Toaru Kurayami no Heishi

A Certain Soldier of Darkness

After dropping the suit of armor into her safehouse, Kuroko headed back to her dorm. She would need a few more of those pills to be able to perform that heist tonight, and she could use something to quell her grumbling stomach as well.

When she arrived back Misaka looked at her from her seated position on her bed. She smiled at Kuroko saying, "Hey there. Nice job today. I was watching over Uiharu's shoulder."

"I only did my duty as a Judgment agent," she said, looking down. Her tone was it's usual blend of humble and haughty but even with her Onee-sama's praise she could not feel her normal pride for her accomplishment. It felt hollow.

Suddenly Kuroko felt arms wrap around her, pulling her towards her Onee-sama's warmth. "Your duty only goes so far though Kuroko. You've been working so hard recently. You're still a human you know. I can see those bags under your eyes, even if you try to hide them behind sunglasses." Misaka kissed Kuroko's forehead gently, "the case is over now, so I want you to get a good rest. And maybe we can go on a date Saturday. Sound good?"

For a second Kuroko was confused. Then happiness surged through her overriding her confusion. A smile spread across her face as she wrapped her arms around her Onee-sama, returning her hug and nuzzling close to her. "That sounds fantastic. Thank you Onee-sama. I love you so much."

"I love you too Kuroko," she said with no hesitation and just a hint of a blush. She affectionately stroked Kuroko's hair with a hand as the other held her delicately until her breathing slowed into a steady unconscious rhythm.

Misaka smiled, glad that she had worked everything out. She had thought Kuroko would be happy when she came home, thought she would go on and on about solving the case. Seeing her so... droopy, when she should be happy had been quite a shock.

Luckily Misaka knew just how to make her smile, a smile Misaka knew she deserved. Considering what Misaka had found out today. She had found out what Kuroko had been hiding, and now had a plan about what to do about it.

'But that can wait for tomorrow,' Misaka told herself as she settled back on the bed, careful not to wake up Kuroko. It was a little early to be going to bed but Kuroko needed the sleep and Misaka didn't mind. She turned off the light and began her planning.

The pereskia is becoming more reliable it seems. The whole thing is still fragile but it seems that she is actually starting to care about Shiro's feelings.

Kuro knew how important the pereskia was to Shiro's delicate psyche and the other day she had shook it up quite a bit. She is still far too thoughtless about what she does and Shiro is still far too forgiving. Things have been rocky and Shiro doesn't listen to me as much as usual. The pereskia is the key now, she is the one that can most easily manipulate Shiro's emotions, but she isn't considerate enough of them yet for that to be a good thing.

Perhaps if I encouraged Shiro to spend time with her other friends then things would even out a bit more. Her relationships with Uiharu and Saten have no exploitable benefits and their connection with the pereskia would possibly render the exercise counterproductive. Jericho is a good reliable person for Kuroko's mental health(after all, most memories Kuroko considered good had been in either the last 3 months or the 2 years that she knew Jericho), but the relationship with Birdy is paying more dividends.

However Birdy is hard to track down and, like Kuroko, had a job that kept her busy. Perhaps it would be best to continue to maintain the relationship through electronic means like Shiro has been doing for the past couple of days rather than physical means. Jericho is easy to find. So I should probably encourage Shiro to pay her a visit on her next free day.

Kuro looked over to Shiro, or rather her incarnation here in the dream world. She was away in another pool of conscious right now, having a nice dream. So this particular incarnation in her world of meditation and, more recently, nightmares, was nothing but dead weight, held up by chains in the shadow of the looming axe, like a prisoner awaiting execution. The fact that Shiro was effectively gone allowed Kuro some alone time where she was free to think without the distracting sensory input that she received through their shared conscious body, though some pain still leaked through.

With the scapegoats' support Shiro was able to acquire protection for the future, assuming it is as reliable as Itora led us to believe. That itself is doubtful but the magnitude of exaggeration has yet to be seen.

Indeed, Shiro had been able to purchase many useful things recently. Both for her and for me when it is necessary for me to step in. Though that shouldn't be too often once this is over. Surely Shiro can handle her conflicts for herself, without the help of a powerless person like me. Well... most of them anyway. Riko still heavily outclasses her in chess, without my help she would have lost far earlier.

This trail of consciousness led Kuro to think about something that she had never thought about before: herself. Or rather, it was the first time she had thought of herself in regards to something other than Shiro. For years she had only really existed when Shiro was distressed. When she wasn't then she would lapse into a sleeplike state until she was called back, then she would review the memory of the incident that was distressing Shiro and give her her opinion and support. But ever since the voice of honey and thorns ravaged their collective brain, the path back to Kuro's place of unawareness had been blocked by the thorny remnants that still lingered and the scar tissue it had left behind.

