Mana was flying. At least it felt so for a blink, right before she vaulted over her front to reposition for a dive kick. It took a little while for her prosthetic leg to stop feeling like an afterthought or some piece of heavy weight to drag her down. Before, every move had to start with a thought about how she'd best position her stiff deadweight artificial limb, whereas she's almost learned to associate careful and deliberate finger twitches with moving the calf.
"Whoa, there…" Damisan ducked his front with a bowing motion, avoiding the vertical swing of the artificial limb. Mana cried out, losing balance as the weight of her prosthetic limb swung her whole body after it because of the inertia that a block she counted on didn't stop.
The feeling of weightlessness didn't stop when the magician crashed on her face into a warm firmness cloaked by a rough cape of rugged and dry cloth. When her weight settled on top of Damisan and the puppeteer realized Mana had flopped on him and didn't mean to hurt him anymore, the stiffness in his body eased up. It was as if this firm and fit soldier melted like soft cheese over the flame to her touch. It felt just as warm and just as mouth-watering. She was staring for too long. Heat washed down Mana's body…
Her eyes felt dry and pain came rushing in like a crashing tidal wave of needles all stabbing into the pupils at once. And yet, the voice that came out of Mana's mouth didn't sound right. It was as if a technician recorded her and then formed three different pitches for her voice and then ran them alongside one another, with each one lagging behind the other by roughly half a second. Even after waking up from the haze, Mana couldn't shake off the feeling of weightlessness. It felt like she was floating even though she's only been suspended over the ground for a couple of meters.
That's right, there was a battle. An unknown enemy force of odd, colorful statues attacked them and, from what Mana's twinging head reminded her of, the Stars didn't fare too well. The enemy was too aggressive and didn't let up one bit. It was almost like they didn't feel pain or fatigue or needed to worry about the integrity of their lives and bodies.
All was also not right with the Stars either. Mana dallied too much on checking up on her team and became too enthralled in memories of home. Shige-H became too distracted with her need to micromanage her team to effectively fend off her attacker, Asuka became a frontline combatant against her wishes and succumbed to the ruthless aggression. Endo appeared to meet a defensive wall that not even his boundless aggression on the battlefield could break through, and Damisan's obsession with finding a way to fight without relying on his puppets may have nearly cost him his life.
A dome-shaped turret stood in front of Mana. A cylindrical tower around eleven meters in size. A monument that became narrower the taller it went until it ended up in a dome-shaped configuration at the top that had multiple trapeze shapes sliding in and out of it. Something felt odd, different, almost. With this monument moving on its own, Mana almost expected it to be beaming off chakra, but she couldn't sense any off of it. In fact, she's never felt so lonely and devoid of chakra signatures around her ever. It was like there was not a single living soul for kilometers. Such a remote place should've been impossible to find. Chakra and life itself were native to all corners of the world. Even Jigoku felt more alive than this, for better or worse.
"Careful. Waking up after having your body replaced feels different, so I've been told. You don't have the luxury of slowly filtering the light out with your eyes, so it all just flows in at once. You'll get used to it," a raspy voice echoed from the shifting monument of sliding trapezes. Just like how the statues spoke to Mana before to ring her nostalgic memories of working with Kiyomi back home, she didn't hear the voice but had it ringing with all the subtlety of a thunderbolt in her head.
Having her body replaced? What did that talking landmark mean by that? Mana attempted to look around, but her body didn't move even though she felt its weight. In fact, she felt a considerable weight holding her down. Erratic thrashing urges of rising inner discord made Mana try to test the mettle of whatever held her bound and suspended. Vocal clangs of relatively low pitch resonated through the dark and damp location that Mana ended up in after being captured. Inertia willed it that Mana's massive frame swung around on the chains that held her suspended, but she couldn't move around at all.
"What did you do!?" Mana's voice resonated through the dark. Its clamor made red eyes light up to her right. It was the same colored head of a statue that used whirlwinds of Wind Release chakra to keep it suspended in the air and fired super-heated light beams from its eyes that ignited the very air they traveled through. Further to Mana's left, a faceless statue depicting a faceless soldier in a black helm lit up a cigar and placed it in its mouth–the only facial feature it still had unobstructed on its marble façade.
