Chapitre 91: CH_3.32 (091)
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The link is also in the synopsis.
———
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Sneaking into a small village was in many ways more challenging than sneaking into a larger settlement like Miya Lake town with a walking patrol and shinobi guards.
Because of the village's size, the community was close-knit where everyone knew everyone, which made blending into the crowd impossible as the chances of getting recognized were 100%— even the use of Transformation Jutsu to disguise as a resident wasn't feasible if someone called out for a conversation.
In such a case, the only way to gather intel without having an inside man was to not be seen at all.
Takuma stood in the shadow of two buildings, looking at a group of people sitting around a table outside on the tavern's porch, drinking booze in the middle of the day, having a loud and rowdy conversation. The people passing by kept their eyes straight ahead without sparing a glance at the group— not even when they blew up in loud laughter.
Humans didn't work like that. Unexpected sounds and sights attracted attention, even if it was for a split second. Every person walked past the tavern like they had stiff necks— it was clear they were consciously not looking at the people. There was a scent of fear in the air.
The group looked like any other resident, but Takuma could tell from that observation that they were special in some way, and with the knowledge about the bandit presence in the village, he was sure they were the bandits. He noted their faces and stealthily made his way to a spot where he could pick up their voices.
"… I like the priest's daughter better."
"Bullshit, you can't compare her to the blacksmith's wife. She curves just at the right places…"
"I bet she's a dead lay."
"It'd take actual experience to convince me… and who knows, the blacksmith might not be able to pay up, and compensate in other ways."
Takuma had no interest in their perverse conversations, but he made a mental note to make it painful for these guys when the hunt started.
A short jockey arrived on the street, trotting on his horse. Takuma stepped deeper into the shadow as the horse neighed and stopped in front of the tavern. The man spoke to the group, "The boss wants to see the protection fees gathered in the office. Be there on the dot at five in the evening. No delays."
Takuma's eyes shined. That was usable information.
As the horse trotted away, Takuma thought to follow it, but a peek at his strapless wristwatch told him it was time to regroup. He followed the horse with his eyes for a moment before disappearing from his hiding spot.
———
.
When Takuma arrived, everyone but Aburame Susumu was present. He silently stood by his team without needing to be told would start when the final member came.
However, time passed, but Susumu didn't come back.
"Should we go take a look?" Iruka asked Raiden.
Raiden took out a small glass vial the size of half a thumb from his person. Inside the transparent vial was a small bug that Raiden released. The bug spread its wings, fluttered above their heads, and flew around in circles for a few seconds before buzzing down back into the vial.
"He's not in danger," said Raiden, putting the vial back into his pouch. "Let's discuss without him."
Iruka nodded, "We will go first…. The report holds true— the bandits have taken over the village. They're armed with weapons and black powder. I couldn't spot any shinobi presence among them, but we can't discount the possibility— don't let your guard down." Iruka continued to give more details about the bandits.
"They're planning to meet five in the evening to pool the protection fees they extort from the villagers," Takuma said after Iruka was done.
"From the horse rider?" Raiden commented; it seemed he had also spotted the man going around the town.
Takuma nodded. "He said they'll be meeting at 'the office.' I don't know where that place might be. However, it won't be a problem— we can follow the identified bandits to the location."
Most of the time, the information provided for C-rank missions was scarce. It could be because the representative that talked with the clients didn't bother to collective extensive information, or the client themselves didn't volunteer a lot of information— the number of C-rank missions that were accepted through the channels every day was large enough that the representative and client couldn't sit down for hours to discuss everything. As C-rank missions held a very low chance of mortal danger to shinobi, extensive information collection wasn't given weight, nor was it economically feasible.
In most cases, the responsibility to collect information fell on shinobi on the field, who could rely on their judgment to pursue specific avenues they deemed necessary.
Takuma finished his report by listing the bandits he had spotted.
As the others were giving their input, Susumu returned.
