Traveling with the whole pack of rabbits was not the same as traveling alone or together with just Kouta. There were not even hopes that the younglings could keep up with the demanding and breakneck speed of a ninja, which, surprisingly, even the less mighty rabbits were capable of. The lower bodies of the rabbits, even those that have experienced less combat or trained much less, were awesome and even the relatively civilian rabbits, as well as the elders, could have, in theory, kept up the pace.

Strangely, despite the young ones being usually quite spry, this time they sort of held the whole group back. Not that it was too much of a problem. Something told Mana that the Ninja Rabbits would not see that much of the Ninja Snakes until they meet up with the less civilized and less intelligent versions that resided inside the Forest of Death as well.

Usujitsa's absence was the only worrying thing. The little assassin had listened to better reason and avoided conflict with the mongooses but he appeared to have disappeared entirely. From what Mana could gather, he was not in Kusagakure nor did he fight the combination transformation. Then again, she assumed too much if she thought that the two of them shared even a moment of understanding. That little cuddle-ball truly was a force of nature of its own will and nobody could have been sure where it would appear next or what its mood would be…

"So what happened with Vasuki and that ninja?" Mana wondered.

"Not sure," Kouta shrugged. "The mongooses kind of lost interest in the serpent once it laid all dead-like. Obviously, it was not dead and since the mongooses didn't care to eat it, the next day it had managed to give us a slip with only a shed skin layer remaining."

"The ninja got caught by da Kusagakure shinobi dat rushed in ta see what was going on by deir doorstep." Usuzoku butted in.

"I wonder if they'll kill him." Mana looked at the rustling grass beneath her feet. Moving as slowly as the group did, compared to her usual speed, the girl had all the time to let her attention wander she could want.

"I don't think it's quite the Kusagakure way." Kouta shrugged. "I'm not that much of a foreign policy expert but, from what we've seen in the village, I'd have to say they'll strike a deal with Konoha for the guy. Just the type of diplomatic move that'd score them some points…"

"Yeah, I guess you're right." Mana looked on ahead. The pill of Kusagakure, a foreign village going above and beyond to preserve the life of a criminal while Konoha may be looking to end it was a bitter one to swallow. Leaking chakra so much and showing off such lousy control, he put more than just the world at risk. His twisted essence spread wider than light could reach. At the very least, the man would be imprisoned for the rest of his life…

"Can you believe he was a Konoha ninja? What would have made him go as far as he did?" Kouta exclaimed in disbelief. While the young man did not really see much of what the combination transformation performed, he had seen enough to realize that it was the very bottom of a bag of options that the ninja they faced off against was forced the scrape at.

"He said it was for some secret that Vasuki promised him to teach," Mana recalled the words of the man she heard after a brief opportunity to clash with him. "I don't know, he did not look very pleased about any of what he was doing so it must have been insanely alluring. Maybe it was some technique, like the one Vasuki used to cheat death?"

"It was Sage Mode." Usuzoku closed his eyes. Even while completely locking off the sense of sight for a brief moment the rabbit managed to keep moving at a stable pace and alongside his companions.

"Sage Mode? I think I've heard or read about it somewhere but…" Mana's face got as wrinkly as a raisin in an attempt to recall something more about the concept than just the name. "Oh well, I guess it's a secret for a reason." She sighed with relenting relief.

"It's not quite a secret. It's just dat most Ninja Animals refuse ta speak about it, they don' want da humans ta keep askin' an' beggin' them to teach it an' all dat. It's supposed ta be more sacred dan dat." Usuzoku explained adopting a very serious tone. Sage Mode was, evidently, a subject that the rabbits took very seriously.

"Yeah, but what exactly is it?" Kouta blinked a couple of times, Mana looked at the young man wondering if his curiosity did not step over some boundaries there. Usuzoku clearly was not sharing the knowledge out of the levity at which information just spilled out of him. The rabbit must have thought that the two needed to know about it.

"It's an ultimate sign a unity between da summoner an' da summoned," Usuzoku replied with the same tone. "It's supposed ta be somethin' really important but humans keep lookin' fer more power, thinkin' they got this whole trust thing down every couple 'a minutes."

"Yeah, I think I get why you'd want to keep it secret." Mana gently smiled. Just like that, she purposefully chose to shut down the topic, Usuzoku glared at the girl with a raised eyebrow.

The closer that the party of rabbits, followed by a pair of Konoha ninja approached Konohagakure, the larger and thicker the Land of Fire forests got. It started from a young and frail tree here and there and slowly grew into a pretty mighty forest esthetic. All the mighty Ninja Snake titans from underground would have run away from an area like this as if plague afflicted them.

The snakes in the Forest of Death already looked awkward in the thickness of the trees, even massively smaller than their underground, more noble and elite counterparts. The emerging massive forest was a sign of safety, of some natural protection and the rabbits appeared very well-suited to move in one. They dashed and danced around the trees and used them as platforms near effortlessly.

