《Threads》Chapter Thirty-Three: Ringo III

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The morning was cool enough without the bone chilling reality of a powerful, mass murdering Agent in Jinchi’s unknown jungle. The power of any given jutsu could vary to a tremendous degree, with some so deadly that Agents possessing them could feel more like reincarnated demons than human. Unfair, but no different than how all individuals possessed differing talents. Some jutsu, like Ringo’s Bubble or Hajime’s worthless blood, were scarcely more than minor utility techniques. Some, like General Hashimoto Daisuke’s Divine Wind (or those other jutsu he claimed to have but so totally didn’t), could annihilate entire armies. In legends those godlike powers capable of immense destruction could be found everywhere- but centuries of war and improvements in technology had thinned the herd of calamity-causing jutsu considerably. Those who would deign to call themselves descendants of the gods found out the hard way that a crossbow bolt (or dagger in their sleep, or poison, or these days even a bullet) would just as easily end their life no matter how strong of a talent that fate bestowed on them. The captain was right. Everyone bled. Everyone could lose. No matter what the legends claimed, Agents were still human.

However natural selection meant those who survived, survived for a reason. Those with powerful jutsu in modern times meant they had ways to survive a bullet, or an artillery barrage, or getting assassinated by paranoid rivals. The description the soldiers gave of this Agent certainly fit that bill. “Eight foot tall monster”, “faster than an arrow”, “claws that extended the length of ten men”, “skin like steel”...a total package with a military mind, all wrapped up in a tidy ribbon.

Yet Ringo felt compelled to pester for her comrades for even more info, even as the picture they painted sounded increasingly dire.

“She wants a skull.” The remnants of the squad pulled themselves back into groups and were about to fall back, but Ringo still managed to squeeze out one last bit of testimony in the chaos. “It’s some artifact- the captain of the squad she attacked must have picked it up. She’s super pissed off cause nobody knows where the captain put it.” The man waved Ringo off as he tried to limp back into formation with the rest of the squad. “Not our fight, cadet! We can’t do jack here. That Agent was sent straight from hell and is on a warpath. Let General Gou deal with her.”

An artifact? It wasn’t exactly news that Agents swarmed the island to plunder the relics of Jinchi, some for personal profit and some for their own countries. For a squad to stumble upon one wasn’t unheard of either. Was that all this was? All this bloodshed over some piece of forgotten junk? It was a scenario General Gou brought up all the time, although it had never come to pass like this before. It seemed absurd, but General Daisuke had staged an attack and kidnapped Gekko for the same thing- greed and ambition certainly were frightening motivators in a lawless land like Jinchi.

Those thoughts were pushed aside as Ringo realized something else. If the captain of the other squad found something valuable, the commanding officer would have certainly stored it in the safest location available. That wouldn’t have been on his person, or on anyone's person for that matter. Secret documents like plans and maps that needed to be kept away from the prying eyes of the everyman were placed in a hidden spot. The top brass no doubt would have stored anything remotely valuable there. Ringo only knew about the location because Gekko had special access to it for hiding his decoded messages, though often the boy would stash his comic books there instead. This Agent wasn’t familiar with Annitou protocol at all or she would have already found it.

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That meant there was still a chance to recover this artifact she was killing Ringo’s comrades for.

Rather, it meant there was a chance to stop the madness! If the Agent got what she was after, then she would have no reason to pursue and endanger other squads. No doubt the monster wouldn’t stop her attack until she found her prize. No, the Agent might even pursue Ringo’s own unit! Retreating here would leave them open to attack!

But Ringo was in no position to turn the squad around. Just looking at her demoralized comrades it was clear there was no motivation left to draw on to push forward. Retreat was the right call to make for these men...

Ringo, though, was a cadet! Acting independently was the bread and butter of an Agent, and Ringo was supposed to be an Agent in training! She turned her back to the formation and looked back out towards the field, where uncollected numerous bodies still remained. Then she snapped her head back and let out a short burst of choice words.

“I’m retreating in this direction!” A few heads turned her way, but only one response came back.

“You’re bloody mad, lass!”

“No, I won’t engage!” Ringo wasn’t sure who she was arguing with, but it definitely wasn’t anyone in the chain of command. It seemed as though nobody remained in the group to issue orders, and she didn’t hear anyone telling her to stop. So this didn’t count as violating her superior officer’s orders, because there weren’t any of those left! “I’m retreating- just back that way. I’ll meet up with everyone later!”

