Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter2 (section)

===4: Strategic Martial Arts===

The Dejima-like New Yokohama Domain was an area of reclaimed land built out at sea. The only land route in was a large bridge known as the Umbilical Cord. The airport was an extension added onto the edge of the reclaimed land like a second scoop of ice cream. New Yokohama Domain itself was large enough to grow into a city of a million, but its land was not unlimited.

When the tanker truck arrived near the scene, Guren and Suiren left through the tank’s maintenance hatch.

They focused on their earphones.

“As planned, please ‘clean up’ the runways, fuel storage, and anything else that could cause major damage! After that, deal with the digital threats such as the control tower and server room!!”

“We don’t know how they intend to take people’s lives, but we need to assume they are planning something big enough for a modular nuclear reactor to be mere bait! Act accordingly!”

Sugiyado Souha left shortly thereafter and shielded his eyes from the sun with a hand.

There were more people than even he had anticipated.

With so many customers stolen by the linear motor trains, the airport had remade one of its vast international flight terminals into a festival venue. There was no entrance fee and they made their money on the drinks, but that meant the place was entirely out of control. The people who could not get inside were flooding the area outside the building.

“Is this wall of people too much of a challenge for shogunate kunoichis?”

“Do not be ridiculous.”

“You wait out here, advisor.”

By the time he heard the sound of large clothes beating at the air, the twins had both stripped off their white dresses to reveal their ninja outfits made with a spider web structure.

It was like a magician’s handkerchief. The dresses twisted around and the twins’ silhouettes seemed sucked into them before they transformed into the ninja outfits with collars and belts to cover the important parts and some decorations like a large flower on the back of the hip.

Overall, they were a mixture of Japanese and Western. They looked like a sleeveless kimono with a pleated miniskirt added on. They looked as revealing as a cheerleader uniform, but the entire body would be covered by a special flesh-colored material, similar to figure skaters. …Although that was similar to wearing full-body bike shorts, so they still had to wear something on top.

It was strange, but just like with figure skaters, the short skirt was still distracting even when you knew their entire body was covered.

The girls disappeared before anyone in the crowd could turn back their way.

(Does that flesh-colored part support their movements with electric potential elastic belt cylinders? That would be Soaring Wings Ver…what’s it up to now? Regardless, that’s a lot of support. Overusing accessories like that will wear down your own cartilage.)

He could not help but start grading them.

He shook his head, exasperated with himself. That was not his role here.

There was no point in looking up into the blue sky to watch the girls leaping from rooftop to rooftop. He had his own idea of where to check.

“…”

He lifted his large scarf up over his mouth.

The cloth covering his face like a mask had been given some special decoration so it would fool facial recognition. It was not much different from the sunglasses and other commercial products to that end. It was all in how you used it.

He had never hoped to get in through the main gate stuffed full of people and he no longer had it in him to leap around between rooftops, so he made his move on the ordinary backdoor. It was of course locked, but he pulled one of his Fierce Fang air pressure kunais from the back of his hip.

(The nitrogen would be too powerful here.)

He simply stuck the sharp tip in the gap and used leverage to force off the electronic lock’s cover. Then he messed with the wiring within to get inside.

Airports seemed so spacious, but the corridors were cramped when you entered through the back.

Shirazaya Guren and Suiren seemed to think Kuhou Ouka’s group was trying to attack the airport and that the idol festival’s presence was happenstance. Sugiyado had somewhat led their thinking in that direction, but he had another idea.

(A mixed bag of idols, huh?)

A total of a 100 idol groups would take turns performing on stage. They were treated with a lot less care than with ordinary concerts where a single idol or group rented out an entire domed stadium, but this really was a mixed bag. There really were some with the “national” title who earned a billion or even ten billion yen in a year.

A modular nuclear reactor was definitely expensive, but not many people could do business with them. And that included with threats. So if you were after profit, it would be a lot better to use the reactor to get close to an idol whose value most everyone could see.

And despite their value, an entertainer was a lot less strictly guarded than a giant diamond in a museum’s glass case or a gold bar in a bank vault. It was laughable to think you could protect a diamond or gold bar if it was free to wander around town with only a few muscular bodyguards.

