| [Apr. 30th, 2014|05:23 am] |
The servants tried to protect the children.
A manservant, a maid, and a cook weren’t much of a hurdle, even if the cook did punch like a boxer. Raidou put them down one by one, dropping them into unconscious heaps, and chased the second maid trying to carry the children out the back door. He caught her in the hallway, grabbing her by the back of her sleeping yukata. Her socked feet skidded on the polished wooden floorboards.
“No!” she screamed, and flailed around to kick him, desperately hanging onto the frantic little girl and wailing baby.
“I know, I know,” Raidou told her, and closed a hand around her throat. “I’m sorry.”
He squeezed, hard and merciless, hitting pressure points to disrupt the blood-flow to her brain. Her eyes rolled up and her knees sagged. He caught the children as she fell, landing in a crumpled curl of blue-patterned fabric at his feet. The little girl, Tomoko, shrieked and beat at his armored chest, seeing a monster in the white mask looming over her. The boy’s name was Sorai, Raidou remembered; he was scarlet and screaming behind a mask of tears and snot, choking on smoke.
They’d done literally nothing. The girl was barely old enough to form permanent memories. The boy wasn’t old enough to have first words.
But Konoha wanted them dead.
The heat was already at Raidou’s back, pieces of the roof thundering as they collapsed. If he wanted any chance of giving Katsuko backup and getting the servants out unburned, he was out of time.
He’d lost Genma’s senbon in the back of the kunoichi’s neck. He pinned the girl against his side, freeing one hand, and drew a kunai. Set the blade to the baby’s throat. Sorai twitched at the touch of cold steel, his fingers splaying in an infant’s grab reflex. Raidou breathed out, and cut deep.
Blood sprayed across the floor.
The little body shuddered and went still, cries extinguished. Raidou made himself drop the boy and re-juggled the girl. She fought him, screaming hysterically. He got a grip on her long, dark hair, pulling her head back to bare her throat.
He brought the blade down again. But as it touched her skin, chakra twitched behind him and her body burst into red flowers.
Raidou swore and spun, coming face to face with a shinobi in the dark grey jounin-uniform of Kirigakure. Firelight glinted on spiky, grass-green hair. Equally green eyes narrowed over the white bandages Kiri-nin used in place of a mask. The shinobi’s hands were folded into a dragon seal. Ninjutsu or genjutsu?
Henge or more head-fuckery?
Raidou flipped his kunai, raking a hot line of pain across the inner side of his left arm, and slapped his hands together. “Kai.”
Nothing changed. Crimson petals blew across the floor.
Behind the bandage-mask, the man’s mouth quirked. “We don’t always do the same thing twice.”
“I do, when it works,” Raidou said, and flung the kunai at the man’s face, drawing his black-bladed sword in the same motion. He launched himself on the heels of his kunai, hitting the Kiri-ninja just as the man deflected the flying blade with the contemptuous sweep of an armored forearm. The kunai spun away. Raidou’s sword clashed down on a short-bladed wakizashi that appeared with lightning speed.
Steel ground against steel, making a thin, shrill noise.
“I’m Aoisuke,” said the Kiri-ninja calmly, as they strained against each other. Of course his name had blue in it. “I’d say it’s a pleasure, but…”
“Can you not narrate?” Raidou said.
“Just making conversation.” Aoisuke's other hand vanished and reappeared, bristling with shuriken. He threw them at point-blank range.
Raidou ducked his head, protecting his neck; steel sliced his shoulders. One thunked into his chestplate, the blade sinking through a joint in the ceramic plating deeply enough to scratch his chest. It felt real.
Henge to hide the girl, kawarimi to swap her with with an explosion of flowers? Or just a localized illusion to fold her presence away? The petals were still there, sinking into the spreading puddle of Sorai’s blood.
Raidou hated genjutsu-users. You had to think on three levels at once, while trying not to get your face carved off. If you couldn’t trust your senses, what could you trust?
Steel, maybe.
Himself, definitely. |
|