The second chapter is here already! As you can see, it's longer. I wrote it the same time I wrote chapter 1, but I decided to hold off on posting it but I gave in, so here it is, whether you like it or not.

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He stood over the body of his latest assignment and summoned his daggers to revert to blunt human fingertips. The blood and bits of flesh clung to his skin, and he shook his dark-skinned hand to get rid of some of it. The disadvantage of having built-in weapons was, of course, the messiness after a job was done. He turned to the sounds of people yelling for the unresponsive victim and banging on the door. Taking a step back, the old ninja let them burst in only to see his signature vanishing act. His art was dying, and no assassin he knew used the amount stealth his job used to require. It was in vogue to make a show as well as a mystery, and he had given up on resisting.

Unseen from a dark corner, he listened to the confused fools panicking over the dead body and the illusion some swore they had seen. He began to make his exit just before he heard someone defend his sanity by asking, "Where did this come from?"

Was he getting forgetful in his age? Bakuryu looked again with white eyes that looked blind and found one of them holding up a brown and dried up leaf. The others dismissed it easily, but it caught the old ninja's attention.

~~~~

"Back so soon?" a tired voice asked. At a bright orange plastic table, a man who looked to be in his thirties calmly sipped a cup of the very same tea as yesterday and the day before that and so on while sitting up straight in a very dignified position that showed much self-control. Long Shin the assassin was clad the same bright and neatly pressed Chinese style shirt and pants we wore each and every day.

The older man ignored him, still focused on the leaf in his hand, which he had taken from under those fools' noses before he left.

Just then, the particle board door to the little employee's lounge burst open. A slender figure cheerfully strolled in, strutting his young body and feminine form. With a forceful wave of one hand, he forced a lock of blond hair from his face and declared for the old men to hear, "Whoo! I'm feeling good today! I'm on a roll! I feel like I could kill a whole city."

"That's nice, Fox," the other two mumbled.

"But first," he said, approaching the coffee maker, "I need some caffeine!"

"Fox, that's the tenth cup of coffee you've had this morning," Long sighed, "You should lay off the stuff for a while."

"You're too strict, you know that Long? You need to loosen up."

"His hair is down today," Bakuryu mumbled, "For him, that's really letting himself go."

"Hah! As if you know anything about loosening up a bit!" Fox laughed while the oldest of the three walked out of the lounge without paying any attention to him. A little piece of the browned leaf broke off and fluttered to the floor, despite the fact that he handled it very delicately by its dry stem.

How long has it been since...

He decided to pay a visit to the labs.

As an assassin, he eliminated unwanted people. Sometimes, he was sent out on different missions to retrieve certain individuals. The eyes of living victims of these missions glared with hate and loathing from behind the confinement of their cells. Bakuryu kept his gaze forward until he reached his destination.

"Ah, the great ninja Bakuryu..." the head scientist called out while rubbing his large hands together. He wore a pair of spectacles on front of his narrow eyes and large and baggy lab coat with "Dr. Hajime Busuzima" embroidered over the left pocket. "You missed a good fight!"

"Really," he muttered while he looked into the training room from behind a one-way mirror. Inside were corpulent captives Tylon had successfully drowned in despair. With mops in hand, they cleaned up a bloody mess that spread across the floor. "The conditioning is working wonders! It's coming along rather well. Soon I'll have the perfect assassin."

"Your 'system,' no matter how good the drill sessions or the drugs are... Can't substitute for real training..."

"Ah, but that was what was so cool! One of the rogues nearly got 'im and he tossed a smoke bomb... and you shoulda seen the look on that sucker's face when he saw that log before he got impaled!"

His white eyes widened. "L-Log?"

"Yep," Busuzima chuckled with a triumphant look on his face. Perhaps this marked the first time the old man took his methods seriously. He was disappointed in his search for some kind of impressed reaction (though he knew better than to expect one). Instead, Bakuryu barged into the chamber, causing the unfortunate souls inside to shrink away from him.

