Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

The Face-Off

A merciless shove of the wasteland winds tested its fortitude against the wreckage of the Allied Ninja HQ. A handful of stationary pillars with some rooms that it used to house stood mostly intact, connected with a singular passageway. Stripped and exposed remains of a corridor that had been marked with the removal of a rooftop and the decimation of its walls. The glass that the corridor passageway used to contain now glistened in pieces some fifty meters below on the scorched Land of Lightning stone.

A dapper man blew into a handmade instrument made of carved wood and leaves stuffed inside of it to produce a mellow tune once one blew either into the back end or one of several holes over it. The musician stood on one end of the decimated remains of the building, taking a figurative position atop of a part of the ruins with no further use to it. Just a standing tower of orderly debris that hadn't fallen yet and still the man stood at the end of the bare passageway as if protecting the entryway to absolutely nowhere.

The wind picked up, irritating the lone gentleman. He opened his eyes and looked off over the passageway and away from his handmade instrument that had occupied the entirety of his attention before. This gale had been strong enough to pick a man up and fling him over the ruins, all the way down. Of course, the man dressed in an ivory coat to match his vest and trousers had never been worried about wind, rather of what it may have brought about.

Flames lit up in thin air, sparks ignited seemingly by the caprice of the wind itself. These little pests didn't behave like any ordinary sparks. They burnt downward as if they had some fuel to burn up when in fact they burnt on thin air. In what made the dapper gent pocket his little blowing pipe, the sparks burnt in reverse, shaping playing cards that they un-incinerated into a shuffling shape of a human. A young woman.

"What's the matter, now whom you've expected to see?" Mana pocketed her hands in her jacket and looked up at the red-haired man on the other side of the passageway who gazed at her with surprise and slight alarm to his expression. "Well, you'll be surprised to find out that Shige and I talk sometimes. Granted, she spoke to me about some grand emergency and lives in need of saving but I didn't tell her when I pulled a simple misdirection genjutsu on her and sent her the other way. You need to work on your deception game."

"I've planned to take you on as well." The man tried to bounce back from being cornered. That he told the truth just now may have been the only thing that kept him from straight out attempting to flee the scene.

"I don't doubt it." Mana shrugged. "But I don't have the luxury of time. I don't particularly fancy you hurting people too. What particularly pissed me off is how you use the name of a comatose man trying to instill paranoia that will get that man killed."

"Really? It's the fact that a lowly assassin will get killed that makes you get off your ass and act and not the beating your comrades took? That's cold..." the man with the red chops smirked, swinging his cane around over his left arm before smacking its tip at the floor under his feet in between his spread boots. "And yet it's also so sick and twisted it's just right enough to be you."

"The difference between us is that I don't need to hide my face when I risk making mistakes nor do I hide behind the names and accomplishments of other men, Endo..." Mana closed her eyes, knowing full well that she was sticking a knife up her friend's ribs with that callout.

"Tsk... I haven't figured how to fool your sensory yet. And yet... It's almost as if you walked in here already knowing..." the fine-dressed man at the other side grabbed hold of his forehead and dragged his hand across his face in vexation.

"I don't need to sense what's hiding underneath that Transformation Jutsu to know my own friend's handiwork. You've been active with this quest to prove absolutely nothing for too long, you've left too many hints. Despite the sensory barrier being up, despite the Allied Ninja being on full alert, nobody noticed anything–that's because there wasn't anything to notice. Nobody snuck in or out. You were always here, switching in and out of your personas when needed, acting like you were training and that was where you got all the bruises. Your reputation as a berserker didn't give anyone the basis to warrant a second look." Mana pointed at all the breadcrumbs.