Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter3

Status: Incomplete

4/10 parts completed

   

Chapter 3

1: Captivating Beauties Behind the Scenes

“Hm, Sensei will always be Sensei, won’t he? Maybe I should have gone with those two.”

A small girl leaned against the railing on a building rooftop while restlessly pulling some fries from a paper takeout bag.

She was about 10 and her glossy black hair was worn in a bob cut, so she might have looked something like a Japanese doll. Except she was wearing a pure white military uniform with a tight skirt. Add in the long boots and she provided a strange mixture of Japanese and Western.

She focused on the earphone that was linked to her phone.

“I never got to say it because he would have gotten after me for it, but Sensei is so cute. He looks like he’s cool and sharp, but he’s a softy on the inside.”

The small-faced girl slowly narrowed her eyes as if thinking back on some memory or another. That proved that she too had memories that she liked to indulge in.

But it did not last long.

“Asagao.”

A voice reached her from the rooftop instead of over her phone. She had not heard a door opening and the emergency buzzer for the emergency exit had not sounded, yet the speaker was there all the same.

Unlike Asagao in her white military uniform with the tight skirt and baggy sleeves, this girl wore a ninja outfit that showed off her figure. In what looked an open-backed one-piece swimsuit plus the baggy pants of a male ninja, Hoozuki was a fusion of extremes in a different way than Shizukuma Asagao.

The cool beauty tightened her various belts and straightened her beautiful back.

“Bara screwed up and we’re on to the next phase. You need to get ready.”

“I just received a call about that. And Bara can hear everything you’re saying. Want to get on the line? She’s pretty mad about you saying she screwed up.”

“But it’s the truth.”

The silver ponytail girl gave a bitter look. Hanasawa Bara was older than her, but this girl was certain she was older mentally.

Nantou Hoozuki was wearing something like a student bag on her back, but when she tossed it to the side, it assembled an off-road motorcycle similar to some kind of spring-loaded 3D puzzle. That was Countless Calamities. Its engine normally produced a loud roar, but the internal components could be directly covered with soundproofing materials on the level of a gun’s silencer, so if she shut off the headlight at night, she could sneak up behind a target in almost near silence and end their life.

“The shogunate’s dogs should catch on soon and lock things down. We’re going to be a lot busier now, Asagao.”

“Sensei won’t sell us out. I mean, he’s so cute deep down!”

“We have to prepare for the worst. Besides, I would prefer it if he gave them an honest report. I don’t want him getting hurt trying to protect us while surrounded by those dogs.”

“You sure sound confident you can handle this.”

“Of course I am,” spat out Hoozuki while leaning forward a bit and curving her back to climb aboard Countless Calamities. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take back our precious teacher’s life. I intend to win this no matter what, even if it means making an enemy of that very teacher.”

2: Further Problems

The twins wearing cheerleader-like ninja outfits made from a combination of a sleeveless white kimono and a miniskirt were hurriedly working within an ambulance.

“Suiren, prepare the blood test. I want to see what he was given.”

“Understood, Guren. I will also prepare the stomach pump and the full-body dialysis. If this is slow-acting, there’s still time.”

Sugiyado Souha in his short-sleeved dress shirt and loose pants had been taken aboard an ambulance they had called instead of heading back onto their tanker truck. He was lying on an electric stretcher, his shirt was opened, and several electrodes attached to cords were pasted to his chest. The truck likely had the equipment for this sort of thing, but they probably did not want anyone associating it with something that stood out so badly.

All three of them left the international airport aboard the ambulance.

“…”

At this rate, they would discover he had been given an antidote for the poison. That could lead to suspicions about collusion between him and his students.

He briefly considered what was going to happen.

If the antidote was discovered, no matter what reason he gave for it, he would be removed from the team since he clearly still had some kind of favorable connection with the targets. That would be an option here. In fact, it would be the best option if he wanted to avoid fighting his students. He might be confined for a while afterwards, but he would be freed soon enough.

But that would prevent him from having any involvement in this incident.

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

They had not grown corrupt and they were not abusing their ninja skills to cause some major incident. They were obeying the conviction in their heart and attempting to find the truth of the final mission that had so greatly influenced his life.

At this rate, they would never return alive.

So he could not sit idly by and let it happen.

He knew all too well that taking on a burden beyond his abilities would come with a terrible price, just like it had back when he lost everything.

But.

Even so.

It was their time with him that had raised them to feel this righteous anger toward what had happened during that final mission. If he did nothing as they walked toward the precipice, he would have as good as murdered them himself.

