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

The Democratic Process

With everything she had come to learn in mind, Mana traversed around the fur tents and wooden houses. The primitive manner of architecture and design of the settlement made sneaking around Yordalar much more difficult than it had been to move around a ninja village. There were no alleyways to speak, every movement had to be carefully weighed in and judged in the context of hundreds of pairs of eyes looking around in every direction.

Just a good hour later after the turned violent attempt to get rid of the Konoha ninja from their settlement, the Yordalarans were just about beginning to return to the routine. There appeared to be little to no ill will in their eyes and none of the unified hatred they had when the bunch tried to chase the team of Konoha ninja out.

Mana had almost no doubt that Meiko and Kiyomi managed to successfully evade attention long enough to hide. She could sense their chakra a pair of kilometers away from her position, sadly, just far enough for Mana to be easily able to confirm the presence of the chakra signal but too far away for her to tell too much about the specifics of said signal. She could still identify and attribute them to Kiyomi and Meiko but she couldn't tell if the kunoichi were calm or flustered, still fighting someone off or trying to elude attention.

She'd just have to trust their skills and hope they did repeat Mana's success. Hanshin always was the more troublesome one. It did not appear like the special jounin was in any mood whatsoever to hide, whether he knocked every single Yordalaran in the settlement out or got himself beaten up and captured, which was unlikely, his situation was still the one that raised the most trouble.

Now that the spies have managed to make the Konoha ninja public enemy No. 1, they were going to have an extreme time trying to complete their mission. Given how well the spies knew these people, how they managed to turn the entire settlement against the Konoha ninja in just a handful of hours and how much they knew about the team from Konoha implied that the spies were no rookies and that they may have been operating in this settlement for a while. Certainly long enough to have absorbed the local attitudes and long enough to know how the locals would react, say, to an unstable, egotistical fool tripping over a child during a polite, all-family lunch.

It may have been better if Mana did not rush to reconnect with her team. She knew she told Meiko and Kiyomi she'd find them but... What of it if she did, exactly? Three people, let alone four, were immensely difficult to conceal and moving in such a group would pretty much guarantee another discovery and yet another settlement-wide manhunt. The second time, these settlers would be much less likely to let the Konoha ninja go this easy and go back to their ordinary day-to-day lives...

Mana's body blurred and flickered to the shade of another wooden house while she concealed herself in an empty chest from which a large Yordalaran had withdrawn a bunch of meat for sale just seconds earlier. Despite the magician blitzing right up to his back, opening the chest the man had just withdrawn meat from and shutting herself inside it not even four feet away from the man, the Yordalaran failed to notice Mana at all.

This was a lucky break she could use. Her stealth skills were just barely enough to qualify as average for her rank so to be able to successfully conceal herself was a godsend at the moment. At least until the magician could put together a decent plan for further action.

"Mana!" a thought calling out her name resonated in the magician's mind. It was Kiyomi contacting her on the link.

"How did you find me?" Mana wondered while allowing the thought to be relayed to the Yamanaka.

"I didn't. I just kept the link going and noticed you were in range..." Kiyomi replied. Mana forgot just how much the range of this technique increased each time the Yamanaka heiress trained it with her clan peers. "Did you get into trouble or something? I thought you were supposed to contact us."