"The bastard chipped my swords. Did he know how ancient these are?" Endo grumbled while examining the cracked hilt of the Sword of the Thunder God and the Sword of Thorns. The latter was a bit more useful when damaged since it was more of a baton that produced iron spikes in whatever it touched and Endo had already found it as a chipped piece of a throne of an ancient civilization in the Earth Country.
"Did anyone see Mana?" Damisan raised his head and peeked through his wet locks, only to scan the wet dump they've crawled off to.
Further and out in the clearing, Shige-H was patching Asuka up with the Mystical Palm jutsu. The vibrant emerald shine from the gleaming medical technique failed to brighten up the lousy day since the Stars ended up witnessing one of the rarer moments when the rain ceased in Amegakure and the sky had a chance to slip its nose through the clouds.
A handful of ninja in baggy clothing descended around the beaten squad of Allied Ninja pushed into the lower, flooded sections of the village and busy licking their wounds. The three that stepped out from the murky crowd of full-bodysuit ninja in gas masks looked the most casual, though the fact the village allowed them some semblance of identity and their advanced age relayed them to be more than your average batch of ninja.
"We'd like you lot to come with us for questioning," a stout man of a thick body build and a scarred and lightly wrinkled face said. He took the time to examine each of the Allied Ninja visually and saw no signs of an immediate threat to either of their lives, which allowed the Amegakure ninja to question them.
"Up yours, asshole," Endo stood up, pocketing the Sword of the Thunder God and sheathing the Sword of Thorns to pull out and connect two separate katana by their hilts into a double-bladed katana sword-staff. The swordsman sliced the flooded floor in front of him, spraying water spatter in front of him while scowling at the arriving Amegakure ninja.
"Endo!" Shige-H scolded her ally while nudging her head to the side to get a strand of hair out of the way. A female ninja with sand-colored hair and a black kimono over a mossy turtleneck approached the Allied kunoichi and kneeled by Asuka's side, gently placing her hands over the injured kunoichi and nodding to Shige-H as a signal that she was okay to take over the treatment of the young woman. Having reached a mutual understanding, Shige-H backed off and handed the baton over to the Amegakure medical kunoichi.
"We're Allied Ninja," Shige-H explained to the Amegakure higher-ups and tapped at the plate of a forehead protector that loosely hung as a sash over her neck. "We pose no threat to your village. We were passing through to the Wind Country and an unknown enemy force attacked us."
"I understand," the stern Amegakure ninja nodded. "But I'd still like it if you came with us for questioning. Even if Amegakure does not have a signed cooperation treaty with the Allied Ninja, we do not see you as a hostile force right now. If you elude our efforts at questioning you, however…"
"Have any of you seen Mana?" Damisan stood up and approached the group, standing side by side with his leader and giving the Amegakure ninja ample personal space so that they didn't see his question as an attack of some sort. "She's a relatively well-known stage personality, and she dresses in a way that makes her tough to miss."
"Nakotsumi Mana, Konoha's Sorceress?" an androgynous-looking man with a chain-mail shirt and an untied, loosely hanging kimono stretched to the flooded surface of the Amegakure floor tightened his look. "She's relatively known around these parts. Amegakure used to organize trips to Konohagakure to see her shows, so even civilians have seen her face on the posters. We'd have noticed someone like that."
"Isn't it ironic that, yet again, the person we lose is our sensor? The only person capable of finding other people we may lose…" Endo cursed, splitting his swords and sheathing them again now that he saw that a battle won't be taking place. With the biggest hothead amongst the Allied Ninja standing down, the rest of the gas-mask squad seemed to relax as well.
"What if the enemy kidnapped her?" Damisan began pacing front and back with his hand sifting through his hair in worry. "They couldn't have gotten too far yet, we need to give chase. We need to find her!"
"I'm afraid we insist you come with us for questioning," the scarred Amegakure ninja repeated, like a broken record. With a lot of his bulky body laying hidden underneath a cloak, it was tough to say if he was ready for a brawl if one would take place, but his facial expression relayed the impression that he had seen plenty of wild things in his life and it made one anxious just to think about starting trouble.
"Sorry, Damisan," Shige-H placed her hand on Damisan's shoulder. "I want to find Mana as much as you do, but we can't afford to take on the Amegakure ninja in their own home village. Even if we could take them, they're bound to receive plenty of reinforcements in here and it will be a tremendously taxing battle. Most certainly, it will delay us beyond where we can reasonably expect to find any traces of those walking statue-people. We'll just have to tuck our chins and take the rest of this beating fate intended for us."
"Now there's that Stars mentality I've signed up for…" Endo spat to the side and slipped his hands inside his messy kimono flaps. "Let's just get this questioning stuff over with already. We've got a mission to complete."
"Aren't you at all worried about Mana?" Damisan turned to his comrade. "How can you be so tunnel-minded about your objective when your comrade is missing?"
