The two men crashed into one another like speeding tidal waves. It didn't take sublime skill in martial arts to tell that this clash wouldn't have lasted long. After all, if the fight gone on and raised too much of a ruckus, Mana would have never had the chance to meet the assassin in question, or his daughter. No. This would have been a short and violent affair.
The skill of Rakugi's father in the signature Hyuuga taijutsu style surpassed what Mana saw Rakugi use, though the young man never used an ounce of the style he learned during his upbringing. Despite Rakugi's Byakugan gleaming bright and silver and veins raking his face when looking from aside, the young assassin fought with a brutal, clenched-fist fighting style, though his method wasn't rage. No. Rakugi was patient and precise, as a skilled swordsman and accurate, like an archer.
The palm strikes of Rakugi's father slid down and under or around the elusive young man. At times Rakugi leaned back, shorting his father out of just mere inches in range, as if taunting him. The killer wasn't foolish or naïve either. Very few times did he strike to wound or disable and saw his strikes deflected, because every deflection or entrapment provided his opponent with an invaluable chance to win. The little Hyuuga heiress tried sneaking off before Rakugi swept his foot and punted the kid back into the corner like a ball of useless, dirty rags.
The assassin's father wanted to speak up, but he only spat out blood from his mouth that stained the white undershirt underneath his black haori. Rakugi had landed a few strikes, using the fact that Mana saw through his eyes when looking at this bout. She saw chakra nodes outright explode with guttural violence within the body of Rakugi's father. It had been as if the man had swallowed an explosive tag. He was dead after just one strike but didn't know it until he broke down vomiting pools of bile and blood.
The crying toddler stumbled her way through the corridor, tears obstructing the view. Mana wanted to believe that this scene would have moved her, that she didn't have the strength to keep on watching, but she would have been lying if she admitted that aloud. Truth be told, while she feared that this gruesome yet inevitable sight might have distracted her from the very reason she took part in this memory in the first place, her experiences had long since rendered her numb to mental breakdowns in the face of these disasters.
Thus when Rakugi kicked the still dying and bleeding profusely body of his father to slip off his scarf and fling it at the fleeing child to loop its end around little lady Hissho's neck, Mana scanned the room without flinching. Eager to find that which she came here for so that she didn't have to experience it again. While it remained stuck up in the air if Rakugi killed the heiress with a single yank that snapped her tender neck because of some remnant of professionalism and twisted kindness or merely because he was in a hurry, Mana didn't find her prize in that room.
Rakugi advanced onward, over the corpse of his father and the Hyuuga heiress lying limp and lifeless on the ground, frozen like a piece of artwork. The young man moved slowly, his movements were jittery as if grains of sand and gravel plagued his joints, drowning and obstructing their movements. Rakugi raked his own face, pulling the front of his hair as he advanced through the mansion, hopping up and pulling himself over the boards on the ceiling and rolling aside when the light came up and men came rushing through to avoid immediate detection.
The guards were sloppy. So frightened they were for the life of their miraculous three-year-old that even with the white eye capable of seeing everything around them, they took a few seconds too late to spot the intruder hiding over the ceiling. Their prime goal was to gaze onward and see if the heiress was okay and if the assassin had been in the vicinity. By the time they realized that the assassin had been above them, Rakugi had extra time to break their immediate striking arms with one punch and further develop his one-punch, one-kill fighting style by dispatching of the small group of guards.
It felt impossible to believe that the young man didn't root the connection to the Five Pillar Seal to either killing the young girl he associated the torment of his existence and life as a Hyuuga to or his own father. Both seemed like monumental memories to say the least and certainly would have ranked vastly above all the memories that preceded it and yet… Despite how stumped she felt, Mana sighed and moved outside, seeing black blurs around her as the hive began going abuzz though the honey thief was well on his way out by then.
Being a branch house member born to better serve the main house appeared to have provided Rakugi with superior knowledge over the district's streets. Had she not been nauseated by this sick individual flashing back through murdering a child before her eyes, as if in a sick feat of defiance, mocking and abusing Mana even well past the point he could pose a threat to her anymore, the young man hid and dispatched of people with the grace and skill of someone who had nothing to lose and everything to win, fighting for their share of spoiled, dream life dangling in front of them.
