Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

What Do The Fearless Have To Fear?

"Hey, you, freaky guy!" an athletic young man with shoulder-length denim-colored hair with sky-colored tips pointed a bandaged rod-shaped weapon that the clasped in his hand at the crawling magician that had burst out from underground because of the overwhelming burst of Signal Man's searchlight. "You got rowdy there! I lost track of the vacuum cleaner guy because of you, so you'll have to take his place!"

Kotsuzu Yabure, the lich of Tonika Village, turned the upper half of his body, stressing his spine as the luminosity of the area didn't let his shadowy cloak persist on him. This exposed the twisted and bizarre musculature of the faceless humanoid and revealed jagged protrusions coated in dry and thick skin lined up over the magician's spine.

"A ninja?" Yabure chattered, noting the Kirigakure headband hanging tied around the youth's neck. Having locked sights on his opponent, the Kirigakure ninja pulled a second bandaged rod from his back and crossed their tips against one another as his combat stance. "I usually like ninja. They're full of false courage, so their panic lasts for ages before their hearts give out. This really lets me get into their heads and get their terrors rolling. This is kind of a bad time though, so, just this once, I'll let you turn around and find someone else to play with."

"You're stoked about fear, huh?" the blue-haired Kirigakure ninja smirked, clutching the handle of his bandaged blade. A metallic clink prompted something to shift around in that blade, and both of his bandaged swords ripped through their bandages. Something was off, though. Both swords seemed like normal katanas just a second ago, though wrapped in bandages. The swords that ripped free from bondage looked like oversized, dulled cleavers that couldn't have possibly fit underneath those wraps or looked the way those swords looked before. "That's too bad. The boredom of this will kill you."

A burst of dry and husky laughter clamored from within the oppressed lungs of Kotsuzu Yabure. The faceless lich bent his lower back out of shape, breaking his body backward and adopting a reverse all-fours stance. His head turned around to make his smile flip upside down on the opposite back of his face while the shifty lich skittered off with a rapid shuffle of his twisted limbs. The Kirigakure ninja covered his eyes at first, terrified that his opponent's shift in position would flaunt his junk in his face, though the flight response in his opponent made the Kirigakure swordsman exclaim and point his clobber-cleaver at his skittering opponent.

"Where're you going? Got a game of shogi to play or something?" having realized that his opponent had no extremities, just a rough patch of skin covering the area, therefore he was in no danger of fracturing his sensitive psyche, the Kirigakure ninja clenched his swords and placed them behind his back as he dashed off after his skittering foe who shuffled in between hectic brawls in the arena and shot straight for the trench and the pointy rock ridges in the center of the arena.

Having reached the edge of the rocky protrusions, the swordsman stopped in a skid and looked up. Then began scaling the rocks with careless leaps and bounds. That was when a forest of semi-transparent, shadowy hands emerged from the other side. The trench and the surrounding ridges provided Yabure with enough shade to form his shadowy constructs, even though they were wobblier than his peak by heaps. Airborne, the Kirigakure ninja covered himself up with his clobber-cleavers as the washing wave of shadowy fists slammed into him. The lashing shadow hands had no struggle bypassing his oversized, dull cleavers and found their way to his jaw, throat, ribs, and waist.

A washing mass of dark appendages all molded together into a larger, interconnected construct of chained rings with a clawed, armored hand attached to the end. Despite its impressive appearance and sophisticated build, the color and texture of the limb was still transparent as a mere shade was no equal to the complete darkness in which the lich was used to operate. The hand locked around the face of the airborne Kirigakure ninja and swung him around with a metallic clang of the interconnected shadow rings. Having sped up the spin to thousands of Gs more than was necessary to break the neck of an ordinary person, the gourmet of horror released his pursuer and sent him flying on a trajectory to disappear over the horizon, let alone out of bounds of the arena.