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Chapter 121 - Arc 8 - Forest of Quest: Looking in the Mirror
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 02:30:25 +0000 UTCI hope everyone enjoyed Christmas and such. I had a pretty rejuvenating break. I didn't get any planning done sadly, but I still really needed it. I think a break every few months is to be expected, it's good for the story.
Back with a 4K chapter, I'm happy.
A lot of this chapter is sorta themed around something very specific that might be heavy handed, but I like it so whatever.
Enjoy! It's good to be back! Thank you for your continued support.
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[2/4 KSH bribed teams dealt with]
What’s going on there? Sakura wonders as she sees the prompt. Someone else is dealing with their targets. Did Ino get a similar quest?
Hunting the main quest targets down is easy with a Naruto clone here to point them in the right direction. The fact that they’re riding a giant cat that’s somehow better at navigating the terrain than they ever could be is also very awesome and efficient and makes Sakura smile deeply. She’s doing that a lot more recently, maybe soon it won’t feel weird. Sakura vows to never be without a mount again when traveling any distance worth noting, it’s just so much better than walking. She’ll have to train even harder with Gai and Lee to make up for the loss in cardio but it’s absolutely worth it. Sure she thought the dog was great, but the way this kitty steps around trees as naturally as she breathes shows just how much potential as mounts her undead have. She doesn’t need to train them. They seem to retain the knowledge of the terrain and how to move even after death which is great confirmation that their memories are at least partially intact. Now whether they can learn new terrain is another question she’ll have to test sometime.
Though, as awesome as this is, It does bring up a potential line of questioning that she hadn’t thought of before. If they retain a bunch of memories from life, was Tsume closer with her estimations than she thought? The trio of dogs needed to be used for her ally didn’t seem to retain much of their past selves, was that the clash or were they just reduced to a puppy-like state and she doesn’t know how to work with puppies?
Also, would an undead pet recognize someone who abused it in life? That could be useful as a side project. Konoha has a lot of different pet-based techniques and people who focus on the idea of animal allies, so as a culture the ninja population is very protective of them. Problems still occur despite that and in response both the village and its people take finding animal abusers and slitting their throats very seriously, but there’s always the issue of detecting what happens behind closed doors. The idea of being useful like that makes her smile, but that smile quickly falls. The fact that she could only detect it after a victim was made hits her hard mid-thought, and that they’d have to find it within a few hours of death would also damper that situation into a depressing hellscape… Tsume’s had a lot of impact on her, maybe she’ll ask her for her thoughts on the matter. If nothing else, it could be a good project to explore if she gets that teacher position she spoke to Iruka about.
Kakashi might actually support her if she did something like that, he likes dogs. She’s caught him petting hers quite a few times when she had her back turned. Though having this thought while riding an undead animal they literally just killed does sort of dampen the mood a little. It’s different, she thinks, they’re supposed to fight these.
“They’re not too far ahead,” Naruto says, “another clone just popped to tell me their location, and they should be within sight very shortly.”
“They know we’re after them by now,” Sasuke says, looking at the two of them to ensure they are listening, “this’ll be the first time we’ve ever intentionally walked into a trap. Are we sure about this?”
“We could get above them and scan them,” Sakura suggests, “if they’re too strong we can always back off. The loss for the quest to deal with them isn’t death or anything.”
“You got a quest?” Naruto asks, “then we should deal with them, they’re significant.”
“Yeah… Are you sure you want to see this though?” She palms Naruto’s shoulder, “you were just crying like an hour ago. We can pop you and do it alone.”
“I need to be ready to pop myself if you two run into trouble so the original knows where to go,” he points out, “I’ll stay behind, don’t worry about me.”
“If you’re sure.” A single look to Sasuke is all she needs to receive his signal, before they’re jumping away from Naruto to get into the trees. She needs to prepare their attack, and figure out which group this is while she’s at it. There’s no reason to be merciless about it, she’s decided that blood lust can wait. Hunger seems sated by all the monsters they’ve been killing and there’s no reason to rush into lethal conflict over something stupid.
