Three miles East of Konoha along the disused Konoha to Numa-Ku road there is an abandoned farmstead, composed of a three-story farmhouse along with six single-storey cottages. The farmstead, once called Honey Bee Farm, has been vacant for fourteen years, following the death due to sickness of its previous owner and the migration of its former residents into Konoha proper.
The client is the new owner of the farmstead and associated properties. They have requested that a team of shinobi inspect the property for damage, dispose of any refuse from the interior of the buildings, and remove any nesting animals or squatters which may have taken up residence in the property. All significant damage should be recorded, especially including damage which compromises the safety of the structures.
There have been two reports of smoke appearing over the property within the last twelve months, though no other sign of activity has been noted. Konoha patrols pass the property intermittently. The last patrol inspection took place two weeks ago, and found no evidence of human occupation.
The surrounding forest is believed to be inhabited by spinebadgers, which are known to prefer derelict buildings as their nesting sites. Spinebadgers are D-rank dangerous creatures, with incidents of civilian deaths in cases where their nests are disturbed. Spinebadgers are believed to pose minimal risk to a team of qualified shinobi of genin level or above.
# # #
Ami lowered the mission scroll after reading it for the ninth time.
She'd jumped out of bed with a spring in her step that morning, though the sky was still overcast, and intermittent drizzle fed a growing foreboding about the upcoming day as she prepared her supplies for the road.
She'd dressed in dark, tidy clothes she favoured, and tied the paper 'victory' tag to the white sash that circled her waist. Her pack had been filled with her cache of sweets and chips, and two water canteens, one of the few things her father had left behind when he walked out years before. She slid the three kunai that her sensei had recovered from the training ground into her pouch, and grimaced at the remains of her shuriken, now just a pile of bent shrapnel, rusty from too long left covered in blood.
The slums of Konoha was one of the farthest districts from the main gate, and rather than follow the branching streets through the commercial district, Ami opted to take the sometimes hazardous short cut across the band of training grounds that circled the more built-up village centre.
The clouds began to clear as she walked, and the sun emerged, already hot despite the early hour. Ami took the change as a good omen for her first mission, though when she saw three familiar figures sitting on the railing of a bridge ahead, her spirits fell. The figures were Sasuke, Naruto, and Sakura from her graduating class.
They looked like they were waiting for something, and now that Ami was committed to her route, there was no way around. She grit her teeth and headed for the bridge, hearing snippets of conversation as she approached.
"He's running a little late," Sakura muttered.
None of them had seemed to notice Ami's presence, less than fifty meters away. They were sitting close together, passing idle conversation back and forth. They each seemed to glow with their own colours. Sakura's hair was the colour of cherry trees in spring, Sasuke was the pale shadow she cast, and Naruto was a miniature sun, beaming down at Sakura whenever she turned her face towards him.
They didn't look like anything so close as friends, but Ami could see something there, a bond. Solidarity and acceptance drifted between them like a tendril of wood smoke. They were allies. There was conflict between them, but they faced the world together. Something about that annoyed Ami, and a jutting root of anger slithered into her mind as she saw them relaxing on the railing. She stomped it down, but where it had been was a space, a vacuum that might have been loneliness, or something else.
Ami approached the three cautiously, eyeing them sidelong like a bird approaching a scrap of something that might be food. "Hey Forehead. Shouldn't you be training?" Ami said boldly, but not unkindly.
"Shut it, Leftover," Sakura yelled, turning her head towards Ami with white-eyed indignation. At one point in the past, even such a simple remark would have sent Sakura running away in tears, but years of such abuse had fortified her against it, an improvement Ami took some responsibility for.
"Huh? Purple?" Naruto said, turning towards Ami with an air of mild confusion. He quickly recovered as he processed what she'd said, then gestured at her accusingly. "Don't talk to Sakura-chan like that!"
"Naruto! Don't defend me!" Sakura said, including the boy within her glare. Ami noticed that Sakura almost seemed more angry at Naruto than she was at her.
"Shouldn't you be with your sensei?" Ami asked, slowing on the bridge until she'd almost stopped, kicking dust idly as she risked a glance at Sasuke, who ignored the situation impassively.
"He's late!" Naruto yelled.
"Ah, well, at least he's a jonin. When he gets here he can teach you some awesome jutsu, right?" Ami offered. "Tsuzumi-sensei only taught me a crappy wall jutsu so far."
"Huh? Wall jutsu? What is it?" Naruto asked. Sakura and Sasuke seemed interested as well, but held their silence, relying on the blonde to brave the conversation alone.
