[ayase saki]

Ayase Saki was not the person she used to be. She didn't know the person she used to be. Didn't want to know, really, felt very secure at least in the knowledge that she had less than zero desire to associate with the woman who had fled the shores of Hana no Kuni in a sick red haze. Memory was of no concern to her. She didn't want to remember. But there was a great chasm between what her body wanted her to do and what it was physically capable of doing: the pit that laid between instinct and ability. Saki held her katana in her hand and felt that she must have been an expert in its use, at some point in her life, but the electric signals from nerve to wrist were sluggish, damaged. Staples in her skull fucking with her footstance and dragging down her reaction time. Miraki was a small town with not too much going for it. Quietly established on the border passage to Tani no Kuni, it saw its fair share of travelers and merchants, but all were en route elsewhere: people hardly ever stayed for long. It had been easy for Saki to make her way in, attaching herself to a merchant caravan passing overland to some settlement to the other side of the country and relieving them of her services when she felt, suddenly and urgently, that she wanted to stay.

SOLO -- 1/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Exactly what had drawn her to Miraki, she wasn't sure. She recognized something of herself in its people--common folk working diligently to survive. Well enough to manage on their own, but too far and too poor to necessarily hire shinobi for their more specific, immediate needs outside of general peacekeeping. There was a market for her here--she could stay a while, a few weeks maybe, get some cash in hand and be of genuine service to people who needed a cheaply hired helping hand. Lots of travelers, too. Who would notice them missing? But her sword hand was not, she thought, what it used to be. Instinct told her that she could handle a protection detail on her own, but her gut and her reality were not lining up. She was adequate, but she was not skilled. There were no gaggles of local children gathering to watch her practice her bladework, no admiring glances at the glint of her steel and the deftness of her footwork. She hacked at a wooden post that served as a training dummy and drew no more attention than any other sellsword who wandered through this town. Had that happened, once? Was she praised for her skill, exalted for her finesse? Saki didn't know. But there was a chasm to cross regardless.

SOLO -- 2/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

A town so heavy in foot traffic played host to what seemed like a disproportionately large number of boarding houses; Saki had found the most derelict one on her arrival, renting the shittiest room at the cheapest rate with the scant few coins she had on hand. She was able to buy herself a week, with a little left over for food--a stipend she could reasonably stretch out, if she went to hunt her own meat. Sato Takashi was the master of the boarding house, a tired middle-aged widower who spent his days doing DIY repairs on his fixer-upper of a business. He had a son roughly Saki's age, maybe a year or two younger—plain, but handsome enough, with dark eyes and dark hair and an attractive slant to his jaw. He seemed to do most of the hard labor around the boarding house, helping his father out as best he could, and so far hadn't seemed to notice that Saki was spending her evenings quietly watching him chop lumber or perform some other sweaty, masculine task. It was when she came back from a hunting trip, a trio of rabbits caught in a snare slung over her shoulder, that she saw the boarding house master's son scything at the weeds on their property and understood why her sword felt so off in her hand.

SOLO -- 3/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Somewhere in the ruined neurological pathways of her mind, wires had gotten crossed, and she was swinging a sword the way a groundskeeper swung a scythe; sweeping, an arcing crescent, seeking to hook and tug instead of slash and stab. She was over-extending, her body used to the motions of a more versatile tool that once served a purpose other than killing. Once she knew what to look for, adjusting was a much simpler process--though the lingering mystery of why she wielded a sword like a scythe remained unsolved. Tanaka Nagito had been killed with a dull knife sourced from his own kitchen; when Saki had run to her apartment to gather her things so she could flee the village for good, the only weapons that had caught her eye were her katana and kobun. And shinobi tools, et cetera, sure, but surely she would have noticed if she'd kept a scythe in her home? But then, she thought, it wasn't like she'd had time to do a thorough search, and she'd essentially been sweeping the home of a stranger. She grabbed the things that were easy and of obvious value and dipped; gods only knew if the person she'd been had a hidey-hole of grisly treasures tucked away somewhere.

SOLO -- 4/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Sato’s son had been more than happy to loan her his scythe when she asked. He was a head taller than her, with dark eyes and dark hair and the smooth softness of babyfat still padding his cheeks; younger than her, but not by much, handsome and dull and easily won over by a compliment and a gentle touch of his bicep. She practiced killing the weeds first. The muscles of her back and shoulders worked with the motion of swinging the scythe as naturally as if she’d been doing it for years; her motions were fluid, easy as breathing. Moving on to her little makeshift training dummy was the next obvious step, piercing and slicing and carving and hooking until sweat plastered her hair to her head and made the staples in the back of her head itch, until only tatters of hay and burlap sack remained. The scythe felt right in her hands. (wash me thoroughly of my iniquity and cleanse me of my sin) Saki did not want to use it. When she went inside for water and a rag she overheard Sato murmur softly, urgently to his son: just keep clear of her from now on, okay? What’s the problem? Her money’s good, isn’t it? Yes, but—just—trust me, Reiji, please. Something’s not right with that one. Saki set her glass down in the sink, loud, and both men fell silent. She left the scythe by the shed outside and didn’t pick it up again.

