"Whoa there," a handful of rather slender-looking guards, wearing helmets that protected the top of their heads and were adorned with shrouds to protect them from heat and sunlight, and a pair of armored shoulder pads and greaves atop of shabby robes stepped in to obstruct the Stars' path. They seemed only to be armed with daggers and bows hanging over their shoulders, so they represented little danger in terms of their combat potency, however, making too much noise would have been an ill-advised decision, regardless.
"Only contestants and recovering competitors beyond this point, sorry," a much heavier armored guard appeared from the shady doorway. This one seemed to be nearly double the size of the rest of the infirmary's guards and wore regal-looking blue steel armor. Ironically enough, a hefty suit that left only the top of his bald and scarred head exposed as the armored suit was thickest by the pyramid-shaped neck. The straight, one-edged blade that this man wore over his back also looked like it could deal some damage. "We wouldn't like to see any sore losers making the tournament any more difficult, would we?"
"I'm the leader of a squad that's represented by two competitors that might be in that building. I'd like to confirm their condition and see if I can retrieve them," Shige-H concocted something that was in between the truth and a lie. While she was the head of Stars, retrieving Mana and Endo wasn't really the reason they wanted entry. The Stars very much intended to see this tournament through and report its results to the Allied Ninja. The Supreme Leader would've chewed them out if they didn't report who claimed the Agbarah Sheikhate and controlled three percent of the Earth's landmass and was one of the five most influential figures in control of the Land of Wind desert. Six, if one included Fennec in the estimation.
"That shouldn't be a problem. What are their names and affiliations?" the large and armored up-to-his-nose guard pulled out a scroll and raised it to his eyes without lowering his head. That was likely because the stuffy and thick armor didn't provide him with the luxury of articulating his neck in that way.
"Endo and Mana. Endo should have signed up as an Allied Ninja and Mana might have signed up as an Allied Ninja or… I don't know, Chaos Factor, maybe?" the question of Mana's allegiance seemed to stump Shige-H for a second and the guard noted it with a raise of his browless ridge over his dark right eye. However, this momentary slip-up didn't seem to alert him too badly.
"Yeah, there's an Endo in the infirmary. Crud… I bet you haven't seen the tournament then?" the guard suddenly mashed the scroll listing the competitors in between his hands and gave the squad of Allied Ninja a sorry look.
"No, we were away on another mission. We got here as fast as we could," Shige-H replied, feeling her voice trembling a bit. They've come too far to have the rug pulled from underneath their feet now. It felt like they've lost too many of the original Stars too.
"Endo's banged up, but he'll pull through. This Mana though… I think we're talking about the same… Creature, right? A moving Five-Tails statue, right?" the tall guard kept prancing around the subject.
"One of the Statumen, Statu… People? From the Chaos Factor, yes…" Shige-H worked herself through the confusion and befuddlement, doing admirable work of keeping herself together and acting cool, all things considered. Neither of them saw what state Mana signed up in this tournament in, maybe Endo might have bumped into Mana and may have had a clue, however, Mana being turned into a Statuman didn't sound completely mind-boggling, given how the Conductor had misplaced more than one of them from their original bodies during that hectic encounter trying to nab Mana's body away from his possession.
"Well, I'm sorry to break this down to you this way, but… That beaut got smashed and busted. A golem with a brass clockwork gear for a head smashed it to pieces before our very eyes. It looked really cool when it happened, but hearing someone worried about that statue like it was a human being… Puts things into perspective in a way none of us thought about it, to be honest," the guard tilted his large and well-armored arm over to scratch his scarred, bald head with surprising ease given the chunky shoulder pads protecting him.
"Wait, what!?" Damisan stepped out of the line and approached the guard. "Are you sure? Did you see anything… Ethereal? Like maybe something came out of the statue after it was smashed to bits?"
"Sounds like something a bit too solid for guesswork," Asuka crossed her arms in suspicion.
"This wouldn't be the first time that Mana kept herself together by maintaining her mind and soul together with self-control. Remember how she could identify your poison and direct her body to keep it contained and expel it all in one upchuck?" Damisan appealed to the rest of the Stars. "And how she was the one to put herself back together after the Sky People scattered us on the Moon with just the strength of her mind and focus?"
