Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

No Way Out

"There's no time! We need to help him!" Mana yelled out as she leaped forward in such an angle that it'd have dislocated her arm instantly, it was fortunate for her that Meiko released the lock just at the last second seeing that the magician's desire to save her friend wouldn't be contained by any boundaries of self-preservation. Meiko's foot, however, swept at Mana's knocking the magician down and then Meiko sat right on Mana's chest placing her arm on the magician's neck. She didn't apply any pressure to it because she knew that Mana would just waste all her air and get strangled instead of stopping.

"Kouta is a smart guy, pretty tough too. He can stay hidden, he can escape if he wanted to, ninja can scale walls, right? He'll appear up here at any moment, no need to put yourself in danger, so what's this Nine Tails? Why can't we just hop down there and kick its ass?" Meiko grunted out as restraining Mana's relentless struggling was starting to tax her a little as well. She didn't want to actually knock her friend out but she was approaching that line and would cross it quite soon if it was needed.

"No. It's impossible... Look, I'll explain it to you, just... You have to trust me and let me go, if you want an explanation then let me go and follow me, I'll explain it to you on my way down there" the magician tried to trick her way out of Meiko's immovable lock but Meiko let Mana go and shook her head.

"No, you explain it to me now and I'll decide later. It's either that or I knock you out for good. You may be a challenge to me when you're at your full strength but not in your hindered state, it'd only take a single restrained punch..." Meiko decided.

"Fine" the magician sighed, she stood up and dusted her clothes with a rough pat before fixing her hair and beginning to try and make a short explanation for it all.

"There was once a powerful kunoichi, she was called Princess Satsuhimasa. She lived in the time when all the clans were unified into two groups: the Earth Clan and the Moon Clan. At some point, the Moon Clan decided that the Moon was too small to contain all the mighty clans that comprised the Moon Clan so they waged war on the entire world attempting to take it over. Princess Satsuhimasa destroyed the Moon and forced the Moon Clan to submit, then she went through a quest of redemption and fixed the Moon again, transferring her own life force through her tree that fixed the Moon." Mana tried to shorten the story and compress it as much as she could but then she realized how much still needed to be explained to someone who didn't care about history that much.

"Okay... Let's say any of that makes a sand grain of sense and assume I believe all of it..." Meiko squinted at Mana. The magician couldn't blame her friend's lack of trust, the story of ninja who could effortlessly destroy planetary objects did sound a bit hard to believe even to someone who grew up in the world of ninja which wasn't a very natural world that was easy to believe in all by itself.

"The mistake of the Princess was that she granted her own life force to the tree by letting it flow through it. The World Tree became sentient, it formed a being of Satsuhimasa's soul and the body of the most powerful Senju clan wood – the Ten-Tails. It was said to be so massive and powerful that just the sight of it caused people to go insane and claw their eyes out, just its very existence threatened to destroy the world – Earth would've been destroyed just because the Ten-Tails was in it. Despite giving the Ten-Tails its substance and life, Satsuhimasa herself couldn't even hope to match up to it and so she and her husband and her son were beaten, however her husband – Yosuke Uchiha did manage to split the beast into nine smaller beasts, it initially intended to seal away its power leaving Ten-Tails in a weaker form but that didn't work, he had to split its immense chakra into nine separate beings"

Meiko scratched her head in confusion but then she suddenly realized something, "Wait, are you telling me that what's down there is actually... A part of this Ten-Tails thing!?"