Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Of Old Men And Child-Murder

The two men crashed into one another like speeding tidal waves. It didn't take sublime skill in martial arts to tell that this clash wouldn't have lasted long. After all, if the fight gone on and raised too much of a ruckus, Mana would have never had the chance to meet the assassin in question, or his daughter. No. This would have been a short and violent affair.

The skill of Rakugi's father in the signature Hyuuga taijutsu style surpassed what Mana saw Rakugi use, though the young man never used an ounce of the style he learned during his upbringing. Despite Rakugi's Byakugan gleaming bright and silver and veins raking his face when looking from aside, the young assassin fought with a brutal, clenched-fist fighting style, though his method wasn't rage. No. Rakugi was patient and precise, as a skilled swordsman and accurate, like an archer.

The palm strikes of Rakugi's father slid down and under or around the elusive young man. At times Rakugi leaned back, shorting his father out of just mere inches in range, as if taunting him. The killer wasn't foolish or naïve either. Very few times did he strike to wound or disable and saw his strikes deflected, because every deflection or entrapment provided his opponent with an invaluable chance to win. The little Hyuuga heiress tried sneaking off before Rakugi swept his foot and punted the kid back into the corner like a ball of useless, dirty rags.

The assassin's father wanted to speak up, but he only spat out blood from his mouth that stained the white undershirt underneath his black haori. Rakugi had landed a few strikes, using the fact that Mana saw through his eyes when looking at this bout. She saw chakra nodes outright explode with guttural violence within the body of Rakugi's father. It had been as if the man had swallowed an explosive tag. He was dead after just one strike but didn't know it until he broke down vomiting pools of bile and blood.

The crying toddler stumbled her way through the corridor, tears obstructing the view. Mana wanted to believe that this scene would have moved her, that she didn't have the strength to keep on watching, but she would have been lying if she admitted that aloud. Truth be told, while she feared that this gruesome yet inevitable sight might have distracted her from the very reason she took part in this memory in the first place, her experiences had long since rendered her numb to mental breakdowns in the face of these disasters.

Thus when Rakugi kicked the still dying and bleeding profusely body of his father to slip off his scarf and fling it at the fleeing child to loop its end around little lady Hissho's neck, Mana scanned the room without flinching. Eager to find that which she came here for so that she didn't have to experience it again. While it remained stuck up in the air if Rakugi killed the heiress with a single yank that snapped her tender neck because of some remnant of professionalism and twisted kindness or merely because he was in a hurry, Mana didn't find her prize in that room.

Rakugi advanced onward, over the corpse of his father and the Hyuuga heiress lying limp and lifeless on the ground, frozen like a piece of artwork. The young man moved slowly, his movements were jittery as if grains of sand and gravel plagued his joints, drowning and obstructing their movements. Rakugi raked his own face, pulling the front of his hair as he advanced through the mansion, hopping up and pulling himself over the boards on the ceiling and rolling aside when the light came up and men came rushing through to avoid immediate detection.

The guards were sloppy. So frightened they were for the life of their miraculous three-year-old that even with the white eye capable of seeing everything around them, they took a few seconds too late to spot the intruder hiding over the ceiling. Their prime goal was to gaze onward and see if the heiress was okay and if the assassin had been in the vicinity. By the time they realized that the assassin had been above them, Rakugi had extra time to break their immediate striking arms with one punch and further develop his one-punch, one-kill fighting style by dispatching of the small group of guards.