| Where the Wild Things Are [Ibiki, Kiba, Tsume] | [May. 29th, 2009|06:07 pm] |
[Takes place Thursday, March 27, five days after Wild Dog in a Nest of Vipers, two days after Words Without Meaning]
The Forest of Death--there was a name so over-the-top it almost sounded like a joke. It was great for scaring would-be chuunin. Looked great on paper to civilians--"Our shinobi train in the Forest of Death." The real irony though, lay in the fact that it wasn't an ironic name. The number of people who had died in that stretch of dense woods to Konoha's south was far from inconsequential. Genin weren't allowed in. Chuunin and Jounin treated it with respect and caution.
Of course there was always some hotshot who wanted to prove what a bad ass he was by going in to train unprepared. One a year, according to Shida. One a year who went in and didn't come out; whose bones were retrieved by an ANBU detail. More times than not it was a freshly-minted chuunin with a chip on his shoulder. Almost always a boy. Sometimes not even a Konoha native, but a visiting ninja from an allied village. That had been the last one to die--a pimply-faced, narrow-jawed chuunin from Suna, who went missing while on a diplomatic mission escorting senior negotiators for the Kazekage. Ibiki knew all about that one, because he'd been involved in the interrogations of the dead boy's teammates.
He hadn't seen the body, but he'd heard it was only identifiable by dental records.
So it was with a healthy amount of respect, and a clear understanding of what he was doing, where he was going, and why, that Ibiki vaulted the fence and entered the forest. It was a dangerous, deadly place, but that was the kind of place you needed as a training ground, unless you only ever planned to take soft missions. Working in the subbasement under Shida, Ibiki's opportunities for field missions were fewer and farther between than he'd like. To keep his skills up, he trained here.
He'd run a good kilometer or so into the forest, dodging traps left by previous users, evading a heavy-tusked boar and her young, slogging through a marshy field holding pools of hidden quicksand. Water walking was almost impossible on the shimmery, deceptive surface. Almost, but not entirely. He was sweating and breathing hard by the time he got to a dense copse of towering redwoods, and stopped to take a drink from his canteen.
Something made his neck prickle. Some sense, maybe a sound. He saw nothing more threatening than shadows at first, but there was something watching him. Ferns rustled--from breeze or beast, he couldn't be sure--and he leapt for the trees, scaling rough bark.
He was surprised to find slender trap wire running taut from the base of the first branch he reached. His eyes traced it into the gloomy canopy, and there, dangling and mostly obscured with hanging moss, was a cargo net. Some animal had snared itself in an abandoned trap, he thought. A monkey by the looks of it.
The monkey moved.
Still alive, poor thing. Probably close to starvation, if it had been there long. He considered setting it free, rejected the idea, and was about to move on, when the monkey called out, "Hey, mister!" |
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