Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

An Out Of Body Experience

Mana was flying. At least it felt so for a blink, right before she vaulted over her front to reposition for a dive kick. It took a little while for her prosthetic leg to stop feeling like an afterthought or some piece of heavy weight to drag her down. Before, every move had to start with a thought about how she'd best position her stiff deadweight artificial limb, whereas she's almost learned to associate careful and deliberate finger twitches with moving the calf.

"Whoa, there..." Damisan ducked his front with a bowing motion, avoiding the vertical swing of the artificial limb. Mana cried out, losing balance as the weight of her prosthetic limb swung her whole body after it because of the inertia that a block she counted on didn't stop.

The feeling of weightlessness didn't stop when the magician crashed on her face into a warm firmness cloaked by a rough cape of rugged and dry cloth. When her weight settled on top of Damisan and the puppeteer realized Mana had flopped on him and didn't mean to hurt him anymore, the stiffness in his body eased up. It was as if this firm and fit soldier melted like soft cheese over the flame to her touch. It felt just as warm and just as mouth-watering. She was staring for too long. Heat washed down Mana's body...

*****

Her eyes felt dry and pain came rushing in like a crashing tidal wave of needles all stabbing into the pupils at once. And yet, the voice that came out of Mana's mouth didn't sound right. It was as if a technician recorded her and then formed three different pitches for her voice and then ran them alongside one another, with each one lagging behind the other by roughly half a second. Even after waking up from the haze, Mana couldn't shake off the feeling of weightlessness. It felt like she was floating even though she's only been suspended over the ground for a couple of meters.

That's right, there was a battle. An unknown enemy force of odd, colorful statues attacked them and, from what Mana's twinging head reminded her of, the Stars didn't fare too well. The enemy was too aggressive and didn't let up one bit. It was almost like they didn't feel pain or fatigue or needed to worry about the integrity of their lives and bodies.

All was also not right with the Stars either. Mana dallied too much on checking up on her team and became too enthralled in memories of home. Shige-H became too distracted with her need to micromanage her team to effectively fend off her attacker, Asuka became a frontline combatant against her wishes and succumbed to the ruthless aggression. Endo appeared to meet a defensive wall that not even his boundless aggression on the battlefield could break through, and Damisan's obsession with finding a way to fight without relying on his puppets may have nearly cost him his life.

A dome-shaped turret stood in front of Mana. A cylindrical tower around eleven meters in size. A monument that became narrower the taller it went until it ended up in a dome-shaped configuration at the top that had multiple trapeze shapes sliding in and out of it. Something felt odd, different, almost. With this monument moving on its own, Mana almost expected it to be beaming off chakra, but she couldn't sense any off of it. In fact, she's never felt so lonely and devoid of chakra signatures around her ever. It was like there was not a single living soul for kilometers. Such a remote place should've been impossible to find. Chakra and life itself were native to all corners of the world. Even Jigoku felt more alive than this, for better or worse.

"Careful. Waking up after having your body replaced feels different, so I've been told. You don't have the luxury of slowly filtering the light out with your eyes, so it all just flows in at once. You'll get used to it," a raspy voice echoed from the shifting monument of sliding trapezes. Just like how the statues spoke to Mana before to ring her nostalgic memories of working with Kiyomi back home, she didn't hear the voice but had it ringing with all the subtlety of a thunderbolt in her head.