Mana shuffled the deck of cards and spread it in front of Shitaka. The punk didn't require any additional encouragement to pick a card. He looked at the card that he chose with a beaming smile. It would have been an otherwise unremarkable three of clubs if it weren't for the "Choice" scribbled onto it with a marker pen.
"Oh, wow, you've actually marked the card that I'd choose, huh? That's rocking!" Shitaka beamed a sheepish smile, thoroughly entertained by Mana's elementary stretching of her magician chops as he offered to slide the card back into the deck.
"If you think that you had a choice to make, my illusion worked," Mana smiled in return after she turned all of the cards over, revealing that all of them had the same marking of "Choice" on them. The magician's hands worked the deck with the chosen card back in it and handed the deck to Shitaka.
"Huh? What am I supposed to do with it? I don't gamble…" Shitaka stroked the back of his head, ruffling his greasy hair.
"Just try it. There's nothing else to do for days while we cross the Land of Frost, is there?" Mana shrugged. She found practicing her magic a valid occupation of her time for now though who knew for how long that would last. At least she had a number of tricks to practice that would have occupied her for days.
Boredom on trips such as these was a curious thing. It set in almost immediately, just minutes after the caravan left its starting point and head out toward its destination. Just after the novelty of the snowy fields had overstayed its welcome and given how the horizon promised nothing but the same stuff for days on end, there was not much of said welcome, to begin with. Once Mana's brain got used to the frozen tundra, days, hours and minutes stretched out to infinity.
The fact that she hadn't experienced this trip beforehand was the worst part of it. It fooled Mana's brain into keeping close attention to the details of the trip which only served to frustrate her more and therefore didn't allow her brain to lull itself. Without that tranquility, making peace with the boredom and letting one's mind just skip and vault through it was impossible so practicing magic was the only way out of it. This bothersome worry only got recycled once the caravan began riding the mountain path and the landscape shifted.
"Yo, Junichi, you wanna see a rocking magic trick?" Shitaka offered the squad leader to pick a card from the deck.
"I've already seen through the trick, there's no use in it anymore," Junichi replied with a grumpy look on his face. He didn't look like much of a fan of stage magic.
"Yo, Cailar, you've gotta try it now that Junichi refused!" Shitaka turned to the flamboyant member of the Allied Ninja who just sighed and drew a card from the middle.
"Oh, the burden of garishness…" Cailar said as he showed the card to the disinterested caravan and revealed it to be a four of diamonds with "Choice" marked on it. "Ah, the illusion of free choice, what a ravishing trick!" Cailar mocked the would-be trickster with clearly faked interest in his tone.
"Yeah, rocking ain't it? You think you had a choice but you really didn't the whole time… Look, they're all…" Shitaka flipped over the deck only to gasp and burst into laughter as he witnessed that Mana had handed him a perfectly normal deck of cards, without any markings on them with the only marked card being the one in Cailar's hand. "Holy shit, how did you do it!?"
"Well… I can't say I don't appreciate the pizzazz," Cailar nodded with a long, sly smile as he looked to Mana and handed her back the deck.
"You think this is pizzazz? I'm pretty sure I accidentally mixed up some of my combat cards into the deck during all of the mad commotion in the Fire Country. If you drew the wrong card, we could have gotten flash-bombed in this caravan…" Mana replied as she promptly shuffled the deck and waved her hands before the dazzled pair as it had disappeared from her hands in its entirety.
"Admit it, you sly coot, you! You're in on the trick, ain't you!?" Shitaka clenched his fist, preparing to nudge his squadmate in the shoulder but Cailar dismissed his accusations with a shrug.
"You're using sealing techniques just to seal away a deck of useless cards? Your chakra might not have fully recovered yet, why are you wasting it like that?" Junichi grumbled. Whereas both him and Mollay were the only ones unimpressed by Mana's trick, Mollay looked just plain disinterested, it was only Junichi who looked as if he was somehow attacked by it.
"It's not a waste if someone's entertained," Mana shrugged, feeling her body tense up and herself getting defensive. There was no need for him to attack her while she was just trying to entertain herself and anyone watching with some easy magic during this uneventful caravan ride.
"You're using chakra and ninjutsu for shits and giggles. Chakra is your vital energy, the essence of your spiritual and physical self and you're squandering it on some silly antics. Ninjutsu is an art of tactics and unconventional warfare, used to steal, gather intelligence and even assassinate people and you dishonor its severity and importance by using it to aid some flashy parlor tricks," Junichi stood his ground, it was his least endearing quality, after all.
"It's not like these so-called parlor tricks won't serve a practical use. I'm not just out of Konoha to work as an Allied Ninja after all," Mana said.
"What do you mean?" Junichi raised his eyebrow, looking suspicious of Mana. The young woman could feel the tension rising in the whole wagon despite the others only humoring Mana's declaration without any deeper accusations lying therein.
