The elevator could not have taken more time to take the party of ninja to the lower levels of the mines. Even more, a couple of times the entire structure rumbled, dust and pebbles started falling from above, several of them were chunks of pure gold.
"Well, at least if we plummet down and die we'll be buried under solid gold..." Shimo tried lifting the gloomy mood but he was proper annoyed himself so even if the mood was even salvageable in the first place he wouldn't have garnered much success.
"Those shakes and quakes... I wonder what's causing it all..." Kouta wondered looking at above, from where they were the top of the elevator shaft looked like an abyss. They were descending so deep down that some of the ninja were visibly starting to get stressed out, Meiko was squirming and tapping her foot impatiently, Mana locked her hands around her chest and pressed her own elbows hard as if by closing in on herself she could protect herself from wherever they were going.
Shimo kept trying to make some bad jokes from time to time, to make matters worse, he was the only one laughing at them as well. It just made the entire situation seem even eerier than it was. Kouta handed Mana a flask with a weird dark green gooey drink.
"There, this should ease up your throat, maybe it'll let go in a while and it won't hurt to talk..." he murmured looking at her while she gulped it all down. His stare was starting to become a bit creepy at some point, luckily the medical ninja realized it and turned his eyes away just in time before Mana had to tell him he was acting weird.
The concoction he gave her was weird, it was sludgy and felt sticky but it actually slid down one's throat quite well. It was also a bit sweet, probably included a mixture of honey but the best alternative to its texture was a limb of a squid. It flowed slowly, like a chunk of goop, it smelled bad but it didn't really taste that bad if it weren't for the minty taste. Minty taste wasn't bad per se but it sort of didn't fit the combination. Too bad medicine didn't have a good taste critic. In a world where lethal wounds could've been patched up in ten or twenty minutes surely someone would've had enough skill and brain to make tastier medicine...
"Kouta... Did you use all of your chakra to heal me?" Mana broke the silence with a question, her voice was still lower pitched and it still ached to talk but not to the extent as it did previously.
"Most of it" the young man blushed and nodded.
"I'm..." Mana opened her mouth before Meiko pulled her in by the collar of her shirt.
"Shut up. You can give your apology for being a suicidal asshat later, then I'll have a talk with you but now let's just focus on saving those miners..." Meiko's grip loosened as the elevator finally stopped. As the door opened clouds of dust started spreading and the environment turned dark almost instantly – the place must've used mainly electricity to light everything up and it must've gone out when whatever happened here happened.
"Ugh..." Shimo cursed stumbling around the dark, he headed towards the closest light source which happened to be a small flashlight, it still was on, its holder was nowhere to be seen though. Shimo turned it on and waved the narrow tunnel of light around. There were multiple trails of blood but no bodies, that was quite odd, the boy followed one trail up the rocky wall which fused with a small metallic wall which signaled the beginning of a small floor administration building.
The blood trail ended right up to the ceiling, right in a gigantic hole in the rock. It was like someone used a six-meter-wide drill to drill a giant tunnel above the floor and then dragged all the bodies into it...
"I can still hear some voices nearby, the miners are alive..." Meiko looked to the east where the least modernized structures of the mines laid. This entire place looked like the living quarters, it reminded more of a modernized laboratory made right in a manmade hole in a bunch of rock. Whatever was being done in the mine was being done here, it was supposed to be the lowest point where the elevator went.
Just as the miners above said, there was a colossal pile of rocks separating the room with the voices from the outer laboratory administration and the elevator room. The miners were stuck behind at least fifteen meters of rock and only faint noises could've been heard through the crevices. It was impressive even for a ninja to hear it, Meiko's senses deserved a lot of praise...
"Wait a second... Could you please shine over there..." Mana's irritated voice asked of Shimo.
"Oh? Did you find another tool to kill yourself with?" the Yuki angrily snapped back at her.
"Look, I know you guys are angry at me... You have a right to be, I acted upon my own thought without hearing your input. But if you expected me to..." Mana coughed up "To stand and watch you die, you're no better than I was when I struggled out of that hold..."
"Our deaths don't matter, we're ninja, you're the client" Shimo tried to argue but Mana's slap silenced him. Due to the darkness it awkwardly hit him on the nose, the blow was much more direct than turned to the side making it much more powerful, unintentionally of course.