"It's the wall walking technique." Ami looked up towards the sun, thinking of her mission. Deciding she could spare a few minutes to show off, she walked to one of the posts which held up the bridge's decorative arches, placed a foot against it experimentally, and began walking slowly up the post. "You keep chakra in your feet, and it lets you stick," Ami explained.
"That doesn't sound like a real technique," Sakura said, tossing a strand of pink hair out of her face dismissively, though her eyes tracked Ami as she ascended several feet of the pole.
"It is too. It took me all day to learn it." Ami said, before pausing, and letting herself slide back down the pole to the bridge. "Didn't you guys learn this after your extra test?"
"What extra test?" Naruto asked, alarmed.
"There's another test you have to pass before you can be a genin," Ami said, looking between the three students uncertainly.
Sasuke was on his feet. "We weren't told about another test."
Sakura joined him, standing from the bridge rail.
"Hm. Mine was like," Ami paused to think. "Tsuzumi-sensei made me take a kunai from the top of a post. Except, it was really hard to climb up, that's why I learned wall walking right after."
"No, no, no," Naruto muttered, running to the bridge post and experimentally trying to walk up it. He fell down immediately.
"Hm, sorry. I thought you'd passed already," Ami said with a smirk.
Sakura grimaced, and after a moment of consideration walked to find a post of her own. She placed a foot against the wood experimentally, and began to slowly walk up it. Half a minute later she was at the top. "This took you a whole day?" she asked.
Ami grunted. "Yeah. I guess that's the giant brain you keep behind your giant brow."
Sakura scowled and stuck her tongue out at Ami, hopping back down. Naruto was still hopelessly trying to run up the post through sheer momentum.
"Well, I gotta go. Got a mission," Ami said, walking towards the end of the bridge.
"A mission already?" Sasuke asked, looking worried, but Ami pretended not to hear him.
Ami chuckled to herself as she walled away from the scene, through fields and woods, towards the main gate. She pulled the mission scroll from her pouch as she walked, reading it for the tenth time that morning, and then the eleventh.
# # #
When Ami reached the gate, she found it guarded a by a single chunin, who eyed her dubiously as she approached, his eyes flicking between her clothes and her headband.
"Going out?" he asked, stepping out from behind a simple stall which the gate guards manned during the day.
"Yeah," Ami said. She hooked her thumbs behind the straps of her pack, as if to illustrate her eminent readiness to leave the village.
"On your own?"
"I don't need anyone else!" Ami insisted.
The man seemed unconvinced, and held out his hand. "Orders?"
Ami dug in her pouch and handed the man the scroll, which he unfurled and skimmed, before handing back.
"A D-rank huh? Well, okay, good luck," the chunin said with a shrug, before pausing and scrabbling for something in the stall. "Wait, you know how to use a storage scroll? Take this. If you get into trouble, push some chakra into it, and back off. It'll send up a katon flare for the wall watch."
"Thanks, Guard-san," Ami said, taking the tag reverently and slipping it into her pouch beside her kunai.
The guard watched after Ami as she left, shaking his head.
The walk to the farmstead wasn't hard, and Ami had no trouble finding it, following the dilapidated signs for Numa-ku village. The road was muddy and rutted, covered in tall weeds and dotted with cracked wheel rims, animal droppings, and fallen leaves, the litter of disuse.
After two hours of walking along the rough road, the battered farmhouse finally came in to view, covered by overhanging vines and moss. Beside it, snapped from its posts and tossed to the ground by some past storm, was a sign which read 'Honey Bee Farm'. The text was accompanied by several realistic paintings of bees.
Ami stopped and dropped her backpack, pulling out the roll of paper and charcoal pencil she'd brought for the mission. Rolling the paper out across her knees, Ami carefully wrote 'the sign is broken' across the paper, before stuffing it back away.
As Ami picked her way through the large farmhouse's overgrown lawn, she stopped to add 'broken windows' and a 'smashed lock' to the list of damage, and inside, Ami found that the interior of the farmhouse was also in ruins. Shattered wooden furniture littered the floor, birds nests occupied the smashed upper windows, and the wooden walls around the fireplace was scorched where some group of travellers had evidently tried to build a camp fire in the hearth, without realising the blocked chimney would force the heat and smoke to flood out into the room.
Ami used what few cleaning tools were left in the farmhouse to sweep out the largest and most rotten pieces of junk, and made a small bonfire of them in the garden. When she was finished, the farmhouse was not perhaps in a state that someone could live in it, but the floors were at least swept clean, and the building only really needed a thorough cleaning and some repairs.
After finishing with the farmhouse, Ami moved to the line of low stone cottages set a little way back from the road. The buildings each only had a single storey, and apart from where they were missing a few roof tiles, were mostly intact.
