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A WONDERFUL shout out to champblaze, and everyone still reading this story. I appreciate you all so much :)
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CHAPTER 7
That night, Naruto released a sigh that had been building up in his chest and looked up at the starry sky.
The roof of his apartment was vacant, except for the boy and three of his puppets—a butler puppet and two maid puppets—who wordlessly waited for the boy to decide on his next steps. The rooftop's door was locked and blocked from opening by a metal pipe.
Their eyes tracked the child as he paced to the edge of the building, setting his right foot on the edge and peering over, squinting his eyes and looking out to the illuminated village; the constant activity of the village wasn't because it had a thriving market, but because the culture of the village was to spend any and every possible hour working since the deplorable state of the economy and standard of living demanded a steady stream of income. When most of the world had moved to electricity to power homes and streetlights, Iwa was still struggling to move away from gas lamp streetlights and candles. Only a handful of upper-middle class and upper-class could afford to have inconsistent, and unsteady electricity in their houses and apartments.
Naruto shook his head.
This wasn't the time for that.
He spotted a floodlit construction project in the distance, recalling that it was a three-storey brick and stone building being built for a wealthy merchant from Mountain Country. It was a fanciful eyesore that was designed with a water fountain as a roundabout inside the compound, imported soil at the front yard that had come from Fire Country and had flower seedlings sprouting from it, and an ironically yellow-bricked road that led to the incomplete metal gate.
Naruto had overheard from some adults that the Tsuchikage was wildly against the construction of that monstrosity, as it was against the minimalist aesthetic of Iwagakure and it would also portray a false sense of economic wealth when the village had historically tried to use their poverty to discourage ransom-driven kidnappings and other crimes.
Oonoki only agreed to the construction after generous donations arrived at the village's General Hospital.
A large horse-drawn cart of soil trooped through the gate. Naruto fixed his eyes on it, following its steady progress around the inactive water fountain roundabout and treading to the backyard, where a deep hole etched into the hard, rocky ground was being gradually filled with soil.
Too perfect, Naruto thought with a shrug. He turned to his puppets and said to them, "I'll do this myself. Make sure you get all the blood stains out of my clothes; one hundred percent cotton isn't cheap."
The mouthless puppets bowed stiffly. One went to remove the metal pipe obstructing the rooftop door, opening it for the others to march through before closing it after himself.
When they were gone, Naruto looked down at the trash bag close to the edge of the building, and his lips screwed down into a disappointed frown. The two chopped remains inside the black bag ebbed an aura of death.
"You should have run."
The boy carefully picked the bag up with both hands; the sinews of metal threads that made up most of the muscles in his arms strained under the heavy weight, with the bottom of the bag sloshing a little. Their blood had been drained and disposed of, but the last few drops that remained collected inside the bag added a bit to the weight.
Unlike Usagin, their deaths had been quick and painless.
Naruto channelled the chakra to his arms, making sure to keep the chakra away from attaching to the bag. His muscles tensed and he carefully manoeuvred the bag over his shoulder, taking a firm step onto the edge of the building.
He hopped off and landed heavily on the roof of a neighbouring apartment building, using the heaviness of the bag to dip into a low run, speeding across the rooftop and bounding off onto another apartment building, this one being a bit smaller than the first two. He skidded to slow down and deftly swung down the emergency fire escape, releasing one hand from holding the bag to grip the metal railings to catch himself before he fell.
He breathed out to calm himself.
The lights of the village unintentionally cast thick shadows over some areas, one such area being the fire escape and alley between the apartment and an old bakery. The boy let go of the railing and fell, quickly gripping the next railing before his fall could become faster, letting go again and catching the railing again, repeating until he landed on a dumpster with a resounding crash.
The boy hissed out a curse and sucked in a large breath, diving into the dumpster and closing the cover after himself, just in time for three Iwa ninjas to spring down from the other side of the alley.
