"Perhaps I should have split my mind a little bit differently." A hollow voice rang from Kiyomi's side. The entity did not speak but in a feat that came effortlessly, she transmitted her thoughts and feelings through a powerful mental resonance.

The fact that distraught Mana most of all was that the voice in which the corrupted one spoke was undoubtedly Kiyomi's. Corrupted and twisted, much more powerful and authoritative, confident as well, but Kiyomi's nonetheless. While that suggested that her treasured friend was still in there somewhere, it also implied that some part of her friend's will may have had a more active role to play in nearly killing her.

"Well…" Kusagoro looked at Mana after standing up and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. All of the ninja affected by Kiyomi's mental assault had various bleedings on them, some bled from their noses, some from their mouths or even their eyes. Given how Shibari's state was the worst, it was a fair assumption that the degree of bleeding depended on the damage sustained by one's mental self.

Mana looked back at the man. He was looking at her so differently now. He was no longer rash and rude, that much was evident even from the way he looked at not only Mana but Dorimi and Musha as well. Perhaps after being saved by the magician delivering a powerful blow to the weakened inner self of corrupted Kiyomi, the man has come to appreciate her as a teammate and a colleague.

"You knew this girl, right? Is this her? Can she still be salvaged or do we proceed with destroying her?" Kusagoro grumbled. He really wanted that Mana would shake her head and affirm the second option. That much was for sure.

"It is her. She's just… Confused." Mana pleaded the man with her eyes not to destroy her friend. Maybe killing her would end this calamity and perhaps it was the quickest and the most efficient way but the magician was almost ready to risk her career and lie if she had to, to prevent such an outcome.

"Are you sure she's even the person you once knew anymore?" Musha questioned Mana's judgment. Her eyes lingered on Dorimi who was completely out of commission lamenting the loss of his own friend. Shibari technically may not have been dead but her body was completely soulless. It was the next worst thing.

Mana closed her eyes in frustration, wondering what she was supposed to say. What was right and what was wrong. Now that Kiyomi was whole again the magician would not even dream of activating her sensory again so she was unable to check the contents of her chakra signature again, just rely on what that divided, minuscule representation of her will was like.

The corrupted version of Mana's friend darted off, she was no longer warping but she was insanely fast. Kusagoro leaped right into the fray to protect Mana from the rushing threat. He thrust his elbow for a strike that would block corrupted Kiyomi's strike and push her back through sheer force that he added behind it after the blow was blocked.

Kusagoro's feet morphed, making holes on them that fired off jets of chakra from them sending the man rushing ahead at the unbalanced and flinched opponent. The man unleashed a powerful rush of punches with what seemed like his real strength. Mana was about to plead with the man to restrain himself again but Kiyomi just bounced back like nothing happened, once again she only got thrown back by the physical force of the impact but appeared to take no damage whatsoever from the blows of one of the most powerful ninja around.

Just what had the Yamanaka girl become? Was it still morally right for Mana to protect this thing at the cost of other lives? How will she ever look in the eyes of Tori or Dorimi for all the lives this event had already cost. Maybe she would not be blamed for whatever happened here for she could have never, in her wildest nightmares, have predicted such a scenario but… Deep inside she'd know that she acted with her own selfish interests at heart.

Kiyomi's body began morphing again as the corruption had made her chakra cloak more malleable. Tendrils started splitting from various parts of her body that she used like whips to attack Kusagoro who was way too overwhelmed by the number and the strength of the attacks to properly defend himself. The man sent crashing back into the fleshy parts of the consumed classroom.

The fleshy tumors and tissues of the corruption began covering the man up, trying to swallow him up in a cocoon of sinew and muscle but with a powerful expulsion of chakra inside his body and a violent outburst of pure strength, Kusagoro powered through and out of the increasingly nightmarish turning classroom.

"B-Rank Storage Seal: Release!" Musha chanted out, placing her hand up front. A sealing glyph materialized in thin air from which the woman pulled out a portable, steam-powered, saw-like weapon and channeled her chakra through it, covering the belts filled with razor-sharp teeth with her chakra.

The woman charged forward, swinging it in an impressively controlled and skillful style of swordsmanship. The strikes appeared to hurt corrupted Kiyomi and she did not even dodge the upcoming attacks, appearing dazed and confused for some reason. As the teeth of the saw-blade continued to shred through the corrupted one, slashing through the chakra cloak and unleashing a shredding flow of fleshy bits from the wounds, Kiyomi did not yell or grunt. Once again, she just got thrown back by the force of the attack before quickly recovering.

