Mana saw Stea's eyes linger on and waver. It hit the magician as a little bit odd as she had always taken the young woman as mentally mature and spiritually strong. It was very much unlike Stea to roll something on and around her tongue before speaking it out.
"Your strategy was solid. You didn't waste any time loading the damage seal, you found an opening then exploded on Doma with everything you had – you could have beaten him like that", she uttered.
"I could have but I didn't. My best was not yet enough to keep him down for good, my gamble did not pay off. In the past I used to hold back tremendously in fear for my opponent's life, I would like to say that that was why Doma won but… That was not the case. I no longer disrespect my opponents like that", Mana replied.
"This fighting style of yours, the way you think, how you analyze other people's fighting styles and match the cards in your hand just right… Your flashy techniques… I believe you can beat me if you got stronger, much stronger", Stea admitted, "Not only that, you can beat me in a flashy and impressive enough manner to promote us both. My skills are leagues above those of the other genin but unless I can put up a satisfying match, it will be for naught. Please…"
Mana could not believe what she was seeing shimmering in Stea's eyes. Crystal, wet and genuine tears. This was a pleading cry of a sky soaring dragon. One that required descending beneath the clouds to devour a cow but needed help to do so. Stea was so immensely skilled that in order to impress the Ninja Council and show off all her skills she needed a powerful enough opponent to challenge her, someone to rise to her level.
"I can't do it, Stea. Two and a half weeks have already passed. I cannot match your pace in just half the time I had before. Whatever talent you see in me, it simply is not there. I was always the unimpressive one, really", Mana politely smiled, squirming uncomfortably out of Stea's gentle grip.
"I thought you were a hero. Those things you said in your show, things about human life being magical and wondrous, do they mean nothing to you really"!? Stea shouted out in desperation. "The famine in my village is no longer what it used to be, people do catch what little fish that have returned to our shores, now that the Eight Tails isn't scaring them away, but instead of dying in a month from hunger, they die in three to six months of malnutrition. I need your help to save their lives for good, please"! Stea cried out falling on her knees, Mana turned around, feeling awfully uncomfortable in the position she's been placed in.
She had denounced this life, she had decided to convincingly to leave it all behind and just perform on stage. It looked like this one last time, this one last time she'd need to fight before leaving it all behind but there never was "just one last time". It's a deceitful and despicable trap, just like with "killing just this one time", it's never just "that one time". If Mana agreed, if she promised Stea to beat her the way that Stea wanted to be beaten, not only would Mana accept an unbelievable responsibility on her shoulders to virtually redefine her in just two and a half weeks but she'd also be a hypocrite, she'd end up agreeing to such proposals again and again, every single time after "that one last time".
This won't be just "this one time". Unless she proves here and now that she's quit for good, there'll be another time and another one. She needed to make a statement here and now, just tell Stea now, just shut down her childish hopes of settling her village's problems all by herself. That was not how the world worked!
"Okay. I will beat you in two and a half weeks. I'll match your pace and get both of us promoted. I'll help you save your village", Mana replied with a shaking voice.
Stea's eyes brightened like two newly born stars, like sparks of superheated iron being molded under the gentle care of a skilled blacksmith. The young woman jumped up to her feet and ran up to Mana, grabbing her hand and pressing it against her own chest, caressing it with her cheeks like the magician had just promised something tangible. Something that was possible, which it was not.
"Thank you, Mana"! Stea kept repeating, in various voices, tones, with both shaking and determined mannerisms. "Thank you, Mana"! She just could not stop.
"What have I done"? Mana kept scolding herself mentally, "I can't match Stea in two years, what can I possibly do in two and a half weeks? My best now wasn't nearly able to match Doma Nacasa, someone who wasn't able to flip the table while keeping all the good cards in his hand with refreshing his body anew. I'll get slaughtered, I'll disappoint her…"
Worst of all was – now she felt like she would be disappointing the whole of Getsugakure as well. With a single powerful leap, using a copied, similar chakra control technique to that she saw Doma use, also using her "Mystical Wings" jutsu to boost her up halfway, she leaped atop one of the mountainous structures in the banged up Training Grounds.
