It was dark around, granted, it was tough to say exactly just what time it could've been outside the thickness of Forest of Death due to the dense cover of trees above. Insects of every sort, flying and crawling have started their nocturnal procession to fuel their further existence. That suggested a later part of the day, maybe past even the climax of the night. Time was running out.
A couple of times Mana dashed to the location where the straws of her sensory picked up ninja to be. The previous tip turned out empty as the ninja had moved on past their stop. A handful of more wild goose chases like that followed. As wet and frail spray of rainwater began weighing down the leafage that shielded the grounds below from it, Mana had begun to wonder if her quest was entirely pointless.
The cold didn't matter, even if the rain soaked her entirely. At least it helped to numb the pain in her chest, her wrists and just above her feet. It didn't do jack squat about the inner pain though, the desperation to do whatever it took to save her friend's health and fulfil the stupid promise she never should have made in the first place.
The next tip of Mana's sensory picked up on two signatures moving her direction from the southern entrance to the Forest of Death. While it would've been unfortunate and very unlikely that Kouta's team would be reduced to just two members so soon, missing checking it was still a luxury the magician couldn't afford. For that reason she moved their general direction to meet them sooner than they ran into her.
Her sensory was beginning to define itself as a new feeling, to sharpen somewhat. Each time she closed her eyes and tried to broaden the scope of her mind's eye it came off easier and easier. The ability must've been unlocked for the longest time, every time Mana remembered being exposed to these spacial views of giant stars whizzing past her floating body must've been it. What she took as a failure of meditation – something she usually excelled at, was truly just misinterpreted awakened ability to sense chakra.
It was a very raw and unsharpened sense. The magician needed training to make it available without meditation, just as a default feeling of hers, as usual as seeing with her eyes. Feeling up those large glowing stars of chakra, seeing their vibrant blazing colors and their immense or smaller sizes was not unlike seeing new faces. If this ability was ever trained and defined it would have been immensely valuable as Mana would've been able to remember and tell apart entirely different people by their chakra signatures alone.
Saving Meiko this way wouldn't have been a mistake. As much as Mana wanted to hate on the promise she had made to her best friend – subconsciously she knew it was the right thing to do. Meiko was someone with damaged self-worth, she lived a cheerful and goofy life but when she was reminded of the disappointment and sadness from the times she failed, such as she'd be reminded of if she was eliminated like this, she just shut down and gave up. Never seeing her friend crushed like that, crushed as she looked all those times she failed a simple ninjutsu technique or failed to concentrate on Mana's training, was worth all this. It had to be…
Hearing rustling beneath her Mana stopped and looked down. She had purposefully moved on the upper levels of the branches to be able to move quietly and survey the owners of the signatures if she ever ran into them as she predicted to be able to. A familiar young lady slowly walked down on the mossy floor of the forest raising Mana's suspicion.
A feeling of cold sharp steel pressed by her cheek from behind alerted her that she was caught.
"What are you doing here? I thought the two of you could restrain yourselves from all of this during the Exams…" a firm masculine voice spoke up.
A clang and black blur surprised Kouta's teammate as in a flash Mana had pushed the blade's edge aside from her face, stood up and pressed a steel tipped card by the young man's throat.
"That was an impressive illusion, time perception manipulation is truly something even I cannot fully master. That being said, your control is sloppy, whenever you use it you freeze the perception of not only your movements but the environment in general. Natural shifts in temperature, rustling and falling leaves and small animals all freeze making you predictable and your illusion very clear. Don't lower your guard even while your opponent is under it…"
Kouta's friend's face shifted from a serious and somewhat cold expression to amusement and even gentle laughter as he sheathed his sword, something Mana quickly followed allowing her steel tipped card to slip under her sleeve and disappear.
"We should train with each other sometime, you'd teach me control and better mastery of what I have, I'd help you with time perception manipulation… I'm Yushijin, in case you didn't know. That girl down there luring your attention is Budoki."
Mana sighed before looking around frantically, her heart was beginning to pound uneasily inside her chest and her breathing ran out of control as sometimes she struggled to draw breath and sometimes she drew too much in, so much that she began choking on it.
"Where's Kouta?" she asked worryingly.
"We've been… Tricked. We fought this team from Iwagakure and Kouta got injured. We thought it was nothing too serious, he healed himself and used up some of our food pill supply. Then he… The symptoms started."
Shaking her head uneasily Mana jumped down, from one branch to another before she landed right up to Budoki who just greeted her with an uneasy raise of her palm. The girl's eyes were sad as if she actually felt ashamed about something, as if she had wronged Mana in some way and the way this entire situation was breaking down just… Didn't rub the magician the right way.