The only rebuttal to that was a half-hearted “nutcase!”, but otherwise the squad kept on moving as if Ringo hadn’t said anything. As bitter of a pill as it was to swallow, and as much as she liked to think otherwise, Agents (and cadets, to a similar extent) were on a different level than normal foot soldiers. Few felt it was worth challenging Ringo on this- after all, she reported to General Gou first and foremost. That meant she knew what she was doing.

Or, well, that’s what they’d have to tell General Gou when her body turned up alongside the others.

Ringo took slow, deliberate breaths through her nose as she watched her comrades disappear into the fog. It was quieter now, with only the occasional yell or howl echoing through the misty glade. Find the artifact, give it to the bloodthirsty killer ravaging Annitou’s forces, and everything would be resolved, right? The average soldier wouldn’t know where the captain stashed any precious loot, only a cadet like herself or Hajime would have been privy to that knowledge. The entire misadventure with Hajime just a few nights prior somewhat soured her on the whole ‘teamwork’ thing but a good Annitou soldier never let themselves be blinded by raw emotion! Ringo would rely on the unreliable again, as many times as she needed to, until the job was done or she was in a shallow grave. Preferably the former, but if it had to be the latter, then so be it.

It wasn’t quite the storybook tale of defeating a powerful enemy. Capitulating to an enemy, in fact, was something that might get one court martialed back at home. But Ringo had a duty to her blood brothers first and foremost, and to plundering Jinchi artifacts way below that. Sometimes you had to slay the demon, and sometimes it was necessary to give sacrifices. She wasn’t a juggernaut that could chop a cannonball in half or summon a firestorm- but Ringo could still solve problems! As long as those problems involved begging for mercy, apparently.

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She shook her head to rid herself of any lingering doubts, did one more check of her belongings, then put forward a confident foot towards the unknown. It’s what a proper war hero would do, after all!

As Ringo advanced the nature of the surrounding glade grew clearer, though the cool fog only thickened with time. Very occasionally a broken looking stone structure or ruin would zoom past her while she darted through the trees. What looked like abandoned paths broke up the otherwise monotonous foliage. This whole area did appear to be the site of some manner of ancient settlement. Oh, and there were bodies, but Ringo was ignoring those as much as possible. Priorities, priorities.

For all the bluster and bravado with which Ringo set out on this endeavor there wasn’t much in the jungle to direct her energy at. Rather she ran into a few retreating stragglers instead, who all told her the same thing. “We’ve been ordered to pull back” mixed with “The Agent can’t be reasoned with” mixed with “You’re absolutely insane”. The last one was typically after Ringo asked if they would consider following her back into the battle. One soldier even laughed at the suggestion while trying to keep one of his eyes in its socket. Annitou loyalty cut both ways- even if those fleeing soldiers had wanted to help, their orders were to retreat. Only a boneheaded moron would have followed Ringo back into the jaws of the beast. Plenty of those existed among Annitou’s ranks. She ran into a distressingly small number of them that morning.

“Last thing I saw,” said the final soldier Ringo ran across, “was the Agent was tearin’ out chunks of one of the brass. She’s interrogating them but nobody knows where her damned relic is, so it’s a waste of time. She just thinks we’re all lying to her. There ain’t no winning against that kind of crazy.”

“Thank you, sir!” Ringo bowed, taking the moment to catch her breath after having run that far. “I’m not going to engage her, just let me know where you saw her last so I can avoid that direction!”

“That away.” The soldier grimaced as he jerked an injured arm back into the misty jungle. “She was sticking close to where we ditched the cannon. Lot of good it did us, that demon moves too fast to properly line up a shot. If HQ would have just issued us some flintlocks, I swear...”

“Noted, sir!” Ringo again bowed, or maybe this was still the bow from before and she forgot to stop. “Please get to safety! And let my comrades know where I am, if you see them!”

“Righto, look out for yourself, lass.” With a less than formal salute Ringo’s last friendly ally disappeared back the way she came. No problem, no problem! That mad dash brought her right into the area where the Agent was prowling, but the cannon was close by as well. This was no different than those stealth exercises at the Academy! Ringo once again began her advance, but slowed her pace considerably. Creeping along the gnarled roots of the largest trees she kept on in the direction indicated by the soldier.

