Chapter 32: Blooding

After we finished breakfast, one filled with little glances between Sachiko and I, Jiraiya felt it necessary to give us a warning.

“Remember your characters. We checked the room for listeners, but everything out there, you should assume we're being watched.”

Urgh, I thought. I had no desire at the time to stop giving little flirty glances. Or to stop receiving them either.

After leaving the room, we went down to the main space of the inn. To give a bit of perspective, the inn was larger than a traditional bed and breakfast, or even what you'd think of as an inn for travelers from the middle ages. It was more like an ancient hotel, one of the big ones with clothes and jewelry shops, conference rooms, restaurants, bars and all other amenities one could need while on the move.

The one we were in focused on high-value clientele; large volume traders, wealthier landowners, government officials and the like. It was a place somewhat known for their secondary services too; you could get a dancer, musician, or more “intimate” entertainment. That wasn't too unusual; what was unusual was that the establishment was rumored to be accommodating even beyond that.

In short, it was the kind of place where they'd likely have contacts with the local branch of a flesh-peddling group, if only to replace their workers assigned to crueler clients, or those with particular tastes. The whole thing offended my sensibilities, and pissed me off something fierce.

I was never someone to categorically decry something like prostitution, so long as it was regulated to medically and legally protect both the workers and their clients. But children? Slavery? Non-consensual activities? Unfair systems designed to keep the prostitutes destitute? None of that was acceptable.

But I had a mission, so I channeled my anger and distaste. It wasn't hard to get back into the character of an obnoxious, demanding young noble shit.

We went down to the garden, and I rather demonstrably instructed Sachiko to “be of some use, and fetch me tea,” while Jiraiya searched out the manager. Sachiko returned just ahead of the manager. In his full sight, I took a sip of the tea then threw the remainder in her face.

“What was that! How useless are you? Are the punishments insufficient? Should I sell you to someone capable of training you, you useless creature?” I berated her, all the while she apologized and cringed. Then I turned to Yasu. “Get her out of my sight. Keep her seiza to reflect on her failures until I return and correct her.”

I doubted I'd have been able to do it the day before, but with our new developments in our relationship I actually found it far easier to separate the role I was playing from myself. Yasu grabbed her by the arm and dragged her off.

I turned to the manager. “I'll punish her for your embarrassment as well, Manager-san.” One of the nice things about the language: you could address people by title instead of name.

“Ahahah, what embarrassment, sir? You were merely disciplining an unruly servant. I am sorry to have intruded. I hope you have been enjoying your stay.”

“It's been quite decent, thank you,” I said, though my expression was quite dissatisfied.

“Is there anything I could do to make it better?” he inquired unctuously.

“Well, I had heard that you provided full services? I was thinking of acquiring someone to play with. If I liked them enough, I might even replace my current servant. Her punishments just aren't having the same effect anymore.”

“Of course sir, that can be arranged. Do you have any preferences? We can find several that fit your needs, then have them waiting for your inspection this evening.”

“I'm not sure. I'm fairly discerning, you understand. Perhaps someone younger, so I might train them properly from the beginning, get them broken to my will before they are older and set in their ways? Would it be possible to speak with your supplier, and see their full inventory in the age of, shall we say ten to fifteen? I would be willing to double your usual cut to make up for the inconvenience.”

“I'm not sure, sir, my suppliers are very private people...”

Well, let's see if more money is enough. To help things along, I gave the hand-signal for Sachiko, watching in hiding, to apply a minor trust genjutsu.

“Triple your usual cut then. And I may end up taking back more than one, so long as they have something worth it.”

Between the genjutsu and the money, he was sold. “I should be able to do something, sir. Perhaps you might return at five in the afternoon, and we will see what we can manage.”

“Excellent. We'll be here then.” And so we left to do more snooping about town. Around two in the afternoon we returned and after our late lunch reviewed the folders on all the reported missing persons and the sketches done by the municipal police. If there were any of the girls there, we'd get them back.

Unfortunately, we were after the general organization, which we suspected had ties far beyond just Okutari. After all, you can't really sell people in the same area you took them from. We wanted the other centers, the transporters, the whole damned network. So while it would be cruel, we (more precisely I) would be marking as many as possible with a tracker seal and waiting until they reached their final destinations before launching a series of raids.

Sure enough, the afternoon rolled around and we had the meeting. We were taken to a warehouse district on the outskirts of the town, and then blindfolded. If we weren't trained for that sort of thing, it might have been enough, as it was I knew which warehouse's hidden basement we were led into, and where that entrance was even without scanning the area with my sensing.

Given the number of the people I was sensing, this was either a major hub or the criminal organization was larger and had more backing than we had realized. There were even chakra signals for a chunin accompanied by a pair of genin. I memorized all three, as they were likely among the priority targets with additional payouts as listed in our secondary objectives.

Finally, we were led into a rather nice room, and a full two dozen girls aged ten to fifteen were led in. Some, typically the youngest, had clearly not been broken yet, while others were mere shells, likely from repeated rapes, beatings, and drug or genjutsu applications. I wanted to kill everyone there. But, that wouldn't solve the problem, and it wouldn't complete the mission.

