Mana flicked her fingers. A pair of cards slipped from her sleeve. The magician flung the cards in an attempt to keep her opponent at a farther distance as well as make him reveal more of his arsenal. Of course, he will evade a simple barrage of projectiles but he will also be forced into action and reveal the unique way he acts on Mana's terms when she's ready for him.

Vasuki's ally flowed like a jet of water, he was agile, he had perfect move economy and was beyond flexible. Had Mana not known any better, she'd have taken him for being the snake if judging by how easily he bypassed her attacks. The man dashed in the close distance, throwing his palm up.

Mana was ready for him, she knew exactly when he'd come at her and as such, she managed to lean and dash back from his attack. What she did not expect however was a pair of arm-sized snakes coiling around one another slipping from the assailant's sleeve.

"So you're a summoner then? I guess it makes sense that the snakes would call you up." Mana spoke almost like she speaking to herself more than the man she was fighting.

"Man, killing you is gonna be a real shitshow. I didn't sign up for this…" the man scratched the back of his cloak. A suspicion sparked in Mana's head, a suspicion of what the man's attempts to remain mysterious were all about. She had to tear that cloak off, she had to expose this guy. Mana leaned forward, with a flick of her hand she let two more steel-tipped cards to slip into both of her hands for some close distance fighting.

Before she could make even one half of the distance she meant to, the magician dashed back. Her sensory alerted Mana of something coming at her from above and lo and behold, Vasuki's tail slammed on the floor of the Ziggurat she was fighting on, damaging it and causing a good chunk of it to collapse down onto the mongooses below. Mana couldn't let them get crushed.

The magician charged forward, trying to race the falling rock. It should have been simple, it should have been just her racing with the natural velocity of falling debris, it should have been child's play. A rough kick to her chin made Mana's body arc back and fly a good distance back, going as far as to tumble over the edge of the Ziggurat floor she was on.

"You can pull yourself back up, I'm not falling for that one." The man taunted her when Mana tried lurking on the edge, keeping her palms and feet stuck to the side of the structure and trying to lure her opponent into letting down his guard. After her intentions were exposed, Mana vaulted back to face the still mindless Vasuki and her summoner.

"You're a Konoha ninja, aren't you?" Mana tried to taunt the man back and make him talk. The more time she was not getting kicked around and slammed with Vasuki's titanic tail, the more time she bought for someone to finally come and aid her with this.

"No." the man replied.

Vasuki hissed like a wild, untamed beast and just slammed its head at Mana as if attempting to tackle her. Mongooses were still rushing at the serpent with much smaller and more spread out numbers. Mana sensed something in the mindless animal, she kicked off the ground and charged at the serpent with a kick of her own.

"Spear Kick!" she yelled out as her foot met Vasuki's tackle and the two impending forces crashed.

Mana was not that physically powerful, Vasuki was absolutely massive and barely needed chakra augmentations to push around anyone smaller than it. That being said, Vasuki may have only had the bare minimum of its chakra reserves left. Its chakra signature was barely enough to register its existence. Shedding another body as well as reverse-summoning this man must have absolutely exhausted her.

The two clashing forces came at an impasse. Mana could feel the flesh and bone under Vasuki's scales giving way and crunching. She couldn't tell much about the state of the serpent but it definitely should have felt that impact. She was winning the force struggle.

"Shit!" she cursed while the magician had to repurpose her nearly victorious push into a backflip that moved her farther away from the mindless serpent and its summoner. The cloaked summoner attempted to drive his knee into Mana's back while it was open and extended in mid-air kicking position. Had she not given up on trying to damage Vasuki with her kick, she'd have had her own back broken.

Having landed on solid ground, Mana could feel her opponent's frustration by looking straight at his wandering eyes that turned back at its partner who failed to sync up with him. The man must have expected a combination attack that they have coordinated with Vasuki but he did not get it due to the mindless state of the serpent. Soon, mongooses overwhelmed the serpent once more.

"Hidden Shadow Snake Hands!" the man exclaimed, making snakes appear from under his cloak in a group charge. The snakes, while small, rushed at an impressive speed and distance at Mana extending well over fifty meters in their rush for her. Luckily, at that distance, and with the attack being so impromptu put together, Mana managed to avoid the snakes by just dancing around them as her opponent has danced around her own attacks.

"You are a Konoha ninja," Mana concluded out loud, watching as the mongooses cover Vasuki up and begin clawing at it or slashing it with weapons, drawing a great amount of blood from it. "I have to say, for someone of your rank, someone who is able to fight me off while they're afraid to use their true fighting style, you're not too bright."

"So you've noticed…" the man cleared his throat before removing the hood and revealing a rich, shoulder-length hairdo of dark hair. The Konoha headband was not hanging on his forehead but it was tied somewhere inside that cloak.

