Chương 230: CH_7.12 (230)
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———
.
"This is very good," Takuma said, giving a nod to Gaku.
"Really?" said Anko, surprised by his reaction. Given their relationship, she was sure Takuma would rip into Gaku.
The three of them were alone in the factory base. She had wanted to run Gaku's plan by Takuma because she doubted her ability to look at the situation impartially and because Chinatsu was the cornerstone of their cover identity; putting her close to an enemy shinobi would risk them all getting exposed.
"It was a risky move, yes— but he was able to convince them and if she manages to convert the chunin into a regular and gain his trust, we're golden," Takuma said as he worked on sorting objects collected from around the factory like screws and bolts using chakra strings.
"That's what I said," Gaku smiled victoriously at Anko. "I'll coordinate with Chinatsu and prepare her for the information we want from the guy. Leave it all to me."
"Yeah, let's not get ahead of us there. This one thing going well doesn't mean everything will. Anko and I need to be keyed into everything you plan to do," said Takuma. Gaku opened his mouth to argue, but Takuma cut him off before he could speak. "You can take the lead on this, but we need to be aware of everything before it happens. Got it?"
Gaku was peeved, but he didn't say anything. On the other hand, Anko was surprised that Takuma gave Gaku the lead; she thought he would take on the lead from Gaku—but she nodded as she agreed that she needed to know about things before they happened. She allowed Takuma some freedom to operate independently but wouldn't extend that treatment to Gaku.
"Alright, keep in touch," Takuma said as he got off the couch and grabbed his weapon pouches and a long hooded overcoat to hide everything underneath.
"Going out?" asked Anko.
"Yeah, I think I have a lead on the Goharu Family." Takuma looked at Gaku, "I followed that guy from the Goharu Family, and I think I found their stash house."
"I knew they'd come in handy," said Gaku.
The resistance group led by Motohiro had helped the team spread the anti-occupation posters around the city. They agreed with what the team was doing and wanted to help more. Seeing their success, the team decided to give Motohiro's group another job—to find the Goharu Family's drug stash house.
Takuma wanted to poison the drugs, but for that to happen, they needed to find the packaging and stash house. The team didn't have enough time to find it by themselves, so Takuma decided to outsource it to the resistance group, which knew the city better than the team.
They failed to find it.
The Goharu Family had done an excellent job of keeping it hidden. However, they found a high-ranking person inside the family who was connected to Goharu's drug trade, which was good enough as Takuma spent a few days following that guy and found the stash house.
"I'll confirm it today," he said to Anko, "after which, you and Daiki can go in to map the interior and plan how you want to do it."
"That's fine by me," said Anko. "I want to talk to you."
"Sure, let's go," said Takuma.
"You really gave Gaku the lead… just like that?" Anko said as they walked to the back entrance to the factory building.
"I would've liked to have the lead, but it's clear that Chinatsu trusts him the most. She'll be putting herself in danger by fishing for information so it's imperative that she does whatever is asked of her. She needs to feel comfortable, and Gaku is the best choice for it… I could take the lead and ask Gaku to cooperate, and he might support me in the open but he'll instruct her differently behind our backs." Takuma shrugged. "It's better to let him have this one. At least this way, there's no risk of Chinatsu blowing our cover because of conflicting instructions."
Anko thought that she would need to discipline Takuma about letting his personal feelings for Gaku interfere with the mission, but here he was, proving her wrong. He was self-aware enough to realise that Gaku was the best choice to directly work with Chinatsu.
"Good job—"
"And well… if he screws up and Chinatsu ends up blowing our cover, I'll be safe," Takuma smiled and patted her on the back, "I can't say that about you guys, though."
Anko was left speechless as she watched Takuma leave the factory while chuckling to himself. He might find it amusing, but Anko didn't find it funny as she looked back at the base corner where Gaku probably had a cigarette in his mouth.
———
.
Takuma sat perched on a roof, staking out the Goharu Family building identified as the drug stash house. As he observed the building, it couldn't be clearer that the building was important. There were two guards with swords at both entries, the windows were boarded and barred, and anyone who stood close to the building for any reason was asked to move or leave under the threat of violence.
He had yet to go inside to confirm that the building was the drug stash house, but he didn't need to because one of the guards was particularly talkative and openly yapped to his partner about what was going on inside. To the guard's credit, he didn't talk about it around strangers but Takuma's ears were much sharper than the average guy—and he caught the conversation when the guard confirmed no one was in earshot.
So why was Takuma staking out the building when he already had confirmation?
