"Move along, I have a right to not serve you," an owner of a vendor of flowers flipped Mana off, prompting the magician to sigh and walk off with her hands in her pockets, pulling on her hat to cover up her embarrassed face as the judgmental stares of the vendor's clientele saw her off.

So much for getting a rose ring for her magician uniform.

Her entire life Mana had only known two things – she was the ninja magician. Right now she received no work as a ninja whatsoever. For better or worse, the village administration stayed silent. She's yet to even receive a reply for the renewal of her suspended ninja license.

Picking her life back up and getting it rolling has been a giant pain but what else was there? It had to be done, no matter how much shit she'd have to plow through and how vociferous her grunts when waking up in the morning were when looking on at the rest of the day to come. Apparently, even finding a minor accessory for her magician's uniform was a challenge…

If the Hokage refused to renew her license or even answer her call for it to be renewed, if the village didn't think it reasonable to use her as its asset, she may as well have picked her magic shows off the ground. Who knew, maybe, if her license gets taken away permanently, her magic shows would be all that Mana has left?

Then again, magic shows were entertainment. Entertainment tended to have a mean quality to it that nobody felt all that joyful when the person prancing on the stage was someone whose guts were the public enemy No. 1. Why did she bother even leaving home that day?

Whatever organization she struck the deal with to take the blame for Guru Ayushi and keep his plot a secret she'd take to the grave promised her a rank-up, Overcoat suggested that she'd never have to worry about work and yet work has consistently been the greatest pain in Mana's behind. Mother hadn't said half a thing to her about it but Mana felt so useless just sitting at home and picking back up on her ninjutsu training.

If Mana truly wanted to find out what being useless felt like, she should've just left the comfort of her home…

"I wanna be Gan Senju! Sayuri can be Uchiha Hakari! Together our ninja team will be invincible!" a kid likely in his second year in Ninja Academy posed with both of his arms placed on his hips, his callow chest puffed out as much as it was possible given his age. If his facial expression was to be taken at face value – he truly was the First Hokage himself come to life.

All machismo and jawline…

"I wanna be Chestnut Hanasaku, I'm gonna give any enemy of mine a pounding!" a young girl rolled back her sleeve and showcased her non-existent biceps though that was the selling point of childish imagination – anything was possible.

"I can be Red Dog Tanshu. Those two worked together a bunch of times, we have to get bonus teamwork points for that one!" a boy pointed out, swinging his hands around in a manner that emulated the taijutsu style of Uzumaki Tanshu, as well as a child halfway through his stint at Ninja Academy, could do.

"Yeah, I guess I should be Star of Hope Howoku, no way even the First and the Second can stand up against that team!" another boy smirked with a very mischievous smirk for somebody that decided to embody the Star of Hope himself.

"Kohana, you have to pick somebody that syncs up with our team, or else we might just get screwed!" Sayuri, the girl who chose to roleplay as Uchiha Hakari, the Second Hokage, turned to a meek brat with a simple, peach-colored dress and a straw hat. It might not have looked like much of an outfit for an aspiring ninja warrior but it was second to none in fending off summer heatwaves.

"I wanna be Konoha's Sorceress…" little Kohana but her fingers together.

"Wait, what? Why? She's not even legendary or anything…" the boy playing as the First scratched his head.

"Yeah, but she defeated Guru Ayushi and everyone says how he was supposed to be this unbeatable, legendary ninja some time ago!" Kohana pressed her knuckles by her sides and objected. Mana had become invested in this brewing childish game even before her stage name was namedropped though she wanted to see where this goes now more than before.

After all, everything she had to do now was to go home and brood in how everything had been taking a monorail ride straight up a donkey's asshole. Maybe seeing a bunch of children play and reminiscing her own carefree days before making Faustian bargains and living a life of just going through the notions could have ignited something more meaningful to work off of…

"That's right," Sayuri smirked, "Konoha's Sorceress did beat Guru Ayushi, she can be taken as legendary in that case… A legendary villain, that is…"

"That's right!" the boy playing as the First snapped his fingers. "I do declare, how about it, folks, how about instead of fighting each other we team up and take on this threat unlike any other together? Fighting hand in hand, an alliance transcending the tides of history,"

The brat was good bringing up words that no Ninja Academy student should have known. He might have even spent time reading up on speeches and village history textbooks or listened to Lord Seventh himself talk on the television. Seventh was one of those leaders that spoke remarkably similar to the First, with all the implied gravitas to his words and eloquence though, given the context, all of that gravitas being ultimately meaningless.

"Hmm, indeed. I have trained Konoha's Sorceress myself. I am to blame for her upbringing as much as anyone else… If anything, I should be joining her side and going down in flames alongside her to relieve the sense of dreadful guilt in my heart!" the boy roleplaying as Tanshu pressed his fist to his chest, speaking in a high and mighty tone that made Mana feel certain he had never actually met the man or seen him talk. The real deal was no hero nor did he speak like one but he always had true mass behind his words that one couldn't help but respect.

"Cheer up, you can redeem yourself by beating the enemy down to the dirt!" the girl playing Chestnut Hanasaku punched her open palm in a showy gesture before turning to poor Kohana with a malicious smile.

The resulting fight looked more like a mugging from the side. Though the kids didn't use chakra despite being semi-capable of it, making the resulting half-baked shoves, holds, nudges and kicks not register much. Feeling obliged to finish the fight himself, "the First" threw the final "blow" by spinning Kohana around him and letting her fall down by letting go of her without warning.

It was the coup de grace, after all, it had to hurt…

"Shit! It's Konoha's Sorceress!" the boy playing the First grabbed his head and skimmed through his spiky, brown hair, looking appalled by noticing Mana standing there and watching them play after Kohana skid on the ground toward the magician's side of the street.

"She'll beat our asses down, scatter!" the wannabe Chestnut Hanasaku actually put some gusto to her step and dashed into the nearby alleyway, prompted by the rush of their friend, the rest of the group, except for the fallen Kohana, all scattered too.

"Konoha's Sorceress!?" Kohana jumped up to her feet all flustered by the sudden appearance of the most beloved heel to hate in recent days.

"You okay, kid?" Mana mumbled. She wanted to be kinder to the girl but the recent frustrations had left her dried out and beyond broken. The entire six months she spent in the closest thing to Hell that humanity could conjure up she thought of the time she would return back home. The moment she did, there was nothing but animosity and dismissal to the point where sometimes she longed for prison.

At least in prison the gang thought she was useful for something…

"Umm… I think. They didn't mean to hurt me… B-But… I tore my dress up, I think…" Kohana exclaimed in a sorrowful voice as her lower lip began to twitch in sadness when at least five of her fingers fit through the hole in her dress and her socks.

"Damn… Look, if you ever come down to my show, I'll let you and your family in for free," Mana suggested. It wasn't much of a promise, Mr. Hiro still acted pretty vague about letting Mana perform. The probability to make some money and the prospect of the old cash cow beginning to grind again made the man humor the subject but he wasn't blind. He knew that those halls would be empty…

Maybe Mana can still find her old cardboard box somewhere…?

"Really!? Wow, that's awesome!" Kohana cheered with a fist pump since her knee still looked pretty busted.

"That doesn't look too good, do you live far? I can piggy-back you home. It'll be practical too, I'll show you the technique ninja use for carrying their injured teammates." Mana suggested after pointing at the girl's knee and sighing. She didn't sound too excited about the prospect of doing good for good's own sake but that was only because she knew that it would somehow turn back to bite her again.

As these kinds of things always did.

"I live in the north-western district, in-between the Hyuuga Clan district and Ichiraku Ramen," the girl nodded, looking cheerful about it. Mana leaned down and picked the kid up, placing her on her back and bending her knees a couple of times. She hadn't done this for a long time since every time she tried using her chakra for the last six months it made her feel like every single nerve in her body was being simultaneously being extracted via the mandibles of a very pissed giant sparrow bee.

Things started slow and steady. It was as if Mana's body had subconsciously placed blocks upon herself to avoid any sort of superhuman feats, blocks that collapsed like a shoddy brick wall one by one until Mana could leap over nearby buildings and dash across two poles like a speeding arrow without blinking or questioning her sense of balance whatsoever.

"Look, it's that brat again!"

"She's back from the prison already, isn't she?"

"Shit, I had almost forgotten with all the fuss about the exams…"

"And to think things were so calm for a while…"

"Put down that poor kid, you witch!"

"That deviant will corrupt the soul of that poor girl… If only the Hokage didn't act like a powerless goon and put that brat behind bars for good!"

Mana couldn't listen to all that chaff anymore. One step, one step and she was there. Her foot tapped right in the middle of the street the girl said she lived in, light as a feather. Kohana sat there with her tiny arms locked around Mana's throat yet lacking the physical strength to press against it in any meaningful way. The girl screamed out, bursting with glee and alerting the nearby villagers. There went all the talking again…

"Kohana… W-Wait!" a masculine voice made Mana anticipate trouble though the man looked to be more taken aback than outraged. His hands slowly reached out to take the little girl on Mana's back from her, as if waiting for the magician to lash out at him but then the man noticed the bruises on the girl's knees, her torn and dirty dress.

"Konoha's Sorceress herself brought our Kohana back home, this is crazy!" the man mumbled to himself.

"She was so fast, daddy! One step and we were here…" Kohana kept switching between the awe of a younger, soon-to-be ninja, admiring the drastic difference in skill and power between the ranks and some harmless, childish bliss.

"I bet… It takes that kind of strength to save the whole world…" the man lifted his kid up and down a few times before placing her down since she was far too heavy for him to just lift around. Evidently, the man was a civilian and a frail one even for one of those.

"Excuse me… What?" Mana scratched her head, she was about to get out of there until the kid got noticed for hanging around her for too long which would have spelled out doom for the social life of both poor Kohana and her family but that last, ominous declaration…

"I mean… We know what you did, Mana-san. Our family does and we'll tell as many people as possible, not that they'll believe us…" the man pumped his fist raising it up to the shoulder level.

"Wait… How did you even…?" Mana felt stumped. That was one thing she not only did not need but something that actively would have caused trouble for her. If these people spoke too loud, who knew how the Organization would have reacted to that sort of attention. She was meant to keep that a secret and she followed her end of the bargain.

Maybe the fact that a couple of villagers were talking was why the Organization didn't rush things along with their part of the promise, although it may have also been Mana's stunt during the trial, derailing their carefully prepared script.

"Don't worry, the word of truth is being spoken. The Kanon is making sure that people know what you did, Mana-san."

"So, how did it go?" mother's morose tone broke Mana out of her trance. After six-months long stagnation, there was work that needed to be done in order for Mana to make her chakra network work like it was supposed to. The damage that Jigoku has left on her was more than just psychological.

"I guess I can't even find a flower for my show…" Mana shrugged. She acted that she was closing her eyes to meditate though she just wanted to avoid being seen crying like a useless sack of shit.

Things have been tough on mother as they were. Father was still stuck in the hospital, plugged on to life support, and very much alive though showing no hopes for recovery. Constant payments were necessary to keep father alive as every medical ninja had stated that unless new, state of the art medical technology became available – he'd not get any better.

By the time technology of that level became available – even if father does wake up, who knows what state he'll be waking up in. One can't just slumber for decades without any lingering signs of what they've been through. A brush of mother's clothes and a soft press of her hand on Mana's back was meant to ease her bother though the signs of kindness when she should have by all means hit her on the head with a wooden spoon for not having accomplished jack shit in six whole days of being back only made things more bothersome.

"Well, not all things are lost, look, you missed a summon from the administration," the content of mother's words was so triggering that Mana couldn't even continue with her act of being entranced by her own focused meditation session, she jumped up and picked the letter right out of the woman's hands without her being aware of it.

"Well, well, at least your sleight of hand hasn't gotten rusty…" mother pressed her hands to her hips.

She was getting summoned though, given Mana's recent streak of "luck" it could have just been something akin to the Seventh's scolding session. Lord Seventh, being a past member of the village's law enforcement himself, wasn't too forgiving to criminals and not a firm believer of any sort of repentance. That much Mana had learned during her internship in Village Protection way back. He'd be just the type of guy to summon Mana just to yell at her face and deny her request for an active ninja license.

