It wasn't like Mana woke up. More like she stayed asleep yet somehow aware of her slumber. She no longer felt the pain all over her body or the sadness over the way things went. Initially, it was like her soul, like some ethereal substance that was only Mana because the magician identified herself as it floated in the air, just several meters above the girl's body. Observing one's own body knocked out and beaten, broken and without a doubt dying was a strange experience. The only thing about all of this that still kept Mana happy was that she didn't float away just yet and stayed around for a while more.
Mana had faked her own death numerous times on the battlefield. Sometimes it was her go-to strategy when she needed to make an opening when her opponents weren't giving her any. Had it not been for this strange fighting style she'd have never survived against Hachi or beaten Noji and Sunomaru right here. This thing going on now, however, was no trick, she was actually feeling her own existence fading away, for real. It's a spectacularly dark and incomparable to anything else experience. Needless to say, Mana's heart was not calm even during this peaceful moment of silence and tranquility. She was afraid.
Could she really be blamed for being afraid to die? Someone at some point said that nothing was to be feared but fear itself, that sounded really stupid at that moment. Maybe the true revelations only came before one's death? Maybe it was because she knew this unavoidable part of living – dying, that Mana could say for certain that fearing fear itself was stupid. What was the point of something existing just for the sake of it being applied to itself? Then again, it wasn't that in this world everything had its point. Mana, for starters, felt incredibly pointless at that moment, her entire life felt like having been lived for nothing now that she lied there dying.
Mana was afraid of death and she felt like that was perfectly normal, death was the ultimate end of everyone. If one didn't fear death or the concept of the absolute end, what else could there have been to fear? Death was certainly scarier than fear itself, at least fearing the end made some lick of sense even if it wasn't as majestic and celestial as the greatest heroes of literature would have made the girl believe.
They would've been disappointed in her for caring about her own life but, for some reason, Mana still considered herself right. Even if ninja could breathe fire and throw thousands of weapons at their enemies in mere seconds even the best and least human of them were susceptible to death. Even the strongest and the smartest died, just like Mana's own sensei – Tanshu did. There may have never been a more powerful ninja in this world and there may never be in the future and still he died, with all of his inhuman strength and endurance even he found his limit which he couldn't cross.
The girl closed her eyes, or at least its soul or whatever was floating above her body... It closed its ability to see. Suddenly the magician felt unifying with her unconscious body, merging with it again. For a brief moment her heart lit up with happiness for the first time in quite a while – maybe she'd still survive this? No. The magician was quite familiar with the concept of meditation, even going as far as to discover several stages of it.
The first one she called Ego, in it she could witness all that was going on with her own body, it was like her own body lit up as a galaxy of stars and suddenly the girl could feel what was going on. The second stage was called Omnes. Mana had still very little mastery over it but it somehow extended the Ego stage to everyone but her. Somehow the magician was able to see small stars instead of people instead of the usual black void with stars around her own chakra network.
The current sight was almost tragic. All of the stars were slowly going out, some of them were burning up, the hottest they've ever burnt but slowly each of them were going out in these gigantic flares, gigantic being a very relative term since those stars were minuscule in comparison, smaller even than the chakra nodes they were supposed to represent. Her own personal galaxy, a universe inside Mana's body was slowly dimming and going out, one star at a time.
The more time passed the more this process accelerated, stars started burning up faster and in larger numbers. The magician tried to concentrate, to try and feel her friends, maybe they could get to her and help her, maybe Eiju still had some silly methods of saving a person? She failed to enter the Omnes stage, it wasn't something too much of a novelty, even when she was healthy and at her best, it was something she did accidentally and discovered new things about every time. She had some sort of gift, gift to see every living being around her with just her concentration alone.
"This is hopeless..." Mana sighed, somehow she managed to retain and salvage a part of her consciousness and bottle it up inside her dying body. She wasn't sure if it helped her live longer or if it just opened the tragic fate of her death up for her to see. So that was how she'd go? Dying while fighting a far stronger opponent, trying to keep them from killing a young man and destroying their own inner integrity. Did she save anyone in the end? Would the young "hostage" ever reform, would he ever know or care about the sacrifice Mana made for him? Would Hisako survive this encounter? It'd really be tragic if Mana crossed her ultimate line and killed her friend on accident with her dying desperation move.
Maybe there was still hope for both of them? Just maybe the kid would somehow see where he was wrong, realize how messed up it all was, maybe Hisako would finally see that while she wanted the right thing to be done deep inside, killing a kid who didn't even know what he was doing and had no chance at redemption wasn't what she wanted...
