Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Hold Your Hands Up

A towering, vaguely human-shaped, legless behemoth rumbled in a patch of the arena it had occupied for itself. The black Cursed Warrior monolith flexed its clay-like body and emitted destructive rays of blue light from the glowing patterns and glyphs decorating its statuesque body. A samurai clad in a black and red gi with waist-length spiky black hair hanging around his back in a streaming ponytail dashed aside from the spray of destructive rays of light that permeated the scorched ground in walls of blue flame. A splash of the cerulean flame caught on to the samurai's white and red fox mask, forcing the warrior to toss it aside to burn up to cinders.

A small band of warriors from various teams seemed dead-set on attacking the human fortress and doing whatever it took to eliminate it and free up some space in the arena for everyone but a storm of kunai slipped into the tiles just mere centimeters away from their feet. The warriors looked up at the unmasked samurai in a black and red robe who stared at the clay behemoth with a fussy pout and had his arms raised and spread to the sides, betraying that it was him to threw the knives to stop the warriors from attacking a foe he had chosen as his target.

"Hey! Just who does that guy think he is?" a lean young man with two swords and a heavy-gear backpack hanging over his mud-colored cargo jacket bittered his expression with spite. "This titan is clearly a monster, so it's up to us, the Exterminator group, to deal with him!"

"You must not know Ishikawa Bando then," another samurai in a plain blue dogi and a red robe hanging over his shoulders snickered before spitting out a twig he had been chewing on for a while now. "Damn, I thought cutting this mountain-man would've been a nice warm-up for the upcoming tournament, but all this fire he's spitting out everywhere must've gotten on Bando's bad side."

The plain samurai with messy black hair and a stubby goatee sheathed his sword and turned around, closing his eyes with tranquility and shutting off his senses from the rampaging goliath completely. The Exterminator looked bewildered by this behavior.

"Wait, do you mean that warrior is in fact a samurai and not a ninja? Why then does he wear a mask and can throw kunai with such impeccable accuracy without even looking?" the Exterminator called out to the samurai who was nonchalantly walking away.

"Because Ishikawa Bando is a ronin who found the Secret Ninja Tribe of Iga and trained himself there before returning to the Land of Iron. He is an above-average swordsman but a peerless ninja, or so I've heard..." the shaggy-haired samurai waved his hand in dismissal of the Exterminator and found himself another battle to partake in, charging at the half-headless giant and the archer lady spewing arrows all across the battlefield.

Ishikawa Bando vanished in a blink. Not a second later, blinding crescent slash arcs began littering the entire body of the clay-man goliath of the Cursed Warriors. Despite the widespread slashing flurry, the Cursed Warrior neither flinched nor showed any signs of pain, instead throwing his hand in a backhand slam and catching Bando in mid-air while he was in high-speed movement and invisible to the naked eye. Surprised by the crash, Bando grumbled and flew back down like a tiny meteor with a radiant tail. The samurai crashed into the tiles, leaving a crater, and fractured crackles across the region of the arena.

With a thunderous grumble, the cursed monolith turned around and raised its hammering fist to smash it down to where the annoying gnat swordsman was. Within the first traces of movement, the fist became engulfed by flames and surrounded by a sonic boom shockwave that threatened a devastating crash. Silence reigned in when the blow collided with the ground, then a deafening howl and a disastrous whirl of gust and airwaves spread in all directions. Just as it seemed like Bando was done for, the white, flashing slashes rotated around the giant's arm. This time leaving shallow indentations as Bando buzzed upward like a mad slasher and hovered right in front of the head-like dome at the top of the fortified monolith warrior.