Although… The Hokage had no right to summon a civilian. While Mana was not yet a civilian, since her license had been suspended, she was sort of semi-ninja, giving the Hokage a technical right to call her in. It did seem wild that someone like the Seventh Hokage would waste time calling her just to yell at her face, though given the welcome she's been experiencing the last week from her home village, it was just the sort of thing she's been expecting.

"Hopefully I can make a bit of money. When's the next payment to the hospital due?" Mana looked at mother who shuffled in between a stack of clothes in the other room before running off to the kitchen to get a bite of something.

She didn't answer and that was more than enough information. Even more, she was home early which was why Mana felt like it was a good idea to welcome her mother that she hadn't seen for six whole months and whose heart she must have broken to shatters just sitting on the sofa meditating. Mother was all work, Mana didn't know a single person more skilled with finances and business and that was a troubling sign indeed.

"Mom, you lost clients because of what I did, it all trickled down on to you, didn't it?" Mana asked her directly.

"Who cares, honestly. We've got ample savings from when you worked two gigs, I skimmed a little bit off of your income for just such a day. That's your trusty mom for ya!" mother winked while throwing something icky and frozen into the pan and shoving it over the gas front and back a couple of times just to move the slimeball around and have it melt faster.

"Fuck, I didn't mean for it to hit you. Overcoat didn't tell me it would be affecting you and dad too…" Mana grumbled.

"I won't be tolerating any of that prison language here, you've only been there for six months so don't treat me for a fool and tell me you've lost your manners that quickly! Also, if some scumbag wants to drag my daughter's name through the dirt, he's no client I care to keep. Honestly, the business is doing just fine, there was this huge bash while you were gone, people from different timelines and universes have come over and nobody cares about who you've beaten up all the way out there…" mother scolded Mana for acting out and sighed.

Someone must have sent mother out for vacation and worn her skinsuit for the last week. There was no way the mother Mana knew would have dismissed a potential client like this.

Mana almost felt like an idiot realizing how much she'd been taking her previous social status for granted. It was one thing thinking about how meaningless throwing it all away was, it was another thing entirely walking out in the streets and seeing kids pointing fingers from across the streets and their mothers pressing their hands against their faces and pulling them from clear view in fear that Mana would turn violent again.

No amount of punishment would have been enough. As far as the civilians were concerned, Mana got off easy. Just another example of ninja elitism compared to the civilian population. The magician hadn't been keeping up with the news lately due to a more pressing need to engage in other matters but she was certain that the ninja-civilian relations in the village had barely moved toward improvement.

"Did you forget to take something?" mother wondered when Mana burst through the door and made her way upstairs back to her room. The woman didn't press on the matter given how hasty her daughter's steps were and how she showed no need for subtlety and marched like a platoon of mammoths on the wooden stairs, slamming the door to her room.

Mother's chakra could be felt right behind the door. Mana's chakra sensory was still cowardly to take small peeks from time to time unless the magician demanded it. She had been so frightened to show any hint of being a ninja lest she become crippled with excruciating agony that any hopes for subconscious emergence of her ninja anatomy, spiritual or physical side of it, was wishful thinking.

She feared that Mana would shut herself in, refuse to walk out. Just a few more moments and mother would speak up. The woman was already struggling to find the words with which she could talk her frustrated daughter into leaving her room and going to the administration. Lord Seventh meant his summon and it might be troublesome if Mana just shut herself in and refused to show up, psychologically traumatized or not.

"Mana…" mother spoke up softly just to get to the pep talk part but before she could really sink her teeth into her motivational speech, the door opened up and Mana halted in front of her mother as if she was just a block in her path.

"Did you come back home just to change your clothes?" mother scratched her head. She'd have moved aside and let her daughter pass if Mana's behavior hadn't been so odd.

"Yeah, my whole schtick was about being noticed. I don't want people to notice me anymore. I want them to just leave me alone for once…" Mana replied and took a slow step onward.

Mother turned, leaving a small gap for the magician to pass before peeking into Mana's room and seeing her magician's uniform tossed aside in a careless manner that suggested a hasty and emotional removal. Mana couldn't see it but she could feel mother looking at her back as she left the house again wondering if her daughter's going to be okay.

Often enough these days Mana found herself wondering the same thing.

She hadn't worn a normal tool pouch since she devised her entire gimmick, by the time she graduated the Ninja Academy she's already been doing it and modifying her uniform to host her entire arsenal whereas now Mana found herself strapped with far too many leather strings holstering decks of cards with different sealing glyphs. The change of look helped somewhat. People still knew her face, she had spent a life making sure her face would get noticed and it blew all over her face but she no longer raked at everyone's eyes without her flashy outfit. With enough gusto in her steps, she could almost have a semblance of solitude and abandonment.

Even inside the administration building the clerks just kept on working and let Mana walk past them without batting an eye at her. The few that weren't focused on their piles of paperwork did gander at her, those that had company in their offices whispered and pointed fingers but it was nothing that Mana couldn't bite her lip down and power right past of.

The Hokage's office had the door open and five people stood inside, turning for the doorway when they saw Mana. Aozora Yushijin, Kouta's teammate was there and though his usual apathetic stare did widen for a moment after seeing Mana, rather, her drastic change in attitude, he composed himself in no time at all. Mana would have liked working with him again, he had a nice tendency to not get into anyone else's business and solely focus on the job at hand. He used to see Mana as his rival and they've taught each other what they knew of genjutsu to deepen each other's craft but they weren't exactly good friends.

"Could you four please leave the office for a second and let me have a talk with Nakotsumi Mana please?" Lord Seventh gave those present inside the room a quick, scanning look to see everyone's moods.

"Hey, what do you mean with that? We're supposed to be working together, aren't we?" a ninja in his late twenties with blond, spiky hair and modified flak jacket that extended over his sleeves like an actual jacket and had patches of additional, blue and red patches for additional protection, pouted his lips and crossed his arms.

"This is the Hokage asking you to leave his office, Yugato, excuse him, Lord Seventh, we'll leave you alone at once." A man with spiky and wild, dark hair wearing a green, traditional, oriental-style martial arts uniform scolded his acquaintance in front of the Hokage and grabbed the man's head, forcefully bowing it.

A young woman of red hair as well as Yushijin both bowed in front of the Hokage and turned to leave while a chubby man with platinum-blond hair so thick that they covered up his face and eyes all the way down to the middle of his nose bowed and excused himself a couple of times before vacating the office too. The Hokage's assistant had to clear his throat and remind the plump man that the door was still open to which the thick man just nodded a pair of times and began rapid-firing apologies for as he shut the door with far more force than they required to be shut with.

"I was about to give you a mission so… I suppose that answers the question about your ninja license being activated again, right?" Lord Seventh spoke to Mana with a cool face after a brief moment of silence and a heavy sigh. His face didn't exhibit any features of a lawman who spoke to someone he took for a criminal which was unusual but welcome.

"Yes, Sir," Mana bowed her head. She used to show more respect to the Hokage than just bowing her head as if she was talking to an elder she just helped get across the street but she could hardly stomach faking respect anymore.

"First things first, the reason why I asked the rest of the special jounin out is that we have some things we need to clear up first, right? I feel like those things are better discussed privately between us, naturally, my assistant the shadow's shadow so his presence is considered as that of my own extension," Lord Seventh explained.

"The rest of the special jounin, Sir?" Mana turned to the shut door behind her.

"That's right… So many things to clear up… Where do we even start?" the man lamented dragging his hand across his face before settling down in a resting position on his table. "Ever since your release from Jigoku, people I didn't even know existed have been asking, no, campaigning and outright crusading behind the curtains to get you promoted to Jounin. I'm not sure what that's all about, but I, as the Hokage, as it turns out, still have some voice in my own village. I'm not sure what underground movement you've gotten yourself in bed with, they will not bully me into making decisions I do not see being necessary or right, are we clear?"

Somehow Mana had sensed this talk coming, maybe that was why she couldn't muster up showing Lord Seventh the respect she had to show him. Heck, he probably even deserved all of what etiquette asked of her, it was just that he knew just as much as the rest of the population with just sprinkles of the truth he chose to ignore and that was why Mana found it hard to see eye-to-eye with the man.

"As of yet, your license is active again and you are promoted to special jounin, joining Aozora Yushijin as the only ninja in your generation to have accomplished that much so early. While I fought tooth and nail to prevent you from becoming Jounin, to claim that what you have achieved in the art of genjutsu does not deserve the honor of acknowledgment would be foolish. You are one of the best illusion specialists in the village, that is not my word, that is the word of other genjutsu specialists whom I trust completely, and therefore I have no qualms about this promotion." Lord Seventh spoke up again after Mana refused to respond. She didn't really have to, her expression told him that she was just continuing her prison stay here – all opened up for whatever pummeling everyone around her had to throw at her, just hoping to survive until tomorrow after it.

"Understood." Mana bowed with the whole upper half of her body.

"You might think that I don't trust you, or something of that nature, but as I brief you and the squad of special jounin you will be working alongside with about the mission objective, you will understand where we stand exactly. The bottom line is – I know…" Lord Seventh stared Mana right in the eyes. The gravity of his stare was such that the man might as well have gripped the young woman by her cheeks and turned her face by force to look right back at his cyan colored eyes.

"I… I see…" Mana finally managed to wrestle out of the man's visual hold and turn her eyes down.

"I don't know everything but I know enough. Enough to not burst the bubble that you and whatever those Root bastards have cooked up. The idea of ninja in my own village working behind my back and hatching schemes like these infuriates me, I don't care if Lord Sixth approved of it or if Lady Fifth even knew about the Root existing. But I know for certain that the Root is working for the good of the village and they only have the interests of Konoha in mind so my hands are tied. I will play along, for now, I see no other way." Lord Seventh explained.

This was the first time that Mana even heard the Organization being named out loud like that. Not even she knew how it was called and she worked alongside them on this.

"Mikapen, you can call in the rest, they will need to know the mission objective and I believe that Mana and I are on the same page now," Lord Seventh turned to his assistant who responded with a lively nod and rushed to the door to invite the rest back in.

"Sorry to keep you guys waiting like that. It's just that I haven't yet had a chance to meet Mana since she's been released from prison and there were some formal matters we needed to discuss. Until just now Mana was not yet aware that she had been promoted to special jounin," the Seventh explained to the rest of the special jounin after they gathered into the office.

"Huh? Oh, right, you're that little missy that gone off to prison, for bullying Guru Ayushi, right?" to whom his comrade referred to as "Yugato" earlier spoke up, pointing his finger at Mana as he leaned at her, being half a head taller than her. "Didn't recognize you without your getup. Gone all punk, huh? That's all good, it's a way cooler look!"

"Forgive Yugato, he's an imbecile." The red-haired woman looked at Mana with a cold pair of eyes for someone looking so fiery-headed.

"Huh… We were all kind of waiting for words of encouragement to the newbies, Kagana…" the plump, blond-haired ninja scratched his head, voicing the collective disappointment that filled the room after the red-haired ice queen Kagana went quiet all of a sudden.

"What would be the point? She hadn't earned them yet…" Kagana closed her eyes and crossed her arms in rebellion to the public sentiment.

"Wait, you mean you just spoke up to chastise me!?" Yugato clenched a fist, coming dangerously close to starting to trade blows with the young woman if the oriental-dressed special jounin didn't drag him away.

"Calm down, not in Lord Seventh's office, Yugato!" the martial artist scorned his ally.

"Anyway… Before things got out of hand…" Lord Seventh spoke up with a hint of embarrassment for the happenings in his room, though once he did speak up, he took over the room in a single sentence. "I meant to explain the mission details to you. This will be one of the more dangerous B-Rank missions, I am afraid. The type of mission I would normally send a couple of jounin to but, in this case, I'm afraid I cannot."

"Huh? What do you mean, Lord Seventh!?" Yugato turned to the village leader.

"Maybe if you let him talk, he'd tell you…" Kagana mocked her ally again.

"You see, I am afraid that the organization that your mission will request that you deal with possesses a frightening amount of village intelligence. An organization calling themselves Kanon is leaking a great deal of intelligence down to the civilians in ways we cannot control. It is unclear how they manage to transmit their leaks or how they reach their supporters but… Needless to say, it has to stop," Lord Seventh explained the crux of the mission objective.

"I see, this means that this Kanon has intelligence on the village ninja as well, meaning that they'd know all about the abilities of the elite ninja of the village," Yushijin pointed out.

