The rain kept on pelting at the polished rocky surface of whatever strange mineral comprised the landmass on the outskirts of Amegakure. The Stars sat on the ground with their heads cradled in their hands, just letting the rain soak them. The Amegakure ninja came to their aid and pulled them out of the pan that the Chaos Factor put all of them on, but they may just have ended up in a much hotter fire in the end.

"Boss, what do we do?" Endo groaned after standing up, having decided he had been soaking enough.

"What can we do?" Shige-H grunted, standing up and inspiring hope in her team, only to begin frantically pacing front and back and wiping the layer of rain off her forehead.

"Those Amegakure ninja looked like they were willing to work with us. I believe the reason they kicked us out was because we didn't cooperate with them," Asuka noted. Out of the four, she was the only one using a traditional black umbrella to protect herself from the rain.

"We don't have time to play detectives and look for Mana, we have a battle royale to win. Asuka and I can eliminate as many potential competitors behind the scenes as we can, but if an entire country is on the line, it will still be a troublesome competition. More so now that we know Konoha sent their heavy guns," Endo dismissed the idea aggressively.

"It seems that the core of the issue is whether we go after Mana or our objective," Damisan sighed after standing up, he looked up at the crying sky and let the downpour flush down his face.

"Why are we even discussing this? Mana knew what she had signed up for. Ninja die during missions. They get captured, and they get lost. We can't afford to ignore our mission objective. It's tough luck for us, but have to carry on," Endo insisted, looking increasingly aggravated by the fact that sitting around in the outskirts of the village that saw so much rain that its ground level was completely submerged under a lake of rainwater hundreds of meters deep whole year long was doing them no good.

"What is up with you?" Damisan grabbed Endo by his kimono and pulled him into where the two could feel the other's heat from their frothing in the rain. "Ever since Mana lost her leg, you've been giving her the cold shoulder, treating her like she's a burden to us!"

"Regardless of the fact if she is or not," Endo relaxed. This left Damisan no other choice but to either deck him as hard as he could or let the swordsman go. "I'm not insisting that all of us must go to Agbarah. After having your puppets busted and refusing to build any worthwhile new ones and pretending like you're still an asset to us without them and that you can perform just as well without them, you've been a real burden to us. You'd be of no use to us in the competition, so you can splinter off of the main group and go look for your precious little pet project."

"Did I miss something?" Asuka tilted a curious eyebrow, looking at the two squabbling.

"Haven't you noticed? Damisan outfitted Mana with a prosthetic back on the pirate ship. Now he just doesn't leave her back, sniffing her ass like a curious little puppy, asking her if she's comfortable or not, if her replacement's as comfortable as the deadweight she lost," Endo hissed, making Damisan regret not punching him when he had him close and in his hold.

Clenching his fists by his thighs and with his chin tucked and his wet hair sliding over the front of Damisan's face, the puppeteer of broken puppets turned to Shige-H with a sullen stare he hid underneath the shade of the evening gloom and sticky strands of wet hair.

"Orders!" he snarled as if demanding of Shige-H to decide or to relinquish leadership.

"Endo is right," Shige-H stated out of the blue, surprising everyone else. "I mean about the part where we don't have to all make it to the tournament. We can't forget that we don't have to win it, we just need to make sure that Fennec's team doesn't, nor does the Chaos Factor. Given that Konohagakure sent their Sannin there, we can be sure that neither of our enemy factions will win. Still, we need to make sure that doesn't happen and put at least minimal effort in," Shige-H corrected herself before anyone could speak up in a quarrel with her position.

"That tournament will have countless warriors from all around the world. It's a good place to make a statement about who's the real No. 1," Endo crossed his arms and looked away.

"I know," Shige-H nodded. "I know what an opportunity to prove yourself means to you. I know that becoming whatever this No. 1 is means everything to you, Endo. I also have become aware of the fact that you no longer see Mana as your friend and a teammate, but as a cripple, you have to babysit. It is for that reason that you should go to Agbarah. The rest of us will look for and rescue Mana."

"Hmph…" Endo blew air out through his nostrils in indifference. "Fine. I see you still have some modicum of intelligence and leadership capability."

"The fuck she does!" Asuka jumped up, and off the rock she was sitting on with a passionate argument. "Why are you sending Endo off alone? He's the most hot-headed out of all of us. There's no guarantee that someone like him will even reach the Land of Wind all by himself! I've tried to kill Mana several times, I think I've made it abundantly clear I couldn't care less if she lives or dies too. I should go with Endo."

"No," Shige-H cut Asuka off. "I don't think that you truly are this indifferent to Mana's fate. I think that exactly because of your complicated relationship, you wouldn't want Mana dead unless it's your call to make. Besides, your skillset isn't best suited for a tournament setting. Not to mention, I know about your relationship with Endo, and I am well aware that I cannot leave you two working together because you'd only be enabling each other's worst tendencies. You're coming with us."

'Tough shit, toots," Endo shrugged with a snicker, turning his back on the Stars and walking off to the southwest. In just a few moments, the driving rain obscured Endo's image enough to only make the subtle tapping of his sandals break through the pouring raindrops.

"Ugh!" Asuka groaned, rolling her eyes. She didn't argue against Shige-H's decision and stayed with the team, however.

"So, what is our next move?" Damisan turned to Shige-H, looking willing to work with the leader's decision.

"We're looking for a bunch of massive statue people. There's no way that they can stay hidden out in the open. The fact that the Amegakure ninja didn't know who or what they were and drilled us on them suggests to me they weren't locals. We need a hotspot to squeeze for information. Mana is a high-value Bingo Book mark. The Black and the legitimate markets should have some information about a head like that becoming available," Shige-H brushed the slippery surface of a nearby stone with her hand and sat down, weaving her fingers together.

"A head?" Asuka twirled her umbrella to shake off the leftover rainfall with a sprinkle off to the sides.

"If the Chaos Factor wanted to kill Mana, she'd be they'd have killed her already. Though what I've seen in Amegakure strongly suggests they were after her from the start," Shige-H sighed, pushing her wet hair out of the way while making a strong turn southward. "It's safe to say they wanted to kidnap her, not kill her. We simply don't have enough information about who these Chaos Factor statues are or what they are after. Mana, the Sun Disc arena, all of it might be related."

"Mana is a distinguished champion of Sun Disc. Maybe it was a recruitment drive?" Damisan turned to Shige-H's back while the Allied kunoichi stared at the horizon off to the south and the stormy creeks ravaging the landscape like a network of Earth's lively blood vessels. "It's difficult to say what they can offer her to make her agree, but they wouldn't have kidnapped her unless they didn't think they could make Mana work for them."

"I mean, let's face it, she's not the most loyal lapdog," Asuka yawned. "Konoha is too lax on its ninja. If Kirigakure would have produced such a wimpy ninja refusing to do what's necessary, they'd have thrown her out not to let an embarrassment like her out into the wild. I can't say I'd be too surprised if they couldn't sway Mana over to their side with a sob story or two."

"Whether it's force, intimidation, torture, or pity, whatever methods they choose in recruiting Mana doesn't matter. What matters is that we find her and bring her back. This tournament is a very short-term worry for the Allied Ninja. The Supreme Leader will blow her lid off if we squander an asset to the Allied Ninja like Mana once the immediate need for solving this tournament situation cools down," Shige-H turned back to the remnants of her team, tying her arms together.

"So, what now? Do the Allied Ninja have contacts in Amegakure we could talk to?" Asuka wondered.

"No. This rain pouring down on us right now is actually a sensory barrier that Amegakure uses to track everyone within the confines of the village territory. As long as this rain touches us, we're like an open book to the Village Protection," Shige-H looked up at the gloomy sky with a stern look, as if gazing into the eyes of the sensor scouting their activities. "Our best bet is to look for contacts elsewhere, someplace where we aren't suspects of withholding crucial information. If we push our luck around these parts, we're bound to get arrested eventually. Even if no charges will stick and the official intervention of the Allied Ninja and the international community would follow, we will have wasted our time long enough for the tournament to be over and for whatever the Chaos Factor plans on doing with Mana being accomplished. Our next destination is Konoha."

"Konoha?" Asuka tilted her head to the side like a curious puppy. "Why Konoha?"

"I see, barking up that tree then? It'll be a tall order, given everything that happened," Damisan sighed and shook his head in frustration. "We didn't exactly leave Konoha harboring the best relationship."

"We still have at least one friend there working for highly influential people with access to loads of top-secret information. If that doesn't work out, one of Mana's friends oversees the village's Intelligence Division. With some luck, she'll share intelligence to save an old friend of hers," Shige-H mirrored Damisan's frustrations. Both acted like they knew what a tough call it would be to head to Konoha.

Regardless of the trouble that was ahead, no one wanted to stand around and soak any more than they already have.

"Konoha has a sensory barrier surrounding the village walls too, doesn't it?" Asuka noted when the three Stars stopped in front of the western village main gate and let the caravans and the bustling crowd of people looking to enter Konohagakure pass around them as they stared at the magnificent architecture of Konoha's walls and the village they guarded.

"It does, its barrier is much less archaic than Amegakure's too. The moment you step through the invisible barrier, you're visible to the Village Protection sensors. Don't worry, we've been in Konoha enough times for our chakra signatures to be on the village records. They won't, per se, like seeing them, but they won't attack us or forcefully evict us either. Konoha still tries to maintain a friendly relationship with the Allied Ninja after all," Shige-H replied, inspiring the trio with the necessary courage to walk through the gate. Almost immediately upon their entry, the Stars noted the chuunin guarding the village gate reach for their radio communication and reporting to the village administration and the Village Protection.

For now, reporting was all they could do. Neither of the trio intended on doing anything shady in Konoha, except talking to some people. The last thing on Shige-H's mind would have been to try picking fights or otherwise straining the relationship between the Allied Ninja and currently the strongest military power in the world, after Kumogakure's strength had dwindled slightly after the Coltan Conflict with Iwagakure.

"Great, they've noticed us, now what?" Asuka wondered, glancing at the chuunin that traced them with their eyes. The duo appeared to ignore any other caravans or people making their way in and out of the village, suggesting that the trio of Allied Ninja was the highlight of their day.

"Skaven and his employers are about as underneath the underneath as they get. Even the village administration doesn't seem to be aware of there being another organization operating in an even deeper layer of the shadows, underneath even the ANBU Black Ops, in this village," Shige-H muttered so that anyone following them or wanting to listen in on what they were talking about would only pick up unintelligible gibberish. "We've got no chance of contacting them. Our best bet is that they'll be interested enough and reach out to us instead. They know we work with Mana and, for whatever reason, Mana seems to have earned plenty of their favor. I'm sure they'll be curious why she's not with us."

"In the meantime, not to waste time, we can contact Yamanaka Kiyomi, right?" Damisan suggested.

"She is by no means a tough woman to find, but we won't get to meet her until she wants to see us, either. It might be a good idea to meet with Wakizashi Meiko as well," Shige-H agreed. "She might not have the information, but she might help us pull Mana out of the fire she's in. We could use her brand of muscle."

"Am I expected to know notable contacts from every village we work in too?" Asuka blew her cheeks out, feeling jealous and irrelevant at the moment since she lacked the experience of working alongside some of the mentioned Konoha ninja.

"It wouldn't hurt. If we ever work in Kirigakure, we'll be relying on your inner knowledge of the village hierarchy," Shige-H shrugged. "Honestly, in Konoha's case, it's more experience rather than background knowledge that's guiding us."

The triplet of Allied Ninja, having spent their time traveling in between Amegakure and Konohagakure to dry up, rest and patch their wounds, also get a batch of dry new clothes from an inn on Tetley Road, kept shooting straight the central village street and crossed the broad wooden bridge across the river to head to the administrative district where all the clan districts were located. It was there that they could find the Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu clan district and start snooping around.

Given how Kiyomi was one of the most influential women in the village, handling immense amounts of intelligence and information for the village, it wouldn't take long before she'd make herself known to the Allied Ninja.

The Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu district was a beautiful mesh of nature and traditional old-timey architecture. People often referred to the Uchiha Clan as the protectors of their old clan ways and the Uchiha were the caretakers of the old architecture, history, and military equipment and that may have been the case, but based on the brief glance passing by that the Allied Ninja had caught, the Zaibatsu's district looked much more tranquil and tuned with the natural environment. It was nothing but gardens and parks everywhere with a nice oriental one-floor house or a mansion placed and modeled to serve as decoration of the garden more than anything else.

"No one's stopping us. How far in are we going to go?" Asuka noted with some mild surprise stuck in her expression.

"It's not like we're forbidden to be here," Shige-H exhaled with a hefty pant.

"We're not forbidden to be in the Uchiha district either, but, based on the stares the locals gave us just passing by, I don't think we'd have to wait long for trouble being there," Damisan voiced his impressions. Gathering up the courage, he approached a young teen in a flashy zip-up jacket and asked him something further from the other Allied Ninja. The kid turned around and pointed with his arm in a direction right behind and to the left of him, gesturing the directions with his hand.

While they were witnessing this scene, a little brown pup ran up to Asuka and began barking up at the young woman with a playful yap. The tongue of the little fur ball was out and its tail wiggled hard enough to lift the little booger off the ground if it would've spun it rather than flailing it. The moment Asuka looked down with a look of outrage that this furball dared approach her, the pup pressed its body to the ground and began dashing around her feet while barking up a commotion. In the spot right where the dog was at first, there was a visible puddle in the gravel.

"Ugh, this place smells of dogs," Asuka groaned, tapping her sandal with impatience. The little conversation Damisan had with the local boy turned into a lifelong hassle for the blonde.

"It's the district managed by a Zaibatsu partly composed of Inuzuka ninja, the clan that works with dogs, Asuka," Shige-H looked to her teammate unsure what to make of Asuka's observation. "Are you allergic or something?"

"No, I'm discovering right now I just might be a cat person," Asuka replied, pulling out one of the umbrellas crossed behind her back and spreading it like a barrier in front of her, making the little pup hop back and continue inviting the young woman to play with it from a slightly further distance. Asuka's indifference and insistence on hiding behind her paper umbrella made the dog quickly lose interest and scamper back to its partner, who just scratched his spiky hair in confusion about the reaction of the Allied Ninja to his partner's playful side.

"The kid just came out and told me where the head's mansion was. He warned she might not be in the village. There was some trouble with the old Yamanaka district that was outside of the village and, apparently, Kiyomi was very worked up about it," Damisan said after rejoining the group and leaving the boy and his pup to bolt off wherever.

"If we help her with that, maybe she'll be more incentivized to help us rescue Mana?" Asuka raised a question.

