Editing Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter6 (section)

===3: Rebooting in the Apartment===

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“Sensei!!”

Even the stirring of his body felt weird. Sugiyado Souha gave a scratchy groan that did not sound like his own voice and opened his eyes to find himself lying down somewhere. He also saw four girls looking down at him.

They were Kuhou Ouka, Hanasawa Bara, Nantou Hoozuki, and Shizukuma Asagao.

“Are you okay? Honestly though, what even happened!?”

Twintail Ouka was wearing a knit sweater and a miniskirt as she moved her face in close as if leaning over him, but he did not respond as he slowly sat up. He wanted to know the current situation. What had happened since Sagami Oniyuri’s Divine Decree had covered a quarter of New Yokohama with lava?

“The ordinary people are safe,” said slender Ouka. “The entire city was on edge after the central heating explosion in the underground mall, so they had mostly evacuated indoors. They fled to the upper floors once the lava showed up, so apparently no one was caught in it. I’ve heard everyone is terrified because they think those were linked terrorist attacks.”

“We can only be grateful that social media can get word around quickly and that this country is so good at disaster relief despite being horribly unprepared for war,” said Bara who was wearing a cardigan over an otherwise light outfit.

“I see,” sighed Sugiyado.

He knew he was being naïve, but he could not deny how relieved he was to learn so little damage had been done. Even though Oniyuri must have already left the Tenshukaku soaked with blood.

This had revealed the handiwork of a ninja to the public on an unprecedented scale, but that very scale left the ordinary people unsure what had happened. Social media could not track down the truth on this one. No one thought a single individual could have caused that.

“Then where are we?”

His torn and bloody clothes had been replaced with new ones. A new short-sleeved dress shirt and loose pants, to be exact. So who exactly had known his taste in clothing and actually changed the clothes for him? When he looked at the girls, they all avoided looking him in the eye for some reason. Why were all their faces red? Especially Ouka. The way she held a hand over her nose made it look like she had a nosebleed or something.

Also, he had not been taken to a hospital room. This was a small rundown room with a tatami mat floor. It was a super-cheap apartment. The lack of light coming through the window and the clock on the wall told him it was night had already fallen. He looked around and finally remembered where this was.

“Hello, honored guest. Neither of us fared well out there, did we? But it was a slap from a beauty, so I’m willing to forgive her.”

John Kniferidge was wrapped in bandages, had one arm in a cast, and wore a leather jacket over a flight suit.

“From the look of you, I take it your knight armor is in the lava.”

“I’m actually glad it was melted so nicely. I don’t want the Shogunate retrieving some half-destroyed scraps.” John sighed. “I’m also glad there was a room we could use. I’m not a spy or a Tuxedo, so I’d be in trouble if I tried to wander around in enemy territory like this.”

They were interrupted by an exaggerated sigh.

It came from someone with a white dress and beautiful blonde hair shining in the room’s light, but who was on the opposite side of the conflict from John. It was one of the Shogunate spy twins.

Shirazaya Guren’s slender throat trembled as she spoke up.

“I never imagined we would be using a Kingdom spy hideout.”

“If it is true this man has been assisting you, then this is a very alarming development, Sugiyado-san.”

Both twins were icily glaring at him.

Yet they were somehow hesitant to say too much, so they may have had a hunch that it was the Kingdom’s Tuxedos who rescued them from that lava hell while they were unconscious.

Before he could say anything in his defense, Hanasawa Bara crossed her arms in her cardigan and tight skirt, lifting up her large breasts, and opened her mouth.

“That is not true. In fact, it is quite the opposite. This is a room Sensei prepared for himself and they copied his key and started using it without his permission. The room belongs to Sensei.”

“That doesn’t really matter.” The young bob cut girl in a knit dress passed him a cup of water with the hands sticking out of her baggy sleeves, so he rubbed Shizukuma Asagao’s small head while finally opening his mouth. “Guren and Suiren? Ninjas like us are not an official army like the samurai or knights. We are nameless spies gathered to achieve the results that are needed but cannot be written in any official paperwork. So don’t get caught up in the official lines between enemy and ally. The world is overrun with problems that can’t be solved from just one direction.”

