A man in a sophisticated suit was leaning over his table, his slight hunch now shot out much more clearly displaying a heavy emotional weight which the man carried on his shoulders. With a sleek rubbing sound of rubber making out with stainless steel of which the man’s table and its sections were made of he opened one drawer and removed a couple of handfuls of murky green cookies placed in a vacuum sealed cellophane package. With a careless swipe to the side he tossed the treats sideways both to the left and to the right. At least two dozen men and women crawled out of the shadows that the man’s office was covered in.
These were men and women of addiction, naked, starved, their hair ran rampant and their fingernails looked long enough to scoop one’s eyes out with a spoon. Their teeth were ruined, their skin was almost bony in its consistency and they dug their rotten, leaking with green slobber mouths into the cookies. An explosion of purple smoke erupted from their mouths. As the slaves of addiction chained to the edges of the room fought for the mana from the heavens of their owner’s mercy they bit each other, bashed and kicked, clawed and tore the flesh off one another despite having promised the other to never lose their humanity no matter how deep the hole addiction spirals them down in just couple of weeks ago.
A couple of these zombies of addiction began screaming in inhuman voices. Their bodies were burning up from inside as their bone tissue covered skin no longer regulated the temperature or sweat, their skin no longer helped secrete toxins out of the body either, the unfortunate ones of that day died whining as they had too little strength left to scream. The man sitting at the table right up to the window sighed and continued to stare at his subjects. He opened another drawer and removed a knife placing it on the table right in front of himself. The owner of the giant skyscraper he was sitting in the top floor of lifted the knife up to his eyes, placed the tip so close that his left eye teared up from fear of the blade slipping too close. The tip and the blade travelled higher all the way to the man’s forehead leaving no cut on his face or touching his skin even once. With a deep depressed sigh the man placed the knife back to the drawer and removed a brush with a couple of face painting tools.
After opening the bottles up the mobster dipped the brush inside and turned around in a luxurious leather chair only to be faced by one of the most industrious and culturally relevant villages in the world, the most glorious panorama of the whole world opened up from where the man was sitting. Yet the shockproof thick glass reflected on the man’s own image somewhat, at least the more colorful parts.
His shoes made of hardened skin of his own drug addicted victims. The ones that ate the “jollyjack” brand of the crackers, it seemed to be a bit less lethal and explosive than the jackbang brand but it eventually hardened one’s skin to the point where it was thick as bone yet flexible as leather. Only made sense to make shoes out of the victims his drugs claimed… Where else would he have put all the bodies of those hopeless victims of fifteen minutes of pleasure ending up intoxicating and ruining their kidneys as their skin could no longer vent all the toxins in their body or regulate its temperature effectively cooking the poor souls from inside.
His fancy suit with a white vest of diamond buttons bought from the money made of selling slow death to the curious. It was hard profiting from suffering and death but truth be told those that called him anything but the businessman of tomorrow did not understand his merchandise. Yes, “Silver Dollar” Croquette was a merchant of death but not because he sold something that stupid fools misused to make death out of something that wasn’t supposed to make it. No. He sold only death. Death and suffering itself and each day he invented new amazing ways of selling more painful suffering and slower, more agonizing death.
To the uninitiated it may have seemed like a terrible thing but those were the literal hatchlings in the life’s pleasures. They were the old crones who had no idea how radio frequencies or moving pictures worked, they infuriated Croquette most of all. Yes, he sold death and torture to those that came begging but only because it was so genius to do so. Death and suffering tasted horrible, they felt even worse and yet… To those to whom pleasure was boring and no longer entertaining it was a new angle. If only those fools saw the women moaning in pleasure as they carved their own bodies in front of him for another cracker, if only they saw the men that hung on the streets because they wished more of the pain and death they could not buy from Croquette. Pleasure was getting boring, pain was the future of marketing.
Croquette’s bloodshot eyes finally gazed upon his face, rather his facepaint as the brush “carved” another scratch on his face. He tried to harm himself, he tried to give himself the pain and death he gave his clients but he never could. Mortenson, that sneaky bitch, thought he didn’t want to get high on his own supply but he wanted to. All this talk behind his back, all those fear filled eyes from the other mobsters, people who literally tortured and killed people made him feel guilty, made him feel unclean, somehow evil for what he did… It shouldn’t have, but it did. Maybe just one cut, just one chopped off finger would redeem him somehow? But how could pleasure redeem him? Redemption needed to be sour and bitter, it needed to be something one feared like the plague but what was there to redeem with when both pleasure and suffering equally pleased one?