"That poison was so smartly designed. The symptoms weren't serious but they were just annoying enough: blurry vision, popping in his ears, pain in his bones and joints. One by one he tried every antidote and every time it looked like it worked only for the symptoms to return soon enough. We went through our all medical supplies in just half of one night…" Yushijin explained rubbing the back of his head uneasily.
"We've… We've turned him in, we couldn't see him suffer anymore. He made the call – he needed too many supplies to function and not drag us down." Budoki looked at Mana with sad puppy eyes. "I'm… So sorry."
While Budoki really seemed to make a big deal out of this elimination, likely attributing Mana's mental breakdown to the closeness that the two felt for each other as a pair, Yushijin looked a bit confused about Mana's presence and her sad reaction to the news.
"Why did you come here? Why did you come alone? Is any of us your target?" he suspiciously wondered.
"No, it's just… He was my last hope…" Mana shouted out before falling on her butt and crawling to sit back to a wet and crooked tree. She could no longer control her tears and the scorching fiery tornadoes of fear for the future burning up inside her chest.
"Ummm… Maybe you should explain to us what's going on, we don't quite get it…" Budoki slowly approached Mana before sitting beside her.
"There's no time…" Mana shrugged it off and jumped up onto a taller reaching branch while gracefully avoiding the other surrounding branches by flipping over them or swinging off of them up higher.
"Hmph… So that's Kouta's girlfriend?" Budoki crossed her arms around her chest.
"Yeah, should've known better than trying to catch the Konoha's Sorceress in my illusion…" Yushijin smiled.
"She's really weird…" Budoki bitterly declared.
Seeing where she was going was getting awfully difficult. Tears were running down everywhere and that, as always, made everything more problematic. So many people used to tell her to just stop crying, they tried finding out what exactly made her cry and then after they couldn't understand it they were so fast to fire off labels. As if pain was as simple as submissive to just being willed away, being stabbed or burnt could always have been healed. No medical ninja alive managed to treat inner pain, not yet.
Knowing that Kouta was out of the picture just made Mana that much more nervous about her promise. Not only was she left all alone to deal with the ramifications of her promise but now her entire quest was rendered pointless. She was just dashing and leaping around for no reason, following no particular purpose or goal. All she was doing at this point was postponing having to face Meiko and Kiyomi after she returned.
Mana tumbled over a branch that was larger than she had predicted it to be with her eyes completely sunk in tears. She covered her face instinctively despite knowing that the fall would only shave off some chakra off of her reserves to make her survive the fall with nothing but insignificant bruises. Her newly reopened chest wound started hurting again in a very peculiar burning pain – likely an early sign of a possible infection to come. It needed to be washed…
The magician sat down and closed her eyes, she didn't even need to delve deeper into her mind to see the clusters of stars representing chakra signatures rise up in front of her. She saw several more signatures than usual, she must've been getting closer to the central parts of the forest by now, hence the more intense and larger quantities of signatures. She had used the ability many enough times to finally gain easier access to it. Still, a far cry from where she wanted it to be though… That would take time, more of it than one hectic night.
How was she supposed to save Meiko now? How was Mana now to remain both Meiko's friend and keep her promise as well as help the blacksmith to get over her wound. She did everything she thought was right – she gave the blacksmith more energy to deal with it by feeding her food which was supposed to help the superhuman ninja metabolism start dealing with the wound. She helped Meiko however she could, tried being a good friend and a good teammate at the same time…
Maybe that was impossible? Maybe being a good friend and being a good teammate were two different things and Mana had to give up on one to be the other? Even Kiyomi, someone with clearly different and much more intense feelings towards the redhead was ready to be hated, to be yelled at for the sake of doing what was right. She was willing to compromise, why wasn't Mana? It would've been the easy way out to just sit down there, just let her mind slip away into hazy deep sleep and let Kiyomi carry Meiko and give her up.
No. There was one more thing Mana had to give up, one more redefined compromise. A Faustian bargain under her own rules, it sounded empowering but truly it disgusted the magician, every time she tried to consider what she was about to do made her sick and throw up a little inside. It needed to be calculated, considered and weighed though, the inner turmoil was unavoidable…
A trio of young genin was camping peacefully around a feint and ghastly chakra lantern construct that was fueled by an unknown elemental but provided a powerful but unseen from afar, similarly to how a fire would be seen, glow. Mana observed the trio from afar, a young girl with the hair of brown and an instrument case on her back was keeping watch with her teammates sitting peacefully with their eyes closed by the lantern.
When the magician closed her eyes she could feel an extension of sorts from the dark skinned young man's chakra signature to the lantern suggesting it was a construct of his making. Judging by how the lantern stayed constantly and separately without sucking out any chakra from its owner, allowing them to even fall asleep while maintaining the jutsu, it must've been a sealing technique of sorts which didn't appear like a bunch of sealing glyphs or hieroglyphs but instead as a chakra construct.