"If I had a choice between Mana living or dying, obviously I'd choose for the witch to live," Endo shrugged. "Doesn't change the fact that we had our asses thoroughly handed to us and that we're lucky only one of us got injured and one of us is missing. The way I see it, if you lose a battle, you're lucky to avoid a complete wipeout."
"Your ally is a strong-minded ninja," a ninja wearing a hood and a baggy top with a red scarf wrapped over his neck and lower jaw muffled through the red cloth covering his mouth. "I can see why you've chosen to take him on a mission abroad."
"Eat shit, I didn't ask for your approval," Endo hissed before sighing and resigning to this drilling routine they were about to receive.
Mana stared at a reflection in the rippling water, seated on hardened black sludge of leftovers of grievous past conflicts and surrounded by decimated, charred buildings that were most likely still laced with the ashes of their denizens from the inside. The reflection of an upright horse with an almost dolphin-like snout. Mana could see why she struggled to look down and around earlier in the hidden warehouse, the neck of the body forced upon her was incredibly thick.
The statue was busted up. Though even with all the cracks and chipped-off parts, it hardly felt as broken as the spirit that inhabited the shell. Wailing felt hopeless, no one could hear her cries but the other Statumen that just hung loosely and watched their newest member from the side.
"I still don't see why we need her," Vatee hissed to the rest of the Statumen. "We had five members, which was a good number to have when heading out on a task you only really need one person for, right? Look at her, she's dead weight."
"Just because you took no time at all to grow accustomed to a body of a viper, doesn't mean everyone should," the floating head statue observed.
"Hey, newbie! Get yourself together! We need you to learn to fight in your current state so that you don't prove to be a hopeless waste of time!" the spirit inhabiting the loose armor pieces and holding it together over a vaguely humanoid shape activated its gauntlet and slipped out its hooked claws. "Hey! Can you hear me!?"
This body that Mana saw in the water. It wasn't her. Mana had been beaten to an inch of her life before and felt like floating, she'd experienced the weightlessness of a fleeting spirit that was so close to moving on to the Pure Land that she could just see and lament the pitiful state of her bruised body. At least in those tough times, she could recognize herself and know what she was directing her pity toward. This dolphin-horse hybrid she saw in the water, this wasn't her…
"It was Mana, right?" the leader of the Statumen approached Mana from behind with his hands pressed to his thighs as if he wanted to stuff them down his pockets but he had none. Just like with the cigar he tried to smoke earlier, this Statumen didn't let his new body affect his habits one bit, it seemed. "Sorry, I know the Conductor said you were some sort of big-shot, but I don't really leave my social circles so I don't know your ass from the moon. Do you know what this statue that the Conductor lifted your mind into is?"
"Not me…" Mana muttered in response.
"Definitely not. It's meant as a sign of gratitude and celebration of the Five-Tailed Dolphin-Horse. The Five-Tails is an incredibly peaceful and protective Tailed Beast that roams all around the main continent and, because it seeks to protect the environment with all of its limitless might, it often ends up fighting against injustice which people can get behind. It's the one Tailed Beast that people actually love and respect. What I mean to say is–you didn't get such a bad roll on your new body, right?" the wind-up Statuman shrugged. "Name's Priskom, and, as you've heard it from the Conductor, I am sort of in charge of this operation of ours. And look, I get it, it's no picnic for either of us, but the only way back to your old body is to win this tournament for the Conductor."
"That's right, so get up and start learning how to control your new body!" the armored Statuman hissed, brandishing his armored gauntlet claws against one another. "If I could learn to manifest my spirit in the form of this body to fill the helpless armor that the Conductor put me in, you can learn how to move around and stomp your stupid horse feet, at the very least!"
"Let's just go," the dolphin-horse's body that the Conductor trapped Mana in stood up. In a cruel twist of fate, the villagers that built this statue for the Five-Tails depicted the majestic beast standing on its hind legs, so Mana ended up trapped in this bipedal stance as well with a rather limited degree of mobility. "We only had three days to get to Agbarah before you knocked me out, who knows how many days we have now?"
"Didn't you hear me!?" the armored Statuman lunged at Mana with a cross-shaped slash. He didn't expect to swipe through thin air as the gauntlet claws sparked while grazing against each other and formed an electric net in between one another, but the electricity dissipated in empty space. Mana had dashed behind the charging Statuman in a blink, forcing the helmet to turn a full one-eighty to see his target calmly strutting behind him.
"Drop it, Drasko," Priskom raised the intensity of his mental signal to let the rest of the Statumen know he was serious. "It's clear that the newbie picked up a thing or two from the short time she's spent in this body if she could completely blitz you like that. She's not wrong, we better get to the Wind Country. I'm sure that by that time she'll get even more accustomed and learn just how much she can bend this new body without it crumbling and chipping away into shambles."