"Kiyomi shouldn't need much incentivizing to help Mana, the two were long-time teammates and friends. Based on a remote observation, their relationship had some shaky spots here and there, but even at its worst, Kiyomi wouldn't leave Mana to die," Shige-H replied. "Though if Kiyomi isn't here, we might need to go find Meiko. She's in the VP, so she's got to be working inside of the village."

"Wouldn't hurt to check first. If this place is this open and welcoming, it's not like they'll attack us on sight after nearing the mansion, right?" Damisan shrugged with a hopeful look in his eyes.

"You dare intrude upon the peace and quiet of the mansion of the heads of the Zaibatsu!?" an effeminate-looking man in black leather trousers and a red and silver jacket, wild and spiky brown hair and pronounced canines snarled and struck a flashy pose in the center.

"Prepare to be ripped to shreds…!" another slender in body build yet fierce in canine facial features young man in blue and black trousers and leather jacket struck a highly suggestive feminine pose to the right of the central figure and the band's alleged leader.

"…by the Omega Special Squadron!" a third one, by far the bulkiest and most masculine of the three, wearing a green and black jacket and trousers concluded the taunt by striking a pose more resembling flexing of his biceps than something elegant and more akin to his comrades. A trio of explosive marbles popped behind them, rustling the gray scarves of the trio behind them. The handheld performance bombs spewed out trails of smoke matching their colors while a trio of large dogs rolled out of nowhere like shaggy cannonballs and landed beside their partners. The dogs all had cowls and long scarves, colored after their owner.

"These guys exhibit an entirely different vibe from that boy from before," Shige-H blabbered out while she stood alone, completely unimpressed by the flashy performance these jokers put together. Asuka blew her umbrella out and covered her blushing face, looking embarrassed for the buffoons guarding the ground floor of Kiyomi's mansion more than anything while Damisan completely turned off and tuned out when reality proved to be much unrulier than the deepest and most repressed corners of his imagination.

"We are not intruding. We merely wish to speak to Kiyomi-san about something. We're Allied Ninja…" Shige-H tried explaining before the brown dog in the red cowl shot forward rolling like a dog bullet and forcing Shige-H to extend her hands and infuse them with chakra control to augment her strength. The resulting impact packed a wallop and dug Shige's feet into the wooden tile set while expelling a concussive halo around the room that nearly made the thick wooden support beams buckle.

"Shaking your knees yet, intruder? That's right, we the Omega Special Squadron have been trained in both raising and treating our canine partners and the hidden clan techniques of the Yamanaka clan, making us able to be always in perfect sync with our partners and opening doors to new, unforeseen heights in man-beast tag-team combat!" the goon in the red jacket tapped his temple with his index and middle fingers. "Omemaru, Man-Beast Mind-Switch Combo!"

Answering his master's call, the brown dog in the red cloak howled while the ninja in the red jacket extended his hands in the Yamanaka hijutsu hand seal position. Hurling through the air, Omemaru bounced back and caught the soul that left his master's body in mid-air, taking off with a vicious snarl and a red blur of a dash toward Shige-H.

Asuka slipped out in front of Shige-H and drove the front of her umbrella like a shield, channeling chakra through the conductive paper to make it harder than steel and knocking the charging Omemaru back. With the Man-Beast Mind-Switch Combo being repelled, the soul of the red jacket ninja returned to his body, leaving from the rear of his canine partner.

"The Yamanaka hijutsu are second to very few in terms of usefulness, however, they tend to have an awful weakness. They rely on the user's mind and soul becoming detached from their body and a mind can only be as fast a thought. You're using your mutt as an intermediary, delivering the soul through your dog's bite or scratch at an astoundingly fast rate," Asuka showed to the three that it only took her one glance at a move to surmise its secrets. "I guess it's true, you guys in Konoha really are comparable to the branch of Yamanaka in Kirigakure. Though they have a different, more aristocratic vibe to them, they also share your tendency for quirky fashion choices."

"We're nothing like those Kirigakure runaways! Alphamaru, Art of Heat Disturbance!" the broad-shouldered and hairy Inuzuka in an ill-fitting, tight green leather jacket struck a hand seal pose, catching Asuka off-guard in an instant. With a terrified and outraged expression, shaking, Asuka dropped her umbrella and weaved a hand seal, transforming herself into a wolf-dog with fur as golden as her hair. Alongside the bulldog in the green cowl, both lashed out at Shige-H at once from both sides.

Before either of them could chomp into Shige-H's flesh, Damisan had already bitten into his thumb and drawn a bloody line on his open hand, pointing it out at the Omega Special Squadron. The wing of the entryway hall where the Allied Ninja were sunk in smoke with the dogs having no other option but to continue their attempt at mauling the Allied Ninja leader but instead of soft and juicy human skin, they chomped into choking smoke and empty air.

A pair of bronze mechanical gauntlets attached to thick steel wire extended from Damisan's sleeves and grabbed the two dogs by shutting the metallic fingers around their bodies. With Damisan in control of the steel wires, he spun the dogs around and smacked them into one another, undoing the forced transformation that befell Asuka and causing the two to plant near each other on opposite shoulders.

"Y-You… Absolute buffoon… How dare you… Force me to transform into some… Some dog!" Asuka snarled with wild, bloodshot eyes. Her expression was so veiny and banshee-like that had completely lost her inherited beauty and cool-headed restraint. Without a hint of mercy or regret, she kicked the fallen man-sized bulldog flying into and through the paper entryway wall, shocking both parties and causing a temporary halt in the blood fest.

"Y-You… Kicked him…!" the muscle head in the green jacket pulled at his long and curly locks with a long face brimming with shock and despair. "What a heel! Kicking a literal dog! What is wrong with you!?"

"You shouldn't have compelled me to use Transformation Jutsu then," Asuka crossed her arms defensively and turned away from both the scene of her animal cruelty and the traumatized stare of the green jacket Inuzuka.

"With stakes this high, we've got no choice, Betamaru, Sensory Wolf Fang!" the blue and black member of the Omega Special Squadron turned to his cocker spaniel ninja dog with a hopeful look. With a dull oaf-like look, the ninja dog turned to its master. Because of the lackluster feedback reaction from the dog, it was impossible to say for certain if the passionate connection that the Omega Special Squadron member sought for had been formed, however, the dog bounced straight onto its master's back while the man in blue leaned down to form a horizontal platform for his dog to stand. His hands were woven together and his eyes were closed.

A loud pop went off and a cloud of smoke drowned out the duo. The rather unimpressive cocker spaniel bounced out from the smoke, having increased its size several times and gained more ferocious and berserk qualities, like vicious claws, bloodshot eyes, and sabertooth fangs. The pooch began spinning in mid-air, hilariously flopping its long and goofy ears before tension turned them to chopper blades, and the spinning oaf became a living flaming tunneling projectile homing in on the Allied Ninja.

"There's no use in trying to dodge the Sensory Wolf Fang! By reading your chakra signature and transmitting it to Betamaru, he will follow you to the ends of the Earth without having to pee on you first!" the blue-jacket cheered for his partner with a pump of his fist before the speeding canine bullet surrounded by a combination of air ignited over insane levels of friction and some addition of Fire Release chakra threatened to decimate the entire mansion with its explosive resolution.

"Lightning Release: Flash Bang!" a voice interfered with the affair that was escalating out of control. An all-devouring flash of light engulfed the entryway hall, making everyone cover their eyes and stumble back toward the nearest surface while grunting from the irritation surging through their eyes and vertigo that the overwhelming pressure on their optics brought about. A few of those that couldn't find an available object to grab onto for support flopped on the ground while the green-jacket member of the Omega Special Squadron tipped over a vase to hug the decorative limestone pillar platform it stood on.

"Inuke, Shita, Ashiyo, what is going on here?" the same voice that cast the jutsu that prematurely resolved the clash between the guardians of the Inuzuka-Yamanaka Zaibatsu heads' mansion and the Allied Ninja demanded an answer while observing in embarrassment how a capable Zaibatsu combat unit entrusted with keeping the peace at the mansion where the heads of the Zaibatsu lived fumbled over their feet and couldn't stop tripping up while their animal partners curled up on the ground and panted heavily with their tongues out and their eyes closed, putting their paws over their heads to ease the irritation of seeping light.

"Shiba-san!" the trio howled out in unison before scrambling back to their feet and stiffening their backs and faces. The severe case of vertigo they still struggled against prevented them from any more ostentatious posing. "These Allied Ninja invaded the head of the Inuzuka-Yamanaka Zaibatsu mansion!"

"Is that so?" Shiba turned to the Stars, looking amused because Asuka pulled away the paper umbrella she used to shield herself from getting overwhelmed by the flash of light off her face and drew it back in while Damisan slipped his head out of some junkyard puppet building piece resembling a defunct and rusty fire extinguisher off his head, having done the same. With a grunt, Shige-H pulled out a senbon that she thrust into her ear, which dripped with murky medicine. A desperate means of dealing with flash-induced vertigo she came up with on the fly.

"Obviously not," Asuka scoffed. "Why would the Allied Ninja attack the Zaibatsu in the middle of the day, in the middle of Konoha, out in the open like this? If we wanted your key figures dead, we'd get black market intelligence on any missions you are out on and catch you there by setting something more innocuous up."

"Liar! Trust nothing this golden-haired banshee has to say! She may look like a belle, but she has a rotten heart dripping with corrosive venom!" Ashiyo, the Omega squad mate in green, pointed at Asuka with a furious growl of outrage.

"Those two are hardly mutually exclusive," Asuka turned away and crossed her arms, shutting herself off from the three surprisingly skilled buffoons.

"Ashiyo is right, Shiba-san, this one kicked a dog straight in the face and she's not even remotely looking sorry for her heinous act!" Inuke, the Omega squad mate in red pointed to Asuka with an outraged plea for his boss to see reason and let them continue their brawl.

"We do not approve of people kicking dogs in this district," Shiba turned to the Allied Ninja, visibly refusing to allow their behavior but giving them a chance to explain themselves seeing how they've mostly been dragged into the madness of the Omega Special Squadron which had the capacity of being quite… Extra.

"We did not wake up today intending to kick any dogs, Shiba-san," Shige-H spoke up and stepped out in front of her team, positioning herself in the rightful position as the squad's leader. "It just so merely happened that we are looking for Yamanaka Kiyomi, a head of the Inuzuka-Yamanaka Zaibatsu because we have information that might be useful to her and we expect her help for that information in return."

"I see, in that case, the guardians of our mansion attacked you prematurely. Their behavior is reckless and risks ruining a very important relationship that Konohagakure has forged with the Allied Ninja. Rest assured that they will be reprimanded, however, I advise you that you stop kicking dogs for the rest of your stay in the Zaibatsu's district," Shiba crossed his arms and nodded with a stern look at his watchdogs. Upon being scolded by the strict look, the trio bawled and stiffened up again, lining up like recruits in a strict military formation.

"I will make it my personal mission that no dogs are kicked under my watch, not only in this district but during all our operations," Shige-H bowed respectfully. Given the reverence in which these three oafs held this man, he was someone of high importance around this home and, it just so happened, that this mansion marked the most important home in the district.

"As far as your goal here is concerned, I'm afraid that it is impossible. My wife simply isn't here. She is tending to a sensitive situation at the Yamanaka Resort. That is as much as I can tell you, for the happenings there is a sensitive Zaibatsu matter that not even the village is fully in on the know," Shiba opened his eyes and scanned the Allied Ninja trio. "If there is information you wish to relay to my wife, you may leave it to me. I may not have taken up the information business as my wife did, but I am her equal as a head of the Inuzuka-Yamanaka Zaibatsu."

"I see," Shige-H bowed respectfully before Shiba, realizing that she was in the presence of the host of the mansion. "That is unfortunate. We don't believe that this information would be very relevant to you, Shiba-san. It pertains to something that is more of a personal value to Kiyomi-san. It is also, in a way, information as sensitive to the Allied Ninja as the matters in the Yamanaka Resort are to the Zaibatsu, I'm afraid."

"As you've said, it is unfortunate," Shiba closed his eyes and turned around as if he fully intended to just cut the conversation short and walk out on the guests. "I assume you intend to leave now. Your goal here didn't strike me as something that granted the luxury of experiencing our hospitality."

"Would we be allowed to go to the Yamanaka Resort and offer our help to Kiyomi-san? We do not need to be in on the know of what it is she is working on, we would merely offer our aid with what she commands us to do," Shige-H proposed.

"Hmm… I don't think Kiyomi would approve," Shiba stroked his black beard before walking back out from a second-floor platform and out of the shade, revealing his short, well-built stature and black hair transitioning into mutton chops and a beard and spiking up on two sides in a full and pronounced split by the middle. "That being said, I am not my wife. Any help you can provide to the Zaibatsu would be greatly appreciated by me. I will scold no one who might bring my wife back home safe and sound."

"It is settled then," Shige-H ignited a chakra scalpel on her right hand and sliced her left hand open, before clenching it to squeeze blood out and extending her fist as a sign of an oath. "We will do everything in our power to resolve the situation and bring your wife home safe, Shiba-san."

"While I appreciate the gesture, you really shouldn't have gotten blood on our tiles. I'd have taken you up on your word, Allied Ninja," Shiba sighed.

"So, I assume now we rush straight to the Yamanaka Resort?" Damisan turned to Shige-H, who was a few steps ahead of the rest of her squad. "Unless we want to speak to this Meiko person first."

"I kind of hoped to get Kiyomi onboard before Meiko. Meiko works in Village Protection, so she doesn't get to leave the village walls too often. Someone like Kiyomi could pull a few strings to make that happen, but it's very unlikely we could do it. Not unless we can get the Supreme Leader to sign an official mission request from Konoha. Even then, Konoha might sign up a different ninja for the task and it will take weeks to get this off the ground," Shige-H smacked her head while grumbling in frustration.

"Not to mention, we don't want our loudmouth commander to know someone coughed Mana away from us until after we have successfully recovered her prized asset, right?" Asuka cheeked the squad leader with a sly smirk and a devious squint.

A black blur stopped the Stars on their path as they slowly made their way across the bridge covering two halves of the village, separated by a river. A quintet of shadowy figures appeared in front of them in a lined-up formation before the shadowy doppelgangers all burst into a hectic bunch of lashing, shadowy tendrils, and mashed together. The mass turned into an ink-like layer that washed down a pale-skinned, punk-like young man with a sideway-shaved head.

"Skaven!" Shige-H exclaimed. She had resigned herself to never see the original Star ever again after the secretive Konoha organization swept him back under their wing. Right now, seeing him standing in front of them, it was tough to say if they would even trust him again. The slender punk now donned a short grey zip-up top with an even shorter black jacket with red straps and packed a handful of tanto blades sheathed behind his back.

