"Haruto-kun, get me that pair of artery forceps."
Haruto with his mask on, quietly picked up the artery forceps and handed it to Hiruko who was currently exploring the insides of an open corpse.
"Haruto-kun, hand me that crank."
"Haruto-kun, hand me those scissors."
"Haruto-kun, can you get me a few suter threads?"
"Haruto-kun… it seems like this one's a failure too…"
"Haruto-kun…"
And so Haruto spent the rest of the week in company of Hiruko, performing various surgeries as Hiruko tried to turn corpses into puppets.
Of course, they failed each time, but it seemed like Hiruko was learning from each failure and they did fail in different ways each time so Haruto wasn't too bothered by the corpses that piled up each time they failed.
Especially since Haruto was rapidly learning the basics of the human body.
It was one thing to know where the organs were in a diagram of the human body, and another thing entirely to identify those when they were floating about inside the bag of flesh that was the human body.
Although it wasn't much in the terms of medicine, Haruto found himself rapidly learning of new ways he could attack Edward during their nightly training escapades to hurt him the most.
In the end, it had started to shape Haruto's fighting style which was turning out to be more of a precision fighter build where he exploited each opening in Edward to deal the most amount of pain in the least amount of moves possible.
Of course, Haruto was nowhere near consistently being able to land hits on Edward just yet, but there were still those lucky one in a million chances when Edward coincidentally let his guard down just enough for Haruto to cleverly slip past it through his own tricks.
"You seem a little happy today Hiruko-san?" Haruto asked softly as he handed over a pair of scissors to Hiruko who was humming away a random catchy tune while snipping a shinobi's intestines away to replace it with a chakra sealing scroll so that the puppet could perform jutsu once it was reanimated.
"Oh my… have I let myself show a little too much?" Hiruko pretended to blush while rubbing his hands on his cheeks, instead of making it look cute in any way, Hiruko's blood stained hands only left behind streaks of blood and made it all seem creepy.
Haruto used to such a sight from the past week casually glanced past it while waiting for an answer as he dropped the bone cracker that Hiruko had been using into the unclean tools pile.
"Hokage-sama has just given me a surprise. Remember that kekkei genkai project of mine I told you about?"
"Hmm…? Yeah, about transplanting kekkei genkai between shinobi using their chakra right? What about it? Did the ANBU capture a new shinobi that has a kekkei genkai?"
"Not exactly… apparently a member of the Uchiha clan participated in cannibalism and killed and ate his two teammates… they want him to experience the same pain as them for the rest of his life so he's being given to me for me to experiment."
"Oh!" Haruto exclaimed with the appropriate amount of surprise. 'Finally… I was starting to think my judgement about Hiruzen's shock that day had been wrong.'
"Yeah…" Hiruko nodded happily, continuing to hum casually as he sutured up the body to finish the procedure of turning it into a puppet.
"Can I join you tomorrow Hiruko-san?" Haruto asked softly while cleaning his hands since the procedure had finished.
"Join me?" Hiruko looked at Haruto with surprise before he nodded, "Of course, I was just about to ask you since we make such a good little team."
"So I can join you then!?" Haruto asked excitedly.
"Yes. Yes, you can." Hiruko responded calmly with a smile before emitting chakra threads from his fingers and attaching them to the newly created puppet.
The puppet sat up quietly and stood up without any hassle.
They had come this far before Haruto had even joined Hiruko's little team so none of them fussed about it.
The puppet then went to the designated test corner where Hiruko activated a barrier and started the test.
With his fingers twitching quickly, the puppet raised its arms and formed hand seals at quite the speed, breathing in a heavy dose of air until it felt like its chest was about to explode.
Haruto held his breath and waited on the side since this was where the tests had failed till now.
SNAP!!
Suddenly there was a loud snap from the puppet! As if it internally hadn't been able to bear the pressure of the jutsu.
However there were no explosions!
At least not until the puppet opened its mouth and exhaled.
A gust of wind travelled out of the puppet's mouth, strong enough to knock away an elephant.
The storm collided with the barrier of the office space and was forced to dissipate before it caused any real damage but the experiment was done.
Hiruko's smile widened.
"Today is indeed a good day Haruto-kun! Apart from needing stronger materials to make the internals of the puppet, it seems we have succeeded!"
"Not we Hiruko-san, you have succeeded by yourself, I had no part to play in this…"
"Come on Haruto-kun… we're a team aren't we? Don't worry about it!"
Haruto only softly shook his head and smiled.
"There's a hundred thousand ryo bonus for completing this research!" Hiruko suddenly said, causing Haruto's eyes to widen.
"....it seems I must impose on your research Hiruko-san."
"Hahaha! I didn't know you were so greedy, Haruto-kun."
Haruto only gave Hiruko a wry smile and scratched his face out of embarrassment.
"I guess I'll see you tomorrow at the office then Hiruko-san?"
"Tomorrow it is…" Hiruko said and nodded, allowing Haruto to leave the office and go home for the day.
Before leaving however, Haruto's gaze landed on his computer where the model seemed to have finished training.
"...it's done.." Haruto said softly, not particularly happy or sad about it after he'd been griping about the issue for a week now.
After looking at the machine for about a minute, Haruto quietly ran a few tests on the model.
"Only a sixty percent accuracy."
Haruto said that while not understanding if he should feel relief or sadness.
So he spent some time checking what was wrong with the model trying to figure out the reason for its poor performance.
"It needs better data… it will work then…since I chop up the data automatically right now the letters didn't get split up correctly in some places which made the model learn wrongly…"
"Hmm…" Haruto frowned.
"I could do it myself…"
"Or I could ask the department to hire people to do it for me since it'll take too much time if I do it by myself..."
"..."
Haruto left the R&D department to finally go home after a long day of dealing with dead bodies.
***
'It seems like… I'm finally in Konoha…'
Jigen looked around at the strongly built buildings and the felt like laughing.
'All this pride in being the strongest and this is it?'
'I can hardly count a couple of shinobi in the entire village that might even tickle me a little.'
'Now let's see if I can find myself a new body…'
***