[Kuronmeru Shiu]

♔

It was nearing evening. It was less apparent from any position of the sun, as the skies had been blanketed all day by gray, low-hanging cumulostratus clouds, and moreso the thickening fog that had begun to creep in.

Shiu walked along the limestone topography, stepping over deep cracks between and the bushes that jutted out from them. He felt certain they would have arrived at their destination by now had it not been for the uneven terrain of eastern Mizu no Kuni. Instead, by his best guess, as the one who was not holding any map, they wouldn’t make it to the village until morning.

It was his first time being on this side of the country. He had noticed a stronger chill in the wind from the night before. For a normal person, it was a jolting freeze that ripped past at intervals amidst an otherwise tolerable, resting cool. It would only get worse the closer they came to nightfall, and the closer they got to the coast. Shiu did not know how lucky he was to not have a single patch of goosebumps raising his skin.

The two of them had barely spoken since their meeting, at the advent of him transferring to be part of her team. So far, even in the solitude of their travels with no one but the other to keep company, this had not changed. Only the absolute necessity of communication had been shared between them. Shiu would not even ask for breaks, no matter the ache in his ankles or the weakness in his knees that slowed his pace. His father would not show weakness over something like this. He would not either.

He did not mind the relative silence between them. One of the first things he had told Sora when they met was that he didn’t want to waste words between them. She was a clanless woman. One who had disrespected his kin, repeatedly. There was more to his avoidance of her now though. Their meeting had ended in a way he had not expected, and it left a small part of him uncertain on how he should feel or how she would behave in the future. He did not like uncertainty.

It had now, once again, come to a point in their journey where it was unavoidable for him to speak to her again. When he had been in the Mizukage’s tower for the briefing, he had not been feeling himself. He had been present, face placid with the appearance of attention, but he had not actually been able to process most of what had been said to him. All he had gleaned from the meeting was when and where he were to convene with his assigned jounin-sensei, and that they would be traveling quite a bit.

As close as they were getting to where they were heading, probably, he could no longer put off asking for what he needed to know.

"Were you given any sort of scroll for this mission?” he said, turning his head to ask her.

Asking for a chance to read over the mission objective again was the best way he figured he could learn what exactly they were expected to do without actually admitting he didn’t know.

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Sora Minami

[Sora Minami]

Hishi Village was a place Sora hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

Nestled in between the convergence of two mountain ranges and a lake, Hishi had, at one point in time, been a bustling farm village on the cusp of becoming a proper town. The population had been predominantly young, with a great deal of farmers, though the place had managed to produce a few notable Shinobi over the years, including a man who became the second in command of the Daimyo’s armies through nothing more than sheer brilliance. And then Musei Squad came. It wasn’t something she liked remembering; the Civil War had been a trying time, and the things they’d needed to do to ensure victory had been… rough, on everyone.

So when Shiu had elected to take a mission that required him to visit the place, the pink-haired Jounin hadn’t exactly leapt at the chance to join in. It had only been her lingering guilt over nearly cutting his hand off that had convinced her to go along at all, and even that had only been with great reluctance. Still, she had agreed, and the pair of them had gone off towards Mizu no Tera, taking the longer but safer route around the mountains.

It had been a quiet trip, the Kuronmeru boy keeping up with her unrelenting pace well enough; better than his brother would have at any rate, and with a great deal less whining. That allowed them to make excellent time- by her best estimate, they’d be at Hishi Village by nightfall if they kept the same pace. So when Shiu spoke, breaking the near day long silence to ask after a mission scroll, the pink-haired Jounin didn’t even bother to look away from the map.

"No, I didn’t think we’d need one." Sora replied, her voice flat and noticeably colder than what the boy would be used to. She knew the mission details well enough though; head to Hishi Village, find out where the bandits were coming from, then eliminate them. Simple, really. "If you didn’t pay attention in the briefing, I can explain it to you."

Kuronmeru Shiu

[Kuronmeru Shiu]

♔

The woman’s frigid tone was not lost on him. He knew, too, that there couldn’t have been a single thing on that map of hers that required such attention. Nothing had changed about the map, nor had the landscape changed in any way over the past five minutes. They had been walking over the same swath of limestone pavement then as they were now. Ahead, far in the distance, they could catch the first glimpse of a terrace carved into the hillside that either presently or once was a paddy field. They would have seen that then, just as well as they could see that now.

Shiu blew a puff of air with sneering lips and narrowed his eyes at her. If there was anyone who should be speaking so dismissively between the two of them, it should be him, not her. Ignoble woman. He resented, too, that she had even suggested that he might not have been paying attention in the briefing, even if there had been some truth to it, in a way. It wasn’t her place to say such things.

"I was only going to review it to make a plan, in case you hadn’t thought of one,” he said.