In a conversation between the talkative guard and a packer working in the building, he heard that today was the fulfilment day of an important big order—that got Takuma interested.
He wanted to confirm his hunch that the big order was related to the enemy shinobi.
A carriage pulled up in front of the building while Takuma watched. A minute later, a bald man with a long scar on the top of his bald head stepped out of the building with a large duffle bag. He wore a tacky suit and shaded sunglasses and entered the carriage with two other sword-carrying men, most probably for protection.
Takuma got up and started the carriage from the rooftops.
The bald man was Waichi. He was the Goharu Family higher-up found by Motohiro's resistance group.Takuma had followed to find the drug stash house. Waichi was the brother-in-law of the Goharu Family's current head, a fortune that had granted him a privileged position in the family.
When Takuma arrived today, he didn't know if Waichi would be involved with the big order, but seeing him come out of the building with a duffle bag strengthened Takuma's belief that it was for the enemy shinobi.
In that case, Waichi taking point made sense. He had clearly attained his position through nepotism, but in the few days Takuma had spent following him, he seemed to be a capable, high-ranking family member.
There were advantages to leaving the client-facing of the drug trade with shinobi to the Renge Gang. Shinobi were dangerous, and having the Renge Gang between the family and the shinobi was a layer of separation and protection for them. But now, with the Renge Gang out, the Goharu Family were forced to deal with them directly and thus had to exercise caution.
A ten-minute journey later, the carriage stopped in front of a bar called the [Ice Sphere].
Takuma noted the name and address, intending to find out if the Goharu Family owned it.
Waichi and his guards entered the bar, and Takuma settled in the shadows to observe the entrance. He wished to head inside to take a look, but the risk of detection was high, and his personal safety was at risk as he speculated the attendance of shinobi. It was smarter for him to stay outside and infer the happenings inside from the context clues.
Takuma fell back on the rooftop and found a tap. He blocked the drain before opening the top to let the running water pool on the roof for a few minutes. He weaved hand seals for the Water Clone Jutsu. The chakra leaked out of his feet trickled outward into the water on the floor that gathered together into a human-shaped silhouette. Takuma felt a sizable amount of his chakra drain away as a clone formed before him.
"I'll go keep an eye on the back entrance," said the clone before disappearing off the roof.
Takuma returned to observe the front entrance. There was no movement in or out of the bar for half an hour until four men finally appeared at the bar's entrance. Seeing them jump down from a nearby rooftop made it clear they were shinobi.
Takuma shrunk himself into a corner and peered down at the bar. From the looks of it, there was a leader among the group, with the remaining three as followers. He assumed the leader was a chunin and the rest were genin.
As the shinobi entered the bar, Takuma was convinced that he had found the group acting as drug dealers for the enemy forces and that the Goharu Family was officially supplying for the shinobi.
At long last, he had found the link in the chain he could exploit to shake up the status quo in Yu. The meeting went on for another hour. As Waichi saw the shinobi out, they chatted outside the front entrance, so Takuma snuck to the back side of the bar to meet his clone.
"Anything to report?" he asked.
The clone replied with a negative.
"Okay, we're going to follow the shinobi to see if we can find something new."
The clone no longer had any use, but Takuma had already spent a considerable amount of chakra to create one, and there was no harm in having a secondary opinion—especially since it was his.
Takuma and his clone took off and tailed the four-person group. They exercised caution, staying well behind to avoid being detected.
"They're overconfident. They're travelling too openly," said the clone.
When Takuma was learning to tail someone, he had also done self-study on how to shake off tails. Shinobi, who frequently travelled through rooftops, added a few simple tricks to throw off a possible tail. One of those tricks was to make the tail lose sight by dipping down to the street level every once in a while. The shinobi in front of them were openly travelling across rooftops without ever stepping down on the streets.
Takuma nodded. "It's surprising given that the Renge Gang was targeted by shinobi." The use of the explosive tag in the Bentetsu police station bombing was enough of an indicator of shinobi involvement. "One would think they'd fear that they were the next targets… but from the looks, that doesn't seem to be the case."
"Good for us," said the clone.
"Is it incompetence, or do they have a reason not to be worried?" Takuma asked himself.
Much to his disappointment, the group returned to the area where the majority of shinobi resided in the city. The area was well-guarded and the most dangerous for the team. Anko had forbidden them from exploring the area because of the risk involved.
"That's unfortunate," said Takuma. "Well, we got the proof that the Goharu Family and the enemy forces are directly connected."
"Yeah," the clone dragged the word, "what do you think that's about?"
