Cute Kunoichis:Volume1 Chapter6

Status: Incomplete

1/7 parts completed

   

Chapter 6

1: Unforeseen Yet Inevitable

The battle was over.

Sugiyado Souha sighed while viewing the girls lying unconscious within the B3 plaza. He had been protecting them. This had been the only available method. He had achieved everything he set out to achieve. And yet it took all his might to avoid punching himself in the face.

He made a conscious effort to shift his focus.

He picked up his scattered Fierce Fang air-pressure kunais, swapped out the instant nitrogen foam cartridges, and stored them within the back of his short-sleeved dress shirt. He would have to locate all the blood, sweat, hairs, and signs of destruction as well. He could not call himself a ninja if he did not at least eliminate any evidence that could be used to identify him.

(They were taught by me, so I should be able to borrow their tools.)

He scratched the scar on his nose, reached into collapsed Ouka’s pocket, and used the special sprayer he found there to clean up while focusing on his earphone.

“John, I’m done here. As promised, I will hand over the empty poison gas canister and the criminal. Tell me where to meet you.”

“Geez, you actually took them all out with your handicap? Now I feel dumb worrying about you, teach. I just sent some Tuxedos your way. You can’t carry someone thanks to your spine, right? Let my men take care of the girls.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it! The Kingdom’s gentlemen love this sort of job most of all. Anyway, we went ahead and threatened our Shogunate contact, but things aren’t looking good. You should probably be on your guard.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“We’re still negotiating with the isolationist government’s contact, but we can’t get anything solid out of them. I thought they were just panicking at first, but it doesn’t seem that way anymore. It’s like they can’t seem to contact their higher ups.”

“You mean those higher ups made a run for it while we still hold their Achilles’ heel? Not a chance.”

“Yeah. It’s possible they’re taking us for a ride here.”

“…”

Someone was taking advantage of this chaos.

They had predicted that things would be shaken up to an abnormal degree and they had used the confusion to accomplish something.

Sugiyado Souha himself had thought pressure from the Kingdom would make it too difficult for the Shogunate to continue covering for the bureaucratic advisor behind all this, so the villain would be cast out of the system and brought to a position where an individual could reach them.

But had someone else set things up so they could cause even greater damage?

“I should probably ask Ouka’s group why they decided to look into my past in the first place.”

“Yeah. Same with those Shogunate spy twins. I would recommend looking into what information they received that led them to ask you for help. The same person may have been behind both decisions.”

“You mean it was all to pit Ouka’s group and the twins against each other as two of the Shogunate’s most powerful ninja groups?”

“No.”

For the first time, their opinions diverged.

John had something else to say.

“They wanted to pit the old against the new – a Hidden One against Elite Ninjas. I don’t know who it was, but I bet you fighting your students was a part of their plan. The twins were only the detonator.”

“…”

“Since they tried to make it an even fight instead of a one-sided slaughter, they must have wanted to prolong the chaos as much as possible. But what did they hope to accomplish using that cover?”

And who was this person?

Not only had they planned something so ambitious, but they must have known about Sugiyado Souha’s final mission that the Shogunate had kept hidden. They also must have had no qualms about putting 200,000 innocent people in harm’s way to cover it all up. Even though they should have been assured a comfortable life by secretly threatening the Shogunate officials, so that ambition plan should have been unnecessary.

They had rejected that idea.

Even though they could have been given a secret position of absolute privilege where the government protected them so much they could kill someone in broad daylight and see no repercussions. So why? The Shogunate officials were nigh untouchable, but why discard that easy route in order to “eliminate” them?

While thinking through this issue, something crawled up in the back of Sugiyado Souha’s mind.

“It can’t be.”

“What?”

“No, it can’t be. It just can’t. She can’t possibly make an appearance now.”

He sounded like he was trapped in a nightmare.

But the questions from John had stopped. Ironically, it was the knight waiting up in the night sky who encountered the truth first.

