Losers

Name: Investigating the Border
Location: Land of Earth
Rank: B
Team: Not Required, Recommended.
Client: Kage
Rewards: 800 exp and 2,000 Ryo
Description: You have been sent to investigate the border of the Land of Earth to discover if there is any truth to the rumors of a Black Sun Occupation there. After entering the border, you are attacked by a group of five B-1 Black Sun Soldiers. These have the stats listed in the Soldiers NPC page. Upon defeating them, you are able to sense a much larger group approaching, so you are required to leave, as you are only doing light recon at this time.

There were no trade caravans, but there was a short, red headed man with a plain, white eye patch walking around in a black leather jacket and carrying a navy umbrella with a strange,
crimson red marking emblazoned upon its hood. For those who could read it, which amounted to zero of the trees and birds currently in attendance, they'd find is read "Circus" in some form of foreign script and, beyond that, was simply an unnecessary accessory. There was neither rain nor harsh sunlight, no wind and no debris in the air. No, the umbrella was not needed in the slightest and drew the attention of...

well no one. No one was present on that main road save for the group of what appeared to be five black-clad armed men. Fun.

They wasted no time, swiftly throwing a volley of weaponry at the stationary man with the fantastic attire. He saw among these mostly kunai with a handful of shuriken. A simple run to the left spared him the gruesome fate of impalement and he cocked his flaming head at them, watching as they sprinted on him at top speed. He returned in kind, lurching forward in a blinding bolt to meet these foes head on, moving the umbrella before him and opening it fully, revealing the brilliant red marking and fully obscuring his short figure.

The ensuing knives and blades suck into the paper of the craft and found no flesh. The distraction served its purpose as the man had rounded out once more to the right and, within but a moment, he had joined the black clad figures as a sixth amidst their ranks. The fun would only now begin.

One of them, a taller and apparently older or more seasoned man, was the first to react, a knife already within his hand and lunging out at the man's throat. However, he was rather cautious, probably due to the fact that his foe was not simply outnumbered but also visibly unarmed. He would soon learn the extent to which a meter and a half sword out ranged the kunai he gripped so tightly as the chakra of it pierced his own neck straight through, sending a gout of blood from him and sealing off his chakra.

Reaching forward towards the soon to be lifeless hand he plucked the weapon once intended for him from the dead hand, spinning to face two much smaller individuals, young boys by the look of it. "Are you... are you two even fifteen yet? Have you bed your first wench?" Ears perked as some stones behind him shifted and he activated an elaborate feint to indicate a spinning attack before sprinting forward once more.

The blade left his grasp as soon as he had acquired it, flying true to the head of the youngin on his right. He felt no pity for these people, perhaps because he could, in some small place of him, sense the enslavement of them. He had himself been enslaved until only recently and the kinship died hard. Their bodies all moved properly but their eyes belied the dead truth of them: husks and nothing more. Once thrown he brought the limb back, hand grasping around a freshly born sword and arching it in a cross slash to remove the head of his third victim, the youngest among them.

He continued running past the still falling bodies for a few steps before turning as if on ice and continuing back a foot or so, gaining distance between the final two who now faced him. He grinned as he cocked his head once more, now more puzzled than previously. "Who are you though? Don't you have some big shpele for me?"

They did not, apparently, and instead drew one fat cleaver each and rushed. They looked more like butchers than ninja but perhaps that was precisely what they were, little more than roaming killers to protect the homeland and serve as an advanced and utterly expendable vanguard. Another final, simplistic feint would dispatch them, his body appearing to show them each that he was about to split into two different simultaneous attacks only to duck low for a third, skewering each with a spear to the gut and leaving the swords in their places. One, the rightmost, attempted again and again to make handseals which look suspiciously like some form of healing jutsu but no no avail. They were cut off from their chakra. Pity.

He could see a rising dust cloud in the distance, a queue to leave he figured as, currently, no one really knew he was out there. He bent down low to the one that continued to try and sign, whispered some made up Italian into his ear, and, with a freshly fabricated knife, cut off the piece of cloth on the front of his garb. It looked to be a sun motif of some sort rendered all in black. He tucked it in his pocket and fled away.

exit