.: ...Well, kind of had a medical issue happen, so that explains my absence. But I'm okay now. I spent a lot of time resting and watching more anime mostly, and I learned that Japanese beds on the floor actually have a name and so I feel pretty dumb right now hahaha. That means I probably have to go back and change some words to "futon" I was using before like temporary bedding and stuff like that. Whoopsie! But here is a continuation of Akuma's backstory. I think I know how long to keep it going (because I can't spill it all right here and now, or else future parts of the story will be boring) but I am excited to dive into more things like how he met Kyojin, Yume, and Kemono. :.

The Archangel of the Hidden Leaf

Chapter 23:

The Dissection - Origins of Project Archangel, Part 2

As the archangel flew around the circumference of the mountain that the cave was in, it kept its gaze aimed at the ground. Among the trees and shrubs, there was no movement to be detected. Only the occasional bird flew out only to perch somewhere, but it ignored them. Akuma knew by now that it was hunting. He continued to follow him by traversing nearby trees, making sure he was keeping a good distance away. The last thing he wanted was to be spotted and become the desired prey.

It beat its wings rhythmically and powerfully, never faltering or becoming tired. Akuma wondered if it required large amounts of energy to sustain such a mechanism. But he also considered the possibilities that body weight and wing size were factored in as well to equalize the effort. There was still a good chance those aspects asserted dominance among its kind, but it could also mean more responsibilities were at hand. Perhaps there was a reason only one archangel emerged compared to the horde that Akuma witnessed two days previous. If this particular one was the strongest of them all inside the cave, then maybe it was supposed to act as a scout every day and bring back food. It was just a hypothesis at the moment, but it was one to highly ruminate about.

Once the archangel stopped moving onward, Akuma stopped, too. It adjusted its stance to be straight up again. Had it spotted something? Akuma knew it could not be him it noticed, but he buried himself in green foliage just to be safe. He watched it stay in place up in the sky, wings flapping to keep a constant altitude, contemplating. Suddenly it reared its head back and unleashed a horrid screech that was loud enough to be heard by the Hidden Stone Village miles away. The sound sent chills down Akuma's spine, reminding him of the carnage he and his medical team watched as their comrades were eaten alive and torn apart. He was just glad he was a little farther away than last time.

Finishing up its call, the archangel quickly dove down. Akuma gasped and jumped out from the foliage to move to a different tree to get a better view. It was about to kill something. He just knew it. But he was going to miss it! Pulling out his journal once more, he plopped onto a branch and watched how a kill was made.

Without beating its wings, the creature swooped downward with an arching angle. The wind caught its wings for it to gracefully glide without interruption. Akuma tracked its path to see what the target was, and he was baffled to see a lone bear down in a barren patch of land. It was brown and had to have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Even if the archangel did slay it, how could it possibly transport it back to the cave?

In amazement, Akuma watched carefully as the archangel aimed for the head. It wrapped its wings around its body like a blanket and purposely collided with the bear. Stunned, the bear swayed but caught itself and shook its head as the archangel unwrapped itself and flapped its wings to get away quickly. But then with one powerful push of acceleration, the archangel twisted around to its back to latch its teeth into the back of the bear's neck. But the hide was too thick to do more damage. The bear yelped in pain and tried to fight back by falling onto its side and rolling. The archangel read its tactic and released it before it could succeed, though, flapping its wings to create distance between them.

Akuma darted his eyes between the journal and the fight as he jotted down many paragraphs' worth of notes. He was absolutely astonished by what he was seeing. Archangels were highly intelligent! They were not just bloodthirsty savages.

The archangel landed on its feet and did not move. The bear got back up on its own feet, and instead of taking the opportunity to run in escape, it chose to charge toward its attacker. Akuma waited for the archangel to fly once again to aim for the neck again, but it stayed exactly where it was. There was no sign of it dodging the incoming yellow fangs that could tear flesh with little exertion.

Just then, a large shadow materialized over Akuma's head. The premature warmth from the sun was abruptly gone. The feeling made him freeze; he was scared to look. It could have easily been a cloud, but something just did not settle right with how sudden it was.

