The stairs beneath Kouta's feet thudded firmly and layers of old dust got picked up and whirled around and down as the two carefully and slowly made their way to the fifth floor. The woman rammed against the door, seemingly because of the effort she had to put into simply moving. Maybe it was just the fatigue as the woman was breathing heavily using the door for support. Having her condition in mind such momentary signs of weakness could've been forgiven.

Slow thumps and foot-dragging noises signaled to the two that someone was coming to the door. A large man in a brown leather jacket and a torn up, hole-covered black t-shirt opened it. He didn't look like one of the Syndicate guys but he most definitely could've kicked some ass. His hair was messy black and long while his facial hair could've definitely used some trimming. The man moved aside and signaled for the two to come in after he saw Kouta's new female companion.

"Is this how it is nowadays Frankes, a minion to oversee your needs and scare old friends away?" The woman teased someone the two still had not seen as she raised her voice so it could reach the more remote rooms of the crack den looking apartment they were in.

"You know how it is Jeandette... I don't leave this place much these days," A cybernetic sounding voice reached the two followed by the large leather wearing guy. The voice came from a room several steps past the corridor the three were in, telling Kouta the way and saving him the trouble of having to stumble around a place he didn't know.

"A voicebox?" Kouta squinted questioningly at the woman who was now named by her old time friend. Before the young man didn't have a name to pin on her face because names simply didn't matter. As a medical ninja, he was used to look at the ailment, at the problems and the solutions he took to solve them. Names were bad, names identified someone, names gave them a feeling, personality and... Names made things difficult. Made tough decisions difficult.

"Don't worry, he won't know if you stare..." The woman nodded with a reply that was supposed to sound like a joke but her tone was so dull and tired that it wasn't particularly funny, it was less fun still when having in mind the subject they were discussing.

Once the three entered the room the leather wearing man positioned himself at the other end of the room and crossed his hands on his chest, carefully staring at Kouta as he was the only odd part of the equation which the man had no idea of. The man sitting on the only old and sophisticated looking piece of furniture in probably the entire block, an old armchair, was supposed to be the owner of this apartment and the man of the hour.

As a medical ninja, Kouta was used to seeing weird shit, even gritty shit but his face and body were on the different scale. The boy even couldn't help but shake a little the first moments after seeing the man. His skin was singed off to the flesh, based on his appearance it was clear that he must've been covered with third and fourth-degree burns and required extensive medical assistance. The worst part was the center split of the body, it looked like someone had lived inside the man and just decided to leave him by peeling the man open like a cheese stick from inside. His face was burnt and mangled, also his flesh opened from inside and suddenly Kouta understood why the man needed his voicebox to speak. The sounds that came out of him naturally made him slobber over himself and just came out as an unintelligible murmur and mumble.

"I've brought a friend," Jeandette spoke up first pointing at Kouta, it was just common courtesy of informing a blind man of the presence. The seated man just carelessly shook his head around trying to locate the young man but then stopped as his remaining sensory organs picked up nothing from Kouta's side.

"I don't care about who you've brought with you, I care about why you're here, Jeandette. It's been too long, neither of us is a person we've once been. Neither of us is exactly a number one hit anymore... The star of the show." The disfigured man whom Jeandette called Frankes spoke.

"True. Soon I'll perform for another crowd, one either of ogres or angels." Jeandette sighed lowering her head and moving up closer to Frankes softly touching his cheek and rubbing it. It was clear from the man's curious and indifferent reaction that he couldn't feel it.

"Consider yourself lucky. Maybe one day you'll do the soundtrack for my picture..." Frankes sighed as the aggressive intake of air forced him to cough, whatever flaming inferno he must've endured most likely also burnt his lungs and the protective membrane to shit. Even breathing must've come to an agony to this man nowadays.

"Maybe..." Jeandette sighed and moved back to Kouta before turning around.

"Don't fool yourself, we're not performing to any angels. We've taken a loan from the demon king and gave up that right with the first cracker we gorged on, we both read the contract of this life of pleasure and fame and we both signed it. I hope you didn't come here to cry on my shoulder because I will neither feel your pain nor have I signed a check I cannot cash with my ass. Can't you see, Jeandette? I've been practicing, practicing living in an actual Hell and I've had plenty of practice. The devil will find no fear or pain or hear no begs to stop when his hooks will tear my flesh, he'll only see a man with terribly bored eyes..." Frankes growled, his cybernetic voice made a low pitch that made the voice sound almost demonic.

