"Do you really have to do that?" a broad-shouldered mercenary with a fluffy, crescent-shaped, upward-pointing hairdo and a brushy mustache turned to his partner who floated off the ground. He sustained his flight through several jolts of Lightning Release chakra, being more than just a mercenary but a rogue ninja capable of more complex feats of ninjutsu.
"I've got to keep training. I'm going to bump into that little bitch, eventually. Somehow, she's out of the slammer, I've heard," a bald individual in a dark jumpsuit with a skin riddled with scars exclaimed as he intensified the electromagnetic push keeping him afloat.
"Oh, you mean the Konoha's Sorceress kid?" Geppo scratched his head. "It's crazy. She only got a few months or something for beating an old man senseless. Meanwhile, an honest to God man just making end's meat has to spend whole years behind bars… I'm telling you, the whole system is stacked against you."
"It makes me cringe when I say this, but I got off easy. The Middle Ring himself won't see the light of day just for looking out for his hometown. Not sure what the poor guy's up to these days. If I'd be seen around him or the part of his crew, that's still running wild, I'd be shut in a tight cell right beside him." Raitoncide said.
"Eh, you've got a decent gig, all things considered, that's right." Geppo shifted his lower jaw in contemplation. "It pays well and all we've got to do is trade some ryo for some merchandise. Nobody's gonna raise a ruckus, nobody's interested in trouble. Everyone just wants to live happy and fulfilling lives and get fat."
"Sure. But take my advice, no matter how well life treats ya, keep everything at a full arm's distance. It's only because I wriggled out of being associated with the Middle Ring that I don't rot in prison somewhere and can even do some honest work. Though, to be fair, I kind of miss some action. I wouldn't mind frying someone from time to time. If it weren't for Ijiki's side-hustles, I'd probably grow bored out of my mind…" Raitoncide said.
"Forest here, forest there, forest fucking everywhere. Good thing that Hanada's crew at least had the decency to set up shop by a shrine. Good luck finding the X spot otherwise…" Geppo shook his head.
"That's 'cause you're a loser, Geppo. You try too hard and you're, no offense, still kind of shit at this. You hustle and wriggle like a maggot and you get lost or get late. If it weren't for me, someone would've gotten sick of your shit and killed your sorry ass already," Raitoncide smirked, cheeking his partner. Geppo didn't look thrilled to be reduced to dirt this way. The man looked like he was a few degrees short of blowing the lid off its hinges.
"See? Even now you wanna murder me. So you murder me, what then? You think Hanada's men will deal with you when you come all covered in blood and shit? You think you're gonna even find them or manage to kill me and still get to the deal location in time? Nah, you're gonna fuck it up again. You're not fucking it up now though, you know why?" Raitoncide kept spreading his wisdom.
"Why?" Geppo asked.
"'Cause you're learning from me. You're keeping your cool about you. Those are the two things that matter the most in our line of honest work–cool and experience. You gain one through the tough grind, if you can survive it, you apply the other to execute and emphasize the first–that's a good guy everyone wants to work with. You're gonna get that working with me, 'cause I'm experienced and I'm cool…" Raitoncide shrugged, as if it was not a fault of his own that he ended up boasting before his old time acquaintance.
"Yeah, I guess those two things are pretty handy to have…" a husky, cybernetic voice came from the opposite side beyond the shrine in the deeper parts of the forest. Raitoncide and Geppo froze with blank stares as they couldn't pin down the source of this voice, or rather, why the source was sitting on top of a body pile and throwing kunai only to catch and whizz it over his finger.
Seeing how Geppo was a simpleton, it wasn't too difficult to tell exactly what he was thinking. Identifying the exact moment when the shock of seeing something entirely different from what he had expected to see before him change into a call for violence. Following that train of thought further to where the bruising mercenary with heavy, mechanical frames stretching from the sides of his forehead all the way down to his shoulder and forearms and colliding into his gauntlets tested the sophisticated manner of the mystery man's armor.
"Just who the fuck are you?" Raitoncide raised his hand, flicking his fingers into a spark before weaving them together in prime position for forming hand seals.
"I guess that's as far as your cool goes…" the armored head-to-toe man stood up and off of the body pile and flung the knife whizzing past Raitoncide's ear. The crackling electricity of the rogue ninja's aura cradled the knife and electrified it, leaving it to shoot right into a tree bark and disappear inside it, just a few inches short of leaving on the other end.
"You've killed a bunch of Katsuo's men. What the heck, man!? They keep telling new, hopeful mercs not to fuck with the money and you fucked with all the money!" Geppo dragged his well-geared arms over his thick hair with enough roughness to pull a good handful of 'em right out with his crude movements. It was just a stroke of good luck he didn't.
"It's a good thing that I'm neither young and hopeful nor a mercenary then," the man walked out into the shrine's light, revealing the red, black and pink motifs covering his extensive samurai armor and the round, vaguely skull-shaped faceplate with glowing, googly eyes and a bandana hanging at the lower end, disguising the lower section of the man's mouth. Even his neck had a layer of armor, rising in a round collar walling off most of his face from unimpeded view when looking at it from a static angle.
