Jujutsu Dragon Emperor Chapter 12 — First Mission (Patreon)

Naoto chuckled at the question, he remembered the man himself asking Yuji that in the tv series, now he knew who he got it from. He pushed himself fully upright and brushed bark dust off his shoulder while he actually considered the question, if she was anything like Todo he doubted she was going to accept a deflection.

"Honestly?" he said, scratching the back of his head. "I like curvy women. Wide hips and big breasts, the kind of body that makes you stop mid-sentence and forget what you were talking about." He paused, then tilted his head. "But I also like the opposite, slim women with nothing but a pretty face are good too. Tall women are incredible but short women have better assets as they're confined to a smaller space. Long hair is beautiful but short hair frames a face in a better way, plus I'm a fan of tomboys. Dark skin, light skin, freckles, no freckles, I genuinely do not care." He was counting on his fingers now, his expression becoming increasingly earnest in a way that was either deeply romantic or deeply unhinged depending on the observer. "Soft-spoken women who look at you over the top of a book in a library. Loud women who laugh so hard the whole room turns around. Women who could beat the shit out of me and women who'd rather talk about poetry. Tattoos, no tattoos, scars, glasses—"

He stopped himself, took a breath, and spread his hands in a gesture of total capitulation. "I love women. That's the answer. All of them. Every shape, every size, every temperament. None of them are safe from me, and I am safe from none of them. If she's breathing and she'll give me the time of day, I will flirt with her, I will pursue her, and I will do it regardless of what she looks like."

Yuki stared at him.

The silence stretched for about three full seconds, and then Yuki threw her head back and laughed so loud that birds scattered from the nearest tree.

"THAT'S what I'm talking about!" she shouted, pointing at him with both fingers like she was selecting him from a lineup. "That's a real harem king right there! No hesitation, no shame, just pure unbridled appreciation for the entire female population! I respect the hell out of that, Zenin, most guys your age would've stammered out something about liking kind girls and then stared at the ground for ten minutes!"

Naoto laughed and waved his hands in front of him. "Slow down, slow down, I'm not claiming any titles here. Harem king sounds good in theory but in practice that's a death sentence, especially when you're talking about sorcerer women. You start trying to juggle multiple women who can all reinforce their fists with cursed energy and you're going to end up in pieces scattered across six different prefectures. I am a man of broad taste but I am not brave enough or stupid enough to test those waters."

"Coward," Yuki said, still grinning.

"Living coward," Naoto corrected.

Yuki walked up to him and slapped her palm against his shoulder hard enough that it would've staggered most people, though Naoto barely shifted under it. She left her hand there for a moment, looking at him with an expression that had shifted from amused to something better. "I like you, Zenin. You're honest and you don't have that stick up your ass that most clan kids carry around." Her grin widened and she leaned in slightly. "And for what it's worth, you're my type too."

She winked, held the look just long enough to watch his expression flicker with genuine surprise, and then shoved him forward with the same hand that had been resting on his shoulder, hard enough that he stumbled a few steps before catching himself.

"Alright, enough flirting, we should get moving. We've got a train to catch and I don't feel like running for it."

Naoto straightened up and shook his head with a bemused grin before bending down to collect his bag and notebook from where they'd been scattered during her ambush. He slung the strap over his shoulder and fell into step beside her as they started down the path that led away from the campus toward the main road. 

"Where exactly are we heading?"

Yuki pulled a folded sheet of paper from her vest pocket and flipped it open without breaking stride, scanning the contents. "Nara Prefecture, out past the main city toward the southern mountain villages. There've been reports coming in over the last several weeks from settlements in the area, entire communities going quiet. No communication, no movement, people who go in to check on them don't come back out. The higher-ups think a cursed spirit's set up shop somewhere in the region, though the exact location and grade are still unknown. Our job is to get out there, assess the situation, determine what we're dealing with, and handle it ourselves."

Naoto's brow furrowed slightly. "That's vague for a mission briefing."

"Welcome to working for the higher-ups. They give you just enough information to get you killed." She folded the paper back up and slipped it away. "Don't worry though, the trip's not all bad. There's a hot springs resort in the area that I've already booked us rooms at, and I managed to wrangle the Jujutsu Tech credit card for our expenses, so food, lodging, and anything else we need is on the school's tab."

Naoto raised his eyebrows in surprise. "That doesn't sound too bad at all," he said with a chuckle. "Hot springs on someone else's money, and a mystery curse to hunt. You know how to plan a work trip, Tsukumo."

