| [Nov. 29th, 2013|06:32 am] |
He set the file aside and picked up the last one. Ueno Katsuko, freshly nineteen, already his subordinate for a year, with more paperwork to her name than Raidou had ever wanted to read.
Except, he couldn’t. Genma’s file contained one blacked out page. Katsuko’s had fifty. Raidou stared at the massacred stack, most of them blue-bordered medical pages, and then set to pulling out whatever information was left. There was precious little. A few broad details of her rerouted chakra system; a single page devoted to the failsafe seal Yondaime-sensei had locked into place and the method of activating it, which Raidou devoted himself to memorizing; and one neatly written, rubber-stamped report that covered her capture, torture, and rescue from the hands of an Iwa medical ninja when she was—
Raidou double-checked the date.
Fourteen.
What?
He sat back in his chair, drained a long swallow of beer, and said, “Konoha, you are fucking up.”
He made himself read the rest. Genin at ten, chuunin at sixteen—delayed, presumably, by the giant hole ripped through her chakra, but that also meant she’d been taken from near the front lines as a genin, which, again, what? What the hell had her jounin-sensei been thinking? Raidou uncrumpled the page he’d accidentally balled up, smoothing it out, and continued. Jounin at eighteen, which beat him hollow, with her entrance into ANBU following shortly afterwards.
Chakra aside, her injury list wasn’t terrible. She overwhelmed most opponents before they got close enough to do damage.
Then there was the psych report.
Raidou got the impression that its author had given up. There was a page of generic, boilerplate observations—’Ueno Katsuko has trust issues’, ‘Ueno Katsuko displays mild paranoia’, ‘Ueno Katsuko is skilled at masking her true mental and emotional state’. Stapled to that was a bundle of medical incident reports charting Katsuko’s issues with everything from standard vaccinations to one particular event with a scalpel, and the resulting property damage. And then there was a picture of a duck, which Katsuko had apparently drawn during a counselling session. She’d colored it with a blue crayon.
Raidou propped his chin on his hand and read the whole thing again, just to watch one poor bastard’s slow spiral into infectious madness.
Maybe the agent had retired. He might have a farm somewhere, raising critters.
Probably not ducks.
Raidou closed the file, stacked it with the others, and looked at them. That was Team Six. His first ever team, not counting the few chuunin squads he’d run with back on the front lines, when promotion usually followed a commanding officer’s messy death. This time, he’d been hand-picked.
Do your best, Yondaime had said.
Raidou let out a long breath. “Oh man,” he said, threw back the last of his beer, and read through them again. |
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