Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Deal With the Devil

The scorching desert sun combined with powerful yet not less searing at the slightest winds that also pelted Mana's cheeks with sand. The magician despised the sand and wished that she had something to protect against it better. Had it not been for her strange habit to find conflict everywhere she went, halting the squad's progress at every twist and turn she'd have perhaps not have had her desert cloak burnt to a crisp from inside her backpack when the Nine-Tails blasted them back in the Land of Rivers. Now she was stuck with what she had, still, it was better than Meiko's situation, the poor blacksmith hated the feeling of scratching sand so she never removed her tracksuit making traveling through the desert a living torture for her.

Shimo was talking to some mean looking desert raiders. These were apparently his contacts from the time he trained with a rogue ninja during his journey of self-discovery. He seemed to have picked up a lot of weird skills during that time. The one that Mana fancied the least, secretly, of course, was his newly found love for self-preservation. Obviously, it was nothing wrong to protect oneself and one's friends from harm at all costs, Mana herself would've been quite an established follower of that rule if it was made law, that being said, rogues thought of it differently and that different approach made all the difference where it counted.

Mana could see it in Shimo's eyes, he roamed the world for over a year, training gruesomely with a powerful rogue ninja who taught him not only improvement of his swordsmanship and also his physical attributes, but the boy also picked up some less than stellar attitudes and skills. Since when did he know some pretty well equipped and well-established raiders in the middle of the Land of Wind? These guys he was talking to reminded Mana of criminals that, be the situation any different than it was, she'd probably be gunning for on a mission with a team of ninja.

It went so far beyond just being a matter of changes, the magician could see it in the eyes of her friend that he changed. He saw some things beyond the village walls that made him always fight to survive. No longer did he take things for granted, all those stories of women and crazy brawls and daring escapes from villages when his sensei's status of rogue ninja was discovered... He suffered a lot to discover himself and he failed to do so. He got lost even more. Now he had that strange shadow of the young man he was before looking from deep inside locked in a chest while his true self-fought to preserve himself and berated anyone else who did not share that belief.

Perhaps Mana was just paranoid, maybe she just felt bad that her friend and she no longer really saw eye to eye. Every time they spoke it all looked so blissful yet every time she made a call he couldn't have judged her more. Yes, her calls never compared with the rogue ninja code that well, she was rarely looking out for herself or her team and despite being just a client she held the mission hostage every time she decided to make a detour to help someone on the way to the mission objective...

"So how's the old pervert doing?" the raider in a strange head cover with a ring on top holding the thing in place wearing light armor and covering white cloth all over his body asked Shimo as if the two knew each other.

"Well, he lost an arm to a courtesan, turns out she was no courtesan at all..." Shimo strayed from the topic, Mana wanted to have as little as possible with these men, they were looking quite suspiciously at the ninja, the only reason their guts didn't cover the desert sand was that they weren't Sunagakure ninja which meant they had no jurisdiction here. Usually, the order in the deserts was maintained by Sunagakure but it was hard to oversee such a vast land and so it was mostly left to self-regulation. The worst bastard of them all always controlled everything until an even worse one raised his head and either had it cut from his shoulders or actually succeeded in becoming the next worst bastard. It seemed to Mana that this man talking to Shimo may have just been a bastard not unlike the theoretical one she imagined.