Mana's eyes raced across the countless alleyways, paths and possible turns. It seemed like the grotesque, barely living people that the Allied Ninja sought answers from could have been in any single pocket of shadows, hiding in any building that was not overly lively at this time of day. Her eyes working overtime and brimming with focus was only a triviality, her sensory was the real ace that the team of Allied Ninja bet on.
"T-There!" the girl's eyes opened wide in shock of picking up a distinct, all too familiar signature. "They're over there." She looked back at the Allied Ninja who were following her. Most of them looked about as surprised as the magician was that Mana managed to find them this easily. It was like the black ones were barely even hiding after eluding their pursuers in the sewers.
"Why would they regroup again after losing us?" Junichi mumbled to himself.
"It must be a trap of some kind. Perhaps they have another ninja with them to fight us again?" Rushira raised a valid point.
"Is there a stronger signature with them?" Junichi asked the magician without offering her the pleasure of a look when she was being addressed.
"There is not. However…" Mana looked back, to the east, the west and the south as similar signatures popped up all over the range of her sensory. "I'm picking up more and more groups just like this all over the village."
"Maybe they're all gonna surrender after seeing how kickass I was?" S-Crew joked while rubbing his nose that got itchy from his boastful type of humor.
"Or they are trying to split us up." Junichi closed his eyes before looking back at Mana with one of his strict glares. "They seem to be pretty desperate about splitting us up recently, aren't they?"
"Don't we just need any single one of them?" Rushira wondered. "It does not really matter if they're grouping up all over the village, does it? We can just attack any group, snag any one of them and leave them. They won't offer much resistance in their state."
"From the size of their chakra, I'd say they are just as strong as normal civilians." Mana provided her ally with additional information. She just wanted to supply her group with as much support as she could to shake off the unwelcome reputation of a possible traitor. "Although, we do not know just who those people are. They seemed to be bossed around by that ninja back there, maybe they aren't really in control of their actions? In that case, we should try and rescue as many of them as we can."
"So, basically, what you're saying is – let's split up, to confront all of the groups, right?" Junichi looked at Mana with a mean glare.
The girl swallowed a tough gulp. Her hands began trembling but, with a tap of her foot, she managed to play it off as anger and desperation. She desperately wanted these Allied Ninja to trust her but when the choice was between saving some poor people who may have been experimented on and kidnapped for some unclear purpose or looking good in front of international ninja superheroes, as far as Mana was concerned, it was not a choice at all.
"Yes. Those people were unrecognizable. Given how they were being treated like cattle or slaves, there is a reason to assume they may just be the missing people. If that is the case, we should recover them as well as uncover their abusers." Mana spoke up while pressing her quivering left to her chest with her right palm. Her voice was trembling so her feeble attempts to look strong may not have gone as successfully as she wanted but, as the threat to human lives began to slither more and more of itself on the table, the way she appeared to others began mattering significantly less to the magician with each passing moment.
"In that case, let's split up. One person per group, capture the walking corpses and move on to the other group. There are chuunin patrolling the village, they should take care of the captured ones once they're in your control while you move on." Junichi, much to everyone's shock, agreed to Mana's plead.
Everything this man thought and did made less and less sense the more this investigation went on. He appeared distrustful and iron-strict to Mana yet when she played right into the frame the circumstances forced her into he spoke and chose favorably for the magician and completely opposite to what he previously revealed himself thinking.
"Hey, are you sure?" S-Crew looked at his colleague.
"Can you handle yourself if you encounter another ninja in your way, Mana?" Rushira looked more concerned with Mana's chances of defeating an undercover opponent such as the one encountered before.
"It was true, the previous opponent was outside the realm of opponents I can defeat, however, my priority is not to defeat the enemy, it is to save those poor things." Mana sighed while anxiety continued to blaze on in her chest, the feeling was similar to falling straight into cold water. Any semblance of air driven out from one's body, breathing forced to proceed irregularly, making it increasingly difficult to draw new, steady breaths in.
"If you get in trouble, use your fancy light show ninjutsu to alert us, even if we are nowhere close to you, someone will notice it in the middle of a ninja village. These opponents will not fight you at their full strength in fear of alerting more attention than they are comfortable with. You should be just fine." Junichi affirmed Mana and, strangely enough, the encouraging words from someone who used to be so strict and distrustful soothed the magician a little. Air once again found its way through Mana's messy and congested airways and into her chest.
"How exactly will we find them without Mana though?" S-Crew scratched his head.
"Give us as many locations as you can." Junichi looked at the magician before every one of the Allied Ninja but the cold giant handed the magician their pocket maps. Given how they were all foreigners, things turned out quite favorably that they had points of reference for Mana to mark on.
In a handful of moments, the magician marked as many of the exact spots as she could, before wrangling a bunch of arrows to the approximate direction where she was unsure where exactly the signatures came from. The farther the signature, the less sure she was, sometimes being able to tell only the general direction and an approximate distance. Regardless of this bump in the road, these poor people wanted the Allied Ninja to find them, whether as a plea for help, or for springing their trap.
