The grotesque critter-like ninja that burrowed its way out of the guts of the Iwagakure giant was an agile little crawler. It wasn't just mere speed and agility that made him feel so quick. It was also a lack of regret or hesitation. He didn't feel pressured by Mana's appearance. He thought little about clawing his way into a tall man's guts and slicing his way out if needed. Like a little rat, he just moved and did what he needed to in order to thrive.

Perched atop of the head of the dead Iwagakure goliath, the puppeteer commanded his thrall to raise his fists up in the air and hammer them down. It almost felt odd. It wasn't like an attack of such nature would ever hit Mana, so the ninja magician just glided backward. This let her gain enough range while keeping her guard up and ready for impending follow-ups.

A triplet of arrows slid into the joints of the tall Iwagakure ninja. With a mere glance, Mana noted the Iwagakure kunoichi whose life Mana just saved, holding a wooden bow in her hands. It appeared to be a simple construction, nothing more complex than a limber and elegant yumi bow. The woman's aim was on-point too. It would have been, at least, if her opponent was a living human that cared much about their joint integrity and their vitals.

"Don't aim for the joints and weak spots. Aim for the puppeteer!" Mana yelled out to the woman who expressed gratitude for Mana saving her life by assisting the ninja magician in battle.

"Easier said than done," the woman replied with a snappy spice of sass after releasing a handful more arrows only for the troublesome creep, drenched in blood and guts, sliding across the giant's body or using the lumbering mound of muscle as his human shield.

"Don't push it too hard," Mana yelled out, weaving out of the way of the pounding and rampaging giant as he tried breaking Mana's bones to make her capture easier this time. "He did not convert your friend into a human puppet. The enemy is just rag-dolling him around. His movements will stay sluggish and unnatural. Keep your focus on the puppeteer!"

"I am older than you, you know," the woman barked back, kneeling to put an arrow straight through her dead friend's knee and then another one through the vital muscle tendons around it to see if the giant would bend. Even if he felt no pain, articulation of both man and corpse alike required specific body parts to stay connected and intact. Sadly, while the Iwa kunoichi slowed the rampaging corpse some, the petite puppeteer kept him moving through sheer force of manipulation via chakra-infused strings.

"Yeah, well… I outrank you…?" Mana muttered to herself while weaving her hands together and expelling a blinding flash of light from her hands that served as a focus for her illusion. Oddly enough, the enemy embedded their scissor-blades attached to his fingers into the back of his corpse puppet's neck and slid down to cover up. He had some knowledge of Mana's abilities. He knew enough not to look at the light, at the very least. "Crafty little…"

Mana didn't have enough time to finish her sentence as a handful of puppetry strings flew off into the air and wrapped around the airborne electricity wire while the underdeveloped puppeteer kicked the cumbersome human log over to body slam onto Mana. The magician vaulted to the side, avoiding the body slam, but the resulting cloud of dust made it difficult to trace her opponent's movements. The little critter crawled up the pole and lurked perched atop of it, seeking his next target.

He was an annoying opponent. Because the super-sized corpse he used to attack them before didn't use any particular fighting style and just jerked and swung about, Mana couldn't get a taijutsu style profile on it or take any patterns that she could use to form a reliable evasive style around it. Sensing a creeping chakra signal closing in on her, Mana weaved a pair of hand seals.

"Wind Style: Friendly Gust Jutsu!" she yelled out, expelling a strong wall of wind that kept the tips of the puppetry wire away from her limbs. This gave her comrade a chance to sling a few more arrows in her opponent's direction, but the puppeteer once again flung his puppetry strings to a different boulder and zipped away.

"He's making us chase him. Why would he think we'll chase him?" the Iwa kunoichi ran up to Mana so that the two could group up and fight together more efficiently.

"Because we have to. Aren't you here to uphold public order? This guy's clearly a nuisance to Boulder Town so you've got to arrest him," Mana came up with something that let her keep her own motive in chasing after this disproportionate shop of horrors in the evening twilight to herself.