Either way, that was all that Mana had as her calming thoughts that should've made her transition to the dark and scary embrace of death more pleasing and more acceptable. It did neither of those. Assumptions and hopes didn't do the trick. Even in her final moments, Mana felt sad that her life ultimately served no purpose or use. Just like fearing fear itself instead of fearing death – something fear was supposed to help us avoid as an integral instinct of our being, her life was lived only for its own pointlessness instead of what it was meant to do – save people and change the world.
"You're wrong though, stop wasting both of our time with those thoughts and find out a way to live" a strange voice echoed loudly throughout the black void of Mana's dying Ego stage. It was an originally kind and soft voice, maybe a little bit on the whiny side but it had so much commanding authority and ruthlessness behind it.
It reminded Mana of her own voice but perhaps much older. Her own voice had already transitioned through puberty and changed very little in its core, this one, however, was changed not by age but by the shift in the speaker's core itself. Almost like this Mana was angrier and meaner, almost like she had seen more in her life. For a moment the magician wondered if this could've been her from the future but it made little sense, even having in mind the nonsensical fact that she was thinking about it in a cradle of self-created mental cocoon inside her own mind with her body looking like a vastness of space constantly dimming away.
"What are you talking about? Who are you? Why are you in my body?" Mana wondered, thinking those words to herself similarly to how she would've done if she was on Kiyomi's mental telepathy link. Who knew someone peeping on everyone's thoughts would've taught a valuable lesson of how to communicate with mystical mental constructs? Live and learn, even if there wasn't too much living left and that reduced the amount of the other by extension.
"It doesn't matter, stop emo'ing about your sad life, you've done plenty and you'll do more if you help me and concentrate on what's ahead, instead of looking back if your life was worth it, look at how to extend it" the voice echoed back at her again. All of a sudden the space shaped around her body opened its eyes, glowing star-like orbs were staring at Mana's little mental cradle with large portions of the space bending around where the entity's mouth would've been forming lips, when they opened only darkness was inside, absorbing any rays of light that came from the eyes of the entity. It was like Mana was alive and talking to the representation of her own body, like two parts of her were conversing with each other.
"So did my mental disorder return? Am I seeing things now?" Mana scratched her head.
"Ugh, you just aren't going to let go of this, are you, you stupid brat? It doesn't matter who I am, I am someone so closely bonded to you that if you died right here I'd die along with you. You were the one giving birth to me but that process has not yet been completed. Let us say that I am still a creation in-forming and you're killing me by dying before I can be born inside your own mind" the thundering voice replied, it looked pretty angry at Mana for some reason, then again, if what it was saying was true it had all the reasons to be angry. "Plus, your mental disorder was linked with failure to relate one concept to another, not forming of separate personalities inside your own body?"
"Oh, so you're like... A murderous me, an evil twin, I mean what would be the use of a good twin anyways? An imaginary friend? What am I talking to here?" Mana asked scratching her chin playfully.
"Look, it's too early for me to know what I am exactly, I haven't even been born yet fully, give me a break, you twerp! It's your sadness and fear, your hesitation that gave birth to me. What exactly I am remains to be seen" the entity kept on speaking. It didn't even have a body but it did seem to have some kind of personality already, if it was true and it was Mana's indecisiveness and fear that sparked its life.
"Well, I'm sorry if you'll die with me, you certainly didn't deserve to, then again, maybe you don't even exist, maybe there's no extension to even be made. If you're a part of my personality then there's no "you and me" when talking about who died. It's just me who is dying" Mana explained.
"Sorry though, I don't know a way of how not to die, this withdrawal inside my own dying body is the best I could do and only because I dabble in meditation. Right now I have no false hopes of survival, there's just one thing I want to be made clear to me – have I lived in vain? Was my life ultimately useless? What if I even made the world worse by being born? Those are the questions I need answered before my passing and I'd love if you could help me with that..."
The entity stood there with its wide starry eyes shining its light endlessly at the magician's face. "You're stupid, I hate you. You would rather delve into meaningless things like meaning than save your own life. Here's my answer..." the suddenly the space of the black void moved forward, as if the entity moved and then a giant explosion lit up where its titanic fingers snapped. The expanding sphere of light expanded covering the entity and Mana.
The girl found herself standing in her healed mental self in a white endless room with a red glowing orb floating beside her. When the entity continued to move or speak it acted through the fist-sized orb floating close to the girl's head.
