After the medical ninja concluded the valiant task of patching Mana up, the magician felt like wearing a new, freshly ironed shirt. Except that shirt stretched out over her entire body and covered some extremely sensitive skin. Bandages soaked with something sticky but refreshing covered most of the girl's body. Maybe she could still salvage her shows by rebranding herself as the Amazing Mummy Girl.

Her parents were still home, the Nakotsumi house was further away from where the destruction took place, some villagers from the further districts chose to evacuate into the retreat under the Hokage Mountain as well but Mana's parents were not like them. Father's life was too downed by the pain and mother was simply too badass to get frightened by some immortal, genetic monstrosity rampaging across the village streets and pretty much doing whatever it wanted.

A middle-aged woman desperately clutched at her scattering hair. The hectic battle transpiring in the background did not let the woman a moment to settle down and do her job. She was dressed in the Konoha military uniform, full flak jacket and all but if the monster closed up to where the journalists were reporting from – it'd have been of no help. It was just for the casual audience that could have used the realization that things were going ballistic in their own village. A place they considered sacred and safe before and took for granted.

Father was too absorbed by the television screen to hear Mana enter the room through the hallway after dropping her boots aside. She was too tired for etiquette or house rules at this point, given her ghastly looks, it was understandable. Mother was cutting something that was once a living being in the kitchen frantically and efficiently. That was her way of calming down and given that she had the need for it, it was forgivable that she would miss Mana entering as well.

"The monster seems to be quite contained within the south-eastern district. The jounin who were so absorbed with managing the evacuation and making a proper battle plan have now engaged the beast and are attempting to move it away from the village." The woman outright yelled as the noises and shockwaves coming from nearby were difficult to talk over. Once in a while, both the reporter and the crew filming her got tossed around by the resonating battle they were observing.

"Where the hell were you!? What is this!?" mother's voice made Mana flinch. It appeared that the magician got so absorbed by the report that she missed when mother's knife stopped thumping against the cutting board. "Are you OK!?"

The woman launched herself at Mana, she extended her hands for a hug but before the woman collided with the magician at the speed that would have been enough to qualify it as tackling her daughter outright, Nakotsumi Kei stopped and examined the magician's pitiful state.

"I need… A bath." Mana sighed. Her voice was weary. She sounded about as lively and she felt, given that her skin was paler than all the bandages she was wrapped in, that was not very lively.

"Oh, God! You're all bloodied up…" mother cried out, she still struggled to believe the state that Mana left home in. Naturally, if this was just another day, just another mission, she would have never been allowed to leave home in this condition but this was no ordinary day. The medical ninja from before needed to treat more people until the whole Honda affair was over and through.

"It's not as bad as it looks. When they pulled me out I was bleeding all over so the blood needed to be stopped immediately before all the wounds could be treated." Mana showed her mother a handful of new bandages she had to change into. "I need to wash before applying these. Onimaru-san said that I needed to change out of these old ones as soon as I get home."

"The bastard probably could have helped you out more but he was worried you'd run right back at that thing." Father sighed before standing up and approaching the magician too. "This was beyond reckless. I hope we don't need to tell you how disappointed we are that you ran off and nearly got yourself killed."

Mana scratched an itchy sore at the side of her neck. She may have opened a shallow bruise that was halfway patched up because of how minor it was since she felt the area get wet almost immediately after messing with it.

The girl looked down and to the side. Her one uncovered eye looked about as guilty as humanly possible. Taking this was sort of a part of the responsibility as well. Stopping Honda was something Mana felt responsible to do and therefore taking the consequences of failing was a grand part of that package.

"Honestly, if you weren't a ninja on active duty, I'd have grounded you and trapped your room. If I could still tinker that is," father continued before floating off into his past. He clearly looked like he had expected to still be able to tinker before the cruel reality that was a part of his day-to-day life hit him all over again like the very first time. Living without the wonder drugs of Ayushi's cult did not look like all too attractive fate to struggle with.

"Can I go? Onimaru-san was really insistent I washed myself up when I get home." Mana spoke in a husky and submissive tone.

"What's that?" mother picked up the Hyuuga ointment that Mana was still clutching in her hand. Part of the jar was emptied the first time Onimaru applied the bandages on Mana but a bit less than half of it still remained.

"A gift, I need to rub it into the bandages, I think…" Mana yawned and then sighed in succession.