"I hope you have a good reason to be late," Raiden narrowed his eyes at his genin.
The Aburame nodded, "Thirty-one bandits in total— five are currently outside the village, in the woods, hunting. They're going to meet at the village's community hall in the north around five in the evening. None of them wield chakra. We can strike when they all gather."
Takuma peered at Susumu. The Aburame had overshadowed all of them in terms of the importance of information. He had told them the number of targets, how many were currently in the village, the meeting place, and that none of the bandits had experience with chakra. Takuma's eyes swept over Susumu's body, knowing that all of that information was collected through insects and bugs that Susumu was festering inside his body. While he didn't wish to house insects inside his body, he couldn't help but feel envy at the ability they granted Susumu. He would've never been able to figure out if any of the bandits had experience with chakra if he didn't see them use it. He also didn't have a method to track thirty-one people in real-time.
"Rest for now. We start when they're all in one place," said Raiden to all.
———
.
Shimura Raiden faced his team as they made preparations for going against the bandits. Six genin were more than enough to take care of thirty-one civilians, even if they were martially skilled. And he and Iruka were there, so the bandits stood no chance.
But neither he nor Iruka were going to lift a finger. They were here to observe.
He glanced at Susumu, who stared at an insect on top of his finger. Raiden was more than satisfied with Susumu's performance till now. He followed orders without complaints, held substantial insight, and produced exceptional results— a perfect template for a shinobi. His Aburame clan background and the clan jutsu only elevated him.
Even if Susumu's father hadn't asked him to take him under his guidance, Raiden would've gladly taken him into his team. The child was a great find.
He turned towards the girls. Yuko and Aya. He had been working with them for over six months when their parents had requested him to take them under their wings. Onikuma and Izuno— they couldn't hold a torch to Shimura or Aburame, but they were still proper Leaf clans. He had worked with their shinobi and had found them satisfactory for their station.
Yuko and Aya were like what one would expect teenage girls to be— overly concerned with how they looked and dressed, needlessly stressed about not fitting in, childish romance, and all other things that came with that age. He wished they would conduct themselves with more maturity and dignity, but he had worked with plenty of teenagers to know that was a tall ask. As long as they were competent shinobi, he could overlook their other flaws— which they were steadily working towards. He was satisfied with that.
Raiden turned his attention to the other team.
Umino Iruka. A chunin at sixteen, an achievement that not many shinobi achieved. That and the fact that Iruka's parents were shinobi was the only reason he had agreed to work with the younger chunin when the recommendation came in. But Iruka had disregarded every suggestion he had so generously given him about his team for the mission.
He furrowed his brow at what Iruka called his team. Dai, Yumiko, and Takuma. He couldn't see why Iruka had chosen them. They were undisciplined enough to fight with the other team. Raiden had presented him with suitable candidates… and he still chose these lackluster individuals. Raiden shook his head in disappointment.
"… All of them are inside," the insect on Susumu's finger now flew around his outstretched finger.
"Good," Raiden nodded. "We have to leave tomorrow early in the morning; I want you to be well rested, so get this over swiftly and cleanly."
""Yes, sir!""
Iruka addressed his team, and with that, the six genin moved toward the community. Raiden looked to Iruka, who nodded and headed towards the back door while he walked in through the front door.
The building that the village called a community hall was a one-story building smaller than his family compound. It was just one big room with pillars bearing the roof's weight. Inside the hall, the bandits stood around with two men sitting behind a table with stacks of ryo piled upon them. One of the two men was cursing the man standing in front of the table, who had his head bowed down, taking it in.
"… you can't even do simple things! Useless! Fuck out of my sight!"
Raiden couldn't see any sympathy in the eyes of the other men. On the contrary, they even looked to be enjoying the scene of seeing their comrade getting chewed out.
'Undisciplined swine, all of them,' thought Raiden as he closed the door behind him.
It was then the man who had been cursing noticed Raiden.
"Who the fuck are you?!" he yelled.