"See, it's situations like these that separate the cool from the rest. Where a little, pathetic shit-stain would pack their shit and run for their pathetic lives, the cool would fry this crayfish inside that fancy armor and sell his charred ass to Hanada Katsuo!" Raitoncide clapped his arms together, drawing his fingers apart with interconnected jolts of lightning through what seemed to be great physical effort.
"Lightning Style: Lightning Pillar!" Raitoncide howled out, the mystery man reached for his belt, pulling out a paper tag and slamming it into the rising pillar of electricity. The tag lit up with blue light upon contact and seemed to soak the Lightning Release ninjutsu technique up like a sponge. The man moved with no fear or hesitation, normally present to someone in the heat of battle.
The killer's speed wasn't blinding, not even to a couple of thugs, but the total assurance in every move only inspired more fear than the man would have, had he truly moved like a lightning bolt himself. Not even when Raitoncide took to one knee and chanted out the name of a follow-up attack, flinging stray jolts of electricity from his intertwined hands at the charging threat did the enemy as much as flinch.
With but mere subtle twitches and leans the enemy either avoided the jolts or let them slam against his large, flat shoulder pieces and bounce off of them while the faceless, almost inhuman in his total lack of emotion assassin closed the distance and wailed his fists with thunderous cracks on Raitoncide's face before pushing the overwhelmed and bleeding man aside with a standing kick.
"You shouldn't have let Raitoncide leave the range!" Geppo threatened the killer as he extended his hands out to try to blast him with concentrated sound waves rushing from the modulator gauntlets he wore but the mystery man slammed the paper tag he used to seal away Raitoncide's technique onto his shoulder plate and leaned for a shoulder charge. Instead, the lightning pillar he sealed away boomed from atop of the surface he stuck the sealing tag on to, overwhelming and drowning Geppo in Lightning Release chakra and leaving him flat on the ground, coughing smoke as his entire body felt too heavy to move.
"Nice tech. Connected to your vocal cords, isn't it? It's a nice source for sound waves but means you have to talk to attack…" the assassin boomed out with a cybernetic, utterly emotionless handful of sentences as he pulled a detached handle of a sword from the back of his pouch. He moved the handle up to the throat of the fallen and dazed mercenary as if threatening to slit his throat with the missing blade of the broken sword.
"What kind of jerkass sword is that!? You'll pay for making fun of us now, you fucking edgelord!" Raitoncide howled out from the bottom of his chest as he channeled surging Lightning Release chakra all over his body until the golden gleam of his Lightning Armor became impossible to tell from the man's actual skin.
Just as the coated with Lightning Release chakra rogue unleashed all of his pent-up chakra in the shape of a concentrated beam, the volume of which drowned out even the name of his technique, the heavily armored killer merely turned his upper body and raised the hilt of the broken sword, breathing life into it as if igniting it. His featureless helmet and mask became clearer in the shade, illuminated by the booming plasma sword in his hand that seemed to possess such extraordinary build up of Lightning Release chakra charge that it cancelled out Raitoncide's technique by absorbing it into it.
"No fucking way… I made that jutsu to kill that cheeky bitch! Not even her Lightning Release should have absorbed a ninjutsu of this high rank…" Raitoncide shook as the will to keep fighting appeared to fade away just at the mere sight of the Sword of the Thunder God in the killer's hands.
"That cheeky bitch? Lightning Release… Wait a sec, you're that grunt who worked for the Diamond Hand, right? I'm assuming you're talking about Nakotsumi Mana, Konoha's Sorceress?" the killer extinguished his majestic sword and pocketed its hilt while he stood up and moved away from Geppo, allowing the pummeled grunt to rise on his bottom at the very least.
"Yeah, no way am I gonna kick the bucket before frying that bitch for ruining my life!" Raitoncide's fists clenched again, the faded will oozed back into his eyes as he glared at the fallen Geppo with a cold stare of a hardened killer. "Sorry, Geppo, I'm not gonna hold back just 'cause you're in range!"
"H-Hey… Dude… I… I didn't attack because he was right next to you… Come on, now!" Geppo pleaded with his partner but the heavily armored killer raised his fist up, demanding his time to speak and interrupting something very merciless.
"It's useless, what you are doing right now won't work on me. I've spent almost fifty years killed ninja, mercenaries and civilians alike and a punk like you doesn't have what it takes to surprise me. You'd just be throwing your comrade away," the knight of the iron face waved his gauntlet while the bandana covering the lower section of his face singed away, ignited by a spark of Raitoncide's previous ace jutsu that it had caught.
"I'll take my chances!" Raitoncide declared, weaving a couple of hand seals before a husky tone interrupted him again.
"Nakotsumi Mana!" was all that the armored butcher had to say to snuff out the wild electricity surging all across Raitoncide's body. "I know that name. It is the last contract of my daughter. The one she didn't fulfill."
"Yeah, tough break, pops. You're still gonna fry, too bad for you and your chick, but at the very least you can go knowing that you'll be meeting that bitch soon enough and can flay her all you want down in Hell!" Raitoncide yelled out before Geppo jumped up on his boots and staggered back.
