Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume2 Chapter2 (section)

===3: Target===

The following morning arrived.

You might think of ninjas as working in the shadows of the night, but they would operate in the light of day as well. They would act whenever necessary, they would get enough rest to ensure their top performance, and they would always make sure to remain inconspicuous.

However…

“What the hell? Who is this?”

Sugiyado lightly slapped his hand at something soft near his face.

“Ahn, that’s my butt, Sensei.”

“…”

“By the way, if you turn the other way, you’ll be burying your face in Hoozuki’s chest. Who, I might add, is currently borrowing one of your shirts.”

“Bara? And Hoozuki too?”

“There’s no real time limit for dealing with that old man’s case, is there? So why not take a bit of a detour for some pink and milky-white fun with us?”

“I trusted you to not be like this, but maybe I should rethink relying on you here.”

Four figures scrambled from his bed as quickly as they could manage. They all sat down in a row on the wooden flooring. Those students knew how to tell when Sugiyado Souha was willing to put up with some joking and when he was not.

[[Image:Kunoichis_v02_BW03.jpg|thumb]]

Bara wore a negligee, Ouka wore pastel pajamas, and they all gave each other cautious looks.

“You disgusted him with the horribly cliché choice to use your chest.” (Bara)

“Using your butt seems worse to me. I mean, that’s your lower body.” (Hoozuki)

“The worst one was Ouka. She climbed headfirst under the covers and fell asleep with her face between his legs. And that was very much intentional on her part.” (Asagao)

“Hey, don’t act all pure yourself, Asagao. We all know why you’re wearing those over-the-top panda costume PJs.” (Ouka)

Nothing he said seemed to get through to them.

Technically speaking, they were his ''former'' students and were now independent Elite Ninjas. Responding to this oddity in New Sapporo Domain was the expected response for spies who served the Shogunate, so there was no real reason for them to do so under his command. In fact, they could earn a lot of points if they bound him and threw him back into Abashiri’s special prison (even if they were the ones who had broken him out in the first place).

He could not forget that this was not the expected situation. It only worked thanks to so much kindness on their part.

“Now, then.”

Letting that show would only make the kunoichis more self-conscious, so he casually kept it hidden while he too left the bed. He wanted to check on something before he took a shower.

A Fount of Knowledge, a complex device hooked up to various communication devices, sat on the living room’s glass table.

“Let’s see how much this has gathered.”

“Wait, Sensei! Let me use the Fount!”

Asagao hopped to her feet and followed after him. That seemed to restore the flow of time for the other girls because they began to move as well.

Staying focused at all times during an important mission would only lead to burnout. They needed to get a set amount of rest at set times, but anyone who had been up all night worrying about something would know that was much easier said than done. People tended to fall out of their usual rhythm and routine on important days or when not allowed a single mistake. And the effect was greatest when their own life or someone close to them’s life was on the line.

But it was also true that shutting your eyes and falling asleep would cause time to pass.

It was a waste to not use that time to accomplish something.

That was why Sugiyado had altered his phone’s settings to have the device automatically gather information while he was resting. It did not take all that much intelligence to use a crawler to gather data like you were pulling a drain plug in the vast ocean of the internet.

Extremely small Asagao licked her lips as she checked on the device.

“Mechanical data harvesting is fairly indiscriminate, so you end up with a lot. There’s a bit of a trick to filtering the results, so just leave that to me.”

“You make it sound complicated, but isn’t it similar to knowing the best search terms to narrow down the results on a search engine?” asked an exasperated Ouka, but Asagao did not seem remotely bothered.

They were most interested in the core of Princess Karin’s electrical infrastructure, but they were not going to find a specifications document just sitting out there on the open internet.

Still, there were other hints to be found.

The Stonewalls.

The central members of Amamo, Yukizasa, and Oume.

New Sapporo Domain’s classified server had been tampered with to hide those terms, so they held great meaning.

“Here we go.” Asagao seemed to be enjoying herself. “They’re doing a lot to hide their names, but they’ve transported a few cargo containers to different locations. This says they contain…electronic garbage like computers and phones.”

“So pure gold in another form?”

“If you know a little ‘alchemy’, you can get a fair bit from the circuit boards and semiconductors. Since they aren’t crossing the ocean, there’s no need to make payments over fiberoptic where the deal might be discovered.”

