The next morning was met with silence. Neither Bult nor any of the other contestants spoke to Mana at all. Granted, that may have been due to the magician’s lack of trying since she just assumed that she once again squandered all of the respect and rights she had earned previously after losing. Wasn’t that how this place worked? People had to fight and win to get the treatment that any human being deserved… Everyone just continued to stare at Mana uncomfortably and all the talking ceased immediately when she left the cell and walked around the hall during breakfast and the announcements of that day’s fights.
From what Mana gathered there was a huge influx of new recruits. A small time settlement was destroyed recently, not too far away from Agbarah, the work of the desert raiders who lately were becoming more and more aggressive as they gathered under the wing of their new leader, granted, Mana wasn’t able to get any other clues about Fennec and his ambitions being involved. She thought it was very likely that it may have been a statement, maybe even possibility that the cursed rogue was looking for the Konohagakure team that crushed the outpost of his subordinates.
Finally when the fights were announced and everyone rushed out to peek at the fights through the small observation spots they could put themselves into, Mana, not feeling like looking at violence she failed to stop from happening decided to just return to her cell. The girl’s feet dragged along the rough rocky ground so hard that she even tripped once and her sandals got full of sand. She lifelessly fell onto her bench and looked at Bult who was also laying and looking at the wall. Why would a veteran warrior withhold the pleasure of seeing some good fights?
“You know, I really expected this hatred treatment from everyone else but… I just thought you’d be different” Mana said with a dreadful combination of sadness and some scorn behind her voice. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely just to suspect her cellmate of losing belief in her, for no longer looking at her like she was a human being but Mana was just too frustrated and crushed by her loss to deal with all of that bull properly.
Bult flipped over and looked at the magician, “No one’s angry at you, we’ve just seen you give up out there and… We thought your dream was crushed, none of us are willing to get in your way now that you’re going through what all of us had already gone through” the man replied, trying to smile gently for the girl just to soften her beaten and squished heart.
“He didn’t crush my dream, I didn’t give up because I gave up on my dream, I gave up because further violence would’ve been pointless. It was a deadlock, I could’ve kept on dodging him forever but I’d have never been skilled and fast enough to respond, in the end he was just a superior fighter” Mana replied scratching her aching abdomen. Her head still felt a little dizzy, that all too familiar sensation of colossal slimy slugs sliding up and down her throat trying to force vomit to burst through as if trying to pull a mean joke on Mana.
“So you’re still going to do something? You still plan on fighting him again?” Bult wondered looking at his own busted up hands and the wounds he sustained during his own fight with Damij.
“Yeah, I just… Need to figure things out, I don’t know how to go at him, what went wrong… All I know is that I was too focused on what needed to be done and not enough on how to do it” Mana replied as her eyes dimly closed down. She was very far away from being on Damij’s level. It was quite possibly impossible for her to ever reach such mastery of martial arts in her entire lifetime. Maybe there were more hacks she could’ve learned but she needed a master who knew them. Kouta knew perfect dodging techniques because he was a medical ninja, Meiko knew redirection techniques because she was a skilled sword user and knew some mystery ways of punching someone in the face. All she could’ve learned here was pure martial arts and there was little to no point of doing it since Damij was better than anyone else there. Then there was still Mana’s own quest of finding the Box of Ultimate Bliss and regaining her chakra manipulation.
“It’s fine, you’re still young, we were all young and ambitious once, we all only looked at things thinking what there was to gain from them and never considered failure as an option. We’ve always thought that if we failed the world would explode and we’d cease to exist so that the best option was to focus on the difficulties ahead, instead of what’d happen if we lost and how to deal with the consequences” Bult replied squirming on his wooden bench and sitting up. “Hey, old man! Are you here?!” the large man yelled out.
“Yeah, I’m listening” the old man replied, “You’re willing to start training or what?” his high pitched elderly voice reached Mana’s ears. “It’s been too many years since the Goddess of Battle last rampaged in the Sun Disc arena, let’s make the old bitch proud, shall we?” he tried to motivate Mana.
The magician laid there in total silence for a couple of minutes, considering all of the options. Her friends may have been wandering the Land of Wind desert looking for her. She needed to somehow let them know exactly where she was and that may have been possible by using some hawks from the Agbarmahal palace. Nothing in her mission directly contradicted her current new side objective, that being said she didn’t have all the time in the world. This was just a temporary stop on her quest.
Mana’s eyes shot open, “Let’s go, old man, however I don’t have much time. We will train for one week, then I shall challenge the Ascension Gauntlet. There are people I must inform and using the Agbarmahal’s hawks or the Sheikh’s merchants to find them and deliver my message would save me a lot of time. I will still save this place, just like I intended…”
“Mana…” Bult tried to object. He would’ve been right to do so, after all, Mana was making almost the same mistake she made the last time.