"You're going the wrong way," he put it bluntly. "The Village Protection office is that way," Skaven pointed to the Hokage Monument.

"So, this is that guy that left a very convenient opening for me?" Asuka pressed her hands on her hips and leaned forward a few degrees to get a better look from different angles. "The one that was a double agent for Konoha?" she grinned sheepishly, as if it was a hidden ace she pulled out without a probable cause, just to see if she could tick Skaven off.

"I was not a double agent for Konoha. I was a double agent for my employers. My task was not to spy on the Stars or the Allied Ninja but to make sure that Nakotsumi Mana stays in one piece. It's now become abundantly clear to my employers that this is impossible for you to assure without my aid," Skaven cast a suspicious glint at the Stars.

"So… How much do you guys know?" Damisan scratched the back of his head, blowing off some influx of air that had built up in his lungs over some difficulties breathing right. Seeing someone you would entrust your life and call a friend any day of the week, but also someone who was secretly working with someone else behind the scenes and had to leave the group so abruptly, only to reappear and scrutinize your work again, would do that to most people.

"We know Mana suffered a horrible injury in the Land of Earth. We know she's gone missing," Skaven began listing before turning and pointing to the Hokage Monument again. "We're not exactly rich with time. Yamanaka Kiyomi's little attempt at retaking the Yamanaka Resort could really use some of our support and we can use that support as leverage for her aid to rescue Mana."

Asuka and Damisan turned to Shige-H. Pocketing her hands, the Stars leader turned around and began heading toward the Village Protection office only for her squad and Skaven, who also had a role to play here to follow. The civilians, who had shortly become stunned and terrified after seeing Skaven's distracting display of dancing shadows, gulped their anxiety down and returned to their day-to-day lives. They've seen plenty of freaky stuff like that, living in the middle of the current world's biggest super-power hidden ninja village, and they'll see some more before the day was done.

"You guys work fast! Mana only got kidnapped yesterday," Damisan observed.

"We have spies in Amegakure. Spies that reported your little encounter with the Chaos Factor faction and that you lost one of your members. The renowned Konoha's Sorceress isn't exactly easy to miss, so her absence was duly noted by pretty much all the Amegakure officers that picked up on her presence in their village," Skaven replied with a blunt tone and a blank expression. "This isn't even the worst set of news. My employers have suspicions about the identity of the mastermind behind her kidnapping. Though getting the complete picture, I must share the intelligence my employers have with what Yamanaka Kiyomi's Intelligence Corps know and make a complete whole that'll clear it all up for us."

"We wanted to recruit Meiko, but we feared she won't be able to join us with her involvement with the Village Protection. Not unless Yamanaka Kiyomi can pull some strings…" Shige-H said.

"That's why I'm here," Skaven replied with indifference. "Nobody pulls strings better than my employers."

"Your employers?" Asuka leaned out of the line to get a peek at Skaven. "Did I hear that right?"

Skaven completely brushed Asuka's teasing off with grave silence and not even a twitch of his eye. The fact that the blonde wanted to see him short of breath after mentioning his employers because of a seal of silence etched onto his tongue that would snuff out his oxygen the moment he said too much and restricts his airflow when he even approaches the topic was not lost on Skaven.

"Oh, come on. The way you become short of breath whenever you say that, it's kind of funny. Say it just one more time, pretty please?" Asuka teased Skaven with a sheepish grin, but Skaven kept on walking.

"I would stay under the radar if I were you," Skaven, at last, mustered up a bitter response. "Daughter of Namikaze Shirona. Your mother isn't mentioned in kind in this village and I'm sure that the Black Ops wouldn't mind capturing you or taking you out. They don't really need a good reason, just the danger your life and potential pose to assume the position your mother once held is enough."

"Oh, I will assume that position…" Asuka turned her nose up and turned away while babbling under her own nose with meek movements of her lips.

The Village Protections office was messy and loud. Officers running around, papers in the air, and reports of chakra signatures entering and leaving the village bounds cluttering up the space and laying an oppressive siege of one's eardrums. VP officers dashed up and down the stairs and raced across the cubicles, some of them rushing to process certain files or deliver them to the right cubicle while others were dispatched to intercept some situation out in the village and hurried to do their jobs.

"Finding Meiko in this bubbling broth is going to be a hassle," Asuka sighed.

"Don't worry, Meiko isn't easy to miss," Damisan tried calming his comrade down, though his own visual inspection came back empty.

"This makes it that much more surprising when you can't see her anywhere," Shige-H sighed, trying to shake off the boisterous atmosphere of the place and the negative effect it was already having on her blood pressure.

"Oh well, we tried," Asuka shrugged. "If those employers of yours are so influential, surely they must have a way to entice Yamanaka Kiyomi to work with us. Besides, I thought Kiyomi and Mana were friends, why would she need enticing in the first place?"

"Because she is currently otherwise occupied with the entire Yamanaka Resort having been taken over by rogue ninja. We need solid proof her troubles are related to Mana's kidnappers and we need as much backup as we can get," Skaven argued, doing his best to restrain his voice even though in the babbling cacophony of the busy office there were almost no chances that he would be heard, let alone understood. "Don't bother looking for Meiko. We'll talk to her employers and have her come to us."

The group made their way through the bustling cubicles, slowly but methodically. On the farthest western wing of the Village Protection offices sat a young woman with a red turtleneck sweater underneath the standard Konoha flak jacket and thick, round, black glasses. Approaching the assistant of the Village Protection chief, Skaven placed a scroll from his pouch on her table but didn't remove the hand from it, showing only the seal on its side to her.

"The chief needs to see this scroll," Skaven spoke quietly and bluntly, but even in the ruckus all around the office, the assistant heard him loud and clear.

The assistant looked hesitant at first, gently petting her tight and neatly done hair bun but then she got a good look at the seal that the gap between Skaven's fingers showed her, which prompted her to jump up and take it off Skaven's hands. As if knowing better, the woman kept it tucked underneath her elbow while shooting straight for the chief's office.

Just a couple of minutes later, a rather tall and broad-shouldered young woman left the chief's office. She wore the standard Konoha flak jacket over a short-sleeved, tight black undershirt with a red circle with the black Konoha insignia mark on the shoulder. She had short blaze-colored hair that run a bit past her chin and, despite a rather impressive musculature, rather soft and feminine facial features.

"Whoa, it's you guys!" Meiko snickered, grinning like a little monkey. "Gee, thanks for pulling my ass out of there! I was getting one heck of a roasting in there until you guys came here with whatever you used to get me out of that office!"

"Out of curiosity, why was the Konohagakure VP chief giving you a hard time? I thought you were supposed to be, well… Good at your job," Asuka inquired, showing off her habit of immediately looking to always get under everyone's bad side.

"Wakizashi Meiko is a distinguished Konohagakure VP officer. Not to mention, she's an excellent, undervalued, and underpaid kunoichi. Her chakra capacity, toughness, and physical strength are all at an A-Rank level. The only reason the village has not officially promoted her yet is that her main ninja arts: ninjutsu, genjutsu, and taijutsu are all at around B-Rank level, even though her kenjutsu, bukijutsu, and shurikenjutsu all surpass A-Rank level. She is likely to achieve promotion to the rank of Jounin for her service in Village Protection before she becomes a Special Jounin like Kiyomi and Mana," Skaven replied.

"Aww, shucks!" Meiko snickered, with a flush of warmth in her cheeks. "You really know how to talk people up. For your information, it wasn't that big of a deal, I just sucked a rogue ninja looking to blow himself up alongside the entire residential district into a micro black hole, that's all."

"That… Actually sounds like a huge deal…" Damisan squinted.

"The village wasn't in any danger, I had a barrier technique erected around it the whole time so nothing except the perp got sucked into it. The collateral damage was minimal, just some general ruckus, and a few toppled trash cans," Meiko waved her hand in dismissal before leaning back on her hands. "They're really giving me a hard time here sometimes. I appreciate you guys pitching in to pull me out. Speaking of which, it's almost my lunch break."

"There's no time," Skaven shook his head. "We need to hurry to the Yamanaka resort. We've wasted enough time as it is."

"Huh? Yamanaka Resort? No can do, sorry, a VP officer mostly works within the village walls, so I'm expected to stay here in case I'm needed," Meiko waved her hand.

"This assignment and the request I've submitted to your chief are the only reason you're out of that office. Unless you want to go back and hear the rest of that scolding, you're going to have to go with us to the Yamanaka Resort and pull your friend Kiyomi out of the fire," Skaven insisted. He had a strange sense of calm around him, almost as if he knew that this was an offer Meiko couldn't refuse.

"Kiyomi? Shit, why didn't you start with that? What's going on out there?" Meiko dropped her hands and grabbed Skaven from both sides before realizing she was just holding two handfuls of air while being sunken in the shade. Meanwhile, Skaven stood behind her and headed for the door that led to the staircase across the Hokage Monument outside of the offices.

"We've got no time for this now. We'll patch you in on our way there," Skaven dismissed Meiko's request before walking out into the howling gale outside. With loud stomps of her padded boots, Meiko rammed the door with her shoulder and nearly walked out with it in her hands.

"That's not a very good start to our working relationship, you guys. Say, weren't you Mana's squad from back in the day? Where is Mana anyway?" Meiko asked again when Skaven vanished with a Body Flicker, followed by the rest of the Stars. This prompted Meiko to do her best to keep up with the hasty squad of Allied Ninja.

"Well, at least someone doesn't know everything," Asuka tilted the corners of her lips up in reaction to Meiko's obliviousness.

Their way to the Yamanaka Resort would be full of all of them having to get Meiko up to speed. Village Protection may have been aware of just about everything that was going on inside of their village walls, but they appear to be quite oblivious as far as anything beyond the walls went. Then again, that was what the village had the Intelligence Division, the Black Ops, and whatever Skaven's employers were for. Those extensive layers of spying and intelligence excellence would easily compensate and then some for the tunnel-vision of the Village Protection.

A man clad in a skin-tight carbon bodysuit with ample of armored steel frame reinforcements and large, nail-shaped metal rods sticking out from its joints paced in a methodical patrol route across the stone-paved road in the Yamanaka Resort. The plentiful surroundings of tall oriental mansions provided lots of shade, which made the enclosed system of fortifications appear gloomier than they were meant to be seen. That is, of course, if the sight of these oddly dressed footmen didn't relay the oppressive militaristic dystopia vibe enough already.

The footman stopped in place and looked down. The red-tinted lens in his goggles tightened their focus before widening the lens to encompass as much space as possible. The soldier of as-of-yet unknown origins leaned down to inspect a blotch on the ground that had perfectly molded with the shadow cast by a nearby mansion. A blotch that looked almost like a shadow, but uncanny enough to warrant further inspection and attract suspicion.

The pool of blackness seemed one with the stone-paved street like only a shadow could have been. Yet there was also a distinct river of corruption touching it. A pathway that connected this expansive mass with some dark alleyway behind a turn of a corner down the historic block of manors and grand establishments. Another soldier noticed the commotion, running down from a different block to accompany the patrol so that he didn't hurry into immediate peril. Even though the masses of faceless troopers were expendable, their failure threatened the entire operation of the enigmatic invaders that quietly took over the entire Yamanaka District from under the Zaibatsu's noses.

A single tendril shot out from the alleyway, punching clean through the soldier's chest and leaving it hanging limp on it. Almost immediately, the shadowy tendril wrangled after the second patrol, wrapping around its neck as it nearly ran out of its range and couldn't impale them. Without as much as a sound, the shadowy tendril reeled both soldiers into the shady alleyway as its shade became a vertical jaw that crunched the two soldiers from both sides before vanishing into the rock that paved the street and the trap that lured the patrols in.

A pair of navy-blue sandals touched the stone floor, creeping up to the deceased pair of soldiers. Skaven was a professional since, despite the highly effective and graphic visual of his combination of the hidden shadow techniques of the Nara clan, all the soldiers' wounds were internal. The punk operative leaned down to inspect his catch, pulling the mask off of the nearest soldier. The sight he saw down under made even the hardened operative of an organization that went an entire layer deeper than even the ANBU squint. Not exactly out of disgust, but because he needed to understand what he was looking at.

The face of a man, or a woman, under the mask had been shaved entirely hairless. There were metallic frames built around the head, almost like an external exoskeleton, with nails pumping in like sewing needles in and out of empty sockets where the exoskeleton frame had openings to spare. It was difficult to say if this was the byproduct of the grisly demise that this footman had met or whatever conditioning turned it into whatever they were in the final stages of their life that made their eyes roll to the sides in every direction. The eyes were also bulging out and bloodshot. The veins littering the pale complexion of the soldier had been colorful and darkened, likely a result of blood experimentation or a surplus of chemical substances at work.

These weren't idealistic freedom fighters or ruthless mercenaries, these were converted, mindless drones. Deprived of personality and individuality. It took a great deal of force for Skaven to rip the mask completely off, that was because the mask got stuck on the exposed brain and the flayed spare flesh stamped by pumping nails to the exoskeleton framework. Skaven's little indulgence in some body horror chills and thrills was cut short by the sounds of rapidly tapping feet.

An entire platoon was running up to the alleyway and the same walls that previously granted Skaven sanctuary from unwanted attention now cornered him. What was worse, there were more thuds on the rooftop level too. With a scowl, Skaven looked up at the evening sky, as if expecting his inevitable discovery and the shitshow that was to follow. And yet, when dozens upon dozens of soldiers peeked down from over the roof and aimed their shuriken dispensers down at the ground and then another party came rushing in from the turn into the alleyway, all they could make out was the dead bodies of their peers. The inspection on the ground made the party miss the washing of two-dimensional shadowy blobs splattered across the wall as Skaven's Shadow Projection Jutsu dissolved.

The shade of the alleyway offered some modicum of cover while the shadowy tendril withdrew from the alleyway and back to its caster, who stood in a convenient hiding spot, surrounded by the Allied Ninja and a Village Protection hotshot.

"Did they see you?" Shige-H asked.

"No. But they will be suspicious. I think…" Skaven blew a chest full of chill air out from his lungs, contemplating what to make of the horror show inside of the resort.

"You think?" Asuka raised an eyebrow.

"We're not dealing with mercenaries or with any other breed of soldier I'm familiar with. These aren't rogue ninja either. They're… Drones of some sort. Drooling, unresponsive, bulged and wild eyes, lacking notable intelligence, everything is included in the package," Skaven explained the best he could.

"Drones? Like puppets or something!?" Meiko pumped her fists in excitement. "I've never fought an army of independent puppets. Who knows what sort of weaponry we'll find after disassembling them?"

"No, not like puppets. They're human. They were, at some point, at least. It's hard to imagine anyone going through this sort of procedure willingly, so I don't think they've signed up for this. When I killed a pair to inspect them, search them for headbands or some sort of ID, it was like I kicked a hornet's nest. They have to be connected somehow and share their experiences," Skaven pointed out.

