One thing that Mana had to hand it to the cruel face of fate was that she'd have never expected after waking up that day that by the end of it she'd be walking all the way to the Yamanaka Resort together with Kiyomi and Meiko. Hell, she didn't even count on being single while doing it either.
"I can't believe it that you went home to prepare and you still left in that clunky armor…" Kiyomi sent glares of straight fire in Meiko's direction.
"Well, what was I supposed to wear? A silk dress?" the blacksmith raised her eyebrow and turned at Mana with a humorous sneer to show that she thought her own response hilarious but Kiyomi stonewalled it with a straight face. "No way… A dress? Are you mad!?" Meiko threw her hands out.
"Beaches are quite humid. Armor gets rusty in humid areas, is all I'm saying…" Kiyomi shrugged. "I'd have taken a T-shirt even, sometimes you show less skin than Mana."
The two turned back at the magician who looked like she was just tagging along for the ride. It took Mana a solid handful of seconds to even realize she was being looked at and counted on to provide a witty response.
"Unbelievable… Can you believe this one saw more action than you did?" Kiyomi sighed and pointed at the magician with a thumb while trying to keep a warm face just to let the remark sound about as inoffensive to two of her best friends as possible but the best way of making it sound that way may have been to keep it from leaving the spokesperson's mouth.
"I'd argue I had some ass-kicking moments…" Meiko crossed her arms over her chest.
"Not even remotely the kind of action I was referring to." Kiyomi teased her friend by leaning in way too close into the blacksmith's personal space. Something that freaked the redhead out and made her lean back.
"If you don't stop trying to get me in a dress, I'm gonna show you some action right here," Meiko replied with a long face.
"Oooh, will that count as a date?" Kiyomi teased her friend again.
Mana looked up at the two play-fighting and couldn't help but smile. The knowledge somewhere deep down that because of what she and her team had done, somewhere hundreds of thousands of people became casualties of a mineral trading conflict that went all too far and that a whole bunch of wild tribesmen that, while weren't beacons of morality exactly, possibly even the farthest thing from it, still deserved more than the violent deaths they received and that she had hurt Kouta in perhaps the most personal way he's ever been hurt just to distance herself from everything and everyone dear to her had never gone anywhere. Smiling with that itching in one's core felt almost like a crime.
Yet the magician smiled regardless.
How could one not? Seeing those two, the two that symbolized probably the most stable times in Mana's life, the two that were the closest things Mana's ever had to a friend despite never ending up on her friend list during or shortly after her childhood, just goofing around like the weight of the entire world on their shoulders didn't matter felt liberating. The cruel irony of a skilled illusionist relying on a social illusion to hide from how she felt deep down was not lost on Mana as well.
"I've gone through it a bunch of times." Kiyomi woke Mana up from the deep haze she was in. Thusly the blonde liberated her friend from the cruel trap of allowing one's thoughts to engross everything around her. To let its black coils sink out the present.
"I know. You don't think about it the way I do so it's hardly relevant though…" Mana took a sip from her glass of kvass in a quiet for a public inn found on the ever popular Roiyaru road lodge.
"Really? Humor me, what's so different about the way you see break-ups?" Kiyomi acted out being offended. Her upward-aimed eyebrows betrayed the playfulness although the magician was more bothered by the misunderstanding of the subject.
"Oh… Sorry, I was talking about… Something else." Mana dismissed it. "I'm fine… Really. It's something I had to do so I'm fine with it. Wouldn't have done it if I didn't think it was fine."
"Really? Because you've said fine an alarming number of times…" Kiyomi raised an eyebrow. "Look, there's nothing wrong about letting the salt of it get to you. When Eiju died it was rough and the two of us had drifted apart somewhat near the end. I'm sure Meiko's molten a whole bunch of her lovers and she hadn't yet given the true love of her life the second look she so rightfully deserves…"
Meiko turned her head to the side like a puppy in confusion. She even stopped chewing on some homemade confections just to maximize the brainpower processing what Kiyomi had said but she still looked quite oblivious to the gist of it. Beside the crumb-filled sheets laid a handful of messy t-shirts and a handful of dresses that Kiyomi lied about buying for herself only to slip them into Meiko's bag under multiple occasions.
"What I'm getting at is… You won't deal with it unless you admit it needs dealing with and start dealing with it. We're just here to make sure that one of the foulest experiences in a maiden's life isn't too bitter for you. I've found that the beach is a perfect way of unwinding and having some antics in during a rough break. Beach antics, if you will…" Kiyomi pitched her intervention for the nth time as if Mana had not allowed herself to be lulled by it the first time, only realizing what was going on through the haze of gloom after the magician was already heading down to the Yamanaka district and its beach resort.
