It was stunning to see Kidenshi on his feet and back to the mission after such a brief recovery. Naturally, some of it could have been attributed to the superhuman ninja metabolism but some of it had to be more of an individual trait of the young Inuzuka shinobi. Some were quicker to get back on their feet and brush off injuries than others and Kidenshi certainly was like a bar of iron.
"So do we just follow the scent of pumpkins again?" Kidenshi wondered, giving Mana an off-handed look. Given how the magician was the highest ranking ninja amongst the quartet, the Inuzuka expected her to make the calls.
"That did not work all that well last time." Chominu's eyes turned sad. The Akimichi's face was a curious baggage. His eyes seemed forever closed or just squinted that intensely and the only way to understand what he was thinking was to observe his facial cues or to follow the Akimichi's tone.
"It's because somebody can't pull their own weight." Kidenshi crossed his arms over his chest, looking at Lithia with a sarcastic glare that was meant to skewer his cocky teammate with ridicule.
"Ugh… It's not my fault I'm not a darned glutton that can smell a pumpkin from a mile away or some mutt-person." Lithia snapped back. Given her highly confrontational and bragging personality, it may not have been a good idea to instigate a conflict with her like Kidenshi did.
"The funny thing is pumpkins aren't even that yummy…" Chominu smacked his belly, letting his tongue flop out from his mouth. It was tough to say if he was imagining gorging on a large squash or reacting in distaste for the particular member of the fruit species.
"I must admit I would be inclined to agree with Lithia-senpai." Mana closed her eyes. The admittance did not come easy. "I myself cannot smell and we absolutely cannot afford to split to chase of scents. None of us is strong enough to defeat the enemy if we run into them."
"I dunno, splitting apart and putting work in seemed to work out so far…" Kidenshi leaned back on his arms with his lips pouting. He did not agree with Mana, clearly, but he was willing to listen to her suggestion, provided she gave him one.
"I believe a much more productive way to approach this mission would be to find your team leader and ask for their help. If the enemy truly is a rogue specialist ninja with an unclear objective, we will need a help of a jounin to take them down." Mana voiced the reason for her worst worries.
"Heh, too bad, Yumari-sensei is away on a mission with the other jounin." Kidenshi snickered. This time, however, it was more of a laugh that acknowledged a problem and the hopelessness of his situation rather than one of amusement.
"If more than one jounin are involved, I take it the mission is important." Mana sighed.
"Yeah, they're escorting a party of Allied Ninja into our village." Chominu nodded.
This was troublesome. There would be no way that any number of ninja in charge of escorting a member of a supranational organization of ninja that did not acknowledge village walls or country borders in their missions. While the fact that a party of Allied Ninja was heading to Konoha for a mission deserved a conversation all by itself, it was not a worry for the current moment.
"What about Lady Fifth?" Chominu wondered. "She's a sturdy and strong lady, she could handle a rogue specialist without a doubt!" the gentle giant declared uppercutting the air in excitement as he spoke.
"She's retired, you blunderbuss. At her age, can you blame the woman?" Lithia shrugged in a very smug and mocking manner that irritated Mana but, somehow, the magician managed to swallow it down.
"She is also away from the village by now." The magician added.
"Whatever, I don't like the idea of looking to someone else for help anyway." Kidenshi let out a half-tamed growl. "We somehow got through everything we've encountered split apart so that we don't get in each other's way, now we're together, that should be all the muscle we need."
What naivety from someone older than Mana! The magician sighed recalling moments in her own life when similar thoughts had visited her own mind and the bitterness of regret when it all got toppled and blown away by the wind. The foolish thought that maybe all of the Ninja Rabbits could take on Yamata no Orochi, that all of the party looking for the Box of Ultimate Bliss could together finish off Akimichi Francho…
"Don't worry, Mana-san. I will be supporting you all the way!" Usubane cheered on Mana from behind.
"Oh, you're still here… I had thought you'd puff away when you're not needed like good minions do." Lithia threw an off-handed remark pissing the rabbit off even more than she had already managed to. This time, however, just barely, a warning look at the rabbit from Mana managed to keep her at bay from lashing out.
"In any case, I would suggest thoroughly inspecting the district you found the lantern in before you got attacked." Mana quickly changed the subject. "Perhaps we can find more clues about the nature of these lanterns and why would a rogue specialist ninja engage in a measly act of olfactory hooliganism."
"To assume it is a specialist ninja that placed those abhorrent lanterns is a leap at best." Lithia objected. "It must be a silly Academy Student that got a lucky jump on my simple-minded teammate."
"An Academy Student, you say!?" Kidenshi began rolling his sleeves back and was in mid-charge at his teammate before Usubane's ears wrapped around his body and pressed him closer to the rabbit. Mana observed in curiosity how the teen rabbit used her strong ears as an extra pair of arms, wide and powerful enough to restrain a C-Rank ninja all by themselves through nothing else but physical effort.
