Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

The Rogue Element

It didn't look like this mysterious assailant was willing to wait for Mana and Shige-H to get the answers about his affiliations that they wanted to extract. Before Mana's jaw could even twitch to ask, the sand underneath her feet rustled and leather straps jumped up, lashing like scorned vipers. It happened so suddenly and out of nowhere that Mana hadn't even replaced herself with an illusionary copy to trick this man while she moved to a better position.

The tight loops of leather whips stretched around Mana and restrained her hands. It seemed like this man had been truthful to his request to take Mana and not hurt or kill her, as this sort of opening would've given him a fair shot at either. Yet he merely left the magician subdued and wriggling on the ground while he switched his attention to Shige-H.

"This is getting seriously annoying!" Shige-H dashed at the man. While he spent the entirety of his focus and surprise factor on capturing Mana, he didn't have nearly enough focus left to deal with Shige's sudden outburst of speed. The fist of the medical kunoichi lit up with a blue flare as she was about to make a paste out of his innards with a single power blow. "Everyone's after Mana all the time! How many times will I have to tell you mercs and assassins that she's mine!"

The body of the assailant coiled unnaturally, wriggling like an aspen tree before taking a hard yank and moving out of the way of Shige's focused fist. This amount of flexibility shouldn't have been humanly possible. Even Shige's eyes were wide open and as a medical kunoichi, she had a fair idea of what one could reasonably expect in terms of flexibility of the human body.

"Konoha's Sorceress is all I want. If you insist on getting in my way, you'll die," the man stated calmly while slamming both of his hands down like hammers. Responding to the downward motion, the pair of lashing whips he held in both hands went crashing straight down and ground Shige-H to the dirt.

Just as Mana thought that she had slipped out from the restraints, the leather straps pressed on. Something wasn't right. She had escaped bindings hundreds of times more complex, involving locks and far more limited movement. She could escape a coffin she was in if they filled it with cement, sealed inside of a safe, and drowned in a lake, and yet a few whips stayed on her as firmly as the blink they restrained her. Even more, Mana's fingers and joints felt numb. It was a likely culprit of why her escape effort just didn't work.

"I said... Take a hike!" Shige-H grumbled, shooting back on both feet, much to the surprise of the whip-using assailant while driving her fist up in a weighty wake-up uppercut. The man's entire body stretched out to the identical inhuman extent as his previous feats when eluding Shige-H's attacks, though this time it was because of the transferal of the countless megatons of force hitting his jaw. The attacker's neck, his spine, the entire body evened out like a string before he flew straight up like a human missile.

"Damn... Those lashes sting..." Shige-H winced and stumbled. She wasn't wrong, as evidenced by a pair of purple stretched across Shige's back with splatters of blood on the sides. The crash of the whip was so severe that it forced blood to spray through Shige's pores on the side. "You still down? I expected you to be out of binds like that yesterday."

"Something's off about this guy. I can't move and it's not because of the leather straps..." Mana grumbled. It was only when she calmed down and closed her eyes that she realized what was going on. There was a puny signal of chakra stretched out around the straps she had on her. It had been a while since Mana encountered this technique. Just like she would dispel an illusion, Mana expelled a pulse of chakra and sent it across the invisible steel wire strings, right toward its owner, wherever they were. "There's a puppeteer involved. They wrapped these whips in tiny strands of steel wire that connect upon touch. From there, the puppeteer can control the body of the restrained target so that they don't escape their bind."