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

Towards the Surface

Despite Mana's most honest attempts of relaying the idea to Usujitsa, the tiny disaster refused to use its clones to help his kind pass to the other side of the cavern. That passage was essential for any of the destinations that the rabbits were to take, whether it was for the sacred home for the Ninja Mongooses or if they suddenly reconsidered on this suicidal side quest – Konoha.

Given how pouty and stubborn Usujitsa was getting, how erratic his babbling voice was and how frantically the little fluffball shook its head in refusal, Mana was forced to back off its case lest she risked running out of whatever favor she had with the little terrorist, killing the Ninja Rabbits far before they even reached the mongooses.

Luckily enough, just as previously thought, there were ample rabbits with the Earth Release affinity. In fact, it may have just been the most common elemental affinity along the entire species so building a bridge in the less than stable cavern was quite simple. Given the sheer number of Earth Release users, Mana wondered if they couldn't have just made a tunnel of their own using all of their abilities together.

Granted, it would be a tough task, the minerals this deep below are immensely hard. Pretty much as dense as anything ever got. That meant that the rabbits would have needed techniques of incredibly elaborate sophistication to carve through this level. They may have passed that obstacle by simply using a variety of lesser ranked jutsu instead.

What they could not have ignored was the distance that such a tunnel would have needed to go as well as the stability it required to have. Not only would the distance drain the builders of most, if not all, of their stamina after completely irrelevant percentages of the tunnel being built, but the builders would require maintaining a level of finely tuned control all throughout.

Given all those factors, it may have just been a safer option to build bridges instead of tunnels and fight anyone using the paths more commonly taken. There was none of that at play with a bunch of rabbits simply summoning a handful of thick, and elongated stone plates from underground and arcing them over the abyss leading to a scorching end.

There was a lingering sense of dread all around while the rabbits took their sweet time getting across. It was an entire population of ninja mammals moving over a narrow plate of Earth Release summoned platforms, after all. Mana kept her sensory open, forced it to scan the surroundings, again and again, almost hoping to justify that awful feeling of certain doom but... Everyone got across without as much as a hitch.

Kouta was carrying Usuzoku on his back. Both the young man and Mana hoped that Kouta's overall chakra resources would last until the fateful journey to the Ninja Mongooses would last in assisting Usuzoku in his valiant battle against certain and most painful death of having his innards liquefied from inside.

After a short while, the whole party of rabbits disappeared into the cold and unwelcome darkness of the caves through which the elusive Nagendi once slithered and attempted its clever ploy to surprise and overwhelm the gathered defenders of the rabbit species. Some of the young appeared interested in seeing the beast's corpse but they were left disappointed – only ash and dusty, burning-smelling remains were all that was left. Usujitsa took good care of that in one of its more capricious moments.

After the rabbits were gone, the entire cavern once again returned to its deadly state of grave silence, breathtaking heat and immense air pressure. There were no living creatures to experience the cavern in a state of illumination provided from the enhancement of their sensory input or to suffer through the blistering heat. Only once in a while, a shaken platform of stone collapsed from one of the walls or the ceiling of the cavern. Eventually, the entire place would collapse, destroying all evidence of any activity ever having taken place here.