Seeing a medical ninja approach the two women that barely managed to hold each other together felt strangely like the most misfortunate case of déjà vu, even if the medical ninja working on her father's sudden collapse was different. A natural detail, given the vast difference of situations in question.
The man's face suggested that he was well aware of how painful what he had to report would be for the two, his seasoned face told tales of great differences in reactions that he had seen from all sorts of people hearing that same prognosis out. No. If Mana was to guess, the medical ninja had never had to deliver this specific prognosis to anyone before.
"He's stable, the seizing stopped but… We don't think that your husband is going to wake up." The man sighed. "There's no specific reason for him to stay out but… We think we know what's caused this and… We've seen this same thing in all too many cases."
"How many of them woke up?" the first reaction from Mana's mother was predictable. The woman's love for her husband was the only thing rivaling Mana's own respect for her father.
"What did cause this?" Mana asked almost at the same time as her mother, over the last couple of hours she'd passed the begging for a miracle stage and went straight to maniacal rampage mode. All she needed was a target.
"It was the pain medication he's been taking. The under the counter stuff. There's a reason those elixirs were never approved. They're outright miraculous in quality and the skill that goes into brewing them is most often superior to any of the official medication but… Those drinks are not made for men and women, they're made for some sort of superhuman. Every sip is a gamble with one's own life and the absence of pain can be very addicting, especially in cases where the pain was an accustomed guest." The medical ninja sighed. The way he spoke implied that he had given this same thing to plenty of people, sadly, Mana's initial suspicion was shot down, although, that was hardly the most painful thing at the moment.
"How many wake up?" mother raised her voice. It was at passionate moments like this that Mana remembered that the woman did not build up her respectable café business by being a quiet little mouse.
"None. It's the only thing certain about that sophisticated junk. It helps until it no longer does, in especially unlucky cases, what happened to your husband happens. We can sustain his life without much trouble but… All of the cases I've spoken of, the reason why this condition has a perfect mortality rate is that people eventually lose hope and choose to just let go." The man scratched the back of his neck. It was no slim pickings for the specialist delivering the news either. The grim expression he took made Mana suspect that he expected at any moment to be blamed for the man's condition.
Blame… There was plenty of that brewing. Anger and blame fumed like the vapor of boiling water and began staining the windows to Mana's soul, through which her soul saw the world around her. This was not like a mere girly whine that she had from time to time. The one that wet her eyes and made it difficult to breathe in a regular manner over the internal weeping.
The rage obscured everything. Sound, sight, mind, chakra sensory. The anger corrupted and began a part of each of these feelings. Even the magician's sense of touch began boiling in fury as her skin began portraying the heat of the boiling emotions contained inside.
"Where are you going?" mother turned to Mana. The magician hated doing this. To leave her mother without her daughter right after realizing that she'd only have her husband as a lifeless husk alive only through the most liberal manners of speech.
"The opposite of the right thing to do." despite the irony inviting a smile onto Mana's face, the magician was far from the perfect condition to smile. She was not entirely wrong though. Despite the fact that she knew Guru Ayushi must have been stopped, this was not the right way to do so. It was the way that Mana wanted to do it now.
She considered talking with him before. Attempting to reach the once noble and exalted legendary ninja that has managed to retire far past not only the usual retirement age but also his advanced age that he managed to reach through his uncanny mastery over the field of medical ninjutsu. There would be no more talking. There was a new emotion, a new edge that Mana's body lingered on deep down and the magician was beginning to feel the gentle breeze that invited her to take a nosedive down from it.
"I'm going to kill him." She declared before flickering away from the woman's eyes. She left her broken mother to deal with the confused medical ninja who, without a doubt would expect an explanation of some sorts, she was wrong in every conceivable way.
There was shame in confronting a man that has sent multiple people to the hospital because he had overestimated the vitality of his potential patients, one that has created a cult of his to realize a wild goose chase of a ninja way through whatever means imaginable, a cult that has created a monster that has nearly torn down the entire village all by itself once before.
Light and air itself pressed itself at the corners of Mana's eyes. Such was the result of going through some of the worst couple of weeks shortly before losing her father and realizing that not only that was when she'd have the most fateful moment of her entire life but also that the man playing a role at that moment was responsible. The only sleep that Mana's had in the past week was the rest of the deadly venom knocking her out...
Why was it so easy to modify her plan to make it lethal? So many days spent planning around the eventuality, planning out the encounter trying to avoid the option of killing a legendary ninja she had no right to stand in front of anyway. A certain-doom situation with an even further reduced odds and yet when all of those kid wheels had to go, it was the simplest thing Mana's ever done. In fact, the plan became nearly thrice shorter as a result.
