In that small house near the river in a quiet neighborhood of Kirigakure, Issei sat next to his bedridden mother, whose condition was only growing worse every day. His father stood over them, attentive and worried, while Issei was calm and composed as he usually was. She slept, her nose twitching slightly with every few breaths. "I know Ena appreciates these visits, Issei. She's getting older, and in her condition, who knows how much longer..." Issei stopped him mid-sentence. "She'll be fine. Even when that day comes, her suffering will end, and we'll find a way to adjust without her, keep her memory alive." Issei processed emotions differently than most. Grief, pain, sadness, loss...they all essentially had the same effect on him as mild discomfort or inconvenience. He wasn't always like that. Tragedy was a regular thing in his life, so he adjusted accordingly. His father looked down at him, almost angrily, considering how dismissively he was treating his own mother's impending death. "I suppose you're right."

Just as Mizuto turned to leave the room, Issei finally spoke up about what he had actually come there that morning to say. "I'm starting an organization soon, so I'll be travelling a lot more in due time. And I'm going on a mission today."

"Oh, well that's nice. I hope you can find time in between your travels to visit. Be safe, son."

"It's a scouting mission to help the village gather information on the potential location of Gekai." Mizuto grew quiet, stopped dead in his tracks, and turned back around to face Issei. His eyes were tired, dark bags underneath them, the wrinkles all over his face each telling a tale from his time in the ANBU, and Issei imagined all the things he must have experienced as a shinobi who had an even greater past with that psychotic ninja. Issei didn't expect any sort of advice or additional input: he was just telling his father about the mission because he knew it would be important to him. Mizuto only repeated himself, this time in a much more solemn voice. "Be safe, son."

Hours later, Issei was journeying over the raging, dark waters that stood between Kirigakure and the Land of Whirlpools. Speed and endurance training in the last few months had prepared him for the worst, so he ran across the surface of the water, faster than any ferry he could've paid for that afternoon. Since it was summer, the sun was actually visible for once, though that didn't do much to warm the ocean. It did make for a beautiful view as Issei looked out over the horizon. Even over a decade later, he remembered the path to the hideout, because the memory of finding his way back to Kirigakure on foot while his bones nearly tore themselves out of his body, his stitched wounds were bleeding, and he was nearly unconscious from exhaustion, was unforgottable. It scarred him; it didn't haunt him anymore, years of therapy and meditation had allowed that much, but he could never forget it.

In the hideout's place was a ruin, a giant pile of ornate stones with carvings along the outside of them indicating some lost culture of the Land of Waves. Issei ran his hand along the rocks, knowing full well that the hideout was underground and thus he needed to destroy the stone that impeded him. He extended his spine, exposing his tail, before smashing it into the rocks at full force. This left a number of cracks, so he repeated the motion, once, twice, thrice more, and finally they succumbed to his force, crumbling further. They revealed a stairway in the rubble, just enough of it opened up so that Issei could squeeze himself into it. There, in pitch darkness, he activated his Katon sensory ninjutsu in order to feel out his surroundings. The most overwhelming thing he felt, though, was a sense of dread...

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Despite not being able to actually see in the dark, the memories of Issei's former torture chambers matched up with what he could sense around him. It was a bit difficult, since it was so cold in there, and there was no trace of anyone's chakra or body heat, though there were a few rodents that left heat trails. His priority was to find something flammable to use as a torch, he brushed a foot along the ground, following the rodents as he went, until he hit something that sounded like wood. He picked it up, felt it in his hands; a clipboard. It would have to do. Filling his lungs with burning chakra, he released it in a steady stream for just a moment before ending the jutsu prior to its full power. This was enough to set the clipboard ablaze and flood the room with dim, red light as Issei transferred the burning board from his hand to his skeletal tail to avoid burning himself. There was broken glass along the floors and wires coming through the walls, though there was no electricity and there hadn't been for a long time. There were two corridors, one that continued straight and one that branched off to the right, so Issei went forward into the first one to avoid detours. It was a hallway with multiple cells on both sides, at least a dozen total. Dried blood, skeletons, more rodents, some bugs. Issei collected a few bones from one of the skeletons in hopes that Kirigakure's medical teams would be able to identify the body. One of the cells' bars were bent and broken, suggesting that either someone was lucky enough to escape or they had been turned into such a strong weapon that they managed to break the bars but still ultimately succumbed to the Surgeon's experiments. Issei had never seen any of the Surgeon's puppets, and he already knew that the Surgeon was insanely powerful without them, so it was a bit frightening imagining what the man possibly could have had in his arsenal.

The third cell on the right side of the hall was one that caught Issei's attention. It was charred black all over the inside, and there were multiple holes in the walls, though none big enough to destroy the cell's foundation and allow escape. The bars were still perfectly intact, though the lock was broken, so Issei opened the door to get a closer look. At first, it seemed that nothing of interest was within, but then Issei noticed a small carving in the lower right corner of the wall, where there was no holes or any sign of burning. Four verticle straight lines, evenly spaced from one another. A count? Four days, four months, four years? How would the prisoner have known as time was passing? He turned to leave the cell when something surprised him; a new chakra signature had appeared. They were standing at the end of the corridor, but for some reason, they lacked the body heat of a regular human being, despite having the shape and chakra system of one. "Who are you?" Issei asked, stepping towards the figure and raising his tail to bring light to its face. Looking back at him were a pair of dead eyes, without focus and yellowed. It wore an Iwagakure headband. The rest of the thing's face was very clearly mechanical, and as it opened its mouth, it released a high pitched clicking noise. A stream of senbon, likely poisonous, blasted out of the puppet, and Issei instinctively wrapped his tail around himself to block them. They seemed to be coated in poison, by the purple sheen of them as they came across torchlight, so he took note of that as they were deflected and immediately sprinted toward the puppet for a counter attack. He threw a punch, which the puppet dodged expertly as it opened its mouth to shoot more senbon. Issei proved to be faster, though, bringing his tail down at full force and hitting the puppet's mouth, breaking its firing mechanism. He was going to follow up with a roundhouse kick but the puppet's arm was expanding and started gain chakra and heat, when seen through the lens of Issei's sensory jutsu, so he tried a different maneuver instead. He grabbed the puppet and threw it against the wall before jumping back and wrapping his tail around himself again. There was a deafening explosion, and light flooded the room in a blinding flash for just a second. Then, the ruins started crumbling, rocks falling down around them. The puppet was still intact, its eyes set on Issei, coming straight for him, but he knew he didn't have time to continue fighting and his best bet would be to escape. He started running for the exit, dropping the burning clipboard and using his tail to collect various medical materials off of the ground for testing back in Kirigakure. The puppet pursued him like a predator, but had been damaged in the blast and couldn't quite keep up. By the time Issei squeezed back through the hole in the stairway and saw the light of day, the puppet had gotten trapped under a rock and was doomed to be crushed.

Breathing heavily, Issei looked at the things he'd recovered. A scalpel, a leg bone, a bloodied rag, and a broken syringe. Considering he was neither a doctor nor a scientist, he had no idea how helpful any of that stuff would be, but he had completed his mission at the very least. The one piece of information that was most vital to hunting down Gekai came together in Issei's mind as he started the journey back home. His own Kirigakure headband, the markings outside of the ruins that represented the Land of Whirlpools, the puppet's Iwagakure headband. The four lines he saw in that cell weren't hash marks. They were the symbol of Amegakure no Sato.


[ Exit Thread, Mission Complete ]

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