "The caravans aren't meant to take large numbers of people through the mountains. It'll take us weeks of caravan trips to get everyone across."
"I guess that's why Supreme Leader booked it with Land of Earth and Land of Wind to provide them with workers. Easier to take them home that way," Mana observed.
"We'll just have to book a train and take them all to Land of Lightning that way. It can't be helped," Shige-H sighed.
"Book a whole train just for us? Just how much will that cost?" Damisan scratched his head.
"We'll just have to ask everyone to chip in and then the Supreme Leader can reimburse them. It'll be okay when they realize we could've left them on the Moon…" Endo smirked after crossing his arms and nodding to himself.
"I did a few shows here in Konoha. We can use some profits to cover some of the cost," Mana suggested. "Though it probably went to the account that my mother has for that stuff, she manages my finances because I'm not very good with that stuff."
"We can see that, suggesting to cover all the losses like that," Endo raised an eyebrow.
"Damisan…" Mana muttered while slowly inching up to the puppeteer while Shige-H secured the tickets for everyone and Endo guarded the VIP group against any follow-up kidnapping or assassination attempts. "I wanted to talk to you about something."
"Hm? Well, I guess now's as good of a time as it'll get," Damisan nodded. The young man observed as Mana pulled a scroll out of thin air and handed it to him. The curiosity of the entire transaction baffled the puppeteer, so he was slow to reach out and take it.
"Before we left the camp I… I felt terrible about how I reacted to seeing your actual face. I… I shouldn't have reacted that way. You showed so much trust in us as your friends and I… I completely ruined that. I thought about this being my way of telling you I'm sorry but… I guess it's useless now, plus, it probably would've been in bad taste anyway so… It's just, I asked Meiko to draft this for you so I may as well pick it up and hand it to you. What you do with it now is your business," Mana sighed. Her constant shifting between body positions and impatient stance relayed just fine how nervous and embarrassed she was.
"Huh? What even is this?" Damisan unraveled the scroll, looking into a large sealing glyph with artistic decorations circling the central symbol. "A seal?"
"Yeah, it's… Uh… I just… Thought maybe making it possible for you to… Well… Look differently without having to use the Transformation Jutsu and wearing those ridiculous cylinders with mugshots," Mana scratched her forehead, feeling a slight itch in the area after her nervous state might have led her to scratch a bit too hard. "Now that I say it out loud, wow… It was probably a horrible idea… I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like…"
Air squeezed out from Mana's chest after brawny arms wrapped around her and pulled her under the cloak that Damisan used to hide his scarred and dismembered body under. Shortness of breath pounded from inside Mana's lungs, demanding that she take a breath right now but the pain felt nice and warm as Damisan pressed her tighter and tighter to where he lifted her off the ground a few inches before finally letting go.
"I'm glad you didn't hate it or… You know, I didn't ruin everything beyond repair this time," Mana broke into a singular chuckle while pulling her hair under the air. Damisan's eyes had been wet, though being the adamant soldier that he was, he didn't give in and shed any actual tears. He held himself admirably, even when succumbing to the emotions gnawing from within would've been just fine. "I didn't mean it like that, I just wanted… You know, to make it easier for you to… Damn, there's just no good way of saying it."
"It's okay, Mana, I understand. This has to be the nicest thing someone deliberately did for me," Damisan grabbed the back of Mana's head and pulled her in to feel her forehead pressing against his. Mana wasn't sure what this was all about. She had seen some Land of Wind natives expressing gratitude or goodwill that way from her time in the Sun Disc arena, though she didn't resist. This guy just regained the feeling in his skin a handful of hours ago. He must've wanted to feel everything there was to feel in the new world he returned to. Still, he hugged her as if he knew he'd never have time to do it again.
"Well… It's a big load of crap now," Mana sighed and rolled her eyes. "I mean… You have your body back. My apology present is a bit ill-timed, I suppose."
"It's amazing. You may never know when wanting to look like someone else without occupying your focus and concentration for Transformation Jutsu will come in handy. It's an amazing present even to someone who didn't go through what I went through," Damisan stared at the scroll and examined its contents, then its exterior before pocketing it.
"Well, if you're just saying it to comfort me for how badly I screwed up with this, just know you can always wipe the seal out with chakra and just use it as a storage scroll," Mana teased.
"I would cut my limbs off again before I'd do that," Damisan replied without a hint of hesitation. "You did this for me and I didn't even look normal back then. You did this back when people still saw me as a freak and you did it without even a hint in your mind that things could be any different. You couldn't have known how this whole wild mission would have turned out. You guys… No one's ever stuck their necks out for me like you. It'll be so hard to leave…"
"Wait, what!?" a scolding wave of hot water washed down Mana's back underneath her skin.