Kurogane was beginning to hate this journey even more than he had when he had been forced to travel with a group consisting of an overeager, lovesick teenager, a clueless, amnesiac princess and an annoying idiotic mage. He had slowly learnt to accept his companions for who they were as he got to spend time with them and maybe somewhere along the way, even learn to care about them a little. But things started changing in Tokyo. The kid turned into a monster forcing the princess to mature and the mage to become cold and distant. Just when he thought things could not get any worse, the other kid started pulled that stunt with drugs and then his heart.
Now the atmosphere was so suffocating and disturbing he could barely stay in the same room as the others for more than a few minutes without having to stomp the urge of gnashing his teeth or rattling the stupid blond or the princess or the damned kid himself just to make them say something. The silence was maddening and as they kept on traveling through worlds, sometimes finding the princess's feathers and sometimes finding proof of his former student having destroyed the world in search of those lost fragments of her soul, Kurogane slowly felt himself going mad.
Not the type of crazy that would warrant him going on a homicidal rampage but the type of crazy that made him want to scream and kick and punch and break stuff just to break the sickening spell of quiet that had settled over them all. The princess pushed them all to jump world after world in an almost fanatic search of the love she had lost, the mage helping her along every step of the way but it was the silent brunette that unnerved him the most, wordlessly yet efficiently performing his job of helping them locate the feathers or trace the steps of his clone. To say he was not surprised by the way the boy felled any opposition they faced in their various quests would be a lie. The ruthless manner in which he slew anyone that came at the princess with the intention of harming would have put Kurogane's old self to shame. But even as he would watch the life flow out of the twitching, gurgling bodies at his feet, the kid's own eyes would remain blank⦠emotionless⦠unaffected.
It chilled him to the core, thinking anyone to be capable of such inhumanity. There were times when the blank eyes were filled with life, no matter how brief those instances might be, making the ninja wonder if maybe there was still something left of that brunette that had joined their group in hopes of being accepted by complete strangers. The emotion would always be the same, a deep unfulfilled longing for the jade-eyed princess whenever the girl was asleep or not looking or on rare occasions startled by the wondrous sights before her but then the kid would blink and it would all be gone, leaving behind nothing but a heartless shell.
