Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Ninja Noir

Kouta slowly and tediously roamed the industrialized outskirts of Otogakure. It was much easier to find a place that'd host them for what little remained of their coins than it'd be to find Meiko and Mana in that mad hive of people. These men and women appeared to be so insanely pleasure driven, the entire population of the village swarmed in the central districts and filled the endless shops, entertainment halls, and gambling houses. The medical ninja found such excessive amounts of people exhausting, maybe it was just the sleeping warrior inside of him – it was much harder to anticipate an incoming threat when one had to check more people than their eye could register and count.

Yet another industrial district rotten and rundown inn refused to house Kouta and three more people, even if they flocked to one room for the price which the boy carried with him. It would've been so much easier to communicate a clear plan – who was responsible for what, who was going where etc. Had they been a well-oiled and running machine of teamwork they once had been perhaps that'd have been the case. Now everyone was so glad to finally get a break from the others that somehow the idea completely slipped from everyone's minds.

"And what if we returned with really pricy stones? Minerals unlike any you've seen before?" Kouta asked out of desperation, he's had enough aimless wondering begging inn keepers to slash their prices. It was about time he tried Shimo's way of the slimy tongued rogue. The Juugo has seen the Yuki at work when he spoke to the desert raiders and plenty more times, just how hard could it have been?

"I may, in theory, be interested. What are those minerals? Gold? We have plenty of that here, we live in an industrial district, boy. Every day gold ores reach me from customers too drunk to count ryo properly..." The man replied, Kouta barely restrained the instinct to curse, somehow Shimo made bartering seem so easy but when he had to do it, it just didn't work...

"Audra ore shards. Artificially crafted. A single shard could buy this whole damned establishment. You're making me question my own stupid decision to offer them to you of all people..." Kouta answered truthfully. Honesty was probably not the better trait of a trainee spokesperson.

The inn keeper laughed out loud so hard he clenched his fatty sides. He certainly looked like the kind who paid for their greasy food with gold ore instead of ryo. Kouta realized that the man distrusted him, perhaps he was not wrong to do so, after all, he lived in a shadier part of the place, also he was just told tales, by a teenager no less, of an ore of one of the priciest minerals in the world, one that was never supposed to exist in the first place...

"'Ey, boy!" A suited up gentleman with a fancy top hat, strangely not as fancy as Mana's which was surprising only because of how expensive the man's attire seemed otherwise, approached Kouta with some backup behind him. These gents all appeared to be formally dressed, the spokesman of the crew had black as oil mutton chops and a pair of moles on his face that looked almost comical. "Theoretically, if dose shards exist... How would you, allegedly, come into knowin' about dose?" The man mumbled out in a strangely familiar to the young man dialect.

"Syndicate? Here? Maybe it's some other band who just dress and act the same?" Kouta wondered. It couldn't have been possible, technically they could've been extending their influence zone but then why would they hang out in some rundown inn at the edge of Otogakure. It was a good twelve kilometers from the main city, Kouta had to use his actual movement speed to get there in seconds as opposed to the slowed down charade the whole team put up just so Mana didn't get left in the dust.

Ninja moved at great speeds, even Mana had the ability, in her current shape, to circle the planet a couple of times in just a handful of moments. Yet moving at such pace would've been foolish for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it consumed chakra to augment one's abilities to the max, one would find themselves strained by the time they arrived at the destination they wished to be in, they'd also risk straining their networks too much moving that way. It was always wiser to keep augmentation down to the necessary moments in battle.