"The hell was that?" one of them asked, looking around the dark alley with visible confusion.
Another looked behind the dumpster, covering her nose with a handkerchief and retreating a moment later with a wave of her other hand in the direction of the dumpster. "Cat." She gagged. "She's giving birth."
The third Iwa ninja, the only jounin among them, smirked with a scoff, perching his hands on his waist. "Not a cat person?"
"They're evil. Every single one of them," she spat unironically, making the jounin and the other chunin chuckle humorously at her irritation.
The first speaker, the other chunin, shook his head and turned to leave the alley. "I'll notify Animal Control."
The jounin didn't move, looking intently at the dumpster. "And send that poor creature to that blasted building to get neutered?" he shook his head. "That place is even more lawless than here."
"Take her, then." The lady suggested gratingly, spitting again to rid her mouth of the foul smell of feral cat-birth.
"My wife says she'll divorce me if I bring in another stray," the jounin answered with wilted shoulders, nearly pouting. He turned to the other chunin with hopeful eyes. "What if—?"
"No." the other chunin shot him down with a blank expression. "Never gonna happen."
The female chunin swore before her team's captain could turn to her. "Don't even think about asking me." She grabbed the more experienced man by his arm and forcefully dragged him out of the alley, shoving him to climb back up the wall and giving him no room to protest. "Sento's calling Animal Control. We're done here."
The jounin pouted fully, sluggishly simpering up the wall with chakra attached to his feet. His subordinates followed with blatant rolls of their eyes until they pulled themselves over the edge of the bakery roof and wandered elsewhere to patrol.
A minute later, Naruto threw the dumpster lid open and scrambled out, panting for dear life and without the trash bag.
His lungs allowed him to hold his breath for a shockingly long time, but that didn't mean he enjoyed sitting inside a filthy, slimy, smelly dumpster where rats and cockroaches tested his self-restraint.
The boy debated leaving the trash bag inside the dumpster and calling it a night.
His clothes were beyond redemption. One hundred percent cotton could be cleaned of blood, but the memory of stewing inside a dumpster was something that would never leave the boy. He was only glad that the simple blue shirt, black shorts, and black sandals he wore weren't his preferred style of clothes to wear to school.
He couldn't convince himself to be so sloppy.
Naruto wiped down his face from the sweat and steam of the dumpster and gathered up his wits. Then, he proceeded calmly to the dumpster and jumped back inside, diving out a split second later with the trash bag. He carefully peered out of the alley and watched the gas lamp streetlights shine light up and down the street. There was not much foot traffic at that hour, besides medics leaving the hospital after their shift, drunks bumbling out of bars, and artisans like stone masons, carpenters, cobblers, and tailors who had closed their shops for the day and were heading home.
It was eleven in the night; whichever customers they hoped to grace their shop at that late hour weren't coming.
Thankfully, there weren't any carts on the street. And fortunately, again, Naruto didn't live near the redlight district, where nobody slept.
The boy looked up to the rooftops and corners, searching for patrolling ninjas. He stepped back when one flew from one building to another across the street, racing past in pursuit of something only he could see.
Naruto blazed across the street and immediately clambered up the wall of a bar, tucking low as he swept onto the roof and barrelling hastily to the other side, skipping onto a short residential house made from curved stones. Naruto shot off it and clasped a first-storey window of an apartment building. His muscles thrummed and his chakra fired into his arms for the boy to yank himself up onto the windowsill with one arm; he took a second to make sure that the resident of the room was sleeping, and the school-age boy was. Naruto proceeded by stepping onto the wall and shooting up, zigzagging to remain partly obscured from the streetlights and bounding onto the rooftop a minute later.
The boy wheezed and gently eased the trash bag off his shoulder, looking back at his progress and seeing his tall apartment building a bit in the distance.
Good.