"Right… I imagine there's not much reprimand you with that you haven't put yourself through already. I know how hard you deal with losing…" father scratched the back of his head while his eyes wandered off onto the screen again, observing the hectic and fruitless attempt to relocate Honda. From the looks of it, the monster was more persistent to stay where he was and do whatever the hell he wanted than it was to protect himself from getting wailed on. Honda defended himself harder from attempts to move him than he did from attempts to take him down.

The water burned Mana's irritated and littered with wounds skin like acid. Not on the outside though, while it hurt like hell to just have it running anywhere near, as much as splattering a couple of drops onto it, visually Mana's dirtied, dust-covered and bloodied skin paled back out, making her look almost like a human being.

Despite her most genuine attempts to move her thoughts away from Honda, Mana could not stop having the cloud of her mind linger above the subject pretty much all the time. Whenever the girl did not work consciously on moving her thoughts to something else – the rampaging, loudmouthed, bumbling monstrosity had occupied her thoughts in its oversized entirety.

Mana sighed with sadness reflected figuratively at her breath that gathered on the glass from the inside of her shower cabin. In this state there was no way that she would ever get a shot at Honda again, perhaps that was for the better. Just mentally traveling back to that accursed gambling house and visualizing that fearsome abomination in front of her giving it his utmost best shot at killing Mana in the most gruesome way possible was frightening, even to someone as quirky as the ninja magician.

Still, what a curious monster Honda was together with its fearsome nature. Completely oblivious to pain, no movements wasted on flinching, wincing or reacting in any way to being attacked. All the boy-turned-monster knew was absolute, all-out attack. Even to someone who was supposed to be technically impressive at a defensive hand-to-hand fighting style, evasion and counterattacks like Mana, such a style of combat was panic-inducing.

Usually attacking successfully opened the opponent up, it gave one time and opportunity to follow-up, the presence of pain in their system, the very fact of them taking damage prevented the enemy from attacking back. Even if the enemy counterattacked, pain always provided a split-instant of an opening, whether a telegraph to read an upcoming attack or a window to avoid it. Such was not the case with Honda.

All Honda knew was attacking. If one punched him and did not blow him off his feet with one blow, they risked getting an immediate response. Offense wasted movement. It opened the attacker up as well. It made them invest into awkward attacking motions that made them stiff with inertia. Attacking Honda was as dangerous for this unflinching, ruthless revenge-response as it was to just stand still in front of him and wait for death.

Even if one succeeded at attacking Honda, to what use was it really? The risk of opening oneself up for an immediate counterattack was simply not worth it when the reward of damaging one's opponent was taken away by Honda's regeneration. What a curious ability that was… Completely random with its speed and efficiency. Or perhaps not…

Mana turned the water off and pressed her hand against the glass. That way perhaps it would not tremble this much, fear lit up in the magician's heart, she felt entrapped within this simple comfort item. The magician had to resist with her utmost ability the instinct to crawl and wrap up in the corner in a fetal position as her body demanded her to do. She wanted to bust out, kick out, escape, to scream for help… Anything but not to remain inside…

The girl closed her eyes. She halted her accelerated breathing by simply shutting her breath down entirely before slowly resetting it with conscious commands over its proceedings. As instructed, Mana's body continued to breathe in and out in a controlled pace while the girl's mind slipped away into the star-filled space of her inner self. It looked so vast, so endless and filled to the brim with mystery. Unlike when Mana visited it before, her inner space was not dark. It was almost dark sapphire in color with azure nebulae spreading across like candy cotton.

Then the magician rebuilt the entire ground floor of the Hanada gambling house where she faced Honda. She observed her first shots blow the monster's flesh open and watched those very same wounds stitch up immediately. The visions and sounds fast-forwarded in a breakneck pace until they stopped at when Usubane was hammering at the beast, holding him down for an entire minute.

Mana's hand reached out. Even while she saw nothing in the inner space of her own mind, she could physically feel her limb touch something cold once more. A glass prison meant for hygiene. The magician leaned her head forward, feeling the cold resistance of that very same surface that remained out of sight for her mental self. With a swipe of her hand to the side, Mana opened her shower door and walked out, wrapping herself in a towel and being extra careful not to look at herself in the mirror. At least not before she reapplied the bandages.

