A bright light enveloped the staircase room, forcing Mana to cover her face up instinctually. Noise boomed for a blink before dying out in a void of childish laughter. The light became a veil of white that surrounded everything, a veil the part of which Mana became one with without expressing her choice to do so. By the time she rationalized what had happened, she laid on her back outside, brushing her scraped back against stone while shards of glass and shredded wood rained from the sky.
Mana looked down, inspecting her body. There was a massive gap in her chakra. Her body had augmented her to withstand an expanding bubble of booming obliteration without her conscious demand. Normally Mana still hesitated to employ chakra augmentation, but survival came first to what her consciousness thought about a method of survival to her body. Hearing the ringing and feeling a warm drip down her ears, Mana stood up and faced the wall of flames before her and a massive wine-red shape with gleaming eyes on the horizon.
"The Four-Tails?" Mana muttered to herself, seeing the four tails of the colossal monkey titan flapping about as it smashed, kicked, and breathed emerald flames. Lives blinked out by hundreds as within an instant fireballs and lightning bolts lit up the sky and smashed into the beast, but they were like gnats attacking a raging bull. They may have been too tiny to pin down and squash, but they also couldn't hope to accomplish anything more than irritate their target.
Hearing screams and wailing fill the air, Mana turned her head up, seeing tremendous chunks of the hive-shaped building falling from the heavens. With the completion of a few hand seals, the magician took to the skies and swooped up to the falling building chunk, pinpointing the location of every frightened recruit and injured person within in need of rescue before the plummeting chunk hit the ground. With Mana having improved her Mystical Wings Jutsu and reinvented it time and time again, it may as well have been a different jutsu from where it had started out. Mana would require all that expertise to pull this off.
"Fire Style: Dragon Claw!" Mana yelled out while riding the current of wind that sent her torpedoing toward the falling building. After completing the Tiger hand seal, Mana blew out a mass of hot air from her lungs that ignited upon contact with the air around her and slapped with an open palm, creating a triplet of Fire Release chakra spikes that slashed through and melted the building wall making for an easier punt through.
The shrieking in her head took over as Mana winced and cried out in pain, slamming the building with her head and shoulders first was never a fun experience and she couldn't wallow in discomfort for too long lest she became a sharer of the fate that the victims she was trying to save all shared. As fast as she could, Mana activated her Mystical Wings again and maneuvered around the collapsing building chunk, grabbing and dragging whoever she could on her way out. Once the hot brush of late spring caressed her cheek, Mana vaulted in mid-air to secure her hold on the few survivors she held and slowly descended, wincing when the building wing hit the ground with a thunderous roar.
"Fuck… Oh, shit, Oakley was still there…" someone hanging on Mana's neck and slowly driving her down like an overweight balloon lamented.
"What? This isn't everyone?" Mana turned to them, feeling her pumped cheeks cool as their color paled out. How could this have been? How could she have missed someone?
"Yeah, there was this young man, he got pinned by a collapsing ceiling, I think he was still alive…" the young woman whom Mana held by her hands while the entire group landed on the ground and collapsed, breathing easier now that the immediate threat to their lives was over.
"My chakra sensory I… I thought I sensed everyone…" Mana dragged her cool hands over her face, rubbing her eyes almost to the point of bleeding before clenching them in fists.
"His chakra must have been pretty weak, with all this shit in the background…" one of the rescued recruits pointed at the massive bestial titan throwing parts of the building he had just reduced to ruin and squishing those choosing to hold it off while people got back on their feet and worked to help each other out. "Is that the Four-Tails!? I thought it was last seen in the Earth Country…"
"It's Iwagakure, it has to be, they've sent this beast to destroy Kumogakure in revenge and it's too stupid to see what's it doing!" one of the female recruits Mana helped wrapped her head in her hands, shaking in disbelief that they were fighting off a Tailed Beast.
"Move to the outskirts like in the survival drills. You know them better than me, I failed the graduation exam," Mana muttered with a hollow tone before turning to the Four-Tails and scanning the hot spots of its destruction. As streams of its emerald flames engulfed people and buildings, it seemed to dissolve them on a cellular level, almost as if it was toxic to their very cells and acidic to the tissue at the same time as being infernally hot.