Probably, Sasuke looks like he’s ready to murder. The malicious glint in his gaze is something powerful because she’s never expected anyone to feel that protective of her. She hasn’t conceptualized just how much of an impact she’s had on her friends, and that stops now.
“When we’re done, I want you to tell me what you’re feeling,” She says, “I’ve been in the dark a bit too long and it shows.” She owes him attention, she can hold off on gathering summons for another hour or two.
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Standing above the trio, Sakura can’t help but feel a little pensive.
[Doku of Sound
After bandits killed his parents, they kidnapped him and eventually sold him to Sound where he has thrived and quickly become a rising star Genin. In Sound this is kind of a raw deal because a Genin is still pretty weak and the weak die, quickly.
Danger Level - Really just not a threat to you]
All three are like that, and that has her biting her lip instead of jumping in with her sword out. She holds herself back and signals for Sasuke to wait. She’s not sure if the increase in charm has given her more compassion, or if it’s that she was too numb to focus on what she already had inside and raised charm has made her more self aware of her own feelings, but she finds herself hesitating for a few reasons.
First, last time she checked the danger rankings were supposed to be relative to the world. It’s possible they’ve been based on her since the Scan skill ranked up and she just hasn’t recontextualized the qualifiers since they seemed generally fitting, but even if that’s true, it’s worth noting and somewhat confusing. If it’s accurate, she could probably take all three of them down in seconds. She could discard them like salty tears in the pouring rain and never think about them ever again. This is good news for them, oddly enough, because it means she can afford a level of mercy with them. If they were seriously strong she’d be halfway through contemplating an ambush to make sure they died screaming, but as is, she can afford humanity. It also raises questions about how important this quest is. If this is the best they send at her at the current level of enemy, does it matter if it levels up to ten?
Could she be merciful, fail the quest, and just find the organization head with Tenten’s old hammer at a later date? Like with any organization, only one person really needs to die in a gruesome display to destabilize the rest, and it doesn’t look like any of these Genin are the head.
Second, that’s not the scan page that arrives when she’s staring at an enemy. That’s the normal scan page, which means the system recognizes them as people instead of enemies. They’re clearly here to kill her, they snuck into an entire Chunin exam with a - likely secondary - objective to jam an electrified kunai into her throat and get evidence of her convulsing corpse, but being her enemy does not mean they are enemies. Err, maybe that’s an odd wording. To rephrase, there’s a difference between someone placed in her path to test her, and someone who is placed in her path to test her sword. The two may seem similar, especially if she’s not feeling very generous with her patience that day, but there is a very important distinction that she’d like to start making a big deal of. At least, she’d like to make a big deal out of it in a largely non-lethal test in the middle of Konoha.
The third and most important reason she pauses is that they’re all orphans of war and violence, is that a common thing in Sound? Is the entire place some kind of bandit refuge and outcast masquerading as a haven? Getting information her village might not have on a budding organization like that is significantly more important to her than slaying some desperate and poor Genin who joined a shady organization to get food or necessities. Or got sold into it, can you really get sold to a village? How does that even work, wouldn’t that result in missing-nin all over the place?
Also like, how is she supposed to read three incredibly depressing backstories and immediately think ‘lets get stabbing?’ It’s a mood killer, seriously. “Sasuke.” She looks over to him with a little sadness in her eyes. She wishes she had Charm like Ino’s, or Naruto wasn’t in such a pitiful state. Naruto could probably do a great job at this, talking hostile entities down feels like something he’d be pretty good at, she should test that sometime. He deserves a chance to let his charm shine, it’s probably a lot higher than hers. He’s so compassionate he has issues popping his own clones.
Just not now, now it’s time for her to try and test how far she’s come. “I’m going to try and talk to them. Be ready to back me up.”
“You don’t think we should ambush them?” Sasuke asks, “or set traps? Didn’t you learn trapping with Naruto? The two of you could set something up.”
