The realization that one felt better with a stab wound still doing its wet thing compared to just fifteen minutes earlier was a peculiar one only available in the Jigoku prison. Mana looked down at the barebones patch-job that one of Anika's crewmates did on her. It was hardly an adequate application of bandaging for the wound in question but it was serviceable enough to be an improvement over just letting it bleed.
"Dammit… Lost Kawaji. He was a pretty slick guy to send out when I wanted someone dead quietly." Anika sighed.
Calling Anika's crew her crewmates was just an odd dealing mechanism. By all means, Mana should have called them by the real names of the lot – they were slaves. They had little to no rights or say on things and the only way that Anika treated her flock better than actual tools was that her crew was too large to stuff into a wallet or satchel and carry around.
And yet Anika did try and preserve her crew to the best of her ability, Mana would not have bet her ryo on the fact she did it because of some sort of care over the people she claimed ownership over but even if she did so for her own personal gain and the potential use the people in her crew served to her, she still looked out for them somewhat. More so than the magician thought inmates of the worst kind of prison imaginable being capable of.
Mana closed her eyes. The kids dragging her in their own half-assed kind of way noticed that the young woman was getting too relaxed for how much they were willing to tolerate and they let go of her. That broke the magician out of her concentration but it was just a momentary obstacle.
"Hey!" Anika's voice thundered from her right. The vague silhouette of the woman manifested inside Mana's Ego realm. By now the magician had learned to tolerate some interruptions to her concentration without all of her progress immediately sinking to the crapper. "We've gotta move! I've lost enough people today!"
"I need to meditate. Slow down my heartbeat so that my bleeding slows down in the process. That's the only way to deal with my wound in my current, weakened state." Mana replied.
"You're going to listen to her?" someone unfamiliar to the magician asked Anika. It must have been outlandish for these people who were essentially slaves to Anika's whims. Who went where she went, stole what Anika wanted and killed whomever Anika told them to kill.
"I would backhand a bitch talking back to me in a heartbeat but if it will save her life and spare me the further waste of perfectly good currency, I'll take it, I'm a pretty big girl!" Anika finished the last part of that reply in an imposing tone, Mana did not see the conversation develop visually but she imagined the local crew boss looming over the poor crewmate daring to question her actions.
"We're about to be attacked." Mana opened her eyes.
"Wha…" Anika could not complete her confusion-driven response before a forked blade on a thick chain tore through her crowd, downing a handful of her inmates. One more came at Anika's abdomen but one of her slaves jumped into the cover of his leader and took one in the chest. The blades got stuck in the poor inmates hard enough for the entire body to be dragged about freely, as demonstrated when a handful of the victims got dragged out into the distance and the one who sacrificed his own life for Anika flew right into the grasp of a tall, bald man in a half-busted mask that was meant to prevent the man from eating something, or rather… Someone.
The one visible eye from the cover of the leather mask glowed with ecstatic flares when the man tore his hands into the injured and dying body of the inmate he just hooked like a fish and then tore the man in two. The scariest part of all was that everybody in Jigoku wore the same chakra suppression seals, this was all this man's natural strength…
"Nereigen…" Anika grumbled. Her voice sounded grim, the usually cheerful and larger than life personality was robbed of all oxygen and any joyful resonance in her neurons.
The unnatural physical strength of Nereigen likely came from his sheer size. A living tower over all living things, Nereigen was four times larger than any man Mana had seen while sitting. The man sat in a throne of bones that also had rod-sized needles sticking out from them, appearing not quite immune to the curse that befell furniture in this facility. Nereigen's body was adorned with armor built from scrap and decorated with bones of lesser men, molten onto the scrap. The man had his chain hooks wrapped in dozens around his limbs while eight tube-like protrusions stuck out from his throne, likely cannons for more chain hooks.
A childish cackle alerted the petrified remains of Anika's crew and forced them to look around frantically, pressing their backs one against another in a desperate attempt to spot the next hook on a chain. While the screams and gurgling of lives being extinguished rocked Mana to her core, the magician was left wondering as to who exactly could move so fast around the area as to drag the victims around this way and leave nothing but bloody trails and messy remains.
