"Huh? What do you mean by that, you know?" the Seventh Naruto turned to his advisor, who still struggled with the idea of explaining what he had in mind. "You think there's still a way to reach the moon from our universe?"
"Well, it's a long shot of an idea to be sure, but… My wife told Shikadai an interesting story a few times. I wouldn't be bringing it up if she didn't insist that it was real. Apparently, it's something that everyone in Sunagakure knows and believes." Shikamaru scratched the back of his neck, wrestling with himself.
"A story?" Sasuke turned to Shikamaru with an apathetic look. The Uchiha thought little of this story that Shikamaru brought up.
"Yeah, the story of the Sands of Time. The Sunagakure believe that this special, golden sand can cause an immense sandstorm that washes anyone caught within them to the past or the future. Normally, the Sands of Time are a chaotic force of nature. However, according to Temari, there are multiple artifacts found within the Wind Country that can control and direct the flow of the Sands." Shikamaru said.
"The Sands of Time? I've got to say, Shikamaru, that sounds like a bedtime tale, you know…" the Seventh Naruto pouted and shifted his lips about, trying to find it within himself to believe this story.
"Actually…" Mana interjected. "I don't find this legend that hard to believe at all. In our universe, there was a woman able to distort the fabric of time-space using a gold-colored Sand Release. I've met her. These Sands of Time sound much more powerful than what Regalia-san was capable of, but even their power does not sound impossible, given the context, and it would explain where Regalia-san got her inspiration from."
"Hmm…" Naruto rubbed his chin as he pondered on something. Lord Seventh then shook the mouse by his computer screen and began tapping at the buttons on his keyboard. After he was done with the task, the Seventh Naruto turned around to face a bunch of television screens behind him. While initially, they appeared to have been used for video conference calls, a lone face appeared in all of them at once. The face of a red-haired young man with dark bags around his eyes and pale skin.
"Naruto, is that you?" the man asked with a husky voice.
"Sorry to bother you, Gaara, but I wanted to run something by you, you know. We've got visitors from another universe. They say that they're looking for a way to get to the moon, you know." Naruto explained to the Kazekage.
"The moon? But the moon has been destroyed in our universe." Gaara replied without missing a beat.
"That's right, but… Shikamaru told me something about some Sands of Time. The Allied Ninja from the other universe think that by using those Sands they can transport backward through time on our universe, to when the moon was still intact, then use the portal that we used to get to the moon to face Toneri." Naruto pointed out.
"Indeed… Most locals know the legend of the Sands of Time." Gaara nodded. "Though the Sands are an anomaly that cannot be simply located. They ravage the face of time by causing sandstorms all over the time-space. Without an artifact that controls their power, you cannot find them, let alone use them. Even then, if your guests use the Sands of Time, they'd be stuck in a time in the past–where nobody knows who they are and, even if they get to the moon, they'd still have to deal with Toneri."
"There's another problem…" Skaven pulled his hand out of his pocket and raised it to attract some attention to what he was saying. "Even if we find and use these Sands, even if we take this spring portal that Lord Seventh spoke of and go to the moon, even if we deal with this Toneri person, without portable universe-bridge technology, we won't be able to come back to our own universe while on the moon. There's no point for us to travel to your version of the moon, after all."
"We can arrange for a portable universe traveling device to be built. It might take a few decades, but you can merely hop to an alternate timeline, one that exists decades in the future and is connected to this universe, and it'll be ready for you. That timeline will come into being the moment our science division starts working on the device, after all." Shikamaru pointed out.
"If the Sky Clan defeat us, they'll have their hands on that technology as well." Endo brought up the more frightening aspect of it.
"As much as I would like to protect Konoha from such a conflict, I've come to find that threats like those are best confronted and snuffed out early before they prepare and set their plan into motion," Sasuke answered, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword as he closed his eyes. The concept of facing Sky Clan ninja that were to be considered godly to a universe comprising ninja much more powerful than the ninja of their universe intimidated Sasuke somewhat but the Uchiha agreed that if they were a threat, they were a threat better confronted sooner rather than when they set out to wreak havoc on their own terms.
