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

Cheating for a Better Tomorrow

After a while of thinking up scenarios and problems for the kids to solve, Mana noticed that a particular girl was answering all of her questions. It was the same book-wielder from before, the one that aided her by informing that the students had scattered and mentioned where exactly Kanra was.

For a good fifteen minutes, Mana enjoyed that. It let her catch up to what amount of the lesson plan she had squandered by being a bit late and then embarking on the quest to gather the children together again. That being said, she could only allow this to continue for so long.

"What's your name?" Mana asked the knowledgeable kid when her hand once more shot up.

"Kinami, Maiya," the girl replied without getting flustered that the teacher had disrupted the rhythm of the lesson which it was getting comfortable in for a while.

"Could you please stop answering for fifteen minutes?" Mana smiled.

"Sure..." the girl sighed.

After checking on a suspicion she had, during the following five minutes the magician continued to make-up easier and easier problems, some of them even on the level of what first-years should have been able to solve. And yet, whenever she stopped describing the situation, the classroom went completely silent.

Mana looked at Maiya with the same polite smile she wore when asking the girl to stay quiet. In a way, it was a probing glare. It was evident that no one else in this class was studying anything for a while because they knew quite well that Maiya would be answering all the questions. They only needed to read up before the special courses and tests, only to stand on a barely passable level. These kids were feeling comfortable. It was the kind of thing that got people killed.

Maiya's cheeks did blush a little, she was a bright kid, she saw the problem just as well as Mana did but her fluster was not quite like that of a purposeful offender. It was more likely that she simply did not know what her peers were thinking about this. Tori was a smart woman, she'd have caught on to this eventually, meaning it was going on for a short enough while for the damage to be manageable.

"Alright, I'm going to write down some of the things you needed to know by today but, evidently, do not. The moment you do not know the data on a single dimension, be it the height of your perch point, the distance between you and your target or the length between you and the static point of your target's location, let alone the environmental factors, you get lost..."

"This is stupid!" Kanra yelled out. "Stupid and boring!"

"Shut up, Kanra!" Maiya spoke up, Mana knew the emotions that fueled the girl's snap back, it was shame. Shame in her class. This girl was so much how Mana would have been if she was a portion as bright as Maiya during these early years. She had so much potential inside her and she must have realized that by now. Better yet, she was trying her best to live up to that potential. Younglings did not get any better than this.

"No! What do I care how far away my target is. If I throw the projectile with all my might, I'll get it anyway! If I don't, I'll just kick their ass up-close," the boy objected trying to think outside the box of the provided problem description. In a way, these weren't bad traits, although looked down on by the more conservative and matured ninja.

"Just give him an assignment, huh?" Mana thought to herself, going back on what Tori told her before leaving. The girl walked up to a drawer in the corner. She remembered something very childish and very odd being in one of the compartments, the one that she opened up to check. At this point, the entire classroom was silent and looking on at what Mana was about to do about Kanra's challenge to her authority.

No doubt, they expected Mana to flip out and play into his hand. No. This was just the kind of thing Kanra wanted. Troublemakers thrived in trouble, in the attention it brought. What Mana was about to do was not very nice or how she would like to solve problems like these but it was the only thing that came into her mind at the moment.