A flock of hawks took off from the ground where they've been feasting on a pair of chickens. The birds of prey ate unhindered by the owners of the farm birds now that they were otherwise predisposed. It did not take long for Kiyomi to catch up to Hanshin. If the special jounin had attempted to get away from her, to get anywhere he badly wanted to be, she'd have been left in the dust. Clutching at straws and tracking footprints, moving fifty meters in the right direction every minute or so. May as well have been standing still at that pace. No. Hanshin was purposefully moving slow. The Yamanaka knew better than to assume it was to give her a chance to catch up, he could not have given fewer singed hairs of a rat's behind.
"Ease up." Hanshin finally acknowledged her existence, of course, it would have been with a command. While the words may have been those of an advice, the tone implied the former. It was unlikely that the bastard had enough empathy in him to advise anything. All he knew was how to make sure that nothing around him got in his way or slowed him down, except himself, when he wanted to, apparently.
"Aren't we in a rush?" Kiyomi wondered. Giving in to the command of this man made her naturally feel a bit rebellious, if he was to get what he wanted, he'd have to work for it and convince her. It was an illusion of power that she had a choice in the matter but it was sweet enough to give it a little lick.
"We're tracking a predator that's been hurt. He'll be wary now, warier than he's ever been. We need to make him believe that he's the predator and not a lump of meat and fur again. Predators only pounce when they firmly believe in their status, hunting needs effort and effort is the currency of the natural economy." Hanshin explained. He was not irritated, in fact, he looked a tad amused and proud in his own image. Come to think of it, Kiyomi didn't remember a time that the latter had ever left his duffel bag of emotion.
"You've lowered your armor, haven't you?" Kiyomi turned at the team's leader.
"Goes without saying, otherwise, what's the point? Hanshin did not realize this before but Hanshin is glad you came. You're worn and wounded, the smell of blood will draw the slug out." The avatar of masculine perfection bent and twist his lower back in a way that exposed both his neck and all of the blind spots on his back. Not even the Hyuuga, the clan with perfect vision and awareness of their surroundings could track all around them, with someone like Hanshin, his blind spots were even greater, however, this time this worked to his advantage.
"What's the point if he's not a sensor?" Kiyomi sighed, feeling more and more breaths soothe her lungs. Like a freezing waterfall that took out the fire inside her chest. She took some mean blows while she was unconscious, the mental trauma she suffered while inside Meiko's body was not something to be dismissed, it might take a while to shrug the creeping dread off completely.
"Oh, he'll be able to tell." Hanshin grinned while using his hands to cover up his eyes, a bold taunt for his opponent. A call for the childish instinct that told one that the one seeking was still counting and therefore oblivious, vulnerable… "People like him, they can always tell weakness, vulnerability. They smell it."
A silver glow streaked from the corner of a nearby tent, shining just enough to pierce the hole in the fur that covered it and reach the curious eyes of the Konoha ninja who were looking at all directions and scanning for their target. Even though the light remained consistent in its brightness, after the initial spark, it became blinding, irritating and overpowering, both Kiyomi and Hanshin stumbled back and covered up their eyes in response to the vexing reaction.
A shape of an athletic young woman weaved and stranded into being, the rays of light that gave it color and appearance spun and tied around one another like a spider's web. The long, red hair of the female blacksmith flowed with vigor behind the blacksmith's back.
"M-Meiko?" Kiyomi slurred, her balance felt wobbly, strength was leaving her muscle fiber as if it was being drained by a vacuum. Soon enough, a second shape began forming beside the blacksmith, rippling like a mirage as it revealed its deceitful appearance and wrapped its limbs around Kiyomi's affection. A young woman dressed in Lolita-style clothes, pale in skin and spreading the tendrils of shadow that was her hair and the endless black void of her eyes across.
"Meiko-chan… She's such a bother… Let's kill her." The Uchiha snake whispered into Meiko's ear, scaling the blacksmith's body just like a snake slithered a tree.
"Yeah, a bother… Let's kill her." Meiko nodded.
Kiyomi raised her hands up in the Yamanaka hijutsu hand seal position. Her vision blurred, nausea threatened to flip the contents of the Yamanaka's innards inside out. Less than perfect conditions for aiming. Meiko charged forward, shooting her foot down right at where Kiyomi was standing. Her whimpering balance and the desperate need to use her technique before all of her remaining strength fades. Before her nightmares claim her forced the blonde to stay put and accept the punishment of nightmare version of Meiko.
"Mind Body Switch!" Kiyomi managed to chant before Meiko's foot smashed her own with a stomp weighty enough to match the severity of sky itself falling down. Kiyomi screamed out but her pain was heard by no one as her consciousness had already been sent away in the shape of a spiritual chakra construct. Lithia Uchiha and Meiko both bent their heads to the side, one to the left, other – to the right, leaving a gap just wide enough to let Kiyomi's consciousness miss the two and fly off into the skies above.
The Uchiha girl vaulted off of Meiko's body, digging her knee deep into Kiyomi's gut as she landed atop the Yamanaka's body. The young woman leaned up to Kiyomi's face and licked her cheek while her hands wrapped around the blonde's throat.
