Kouta and Meiko continued to observe Mana’s leaking and overflowing bursts of dark blue chakra flares in shock and awe. To them it was tough to understand or even to believe that their friend had after such a long time regained the ability to use chakra, augment her abilities and use ninja techniques. While normally the two would’ve felt relief about such an event and that Mana’s troubles of identity would’ve been solved now they were far too stumped to feel such a thing. Maybe it was because of the excessive amount of events transpiring and piling up on one another: Shimo’s death, Francho’s colossal expansion and weight increase and others.
“Okay, now I’m totally lost…” Kusagoro flipped his hands up before smacking his forehead.
“Mana, your chakra is back! The shock must’ve forced your body to remove the mental restraints!” Kouta yelled out triumphantly. It took a brief moment for the young man to finally catch up with what had just happened. To understand all of the implications of this revelation but he was happy, the girl he loved was finally whole again and he’d get to know the side of her he had never seen before.
“Your chakra is leaking outside your own body “ its size must be massive! Just how powerful were you before losing your control?” Meiko laughed out in surprise. The blacksmith must’ve seen this revelation as something to pull the team out of a tough spot, something to save them and the joy of finally regaining hope was getting the better of her.
“It must be all the training I’ve been doing without my chakra. I’ve strengthened myself so much that my physical chakra increased at least ten times in the Sun Disc arena, I can still feel my spiritual chakra growing right now to meet the physical chakra size and balance it out…” Mana expressed her own surprise after looking at her body which was expelling rays of darker sapphire blue flames, it was a much darker colour than the typical light blue chakra colour which was another mystery of its own.
“It doesn’t matter, Francho might just be ten times the size of the Earth and just his hands possess mass larger than the human mind can comprehend. He’s as good as invulnerable…” Kusagoro grunted making the hope inside Kouta’s and Meiko’s eyes slowly dim before dying out completely.
“Oh no…” Mana shook her head angrily, her entire body began to tremble overflowing with the newly regained chakra, her whole essence was pretty much soaked with the augmentations that the new chakra could provide her. Yes, Mana knew it was immeasurably inconsequential compared to the force Kusagoro hit Francho with which appeared to be inefficient at best at much lesser mass of the Akimichi’s body but Mana was a different kind of ninja.
“He killed Shimo. He doesn’t get to hide behind his invulnerability. I’ll beat him down, and just this time… I’ll kill him!” Mana shouted out letting all of her built up chakra out before her hands went through a combination of hand seals, one that she had only used once and then lost the hope to master. The magician was seeking use of the illusive technique that she was attempting to control and use properly during the most of her ninja career but lacked control as well as chakra pool size.
“Sweet Lullaby Jutsu!” Mana exclaimed after setting her hands in the position of the final hand seal and then emitting a soft and sweet melody from her lips in the shape of a whistle. The gentle whistling tune filled the air and then Meiko, Kouta and Kusagoro fell to the ground grabbing at their abdomens and blushing. It appeared like their bodily temperature had risen almost like they had a fever but their eyes were wide open because their whole bodies were paralyzed with pleasure.
Finally, after regaining her control and drastically multiplying her chakra pool dozens of times Mana managed to pull the Sweet Lullaby off. Now that her body and mind were both as one after Shimo’s death, now that both her conscious and unconscious parts wished nothing else but vengeance and justice for her friend’s passing, stopping this maniacal Pirate Lord before he destroyed the whole world in his desperation.
“What… The…” Kouta uttered as her closed his eyes covering them as the sights he must’ve seen were too much for the boy’s composure. “And it smells so good…” he continued to whine in his delirium meanwhile Meiko was jumping in joy and rolling around on the box by wrapping her arms around her legs like a human cannonball of joy.
“Swords, swords and food everywhere!” the blacksmith screamed out in glee still blushing while the young redhead’s eyes raced around looking at one illusionary artefact after another.
“No way… What a powerful illusion, even I don’t have the chakra in my current state to break it!” Kusagoro shouted out in surprise as even he was grasping at his heart as if the pleasant smells and sights were threatening him with a heart attack. Eventually he too was forced to fight with himself and close off his senses.
Mana looked back at her friends and felt a bit bad about not letting them know about this illusion. It wasn’t meant to be used as a mean of battle, it was supposed to be something she used on his father, something she worked on ever since he received those injuries in his final mission. Something to alleviate his pain and change it with pleasure. Eventually the magician understood that she would never manage to hold such a technique focused on him forever and so it could never be used that way. Still, other uses of it were still possible.
Francho began yelling into the sky, he wailed around frantically tossing his immeasurably heavy arms around through empty space just narrowly avoiding hitting the moon which would’ve shattered it to pebbles. The Pirate Lord then grasped his abdomen as if trying to clutch at a very irksome spot and began crumbling down as if he was about to crash into the Earth but then his size began to drastically decrease.