"Call me Yuki. And yeah, if I'm going to be dragged across Japan to the sticks, the least I can do is make sure the accommodations are decent." She jerked her thumb toward the road ahead. "Train station's about twenty minutes from here on foot. We'll take the Kintetsu line out from Kyoto and transfer at Yamato-Saidaiji, should put us in the area by late afternoon."

They walked together at a quick pace as the campus fell behind them and the path gave way to residential streets and then the wider commercial roads that led toward the nearest station.

Yuki talked as they walked, basically giving naoto her life story. She told him she was twenty, a fourth-year at Jujutsu High in what was technically her final year though she spent more time in the field than in any classroom and had been doing so since her second year. Like him she was one of only four special grade sorcerers currently recognized by the jujutsu world. Her cursed technique involved the manipulation of virtual mass, the ability to add or remove gravitational weight to herself and objects she touched, which explained why her earlier throw had sent him into a tree with considerably more force than her frame alone should have been able to generate.

"My dream," she said, unprompted, as they turned onto the main road that led toward the train station, "is to find a way to eliminate cursed spirits entirely. Not exorcise them one by one, not keep the population down to an acceptable level. I mean get rid of them permanent. Figure out the root cause of cursed energy itself and find a way to sever the cycle so that no human ever has to be afraid of something their own emotions created. I know most people think that's impossible, and maybe it is, but I'd rather spend my life chasing an impossible goal that matters than settling for a possible one that doesn't." She glanced at him with a sideways grin. "What about you? What's the Zenin heir's grand plan?"

Naoto opened his mouth, then closed it again. He walked in silence for a few steps, his gaze dropping to the pavement ahead of them as the question turned over in his mind.

What did he want?

When he'd first been dropped into this world, the answer had been simple.

Survive. 

Don't get crushed by the monsters that inhabited this universe. Gojo, Sukuna, Kenjaku, the endless parade of special grade cursed spirits threats that could erase him from existence without effort. That was the extent of his ambition in those early years, just stay alive long enough to carve out a space where the world couldn't reach him. But somewhere between living in his own house and raising two girls and training until his bones cracked, the goal had shifted without him fully noticing.

He didn't know much about what was coming. His memories of the source material were fragmentary at best, and everything past a certain point was a blank wall he couldn't see behind. Survival was still the baseline but it wasn't enough anymore. Not with Maki and Mai waiting for him at home. Not with the clan breathing down his neck. Not with the higher-ups pulling strings.

He looked up.

"I think everyone," he said slowly, choosing the words with care, "sorcerers and regular humans alike, is born holding up a weight. And that weight gets heavier as you go through life. Sometimes it's the curses that add to it, sometimes it's the people who are supposed to protect you, the higher-ups, the clans, the institutions that treat you like a resource instead of a person. A lot of people end up collapsing under it. They break, or they give up, or they get twisted into something they never wanted to become, and the people at the top just step over the bodies and keep going because the system was designed to produce exactly that outcome."

He paused as he stared ahead. "My goal is to lift the weight off everyone's shoulders. To push it so high above them that even the notion of suffering under it becomes a memory. I want people to be born free. Not free in the bullshit political sense, but actually free. Free from the expectations that crush them before they're old enough to understand what's happening. Free from the systems that exist only to sort them into useful and disposable. Free to decide for themselves what their lives are going to be without some elder or council or curse telling them otherwise."

He let out a breath. "I know how that sounds. I know it's the kind of thing a sixteen-year-old says before the world beats it out of him. But what's the use being this strong if I don't try and change the world."

Yuki didn't respond immediately. She walked beside him in silence for several paces. When she finally reacted she hummed. "That's a hell of a weight to volunteer to carry yourself," she said.

Naoto gave a small nod. "I know."

Yuki's expression broke back into a smile, wider this time. "I like it," she said. "Reminds me of that Greek myth. Atlas. The titan who held up the sky so it wouldn't crush everything beneath it. Everyone remembers the punishment, but people forget that he chose to keep holding it. He could have let it fall and let the world deal with the consequences, but he didn't."

Naoto laughed. "You know, it does sound similar when you put it like that. Though I'd like to think my version ends better than his did."

"It better," Yuki said with a grin. "And who knows, maybe I'll be there to help carry the sky with you. We've got similar ideas about tearing down the bullshit that holds the world together, and I've been looking for someone who actually means it when they say they want to change things instead of just complaining about them."