Instead, I went up and down the line, prodding and inspecting them, or at least that's what it looked like. Instead, when I pinched them or poked particularly hard, I'd mark them with a seal that I could remotely “ping” to get a location. The range wasn't that great, a bit under ten miles, but we had Pelicans to do the actual following; these had the latest station-keeping seals, and could actually maintain position based off of a beacon. If truly necessary we could follow as many as half a dozen different targets without even leaving the town.

I wished I could save all the girls, then, but as that wasn't possible, I went with the next best alternative, if one of the more difficult morally. I picked a girl to buy, one that was clearly a fighter from the marks on her. From the look in her eyes and the freshness of her marks she still hadn't been broken yet. We had the expense account for it, after all. She was younger, at a guess ten or eleven years old, and clearly didn't know whether to be relieved or whether she was going from the frying pan to the fire. We haggled before settling on a fairly exorbitant fee, then left the way we had come in before returning to the inn.

Over the next few days we watched while shipments of girls went off on a pair of river barges and a single land-caravan. All the while, we were building up a massive dossier on the organization and their activities; it was far larger than it could have been without at least some level of governmental coverage. It was likely a highly placed lord, or at the very least an influential bureaucrat, was involved. When we caught them, I was going to fucking break them whatever their political backing.

And, unlike many other ninja, I'd get away with it. My position as a samurai could be argued to demand it, in fact, and I fully planned to take advantage of those gaps within the law.

Finally, more than a week later, Jiraiya gave us the OK to launch the first attacks. The two river barges had traveled up and down the river before most of the girls scattered. We tracked the distribution points they went through, and communicated back to Konoha. The client after being informed of the extent of the rot had apparently expanded the mission parameters, hiring two other teams to hit those regions and track down whatever girls they could find. The land-caravan went to what we discovered to be a hidden bandit stronghold near Okutari. We thought it might be the main center for their operations in the area, and were planning to hit it after rolling up their people in Okutari itself.

Finally the time came. We launched the operation. First, we hit the warehouse. The fight itself was pretty unremarkable. Untrained thugs, no challenge. The experience though. The experience was one I would remember for all my lives.

People might talk about the look of it, the blood and such. It was possibly because of my experience with violence on TV, but the look wasn't actually that bad. Given the poor lighting and speed, it was a mess but not really any worse than horsing about while painting.

The smell... The smell of the blood and shit and piss. The smell was bad, but only afterwards, when I had time to take it in. Afterwards, for years, the smell was a definite memory trigger. But during the assault, I was so up on my adrenaline and focus, I never really noticed.

The taste was pretty fucking awful. Not noticing that the liquid on your lips was specks of your enemies' blood, and then unconsciously licking your lips and tasting the rust and iron and salt and realizing “oh shit, that's someone's blood, I hope to fuck my immune system is strong enough.” Not a pleasant sensation, or a pleasant thought.

No, in the moment, the really unpleasant thing was the sound. The yells and screams and even begging weren't that bad. Again, I barely noticed it in the moment.

What was bad was the sounds of blades cutting through flesh. What was worse was the sound of metal on bone.

I had always been bothered by that sound, and then to be hearing it, feeling it transmitted through my blades into my hand, up my bones and then sinking into my brain. That was what I'd remember about my first kills the most. The sound of it.

And if you thought a wind blade might have sounded different, you'd be right. It sounded like a high-speed bone saw as it cut through limbs and necks and ribs and bodies. Even more hideous a sound than plain steel on bone. For years I’d shiver thinking back at those sounds, and I developed a far greater apathy to the sound of metal on bone than I’d had before.

There was a reason most ninja ended up at least partially insane.

The operation itself was highly successful. We had total-casualties for the enemy thugs, either killed or disabled, and captured the chunin and both genin as well as some fat fuck in a fancy outfit we figured might be a local boss. Until we could interrogate them properly, we kept the HVTs (high value targets) in prisoner scrolls. Jiraiya went to fetch the town guard while Sachiko, Yasu and I secured the scene, gathering any documents and treating the worse-off slaves. Soon enough the guard arrived and we passed off the prisoners and those we'd recently freed, then went off at best speed to the stronghold in the woods.

The stronghold was a semi-permanent camp set up inside a palisade surrounded by a ditch; it reminded me a bit like a motte-and-bailey, but without the motte or keep. Overall, we estimated forty to fifty bandits and a similar number of slaves.

If it weren't for the captives, I'd have destroyed the entire camp within seconds with something strategic. I was ready to be done with the business. As it was, we needed a close assault. We had identified a barracks for the slaves, and were expecting that a number of them were also in tents or huts as entertainment for their captors.

We decided to go in stealthily at night rather than push a full-court assault. Between my sensing, Yasu's sensing and spotting, and Sachiko's genjutsu we managed to sneak up and kill the sentries.