The Sweet Lullaby technique overloaded one’s senses with pleasurable sensations, stimulating all of one’s pleasure points and affecting pretty much all of the humanly senses. The affected were all who heard the sweet tunes of Mana’s which she emitted after casting the illusion, they saw, heard, smelled and felt whatever gave them most excitement and pleasure. In addition Mana’s voice began sounding like an alluring song of a siren making it heavenly and alluring making it immensely difficult to even wish to cancel out the illusion even if the victim had the ability to do so.
Just as the minimization ended and Francho got reduced to normal size the tall and fat Pirate Lord slammed on top of the Box right onto his face spreading his disgusting filthy murderer blood all over the Box’s top surface. Mana turned around and looked at him with burning fury, one only seen in the eyes of a person whose comrade was just killed right in front of them.
“How did he… Hear that from up there?” Kouta continued to struggle to even be able to talk as his body was paralyzed and drawn to the ground from sheer intense pleasure just like Francho’s.
“Figured his stupid pills also augmented his senses amongst which was his hearing since he assumed he’d have a way to hear a positive answer from us even from all the way in space. Augmented senses can be used by the enemy just as potently… Because his sense augmentation was purely pill induced he couldn’t have limited it even if he wanted it” Mana replied coldly while she walked up to the beaten up and broken Pirate Lord. The man was shaking in pleasure and didn’t even try to resist or pick himself off the ground in the highly undignified position he ended up in after being face-planted into the Box. After a couple of moments passed since Mana stopped whistling the illusion ended by itself.
Meiko and Kouta struggled to pick themselves off the ground as they had never been so effectively disabled before. Even Kusagoro still huffed on one knee as his muscles twitched after such immediate end of such intense overload of pleasant sensations.
Francho still remained on the ground, writhing as none of his bodily parts seemed to work. The pirate must’ve finally hit the after-effects of the pills now that after getting hit by Mana’s illusion he was unable to maintain his mass and size manipulation techniques and had to overload his abilities to return to normal size and weight.
“Mana?” Kouta asked with great worry behind his voice after seeing the magician slowly walking up to the pirate and just standing in front of his undignified and broken pose.
A lightning fast punch dug right into the pirate’s face throwing the man rolling to the other side of the Box and close to plummeting below to oblivion. Mana pulled her fist back and caressed it shouting in pain as she wasn’t used to just punching and the damage it did to her own hand, she rarely used her fists but this time it couldn’t have been helped. The magician looked at the messed up bloody pulp which was left from the almost completely drained of chakra Pirate Lord as he helplessly writhed on the ground. He didn’t say anything or even shout in pain, he just laid there like a goddamn vegetable.
Mana grabbed him by what little remained of his hair and pulled the man’s face up closer smacking him from the sides, slapping him a good couple of hundreds of times in rapid succession. While her speed was unlike anything Mana had even seen her own body pull off before the magician didn’t care to admire her own growth. She just worked out of pain and instinct. Mana grew sadder and broke into more and more tears with every smack she gave the Pirate.
Finally the barely resembling a man mass of flesh in Mana’s arms slipped out of her arms after Mana loosened her grip and collapsed on her knees breaking into tears. She didn’t do it, she didn’t kill him. The magician could still hear difficult wheezing which made bubbly mix of blood and air still escape Francho’s nose, or at least the part of his body where it was supposed to be. Kouta walked up to Mana and hugged her from behind, the magician turned around and hugged his abdomen in return pressing her head against his chest.
“He killed him… Shimo’s dead… But I couldn’t do it. I still don’t want to” she whispered in tears still struggling to believe it.
“Yeah…” Shimo nodded and looked at the beaten pulp of a Pirate Lord laying in the pool of his own blood. Depending on the fact if his unnatural metabolism provided by the ability to control chakra remained he’d just barely pull it off and recover. There was little doubt in that fact “ Akimichi Francho was a tough one. What state he’d return in would be a different matter entirely…
“Mana decided not to kill him. It’d probably be for the better if you didn’t…” Meiko looked at Kusagoro asking him more than ordering. The veteran Jugo just shrugged.
“She beat the guy, she owns the laurel of pulling all of our asses through. I’ll just have to deal with it and respect her claim to that fucker’s life” Kusagoro replied after walking up and spitting close to the messy pulp of flesh that Akimichi Francho was.
“You hear that, you vegetable-ass-looking fucker? She owns your life now and any time she will want to take it, I’ll lead her to the depths of hell to find you and help her claim it” the Jugo exclaimed taking a moment to enjoy standing atop of the man who proved so difficult to beat all by himself.
