The streetlights had gone out for the morning. It was not something of great significance, not quite a life or death type alert. Regardless of that fact, Mana opened her eyes and stood up from the bench in the middle of the town square where she was residing the whole night, meditating. It may have been a tad too early to declare an end to the night, given that the sky would still be dark for hours, but the magician was finished with that town square.

It was not that Mana could not have paid for a shabby roof over her head and a bedbug-ridden place to rest her head on for a single laydown. She just found herself conflicted and at a bizarre case of inner strife. There was something about this town, something about that last day that, not all by themselves necessarily, but in a peculiar combo of the two prevented the magician of even thinking about sleeping.

It was as if this entire town leaked out some strange incense of malice at night. At this point, the magician was not sure, if she was imagining it or if the mysterious, town-size mass of reek of bloody murder was real. One part of Mana told her that she could not have caught a whiff of anything – there was no logical reason for her to worry, nothing solid, anyways, she could not have been sensing anything at all.

But then… Even civilians sometimes had bad hunches that were justified. History was full of stories of people who sensed something bad in the air around them and did not depart on trips that would have been fateful to them. In theory, if a great combination of chakra signatures of outright wicked, twisted, beyond redemption scumbags all gathered in one place, Mana, as a sensor could sense their inner natures impacting their chakra signatures.

The problem was – Mana did not quite know for sure how dark and corrupted chakra signatures felt, only had it told and described to her. What was to say this wasn't just her making stuff up. The report was out, her mission was over, and yet… Mana stayed in Shukuba, rotting in its reek and letting it soak her in its corruption, making her shake from her very core.

Indeed, Shukuba was different at night compared to the happy-go-lucky ball of cheers, carnivals and ice cream vendors it was during the day.


With a yawn, Mana entered the Security HQ, looking to meet with Itemi and Okasune. It felt odd referring to one with their first name, while Mana always thought of the other referring with their last name. It was just that whereas Itemi was so goofy and weird and officer Okasune described as such a big and deserved servant of her town that an honorable referral seemed to be in order.

"The kid waltzed in like she owned the place, the sentiment present not in her strut, hell, she was basically dragging her feet behind her. It was just that she came back even though she had no reason to. No one in their right mind ever took a one-two Shukuba beatdown and came back for more with a bloody smile. Rough night? I asked her." Itemi did his thing.

"Not really, I found it quite productive training my chakra capacity through the night. I've spent some yesterday while I was sneaking around, figured some meditation and chakra node stimulation was in order while it was recovering." Mana yawned again. It was unlike a kunoichi to get tired this easily. Ninja were used to taking multiple sleepless nights with their chakra augmentations sustaining their systems. Maybe there was more to this "Shukuba beatdown" than the magician heeded.

"Right… Chakra… That was that spiritual thing ninja had. I had no idea how would one even go about training such a thing, figured that with the unjust world we live in, you'd live with what you're born with." Itemi shrugged as he sipped a cup of something very aromatic.

"Not quite. It's not only spiritual either. Chakra is both physical and spiritual in nature, only by training both parts of one's body can it be made to grow efficiently." Mana replied feeling oddly honored that Itemi was genuinely interested in ninja. Given how most of her interactions with the civilians was about her profession as a stage magician, talking about this to someone who had not undergone the ninja training felt very exciting.

"Huh. Spiritual mumbo jumbo, I guess momma was right, I could have never made a ninja. I was always more of a lift a bunch of weights – punch someone in the face as hard as the weights you've been lifting let you kind of guy. Okasune may have been pretty intrigued by this shit, she was into the whole spiritual way of life kind a books. Speaking of the big starlet, where the hell was she? I kept nervously looking around, figuring that maybe during one of my smoking breaks I missed her coming to work. Figuring… Yeah right… Hoping, more like it".

Itemi's growling outer monologues were making Mana's sleepless night feel that much more draining but the officer raised a pretty solid point. Officer Okasune didn't appear to be present in the office, the magician tried to figure out if anything on her table was moved the slightest since the three left the HQ yesterday. Even if a hint of a migraine and general snooze was plotting against Mana's skills and memory, she could easily see that nothing was even remotely moved.

That could have waited. Mana's interview with an attempted murderer could not have.

"Can we see that officer as soon as possible? Okasune-san promised she'd let me do that this morning and this is on a schedule." Mana looked at Itemi who just raised his eyebrows before sipping from his cup again and putting a bunch of shiny accessories in the pockets of his jacket before zipping it up and standing up.

