A thick tree whirled from the outside area into the small, simulated street corner, smashing into and right through the fake café and raising a thunderous ruckus. Baiso walked in scratching his head, he was sure that he aimed for the dandy-looking magician but she was nowhere to be seen. He didn't even see her dodge.
"Took you long enough, dipstick," Joshipa let out a rough grumble still lying on the floor and lacking strength to move. "You better scram, Mana's not your type of opponent."
"I ain't runnin' from nobody who dresses like an attendant of some kind…" Baiso growled, throwing his gaze around in a desperate attempt to pick up on something even remotely Mana-looking.
A little, fuzzy, white rabbit hopped out from the wreckage of the café. Baiso leaned down to look at its pretty, red eyes as he sniffed his nose that drooled with blood and picked rubble out of his wild hair. The little mammal looked up with a lovely stare, almost hypnotizing the half-sitting powerhouse enough to distract him from handfuls upon handfuls of white bunnies hopping out from all over the area, flooding the place.
"What the…?" Baiso looked around. His confusion turned to wonder when white furballs began washing like a tsunami wave from over the café he just wrecked. The brute covered up and braced for impact as the wave of bunnies washed at him, rubbing their fluffy and soft bodies against him in ridiculous masses as the entire war game square became filled with rabbits.
"What are you doing?" Joshipa muttered with a weak voice that somehow still retained her usual sting.
"You fought that chick, didn't you? What do those rabbits do?" Baiso growled as he began shoving and kicking the rabbits aside but his brute force appeared to have little effect on the hairy predicament he found himself in.
"What rabbits?" Joshipa wondered before cringing. It didn't take long for the beaten Allied Ninja upperclassman to realize what was going on.
"If you're here, that means you beat someone and got the objective, right?" Mana's voice finally reached Baiso as the magician sat atop of a stray, horizontal steel bar sticking out from the totaled café.
"Stop hassling me!" Baiso roared out, smacking his fists together and sending a resonating shockwave throughout the field, decimating the bunnies like an ethereal vision as well as the faux image of Mana seated before him. The brute turned around to the direction of the magician's grunts to refocus his rising wrath to.
"Yeah, it took me a while to kick that angry brat's ass, he has an allergy for going down, it seems… Let's see if you share that team spirit…" Baiso cracked his knuckles as he began slowly approaching Mana while she picked herself off of the ground. She had Baiso in her illusion before but she needed some intel out of him, she should've detonated it immediately…
"C'mere!" Baiso snarled as he tried scooping Mana off her feet and into his grip but Mana hopped straight to his blindside with a backfoot stomp at the side of his knees. The brute growled in pain and fell to one knee. With stiff kicks aimed right at Baiso's busted face, Mana began reducing the bruiser down to something she could interrogate.
It took more kicks to the face of the kneeling brawler than she'd have liked to admit but after more of them than Mana could count to, the tough guy looked wobbly and his mean-looking nose looked even worse than it did when he walked in. The bloody drool reached all the way to the ground and it didn't look like Baiso tried to hard to close his eyes to restrict the blood from his cracked forehead from disrupting his vision.
He didn't need to talk, Mana grabbed hold of the bruiser's temples and began probing him mentally. It didn't take too long to see flashes of a pathetic looking mannequin inside of a rundown prison cell. Baiso must have viewed the brawl between him and Endo highly as various violent images and recollection of pain which the giant seemed to glorify were still fresh in his mind and the bruiser didn't shy away from them nor did he try to shelter these memories from Mana.
What did take some more probing, however, was the exact information that he saw on the prisoner. Baiso might have looked like a thick brute but his focus on the information that mattered was commendable. He didn't actively think of that intel. This was what made it more difficult – evidently enough the burly youth had ample training against mental interrogation as he did the more difficult thing and weaved the intelligence in between his memories.