She could feel a nasty lump in her right eye. It must have been the same injury from before aggravated to the nth degree. As much as the magician did not wish to dwell on it, she may have lost an entire eye or just vision with it. It may have been too grievous of a wound for the medical ninja to look at properly with Onimaru focusing solely on things that threatened Mana's life immediately via blood loss. The girl pressed a rag against her right side and tightened the bandages to hold it in place.

If she could not see with her right eye, it would not hurt to close it down and wrap it up. Everything hurt. Just like washing her irritated and bruised body hurt before, reapplying the bandages made Mana wince, whine, and quiver in pain. While she was bandaging her middle section, the wound on her back, where a bunch of debris bruised her and almost crushed her spine before, made the magician bite her lip in pain hard enough to draw blood.

After the bandaging part was over, wrapping herself in the bathrobe was much softer and felt much cozier. Even if the extent of her injuries, and the means she had to go through to hide them and recover from them, robbed the magician of the warm and soothing feeling of the robe rubbing against her skin, Mana felt like she should have been grateful that there was a numbing layer of bandages in between the robe and her bruised and broken body.

Mana's one working and uncovered eye shot open. What if… When the magician first saw Honda in the sewers, he was at his strongest. He had faced multiple B-Rank ninja along the way to the gambling house and suffered no injuries. He moved at lightning-pace meaning he wasted no time recovering whatsoever and yet when he did reach the gambling house he may not have been stopped per se, but he was inconvenienced by the strictest definition of the word. The only thing that changed in between those two periods was Honda's chakra signature.

Honda was not strictly immortal and invincible, not like Shigin was at all. In some ways, Honda was a superior specimen compared to what Guru Ayushi tried to achieve but in some ways, he was a massive step back, likely because Honda was started way before some of the in-between experiments. He was the magnum opus Ayushi was working through this entire time, he embodied both the man's early work when he was unfamiliar with what he was doing and merely getting acquaintanced with the work he would do in the future and the man's peak.

Honda's regenerative abilities very clearly deteriorated. That was not to say that the longer Honda fought, the weaker he got, merely that his regenerative abilities depended greatly on his chakra signature which was drastically unstable. Unlike normal people, Honda did not have a singular chakra signature that he used. That was why at times Honda's chakra sky-rocketed whereas in others he was impossible to sense at all. Whatever other bodies were involved in Honda's making were alternative sources for chakra and Honda drew from them whenever he needed, most likely unwillingly, based on his emotional state.

This was important. Mana needed to let somebody know of this. It could have led to the secret of stopping the monster. If one pressed on and drove the chakra signature to the very edge of Honda's limit without making Honda lose his humanity to the point where he tapped into the other chakra signatures, they would have timed Honda out and made him vulnerable. Injuries would actually stick. One did not necessarily have to kill Honda immediately to stop him!

The magician walked up to her room, limping on her right leg as her knees felt worse than that time she fell off of the stack of boxes and busted them open pretty badly as a kid. Mana's lips curved to the upside when she realized how foolish she even was for comparing those two injuries. Right now, she was inches away from passing out, a good punch away from dying outright.

While in her room, slowly, the magician sat in a meditative position and straightened her back out. Something that made her aching ribs and spine crack about but Mana pushed through the pain. Who needed experimentation and drugs when she had some good old meditation and willpower, that tool that served her so well early-on in her life…

If Mana was to do this, to leave back and into the fray of battle, if only to warn and brief the ninja actually doing the fighting, she would need all the advantages she could get. Some augmentation would not hurt… Sadly, it has only been a couple of hours since the collapse of the building and she could not have been even at one-tenth of her total limit. It took all Mana had to survive a single, meaningless shove from Honda, with just around eight percent she may as well have not even tried defending herself if push came to shove.

The magician started meditating again. Visualizing her own network, feeling the movement of her own spiritual and physical energies. It was like looking at a creek with massive ridges during the draft, only a trickle instead of a mighty, flushing stream that was supposed to wash the dryness away and satisfy the figurative thirst of the magician's entire inner world.

She had not trained this way since the time in the Rabbit Caves, and yet whenever she did, it helped her increase her chakra signature at all times. Looking at the chakra nodes and watching for meaningless lumps of chakra improperly controlled and left to burn away inside her system. Every time Mana used a jutsu, her body mustered up the chakra needed to perform it but the control of no single person was exactly perfect. There were always leftovers, rejected runt from the litter that just stayed around meaninglessly inside one's system, building up like pus and waiting to be shoved back into the system.