"Ah, but that's your worst hell, isn't it? Boredom... I feel like the ogres will be content with just boring you to death. That's why you didn't kill yourself when this happened, that's why you don't have the guts to end it before it ends... You like the pain, pain is just opposite side of pleasure and none of the extremes terrify you, just the golden middle. The balance of the scales." Jeandette replied to which Frankes almost burst into laughter. His body shook violently in the armchair and spat out green slobber from his mouth as the voicebox dangled stuck to his mouth.

"Laughter," it translated.

"I'm playing a role, Frankes. The very last one, one that'll let me pass peacefully, a good one, decent one, one for the angels. You can help me and possibly share my place in purgatory or live miserably with eternal boredom lingering in the future. Maybe the angels will let you live in pleasure, live your old life again with your wife, like the old times..." The woman explained why she came, something that appeared to be quite stumping for the disfigured man as he had asked about it multiple times. These two must've not seen each other for a long time, Jeandette must've not been a common guest in these parts.

"Last role to play? So you need weapons then? Humor me, what can be so humbling that it'd wash off your sins, what could be so generous and holy that it'd give you a chance that the angels would waste their time?" The man asked, his cybernetic tone shrieked as it reached a high note, must've signaled an ironic change in tone.

"We need ninja kits, as many as we can have, I'll take what's left of them as compensation for my help," Kouta spoke up hoping that the man would agree to the terms and supply the weapons for the remained of their mission, all the way until the Box, if the other manage to decipher the sphere, that is.

"Young man... I am the only non-Syndicate affiliated black market dealer. I chose this path because I don't give a shit if I live or die, no, I actually wanted them to kill me, torture me and pull me from this world of boredom. To this day no such thing happened. It's either because I'm that good or because they leave me as is on purpose, just to get back at me. There are many who wish my weapons, weapons unaffiliated with the Syndicate..." Frankes began his complex refusal but suddenly Jeandette's voice rose up again.

"We are going after "Silver Dollar" Croquette and "Black Widow" Mortenson." She spoke killing all speech for a moment. The silence of the graveyard took over, wrapped its long rotten fingers around everyone's throats. Finally, Frankes managed to peel and break those old crone's fingers off his throat.

"I'll give you whatever you need... Not because I believe in you, you'll most likely die but... If you kill the bastards and burn their operation to the ground I'll hear about it and laugh, oh how I'll laugh... If you don't they'll know you got your weapons from me – they'll finally have no right to ignore me and they'll come, cut me into pieces, maybe burn me to cinders... It'll shake some excitement into my life for once." The poor man wobbled like a nostalgic war veteran longing for his lost buddies.

"Do you have any steel tipped cards? Hopefully, not artificial steel, actual living chakra conductive steel?" Kouta wondered

"What? Who the fuck plays with steel-tipped cards? They'd shred your hand like paper shredder unless you know what you're doing!" The cybernetic voice shrieked again in the high pitched tone.

"Very well... Ten ninja kits shall suffice..." Kouta nodded feeling a little bummed that he won't be able to bring Mana back some spares.


Mana huffed and grunted. She was tied to a chair with a Syndicate goon beating her up. One thing the magician didn't and couldn't possibly have predicted was how the Syndicate would react to an unknown mobster marching up to their establishment with a pretty wanted face tied up and handed her over to them. Meiko, or rather the comedic shape she now took, was lead to the leader of the establishment, Mana managed to slip some questions before she was taken to the other room to be tortured and at some point killed.

She just hoped that Meiko would get her answers before the killing part came. Mana could've escaped being tied to a chair in two seconds flat without her chakra control, still, fighting a grown and pretty brawny man would've raised noise and that'd have ruined it all. The little girl stabbed in the heart would've slipped into oblivion, as would the other future victims.

She could've maybe used some physical chakra augmentation, tanked those blows to the point where they didn't feel like all that much. At her peak, she could probably take a punch from a Chuunin without dying but the problem was not the power of the punches, it was the extended duration. At this point, Mana was being punched around for maybe fifteen minutes with guys changing a couple of times. She decided to only use minimal augmentation, see that their rings didn't crush her eyeballs, see that she didn't lose too many teeth because she hated the painful process of regrowing them.

The guy pulled out a fork and ran it by Mana's face. The magician had to hand it to him, her head felt woozy and the whole body hurt and felt bruised pretty badly. She saved herself from a lot more terrible injuries as she'd have long since been pounded meat if she didn't augment herself. These guys hit harder than most people, hard enough to grind stone and punch through steel without a doubt. They must've been beginning to get suspicious why the girl's face didn't change into minced meat by now. Still, the general rule was that forks hurt... They were also slow and messy, Mana was not looking forward to that at all.