"Yeah, we can solve the other problems as well, you know." Naruto clenched his fist with an excited smirk on his face. "If someone from our universe, that's known to the ninja in the past, accompanies you guys, you'll have no problem dealing with the locals. You'll likely want Temari to be with you anyway, right? Since she knows the most about these Sands of Time, you know."
"W-Wait, my wife?" Shikamaru freaked out.
"Yeah, I was thinking, Shikamaru…" Naruto scratched his forehead temple "What if you, Temari, and Kakashi-sensei accompany the Allied Ninja? Kakashi-sensei is well-known and respected, both in the present and in the past, Temari knows more than us about the Sands of Time and the potential artifacts capable of finding and handling them, you can work on the strategy of this mission and handle the universe-traveling pocket device, you know."
"It's a drag but…" Shikamaru scratched his head. "It's also not like I will have to make the trip. It'll be an alternate version of me from a related universe. One that experiences the present as it being decades in their future, so… What the heck…"
"You realize that the version of you that will be making this trip has also said the same thing, right?" the corner of Sasuke's lips turned up a few degrees.
"Alright!" Naruto pumped his fist. "Then the greatest co-operation in history has been set up, you know!"
"Is it really okay?" Damisan wondered, staring at the ceiling while swinging his artificial legs about in the room back in their home universe. "Not letting the Hokage know about this, I mean."
"He doesn't technically have to know," Skaven pointed out.
"Skaven's right," Shige-H nodded in agreement. "Lord Seventh gave us the universal bridge to use to advertise Mana's shows. It's all the excuse we need to start looking for the right universe."
"Finding the right universe, one directly related to Universe No. 2016 and experiencing time decades in the future from where Universe No. 2016 is, will be a tall order, though. Especially so without someone who knows what they are doing." Mana's shadow clone pointed out.
"Aren't you glad of it?" Endo turned to the patched-up young woman. "You'll have all the time you'll need to learn the Armor Ninjutsu."
"That may be so…" Mana closed her eyes with a grim expression, "But I'm worried for the workers. Finding the right universe in the infinite vastness of the multiverse might take weeks, it might take months or years. That's not an amount of time that we can spend looking."
"Are you proposing something, Mana?" Shige-H turned to the stage magician.
"I might be…" Mana nodded.
Mana stared at a grand, classical-style temple just a few kilometers away from the village walls but well within its immediate area of influence. Because a lot of training grounds, working fields and gardens, and some clan facilities had been located outside of the village, it wasn't hard slipping away through the Konoha gate in the middle of the day. Many civilians made that same trip to pick some flowers from a public garden a handful of kilos away from the village and many more ninja, Mana herself included, made their way to the training grounds the same way too.
"The lady is waiting for you," a ninja clad in a red and black jumpsuit with sharp shoulder pads, long, jet-black hair falling over his face and a crimson bandana obscuring the man's face below the nose spoke up after flickering behind Mana's back alongside a few similarly dressed ninja.
The handful of this odd ninja police force accompanied Mana through the gate of the temple and into a gorgeous garden of bumpy, emerald hills, shrines and pagodas, and tiny artificial creeks and bridges bending over them to provide passage. Mana closed her eyes, snapping them open in an instant after engaging her chakra sensory. Kiyomi's chakra had been all over the place. It seemed like her long-time friend has found a way to counter Mana's chakra sensory by flooding the entire room with her own chakra. While Mana could easily make out the fact that Kiyomi was present, making hiding from Mana's impossible, but equally impossible, was to determine Kiyomi's exact location.
Mana turned her head up, witnessing ripples of ethereal, pink glow in the air above the garden as the rippling energy morphed transparent, illusory clones of Kiyomi comprising nothing but barely focused, chakra-infused thoughts. All of whom merged into one central form that landed in front of Mana and straightened her back after the landing before turning to the magician.
"Showoff…" Mana smiled.
"You're the one to talk," Kiyomi muttered in response before scanning her personal force of ninja accompanying Mana. Upon receiving their attentive looks, the ninja nodded and flickered away.
"This is a mental construct I'm facing, isn't it?" Mana put her hands in her pockets.
"Once again, pot calling a kettle black." Kiyomi shook her head. "It takes your kind of guts of sending a shadow clone here so soon after mending our friendship."