"I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not but back in Konoha I used to be a pretty famous stage magician and I want that part of my identity back. As an Allied Ninja I will work all over the world, right? As if in various countries and even other ninja villages. Well, my manager and I have struck a deal about a World Magic Tour of sorts, which will serve as a fine alibi of me being everywhere around the world if my status of an Allied Ninja on a mission will ever need to remain a secret." Mana pointed out.
"Hmm… I've never thought of it that way. I suppose it might be useful to have a potential diversion from your real reason for being inside a more hostile area," Junichi sighed in peaceful agreement with Mana's idea. "I'm sorry if I lashed out for what seemed like no reason at all. Given this context, one might view what you are doing now as sort of ninja training so please carry on, I will not disturb you again."
"You don't much get how this stage magic gig works, do you? I can always use some input," Mana smiled.
"You remind me a little bit of your father. He also stood out from the rest of his squad the couple of times I've worked with him. He'd always set traps and prefer to lure the enemy into battlefields he had prepared instead of taking them on where the battle took place. His worst nightmare used to be missions where he was constantly on-foot, escort missions and the like, only because he couldn't set any traps or prepare his surroundings at all," Junichi said glancing through the window as the caravan took up and elevated on another mountain road, leaving the frozen plains down below underneath a thick layer of cold mist floating down and off the mountain road.
"I still don't quite see the resemblance…" Mana admitted, even though she very much wanted to see it.
"He would also insist that his way of tackling the mission objective was the ideal one. It was a really irritating feature of his, he wasn't the highest-ranking ninja any of the times we've worked together but he always thought that the problems should have all been left up to him to solve," Junichi explained his point.
"That does sound like someone we all know," Cailar nodded.
"Though he wasn't without a twisted side either. It just took a deeper look to see it. He didn't set all those traps and prepare all those counter-measures to make sure and preserve lives. He did so because it was a point of pride, something that would make him feel accomplished to capture dangerous opponents alive by disabling them in various ways. I don't think he was a hypocrite, he never claimed otherwise to make him so but you can't help but shiver when you think about an opponent such as that and what he might have become in time," Junichi sighed. He must have known at least a little bit of the misfortune that befell Mana's father as he certainly looked crushed enough as a man lamenting an old acquaintance.
"He tinkered a lot in his spare time too," what seemed like a weep escaped Mana's lips in a forceful chuckle. "I guess in that way we're similar too. Both of us liked to employ our skills serving a hobby that had nothing to do with ninjutsu. For shits and giggles, in a manner of speaking."
"Shits and giggles…" Mollay mumbled with a rowdy-sounding, irritating tone. "I grew up using chakra and ninjutsu to extract precious minerals from a cave in the mountain. Reeking of sulfur, dark enough to blind children that grew up working there from their early years. You see, what they would do is just locate a vein using a specific type of Advanced Sensor that could send pulses through the rock and then just drill onward through that vein, collecting the shards. It was only a matter of time until the mountain fell onto the straight cave after the village's greed made us mine the vein that supported it more than the rock we dug through did, dropping the entire mountain on top of us. All that gold, coltan, iron and coal or whatever… All of that is shit and a giggle is all it's worth. As far as I'm concerned, use your gifts for whatever you damn well like and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. As long as they bring you or someone else happiness because that will never be the desire of those that own you and your power and those that would wield you as their tool."
"Holy crap, you went on a tangent there, bud…" Shitaka whistled. "I don't think I ever heard you say that much stuff before,"
"And what about you? Have any breath-taking stories to share? We have all the time in the world it seems and we could all use hearing what tears a man down to want to just blow it all up," Cailar turned to Shitaka with a sly expression on his face.
"Heh, yeah, I didn't have the most rocking of lives, I don't think that anyone that could just cover their eyes and yell real loud to filter out the noises and the sights of the real world around them would choose not to do that. Heck, I'd have really liked to be able to play with puppets like a pal of mine, maybe then I could have at least been better at pretending that I had friends and people that cared," Shitaka pouted, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Your friend was a puppeteer? That's a rare talent for a Kirigakure ninja. Most prominent puppetry masters and all of their secret arts lie in the Land of Wind. He must have carried that art in his own, unique direction. Kirigakure would be lucky to have such a person," Mana tried to comfort Shitaka as for the first time he was actually letting something get to him and bring him down before her eyes.
