Kouta slowly and tediously roamed the industrialized outskirts of Otogakure. It was much easier to find a place that’d host them for what little remained of their coins than it’d be to find Meiko and Mana in that mad hive of people. These men and women appeared to be so insanely pleasure driven, the entire population of the village swarmed in the central districts and filled the endless shops, entertainment halls and gambling houses. The medical ninja found such excessive amounts of people exhausting, maybe it was just the sleeping warrior inside of him “ it was much harder to anticipate an incoming threat when one had to check more people than their eye could register and count.
Yet another industrial district rotten and rundown inn refused to house Kouta and three more people, even if they flocked into one room for the price which the boy carried with him. It would’ve been so much easier to communicate a clear plan “ who was responsible for what, who was going where etc. Had they been a well-oiled and running machine of teamwork they once had been perhaps that’d have been the case. Now everyone was so glad to finally get a break of the others that somehow the idea completely slipped from everyone’s minds.
“And what if we returned with really pricy stones? Minerals unlike any you’ve seen before?” Kouta asked out of desperation, he’s had enough aimless wondering begging inn keepers to slash their prices. It was about time he tried Shimo’s way of the slimy tongued rogue. The Juugo has seen the Yuki at work when he spoke to the desert raiders and plenty more times, just how hard could it have been?
“I may, in theory, be interested. What are those minerals? Gold? We have plenty of that here, we live in an industrial district, boy. Every day gold ores reach me from customers too drunk to count ryo properly…” the man replied, Kouta barely restrained the instinct to curse, somehow Shimo made bartering seem so easy but when he had to do it, it just didn’t work…
“Audra ore shards. Artificially crafted. A single shard could buy this whole damned establishment. You’re making me question my own stupid decision to offer them to you of all people…” Kouta answered truthfully. Honesty was probably not the better trait of a trainee spokesperson.
The inn keeper laughed out loud so hard he clenched his fatty sides. He certainly looked like the kind who paid for their greasy food with gold ore instead of ryo. Kouta realized that the man distrusted him, perhaps he was not wrong to do so, after all, he lived in a shadier part of the place, also he was just told tales, by a teenager no less, of an ore of one of the priciest minerals in the world, one that was never supposed to exist in the first place…
“’Ey, boy!” a suited up gentleman with a fancy top hat, strangely not as fancy as Mana’s which was surprising only because of how expensive the man’s attire seemed otherwise, approached Kouta with some backup behind him. These gents all appeared to be formally dressed, the spokesman of the crew had black as oil mutton chops and a pair of moles on his face that looked almost comical. “Theoretically, if dose shards exist… How would you, allegedly, come into knowin’ about dose?” the man mumbled out in a strangely familiar to the young man dialect.
“Syndicate? Here? Maybe it’s some other band who just dress and act the same?” Kouta wondered. It couldn’t have been possible, technically they could’ve been extending their influence zone but then why would they hang out in some rundown inn at the edge of Otogakure. It was a good twelve kilometers from the main city, Kouta had to use his actual movement speed to get there in seconds as opposed to the slowed down charade the whole team put up just so Mana didn’t get left in the dust.
Ninja moved at great speeds, even Mana had the ability, in her current shape, to circle the planet a couple of times in just a handful of moments. Yet moving at such pace would’ve been foolish for a multitude of reasons. First of all it consumed chakra to augment one’s abilities to the max, one would find themselves strained by the time they arrived at the destination they wished to be in, they’d also risk straining their networks too much moving that way. It was always wiser to keep augmentation down to the necessary moments in battle. Another reason was because of the chakra they’d emit, such a fast mover would flare up as a chakra signature for any nearby sensors or chakra tracking devices any mercenaries would wield, ninja wished to be quiet and discrete and it was much more so to travel quietly but slower than to flash to the location of their desire in a mere moment, attracting the attention of everybody in the process. Yet another reason was perception, it was troublesome to perceive miniscule objects in such hasty movements, when moving so fast one was begging to run into a trap or just blast through every tree, mountain and boulder in their way spending out more chakra on perception augmentation and endurance augmentation to survive such a nasty trip, also making much more noise in the process. Still, when moving in such small distances Kouta had little restraint from using his actual speed…
“That would be because I have them…” Kouta replied, “Looted everything what remained after the collapse of the Katabami Mine, right out from under the Syndicate’s noses…” the boy added to the spite, checking the reaction of these men.
The men instantly reached for their weapons. They found none. Loud cracks and bits of pieces of steel signaled that Kouta had long since disarmed them and broke their blade firing pipes into pieces, the boy had to hand it to them that he was beginning to feel sweaty and his breath slowly picked up the pace, perhaps we was overusing his tremendous speed advantage. Maybe he needed some more food to replenish his stamina since his weakened and restless body was struggling to keep up with the boy’s inhuman demands.
