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

Greased Lightning

"I'd appreciate if you toned your voice down a bit, Itemi-san. People who are allowed to visit usually do not enter through the window." Mana noted to her surprised and hazed person of interest.

"Seeing people who should not present in places they are very much present in makes a man question if he is insane. It just so happened just I may have been insane when I decided to shoot series of blades at a bunch of people robbing this town all by my lonesome. Given my impressive track of insane thoughts on sane mind, it was especially difficult to understand if I was sane or not..." Itemi lamented, toning his voice ever so slightly but still husking it out far too loud for Mana's liking.

The magician approached him and sat down by his side, calming down the pair of awakened patients present in Itemi's ward at the same time who were woken up by the disturbance. Another pair was still resting despite it, they may have been knocked out too good for awakening. Had Mana's sense of smell been intact, the smell of medication would have told her that information, for now, just glimpses of their baby-like sleep would have sufficed.

"This is not about that. I did feel a bit betrayed about you running off on your own like that as I would not have expected the best paperwork guy on the Force being the loosest cannon as well, that being said, I am here because of the paperwork you used to file while Okasune-san did the dirty work..." Mana clarified it.

"I was a tough bastard. It may not have looked like it but... I was sitting on drugs and alcohol, my rope of life all throughout the cold winter road. It would have been tough numbing the pain for a guy to whom painkilling food pills were nothing else but candy with the goop that Shukuba Security called coffee." Itemi grumbled, scratching his floaty and tired looking eyes.

Mana caught on what the officer meant to say with that. Itemi was certainly an oddball given that he communicated in this odd manner but he was not outright insane. His body had built up such a tremendous tolerance for painkillers during his career of self-prescribed cures of all ills in the shape of elixirs and food pills that only an elephant-sized dosage would have done the deed of numbing his pain in the hospital. That meant that Itemi would be in the constant floaty and drugged state throughout their conversation.

"We're chasing after Raitoncide. You filed plenty of crime scenes, you recorded and booked all of testimonies and evidence, such as it was. We're flying on instinct but I am leaving after tomorrow and I have until then to end this. If I don't catch a guy that Shukuba Security failed to find for months, possibly years." Mana tried to keep it short but given how much Itemi had sat out due to his hospitalization it was quite difficult.

"It was foolish of her to come here. She could have easily just scanned all of the reports, all of the documentation, she saw enough of it to notice that I was involved in doing most of it. Not that there was much to find. When a guy fires off superheated lightning bolts and fries everything he touches, only so much evidence is left behind..." Itemi growled in pain. Sitting up escalated the conflict between the overdose of painkillers and the sharp pain.

"So all the bodies were incinerated?" Mana scratched her chin deep in thought. She found it hard to believe that someone could have left not a single trace being as careless and pompous of his own power as Raitoncide was. The killer had made a fatal mistake in assuming he was the only side of the conflict making plays and moving their figures across the board. A person who always stays one-step behind could not have fooled the Security for this long unless he was merely lucky.

"It was the stuff nightmares of drug trips were made of. Talking about this while high on painkillers may not be the best thing in hindsight. It's like yelling about the goods on sale before the person asking you to keep them safe hasn't even crossed the street yet. Bodies were either completely charred up or left with gapping holes, the edges completely singed, killing them of shock or simply by blasting a vital organ out." Itemi said in his own unique manner.