With the bit of heart-stopping excitement that was the last handful of days in the magician's life, Mana's mornings lately were pretty much the same. Get up, slog through the usual morning routines, head for the headquarters of the Intelligence Division for some genjutsu training. Then again, perhaps this was what was needed. Facing Yamata no Orochi gave Mana plenty to think about.
It was not even the fact that she lost that didn't give the magician the peaceful night's sleep. It was how she lost and the implications Yamata provided for his unimaginable amount of strength. He was not too different from most powerful ninja Mana knew. Tanshu, Hanasaku, Lord Sixth, all of them were in a lot of ways similar to the Eight-Headed Snake. All of them had a certain distaste for responsibility and needless restrictions and the power of control over their own lives, something Mana could not for the life of her even find, let alone grasp.
There was no control. Mana thought that she was in full control but was she really? She thought she chose to find the Ninja Rabbits and lead them out of their infernal caves and into a living quarter more akin to what they were used to. But would it not be true to claim that she only "chose" that option because of the promise she had made, because she was bound to it and decided that this was the right time to do that.
Did she even decide that much? That it was the right time? Maybe it was only because of the bonds of friendship with Kiyomi that Mana began getting emotionally involved into the brewing conflict between the Uchiha and the Yamanaka and ruined her working relationship with the village, forcing it to vacate her schedule, making it the right time. The more Mana delved into the wicked webs of choices she has made, the more horrifying the discoveries were.
Her bond to her responsibilities was beaten soundly by Yamata's freedom to control his own life. The only hits she landed, each inch by which she shook Yamata's freedom was the inch she was humored by her opponent to shake him by. She did all that she was allowed to do, she only survived because Yamata decided that she has earned that survival. And at what cost…
Mana wiped the predecessor to tears forming in her eyes, every time her thoughts lingered back on that moment and the shards of Audra alloy scattering in the air she could not help but barely keep herself from tearing up. Now all that remained of her lifelong friend was just memories. She could not even fulfill the responsibility of honoring his memento and putting his name out there by making him proud of what she did with what the Yuki had left behind.
"Is something distracting you?" the head of the Intelligence Division lifted her eyebrow. Even the Intelligence Division officer Mana was training on looked back at her with a curiosity about what was taking the magician so long to probe into his mind.
"I'm sorry, Seiga-sensei. It's just… I don't know if this is the right thing for me." Mana lied. "I am an entertainer at heart, I try not to use techniques I did not invent myself."
It was a stupid excuse but it was one Mana would much rather shield with than let the woman see the truth of the turmoil that was inside her chest actually. Mana's very foundation was being questioned, the very pillars that held it up high and going strong for the entirety of the girl's life were being busted down by a hammer just large enough to topple the entire thing down.
"Well, this is not exactly a technique." Seiga sighed with a strict glare at Mana. While it was clear that the woman wondered if she was wasting time with Mana, it was not like she had anything much better to do. The head of the Intelligence Division lead very few actual interrogations and, for the most part, just saw that everything was running smoothly. "More of a concept."
"Oh, I see…" Mana replied without feeling. She did know the difference between these. It was the difference between the redirection style Meiko taught her, between the evasive style Kouta tutored her in and the fighting style she devised with the old man's help by molding those two together. This was just something she'd devise something stronger from.
Probing inside someone's mind was not as complex as one may have taken it to be. It was especially simple for a genjutsu user who was already quite familiar with the concept of projecting some of their own chakra inside the opponent's bodies, using its flow to influence their own chakra flow and disrupt the ordinary rhythm of the flow, disrupting the fluidity of how they battled. Mana pretty much pulled the general concept off at her first few tries.
It was doing something notable with it that was much more complex. Projecting specific thoughts and images, Mana pretty much had to learn how to walk all over again once inside someone else's mind. Seiga was a whole different story entirely. Inside her own, or anyone else's, mind, she was the mistress of reality itself. Whereas Mana struggled to look at the right directions to find the right shelves containing the right thoughts, Seiga could project whatever she wanted, change the dimensions and content of someone's mind and cause pretty much whatever effects she wanted, given time.
The training Mana did required to find a marked scroll that each officer that assisted with her training each day had hidden. She had to look into the officer's mind without them trying to hide it all too much and extract the information about it. The attempts of the officer to hide anything were fruitless, ultimately, even if they did not try too hard to conceal that information, pretty much any attempts to do so could have been busted down, given time.
It was a scary truth to learn, especially in such a compromised and terrifying time for the girl. No matter how willful and devoted the individual, no matter the difference in skill between the interrogator and the one being interrogated, with genjutsu interrogation, eventually, the information always came out.
Seiga's sigh made Mana retreat from the shadier corners of the officer's mind. The man had constructed an elaborate labyrinth of dark alleyways with bars and inns all over. One of those must have contained the information Mana was looking for. Hiding information as well as finding it was similar to the memory palace practice.