Soon, Mana received her answer, in the forms of dwarfs sitting atop of massive men with leather masks, carrying their size-challenged kin around on their shoulders. The arms of the giants were relatively underdeveloped but their feet were anything but. These men ran and did so frequently, that was the source of the impressive speed of the ranged attacking crew. By all means, Anika should have had more time to prepare, if only the attacking crew did not use a long range weapon.
Anika's inmates hissed at their assailants but their fighting spirit was soon extinguished by a boisterous roar of an engine. A shrieking of rubber across the Jigoku floor and the rushing attacker wiped away the gloom of the smoke. It was not long until Mana heard the unimpressed laughter of the judging Agors in the distance. This would be just like the assault of Yamajin's crew all over again.
A flash of a metallic face, an absolute giant of a man with a cage for a mask that his swollen and burnt flesh did not fit inside perfectly and bent the arm-thick metal bars bit by bit blurs of teeth sharpened with stone or flint that spread rotting, infectious slobber and the endless roar of engine wherever the massive horror-show rolled by. The inmates Anika owned screamed and waved about helpless, splattering blood all over the place when the monster of rubber, metal and very human-looking set of berserk eyes drove off with a victim of his choice impaled on one of his chainsaw arm prosthetics.
It was only when the motor-rolling man roared out, satisfied with the carnage he had wrought and wiped away the static of the gloom around him that Mana got a full picture of one of the more notable properties of Nereigen's crew: a man who really wanted to look like a dinosaur, judging from the shape of the armor and prosthetics he adorned as well as the swollen stump on his jaw and the hunched position he stood in. A warrior who was only a man from the waist up as he stood atop of a massive tire he rolled around using and had a pair of very vociferous chainsaws rumbling atop of both of his arms.
What a sad thing. A man who had lost his lower body, his arms and carried scars of skin-melting burns wherever his skin was exposed. Someone who has truly, by every sense of the word became more of a gimmick and a tool rather than a man…
"I recall you owing me a dog." Nereigen grinned. The man raised his chin, still strapped into the uncomfortable looking restraint that hung half-torn on his face, the ringleader of Nereigen's crew swept the field with his arrogance and might.
Anika just stared back at the man with fury brimming in her eyes and enough of it trickling down to make her grind her teeth hard enough to dull them and make her gums bleed. It was the type of rage that the magician could understand and recognize – the anger born of hopelessness, one that made someone hate not a specific man, not a specific circumstance but instead the entire world. It was, usually, the last flame of defiance before one's end, if a situation calling for such a reaction did not burn up the living embodiment of such rage, grief and devastation usually followed it and no man or woman walked out from this feeling the same way that the emotion took them over in.
"You know me, normally, I'd have just blown your pathetic excuse for a lair up, slaughtered everything and everyone inside and thought something interesting and public to end you with. But we both know that a raging lunatic makes for a poor leader in these parts. I'm willing to listen to how you beg for your life and adapt my plans accordingly. Given how just butchering the lot of you would just waste my resources with nothing to show for it…" Nereigen thundered.
"I killed Yamajin! I'll find a way to kill you too!" Anika growled out in defiance. She knew that she was unlikely to walk out from this meeting alive so she figured to at least go out in a way that would have honored her in the talks people would mention her around this hellhole in the future.
"Really? Interesting…" Nereigen scratched the chin part of his mask, overcome by some inhuman rage, the man pinched the mask and attempted to rip it off of his face but failed, even with all of his freak strength and the blazing fury that fueled and enhanced it. The man gave in and just slumped in his chair, his single visible eye dimmed in disappointment. "I was going to visit him next. Maybe I was going to have one of my dogs dress in your flayed skin to scare him first, then they'd have removed that skin to reveal themselves and scared him shitless, then I'd have shown up and told him I had plowed right through your crew to make him overjoyed, only to tell I was about to do the same to him and see all that joy leave his eyes…"
"Yeah well… Saved you some trouble. Fuel and danger too, you know how scary these parts are with how many holes there are around here." Anika grinned. Deep down she still hoped that one of those Nereigen's colossal war-dogs tripped up and fell into one of the holes that spelled out one of the most terrifying demise to anyone falling into it.