An image of the Hanada estate flashed, then the training with her newly formed team and Tanshu-sensei, then the following missions, the brawl and getting lost in the Forest of Death, the huge scuffle between Shimo and Sugemi in the Police Force cellars and Mana hesitant to involve herself before exploding with all of her power and recklessness, then the final image of Mana standing in front of Hisako with a card in her hand with the unconscious hostage boy lying down close to them.
"Your whole life you were a bratty idiot, you spent wasting it by desperately trying to throw it away. You claimed that "All life is sacred" and you also said that you knew that your motto included you by extension yet you never showed that. You always leaped first into battle, always the first to endanger yourself without thinking that your friends and your family might feel the same way about you as you do about every life in this world. You wanted to die and you now got what you wanted, a true hero would've lived instead. Living and accepting that there are things you can't do, things you can't change is much harder and more heroic than dying bashing your head against the wall trying to change them still... That's what I have to say to the reckless moron that killed me before she finished creating me..."
Mana's head sunk down with her hair falling all over her face and getting into her sticky with tears eyes. Her mental cradle started faltering, blinking in and out of existence, suddenly the entity became incredibly troubled.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing!? Shit, fine... Let's take a better look then. See what we can find out about things troubling you. Maybe if you calm the hell down you can still pull us out of this"
The image flashed back to Mana's parents. Mother once told the story of how the two met, it was a story full of inconsistencies and lies so it wasn't until Mana learned the history of the Wandering Ninja that she actually could fill in the gaps in it and piece it together.
Mother was crying on the father's doorway, her dress was bloody on the lower side. The entity's voice reached Mana's consciousness, "Let's imagine that your mother suffered an unfortunate accident and you were never born, to begin with, if we come with the consensus that your birth did good for the people around you, you will force yourself to life, I don't give a rat's dookey how. If we find out that your life is somehow making it all worse – I'll just leave you here with your blasted depression to let it sink away your mental barriers until your inner-self fades and all that's left is your dying veggie of a body which would follow soon. It'll be a sad but painless death."
Mana looked at the tragic image of her mother covered with blood and it just made her feel worse. The girl felt a warm glow by her ear, the orb moved around over her hair as if it tried to stroke it.
"Look at this, already you not being born would affect people negatively, it is highly possible that after this your mother and your father would become living trainwrecks. Must we really go on?" it asked mentally.
"Yeah, if I was never conceived, to begin with, even this tragedy and sadness could be avoided. It depends on the scenario we create and this one is inconsistent..." Mana replied.
The image shattered into pieces like a broken mirror. The orb relented and another image formed. One of the people just walking about the Konohagakure streets.
"Look at these people, what can you tell about them? They all live in a world where you don't exist, you've never been born, never even been conceived. Our mother and father just went their separate ways shortly before the genocide and their fated bedding happened."
"They're... Normal... Almost bored." Mana observed.
"Exactly, they have never had the pleasure of witnessing a young toddler in a black flowery dress performing magic on her way home from the Academy, every day on the same cardboard box. Even more I'd say that they are not just normal, they're miserable because they live in a world we both know sucks, our world is miserable, full of death and sadness, a world that doesn't respect its people, where life means nothing and happiness means less than the dirt on the shoes used to stomp on it. They never had you, some silly girl doing magic, telling people that there was still hope to change it all. You may have sucked at actually changing the world but you talked an awful lot and you weren't half bad at it. You must've inspired people, just look at all those people, most of them would've gathered in the halls you performed in and saw your magic tricks with all your philosophy in between. They'd have been amazed and thought, hey, if the right card can come out of the butt of a rabbit this girl pulled out from a pigeon which flew out of her hat, why can't people stop slitting their throats too?"
Mana's eyes lifted up slightly, she looked at the normal and bored people walking about and turned to the side. "I guess... That's not a real trick though..." she uttered indifferently.
"Forgive me for not knowing what magic is yet, I have not yet been born and I don't care enough to access those memories of yours to check..."
The image faded once again, this one was not smashed, it simply got painted by another one right on top of the old one. Almost like a gigantic brush just brushed it on by some cruel artist of a deity of fate. The image showed the Hanada estate on a beautiful morning.
"If you were never born, Hanada would've never covered the first months of your rent, you'd have never come to thank him and he'd have been killed by the mercenaries after gruesome torture. His kids and family may or may not have survived but without your meddling, they'd have never escaped and warned the village officials. Best case scenario – one person dies in a horrible and gruesome way, worst one – an entire family as well as people in the estate at the time die too if the mercs decide to burn the whole blasted thing down. You being born saved a lot of lives even if you thought you just got your butt kicked in there and got saved. Your meddling, your involvement alone saved a lot of lives and you were on your first days as a ninja" the entity explained again.