“Gentlemen, please!” the inn keeper shouted, “I pay protection costs, how different is it from racketeering if you brawl inside my inn?” he tried to reason. The Syndicate boys turned tails, but not because they were reasonable men or saw the man’s point, no, they knew they were outmanned and outgunned by a single unarmed ninja. There were literally no tricks or ways in which they could’ve beaten Kouta, even with their guns all of their kunai would’ve simply bounced off of the boy unless the mafiosi learned of ways of enhancing their fired kunai with chakra somehow.
“Alright, guys, let’s go, but our other boys will hear about dis, kid? We’re gonna find you and yer friends, ye ain’t hidin’ in dis joint for long, ya hear me?” one of the fleeing gangsters tried to fire off empty threats at the medical ninja but Kouta knew that scum like the Syndicate only posed a threat to just starting out genin, not his skilled and experienced team, not a team who had already beaten the crew a couple of times and knew all their tricks. This time they won’t have those Audra skin covered brutes to bail them out either, even if they would, by now the team knew how to beat them…
“Good, do me a favor and bring everyone in your organization to me, that way you’ll spare me the trouble of looking for you” Kouta replied turning around and looking with a sorry glare at the inn keeper.
“Any chance this changed your mind?” he curiously shrugged.
“Not a chance, kid, if anything it enforced it, if you’re picking a fight with the Syndicate, you’re picking a fight with the whole damned village…” he rasped out angrily.
*****
“Are you sure this is what girls wear around these parts?” Mana wondered looking at her leather jacket and skirt. She looked like a punk missing just a dirty pink mohawk and a bunch piercings. Meiko just giggled staring Mana down, she had little right to mock Mana having bought male clothing, the blacksmith wore a white zip-up tracksuit with black strips and trainers. This village had the oddest sense of fashion and Mana felt torn between the shame of walking around dressed in a button down with a leather jacket and a leather skirt and dressing herself in male clothing as well. To her neither of the options sounded reasonable.
“It’ll be fine, we’ve been roaming the shops for a whole couple of hours, I never thought of you as such a shopping diva, Mana…” Meiko laughed awkwardly shoving her fist into her throat just to shut herself up from cracking into laughter. “It can’t be that much more restraining than your usual clothes…” the blacksmith couldn’t help but slip in a joke of a more biting fashion.
Mana sighed and flipped up her top hat, Meiko was right, the two wasted far too much time looking for suitable clothes and the goal was not to look good, it was to find something to change their ruined clothes.
“Fine, but we’re not buying any spares from here…” the magician agreed and the two finally left out to look for this Notasa lady. They were in the central most crowded district and from what they already knew the kid they were looking for was by far the biggest starlet in the village so this must’ve been the only district where a star of such a level would perform. The question was just when and where exactly, also would she allow the team of ninja from Konoha to even approach her with the consult of what exactly the sphere said…
“Excuse me, would you know where Notasa would be performing, today if possible, we’ve come from another village and would very much like to hear her perform before we go home…” Mana asked a young man who just stared her down with the most awkward looking eyes, even when Meiko butt in it didn’t help much. All they got were a bunch of sly remarks and suggestions to take them there if it was on a date. Ironically enough things weren’t much more pleasant to deal with when the magician tried asking the opposite gender.
“Wow, people here are so weird…” she grunted slapping her own forehead, “Why would a girl ever suggest to take another girl out on a date?”
Meiko slapped her hands together a couple of times thinking about something in a deep corner of her mind before shrugging, “Yeah, doesn’t make much sense… That’s other cultures for you…”
Just before Mana tried to approach another pair of young friends walking down the busy street the two noticed a bunch of kids running down the alleyway. It definitely looked weird that someone would purposefully enter such a dark and cold looking place if they were as young as the children the magician saw but she was forced to write it down to the differences of culture. At this point when she was so overwhelmed by differences of two such close in their locations villages, it was tough to say what was weird and what was just a small cultural difference.
“Excuse me, would you know by any chance where…” Mana began asking but she heard a gut wrenching scream from the alleyway, the magician instantly dashed off at that direction ditching the group of young people she was trying to question, her worn out and torn up sandals quickly carried Mana’s hungry and tired body through the paved stone streets and into the damp and dark alleyway where not even a single spark of light shined. The magician tried to follow the imagined location of the sound but the truth was it could’ve come from anywhere. Her new clothes squirmed and rubbed awkwardly but they didn’t restrain Mana too much, much to the girl’s calmness of heart as it was tough to say when she’d get a decent attire change.
Mana just had a whole bunch of people die on her watch, she wasn’t about to let any more die, if there was one chance there was anything she could’ve done… Meiko shouted out the magician’s name trying to call her to the blacksmith’s location, her ninja’s augmented hearing and perception must’ve allowed the girl to better pick up the exact location of the sound and Mana followed her friend’s voice without hesitation or question. It was so dark…
By the time the magician reached Meiko, and in terms a source of light coming from an open window and a gathering crowd she was shown just who uttered the scream… It was so cruel when the last breath to come from someone’s chest was a scream.