Croquette’s finished painting another scar on his face. By now his face looked like he wore a mask of some sort. He ran out of space to draw his mutilation paintings two years ago forcing him to shave his head. By now he had to draw himself new eyes to mutilate with paint and imagination. He couldn’t cut himself, he couldn’t take any of his own poison so he had to just imagine he did… For now it was the best redemption “Silver Dollar” Croquette could hope for… Each stroke of his brush felt like the sharpest knife painting a smile on his face, each light tap of the brush felt like another eye getting poked out, blinded forever.
With a loud bang Croquette’s door opened and a mobster ran inside. As he showed his face in “Silver Dollar’s” twisted office of madness endless tirade’s of weeping and moans came from the shadows that covered the left and the right sides of the room. The chains that held the addicts began to shriek and clang, bone snapping noises could’ve been heard as the poor tortured souls tried to bite the chains with their rotten teeth snapping and breaking their jaws or broke their long pale fingers trying to peel their collars open.
“The mask!” Croquette ordered out loud moving a large kunai dispenser coated in silver to the angle it would’ve required to pop one kunai blade with into the fool’s skull.
“Oh, sorry, sir!” the mobster bowed his head and removed a red demon’s mask placing it on his face. He did look quite grisly and scary with this lighting and how his deep blue eyes popped out from all of that darkness and the little light that the neon lights from outside provided danced in his irises.
“How many times do I have to tell you, these people have lost their humanity and seeing someone beautiful and undamaged just makes them… Jealous and uneasy. They become difficult to manage!” Croquette growled in an angry tone, he didn’t raise his voice but his subordinate clearly heard it as he bowed several times repeatedly.
“Yes, I know, I apologize, it won’t happen again!” he bowed again and again before slowly walking up to the table of his boss and placing a tape right in front of the man. The mobster’s walk was greeted with growls and snarls from the darkness to the sides of the room.
“Why do you even take it off in the first place?” the drug overlord growled angrily, his subordinate bowed again.
“Well, with all due respect, Sir, they’re creepy as fuck…” the man added. Croquette thought filling the fool’s body with blades but reconsidered as quickly as he thought of it. He didn’t want another sin on his conscience to atone for. He only gave people what they wanted and this fool was too numb skulled to wish the pain he had for sale.
“What is this?” Croquette asked calmly pointing at the tape.
“We’ve recorded something… Interesting. Sixteen people all knocked out in a single frame. We can’t make out what it was…” the mafioso explained before Croquette stood up with the tape and used a button to lower a moving picture projector, slowly walking up to a recorder and stroking the head of one ruined woman chained nearby the device, she kissed his hand, she laid by his feet when he wished her to. Such was the cost for pleasure, such was the cost for the mercy of death he had all the capacities to give. These men and women had all that they wanted but no future… They had all the pleasure but none of the happiness.
Croquette carefully examined the recording and sighed. He could see nothing more but a dark blueish blur in the single frame that managed to capture whatever took out these men. Then a woman stumbled in and through the bottom floor carefully stepping over his knocked out guys. The owner’s eyes carefully looked over the floor seeing no blood, whoever did this was foolish enough to not kill anyone. If someone was this fast they were probably a ninja, a really tough ninja fully capable of devastating a whole country if their power was unchecked and undirected. They could’ve at the very least blow those puny mobsters up in a blast of blood and guts but ironically enough this assailant had no guts themselves to do such a thing.
“I don’t care what everyone is doing, make everyone mobilize as quickly as possible” Croquette ordered by just staring at the frozen recording that ended its run, freezing on the wheezing and collapsing of the woman in a ruined night gown, those blond locks he could’ve identified anywhere and just some years ago “ so could everyone else in this fucking village.
“Excuse me, Sir, but maybe you could tell us who this woman is?” the uneasy masked mobster asked.
