"You're scaring the rats away." Erumo lamented after taking a seat on the bench that Mana pushed for her.
"I didn't try and force you out from the get-go, how about you give me the benefit of the doubt?" Mana shrugged. For some reason she imagined herself popping a cigarette at that moment but given how she neither had any cigarettes on her nor was a smoker her hands left dangling with the awkwardness that the magician tried to conceal by placing them neatly on her laps.
"Sure, just saying – no point to a trap that doesn't catch anything." Erumo rolled her eyes. Her appearance may have been a bit standoffish but her tone was friendly. The two girls had mended their differences a few years ago, differences that hailed from the time of the Chuunin Exams and, frankly, were well deserved from Mana's part, however, it seemed that whether it was for the general circumstances surrounding the meeting or the long period of time in which the friendship was not affirmed, things have chilled by a considerable leap between the two again.
"So you've failed to catch a boy who dressed in a rat suit so now you're catching every rat in the region? Hardly seems healthy." Mana observed. This was once again one of those observations that the magician imagined herself lighting up a smoke while delivering in her mind yet because the reality did not fit her imagination, probably came off significantly lamer than initially thought.
"You're hardly the one to lecture people about healthy ways of dealing with trauma. If I reply too rudely will you disappear for three years on one of your pilgrimage trips again?" Erumo looked away. Rats around these parts were hardly shy and to an aspiring vermin hunter, the very sight of their curious snouts must have invited thoughts of wasted time.
Mana sighed. It did not take a master psychologist to realize that she was wasting time with this approach.
"You know, my father was a pretty good trap specialist himself," Mana observed.
"You must have been gone for longer than I thought, forgot all about the part where he was one of the inspirations that drove me to choose this path." Erumo finally looked at Mana straight. Her eyes weren't sharp but her tongue still thrust for the available openings.
"What you may not have known is that he helps me design the death traps and gadgets I use on stage. He comes up with the ideas for them, I build them under his guidance and careful observation." Mana said.
"Okay, you've made me jealous, to what end though?" Erumo raised an eyebrow.
"We don't have to just sit and talk. This isn't an interrogation. I'm just worried about you and Kouta and if building traps helps you relax, I can try it out, maybe it will help me too." Mana shrugged. Deep down she knew she was playing dirty – the first way to successfully interrogate someone was to convince them that they weren't being interrogated.
"You're worried about both of us and yet it's me you've come to talk to?" Erumo said in surprise. The young woman stood on her feet and moved back to the lumbering and dusty oak table where she had a handful of contraptions and metal parts that were yet to make something coherent and of purpose.
"Kouta doesn't quite talk to me. I don't think I have the strength to try and get to him regardless. Who knows, maybe your method of dealing with baggage will help me better than mine." Mana shrugged, approaching the crafting table herself.
"No offense but moping is not a method of dealing with baggage. It's a sign of drowning in baggage." Erumo grinned, whether it was because she found something to smile about in this reply of hers or because of the rotating buzzsaw mechanism that she's completed and prepared to install onto a tiny box was unclear.
Mana failed to humor that with a response. With skillful movements of her arm, she collected small cylinders and screwed them onto a metal stand. The magician flipped and rolled the half-done piece about in her hands, she didn't care to look up and face the respectful surprise in Erumo's face. Mana sighed before placing her project back on the table and moving to a nearby rack filled with jars and little barrels. The young woman looked at one she opened and liked the color of before walking up to Erumo and moving the open jar to her friend's face.
"Sniff it," Mana asked.
"What for?" Erumo wondered.
"I need to know if it smells sweet," Mana said.
"Can't you smell it yourself?" Erumo turned the front tips of her eyebrows downward, pressing the front of her eyes to make them look more irritated.
"If I could…" Mana almost answered the temptation to be as flippant with her friend as she was with her but somehow she managed to restrain herself. "No, I can't."
"Damn. Somebody whacked you that hard?" Erumo asked with relative shock in both her tone and her expression.
"No, I gave up on it willingly to strengthen my chakra sensory. It was a shortcut, an only option to win in the Chuunin Exams." Mana replied. The honesty and carelessness for her impairment made Erumo nod her head a pair of times before sniffing on the jar.
"It's a jam of some sort, probably, smells a bit molded though," Erumo replied to the best of her judgment. "You can be pretty hardcore when you're motivated, I always knew that."
"Mold is good, it's a little of some exotic smell on top of the jam." Mana smiled before dragging her fingers across the walls of the jar and applying the yellow goop onto her pet project.
"What's that supposed to be?" Erumo wondered.
"I won't kill an animal just because I want to stretch my creative muscles a bit. I'm not sure if you knew this but my father took pride in capturing his enemies alive." Mana shrugged.
"Yeah, but his traps didn't look like an Academy student made them…" Erumo laughed at Mana's chunk of cylinders and scrap.