Yes.

Physically encountered it.

“What the hell is that? …Wait. This atmosphere, this scent.”

“John?”

“Dammit. I get it now. Unless my sensors are broken, it’s that ghost!! This is indeed beyond your abilities. Engage!! I’ll start a defensive battle here and call in support from the aerial aircraft carrier even though this is nowhere near my jurisdiction! This warrants it!!”

“No, John!! If this is what I think it is, then not even a Kingdom armored knight can handle it!!”

The conversation ended there because the connection was severed.

(Dammit!!)

He could not control his heartrate. The bad feeling inside him only continued to grow. Waking up the others and taking them with him would only put them in more danger. He decided to do this alone. He hurried up the stairs to reach the closest exit from the underground mall. On the way, he passed by several people in the supposedly deserted place. Unlike him or Ouka, they were nondescript and inhumanly cold, so they had to be the Kingdom’s Tuxedos. They would look after Ouka and the others even though that would put them at greater risk. He gave them a bow out of obligation and not just appreciation.

He caught glimpses that something was amiss even before leaving the underground mall.

It was hot, but not due to the weather. It was like being thrown inside a stone oven. If the heat was this scorching from a distance, just how abnormal a situation would he find outside?

(Yes, it’s the same.)

As he ran, he was reminded of his past. He remembered when death had been a constant companion, when he had failed to predict anything at all, and when he had needed to constantly adlib ways to slip from the grim reaper’s grasp to survive. He had felt like he was crawling through an ocean of blood and mud. This had the same scent and atmosphere, but now was not the time to rejoice at the reunion.

(Come to think of it, I caught glimpses of this the entire time I pursued Ouka’s group with Guren and Suiren. This scent was in my nose the entire time. Yes, none of it ever actually ended. This is all a continuation of that final mission!!)

He finally reached the exit to the surface.

A scorching wind hit him like a solid wall as he set foot in the city night.

Everything was colored by a golden-burning hell.

The usual neon signs and car headlights were nowhere to be seen. Not even the ordinary darkness of the night was allowed to exist.

Molten rock covered everything.

A boiling sea of magma bubbled up like the fountain of youth, gas erupted out, and all forms of life were robbed of a livable environment.

There was no sign of John Kniferidge in his silver Claiomh Solais knight armor. However, some arms and legs from the unmanned musketeers who served the knights could be seen floating here and there in the bubbling lava.

He had almost certainly been shot down and the pilot’s survival was unknown.

It took dozens of this country’s armored samurai to just barely be powerful enough to defeat one of those armored knights, and victory was even more difficult when that knight was accompanied by a full unit of unmanned musketeers.

Yet one of those knights had been so easily defeated here.

That nightmare was back.

According to John, Kingdom agents who had infiltrated this country had come up with an excuse to evacuate the civilians from this area to protect them from the possible poison gas leak. Ouka’s group and the blonde twins would have been collected by the Tuxedos. But those were the only two pieces of good news.

Sugiyado looked up toward the moon as if mimicking his past actions.

Yes.

Sugiyado Souha had been badly injured during his final mission.

But who exactly had done it?

There was nothing to stand on for kilometers around. With a bit of bad luck, the tall reinforced concrete buildings might even tilt and sink into the lava.

Nevertheless, a beautiful girl in a ninja outfit was illuminated by both the lava erupting from the depths of the earth and the cold moonlight pouring down from the heavens. Her clothing was similar to Kuhou Ouka’s, but also different. It was still a bodysuit combined with a white sleeveless kimono top and a front and back skirt, but the sides of the top were left wide open and the back fell below her hips like a coat, making it look like a cross between an ancient queen’s dress and a surgical gown.

It would not have been originally designed to create such obvious sex appeal. It would have been designed to best draw out the special trait of a young girl – that is, a protective desire and a cute impression that would cause any attacking hands to hesitate. A split second could be the difference between life and death in the ninja world, so being adorable could be a deadly weapon there.