Takuma looked where the clone pointed and saw a pillar of smoke that rose and blot out the sky in the distance. The amount of smoke was the indicator of the massive size of the fire source.
"Should we go take a look?" asked the clone.
"Yeah, let's…"
———
.
"This is bad," said the clone, horrified as he looked down at the scene from a nearby rooftop.
Takuma stared at a burning police station building. Flames burst out of every orifice that building had: the windows, the doors, and the cracks in the ceilings and the walls.. Spectators stared at the fire from a distance as the firefighters tried to put out the raging fire to no avail.
The fire wasn't the horrifying part of the situation.
The police station was built on the corner of an active street. In the middle of the street in front of the police station, three bare poles were stabbed into the road. And from those poles hung three corpses of blue spray-painted men dressed in Yu's police force uniform. If it wasn't already similar enough, they had the blue posters stuck to their chests.
Someone had copied the police station bombing.
Takuma stared at the hanged man, unable to move his eyes away. His mind raced at what this meant and how it would affect the team's plans. It was clear they wouldn't be able to proceed as intended.
"I need to inform Anko—"
As Takuma spoke to the clone, he felt a gaze on him. Takuma straightened up and looked around to find the source of gaze. He scanned the crowd on the ground, and the windows of the buildings, but couldn't find the source—the gaze was still on him.
He felt his skin prickle as he scoured the rooftops.
In the same line of buildings, five rooftops away from him stood a solitary man dressed in black tactical gear with a sword on his back. The middle-aged man smiled at Takuma when their eyes met which sent chills down Takuma's back.
"Bro, we have company," said the clone, gravely.
Three more figures in black tactical gear and white porcelain masks were on the rooftops around then. They were all staring at Takuma. He was surrounded from all four sides.
"Bro?" The clone looked at Takuma when he didn't get a reply.
Takuma had grabbed his head as a sharp migraine stabbed his brain and was groaning in agony.
When Takuma found himself in the 10-year-old orphan, shinobi academy student's body, he wasn't given the boy's memories. It had been a big problem because Takuma had near zero idea about the situation he'd found himself in. However, instead of memories, he got something akin to intuition that told him things like his name, the academy teacher's name, the address of his apartment.
The intuition was godsend because without it, Takuma wouldn't have been able to pass himself as that 10-year-old orphan.
However, even that intuition had limitations.
Takuma had wanted to know about the origins of the scars on his body—but instead of giving him some answers, he was punished by harsh headaches. For whatever reason, the intuition didn't want him to know about the scars, and every time Takuma tried as much as to think about the story behind the scars, he was punished. It was so egregious that even looking at himself in the mirror would leave him in pain.
He had to force himself to not think about the problematic parts of the boy's past like the origin of scars and the identity of his parents. The pain acted as potent negative reinforcement, and beat the urge out of him. He wished he knew everything about the boy's past, but it wasn't worth it when it meant getting a horrible headache every time his thoughts wandered in that direction.
It had been a very long time since Takuma had one of the headaches, and he was glad for it.
But here it was again.
Takuma looked up at the man smiling at him. He had no idea who the man was… only that the man was somehow related to the boy's problematic past.
.
———
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Chương 231: CH_7.13 (231)
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The link is also in the synopsis
———
.
'Take a deep breath,' Takuma said to himself.
He groaned as another hot stab assaulted his head. There wasn't a worse time to get a headache than when he was surrounded by unknown hostiles. A part of him wanted to find out about the first person who had triggered his headache, but he could see a trap when he saw one.
The unknown shinobi had set the police station ablaze in hopes of drawing out the culprit behind the Bentetsu police station bombing, and Takuma had played right into their hands. He had to escape regardless of what he wanted because capture wouldn't mean good things for him. Fortunately for him, his hood was concealing his face from view—as long as he could shake them off, he could escape without the possibility of a sketch of his face plastered around the town.
"We're leaving," Takuma said, still trying to calm himself down.
Takuma and his clone jumped off the rooftop into a side alley and quickly headed towards the police station street, where the crowds gathered. Without a word, both of them used the Transformation Jutsu to turn into two young women in an attempt to blend into the crowd.
Transformation Jutsu was easy to detect when one was looking for it, but the difficulty spiked when the adversary was looking at a crowd from a distance. They consciously chose to transform into women in an attempt to throw off their pursuers.
"Stay," said Takuma.
"Are you sure?" asked the clone in the form of a young woman.
It was an extremely risky move to stay in the crowd instead of instantly taking off—but Takuma expected the pursuers to look for people leaving the crowd. They moved away from the side alley entrance as that area would be looked at with the most suspicion after people walked away from the scene.
