Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume2 Chapter1 (section)

===4: The Kunoichi Back Home===

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Now, what was Hanasawa Bara doing during all this?

“Hm, hm, hmm.”

The splashing of warm water echoed through the bath.

It was an indoor bath, but it was a natural hot spring. Bara usually preferred to pour in some Western aroma oil for a more relaxing experience, but a hot spring was not bad every now and then. The cypress bathtub gave the cloudy bathwater a unique and indescribable aroma.

But she could not relax in here forever.

A timer emitted a crude electronic tone.

“Hm? I suppose it is about time.”

The cloudy bathwater parted and she walked to the dressing room in the nude.

It was easy to assume she did everything in the most luxurious way possible, but she actually preferred a standard towel fabric to a fancy silk one. That texture was one of the few joys she had encountered ''after the fall of her family''. It may have been similar to Sugiyado Souha’s love of Happy Churn.

The sexy girl gently grabbed a towel and dried off in front of a large mirror that reflected her full body. She always used two towels to dry off. The first she used on her face, her large chest, and her hips. Then she grabbed a new towel to dry off her arms, legs, and back.

She did it all in front of the mirror for much the same reason as a pro dancer.

The way she moved her body and shifted her weight had a large influence on her sex appeal. She liked to practice various actions and judge herself on them on a daily basis so she was always cognizant of how she looked doing different things.

After thoroughly drying herself off, she donned a special flesh-colored material that clung to her skin, much like the skintight material that figure skaters wore to stay warm. It was a cutting-edge piece of equipment that used a spider web structure to defend against bullets and blades and that used a combination of electric-potential-elastic belt cylinders and chemical winches made from a high-polymer water-absorbing gel. She put on ordinary underwear over that. There was actually no real reason she had to wear that, but humans were easily influenced by their imagination. Obvious underwear worked better at distracting the enemy than something that blended in with her flesh.

A normal kunoichi would normally finish it off by putting on the outer portion of her ninja outfit, but Bara was not your normal kunoichi. She needed another step in between.

She had something to attach to her lower back.

A mass of synthetic fabric larger than a pouch and smaller than a backpack more or less sat atop her large butt. Needless to say, that was the battery pack for the Serpent Monster coilguns hidden in her hair. Over that, she put on an oiran-style kimono that left her shoulders bare. Leaving the front of the kimono open helped hide the fact that the kimono and the knot of its sash were being used to hide the lump on her lower back. Finally, she stuck her phone into her cleavage. For a ninja, information was more important a weapon than blades or bullets.

Her hair was still a little damp and she did not have time to use a hairdryer, but it was not enough for her lovely ringlet curls to be squashed flat.

Her red hair doubled as the barrels for her coilguns. She had a wire-like framework installed through her hair to provide the optimal distribution for the solenoid coils.

“Hm, hm, hm, hm.”

She hummed as she left the dressing room. She sniffed at her kimono and hair to enjoy the lingering scent of the hot spring. Her bare feet slapped against the floor as she walked through a large indoor space with (her ultra-thin ninja outfit making it look like) her skin was flushed pink even along the line of her nape. She made her way to a room detached from the main building. It was a metal box larger than a one-room apartment.

“How are you feeling?”

She opened the metal double doors and asked a mocking question.

The space was shaped like a long rectangle and a closer examination would have shown it was a large cargo container. There was also someone imprisoned within, but no one could tell that from the outside.

A professional would not be so terrified of leaving behind any hairs or fingerprints that they used a powerful stain remover to get rid of all bloodstains on the walls and floor after every single job. Once their objective was complete, they would crush the entire container and toss it in a blast furnace to eliminate all the evidence. It was simple, easy, and thorough. A ninja’s tools of the trade had to be 100% reliable.

A single chair sat in that space surrounded by metal walls, but it was not for Bara.

The chair was bolted directly to the floor and it was equipped with a few belts that were strapping a man to the chair like he was just another component of the chair.

The man’s head had slumped to the side.

Bara roughly grabbed his hair and shook his head side to side, but he did not react in any way. Much like a houseplant someone had forgotten to water.

Again, there was no chair in here for Bara.

If she only needed to kill some time, she could do so outside the container.

She was not the type to spend much time on this sort of thing and she did not act any more cruelly than necessary. All she did was mechanically extract all of the information they needed. No more and no less. Although that made her feared for a different reason.

She let go of the man’s filthy hair, circled to the front of the chair, bent her knees, and shined a penlight into his eyes. His breathing was normal, but his eyes did not dilate like they were supposed to. That kind of physiological reaction could not be suppressed even with self-hypnosis.

This was the polar opposite of the pleasant towel texture.