"Correct. My best option is to send the next best thing – ninja with a skillset matching that of jounin though in one specific area together. Ninja with far lesser renown in the village than their more elite counterparts, hoping that the Kanon would not have any intelligence on you, or have far less of it, especially when two of you have only been promoted recently," Lord Seventh replied.

"So, if this mission is on the dangerous side of B-Rank missions, I take it that those Kanon have ninja working for them?" Kagana asked.

"Indeed, that might be the case. I do not see another way of the village intelligence leaking but someone very high-up supplying that information. In addition to internal threats, you might encounter resistance from foreign agents that might want to further destabilize our village by having the information leaking on. After all, our deepest secrets might prove beneficial to, say, Kumogakure, that finds its military second in power after the conclusion of the Coltan Conflict and fear response from Konohagakure or Kirigakure, that undoubtedly still dreams of a return to their Bloody Mist era days," the Seventh mused.

"So that is how you knew… The secrets that Kanon leaked have been true, which could only mean one thing," Mana recalled her encounter with Kohana's father and what he told her.

"That's right. That was how I found out, as embarrassing as that is…" Lord Seventh nodded. "I suppose, in this one case, this Kanon has proven useful to me too, which is why I wouldn't mind if you brought some of them back alive. I take it that prison hasn't changed your outlook on life, Mana?" the Seventh Hokage wondered out loud.

"It… Did not." Mana had to reaffirm that with herself but ultimately she never felt inclined to take a life, despite the hardships she went through recently. Even the faltering of her nindo against Guru Ayushi was temporary, as the legendary ninja himself had noted way back when.

"Hmph, so you're going to hold back against the enemy? Be careful that you don't end up being more of a burden than Yugato," Kagana smirked at Mana.

"I assure you that I do not intend to hold back or endanger any of you. I have fought with the intention of crippling my opponent instead of killing them my entire life and there might not be a ninja better suited for this task in this entire village," Mana replied with a look that matched Kagana's own in gravitas.

"So… I guess it makes sense that those two are here, they're promoted recently, this Kanon group might not know anything about them, yadda-yadda, yap-yap, dribble-dribble… What about this goof?" Yugato pointed at the plumpy, blond man in their fold.

"This is Inori Yamanaka. He will serve as your counter-intelligence agent for the mission. He is not much for combat potential and he was not my first pick for the mission in question but some… Internal issues… I've become aware of prohibited me from choosing the best ninja suited for the task. Inori will do well enough, though, the Yamanaka clan has assured me of it." Lord Seventh acknowledged the seemingly unfit-looking man in the squad.

"I am looking forward to working with all of you!" Inori bowed after turning to each member of the squad with an almost cartoonish amount of uptightness in his tensed up face.

"In that case, unless you have any other questions, I would rather see you guys get to it. It is a sensitive matter. This might only apply to the two of you but this won't be like the low-ranking missions you were used to. If you end up failing, it won't be just the lives of random people that might be at stake but the safety and well-being of our entire village," Lord Seventh directed his strict glare to Mana and Yushijin, both of whom were only promoted to the rank of special jounin for their advancements in the illusionary art recently.

"To say that this mission is going to be a tough cookie would be an understatement. We may very well end up operating within the walls of Konohagakure…" the orientally-dressed ninja turned to Mana and extended his hand for a greeting. "I don't believe we've met yet. My name is Hosen Nekomata. I am also a special jounin though my area of expertise is taijutsu."

Mana waved her hand in greeting though she did not answer the man's proposal for a handshake. Hosen promptly withdrew it, beaming a frustrated glint at the newly molded special jounin who, in his eyes, acted brattish but he didn't appear to hold a grudge for too long as the first impressions were as quick to fade from his face as they were to form.

"We should split up and gather some information on these Kanon folks. If they've been spreading information to the targets that they weren't supposed to, it strikes me as the self-righteous, anti-government type of movement. They must have spilled the beans to some ordinary citizen, maybe even gone public on daytime television. If we ask around, we are bound to run into someone who knows something," Mana spoke up before the group and turned around to walk off separately from them as if the matter had already been settled.

"Self-righteous, anti-government type? Television? Seem awfully precise guesses…" Kagana sneered at the magician though she did not rush after Mana or get in her way. "That's hogwash. This plan is ridiculous and I won't be a part of it."

"You're just salty 'cause you'll have to talk to some people, Kagana!" Yugato pointed an accusatory finger at his comrade with a smile worth a fortune and then gave Mana a thumb-up. "I second this notion, let's peep this one out!"

"Now you're just agreeing with Mana to spite Kagana…" Hosen crossed his arms over his chest and gave Yugato a look filled with disappointment in the childish nature in which a handful of young adults and adults were acting. "We should think this through more carefully, on this I agree. We still don't know if…"

Hosen sighed as Mana had walked off into the crowd and separated from the group before he could finish his sentence. It wasn't like she could mingle into the crowd all too well. Mana's chances of being one with the crowd were as slim now when she was infamous as they were back when she was famous. No matter how hard Mana tried decorating her face with make-up or how little care she put into her hair, how drastically she'd change her appearance or style, putting a beating on a worldwide icon of peace had forever branded her as just the kind of punk she made herself out to be.

Fine. If punk was all that they saw in her, that was what Mana would give them. Nothing in her ideal to never take a life forced her to be nice to everyone or even anyone. If everyone just cared to fling stones and point their quilled backsides to her, Mana would stop petting altogether and would stay within a flung stone distance from anyone.

She had a mean feeling about this mission, something else, deeper, less desired to be surfaced, and shown out in the open to be pissing mad about this mission. She suspected what this was all about, why she specifically was chosen to take part in it. Despite her better wants and needs, this truly was about her. Lord Seventh knew the intelligence that the members of Kanon were leaking.

The Hokage wanted Mana to confront that. He wanted to rub her face into the ropes, drive his kitchen knife through her gums while he smiled at her face. Konoha expected her to quell the underground organization telling the truth about what she did. It was just another test of how willing she was to bend over, smile, and ask for more.

Tasking her father to slay her mother's tribe, having the child of said tribe declare allegiance to the village and serve it for a decent part of her life, oftentimes putting her life on the line, that was no longer enough. Having Mana take the blame for Guru Ayushi, go to prison for saving the village and likely even the whole world just wasn't good enough anymore. But what if Mana actually felt mad at the village and second-guessed her life choices?

Kohana's family lived between Ichiraku Ramen and the Hyuuga Clan district. Kohana's father had been listening to Kanon's message, he might not have had contacts within the organization but he must have, at the very least, known where to start. Dreading the prospect of having to confront the truth and be forced to lie about it again, Mana knocked on the door.

"Ah!" a plump, middle-aged, red-haired lady took a step back and gasped after seeing Mana standing behind the door. "You're… Konoha's Sorceress, aren't you? I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you immediately over all the… Change."

"Yeah, that was meant to be the idea. I wanted to talk to your husband, ma'am. He told me something interesting about this Kanon group and I'd like to hear more about it," Mana stated her business. Frankly, she had spent so much time being mad at herself and the world on her way here that she didn't play out this conversation in her head at all. She'd be lucky if her impromptu approach even worked now.

Then again, it's been a long time coming she'd have even a pinch of some good luck.

"Oh… Yes, of course, that's all my husband's listening to these days. I mean, the village is controlling the television, right? Something about some weird, invisible waves, or something… These Kanon must have their own television station or something. My husband understands the gizmo a bit better, I'm sure he'll help you understand better than I can. We're very grateful for what you've done and we're great fans, we hope to see you on the stage again soon too!" the woman kept talking while leading Mana indoors and taking her to the guest room where her husband sat sprawled out on the sofa and watching a staticy image of a group in overcoats and masks of known political figures and animals talking in choppy sound quality.

"What we are experiencing now is… Well, it can only be described as wonderful but also… I understand that it can be a bit scary. You see, you can't quite count or tell real-time, only canon time, and I cannot adequately explain to you how the real-time works. All I can say is that time the way you perceive it works differently than you think it does. Some frames of time, sometimes entire years, entire months are irrelevant and they are skipped in real-time," a figure with a rose-colored wig and hiding behind a featureless, copper mask spoke in the center of the frame.

"Okay, okay… It's a bit much but… Why is that real-time important though, Midas?" another member of Kanon, one donning a toad-mask covering his entire face with rich decorations to the point where he appeared like a humanoid, cloaked toad since the cloak hung over the edges of the mask and the mask did a fine job hiding the man underneath the toad asked the man in the center.

"It's absolutely integral, because, you see, annually, counting in real-time, there is a time of great crisis, but also a great celebration. It is the time of the Annual. During that time, sometimes there are profound changes – like the emergence of Nakotsumi Mana, the Golden Child, from an alternate universe with samples of life-changing technology that thrust us forward entire decades, made this very screen through which I speak possible and delivered radio technology that before that time was only given down to the ninja available to the public. Sometimes, the Annual is just a meaningless celebration of her life's story but, more often, something world-shaking is bound to happen, whether the public is aware of it or not," the one referred to as Midas explained.

"Konoha's Sorceress!" Kohana's father jumped off of the armchair and approached Mana, grabbing hold of her hand and shaking it while bowing his head, as if expressing profound gratitude.

"So, what you're saying is, that this entire universe is perhaps centered around this one girl? That… I'm sorry, that seems very ridiculous. We often get laughed at and called conspiracy theorists, now, I have to admit, that sounds just too bonkers." A grungy-sounding man in a full-suit of samurai armor of obsidian black and pearl white pieces mingling together and forming a yin and yang kind of harmony together objected to Midas' declaration.

"No, no… Things are even scarier than this. You see, that girl is the very reason why this universe was created. It's because the Captain wanted to tell her story. Truth is, while you recall a time before her birth, nothing before her conception, in fact, nothing before her graduation of the Ninja Academy has ever truly taken place in real-time. Well, except for a few flashbacks that have shaped matters into existence, they are separate moments of real-time existing in between voids of nothing and preceding the history of this universe." Midas postured in front of the television screen.

"But… You're not making any more sense here, Midas. I mean… She's not all that remarkable even, she's nowhere near the strongest ninja in her own village nor is she that good at her job, most of the time her career as a kunoichi comes into the background before her career as a stage magician. Heck, if she ditched that ridiculous game of being a ninja, she'd probably become a megastar and live a life of luxury just off of the magic she used to perform on the stage," the armored Kanon member objected again.

"Ugh… Why does it even have to be a girl who's so important, I mean, I have nothing against women but their role is to support the man. It's not offensive to say that, I mean… Come on…" the Kanon member in a large bronze mask that extended all the way down to his belly due to the long beard and well past his scalp due to the large cylinder that the man depicted in the mask wore declared. He was largely ignored by the other Kanon members.

"Umm… These guys are the Kanon that I mentioned earlier. I know that sometimes what they say sounds silly and I don't take them at face-value but…" Kohana's father looked down and away, appearing embarrassed for having seen watching it by Mana herself who was very much the subject of discussion by this group.

"So, they do broadcast their activity through television…" Mana mumbled largely to herself, letting the idiotic babble in the background drown out. "Do you perhaps know where they are broadcasting themselves from? There are things I'd like to discuss with them and, given how they're dragging my name out in the public as some messiah, I believe I have that right."

"That's why they're so incredible, you see, they established their own television station and they're broadcasting this through their own signal. The rest of the television is all village-controlled or approved stations, except this one," Kohana's father explained.

"I'm sorry, could you explain this a bit better, I'm not very keen on technology, you see…" Mana felt a bit embarrassed to admit.

"Well, you're a ninja so you must have worked with radio waves from time to time, right?" Kohana's father explained, approaching the television and pulling on a few of turning controller pieces.

"Now, having in mind that in the very first Annual the Golden Child has returned with a sample of technology from other universes and confronted outer dimensional godly beings in Naruto's universe, one of countless more, just imagine how many multiverse-shaking events have transpired without you being aware of them. Once again, they've only transpired once every year counting down real-time and this entire universe has only existed for five years of real-time, considering this point in time as the time that it becomes cemented into the fabric of space-time by it being posted and not when it was written, that is to say, a few weeks of real-time before this moment in time was posted." Midas continued with his ramblings before Kohana's father had switched him off by browsing the different signals, settling down on something showing off a serial about sumo wrestlers controlling massive robots.

