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

Can't Fall Down

A stunned behemoth stood in front of a bustling gambling house, strangely enough, on a completely different village district to the one he rampaged on not five minutes earlier. The child in a freak's body wore a dark and torn up improvised rag over his head and shoulders, made from somebody's coat. Slobber with a hint of blood red occasionally dripped from the chilling smile of the monster as he stared on at the glittering tower of his dreams.

"Lights..." he wheezed out deep from the bottom of his immense chest. A cavity massive enough to store multiple people that could have spoken for him and yet the partially disguised monstrous appearance of Little Honda was not quite out of the ordinary enough for the ninja village.

A slightly slurring and moving very unstably on his feet customer left the gambling house. Honda's hungry for life eyes caught just a glimmer of the wonders contained inside the gambling house but he liked what he saw. Slowly, moving a muscle of each of his tremendous limbs one inch at a time, the towering abomination inched his way toward the inside of the luxurious gambling house.

"Hey, I'm afraid you will have to stay back." One of the black bodysuit wearing men in shades that watched all that attempted to enter the highly spoken of Hanada Katsuo's gambling house but appeared to care very little for who had left it, whether drunk through the front door or mangled through the back door, stepped up.

A frightening churning sound followed by a dull splatter came not too shortly after the image of Honda's massive fist landing atop of the guard's head. The man may have been an established mercenary making enough dough from the infamous Hanada Katsuo to drown his warrior's pride, but he did not expect the type of brute force and unchained ferocity that this particular visitor brought to the table.

The colleague of the recently deceased mercenary only took a few dashes back to put some distance between himself and the giant. He tried not to look at the grotesque sight of a man snapped in two where his spine failed to support the massive force of the landing hammer-punch above his head nor at the completely ground to bloody dust parts of his recent colleague's body.

"I'm coming in to see more lights!" Honda roared out. The mercenary may have tried to prepare himself both mentally and physically for an upcoming charge or an attempt for this lumbering freak to attempt to utilize the dominant physique of his in an attempt to crush him just like his recently departed friend. What he could not have thought to prepare himself for was a wall of sound that tore the very flesh off his bones before leaving him as just a lifeless, bloody skeleton with what used to be his flesh scattering across the floor in the shape of a bloody stain.

*****

"What is that?" a fancy-looking man in long, golden hair pointed at a monitor far inside and above the vast Hanada Gambling House.

"Don't know, Sir, some sort of freakazoid, I think." The mercenary working on the monitoring duty informed his superior.

"A large one at that. Blocks out almost the entire sector... Why would the face-control let in a raggedy, troublesome thing like this in? Have we learned nothing from the time that orca Hoshigaki-type tried to rob us?" Hanada Katsuo spread his hands out wide before stroking his temples in frustration. "Now I'll have to disturb this perfectly fine evening, just when I thought the trouble in the other districts would flood my gambling house with people trying to run away from the fact they live on borrowed time."

A muscle-headed mercenary-type in a black tank top pressed a button that turned all the lights off, before switching them to red and started spraying water from the sprinklers above. Hanada Katsuo was an efficient man who has found out in life that half-measures rarely drove his customers out when he actually wanted them out. Going all-in with the emergency telegraphing was the way to make all the fancy Konoha ladies step out of their heels for once and really make an effort in booking it...