"You're not coming with?" the rescued recruit asked with a raised tone to overpower the shattering boulders and roars of earthquakes in the distance.
"Too many people can't get out. Your protocols don't apply to me anymore, I'm out of the Allied Ninja. I'm doing what I think is right from this point on," Mana replied without turning back and flew off toward the source of all the heat. The Allied Ninja were getting slaughtered. For every platoon to take the beast on, hundreds of ninja evaporated to ash in the hellish baths of the monkey's flame or met their doom underneath a rampant storm of rubble.
A spike of chakra to her right, Mana barrel-rolled, avoiding something that simply radiated with chakra. Just when she thought she was safe, the projectile she had avoided lit up and made Mana scream out in pain when its rowdy blast and rough shock waves sent her arrowing back down. Just a few blinks longer and Mana would've splatted down and broken something, since she avoided the pinpoint explosive projectile, she kept enough consciousness to swoop up and correct her course at the final few seconds but she settled on not lingering in the skies anymore.
There was something else here. Someone else.
It wasn't the Four-Tails shooting explosives at her. This was a combo of ninjutsu and weaponry for sure, but primordial titans of chakra didn't know such subtlety and the evidence was all around the Allied Ninja and cinders falling from the cloudy skies that had turned dark from smoke before the noon clocked in. There was a third party, a method to this madness but, as always, screams and pleads for merciful salvation or a merciful death distracted Mana.
A handful of banged-up recruits hung atop of a dislodged and flipped-over piece of debris. It had rested in a position that suggested to Mana that the grand beast ahead had lobbed the whole thing here with those poor people hanging on the edge and shellshocked. With a kick to her flight, Mana leaped off of the sonic boom underneath her feet and slowed down before grabbing hold of the hanging recruits before U-turning and placing them down on the ground. Just after they had settled and realized that they were down on the good old ground a stream of emerald flames washed over the fallen building wing, reducing bricks and steel railings alike to ash and decaying it instead of melting it.
"That burning… It's massively cytotoxic, oh god…" the recruit with a fractured leg that looked strangely clean moped prompting Mana to put two on top of two.
"You're a medical ninja? Can you reach the outskirts? That's where everyone's regrouping. There might be survivors that need your help," she asked.
"Sure…" the medical ninja nodded. "Just give me two to thank the forces beyond I'm not flat or corroded to a pile of dead, powdery cells right now."
"Can you take him there?" Mana turned to the other recruit she just rescued.
"Yeah, I can walk," the recruit nodded.
"Tell me you're not going toward that thing…" the medical ninja looked up to Mana with a pain-ridden expression, holding his fractured leg.
"Eventually, maybe, for now, I've got to make sure that I help everyone I can," Mana ran her hand over her unruly hair, freaking out after realizing that everything around her potential tasks were failing. Ninja trying to coordinate an assault on the Four-Tails died by the handful, approaching the outcome of being wiped out. People in need of rescue crying out all around her, people she wasn't helping right now. "Survive, please, help someone else if you can," Mana muttered and took off again, rushing toward the grand monster on the horizon on her own.
Jets of the jade flame passed around with a rumbling shake. A recruit screamed, curling into a fetal ball where the flames ate her up and reduced her to nothing with a corrosive embrace before Mana's eyes. Her own shaking hand before her aligned to Mana's eyes while the magician gulped down her sorrow and turned her attention to a nearby recruit pinned down by rubble. Taming her desire to save everyone, Mana dashed to the poor recruit and grabbed hold of the debris, trying to push it off the ground herself.
"Just… Shit… Just smash through, you won't lift it off!" the recruit yelled out. The fallen wall had smashed both of the recruit's legs down under and, normally, lifting the thing pinning him down would have doomed the young man to certain death, but his ninja physiology and chakra circulation would sustain his life long enough, as long as he receives help.
"I can't, if I smash it from above, it won't be subtle, I'm going to injure you more…" Mana grunted and cried out while struggling to lift off the building wall collapsed to the lower half of the recruit. This went against her principles but losing control of her chakra again and severing her network sure beat seeing this poor man die before her eyes just like that last recruit. As the ninja magician tapped into her chakra augmentation, immense strength rushed through her and the wall became easier to lift and fling away.
