Kouta's head turned to the right to follow after the light sound coming from that direction. Unlike Mana, the young man still reacted to things a fraction of a moment after it happened and while for the magician it was no trouble at all to see these types of reactions, it happened to be a whole different matter when flipped the other way around.
"How many died?" Mana asked. It may have seemed cold to most that she would not try to reaffirm if her own boyfriend was okay after an invasion of some of the craziest and most brutish tribes of killers and raiders out there but the simple truth was that she did not have to. She had not a hint of doubt that something of this level would not threaten the Jugo in the slightest.
"None." Kouta grinned. "Yushijin and I joined forces. His illusion was crazy effective on those guys and whatever minor injuries I did see are treated. I wanted to help Yushijin fight those guys off but he insisted that I served my purpose a different way."
"You fought them off all by yourself?" Mana's eyebrows tilted in respect for the leader of Team Fir.
"I didn't do anything you haven't done." Yushijin shrugged before pointing at the magician's bald companion with his chin. "Friend of yours?"
"More like an itch I can't scratch. He's far faster than I am meaning I couldn't lose him," Mana lamented. She probably could have given this Kumogakure ninja the slip by using genjutsu on him but she chose to save her chakra for the upcoming encounters with the tribe or if these Kumogakure ninja actually decided to stir trouble.
"You're so mean!" the freaky baldy leaned back while placing his hands on his cheeks as he shrieked it out like some classic cartoon character. Mana may have chuckled if she hadn't seen this man disembowel dozens of people with a single swing of one of his lightning whips.
"She is right though, we are under no obligation to make friends here." A more disgruntled declaration echoed from the left. Mana turned her eyes to face the Kumogakure ninja she had not sensed before. A tall and moderately athletic in build youth with tall and spiky blond hair and a handful of feathers sticking out from his headband that did its best to streamline his hair. "We just share a common objective, that is all."
Mana had to hand it to this person. While the blood dripping from his tekkokagi claws disgusted the magician, the fact that he managed to not only survive but thrive during the invasion while suppressing his chakra completely was impressive. Suppressing one's chakra meant not only becoming impossible to tell from a civilian to a sensor – it literally meant becoming as strong as a civilian for the duration of the use of the suppression technique. The genius of battle and skill required to overcome hundreds of super-human level opponents while suppressed to such an extent was remarkable, even if it was a talent for murder.
Mana's eyes turned to above. Where the one with the clawed gauntlets did his best to sneak up on the magician, this incoming one tried nothing of the sort. It almost seemed as if though he just decided to drop by. This was the sizable signature that the magician had sensed blocking off the escape before. The fact that these four offered one of them with the largest chakra signature for such a meaningless task almost proved amusing had Mana's mood not been soiled by all the blood that's been shed.
The ground under the kunoichi's feet tried to spit her up as if refusing to hold her any longer. This rejection felt a little more forgivable given how a heavyweight brawler who appeared to not be interested in wearing a shirt smashed right into the middle of the square and demolished a handful of damaged buildings that were doing their best to survive the attack. Mana had never thought it for a second that these four cared about the wellbeing of this settlement but this sort of recklessness pushed her irritation scale further still.
"What the hell, guys? What the actual hell!? I waited and waited but nobody ran my way." The nearly three-meter tall and yet somehow still block-jawed physical specimen cursed at his two present teammates.
"Yeah… I underestimated these dirtbags. They have more guts in them than I gave them credit for, not the fleeing kind. Fought to the last…" the clawed-shinobi clanged his close-range blades one against the other with a smirk that suggested enjoyment from not only the countless acts of slaughter he had committed but also in the great handicap he put on himself and the challenge it provided.
"Do not enjoy torment like that. What happened here was a tragedy!" a grievous feminine voice came Mana's way as the final of the Kumogakure ninja showed up – one that looked remarkably similar to the Yamanaka woman from before but a handful of years older. The magician could already sense the Yamanaka about to join the group. Soon they'd figure out what's what with these folks.
"Maybe if you guys knew who you were hunting, you'd have planned this better." Yushijin showed a similar distaste to the foreigners who, granted, had a much better claim to being in this settlement than the Konoha folk. He even appeared to have come to the same conclusions once seeing the towering Kumogakure native with a wrestler's physique complaining about seeing no action in the entire encounter.
"Like you? You guys knew the enemy so well that you decided to fight them in the middle of a settlement…" the clawed Kumogakure ninja grinned, thinking he was mocking the Konoha ninja when in fact he was just displaying how oblivious the Kumogakure ninja were.
"We fought here because we have a support ninja amongst us. One that specializes in laying traps. Working here allowed us to both save as many people as possible and utilize all of our members effectively." Yushijin replied, showing that while he may have downplayed his abilities as a leader, he was a shooting star as far as these five were concerned.