"That's because they weren't judged before they were finished," Mana replied with calm in her voice. The magician removed a paper tag and scribbled a kanji symbol, then placed it into the side of the second cylinder that did not have any jam slathered onto it.
With a flick of her wrist, the magician rolled the completed trap sliding across the floor until it hit a corner of a rack on the other side of the room. While most of the rats looked interested in the sliding chunk of scrap that smelled of mold and sweetness at the same time, they were not bold enough to dash after it just yet. Until they would feel that way, Mana decided to patiently wait at her corner.
"I've been to your shows. Your usual designs are much deadlier than this. Don't you find it hilarious that you use deathtraps on yourself yet can't be bothered to kill a rat?" Erumo smirked, her glance slipped at Mana's trap from time to time. Within her own hands laid an interesting design that likely took inspiration from Mana's own magic shows – a layered scrap box with openings on all of the compartments and buzzsaws that were supposed to insert their teeth into the ridges.
It was no deathtrap but it was needlessly brutal and torturous. Not something Mana would have expected to see from Kouta's teammate. Erumo may not have bothered herself with creeds of never taking a life but she was not bloodthirsty either. This must have been a current development.
"What you've told me about that boy. It sounded pretty gruesome, I can't blame you for feeling down about the whole thing. If you truly need space, I'll leave you alone." Mana suggested. If the magician took her promise to the receptionist to make Erumo stop killing rats in his warehouse and cause a general ruckus with her deathtraps, she'd have been taking a gamble. After all, once promised, even if Mana did not leave when prompted to, she'd never earn the lost trust back in that case.
"It's not about that. I've seen people die or get injured. I've injured some myself, I've killed myself… Through traps, I guess, as distanced from it as possible but… I wasn't fooling anyone, myself included – death's a death." Erumo sighed. She threw her little trinket over her shoulder and let it roll around wherever it landed, having decided to not use it, maybe out of respect to Mana's decision to not cause needless torment to the rats, maybe because she simply did not fancy her own design.
"It's just that… When I saw that corpse, the one which the kid was hiding in… It reminded me of…" Erumo struggled to find the words. It was because she wasn't whining or approaching that territory but more miffed than anything about the entire affair that the magician even kept listening instead of trying to change the subject.
"Something painful from your past?" Mana wondered, leaving it as a possibility for Erumo to take an easy dive out of the arduous talk. At any point, the trapster could have just nodded and left it at that, as someone who had some of her own painful memories, Mana would have understood and taken the failure of removing her pissed and looking for relaxation squadmate out of the warehouse. She's taken so many losses recently that losing again did not sound all that scary.
"And it's the same thing that Chinoike woman showed me. Couldn't move past it since she brought it back up, just when I thought I was starting to get over it, there it comes again." Erumo let her head sink down and her shoulder-long hair fall over her face. Something wet was spilled all over the table, something resembling pickle water but it did not appear like the tips of her hair sinking into that muck or it touching her elbows bothered the trapster all that much.
"I struggle to fathom what a stitched together body might remind you of." Mana shook her own head. As a response to the silence being broken, Erumo sat back and finally removed her arms and hair off of the pickle water.
"A stapled one. My mother was killed a solid bunch of years ago. Some cabal of black market organ dealers took what they needed and then stapled her body together, they were supposed to pass something to some local crooks that way. If she was just moving around the Land of Fire unprotected, it'd have been one thing, those bastards were bold enough to kill off the team of genin accompanying her too." Erumo clenched her well-maintained and gentle hands into two little fists that did not look like they were meant or capable for that matter of causing too much harm.
"Rogues that brutal operating near the village would get eradicated almost instantly. Konoha has a reputation to upkeep." Mana shook her head disbelief. Not disbelief in her friend's story but out of the sheer randomness of the chaos that once descended into her life. Something so brutal and so mindless, it did not appear beneficial to anyone involved.
"Yeah, those guys got too brave, thought that they were invincible then ran into a stronger team of ninja. Konoha doesn't take their potential manpower being wasted that way lightly." Erumo sighed. "A lot of people would think that knowing that somebody who did something this lurid to ones you love the most received a mirroring punishment would resolve anything. It doesn't. People laughed at you when you said that you will become a ninja without killing anyone but I was one of the few that didn't. Mostly because I understood that. I understood why someone would be this way. Killing really is pointless, it doesn't make you feel better and resolves nothing. It might kill a rat but it won't change the fact that your warehouse is infested, only moving all the food to a more secure location will do that."
Erumo sat and marinated the feelings for a short while before looking away and sighing.