Just as he thought about it, his worst fears came to fruition. Even more horrid screeching erupted as the familiar curtain of monstrous bodies rode over and past his face like a tidal wave breaking at its peak. Big, small, male, female, brown hair, black hair…He saw it all. The entire cave of archangels had arrived to feed on a single bear! He waited for jaws to chomp around the back of his neck and end his life right then and there. A fresh wave of petrification had swamped his senses.

His heart rapidly thudded in his chest cavity. They just kept coming. It was almost endless. The number of archangels in that single cave had to have been as many shinobi as the Hidden Stone had. And he was supposed to summon up a battle plan to exterminate them all? There was no way!

When they all finally stopped arriving, all Akuma saw was the mass of white bodies crowding the place where the bear had once been. Every single one was trying to get their teeth sunken into the furry hide to rip a chunk out to eat, and some were willing to kill their own kind to get it. Dead bodies started falling to the ground, and archangels who could not get to the bear yet jumped on them to eat. The sight mortified Akuma. He did not know they were cannibalistic of each other, but if they were willing to eat humans, it should have been expected.

Heads started popping back up with blood splattering and soaking them all. Archangels began pushing each other away once it was obvious they got a mouthful of meat in their stomachs. Dead archangels were abandoned while satisfied ones began to fly away to return back to the cave. More blood rain showered over the ground, hitting Akuma along the way. He had pushed farther into the foliage to ensure he would not be spotted, and frankly, he had seen plenty. With a shaking hand, he scribbled multiple pages of notes about the entire event. He had to use exact details. This was how they hunted only one target, so having to chase down multiple targets had to require more precision. Considering there was essentially no other wildlife to be found, it would be nearly impossible to see.

When the area grew quiet, he nervously moved a branch to see what was left of the scene. No archangels were feeding, including the one he had followed here. A pile of bones with residual meat, fur, and organs were in the place he had last seen the bear. The dead archangels were still laying around, some more worse off than others. That surprised him. He had personally watched archangels carry off shinobi they killed, so why not their own kind? In fact, they were not even like the bear's remains. Every morsel the bear had to offer was gone, making it hard to recognize that it had once been a bear at all, but the archangels were just left as they were. Even after having the bear, why not finish off the other dead?

Well, there was a chance they would return later to finish them off. Akuma made extra sure he was alone before he jumped down to retrieve a body that was the most intact. He did not have to use his trap after all.

The archangel that Akuma chose to bring back to the village was a male who had slim muscles and a fatal neck wound. He guessed just by looking at it that was around sixteen years old. Although he had not seen exactly the provocation that caused its death, he assumed the young age meant it was unable to defend itself properly.

He wanted to wrap the body before transporting it, but he had left his bag near the cave and he did not want to risk being seen since they were all active now. So, he held the limp body over a shoulder and battled with its flopping wings that were constantly getting in the way.

It took longer returning to the village than it did leaving it. By the time he had arrived, it was close to noon. The chunins monitoring the entrance were shocked to see he was back so soon. When he had left, they asked how long he would be gone, and he told them a few days. After only less than eight hours, he had brought back a dead specimen. But as quickly as their faces showed joy from his survival, they were transformed into uneasiness. The dead archangel dangling off him was an unpleasant sight.

"It's been a while," Akuma joked once he was in earshot. "Can one of you alert the coroner for me? I want to get to work as soon as possible."

"Uh, y-yes," the teen in their small group answered before going ahead of him.

"Whoa," another chunin voiced. "How did you trap one so fast?!"

"I got off lucky," Akuma clarified. "It's a long story, but they started eating each other. I just picked up one of the dead." He walked through the entrance to head to the coroner, waving at them as he passed. "I'll be off now."

The walk to the village's hospital seemed just as long as the trek back from the bear's final resting place. People stared in astonishment to see an archangel in the flesh while others appeared terrified and untrusting. It was like bringing an explosive in the heart of society; at any moment, the creature could reveal itself to be very much alive and take out Akuma along with others. But he had been traveling with the corpse for a few hours without any problem or hints of such a conspiracy, so he knew it was never going to rear its ugly head again.

Once he reached the village's hospital, he went to the unit that held the coroner. The chunin who had gone to warn of Akuma's arrival was inside with the female specialist, who was preparing a sterile table. "Over here," she alerted, giving it one last wipe with a sterile wipe.

