Not that there's been a torrent of requests, but we're not inactive, we just have several chapters for new fics going on at the same time and I have zero focus on any of them. Pruning chapter 5 is done and I'm half way through 6 so I hope people haven't lost hope for it. Hayate is a cool character I don't intend on utilizing so we decided a one shot would be nice.
"So… What do you want to be, son. You've got a year to pick something, we'll support you no matter what, promise." A merchant with years of experience under his belt and his ill complexioned wife smiled down at their son, who was scribbling on a piece of paper with his assortment of crayons.
For a moment, he set down his crayons and lifted up his paper to show his parents, it was a crude stick figure holding a sword larger than the figure's body.
"I wanna be this guy." The pale skinned boy said with a completely straight face.
There was a beat of silence as his parents stared at the drawing in bewilderment, before they broke out into joyful smiles.
"The first shinobi of the Gekko family! How brave!" His father exclaimed, clapping a hand down on his son's shoulder.
"I'm more a swordsman than I am a shinobi, I should warn you of that at least." Hayate Gekko warned the three red-vested jounin in front of him, all of which had their wakizashis drawn and pointed towards him.
Hayate hadn't intended to find any enemy shinobi occupying the frontier village he'd been assigned to, and he certainly hadn't expected to find so many civilians, he hadn't really considered that he'd be seen as the bad guy in this exchange.
Hayate was the bad guy in this exchange.
His hand remained resting on the sheath of his katana, hacking and coughing into his other hand, the shinobi before him all seemed hesitant to make the first move, his illness was almost always believed by enemies to be a smokescreen to mislead them, give them a false sense of security.
A small blessing considering it was a terminal illness, but Hayate counted his blessings all the same. His lungs still heaved, but Hayate decided that giving his opponents the lead in this battle was just too much of an advantage for them to take.
In a flash of silver, Hayate's katana slammed against the leftmost shinobi's own blade, but his opponent stood strong.
As a whole, there were five, maybe six, techniques that kenjutsu applied when considering movement. Efficiency of movement. That was a crucial law in kenjutsu, Hayate's katana bounced off of his opponent's wakizashi and as it did, he slipped backwards, allowing the two men on his right to plunge their blades into the space he had only just occupied. Using the momentum of the initial clash, Hayate made to swing in reverse, not wasting a single ounce of strength by trying to force a swing in the other direction.
Hayate's downwards slash was met with his original opponent's wakizashi, while the two other shinobi had flanked him on either side, hitting him with a classic pincer maneuver, he was impressed.
"You do outrank me, I suppose…" Hayate murmured, his own rank being tokubetsu jonin. Their rank had been given to them because of their talents in several areas, taijutsu, ninjutsu, genjutsu, the list went on. Hayate's rank was given to him for one reason, and only one.
"Secret Sword, Moonlight." Hayate stated. With blinding speed, Hayate sped past the two shinobi left and right of him, slashing his blade upwards towards the man directly in front of him.
The katana met flesh and he didn't stop dragging the katana upwards, not until it veered slightly left, cutting the man's jugular vein.
"Gamatsu! No!" The shinobi on the left screamed in horror, Hayate instinctively spun the katana's grip in his hand and swung it blindly to the left of him. It would have been an inefficient move, had he struck nothing, but the blade bit into the man who screamed out his dying comrades name.
Hayate had to suck up the feeling of guilt that welled up in the pit of his stomach, empathy was human, not something a shinobi should aspire to be, not something he could afford to be.
One of the other key tenets of kenjutsu was precision, and Hayate suffered tremendously for it, every strike needed to be lethal when you were outnumbered. Hayate dashed backwards, drawing his katana away from the other shinobi's shoulder, the man clung to his shoulder, dropping to his knees and almost beginning to cry in shock. Hayate felt an incredible gust of wind rush by his head, followed by the sound of wood from the house behind him shattering completely.
The other jonin had abandoned his blade, in favour of blasting a large rock in his direction with some form of ninjutsu, Hayate appreciated a shinobi that could improvise on the fly.
The second rock was blasted at his chest at an incredible speed and Hayate only had time to draw his blade defensively, pouring chakra into his feet to glue himself down as well as channeling chakra into his katana to withstand the pressure.
His arms screamed in protest as he pushed his blade against the hunk of rock, chakra seeped through his arms and feet like kikachu beetles were eating at his whole system. In a matter of milliseconds Hayate had lost half of his chakra reserves and his wrists felt as if they were broken, worse yet, the jonin before him was running at him with a kunai, while the other one had already made a tourniquet for his shoulder, looking towards Hayate with murder in his eyes.
The kunai was a fake out, Hayate knew that. The jonin dropped the blade the moment he was in range and dropped to tackle him, Hayate reversed the grip of his blade for what felt like the one hundredth time and plunged the katana downwards, stabbing at the heart from the jonins back.
When a wooden log appeared in a poof of smoke, Hayate didn't hesitate, he flicked his katana to free it from the log and spun around, this time not failing to slice the neck of the jonin that had advanced upon him.
With a gargling of failed breath, the jonin collapsed to the floor, reaching out towards his legs in a final act of defiance.
