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

Cut / Itches that Cannot be Scratched / The Good and Bad Way of Letting Go

The hive was a cradle-like environment. Cozy and greatly compressed by the massive amounts of threads and furs hanging all over the place. Judging from the looks of it, this was the place where the intricate outfits, accessories, and items devised out of the cadavers of both human and animal bodies alike were made. A handful of bare-skinned women donning only layers of paint across their extremities and their face, crooked and starved were still working, ignoring the end of their world transpiring around them.

Their hen-skins were pale and beginning to rot in places, the magician figured that these women would die the moment they stopped continuing the strenuous physical activity, allowing the cold to put them to sleep and then claim them shortly thereafter.

There was no missing the beady pair of eyes staring at the magician from above. A woman wearing shells of turtles and skin of other reptiles across her body hung over the top of the hive, using the webs of threads and hanging bone accessories to place her feet into and maintain her upwards, bat-like hanging position. Just like in the tribesman's mental image, a long tail of strewn together insect shells covering a piece of hemp rope and a frightful, still bloodied hook attached on the end and weighing the artificial limb down.

"Your people won't give up until you're down," Mana stated staring right back at the woman, unfazed by her ocular, death meaning sparks.

The black scorpion woman gave her assembly of workers a cruel hiss, obeying the scorpion's authority to the end, the bunch dropped their work in the middle of production and scattered. The scorpion woman then placed and rubbed her hands over her upper arms, as if she was cold, even though that could not have been the case. The black scorpion pinched and lifted both of the shells protecting her elbows and then let go of them, letting them snap back into place. The scorpion woman then pointed at the section of hooks behind shrouds of wool, dyed crimson by the skinned bodies mostly concealed behind the mists of wool puffs.

"Your people have no more home. If you're a drop of a mother figure your folk make you out to be, instead of threatening me you'd..." Mana grumbled as an answer to the revelation of what the scorpion woman planned on doing with the magician's dead body. Her answer was cut short by the scorpion's smack, with a single twitch of her abdomen and her chest, the woman sent her artificial tail whipping at the magician's direction.

It only took a lean of her head a bit to the side for the hooks to miss their mark and smack into the wool and the stone behind Mana. The magician was not nearly as stupid as to let down her guard and allow the hooks to hit her on the way back. She grabbed the artificial tail and sent a shock of Magician's Touch Jutsu through it. She could only perform a lower ranked version of that jutsu so suddenly and without the use of hand seals at that moment but even a B-Rank version would have sufficed.

True to the ideals she instilled within the hearts of her people, the black scorpion did not scream or grunt, she jerked and twitched as the charge of the Lightning Release jutsu passed through her body. The still smoking body of the tribeswoman smacked onto the ground. Mana would not give it time nor the space to recover, she dashed up to the black scorpion, delivering a crushing kick to her abdomen and sending the woman smashing into the wall with enough force to send even more cracks throughout the entire mountain range. A pair of dislodged chunks threatened to crush the two women still duking it out inside.

Mana thrust her hands up, she may have survived getting crushed by one of these boulders but not her opponent. Through grit and determination, the young woman pushed the boulder back the direction it came from but then something shifted so very high up. The weight intensified thousands of times. A back-breaking sensation similar only to having a saw dragged across one's exposed spine made Mana's perception of the environment around her fade out momentarily. For just one second, the entire mountain top was resting in her hands.