Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Crash Course

Eventually, the kid spun his rapier once again and blocked the knives using the same technique again. The tips just barely broke through the thickest layer of air and got bounced off by the softer part of the protective cushion. The knives were flung right back at Hisako, the woman leaned to the side to dodge her own deflected knives, one of them hit the wall and fell down far away from Hisako but the other one hit her in the cheek leaving a cut. The Yoruma touched her cheek and looked at the blood on her fingers. She was getting slower, her reaction time was falling significantly. Fighting two strong opponents would do that to a person, even if the second one is more lucky and talented than he is skilled.

"I guess you got jack squat after all" Yellow laughed out before breaking into a streak of huffing heavily. He may have noticed it already – his untrained body failing to keep it up.

"Nope, I got you. Usually, I'd just stand here casually bombarding you with knives from afar, shrieking like an Academy girl on her first date each time you tax yourself to that technique trying to block it until you eventually either die of exhaustion or a knife is stuck into your eye. Then I'd just come in closer and disembowel you like a hunted down animal up close. Strangely I feel little excitement about killing you so I guess I won't play the enjoyment game, I'll just end it..." Hisako spoke out in a cold and indifferent tone. The assassin spoke of murder as if it was just as casual as washing her dishes.

The brat swung his sword around and tried to force an arrogant smile. "I'll believe it when I see it" he replied. Hisako drew both of her blades and playfully spun them around in her hands pointing their tips right at her opponent.

"Yoruma Hidden Technique: Dance of the Night" the woman mumbled under her own nose, her lips twisting so briefly that one who didn't listen carefully would've missed the woman naming her technique. The dangerous thing about weaponry techniques and taijutsu techniques was that some of them used no hand seals which made them difficult to see coming. One had to be looking for signs on one's body or one's mouth, pronouncing the name of one's technique to alert their own body, to sort of use it as a mantra to get one's body into a mode fitting to perform the technique.

Hisako's figure leaped forward, almost twice as slow as she was before, incomparably slower than the flashing dark blur she was when fighting Cony. However this decrease in speed was not due to her exhaustion or numerous injuries, it was instead because of the technique she used. She was purposefully moving slower, she wanted her blade thrust to be blocked, it was how Dance of the Night worked. A single block would cause Hisako to quickly boost her speed, forcing the opponent to block, again and again, causing them to be locked into an eternal circle of blocking until they tire or open up for her finishing strike.

The boy blocked the first strike from the right, he was as dumb as the Yoruma perceived him to be, or perhaps more arrogant, those two often tread side by side. Using her second blade Hisako swung from the left, blocked again, then another swing from the right which was blocked also. The boy was at least smart enough not to use his dangerous defensive air wall technique – he realized that Hisako saw it. She saw through the technique, she knew that techniques that focused on less concentrated strikes and much more on continuous combinations of strikes had a chance to outlast the technique and also leave the enemy without a chance to counter the first block.

Hisako's lean and strong frame jumped slightly up in the air, letting her blades and arms extend and spin. She acted like a masterful dancer, her strikes were so precise and while she gave the boy a lot of openings she was picking speed up. That was the nature of her Dance of the Night – while the technique was incredibly slow, to begin with it picked up speed at a dangerous pace, within moments it made the speed even greater than the maximum speed of the user was before.