| [Dec. 16th, 2009|02:52 am] |
"Going in there killing is likely to get us killed sooner rather'n later," Ryouma said mildly. He shoved his mask to the side of his head, rubbed his sweaty glove over his sweatier cheeks, and poured half his canteen over his head. Didn't much help the whole wet and dripping bit, but at least he didn't feel quite so much like his face was on fire.
And compared to yesterday, they'd been taking it slow.
"I like plans," he added, gulping down a quarter of the remaining water in his canteen before he capped it again. "And maps. Maps are awesome. And I betcha Intel was thinking of something when they were generous enough to give us two." The pretty little watercolor had gotten them here; it was the swiftly penciled blueprint's turn, now. Some Intel agent had sat almost where they were standing, maybe, and sketched out the details of the fortress for the Hunters who would follow him. He'd even included the nightingale floor, which Ryouma almost wished he could try out for the sheer fun of it.
"Lookit," he said, crouching to spread the drawings out on the new spring grass. "Here's the front gate; here's the handy little back gate; fortunately we're ninja so we don't need either of 'em. But it's pretty useful to know that if you come over the wall, you go in this door and down this hall, and a couple turns and a staircase and a hallway later..."
He squinted at the neat kanji labeling the little square. "You're in someone's room, at any rate. Damn, he shoulda just stuck with the pictures. But here--" he tapped a row of characters marching down the side of the page--"I'm pretty sure this's the guard schedule. It's times, at any rate, which makes sense."
Katsuko's mask had tipped to stare at him, now, instead of the blueprint.
"I got better things to learn in my Academy days than kanji," Ryouma said airily. "Like, if you plot a route ahead of time, and go in at the right time, you're a lot more likely to run into your target instead of his personal army. And if we find him first, he doesn't get to run out his handy little back gate. See?" |
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