She didn't wait for a response, just turned on her heel and started walking faster, her hair swinging behind her as she called back over her shoulder. "Come on, Atlas. Pick up the pace or we're going to miss our train."

Naoto shook his head while grinning and jogged to catch up.

...

The first-class car was nothing like the rattling, overcrowded carriage Naoto had braced himself for when Yuki mentioned the train, and he said as much the moment they settled into their seats, the leather cushions wide and deep enough that he could have stretched out sideways without his feet touching the armrest. "I'm surprised the college actually splurged for first class," he said, running his hand along the smooth armrest separating their seats. "Yaga doesn't seem like the type to authorize anything beyond the absolute minimum required to keep us alive."

Yuki let out a short laugh as she dropped into the seat beside him, kicking her boots up onto the little fold-out footrest. "Those cheapskates wouldn't spend an extra yen if their lives depended on it. I upgraded us myself after they'd already booked the standard tickets." She settled deeper into the seat, letting out a satisfied breath as the cushioning adjusted around her.

"Remind me to stick close to you on future missions," Naoto said, settling back into his own seat and feeling the tension start to bleed out of his shoulders.

She grinned and stretched her arms overhead until her shoulders popped, then let them drop loosely into her lap as she turned her head toward him. "Alright, so technically I'm supposed to spend this trip teaching you a bunch of field tactics, how to read a cursed energy signature from a distance, proper containment protocol, all the standard mentor nonsense the higher-ups expect me to drill into you. But honestly, watching you beat Gojo into a wall during that exhibition match told me everything I needed to know."

"You're plenty strong already, probably stronger than most sorcerers around right now, and I'm not in the business of wasting breath teaching someone something they don't need." She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, and tipped her head back against the headrest. "So entertain yourself for a while. I need a nap. Wake me up if the train catches fire or if you spot something interesting."

Naoto chuckled and shook his head, watching as she folded her arms across her chest and let her eyes drift shut. He reached down into his bag and pulled out his notebook and flipped through several pages of dense, cramped handwriting until he found the section he'd left off on earlier.

He had hit a frustrating wall recently in his broader talisman work, specifically around the question of whether his designs could be adapted into something that lived directly on the skin rather than existing as a separate physical object that needed to be carried, drawn, or activated by hand. 

A tattoo-based seal would solve so many of the practical problems that plagued paper talismans, the risk of losing them, the vulnerability of having them destroyed mid-fight, the simple inconvenience of needing a free hand to deploy one, but every attempt he'd made to translate the underlying theory onto a permanent medium had collapsed under its own structural requirements. 

Paper could be folded, layered, and torn in ways that let him build complexity into a disposable format. Skin didn't behave the same way, and cursed energy etched directly into flesh required an entirely different relationship between the seal's structure and the body's own circulatory system for cursed energy.

Rather than force the issue further, he had shifted his attention sideways toward something he thought might eventually feed back into the larger problem. 

A design he was calling an impact seal. 

The concept was straightforward in theory and maddening in execution. The seal would absorb kinetic energy delivered to it over time, whether through repeated strikes or a single sustained pressure, storing that energy rather than dispersing it, and then release the entire accumulated total in a single concentrated burst when triggered. In essence, it would let him turn an opponent's own offense against them, banking the force of every blow they landed until the moment he chose to give it all back at once.

He spent the better part of two hours hunched over the notebook, sketching variations of the seal's internal structure, testing different geometric arrangements of the binding lines that would need to channel the stored energy without it bleeding out prematurely or destabilizing the paper before the release trigger activated. 

The central problem kept circling back to containment. Kinetic energy wasn't like cursed energy; it didn't want to sit still, and every structure he drew either leaked the stored force through the edges of the seal within seconds of absorption or, in one particularly frustrating iteration, built up pressure so quickly that the talisman simply detonated on its own the moment it crossed a certain threshold.  

He crossed out an entire page of notation and started again from a different angle, trying to borrow some of the layering logic from his storage talismans to see if compartmentalizing the absorbed energy into smaller, sequential pockets might solve the leakage problem even if it complicated the release mechanism.

By the time he finally set the pen down and rubbed at his eyes, his neck had stiffened from holding the same hunched position for so long, and the train had carried them well past the outskirts of the city into a stretch of countryside where rice fields rolled past the window. 

He closed the notebook, tucked it back into his bag, and stood while stretching his arms overhead and rolling his shoulders to work the kinks loose before deciding a walk to the dining car for a drink would do him more good than another hour of staring at the same diagram.