The closer she drew, the more evidence of the battle unfolded around her. Battle might have been a misnomer, it looked like a nightmarish massacre. Weapons lay discarded or broken in all directions, some even lodged into the trunks of the trees. Ringo stepped lightly to avoid tripping over the occasional dismembered limb or tangle of bloody bandages. The earth underfoot was heavily disturbted with evidence of a multitude of footprints going in all directions. Interspersed with the telltale signs of a panicked retreat Ringo spied some very odd shaped prints in the soil. Claw marks? Dinosaur feet? Demon tracks? Try as she might, nothing in those memorized textbooks matched up with what she saw. Maybe this Agent was a monster after all.

Inching forwards step by step, even more abnormal clues crept into her vision. There, on the very periphery of her sight, stood some human-like silhouettes. They didn’t move, though they seemed to be standing upright. No, no. Not standing. They were hanging. Hanging from the trees like a tree ornament.

This might have been a storybook tale after all, but not one of noble heroism. The deeper Ringo went the more it looked like the horror stories her mom used to tell her before bed. Nerves, it was just nerves! Ringo gripped her baton with white knuckles and kept moving forward. Monsters didn’t exist anymore. No matter how much evidence to the contrary dangled around her.

Ringo’s footsteps quickened as she turned away from the imminent dread swaying just out of her sight. Dry leaves crinkled quietly underfoot. There wasn’t any more yelling (or screaming). The deathly silent minutes crawled by even slower than Ringo moved. Occasionally a muted thunk or wisp of wind through the tree branches would stir within the silence, but the fog distorted sound so heavily Ringo couldn’t even tell where the noises came from. On instinct Ringo slowed her breathing. As she kept a low profile her fingers wrapped around a tree trunk to give her leverage as she peeked around it. The edges of the trunk’s bark were shredded and cracked. A multitude of crossbow bolts lay embedded within the tree. Some of the trees even seemed to be bleeding black sap. The tension inside Ringo grew by the moment and soon her eyes started to hurt. Her body decided on its own to stop blinking.

The barest outline of a shadow entered her range of vision. Her chest seized up and stopped a breath in the middle of her throat. That shape, that size...there could be no doubt any longer.

Just barely more than a shadow in the fog...

Nestled between two mighty looking trees...

Jutting forward with all its lethal, terrible power...

...was the distinct form of an Annitou style cannon! The long barrel rested on a wide wagon. The vehicle's big wheels popped out among the vertical trees and could be identified even at this distance, like a friend waving to Ringo from a crowd. The end was in sight!

Yet, even having spotted her target, Ringo stayed low and slow. She waited a minute, then two. She must have turned around six times just to keep glancing over her shoulder. If it would have helped, Ringo would have even put her ear to the ground. But, no. She heard nothing. No footsteps, no sounds of combat. Just the idle silence of the jungle in the early morning, and her own pounding heartbeat.

Maybe the Agent had given up. Maybe she was chasing after the retreating soldiers. Or maybe it was a trap. Did any of those possibilities change Ringo’s course of action?

Of course not. With a deliberate delay Ringo finally abandoned the safety of her cover. She was already a short girl, but her form was now so low to the ground she needed to keep her hands up to avoid dragging her knuckles into the dirt. There were few places for cover between here and the wagon, but each stride she took Ringo’s eyes darted around for signs of an enemy. It wasn’t until she was close enough to see the Annitou seal emblazoned on the side of the wagon that she finally picked up the pace. At a glance she noticed the entire wagon had been ransacked. The bags of gunpowder were torn open, food bags and sleeping mats shredded, even the wooden paneling splintered and shattered as if some hungry beast had been prying the boards loose with its teeth. The cannon itself, a solid construction of iron and steel, thankfully looked relatively untouched. Ringo wasn’t too late!

Right at the wagon’s perimeter Ringo took one more step, putting her goal within arms reach. The soil around the wagon didn’t look any different than the rest of the glade. Why would it have been? Ringo’s head had been kept so low that her nose might as well have been in the dirt, but at that moment her attention moved to the wagon instead. Tunnel vision. An instructor at the Academy once chastised Ringo for falling prey to that common mistake. Her fervor for duty came with its share of downsides, and now of all times it reared its ugly head.