"Sorry, forgot it's you we're dealing with here..." Shimo expressed himself not in any way less edgily. He had a lot of anger deep there, he could've kept it all to himself or expressed it at his own leisure and Mana would've listened to it all because she had it coming for getting caught off guard. However, one thing she'd not stand for was him berating the lives of her most beloved people, a group to which he himself belonged to.
Shimo's small tunnel of light turned towards the small round stones that Mana asked to direct it at. Meiko shrieked like a little girl, she started to jump around and leaped towards the stones, she started caressing them and almost smooched them a couple of times. Mana scratched the back of her head. She wasn't entirely sure what this ore was.
"This has to be an illusion, someone check it!!!" Meiko screamed out in sheer unrestrained excitement. Honestly, Mana had never seen her like that and she saw the blacksmith examining some more of her father's blueprints when she was reading up on the Box in Konohagakure archives.
"What exactly is this?" Mana asked trying to touch the ore, it was very soft and warm to touch, the slightest touch made its blueish stones etched into it light up with bright azure flame deep inside them. The magician had never seen such exquisite work, especially in nature. This reminded her more of something that the man's hands made.
"This is literally impossible..." Shimo murmured to himself while Meiko screamed out like she was a child receiving a thousand copies of their favorite toy for their birthday.
"Right! This is only the most incredibly impossible legendarific awesometubular superbtacularest thing ever!!!" she yelled out kissing the stone for longer than Mana considered normal for a little maniacal blacksmith finding something incredible deep underground the Land of Rivers mines.
"Okay, will anyone finally tell us what this blue ore is?" Kouta asked quite annoyed by the scene the two made himself.
"This is... Kill me for saying it out loud... 100% literally pure, okay I mean... 50% stone, 50% product so technically it's 50% pure, nevertheless it's... Audra ore!" Meiko uttered as if she just told an estranged son she was his long-lost mother.
Mana shook her head, it sounded like utter nonsense. "But... Didn't you say that Audra was not a natural element? That it was a manmade alloy with... Meteorite dust and molecular... Chakra particles or whatever? That it's only made by skilled Kirikuzu members due to their bloodline ability?" she asked for a clarification.
"That's why it's so astonimazing! Apparently, they exist in ore form! This makes absolutely no sense, isn't it just superlicious!?" Meiko yelled out still stroking the stones as if they were a baby she just literally gave birth to.
"I'd rather you stopped slaughtering the language and... Tried to understand what the hell this is... I mean... How?" Kouta scratched his chin looking completely stumped.
"Of course... Audra IS manmade, these ores ARE manmade!" it occurred to Mana all of a sudden – everything started to make sense, the entire thing. It still needed to be put back into places and the proper order of the rows of this puzzle was still a bit confusing but she knew just about what this mine was.
"Uhhh, no they're not!" Meiko yelled out hopping back on her feet and off the cold wet floor "Look at them, they're so beautiful!"
"Yeah, that's the point – instead of shaping the Audra alloy into a weapon or a shield or a piece of armor, the Syndicate is making them into ores by infusing the particles with the walls of the mines. They've got all this space to use, all those endless floors, the ores laying here may just be worth... All the money, like literally all of them the world has to offer, and it's a completely limitless supply of infinities waiting to be exploited..." Mana explained her theory.
"Except why would they be making Audra alloy into ores when they can just make weapons!?" Meiko yelled out, more of her failing to restrain her excitement than because she felt angry.
"Because a weapon is worth as much as a weapon is worth, an ore has a potential to become anything, so it is worth infinitely more. Other Syndicates like the Bellucini family we've heard of can just buy this ore and work it in secret, this secrecy is worth multiple times over more than just a weapon. Think about it, you can buy one of the most awesome materials in the world from someone without telling them what it's for..." the magician started to get just as excited as Meiko which didn't do wonders by any means to her voice as her throat started feeling sticky and the girl broke into coughs after expressing her theory.
