Increased Patrols:

The air was cool and crisp this early in the morning. Shinako kept her hands balled into loose fists to keep her fingers from shivering in the draftiness of the briefing room. The scent of cigarette smoke hung in the air, though it did not hold the repulsive, acrid tint it normally did. Somehow, in the dim light of the administrative building in the early hours, the smoke smelled like pure nostalgia, or a familiar friend. Had Shinako’s thoughts been more grounded, she may have been disturbed by the sensation. As it stood, her attention was focused on her Jounin Commander. Even in the chilly morning air, the massive Akimichi Shinobi was already sweating. He always smelled like spray-on deodorant and beef jerky, and greeted all of his subordinates with a smile and a personal comment. How’s your foot, I’d heard you injured it? Did you ever find that spicy curry powder you were looking for? How’s your father?

In her normal interactions with the blonde-haired man, she did little more than respond to his deft small-talk and deliver a document or two. His façade was fascinating to the younger Nara woman. More than once, a mission debriefing report had come across his desk bearing his name. This was how she knew that his preferred method of dealing with opponents was a high-speed, precision Taijutsu maneuver in which he delivered a well-placed open hand chop, infusing it with chakra and slicing his foe clean in half; Barehanded Execution, the technique was called. The thought of his smiling face as he ended a life so easily produced an involuntary tremor down Shinako’s spine. He was proceeding through the daily assignments alphabetically, and had reached Muubei Dadao. Her briefing was soon approaching.

It was not often that Shinako was drafted for field rotations, though she had been spending much more time outside of the village’s protective walls and barriers lately. When the telltale red enveloped had landed in her inbox, Shinako had not felt the trepidation which had accompanied her previous summons. Her dreams were still occupied with the goings-on of that day, and the despair it had uncorked. Smoke could never be placed back into a bottle. It seemed right that she should be sent back into the line of duty; back into danger.

“Nara Shinako….oh!”

The Jounin Commander seemed surprised, and gave an amused chuckle at his hesitation, lifting a hand to beg her indulgence as he silently read over the details of her assignment again. He did not design the missions himself. That job was better left to the people at the tactical division. His job was to get the laborers and administrators up to speed when they were called for intermittent duties to fill gaps in the roster for field Shinobi.

“Another B-Rank? Are you still a Chuunin, Shinako-kun? Hm, hm. As I recall, your last two assignments were also of B-Rank….at any rate….”

The man was attempting to tease her to put her at ease. It wasn’t working. Shinako had feared that she would once again be given a mission with the potential to turn deadly. Her superiors had been pushing her harder and harder since her score on the Uniform Strategic & Tactical Exam had returned. The Kunoichi’s score had been nearly perfect, and was the highest in nearly a decade. She had achieved the same score as such vaunted Shinobi as Senju Tsunade, Uchiha Shisui, and Nara Shikamaru. The test was rarely administered, and candidates for special tactical certification were often pushed to their breaking points before the higher-ups could turn them into targeted weapons. The commander’s joking did little to soothe Shinako’s nerves, though she did smile to signal her appreciation of the effort.

“It’s a targeted patrol. You’re to check out a rash of raids out in the Obake Weeds. There have been reports of bandits, and we need someone with a sharp mind to engage and stop them. Lethal force is authorized, though not necessary….”

The man kept talking, but Shinako could not hear him over the pounding of her own heart filling her ears. The Shinobi around her rustled and rankled at the announcement of her assignment, and she could feel their eyes boring into her with sympathy and concern. This had to be some sort of mistake. Since her graduation from academy, Shinako had attended only four mandatory combat fitness tests, and had barely passed them. She spent her days behind a desk, and was primarily trained as a support Shinobi should an emergency arise. Being sent to deal with criminals and ruffians head-on was not something for which she had been trained. She swallowed hard and tried to continue her smile as the commander handed her the briefing folder. When the dossier revealed the rough nature of the people she would be dealing with, it was all she could do to keep from crying. She would be going alone.

Shinako’s eyes darted back and forth across the page for some detail she might have missed; some loophole, or back door. There was none. She was to scout out and deal with the problem directly.

855/855

“So let me get this straight once more, Shinako-kun….”

The Black-ops officer’s voice was calm and raspy behind the porcelain mask which hid his face from the world. His cloak covered the coiling arms which reached for the debriefing folder once again. He deftly flipped it open, barely touching it with his long, spider-like fingers. A persistent drip of water sounded through the bowels of the administrative building, four floors below the room in which she had been briefed the morning before. The cinderblock room was lit only by the dim light of a single electric bulb affixed to the ceiling. The harsh environment made it easy for Shinako to hear the mild disdain in the man’s voice as he paused to confirm the story for what must have been the sixth or seventh time.

“….you….sent a letter?”

Once again Shinako nodded. She was cold, and had been here for nearly an hour; she had explained the details of the mission to this officer over the course of the past twenty minutes, and had met with at three others as well. She sensed that they were looking for some sort of inconsistency, and something told her to be cautious and specific.

“I delivered the letter.”

