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

Games Best Played Dirty / The Great Cave Bash / Bet on the Black Scorpion

The tight lock around Mana's wrists loosened and then disappeared. The magician pulled her head out of the snow and coughed some of the freezing, watery fluff out. Instead of flipping out on Yushijin for pulling this, she turned to Erumo, matching the confusion that the other ninja were expressing at the moment.

"You had a tribesman captured this whole time and you said nothing?" Yushijin questioned his teammate.

"I mean, I was waiting to see how this whole situation plays out. If we decided to not work with Kumogakure it would have only made things worse if I opened with that, don't you think?" Erumo shrugged. With a shimmering in a way fine jewelry gleams smile, the trapster grinned at Mana who at the moment was glad that she'd been dunked into the snow – something cold enough to temporarily hide away the blush from being humbled this way. "I bet you want you would have been nicer to our best interrogator now..."

"Interrogation's a piece of cake. If you pale-skins don't have the gut for it, just let me at 'em." The Uru-V jumped at the opportunity to commit explicit torture – just about the least effective method of interrogation out there, especially so given the nature of the subject being interrogated.

Yushijin turned to Mana. He could have personally attested to the magician's interrogation and mental scanning skills as the two have trained and exchanged thoughts extensively using the very skill that may have surfaced the much-needed knowledge.

"Go for it." Mana sighed. At some point one stopped being impressed by how utterly wrong an incompetent fool was at everything they did and just let them ram the wall with their heads pointed forward, running at it in a wild dash, hoping to get on the other side. Some degrees of idiocy were so deep-rooted and so incomprehensible that simply leaving the idiot be was the only option, lest one became submerged in the filth themselves.

Mana didn't make a handful of steps from the scene, trying to cool her head, ironic, given her recent tumble, before Yushijin's hand stopped her in her tracks.

"Going to stab me from behind again? Why the hesitation?" Mana's eyes flared at the leader of Team Fir. The merely imagined simplicity of the mission and the number of complications that rose in the middle baffled the magician to where she could no longer feel confident about how reasonable her own judgment was. At this point, she just dunked into whatever flow of emotions burst through and let it rock her boat.

"You know those guys won't do anything but kill our only lead. That guy won't speak, I've never heard them speak once. The only thing we can get from him is his memories and there's nobody better than you in bringing it out." Yushijin spoke with a calm voice, there was no hint of apology for the stunt he pulled back there. He felt being in the right back there which only further aggravated Mana's desire to wash her hands and go rogue on the entire operation. That would be the end of her license, and that's only if she completed the mission by herself. Rogue failure may have meant actual incarceration time.

"They have a Yamanaka amongst their ranks. I'm sure they'll manage." Mana spread toxic fumes from her eyes, granted, of imaginary variety. A weakness of her furor that she regretted at that moment.

"Come on, they're from Kumogakure. They won't use a scalpel where you can use a chainsaw, force is all they understand and they'll try to force their way through. I doubt that Yamanaka even knows proper mental techniques, migraines are the best I see a Kumogakure Yamanaka capable of." Yushijin was an inch short of outright pleading with the magician.

"Even if I would want to help, they won't let us anywhere close that guy. It's the type of machismo attributed to the whole damn country." Mana growled, transitioning to being mad with Yushijin instead of at him.

"Look, I know the whole situation is frustrating. They're basically spitting in your face every passing second but... You want to save the lives of those tribesmen, don't you? Watching their backs the whole time is the best way to make that happen. You know we can't take them out but we can make sure they don't kill everyone. By feuding with the entire country that has military bases all over the location, you won't be doing yourself or those tribesmen any favors. If you want to save those men and women, as unworthy of your mercy as they seem, you still have to do be the one doing it." Yushijin said.