Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume2 Chapter4 (section)

===8: Peak of Death===

Their solid footsteps may have been their version of a starting gun. Because ordinarily, a ninja would silence their footsteps first and foremost.

That was a region of death.

They were aboard a sky fortress at an altitude of 3000m. One step over the edge would mean their death. But more than that, they were atop the bridge at the very top of the Raging Gale and that bridge was covered with enough skinny antennas to look like a bamboo thicket.

They used the antennas themselves as footing.

Sugiyado Souha and Kiritsuma Ootsumekusa.

Merely being there was reckless enough, but they also wielded deadly ninja tools.

Sugiyado Souha of course had his Fierce Fang air pressure kunais. They were installed with instant nitrogen foam cartridges that far surpassed the specs of a car’s airbag. When those forcibly opened the tungsten steel blades, they produced a maximum of 15 tons of force to pierce into and destroy their target from within. They were powerful enough to pry open a tank’s hatch.

Then there was Ootsumekusa, whose black braid swayed as she moved.

With a sound of distorting air, several metal antennas tilted diagonally after being sliced through below Sugiyado. The orange sparks blossomed only after a short delay. Ootsumekusa had no reason to provide a demonstration. Sugiyado had only managed to avoid the attack by pulling in an arm to intentionally shift his axis and give himself a spin as he leaped from one antenna to the next.

But what was slicing through those metal rods thicker than his spine?

“A sports kite!?”

“Soaring Bird. An ancient technique, right? Our teacher loves things like this.”

The sound like a broken flute had to be either carbon nanotube or cellulose nanofiber. Whatever it was, it had to be a special fiber made from carbon, not a simple metal. The ultra-thin wire was drawn taut and sliced through the air. She manipulated a highly optimized kite at this high altitude to send the wire wherever she wanted in order to sever Sugiyado’s head.

This was different again from a kusarigama or a whip. Nor did it wrap around his neck or catch on his legs from behind like a wire weapon normally would. Even severing wires normally had to catch on something like a tree branch or road sign, but this Soaring Bird didn’t need even that. The sports kite acted as the other end and it was flying wildly in the wind, so the wire was in constant motion.

The backs of Ootsumekusa’s hands were covered by metal tools.

The bending portions of the constantly-moving kite string all acted as solid blades. It would slice through anything it tangled around. That meant the Soaring Bird was a lot like an invisible sword dozens of meters long. In a group battle, it held the possibility of slicing horizontally through the entire enemy army.

Of course, ninjas could make anything into their weapon or tool. That was why a lot of ninja tools were things easily acquired on site, like grass sickles and kitchen knives.

Sugiyado was familiar with kites being used as ninja tools, but never as a weapon. As a ''practical'' ninja tool, they could be sent up as a signal when smoke signals couldn’t be used because fire wasn’t available. Or a camera and cable could be attached to one to use it as an air surveillance drone when you couldn’t afford to send out any wireless signals.

(Things have been evolving without me noticing. Nothing ever stays the same in the ninja world!)

“Sh!!”

“Your breath is escaping. You’re past your prime. I was hoping to show off my skill to please our teacher, so give me more to work with here.”

He was pursued by the husky voice muffled by the dust mask.

They used the blowing wind to change directions in midair.

Sugiyado and Ootsumekusa both soared through the frigid sky, taking unnatural courses a simple thrown ball could never emulate.

But in that short exchange, she had predicted his issue and pointed it out with as little action as possible. It was possible she had noticed the springs in his legs and bolts in his spine.

She sliced through all of the antennas standing in her way. The cuts were sharp and Sugiyado concluded it was best not to land on them. When a weight of 5kg felt funny and 10kg caused an explosion of pain, it was safest if he did not include metal armor in the soles of his shoes.

Thus, he took a different approach while soaring through the air.

He landed on one of the few parabolic antennas sticking up like a morning glory flower with its support pillar seemingly tangled in vines and he leaped from there. He performed a flip to avoid the attacking wire and flew toward a rodlike antenna sticking out horizontally.

He heard the parabolic antenna and its tangled pillar sliced through behind him.

Ootsumekusa hadn’t been slow to react there. The support pillar thicker than a telephone pole tilted toward him, scattering lots of high voltage sparks as it went.

