"Wow, the little starlet didn't check out." S-Crew grinned while gesturing at Mana, who showed up at the nearest hotel to where she and the Allied Ninja parted ways last night.

"Why would she? It was her idea to tag along…" Rushira squinted at her comrade.

"Just making conversation, sheesh." The Kumogakure native shrugged.

"You have a good reason to be surprised. Not every young ninja would come for more of what we did yesterday." Cailar looked at his colleague.

"I am more surprised to see Junichi here." Rushira grinned while butting her tall friend with her elbow. "One would think that after years of serving abroad you'd spend a bit more time with your family."

"We've got work to do." Junichi cleared his throat.

"You're all closed in like your missus cheated on you or something." S-Crew joked.

"She did," Junichi replied without a hint of emotion.

"H-Holy shit!" S-Crew flipped out, the rest of the team gasped. Mana was not overly invested into this small-talk, she was just itching to get to work but this little revelation did somewhat touch her.

"Are you serious!?" Rushira lost it, she leaned in on the giant's side and began patting his shoulder and his back excessively in a friendly manner. Taps like that would have broken the ribcage or dislocated any punier shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

"It's no big deal. I came back home, saw my wife with another man. Lost it. She said that I should have expected no different after four years. I thought it was fair enough, a rather valid point so I conceded." Junichi shrugged. "So are we looking for those missing villagers or what?"

"He's joking." Mana nonchalantly called the man out while his colleagues were losing it. They began fumbling over individual elements of what was said, each thing more ridiculous than the other, together with the cold and bland tone of the speaker they created a very inviting for conflict scenery. Mana was about as much of a people person as anyone else but she knew a bit about entertainment and she could see fluff being pulled from a mile away.

"Indeed. It is a joke. I found it hilarious when I thought of it this morning." Junichi pouted his lips while he nodded his head repeatedly. "Then I thought it was stupid and out of nowhere but you walked into it so you left me no choice."

"Damn, that was pretty mean though. Leave the joking to me next time…" S-Crew rubbed his nose with his thumb erratically.

"Very well, in any case, we do not have strong clues about where to look yet. I suggest we examine the records from yesterday, look for any reason to look into things further, no matter how slim. If someone found a ryo in the place where someone disappeared earlier, we look into it." Junichi declared the no less grueling schedule.

"Actually…" Mana rubbed the back of her neck in discomfort. She felt a little bad bringing something like this up but the Konoha native Allied Ninja did say that they were looking for anything, no matter how slim. "I heard and felt something yesterday. I'm sure it was nothing but… It was like this huge presence just appearing out of nowhere. Like something big with an immense chakra signature had been sleeping and woke up yesterday. It can't be anything important, right?"

"Hard to say, what are the odds of two similar calamities befalling Konoha at the same time and in no way clashing against one another?" Junichi rubbed his chin in worry.

"Come on though, we're looking into night terrors now? I mean yesterday kind of dragged but we did it all for the noble goal of closing the case down. If something huge would have woken up yesterday, it'd likely have gobbled the village down by now." S-Crew objected in his own way.

"Perhaps, but these cannot be mere night terrors," Rushira suggested. "Sometimes dreams can be influenced by outside factors. Like when you start dreaming about scary things when you're cold or hungry or when smells in your vicinity influence your dreams. Mana is a sensor, perhaps her subconscious alerted her of her sensory picking something up while she was asleep this way?"

Cailar sighed. "This cannot be related to the disappearances. I am much more interested in something more direct – the surprising presence of black market drugs in the village."

Mana was initially about to object to the Allied Ninja's flat-out dismissal of her thoughts. After Rushira's suggestion, the magician was just about willing to take her nocturnal sensations seriously but Cailar did spare himself of a clash with the magician.

"You mean the over the counter pain medication?" Mana wondered.

"That is correct." Cailar nodded. "Listening to all those stories about people disappearing and reappearing, incapable of feeling pain or awakening these odd abilities. Has an overqualified Quack not made into our list of suspicion yesterday? It is simply all too convenient, just like S-Crew poked fun at it before, I do not believe these two factors to not be related."

"Hmmm… Indeed, for two outside factors to operate in a village like this on such a scale and not butt heads would be impossible. It is more than likely these two are related." Junichi pondered.

"Could we maybe look into the scary roar last night?" Mana suggested. Her left hand started trembling, making the magician stuff it inside the inner pocket of her blazer.

"You cannot be serious…" Cailar looked at Junichi.

"I'm afraid the girl has become our tie-breaker." The giant sighed. "Monsters roaring in the night, possessing chakra signature that would wake up a sensor in the middle of her beauty sleep sound unlikely but… Won't hurt to ask around."

"It quite literally might hurt…" S-Crew rubbed his thighs

"Oh, come now. Don't be such a sissy." Rushira teased her constantly goofy comrade. "If we find no clue of any monsters, we can go back to investigating the black market painkillers at any time. This is a mystery that spans for years, what's a little side-quest in the face of that?"