"Thanks, lad," Akuma told the chunin, allowing him to return to his post. When he placed the archangel on the table, the coroner looked at it with a dubious expression. The wings were hanging off the sides, but not limply. The cartilage in them was keeping them stiff. She eyed the neck wound and serrated cuts around its body where archangels had started eating him.

"Takes a second to get used to looking at one, I will admit," Akuma commented, breaking the silence between them. He knew a medical examiner like her had never seen combat before, let alone one of the ferocious creatures threatening the village.

She brushed a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. "So, what's the plan?"

"I want to dissect it to see what we can discover. We know nothing about these things."

"Okay. Then I'll start draining blood and embalming," she shared as she placed a white towel over the archangel's exposed waist.

"I'll be back," he said, going for a door that led to the rest of the hospital. He pulled the journal out from underneath his clothes. While the coroner took the time to do that, he was going to transcribe his notes into the "Archangels" file he had set aside. There was so much for him to talk about and elaborate on that it would take him a while to complete.

His pencil scribbled farther and farther down the pages as his free hand pressed his journal against the desk. His ring finger, middle finger, and index finger all held it open so he could seamlessly glance over and copy the sentences over into the file. Some he reworded, others he explained more what happened. There was so much to say despite it being a minimal encounter. He could not imagine how much time he would spend sitting at this very same desk transcribing notes from an entire day's worth of observation. There was a chance he would give up completely on transcribing and just tear out pages from the journal to stuff in the file.

When his dominant hand hinted at cramping from his nonstop writing, he finished the sentence he was working on and settled the pencil down for a rest. His eyes shifted to a clock that was on a nearby wall to see it had been close to forty-five minutes since he entered his office. He knew the coroner would be finished prepping the body soon, so he decided now was a good stopping place.

Closing the journal and file, he stood up to grab his white coat and left to return to the coroner. Plans for the dissection ran through his head as he walked through the cold hallways of the hospital, passing by staff and patients. The first thing he wanted to establish was whether or not archangels were human. They certainly had human characteristics, but there was no harm in digging deep into the mystery surrounding them. He would open up the corpse to first evaluate the internal organs. If he was dissatisfied with what he found, then he would peel back integument to identify the different muscles, but he doubted it would take something so tedious to convince him.

The last thing he wanted to dissect was the prominent features the archangels possessed: the wings, eyes, and teeth. The head would more than likely have to be removed from the body so they could study the secret behind their hideousness and monstrousness. Why were their eyes black? How were their teeth laid out underneath the gingiva? He also wanted to peel back the skin on the wings to see what they were composed of. They were not very meaty like bird wings, so muscle tissue had to have been lacking. Perhaps they were really more like the wings of a bat? There were so many things he wanted to find out!

When he entered back in the sterile room, he heard running water draining down a sink. The coroner was preparing to get dirty. But instead of going to join her, he was shocked to see a short old man standing next to the table that had the dead archangel laying on it. His eye level was just past the surface as he stared with a grimace at the creature. "Lord Tsuchikage?" Akuma voiced, surprised to see him.

Onoki glanced at Akuma for a moment before returning his gaze back to the corpse. "I wanted to see it for myself," he reasoned. "How did you kill one so quick? And by yourself, at that."

"It wasn't my doing," Akuma revealed, stepping closer and letting the door close behind him. "I had just arrived at the cave when one came out to scout for food. I watched dozens kill an entire bear, but some started killing each other in the process. I picked this one to bring back since its wounds were minimal compared to the rest."

He did not respond for a moment. The Tsuchikage believed Akuma was capable of success in this special mission, but he never expected the lucky bastard to have a specimen fall right in his lap. "What will dissection accomplish?" he asked.

"I want to confirm whether archangels are truly human or not. If they are human, then I must label them as kekkei genkai users."

Onoki narrowed his wrinkly eyes at the proposition. The origin of kekkei genkai was unknown in the ninja world. They ranged from chakra nature types to bodily types. But this was unlike anything he had seen before. It was almost too grotesque to be classified as a bloodline limit in a population of humans.

Akuma noticed the silence between them, so he continued. "But I also want to dissect the wings and head. If I can learn how their wing mechanics work and what is special about their eyes, it could possibly teach us how to combat their abilities."