"I thought that maybe dealing with the mission at hand would somehow distract me. That's how I've always dealt with things, distractions. Plans and blueprints, plans and such… Even now the craziest thoughts pass through my mind. I keep wondering if we could have asked Kouta to keep the kid alive before you could have interrogated him, then we could have used that information to transform into him and talk to his people into showing themselves on a battlefield of our choosing. Ludicrous plans like this one, each crazier than the other keep plaguing me, it's what keeps me awake. It's because of what my role is, I always try to think things through," she said
"You know, when I found out about what had happened to Iwagakure, I felt responsible for it, somehow. A squad of which I was a part of foiled an Iwagakure plot to get an upper hand in the conflict and for that reason, I felt responsible for all the lives claimed, I still do. This whole time I've been thinking of ways in which I could have changed things, maybe I could have spoken with more conviction, gotten to them and made everything work out. Who knows… Even now I don't know the answer. The only thing that gives me solace is knowing that I did the best thing I knew that needed to be done at the time, that I did not miss any opportunities or waste any time. Even if whatever outcome was meant to come comes to pass, it feels somehow liberating knowing that you wouldn't do anything differently, even if the regret over the tragedy won't stop eating at you."
A few steps behind Mana's back her scrap box with cylinders lit up with a dull blue flare. A rat that had been lured inside disappeared into a different sealing dimension.
"Holy shit. That actually worked. If you feel so down about being a lousy ninja, you can always leave it behind and market this idea." Erumo smiled through eyes brimming with melancholy.
"No, who has the time and effort to reapply the chakra to the seals all the time. I guess I could employ something who can place a higher ranked seal but then I'd have to share the cut… Who knows how successful that sort of business would be." Mana shook her head with a smile. She enjoyed being able to distract Erumo from the unpleasant stream of memories that the recent events brought up and the nightmares they invited.
"You really don't know a thing about business, do you?" Erumo laughed out. "That's how business work, you supply an idea and gather people capable of bringing it together, while you take everybody's credit. For someone with such an awesome father, you're an average trap specialist but as someone with a respected café owner as a mother, you're an abysmal entrepreneur."
"What's true is true." Mana shrugged. "The owner said he'd make me cocoa if I got you out of here. I'll ask him to make you some too if you do."
"Yeah, after seeing you spend fifteen minutes on something that caught one rat, I'm done for the night." Erumo stood up and pocketed some of the remaining pieces while sealing the larger ones into a scroll that she placed on her belt.
"You okay? I mean besides the lack of sleep." Mana wondered after seeing Yushijin staring at the cloudy, shade of cobblestone sky that was very generous with the gift of wet snowflakes, drooping from above by the fistfuls.
"When the village finds out that we've had the chance to get the enemy come to us… It will be yet another thing I'll have to answer for." Yushijin replied.
"It's not like you've had a choice to make." Kouta crossed his arms over his chest. "By the time we even came to you with the information, the kid was already dead. No need to blame yourself over milk spilled by someone else long ago."
"I guess so." Yushijin closed his eyes and took a deep breath in.
"Do you regret that we didn't let the scout return to his people and have all of them come here?" Erumo wondered.
"Not at all." The Konoha swordsman admitted. "I may not understand or like these people all that much but I wish no harm to come to them. That's just human nature."
"So what now? We just wander around the mountains, looking for chakra signatures? Some of these mountains are four to twelve kilometers tall, at their peak, I won't be able to sense anything at the bottom. Plus, if that scout was any indication of the strength of the tribesmen, their chakra systems won't be that developed which means their signatures won't stand out too much." Mana voiced her doubts about the most basic approach.
"No." Yushijin shook his head. "We wander the routes connecting the settlements, look for trading caravans and people traveling across the Land of Snow, question them for information. If we know which settlements have been attacked, better yet, which settlements have had remnants of grisly murders in them not too long ago, we'll know our mark. Hopefully, we'll be able to intercept the raiding party before it hits the settlement. We'll do our best to keep the fight in the snowfields and out of the settlements."
"And you were worked up about being a bad leader." Mana smiled.
"Every two hours we'll be taking a thirty-minute break." Yushijin decided.
"Wait, what? That seems counterintuitive. We'll get nothing done if we waste time just sitting on our butts." Kouta got grumpy about it.
"Plus, the cold and the winds won't give us any mercy, it would be pretty ruthless of you to ask us to just sit in the middle of an open field while blizzards unlike anywhere else in the world will be pelting at us. Thirty minutes will hardly be enough time to set up a proper camp." Erumo disagreed with her leader's decision, it was a rare occasion but her tone was softer than when she objected someone else. It was clear that the young woman spoke up out of what she deemed to be a necessity.
"Mana and I need to cement what we've picked up from one another in our training. We've taught each other the theory and the basics of what I wanted both of us to learn but if we are to use that advantage effectively, we still need to polish those skills." Yushijin shook his head, it appeared that the leader of Team Fir was adamant about these stops.
With hesitation and with their vigor replaced with wary, Team Fir nodded in sync and followed their leader into the picking up veil of white out in the open. There was nothing but frozen ground covered with layers upon layers of snow that never truly melted before the successive layer covered it up. To the west and the far north laid the mountain ranges, the tall and proud barriers in their quest. To the east laid the most active settlement clusters while these open fields were reserved to hills tall and short, covered with trading and journey roads.