All sorts of doubts plagued Mana on her short carriage ride through the muddy winter streets of Shukuba. Would the Lubber work like it was supposed to and nullify Raitoncide's ninjutsu? Did Mana understand his abilities correctly? Would the Security even manage to obtain everything they had to find? Just how exactly would she go about finding the once famous serial killer.

"I will take you to the hospital but after that, my workday's over. You will need to either catch a ride yourself or go back on foot." The coachman cleared his throat before letting Mana know.

"That's just fine." The magician smiled, trying to not telegraph just how hard the doubts eroding her from the inside were affecting her. She had hoped to hear something troubling from the man based on his worried face as he leaned back to inform Mana about that through a narrow sliding opening between the inside of the carriage and the driver's seat. Turned out his worries were not that troubling to Mana.

The driver undoubtedly had expected it to trouble the magician. There may have been a considerable distance between the hospital and the Security Force HQ. Knowing the doubts and the stakes on Mana's mind, going back on foot was the least of her worries.

"It may have been wise to go there tomorrow. I'm doing the best I can but the visiting hours are over at five." The man warned the magician that even if the first bit of information did not bother her, it may not have been all of her problems. Still, Mana could not have cared less about this bureaucracy thing. She would get inside Itemi's ward one way or another. People's lives were at stake.

"You're quite the worrier, sir." Mana grinned as her doubts and fears got pushed away by the spontaneous conversation with this coachman. She almost blurted out "mother hen" instead of that other thing she called him, thankfully she had enough experience of knowing just how much the man may have felt antagonized and flustered by her calling him that.

It was interesting how the language worked. Two separate words meaning almost the exact same thing would have had a fundamentally different effect, just because Mana was a teenage girl calling a grown man those words. The one she used was okay but the one she almost ended up using before getting stuck momentarily and changing the word she was about to say would have ended up saying the same thing but with offensive undertones. Knowing her situation Mana needed to make an enemy out of a coachman the least right now.

"I just get a lot of flack for something like this from the Security. I couldn't help but notice you're high-ranking from your uniform. Those guys let their rank get a bit over their head, no offense." The man started talking quite extensively for a coachman. Mana couldn't say anything precise about it, she hadn't met enough coachmen to tell if this man's behavior was off or not.

What did immediately tip the magician off was how the surroundings dimmed around her, she was not using her windows due to them being unclean and the constantly splattering rain and mud making it tough to perceive anything clearly, but the difference in the light coming through became apparent almost in an instant.

Mana laid down on her seat before double kicking the window into smallest bits and pushing her aching body off of the seat. The magician grabbed the edge of the carriage's roof with her fingers, using the momentum to rotate her body around and make her land on top of the carriage roof. A pillar of lightning burst through the carriage, the sheer blunt force of the explosion tossed Mana aside sliding through the mud and snow on her knees, opening some old wounds.

While the alleyway that the carriage was in was sunken in darkness and shadows of the surrounding tall buildings, the resulting flame from the explosion and the superheated debris of the carriage blazing up revealed the magician a large number of men surrounding her from most pathways leading in and out of the alleyway.

"You may be late for your hospital appointment after all. Don't feel sad, we may just end up sending you to the hospital basement the quicker way!" the coachman yelled out, somehow managing to escape the blazing carriage. It must have happened during Mana's quick escape from the vehicle upon the first spark of suspicion heating up in her chest.

Within moments, the magician's sensory wrapped around the massive crowd of men and women present, even feeling an eerily familiar signature atop one of the building balconies. It would have been foolish to attempt to kill a ninja through sheer manpower alone. At some point, ninja reached the level where no number of normal people could have overpowered them, stronger yet became so awesome that not even numbers of ninja could have matched them. Those higher classes required a ninja of matching skill to face them in order for them to be stopped.

"You're wasting your storage, Raitoncide-san!" Mana yelled out. She wanted the man to know fear before he fled. To know that she was both aware of his skills and his true identity.

The whole army of the Diamond Hand members, possibly a pair of hundreds of them, charged at the magician with only the alleyway restricting their flow. Her wand flashed in the magician's hand as she began whistling, making the surrounding assailants collapse on the ground overcome by pleasurable sensations. Mana began dispatching of her disabled attackers one by one, each one taking not more than one or two palm strikes that evenly spread Mana's superhuman strength over their bodies.

The massive force flowing through their bodies tore fractured bones and internal organs incapacitating the unlucky assailants for good. The alleyway was dark enough for sight alone to not be enough to avoid all of their attacks but Mana did not rely on sight alone. By closing her eyes she allowed all of the sensory input focus on her hearing, touch and chakra sensory alone. Hearing the attackers step up to her, hearing their peers scream in pain as the pleasure of Mana's illusion was changed by the pain of their own allies stepping over them like charging cattle.

