Moving around while carrying multiple ninja kits was difficult. While Kouta requested more kits than he could possibly need to take out a Syndicate establishment the young one thought that it’d be useful to stack up for the future. After all they were close, close to the Box, after all this time! It seemed like once Kouta cleaned this last matter up and caught up with his team someone would have already found a way to decipher the sphere and they’d have one final destination to head to. And then… Mana would finally get her chakra mastery back and maybe cheer up for once.
Granted, just as the lovely magician was selfish to leave on this mission merely to restore her chakra control and reward her blacksmith friend with an adventure, Kouta also had similarly selfish causes. Mana said she liked him, she said she wasn’t against the idea of trying to make something of it… That was Kouta’s driving force because he also greatly admired the girl. He was still hesitant to say “loved”, he knew very little of what that word meant and just what sort of feeling hid behind it.
“You doing okay?” he checked on Jeandette who was slowly creeping behind him, granted she was doing better than someone with molten together innards would’ve normally been doing but it never hurt to check.
“Yeah…” she uttered softly and continued to limp forward, sometimes fixing Kouta’s direction by telling him to turn the other way or giving him directions up front in case her mind blacks out.
Love… What a strange word with an even stranger phenomenon hidden behind it. Ever since he was a young boy Kouta heard countless songs, saw many plays and read a multitude of stories of love. He didn’t particularly fancy them too much but love always played a central part in any story. Some may have argued it was a much more important feeling than the justice delivered to the villain of the story. It was a more integral part of the story than killing the bad guy. That always confused Kouta. It was almost like killing the villain of the story was sinful, almost like by killing them the hero lost their humanity but love somehow was not, love redeemed them and helped the audience and the hero to move past the murder.
Love was idolized, praised and raised to the heavens without an end, without an equal in the handful of feelings standing beside it. Anger, justice, empathy, apathy, happiness even… None of these, or any others, received the appraisal which love got. Ever since his youth Kouta felt like he was blessed for once having a chance to feel that exalted feeling. He thought surely he’d feel this divine elevation of character and mood, his heart would without a doubt claw its way outside the chest once he got this majestic monarch of all feelings.
Such a thing never happened… When Kouta looked at Mana it felt like he was ready to forgive her anything, like everything the girl did was perfect and everything she touched turned to gold. He wanted to spend time around her and talk to her and laugh at the things she say or make her laugh, eat something delicious with her and watch her enjoy some gourmet dish for the first time just to see the happiness and surprise in her face and yet… Where was this divinity, this elevation of the human essence. This was no royal, heavenly feeling. This was very primal and human, it felt like a sin even. Every time Shimo used to tease him about it Kouta blushed and denied everything, he was even ready to pick a fight with the swordsman just to prove a non-existent point, to prove nothing but his own foolishness because this foolishness was something Kouta would rather have than this strange earthly pleasure of… Love?
The boy’s confusion was even deeper now. Now that he was in Otogakure and saw all around him people gorging and indulging in the sweetest pleasures. Men and women disappearing in the alleyways or scantily clad youths giggling as they disappeared in the inn rooms. Kouta may have been young and naïve but he was no fool, the innkeepers preyed on that youthful love and lust, that desire and hunt for pleasure by raising the room prices for a night… That was why he couldn’t get a room for the life of him for a below average pay that would’ve earned him a roach infested joint anywhere else in the world, at the very least.
If these people engaged and chased for pleasure, would they end up like Jeandette and Frankes ended up? Does pleasure and living for one’s desires always necessarily lead to their fate? Is pleasure nothing more but a fire for the human moth that feels so warm and pleasant but burns them up in the end, sometimes literally so.
“Jeandette-san…” Kouta addressed his newly met friend by her name for the first time.
The woman laughed and shook her head. “Spare the pleasantries, I lost the right to a honorific the moment I bartered my life away in the most ridiculous gamble. The ignorant deserve no praise nor honors, only serves them right to spare them the honorifics as well”
“I just… Before we reach the place we’re headed to and I make a proper plan of assault I… Wanted to know something” Kouta spoke slowly and hesitantly, he had little desire to actually finish his thought but he needed to know. This inquiry was so similar to his feelings for Mana “ hesitation to admit them and fear of what it’d bring but also a great desire of the fruits of that labor.