It might not have even been a deliberate tactic. It was just as likely that it was just mnemonics, a way for someone in a rush and a shaken head to memorize a great deal of information. Walls of a facility of some kind, damp, dreary, and metallic in the colors that dominated the place. A party of kids ran down its halls, leaving a room in that hallway that had been sealed off with a door comparable to a safe. One kid, in particular, a small and sickly-looking brat had a familiar set of wild, spiky, brown hair though the features of his face were much gentler as if his face was still unflattened and, as of yet, unbroken even one.
Mana let the kids flee while her attention lingered on the door that they burst through. One thing of note in this entire gloomy place was the numbers 208 dyed on the door. The range of memories was not that long, usually one could only materialize a very narrow recreation of one's own state at the time as well as the general details they noted, that was especially prevalent if one recalled of a time that was well in their past. Had there been any other notable details, those would have been what Mana would have noticed instead of those numbers.
The fleeing wave of oblivion – a white void of that which Baiso either did not know or could not remember engulfed the magician, taking her to the next location. Somehow even gloomier and darker still – it looked like a warehouse except even tinier in size as it only hosted a handful of jackets. While the initial memories of this place gave Mana impressions of an orphanage – the price and quality of some of those jackets suggested that this was more like a school. A Ninja Academy, maybe?
"Hey, are you Baiso?" Mana heard a rather angry, childish request that seemed whiny enough to sound like its owner was about to voice a spoken complaint. True to the initial impression, a taller and much healthier looking brat compared to little Baiso before walked in through the one entryway and exit that this rundown storage unit had, walling young Baiso off from leaving and engulfing the cloakroom in shade.
"Yeah. You wanna fight?" Baiso, now with a much more familiar, crude tune snarled at the entrant who looked a few years older than him.
"You're some dumbass, aren't you? I'm three years older than you. You beat up my classmate today so you're damn right we're gonna have some trouble!" the entrant, accompanied by two others of indistinguishable features walked in closer to young Baiso. Mana could hardly contain a chuckle as she had no doubts that the reason why Baiso couldn't recall any features from these two was that he only cared about the squabble with this upperclassman.
"He made fun of the way I talk!" Baiso snarled again. The animalistic way he talked seem much worse at this part of his life and once Mana took a better look at the young man she realized why – his face looked like a bowl of mashed potatoes that had just had a brick flung into it. There couldn't have been a doubt that this troublemaker fought everything that moved.
The following altercation was mere splatters of black ink over a paper of scarlet. The little brawler must have felt so engrossed into the fight that he lost track of any sense even back then, making it of little mystery how come he could vaguely recall any specific details. By the time some semblance of clarity returned to the memory, Baiso was flat on his back in the corner, breathing through bubbly puddles of blood running from his airways though with a smile richer than a billion ryo.
"You deserve the shit you get, asshole. You picked a fight with an upperclassman five years older than you so you deserved what came to you. The upperclassmen say you just don't stop coming. That must have been why Yasu smashed your face into a wall for it. Dunno bout that rep though. You seem like a wimp that goes down just like anyone else to me…" the upperclassman turned to his featureless cohorts with a giggle. Now Mana understood why little Baiso had so much trouble breathing right – it was something that followed him all the way into adulthood. The injury sustained in a fight back when he was still just a human and not some senseless ogre of pure violence that he'd become eventually.
"I don't care if your runt of a classmate made fun of me, I'd have stomped his head into the pavement in any case. That's how I'm gonna make it into the Ninja Academy – I'll just kick the shit out of everyone that is about to make it until they either take me in or there's no one else left to take in!" Baiso spread his arms out and charged at the bully like an animal, tackling him to the ground and beginning to hammer at his face. Mana turned around, even if this memory contained some crucial detail, she didn't fancy watching a kid somewhere halfway across the world having his head bashed by arms that looked duller than a blacksmith's smasher.
