The Second Disciple

[Sia]

It was painful for her, truly, when she died. Her soul lept into her throat and she would vomit were she not ethereally made. Her mind raced with memories, visions, and thoughts of whom she was and whom she might learn to be. She remembered Shinjiro the most vividly, and the most fondly. Vorashu too, Kotaru, Hisayo, and Kayoko. She remembered Shio, Ume, Shiv, and Maru. Wild images flashed before her eyes for what truly felt like months. Villages burned, ransacked, pillaged, and destroyed. Cities and cultures razed to the ground in a torrent of mists and flames, acid encroaching all around in a green fog.

Iron. It was a dominant thought in her mind. A small, simple task which manifested itself by accident but that Maido found herself not necessarily resisting. Her soul ruptured, it hurt a great deal. For the first time in a long time, the Blood Witch felt vulnerable. Finally, she opened her eyes and found that she had no real ones. She looked around, gaining a sense of her surroundings. She was in a house, that she supposed was most likely Kotaru's. She had been set gingerly aside and she took it from the fact that her core had been moved from its original location that Kotaru had heard of her death already. She wondered how much time had passed and began to collect and surge chakra into, from, and around her body in a loop.

Her real, true, original body erupted outwards from the core, entirely nude and no cloak to speak of. She stirred, again channeling her chakra and causing her signature cloak of red fluid to sprout out around her neck, forming into a full cloak and hood that covered her entire person and disguised her nude appearance as she paid absolutely no mind to the onlookers. Next, her hair changed color, half of it turning black, directly down the middle. She dropped her hood and began to put it up in braids, one white and one black. Now, she performed fuuinjutsu and summoned Substiwolf, whom disappeared and reappeared immediately, handing Maido new clothes. She donned them, a new attire of all dark black and purple with raven feathers and black bear fur lining it quite splendidly. She made eye contact more than once with Kotaru as she dressed, finally bringing a single finger to his lips as she spoke her new name to him. "Muramasa, Maido is dead...we need a new name now...." and with a wicked smile that the true Maido hadn't displayed in quite some time she added, "...and I for one cannot wait for you to see what we have in store for you." Her chakra surged and she shot out her hands, sending a light purple blast of chakra outwards into every conceivable direction. She gasped, then condensed the purple chakra down tighter and began to give it shape. She added hints of doton to it and made it solid before refining it further with a gemstone for clarity. At the end of it, Maido slammed a brand new secondary core into her body replacing the destroyed one and being quite noticeably winded from the process.

She opened her eyes and awoke then, and stared around the room, finding that she hadn't really taken form again at all. It appeared to be a house of sorts, yet it was imprisoned in a red crystal that moves like loose fluid. "Am I in Kotaru's house?" She murmured. "Oh yes." Her better half said and stalked out of the shadows before her. It spoke acidic words that perverted her mind, tainting her speech. She told it to be quiet, and to leave her alone. She concentrated, willing her chakra to take form and break from her sleep. For what felt like so many hours she struggled, and could not even move. She rocked back and forth, just her core, wrapped in a silent red cloak. She was unable to move it, unable to guide it, unable to provide it with life and the like and she was broken.

Broken, truly, she didn't know what to do. She gathered her strength and found it nonexistent. Show woke up, again, this time in a sweat and surrounded by others, wearing masks like hers. She recognized Shinjiro and Kotaru immediately before the others, and listened as they belittled her for her haphazard manner of dying. She tsked, then in a prude fashion she stood up from her throne and disappeared, turning into a cloud of red mist before turning invisible. She found herself then standing on a pale beach, with a long shadow behind her and only her polearm of acid could be found by her side. Before her, dark denizens and creatures of the night formed as the light above became clouded and disappeared, replaced by a red moon. She brandished her polearm, and fought off many dark creatures made of shadow with absurd red and sometimes yellow eyes. She lost count of how many she slew before she woke up again.

Maido found herself staring down at her target from high above, her mask shrouding her face as her cloak of liquid blew in the wind. She descended onto the target, her cloak hugging around them and pinning their body to hers in a surprise embrace that was as equally surprisingly strong. Needles pierced from her body then, shooting outwards from her own and the cloak and piercing into the target all over. It was violent, immediate doom as the blood turned into acid and began to eat the target away from the inside out as they screamed. Maido let them go and everything became black.

She woke up and again attempted to gaze around the room and take it in. She found she had no body, and struggled again to maintain elements. Her cloak was wrapped around her heart-sized core, many layers encircling and hiding its egg like features. Like the Phoenix, Maido was reborn then, her sight and hearing returning in that order as her senses extended outwards into her cloak. The cloak purred and stirred and a red, fluid, clone-like version of Maido's face formed out of the folds of the fluid, completely red and ghastly in appearance and she looked around the room. "Hmm." She said, then shrunk down her size to appear much smaller, disappearing her ghastly, ethereal head into the folds of the cloak. She wondered then for just a moment if anyone was nearby or not, and then her head began to ring. Aching, swelling, throbbing, pain. It came back to her with a ringing as she discovered her sense of sound was quite...wrong. A pain in her metaphysical ears, the pressure was quite intense. It traveled throughout her false body and she felt it all the way in her core. She had died, truly, and it had been quite dramatic this time. Her thoughts raced. She certainly hadn't expected to live to reach over a thousand, but here she was. She recalled then, the many lives she had lived and fell back to sleep, her thoughts being replaced with dreams and memories that fluttered around her everywhere like stained glass windows.

A pale, unclothed Maido stepped onto the pane of glass gingerly, her toes touching down upon its cold surface as she walked around in the void, examining the memories of her past lives. Her inner fragmentation presented itself, and spoke calmly to her here in the void. "What a life you have now lived, Muramasa, Maido." It said to her, gesturing at the memories before them. "Yes...So many experiences, so much knowledge. I suppose we'll have to thank Shio when we see him again." Maido said to her better half. "While not anticipated, his time jump shenanigans very well may have been for our benefit." She said after a moment. Her better half actually agreed with her for once, the first time since the long meditation. The two of them snickered to themselves and Maido recalled her life before the illusion took hold of her, grasping the memories before her and viewing them one at a time within the void. Too, her better half gazed upon them and the two of them conversed for what felt like weeks, filling each other in with details that the other may have missed, and eventually painting quite the vivid picture within their mind's eye. "Yes, that sounds right, that's the life we had before."

Within the void, Maido summoned a throne for herself and her mind, and the two of them sat across from each other and continued to talk. "Do you think we should go back to Kirigakure?" Maido asked. "No, I think this is a good opportunity for us to do some things before people realize we aren't dead." To this, Maido raised her eyebrows and smiled. "Oh I'm so glad we get along now." Her wicked grin was returned, in kind, with another one.

Finally, Maido woke up, escaping her dream within a dream loop and her consciousness shifted into the core in Kotaru's house. Groggily, she began to manifest a cloak around the core and an ethereal, ghastly red version of her face began to materialize out of the folds in the cloak and looked around the room. She found that even this such action was incredibly, gruellingly taxing for her, and she almost passed out immediately from exhaustion. She wasn't able to reform her whole body yet, it would take some time. She could barely sustain her cloak, it was a measly looking thing, truly. Finally, she spoke, "Hello?" She said sheepishly into the house.