"Did you see how many there are?" Damisan wondered.

"Probably much more than there were people in this resort. That's rare, invasions and takeovers of settlements and establishments rarely come in military force surpassing the number of civilians they're taking over. Then again, the Yamanaka Resort must have been well-protected. They're armed with high-grade dispensers. Not the handheld ones, the larger stuff. The weaponry is mercenary tech for sure," Skaven replied.

"There was once a case of village weaponry caravans being intercepted by mercenaries. Kiyomi told me the story when she worked with Mana to beat a gang of mercs up," Meiko shrugged. "Maybe Konoha's ninja tool caravans are being skimmed off the top again?"

"Unlikely, a lot of that was because of Lady Fifth's absent-mindedness in keeping up with the paperwork. Lord Seventh has a lifelong career serving the village and managing the VP, there's no way that he wouldn't sniff something like that out. The arms are coming from somewhere else and there's a lot of them," Skaven growled with a miffed look on his face.

"You think another village might be involved?" Shige-H scratched the back of her head.

"Maybe. We'll just need to sort this situation out before we make that call," Skaven shrugged, following it up with an oppressed sigh.

"Any sign of Kiyomi or her peeps?" Meiko nudged toward Skaven with her chin. She looked shaken, not in an anxious way, but in the way that suggested her fists were itching to get into a fight. That could have been a troublesome trait, though Meiko was perhaps the most like the leader of the Team Hokage, Lady Fifth, out of the three members.

"Sadly, no. I don't think I could have missed a personal entourage or someone like Yamanaka Kiyomi. She's either captured or dead," Skaven shook his head, showing no deliberation about speaking either of those possibilities out loud.

"Yeesh! What's wrong with you? Can you not count my friend and old teammate like some headless chicken on its way to the soup bowl?" Meiko winced. "Anyway, we're busting her out of here for sure!"

"If she's been captured, and their intent is truly to transport her somewhere, then a rescue is certainly possible. Though she might not be in any condition to assist us in rescuing Mana," Skaven didn't look too hopeful about their odds, but he was showcasing himself as something of a negative Nancy to this impromptu squad of ninja he's been assigned to work with.

"Any ideas how we're going to find her in there?" Asuka exhaled in frustration. "Sounds like there's an entire enemy army in there and, at the very least, they're formidable enough to have conquered the resort in the first place."

"This resort is exactly what it sounds like–a recreational district with fancy castles and manors used for clan meetings. It's only got a handful of security establishments that host soldiers. Most mansions are unprotectable, those militaristic security towers, however, they're fortified. If these guys are holding Kiyomi hostage, she'll be in one of those towers. We've got neither the luxury of time nor the ability to track her precisely. We'll have to smash and plow through and check every tower one by one," Skaven explained.

"And how did you come to know that? The Yamanaka Resort is secretive enough for Kiyomi to hide this invasion from her village," Shige-H crossed her arms, not looking too excited about the smash-and-grab idea.

"Please, I may be an ex-nuke, but I'm still a Nara. The Nara, the Akimichi, and the Yamanaka are as tight as it gets. They've pretty much have always been a de facto Zaibatsu," Skaven sneered back at the young woman who used to lead his team.

A shadowy tendril stretched across a bridge connecting two manors. A drone turned to the gap over the rail, only to see the tendril rise as a shadowy hand and grab him by the throat, flinging him over the edge. Skaven vaulted over the railing and onto the bridge structure, attracting dozens of soldiers from each side. A vocal battle cry made the gathered soldiers, who thought they had their assailant pinned down from both sides, peek up even though the ceiling and the roof obstructed whatever was coming.

Shige-H smashed through the bridge, smashing the central wing while the left and the right wings collapsed because of a shock at the structure's integrity. The resounding shockwave from Shige's chakra-enhanced punch even made the bridged sides of the manor crumble and flop to one side while the soldiers and a shadowy doppelgänger of Skaven's were caught in the middle of the crash and were in for a messy and tall plummet where they'd end up buried under tons of rubble.

Asuka twirled her umbrella in front of her on the ground level, deflecting streams of shuriken and kunai coming her way from dispensers. With her free hand, Asuka pulled on some steel wire and spun another umbrella into the air. With the umbrella reaching its climax in the air and speeding up to top spinning speed, it set off sprinklers from each of the umbrella segments. With a wave of her hand seal, Asuka turned the sprinkling drizzle into drilling jets of water hurtling down at the formed platoons of soldiers in front of her.

Unraveling his sleeves, Damisan revealed storage seal glyphs tattooed on the back of his forearms. Instead of calling forth a whole puppet, they released merely the two sides of a diamond-shaped shield that Damisan plunged his hands in the back of and connected into a singular protective rhombus. The incoming storm of kunai and shuriken and even a handful of explosive spheres didn't even push Damisan back into a tumble.

Damisan undid the hefty protective measure into a cloud of smoke while the soldier drones continued their fire, racing across the battlefield and dodging the incoming fire, Damisan opened his jacket, revealing sealing tags inside. Rolling and spinning in a mad blitz, Damisan passed the lines and groups of enemy forces front and back, left and right, leaving the soldier drones impaled on claymore-sized nails that one of his broken puppets used. Stopping behind the enemy formation and forcing them to turn around to keep their firing rate steady, Damisan slipped on a mask of a broken puppet that spewed a flurry of needles in all directions.

The drones didn't seem all too rattled by this attack, managing to simply cover their heads up and hunker down to weather the sharp and thin storm of senbon. Only when the shrill noise of steel wire reeling alerted them did they peek their heads out from under cover. The large and wide-mouthed bestial mask that Damisan wore had hundreds of steel wire strands attached to the needles that hooked the enemies with the reeling wire, dragging all of them toward the mask at once. Now that he had them, Damisan tossed the big-mouth mask aside to have the hooked enemies bundle together on top of the fallen mask, all tied up into hectic knots, the mindless drones kicked and thrashed around with extremely thin hopes of ever escaping the knot of steel wire and human limbs.

Wielding her Reactor Gauntlets, Meiko parted her hands, hitting a pair of soldiers with a clothesline that sent them flying into buildings and collapsed entire mansions onto the drones that took cover. Despite being the smallest of her armor configurations, Meiko easily fended off the incoming storm of shuriken and kunai by skillfully deflecting the stream of ninja tools. Slamming her Reactor Gauntlets together, Meiko triggered a quintet of barrels to split off from the sides, forming a sun-like configuration.

"Reactor Scattershot!" Meiko exclaimed, launching a Reactor Shot from each of the barrels. The fireballs hurled toward the soldiers and obliterated entire formations and small platoons and with the effort of the rest of the squad, soon enough the Yamanaka Resort wing was just a smoldering field with noticeable patches of collapsed buildings here and there, and the surviving structures showing signs of wrecking damage.

"Come on, let's head to the tower!" Skaven hurried the rest. With bountiful leaps, those fighting on the ground level stuck to the wall of the fortified security tower that usually hosted the more distinguished Yamanaka clansmen assigned to guard the resort against exactly the sort of fate that befell it. Shige-H punched a hole in the wall, leading the team into a tall opening of round corridors connected by crossing diagonal bridges on various levels of elevation.

The team dashed around different floors, scanning the barred and locked doors for signs of Kiyomi. Some of the storage rooms and offices had been crudely repurposed into makeshift laboratories and holding facilities. Most of them had blood on the walls and traces of something meaty and chunky scattered around, from human teeth to specks of the brain and other organs. None of the holding rooms had anyone left alive to rescue.

"No one's here!" Meiko grumbled with deep-seated irritation. She must have felt the chances of finding Kiyomi alive and well plummeting a good quarter down. As if they weren't low enough as it was.

"Shit, those soldiers… I knew their eyes looked strange…" Skaven ran his hand across his hair, pushing it back with a nervous tick while turning to pace back and forth a dozen of steps.

"Skaven…" Shige-H encouraged him to share his discovery.

"They're blue eyes. Light blue eyes. Exactly like the Yamanaka eyes. They tried to mask their messed-up work by shaving them and dressing them up with full-body suits, but… I'm almost fully certain that those soldiers we were fighting just now were once Yamanaka. As if in members of this very resort," Skaven growled.

Damisan stayed behind the rest of the team. He cut through the bodysuit and mask of one of the beaten soldiers that stayed behind to watch this security tower to get a closer look. The whole configuration that made these soldiers move and the uncanny movement patterns they showed looked suspicious enough to warrant a closer look.

"Entertaining yourself?" Asuka tilted a judgmental eyebrow after creeping up to Damisan and making him jump up.

"No way! This is something I fully expected to see in the Wind Country, something that Fennec's mercenaries would pull. But this is different, this isn't just a body horror show. This isn't just a freaky flayed man banner or whatever they consider a twisted work of art in there. These corpses move and fight. Heck, they might not even be dead when we're fighting them," Damisan stood up and exhaled in frustration. He had to hand it, while there were similarities between the art of puppetry and this sick display, the mechanical know-how to make these brainwashed and de-personified Yamanaka dance to the beat of someone else's drums was worlds above Damisan's abilities.

"Let's move on, we have other towers to check," Skaven hastened the team to regroup and move out toward the south-eastern wing where there was another security tower, exactly like this one. All they could do was hope that that security tower would have something worth saving.

The Allied and Konoha ninja vanished and flickered away, swiftly bouncing off various bridges connecting different floors of the security tower until they ascended to the very top and through the openings out into the upper layer streets of the Yamanaka Resort. The altered and brainwashed Yamanaka troops swarmed across the rooftops like a hive, dashing across the entire Yamanaka Resort and homing in on the location of the invaders.

"The northeastern tower is the closest, let's hurry," Skaven hastened the group, drawing a tanto blade and flickering away to clash with the incoming influx of the brainwashed Yamanaka forces.

Meiko pushed her fingers into the openings on the chest of her armor. Upon sliding deep enough, the fingers flipped some hidden switches that forced the armor to pop off and slam shut like metallic blocks around Meiko's arms while they shifted and transformed into large armored gauntlets with hydraulic pressure pads on the knuckles and serrated steel segments covering Meiko's fingers. Upon slamming her fists together, the armored kunoichi expelled a chirping field of static electricity around her before shooting off toward the incoming forces like greased lightning.

Shige-H's eyes lit up with bright flashes, similar to the radiance of Lightning Release, except it didn't produce any electricity. Instead, the glow around Shige's eyes shot out small square pixels that sizzled and dissolved in hot sparks after momentary exposure to air.

"Plasma Release: Power Sigh Scan!" Shige-H chanted out after weaving her hands together, then, the medical kunoichi reached for her lower eyelids and pulled them down slightly. Concentrated beams of what seemed like a very unstable radiance of lightning that behaved more like a stream of flames burst out from the eyes of the young woman. Shige-H turned her head, turning the beams of focused plasma emitted from her eyes and causing a bleeding scorch to form around the mass of brainwashed Yamanaka soldiers she incinerated.

"Puppetry Art: Supersonic Storm!" Damisan chanted, pulling out a pair of scrolls that disappeared in clouds of dust. When the dust cleared out, two curved sides of thick steel fitted around Damisan's forearms. The puppet master of a broken roster extended his arms and connected the two separate curved pieces to a singular cannon. A strident howl picked up deep inside the barrel-like opening that shot out from the cannon as a horizontal whirlwind and blasted the rushing Yamanaka troops aside, scattering them without killing them.

"You're being awfully careful to incapacitate your opponents. Those troops you pinned down earlier, now you're just rag-dolling these guys around…" Meiko noted, cocking her thunderous armored gauntlets and letting her sealing glyphs soak up on Meiko's chakra while lightning bolts cracked down around the blacksmith, scattering shocked and immobile Yamanaka troops that looked unable to battle.

"Likewise," Damisan noted. "You're focusing on armor and weaponry as opposed to ninjutsu. It seems Mana has a type for her friends."

"I see, so it was Mana that inspired you to try to kill as few as possible," Meiko turned to Damisan with an apish grin.

"Something like that, you too?" Damisan looked a bit taken aback. He had always considered his experiences of discovering the modicum of truth in what Mana begged him to do and coming to his senses to be a highly personal experience.

"Yep!" Meiko nodded enthusiastically. "I guess she's not a total nut job. She's changed at least a few people."

"Yeah," Damisan nodded, cheering up a bit.

"Keep up you two!" Skaven scolded the pair while Asuka twirled around in mid-air, kicking and smacking handfuls of incoming Yamanaka troops by the handful. Shige-H also combined her Plasma Release with her Chakra Enhanced Strength to deliver devastating and explosive impacts at close range. Each punch demolished a brainwashed troop and scattered dozens more in their vicinity, sparing them the crippling and unfortunate fate of the one getting pounded into the dirt.

The north-eastern security tower was much like the south-eastern one. Except instead of empty barred cells and offices with walls, ceilings, and floors coated in blood and human brain matter, there were bubbling test tubes with ready and fully equipped Yamanaka soldiers ready for action. The moment Shige-H busted down the wall and led the squad in, a handful of the test tubes drained down and released the soldiers. When they were released, they flopped face-first down on the floor before the goggles on their helmets lit up with magenta-colored light, at which point they sprung to life and attacked.

Picking up a few kunai dispensers off the fallen troops, Meiko dragged the firing line across the upper floors, dropping a good few dozen of soldiers down on the ground and pinning them down to it when they continued to twitch and do their best to drag themselves into battle despite the grievous condition of their bodies. The squad of Allied and Konoha ninja flickered away, instantly beginning their search for any containment facilities where Kiyomi might have been.

"Well, well… What have we here? Konoha ninja? And what are those insignias? Not something I recognize… What does this "Allied" symbol mean?" an ear-raking though a masculine voice spoke up in stronger volume to reach the bundle of ninja searching the facility on the much lower levels. Though, based on how fast they were advancing, they would have reached the top floors in no time at all.

"I figured there would have to be a ringleader. Someone that's not the brainwashed and more of a brainwasher," Shige-H looked up with flares of light pixels sparking from her eyes, ready to sear a literal hole through the brain of the horrid monster who would inflict such a dire fate upon his fellow man.

"Hmm… This is most unexpected. We did not expect that Yamanaka Kiyomi would drag Konoha into Yamanaka clan affairs. That was not up to the Conductor's assessment of her character," the strange fellow with a long, oval-shaped, pale, and wrinkly face topped by an ear-length bowl cut of graying black hair and seeing the world through engineering goggles observed while stepping forward and closer to the railing. "Not that it matters. The conversion of the Yamanaka clansmen in the resort is complete. I will not tolerate any interruptions."