On the cold stone paved alleyway laid a little girl, she had a whole body riddled with small kunai blades but her face looked relatively calm, she must’ve died quick. Whoever wanted to kill her must’ve tried really hard to kill her and do it quick, still, the pain must’ve been too much for the kid to not utter a single scream.
“A murder? Here? I almost feel sorry for the perp…”
“The Syndicate will have the shitface’s head for this…”
“Wow, I wonder who’s gonna have it worse, this poor kid or whoever did this once the Boss gets his hands on ‘im…”
“A random alleyway crime? Here? When was the last time that happened?”
“Look at that body… She’s riddled with kunai, almost like it was a Syndicate hit, could it have been? Are the Syndicates doing this now?”
A whole bunch of wild banter reached Mana’s ears as the crowd began gathering around the body. The magician girl’s eyes squinted in anger and determination, she would find whoever did this, she didn’t care if she’d have to lose an opportunity to decipher the strange ancient code ball from Wind Country in the process but the death of this little kid would not go forgotten… Too many deaths of too many children have in this cruel world and it seemed like the pleasure driven people of Otogakure were far more shocked by an actual reminder just in which planet they settled down than Mana was by yet another failure to save a life in need of saving…
*****
Shimo angrily kicked a can so hard that it bashed into a stony wall of a building and exploded into tin shrapnel, scratching a couple of passers-by who just turned at the Yuki and then at the wall, one guy just angrily turned his index finger by his temple suggesting that the young swordsman may have had a psychological problem of some sorts, as far as that man’s professional judgment was concerned anyways…
The swordsman had a decent reason to be moderately annoyed, he didn’t manage to get any information from that young lady and she was so into sleeping with him that it somehow shook his wish to be himself off. He could never understand his sensei’s wish to sleep with women he paid off to sleep with him. Nor could he justify being a gentleman and his usual self to ladies who acted so simple minded and pleasure driven as the women he lead to the block of flats before.
He had gotten a couple of hints about the name of the hall from the woman, however a name he had no association to meant very little to a young man who came to Otogakure from a different country. Only then did Shimo see a gigantic neon sign pointing out that the establishment below it indeed was the very same, one and only, Ponac hall. The Yuki swordsman may have underestimated the pompousness and sheer in your face attitude of this village. Even more, he was yet to see a single ninja in this ninja village, no one ever bothered to wear the headbands with the Sound Village insignia on it. They were either hiding their allegiances or… Maybe the Syndicate didn’t like ninja and the folks were forced into hiding their identities? But Otogakure ninja couldn’t have been that lame as to lose to a bunch of overdressed pretty boys with fancy blade cannons… This village held so many mysteries and it was so easy to lose oneself in one completely unrelated to Shimo’s mission at hand.
“Ponac hall, huh?” he wondered looking at the crowd of people lined up that dragged all the way to the dozens of other halls. Just faintly his eyes could pick up a large poster depicting a pretty young woman, perhaps in her late teens to early twenties with fancy looking bright blue hair and overly pompous hairdo matched with excessive yet impressive make-up job for a teen of her years. So even kids were absorbed into this mad pleasure and musical culture… Shimo sighed realizing that he was to see many odd things before the night ended, even after seeing what he was about to see he’d still be lucky to get why the crew came to this darned village in the first place.
Shimo tried approaching the suit wearing gentleman standing by the door and wearing those insanely fashionable nightly shades that must’ve been so immensely comfortable and helpful at night, then again… The whole place was so filled with neon lights showing off one product after another that perhaps Shimo was the fool for not wearing something to block all this blasted light out from his eyes. All of the sudden he began understanding the point of all this odd fashion sense of all these local folks. Maybe by living the Otogakure dream for a while he’d understand a lot more about the mysteries of this place, then again, this place reeked of everything the boy was not overly fond of. Talk over action, visuals over content…
“Hey, back of the line…” the muscle mountain said rather gently pushing Shimo back
“With that kimono, stay at the back of the line…” his similarly dressed friend joked making both of them crack a grin. “Cosplay night is next Saturday, come back then, Musashi the Great Sword…” the first one laughed out from a reference to a popular manga series, maybe if Sugemi was here he’d have made some aware sly replies about it but the condescension just made Shimo angrily walk his way to the back of the line. It’d be hours before he was even let in, there was no guarantee that Notasa would even be performing then. He needed another plan of getting in, it was so convenient that he had attire problems and authority issues when he wanted to bust some Syndicate heads so badly…
Maybe Shimo was yet to get some enjoyment of Otogakure and how the life here was lived after all…
[Reviews - 0]Chapter or Story
Table of Contents
- Text Size +