Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Flashbacks to a Nightmare

Sekita cried out at the darkening evening sky, her entire body stiffened in tension. That and her roar made it difficult to tell if she was still struggling with the agony of having drunken an entire vat of venom that the Allied Ninja stored in this place to be used by their ninja on missions, or if it was a declaration of violence meant to the gathered staff of Allied Ninja tutors and recruits alike.

The woman's size had grown tenfold and she was already a behemoth, to begin with. Her eyes whited out and twitched lifelessly but there were no signs in her chakra that she was dying or going through any sort of weakening process at all. It was quite the opposite – the Akimichi youth was soaring in power as her flaring chakra signature colored the mixture of bronze and red. It was the color of a particular taste for violence. She did not thirst for blood but merely for breaking things, lashing out at the world for the pain she was feeling at the moment as well as the pain that it made her go through her entire life.

The threatening giantess tumbled over herself, taking a few stumbling steps forward as her upper body leaned over, Sekita clutched over her abdomen as the skin flaps that hung all over her body stretched out and filled up with something else. Veins bulged out, flushing with unclear, cloggy fluid from within the young woman, a sort of phlegm that had an unhealthy shade of blood-red mixed with something corrupted and violet, resulting in nothing short of bloody sludge coursing through Sekita's veins.

Bile poured out from Sekita's mouth as if a hose was let loose and freed to spray and flood all around it without control or restraint. The emerald sludge with webs of black snot covering it as an outside layer threatened to flush away the entire storage yard. The wall of the rushing flood reached to the very top of the vats, forcing Mana to jump up and clap her palms and feet together before waving them underneath her and activate her Mystical Wings Jutsu to form a wind current to ride upward.

There was no time to save everyone, Mana grabbed the nearest staffers to her – the old man with winter clothing and the woman that might have dressed for the exact opposite conditions, wearing an elegant headdress and looking like a priestess of some civilization founded in the eastern Land of Wind deserts. Mana wasn't used to carry passengers around so her flight was slower than she was used to but she persevered and flung the two ninja to the tops of nearby venom vats. They turned around and thanked Mana with their own grateful gestures.

Mana bit her lip, seeing the flood claim one of the tutors – a well-built middle-aged man with dark skin and bone-shade hair. She begged whatever forces might have been listening that the bile wasn't lethally venomous or acidic though, judging from how the man emerged and activated the Art of Water Walking jutsu to get over the venomous tide with his elegant, blue coat corroded to rags with the venom working on his shirt and tie next, the magician just winced.

It didn't look that these people know what they were dealing with, whereas Mana might have had an idea. Sekita was a mutant. In extremely rare cases, there occurred mutations to the ordinary features and abilities of a ninja clan member. The Chinoike clan were all mutant Hozuki clan members and the magician had the honor of meeting them during the Yordalar mission way back. The hanging skin flaps, the unsightly appearance, this unique reaction to ingesting outright poison... This could have only been a mutation on the usual Akimichi features.

The Akimichi clan did not have a bloodline ability per se. They utilized hidden techniques taught within their clan which made them slightly more open towards marrying and procreating with people outside of their own clan as the chance of a clansman mutating like this was only recorded, to Mana's knowledge, on extremely rare cases of members breeding within their clan. It wasn't quite like inbreeding, the clan wasn't necessarily related through family bonds but curiously enough, when it came to mutations, they tended to occur within the offspring of two clansmen.