Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Road to Ascension

"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.