"Hmph, now those brutes suddenly make sense!" Kouta exclaimed having a breakthrough of his own. "These brutes are people with skins fused with the Audra steel particles. The process would be incredibly painful, it's like getting skewered on a molecular level but with a bunch of precautions it could be done, that's why my blows were completely ineffective – because Audra can only be destroyed by a more focused and concentrated chakra, that's why Shimo's ninjutsu was so effective against them, that's why my Chakra Pistol Jutsu completely bypassed their defenses..."
Shimo smiled and locked his hands on his chest. "Good, if we meet any of those brutes ahead we'll know how to fight them now..."
Kouta closed his fist concentrating chakra into just the tip of it until it started glowing with sharp azure flames protruding from random points. "I think I can modify my Enhanced Strength technique to do more damage to them but punching them using chakra augmentation is like slashing at chainmail. Ninjutsu would work the best. At any rate, it'd be for the best if we saved whoever is stuck in there"
The medical ninja leaped forward pulling a large stone out of the pile, some of them had to be lightly "tapped" from below to shatter into smaller pieces by the medical ninja. Meiko ran up to help him, her physical strength was unbelievable and while her chakra augmentation could only be used at its maximum since the blacksmith completely lacked any semblance of subtlety in her chakra control, her natural physical strength was enough to move large boulders without active aid of chakra.
"Nice call, Mana..." Shimo acknowledged her putting the puzzle together with an arrogant look on the other side while the two waited for their much physically stronger friends to clean the path. Soon Kouta crawled out to join them popping a blue food pill. It was one of the chakra regenerating food pills that medical ninja used, it didn't replenish one's chakra but it accelerated the natural body aging process a couple of days so the chakra started regenerating much faster by itself. The cost of tricking one's body in such a way was that it naturally stressed out and aged a couple of weeks or even months so abuse of them could've shortened one's lifespan, however they did regenerate a lot of one's chakra within an hour or two instead of a couple of days and good rest.
It was clear that Shimo was still angry since he refused to look Mana's way but at least he still didn't hate her half as much as her other ex-best friend – Sugemi. That youngster outright declared that one day he would clash with Mana and fight her to the death because Mana's belief was dangerous and foolish...
Meiko appeared out of the tunnel all covered in black coal marks and dust, all dirty and huffing from being worn out but happy like a kid seeing a bunch of glow-worms for the first time in their life. She gave the resting squad a thumb up.
"Path's open, I don't think the suits and miners on the other side noticed it yet, let's go tell them!" Meiko laughed out
Carefully and quietly, the team sneaked through the tunnel, Shimo even went as far as to kill the lights since the other side had a tremendous excess of light coming from it – the main labs must've used some sort of a different light source or had a lot more resource power than not at all which case the outer labs was stuck with. Shimo peeked through the tunnel and then looked at Meiko with an annoyed squint.
"This "tunnel" is cone shaped. We can easily walk the early parts but then it seems you've got lazy and it gets narrower and narrower..." he complained
"Yeah, sorry 'bout that..." Meiko laughed out as she kicked the final barrier leading to the main labs down exposing their attempted entry. Right as the wall collapsed and the main lab reconnected with the outer labs and the elevator chamber the miners started rushing through the tunnel. They didn't care to fight or to curse at the Konoha ninja, Mana could've sworn she even heard a couple of absolutely terrified and soaking with sweat and piss grateful miners coming their way from the rushing crowd, there could've been as many as twenty miners still trapped there. What troubled the four ninja were the five suit wearing mobsters with the shorty Boss staring angrily at the ninja.
"Waste em!" the Boss shouted out pulling out two large X shaped crossbow-like devices with kunai belts attached to it and pressed a switch firing off streams of kunai knives at the ninja, each of those may have fired anywhere to ten or so kunai per second. Meiko's arm swiped through her arm as her other hand made a simple handseal: "Storage Seal: Release!" she yelled out unsealing her buckler which she picked up and resealed after the fight was over before getting onto the elevator. Loud thuds and clangs signaled the successful block of the Boss' offensive.
"Hey, calm your pompadour, suit-man! We're here to save your butts!" she yelled out trying to out-yell the endless barrage of kunai that'd have made them into pin-cushions if they were allowed to fire off unblocked. Suddenly the barrages stopped and Meiko pulled the shield away.