"I see… Well played. Pale-skins tend to run and hide when their skill fails them but as long as it worked…" the clawed ninja complimented Yushijin's leadership in his own special way.
"Okay, so… Who are these guys?" Erumo announced of her arrival with a loud inquiry that left the chance open for both her friends to fill her in as well for the Kumogakure ninja to introduce themselves.
"That's quite the nerve on you." The voice of the Yamanaka kunoichi that Mana was already semi-familiar with provided the Konoha trapster with a backlash of matching intensity. "You are aware that any settlement in the Land of Snow is under Kumogakure protection?"
"So you five are the ninja from the nearby military encampment that the settlement leader told us he had contacted?" Mana finally put it together. Given how much time and attention she devoted to analyzing the situation, she felt a bit dumb for not having realized this a bit sooner, instead of taking these five as the village-sent ninja.
"Yeah. A lot of the local military bases have heard of this tribe to some capacity… It's hard to compile intelligence when everything you hear about them refers to them as "the tribe" or "savages" but we make do." The feather-donning Kumogakure ninja replied while scratching the tip of his nose with his thumb.
"They are not eloquent enough to declare how they are calling themselves." The oldest of the Kumogakure ninja – the kunoichi that previously lamented the great loss of life that had occurred in this settlement declared.
"In any case, we are tasked on official Konoha mission to stop these attacks. We will be dealing with the tribesmen problem and I am sure that you can see that we will have no trouble accomplishing this task. We'd appreciate being left working alone, four is a squad, nine is a mob." Yushijin suggested, judging from his tone, he did not believe that the other group would just leave the task up to them like this.
"Sorry, pale-skin, we've got orders of our own." The clawed ninja declared while stepping out in front of his group.
"You'd think that we'd enjoy having work taken off our hands but we're kooky like that." The bald Kumogakure ninja joked.
"Perhaps we should not look at this situation as if it was an impasse and choose to work together?" the mature Kumogakure kunoichi raised the possibility.
"Is this woman your leader?" Yushijin ran his eyes across the Kumogakure group.
Mana did not feel too excited about how willing Yushijin and the others looked to team up with the Kumogakure ninja. While if she had only met the kunoichi that suggested teaming up before, she'd be all onboard as well, with the material she had on the bunch now, she'd have rather left the matter unresolved than worked with this lot.
"We don't have a leader. Maybe you've skipped it through your narrow pale-skin brain about how we're all working in a military base and aren't an official squad but that's the way it is. We're all just local officers, nobody's a subordinate here." The tower of muscle from Kumogakure spoke up in a rumbling tone and an equally aggressive-sounding tone.
"Wait. Why are we the ones answering to you? You bunch are the ones operating in Land of Snow. I don't doubt it that if Konoha ninja caught Kumogakure ninja operating in Land of Fire, they'd put our own behind bars without blinking twice." The Yamanaka expressed her outrage at where the conversation was going.
"Calm down, Kari. These ninja are not our enemy, they are wearing their headbands, it's not like they are hiding, is it?" The more mature of the two Kumogakure kunoichi tried to pacify the situation. So far, she looked like the only one Mana was willing to work alongside with but after hearing "Kari" out, the magician had to admit that there was some reason to the Kumogakure ninja refusing to roll out their finest welcoming carpets for the foreign guests.
It was not like Kumogakure was famed for legendary hospitality, in fact, it was just about the exact opposite of that idea. A country that's lived in isolation until comparatively recently and still harbored distrust and moderate distaste for those that looked like foreigners to them. Given how international affairs commonly meant trouble, the recent history only enforced this sentiment of foreigners being a bad omen amongst all but the generation born in a shared yet greatly expanded world.
"You've got some low tolerance standard. It's international law for ninja to wear their headbands out in the open unless they are infiltrating or something whether they're operating on foreign land or back home." The clawed ninja declared.
"And I didn't start out from introductions for a reason!" Kari from Kumogakure leaned on her older comrade looking a tad betrayed by the decision of her fellow ninja to call her by her name in front of the Konoha ninja.
"It is just extension of good will. And you know how little those rulings are respected, Uru." The Kumogakure kunoichi had spent so much time arguing with her own team by that point that Mana wondered where exactly her allegiances laid and what exactly her game was. She may have been just playing up her fondness and willingness to cooperate on purpose. If the Kumogakure ninja had a Yamanaka alongside them, one could not be sure that all of them were not communicating mentally the same way that Kiyomi has had Team Hokage communicate all throughout their run in the team.
Mana glared at Yushijin. She would have liked nothing more than to just declare that she wanted nothing to do with this lot and then just do her own thing. Given the track record, Team Fir would find and neutralize the tribe far faster than the Kumogakure ninja who only cared about how fun fighting the tribesmen would be and how many of them they would kill. Regardless of what Mana wanted, she was not the one to make these kinds of calls, not for the entire team.