Much to Mana's surprise, it appeared that she was not the only one with terrible nightmares last night. Plenty of people around the vicinity of her home heard an overpowering noise and some of the homes even reported broken windows to the Konoha Administration that very same morning. The Allied Ninja found some genin fixing the busted windows and cleaning the glass for their simply chore missions while talking to the villagers willing to tell of their experiences.

"Huh… It appears there is another mystery on our list of things to consider." Junichi coldly affirmed that Mana's experiences last night were no mere dream in his mind.

"Okay, two things happening side by side was pretty casual for us but three? You mean some drug kingpin is pushing painkillers on the black market, kidnapping people on the side and they're a giant monster? Get out of here…" S-Crew was the only one who found that observation funny, as much as he tried poking Cailar with an elbow, the Allied Ninja with the stylish hair found little amusement in S-Crew's suggestion.

"We need to look into this at least until we can establish that there is no connection between this and the disappearances. Monsters are known for a lot of things but making people disappear just may be in their modus operandi." Mana voiced her thoughts. Her thoughts were impure and she could feel that. There was a hidden nerve that was quite painful and one that the magician, despite her best intentions, very much wanted to keep hidden.

"I could go for a good monster fight. Even if the beast is unrelated to these disappearances, it would make for a good brawl." Rushira shrugged. "If it is related, not only we get to kick its ass but we save a lot of people along the way and do our job here."

Mana was glad to have someone among the Allied Ninja on her side. In her glee she let her eyes wander around the group, surveying their mood and they accidentally fell on something that made her blush and look away. It was possibly the strictest glare that the magician had ever seen directed at her from Junichi. Why was he looking at her this way? Was he mad at Mana for something? She would have been able to understand someone like S-Crew looking at her this way for making more work for him but Junichi…

"We may as well look into this monster thing." Junichi dropped his attempts to kill Mana with his chilling glares about as quickly as he picked them up. Not only that, confusing the magician with his behavior even more, the Allied Ninja appeared to support the side that made him get so furious just a handful of moments prior.

"I agree." Cailar was just another shocker to add to the list. The rest of the Allied Ninja and Mana stared down the stylish ninja who was beginning to carve the image of being quite the dissident in most cases. Perhaps dissidence was becoming the norm to him, by joining in on the popular opinion the man intended to achieve the same shocking effect he feasted on before when he disagreed and derailed any discussion or job.

"Wait, what?" S-Crew turned at the stylish ninja.

"If anyone read our report from afar, they'd come to the conclusion that this was a clue after an entire day of pointless examinations and questionings. It's a poor and, as of yet, an unfocused lead that may not even be a lead at all but it is all we have." Cailar explained his reasoning.

"Holy shit, if we don't look into this monster shit, we won't be able to shut this case down because we'll have open leads." S-Crew rubbed the back of his bald head.

"That is correct. Even if we return with a closed case, someone outranking us will reopen it and send us back to look into this monster business as a possible lead. It won't be pretty when they do it either." Cailar sighed.

There was an increasing amount of filth gathering in the motives of everyone involved. S-Crew appeared to care little about anything else but goofing off and getting this mystery that is possibly the most important case Konoha has seen in ages shut down, Cailar was just looking to choose a position that would incite the maximum amount of chaos, Rushira was looking for a little bit of entertainment and who even knew what Junichi's deal was… Then there was Mana…

Deep inside, the girl knew that the painkillers all over Konoha markets and vendors that just appeared out of nowhere a handful of years ago were the stronger lead. The disappearances may have predated the painkiller boom but they were still too close to dismiss the connection. Now they were just chasing monsters around in alleyways.

"Mana claimed that her sensory could work in kilometers of range. That does somewhat limit our range of possible locations to look for this monster but…" Cailar only complained before exhaling with a depressing wail.

"In any case, the reports of strange sounds and the amount of more notable damage and phenomena is around this district." Junichi looked up at the dull and seemingly dead entertainment district filled with gambling homes and just about any establishment that could afford the colorful nocturnal advertisement. It was the modern jungle in more ways than one, it seemed. Not only did it possess the qualities of an urban jungle but it also had the nasty property of housing a beast.

Districts like this one were far from abandoned or forgotten. In fact, it would buzz with activity and shower the village and its clear spring sky with a whole specter of lights just a couple of hours later. This particular district was merely going through a refreshing phase, having been active to the very brim of how much vitality it can support through the night and the early morning, now it was but a corpse to be reborn in the dark hours once more.

"Those neon lights sure are ugly when they're not in use…" Cailar noted after inspecting the entire place with his curious glare.

"Yeah, but these streets must be on fire when those babies are on." S-Crew whistled into the air after doing the same.

"Can you pick something up, Mana?" Rushira looked at the magician who, after being encouraged to do so, closed her eyes and concentrated on her sensory.

Chakra sensory had a definitive range, one that could have been increased through training but it also had an uncanny ability to expand that range as long as one was concentrating on this one sense alone. Closing one's eyes, shutting oneself off from any other sounds and concentrating could have expanded the range a good two to four times. At this pace, Mana might become able to cover the entire village with her sensory in a year or so.

