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

Bum Piñata

"Is there going to be any groundwork?" Mana wondered as she entered a default defensive stance. She had seen Yushijin fight before, she knew exactly how to stand for the best chance of evading each and every blow from his massive sword or any surprise tackles, feints and kicks he might use to try and spice his style up. There's only so much "spicing up" one can come up with when they're holding a claymore that occupies both of their arms most of the time.

"None yet. I will purposefully slow my pace down for you, try to feel and understand what I'm doing. I'm sure that a prodigy of illusions should get the basic idea in a blink. Execution and mastery are wholly different things altogether..." Yushijin replied. He raised two of his fingers up, Mana felt the intrusion of his chakra within her system but she did not resist. Truth be told, there was little she could have done to resist genjutsu in the first stages of it being used. One could not lay some sort of chakra barrier or shield themselves from illusions completely. Even if they busted an illusion up with their own flow manipulation, the initial stages of the genjutsu technique would have gone on unimpeded.

One could not wall off a rushing river without getting at least a little bit wet.

The next thing Mana felt was a light tap on her shoulder. Perhaps she let up too much. Delayed shattering Yushijin's illusion. She wanted the most time possible to read into it. It was like staring at an ancient scroll, filled with priceless information that was written down in a language Mana could just barely understand while being submerged underwater. Even if she was beginning to choke up and the threat of a watery grave loomed closer and closer, the magician lingered and stared at the tablet, trying to win just a few more seconds to read it, up until it was too late...

It was not a mistake she should make in a battle. Then again, in a battle, she was quite unlikely to study her opponent this way. She would try to understand them but not learn their craft.

"Took your sweet time. Well, learned anything useful?" Yushijin wondered. He was teasing, he must have seen it from Mana's eyes. The magician would not have allowed herself to be completely drowned out in a genjutsu technique unless she intended to read it in its entirety and had a pretty good chance of doing it.

"Your flow is weak at the entry point. Subtle as a tick, if you hadn't used a hand seal, I'd have never felt it enter, just felt that it's already entered my network. From then on you subtly drive the chakra up all the way to the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum, from there you pinch it in all the right ways to play with how the target perceives time." Mana reported.

"W-Wow... Just like that, you've learned the fundamentals of temporal illusions. I'm shocked, you're not just a natural, you're a genius. It took my entire early career to learn just this one illusion and you've captured seven years of training in just seeing the completed illusion once." Yushijin commended Mana with his arms locked over his chest. He let down his guard from the surprise of his student's skill.

"Not quite. Just this much is pretty much useless." Mana shook her head. Yushijin needed to give her more credit than the condescension he gave her in return to her fundamental analysis. "Just knowing which areas of the brain to pinch and how to better do so does not help me. I still need countless hours of practice to work out how different touches make a target's brain react. How and where exactly I need to pinch to accelerate or rewind one's perception of time."

"You forgot stopping it." Yushijin grinned.

"I did not. Stopping it must be the simplest thing to do of all – you've done it as a child. If I had a knife to my throat and was forced to guess, I'd say it's as simple and squeezing the whole thing hard by accelerating and forcing the flow as hard as possible." Mana smiled in return.