"Oh, sure, something like that happened in the colosseum too!" the guard snapped his fingers despite them being stuffed into large gauntlets that looked to be fully able to rake the flesh off of a skull clean. "But then the golem tore into that whole spirit thing and ripped it apart, scattered it until there were just mere strands of it left, like tearing up a wall of spider's webs. Then it went poof, and it was no more. Evaporated like smoke into thin air."
"With all due respect, we'd rather talk to Endo in the infirmary and confirm that Mana's really dead. It's just that we went through a whole lot of trouble for her and… We go back a long time. It's difficult just letting go of people you've known for so long and burrowed through a thousand pounds of salt together, you know?" Shige-H requested the guard to let them through.
"Yeah, yeah, I guess I know what you mean. Nothing makes people grow tighter together than the threat of certain death on the daily," the guard stepped aside, earning a few wary stares from the line of archers guarding the entryway. "Let them through, it's not like they're mercs or Sunagakure ninja. They're Allied Ninja. If you catch them causing trouble or making noise, disturbing the competitors' rest, escort them."
"Understood," one of the robed archers nodded, visibly disagreeing with the decision but not enough to argue with a higher-ranking and much more physically imposing guard. "Step inside."
"Well, that went surprisingly smooth," Asuka clapped her hands as a teasing gesture. "What now? Do we find ourselves a shaman or do we follow the smell or spirits?"
"We split up. This place is too big for all of us to examine together. Let's stay in contact with each other," Shige-H handed Damisan and Asuka wireless radio sets to slip on. "Our primary objective is finding Endo or Mana, secondary objective is gathering intelligence about the results of the battle royale and how favorable they are to our mission. If we encounter anything shady, we only interfere if the perpetrators are Chaos Factor or Fennec's mercs. Just because they might be out of the competition doesn't mean that they might not try pulling something shady."
"Are we just going to ignore the fact that Mana's working with the enemy now?" Asuka's look soured as she lamented in a teasing tone. "Why is it I always get flack for it, but when it's Mana doing it, she's a VIP all of a sudden?"
"She might not have much choice. As far as Mana is concerned, she might still think that the Conductor is holding her body hostage. If she's doing better than the guard implied, she needs to know that we've secured her body. Once we find wherever her mind might be, we can start working toward merging the two. Things will be much easier with both Endo and Mana back in our ranks at full strength," Shige-H replied while slipping on her wireless radio set and activating it. It would have been better to have a Yamanaka setting up a mental link between their squad, that way, their communications would have been safe from interruption. Still, they had to work with what they had. Kiyomi and Meiko were Konoha ninja with tight allegiances to their village and wouldn't have been able to leave their village on a whim.
Something made Shige-H wonder if Kiyomi even wanted to. She didn't look too heartbroken about leaving the rest to the Stars, unlike Meiko.
"Well, as full strength as Mana can be," Asuka shrugged with a mean-spirited smirk. "It's too bad that the Conductor didn't give Mana a cybernetic leg or keep her body in some sort of regenerative fluid to help her grow that stump of hers back. Who knows, she might prefer having four stone legs to just one."
"Enough of that, Asuka," Damisan objected. "Keep your mind on the mission objective."
"Oh, I didn't mean it as an offense to your prosthetics, Damisan," Asuka waved her hand as a mock apology. "I was merely making an observation about Mana's natural shortcomings."
"If you don't cut it right now, I'll arrange it you get a personal lesson in being crippled," Damisan stepped up in Asuka's face, surprising the blonde to the point of her dropping her teasing for a second and turning serious for the first time since leaving the Conductor's hidden base.
"Just tried to lighten the mood a little, sheesh," Asuka shrugged and turned toward a favored corridor turn. "You should cool it back a little. If people listening in gave a shit, they'd start gossiping about what you're getting so defensive at."
