"Can I ask you something?" the Blood Lagoon kunoichi in a leather jacket and long-untended, shoulder-length hair asked Mana while the trio was moving toward Yushijin's chakra. Perhaps the duo may have gotten to the leader of Team Fir sooner but they had no sensory abilities to trace Yushijin with. Even if they did know his previous location, Mana felt Yushijin's location shift several times. And so the Blood Lagoon duo was hampered by the magician's greatly reduced speed, a result of the injuries sustained against Masu, the mechanical Hozuki.

It did not appear that the young female was all that bothered by it, or anything at all, as she maintained the same, old face at all times. The massive lump of armor and muscle, however, did not look all too happy, judging from his tense movements grinding teeth.

"You look injured, I'm sure if you took a little time to treat your wounds we could pick up the pace a bit." The hulking Blood Lagoon spoke up even though the trio have only been moving for about a handful of moments, compared to the speed that the brute was normally used to, it must have seemed like an eternity to him.

"Our medic is currently losing his mind. He is too violent and unruly to heal anyone in his current state. Calming him down will be another chore down the long line of them." The magician sighed.

"Your ability to read a battlefield and make decisions based on your input is impressive." The giant complimented the magician. He had not expected Mana having already put Kouta's potential role into perspective.

"How did you know they had a medical ninja among them in the first place?" the stoic, sword-wielding kunoichi of the Blood Lagoon wondered.

"They must. Foreigners would never leave their village walls without either a medical ninja or someone with great survival and first aid skills in general." The brutish Blood Lagoon ninja explained.

Yushijin's image blurred in before solidifying in between Mana and the two Blood Lagoon ninja, the Team Fir leader threw a horizontal slash of his claymore, wide and strong enough to handle both of the two ninja. Mana sensed an extension of Yushijin's chakra flowing out of his total pool and entering the networks of his opponents. He was using his Last Resort genjutsu on them, having needed to find ways of beating it so recently, Mana knew how to tell Last Resort's telltale signs well enough.

"Stop. They're here to explain things to us." Mana wheezed out, Yushijin's claymore stopped just inches short of the young woman's throat and the middle section of her better-geared companion.

"Oh, I thought they were chasing you, my bad…" Yushijin sheathed his sword. "It's just that lately everybody here seemed like an enemy, it is hard to leave the perpetual survival mode."

"I like this guy." Mana saw the barely visible lower side of the giant's face twist in a wide grin. Had she not been proven wrong on the spot, she'd have figured the lump of steel and accessories to only be capable of disdain and disappointment. Just like his apathetic female companion.

"I assume this is your team leader then?" the female Blood Lagoon ninja eased up, removed her hand from the handle of her blade, which she'd have been too late to draw regardless, and straightened out her back.

"That's right, you can tell him everything," Mana grumbled out before the irritating iron dust made her almost cough her lungs out through her mouth inside out.

"You okay? You seem pretty banged up. We should see Kouta first." Yushijin suggested.

"I need… Air… But breathing burns. But I'll be fine, plus, Kouta can't help me now anyway. He is currently in his Cursed Seal state. He won't sit still for the two seconds it would take to tend to my ribs." Mana noted, feeling the rising chakra of her boyfriend further away in the valley. Ever since she first sensed the change and corruption seeping into his network, his chakra simply did not stop growing in size but also in its taint. Even with all the training of her sensory abilities that Mana has done, if she ended up closer to Kouta, she may have been forced to shut her sensory down or face the risk of having an anxiety attack or getting knocked out on the spot by the fearsome wickedness of his signature.

"You keep mentioning this… Cursed Seal as if it will be troublesome. Will it cause trouble for my friends?" the young Blood Lagoon woman asked the Konoha duo.

"Level One or Level Two?" Yushijin wondered.