“She’s a nobody, she’s just an Otogakure whore, she’s got someone to help her, that’s the one you should be worried about” the drug lord still spoke with his head tightly fixed on the sights on the projector that still didn’t change having finished the recorded run long ago.
“Tell Buonafino Sangrant to take his post and stop doing whatever he’s doing, I’ll need his tight grip on the situation…” Croquette added while he looked down at the twisted face of bony skin still locked in the expression of agony on his shoe, the face must’ve died in that expression and gotten stuck that way when it was peeled off with a spiral drill.
“And Miss Mortenson?” the mobster inquired shortly before he was about to close the door and leave.
“I don’t care who that fucker is, whoever decided to fuck with me, they won’t get a drop on Mortenson. Her knife is always in your back, not the other way around. The back of that woman is never exposed long enough to slip a knife in it” Croquette replied with a lazy backhand motion. The mobster finally ran down the stairs to alert everyone on the upper floors before running to the elevator to look for Buonafino Sangrant. He was an odd man of even odder tastes and it was tough to say where the man would’ve been in this plaza of many pleasures.
*****
“You sure you can move, Jeandette?!” Kouta exclaimed with a worried and much louder tone than he’d have wanted.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll live as long as I’ll have to, I’ll see that fucker burn…” the woman grunted standing back on her feet before coughing blood all over her night gown and onto her palms.
“We can take a break, you know… I spent a lot of chakra healing you before, I also used out a lot of it taking those goons out right now. It’s safe to say I’m only at a fraction of my abilities” Kouta explained.
“Look at me and tell me, looking me straight in my eyes, that I have enough time for a break. That I won’t die before seeing that bastard breathe his last while I have my last smoke” Jeandette grabbed Kouta’s collar and pulled the young man closer to her face looking him in the eyes with passion and burning rage.
Even if his worry did not flicker for a moment the medical ninja bowed his head and turned towards the long staircase. Jeandette realized she was getting desperate and sighed.
“If you’re tired we can have a short break. Make no mistake, “Silver Dollar” Croquette makes enough money to sustain one third of Syndicate’s grip on this village. He has no moral or any other kind of qualms with what he does. He has the whole army of goons at his disposal, each one of them was tutored in the art of combat. When we move up, it’s gonna be war out there…” the woman explained trying to tell her comrade how it is.
Kouta’s arm shifted, morphed into a long tube that fired a glowing blueish ball of pure chakra blowing up the door on the ceiling that blocked off the entry to the other room.
“Catch up to me at your own pace… I saw some elevators nearby so don’t make me wait too long” he whispered to the tired and dying woman, the one to whom he promised that he’d show her the empire of the man who built it on top of her life by stepping over her as painfully as possible crumble. The one to whom he promised that one last cracker before she goes. That one last cursed smoke emitting only devil knew what sort of chemicals inside of her body.
Kouta’s body blurred and disappeared. The woman did not lie, the other room was flooded, each and every corner of each and every room was full of these masked mobsters, some of them wore their demonic colored mask by their belt, some of them had them on. They were just leather or plastic, they offered no protection from Kouta’s blows. He punched and kicked to the sides, he moved swift like a falling star and he hit hard. These men were no ninja, Kouta was forced to weaken his blows just so he doesn’t cut them down like hot steel wire through butter. They did have a certain degree of training “ humans trained by corrupt rogue ninja in the paths of superhuman physique. Still, physical superhuman training could only build one up to a certain point, to surpass the human limit was only to hit the superhuman limit in the skies above. When Kouta felt his head bumping against the superhuman ceiling…
Piles of mobsters elbow dropped him from above, endless crowds more fired upon him with those kunai dispensers piercing some of their own but also leaving shallow cuts and stabs on the boy’s own flesh.
When that superhuman ceiling becomes unbearable… Kouta only tears it down. The boy yelled out opening up his body and making his skin shift into holes, four on his back, six on each of his legs and arms, four on both his palms and feet. Chakra beams blasted from each one of it. Powerful enough to blast the mobsters off of him with the combined shockwave tossing every single mobster aside. The beams erupted through the walls and the windows shooting off a blue pillar beam from each hole it blasted through.