"I still don't get what the big deal is…" Meiko yawned, dropping a handful of half-chewed doughnuts all over the as of yet unmade bed. Then again, knowing the blacksmith, it was quite likely that she'd never make it before snoozing off, to begin with. "You're still friends with Kouta, you're just no longer looking through the cabbage fields."
"I'm surprised by how subtle and mature your understanding of the subject was." Kiyomi looked at her more physically imposing friend with shock and awe.
"Thank you." Meiko nodded.
"I don't think that way at all." Mana looked away. "When I… Did that. Kouta lost control of his Cursed Seal. He lashed out and nearly punched my head off. This was the first time I saw him flat out lose control of his Cursed Seal without any input from his own part. It's just… It hit him, it really hurt him personally and deep down where it bleeds the most. I don't think we can ever be in the same room without everything around us collapsing, literally as well as figuratively, it seems."
"Nah, forget it, girl." Kiyomi shook her head. "I broke up and mended things with Eiju over and over and over again and while it did progressively get more and more awkward to stand in the same room as him, mostly because both of us wondered if the other is just going to mend things and make it work again, at some point we really became good friends."
This assurance did help Mana a fair bit. Eiju and Kiyomi helped her a fair bit when she was figuring out if a relationship could even work while working towards becoming a great ninja at the same time. There was a reason why those two were Mana's go-to consultants in terms of romance. It was because they knew what they were talking about.
"Aren't your only romantic experiences a rogue run-in with a Quack, formed solely out of spite to your clan traditions, a bunch of attempted arranged marriages and an attempt to forcefully marry you after a kidnapping?" Meiko pointed something had not even come to Mana's attention out. While it happened seldom, the blacksmith may have gotten some enlightening insights too.
"You need to fail at something ten times to do something right, for your information." Kiyomi pouted her lips and blew out her cheeks.
A crowd of naked people ran about a remote wasteland, surrounded by mountains from every side. The summit of every mountainous wall laid somewhere beyond one's perception, concealed by clouds in their entirety. That was to say that the only way one even knew these mountains even had summits was the knowledge of how mountains worked and how they looked.
The flock was a dirty bunch, one that must have gone through a whole bunch of torment for they appeared to be both starved as well as carrying a hint of apathy towards their ultimate fates. They may have attempted to scatter and flee but they knew that there was no use of running about the bases of these endless mountain blocks. Their resistance to their doom was purely instinctual.
Mana glared up, she was not entirely sure what she was gazing at but it appeared as if the enlightened finger of stardust-clad divinity itself had decided to poke their sandbox a bit with their as mighty as it was cruel finger. Some kind of supernatural knowledge that simply existed inside the magician's head the whole time suggested that the beam was not originating itself from the sky and pumping into the core of the Earth but, in fact, the other way around. It was fired from a remote location on the other side of the world.
The kunoichi tried to walk and calm the panicking folks. As the air around the mountainous settlement turned ever stuffier and hotter, the pointless, instinctual resistance turned to utter agony of fear in these people's faces. Mana was even worse off – she was frightened not only by the supernatural calamity that threatened to cook the cornered off village to cinders but also by the base, featureless and dirty appearance of the petrified victims of the upcoming disaster.
The evening's sky had never looked so bright. The magician tried talking to even one of these poor, doomed people but, much to her disturbance, her mouth stayed shut as if melded thusly. When the young woman tried peeling her mouth open, she could do so. Only to feel the ever-present salt and dryness in the air, every single drop of water or humidity was gone. The fleeing and cowering villagers turned to dry and disturbing husks of skin atop of brittle, collapsing bones. Their skins stretched over their eyes in profound sadness as no muscle tissue remained to hold them intact and behaving like a set of human eyes.
The clouds split and the beam of pure energy hit the ground at the same time, razing everything to dust and ashes. There was not even a hint of coal, not even a pebble of rubble, just a smoking, plain wasteland. Even the mountains were completely leveled. Mana removed her cowering hand off of her face, feeling shocked that she not only survived the catastrophe but remained unscathed. Tears started forming in her eyes when she realized that none of the poor people, the ones truly struggling for their lives survived.
And here Mana was, unscathed to smell the ashes.
A blood-curdling scream made Mana turn to its direction. What made it more disturbing was not its pitch or volume but the fact that it came from deep underground and yet powered through. Even if the chest cavity of whoever emitted that scream drowned in scorching ashes and dust, they kept on screaming as a colossal arm, the size of the magician all by itself, burst from underground. The arm bent and slammed against the soft layer of burnt ashes and began pushing itself off the ground…
The monstrous Honda emerged from underground. Gleaming at the magician with its soft and childish eyes while it licked its lips. Mana entered a fighting position, she knew better than to trust what the monster's eyes told her. While it may have looked like it was just in search for a long lost toy, Honda wanted nothing more than to pull anything within its reach in two and drink their falling blood just to moist its dried out lips.