“Hmmmm, a week you say. You couldn’t defeat Damij one on one before, to make a fighter out of you capable of fighting off three champions of the arena one after another, Damij included…” the old man mumbled to himself.
“We have about a week until any of us are likely to see battle, right now the Sheikh is checking his new recruits, filling the days with useless warm-up matches just to measure their strength, one or two kill matches at best per day. We’ve got time but not much of it, Mana can’t afford to fight and get hurt again before taking on the Gauntlet…” Bult finally got onto Mana’s side despite most likely thinking that she had the wrong idea. He was supporting her just because he knew that the magician needed him. That made Mana’s small but often pouty lips twist in a way resembling a smile ever so slightly.
That very same day, after lunch and getting their daily water rations Mana and the old man got together in an old previously unused cell. It was slightly larger than all the others but all four new and temporary inhabitants were participating in a Battle Royale match. The ex-kunoichi tried her best not to think about how she failed those men and women, how she could’ve saved them from this suffering and potential death if only she fought harder, if only she… Could somehow have won. This was her curse, her suffering but it also made her stronger by giving her purpose and direction, it showed exactly what failure meant and it made her push harder to avoid future failure.
That being so, she was still below average and the old man bodied her every time she wasn’t just dodging and redirecting his blows. She could dodge him and redirect him like everyone else perfectly, not skipping a single blow but the moment she switched styles the old man completely dominated her. It was like he didn’t fight in the present, each and every move of his looked so slow and useless but he was working Mana like a chessboard to place her at a place and in a stance he needed her in to beat her down.
“You’re terrible, it’ll take ten thousand years to make a martial artist out of you…” the old man angrily declared after wiping sweat off his face and sitting down. Technically he was superior than Damij and Fajal combined in pure technique, he must’ve been a martial artist of such skill that it pushed the maximum amount of martial art skill imaginable by the farthest stretches. It was like thinking a pebble was the largest concentration of rocks and then seeing a meteor in action. However the old man was slow, he was also battle worn breaking down in bleeding sessions in mid combat and also he got tired almost instantly, after one or two combinations of strikes.
“Just like I thought…” Mana replied as the two left the cell, she looked at two stretchers with a bloody cloth covering a cadaver of unclear origin, most likely someone’s remains from the Battle Royale, one she could’ve prevented. Needless deaths everywhere she looked and she should’ve stopped them all… And yet, Mana knew no way of how she could’ve helped these people: the only way would’ve been to win but to win she had to have had her chakra which meant having to let the perfume tycoon get gutted by Hisako back then… No person could’ve been blamed for any of this but… Mana somehow found herself responsible for everything, as a person who placed responsibility to change the world upon their shoulders should.
“These moves…” the old man grumped out looking at the gruesome sight of dead men and women being carried through the rotten and smelly cells that reeked of rodent poop, blood and vomit. “How and where did you learn them?” he asked, probably referring to Mana’s improvised style of dodging and redirecting, the combination of two styles taught to her by Meiko and Kouta.
“My friends, ninja taught me those, I needed something to replace my lack of fighting ability after I lost my chakra manipulation” Mana replied looking down and thinking about where her friends may have been now. She could only hope that they were alive and well.
“I thought I saw some ninja taijutsu in there… As a non-ninja I know nothing of those moves but they appear designed to kill, you use them to dodge. There is something that could give you the power to fight Damij, Fajal and all of his crew all at once breaking each of them like a parrot’s beak breaks nuts. That’ll need some… Questionable means to be taken” the man ominously cut down.
“You say that these styles are designed to kill, what do you mean?” Mana asked.
“Well, I see potential in them, they are incomplete. What you show is a paper with a girl of exquisite beauty drawn on it but the face and the bosom are not yet finished and remain blank, you get what I say?” the old man hinted giggling into his fist, no doubt imagining something dirty.
“I’m not sure I do” Mana squinted at him, it was a strange feeling having to squint at someone downwards since the old man was very crooked and so quite shorter than Mana.
“All ninja moves are built to kill and yet yours lack that ability, taijutsu is an art of murder using one’s own body, if you use it differently your style is incomplete. Your moves are just 75% complete and the 25% that remain are a very naughty detail “ killing blows. Your martial art could be a new brand of martial art completely unseen on this planet, you basically invented a new combat style but it is incomplete yet, your moves show capacity for another move very often suggesting that your friends purposefully took something out of them, knowing you’d never kill” the man explained.
Mana had gained a great deal of hope previously but now her face sunk down again.
“I apologize but I cannot complete the style, I have sworn to never kill and I’d rather die than take a life” she exclaimed almost like a mantra.