Mana picked the injured recruit up and dashed behind and around the scattered debris, pillars of jade flame burst from underground, swallowing both the location where the recruit had been pinned down under and all around Mana but, with a swoop of her Mystical Wings, Mana squeezed through a few closing pillars and flew on a lower ground level toward the outskirts and further away from the action.
"Ugh… I can't feel my legs but… Thanks, you saved my life," the recruit muttered, wrapping his hands around Mana's neck while the kunoichi slowly tried shoving him away and handing the young man to the medical ninja working on healing those survivors that still weren't beyond help.
"Mana!" a familiar voice reached the magician, making Mana groan with a subconscious expression of her frustration. "We were so worried!" Shige-H, Damisan, Tomi, and Skaven surrounded her and hugged her each in a row while Shige-H examined the magician for wounds.
"Good, you guys are here too…" Mana scratched her head, realizing she came off bitchy by reacting this way to her friends being worried about her, but they seriously slowed her down. So many people out there still weren't beyond saving, so many would die because Mana won't be there.
"Calm down," Skaven stated with a sharp look right Mana in the eyes. There was something unspoken, something odd going on with him. As if he knew exactly how Mana felt on a level much deeper than someone who had only known her for a few months on a mostly professional level may have known her feelings.
"How can I!? There's a goddamn Tailed Beast out there! Everyone's doing their best to make time to rescue everyone we can. I can't just stand around here and talk!" Mana dragged her shaking hands across her face, her sifting fingers threatened to pull the unruly curls that weaved into untidy loops around her fingers but it only pinched her scalp in the end as the loops always caved under pressure. "I can't even fly around fast enough, there's some maniac shooting me out of the sky every time I rise!"
"Wait, what?" Shige-H gasped.
"Yeah, there's some unidentified, large chakra signature, A-Rank. At the very least, he tried sniping me out from the sky with a long-range explosive," Mana said.
"That's what I've suspected," Shige-H scratched her chin. "I have a vague clue what we're up against. This Tailed Beast, it's a diversion. Shit! I think I know why we haven't found Endo too. Damn… Let's just hope that man hadn't killed Endo and that he's just being his usual crazy-ass self," Shige-H flipped out, pacing across the more tranquil patch of the outskirts while rubbing her forehead nervously.
"What are you talking about?" Tomi's face soured.
"Think about it, who can pull something like this and who has the absolute nothing-to-lose mentality and sheer guts to do this? Who have we scorned to the point of them declaring a blood feud against us, but whom we haven't heard from since?" Shige-H sat down on a nearby rock as she stared at the ground.
"You're losing me. I'm off to see whom I can save! Shadow Clone Jutsu!" Mana split her chakra into five separate pieces just because she'd be able to help more people this way. She also reduced her combat potential by raking through her chakra resources this way too, but it wasn't like she fostered any hopes of doing anything against a Tailed Beast but becoming a powdery pile of ash.
"No, wait! You're absolutely the worst person to be out there right now–you haven't met that man, Mana, but he's the father of the assassin that tried to kill you. We've met him while securing the tissue sample that saved your life," Shige-H jumped up and stood in front of the way of the central Mana.
"I don't care about that man or whatever pointless vendetta he's on. If he stands in the way of me helping everyone I can, I'll deal with him," Mana looked up to Shige-H and the two clashed resolute stares. It seemed as if though neither was ready to back down from the other with Mana flirting with the thought of employing genjutsu while Shige-H tried defusing her friend through reason and employing her caring look.
"Deal with me? That's interesting," a cybernetic-sounding voice reached the Stars as all of them turned to where the voice came from. A tall and well-armored in a full-karuta set man carrying multiple armed sheathes and donning a round face-covering mask with three round, yellow vizors that complemented the night-black karuta with red decorations and edges to it.
"So, it is you…" Skaven sighed. "Oh well, maybe it's for the better, I still owe you for dealing with some of my old associates. Not all of them were salt of the earth, you know. Some of them were just people trying to make a living the only way they knew how and they didn't deserve to be your chess pieces."