"I'd say he goes beyond that. Thanks for your help, my name is Prabba," the Iwa kunoichi introduced herself while moving her hand away from the string of her bow. Following the weak signal of chakra coming off from this woman, Mana noted a small sealing glyph on her wrist that stopped its blue glow and disappeared after the Iwa kunoichi had unsealed no arrows in a few snaps.

"Nice to meet you. I assume you'll help me capture your attempted murderer?" Mana nodded while keeping up with the wild puppeteer as he swung across the Boulder Town in circles like a madman.

"It's sort of my mission objective. I'm not sure why you're after him…" Prabba replied. "Nor have I any clue where you left your bodyguard."

"She's not too far behind. We need the enemy to think he can win, or else he'll feel cornered and flee again," Mana replied, checking in with a whiff of Shige's chakra signature just a few hundred meters from their location. The magician trusted the leader of Stars to follow them without the aid of sensory.

"There you are…!" a blood-curdling shriek alerted the pair and forced them to stop mid-rush. Mana settled on top of a stone platform, while Prabba stuck her feet vertically to the wall of the nearest building. They were too late to stop the swinging madman from flinging his puppetry wire toward a certain ninja with spiky green hair. "Dance to my tune, like you dance to that of the foreign tyrants!"

"What the f…!?" Prim-S croaked out before the tremendous physical strain affecting the joints of his limbs sent him hurling across the town street and robbed him of the oxygen to finish his cursing. Prabba stuck the end of her bow into the building wall and flung herself across, as if pole-vaulting, with a spiraling foot-dive aiming right at the little puppet master.

The impact made a deafening pop and the oversized, bulbous eyes of the freaky puppeteer rolled back as his mouth stretched forward, as if he nearly had his entire jaw try to escape from his mouth. This momentary distraction made the signal of the Puppetry Technique coursing through the strings attached to Prim-S's limbs blink out. Using this blink of a moment, the Kumogakure ninja slashed at the wire controlling him with his kunai, and severed the strings before the enemy could make them harden up with chakra coating again.

"Konoha's Sorceress, Iwagakure kunoichi… What's going on?" Prim-S gave the duo chasing after the murderous puppeteer a rough look before focusing back on the recovering enemy. Wondering if this was her time to act, Mana weaved the Horse-Bird-Snake hand seals and looked at her opponent's eyes as they recovered from the post-impact haze.

The disproportionate, stubby body of the murderous enemy stiffened up as he tossed his head upward and straightened his back like a plank from his usual creepy slouch. Once more, the puppeteer's eyes rolled back as his lips began wavering. Deep in the confines of his mind, the slimy murderer saw the image of rusty chains bursting from underground and binding him in place while a sleek, black, wooden box shut around him like a coffin. Before the man could even realize he was under the effect of genjutsu, illusionary swords impaled him by skewering the coffin he was in with such massive numbers and force of impact that the coffin shattered into shredded planks.

"Disgusting… What's he doing?" Prim-S reacted, seeing his opponent collapse and start jerking his limbs. Mana didn't rush to come any closer to him, even though she fully intended to, eventually. Shige-H flickered beside the trio of ninja as well, seeing the chase around town as finished.

"He's terrified. He's just witnessed himself die in a gruesome way while his mind was under the state of extreme delirium, confused and hazy because of things it couldn't comprehend transpiring around it. No matter how brave one thinks they are, such impressions are scars for life. He's awakening an entire slew of different phobias he didn't know he had," Mana gave her best guess. Nothing in the chakra signature of her opponent suggested he was playing possum, even though his reaction to extreme dread was unlike anything Mana had ever seen.

"You know what to do," Shige-H nodded, looking to Mana.

"Okay, I think now is the best time for me to ask: what the heck is going on, why did that midget with oversized head just attack me, who the hell is he, what the hell are any of you guys doing and what is your relation to this guy?" Prim-S demanded answers.

