Shitaka pulled a wooden cork out of the plastic jar and allowed whatever vapors it contained fill the air. While Mana could not smell its sharp odors herself, judging from the nose-turning reaction from the other Allied Ninja, it was an aroma that stung at the nostrils. The subdued ninja writhed in a vain struggle underneath Shitaka's knee which kept him pinned to the ground.
"What is that you're giving him?" Mana looked up from a fallen position. She rubbed her hand over her moist and cold nose a couple of times to take a more presentable appearance before the Allied Ninja.
"What does it look like? I'm giving him rocking mad drugs to make him spill the beans!" Shitaka stuck out his tongue, looking mighty proud of his approach to the situation.
"That's torture. His comrades are all dead and now you're going to torture him?" Mana pushed herself onto her feet, even though her stance was wobbly, a bit weak at the knees, but she managed to carry herself to the scene.
"Calm down, I'm not quite sticking knives under his shoulder blades just yet. We're just gonna have a rocking good time, just a little chat, nothing more," Shitaka snickered. Junichi rolled his eyes. This leather-clad ninja chemist didn't make his case any more presentable by behaving like a street punk.
"You're drugging him. That's still torture. I've trained with the Intelligence Division. I can interrogate people far better than you ever could by torturing them," Mana insisted.
"Once again, drugging, not torturing…" Shitaka squinted, looking around the area just to confirm that he was not the only one thinking this way. While none of the fellow Allied Ninja looked at Shitaka as if he was crazy, they did turn away suggesting that the punk would get no help from them.
"If you inhibit his mental state, he'll just tell you whatever he sees and feels – a bunch of delirium from the tripping handbook. I can do it properly," Mana pressed her case.
"Absolutely not," Junichi cut the magician's will down. "Not in your current state. You're worked up about your summon killing off a bunch of enemy ninja. You're in this to prove something but your mind isn't in the right place. I agree that the Intelligence Division's methods are superior to Shitaka's but I will not permit you to mess with the interrogation while you're distressed like that."
"I'm not distressed! Ugh!" Mana yelled out and then grunted, realizing that she just made Junichi's case for him, even though she couldn't even begin comprehending the angle from which she might have agreed with him.
"Take a rocking good whiff, crow dude…" Shitaka snickered, placing his jar by the nose of the subdued ninja and then pressing his knee to the ninja's gut to force him to take some air in faster. Ninja could have held their breaths for anywhere from twenty minutes to over an hour, depending on their training with this specific area of chakra augmentation. They'd have all grown beards by the time this guy decided to speak. "Now, who's your master, and what does he do?"
The ninja clad in black writhed on the ground as if attempting to wrestle against the adverse effects of the substance he had just inhaled. The man began clawing at his face, ripping the black cloth that he had wrapped over his head and freeing his lower face though ironically it only led to him taking more breaths of Shitaka's drug.
"I… I fly like a crow. Me and my brothers, we all fly like crows. My sister… She came for us, to bring us home… Home… We couldn't go back home. We were on a mission… Me and my brothers…" the ninja began grunting. Sweat glistened on his forehead with the reflection of the moonlight. The man had a pale complexion due to constantly wearing that wrapping for his getup though his blood must have been boiling for he was all flushing with red.
"Whoo boy…" Shitaka sighed. "It might be a while…"
"Your brothers, those were the ninja fighting alongside you, right?" Mana inquired.
"We couldn't keep her around. My sister… I sent her home, I don't know what happened to her… They burnt her up to a crisp…" the crow-ninja began throwing his arms around, forcing Shitaka to lean out of their way and let the troubled and drugged captive to flap and thrash about on the ground in his dazed stupor.
"Your sister? I thought you worked with your brothers?" Mana approached the ninja closer, Junichi raised his arm up to block her path though it was more of a stern recommendation rather than a forced attempt to keep her away. Submitting to his will, Mana halted by his arm though continued to try and direct the drugged man toward some semblance of sense.
