The blonde robot buried its head into its work. A swing of the axe there. A trap here. Checking the bushes for berries that were not there.
Some may have gotten caught in the monotony of work, but not it. Never it. It threw its whole being into the work. Dilligent. Dutiful. Laser focused. It was hypnotic. If one could see the action they would have known it was a robot. For it was as focused as one.
And it stuck out in nature just as badly.
Its movements were completely quiet, in contrast to the loud cacaphony of the forest surrounding him. It didn't make a single noise, not from its mouth to speak or from when its feet touched the ground. It was as if it was a ghost. It seemed as though its legs did not move. It simply glided over the landscape, easily grabbing lumber and dragging it back to a small cottage surrounded by trees. Its swelling muscles didn't seem to struggle with the weight.
The blonde robot reached the nearby river, beginning to bathe itself after a long days work. The sun glistened off of its skin. It was there that the robot became a grizzly sight. A war torn automaton. Criss-crossing scars made their way down its back, with a massive vertical slash going down its chest from its collarbone all the way to its left hip. If one could peer into its violet eyes they would have questioned how it got the scars if they weren't forced to flee from the absence of anything in them. No, blonde hair and violet eyes the would normally scream warmth instead seemed like black holes that took everything in and let nothing out. The frigid emptiness could have frozen someone dead on the spot. It was not a dull coldness. It was sharp. There was life in the eyes, but not in any way one would recognize it. They were primal.
They eyes of an animal that went through the motion of life with one purpose.
Who knew how long the blight had been there. Staining nature with its unnatural frame. It did not belong here. It belonged...somewhere, but certainly not here. The battlefield if the scars were any indication.
And thus the routine of the robot was formed. It did this throughout the years. Tredging through the sweltering heat. The gentle cold. The storms of fall and spring. Summer, winter, spring, fall. The seasons came and the seasons went. Its routine was the only constant. After the first year all wildlife had disappeared. Either hunted or ran away at the dawn of the new apex predator.
By the second year the fruits and vegetables disappeared as well. The fruit bushes that were plucked clean refused to grow. The soil did not give growth to any edible plants.
By the third it was clear the forest itself was trying to wage war on the blight. To evict its presence.
It gave up.
It was a blight. That much was clear. Empty traps scattered the area, bushes void of any sign of flowering. A blight that had defeated nature. How it had managed to survive this long made no sense.
How was the robot able to survive when nature itself rejected its very existence?
The robot often pondered that itself.
This was not how the robot had initially viewed its life going. Who would? It was completely isolated. What type of life was that? A life of loneliness?
The one the robot wanted.
It was a life it had lived for three years, undisturbed. Simply appearing one day and placing roots. Claiming sovereignty over the forest. A calm life. A peaceful life, where it wasn't assaulted by the outside world. A good life. A quiet life. A life it would have lived forever if it had the choice.
It did not.
The second the blonde robot stepped out of the water it's violet eyes burned with something akin to rage. The closest it could get to it. The emotion lacked any meaning when looking into those eyes. No, it was...annoyance maybe? Frustration? Distaste? No. That wasn't it either.
The robot's eyes leered into the nearby forest shrouded in darkness. It had bathed for a while. The sun was down. The moon's rays could not illuminate the forest, for the clouds overhead blotted out the forest in an almost eerie darkness. One mothers would tell unruly children monsters lived in to dissuade them from going out of sight. Many a thing that went bump in the night could live in that darkness.
The robot was that bump in the night.
"Come out. I won't tell you again."
No movement. The blonde walked away towards its small cottage. The shadows of the forest flickered, before cold steel met flesh and red squirted into the air like a rivlet, staining the pristine water the blonde had just bathed in.
The masked man fell to the ground with a crunch, his own kunai in his throat. The blonde continued to walk forwards, as if unaware of the murder it had just performed. Dozens more shadows flickered forwards, however the blonde easily avoided the attacks. A blade descended towards its right collarbone, but it easily snapped it with its bare hands, something dull flickering in its eyes. Its hands moved, weaving as if in a dance before three of the shadows were dead at its feet, revealing them to be nothing more than masked men.
The other shadows paused, staring at the robot before them. The robot eyed them.
"I don't know who you're working for, but go tell them to fuck off. I'm not interested in being a puppet to these stupid little wars."
"By order of the Godaime Hokage you are ordered to return to Konohagakure."