"Mana, you do your thing. I'll handle these two until you come back," Shige-H sighed and encouraged the magician again. Still careful about her approach, Mana slowly crept up to her seizing opponent and pressed her hand to his forehead, which was still drenched in sticky clots and blood. This was one of the few times that Mana was glad to have a numbed sense of smell since she was almost certain that she'd be belching up after being this close to this man.

"What… Is this place?" Mana looked around. The first impressions made her believe she was in some kind of pit. Though, when she looked up, the young woman noticed that the skies were visible, albeit gloomy. She wasn't in a pit, she was inside of a trench. Granted, this trench seemed to be multiple-men-deep, and it didn't seem like anyone could've just crawled out of it as the pelting rain send mudslides down, drenching anyone unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

As it could've been expected, the enemy's mind offered little resistance in its current terrified state. But it was also incredibly chaotic, and it needed little resistance to keep what Mana wanted to know away from her. A cascade of fireballs colored the sky, encouraging the magician to kick off and fly across, moving onward toward the trenches. The falling bombardment hit the ground in quake-inducing explosions before lightning bolts lashed violently from the sky and socked right in front of Mana's way. The ninja magician vaulted backward a few times and began evading the moving jolts and picking another path in the dug-up labyrinth.

"This must be some sort of battlefield…" Mana realized. That was when arms and legs began burrowing from the muddy walls of the trenches, revealing moaning, humanoid forms of mud that sought to grab Mana and drag her into the trench walls whole. A resonant punch rippled through the entirety of the puppeteer's mind, making the whole scenery wave like the disturbed lake surface. And yet… No matter how high Mana flew or propelled herself, the walls of the trenches always soared higher and higher until they seemed to reach the sky.

She couldn't be in control of a mind that was panicking while dumping its original owner's control. At some point, a consciousness formed a thought that maybe it was the rational control of its owner's mind that caused this entire mass of fear it was under and just booted them out. When something like this happened, not even someone taking control over that mind could've put it in order. Mana closed her eyes and tried to breathe. She had to stop looking with her eyes because the stormy, mud-ridden trench felt obstructing and she just couldn't breathe anymore despite how far away the trench walls were from one another. The magician homed in on the most soothing voice around and just glided toward it with her eyes closed.

The trenches didn't go anywhere but the image of a young, hunchback boy with the head the size of most of his torso and immensely expressive pair of eyes, surrounded by a young pair of plain-looking folks seemed to be the focal point where the trenches stopped acting up. That may not have necessarily meant a place of comfort within the man's mind, but it definitely meant a notable focal point of importance.

"You didn't tell me!" the hunchback boy thrashed about in what seemed to be an odd environment to have this argument in. This definitely wasn't the location this argument took place in, but this command station in the middle of an endless field of trenches was where the shattered mind placed it now. "You didn't tell me I was a monster, a freak!"

"That's because you're not a monster, son. We love you just the way you are," the broad of shoulders father with shaggy hair and a full facial hair brigade leaned down to pat his son's hunched back with an encouraging smile.

"I hate you!" the disproportionate boy lashed out, biting into his father's jaw and taking out a strip of flesh. His father grunted in pain with a dulled-out look and pushed his young boy away from him. "You treated me like a normal boy. You never told me I was a freak and now my whole life's ruined! Everyone's laughing at me… You should have told me!"

"Told you what, Krown? That you look different from the others? Who cares about that? We loved you the way you looked, so we told you the only truth you should have cared about–our truth, that you're the best blessing we've ever had…" the boy's mother leaned down to caress his cheek gently with a face full of tears. "What parents would even tell their son that he's a freak? A pair of liars, maybe…"

"You're the liars…" little Krown reared teeth that still had drips of his father's blood passing down his lip. "I thought I was normal, I thought I was human… I'm nothing more than an ugly sack of malformed bones! I was never supposed to be the noble hero, the handsome and strong hero…"

"Krown… Don't talk that way!" the boy's mother slapped him across the cheek with everything she could. This was the first time that she lost her cool and that frustration took over from encouragement.