Yushijin shrugged. Judging from his eyes, Mana could see that he knew that Mana would hate working with these folk but she could also pick up that he would rather like that. As a team leader, obviously, he wanted to maximize the odds of the mission's success whereas Mana was looking solely from her own skewed prism that prioritized her principles over the job at hand. Realizing that did not make Mana feel any different, however.
"We can make it a competition. Both of our squads are clearly on the same objective and it doesn't look like most of us are on the same page. We can always just see who can get to their objective first." Kouta shrugged. Mana liked his suggestion, mostly for the same reason that she could see on the Juugo's face – he was certain that Team Fir could get to the tribe first. The problem was that based on the looks on the Kumogakure ninja faces – they kind of thought the same way too.
"We are soldiers. Soldiers do not gamble. They work things out or they fight them out." The clawed ninja taunted Kouta by stepping up to the young man while raising the blades of his claws to the point where they were a good hand's length away from the throat of the medical ninja. Kouta was a nice sport, didn't flinch once or show a sign of fear.
Mana just loved it when Kouta switched from being goofy to being cool and neither one would have worked without the other.
"Whoa there…. That's the last thing we want. However, what Uru-V said is true – separating is not even an option." Kari, the Kumogakure Yamanaka, declared while stepping in between the two youths and gently pressing her hands against Uru-V's chest to gesture for him to back off.
"Yeah, you can't just dump us. Not after all the effort we went through to get connected! It's just not the kind of relationship we have!" the tattooed baldy jumped up and exclaimed.
"Be reasonable." The older Kumogakure kunoichi pleaded with the Konoha four. "You will not have an easy time after having crossed us while surrounded by Kumogakure military stations all over the Land of Snow. We outnumber you as well, meaning that even if you can defeat us, it will demand a toll of pyrrhic proportions. How about our squads work together and have an all-around easier time?"
"Easier time doing what exactly? Slaughtering those tribesmen that's not how we intend to handle things and that is not how the things will be handled." Mana couldn't keep herself back any longer.
"See? You guys ain't all order and discipline either…" Uru-V taunted Yushijin right in his face when Mana, a member of the team he supposedly managed spoke up against what the general direction of the course was beginning to take shape into.
It did not demand a genius to realize that Mana walked all over Yushijin, even more, it didn't take mastery over the social skills to see that the Konoha swordsman hated that. The way he viewed Mana internally changed from that point on, such was evident from the way in which he was looking at her. Whereas before every word and every notion the magician put forth was viewed like a refreshment handed by a respected and loved friend, now Yushijin carried no subtlety or nuance in his glare – he was just flat out irritated.
"Some of us are gentler than others, however, surely you agree that it is not for gentle souls to try and explain how the hardy should behave…" the Kumogakure kunoichi who was the strongest advocate of joining forces stepped up closer to Mana with an open, supposedly inviting and open stance.
"How about the hardy at the very least try to not resemble the enemy they're fighting?" Mana grumbled, knowing full well that with every word she spoke, Yushijin was getting more and more frustrated with her as his apparent handle over his team's affairs was being compromised by a single person who was not even supposed to be on the said team, to begin with.
"Look, missy, you guys aren't under any conditions to even argue about these things – you're in Land of Snow, Land of Snow is protected by Kumogakure. I'm not much of a grammar buff but even I know a period, full stop when I see one." Uru-V objected. Just a single thumb's worth of moving forward and everyone would be all up in each other's faces.
"Maybe if you weren't too busy waging war on foreign soil, you'd stand a better chance at protecting your own alleged allies, at least to the point where they don't have to ask other countries for the protection you're supposed to provide." Mana snapped back at one of the handful that was a legitimate threat to the integrity of her docile and peaceful beliefs.
Ground slipped from under Mana's feet. The magician would not have been caught unprepared by the Kumogakure handful, she's been expecting something befitting the lousy first impression they've built for themselves this whole time. It was because the surprise attack came from behind her that she'd gotten flustered over it and tripped up. By the time that the magician sensed the refueled and erupting flow of chakra in Yushijin's network and was considering turning back to see what that was all about – she was already face-down in the snow with Yushijin's firm grip locking her arm in place after having just swept the solid ground off of her feet.
"She's my teammate, I'll discipline her. The tensions are too high right now to discuss this with fruitful results. We can report in your military base, register our activity, see where it goes from that point on. This is your jurisdiction and we intend to respect that the best that our mission objective permits." Yushijin did his best to mend the bridges that Mana's loss of composure burnt down.
"Yeah… Before we do that, can we interrogate the guy I've captured in one of the dimensional trap holes?" Erumo raised the issue together with her curious hand.
The entire Kumogakure bunch raised their eyebrows at once, moving their eyes in rapid succession from the downed magician who was cooling her face down in a bunch of snow and to the least notable of the Konoha bunch who had said the most meaningful thing in the entire exchange of sentiments and threats.