It pained him to think Ouka and the other three would be committing crimes purely for money, but this was a professional job at this point. Combat was not kind enough to change its result if you prayed hard enough. He had to harden his heart and assume the powder keg had already been lit back when they stole the modular nuclear reactor.

He borrowed a pamphlet from a cardboard box that probably contained excess stock, he viewed the list of participating idols, and he tapped his finger on the photo of the biggest earner there.

(Shitou Kyouka. It’s gotta be her.)

This might be a largescale idol festival with 100 groups performing, but the organizers and sponsors at the top had their own plans.

This was likely all a way to give their prize girl the trophy so they could claim she fought fair-and-square with a hundred competitors and emerged victorious. And if you ignored the fixed game that was first place, the other unknown idols did have a chance here.

Locating her was not hard.

The internal staff had welcomed that superior idol very differently from the rest. Listening in from the edge of the corridor told him a lot. She was not to be given any cold drinks before her performance, no part-timers were allowed in to play amateur paparazzi, and so on.

When Sugiyado visited her location, he did not find a dressing room.

She had been given a rehearsal booth that was the exact same size as the main stage. It was impressive. With 100 groups participating, it was hard to give them all separate rooms. Idols from the same production company were probably forced to share a room. Simply giving this one a space larger than a school gym all to herself was enough to know how much of an advantage she had been given.

The rehearsal booth was lit up by several lights powerful enough to act like heaters.

In the center of the stage stood a girl with short hair and a mostly black costume with a flashy miniskirt, small wings, and a tail. It was probably supposed to look like a demon.

That was Shitou Kyouka.

Her refreshing voice contained an odd intensity and charm that ruled this vast space even during meaningless voice training.

There was no sign of any staff in here. It was so convenient you would think she had known this was coming.

Sugiyado Souha frowned, slightly twisting the scar on the tip of his nose, and spoke.

“Who are you?”

That national someone tilted her head with microphone and stand in hand.

Everything down to her fingertips was identical to what he had seen on TV and in that pamphlet.

However.

He immediately pulled a Fierce Fang air pressure kunai from the back of his hip and threw it toward her cute little face. A hit from that special assassination weapon could pry open a tank.

Time seemed to stop and silence covered all.

Yes, the girl who was supposedly a professional idol and a combat amateur instinctually tilted her head the other way so the deadly weapon passed right by her.

He asked another question as if that came as no surprise.

“Are you planning to sing and dance looking like Shitou Kyouka?”

Yes.

Kidnapping a top idol would not mean getting paid a massive ransom. Even if her family handed over her credit card or bank information, the bank would reject any request to withdraw all the money from her account.

And no matter how valuable an idol was, she could not simply be sold for that supposed value. She was the same as the modular nuclear reactor in that sense.

So the cleverest method was to use abducted Shitou Kyouka’s body to copy her fingerprint and iris patterns. If her family could not give you access to her bank account, then you only had to disguise yourself as the idol herself.

The top idol on the stage answered him with a bewitching grin.

The microphone stand she held shook.

In the blink of an eye, she revealed a black, chrome steel gun with a grip and stock decorated like a katana. That vertically-stacked double-barrel hunting gun was known as Midnight Tempest.

He knew what that meant.

“Ouka.”

A memory meaninglessly flickered in the back of his mind.

He decided this was a form of coquetry meant to capture a target, so he forced it out of his mind. Time was flowing all the while.

She threw off the stage costume to reveal the spider web ninja outfit that seemed to proudly display the undeveloped bodylines of a middle school girl. That bodysuit revealed all of her shallow curves and it was covered by a hybrid outfit that looked like the combination of an old-fashioned sleeveless kimono and a lower-body apron. Decorative cloths blew in the wind, a red rope danced behind her hips like a cat’s tail, and long chestnut hair was worn in twintails. He recognized it all.

His thoughts immediately turned to Midnight Tempest, which could control fire, water, wind, earth, and all else and was equipped with a bayonet and a multipurpose sight that resembled binoculars. She was like an incarnation of direct fighting power, a rarity for ninjas. He took a few steps back to adjust the distance between them. It had a close-range blade and its capsule rounds could contain incendiary, freezing, electric, acidic, or adhesive materials. Taking a rush of those varied attacks head on would not be the best idea.

