The waxing moon spun long black shadows on the surrounding brush. Cacti in columns as tall as telephone poles stood around her, almost seemed to tilt towards her. During her less lucid moments their figures were the most menacing - it was easy to think that a dark outline was the shape of a man, that man.
The worst was waking up with that feeling, like something was standing over you. It was a feeling she knew too well, and it was just one of the reasons she preferred to move at night. Her body wove a bit as her feet dragged against the ground. The walking stick she was too tired to lift trailed beside her, making a long shallow line in the dirt.
She looked up again for the first time in ages. Ahead she saw what must be a wall, cool-looking and glowing like ivory in the moonlight. It looked like a mirage. But surely there were no mirages at night. Could it be truly real? From a distance it looked tall and perfect - as if cut from one single, seamless stone. It rose above the land and scrub, an unassailable opponent stretching for hundreds of yards side to side.
"Damn it," she cursed. Was her delirium so deep that she had only noticed it now that she was nearly upon it? it must be so, and why not? In her exhaustion she trudged for days as if half-asleep towards no destination. A normal traveller in her state might have rejoiced at the prospect of humanity and the things it meant - rest, food, water; and company.
But she meant to be alone. She had meant to wander into the desert - away from that man, and what remained of those people, away to where each point of life was so quietly distinct - away to a place where she could dissolve into that open space forever. But a wall? A wall meant humanity. And humans meant the threat of capture. She knew already the cost of capture and escape.
She had brought few mementos from her flight. There was the staff, snaking a waving line besides her in the sand. It was uncut and unvarnished, and still bore bark and leaves, now shrivelled from the sun. She wore a stained hospital gown that barely reached her knees, and a jacket, bearing the crest of her captors. The woman had… Salvaged it from one of them as she fled. In her pockets there were no tools, only seeds she had collected along the way. In a real way though, the seeds were tool enough for her.
The wall was perhaps a half mile out. She felt no human life near her or behind it, thankfully. She sagged to her knees. The wall stretched so far on either side and the prospect of diverting her course, as tired as she was, it was just too much to bear.
She sat on her haunches breathing hard for a bit, and then finally closed her eyes, she whispered a quiet thanks to the energy she could feel undulating the night around her. Wishing to shelter and conceal herself; not wanting to be disturbed by the more lethal creatures of the world around her; she concentrated on the energy of the plant life beneath the sand and surrounding her body. Silence bloomed around her as the movement of the brush in the soft night wind stopped completely. For a moment, all things around her stood frozen.
Then there was a sound. It began as a susurration, now punctuated with sharp crackles. Around her the brush was growing, reaching, straining towards her. The strands of twigs knit themselves in a dome, weaving a barrier. They finally grew over her in a dense net that the moon could barely penetrate. Shelter made, she pushed the sand around her into an indentation where she could be warmed by the earth as she slept. As her eyes slid shut as she prayed for dreamless sleep. The sighing of the wind in the scrub could suddenly be heard again.
Shiro. The fourth son. The unlucky one. Zettai meditated on the name of his captor as his long body hung, suspended by his ankle. The Grass Daimyo's fourth son sought to torture him into obeisance. Little did the squinting, grasping man understand that all of the injuries that he heaped upon Zettai's body were merely austerities - acts of sacrifice that brought him closer to his God.
For surely, he was being purified, Zettai reflected, for that time when he would meet her again - that time when she would accept him as her consort. Then their true work would begin, Zettai thought, with satisfaction. In the mean time they could hang him, burn him, dismember him. Surely, she would heal every injury. These acts of sacrifice were his penance. He had been unfaithful to her. He had abandoned her in his frustration for her refusal to appear before him. And as soon as he had stepped away, she had manifested, as if to humble him.
It had been a stroke of genius by one of his scientists that had finally unlocked her. Oh, to be there for that day! That glorious union! How blessed were all those that were consumed that day! Zettai had only been able to recover the video of it that thing she revealed herself as in that moment she was indescribably beautiful. Her ego disappeared completely, and she had become heavenly vengeance, personified.
Zettai meditated now on that shining face as he felt the sinews and joints of his right leg slacken and separate. To be hung upside down by one leg for this long would have broken other men physically and psychologically, but he had subjected himself to trials like this in the pursuit of the God. So deep in his meditation was he that Zettai barely noticed when the door to the room swung open. It was that spiteful little man again.
Shiro stood silently before the man's stinking body, slung like a slaughtered animal from a hook on the wall, his once carefully groomed ink and salt hair hanging like a dirty halo around his ears. The image pleased him. Zettai had done the unthinkable. He had lied to him. He had embezzled money, and he had stolen a prize from him - a great power that Shiro had entrusted Zettai to master.
