"I'm really glad to see you. Isn't it crazy how we just happened to butt into one another?" Kiyomi smiled while looking at the barely cloudy sky with dreamy eyes.

"Not really." Mana shook her head with an aura of serenity around her. "I figured you would be coming back today, there was really just one place you could have come to. It must have been difficult not to be able to attend the funeral because of clan grievances."

"Oh, you have no idea!" Kiyomi grumped out. "Still, I'm glad to put it all aside now. I'm glad that things didn't escalate and break out into a full-on conflict."

"It seems naïve and foolish how sure we were back then it would…" Mana closed her eyes, feeling a bit embarrassed about the childish worries that people in charge would not be able to keep their egos in check and would risk so much for another war. It was especially foolish to think this way while being a member of the generation that never experienced war, thinking thusly about the generation that had. Then again, certain professions and certain people reveled in war so perhaps the idea was not all that insane…

"You speak as if there's no conflict in the world right now." Kiyomi's eyes got serious as she looked on ahead.

"True, I've heard about Iwa and Kumo. Seemed like such random countries to ram horns against each other." Mana sighed.

"So do you feel responsible for that one too?" Kiyomi teased the magician, figuring that she would receive a foolish joke or a somewhat unnerved, negative reaction but Mana's face turned genuinely sour.

"I'm not sure, honestly. It was me who brought back all the blueprints and samples of the technology that partially escalated the feud. Had it not been for the dire need of coltan, maybe the conflict could have been avoided." Mana gave a vague shape to her inner worries.

"Who could have known how crazy everyone would go over the technology… It's like our entire worlds changed in a just a handful of years." Kiyomi sighed. "Though I must say, I think I kind of see the way you feel about fighting right now. People of mountainous regions, the only places in the world where coltan can be mined from fighting on those very same lands, destroying that very same mineral they are trying to provide in the process…"

"Coltan is not the most painful victim of this conflict," Mana noted. "Your return wasn't a surprise to me, Meiko's however was." She changed the topic in a heartbeat.

"Wait… Meiko's back too!?" Kiyomi flipped out, her face covered with a smile while her cheeks blushed ever so lightly. A somewhat predictable reaction given how close the two girls were.

"Yeah, we're heading her direction right now." Mana nodded calmly.

"Wow, your sensory must have gotten crazy!" Kiyomi complimented her friend. Not only was the magician able to trace Meiko returning from outside the village but also pinpoint the blacksmith in the middle of a busy ninja village in one of the busiest times. The old Mana would have covered up her head and complained of being unable to focus while surrounded by so many massive signatures but this new Mana looked completely unfazed by it, almost like it was a no-factor.

"I've trained it quite extensively. I did not pick up many new techniques but I have sharpened some of the tools I already had." Mana winked slowly in confirmation. "Using sensory in tracking is just the first step of the sense. It can be so much more."

"What do you mean?" Kiyomi wondered.

"Well… I can see it, but I can't quite yet grasp it. All I can say is that just like you can sense signatures, you can sense parts of them as well. It's something I still am working on, sadly." The magician sighed before loud noises of the feminine sort reached their ears. After moving the curtains before the entrance to Yakiniku Q, the sight of a red-haired wanderer that could not have seen a shower or a comfortable bed in months almost standing atop of the table she was eating off of.

"Stuffing your stupid face in, huh? Honestly!" Kiyomi tipped her eyebrow as she went off to greet her old friend.

Whatever buttery dumpling Meiko stuffed her face in before exclaiming in ecstasy occupied the girl's full attention until Kiyomi walked right up to the blacksmith. It was as if until the blonde was not near enough to threaten the redhead's food she did not even exist. Meiko gulped the dumpling down whole before yelling out in excitement.

"Hey, you guys!"

"Don't you "Hey" me! How could you think about stuffing your face first of all after returning?" Kiyomi leaned in on the blacksmith who appeared completely unaffected and unimpressed by the imposed stature of the Yamanaka heiress and just stared back at her blankly.

"I had no idea where you guys were so I just decided to do what my heart told me to do and just hope that everything kind of works out in the end…" Meiko explained before stuffing one more dumpling, gooey with grease and slipping it down. The fatty nature of the meal must have been more than just a meaningless indulgence as it appeared to make the food easier to devour, even though it affected the taste greatly to the side of the scale Mana disliked her food in.

Meiko lifted her eyes up and moved them at Mana, looking slightly baffled by the fact that the magician kept her distance and did not engage in the act of playful wrestling that Kiyomi allowed herself with the drastically physically superior teammate. The magician smiled with a composed grimace before softening her eyes to let the blacksmith know that she was not angry nor did she have a reason to be this way. She just said hello this way, it just felt more right.