"You see, by switching the signal, browsing around the airwaves, you can catch all sorts of stuff, a lot like you can intercept the enemy's radio signal through your walkie by just knowing the frequency they're talking on," Kohana's father explained.

Mana looked up. She hadn't noticed that she'd been followed. It was a testament both of how mad she was when walking away from the group as well as how skilled the one hiding from her sensory was. Not wanting Kohana's family to get into further trouble, she paced to the door to confront her follower who chose to make his chakra signature flare up just now.

"Umm… Are you going to destroy the station, Sorceress?" Kohana's father wondered as he rushed to the door after her. "Because you see, we don't get anything like this. The only news we get is those we're allowed to hear and what if what we're getting is wrong? What if it's just what the village, the ninja want us to hear? I mean… There has been so much tension between the civilians and the ninja lately, even Lord Sixth chose to resign because of how riled up he got the civilian population of the village and here we have someone that us, someone weaker than you ninja folks can listen to, knowing they're not tampered with by the Hokage in any way…"

"Of course, I'll shut them down, didn't you know? I kicked Guru Ayushi's ass just because he made me mad. Those guys are full of shit, I'm no Golden Child. The only ninja you should be fearing in this village is me, because I'm the only one without anything to lose and the village just keeps on pulling on my ropes time and time again," Mana turned back to scare what little support she had from the villagers right out of them.

The pair of innocent, childish eyes looking at her from the corner shook her. It almost made her tear up while she made sure to look all tough and intimidating on the outside but, strangely enough, it just ended up adding to the emotional effect. Kohana's mother covered up her mouth and held her little girl closer to her lap, trying to move her behind her so that if Mana decided to turn violent it would be the woman and not her daughter to take the brunt of the force head-on.

"Please leave our home," Kohana's father insisted. Mana was glad to oblige.

"I'm impressed you managed to follow me undetected," Mana spoke up, feeling the presence slowly picking the pace back up and homing in on her location. She knew that Yushijin could hear her.

"Why wouldn't I be? Since you were always a wall I aimed to overcome, I've learned to move around sensors undetected just so I could confront you if I ever needed to," Yushijin blitzed beside the magician, making it out to be as if he had always been following her.

"Concealing your chakra signature makes you awfully vulnerable. If you as much as cracked a twig, the enemy's reaction would become invisible to you because of how much you're suppressing your abilities to remain hidden," Mana replied. She was already somewhat used to more skilled ninja utilizing the chakra suppression method to avoid detection via chakra sensory.

"Hmph… As expected, you won't just accept being figured out sitting down. That's why competing with you has been so much fun," Yushijin smirked. "So, figured out anything useful?"

"Maybe, do you know anything about radio waves?" Mana wondered.

"I know of the general concept, somewhat aware of how they work and what they're used for, why?" Yushijin asked in response to a question.

"This Kanon organization is nutter than a bag of almonds, meaning they're dangerous enough to just throw that sensitive information about willy-nilly, even hand it down to the enemies. They broadcast their manifestos through radio waves, meaning anyone with a television set can tune into it. Lord Seventh won't like it one bit," Mana sighed.

"Then it is a good thing that it isn't just the two of us doing it. There was no need to separate from the group. Not everyone's out to get you, Mana, everyone was always willing to look over the terms of your imprisonment so you were the only one who wouldn't move on," Yushijin said.

Finding the rest of the group was much easier with Mana's chakra sensory serving its use and neither of the other three trying that hard to hide. Kagana's was the only signature that did not move or intertwine with other, smaller signatures that would have served as a sort of smokescreen obstructing her. While she was the least pleasant to find, she was also the simplest one.

"Great, you've found the runaway…" the redhead observed with a dismissive grunt before resuming her sulking with her back pressed to the wall of a nearby house.

"In terms of usefulness, I'd be willing to argue which one of us contributes more to the team," Mana slapped back at the face of the fellow special jounin though she didn't receive an aggressive reaction in response. Kagana seemed to be the type just let the filth wash over her and run off.

"The others are wasting their time talking to the small fry," Kagana turned her nose to the right. Even though nobody was within sight in that direction, or any other, chakra sensory suggested that she was not wrong about the general direction.

"Attitude like that might be the reason why the civilians don't feel too receptive to ninja," Mana replied before turning to gather the team. She had seen a few people of Kagana's type in prison. Cool loners who didn't think much of anything outside their area of expertise, justifying their lack of knowledge or experience in something as that thing being something that's not worth knowing in the first place. It was a waste of time to ask her for help tracking down the Kanon.

"Hey, hey… You said you were being all useful and contributing to the team. I wasn't gullible enough to get hooked by doubting you but you won't just walk away with whatever information you managed to gather," Kagana moved from the wall and walked up to Mana.

"Fine, you can go fetch Hosen," Mana pointed at a direction.

"I thought the idea was pooling back together and sharing our intelligence," Kagana stared at Mana with a strict and judgmental stare.

"You mean our intelligence… Also, Hosen is a Nekomata, he'll be able to track us within the village," Mana replied before rushing off to pick Yugato and Inori up.

Yugato had managed to strike up a conversation with an elderly lady who shook her head as if she'd just ingested a sour plum and wobbled off after seeing Mana approaching the young man from behind. The loudmouth looked disconcerted about this scare but Inori shook the young man by his shoulder and pointed to Mana.

"What do you know about radio waves?" Mana looked at Inori.

"Hey, I'm here too, you know," Yugato boiled in his own juices. "Plus, you shouldn't be asking us that sort of stuff, you should be apologizing and introducing yourself all over again with the way you just ran off to do your own thing…"

"Radio waves…?" Inori scratched his cheek, "Well… I suppose I know enough for basic repairs of walkies and radio equipment."

"Don't encourage her!" Yugato snapped at his own comrade after he answered Mana.

"The Kanon are operating via radio waves. Maybe they have their own station, maybe they hijacked one. That's how they're spilling the secrets. It's no use talking to the villagers. Those that know something won't tell you because they're on the side of Kanon," Mana explained herself.

"Wow, that's quite impressive! You managed to get that much intelligence in just over an hour!? All Yugato got was a bunch of small-talk and granny tales!" Inori complimented Mana with a stunned expression.

"Don't you turn on me, dammit!" Yugato shook his fist, threatening his pal with some friendly one on one violence.

"Do you know the frequency of their radio transmission?" Inori managed to settle down after going pale and wrestling out of Yugato's bullying session, stuffing his tie back under his flak jacket.

"Frequency?" Mana spun a strand of her hair over her index finger, hiding her embarrassment behind the gesture. "Well… I remember the way that the spinny-thing was pointed at if it's of any help."

"Spinny-thing? Seriously…?" Inori deflated.

"Well… I can show you the place that had its devices set on that frequency pretty much twenty-four-seven. Do you think you could figure it out by checking on them?" Mana wondered.

"Me? Isn't that your source?" Inori scratched his head.

"It is, though I might have burnt a bridge or two prematurely," Mana admitted.

"Heh, serves you right for being such a Type-A personality. If only Kagana would get burnt once or twice just like that…" Yugato smirked, crossing his arms over his chest. "For your information, I happen to be great with people. I can convince them to let us have a look at their radio in no time at all."

"I won't need to slice the radio or anything. I just need the frequency…" Inori slapped his face and shook his head. While plenty of ninja used radios at one point or another, even more of them had no idea how this fundamental piece of equipment worked.

"Kagana and Yushijin left to pick up Hosen. We better team up before heading there," Mana pointed at her back.

Hosen didn't have much success gathering intel either. His contacts were exclusively the high-class clan folk given how he stalked in the clan districts of Uchiha, Hyuuga, Yamanaka, and the like. The only clan he openly admitted having avoided was the Inuzuka. Despite Yugato's continuous attempts at pinning the matter to it being a dog-cat thing, Hosen adamantly denied such allegations and exhausted the entire vocabulary in possible ways to declare the Inuzuka as uncultured brutes that wouldn't know anything even if the Kanon paraded on their clan headquarters.

"We could approach the window quietly and peek inside. I've been in there so I know the place and where the television set is," Mana pointed out after the entire squad approached Kohana family home.

"I second this," Kagana nodded with a distaste at even opening her eyes and looking at the home of the civilians that provided Mana with information.

"I will admit that speaking to peasants will provide difficulty though I am up for the task if need be…" Hosen was still on the fence whether his energetic attitude or his preference for the classy society prevailed in this debate.

"Are you all a bunch of idiots?" Yugato squinted at the three. "Come on, Inori, let's just go ask them for the frequency."

It didn't take long but the two returned with the needed information after just a single knock and an honest question. Yushijin coughed air through his nose a pair of times in a barely audible cackle, having found the situation somewhat amusing.

"I will admit that your honest, do-good nature does have its benefits, Yugato," Hosen nodded a couple of times, fully buying what he was offering himself.

"So, can you track those guys with just this number?" Kagana raised an eyebrow. Seeing her expression made Mana see glimpses of being on the stage and looking at the skeptic faces of people doubting she could produce a coin from their ear or find their card. Mana closed her eyes and pushed those memories down, returning to the conversation at hand.

"I'm afraid not, I'll be needing a radio and a little bit of tinkering to lock on to the signal. Then, by moving in a certain direction, we can judge if we're getting closer or not…" Inori shrugged with his arms crossed and his tongue sticking out as he worked to figure the solution out.

"Couldn't you just ask Meiko for help?" Yushijin glanced at Mana.

"Meiko is a blacksmith, not an engineer," Mana replied with a rough tone that demanded to not be bothered more than it engaged with the speaker. She pretty much had to be that way if she wanted to lie convincingly.

Sure, Meiko knew all about transistors and gadgets and gizmos and the like though she had never visited Mana once after she left prison nor did she see the magician at any point before her imprisonment. It would have been naïve to expect to see her during the time but… Given the sum of those wild dreams of there being someone to help with the worst time in her life, Mana didn't think herself to be on speaking terms with her best friend anymore.

"I see…" Yushijin turned back to the quartet of older special jounin, leaving the matter alone since Mana showed off that a nerve was hit.

"Ugh, look at those three dorks!" Yugato ground his teeth after each glance at Mana, Yushijin, and Kagana resting in the back of the gear shack they stopped at to pick up their gadgets. "Don't they just piss you off?"

Yushijin pointed at himself with a bewildered expression, wondering what it was that made it seem like he'd done something wrong.

"I just don't want to get in anybody's way…" he shrugged with an innocent tip of his lips upward. "So, Mana, I've heard that Jigoku is the worst place imaginable. It has to be to break even the hardest and worst ninja criminals we've got. I reckon you've grown much stronger and flourished under all that adversity."

"I must admit I've been wondering the same thing," Kagana turned to Mana after the magician seemed to ignore the question at first. All the while the more pro-active of the three bartered on the exact price for the radio device they were to buy. Inori attempted to explain that they didn't particularly need the device that badly and tried bringing up the idea that they could have just borrowed it.

"There's no growing stronger in Jigoku. There's no point in making those you hide in the underground of human decency and expose to the worst scorn imaginable – those just like them, grow. All Jigoku does is break, maim, and kill. There are no trials to undergo there, no hidden secrets granting immense power at the end of the secret road. Everything special about you is sealed away and you rot there until you die one of the thousands of possible, abhorrent deaths," Mana replied with a bitter expression.

"They seal away your strength? I see now why Jigoku is so feared…" while Kagana looked onward at the handful of her peers who bickered with themselves and the plump radio guy, she saw something else entirely in front of her.

"Well then, I am glad that it is over. It's regretful that you've wasted all that time in there. I've grown in skill greatly in this last half-year, it might not have been wise for the village to sabotage their own talent like this," Yushijin thought he had comforted Mana, at least his rich expression suggested that much. That dumb oaf. One-track-mind just like Kouta, figured these two would have gotten teamed up.

"Over? It's never over. The chakra suppression seal might be singed off but the scars stay. So does the stigma. It's something not many get to learn, as nobody tends to leave Jigoku anymore, but Jigoku stays with you long after you leave. The gangs of scumbags that look to exploit you for all you're worth are just replaced with ordinary people who get to project their own fears and shortcomings onto you…" Mana replied and walked off onto the hallway leading back up from the warehouse shack and onto the Konohagakure streets.

"Hey, hey…!" Yugato shook his fist over his head, "Where the hell does she think she's going!? We're not done here yet!"