“They’re just not strong enough to warrant it.” She admits, the words taste a bit like acid on her tongue but she means them nevertheless. The teachings that school and Kakashi beat into her - sometimes literally - about never underestimating her opponent and always taking a decisive victory clash with her skills and traits quite handily. Her kit is weirdly built around trivializing easy fights enmass, and if she wants to get any use out of it she needs to ignore what she’s been taught.
It’s hard, but she’s smart, she’s figuring it out. Her feet take her down from the tree with a simple jump, and the next second she lands in the view of the three boys she met earlier. It’s amazing how long ago meeting them already feels like. Hugging Naruto for several hours probably didn’t help her perspective of time since it was just, ridiculously long. It was nice though, very nice. She’ll have to do it again sometime.
“Ah, it’s that girl from earlier.” The big guy greets her with a raised hand. His hand was bleeding the last time she saw it, now it’s bandaged. That’s good, infections aren’t common for ninjas but they’re not impossible and this forest is probably filled with horrific bacteria. If a ninja was going to lose their limbs in the middle of Konoha to something like illness, it’d be in the forest of death.
“Doku.” She greets, crossing her armor plated arms over her shiny red chestplate and nodding to him while leaning against a tree. There’s a dozen roots sticking out between them and her, the visibility is low but the pathway is straight and clear, if not incredibly narrow. He seems to smile at being greeted but his two teammates, shorter in comparison and built for speed, narrow their eyes and fall into a combat ready stance. Their knees are a little bent, their arms are at the ready, lifting kunai and giving her sharp glares.
The man who she assumed was the leader looks behind himself at the sound of their quickened breathing, and furrows his brows. “You didn’t tell her your name.” One of them explains. With that Doku’s already spun around and is dragging a pair of hand axes away from his side. They were covered in cloth a moment ago. She’d assumed they were very large kunai pouches, maybe for carrying Fuma Shuriken - Sasuke has some, they’re basically giant spinny airborne wheels of death, it’s great - but that’s clearly not the case as their contents now gleam in what little light is pouring through the trees. She had assumed since it’s the village of Sound that they would have some sound based attacks, but then she’s not exactly bursting with leaf based attacks so that was probably dumb.
The make isn’t anything she’d be proud of as a novice blacksmith, but she has the privilege of funding and good materials. It seems to her like Sound might not have those kinds of resources for their lower ranks. It’s a shame, and just another reason to have compassion and be patient with them. They aren’t a threat to her, that’s important to remember. Aside from a stray Jutsu she walks into, they likely can’t hurt her. She needs to watch out for hand signs, not their weapons.
She gets a stipend to cover living expenses and tool replacement, do they? It probably doesn’t matter, it looks like she might have to kill them anyway. She’ll try to subdue them but she’s taken down stronger foes before because they underestimated her, she’s not about to let the system mislead her into letting her guard down enough that slaying them is completely off the table.
She only has the option to spare them because she’s still alive and her abilities are fine tuned to discarding trash in the dirt. Her heart’s ability to continue to beat is more important than them, her attitude towards mercy will change at the slightest risk. “I’m Sakura,” she explains, nodding her head at them, “let’s talk.”
“That’s impossible, Sakura’s a ninja, not a Samurai.” Her eyes focus on the man who said that.
Her scan introduced him as, “Kazuo, I’m not a Samurai.” She gets where he’s coming from though. With the bright red armor Haku got her, and Hunger at her waist, her main style being sword based, and even her strongest custom Jutsu being a sword technique - she’s a freaking Samurai isn’t she? When did that happen? Maybe she should take a training trip to the land of Iron and see if she can improve her Kenjutsu there. They're probably better teachers to random girls than Kakashi is to his own students. He drops in to help her with her technique on occasion but it’s not inaccurate to say Gai’s her sensei now, and he doesn’t know nearly as much about the blade as Kakashi does. She could also probably switch to a Jutsu focus now that her Chakra is up if she can get Kakashi to help for twenty seconds.
