“Shit, you’re heating up” Bult growled after checking Mana’s forehead in the morning. This whole night after her fight the magician felt like some underdeveloped amphibian stuck in a puddle of sludge and drying in the Sun. Her own body was heating up and betraying her, she kept kicking around and writhing in her lackluster bench that most fighters called a bed. She threw blood up a couple of times and the veteran fighter tried to get some attention from the guards who only promised to send someone with some healthcare skill in the morning, if Mana survived that long. She must’ve taken quite the beating…
“You can’t possibly fight Damij like this” Bult sat down on his bench after Mana stopped grunting in pain and rolling on the bench, every time the pain intensified the man held her pressed down to the bench until she threw everything up and the pain stopped, only to come back later. The man sat by her side the whole night, checking that she didn’t choke on her own vomit of fall off the bench. Her innards must’ve already been crushed enough, at least some of her bones must’ve been broken and another shock could’ve just killed her outright.
When the medical staff came they only did some brief tests, checked the blunt trauma all over Mana’s body, examined its color and tasted her blood. They did some really weird looking tests but they claimed that there was no time to do accurate analyses, had she not delivered such a wonderful fight night last evening she’d have not even deserved as much courtesy as she got now. Apparently the Sheikh was somewhat interested in Mana’s condition and was adamant that the best people checked her injuries. Even the big man was looking forward to Mana’s fight which placed unimaginable pressure on her to get better.
“Well… Couple of more hours and she’d have died, we can treat this but she won’t be in a condition to fight for weeks” one of the medical staff declared placing their hands on Mana and beginning the Mystic Palm treatment. The other one pulled out a strange blob of purplish goo and stuffed it down Mana’s throat, the girl could feel the goo blowing up inside of her, it was a similar feeling to having a sanguine pill of Eiju’s stuffed down her mouth so it must’ve served a similar purpose. Some strange liquid that helped her body heal.
“That’s good, she’s done some killer fights yesterday, I’m sure Sheikh won’t mind waiting a bit” Bult sighed but Mana shook her head. Her body felt weird, eyes were heavy and her skin was drowning in sweat, she wasn’t sure if it was because of the desert heat or the burning up fever she was having. Whenever she moved any of her arms the bones wriggled and cracked letting out some pretty disgusting noises but the medical staff assured it was harmless.
“We’ve given you all the medicine we have, it is a medical concoction invented by the great doctor Avemari himself four hundred years ago. The man basically jumpstarted the medical art in the Land of Wind. It has healed much worse injuries than this. Now it’s just a matter of how fast your metabolism will absorb it for, for ninja it’d take hours, you might take a bit longer” the doctors kept calming the two down.
“I’m not much of a martial artist, it’ll probably take too long. I need to be up by tomorrow’s fight” Mana complained.
“Yeah, you’re kind of a puny little thing. That’s why fighting Damij is out of the question” Bult replied looking Mana straight in the eyes. Initially he was completely sure that Mana’s condition would deter her from taking the man on but after a couple of strange remarks his calm demeanor was beginning to fade.
“No. I need to fight. Every day I spend getting better people get hurt and die, fighters taken here by force and those who came here mistaking this place for what it truly is. I have no right to lay here until I feel comfortable to fight, that’s not how this world works. You don’t get to wait before you’re comfortable to take challenges on” Mana replied pushing Bult away and sitting back up. The doctors didn’t appear to object it too much but one of them warned the ex-kunoichi to try and refrain from walking or standing up for too long.
“It’s not your challenge, you challenged yourself with this! Throwing your life away will change nothing. Maybe you can beat Damij, maybe you can jump around and flail like you did with Fajal, maybe you can survive longer than seven minutes against him “ something no one has ever done. One thing that’s for certain “ you can’t fight him like this. Even when you’re good and ready it’s just a big “maybe” that you can beat him” Bult started getting annoyed, he jumped off his bench and started flailing his arms as he spoke which was never a good sign. His fighter’s metabolism was starting to kick in, his swellings had already changed color, it’d probably taken a couple more days for those to heal completely.
“So you will fight then?” a low pitched and a little screechy voice reached the ears of the two as a slim and beaten up figure walked into the cell “ it must’ve been the time when all the fighters were free to watch the fights and no one checked where one went or what they did so Myrwa had snuck into Mana’s cell.
“Myrwa! If you’re here to hurt her I’ll…” Bult jumped up waving his boulder sized fists but Mana gently pressed her hot hand against his chilly dark skin making the giant back down.
“Myrwa-san… I’ll understand if you hate me and wish me harm for what happened to your brother, I have sworn to myself that I’d never take a life and trust me “ I have not yet broken that word. I just wish you to know that I am sorry for what happened and…” Mana tried to speak but her fever and pain all over her body made her words slurry and come out a bit dizzy.
