Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Where We Come From

Separated

Mana's eyes softly clapped as the first sight they saw after she came to her senses was Meiko's silly ear to ear grin above her head. Right after the blacksmith noticed the girl's recovery, she alerted everyone else and Shimo helped Mana sit back up while Kouta did some quick medical check-ups that made him calm down about her overall condition.

"I didn't have much chakra to work with and I've never just repurposed someone else's chakra like that, I need to make sure everything went fine." He explained.

"So that woman in the red dress with the sand and genjutsu, did she hurt you, should we have kicked her ass?" Meiko asked sitting down closer to Mana.

"She did intend to hurt me if I didn't help her but... At some point, she seemed to have changed. After I told her that I was willing to sacrifice my wish to help her she just froze up and said something about how much she changed and how much she hated that, what happened to her?" the magician asked. For a moment the others looked rather surprised by Mana's revelation but then none of them really dared to say anything.

"She kicked our asses then left, told us to not leave through the main entrance and use the underground tunnels for some reason. Then she made such a huge ruckus that the lower floors of the castle are completely overtaken by sand. I'm not sure how we'd leave through there in the first place" Shimo complained a little or at least his tone made it clear that it was supposed to be a complaint. "On top of that, Kouta's crazy dad is still probably after us"

"She didn't look like a bad person, she held back the whole time and tried to calm us down but after seeing the state you were in we couldn't think clearly. She knew that my chakra was at a low so she didn't hurt us too bad, she used illusions to subdue us and they wore off a little later for some reason" Kouta said as he carefully applied a bandage over Mana's scraped abdomen.

The magician sighed. "She decided to confront the man she and her family were running from, if the illusions wore off within an hour with no effort from your part to deal with them it probably means she either left the effective range or died..."

"Hey, don't get all depressed on us about losing someone again, we don't know if she died or not yet... She was tough enough to grant the benefit of the doubt." Shimo growled knowing Mana's personality too well.

"Yeah, thanks..." Mana thanked her old-time teammate, she really needed at least a spoken statement that there may have still been hope that she didn't completely screw it all up again.

"We messed up, we had to protect you but we were too weak. We got our asses kicked by everyone we fought and all we could do was survive. I'm done living this stupid rogue life of just surviving, Mana, next time we'll protect you properly. I swear!" Shimo angrily exclaimed carefully punching the wall and looking at his friend with an angry glare. The magician had never seen her friend look at her with those eyes, he used to endlessly praise her for no reason and watch out for her just because she belonged to the gender he swore to pamper, then he started to get annoyed by her protective and needlessly selfless personality but something changed after this encounter.

"It's fine... You had no way of fighting those guys, Kouta's father is at least a Jounin level ninja, those people from the Sand Village were on the other level entirely. We weren't and could not have been ready. Also, Meiko, thanks for saving everybody when I asked you to." Mana smiled at her friend, her face hurt like she'd have been bashed with a rock for hours and her eye still felt swollen so Kouta must not have had enough chakra to deal with those injuries, just the life-threatening ones.

"Well, I mean... You told us to and... You're not our leader but your calls tend to be the right ones or at least pull us through most of the time and that's good enough" the blacksmith blushed, her shame wouldn't have been visible due to poor fire lighting had it not been so overblown.