"Wh…Wh…Wh…" something dull and awfully bubbly came from behind Mana. The magician turned back, trying not to focus on the state of the poor older boy trying to say something rather than focusing on Baiso's ecstatic grin. Covered with splatters of blood, the young boy stood up from his beaten challenger and began slowly approaching the two friends of his until they turned tail and bolted like an ogre from hell itself was chasing after them, looking to sit them both atop of a bamboo pole.
Mana didn't make any attempts to follow the chase, she stayed behind and let the memories wash her away and take her to wherever else they flowed. Something hard and dry was under her bottom. Recently washed sheets that still reeked of decay. It was a sight that Mana thought she'd know well – a prison cell, though hers was much more… Elaborate and ever-changing than this one. It was safe to say that Baiso had never been anywhere near Jigoku. Judging from the bloody shitshow and conditioning of children like they were soldiers in cold and desolate, damp facilities, that she saw in the earlier memories – this could have only been somewhere around the eastern part of the world. Kirigakure or the Archipelago, perhaps?
Voices reached Mana from the side, behind an open, thick, metal door that looked just the same as the safe doors from Baiso's educational facility where he got his brawling chops from. What felt odd was that Mana could hear the voices, she could turn in their direction but she couldn't move. A mere glimpse at Baiso, now significantly bulkier and more monstrous-looking, laid out on the busted bunk bed over a dead body who was smashed by the top bunk falling on top of him and crushing him dead when Baiso laid for some shuteye suggested a reason why this might have been the case.
Baiso could hear those voices too but at that moment he wanted nothing more than for them to walk into his cell and find him there just like he was lying there. Carefree, a malicious grin on his face, his dead bunkmate right underneath him, not a drop of blood drawn out of him yet his pale and rotting corpse sprawled out from messy wreckage of wood and steel framing yet completely of no concern to Baiso who continued to stare right at the ceiling of his own cell with a carefree, malicious smile.
"This is the new guy's cell, right?"
"Right, what a freakazoid, I heard he just swam up to Jiro Island and started beating the shit out of the guards until they took him in and imprisoned him."
"No shit?"
"Yeah, heard so too…"
"He's a hitman, right? Who's he after? Halberd or Toroi?"
"Who knows…?"
"More like who cares, nobody owns up to this guppy and he's freaking everyone out, time for him to go, permanently, if you hear my sneeze…"
"Sure, as long as my dragon tattoo is the last thing he sees and he knows not to mess with Toroi and his crew…"
The inmates all swarmed the open room at once. It was the middle of the night though Mana had seen more correctional facilities than to expect that any warden would keep any semblance of control around these parts. To be fair, control was to let these gangs run the place, that was the only way that this place would see anything remotely resembling order. No matter if this was the Jiro Island Containment Facility, Jigoku, or Rengoku, the way things worked was just the same.
"Holy…!" a few inmates stopped, pissing in their boots over the grisly sight of Baiso smirking at the ceiling while laying on top of his broken and positively reeking cellmate but the smell of blood about to be drawn prevailed. They rushed the cubical cell and one of them flipped a dirty sock over Baiso's forehead in an attempt to keep his head restrained while the others restrained his limbs and those who remained punched or stabbed at the new guy with their results from homemade recipes.
Some of the hitmen had more moxie than the others. Though the ultimate result was all the same, despite it – they all backed down with their hands too heavy to keep a solid grip over the shivs and decent-looking blades or smashed bottles. Most of them had cuts over their own hands due to improper handling and ruthless sadism when holding their tools of the deadly trade. Baiso's crimson chest lifted up and down a few times as the burly inmate sat up, his malicious smirk only grew sharper. His eyes were sunken in red though the bleeding was only internal as none of the inmates penetrated his ocular orbs despite numerous attempts.
Mana sighed, given how Baiso had now regained his passion for movement, this was just the right time for her to leave the cell and leave the burly brute to enjoy his treasured memories of yet another senseless rampage. The magician had no doubt that this version of the monstrous brute would lack what little semblance of restraint his childhood self had.
