Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Games of Body and Soul

Black 'n White Intermission

All sorts of doubts plagued Mana on her short carriage ride through the muddy winter streets of Shukuba. Would the Lubber work like it was supposed to and nullify Raitoncide's ninjutsu? Did Mana understand his abilities correctly? Would the Security even manage to obtain everything they had to find? Just how exactly would she go about finding the once famous serial killer.

"I will take you to the hospital but after that, my workday's over. You will need to either catch a ride yourself or go back on foot." The coachman cleared his throat before letting Mana know.

"That's just fine." The magician smiled, trying to not telegraph just how hard the doubts eroding her from the inside were affecting her. She had hoped to hear something troubling from the man based on his worried face as he leaned back to inform Mana about that through a narrow sliding opening between the inside of the carriage and the driver's seat. Turned out his worries were not that troubling to Mana.

The driver undoubtedly had expected it to trouble the magician. There may have been a considerable distance between the hospital and the Security Force HQ. Knowing the doubts and the stakes on Mana's mind, going back on foot was the least of her worries.

"It may have been wise to go there tomorrow. I'm doing the best I can but the visiting hours are over at five." The man warned the magician that even if the first bit of information did not bother her, it may not have been all of her problems. Still, Mana could not have cared less about this bureaucracy thing. She would get inside Itemi's ward one way or another. People's lives were at stake.

"You're quite the worrier, sir." Mana grinned as her doubts and fears got pushed away by the spontaneous conversation with this coachman. She almost blurted out "mother hen" instead of that other thing she called him, thankfully she had enough experience of knowing just how much the man may have felt antagonized and flustered by her calling him that.

It was interesting how the language worked. Two separate words meaning almost the exact same thing would have had a fundamentally different effect, just because Mana was a teenage girl calling a grown man those words. The one she used was okay but the one she almost ended up using before getting stuck momentarily and changing the word she was about to say would have ended up saying the same thing but with offensive undertones. Knowing her situation Mana needed to make an enemy out of a coachman the least right now.

"I just get a lot of flack for something like this from the Security. I couldn't help but notice you're high-ranking from your uniform. Those guys let their rank get a bit over their head, no offense." The man started talking quite extensively for a coachman. Mana couldn't say anything precise about it, she hadn't met enough coachmen to tell if this man's behavior was off or not.

What did immediately tip the magician off was how the surroundings dimmed around her, she was not using her windows due to them being unclean and the constantly splattering rain and mud making it tough to perceive anything clearly, but the difference in the light coming through became apparent almost in an instant.

Mana laid down on her seat before double kicking the window into smallest bits and pushing her aching body off of the seat. The magician grabbed the edge of the carriage's roof with her fingers, using the momentum to rotate her body around and make her land on top of the carriage roof. A pillar of lightning burst through the carriage, the sheer blunt force of the explosion tossed Mana aside sliding through the mud and snow on her knees, opening some old wounds.

While the alleyway that the carriage was in was sunken in darkness and shadows of the surrounding tall buildings, the resulting flame from the explosion and the superheated debris of the carriage blazing up revealed the magician a large number of men surrounding her from most pathways leading in and out of the alleyway.