They ran for a full day and night.
The child Ayane was carrying woke up midway, but before he could utter a single word, she stuffed a soldier pill into his mouth and promptly knocked him out again.
Only after fleeing hundreds of miles did Woodpecker finally deign to slow his pace as they reached a dense thicket of trees.
"Alright, we should be safe now." He let out a long, ragged breath, his voice tinged with the relief of a survivor. "Mashu shouldn't be following us anymore."
To keep moving, Woodpecker had only given his gruesome wounds the most basic emergency treatment. By now, the blood had hardened, gluing his tattered flak jacket to his mangled flesh in dark, purplish scabs.
Ayane suspected that the puppeteer named Mashu might never have intended to hunt them down in the first place. Their escape had been... suspiciously smooth.
Yet Woodpecker was jumpy as a cat; he looked at a stray dog on the side of the road and looked ready to hurl a shuriken just to see if it was a transformation.
The caution of the older Anbu generation... I guess I have a lot to learn, she thought. But since she had no proof, she kept her mouth shut.
I really need to get a sensory jutsu. Being 'blind' to the battlefield is too passive. As someone who used to play games with full-map hacks and quest markers in her previous life, this uncertainty was maddening.
Woodpecker seemed intimately familiar with this forest. After a few precise turns, he located a hollowed-out tree. "One of the Anbu safehouses. It has stocked supplies, rotated regularly."
He glanced at the boy Ayane was still carrying. "Why haven't you dropped him? Are you planning to bring him all the way to the front lines?"
Ayane gently laid the sleeping child on the ground. "If we leave him behind, then there truly won't be anyone left from Maba Village." She whispered, "Someone has to... remember them, right?"
The words of Principal Ichii flickered in her mind. Woodpecker snorted. He looked at the demon mask covering the girl's face and muttered, "Hmph. Naive, foolish womanly compassion."
Ayane puffed out her chest, unoffended. "Correct. I am a woman!"
Though they had only been together for two days, surviving a life-and-death encounter had shown her that Woodpecker wasn't a bad person. He kept preaching that Anbu didn't need emotions, but if he were truly as cold as he claimed, he wouldn't have bothered talking to her at all.
"Swan, I need to apply medicine. Keep watch," Woodpecker ordered as he sat cross-legged. "Stay sharp. We're close to the front; Konoha scouts might be prowling nearby."
Can we please stop raising flags? Ayane complained internally. If you love making things difficult for yourself so much, why are you called Woodpecker? You should change your name to Crow!
Still, she leaped onto a high branch. She was exhausted. Her muscles screamed for rest after the back-to-back combat and the day-long marathon. Even a shinobi—a "vegetable" with 13 billion cells—had limits. But she was the only one capable of guarding them right now.
After confirming the perimeter was clear, she sat in a concealed spot and summoned her panel.
[You have completed a grueling physical training session!]
[Achievement Points +16!]
Ayane almost lost it. The system treated my life-or-death flight as a morning jog? That's cold.
She scrolled past that to the real prize.
[New Trait: Overflowing Killing Intent (White)]
[Description:] "Killing one is a crime; killing ten thousand makes you a hero!"
[Effect:] You can materialize formless killing intent to pressure and intimidate enemies. Note: The intimidation effect scales with the amount of "Killing Intent" collected.
[Evolution Requirement:] 1,000 Achievement Points + 1,000 Killing Intent Value.
What is this? The ninja version of Conqueror's Haki? Ayane mused. Others have the potential to be kings; I have the potential to be a serial killer.
Then she remembered that killing intent was a very real thing in the Naruto world. In the original series, when Team 7 met Orochimaru in the Forest of Death, Sasuke—a member of the Uchiha clan, masters of Yin release—was paralyzed by the sheer pressure of Orochimaru's intent.
She checked the 'Killing Intent Value' notes and sighed. The rogue Chunin she just killed only provided 24 points. To evolve this trait, she'd have to kill at least forty more guys like him.
It's literally forcing me onto the battlefield. Killing is a bad habit; I guess I'm never quitting now.
She popped a soldier pill and leaned back, but her mind wandered back to the battle—not the victory, but the corpses in the mud. This was the Second Great Ninja War. The Hidden Rain was still at its peak, and Hanzo was at his most ambitious. And yet, the country was already a graveyard. What would it look like in a few years during the Third War?
No wonder the Akatsuki grows so fast later on. The people of Rain are desperate for hope, even if that hope is a moth flying into a flame.
But then again, the Rain had started this specific war. Hanzo wasn't clean.
Clutching Stormrazor to her chest, she thought about the "justice" of it all. The Land of Rain was trapped in eternal storms.
You couldn't grow crops here. She remembered her mother saying that rice in the Land of Whirlpools was ten times cheaper. A country that can't feed itself has no choice but to expand or starve.
During a bad harvest, a single bowl of hot rice could cost 5,000 Ryo. Five thousand! In coins, that was more than you could hold in one hand.
BOOM.
A low roll of thunder broke her train of thought. Ayane sighed, shaking off the weight of national geopolitics. She was just a girl about to enter a meat grinder; she needed to worry about living through tomorrow first.
She looked up at the sky. The leaden clouds hung low like a heavy net, suffocating the land.
Suddenly, a thought struck her, sharp as the lightning above.
If one day... I become the God of the Shinobi world...The first thing I'll do...Is tear this ugly sky apart, so it can never hide the sun from me again!