"Yeah but... What if Hanada is responsible for more deaths by his survival than he... Whatever, it's still human life... I guess you're right" Mana was feeling emotionally crushed so she started to leaping to truly horrible arguments. She knew that she was grasping at straws only to belittle her own existence she was so afraid of losing. Somehow it seemed that if she acted indifferent she may have actually started to believe it – she'd have stopped caring about it that much. The fox and the grapes sort of thing...
The image flashed again, this time it was Mana who instigated the change just by thinking about it hard. She visualized just how the image should've changed and it did, everything she imagined happened. The image depicted the training grounds with Tanshu-sensei training Shimo, Sugemi and a generic looking third girl who wasn't Mana. The image still depicted the three failing but this time Tanshu had a smile on his face, not a full one but the sort of pleased grin he used to have when the three of them did small-time missions like the one with the dishes and the filing.
"If I wasn't born my best friends and my mentor would've been better off..." Mana uttered quietly before going silent again, forcing the orb to ask for her to elaborate since it didn't quite get where the girl was going.
"Well, Shimo only cared about me because I was a girl and he had that gentleman personality to him. Before he went through emotional maturity he just tried to be nice to girls and tried for that to be the one thing that defined him. Well, usually Konohagakure teams are composed of two boys and a girl so it's safe to assume I'd have been replaced by a female so he'd be as happy, to begin with, as he was with me as his teammate. Later on, the relationship might change but maybe the other girl being a better friend than me would help them understand each other and actually get involved with each other. Shimo felt bad for me which was why he said he didn't want to look at me as a girl he could date, I was kind so with him having his personality in mind he'd have played with a lot of girls and hurt me which he didn't want to do. Maybe the other one would've been different, it's a safe enough assumption..."
The image changed to Shimo, now having grown up to the point back when Mana last saw him leaving the Konohagakure gate with the grown third teammate by his side and the two holding hands. The orb floated around, "Let us assume it is so, go on..." it gave a temporary agreement but it was quite clear from how it glowed that it was desperately looking for counterarguments.
"Well, Sugemi never really cared about me, I was just his third teammate. He was the only one he cared about and Shimo was his rival so that gave him some amount of thought too. I don't think that there's any reason to think that the other girl would've made him feel anything about her, however, later on Sugemi started hating me because in his eyes I was wrong – "bad people needed to die, good people needed to live, simple as that" mentality fueled him which most people in the village agree to. All I have to do is just remember the funeral after the Kage Summit, people's eyes sided with enraged Sugemi screaming angrily for revenge, they looked at me with spite and anger when I dared to stand for my views... In the end, Sugemi would've found a good friend in the third one if she was a generic village ninja with same ideals as the others... Maybe he'd have never rebelled like that, maybe he'd have never been imprisoned if I was replaced by that other girl"
The orb floated around for a while making several small circles. "There are a lot of assumptions in your words, you assume a lot of things so your words aren't entirely correct but yes, Sugemi would enjoy a more traditional-minded teammate as a friend and expecting that generic teammate to be an extremity would be to make a wilder assumption than all of the ones you made. True. Sugemi would've been happier and his life may have gone a bit better if you were never born" the orb floated around for a while as if gesturing for the magician to continue.
The image changed to the image of Mana down on the ground clutching her busted ribs and Tanshu kicking her while yelling how stupid she was, way back during the first day of their team training. "Tanshu-sensei would've always been happier without me. He hated people that thought like I did and sure, judging from his final words to me I seemed to have reminded him of some person in his youth but... Still, he hated my guts and working with me – that much is a given. If he had received a more submissive student he'd have properly shaped her into a worthy successor of his, not a confused mess who endlessly questions herself like I turned out to be"
The orb replied without hesitation, "True, Tanshu would have been happier if he had never met you and he'd have never been reminded of his first love which went so tragically, supposedly..."
Mana blinked a couple of times confused, looking at the orb. "So have we reached a consensus then? Team Oak would've been way happier and stronger without me?"
"Wrong!" the entity lashed back at Mana, her rude voice almost mocked the girl for daring to make assumptions like that, "Individually each member of Team Oak would have been happier had they never known you, that is correct. However you forget that without you Team Oak would have never been formed in the first place – it was formed because you were stubborn enough to make Tanshu-sensei get thrown out of balance and attack you himself..." the entity quickly flashed the memory back and stopped it at the moment where Shimo pointed the fact that the team was formed and that they won out.