"One. For something that releases all of his violent urges, Kouta's control over it is respectable. I think he may have been practicing using it a whole lot during the three years we've been apart." Mana sighed in disappointment. She knew how much acknowledging his Juugo heritage meant for Kouta and for how long he's been forced to suppress it, how long he lied to himself about hating it before finally learning to accept it and embrace it but to put this much trust and training into an ability that releases all of one's violent tendencies and urges into a massive burst of chakra just seemed… Wrong.

"He won't cause any trouble, not to your friends," Yushijin answered the Blood Lagoon swordswoman with a reestablished sense of cool. "It is a pity that he didn't consider how much more useful he would be as a medical ninja right now though."

"I see. I want to get this over with as soon as possible so… Just let me tell you that we mean no threat to you, we don't know nor do we care what your business here is but we do appreciate the hand. All you need to know now is that these people belong to the Hozuki clan from Kirigakure. They want us dead which is likely why they've dispatched all of us here in the first place and then sent their wild dogs after us. That is all there is to know. Whether you agree to help us defend ourselves or not, that is up to you, if you stick to your own business, I won't blame you but if you stand in my way, I'll cut you down." The Blood Lagoon swordswoman explained before looking around with a sense of cool and then turning to Mana.

"You seem to know who people are and where they are exactly. Could you direct me to the battlefield that needs my help the most, whatever you decide to do?" the Blood Lagoon asked the magician for a favor.

"Wait a second… While I don't doubt that these Hozuki want you dead, there must be a reason why. The clan would not go through so much trouble and deceit just to snuff you out otherwise. You've been sent to the middle of pretty much nowhere, it is evident that the Hozuki wish to make sure you are not only dead but also forgotten and outright deleted from having ever existed in the first place." Yushijin's face turned serious. The leader of Team Fir clearly disliked having the sharpest point of the truth being held back from him, especially now, when it may have turned out that he had made the call to send his squad into where they got gravely injured.

The young Blood Lagoon swordsman sneered at Yushijin with pouted lips and eyes that stabbed bloody murder at the Konoha ninja. For a pair of seconds, the two just stared at each other, a thin young lady, half Yushijin's size sneering at him from below and a Konoha ninja who answered the scorn in the young lady's eyes with the same apathetic cool that radiated from the young swordsman's eyes not too long before, all the way to the point she squandered it away.

"I don't care if you chose to help us, or not. I've told you all you need to know because I felt like I owed you that much for the amount of trouble you got into. That is all." The Blood Lagoon kunoichi turned her back at the Konoha ninja.

"It's too bad Chiya-san doesn't like you as much as I do." The armored giant grinned, the only bright beacon from the shadow cast by his lumbering helmet being his pearly whites. "You look like you could raise some hell…" the Blood Lagoon ninja addressed Yushijin who just ignored the remark without any meaningful reaction. The oddball duo directed their eyes toward prominent chaos of dark chakra splitting the iron mists and beaconing its malice in all directions. No one needed a sensor to tell where exactly all of the battlefields would be converging in.

The duo then disappeared, leaving behind only a spreading ring of dust, carried by a wave of air pressure raised by their hi-speed movement. The two chose to move faster than it must have taken them to remain completely concealed.

Yushijin took a slow and steady step, preparing to do the same mad dash towards the beacon of taint. Mana pressed her hand against his back, it was the only way she could ask for a bit of his attention before he left fast enough. The leader of Team Fir turned his head back at her with questioning eyes. Emotion returned to his face as he was now around people he tolerated showing it to.

"I can sense that your flow is irregular. If you fight now, every movement, every technique will require additional chakra from you and your control will be in shambles. You need to calm whatever's troubling you first." Mana explained with a raspy and pausing voice while she struggled for breath.

"I see… I think I'll handle it." Yushijin dismissed her worries and disappeared after the less than willing to cooperate duo of the Blood Lagoon. Mana covered up her hat to keep it from flying away from the intense pressure that Yushijin's dash generated. Nobody seemed to be bothered by moving stealthily, it was now all about just making it to the center of the pit and letting fate filter out those that would survive and those that would not.