“Well? We have a lot of time until we reach the Messalina Plaza, go ahead…” she encouraged Kouta to speak, “I quite literally don’t have whole night…” she added only to invite giggling from deep in her own chest.
“There is this girl I like very much… I’m not really sure where it leads to, what it is and… Seeing this village for what it is, what it turned out to be when people do and get all they want by just snapping their fingers, when they indulge voraciously in all the earthly pleasures…” he began trying to shape his question but he felt a cold and sweaty hand of the woman wrap around his neck and pull him in closer.
“Never be afraid of getting what you want. Never be afraid of aiming high or trying your damn hardest to live a life of pleasure. Love isn’t jackbang, even if sometimes it looks that way. A moth that burns in the fire is a thousand times happier to that which hides in the darkness of the woods and ends up in some stinky basement. I may look like a lot of things but one thing I know is that I am happy for everything good that happened in my life. If we pull this shit off, I will die happy. That is more than most people that want something they don’t try to reach for and end up hating their object of desire in the process can have. My advice is love. Love with all your heart. It doesn’t matter if you die tomorrow or in a thousand years, what matters is that you are happy and content in your final moments”
Kouta looked down and scratched the side of his head, he mumbled out an expression of gratitude for the woman but he just couldn’t completely understand the mixed message. Everyone he saw in this village craved pleasure during every moment of their existence with every fraction of their being and yet this woman, someone who had burnt from this mad quest for bodily pleasures and someone who knew people with lives ruined by the mad chase for pleasure advised him to love.
“Love isn’t jackbang…” he uttered under his own nose, if anything this felt like just one more line praising love beyond what it actually was. Blast those poets and playwrights, musicians and directors for deifying love. It made such a mess of all things… There were more meaning behind those words than the boy had initially realized, the woman may have revealed what he needed to know. Chasing a happy and pleasant life was not wrong, nor did it lead to ruin, it was chasing the wrong, momentary pleasures ignoring the things that really mattered. “Love isn’t jackbang…” he repeated to himself.
Love was one of those important pleasures, love was a long time investment, it was a joyous and simple earthly pleasure that granted one a lifetime of happiness spending time with one they loved. Jackbang was a cheap imitation of a relaxation drug from another country, something that gave a short termed flare for the cost of slowly, or immediately, ruining one’s life. No, love was no jackbang indeed and that made it worth chasing…
“Hey, loverboy, we’re here…” Jeandette giggled grabbing Kouta by the back of his head and turning his head at a large French fry shaped tower of glass and steel, an example of architecture that was fairly decent, the likes of which the commoners called “a skyscraper”
“Messalina Plaza…” the woman’s face grew nostalgic, serious, sad and longing within a span of a second as her eyes gazed at the modern miracle of architecture.
*****
Mana stared into the sky with a blank gaze. She could hear unrest and shouts nearby, most likely emanating from the raging fire that lit the night’s sky nearby, likely invisible in the further industrial districts. People shouted and gathered at the spot, a powerful blast echoed as the air around the lit night’s sky formed a round pillow that apparently burst from the speed and force of someone quickly approaching Mana’s direction. The magician continued to stand and wait around, focusing a tiny bit of her physical chakra into her eyes, making them flare up with a reddish glow at the irises and began to notice some familiar shapes in the sky.
A young yet tall and well-built red haired lady flew right at her current location, covering great distances in but a mere moment before the blue flare at her boots began to fade before completely going out. A loud comical shout of a falling Meiko could be heard as her boots turned on again with a last flare propelling her forward letting the blacksmith adjust her position upright and slam into the ground from at least two hundred meters in the air and causing a large cone of drilled out dirt as she slid towards Mana. As the blacksmith finally finished her improvised landing she just stroke the back of her head and apologetically grinned with her full teeth smile before jumping up and beginning to check Mana.
“Oh my God, Mana! I’m so sorry, what did they do to you!? They didn’t tell me anything at all about what they were going to do to you and I was so worried and then one shitbrain slipped something about you going to “swim with the fishes” and I thought it was nice of them to let you swim in their aquarium but then they all began talking of you in past tense and…”
Mana placed her hand on Meiko’s shoulder and nodded.
“It’s fine, if I wanted to, if I ever felt like the pain was more than I could have handled I’d have busted out in two seconds flat. I just wanted to give you all the time to get as much information as possible. Did you get any?” Mana wondered.