“Will someone let me talk for once?” Myrwa laughed out scratching the back of his head, only when the man had moved his slim arm from his abdomen had Mana noticed a bandaged and strangely brother-less body of the slim fighter. So that accident in the arena made the man have that dead weight removed? Had the man finally moved past his brother being born dead? As much as Mana regretted all the pain she had to inflict to this man, both physical and psychological, having to break down to him what everyone must’ve known but no one bothered to tell, she felt glad that the man had a new chapter flipped for him.
“They’ve removed that stump from my body, normally I’d have to stay confined to bed but they said that my blood is something weird. They said that someone in my family must’ve been from some clan in Otogakure and that my brother was a bloodline of some sort. Apparently since my father was a clansman and my mother was not that tainted the bloodline and that’s why my brother was born dead. The healers also said that my brother’s blood and his cells themselves were poisonous and so my own blood had to possess regenerative properties to counteract my brother’s own poison” Myrwa grinned, closing his eyes and twisting his mouth. While the girl had to hand it to the man that he did appear quite creepy from a bystander’s point of view, reminding more of a ghoulish wraith than a man, Myrwa’s smile was quite pleasant to see. Mana only wished that she had enough strength to smile.
“I have seen a similar condition, you may need to take poison for the rest of your life because regenerative ability is something that carries dangers all by itself. It’ll form…” Mana tried to warn Myrwa, remembering Eiju’s sickness and the Quack’s desire to be cured of having to take poison for the rest of his life but it appeared that Myrwa was shining with glee from it.
“Yes, I know. It’ll form growths, miniature incomplete organisms inside my body that’ll grow and damage me. They said there’s another way “ my cancerous cells could be used as treatment for injured fighters. They said that my blood could be used as a metabolism booster of sorts. They said I can be a doctor if I so pleased. I have risen above the slums, just like I always dreamed…” Myrwa teared up wiping his giant teary eyes with his comically puny arm and his long fingers fit to play an instrument or steal.
“I am glad that you’ve found another purpose. I hope you’ll live a good rest of your life, having moved past the death of your brother and all this mindless fighting” Mana still desperately tried to smile but she couldn’t. She was just too weak, her body hurt too much. Every time she tried the pain made her expression more whiny than happy.
“A weird thing, closure… I used to keep having hope, hope that my brother is alive, hope that I could use that budo-mumbo-jumbo to bring him back even if he wasn’t… Hope that we could rise above being good for nothing losers together. It’s ironic that all my dreams came true when the hope died, I suppose sometimes hope is the only thing keeping you from moving on and growing. I’ve learned from this that only when hope dies can you truly move on and deal with something terrible” Myrwa kept weeping like a child. Despite something revolting appearance of the man, especially so when his facial muscles shifted and bent during his weeping, Mana felt really happy for the man.
“You’re not out of the woods yet… Think the Sheikh is just gonna let you go? Think again…” Bult angrily intercepted, finally settling back down after realizing that Myrwa came to thank Mana and not finish her off.
“That’s why I came here, Mana… I wanted to see if you were actually sticking to your word, if you still fostered that foolish hope to change everything, to give us the choice to leave this place. I want to travel the world and heal people using my clan’s legacy, I want my brother’s death to mean something. I want to be the man with the golden blood. I want you to set me free, Mana!” Myrwa shouted out kneeling before Mana and falling onto the ground. Myrwa rubbed his face into the messy stone floor of the cell, almost like he tried to force his face through it and onto the lower floors.
“Hey, what are you…” Bult jumped off his seat but then Myrwa lifted his head, all the rubbing he did to the ground made his forehead gush red with blood.
“I am not asking you to die for us, I am willing to give you as much of my blood as I have to. I can accelerate your metabolism, Mana, I can make you be in fighting condition by tomorrow, will you do it!?” Myrwa shouted out loudly declaring his offer. Mana looked to the outside of her cell and saw the doctors being lead back by a feeble old man.
Finally Mana’s emotions broke through, her eyes teared up and she had to dig her slobbering nose into the middle section of her own arm. “Yeah! I’ll do it! I always meant to do it and I’d have done it even if I wasn’t able to walk there by my own!” Mana cried out.
“Mana!” Bult shouted out, “That’s dangerously arrogant of you! No one was able to beat Damij or stand up to his crew in a long time, you’re really strong, much stronger than anyone gave you credit for but… Please!”
Mana took off her torn up and messy shirt and extended her arm for the medical ninja, with the other hand she pulled Bult’s beaten and swollen head to hers and pressed it against her forehead.
“I will fight him! I will win back the arena you want to fight in, the best fighting arena in the world where you can fight to your heart’s extent until the day you die tragically in your bed of old age. I will explain to Sheikh that forced fighting only leads to needless death and harm and that only fighters who fight honoring the art can deliver that godly fight he wants” Mana explained, letting Bult’s head go.