"I'm sorry about that. I do not have the luxury of time, I'm afraid. Circumstances demand that I am in multiple locations at once." Mana pressed her hand to her chest in apology.
"I see, well, I am occupied on an ambush, gathering intelligence. I can't meet you here either, so I won't blame you for something I am equally to blame for." Kiyomi shrugged. "What's up?"
"I need your help with something… Sensitive." Mana wondered how she would go around framing her request.
"Sensitive with you sometimes means treasonous." Kiyomi raised an eyebrow.
"Asking what I am about to ask of you… You deserve to have more information than my squad would share with the queen of Konoha's intelligence. I fully understand that I take the risk of this intel leaking to Lord Seventh but… A clan of ninja living on the moon has kidnapped workers that signed up to work for the Allied Ninja and we're trying to get them back." Mana said.
"The moon?" Kiyomi bent her head.
"Sorry, it sounds hard to believe, I know…" Mana shook her head.
"Not at all, just the type of thing you usually get involved in," Kiyomi sighed. "I hope you don't expect me to go to the moon with you and fight some monsters I can read about from legends of this day. I have my own Zaibatsu and my husband to take care of these days. I can no longer take those sorts of risks without some serious forethought."
"I see, that's not what I had in mind though. We have a plan of how to get to the moon, but it requires a member of the Scientific Division that knows how to operate the universal bridge. There's a specific universe we're looking for and by the time we find it on our own…" Mana cut her explanation short, just because she had a hunch that her friend could figure out the rest.
"So, you want me to brainwash someone into helping you without being aware of it?" Kiyomi raised her other eyebrow.
"Whichever method you pick, I would appreciate your help. The Allied Ninja need the Hokage not to know the full story so we can't ask the Scientific Division directly," the tone of Mana's voice picked up alongside her increasing heartbeat. Her friend was just as likely to help her as she was to stab a mental construct through Mana's chest, subdue her and fling her back to Jigoku for planning something like this behind the Hokage's back.
"Humph…" Kiyomi cracked a grin. "That's a strange request, Mana."
"I know… I know it would compromise your position, and that of the Zaibatsu, if it ever came to light. I will understand it if you refuse." Mana bowed her head. "As you've said–you have greater things than yourself to think of these days."
"Don't make a mistake, Mana," Kiyomi chuckled to herself. "It's not like I haven't done my own shady business to get the Zaibatsu where it is today and in direct crosshairs of the shadier units of the Konoha Black Ops. Making what you need to happen would be child's play to me. I could accomplish that by merely threatening the scientist or those they hold dear, without ever needing to cast a single jutsu. You'd be surprised what secrets people would bring to their graves when a sword perpetually hangs over their heads. At some point, they forget it was ever hanging there, to begin with. That's how comfortable people become with swords hanging over their heads."
"I see. I might have underestimated your abilities then," Mana nodded in apology.
"What I meant by mocking your request is that even the old Mana I used to know had the capacity of performing such a trick on someone's mind. You could just as easily have convinced a scientist to assist you and then wiped their memories, even years back. What gives? Why risk exposing your plan and yourself like this? Why do you always risk appearing vulnerable like that?" Kiyomi pressed on. "Answer me that and we can be on our way to look for your scapegoat."
"I've made a promise, of sorts. A certain young man teased me about my tendency to abuse the ability to mess with people's minds and I'm trying to explore different avenues before resorting to that these days." Mana admitted truthfully.
"Huh? Must be some guy for you to pull something like this…" Kiyomi whistled out. "It doesn't look like you're lying, either. Alright, let's get to work. Even with a geek under your armpit, it'll take a few days to find your universe."
"It's… Not like that." Mana muttered in response with a light shade of pink washing over her cheeks. "We just work together, he's awfully annoying to deal with, so I'd rather not have to hear another word from him about it, that's all."
"Right… I wouldn't have pulled a stunt like this for my husband, not back in the day, not even today. So you just keep telling yourself that. You care about what he has to say, and that's already different from the Mana I know." Kiyomi cringed.
