>>5977472“Well. Good work.” He says. “Nothing we can do about the crab damage, shit happens. I should probably walk down the river, fish that redhead out of the water and get her stuffed somewhere where she won’t wash up and get discovered too fast.”
He places a hand on your shoulder. For the first time ever, you feel revolted by his touch and you quickly brush it off.
“Naoki, PLEASE.”
To his credit, Naoki hesitates before ignoring you. “We’ll need to know if you learned anything while talking to them.”
For a second, you imagine hitting him. Yelling at him. Letting the confused disgust in your core have a target and just let him have it. But you’d be a hypocrite. This was all your decision. Just yours.
You feel like it’s getting difficult to breathe again and you wish he would just piss off for a second and let you relax, but you focus on deliberately trying to calm down. It doesn’t work, but at least trying gives you a reminder of your sense of self control.
“General store in Takefu. Code word is asking for beetle resin. They implied support from other organizations. They said the Lords of Fire were promising to train civilians to use chakra.” You manage to squeeze out. You don’t even feel like you’re talking, just letting your animal instincts work your mouth with puppet strings.
“Alright. So, nothing actionable right away. I’ll get that corpse out of the water before it drifts too far, you should probably check on Masami. She’s probably having some kind of panic attack.”
Yeah, no shit, asshole. You manage to croak out a grunt of acknowledgement as you turn to walk into the woods, but you quickly change course and head over to the tollhouse where the bodies were tossed.
Naoki had the sense to close the door, but there’s an aura emanating from this place. Unclean. Disgusting. You want to burn it down, or at least get the bodies buried somewhere with a bit more dignity. But there wasn’t any time for dignity.
Instead you fall to your knees as a wave of incredible vertigo overcomes you. You begin rubbing the dirt in front of you in some kind of bizarre ritual to steady yourself and remind you that you’re settled on solid earth, trying to get your bearings.
Could you doctor the scene so that it looks like something else happened? No, that’d be basically impossible. Too many bodies to get rid of, too little time. No real tools to make some kind of elaborate scene either.
In moments like this, all you could really do was pray.
You take a deep breath, and begin.
“May they be received in the Pure Land. May they be free from animosity, oppression, and trouble. May all beings, the living and the dead, be free from all evil.”
You could go on, but going any further seemed obscene because you’d be talking to yourself instead of to them. That was enough.
Strange. Why do you wish Daigo were here right now?