This stimulation of her network would not be much. It may have increased her remaining chakra from eight percent of Mana's total to twelve, increasing her overall chakra limits by a good four percent overall, not that it mattered if she got killed in action… Either way, if she knew a way for Honda to make it out alive, a way to stop him before he could kill any more people, it would have been irresponsible of her to just sit at home and lick her wounds. She needed to press on, she needed to move, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much she wanted to just tune out and go to sleep while the sky above her was red and sounds of battle echoed in the distance.

Mana dropped on her feet, feeling an inch of her strength flooding back into her body and numbing the pain of her busted and bruised knees having to cushion the fancy leap off her bed that broke the girl's static meditation. The magician quietly snuck downstairs, looking at the still working TV screen and her father stretched out on the sofa. His chest lifted up and down slowly, in a rhythmic fashion. Mana may not have been exactly the epitome of stealth, oftentimes she loved being flashy and loud but the slumbering patriarch of the Nakotsumi family had no hopes of noticing Mana leave.

"Once again, I must ask you, where is the Hokage during this crisis? Is his role not to spearhead the attack on the monster? Should he not have immediately sprung into action and disposed of Honda the moment he entered the village and it became public knowledge to his office?"

The news has passed the reporting from the scene of the battle stage and had reached the fruitless debate and finger-pointing stage. The television crew was desperate for actual news but not as desperate as they were at milking this attack for every inch of the time its succulent, figurative tit.

"That's nonsense, Junsei-san, you know as well as I do that the Hokage's role is not to swing fists like some brute on the battlefield. His role is to inspire the villagers as well as those on the front, to manage the logistics of the defense. If we look back at history, the most efficient defenses were managed by men of smarts and inspiration, strategic geniuses, not self-appointed heroes."

"You say that but we do not see Lord Sixth anywhere near a camera, addressing his village either. How is a common villager supposed to know that the head embodiment of his security, the avatar of strength and everything a ninja is supposed to be isn't hiding in the mountain of his superior predecessors."

"Now, Junsei-san, that's a loaded question and you know it! If we should blame something, it's the Sannin, just where is Juugo Kusagoro right now?"

"I disagree…"

"Mana?" This crying voice was unlike those babble-spreading others from the screen. It was mother's. "Where are you going?"

Mother was talking quietly, she did not intend on waking father up because that would have only caused more ruckus and quarrel but it was self-evident, it did not take a master people-reader to tell – she was pleading Mana to turn around and stay. To lie that she was just going out for some fresh air or something like that… Anything to keep her worried heart from bursting out her chest as if it had brutally swung a sledgehammer to do so.

"I… I know how to stop him. Without killing him, without letting Honda kill anyone else. I can do it. If anyone else dies with me knowing that I could have stopped it all. If those ninja kill Honda when I know I could have stopped it before it went to that… What's the point of living with that kind of disgrace?" Mana replied, mirroring her mother's whisper.

There were so many emotions, so many things running through mother's face and her head at that moment. The woman could not decide if she should have just flipped out on the magician, just scream all of the pent-up worry, all of the deceitful serenity from after Mana came back home and the woman knew that her child was now safe again, if injured badly or to just smack some sense into her daughter outright.

"It's not like I can stop you…" mother looked down. "There's nothing to gain in just standing in your way."

"I'm not going out there to be a hero. I'm out there to deliver a message, mother. I know I can't beat Honda the way I am now and I do not intend to try. I don't care about bragging rights or the honor of winning against something like that, what I am after is the same thing I was always after – to make sure that everyone survives." Mana's figure disappeared from the hallway with the door silently closing not a full moment afterward.

"Even if I have already failed at that…" Mana finished that thought while she was by herself, moving across the emptied streets of Konohagakure that varied from looking just like they always looked except for the hustle and bustle to reminding of a literal war zone in the narrow areas where Honda had made his way through, plowing through any measly resistance he met along the way like it was nothing.

"He was fighting, straining his regeneration this whole day non-stop. It must be at the boiling point just about now. It must be…" Mana tried calming herself down both to qualm her rampant fears raging like wildfire somewhere inside her ribcage and to move her thoughts away from her sore and broken body and her burning from exhaustion muscles. Even getting to the battle would be a torturous trip…