It was a half-truth, which felt like a safer bluff than an outright lie. He hoped that would be enough to goad her into sharing something that might jog his memory, adding in a dash of condescension for the disrespect she had shown him.

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Sora Minami

[Sora Minami]

I might have actually believed that, Sora thought as she lowered her map, sky-blue meeting Shiu’s, lips pursed in a thin, obvious frown, if he hadn’t been so obvious about how he picked missions. He and Enyo both picked things based on superficial observations; more often than not, the Kuronmeru twins chose the option that seemed to have the highest chance for violence or bloodshed, regardless of what the actual parameters were, which led to some… interesting moments when they discovered what they were actually supposed to do.

"Right." She began, folding the map and stuffing it into her back pocket as she stared down at the boy, her frown fading to an almost wry smile; almost, but not quite. "Why don’t you tell me what you’ve come up with then?" The question came out with that same wry twist, her face placid save for her eyes, which glimmered with knowing humor. The boy had no bloody clue what they were doing here, let alone how to go about doing it- but she could spare a few moments to let him hang himself with his own words. Only a few, though.

So the Jounin waited, giving her student ample time to respond- and when he didn’t provide a suitable answer, she nodded, placing one hand on her hip as she gestured down towards the lake, her lips tugging up in a properly knowing smile. "Well, while you’re thinking about it, why don’t we get moving? Bandits aren’t going to kill themselves now, are they."

Kuronmeru Shiu

[Kuronmeru Shiu]

♔

Obnoxious woman.

He stopped when she stopped, though he was unhappy to do it. He didn’t like the change in her expression either. It was not quite the same twisted smile she’d given him during their first meeting, when she’d mocked him for the kekkei genkai his genetics had shackled him to, but it was just reminiscent enough to give yet another reason for why she was getting on his nerves.

"Maybe you should worry more about when the last time you cleaned your ears out was. I said I was going to make one, not that I had one.” He might have been able to add more to his argument, too, except in that moment, his imagination failed him, as it often did.

Briefly, he felt a pang of yearning for Enyo’s company. It was Enyo’s specialty, not his, to be able to craft his words to get what he wanted. Shiu often dismissed it as a useless exercise. There was no need to talk their way around people outside of their clan. Others should know to heed to them for the fact that they were Kuronmerus alone, and if they weren’t willing to cooperate with them, then they could just take whatever it was they wanted from them. In this rare moment, though, where he could not admit to the thing he wanted, or rather needed, it would have been a useful skill to have. Had Enyo been there, he might have gotten her to talk, whether by accident or intentionally.

Just as likely, though, or even more likely, Enyo would’ve picked up on how he’d somehow missed their mission objective, and for all the times Shiu chastised him for being inattentive or careless, Enyo would’ve been elated to catch his twin in a moment of being ignorant. Perhaps it was best that he was not there, after all.

Right when Shiu was starting to come up with a maybe-suitable excuse, something along the lines of how the mission was going to be so easy and simple that he hadn’t thought to come up with a plan at all, Sora seemed to move on from the question and prompted him to start walking again.

"You were the one who stopped us to begin with,” he grumbled, turning his gaze from her and down to the lake, where he resumed his trek down the craggy path.

Shiu’s moody tone was more half-hearted than it was before. He thought it might have been intentional on her part, though he wasn’t certain, but she had given him a hint as to what they were going to be doing, and it was something that appealed to him very much. Bandits. He hadn’t been given the opportunity to kill in any official capacity since his graduation nearly three years ago. His last mission in Amegakure should have been that chance, but for stupid reasons their employer had barred them from killing as their method of dispelling the bandits.

It was a small, silver lining from what had otherwise been an extremely annoying conversation, and he couldn’t completely hide how this revelation had sparked a light in his eyes and spurred a small bit of pep to his step. He only hoped that she would allow them to rest first before beginning their assault. He wanted to savor this as much as he could.

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Sora Minami

[Sora Minami]

"Sure you were." Sora said as the pair of them began moving once more, her sky-blue gaze focusing on the path before them, which was somewhat precarious. The rocky surface they were traversing was uneven and, had they not been Shinobi, would have been utterly impossible to cross with any degree of safety, the surface too broken up with crags and little gullies to be serviceable. But they were Shinobi, and so the Jounin and her recalcitrant Genin made decent time, covering the miles between them and Hishi Village in relative silence, noting the changes since she had last been through the region.

Several new large sinkholes had formed to the east of the lake, one of which looked to be near a quarter-mile wide, though a fuzzy memory told her that particular one might not be new at all, but an old one that had simply grown with time. She wasn’t certain though -it had been a decade or more since she had last seen it- so the pink-haired woman kept her opinions and thoughts to herself. Eventually, the duo made it out of the limestone crags, the ground evening out to damp, rocky soil, a proper road coming into view… as well as a small caravan of merchants, huddled together around the ruined remains of their cart, burning what looked to be dead bodies.

