Team Twelve 2:
Shiina's story
Running was second nature to Ekiden Shiina. Her feet pounded the dirt road beneath her as she sprinted, black hair waving in the wind like a banner announcing her arrival. It was not unnoticed in the trees framing the trail, as tripwires sprang to life before her.
Duck, handspring, handspring, tuck and roll. Another set emerged, and Shiina gracefully dodged through them as well. Rebounding off a tree trunk she lept clear over the next set of traps, only to meet several machine-launched kunai and additional weapons. She scowled, but a quick application of the Body Flicker Technique allowed her to speed her descent to the ground and avoid them all. Landing in a crouch, she bent over nearly backwards to avoid several more machine-launched blades, before snapping back to a standing position and resuming her run.
Shiina spared enough energy to check her watch, and smiled. Already, she was making her best time yet on the course. She resumed her focus on the path ahead and behind, dodging another series of dangerous traps.
As our protagonist is a bit busy at the moment, it is up to the narrator to fill in the gap of this young ninja's backstory. The Ekidens were a wealthy, but otherwise unremarkable family in Konoha. They had no spectacular bloodlines, no fancy summoning jutsus, no animal companions. They were not scientists or engineers or scholars. They were in the postal business.
Ninja were not all about killing and fighting-A significant percentage of their endeavors went towards civilian matters. And among the least appreciated of these ninja careers was that of the mail ninja. Moving letters, packages, anything between the various cities and nations on the continent was what they did. It was a rough job, including huge stretches of road and wilderness, long hours, and dangers at every turn in particularly wild country. Most other potal ninja were rejects from frontline combat, who could at the very least take care of themselves.
But the Ekidens were different. The founder, Shiina's maternal grandfather, had spared no expense in creating a dedicated mail nin training course for any potential employees. It had everything that could possibly be encountered on a mail run, including wild animals (tigers from the Konoha Wildlife Preserve), hostile ninja (chakra-animated dummies with nasty weaponry), and of course, booby traps.
Other postal companies wondered what Enkiden was thinking, splurging his investments on what they saw as unnessecary. They predicted that the company would fall flat in a few months and go bankrupt.
After Enkidu paid off all his debts in his first few months of operation, his competitors still felt that the new company would be gone relatively soon. The more training you gave your employees, the more you had to pay them after all.
Three years later and Enkidu Postal Services was the top mail service in Konoha. It remained at that spot ever since.
Shiina, however, was not looking to continue in the family business. As the granddaughter of the founder, she'd been given access to the course at her request, but when her mother had found out that she wanted to become a regular ninja rather than take up the family business, she was nearly disowned. Her father had managed to intervene before her rash mother did so, but she was denied the company as her inheritence. Shiina couldn't have been happier.
Several dummies appeared, all armed with swords on the path ahead. Shiina smirked, tightening her gauntlets. Meimei Shitai!
Her steel-knuckles let her smash clean through the head of the first dummy, before angling her body into an axe kick, breaking the shoulder of the next dummy with her steel-heeled boot. She stepped on that dummy and used it to push her forward, two steel and leather guarded fists smashing through two more dummies. Forward flipping once more brought her steel-plated toe into the chest of the last dummy, knocking it to a tree. She resumed running, adjusting the straps on her hand-made boots and gauntlets out of habit.
Taijutsu was what Shiina excelled at. Who needed fancy jutsus and techniques when you could just beat the heck out of anything in your way? Shiina liked to think of herself as a living weapon, and so she'd done and studied everything she could towards that end. So any part of her that could be used offensively, she covered in leather and steel.
She was nearly at the end, her way barred by no less than two dozen armed dummies, all ready to leap and attack. Shiina smirked, gloved hands swiftly forming hand seals.
"Kasokuundou: Oto no Sokudo!" She whispered out of habit, saving her breath. Her aura flared bright blue as she suddenly seemed to vanish, leaving only a dust cloud in her wake. The dummies paused, as though confused... Before they were shredded, blasted, and pulverized by a contained sonic boom.
A quarter of a mile away, Shiina stood, leaning her hands against her knees as she tried to catch her breath. She couldn't help but grin as the sonic boom crackled over the forest.
"Not bad," said a familiar voice nearby. She looked up, her father standing in black robes, smiling gently at her. "Fifteen miles in two minutes, thirty-eight seconds." She shrugged, her grin only widening.
"Yeah..."
"Practicing hard?"
"Always." Her father nodded, and turned away.
"Sorry I can't stay long... I just wanted you to know I thought you did well," he said, as he walked towards the company's main complex. Shiina sighed, nodding, before standing up and walking for the exit. If they stayed together any longer, then her mother would find out. It was the price to pay for her dream.
Translations:
Enkiden - Stagecoach (as in for mail. Yes, it's a pun.)
Meimei Shitai: Invisible Body
(This basically means her fighting style is based on moving so fast she can't be hit.)
Kasokuundou: Oto no Sokudo - Accelerated Motion: Speed of Sound
(This technique allows her to move at supersonic speeds just long enough to create a sonic boom and use it as a weapon against a target.)
R&R