"Settle down, will you? We're all in the same boat, after all…" the faceless soldier with wind-up limbs that gave Damisan so much trouble before proclaimed.
"I will lower you down. You might find it difficult to move at first, but we won't judge. You've just gained a good forty tons after all," the monument beamed out a signal from the ever-shifting configuration in its dome. The chains holding Mana suspended began rolling down, lowering her with a hefty thud that let out a halo of bright dust from underneath her.
"What did you do? Why can't I look down?" Mana asked again, with all versions of her out-of-body, vocal experience becoming higher pitch simultaneously.
"If it will help you get acclimated, you might view it as one of those good news, bad news situations…" a colorful tiki totem statue with a segmented body stepped forth boldly. "Good news–you've got both of your legs now. Honestly–it's an improvement. I'm sure that the Conductor will let you keep your current body if you make this work…"
"What are you talking about? If you kidnapped me to torture information out of me, you're doing a very poor job telling me what you want to know!" Mana tried moving around but felt hopelessly bound by the chains holding her, even after being roughly placed on the ground.
"You didn't let him finish, dear…" the tomoe serpent statue slithered around Mana. Even if Mana couldn't follow the serpentine statue moving around, nor could she feel her slithering touch, she could tell by its positioning and the way she hung just over her head. None of this made any sense. That serpent was massive enough to be confused for a statue the last time the Stars saw it coiled over a building. How could she fit over Mana's body?
Unless…
"If you could shut your trap and let me brief you, that'd be nice…" the shifting configuration of the monument in the center interjected Mana's duplicated horrified shriek. "Yes, I've taken the liberty of swapping your mind with this statue you currently are possessing. I am, as all your fellow Statumen have let it slip, the Conductor."
"The Conductor?" Mana repeated to herself. This was only because she needed something to ground her from the horror of being trapped in this statuesque new body of hers. A body she had no clue about because it didn't seem equipped with an articulating head while the rest of her limbs were still bound by glowing chains seeping violet chakra from them.
"Obviously this is not his true name," a crystal-shaped obsidian block statue with detachable gauntlet arms emerged from the darkness, moving up closer to Mana. In his polished shell, Mana could see traces of her new body. It had a humanoid shape, generally, though there were some pointless decorative additions to her limbs that Mana couldn't quite make out from the limited reflection in the dim torchlight available in the center of the room. "Though we are too disposable for the Conductor to reveal his true name to us."
"Quite the contrary," the monument that spoke with the Conductor's voice pointed out. "You are, in fact, very dear to me. If I let you know my true name, I'd have to destroy you afterward and, if you fulfill your end of the bargain that I have imposed on you, I very much intend on keeping mine."
"What are you talking about?" Mana asked with her figurative heart having settled back in her chest after realizing that no matter how much she tried killing herself by elevating its rhythm because of the severe stress of the situation, she simply couldn't. Likely because her current body didn't have a heart to burst.
"This transitions us nicely to my briefing of our newest Statuman–Nakotsumi Mana or the Konoha's Sorceress. A handpicked member of mine, in fact, unlike the rest of you. From now on, Statumen, Sorceress is your second in command," the Conductor's mental signal boomed through the Statumen.
"Are you kidding me!?" the serpentine statue lashed out. "Why does the newbie get to act all important all of a sudden?"
"That's your problem, Vatee. You keep running your mouth when you should listen instead," the faceless statue with wind-up limbs, who tried to smoke a cigar although because of his body being entirely too massive and not possessing lungs, remarked. His unsuitable body left the cigar smoldering in his mouth with none of its usual effects. "We seem to have six members currently. This just makes it a bit cluttered and stuffy, so you should keep this in mind when you next open your venomous mouth with nothing useful to say."
"Nothing useful? May I remind you it was my paralyzing agent that captured Konoha's Sorceress in the first place?" the serpentine Statuman called Vatee hissed out with a similarly duplicated and augmented mental signal to how Mana's thoughts radiated out from her body.