The boy takes a step back, shaking a little at her use of his name. That’s good, unsettling them is somewhat the point. They aren’t attacking yet, and that’s important. “Look, this whole conspiring to kill me thing is very cute, but you need to understand that you can’t succeed. You were sent after me to die because someone finds it funny.” She kicks off the tree she’s leaning against, and with a flicker of her agility trait to get her to top speed she’s in front of Doku before he can blink. She doesn’t draw her blade, she lets her instincts take over, and dances through his spooked flurry of slashes and attempts to hack her limbs off. The axe heads come within an inch of her face, and she shifts out of the way. He slashes at her neck and she tilts her head back perfectly, wasting no movement she can discern. Doku raises the axes and slams them down at her while she’s bent over, and she presses her hand into the dirt to support herself while she twists, kicks her leg up, and catches his wrist with her foot. Genin Strength isn’t a trait she uses very often, but its wording is misleading. It states that anyone below Genin strength immediately loses in a contest of strength with her, but that’s not quite what it does.
What it actually does is calculate the force being applied, and if it’s below Genin level it instantly loses without the slightest chance in hell. What this means is that by catching his wrist before it can fall towards her, she catches it before he can muster strength and he finds himself slamming his arm down on an immovable wall of the densest metal her system can come up with. His scream catches her by surprise and it almost covers up the sound of his arm shattering on the spot and his hand being pierced by his own bone shards. She does, however, hear it. She’s sure his teammates do too.
The axe bounces out of his hand, and she switches to a full handstand, spinning in place and not even bothering to evade the axe in his other hand falling towards her with almost no force. She angles herself just right so that when she pushes off the ground and does a flip mid-air, she catches the flying weapon and lands with a sweeping strike that causes a shockwave of wind to blow leaves away and force the two in front of her to guard their faces with their arms and sleeves. Well, arm and sleeve in Doku’s case, his arm looks really bad, it’s already swelling and purple and there’s blood leaking into the dirt. She’ll have to remember not to use that trick against anyone in a spar.
She has several traits which make bullying the weak something she’s actually good at. If dealing with them without killing them means abusing those traits, she’ll do so with glowing red eyes and a smirk of malice aimed right towards them. Wait, two in front of her?
She barely has time to duck down and kick out behind her before a kunai slams deep into the space her neck just was. She finds her face covered in something hot and fluid, as her attack forces enough blood out of her opponent's mouth to drain a small animal completely. She’s pretty freaking sure a kick to the stomach isn’t supposed to result in that much of an impact, are Leaf Genin just built differently and Sound Genin are made of glass? She’s absolutely hit Lee ten times that hard and he laughed at her. She’s absolutely splattered with what he had inside, and that’s before he takes a step back and collapses onto his knees, retching out a putrid mix of black and red.
“I didn’t hit you that hard…” She can’t take her eyes off his two enraged teammates, they’re looking at her with murder in their eyes, but that just means getting behind him so that he’s in between them and her. “Sasuke, please help with them,” she calls out a little pathetically. The feeling of accidentally hurting someone always sucks, it’s like her stomach is alive and angry.
The third boy starts some hand signs, which do catch her attention, but before he can finish them the two are wrapped in a river of ninja wire that flows from the trees, overtaking them and looking mightily like a sharp spiderweb. She has just enough time to kneel down and place her fingers on the downed boy’s neck, starting to count heartbeats to ensure his heart didn’t explode or something, before the entire area in front of her is bathed in hellfire. The heat hits her face first, shocking her into raising one of her armored arms to protect her. It scorches the land, engulfs the trees and roars loud enough to cut out the screams which erupt almost as rapidly as the blaze in front of her.
“Uh…” She trails, a hundred sixty beats per minute, that’s pretty freaking high for a ninja but her heartbeat would be high too if she was watching her teammates burn to death out of nowhere. “Sasuke, I meant like, subdue.”
“I knew what you meant.” He answers her with a darkness to his tone as he drops down from the trees, holding up the two pouches they had on their waists before they, you know, “I got these before they went up in flames.” He finds the time to mock her about her earlier mistake while the enemy turns to ash in front of her.