Raiden had no reason to answer the rude question, so he crossed his arms and stood there silently and observed the men to conceive the plan on how to clear them out as fast as possible, even though he wasn't the one who was going to do that.
Three men nearest to Raiden drew their swords and dagger as they approached him, but before they could touch him, each found a kunai sticking out from a part of their body. Raiden frowned when a drop of blood stained his shoe.
He looked up as his team descended into the hall. Raiden looked at the man who had been cursing a few moments before, who he guessed was the leader. Raiden saw a flash of understanding pass the eyes as he gawked wide-eyed at his team.
Everyone had changed out of their shinobi uniform before exiting the Land of Fire. Walking around another country in the shinobi uniform was inviting trouble, and they didn't want any. But even without the uniform and headband, it was easy to figure they were shinobi. The kunai itself was a weapon that only shinobi used.
"Shinobi!"
What followed couldn't even be called a brawl for how one-sided it was.
Raiden observed the six genin running through thirty-one grown men like it was child's play— which it was.
He followed his students, and they were doing well. They incapacitated swiftly and placed kunai cuts with the precision he expected from them. His eyes also went to Iruka's team, and they were faring as well— it would be embarrassing if they did.
"Hmm?"
Raiden caught Takuma and noticed that out of all of them, he was the only one not using a kunai or any weapon. The boy clobbered the men with his fists. Raiden thought it to be inefficient, but his eyes naturally followed the boy, and he couldn't help but notice that each strike was placed where it would hurt the most without hitting any vitals. The boy was collected as he dodged sword strikes and countered, showing experience in his moves.
The leader tried to run out of the back, but Takuma jumped over the table, grabbed the chair the man had been sitting on a few moments before, and threw it for the leader's head, knocking him out before he could escape the hall.
It took barely two minutes before the fight was over.
"Good work," Iruka walked inside from the back exit. "Tie them up while we inform the villagers."
Iruka walked out, and Raiden followed after him. He wanted to ask the boy why he didn't use the kunai, but it didn't matter— perhaps the boy wasn't fond of kunai.
The cover-up mission was over, not they simply just needed to get past the niceties before they got onto the real mission.
.
———
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The link is in the synopsis!
Chapitre 92: CH_3.33 (092)
Want to read ahead of schedule? Head over to Patreón @
[ https://www.patreón.com/fictiononlyreader ]
The link is also in the synopsis.
———
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"Want help?" Takuma asked Yumiko and Dai, who were patching up the men they had slashed.
Yumiko looked up from the chest wound she had made at Takuma. "How are you done so quickly?" she asked. "I'm still on my first."
"Didn't cut them open," Takuma knelt beside Yumiko and began helping her treat the wound. They were Leaf shinobi in a foreign land— they had no 'authority' to kill in the Land of Frost. As such, no killing. The cuts that Takuma's teammates had made weren't fatal— and he himself had gone with the unarmed assault because he thought it would be a hassle to treat the bandits. It was more efficient to bruise them until they couldn't move.
Yumiko turned her eye to the five bandits he had beaten up. They were lying flat on the ground on their belly with their hands and feet tied.
"What's that?" she asked, pointing at the thing of white around the restrained bandits' wrists and ankles.
"Zip-ties," Takuma said after glancing at his bandits.
"Zip-ties… as in what they use in packing?"
Takuma nodded, "They're compact, tough, super hard for a civilian to break if you place them properly, and as much I like ropes and knots, zip ties are so much easier," which was why many police organizations back in his home world had been using zip ties along with traditional handcuffs.
Takuma helped Yumiko and Dai patch up their bandits, stripped them of their belongings, and confiscated any and all weapons to ensure they didn't try to plan an escape later on. With five fewer people to take care of, they were done before Raiden's team, who, just like them, didn't have a dedicated iryo-nin on their team.
The nice thing would've been to help them out.
Did they? No.