"My father he liked dogs… The young lord had an eye for my sister. Mother died young… She was ill…" the captive continued to switch between mumbling his declarations and shouting them out loud.
"My, my… Our little assassin appears to have gotten mad, nice work, Shitaka…" Cailar chuckled, enjoying nothing more than to have an excuse to cheek at his allies.
"No, Shitaka's drugs must have done something to his brain. It's like he's off any filters, just blabbing whatever's on his mind. Just like a drunkard," Junichi interjected.
"A drunkard? Ah, yes, I suspect that's an area you are an expert in," Cailar snickered, covering his mouth with his index finger.
"Please, Junichi-san, this is getting us nowhere. Just let me give it a shot," Mana looked up at the grumpy veteran who could only muster a sigh.
"Normally I'd be against it, what with your nerves wrecking you and the already tainted condition of our captive but… We've got no time. It's self-evident that the bounty hunters will find us no matter how far outside the main path we tread. Give a hearty shot and be careful. If we can salvage some intel, that's great, if not – we keep moving," Junichi relented.
With a hearty breath, Mana approached the fallen ninja who was beginning to rip the wrapping over his body, feeling like he was about to overheat. Junichi was right, Mana would have rather worked with a perfectly intact interrogation target rather than someone that's already been drugged and not in a good place mentally. Her record of successfully probing minds that wished to remain concealed was spotty and this condition of her target wouldn't help things at all.
The magician placed her hand onto the forehead of the fallen ninja. A kick to her abdomen left Mana wheezing on the ground, she raised her forearm just in time to block a wayward smack of the target's arm. Shitaka and Junichi moved in to subdue the captive. They wanted to keep their cool but with how rough the poor guy was thrashing about it was impossible. Junichi pushed the captive away, leaving him flapping on the forest floor while the veteran fostered his bleeding nose and Shitaka found an opportunity to kick the poor guy while he was down due to him leaving crossed scratched over the punk's chest with his fingernails.
"I have five different jars in my jacket that could make him rocking soft!" Shitaka growled at the distressed captive.
"I don't doubt that but you'd only make things worse. If you do something to his body control, it'll impact the information he'll be able to give us," Mana asked the punk to back up a bit by extending her hand and trying to approach the fallen ninja again. She calmly placed her hand onto the man's forehead, halting him for a moment.
He must have realized how cool the young woman's hand was because he stopped struggling at began lightly wriggling his head to have Mana's hand touch more and more of his face. With a little bit of good-old persistence, the magician kept her hand fixed on the man's forehead, no matter how hard he tried to slip his cheek under it and kept a light press on the area to prevent struggle. After finding her opening, Mana weaved the hand seal.
A cold, autumnal breeze pestered a washed away pleasure town at night. A long-haired man, a good couple of meters in size and a flat face the front of which complemented the impression that it's been flattened by a brick, stood by the brick wall of an inn grumbling under his mouth. The man Mana was interrogating approached him from the side, wearing civilian clothing. His hair had been fluffy and bright without the wrapping, without the wear and tear.
"I got a job for ya," the tall man muttered just after the two met and looked around. "You and yer gang, see?"
"Nah, I don't do that thing anymore. I'm planning to go legitimate, you know…" the captive the way he used to be back then scratched his neck. He was a bit scared of the man, his body language translated it despite his efforts to conceal that fact.
"Yeah, good luck with that, what with the waltzing into Konoha and declaring your loyalty, a guy from some snotty hut on a settlement in the middle of nowhere," the flat-faced giant smirked. "Maybe the Hokage takes you in, who knows, do you think he'll take in all twelve of youse?"
"If he takes me, he gets all of us. Us Twelve Crow Brothers have been sticking together through the thick and thin," the man scratched his chin. It was tough to tell if he bought what he was saying himself.
"So you're out then?" the tall man wondered. "Do the other eleven have a post box I can mail them to? Maybe they'll be more talkative?"