"Yes," Takuma whispered as he stared at the burning building for an excruciating fifteen seconds. Every second that passed was one where he thought that the unknown shinobi would jump down to surround them.
"Okay, I think this is enough time," said the clone. "This is what we're going to do. I will go ahead and try to cross the roadblock to make a scene. Use that commotion to slip away. Agreed?"
The street had been closed off for safety as the firefighters tried to contain the fire.
Takuma nodded after a second of consideration.
"Go," he said,
The clone in the disguise of a young woman took a step forward before unexpectedly stopping.
"What happened?" asked Takuma, thinking the clone must've spotted something.
"… You've got that headache, so I don't know if you noticed it or not," said the clone, "but do you recognize their tactical gear?"
The clones were different from himself in various ways. Even though they were complex creations, at their core, they were simple simulacra of the user. Unlike Takuma, who focused on the middle-aged man and his intuition headaches, the clone's first order of business after seeing the masked figures was to ensure Takuma's safety. It was a noted factual observation that the clones didn't have strong self-preservation instincts unless ordered to, as they knew their life span was limited from conception. They would put the original before them in every matter and were highly receptive to orders from the original.
There could be many reasons why the clone didn't get the same headache as Takuma. Perhaps the clone didn't care about finding out the truth of the matter at the moment, or he didn't have a good look at the man before he spotted the masked figures, which caused his priorities to switch.
Whatever it was, it allowed the clone to focus on the many different things that Takuma missed in his fluctuating mental state.
"What do you mean?" asked Takuma.
"Their tactical gear… it's exactly the same as the assassins from that night," said the clone.
Takuma's entire world screeched to a stop. He stared at the clone through wide eyes, while the memories of that rainy night flashed through his mind. He recalled the assassins' gear, washed in the yellow light of their fire ninjutsu. The clone was correct; the assassins wore the same black and grey tactical gear he had just seen a minute before.
A phantom pain flashed through Takuma's left leg, reminding him of the injury that had given him so much trouble; he had to arrive at Camp Banana with a walking cane. He grabbed his leg tightly and bit the inside of his mouth as the spark of apprehension from getting caught in a trap surged into a choking swell of fear.
"Get a hold of yourself; you've got to make it out alive," the clone pinched Takuma's arm.
Takuma looked at the clone, who was still transformed as a young woman, and took deep, calming breaths.
"Go. I'll be fine," he said.
The clone wasted no time and pushed through the crowd towards the road back on the street corner. Takuma turned to walk away from the scene, and as expected, he heard a loud commotion. He ignored it and kept walking away. With the thoughts muddling his brain, it took him all to stop himself from tearing away at full speed—he couldn't even walk briskly because it would be too fast for a civilian.
Takuma stopped when he heard a faint whistle coming above him. He immediately side-hopped and pressed himself against the nearby building. A moment later, a kunai stabbed the pavement where he stood.
He could tell that the clone was still alive, but the distraction ploy had failed. Takuma dropped all pretence, shed his disguise, and bolted away at full speed. The civilians yelped and exclaimed at the scene of a seemingly normal young woman turning into a shady hooded figure. They screamed when another kunai descended from the sky, stabbing the pavement close to them.
Takuma ignored them and pressed forward. He glanced to the side and saw a masked pursuer, with orange highlights on the white mask, sprinting from rooftop to rooftop, keeping up with him. Takuma changed course very abruptly and turned into a narrow alley off the main street.
The unmasked man, the leader of the masked group, dropped down to the other end of the alley from the sky, cutting off Takuma's route.
"Surrender," said the leader.
Takuma dug his heels into the ground to stop and course corrected towards the adjacent wall. He leaped up the exposed brick wall and ascended as fast as his legs could go. The leader launched a kunai at Takuma and he spun in a quick, complete rotation, catching the kunai. Before gravity could take effect, Takuma was back on the wall and climbing to the roof.
The orange masked figure leaped from across the street and landed on the rooftop while Takuma was pulling himself up. Using the kunai he'd caught, he formed bogus hand seals to trick "Orange-Mask" into thinking he was applying ninjutsu to the kunai. The masked man dove to the side to evade the plain kunai instead of deflecting it.
Takuma didn't stop and directly leaped to the next rooftop, but he didn't reach it. The leader appeared beside him and kicked him completely off course. Taken by surprise, Takuma managed to raise his block, but was hurled towards a building across the street.
"Gah!"
