AN: Late, but there's not much I can do without an internet connection...

21.

Nuke-nin weren't nearly as hard to find as they liked to think.

The point me spell was darn near useless, sure, since they didn't tend to give her a name and she didn't ask. But they did, rather foolishly or with a strange sense of pride, have a habit of announcing to the world they were nuke-nin by still wearing their hitai-ate after they'd defected. They also didn't exactly travel quietly, especially the ones that tended towards raiding and generally harassing the nearby populace. Then there was the fact that some of them were into bounty hunting and frequented certain collection points.

Not all nuke-nin had these habits though. So Harriet relied on her other senses to follow them. Would she perhaps be able to track them down with other methods? Sure. The obvious solution to her nuke-nin related problems would be to exchange healing for the satisfaction of a bounty hunt. But that didn't keep her skills sharp or satisfy her anger at a debt not being paid when she generally needed it.

She hated being played or betrayed.

So, when that first nuke-nin got on the wrong side of her temper, she didn't necessarily go over board (she wasn't an indiscriminate killer, thank you) but she did make sure the rest of the community found his unconscious body at a bounty collection point along with her symbol very clearly painted on his face.

She eventually found out he'd later been so twitchy at ever seeing her again or even hearing her name, that she'd lost a fair few potential customers for awhile. She'd been saddened by the dip in income (she had an onsen habit to sustain) but it was preferable to having to deal with the same situation twice.

Not that it didn't happen a second time. No, some idiot took note of the fact her chakra inspired network of magical power veins looked non-existent and thought he could succeed where his predecessor had failed. That time, she didn't allow him to get five feet before she had him hog tied and hanging from a tree with magic reinforced rope. Then she painted his face, took his bingo book, his clothes, and his sellable supplies, and went about her merry way.

She was sure someone eventually found him given her reputation of collecting debts in strange ways had expanded.

It had been the fifth time it had happened that she'd finally gotten violent. This particular nuke-nin had promised to provide her with a set of forged traveler's papers at a particular time at a particular place. What did she find when she got there? F*ing bounty hunters. Since when did she make it into a bingo book? Or were they just looking to control her?

Either way, she was pissed.

It didn't take much for her to ambush them in turn, letting loose rather viciously and damaging a fair few of them beyond repair. Between the flashing lights with no jutsu name called, the soundless disappearing and reappearing in places where she certainly hadn't been before, and the shear destruction she had purposely left in her wake, the so-called civilian healer suddenly became dangerous.

Then she'd tracked down the bastard that'd betrayed her using Death's uniquely accurate ability to identify souls and handed him over before his time. She'd left his remains sufficiently nearby the road with her symbol painted on a nearby tree to ensure he was found by someone; she didn't really care who it was so long as the bingo book got updated and word got around she was getting progressively tired of their shenanigans.

It was this ability of Death, that Harriet later semi-affectionately termed his sense of smell, that Harriet had gradually taken on as something of a sixth sense. And it was this sixth sense that she was currently using to track down her latest target.

Not that anyone had tried to stiff her recently. No, that lesson had been well learned by this point. This was something else, something that had Death itself all up in a bother, something that registered even to her as somewhat unnatural. And somehow with a soul that was in multiple places at the same time. Horcruxes? Did they have those here? How foul!

What ever it was, large swathes of people were disappearing and it reeked of the same unnaturalness of the soul she was chasing. Given how difficult it was to pin that soul down, and the surprising few leads she was able to get from her other nuke-nin contacts, she was pretty sure it wasn't a village operation, or was no longer a sanctioned village operation, which was interesting in and of itself.

Knowing that helped as it allowed her to mix what she knew through the standard methods with the use of that strange sixth sense to narrow her area of interest to the largest swath of unnaturalness. As a result, she was now currently searching for a base of operations in the general area between the edge of the Land of Fire, Hot Water, and the Hidden Waterfalls Village. She was pretty certain that if she didn't find anything there, she'd have to go back into Konoha territory, the next largest area of unnaturalness, for all that she was relatively certain their Kage wouldn't sanction this level of… perverseness.

She was, however, now almost certain it had something to do with their request that she track down a particular nuke-nin of their own.

She had a name, sure, but no visual and no real information so for now, given that the pieces of her erstwhile target kept moving around in and out of her current area of interest, she was looking for an identifying mark or signature that identified the central piece ... other than that rather snakey smell attached to the soul, which was kinda weird but useful and, once again, kinda fit the profile of that Konoha nuke-nin Ochi- … something or other. Damn. It might help if she could remember his name…