Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

The Chaos Factor

"What are you doing?" Endo asked, having stumbled onto the scene of Damisan standing surrounded by a handful of puppets. "It's not like you to spar without Mana lately."

"That's because I was helping her polish up her prosthetic puppetry. This isn't about improving her skills, it's about improving mine," Damisan replied, twitching his left hand which sent Chaff Mercury into a dashing blitz. The puppet homed in on its master in a straight, gold-tipped line with a violent hypersonic shock wave bursting halfway. Chaff Mercury tossed a wild flurry of hundreds of punches a millisecond but Damisan's footwork appeared impeccable. The puppeteer may not have been swift enough to evade the puppet's onslaught, but he avoided taking a beating through careful space management instead.

Urchin Pluto began buzzing in place with a roll that revealed the jagged scrap edges sticking out from its back. The rolling buzzard flew at its master like a cannonball but Damisan fell sideways to the floor, anticipating the attack as he wrapped his legs around those of Chaff Mercury and turned them to flop the speedster puppet right in Urchin Pluto's way.

A flock of sparks flew out, accompanying a revolting scrap shriek as the garbage laying the foundation of Urchin Pluto contacted the higher-grade alloy used in reinforcing Chaff Mercury's frame. This collision resulted in both the dents of Chaff Mercury's reinforcing plates and the bending of the blades comprising Urchin Pluto's built-in defenses.

A wooden humanoid with a long trident arm and another one reinforced and flattened to resemble a shield charged forward with rapid thrusts of its trident arm. This newly built puppet was slow and methodical enough for Damisan to lean out of its way. Without warning, the puppeteer exploded into a high-flying backflip, grabbing hold of the frame of an oval-shaped flat puppet comprising a gelatinous surface of liquid metal and a containment frame with a pair of decorative bronze arms and legs for support.

"Hmph..." Damisan grumbled, unimpressed with his teammate's display. "I thought that the Sun Disc will allow you to use your puppets. What is the point of training yourself against them?"

"We don't know that for certain. Besides, puppetry is a popular fighting style in the Land of Wind. In fact, it is rarely seen in ninja raised outside the country, so plenty of warriors will have countermeasures against it, I'm sure. I need to learn to fight my own battles if I have to. Not to mention, my puppets are still relatively new and I hadn't had the chance to build incredibly strong ones yet or install plenty of reinforcing upgrades into these ones. They're a poor measurement of my skill," Damisan exhaled forcefully with a show of light fatigue as he stretched his numbing muscles.

"You're wasting your time with this ridiculous training," Endo scoffed. "It hardly tests you and pushes you. As you've said–these puppets don't translate the entirety of your skill as a puppeteer. Not to mention, you're the one sending them after yourself so you know where they're coming from at all times. That's not how a battle is going to be. You need to stop embarrassing us as a team with this display and start building better puppets already. Play to your strengths instead of cowering to cover for your weaknesses."

"If the Sheikh insists that you fight bare-handed, could you do it?" Damisan wondered while doing some light stretches to ease the numbing.

"I'd much rather join Asuka in cutting down every inconvenient competitor behind the scenes," Endo admitted.

"It's not like you to show fear," Damisan smirked with a light tease.

"Who said I'm afraid?" Endo instantly bit the hook, as he was known to do.

"Someone tells you to fight bare-handed, you throw the competition and start cutting people behind the scenes. Sorry, but to me, this tells you're afraid of a bare-handed fight," Damisan shrugged with faked innocence.