As her foot landed on the earth beside the wagon, something unseen buried within the soil snapped loose. A coil of white cloth shot out from the dirt under Ringo’s boot. The cloth snapped upwards and tightened so fast that for a second Ringo thought she stepped on a landmine, and that her limb was about to get torn off. Instead the long ribbon knotted itself off and became a binding noose around Ringo’s leg, like an anaconda choking out its next meal.

A snare! That was just about the only other thing Ringo could think before the ribbon snapped a second time. The cloth wrapped around her ankle whipped upwards with a powerful elastic force and swept her off her feet in an instant. Ringo’s light body was thrown upward and she toppled head over foot like a pig being strung up for slaughter. Since she was significantly lighter than the average soldier, the stored spring-like energy in the trap ended up bouncing the girl quite high, tossing the small child around like a morbid ragdoll. Just barely Ringo thought she saw the snare’s anchor somewhere far up in the tree branches above her, though it was hard to tell with all the bouncing around her body was doing at the moment. Her spinning vision didn’t pick out any human shapes up in those trees, either. So, on the bright side, no Agent was about to kill her!

No doubt the Agent was nearby, though. No, no, no panic. Ringo’s lungs resumed trying to function and she tried to take stock of her situation. The tension in the snare was slowly spinning Ringo’s upside-down body in place, and the momentum from her trip was still causing her to sway quite a bit as she dangled up above the wagon. The ribbons didn’t feel any tougher than normal, if she could just cut herself loose, there would still be time to...

An innocuous rustling dripped into her scrambled ears. The very disoriented Ringo wasn’t exactly sure the direction she heard the unmistakable sound but it filled her stomach with bile nonetheless. That sound- that noise- that utterance. She had heard it dozens if not hundreds of times already, most often from the rats that tended to plague Annitou’s main island something awful. Something was moving through the leaves. Something big and heavy. But from where? Not on the ground, surely. Ringo’s increasingly dry eyes broke from the wagon as she tried to scan on the reversed horizon. It didn’t sound like footsteps. No, instead it sounded like a strong wind was moving through the jungle, brushing foliage aside in its wake. The noise itself wasn’t threatening but what it portented made the blood rushing to Ringo’s head turn to ice.

Above. Above! Or rather, below! Ringo broke her attention from the earth to look upward, past her own dangling body. In the canopy. The sound was coming from the treetops! At once she cursed her ignorance- all this time Ringo had been treating this as though she were avoiding Hajime or Gekko in one of their training exercises. A real Agent wouldn’t have done anything so predictable as to stay on the ground where they could be easily spotted. The demon must have been in the trees this whole time!

The sound approached with an alarming speed now. Ringo’s fingers snatched out a small bladed knife at her hip. She strained to pull herself up to her leg to try and cut herself loose. To her horror Ringo saw the snare around her foot was coiled tightly several times, into what looked like four or five separate ribbons that all extended up above. It wasn’t even that simple, as the bright white cloth looked to be woven into itself as well, like a snugly fitted sweater. It might take several minutes to slice through each one individually. The way she was bound, it reminded her precisely of how she felt when she engaged that ribbon-jutsu wielder from before.

Ringo still wouldn’t believe it. This Agent obliterated two entire units of Annitou forces. It couldn’t be the same person. That girl from the previous night had looked so...normal. This had to be someone else!

A sickening plunk shook the trees above her. Ringo felt it right in the pit of her stomach, as if someone just dropped an anchor on her heart. In the mists above, obscured by the vegetation, stood something massive. Whatever it was, it stood far bigger than that female Agent from the night before. The shape couldn’t be immediately placed in Ringo’s mind either- it almost looked like a gargoyle! The leaves blocking her view meant Ringo could only make out a rough outline of the creature: she could see what looked like a pair of long, hooked claws extending up towards some kind of bony body, which likewise appeared to be attached to some inhumanely long and spindly pointy fingers. The head was also impossible to discern apart from something that looked like long hair or horns covering its entire circumference, concealing the face (if the thing even had a face) in its entirety.