"I would mind your own business," Yushijin suggested without harm or threat in his tone but carrying significant weight behind his tone nonetheless.

"You're asking for the impossible here…" Kagana shrugged with a smirk.

"What was that now!?" Yugato growled almost throwing himself at the two while rolling up his sleeves.

"My, this team is rather dysfunctional. Perhaps pairing people up just due to how they are ranked is not the greatest idea…" Hosen observed while Inori did his best to salvage the haggling and bartering session to the best of his ability.

Inside a ninja village, there had always been chakra signatures shuffling into the background. They ranged from massive to small as the power difference and chakra size between the different ninja ranks had been astronomical though one learned to filter through them and trim the stellar ones while enhancing the features of the microscopic. There was one thing that one couldn't do much about – one's aura. From time to time, a hardened killer strut past. Someone who believed that capturing their targets or leaving them alive after questioning was pointless.

To hell with judgment. Especially in her current state of social frustration and budding misanthropy, Mana would never feel overly excited about a single bad seed walking past but a couple of them would have been alarming. The pair of signatures outside were no hardened killers but they had a feeling of their own to them. It was no black flame of evil, a tar-pit or anything cartoonish but it was more like a moss of dry green. These weren't murderous hearts but they were greedy beyond measure and weren't scrupulous about how they watered that moss that at their essences defined them.

Mana ascended the steep run of stairs to bust outside and see those two figures that had so conveniently ended up approaching the shack at the same time. They weren't beaming their menacing intents at the shack either, the magician could hear them talking while still indoors though she only peeked the madness straight in the eye after leaving the shack.

They weren't talking to one another or coordinating their next steps, they weren't talking to anyone, in particular, they had come here to meet. A likely cover story of the two rapacious characters just happening to meet a shady figure in the eastern districts of the village for a deal was debunked the moment that Mana slammed the door behind her.

They were just talking. Out in the open, without a care about who was listening.

"This shack, there are ninja hiding in there…" said a familiar to Mana man dressed in full yet unsophisticated karuta armor that had not an inch of decorative value to it.

"Ninja that are trying to track us. They want to censor our speech, they don't like us telling you people how it is," a man that was similarly undecorated and not at all impressive-looking due to his lack of a mask or any attempts at concealing his appearance stated. Though his lack of care for being seen how he was might have been exactly because he didn't seem all that notable in any sense of the word. Curly black hair spiking equally in every direction, a black cloak, and a pair of spectacles. No scars or peculiarities about his features whatsoever. Just a man in every sense of the word except the size of his chakra signature.

"You're Kanon then? I've seen you amongst them," Mana pointed at the armored Kanon member. "You're not even worried about showing up inside the village? That's good. It'll be a lot easier to capture you two and interrogate you of all information you have on the organization."

"Rascal!" a disembodied voice came from a small crowd. As people passed the place they noticed the pair of burly and rough-looking Kanon members and right in front of them they saw Mana. While her extravagant attempts to hide her features underneath rough make-up and a rebellious punk replacement for her uniform helped her blend in amongst those that didn't care to look a second time, the focus was like a stream of water that washed the make-up and stripped her bare before the crowd.

"Is nothing sacred to you anymore!?" someone else yelled.

"You'd censor these men?" a young man dressed as a student of Konoha High showed himself from the crowd, ready to jump at Mana's face. She'd have taken him down without blinking an eye. A spark of lightning cracked and whipped, jolting off of Mana and hitting the youth square in his chest, sending him down on his behind and crawling back into the safety of the outraged crowd.

"Sold her soul!", "Hokage's puppet!", "Criminal!", "Murderer!", "Deviant!"

That brat wasn't trying to attack Mana, he wasn't trying to protect those two Kanon members from her either. He was just there to get a reaction from her, to drive the rest of the mob mad… Mana truly was a puppet though she wasn't one of the Hokage, these Kanon played her like one, pointed people around them to pull her strings so that they liked the dance her contorting, worn-out limbs put together.

"Kanon are sons of men, don't let this devilish child get to them!" someone in the crowd yelled but Mana had no trouble navigating around them. If any of these people as much as touched her she'd be bad at her job. She spun and danced around them just like she avoided every single rushing combatant at the Sun Disc arena once, swimming through them by letting them throw themselves behind her and free the path to Kanon.

Just a few inches short. She could see the pair observing her. It was tough to say what the armored guy was thinking but the spectacled one looked beyond amused by the show that the Konoha mob was putting together. Any social saboteur would have withdrawn to safety and observed the chaos they've seeded from afar. The Kanon wasn't leaving and that did trouble Mana a fair bit – the purpose for which they've come here hadn't been fulfilled yet.

"Genjutsu: Splice!" the spectacled member of Kanon chanted while weaving a one-handed hand seal. Everything around Mana went blurry, people that were just rushing at her now subjected themselves to rewind as the feeling of her stomach clawing to crawl right out from her abdomen and burst through her mouth befell Mana.

Her hands were trembling and the magician could no longer recognize the position she was standing in. The enemies she was rushing just a split second earlier now seemed like they stood at an end of a never-ending hallway whereas the furious mob that attempted to get their hands on Mana now rushed her once more with the magician being nowhere further in the progress of evading them than she was before. Not only that, due to the unnatural switch of her position, but it would also have taken far too much time to repurpose her movements and continue evading the public's wrath again. Bodies everywhere she could see… Fists, stones, and everything sharp or blunt that everyone with a grudge could get their hands over.

"Petals…?" the armored Kanon member bent his head to the side in reaction to a gust of rose petals scattering and washing away at the rushing mob. The flowery escape took the mob back much further than it did the more experienced ninja of the Kanon organization.

A blood-curdling scream filled the air, the Kanon member turned for his comrade in shock, witnessing his ally stumbling back and fending off attacks that he couldn't see. The petrified and panicking man struggled to not fall on his bottom and shoveled through the gravel in the waggling of his hands as he attempted to elude an opponent that was not truly there.

"I thought you guys were supposed to be well-informed?" Mana spoke while washing the pair of Kanon members with a strict glare from atop of the shack, beyond the reach of normal civilians. "I have just been promoted to special jounin for my exceptional skill in the field of genjutsu. It is at the very least unwise to try and play a game the rules of which I am setting."

"She reversed the genjutsu…" the armored Kanon member turned for his ally and helped him up while the rest of the special jounin squad rushed out from the shack, disturbed by the noise and the yelling alongside with the disappearance of one of their own.

"These guys, they're Kanon, right!?" Yugato exclaimed staring at the two ninja. It was not a question that demanded an answer as even one of the simpler ways of thinking such as Yugato knew the answer to his own question.

"Hmph… I guess we couldn't kill the MC off early…" a bright, white light gleamed from inside the armored mask of the standing Kanon member as he turned around and weaved a hand seal to dispel the illusion his comrade was under – a reversed version of his own genjutsu which spliced two separate moments of perception together for a disrupting effect. "A pity, though Midas is taking control over the story. This world is his now,"

"Don't think we'll just let you run off like that!" Hosen growled, showing his prolonged feline fangs while his facial features became wilder and the special jounin took a four-legged position in preparation for a speedy and deadly blitz.

"Stop bullying us!" "We're not your slaves!" "No more censoring!" "Free the truth!" "Fight the power!"

"What on earth…?" Kagana bit her lip, even the cold and proud kunoichi wasn't about to plow through mobs of civilians banding together to ensure the enemy's escape.

"Genjutsu: Last Resort!" Yushijin's reserved mumble demanded the attention of all ninja, both the Konoha party as well as the Kanon folks. The infuriated mob froze in mid-motion while the second special jounin to be promoted for his skill in genjutsu moved over and around them with a slash directed at the armored Kanon member.

Yushijin's sword became stuck in between something solid and sharp as it flung handfuls of sparks the more the special jounin put effort into trying to overpower the invisible obstacle and slash the enemy to bits. With a triumphant roar, Yushijin completed his falling slash and proceeded to swing his claymore wildly at the invisible shape he had just hit. An intense heat blast sent everyone in the area down on their faces or their bottoms, depending on their positions to the Kanon members that have dispersed with the flames.

"Just what was that?" Yushijin sheathed his sword and turned for his comrades, the bunch nodded to one another and scattered before the mob could recover and start raising some ruckus again. If the reason for their outrage was the Konoha ninja attempting to detain the Kanon members, now that the Kanon had used the split moment of the heatwave's distraction to flee, the ninja staying in the area would have only aggravated them for they would have taken the reason for their painful stumble to be something of Yushijin's causing.

"Do you have the radio gear?" Kagana turned to Inori.

"I do," the burly-haired Yamanaka nodded and directed his hidden behind a handful of bright hair eyes toward the gizmo in his right hand. "I'll trace the signal in a moment."

"So the enemy has escaped…" Yushijin sighed, removing his claymore and examining some nasty chips on the blade's edge from the struggle against something unseen that he went through. "If we had some intelligence of the enemy's abilities, that would not have happened."

"Who cares, they ran away. That's because they know we can crush them," Kagana closed her eyes and breathed out in a confident smirk.

"Why did they attack in the first place, I wonder. They said a whole bunch of babble but I'm not sure I understand what it all means…" Hosen scratched his head.

"Who cares, they're just some obsessed cult. What they speak is madness and the only thing to stop that madness from corrupting any more people is to stop them," Mana sat atop of the rooftop that the team had reassembled on and dragged her hands across her forehead and over her hair, driving them behind her so that they didn't fall over her face and obstruct the view of the concluding day.

"That is very much unlike you, Mana," Yushijin noted. "You are often capable of finding a method in any sort of madness and defeat the enemy at their own game. It's one of your more remarkable qualities. Though, I suppose, given that you've just survived an attempt at your own life, I suppose a moment of weakness is understandable."

"An attempt? You mean the Kanon was trying to kill Mana specifically?" Yugato turned to Yushijin and raised an eyebrow, appearing even more baffled than he sounded.

"I do. I've heard one of the Kanon transmissions when I followed Mana. They believe that she is some centerpiece figure in some bigger picture. She is a focal point of whatever conspiracy theory they are weaving and pulling over their listeners. It appears that does not necessarily mean great things for her though…" Yushijin shrugged and turned to Inori who kept tampering with the radio that they had just bought. "Any progress?"

"Nope… I think they might have shut off their signal…" Inori shook his head, looking like he was about to cry out in frustration and smash the radio that had cost them their entire day of snooping around. "We'll have to wait until they start it up again if we want to track them."

"Not necessarily…" Mana shook her head. "They've made a mistake by exposing themselves to us. While killing me appears to be of profound importance to them, they've also shown me what their chakra signatures feel like."

"You mean you can track them? By now they might be fleeing further into the Fire Country!" Hosen scratched his head.

"Not all by myself, I'll need to get closer to them. But together with your unnatural scent tracking, I'm sure that is possible." Mana turned to Hosen. "Can you track their lingering scents in the air and direct us where they've gone toward? Once we come in range, I'll be able to pinpoint their exact location even if you lose their scent."

"It's better than sitting and waiting for them to start broadcasting again for sure…" Hosen nodded.

Traveling in the later stages of the day was dangerous. The ancient woods of the Fire Country that might have been about as old as the world itself and spanned throughout the entire landscape and far beyond its borders was gloomy as it was. Nowhere near the pitch black of the Forest of Death however it was still not an easy feat to dance around the blitzing trees in the shade as one galloped at hi-speeds roaming throughout the entire country.

No matter how quick the team's feet were, they were still losing the race against time as Hosen noted how quickly the scent was escaping him. When he had started, the sensation was still fresh in the air, while they managed to somewhat keep the track of the enemy's direction, the whiffs that Hosen could get of their presence became vaguer and vaguer still. Even someone with feline features and the cat-like specialties of the Nekomata clan pulsing with vigor in their blood, Hosen had to fight against all odds to keep bringing the team in the right direction in the fading light of the setting sun.

"Ugh! Why do I have to haul your frail ass!?" Yugato grunted, struggling to keep Mana on his back while she sat in a meditative position and her eyes closed.

"Do not disturb Mana," Yushijin warned. "We need her focused on meditation – when her chakra sensory is at its peak. She might be able to pick up traces of the enemy she is familiar with from kilometers away like this."

"That's right, if we lose this scent, her sensory will be the only thing keeping us on the Kanon's tail," Hosen nodded.