"Boys…" Mana sighed, air certainly left her chest easier than it went in. With a dozen of the speed that her peers used to rush toward Kouta's battlefield, the magician chased after her boyfriend's safety as well. Her step faltered even further halfway there.

Maybe Kouta didn't want to see her there? Right now he was the only chakra signature notable enough to confront the greatly reduced although still a notable tower of the leader of the Hozuki group. The signatures of most of the other Blood Lagoon members present at the place had dipped somewhat proportionately to the tremendous plummet of the Hozuki's chakra so besides the massive influx of violence given ethereal expression into Kouta's system that entire battlefield remained dreadfully stale.

What if Mana's appearance calms Kouta's heart? What if they lost the only ace they had, the only hope, as painful it was to admit, in defeating the Hozuki titan? What if another scenario like that time by the Box of Ultimate Bliss repeated itself and without this violence and taint there would be nothing to prevent losses? This was nothing like things Mana used to think about. It used to be all so simple, act her most honest, do as her childish ideals demanded of her and expect things to turn out alright. To hell, if they didn't…

It was only after repeated to hells that Mana felt forced to begin thinking differently. Only when a figure obscuring the setting Sun in the distance was so threatening and so immovable that expecting things to turn out alright was outright ridiculous that Mana began thinking this way, maybe this feeling that violence was necessary to prevent greater violence was because of that very same shadow in the horizons?

Mana dragged her hand across her hair, pushing a handful of strings away from obscuring her eyes and charged onward. Even if her presence distracted and soothed Kouta's fury, she needed to be there. To do whatever she thought possible to prevent deaths on either side. Else she'd end up hating herself on the inside.

Kouta was not sure how much longer it was decent of him to continue hammering his opponent. The red in his eyes, the tensed veins around his body and that inhuman heat he felt all over his skin, heat that could only be tamed by employing his entire body, tensing his muscles through acts of violence nobody considered humane to the point where they lost all sense in them and in that way stopped that infernal scorching that enveloped them.

Something iron-tight locked around him just when Kouta had wondered if there was something still left of his opponent's face for him to pummel. The iron grip then enacted an irresistible force of attraction that coated the young man's body with a blanket of weightlessness. Weightlessness followed by a crushing shock. White all around, an irritable screech made it impossible to tell exactly what it was that Kouta could not see. The Juugo almost welcomed the returning, overwhelming pain. It was a sign that he was returning to his own, cold and welcome home plane.

Hot dampness rubbed off against Kouta's face and into his hair. The head-splitting sear in his head was powerful. Had he been the little runt he once was, perhaps Kouta would have considered crying out or acknowledging his bashed open head that bled in two whole lines of red all over his face, converging at the point of his nose and drooping persistently on the iron mush floor. It was the doing of Mizoma and his wicked headbutt, no doubt.

The swordsman would not get the satisfaction of Kouta crying now. Instead the welp of a boy, a battle cry of a Juugo embracing his murderous urges shook the ground beneath the combatants' feet, sending shining fractures and branching out patterns where Kouta's overflowing chakra incinerated the fallen iron dust layers and shattered the stone beneath. The Valley of Hell displayed a fiery and dominant with the brimstone side of itself that made the name seem that much more fitting. It was a localized little corner of hell indeed.

With a backhand swing, Kouta split the sky-reaching flames in front of him, his fists irradiating a flare of malevolent chakra that coated and protected him from the skyrocketing temperatures but left marks on his body and spirit of their own. The boy's body began undergoing the signature changes of the Juugo clansmen but this time it was no technique, there was nothing unnatural being summoned. The malformations appeared naturally, without any of Kouta's input, it appeared much more like subconscious, spontaneous evolution rather than an effort to reach new heights through the transcendence of one's own humanity.