“Where are they sending the gold bars in trash form?”

Sugiyado reached over to touch the screen. Asagao twisted her body to complain, but he ignored that.

“The Teine Workshop District in New Sapporo Domain.”

“None of this is concrete.”

Bara was right.

And you could not take their skill in this field lightly. Places like this contained technology even more advanced than global corporations. Modern ninjas like them were pros at preventing the theft of technology by foreign states. They could not exactly do their job without knowing where that technology was found.

In fact, their ninja noses were telling them something here.

Had this been intentionally organized as a collection of small workshops instead of a single major corporation or laboratory so it would not stand out in the paperwork?

It would not be unusual for each individual workshop to be smaller than a convenience store or gas station, but they would cover a 5km square of land when all brought together. If they were all working together as a single large entity instead of competing for survival, then that would be a productive facility with incredible power.

“Is it like taking a skyscraper, cutting apart each division, and spreading those out along the ground, Sensei?”

They used slow-melting artificial snow as an environmental defense policy, two strategic antiaircraft lasers towered up on the outskirts, four 900mm rapid-fire railguns and a moat full of electrolyte liquid sensors protected the castle, and a since-abandoned linear motor train network could be found underground.

This frigid land had large areas of empty space, so the Shogunate’s usual defensive theories did not apply. But who had done R&D on all the equipment used to defend this northern land?

In the modern age, civilian satellite services could be used to search through even the most remote areas of the world, so building a secret base deep in the mountains was meaningless.

However…

“It’s all white, Sensei.”

As Ouka leaned up against him to peer at (Asagao’s) phone, he viewed the satellite and analyzed what he saw.

“That’s probably the artificial snow, but there sure is a lot of it even for the area around New Sapporo Domain. That much seems like it would be a strain on the building rooftops.”

The slow-melting artificial snow was used as an environmental defense.

The idea was for it to slow the advance of an Imperial army arriving from overseas, but that was all hypothetical. Hindering the people’s lives for that would entirely defeat the purpose. And yet there it all was. The thick layer of snow did more than color the image white. It also appeared to obstruct measurements made with infrared and microwave.

Sugiyado chose his words with careful attention to where he was steering the conversation.

“If they’re deploying so much of that ‘defense’, is that some kind of crucial location?”

It only looked like a working class area of plain workshops, but it was actually the same as a company town that controlled the finances of an entire giant automobile factory or semiconductor manufacturer.

“Whether she goes to the Shogunate, the Empire, a company, or a university, Princess Karin thinks relying on someone else for her power means handing them her Achilles heel. That means she will have her own technology division to keep that Achilles heel in her grasp.”

“Is that what this is?” asked Bara.

“It might not look it, but I bet that place has the strictest security. Probably about as difficult as sneaking into an international corporations’ HQ.”

A new electrical system was being set up to recover their defensive infrastructure.

It had to be the equivalent of more than 10 nuclear reactors.

The system used might or might not be dangerous, but Princess Karin and the Stonewalls had at the very least killed one person at Abashiri’s special prison, poisoned the domain lord, and stolen New Sapporo Domain’s authority. Things would not have progressed this far if their reasons were something anyone would accept if they simply explained them.

It would be well worth investigating this (giant strategic military research institute disguised as a) workshop district. Whatever Princess Karin was ultimately thinking, nipping this new electrical system in the bud would mean grasping the Achilles heel of the Stonewalls who had taken over New Sapporo Domain and held great influence over the entire Hokkaido Area.

“Let’s work out a concrete plan,” said Sugiyado. “We don’t have much time.”

“Checking back in time, there are a few facial recognition readings.” Asagao snatched back her phone. “The Stonewalls are hiding their faces to an extent, but they aren’t perfect. Now, I think they’re skilled enough to do a better job, but they get lazy because they know Princess Karin can cover for them.”

“Does that mean one of the other three are defending the shopping district?”

“They appear to be working on a rotation, Sensei. I can’t tell if there’s a schedule or if it’s randomized, but using the most straightforward pattern, I know who will probably be next.”

Perhaps because Asagao herself used her youth as a weapon, she did not hold back the cruel smile as she revealed this information.

“Taganuma Yukizasa. As the youngest, she uses her light weight and short limbs to specialize in combat in closed and dark spaces.”