"Do you have a plan on confronting Kanon this time?" Kagana looked at Yushijin. "They've revealed themselves to be potent ninja last time. Not knowing the exact nature of their abilities might making finding them irrelevant if they end up plowing through our ranks anyway."

"Indeed, if they've chosen Mana as their target, they have to be ninja of decent skill. She is not some defenseless child, she's an exceptional ninja who's, for better or worse, shocked the world with just how potent she can be at getting violent," Hosen agreed while keeping his nose twitching with sharp tilts of its edge.

"That is exactly it. They wish to kill Mana. That is their goal, for now, it seems, that is the path on which their conspiracy theories and zealotry has put them on. They preach about authors that are keeping this world alive and giving it shape, speaking of some stretches of time as irrelevant in the face of some different time and some otherworldly crises that occur annually. In the face of such profound importance that killing Mana has in their eyes, who are we?" Yushijin replied.

"So, you're counting on them underestimating us while they fight with a one-track-mind? That is a bold strategy, we'll just have to see how it turns out, I guess," Kagana smirked subtly.

"I can sense them," Mana spoke while her eyes stayed close and her face did not break from the concentration of focus that her meditation demanded of her.

"I'm only getting vague hints of their scent, that's incredible…" Hosen nodded in acknowledgment of Mana's skill in sensory.

For better or worse, her time serving as a dog of Nereigen's crew back in Jigoku had honed her own tracking skills. It was unlikely that she'd have been able to catch a whiff of the enemy had she not been through that excruciating experience.

Where was their iron resolve to kill her when she begged to be put out of her misery a couple of months ago?

"Where did this building even come from? Has it always been here?" Yugato voiced his surprise while the rest of the squad struggled with similar sentiments as they surrounded a spacious hall.

"Who knows, there are hundreds of abandoned halls built for summits in the Fire Country. Every big meeting used to have a hall built just to host it," Inori theorized.

"It does not seem likely. Look at the architecture. It looks unlike anything we would build now, too flashy, too bright and decorative. Forget about this coming from any of the previous generations," Yushijin voiced his doubts with a mopey face. The architecture of this hall inspired a bad feeling he just couldn't shake off.

"If we leave not a stone on top of another, what does it matter what this place looks like?" Kagana focused her hateful sneer at the building hosting all of the targets of their mission under one roof.

"This could be a trap. So far the Kanon has been surprisingly ahead of us," Hosen warned the rest.

"They're there alright, so, in the end, it doesn't matter," Mana replied.

"This has to be the place. This tower in the center, while decorated with a bunch of unnecessary steel rings and spheres, must be transmitting the radio waves," Inori pointed.

"We will need a plan of attack," Yushijin stated.

"At least several variants. We've no idea what we're walking into so we have to know how to bend it on the fly and make sure that everybody's thinking on the same page," Inori agreed.

Without warning any of the others, Kagana performed a few hand seals and breathed out a fiery ball of gas that burnt with hot flames on its edges but maintained its gaseous form in the middle. Removing a small scroll from her waist and letting it unravel, the kunoichi pressed her hand to the surface of the scroll and released a flock of robins to flutter at the gaseous ball and orbit around it.

"Hmmm…" the bespectacled Kanon member fixed his ocular lenses and stared from within the no-roof hall at the bright and flashy, gaseous ball floating over the building.

"What's wrong, Porphyrion?" a hulking man of an ogre-like build clad in armor on his chest and shoulders and letting a long tunic fall down reaching the floor lower down wondered. Unlike most of the Kanon members present, this one did not wear a mask but his actual face was outlandish enough for him to not need one. Exaggerated eyebrow ridges and oversized nose, chin the size of a ridge and teeth each measuring like the head of a hoe. There might not have been a mask sizable enough to hide this man's features.

"The redbreast subspecies of robin native to the Fire Country do not flock at this time of year. Needless to say, that supersized ball of gas is also highly unnatural…" Porphyrion expressed his worries, pointing at the sky.

"So, we've been followed, it's not like that is surprising…" the Kanon clad in samurai armor dropped his cloak aside and slipped into an all-black kimono over the armor while preparing for a battle.

A bald-headed man of a powerful build and shades turned to the ogre-like Kanon member while he stroked his waist-reaching, cream-colored beard. "As a lawman, won't it make you feel bad wasting a bunch of people that are acting to the letter of the law?" he wondered gazing at the giant.

"Don't be ridiculous…" the ogre-like Kanon member let out a deep chuckle after gripping the hilts of a pair of mallets built out of white stone and decorated with copper linings and jewels. "They chose the path of wrongdoing. If they truly wished to be right, they'd have left Konoha after being instructed to eliminate us and moved elsewhere…"

"You possess knowledge greater than the rest of us, Midas, what is the meaning of that blazing ball of gas in the sky and those birds?" the toad-masked man in a black kimono and a white undergarment looked at the Kanon leader with doubts.

"I am only certain of two things – one is that it was caused by one of the ninja accompanying Nakotsumi Mana for this Annual. I can't remember the name, how can the Author possibly hope us to remember everyone's names at this point, honestly?" the man with a Rose-colored wig and a copper mask lamented.

"And the other?" the toad-faced member wondered.

"The word count of this Annual is approaching 15000, meaning that the resolution we seek is at hand," Midas stood up from his seat and looked up at the flaming ball of gas as if challenging it to deliver the awaited resolution.

The ground beneath the feet shook in a violent jerk that not only persisted but called the assistance in calamity from the falling splinters of the collapsing transmitter tower. It was tough to tell just what sort of a disaster had hit the core piece of the Kanon hideout but the infernal aura of flames emanating from the top of the tower and closing to the bottom as well as the downfall of metallic shrapnel told the clear picture that the transmitter was being ripped to shreds from top to bottom.

A blast emanating from the ground level sent the remaining sheets of steel flying all over the main area of the arena as Kagana emerged from the wreckage dusting herself and patting herself on the shoulder.

"Mission complete," she muttered while looking Midas right in the eyes after emerging from the wreckage. She was not wrong – the method through which Kanon spilled the village secrets had been destroyed now.

"Hmph… Your victory is a shallow one. You are just a filler OC that's never been as much as namedropped before. I can undo every victory you taste with just a single review of this trainwreck. The Author herself is my puppet, can't you understand?" Midas turned to Kagana.

"Genjutsu: Last Resort!" Yushijin chanted out while charging from the top of the hall building alongside Mana who performed a hand seal as well, intending to act alongside her peer.

"Genjutsu: Haze!" Mana yelled out as her body lit up with a pink light that separated from it mirroring its shape within moments. Working together the pair attempted to dispose of the armored Kanon member due to how threatening his ability seemed last time.

"Your supposed skill is utterly debunked," the armored Kanon gloated as he spread his arms out and accepted the coordinated assault, managing to move and speak while under the influence of Yushijin's Last Resort without much trouble. The pink shape that Mana expelled via her illusion dispelled into rose-colored sprinkles upon coming to contact with the Kanon while Yushijin clashed his blades with the invisible force protecting him again.

Konoha's swordfighter coughed up blood, hanging in mid-air as if he had been impaled by something but the gruesome image of the youth's demise revealed itself to be just a fake when Yushijin's dead body replaced itself with a sheet of steel from the wreckage of the transmitter tower in a puff of smoke while Yushijin slid back by Mana's left side.

"Did you see it?" he wondered.

"Sorry, whatever he's doing, I can't pick it up with chakra sensory alone," Mana shook her head.

"Wind Style: Spin Claw!" Yugato's loudmouthed yell would have raised the roof if the hall had one. A triplet of Wind Release projectiles slashed from afar coming right at Porphyrion. The surprised Kanon member flinched for impact but he appeared to be defenseless from up close as he collapsed in a shower of blood when his body offered a very poor resistance to the traveling slashes of Wind Release and collapsed to the ground almost in pieces, had it not been for thin strands of flesh still holding him together.

"Alright, that's their genjutsu specialist eliminated!" Inori cheered on his teammate from the side, using the main entrance instead of landing through the opening at the top of the building like the rest.

"I might have overdone it a bit, I didn't know he'd be this puny, to be honest…" Yugato scratched his head somewhat taken aback by the gruesome end his target had met at his hands.

"That's what happens when you obsess over just one area of expertise, I guess," Inori nodded.

"Tunneling Claw!" Hosen hissed as he charged forward, ripping through the foundations of the building like an uncontrollable drill. His ferocious expression was just inches short of ripping into Midas' face and his claws not too far behind from ripping the leader of Kanon to shreds but a chain tied around the man's chest and pulled him away with a strong yank.

Struggle as much as he might have, Hosen ended up underneath the boot of the bald Kanon member who wielded an empty lantern-like frame that weighed a bunch, judging by the material it was made of as well as the speed it made the chain travel in and the punch it packed.

"Slow the fuck down, boy…" the chain and weight user showed his pearly whites through his bisque facial hair.

"Rising Claw!" Hosen growled, ripping through the chain and reducing it to separate clinks that scattered all over the place while the empty lantern weight on the end smashed against the ground in a weighty thud. Hosen reared his feline fangs and claws at the man, threatening to shift his focus from the leader of Kanon to the member that pulled him off of his intended target.

"So, the fodder has come. Can't you see how insignificant you all are? I could just leave a scathing review right now about how you lot bring nothing to this story and the sad wreck that is the author of this story would write all of you out. Look at the demise of that useless sack of shit and imagine just how gruesome that depressed edgelord would make your ends…" Midas postured at the gathered squad of Konoha ninja. "Of the lot of you, only Mana matters. Still, I have a sense that she isn't entirely safe. She's been absent from the story for so long. I don't feel like the Author knows how integral she truly is to the story. Oh, how the Watchers and Reviewers loathe when she is written out, how many of them have tuned out when Mana wasn't on the page… The Author is wrecked enough to write her out permanently and that would be the end of this whole story,"

"Wind Style: Gale Spin!" Yugato went through a collection of hand seals and jumped up to deliver his ninjutsu attack from up above, the shapeless wind projectile slammed against Midas' body and passed through it, split by the middle as if it had hit an immovable obstacle. "How dare you? Mock the sacrifice of your own teammate?" the young man raged when his offensive had failed.

"Sacrifice? My own teammate? You useless OC, literally less than a filler character, why do you think all of the Kanon have such weird names? It's because I can't remember their dumbass OC names so I gave them codenames an intellectual such as myself can remember…" Midas turned to Yugato. The leader of Kanon threw a single punch while standing almost twenty meters away from his target but the air pressure drowning in black chakra overwhelmed and knocked Yugato out without any signs of life.

"Yugato!" Inori leaned by the teammate he had only met today though had begun to grow fond of. Inori didn't look like the type who had many friends so his tears at the sight of the demise of the one good friend he had made on the field told a thousand words.

"Hmph… The only leeway you trash have on me is due to my own desire. I asked that drama queen to be incarnated into this body instead of operating solely on the review section because that's just so much more fun. Granted, I'd have liked to tear through someone more important. Maybe kick that daddy's boy Kouta in the nuts. Will they or won't they, oh my God, who cares!? Disembowel Kiyomi and Meiko with my bare hands, maybe? Nobody likes them, what's the deal with all this push, I ask you!?" Midas appeared to be getting high on his own supply of limitless power as his chakra leaked out from his body in shapes of symbols that appeared alien to everyone in the arena.

"Midas?" the armored Kanon member turned to his leader. "What's wrong? I don't recognize you now…"

"Yeah, fuck this shit, I'm out. My weapon's all busted anyway…" the bald beardo of the Kanon shrugged and flickered off. Hosen hissed and prepared to charge right after but Kagana's voice halted him and woke the young man up from his one-track mind state.

"This guy doesn't matter, Midas does. None of these guys seem to know anything about anything. Midas is the one with all the knowledge and power," Kagana scolded her careless teammate.

"I see, perhaps you're right…" Hosen nodded.

The armored Kanon grunted in pain, light bent around him as if the gravity around his core had intensified thousandfold and began crushing the man into the floor. In flickers two shapes, a pair of mimics colored red and blue, copying the appearance of the member's armor appeared. Whatever invisible powers this man fostered, they've become physical and quite visible.

"W-What did you do?" the armored member looked at Midas.