This time though, she did not strike back immediately with even greater strength as she did against Kusagoro. The morphing tendrils all over her body subsided their wild, swinging rampage and backed into the chakra cloak covering her.

"Meiko… Musha-san is reminding Kiyomi of Meiko…" Mana realized looking at the pinkish-haired jounin attacking a weapon that looked like a sleeker and more polished version of the chainsaw-sword that Meiko fawned over during the Chuunin Exams. "She's still in there somewhere… She always was…"

Mana signaled for both jounin to back down and regroup with her. While the two were technically her superiors and did not require following her orders, they both did so with only a brief delay of consideration. As predicted, Kiyomi did not follow them up or attack now that her mind was confused by the sights that reminded her of Meiko.

"She's still in there. I know it. I think I know why she's this way. This is not just an accident, well… It's more complicated than that. It's a culmination of multiple accidents that are related to one another." Mana let the jounin know.

"There have been plenty of Yamanaka that interrogated and probed the minds of the reappeared victims." Dorimi joined in. Walking up to the group with Shibari's blood still smeared on his face and glasses. His hair was now standing free as the man had tied the grisly sight of horror and whited out eyes of Shibari with his bandana.

"Yes. But they have done so over a long interval. They've also probed a bunch of other minds as well, spreading the corruption extremely thin. Kiyomi had been in very few minds that were not corrupted recently and every time she entered one she became a little bit more angry and distressed. As her friend, I should have noticed it. I was surprised by how brutal and one-tracked she was on a recent mission but… I just…" Mana clenched her fists in despair as her eyes teared up.

The regrouping got interrupted by tendrils wrapping around Dorimi, Musha and Kusagoro that dragged them back into Kiyomi's vicinity. Another bunch of them coiled from above and below aimed to catch Mana. While they tied around the magician and squeezed tight, the girl dispersed into flower petals and reappeared at a different location.

Kusagoro just barely squirmed out of the tendril's grasp. Tattoos and glowing glyphs began running down his body as his eyes lit up with a faint yellow glow of his irises. This was the Jugo Cursed Seal that Kouta disliked so much and Kusagoro used in more engaging fights. While he had not yet allowed the seal to advance to the second grade, he was no longer planning to hold anything back.

Musha screamed out in pain as the tendril around her squeezed without letting Kusagoro's breakout distract its own efforts too much. This corruption appeared to function as a swarm mind of corrupting cells. Just like the returned victims were capable of all those unbelievable body shaping tricks and intense resistance to any form of damage. If their entire bodies were just tissue comprised of numerous smaller, swarm minded organisms with no organ systems or more complex structure to them, that would have made everything around here make more sense…

The tendril that tied itself around Dorimi's leg swung the poor jounin around, slamming it against every and any surface it found nearby until after one final slam it let go and allowed the fleshy substance of corruption to envelop the man in its fleshy cocoon in an attempt to swallow him. Just as it had happened to Kusagoro. It appeared that only specific and very progressed sections of the corruption were able to envelop living bodies that way.

Mana's Audra wand shimmered in the few sources of light present in the nightmarish classroom but Kusagoro's roar stopped her in her tracks.

"Don't interfere! You'll get crushed if you do! Leave handling her to us. Just try to figure out a way to save the brat before we murder her!" the man yelled out in a voice much wilder than even his normal battle cries. It was true that Jugo surrendered a certain bit of their emotional stability and sanity while letting their Curse Seals advance.

Despite the warning, Mana swung her Audra wand, focusing her chakra to channel through it in an attempt to aid the jounin from afar. Kusagoro was too caught in his own sadistic tendencies and attempts to punch Kiyomi out of her corrupted shell. If he even cared about that at all.

"Magic Spark Jutsu!" Mana chanted out as she swung her wand around, firing a barrage of lightning chakra projectiles at Kiyomi from her position. She spoke the name of her technique not out of necessity to do so, after the training in the Rabbit Caves she no longer needed that for her most familiar jutsu, but out of hope that any semblance of familiarity would trigger memories to resurface in her corrupted friend.

Musha felt the tendrils loosen. She did not wait too long and went through a collection of hand seals the moment her feet hit the floor. Mana's projectiles were not that powerful but they appeared just capable enough to shock the tendrils that Kiyomi created into a twitching seizure of sorts.