This was just grey and bloody filler. There was not a chance in hell that either of these poor Hyuuga clansmen would have served as the connection when not even the man's own father nor his self-appointed nemesis that. Despite the man in the overcoat never telling Rakugi that, the two men met in the cemetery as if planned to do so. Even Rakugi looked lightly surprised by how well he was read by the members of this organization, while the man just turned back with a grizzled look. Neither impressed nor disappointed in the youth's work, just acknowledging of his existence.
"So, you've killed your old life, I take it," the man in the overcoat said. He didn't ask about it, he just flat out stated it.
"What makes you so sure? Maybe I was just training?" Rakugi clapped his hands to wipe the dirt off of them. He had ditched his gear and weaponry at that point in hiding places known better to him.
"When a man kills their own prior life, a part of them dies with that life," the man in the overcoat tilted their top hat and pulled on the damp locks of their greyed-out hair, as if gesturing for Rakugi to check.
Feeling curious, the young assassin pulled on his hair to examine it, he saw nothing on the first handful but the second one that grabbed more to the right revealed a handful of hair much paler than even the silver hair of the grizzled, village-serving veteran. Rakugi sifted through his hair, observing that half of his head of hair had gone pale with light inflammation seeping through his scowl, though the young man dragged his dirty and bloody hand combing through his hair.
"This is nothing. I feel nothing. If you think you've put me through a test of some sort, you're wrong. These deaths were just a formality. They were dead long before I drew the bow or threw a punch," Rakugi objected to the man's insinuation.
"You know, I'm not here to help you lose a tail or to help you finish up burning down the bridges. We don't adopt murderers into our fold, if you know what I mean. If you killed anyone, you'll have to face justice for that on your own terms." The man in the overcoat turned to Rakugi. The young man seemed baffled up to a point in time before a veil of understanding shrouded his expression in maturity.
"Killed anyone? The fuck are you on about? We're just having a talk over here. Figured an old guy like you would understand what I'm feeling better, as you've said earlier–we both lost people on the line of duty." Rakugi stuck an index finger up in his ear and waggled it, adopting a bratty persona completely out of the blue.
"Right. Tell you what, me and the other old farts are meeting up all over the village places. Nowhere special in particular. Places that used to mean something to someone long ago but places that have moved on or died out, I guess. Maybe they've got some stories to tell you you can find useful? We've all lost a thing or two, but we all want to see this village grow much older than all of us are. Shed many times as many layers and find thousands of nowhere in particular places just like those…" the man in the overcoat turned the tip of his hat up as he gazed at the stars over his head.
"If the Hyuuga heiress was to die, how would the village be better off?" Rakugi turned to his companion.
"That's random. I'm too old for could-a-beens and should-a-beens, you know. You'll only make people raise eyebrows if you talk about that rubbish in public too. My friends and associates feel too burdened by the weight on their old bones to figure how much more weight and on which shoulder they could have added over the years," the veteran dressed for an autumnal drizzle cleared his throat, no-selling the question like it had been something normal.
"You're right. I guess it is random and meant nothing… That's what I said before, didn't I?" Rakugi scratched the back of his contrasting hairdo, still getting used to his new weird look. "Forget I asked."
"Sometimes it's not about the immediate beauty of things in front of you, kid. Take it from an old fart like me. Sometimes stepping on a little bud is okay if you know you'll be tending to the garden tomorrow and seed a hundred trees with a birdhouse on every branch. Even if the bud was about to bloom all cute and aromatic and didn't really hurt anyone." The man sighed before taking something out of his pocket and handing it to Rakugi.