"You are quite content to hang there aren't you, fool?" Shiro asked the man lightly, observing the way his right leg looked pale and distended after so many hours in this position.
"That's fine. I am quite content to keep you there," Shiro continued, smiling; not expecting the resistant idiot to crack just yet, after all the man was a Grade A zealot, bordering on delusional. But Zettai was in his grasp, and other things were, as far Shiro was concerned, on their way to being in-hand. Shiro understood the art of escalating horrors. He could play pain on the body only as a practiced master could.
And even if the man did not break, even if Shiro's technicians unencrypted the project files before Zettai was willing to share his key, there was still this pleasure of extracting some sense of justice from the body of this fool who had so readily betrayed him and led a whole team of Grass scientists Shiro had paid handsomely to do the same.
The Kusakage had already bent over backward assuring Shiro that he had known nothing of Zettai or his team's defection. Shiro was not satisfied of this yet, but at the moment he relied too much on the shinobi of the Hidden Village of the Grass to support him in his manoeuvre. Retaliation for their apparent incompetence was not something he could conduct just yet, but like the barbed lizards he kept in his garden - Shiro was capable of waiting for the right moment to strike.
"So the May Queen is dead, Zettai-sensei?" Shiro asked. "And all your team with her? How neat. How perfect" Shiro said, squatting down on his haunches to bring himself to Zettai's face level.
"I want to believe you, sensei; and still, you refuse to unencrypt those files for me" Shiro said, flicking the other man's forehead, but getting no reaction.
"You know I must assume you're lying?" Shiro continued, prying open the Zettai's eyelid and seeing the pupillary constriction that confirmed that the man was indeed conscious. He also noted the tiny burst capillaries in the whites of Zettai's eye. Strong though he was, the older man was not immune to Shiro's techniques or gravity.
"You know that I must search for them, and for her?" Shiro said. "What did you unleash, Sensei? Was it everything we hoped for? Are you truly foolish enough to think you can keep that weapon from me, after I have invested so much to develop it? If I am a fool for trusting you, Sensei. Then truly, you are a greater fool for betraying me."
With that Shiro blithely patted the man's purple-red cheek, pooled as it now was with blood. "I'll have them take you down now, Zettai-sensei. But tomorrow, I promise you, we'll play a new game."
She felt them before she could see them. There were four human energies. She lay motionless in the depression she had carved out. Perhaps she was still unseen and unfelt. To increase those odds, she released the edges of her own life-energy, letting it disperse, gauze-thin and nearly imperceptible around her. Concealing her chakra in this way would work, but if one of them saw her or the shelter and became curious, she would be out of luck. They walked on for a bit and she dared to hope.
Suddenly she felt it as the four became six. The woman shivered in the sand. It couldn't be them, could it? After all the blood she had shed to get out, to get away. She hoped that it all wasn't for nothing, or she would need to find a way to take herself away from them absolutely; and to make her body irretrievable in the process.
The new two felt like the half-men, the shadow copies like the ones her captors used to use to corral her. Their chakra was a mere fraction of the original four she had felt. It was the half-men that approached her. Their posture and energy was tense. They were ready for a fight.
She would need to take them by surprise if she could. She would need to do it effectively, but not lethally, if she could. Images lanced through her brain of the alternative. Not again. Not unless the situation was totally dire. She closed her eyes again to help her concentration.
The life force of the desert was quieter, true; but this particular area harboured enough energy that she could focus and use it if she tried. She reached out with her mind and felt the towering saguaro and the desert sage bushes, the tips of their branches and tines all glowing points in her mind's eye. She knit her energy together in her mind, encircling the original four pursuers with an invisible ring using the plant life as winder and wool.
Their figures cast about uneasily, sensing her. She had to act quickly. Although tired, she reached and pulled hard on the strings that bound her to the saguaro and brush. As she did so, she tore out of her shelter and ran. Behind her the half men began to chase her.
Her energy strained backward, reached down into the trailing connections behind her and the ground broke, a normally invisible network of roots clawed at her two pursuers. She heard their cries of surprise and she risked looking back. That was her mistake. She did not notice the rock that caught her ankle. Instead, she tumbled right over it and hit her head.
"Saru!" a man's voice was heard as her now still form lay on the ground. "What the hell was that?"
Saru was the first to reach her crumpled, thin form.
"It's a kunoichi" - Midori was right, her jacket has the symbol of the Grass Village.
Ebisu materialized next to Saru.
"Kunoichi? What ninja trips over a rock and brains herself?"
"Well," Saru retorted. "What civilian could do that?" Saru asked, inclining his head back towards the tangled knot of broken earth and roots behind them.
Ebisu grunted. "So much for drills in the Demon Desert. Let's take her back for ID and interrogation."