"What's saving our butts is all those guys we left below to fight off the Big Guy, we're almost tempted to stay here and lure him to the main lab again just to see him chomp your little heads off!" one of the mobster goons yelled out.
"Ye, we kept him locked down and sapped his blood for the Audra manufacture for so long that it must be really hungry..." his friend decided to join in on the threat.
"Although... To put matters into perspective, mayhaps it would be for the better for us to... Not be around when the Big Fella breaks out... Ya see... Anyone?" the less enthusiastic one whimpered.
"Heh, ye hear it, Konoha goons, lotta guys with a lotta kunai dispensers are keeping the Big Guy down there now that we used the Big Culling Gun to repel it to the lower levels! When they whack the damned thing they're gonna get here and get really angry!" another one yelled out.
Meiko's eyes shined with a bright spark of excitement. "Big Culling Gun!? Sounds awesome!!!" she yelled out, quite enthusiastically, yet not quite at the same class as the Meiko who found the Audra ores. The Boss turned at a large turret like device with an oversized pipe.
"There! Fifty meters long, twelve meters tall, as tall as this whole lab complex, fires cannon balls with four hundred Audra infused kunai each shot! Each cannonball costs around fifty billion ryo to make!" the dwarf started his power fantasy speech before coughing to his fist, "We used it to repel the Big Guy's attempt to eat us all but... It sort of ran out of ammunition, we even filled it with normal kunai balls and explosive kunai balls but, nothing we do seems to work... We only delay the Big Guy's advances..." the little man complained.
Mana turned to observe Meiko's reaction to the description of the weapon that even amazed her a little, to someone as maniacal towards various contraptions and devices and exquisite craftsmanship it must've been outright orgasmic. Lo and behold her friend laid down completely knocked out by a rampant nosebleed.
The girl couldn't help but smile, even if they didn't find the Box in Wind Country, Meiko's time was certainly worth it, the blacksmith maiden saw more than her share of awesome things throughout the journey so it may have already been worth it.
Kouta and Shimo disappeared. The Yuki's sword's hilt dug deep into one mobster's gut, he then swung it to the side hitting the still sheathed blade straight into the head of another one before he could blink. These two attacked faster than the human eye could track them! Kouta's knee instantly knocked one fellow out, a combination of weakened blows knocked another one out. The fifth one tried to lift his hand but Shimo moved to the side and ripped his sleeve off exposing a kunai dispenser with strings to set it off attached to his wrist, with a quick grabbing motion Kouta crushed it together with the wrist bones of the poor mobster.
Suddenly Kouta's body got tossed aside, the boy bounced back off of a solid steel wall and fell deep into a strange crater. Mana was surprised by the strength of this "Boss" guy but then her sight fixed on his strange blueish knuckle-dusters – these must've been Audra steel too, having in mind that he had a full mine of its ores.
"Kouta!" she screamed out trying to get his response but the dwarf only laughed ridiculing the magician girl.
"You little twit, I tossed him to the Big Guy down below! He's as good as headless, the Big Guy likes biting people's heads off first!" he laughed out revealing a full mouth of Audra steel covered azure shaded teeth.
"I'm getting sick of hearing about this Big Guy... What exactly do you hold locked down here, chibi?" Shimo asked. Mana noticed Meiko slowly recovering from her nosebleed knockout.
The little man reloaded his kunai barrage tubes and pointed them at the swordsman. "Do you know what this place is? It's the Katabami Gold Mine, the place where the last Jinchuuriki of the Nine-Tails died! In other words, chained below by his last Jinchuuriki before his passing and starving to death down below is none other than...The Nine-Tailed Fox"
Author's Note: 1K views! Wow, I feel really grateful to everyone who bothered to check my story out and sometimes even leave their input. This was never intended to be a very popular story, it was a very personal tale which I kinda had to tell just to express some weird desire inside me to write and to tell this story in particular. It's not the type of story that gets a lot of attention so I'm extremely grateful to anyone who helped me along the way leaving their well-appreciated words about what worked and what didn't, helping me grow as a writer which was also one of the intentions that urged me to work on the story. It was never a story I wanted to get big or to push it forward but if it managed to entertain at least a single person with at least some of its content then that makes me astonishingly happy.
Thanks <3