Mana's cold and shaking hands wrapped around her sweaty, dark hair, letting them sift through her fingers as she covered up her face. She wanted to just squish her stupid head for accepting Stea's plea. Something was wrong… A powerful chakra signature was moving in, Mana moved her hands away and saw Gasco Patura land nearby her and standing by her side. Maybe he was smarter? Maybe he knew what Mana had just signed up for and…
"It was an incredible thing you've just agreed to", the thunderous-voiced giant gently smashed Mana's hopes of being proven having just acted unreasonably.
"Was it? I could sense how much chakra Doma still had after my attacks, he was less than halfway done after everything I threw his way. If I don't finish Stea off in one quick swoop, if at least 1% of her stamina and will to fight remains – she'll stand up and heal up, becoming thousandfold stronger for the duration of our battle making her undefeatable and me a failure", Mana explained things the way she saw them to the giant.
"Hmph, after spending so much time as a sensor, I'd have hoped you'd be able to tell the difference between chakra and one's ability to keep fighting, their life force. Chakra, stamina, life force, all of these are different and you are only seeing just one of them. Regardless, you've advanced remarkably in just one week, in between the Forest of Death where you were just a toy for us to play with to the point where someone like Stea sees promise in you. Your sensory abilities have jumped a whole year ahead in just five days. I can't say if you'll be able to do what you've promised to do but you've jumped at the chance to help someone, no matter if you're strong enough yet to do it. In the end, isn't that what heroes are"? Gasco sighed before sitting by Mana's side.
"Maybe, but is it really that great - jumping into action when you're not strong enough to help? Won't you just make things worse if you do that?" Mana voiced her fears of disappointing the young woman she just promised to save her village to.
"I didn't say being a hero was all that great. Heroes died first in the famine, you know. Anyone who didn't do horrific things did, it was a social contract of ours to leave what we did behind us, it was a difficult time, leave it all behind and move on", Gasco looked longingly at the endless forests as far as the eye could see, just naked trees soughing.
"Can you? Can you just move on after doing something as terrible as promising someone to save their home and failing"?
"Obviously not. Neighbors promised to forgive and forget the fact that they may have cannibalized each other's children who were just looking for food, that they ate and killed things and people they shared feelings for. That whole sense morality went away for the sake of survival but don't think for a second that they were truly left behind. Memory is a cruel thing. You've taken up responsibility on your shoulders, it won't be ignored or forgotten but that only means you're an adult now. You should be proud of yourself because being a hero may be worth rabbit's piss but being a mature adult is a worthy and remarkable thing" Gasco spoke more words now in this one dialogue than Mana had heard him ever say before.
"Rabbit's… Piss…" Mana mumbled under her nose. A crazy idea was beginning to dawn in her head...
"Oh, it's just a manner of speech, an expression we have in…" Gasco tried shrugging it off.
"Tell me", Mana interrupted him, "Tell me about your home, tell me about the worst it got. I need to know what lays on my shoulders. I need to know the people I'll be returning to the ways I denounced for".
A gloomy fog haunted Getsugakure in the prime of the great famine that appeared to not linger and budge for one single moment. A little party of heroically minded individuals who had not lost their hope for both surviving and maintaining their humanity wandered the village streets, knocking on each door of every little gloomy house they could get to over the streets littered with dead bodies. The ghastly expressions of the emotions they had in their final moments and their endless misery forever ingrained on their faces.
"Why do we bother", one of the teens asked with a feeble voice. "We can shelter enough corpses by just picking them off the streets. Why take them off people's hands"?
With this hopeless sentiment, the young teen left the party, running off whether to the direction of his home or just trying to see how long he would survive outside the weakened and dying village's walls. A place where bandits and mercenaries roamed, avoiding the village like the plague, likely considering disease to be the reason of the quickly dropping population, decrease in caravan activity and the foul stench of death from miles away.