The magician's hands acted on their own, she had not truly expected to fight Honda ever again but she had prepared a pair of plans for such an eventuality, just in case. They weren't her proudest bunch of strategies but…
Arms burst from underground. Frail and rotten, not ones that seemed to have belonged to someone recently deceased in the pillar of descending hellfire but ones that were buried centuries ago. Their might and persistence proved sufficient to totally incapacitate Mana and force her hands apart, opening her up and immobilizing the magician.
It was situations like this that forced Mana to break out hidden aces. Currents of winds, turbulent enough to tear one's flesh from the bone without much issue accumulated under her feet, attempting to lift the magician off into the air and carry her away from this massive gravesite, from him!
More arms… Grabbing the magician by her heels and dragging her back down, grounding her to meet her doom just like those she had recently attempted to save. Mana looked down at the struggling corpses beneath her. She felt a surge of power inside to break their grip and fly away but she did not have to. The arms let go. They let go because they knew. They knew that the magician would no longer resist what's to come. They knew that she'd accept her end, as violent as it may have been. She'd accept it because she felt like she deserved it.
Honda's gigantic hand clutched at Mana's waist and lifted her up, moving the magician in closer to his smelly, abominable visage. The monster's free hand pinched at Mana's free arm as if it was just a matchstick and lightly pulled on it.
Mana looked around at the room covered in nightly shadows. Inside the shade, the pair of her two best friends stared at her in confusion and worry.
"I had a bad dream…" she muttered in return. She must have really been giving her best scream, the magician couldn't recall the last time she's seen Kiyomi and Meiko with jaws hanging this low.
There wasn't much that Mana could have done to downplay what had happened. Ninja saw all sort of messed up stuff, it was bound that some of it would stick with them for a long while after the nightmare fuel was introduced into their lives. Hell, most of the legendary ninja have acquired A-Rank and higher status before reaching their mid-teens. Mana's own leftovers must have been nothing compared to the baggage those guys brought home from their casual assassinations and state-sponsored genocides.
"You could have spoken to that support group but you just had to eat that garbage all by your lonesome…" Mana tried whispering under her own nose. Something that often helped out in a tough spot was making it all seem like a joke right after writing something cruel and wicked off as the universe playing jokes.
The magician knew better than to close her eyes and try to get some sleep. Ever since the last mission, this was the first time she'd gotten a true, knockout snooze and that solace ended up being a lie wrapped in a nightmare package. Mana breathed heavily under the cover, feeling the stuffiness of the air around her. The windows were perfectly shut due to the sizeable raindrop-caused pitter-patter. It took the whole of fifteen minutes until it seemed safe to peek from under the covers and examine her teammates.
Meiko was sleeping like a baby, even better, she laid sprawled out all over the bed, her left arm, as well as her left foot, rested on Kiyomi's tilting body but Mana knew Kiyomi better than to think the Yamanaka would complain or lose sleep over it. Quite the opposite, judging from the gleeful and slobbery, waving grin, the Yamanaka heiress was enjoying herself while under Sandman's spell.
The magician slipped into her shirt and then crept to the window, finding a tough but well-placed sanctuary on a wooden cupboard right by the window. With longing eyes the magician looked outside, trying to see past the running rain and the clouds. While she loved the rain, it was the effect that the gloomy weather caused on the world that Mana knew and treasured that the magician felt the most interested in at that moment.
Another sleepless night, however, staring at the rain until the early hours of the morning sure beat staring at the faces of death and failure and feeling the torment of her limbs being torn off one by one – a feeling that, for whatever reason, Mana knew intimately enough for it to recur in her dreams over and over and over again.
"Isn't it amazing!?" Kiyomi marveled at the snippets of the Yamanaka resort still visible from the fortifications that were built around it. The defenses of the place had grown infinitesimally compared to the state that the resort was in when Mana had visited it all those years ago. Then again, perhaps it was the magician's fault for not recognizing the threat of a clan feud with the Uchiha as well as the everpresent threat of the Red Hawks that refused to surrender their radical ambitions even after their clan authorities had made peace with the world.
At any point in the last five to three years the Uchiha may have raided the place, they were like a scalpel made of titanium – steel tough and surgically precise. The Red Hawks, on the other hand, were like a time bomb with a screwed up clock. Everpresent, dangerous both due to their own screwed brain and the unrestrained destructive potential they packed.
"This looks like some military establishment. Did you enroll us on some secret mission or something?" Meiko placed her hands by her hips in a loud clang as her gauntlets rubbed against the armor plates hanging by her waist.
"Beach, young lady, I've brought you to a beach!" Kiyomi scolded her itching for action comrade while grabbing her by the ear and dragging the redhead across the opening all the way to the main entrance through the gate.