"Yes, I assume that is why all four of you rising superstar crews made your lairs around here, to avoid the more leveling attention of the real emperors of this prison – those holes are troublesome to navigate, Gosenri here had to remove the lower tank half of his body and replace it with a unicycle to reduce the risk of falling down one of those pits." Nereigen sighed. "Well… If that is all, maybe we should just kick all of you down one of those holes you walled yourselves off with?"
"Wait!" Mana stepped out. She did not expect the immediate response of a destructive fussilade firing off from Nereigen's throne in her general direction. Something strong pushed Mana down on the ground and the magician felt a pile of bodies cover her up. As all hell broke loose around her, the magician closed her eyes and wondered if she truly was going to make through this.
She was a fool taking her survival for granted like this and only count on the torture of the time she was cursed here for being the only obstacle in her way. Once the smoke cleared Mana rose from the ground covered in blood and gore, seeing the greatly reduced ranks of Anika's crew and even the ringleader herself missing an arm and writhing on her knees. Whatever these explosive projectiles were, they were clean – the heat erupting from within cauterized any wounds they caused or charred the victim up from inside if it hit close enough.
Nereigen rose his hand up, a hook on a chain went Mana's direction and coiled around the young woman. Instead of killing the magician this time, one of the self-proclaimed emperors of Jigoku pulled the magician in closer to himself and lifted her up to his eye level. The busted up clothes that she arrived in the prison with tore before the man's eyes but the man had restrained the magician in his palm, keeping a tight clutch on her.
"Interesting. That bombardment went through half your crew yet you guys were so adamant about protecting this one… She's valuable, isn't she?" Nereigen wondered. "You've given her the collar of one of my dogs, she must mean something to you…"
"She's worthless! Just some civilian that asked to be transferred here in hopes her punishment would be shorter. She's even got a heart condition so she's dying half the time she sees action." Anika grunted and moaned through the ungodly amounts of pain she was in.
"I'm a sensor," Mana stated up in Nereigen's face. The one visible eye of Nereigen opened wide and gleamed with a chestnut-shaded blaze of excitement.
"I see… I wondered how Anika's dogs protected her from my surprise attack, you must have warned them." Nereigen's mask shifted and turned with a leathery rubbing sound from down under. The man must have been smiling.
The towering emperor laid the magician down on the ground by his feet. He then pulled out a leather mask that covered up the entire head and left little for breathing. It just had a pathetic rip on the back for one's hair, if they were longer, which Mana's certainly were. Alongside the headpiece, he threw her a bunch of leathery strings that were held together by buttons of silver and were rather stringy but wide enough to serve as a broad definition of "clothing", one with the standards that Mana's current attire was feeling under the weather of living up to.
"Become my dog. Sniff for me. You'll live that way." Nereigen suggested.
"Let Anika and her crew go. I'll do it. Only for six months though, my punishment ends then." Mana asked. To show that she was serious, she slipped into the stringy outfit and took the mask into her hands and prepared to slip it over her face.
"I suppose she's repaid her debt by finding me another dog. I've plowed through enough of her ranks to make her no longer a threat to me. I won't crush her but I can't promise that somebody else won't do the same." Nereigen shrugged, making his armored body clang as the hanging chains smacked about all the scrap and bone on his armor.
"That's fine." Mana nodded and slipped into the mask.
There was no way that Nereigen was not an experienced ninja. He knew the value of sensors, he also knew that their abilities remained intact when conflicting with the local chakra suppression seals. He also appeared to be knowledgeable about the fact when one shut down most other senses by robbing one of their way to see and muzzling what they could hear – one's sensory abilities grew exponentially. Almost by the same time that Mana's eyes became accustomed to the long-lasting dark she'd spend the next six months in, the usual flares of candles and larger blazes lit up around her.
The chakra of the locals was suppressed a great deal, likely on their own to avoid any instinctual conflict with the seal and spare them the excruciating pain that followed such an event. That was both good and bad, the larger chakra was easier to track and sense, easier to tell more specific details about, however, being around smaller chakra won't upset Mana's heart too bad.
"Anika said you had a heart condition, don't worry, dog," Nereigen thundered with his boisterous voice as he pinched something onto Mana, something that made her move together with his chair and let the towering man yank her about. "There are plenty of others to fight for you. Anika was smart to hold on to you over the rest of her chaff. I'll be expecting the same from my own war-dogs – the value of this girl is third, only to my own and Gosenri."