After yet another door fit the description of either not opening the door or refusing to surrender their dead bodies to the social activists taking them off their hands, an elderly man sighed.
"What's the point, they either can't deal with the fact their dear ones are dead or they plan on cannibalizing their dead ones instead of surrendering them to us for a burial", with those loudly exclaimed thoughts, the old man left the party and wandered off.
"Tsk, this is fucking ridiculous", the large yet quickly rotting away man pulling the cart of the dead grumbled. "As if I got enough strength to both survive by my own and bury some dead meat. Eating them before they're too bad and suffering through the symptoms may be better off than just burying them"!
Just like that yet another social activist declared a mutiny to his own social activism and left the party. Eventually, only two remained, a young silver haired girl, like a twinkling little star, and a young man, similarly plagued by his hunger and clearly decently worn and damaged in his battle against certain death. Both too young and too naïve to give up, both pushing onwards on the noble but pointless goal to bury everyone who died properly.
"We don't have their names", the young man mumbled.
"You giving up too"? Little Stea hopelessly looked at her friend with sad eyes.
"Only over my dead body", the youth shook his head, filled with great determination. "Just noting the fact that the gravestones won't be what I'd like them to be".
"That expression stopped being funny…" Stea worryingly replied, "You don't look too good lately".
The young man stopped pushing the cart with piled dead bodies to roll up his shirt and slap at his painfully swollen stomach. "Look how well I'm doing, my stomach's full of something" he laughed out.
"Something's full of something else, alright", Stea let her worries down to a laugh. She knew her friend would never show weakness in front of her. That was just the kind of kinship these two felt for each other. Now just keep pushing this cart, just keep moving. These poor people deserved it…
Stea did not talk to her friend, they just kept pushing the cart, doing what they had to do. The boy kept on making short breaks to run behind a house, or another, even when he was pushing the cart, he kept spitting blood to the side from his dried out and cracked lips and bleeding gums. Stea thought he just needed a break, granted, she was also glad to find an excuse to rest a bit herself every time her friend ran off holding his abdomen like a mad man.
"Valor"? Stea called out her friend's name but only the wind carrying the ever-present foul stench of death answered. Worried, the girl ran off, following the direction where her friend last ran off to when she still saw him.
Stea quickly vaulted over the small wooden fence before noticing it was unlocked and could have simply been opened. That was the most likely way that her friend got into the yard in the first place. The girl looked around in worry, she saw some puddle of stinky substance at the corner of the house but, honestly, even if it was what she thought it to be, it couldn't overpower the usual smell of death in the air so it was impossible to identify. Given how much rotten and bad food starving people ate, Stea could only guess what the likely contents of that puddle were.
"This doesn't make any sense, if something bad had happened to him there'd be blood", the girl looked around trying to see some remains of her friend. Maybe he just got away, finally feeling sick of this whole pointless affair, but that wasn't really Valor. Valor was Stea's soulmate, he was the knight that gave her strength to keep making her feelings surface into reality.
Even if she fully knew how dangerous it was, Stea knocked on the back door of the house of the yard where Valor had disappeared. If the locals had not seen Valor, that could only have meant that he did actually leave her. Strangely, the back door was unlocked and opened up immediately after Stea knocked on its palm tree frame. This was stupid, it was dangerous… Stea wandered inside.
"Excuse me", she muttered out before repeating it loudly so that her presence did not surprise the masters of the house. If she was invading their home, temporarily, with good reason, she was better off letting them know she was looking for someone.
"You shouldn't have followed", a weak and husky voice came from the guest room, a man collapsed and barely breathing, sprawled out in an armchair jumbled out before Stea ran in the direction of his voice, the heart in her chest kept thumping to the point where it felt it would soon be busting out of the cavity that housed it.
"My friend, he disappeared, have you seen him"? Stea asked the weak and dying man trying to step up in front of him as he didn't bother to turn at her, maybe he was too weak to even do so. "We can bury your dead too, do you have any"?
"Me and my brother... We are ninja, we only need to eat a little bit once in a month or so, the smallest chunk of food suffices. You shouldn't have come here, we don't need you", the weakened man kept repeating the last part again and again.