Mana had no idea what that object was, seeing how it had been replaced by the Five Pillar Seal part that she's been looking for. Just when Mana was feeling the buzzing bees down in her belly that burnt up with noxious fumes of fright that she'd have to sit through that careful yet brutal massacre. In Jigoku, Mana had met dumbasses who would have admired Rakugi's work and how few people he slew and how he had done it. Too many of them wouldn't have shut up even when Mana would have asked them why anyone had to die at all…
"Om Mani Padme Hum…" Mana muttered, looking at the fingers of her own hand as four of them became replaced by the polished stones of jade artifact containing the sealing power necessary to boss around even a Tailed Beast. The magician had studied enough ancient dialects to know that the mantra that the seal portrayed had been already completed, and yet there was still one bit of it missing. A Five Pillar Seal with a mantra of only four parts…
The entire world inside of Rakugi's memories became small as blurry images of two little girls with pigtails that seemed staticky as if their creator had scribbled them with a dark blue sharpie embraced each other from the sides. One of them had hair of pure white while the other one had a hair color completely matching the color of its unimpressive creation. Upon contact, the scribbled lines flowed out of order and swirled one around the other like thread forming a perfect twine.
Inside that woolen world, as it slowly took a more cohesive appearance, Mana locked onto the next key memory. Two people, a father and a daughter, stood inside of a cavern of shiny, cerulean stalactites illuminating the home of choice of this curious family of two. The family situated themselves one in front of the other. Rakugi must have aged around forty years. The jump was so sudden and contrasted how close the rest of the memories were to one another so badly that Mana had to shake her head and consider the situation in front of her twice.
Ion looked different at this point in time compared to how she presented herself to the Stars. She donned a subtler version of her father's armor. She chose a platinum hue with sapphire lines stretched across it and she may have been a handful of years younger than the deceitful backstabber who shot a pressurized airwave riding hawk through Mana's chest from a high-caliber dispenser cannon.
"You may begin at your leisure." Rakugi donning a much stricter and grumpier expression though, Mana was shocked to witness that he still didn't have the blinding wound decorating his face.
"Stop grumbling, dad, you've been grumbling this whole time!" Ion took a low fighting stance by extending her legs wide and bringing her upper body lower to maximize her balance. She must have been a nimble fighter, emphasizing mobility in combat to require balance this much. The masters in the Sun Disc arena would have qualified such thirst for something in combat as toxic as Ion's entire stance seemed built around drinking in as much balance as she could manage at all times. "I'll stop punching you in the face when you admit you're a biased old grouch and won't let me take my own job because you can't fathom your little girl has grown up."
"I'm grouchy because my daughter challenged me to a battle to prove her worth as an assassin instead of stabbing me in the back proper. I've never been more disappointed in my entire life. If I find the opening–I'll kill you." Rakugi declared, rolling a pair of thin throwing knives in his hand before freezing in a knife-fighting stance.
Ion didn't hesitate to begin. She slid her fingers across her nails, slashing into the soft meat and drawing blood in an instant as she splattered the blood out in front of her, summoning a handful of hawks that swooped onward like living missiles. Rakugi had already been gliding above them by the chance they appeared, socking his own daughter in the jaw and letting go of his knives as he smashed every single piece of her armor to bits with focused punches that honed in on the armor's weak spots before kicking his falling knives back into his hands with full-intent on working on his daughter's wide-open and exposed body. Rakugi wasn't lying–he was fighting to kill.
The man was the first person Mana could remember whose sleight of hand might have surpassed hers. He could have stabbed and outright eviscerated Ion in a blink then and there, but the man seemed to freeze in place.
"Aw, dad, you do care…" Ion posed with her hands over her hips as she had the fear of death frozen in her eyes for a blink before she realized her father halted his hand. Her speech was slow–this sudden show of mercy seemed like a shock to Ion herself. Grazes and scars littering the young woman's body suggested that restraint wasn't something her father practiced as a rule.
With a scornful expression, Rakugi shot to the sky as a missile and thrust open palms downward, expelling crushing gusts of air pressure that slammed Ion to the ground and stomped her into the cave further, threatening to crumble the entire cave. The man dragged himself down with a steel wire attached to a throwing knife as gravity was too slow for the veteran assassin.
"Fine, you can take your own job." Rakugi muttered with a bit of his signature grouchy grumble. "Inexperienced marks only. You don't work on anyone older than you unless you have my permission to do so. You'll have to earn every elevation in rank over your own through hard work and sweat and blood."