This was an odd experience for Kuro. Her whole purpose for existing up to that point had been as a guide for Shiro. She dealt with Shiro's problems and was rewarded with the blissful state of unconsciousness. It was what she did, it was her duty, her place in "life". She gazed up at a clock tower that pierced the horizon; the massive clock embedded in the pure white ivory tower was stuck at 12:01, one minute past midnight. The stopped clock and the memories it held were proof enough of the necessity of this weighty task.

But now this duty had been disrupted. She existed when she had no reason to exist. She was aware even when Shiro's happiness indicated that she had done her job and could rest again. She was like a soldier in peacetime, or a firefighter without fires. For the first time her existence was not entirely for her job, for the first time her existence was not exclusively for Shiro. It was such an odd feeling and one that was so very difficult to adjust to.

She looked at the hands of her own dream world incarnation. They were as black as night with dull edges that made her look like a moving shadow. It was an appropriate analogy for someone like her; someone without a true body to call her own, dependent upon another for continued existence.

What am I? Who am I? She didn't quite know yet. She would need to reevaluate at a later date when she had compiled more experience. As she decided that, she felt the dream world rattle and shake. This shaking was accompanied by increased sensory reception, suggesting that she was waking up.

Kuroko opened her eyes. The pain from her injuries had jarred her from her sleep. She was a bit surprised as she had not actually remembered falling asleep, just the nirvana that was her Onee-sama's embrace. Her Onee-sama still held her delicately with one hand resting in the small of her back while the other was at her own side. It was still dark outside; she turned to see the alarm clock flashing 12:01.

Kuroko frowned. It was her least favorite time of day. It held too many bad memories.

She extricated herself from her Onee-sama's grasp. As pleasant as it was to be held by her she had something that she still needed to do tonight and now that she had had a little rest it was the perfect time to do it.

She got the armor from her safe house, put it on, then teleported off towards her destination, the location of the 4th Horn of Jericho.

Specifically, her target was one of the few houses in academy city. Despite the fairly small population density, most people in the city were students who tended to live in dorms or apartments. Because of this the great majority of the city's housing, even that of non-students, was comprised of towering apartment complexes. The people that could afford housing tended to be the wealthy CEOs who owned the business in the city and thus had quite large houses which were all congregated in one particular area, known commonly as The Empire both for its ancient-Rome-style architecture and the social status of the people who lived there.

Despite the fact that it was the wealthiest neighborhood in the city, the crime rate was almost zero. Given the nigh non-existent police presence this fact had always bothered Kuroko until the other day when she learned that almost every inhabitant of The Empire was in some way connected to one of the crime families which were easily capable of warding the area against any non-organized rabble.

Still Kuroko was not worried.

Academy City was a city of students and of ESPers. There were over 350 thousand people in the city who had manifested their ESPer abilities and the city itself had adapted to reflect this. Because of the number of pyrokinetics, the fire safety codes were the strictest in the world. Because there were so many electromasters, the power grids could handle far more voltage than a regular city without going out. There were innumerable precautions that people took in order to counteract various powers and abilities. For a city where so many people had superpowers this was necessary.

However some abilities were too rare or difficult to counter and thus people did not bother. Teleportation was one such ability. Only 56 people had abilities which fell under the instantaneous movement subset of spatial manipulation, also known as teleporting. Of those 56 only 20 could teleport a mass over 10kg, and of those 20 only 6 could teleport themselves. It was such a rare ability that only one man, the warden to a reformatory school that specialized in detaining ESPers which could easily escape normal confinement, had ever bothered to try and counter it, via an advanced material which could stop the movement of an object as it traveled through the 11 dimensions and bring it back to the normal 3.

But even this would be useless against Kuroko, though this wasn't known to her. Her power, unique among all of Academy City, was to distort the dimensions and shift something's very existence to a different location, rather than simply moving it. It was an ability that could not be countered. There was no door nor wall nor vault nor lock which could keep Kuroko out. In theory she could break into any building she wanted. If she so had the conviction and didn't care about being seen she could probably rob every bank in Academy City in a single night, limited only by the weight she could teleport with.

Still Kuroko was cautious. This was a mission of stealth after all and the grounds were unfamiliar to her. Luckily she did have some advantages, courtesy of her generous suppliers. The computer which connected to the sunglasses had been uploaded with certain things before it had been given to her. It was the classic black market package that had the locations of Academy City's grid of security cameras and their coverage as well as a list of Judgment agents, criminals, and VIPs (with face recognition software allowing you to identify people in real time) tirelessly compiled by Simurgh Associations.

