Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

The Secret of the Katabami Mine

The elevator could not have taken more time to take the party of ninja to the lower levels of the mines. Even more, a couple of times the entire structure rumbled, dust and pebbles started falling from above, several of them were chunks of pure gold.

"Well, at least if we plummet down and die we'll be buried under solid gold..." Shimo tried lifting the gloomy mood but he was proper annoyed himself so even if the mood was even salvageable in the first place he wouldn't have garnered much success.

"Those shakes and quakes... I wonder what's causing it all..." Kouta wondered looking at above, from where they were the top of the elevator shaft looked like an abyss. They were descending so deep down that some of the ninja were visibly starting to get stressed out, Meiko was squirming and tapping her foot impatiently, Mana locked her hands around her chest and pressed her own elbows hard as if by closing in on herself she could protect herself from wherever they were going.

Shimo kept trying to make some bad jokes from time to time, to make matters worse, he was the only one laughing at them as well. It just made the entire situation seem even eerier than it was. Kouta handed Mana a flask with a weird dark green gooey drink.

"There, this should ease up your throat, maybe it'll let go in a while and it won't hurt to talk..." he murmured looking at her while she gulped it all down. His stare was starting to become a bit creepy at some point, luckily the medical ninja realized it and turned his eyes away just in time before Mana had to tell him he was acting weird.

The concoction he gave her was weird, it was sludgy and felt sticky but it actually slid down one's throat quite well. It was also a bit sweet, probably included a mixture of honey but the best alternative to its texture was a limb of a squid. It flowed slowly, like a chunk of goop, it smelled bad but it didn't really taste that bad if it weren't for the minty taste. Minty taste wasn't bad per se but it sort of didn't fit the combination. Too bad medicine didn't have a good taste critic. In a world where lethal wounds could've been patched up in ten or twenty minutes surely someone would've had enough skill and brain to make tastier medicine...

"Kouta... Did you use all of your chakra to heal me?" Mana broke the silence with a question, her voice was still lower pitched and it still ached to talk but not to the extent as it did previously.

"Most of it" the young man blushed and nodded.

"I'm..." Mana opened her mouth before Meiko pulled her in by the collar of her shirt.

"Shut up. You can give your apology for being a suicidal asshat later, then I'll have a talk with you but now let's just focus on saving those miners..." Meiko's grip loosened as the elevator finally stopped. As the door opened clouds of dust started spreading and the environment turned dark almost instantly – the place must've used mainly electricity to light everything up and it must've gone out when whatever happened here happened.

"Ugh..." Shimo cursed stumbling around the dark, he headed towards the closest light source which happened to be a small flashlight, it still was on, its holder was nowhere to be seen though. Shimo turned it on and waved the narrow tunnel of light around. There were multiple trails of blood but no bodies, that was quite odd, the boy followed one trail up the rocky wall which fused with a small metallic wall which signaled the beginning of a small floor administration building.

The blood trail ended right up to the ceiling, right in a gigantic hole in the rock. It was like someone used a six-meter-wide drill to drill a giant tunnel above the floor and then dragged all the bodies into it...

"I can still hear some voices nearby, the miners are alive..." Meiko looked to the east where the least modernized structures of the mines laid. This entire place looked like the living quarters, it reminded more of a modernized laboratory made right in a manmade hole in a bunch of rock. Whatever was being done in the mine was being done here, it was supposed to be the lowest point where the elevator went.