Being driven solely by one's way of being a ninja was a curious thing. Case in point, Mana had thought that she'd have at least a remote idea on how to handle the Chaser once she actually came face to face with the monster with a human face. Despite all the terror and awe of his power that even the insurmountable Sky Clan ninja had in their voices when speaking of him. Somehow, Mana thought she'd pull it through. Just like how she always did.
And yet, now, when she stepped out of the line of fearful would-be gods and slid down the crater to face off against a man like none she'd ever faced before, a monster she missed out meeting by accident and almost butted shoulders with early in her career as a kunoichi, nothing came to mind. She had aces hidden up her sleeves, sure. Moves and things to reveal that she thought she'd use against the Sky Clan if they ever stopped cooperating and tried to kill her and end her mission prematurely.
They weren't moves that'd work and save her, just something to fight back with. And yet, knowing what Mana knew of this bipedal parasite of chakra, she had absolutely no idea of what to do against him. And yet, her feet kept on carrying her forward. Even when the parasite sniffed something curious in the air and turned around toward Mana. These glowing eyes of cerulean light he gazed at Mana with. Despite lacking features signature to eyes, from their shape and the general body language of the tall and fit man, Mana could tell he was curious.
Perhaps curious wasn't the right word… Baffled, more like it. Mana wasn't sure if this monster could sense chakra. From what she recalled of Regalia's plight back in the Wind Country deserts, she suggested that there was nowhere one could run and hide from the beast. That he'd always find its mark once he tastes their chakra. Also, that nothing could stop him. Maybe it would have been wise to start working with that part?
"She'll get herself killed down there," Seikuwo stated, crossing his arms yet finding no better course of action than inaction. Maybe it was for the better, considering that he was a figurative nuke faced against a monster that only grew stronger from his sort of radiation and violent intent.
"That's right!" Ishikeru pounded his open arm with a stony thud. "Mana-sensei said she came here with comrades! I think Mushen turned them all to Shinkyochu!"
"Allies?" Seikuwo looked at his fellow Sky Clansman with confusion. "I suppose a puny little thing like this woman could use some. Though if Mushen stopped them, I can't see them doing much more but feeding the Chaser."
"Chaser! Stop this massacre and leave this Moon at once!" Mana yelled out, trying to put the lessons she learned from Usujitsa in the Rabbit Caves to use. Maybe he too was just a scatterbrain who would yield to a commanding voice?
With his signature silence, the Chaser turned around and raised its hands, as if preparing to wrestle the ninja magician. Mana would have been a fool not to take this as a declaration that her demand for a peaceful resolution had been for naught. Usually when one took a fighting stance–that signaled that they've chosen violence.
The Chaser vaulted forward with a pounce. His moves were animalistic. Fast, though even when Mana couldn't directly see them, her lifelong training at evasive taijutsu allowed her to read his movement patterns and this Yomi fighting style would only become more effective the more of Chaser's moves Mana sees. The magician swooped in a twirl, leaving the Chaser to pounce past nothing but empty air as she danced around him like a matador.
Mana kicked the Chaser, shoving the heel of her leather sandals in the sides of his knees, but it was like a fly trying to headbutt through a brick wall. The monster had been so utterly soaked with chakra that Mana's hits would not register until she either joined him on the level of power of the divine realm or let the beast starve again. Who knew how long that would have taken…
"Weaponry, Earth-woman, weapons scrape the Chaser's skin and rend his flesh on a surface level. This will not leave deep wounds and will only madden him, but it is the only method we've discovered of seeing him bleed," Seikuwo yelled from all the way behind. With a primal snarl, the Chaser turned toward the lined-up Moon ninja. Seikuwo's voice had gotten his attention and so, enveloped in a cloud of Moondust, the chakra parasite dashed toward its majestic prey.
One of Seikuwo's warriors, a slender man of skin utterly soaked with black paint and dressed in a white robe and a silver, halo-like ring hanging behind his neck and extending over his head placed his hands up and focused his chakra into a sphere shining with a silver shimmer, blasting it off toward the rushing parasite. The sphere embedded into the Chaser's chest and began drilling into it, stopping the monster mid-charge.
Mana had to clutch and cover herself up from the immense force of this concentrated jutsu but just a few blinks after colliding with the Chaser, as it could have been expected, it began dissolving into a hissing sizzle of sparks and absorbed within the Chaser's being. So much Mana gathered from the cloud of dust around the Chaser, becoming irradiated with chakra and emitting a haunting lunar glow.