“If you knew what I meant then why…” She has to hold back tears, but they’re dumb and meaningless and they don’t matter so whatever. The sniffle she fails to stop is a little more awkward.
“I told you.” he growls at her, red eyes spinning slightly in a way that accentuates his glare. It’d be very pretty if she wasn’t pissed. He stands with one hand in his pocket and the other holding their bags, shadowed by a rising beacon of flame created by his own rage. “They’re trying to kill someone important to me, I want to hurt them. You didn’t ask me if I wanted to spare them, you just assumed I’d be okay with it.”
“Ah… that’s fair. I think we both need to work on our communication.” She nods to herself as she pulls her hand away from the vomiting boy who’s not getting any better. She stands, and draws her sword. “Sorry dude, but he’s gonna burn you to death. I’ve weighed the numbers and this is the better result, uh, I hope you meet your friends again.”
“Please, no-” Kazuo raises a hand towards her, and with a simple slash his actions stop. Hunger’s satiated, and Sasuke has one less dude to torture. She hates torture
“The last time someone targeted you directly in front of me, you ended up pinned to a tree. I still remember taking turns carrying your lifeless body with Naruto after Kakashi passed out… I won’t have that again.” Sasuke clenches his fists and bends over to collect Kazuo’s newly abandoned bag of balls.
“Death I didn’t want always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” She grumbles, trying to mentally work around the acrid taste invading her mouth with vengeance. “But I understand.”
“Good.” He says confidently. No Sasuke, not good, they’re not good at all. This is going to be a topic in group conversations for months to come. Ino is going to hear about this, Sasuke should never be in her conversations with Ino, he doesn’t fit into their dynamic at all. But for now, they’re in a test, and she’ll not make him feel like Naruto makes her feel when he looks at her after she kills someone he thought he could spare.
For now, if he’s going to kill them, they’ll kill them.
No, that’s a bad assumption, that’s not talking again.
[1/1 Official KSH team dealt with]
“That was the official team, the rest are merely bribed mercenaries,” Sakura says, “can we spare them, or is blood what you truly want?”
“I don’t know.” He admits, pocketing the bags, and resting his hands in his short pockets. “I’ll know when we meet them.”
“No, Sasuke, I need to know.” She looks into his red eyes with her own glowing gaze, challenging him without an ounce of mercy in her glare. “The mentality I go into the engagement with is important, I can’t have you killing people I’m trying to be merciful with. I get the hypocrisy, but a part of growing up is being hypocritical. Death or peace, your choice.”
“... If your system says they’re not dangerous, we can spare them.” He decides, stepping back from her with flushed cheeks. “Sorry.”
“Me too. I know how you both feel now, and I’m sorry I ever made you feel this way.” She sighs deeply, mournfully, and looks down at the corpse she was so recently trying to talk out of this.
Now she feels stupid. At least they got balls and quest progress.
[Total Balls: 220, Rookie 9 and the Exams Ball objective completed. You can now distribute the balls and leave as a group of nine.]
They must have had a lot of balls on them, it implies they took down another team at some point, or that they scored incredibly well in the first exams. Either way, there’s no way she can leave yet. There’s a lot of other quests to complete, but it’s nice to cover some of their bases. With this many balls, and the amount of balls the other three teams working with the KSH they have to hunt down will probably have, they can probably change plans and not spend tomorrow hunting balls.
Balls… that word is going to stop sounding like a word soon, she can already tell.
“Balls, balls, balls, balls-” it already kinda sounds like a Jutsu callout.
Comments
Dopplerdee
Sometimes you just need to take ah break.
Christopher Cummins
I had fun. It's good to be back, I was worried this chapter was a bad way to get back but in last minute edits I ended up adding well over 1000 words and reworking most of it. I hella needed that vacation, and I'm happy the story benefits from my taking it.
Dopplerdee
There is so much good in this chapter, but ending on Sakura saying Balls over and over is just the cherry on top.