SOLO -- 5/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

The sword felt good in the mind but wrong in the body. The scythe felt good in the body and good in the mind, but good to the wrong part of her mind, good to the part that had been poked full of holes and stapled shut for whatever wretched thing that lay within to fester and starve out and die. She could not feed it (a repentance that leads to salvation without regret) would not feed it any more than she fed the desire that made her jaw click when she saw the smooth plane of Sato Reiji’s back as he brought an ax out to the chopping block. He chopped firewood most days, but he forgot his shirt when he thought Saki might be watching. He did not know how delicate the flesh was between muscle and rib, how fragile the length of a man’s spine. He was too sheltered to heed his father’s warning, so Saki obeyed on his behalf. She stayed away, took her practice with her out to the wetlands where she went hunting. What was the middle ground, she wondered, between sword and scythe? The line between redemption and repentance? From whom did she want to beg forgiveness?

SOLO -- 6/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Polearm, she decided. There was a tiny forge in town manned by a smith who traded mostly in horseshoes and axles, but he had a few pieces of adequate weaponry, enough to restock a traveling shinobi on their way to a more interesting destination. Kunai, shuriken, wakizashi, tanto, katana—a scythe, yes, displayed with the rest of the farming equipment, but also a naginata, with a long shaft and a curved blade. The smith let her hold it and give a few experimental swings. The heft of it felt adequate in her hands, the flow of its movement intuitive and easy to learn. It was something to learn, she realized as she swiped and stabbed; there was no ghost-memory worming its way through her nervous system, no echo of a past life roaring to make itself known. A truly fresh experience, one that she could confidently call her own. Ten thousand ryo, the smith said. Saki had never moved faster than she did to put it back exactly where she found it; ten thousand ryo was all that had been with her belongings at the hospital, and even that pittance was all but gone now. She could maybe barter the sword for the naginata, but the sword grew heavier when she thought earthen thoughts at it and lighter when she thought breezy thoughts at it, and the sword scratched a different kind of itch that she didn’t know how to place, so the sword it would have to be.

SOLO -- 7/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

So she was back to square one: standing opposite a training dummy with a katana in hand, trying to learn how to wield something that her body insisted it knew how to use. Saki was aware in her periphery that Reiji followed her out to the wetlands under the guise of collecting herbs or rain-wet firewood he could dry out at home, could taste the phantom of his blood caked against her teeth. She gave him a wide berth, double-triple looped to lose him without getting him lost, and tried to focus on skewering bark instead of the tender sweetmeats of a stupid, stupid boy. Knowing how her body wanted her to hold the scythe helped her correct it to how it was supposed to hold the katana. Two-handed felt stronger and more stable but also made her more prone to relapsing into slicing and hooking and carving (return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning) so she held it one-handed instead. Her free hand found that it liked to weave handseals while otherwise unoccupied, and could do so with relative dexterity. The scant few shinobi she’d seen in passing since arriving on the western continent had all used both hands to weave their seals, so she doubted she could achieve much in the way of shinobi arts with her katana in hand; yet she found that with a seal held in her free hand and a little chakra to push herself beyond, she could flash-step even with a blade in hand, blitzing to reposition herself around her training dummy as she pleased.

SOLO -- 8/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Relearning ninjutsu had been a slow and brutal process. She'd picked up a little in that brief window between discharge from the hospital and flight from the country, but Saki knew intuitively that it was a fraction of what she used to be capable of, executed slower and more shoddily than one would expect of a shinobi of her caliber. With no one to learn from--she dared not approach any of the shinobi she'd encountered trying to learn, or else risk giving up the ghost--what little she'd been able to pick back up was largely learned through observation and practice. Dark eyes followed the acute movement of seals weaving into seals, catalogued action, reaction, and consequence with the kind of clinical interest most commonly reserved for researchers. She was making progress, but not enough. Self-defense wasn't her concern; though she walked through the valley of the shadow of death, she carried a big stick and was the meanest motherfucker in the valley. It was the grim kind of certainty that took her own animalistic deadliness for granted. No, what concerned her was basic professionalism. If she wanted to make a living as a wandering shinobi, she needed to be able to perform up to par. Without the support of a shinobi village to vouch for her ability, she needed to be twice as skilled and half as expensive to keep finding consistent work. For now, all she had was her sword.

