Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Mana To The Rescue

A bright light enveloped the staircase room, forcing Mana to cover her face up instinctually. Noise boomed for a blink before dying out in a void of childish laughter. The light became a veil of white that surrounded everything, a veil the part of which Mana became one with without expressing her choice to do so. By the time she rationalized what had happened, she laid on her back outside, brushing her scraped back against stone while shards of glass and shredded wood rained from the sky.

Mana looked down, inspecting her body. There was a massive gap in her chakra. Her body had augmented her to withstand an expanding bubble of booming obliteration without her conscious demand. Normally Mana still hesitated to employ chakra augmentation, but survival came first to what her consciousness thought about a method of survival to her body. Hearing the ringing and feeling a warm drip down her ears, Mana stood up and faced the wall of flames before her and a massive wine-red shape with gleaming eyes on the horizon.

"The Four-Tails?" Mana muttered to herself, seeing the four tails of the colossal monkey titan flapping about as it smashed, kicked, and breathed emerald flames. Lives blinked out by hundreds as within an instant fireballs and lightning bolts lit up the sky and smashed into the beast, but they were like gnats attacking a raging bull. They may have been too tiny to pin down and squash, but they also couldn't hope to accomplish anything more than irritate their target.

Hearing screams and wailing fill the air, Mana turned her head up, seeing tremendous chunks of the hive-shaped building falling from the heavens. With the completion of a few hand seals, the magician took to the skies and swooped up to the falling building chunk, pinpointing the location of every frightened recruit and injured person within in need of rescue before the plummeting chunk hit the ground. With Mana having improved her Mystical Wings Jutsu and reinvented it time and time again, it may as well have been a different jutsu from where it had started out. Mana would require all that expertise to pull this off.

"Fire Style: Dragon Claw!" Mana yelled out while riding the current of wind that sent her torpedoing toward the falling building. After completing the Tiger hand seal, Mana blew out a mass of hot air from her lungs that ignited upon contact with the air around her and slapped with an open palm, creating a triplet of Fire Release chakra spikes that slashed through and melted the building wall making for an easier punt through.

The shrieking in her head took over as Mana winced and cried out in pain, slamming the building with her head and shoulders first was never a fun experience and she couldn't wallow in discomfort for too long lest she became a sharer of the fate that the victims she was trying to save all shared. As fast as she could, Mana activated her Mystical Wings again and maneuvered around the collapsing building chunk, grabbing and dragging whoever she could on her way out. Once the hot brush of late spring caressed her cheek, Mana vaulted in mid-air to secure her hold on the few survivors she held and slowly descended, wincing when the building wing hit the ground with a thunderous roar.

"Fuck... Oh, shit, Oakley was still there..." someone hanging on Mana's neck and slowly driving her down like an overweight balloon lamented.

"What? This isn't everyone?" Mana turned to them, feeling her pumped cheeks cool as their color paled out. How could this have been? How could she have missed someone?

"Yeah, there was this young man, he got pinned by a collapsing ceiling, I think he was still alive..." the young woman whom Mana held by her hands while the entire group landed on the ground and collapsed, breathing easier now that the immediate threat to their lives was over.

"My chakra sensory I... I thought I sensed everyone..." Mana dragged her cool hands over her face, rubbing her eyes almost to the point of bleeding before clenching them in fists.