A year.

It's been a whole year of these damned tests.

And during this whole year the little girl with white hair and deep purple eyes hadn't been able to even put one toe in the sun. She had been confined strictly to dungeons bellow the castle. Well they weren't called "dungeons" by everyone else but she knew exactly what they were.

She sighed quietly and folded her hands in lap. Her eyes stung with tears at the thought and memory of the past year.

All the cutting and burning and severing.

All the blood.

Her blood.

Shiori played with her hair absentmindedly. She was only six years old so she didn't really understand all of the things that they had been saying. But she did understand one thing.

Her body healed itself really well.

So well in fact that she had earned the name White Demon.

Her lips pressed into a thin line and her fists tightened at the thought. Shiori didn't like that name. She wasn't a monster. They treated her like one. But she had feelings- lots of feelings.

One of those feelings happened to be pain.

The 'scientists' as they called themselves seemed to have forgotten this. It's almost as though they ignored her pain completely just to satisfy their own taste for blood. They cut her a lot. Sometimes deep cuts and sometimes shallow ones- but they always seemed to heal the same. Injuries just healed quickly for her as they always had; she thought was normal when she was younger. But it seems it wasn't. Shiori was surprised to find out that others didn't heal like her.

It wasn't just cuts or burns to her body that seemed to stun others though. Poisons and gases didn't work on her either. No matter how much they gave her. Apparently 'venoms' had no affect either- although for the record she thought those were the same things as poisons. Shiori was beginning to get the strange feeling that perhaps they were regularly poisoning her food as well.

Everyone just wanted to see what her limits were.

The stone cell was cold and hard. Not to mention dark. Her dark amethyst eyes had grown used to it for now, but she felt that they'd be back soon to pull her into that bright white room and perform more of their tests. No matter how hard she tried to get comfortable here and no matter how often the scientists called it a "cove" instead of a dungeon, it didn't change anything. She was sad, scared, and lonely. A year of connect-the-dots with the chips in the stone walls had grown repetitive and mind numbing.

All of her complaints disappeared immediately when she thought of what the scientists had done to her yesterday. They had been so impressed with themselves and happy. They hadn't noticed the screaming girl on the table. They didn't care.

They don't know what it's like to have your arm chopped off just so some people could see what would happen.

Shiori endured an hour tied to the table without her left arm. The white coated people wanted to see what would happen. Nothing regrew but the bleeding stopped a few minutes by itself. The tears didn't though.

Surprisingly the wound didn't close up like it normally did. It remained open for the next three hours that she lay there. Shiori found comfort in the eventual numb feeling that set in. After waiting four hours and being thoroughly disappointed they decided to see what would happen if they attempted to put the arm back in its rightful place.

As soon as the severed arm made contact with its original place a sharp pain began. Shiori felt as though her arm from the tips of her fingers to the top of her shoulder was on fire. She screamed bloody murder to deaf ears; the scientists were too enthralled with their note taking and observing to care. After what seemed like another four hours to Shiori, which in actuality were only a couple of minutes, she could move her arm as though nothing had happened to start with.

They seemed extremely spurred on by this finding. Shiori could hear the murmur that they wanted to see just how far this could go. Could she be truly immortal?


It was different.

Not necessarily a bad different.

Just different.

Shiori tossed the sword from hand to another with ease. The stinging of the fresh and healing cuts that she had been awarded no longer bothered her that much; she had grown used to it enough that now she just shoved the want to cry deep down inside her core. Why should she waste her time doing that? By the time her first tear would fall she'd be almost completely healed anyway.

She couldn't help but admire her gleaming weapon; a straight double edged sword that was the length of her arm. Not too heavy to slow her down and not to light to feel flimsy either. Shiori felt invincible when she held it.

A blur approached from her right. Shiori leapt to her left quickly just as a large blade smashed directly where she had been standing not a second ago. The wielder recalibrated and lunged at her again. Shiori didn't miss a beat in lunging at him as well.

They twirled in a deadly dance of swords. The only sounds to be heard were the clang of metal hitting metal and the grunts of one frustrated swordsman. The small crowd that was watching didn't dare to make any other noises. This dance couldn't have any distractions.

Shiori knew how to fight an opponent like this all too well. He was a fighter that relied purely on his sword's size and power rather than his own body. Shiori knew better; a sword wasn't just a weapon, it was an extension of you and should be treated as such. A sword was your ally.

She easily leaned out of the range of her opponent's sword as he swung it at her. She merely received a slight trim of her bangs and a grazed nose- it didn't faze her at all. Shiori recovered quickly and made her move. He was still wide open as he tried to recover from his miss so she lunged forward and slashed an 'x' across his chest before she lunged with another attack and made a similar 'x' across his back.

She had been training like this for a while now. Her adopted eleventh birthday had passed- not that anyone besides her had noticed. When she was 6 it was decided that she'd be trained like a normal person from this village. She was aware that they planned to send her on what would be suicide missions for most people. She was expendable. Shiori yearned to prove them that she was more than they thought.

To them she was merely a girl that healed quickly, was very fast, and very strong. All of this was apparently due to her intriguing chakra. Shiori knew what the basics of chakra were and even ninjutsu and things of that nature, she had been part of one of the noble families before it was decided she was just the White Demon. She knew basic hand seals to mold her chakra and she was aware that her chakra nature was lightning. The training with that wasn't able to go any further though; while her chakra seemed extremely useful for healing herself, it was extremely difficult to control. Shiori felt that this was because of her ability too.

Her opponent floundered on the ground as his wounds wept deeply. She could only stare in wonder at the thought of what it must be like to have a body that does not heal for you much quicker than this. They seemed rather frail- well she wasn't any less frail. She was just like this boy besides the fact that if she didn't have her chakra to heal her so quickly. She could be in his place. If she hadn't been the one that had been cursed… so much would be different.

Shiori gripped her blade tighter in anger as she thought deeper.

Her 'father' had never made any move to save her. Quite the opposite. He had ordered all the experiments and mutilations. He wanted revenge on her for her 'mother'. She hadn't done anything though…

She didn't dare to call it a kekkai genkai. No. That seemed too nice for this thing. Too pleasant.

It was merely a curse.

This Village of Swords was a curse as well. Shiori felt the need to not stay here any longer than she had to.