He moved down the aisle of the first-class car, passing rows of mostly empty seats occupied by a handful of business travelers absorbed in laptops or dozing against the windows. It was in the gap between the first-class car and the next that he clocked the man.

He was unremarkable in every visible respect, middle-aged, dressed in a plain gray suit that fit well enough to suggest money without drawing attention, a newspaper folded under one arm and a phone in the other hand that he wasn't actually looking at. 

He sat two rows back from where Naoto had been seated, positioned with a clean sightline down the aisle, and he had been there, Naoto realised since before they'd even boarded the train. He hadn't moved much. He hadn't spoken to anyone. And the moment Naoto had stood up to walk toward the dining car, the man's posture had shifted and he moved to follow. 

Naoto kept his pace exactly the same, his expression betraying nothing, and continued through to the dining car without so much as a glance backward.

The dining car had a small counter at one end and a few high tables bolted along the windows, staffed by a single attendant who looked up just long enough to take Naoto's order for a bottle of water before returning to whatever was playing on the small television mounted in the corner. 

Naoto took his time, leaning against the counter and watching the reflection in the window glass rather than the door behind him, and confirmed within a minute that the man in the gray suit had indeed drifted into the connecting space between cars.

'Good,' Naoto thought. 'Let's see how far you're willing to follow.'

He paid for the water, tucked it under his arm without opening it, and instead of heading back toward the first-class car, continued forward through the train, passing through two more carriages, glancing occasionally at his own phone as though checking messages, letting the man trail him at a distance that probably felt invisible. 

By the fourth car, the foot traffic had thinned considerably, most passengers settled into their seats for the long stretch through the mountains, and Naoto finally ducked into the narrow vestibule between two carriages. He stopped there, set the water bottle down on the small ledge beside the emergency intercom, and turned around fully for the first time since leaving the dining car.

The man in the gray suit had followed him into the vestibule and now stood a few feet away, the newspaper still tucked under his arm, his expression settling into something far less bored and far more attentive than it had been in his seat.

"You've been sitting two rows back since before we boarded," Naoto said in an almost friendly way. "Didn't touch your phone the entire ride, didn't read a page of that newspaper, and you got up the second I did. I'm guessing the higher-ups didn't trust Tsukumo's report alone and wanted their own set of eyes following me around."

The man's mouth curved into a smile, and the casual posture dropped away entirely. "Good guess," he said, his voice flat and faintly amused. "You're Smarter than they gave you credit for, honestly. So why don't you be a good boy and go sit back down before this gets complicated for you."

Naoto tilted his head slightly, studying him. "Nah."

The word had barely left his mouth before the man moved, and Naoto immediately understood that the higher-ups had bothered sending someone with actual skill rather than a simple errand boy. 

The man's strike came from an angle that didn't make sense, a fist arriving at the edge of his vision, from a position his eyes insisted was empty space a half second earlier, the man's body somehow always occupying his blind spot . 

Naoto twisted away on instinct rather than clear perception, the punch grazing past his ear close enough that he felt the displaced air, he then countered with a jab that should have connected solidly but met only empty space as the man's silhouette blurred sideways into another blind pocket Naoto's eyes simply couldn't track fast enough.

"Cursed technique," Naoto muttered, backing a step and raising his guard properly now, his earlier nonchalance burning away. "You're able to stay in my blind spot, you're tracking my exact field of vision and positioning yourself just outside its edge."

"Smart and smarter," the man said from somewhere that should have been visible and wasn't. "Most sorcerers your age panic the moment they can't see their opponent for sure."

He attacked again, and this time the strike landed, a hard punch catching Naoto across the ribs that staggered him sideways into the vestibule wall hard enough to rattle the connecting door in its frame. Naoto grunted, absorbing the blow as best he could, and swung a counter into the space where the punch had originated, but the man had already shifted, his presence sliding into the dead zone at the very edge of Naoto's vision once more, and the follow-up strike caught Naoto across the jaw before he could fully reset his guard.

This was a problem. 

The man wasn't faster than him in any conventional sense, the footwork wasn't extraordinary, the strikes themselves weren't devastating on their own, but the fact that Naoto's eyes simply could not see his position in real time meant every exchange came down to reaction after the fact rather than anticipation, and reaction alone was losing him ground with every passing second.

He took another hit, a kick to his thigh that buckled his stance, and as he caught himself against the wall he forced his breathing to slow and closed his eyes entirely.

If his vision couldn't track the technique, he'd stop relying on it.