"Yes!" Mana snapped her eyes open. "These are weak signatures. Likely those from civilians but they are highly unnatural."

"No monster then?" Cailar turned and twisted his lips to show off his disappointment. It appeared that the Allied Ninja have found yet another track to begin looking in but they could never for the life of them finish a track they started while on this investigation.

"Perhaps not but… If Mana finds those signatures odd, it won't hurt to check their location out." Junichi nodded with the approval of how useful the girl's sensory turned out to be.

"They are at a most unorthodox location, their chakra are also unlike that of normal civilians, although of similar size. It has influences of something else entirely in their networks." Mana described the odd sensation she felt when inspecting this anomaly amongst everything she picked up on before. It took her some training before she could just single out oddities like this from the entire picture. It was like looking for a hippo in a picture overstuffed with cartoon elephants unless one knew exactly what they were looking for and where that thing was supposed to be, it may have taken some time to find it.

Mana and the Allied Ninja hurried along the abandoned pathways and quickly cut the street onto an arching bridge that had a steep fall underneath, covering over another street down below that crossed it. Misshapen and nearly rotten figures of coal-black skin and lips that were so damaged they barely concealed their ghastly grins all looked at the gathering Allied Ninja with surprise that their meeting was interrupted.

The sole normal figure of a Konoha ninja wearing a black overcoat over his flak jacket and standard uniform of an average or higher ranked ninja stepped out in front of the pitiful figures.

"I'll take care of this." He mumbled.

"Mana." Someone in the crowd of the black deadmen uttered and extended their long, corrupted finger at the magician's general direction. In a hurry, the rest of the revolting figures joined in on the excitement that took over the pitiful ones upon laying their eyes on the magician.

"I know, not now." The ninja turned his head halfway to the side of the overly excited men and women that, in their condition, should have been dead but were not.

"I guess we ran into the drug dealers first… Told you those drugs had more to do with the disappearances than the monster." Cailar turned at the rest of the squad with a smug face, as if taunting them and bragging of his superior instincts.

"This visual does seem to be more related to the rampant painkiller black market than the monster indeed." Junichi joined the side of his teammate. "That does not necessarily invalidate the existence of the monster."

"Allied Ninja, this is troublesome." The mysterious ninja who seemed to be barking orders at the coal-black ones exclaimed while the feeble subordinates hobbled like penguins to a nearby manhole and disappeared into the blackness it led to. This ninja stood like a wall between the Allied ninja and those poor people, if they were still fitting to be categorized as such in their current condition, that is.

"That's right, scumbag, we're here now to investigate the shit out of this shit!" S-Crew threw his fist out as a declaration of his upcoming victory against this man who had decided to serve as a roadblock in this situation.

"You were the one trying to shut this investigation down this whole time…" Mana squinted her eyes at the Allied Ninja.

"Yes… Well… You see…" S-Crew began making up excuses, squirming and rubbing the back of his head as he sweat profusely. "It was a ploy, all just a ploy. I didn't want to reveal too much information about this to random villagers so I tried to get you disinterested, you see… Now I can remove my mask of aloofness at last!"

"Good, so you can then beat this guy for us." Rushira grinned before smacking the Kumogakure native in the back. The man got thrown forward and nearly lost balance after this roughhousing but managed to stay on his feet somehow.

"Wait, all of us will not be fighting him?" Mana got surprised. "Surely if we all attacked him at once…"

"We'd all waste chakra and constantly get in each other's way." Junichi shut Mana's appeal down. "This is a pretty narrow street, maybe too narrow for S-Crew to fight alone. We are more than likely to meet more able fighters ahead. If this man was someone important he would not be throwing himself at us to protect a bunch of walking corpses."

"It appears you've got me…" the mystery Konoha ninja smiled, throwing coat off to the side and revealing a serpentine, scaly face with glowing eyes and snake heads butting out from the man's shoulder blades and kidney area. "I am just a meaningless life in a greater purpose. Sadly, I lack the numbers that those poor people possess and their knowledge and therefore I am of limited use to my guru."

"Guru?" Mana mumbled to herself.

"Enough, S-Crew, take this guy down, and Mana…" Junichi turned a strict glare at the magician, "Don't think you're off the hook here too. Those people seemed to know you even in their current state. It does not look like you are completely unconnected to whatever this is, just like I thought."

"Man, you're so weird looking… How did you ever pass as a normal ninja?" S-Crew kept on complaining while he stepped out in front of the party of Allied Ninja and Mana and prepared to face this strange, serpentine man.

"I did not even need to try too hard. Ours is a strange world, full of even stranger people. Nobody cared if I looked a bit scaly as long as I got the job done." The man replied as he took an offensive, wrestling-like stance and the snake-limbs extended onwards as well, creating a perfect circle of area-coverage and a very powerful fighting stance to beat or find openings in.

Then again, if someone could have found an opening in a situation like this, it would be one of the Allied Ninja…