"Well, whaddya know!? I guess the dragon tat is the last thing I'll see of you guys!" Baiso snarled at the bloody mess he left of the place while staring at a torn off patch of decorated skin that was the only thing resembling sense in the brute's hands.
"208. WH. Dragon logo…" Mana muttered the password under her own nose after stepping away from Baiso and letting him hang powerless though still on his knees.
"What the fuck? How did you…?" Baiso growled as he pushed his burly hand down and forced his body to stand back up, even though he was on wobbly legs. "I smashed the damn puppet good so that you couldn't read what it said, I did…"
"And yet you didn't smash your own brain… Next time show less restraint," Mana aimed a strict look toward the particularly brutal young man that she now got to know a tad better as a result of taking a gander at the memories he associated with each separate detail of the password that the prisoner puppet relayed to him.
"Some goddamn witchcraft… Looking into my mind and shit…" Baiso shook his head and smacked himself across the temples to try and shake off whatever haze the momentary slip into his mind still lingered and held control over him.
Mana flicked the tip of her top hat, letting it roll off of her head and into her hand while she stuffed her hand down into it and set off the storage seal inside it. She had to rely on the Multi-Summoning Jutsu to call for two rabbits but there was no need for her to resort to washed-down jutsu invented by someone else for just one rabbit.
"Ji!" Usujitsa barked out overjoyed to be by Mana's side as he hugged the magician's lap and began rubbing his face by it.
"There are two more signatures coming in from the south and west. We'll have too much company to handle soon enough, get ready to cut loose. No murder. Anything softer is fine," Mana relayed her orders to Usujitsa with a strict tone. The absolute hell that she's experienced in Jigoku must have translated well through her serious gaze as the psychopathic rabbit just gulped with a fearful gaze and rolled away from Mana in fright. Then again, he was always easy to influence due to his limited intelligence.
"Another illusion, twerp!?" Baiso cracked his knuckle, charging at Mana while putting his shoulder out. He was fast, faster than even Mana could weave any hand seals. The magician rolled aside but she could sense an impulse of chakra leaking out from the charging juggernaut the whole time – it was some sort of enhanced taijutsu technique, something closely resembling Budojutsu from the Sun Disc Arena. The gust swooped Mana right back in Baiso's reach while the charging brute swatted her aside.
"Told ya you shouldn't have fooled around against me – you'd not have to reserve chakra right now on a lug-head like Baiso," Joshipa muttered with a weak tone.
Mana grunted in frustration while picking herself off the ground. It's been a while since she's been tossed around like this, not since Sekita. Baiso scooped Mana off the ground by her hair, showing off his flattened a thousand times over mug and his smile of dulled out and busted teeth, that same look he offered those prisoners he pulled apart with his bare hands.
"What's the matter? Your little funny-bunny ran away…" Baiso snarled right up in her face.
Mana only needed to clap her hands and send surges of Magician's Touch through her body to stun the dimwit in his heavy-duty boots and leave him dazed and stumbling again. Baiso threw his arms around, trying to swat Mana but he only dispersed a shower of flower petals that all froze in mid-air and began swirling around him, covering him entirely while one by one they all transformed into sticky notes and etched the markings of an explosive note onto them.
"The rabbit is for your crew. This is all it will take for you…" Mana muttered while her shape manifested behind Baiso and flicked her fingers, detonating all of the explosive tags littering Baiso and having the lug fall flat on his face with whited out eyes and drool from his mouth. Endo did a number on him physically, Mana tested his mental might as well, his consciousness only needed one good punt to shatter.
The problem was that Mana was standing around in the café where the second objective was at and everyone was homing in on the second one. The source of this problem was that an alarming number of Shogito's crewmates made it out with their objectives. Baiso landed a few good shots on her, tossing her around like that and Mana might not have had the stamina to keep up with two whole crewmates of Baiso's weight class but of a different skillset all by herself…
One could have only hoped that Usujitsa retained his ability to surprise and dazzle.