Even now, as Mana forced the stone hooves of this alien body to bend and turn and form steps with what seemed like solid stone legs, she thirsted for the feeling of chilly water spatter grazing across her calves. She longed for the annoying wetness when some water made its way through her sandal and soaked her feet and the shivers down her spine that it sent reverberating through her entire body. Even if it was a temple that kept Mana's own mind from disintegrating and effectively kept Mana from dying, Mana could feel a novel sensation boiling deep down.
She hated this stony horse's body. Mana wanted it to crumble away, if her mind was a tangible force, she would've gladly ripped this body apart and crumbled it into pebbles herself even if it meant that there was nothing keeping her mind from drifting away and dissolving into oblivion. The Conductor made a major mistake with this move. Previously, Mana felt like hanging over an abyss of indecision, but her answer now laid clearer than ever. Now, more than any other time, Mana knew what she had to do.
Pink cottony clouds wrapped around the evening sky of the Agbarah Sheikhate. The clouds seemed to drown the simple, square, and rectangular sandstone buildings in the shade that the Wind Country desert rarely saw. The majestic palace of the Agbarmahal stood tall and its peak etched into the clouds like a knife digging through and spilling guts, which resulted in a halo of clarity around the palace where the rays of the fading sun still danced and bounced off of the white walls of the palace and the bronze and golden decorations sparkled in the dying sunshine.
Large masses of people bustled around the tall walls of the Sun Disc arena, standing on the outside and staring at the massive, interconnected bronze disc formations that, while didn't quite reach the majesty of the Agbarmahal, still stood well above any other building in the entire Sheikhate. The walls of the Sheikh's domain stood strong and unchallenged, yet the guards were more welcoming than ever before these days. Whereas they'd have fought to their final breath against the Fennec's mind-washed hordes and mercenaries alike, now they had specific orders to let anyone through if they declared their need to take part in the tournament.
While the Sun Disc had seen its share of marvelous brawls and spectacles since its rebirth a few years ago, this upcoming event felt larger than anything. Both of the two goddesses of the arena combined wouldn't have pulled in such crowds and this insane number of competitors. They all came from far and wide to compete for the patch of land, for this fine ruby in the vast desert sands, and the Sheikh didn't even need to make it official. The word of mouth spread this message as far and as wide as it needed to go.
Mana felt glad that she couldn't see the other Stars, even though a spark of worry lit up in her heart. Many horrible things could've happened to them. The trapped magician couldn't even feel sure that all of her friends had even survived their encounter with the Chaos Factor earlier and, given their lousy luck so far, they could've run into many hostile parties looking for a premature elimination of more competition.
Ironically enough, the Konohagakure team stood and waited for their turn to register not too far away from the Chaos Factor. Since Mana's new circle of acquaintances and her newest form of imprisonment all adopted the shapes of walking statues and stood far larger than any surrounding competitor, they earned more than their fair share of stares and surprised finger-pointing. Many confused the unnatural team for decorations and simply walked past them, not giving them much thought but a single twitch of movement from either of the Statumen made most beholders struggle against the feeling of megalophobia they didn't know they had.
"Huh…" Kusagoro's growl, which was all too familiar to Mana, reached her from down low. "I didn't know they let literal furniture sign up?"
"It appears that all manners of fighting styles will be represented," Yushijin observed while turning around and seeing just about every manner of warrior imaginable lined up and wearing their meanest game faces.
"That may be true, but I don't recall ever hearing any stories about living statues taking part in any wars…" Erumo scratched her head while scanning the most unorthodox bunch of competitors waiting nearby.
"Names!" a bare-chested brawler with a triangular military-style hat and baggy white pants yelled out when seeing the Statumen creep up on him with highly uncanny movements. No matter how odd one's day was, seeing actual statues rolling up would've made one blink twice before one could reclaim their gift of speech.
"Priskom, Drasko, Vatee, Galdva, Poru, Mana…" Priskom listed the folks with the stunned muscle-head guard quivering with an open lower jaw after realizing that he couldn't quite hear the statues talking but he heard the names being listed loud and clear, despite the surrounding ruckus that made his job so difficult. The guard leaned down to the scroll and quickly scribbled the listed names with no errors, which was unusual given the worldwide fame of the tournament and the competitors dropping from many countries with many odd-sounding names.
With a nervous rumble, Mana turned her head to the side to glance at the Konohagakure team, though they didn't seem to have registered anything of what Priskom had just relayed to the guard. She was sure that they'd have had some questions if they had heard a familiar name being listed amongst this bunch of walking monoliths. Having listed the names, the guard gestured for the Chaos Factor to step further and make their way into the arena. Because of their immense size, it wasn't a simple task and it wasn't like the monuments would have much space to move around or stretch in, but the good thing was that their wretched new bodies were used to standing perfectly still for extended periods of time…
The wildest tournament to decide the fate of Agbarah was just about to begin.