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

Cruelty

"I noticed the bunnies playing close to home. When I spoke to them they seemed quite spooked out, what happened?" Mana looked at her ninja animal partner who just scratched a spot behind his ear, enjoying this action for a short while. After he alleviated that itch, the rabbit sighed and spilled the beans.

"Da snakes have us pressed to da wall. We dun have too much space ta back out to." Usuzoku grumped.

"What did they do?" Mana asked with a slow and composed tone.

"Not sure who done did it but one a dem done kidnapped a bunch a younglings. Dose dat ran back to deir mommies said da bastard straight out ate one little bunny up on da spot." Usuzoku explained. "'Ey... Where did ya go?"

Kouta looked around frantically, noticing that Mana decided to not wait around until the talk was over and the two had settled down. She had dropped her bag in Usuzoku's place and just disappeared. Even if she did not know the place, she could use her sensory while concentrating to reach out for the highest and most malevolent chakra signature she could find.

It was less than a reasonable plan of action but Mana was in a less than a reasonable state of duress. Kouta rushed out after her. He could hear loud and rushed clangs as he moved as fast as he could so that he could catch up to Mana while she was still concentrating instead of when she was moving at full speed with her target in mind.

Loud thuds to the stone spread out as wide as the sound could reach into these caves. Emanating and reverberating from any surface before it became a ghastly harmony of smacks to the stone by a hard but organic substance. Ever so often, the thuds were snuffed out by a panic-inducing, deafening hiss that expanded kilometers to each side until at the very edge of its sonic life became a sad, almost wailing-like melody.

The place was a deep, round cavern. Similar to an indenture in a chunk of clay if one drilled it with something solid and perfectly round. The half-cut sphere that went down into the hard and dense stone structure was illuminated briefly by cracks in its bottom from which a flow of molten steel spread its light and heat. The place used to be decorated with hive-like structures. Houses and the like for the rabbit population before the entire society was driven out, deeper into the caves.

Enjoying its current status quo, a curious titan hissed with self-satisfaction, raising its peculiar-looking head and enjoying the bunch of little bunnies it held inside the coiling position of its body. From here it could have just simply driven its head into the circular trap and swallowed these poor, petrified for their lives bunnies whole. They would have had to grow for a hundred years before they'd make the snake even stretch itself one inch while swallowing the bunch of them...

The colossal snake turned and twisted its strangely shaped head. As if showing off the crest on its head that was very much unlike the heads of most other snakes it had known. To the terrified younglings in its clutch, the gigantic snake with a pterodactyl's head would have appeared like something from their parents' nightmarish tales of the monsters that would come get them if they misbehaved on steroids.

"Lightning Style: Magical Punishment!" Mana's voice echoed through the structure while a crackling beam of lightning wrapped itself right around the skull of the titanic snake, applying all of its weight and density onto the skull of the cruel apex predator.

The snake hissed out while it fell to the front. Right before it would smash onto its own coiled up body and conceal the trapped bunnies in darkness, Mana hit its skull with a Spear Kick to make it change its direction and tumble backward while it uncoiled and let the bunnies go.

"Go home," Mana ordered the bunnies. There was no cheer or the usual showmanship in her voice. She had to sound strict and scary enough to intimidate these scared kits into motion from their panic and make them trust her. In her mind, such an approach should have worked however reality proved to be a little bit different.