"Fire Style: Great Fireball Jutsu!" the woman yelled out. Chakra she molded inside her body was converted into flames before being spouted out as a flamethrower that shaped a large fireball at the end. The erupting firestorm from the technique colliding with corrupted Kiyomi, who at this point was spread out too widely all over the classroom to avoid the jutsu, that it threw Ikiro and slammed it into the blackboard. The impact was strong enough to break the man's seat.

"Earth Style: Volcanic Summit!" Dorimi yelled out as he slammed his hands together right after landing on the ground and powering out from the fleshy corruption enveloping him, something that the fiery distraction of Musha's technique aided him in doing. The building materials of the classroom burst from under their fleshy sarcophagi and began shaping a mountainous structure around the raging firestorm.

The combined efforts of Dorimi and Musha created a floor-to-ceiling sized pile of construction materials that shaped into a makeshift volcano that contained and compressed the raging fires of Musha's technique, greatly increasing their power and efficiency.

"Chakra Cannon!" Kusagoro roared out after pointing his morphing cannon-shaped arm at the mountainous structure and unleashing a blast of chakra that blasted it to bits causing a powerful explosion that would have easily leveled the entire Academy had it not been covered with regrowing corruption.

A deafening roar made Mana lean forward and look for cover as the sonic booms alone caused massive shockwaves across the entire corrupted structure while a powerful blast of chakra freed Kiyomi from what remained from the debris she was surrounded by. Despite putting in their best efforts, the jounin were still barely making progress.

The structure started reforming. This time free of its previous construction materials and entirely based on growths of tumors, bone, and bio-materials. Mana saw it in Musha's worn out eyes, the flames she breathed out were not as intense as they could have been. It must have been her mental state that diminished the power of her attacks. If this was allowed to continue, this would not have ended well.

"Kiyomi, why are you doing this? Just settle down and let us help you." Mana yelled out at her friend who at last glared at the magician with its wide, glowing eyes in acknowledgment.

"You'll help by dying…" Kiyomi let out a strong resonance with her mind that forced Mana to grip at her temple and distracted her almost enough to completely miss the fact that she was being attacked.

The reformed tendrils of pure chakra spreading out of Kiyomi's body rushed at the magician. Mana took a meaningless step backward to strengthen her balance, she knew that such a motion would not be enough to protect her. However, the attack did not go the way that the magician had planned it to go.

The tendrils stopped in their tracks and instead of slamming into Mana's illusionary shape and triggering her Flower Petal Sanctuary spread in a wider range, hitting as widely as possible while sacrificing some of their power that came with their collective size.

"Mystical Wings Jutsu!" Mana yelled out as she used the wind currents she generated beneath her feet to lift her off enough to dodge the wild rush of tendrils coming her way before her feet stuck firmly to the ceiling, giving Mana some space to prepare the follow up defensive measure. The tendrils were quick to change direction and corner her again.

"Magic Bubble Jutsu!" she chanted while she swung her Audra wand in a round motion creating a defensive pocket of air with Wind Release chakra around her. The tendrils wrapped around it in an attempt to break it through sheer force and they would have easily succeeded if it was not for the help from the jounin who finally dealt with their own handfuls of tendrils and proceeded to attack Kiyomi herself.

Another pulse of corrupted chakra from the Yamanaka sent the jounin tumbling back and crashing into the fleshy walls of the new structure that was forming in place of the destroyed Ninja Academy.

"This… This is going nowhere." Musha noted.

"I won't let this go. For Shibari-san's sake, I can't." Dorimi grunted and swung his tanto blade in wide arcs to fight off the fleshy strands of corruption trying to wrap him into a cocoon and smother him to death again.

Kusagoro blasted out from his own cocoon with ease once more. Despite his attempts to pass through the whipping offensive of the tendrils, he was not gaining any footing that was not soon lost once Kiyomi's ire intensified.

"That jutsu… I've never seen it before, what was it?" Kiyomi spread another resonance of her thoughts that felt like someone yelling in bloody madness right into one's ear. The overpowering sensation very nearly made Mana lose her concentration, which in terms would have made her lose footing and fall from the ceiling down to the ground.

"It's something I learned before I met you. I used it against Hisako when we fought and not in a while after that. It just… Carried bad memories with it." Mana replied, still feeling hopeful that she could connect on some level with her friend who seemed more and more lost as the hopeless battle continued.

"I see. A technique you use exclusively against your friends…" Kiyomi's reply was soon to resonate again. Now that Mana knew it was coming, it was much more tolerable.

