| [May. 2nd, 2009|09:12 pm] |
Raidou didn't have an answer, barely had a thought, but that tended to happen when a little dead girl had her long black hair tangled around your ankle. He bent down and, very carefully, eased himself free.
The clearing they were in wasn't a natural one. Blackened scorch marks streaked the still-living bamboo, proof that someone had used a fire jutsu so recently the rain hadn't had time to wash the evidence away. The ground was torn and shredded, great gouges carved through mud and earth, massacred by blades and chakra and whatever else had been turned on the four bodies lying broken at their feet.
Raidou swallowed hard, clenched his fists, and tried not to see the way someone had wrenched Akimi's legs apart. She was twelve years old, far too small, and he could still remember the day Jiro had come home, bursting with excitement and determined to write her an epic love poem.
She was too young to have her name carved on the stone.
He gritted his teeth. She was too young--but they were far too old to stand around in a killing field, staring like fools at the recently gone, waiting for someone else take their heads off.
He jerked a hand at his clone, signalling it to peel away and check the surroundings. It ghosted away into the undergrowth, silent as a breath.
"Take the two boys, kid," said Raidou, hoping an order would be enough to snap Genma out of that unnatural stillness. "I've got the girls." If only so Genma didn't have to.
He pulled himself out of the mud, standing on the fetid surface with a dull flicker of chakra, and tried to work out how they'd be able to burn anything when the rain was still lashing down. But burying those tiny bodies in the melting slag of a poor battlefield seemed like the final violation. He wasn't sure he could bring himself to do it.
"Maybe we could take them home," he began. "With enough clones--"
A flash of bloodthirsty chakra was all the warning he got before a hail of kunai scythed across the clearing, fluttering tags bound to their handles. Raidou threw himself at Genma just as the first explosion tore half the clearing up. |
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