He let cursed energy flow outward from his core in a controlled surge, channeling it specifically toward his ears, reinforcing the nerves and tissue until his hearing sharpened several degrees and he could hear behind the train rattling.

The next strike came from his left, and Naoto's hand shot out and caught the man's wrist before the fist had even fully extended, his eyes still closed, his entire awareness narrowed down to the sound of displaced air and shifting clothing. The man made a small, surprised sound, clearly not having anticipated the technique failing this particular way, and Naoto used the grip to yank him forward off balance, driving a knee up into his centre mass.

The impact connected solidly, the man doubling over with a grunt, and Naoto opened his eyes now that he had a fixed point of reference, pressing the advantage immediately with a hard elbow across the back of the man's neck that drove him down toward the floor. 

The man tried to twist free, tried to slip back into that blind spot at the edge of vision, but Naoto kept his eyes closed tracking the rustle of movement by sound alone and intercepting the escape with a strike to the back of the knee that folded the man's leg out from under him.

What followed was less a fight than a dismantling. Every time the man tried to retreat into the blind spot that made his technique so dangerous, Naoto simply closed his eyes and hunted him by sound, and without the advantage of being unseen, the man's actual hand-to-hand skill, while competent, simply wasn't enough to match someone who had spent his entire life training. 

Naoto caught a desperate punch and twisted the arm behind the man's back hard enough to make him cry out, then drove him face-first into the wall and pinned him there with a forearm across the back of his neck while his other hand wrenched the trapped arm higher, the joint creaking under the pressure.

"Yield," Naoto said, "or I start breaking things, though I genuinely don't care which order."

The man was breathing hard and finally went still against the wall, his earlier mockery completely evaporated. "Fine. Fine, I yield."

Naoto held the position another few seconds just to be certain, then eased off enough to reach into his bag with his free hand, pulling free a length of cord and bound the man's wrists tightly behind his back before securing his ankles as well. 

He hauled the man up by the collar, ignoring the muffled protests, and walked him down the narrow corridor to the nearest restroom, shoving him inside and propping him awkwardly against the small sink before pulling the door shut and jamming it with enough force against the frame that it would take real effort to get it open again from the inside.

"Someone'll find you eventually," Naoto said through the door, not particularly sympathetic. "Tell whoever sent you that the next one they send should probably know how to fight before bragging about how clever his technique is."

He retrieved his water bottle from the ledge where he'd left it, rolled his shoulder where the punch had landed earlier, and made his way back through the train toward first class. 

Yuki was just stirring when he slid back into his seat, stretching her arms overhead with a groan before blinking her eyes open and squinting at him with the bleary disorientation of someone freshly woken. "Hey," she said. "Get me some water too, would you? My mouth feels like I swallowed sand."

Naoto handed her the bottle without comment, settling back into his own seat and allowing himself a faint smile as the train rattled on toward Nara, carrying them deeper into the mountains and whatever was waiting for them there.

...

The train rolled to a stop at a station that barely deserved the name. It had a single concrete platform with a rusted awning, no ticket gate, no vending machines, nothing but a faded sign bearing a station name that looked like it hadn't been repainted since before either of them were born. 

Naoto stepped down onto the platform behind Yuki and turned in a circle, taking in the surrounding scenery, which consisted entirely of mountains wrapped in dense green forest, a narrow road disappearing between two ridgelines, and absolutely nothing else.

"This is the most boring place I've ever seen in my life," he said, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun as he scanned the horizon for anything resembling civilization.

Yuki slung her bag over her shoulder and stretched, working the stiffness of the train ride out of her spine with a groan before glancing sideways at him with a grin. "You'll come to appreciate the countryside, trust me. Especially once you realize we're far enough out here that there's no cell signal for miles, which means the higher-ups can't call either of us no matter how badly they want to micromanage this assignment."

Naoto pulled his phone out anyway, checking the signal bar out of habit, and found exactly what she'd promised... nothing... not even a flicker. 

He yawned, covering his mouth with the back of his hand, and quickly typed out a message anyway, figuring it would send the moment he found signal again later. 

Naoto: Heading into the mountains with Yuki, no service out here so don't worry if you don't hear from me for a bit. Good luck on your missions, try not to get yourselves killed or arrested.

He sent it to the group chain with Shoko, Geto and Gojo and then pocketed the phone and rolled his shoulders before falling into step beside Yuki as she started down the narrow road leading away from the station.

The hot springs resort, when they finally reached it turned out to be considerably nicer than the surrounding scenery had suggested it would be. A traditional ryokan built into the side of a hill. A man was waiting for them near the entrance, leaning against one of the wooden support posts. 