"Godaime," the robot muttered. "So the old man died huh? Who took his place?"
The shadows floated around the robot in a circle. It was coordinated, as if a dance.
"Return peacefully and we will ignore the deaths you have caused today."
"No seriously, who the hell could have possibly replaced the old man? He's dead. Princess is in a psych-ward. Neither the scarecrow nor the green monstronsity are capable of leading. One of the crimson eyed fuckers?"
A shadow flickered towards the robot only for it to easily deflect the tanto and snap a kick into it's knee. The shadow didn't have time to scream as the robot snatched the tanto and smashed it into it's throat, revealing another masked man that crumbled to the ground.
"This is your last warning. Tell me who the Godaime is. I'm actually curious here. I don't get much in the way of world news."
The shadows moved.
The door to the cottage opened, before it closed, locking a litany of dead masked men outside. The robot sat on the bed, reading over a scroll that was on one of the shadows. The robot read it aloud, a frown forming on its face. Three simple words adorned the parchment.
"Retrieve the Kyuubi."
The blonde robot stared up at the ceiling, throwing the parchment to the side. For the first time in three years something akin to emotion adorned its face. Breaking the metal. Perhaps it wasn't a robot after all. No, instead a man, a tired and weary man stared up at the ceiling. Memories flooded his mind. Happy ones. But sad ones as well. Almost entirely sad ones.
Two corpses stuck out. A giant of a man. A demure, but toned woman.
Awful memories. Ones he had tried to forget. The reason he had abandoned his service in the first place. He simply couldn't anymore. Who could? No one could, except monsters. That was what described those cesspools. Places filled with monsters.
And those monsters wanted him to be their monster. Their demon that went bump in the night. The thing that made the monsters of the world run with piss rolling down their legs. One of the nine devils. The curse he was born with. He thought he had avoided that fate after the blessing was given. He supposed that was naive of him. He was smarter than that to believe he would be free of that life.
But he had wanted to.
But that was not a tie one could cut off without death. For a second, it seemed like a nice idea. Peaceful. Freeing.
And like he had many thousand times he rejected the notion. The man and woman would not have wanted that for him. He had disappointed them enough. He couldn't face them in the afterlife with another mistake on his name. How could he?
The blonde man stared at the parchment rolled onto the floor. He could leave now. He doubted the Godaime, whoever they were, would be foolhardy enough to believe he would simply quietly go along. Even more so, he doubted that they believed a measly group of ANBU could handle him as well. They wouldn't give him a long time before the second, much more elite group of shinobi came to bring him back. He could leave now. Not give them anything to track him with. Even the dog fuckers couldn't track him. Honestly, it made him question how he had been found at all.
Must have been the Nara's. They were smart enough to figure it out. Give them the utility of the dog lovers and Hyuga's and well, that was a match made specifically designed to find him. Although, perhaps it was one of the Hunters of the Water. He didn't know much about them, but their skills at tracking their prey were well-known. Just because the shadows said they were from Konoha didn't mean they were. He supposed any of the other five could have come for him. Lightning. Rain. Water. Earth. Sand. They were all fully capable of finding him if they truly put their heart into it.
Well maybe not Rain.
But still, why now? It had been three years in his peace. The other villages would have tried to find him the second he disappeared. But Fire? No, three years would make sense if there was a new Hokage. There was the chance that something had changed. Something the other villages had done. Something that required his presence. If his guess was right, the devils were now out and about and Fire wanted theirs. It was the only thing that would make the change make sense. How could they fight devils without the most powerful one?
He supposed it didn't really matter what their reasons were. Whether Fire wanted their devil back, whether the small chance another village was searching for him under Fire's guise, or even whether this was a stray group of idiotic hunters looking to make a name for themselves and cash in on the biggest bounty in the entire Bingo Book that even the Huntsman thought was too much work to try and cash. They had found him.
And if they found him now that meant that anyone could find him. Which meant running would really only be delaying the inevitable. All he could do now was send a message.
And that meant his peace, how sweet and soft it was, had been broken. It was a temporary peace, and deep down perhaps part of him always knew it would be. But he cherished it almost as much as the dead. His peace would end. He was forced back into the world. Even if he didn't want to be. The very fact that he was found cemented that fact in something deeper than stone. If Konoha found him, it wouldn't be long before any of the other five great villages came looking for him.
He was out of retirement he supposed.
"Fuck."