The unpredictable wire was now joined by dazzling sparks. Sugiyado had thought he was analyzing the situation and escaping, but this told him he was being led around.

A dull clang interrupted.

That was Murakami Michihiko, but not his metal flute. He had more or less tackled the falling remnants of the parabolic antenna to knock them out of the way. The bright sparks were hidden and Sugiyado’s vision returned.

“You aren’t going to complain if we make this two against one, are you?”

“You are a ninja. I doubt you are giving me the accurate number.”

From Sugiyado’s position on the horizontal antenna, he could see Oniyuri and Princess Karin running parallel to them, jumping between different spherical doppler radars and convex transmission parabolic antennas.

A ship this size had a few antenna towers alongside the central bridge and steel ropes thicker than Sugiyado’s arm ran between them. Plenty of sensors and radars were attached to those. A lot like the flags strung up at a school athletics festival.

Ootsumekusa was aware of all that, but she still spoke through her dust mask.

“And that is fine with me. I have no reason to use only my physical body to fight.”

The sports kite’s ultra-thin wire sliced unnaturally through the air to approach. But that wasn’t the true threat of the Soaring Bird.

“Murakami!!” shouted Sugiyado before even jumping from the horizontal antenna rod to some other footing.

It was too late.

With a dull thud, the young man’s curled-up body wobbled in midair like he had been tackled. There were more than 3000m up, so a careless misstep would mean death.

“Drones,” announced Kiritsuma Ootsumekusa with a smile.

There was a silhouette much like a model plane more than halfway crushed by its own weight and speed. It was scattering lightweight materials, like aluminum or polycarbonate, but it had to be fairly sturdy. Think of it like a meter-long piece of metal flying in at 300 or 400 km/h – two or three times the speed of a professional pitcher’s fastball. Even with the protection of special ninja equipment using a spiderweb structure, you couldn’t take a hit like that too many times. Sugiyado was nearly defenseless, so even one hit would kill him.

The husky female voice spoke again with her black braid swaying.

Ootsumekusa had her feet atop an infrared jammer resembling a lighthouse.

“Soaring Bird is a based on a sports kite, but the winds will not always be favorable. But that only means I need the ability to alter the winds themselves.”

She wasn’t talking about controlling the weather over a large area. If she only needed to alter the wind direction within a radius of 100m, artificial walls would suffice. This was a phenomenon and technique seen frequently enough in building winds, windbreaks, and frost-protection coverings.

Several drones flew in circles around Ootsumekusa. She was like a queen bee. The kunoichi who covered the bottom of her face with a mask to give herself an even greater imagined beauty whispered from atop the central ship’s infrared jammer.

“Now, come for me. We have always been an army.”

This kunoichi had offered her love across the boundary between man and machine. She may have felt more comfortable with masses of metal and silicon watching her back than a flesh-and-blood ninja.

“Kh.”

Sugiyado needed to rethink his plan.

He threw an air pressure kunai from atop the horizontal antenna rod. Destroying the high-speed drone was meaningless since its wreckage would still be rushing toward Murakami Michihiko. So instead, Sugiyado hit the unbalanced young man’s right shoulder to send him spinning along a different course.

The drone just barely missed him while flying with the force of a lightning strike.

“Princess Karin, help out Murakami!!”

“Don’t expect me to thank you for that, insolent fool!!”

Princess Karin shouted back while jumping down from one steel rope of sensors to a lower one in order to collect her secret husband.

(That’s two. I need to do something later about the kunais that fell to the ground so far below.)

Sugiyado didn’t have time to watch what happened with the young man and woman.

He jumped from the horizontal antenna rod to one of the thick steel ropes containing so many sensors.

The Brown Bear made her own move in the meantime.

She had her sports kite and the drones that looked a like model airplanes. And the long blade made from the taut wire hadn’t disappeared from the stage either.

Sugiyado had used up a beat to redirect Murakami’s body. That allowed the Soaring Bird’s deadly wire to get that much closer to Sugiyado’s torso as he stood on that suspension bridge. As sharp as that thing was, it didn’t matter if it hit his vitals or not. No matter where it hit him, it would slice right through and then this battle was over.

Sugiyado responded by throwing an air pressure kunai.

It was easily deflected and the wire blade capable of slicing through a bomber hit Sugiyado in the side of the hip.

“Gh!?”