"Shit, they'll keep on feeding him as long as he poses a threat!" Mana bit her lip in desperation. Even trying to starve the Chaser would prove a lethal strategy. Who knew just how many centuries a jutsu such as that could refuel this monster for? Seeing her opening, Mana whipped her hand and flung a handful of steel-tipped cards at the humanoid parasite.
"Well, that got your attention, didn't it?" Mana smirked when the cards stuck into the back of the leech and made him freeze up like a scorned feline. The Chaser bent his back out and stumbled forward, whipping his head back with a furious grit of his teeth. Now he was ready to pull Mana apart limb from limb, whereas before he had been ignoring her and the insignificant level of chakra she offered him. "That's one thing an entertainer hates, it's being ignored."
With a resonant battle cry that shocked Mana some, given the man's relative silence until now, the Chaser hurled himself across the lunar fighting stage toward her. The ninja magician responded, not with evasive action, but with more and more steel-tipped cards. Aiming for his joints, his pressure points, and all-around sensitive areas. She even stabbed one into one of those radiating, azure eyes of his. For the second time, Mana felt like a matador, dancing around a charging, reckless bull and sticking swords into it.
Having allowed the Chaser to rush past her, Mana began a ceaseless flurry of cards, emptying multiple of her steel-tipped decks all at once as she pushed the Chaser back into the location where Mana was just a few moments earlier. Before she evaded his charging slam and exactly where she left a little present for the monster.
"Royal Flush!" Mana chanted as she weaved a hand seal and activated the few explosive pouches she dropped and buried in lunar dust with a sweep of her leg. The detonation they offered was nothing compared to anything that the Sky Clan had already flung at the parasite, but it was entirely weapon-based. There was a hint of chakra in all weaponry, that must have been why weaponry offered only limited effectiveness as whatever traces still lingered in it refueled the monster for some of the damage he had suffered.
It was for that reason that Mana didn't lower her guard for a second and fully expected the Chaser's re-emergence. Problem was, while this opening move was as effective as Mana could've hoped for, it also rendered her short of her cards, lest she began relying on the ones with seals inside them. Given how seals were akin to ninjutsu in some regard, this would have recouped for any ticks of damage she scored thus far if not overcompensate and render the Chaser even stronger.
"She is taking the fight to him. Despite being so fragile, she still fights…" Ishikeru said in awe of Mana staying true to her word before the Sky Clan.
"Of course she does, I told you she didn't lie about that," Tairunto placed her hand on the hilt of her sword, preparing to intercept the charging beast and offer her life for the safety of the majestic vanguard of the Moon ninja if the leech once again charges at them. "For all it's worth."
"Fighting is one thing that the Earth Clan is eager for. Even when the enemy utterly outmatches them, they'll fight on until they either trample their enemy or are so severely beaten that their enemy flees from the grossness of the affair. That is one thing you can be certain of when the Earth Clan is involved. It is of no surprise that she fights, therefore," Seikuwo dismissed Ishikeru's call for awe and respect for the quivering leaf doing its fickle best to stay stuck on the branch it was on in the face of a cosmic typhoon sweeping its home.
An unintelligible grunt came from the cloud of dust. Mana took it to the skies, riding an artificial wind current of the Mystical Wings Jutsu to avoid the Chaser's attempt to charge out from the cloud and bearhug her. From that position, he could have confidently sucked her dry and left her rotten husk as a warning to the others. This was all she could do, for now, keep her distance, just keep him away and dazzle him. Try to figure something out… Something…
A thought popped into Mana's mind as she begged herself to move in time and evade the hurled boulders from down below in mid-air. She lacked some of her usual grace as she wasn't a frequent airborne combatant, though Mana managed. Evidently, hurling building-to-village-sized boulders also wasn't a standard method of attack that her enemy had been used to. Mana's hand slipped back behind her blazer and into the back of her tights.
The only way to remove this threat and not to break her vows was to move him the farthest distance away that one could go. To the whole different universe, anywhere, a void before or after time, heck, maybe straight into the Zahhak's jaws if she was lucky. If ever there was an entity that could survive a reboot of everything–it would be this Chaser, soaked with the nigh-divine level of chakra of the Moon ninja. Mana felt the paper and leather brush against her hand. The feeling of a scroll and she dived toward her opponent in a move that surprised both the Sky Clan observers and even the leech himself.