Kouta’s tired, scratched and bruised body continued to punch, knock out each of the men that fired upon him, when the floor was clean he moved up. He knew that Jeandette was climbing the steps behind him, he had to move quick but sometimes exhaustion slowed him down. Sometimes those odd large camera boxes on the ceiling and in the corners managed to catch a glimpse of him, just blur, very rarely identifying him as something human. He did not wish to appear human to these people, they’ve built their entire lives trouncing humans, stomping all over their lives and dragging their faces in the mud. No, to them Kouta was no human “ to them he was a force of nature, a wild tornado of hellfire that would burn this whole building to the ground in its wild blaze.
The toughest part of fighting these endless hordes of mobsters and evading each and every kunai blade their fired was that the young medical ninja had to hold back “ he had to quickly adjust his speed from his peak to slower, he had to use significant skill to avoid all of those attacks at once but he only had to try his very least to knock these men out without murdering them. This ballet of adjusting his speed and strength was the toughest part. Kouta felt what little already remained of his chakra quickly get sapped from his body, his shoulder felt a cold breeze as one of the Audra alloy coated kunai had already grazed by his skin damaging his clothes by the shoulder. The strap of cloth got in his way but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like these simpletons could capitalize on it even with their superior numbers.
At one moment the young man stopped fighting, he looked around and saw nothing but knocked out and hardly breathing bodies. Men knocked out cold or grunting in pain as a force of nature hardly picked up by any of the endless cameras ran over them getting all of them out of Kouta’s way. Kouta looked around seeing only a swimming pool and a sauna complex behind him. A tall and relatively bulky man walked out of the sauna with a towel covering his chubby frame and another pink towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Ah… You’re quite fast… I was just told of your arrival six point eleven seconds ago” the man whined out in a masculine voice yet the line was delivered at such a whiny tone that it greatly annoyed Kouta and creeped him out a little.
“How many floors are there in this complex? I do not wish to hurt anyone but if I continue moving like this I am bound to slip up and punch a hole in someone…” the medical ninja inquired.
“Oh, if I were you, I’d not worry about that. You see, you’re staying in this floor” the man’s black curly moustache twisted as he smiled and extended his hand to the medical ninja. “Buonefino Sangrant, pleased to meet you, boy!” he laughed while keeping one hand on his towel that held his junk covered up.
Kouta slowly and carefully approached the man, with a simple handshake he could inform him that the boy was not in any mood or power level to be trifled with. By simply crushing the man’s palm he could finish this quick and move on to the hundreds of floors above.
The young man’s hand was dwarfed by the gigantic palm leaf that was Buonefino’s hand the two pressed against each other and Kouta found that crushing the man’s arm would not be as easy as he had thought. The pressure from their arms began to crack the pool tiles below but neither of the two gave way.
“You’re an impressive young man, you’ve went through war and came here with a couple of scratches and grazes. Each one of those Syndicate goons are as strong as one of you genin right out of the Academy” the chubby chuckled as Kouta felt his feet leaving the ground.
Buonefino swung Kouta around, slamming him against the tiles a couple of times before swinging him around his head and launching him out the wall to fall out of one of the several hundreds of floors, wherever the two were located.
Kouta’s feet quickly morphed into the Juugo signature chakra cannons bursting with blue chakra flares just like the boy had seen Meiko do, the blacksmith sealed chakra into her boots to release in a time of need so that the release would give her some acceleration and propelling force in mid-air. Just like that Kouta burst back into Buonefino’s room. He could’ve just flown up to the top but he would’ve wasted a lot of chakra flying hundreds of more floors up, also if Jeandette ever stumbled into the room, whether travelling by stairs or the elevator, where Buonefino was she’d get killed and Kouta couldn’t allow that.
“Ah, you’re back, young boy…” Sangrant laughed slapping his belly, it appeared that he switched his towels out for long spandex tights and a dark red full body suit that had a wide cut in the front to allow his chubby frame to breathe more freely. Now that the pink towel slipped off Sangrant’s head his bald egg of a head could’ve been seen. The thing was shaped like an ellipse surrounded by streaks of black curly hair that started from his nose and wrapped around his bald head in the shape of circular and thick waves of facial hair.
“They always come back… They always do…” the man smiled after, his eyes betrayed it, he finally decided to take it seriously.
[Reviews - 0]Chapter or Story
Table of Contents
- Text Size +