Usubane took a brief moment to glance back. She was not the one in the duo that possessed the gift of chakra sensory but there were other ways of telling that the magician was not keeping up with the rabbit. This proved especially odd given how motivated the girl seemed just a moment ago to reach the epicenter of the corrupted chakra which, as she did with many more things, Mana blamed herself for.
"What's going on?" Usubane yelled out, doing her best to yell over the sounds of confused and busy streets below.
"Give me a hand here," Mana asked with a soft tone as she used her Mystical Wings Jutsu to lift herself up so that she could reach a trapped villager, waving in a balcony that had its steel bones exposed while its concrete flesh crumbled to the streets below chunk by measly chunk. The man barely even registered getting lifted off and placed on the ground but he must have been used to ninja as he waved to Mana while she rushed on to the next person in need.
"You're not going to try to rush me?" Mana closed her eyes just to prepare herself mentally for the discomfort that would inevitably come from getting scolded or belittled for wasting time on rescuing villagers instead of confronting the cause that kept generating new cases of civilians in need faster than Mana could aid them.
"Why would I?" Usubane huffed before she lifted off a massive part of the fallen building that trapped a family of four in their basement since the fallen chunk of the building covered their escape up and left them buried. "I don't want you getting yourself killed. Rescue as many people as it seems necessary. I'd much rather help you with saving humans than getting yourself maimed or slaughtered."
"Thanks." Mana did not confront Usubane about her dislike of the magician's idea of confronting Honda herself instead of doing what most lower to average ranking ninja were doing – dealing with the aftermath of those few instances where the monstrosity reared its head and did some damage.
It took a while to reach the end of Honda's clear-cut path of destruction and mayhem. Mana stubbornly helped every single villager in her awareness on her way to the Hanada gambling house. The sentiment of what may have been her resting place belonging to the man associated with the earliest bits of her ninja career did not completely elude Mana's mind.
"I smell something…" Usubane sniffed the air.
"There are people fighting inside. Honda's one of them. This is strange, there were supposed to be more signatures than this…" Mana looked to the nearby totaled buildings with worry in her voice. A smoldering fire of corrupting panic took its place in Mana's chest, arresting her breathing for a moment as she rushed to the destroyed building directly to the east of the Hanada's gambling house.
"Is she?" Usubane gasped looking at the grotesque sight of a lifeless body with greyed out eyes. The awkward position of the girl's neck suggested that it was snapped.
"I sense nothing from her… I knew her a little from the Academy." Mana closed her eyes and pressed her trembling fists tighter. The fear in her chest changed to a different emotion that just for a moment made the magician's fists still and clear with purpose. Given how dangerous this emotion was to Mana's chosen way of life, the magician quickly quashed it.
"It's not your fault, Mana-san." Usubane tried catching Mana's eyes. "You weren't dilly-dallying exactly, you were saving villagers. You didn't know that it was this Hyuga girl or those villagers."
"Come on. Let's see fates of whom else will haunt me." Mana replied with the clear hint of swallowed grief in her reply. It was self-evident from the way that the magician was avoiding Usubane's eyes that the girl was struggling to keep her eyes dry.
Before the duo of a girl and her trusty rabbit could move into the Hanada gambling house with purpose and planning, Tanko Shigin burst through the roof of the tall building. He did so before spiraling off so high above that the very detail of his spontaneous and highly unorthodox exit from the building as well as the altitudes he was soaring in were visible only to those with advanced ninja-like perception.
Usubane knew that now there was no longer any time for planning. Her summoner would be rushing in head-first into a battle she clearly knew she could not win, fostering false hopes of talking Little Honda down into being the silly brat that the boy once was. Compared to those odds, the chances of Mana flat out stopping Honda seemed quite likely.
"Magic girl!" Honda appeared to chuckle while he clapped his hands together. It appeared that Hanada has escaped his ire, that generated as spontaneously as it faded away. Maybe this was because of Little Honda's mental age and lack of maturity, perhaps it was because of the experiments he was a subject to or perhaps the experiments had drawn out and supercharged his childish instability. Whatever the case, Mana no longer looked as soft on the boy as she may have been before.
Her look turned even sharper and colder once she noticed Pagu Aphonei's choked up body as well as the lifeless state of Zephra Tsufuki who laid in a similarly awkward sprawl to her deceased teammate outside suggesting that she had suffered plenty of fractures all over her body before she was given the mercy of death.
"I'm taking you in, Honda," Mana stated without the previous attempts to charm the boy or sound like Honda's big sister or a motherly figure. "You're a danger to yourself and the people around you. I should have seen this sooner."
