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

All Answers Needed

The gate leading up to the Tribunal hall was relatively puny while looking from one side through the gapping fangs of the demon inviting one to step inside. Once one did, however, the end appeared to be nowhere in sight. It made almost no sense, it took Mana couple of minutes to cross the corridor utterly sunken in darkness which she could see both ends of from the outside being so close that she could reach out from one end and have it appear on the other end.

The Council sat at the farther end of the hall. Right up front a V-shaped row of heavily armored and physically impressive samurai armed with long and thick weaponry wrapped in rags and resting on their backs was protecting the entire fold. It was tough to say exactly what their choice of weaponry was, especially when Mana was not quite the expert on the matter, all she could tell from the general appearances was that the gear was heavy, the sort that a tube-shaped boulder would remind one of.

Behind the V-shaped vanguard stood the unarmed samurai with only the chest-armor and flags decorated with various symbols of the villages found on each of the respective countries. The samurai holding each banner had differently styled armor, Mana's hobby in reading about history and legends allowed to identify the fact that these were different armors that the samurai wore during different seasons or different battlefield conditions. It was a nice touch changing the gear up like that to accentuate the differences but also the supposed unity between the countries, just like these samurai, the Voices may have adopted different gear, representing different skills and allegiances, but ultimately they were all just people with common a common starting ground.

The main squad of samurai surrounded the stand where the Council sat in a diamond shape. It would have allowed them to perfectly repel an attack from any side, even if a ninja managed to give them the slip. Why one would be as foolish as to take on this many samurai, when a single ninja would not have lasted too long against a single samurai in a fair fight was beyond the magician but these men had their jobs and they took them seriously. Their speed, their battlefield awareness would have allowed them to repel even the trickier attacks and the hi-tech gear "borrowed" from Kumogakure would make them much more difficult to fool with illusions. Technology had no chakra nor brains to pinch, after all.

Mana bowed with the greatest respects in front of the Council, moving up a good eight meters away from the first row of the heavy-geared samurai that comprised the vanguard of the protective formation. Like that she both showed respect and displayed to the samurai that she was going to stay right there during her testimony which made some of the more tensed up man-containing-shells relax somewhat. The range in which Mana was in would have been classified as "long-range" in combat theory, most attacks, ninjutsu, and genjutsu included would have had decreased efficiency and killing potential from that range unless a ninja specifically modeled their skillset to work in long-range. Needless to say, from the long-range, the samurai had the optimal reaction time to intercept anything foolish that might come to the magician's mind as well.

"Welcome, Voice of Konoha. We are glad to have you testify in front of this Tribunal." The Fire Lord greeted Mana. Perhaps such was the protocol, each Lord mainly questioned the ninja falling under their employ, with the rest only butting in if they had some spontaneous questions plaguing their minds.

"It is a greater honor to stand here, representing my profession as a whole." Mana bowed with the greatest of possible respects being shown again.

The h-word made the captain of squad fourteen of the Divine Retribution squad squint in pain with a pale face. The only present signs of life in this zombified man were the bloodstains on his patched gut that was so recently let out on the floor and the dark spots over his eyes. Somehow, this man was still in the process of bleeding out after his seppuku with no literal deadline in sight.