"She's attacking!?" Ishikeru howled.
"The Earth-woman truly has lost her mind…" Tairunto sighed, already signing Mana off as dead in her mind.
"No… There's something… Unholy in her grip. It's as if… Even I can't sense any matter that I can mold there," Seikuwo's eyes shot wide open as this was the first time that he had to admit something like this. He could even mold the matter of the Chaser himself. With the obvious caveat that the beast would then absorb and feast on the chakra that the head Moon ninja had provided him with.
There was no time figuring out when or where to send him. Specific coordinates required countless hours of grueling work, research, and preparation. The leech had to go away. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. Mana didn't like the idea of potentially sending him away to a universe aware of his threat, far weaker than the inhabitants of this one and unable to deal with what the Chaser brought about, but this was the only way to deal with him. She'd just have to take a note of it and save that universe at some point when she found a way…
Just as Mana pulled her hand out and sought to unravel the scroll, containing the means of a remote link between the omniverse, her jaw dropped as her hand was empty. Mana froze up, hovering right up the Chaser's face as Mana's confidence had taken aback even the humanoid parasite. The monstrous man leaned back in respectful fright, fully expecting its own undoing at her hands by this uncanny, hidden strategy of hers. Once Mana's hands turned out to be empty and the magician, baffled by the sudden disappearance of the technology the Stars used of returning home from the other universe, the Chaser became emboldened again.
The Chaser's hand brushed through a sift of flower petals as he attempted to grab Mana by the throat and gorge on all she offered before snapping her frail neck like he had done to plenty of other Moon ninja before. In shock, it was now the Chaser that froze up and looked down at his hand. He had never felt it before. Lies, trickery, and deceit of the illusionary arts. That was because no other genjutsu had worked on him. Mana's method of casting illusions differed from how most genjutsu specialists used it.
"Genjutsu? How…!?" Seikuwo barked in an equal amount of shock.
"Is that genjutsu, or is that magic?" Ishikeru turned to Seikuwo, pulling his finger from the cover of his other two fingers hanging down in front of it, creating a childish illusion of his finger being separated in the middle by his motion.
"Tsk, if her genjutsu can affect the Chaser while soaked with our chakra, that means…" Tairunto said in a husky tone before cracking into a guffaw. "She's been able to trick us too this entire time, but she held that back from us. She kept that from me! Truly a magical woman, if ever there was one."
"It is our fault for underestimating her kind. Had you suspected the Earth-wo… Mana… To be able to fight us and deceive us with genjutsu, you'd have found out the truth. The reason she had you fooled was that you never suspected it enough to see it with your own eyes. Your biased disbelief clouded your judgment, as it has all of ours." Seikuwo mused to himself while Mana's shape reassembled farther away from a swirl of rose petals.
Mana's expression betrayed just how dire she saw the situation as. By using genjutsu to escape certain death just now, she gave the Chaser some of her chakra. Since some of it had to enter his system to pinch his brain centers the right way, he assimilated Mana's chakra right after her genjutsu contacted him. It was more than likely that even Mana's unique style of genjutsu would only have a momentary effect before the monster absorbed the technique.
"That… Chakra…" the Chaser spoke, staring at his hands as he hunched over in disbelief at what he had just sampled. The Chaser's hesitation to attack and inflict grievous violence against an opponent that he had cornered brought Mana back a little. Though not nearly as much as the humanoid leech speaking up. "I must… Have… More…" he muttered as a black, ink-like glow burst forth from his outline and as he howled toward the ceiling of the golden orb.
A rampant earthquake littered the world inside of the hollowed-out Moon. Fissures and collapse of the scenery that the Moon ninja had crafted here changed the background and utterly ruined the world, leaving just a golden shell and clockwork all over. The illusion of peace and tranquility, of serene culture, disappeared and only the busted gears that churned to make it work remained.
"What happened!?" Ishikeru bawled at Mana from the sidelines. "I thought you had a plan or something?"
Mana looked down at her hands that shook similarly to her opponent's, even though hers quivered from disorientation and not some unnatural surge of power. Where the Chaser had grown more powerful, amazingly so, compared to the minuscule portion of Mana's chakra he had sampled, Mana only wallowed in puzzlement over the disappearance of her last hope.