SOLO -- 9/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

While ninjutsu still felt foreign to her, chakra was something she understood intimately. She was more than familiar with the feel of its flow within her, how to direct and focus it to where she needed it to go. What came easier than anything else was understanding that she had three critical pieces of equipment that would serve her during this tenuous recovery periods: her sword, her knife, and her jacket. Doton came naturally to her. She had no recollection of a paper test and her brief overnight stay in Kusagakure hadn't provided the opportunity to re-enact it, but instinct shored up her defenses, protected her from blows that would have been much nastier without the flow of earthen chakra to the hoodie she wore perpetually. Translating that to the sword was easy--it made her blows hefty, more weighty, made it feel less like graceful bladework and more like she was brutally beating the makeshift dummy to death with a hefty metal bat. It was satsifying. Visceral. She slipped back into that two-handed grip and swung overhead, cleaving the poor victim of her dummy in two with one heavy strike. Slick sweat stuck her fringe to her forehead and she was panting with exertion, but the flow of chakra to the blade was steady, and she swung and swung and swung until the dummy was in splinters at her feet. She surveyed the carnage with a critical eye (break my bones so that i may feel the pain of the lame) and upon feeling her own satisfaction at the sight, promptly cleaned up the mess, pushing thoughts of splintered bone and spilling offal firmly out of her mind.

SOLO -- 10/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

She took a break back at the house. She needed to eat and hydrate, of course, but she also needed to stabilize herself, wrench her mind back from the path it was so prone to wandering down, flashing images that she never wanted to see in front of her unwilling eyes. The barrage was unending. It exhausted her. And Reiji, all the while, was in her shadow; she could feel his gaze on the back of her head, looking at the dark shaved stubble, the dull shine of the staples holding her skull in place. He almost worked up the courage to speak to her, but she was gone before he got the chance, disappearing back into the wetlands without finishing her meal. A replacement training dummy established, Saki tried what came not so naturally to her—fuuton. She’d trained in it at some point, that much was clear, because when she channeled wind-aspected chakra into the blade it took like flame to a hay bale. Where brutality had been her measure before, her movements now were graceful, more fluid, more precise; the katana felt lighter in her hand, the edge of the blade landing more swiftly. There was no deep satisfaction of shattering beneath her hand, but this was a far easier style to manage one-handed. She was mobile, reactive, inflicting onto her inanimate victim a death by a thousand cuts.

SOLO -- 11/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Doton and fuuton, then. Dynamic, complimentary, useful for a wide variety of situations. Saki fell back into simple sequences, kata that felt both natural and not; she knew the movements instinctively, but her body struggled to perform them correctly, over-correcting for a larger weapon with a longer shaft. Getting the basics back down would be vital, she thought, but in the meantime a gimmick or three would help her scrape by. What of katon, raiton, suiton? She tried each of these in turn, imagining flames licking off the edge of her blade, sparks dancing along the metal, a water wip splashing off the blunted edge, but no such mystical effect materialized. She had, it seemed, reached her limits. Whether that was because it was all she’d been capable of then or if it was simply all she was capable of now remained to be seen. All she could do was what she could do, and though her frustration with her own lack of skill mounted by the minute, she strove for patience. The skills she’d learned had taken her all of that lifetime, presumably, and it was unreasonable to expect that she could re-learn it all in only a few weeks time. All it would take was practice. And a mentor, if she could swing one, but she wasn’t betting high.

SOLO -- 12/12

LAIKA OF THQ

[ayase saki]

Practice took her well past sunset, until she could barely see the wooden dummy in front of her but for the light of the moon. Even still it was only an amused, masculine voice that broke her out of her reverie; old enough to be called a man, but still boyishly charming. Reiji was only a year or two younger than her, but he seemed so young for how sheltered he was, how perfectly innocent, utterly untainted by malice or pain. (aid me in bringing suffering to those who fail to see agony) "Ayase-san,” Reiji said, in the tone of someone who had repeated himself several times already. "Father made dinner hours ago, it’s getting cold. Are you coming back to eat?” Saki wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her jacket, sheathed her katana before she did anything stupid with a naked blade and an innocent man alone in the wilderness. She nodded. "Good,” Reiji said, satisfied. They walked together in silence back to the boarding house; Reiji hedged, while Saki gave him no quarter, utterly unwilling to be the one to cross the line so firmly set by his father. They had almost made it back to safety before Reiji threw caution to the wind. "I was wondering,” he said hesitantly, chewing on his lip, "if you—ah, if you might want to go out with me tomorrow afternoon? There’s a teahouse in town, nothing fancy, but—” "I’m going hunting tomorrow,” Saki interrupted. "I’ll be gone for a couple of days.” Part of the arrangement for her rental being priced so cheaply—she only got to eat if she helped to provide the meat. Reiji looked devastated. He was pretty, she thought. They had come to a halt just outside the front door, Saki’s fingers just barely grazing the door handle. Would it be so wrong to indulge herself? To go on a nice date with a pretty young man so innocently obsessed with her? The worst of her indulgences would never allow it to remain innocent for long, Saki thought dimly; but then, he had been warned. Who was she to stop a buck from wandering into the lion’s den? Saki smiled. "We’ll go when I get back,” she said, and he lit up like a firework. By the time she returned from her hunting trip, a buck slung across her shoulders and a wolfbite worse for wear, Reiji was already gone. And so the slope slipped down. [end.]

SOLO -- 13/12

LAIKA OF THQ