There were many questions clawing to escape and become vocalized from within Mana's brain but she had to establish some sort of order to it. Before she could do that, the bitter memory of her father resurfaced and all of a sudden everything went black again.

This time Ayushi was not about to just stand and get pummeled again. The ninja who quite possibly surpassed multiple Hokage in the list blocked every kick and punch thrown his way. Once some semblance of consciousness returned to Mana, the magician just growled like a caged animal since she quite literally was like one – her fist was locked in Ayushi's grip, her hand twisted in a discomforting manner behind her back while her foot was also caught and raised up. In a masterful display of knowledge of balance and a feat of strength, Ayushi balanced the subdued magician in mid-air.

"It's because of you that my father will never wake up again!" Mana cried out. It was hardly her best-worded sentiment but she had no time for that. She could no longer kick or punch so soiled with tears bravado was the second option she resorted to.

"Oh… So he's succumbed to the side effects. That's unfortunate." Guru Ayushi lamented while he flicked the magician onward with a shove of his arms, he let Mana go as he did so, letting her complete a frontal flip and land on her feet. It was a show of mercy and that made the furious kunoichi just that much more pissed.

"Yeah well… I'm glad that you've found me. I was having trouble finding you and I wanted this." Mana declared after straightening her back and standing back up. Her hat laid somewhere atop of an erect arm but it would have to wait for a bit. If she went after it just now, she'd be even more obvious of an opponent than she already was.

"This? You mean you wanted to punish me for what you're blaming on me?" Ayushi wondered with confusion in his eyes. "That's not the girl I remember. That is violent, spiteful and illogical, that's how the world we seek to change thinks, Mana."

"I don't want to change the world!" Mana yelled out while she threw her hands out forward "Magical Punishment Jutsu!" she grunted as a wild lightning bolt erupted from her crossed palms and slammed at the area where Ayushi stood the Guru was no longer there, having moved with a quick side-dash.

"I want the world to choose to change all by itself." Mana's voice reached Ayushi from behind him. The man turned around with a shocked expression. He must have immediately realized that one of the two versions of Mana was a clone but he was not sure which one and the magician knew that. Having just witnessed how much Mana had changed since they've last seen each other, Guru Ayushi was no longer certain if the peaceful and kind kunoichi he'd met was still there.

If she was – she'd have sent the clone after Ayushi and stayed back, tried devising some sort of a sophisticated plan of how to subdue the ninja that was the next best thing to being invincible and eventually failing. This new Mana that Guru was just beginning to understand may have come after him herself, refusing to surrender the honors of clawing the Guru's eyes out over and over while they regenerated to anyone and choosing to keep it all to herself.

"Lightning Style: Shadow Clone!" the Mana that launched the Magical Punishment bolt weaved her hand seals, alerting Ayushi as to which one was real. Desperate to outrace the rage of the young woman he once idolized and changing his life to model himself after, the Guru dashed away from the fake with a speed that truly would have outraced lightning itself. Even after the jutsu was set off and the clone dissolved through user's choice, Ayushi packed enough speed in his sprint to escape the clutches of manifested lightning from point-blank range.

The man behind the legend grunted in pain as an overkill of lightning jolts passed down his body, forcing him on his knee. Only after the painful reflex of pain and the complete temporary atrophy of his muscles did Ayushi realize that Mana had faked him out and had him play right into her hand. Instead of having her clone chase after a vastly superior opponent, she had the opponent use their uncanny speed to get to her clone.

"Spear Kick!" Mana roared out as her real version dashed in and, after jumping up into the air, dived down with her right leg thrusting forward and digging deep into Ayushi's face as it pushed the man into the ground. Lightning Release was not always deadly because of the awesome temperatures of the lightning it produced, the blitzing speed of the techniques nor its destructive capabilities, oftentimes it was the stunning properties that killed. Such was the case currently, even if Mana's kick was more satisfying on a personal level than deadly.

"So you've what? Decided to kill me? That's hogwash, Mana, we both know that. You've been swinging your tiny fists around, kicking about like a whiny child, reveling in the hurt you've put on me but one thing you haven't been doing is killing me. Someone like you would have devised a way to kill me in three whole years… Unless… It hasn't been three years, has it?" Ayushi wiped the blood off of his face and before he was done wiping the first few droplets the entire bleeding stopped and the man's busted up face reset to its normal look. Normal for him, at least.

"Don't even talk about him!" Mana shouted while her hands worked through even more hand seals in the blink of an eye. She was wasting chakra, leaking it, actually and she knew that but it didn't matter. When her life was about to end when Ayushi would just about feel like he's had enough of losing, what exactly did she have to preserve herself for? "Heinous Shock Jutsu!" she yelled out as lightning crackles separated off of the electric aura surrounding Mana's entire body and reached out for Ayushi's upper body as well.

While the cloaked Guru attempted to evade the brunt of the technique, a single branch of the spreading lightning touched his chest instantly enveloping the man's upper body, chest to shoulders, to head, with lightning. Mana turned away to wipe away her tears as the imploding lightning pressure devastated Ayushi's body, popping him like a pimple from the upper bits.