"Sometimes I struggle to remember why we keep her around. There have to be recruits lining up to join our squad back in the headquarters…" Damisan sighed in frustration, knowing full well that Shige-H was going to take the side that kept the Stars together as opposed to kicking members left and right. Because of that knowledge, Damisan walked away from the conversation before he could even hear out Shige's response.
"Right," Shige-H grumbled under her nose, shaking her head in frustration at the just about the usual level of dysfunction amongst the Stars being put on display. "Now, who might know a thing or two about where I can find Endo, I wonder?"
"Hmm… Maybe one of these healers knows something?" Damisan muttered to himself while scanning the rushing shrouded men and women dressed entirely in baggy pink robes and headgear that revealed only each healer's eyes. Despite this eerie vibe they gave off, the regal pink color of the robe, how smooth and thin the robe looked from the side and the golden ring accessories that decorated the shoulders, arms, elbows, thighs, and calves of these curious members of the Sun Disc staff suggested them to be revered in the local community.
Since most healers that rushed past him either in the opposite direction or onward ahead looked like they were in a rush and the entire arena section seemed to bustle with activity, Damisan felt hesitant to disturb them. That none of them spoke out loud yet passed every second of their lives with an ironclad focus on something that, looking from afar and judging by their expressions, was of paramount importance made Damisan wonder if these healers could even speak and if they were human at all. Then again, that was likely the intended purpose with their concealing and baggy clothes and reserved attitude.
It was only when Damisan found an open door and heard some very human and, frankly, quite welcoming voices inside that he peeked in. Bundled around a bed was a handful of women in baggy white trousers and scanty suede vests. They didn't look anywhere nearly as sterile and aseptic as the healers from before did, in addition, they looked to be quite handsy and covered in make-up. A few of them held trays with exotic foods and refreshments, suggesting that these women attendants were more akin to support staff than healers.
"Em… Excuse me?" Damisan slipped inside the room. The scantily clad attendants jumped up as if sprinkled with cold water and turned at him. Impressively enough, they didn't drop or even shake the trays in their hands despite the startlement. When two of these attendants stepped to the side from the bed they surrounded, Damisan noticed a particularly scraped and crippled man with a darker tone of skin than even the locals, suggesting that he was from somewhere around the Land of Lightning. "I'm looking for an Endo. We were told he was competing in the tournament but didn't make it to the second round…"
"Endo?" an attendant in a red suede vest pressed her dyed fingernail to her cheek as she looked up deep in thought.
"I think I know him. A cute swordsman fellow with a nasty attitude and massive entitlement issues?" an attendant in blue with a mouth shrouded in a thin veil that was transparent enough for the vivid colors of the attendant's lipstick to gleam through.
"That can only be him," Damisan nodded. "I'd be eager to debate the cute part, though dying on this hill isn't worth the trouble. Could I maybe see him?"
"I think he's in the southwestern quarter of the building. You're in luck, he was so absolutely insufferable that he didn't stop causing trouble until we put him in ward No. 1," an attendant in a black and violet vest replied. "He's bruised and is still recovering from a broken arm and busted ribs. The healers patched him up, but the restored bone tissue will be sensitive until sometime tomorrow. We try to avoid numbing the pain to remind the patients that technically they're still wounded so that they don't overdo it and think they're good to brawl again immediately after waking up."
Damisan clapped his hands with a polite smile, bowing in gratitude before turning around to bolt through the door before stopping with his hands resting on the door's edge. Longingly, he looked down and sighed. While the attendants stared at Damisan's back for a few seconds, noticing his hesitation, one by one they returned to tending to the crippled and battered man laid out in the bed they swarmed around. By the time Damisan turned around, only one of them still kept her attention on Damisan, hoping he would still ask them something.
"What's this guy's story? He looks pretty banged up. I didn't see the tournament, but I've heard it was chaotic," Damisan asked with a restrained volume of his voice, suspecting that he may have been overstepping his boundaries a little.
"You don't know the half of it, stranger," the crippled man unexpectedly replied for the attendants. "While I cannot see the extent of my own injuries, likely I won't be able to see anything at all ever again, I must say that the internal wounds sting far more than what keeps me in this bed while my future opponent is, no doubt, training."