Most of Academy City was extensively monitored, the richer areas even more so, so it was far more cost efficient to use the surveillance system already in place rather than installing one's own. The Agiko were among those who preferred this method, enabling her, with the help of the map, to sneak close enough to the villa-esque house to scope it out. There was a sick feeling in her gut at the thought of what she was doing, which was technically burglary. But she pushed it down knowing that the object in question was already stolen and then purchased illegally by someone who had committed numerous other crimes. So it balanced out in the end… right?

She surveyed the house through the glasses' various filters, trying to get as complete a picture as possible. The filter which revealed the most was the electric field sensor which revealed the power lines running to the various cameras and other electronic devices spread throughout the yard and house. For a second she knew what it was like to see through her Onee-sama's eyes and the experience was quite interesting, but she had other things to worry about.

Security was tight and locating holes in it was tricky for someone with as little training as Kuroko. Luckily her suits various functions made this much easier. Primarily its camouflage ability which allowed it to project a picture of whatever was behind it using the fiber optic network wired among the carbon nanotube mesh skin. It could even use the same trick at infrared frequencies meaning that infrared and T-ray light couldn't detect it either.

However this feature was not perfect and it took a fraction of a second to project, which would mean she'd be visible for a fraction of a second if she teleported. Moving with the camouflage feature was also buggy and not suggested for high-resolution cameras that could detect such things with ease.

So she manually set the color to umbra and the infrared setting to normal. This way she could blend in with the shadows perfectly, which is what the suit had been designed for anyway. Using this she teleported within range of the house and focused on her next target: an air duct.

She teleported inside the duct with little difficulty. The padding on the armor served to muffle the sound of the already quiet suit as she climbed along the duct, on the lookout for anything suspicious. Her breathing was muted by the self-contained helmet so she traveled along without a peep.

She felt ridiculous for doing such a cliché maneuver as climbing around the air ducts but she knew that it was the best way to remain undetected as she searched for the saferoom where the Horn of Jericho was located. She had gotten the schematics of this building off the internet and uploaded them to her HUD. But she somewhat doubted that the room would be labeled on it, she didn't even think that the room would exist on the blueprints. In fact that was what she was planning on to lead her to it.

Sound was as important to both surveillance and non-detection as sight was. So, in addition to having exceptionally visual manipulation capabilities, the suit also had a very good system for dealing with sound. One of these features was a form of sonar which Kuroko put to use. The metal lining of the ducts easily reflected the high frequency sound and gave a complete map of the duct for as long as it remained straight. She overlaid this map on top of the blueprints of the building and crawled forward until she got to a 4 way intersection. She pinged each of these offshoots and then continued on, following what seemed to be the best path.

The map slowly grew and after a while of this she finally located a duct which lead somewhere not on the blueprints. Kuroko followed this duct and arrived at a grate overlooking a hallway. There were no people and no cameras so she teleported out of the grate into a nearby shadow right next to the door.

She reached to open the door only to have it open up by itself as two people dressed completely in midnight bluish grey outfits. They clutched the suitcase in one hand as they ran with inhuman speed down the corridor. Kuroko barely had time to react before they were gone. She looked in the room to check and saw that the Horn of Jericho was gone from what was it's obvious place in the center of the room while all the other riches of the room had been left untouched.

She stood there for a minute wondering what the hell had happened before realizing that this wasn't the place for that. She teleported back into the duct then from there to outside.

She pondered what she had just seen and reached the conclusion that she had had an odd hallucination. After all, "there is no way that I just witnessed two ninjas running out of that room with the suitcase."

Given that we share sensory information we would probably share hallucinations so I cannot say that you are incorrect. But I would like you to admit the possibility that it actually happened.

"No. there is no way that Ninjas exist. I refuse to believe such a preposterous idea. They are nothing but a myth. You are the logical one, why in the world are you even suggesting that that was anything other than a hallucination."

Your roommate shoots lightning out of her fingers and once defeated a big, blue, fetus-shaped blob of concentrated AIM-fields. I am willing to believe in Ninjas, I am willing to believe in magic, I am willing to believe in anything but luck and God at this point. With the exception of those two things, logic dictates that you should believe in whatever has evidence behind it, even if it is something like magic. Besides, if it was nothing more than a hallucination then why is the tracker you teleported into the suitcase before they disappeared around the corner moving away from the mansion. Whether or not they are ninjas, something has taken the suitcase and is bringing it to another location.

"Yeah, whatever, I'll follow it…"she relented, not willing to lose an argument with Kuro again like she always did.