"Better pay attention, you wouldn't want Hanshin to kill you and disappoint your friends." Hanshin taunted Mana, encased in Black Vicious as he charged onward at the ninja magician. While a tight coating of chakra surrounded Mana with card-shaped links forming a cloak around her shoulders and hanging on her back, Hanshin's armor that took him his entire life to perfect was too much.
The fists ripping the woman that Black Vicious depicted apart detached from their gaunt victim and began pummeling Mana's armor, shattering her chakra armor in a blink and reducing Mana to a writhing curl of torment on the ground. A dark shadow loomed over the young woman's head as the detached, fist-shaped chakra constructs hammed at her, despite Mana's desperate attempts to armor herself again. Every time a chakra plate formed as a protective cloak, one of hundreds of airborne fists grabbed it as it held the Black Vicious and ripped it off of Mana, dissolving the ethereal plate into thin air.
Quiet ticks of goopy blood tapped against the grass as Mana peeled her battered and broken body off the ground to look at the rising titan in front of her. The Black Vicious had changed its shape and risen as a dark condor floating above the ground and flapping its building-sized wings. Everything, from the clenched fist that pointed a middle finger as a representation of the armor's "beak" to the two open arms, that flapped as its wings were made of ethereal chakra hands.
"He's… Advanced the Black Vicious further?" Mana grumbled, feeling the hot bile of blood rising in her gut and burning her throat until she coughed it out.
"You're wrong, this is no longer Black Vicious. Hanshin's titan has transcended to a state deserving its own name. Unless you get pick yourself up and get yourself together, Hanshin's Misery Vulture will leave nothing for your friends to bury!" the Sannin taunted Mana as the Vulture stitched together from hands prepared itself for an impending attack.
"He's coming at me…" Mana clenched her fists. Despite her best attempts to stand her ground, she felt her feet dragging behind and trembling before the colossal titan of all-encompassing wings. How was she meant to protect against something like that? Even if she advanced her armor to a further stage and gave it a defined shape, applying perfect shape control to it, there was no way that even her third stage armor could stand up to this airborne bird of prey.
"You better pull off that shocking, last second, rebellious twist of entertainment, Mana, or else a mere blow of air from the Misery Vulture will tear the flesh off from your bones, whether you augment yourself or not. Armor Ninjutsu is your only chance for survival. Even then, you'll have to get creative." Hanshin taunted Mana while posing from the center of the bird's head. As the middle finger of the hand comprising the Misery Vulture's head opened up, a horizontal stream of air shaped like a ripping and tearing vortex of concentrated airwaves boomed right toward Mana from the pocket between the open middle finger and clenched hand.
"Damn it… Damn it…" Mana closed her eyes. Even if she could focus her shape manipulation to work just right, even if she had the imagination to craft her own perfected chakra armor of a stage mirroring Hanshin's own Black Vicious, she'd be dead for sure! No armor could protect her body from that sort of overwhelming pressure.
The vortex erupted into a violent gale as it dissolved in crescent-shaped, blinding slashers in all directions that sliced trees, mountains, and natural monuments alike. When the smoke of the rubble settled down, Hanshin cracked a grin. He was staring at a shattered chunk of armor that had fractures of it still slowly scattering like dancing snowflakes.
"Well, well… That's an interesting solution…" Hanshin smirked. "You've cheated death again, it seems, Mana. But this is too much fun. Pressing your back against the wall is too entertaining, so don't expect mercy from me!"
As the top-hat, sapphire-colored armor laid in shatters, a handful more stood untouched by the turbulent air-blast of the Misery Vulture. One of the top hats tipped up, making Hanshin focus his attention on it, expecting Mana to be sheltering herself underneath that top hat. While Mana couldn't quite muster up an armor strong enough to withstand Misery Vulture's or even Black Vicious' attacks, she could manifest multiple weaker armors, numerous enough to throw them for a loop yet advanced enough to match the complexity of the third stage.
Both Hanshin and Mana knew that their training was over–Mana had advanced to the third stage yet Hanshin's blood-thirsty nature had been too excited to stop trying to kill his poor student and thus Mana had to keep developing and advancing her ability on the battlefield. That was the only way she could hope to survive facing the master of Armor Ninjutsu while playing his own game.