"Sure thing, I answered the kid. For all the talk she gave about healthy spirituality and all that shit, she was as obsessed as the best of us, or rather, those that let their obsessions drag them under. The healthy ones could move on, wave their hands and feet and surface before they breathed too much of that filth in, the rest were stuck, staring at the surface with bloodshot eyes while the swampy yuck filled their dead lungs. Speaking of filthy lungs…" Itemi cracked a spark, lighting up a smoke as he waved for Mana to follow.

"Okasune was a big girl, she could take care of herself was what I kept telling myself. Still, it wasn't like her to miss the early hours of work. Back when we were both young interns her office window was always open in the morning even when the janitors arrived at the place first."

Mana had expected Itemi to be much more vocal during the brief drive of a caravan that took the two of them to the local arrest facility. Maybe it was his nervousness and worry over his partner and friend but the man was just staring lifelessly through the half-open glass, occasionally letting the smoke from his simmering puff leave the caravan through the window.

It was not until the duo stood on the first step of the stairs leading up to the arrest house of Shukuba that the man remembered to talk, given what Mana had learned of him up to now, him not talking was the same as him forgetting to feel which creeped her out.

"Shukuba arrest house. A processing facility for beat meat before it's sourced, evaluated by a pretty well-fed butcher and sent to an appropriate home. Tough shit, these deviants weren't even decent enough to be categorized as meat, meat fed some people after the butcher identified and worked his magic with it. As the case was with the deplorable, usually the people had to feed them."

"I disagree, Itemi-san. I view prisons as a sort of reformation facility and welfare of supporting them as an investment for the future, once the prisoners leave and are reformed." Mana stated with a smile.

"The kid remained hopeful as usual. The hypocrisy in her sprayed like blood from someone stabbed in the alleyway for their fancy pair of shoes. She's spent one day in Shukuba and she already had bags under her eyes. A week later, she may have been the one running around with carnage in her eyes, killing people because they had fancier looking cardboard boxes to sleep in." Itemi mumbled as the two approached the door of the arrest house with the officer removing his smoke and tossing it away.

A short while after the door closed behind the two, Mana ran out from inside the arrest house to step a pair of times on the cigarette before trying to enter again but, still feeling uneasy about it, picking it up and throwing it into the trash just a few meters away.

By the time Mana found Itemi inside the facility, he was already working on some kind of a deal with a security officer that looked about halfway geared compared to the task force sent to arrest Tokuse Bonda yesterday. The girl just stood behind the two talking men, rubbing her shoe uneasily against the floor until she was called up.

"Okasune-san referred to some "Yokotomo Donyoku" fellow yesterday when speaking to that woman. Who is he?" Mana wondered. She meant nothing by it, just something to kill some time and, maybe, make the overall picture at least a little bit clearer.

"The smoke-police asked a silly question about a nobody. Someone who played one too many scavenger hunts and accidentally found a treasure in someone's backyard. Yokotomo Donyoku had nothing to do with anything so it felt interesting why the brat was so interested in him. Then again, it must have been overwhelming just jumping onboard a moving train and expecting to know which way the coal on it was going."

Mana and Itemi got lead into a room with the officer, the man looked about as rough as a man who spent most of yesterday arrested would look. That was a pity as the officer was pretty young and, Mana could tell, quite attractive.

"Why'd you do it?" Mana jumped to the point. The sleepless night, that worked her like a rider worked a mare they rode overnight, despite her better willfulness of admitting it, was her reason for doing it.

"Just following orders." The man shrugged his shoulders, tossing his hands as high up as his binds allowed him. Mana squinted suspiciously, what did that mean?

"Just following orders my ass. We all got the same set of orders, Okasune was running the whole operation. There could have been no way that she ordered some ambitious schmuck, straight out of Security boot camp with high marks and shoot-for-the-top attitude to just shred a guy in the middle of the op." Itemi raged, moving in on the guy and grabbing him by the hair, attempting to slam his face into the table before Mana stopped the man by placing her hand on his shoulder, having moved up from behind him right after he charged up to the poor man.

"Are you implying that Okasune-san ordered you to kill Bonda? Why would she do that?" Mana wanted some more clarification if she was to buy this man's version. Still, at the very least his side of the story deserved to be heard.

"I dunno, one morning she just whispered it into my ear. Had to do it, she's always been pretty indifferent and cold. She played me like a jack thrown out onto a field of kings. I've been wanting her affection, as much as a pleasant wink that the mere suggestion of what she desired just flung me that way. It stopped mattering what the thing she asked me to do was, it had to be done." The deviant kept talking, he was clearly crushed by the whole experience. So much even that Mana was beginning to believe parts of what he was saying.

Itemi did not look like about to buy into it, the Security officer grabbed the man's head and smashed it against the table, leaving a good, bowl-deep dent in it while the nose of the ex-officer spilled with red all over.