Sharp pain in the left shoulder, Mana ground her teeth trying not to scream. It might be difficult to still do her mission after this. She needed as much functionality as she could muster but if she augmented her body too much she'd risk losing her physical chakra again by breaking the network or revealing the extent of her abilities to these jokers. In fact, she loosened her augmentations from the punching phase, letting small tips of the fork to slip by her flesh. The last thing she wanted was to break or bend the blasted thing and force the guys to get more inventive.

Mana wasn't sure how much time passed. She felt sharp pulses in many points of her body and she was passing in and out, her conscience was fading and coming back. She had to persevere, she had to for the little girl that was murdered, if they managed to get a little bit of info from all of this it'll be worth it, it'll be worth getting skewered by forks and burnt and beaten... Mana would suffer a thousand times more if she could bring that poor kid back but she couldn't...

Such was the curse of the human life, no way of rewinding and fixing the faults of the past, only moving forward and making sure those mistakes meant something, that something was learned from them... Mana began humming a song in her mind, slowly she began slipping into meditation, she felt more stabs coming her way but her mind was gone, how come she didn't think of it sooner?

A cold shower made Mana's mind snap out. She looked around and noticed that she was drowning, the magician stopped breathing and coughed out some water she prematurely inhaled. Fear scurried into her heart. That was just a side effect of drowning, Mana calmed herself down, her meditation must've made her move far away from the torture and made her slip away. Those Syndicate goons must've thought she was dead and dumped her body, still tied into the chair which was also tied to rocks... Mana felt her ears screaming – the pressure was getting to her. Her calm hands quickly worked wonders of the sloppy knots, it only took moments to escape her binds. The magician tried to swim up.

"Shit," she thought when she realized that the stones weren't tied to the chair – they were tied to her leg. A couple of extra seconds to escape those binds and then just float into the light... Pain... So much pain... Mana had no idea her meditation could help her withstand any torture, she had never thought of it that way. Now that she was back, however, everything those men did to her caught up with her. The only things in Mana's mind, however, were questions: if Meiko got any useful information and if she was OK.

Mana's naked body swam out into the dirty shores. She dragged her body across the stone looking at the trail of blood she left behind. Ice cold water ran down her body, freezing the girl and forcing her to grunt in pain and cold at places, easing the pain with its freezing presence in some others. Tracking the wounds on her body she must've been stabbed more times than the magician could count but these were shallow wounds. Shallow but they were just numerous enough to be worrisome, the magician's semi-normal human body was already failing. Blood was rising and coming out from her mouth, that despicable bloody taste in her mouth... Mana wrapped in the rags she was brought here in, Syndicate may have had immunity from social stigma or persecution but they wouldn't have dragged her through the streets butt naked.

Slowly, Mana crawled forward, on her knees when she couldn't walk and on her feet when she felt hopeful. An old man ran out from a small shack nearby to the lake she was dumped in and dragged her into his home. He tried treating Mana but the girl pushed him aside gently and asked for clothes and bandages. The old man disappeared for a moment and brought her similar clothes to those Mana wore, the way he explained it they belonged to his daughter. He also brought a large brown bag with medical supplies.

"So women here do wear those things..." Mana thought to herself examining a slightly more worn and older version of the attire she wore, despite being worn, this one had a fortunate advantage of not being soaked in blood and didn't have any stabbing holes in it. It was an almost exact replica instead small inconsequential details like the jacket's zippers being colored golden instead of silver and the shirt having purple lotus motifs on it. The leather jacket was also decently torn in some places like the woman was dragged on the ground in them. Mana decided to rather not ask about the details of that and thanked the man.

"My girl likes to get wasted and she's rarely home, only whenever she can drag her drunk frame through the pavement back home. Whatever I can do to help I'd be glad to do..." The old man nodded and bowed his head.

The kunoichi removed the bandages and quickly rounded herself up in them wherever the fork wounds still bled, once applied the bandage stained red almost instantly. After putting the bandages on her limbs, abdomen and some on her forehead to cover up the knife cuts she got at some point Mana got dressed, thanked the man with a low and respectful bow and ran out. She still had to find Meiko now...


Shimo slowly walked around the endless corridors of the hall after the show. The public just all jumped up and left right after it. It began clearing up even before the end of the show, most of them left right after Notasa's performance and for a moment Shimo also wanted to do that. Leaving would've been a mistake, Notasa also performed together with some other artists so she was clearly not leaving until the end of the whole show so the Yuki decided to sit the whole thing through.

Loud noises emanated from the end of the hall. Shimo looked around and then casually began strolling towards the direction of the noises as he was looking around like he was just minding his own business and just happened to run into the brewing situation. Something really bad was brewing, Shimo could tell just by looking at the number of Syndicate goons rallied around the large preparation room with a large bright blue note on it where "Notasa" was written in all the colors of the rainbow.