There must have been some kind of natural history of living in a forest environment recorded in their genes, movements like that did not come entirely naturally in such a short period of time. Then again, from what she could recall from when she met Usuzoku for the first time, the rabbit warrior also excelled in the Forest of Death.

The size of their group and their relative strength granted them even more safety. By now Mana's, Kouta's and everybody else's chakra would have mostly recovered. All of the strongest rabbit warriors were in a pretty adequate condition for a fight and no lowly bandit would have bothered flinging themselves against a well-prepared group like this comprised of multiple B-Rank threats. The economy of life and death simply ruled it pointless.

A lonely flare of unimaginable revulsion made Mana stop all of a sudden. Kouta, Usuzoku and the rest of the rabbits just curiously looked at the magician as they passed her, letting their confusion about the girl's sudden halt take over and cost them some more moments before they noticed the man of white hair, dark skin, and eyes of flaring red.

"A Sharingan? No… There aren't any markings on his eyes. They're just… Beaming." Mana felt her body shaking for absolutely no reason. Whatever cosmic horrors the man's initial appearance just casually standing in front of the rabbit crew summoned, they were gone now. His chakra signature, if he even had one of note, had completely faded away.

Usuzoku looked pretty pissed that this man no one had ever seen or met before was standing in front of their path. Nobody looked like they had any strength left in their bodies to move around him either. This man appeared to have a chakra signature of a civilian but emanated an odd sense of dread that was simply more ancient and primal than some rational sense. Something about him just seemed… Evil.

"I'm not sure which one of us should feel more honored, I rarely leave the underground and yet I am glad to have found a good reason to." The man smiled looking straight at Mana. His glare… It was so precise, racing, soaring around everyone in between the magician and him and simply freezing Mana in place with nothing but a look.

The mysterious white-haired man sighed and finally closed his eyes, letting everyone breathe easier for a moment just as he has. "You know, I did count on suppressing my chakra and taunting you being pretty stupid. I thought you'd all just attack me at once and utilize the moment. I guess what those that survived told me was right… You really don't kill, do you?"

Mana's bemused face was slowly beginning to get drained of hope, her eyes intensely scurried across all the rabbits involved in the situation. None of them appeared to be the focus of this man and yet all of them looked completely tame and subdued by his powerful gaze.

"You're him, aren't you?" Mana exclaimed. Her voice was trembling more than she'd have liked to let the man on but it could not have been helped. Honestly, when confronted by someone as terrifying and ancient as this man, nobody would have been blamed for being scared and stooping to all sorts of lows just to walk out alive.

"You're perceptive. I did not let my chakra alert you to it by keeping it mostly back and yet you unmasked me immediately. So amusing…" the man smiled with reservation. His emotions were not overblown, they did not appear malicious or twisted like the other snakes. This one has seen enough life to face it with composure and rationality.

"Do you know this man, Mana?" Kouta looked back at the magician. The eyes of the young man were still very much sunken in a haze of mystery about the identity of this mysterious figure. The awesome air pressure emanating from even the most suppressed form taken by this man was still alerting the young man that this person was something special.

"It's Yamata no Orochi. The one that can wrap two of its heads around the world and look himself in the eyes. The progenitor of all Ninja Snakes." Mana's voice turned husky. Shortage of breath made it difficult to pronounce these intimidating words but she had no choice – the rabbits and Kouta needed to know that from now on they played by Yamata's rules.

"In the flesh. I seldom take the form of a human to traverse the world and leave my entrapment. As you imagine it is terribly stuffy and uncomfortable, spending decades wrapping oneself around any crevice you can find, warming one's feet on the very core of our collective home." Yamata looked up into the sky. The transformed serpent admired the warm rays of the Sun breaking through the leafage and caressing his dark cheeks. The light irritated his crimson irises forcing the serpent to squint a little, not out of pain, but out of discomfort.

"The sky is a sight I always take time to admire. It is unfortunate that we must meet so far in the Land of Fire…" the serpent spoke to himself, looking genuinely displeased that he did not manage to intercept the rabbit party before they reached Land of Fire.

"Then let us pass and move on that way. You'll pass into a clearing in no time." Mana suggested, her voice was sounding a bit too irritated and defensive, she honestly wanted to avoid this encounter by all means. Just throw it all away, just run the other direction, run any direction… Just not to be here anymore, not in front of him.

Yamata chuckled. The smirk stayed like a nasty imp pinching one's lip and refusing to let go. Tails of white wrapped around Yamata creating a cocoon of scales that spun rapidly around its creator with enough force to slice through the trees and blow a good couple of hundred of meters of forest down. The spinning tails were nothing if not diligent. Not a single chip of wood or stray leaf remained of what once was a nice patch of dark and moisty forest ground.

