(New Leaf) Canicular 6 (Patreon)

AN: Finally got this out a day later than I wanted, work had me busy as shit yesterday and I didn’t have time to do my usual edits and posting, my apologies.

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Naruto

I must have paused for too long trying to get my story straight in my head, because she started talking again.

“Homeroom 1-B under Arata Misaki and member of the computer club, apartment 8-C of the Neighborly Heights community complex, and unofficially recognized as a citizen of Nippon just over a year ago, with a new identity created through the Spectre Assimilation Bureau, backdated to cover your lack of existence in the system prior. After a year of turning away government agents, you began working with the local Devils, and are now trespassing on a government subsidiary’s property for the second time this month.”

Her gray eyes narrowed, the first real shift in facial expression she’d made.

“I’ll ask only once, Uzumaki Naruto; Who are you, and what is your purpose here? Cooperate, and we will be lenient.”

‘Huh.' She’d done her research on me, and even managed to sneak up on me. ‘I guess the ninja cosplay outfit isn’t entirely for show. But uh, what’s the deal with that other stuff?’ Maybe those shady guys who sometimes showed up at my door weren’t actually creeps sent to do shady things to me? Maybe they were just creeps who were bad at their jobs…

Moving on.

“You got the wrong idea, lady,” I told the young woman, slowly raising my hands with my palms open to show I was unarmed, eyeing the blade an inch from my neck. “I really am just a student at Kuoh Academy now days.” I cautiously poked a finger at the flat of the tanto while I spoke, to see if her grip and positioning of the blade would budge. It did, slightly, but she pushed it closer to the skin of my neck warningly, her lips thinning and an unamused eyebrow raising in response.

‘Probably around my strength,’ I thought, based on the resistance. ‘At the least, not way overwhelmingly stronger than me even if she happens to be holding back.’

“I don’t care about the different factions or whatever,” I said flatly, eyeing the dim green blinking light of the console reflecting off of the end of her polished blade. “I hang out with devils and do odd jobs for them because they’re my friends, from school, not for any other reason.”

The hand holding the blade shifted its grip just the tiniest bit, but I couldn’t tell if that was in a good way or a bad way for my future health in the low light. I couldn’t risk it.

I made my decision and looked up to stare at her, glancing my gaze to the side for a single instant.

Something about humans that I didn’t really grasp until I started studying biology in this world, is that humans are social animals, with a ton of unconscious habits that we evolved to survive in the world as a group.

For just a split second, her eyes flickered to follow my gaze out of sheer instinct, an ingrained reflex that she either hadn’t consciously realized existed, or hadn’t learned how to suppress in a combat situation yet due to her relatively young age for fighters in this world.

I flexed my wrists and a pair of knives shot up into my raised hands’ grips; one being one of my regular disposable dark-gray kunai, and the other being a new kunai made out of the same shiny and supernaturally durable metal my sword was.

I jerked my head back while slipping the polished knife between my neck and her blade, and I forced her back a couple steps in her moment of wide-eyed surprise. At the same time, I spun my other kunai into a reverse grip and caught her reflexive palm-strike on the solid part of my elbow in a high block, before swinging the rest of my arm down in an attempt to stab her shoulder to disable her arm. She pushed past her surprise and collected her expression almost instantly, pulling her hand back just in time to bring it up to catch my wrist, the sharp point of metal just centimeters from her shoulder.

“If you won’t come quietly-!” The girl grunted out in exertion as she held back my retaliation.

She twisted her tanto around to push my other kunai to the side, breaking our sudden blade lock at the same time as she threw my wrist to the other side, leaving my upper body open for a single moment. A fluid motion brought her tanto back up to thrust at me.

Unfortunately for her, I was already mid-motion, bringing my leg up to kick her in the gut. Unfortunately for me, she blocked my kick with her knee the same way I’d blocked her palm strike with my elbow. Even as the strength of my kick pushed us away from each other, forcing us to hop back on a single foot each to keep our balance, the leg that she used to block snapped up in a kick straight to my extended calf that had me wincing, already feeling the muscle want to lock up as we flew apart.

I slid back until my heel banged against the wall below the window and stopped my momentum, while the Shinra girl’s path sent her tearing through a flimsy cubicle divider, without her even giving a reaction to show that she’d noticed it as she landed. It was a little hard to see her exact shape against the darkness of the room at this range, but I was just able to make out her tanto being held up near her head in a two-handed stabbing position thanks to a glint of light reflecting off it, its tip aimed at my chest.