Naruto rolled his shoulders and neck, and stretched his arms and legs, squaring his shoulders for the second leg of his journey. After a five-minute break of regaining blood flow to his fingers and arms, Naruto picked up the trash bag and continued, though not before a final remark in the secrecy of his mind.
Hiding bodies is so tedious.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"Back it up!" the foreman yelled, waving a pair of yellow, glowing sticks toward her while carefully stepping back close to the pit. The large cart that had been drawn by two horses was now detached from the horses and now being pulled back by six men, three on both sides. The massive backyard of the mansion had a chasm of a rectangular hole.
Elsewhere on the construction site, the din of hammers beating down on chunks of rock and the deafening holler of saws grinding away at wood polluted the air.
The morning and afternoon rotation of construction workers had long since departed, with only those who wanted to work for longer—to the detriment of their health—left to work alongside the evening and night rotation of workers. It would explain the tireless vigour at which the people worked; the merchant had spared no expenses, and as such wanted the mansion done within the next two months.
"Stop! That's close enough!" the cart came to a hard halt a few paces from the chasm and the heavyset men dragging it heaved, catching their breaths.
The foreman, a stocky woman with jade eyes and long, dusky orange hair tied into a messy bun, rolled up the long sleeves of her red chequered shirt and hiked up her khaki pants, looking back a little and humming in thought as she scuffed her boots on the hard ground before the large, rectangular hole; it was about a hundred yards deep and spanned the entire length of the mansion's wide backyard.
The foreman checked her watch.
One of the muscular men came up to the foreman; his thin white shirt was stained with black soil, and so were his khaki overalls and thick working gloves. He gingerly pulled off his gloves ran his fingers through his short, brown hair and inhaled deeply, exhaling from his mouth and whistling at how deep the pit was. He stank of sweat and cigarettes.
"Whatcha thinking, boss?" he asked. "Is boss man giving you trouble?"
"Bah." The foreman scoffed at the overly familiar name for the merchant who had hired their construction company. "Not him. The plumbers are supposed to be done piping up the building weeks ago." She set her fists on her hips and looked at him. "The electricians are complaining that the plumbers are getting in the way."
The worker chortled deeply. "Sack 'em and hire better plumbers. Easy peasy."
The foreman rubbed her nose, sniffing. "Not that easy." She motioned for him to back away and she did so as well, discarding the issue for the moment to better handle the matter at hand. An assistant handed her a shovel, gripping one himself, and the two climbed onto the cart, standing on the soil. "Let's move it in!"
More workers climbed onto the soil with shovels, four of them, and they began to rigorously scoop soil from the cart and toss it into the pit.
Amid the noise of the construction process, they didn't notice a shadow escaping from the other side of the pit, scaling the fence, and vanishing into the night.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
The next day, during Class 1-F's first morning period, the students were assembled in their usually assigned training ground—the one they used the other day to learn hand seals with Sugita-sensei—and were promptly arranged into neat rows. Their arms were horizontally raised on their sides and the class shuffled, giving themselves room so that only the very tips of their fingers touched their neighbours.
Each of the ninety-nine students got a large space for themselves, letting their arms fall to their sides and excitedly chattering at what they were going to do that morning.
Their teacher, a greying man with a long white beard that reached his navel, a handlebar moustache and slicked-back white hair, snapped his fingers and hissed through his smoke-stained teeth. The lines of age were deeply etched on his lean face and his almost prominent hunch indicated his weariness for the simple act of standing up.
He adjusted his small, circular glasses and set his hands behind his back, trying to stand as upright as his hunched back could permit; his chunin vest was faded from time and frequent drycleaning, and his long-sleeved black shirt and ninja pants were the only things that looked fairly new, while his brown shinobi sandals were heavily worn down at the soles.
He looked like a haggard old man.
No student dared to comment.
The teacher wrinkled his lips and barked, "First stance!"
