Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Death Of A Star

With the Tailed Beast Bomb still accumulating might and further escalating Mana's already hectic heartbeat toward a point where it would burst out from her chest, the titanic rampaging ape scooped up Damisan with its hand and swung him around, cradling the beaten young man inside his hand before slamming him into the ground again. Sparks and steel shards flew out in all directions from Damisan's smashed to bits equipment. The airborne steel turned crimson from the splatters of blood in the air.

"Move!" Mana commanded herself. As ordered, her legs sprung into motion, albeit still shaky enough to drop her at any point. Even if she had full control over her frightened, whimpering limbs, what use would they serve?

Neither one of the potential outcomes before her was acceptable. If she didn't intervene and take the Four-Tails' attention off Damisan–he'd die for sure. He was half-dead already and all of his prosthetic limbs had been impressively devastated and scattered throughout the gruesome and bloody battlefield. Then again, intervening on Damisan's behalf wasn't enough–if the Tailed Beast charges up its apocalyptic technique that is driving Mana insane merely by being charged up, they'll all be dead, no matter if she saves Damisan or not.

"Royal Flush Clone Jutsu!" Mana chanted, weaving a hand seal and waving goodbye to almost half of her chakra. She hadn't been driven to the point of chakra exhaustion for a while, that feeling of pressure around her eyes and blurry vision had become almost alien to her since the magician trained her chakra capacity to become inferior to very few ninja in the world through her unique, meditative methods of self-control.

As the Tailed Beast hurled its fist to hammer it down and leave nothing but a bloody stain of the impaired shinobi laying unconscious, bruised and bloody before it, a pair of Mana's doppelgangers flew in from the side, crackling with Magician's Touch Jutsu while delivering their strongest hooks to both of the Four-Tails' jaws. As the high-ranking Lightning Release chakra resonated through the chakra monster's body, one could almost believe it to have caused some sort of impact. It did not. The infuriated monkey slammed both of its hands together, clapping the clones to their demise.

A ground-shaking explosion parted the monster's arms open as a bright flash swallowed the Four-Tails. The Wind Release and Fire Release Shadow Clones reacted to one another as they dispelled into their respective violent elemental reactions, one enhancing the other and creating something devastating together. A spherical marble of a fiery inferno that howled and boomed in its destructive path, engulfing the monster of living chakra whole.

"C'mere, you..." Mana's clone mumbled while scooping Damisan off the ground. He was wet and felt incredibly soft in her hands. His clothes and skin had been drowning in blood and had the impaired ninja any semblance of consciousness left, the fractured bones might have given him a puncturing warning after Mana moved him away from the sudden death zone so rudely and swiftly.

Mana had been right to place absolutely no hopes in her impressive combo of different nature affinity Shadow Clones and their highly destructive chain reactions amounting to much in the end. More and more pixel-like obsidian chakra dots began flowing into the sphere that had been expanding in between the upper and lower jaws of the hectic monkey chakra beast. As the smoke clear, the beast browsed its immediate surroundings for victims to smash but could find none.

The beast's nostrils twitched. It turned around and dragged its mountainous fingers over the battlefield floor, dislodging a colossal boulder from the floor, and lobbing it toward an area diagonally behind it. Mana's image froze still, petrified as the unexpected flying mountain plateau swallowed all semblances of light before landing right on top of her where she had attempted to draw out the third pillar. The dislodged rocky projectile landed with a resounding, authoritative thud. A splitting fissure of Wind Release blades ravaged the mountainous surface, an aftereffect of an elemental release Shadow Clone being dispelled.