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

Trouble is Dead, Long Live Trouble

A wave of chakra signatures moved back from the wall. This felt suspicious. So far Erumo's traps have been fairly effective and while the kunoichi had to restrain her imagination to what she could achieve with the resources she had, the people that the settlement gave her and the number of traps required, she still excelled. Retreat from the wall suggested that the dispensers either did not work or were ineffective.

A good couple of dozens of invaders wearing animal pelts that could have used a more skillful removal method alongside their bones and other bodily accessories, donning and stitching their impressive array of adornments all over their makeshift attires rushed into the settlement. The employed trap-makers all fled for their lives, the brutish all-out offensive without a moment for flinching or mourning for the fallen comrades of the tribesmen forced even Erumo to retreat.

A young man with shoddy clothes and petrified eyes that looked as if they had attempted to crawl out of the young man's skull in order to get ahead of his terrified fleeing body made a run for his life. A meaty giant wearing a multitude of stitched together bear furs rushed at him from behind with a mace made of somebody's hefty bones.

The skull-crushing swing that was meant to finish off the fleeing worker met stiff yet reliable resistance of Usuzoku's sword while Mana rushed on ahead with a dash, taking a second to hook the bear-man's neck with her thigh and push it down into the dirt with enough force to break his face but not kill him. Knowing exactly how powerful each one of her opponents was helped a great deal to know exactly how much force was needed to dispose of any of them.

"T-Thanks!" the man yelled out.

"Go. Don't worry about helping others, I'll take care of that." Mana hurried the lucky worker. Immediately after she evaded a pair of rounded, bony hooks that a handful of tribesmen attempted to use to tear muscle and flesh off her bones. These were crude and brutal weapons, left grisly injuries. From the looks of it, they were not efficient weapons in the slightest and would have left one with a torturous yet certain end.

While simultaneously evading the shoddy attempts at placing the magician into an hours-lasting agony with their primitive tools for murder, the Konoha kunoichi drew blood from her thumb and weaved a good dozen of hand seals in the time that it took one of these men to swing one of their hooks. A self-preservation instinct made the magician freeze before placing her palm onto the ground. Luckily for her, the instinct proved correct.

A sharpened and modified skull of some massive herbivore smashed into the area where Mana had intended to place her palm and summon another partner. The skull was the end of an impressive if somber mid-to-long range weapon that was made out of connected vertebrae with the smashing skull at the end. The horns and tusks present at the sides would have served the same flesh-tearing and penetrative function while the thickness of the bone would have smashed one's head like a melon if given the chance.

In a flash of silver, Usuzoku disposed of all of the surrounding tribesmen allowing Mana to complete her summoning technique unimpeded. A goofy-looking white rabbit with a tongue so long and slobbery that he appeared like out of a cartoon that provided a grim contrast to the attempted scene of macabre slaughter all around the settlement.

"Little blasts only, protect the people, cripple the enemy," Mana instructed Usujitsa with a strict tone. In her years of training in the new Rabbit Caves, she had found out that the terrorist was mostly a braindead idiot and whenever one spoke at a decently authoritative tone to him and the rabbit kind of respected the person speaking – he was obedient like a toddler. Granted, a toddler was possibly Usujitsa's superior in the intelligence department yet possessed none of Usujitsa's potential for untold calamity which was why Mana rarely, if ever relied on the rabbit terrorist's services.