His actions here were restricted, but it was still the best place for him to gather information related to the threat those girls faced.

He could not let himself be kicked out.

Ouka’s group did have to be stopped after stealing the modular nuclear reactor and abducting a top idol, but he knew nothing good would come of letting things play out according to the scenario drawn up by the shogunate’s darkness.

He had to outdo them.

He had to use them.

And what did he need to do that? What could he do to avoid suspicion, acquire information on their quarry, and sow confusion within the investigation team?

(The antidote.)

He focused on that.

His options here were limited, so he materialized the smallest of the hurdles he had to clear.

(First, I need to stop them from analyzing the antidote or researching where it came from. I need to trick them. If I don’t, I won’t make it any further. I can’t let them think the antidote came from Ouka. If I’m kicked out of here, I can’t stop those four.)

“Ugh.”

He wrinkled the scar on his nose while groaning and twisting on the stretcher. He rolled from his back to his side and used that movement to catch some of the tape between his body and the stretcher and peel it away to lift up an electrode. Then he only had to place his phone on it and have it vibrate by setting off an alarm in silent mode.

The unnatural vibration messed with the contact between electrode and skin to create an abnormality on the EKG monitor without the need for an outside electrical source.

“His heartrate is abnormal! The amplitude pattern is fluctuating! He’ll go into shock at this rate!!”

“Damn!! Sugiyado-san!!”

It was a little more complicated, but the idea was not all that different from a small child in the school infirmary messing with the thermometer to get an excuse to skip class. Everything had its uses. Even silent mode was fairly loud in quiet places, but it could go unnoticed when there was a lot of other noise around.

Shirazaya Guren gulped and quickly grabbed his shoulders to roll him onto his back again, but he gathered his strength to fight it and kicked his legs in a way that would not put pressure on his damaged back. It would look a lot like he was convulsing as deadly poison circulated through his body. Forcing your way through with brute strength was not the only way to do things. A ninja needed ways to make themselves look weak as well.

If he was rolled onto his back, the phone’s presence would be discovered, so he ended that trick and reduced the intensity of his feigned convulsions.

“Has he stabilized?”

“No, we can’t know that for sure. He could deteriorate at any moment. Prepare the stomach pump!”

While the twins were focused on the monitor, he snuck a hand behind his back and pulled one of his Fierce Fang air pressure kunais from below his untucked short-sleeved dress shirt. He may have been able to aim for defenseless Guren and Suiren’s throats, but he that would mean wiping out the investigation team he needed to use.

(The stretcher uses electric assistance. That means it has a large motor…and a magnet.)

The kunai’s tungsten steel was not the most magnetic of materials, but that was not what he was interested in. He used the pointed tip to unscrew and pop off the cover and then he pulled out the powerful neodymium magnet used for the motor.

The preparation was simple.

“!!”

With an extra large “convulsion”, his back and the rest of his body hopped up and he pushed his palm against the side of a piece of precision machinery in the cramped ambulance. No, he pressed the neodymium magnet against it.

Needless to say, pressing a magnet against a medical computer would cause a malfunction.

“Ah!?”

Shirazaya Suiren’s white hair extension swayed as she cried out and Guren quickly reached for the wiring behind the device, but he used that moment to slip the magnet behind his hips and then return it to the stretcher’s motor while they were not looking. His phone, the air pressure kunai, and the neodymium magnet were all like balls he was juggling. But right now he needed a certain type of courage more than skilled fingers. He was redirecting the attention of more than one person right in front of him while performing tricks right out in the open. This was the standard method of stage magicians, of con artists, and of ninjas.

He had taken out the EKG. There was no more need for restraint in his performance. He shook his body, breathed erratically, and let his eyes crawl around unnecessarily while grabbing at the chest of Guren’s white dress.

“Oh…bh!?”

“Oh, no. The convulsions are back. Suiren, restart the device immediately! Sugiyado-san, I do apologize, but I must strap down your arms and legs.”

“No…wait…my breast pocket…”

“?”

“My school’s…antidote. If they used the poison…I taught them…”

Guren sprang into action. What she found in his short-sleeved dress shirt’s breast pocket was a small bottle of commercial eye drops, but not many professionals would walk around with a set of bottles actually labeled “poison” and “antidote”.

She removed the cap, and…

“Please open your mouth, Sugiyado-san. Suiren, help me! Hold his hands down!! I’ll pry open his mouth!!”

It was said bitterness was the sign of a good medicine.

Now he only had to swallow it.

Blonde Suiren actually gulped louder than him.

“He’s…settled down?”

Of course he had.