"Y-You…" Stea mumbled out.
"He was already halfway gone by the time we…" the man could not finish what he was saying. Something was wrong, all the feelings tumbling inside of Stea, all the anger, all the thoughts and despair of the unfair world around her, all of it erupted at once in a bright white blaze, as bright and hot as the flame of the hottest stars and as compact as the room she was located in. There were no remains of the man in front of her, not anymore, the pressure of her chakra splattered him around the room but the heat and intensity of it instantly evaporated his remains.
"B-Brother, what was that"? a voice thundered from above, the man descended from the second floor only to freeze in motion, witnessing the devastation that the awakening and the sudden eruption of the thousands of different malicious feelings and thoughts inside this young girl's mind had brought.
"D-Don't come any closer"! Stea screamed out, she was no longer acting of her own conscious mind. It was pure instinct. She realized by now that these two had attacked and kidnapped her friend for food, one corpse would have likely sustained them for a while, given their background. They did not even need the whole thing but they were ninja, killing was what they knew best.
Stea couldn't even see the man move. She just felt sharp pain in her chest. Her eyes wandered down, thinking of a thousand things: why didn't the power she had before manifest again and help her, why didn't she move, more so – when will this nightmare they were living in ever end? One thing the girl knew for sure, as she looked down to affirm the man's butcher knife piercing her heart, she would not be there to see the end of this nightmare…
Two fingers were holding the blade right by her heart, twitching slightly as blood trickled from them, the tip of the blade had penetrated the girl's skin slightly but the rest of the blade was stopped.
"I… I didn't see you", Stea muttered out before falling on her knees and covering up her head. It was the final impulse of a collapsing mind.
"I am a ninja, dear girl, just like you have the potential to be. If you did see me before I intended you to – I'd be very bad at my job", the old man smiled as his rich moustache line moved upwards, his eyes brimmed with confidence and dreamy hope, just like Stea's used to before she wandered into this home.
"Shit, old geezer, you're crazy fast, got here entire seconds before us"! A bratty voice rumbled from behind Stea before the front door and the front wall of the house fell apart, revealing a little brat and an older, more muscular and cool-looking young adult. Whereas the eyes of the little boy were overflowing with emotions, rage, excitement, annoyance, all at once, changing every second, the eyes of the brutish looking bald-headed youth by his side were boring and calm. Just how many resident nightmares like this had these eyes seen?
A flashy dance of clanging blades, invisible to Stea's broken, teary and blanked out eyes erupted all over the house: the kitchen, the second floor, then the guest room before the old man slumped on his knees, covered in cuts and bruises and the other ninja fell violently crashing through the kitchen appliances and through the kitchen wall, all the way outside. Deader than the dead get.
"You're so amazing, girl, Gasco could sense you from all the way back! We did not even intend on looking in this neighborhood this week! Why didn't you fight back yourself, with your chakra level you'd have blasted them away easily"!? The brat kept on prancing about the broken Stea asking his series of questions.
"Idiot, look at her, it's clear that she can't control her latent talent. She's untrained, just sheer chakra signature size isn't everything. Old man, you wasted too much chakra on this trash. You didn't need to use your damage seals on the likes of him", the baldy just angrily grunted, closing his eyes and smugly walking away from the battlefield, as if everything that interested him had already been resolved.
"Nonsense. These two may have been too weak for me to need to use my ability but… They were ninja after all, not just any ninja, deep inside they regretted the actions they had to take in order to survive. That is why they wanted no witnesses – shame", the old man closed his eyes before gently helping Stea get back up on her feet.
"Who are you people"? Stea cried out, still shocked about the table where the game she played was located on being flipped over, fundamentally changing its rules, and making it difficult to put the pieces back together.
"We're the last hope this village has of overcoming this shitshow, wanna help"!? The brat gave Stea the thumb up before wiping his snot off of his nose and laughing out in embarrassment. "You're pretty strong yourself, we could really use your help"!