“It is dangerous to do this, kiddie, I imagined you’d have ended up facing Damij one day, you’ve got the same hungry eyes as the Goddess of Battle had. However I imagined I’d have the time to train you” the old man who lead in the doctors shook his head and scratched his long and messy beard. It was the same man who told Mana the story of the legendary woman who once completed the Gauntlet, even before Damij did. Finally Mana could place a face behind that voice.
The man was a short but very wide shouldered one. He looked like he could’ve been a prominent martial artist but his age got to him after long years. His face was covered in thick looking skin and strange scratches. Those must’ve been the stigma that lifelong fighting left the old man.
“It’ll be fine” Mana replied laying back down as the doctors prepared to make some treatment from Myrwa’s blood. Naturally they couldn’t have just spilled his blood into her body, they needed to extract the right cells from it and make medicine which Mana’s body wouldn’t have rejected. They had no time to play around with blood types so they needed to make the medicine which would’ve taken some time.
“I’m not much of a fighter so training me wouldn’t have worked, took me whole weeks to learn just what I know now” the girl grinned with a guilty look.
“True, your fighting style reeks of disrespect towards martial arts, designed to win and not fight, defeat and not clash. Still, if anyone can repeat the feats of the Goddess of Battle it’s you. As much as it disgusts me to aid someone like you, you’re the last hope this place has to becoming a sanctuary of martial arts like it used to be” the old man giggled, despite talking a lot of rather mean things that were a bit offensive to Kouta’s and Meiko’s fighting style, he appeared to look at Mana with joyful eyes, almost like a grandpa would’ve looked at his grandkids.
The doctors took at least half an hour more to create the medicine and inject it, Mana didn’t feel much different, the cells of Myrwa didn’t feel like Mystical Palm treatment or any other regenerative measure she’d taken up to that moment. It felt like absolute nothing. On the contrary to the weirdly unimpressive feeling of the medicine it appeared to really have worked. The old man continued to sit around the cell, kneeling by Mana’s bed and waiting for her to recover, desperate to have at least one or two hours to train her before tomorrow’s fight. Despite Mana’s recovery, her fever moving away, her sweating ceasing to as much as it possibly could have in the middle of a desert and her internal bleeding marks fading to just slightly darker spots on her body, by the time she recovered the old man was lead back to his own cell by the guards.
“You shouldn’t fight. Even the old optimist thinks so, take some time, let the man train you. Win a bunch of fights and earn the right to face Damij in a one on one fight the right way” Bult was adamant to make Mana change her mind about fighting Damij but the magician was equally as determined to fulfil her dreams about this place.
“If I did that the Sheikh would pit us against each other in a fight to the death, not a warm-up match. A fight to the death cannot be epic, it cannot be that godly fight which the Sheikh wants. Both of us would just be wishing to survive, furthermore the Sheikh’s joy of battle would be diminished by my refusal to kill Damij once I beat him. It would not work. I need this. This is right” Mana replied with a hopeful and soft voice. She appreciated her cellmate’s worries for her well-being and her life, she really did. The man was beaten and crippled by this Damij and how to him the champion appeared like some sort of sky towering wall of stone and fire.
“You’re just like I was when I was young. You never consider the possibility that you can lose. You keep saying “I’ll win”, “When I win”… What if you lose, what if you’re nowhere close to Damij’s level? What if he breaks your spirit and destroys the momentum and love that the public already feels for you, how long do you think it’ll take to get it back? How many innocent fighters will die then, just because you rushed recklessly. Should’ve at least let the old man train you…” Bult rubbed his aching battered face, probably still remembering the beating he himself received from Damij that crippled him.
“I’ve lost so many times in my life, got beaten so much and refused to fight enough times to never lose the dice roll ever again. If I lose “ I’ll die, that’s how I’m used to think and that thought deserves no further consideration. I’m willing to die for my dream but honestly focusing on how to win justly is hard enough for me to bother thinking about how to die honorably. If I die, I’ll die, that’s that, that’ll be the end of the last daughter of the Wandering Ninja, if I win I’ll move one step up the ladder…” Mana’s feeble voice reached Bult, both cellmates were on their sides only showing their backs to one another because each one was worried about all the different things about tomorrow.
“I mean… No need to dramatize things, it’s just a warm-up fight tomorrow, killing during warm-ups is frowned upon and Damij won’t wish to lose face” Bult replied with a little more cheerful tone, maybe he wished to cheer the magician up a bit, maybe he wished to let her know that this may have just been one of those trials that made her grow where victory was impossible.
“No. I must win and I must do it tomorrow” Mana firmly cut it down.
The two didn’t exchange another word after that until the next morning, the morning of the big fight.
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