"Don't think so…" the captive shrugged. "Bye, Tani,"
"Alright, no hard feelings, man, I know you're just trying to do right by your old lady's memory. If you ever decide to say screw it, I can always use a guy…" the grey-haired giant shrugged.
"Thanks, appreciate it…" the captive shrugged.
This was not at all what Mana was looking for but that was to be expected – the man's mind was a complete tangled mess. He had no impulse or instinct control and his thoughts and memories flowed freely, without any restrictions or mental blocks. If only Mana could have gotten to him before Shitaka pulled his magic on the guy.
A bright flash. Mana stroked her hand over the air, grabbing it like a sheet of paper and pulled it like a shroud off of a person's head, ripping through the memory and moving onto whatever laid underneath. She was on a farm of some sort. Maybe the flat-faced ruffian from before went a bit overboard talking smack about this place but it was just about the most ordinary farm on a settlement at the edge of the Fire Country.
"So, you're back, aren't you?" a woman in rather sophisticated clothing for the rundown corner of nowhere she was living in spoke up. Mana turned for the door behind her and saw the captive entering through it. It was odd that she couldn't see any of his brother's in any of his memories despite them, apparently, being a large part of his life. Nothing of his sister either…
"You don't sound very happy to see me, Kichi-san," the captive made an ironic tip of his head while posing with his hands extended to his sides.
"I am your stepmother, I know you might not be too excited to accept that. And I am about as excited to see you as any farmer is excited to see a broken rake in their shed," the middle-aged woman dismissed the young man with a crude gesture.
"Well, it's a good thing that you're neither a farmer as you've done not an ounce of actual farm work nor have you ever been inside a shed so you have no idea what either of those things feel like. Otherwise, I'd have gotten offended by that…" the young man pulled rags of his torn clothes and ripped them off, dropping them on the floor. Despite having lost her sense of smell a long time ago, Mana could sense a strong punch of blood coming off of the clothes. Likely a sensation etched into the captive's mind.
"Got into a fight again, I see?" the woman continued to nag her stepson.
"What is this? Definitely not mother's worry…" the shirtless young man picked up a bucket and stopped in between the open door, ready to step out to wash by the well.
"You know, better men get paid for fighting. Fighting for free is the same as raking your own foot, why do you refuse so adamantly against being of any use to me, almost like you're not your father's son," the woman was about to follow her stepson just so she could beat him over the head and push his neck further into the loop but a blazing glare at her halted the cowardly hag.
It didn't look like a pleasant memory whatsoever and if Mana helped the captive move past it, she'd finally get to the information that she and the Allied Ninja needed. There were no qualms about ripping this recollection like a crumpled page and ripping it out of the book of the captive's mind.
"We've heard you're looking for people that could do work for you…" the captive spoke through his black wrappings. He had two triplets of short swords crossed in pairs on his back, him and exactly eleven of his supposed brothers that were absent from his memories up until now. He dropped a bloody head of a white wolf and let it roll toward a table filled with food around which a group of men and women were seated and enjoying their time together. "Since your gang is now one member short…" he concluded his thought.
"That head, is that Shirami?" Peiras who was sitting by the table alongside his brothers pointed at the bloodied head.
"I figured if I removed his wolf-mask, it would just look like some random head to you guys…" the captive shrugged. "It just so happens that I'm looking for work and I fit the theme of people your gang is looking for."
"Is that a fact?" a one-legged crone stood up and picked up her crutches to scurry up to the intruding party of twelve. "You seem to know a great deal about the Nine Tales Gang…"
"The white wolf guy was very talkative and quite proud of being a part of it. He couldn't stop telling me all about you, figuring that one of the details he shared would scare us," one of the twelve spoke up, prompting the old crone to leap at him like a fish and dig her teeth into the poor man's throat, ripping a pulsing chunk of it out though not a drop of blood dropped from it. Only black smoke once the man dispersed into a shroud of shadowy black.