One blonde kunoichi held out her arm to show him the tracking bracelet she wore.

“The Shogunate will not defend you in this.”

“Of course they won’t. The day they start officially defending stuff like this is the day they’re finally overthrown. Although I’ll be curious to see how they plan to get back on their feet now that the Tenshukaku at the top have been slain.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, so the twins had to sigh again. Were they impressed by how he lived his life, or had they decided nothing could ever fix his stupidity?

The girls gathered around the uncomfortable bedding began speaking once more.

First up was silver ponytail Nantou Hoozuki who stretched her back inside a loose sweat hoodie.

“Sensei, it’s about time you told us just what we were made a part of.”

“I suppose so,” said Sugiyado.

He chose to speak it all aloud here to help him organize his own confused thoughts.

“There was a kunoichi named Sagami Oniyuri.”

John stiffened at that name since he had been directly involved in the final mission.

The girls had arrived later than that, so it did not mean much of anything to them.

“The general public thinks of ninjas as people who can clasp their hands together and hold a scroll in their mouth to create an explosion of smoke and solve everything, but that kind of ninja does not really exist. Oniyuri, however, is an exception. Her body has been modified in 88 places – primarily in the brain and heart – to give her the psychic powers needed to take a step into the mystical realm with her ninja techniques.”

That was what had created that lava sea.

Sugiyado held his head in a hand.

“Oniyuri has made those psychic powers her own and I doubt anyone but her knows what exactly Divine Decree is. I have tried to explain it rationally, like that she uses telekinesis to float and that she rapidly vibrates molecules to create heat, but all I have is speculation.”

“But why do this now, Sensei?”

Black bob cut Shizukuma Asagao tilted her extremely small head.

“You’re looking at this wrong.” The boy’s answer was obvious. “Oniyuri has been crawling through that same hell ever since what happened back then. Because I failed to grab her hand, she has continued to sink into the darkest parts of the Shogunate.”

“Sensei…”

“So she plotted a way to escape on her own. I can’t even imagine how many layers of security are generally applied to a kunoichi who can use that psychic Divine Decree as a weapon, but she was waiting all this time for that perfect hierarchy to be shaken. All while she occasionally leaked some information to you four or to Guren and Suiren as they pursued you.”

It was now the white dress twins’ turn to bring a hand to their foreheads where they stood over by the wall.

“You mean we were being manipulated too?”

“We are Shogunate spies, but we have never even heard the name Oniyuri.”

Sugiyado shook his head.

“In a way, she is a more perfect ninja than I am. If me having connections to both the Shogunate and the Kingdom was enough to surprise you, then you can’t even imagine how deep the rabbit hole goes with Oniyuri.”

Besides.

“Ouka, Bara, Hoozuki, Asagao. I know you were angry that I was being treated unfairly, but where did those feelings begin?”

“What? But…but we don’t need a reason to want-!”

“The Shogunate is thoroughly covering up everything about what happened to me back then, so you would never start to question my past for no reason. That alone is proof that their media manipulation defenses were falling apart.”

“…”

“Someone must have been giving you glimpses of that information out in the open and in secret. For example, hearing ‘multiple sources’ insulting me behind my back but where you could hear them. But those people who thought themselves so knowledgeable while they whispered questionable secrets to each other were only being manipulated by a game of telephone that began with Oniyuri back in her cell. They played right into her hand without noticing any of it. Then you picked up on that and began developing exactly the emotions she was hoping for.”

That technique was more like the Machiavellianism of a harem than a ninja technique, but that too was part of a kunoichi’s repertoire. This was not a sport with separate weight classes where arm strength and lung capacity did all the talking. For better or for worse, they brought those “feminine” aspects to the battlefield.