A stealth kill like that was actually not as simple as it sounds. There was a bit of technique to it. First I got really close. Then I grabbed the target around the neck with your left arm, almost as if I were going to put them in a choke hold, but twist their head up and to the left, leaving the throat nicely exposed. I slammed my knee, hard, into the base of their spine, and pulled them backwards, taking them off their balance. Then, with them stunned and unable to twist or resist, I slammed the knife home into the throat, and drag it up and out to the side, making sure to get all the major blood vessels.

If I could, I actually wanted to avoid cutting the windpipe; it made this bubbling hissing sound that was a bit of a giveaway. It wasn’t loud, per se, just unnatural and could warn other sentries. The other thing to watch out for is that I didn't cut my own arm in the heat of the moment; that was part of what the partial-take-down helped with. It helped me position myself in the darkness and gave me the time to make sure of my knife’s target. Had I lacked training, and worried about messing up with actually getting the blood-vessels, I could have taken a step back, extending the victim's body further, and then stabbed through the stomach, directing the wounds up towards the lungs and making sure to slice the diaphragm. There were other methods; going after the organs in the small of the back, for example, but the one above sufficed that night.

#KonohaChildren’sEducation, I thought darkly at the time.

With the sentries dead, we were able to go door to door and tent to tent in pairs. I worked with Sachiko and Yasu worked with Jiraiya. We didn't have the ability to take a whole load of prisoners; especially not without waking the encampment up, and risking the captives. It was bloody work, but it was almost unreal. Just, sleeping, then dead. Sleeping with a captive, then dead without her even noticing. Again, and again, and again.

Until eventually we came to the center of the camp and the estimated leader's tent. He didn't get the same quick kill as his fellows; he got a strong sedative injected into the neck, then a pillow pushed over his face until he passed out and could be restrained. We made another pass through the camp to make sure we didn't miss anything, then woke the captives and gathered them up away from the bodies.

The operation complete, it was time to find out who was profiting behind the scenes. I had asked for and received permission from Jiraiya to try out a new interrogation method. Back on Earth, a family friend was special forces, and at one point had talked about the differences in different interrogation ideologies. How the Americans tended to be very enthusiastic but ultimately unskilled; they were good at getting people to talk, but not so much at getting high quality information. The British typically excelled at longer-term, more mental interrogations that might take time, but carefully broke the subject and got all the information possible. But that the Israelis had some of the most interesting techniques from a scientific point of view, as well as timeliness and efficacy.

Apparently, the Israelis liked to use something called “shaking”. Not nearly so terrifying a name as other techniques, right? The way that it worked was that they would take the subject, and either using a chair on a spring, or just holding them tightly by the collar, shake them so that their head was moving a lot. Kind of like a head-banger in a concert, except a bit more extreme and including a lateral motion that particularly rattled the brain.

The interesting thing was that this would cause symptoms similar to delirium and drunkenness. The disorientation was meant to be so intense that the subject would often think they were dreaming, or talking to their comrades rather than an interrogator. Best of all, the effect could take less than ten minutes to become effective, and caused little enough long term harm that it could either be repeated, or allow other interrogation methods later. Finally, it left no marks.

When I, thinking as a ninja, realized I might need to carry out the occasional field interrogation, I decided that that method might be an effective one, and so I had storage seal with a “Field Interrogation Station.” It was basically a chair with a seal to shake the subject properly, with controlled intensity. That mission was to be the first actual live-test of my device, and I was interested to see how it would perform.

The backup plan was to use one of my overpowered genjutsu to make our prisoners believe and trust us. That was judged to have a greater risk of breaking their minds, though, hence it being the backup. Really, no one liked seeing me use genjutsu. It was just disturbing.

As for really good truth-sensing, we couldn’t manage it. Even relatively pathetic ninja had too much control for a polygraph set-up to work. I had previously experimented with Sachiko and Yasu on how I might use touch-contact and my deep scans to watch the chakra-flow in the brain and try and detect when they were lying or telling the truth, but it turned out far too hard to get good baselines without much more study than I was willing to give the subject.

The shaking test proved highly successful. Within an hour, we had the leader of the bandit camp spilling his guts about all his most important contacts, and even got the name of the Provincial Police Commander running the corrupt guards and inspectors who had been helping the scum from the government's side.

I kept my promise, and used the nastiest interrogation genjutsu I had access to. It had just the right amount of pain to agonize and incapacitate, leaving the victim unable to even suicide properly. Said commander screamed for days until he died, but he gave us a list of everyone involved first. The autopsy wasn’t sure what got him in the end, between a combination of infection after clawing out his own eyes, a lack of food or water, tension, and elevated heart rate from the pain.

The whole affair had been a nasty, dirty piece of business. But we were doing good work. That was important to me. I would live a long time; keeping myself steady mentally was a priority. It would be too easy to become monster rather than man if I wasn't careful, so I was wary of becoming too easy with immoral actions. Killing, in the right circumstances was fine, but supporting, or even tolerating real evil like that slavery was not.

Not when I could do something about it.

Looking back, I definitely lost my temper, and if I were to do it again I’d not have tortured the man to death. But I’d have dared anyone to look at the children we rescued and say it wasn’t merited.

Our first C-rank a massive success, we returned to Okutari for a rest period before heading out on more missions.