The other soldiers were right. Nothing about this monster looked familiar. It didn’t even look human! But, no, no, no. Monsters didn’t exist. The heroes of old drove those ancient creatures to extinction centuries ago. The only demons that prowled the world now were man-made. Ringo maintained her composure even while dangling by a foot and went straight into plan B. She thrust a finger up into the branches overhead, doing her best to gesture in the general location of the enemy despite still slowly rotating in place. “I’m Cadet Kurusu Ringo of General Gounomouno’s personal Jinchi squad! I know what you want! Let me go and I’ll show you where your artifact is!”

“Tell me first.” The voice that rumbled up from above was unmistakable female, but heavily muffled. Even if it had been the girl from before Ringo probably couldn’t have placed it either way, so brief their time together had been. The attitude certainly felt like a dead-on match, though!

“Let me down first!” Ringo kicked a bit and felt the ribbons around her ankle tighten. “It’s not like I could get away anyway!”

“Tell me,” the form above Ringo seemed to have bent over to touch something, and at once Ringo felt the cloth around her limb stiffen painfully. “And I’ll consider letting you keep some of your limbs.”

Okay, so, negotiations weren’t going exactly as planned. Gekko would have been better at this type of thing, or even Hajime on a good day. Ringo was not quite cut out for haggling.

After a few moments of terse, contemplative silence, Ringo relented. “There’s a false bottom under the cannon’s barrel, where squad captains keep important material like their orders. I guarantee that’s where anything important was put!” In her head, Ringo figured that if the Agent could be appeased, there would be no need to continue the violence. People could be rational, right?! No need for everything to be solved with violence!

After another silence, the muffled mummy standing watch above Ringo seemed to make a decision. Ringo felt the branches sway as something heavy leapt from above. She then heard a hefty thunk as the gargoyle hit the dirt behind her, out of her vision. With more than a little bit of panic Ringo swung her arms back and forth to try and force herself to spin around. For some reason she just wanted to face the cannon again- maybe because seeing it just made her feel better. It wasn’t until she already heard the paneling of the wagon being torn open that she finally managed to impart enough rotation to herself that she got a good look of the monster-Agent.

There was no mistaking it now. The entire figure was lurched over so exact measurements couldn’t be estimated, but Ringo could tell the thing was enormous. Standing tall the full shape of the Agent would have been two or more heads above most grown adults. Her outer layer looked to be composed of a multitude of interlaced bandages, less of what one would see wrapping a wound and more like a criss-crossing, coiling weave like those thick ropes they used on the biggest Annitou warships. The base material didn’t look very complex at all, based on how the blood stained across them seemed to be seeping into the fabric. It was just some kind of fibrous cloth, held rigid into a sturdy suit of armor by some unseen force. That eliminated all doubt in Ringo’s mind about this type of jutsu. The Agent was using some kind of strengthening technique on the cloth to protect herself and augment her abilities!

If Ringo hadn’t been absolutely terrified of getting gutted like a fresh fish, she would have been in awe at witnessing such a powerful jutsu up close. These moments were once in a lifetime, perhaps more literally than the cadet could stomach.

Any excitement was short lived with the next realization. The upside-down pit in Ringo’s guts only grew larger. Augmentation jutsu were absolutely terrifying. It was one thing to exert some small control of your surroundings, like being able to move bubbles or the air. But those that could perform feats like total manipulation of a material existed on another level entirely. In most cases usage of a jutsu didn’t drain one’s stamina or energy- it was much like breathing, or blinking, or growing your hair, in that exerting your natural talent was simply an extension of being alive. An augmentation jutsu like this girl’s meant that the Agent inside wasn’t having to waste muscle movement or energy to protect herself and move around. In fact she might be perfectly fine underneath that ribbon-weave, as fresh as a spring daisy.

As long as she stayed within the confines of her suit of armor it would be no different than a person using a sailboat to move around. This Agent could slaughter Annitou foot soldiers all day long and never grow fatigued. In fact, she might even be quite comfortable in there!

Fine! That was fine! Ringo wasn’t going to fight her anyway, that totally wasn’t her intention! The beast-like form of the Agent wasted little time in prying apart more boards of the wagon specifically where Ringo had told her to. It took less than a minute for the long, edged claws (also made of the same clothlike material as everything else) to finally click up against something not quite as easily shredded. The Agent’s head perked up a bit and glanced around, lingering only for a moment on an increasingly lightheaded Ringo. Dangling like a pinata wasn’t the most dignified position but Ringo still tried to belt out a commanding presence from that state anyway. “That’s the lockbox! But you’ll need a key from a captain to open it, and they won’t give those up without-”

Wordlessly the gauze covered Agent used two of her elongated fingers to pluck something within her armor. A tiny unremarkable iron key appeared. Ringo almost felt her ears pop, either from raw emotion or because all the blood was rushing to her head. This shouldn’t have surprised her. Already Ringo came across so many bodies...even a captain wouldn’t have stood a chance against this jutsu, really. Those commanding officers she killed hadn’t divulged this secret either...and the lower ranking foot soldiers wouldn’t have had a clue in the first place. How many people had this Agent killed, for no reason? It was all so futile!

