Chapter 9

Tea Country

Ryoma, Recently Promoted Ninja

Gaku woke up by the end of the second day, recovering from the one-two punch of having two limbs broken, many more fractured, and his entire body covered over in ugly purple bruising. So not really a one-two punch and more like… many consecutive punches. The metaphor was falling apart the more he thought about it.

Now, if he was a civilian, a broken arm would take a good… two months to be not-broken anymore, and potentially up to a year to recover its full strength. Chakra, the helpful stuff that it was, would naturally bolster recovery simply by being present in the body. Not usually to the point of battlefield-relevant regeneration, but an injury that would take a civilian one month to heal might take a ninja a week.

A ninja usually didn’t have to worry about bleeding out unless the injury was exceptionally traumatic, infection was usually only a worry with particularly filthy wounds, and many of the most common poisons and diseases were something most ninja could push through without too much trouble. Poisons that worked at all against ninja either specifically targeted chakra networks, or were so hilariously lethal that it didn’t matter anyways. Broken limbs would usually heal back correctly even without putting them in braces, and much of the wear of age took substantially longer to set it.

Having a stronger, healthier body produced more chakra. Chakra in-turn naturally facilitated health and strength in an organism in all kinds of little ways. It was pretty nice that way. People who didn’t actively use chakra, such as the massed levy-armies of samurai and daimyos, might just die from getting a minor cut and infection setting in. A Samurai could usually laugh off a severed arm and beat you to death with it.

Of course, none of this applied if you were suffering from chakra exhaustion and had thrown your internals out of whack. This is why the first thing most nin-medics did after stabilizing a patient was to simply refill their chakra reserves back up to stable levels so it could start circulating and facilitating the recovery of the body on its own.

All of this to say, Ryoma expected the man to be combat-worthy in a week. He’d have to come to a decision soon about whether or not he wanted to pass along some info. Typically something rather frowned upon in ninja-society, but the information Ryoma had in mind wasn’t treasonous. Certainly it’s something that would only help Sunagakure in another… fifteen years or so, maybe. Of course, if he shared it, that would be drawing a lot of heat down on him that he’d really prefer to not have…

He’d figure it out eventually, in the meanwhile he’d finish up Mari’s replacement arm. Carving it during his shifts on nightwatch and keeping everything sealed up until it was ready. He wasn’t sure if she could produce chakra strings or not, but pushing chakra into something that was directly attached to you was much easier, so it probably wouldn’t be hard for her to figure out. The frame would be carved out and everything linked up via ball-joints soon enough, he really just had finishing touches left to do. From there he’d hand off the scroll and some instructions about using it and if she decided to reveal the thing in front of the Konoha team, it would be on her head instead of his.

Yup, nothing to do with him, he’d be blameless. This way the Kazekage would be mad at someone else and he’d be free to skip off back home. He considered putting a weapon in it, but that could probably wait for an actual commission or something.

Gaku had woken up and was in the middle of talking to his genin team, something Ryoma would politely stay away from in case they were exchanging sensitive information and didn’t want Suna hearing.

“Uhm…” Came a call from the side, Ryoma turned his head towards the source of the voice. Lady Ikeda, clad in her travel-dress and half-leaning on the side of the noble cart, looked over to him. They had stopped for lunch, and he was in the middle of eating a delicious portion of rice, canned meat, and baked sweet potato.

She had lost a fair bit of weight since the journey started, the only real evidence of her once-chubby state being the roundish face.

He took another bite, a transformation applied over his form maintaining the illusion of the face-mask. In actuality, the face-mask had been untied and lowered around his neck. Lady Ikeda briefly pulled back at the sight of him eating through a mask, before shaking her head. “Yesh?” He asked through a mouthful.

She stared for a few moments more, before shaking her head and returning to some prior point. “I uhm, I wanted to ask you about something…”

He continued to chew, nodding briefly to indicate he was listening but not verbally replying. She twiddled her fingers for a few moments, looking around before eventually deciding to keep her gaze on the ground. “The- uhm- b-bodies of those bandits…”

“Hm!” He hummed in response, chewing and swallowing the bite as he did. “I suppose you’re wondering why I took them?”

“Ah- yes.” Lady Ikeda confirmed, glancing up at him and then back down again. She was all nervous, he supposed it was a bit distasteful to talk about corpses.

“Well… there’s a number of reasons, but the biggest one..” Ryoma nodded his head back and forth, thinking about it for a moment before coming to an answer. “Well, someone has to bury them.”