She had slipped malicious information to the people who visited her cell and used their mouths to spread rumors like a game of telephone to ultimately have Ouka’s group cause trouble. She had never expected Guren and Suiren to be able to stop them. In fact, the trick had been to delay the conclusion until the Shogunate leaders panicked and decided to release her from her cell to resolve it as soon as possible. And once she was out, she immediately bit the hand that fed her and assaulted the Tenshukaku. Everything that had happened was connected.

She had soaked the Tenshukaku in blood.

That was simple enough to say, but Sugiyado guessed that she had made it look like an indiscriminate slaughter when she actually intentionally left a certain number of survivors behind. But not out of the goodness of her heart. Then the Council of Elders would see it as a chance to take power for themselves or to assist the Shogunate’s recovery as a favor they could cash in on later. The many conflicting plots that would spring up would end up binding them. The fact that news of the attack on the Tenshukaku was still being thoroughly suppressed made it clear that something was up.

Ninjas did more than make use of preexisting cracks. At Oniyuri’s level, they could smash a solid monolith to pieces.

“And with Guren and Suiren, it was a little too convenient that they managed to reach me so soon after Ouka’s group got into trouble. While they’re irreplaceable students for me, they were already Elite Ninjas working for the center of the state, so they must have connections to tens of thousands of people, including the invisible ones of profit even they aren’t aware of. I doubt you could have pinpointed me as a relevant party so quickly without assistance. I imagine someone casually dropped you a hint or went around eliminating all your other theories. All while they had no idea they were relaying a message for Oniyuri. There would have been no material evidence there. John or Violia could probably have smelled it, but that only works for someone who was in a direct confrontation with her.”

“Understood. We can reach a conclusion about that later, so let’s learn about our enemy now.”

“I find this hard to believe, but those doubts will only delay us right now. Please go ahead.”

“Sure.” Sugiyado Souha nodded. “You really could call it a grand plan. I can’t even imagine how many people now lie dead in the bloody Tenshukaku. But her actual objective must be incredibly simple.”

“?”

Kuhou Ouka tilted her head with her growing figure contained in a knit sweater and miniskirt.

“She wants freedom. She wants to travel the world as she likes without anyone restricting her. That is all she wants. It is all she has ever wanted since I first met her.”

In other words, in the years since he had let go of that freedom-seeking girl’s hand, she had been meaninglessly imprisoned, subjected to insane human experiments at the hands of the Shogunate which claimed to advocate justice, and only been allowed outside when it was time to defeat and kill someone. That feeling of being trapped and hopeless was something that Sugiyado could never even imagine after living his life as an instructor and supported by so many people.

“Who’s supporting her?” John sounded exasperated with his arm in a sling. “Biting the hand that feeds you and devouring the rest of them to escape your cage will only get you so far. I doubt any individual who attacks an entire nation will last long. We won’t touch this one, but what about Asia or the New World? Does she have some hidden thread connecting back to a force powerful enough to rival the Shogunate?”

“No, I doubt she has something like that. She simply wants to rejoice in her freedom. It might only last a minute or a second, but she loves true freedom. The protection of some other organization would only sully it. Those bonds would only get in her way.” Sugiyado slowly exhaled. “Why did she use her psychic Divine Decree to fly to New Yokohama Domain immediately after slaughtering the Tenshukaku in Tokyo? Why did she burn down a quarter of the city upon seeing me? Why was she waiting there to speak with me? The answer is obvious: she’s going down the list of things she wanted to do once she was free. This isn’t about some larger group and its interests. This is all there is to her.”

Someone audibly gulped.

This insanity was enough to fill the room with silence.

“B-but doing that is suicide.”

“John. She has not changed at all since we last saw her.”

John initially frowned, unsure what the boy meant, so Sugiyado broke it down for the man and restated it.

“I’m saying she still has those body modification implants in 88 parts of her body. The simple act of walking creates enough force to lift up her internal organs. Plus, she has her psychic flight. It might look like she does not feel any weight, but when she ends the flight and lands, the burden is even greater than what we feel. Yet she is still the same as she was on the inside. Do you get what that means?”