But then it hit him.

She was an incarnation of direct fighting power, but chestnut twintailed Kuhou Ouka had lacked the skill in disguise needed to fool a crowd of a hundred thousand and all the TV cameras.

Which meant…

“No, is that Bara!?”

As soon as he saw through the disguise, the silhouette melted once more.

The ninja outfit he now saw had an entirely different design. This one was a bodysuit worn below a flashy oiran-style kimono that left her shoulders exposed and left the ends of the large obi draping down past her knees. At 18, her bodylines were more alluring than cute. She had a large chest and a slender waist. Her fiery red hair was worn in splendid ringlet curls for a luxurious look very unlike a ninja.

But now was not the time to stare.

He could already hear the sharp sound of something like a long needle stabbing through the air.

It had not been thrown by hand.

Each of Hanasawa Bara’s ringlet curls had a powerful electromagnet woven in, for a total of 18. Each of them was a coilgun that used powerful electromagnetism to launch a metal core, similar to how a linear motor train worked.

She specialized in disguise and camouflage, so her job was to sow confusion and then assassinate the enemy with a single powerful attack.

In this case, she had used the double disguise to alter the distance between them and then destroyed the stage lighting to “increase” the number of flying weapons. It was all an issue of the focal point. If you held a finger in front of your face and then tried to look into the distance, the number of fingers would seem to increase. And adjusting the eye’s focal distance was not the only way to adjust the pupil size. It could be done against your will when the brightness of the light changed. The confusion did not even last two full seconds, but that was plenty of time when you wanted to make a projectile attack.

If he had not been familiar with her habits, it would have all ended here.

“!?”

His hand danced around before his mind could catch up.

He had drawn a new double-edged knife-like Fierce Fang from the back of his untucked short-sleeved dress shirt. He had never submitted the designs to anyone and it was a delicate enough weapon that he doubted even Ouka and the others could use it.

He took that thick, tungsten steel blade and slashed up from below to knock down the pin-like weapons flying toward his eyes. A kunai was originally a digging tool, not a projectile weapon, so it was plenty sturdy.

But that had not been the best move.

(Crap.)

He was familiar with Bara’s thorns. Her weapon was named Candy Needle. Those were special poison needles made by mixing various chemicals with melted sugar and letting them harden. They must have also had iron sand mixed in to launch them with those coilguns. If stabbed by one, your own body heat would melt it and allow it to infect you, but if you deflected one, the shattered pieces smaller than glass shards would enter your body through the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose, and mouth. Targeting his eyes had been no more than a way to get him to reflexively move his hand.

(Ghhh!?)

He immediately shut his eyes and turned his head away, but the right half of his vision immediately died. The poison was already being carried around his body after being absorbed by the mucous membranes. But he did not have time to tremble in fear. The enemy was approaching fast.

Sugiyado Souha was not the kind of guy who would let himself be killed just because he could not use one eye. He was suffering from extreme pain and fear, but on a different level, his strategic thinking continued.

(Bara uses the coilguns made from the electromagnets hidden in her hair. That means she needs a large power source – a large-capacity lithium ion battery. If I destroy that, I can bring down her strategic support system.)

Then where was her second heart?

There was only one possibility.

(That oiran-style shoulder-exposing kimono seems like it doesn’t leave much to the imagination, but just like an unzipped coat, her back is always covered. She must be using a harness or something to carry the battery pack like a backpack!!)

It might seem unrelated at first, but the way her large chest seemed lifted by something was likely due to the harness. He could tell a slight difference there compared to her usual red dress. It was like she was wearing a push-up bra.

“!!”

He forcibly cut the pain off from his mind.

He accurately launched one of his air pressure kunais into the groove between panels forming the stage floor below his student’s feet. He had already spun the dial with his thumb, so after exactly three seconds, the nitrogen activated the device and mercilessly destroyed the floor below Bara’s feet.

First, he knocked her off balance.

Once she showed her side or back to him, he would aim for and destroy the large-capacity lithium ion battery that would be hidden below her kimono and obi.

