>>5810939>>5810951>>5810966>>5810991>>5811353You take a deep breath and settle yourself. You were on the job, like it or not. You were in bad shape, but you needed to find this woman. Even if the risk of encountering wolves alone was somewhat suicidal, you would rather face that as an issue rather than just give up. It was in your nature to place others before yourself and you didn’t have a choice.
Regardless of anything, you wouldn’t live with the regret that you could have tried but didn't because you decided not to let self-sacrifice stand the test of adversity. One day you might have to die, and that was preferable to being a coward.
You sit against the trunk of a tree and meditate for a moment. You think of the flow of energy in the forest, the kami all around you, watching you, flowing through you, and you know what you need to do. You weren’t cut out to be a scout-nin, but you would give it your best.
You stand back up and begin slowly moving westward. Paying less attention to your sphere, you begin earnestly paying attention to the foliage and dirt around you, hoping to spot some tracks.
Of course, your books in the academy made it sound easy. Junpei made it sound easy, like you could just see a broken stick and immediately find some kind of obvious path to follow. Of course, that was generally impossible without knowing your quarry and environment extremely well, which you most certainly did not. That doesn’t stop you from giving it an honest try.
How would Junpei handle the situation is the main thing on your mind, because you believe 100% he would be the man for this job. You imagine what he might have done differently. Memorizing the topography of the area on the map, keeping an accurate picture of where he was in his mind at all times, being extremely aware of his environment and how to efficiently move through it… Skills you didn’t have, but you could at least imagine. You could at least fathom how to do this correctly.
Eventually you actually do notice something. There’s a tunnel in a bush, leaves and twigs brushed aside to make a small, rabbit-sized gap. If you looked extremely closely, you could just barely make out how there’s a line of not-as-dense grass leading through the bush and beyond it.
Think like a wolf. Imagine that there’s probably the smell of small game wafting from this area, and that a wolf might follow it. There maybe, possibly might have been wolves following these tracks as well.
Would the old lady be with the wolves? Maybe. Maybe not. If she was with them, her chances of being dead went up dramatically, and you don’t see any reason to hold out hope of finding her if that is the case, but it was the only lead you had.