"We have little time, running shorter every second... How about you hurry up, I still want you to work on saving yourself more, every second boosts your chances of figuring some trick out, you know..." the entity hurried the magician up. Mana thought deep and concentrated hard trying to come up with some person whose life she changed for the worse.
"What about Guru Ayushi?" she asked recalling the old man, "Had it not been for me he'd have never pulled that madness on himself and started talking about those weird ideas, in the end, he'd have never latched himself on my beliefs and started talking everywhere about them, right?"
The orb floated around before lashing back at the girl rudely, "Wrong! Think about it, even if we do assume he has gone mad, isn't the saying "Happiness is bliss" right? He thinks that he is right and for the first time in his life standing up for something. You gave him that happiness even if it is just an illusion. Even more, remember when we spoke of people being inspired by your stupid ramblings of peace and hope? Now, in the form of Guru Ayushi, those ideas will reach more people, they will reach the ears of the most remote corners and when coming from a source like Guru they won't be doubted. If you have never been born Ayushi would have simply never changed, he'd have remained his stiff old self and have never gotten the illusion of happiness that you provided him"
Mana wiped her tears and then flashed forward a large chunk, right up to when she met Kiyomi with the two walking through the village gate being the center memory that shaped the image.
"What about this mission? Wouldn't Kiyomi have been happier meeting some other experienced genin? Wouldn't Hisako be happier, maybe even still alive?" Mana wondered.
"Absolutely not!" the entity cut back at Mana, "If you have never gone to this mission, Kiyomi would've died fighting against Hachi because your silly behavior saved her life many times and while doing so you broke the conventional ninja rules. You once gave up on an advantage to save her life, that is not something ninja do. She'd have died several times, maybe she'd have even killed Hisako, to begin with during their first encounter making this mission a certain failure. It's not that tough to believe when you take the Yamanaka's iron will of hating rogues, mercenaries, and criminals. Even more, Hisako would've killed that young man for sure failing this mission still, you supposedly sacrificed your life for the only scenario in a million where this crazy mission where all the odds were stacked against you three could still be completed. Now stop whining and save your life..."
All of a sudden the orb started to glow dimmer and dimmer, the entire memory background started darkening and slowly dissolving pixel by pixel rising up into the sky and fading away, dissolving into even smaller pieces. The entity formed back into a special version of Mana, much younger, more like a toddler version of her before giving the girl one final look in the eyes, that final stare from those starry glowing eyes that begged the magician to find a way to defy death, that final starry gaze that begged for a chance to live even if it wasn't going to live its own life in the first place, just be a part of Mana's mind the nature and purpose of which still remained unclear.
The spacial girl faded away just like Mana's memories, one small dust at a time until she was gone. A bright cocoon of light formed around Mana again as she curled into a small fetal position ball and fell asleep. The surroundings around her changed into that same void filled with dying stars. The bright light of the inner universe of the girl's body sometimes reflected off of her sleeping eyes making the girl squint a little before she closed her eyes back again.
Mana's body was slowly dying while her mind went to sleep to preserve its existence for as long as humanly possible. The magician's mind was now calm and peaceful but one thing was for sure – she had not given up yet. She wasn't able to save herself from dying from inside her own body but maybe she was able to prolong her life by surrendering her life to the hands of people whom she helped, people that she trusted. If there was ever a chance of her living and finalizing the creation of the entity that helped Mana figure everything out, it would not be done by her dying body or mind, it'd be done by the people she met along the way, people she helped, people she loved all the same and wanted happiness for. Wanted happiness for enough to prolong her own life and suffer through as much pain and sadness as necessary to make them happy, even if the cost of their happiness is her survival and her own happiness!
*****
Hey, happy New Year everybody! How amazing that the New Year chapter is also the 100th one!? Wow! It's been 100 chapters already and there may just be several hundreds more :D. Anyways, I thought long and hard what to do about this 100th chapter, I wanted it to somehow be canon so that you guys didn't feel tricked into waiting but also feel special somehow. I made the chapter almost twice as long, also I decided to pay homage to my favorite childhood cartoons. Pretty much every cartoon I ever saw had the obligatory "What if the protagonist was never born" episode so I decided to pay homage to it. I know the trope is so stupid and has been done to death but I think it makes sense plus it's an homage so it by definition can't be wrong (yeah, that's how it works now :D)
Next week, it's back to basics and the story picks off where it left off!