"Head’s up." Sora said, instantly going on alert as she laid a hand on her sword, ready to fight but not ready to pull the trigger just yet. She wasn’t a sensor, so she had no clue if there was anyone else nearby, but the thought of an ambush crossed her mind, and she wasn’t about to simply walk into one if she could avoid it. Especially since her own Hunter-nin team had done something eerily similar in this exact spot. They hadn’t been spotted just yet, but they would be soon… which might not matter at all if they were what they seemed.

Kuronmeru Shiu

[Kuronmeru Shiu]

♔

The distance between where their conversation last left off and the miles that passed with seemingly no apparent destination in sight tempered Shiu’s excitement. He had fallen into an almost pensive state by the time they departed the limestone pavement and came up a more familiar kind of soil. Shiu’s eyes were immediately on the ground, at his feet. The dark, glossy sheen of dirt fat with saturation gave him pause for just a moment. Then he was taking uneven steps along the ground, carefully placing his feet on rocks and the relatively drier patches of earth so as not to dirty his sandals. Shiu enjoyed dirtying himself to a degree, but it was within the specific context of beating someone to a bloody pulp. Getting a patch of mud sloughed onto his sandal because of a misplaced footstep was just uncomely.

He had just sunk his foot onto a particularly pointy stone when Sora alerted him to what caught her attention. He looked up, immediately spotting the caravan in its sorry state. Shiu looked at them curiously, noting the subtle tells of the jounin beside him being prepared for something out of his periphery. Were these the bandits they were to kill?

His own hand fell to his side to bump the hilt of his sword as he looked down at the people below. He saw no big, gaudy weapons that he usually associated bandits with, nor did their attire have the awkward proportions of clothes stolen that were either too big or too small to fit their frame properly. As they drew nearer, however, there came a particular odor—the smell of charring flesh.

Shiu turned his head to Sora, but her face remained impassive, and she gave no indication that they were to attack. He looked again down towards the road with morbid curiosity. The fact that they were standing around burning bodies to him seemed grounds enough to attack them. People did not stumble upon bonfires made of humans by pure happenstance. Shiu, for his part, wanted to hurry and watch the cremation process of the bodies up close. He was a medical student, after all, and surely taking advantage of the rare opportunity to watch a corpse go up flames would help him learn… something. He was a soldier first and a student second, however, so they would have to deal with the strange bandits first before he had a chance to study the fire. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, but if they hurried, he thought they might be able to dispatch the probably-bandits before the kindling developed fourth-degree burns.

Wordlessly, he tilted his head back in Sora’s direction, not-so-subtly shifting his eyes from her, to the people on the road, then back to her in a repeated gesture, as though to ask, Are we going to hurry up and do something about them or not? He wiggled the heel of his hand on the tsuka of his sword, quietly, to further emphasize his point.

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Sora Minami

[Sora Minami]

Sora watched the group with a level eye, her sky-blue gaze so focused on the company of men that she actually missed Shiu’s look, her mind in two places at once. Memories of a day much like this one flooded her, a situation just like this, albeit one with a very different end. Maybe. She still wasn’t certain if these men were the villagers they seemed to be- but with the sun setting, and her Genin waiting for the call, she didn’t have time to suss out their motives from afar.

"Come on. Let’s go see if they need help." The Jounin said, lowering her hand away from Samidare’s hilt as she spoke. She gave Shiu a moment to get moving, then started off herself, trudging alongside the Genin so the pair of them arrived together. There were four of them left, a quartet of men ranging from a young boy not much older than Shiu to an ancient man who looked half in the grave already. He was the only of the four sitting; the others stood, half watching the fire, while the boy was turned fully towards the road, watching.

So it came as no surprise that the young man noticed their approach first, his head twisting around towards the others as she and Shiu came near; the two middle men, both adults, moved in between them and the boy, the old man still as a rock as they neared, their faces a mask of determination hiding fear.

"Hold it right there!” One of the men said, his voice loud enough that the echo bounced off the distant mountains, coming back to them as she slowed, then stopped entirely about twenty feet from the men. Far enough to make them feel safe, close enough to get in and do what needed doing… if it needed doing. "D-don’t… don’t come any closer! We’re armed!”

Kuronmeru Shiu

[Kuronmeru Shiu]

♔

Sora stood unresponsive, long enough that Shiu gave up trying to get her attention with his non-verbal gestures. It was a silence that was vaguely reminiscent of how she had refused to look at him at first when he had started speaking to her, needlessly pouring over a map he felt certain she must have already had memorized. He wasn’t sure what the vacancy in her eyes was about, but he didn’t like it, and he made that evident by looking at her with an increasingly annoyed stare.