"Kidenshi-senpai described a jutsu that defeated him. It sounded suspiciously similar to Ninja Art: Leaf Blade – a jutsu that plenty of ninja employed by the village in specialist positions would know." Mana explained with the bitterness of having to argue with the extremely toxic member of the team persisting in her tone.
"Yeah, I thought that jutsu was sort of lame, at first. Then it hit me as bad as a bunch of sharpened blades stabbing at me would and completely made me lose focus, then, I thought it was pretty cool." Kidenshi explained in more detail with a massive grin on his face all throughout.
"Oh, I was not aware we have come to this conclusion, I tend to ignore everything these two say." Lithia shrugged with not only a surprising amount of self-awareness to the problematic teamwork of this team but also an even more shocking admittance of her own flaw. This came so shocking to the magician that the girl looked at the Uchiha with surprise for a good couple of seconds but due to the utter indifference of the little Lolita girl, it did not look like she had noticed.
"Well then, to the north-eastern Administration district!" Kidenshi raised his fist in the sky before letting his finger point at the direction of the district he was found knocked out in. The way he emoted seemed so overblown but he did manage to make Mana smirk for a bit with his silliness, which did not come often these days.
All four of the Konoha ninja and a ninja rabbit following them around blurred in an instant, moving to the higher levels so that they could move at high speeds without disrupting the harmony of day-to-day life below. That was usually what the rooftops and wires connecting them were used for anyway.
Mana arrived first to a nearby rooftop to the alleyway where Kidenshi was found knocked out in. It was not exactly that her speed was the greatest between all of the Konoha ninja in this mission, it was merely that her control was precise enough to approach the speed limit no ninja crossed inside the village closest to the edge, which let her beat her temporary companions to the location.
The rest arrived just seconds later: Usubane first and not far behind Mana, then Kidenshi and Chominu. Behind them, looking almost completely uninterested in any of the proceedings or giving any effort on her part – Lithia Uchiha. The girl was moving so slowly, in fact, that Pompomaru started barking at her right after she appeared a good twenty seconds later than Mana did. It was an entire eternity in the timing of ninja speed.
"Calm down, Pompomaru, we weren't in a rush." Kidenshi tried to calm his partner down.
"I was merely saving myself the effort by moving in the slipstream of Chominu's massive frame," Lithia replied to the dog. It was unclear if the canine could understand her as it just barked back at her once before moving on to sniffing the air.
"Mmmm…" Chominu hummed into the air letting his teammate's words slip right over his head. "I can smell the pumpkins already…"
"Yeah…" Kidenshi nodded with a serious face. "They're all over the place. I can't even pinpoint them like this. It's just a ring of pumpkin scent all over the area."
Mana could not smell the faintest whiff of it but it was to no surprise after she parted with the sense of smell to improve and focus her chakra sensory abilities in a pinch. The magician closed her eyes and focused on her chakra sensory, trying to see if there was perhaps more to these lanterns than just an olfactory prank and light pollution. If they had a trace of chakra to them, perhaps she would have more luck pinpointing the lanterns.
There was nothing. Either the lanterns were not emitting any sort of chakra signals, weren't at all chakra-based in nature and origin or their signals were merely too faint for Mana's abilities to pick up.
"Let's see…" Lithia smugly yawned. Once her eyes opened, they were flaring red, it was the legendary Sharingan of the Uchiha. The accursed eyes that gave them their honored status among other ninja and upon which their reputation as the elite ninja clan was built on.
"There. There and there… Quite a lot of them, in fact…" the girl pointed at some of the lanterns as her eyes appeared to pick up on the sensory output that each individual lantern put out. "If these lanterns are troubling the peasant civilians, I wonder why they do nothing about removing them themselves…"
"Showoff…" Usubane showed her tongue to the Uchiha.
"This is impressive," Mana admitted. "How exactly are you picking them up? Can your eyes pick up on their chakra signatures?"
"In plenty of ways, Konoha's Sorceress, I would see their chakra, given they put out a strong enough signature. In this case, I merely precisely read the illumination they put out, read the patterns of their light." Lithia explained, feeling honored that she finally was justified in her self-praising efforts as she was actually complimented and inquired about her abilities.
This was amazing! Mana felt completely overshadowed by the immense precision of focus of the Sharingan. Here she thought that she was quite adept at perception and following patterns when, in fact, she was rendered completely helpless in the greater shade of even a single, inexperienced user of the Copy Wheel Eye.
For someone to merely glance at an evening gloom and tell where exactly the small needles of light are coming from, let alone filter them from a wide array of other light sources… It was mind-boggling, to say the least, and Lithia performed it with such ease as if mocking the task in its face.
"Alright, let's get to it, then." Kidenshi smacked his fist into his palm before preparing to attack the lanterns as if they were a clueless enemy while he was a wolf prowling from a good vantage point, looking to sink its fangs into the neck of his prey.
"Not so fast." Mana stopped the young man. "Lithia-senpai did raise an interesting point."
"Of course, I did." Lithia shrugged, utterly full of herself.
"Of course she did…" Kidenshi dragged his lower lip down while he squinted at Mana as if trying to teach the magician to stop encouraging the self-righteous and arrogant ways of his insufferable teammate.