"Dude, for the love of… Just listen to what he has to say. Look around you, if this guy wanted us dead–we'd be dead right now!" Geppo called out to his hypocritically hot-headed partner.
"He screwed us out of a hustle of our lifetimes. From where I'm standing, he ain't too far above Konoha's Sorceress on my shit list!" Raitoncide oozed wrath toward the iron-faced human-tank.
"I know your feelings, young man. Before the loss of my daughter I too only cared about the money, the experience, the reputation of being the best… I've kept all of those things and yet I've got nothing to show for it now. I'm left with nothing to call my own except for my particular set of skills," the killer spoke, though it was impossible to tell his grief, if there was any, through the voice-box making his voice sound as artificial as possible.
"That's a nice sob story, old man. Yet all I can hear is your problems and nothing to keep me from frying you where you stand!" Raitoncide lashed out.
"I realize that until you feel that grievous sense of loss, you don't much care for this particular kind of pain. Though I might have cost you your money from this black market deal I've interrupted, I can still make up for it by giving you something that you might treasure more in the long run–I can help you ruin the life of the young woman that ruined both of ours." The killer suggested.
"You're talking sweeter, keep going…" the scarred grunt crossed his arms and wiped the blood dripping from his nose and mouth. The electric aura booming from him dissipated into nothingness once more.
"When I heard that my own daughter lost her contract, her life and her head, most importantly, I was ready to throw it all away. I tracked down the bastards that did it and either butcher them or die trying. That body pile back there was just around, they'd have gotten in my way and so they had to die. You'd have joined them too…" the killer said.
"We haven't yet established that, I've spared your life, old man, remember that!" Raitoncide oozed in high sodium content.
"Shit, you were planning to take someone else on too?" Geppo shook his head before a hefty sigh. "You mean Konoha got a wind of this? The deal's over?"
"Not Konoha, the Allied Ninja. The party of Allied Ninja is coming here to claim whatever merchandise you were meant to purchase here. I had little intel on their abilities and, at that time, I didn't much care. All I wanted was a blaze of bloody glory. Given that your own grievance with this Nakotsumi Mana is much more… Personal. I will leave her friends to you, however." The killer turned and pointed to Raitoncide while raising his other gauntlet to point at Geppo simultaneously.
"That so? Why the fuck should I give a shit about anybody other than Mana herself?" Raitoncide raised the ridge that he once had eyebrows on.
"Because killing is something I offer to contracts. It's quick, it's never personal, and your issues are nothing if not. As someone who has been through that type of pain before, trust me, hurt enough people she cares about, get really creative about it, and she'll cry tears of blood and tear her own hair out and strangle herself with it," the cybernetically voiced killed said.
"This smells like a set-up…" Raitoncide growled.
"If I let you go at them like this, it would be. If they've managed to kill my daughter, you'd last against them exactly as long as they'd let you breathe for. I've gotten a glimpse of your abilities, I can offer a few insights to amp you up just enough to stand a chance though…" the armored mystery man left the offer hang in the air.
"Even stronger? I've trained for entire years to step up my Lightning Release game to this level, and you're telling me that you can just give me something to amp me up to your level before those jerkoffs find us here?" Raitoncide looked hesitant to buy into what the armored killer was selling despite the man letting them live this long where he spared no such expense with the others.
"No, not my level. To get to where I am, mere strength isn't enough. You need to be cool and experienced to stand next to me," the armored enigma replied. He pulled out a sealing tag and attached it to a kunai before flinging it in a round arc for Raitoncide to catch. The hungry for vengeance rogue caught it right off the air and looked at the sealing tag. Even a simpleton such as him had the brainpower to comprehend the hieroglyphs he was staring at.
"This is…" he muttered.
"Stick this sealing tag to a tenketsu point. Unseal it, it will make your lightning change color," the man ordered.
"Okay, what about me?" Geppo waved his arms around. "I don't much care about Konoha's Sorceress or her crew, but you've messed my gear up too. After robbing us of my gig, you owe me something too, old man!"
"I suppose so…" the killer reached down behind his collar and pulled out a mechanical, cube-shaped object and flung it over to Geppo. "Use this. It's a voice-box meant to augment and change your voice. If your sound waves depend on your voice, may as well amp it up."
"Won't this make you feel sour, old man? I will kill that self-righteous bitch myself, you know. Can you live with yourself knowing that?" Raitoncide smirked in the face of the emotionless manslayer before him.
"I don't share your need to be the one to cause that girl misery. I suppose, in a way, my grievance with her still isn't personal. Still, justice must be done, her friends and her must die. That's just the cosmic sense of justice governing us, no matter how we feel about it. Whether I am the one to kill her or someone else is, I'm fine with it either way." The killer shrugged and turned to walk away.
"Hey, old man, where did you get a fancy sword like that?" Raitoncide yelled out to the killer as he walked away. The armored enigma stopped only to turn back halfway to the unstable grunt.
"A Thunder God…" the killer muttered before turning away and disappearing into the shade of the endless Land of Fire woods.