“And what about the lives of others? If you do not do what you dream of doing people will keep on piling under bloody cloths and will get carried away in masses, good, peaceful people that were just mere settlers before raiders raided their settlements, sending them to this war zone to fight for food. Will you still not take lives then?” the old man angrily growled at her.
“I will find another way… You have given me a great idea, to include offensive moves into my incomplete defensive martial art. Perhaps I can perfect it in this next week but I shall understand if…” Mana began another speech before she was cut short.
“Shut up! I shall guide you until the end of your path, granted it shall be a short and painful path but I shall see to it that you walk it until your feet bleed. Counterattacks. That is your answer. One of your styles focuses on redirection, the other on evasion, they are each purely defensive styles but the first one opens your opponent up for counterattacks. Show me your taijutsu style and I shall use my experience and expertise to help you devise a perfect counterattack style to include into your combination. You shall avoid every attack perfectly and respond with equal or greater pain than your opponent meant to cause “ I find no more suitable style for a foolish pacifist such as yourself” the old man replied stroking his beard so hard that if it was a cat it’d have clawed the man’s face off.
Mana jumped up in excitement. That sounded so perfect for the kind of fighter she meant to become. She’d never become as skilled at martial arts as a purely taijutsu focused ninja but she’d at least have means to fight them hand to hand, so far the only times she’d been beaten were times when she didn’t use her evasive style or used it improperly. If she was taught offensive moves to incorporate in her defensive style in the form of counterattacks it’d be the perfect addition. She’d be the protector of peace and human life who’d respond to any violence with slightly larger force, perfectly avoiding a strike, redirecting it in a way that opened her enemy up for counters and delivering the strike. The perfect trinity!
“Well then, we shall start first thing tomorrow, I just need to know that you shall do nothing stupid until we complete the training. Also if at any point I see that it won’t work I need to know that I can count on you to finish it properly” the old man responded seeing the girl’s excitement.
“I can promise the first thing but I shall fight in the Gauntlet after one week, seven more days is more than I can afford to stay here, for seven days I can tolerate seeing pain and suffering of innocent people just because I am still unable to save them but not longer. I shall make everyone’s pain and lives mean something, this time I’m sure of it” Mana replied.
The old man sarcastically sighed, “You may possess one millionth of her talent and martial arts prowess but you certainly have all of Goddess’ conviction. All of her worst traits and none of her good ones, what have I gotten myself into, I wonder?”
For the next seven days the brutal countdown began. Every day Mana showed the old man the basic moves of ninja taijutsu that she was taught in the Academy, helped the man understand its basic principles and the man helped her adapt those moves into a perfect counterattack based mini-style which she eventually could combine with her present two. The man was adamant about Mana ditching the kicking style, he said that there was no longer any use in the magician keeping her opponents away from her because she could no longer use genjutsu and ninjutsu anyways. She should’ve just focused on the style she was trying to master completely.
An important part of the training was also Mana’s attempts to make the style visually pleasing. The man expressed his disgust of Mana’s cheap and abusive style and claimed that it felt like cheating at an honorable art of martial arts and the magician took it to heart because she wanted the Gauntlet to be the best fight that the Sheikh and the public had ever seen. She was an entertainer as a stage magician, she knew what pleased the public, cheap visual and auditory tricks to keep them entertained, strikes that may have looked visually pleasing but were less than stellar in their sheer force. Mana wouldn’t be losing potency, she’d still be overcoming any attack thrown by a human or weaker ninja. So many times the magician was told that she could never fight on an even level to a ninja who can use chakra augmentation, ninja that can move in blurs and destroy entire buildings and even mountains with their full power, not to mention chuunin and higher who could probably blow up the entire world if they didn’t control their chakra transferring through punches alone. Studying with the old man made the magician doubt those claims for a second. She was getting good.
Was she good enough to beat all three champions of recent events? Possibly, maybe not. That much remained to be seen but she was growing in strength, speed and technical knowledge of the martial arts. She still despised an art based on violence but she fought not for destruction of this arena but for the art meaning what it was always supposed to mean. Improving oneself through the art of fighting. Mana was not that kind of person but she saw the people to whom it was a way of life and she wanted that for them. She wanted the Sun Disc to mean what it once meant, not for it to be some rubble of stone with its inhabitants let to wander the cruel desert.
The entire time, those whole seven days of her training Mana also took a brief moment to talk to Bult every night, hear what he had to say about each and every champion of every event of the recent days. She was a girl who loved knowledge, certainly on the geeky side so the more preparation she could’ve gotten on the potential opponents she may have faced in the Gauntlet the better. Despite only being able to get a couple of clues, as few as she had gotten went a long way. Right before the seventh day dawned Mana knew deep inside that she was as ready as she could’ve possibly been. Tomorrow she’d once again waltz her way out into the arena and demand for the Ascension Gauntlet!
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