Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

A Desert Kiss

"Kakashi is down for a few secs, Mana, you'll have to take over the sealing duty for now," Shige-H declared after leaning over Kakashi's perforated body and hovering her hands over the wound.

Mana did not reply, but her face showed not a single sign of happiness. She was never too trusting in her sealing techniques. Back in her early days, it was indeed her father who took care of the seal he gifted Mana in her hat. Since that time, Mana learned to manage that particular seal rather well, though she still considered herself a novice in the craft. Ninjutsu was like languages, knowing just a couple of jutsu was like knowing a few words in that way.

Smelling the reek of the humans' hesitation, the black-skinned ogre forced its way through the manor's fortifications and grabbed hold of a barrel, lifting it over its head and gulping rich amounts of liquid within. Thick, black drops ran down its jaw, chin, and down its body when the goop within that quarrel could no longer be contained in just the bestial jaw of the black ogre.

Damisan raised his left arm and clocked it with a mechanical reloading sound. The prosthetic's base dug into the artificial join it used to connect to the body and once it dug out, it spread like a pair of scissors. A pulse of flames left the puppeteer's prosthetic feet as he jumped to action. The black ogre coughed and nearly choked on the goop it was downing in surprise that this meek, half-metallic man would attack him so recklessly.

The green-skinned ogre swung its sickle chains, slashing in mid-air in an attempt to catch Damisan off-guard in mid-flight but the self-puppeteering ninja maneuvered around the blades with elegant precision and blasted in a direct, arrow-like path to his opponent. The ogre grinned, rearing its chipped chompers and brutish fangs, as the sickle blades weren't the only danger in this situation. A grip of chains locked around Damisan, halting him still and shocking his fleshy parts because of the sudden stoppage of his blasting motion.

"Shadow Strangulation Jutsu!" Skaven chanted out, sending a wave of shadowy tendrils toward his struggling, subdued pal. An entire crowd of arms split off from the main tendril and crawled up the chain links, wrapping their fingers around the chains like it would have gripped the tender necks of Skaven's enemies. It only took a meek amount of pressure to make the chains click and scatter in detached links.

Riding the high of his initial dash, Damisan soared up to the recovering ogre that still tried gulping down the liquid it was gorging on before. One of the best-equipped shinobi in the Allied Ninja smashed his scissor-shaped hand at the mouth of his enemy, squeezing the jaw of the black-skinned ogre shut by slamming the two scissor parts shut over it. The distressed ogre shook and tried to wrestle out of the pliers-like lock over his jaw as the kerosene it had been downing began filling its lungs and innards as it had nowhere else to go.

The ogre's stress had been so intense that the goop sprayed from the bodily crevices and various places on its body, where separate chunks of flesh connected. Damisan wound up his right arm and snapped his elbow open, letting a satisfying hiss of steam out from a tube inside. The red-skinned ogre swung its limbs in a mad dash to its kanabo, but Mana clapped her hands together, shuffling the armor ninjutsu cylinder constructs around and making a few more that she mixed into the fold.

Not being the brightest light in the house, the red-skinned ogre bawled in wrath and began kicking random cylinders, unable to bash through them but what the beast lacked in focused force, it compensated with relentless wrath meant for every angle and every direction around it.

"Thruster Bullet!" Damisan said, releasing a focused stream of steam from the back of his elbow as the hydraulic system that both he and the Scientific Ninja Weapons Team came up with thrust repeatedly like a mechanical sledgehammer stamping gruesome tears and holes in the ogre's flesh as the series of punches left the sinful case of demonic possession wobbly on its feet. "Now!" Damisan signaled, taking a blast up in the air while Mana shuffled through hand seals.