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

The Obsidian Training Sword

With a loud, endless tirade of thudding, passionate feet picking up dirt and dust, the empty road filled with mercenaries. Kiyomi and Waiso followed the rushing crowd outside, they simply mixed into the crowd which appeared quite willing to let them join their ranks. Hanasaku settled down by the bar, choosing to get something to eat and drink instead. She did not need to say the word, as large as the mercenary ruffian was Meiko had it covered in the mind of the Sannin.

The crowd cleared out an opening, standing around it in a ring formation, creating a living fighting stage made of dirt and patches of grass and fenced off by the living barrier of passionate and positively drunk individuals. Some of them yelled obscenities, some of them encouraged their pal while others were too drunk for their yells to make any sense at all.

The towering mercenary removed a long, weapon shaped pack that he wore behind him. Due to the massive size of the man, it was not easily visible and the massive frame made the rather unimpressive weapon drown in the muscular back of its owner. With a rub of his hand, carefully undoing the bind and then unwrapping the weapon from its black cloth cover, the colossal mercenary was finally armed.

"That's one impressive weapon!" Meiko noticed. Stars shimmered in her eyes as they ran down the obsidian black color of the material the weapon was made of.

It was no blade. More like a bar that was shaped like a training sword but it did not appear to be sharp or capable of cutting anything. It could have been a non-lethal weapon. Carrying something like that out in the open or giving such a bar of blackness for inspection, the man did not risk attracting too much attention. Or so he had thought as the non-lethal bokken of whatever it was made of was more visually impressive than most blades Meiko had seen in her life.

"Right? Gonna make a fortune selling it on the black market. All sorts of figures are gonna show up, looking to pay any amount of money for a bit more of the only currency that matters – power!" the mercenary smiled in pride. His eyes ran down the blackness of his own bokken. It was then that Kiyomi's eyes picked up on a particularly peculiar detail.

"What's wrong with that sword?" she asked out loud, trying to make Meiko give the sword a closer look. It would not have been completely impossible for the blacksmith to have missed out on a major detail after she was drooling all over the weapon. Just like someone admiring the finer aspects of the feminine forms often forgot to remember the color of the woman's eyes.

"You mean what's awesome about it?" Meiko grinned. She reached for her own forearm, dragging her hand across her wrist guard and leaving a glowing source of bluish light on the armor piece. The blacksmith pulled out the sword that her father gave her before she left.

"Now that you mention it..." Waiso scratched his chin, feeling stumped. "The surface does look very odd... Almost like the bokken is searing hot and messing up the air around it."

"Tsk. Those mercenaries... Always getting their hands on pricy equipment without learning to use it." Kiyomi grumbled. This encounter made her recall her own experience when she and Mana faced a leader of the mercenary gang who also, not unlike this gent here, got his hands on some heavy Konoha military cargo.

"What? You mean all of you aren't going to come at me at once?" Meiko raised an eyebrow when the tower of a man took an offensive stance with his peculiar bokken.

Without answering with anything but a wild and deafening battle roar, the man charged at Meiko, swinging his usual sized bokken at her. Meiko placed her buckler up for an easy block. It seemed like a very reckless way of attack, the man was clearly forcing his massive frame to work overtime but his sword was relatively small for his size. It was evident that he used his overwhelming strength to swing his weird blade as hard as he could instead of relying on the weight of his sword.