The training in the Sun Disc had served Mana well. Back then, even depowered she managed to fight off about three hundred of martial artists of lesser skill. While these Diamond Hand assassins and rough-housers from both the Index and Ring Fingers of the Diamond Hand were more skilled, stronger and faster than those poor people, Mana was much stronger now as well.

Those few that the magician could not get to in time, were stomped over by their own kind. An odd pain began rising up from inside of her lower abdomen, her joints began feeling sore and Mana noticed the speed of her movements plummeting. Her chakra resources did not have any time to recover since she wasted quite a lot fighting Index and Raitoncide the first time, then the encounter back in the Tribunal building…

"Shit…" Mana realized that killing her was not Raitoncide's intention. Where the Middle Ring viewed his lesser-ranked thugs as colleagues and protected them from needless fights, now that the organization was split, Raitoncide was more than willing ruthlessly sending them to their demises just for the sake of weakening Mana for their upcoming encounter.

The pain of billions of little needles penetrating her body and shaking her to her very core crouched Mana to the ground. Ring Ring had launched an attack of some sort towards her, incapacitating a good handful of his own men in the process but he did not care. As long as Mana suffered, as long as she struggled and broke a sweat…

"Magician's Touch Jutsu!" Mana yelled out as the body piling assassins and their continuous reckless attempts at stabbing Mana through the bodies of their own allies was becoming dangerous. She quite enjoyed being closed in a box and the box being skewered with swords on the stage but not in such a chaotic scuffle.

The assailants all scattered across the alleyway, blasting through the walls and breaking balconies that stopped their flights back from the Lightning Release shock Mana let out. It was odd that her technique was not stopped by Raitoncide. He must not have had it in him to muster up a higher than B-Rank Lightning Release jutsu to neutralize and absorb Mana's like before, either that or he kept those resources for future use. That was useful to know…

Feeling the taste of blood in her mouth and sweat running down her forehead and dripping off her dark hair, Mana rose back off of her busted knees and started working on neutralizing the attacking force. With each passing moment, she took down a good ten to twenty men and women, not just the muscle-headed rough-housers from Raitoncide's Finger but also the trained assassins from Index's as well.

This was just about enough of that… Mana kicked off of the face of one of the men charging for her with a short sword to leap up and stick to the wall where she could scale up and reach Raitoncide. He would not stay neutral in this and just lob his thunderbolts at her again. Within the time that would have been unperceivable to the normal people or lesser skilled ninja, Mana leaped off the wall and activated her Mystical Wings jutsu, propelling herself at her opponent. Even if he chose to interrupt her technique, he could not just neutralize it like he used to do before, Mystical Wings was a Wind Release technique which did not possess the same neutralizing properties of the Lightning Release.

Waving to Mana like he was mocking her, Raitoncide disappeared in sparks of lightning that then crackled through the steel railings and disappeared somewhere alongside his horde of Diamond Hand goons. Mana would not get to catch a breather as a strong force pushed her through the nearby window of the balcony she was resting on and inside the abandoned building that was in the alleyway.

Shadowy blurs danced across the dim room, they were stealthy and capable of hiding well. Had they not entered the narrow streaks of light that were coming off from the other building right opposite to the one where Mana was forced into, they'd have remained traceable only through their minuscule chakra signatures. Holding her sore ribs and occasionally stretching out her numb limbs, Mana prepared to push back against the Finger of assassins who felt vengeful for what the magician did to their Ring.

It did not take a genius to notice that more than half of the force that Ring Ring had brought along dispersed. If Mana were to guess judging by the chakra signatures, stances and movements of the shadowy figures sticking to the darker corners of the abandoned building she was in, these were purely the men and women of Index's assassination Finger.

Mana moved her body aside to avoid a divekick from a chakra signature rushing in from above. A quick movement swatting her hand aside dispatched of the assailant by smashing Mana's wand straight into their surprised face. These assassins may have been trained to fight weaker ninja but they could not have encountered a sensor before, even if they did, they would not have been someone who skipped multiple stages of their growth like Mana did to achieve heights years beyond their reach.

A flurry of Mana's kicks continued to thin the advancing herd. The magician's legs moved fast enough to completely evade the assassins' perception making their knockouts a total surprise for them as they advanced attempting to surround her for cheap shallow cuts and bruises. These assailants did not fight fostering hopes of victory, they fought to bleed Mana dry so that she was in no condition to fight Ring Ring, that much became evident long ago.

The remaining fifty continued to swarm the building, not only that but now their herds have thinned enough for them to reveal their ranged weaponry, firing buzzing series of kunai fire at Mana from the darkest corners of the room. These kunai were factory bunch, almost no chakra presence weaved into their steel at all. That made them not too damaging and dangerous to stronger ninja but very difficult to read properly if one fought through sensory alone.

