Chapter 179
You know, I really should work on my live capturing skills, because Haku, despite his technical pacifist attitude was really bad at capturing people.
Actually, maybe it was better to say, he was bad at capturing people whole. He actually seemed a bit down about it as we sat there treating the four shinobi we captured. Thankfully, all ninja of the Land of Water were taught how to deal with frostbite.
"Wow, I didn't expect it to be this bad." Suigetsu said as he wrapped the bandages around the finger stubs of the young boy with blue hair. He'd lost his thumb and index finger on the hand holding his blade and a pinkie on the one that wasn't.
"Not everyone has the benefit of being living water." I said dryly as I wrapped Kujaku's feet. She'd been wearing gloves so her fingers didn't suffer the same fate as the boy's, but her toes were only covered in light stockings, so she'd lost a couple of those.
"These guys weren't properly trained." Zabuza said as he tended to his own defeated ninja wannabe. We had to leave the village proper and set up a fire with a large pot full of water in which the man with long brown hair was being held down by Chojuro. His upper torso was discolored from where the armor chilled his flesh even through the cloth under it. We had to warm his body slowly as the water heated up. "In all likelihood, they were self taught, which meant their bodies had half hazard conditioning at best."
"Plus, it's really warm here. I don't think winters get that bad." Chojuro said. "I mean, the nights were cold in the desert, but…"
"But this isn't the desert." Haku said where he was treating the last person, who was also in the pot, the turtle. His sword hadn't frozen off any fingers, probably because his was a fire sword and it was warm to the touch. Still, he'd been the center of the attack, so he'd been hit badly everywhere else. "Deserts get so cold because of the lack of water in the air. This is the Land of Rivers, there is plenty of water in the air here. Still, I didn't think..." He frowned as he looked down at them, "They probably won't be very cooperative when they wake up."
Haku's grimace made me sigh as I set down the woman's leg from where she lay under a thick blanket, "I mean, that was probably always going to be the case. This was the best way to take them alive." I walked over, patting him on the shoulder.
"A sword fight would have been fun, I would have loved to see those swords in action." Suigetsu said as he gazed over at the pile of swords longingly. Fingers itching to grab one and play a bit with it, I'd bet.
"Why would we do something so stupid as engaging an enemy with unknown tools in a straight fight?" Zabuza said with an annoyed tone.
"Didn't you engage a genin team alone and get your ass handed to you?" I said.
"Didn't you use yourself as bait for a jinchuriki?" Zabuza replied.
Touché. I rolled my eyes as I walked over to the bath and set my hand on the man with long brown hair's forehead. Closing my eyes I did a scan and hummed, "Don't think they'll wake up on their own."
"Not with the amount of drugs you pumped into them." Suigetsu quipped as he set the hand down and crossed his legs. "So who's gonna do the talking?"
Zabuza stuck a thumb towards me, "She's had the best rapport. I'll be back up, you three will watch the perimeter after we get them stable."
I nodded. This was a lot of trouble, treating them like this. I was just glad they were more valuable alive than dead. I'd checked their teeth, they didn't have any suicide pills hidden in there nor did I find any seals that might cause any of them to self destruct.
Hopefully that meant they weren't willing to die.
It was about an hour later when we woke up the man in the tiger armor. We debated who to wake up a little bit and decided on him based on temperament, age, and the fact that he wasn't missing any extremities because of his capture.
Then we spent the rest of the time setting up the campsite rigging traps, putting up silence seals on the perimeter and making sure the area was secure. Haku watched over the other prisoners while Suigetsu and Chojuro were on watch around the perimeter.
Pushing the man up against a tree, I set a bucket in his lap and pressed my hand to his chest after doing a particular jutsu taught to me by the Sumire as a safety precaution.
I stepped back and his eyes fluttered open as his body started a very particular physical reaction.
By the time the man stopped vomiting, I'd heated the water enough to make tea. His body was convulsing as sweat poured from him and tears dripped from his face. When it was all done, he looked exhausted, which was fair, it was not a pleasant thing to experience.
"Wh, what?" The man looked up, dazed, with a dirty face and clutching the bucket to his stomach.
"You empty?" I said as I walked over slowly with the hot teapot in my hand and a sling full of teacups. Sitting down, I started setting up, "Once the cycle finishes you should be fine to drink something. You're not sick, I just purged your system."
"What?" The man looked up at me, his eyes clearing as he tried to stand but found his legs not responding. "Why can't I?"
"Your legs are still tied." Zabuza said this time, stepping forward from the gloom. We'd put out the fire, so it was quite dark. He wasn't wearing his disguise anymore and his toothy smile made the other man try to scoot backwards, but his head hit the tree from his haste, he even knocked the bucket off his lap onto the ground. "You didn't think we'd leave you completely unbound."