“-then I’ll take you in through force.” She finished in a no-nonsense tone.

I got the feeling that whatever way she was leaning before, she definitely didn’t believe in my honest intentions now.

Multiple meters away from me, with a blade barely more than a foot long, she thrust.

My newer kunai was something I’d had commissioned specifically to consistently withstand clashes against stronger things, like Light weapons and the swords Kiba could make, while still being small enough to keep on me at all times unlike my sword. According to Koneko, this chick was probably part of the Shinra clan– the one tied to the Metal phase/element/whatever they wanted to call it– so I knew from the moment she showed herself, that it was basically a guarantee that the only major piece of metal she carried wasn’t just an ordinary tanto with nothing special going for it.

I’ll admit; whatever I was expecting from her, a bootleg of that snake bastard’s extending sword wasn’t in my top ten guesses.

A flash of reflected light was the only visual cue I got as the blade shot at me like a bullet.

My wrist jerked as the angled tip smacked off of my new kunai with a clang, racing over my right shoulder as its path was barely redirected by my hasty deflection. She had aimed at my chest at the start, but shifted to pierce my shoulder when I began moving both my kunai into place to block that, abandoning her feint to aim instead for a non-lethal incapacitation on me like I had for her, forcing me to react in a split second or take the hit.

Also, despite the window being directly behind me, I didn’t hear the sound of glass breaking. 

Meaning, her control of the technique was good enough to stop the extension exactly where she wanted to based on feel and reaction speed. Either that, or it was one of those techniques that had users set exact parameters before activation for total consistency, like the henge or kawarimi. 

I leaned towards this case being the first option.

Though, none of that was the focus of my mind at this moment. Despite the relative distance between us, the pressure she began putting on my kunai in her current attempt to slice down into my shoulder wasn’t any less than what she’d used for that brief moment we’d clashed a few seconds ago. In fact, it was even more than before, since she was using two hands this time.

“Give up,” she demanded with a tone of authority. “If you keep resisting, I can’t promise your connections to the Ruin Princess will protect you from punishment when I take you in for breaking and entering.”

Somehow, her technique seemed to let her ignore leverage, putting the entirety of her strength into pushing down on my crossed knives with just the end of her meters-long blade. I was reluctant to throw her blade to the side and get out from under it just yet, because if her leverage trick worked the way I thought it did, she might be able to turn it back on me from a more difficult to deal with angle at a moment’s notice.

“‘Take me in’ this, ‘breaking and entering’ that, what are you, a cop?!” I groused through grit teeth.

“Yes, actually.” The deadpan response caught me off guard, and I stumbled for a split second when the weight of her blade pressing down on me disappeared.

It sliced through the air at my side, suddenly changing direction with a flick to cut back towards my hip with seemingly little effort from the girl; just tiny twists of her wrists angling the weapon, keeping her feet planted instead of trying to get a better position like an actual ninja would.

A flex of my ankles sent me jumping up over the blade as I threw my cheap kunai at her center mass. Another flick of her wrists had the blade banking sharply upwards to come at me from below while I was still in the air.

While I kicked my feet down to stop her slash with the steel-reinforced soles of my shoes, she twisted out of the way of my thrown knife without shifting her feet, giving me an idea.

“Shinra Himitsu.” She announced her name while I stood crouched on top of her tanto (which she didn’t seem to struggle much to hold up, with my added weight). “Junior agent of the government’s Spectre Enforcement Bureau under the National Police Agency, which holds a controlling interest in the True Elements-”

“Blah, blah, blah. You can believe it or not,” I interrupted while balancing on her blade, gesturing around us with the knife in my right hand while fingering my hip pouch with the left, “but I don’t give a damn who owns this place! Whether it’s you clan people or some government agency, it doesn’t mean anything to me!” I was venting some real irritation at the situation, since all the recent chaos was starting to take away from my hang-out time with Koneko-chan.

My footing disappeared as the tanto retracted suddenly, leaving me at the will of gravity. I twisted midair as I fell, whipping my main knife at Himitsu’s forward foot and a spare from my pouch at her chest, even as the tip of her tanto punched straight through the space my stomach had been a fraction of a second before.