"Let me snuff her out for you so we can be together, Meiko-chan…" Lithia whispered to Kiyomi's ear. These nightmarish mirages did not care if the floating consciousness could hear their words, truth be told, the Yamanaka felt and heard every tiniest bit. Away from her body that was slowly being choked out by its own inner demons, trapped in a bubble of spiritual energy that was as sluggish as a thought and the only option being to just observe her own pitiful demise.
It would have been a pathetic way to die…
A majestic hawk swooped down from above, smashing its face and its beak right into the back of the head of a balding spy disguising himself as a foreign diplomat. Blood sprayed from Kiyomi's busted nose as the face of the hawk was nowhere nearly as durable as Kiyomi's own head would have been but it did not matter, the dizzied and surprised spy fumbled over on the ground, an entire specter of stones scattered on the ground beneath him, falling out from inner pockets of his coat.
The hawk wrapped its claws around the silver stone and took flight. The gift of oxygen that everyone took for granted returned to Kiyomi's chest while her consciousness returned back to her body from the temporary sanctuary of the hawk. The Yamanaka rolled on her side and coughed out the blood that very nearly choked her up while she was away after she had broken her nose and covered her face with her palm.
"Stones? So that is how you control people's minds…" Hanshin's cocky voice sounded like mana from the sky for once. "Hanshin understands now… You scum must be from Iwagakure, these must be chakra-conductive stones through which you channel your techniques… In that case…"
The pitiful shape of the tripped over spy attempted to scurry up and scoop his stones up, try and wrap his slimy fingers around at least one so that he could use one of his techniques but all of them simultaneously shattered into dust and lost their hue after a myriad of black flashes with golden trail crushed them into powder, making these miraculous, almost gem-like stones into nothing more than simple, grey, lifeless hunks of gravel. Yet another testament of the awesome speed and might of Hanshin's fully shaped Black Vicious that once again was given use now that the fooled predator was lured out.
"Damn it… Silver, purple, blue, green… All of my stones…" the groveling spy lamented over the destruction of his stones. No ninja with any hint of pride would have sniveled like this unless their only method of fighting was tarnished.
Kiyomi turned to the special jounin, then back at the stones that the strong western breezes coming in from the Wind Country deserts farther to the west were carrying like ashes. Hanshin used his fully formed Black Vicious to destroy these stones, they must have been brimming with chakra if he deemed such drastic measures necessary to destroy them. What a peculiar method for fighting…
"Mind control, illusions… Who knew what other types of rays your stones could emit if channeled with enough chakra. What a dangerous worm. We should just kill him right here…" Hanshin grinned with eyes psychotic enough to make even Kiyomi believe that the Konoha ninja was about to punish the beaten spy.
The Yamanaka heiress knew better than that. The rational part of her kept calming her down that Hanshin would not just waste this man without first acquiring every tiniest bit of useful information from him. Information… That was what Hanshin was after.
The Iwagakure spy shook and squirmed on his knees, the prospect of his own mortality being reminded to him was not a pleasant one on him. The man closed his eyes and ground his teeth for a while, as the muscles on his face tensed and shifted around, sweat began dripping from his forehead and running down his cheeks and chin. Then, in a matter of his resolve having been gathered in its entirety, the spy opened his eyes.
"Do it then! You Konoha ninja will not enjoy this for long…" the man gritted his teeth and prepared for death.
"Oh? You're just a distraction then? Your devotion is admirable, yet useless." Kiyomi was surprised to see how easily Hanshin extracted information just through things that the spy said or, more exactly, what he implied. This spy had pride in him, more than anyone initially may have thought, but that very same pride now served as a hindrance that very nearly made him betray his village on accident.
"I can interrogate him, see what he knows." Kiyomi stepped forward, still clutching her busted nose that was beginning to bleed less and less while the chakra circulation treated these conditions as those of an active battlefield and her body did its best to keep the blonde in as much of a fighting shape as humanly possible. "I'm not in a great shape at the moment, but it will only take one mind switch to see what he knows."
"Very well…" Hanshin stepped back, letting Kiyomi step up in his place and form the Yamanaka hijutsu seal right up in the spy's face. A ghastly howling noise spread across the Yordalaran field that the three were in while Kiyomi's body fumbled lifeless with Hanshin only scowling and sneering at the powerlessness of the Yamanaka while she left her body instead of catching her. Even moving out his hand in front of the body of the falling girl would have gotten into Hanshin's way. Admittedly, while he hesitated to do so, the avatar of masculine perfection did kick Kiyomi's body onto the side so that she did not drown in the puddle of her own nosebleed.
Entering someone else's mind felt weird. Especially when one did not attempt to control the body from within, in which case it was simply the case of having to deal of seeing yourself as someone else when you looked at yourself and being able to do different things when you tried doing them. No, Kiyomi kept her consciousness deep inside the mental realm, her grip onto the enemy's mind was much stronger that way and she could focus on extracting information instead of managing both the physical and mental aspects of a foreign body.