"Huh? What's wrong with you? Are you dying or something?" Meiko mumbled, her eyes looked completely baffled while the blacksmith let go of Kiyomi's neck and let the blonde slip out of her clutch and almost fumble down. Had the Yamanaka lacked the grace and balance to elegantly twirl back into a stable position, she'd have slammed her face against the ground and embarrassed herself.

"You idiot, she's just not into this physical greeting stuff. How dense can you be?" Kiyomi complained before giving Meiko a puny bump on her arm. "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your arms became puny after all these years, where's all the muscle?"

"That stuff was useless. There are more efficient ways to be strong, I simply did not have enough food to sustain that kind of strength so I had to delve into the spiritual mumbo-jumbo Mana taught me about to increase my chakra and become stronger differently." Meiko spun her arms around as if warming up. She very nearly totaled the plates and the table she stood nearby to.

"So you're stronger this way than just blindly putting on muscle and lifting heavy things?" Kiyomi squinted with suspicion at her teammate.

"Sure. Loads stronger! Had the darned war not postponed the Chuunin Exams, I'd have shown you just how much…" Meiko teased the Yamanaka heiress with a challenging smile on her face.

A vibrating twitch passed through Mana's wrist, all the way to the upper arm forcing the magician to flick her arm down and observe the petit, red gadget that emerged from her sleeve. Meiko noticed her friend's focus shifting but was too invested in the gadget that Mana had on her. The gearhead in Meiko simply could not resist almost tackling the girl to the ground and twisting her arm in awkward angles just to get a better look at the gadget.

"What the hell is that!?" Meiko finally managed to squeeze in a semi-intelligible sentence along all that gibberish.

"It's a messenger." Kiyomi squinted her eyes. "Haven't you heard that the village switched out messenger hawks for messenger gadgets?"

"True, true… The hawks do eat and poop a lot, they also have a limited speed whereas the speed of radio waves would be near-instantaneous compared to that… The design seems simple enough, I bet it has plenty of unused space for modifications!" Meiko started speaking to the entire three-hundred-kilometer vicinity, judging from the degree of her excitement and the volume of her voice. "Can I undress this bad boy and look at what it has underneath?" The blacksmith turned her head up to glare at Mana with puppy eyes.

The most curious thing happened when she did, in between the moment when Meiko's eyes still stared at the magician's messenger and lifted her head up to look at Mana's emerald eyes, the magician was nowhere to be seen. Only the red gadget remained hanging in Meiko's hands, leaving the blacksmith completely baffled. With a swift motion of her arm, Mana snagged her gadget back, revealing herself to stand beside her friend almost close enough to rub shoulders.

"Please do not disassemble my messenger, Meiko. It is my work tool. Get your own if you have the need, they supply a free one to any active ninja submitting the application." Mana calmly explained before slipping the gadget back onto her wrist and concealing it under her sleeve as she used to play with cards in front of the audience with a wave of an arm.

"I'm surprised you didn't know about the messengers." Kiyomi turned her face away from Meiko in disbelief.

"I'm surprised you did. Weren't you also away training?" Meiko replied.

"Sure, but I've seen loads of Yamanaka check into the resort with their messengers intact. The first couple of weeks they were the talk of the whole pack." Kiyomi shrugged.

"You kids play nice," Mana waved at her friends. "I have work to do."

"Hey, did you know there's a new Hokage, Lord Seventh?" Meiko turned at Kiyomi with a foolishly naïve glare only to be met with a snappy pair of Kiyomi's own orbs.

"Never change your oblivious, childish ways…" Kiyomi sighed, it may have been the last thing that Mana heard before leaving the restaurant and letting the cacophony of crowd noises drown everything out. The magician extended her sensory to the outside, sacrificing some of her more physical, down to earth awareness for the sake of the more spiritual understanding that in no way hindered Mana at this point.

It was a curious thing that Meiko said. Even if Kiyomi already knew about it, Mana did not. She sure dodged a socially uncomfortable bullet by slipping out from the conversation without revealing that she knew little about the change of the leading village authority beside the obvious sight of another face donning the Hokage Monument.

When Mana left the village for the Rabbit Caves the social situation was at an all-time hot, the civilians and ninja were at each other's throats so it was not tough to see why the Council would much rather choose to elect a new figurehead and muzzle the uproar a little. New faces usually had the benefit of not being blamed for things that their predecessors did, or, at the very least, had that excuse in their pocket for future use.

Still, when the figurative tendrils of the magician's sensory range reached into the Hokage's office and felt up the figure sitting at the chair, her eyes widened a few inches. Yes. It made a lot of sense. Mana must not have been too far off about the reasoning of why the Hokage changed if they put that person in the seat. Someone with experience of protecting the village, someone whose credentials at serving the village needed no further elaboration or explanation and were beyond debate. Just by reading their dossier one would be convinced that this man had the protection of the village entirely in their mind.