"I couldn't believe what the guy was saying. Kita, a treasured friend, an old-time colleague was sleeping around with this loser? No way. Wasn't having any of that. My fist pounded and pounded on his face, like a hammer trying to call some sort of sick sense upon the world, if any of that sense was the master of the mansion of rational mind I was knocking on, it would have come and opened the door. It took the brat a while to stop me, she must have gotten worried about the asshole getting killed."

Mana did take longer than she should have. She should not have had Itemi laying hands on the guy to begin with. The whole thing with Okasune being thrown into the line of fire and how little sense it made, but how convincingly the story was weaved and told, made Mana submerge down under. She couldn't swim any longer, the dirt, the blood and, most importantly, the irrationality of its mysteries and lack of any progress towards them moving forward made the magician sink slowly to the bottom as her lungs were beginning to fill with the filth.

Like a saving grace, a hand of some Security officer pulled Mana and Itemi out of the interrogation room before beginning to yell at them. While the magician felt grateful that she was moved from that gruesome scene but the words of the officer just rang through her ears like shellshock. There may not have been a shell to be shocked by, the real shells would have still been to come when the dust settles and the two have to make any sense out of everything that remains.

"There can't be any doubt, he told us what he believed. I could tell that much, I can stand by my word." Mana ruffled her hair before sitting down on a nearby bench and wrapping her fingers around her head as if trying to squeeze a single rational thought out of it.

"The girl was freaking out. No wonder, she was trying to sift through more quicksand with her fingers than she could possibly even imagine existing. She wanted to be the rational problem solver but at the moment she was just breaking down. Just a bother. Then again, given it's Kita we're talking about – I was afraid that so was I. The moment the Security officer in me awakened from the voluntary breakdown, I would have had to confront the painful truth."

"You mean, you believe Okasune-san could have been in on it?" Mana looked up.

"The kid was talking hogwash. Her mission was over, this was long past just the Fire Lord's goddamn money. This was about the integrity of the last good woman in Shukuba and how quickly its foundation was crumbling. No, Kita was not in on it. She could not have been in on it, she'd have had nothing to gain from killing the self-righteous fop, good, old-fashioned Security dirt, however… Yeah. I understood it perfectly now, not because of the lack of trying to forget it all and stumble in the dark like the little magician girl was."

Mana was not quite sure what Itemi was talking about, she could put some pieces together. So the officer believed that Okasune may have had some dirt on her hands and, somehow, this action was supposed to keep that dirt hidden? It was a shoddy explanation at best.

"We need to visit Okasune-san's apartment." Mana may not have known exactly what was running through Itemi's brilliant mind but she knew at least that much. She'd catch up to the man eventually, he had an incredible ability to be unable to keep something like this hidden.

"The kid was right, of course, I lit another smoke. Shit, for this I may as well start drinking again. Before Kita's record got dirtied by the footsteps of someone with boots just as shitty as Kita's final days were, I needed to set the record straight. A fucking brilliant bitch irony was – for once in her life when Kita was looking for redemption, she was about to be caught red-handed for all the skeletons in the drawer of the great Shukuba hero. Had she kept rubbing hands with the boneheads - she'd have been just fine. Just another gold star in her starry ledger."

The duo rushed back into the carriage with Itemi tipping the coachman with Okasune's location. As the carriage was passing by a small lantern where a dark blue pidgeon was sitting, Itemi whistled and the bird caught up with him, settling on the leathery arm of its summoner.

The man attached something he had just scribbled with an off-hand while it was not holding his cigarette before letting the bird take flight.

"What was that?" Mana inquired.

"The kid was completely oblivious to the procedure, hell, she was oblivious to what Kita was up to until yesterday. Should she have been let in on it? Shit… Kita liked the brat, she looked at the Sorceress with that kind of hopeful eyes that I and her got when we were training to become Shukuba Security. Where in the hell did those eyes go? Where in the hell did those times go?"

"That's not a viable answer to that question." Mana insisted. The bad feeling in her heart that was ever-present through the night and kept her awake persisted, not only that, it was slowly growing as it pulsed like a tumor in her gut.

Before Itemi could explain, the carriage stopped and he threw himself outside, rushing to Okasune's door and slamming it down. Shukuba Security appeared to possess a moderate amount of physical aspect training, it would explain how Itemi managed to hurt that ex-officer back there that badly that fast and how he so effortlessly blasted the door out.

Laying in the pool of her blood, Okasune laid sprawled out on the floor. While Mana covered her mouth and took a couple of moments to let this sight sit with her, Itemi did not appear nearly as surprised. This entire way here, he was expecting to see something like this. Secretly hoping that nothing like this would have happened but…

This was the reality. Just a beginning of another workday in Shukuba.