“That would make a complete mess of her insides!”

“It’s honestly a miracle she’s lived this long. She has nearly 90 implants in her body and just one of them catching on a blood vessel or organ can kill her.”

“But…but why, Sensei?”

Kuhou Ouka looked pale and Sugiyado shook his head.

“I’ve never heard of Divine Decree ninjas being mass produced. That means they never could make another one of her, so I imagine the Shoguante wasn’t willing to let go of such a valuable specimen. I mean, no one can explain how she works, so swapping out any of the parts could ruin the perfect balance and make her lose the psychic powers.”

The Shogunate had intended to force her to live that life for years or even decades until they finally cracked it. They knew deep down that analyzing it was not possible, but the prospect was too attractive to let her go.

That was why Sagami Oniyuri had quickly given up on obeying the Shogunate.

She would not last long either way. The Shogunate had no intention of swapping out her parts and she could not acquire the parts or update them on her own. And of course, simply pulling the implants out of her body would not save her either. She was blocked at every turn. So even if it was only for a moment, she wanted to experience true freedom. That may have been how she broke.

“So is that psychic stuff the secret of your final mission that the Shogunate was so desperate to hide? Not that it matters now that Oniyuri defeated the villains in the Tenshukaku.”

Twintail Ouka pouted her lips a little bit in her miniskirt and sweater. That girl with an undeveloped figure must have wanted to bring the villains to court to recover Sugiyado Souha’s honor, no matter what the secret turned out to be.

“Most likely. But come to think of it,” said Sugiyado. “Yes, I think Oniyuri’s presence may have settled all of that.”

“Hm? What do you mean?”

John looked puzzled and Sugiyado shrugged.

“Back then, I wasn’t aware that her psychic powers had been created under the name of Divine Decree. John, you didn’t either, did you? That means she wasn’t being used in actual combat yet back then. They were only sending her in for a trial run to gather test data.”

“You mean they sent such an unstable form of firepower to that battle over our queen? To be clear, our Kingdom saw that entire event as one step away from doomsday.”

“I imagine the Shogunate had not planned for what happened there either. In their original scenario, they only wanted to test her against you knights who were fighting for the honor of rescuing that little thing – or as they saw it, using that as an excuse to test our strength and steal our tech. She was unstable and difficult to control at the time, but her initial objective was to pursue you and that led to attacking the queen. The chain of command meant to bind her then must have collapsed.”

“Yeah, if it got out they chose another country’s head of state to test their new experimental weapon on, it could only lead to all-out war. We would have to respond to such arrogant provocation.”

“Although I bet the Shogunate officials were more aghast than anyone since they had only wanted experimental data on the psychic powers. They completely lost control. Oniyuri was wandering around without anyone capable of accurately aiming her, so she could have killed your queen at any time. If that huge a mistake ever got out, they were done for. It didn’t matter what they had intended to do. Sending in such a risky weapon at all would be enough for a major international incident. And explaining themselves would have required revealing their top secret Divine Decree research. They would have to tell everyone about the tech they thought they had entirely to themselves, so they were all forced to pretend they knew nothing at all about what was happening.”

“Um.” Twintail Kuhou Ouka raised her hand. “But, Sensei, wasn’t staying quiet the more dangerous option?”

“Which is why the interest was piling up all the while. Right up until Oniyuri used the recent chaos to take off the officials’ heads.”

They finally had a picture of the entire incident, but it was too late. Everything had changed from the moment Sagami Oniyuri appeared out in the open.

The red hair extension girl, Shirazaya Guren, spoke while crossing her arms by the wall.

“Do you have any idea what she will do next?”

“She must have a long list of things she wants to do. But while she wants to enjoy her freedom to its fullest, she doesn’t have much time. She won’t be able to create any new friends or lovers, so she should try to use her old acquaintances to act out her desires.”

“Hold on…are you saying what I think you’re saying!?”