“Was that your plan, Sensei!?”

A moment later, Bara let out a roar while embracing her own body as if squishing her large chest.

Did she fold up her arms like that to avoid accidentally hitting herself?

Her 18 red ringlet curls all floated up and became cannons. She actually fired the coilguns at the floor all around her as if to add damage atop damage. The floor material burst up around her like a crater or splash.

This was not an attack from the Candy Needles that shattered upon impact. This had to be Final Cannon, thick and heavy metal needles that wove depleted uranium into well-tempered steel. Unlike the easily-shattered Candy Needles, these supplied the full power of the coilguns. But what was Hanasawa Bara’s true intent here?

(A makeshift barrier!?)

In terms of modern weapons, his Fierce Fang was similar to a precisely-aimed rocket. Instead of piercing the target like a sniper rifle, it would shred the target from within once it recognized a hit.

That made it vulnerable to obstacles. A single tree branch of leaf in the way would block the line of fire and it would shred the wrong thing.

Both sides of the fight knew each other well enough to block their tactics and ninja arts with simple tricks.

While Sugiyado’s air pressure kunai was blocked by the pieces of the floor, Bara’s Final Cannon could break through that obstacle like it was wet paper and break his entire body and her Candy Needles could weave through the gaps and inject him with powerful poison.

Normally, this would be the end – a hopeless checkmate.

However.

“Is that all you’ve got, Bara!?”

“!?”

He was not broken.

When reaching out toward a student being swallowed by the depthless darkness, his spirit would never be broken no matter how desperate his situation. He had no reason to doubt himself here. He was willing to make an enemy of the world if it would save them. He did not need to think twice to know that.

This was why he had agreed to help Shirazaya Guren and Suiren.

The situation was worsening at an accelerated rate. If it continued on to the end, they would lose everything. And here he was working to save people within it all. He felt like he was once more floundering in that nightmare where he had broken his spine, but that changed nothing about what he had to do.

He could not abandon someone he had grown so close to.

No matter what.

It was in fact his student Bara who looked shocked when faced with that willpower of steel.

He knew they would not hit his target, but he still threw a few more Fierce Fangs. They hit the flipped-up floor panels before reaching Bara, but that was fine. He used the devices to tear apart and destroy the floor material, rearranging the layout in midair. In a shape that Bara had not expected.

Her ringlet curls finally fired the Final Cannon needles of depleted uranium alloy at Mach 7.5, but it was too late.

Just as a bullet fired through glass would have its course diverted every so slightly, Bara’s Final Cannons had their paths bent by the unexpected number of obstacles in their path. They shot right past his face.

He did not even blink.

There was now a narrow empty space between them, much like the eye of a needle.

“!!”

“!?”

A Fierce Fang left the boy’s hand and poisonous Candy Needles left Bara’s hair, but the kunoichi girl would only have noticed something after launching her attack: Sugiyado Souha had lured her into making that attack.

And.

His target was not Bara who had been disguised as an idol. In fact, he could not hope to hit her body that continued its living motions even as she fired from her hair. With an eye taken out and poison in his bloodstream, it was hard to hit a target that could escape the single point of a sniper blast.

So he did to her what he had done to himself.

As soon as a Candy Needle was launched from her ringlet curl, he hit it with his kunai. From the front, that was like targeting the tip of a needle, but the ringlet curl coilgun barrel could only launch the Candy Needle straight out. The ballistic path was easy enough to predict if he already knew which way that barrel was pointed. Especially when the line of fire between them was limited by so many obstacles. That was far easier than targeting Bara herself who continued evading as if dancing.

By throwing the kunai through the open path, it naturally flew toward the Candy Needle. He only had to use the guidelines already set up for him. Unlike Bara’s flowing, living movements, this was as easy as completing a tutorial.

The shattered Candy Needle burst in front of the kunoichi and covered her small face with its small fragments.

“Ah!?”

She leaned back, unintentionally jiggled her large chest, and quickly held a hand to her face, but it was too late.

The flow of time seemed to revert to normal for both of them.

The floor materials spreading out around her like a crater or splash clattered back down.

Sugiyado cautiously pulled a Fierce Fang out into his hand as he spoke.