"Enough! If you wish to return to your original bodies, you better learn how to work together," the monument that channeled the Conductor's thoughts through it relayed to the circled squad. Several trapeze-shaped sliders went out, creating an opening at the top of the structure that began beaming eggplant-colored light with vibrant pink shrouds around it. It was a sort of gravitational field that erected a limp feminine body in a zero gravity field. Seeing her own body flopping about like a ghost with her jaw loose, clothes flapping about and eyes rolled back made Mana uneasy deep down.
Problem was that no matter how much panic this situation invited, she couldn't turn and run. She was completely helpless and trapped in this bothersome lug of a temple. The worst part of all was that she had to pretend this was now the new her. This wasn't her body, this wasn't her. Mana just couldn't stop repeating this to herself over and over again, though this didn't make the bogging mass of her new frame drag her down any less.
"As you can see, I've preserved your old body, even though I agree with the sentiment that it's been abused somewhat and you should just take this opportunity as a chance to live in a new, better, and more durable body," the Conductor let the gravity field subside and for Mana's floaty husk to flop back into its insides, at which point the monument's peak shut back down with the trapeze sliders moving back into place and locking it down. Even if Mana gained control over this cumbersome avatar of hers and attack the Conductor's relay tower, she'd only retrieve a helpless, dead shell. She needed the Conductor's tricks to return to her body. That was the conclusion Mana drew at this point, with the limited information she had available.
"Thanks, I'll pass," Mana lashed out with a voice that reeked of desperation, and its elevated, artificial, and echoing pitch only made it more apparent. "Now put me back how you found me."
"I intend to," the Conductor answered with a pacifying tone. "However, I need you to run a little errand for me first. There is a tournament I need you to win. If you or one of my Statumen win this tournament, I'll return you and the others to their own bodies. If not, I'll have no use for either you or your old bodies, so I think I'll just use them for my experiments. Maybe I'll put some pigs' minds into them and see if they work, maybe I'll just disintegrate them, who knows…?"
"The tournament? Don't tell me…" Mana gasped.
"That's right, you and your Allied Ninja comrades must've been en route to the Sun Disc arena right? This spares me a lot of needless debriefing about the affair, as they have briefed you at the Allied Ninja HQ," the Conductor explained. "See to it that the Statumen win the tournament and I'll have no further use in holding you hostage. I'll return you to your old body and that'll be the end of that. You can even feel like a big hero, having won the safe return of these five back to their bodies too."
"Why me? You already have five competitors. That's more than enough…" Mana felt her voice plunging into despair. She just had no play here. In this body, it felt like all of her abilities and talents had been sealed off. She couldn't sense chakra, there was no use in casting genjutsu on a slab of shifting stones and it wasn't like she had the articulation and liberty of movement necessary to fight either. For all intents and purposes, Mana's chakra network stayed in her old body. It was only her mind that had been misplaced.
"True, but there isn't a limit to how many competitors one can send. If all of you make it to the quarter-finals–that's a six out of eight chance to win the whole thing. I like those odds. Besides, you've won this tournament before, you've run the gauntlet, so to speak. Having a previous champion on my team boosts our odds exponentially. Then there's also the fact that you've somehow impeded three of my associates despite being nobody of no importance. That is intriguing. It's about time that you make up for the inconveniences you've caused us," the Conductor postulated while Mana tried returning to her recent missions and trying to decipher what this shady figure was talking about. It wasn't like he'd let her know or give her more clues. This wasn't charades, and he wasn't interested in letting Mana know the answer.
"You're… The Chaos Factor, aren't you?" Mana muttered. Because of the curious way that her statuesque body now transmitted her voice through the surrounding minds in a telepathic boon, it was impossible for her to muzzle her thought train.
"Chaos Factor? What are you on about?" the possessed armor Statuman extended his clawed gauntlets with a menacing gesture. These folks must not have been aware of the label that the Konoha Black Ops intelligence put on them and the Allied Ninja borrowed and made it official.