A wave of uncoordinated children snapped to attention, some fumbling and toppling over, while those that barely remembered the first stance of their Academy's fighting style messily flattened their feet to the ground, shuffling their left legs back and their right slightly bent at the ready. Their arms and hands were closed into fists, with their dominant hands held out straight and their other hand close to their chins.
"Hold!" the taijutsu teacher yelled, glaring disdainfully at the fallen students as they scrambled back to their feet and fixed themselves into proper position, twitchingly looking at their classmates to see if their stances were correct. "I said, hold!"
The training ground froze at his bellow, and the students, whichever positions they were in, didn't move.
From inside his chunin vest, the man pulled out a thick ruler. He casually marched forward with his hands at his back and the ruler gripped in his right hand.
Beads of sweat began rolling down the students' faces, swallowing thickly as their teacher slowly, and carefully, walked through their ranks. They didn't move to look back, only straining their eyes to look to the side and battling the urge to relax their shuddering arms.
"I believe we tirelessly revised this position in class last week," the man said in a smooth voice, loud and clear. He stopped between two students, a girl and a boy, and the two immediately began to shake. "I also showed you all, and carefully described, the first stance through to the second stance yesterday." He tapped his chin with his ruler, faux thinking. "If I'm not mistaken, I instructed this class to practice these stances at home. Did I not?"
No one answered, and the man whipped around, striking the girl in her lower back with the ruler and bellowing with a scathing look in his eyes.
"Did I not?!"
The girl fell with a cry, clutching her lower back and weeping. Her face was contorted in pain and hot tears trickled from her eyes. "Yes, sensei!"
"I'm talking to all of you!" the man shouted, irate. Winding around and whacking the boy at the top of his upper back, dropping the child. "All of you, answer me!"
The boy rolled on the hard ground, his chest jutting out and his fingers bent back at the biting pain that stung his back, wheezing through grit teeth and visibly trying not to cry. No student moved, but a chorus went around the training ground. "Yes, sensei!"
"If you want to get yourselves killed in the field, that's your business," the old teacher barked savagely, glaring at the boy who shakily got back to his feet. "But in my class, you will excel. Do I make myself clear?!"
"Yes, sensei!" the class shouted in response.
The man paused for a moment, skimming his eyes over the crowd of children, searching for someone, until his dark stare landed on a boy wearing a ballcap, standing in an impeccable first stance; his back was upright, his dominant right hand was straight, his less dominant left hand was neatly bent to guard his chin, and his legs were set firmly on the ground. His face though was threatening to break into a frown.
"Shinjiro! At ease!"
The boy jolted, and did as he was commanded, bringing his arms down and snapping his feet together. Then he shifted his legs two feet apart and tucked his hands behind his back, always keeping his back straight.
Shinjiro squared his shoulders and shouted. "Yes, sensei!"
"Sugita-sensei tells me that you're an exceptional student. He won't shut up about it." The old teacher hummed, turning away from the boy and casually walking through the ranks of shaking students. Their arms were beginning to get sore and their backs trembled, praying for rest. "Iwa's very own genius. Is that true?"
There was a delay, and the old teacher stopped, slowly turning around to see that the boy's eyes weren't following him; rather, he was looking straight ahead at nothing in particular, his face roiled with uncertainty at how to answer, until he said with a joking smirk and turned his head to look at his strict teacher, "I've got my moments, sensei."
"Proceed to the front of the class." The teacher didn't respond to Shinjiro's light-hearted answer, fully facing the front as his cheeky student marched from the fourth row to the front of the class and wound around to face his classmates. The man squinted his eyes, adjusting his glasses and scrutinising the boy. "First stance."
Shinjiro stamped his right foot on the ground and rigidly moved himself into the fighting style's opening stance.
"Hm." The man rolled his tongue in his mouth, bobbing his head. His mind wasn't on the faint muttering of chattering washing through the children of Class 1-F. "Second stance."