"I'm just a freak… A monster that's supposed to live deep down and wait for the handsome hero to kill them…" Krown wrapped his hands over his face while collapsing into a curled ball of torment.

"So, some kids teased you in the Academy and you're going to give up, is that it?" Krown's father crossed his arms. "If you don't have the Will of Stone necessary to keep moving on and insist on feeling pity for yourself, maybe you should've just picked up breaking your back in the mines like your old man…"

Before he could realize it, Krown sprung to life and hopped up to the nearest table, snagging a pair of scissors from it and thrusting it into his father's eye. A blast of blood colored Krown's misshapen face red with a squirt getting into his right one and forcing it closed. The left green bulb turned to his mother, who just screamed from the depths of her lungs.

"I'm just a monster…" Krown muttered. "Monsters don't deserve pity, not even from themselves."

"Please, son… We loved you…" Krown's mother cried out while trying to crawl back and fumble closer to the door, but the trench command center had no door.

"I'm just a monster…" Krown wheezed out, feeling short of breath. "Monsters don't deserve love either…"

Feeling like there was no need to follow this scene any further since it won't show Mana what she wanted to know, the magician waved her hand. A flood of mud drowned the opening in the wall where the command center was founded and sealed the memory away underneath a layer of wet and filthy sludge. Feeling muddy hands bursting forth from underground, Mana stopped her breath and closed her eyes, focusing her mind into a piercing arrow of willpower. Wherever these arms intended to take Mana by plunging her into the muddy depths, they'd take her wherever she wanted to go instead.

It was a dark and damp room. Only occasionally did a spark light up in the distance and illuminate Krown's emotionless face. Mana struggled against the muddy arms, awakening from their hypnosis and trying their best to pull her back in and drown her in the stream of filth, but she shoved her way through. Because of her focus. Despite her willful intent, Mana was drenched in sludge. That was a bad sign–she couldn't completely control the mental fort for much longer. Soon enough, the mind may have collapsed in on itself.

Steps of leather boots attracted Mana's attention, distracting her from her worries. It was a burly old man with silver hair and a Manchu-style mustache, wearing a red bandana with the Iwagakure headband. Mana could only tell because of occasional sparks coming off from Krown as he kept on pickaxing at the ore that was too hard to sock even the tiniest speck off of with his measly tool.

"Don't you use any light?" the man smirked.

"Did you come to kill me?" Krown asked with a high-pitched voice, though less childish than he had when he murdered his parents.

"Quite the opposite. I came you to give you a new life," the burly old-timer snickered, showing the hunchback a thumb-up.

"Monsters lurk in caves, waiting for a hero to kill them. If you're not a hero, then you're a victim," Krown replied as his voice turned lower and lower in pitch and, eventually, the pickaxing stopped and the mines sank in complete darkness. "The more people I kill, the sooner a hero comes to finish the job."

"Sorry, son, I know that having enclosed yourself at the deepest, abandoned corners of the mines, you're away from the news but… The country's at war with Kumogakure. We could use a monster right about now," just as the old man lit up his matchstick, the frozen image of Krown with his mouth open and slobber dripping from his pale-blue lip became clearer just inches from the man's face. The man lit up a pipe and puffed on it, drowning the room in smoke.

"You… Want a monster?" Krown closed his mouth and pulled off, vanishing from where the light could touch him.

"That's right, but none of that pussy-ass wanting to get yourself killed shit. You ain't done until your country says you're done. That way, you can be something more than a monster. Do a good job for your country, and you no longer have to be a monster. You're a fucking freak now, but free Iwagakure and you'll become the hero of the story," the old man kept going on.