Good. Let's stay behind them, follow them to wherever they are going, and then retrieve it.

Kuroko nodded as she followed Kuro's orders. The blip moved quickly, as quickly as a car. Though the path it followed seemed to cut through buildings, suggesting that a car wasn't involved at all.

They went quite a distance, out of district seven and into the border between districts two and ten, before stopping at a small bungalow. Kuroko scanned the building once she got there only to reveal that there were no life forms inside. She took this to mean that they had dropped it off here and left.

Since this was the case she teleported inside the building where she saw the suitcase lying on a table in the middle of a shadowy room. She walked up to it, but when she had gotten only half way there she felt a sharp metal blade press against her throat, the one weak point where the armor didn't protect.

"I have to say that I wasn't expecting this," a voice said from the shadows before walking out into one of the few beams of moonlight that penetrated the high windows of the bungalow. His hood was off revealing his face. He was a tall teenager with black hair and a band wrapped around his forehead. In the middle of the band was a piece of metal with an emblem inscribed on it. "Looks like someone was tailing us after all. I told you Saeji, my instincts are never wrong. Feel free to kill her now."

Saeji was just about to comply when suddenly his sword disappeared from his hand. The element of surprise was only effective if used immediately after all and now that Kuroko could respond she wouldn't be beaten so easily. She teleported the offending piece of metal into the floor, then she leaned back to touch her grappler and teleported him just in front of his sword. The sword caught on his clothes, trapping him.

"I suggest you give me the suitcase peacefully," she said. Her suit automatically disguised her voice, shifting it several octaves down and blurring any audial distinctions that could be used to identify her. She noted that she would need to speak carefully to avoid her usual desu no~ verbal tic, but at the moment that didn't matter.

"No. I need it for my own purposes and I went through quite extensive lengths to get it," he said pulling his hood down and disappearing into the shadows, Invisible even to her infrared sensors. "This will make things so much easier. I don't care what the old man says, with this no ESPer can hope to stop me. "Kuroko suddenly felt a sting in her neck, like a mosquito bite. She checked to see a small dart, probably poisoned, lodged in her neck.

"Not even you can stop me." The voice said, much closer to her and on her right. She turned to try and attack but he was quicker and she felt something hard come into contact with her back as he attacked her vulnerable rear.

She spun to attack but her kick hit nothing but air. A second later she was attacked from the side. She didn't bother attacking this time but instead adopted a defensive posture as she analyzed the room, looking for anything. The beams of light which would reveal him were too small to rely on for defense.

He attacked again. The moment Kuroko felt the attack land she moved her body with it, softening the blow. If she continued to do this she would get quicker and quicker and she could probably eventually get an attack on him. But the poison worried her. She didn't know how fast acting it was and if she took a strategy like that then it might be too late by the time she could enact it.

But there was nothing to indicate his presence. Even with the most advanced technology available she couldn't detect him. Freaking ninjas…

That was when a thought struck her. She remembered the previous night when she had had to fight Jango in the middle of his smoke cloud.

She grinned and got out one of the smoke grenades she had found amongst his stuff. The Horn that he had had had been heavier because it had held various types of grenades and other tools that he used to disable ESPers for his bounty hunting business. A couple of them were the same type of smoke grenade that he had used. She pulled the pin dropped this on the ground and soon it detonated, flooding the room with smoke.

The infrared capabilities showed the smoke clearly, but more importantly they showed lack of smoke clearly. As he attacked she looked in the direction of his attack and saw a small outline where the smoke did not penetrate. Now she could fight him.

Still it was a losing battle. He was a far more skilled martial artist than she was and he was still winning. Even worse the smoke was beginning to clear, soon she wouldn't be able to see him at all again. She needed a plan.

Don't forget you are a teleporter...

…

She attacked again, but this time when he blocked she used the contact and teleported him right into the path of her other fist. Then she teleported him again and kicked him. She continued juggling him with her teleportations until she was sure he was unconscious.

When he finally hit the ground she was exhausted from the ordeal. She took several weary steps to the table with the capacity down and grabbed hold of it only to fall unconscious just as she was about to leave.

She awoke several minutes later in a small room quite different from the one she had fallen asleep in. It didn't have any windows. And the walls were stone instead of plaster. Pillars formed two lines down the long room; hanging from each pillar was a banner with the same emblem as the teenage ninja's headband. At one end of the room was a small altar and at the other end was a door. She sat in the middle of the room at a table across from an elderly man with long white hair and a long white beard in a very old fashioned robe.

"You are awake I see," he said sipping some tea, "A bit of a surprise I must say. That etherplant dart was a lethal dose for someone twice your mass.