It was true, Akimichi Francho used out all of his tricks which were meant to shift the power balance between the Pirate Lords and move his crew on top in an all-out war. In that sense the Pirate Lord didn’t just fight Kusagoro, he waged war on the man and used out all the tricks he’d have used normally to win the war with the other Lords. He used up all of the aces up his sleeve just to beat one experienced jounin from Konoha and still he failed. History would remember this man as a failure even if he was so immensely powerful. He had the power to literally hold the world in his hands and yet by using that power he ruined himself and got torn down to nothingness.
“Kid” Kusagoro referred to Mana while still looking at the grave-like silent oblivion of total blackness that surrounded them only briefly coming up with the illusion of being lit up by the purple lightning storm when they stroke. “We should probably head out soon, if you want to use the Box to bring back your friend, I’d advise you to not waste any time. That trick which Francho pulled may have alerted a lot of people “ cosmic size beardo’s usually do that. While I doubt any villages will rush into a cradle of pirate territory a lot of marine hunter ninja might, it’d be troublesome to explain yourselves and reveal your mission objective to them, even if you do “ the Fifth’s face will be instantly tied with this battlefield”
Mana slowly stood up and felt Kouta’s grip loosen, she stepped out of his embrace and nodded. She understood Kusagoro’s worry, after all, if the Fifth is tied to this place she’ll have to pay for any damage caused for this area and she’ll have to repair this place out of her pocket. That’s more zeroes coming out from a village’s budget than one could count on their fingers. Also it’d be a nasty stain on the village’s reputation. Ninja weren’t heroes, few people would care if the Konoha team just saved the world from a threat they themselves escalated, many more would lose faith in Konoha’s subtlety at handling things.
The magician placed her hand on the Box’s surface and allowed some of her chakra to leak out. Normally people couldn’t just transfer their chakra from themselves into other people, even medical ninja couldn’t pull of such a seemingly simplistic feat and yet something told Mana that the Box would be different. She didn’t care if this mission would be a failure. That much she and her team had decided on since the very beginning. Shimo deserved a second chance seeing how his first was taken away from him because of Mana.
Was it though? Could Mana really blame herself. As the magician’s chakra leaked out through the crevices of the Box lighting the whole structure up like some intricate mechanical wonder the young kunoichi wondered if she was actually to blame. Wasn’t that the whole point Shimo tried to portray before his death? Wasn’t it what pissed him off the most about Mana - that she blamed herself all the time about everything?
After all, could Mana really have controlled any of the consequences of these actions? She couldn’t have predicted or within reasonable thought had seen any of these events coming. Them arriving to the Box sooner than foreseen, Hachiro’s aid giving them false hope about having chances to actually win this battle with Read’s crew, Francho intercepting the message in the bottle meant for Flint and rushing to the location triggering a confrontation. She played it all right, none of her choices were wrong… Then why did she feel so terrible? No pirate crew will end up with a full bag of Audra shards now and no Pirate Lord will wield the power of the Box and yet Mana felt like a sobbing loser.
The chakra present and lighting the Box of Ultimate Bliss dyed black with bright white edges to light the darkness around the black shape that the entirety of chakra began to take. Mana had to hand it that she felt more drained than she had hoped, it felt almost like she had just donated a good portion of her own blood. Together with her chakra she had given this Box her very life force a good portion of which was drained out of her to give life to whatever this Box would conjure. How would it work? Was Mana supposed to say her wish now or…?
The chakra leaked out, twirled and rose in vortexes and jets, expanding greatly until it took shape of a gigantic bird like creature. It looked very primal and bestial in its lower body features as its legs were covered with black feathers that were similarly coloured as the dark chakra leaking out from the Box. The oddities started from where the lower body ended “ it appeared like the entirety of the creature’s spine was extended like a long dragon and barely covered by the black skin covering it but it was very clear that the bird-like creature had no muscle or digestive tract there.
Right on its chest laid a round sphere which was evidently supposed to be the creature’s head as it carried four closed eyes with sets of two on each size and a mouth-like opening that had bones protruding from it in a manner similar to how teeth would protrude. Similarly bones were protruding from its back as well separately even to its all reaching immensely wide black wings that continuously shed black gigantic feathers of chakra that faded into ashes before they fell to where the ground level was supposed to be.
The creature was mostly black yet its paws and feet and the claws protruding from the tips were mostly dirty brown. Despite its majestic size and pose the creature was actually quite pitiful and sickly looking as its tail reminded of a broomstick tied to a long string of cloth. Where normally one’s head would be there was just a measly stump, similar to the remains of a beheaded chicken had their heads just healed up after their death and remain as a lifeless stump.
After the entity finished its strange creation ritual it spread its wings widely firing off the feathers far far away, the ninja could see and hear the feathers exploding with all destructing power but they didn’t really have much to destroy as the battle that was waged beforehand had finished destroying everything for it.
“I am Satori!” the entity spoke in a voice that would’ve belonged to a young man, maybe one in his early twenties or late teens. “What would be your wish?” it went straight to business.
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