Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter3 (section)

===4: Buried Ninja Sword===

After transferring to a different vehicle in an underground parking garage, they arrived at Sugiyado Souha’s apartment in an ordinary car.

He had been accepted onto their side, so he would be sleeping in that tanker truck from now one. But first, he needed to pack a bag with clothes and whatnot.

He gave a self-deprecating smile while propping himself up on the shoulder of Suiren, one of the twins in white dresses with bold slits.

“So this place was already being monitored, huh?”

“Yes. But only by other spies. Do not worry; none of those samurai were spying on you.”

“Ha ha. Yeah, I don’t want to see one of them hiding behind the vending machine.”

Guren went in ahead of them to make sure the place was safe and then the other two entered the rundown room.

It felt so terribly nostalgic now.

It was a lot like returning home from a trip. The furniture was in the same place and the amount of dirty laundry had not changed, but it did not smell like home.

“I checked around, but there is an awful lot of laundry and trash bags piled up in here.”

It had gotten this bad in just the few days since Ouka and the others had cleaned up for him.

“This cluttered world is unbefitting of an instructor. You will be away from home for a while, so it would be best to clean this up now.”

He was just about to beg them not to expect much from a guy living on his own, but then the twin kunoichis got to work on the towering mountain range themselves.

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“Hold on. I can’t have shogunate spies do this kind of work for me.”

“Our duty is to fulfill whatever task is required of us, regardless of what it entails.”

“Oh? What is this? Um, a value pack of Happy Churn???”

“Oh, if you ladies are not prepared for the difficult path that awaits you, I recommend stopping here. You must keep strong or you will be dragged into the abyss before you know it. Don’t blame me if you try one and are addicted for life.”

Meanwhile, they split into a trash bag team and a laundry team and got to work. Having those composed girls emitting a silent pressure while observing what brand of underwear he wore was unbelievably awkward, but he had been placed on the trash bag team. He could not approach them, so he could not use his ninja techniques to surreptitiously obstruct their work.

“Garbage pickup is tomorrow morning, but we cannot wait until then. We can report a tree branch cut down on the roadside out front and have them send in a truck now.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

Eliminating those mountains made the space feel a lot bigger.

He was reminded of how Kuhou Ouka, Hanasawa Bara, and the others had paid him a surprise visit, rudely said he would get sick living in a place like this, and cleaned everything up for him.

Also, the better view of the room had brought something into view.

A sword in a black scabbard and wrapped over and over by a very long decorative cloth sat in a corner of the room. Unlike ordinary Japanese swords, this one had no curve.

Instead of simply cutting down an enemy, it could be used to create footholds while climbing tall fences, it could be used as a grappling hook for scaling walls by unwrapping the cloth that had a weight at the end, and it could be held out ahead in the dark to check for obstacles.

Shirazaya Guren gulped, sighed, and spoke in an impressed tone.

“Is that a ninja sword?”

“It’s called Salvation & Punishment. It’s too much for me now, but I never had a chance to get rid of it. I’ve just kind of held onto to it even though I have no use for it.”

“That alone shows how much you once relied on it. I see nothing to be ashamed of there.”

Normal(?) ninja swords were made shorter than the average Japanese sword for easier use indoors, but this one was actually longer than average. All of his personal idiosyncrasies must have been woven into its design. It was obvious to everyone that he was fond of the blade.

Guren narrowed her eyes while carrying the last trash bag to the front door.

“Can I ask your story?” said Sugiyado while leaning against the wall.

“It is not a pleasant one.” She toyed with her beautiful blonde hair and let out a slow breath. “We were in an airplane crash. We never had any business with this isolationist country, but once we were swept onto the shore here, we had no choice but to stand on our own two feet. Fortunately, we had talent. Talent at hiding in the shadows and laying out strategies. That has allowed us to avoid the horrors that you heard the samurai mention.”

“…”

“I will not lay all blame at the feet of this era or this nation’s system. There are times when I am so engrossed in a mission that I forget all else. I have enjoyed using the shogunate’s power to act as the hunter. Some of those we have hunted down were blonde-haired girls younger than me. But this is the life we wanted because it suits us. That is all there is to it.”

It was true that most everyone who dedicated themselves to the shadows had some kind of circumstances leading them in that direction. Sugiyado Souha did and so did his students.

But there was something different about Shirazaya Guren’s story that she told with a tremor in her small throat.

They had not chosen this.

The bracelets on the sisters’ wrists likely tracked their location.

It was like they were given money and forced to make more and more high-rate, high-risk gambles with it, but if they screwed up and ended up in the red just once, they would be sold off themselves. Pointing at the losers of those gambles and telling these sisters they had destroyed those people’s lives seemed wrong somehow. At the very least, those samurai, who had grown fat on taxes, were in no position to say it.

“Have you ever wanted to return home?”

“I dream of it every night. But it simply isn’t possible anymore.”

She seemed to be referring to more than just the country’s isolationist policies.

Normally, other countries wanted Japan’s technology badly enough to repeatedly send in scouts and take military action against the isolationist country. They should have rejoiced if some of their own people returned after infiltrating so deep into Japan.

So why would it not work that way?

“Didn’t I say we have already cut down several people with this same hair color? The knights across the sea have us on a list of dangerous individuals, so we could never live a normal life even if we did make it back to our homeland. Without the government’s backing, we would be branded traitors and I imagine we would actually be in even more danger than staying here.”

There had to be more to it than that.

The higher ups had almost certainly intentionally sent those twins to hunt down their compatriots. Both to test their loyalty and to leave the shogunate as the only place they could ever hope to survive, thus making them easier to control. It was a lot like a gang initiation ritual in which the initiate had to shoot a police officer or teacher to cut off any hope of help and isolate them from society.

These were victims.

No matter how much power they might have, Sugiyado could not think of any other word with which to describe these twins.