| Knife's Edge [Closed to Katsuko and Ryuichi] | [May. 24th, 2009|08:26 pm] |
It was Ryuichi’s opinion that Intel was screwed up and filled with sadists. It was also his opinion that his current mission partners were doing their very best to make him miserable. Despite flatly ignoring them for three hours straight and then pretending he was deaf for what felt like another two, they were succeeding.
Thick grass stretched out from them in all directions, broken only occasionally by dark boulders. A chill wind hissed through the grass, and it would have been worse if it weren’t so dry. When the sun went down, Ryuichi knew it was going to be very cold. Winter was mostly over, just a few more days of cold intentions to break it up before the heat came, but this was one of the few and letting everyone know it.
Eventually they would reach the forest and the rendezvous point. Katsuko would be there.
When it all came down, she was little more than a stranger, but Ryuichi respected her fighting ability. That mattered in a Hunter, and what mattered more was that she seemed level-headed.
Well. For a jounin.
Ryuichi was hoping they would reach her sooner rather than later. Preferably before he fell to temptation and tried to kill his current teammate.
Fujimaki Ryozo was a Hunter who specialized in ninjutsu, four years older and about a head taller than Ryuichi. He’d taken about five minutes after the briefing to decide that the fact that their names were so similar was a sign they were meant to be friends. If he hadn’t done that, Ryuichi might have considered respecting him. Rookies were supposed to be respectful to veterans. It was a good way to survive.
Disrespecting them was a good way to get dead. Ryuichi was almost at the point where he really didn’t care anymore.
“Senpai,” he said through gritted teeth, “stop touching me.”
Right fucking now was implied rather than said. It would have gotten through to most shinobi.
Ryozo prided himself on the ability to become oblivious on command and didn’t make any move to let go of Ryuichi’s ponytail. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” the older Hunter asked cheerfully.
“You said that already,” Endo Yuya snapped. He was the token Intel agent for a mission composed almost entirely of Hunters, and entirely displeased with the situation. Everyone knew it. Tall, skinny, and twitchy as a cat in the Inuzuka compound, Yuya had shown a penchant for ignoring anything and everything the three Hunters were doing, just so long as they didn’t make too much noise. “And it’s not.”
“Aw, don’t be like that,” Ryozo said, waving his arm to reiterate his point. “Bein’ negative doesn’t achieve anything. Hey, rookie! Am I right?”
It was obvious who he was talking to, since the other Hunter was six months past rookie-status and prepared to let everyone know it. Her name was Sugiyama Bachiko and she was an arrogant little bitch Ryuichi thought should have been strangled at birth.
“Rookie, am I right?”
Ryuichi didn’t respond with words. He’d spent far too long ignoring his teammates—veterans or not—and this. Was. Going. To. Stop.
Now.
Two weeks ago, an interrogator with one arm had taught Ryuichi how to twist in a choke-hold and kill someone with only a fist and a good strike to the stomach. The trick was applying enough chakra to shatter your opponent’s guard and fuck up their internal organs.
It wasn’t a good idea to try to kill your superiors. They tended to return the favor, only without the attempted aspect of the action. It was better just to ignore it, or pretend to. Of course, Ryuichi had never discovered exactly how one was supposed to just ignore shinobi like Ryozo.
There were limits to everyone’s patience, and he didn’t have much to begin with. Ryuichi didn’t even think about it. He just stopped dead and slammed his elbow into Ryozo’s stomach, using enough chakra to hurt, not enough to kill. Part of him wanted to go the extra mile, but Ryuichi wasn’t quite that far gone yet. It was probably only a matter of time.
The first warning that things were going bad was the strangled curse Ryozo snarled as Ryuichi twisted free. The second was the headlock the older Hunter put him into. “That was stupid,” Ryozo growled.
Ryuichi had to disagree. Trying to break the man’s nose was far stupider.
It was around this time that Katsuko showed up. Ryuichi jerked free of the headlock and dodged over to her, eyes narrowed behind his fox mask.
Thank the gods the other three weren’t part of his mission. |
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