"Damisan, Meiko, and I will keep his guy busy and talking for now, go find Kiyomi," Skaven turned to Shige-H, requesting her permission to order her teammates around. "We have the best odds at keeping this guy alive long enough to interrogate him after."

With a subtle nod, Shige-H left alongside Asuka to look for Kiyomi in one of the nearby offices. The odds of finding her were slim, though less so than they were in the last tower that appeared to be dedicated entirely to dungeon cells and horror fueled by one's own imagination when one saw the signs sprinkled all around the place. This place had an aura of dignity and genuine scientific progress to it. It should have been a more suitable place to hold a prisoner as esteemed as the head of the Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu.

"You'll have to excuse me if I don't feel like entertaining my guests. The knowledge of Konoha's involvement here is of great importance to the Conductor," the peculiar-looking man with thick and tinted spectacles waved the remaining ninja off. Meiko was about to attack him for turning his back on them and trying to walk away when Skaven extended his hands to the sides. Showing restraint was the right call, after all. Dozens of fully dressed and equipped, brainwashed troops spilled out from the nearby offices on the level of the bridge where the field leader of these mindless drones previously stood.

By now the alliance of the Allied and Konoha ninja has fought these strange enemies enough to have a general understanding of how they preferred to fight and their behavior here was nothing like what they ever showed earlier. These mindless drones threw themselves off the bridge, running with their arms flailing over their heads and actively discarding their weapons and kunai dispensers and stripping their ninja tool pouches and duffel bags where they held their equipment in.

"Human-Puppetry Art: Rocket Dozer!" Damisan chanted out, pulling the sleeve of his robe down and revealing his forearm. The sealing glyphs tattooed throughout the revealed patches of skin lit up with blue light and popped, surrounding the Allied Ninja with smoke. A low-pitched burning sound dispelled the clouds of dust and threw Damisan flying forward as parts that would have normally comprised a puppet's torso now shut around Damisan's arm and formed an improvised scrap gauntlet. The chakra storage seals where the puppetry strings would have gone into the puppet became overloaded with direct contact with the puppeteer's body and shot blue chakra flames that served as a rocket.

Damisan soared through the air, homing into the rushing hordes of seemingly suicidal drones, his improvised gauntlet snapped open as the scrap torso opened itself up, revealing a hollowed-out end in the middle. By shutting the torso, Damisan intended to trap at least one of these poor victims of brainwashing. Meanwhile, Meiko split her arms to the sides, letting her Reactor Gauntlets shut around her forearms while she revealed brewing combustion cores at the palm of each gauntlet.

"Twin Reactor Shot!" Meiko called out, firing a double Reactor Shot, each homing at a separate handful of drones that appeared to be just throwing themselves at the enemy ninja.

"Shadow Sewing Jutsu!" Skaven fell to one knee, sending extensions of his shadow to spread in all directions and turn into sharp tendrils that would penetrate the groups of soldiers that bypassed the measures that each of his comrades took against the enemy at a closer range.

"Guys… Something's wrong, get clear!" Damisan exclaimed when his Rocket Dozer torso shut around a few of the falling soldiers like a bulldozer arm and bundled them together. This proximity made the brainwashed drones emit a static field that turned up the heat in a radius of a couple of meters around them. A vicious rip threw Damisan away when the pair of the brainwashed Yamanaka detonated with only the meek heap of scrap that Damisan used as means of entrapping his opponent, blocking him.

Meiko covered her face up when the handfuls of groups of mindless drones she hit with the Reactor Shots blew up as well, leaving nothing of note behind after the detonation clearer out and causing vicious chained explosions amongst the other jumpers. Skaven grunted in pain and skidded on his shoulder across the bridge, stabbing his tanto to get it stuck in the railing so that he didn't plummet a handful of floors down. It wasn't that Skaven feared the fall that much; it was more that they couldn't afford to let go of the bastard that invaded and took over the Yamanaka Resort and caused all this mess.

"Hmph…" the bowl-cut fellow fixed how his engineering goggles hung over the hump of his nose. "Good luck getting mercenaries to show this kind of devotion. My Psi-Borg program removes all traces of independent thought and resistance. This leaves place only for obedience and conformity!"

As if realizing he was tempting fate by overstaying his welcome, the mastermind behind the Psi-Borg program hurried to vacate the bridge for the office complex on that floor. Meiko, Damisan, and Skaven scrambled together to run in pursuit when a flood of maddened Psi-Borgs spilled out from various doors on that level and rushed to the rails to throw themselves at the trio, ready to blow themselves up just like the previous crew did.

Asuka clicked a trigger on her umbrella, slipping a hidden blade out on top of it and turning it into a makeshift naginata. With a few slices, she reduced the locked steel door to the crumbling quarters of the whole and rushed inside. The sight there made her cover her nose and look away in disgust. She was fully ready to hurl though the life she led gave her a choice of struggling against the basic human instinct by drawing strength from similar experiences she's witnessed before.

One of the Psi-Borgs was shaving another one. The problem was that Psi-Borgs were already shaved spotless-clean upon their conversion. It may have been the case of an erred individual, or it was the case of a blonde with one loose hand holding it firm in a hand seal position, causing a mistaken and entranced Psi-Borg to shave through the flesh of his fellow soldier with the mask being cut open, the flesh flayed and so much pressure applying to the process that the brain of the second Psi-Borg was on full display through the cracks in the skull. Various surgery tools laid scattered around, making it impossible to tell what exactly the mindless drone saw while he was operating on his peer.

"Are you here to brainwash me or to help me, because I can easily make this poor guy see my face on your head next," Kiyomi hissed out a threat at Asuka. Unintimidated, the umbrella-wielding blonde walked up to the two completely dazzled and helpless Psi-Borgs and knocked them out with strong but precise hits. Silver flashes made Kiyomi's eyes widen for just a second before the belts holding parts of her body she hadn't freed yet from the operating table cut loose and the head of the Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu could sit up again.

"This should answer it," Asuka said.

"Thanks, this'll make it faster. Did the mole-looking guy see you?" Kiyomi asked, looking rather grim about the probability of getting a positive answer out of the Namikaze kunoichi.

"He did, is that a problem?" Asuka crossed her arms while Kiyomi sat up and stretched her numb joints.

"It will be. Unless we kill him before he croaks. You're Allied Ninja, right? I'm sorry, the information is classified Konohagakure business, but all I can say is that his master is a very influential man and he can make Konoha a whole load of problems if he knows Konoha is involved in preventing his plans here," Kiyomi explained before rushing out the door of her office without even being done talking yet. Asuka had few options but to follow.

"Great, you've found her!" Shige-H exclaimed, sounding quite excited about it.

"Oh, you're the leader of the squad Mana is in, right? Is she here too? Before you embarrass yourself by being factually incorrect with the whole damsel in distress business, I'll let you know I had perfect and complete control over the situation," Kiyomi extended her hands to explain everything to Shige-H before smacking her forehead and rushing right past her. "Shit, not the time…"

The two confused Allied Ninja kunoichi dashed after Kiyomi, giving each other creeped-out stares as if trying to determine what got their VIP into such a rush. Groups of Psi-Borgs began busting out from the offices from the left side, where the floor had offices as opposed to the railed offside with the bridges to the other side of the tower and staircases leading to different floors. Unbothered by the sudden appearance of enemies, Kiyomi kept running forward all the way until she'd come into contact with them. Then, suddenly, she was no longer there.

It was as if Kiyomi had been behind them the entire time. This didn't bother the Psi-Borgs at all, though it bothered the Allied Ninja, who now had to deal with a whole bundled group of Psi-Borgs before catching up to their VIP in this tower. Meanwhile, Kiyomi just dashed off on her merry way, waving her hand over her head.

"Take care of these guys, I'm leaving them to you!" she yelled out. "If I don't silence that mole guy, everything will go tits up for everybody!"

A deafening blast on a lower level that made the whole bridge of that floor collapse into a downpour of metallic parts and hefty cement chunks made the two Allied kunoichi lean to the railings to check the well-being of their comrades while the Psi-Borgs rushed them still. They noted a wild squad of straight-up suicidal Psi-Borgs that flung themselves into free-fall from the upper floors and detonated after a short while, shaking the very foundations of the tower and threatening to injure or maim one of their comrades.

Asuka opened her umbrella, blocking off the path of the incoming Psi-Borg rush while Shige-H channeled her chakra into the soles of her feet and shot forward with a dropkick that gathered all of their bundled enemies together alongside one of Asuka's umbrellas and threw them all aside like bowling pins. The pair then resumed their dash chasing after Kiyomi, even if their recent experiences suggested that just because they had a visual on her didn't mean they actually saw things as they were.

Minds had the tendency to play tricks on one that's near the Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu head and whom the blonde sought to fool at the time.

"Damn it all, where is she?" Asuka grumbled upon seeing all the floors spilling over with Psi-Borgs with the suicidal ones equipped with pouches full of explosive sealing tags shuffling into the fray of the ones that were merely meant to serve as ordinary foot soldiers.

"That runt must be in control over all those brainwashed troops. It's as if he's called all of them over here to this tower the moment he felt the pressure mounting up!" Shige-H grumbled, engaging in a hectic fight with a swarm of faceless troopers before collapsing floor sent both her and Asuka tumbling down into the dark. Explosions littered the place left and right, making it near impossible to understand what was going on, who was alive and who was dead with the Psi-Borgs ceasing to target anyone specifically and just beginning to cause general devastating chaos with their detonations and kunai dispenser firing lines.

The goggle-wearing man dashed through a long corridor that led straight to his office. The flooding waves of Psi-Borgs parted into two sides, leaving the entire center of the corridor for the fleeing rogue while they sought to add their input in inconveniencing the squad of ninja struggling against the full might of the brainwashed Psi-Borg army. The mysterious man in control of the Psi-Borgs slammed his shoulder at the door, shoving it open before forcing it to shut and pressing his back to it, panting profusely.

It took him a short while of emboldening before he pushed his back off the door and rushed to the table. The man opened up a hallowed-out stone globe and removed a scroll from inside of it, unraveling it over the documents and blueprints on his table. Focused, the man slipped his engineering goggles up over his forehead and weaved a couple of hand seals.

"Remote Viewing Jutsu!" he chanted out, activating a sealing glyph in the center of the scroll which cast glittering white powder pixels out into the air that rotated in the form of a galaxy while the exorbitant amount of light produced by the sealing technique in the scroll centered on it, casting up in a reverse-cone shape, like the beam of an upward flashlight.

An image of a man in a long leather coat appeared from within the tunneling beam of light. The transmission was vague about details and flickering, almost as if the man seemed not as he was but as the caster remembered them deep in the confines of their mind. The crude appearance of the man's head, defined by ample wrinkles, would've suggested his head to be nothing more than a mass of brain matter, though it was impossible to tell because of the lack of a precise, detailed view from the technique.

"What is it?" a staticky voice came from the other end. "You've promised me that your Psi-Borgs could conquer a country. Don't tell me they failed to wipe out a facility of a single clan."

"They didn't fail, Conductor. They performed admirably! Not to mention, I'm converting the bodies of the captives and the dead that were deceased recently enough into new Psi-Borgs! As I've promised, the Psi-Borgs don't just replenish themselves after each battle, their ranks grow! Forget a country, in time, you can use them to conquer the whole wo…" the passionate wrinkly, and gaunt man gestured before stiffening up. In a snap, the man's look became dull and his jaw began hanging loosely and he began staggering to the sides, almost as if he wasn't sure which side to flop.

"Yamanaka Kiyomi…" the man on the other side stated with a certain degree of spite in his hateful voice.

Kiyomi approached the scroll carefully, witnessing the scroll's connection wavering as the user of the Remote Viewing Jutsu became utterly paralyzed and experienced difficulties maintaining their technique. With a snap of her fingers, Kiyomi dispelled the mental knife constructs she flung into the back of the man that led these Psi-Borgs against the Yamanaka Resort and saw him flop unceremoniously on his face.

"Yamanaka Tenma," Kiyomi answered, a bit taken aback at first that Tenma's impressive mental prowess and chakra capacity seemed to take over the Remote Viewing Jutsu and sustain it from the other end. The only way that could have been possible would be if Tenma took over the body and mind of the one using the jutsu. Just in case he sought to surprise Kiyomi by commanding the paralyzed body to lash out at her with the power of his mind alone, the Zaibatsu head kept a careful eye on the paralyzed body.

"You know who I am, that's bothersome. Facing me was your first mistake, being a loose end to me would prove to be your last…" Yamanaka Tenma thundered with a staticky voice from the other side of the line, in an undisclosed location that could have been anywhere in the world.

"Oh, stop teasing you," Kiyomi grabbed the fallen associate of Tenma's by the neck and tilted his limp body to show it to Tenma through the remote viewing line. "You need focus to puppeteer me into killing myself. If you take over me, you'd have to let go of this useless waste of space. The problem is–he's the user of the Remote Viewing Jutsu, meaning that you'd lose your focus with the jutsu going down."

"You seem invested in keeping me on the line. What business do you have with me?" the mysterious rogue ninja known to most only as the Conductor asked.

"Oh, you know… You were our problem long before today, but masterminding the invasion of the Yamanaka Resort, that pretty much makes you No. 1 on my shitlist. I'm coming for you and I can both amplify and prolong your pain," Kiyomi leaned as close to the beam of light, enlightening her hated enemy as it was possible without disturbing the communications transmission technique.

"I don't think you will," Yamanaka Tenma replied, crossing his freakishly long and thin arms in front of his chest. "I am fully aware who tipped you off to my plans here. You and I both know the ramifications of me having proof of that, don't we? It's why you rushed to silence this deluded dolt. It's unwise to play games with me, go back to your village and your family, and pretend to be a beacon of the information highway of the kiddy pool as you've done so far and leave the dangerous games to the adults. You just can't handle the stakes of the games we play."

"That only makes the fact that I know your peers wouldn't like it very much to find out what you've been up to here that much more dangerous, right? I mean, I might not know who they are or what group exactly you work with but… I've heard you're kind of everywhere, so if I keep talking loud enough, the lapdogs of one of you are bound to hear it. What do you think the stakes of that would be? I've heard that you guys like to stay hush-hush and behind the scenes. I don't think employing your boy toys to openly attack a clan facility qualifies," Kiyomi teased Yamanaka Tenma with a wink.

"These are dangerous times," the Conductor said with a tone full of dark foreboding. "Wars break out for the pettiest of reasons. Countries and villages once considered great end up just a pile of rubble with salted fields and an air full of cinders at the end of the chapter. I wish you don't have to wake up and find yourself living in that reality. You might see Konohagakure as the beacon of power, but power invites challenge, and the ultimate power invites an unmatchable challenge."