The vibrant sound of hundreds of stomps drowned out in the roar of Gosenri's chainsaws and his motoric unicycle. Mana did not at all feel comfortable selling herself out this way but if that was the only way to save someone in her current state, she'd have done it in a heartbeat. Just how many times has she put her life on the line, fully expecting to die for others' sake? Why would selling her integrity out for someone else's wellbeing be that much different?
"Hate to burst your bubble, boss but your dog is bleeding limp." A feminine voice by Nereigen's side reached Mana's ear, lightly toned down by the layer of leather wrapped around her face. Breathing in what was to be her new face for the following six months was almost unbearable, just an ounce of oxygen above the level needed for fundamental survival but comfort seemed beyond the horizon.
"Hmmm. Treat her when we're back home." Nereigen nodded, his voice calmed down from the commanding authority he thundered with before.
In a twist completely unlike what would have befitted a crowd placed in the maximum security containment facility that was surrounded in total secrecy in terms of the finer details of its properties, Nereigen turned his crew around and began heading back, leaving only the ravaged remains of Anika's crew to pick up after themselves. Broken but barely alive. Sensing the mellow red vibrations in the chakra signatures behind her, Mana stopped and looked back at what she left behind. She spared a thought for what would happen to Anika and her crew but saw no way of helping them any more right now.
A strong yank on her chain made Mana fall over and drag for a short while before she regained her stature and began jogging after Nereigen's rolling throne. A mechanized grinding sound following something slurpy, squishy and snappy together with Gosenri roaring out in excitement followed, Mana was not sure what that sound was but she did not notice any disappearances of chakra signatures so whoever just got ground up by Gosenri must have already been long dead. Could this infernal machinery that this crew had been employing be run on human bio-remains? That truly was a gruesome conclusion to draw and one Mana hoped to be fake, for peace of her own mind.
"Careful. I've seen this throne snap the necks of some dogs that decided to go against its direction. It is very symbolic that way…" Nereigen spoke to Mana in her muzzled tone, meant solely for her.
"Sorry. I'm still getting used to the whole no vision situation." Mana lied. Whether because Nereigen was a poor judge of what was true or because he simply did not care about the magician's reasons, he left the matter alone.
"Which part of the Fire Country you come from?" he asked. It was highly unconventional of what was essentially an over-glorified slave owner to ask these things of his dogs, or so Mana thought.
"Konoha." She replied.
"Oh… You wouldn't have by any chance been close to the Yamanaka clan? That's where I once hailed from…" Nereigen wondered.
"I used to know the heiress of the Yamanaka clan before I did what I did, we used to be very good friends," Mana said. "She's very adamant about her position on crime so I'm afraid that will ever be the same again…"
"Really!? You would not know how my dear brother, Yamanaka Bakuchi is doing? Still sleeping his life away in his old age?" Nereigen wondered.
"I'm sorry… I… Can't believe I've met the man…" Mana shook her head, enjoying the slight breeze that moving her head allowed to slip into her mask.
"Oh well… It's been a long shot anyway, you said you've met some Yamanaka on the higher echelon so I just got my hopes up…" Nereigen sounded a little bit disappointed and deflated after hearing that. It almost made Mana feel bad for the iron-fist ruling, people-owning, psycho maniac.
Mana did not have any words to offer that would have soothed the troubled soul of the giant man so she just let the somber mood linger in the air as she did her best to keep up with her gigantic home on wheels. The young woman was not sure herself why she felt this bad, if she had met someone as giant as Nereigen amongst the Yamanaka, surely she'd have remembered the fact… Then again, so much had happened, she's met so many people along the way leading up to here and now that… What if she couldn't?
It was remarkable how a fully motorized crew could have rolled with such a monotone and restrained hum.
"Lord Seventh!" Kiyomi kneeled on her knee after walking into the Hokage's office. After she and Meiko received their summons together while working together on their last mission, the Yamanaka heiress did not expect to see the entire gathering of Konohagakure genin at the place. Some of them were relatively new and unfamiliar to Kiyomi, she's been a genin for so long that more than half of the current graduates were either too young in the Academy for her to talk to them, or haven't been yet enlisted during Kiyomi's own stint.