"Why did the civilians not merely discard those lanterns by themselves?" Mana wondered. The lantern that her eyes were resting on was placed in a very accessible location and very much within reach even to a child's arms. "That means they must have some sort of defense mechanism that prevents such an outcome, one that is not powerful enough to raise too much noise and injure the target too badly but one more potent than their, apparently, stinging odor."
"Come on," Kidenshi complained, followed by Pompomaru's angry bark. "They're just stupid prank-lanterns. They would be flaring up with chakra if something like that was sealed inside them. You're a sensor and you weren't even able to pick up on them, neither was Lithia's all-so-impressive Sharingan."
Mana bit her finger. Kidenshi had a point. She was just completely dazzled by the amazing power of the Sharingan and to imply that whatever these lanterns were doing was strong enough to fool it was perhaps a bit of an unbelievable leap.
"I say we let the brawnheads try. What's the worst that can happen?" Lithia suggested with a sly look aimed at Mana.
"They could encounter a frightening barrier that dissolves their limbs on a molecular level or trigger an explosion that kills them?" Mana suggested some of the more commonly known trap seals.
"Exactly, nothing bothering us…" Lithia showed Kidenshi her mocking grin. "Please, go ahead, peasant, taste our food."
Kidenshi just flipped Lithia a very bad finger before taking off. He looked a bit warier after Mana's warning but he was moving with purpose. With enough awareness and wind in his steps, a notable ninja may have been able to outrace an explosion after it was triggered but before it hurt them. Still, they needed to, at the very least, know it was coming to do so.
The moment Kidenshi approached the lantern and quickly swiped his arm to remove it from its current location atop of a white fence, the ground rumbled for a moment forcing Mana's entire body to stiffen and burn up with adrenaline. She was wary of just such an eventuality and here it was, justifying her fears. It was much worse to have been fearing in vain than for one's fears to be justified.
Vines as thick as roots of a large tree erupted from underground, reaching out to attack Kidenshi and lock him down. Mana sensed a notable dip in Kidenshi's chakra. So that was why she could not sense any signature from the lanterns themselves – they were made to use the chakra of those that touched them to create their deathtrap.
Without a doubt, the chakra required for such a function to be embedded into the pumpkin lanterns was hidden away, based on a different frequency perhaps, one that neither Mana nor Lithia could pick up on without being aware of another frequency of chakra signals being in play. The magician knew that if she stopped worrying over Kidenshi and Pompomaru and just attempted to check various different specters of frequencies for chakra signature signals – she would find it.
The vines wrapped around Kidenshi's body and began trying to break it in numerous ways. Some of the vines pulled on the boy's limbs, trying to pull them apart violently, some of them wrapped around Kidenshi's throat to silence him as well as completely crush his airway potentially strangling him while others just pressed really hard at random locations of his body with the attempt to squeeze his innards out.
Pompomaru barked like mad while he turned to a buzzing sphere of fur – a quite literal furball. The canine then blitzed about, severing the vines using flashes of his teeth as well as the chakra channeled into each one of the hairs on his fur to shred through the vines. It was a valiant effort but the number of vines that Pompomaru destroyed was nowhere near enough to overcome the reactive trap that kept on draining Kidenshi's chakra and killing him.
Mana leaped into the boy's aid. A couple of handful of steel-tipped cards in well-placed locations managed to loosen and sever enough vines for Kidenshi to escape himself and begin putting in some distance between the lantern and himself.
"Damn… These weren't doing this the last time…" He huffed. The Inuzuka was struggling to breathe as well as had a sizeable chunk of his chakra just taken from him.
"They must have been remotely activated since they were placed. If these are seals that function as traps, it makes sense that they would not be active the whole time." Mana replied. These were still just speculations about how these lanterns worked. It was only now that the magician could see the object of her interest from close enough distance to see its finer details but from a safe one as well.
It was a mahogany colored, gothic-looking shape of an actual lantern with a lone candle slowly rustling inside that turned into a contained firestorm the moment that Kidenshi triggered its defensive mechanisms. While Mana could not tell it herself, she could reasonably put it together that they must have also reeked of pumpkins. Kidenshi's face was quite twisted by the smell, although, in his case, it was tough to say if it was the damage he had suffered after triggering the trap or the resonant smell in the air that bothered the Inuzuka.
"We need to destroy it from afar, without entering its range." Usubane looked at the two genin still perched on the rooftop and breathing easier now that their teammate was safe.
Chominu took a wild leap down and placed his hands on the ground the moment that he landed.
"Earth Style: Practice Brick Jutsu!" the genin yelled out erecting a sturdy wall of dirt right in front of him. With an awesome roar of power that followed a mighty smack, the Akimichi sent the erected wall flying at the lantern. Upon impact, the wall crumbled into smaller chunks of rock and dirt they managed to either miss the nearby houses or just harmlessly smack into their walls and roofs in the shape of lifeless mud with no trace of chakra left inside them.
The lantern was destroyed.