He was older, maybe in his fifties, dressed in plain clothes that gave no indication of his actual profession beyond the small Jujutsu Tech pin fastened discreetly to his collar, he straightened up when he saw them approaching, offering a polite nod.

"Tsukumo-san," he said. "And this must be the Zenin boy everyone's been talking about."

"Naoto," Naoto said simply, shaking the offered hand.

"Pleasure. I've got the briefing materials ready whenever you'd like them, though I'd suggest getting settled first if you're not in a rush. There's not much that can't wait an extra hour out here." He led them through to a small sitting room off the main hall and once they'd seated themselves he laid out a folder of papers and several photographs across the table's surface.

"Six villages in the surrounding region have gone completely silent over the past several weeks," he said. "No communication, no response to outreach, nothing. When we've sent people in afterward to investigate, every single village has been found completely empty. No bodies. No signs of struggle, no blood, no damaged property, nothing knocked over or broken. It's as if every single resident simply stood up and walked away mid-task, leaving meals half-eaten and laundry still hanging on the line."

Yuki hummed leaning forward slightly to study one of the photographs. "No struggle at all. That's strange even by curse standards. Most cursed spirits that consume entire populations leave some kind of mess behind."

Naoto picked up another of the photographs, frowning at the image of an empty dinner table, two bowls of rice gone cold and untouched, a child's toy abandoned on the floor beside an overturned chair that had clearly fallen on its own rather than being knocked over in a struggle. "Why are these villages so remote in the first place? Most settlements cluster near roads or rivers for trade and resources. These are buried deep enough in the mountains that they must have trouble reaching anyone."

"Good question, newbie," Yuki said, reaching over and rubbing her hand roughly through his hair before he could duck away from it, grinning at his immediate look of irritation.

The contact set down the photograph he'd been holding and folded his hands. "These villages are remote because their populations are primarily Christian."

Naoto raised an eyebrow, genuinely caught off guard by the answer. "Why would that matter?"

"When Christianity was first introduced to this region centuries ago, it faced severe persecution from the established Shinto communities. Entire families were driven out, sometimes violently, for refusing to abandon their faith. The communities that survived did so by retreating into the mountains, into places remote enough that nobody bothered chasing them any further. They built their villages there and simply stayed, generation after generation, long after the original persecution faded into history. At this point it's less about active religious conflict and more about inherited habit and cultural identity. Their ancestors fled there, so they remain there, and most of them couldn't tell you the specifics of why beyond 'this is where our families have always lived.'"

"How much contact do they usually have with the outside world?" Naoto asked, setting the photograph back down.

"Not much. Each village maintains a small radio tower, mostly for medical emergencies or genuine crises, but otherwise they're largely self-sufficient and prefer to stay that way. Limited trade with the nearest larger town, occasional visits for supplies they can't produce themselves, but day to day they keep to their own communities."

Yuki leaned back against the cushion behind her, arms crossing as she studied the spread of photographs. "And I'm guessing, since we're sitting here right now, that another one's gone dark recently."

The contact nodded, sliding a final sheet of paper across the table that bore a hand-drawn map with a small village marked in red ink, isolated from the rest of the cluster by a noticeable distance. "Three days ago. Hinokage. It's about fifty miles from here, further into the mountains than any of the others that have gone silent so far."

Yuki groaned audibly, dragging a hand down her face. "Fifty miles. Through that terrain. Of course it's fifty miles." She let out a long breath, shaking her head before finally shrugging. "Fine. We'll head out at dawn tomorrow, get an early start so we're not navigating that kind of distance in the dark on unfamiliar trails." 

She turned to Naoto, gesturing vaguely toward the doorway that led further into the ryokan. "For now, though, I say we take full advantage of the fact that we're in a excellent hot spring before we spend tomorrow hiking through god knows what kind of terrain to find out what happened to an entire village. I know I certainly intend to."

Naoto chuckled, already feeling some of the tension from the day's travel start to loosen at the prospect. "Can't argue with that logic." He turned back to the contact and offered a nod of genuine thanks. "Appreciate the briefing. We'll let you know what we find once we're back in range."

The contact inclined his head in acknowledgment, already gathering the photographs back into their folder as Naoto rose and fell into step behind Yuki, who was already heading toward the corridor that led to the springs.

(AN: So I'd say the second arc has begun in earnest and the main villains or one of the main villains will be introduced soon. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter.)