"Why do you even need to win this tournament? Why go this far, kidnap people and misplace their minds into different bodies and hold them hostage?" Mana couldn't believe someone would do something like that. It was now that the full extent of the Conductor's scheme formed in her mind that she realized how appalling it all was and how much worse than anything she'd imagined the Chaos Factor to be this plot was.
"Simple. The same reason that all you other ninja villages and organizations send your lapdogs to that tournament–to claim Agbarah. I simply can't let this booming ground for exciting new experiments fall into the hands of the Great Ninja Villages. Ninja have taken everything they've been handed and run it into the ground. They cannot be allowed to expand their influence into the Sheikhates as well," the Conductor answered. His voice turned deeper and stricter as he was discussing the possibility of a ninja village claiming the Sheikhate as its own.
"And you would use it for a better purpose, then?" Mana tried her best at a mocking stab given her desperate and stressed state. She couldn't help but hear how pathetic and crushed she sounded. Then again, she had every reason to feel hopeless. De-powered and trapped in an alien body of marble and stone. Forced to fight against every home she's ever known on the side of the lunatic that did this to her.
"I wouldn't expect you to understand. You know too little. But yes, it would be an important extra step for my group," the Conductor replied without dropping the sternness in his voice for a second. The chains around Mana burst, shattering into thick iron rings that scattered across the metal floor. Slowly, Mana felt her limbs tremble while spewing dust and minute pebbles from where her body bent. The statue she inhabited wasn't meant to have joints, but because of the way she was used to moving, it bent forcefully and created them. Because the statue was still overflowing with someone's chakra coating, the structure held together without collapsing or chipping off the bending body part.
"Whose chakra is holding this together?" Mana wondered.
"Yours. While your chakra network stayed inside your crippled and helpless old body, you must be familiar with the two aspects comprising chakra, correct? If my intelligence serves its purpose, you've won the previous Ascension Gauntlet at the Sun Disc arena by using physical chakra. This time, it is spiritual chakra you'll have to rely on. It will take time to learn to wield it and as a sum, you will be weaker than before, but if you work your new body in clever ways, you can actually achieve some impressive results with it," the Conductor explained. The ground trembled. Torrential waterfalls began oozing in from above as the roof split into two and opened up under what seemed to be a watery surface that spilled into the underwater warehouse the Conductor's relay tower and his Statumen were in. A living lake that comprised the ground level of Amegakure. Through the opening in the roof, light seeped in.
"Go now. I expect you to learn how to control your new body by the time you reach the Sun Disc," the Conductor issued his order. This was a test. The head Statuman ascended outward on a living whirlwind that formed a giant whirlpool around the surrounding surface of water. The armor Statuman attached itself to the leader of the Statumen who dashed off while Vatee slithered through the falling water, aiming upward. The segmented totem pole pressed his limbs to his sides and released a halo of differently colored flames from each segment, propelling itself upward to leave alongside his comrades. Mana was meant to follow them without question. To bow and behave like a good little hostage.
"I have all the intelligence I need on you, Nakotsumi Mana. I know all about your family and every friend you've ever had. It wouldn't be too difficult for me to pull some strings and see that your friend Hisako, who is on a mission at the Land of Waves, would wash up dead, or either of your other friends. I am not overly fond of young Kiyomi's policies and how she's been handling the Yamanaka clan myself, it'd be my genuine honor to force her to slay it herself and then slit her throat before the ninja sent to stop it. Ultimately, the easiest way to break you would be to flood this monument with acid and melt all of your helpless bodies… Pick your poison, Nakotsumi Mana," the Conductor's trapeze plates slid in and out as the monument relayed its dreadful message.
Mana extended her large, marble hand to the side and grabbed hold of the rattling, onyx tomoe tail. With her swift ascent, Vatee dragged Mana up to the shores of the Amegakure outskirts too.
"Good girl, keep on dancing at the beat of my drums and you'll be back in your body in no time," a mental signal echoed in Mana's head. The abhorrent feeling of hearing and seeing things through this sluggish, alien body and the expectation of her to just run with it made Mana want to place her hands by her temples and squeeze until the marble head just bursts. Though something suggested to Mana that this wouldn't help her current predicament.
What was she supposed to do?