He had been given the real antidote quite a while before. But he no longer had to fear the medical equipment recovering and then discovering an antidote in his body. He had created a reason for it to be there.

“Pant, pant.”

(Will that allow me to stick around for the time being?)

He was finally released from his tension.

But the end was not in sight yet.

The ambulance’s radio received a transmission.

“This is Azure Dragon 01. You say those runaway ninjas have made their move? Then hurry up and tell us where to aim and who to shoot. I’m so bored I swear my entire body is gonna rust.”

“Azure Dragon? Who’s that?” asked Sugiyado.

“The armored samurai handling our firepower support,” replied one of the twins.

“This is Yellow Dragon 00,” the other twin said into the radio. “Azure Dragon 01, please remain on standby until you receive further orders. Unnecessary transmissions have a chance of hindering progress of the mission.”

“Sorry, Little Miss Doll, but I’m not good at all that awful sneaking around.”

For once, the calm and composed twins clicked their tongues.

But not at what was said over the radio. They had both looked out the white smoked window.

A heavy gust of wind blew in as a large moss green shogunate truck pulled up alongside them.

This was clearly a military vehicle.

The back had no canopy covering it, so the giant forms curled up in two rows were exposed to the elements.

Instead of adding armor to human silhouettes, these looked like their silhouettes had been remade into those of carnivorous dinosaurs. They were masses of artificial muscles and full-body armor with sinister Gatling guns and grenade launchers worn over the shoulders or back.

These were the armored samurai.

Unlike Sugiyado or the twin kunoichis, this high firepower did not know how to hide. The crests of their samurai families were emblazoned prominently on their chests to identify themselves and these physical manifestations of death would not hesitate to reduce anyone to a puddle of blood in their efforts to uphold the law. These were the berserkers of an insane world that heaped on praise when they heaped on the killings.

This kind of firepower was not meant to be used for domestic criminal matters. These were weapons of war meant to stand up to the extraordinary knights and musketeers arriving by sea and air to steal the nation’s technology.

Guren audibly gulped before responding.

“Azure Dragon 01!! Know your place in this! If you trip us up by practically announcing our presence, you might as well be destroying your own eyes and ears here!!”

“That’s more like it. Do you shut-in cowards need a nice spanking now and then to keep you on your toes? I mean, I’m sure it hurts to kill some fellow kunoichis even if they did run away.”

“Do you question our professionalism!?”

“You know what we call a so-called professional who hasn’t fought in a real war? A virgin. Oh, but I guess virginity makes you more valuable when you’re a girl, huh? Heh heh.”

The sexual turn of the conversation seemed to actually calm the twins down. Using such things to lower a target’s defenses was a kunoichi technique, so this must have put them in work mode.

“But don’t you forget, blondie. You might be working on that Dejima-like reclaimed land, but a doll with those looks is only allowed to strut around working as shogunate spy – instead of being hunted down by them – because you do the work we give you. You won’t like to find out what happens if you can’t manage it. You can guess what might happen if you lose the shogunate’s backing in this isolationist age, can’t you? No one from overseas can ever be truly trusted and there’s not going to be a formal investigation. We’ll have you sit down, place heavy stones on your lap, and keep doubling the weight until you confess to letting the criminals escape.”

“Kh.”

“Get the picture now? You call yourselves kunoichi? Don’t make me laugh. That’s just a fancy word for gloomy cowards without the guts to make a frontal assault. Ninjas have no honor. At best, you’re the gofers for us samurai. If you get it, then work like a workhorse and guide us to our prey. We’re using someone for target practice – you can decide whether it’s them or you. So please, even I’d find it a little distasteful to slice up my formal colleagues and make mincemeat out of them. Gya ha ha ha ha ha ha!!”

…Sugiyado Souha could not abandon them.

That was the honest thought on his mind as he clenched his teeth and saw those two bite their lips while pale in the face. This would have been so much easier if they were soldiers pursuing his students after being manipulated by the shogunate’s darkness. But now that he knew the reality of the situation, he had one more hurdle to overcome. He could not just fool these twins and rescue his students. That would place a great debt on the shoulders of these twins who had done nothing wrong. And in the most unfair way imaginable.

So he made up his mind.

He had one more burden to carry, which put him one step closer to death. Just like during that final mission, he was surrounded by an unpleasant atmosphere that seemed to be leading him toward a major failure.

Nevertheless, he did not break. He only quietly updated his list of objectives.

He had to rescue both the pursuing twins and his runaway students.

And he had to escape with them all.