"Very well, scatter!" Junichi ordered the squad as the Allied Ninja as well as Mana blurred out from the vision of normal civilians during their quick leap to the upper levels of the village where ninja that needed to move quicker than usual moved. Every single one of them had a personal emergency, possibly not that much less immediate than that of the Allied Ninja and Mana's…
The hunched bodies of humanoid figures laid crouched in a circle as if gathering around a singular point of interest, their own personal fire in the middle of a blizzard. Not even Mana's sandals tapping right behind them during her landing, something that was extremely clumsy of her, alerted these curious and poor things. The magician's body was not in her complete control with the amount of anxiety running through her veins, it felt like having magma running in her veins, burning her up from inside. Given that overwhelming feeling, it was not that hard to understand her lacking success in the stealth department.
Looking at these poor, walking corpses from behind made one truly question if they were human, to begin with. As black as the shadows they hung on to, bones protruding from every surface it found the chance to, even if they were once human, now they resembled but ghosts of the men these things once were.
"How do you know me?" Mana spoke up. She pondered for a brief moment if she should attack and try taking these things out before they got their chance to escape again or speak to them, what exactly she should say in the latter case. This was not the brightest thing that came to mind, however in her terrified state thinking clearly and acting upon those reasonable thoughts would have been equal to a miracle.
"Mana-sama…" a bunch of husky voices replied to the magician as the poor humanoids all fell to the ground as if bowing to a royalty of some kind. This was not just respect, not what Mana felt for her superiors, this was no admiration either. This was worship.
"W-What's the meaning of this?" the girl cried out, even while in the face of her own worship, she took a fearful step back and found herself pressing her hands against her chest again so that they stopped trembling. Her sensory was beaming in all directions, waiting for the hidden shepherd to these poor creatures to attempt and attack her as this could not have been anything but a measly attempt to confuse her into lowering her guard.
"You're alone. Good." A voice came from behind Mana. The magician jumped up and looked back. She would have yelled out after the fear in her lungs tipped the lid but she was so overwhelmed by the emotion that it robbed her of speech and voice completely at that moment.
A moment later the magician felt the chakra of this curious new player on the board rising up. He was also familiar with the chakra signature suppression technique that the magician was beginning to encounter more and more recently. She should have been smarter, this enigmatic person was no threat with his signature suppressed, it was now that he finally unchained it that he was truly dangerous.
It was a man, one dressed identically to the reptilian shinobi before but the face and every open surface of this one was covered with strange, bony threads that expanded in intricate net-like vessels of bone all over the man's skin. It may have been an outer layer of some intricate armor, for all Mana could have put together in her cornered and trembling state.
"It will make talking to you much less troublesome." The mysterious ninja sighed in relief. By that point, Mana was ready for a certain battle to break out so this social objective surprised her a bit. The surprise was no counterbalance to fear, however, it was yet another stone on the terror's side of the scale.
"Talk?" Mana muttered.
"Correct. This may be a little early to include you but the attention to his plans has escalated beyond his predictions as well." The oddball continued to speak in riddles. For someone who was about to include Mana into whatever was going on here, the man really had a knack about leaving a whole lot of information out. He was being careful, sizing the magician and her mental state up, predicting a possible reaction. He disagreed with whosever idea it was to tell Mana whatever this man intended to tell her.
"Before you tell me anything, just tell me this one thing. Are these people actually the people that disappeared?" Mana gestured at the poor, rotten souls grouping up behind her and continuously bowing and mumbling admirations at the girl.
"If I answer, you will be preset to oppose whatever his ideas are. You are putting me in a tough spot, Mana-san." The enigmatic, bone-web-covered ninja scratched the back of his head, as his spiky fingers rubbed against the bone on his neck, it let out a gut-wrenching, crunchy sound.
"You're in a tough spot? I'm confronted by you in a dark alleyway, surrounded by these poor things. As we speak right now, Allied Ninja are putting their lives at risk against Konoha ninja who may or may not have been involved in Konoha's own people disappearing. I'm not sure if I'm confronted with a village-wide conspiracy and am about to be taken out because of how much I've put together or if the village is still oblivious to what's happening." Mana snapped back at the ninja, she was different from before. A lot more mad. The respect that this enigmatic ninja showed her gave her some space to step forward and establish her own position before she slips off the bridge completely.
"You are reading this entirely wrong, Mana-san, I swear. This is all for your sake, this is all because of your ideals, all inspired by them." The man stepped up forward himself. Mana faltered, fear got the better of her and she took a step back. Whatever leverage she may have had over the man because of the respect he had for her, for whatever reason, she may have just squandered it.
"Yes or no. Answer the question." Mana cried out. Even if she was defeated in the imaginary plane on which the battle for the dictatorship of the terms of the conversation was fought, she still showed some fangs.
