Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

Shabby Steel

Damp and silent raindrops just barely ticked as they were falling and being absorbed by a raggedy cloth hood covering the shoulders of a large man who was wandering the rocky streets of the port town during a downpour. For a second, the man's large cape topped off with a face covering shady hood split by his body after the cape was blown back by a strong gust of ocean winds, the gusts brought with them a sour smell of salt and blood. For a brief moment that the man's muscular arms were revealed a white tie with messy red dried out blood stains could've been seen tied around one of them.

The man walked alone, he had a company of a dead young woman before yet he submitted the cadaver to his home village instead of giving it to the bounty hunters that paid much better. The Hokage was quite thankful for the contribution and, apparently, the dead body he carried on his shoulders at that moment was immensely valuable. The DNA of that woman must've had some really weird strains or something, she was a freak of her clan and the dead bodies of those mutated freaks were always priceless. The man's muddy reputation was almost redeemed and, with his request, he was reinstated to his previously held yet suspended rank and given another mission – to retrieve his son and bring him back to the village.

Apparently, after a long while, the village was becoming a little curious as to what happened to the team sent after the Box of Ultimate Bliss. The last report that reached the village expressed interest in seeing an artist in Otogakure in order to decipher some strange clues the team had picked up. That could've been several weeks ago and to a ninja moving at a careful but elevated pace it would've taken much less to travel a quarter of the world. The Administration suspected that the team may have continued their mission as mentioned in the report after the clues have been deciphered. There were some that feared the young teens going rogue on the village... The hooded man accepted this low ranking mission but not because he did low ranking jobs like that, not even because the mission target was his son. It was because he had another hidden agenda.

The hooded man walked up to a merchant selling fish by a lowly inn. He moved his hood up a little so that his mouth and some of his face could be seen if the man preferred lip reading to auditory speech recognition.

"Have you seen an Uchiha, preferably with the Mangekyou set of eyes. Last time I saw him he had just one working eye." The man asked but the old man just scratched his head.

The words "Mangekyou Sharingan" would've said nothing to a lowly fish merchant, they may have sounded funny. Like some myth or a legend to others. To those that knew what it was, it may have invited excitement or a sip of respectable fear. It was a set of eyes unseen for quite some time, someone using those demonic abilities from those accursed eyes would've stood out like a sore thumb.

"Mange-what now?" The old man giggled, "I just sell some fish, want some trout maybe? Don't tell me, you look like a salmon kinda guy to me." The man chuckled again. His manner of speech and gesticulation suggested low intellectual capacity.

The hooded man's arm shot like a viper through the air, moving almost instantly. Fractions of a moment itself, if given a set of eyes and a soul wouldn't have been able to track the man's movements. After gripping firmly at the man's collar the hooded man picked the small elder up and pulled him up closer, to an eye-to-eye level but the murky skies and dark rain clouds helped the mystery man's hood form a shadow around his eyes.

"Think hard, old man, did you see a man with red demonic eyes teleporting around. He may have had just one eye, maybe carrying his dead sister around... Think hard and answer truthfully." The mystery man grunted out angrily, he almost roared the words out right into the petrified elder's face.

A collection of loud thuds and whizzing blades interrupted the conversation, or rather interrogation, as a barrage of small knives bounced right off the mystery man's back and head as if the man's skin was made of impenetrable armor alloy. To be honest, he was merely immensely tough, but a man of flesh and bone like any other.