"You're pretty strong for someone using just snake techniques. Someone of this strength should be able to beat me if they went all-out." Mana had to admit.

"Hmph, it was not my idea to just rush in here like this. It was all Vasuki, the useless reptile just lost all control and started burrowing here once we got closer…" the man grunted. He did not have to reveal this to Mana, he was defending his pride even though that was entirely unnecessary. He was prideful, maybe she could have used that?

"I thought killing kids and rabbits was sort of beneath someone like you." Mana taunted the man.

"Hmph. All too true. That being said, the damned snake promised me to teach something interesting if I helped it get its revenge. I'll kill anyone I have to, even the Konoha's Sorceress herself to get that secret." The man raised his fist up.

"Secret?" Mana wondered to herself.

"Listen up, you stupid snake! If you can't think straight, I'm taking control!" the enemy turned his back to Mana but the magician knew better than to charge at the man now. If someone of his experience showed their back, that meant they were expected to be attacked. Just like predicted, the man turned his head back with a taunting smirk before taking off and landing on Vasuki's head. The man then began fighting off the mongooses that attacked Vasuki as mindlessly as it chose to invade their home.

The magician took this moment to sense the chakra of the mongooses she failed to protect from the falling debris before by dropping her guard. She couldn't pick anything up. Nothing at all… She failed them. This emptiness where once life simmered should have inspired dread and great sadness in Mana's heart but the magician was now old enough to learn to use those feelings and convert them into anger.

"I'll provide the chakra, you half-dead, good for nothing sock. Just give me a body to mesh with and the sheer size, will you." The mysterious summoner weaved a handful of hand seals before slamming his hands together and building up an alarming amount of chakra. Something big was coming!

"Combination Transformation!" the man declared as clouds of white filled the entire cavern, leaving it through the open hole where Vasuki blasted through.

"His chakra doesn't appear to have increased but…" Mana thought to herself while doing her best to track the enemy inside the white smoke. A loud, roar made the air pressure push intensify and drove a large gulp of smoke down to Mana's nostrils and her throat. Whatever the enemy transformed into, it was big and a perfect combination of Vasuki superhuman size and mass and the summoner's relatively intact mental state and above average chakra.

Coiling tentacles slammed into multiple floors of the Ziggurat before wrapping all around the structure and pulling on it. Mana felt a tight pressure. She had to force all of her chakra to augment her body to keep her innards from getting pressed out of her like toothpaste from a tube. She could barely see anything inside this damned smoke. As more and more smoke cleared, the frightening visage of what Vasuki and her summoner became clear.

It was a round colossus, fat enough to press its frame in between the Ziggurat and the very bottom of the cavern it rested in. Whatever ground stood in its way, it demolished with sheer size and expanding mass. It had no legs, there was no use for something like this when its sole intention was to stand its ground and kill everything in sight. Where there should have been legs were a couple of dozens of snake-shaped tentacles with no eyes or openings for mouths.

A whole bunch of those snakes extended up and down and kept yanking on the Ziggurat in an attempt to topple it. One of these tentacles managed to pin Mana down and press hard on her. The magician wondered which would give way first, her body or the floor of the structure beneath it.

"M-Magician's Touch!" Mana yelled out, transferring surges of Lightning Release chakra through her body and up the faceless snake tendrils all the way up to the titanic monster that combined both human and reptile features.

The combination titan roared in pain. The snake-like tendrils that threatened to destroy everything the mongooses had and held dear must have felt intensely numb as Mana managed to push the one that pressed against her away with relative ease. Even while numb, it was easily ten times her size and a hundred times her length. Even if the technique she used did not temporarily paralyze the opponent, it would have had little option to move freely in this compact space. Compact only for someone of its size.

After the monstrous transformation pulled down its numbed and horrific tentacles off of the home of the mongooses, a much more unified and controlled multitude of mongoose forces flooded out from the Ziggurat, charging right at the colossal and lumbering giant. More and more of the white transformation cloud cleaned out revealing a frightening detail.

The unattractive looking face that Mana took for the creature's head was only a growth at the center of its chest while its true head was missing, replaced only by hundreds of much smaller but just as long snake heads with spiked bone protrusions where their eye ridges should have been and covered with bright colored spiky patterns of bone.

The magician wanted to help the mongooses, they clearly did not anticipate this influx of new stunned targets just waving about to shake off the feeling of numbness from Mana's technique. One of the bright orange heads swiped wildly in a horizontal direction, spraying flames from its mouth. The dizziness and disorientation that persisted in the beast made its aim wobbly so none of the opposing animals got incinerated by this attack.

If only the mongooses stopped doing what they wanted to do the most – just charge at the snake monster blindly and stopped for a moment so that Mana could work out a plan of attack, things could have been better. Then again, perhaps she did not need a plan?

