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

Children and Motivations

While Mana may have only told Yamata that she required the rabbits to move on to Konoha to save them, she had to admit that their absence and the ease at which Yamata let them go truly felt liberating. Combined with the knowledge that all the rabbits that got sealed away into the infinite nothingness of Ouroboros were now wandering somewhere in the Land of Earth, it made for as powerful motivator as any.

The magician was no longer fighting to keep afloat, to keep herself from drowning in the negativity of having lost everything she had worked for and that she'd die knowing that everything she did amounted to nothing. This time it felt quite the opposite, while Mana did not want to die, she'd have accepted it knowing that what she sacrificed it all for was worth it every step of the way.

That being said, the fight at hand was extremely complicated because Mana had much fewer options than she has had in quite a long time. Her Audra wand was busted and was a good blow away from breaking, which locked away a lot of prowess she achieved in control and chakra channeling during her training with the rabbits. She was now a good couple of steps weaker than she was at her best.

"I take it you are not the offensive type?" Yamata grinned looking at the magician.

Mana let it off to silence. She needed to entertain this person. Ironically enough, just for once her life as a ninja and her life as a magician intertwined. Like never before Mana needed to be the least ninja she's ever been while using ninjutsu. She needed to be flashy, inventive and cheerful. While the first two were taxing, the third one was significantly easier now that the rabbits were safe.

The magician placed her hands forward, she took a brief moment longer than she'd usually take channeling her chakra without her wand or without weaving any hand seals but such was her current situation.

"Magic Spark Jutsu!" she chanted out. A flock of sparks fired out from her extended hands, flashing and bursting with warmth all over the battlefield while they raced towards their intended target with varied accuracy results.

The crimson eyes of Yamata no Orochi lit up with a bright, red flash. It was like he concentrated his chakra to augment whatever effects his gaze put out. With this tremendously clever use of his chakra, the man effectively locked Mana down in place, overcome with the tremendous pressure of the weight of Yamata's gaze, and dispelled all of the sparks at once.

"A pointless distraction," Yamata muttered. "A distraction that fails to draw your opponent away from your main attack is a useless one."

A creep of overwhelming fear crawled up Mana's spine like a large spider that meant to put its eggs in the lower back of the girl. The magician could almost feel its hairy legs rubbing against her body, she could almost see and feel the ghosts of her past failures clinging to her body, forming an effective prison of her own inadequacy that locked her down from movement.

"Move!" Mana yelled at herself from within her prison of oblivion but the bars of anxiety did not budge one bit. The girl had completely lost the control over her own body and that fact just made her fear expand into a massive blob of corruption even more.

"If I don't move, I'll die! Move!" Mana ordered herself again but she could not as much as even twitch. Shortage of air was threatening the magician with a blackout, the frightening feathers of blackness began wrapping around the edges of her vision, making the effective field that her eyes could see in clearly extremely tunneled.

She had to run. She had to use all of her chakra in one big burst just to escape this tremendous gaze pressure and then just bolt. Maybe, just maybe, in a decade or two she could forgive herself for running away, maybe she'd gather enough inner strength to find out if the Yamata ever exploited her escape and got back to her by snuffing out all the rabbits, by killing Kouta...