"I was put into this world to inhabit it. It is my home and I feel like shaping it as I wish." Yamata spoke up once the tails unwrapped and disappeared somewhere in the back of his neck and under his star-bright hair.

Mana looked around seeing a pair of incapacitated rabbits blown back by the force of impact. It did not appear like the Eight-Headed Dragon cared all that much about who or what got in the way of him admiring some sky. The magician's fingers clenched against her hand so hard it hurt.

She wanted to hit this man, to hurt him really bad but she could not. He deserved to be moved aside and stopped from hurting anyone else but… Her body would not move. Some voice of Mana's better reason, having nothing to do with her actual reasoning mind, kept screaming in her head to stay where she was and not make this situation worse.

"He killed someone…" Mana felt the count of chakra signatures drop by a few individuals. Nobody that got hit with the brunt of the spinning motion, by the tails of Yamata survived. Chakra augmentations, ninjutsu training or not, they died instantly without making much of a mess. The evidence of Yamata's efficiency as a killer was clear.

"You're not the only one living here!" Mana yelled out. Even she was a little surprised by how loud and antagonizing her tone came out. It took a significant amount of force just to bust down the barrier of commanding one's body to move so it was difficult to stop the inertia from that point on. "All of us share this world together and nothing gives you the right to kill others."

"I killed someone?" Yamata looked around, his eyes instantly fixed on a pair of rabbits with snapped necks and eyes that looked more confused as to why they were looking the wrong direction and facing backward than dealing with the end of their lives. "That is just unfortunate."

"Unfortunate? Is that all you have to say?" Mana managed to bust down Yamata's paralyzing barrier once more. Give or take a few more seconds and she would be able to do it consistently, maybe then she could make this bastard pay.

"Trust me, Konoha's Sorceress, if I wanted to kill any of you, or all of you, I'd have done so while you're learning to move under my gaze." Yamata's face turned serious, all hints of pleasure in standing under the spring sky faded together with the souls of those he had killed. "As it is with most lives I claim, it was an accident. My soul was shaking with the need to be free, to feel the sky and the Sun brushing against my skin more… More. I have spent decades underground, it was not until I've seen humans disguise their age and natural flaws with switching shapes that I even learned to walk the surface of this world, something I had not done since childhood before then."

Mana's hand twitched. Her elbow bent ever so slightly. He was right, not only was he right but he was also very much aware of the fact that nobody else could move all too much in his suppressed presence. These snakes… She wanted none of the conflict they brought, all she wanted was to move the rabbits away from it all, to safety. Give them freedom. Some security.

"Let the rabbits go," Mana demanded with more control and gentleness in her voice than ever before when speaking under Yamata's gaze. The serpent wearing a human shape looked pleasantly amused by the magician's control. "Ever since you showed your face to us, it was me that your eyes could not leave alone."

"Who told you they are not free to leave?" Yamata raised his eyebrows. "If they can move, by all means, do so."

"You…" Mana growled.

"Stop dis! We knew what we got into." Usuzoku's voice broke Mana out of doing something stupid. "What, ye really take us fer some idiots dat thought we'd just waltz out a' our homes an' go to some nicer place without losing someone along da way? Dat was always da argument, dat was always the unfortunate plan."

"I have too little time to waste it on getting offended." Yamata shrugged with a grin. "But this is no power-play, Sorceress, you misunderstand my intent entirely. I do not follow some "the strong survive, the weak perish" type nindo… Well… Maybe I do just in this case, just not with the rabbits. I never cared too much about the rabbits deciding to move."

He could not have been lying. Mana did recall something of the sort being said by one of the three serpentine titans that attacked them underground.

"The loss of my sons and daughters was painful, nobody likes losing their children. I'm sure you can relate to the pain of loss. I've just gone through what enrages you so much that it stopped giving me power and aggression, now it just makes me feel hopeless and sad inside." Yamata pressed his hand against his chest. "But my intentions here were not to act upon that which I stopped having the capacity to feel long ago, it was the same feeling that led me out of my self-appointed imprisonment to begin with – curiosity."

Mana was beginning to wrap her mind around what this shapeshifting progenitor was talking about.

"My heads stretch out far away and are many. I can see and hear all sorts of things. I certainly did not expect a handful of rabbits following a pair of ninja defeat some of my strongest but also the most unruly children. I do not blame you for their deaths. I got to know of your inability to take a life by someone who slipped away. Someone who was told of the fame you've garnered back home by a contractor and in term let me know of it too. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about that. Then I heard about a child speaking of their contract like they were their own species, I heard of that same child fighting alongside their own as well as the sworn enemy of their own, uniting those two. I am no longer surprised, I am intrigued enough to spend on you a bit of my time on the surface." Yamata grinned.

Just like that, the almighty serpent validated Mana's formless inner worries.