Her blade retracted in an instant again as she jumped up and to the side to dodge both. At the same time, I clenched my empty fists around the practically invisible wires trailing out from my sleeves and swung my arms, my feet touching the ground as I yanked my right hand back and swept my left up at her. My good kunai came flying back at me, while the forgotten one I’d thrown earlier whipped up after her.

“What the-?” The wire wrapped around her ankle right as she was about to land.

I caught my nice kunai, and before she could react in time to try cutting the metal thread connecting us, I yanked hard on the wire, pulling her leg out from under her the moment her foot touched the floor again.

She recovered almost instantly, managing to plant her other foot on the ground and extend her tanto to stab into the floor, propping herself up but it was an awkward position to act from.

“I’m not here to fight, even though I’ll defend myself,” I told her, still holding the wire tight in case she tried to make a move. “I’m here because a bunch of people are causing problems in the town I live in, and I’ve decided to help my friends keep the peace and investigate. Nothing you say or do can change my mind.”

I did my best to memorize the layout of the room, and dug two fingers into my pouch to pull out a large-gumball sized pellet wrapped in paper; my latest advancement in smoke-bomb tech (with some magical help from Akeno– alchemy was useful as hell).

“Your guys are part of the problem, and I’m going to figure out why that Fallen was here, no matter what some government chick says.”

Her eyes widened and she moved, lunging towards me with her hand outstretched. “No, stop!”

I yanked to try and trip her again, but the metal wire had apparently loosened enough to free her without me noticing somehow, so it was just the kunai being reeled back my way instead.

‘Right, metal element bullshit.’

It didn’t matter, she wouldn’t reach me in time and her tanto wasn’t currently pointed at me. I was already throwing it down.

The pellet hit the ground with a loud bang and a flash right as I twisted and swung the flying kunai into the window to shatter it outwards. Himitsu’s approaching form disappeared from sight as a thick, gray smoke began rushing to fill the room around me in a split second. I dashed to the side, keeping my movements silent as I circled the room while the smoke filled it, and engaged the mechanism on my bracer to reel in the wire so I wasn’t dragging the knife on the floor behind me.

I had broken the window as a diversion, while I was actually making my way to the hall so I could take the stairs.

I raced through the room and escaped the edge of the cloud and into the hallway.

I made it a single step, when I noticed the black-haired girl bursting from the smoke just a step behind me and to the side, wisps of gray trailing off her limbs. Her head was angled to stare at my left forearm right where my bracer sat.

‘She predicted me? Damn!’

I slammed my forward foot down, tiny metal studs on my soles digging into the thin carpet to stop my momentum with a short and rough slide, and dashed backwards back into the smoke as she stumbled past me, unprepared for the sudden maneuver.

“Wait! I-!” Whatever she tried to say became indistinct and muffled through the thick smoke. Something about the shape of the tiny particles absorbing and scattering sound vibrations really well, according to Akeno when she helped create the things.

I stayed low as I ran back through the office relying on memory, dragging my hand across the floor to snag the other extra third kunai before heading over to jump through the window, where the smoke was already beginning to thin out as it escaped the office space.

Landing on one of the building’s crossbeams, I saw workers from below looking up and pointing fingers at the billowing smoke. One of the men ran over to a fire alarm on the wall and pulled, setting an alarm blaring.

‘Damn, I’m on a time crunch now!’

I shot into a sprint across the shadowed beams, relying on the smoke distraction to draw the attention of anyone who would be looking up. I chanced a glance back and saw my pursuer land on the beam in the same place I had.

Again, her gaze was locked onto my left arm.

“Tch.” I clicked my teeth together and dropped down between two tall shelves to get out of her vision. ‘Did she manage to put a tracking spell on my gear after I tripped her?’

I threw the probably-compromized knife in one direction while I ran the other way, and swiped my nice kunai up to sever the wire. If I was right, then the spell or whatever could be attached to the kunai, the wire itself, or even my entire left bracer system, channeled into it through the wire when it was wrapped around her ankle.

If it was that last scenario, I would be screwed until I could  find the time to ditch the entire thing.

‘Who am I kidding… she knows where I live, I’m screwed regardless!

Unless…?

I put aside thoughts of crashing at the mansion or Koneko’s place for a while, and focused on weaving through the maze of shelving units towards the back corner. Luckily, every night shift employee who might have seen me running through the work floor was either distracted with the results of my smoke bomb right now, or evacuating the building due to the insistent ringing of the fire alarm.