Mana waved her wand. Spinning around as she did so, the magician created a weak vortex of Wind Release chakra that deflected the series of kunai coming at her from multiple directions before they could cause her more cuts. Even if she may have been good enough to avoid being hit by any stray blades before, in her current state she could not rely on her experience of what her skill was once. She was still recovering and the battle she went through before was beginning to wear on her on top of that.

Grabbing one of the deflected kunai as it rotated in mid-air, Mana rushed ahead, she needed to leave outside. This place was too tricky to fight in, too many shadowy corners, too many exposed construction details, steel rods and potential hiding spots for her trained opponents. Even if the assassins rushed in by the handfuls in attempts to stop her, Mana's wand dislocated their joints and incapacitated them by smashing them aside while her kunai swipes cut them down with more grace than the blunt chakra channeling tool in her other hand.

Keeping all of them alive was enough pain as it was in her current condition.

The Audra wand was longer, that helped Mana deflect the projectiles that the assassins choosing to stay at long range and try to snipe her from vantage points used or defend herself while her kunai did the dirty deed. A good five assassins fell as Mana closed the length of the lower floor, looking desperately for the way out as the lower floors lacked the brief rays of light that the upper floor offered. Descending there may have been a mistake but Mana needed to keep moving. If she stood still those guys would surround her and leave even more painful memories to recover from that would trouble her, even more, when she came for Raitoncide eventually.

The Audra wand crackled with lightning, Mana swiped it at the sides firing off barrages of small spheres of Lightning Release chakra at her opponents. The brief periods of illumination that the lightning provided her helped the visual aspect of her senses and helped her dispatch of the more elusive and well-hidden long-range assassins. By the time Mana noticed that the assassins finally managed to surround her as they originally intended – there was just a dozen of them left and they were not quite surrounding Mana at that point.

Mana was letting them surround her to keep them all in a single, visible circle around her.

One of the local townsfolk yelled out loud at the vagabonds that must have gathered in the nearby abandoned building. He saw some faint flashes of light and took it for the homeless starting evening fires to warm them up before sleep. Homeless did not have a habit of busting down walls though. After a masked man flew out through a busted wall and a young girl covered in dirt and blood leaped out from the hole, carefully maneuvering around the busted up railings before landing on the ground and running away incredibly fast, the complainant realized that this was no ordinary case of the homeless disturbing his evening.

This was unfortunate… Mana checked some of her newly opened wounds, the grazes on her knees that she should have augmented and protected against in hindsight, if only it was not for her paranoid dislike for augmenting her endurance, and several other cuts and bruises that the luckier assailants managed to land.

Her wounds were minuscule, she did well with avoiding anything grievous, let alone something that would have convinced her not to start trouble with Raitoncide tomorrow. Problem was that she spent plenty of chakra to fend off the assailants. She foolishly believed that everyone Raitoncide had brought with him would attempt to kill her as some desperate attempt to end her life. Raitoncide was cleverer than Mana gave him credit for, he retreated half of his force after fleeing himself, leaving only those whom Shukuba Security would have captured anyway, after probing Index's mind.

By tomorrow, some of her chakra should return but she would still be weakened compared even to the state she was in when she fought Raitoncide just now. Regardless of that, he must have counted on Mana facing him fair and square, fight him to protect her pride as a Konoha ninja, endangering the lives of her fellow officers foolishly. He had another thing coming tomorrow. His attempt at being clever will backfire if Shira and Thumb manage to get their hands on enough Lubber.

The last thing Mana could do was not to rush to the hospital and strain her body even more. Traveling at a casual pace she had reached the place well after the visiting hours had ended. Regardless of that, she decided to test her luck some.

"Ma'am, I need to see the Shukuba Security officer that's been injured during the robbery of the town's budget funds." She asked the nurse sitting on the first floor nicely.

"I'm sorry, the visiting hours are over. Please try tomorrow morning, nine to five." The woman responded just as nicely. It did not look like even Mana's Shukuba Security uniform would have made the difference. This was just not her day…

Moving into the alleyway where she and Thumb were once attacked by Bakku and his hired crew, Mana rushed up the hospital wall using the Academy Art of Tree Climbing technique, using the natural darkness of the evening shadows as her cover. At least she lucked out there. After managing to slip by a pair of floors of windows undetected, Mana slipped through into Itemi's ward, finding the man where he was back when the magician was first visiting him.

"When my eyes tried catching glimpses of the shrouds of the night's black evening gown flashing outside my window, hoping that the drugs that numbed by pain would make the old bitch appear as presentable as eight cups of sake would have, I did not expect to see Konoha's Sorceress. Prancing around, like a vengeful banshee looking to scream my ears blood-red for the prank I pulled on her that put me here. It looked like tonight's drug trip would be just like your ordinary workday – not remembering if it was the empty bottle or the woman in your room who knocked you out last night." Itemi's voice informed Mana that her trip here might not have been as fruitless as her deepest doubts kept scolding her it would have been.