"Stop hiding. I've given your consciousness more than enough leeway to form, I need it able to speak." Kiyomi's thoughts resonated through the mind of the enemy spy. She wanted him to know that it was no coincidence that his consciousness was not feeling any pressure or locked down by difficult to overcome mental barriers.
"I've already told you that I won't tell you anything. What makes you think I'll tell you more when you're inside my mind?" the consciousness of the foreign spy manifested itself in an ethereal image of the man's face formed by glowing, phantasmal substance and covering most of his mind. With a blink of Kiyomi's eyes, the man's consciousness collapsed into an unrecognizable fraction of what it appeared as initially while that of the Yamanaka heiress bloated and grew far surpassing even the initial girth of the consciousness of the mind's owner.
"Well… Because I'm inside your mind." Kiyomi replied with almost childish glee. "You may not understand this, to be fair, I think only Mana, my magician friend does, she's a genjutsu user, you see, but people tend to think that it is easy to beat illusions and consciousness tampering. All you have to do is understand that something is an illusion and you won't be afraid, right? All you have to do is not say anything and you'll beat it, right?"
The spy grunted in discomfort and emitted a weak wail while the pressure on his consciousness built up. He did not say anything but his silence was enough for the Yamanaka to understand that he merely did not want to admit that she literally read off his mind without even trying, ironically enough, while being inside of his mind.
"Truth be told, anyone thinking that way always folds. They lose for one simple reason – they're arrogant. They think that when the nightmares come they will have the same level of awareness, the same calm and level mind they have when acting cocky. You feel it, don't you? The pressure to your consciousness, the innate desire to tell me something, tell me the truth or tell me lies, but in your current state, can you even tell which is which?" Kiyomi's thoughts resonated like an almighty declaration of divine law inside the poor man's mind. The more the Yamanaka showed off her point, the more the man's consciousness folded in on itself and more pathetic it continued to become.
"We've lost too much, too much is at stake… Do your worst, I won't tell you anything…" slurry, weakened and disorganized thoughts spread through the realm of the spy's own mind.
"See? You're already talking to yourself right now… How sane can you possibly be?" Kiyomi's thoughts thundered in return. "Or maybe you're talking to me still, who can really tell? Not you, not until I make this pressure stop."
"W-What is this jutsu? This…" the spy continued his pitiful resistance against the inevitable.
"It's not what you're used to, not the method of interrogation you've been taught to defend against, right? I assume you've expected something as elementary as the Psychic Transmission technique? Only I knew that a spy like you would be well trained in resisting interrogation, I didn't really have chakra to spare on half-measures. Skipped right to the big stuff… Now, tell me about what you've lost, what the stakes are?"
"You wish… You're just sweet talking me, waiting for something useful to slip out. You're trying to get me talking about meaningless things, then you'll slowly move closer to the topic before I don't notice the fact I'm spilling the beans." The spy revealed just how well versed in interrogation methods he was. Truthfully, he was already giving Kiyomi plenty, without even realizing. The more Kiyomi pressed against the spy's mind, the more of his thoughts, his feelings and memories she could access at will by fooling the man's mind that her consciousness was no longer that of an invader but that of its owner. The more the man resists, the weaker resistance he will provide, the more battered the defenses around his mind, memories, and feelings will be.
"Oh, so now the sacrifices you've suffered, the stakes you stand to lose are all meaningless? Either you've already started losing it or you've revealed who you really are under pressure. Nothing like a little grind to reveal an ugly black diamond amongst the coal…"
"That's not… You'd have done the same thing in my shoes. If your people were at war, slowly losing a war on their own turf, only being able to postpone the inevitable slaughter of your people, the upcoming destruction of your home against the most powerful military on Earth that thinks just because it's so strong it can push people around and take away people's livelihoods..."
"I see…" Kiyomi loosened her grip a bit. "So you're here for military strength, it is possible that Yordalarans might provide cheap military force, their resources might feed your own military for a while…"
"Not just that. Don't take us for complete fools, we don't just intend to postpone the outcome of the war, we're looking to create it." The spy cracked. "Yordalarans will do the fighting while their resources will help our own military recover. Once their resources have served us and their own manpower has run dry, then we can push Kumogakure back, finally beat the strongest military in the world and reclaim our livelihood."
"So you're willing to sacrifice this entire settlement of people just to get ahead in trading stones? And to think you've tried getting the moral high ground on me a while back…" Kiyomi pressed the man's consciousness some, released the pressure entirely before applying a greater grip. It was similar to how boa strangled their prey.
"I can't believe you still don't get it! Coltan isn't just some stupid market, some simple business for Iwagakure. It is and always has been its export, its pride, and joy! Imagine if one day Konoha wouldn't be able to trade because some stronger village decided that it will now be the sole supplier of… Wood… The Will of Fire? Whatever you people trade…" the spy grumbled. He'd have likely snapped even while of sound mind, something that one held extremely elementary yet of almost essential value was always a good pressure point to target.
"Then help me understand… Explain it to me… You told Hanshin that you're willing to stall us – stall, keep talking." Kiyomi said with certain dullness, she did not order it or demand it, merely stated that the man should be communicating with her.