"Shut up, ANBU scum, I've got no issue with you so I suggest you run back home to your master's lap and rub your back against it before I break it instead," the assassin raised the ancient hilt he used in the earlier clash against the Stars in the Fire Country.
"ANBU?" Skaven seemed stricken by this referral.
"I've got no time for this. You've brought a Tailed Beast here, and you sent it to rampage here, causing who knows how many casualties! I've got no time to settle meaningless squabbles with you. People are dying out there!" Mana took a few careless steps forward, swiping her hand to the side, but neither her approach nor her body language caused much concern for the veteran assassin.
"You want to keep it simple, huh? Fine, how's this for simple, Konoha's Sorceress? You roll back your collar and fall to your knees, I'll make it quick and recall the Four-Tails. How's that? The ball's in your court now, you're the one responsible for every death that the Four-Tails causes from this point on because you can stop all this by giving me the satisfaction for my daughter's death and the stain on her reputation," the killer spoke with a cold tone that didn't seem to require the aid of the voice box that he used at all. He was hollow even without it.
"What kind of sick and twisted…!? How can you blame Mana for surviving an attempt at her life?" Damisan ran up to Mana's side as his cloak stayed behind him and touched the ground gently. Behind them, recruits cowered and hid in search of safety as they were incapable of helping Mana and the rest of the Stars out too much against this threat in their current states.
"How do I know you've got any sort of control over this beast?" Mana tried finding the man's eyes somewhere behind that round, steel helmet covering his entire face up but there was nothing but glowing lamps behind them it seemed. The killer may as well have been a machine just like the facade he tried to form implied.
"The thing on Four-Tails' forehead. It is a part of an ancient artifact known as the Five Pillars Seal. It imprisons the victim underneath an impenetrable seal of five pillars and until it grants me five requests, each freeing it from one pillar, it remains under my total control. If I command it to, say, pick its nose and dance around, it would be free of my control." The killer explained, pointing at the raging beast bashing in the distance. "Right now, it is under the orders to distract the Allied Ninja until I take my vengeance. Once you are dead, that request is fulfilled, leaving it with only two more requests left ungranted."
"But if it is free, then it's no better than a wild animal. Tailed Beasts are dangerous weapons of mindless, mass destruction already. If you set it free, it'll just finish the job!" Skaven lashed back at the mastermind of what might have been the collapse of the Allied Ninja.
"No. This is not the first time that the Four-Tails has been captured this way. I have found that the beast is terrified of that artifact and will flee from it the first chance it gets. With it being captured by it again, its panic will be even more apparent. It will flee to a whole other country from where the Five Pillars Seal is, of that, you can't doubt." The veteran assassin replied.
"You're just a treacherous snake! You're delusional if you think we'll trust the father of the lying pit viper that infiltrated us and tried turning Mana-nee against us before nearly killing her!" Tomi threw a wild fit. "Don't listen to this guy, Mana-nee, he's lying!"
"He isn't," Mana shook her head. "I'm well versed in history and lore of the world, it used to be a hobby of mine, and I've heard of this story about the Four-Tails."
"A Fable of The Western Ninja by Aporius Noregin, wasn't it?" the killer asked with his inquisitive tone barely sifting through his wall of apathy.
"You read the scrolls in the Konoha Archive?" Mana muttered, somehow failing to find this impossible, rather feeling a bit of admiration for how devoted this man was to ending her life and coming to know the best ways of doing just that. "The same books I've read?"
"Look at who's suddenly all-talk…" the killer pointed his ancient-looking hilt at Mana in an accusatory gesture. "That's right, I've learned what makes you tick just like my daughter did before shooting you down. She did everything right, she doesn't deserve the stain of dishonor your survival gave her. Enough stalling, you're the one costing lives now, Konoha's Sorceress, accept death or fight back as a hypocrite. Your choice, just know that I'll kill you, your friends, and every wounded recruit here, leave no survivors unless you wipe the stain on my daughter's memory willingly."
"I'm sorry about the loss of your daughter, but you shouldn't have involved so many innocent people in this. You're too dangerous and too reckless so I won't hold anything back," Mana leaned down and pulled out a broken chunk of someone's steel staff, pointing it at the man after her own life like she used to wield the Audra alloy wand early in her career.