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

I'll Give You Blizzard Romance

Land of Snow managed to catch Team Fir unprepared. The irony of an entire country, rather everything it represented and was best known for, managing to sneak up on a team of ninja was not lost on Mana. The magician could not stop wearing a ludicrous grin the entire time. Once in a while she would just start smiling or chuckling to herself for no apparent reason and had Erumo not been oddly mad at the magician and Yushijin too tired to care, she'd have surely been drilled about her mental condition.

Obviously the whole country did not approach the trio from behind, blades to their throats and threats of drowning them in their own blood if they did not surrender a scroll or intelligence they were protecting or told the password that allowed ninja passage through protected survey points inside Fire Country or to enter certain remote facilities and archive buildings.

What snuck up on the trio were the frigid chills and snowflakes clamped together to make them about the size of a small apple. Snow could not have been snowing, it was falling from the sky as if dropped with a spoon from a bucket of the thing. At the edges of the Land of Snow, the air was still a chilly mixture of the two clashing sides – the damp heat of the close south from the equator and the masses of snow falling down by the fluffy snowballs and melting almost instantly – constant snowfall, no snow on the ground.

"You okay?" Kouta reminded of himself, irony once more showed herself off as the type of bitch it was by having the magician forget to include her own boyfriend in most social equations passing through her mind.

"Yeah... Just... Remembered a joke that's all." Mana dismissed it. She did not like lying, she was bad at it, but explaining why she was chuckling from time to time to Kouta would have been so frivolous and to such little use that she chose to rather leave him out of it.

It was not that difficult to understand why Mana had forgotten all about things Kouta cared about. After training and working alongside his father the youth became so entranced and excited with battles that he stopped caring about things he used to care about. He was constantly late, never asked or insisted about anything that did not include a battle he may have deemed satisfying. The only reason they got into the Valley of Hell mess in the first place was that he just felt like having a blast.

"Well... Could you tell it to me?" Kouta blinked rapidly a pair of times, staring with a blank expression that Mana would have used had she still been interrogating people in Shukuba. People she still had no reason to suspect yet wanted to dig stuff up about regardless just to see what comes up. His tone implied almost that Mana owed him that much.

"Do you want it to also come with a 2000-word essay of what I think a joke is?" Mana raised her eyebrow. She was probably mostly at fault for lying. This was such a no-quarrel and it was laughable in of itself how avoidable this entire fight was. It was because of how unimportant this disagreement was and how much Mana was at fault for it that she got this defensive and made a deal out of it.

"I mean... We've seen some pretty messed up stuff out there. People have been known to lose their minds let alone morale in better conditions than these." Kouta shrugged.

"You meant well. We could all probably use a joke..." Erumo grumbled on. Her passive-aggressive tone implied a similar amount of wrath boiling inside of her yet it was sort of broader in the scope that it wanted to cover.

"And check if I'm not insane..." Mana brought up the point of Kouta's that she chose to focus on rather than the more reasonable alternative.

"We're stopping. There." Yushijin interrupted the quarrel of the three. He pointed his extended arm at a small settlement in the distance. It was so measly and underdeveloped that the floor-high brick wall around it should have cost more than most of the houses consisting it.