Searching the small settlement for an archive building or a library was not as tough as it initially seemed. The Land of Snow carried a reputation of raising a no-bullshit, a rather stoic population and one would assume that, given the lacking size of the settlement, it would not necessarily trouble itself with building an archive. Instead, one would think, they'd build another warehouse to store food and supplies. This was not a settlement that enjoyed a genuine Land of Snow weather experience of perpetual winter, however, judging from the endless frost of the ground under the Konoha ninja feet, it did not see true spring or summer either.
The very first passer-by that the two young ninja asked pointed them the right direction. It left Mana wondering if Yushijin and Erumo enjoyed similarly easy times locating the inn for Yushijin and a place to buy weaponry and tools for Erumo.
The library was just as minimalistic as the settlement itself. Just a bland, oak table placed to stand guard atop a stone floor and concrete walls with the only hint of color in the place being the few dying plants, that must have only sustained this long through absorbing the junk food of lamplight, and the occasional more interesting cover of a book.
Kouta chose to hesitate and linger on behind Mana, something that the magician found a little irritating since it was his quest to gather the needed courage to realize if he was truly broken within or not. She should not have led him by his hand on such a quest, however, sometimes, that was the role that the emotional support needed to serve. Despite her wary, Mana chose to be patient and not scold or question the young man.
"You're more experienced with libraries…" Kouta mumbled after an occasional checking glare from Mana. The magician meant nothing by it, just to see if her boyfriend kept up the pace and did not get lost. Losing each other, even in a settlement as small as this would have made things even more complicated for the team, even if Mana could track them down in a couple of heartbeats eventually.
"Right…" Mana sighed. The young woman walked up to the rather approachable and granny-like old woman with a swampy-green turtleneck and thick, plastic glasses. "May we use the library for a moment?"
"No." the old lady cut down with strict and business-like frost, befitting and executioner, not a plump and short granny.
Mana and the librarian stared at one another for a couple of blinks before the granny returned to her book.
"Well… Why not?" the magician asked for the explanation that she expected to get from the get-go yet didn't. Had she not encountered similar, minimalistic speech patterns from just about every local she spoke to, she may have gotten a bit peeved by it.
"Don't have card." The old lady replied without pulling her eyes off of the book.
"Can we get one?" Mana asked.
"No." the old lady replied.
Even if the vagueness and the pointlessness of the conversation were beginning to force Mana to grit and grind her teeth, the magician continued, wondering the whole time that perhaps there was some verbal or social trick to have these folk tell all of the information necessary without having to drag it from them.
"Why not?" Mana asked, her tone was visibly more peeved than the last time she asked the question.
"Not local." The woman replied.
Mana pouted her lips. Shifting and moving their weight around, struggling over yelling something obscene out while trying to rationalize this entire ruleset of the library to only hand out readership cards to locals.
"Look, ma'am, we just need to check one thing. It would really help this young man." Mana tried a more humanizing approach, she gestured at Kouta who inspired pity in anyone with a beating heart without even trying. Just out of the sheer melancholy of his current emotional state and situation of loss that he was working through.
While the librarian did lift her eyes to examine Kouta, she did nothing more than that nor did she reply. Within mere moments of looking at the young man, she returned back to her book.
"Don't you want to help him at all?" Mana wondered.
"No.," the granny said.
"Don't you have kids just like him? Grandkids even?" Mana was preparing a plan B in her mind but she needed some time to work it out, continuing to aggravate this woman was not a clever plan but, at this point, the magician wondered if the woman even had it in her to become aggravated.
"I do." The woman replied.
"Are they at all like Kouta?" Mana asked, desperately craving to browse for a personal connection with this stoic. At this point, it was more a matter of principle than a rational attempt at gathering information. It was action fueled by the belief that everyone in this world was human and Mana would force humanity out from this woman even if she had to physically fight somebody to do it.
"This boy a little like my grandson." The woman shrugged after checking the validity of her statement beforehand by staring back at Kouta for a short while.
"Then wouldn't you want to help your grandson if he came here looking for information?" Mana raised an eyebrow.
"I would." The woman nodded.
"Then will you let us use the library for just a minute?" the magician wondered.
"No." the woman replied, not even offering a shake of her head with her refusal.
"Why not? You would let your grandson use the library if he needed it but not Kouta? They are both in dire need of information, so why? Why is it such a big deal to you?"
"Grandson has card. Kouta doesn't." the old lady replied.
Dragging her nervous fingers across her curly black hair almost hard enough to pull them out with her bare hands, Mana returned to Kouta who was about close enough to have heard just how the conversation went.
"Well, could you then tell us what we want to know?" Kouta looked at the old woman. The granny kept reading her book for a solid sixteen seconds before placing it down with her eyes closed and letting out a deep breath. Her old lips curled into a polite smile about as slowly as a sloth flipped through the pages of the national history of the country its home jungle was located in.