What happened? Where did the remote cross-universal bridge go? Did she lose it somewhere? Could it maybe have disappeared when Mana dispersed into Shinkyochu? No… She felt it in her hands just a blink before dashing right up to the Chaser. And then… It was gone. Why? How? Where did it go? Without it, Mana had nothing.
"What a conundrum…" the Chaser said, staring at his hand while his body began seeming more and more like it had been inked and scribbled onto this world, like a living character of a woodblock print. "Such weak chakra yet… So delicious… So mouth-watering. Makes me parched for more."
Mana dashed back, taking a wild leap onto a golden gear stuck on a rod to gain some distance and retreat from the battlefield. She crumbled on one knee and ripped her collar open, flinging the white bowtie aside to let some air in.
"Mana-sensei, don't give up!" Ishikeru cheered with a fist bump into the sky.
"Whatever she tried to do, it failed. Now she's done for. It's meaningless. We should take over," Tairunto turned to Seikuwo to see where the leader of the Moon ninja stood on this.
"Where did he go…?" Mana thought to herself. No matter how attentively she scanned the battlefield, the Chaser seemed to have utterly disappeared. The Sky Clan ninja looked safe. Even if Mana moved from its way, the Chaser didn't follow through with his idea of wiping them out.
"Chakra… Devour…" a primal hiss came from Mana's back. Her first idea was not to waste time and motion and not bother turning around, but her body acted before her mind could. An iron-tight grip around her forehead secured an inescapable lock while the monstrous chakra parasite lifted Mana up in the air and reared his apish smirk, observing her pointless wriggling.
He was like a spider, injecting something… Unnatural into Mana's system that seemed to make her stamina, her chakra, both spiritual and physical sizzle and dissolve. Like corrosive acid to the spiritual and unseen. What he left after this destructive touch was no longer Mana's. It was something that the Chaser, more accurately, the Leech, ripped out from her and fed on. It had been something so tasty to him he couldn't stop licking his lips and his eyes shined with splendid vigor, the same one he robbed from that which he held in his hand.
No matter how hard Mana tried to pound the pressure points on the Leech's wrist, his hold didn't lighten up one iota. The ninja magician kept up her struggle, trying to wrap her legs around the Leech's elbow and break it, only for them to flap around, unable to even reach it. She tried kicking, but only flailed her weakened limbs about like wet noodles. Eventually, even holding her hands up became too much of an agonizing burden and they collapsed by her side as the look in Mana's eyes began looking dimmer.
"Kenjutsu: Cross-Draw!" a brutish voice resonated from behind as a thuggish individual flashed in behind the Chaser and draw two swords that connected as one into a katana-staff. Instead, the swordsman drew both of them at once in opposing directions, forming an iaido technique that worked almost like a scissor cut.
The grip around Mana's forehead weakened. A loud grunt of "Now!" reached her muzzled and dazed perception as Shige-H tackled the Leech by his waist, instead of trying to push him away, lifting him off the ground and flinging him toward another gear platform while two rocket-arms grabbed Mana and activated jets to pull her the other direction. Finally, the sapping of chakra ceased and fresh, artificially sweetened air hit Mana's nostrils. Just as the Leech attempted to grab hold of the grappling Shige-H and retaliate by switching his target and draining the Stars' leader instead, a shadowy tendril wrapped around Shige's waist and pulled her out of harm's way.
"I've reassembled your allies and turned the swarms of Shinkyochu they became to human form again, Mana. You better win now. We're counting on you all," Seikuwo proclaimed from the sidelines as the Stars gathered around Mana in a protective formation while the Chaser recovered and wiped his own slobber off his lip. With the chakra he had drained off of Mana, his entire upper body had become drowned out with surreal ink and his eyes became just two white circles, emanating radiance from them. His hair rustled wildly in all directions as the monstrous man flexed his transforming body.
"Not even a full second that you're back to human form and you're already trying to kill someone, jeez, Endo…" Skaven groaned while helping Mana up on her feet and offering support while she recovered from the daze of losing a whole mass of chakra so suddenly.
"I'm not sure what's going on, but that asshole's trying to kill Mana. That means he's the enemy. That's more motivation to kill someone than I usually need," Endo spat aside and pointed one of his swords at the haunting mountain of muscles looming over both the Earth and Sky Clan representatives alike.
Author's Note: Next week I'm going back to the old schedule of two chapters a week. Couldn't have found a better time to finally be able to give this story the attention I want to be able to give than its 800th chapter! I hope someone's as excited about the story going back to a proper pace as I am getting back to it... :D