"I know a thing or two about being crippled. You shouldn't get discouraged, my condition was far worse than yours, yet I kept on doing what I thought was right," Damisan approached the unfortunate soul, examining the bruises and blunt force trauma cluttered all across his sinewy body with the standout injuries being a missing arm and a leg.
"Don't you have a friend of yours to check up on?" an attendant wondered, not looking too pleased that this stranger took over whatever their job here with these food trays was.
"I've got a few more friends looking for him in the building. I'd reckon that both of them have the mental capacity to ask someone for his location, so he'll be fine. For some reason, I feel like I can be of some help here," Damisan turned his eyes away as if feeling embarrassed by his own admission. "I know how hard it is to bounce back from injuries like these, I know the feeling of a complete collapse that follows, the dour and the mental disarray."
"Oh, so you think I can still fight on, just like these attendants here trying to bribe me with food?" the one-armed and one-legged punching bag dragged his punished body to sit up. Despite the constant breakthrough of wincing and grunts of torment that escaped his throat, whenever he could get these instincts under control, he looked excited to meet Damisan and talk to him, as opposed to the handful of attendants offering him tasty delicacies and dessert to lift his spirits.
"Fight on? You mean you actually won!?" Damisan exclaimed in shock. "Damn it, now I really am worried about the well-being of my comrade, if this is what winners look like!"
Ryoku Genshi broke into laughter. A wholehearted and genuine peal, unlike any emotion he's ever felt since losing an arm in victory and then the resulting self-destruction of the Cursed Warrior he was tricked into defeating by a cunning spy costing him a leg and nearly ripping his healthy arm out alongside his shoulder.
"Indeed, I must not look like a winner, huh?" the professional athlete nodded with an upward crescent grin. "If it's any consolation for your feelings of inadequacy after this minor mistake, I don't feel like much of a winner, either. My opponent in the next round is a samurai, I've heard many great things about the talent and strength of samurai in battle and I've had the honor of witnessing them living up to their reputation as the ultimate warriors throughout the land in this very arena. Blind, stripped of my armor and play ball, one-armed, one-legged, with the muscle and tendons of my healthy arm in shambles… Is it really that hard to see why?"
"But Ryoku-san…!" the attendant in blue clacked her heel against the polished to a shine sandstone tile. "If you refuse to compete, that will leave only fifteen competitors. Sheikh-sama went through so much organizing this event, the audience will be so disappointed if one of the second round bouts ends in victory by default after the astounding spectacle and all the effort you displayed on the first round!"
"Hmm… I don't imagine things will be much better if I walk out on crutches only to get cut down. The coach told me that the days of Sun Disc serving as a slaughterhouse were long over," Ryoku Genshi looked down with a gloomy look that befitted his devastated condition.
"The fact that you're even entertaining that idea suggests to me you've got some high stakes that press you to compete," Damisan spoke up.
"This place… Hearing the excited people cheering, hundreds of thousands… So many happy and enthralled faces following your every move that all these faces blur and it feels like the entire world is watching you, rooting for you. It's not something that many pro athletes get to experience in life. As far as the Feudal Lords are concerned, we're just children who haven't grown out of the age of playing games. It's tough to surprise and entertain an audience or to pretend to push the limits of human athleticism when you've got such steep competition and the very forces that consider you a useless mouth-breather…" Ryoku Genshi leaned back in his fluffy white pillow while looking up at the ceiling, almost like he could see a beaming ray of sunshine breaking through the window behind. An illusionary window that was there replacing the thick sandstone wall.
"So, you're an athlete…" Damisan grimaced, pulling his lip to the right. "A strange sight in a martial arts tournament."