Shinjiro brought both of his fists to guard his chin, shifting his feet back together and lifting his left foot to about the height of his right knee as if to perform a crane kick; this was a deceptive defensive stance, goading the opponent into thinking that standing on one leg would somehow slow down the user's reaction, tempting them to close the distance for the user to summarily block and counter.
The boy's balance was faultless.
The Academy's Earthflow fighting style wasn't anything special; it was simply a generalised set of movements that had been gathered from other fighting styles in Iwa and around the world. Like Konoha's Academy fighting style, or the basic fighting style of any ninja school on their continent, it was only an introductory fighting style for children that was simple enough to learn and was a gateway to learn other fighting styles; it taught them adaptability to the situation and versatility.
It wasn't particularly powerful; the striking depended on how strong the user was, and the defence was deplorable and hinged on the user's ability to endure blows until they saw an opportunity to counterattack.
If not for the teacher's strictness, the students wouldn't have taken it seriously.
Looking at the boy, his face conveyed seriousness, focused on the task at hand. Then his eyes flicked to a student at the front of the row of children and caught that person's flabbergasted expression, which steadily shifted to a faint smirk. Kurotsuchi pursed her lips, trying not to smile and failing miserably, and a look of satisfaction set on Shinjiro's calm face.
"Good." The teacher coughed into his fist, and Kurotsuchi's smile disappeared. Shinjiro looked up to his teacher as the man approached, stopping in the third row and saying, "Everyone, at ease!"
As one, the students wilted and relaxed their stances. Some collapsed to the ground, rubbing their sore arms and back, wincing at the strain in their muscles.
"Do you have any ninja in your family, Shinjiro?" the man asked aloud, approaching till he was at the first row. His hunch loomed over the boy, and the seven-year-old looked up at him with a cool blue stare.
"No, sensei."
"Do you have any friends that are ninjas?"
"No, sensei."
The teacher's brow creased and he hummed reflectively. "Are you originally from Iwa?"
"No, sensei. My parents adopted me from Wave Country."
Wave Country's fall into anarchy since the Gato Company forcefully took control of the country was globally known. There was still a mass emigration of refugees fleeing the country. The record of citizens had burned down with the country's historical library.
The teacher walked a few steps to the right, muttering something to himself.
Then he said, "Truly tragic."
Shinjiro's calm expression cracked with an invisible smirk before it hastily mended before anyone could notice. Kurotsuchi saw, though; no matter how fast Shinjiro smothered his true emotions, the girl always caught it, one way or the other. No other person was able to do this.
"Get back to your position," the teacher ordered, and Shinjiro hurried back to his spot, turning and standing at ease.
Before he could order the class to get into the first stance, Kurotsuchi's father, Kitsuchi, flickered to the old teacher's side and whispered something into his ear. The old man's face became pale and he muttered something quietly back to the jounin, frowning at Kitsuchi's response.
The jounin's face was grim and his whispered instructions were firm. "We want all students accounted for. The village is on red alert."
"…Fine." The teacher grunted. He addressed the class, standing as upright as his hunch allowed. "Everyone, go straight back to your class. Lessons will be indoors till further notice."
As if on cue, about twenty Iwa jounin appeared around the rank of anxiously murmuring children, who jerked away in surprise at the seriousness the older ninjas were showing.
"Quickly now."
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
"Lord Tsuchikage," Sugita-sensei saluted, stepping aside when his short Kage barrelled past him and stormed up the final flight of stairs to the fifth floor. "Sir—"
Oonoki grunted and walked under the police tape, barely dipping his head to skim beneath it and stopping abruptly as soon as he saw the restroom door. He wrinkled his mouth and frowned, looking over his shoulder at Sugita and another jounin. "Is this what all the fuss has been about?"
A small team of chunin trackers were outside a fairly normal restroom, dusting the walls and floor for prints. They promptly stopped what they were doing and snapped into crisp salutes, standing at attention.