Arms wrapped around Mana's body, making the magician raise her head in shock. Ayushi was done regenerating before she wiped her tears and moved in to embrace her already. He was playing, humiliating her. Fighting on a level where it seemed like the two were on an equal field when in fact he was taking everything Mana had to throw at him and just mocked it to her face.

"I know you're in pain. I've lost everyone I've ever loved as a young man and I can see that you're a thousand times the ninja I was. When faced with harm against your loved ones you fight back with everything you have. Unafraid to step over yourself to do so. I locked up, I gave up. It is now time, however, that I too resist the world that has claimed people dear to me." Ayushi spoke with softness to his tone.

Mana rumbled and struggled to escape his embrace and after the first few wriggles, the man did not resist too long. Finding herself freed from Ayushi's grip, having strained her body sufficiently with these last few attacks to where the rage inside her no longer demanded blood to be drawn, where standing in this man's presence without attacking him no longer felt like a crime to everything Mana felt deep down, the magician was finally beginning to listen to what Ayushi told her. More importantly, she began considering where she was and for what purpose.

"I was looking for you to kill you but why did you find me?" Mana growled, clutching her fist tightly by her side in an aggressive stance, pressing her upper body as close to what amounted as a floor in this dimension. The magician was too infuriated to even worry that any of this grass field of arms could have sprung to life and locked her in place. "Are you still deluded enough to think I would ever join the cult that's nearly leveled my village and then nearly killed my father?"

"No. That is sad but I did not think you would do so willingly, yet…" Ayushi left the last part lingering in the air. "I am glad that you're asking the right questions though. I was beginning to wonder when we could proceed to the important part."

"So you do need something from me…" Mana concluded. A bit of confusion sparked in her abdomen springing to life a cluster of butterflies. It felt completely baffling as to what someone like Ayushi might have needed from Mana.

"I want to help your ideals to come to life, that is all I'm planning. However, you know that you're far too young and inexperienced to help me with that. Your judgment often becomes clouded, you tangle yourself in meaningless engagements and responsibilities and lose sight of the big picture, it's no surprise, I was a lot like you when I was even twice your age." Ayushi reflected, "It just so happens that I have acquired every tiny element of my plan and I am ready to give it a whirl. In fact, I've acquired the final piece just now, shortly after saving your life in the hospital. If only I would have taken you then, maybe I would not have had to chase after you right now and maybe you would not have had to experience the loss of your father before you saw your dream realized."

Realized? Just what on Earth was this man on about? Mana's dream was never something that could have been completed. It was an endless quest that was bound to fail as the finish line was an ever-expanding amount of distance away. Even if somehow the magician began traveling at it in leaps equivalent to the speed of light, she'd still never catch up to the immense expansion and development rate of her dream. That was both a cruel irony but also something inspiring. A dream that was more of a guiding star than a material goal that could have been brandished and held in one's hands.

"What was it that you needed in Konoha?" Mana's lips moved on their own, her tongue slithered like a little traitor to the magician's better judgment of remaining in the dark.

Ayushi's hand reached behind his cloak and pulled out something that drastically reduced the apparent body size behind the cloak. What was underneath that cloak was not Ayushi's athletic build but instead his rotting shell together with this piece of abomination he had picked up.

"M-Magic girl…" a twisted version of a voice that once belonged to a child left the detached head of a creature to which death would have been a mercy. Flesh and various bits of its face appeared stitched together, each piece of the puzzle did not belong and was evidently forced to fit, whoever reanimated this monster did not take them from the same box, resulting in massive patches of rot everywhere where the foreign blood and flesh rejected the host.

"Little Honda…" Mana uttered in pity for the beheaded creature, still clinging to life.

"Little? Hardly. If I did not work at preventing his regeneration, he'd show us both just how "little" he is. He's a lot like you, you know, just a child that has much more importance than they're acting like. If I was to allow this experiment of mine to regain his body, he'd just start rampaging and eating things at random." Ayushi sighed while lifting Honda's head that was nearly the size of his entire core while looking at the monster's eyes and dropping and shutting jaw.

Once Mana got a better look at the back of the unfortunate victim of human experimentation gone wrong, the magician noticed sealing glyphs all over. From the rumors she'd heard, the village kept Honda contained in tubes of corrosive liquid that burnt excess regenerating tissue while keeping his head from dissolving as regenerating tissue was weaker while still forming whereas the completed and living, in a manner of speech, tissue was stronger.

It was just another grim reality of Ayushi's "dream" that's about come to pass. A child on whom his cult had experimented spent three whole years as a massive head drowning in an extremely corrosive acid, could he even fathom what lack of pain was now that his head was no longer doomed to sizzle away for what amounted as an eternal existence of torment and further studies on what made him tick?

A reminder, yes, but also a testament to Mana's own failure. Just another pair of eyes to look at knowing that she'd failed Honda and was too weak to give him any different kind of life.

"This poor child will be the back on which we will build the castle of our dreams. Soon, Mana-san, soon…" it was hard to say from Ayushi blank, white stare into Honda's terrified eyes but the man's tone betrayed the longing and dreamy nature of Ayushi's thoughts and feelings at that moment.