But.

The groan did not come from the boy.

It came from Ootsumekusa who was operating the wire.

“Why didn’t it cut you!?”

“Try to figure that out yourself. Are you really going to say ‘I don’t know’ in front of your favorite teacher?”

Sugiyado leaped to the side and landed on the lightning rod attached to the support pillar for the steel ropes. While making sure to dodge out of the way of the drones trying to tackle him from a blind spot.

To Kiritsuma Ootsumekusa, the state of her trump card mattered more than the apparent state of the overall battle. She gently shook Soaring Bird’s entire wire. The slight vibration traveled along the wire like a tin can telephone, but the wire made a cracking sound at one point.

She glanced down at the spool covering the backs of her hands and then spoke from behind her dust mask.

“You froze it? You used the same method as blood or oil on a sword.”

“An altitude of more than 3000m is about the same as Mount Fuji. By placing just a bit of moisture on the tip of the kunai and hitting the wire, it isn’t hard to freeze. Also, skiing and skating don’t work so smoothly because you are on ice. You can only slide like that because of the thin layer of water created from the friction melting the surface.”

He didn’t need to freeze the entire length of Soaring Bird’s wire. And freezing just the point that was likely to contact him wasn’t difficult.

He jumped from the lightning rod back to the sensors and said more to Ootsumekusa while running along that elevated space that was too unreliable to even call a suspension bridge.

But…

“This gives me a defense against your wire. And if the same method can always stop an attack, then it isn’t worthy of being called a ninja technique.”

“Kh.”

“But what about you? Can you kill me by repeating the same thing? If you can’t, then I can close in on you and eventually find a chance to throw a kunai.”

She still swung the sports kite. But while running aft from the bridge, Sugiyado didn’t stay focused on the wire he knew how to deal with.

(If she was foolish enough to try the same thing again after that, she wouldn’t have survived this long.)

Several invisible attacks approached from multiple angles, masked by the obvious sound of the wire. That was probably air. The drones flying around the area were ninja tools capable of locally altering the direction of the wind. If used correctly, they would be able to transform ordinary air into a gust so powerful it felt like a physical blow or even a sharp vacuum blade.

“!!”

The thick steel rope carrying the sensors was suddenly sliced through. Sugiyado couldn’t afford to fall with it, so he jumped to a thin support pillar.

Something had happened.

And it wasn’t over yet.

Accurately dodging every one of these attacks wasn’t possible.

The Fierce Fang air pressure kunais couldn’t shoot down vacuum blades and rupturing the instant nitrogen foam cartridges could only do so much. Not to mention that he only knew she was making some invisible attacks here. He wasn’t confident he knew how many were left and where they were.

Ootsumekusa really was Ootsumekusa.

She was the kunoichi who stood at the top of the secretive Brown Bears. It would be one thing if he had time to think up a countermeasure, but in a one-on-one fight with no preparation time, she could repel even a former Hidden One like Sugiyado Souha.

Which was why Sugiyado didn’t hesitate to give up on that.

He shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Oniyuri, a little help!!”

“Don’t make me wait so long next time, Instructor.”

He heard sweet, bewitching laughter reminiscent of the smell of rotting fruit.

A moment later, an explosion blasted away the frozen air at an altitude of 3000m. But instead of red, it was pure white, like a blowtorch.

It occurred higher up than Sugiyado.

While rattling the high-altitude sky, Oniyuri floated with no footing below her feet like some kind of mirage.

“You’ve heard of hot-air balloons, I assume. The heat of flames has been used to alter the density of air and create lift for hundreds of years. And the latest technology can take that principle to this level. You can’t defeat me with an air hammer, vacuum blade, or any other silly trick.”

Oniyuri whispered while gently coming alongside Sugiyado without landing on anything herself.

Ootsumekusa clenched her teeth while using one hand to grab onto the dangling sensors.

“A plasma jet.”

“Yes, a mass of 6000 kelvins, more than three times the temperature of a blast furnace. Around the same as the surface of the sun, I believe. True ninja techniques do not need the assistance of natural phenomena. You need to tear down the natural environment and replace it with your own.”

Sugiyado Souha and Sagami Oniyuri.

They both landed on the narrow supporting pillar for the moment.

They were both Hidden Ones, a rank beyond even the Elite Ninjas at the top of the official rankings.