Neither Takuma nor Yumiko or Dai had any interest in helping them out. Dai stayed inside to keep an eye on the bandits while Takuma and Yumiko walked outside to see the villagers gathering around the community hall. The screaming and shouting had pulled them to the hall, and with no noise pollution in the quaint little village, it seemed that the sounds had reached quite far as the number seemed to keep increasing as more and more people emerged from the streets beyond.
Takuma and Yumiko stayed silent as Iruka and Raiden addressed the villagers. There was a great commotion that reached its peak when they finally realized that the village's bandit problem had been solved. They cheered so loud that Takuma, who had gotten used to the up-close raucousness of the Ring, had to cover his ears.
"This means we're getting great feedback, right?" Takuma whispered to Yumiko.
"We better," Yumiko smiled.
A middle-aged man, the village chief, followed Iruka into the community hall, and when he returned, he raised his hands into the air and yelled,
"WE'RE FREE!"
What followed was a festival with great food, booze, and ecstatic vibes heating up the people in the cold village. The Leaf shinobi were pulled into the celebration despite Raiden's resistance, but Iruka convinced him, and they participated in the festivities.
"Where did you go?" Yumiko asked Takuma, who returned to the large bonfire that the villagers had started.
"Nature called," Takuma lied through his teeth. He glanced back at a few village youngsters who grinned at him, but he shot them a chilling look and placed a finger on his lip— which made them scurry away from the bonfire, away from the celebration. The cold weather of the Land of Frost rendered a low and low supply; however, the demand was high and high— and the crazy markup because of that was just too good for Takuma to pass on.
Iruka came to them with flushed cheeks and slightly raised lips. "You three did good. I'm proud of all three of you," he sounded happy.
Takuma looked at the tankard of mead in Iruka's and wondered if he was drinking too much, but Takuma also knew that shinobi with their chakra-altered bodies could process alcohol much faster than regular people. He hadn't drunk alcohol in his body, but the alcohol buzz was anything like his weed high that he came out so much quicker than in his previous life, it took a lot of anything to get a shinobi inebriated.
"What's going to happen to the bandits, sir?" asked Yumiko.
Iruka's buzzy look turned serious as he looked in the direction of the community hall. "The village will follow the Land of Frost's laws and punish the bandits accordingly…. They don't have the capacity to hold these people in any form of prison, so those bandits will probably be hanged, or if some people get lucky, they'd be kicked out of the village with no supplies… and it's tough outside in this cold. Punishments in villages like these, away from big cities, can be much laxer or harsher depending on the crime…. If we were Hidden Frost shinobi, we could've mediated, but we can't do anything."
Takuma knew this world to be much different than the one he had come from. He knew better not to see this world through the lens of morality molded in his past, but he couldn't altogether leave it all behind with a snap of his finger.
"I'm going to sleep," Takuma sighed as he got up.
Whatever happened to the bandits, he didn't have anything to do with it. After leaving the village in the morning, he had no reason to return.
———
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The following day the Leaf shinobi left the Shiyuka village as soon as the sun came up, leaving the villagers after ensuring they wouldn't be overrun by the bandits they had caught. The cover part of the mission had gone well… but now they had to do the real mission.
"Listen up because this is important!" Raiden addressed the group as they ran on the road. "We're going to meet Hidden Frost shinobi, so I want everyone here to be on their best behavior! From the moment we make contact to the moment we enter the boundaries of our village, I want all of you to be laser-focused with every fiber of your being dedicated to this mission. Don't let your guard down even for a second!
"There's a reason why Hidden Frost organized a face-to-face exchange and did not send the information by a carrier eagle— this information is important for both the villages. Your village is relying on you— your country is relying on you! Complete this mission and prove they were right to entrust you with this responsibility."
Takuma clenched his fist and kicked the ground harder. He felt his heart pick up beats, pumping his blood in anticipation.