"Y-Yes Sir!" Ion mock-saluted her father as she barely scrounged to get back on her feet.
"What's the matter, killer? I thought you were excited about a job of your own? Why are you still here?" Rakugi growled through grit teeth, forcing air through with a noticeable bit of haste in his tone. He was trying to get rid of his daughter… Mana turned her head behind the man, wondering what he saw. There were no chakra signatures, nothing a Byakugan might have picked up, but Mana shared a more intimate knowledge of someone's presence with Rakugi.
"N-Now? B-But I… It hurts to breathe and I think you broke my fucking leg…" the teen assassin wanna-be whined, limping a few steps closer to her father before being greeted with scornful disapproval. A face of such disdain that she almost gasped audibly. "F-Fine…" Ion muttered, limping with a grunt of pain with each step to it.
A moment of uncomfortable silence reigned in. As young Ion walked off deeper into the cave since her father blocked off the main exit with his disappointed look and polished body build, Mana wondered just how long would the assassins wait until they make their presence known to Rakugi.
"My daughter has nothing to do with this. She's not affiliated with the Hyuuga, she doesn't have the Byakugan even if I am her father. She's all-mother in that way." Rakugi spoke with an elevated tone, letting his voice echo through the shade. Men and women dressed in standard Konoha uniforms and a platoon of Hyuuga ninja with black dogi and a white haori standing out from the crowd surrounded the lone assassin.
"She might not taint the Byakugan, but you do. Tainting our bloodline is not why we're here. She is an illegitimate Hyuuga and we cannot permit her to live through this. Even if your crimes against the Hyuuga would permit your survival, your eyes and your daughter are sins against our clan that must be eradicated." A man from the Hyuuga dressed in ceremonial robes spoke up.
"The famed Imbrium. An esteemed strike force loyal to the Hyuuga, almost dogmatic and maniacal in their devotion to cleaning out injustices and spites toward the clan. Does Konoha know of your presence here, I wonder." Rakugi adopted a similar manner of speaking while voicing questions as statements, as the old overcoat-donning geezer that took him in to the enigmatic underground organization spoke. "You know, it's because of this elitist, do-whatever-you-want mentality that Konoha had me kill the heiress all those years ago, I bet."
"So, you will deny your own role in orchestrating Lady Hissho's murder until your final disgraceful moments, dog?" an outraged kunoichi from the ranks of the Imbrium exclaimed. "Your conspiracy theories of a mysterious organization that employs you won't protect you or your daughter but owning up to your taint and penance will leave you and your bastard daughter forgotten amongst the Hyuuga instead of the figures of revulsion which you are now."
"It's a good thing that your approval isn't what I'm looking for," Rakugi smirked as he advanced to the cavern wall and drew an oversized sword out of a bundled sheath of black cloth. "The only approval I care about is the fear of the tallymen that will pay the bounty for your heads. It's a funny thing–the fear of a tallyman. They never ask but you can always see them wonder–if the head looks so miserable, just what did I do to the body."
"Enough filth, dog. You will pay your penance whether or not you like it!" the Imbrium commander interrupted Rakugi's monologue as the Hyuuga chuunin around him all yelled out in approval of their commander's sentiment. Mana felt a rustle of fear in their voices. The reason some of these ninja wandering into the lion's den alongside the Imbrium wanted Rakugi silenced was because they feared about the truthfulness to his words.
"Not that it matters in the end but… It shows how faulty your intel is, Imbrium, I am no longer employed by the Root. I've severed all ties with that lot a long time ago and went my own way. It just didn't work out between us, I don't like Curse Seals all too much, I'm sure the tethered dogs amongst you understand." Rakugi entered a fighting stance after swinging his sword over his head in an impressive feat of strength and reaching for the ground to slip his helmet from a pouch down on the ground on. It helped to drive fear into the victim's eyes when one viewed their killer as more like a demon and less like a man.
It was part of the reason the battle nearly ended once Rakugi's armor unraveled when he faced the Stars.