Kurai let out a sharp, clipped hoot from above. It was not her usual hunting cry, but something sharper and more urgent.
Kuroichi glanced up from his training, wiping his sweaty brow, as she circled above. Without any need for excessive words, he understood and followed after her.
Kurai controlled her flying speed, letting him tag along without issues. Their journey took them a while, somewhere between one and a half to three hours Kuroichi guessed. The way they took was unfamiliar to him, never having been in this particular part of the forest before.
As they went in deeper, the trees seemed to grow closer together, as if denying entry to any outsiders. Their trunks grew warped and twisted, roots clawing at each other. Moss blanketed every place in sight as he slowly made his way forward.
Kurai had it easier, she just needed to indicate the direction where to go. She perched high up on a branch of a tree, looking at Kuroichi amusedly as he fought his way through the thicket.
Then he saw it. A man-made small clearing, that was completely overtaken by nature opened up before him. In the middle of it, Kuroichi could clearly see the outlining's of what used to be a campsite.
It had obviously been long abandoned, the only things still visible were a collapsed tent frame and some blackened rocks that didn't have anything growing on them.
One tree, right next to where the tent used to be, had a scroll casing trapped in between some of it's branches. The casing had long lost it's sheen, dulled by the passage of time. With a little bit of effort, he pried it off the tree and carefully unfastened it, making sure not to accidentally break anything.
Inside lay only a rotten, half decayed bingo book. Kuroichi remembered them, not just from the anime and manga, but he also had memories of his father reading similar pages.
The cover was faded and torn, but he could still make out the emblem of one of the hidden villages, though it was too worn to make out which. The books stitching had unraveled in a lot of pages, leaving gaps everywhere.
Most of the pages were stuck together or rotted through, there was no information to be gleaned. Some names were smeared beyond recognition, while other's faces had faded into blank spaces. One page even crumbled as he tried to turn it, disintegrating into dust.
But not everything was gone, a few entries had barely survived, water-stained, but decipherable. A name, a face, rank, bounty and what seemed to be information that wasn't readable anymore.
At first, holding what was once a tool for hunting people like prey gave Kuroichi an eerie feeling, but he didn't mind too much and quickly put it out of his mind when he gently closed the remnants of the book.
As he took another look around, he noticed a grave marker that stood to one side of the clearing. Just a smooth stone stuck upright in the soil, it looked weathered, but somehow a kunai was still edged into it's base. There was no name and no symbols to be found on the grave.
Kuroichi stepped closer, a weirdly unsettling weight pressed down on him. 'If I die again, would anyone even know or remember my name?' The stone marker stared back at him, silent and still.
"Did anyone even know who you were?" he asked aloud, his voice low and quiet. "Did anyone remember?"
He naturally didn't expect an answer. The only response was the softly questioning hoot of Kurai. She didn't understand what was going on, but she knew Kuroichi's mood had changed.
On his sides, his fists clenched. His thoughts lingered for a while, what if this was him tomorrow? Forgotten and buried deep in the woods with nothing left. Even worse, he expected it to be normal for ninjas to not even have a grave at all, only becoming a footnote in some report about battle casualties.
However, something inside of him lit up again, it wasn't comfort, acceptance or peace, but a cold resolve.
"I knew what kind of world this is," he muttered. "This place is messed up, full of death, betrayal and cruelty… but I still chose to survive in it."
His eyes hardened, and he looked away from the grave. "I don't even need to be remembered, who cares about that anyway? I just need to live long enough to become strong enough. So strong that I'd never end up like this, not again!"
As he turned to walk away, Kurai silently followed him, gliding above him in the sky. The weight had not left Kuroichi's chest, not at all, however, there wasn't any doubt, hesitation or fear in his gaze anymore, he was full of determination and practically burned with purpose.
Back at his shelter, Kuroichi started a fire and sat next to it. The forest had gotten quiet, the only sounds being the crackling of the fire, the buzzing of cicadas and the eventual chirp of a bird.
Kurai sat silently on a branch overhead, eyes half-lidded, but still awake. The scroll casing and worn bingo book lay beside him, little reminders that he decided to keep and take with him.
He thought about what he'd be working on moving forward. He could still improve his chakra manipulation, he had a lot of different ideas for that. While that would naturally help him in the long term, he wouldn't see any benefits immediately, and right now he craved a semblance of power.
His gaze drifted to the edge of his camp where a small pool of water reflected the moonlight. Thoughtfully, he stared at it.
If he wanted to not just survive in this world, but to truly thrive, he'd need more than silent resolve. He needed jutsu, real techniques that could cause damage.
He'd been holding himself back from learning the rest of the jutsu his father left him, taking things one step at a time, but now, he decided he'd start practicing them.
He'd still be cautious, and only carefully explore this new kind of level of jutsu, but he was confident that his chakra control was good enough for him not to get himself killed immediately, at least.
When it was time to sleep for the night, Kurai landed next to him, gave him a soft hoot, and hopped inside the shelter to relax. Usually she liked places that were high up, from where she could see everything clearly, but since she grew up with Kuroichi, she was used to spending nights on the level of the forest floor.
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