The door itself didn't look out of place; one of the hinges looked a bit askew and the door was fading, but this was ignorable and could be chalked up to age.
"We're pulling focus from finding those two children to playing detective games outside of a door?" the Tsuchikage asked with a scornful growl.
Kidnappings weren't uncommon in Iwa, though not for the sake of ransoms or any kind of blackmail, since it was evident that Iwa didn't have any money to pay off any kidnappers, and their foremost policy was to never negotiate with kidnappers in the first place.
Never.
Kidnappers from Iwa or any criminal entity that crept into the village from outside stole children and adults to sell them off, either to slavery or for their organs to be harvested. Since the time of the Third Tsuchikage came into office many decades ago, and it was clear that not a single private or public penny would be sent over to pay off anyone's ransom and that Iwa's trackers were dispatched to find the criminals, kidnappers turned to the black market to recoup their losses.
The strange thing about the children disappearing was that the trackers had said that they were taken while they were on school grounds, and this alone was extremely unusual.
For all of Iwa's faults when it came to funding their education, they took the security of the school seriously.
This was a drastic understatement.
Oonoki's hidden village wouldn't have as many active shinobi in its ranks if anyone could just snatch one of their own from the safety of the school. Iwa's Academy security had a one hundred percent success rate for over one hundred years, so much so that the security personnel on the campus were often exported to aid trackers to apprehend missing ninjas.
"All of you, get back to work," the Tsuchikage barked and made to whip around to fly out of the window, but Kitsuchi climbed through the window and dashed to the restroom door, throwing it open.
This stopped the Tsuchikage in his tracks.
For when the restroom door looked fairly average, the interior was the exact opposite.
The stalls were smashed and collapsed into each other, and the sinks were broken, leaking water and spilling onto the cracked tiles on the ground. There was a distinct patch of broken tiles in the vague shape of a body on the far side of the restroom across from the door, stained with blood and bearing a nightmarish slash cutting down from the wall to the floor. This slash was three times larger than an adult's and the claw marks ran five inches deep into the wall.
Pieces of greyish brain matter stained the wall of that patch of broken tiles, hardened like cement, and water and blood soaked into the fissures of the patch of broken tiles.
Oonoki fumbled for the doorframe, keeping himself upright at the horrific sight. His face was pale and he was silent.
Kitsuchi lingered behind his father. "There weren't any footprints. No handprints. No chakra prints. No hair follicles and no loose clothing fibres. There's nothing at all." The man shrugged, and the Tsuchikage still faced the crime scene. A grim frown gradually set on his pallid face. "The blood came back positive for one of the students," he motioned to the destroyed and bloodied restroom, "Usagi Okaze. First Year." The man almost didn't want to continue, but he pushed through, saying, "His parents reported that he didn't come home from school yesterday."
"The…thing that did this," Oonoki muttered, about to step inside but thinking better of it. Wind gently gathered under his feet and robes, slowly lifting him and letting him hover inside the restroom. He studied the crime scene. "Does it have anything to do with those missing children?"
"The trackers suspect so."
Oonoki closed his eyes reflectively, humming.
"They think some sort of…of…demon is loose in the village."
It wasn't outside of the realm of possibilities in their world, and Oonoki considered it; the transformation technique was something that any common genin could perform.
That still didn't explain the disappearing act or the sheer brutality of this scene. Transforming into large animals, or any animals at all, came with plenty of drawbacks; that was why shinobi with plenty of chakra to spare didn't try such complex transformations.
"Keep it out of the news; we can't afford the village panicking," the Tsuchikage ordered, levitating out of the restroom and softly touching down to the ground. "Tell the trackers to leave the demon for now. Focus on retracing this poor boy's last few days." Oonoki cast a final look at the peculiar patch of smashed tiles, the sopping blood mixing in the water, and the brain matter. "Report anything suspicious."
He had a hunch.
Authors note
That's that about that.
I'll see you when I see you :)
Foy.