Combination Transformation was a pretty pricey technique to use. It usually required pretty nifty contributions from both sides which, in this case, was not what happened. The human summoner was the one that supplied the crazed Vasuki with chakra. Such a transformation should have had some flaws…

Usually, the animalistic side should have been the sturdy and invulnerable one, because that was where all the chakra used for the Combination Transformation was. This time, it was the exact opposite. Vasuki was the weaker contributor that barely contributed a thing because it barely had anything to contribute. That could have only meant one thing… The snake bits were the weakest links.

Mana took a leap of faith down. Lightning Release chakra crackled all over her body while she flashed her hands in a blur weaving some hand seals and pulling out her trusty Audra wand which she pointed at one of the numbed lower body tentacles.

"Lightning Style: Magical Punishment Jutsu!" she yelled out while a bolt of lightning shot out from the tip of her electrified Audra wand, channeling all the way from her body and through it. The jolt did not attempt to send the shock and spread it alongside the entire limb, let alone the entire titan of a monster Mana and the mongooses were facing, it merely covered a small area and imploded with all of its intensity and density.

The lightning blast dispersed leaving little to no signs of damage. Mana's surprise was so strong that she just barely managed to wave her Audra wand in time and form the gusts of wind. The gusts that prevented her from hitting the bottom of the cavern where the snake tentacles slithered creating a deadly den of faceless serpent-limbs.

"Mystical Wings Jutsu!" Mana chanted out as she controlled the channel of wind gusts to raise her up and swoop into the level where the mongooses were engaging the monster. She felt a moderate amount of burn in her legs and arms and a small shortness of breath made her slow down for a moment while she observed the combination titan recover its better control and the ability of full movement.

Mana pointed her wand at the neck of one of the plentiful heads that were occupied in an attempt to devour the mongooses. This may have been a much more sensitive target – the bottom snakes were a combination of the serpent and its summoner, the face that laid grown into the flesh in the beast's chest was the most human part while these snake heads just blindly chased for the mongooses – it must have been the most Vasuki part of the titan.

The jutsu that Mana used was not one that required words or much hand seals anymore, just like most of her early childhood techniques, not after training in the Rabbit Caves. Before Mana lost the need to call out its name, it used to be called the "Finger of Death Jutsu". A rather weak and useless technique, less of a jutsu and more an experiment on how Wind Release techniques worked.

Wind Release was at its most potent when it was used for its cutting ability so the first jutsu Mana ever invented by dabbling in it was a simple, elongated stream of wind that worked more like a scalpel than anything else. It left small and shallow cuts into whatever it hit but it was not all that fast or strong. If the monster got injured by this, it would get injured by anything. This jutsu would show Mana if the heads were the weak spot.

A spray of blood drooped from the sides of where the cutting stream of wind sliced into the flesh of the thick serpent head. Within an instant, the injured head turned at Mana's direction and opened its mouth.

"Shit, it hurt, didn't it?" Mana bit her own lip as a pleasant tingle of respectful fear for the size and power of her opponent ran down her nervous body. The magician flicked her wrist and sent a steel-tipped card to the side and made it lodge into the Ziggurat while the steel wire attached to the card helped the magician to spontaneously move her in mid-air.

Initially, the magician had no idea what the nature of her enemy's attack would be. She had a nasty feeling it would be faster than any of her gusts could carry her away from. Her hunch was proven right when the injured head breathed out a stream of hot, glowing salad green air. The magician had no idea what that was, but it seemed too fast for her limited Wind Release technique to race with.

Mana felt the bones in the heel tingle with pain once her feet hit the wall. Her augmentations faltered there for a moment. It was not something too troubling just yet but she'd be wise to stop wasting chakra on countless weak sauce techniques and finally pull something that worked out of that fancy hat of hers.

As the serpent head continued to breathe its bizarre air attack in a chasing attempt to murder the magician, it was soon beheaded by a mongoose that was swinging by on a similar improvised grappling hook that had a three-point kunai on one end and steel wire attached to it that connected to the device on its arm.

Mana may not have been someone whom the mongooses would have listened about the titan's weakness but they would listen to one of their own. By unintentionally showing one of them how to fight this thing, she may have inspired a more effective offense by the mongooses. The magician's eyes faltered just for a moment, having picked up on Usuzoku's slightly replenished and more lively chakra signature, followed by those of Mongohi and Kouta rushing to the upper levels.

"They've got the anti-venom specialist's request for anti-venom. They must be rushing back to the small complex cave where they filled all the forms to see Mongolepius about the anti-venom." Mana thought to herself. Only the sound of crumbling stone and grungy dirt, snuffed out in the harmony of hissing from the snake heads at the top of the titan's body drew her attention back to the monster at hand or, rather, the colossal buttocks flashing right in front of her face as the titan was climbing out of the cave.