"Yes." The old lady replied.
Mana's jaw dropped. "Unbelievable…" she whispered to herself while the old lady placed her hands together and waited for the following questions with politeness and patience.
"We're looking for the information on the sword that one of the Seven Swordsmen of the Mist – a man named Mizoma uses. We need any sort of information, rumors, even legends will do." Kouta looked at the old lady with eyes that almost pleaded her for any sort of bits of information.
The librarian stared at Kouta for a short while before picking her book back up and starting her slow-paced reading all over again. The confused Juugo looked back at Mana then turned back at the reading granny and cleared his throat. It took a good pair of minutes before the woman stopped looking up and down as if wondering what it was that the young Juugo wanted and finally mustered up an answer.
"Don't know a Mizoma…" the granny shrugged.
Mana rubbed her eyes with irked fingers. Something electric passed through her brain, like a shocking snap that jumpstarted a figurative lightbulb and the young woman stepped up beside her friend and tried talking to the accidentally unhelpful librarian.
"Perhaps the name of Tengu of the Phantom Lantern says anything?" the magician recalled what her mechanical opponent told her when describing the leader of his death squad.
"It does." The elderly woman nodded while flipping a page and shifting her eyes to the upper left corner. It took a total of thirty-two seconds before Mana realized that she will not tell the magician what exact references it was tied to in the librarian's mind unless specifically inquired about that.
"What exactly does it say? Do you know anything about his sword?" Mana asked more specifically, shortly before finishing that question, she realized that she will once more only receive a yes or no return so she decided to clarify in just that sort of case. "If you do know something about the sword he is rumored to use, we would like to hear about it."
"The Tengu uses the Trinity Buster. A sword that cuts in three planes, three dimensions and three layers of space-time." The librarian replied. It was of no shock that she knew this information truthfully. While usually military secrets such as these would have been better protected to the point where any well-read person could point them out, the swords of the Seven Swordsmen have gone through so many masters and transcended so many generations that they were almost common knowledge to anyone looking for a more militaristic side of history.
Truthfully, Mana felt disappointed back on the field that she was not able to pinpoint the sword's lore herself. If only she paid closer attention to the boring, almost pornographic in a way, descriptions of warfare specifications in the history and mythology books she devoured on her spare time… Used to devour, anyway…
"Three planes…" Kouta mumbled, alongside the rest of the "threes" that the old woman muttered.
"It refers to the planes of matter: physical, mental and spiritual. In order to cut at all three planes, a sword must be able to slash like any other sword – cut through the physical plane, ravage one's emotional state – cut through the mental plane, sever one's chakra network and spirituality itself, connection to one's ideals and greater things – cut through the spiritual plane." Mana explained. She had all of the planes down long ago as this sort of knowledge benefited a ninja in training greatly. After all, chakra utilized two of the three planes and the mental plane was equally important for the more social aspects of ninja work, not to mention the extensive research into the subject she gone through while training with the Village Protection.
"Three dimensions and three layers of space-time…" Kouta wondered. His tone suggested that the Juugo did not consider these nearly as important as the previous ability of Mizoma's blade. "I suppose that the sword can reach dimensional travelers, slice into the past as well as the future, which is why it seemed like there was no avoiding the blade's edge."
Perhaps it was for the better that nobody knew the blade's exact abilities at the time. Had they known what sort of power the Trinity Buster was capable of, they'd have undoubtedly let their spirits cave in to its legendary abilities. Not to mention, Yushijin may have gotten tempted to take the sword with him, or the Chinoike folk would have felt the same way, which in term would have caused further conflict between the two groups, on top of the initial tension present.
Just who was Mana trying to fool, the magician knew full well that Yushijin would not have cared for the blade's abilities even if their full scope was available to him. Letting one of the two groups carry the blade, however, would have surely invited a challenge from the other Seven Swordsmen. No self-respecting group of military excellence would have allowed such a tool of conquest over the spiritual, mental and physical, not to mention space-time and dimensions themselves, slip through their fingers.
"Well, you've got your answer…" Mana smiled. Her eyes opened back up after a handful of moments of putting rings atop of their respective pillars and dotting the i's.
"Yeah…" Kouta nodded with reborn energy. "The Cursed Seal is highly dependent on emotion. If Mizoma cut at mine, he'd have severed my violence, my anger… He'd have tamed my spirit and ended the Cursed Seal state prematurely. That's why I transformed back, not because he sealed that part of me away."
The young man stepped up in front of Mana and wrapped his hands around her, pressing the magician against him tight. Mana's eyes opened wide, their white contrasted the blood-red blush in her cheeks.