He was finally doing something of importance. Yes, he didn't have Nenro's connection, Masaaki's new clan backing, or Taro's parental support— but he was doing something of importance that none of them had done. They discussed the missions they went on, and neither of them was as important as this one. A hand-off with foreign shinobi. For the C-rank mission category, where shinobi contact wasn't anticipated, this mission was the top-tier mission for the category. He had just saved a village from a continuing future of exploitation which was a great mission in itself, but now he was going to do something that made it look lackluster.
This was a turning point, Takuma could feel it.
After four hours of travel, they arrived in the middle of nowhere. They had passed through a large belt of agricultural villages before arriving at the edge of a natural forest where a one-structure stone shrine stood.
Takuma had seen these types of shrines during his treks around the Leaf village. They were shrines dedicated in honor of local deities such as forest guardians. He hadn't been religious in his previous life, but after finding himself in a new world, he wholeheartedly believed that there were existences belonging to higher planes. How else would he find himself in this world, in the boy's body?
So, he made sure to clean the shrines he found.
"A kilometer into the forest is a clearing," Iruka stood beside the shrine with a rough map in his hand. "That's where we make contact with Hidden Frost shinobi. They're allies, but we will still be careful. If you have any preparations, do it now before we head in."
Takuma pulled up his pants and tightened the straps on his weapon packs and arm and shin guards. He took a breath and imagined a mask over his face. His restless heart settled down a level as he felt a focus rise within him. He would go in and come out. That was all.
The two teams headed into the forest, and soon they arrived at the clearing. The situation could've turned two ways— if they arrived first, they would've set up traps as they waited for the Hidden Frost shinobi— but as it turned out, they were the last to arrive with a group of Hidden Frost shinobi already present in the clear.
Four shinobi, three men and one woman, dressed in shinobi gear with a blue and gray color scheme that matched the Hidden Frost. They all had pale skin, suiting the cold weathers of the Land of Frost. Something to notice was that all of them had swords on their backs.
Takuma judged their gait, balance, how they held themselves, where they were looking, the sword length, and everything he had learned to look for in fighters. Then, he compared it with kenjutsu users he fought in the Ring to prepare himself in case things went south.
They looked at the eight Leaf shinobi in nervousness. It was understandable; they were outnumbered 2-to-1, and if a fight ensued, the odds weren't looking to be in their favor.
'If one of them is a jonin, then that might be different,' thought Takuma, but there was no way to tell that.
"The weather is warm today," said the leading man, older than the other three Hidden Frost shinobi.
Raiden responded, "You think so? I feel the weather is just right. Perfect for tea, actually."
"You think so? How about we go have tea after this."
"It'd be my pleasure."
The Hidden Frost shinobi eased. The secret code which tested their identity was confirmed, and they could initiate the transaction.
"The information?" Raiden immediately got down to business.
The Hidden Frost shinobi nodded and took out a pack of three scrolls from his pocket. They looked like any other scroll would, and from a glance, there was nothing special about them. The Hidden Frost shinobi and Raiden stepped toward each other as the rest stared at each other with a healthy dose of tension hanging in the air.
Takuma's eyes followed the two men who were about to exchange information. From the looks of it, the second part of the mission was going to be boring— and Takuma was fine with that because boring was simple, and simple was always good during missions. According to Takuma's standards, he did enough fighting in the Ring and wished for zero action during missions. If surrender was an option, Takuma would've demanded it from the bandits— but they had to scare and injure the bandits so they wouldn't rise up.
*Crackle*
'Hmm?' Takuma looked towards the sound.
For a split moment, he thought it was a branch breaking or something similar, but immediately, his mind shot up similarities between what he heard and what his Lightning Release: Shock sounded like.
Before realization settled in… before Takuma could even turn his neck completely… before anyone could react— a lightning-covered kunai shot out of the evening shadows of the forest around them and—
Takuma jolted, his eyes widening as the lightning streak disappeared…
… into Raiden's body.
.
———
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The link is in the synopsis!
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
200+ Classement
Power Stone 
109 Power
stone 
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