>>5808867“It’s just Hotaru. Good work. Let’s go.” She says, curtly. Your merry band continues forth.
Everyone stays silent as you exit the village. Eventually Otomo has something to say.
“Uh… Damn, Naoki. That was pretty savage.” He says, looking mildly sick to his stomach.
Every time he talked to you, you had an embarrassing habit of reverting to a normal teenager who liked reading manga and listening to music. You can’t help but rub the back off your neck, feeling kind of bad that you elicited that kind of reaction.
“Well, dude, I don’t know. You never know how strong someone will turn out to be if you give them the chance to show you. If you don’t know for absolute sure, you can’t hold back. Like, imagine they turned out to be shinobi who were just pretending to be low level mercenaries to get me to drop my guard. Transformation jutsu, I don’t know…” You say, rambling like a dumbass.
Truth was, that hadn’t occurred to you. But you liked to keep his opinion of you up. It was important to you that he not look at you like some kind of psycho, since he was your friend. This is why you wore the mask, damn it. To keep your worlds separate. But no. Jeeze.
—
Naoki was some kind of weird brute! You are Masami Igarashi!
Your teammates were dicks! Dicks!
You frown in irritation. When you were younger, this is why you felt like shit all the time. You just wanted to be a good ninja, but you were always being overshadowed by everyone around you. You just sucked. Naoki was some kind of ultra badass, Otomo was already high level in ninjutsu and could apparently exterminate invisible demons, but what about you? Fucking crab girl.
Your cheeks start to burn red as it pisses you off.
You didn’t even have that to start. Your grandfather explained to you in one of his lucid moments how he had formed a contract with crabs in his youth: Allow yourself to sink into the depths of the ocean with no breath in your lungs and pray to the crab kami to save you. If they decided they liked you, they would save you and you would be presented with their scroll to sign it in blood. Like… Huh? What? Who cares! Fuck it! Everything ninja could do was stupid bullshit, but you needed stupid bullshit of your own so you wouldn’t always be an afterthought.
You nearly died. But you had no choice! Without crabs you had jack shit. So you spent a summer trip journeying to the sea so you could drown yourself like a retard on the off chance crab spirits would think ‘Hey, cool.’. Ultimately you entered the spiritual plane of crabs, a bubbly little island with several of the little cuties clacking their pincers at you. It was a good day.
At least crabs liked you. Nobody else in the academy really did, Juro-Sensei just looked at you like a mild disappointment, only Otomo really tried to be your friend and he was a stupid oblivious asshole who couldn’t do it right! Well, maybe you were wrong…
You grin remembering watching True Ninken with him. Oh poor stray lit’tle nin’ja dogs…