"How long will it take?"

"I'll try to be done within two days, my Lord. And then…I want to request to retrieve a female specimen."

"Why?"

"For comparison, sir."

"We can't waste time, Akuma. We have to start clearing out caves as soon as possible."

"And we will. I just want to do more observation while I get another specimen. I only watched them for less than an hour. We still know next to nothing about their ways."

Onoki grumbled and turned his back to Akuma. "Very well. Report your findings before you set out." Without waiting for a reply, he opened the door that led outside and left.

The coroner came to the other side of the corpse with proper plastic coverings over herself and a sterile tray of tools. "Shall we begin?" she asked.

A bright light shined on Akuma's face without warning, making him flinch and squint. He could feel the wooden surface of his desk pressed against the side of his face, reminding him that he was still not finished noting the findings from last night's dissection into the file. All he wanted was a nap after staying awake all night. "There you are," his sister Hikari said mischievously. "I heard you were back in the village but you weren't home."

"Sorry…" he trailed as he sat up in his chair and covered a yawn with his fist. "I've been working."

"Is it true that you killed an archangel and brought it back here?"

"I didn't kill it," he insisted, realizing false rumors were spreading around the village. "But I did bring back a dead one. I stayed up all night dissecting it and studying it."

"No wonder you were asleep," she giggled, stepping closer. "But you're okay, right?"

"I'm fine. There was no confrontation," he assured her as he took her hand to lead her out of the office. "Come on. I'll show you what all I did."

"Alright, fine, but we'll have to make it quick. I have an appointment."

He paused in the empty hallway. "A prenatal appointment?" he questioned with intrigue.

"Just to take some tests. We still don't know if I'm pregnant or not. But whatever the result, you can't hear it first!" she lightheartedly bantered as she let him lead her to the coroner.

"But I'm your big brother. I lived with you for most of our lives. I believe I'm more of a priority," he joked.

"Sorry, I think Haruk should know first since he's my husband and all."

Akuma exaggerated the rolling of his eyes to end their amusing dialogue. He was glad his sister was starting a family, but he always wondered what she loved about her husband. Married less than two years, and yet Haruk still seemed indifferent to his brother-in-law. He was an aloof man in the top ranks of the explosion corps of the Hidden Stone. Smiling held no significance to him, especially in the encounters Akuma had with him. He might have been a softer person behind closed doors, and that was what Hikari loved about him, but Akuma would never know. Just the thought of him becoming a father was odd.

Inside the vacant coroner's facility, Akuma retrieved the refrigerated body for Hikari to see. She stood with some apprehension in her nerves. Her career as a shinobi only ascended to a chunin rank, but she stepped down when she got engaged to Haruk. She willingly traded her adventurous life for once of domestic comfort instead because being a wife was more important to her. Because of that, however, she never got to join in on missions regarding the archangels. But from the stories she heard, she was unsure if she wanted to lay eyes on one at all.

Akuma rolled out the table to reveal a snow-white body that had wide appendages dangling off the sides. It was laying on its stomach, and it was missing its entire head. Hikari gulped as she stared at the stripped flesh that revealed pale muscles that were drained of blood and thin bones that were connected by joints and ligaments. There were pins stuck in certain places with colored tags coordinating them.

"I managed to identify archangels as humans with a kekkei genkai," Akuma shared. "So I did some investigating and found that the wings sprout right where the human body has two prominent chakra points in the back. Isn't that amazing?"

"Y-Yeah," she stammered, not removing her gaze from the corpse.

"But I also tried to recreate the motions their wings make," Akuma continued, clasping the one closest to him and shifting its position around. "They can move in virtually any direction. I watched one unfold his out like a bird does. But since they can hyperextend without resistance, I believe they can essentially cocoon themselves like bats, but I'll have to go back and observe to see if it's true."

"What? You're going back?"

"I have to. I want to assess their behaviors further, and I want to compare a female specimen."

"But…"

"I know. I promise to stay alive. Don't worry about me."

But it was not that she worried about so much. He proved to be capable of a dangerous mission, but the way he was speaking with enthusiasm about his new knowledge of the archangels showed the spark igniting within him. Was it the start of a newfound passion, or the start of an obsession?