The first door Ami tried resisted her attempts to open it, its lock apparently still sound enough to provide some security. She was briefly tempted to just kick the door open, but knowing that she'd only have to log the damage afterwards, she instead knelt to examine the lock. The academy's introduction to lock-craft had been brief, and purely theoretical. Iruka-sensei had explained the basics, most of which Ami had daydreamed through, but there had been no practice, or any details beyond the simplest principles.
Ami had little hope of being able to pick the lock as she knelt, but as she peered through the keyhole, she realised it wasn't a lock at all, but just a latch on the inside of the door, which could be lifted from the outside just by inserting a correctly sized peg. It was more of a mechanism to keep out wildlife and nosy passers-by than a lock intended to keep out a determined intruder. Ami found a twig the right size, and smoothly let herself into the cottage.
The inside was relatively clean and untouched. Whoever once lived there must have packed up before leaving, and the latched door must have done something to keep out destructive animals and vandals, since the few simple pieces of furniture which remained were in good condition. Ami made a note of the missing roof tile, and the water damage to the floor, and left the building.
The second cottage was in a little worse shape, with a broken window and a few more missing tiles. As she used her twig-key to open the door, she noted spider webs deep in the corners of the room, and much of the wooden furniture scattered around the room gave off a rotten smell. Over in the corner of the cottage, hung a mass of dark grey -something- and a cluster of black-red lumps, each about the size and shape of a watermelon.
As Ami peered at the odd mass, wondering if it were a kind of mould, she saw a twitch of movement. Her mind lurched as it attempted to comprehend the odd geometry of the object. She saw a needle-thin stick, twitch against the black leathery lumps, and the entire shape shifted, revealing it to be the body of an enormous spider, as large as a dog, hanging from a dangling bundle of white-grey silk.
Ami screamed. The other shapes twitched in answer, revealing the mess to be a trio of enormous nesting black forest spiders. Her stomach twisted itself into a knot, threatening to make her vomit, and was only being kept at bay by the amount of air rushing through her lungs as she cried out.
Ami darted back out of the house and slammed the door shut behind her, then in a flash of fearful realisation, looked over at the broken window. Ami didn't know whether it was panic or instinct that made her throw a kunai at the empty space in the window, but the moment it passed into the cottage, one of the spiders appeared at the empty frame, and the kunai buried itself to the hilt in the spider's abdomen.
The struck spider fell to the sill, and Ami tossed off another kunai in anticipation of one of the others following it. But the remaining two spiders were not so close behind the first, and the kunai rattled uselessly into the interior of the cottage. Ami saw a long, hairy leg emerge from the window, as a second spider crawled down from the cottage's ceiling, probing carefully around its fallen nest-mate. Ami swallowed the writhing in her gut and jumped into the air with a spin, delivering a textbook academy spinning kick and knocking the creature back into the building.
Ami heard hissing, and took a panting moment to recover her breath. There were still two left, and she had only one kunai - the 'victory' kunai of her genin test. Ami felt around the interior of her pouch, and realised she also had the flare tag from the gate guard. Without pausing to imagine the result, Ami drew the tag, sent a pulse of chakra into the design, scrunched it into a ball, and tossed the balled-up paper in through the broken window.
There was a moment of silence, and then the paper erupted into a fast moving fireball, rocketing upwards until it hit the cottage's tile ceiling, and rebounding, spinning and ricocheting around the inside of the cottage like an errant firework. Ami had to duck a shower of white-hot sparks as the chakra flare passed close by on the inside of the window, and she darted to the side to put her back to the wall.
Ami had never imagined that spiders, of any size, would be able to scream. But as the flare spent its energy bouncing around the inside of the cottage, searing its walls and occupants, the creatures inside gave out constant, breathy shrieks, so high pitched they were almost a hiss. After a few seconds the sound of screams faded, and after several more the riot of the flare died away too, all of the energy that was meant to help the flare gain height spent in a brief, violent, fiery maelstrom.
After half a minute of silence from within, Ami risked a glance through the broken window, and saw that the flare had set several parts of the wooden floor on fire. It also seemed like the webs of the spiders burnt well, as there were several tall blazes hanging from the walls, particularly around the central nest. The flames reached up, blackening the ceiling tiles with ash, and she could see smaller flames spreading to the roof supports.
Ami decided to take some time to herself to vomit, bending over and emptying her stomach. The terror, the violence, and the thought of the hideous creatures more than enough to keep her retching for seconds after she had nothing left to bring up. Finally, she spat, washed her mouth with water from her canteen, and, grimly terrified, began to check the remaining cottages.