"I don't understand. If you know and care that Honda has suffered because of what your followers did to him and caused more people pain after he escaped, why take him from the village again?" Mana took a fighting stance, preparing to attack Ayushi to try and reclaim Honda but she reconsidered that before making any mistakes and committing to them.

She forgot so easily about how Ayushi let her hit him. He let her because her attacks were of no threat or no consequence and helped the magician blow off some pent up steam. Now if she attempted to claim something that Ayushi postponed taking Mana, also an element of his as of yet unknown plan, while she was in the hospital to claim first, he would hold nothing back to protect it.

"You fear for your life. Don't." Ayushi noticed the wavering in Mana's eyes. "I do not need you to kill you, I don't intend to do so either. Even if you feel determined to fight back against me, given what you've been through, how young you are, I understand that. Your part in my plan is a bit different."

After stating that, Ayushi threw Honda's head to the side and weaved a hand seal with both hands. The ground underneath Mana's feet trembled, a man-sized arm erupted from the forest of its peers and caught the head. Its cold, dead fingers wrapped tight around the remains of Honda and did not look merciful enough to either let the head go or to crush it and end the boy's torment.

"My plan is truly all about this poor young boy. I realize you are angry, Mana, but I would like for you to quell your anger just for a moment and hear me out. Perhaps in your merciful and often a tad childish heart, you will find the strength to agree with me and help. It would mean me the world." Ayushi pleaded with the magician, choosing to remove his cloak and let it float aside. The whirling winds of the Juhiru dimension picked the piece of abandoned cloth and carried it somewhere to the edge of its extents, into and beyond the dark shrouds surrounding the two living aliens to this dimension and deep into the reaches of whatever absurd cosmic horrors lurked beyond the extent of the violet shroud.

"Before I met you. Truly met you, that is. I used to think that I could do things a different way." Mana said. "Instead of beating the enemy, I thought I could compromise, instead of fighting, I thought that things could have been solved better through listening to them. You've lived your entire life by that and only abandoned that dream when you've gone mad. Oftentimes I could not uphold that, no matter how much I tried. I'll listen to what you have to say but only because I want to be more like the man you used to be and not the mad version I see right now."

Ayushi bit his finger again. Without any rush this time, the legendary shinobi went through a familiar set of hand seals to the magician. He was summoning something again. Just what exactly? Was he intending on bringing another dimension and melding the two somehow?

"Summoning Jutsu: Merchant of Souls!" Ayushi yelled out. The tattoos covering his body from the neck down lit up with azure shimmer, the intense chakra molded within his body and the shiny way it manifested in glowed through every orifice of the once esteemed and wise man. Ayushi's eyes began glowing the same color that his irradiating chakra glowed in.

The ground quaked with much more violence than ever before. Mana could not have kept her feet on the ground and hoped to not have them break or not to sprain something elsewhere as the quake shifted Juhiru's integrity to its core. Something Ayushi did right now was tearing the entire dimension asunder, ripping it into two just so it could squeeze it massive, world-ending shoulders into the crevice of its creation.

It was then that Mana realized that what Ayushi had summoned had not appeared in Juhiru just yet. The destructive chakra that was destroying the entire dimension resided inside Ayushi. As the man hunched over and grumbled in pain, blood and slobber pouring from his eyes, nose, and mouth, the world-ending nightmare he employed to create world peace began to emerge.

"You summoned it inside your own body?" Mana's foot trembled back on her own. She could not begin to imagine the amount of pain that would have caused, certainly enough for a man willing to endure it to be ready for any kind of sacrifice for their goals to become realized.

"There was no other way. Totems can only be summoned from scrolls or some other special means. In order to not rely on something so easily destroyed as a scroll… I have adopted the scroll's contents onto my skin." Ayushi roared out in pain. The man jerked and bent his entire upper body back as a massive, stone hand busted out from Ayushi's chest cavity.

Truly Guru Ayushi was the only titan capable of enduring such a procedure. Anyone lesser would have long since gone mad from the pain or died from the gruesome manner in which the totem emerged from the man's body.

With gut-wrenching noises and excessive showers of blood, a stone statue began emerging from inside Ayushi's body. While initially appearing smaller than the man giving figurative birth to it, the statue's proportions expanded exponentially after each one of its limbs left the body of its originator and master.

The Merchant of Souls – a thirty-three-meter marvel made of vegetation and moss overrun stone and marble. A wonder such as this one may have comprised an entire garden of a massive fortress, it was a marvel to build an entire city around and show to curious sightseers. From what Mana could make of the statue, obstructed and partly covered up by the shrouds that concealed the presence of humans inside Juhiru from whatever else resided in it, it was a body of some old yet well-maintained man of a thousand arms, each one of them holding a different object inside of it.

The wounds on Ayushi's body did not heal as instantly or without a trace, as they used to before, however, it still took but a moment for the man's body that had just released this marvel out into the world to recover. The Guru straightened his back and cracked his neck a pair of times employing the assistance of his thick arms.

"Well then, Mana-san, shall we play a Game of Souls?"