“Now we’re even, Bara. No, we aren’t. What are the basics of poison effects? I taught you this!”

“…”

She held her right eye and bit her lip a little before finally giving in and answering.

“It comes down to the speed of blood flow and your weight.”

“Yes. And your smaller body means it takes less to reach a lethal dose. Plus, standing under those bright spotlights must have warmed you up like a halogen heater. That means the exact same poison will spread through your body faster. This is checkmate, Bara!”

“Kh…Sensei.”

Given the poison, she needed to avoid getting worked up and thus accelerating her blood flow.

But the boy was at his limit too.

Each of the girls had their own circumstances.

He had taught them all of his secret techniques in order to give them the strength they needed to face this harsh and cruel reality without being crushed.

He had believed it would lead them to happiness.

So why was this happening?

“Then tell me this before we both collapse! Why did you do this? And where are the others!? Ouka and Hoozuki are a part of this too, aren’t they!? Where are they!?”

But in truth, he was in the more dire situation.

''I am going to teach you many things.

''Some of them will be ways to hurt and harm people.

''But if you always work toward a righteous goal, there is no fear of your knowledge and techniques getting the better of you.

That was what he had tried to teach them.

No, he ''had'' taught them that.

“Yes, Sensei. Your Ouka is over here.”

He heard a voice from behind him.

Even with the poison’s effects, he had been careless to let someone sneak up on him. Or was this a testament to their skill?

He recognized the voice.

It was Kuhou Ouka, the strange ninja who specialized in direct combat.

“…!?”

He tried to spin around like a tornado with Fierce Fang in hand, but the active-duty Elite Ninja was several times faster.

A dull pain ran through the back of his neck.

Impossible sparks filled his vision.

Once he realized he had been hit with the stock of her unique gun, he had collapsed forehead-first to the stage without bracing for impact.

“Ouka!!” shouted sexy Hanasawa Bara. But she did not sound happy to see help arrive. “Wasn’t there a better way of doing that!? Poor Sensei!!”

“Yes, I’m sorry, Sensei. Are you okay? That hurt, didn’t it?”

She gently flipped him over onto his back. He saw someone with still-growing bodylines peering down at him. He saw chestnut twintails and red ringlet curls. If not for the sinister bayonet-equipped hunting gun named Midnight Tempest and the coilguns hidden in those curls, they would have been beautiful enough to forget all about the ninja outfits and fall in love.

And.

They really did sound worried about him. They were exactly how he remembered them, but that was what made no sense here.

“You…two.”

One wore a sleeveless kimono plus lower-body apron and the other wore an oiran-style shoulder-baring kimono. They both wore bodysuits below that. Those kunoichis made no attempt to hide their ninja outfits made with a cutting-edge spider web structure. That proved they were willing to turn this city of a million into a battleground.

They had stolen a modular nuclear reactor and abducted a top idol. Those were not your average crime.

“Why are…you doing…this?”

He could barely even see while collapsed on the stage, but he still squeezed out a voice as if groping through the darkness.

“Did I…do something wrong? Tell me, Ouka, Bara.”

“Bara, hurry and give him the antidote. Anyone could get their hands on it, but the shogunate’s dogs can be careless in the weirdest ways.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am. It’s really not much more than an animal tranquilizer, so it doesn’t have a lethal limit. Oh, I’m feeling dizzy now too. That’s not good. Ouka, carry me if I pass out, okay?”

“Will do.”

They briskly made preparations just like they always did. He could not even imagine what had caused everything to go wrong.

While peering down at him, Kuhou Ouka smiled in an alluring way that did not suit her undeveloped silhouette.

“Nothing has changed, Sensei. Not for us.”

“What?”

“ ‘I am going to teach you many things. Some of them will be ways to hurt and harm people. But if you always work toward a righteous goal, there is no fear of your knowledge and techniques getting the better of you.’ Right?”

She sounded like she was begging for his praise. Almost like a puppy.

But wait. Could that mean…?

“Hold on. What are you trying to do?”

“Shitou Kyouka is a top idol who makes 10 billion yen a year. If you earn that much, you’ll get the VIP treatment in asset management. She should be immediately welcomed into the special sectors of banks and stock exchanges. It wouldn’t make sense otherwise.”