The man had ended up like this because of the perfectly ordinary white cloth tape attached to his neck and chest.

(This itch tape is based on the hairy caterpillars that gather on rose hedges, but it worked even better than I expected. But it affects different people so wildly differently that you need to run an “allergy test” first. Expose them to it for too long and it might destroy their psyche.)

Since this topic was so risky, Sugiyado had not taught it through online video lessons like he had with everything else. Sleep deprivation, overwork, weights, ice, smoke, needles, blunt impacts, joint pressure, water buckets, electricity, drugs, and more. Bara had experienced and overcome a wide variety of torture methods at the hands of her instructor in the name “anti-torture training”, but all she had learned was that humans were not built to endure these specialized techniques – a simple fact that your average kid off the street already knew. With unlimited time to work with, anyone would reveal everything they knew sooner or later, or they would die before doing so. According to her instructor, Bara’s face had been a mess of tears and snot while she trembled and begged for her life despite knowing it was only training. Why did she only know this secondhand when it was about her? Because during all the trembling and convulsing, she had passed out more times than she remembered and she could not seem to coherently piece together what fragmentary memories still remained with her. …She thought her face would burst into flames from embarrassment when she thought about the fact that he must have cleaned her up after she made such a mess of herself in that closed room.

Thus, torture countermeasures were less about whether you could endure what was being done to you and more about how you could get the torturer to stop. Taking control of whoever was in charge was the top priority. You could make a plea to their emotions to get them to break with their side, you could set a fire or cause a power outage to let your companions know where you were, you could amplify the guilt so the torturer could not maintain their mental stability, or you could intentionally let yourself be badly wounded to destabilize your vitals. There were countless methods.

So.

Bloodless torture methods were a lot safer and more beneficial for the people hoping to get information out of someone. Even professional soldiers could come down with PTSD, so capturing someone and unilaterally harming them was not necessarily “safe”. But if things were managed in a digital, numerical, and emotionless way, you did not have to worry about being shaken yourself. Of course, Bara was the type to be shaken here if this man claimed to have a sick sister or a is girlfriend who was taken hostage.

She crossed her arms and lifted up her large chest while asking a question much like an overbearing doctor.

This was one of the people who attacked the Abashiri special prison.

“I have a question. What is your name?”

“Sarutobi Ryugo.”

“What is your real name?”

“Tanaka Haruo.”

Just like when you did not get the answer you wanted from a search engine or AI speaker, she repeated her question slower and more clearly and got the information she was after as easily as pulling it from a drawer.

This was all ninjas were.

The exciting legends and genealogies of famous ninja families were all camouflage meant to hide the truth. There was no actual ninja family of Sarutobi. The word “ninja” was widely known, but no one knew what they really were or what they really did and no one tried to dig too deeply into those questions. The general public image of ninjas derived from entertainment was all a bluff that did not come close to showing what real ninjas were like and existed to give real ninjas an easier time of doing their jobs. There were ninjas who specialized in infiltrating acting troupes and film studios to influence how ninjas were portrayed. It was an official duty of theirs, but one they had to keep hidden.

Hanasawa Bara’s real name was not Hanasawa Bara.

She had abandoned her old name with the fall of her family.

“I would like to know about your organization. Who are they?”

“Mountain.”

“More specifically.”

“The Nobushi.”

She got an answer, but she still clicked her tongue. The time lag before he answered had been off. Despite the many stimulations tormenting him, there should have been some hesitation.

(Is this a detour? Am I being directed into an intentional labyrinth?)

“Again, who do you belong to?”

“Sea.”

“I said to be specific.”

“The Pirate Gunners.”

As expected, he gave a different answer this time. And she doubted either of them was accurate. He had been given a few “insurance” stories that were false but would be convincing enough to satisfy the questioner enough that they stopped the torment.

This man was a disposable pawn recruited on site.

Getting any useful information out of him had been unlikely from the beginning, but she had not expected it to be this hopeless.

(On the other hand.)

She looked away from the man’s face and toward the phone she pulled from her cleavage. It was gathering a variety of data – brainwaves, heartrate, perspiration, body temperature, eyeball movement, facial muscles, etc. – but all of it said this man felt ''confident''. Whatever he had been told in advance, once he was captured by the enemy and separated from his organization, he should have been filled with distrust and beginning to wonder if he should really continue to obey them.

(I doubt this is just him being a particularly tough guy. Someone must have filled him with this abnormal confidence. But how could they do it so well so quickly and who would specialize in that method?)

Bara sensed someone else’s control at work here. Would an amateur taken in for a single job really trust the parent organization so strongly? She might find a hint to the enemy’s identity there.