Kunoichi is not a title she is fond of. Even shinobi sends a shiver down her spine. It forces her to feel some odd sort of comradeship with the bodies she steps over, remembering that she is one of them.
She wonders how many of them made names for themselves, how many hoped they would.
She doesn't remember how old she was, when she made her first kill. It was a shaky throw, only hitting because their foe was too busy cutting the throat of her sensei.
The enemy wasted his last breath cursing the name she wouldn't tell him. Asking how a man as great as he was killed by this weakling.
He repeated his name again, but she does not recall it.
Everyone wants to make a name for themselves, except for her. All her kills are fast and finished, and she leaves them with the unanswered question of why they haven't heard of this one, this Silent Death.
She has made herself invisible. Her mask is one of blank amusement. Her uniform bleeds, not into the deep forests, but into the collage of humanity that occupied these towns and cities. Nothing remarkable. No scars or bandages or preferred weapons, waved rashly at her foes. No. If shinobi were indeed weapons, she was the unremarkable senbon that always, always hit its mark.
Conversations are for those who are looking for mourners and a large memorial. She cannot help but smile at some. Careless braggarts. She had kidded herself in thinking that her class was more intellegent than this.
"My death count is in the fifties."
"No way! I'm still in the thirties!"
Hers is just past two hundred, if anyone cared to ask. Not that anyone did, after her team was killed. Her first mission. Death death death. What a pretty name. The only one she has ever liked.
Maybe, if she is good enough, she will die without a name. A little, quiet death that even her killer fails to remember.
The only grave she will ever receive lies underneath an unmarked tree, three months from now. Her killer will not even watch her last breath, struggling through a cut throat. He did not even note the thirty or so bodies that surrounded her. It will be dark, and this is war.
A scavenger of battle strips her of her weapons, mask, and clothes. He will burn the other bodies, but leave hers. She is not the enemy, after all. Animals scatter her bones, and her skull will sink into the blood-softened ground. No one will mourn her. She will never even be written as missing.
She will die smiling.