“Yeah, some…” Meiko nodded still looking at Mana and her bandaged head with a sorry stare, it looked like the blacksmith was about to break into tears at any point. She seemed to have a soft spot with people she had grown fond of and gotten friendly with… Perhaps she was lucky to not see the rest of Mana’s body, only her bandaged face, Mana pressed the collar of her shirt more tightly together so that it concealed the scars and still fresh bleeding wounds on her body.
“There have been several incidents like that all over the village, strange incidents of violence. Here look at this…” the blacksmith removed a piece of broken wall with something drawn on it with blood.
Mana looked at Meiko questioningly.
“When they let me know they tortured and apparently drowned you I got really mad at them and left no smug face unpunched and not a stone on stone in their headquarters. I blew it up with a really good punch, almost lost control there and destroyed the whole district…” Meiko admitted with a shrug. Mana noticed that Meiko had a really scary side somewhere deep, probably one fueled and built up of her awkwardness and strange trait of completely misinterpreting and misunderstanding things.
“So first I asked them to point out all the similar cases of random unsolved violence, this is what they showed me, the locations may be wobbly, most of the conscious guys had broken fingers and busted wrists” Meiko smiled with a little guilt revealing what all those blood stains meant.
So all of these points meant some sort of violent random outburst? It must’ve been too random for the Syndicate to pinpoint. They seemed to be quite fixed on maintaining order because the whole village was their own business playground and they wished to run a tight ship here. They must’ve despised those random sparks of violence more than anyone else…
Mana took Meiko’s finger and placed it at the sheet of folded and mangled, blood stained paper.
“Draw” she asked.
Meiko closed her eyes doing her best to focus and mumbled “Finger Carving Seal” as her finger lit up with a blue flame and left a smoldering drawing mark wherever she held it, just strong enough to be seen but not wide and hot enough to ruin the paper. Mana slowly moved and guided Meiko’s seal drawing finger across the paper connecting all the dots into a strange sign that appeared the combination of a slightly rotated S combined with a punctuation slash.
“Holy shit! It’s a “segno” mark!” Meiko shouted out, frankly Mana had no idea what the mark meant so she was greatly surprised by the blacksmith’s affinity for shocking the magician with her intelligence so soon after she shocked the girl by just how goofy and naïve she was.
“Segno?” Mana asked playing with a streak of her hair as she was a little bit jealous that Meiko knew something that the magician did not.
“Yeah, it’s a musical sign used with “dal segno”, another sign that tells the musician to repeat something starting with the last “segno”…” Meiko excitedly exclaimed looking at the graciously drawn and quite beautiful looking mark that truthfully symbolized places of great random violence.
“So then the sign is complete?” Mana wondered looking at Meiko curiously, “Will these random events of violence no longer happen?” she asked the question she wished to know the most.
“Oh no, it’s still missing three signs, namely dots here, here and then maybe a more perfect finishing stroke of this line…” Meiko pointed at a couple of spots.
“Well then, at least we know where these events will happen, we don’t know when though… If anything we have time, at least until Kouta or Shimo finds us” Mana closed her eyes realizing that it was now her responsibility to prevent these future events of violence. With so many dots filling the Otogakure map there was no reasonable doubt that whoever is doing all of this will want the “segno” completed sooner or later.
*****
The man whom the Syndicate wished to kill so much “ Carnefici Satsu flipped the toothpick in his mouth hesitantly as his tongue played with the small wooden pick. It must’ve been the nerves, or maybe he no longer felt nerves before a fight? After all, a man of his notoriety… Carnefici’s name was not entirely unheard of by Shimo, he faintly remembered reading it long ago as a kid in the papers. There was a huge deal, back then, some sort of public outcry when ten years after his capture Carnefici was still not executed. The punishment was delayed due to a big outcry about which prison Carnefici should’ve been imprisoned and wait for his execution in. The quarrels lasted for so long that eventually the sentence was changed altogether into life imprisonment… Apparently somehow “Carnage” Fici managed to avoid even that sentence.
Two Syndicate thugs rushed at Carnefici. The man blew air lightly by his tongue shooting the toothpick clean through the eye of one of them, a small squirt of blood shot out before the man collapsed on the floor, shaking in pain. The other stroke at Carnefici with a concealed blade which disappeared entirely in Carnefici’s body. The scared shitless mobster tried to pull his hands out from being stuck in the body of the most terrifying murderer and pillager in recent history who did some of the worst crimes recently recorded for the sole reason of being bored. Carnefici dispatched of the man with a backhand slap sending the man down on the floor.