His eyes were not playing tricks on him. In one pool of blood lay a young and fresh leaf. He delicately plucked it from the still warm puddle with fingers that had broken bones and disrupted nerve endings. It was young and fresh, a newly budded leaf of spring.

"Where is he?"

"Hm? The kid? He's doin' chores..." the scientist mumbled, pointing down the hall. Without another word, the elder of the two left. Busuzima pushed his glasses up on his face and grumbled, "Y'could at least act like I exist..."

Sternly he made his way to where the child was supposedly doing chores. Since his pride robbed him of the capability to ask, it was a while before he finally came upon a room in the depths of the labs, one that frightened most. Bakuryu himself tried to keep his eyes away from the tubes and tanks that adorned the dark room. In the middle of the darkness, he found him.

He was a rather pitiful sight, a pale and thin boy in a light slip, barely thick enough to warm, him huddled on a crate in the dark. They had allowed his dark hair to grow and become unruly, and Bakuryu had recently taken it upon himself to trim it and make it so the boy looked like a boy he once knew when he looked into a mirror in the days of many years past.

"Are you not supposed to be doing chores?" he asked. The boy looked up at him and it was only now that he could see the bundle in his arms. The infant in his arms began to fuss, and he immediately put the bottle back to his lips.

Bakuryu held the leaf on front of his face and asked him, "Do you know what this is?" The child whispered a quiet, "No, sir."

"It is winter now," he told him, "Can you explain where this spring leaf came from?"

"Win.. ter..?"

He shook his head and let out a breath of disgust. He then pulled up a crate and sat down next to him. "You wouldn't know. This is your whole world... and nothing grows around Tylon. Nothing dares to live here but us fools. In winter, there are no green leaves like this."

The boy cocked his head and looked at it with wide golden eyes. "I'm sorry. I think it's my fault that... 'leaf' appeared."

"So you did produce this. So you did teleport..."

"Was I not supposed to do that? I was concentrating really hard on getting out of the way that I..."

"Did you see anything?" he then asked him, now very curious, "Did you find yourself someplace else for a moment?"

"Is it green?"

"Yes!"

"I saw someplace with lots of green for a second... There were tall brown things and green things coming out of the floor (which was all lumpy) and lots of green things above..."

"That's called a forest."

"'Forest...'" he repeated, taking in this lesson with the diligence he displayed in his other realm of study.

"No science has figured out why a dead tree flashes when we perform our 'magic,' so to speak, or how we are able to use that 'magic' in the first place. Even we do not know this secret. Busuzima thinks he's unlocked a secret, but say he's created another mystery: you've never seen the forest with your eyes, at least to your memory, yet a vision came to you nonetheless."

He paused for a moment, and during this time, the baby opened his bright red eyes and started flailing about, hitting the boy in the face a number of times with a little fist before pulling on his hair. "I'll get your toy," he told him before explaining to his senior, "After his 3:00 bottle, he has to have his toy. If he doesn't have it within a few minutes... He'll throw a fit."

"He reminds me of someone," Bakuryu noted when he thought of his strict schedule. He saw the youth produce a small plush doll that was mostly the overly large head of a certain striped big cat with little stubby arms and legs and shake it on front of the baby, who, upon hearing the rattling noise it emitted, ceased crying and snatched it up. "A plaything...," he wondered out loud. No child he had ever seen within these walls could have hoped to dream for so much. "Who is that?"

"I don't know, but he's really special. Master Busuzima tried hard to make one that would live, and he's the first to live this long. He told me to make sure he doesn't die on us, too, so I have to take extra special care of him."

"The Kato school of ninjutsu... reduced to such pathetic dregs. They've ruined us. We shouldn't be this way," he sighed, looking at the leaf between his fingers, "I'm surprised you are not dead already, as I am. Wherever that life came from... Never forget that vision."

"Master Bakuryu...?"

"Always seek that forest," Bakuryu explained while he rose from the crate, "I think we both need it to live. After all... what are moles without the soil?"

"Sir, what's-"

"Nothing... Go back to your chores..."

"Yes, sir."