Within a minute, I reached the door to the stairwell and, ignoring the ‘Restricted Access’ sign, tried punching in the electronic lock’s default emergency access code.

I clicked my tongue when it blinked red and didn’t unlock. It was made by the same company that made my gated community’s security building locks, so it was worth a shot. I quickly put one of my kunai to use unscrewing a pair of screws to pop off the face plate, taking a chance and assuming that the tamper switch wasn’t actually wired, and pressed the blade against the contact connected to the exit button on the other side of the door.

This time, the panel gave an extended beep and the light lit up green, so I turned the handle and opened the door. I stepped into the enclosed stairway and hastily screwed the plate back in place before racing down the stairs, letting the door swing shut behind me as motion-activated lights lit the stairwell.

I reached the bottom in less than a second and pushed open the next door in a hurry to step into the basement.

Even before I entered, the lights were already on, confusing me a little as I walked into what looked like a normal basement. It was larger than average– which made sense because this was a warehouse– but other than that, it was just filled with a bunch of messily scattered basement-things like boxes, extra shelves, unused furniture, and the infrastructure stuff like boilers and backup generators or whatever the old and rusting machinery was.

The sound of water running through pipes and pressure changes through the heating system were loud enough down here to cover the muffled sound of the fire alarm as I stepped between piles of random stuff. I looked into one box and saw stacks of paperwork, and then another that was full of dusty old office phones and various cables. There was one of those outdated box-TVs on one of the shelves, and leaning up against a heavily scratched wooden desk was a baseball bat of all things.

“What the hell?” I muttered out loud. “Does everyone who works here just dump all their useless junk down here?” ‘Where’s all the secret important stuff?’

“Yes, they do.”

I spun around, kunai raised as Shinra Himitsu’s voice came from behind me where the entrance was.

“Cool it, I’m not here to fight anymore,” she claimed with a head tilt, her hands hanging down at her sides. “After all, I did try telling you to wait up before you ran, by the end of our confrontation.”

Her Tanto was returned to its sheath on her lower back and her stance was relaxed. Not to mention, she literally announced her presence to me when she didn’t have to, so her statement actually checked out.

“Alright…” I chose to accept her statement at face value, even knowing full well it could be a trick for some other objective of hers. “I’ll believe you for now.” I glanced around the room. “Why is this place ‘Restricted Access’ then if it’s just used to store old crap?

“The sign is probably there to stop the average moron from accidentally breaking something important like the water boiler, or the internet circuit,” she said with a shrug, before her lips thinned. “Now tell me, what did you mean back there when you said ‘you guys are part of the problem’?”

“I meant what I said. A bunch of groups are causing issues in the town right now, and you guys– the Five Principal Clans– are involved in it,” I told her. “Stray Devils are showing up every day without any explanation, hotheaded youkai with grudges are getting into fights with you clan people that we have to constantly break up, and Fallen Angels were popping up in places they shouldn’t have been– at least, they were right up until Koneko-chan and I tracked that one here last week, and now they’ve gone into hiding. I crossed my arms while listing off the different issues, her frown deepening as I explained. “This place is one of the last obvious leads we have on the group of Fallen involved, but your people have been jackasses refusing to give us access to investigate.”

“That’s a major breach of protocol,” the scarred Shinra girl said with furrowed brows. “While the Principals own a significant stake in this property and company, the majority owner is still the Japanese government. Since the government is aware of the Gremory and Sitri management of the town, our clans have no right to deny them entry in their role as Kuoh’s supernatural ruler’s.”

I snorted. “Red and Sitri’s peerages are stretched thin as it is, keeping the town in check right now. Whether they tried through the ‘official channels’ or not, I don’t know. I’m just here to help them in my own way. The Fallen was here for some reason, after all. Better to find out what he or she was after.”

“Ah.” She nodded in understanding. “So that’s why you came down here; you thought there might be something that the Fallen was interested in stealing in the ‘restricted access’ room.”

“Yep.”

She went silent for a moment, obviously thinking, before her head fell into her hand with a sigh and a muttered complaint. “Senpai is gonna make me do so much paperwork for this… Shishou too…”

“Fine,” she said, shaking off her resignation and looking up to meet my eyes. “If there’s anything a Fallen might be interested in stealing, it wouldn’t be down here or on the regular work floor. I’ll bring you to our secure storage room to take a quick look around, but we’ll have to be fast. It’s better for both of us if you aren’t here when the first responders get here.”