Before he could decide whether to try verbally prompting her or moving on ahead without her, she finally spoke again, but not in response to the looks he’d been giving her, nor was it something he had expected. Help them? They didn’t help bandits, they killed them. Perhaps it was because she had determined that they were not bandits, but if that were the case, why would they go out of the way to help them? It had nothing to do with their mission objective, as far as he knew. The jounin may have been one of those soft-willed, charitable types, who made themselves into doormats for those who were too feeble to help themselves. It wasn’t something he made a habit of doing himself, especially not while on duty. His time was precious because, unlike most others, his life was meaningful, and he didn’t like wasting it on hopeless causes.

He was still insatiably curious about the contents of that bonfire, though, so any excuse to get closer to it was good enough for him. He just hoped she didn’t take this as some sort of sign for some altruistic side to him that he didn’t actually have.

Shiu, unlike his instructor, did not let his hand fall from the hilt of his sword. He let it rest casually against it, because he did not care to appear non-threatening as she may have. As they descended the sloping landscape closer to the road, Shiu kept most of his focus on his feet, making sure his gait carried as much of an ethereal beauty to it as he possibly could while traveling downward at such an incline. When it leveled out, he looked back up to survey the group ahead of them, who had evidently taken notice.

With much of the mass of the sun’s body sunk below the horizon, it left glaring orange streaks blurring his vision, and he had to squint just to make out most of the details of the group’s demographics. It was an age range among the group that he found curious, and unexpected in as far as what he had pictured when he had believed them to be bandits. The teen boy, who seemed farther along in the stages of puberty than he was, in particular caught his attention. Shiu wondered, idly, how easy it would be to kill him if he tried. He imagined very easily. He was not a Kirigakure shinobi, after all.

Their defensive posturing came as a small surprise to Shiu, and he stopped when Sora halted in his periphery. Any lingering exasperation he may have felt towards the jounin-sensei was all but forgotten the moment one of the men decided to flap his mouth. Shiu’s brow lifted in amusement as they postured, trying to pose a danger that was nonextant to them by virtue of their civilian status, as far as the young genin was aware. It was enough to twist his lips into a small, wry smile, and something even more rare from him—he laughed.

It came out as a short, dry chuckle. When he finished, he asked the man, "Armed? With what? Kindling from that fire?”

Shiu did nothing to filter the mockery in his tone. Even if he ultimately got roped into performing some menial task to help out these hopeless characters, he was glad he went along with Sora’s conviction to approach these men. He had not expected the entertainment of commoners thinking they could do anything to make him feel unsafe.

As much as he may have enjoyed goading these men into saying more funny things, his obligations as a medical student meant there was a time-sensitive subject here for him to address. So Shiu nodded his head towards the bonfire, deciding to get right to the heart of it without delay. "Who are you burning?”

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Sora Minami

[Sora Minami]

Sora watched the quartet of men with a level gaze, her lips pursed in a thin line at Shiu’s antics. His attitude was the absolute last thing they needed at the moment, but the boy had already spoken, setting the tone for their interaction with the men before she could so much as say a word. And two of them did react, their shoulders squaring, hands balling into fists as they stared down at her student, squinting through the glaring rays of the setting sun at his smaller frame. Her right hand slid up, resting gently on Samidare’s hilt, a sigh escaping her as she glanced between them, trying not to let the moment dictate what happened next.

Fortunately for all of them, however, the old man behind the two men had better sense than his companions, and spoke up, his voice soft and wrinkled with age, rustling like old paper as he waved a single hand at the two middle-aged men, almost dismissing their antics. "Are you two so foolish as to let the words of a boy make you leap into a fight you can’t win? Open your eyes Sado, Tadashi. The lady is a Shinobi.”

The two men froze up at the older one’s voice, their faces going flush at his rebuke- but they lowered their shoulders, looking away from them in silent shame, their annoyance and fear mollified, at least for now. Although, given the subtle edge of disgust in the old man’s voice when he said the word "Shinobi,” perhaps it was simply the calm before the storm…

"That we are, sir." Sora said, speaking up before her Genin could interject, hoping that his curiosity about the burning bodies would be sated by a closer look now that they were no longer reacting with hostility. "Kirigakure received a missive from your village head, asking for help with bandits plaguing the area. My student and I are here to help you with that."

The two men in front stiffened at that, their eyes drifting away from them and towards the teen behind them who hadn’t said a word through the whole exchange, his gaze empty as a calm puddle of water. Whatever had happened here, it hadn’t been pretty. "What happened?"

Kuronmeru Shiu