Ami found nothing of note in the remaining buildings, and aside for 'one cottage is all burnt up', she had little to add to her list of damages.
Despite the spread of the flames, the lack of fuel in the stone building had made the fire easy for Ami to put out. A chipped bucket of water through the window smothered the flames that covered the wooden floor, and a perhaps ill-advised climb onto the roof let her pour down enough water to dampen the fire that had spread to the ceiling. The nest she let burn itself out, half sure that if she touched it, a wave of tiny, hungry spiders would rush out to devour her.
When Ami began the short hike back to Konoha, the column of smoke had mostly dispersed.
As Ami passed back through the main gates of the hidden village there was a new guard on duty, who inspected her orders and let her go on her way. It had been a long day for her, and she was exhausted, physically and mentally, but she still had to report to the sensei at his post on the wall. She paused on her route to Watchtower Six to buy a slice of melon from a fruit vendor to settle her stomach, and picked up a couple of apples for the sensei as well.
The wall-walk to the top of the watchtower was gruelling, and when Ami reached the top she found Tsuzumi there with Okei, both with their backs to her as they scanned the darkening forests.
"They should make some steps for this," she huffed as she dragged herself over the low wall around the edge of the watchtower, and slumped to the floor.
Okei turned to Tsuzumi, "You didn't tell her about the steps?"
"Ah-ha, it's good training!" Tsuzumi laughed.
Ami just scowled, but her expression unwound itself as she saw the sensei turn to her with his familiar smile.
"Hey, Ami-chan. Good mission?" he asked.
Ami was about to launch into an angry rant, but paused. With the time on the walk back to the village to calm down, and the distance in time and space from the horror she'd felt, the memories of the day were beginning to fade from the raw emotion of visceral experience to something more mellow and more easily digested. She considered the question for a moment, then gave her sensei a thumbs up. "It was cool!"
"Oh? How did it go?" he asked.
"Hm, well, the farmhouse was a dump, so I cleaned it up. But the cool thing was the combat, and the fire," she enumerated.
"Combat?" Tsuzumi asked, his smile disappearing. "Fire?"
"Yeah, one house had giant spiders, huge," she held her arms out to demonstrate. "So I blew them up with Guard-san's flare tag."
Okei turned away from the tree line with a frown. "Giant forest spiders? They shouldn't be so close to the village."
"Yeah, giant," Ami confirmed. "It was okay, I got one with a kunai -shlock- then threw the flare tag into their nest. It was pretty cool."
Tsuzumi's smile was back. "It sounds like you had a good one. My D-ranks were all chasing cats and painting fences."
"Hng, were you bitten?" Okei asked gruffly.
"Nah, they couldn't touch me," Ami bragged, dragging herself up to sit against the wall. "Oh sensei!" Ami tossed Tsuzumi a pair of apples.
"You had a brush with death, kid," Okei said. "Those spiders are venomous, and out there alone, there'd be no one to carry you back for treatment. That's why kids are usually sent out with a team." Okei's last words seemed to be more for Tsuzumi, if the man's glare was anything to go by.
"Ah-ha, it was fine, fine," Tsuzumi said, waving dismissively. "She's a shinobi after all."
"Yeah, it was fine- fine!" Ami confirmed, unconsciously mirroring the dismissive wave with one hand.
"Okay Ami," Tsuzumi said, suddenly serious as he bit into an apple and continuing to speak with his mouth full. "Now you must perform the next part of the mission - the written report part." He tossed her a blank scroll and a pencil. "Write up a full report of everything that happened. If I give it a pass, you can hand it in tomorrow and get the reward. If it's not good enough... you'll have to rewrite it."
Ami frowned and nodded seriously, beginning to scribble on the parchment, as Tsuzumi turned back to the surrounding forest.
"I can't believe forest spiders were nesting so close to an occupied area," Okei said quietly. "That's dangerous."
"Hm. Well, it was an abandoned place after all," Tsuzumi replied.
The two chunin made sparse conversation as the minutes wore on, and Ami continued to scribble her report. Ami unfortunately forgot to include the fact that she'd been responsible for the fire damage to the cottage, but it was otherwise accurate and fairly complete. Eventually Tsuzumi broke off from his watch to read her attempt, shooting her a smile and an approving nod, and dismissed Ami with a demand to report for training the following morning after turning her mission report in.
"And after I finish my shift tomorrow, we'll meet in town and I'll take you out for a victory celebration meal!" Tsuzumi promised.
Ami took a deep breath and lifted her hands to the sky and shouted, "Victory!"