But the impression changed entirely when the person within it had changed.

You could say she had matured and then some as a girl, and you could even say she had begun to rot. That monster’s demeanor – no, her seduction – was reminiscent of a fruit with an intensely sweet smell. The fact that she was originally the cute type made this change seem all the more alluring, sweet, and (most of all) immoral.

Her madness drew people in to a gruesome extent.

She was like a Venus flytrap.

You could even say she embodied the seduction of death. The grim reaper’s scythe that gave people everlasting peace may have been coated with a poison this sweet. He knew the truth here, but if he did not focus his mind, his thoughts would have been stirred up from outside and his concentration would have been forcibly disturbed. Even though she was not trying to do anything of the sort.

“…”

To reiterate, there was nothing to stand on and she was not standing on the ground, yet there she was.

She was floating.

She hovered about 5m above the sea of lava.

What were ninja techniques?

The ones used in the current age were best described as an adaptation of stage magic. Special tools were set up in advance, wires were laid out in secret, and then you waited for your opponent to be fooled. Realists who claimed they only believed what their own eyes showed them would fall for the illusion and be left in the depths of confusion. It could all be explained using tricks, so it all came down to one’s breadth of knowledge. That was how it was supposed to work.

But this girl was the one exception.

This was something entirely different from the ninja techniques that used an extension of existing techniques to create new, modern equipment. This took things so far that even a front-line Hidden One found it grotesque.

This absolute absurdity was even more bizarre than the ninjas seen in old stories.

She had taken ninja techniques to a truly occult place.

She used the term “psychic” to realize the illusions behind ninja techniques. The inside of her skull was covered in a material that absorbed electromagnetic waves to remove all external EM interference and a pacemaker had been implanted in her healthy heart to let her consciously alter her heart rate like changing gears. Thanks to those changes, she could guide herself into an extreme trance whenever she liked.

The bolts in Sugiyado’s back ached ominously.

No, the ache came from the wound a certain girl had given him.

That sword strike had not just physically wounded him; it had left its scars on his psyche as well.

He knew her name.

The figure showing through her spider silk ninja outfit was awfully sensual. Long hair flowed down her back and two shorter bundles of hair fell to either side of her head. That glossy black hair contained a bewitching sheen. But he could never forget. He still vividly remembered the name of the one who had slashed his back.

They belonged to the same rank, the same system, and the same world.

She existed beyond even the Elite Ninjas who stood at the top of the existing High, Middle, and Low hierarchy. She was one of the Hidden Ones, whose total numbers not even he knew.

So he shouted her name, as if facing his past.

“Oniyuri!!”

He heard a quiet voice.

It was a laugh.

Her head tilted at an angle, a stray strand of hair had found its way between her lips, and a sticky clear liquid dripped from the corner of her lips. The red of her cheeks had to be more than just reflected lava light. One look at her excessively damp eyes was enough to tell she was using Divine Decree. She had consciously turned an invisible dial to send herself on a “trip”.

With her melted gaze on him, that disaster in human form continued laughing.

She was undoubtedly one of the Hidden Ones.

She was one of the elites of the elite who had been there with Sugiyado Souha in an older era.

“So we meet again, instructor.”

“…”

“I can call you that now, can’t I? I have been dreaming of you this whole time. It is too late to try to save someone only after arriving on the battlefield, so you wanted to teach people everything they needed to survive before the fighting began. Wasn’t that your dream?”

This was an inner motivation that not even Ouka’s group or the twins knew about.

Oniyuri’s knowledge of that fact hinted that she had not simply been an enemy originally.

She had not been an ally by any means, but he had not wanted to call her an enemy.

Like a marriage scammer, she had a way of remaining in your heart even after you were deceived. Not even someone on Sugiyado Souha’s level could find quite the right word to describe her.

She truly embodied the feminine side of being a ninja.

She was the perfect kunoichi.