"Look, kid, yer a good gal, ye pay your protection fees. We don' have a problem with ya, see? We got a problem with yer bodyguard" one of the Syndicates spoke as Shimo joined in on the rally to see what the big fuss was about. The hall outside had a good twelve men gathered and there were four more inside. Or so it seemed initially when Shimo peeked inside something, or rather someone, he knew made him open his jaw wide.

It was a short man, used to be short, anyways, also he merely used to be a man. What once without a doubt was the man Shimo knew was now an abomination of nature and science. The very mob boss they've brought down an entire gold mine on was standing alive and kicking in the center of Notasa's chamber, his flesh must've been crushed and peeled off his skin and reassembled, it had many scars that didn't have blood and meat inside of them, instead it glowed with the purplish glow of the Audra alloy. Got a much fancier black with white stripes suit after the last fight too, picked up a knack for smoking indoors as well, his black tie had a red Otogakure symbol on it symbolizing the true "Otokage" of the village...

"I don't care if you have a problem with him, he was attacked and harassed and that's why he had to do what he did. He didn't even kill your men, he's not the monster you make him out to be!" The lady who was for now only known to Shimo as Notasa, and as such was immensely important to the youth screamed out through distress and tears.

"Lady, this guy right 'ere is none other then Carnefici Satsu, you may be too young to know what he used to do in his day, see?..." the boss spoke up, his tone and voice were a lot shallower and huskier, also much calmer. If Shimo had to guess nervousness must've broken his stitches and tore his flesh off the Audra core he had under it.

"I don't care what he did! He was recently out of prison when I hired him, he's my bodyguard!" Notasa once again was losing her composure – a bad thing to do when talking to a bunch of lowlifes like the Syndicate.

"How many settlements did you plunder? How many women did you rape and murder? How many ordered hits did you complete? How many children ninja did you slaughter in your days, Carnefici, or should I call you "Carnage Fici", do you still answer to that nickname? The old lady tales say that your headbutt once killed fifteen people, one exploded just from the force of it, the others died of the air pressure around it..." A mobster close to the Boss spoke up. The large man close to Notasa remained silent despite being asked a direct question.

He was an average sized, well-aged fellow, wore a suit and shades, similar to those that the bouncers wore. He had no weapons on him and had shoulder length brown with grey streaks hair that wasn't supposed to be that long, they merely ended up being that way due to lack of trimming and supervision. He also had a neglectful stubble that may have been a couple of months old but his eyes were the worst. In those eyes, one could've found fear, aggression, and the desire to rip one's throat out and shove it up the other end. A scary fellow through and through...

"I remember them all. Every poor man, woman, and child I did wrong to. I've been thinking, dreaming and remembering what happened to every seventy thousand fifty-two hundred of them. Shall I list them by names or is my word enough? I do not have the tongue for foreign names so I may disrespect my legacy by speaking their names, however..." The man spoke, he had a voice similar to the noise a man made when they had corn stuck in their throat.

"There will be no need, as someone who has paid her dues each and every bloody month I request you cease this at once! This man may have done terrible things in the past but he has already answered for them, you've no right to treat him like an animal!" Notasa spoke, now much calmer yet also much stricter.

"You dare ya, ye little bi..." The man's throat was crushed by his Boss lifting the mobster off the ground by grabbing him by the neck and lifting him effortlessly into the air before throwing him aside. The mobster was lucky his Boss didn't feel sadistic or else he'd have easily snapped his neck with just a tip of his thumb

"Yer right, kid, see? You paid your dues, see? But we are paid to protect you. That means that this man here, see? A killer of over seventy thousand and pillager of thirty-nine settlements and two villages is a security flaw, see? As someone paid to protect you, we can't allow this monster to be beside you, see? So, "Carnage Fici" Carnefici, you gonna bow and let me kill you quickly or are you gonna go for a few rounds?" The Boss grunted.

All the Syndicate thugs standing outside flew back knocked out by Shimo's strikes. The young man drew his blade and gently tapped each and every one of the thugs with the end of his hilt before they could as much as blink. They needed to be killed, they deserved death but... Shimo declared that he'd try and model his sword after Mana's ideal as much as he could. He killed only when necessary, he was a sword wielded to protect and so he claimed lives only to protect.

"I wouldn't mind a few rounds myself, Boss..." Shimo grinned confidently when the man's face shook violently, his flesh and blood dying the mobster's face completely purple in rage.

"You!" Was all he huffed out.