Mana's entry into the Administration's office complex on the first floor raised a few more heads than the magician would have asked for, many more than most other ninja raise on similar circumstances. Then again, despite her average rank, Mana had done quite much for the village on far too many occasions, when one also puts on top her public image of being a stage entertainer and her starring performance in the finals of one of the craziest Chuunin Exams in recorded history… The interest sort of made a bit more sense.

Or maybe she's just been gone for far too long?

Mana entered the office without knocking or waiting, without listening in. Her steps were loud enough to hear coming from far below as the training with the Ninja Rabbits had exponentially strengthened her lower body. Lord Seventh had chosen himself a different assistant, this time it was an all too familiar face…

"Mana! What a surprise! You didn't even knock!" Kuribira, the young woman who oversaw Mana's introduction into the VP during her time assisting the institution gasped before exclaiming. Whether it was because of a face this woman put on or because she was just that damned obvious, she was as easy to read as an advertising sign placed right next to the kitchen window.

"I felt welcome," Mana said, oozing with serenity.

"Well… More or less…" Lord Seventh tipped his large, red, cone hat with the kanji symbol for "Fire" beaming out to the outside world as a declaration of Uzumaki Midoben's tremendous accomplishment and power acknowledged by the Fire Daimyo, the Konoha Council as well as the jounin. More than that, a Hokage that was not approved by the ANBU would have been just a figurehead joke. A leader who was not served faithfully by their Black Ops would have been the greatest failure in the village's history and given how intricately tied in with the Black Ops the Sixth was… Midoben must have really been something to be granted the ANBU's trust.

Mana kneeled in front of Lord Seventh, the past leader of the Village Protection, but she did not stay kneeling until called up. It did not appear that either Kuribira or Lord Seventh cared all too much.

"I'm glad you came, I was not really sure if you were back or not. I no longer have the Village Protection sensory corps on my call these days. Wasn't sure if you picked up your messenger already and if you have recovered after the incident." The Seventh Hokage started naming the things that could have gone wrong.

"Well, you do have the Village Protection on your call, it's just that it takes longer for them to come to your office." Kuribira teased her superior who grinned with modest satisfaction with the joke but without dropping his composure too much.

"You called out, I answer. I can just hope that this has nothing to do with the conflict between Iwagakure and Kumogakure." Mana spoke up.

"Oh, no. That would be entirely counterproductive. Knowing your record, your nindo, it would be really silly to ask of you to participate in the conflict. For now, Konoha is adamant about its neutrality in that regard." Seventh dismissed Mana's fears.

The truth why was self-evident. With Iwagakure and Kumogakure tearing each other apart, with each successive military operation growing bolder in gall and larger in scale every Ninja Country had to essentially choose a side to escalate the conflict to its final stages as fast as possible before it got things entirely spiraling out of control. Thing was that it was incredibly tough to choose between these two. On one hand, Iwagakure was producing computers and impressive calculators with their immense supply of coltan for years before Mana brought the capsule of technology back. On the other, Kumogakure was the country with the strongest military so it was not all too wise to bet against it.

"So how did your recovery go? Are you really ready for action? I know it's been three years but…" Kuribira asked Mana with profound worry on her face.

"I've made a full recovery of the injuries I've sustained against Honda in the first two weeks of my training with the Ninja Rabbits. It would have been impossible to train as hard as I did without recovering as soon as possible." Mana nodded.

"Two weeks? That sounds next to impossible! Are the Ninja Rabbits sitting on some asset unknown to us?" Seventh went all interested all of a sudden.

"Usuzoku, my Ninja Rabbit partner, and I had a little help from a little rabbit urban legend. If extracting that titan out of its hole was possible, if there was any way that I could use it to assist the injured and dying in the village in any way, given the kind of ninja I am, do you think I would just sit out on it?" Mana made her point.

"Heh, I guess not." The Seventh Hokage looked down with a smirk on his face. "In any case, this mission should serve as a nice warm-up for you. It is a solo assignment that will require next to no fighting from you so you should have been golden in any case. The stakes are nothing less but the shinobi system itself."

Mana's focus sharpened. This was something that she did not see coming, even with all of her sensory, all of her strategic and sensory perception. Something of this magnitude seemed daunting, even with all the training and all the skills she had gathered in the Rabbit Caves. The magician had to actively resist the instinct to ask if maybe this was too much for her and Lord Seventh should have reconsidered.

"I know what you think, Mana-san, "This is all too much for me", right? Thing is we don't really have a choice with this, it comes from a bit above us." Kuribira tried to soften up the blow. She had a weird motherly look on her face.

"Way above seems like an understatement. This comes all the way from the Feudal Lords themselves. It does not get any higher than that…" Seventh got serious and gloomy all of a sudden as he leaned in on his enclosed hands and hid his lower face and the short stubble it fostered behind them.