"You're lying… Just like my parents… Monsters can't be heroes… Heroes kill monsters for being ugly and rotten. Heroes are pretty and good…" Krown's voice turned into a snarl. He was inches away from seeing red as he did in his last memory.

"Son, war ain't a fucking fairytale. The pretty boys die first. War is a fucking horror story and monsters are the only actual heroes that see the end of the story. I wouldn't be standing here talking to you if it weren't so," the old geezer crossed his arms and closed his eyes.

"If Kumogakure wins the war, they'll kill all of our heroes. Then there'll be nobody who can kill me. I'll stay a monster forever and the world will stay as rotten as I am…" Krown's voice rang through the mines. Judging from where it came from, the young man was talking from the point of entry into the level of the mines he lived in.

"That's one way of putting it…" the old warmonger chuckled to himself. "Glad you reconsidered. Also, glad you weren't just a fucking psycho that I'd need to put down myself. This is war, but it ain't an all-you-can-kill buffet, got it? We're professionals, not some ward of sickos."

"Don't worry, I made plenty of friends to keep me sane through the years…" a distinct voice came from within the mines that seemed to freak the old man out at first. When he noticed a faint, blue glow over the wires, the old veteran put it together that Krown was talking through a puppet.

"Glad to hear it, say, why did you do it? Did your parents hit you or something? I mean… Killing your whole family, then killing your whole Academy class the next day… Abusive upbringing will do it to ya, but…" the old man walked the natural flight of stepping stones toward the old and busted, fenced up elevator.

"No. My parents loved me. They also lied to themselves and they lied to me. My class, meanwhile, didn't lie to me about me being a monster, but they did abuse me. You're the first person not to lie to me and tell me you need me just the way I am, so it's new not wanting to kill someone…" Krown said while the elevator began rumbling and slowly ascending.

Mana floated onward, feeling her connection to Krown's mind slipping. She could almost see through her own hand and body. Focusing all the leftover focus, she tried to streamline the ascending elevator to take her closer to the memory related to the party that sent Krown to kidnap her. From what she's seen so far, Krown just wasn't the kidnapper type. It'd have taken some extreme circumstances for him to change his M. O. like that and be okay with it.

Suddenly she was in an old, wooden hall inside of a cave etched into the side of a mountain. Clouds and howling winds came from the tunnel behind Mana and shadowy figures that seemed staticky and tough to make out surrounded her. A young woman with short, black, and pink hair and wide-open, crazy mint-colored eyes that raced across her many points of focus raised her hand.

"I've got a side-job for you, Krown. This might be more important than even that traitor, Yaban. Konoha's Sorceress with a party of Allied Ninja watchdogs is coming to Boulder Town to perform. The world would never listen to us normally, hell, who knows if they give a shit even after we hand them Yaban's battered body back in exchange for freedom, but when we threaten that pretty face… They'll have no choice but to listen," the young woman stuck out her tongue and twisted her face with wrinkles of rampant mania.

"Wait, are you seriously sending Krown to snag her?" a tall woman with a sleeveless black gakuran, a spiky, upward hairdo, and an abundance of colorful facial tattoos and piercings scratched the back of her head. "Doesn't that guy never shut up about being a freaky monster?"

"Don't worry, Veno… Monsters are good at kidnapping princesses too…" Krown bulged out his left eye at his comrade, which, evidently, freaked the latter out greatly.

A stream of sizzling drips made Mana jump up. Something violet had been pouring down from an invisible source in the ceiling and, based on how nobody in the memory had been reacting to it, Mana realized that this was on her end. She hurried to cancel the connection and did it so hastily that she even jumped and staggered back right after waking up. She tripped over and fell flat on her bottom.

"Are you okay?" Shige-H helped Mana up. "That guy just started seizing and spitting up foam or something. His veins turned all black too, and he's just thrashing around. I don't think you'll be able to get anything from him."

"We need nothing else. We got 'em…" Mana panted while dusting off her blazer and tights. "This guy's from the same group we're looking for."