The magician leaped down and began slowly approaching the trio, her hand was already halfway into her pocket and pulling out a bunch of cards to be thrown at her opponents before the young lady with the instrument up her back noticed it and jumped in to block Mana's attack. The magician's cards dug in deep into the instrumental case, ignoring the damage to the case the girl simply unzipped it with one fluid motion and retrieved a beautiful spruce and maple violin. The kunoichi transited between watch-mode and fighting stance flawlessly, she was undoubtedly skilled.
Taking mere moments, gentle tunes filled the air. The magician stopped in her place, jerking her body and twitching in her attempts to move that just stopped. Hearing the melody based genjutsu being set into play the teammates of the young kunoichi woke up and leaped to her aid. The lighter skinned and slightly chubby young man extended his hands as a cloud of strange dust emerged from under his sleeves surrounding Mana. The magician did her best not to breathe but the dust made its way right into her lungs and her airway.
"Well this is weird…" the third teammate of the violinist and the chubby Kumogakure paleskin yawned before extending his hands at Mana. "You couldn't have come here alone, where's your team, what are they plotting, which one of us is your target?" he kept on questioning Mana.
As the magician continued to sit silent longer and longer, almost defiantly to his request the dark skinned and dreadlock wearing sealing jutsu user turned at his chubby teammate.
"Yo, paleskin, I thought your stupid spores should've affected her will and forced her to talk?"
"They should've…" the chubby shrugged.
"This is remarkable…" the young violinist stopped playing and placed her violin back into the case.
"You say remarkable, I say dangerous!" the seal user pointed his finger at Mana making his hand shaped like a handheld kunai dispenser before he "pressed the trigger of it" materializing a flat and round sealing glyph around the tip of his extended finger that then blasted a lightning fast beam of pure chakra out and through Mana's chest blasting her down on the ground.
"Hmph… I think she actually attacked us alone." The sealing jutsu user looked around after realizing no one came to the deceased magician's aid after he blasted a hole through her chest. "Shit, I didn't really want to kill her, I thought this was a clone or… I dunno…" the young man shrugged.
"Wait, where's your ninja pouch?" the chubby pointed at his teammate's leg where a pouch containing all of his ninja tools and his supplies, medical supplies included laid. After a brief moment of confusion the young violinist noticed that the cards stuck in her case have also all disappeared as well as the corpse of the young magician that seemingly was never even there to begin with.
The violinist kunoichi started laughing uncontrollably before the team realized that they've just been bamboozled by someone who didn't even need to take them out as their targets. Upon that realization and the upcoming pondering about the unsure future without medical supplies or some of the weapons the laughter and cheer sort of died out into a more melancholic silence.
"You're just in time. A good ten or fifteen minutes and I would've taken Meiko up on my shoulders and carried her right to the southern entrance." Kiyomi faintly smiled upon seeing the magician returning with a pouch of medical supplies.
Without replying a single thing and still pale and confused about what she had just done Mana simply kneeled by Meiko's side and removed one green pill, placing it right into the blacksmith's mouth and asking her to chew.
"Where did you get those supplies? Did Kouta give you those? I figured you'd go ask him for something like this…" Kiyomi wiped her sweat in relief after seeing Meiko's physical condition improve right before her eyes. The blacksmith's cheeks and her entire skin regained its human blooming color. Her eyes opened up and started clapping together like a baby who was just really happy to be awake.
Mana didn't reply a thing. After Meiko opened her eyes the magician just fell on her side and curled into a fetal position right down there on the grass. Initially Kiyomi thought Mana was injured and even forced one red food pill down her throat to help with the wrist and chest wounds.
"Holy shit, there are two more yellow pills and two more red food pills. No way Kouta gave you this, if he had you'd be contractually obligated to marry him on the spot!" Kiyomi whistled looking into the pouch that Mana brought back after tricking the trio of sleepy genin using one of her oldest genjutsu techniques she often used on stage. A technique that created a visual double of Mana and had her die on stage and even temporarily duplicated a lifeless corpse for a good minute or two – Fancy Trick Jutsu.
It appeared that after seeing the knives and shuriken that also came in the package of the pouch the blonde realized what may have actually been done to get Meiko these food pills. Her face didn't look horrified or judgmental over what Mana may have done, in fact, it completely got absorbed into making food and taking care of Mana's and Meiko's injuries.
The magician wrapped her head around with her arms and covered her crying face up. She stole someone else's medical and weaponry supplies. It wasn't against the rules, it wasn't in any way considered wrong in the ninja world, in fact, Kiyomi was one step away from commending Mana for tricking someone else successfully for her own gain but she may have had the common decency and insight to realize how the magician must've felt after something like this.
At the very least, now there may have been four teams that wanted Team Hokage out of the competition…
