This mysterious burglar being a part of the Diamond Ring was something Mana could not have predicted. Everything about her crime seemed so sloppy and too on the nose to be applied to someone of such secrecy and proficiency in the art of crime that the Diamond Hand displayed. That changed all plans, Mana needed to first make this woman leak information. Fortunately enough, she was almost begging to tell the magician all about her amazing plan and how, the burglar thought, she had played the kunoichi.
"Alright, you've got my attention. Speak", Mana said.
"Awww, come on. I like to dance while I sing." A reply came not too soon and not too long after.
The burglar moved fast, she certainly had some kind of training and while she may not have known what chakra was or how it worked, someone had explained to her how to make herself stronger by training it. Mana heard the tension on the floor beneath her feet, back in the Rabbit Caves she had learned to fight in complete darkness by picking up on just such details while suffocating on blazing air and occasional noxious gas leaks.
The woman was trying her thing – use the Shadow of the Dancing Leaf to move in behind Mana and then knock her out with a single strike to a vital on the back of her neck. Cutting off the flow of blood as well as the flow of chakra around that area and disrupting the entire network for a good while, depending on the strength of the strike and the augmentation resistance to the impact.
While Mana was struck with a sour case of a surprise that her opponent had mastered the Shadow of the Dancing Leaf to the extent where she did not need to even utter the name of the technique anymore, the burglar was slow and predictable. With a controlled motion, purposefully restricting her speed to an irrelevant fraction of it so that her opponent was not scared off from the attack before it concluded, Mana locked her arm around that of her opponent's at the elbow before snapping the burglar's arm to break backwards.
Where usually the blood-chilling screams of pain followed such a counter, accompanied with the unnerving racket of snapping bones and blood of an open fracture being splattered across the surrounding walls, the limb of the burglar merely bent backward like an elastic sandbag. With a strong yank, the burglar had pulled her arm out of Mana's lock before her fleeing body was cornered by the wall where the safe was located in.
The cruel irony was that while the object inside the safe was seemingly everything that the woman had wanted, she could not leave with it even if Mana gave her enough time to extract it without going through the stage magician.
Those arms were something Mana had not seen, something that surprised her but not enough to break the magician's composure or cost her anything too pricey. "I hope you sing better than you dance." Mana taunted her opponent, she had no doubts that the burglar had already hammered into her skull just how outmatched she was and that she would have been completely crippled by a single exchange of blows had she not possessed those weird enhancements.
"Well, well... Maybe I have been a bit too ambitious, planning to both kill you off and loot the necklace right from your cold dead hands." The burglar-lady exclaimed in unease.
"Those were body augmentations, weren't they? Where did you get them?" Mana pressed on with the questions. Her opponent was unusual in terms of her physical condition but the magician saw no problem in holding her here and keeping her occupied while the woman talked.
"Why? Jealous? I can introduce you to my guy in Otogakure." The playful tone of the woman's voice echoed from around the room as she had leaped up and stuck to the walls. Initially, it had appeared that she was using the Art of Tree Climbing to stick to the hard surfaces but an odd clang noise reached Mana's ears making the magician suspect a sharp weapon attached to both the hands and feet of the highly elastic woman to be at play.
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Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul
FanfictionThe third book of the "Tales of a Ninja Magician" series. A story about Nakotsumi Mana, a stage magician who follows up her dream of changing the violent world around her and becomes a ninja. Based on the world and setting of Naruto created by Masa...