"Ugh… I hate espionage. Everyone keeps talking in riddles all the time," Kiyomi shook her head, venting her frustrations.

"I'll speak plainly then. Shishiki is a small-time, misguided sewage rat, believing his technological means to be a superior method of mind control. He never admitted it to me openly, but he believed his Psi-Borgs to be superior even to the power of my mind. He is beneath someone like you browsing his mind and he knows little of worth or danger to me. I have something that'll be interesting to you in a facility that's in the forest right in the middle between the Rengoku Correctional Facility, the Black River, and the Amegakure border. Come there and you'll have your chance at your shot at me and a neat little surprise on top," Yamanaka Tenma said bluntly before something abruptly flashed bright red in the upper right corner of his oval-shaped head. Almost immediately, Shishiki's head snapped backward, finishing him and ending the transmission.

Even when he was wearing the mask of a blunt man issuing a challenge, Yamanaka Tenma acted like a spy. He didn't issue any follow-up conditions, like telling Kiyomi to come to his facility alone. Likely, he fully expected Kiyomi to bring several platoons of the Zaibatsu forces on a full-force crackdown, but he knew better than to have Kiyomi speak a word of this to the Hokage and request official village support. He knew the behind-the-schemes plots that Kiyomi was a part of and that it tied Kiyomi's hands behind her back. Not to mention the little dangling carrot right in front of her. What did he mean by "something interesting" exactly?

It was then that Kiyomi recalled the fact that the Allied Ninja, that one Nara clansman that looked awfully similar to those ninja that contacted her about Yamanaka Tenma's plan to invade the Yamanaka Resort with military force, and Meiko, for whatever reason, were in danger of being overwhelmed and killed by those Psi-Borgs. She turned around and dashed across the familiar security tower corridors until she reached the bridge and looked down. Everywhere around her there were only disabled and limp bodies of those poor, mangled Yamanaka Psi-Borg "converts".

The death of that rat Shishiki must have undone their brainwashing. Knowing how trusting of his technological prowess Shishiki was and how he intended to become a one-step greater mind controller than even Yamanaka Tenma, Kiyomi suspected a chip in his brain that would have rendered all of his precious Psi-Borgs useless if Tenma ever were to betray his dog and kill him. The misguided buffoon must have truly thought that this would dissuade his master from getting rid of him after he served his purpose. Unfortunately for him, he didn't have the informational background that Kiyomi had on his own master, which suggested that Yamanaka Tenma didn't trust people he couldn't silence forever or brainwash.

"You ungrateful bitch!" Asuka screamed from the bottom of her lungs, pointing up at Kiyomi from the bottom floor of the tower. Had it not been for the immense frustration guiding her voice to previously unseen amplitudes, Kiyomi wouldn't have even heard the blonde speak. "We came here to rescue your sorry ass, and you just left us to die!"

Kiyomi took off with a bountiful and elegant leap off the bridge, vaulting over her front before landing on a bridge one floor lower, repeating this routine a couple of dozens of times before landing before the Allied Ninja, Meiko, and Skaven. Shige-H barely bothered to register Kiyomi's appearance as she was busy healing torn-out muscle and grievous wounds of different calibers that demanded her full attention.

"I figured Mana wouldn't let anyone die. Speaking of which, where is she?" Kiyomi looked around.

"It's part of the reason we're here," Damisan sighed before throwing away handfuls of unsalvageable scrap of puppetry parts he used to augment himself in battle. Parts of puppets just weren't as durable when wielded separately, it seemed. Then again, all those shields and layers of armor may have saved Damisan's hide, given how explosive that last bout was. "She's been kidnapped, and we figure that you might have some intel about it. Given your background in the Intelligence Corps and having successfully replaced it with the Zaibatsu's efficiency in gathering and managing intelligence."

"Mana? I thought she was working with you this whole time," Kiyomi placed her hands on her hips. "How do you lose someone like that? She's nothing if not slippery and it's not like she dresses to stay hidden. I believe the exact opposite is the case."

"So, what you're saying is that this entire business in this resort has been one massive waste of time?" Asuka mirrored Kiyomi's stance and turned to Shige-H, casting the stones of the blame on the squad leader.

"It's not a waste of time. I swore a blood oath to Shiba, remember?" Shige-H turned back at her teammate. "Besides, we did good work here, even if it will not be reflected on our records because none of this is official."

"That's the only work I have use for!" Asuka flipped her hands up over her head.

"Wait, you went to my manor and spoke with my husband?" Kiyomi stepped up to Shige-H.

"We were looking for you, hoping you might know something. You're possibly the best-informed person around the village and the rogues we're looking for are operating in the Amegakure area so it's relatively close to the Land of Fire," Shige-H shrugged, sitting back after having completed her duties as a medical ninja and having found herself too beat to stand up on her feet. "Your husband let us know you might be around these parts and I promised him I'd make sure you were safe just because of the minor inconvenience we caused and because I wanted there to be no ill will between the Allied Ninja and Konoha. Given how we're not here on official business."

"With a blood oath… Wait, did you say Amegakure?" Kiyomi snapped her fingers, pointing at Shige-H. Without even hearing a confirmation back, the blonde turned around and stepped away from the group. "What are the odds? Tenma's hidden facility is in Amegakure too. He's probably informed well enough to know about the background of the Team Hokage… Shit, that means that the thing I'm going to find interesting might be Mana."

"That was cold of you, leaving us here to fend those guys off all by ourselves. That got sticky, you know. If this Allied Ninja medic lady wasn't here, I could've gotten sidelined!" Meiko voiced her complaints at Kiyomi, referencing the close friendship they used to have that's gotten stretched thin lately because of very different lines of work both of the two young women ended up doing for their village. "You better not even dream of crossing yourself out from helping Mana!"

"No, it appears that our interests have actually aligned. This is just perfect. Tenma knows nothing about you because I silenced that mole-man before he could say anything. That was what the risk of your lives was worth. Now we've got a shot at one of the most wanted rogue ninja in the world's history," Kiyomi turned to the Allied Ninja, changing her tune and the entirety of her body language.

"Now she's playing along," Asuka rolled her eyes. "I say it's too late. We cut her loose and send her home to her husband and dork servants."

"What happened in that office, Kiyomi," Skaven sprung back to life despite having taken quite a licking in the explosive brawl with the Psi-Borgs. Shige-H had already addressed the immediate injuries that threatened his well-being, leaving only the scrapes and bruises. Also, the stomps on his ego that wouldn't let him forget how close his life was to end in some security tower facing off against zombified, cybernetically enhanced drones. "You spoke with the Conductor, didn't you?"

"The Conductor?" Meiko couldn't stop switching her glares from one to the other. "Who's the Conductor?"

"We've got a long road to the outskirts of Amegakure ahead of us and not very much time," Kiyomi replied. "If you have any food pills or personal medical supplies, you better use them now so we can leave as soon as possible. It just so happens that I might have a clue where Mana is after all."

"It's so weird she's the one to get nabbed," Meiko grumbled with a pouty face. "She's by far the toughest person I know to keep bound and gagged."

"Yamanaka Tenma has always been a sort of boogeyman amongst the Yamanaka folks. On one hand, he's pushed the hidden techniques of our clan by far the farthest, on the other, he didn't quite let human decency impede his advancements. He's surgically altered his body, upgraded himself through cybernetic implants, and implanted chakra signal emitters deep into his brain. His ability to control people's minds transcends anything that any other ninja in the world can even imagine. He controls other people's minds and thoughts like they were extensions of his own body. It's because of how untrustworthy such mental prowess makes someone that he's been exiled from the clan and he's made us his enemy ever since," Kiyomi explained while the Allied Ninja and the Konoha ninja dashed across the treetops, racing toward the location of the Conductor's hidden base.

"In the criminal underworld, he goes by an alias of the Conductor. He's got an assortment of highly influential friends who are so dangerous that they even have my employers at a stalemate. Meanwhile, my employers are not the type of people who enjoy being held by the balls. They desperately search for any filthy underwear in Yamanaka Tenma's drawer or those of his associates. Their identities are so dangerous that neither I nor any other agent knows them unless it is strictly necessary for an assignment. The wrong person knowing the identity of any of them could put the entirety of Konohagakure in jeopardy because of the military power that those men and women possess and their political influence," Skaven added from his drawer.

"That was why I was all ears when one of the agents working for, whatever Skaven's employers are called, approached me with a hot tip that Yamanaka Tenma was going to send a lackey of his test some military technology on the Yamanaka Resort. Also, why I couldn't rely on the village's support in repelling the invasion–if Yamanaka Tenma knew that Konoha and not just the Yamanaka clan was involved in directly getting in his way–he'd sic his friends on us and Konoha wouldn't have a stone on top of a stone by morning. Wiping out the top military power off the map is a big move, so they need their excuse, Konoha getting in their way is that excuse," Kiyomi said.

"Dealing with Yamanaka Tenma and his associates have taught our agents some ground rules of how their circle operates. They prefer to stay in the underworld, so they don't make big moves unless it is for a very good reason that their leaders approve of. Also, they would flat out blacklist Yamanaka Tenma if they found out he attacked the Yamanaka Resort without a common agreement, which he'd never get, because his reasons are so personal," Skaven corroborated what Kiyomi might have left out or not have been aware of. Both of the two were aware of a whole lot, but neither seemed to know the full picture of what they were dealing with, which was always a big danger.

"One thing I can't really connect to this entire kerfuffle is how and why would Yamanaka Tenma kidnap Mana. As Meiko implied, Mana is near impossible to keep detained, and only prisons and binds that have held her in one place were the ones she wanted to be in. Even with Tenma's abilities, Mana's got mental conditioning from the Intelligence Corps, so her mind is difficult to tamper with too. Not to mention, I can hardly imagine how even Tenma could have put together an opportunity…" Kiyomi's face turned grim while she picked up the distance she covered with a single dash each time, making the rest of the group speed up too.

"He leads a group called the Chaos Factor," Shige-H felt a tad relieved to be useful to this alliance where she was feeling like she was just a client with little to nothing of note to contribute. Hearing Skaven and Kiyomi explain so much about this enigmatic Conductor felt overwhelming, even though this was ultimately why they contacted Konoha in the first place. "They are related to a mission we were on. They're an opposing force and we know little about them other than we are to treat them as an enemy. The Chaos Factor set up an ambush and attacked us in the middle of Amegakure. It was a quick hit, grab, and run. I've seen nothing like those guys. It was like they were all living statues."

"Nothing surprising there," Kiyomi slowed down her blinking for one extended moment of frustration. "Displacing a person's mind into different objects is an advanced Yamanaka hijutsu. Given how it's treated as an advanced technique by the ordinary Yamanaka, it's foundational child's play for Tenma. He can probably cast the jutsu without the focus of speaking its name."

"Are you sure rushing to meet this Yamanaka Tenma head-on is smart?" Shige-H took a moment of Kiyomi's attention, earning herself a glance backward from the Zaibatsu head. "From how you've described him, it seems like confronting him is nigh impossible. How do you fight someone able to control people's minds at a whim, with no weaknesses of ordinary Yamanaka hidden techniques, someone who's more on the mental plane than occupying the physical reality and can misplace people's minds into objects with a blink of their eye?"

"I'm no slouch either," Kiyomi smirked. "I won't foster false illusions of being anywhere near Tenma's level, that's why he spent decades on experimental surgeries and mechanical augmentation of his body. But Yamanaka Tenma was wary of attacking the Yamanaka head-on before, I think part of it is because of my uncle and his abilities. Just like Tenma, my uncle and I have taken the Yamanaka hijutsu on whole different worlds. I should be able to inconvenience him enough to cover for us."

"Think of it this way," Skaven added. "Yamanaka Kiyomi has an ability to forge mental constructs that exist on the mental plane, meaning that if she forges a mental clone of herself or an invisible bubble around her, she could block Tenma's abilities. If you think of Tenma's mind control as a focused beam, any construct Kiyomi would put together would serve as a shield and block it. It's hardly a foolproof defense, Tenma is simply vastly more powerful than any other Yamanaka alive. But it's enough for a good shot at him."

While discussions and battle planning were plentiful initially, they had to dim down, eventually. Neither of the ninja allowed themselves the luxury of accelerating to instantaneous movement speed and simply blink to their desired location. No one could have known what traps Yamanaka Tenma, someone called the Conductor, because of their shrewd mind for underworld dealings and strategy, could have put in place for someone he wanted out of his way and someone he invited to his secret facility. Or what brainwashed or simply loyal subjects could have been lurking and waiting for a chance to ambush any incoming parties of ninja.

"Hey, I don't remember you from back when. I think the last time I saw you was when you guys got arrested for landing on top of the Hokage Mountain on a dragon. You seem to remember me though…" Meiko approached Damisan from the side, asking for an explanation of his behavior.

"We've met. I was the weird creep with mechanical limbs, a cape, and a cylinder with human pictures stuck on them," Damisan explained. "Moon people put me back together from disintegration and they put me back together in my original body before Fennec's goons maimed and disfigured me."

"Oh, Damisan, right?" Meiko pointed at the melancholic puppeteer with a sheepish grin. "I used to be awful with names of both people and places. It took me a bunch of screw-ups working at Village Protection before I got over that. I'm pretty sure I got that right."

"Yeah, you did," Damisan replied while still looking on ahead.

"I saw you arming yourself with puppetry weapons and body parts. Is there some trouble with your puppets?" Meiko wondered. "A puppeteer of your rank should know that incomplete puppetry parts grade several ranks lower in terms of use compared to the full set. A puppet hits way harder than a puppeteer wearing the puppet's arm like a glove. If you need help with your roster, I can help. I'm a blacksmith and a pretty darn good mechanic, and it sounds like we're headed to a pretty mean fight."

"No, I want it like this," Damisan shook his head. "Immediately after my body got fixed, I felt like I was no longer lost and broken. I rushed off straight back to the desert, to kill Fennec and his commanders, to slaughter his platoons for what his men did to me, and to the various settlements in the Land of Wind. Mana thought it was a waste of the opportunity to start fresh that fate has given me. She saw things as they truly were, she told me I was going backward and that I'm bound to drown in that same bloodshed again. She was right…"

"She's crazy, but sometimes she is right," Meiko stretched her lips out with a stiffened lower jaw and blew her cheeks out. "The problem is that sometimes everyone knows the right thing when they see it, but they also know that it'll cost too much to reach for that thing. Mana doesn't see things that way. She'll go for the moral high ground even if she has to crawl through a lake of fire to get there. She just… Keeps getting burnt by it and, as her best friend, it hurts to see it."