"That's not what I said at all!" Mana snapped back at her friend. "I lost everything that day. I can't help but feel scared whenever I think back of that day. Just like when all of this happened and I was afraid to augment myself to power through the calamity…"

"That's right. Mana… So hesitant to kill people actively but possessing one of the highest passive kill-counts of anyone she knows." Kiyomi replied with an oddly antagonistic manner again. This was just like talking to her friend in the hospital but supercharged to a massive extent. Mana could not put together where all the anger and frustration in her friend came from.

"You're a criminal. All of you in this room are… Innocent people do not get freaked out by the sights that I show. Your nightmares haunt all of you, I can feel it." Kiyomi pressed on. "None of you are innocent. I'll kill you all."

The final declaration made Mana step back in disbelief. This was her friend talking for certain but she was not being herself. Her identity was what was spreading these vile thoughts. However, that identity was corrupted. She was still in there but she may have been beyond reach by now.

People were paying with their lives. The kids that died when the catastrophe started, Shibari, all those people who failed to evacuate before the spreading corruption got to them. Mana could only hope that the entire camp where the injured were being treated outside was evacuated in time before the wave of expansion hit them but to think like that was to be hopeful. She closed her eyes, filtered out the contents of this classroom and looked around the building.

The bodies of those she imagined having died began rising from the fleshy dens of the corruption once more, wrapping themselves around Mana's body and trying to bite chunks out of her and claw at her. These were all just figments of her afflicted mind but they hurt like they were happening for real. Regardless, Mana persevered to spread her sensory as wide as she could…

There was nothing. That was not to say that there were no signatures alive in the vicinity. Merely that the corruption had spread to the very edges of Mana's sensory and that anyone in those vicinities had been evacuated or consumed by now and not a trace of the village remained now in those parts.

Mana woke up in a dome of earth. Dorimi must have erected it around her to protect her from the attacks that her scornful friend may have launched at her. Before she even had time to deal with the pressure of having procrastinated for so long, the ground beneath her feet shook and Kusagoro smashed into the dome toppling it all down.

"I don't know how to reach her…" Mana cried out. Her eyes were tearing up but they were not lost. "I think… I think we need to…"

"Hit her for real. Putting her down being the main priority, her survival the secondary." Kusagoro scratched the back of his aching neck. His tattoos had drawn back into his body and he had stopped using his Curse Seal for a moment, whether because of exhaustion or because he needed a clear mind for a while.

"Y-Yeah." Mana nodded realizing she may have given up on her friend and sentenced her to death by telling one of the most powerful ninja in the village to hit her with intent to kill.

What other option was there? So many people had already lost their lives and homes. There was absolutely no sign that the rest evacuated or if they perished. The corruption had spread across the entire Ninja Academy territory and was beginning to reach deep into the central district of the village where it would have had masses more people to consume. Even if Kiyomi survived, would she ever forgive Mana for not stopping her and forcing her to become what the girl used to hate more than anything?

"Mass murderers teaming up with a lousy, self-righteous thief and a killer by circumstance. I'll kill you all!" Kiyomi's rage continued to spiral out of control as her chakra tendrils began wrapping around one another forming entire limbs and forcing her chakra cloak to grow out of control until it burned through the corruption beneath its own feet.

"Alright…" Kusagoro blew a whole bunch of air out of his lungs before leaping to confront the outraging entity of corruption. Jet-like appendages began sprouting through his body and tearing up his clothes, even though his flak jacket before spitting blasts of blue flames that spiraled the jounin onward towards the raging threat.

"Piston Fist: Style One!" Kusagoro roared out as half of his body transformed into a shape that resembled greatly his Level 2 Curse Seal transformation. More jet boosters grew from the back of his enlarged hand and fired off blasts that propelled his fist forward with more throwing power. As the two clashing forces met each other, the entire room sunk in bright blue and dark purple light.

Mana felt a gentle spring breeze caressing her cheeks. She opened her eyes only to see the entire Academy gone. Only fleshy remnants of the corruption that once was remained. Now singed into feeble charcoal lumps where the calamity once spread.

Kiyomi's unconscious body laid in the center. The dark chakra enveloping her was completely gone and some grievous looking burns covered the exposed parts of her body and her face. Kusagoro was huffing on one knee while Dorimi's impromptu raised ground platform held the survivors of the entering party on the second-floor level. The corruption that had once been steadily spreading was now actually retracting into its center. Mana noticed a rocky structure atop the earth platform that soon crumbled revealing Ikiro's unconscious body inside.

The calamity may have been over but at what price…