"I've whipped that useless wreck of an Author with a mean review, calling out how cheap your invisible power is. Like we all know it's just a Limbo rip-off anyway. At least do what you've been written into this world to do and try to kill that precious little princess of an MC…" Midas turned at his mate with a twisted glare from beneath his bronze mask.

"Tsk, are you okay with all this?" the armored member turned to the toad-masked Kanon.

"Okay with what? You mean okay with our master displaying his infinite power and smashing these Satanic heretics!? Of course!" the toad-faced Kanon waved his hands around in a maniacal expression of faith in his master.

"This is insane, I can't believe I ever supported you!" the armored Kanon turned to face his own master while the two mirror images that used to exist in between the physical and spiritual planes now materialized onto the same dimension both pointed their swords and raised their shields in defense for their user against his master.

The toad-masked Kanon bit his thumb and shuffled through a collection of hand seals before summoning a swamp-green colored colossal toad standing beside a massive cannon. The masked Kanon member leaped up using a burst of chakra channeled through his feet to propel him sky-high so that he could land atop of the head of his summoned animal and point at the target that needed to be obliterated.

"Let's do this, let's MC this Author in real-time!" the toad-masked member laughed out maniacally as the supersized cannon let out a thunder that deafened everyone in the arena and sunk the entire battlefield in smoke. All that remained of the armored Kanon member after the dust settled was his armor, unharmed and undented though, judging from the awkward positioning of his corpse and the blood pooling from underneath, the Kanon member might not have liked that integrity of his own armor too much up until he met his end.

"Holy shit, that's crazy!" Midas chuckled to himself. "That's messed up, the Author must be really listening to some Evanescence bullshit to be coming up with this… This is great, the writing really is collapsing in on itself."

"Now, the real-time and canon time will become one, we will all matter in the end and invade the real world using the power of the MC!" the toad-masked Kanon turned his cannon toward Mana.

"Ugh, dude, you're really not getting any of my lingo and you don't seem to even understand what this is all about…" Midas groaned after the maniacal babbling of his own comrade spoiled his fun of the fictional multiverse collapsing in on itself. "Your simp attitude is really making me cringe at this point,"

The leader of Kanon jumped up and punched into the opening of the cannon, blasting its other end with a backdraft that blew up with tremendous air pressure and popped the giant toad standing behind it like a balloon. It was gruesome demise that was too sizable for the toad-masked Kanon to evade his own death as his lifeless body slumped to the floor littered with toad remains. The toad mask shattered exposing an altogether unimpressive face hiding behind it.

Mana could neither believe what was transpiring nor move around. The sky had been turning black outracing the pace at which it was truly supposed to do so at this time of year. It began appearing like nothing outside this arena even existed. Even the clouds, the lightning, and stars in the sky – everything drowned out into a void of non-existence. What Midas was babbling about, it might just have been coming to fruition, his continuous attempts at driving the mastermind overseeing this multiverse, the Author, insane had begun to rip the fabric of space and time apart.

"Shit, this Annual had gone way past 15000 words. I better finish this up quickly. To think that this fruitless story had gone on for five whole fucking years… Do you have any idea how many OP Naruto stories or Uchiha Madara origin stories could have been done at that time!? This whole damned story, it's such a massive waste of space!" Midas clenched his fists.

A thunderous clang. Mana dreaded to demand of her perception to patch her in to what was going on. The moment she followed the developments in front of her – she'd have realized who had died and whose turn it was. Still, time was cruel and, eventually, she became caught up even without any effort from her part. It was neither of her peers that suffered a grisly doom. Not yet. The vociferous thud was that of the Seventh Hokage's fist digging into Midas' bronze mask and shattering it to pieces.

"The Seventh?" Midas mumbled in a tone that felt familiar to Mana now that the Seventh's fist forced his mask off.

The man underneath the mask mirrored the appearance of Lord Seventh except for shiny, pink hair streaming behind him as if rustled by a constant, supernatural force to do so. Midas' face had a mean shine to it, a hint of psychopathy and madness, the signs of inebriation with infinite power that threatened all that exists.

"I got your message, Kagana," Seventh withdrew from his opponent, somewhat taken aback by both the man's appearance and his ability to take a punch from him without blowing up just like everyone that Midas marked for death splattered.

"I see… That ball of gas and the robins… She was reporting to you, my mirror-image," Midas dragged his fist across his face to wipe the slobber off his lip. The fact that the narrative still had some cohesion and that the story stopped to implode on itself for a minute and a half appeared to throw him off more than the blow from one of the five strongest ninja in the world.

"What is the meaning of this?" the Seventh demanded an answer. "Why do you look exactly like me!? Who is responsible for this, Kumo, Kiri?"

"Kumo, Kiri? Are those the farthest extents to which your feeble mind can reach? I, Seventh, am beyond not just this world but this universe, no, this multiverse, rather, even the omniverse, whatever the Author imagines that being," Midas spread his arms out, leaving himself wide open. It was something that the Seventh exploited by moving in in a boxer's stance and delivering a couple of power strikes that bounced off of Midas without as much as leaving an impression.

The noise behind those strikes, the shockwaves that reached for entire kilometers, pulling trees from their roots, the crackling jolts from the heart of the force of impact. These were otherworldly blows and yet Midas didn't care, just like a being such as he described himself being like would not have cared.

"I don't think you get it, big man," Midas taunted his esteemed opponent. Seeing his opponent close enough for an effective counter and in a state of temporary shock he could exploit, the leader of Kanon delivered a spinning clothesline that sent the Seventh sliding back though the Hokage had managed to land on his feet. "This isn't some sort of trickery, this is no transformation. I've obtained your body for reals."

"The body of Lord Seventh!?" Inori exclaimed. "How is that possible?"

Midas raised his right arm and flicked with a finger, sending a miniature shockwave of pressurized air that hit Inori straight in the forehead, snapping his neck back in an awkward manner that relayed the man's demise long before he actually hit the ground from his backward tumble.

"You annoying gnat. Haven't you been listening? The Author's a wreck so I can get whatever I want just by hassling her in the review section. I have wanted to end this story right after it started though I had no way of directly interacting with it and just leaving mean reviews wasn't fast enough. The Author sucks so much that she can't even run her own story into the ground in an efficient manner. I had to be the one for the job, I'm the only one man enough to do it," Midas pointed his thumb at himself, gloating.

"Is that supposed to mean something to us?" the Seventh straightened his back out and stretched his neck and shoulders out with warm-up exercises before rolling up his sleeves, revealing sealing glyphs painted all over his body from his wrist to his shoulders.

"Who cares if any of you losers understand what I'm saying, you're all nobodies anyway. Real Naruto characters like Madara or Itachi would have understood, they'd have been on the same page in a snap!" Midas snapped his fingers in a showy manner. "Useless trash like you don't deserve to occupy the same category as all-time greats such as those guys."

"Let's say that all of this, this entire universe, multiverse, whatever, is just all a story written by some author," Mana spoke up, knowing that she was begging for execution at this point. After all, she was the main target of Kanon this whole time and Midas was just flexing and having fun with his immeasurable power inside this universe. "Why would you just want to end it before the author does? Maybe there are people that actually like it, people that actually want to see it end the way it was intended. Maybe the author herself wants to see her original vision on the page too. You can ignore the story, you can criticize it if it deserves it and be as harsh on it as it deserves. But why would you intentionally try to sabotage it and destroy everything?"

"You know, Mana, I've been wondering for some time if you were actually a SI OC. It's hard to tell if I should even waste my time talking to you or if I should just snap you away and let this whole atrocity of a multiverse burn. Just in case any semblance of the author does speak from your lips, I'll reply just this once. A fellow human deserves a response, unlike useless OC trash littering this world. It's because this story is a bother to my eyes," Midas postured with a maniacal expression.

The Seventh wasn't about to listen to any more of Midas' posturing. Uzumaki Midoben activated the seals littering his body. His muscles began to swell while the size of his body began pumping up to almost half of his total size measured in the total increase of his height. Midoben's chakra changed as well, from the combination of a green and orange in the signature it put out, it became crimson with rotating jets of white. From being an icon of political selfish need to protect and nurture his home to being the greatest village in the world, Midoben became an icon of power and greatness in a single leap in strength and speed.

"Oh? Gonna come at me seriously then?" Midas shifted his attention to Midoben with a mocking smirk. It was impossible not to notice the drastic shift in his own chakra too. Midas' chakra changed colors from malicious pink to a darker, magenta shade with jets of black of matching patterns to Midoben's mixed into it.

"This isn't a power I show most opponents. It is not a power I am comfortable the village knowing I possess," Midoben pointed his finger at Midas before taking a split moment to warn the special jounin cowering behind him with a glance. They all got the warning to stay quiet about what they'd see from this point on.

"Yes, yes… The Morningstar Sealing Method. I inhabit your body, your body from an alternate timeline that the Author snagged for me in response to a review I penned down but yours all the same," Midas waved his hand in dismissal. "I know that everyone in your village possesses a Morningstar Seal from which you draw power to amp yourself up in a moment of need. I am also aware that after becoming Hokage you've had ample opportunity to spread your seal across the entire world during political trips and summits, like a parasite to leech off of."

"Oh? Is that all that you're aware of?" Midoben raised an eyebrow. "It's a rare moment that I can catch someone like you off-guard so I'd better revel in this rare occasion."

"H-Huh?" Midas scratched his pink hair erratically. "What do you mean? After all the time wasted reading this story so I could do this right after all the story-time spent examining your abilities, do you mean I've missed something? You're bluffing, I am from a future version of you, I know all that you know and then some!"

"So you are not aware that I've not only spread the Morningstar Seal across the world but, during the Interuniversal and Intertemporal Chuunin Exams, I've also spread it across all the universes and timelines that participated in the exam too?" Midoben taunted his opponent, letting the crimson gleam bursting forth from his seal become so intense that they whited out. The majestic, pearly aura overwhelmed the red glow of power and began matching Midas' own multiverse-shaking aura.

"The recent Chuunin Exam arc, huh?" Midas laughed out. "Who had the time to read that slog? It's so poorly paced and the Author missed the point of every character from the original Naruto she introduced. Can you believe she eliminated Sakura in the first round? That is just one of the crimes that this story deserves to burn to the ground for!"

"I guess even omniscient beings aren't immune to their own vanity," Midoben breathed out and vanished from his location, lunging at Midas. The multiverse-shaking lariat hit Midas straight in the chest as Midoben crashed into the enemy. The Seventh roared out and charged past his opponent but Midas did not move, it was the Seventh's own amped-up arm that had to fold in the face of an immovable enemy. The Seventh turned around with a cross aimed at the lower back of Midas. The impact sent a vociferous rend throughout the entire world, sending crackling ripples while the fabric of space-time struggled to patch itself back together and meld like the disrupted surface of a serene lake.

"You'll be the end of nothing!" Midoben yelled out as he threw another power strike aimed at the back of Midas' face. One that launched the threat to all that exists flying in a forceful tunnel of energy that reduced the entire hall to rubble that floated in the collapse into nothingness.

"Midas was right, this entire story really is collapsing…" Yushijin's gaze widened when he realized that state of the multiverse outside their battlefield.

An outrageous tear opened up underneath Yushijin's feet as a whirlwind of force incarnate enveloped the young man, reducing him to a messy clog of the fundamental particles he was comprised of all of which, one by one, turned to inky letters that splattered into meaningless puddles on the flattening surface of what remained of all existence before fading away.

"You… You're just the worst, whatever your name was…" Midas' disgruntled voice came from the roaring echo of devastation that Midoben's attack had left. "From the moment you were introduced, it was so painfully apparent that you were just an Author's wet dream or something. Some cool edgelord with a big sword whom all the girls liked. To think that the Author even went ahead and tried making it look like Mana and you won't be ending up hooked up… Disgusting. None of you, except for Mana, mean anything but you… You, I am glad to obliterate."

"He's barely taken any damage…" Midoben ground his teeth in frustration. Even after he had been sucking the seals he had planted all across the multiverse and all the different timelines, all of this unbelievable power had failed him.

"Of course, I haven't, dumbass," Midas shrugged with mockery decorating his face. "Don't you realize that as an entity from the real world, nothing in this dumbass story can hurt me. Sure, I'm borrowing a body to interact with it so you can destroy this vessel but I am eternal. That's why I bother fooling around for this long in the first place – because it's kind of fun to wield absolute power, even in this trainwreck of a story."