“But the shogunate will have secret external storage for any information they don’t want to keep too close by. They’ll use the excess space that not even the server administrator is aware of. That defeats the purpose of the usual security methods, but they’re afraid of rival factions learning about the skeletons in their closet.”

Based on the documents shown to him by blonde-haired Shirazaya Guren and Suiren, Sugiyado had guessed that stealing the modular nuclear reactor would cancel some other events and have the bank and stock exchange servers isolated in fear of an EMP attack. But what if those servers contained more than just money?”

“…”

He felt like his brain was tingling.

And not from the poison. He was probably subconsciously refusing to connect these hints together into an answer.

This was about information the shogunate would want to keep hidden no matter what.

And also information they would fear to keep nearby.

“Sensei.”

And his students had said they were working toward a righteous goal, just as he had taught them.

“We want to learn the truth of the final mission that led to your position being unfairly taken from you.”

“We would do anything for you, Sensei. Tch. What an embarrassing line. Stop making me say stuff like that.”

His brain froze.

Yet his heart pounded wildly like it was going to boil over and burst.

(For me?)

This, he had not even remotely expected.

(To save me?)

No. That was the one thing they could not do! Warning bells blared in his mind.

“Ouka, Bara!!”

“It isn’t just us. Hoozuki and Asagao feel the same way.”

“It’s over for me. I’ve accepted it. So you don’t have to dig this back up! No one wants that!!”

“But we can’t accept that. You can’t return to the front line because of your injuries? You can only work as an instructor now? Not a chance. I don’t know what actually happened back then, but they clearly treated you unfairly. If they hadn’t intentionally delayed your treatment, those wounds wouldn’t have been so bad! And making you an instructor wasn’t some kindness from the shogunate. It was the opposite! They didn’t know what you would say if you were given your freedom, so they surrounded you with us. I can’t think of any other explanation for every scrap of evidence we’ve seen!”

“It’s wrong for us to get all the credit. Someone else clearly deserves more praise than anyone. Isn’t that right, Sensei?”

“~ ~ ~!!”

To be honest, he was glad they cared so much for him. It helped immensely to know they remained true of heart and were not kidnapping people for money.

But they could not do this.

The darkness of that final mission was too deep.

If they got involved, not even those four Elite Ninjas would escape unharmed.

“Don’t worry.” Kuhou Ouka crouched down and gently smiled while peering down at his face. “Sensei, we won’t cause you any trouble. You report everything that happened here and continue pursuing us as an enemy. The shogunate’s dogs need some kind of assistance to keep up.”

“And it should help rattle the shogunate bigshots who have something to hide here.”

Sugiyado just about cried out in a desperate attempt to stop them, but he must have predicted that they would have slipped from his grasp before he could do anything.

“You do the honors.”

“Really? I wouldn’t hold back if I were you.”

[[Image:Kunoichis_v01_BW04.jpg|thumb]]

Kuhou Ouka laughed and took a swig from the vial that Hanasawa Bara handed her. But instead of swallowing it, she kept it in her mouth and moved her face in close. Her slender fingers pulled the scarf down from his mouth.

Her lips tasted of medicine.

The bitter liquid that flowed into his mouth dissolved the toxin wreaking havoc on his body.

“That was my first? What about for you, Sensei?”

After a short bashful pause, it was finally over.

That acted like a dividing line.

“Okay, Sensei, we will be leaving for today.”

“Once this is over, let’s have another hotpot party. We can finish it off with udon this time.”

After laying limp Sugiyado down on the stage, the two girls in cutting-edge ninja outfits stood up. They were really going to leave this time. Without Bara remaining to play the role of Top Idol Shitou Kyouka, the alert level would go up, but they must have decided staying would be too dangerous.

That meant they were moving to the next stage of their plan.

They were headed toward near certain doom.

They really would reach that final mission at this rate. If his students were headed toward the abyss, he could not just sit idly by and let it happen.

(Kh!!)

He desperately tried to reach out a hand while collapsed on the stage.

But he could not do anything.

A moment later, the girls had entirely vanished from view.

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