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

A Deal with the Shadows

"Really? You wake up after sleeping for days from a battle in the middle of a village, surrounded by a barrier formidable enough to hold off the strongest ninja and one not even the best Village Protection ninja can crack through and you're dead-silent?" Lord Sixth wondered. The man took a couple of more bites off of whatever he was sustaining himself with, further accentuating his rush of finishing his lunch.

"Is my dad okay?" Mana's voice was husky, it did not require further clarification that the magician had not spoken for a couple of days and had been through a lot lately.

"Still comatose." The man shrugged after finishing his lunch, dusting off his hands and then locking them over his chest, ready to devote all of his attention to Mana.

That meant that mother did not pull anything radical and had him unplugged from life support. His further life may have been pointless but as someone who was adamant, often even to the point of obsession, to keeping things alive, Mana would have liked to have her father live on until it would be impossible for him to do so. She felt a bit of relief in the ocean of apathy that her mother felt the same way.

"That's it? You don't want to know how your fight ended? Nothing that interests you at all?" Lord Sixth in his new body and face wondered.

"No." Mana closed her eyes and put her body back onto the pillow. It felt about as hazy now as it did back in the heat of the battle and now there was no burning need for her to power through that dizziness. There was no point for her to do anything at all, may as well have spent the rest of her life in this bed.

"I feel like you're not appreciating our efforts to keep everyone wanting to see you away from your ward? The local urban myth is that you're sort of a big-time hero. We're doing what we can to quash that, it's a long story, it's why I came here to talk to you, in fact." The man pointed out after placing one of his hands over his hat and fixing it to sit tighter atop of his head.

"Lord Sixth..." Mana spoke up to try and get the man who never even really got onboard with her follow his own advice and leave her alone but his raised hand silenced her. It was not that hard to do, given how Mana had to power through her gloom to speak.

"I'd appreciate if you called me Overcoat in this disguise. I did not go through all this effort to reapply for my old job with a public face to have myself be identified by the commoners, thank you very much." The Hokage who lost his seat after a tremendous crisis of villager trust at some point during the three-year break between Mana's departure and her return explained.

"Whatever... Overcoat..." Mana sighed.

"Sorry to cut in line again but... It just seems to me like you're not behaving much like a team player and for what is to follow I will very much need you to be quite the team player so I'm just going to go ahead and explain to you what the situation is, in exchange for that, we'd like to hear about what had happened inside the barrier..." Overcoat shrugged while gesticulating with his arms in a way that Mana had never seen Lord Sixth do.

It was remarkable, this transformation that the man once called the Sixth Hokage had undergone. If his words were true, he was now back on his spying ways, or whatever Black Ops handiwork he was doing before emerging to the surface as the Sixth Hokage. He not only has completely changed his face, his voice, and his build but also the way he moved, his speech mannerisms and patterns. Everything about him except his chakra signature suggested that Overcoat was a new man in his entirety to the man once known as the Sixth.

"There's nothing to tell you, the man once known as Guru Ayushi had gone insane and tried to seal the chakra of a bunch of people he had kidnapped as well as my own souls into a biological weapon known as Honda." Mana halted to see if the Sixth had any betraying reactions to the name of the monster that inadvertently caused his downfall as Hokage but there was none. It only further added to the impressive work that Overcoat had accomplished with reinventing himself.