Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

The Tunnels Have Eyes

"Clearly..." Kouta agreed with a smile as dozens of his kicks overwhelmed another crawler before his leg wrapped around its neck while another one kicked it after uncomfortably bending right in the middle knocking the creature out. The cave was dark, to begin with, and then there was all of this smoke coming out from somewhere... Mana had to admit that it was getting hard to keep up and yet she was probably doing the best despite being possibly one of the weakest members of the trio. Meiko and Kouta relied overly on their ninja senses and superior augmented stats to fare too well in such a battle so they began skipping some blows, getting marked by attacks they could've easily dodged if they saw them coming.

Mana shouted in desperation tossing forward a couple of her cards that unsealed as they touched the ground unleashing a flash of light that most common flash bombs used by most ninja could do. The creatures didn't look affected by it at all but when the light cleared Mana and her friends were gone.

"Why did we run? We could've won that battle..." Meiko objected with a gentle whisper while the three were hiding behind a sharp rocky turn.

"Something's odd..." Kouta objected looking at the wandering ground of the creatures while Mana nodded.

"It is, these things aren't the creatures we're looking for," she agreed.

"They aren't?" Meiko appeared completely lost, "So there are two different kinds of creatures underground in here?"

"No. These things must be fakes. What if someone transformed into these creatures using the Transformation technique for some reason, that's where the smoke comes from, usually you can keep the technique up after being hit but when the user is knocked out it ends in a puff of smoke that can't circulate in this depth. For creatures that lived in a cave for most of their lives they didn't look that troubled by the flash of light which seemed odd to me." Mana was breathing heavily, she wasn't happy by how much effort it took her to fight those things as they weren't really that strong, it must've been the sudden switching between the physical chakra and back. It must've been more stressful to her body and overall exhausting to fight that way than to just fight using one of the two all the time. Or maybe she was afraid of her own new power too much to teach her body how to deal with that stress properly.

After a loud combination of clacking and rumbling sounds the creatures left. Mana breathed out more easily only to look at her side and notice another creature staring right at her – different and uglier than the ones they fought. This one hung onto the ceiling but looked more like a mixture of a human, a rat, and a mole. It had rough patches of really greasy and nasty looking fur and its jaw as well as its snout were torn in multiple places making it look really deformed. It was much less refined and less well shaped and built when compared to the previous dwellers. These other ones were hunters, this one was a pitiful abomination that looked like it was going to die if left be due to its own pitifulness.

Meiko and Kouta simultaneously turned at Mana wondering about her silence before screaming wildly, after a brief moment the blacksmith shook Mana's shoulder wildly and asked.

"Why aren't you screaming!?"

"Told you, I'm only afraid of ghosts, not body horror," Mana shrugged resuming her match of stares with this pathetic caprice of nature that was soon followed by more glowing eye shapes opening up inside the cave. It appeared that the skins of these creatures were so rough and ragged and dong brown that they could've perfectly stayed hidden standing next to a wall of the tunnel while merely closing their eyes.

These creatures also appeared to possess eyes, the one that came up closer to Mana and decided to reveal itself first clacked up a series of twelve strange different toned clacks in a manner nearly identical to how those previous creatures communicated.