"Did Shirami tell you that we take our name very seriously? We've only got place for one guy, now that Shirami bit the dust, you see…" the crone chuckled with a soft-spoken voice after picking herself up off the ground with deceptive speed for someone with her impediment.
"That's fine, by me," another one of the remaining eleven said. "All but one of us is the same way, though I'm beginning to think you'd take a bite out of the real me if I told you which one,"
"Now that is amusing…" a man of black-skin though more so due to some unnatural condition rather than his racial background turned around the long table he sat on. The man's skin was like glistening, greasy coal and underneath his unbuttoned white shirt at the top, there were features of faces gasping for air, food, or water. At least two more alongside the man's own could have been made out in the opening of his shirt. A hardened appendage of rocky texture formed what would appear to be a backward-bending horn making it look like a ponytail of sorts stood out alongside a myriad of unnatural features.
"Maybe, but people take me more seriously a gang of twelve, pays me much more too," the captive shrugged.
"So, am I part of the gang, or what?" the captive wondered.
"Sure, sit down by the table, there's an opening and some food now, it would seem…" the pouncing, cannibal crone chuckled as she crutched back to her seat by the table and rested her buttocks.
Mana opened her eyes and stood up, moving back from the uneasy captive. She now had her answer, maybe she'd have been able to snoop around some more and gotten some more information but that was a gamble, given the loosened lips of the target. Her own head was beginning to get woozy from roaming a foreign mind in a state of stupor for so long and acting like she owned the place.
"My sister… They burnt her up like she was one of us… She came looking for us… But my mother died young, I was too young to work back then… The Daimyo's to blame for burning her… I told her to leave, the others would have killed her… The nephew liked the looks of her… If I kept her around me, she'd have been in danger… Bandits caught her on her way back… It was too late for me to turn away from my work… Not late enough for her to start something…"
"Wow, you've made him spill all the beans at once, no rocking scoop though…" Shitaka pat Mana on the shoulder once the young woman moved back from the restless and drugged soul.
"I might have ripped a page or two of unpleasant memories freed up some space…" Mana sighed. "He works for the Nine Tales Gang too. They must be really invested into that bounty."
"Then we better move. It won't get any easier until we leave the Fire Country border and then we can stop at the first inn on our way," Junichi declared, approaching Mana to congratulate her on a job well done too. "I'm impressed, kid, not many ninja can move past their demons and do their job as you did."
"Usujitsa didn't kill anyone," Mana replied. "He used clones that transformed into crows just like him. Usujitsa must have dispelled them but he didn't finish the main one off, for once luck was on my side."
"Yes, how very lucky of you…" light danced across the steel wire between Cailar's fingers as he leaned toward the captive.
"Wait, what are you doing? Don't kill him!" Mana objected.
"He's a rogue mercenary, plus, he did get a few good licks in and it makes me rather furious," Cailar mocked Mana with a sly smirk, halting only for a second before slipping the loop of steel wire around the throat of the drugged ninja.
"We've wasted enough time as it is," Mollay scolded his ally. "We've got no time to be wasted on strangling him, let's move already."
"If the method doesn't suit you, we can always kill him quickly. Mollay can literally turn him into dirty sludge or a stone," Cailar argued while the rest of his party fled into the thickness of the nocturnal Fire Country off-road. The man sighed and followed the rest, leaving the delirious ninja to recover from his stupor and figure out what to do with his life from this point on his own.
"Thanks," Mana turned to Mollay who, she had no doubt, saw no harm in killing the enemy though showed support for Mana's call. "What you did means a lot to me,"
Mollay did not reply, just stared on to the difficult to make out maze of the forest, leading the path back to the road from which point on they could have reached the Fire Country border sooner. If the Nine Tales Gang and the rest of the bounty hunters after Mana had little trouble finding her off the main roads as well, there was no reason to take the more difficult and dangerous path, after all.