| [Apr. 30th, 2014|05:02 am] |
On the other side of the house, the second wing of the guard patrol hadn’t caught the change in the wind. They carried themselves like fighters, comfortable with their weapons and scarred from old victories. Not ninja-trained, but they’d obviously seen combat. Which wasn’t unusual, given Fire Country’s recent history.
Mercenaries, most likely.
Raidou didn’t feel good about putting them down, but that was the job. You couldn’t blame a dog for what its master had done, but you didn’t leave it standing to bite you, either. He dropped down into the center of the group and broke two necks, stabbed the third man in the chest. The fourth guard dodged. A woman, muscular and fast, scrambling to bring an iron-shod staff into play. He blocked her first hit with an arm-guard, irritated by the muffled clang, and yanked the staff out of her hands.
She went for him with a knife. Raidou flipped the staff and staved her chest in with the iron end, ending the fight in a crunch of bone. Her body dropped. He stowed all four corpses behind a manicured collection of shrubbery and slipped around the east side of the house. On the edges of his senses, Katsuko’s spark was already heading west. There was one outlying guard on each side of the house.
Judging by the fractional hesitation in Katsuko’s movements, hers only took a second. Raidou’s was no more complicated.
He touched his target-entry window frame, feeling for the threads of a chakra trap, and acknowledged a passing thought. This is too easy.
There was no trap.
The latch took a second, then the window slid soundlessly up. He boosted himself inside, landing in a light crouch on grassy-smelling tatami floor of a storeroom. The lights were off. The house had the soft-breathing quality of sleeping occupants. Intel suggested there was probably a guard or two inside, but they’d only had two days of data to pull a pattern from.
Raidou cracked the sliding paper door, checked his sight lines, and padded down the hallway. On the other side of the house, he could feel Katsuko circling right. Her spark glowed on his mental map like a single constellation, heading towards the master bedroom. Raidou’s path took him to the servant's quarters, where no one was awake enough to require an immediate solution. Unlike his father, who housed a full recruitment of servants, Tsuto Masaaki kept a much smaller staff on-site: just a manservant, two maids, a cook, and a nanny in the kid’s room. From a passing glance, Raidou was pretty certain none of the sleeping servants had combat training, though the cook was surprisingly sturdy in the biceps. Probably came from punching dough.
He left them in peace and reversed directions, heading for the nursery.
There was no guard, which put him on edge, but the nanny was dozing in a rocking chair with an open book on her lap. She barely stirred when Raidou closed a hand around her neck and put hard pressure on her carotid, tipping her off the ledge into actual unconsciousness. That wouldn’t last long; he tightened a loop of wire around her wrists, locking her hands together, and left her slumped in the chair as he moved quietly forward. |
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