Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of What Defines Us

Inspiration from Most Unexpected Places

The familiar sound of breaking waves hitting the shores greeted Mana's ears together with the salty sea smell. This beach, however, had no fishing settlement or port town on it, just a couple of separate shipping establishments selling or renting boats together with rowers. The beach appeared to begin suddenly, at some point the endless horde of trees just stopped and a fist-sized extension of grassy plains extended a bit further before running into a rough sandy beach.

"So do you have money to rent out a boat?" Yanagi wondered looking at Mana suggesting that he was broke.

"I don't feel like rowing, maybe we should pay a rower?" Sugemi complained stretching out. He must've been getting soft in the prison as early mornings hit him right below the belt.

"We can't afford to waste time. We're already a couple of days behind the Imarizu. We need to travel to the other side instantly – as fast as we can. That way we'll save one and a half day and possibly still be in time to interrupt the marriage." Mana firmly stated looking at the misty and calm surface of water extending into the horizon. The thick mist made the sea look almost infinite but most people living in the Fire Country knew that the voyage to the Land of the Waves would've taken a bit less than two days.

"I can do it..." Sugemi smiled smugly looking at his companions with some arrogance and condescension. "Can you though, without running into stupid filler shenanigans?"

Yanagi nodded, he was a bit intimidated by the challenge but his face beside a shade of seriousness didn't betray any shade of fear. Just the healthy bit of respect for the challenge.

"Won't even break a sweat..." Mana closed her eyes before stretching out her legs and cracking her fingers.

"We will. I hope you've taken it into consideration – we'll spend a lot of chakra pulling something like this. We'll be at a disadvantage during the fight, I doubt the Imarizu would've pulled something like this." Yanagi looked at Mana questioningly but the kunoichi didn't answer his gaze.

The magician leaped up into the air allowing her hands to flash through a bunch of hand seals in a mere moment. A chilly breeze blew the team's way leaving Mana suspended in mid-air.

"Mystical Wings Jutsu." she chanted out before leaning forward and supercharging her jutsu, the imbalanced super-powered wind current launched Mana shooting like a sky soaring arrow through the ocean. Crossing the entire distance in a bit less than a couple of seconds.

Once the magician's feet firmly landed on the ground on the other side she breathed out uneasily. Mana had to admit that supercharging and struggling to maintain her technique cost her more chakra than she had wished it to, then again, it was still better than trying to leap over the sea just using simple chakra augmentation. The young woman stretched out her numb and aching muscles and closed her eyes trying to calm down her erratic chakra network and her rushing heart.

A powerful blast shook the ground beneath Mana's feet raising a wave of sand so immense that the magician had to leap sideways to avoid it. Sugemi was smiling in his showy landing pose in a giant crater of sand blasted away from under his feet, his skin was swollen red, blood vessels shot out and pulsing as they struggled to sate his slowly dying muscles with oxygen. A moment later the gates that Sugemi had opened closed down relieving his tense muscles and returning some cheerfulness into his cheeks. The young Nara's gate mastery appeared to have increased, it came off much more casually to him now. He must've still been training in prison, pretty hard from the look of it. It was good to know – they'd need all the skill they can get pretty soon.

Seconds passed by before a darker image appeared in the fog and then closed in – Yanagi was riding a cloud of large insects. These weren't the usual Aburame parasitic insects, these were a whole another breed. Where the usual parasitic insects looked somewhat like black small beetles, these massive ones reminded Mana more of locusts or grass hoppers with large buzzing wings. While she was genuinely creeped out by the display she did her best to hide it as while she was not a fan of creepy crawlies she didn't want to offend her companion. Somehow the impression hit her that the Aburame bonded with their symbiotic crawling friends which would've made expressing disgust really offensive.