Kage was no ninja. Not in the black-pajama sense. He was a ninja de la magia —a ghost in the machine of sorcery. While battle-mages hurled fireballs, Kage had trained in the Silenced Marshes, where magic was a leaky faucet, not a geyser. His tools: a thread of counterspell silk, boots that walked between teleportation jumps, and a blade that didn't cut flesh, but severed enchantments at their root.
The victim was Archmage Valerius, a man whose beard sparkled with stored incantations. He awoke to find his Vault of Silent Syllables—a dimension folded inside a teacup—emptied. Not a single cantrip remained. On the marble floor, a single shuriken, etched with a glyph that changed shape when you blinked. ninja de la magia
Kage stood on the ceiling of the High Sanctum, wrapped in a Null Aura that made him look like a hole in a painting. He wasn't stealing the Light-Heart. He was unweaving it, strand by strand, returning the magic to the ley lines below—the same ley lines the Ministry had been choking with taxes and quotas. Kage was no ninja