Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

The Obligatory Wonderful Life Episode

It wasn't like Mana woke up. More like she stayed asleep yet somehow aware of her slumber. She no longer felt the pain all over her body or the sadness over the way things went. Initially, it was like her soul, like some ethereal substance that was only Mana because the magician identified herself as it floated in the air, just several meters above the girl's body. Observing one's own body knocked out and beaten, broken and without a doubt dying was a strange experience. The only thing about all of this that still kept Mana happy was that she didn't float away just yet and stayed around for a while more.

Mana had faked her own death numerous times on the battlefield. Sometimes it was her go-to strategy when she needed to make an opening when her opponents weren't giving her any. Had it not been for this strange fighting style she'd have never survived against Hachi or beaten Noji and Sunomaru right here. This thing going on now, however, was no trick, she was actually feeling her own existence fading away, for real. It's a spectacularly dark and incomparable to anything else experience. Needless to say, Mana's heart was not calm even during this peaceful moment of silence and tranquility. She was afraid.

Could she really be blamed for being afraid to die? Someone at some point said that nothing was to be feared but fear itself, that sounded really stupid at that moment. Maybe the true revelations only came before one's death? Maybe it was because she knew this unavoidable part of living – dying, that Mana could say for certain that fearing fear itself was stupid. What was the point of something existing just for the sake of it being applied to itself? Then again, it wasn't that in this world everything had its point. Mana, for starters, felt incredibly pointless at that moment, her entire life felt like having been lived for nothing now that she lied there dying.

Mana was afraid of death and she felt like that was perfectly normal, death was the ultimate end of everyone. If one didn't fear death or the concept of the absolute end, what else could there have been to fear? Death was certainly scarier than fear itself, at least fearing the end made some lick of sense even if it wasn't as majestic and celestial as the greatest heroes of literature would have made the girl believe. 

They would've been disappointed in her for caring about her own life but, for some reason, Mana still considered herself right. Even if ninja could breathe fire and throw thousands of weapons at their enemies in mere seconds even the best and least human of them were susceptible to death. Even the strongest and the smartest died, just like Mana's own sensei – Tanshu did. There may have never been a more powerful ninja in this world and there may never be in the future and still he died, with all of his inhuman strength and endurance even he found his limit which he couldn't cross.

The girl closed her eyes, or at least its soul or whatever was floating above her body... It closed its ability to see. Suddenly the magician felt unifying with her unconscious body, merging with it again. For a brief moment her heart lit up with happiness for the first time in quite a while – maybe she'd still survive this? No. The magician was quite familiar with the concept of meditation, even going as far as to discover several stages of it. 

The first one she called Ego, in it she could witness all that was going on with her own body, it was like her own body lit up as a galaxy of stars and suddenly the girl could feel what was going on. The second stage was called Omnes. Mana had still very little mastery over it but it somehow extended the Ego stage to everyone but her. Somehow the magician was able to see small stars instead of people instead of the usual black void with stars around her own chakra network.

The current sight was almost tragic. All of the stars were slowly going out, some of them were burning up, the hottest they've ever burnt but slowly each of them were going out in these gigantic flares, gigantic being a very relative term since those stars were minuscule in comparison, smaller even than the chakra nodes they were supposed to represent. Her own personal galaxy, a universe inside Mana's body was slowly dimming and going out, one star at a time.