Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

The Six Perfections

The second, wheel-shaped puppet, to which Buhakim referred to as "the Solitary Awakening" began emitting odd sounds. In a way, they were rather displeasing for they reminded of the stomach growling sounds or one's own innards shifting inside one's own body in a case of bowel unrest. The central parts of each of the puppet's arm handle popped open, releasing a handful of strings, likely chakra conductive ones, like the ones used in the puppetry technique.

"Puppetry Technique: Solitary Awakening"! Buhakim muttered out, humming his words through his teeth like a prayer as the countless strands of wire were launched at Jean-D's general direction.

The skilled kunoichi fought the advancing strings off rather valiantly, her movements were swift and precise and she struck with the full knowledge that the puppetry strings could not be cut unless chakra imbuement of higher concentration was used. Eventually, it became evident that the wired offensive was simply too overwhelming and wide ranged for it to be avoided, then something incredible happened – the knives of Jean-D lit up with blueish base chakra colored flares, visible even to non-sensors. Apparently, Jean-D had the ability to imbue her knives with chakra.

With a swift X-shaped slash with both of her long knives, Jean-D cut through the puppetry wires, separating the chakra channeling coming from the Solitary Awakening and making the separated surrounding wire collapse on the floor around the girl like flabby wet noodles. Jean-D sighed easier before charging at her opponent with a strong slash at the puppeteer a crimson line opened up on Buhakim's chest with a weak spray of blood following right after, slightly tainting the spiritual and composed look of the golden haired youth.

"Puppetry Technique: Vehicle of Disciples"! Buhakim chanted out in prayer again as his fingers moved at an incredible speed. Even to Mana, someone who focused on quick sleight of hand tricks as a part of her living, Buhakim's fingers appeared blurry and difficult to follow. That must have been the skill of a well-trained puppeteer...

The grotesque molded shape of multiple faceless bodies stuck together began erratically flipping and rolling around, striking with all of its limbs at the same time. Whereas normally such a wild attack would have been somewhat easy to read, creating a profile of such an abomination of nature would have been impossible. It was just a mad combination of blank faces, arms, and legs.

Slowly, one by one, Jean-D danced around the puppet, slashing and cutting at it as she found herself too overwhelmed by the highly unorthodox fighting style of the puppet to properly focus on rushing down the puppeteer. Anyone, who graduated the Ninja Academy, would have remembered that engaging the puppets and playing the puppeteer's game was the worst mistake one could have made against the puppeteer. As satisfying as the idea of destroying one's precious tools of combat and leaving them defenseless was, it was simply an inefficient way of combat as most puppeteers had entire arsenals of puppets in reserve, also the Puppetry Jutsu cost much less to maintain than pretty much anything one would've used to destroy these puppets, even if its strain on the user slowly increased as time of use went on.

Something odd happened in the middle of the ceaseless string of strikes, Jean-D got hit out of the blue, when just a moment later she appeared to have total control. Again and again, she continued to skip strikes before letting up and getting pummeled ceaselessly by the grotesque abomination of artistic liberties. Luckily enough, the kunoichi still had enough in her lungs to manage a quick evasive action that put some space in between her and the puppeteer.

"Dimensional Blade"! Jean-D shouted out as she thrust her knife into thin air, still lighted up with base chakra flare of blue.

A knife with all of its channeled chakra flow intact pierced Buhakim's chest from behind, making the young man's body bend backward in a grisly manner as his body collapsed lifelessly like a sack of potatoes before puffing into a cloud of smoke. The flashy show revealed that the object impaled through a dimensional rift was not Buhakim himself but his Solitary Awakening puppet.