"You're scaring him." I said in an offended voice as I wrinkled my nose at the smell of the filled bucket. Still, I poured a cup of tea and blew on it a bit, "Yes, we've captured him, but there's no point in us harming him."
His eyes turned and focused on me this time, recognition lighting his eyes, "Jo-san, you," He started looking around, "Them, the others," His swivel stopped when he caught a glance of the blankets, the three other figures lying on the ground. "Dead?"
"No," I said, "Just unconscious, they'll stay that way for a good while unless I do to them what I just did to you."
"What did you do to me?" He was shaking a bit, the sweat was probably cold on his skin.
"I told you, it was a purge. A way to force the body to rid itself of poisons, in this case a sedative to keep you asleep while we treated you." I said.
The man looked down at his body at this, his hands reaching up and touching the now sweat stained bandages around his torso, "What? I don't remember. Did you beat us?"
"In a sense." Zabuza interjected, "We captured you, in the most efficient way possible, but it had some side effects." He stalked to the side, his eyes never leaving the man as he moved like the large predator he was. "We worked very hard to keep that to a minimum, so you should be thankful. We don't need you dead. Though anything else we need to do, to get what we need, well, it depends on you."
"Make us sound like monsters why don't you?" I rolled my eyes, it wasn't part of the act. I wasn't one for interrogation myself. Getting actual accurate information with intimidation was often faulty, especially if torture was employed. Which was why I was the counter, the good cop. Working with someone through goodwill worked much better even if it took a gentler touch.
The man looked at me again, though he kept an eye on Zabuza as he talked, "Aren't you? Why? Why haven't you killed us?"
"Honestly, I'd no sooner destroy a stain glass window than an artist such as yourself." I pushed the tea into his hand, "Drink, you need water after what happened."
The man looked at the tea and made the decision quickly, or maybe he was really that thirsty as he gulped it down. I picked up the pot and refilled the cup. He drank three more cups before he spoke again, "You want us alive, because of the weapons and armor. You want us to make you more."
"I mean, yeah, we'd like if you did that, but we're not going to force you to do anything under threat of death." I said.
"Speak for yourself." Zabuza retorted.
"You're not helping." I sniped over at him, "We didn't come here to intimidate people, we just came here for information, and to buy things."
"How can I trust you? You're shinobi. Shinobi ruined our village." The man said.
I let out a breath, "You know, I think we're going about this the wrong way, let's start from the beginning." I held a hand to my chest, "My name is Mogami." My eyes flickered up, "You know him, I suppose."
"From the bounty posters." The man said, "But why would I give you my name?"
"Um, it makes talking to you easier." I said simply, "I mean, I could just call you, you, or long hair. I could just ask the others, but that'd mean I'd have to wake them up the same way." I said.
The man grumped, "I'd rather you didn't. That was very unpleasant."
"You're telling me, I had that done to me once a day during my training." I said, scratching my head as I poured him another cup of tea, "That's how I got my taste for tea, it helps better than water getting the taste out of your mouth."
The man looked at the tea than back at me. "They did that to you? You're just a girl."
"We don't coddle our young." Zabuza spoke up again, "Nor do we do whatever halfassed training you lot did. That's why we're here and you're there."
"Our lot, we worked hard to craft weapons that rivaled those made in myth and at night trained tirelessly to use said weapons." The man looked over, his voice higher, "We did all we could, so we could work on our plan to return Takumi village to its former glory and get the respect we deserve."
"Yeah, and how did that work out?" Zabuza responded with a sneer. The man went silent and looked down. Zabuza grinned, but I rolled my eyes as the man drank another cup of tea. The silence went on for a few moments before the man held out his cup again. I filled it again and said nothing before he broke the silence, "Have him leave." The man said.
"Zabuza?" I looked up at him.
He sneered, "Why would I leave you alone with my student?"
"I won't talk to someone complicit in our downfall." The man said.
"Don't try to lump us all together, I didn't…"
"You should go." I said. "It'll be fine."
"That's a risk you want to take? They've already attacked you. Unprovoked." Zabuza said.
The man looked up at me then Zabuza, his eyes shifting. "You provoked us by taking our livelihood, forcing us to the lower arts." His voice however shifted a bit as he looked at me again. Thinking likely of what happened in the clearing.
"Yeah, you should go." I said. Zabuza huffered but in a gust of wind, much flashier than he usually did, flickered away. Well, not really. I was certain he could still see and hear us, but he was creating an illusion that he wasn't there. The man stared at the place before his shoulders slumped, his head going down as he let out a breath, some sort of bravado he was holding onto in Zabuza's intimidating presence.
He drank the tea more slowly this time before setting it next to him. The next thing he said softly, "Suiko," His voice tired now, "My name is Suiko."
"It's nice to meet you, Suiko." I said as I set my teapot down. "I'm going to have to refill the pot, is that okay?"
He nodded, and I walked away for a moment, getting more water and heating it before I walked back and started talking with him again.