They held nothing back.

If Ootsumekusa managed to survive this, it would in fact boost the Brown Bears brand considerably. Their mechanical teacher’s plan to break their spirits and get them to surrender would fail miserably.

“Controlling the air means more than neutralizing your hammer and vacuum blades,” announced the boy.

“Oh, no.”

By the time something occurred to Ootsumekusa, it was too late.

“Oniyuri, destroy that sports kite disturbing the air. Ootsumekusa can’t wield that ultra-thin wire without it!!”

This was a high-risk, high-return situation for both Sugiyado and Ootsumekusa. If the Brown Bears’ strongest kunoichi was defeated in secret, the rest would lose their will to fight. But if Ootsumekusa emerged victorious after all this, it would encourage the Brown Bears.

Killing them would be the only way to stop them.

But Sugiyado Souha jumped to the same string of sensors as Ootsumekusa and charged toward her while she tried to keep her distance.

The battle was fought on the metal ropes and sensors strung up high in the sky.

Metal loudly clashed with metal.

The parts on the back of Ootsumekusa’s hands had looked like a spool and controller for the ultra-thin wire, but they also protected her hands like knuckledusters. They were a type of emeici or wind-and-fire wheels. She wasn’t broken yet. She could still win by smashing Sugiyado’s skull with a cross counter.

One sent out an air pressure kunai on the right and the other sent out a fist on the left.

But they had to focus on their opponent’s other weapon.

No…

“Down, Soaring Bird!!”

Atop the sensors lined up like athletic festival flags, the husky voice erupted from behind the dust mask.

A high-speed drone reinforced with aluminum or polycarbonate dropped toward Sugiyado’s head like lightning. Oniyuri was interrupting the air hammers and vacuum blades, but she could not negate the weight and speed of the drones themselves.

A dull clang rang out.

A hammer on the end of a long string swung around to gain speed and crashed into the high-speed drone.

“I can’t believe I had to go out of my way to save that insolent fool!!”

Princess Karin was shouting resentfully on some footing a level below them, but she was free. She needed full use of both hands to swing her hammer like that.

So.

Where was Murakami Michihiko who she had been assisting?

“Tch!!”

Ootsumekusa clicked her tongue. Her right fist, protected by the knuckleduster-like ninja tool, had been stopped by someone else. Specifically, by a metal flute. A weapon that looked a lot like a metal pipe had been forcibly shoved in the way.

“Weren’t you listening?” said the young man from close up. “I asked if you weren’t going to complain if we make this two against one!!”

Teeth-clenched Michihiko’s return must have been a surprise. The Brown Bears’ strongest kunoichi hadn’t meant all that much with her voice command to the mechanical drone. She had only wanted to distract Sugiyado long enough to smash him with her fist.

But she had been stopped.

And the battle advanced to the next move.

Ootsumekusa’s air hammers, vacuum blades, high-speed drone tackles, and even her two fists had been stopped.

But the same couldn’t be said for Sugiyado Souha.

His right air pressure kunai had been stopped by Ootsumekusa’s fist, but he had another. He still had the Fierce Fang in his left hand.

“Goodbye, Kiritsuma Ootsumekusa.”

“Kh.”

A certain old man had shown him the solution.

He had been framed for a government official’s crime and received unwarranted criticism, but he had used that to preserve the peace.

He may have lost his life at the hands of the Brown Bears, but even as he died, he had said nothing about that crime. He had held his tongue and taken it with him. He had only left behind hope for his grandson.

That Sugiyado could carry on.

The series of events set off by that old man’s death had to end here and like this.

“Ninjas don’t do things like those classy samurai. So get a little dirty and save everyone with your defeat!!”

In order to knock her out through her bulletproof gear, he sent the full power of his air pressure kunai into the brutal kunoichi’s chest.

“I…” A faint muffled voice came from behind the dust mask. “I only…wanted to create a meager home…for our teacher.”

The black braid girl slumped forward.

They were on an unstable array of sensors above a 3000m drop toward New Sapporo.

But Sugiyado’s back wouldn’t let him carry the defeated kunoichi.

That was a cruel but absolute rule.

The boy slowly exhaled.

And he spoke.

“Oniyuri, you carry her.”

“You’re too kind, Instructor.”

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