It had only been about two minutes since the employee pulled the alarm, and we were on the edge of town, so we probably still had a few more minutes before then.

Still… “Not giving me a whole lot of time to investigate,” I snarked, “but okay. Lead the way, lady.”

She nodded once, turning and racing back the way we came with me hot on her heels.

We sped up the stairs and out into the maze of shelving units and boxes, where she jumped up, kicked off of the top of one of the units, and launched herself up to land on the railing of an upper-level catwalk and continue running. I followed with a single jump, staying close behind as she led me towards the front of the building.

“The ‘secure’ storage room is in the front?” I called over the ringing of the alarm with a raised eyebrow, not that she could see my face as we began to slow on the approach to a sectioned-off space with a door. “Isn’t that just asking for a burglar to walk in the front door and walk out with your good stuff?”

“You went straight for the back of the building.” Her rebuttal was as effective as it was deadpan, making me chuckle awkwardly. “Plus, more employee activity in the front means more witnesses.”

“Fair.”

With most of the workers either sticking around to gawk at the ‘fire’ or evacuating the building, the front lobby office was empty when we went through the door. We turned a corner and went down a short hallway which led to a sturdy metal door, a door that opened without the Shinra girl needing to put in a code after she turned the handle with a silvery-glowing hand.

Stepping inside, the storeroom was somehow both larger and smaller than I expected; the stuff inside was both more and less impressive, too. I stepped inside first, glancing around.

It was about the size of my bedroom, so more roomy than a small storage closet, but more cramped than what I’d imagined of a full-on storage room. Draped above the door was one of those thick ropes with tassels hanging down that shrines used to ward off evil spirits. Lining the side walls were clearly labeled cabinets and shelves packed with stuff; things like traditional ink blocks, stacks of talismans and explosive-tag sized paper slips, jars full of powders and liquids of different colors and levels of clearness, and incense burners.

On the back wall, there were dozens of religious staves like shakujou, wands, and bows, all hanging on wall mounts, as well as a crate of messily folded robes and a crate of wooden geta sandals sitting on the floor.

“... I gotta admit-” I began, scratching the back of my head sheepishly, “-I have no idea what I’m looking for here. Got any clues?” I turned to face my escort, just to see that her standing a single step into the doorway, eyes narrowed in a frown that scrunched up the scar across her cheek.

“... No.”

She didn’t sound super convinced herself.

“Our inventory audit didn’t find anything from this room unaccounted for-” she began, looking around with a slow, assessing gaze. “-but something is off. I just know it, but I can’t tell what.”

Just that moment, we both noticed the distant blaring of an approaching fire truck overcome the constant ringing of the fire alarm to be heard.

“That’s your cue to leave,” she said, not even looking my way.

“With nothing to show for the trip,” I said with a sigh, before clicking my teeth. “So much for my attempt to help out. Damn it.”

The government agent-slash-Shinra clan member shook her head. “I’ll keep investigating, with the bureau’s backing if need-be. If I find anything the Gremory and Sitri heiresses should know, I’ll contact you.”

“Huh? Really?” I asked with some surprise.

She looked at me for a moment, before tilting her head. “It’s my job twice over to stop the supernatural from breaking the everyday peace. You are trying to help with that goal, aren’t you?” I nodded. “Then it’s fine. Now shoo, leave before you’re spotted by someone else.”

I decided to trust her for her word after everything else she’d shown me, and slipped out to make my escape from the building.

I made it to the perimeter wall of the depot right as the fire trucks reached the front gate, and slipped out the gate in their blindspot right as the last one passed through, free to go home.

Or not, because apparently my place was a popular haunt for stalkers now days. I debated heading over to crash at the mansion or Koneko’s apartment.

‘Himitsu said she’ll get in contact with me, so she’ll probably show up at my place uninvited.’

I paused in thought as something occurred. ‘Wait, does it really even matter? If she found my place, she can easily find my friends’ homes.’

I shrugged and chose my destination, planning a stop along the way.

‘I guess I’ll pick up some dinner for Koneko-chan as a thank you. There’s gotta be a twenty-four-hour food joint somewhere on the way…’