"Very well… Yes. All of these souls are actually the people that have disappeared. As you can see, they did not disappear at all, nor did they ever reappear. They've never truly been gone." The ninja dropped a bomb on the magician. Mana looked deep into his eyes and his gestures. His appearance was bombastic and extravagant making his true character tough to tell for sure but… As far as the magician could tell – he was honest. Even if this all was a big lie, this one believed in it.
"Don't even start walking this path. Look at these people, look at what's been done to them! How can you dare tell me this is somehow my fault?" Mana gestured in the direction of the poor worshipping souls.
"It was not Guru's command that they deny their own wellbeing this way. Their states are a result of fanatical devotion to your and Guru's ideals." The ninja replied. He did look a bit irked by Mana's choice of words, there could have been no doubt, had it been anyone else but the magician that had spoken them, there'd have been a fight, regardless, he managed to hold himself in order and behave.
"This is the second time I've heard about this Guru. Is he behind it all? This plan of yours?" Mana asked.
"Obviously. Who else do you think could take up such an epic undertaking? Look, this location is not entirely safe for me or these poor people. Can we please relocate? I assure you that no harm will come to you there." The man requested a change of location. This time it was much easier to tell, even through the face of her own fear staring Mana right in the eyes, that the man was being completely genuine and had no intention of hurting Mana.
"You'll do one better, if I go with you, you release these poor people." The magician pointed at the group.
"This is a bit unreasonable, Mana-san. They are here by their own choice, you're asking me to use force against them and keep them away from their life's work? Needless to say, their resolve and faith in the mission is also Guru's strength, the blood in his veins, without their help his mission and yours as well cannot be fulfilled."
"You misunderstood." Mana shook her head. "I meant these people. You ask me something I would normally not do, as a guarantee, I ask something from you in return, something small and reasonable, just to establish a connection and show good faith. As absolutely revolting everything about this situation is, I am willing to listen, for now."
The magician could barely believe her own words but she did need to hear this thing out. Even if everything about this was just as revolting to her sense of morals as the sight of the degradation of these poor people was to her sense of sight, this man was spilling precious information and offering to take Mana to whatever lair these conspirators had, one of possibly many, but one more she'd otherwise get to see. No matter how she felt about this whole affair, she needed to entertain this offer, if anything, to extract information and see what could be done about freeing every single one of these poor souls.
"I see…" the enigmatic shinobi looked relieved. "That is indeed very intelligent of you, this must be a result of the training you did with the Intelligence Division recently…"
"Were you spying on me?" Mana bit back while her body subconsciously surrendered to the rhythm of slow movement of the fellow Konoha ninja leading her to whichever location he deemed fitting to spill Mana everything she wanted to know.
"We had to. You are a precious figure in our work. The muse behind everything we hope to bring about. The one young maiden that inspired Guru, a man that had long since lost his hope and inspiration. We could accept no more fiascos like that bout of yours against Yamata no Orochi. It must have been painful to see Nishiki and his snake-like features." The mysterious ninja was beginning to reveal just how much Mana was unwillingly involved in these disappearances and just how important of a role she played in the dogma that fueled this conspiracy, the means that this importance led these people to take up because of that importance.
"I've acquired a new set of nightmares since then…" Mana looked away, pressing her trembling hand to her skirt with her other free hand.
"I see… I assure you, Nishiki has nothing to do with the Ninja Snakes, in fact, ever since his DNA was altered and spliced with that of an unwilling participant, we are sort of at a conflict with the snakes." The man sighed, the very idea of Mana's trouble appeared to have a visual effect on the ninja's mood. One would have been foolish to underestimate the depth of fanaticism.
"Is that what that was?" Mana asked. "I wasn't sure what could make a man grow four snake heads from their back and get a scaly skin…"
"Yes. You see, Guru is actively working on gene splicing, I myself am a result of a fusion between a man and a deer. This net tissue over my skin, this armor of sorts, is like the hardened horns of a Ninja Deer from the Nara clan forest. It will all make sense when I explain the mission to you, for now just know that this is all just exploration of the uncanny regenerative abilities of the animal world."
"Deer isn't the first animal that comes to mind in that department," Mana observed.
"True, Guru's experimentation is vast and varies in success but his work is noble and intentions pure. I must thank you for giving me this chance. If I screwed something of such profound importance up, I'm sure that not even this regenerating armor of horn-tissue would save me from my own despair and Guru's disappointment." The man smiled. From under the web of horns that covered this man's skin, his smile looked creepy, like the smirk of a maniac from behind the bars. Except, in this case, the bars hung on the man's skin.
Strangely enough, as Mana approached the highest point of danger in this investigation she was ever in, her fear was beginning to settle down. Perhaps it merely reached the highest point and failed to uphold it, overloaded and died out. Maybe Mana's fear for her own life turned to indifference with the ever-growing escalation of the stakes against her survival.
Either way, the true intentions and the true revelation of this mystery still laid ahead and Mana, without questioning herself for a moment, kept on walking to it like a moth to a flame.