This time nobody got in the magician's way on her way to the village center. No villager stopped her to say hello, no fan of hers expressed some helpful and friendly impatience to see her next show and no children chuckled simultaneously to losing their gift of speech upon seeing Mana live, living her life just like they did and walking around the village. Mana did everything she could to look and act more like a banshee of vengeance and that was just what the world saw her as now. Either that or they just took her as some crazy person jolting down the streets like mad.
Mana closed her eyes and extended her sensory as far as she could. She had not sensed Ayushi's chakra before, meaning that she should, in theory, not be able to recognize it. Despite that common logic, the kunoichi felt that someone with the traits of Guru Ayushi should not have required previous experience of their might to be felt. The man's chakra should have been the size of a galaxy amongst sparks of normal civilians, the campfires of genin and stars of jounin.
And yet… The place felt completely empty of such a signature. Mana could feel the Hokage far out in the northern districts, the jounin in the Standby Station to the west, a handful of notable medical ninja in the Konohagakure hospital east and another dozen of strong signatures on top of that even further east. There was nobody of Ayushi's caliber anywhere. If Hanasaku was still in the seat as Hokage, Mana may have humored the idea of coming to her for help. Not help with confronting Ayushi, help to find him.
A sphere of bubbling, blue chakra wrapped around the magician, foaming from thin air as sealing glyphs formed and floated around the sphere that sealed the magician's movements. A man wearing a cloak but, completely missing the point of his choice of attire, leaving the hood down and his face exposed approached the sealed magician and tapped at the sphere with their hand.
"You may have been looking for me. I decided that I should find you instead." The pale, humanoid figure smiled as it looked up at the magician girl that was floating weightless inside their sealing sphere. A crowd of curious bystanders was beginning to form a circle around the scene. A social circle around the sealing sphere and its creator. Just what sort of technique was this, more importantly, how did this man use it without tipping off Mana's sensory?
It took about as much effort to turn at the sealing-master as it did for a person to move underwater. The general feeling of weightlessness and floating was similar to that experience as well. However, it was quite easy to breathe while inside the sphere so the magician was under no danger of drowning. There did not appear to be any other purpose to the sphere other than containment.
With his featureless, white eyes, the sealing-master turned his head around, showing off the countless, basic shaped tattoos covering the man's bald head from the sides, the top of the head as well as his chin but ceasing at the face. Despite his pale appearance, the wrinkles and general features of the man's facial muscles and quirks appeared overly pronounced.
"It is just a matter of time before some unwanted company interrupts us. If you excuse me, I'll make this reunion a bit more private. Don't be afraid, it's for their own sake. If you had lived to be my age, you would have realized that the other ninja are like children to whom fire is not something to cook or create something with but something to wave around at the end of a stick and scare the animals away. If they engage me here they would only cause damage to their own building, to their own people, trust me, Mana-san, I have both our best interests in mind…" the man smiled again.
"Ayushi-san?" Mana muttered to herself. She had not recognized the man after the drastic transformation he had undergone. The last time she met the man, he had suffered severe burns and then regenerated to a completely new and baby-soft skin as well as new muscles for his well-toned body. His current body appeared much gaunter and more inhuman. The pale skin, the dead-white eyes and the tattoos, the skeletal body structure.
"I sense resistance from your side. Don't hurt yourself, you cannot break this seal. It absorbs the chakra you use against it and uses it to enforce itself as well as punish you for trying." Ayushi smiled and patronized Mana as if she was a silly child. "There they are, like clockwork… I've been in this job for far too long, things have lost their flare. Can't get surprised by anything anymore."
"You have no idea…" Mana thought to herself as she swung her limbs about, trying to loosen up the force keeping her suspended inside the sealing sphere. Maybe Guru Ayushi was right, maybe she could not break this sphere but she will make it more difficult for this sick man to do whatever he had planned to do.
Just inches short from where the Konoha ninja rushed to the scene of a bizarre street scene, Ayushi created a cube-barrier of dark ruby gleams that tipped every approaching ninja off to its vile yet to be revered power. Even if none of these response squad ninja were sensors, they knew better than to tangle with the red barrier covered with shadowy sealing glyphs. Even if sealing glyphs were a dead giveaway all by themselves, there was something supernatural about this barrier, as if it displayed Killing Intent all by itself and petrified even B-Ranked ninja that usually were the first to respond to such events.
Inch by inch, the barrier began expanding in every direction except deeper underground. The rate of its expansion was pathetic, although it appeared to dissolve anything it touched to some sort of primal dust that was even more brittle than the real deal and powdered away into something even smaller, something that was impossible to trace and may very well have either been nothing or the next best thing to it.