The man became preternaturally still, though she could see his eyes moving back and forth across the pages of the document. After a long pause that seemed to last for several minutes, he reached into his cloak and produced an enveloped. Shinako recognized it almost immediately.

“Ah, yes. Right. I think this is it. A man, Kazamachi Abe, delivered this, and himself to our custody scarcely an hour ago. Just before we called you in, actually.”

The Kunoichi was careful not to let her emotions show through her face. They struck her in waves, and she was not entirely sure which she felt strongest. Relief, fear, suspicion. All of these mingled and danced through her mind. She had not asked any of the bandits’ names but for the leader, Kazamachi Hedon, the man with the massive war-hammer. Her own briefing had not contained any names, and she doubted that they would have been excluded if the document if the reconnaissance had existed at the time the mission was assigned. Either the ANBU interrogator was telling the truth, or the information had been extracted since her return. The former was more likely than the latter. Shinako gave a single nod in acknowledgement that she was following along with the narrative.

“He says you spoke with his brother, and that the raiders are moving on from the Land of Fire. He’s been arrested for further interrogation, but he says you made quite the impression on his brother during the ah….private discussion in his tent.”

Shinako had to keep herself from shifting uncomfortably at the lewd implications the man was making. These things probably went much more smoothly if he could make get his subjects flustered. The Nara Kunoichi was not going to give him that satisfaction. She nodded again, and he continued, opening the envelope and reading a few lines.

“It is a strange thing to know how one is slated to die. Do not mistake, dear reader, that I am talking about our general sense of mortality. No, I write directly into the void, with the uncommon knowledge of the dangers I am asked to face….Is any of this sounding familiar?”

Her heart nearly skipped a beat, and Shinako had to concentrate to stop the breath from sticking in her chest. The words were, in fact, her own. They were from the very letter she had delivered the day before. Making slow and deliberate eye contact, Shinako nodded again.

“Lord Shikashige was known to say that the way of the Shinobi is one of immediacy, and that every decision should be made within the space of seven breaths. The way of the Shinobi is found in being determined, and having the spirit to break through to the other side.”

The man cleared his throat and drummed his unnaturally long fingers against the hard wood of the table at which the two sat, opposed to one another, locked in an invisible struggle. He continued.

“If you pass through a desert, wandering, lost, you might leave a small cairn of stones. You know that no one will ever find it. You yourself will die miles and miles away; your body will disappear. Even the cairn will be buried, in time, in the shifting sands. But somehow you want it there, the little mark, deep in the enormous heart of that vast wasteland. It will never be found, but it exists; it exists because you existed. In this sentiment lies the nature of this letter, and I hope, someday, that you will read it….It goes on….”

The man cleared his throat again, and Shinako was sure she heard some hint of a foreign emotion there, briefly rising only to be swallowed in that practiced way that hardened Shinobi had. It was too fleeting for the Kunoichi to know what it possibly could have been. The man raised his eyes from the letter and met Shinako’s hard stare once again.

“It reads like a suicide-note, Shinako-kun.”

About that, the man was correct. Shinako had not written it with the notion of delivering it to the bandit leader. Instead, she had intended to tuck it away somewhere; deep within the library, or among the shrines to the kami. Anywhere, really. It was the act of writing it which held importance, not the ultimate fate of the missive. Then something inside of her had snapped; yelled out to the heavens in protest. She had become angry with the circumstances which had led to this, the callous hand that had stamped her name at the bottom of a death-warrant, the unfeeling society which would smile as she set out. A part of her screamed because it wanted to live, and so she took her letter with her, to deliver it to her killers.

1,000/1,855

The head of the ANBU Intelligence Division, in a moment of surprise, had called it a minor miracle. “Even the lamed hawk can catch a rodent or two,” he had said later. Shinako was not sure which was more true. What she did know, is that this mission had been some sort of test. There was no reason that the Black-ops should care about the B-rank activities of an administrative Chuunin. How she had marched into a camp full of bandits and convinced them to leave with a strongly-worded letter. It sounded more like a quirky folk-tale than a matter of official interest. Yet, the interviews had gone on for nearly five hours, with gruff men in masks poking and prodding Shinako for details about the specific words chosen, surveillance strategies deployed, and psychological tactics at play. In the end, it seemed, they had decided to chalk it up to an accidental stroke of brilliance; a flash in the pan.

Shinako could make her peace with that. As she arrived home, she collapsed into her bed without removing her clothing, breathing in the comforting scent of her own sheets deeply. The debriefing had been almost as much of an ordeal as the mission itself. On one level or another, Shinako had always known that a Shinobi had to be willing to die to even do this job; put their bodies and sanity on the line day in and day out. Not that Shinako herself was particularly brave, or glorious. But something about close encounters with the ANBU was incredibly different, and somehow far more dangerous. In those hours, Shinako had grappled constantly with a terrible and ever-shifting force she could not quite understand; a fiercely intelligent animal that moved with deliberate purpose, of which it was hard to take measure. To live in a world like that, under its watchful eye, would require something different than reconciliation with death and destruction. Shinako would have to put her very soul at hazard to venture into the depths of that dark world.

340/2,195