"Ever since the first day of moving back into the Land of Wind, I've encountered so much bloodshed. I kill a man of Fennec's, but I see a settlement burn or collapse into fear and submission to tyranny in the process. War is a bloody business and every step forward on the frontline is paved in the dead bodies of good people. Some people, like Endo, would butcher their way through to the end, saying that the ends more than justify the means. I, meanwhile, I realized I cannot do this. Some of my puppets were broken already, the rest I dismantled after coming back to the Allied Ninja. I have a handful of the good old ones, but I use them for sparring, mostly. One day, I'll hone my body to be as tough as the puppets I command," Damisan answered, looking forward to the shady leafage of the thick Land of Fire forests.

"Why? When you resolve to never take another life, you must work on your skills more, not less. Fighting without the option of killing your opponent, or going to war with a person while worrying about their well-being at the same time, will always be a handicap. You need to play to your strengths to cover that gap," Meiko shook her head in bewilderment.

"My puppets… They're… I've never told them to anyone, but when I look at them, I see nothing other than a tool of death. A machine of war. It's not too much different from a sword, at first glance. But it couldn't be more different. When you swing a sword–you make a statement, you make an oath, sacrificing a part of yourself to deal death to another man. Commanding a puppet is so… Distant, and impersonal. Inhuman even. When I fight, I want to be responsible. I want to see the results of my actions and if I end up taking a life, I want it to haunt me for the rest of my life," Damisan spoke with a wistful stare of longing. A blank stare peering far away into the distance.

"Damn," Meiko winced. "I don't even know what to say to that."

"When I outfitted Mana with the prosthetic leg, seeing her excitement of feeling whole again. That's what my skills should be all about. That's why I want to put them to good use. Giving people opportunities and enabling them, rather than taking opportunities away and hurting them," Damisan muttered, turning away from Meiko as he delved deep into the precious chest hidden away in a treasured underground cave of his memories.

"Wait, you gave Mana what!?" Meiko freaked out loud enough to scare away the surrounding birds.

The task force composed of Allied and Konoha ninja grouped up in a circular formation around a forest clearing that hosted a lake just barely large enough to see the other side on. The lake led to a plain of rocky wastelands full of clay–the outskirts of Amegakure. To save time, some of the task force members occasionally glanced at Kiyomi, since she was the one who received the directions from the Conductor.

"This lake should be the place," Kiyomi sealed her call in stone. "This entire patch of land is the exact spot, but there are no buildings or bunkers around here. Hiding your hidden facility inside of a lake just makes sense. It's difficult to get to it, even if you know where it is."

"Okay, then what now?" Meiko pouted. Kiyomi took off from the layer of leafage and landed in front of the soggy grasslands where the forest grounds melded with the lake.

A rumbling quake of something hefty shifting from underwater hit the lake's surface. Rampant ripples spread across and turbulent whirlpools formed in several places in the front and back of the lake. Just as Kiyomi began thinking she fell for some trap and everything might just get blown up and go up in smoke in a second, the lake's surface split apart, washing a massive amount of water down into some strange, dark cellar down below.

"It seems he's inviting us in," Asuka observed after the rest of the task force positioned themselves around Kiyomi, preparing to support her if needed. She was the only member of their squad capable of preventing a complete wipeout of their entire squad when facing Tenma, as she was the only one of them with mental abilities, even if they were a far cry from Tenma's.

"If he senses your presence, he must sense ours too. The fact he's opening the door of his facility for us and pretending to be a good host should hit all the red flags. This is a trap, Kiyomi," Shige-H warned the Yamanaka, as well as the rest of the task force.

"We always knew it would be. I'm sure he counted on me inviting as many of the Zaibatsu ninja here to accompany me as I could muster up. Strange, I'd have thought he would get angry if I didn't bring him more Yamanaka to destroy, but he seems to act like it's business as usual," Kiyomi squinted her glare. Just a blink later, all the task force flickered away and dashed into the massive opening, jumping on and off to the walls while crisscrossing their way down to the ground floor that had been completely sunken in shade.

The moment that the task force entered the Conductor's hidden facility, the roof closed down over their heads to prevent all the lake from flowing into the entryway into the belly of the beast. It was incredibly dark down there until Meiko licked and stuck a note with a sealing glyph onto an ordinary flash bomb and rolled it down on the floor. Unlike ordinary flash bombs, this one didn't pop with a blinding flash of light but spread its radiance at a much-restrained level over an extended period. Where setting off an ordinary flash bomb was to pop a balloon, Meiko's improvised use of the tool was more like sticking a hole in the side with a needle and letting the air slurp out slowly.

This gave the task force a modicum of vision of their surroundings. While the entryway they were in was empty, once they followed the trail of heavy stone platforms sliding aside and out of their way like gateways and trekked through the corridors, they encountered leagues of disturbing sights like androgynous humanoids dressed in leather straps and wearing faceless leather masks, mankurt-like drones stuck to walls by long networks of rubber tubes or floating inside of test tubes in suspended animation. It was as if the Conductor was guiding them to his desired meeting spot by activating the signal lights where he wanted them to turn.

"He's being awfully nice to not sic these legions of brainwashed people on us," Damisan observed. He had never imagined that there could have been bigger monsters out there than Fennec, but Tenma made a decent claim to that title, given everything that the Allied Ninja saw that day.

"He's anything but," Kiyomi gritted her teeth. "He doesn't want to waste the time and effort that went on enslaving these people and modifying them to be more receptive mind slaves to him and more efficient soldiers. He must realize that even if their combined mass could overpower us eventually, we'd plow through more of them than we're worth in his mind."

"These look different from those half-mechanical soldiers from the resort," Meiko observed. "They're still horrific in their own way, but… I wonder if they're more dangerous, or less. We barely survived an onslaught of those other ones."

"It's difficult to say," Skaven sighed. "These appear to be ordinary men and women with extensive surgical procedures performed on them. The soldiers we faced in the Yamanaka Resort appeared more like mechanical soldiers with traces of humans they once were. These are two entirely different approaches to brainwashing."

"Welcome, Yamanaka Kiyomi. I'm glad you've taken up my invitation," a thunderous mental signal made those unaccustomed to telepathic communication grab their heads and grunt in pain. Being so close to the unbelievably powerful mental signal communicating telepathically felt overwhelming, almost as if this man could erase all traces of all that persisted in one's mind and memory with a word. What was more horrifying was that hearing this roaring speech in one's head could've driven one mad enough to abandon all those things willingly, just for the serenity of never hearing a word of that voice again.

Before the Stars and the Konoha ninja, in a large, illuminated hall at the end of the corridor they've treaded through, stood a dome-shaped turret with a cylindrical tower almost eleven meters in size. At the very top of the dome configuration, there was a handful of trapeze-shaped slabs sliding up and down. Something felt so awry seeing this looming before you.

"It's Tenma's voice, no doubt," Kiyomi grumbled, putting up a valiant defensive stand against the overwhelming telepathic rumbling. "But this isn't the man I saw on the other end of the Remote Viewing Jutsu signal."

"As you must have feared in the deepest corners of your mind, this is indeed a trap," the Conductor's mental signal relay station turret standing before the task force rumbled with painful and deafening telepathic thunder. "I have too many and too pressing matters to attend to stand before you myself. That being said, I wasn't entirely deceitful. This psychic energy transmission station before you is quite important to me because it allows me to operate at limited capacity from far, far away. While my true body can be just about anywhere in the world, through these stations, I can be anywhere and everywhere at once. Also…"

The central section of the cylindrical tower opened up by having two stone slabs slide aside and reveal a one-legged body of a dark-haired young woman floating in suspended animation in a test tube. Damisan, Shige-H, and Meiko gasped and grunted in outrage, Asuka, Skaven, and Kiyomi displayed a much more restrained reaction to seeing Mana's body demonstrated like a bargaining chip.

"I wasn't making that leverage thing up, either. This is the body of Konoha's Sorceress, Nakotsumi Mana. The intelligence I have suggests that you two used to be teammates back in the day and, based on what I read from the memories of this young lady, she seemed to look up to you like an admirable upperclassman. It would be such a shame if you ended up letting her down, wouldn't it?" Tenma taunted the ninja grouped up in front of the stone and metal station, transmitting extraordinary mental energy that caused visible ripples in the surrounding air.

"What do you want with Mana? You wouldn't have kidnapped her just to mess with me. There are people more relevant to my life right now," Kiyomi asked. Given how Tenma would have had no reason to think that any of them would leave this facility alive or with their minds intact, he should have answered them truthfully.

"I am using her mind for a little errand. When speaking in public from a stage, she sounds like such a self-righteous fop, and yet she's doing exactly what I ask her to with no need for brainwashing just to go back to her precious human body," the Conductor explained.

"You misplaced her mind!?" Kiyomi growled in simmering wrath.

"That's right. Even if you manage to somehow wreck this station without damaging this body or its life support systems, it's just an empty shell. Her mind is in the Land of Wind, working for me now," the Conductor thundered telepathically.

"Can you place Mana's mind back in her body if we retrieve them both?" Meiko turned to Kiyomi.

"Sure, just about any Yamanaka worth their salt should be able to," Kiyomi shrugged.

"Misplacing minds… That's exactly what you did to those Chaos Factor statues, didn't you? You've put someone else's minds inside of those statues and had them set a trap for us by acting like background decorations in Amegakure," Damisan put it all together.

"If it would be of any use to you, I can demonstrate…" the Conductor thundered on with a maliciously lingering end to that last thought. Suddenly, the air ripples around them became more intense than ever before. It was as if the very fabric of visible reality around them became a blanket that some impetuous child was shaking and waving around to dust it off.

"Won't let you!" Kiyomi clapped her hands together before going through a myriad of hand seals. A potent telekinetic pulse threw all the task force ninja flat on the ground and sliding across the room, then smashing backs first into the wall with so much repulsive force that it lifted them off the air and threatened to scrape their innards across the walls through crude rubbing and dragging.

In a blink, the overwhelming tension relieved itself, and the task force ninja flipped, vaulted, and rolled backward to position themselves horizontally onto the wall while Asuka's lifeless body slumped to the ground. While the Allied Ninja called out to their fallen teammate, Kiyomi gritted her teeth.

"Sorry 'bout that. He was going to misplace all of us, but I could only cover for most of us. He busted through my defenses there," Kiyomi explained.

To the far left of the hall, an experimental test tube opened up, washing away foamy emerald liquid as it opened and released a howling, muzzled humanoid clad in tight leather that seemed to dig into the poor soul's brain and squeeze their head so hard that it drove them mad. Shaking, twitching, and dragging their pathetic body across the floor, they tried to rip the tight leather off their head or to remove the tubes obstructing their breathing, but someone stuffed them firmly through the airways.

"Unpleasant, isn't it?" the Conductor addressed Asuka, whose mind he misplaced into one of his conserved brainwashed experimental slave bodies. "The pain is enough to make you go mad. Unless you never want to return to your precious old body, you better kill your friends for me, darling."

"Shit!" Kiyomi winced. "We can't just sit here and let him dictate the terms. We need to blow this idol station up without damaging Mana's body too much."

Shige-H grunted in severe physical strain while coating her fists with a burst of basic blue chakra and then transforming them into the emerald glow of the Unmaker Fist. The flowing chakra burst from more than just Shige-H's fists, it exploded from her entire body, sending the leader of the Stars soaring across the room with a vicious swing that made thick slabs of armor sizzle and disintegrate upon contact with her hefty slugging blows.

The Conductor's idol shook from tremendous shock transferring through it, but it stayed standing firm. Just as it was about to send another resonance of mind-bending psychic techniques, a vertical whirlwind hit him right in the center where the station was the thickest, but also where Mana's entrapped body was stuffed into a medical tube that preserved it from dying without a mind and a soul. Nuts and bolts and chipped parts flew off of the rattled station in all directions.

"That's great, keep swinging from all directions! Hit it fast and hard!" Shige-H cried out while going to town onto the structure with hooks and double ax handle slams of her Advanced Bloodline imbued fists.

"Powerful. Powerful enough for me to bend to my will!" Yamanaka Tenma declared, a cascade of violent thunderstorms rippled off the psychic energy station that served as an idol to Yamanaka Tenma and his uncanny abilities. The true might of the reality-bending mental energy expanded into the mental realm, where only those with a connection to the mental plain and its energies could perceive it. Kiyomi went through a myriad of hand seals, forging mental constructs to intercept Tenma's signals that would take control of her allies' minds.

A fusillade of clangs distracted Kiyomi, it was the meat puppet with Asuka's mind displaced inside it that opened fire, but she didn't attack Kiyomi who was in clear view of her. She fired upon the armored and exposed back of Meiko and forced the blacksmith kunoichi to slip off the wall and flop on the ground, then dash across the hall to avoid the constant stream of blade work coming her way.

"Damn it, I was certain I shielded you… It's because I did. Everyone! Meiko's mind is under the Conductor's control! Watch out for her!" Kiyomi warned the rest.

"Fend her off, but keep attacking the idol. Unless we smash it, Tenma will keep pushing and brainwashing us, and Kiyomi can't fend him off completely. We won't last too long unless we smash that thing to bits!" Skaven relayed verbally to the team before clashing with Meiko in mid-air by slamming his short-blade against Meiko's kopis-style sword to prevent the redhead from coming after Shige-H who got close and personal to the Conductor's station and was dealing some heavy damage.

"You would have been better off submitting your minds to me. It would have been a pathetic existence, but you'd have stayed alive!" the Conductor thundered down, stunning everyone and forcing them to grab their heads and plummet writhing on the ground in mind-splitting pain. Turbulent telekinetic currents elevated everyone into the air and began slamming them around the walls, ripping them apart in different directions, threatening to quarter the task force ninja.

Only Meiko was spared of that fate, popping out a scroll from a compartment inside of her gauntlet and flicking it into the air. After a pop, it unsealed a hail of swords, knives, shuriken, and a good deal of weaponry that only added to the Conductor's telepathic assortment of tools for bloody murder. Bit by bit, the situation was going out of control.

An uncontrollable telekinetic pulse without a precise direction, just raw, unchained mental power going absolutely wild, sent the sharp blades hurling at hypersonic speeds in all directions, cutting and stabbing into the entrapped task force ninja and leaving them riddled with blades and weapons like pincushions. Tenma's mental rampage died down, dropping the grievously injured bodies on the floor with Meiko equipping her Reactor Gauntlets and coating them with Fire Release chakra to supersize them. Step by step, Meiko's commandeered body approached Shige-H, intending to see that every injured ninja is finished.

A howl rang across the hall, the slabs shifting at the top of Tenma's idol went into overdrive, computing what had just happened, but Meiko turned around and put her hands together. The Fire Release coated Reactor Gauntlets shifted into a higher gear. Meiko pounded them into one another, expelling a heatwave that seemed to inconvenience the damaged idol at the very least.