With a deliberate slowness, perhaps because she anticipated a trap, the Agent inserted the key into the box embedded in the wagon. A small mechanical click sounded. Standing more than an arm’s length away she reached over and pulled, dislodging the top of the box with her spindly fingers. No booby trap activated. Finding this agreeable, the Agent reached into the box and seemed to feel around for a bit. Then like a farm pulling a turnip from the ground her claw popped out with something small and black in between its pointy fingers.

Ringo could barely see it. It looked like a rock, maybe a bit darker than normal but otherwise not worth thinking about. Was that really it? That little pebble had been the cause for all this mayhem and bloodshed? The Agent up until this point had been noticeably cool and calm, and that hadn’t changed much, but even from where she dangled Ringo could almost feel an air of triumph imminanting off the ribbon-Agent. She held the rock up a bit as if trying to get a better view.

Ringo couldn’t tell where the Agent’s eyes even were- a big tangle of ribbons, almost like hair, drooped down across the entire ‘head’ of the suit of demonic-shaped armor. Maybe the girl’s peripheral vision wasn’t very good while encased in all that cloth. The early morning light denied the Agent a good way to examine her prize, so with lurching steps she tried moving somewhere not so shaded by large trees. That brought her closer to Ringo. The Agent didn’t even seem to notice the cadet anymore, though. And who could blame her? What threat would a tiny, wrapped up lass like Ringo pose from that position?

But, but! Now that the Agent was this close an intrusive thought nagged at the edges of Ringo’s consciousness. Up until now (and including now, honestly), all the emotions roiling and writhing within Ringo kept her mind off the actual horror of the moment. Maybe the fog was lifting more but she could see with much more clarity the bodies laying scattered around the wagon like discarded laundry. Fresh blood still dripped from the Agent’s stained claws. She could smell something in the air, something foul like burnt hair, mixed in with the iron taste of raw meat. A word flashed through her head, an unfamiliar one she didn’t often think. Evil. Monsters only existed in storybooks, but humans could more than make up the difference. This Agent was on foreign soil, plundering some trinket purely for their own benefit- what kind of nation would have sanctioned such wanton slaughter over a random artifact? In any other time and place this would have been an act of war!

Not on the lawless Jinchi, though. Free from the prying eyes of civilization, this kind of debauchery could be practiced without the fetters of morality getting in the way. When this Agent escaped nobody would know where she came from, and there would be no proof whatsoever of who perpetrated the massacre. Ringo didn’t even know her name.Putting herself in the mind of a stranger like that was difficult but already Ringo could start connecting the dots- no Agent would leave someone like her alive. Ringo was more than willing to die to protect her countrymen. But the injustice of it! The cruelty!

Less than an hour ago Ringo steeled herself for an unwanted confrontation with no expectation of victory. She wasn’t a martial artist like Hajime, or a smooth talker like Gekko. Her best traits were following orders and her willingness to do her duty. But now, for reasons she couldn’t understand, it felt like her soul wanted to rip itself away from her and lunge at the murderous Agent. Watching the creature-like goblin of a girl casually inspect her treasure while stepping on the bodies of Ringo’s fallen comrades seemed to pull some darker ferocity out of the cadet. Maybe this was what Hajime felt like all the time.

It was a futile, meaningless emotion, though. The kind of thing Gekko was always telling Hajime to ignore. Ringo still dangled like a ripe fruit from a trap she blundered into entirely on her own. A cadet like her couldn’t stand up against a foe like that. Her pockets weren’t laden with throwing knives or poison or any of the other myriad of deadly implements her fellow cadets like to tote around so proudly. Ringo carried only what she needed for support. A compass, an extra canteen, back-up socks...her only real weapon was the short wooden truncheon that was mostly used for self defense and reaching rations on the top shelf of the cafeteria.