"Thanks… This… This was really important to me. You hate that side of me and yet you still helped me, regardless." Kouta almost hummed out into the magician's ear with a soft tone. His tight grip and soft voice made Mana feel warm and funny inside, she wanted to escape his grip, to run away from this unexpected warmth but she couldn't. She'd have to fight him to escape and that was one thing she really disliked doing, for that reason she could only let that feeling melt her from the inside in Kouta's arms while her cold breath fled through the emergency escape of her open mouth.
"Outside, please." The librarian spoke up for the first time without being asked or spoken to beforehand. Unlike before, this time her speech just made Mana chuckle. Kouta followed her lead, the grip of his hands loosened before parting entirely. The interruption sort of spoiled the mood but it was fine.
"I guess I sort of needed it too. Lately, I've been working so hard towards beating someone that I thought I had forgotten why I got into the gig, to begin with. Feels great to help someone for once instead of beating somebody up." Mana replied while the two Konoha ninja headed toward the exit, having not even entered into the library itself. Just the first steps of a journey were fine, as long as one's goals with which they've embarked on the said journey were satisfied…
Mana felt like she would have been wise to remember that lesson for the future.
"You do know we can't track you if you wander off, right?" Yushijin raised an eyebrow at the returning pair. It did not take much mental capacity to muster up the thought that once the leader found them a place to stay, he'd return to the initial location where he left his team to pick them up. Nor did it take much to realize that Erumo, probably the most resourceful member of Team Fir, would figure the same conclusion out by herself and return to the same place.
Regardless, having the ability to sense chakra signatures and read into the truly familiar ones, ones that Mana spent entire days around, truly did serve its use.
"It was my idea, sorry. We had to check the library for something." Kouta grinned while rubbing the back of his head, messing up his already hectic hairdo and gleaming childish innocence through his smile and apologetic expression as he did so.
"Didn't take you for the reading type." Erumo cheeked her teammate, her eyes, lacking any edge or malice to them suggested that it was not a mean-spirited chomp from her behalf.
"Do not worry, not a single book was read, Kouta's perfect record of avoiding reading remains intact." Mana dismissed the joke while playing along with it at the same time. The young Juugo raised his eyebrows while turning to Mana before sighing and just laughing along with his team instead of taking offense. It was a useless and pointless habit after all and pointless things had little use to serve in their line of the work and the world they lived in.
"So you've heard then? About Iwagakure?" Yushijin's face turned sour right in front of Mana's eyes. It was as if the casual and friendly jokes helped the leader forget his troubles and the grim news that he had to deliver for just a mere moment but then those troubles surfaced back right after.
"Iwagakure? What about it?" Mana wondered.
"Seriously? In a library? The place riddled with older newspapers?" Erumo looked at the pair with something resembling a dull disappointment.
"It's decimated," Yushijin reported with a bitter expression. "Kumogakure attacked them. For real this time. They even used their Chakra Diffusion Wave Cannon for the first time. It was a statement rather than anything else… Thirteen thousand dead and counting."
"No…" was all that Mana could mutter. Knees began feeling wobbly, her body felt like an entire mountain and human knees were not designed to support the weight of mountains. The magician just caved in, she bent her knees and wrapped her quivering fingers around her head, filtering through handfuls of curly dark hair to do it.
"I mean… It's a tragedy for sure but…" Erumo sat down and tried to comfort the magician by placing her hand on the young woman's shaking shoulder. "They were warring with the most powerful military in the world. Nobody expected Kumogakure to scorch the entire ground but… It's the type of thing that happens in war. In some ways, I can understand it. One blast and the war's over…"
"It's over alright." Yushijin nodded. "What remained of Iwagakure surrendered in exchange for protection from outside forces. Villages have walls and seals for a reason. The blast leveled all of that. Seeing how Kumogakure has their forces inside the territory, for now, they're the first of the Great Villages to watch over Iwagakure."
"That blast… Something as powerful as the Chakra Diffusion Wave Cannon should have impacted the entire planet. I bet it's the blast we felt on our way to Land of Hot Water!" Kouta exclaimed, recalling the earthquake that nearly subdued the entire Team Fir all by itself.
It was all her fault, in a way. Mana and the repackaged Team Hokage meddled with Iwagakure's plans to win the war, as some of those involved would have claimed – just to survive. How was one supposed to not feel responsible for having destroyed a nation's secret plan for survival, something that resulted in a tragedy like this just a handful of days later?
Mana's knees straightened out. Sometimes willpower let human shoulders to be burdened by mountains. It did not mean that there was no weight crushing the ribcage of the young woman but she would have to live with the choices she's made and the roles she's played. That was within the job description.
"Mana?" Kouta looked at the magician.
"It's fine. I'm tired. Can you show the way to the inn?" Mana looked at Yushijin.
"We could all use some rest, I'm sure. I'll lead the way." The leader nodded without a hint of objection.