Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

The Wheel of Vengeance

The humidity felt like a moist cloth smacking in the face and lingering for an uncomfortable period, just long enough for its chilly mop water to run down one's face and drip under one's collar and leave one shivering before one's own body warmed the droplets up to bodily temperature. Once one wiped the wet rag away, another one that was cursed to take its place splat right back into one's face.

Dark and chilly, the mental fort of Ion's father appeared to be modeled after a dark and abandoned city. It looked nothing like Konoha's village streets. There wasn't a bud of a plant in miles. Just towering steel mills, power plants, and factories and just lifeless spikes and towers of steel that had absolutely nothing inside. Mana approached one and glared through its window. Oddly enough, there didn't appear to be anything inside, just complete darkness, and none of the buildings had any doors to them.

"Imagination wasn't your strong suit, huh?" Mana sighed, turning to the confusing layout of empty streets ahead of her. Mental forts might have ranged in on being various degrees of massive. It depended entirely on how much experience and memories one's mind held or how many treasured corners of one's mind it protected, and how many fake rooms one generated to keep probing eyes and minds away from. Mental training had a grand role to play as well.

Then there was the fact that the assassin that had caused so much trouble to the Stars and nearly wiped out all the Allied Ninja all by himself had been drifting in and out of consciousness, which meant that his subconscious was taking over more and more of the fort. This was both good and bad. Subconscious had a mean habit of being all over the place and hectic, though it was less focused and much softer than the piercing arrow of focused willpower. Willpower was everything on the mental plane. While subconscious had plenty of ways to surprise and catch one unaware, it sort of lacked the focus to make that chaos work in one's favor.

A heavy rumbling noise joined in on the howling winds brushing against polished, damp steel beams and jittery glass panels. Mana turned toward it. Was it a meaningful attempt to protect the mental fort against her or just a manifestation of the chaotic subconscious? It depended on what shape the interloper would have taken: if it was an avatar of similar appearance to its master, it'd have been the first, if it was an ice cream man with a mop for a face and teddy-bear hands, handing out crossword magazines–it'd have been the second.

Mana's lips stretched down, forming a downward aiming crescent while her eyes jarred when the ground shook and a rumbling lump of heavy machinery showcased its mechanical glory from around the corner, scraping a handful of buildings as it rolled in on crawler belts easily thirty times Mana's size in total length and the growling machine busted a nearby building as it turned the corner and aimed its main gun barrel down, straight toward Mana.

The house-sized tank had been a willful creation. It modeled itself after the vizor-down version of the heavy metal helmet that Ion's father donned, complete with a set of three glowing goggle lenses positioned in a triangular shape around the mantlet. Mana snapped her fingers, testing the mettle of her willpower against that of the enemy's. Cuddly bunnies began sprouting from the end of the barrel as the tank began grumbling and shaking about while hopping mammals overtook it from within its hollowed shell. The ground rumbled again as the lash of a thunderbolt would have been a mere whisper compared to the resonant blast that decimated the spot where Mana stood before the tank.

The bunnies that hopped out from the tank all cuddled together, forming a humanoid shape that solidified back into Mana as the previous avatar of her probing willpower had been utterly torn asunder. The magician's eyes raced across the complicated clutter of busy city streets as steel birds began circling around the main square up in the sky. As their gut opened, they dropped some hefty steel boxes, and it had been one of them that caused the rupturing detonation that had rocked Mana before.