>>5809873Naoki picks this time to stick his head out of the cottage window, eating an apple while observing the two of you in the yard. You had only ever seen him with his mask down to eat. It always bugged you how normal he looked, you always secretly assumed he was disfigured or something. Well, MORE disfigured.
“It’s a shame you can’t use Kenji’s blood.” Naoki says, absent-mindedly.
“Kenji’s blood?” Otomo asks, furrowing his brow.
“Yeah. They’re related. It sucks that you can’t direct the jutsu to respond to members of the family, instead of just individual people. It’d be really cool if you could.”
Otomo deflates like a balloon as he sits on the stone fence, looking utterly defeated. He just sits there.
“Hey.” You say. “Do you want me to ask Kenji for his blood?”
Otomo nods solemnly.
You comply without further comment. The two of you could use apples as well. You’d poke fun at him for having donkey brains for not thinking of using Kenji’s blood, but you didn’t think of that either.
—
You are once again Otomo Mizutani.
You’re holding a sensing blood sphere in your hand, leading your trio through the woods hoping to come across Mrs. Sato. The range of your sensing sphere wasn’t huge, somewhere between 100 and 200 feet depending on the strength of the signal.
Hotaru is preparing a light dinner with Kenji at the cottage, helping themselves to her resources. You can’t help but inspect the freshness of the apple you’re eating. Fresh. Very fresh. If Mrs. Sato was missing, it couldn’t have been longer than a couple days, if she were missing at all. She might just be out picking herbs.
She MIGHT just be out picking herbs. Nobody says it out loud, but there was also a high chance the woman was dead somewhere. Kenji had explicitly described that she was 94 and probably didn’t have much longer. If the woman had fallen in the woods a day or two ago, if her hip gave out, heart gave out, any number of issues an older woman might experience, she was surely deceased.
You can’t help but grimace thinking about it. Part of you wanted to move with a little more urgency. You wonder if it made you a selfish little shit that you were so hung up on how gross piss was even though there could feasibly be a life on the line… No, that’s honestly just unreasonable. If you were too late, you were too late. The chances that a mere 5-30 minutes was going to make a difference was quite low. Still… You secretly pray that if she IS dead, it didn’t happen today. You’d feel like a real piece of shit for letting Naoki talk you out of the rickshaw run, or being so hesitant about Masami’s gross pee idea.
Damn it.
