Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Revolt? Hanada Estate Under Attack!

The "stage" magic that Mana performed was unique, it, obviously enough, wasn't actual magic but it was the closest it got to the real thing. How did one define what is magical? Was it something that could not be explained? Life had many mysteries, probably less was known of it than unknown and people seemed to be strangely more attracted to learning of how to take it away than to understand what it actually was. With that in mind, one wouldn't have to twist their mind around too much to empathize with Mana's peaceful point of view.

What the young kunoichi did when she performed was a combination of both simple practical magic but she most of all preferred ninjutsu. After all the point of her magic was to show ninjutsu as something other than a tool to claim lives or to ruin them. Instead of cutting people to pieces or burning them alive, Mana preferred that her techniques looked impressive to provide a certain spark of joy for her audience. The girl took great pride in the preparation work she did before each performance, she always ground her magic to perfection.

For that simple reason, the audience of teens and children just a couple of years shy of being qualified as teens looked like they were colored impressed. The very first thing that Mana did was weave a single handseal and force a small and harmless current of wind chakra out of her sleeve, then flick the device around her wrist hidden behind her sleeve that shot out the deck of cards she had hidden. The combination was an impressive display of cards twisting around in a horizontal and round twister. With swift movements of hands, Mana caught each and every card and started shuffling the deck.

"So does anyone want to volunteer? I promise not to turn you into things or hypnotize you or anything." Mana smiled when a kid jumped up and ran up to her, his face didn't look like it belonged to a fan, he looked eager to make a fool out of Mana and to bust her act. Reading faces to some extent was something that was taught in the Academy, for a ninja it was essential to identify the dangerous faces from the harmless ones in a large crowd sometimes, sensei probably had no idea that Mana would use it for magic shows...

"Thank you, now if you could please pick a card we can finally see some magic." the young ninja magician smiled as she quickly shuffled through the deck gesturing with her chin for the teen who looked like he was just slightly older than her to pick a card. With a rather rude and powerful movement, the teen drew a card out of the bunch and the raven-haired magician grinned with a half of her mouth - he played right into it. "I think someone has the King of Hearts." Mana declared as the kid showed it to the audience.

This wasn't the sort of trick to represent Mana's arsenal of stage magic, this was just a warm-up trick that used very intricate and psychological tricks rather than sleight of hand. The trick was to remember the card she caught that she wanted the audience member to draw, to know exactly where it was in the deck, and to flick it open to him several times during shuffling. The teen's mind perceived that card as special and subconsciously chose it most of the time, had he not chosen the card Mana had several backup plans how to develop the trick further but for now this part had to end.

"That's pretty cheap, show us more tricks like that flying cards bit!" the volunteer decided to heckle for some reason. Mana didn't really want to overexert herself with chakra usage, she usually did three to four ninjutsu or genjutsu tricks per show and those were the only things she knew. All of her ninjutsu or genjutsu techniques were harmless techniques made for magic shows and all of them were made by Mana herself. Truth be told if she did not possess precise enough chakra control to train genjutsu and the ability to invent her own impressive visually but ultimately harmless techniques she'd have not passed the Academy test.

One thing that was odd about Mana was her refusal to use jutsu that were not invented by her. As an artist, she felt very uneasy about ripping off other artists which proved to be difficult in the Academy because it was all centered around learning the generic Academy techniques. By no means were they any easier to learn than Mana's own techniques, most of them had tricks and practical uses to them unlike the jutsu that Mana used but that was not the obstacle that prevented Mana from using them - it was her hesitance to use the techniques she didn't invent.