Queen of Genjutsu Indeed [SC Training]

Age : 31 Posts : 1495

The day that the fight with the Parabrahma would officially begin was getting close. Day and night Mana trained without a break, mastered crazy techniques that she couldn‘t have imagined knowing when she started her career as a ninja, improving her natural abilities: strengthening her body, soul, her sensory etc. At one point the young woman‘s body was so worn down that she could literally do nothing more but sit up in her bed and meditate. Mana will NOT fail in that battle, she will protect everyone, no brave souls of Kumogakure will die, the Daimyo will absolutely not die!

Meditation had its own perks. Mana was a master at meditation, having been doing it as a child, even her first sensei – Rokudaime Hokage has complimented her on being a prodigy at a field that requires such concentration that the woman herself lacked. Mana’s mastery was illustrated by the discovery of the meditational stages: Ego – the state where one gains awareness of one’s own bodily processes, Omnes – a version of meditation, one closes their mind and then suddenly opens it up, letting only the chakra signatures come through – it’s a version of chakra sensory.

But beyond those two stages was the third, the least explored but the one that the magician always used in training – the Verse. The Verse allowed Mana to create a world inside her mind and force her body to believe that it was real. The concentration was so powerful that the first time Mana discovered it, it pulled her into a comatose state because at the moment the girl wished to not exist anymore, and so her mind almost deleted itself. Furthermore it pulled those that read her mind during the meditational state inside that world which was weird.

The Verse was amazing for training because it allowed Mana to train her body without taking any actual damage, spending any actual chakra. Her body believed that chakra was spent however since it actually wasn’t the woman recovered much faster than she would’ve normally, what would’ve taken her days to recover from now only took merely an hour shortening the time needed to cross the superhuman boundaries in ninjutsu, genjutsu, sensory, whatever the youth wanted to train.

Since her body was completely crippled from the exhaustion Mana closed her eyes and focused to enter the Verse state. In the Verse her mind was completely oblivious to happenings outside her body, time, noises and sights did not matter. Only what was going on in the Verse did but Mana didn’t worry. She planned to train genjutsu and that art was particularly complicated and exhausting. Training something like that for a long period of time was next to impossible.

The magician returned into her inner world, the same one where Konohagakure was in ruins, where a version of herself called “the Empress” has taken over the village. “The Empress” reminded Mana what would happen if she chose to kill, to cross any borders she holds sacred at the moment, if she craved power instead of more noble goals. Mana will never accept an important post, many times she’s been considered to take the chair of Hokage but she refused, she was offered the post of Shukuba governor but she refused.

The magician walked right past the guards, her face was well known to them, Mana entered the ruined Hokage Building which now served as a throne room to the woman in red dress – “The Empress”. The Sennin stood eye to eye in front of her older version, the woman muttered with a bored tone, “What do YOU want?” She wasn’t excited by Mana’s arrival, the Empress felt a soft spot for her material version – the magician was the only thing she could not kill and one would’ve been an idiot to consider Empress anything but a killer.

“I want to train with you, Empress-san”

Mana replied with a gently smile, cocking her head sideways. The Empress sighed. “It’s stupid for us to train, I am the stronger one: I have no limits to kill anyone, I do not restrain myself like you do. Also while I am inside the Verse I have infinite chakra because you’ve made me like that.” Mana’s smiled did not budge, the woman sighed again, stood up from her throne and jumped forward. “If we fight for real, this place will go to shit again, just one clash of our weakest fire techniques blew off the roof last time. You may not care about it but my guards have to fix all of this because YOU forget to. This is your mind, start treating it like it…” The Empress yelled shaping handseals and sending a genjutsu Mana’s way.

The magician witnessed the chains tying her up and closing her in a black box. It was a relatively weak genjutsu, one that Mana has never used in battle because it was meant to only test her limits, it was discovered when the magician wanted to step beyond just C rank illusions and did so, still, the genjutsu was weaker even than actual B rank techniques. Mana closed her eyes, she realized that if she didn’t beat this illusion she’d be in trouble, just like that Shingan opened revealing Mana’s chakra pathways to her – the magician saw Empress’ effects on her body, which chakra points it hit. The Sennin drove chakra through her body violently breaking out of the illusion.

It was the magician’s time to respond, Mana sent the same illusion the Empress’ way. Just like Mana the woman broke out of it uttering “Useless”. The red dressed version of the young woman was always more arrogant and full of herself, she considered even Mana – a reflection of her own self to be inferior to her. Deep in her heart the magician knew she was right, holding back did make her weaker from the ball of destruction that the Empress was. That day was spent just sending and receiving genjutsu between the two women. It was an interesting experience allowing the magician to notice her own mastery over genjutsu – her other version was good, so good that just seeing her in action helped improve her own skill!