"He's dead. That's a recurring trend with people in my life, though, I guess, all of our lives. Though I won't sit there and act like I'm not having a rocking good time right now or that I'm somehow special 'cause of that loss. A whole bunch of Mollay's friends from his back-breaking days got squished by a mountain, heck, some of my friends probably killed or maimed some of Junichi's friends and vice versa. The shit between Konoha and Kiri was pretty wild and even you have to recall that time. So yeah… My parents died during the Second Great Ninja War, my nanna died of being old and my friend died fighting Konoha ninja. I guess Mollay hit the nail in the head, don't listen to dinosaurs like Junichi unless they're telling you to duck." Shitaka tilted his feet and placed them beside Mollay on the other side of the seats.
"Well, it's not like Mollay wasn't always the brevious type though I think I speak for everybody when I say that nobody expected him to maintain his seat at the top of the hill with that latest tangent of his and yet he did, somehow." Cailar yawned.
It didn't take long for the mountain roads, all the sharp twists and turns and near-tumbles down the narrow path and down through the chilling mist and into the tundra below to become monotonous just as the previous landscape did. Once the day turned to a slog and it began feeling like there was nothing new to be experienced in the pelting white outside the caravan or anything of note to be seen through the thick fog down below, the journey was over.
The first signs of that were when the snow disappeared and that satisfying crunch no longer sated one's ears when listening in on the melodious hum of the perpetually turning wheels. The rough and rocky floor was still frozen solid though for a good couple of hours until a layer of dust began forming behind the wagon, suggesting that there was not a drop of rain that had soaked the ground for quite a while. The caravan began slowing down multiple times, bringing up the illusion that maybe the journey was finally over for good but it was just to ease the torment of an exceptionally rocky patch of road ahead. Though once the caravan had stopped and turned sideways, there was no mistaking it – the trip was over.
"Well, nothing but ten million square kilometers of rocky wasteland and mountains up ahead. I'd give you fellas a ride but…" the driver shrugged. He looked completely beat. Even knowing the journey waiting up ahead, Mana would have chewed her own finger off before letting this tired man drive them another hundred meters before taking a nap.
"Don't fuss about it. We're only making a diagonal cross toward the eastern shoreline from here. Plus, it'll take us way less time to travel on foot than it'd take to cross via caravan. We can take a little bit of dried out wasteland way better than the tundra and the mountains," Junichi saluted the man in a friendly manner and backed off, blowing off air from his lungs. "I can never understand how ordinary civilians can take these trips without sleep."
"What choice do they have? It's their most profitable way of making a living. Plus, I'm not sure if he's just an ordinary civilian. When I had busted my own chakra network once, I had mastered a few ways of enhancing the body and its metabolism without the use of chakra, or rather, just using its rawer forms," Mana pointed out. She very much suspected that either physical or spiritual chakra was at play in the unnatural endurance of this, otherwise, ordinary man.
"Well, from here on out it's just a dash to the coastline. Our chakra should have recovered fully and had been so for a while now. We can stand putting more of our shoulder into it. We can rest again once we reach the HQ," Junichi briefed the team on their immediate future plans for this escort mission.
For the first stretch of the Land of Lightning, the Allied Ninja really did put a lot of energy into their dashing. They had cleared the rocky plains area in a heartbeat and only once the massive, brown rocks, plateaus, and sky-carving mountains alike appeared in sight that they dropped their speed critically so to not smash through them and both ruin the natural landscape and drastically dip through their chakra resources for no reason. By the time that Mana noticed the other Allied Ninja slowly dropping their movement speed, she couldn't believe that they were nearing their destination.
It was only once Mana stopped completely and approached the edge of a mountain path atop of a rocky shore and looked down onto the coastline only to see a building the shape of a flattened ball though mostly resembling a beehive in its layered structure and color that she at least realized that they had reached their destination. Cailar had noticed that Mana had been lagging behind while the rest of the Allied Ninja struck up a conversation with local guards watching the path and the shoreline. The man waved at the magician so that she didn't walk off by herself or disappear somewhere.
It was almost difficult to believe that after spending the better part of the week trying to reach this place it was finally before Mana's eyes. Layers of stone spun around with windows beaming with golden light. It almost looked peaceful and it had been deceitfully calm from the distance and looking on from where Mana was staring at it. Not a single outburst of a meaningful chakra signature except for the handful of ninja patrolling the area. The place was etched halfway between Kumogakure and Land of Frost in the Land of Lightning and all the way to the east by the coastline which made it tough for wayward bandits to even target it. If someone came with an intent to do harm upon the Allied Ninja HQ, they'd have to do it with serious scorn and even greater resources to accomplish that goal.
"Mana, let's go!" Junichi yelled out, calling to the magician as he had cleared things up with the guards and confirmed that he wasn't some impostor just posing as the man whose face he wore. Soon enough, Mana would have to learn all those security codes, passwords, and encryptions herself.
None of that mattered now. The journey was over, she'll soon be an Allied Ninja, even if Mana's heart didn't flutter in excitement over the idea, the grueling difficulty of the trip made it feel like an achievement nonetheless.