Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

The Final Throes

A weighty thud pushed out a hawk with his wings pressed to its sides. A living tip of an arrow, coated with the radiance of basic chakra and spiraling through the air toward its destination. The distance of twelve kilometers covered in a third of a second as the bird's beak met its fleshy goal. Mana let out a husky grunt as the hawk left a jarring hole in her chest and straightened out its trajectory in an arc that tested the bird's integrity. The bird of prey lingered in the air, observing the young woman fall on her front with an obliviated expression reflecting only a void of any signs of life.

Ion's sandals clicked against the stone plateaus a couple of times as the second-generation assassin rushed in to confirm her kill. She wasn't a sensor so knowing if Nakotsumi Mana was dead or not was a troubling matter. One made even more troubling having in mind that the young woman was a potent ninja. Ninja had metabolisms and vitality that defied reason, a person without breath in their lungs could have been alive and sustained through only drawing vague breaths every twenty minutes.

"Is she dead?" the hawk wondered, the weight of the impressive flight and synchrony with the heavyweight artillery that the Snipe Hawker employed taxed the bird and one could have been able to tell from his voice alone.

"Maybe, maybe not. She's got a hand-sized hole in her chest, even if she's not dead yet, she'll soon be," Ion replied. She was in a rush. It was possible that nobody would have noticed that booming sound far off in the rocky wasteland and nobody from inside that building would miss the magician, of that the assassin had made sure already. Still, if the magician was just playing a mind game with her, it was dangerous to approach this corpse without being fully sure.

"Mana!" a blood-curdling scream pierced the training grounds. Ion's heart shuddered as her eyes scanned the surrounding, she was looking for a spy. Someone hiding their face behind the brushes of the stone pillars but that was not what she got in return. Shige-H rushed through, ignoring all reason and danger of rushing out to a stiffening corpse of one's ally out in the open with the killer standing right before them.

"I'll make you wish you hadn't done that," a whisper crept up from behind Ion, making the assassin jump up. It wasn't stealth but the speed that did her in as Araki Endo had blitzed right behind her and decided to skip the mourning process and simply tear the assassin limb from limb in an act of self-justified vengeance. It was a simple emotion, primeval almost, she should have seen it coming.

Ion leaned to the side. Her father had polished her martial arts skills plenty. She's been knife-fighting and performing feats of gymnastics and life or death evasive action since she knew how to walk. Someone who struck from afar like the Snipe Hawker would have exhumed a simple weakness of being easy to shred apart at close range and father made good on his proclamation of trapping a simple-minded opponent in their basic line of thinking. Ion vaulted backward and pushed her body off of the plateau, landing in between the rushing Stars members.

What is the meaning of this? She had infiltrated the Stars, hasn't she? She made sure to learn about the type of person Mana was and manipulated her into shutting herself off of all of the friends she had made here. She was supposed to be alone, that was an integral piece of Ion's plan. An emerald gleam beaming out from her backside made Ion's sandals shift uneasy, grinding the gravel under her feet.

"Can you help her?" Damisan turned to Shige-H who was leaning over the hopeless case of a magician without a chest cavity with freaked out, moist eyes.

"I... Who knows... I can't heal THAT, that much is for sure..." Shige-H cried out in desperation. Good. This was the first time that Ion had heard the leader of the Stars this freaked out. She usually maintained her composure and whenever it was not so – the outburst of feelings that Shige-H displayed was clearly played. Ion was too much a faker herself to be played Shige-H's act though her gang was played. Gullible fools, maybe their natures could still have been appealed to?