The training was just so incredibly fun that Mana decided to spend the next day training as well. Just travelling back to the Verse and keep sending illusions at each other. This time the Empress stepped up her game and started using A ranked illusions, those ones were much more dangerous as an unsuccessful counter could’ve left Mana comatose and then the Parabrahma would’ve had a bigger chance of pulling their heinous plans off. The magician couldn’t and didn’t intend to let that happen. She kept breaking out of the illusions, slowly catching on to how they were crafter and masterfully unweaving them.

This method of training helped the magician so much that Mana decided to spend the entire week home. Breaking out of Empress’ illusions helped her understand how a true master of illusions weaves genjutsu, which point they target, after all – Empress was Mana without the moral limits, she wasn’t afraid to hit the really hard to notice points, to flood the really hard to break. This gave Mana experience on how to deal with really dangerous situations when the opponent tried to take her out with genjutsu with full comatose or killing intent. As far as Mana’s mind was concerned – genjutsu coma was pretty much an equivalent to her dying.

Not only that, from seeing how a skilled enemy defends against genjutsu Mana was able to improvise, attack different points of one’s mind, try to trick them to make the illusion harder to dispel. After all, genjutsu was incredibly tricky, not only it was super difficult to understand and even harder to execute but it was also difficult to use. How is one supposed to rely on genjutsu when a single technique that all Academy Student knew was enough to break out of it? Imagine a gigantic Katon technique being able to simply be dispelled into thin air by a simple application of chakra. Very few were able to properly master genjutsu due to how complex it was to pick up, improve and use.

Seeing the Empress responding to Mana’s genjutsu helped her understand how most ninja without limit and restraint fight it. No. It was much harder to fight the Empress using genjutsu because the Empress literally WAS Mana, she knew which points and to what extent were targeted, she knew how each genjutsu worked making Mana have to work extra time to make it believable. No matter how hard she tried, the Empress had infinite chakra supply in this universe so she never looked fazed by the magician’s techniques.

Mana started neglecting her training for these couple of weeks just to practice with the Empress. This was so incredibly difficult, the woman just kept busting out of the magician’s illusions as if it was nothing and sending same illusion back her way. Except to Mana each illusion was a challenge. Some part of the young Sennin was feeling bad, here she was training incredibly strenuously working out her mind and soul while working with breaking out of each illusion and casting that of her own with improved execution at the stronger version of her and the Empress looked barely entertained.

Still, despite her crushed and broken Ego, Mana still had to return, to train, she’s struck a gold mine here and this whole month spending training strenuously, straining her mind to recognize and dispel genjutsu, working on her chakra mastery using genjutsu and working on making her genjutsu take more skill to beat. At some point the magician could’ve sworn see the Empress struggle to recognize the genjutsu, to see just which part of her mind was affected to properly break out.

“Was that a sweatdrop, Empress-san?” Mana asked playfully while huffing and panting herself from the exhaustion of a whole month of tense training inside her own mind.

“You control this world, you just imagined me having trouble, dummy!” Empress responded with equally as playful of a grin back. Mana could see that the woman was actually having fun.

Mana decided that whenever she had to train, she’d come here to entertain the Empress. Sure, she was only a part of her mind, a personality created to rule over the Verse, someone to remind Mana of her restraints and what would happen if she stopped holding back. Exchanging illusions every day made Mana’s mind work faster, both at identifying the points of her mind the illusion affected and in dispelling it. The point of this training was both to improve her skill with genjutsu and keep her promise to the Empress about coming to visit.

“Whatever, you picked up some really good skills here, scram and go fight someone real!” the Empress yelled out after one evening of training. Mana’s eyes shot open as she started to train in the material world. Channeling her chakra, practicing her techniques in practice, it sucked that she couldn’t practice her techniques on things without a mind but imagination still helped. Just like a taijutsu user trains against imaginary opponents, Mana attacked imaginary minds. Imagining the feel of chakra seeping through the opponent’s mind, imagining their supposed reaction trying to dispel it, applying the knowledge she acquired from the Empress.

Mana could feel her improved knowledge and the illusions, she was nothing like she was before. It was just a small multiplier to her skills but because her skills were so vast the small multiplier caused her skills to dwarf her old understanding of the illusionary arts. The magician simply couldn’t wait to show off her improved skills to the Parabrahma, during her first fight against the ten of them she already managed to capture them in a genjutsu twice, with this newly acquired skill and knowledge, with this new and improved training she was really prepared on the illusionary front.

Regardless, this would not stop Mana from practicing genjutsu with Empress, she’d still once in a while visit her evil version to exchange illusionary techniques for several hours as a mean of not getting rusty. If there was anything that Mana had learned, it was that there was no end to how powerful one could have gotten, after all, just one month earlier Mana could not have even imagined there being such world of genjutsu that was so far away from her skill back then. People used to call her “Queen of Illusions” already back in Konoha, back before all of this training, right now there was actually a reason for that. She’s reached a level of mastery over the field that will be tough to improve…

[2121 W/2000 W]