"You're being too soft." The woman scolded Mana. "You're just walking around the field of their own making."
As she gave the girl advice, the woman placed her own hand on the forehead of the officer, closed her eyes and concentrated. Mana wished to see what exactly the woman was doing but it would have likely taken the mental link of a Yamanaka to link three people together like this. Whatever Mana acquired through training, Kiyomi probably had gifted by birth on a whole different level.
"You need to change the rules of the game, even if you're playing under their house rules." Seiga scolded Mana after leaving the officer's mind.
"That was impressive, ma'am!" the officer wheezed out looking exhausted by a mental struggle that may have taken just a handful of moments. It could have taken whatever amount of time the illusionist wanted it to feel it like it'd have taken on the mental plain though.
"For an entertainer, your creative flair seems to be intact but your talent for the craft is shaky… You're afraid to press harder." Seiga explained without dropping the strict tone of her voice. She was just like Tanshu was back in the day except without Mana offending deeply personal connection to his own convictions.
"Perhaps her talents lie in the defensive techniques of mind probing?" the officer suggested. Seiga looked mildly interested in this suggestion so she asked Mana to switch places with the officer. The woman placed her hand on Mana's forehead and closed her eyes. Mana felt her consciousness slipping as if fading away into a state of deep slumber. Falling, drowning in a whirlpool that did not appear all too interested in filling Mana's lungs and choking her out as much as it was in dragging her somewhere deep down.
Mana was quite familiar with the basics of mental probing through genjutsu even before Seiga's training course. The magician instantly began building up an impressive fortification to protect all of her secrets. A stormy ocean flooded the magician's mind, the foaming waters pushed upward a solitary island surrounded by thousands of sea miles of nothing but raging, merciless storms and crashing waves all around.
A steep as much as it was rock-hard surface rose up on which Mana would build her fortress. Steel, rock and building blocks molded together to form impressive and detailed fortifications, burning with blue flames, rabbits shaped mental constructs armed with swords protected every nook and cranny from any attempt to probe inside or even take as much as one step into Mana's mental realm.
A massive fortress of innumerable towers burst from somewhere deep underground it all and soared into the sky. Each separate secret and thought locked itself inside chests and treasure rooms of worthless, mental gold to distract any wandering soul that has managed to come this far. It should have taken entire hours, if not days to work one's way through defenses as elaborate as these.
"Interesting." Mana heard Seiga's voice ring in her ears. "You've got flair, you are skilled. This is no mere, unfocused talent, this is hard-trained skill, plain and simple."
The stormy clouds over Mana's mental fortress began twisting into a whirlpool that matched and then dwarfed the intensity of the whirlpools of stormy oceans surrounding Mana's fort. A tremendous pressure overwhelmed the magician who had to slip out of focus and cancel the projection of her own inner self inside her own mind just to survive Seiga's assault. The woman was not attacking or sieging Mana's fort, she was changing the very rules of how Mana's mental reality worked.
The stormy seas began boiling, turning blood-red before evaporating, leaving nothing but oceans of sea-salt behind as far as the eye could reach. The erosion of water endlessly bashing against the shores of the island where Mana built her mental fort began changing and molding the location, the rock upon which Mana's fortress rose up began narrowing, soon turning about as narrow as a singular support pillar. Mana had to work her best magic just to balance the massive fort atop of it.
Not that it did any good, with a simple glare Seiga accelerated the flow of time billions of times. Forcing the steel to bend and turn to ruined strings as soft and malleable as that of copper wire, the rocks and building blocks to crumble and the pressure of passing accelerated time and the crushing gravity of Seiga's stare to completely decimate Mana's army of blue-flame rabbits.
Mana shook awake from the horrific experience as if from a nightmare, sweaty and exhausted. Her head was pounding with intense pains as the concentration needed to put up defenses as focused and detailed as the ones she mustered up would have flat-out unreachable to any lesser ninja.
"Don't worry, kid, I've trained most of the high-ranking ninja in this Division. I know a lot worse secrets than that… Now, I would not want to keep you away from your date, would I?" Seiga pat Mana's shoulder while she placed her own hands inside the pockets of her coat and walked out of the dark room where the training was taking place.
The officer beside Mana overseeing her training and assisting the head of the Intelligence Division with all he could just cracked a grin before leading Mana to the office wing and to the door to the outside.
"Just massage your temples, your forehead and all over your eyes, usually helps with the pain…" the man advised with a friendly smile.
Somehow with her self-esteem being about as low as it has ever been, it did not feel so bad having all of her secrets and deepest thoughts exposed to the head of the Konoha's Intelligence Division. It only sounded scary when one did not think about it that much. In her job, Seiga probably exposed to all sorts of weird information and she'd see deeper and darker secrets until the end of the next hour, most likely, what were Mana's childish worries compared to that? It most likely won't take half an hour before they are forgotten.