Suiko didn't exactly spill his guts. For the most part we talked about seemingly random things. I asked some questions about the armor and the weapons but he was fairly tight lipped about them. Still, he told me a bit about the village and their training. They mostly focused on the physical aspect of it. Doing things like hauling boulders, and trying to push themselves in weapons training. The most basic of shinobi training, really. None of them could use any proper jutsu, not even the basic three used by genin. They were tougher than a normal person, could probably kill bandits with little trouble, but would struggle against genin out of the academy without their tools. They knew they needed to practice against real shinobi, and had been confident with the weapons they'd be able to get a proper field test with us.
They were also under the assumption they'd been caught and we were sent to kill them anyway since what they were doing was in fact illegal. Considering the history of this country and what happened to the village that specialized in making traps, that wasn't that much a stretch of logic. If one village could be wiped out for not being an official shinobi village, why not another?
So it wasn't just bravado. They were scared we were sent to kill them, even though we had no idea they existed at all until they presented themselves. As confident as they seemed, they, or at least he, was still aware of how dangerous a task they were undertaking.
We finished talking when he passed out from exhaustion. The purge jutsu might have woken him up, but the process was still hard for someone unused to it. I called the others back and we tossed him back into the water pot to clean him off a bit. Just because he was a prisoner didn't mean we had to have him smell.
We waited a bit longer to wake up the second person we interrogated. This one was the younger boy, the ones who did the interrogating were Suigetsu and Chojuro. The boy, his name was Ryugen, was much more willing to talk about his weapon. Apparently he didn't make the weapon himself, not completely, he did so with his grandfather, who passed away before it was finished and he helped finish the design before training with it. He also talked a good bit about its different capabilities, seemingly happy to have the audience despite the situation. Though he did try to make a break for it when he thought we weren't looking, as he'd managed to slip his leg bonds while we talked. That ended his questioning as Zabuza caught and knocked him out.
Next up was Kujaku. Just like before, Haku and I talked to her. She stared at her feet when it finally got to her attention.
"What did you do?!" She was definitely startled.
"We froze you." Haku said, discomfort still evident on his face to me, though probably not to her. He still looked fairly placid, though he wasn't smiling. "Since you moved to attack my comrade."
"She started it!" Kujaku said.
"Did she?" Haku didn't really need to say more, the tone of voice he used wasn't even accusing. It sounded like a real question which I guess was why it caught Kujaku off guard. This made her silent for a few moments as she looked down and mumbled a bit to herself.
"No,Itoldthemtheywerecustomers."
"Pardon?" Haku asked this time.
"I told them you were customers!" She said louder, just short of a shout. "But they insisted the big guy was a threat, so you were all threats by proxy. That you were just lying so you could scope the village and finish the job the other shinobi started."
"What?" I said, confusion evident in my voice.
"Everyone knows we exist on sufferance." Kujaku said, turning away, "The only reason the Daimyo didn't let our village be wiped out is because of the inflow of taxes from this area. But if we upset the shinobi again, even that wouldn't save us. It didn't save them from the Kurosuki clan."
"The Kurosaki clan?" Haku's eyebrows went up as did mine, we looked at each other. That sounded like...
"Yeah, bastards came in and all but took over my cousin's village. I saw them when I visited. That asshole with the long hair, kept forcing people to have funerals for his amusement. Anyone who objected, anyone who tried to stop him met the ends of his swords." Kujaku said.
"Swords?" Haku said, "He had more than one?"
"Twin blades," Kujaku looked over, "I based my design off of them, at least partially. I didn't know the point of them being barbed. But they were still beautiful weapons even in the hands of that psycho."
Holy fucking shit. I glanced around to see if Zabuza heard that. He didn't reveal himself, but I looked at Haku, who had schooled his face as he continued to talk to Kujaku. But wow, we actually... I put a hand on my chin as I thought, well more I was holding up my jaw so it wouldn't drop.
After more than a month away and a lot of just flailing around, we actually had a lead on one of the seven swords. Specifically, Kiba, the lightning blades, wielded by Raiga Kurosuki.
Short chapter!
Short career, I got a job, I lost a job, had it for a little more than a work week. The sad thing, this isn't the record. The record is when I was hired for holiday work, worked black friday, and was promptly laid off afterwards.
Employers markets suck.
So I'm not sure if you guys know, but this is based on the final filler before Naruto leaves, obviously, this is set before that. These aren't original characters, but I am expanding a bit on their individual personalities because they don't really have any during the two three episodes that are shown, besides being arrogant and willing to sacrifice for their plan. In this case, I thought of them more as individuals, still fanatical, but for different reasons. A lot of shit went down in Land of Rivers, like the trap master, that filler which was used in DoS, originated as well, if you didn't remember.
Anyway, trying to keep things moving, even as I go on the job hunt once again.
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