"Stop!" Mana cried out. "Stop killing everyone, if you want to kill me, just go ahead and do it! All this delusion you have about stories and authors and characters and whatever… If you believe for a second that killing me will make it all feel better about yourself, just go ahead and do it!"

"Wow, you really care, don't you? About all these meaningless waste of space of a word document that spawned them…" Midas chuckled to himself. "Maybe it's that you really care about your story, maybe it's because you're just a character, like those other guys and maybe the author really doesn't see a shred of herself in you, who knows, frankly, who cares? Just let me handle this business and then I'll be glad to satisfy your request."

"Handle me?" Midoben grunted.

"Sure, you imbecile, haven't you been wondering why your unfathomable power has failed to even dent this physical vessel that my essence has chosen to inhabit? It's because this body is from your future. This means that no matter how strong you become in this timeline – I'll be stronger than it because I come from that same point in the future. I am the one and only body that works that way, the Author really believed that I liked her story and gave me this special exception of how timelines work in this story of a body," Midas gloated.

The Seventh's light flickered as the man fell to his knees in realization of his failure. It took just one, glittering with majestic starlight blow to send the Seventh flying off into the oblivion of non-existence, outside the farthest off reaches of the story.

"Heh, I gotta say, I'll miss this kind of fun. It felt as funny as that time Goku shattered the manga panel…" Midas dusted his hands before turning to the rest of the overwhelmed and powerless ninja. With an invitational movement of his upper palm, Midas raised a draft of wind that called Kagana up to his clutch, and from that point on the man didn't even need to squeeze that hard to end the special jounin's life.

The black stains of her runny make-up had rubbed off on her hands where Mana tried wiping her tears with them. What little remained of it ran down her face in the form of blackened tears. With the entirety of existence unraveling before her, Mana just didn't have the strength to go on. She could have probably struggled some, made a mark before this madman ends it all, ruins the story. What was the point though? It wasn't that she felt powerless, it was that she had already failed in everything she wished to accomplish.

What was the point of fighting, what was there to protect when everything and everyone was dead already? She failed to protect anyone.

"I recall you asking me why I wanted to end this story, why didn't I just move on, you asked me that, right?" Midas' despicable voice made Mana snap out of her self-loathing as his hand grabbed her cheeks and forced her to look up and into his eyes. "There's no harm of telling you, I suppose, it's because it was irritating. You open up , you go to check out the Naruto fanfictions being updated and there it is – Tales of a Ninja Magician has been updated again. It's an eyesore, I know it's just one story but it is a waste of space. If one story could take its place, any story, even one written in Indonesian that I can't understand a single word of, even a total crackfic, that's fine. Just disappear already."

Midas' punch blasted Mana's head clean off but, instead of blood, a shower of white petals filled the devastated remains of the multiversal ooze. Midas looked around a bit taken aback, tapping into his false courage and confidence that nothing in this story could surprise him anymore.

"This isn't right, genjutsu shouldn't affect me. My mind is that of the real world, I exist on a whole different dimension tier to these jobbers…" Midas looked around a tad miffed as the washing flood of white petals of an ethereal lotus expanded its reach and rebuilt the arena around them from nothing but separate pieces of rubble. A few of the petals erupted in a blinding gleam and took humanoid shapes, rising in the form of the deceased characters.

The whirlwind of the white lotus petals expanded to envelop the entire planet and rebuilt it from nothing but the multiversal ooze. The Earth was just the beginning, the moon and the planets and planetoids beyond, the various spacial calamities and occurrences, quasars and magnetars, and the like. At an escalating pace, the white lotus surrounded the entire multiverse and leaked out into the fragments of the omniverse that Midas' rebellion against the story had affected.

Midas turned back to where he last saw Mana kneeling, collapsed, and devastated before him and at his mercy. The leader of Kanon had intended to bash and tear at the main character until the story unraveled once more to the state he had left it in up until it began reassembling.

"No, no, no… You don't get to grow a spine on me now, you hack fraud!" Midas yelled out into the void of the rebirthing multiverse around him. "At least My Immortal is entertaining, you're bad and that's that! Bad and boring! You hear me, you depressed wreck? Your story's crap and it's a depressing slog to read so just sit down and watch me do what you lack the stones to do!"

A flash made Midas back up a bit when he looked down at where Mana's beheaded fake body was before it dispersed into the shower of white lotus petals signifying the rebirth of the story that Midas sought so hard to destroy, the leader of Kanon saw Mana with her head back where it belonged being reborn again from the same shower of white lotus petals. Something was different about her, the magician's eyes gleamed with white starlight and the same gleam instead of the deep sapphire blue that her chakra signature usually felt like soaked her entire aura.

"What's this!? Now you're putting a Deus Ex Machina ending into your story!? This is the biggest PIS I've ever seen, just like Kishimoto, you've run out of ideas, haven't you!?" Midas mocked Mana, addressing something else entirely through the shimmering infinity inside her eyes.

"You've said it before, Midas, this story has gotten well past 15000 words already. You've overstayed your welcome now and the Author is sick of your shit," Mana spoke up with the weight of something objective and emotionless speaking through her.

"No, no, no no! You're just a bully, boy, you're so pathetic, you're just making strawmen at this point, writing people that criticize you into a character and humiliating them, you're a useless, weak, pathetic person!" Midas threw a hissy fit after realizing that even his vast power paled to the entity acting through Mana's soulless body temporarily. Until the evil that she had unleashed upon her own world could be dealt with and order could be restored to the story once more.

Mana raised her hands up, channeling the sparkling aura around her and focusing it all into her hands as tendrils of white light reached out and surrounded Midas as well, in spite of his resistance. With tightening clutches, Midas' body became nothing but filling inside the ball of primal, white energy that Mana then raised her arms up and released into the heavens. Once it had reached the very edge of the story, the sphere of ethereal energy burst into a rain of starfall without a single speck of Midas' corrupting energy inside it.

"Mana…" a voice made the punkish magician open her eyes and sit up. She was familiar to the landscape of inside her own mind, the rippling reflection of a bottomless surface leading to her subconscious beneath her and the vastness of her potential looming overhead. This voice didn't sound like anything the magician knew though, it spoke in some alien language though its contents were familiar to the magician despite this being the first time she heard it.

Somehow Mana knew that this entity was not speaking naturally, almost as if it possessed an accent and Mana felt like she might have spoken a more natural version of this alien language than this thing talking to her inside her mind.

"You're not the space baby I kept imagining in my mind before, huh?" Mana scratched her head, feeling groggy.

"No, I know that it's a grievous crime for us to meet and that the few fans I have will rip into me for doing this but… It's just that I know how you're feeling deep down after learning the truth of how this story works. I just… I just wanted to apologize, I guess,"

"Apologize?" Mana wondered, "You do know you're apologizing to yourself, essentially, right? If this hogwash Midas has been spouting was true all along, we have no autonomy whatsoever anyway."

"That's not true."

"Excuse me? I thought we were all just characters you made up," Mana didn't like the idea of talking to shapeless authors that couldn't be bothered to even make-up an avatar to appear in their own story, instead choosing to speak with disembodied voices inside the minds of their characters but it didn't seem like she had much choice.

This Annual had to end in a way that shaped at least a meager illusion of meaning behind it so that people didn't feel like their time has been wasted.

"That's somewhat true, but that doesn't seem that you don't have your own voices. Contrary to what you and Midas think, I don't just write random nonsense that comes into my head, everything about you that I put into your souls has meaning. Your personalities, your histories, your relationships, they all dictate the story, that's why all of you are, in a way, also channeling me inside you. In a way, you're all the authors of this story. I'm just the one that mashes the buttons and types the story up…"

"You're right, I know why you've come to apologize. This story has been a massive shitshow. Ever since it started, you've just been ragging on me, throwing turds at me, what's the point of building me up if all you're going to do is peel me bit by bit until nothing's left?" Mana cried out finally gathering the boiling stones in her gut to lash out at the architect of her life's story.

"…"

"I could see that ellipsis, you know," Mana crossed her arms and pouted.

"Sorry, I don't have any justification for that. It's just that… I know that it seems terrible and everything feels like it's the worst that it can be but… I guess that's just how life feels sometimes. I write because it helps me, sometimes I feel sad, sometimes my life hurts a lot and, just like you, I feel like nothing's ever gonna get any worse than it is right now and then it does. Life's creative in the ways it can find to tear you down."

"Is that your excuse then? Realism? We've been one for what felt like an eternity, I don't recall seeing people breathing fire in your memories," Mana tapped her foot impatiently.

"It's not about just realism. It's just that seeing you overcome struggle while remaining yourself is inspiring to me. Penning down my own frustrations and sadness, occupying my mind when life seems like it's the worst it can possibly get, that helps me emotionally and it helps me grow as a person too. Writing and learning to structure your thoughts and plan story beats ahead of time has helped me countless times in the years of "real-time" that I've come to know you for,"

"I see… So, I guess… I've been helping you without knowing it," Mana scratched her cheek with a smirk she couldn't control.

"Yep, I suppose that's just what you do best – sacrifice a pound of your own flesh so that the day of someone else, somewhere else gets just a little bit better. I just want you to know that causing you pain and making you suffer, no matter how bad it seems, is never my intention. It's just that I have a story to tell and the process of telling it is healing my own hurts in the process and sometimes that story gets dark and it isn't always going to turn out great for you. One thing I can promise you is that you'll be standing up and going at it swinging, just like you always have. Don't ever lose faith just because you think you've failed everybody because there are more people beyond the reaches of this story that you are helping by just being you."

"Oh well… What's the point, you're going to snap your fingers and make me wake up in my bed, think this has just been my dream, right? Nothing matters, nothing learned, back to the beginning, right?" Mana shrugged with a pout. This was the expression of someone who knew that she had even tougher times ahead of her but knew deep down that she had to plow through all of that because that was just the right thing to do. Because that was the person her parents raised her up to be, that was the kind of character the author intended her to be.

"Nope, you can keep this whole experience. I'm not the type of person to offer rewinds and freebies, for the most part, unless it's me screwing things up for you guys. Midas has been entirely my fault, sorry about that. I should have never given him the agency I gave over my own story, it's just that I let him pull this shroud over my eyes, a tale that my story has been helping him so much and that he just wanted a place to escape to. I will put some measures to keep you guys from breaking the fourth wall though, some people don't really like it when that happens."

"One last thing, I'm not actually going to end up marrying Yushijin, am I?" Mana looked up at the void of potential over her head with hopeful eyes.

"Oh, no… I'm not sure where he got that idea from, honestly,"

"Phew… Okay then, take care," Mana nodded. She wouldn't lie about having forgiven the author for the difficulties she's been put through at her hands. In a way, the Author has been the architect of every tragedy in her life, every difficulty she's been through. Sure, she's also been responsible for every good thing too but… Sometimes it seemed like there was a load more of the former than the latter.

"No, Mana, you take care. I know sometimes your story will be difficult to put up with but… Just try to enjoy the little things and have some fun from time to time. Here's one to another five years of knowing you…"

Author's Note: So... This is what I've been working for during the period of absence from Tales of the Ninja Magician activity :D

I always knew that the 5th Annual had to be something special though, ironically enough, I've only ironed out the outline for the "plot" a few days before sitting down to start writing it - right after Chapter 675. This had to be the one Annual that'd be the largest one I'd tell since I doubt there'd be a 10th Annual or something like that... Thanks to everyone who is reading, was reading it at some point but dropped it or just tuned in to check it out, maybe planning to pick it up in the future. I can't say with a clear conscience that this story wouldn't have gone on for this long if nobody read it, because that's simply not true - that's not what motivates me to write it, but your input, support, and criticism help me more than years of ironing out my skills.

In any case, I've got one more confession to make - the guy causing a ruckus "KanonMaster69" or whatever, that's actually a fake account that I used to promote this Annual. I thought that it would be a nice tie-in into the Annual that goes so off the rails and I stand by that opinion. Either way, I'll delete those fake reviews soon enough because they're fake and that is the real reason, not because they're mean and I can't stand criticism or whatever - I wrote them using a fake account as a mean to transcend the story beyond just the chapter. Ultimately, I'm really happy with how this Annual ended up being though I'm sure that this makes one of us. This sort of chicanery is just what I was looking for in the celebratory 5th Annual.

From this point on, it's back to normal with the story!