"My Reactor Gauntlets can shift one gear higher, I call this coated version–the Geo Gauntlets!" Meiko exclaimed, thrusting a defiant fist toward the Conductor's baffled idol. For a short while, the Conductor didn't understand why he had lost control over Meiko's body, it was then that he turned his focus to Kiyomi who still laid by the wayside, bleeding.

"You! You entered her mind, overriding my control, and then left!" Tenma thundered with a vengeful fury.

"This higher gear of Reactor Gauntlets produces a more powerful version of Reactor Shot too. The Geo Blast!" Meiko cupped her gauntlet pads together, focusing the Fire Release chakra as an additional upgrade coating of the ordinary Reactor Shot, forging a blazing fiery bomb in between the two hands that she spat forward with a rowdy shockwave, propelling it in a wild hurl toward the stone and steel structure.

Tenma's painful bellowing filled the hallway as slabs and chunks of his fortified structure chipped off of it with hefty blocks that let out a deafening clamor as they slammed against the ground. Unbeknownst to Meiko, black rubber wires slid out from the exposed mechanical innards of the idol fortification. They wrapped around the discarded and lifeless Asuka's body and dragged it in just a moment before Meiko's Geo Gauntlets would have pounded away at the damaged structure.

"You… Don't you ever want to return to your old body? Don't you ever want to look like your true self? Do you want to experience this unimaginable pain of your brain being squeezed through your eyes for the rest of your days? Unless you kill these ninja and attack this Konohagakure kunoichi right now, I'll snap the neck of this body and make sure that happens," the Conductor threatened Asuka who still bellowed muzzle grunts and screams from her leather-bound freakish new meat puppet body.

"Sorry, but her body isn't exactly under her control, or yours, for that matter…" Skaven's husky and pain-ridden voice made Meiko and Tenma turn their attention to the kneeling and panting Nara clansman with more than a handful of kunai and short swords sticking out from his body. He held his hands in the Shadow Possession Jutsu position, keeping Asuka's mind slave body in place.

"Do you think that changes the deal? I'll snap every limb she has one by one before snapping her neck last unless you release my mankurt from your possession," the Conductor thundered out.

"Truth is, I didn't really put my chips behind this move, it was this one," Skaven smirked when Asuka's slave body waved her hand to the Conductor, revealing that Skaven's shadow wasn't actually controlling her after all. Asuka was merely pretending to mirror his movements. Meanwhile, Skaven's shadows formed a hand construct that slammed into the exposed internals of the Conductor's idol psychic station and ripped the medical tube with Mana's body out, sending it skidding across the floor with a few cracks but no notable damage to the pod.

"You!" the Conductor's stations slabs shifted, revealing a pair of magenta-colored tinted lenses. Kiyomi rolled over on her front side, moaning and grunting in pain from the ninja tools and weapons sticking out from her body. She formed a mental clone of herself in front of Skaven to protect him from the Conductor's focused beam of mental energy that would have surely erased all traces of Skaven's mind and memories from the mental plane forever.

"You're an incredibly tough guy and a man too dangerous to be left alive. That being said, against the combined minds and experiences of all of us, all working toward a solitary goal, not even the sharpest and most powerful of minds can compare," Skaven grumbled with his hands lowering down as blood dripped from his aggravated wounds.

The wires holding Asuka's body hostage severed, letting Asuka's body flop on its face down on the ground. It was Kiyomi's mental blades that severed them. However, they didn't just thrash around mindlessly. It was as if something held them in place. A second later, Tenma's pitiful howls broke through the telepathic communications. The rest of the flattened and injured task force recovered and scrambled together to keep fighting to the best of their ability.

"Whatever you're doing, it's working, keep going!" Shige-H encouraged Kiyomi.

"I'm sending him some of his own medicine through the connection he has to this station. He's adamant about maintaining the connection, but that same connection feeds him painful mental signals. It's like holding on to the wire that's shocking you. This is your chance," Kiyomi explained. "His station's crumbling, Mana's out of it, let's finish this!"

"N-No… N-No… All of you… Will serve me… Or die!" the Conductor insisted, rippling their surroundings, but this time Kiyomi went through more hand seals and it seemed as if nothing had happened.

"Okay, who's in what body and who's brainwashed now?" Meiko patted down her own body, frantically looking around to understand what had just happened. "I felt my mind just leave my body just now. Where did it go?"

"I misplaced all of your minds for just a second to make them avoid being hit by Tenma's technique," Kiyomi explained with a case of a bloody nose and some blood squirting through her eyes and ears from the extreme mental pressure of this telepathic duel she's been engaged with the most powerful mental shinobi in existence. "I had to release him from my mental shock to do this, though. We're back to square one here."

The ground rumbled again, and the Conductor's tower emanated rippling mental waves that made Kiyomi scream in pain and collapse while he rag-dolled the task force around and elevated them into the air, jerking and twisting their joints horrifically before slamming their bodies back down on the ground. Two more experimental tubes opened up from a faraway corner in the hallway, releasing two more meat puppets that twitched and dragged their pathetic bodies across the floor, writhing in pain and misery.

"You are an inheritor of your uncle's talent, Yamanaka Kiyomi. But there's a reason I put my body through all those surgical and cybernetic enhancements. You can only measure up to even one-tenth of my psychic potential for so long. You may be impressive, but you're an ant, nonetheless. Now your friends will suffer this loathsome fate for the rest of their days as my puppets, and it will be all your fault for bringing them here with you. The lucky ones will go insane quickly and abandon the conscience of their ungodly suffering," the Conductor relayed through telepathy as Shige-H, Damisan, Meiko, and Kiyomi dragged themselves to their feet, witnessing Damisan's and Skaven's minds being misplaced into the bodies of Tenma's meat puppets.

"Don't lose hope or give in to fear. Remember what we're fighting for and just keep swinging!" Shige-H cried out, stumbling because of the ninja tools sticking out of her body and bleeding profusely but still igniting the base blue chakra flame of Chakra-Enhanced Strength around her fists. "Kiyomi, stop protecting us. Start attacking him. Your mind can't handle the direct competition with his. Your brain will turn to mush before you can block his psychic attacks at this point."

"I thought you'd have learned by now, woman. I'm the one giving out orders here," the Conductor sent a very streamlined pulse of psychic energy that rocked the spirited medical kunoichi off her feet and knocked her down.

"Shit! He's in her mind now!" Kiyomi grunted. "Meiko, hold her back, you're the only one who can. I'll see if I can hijack her mind from Tenma and free her."

"No, let's do what Mana's squad leader said. Keep fighting Tenma instead of defending us," Meiko shook her head, extending her arms to the side and igniting the Geo Gauntlets again. Instead of just using them, however, Meiko let steel shells surround them and secure them in place, building an additional armored layer on top of them and forging oversized metallic gauntlets on both of her forearms. "I'm shifting to the Meta Gauntlet gear for this guy. No one from VP here to give me flak for opening any micro black holes."

Shige-H shot off the ground with a left haymaker, looking to straight up knock Kiyomi's head off her shoulders in one go, but Meiko's massive metallic arms wrapped around Shige's wrists and began manhandling her by slamming her around, buying Kiyomi some time to focus. The head of the Yamanaka-Inuzuka Zaibatsu weaved her fingers together, creating a handful of psychic energy rifts that spewed mental doppelgangers, all rushing toward the exposed mental energy transmitters that connected all the way to Yamanaka Tenma wherever his real body was.

Troubled howling shook the hidden Conductor's facility as Tenma struggled against the unimaginable pain of countless mental doppelgangers of Kiyomi's mind assaulting his mind through the connection between him and his psychic station that served as his idol. Despite Kiyomi's valiant assault, this simply wasn't enough. She didn't damage the fortification that hosted Tenma's mind at all, and she could still sense a dwindling yet sufficient connection from Tenma's weakened mind to stay in control of the station.

Her strongest move just didn't do the trick. Now it was all over.

"That's… Great! Do it again…" Meiko grumbled, showing severe physical strain in competing against Shige-H, who was doing Tenma's bidding like his living puppet. When using other people's bodies, Tenma could have abandoned all care and abused them however he liked, burnt through their chakra resources, or torn their muscles apart in overexertion. This Shige-H was operating in an excessive show of force, though her brainwashed body was still less than in peak shape after the grueling battles against the Psi-Borgs and the grievous injuries she's suffered here.

"I can't, I'm low on chakra," Kiyomi's hands slipped down as the limited chakra capacity made the true extent of damage from having swords and knives sticking out from one's body very noticeable whereas she could've simply augmented her body past that point before. "Shit… We're so close… Just one solid blow and his station would crumble. Just one good mental push and Tenma would be too weak to use the station… Just one good shot…"

"So sad…" the Corruptor teased Kiyomi, pushing her and Meiko against the wall and restraining them with telepathy. "Now, how do I do away with you?"

Kiyomi could feel Yamanaka Tenma violating her mind with irresistible probing, drilling through Kiyomi's blocks faster than she put them up and browsing for any fears and worst punishments he could exploit. It was within his power to make Kiyomi experience whatever he wanted, even if his ultimate intention was to kill her and parade her as his meat puppet to embarrass the entire Yamanaka clan that once tossed him away like some freak.

"Hmm… You seem to have feelings for this friend of yours. Stronger ones than even your friendship with Nakotsumi Mana. Before I kill you and see how I can use your husk to compromise your clan, I think I'll delete every trace of her mind and soul from existence right in front of you. It's too bad, she could've served as a pretty good foot soldier to me," Tenma poured venom all over Kiyomi, boiling with hatred at how close she was to score a victory over him.

"N-No…" Kiyomi cried out, struggling against Tenma's telepathic grip that felt much weaker than before when his connection with the station seemed adamant. Shaking with intermittent twitches, Kiyomi raised her hands and pointed them at Yamanaka Tenma.

"I can sense you're low on chakra. You might pull off one switch, but it's not like you can switch with my mind when you would be kicked out of it with a flick of my true consciousness, like the flea that you are," Tenma tried wrapping the loop of constricting circumstances tighter around Kiyomi's throat. Her hands began to slip down, one twitch at a time, before Kiyomi put some tension behind her muscles again and a new idea popped into her head. One the Conductor hadn't probed just now.

"I have little chakra left… But she has loads…" Kiyomi smirked. "Mind-Body Switch!"

"What are you…" Tenma struggled to comprehend what Kiyomi was talking about. He was so baffled that he didn't understand until he heard the shrill noise of shattering glass from his left side where Mana's disconnected medical tube lay. "No!" he let out a single potent telekinetic pulse before Mana's body, commandeered by Kiyomi's consciousness, dragged itself out through the shattered glass, accumulating dozens of cuts across it because she only had one leg for balance and Kiyomi's control was wonky.

Shige-H raced to smash Mana's skull with a flying punch, but she'd be too late. The slowed-down connection between Tenma and the station would ensure that the delay between Tenma's command and when it reached Shige-H's mind, inconsequential as it would have been normally, would give Kiyomi's consciousness more than enough time to do its magic.

"Art of War!" Kiyomi chanted, positioning Mana's hands in the Yamanaka hijutsu position and casting a powerful mental pulse to inspire a motherlode of all migraines in Yamanaka Tenma on the other side. Because of how severely weakened his connection to the station was already, this pulse deactivated the station entirely. Losing control made Shige-H and Meiko collapse.

Scrambling to return to her feet, Shige-H wound back her fist and charged toward the battered psychic station, reducing it to rubble with one solid blow and finishing the job of disabling the Conductor's stranglehold on the region. Kiyomi couldn't rush back to her body fast enough. The taste of blood and vomit in her mouth wasn't the most pleasant of a welcoming party, but it was her body.

"It's over," Meiko stretched out on the ground and collapsed the steel coating around the Geo Gauntlets, snuffed out the flames of the Geo Gauntlets, and sealed the Reactor Gauntlets back into the glyphs on her forearms. "Jeez!"

"Never tell Mana about any of this. She has a wild enough of a hero complex as it is," Kiyomi grumbled, sitting up by the wall of the Conductor's hidden lab and caressing her aching head.

"Damisan, Asuka, and Skaven are still in the mankurt bodies," Shige-H noted and pointed at the writhing and suffering squad mates of hers with concern. "That means that Mana's mind is still displaced too. And those of the Chaos Factor."

"Yeah, if you have any food pills that can help me recover my chakra supply, I'll take care of it. Just because I don't want them to go insane from whatever Tenma's putting his slaves through. Skaven knows stuff that would make him dangerous if he were to go mad. Though just about any Yamanaka should be able to undo what happened to Mana," Kiyomi replied, taking a blue food pill off of Shige-H's hands and grinding it to powder between her teeth. It should give her a quick jolt of energy needed to undo the mind displacement on those three. If the body Mana's mind was in were here, Kiyomi could have undone what the Conductor did to her too.

"We're off to the Land of Wind. We need to let Mana know that the deal she's struck with the Conductor is null and void and that we've got her body," Shige-H waved a storage scroll containing the busted medical tube with Mana's body. Inside the storage dimension space, it would be perfectly preserved unless the scroll were to be damaged or destroyed, in which case the body would be lost forever. Probably why Tenma didn't resort to storing the body that way and kept it inside his idol.

"Good luck with that," Kiyomi waved the Allied Ninja farewell after they lined up in the entryway hall, preparing to bust out of the hidden facility door with explosives. "I'll let my husband know that you've fulfilled your blood oath."

"Wait, we're not coming with?" Meiko gave Kiyomi puppy eyes.

"Absolutely not. I must report everything that happened here to my employers," Skaven panted, the effects of his mind being misplaced into that horrifically mutilated body still weighed heavily on him, but his conditioning was strong enough to help him get through it. "I don't think that these shadow games between Yamanaka Tenma and his ring of trust and those operating within the shadows in the ninja villages are even remotely over. Still, Tenma should cool off, at least for a little while after this setback. This will give my employers a chance to regroup and dig up some incriminating intel on him to keep him in check the next time he decides to act. Thanks for patching us up some, Shige. Can I still call you Shige, or is it Shige-H for me?"

"I'll allow it," Shige-H shrugged, sharing a lukewarm look with her past squad mate. "I kind of had to, we wouldn't have gotten very far with all those stab wounds."

"I wanted to see Mana so much. She must be so down after getting maimed like that…" Meiko sighed with a depressed look on her face. "Though, I suppose, she's got plenty of new friends to keep her spirits up when times get tough now," Meiko's look softened after scanning the Stars.

Mana's body was now back under the Stars' control. Things were one step closer to moving away from the worst-case scenario and the terrifying threat upon the ninja world by Yamanaka Tenma had been temporarily dealt with. This was a victory, for all intents and purposes, even if it left its marks on all the victors.