Thinking this way while she was massaging her head just as instructed by the Intelligence Division ninja, Mana actually started feeling a little bit better about this whole affair. Not only was she learning more about interrogation through genjutsu but she was also mastering the skill of focus and perception. Those were priceless skills for a genjutsu user. Control, focus, slow and steady mind… Pretty much everything boring that someone could have thought of were invaluable to an illusionist.
"Your eyes look a bit baggy, are you alright?" Kouta wondered looking quite troubles.
"My body was very nearly torn to bits and pieces from inside just a week ago, a little bit of intense training is nothing compared to that." Mana tried calming him down.
"Did you go to visit the rabbits yet? You should have seen them when I summoned them from your card, they looked pretty happy, all reunited and all…" Kouta smiled kindly before wrapping his hands around Mana and pressing her hard against his body.
"That was the idea…" Mana sighed. A bubbling sensation of joy burst like shaken champagne from a recently opened bottle. "I am glad that we worked this out with the village. They deserve a little bit of peace…"
"You're avoiding the question…" Kouta pressed his lips tightly.
"I'm sorry… It's just… I dunno… I feel ashamed of showing my face there." Mana lamented.
"Ashamed?" Kouta raised an eyebrow, this was probably the most curious Mana had ever heard him be.
"Yeah, you know. I was supposed to help them out, I was supposed to be their human ninja summoner who brought their species from the verge of oblivion back into the main stage… And I got my ass kicked by Yamata no Orochi." Mana sighed. "I feel like I've proved that rabbits are better off running away from snakes. I was supposed to be their hero of hope but I turned out to be the proof of their failure."
"That is singlehandedly the stupidest thing ever said by anyone!" Kouta snickered out loud. "I'm not sure I could even name someone who could have beaten Yamata no Orochi. That guy looked like he was on par with Tailed Beasts and Kage level ninja. That's a whole different stage for us. You should be proud and flaunt it in everyone's face that you survived it."
"Maybe." Mana shrugged before she felt Kouta's right arm wrap around her body from the left and press her tighter to his right side.
"Anyway, this does not sound like a problem that seeing a bunch of noblemen getting stabbed while they deliver cringy monologues in their final moments could not fix." The medical ninja grinned with a full mouth as the two headed for the hall where Mana performed her magic shows to see some theatre.
"I thought people go to the movies these for dates these days." Mana looked up at Kouta, giving a genuine effort to forget all about anything that did not concern this moment in time right now. Just hide all of her shadows deep below the ocean around her mind fortress, put all that mental focus training to something useful for once.
"Yeah, it's tough to imagine that a year ago people used to just look into the sky for romance and eat ice-cream, talk about alien life…" Kouta grinned while his eyes turned softer and warmer for just a handful of moments while he recollected.
"I think… I think aliens may actually exist." Mana leaned her head against Kouta's shoulder, the young man was not too tall so she ended up slightly bumping it against the side of his head.
"That's a significant change in perspective."
"Yeah well… I think when I was in the other universe someone spoke of some people living on the Moon." Mana shrugged. "They seemed to have been living in peace with the Moon people though, or maybe it was just this one guy?"
"You wanna go there sometime?" Kouta looked up in the sky, where he imagined the Moon to be later in the evening when the sky turned dark.
"The Moon?" Mana temporarily lifted her head off her boyfriend's shoulder.
"I mean… I don't see why not. Doesn't seem like that much trouble, honestly. Shouldn't even take us that long, I'm not sure why people don't just do it all the time." Kouta shrugged.
"There must be a reason." Mana settled back down after the suddenly booming excitement of someday visiting the Moon with the young man she loved.
"Maybe it's forbidden or something?" Kouta wondered. "It can't be the distance, father leaves orbit all the time when he wants to wind up for a good punch…"
"It would be nice, huh? Finding a whole new place with another species of people just like us, establishing peace between us, just like in Naruto-san's universe…" Mana dreamed on. "The Earth Clan and the Sky Clan together. We'd make history…"
"Okay, that settles it, one day we're definitely going to the Moon!" Kouta declared playfully.
"Maybe when the cheesy plays stop being so damned entertaining and the craft of moving pictures gets boring…" Mana chuckled.
"I mean… It's already kind of samey, a bunch of noblemen talk mean stuff, one of them gets stabbed by all the others and just monologues for thirty minutes." Kouta shrugged.
"I mean, you'd think they'd speak their hearts out in that much time but no, then they become ghosts and have to haunt someone for half an hour while still talking." Mana sighed.
"You're just saying it because you're scared of ghosts and keep looking away whenever anyone comes out in that shiny white make-up. I mean they're wearing literal sheets in there, you know?" Kouta playfully teased the magician by bumping his shoulder on which Mana was cuddling with him.
Some usual monotony was definitely for the better after the shocks of keeping up her promises. Mana could get used to all of this, maybe, in time, she'd even start to heal…