Hayate spared the deadman no more attention, turning to face his final enemy. The remaining jonin hadn't moved from where he had been leaning.
"You killed… My best friend." The jonin seethed in barely contained rage.
Hayate's eyebrows arched, pointing his spare hand to the body behind him.
"What about that guy?" Hayate asked.
The jonin didn't answer him, he still seethed with rage.
"What's your name, you leaf scum? It'll bring me peace to know the name of Gamatsu's killer before I avenge him." The jonin stated, with a savage grin.
Hayate flicked the excess blood and gristle off of his katana, smiling softly.
"What do names matter, huh? I kill you, you kill me. Gamatsu… And this guy… They're dead regardless of what we do." Hayate said, staring at the jonin without a shred of sympathy. "My name's Hayate Gekko, if that's any consolation, and I'm entirely prepared to die, whether it's to you or the next enemy I face." Hayate stated, changing his stance to prepare the final blow.
The other jonin snarled, readying his wakizashi with his only working arm. Hayate considered his luck, that he had essentially only really had to face two jonin at the same time, rather than three. His only opponent now had succumbed to his emotions at the sight of his comrade's death.
As the jonin charged at him, Hayate wondered how he would feel, if Yugao had died in front of him.
"Dance of the Crescent Moon."
Hayate's movements were so fast that his afterimages moved ahead and behind him, a kind of taijutsu technique that paired beautifully with his kenjutsu to create an almost perfect technique.
The furious jonin didn't even hesitate, swinging at the first afterimage to enter his swinging range, cutting through air as Hayate swung his katana downwards. The jonin revealed his incredible reflexes as he proceeded to move his blade to catch Hayate's katana.
Efficiency and precision. Those were two of the most important rules of kenjutsu, they were rules that Hayate would live and die by long before he succumbed to his illness.
Mid swing of his Moonlight Dance, Hayate diverted his katana, moving left out the way of the wakizashi, and then right, running across the inside of his opponent's blade and slashing right through the man's wrist. His hand had been lopped off. And yet even then he charged forwards, attempting to bite at Hayate's neck.
Finally, Hayate reversed the grip of his katana one more time and dropped to his knees to get beneath the jonin, swinging full force with both his hands and cutting the man's head off with one clean swing.
Hayate refused to imagine how miserable he'd feel, if Yugao died before he did. Wiping the blood off of his katana with his jacket sleeve.
"I guess I'm just a hypocrite, huh." Hayute whispered to himself, coughing up a storm the moment his body relaxed.
His hyper-awareness of the situation extended to what surrounded him, he'd known that there had been civilian spectators, those that had either been too scared, or too foolish to flee already. They now stood, watching him hack and wheeze his lungs out, paralysed in fear.
"Alright… Well, what to do…" Hayate rubbed the bottom of his chin in thought after he sheathed his katana.
"Y-y-you won't get away with this, you leaf scum!" One very brave civilian man shouted.
"The Will of the Rock will live on, coward!" A woman clutching her child screamed.
Hayate sighed as more verbal abuse came his way. He took it in stride as he started to leave the village. This was essentially a mission failure, although he'd at least revealed that the village was occupied by Iwagakure.
What Hayate saw next had him standing in complete awe. The sheer audacity alone amazed him, it made him wonder if his own village truly was as soft as the competition always said.
From his back, Hayate could hear the pitter patter of footsteps from behind him and the large civilian man barreling towards him so slowly Hayate actually felt ashamed for the man through second hand embarrassment. The large man met his eyes and for seconds it seemed like even he had realised that a shinobi couldn't be blindsided so easily.
The crude knives stabbed through Hayate's body all the same, and he gasped in pain, gritting his teeth, elbowing the woman behind him as gently as he could afford while he dropped his fist down on the large man's head.
The large man in front of him had been knocked out instantly but the woman behind him had simply been knocked backwards by his relatively weak attack.
"P-please, I have a family here, a baby girl." The woman pleaded, getting on her knees and clasping her hands before her face.
Hayate looked down at the large kitchen knife protruding his abdomen and then back at the woman. He coughed and hacked a whole lot more, before finally breaking into a gentle chuckle.
"I always thought I'd settle down, have a kid." Hayate replied to the begging woman.
"I mean, not straight away, heh. I'd ease into it, subtly prod at Yugao, see how she gauges it. It'd be her burden after all, I'd still have to work, but I'd love to have had a go at being a househusband." Hayate rambled, sometimes coughing or catching his breath.
He pulled the knife out of his back with a grimace and a grunt of pain. He pulled the second knife out of his abdomen, with a very manly whimper.
"P-please, spare the children, I beg you." The woman cried out.
Hayate walked forward and laid a hand on the back of her head.
"Raise that kid well." Hayate whispered to her.
He formed familiar seals with his hands, and vanished with the body flicker jutsu.
Somewhere far in the distance, a treetop was hacking and coughing, blood dripping from the branch onto a bird's nest.
"Those assholes."
Hayate grumbled to himself for the next hour, wrapping up and sealing his wounds the old fashioned way. He sighed gently, he had to get back home soon.
After all, the chunin exams were starting soon.