"Not before I play with the machines. Wanna see the ball roll around the shiny lights." Honda shook his head and tapped his foot in capricious disagreement.
It needed no clarification that Mana had no hopes of taking this horror-show down. The place was littered with bodies of her past classmates, her peers and colleagues that were just responding to their duty and doing their jobs. Sometimes the magic and glamor of being a ninja and the illusion of making a difference and helping one's homeland made one forget the harsh reality of the job.
"Is it not bizarre how this is the second time you're saving me?" Hanada Katsuo slithered out with his nasty tongue. It was extremely unwise to speak so close to the monster with the fire of anger in Honda's box meant for the oligarch was still rustling and the possibility of it growing into an outright wildfire was still very much out there.
"Bane-chan, clean the building." Mana fixed her sleeves and felt up the devices and decks of cards that were present there. If she was to accomplish anything of any remnant of worth in here, the very fullest extents of her abilities and skillset were to be tested.
"B-But…" Usubane was about to object. Mana gave the rabbit a nasty glare feeling lucky that Honda appeared more interested in the novelty of a talking rabbit than furious at the magician or the rabbit for stopping it from killing Hanada who was pretty mean and authoritative with him.
"You're a close-range combatant. There is no way that you will get in close-range without Honda tearing you apart." Mana replied with strictness in her voice that the rabbit did not question. Usubane was glad to be working alongside her idol in the first place, she clearly felt like questioning the magician any further may have reduced the number of times that she got to do that so the rabbit relented her grip on common sense and delved fully into the madness that Mana was up to.
She kept on glaring at Mana with every brown blur to every injured or dead ninja. This was both a warning and a plead that the magician summoned some more aid from the new Rabbit Caves or stalled until some more help arrived but the iron determination in Mana's eyes made it crystal clear that nothing of the sort was on the agenda.
It barely took a moment before the rabbit was gone. Mana wasted no time before beginning to go through hand seals. Honda allowed her the luxury of the first move, expecting a magic trick and the magician aimed never to disappoint an audience.
The girl extended her hands forward, flipping a bunch of switches on her cufflinks that launched entire handfuls of explosive cards at the monster. This was basically the gist of her plan – stay away, chip at Honda slowly until a weakness was revealed. A bad feeling of ease in which this strategy came to her could not leave Mana's mind as she observed the cards float in mid-air like slow-motion. As if they waited for the magician to perform the next batch of hand seals but, truth be told, she was just that fast.
"Friendly Gust Jutsu!" Mana yelled out with both grief and determination in her voice. This was not to be just a normal use of her long-time favored technique, she was working on it a little bit. Not to the point where its power, speed or any other attribute had improved or where it would have become a whole new jutsu but just enough to grant it a slight advantage of control. Instead of being just a wind wall, blasting objects quickly in one direction, the gust curved in an almost crescent-like trajectory and very nearly completed a full 180 turn before dissolving.
Honda looked at the flurry of cards dancing for him and catching the stride of the wind, floating in a majestic fashion with a crescent-like curve to their flow. To a childish mind, this sight was truly to be awed at. A chain of powerful explosions rippled around the monster, throwing him forward, backward, aside at every direction just from the shockwave of the explosive projectiles detonating right in front of him.
Something was different about Honda this time around, it was not that he was less pissed, weaker or slower. It was not that his regeneration factor did not kick in and instantly patch up even those few chunks of flesh that Mana had ripped out or the burns she caused. The way in which Honda differed was in the way his chakra felt. It was still rotten to the core and vomit-inducing to any sensor focusing too hard on its bottomless vile nature but it was greatly smaller than before.
Hell, if it continued to drop at these rates, Mana may no longer be able to track him from just the figurative stench of vile chakra he leaves in the air where Honda passes through. In that case, she would be left gunning for the monster blindly.
Honda barely halted for a second. The monster emitted a powerful roar signaling to his opponent that he had shed his immature humanity and surrendered to the depths of abominable rot that lurked deep inside him. Honda moved like he was fueled by a bolt of lightning, for a monster his size, he was ridiculously quick.
The monster swiped at the support beam where Mana stood, simply brushing off her improvised method of attack and smashing the upper beam as if it offered no resistance. To Honda's careless, violent swipe, toughened by finest ninja blacksmiths Hanada's money could buy steel tore like wet paper. Mana felt air rushing through her hair and her cheeks, she completed the flip during her dive back and landed on her feet. Her read was perfect in this case, she had not predicted Honda to brush her attack off quite this fast or to move like greased lightning but just this time her dodge worked out.
