Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Beware the Blue Flame Curtain!

Captain Flint stumbled, straightening out his back though grievous shiners were beginning to swell all over his bruised face. In a peculiar enough twist of fate, all of his scrapes were entirely self-inflicted, since the best of Mana's physical abilities barely inconvenienced the man and his tough as a brick face. It was hard to say which torrents of humidity pouring down his face were from the persisting water he had employed to cover his fists with and what was sweat.

A chilling battle cry made Mana tuck her head in and stiffen her neck out of sheer instinct. This came as a shock to her since she couldn't read an attack in the captain's body language. By now she's seen him swing his fists enough to know where he was coming from and in what manner. Her first call was correct–it was no mere attack that came at her. Jets of water swept through the openings and cracks in between the boards of the pier floor and wrapped themselves around Captain Flint's hands.

Mana breathed out. It was a fresh feeling after so much time–she felt a slight twinge in her gut and around her temples, she's been straining herself, but the feeling still was as if she had entire masses of chakra left to call upon. The magician weaved her hands together, preparing to execute an encore performance if her opponent demanded to pummel himself with his earth-shaking blows again but instead of forming solid maces to hammer Mana with, four slippery and nimble tendril limps with hand-shaped ends formed around the Pirate Lord.

Captain Flint's voice picked up in pitch as he slammed his open palms and the manipulated water tendrils straight into the wooden floor, skidding himself backward alongside the knife that was pressing against the buccaneer's foot. The blade's edge contacted the captain's exposed foot, cutting a shallow slice into it as its other end contested against the pier's floor and, eventually, found the easy loser. The wooden pier split into two parts as the captain slid backward, massively increasing the distance between him and Mana by cutting across the pier with the back of the knife's edge without moving his foot away and losing the deathmatch.

"You should count yourself lucky, missy. Lucky that Captain still treasures Getsugakure as the pearl of the northern seas that it is, otherwise he'd blast the entire country away like nothing," Marat yelled out with an empty taunt.

"Cannons!" Captain Flint called out. A handful of towering men with faces wrapped in some dry and stitched material resembling wasp nests in black coats emerged from the lower decks, carrying entire cannons over their heads. The two ogres flung them like they were mere sticks at which point Captain Flint's watery tendrils shot out to grab them out of the air and pulled them in to where the seaman could wrap them under his armpits.

"You still don't get it, do you?" Mana tsked in frustration. "It's not about how big of a fist you can make or how powerful of a blast you can build up. Even an opponent of your scale can't beat me with raw power alone anymore."

"Go ahead and reflect my fusillade back at me, girly, I'll can keep dishing it out and taking it at the same time," Captain Flint howled out as oozing and howling whirlpools emerged from the foaming and roaring seas behind the scarred and beefy back of the veteran pirate. The water spouted into the entryway of the cannon only for the Pirate Lord's chakra to coat them and shoot house-sized blobs of water. Unlike regular cannons, these didn't appear to require any time to reload and could use any firing mode their user desired. "Water Style: Briny Bomber!" Captain Flint croaked out while holding both cannons firmly under his arms.

"Serenity Arcana!" Mana switched her hand seal position into an open palm clap, shaping an armor ninjutsu construct of a magician's stage out in front of her with the back wall becoming one with her so that she didn't have to move the armored boot construct away from the knife. By now Captain Flint might have caught on that while Mana was using her armor ninjutsu to shape her foot and press it to the knife's edge, her options for other jutsu to be used were limited. To use the full assembly of her techniques, Mana would've had to cease the armor ninjutsu and connect her exposed stump to the razor once more.