Ayushi's hands blurred in front of his chest, a splatter of wine-colored blood spread in a wide yet thin arcing line. Mana didn't even notice when the legendary ninja even drew that from his thumb. Another sensation of far greater importance distracted her, however, the barrier containing her began weakening and in a severe way – as if it was about to fade away in its totality.
"Summoning: Juhiru Dimension!" Ayushi grunted while placing his hand onto the ground. Just as Mana's feet touched the ground and she prepared to exploit her newly gained freedom, she braced for the jutsu that the Guru prepared to use. If he had to concentrate hard enough to cancel the seal subduing Mana to use it, it must have been something remarkable and the magician had never seen any information in any of the stories she had researched about any Juhiru dimension in Ayushi's arsenal.
Something abhorrent was manifesting itself under Ayushi's command. Even if no physical changes occurred just yet, the magician could feel it, something different, a nightmare coming to life that just needed a few drops of time before it could understand the laws of reality it was summoned on to manifest itself in its full repulsive glory.
The ground rumbled beneath Mana's feet, a set of nine, finger-shaped protrusions burst from somewhere deep underground, displaying themselves to the surface only from their middle going up to the nail. As the entire ungodly hand surfaced, intensifying the quake to where Mana had to jump up and keep herself afloat using her Mystical Wings Jutsu to avoid the trembling and the terraforming going on, it split like a twisted kaleidoscope into rings of arms, legs and types of limbs that Mana had never even seen before as well as some good, old, octopus-type tentacles.
The entire ground level within Ayushi's dark ruby barrier turned to a forest of these pale and rotten limbs. Some of them had small damage covering them through which blood of various colors flowed like a source of water flowing through a mountain spring. The skies turned pitch black as ungodly, bloodshot eyes opened up and began gazing upon the inhabitants of the Juhiru dimension that Ayushi had brought about. Before the ancient evils that lurked inside this wicked dimension did something about the Guru and the magician that had exposed themselves to their interdimensional selves, dark, violet clouds shrouded the skies, providing some solace from the cosmic-scale horrors inside this dimension.
"Where did you transport us?" Mana's voice trembled as she was now more fear than rage. She now realized that she was right to fear Ayushi's Summoning Jutsu before allowing her rage-driven hands on him.
"Transport us? We're right where we were supposed to be – middle of Konoha. The clouds will make it difficult for anyone to see this barrier, let alone see what's inside of it so nobody will distract us, nobody will get themselves killed doing something they don't understand." Ayushi smiled like a kind old man posturing at a child.
"Then…" Mana looked around with even more horror in her eyes than before.
"Correct, I did not seal us away in Juhiru, I've brought the entire dimension here. Juhiru is not a large place, about the size of a large temple in its entirety. I needed it here, however. I've stored something there that is paramount to our dreams." Ayushi spread his hands out, leaving himself wide open.
Without thinking too hard, Mana attacked the man head-on with taijutsu. She knew that this was no way of damaging him. His passive healing prowess would kick in instantly and heal him from anything that was not instantly lethal to him. That only served to Mana's favor as she could have attacked this man however long she liked until she felt like she had made the man pay for the lives he had taken and ones he ruined.
Ayushi moved in to defend himself but he did not expect Mana's attack nor did he want to fight her. That was the reason why Mana kept all of her limbs and life. A simple counterattack would have opened her right up, in fact, she was already wide open and simple to read like an open kindergarten level book. Angry people, while the most aggressive and relentless, were the easiest to predict and dodge. Something Ayushi felt inside however made his defenses sloppy, he took a few nasty shots to the jaw.
She wanted to love it, she truly did. When her foot dug deep into the opponent's jaw and her foot just slumped into something soft and broken like a lump of unprocessed clay. When her fist penetrated her opponent's body and found something round and squishy inside his body to crush like a capricious child squished rotten apples they found on the ground, just because they felt they could and because it'd be icky in a strangely satisfying way.
And yet… With every gruesome strike like that, Mana felt more and more nauseated by her own actions. By this entire affair. The magician had trained for this for three long years and did so more gruesomely and with more focus and preparation than she'd prepared for anything to this day. Win or lose, Mana at the very least thought herself ready to face this man but…
She had to stop. As the magician stumbled back, not because she could no longer continue physically but because if she had –she'd have vomited all over the limited, fleshy and rotten grass field of limbs around her. It was only when she woke up from the haze of her own bloodlust that she gasped at the bloody pulp she left of the man in front, a jerking and swollen mess filled with steel-tipped cards sticking out of it, Mana hadn't even noticed when she started using weaponry and taking stabs at the Guru.
"I feel like we have some unsettled issues," Guru spoke while his body fixed in a blink that, as per the common saying, was entirely within the realm of possibility to miss if one was not looking out for it. "Before we begin our Game of Souls, I would like to know what those are."