"Do you know why I didn't liquefy out of your attacks, boy?" Mizoma growled in ferocity matching that of the Juugo who was slowly but certainly beginning to lose his grips over his sanity and control. His question was rendered to be of the rhetorical kind, at least for the nearest moments, as Kouta's fist slammed into the man's helmet, bending and twisting the steel alloy like it was made of malleable clay, Kouta's forceful shove tore the steel apart like paper and reached the fleshy bits that the helm was hiding.

While Kouta's fist turned into a hammer-sized mace inside the man's helmet before firing a ground-shaking wave of chakra from both sides of its hollow ends, Mizoma's headless body twitched and jerked, controlled like a puppet by the shockwaves emanating from the chakra cannon wave like a puppet. The grotesque horror show turned to a puddle soon enough while the one of the Seven Swords reformed further away and leaped back into the fray of battle with a roar. A roar that had blood gurgling through the depths of the man's lungs making it that much more gruesome as it betrayed the fact that not even drowning in one's own blood appeared to intimidate the spectral titan of the battlefield.

"It's because I could take it!" Mizoma roared out, smashing his own elbow into the side of Kouta's face. The right side of the Juugo's belfry was beginning to shift further, wooden brown began crawling up and expanding from the black markings that etched themselves in the initial stages of the Cursed Seal's release. One half of Kouta's face was almost completely changed, the whites of his eyes turned black while his irises took a murky, golden hue. The gold that disappeared once Mizoma's elbow and a bunch of the blade tips present on his bent up and busted armor dug deep into the young man's cheeks, only blackness remained of Kouta's dazed right side of the face but the wooden texture, overflowing with chakra saved the flesh underneath from getting peeled off and shredded to meaty chunks by the same blow.

Kouta snapped back. There appeared to be no one, or rather nothing, home. He got hit, he jumped back, that was as simple as that. Mizoma knew that the hits he threw his opponent's way were supposed to hurt, he saw the blood they drew, he saw the flinching and involuntary confusion that the sheer, brute power of his attacks caused but he saw no pain flaring in the boy's eyes, no… No pain. Plenty of excitement, however! It was at that moment that Hozuki Mizoma, one of the Seven Swords of the Mist understood the horror that was the Juugo clan. It was at that moment that the decision of Iwagakure to attempt and exterminate the folk that resonated through history as a heinous act of attempted genocide, not unlike that which Mizoma was attempting here under orders from his clan, became self-evident and justified.

The demons of warfare that were Juugo knew no pain, no weary, when the humans went to sleep and the curse that laid dormant inside them woke up, there was no stopping it for the violence that this world knew as the only answer to any question and solution to any problem appeared to only fuel and excite these beasts.

A deafening shockwave resonated through the battlefield, throwing anyone attempting to approach it off their feet, flattening or throwing off-balance anyone nearby and forcing the Blood Lagoon ninja present in the field to sanguinate to avoid having the aftereffect of Kouta's bestial return-punch to Mizoma shatter their every bone. Oceans of molten red burst and flowed all over, matching the crimson running down Mizoma's exposed face, torn open by the shrapnel of his own helmet, blown up from the sheer pressure and power that hit it straight.

The escalating in the growth of his power, as well as his willingness and desire to kill and maim, youth chased after his opponent. Falling just mere inches short of where Mizoma's long and greasy with blood, black hair extended before his slam through multiple rocks of the valley and final smash into one of the thicker rocky formations. Before the finishing blow connected, a shine of silver dyed the gloomy red atmosphere with a challenging stroke of the artist's brush.

Throwing up as much blood as it showered from the wounds on his face and the teeth shoved down his throat, Mizoma stumbled out of the rocky embrace of the structure he just smashed into. Just mere milliseconds later, Kouta's weightless body, shedding his unnatural, cursed skin and devoid of any of the bloody murder pouring out of his pores just moments earlier hit the floor. A momentary pause, just long enough for a few breaths to enter and leave one's lungs set in stone the triumph of Mizoma's mysterious sword over even the Juugo Cursed Seal.