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

The Evolution Advantage

There the enemy was, aiming its rudder at Usubingu with the intention to blast the rabbit away. The build-up of chakra in the back side of the reptile's body was immense, somehow the serpent managed to direct most of its resources into it even if Mana felt sure it would only use a fraction of that stored potential destructive might.

This was her chance to strike, it would be pretty devastating to the serpent but should not outright kill it. It was building up a compressed mass of Wind Release and once Mana crushed it tail, all that built up tension would have nowhere left to go. With a little bit of luck, it should explode entirely on the inside of the beast's body leaving it less than likely to keep threatening the rabbits.

The azure shimmer of the light reaching in from the outer core below reflecting from the end of Mana's Audra wand flashed in an arc as the magician pointed it at the enemy. She had been channeling and circulating Lightning Release chakra inside her this whole time as she let Usubingu do the luring work, waiting, preparing for a quick chance just like this.

Mana's hungry for success, inhuman perception made the attack drag out. Lightning strands reached out to one another, tying around and connecting with electric bonds and traveling at its destination with purpose. If the final destination of the bolt was not destructive in its nature, it may have even been a little beautiful...

"Lightning Style: Magical Punishment!" Mana yelled out when it was far too late to avoid the technique, even if the enemy somehow managed to put together the massive blunder it has made by poking its tail out.

Snakes were swift, inhumanly so, but most of their speed was reserved for when they hungered and lunged at their prey. When they were determined to catch and kill something and their entire bodies worked in unison with this ancient hunting instinct. Evasion and quick thinking were not skills that could have been attributed to the reptile species.

The jolt of lightning wrapped itself around Calioph's tail, passing and extending itself well past the intended target – the bone-growth at its tail's end. With a blaring, thunderous crackle, the lightning bolt collapsed in on itself, using all of its destructive potential to crush and press against anything unlucky enough to be surrounded by it.

Calioph's jaw dropped, its eyes bulged wide out and the expression of the ancient hunter became that of absolute panic while the sudden flashes of light blinded it in synchrony with the crushing destruction that targeted its tail specifically. While jutsu had the potential to destroy worlds, by far the more potent techniques were those that focused on smaller, specific areas. It was just simple physics, really...

"M-My tail..." Calioph lamented as his body weighed down, clutching desperately at the wall on the sides. Then, its body jerked around in convulsions as the snake realized, far too late for its own good that it still had to somehow deal with the stream of Wind Release it had built up inside its body. The reptile's body inflated and began twitching uncontrollably.

Mana had to hand it to the colossal predator – its scales were incredibly powerful. While the bone-growth was successfully destroyed, just a little chunk of cartilage lumped together, as if molten completely, its body was tough enough not to explode from the built-up inner pressure of its own technique or even burst with a single wound. Eventually, the predator just collapsed, without any signs of life, left dangling by a pair of determined scales that still emanated the chakra required to keep it stuck to the horizontal cavern wall.

Goopy liquid began drooping from the wounds that the reptile had sustained previously in the battle. This one shared the particularly hard scales of Brownback. It was likely that anything of C-Rank or even lower would have been completely ineffective against the reptile so Mana was quite lucky to have thrown her best, given the wild chance.