Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Fatal Warfare

Mana couldn't keep on looking long after the next fight started. She wasn't even sure about what she should've done next. The person she was trying to become would've busted in and stopped all the fighting, right now out there in the arena there were people trying to kill each other. But was Mana that person really? She was never anyone special and now she'd lost even what little special that she had. What was her plan actually? Maybe Bult was right about everything, she spoke a lot of things about peace and saving everyone but she didn't even know the further course of action.

"Come on, let's go..." A guard rudely grabbed Mana from behind and dragged her down from the small stand where she could almost see the people bashing their faces in inside the arena.

"Go? Go where?" She mumbled out, her voice was still muffled and ridden with confusion and stress.

"You've had your chance to earn a nice place to spend your nights in. You've squandered that so you're being moved to the basement. We're moving some new folks, Damij's crew into your cell. After today it'll clean up..." The guard replied caring little that Mana dared to speak.

"Clean up?" Mana spoke but the guard slammed her against the wall warning her without a word that his brief explanation was as good as she would get without pushing it too far.

What could that have meant? Why would her and Bult's cell clean up after that day, she was alive and so was Bult until the fight concluded. Something must've been wrong, something shady must've been going on. Bult's hand was busted up and his entire body was riddled with scars of various sizes but he was a long time veteran and normally shouldn't be counted out unless...

"He's being slaughterfest'ed..." Mana realized. She turned back after the realization hit her but the guard started pushing her even more violently. Whatever little decency she had before was now gone after she lost to an underdog of the roster. Mana's body and mind were taken over by a new sensation – fear and not knowing what to do. Her normal human body was working so slowly, thinking so slowly and shaking like a leaf. A ninja thought fast, acted fast, everything in their bodies, even the signals in their brains were supercharged. Being how she was made Mana feel like she had a mental condition or something.

"What are you, having a panic attack or something? Don't worry, the fighting is over for today, you get to live another day... Not that you tried too hard to earn it, though." The grumpy guard replied laughing half-assedly after that last remark. "Those moves were pretty sick, what were you a dancer maybe?" The man asked but Mana didn't reply, she knew better than to speak in her current standing with the guards and the roster.

The new cell she was shut in was pitch dark, moist and rather cold. If one was troubled too much by the desert heat there was some solace in this dark cube of containment but it did its best to completely limit all the other senses. Mana didn't even doubt that she'd go blind after a spending some time in that pitch blackness surrounded by a silence so quiet that after some time her own mind started imagining screeching noises just to make sense of it all. Finally, something above started leaking, drops of cold but smelly water from above entertained her fleeing mind at least for several moments.

Mana wrapped into a ball grabbing hold of her head, trying to keep her mind intact. There was a conflict once again between what had to be done and what Mana wanted to do. Just like every time she did anything, Mana was forced to choose between her mission objective and what she had to do to become the person she wanted to end up being. Mana's mission was clear – help her team confirm the Box's location, even while she was separated from the team. If they were OK – they'd find her eventually, all she had to do was sit tight.

That being said, she didn't have the luxury to sit tight, even if the magician could've used her newly learned defensive taijutsu styles to survive as long as she had to, beat any martial artist that the arena threw her way she couldn't do that. Bult was a kind man, a warrior soul who may have been very different from her: rude, combat-loving and primitive but he was a kind person as well.