"All of us had a dream. A dream that we've inherited from thousands of generations of similar hopeless mouth-breathers to us. People looked at like overgrown children playing in the mud with rag balls. People persecuted and chased away for simply wanting to play a game they love and promote camaraderie, inspire the spectators to pursue polished and perfected versions of themselves through exercise and playing games until they could move no more. A dream for a Sports Games, a festival uniting sports fans and professional athletes across the world under one roof, watching hundreds of different games being played with no end to the excitement in sight. Sports Games that reward the greatest athletes of their time and showcase their skills for an adoring audience, just like the fans here that enjoyed seeing us incorporate our favorite games into our fighting styles," Ryoku proclaimed while staring at the ceiling with a somber look of dull eyes that didn't blink even when specks of dust sprinkled right into them. The irritation that dust in the eyes caused didn't register in the myriad of sores that Ryoku Genshi felt in his current condition.
"The push toward that dream must be mighty for you to wager your own life in a battle you cannot possibly win. I'm a ninja, though I've done mercenary work and I've been a soldier for a cause too. No matter the creed I swear by, I've always been worn to never face a samurai in a one-on-one battle. Ninja can only best samurai through trickery and outwitting them, samurai are the peerless, ultimate soldiers to which mere mercenaries or fodder cannot compare," Damisan replied with resignation he felt bad that his newly met acquaintance couldn't see. "Unlike most decent warriors, you will see no mercy from a samurai. Samurai use the bone marrow of commoners and untitled lowly warriors as grease for their blade maintenance. To a samurai, a professional athlete is just a pointless head who can't and won't pay their toll to the Shogun. You're lowlier than a prostitute or a sellsword to entitled noblemen like them."
"You have a gift of putting things like they are and not sugarcoating them. A lot like my mother…" Ryoku Genshi closed his dulled, white eyes as his face softened into a warm smile. Despite the bruises, he looked sweeter than a fluffy marshmallow. So treasured must have been his memories of home and family.
"If you asked me for a piece of advice, I'd tell you to drop everything you're aspiring to here and go back home to her," Damisan said mercilessly.
"Heh, she'd tell me I'm even more of a useless lug now that I'm a cripple than I've been when I didn't know the limit of my own strength and kept breaking everything in the farm by accident," Ryoku Genshi replied. Despite how cruel he made his mother sound, the warmth radiating from his look as he returned home in his mind told a different picture of the woman entirely.
"You'll be alive. You'll be safe. If she's like most mothers, she'll appreciate that enough to have you," Damisan replied without skipping a beat. "As someone who's been in your shoes and has seen everything burn down in front of him for the sake of meaningless vengeance that earned me only a deeper void to sulk in, also as someone who's been fortunate enough to have kind and caring friends who nudged me in the right direction, I want to be that kind of friend to you. Trust me, my only regret is that I took forever and a day to recognize good advice when I had it. I lost everything, then saw luck shining on me once and I slipped right back into the same hole. You can't blame a guy for wanting to prevent that same mistake when other people are making it."
"And yet, safety will not change the world," Ryoku Genshi sighed, blowing up the balloon that hovered toward the bright blue sky of his ideal childhood that was still in his memories. "Nor can I be happy knowing that other athletes like me are treated like untouchable dirt when I could change it for them. When I experienced the utopia of how sports can be, I gave up halfway just to be safe and cozy. When I know that I've settled for the same thing that the ignorant see me as–a useless mouth breather who can't pay his own taxes."
"In that case," Damisan replied after groaning and running his hand across his hair. "I may as well pitch in and make sure you give your honest best shot…"
"Wait… What do you mean?" Ryoku Genshi snapped his blind eyes wide open while staring at a random point in the wall far off Damisan's left.
"I didn't lie when I told you I've been in your shoes before. I've built my own arms and legs. I can do it for you. I can't promise you miracles, we've only got one day, after all, but I can promise you that you won't embarrass yourself out there," Damisan smirked.
"B-But why…!?" Ryoku Genshi blanked out while the attendants stepped further away, sharing wary glares with one another though refusing to object since this stranger just made their job of convincing Ryoku Genshi to fight easier. "Didn't you say you had friends here to find? Why help a complete stranger, a mere athlete, and risk making an enemy out of the samurai?"
"I guess your kind of stupid just rubbed off on me and reminded me of some of my bad habits," Damisan grumbled while stroking his hair in annoyance at the hassle he just signed up for. It was as if his soul made a wholehearted leap down this hole, but the more rational part of him still objected to it.