She blinked at him, tilting her head with a little look of concentration. “You took them to bury…?”

“Mhn.” He nodded. “It’s not exactly a clever answer, but if we simply passed them by, the bodies would just rot away until someone else comes by and gets rid of them. Maybe they throw them into the river, maybe feed them to pigs, maybe something else. But the bodies are there because I had a fight, and leaving messes around for other people to clean up is something I try to avoid.”

He reached up to scratch at his ear, tilting his head and closing his eyes as he did. “I don’t have the time to get them buried at the moment, I’m currently protecting you as per our contract, but I have the storage capacity for the bodies and Suna has a corpse-processing division. I’ll bring them back and hand them over for them to handle. They’ll probably use the bodies for medical practice, then hold a little funeral and light a candle for them.”

“It’s not exactly the best end, but it’s better than rotting out here. It doesn’t take much effort on my part to facilitate all that, so there’s no real reason for me not to.” Ryoma shook his head. “There’s a few other, smaller reasons too, but that’s the big one. Someone has to make sure they get buried, it might as well be me. Especially since I’m the one who killed them.”

“…You are very kind, aren’t you?” Lady Ikeda asked quietly, staring at him with some expression he couldn’t parse. Ryoma responded with a rolling snort, amused by the statement.

“It’s the barest courtesy I could show- not enough to call myself ‘kind’ by it at least. I’m just trying to avoid being an Inconsiderate Horseman.”

“Inconsiderate Horseman?”

“Mhm. The Inconsiderate Horseman does not take the time to go around the field, driving his horse straight through and trampling the crops under its hooves simply because he is in a hurry and has the power to do so.” Ryoma relayed the little parable, taking another bite of his food after and finishing through a mouthful. “He is neglectful and short-sighted, and causes a great many problems for himself when he returns from war and finds a famine.”

“Ah- that sounds like a saying from the Buddhas, though not one I’m familiar with.” Lady Ikeda admitted, leaning back and letting her legs dangle off the edge of the cart.

“It would be very strange for you to be familiar with it.” Ryoma nodded with a grin in his voice. “I just made it up.”

As per the custom, the bubbly noblewoman collapsed into another fit of giggles at his antics.

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—

“Took you a bit to wake.” Ryoma said quietly, greeting the cart-ridden Konoha Jonin late into the night. “I figured I’d give you some time to talk to your team privately before I came over for a briefing.”

Gaku Inuzuka, face covered in field-bandages and skin still a bit pale from flushing out whatever that toxin he had been hit with was, gave a tiny nod in greeting. “I appreciate the courtesy, Braggart. I’ve already been caught up on the situation from my team, but I suppose you’d need info on the woman, wouldn’t you?”

Ryoma nodded, sitting down on the side of the cart and leaning against one of the posts that held up the roof. “I’d appreciate whatever you know, in case we come across her again.”

“Well I figured out who she was about halfway through the fight.” Gaku grunted, leaning up in a slightly annoyed fashion. “Ogress Omatsu is an alias- her real name is Kuchisei Kei, B-rank ninja of Iwa, last seen running away from Battle of Bald Field.”

Ryoma hummed at that. “That was the final major battle of the war, wasn’t it? The battle that prompted the Iwakage to declare a full withdrawal.”

“It was.” Gaku nodded, flinching briefly at the pain of moving something wrongly in his neck. “The fact that she’s all the way down here? I didn’t see a headband on her, so she’s probably here on an undercover mission. If she’s here trying to collect nobles for that bounty… There’s a lot of potential reasons for that.”

“It’s hard to determine much more than that- from our current intelligence.” Ryoma mused, reaching up to rub at his chin. “B-rank you said? That sounds about right from what your ninken partner told me, it’s not that she’s all that strong on her own, it’s just that she had the tools to handle you in specific.”

“It’s the poison that’s hardest to deal with.” Gaku grumbled, leaning back. “By the time I figured it out, I was already weakened enough that she could handle me. If I were to fight her again right now, I’d win.”

Ryoma raised his brows. “You’re that confident huh? You’re still pretty badly injured, you know.”

“I have two closed breaks and a handful of hairline fractures. That’s not nearly enough to slow me down.” Gaku rolled his eyes. “No- the only issue against her is that poison, like I said. She needed a sample of my blood in order to tailor it to my biology, otherwise she’d poison herself with the gas. My team could probably take her down now that we know that. Hell- I bet Asuma alone could.”