The Boss rushed at Shimo throwing a barrage of blindingly fast punches the but swordsman had apparently improved much more than the Boss did since their last encounter as he was no longer where the punches were thrown. Shimo’s blade danced in ten, sixty, two hundred, four thousand and even twenty thousand cuts in just a blink of moments as a deafening barrage of clangs unified into a singular shrieking sound forcing Notasa to cover her bleeding ears. Twenty thousand shockwaves erupted from where Shimo’s blade met the Boss’ tearing the corridor and most of the building apart, blowing off the roof from the built up pressure and tumbling down its walls while raising smoke and falling debris up in the process. With a careless glance Shimo looked back to check if Notasa was not injured but the frail body of the pale girl was covered by that of her bodyguard who had debris and pipes penetrating his body all over.
The Boss looked all over his body, looking over his ruined suit and at the spots where Shimo’s blade danced on his rebuilt from scratch body with a cocky smile. The man then flicked himself in the fist and in the forehead laughing out loud.
“Pure Audra skeletal frame and lower skin layer coating! I’m fucking invincible, punk, see!?” he laughed out in a husky tone.
Carnefici jumped up from Notasa pushing all of the debris away from his back, he then noticed that the young lady’s shoulder was cut and noticed that one metal bar went right through his skin and into the young lady’s shoulder, shallowly true, but still injuring her. The angered bodyguard pulled the broken piece of debris and slammed it at the distracted by gloating Boss’ face holding the rock by the metal bar and sending the invincible man flying beyond the point Shimo could even see him.
“Go be invincible somewhere else, cocksucker” he angrily grunted in a voice that, Shimo would’ve most definitely agreed, belonged to a mass murderer. “You fuckers can scram too… Go cry to your flying Boss and ask for his titty” he then lashed out on the downed and injured mobsters that scurried away rather quickly.
“You okay?” Shimo asked him looking at Carnefici but seeing no actual bodily wounds on the man, just his ruined hole covered and torn up suit.
“I’m sort of a gum kind a guy…” Satsu reached for one of the more recent wounds and spread it with his fingers revealing a gooey inside that looked more like bubble gum in which organs floated in than human flesh, more so, the synthetic rubber was rapidly sticking together. “You don’t get to kill as many people as I did if any fucker with a fancy suit and a knife can just stab you” he added angrily growling at the end.
Shimo tried to slowly approach Notasa, he still needed her help but Carnefici’s hand pushed him rudely at his chest.
“Thanks for not trying to kill us, now bugger off” he growled again with that annoyingly husky growl.
“No can do, I need help from your young lady so that I can help mine and let me tell you, I pissed mine off real bad. Backing off is sort of not an option…” Shimo grinned slamming his forehead right into Carnefici’s lowered staring face. Both warriors stood one against another, Carnefici had to bow his head all the way down to stare at Shimo’s level even if Shimo was quite tall for his age.
“Well then, we seem to have a problem then…” the past mass murderer hissed.
“You haven’t killed one man today which makes me believe you’ve not killed since you left prison, you’ve gone soft, Carnefici…” Shimo taunted the man again. While he only needed the help of the young lady he was protecting some part of the Yuki was excited about the chance to fight someone so infamous. Some part of him also wished to show off in front of Notasa as if her approval of his macho stupidity meant absolutely anything. Notasa moaned in pain forcing Carnefici to jump back to her aid. The feared monster, the man that escaped justice was now tending to a flesh wound of some pampered little girl like he was her mommy… Shimo looked at the situation and his excited bloodthirsty stare softened somewhat.
Things could’ve went much worse, all things considered. “They’ll be back…” Shimo said almost to himself.
“Of course they’ll be fucking back, where did you get your genius degree, kid?” Carnefici growled tending to Notasa’s wound using some of his own shirt and a napkin he carried in his pocket to cover up the relentless flesh wound on her shoulder. “When one invincible fucker meets another they have an instinct to bash their heads against each other until one of them stops being invincible and gets his head mashed…” he said in a somewhat calmer and more passively despising tone.
“Shit…” Shimo cursed realizing that he probably won’t get Notasa’s help until the Syndicate gets off her back.
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