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

Gifts of Hermits and Sages

"They got away?" Meiko clapped her eyelids a pair of times. Her confusion at that moment was greater than her hotheadedness and the foolish desire to bang her head against an impenetrable wall.

"Why, they were winning?" Kiyomi stroke her chin, she was similarly confused as to why their opponents would withdraw shortly before establishing their advantage so clearly. It was especially odd given that the pair of rogues were the ones to attack them, to begin with.

"This bio-material, I've seen it before," Waiso explained. He walked up to the grey puddle and plunged two of his fingers into the goop. "This is what happens when you expose a very decomposed corpse to impressive amounts of chakra."

"I could have done it. I was being pushed like never before, I was right on the edge. Just one moment later I could have ignited my sword." Meiko pouted, crossing her arms over her chest. Anger and obsession of this nature was not really something that would normally be attributed to her. Kiyomi turned her attention from talk of bio-material of decomposed corpses back on her treasured teammate.

"You mean they used the Dead Soul Technique." Hanasaku pondered. It would be very unlike Chestnut Hanasaku to identify techniques and skills like this had they not been so closely related to the medical ninjutsu specter of techniques, something that the woman knew quite well in theory but not execution.

"Probably, we've seen that talisman-user give a simple command to living bodies on Kiyomi, it is highly probable that such a jutsu is more commonly used on corpses reanimated through Dead Soul Technique." Waiso pondered as he kept rubbing one of his goop-covered fingers against the others.

"This location does seem suspicious," Kiyomi admitted. "The only reason it would be so open is if there was once a massive battlefield here and everything was simply demolished."

"That means they used the Dead Soul Technique to create corpses out of the remains found in the soil, using tremendous amounts of chakra to both make them work and transform them into their own likeness. Then, when Hanasaku-sensei attacked, the enemy replaced themselves with the corpses and let the corpses get destroyed while they made their escape." Waiso finally put things together out of the details all around him.

"That still leaves the question why." Kiyomi raised an eyebrow and stroke through her hair that was falling over her face to move them away. Her tidy hairdo was all messed up by the explosion she took head-on. "They were winning. Such a setup and a complicated method of escape would have cost chakra and time. Why invest in such a complicated escape method just to make sure you had an out of a winning battle?"

"They must have overheard me and Hanasaku-sensei talking." Waiso guessed.

"I heard you talking. What of it?" Meiko crouched to the putrid pile of grey biologic waste on the grass.

"I said sensei's name out loud. If I had to guess – they did not know she would be here and after they did hear – they got the hell out of here. They even went as far as to leave Meiko and Kiyomi alive if they had the option to kill them because it would have made an escape from a furious Sannin impossible. With Chestnut Hanasaku confused and taking sweet time to figure things out like we are doing now – there's little hope of catching up to them." Waiso theorized.

"So then they were just some lowly rogues, looking to behead some ninja for the black market meeting? Make something more of what they already had for it?" Meiko gruffed. It was hard for her to believe that the person who not only mastered what she could not but also beat her clean was some lousy rogue ninja looking for a cheap head to sell.

"Maybe, maybe not. You two are just genin. Your heads can't be worth more than the explosives they spent trying to claim them." Waiso remained unconvinced.