The etherplant was a plant created by Academy City's genetic engineers which contained a fairly potent poison. In even small doses it could easily kill a man, but in very small, very controlled doses it functioned as a powerful, non-addictive pain medication. Kuroko, who already had a high metabolism for drugs and took higher doses for mass than normal, had been taking this medicine for the past week or so to help control the pain from her wounds from the fight with Ita. During this time she had built up quite a resistance to it. This is what had saved her from the poison tonight.

But Kuroko's head was far too foggy to figure this out so her only reply was, "huh?"

The man gestured to the teacup in front of Kuroko, "drink."

Kuroko realized that she was parched so she took his offer and drank deeply. After a short while she recovered enough to think clearly.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I am Yami Koga, grand-elder of the Koga clan."

Kuroko nodded, "right… right… ninjas… I forgot."

"Unfortunately you didn't and that is a slight problem for us. You see we are necessarily a stealthy organization, existing in the shadows. Due to the actions of one of our former members, you, an outsider, have gained knowledge of our existence and defeated one of our own. This leaves us with a simple choice in accordance with the code. Either the outsider who gains knowledge must join our clan or die."

Kuroko looked at him then shrugged, the medication taking the edge off and making her exceptionally calm. "Hey, I'm convinced this is a hallucination anyway; so you know what? I'll join you. "

"They usually take that route, though often it takes slightly more persuasion," the old man said. In truth he could have killed her as soon as he had found her in the bungalow and no one would have batted an eye. But it was against his code of honour to take the life of one who he was not meant to kill. Plus she had helped him against those two young rebels that had disobeyed his direct orders and risked exposing the clan to everyone.

So he had decided to take another option. He handed her a crest, much like the one that the other ninja had been wearing, in fact it was exactly the one he had been wearing. He had had his removed when he was thrown out of the clan. "That is the symbol of our clan, wear it proudly." The symbol was enchanted with a simple spell that would prevent the first person who put it on from talking about anything that had happened in the hour before it was put on. It was a traditional ninja technique.

Kuroko looked at it. "Huh… thanks," she said as she wrapped it around her shoulder experimentally, then took it off and put it away. "Well I'm going to get going now." She said, waving to the image of an old man that her deranged mind had conjured up as she stood up and left the building.

The room turned out to be a basement in a building that turned out to be a dojo. The Dojo's sign said that it was a school of ninjitsu, which made Kuroko chuckle. "They do like to hide in plain sight. You got to admire that kind of gall," she said appreciatively. Then she teleported away, back to her safehouse. She dropped off her armor and put on her uniform again. From there she went home. The pain medication took the edge off of her bullet wound as well as the bruises she had just received so her teleportation was unhindered by the pain as it had been before. Kuro was yapping in her ear, scolding her for not being careful with the suspicious old man. She didn't really listen though.

It was all a hallucination anyway. Well… more likely a dream… but still. It's not like it affected anything. And now that she was free from the pain that had been bugging her all night, it was nice to have a chance to relax and ease into her growing insanity.

Her mind had been falling apart ever since the incident with the Queen. She had always been mentally damaged but now it was getting worse and worse. The moment she saw the old ninja man she knew that she had gone completely off the deep end.

The thought terrified her and so she tried to drown that terror beneath a mask of carefreeness.

Soon she was back in her dorm room. She deposited the band in her pack then turned to the bed to see her Onee-sama still slumbering peacefully, if a bit restlessly. Kuroko smiled at her cute sleeping face. She carefully climbed into bed beside her and was immediately wrapped in Misaka's restless embrace. She felt as her Onee-sama calmed down, having located something warm to snuggle up to once again.

"At least I have you two to keep me sane," she whispered to Kuro and her Onee-sama. She leaned forward and kissed her Onee-sama lightly, then wrapped her arms around her.

Pain-free, warm, and comfortable in the embrace of the one she loved, Kuroko fell asleep.

Author's Note: Sorry this took so long (though it is bundled with 3 other chapters like I promised, so there's that ((so it's 4 chapters in 12 days which is 1 every 3 days which is actually pretty good considering that it's been 1 every 7 days for a while now))). I didn't get many reviews for my last chapter and so I got struck with a bit of writers block. You, my readers, are my muse and my motivation. I just need to know you're there.

The story of this chapter is a simple one. I found out there were ninjas in the world of TAMNI. The end.

It took a bit of shoehorning and it seems a bit rushed I'm afraid. But I already had a lot of exposition in this chapter and I didn't want to beleaguer it with more. They will come into play later and that is when I will go more in depth.

On a side note TAMNI= TeenAge Mutant Ninja Iguanas.