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

Beach Antics / Black Veins / The Dimension of Barks

One thing that Mana had to hand it to the cruel face of fate was that she'd have never expected after waking up that day that by the end of it she'd be walking all the way to the Yamanaka Resort together with Kiyomi and Meiko. Hell, she didn't even count on being single while doing it either.

"I can't believe it that you went home to prepare and you still left in that clunky armor..." Kiyomi sent glares of straight fire in Meiko's direction.

"Well, what was I supposed to wear? A silk dress?" the blacksmith raised her eyebrow and turned at Mana with a humorous sneer to show that she thought her own response hilarious but Kiyomi stonewalled it with a straight face. "No way... A dress? Are you mad!?" Meiko threw her hands out.

"Beaches are quite humid. Armor gets rusty in humid areas, is all I'm saying..." Kiyomi shrugged. "I'd have taken a T-shirt even, sometimes you show less skin than Mana."

The two turned back at the magician who looked like she was just tagging along for the ride. It took Mana a solid handful of seconds to even realize she was being looked at and counted on to provide a witty response.

"Unbelievable... Can you believe this one saw more action than you did?" Kiyomi sighed and pointed at the magician with a thumb while trying to keep a warm face just to let the remark sound about as inoffensive to two of her best friends as possible but the best way of making it sound that way may have been to keep it from leaving the spokesperson's mouth.

"I'd argue I had some ass-kicking moments..." Meiko crossed her arms over her chest.

"Not even remotely the kind of action I was referring to." Kiyomi teased her friend by leaning in way too close into the blacksmith's personal space. Something that freaked the redhead out and made her lean back.

"If you don't stop trying to get me in a dress, I'm gonna show you some action right here," Meiko replied with a long face.

"Oooh, will that count as a date?" Kiyomi teased her friend again.

Mana looked up at the two play-fighting and couldn't help but smile. The knowledge somewhere deep down that because of what she and her team had done, somewhere hundreds of thousands of people became casualties of a mineral trading conflict that went all too far and that a whole bunch of wild tribesmen that, while weren't beacons of morality exactly, possibly even the farthest thing from it, still deserved more than the violent deaths they received and that she had hurt Kouta in perhaps the most personal way he's ever been hurt just to distance herself from everything and everyone dear to her had never gone anywhere. Smiling with that itching in one's core felt almost like a crime.

Yet the magician smiled regardless.

How could one not? Seeing those two, the two that symbolized probably the most stable times in Mana's life, the two that were the closest things Mana's ever had to a friend despite never ending up on her friend list during or shortly after her childhood, just goofing around like the weight of the entire world on their shoulders didn't matter felt liberating. The cruel irony of a skilled illusionist relying on a social illusion to hide from how she felt deep down was not lost on Mana as well.

*****

"I've gone through it a bunch of times." Kiyomi woke Mana up from the deep haze she was in. Thusly the blonde liberated her friend from the cruel trap of allowing one's thoughts to engross everything around her. To let its black coils sink out the present.

"I know. You don't think about it the way I do so it's hardly relevant though..." Mana took a sip from her glass of kvass in a quiet for a public inn found on the ever popular Roiyaru road lodge.