Honda repurposed his charge into a mighty stomp. Thrusting his feet downward and diving down like an arrow. The slam caused the fancy floor tiles and boards ripple like waves before they snapped in half or got torn to chips from the force that passed them. Mana felt like she was surfing on a tall wave for a moment there while nasty and a bit frightening sounds rung all around her signaling the final agonizing bellows of the Hanada gambling house.
Knowing Hanada Katsuo, he must have built this place to withstand the rest of the world blowing up, leaving only this large middle finger, a symbol of greed and addiction floating in deep space amongst humanity's rubble. There could have been no way for the building to fall from just this, or at least Mana kept telling herself this.
The rumbling ground and shift of balance that felt like going weightless for some time did not abduct Mana's ability to weave hand seals. The magician pieced together a lesser used combination of a handful of them in a fraction of a moment, while Honda was adjusting to the weight shift and preparing for his next reckless attack.
He had to be slowed down, Mana had enough experience and skill to evade the unbelievably fast monstrosity for a while through the skills acquired on focusing on evasion alone but she would be unable to land any counterattacks because the enemy would either brush them off or regenerate them again. That made only half of Mana's close-range fighting style viable and it appeared that Honda was capable of closing ranges in exceptionally fast once he got bloodthirsty.
"Polymorphy Jutsu!" Mana chanted out the name of an old technique she used to rely more on when she was newer at this job. It was a game of chance as it was a peculiar illusion Mana had very little control over. It relied more on what exactly was on the opponent's mind to determine the exact nature of the effects they suffered while under it but it had multiple advantages that Mana needed right now: it was quick, efficient and non-straining and it may have disturbed the growing ferocity and monstrous nature within Honda.
Honda bellowed before falling to his knees and placing his hands in front and beginning to sniff the air around him while he hopped around using his hind legs. Of course, he would have been thinking of rabbits more than any other animal in the corner of his mind, that was the last animal he saw and it was an impressive specimen at that. This rendered the giant immobile and powerless for a few moments as he felt trapped in what he believed to be a transformation of his body into a rabbit.
Mana clutched her fists strong enough for them to shake. She still lacked a solid battle plan. For all of her tough talk, grief, and anger she was not going to kill Honda but she had little to no way of actually subduing him either. Any attack in her arsenal was too weak to affect the lab-bred horror in any meaningful way, any wounds she caused the monster patched up in a blink.
"What irony… You're my perfect antithesis. The only way to stop you is to kill you instantly, with one shot. Crush the vital brain center completely." Mana felt the cruel irony inviting a smile on her face but she was too crushed to give into the reflex. The circumstances were too restricting, the loop was wrapping too fast around her neck and too much had already been lost.
"This was scary, but fun… Again…" Honda huffed while his body still behaved in a manner his simple mind imagined rabbits to behave.
"Dynamic Entry!" an all too familiar young and feminine voice announced while a brown blur dashed in from outside the building.
Honda's neck stretched out aside in a grotesque manner while his head squished into a misshapen lump. In just the time it would have taken for one to snap their fingers the rest of the monster's oversized body followed the massive forces affecting his body and flew aside and out through the gambling house's wall. While doing so, Little Honda busted right through yet another support beam and making the gambling house building emit immensely scary rumbling noises that resonated all the way to the top before returning in a deadly and epic in its scale echo down below.
"Usubane…" Mana mumbled while her eyes looked down. She declared so boldly to the rabbit that she had all the answers needed, that she'd take care of Honda all by herself but when she bought herself an opening she just stood there and boiled in the pot of her own disability of changing anything.
"I saved everyone I could… Preserved the bodies too. No reason not to help you now, right, Mana-san?!" the young rabbit tried emulating the very human gesture of a thumbs-up in her own very awkward way. Out of all the rabbits Mana met, Usubane was the only one so blindly imitating humans, likely due to her obsession with Mana.
"Be careful. Don't overextend, stay on your toes and always have an escape route." Mana advised the rabbit while giving her permission to join her side at the same time.
"I kicked the bastard aside like a ragdoll, don't think we need to worry too much. We can kick him about at least until the big guns show up." Usubane grinned while rubbing her nose with her paws in pride. It was an odd display of her inner world, she felt proud of her own display while at the same time feeling ashamed of her pride in front of Mana because she had heard enough stories of the magician to know that pride was not one of the traits Mana valued all that much.
"It is because he did not augment himself and was severely weakened by my illusion," Mana warned the rabbit. "Normally, he'll shrug off even your power blows. Try to keep looking for openings."
That was all that Mana could offer the rabbit now. No game plan, nothing that could have helped her be the hero she always wanted to be and stop this monster. It appeared that at this moment in time it was impossible to both be the hero that stopped Little Honda and not take a life. A choice was necessary between the two rendering Mana's life's goal impossible to achieve that horrific night.