3: Battle Preparation Delivery

A smooth rustling sound could be heard.

It came from Hanasawa Bara, a girl with a curvy body and overly-bright red hair worn in gorgeous ringlet curls to increase the volume. She had brushed her hair back from a face of such beauty that it would have looked at home awash with a spotlight on center stage, not as a ninja who lived in the shadows.

Her red dress and the ample figure showing through were enough to steal away the starring role in this space.

This elicited an exasperated comment from Nantou Hoozuki, the cool beauty with a long silver ponytail who was riding her lightweight but powerful off-road motorcycle called Countless Calamities. She had never changed out of her ninja outfit.

“That’s quite the weapon you have there.”

“I could say the same about you.”

Bara had woven coils in to her ringlet curls to transform her hair into a sort of linear motor and coilgun. With a total of 18 of those, she could cover all directions around her, but they were also hidden in a blind spot that let her slip past ordinary checkpoints and police searches that only thought to check people’s pockets and bags. It truly was the ideal form of a ninja.

They could fire the Candy Needles made from melting sugar and letting it harden with poison mixed in or the Final Cannon that used an armor piercing needle of depleted uranium alloy, and the entire weapon was known as the Serpent Monster.

“Sensei got mad when I named it the Gorgon. He said I had to go with mythological names for everything or nothing.”

“You made him mad on purpose for some fun, didn’t you?”

“How is that any different from the way you make him grimace by naming each of your bike’s new transformation gimmicks Technique 1, Technique 2, Technique 3, and so on?”

“I just want to make it harder to come up with a countermeasure based on the name, but he’s more of a stickler for aesthetics than you would think.”

“He’s a romanticist. The way he makes it so obvious despite refusing to admit it out loud is so unbearably cute.”

“You mean like that scarf he always keeps around his neck? Well, at least I’ve never seen him stick a scroll in his mouth and hop onto a giant toad.”

“You just know he wishes he could, though.”

“I’m glad he isn’t the type who accepts genetic tampering as ethical. I mean, he gets so obsessed he’d take it way too far once he got started.”

The teenage girls chuckled together in a way that no one would have guessed was part of some dangerous criminal plot.

The four of them had not come from the same place before seeking out Sugiyado Souha’s ninja instruction. They each had their own reason for leaving their peaceful lives, moving into the shadows, and aspiring to be ninjas who got by with trickery. They relied on each other in battle, but they had not seen everything of each other’s lives.

The only one who had done that would be Sugiyado who had gently gotten them to open up their scarred hearts.

Hanasawa Bara came from a noble family and never should have found herself in the shadows. But in order to prop up the samurai families, the shogunate had ordered the number of noble families to be reduced. When her family had been crushed and she had found herself under Sugiyado’s tutelage, she had wondered how she had ended up stripped of her former status and asking a younger boy to teach her.

But when he had noticed she was not committing herself to her studies and training, he had not jumped straight to scolding her. He had instead smiled and told her she did not have to change who she was.

He had simply told her to get the job done. If she could become a ninja who could use her dazzling beauty as a weapon, then she could stay true to herself. So he told her to think up a way to do that.

“…”

In a show of that mature sex appeal, she crossed her arms and alluring lifted her large chest from below, but she narrowed her eyes like a pure maiden daydreaming.

Believers in sports engineering might laugh it off as silly idealism and wishful thinking, but that rose who stood on the front line could tell. The more harsh the scene, the more important and reassuring it was to have a solid sense of “yourself” as a central pillar.

She was certain she had him to thank for not becoming a machine that had missions mechanically inputted and did nothing more than spill blood with blades and shurikens. When her heart had felt in tatters and she had given up on any path other than throwing it out, it was undoubtedly Sugiyado Souha who had held onto it, gradually picked up the pieces and repaired the cracks, and restored her into someone who could find friends and laugh with them.

He had saved her.

No amount of money filling her bank account as payment for missions would ever have fulfilled her heart. She never could have restored herself with that. But he had shown her the way. She was willing to say that her current life was even more fulfilling than life in that luxurious estate before she had become a ninja. She no longer thought of it as a fall or a collapse. She had used those empty days of nothing but wealth as a stepping stool to reach an even greater place.

So now it was her turn.

He could call it insolent if he liked and he could raise his fist and tell her not to do this, but she still wanted to save her master. She wanted to give him the life-saving thing he had taught her. That was the whole of her motivation here.

She toyed with her precious hair and showed off her beauty to the world while holding her head high and asking a question.

“Is it time for the next step?”

“Yes. Let’s get this over with.”

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.

“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.

Part 10

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