Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul

Destination - Shukuba!

The sky-wide blue and purple bruise was beginning to fade away, giving in to the fountain of bloody sunlight that squirted from the horizon before stabilizing into a shape of a burning sphere. The gaseous cotton was like a canvas for illustrations of Mother Nature as she performed another masterpiece. The jury was still out about if it would bring a downfall of frost on the land or if something different would define the color palette of the ground beneath Mother Nature's aerial masterpieces.

Mana had little time to observe the shifting and breaching dawn, her attention was solely focused on a white rabbit of a cottony fur, just like the clouds above her head, except the rabbit's white was yet to be tainted by dirt and blood. Usuzoku was a mighty opponent, once he may have been even mightier, like when the two had first met, she could not have ever dreamed of matching the rabbit in skill and speed.

Now the matters were entirely different. Even as Usuzoku brought his best, Mana was quite able to, for the most part, avoid getting demolished. Just for the sake of preserving chakra for the day and not to needlessly risk breaking her system again, crippling herself potentially for life, Mana asked Usuzoku to use a bokken instead of his massive and quite deadly cleaving blade.

That was not to say that getting hit with a hardened wooden sword swung by someone much faster and about as strong as a B-Rank ninja did not hurt or did not carry the potential of leaving calamitous injuries. Yet being hit in the face by wood, as much force as it carried behind it, was much easier to treat afterward than getting dismembered or cleaved in half.

Mana danced around Usuzoku's quick barrage of hits but she was getting tagged. Every single impact burnt the surrounding area while it temporarily made the point of impact completely numb, only to return with tenfold the searing sensation and a nasty bump afterward. As she was getting hit more and more, continuing to dance around Zoku's attacks was getting progressively harder, just like in the arena with Stea.

Except this fight was nothing like that time. This was just a game, a pointless sparring session meant to just keep Mana's skills sharp. Despite her being about on the same level as her summoned rabbit partner, she was holding back significantly as her goal was not to fight the rabbit. It was to push herself to her mental limits and then sharpen her willpower. She needed to get hurt, to get cornered and then accept that pain, learn to deal and live with it.

"String Reeling Jutsu!" Usuzoku yelled out, the frightening sound of steel wire shrieking like a scorned apparition as it tightly pressed against Mana's wrist, digging into her flesh and breaking her skin but failing to leave anything but a nasty skin-deep cut due to the magician's chakra resistance. Good, her reaction was on point, she managed to toughen up a limb that was previously lacking any augments faster than the pain of it getting hit cruised through her neurons.

"Double-Draw!" Usuzoku yelled out, using his massive rabbit feet to dash near-instantaneously up to Mana as he drew his blade, driving it against her locked up by steel wire arm at her elbow and her armpit. One hit – a drawing slash with his bokken aimed to break her hand by the elbow, re-sheathe, draw again and thrust it towards her armpit to disable the opponent completely.

Mana's body burst into flower petals, scurrying away from harm before reassembling her bodily shape farther away. She was not proud of having to dodge the attack this way, the magician intended not to use this jutsu during training. Had the opponent been anyone else, had they been a microsecond slower... She could have relied on her stage magician cred to pull her out from the binds. She could have surprised the opponent by being free before they even prepared to exploit the bound state of their opponent.

"Yer holdin' back. Dis ain't even fun!" Usuzoku grumbled, sheathing his sword before raising his cute, pink, little nose in the air like a pouty little curmudgeon that he was.