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“Nothing really. I lived through that past, I’m facing this present, and I need to decide what future to seek out. Although if I hadn’t done anything, I doubt anything would have changed.”

What did it feel like to mechanically alter your brain using an external device?

Whatever the case, Oniyuri could not stop smiling while drawing out psychic powers from her brain’s trance state.

She stuck out her unexpectedly long tongue and wet her lips.

“But that would have been boring, so I decided to break free of the Shogunate’s chains. The Tenshukaku at the top is protected by this country’s most powerful system, but that security will temporarily freeze during an incident so earthshattering that the entire Shogunate hierarchy is shaken. So I just had to make my move in that moment.”

“…”

“So don’t worry, instructor. All the sketchy people keeping watchful eyes on you have been returned to the earth. Oh, but I do apologize if you wanted to kill them yourself. I didn’t even leave any ashes behind.”

It finally started to sink in what Sugiyado had been a part of here.

It had all been so she could leave.

The series of shocking events beginning with the modular nuclear reactor had been too much for the top of the Shogunate to bear. They had wanted something to rely on to escape that pressure, so they had opened this Elite One’s cell so she could eliminate those four Elite Ninjas. They had chosen to release this calamitous beast if it would bring about a swift end to their problems.

Had they felt there was no point in holding back?

But surely they should have known who their assassin would devour first once that cell door had opened.

“How far did you take it?”

“Hee hee. You really have changed, instructor. You have found a path of comfortable change taking you in the direction you desired. I, on the other hand, have been stuck in a standstill this entire time.”

“How much damage did you do to the Tenshukaku and how many samurai heads did you take, Oniyuri!?”

He just about overlooked it, but it hit him a moment later.

Stuck in a standstill?

She had not changed – could not change.

“Wait, no, it can’t be.”

“Are we done talking now? Hee hee. My blood hasn’t been pumping like this in a long time. Yes, I thought I might not know what to do with myself after finding freedom for the first time in forever, but I didn’t. Yes, this is what I really wanted to do.”

The floating girl glowed bewitchingly in the lava light within her ninja outfit that resembled an ancient queen’s dress or a surgical gown, and she pointed her skinny index finger toward the heavens.

Immediately, the world converged.

All the scorching lava covering kilometers of the ground began to move like a living creature as she controlled it with her psychic Divine Decree power. The hellish deluge that had swallowed up everything here began to swirl, break free of the planet’s gravity, and gather on a single point. Yes, directly above Oniyuri’s raised finger.

In the end, the blazing hot mass was smaller than a basketball.

That flood of lava could have swallowed up an entire small village, so this extreme pressure caused it to glow all the more sinisterly. Sugiyado Souha gulped as he looked up at it.

His hand trembled while holding a Fierce Fang.

It’s all happening again, he thought.

He had once fought behind the scenes to save a foreign queen caught between the Kingdom and the Shogunate. It had ended in a draw and his body had been left scarred. This was the secret technique he had seen back then.

With her tongue hanging limply from her lips with a thin strand of saliva dripping from it, the horrifyingly beautiful girl spoke with a crazed smile on her lips.

“Hee hee. How about this as an opening move? I am a bit tired right now, so we can finish this later, okay?”

This was not the Strategic Martial Arts approved by this country and its Shogunate. Modern ninja techniques took the arresting techniques and military martial arts based on old-fashioned karate, judo, and kendo and updated them in order to save as many people as possible during times of turmoil. They were powerful techniques, but that was all they were. So this was different. What could you hope to protect using a power as sinister as this?

This was an uncontrollable power that would simply destroy everything in its path.

“An annihilating sun,” muttered Sugiyado Souha in a daze.

A moment later, the girl snapped her fingers with a meaningful smile and the raised sphere burst. A scorching hell erupted in all directions with more than twice the intensity with which it had been gathered.

A paper tiger like his air-pressure kunai was entirely useless in the face of the truly supernatural.

7

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