“Me, John, and the queen. We are the only ones who reached an understanding with her during that final mission. We’re the only ones she has to rely on. There are billions of people out there and she can manipulate them with her Machiavellian trickery, but we are the only ones she has established a real connection with.”

Also, given what she had been through, it was unclear if she had ever learned how to hold ordinary relationships or how to judge her distance with someone.

They had come to understand each other during their pursuit and fierce fighting. They had needed to understand each other to threaten them, persuade them, fight them, escape them, outdo them, and kill them. And beyond Oniyuri’s calculated Machiavellianism, if she had only ever learned one way to search out what someone thought, she might very well throw a flood of lava at someone like anyone else would ring their neighbor’s doorbell.

In a way, Sugiyado and John had been the ones to teach her to do that.

By engaging in such an extreme form of communication with her in the past.

“So if we use you as bait, we can draw out Oniyuri?”

“I couldn’t tell you which one of us she’ll go after first, though. John, you fought her when you lost your armor, right? How did she react?”

“She entirely ignored me. She didn’t seem happy to see me and she didn’t seem to see me as a threat either. She held out a hand without even looking in my direction and then…crash. Maybe she’s only interested in fellow ninjas.”

“If so, the little queen won’t work either. So she’s only interested in me, huh?”

Everyone’s eyes focused on Sugiyado sitting on the futon.

A stiff smile appeared on Kuhou Ouka’s face.

“Y-you’re kidding, right? You barely survived what happened earlier! You can’t do that!! A-and based on what I’ve heard, um!!”

“You can say it. I couldn’t beat her. And that’s why I lost my wings.”

Even in his prime, his entire body had been destroyed in multiple ways and he had just barely survived it. Now a 5kg weight made his back feel funny and a 10kg one caused it to explode with pain. If he tried that again with that extreme handicap, the odds of survival would be even lower. Victory was entirely out of the question.

However…

“I have to stop Oniyuri. You see what her psychic powers can do, right? This is too much for even the Shogunate to cover up.”

“Kh.”

A sea of lava had covered everything.

She had done enough damage to wipe a small village or town from the map. But instead of the result of thorough preparation, it had been done in lieu of a greeting. It was the result of overwhelming talent.

Sagami Oniyuri was neither good nor evil.

She simply wanted to rejoice in her true, unrestricted freedom for as long as possible. But if the needle of her interest turned even slightly toward destruction, tens of thousands would die. No, it was even possible that one girl’s power could bring down an entire country.

The pure destruction was not the only threat. If she continued causing mass destruction on a scale too large to cover up, the people’s fear and dissatisfaction would grow to the bursting point and mass hysteria on the level of the witch hunts could sweep across the country. If enough people began to think the Shogunate was not going to save them, the entire system would collapse in no time.

After all, there was no way of testing to see if someone had psychic powers.

That unrestricted freedom would swallow up all else.

It was her lack of good or evil that made Oniyuri’s catastrophe unavoidable. You could not behave yourself as a good boy or girl so she would spare you and you could not slip her a bribe under the table. So once the people’s fear and dissatisfaction passed a certain threshold, the dominos would already be falling.

“We have to do something.” Silver ponytail Nantou Hoozuki stretched her back in her sweat hoodie and kept a hand on her downturned forehead. “Sensei is right. We can’t just let her do this. If the Tenshukaku was wiped out and the Shogunate isn’t functioning, then we’ll have to do something ourselves.”

“Yes,” said Shirazaya Suiren over by the wall. “While I do find it hard to believe the Shogunate is no longer functioning, the spies like us can still act. If a monster is threatening the peace of our world, I can see no reason not to set out to slay it.”

“Don’t worry,” said bandaged John Kniferidge. “Like I said before, you aren’t alone. You have your connections with me and my queen. Besides, with her power, she could probably attack the Kingdom’s homeland by messing with the earth’s crust or something. This is already our problem.”

Sugiyado Souha thought for just a moment.

He realized just how blessed he was.

He bowed his head once before stating his conclusion.

“Then this will be the final battle. I’ll be placing everyone here on the board, so prepare yourselves.”