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

The Mind Explosion

"Just how deep underground am I?" Kiyomi asked herself. She did her best not to make too much noise and telegraph her location too clearly but she needed some auditory stimuli in this almost screeching, dead silence. The constant tension and worry over the possible impending attackers were beginning to wear on the kunoichi's mind.

The blonde noticed a squirming white-coat inside of a small room with busted windows and no light. Had it not been for Kiyomi's exceptional, superhuman perception in the dark, the likes of which all chakra-users had to some extent, and the very odd, seemingly purposeless actions of the slouched man as well as his well-maintained, white coat, he'd have gone completely unnoticed.

Kiyomi didn't think it to be a wrong idea to enter the room and check on the man. His presence here seemed odd, given how the man she met previously felt confident and truthful in his statement that everyone had bolted after the ruckus started to rise up above. Not to mention the fact that her opponent would have had limited use in a living target.

"Hey, you, did you see a woman run past here?" Kiyomi asked. She didn't feel like going into more detail than this, it was not like the man would have had the chance to see any unusual women running about with the whole black market facility evacuated.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I hid under the table." The man jumped and turned at Kiyomi, his jerking reaction made him push down a bunch of metallic tools that scattered all over the floor and push the cold corpse on the very same table halfway off of it.

It appeared that some of the scared black market dealers left some of their tools and even bodies they were working on intact when they ran away. At least those dirtbags knew the trouble they were in when Kiyomi's own village came gunning after them. The girl felt a little proud of the reputation of her village and the fear it instilled in these scumbags.

"Chances are, she had no use for you. The distance between us must have increased if she's no longer placing talismans on the living... Where is the largest concentration of dead bodies here? Tell me and maybe I'll let you loot these tools." Kiyomi ordered the criminal.

She was no idiot. This guy was no big fish, judging from the scribbling, almost like the type of sound a scurrying rat would make, noises coming from this room, this man was not working on this corpse. He was looting the tools left behind. He's smaller than small-time and completely unworthy Kiyomi's time, let alone her wrath, at least at the moment.

"Oh, two floors down, there's an entire basement where a bunch of useless bodies are dumped. They're used as emergency blood or organ supply but by themselves, unless a professional emergency strikes, they're quite worthless." The white-coat pointed at the floor.

Kiyomi's hand moved too fast for the man to perceive it even if the room was well-lit. Her backhand smack right to the side of the man's face knocked him out cold. Maybe he'd wake up with enough of his brain unscrambled to get his butt out of here before clean-up takes place, maybe not, this shitstain was no longer Kiyomi's concern.

"Worthless?" Mana uttered feeling breath leave her chest.

"Yeah, he was kind of a scumbag. That is why I knocked him out." Kiyomi assured the magician with defensive hand gestures.

"Say, you're not softening the story, by any chance? Like kill that guy because of your Aku-Soku-Zan and then just lie to me while telling the story back, just to make me feel better?" Mana wondered.

"No, he wasn't much "Aku" for me to "Soku-Zan" at that moment." Kiyomi shook the implication off without looking too offended or caught. As far as Mana could tell, her part of the story seemed to sound legit.

"Yeah, if anything, Hanasaku-sensei did most of the killing in that brawl." Meiko nodded.

Kiyomi finally found a long and steep stairway that was just stuffy enough to trigger some never-before-felt sensations of claustrophobia in her belly. Even if Kiyomi was not overly flustered over these kinds of places, she did feel a bit uneasy descending into somewhere completely devoid of any reflections of light, even the faintest emergency light bulbs or any white whatsoever, in such a tight and steep staircase.