His back smashed against the wall, crushing the bricks and cement. Takuma stuck to it and continued his escape from his pursuers. He ran around the building before dropping down to the street level, and tore through alleyways and bends, sticking close to the building walls and hiding within the long, arcing shadows.
It was reminiscent of the night of the assassination attempt. He was running with pursuers hot on his tail. Back then, he didn't like that it was raining, but right now he really wished it was. Yu was drastically smaller than the Hidden Leaf village, and a big commotion could have the enemy forces come down on him. To make things worse, Takuma didn't know Yu as well as he did the Hidden Leaf. He couldn't go towards the industrial district with the factory base, nor could he go towards Chinatsu's house—and those were the two areas he knew best.
For the first time since he had been in Yu, the city felt truly hostile. He cursed himself as he sprinted through the streets, unable to lose the pursuers—he shouldn't have gone out alone. He saw shadows leaping over the buildings and the sound of footsteps as they pursued him like he was a game animal.
The sounds grew closer. He glanced back to see the leader on his tail, a few metres between them. Takuma exerted himself to boost forward when Orange-Mask appeared at the other end of the alley.
Takuma immediately switched to running up the walls again.
On the ground, the leader weaved hand seals. He breathed out a thin stream of fire, cupping it between his hands to form a long spear in his hands. Takuma saw the leader cock his arm back for a javelin throw—he wasn't going to catch that. His danger instinct tingled, telling him that dodging it narrowly wouldn't be enough.
Takuma's mind moved faster as he cycled through his recollection of the street in his mind as his eyes were locked on the leader's spear.
'Window'
Takuma glanced at the window one story above him. As the leader heaved the spear, chakra flooded into Takuma's feet and expunged out of the soles of his feet. The wall underneath his feet cratered as the wall/tree-walking technique was overloaded, and Takuma was propelled off the wall.
Crash! The glass shattered as Takuma went through the window pane less than a second before the spear reached his position and exploded. The fiery rush of flames managed to enter through the window and he would have been consumed by the roaring fire if not for his forward roll onto the floor.
Takuma had no time to look back and stumbled forward into an apartment bedroom. He hurried out of it in search of an exit, having taken one step to run into a pudgy woman holding a kitchen knife to his face. In one fluid movement, he disarmed the screaming housewife and threw a kunai with an explosive tag out of the broken bedroom window.
It exploded right outside the window ledge, damaging the building and the room, but it bought him a few more seconds before the pursuers came in.
He looked down at the screaming housewife who quieted under Takuma's gaze.
"Shut up and hide," he said before hurrying deeper into the house. He saw an old woman closely hugging a five- or six-year-old girl in a living room, both of whom looked terrified. Despite the twinge of guilt in his chest, he had no time to calm them down, so he ignored them.
The apartment was small, and he immediately saw the front door up ahead. He was halfway through it when his peripheral vision caught the sight of a large bucket full of water through an open bathroom door.
Takuma took the risk and weaved hand seals for the Water Style: Eight Tentacles. Just as he finished the hand seals, the leader stepped into the bedroom through the hand seal. Their eyes met, and both of them immediately drew and threw a kunai at each other. The kunai collided in the narrow hallway, a few feet away from the housewife, who screamed and dropped to the ground in fear. In the living room, the little daughter started crying as the grandmother hugged her tighter.
Takuma backed up toward the door and threw three shuriken toward the leader. He deflected them with a kunai while the water inside the bucket rose up in a freeform blob and flew at Takuma, who smashed through the front door into the open corridor.
The leader threw a kunai through the house as Takuma vaulted over the open corridor. The water blob attached to Takuma and sprung out two tentacles that caught the kunai. As he jumped down, he saw Orange-Mask run into the street from around the corner.
Takuma bit his lip in frustration.
He could feel that his clone was still alive and by the looks of it, had taken two out of four pursuers away from him. Despite that, Takuma felt that as long as he had these two after him, he wouldn't be able to escape.
The situation was only getting worse. Takuma's directional sense was average in all purposes, and he was already confused about where he was. For all he knew, he could have subconsciously leading them to the industrial complex of Chinatsu's house. The longer he was on the run with his focus on shaking the pursuers, the worse thing would get. Even if he wanted to get some help by going close to Chinatsu's house in hopes that the team would notice, he wouldn't be able to find his way quick enough.
He needed to eliminate one of them if he wanted a fair chance at escaping, and between the two, Orange Mask not only felt less threatening, but Takuma also had questions he wanted to ask the leader about how the man related to his past.
"Looks like Orange Mask has to die," he muttered.
.
———
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