Meiko kneeled beside the blonde as well, however, her kneeling could have used more work. Her head was not directed down but instead glaring at the curious pair of men standing from both sides of the Lord Seventh. The one on the left being a man in rather unimpressively dressed man in a dull, tortilla coat that covered a black shirt and baggy dark pants. The hairdo and facial hair of this man seemed familiar, however, the ponytail and the goatee were quite common amongst the men of the Nara clan.
The second one was the true enigma. Even if Kiyomi was not quite as gifted as some in the art of sensory, she felt odd vibrations coming off of the man on the right, what was even more mysterious – the man wore a white coat that was eerily similar to the ceremonial Hokage garb but… This man could not have been an actual Hokage, could he? Even Kiyomi's kneeling posture got busted up by this detail.
"I've gathered you here because of something the leaders of your respective teams and I discussed a proposition these two men have come to me with. These are Shikamaru Nara and Uzumaki Naruto of the different universe that one of our ninja has come into contact with. It appears that their technological advancement has allowed them to master the inter-universal travel on a larger scale than just sending one of our own back home and they've come with a curious proposition that might benefit all of us. Given how I am not the author of their idea, while I do approve of it, I will allow the man behind the plan do the talking…" Lord Seventh turned to Naruto who just smirked and rubbed the back of his head in laid back manner.
"Sorry, I'd like to tell these fine ninja all about the plan but… All the technical mumbo jumbo is more Shikamaru's thing. I think he should be the one." Naruto successfully got rid of that responsibility.
"What a drag…" Shikamaru sighed. "Basically, we had hoped to put the inter-universal machine that the invaders of our universe helped us build and the one that helped send Nakotsumi Mana back home for a special event. The machine turned out to be a step beyond our wildest imaginations, some of the universes we've noticed were on the whole different wavelength of space-time meaning that they might mirror ours step-by-step but be at an earlier point in our timelines. We've tried to map the whole Omniverse out but… There appears to be no way of doing that, given how the number of different universes may very well be infinite…"
"You're rambling on, Shikamaru…" Naruto grinned. "Basically, we want to host the Omniverse's first, hopefully not the last… I always struggle with the word…"
"Interuniversal and Intertemporal Chuunin Exams…" Shikamaru assisted his friend.
Author's Note: Now I've left the story in a satisfying enough state for my break before the Annual (it's not much of a break, given how I'm working on the Annual whole way through :D), that's what I'll be focusing on. At any rate, this is all of Mana's adventures in Jigoku that I'm gonna focus on, I've satisfied my itch and the whole exploration and additional world building have gone long enough, I feel. It already went far beyond being the passing mention of Jigoku being a horrible place I've always intended Jigoku to be.
About the Annual I can only currently say that due to how I left the story, it won't feature Mana at all and will be entirely focused on supporting characters, likely the current roster of Konoha genin, both the old ones from the Chuunin Exams that have survived the Honda Incident and the new ones that have just graduated from the recently rebuilt Ninja Academy. My reasons for such a decision is that most reviews and impressions I get from other people mention how they do like Mana as a character and can sometimes relate to her and care about her but a lot of people seem frustrated when I write her out of the story.
A reasonable person might assume that I should just stop doing that and try to focus on what works but I've never been accused of being reasonable. The way I take it, I've failed to make the supporting cast interesting enough to help people deal with the intervals when I've written Mana out entirely and, given how that was a major fault I had with the Naruto story, it's something I really want to not repeat from the original. I always do strive to make the supporting cast stand out and get showcased a bit, have their own moments of both the cool and personal kind but oftentimes the story is a bit too personal to the journey of Mana for that to happen (I wasn't about to "subvert anyone's expectations" and have Meiko solve Mana's beef with Ayushi by punching him really hard).
So the short version is, in order to try and make the supporting characters a bit more fleshed out and get some loving, the Annual and the following arc will have little to do with Mana (granted, given how she's already a Chuunin, about to be promoted through shady under the table dealings after her return from Jigoku, her participation in the Exams would be kind of pointless... :D).
Anyway, thanks to anyone checking out the story, whether you're just here to see how big the word count gets or if you're genuinely interested, whether you've only been interested in the first few bits and realized it's not your thing or if you're actually up to date. Seriously, thanks.