And her jutsu, of course. Her Bubble, a limited ability to make and sort-of control spheres of fragile liquid, provided that it wasn’t too windy out or too hot and the material used wasn’t too thin or volatile. Yeah, that certainly had proved completely useless over her career so far. What a pathetic cadet she made.

The Agent stepped just a bit closer. She ran her fingers over the black object and seemed satisfied with its quality. If she moved any closer to Ringo then those long ribbon-shaped arms would easily be within range to lash out. If any action was to be taken it would have to be now, before Ringo’s narrow window of action popped like one of her ineffectual bubbles.

What if the Agent just left? That could still happen! There wasn’t any more need for violence, was there?

Then, for the briefest moment, a memory resurfaced. A fresh, painful memory. Her, Hajime, and Gekko had been following orders at the dock that night. Staying towards the back, handling the processing of the arrested smugglers. When General Hashimoto Daisuke showed up out of a cloud of choking smoke, Ringo watched and did nothing as Gekko was taken. It happened so quickly, she had told General Gounomouno, that she almost didn’t think it had happened at all. Like a hawk plucking a duckling out of the water, Gekko had been there one moment, and gone the next.

Was that true, though? Not entirely. Maybe there was something Ringo could have done. Hajime certainly had tried, but in the back of Ringo’s head she knew what their orders were. None of them were to engage any enemies. They were just cadets, after all, and still in training. No matter what rationalizations Hajime liked to pull out of a hat, getting involved only meant putting more Annitou assets at risk. What if Ringo got kidnapped too? What if Hajime got killed? The protocol was plain and simple- abandon your teammates for the good of the country. Better to lose one than lose three. The reverse was also true- if an Annitou soldier was cornered, the commonly held belief (though no longer the official policy) was that suicide was preferable to capture. It was in fact the honorable thing to do, to prevent your comrades from risking their own life on the off chance you could be saved. Better to remove that option entirely! Cruel. Cruel but necessary. Annitou as a nation did not have the vast resources of the others, no large continent to control rife with ore and land to exploit. The only way the nation could survive was on the backs of its people making the hard choices. That’s what Ringo told herself as she watched Gekko get snatched up without trying to stop it. Someone had to make the hard choices.

But it hadn’t been hard. It had been extremely easy. A relief, even. Truthfully, for all the bluster, Ringo hated having to constantly put her own neck on the line for Gekko and Hajime. Her youthful dream had been to selflessly sacrifice herself for a greater cause, for the homeland she loved and swore to protect. Often, though, it felt like she was busting her butt just to cover for others' mistakes, or in service to some token task that could have just as easily been performed by a trained dog. There was no romance or heroism in that day to day grind of military life. That too was a sacrifice Annitou soldiers must bear!

At that moment, though, when a chance to live up to her idols presented itself, Ringo knew what her answer had been. “Gekko’s not worth it.” No military legend ever got written about one kid trying and failing to save another kid. Ringo would have just been another example the Academy instructors told bad kids to scare them into behaving correctly. Trying to help would have made her like Hajime- ridiculed, ripe for punishment, considered a liability.

Waiting was just an excuse. If things were going to change, it was up to Ringo to make it happen.

The feeling overtook her before she could even rationalize it further. The Agent was just close enough now. It wasn’t until that very moment that Ringo even realized that apparently she had been waiting for the girl to get within reach. Whether or not the Agent expected a surprise or not no longer mattered, though given the way she was standing in that weird ribbon armor of hers it looked as though she was paying any attention to her bound prey at all. The moment Ringo’s wild twitching turned into something more controlled and deliberate, though, the Agent’s attention finally snapped away from the artifact and back to the tangled up prize.

What could a shrimp like Ringo possibly pull out in this situation? Maybe a hooked fish could flap around and slap a reckless fisherman, but this was an entirely different situation. Still, one did not survive long in this business without maintaining some preventative caution. The moment Ringo began to pull something out of her now filthy Annitou uniform the Agent retreated back a half step. The relic still resting in her claws fell to the side as her other gangly arm rose up as a shield between herself and Ringo. It was entirely unnecessary. There was not a projectile that Ringo could hurl that would pierce the steel defenses of her armor. The myriad of deflected crossbow bolts now littering the jungle floor could attest to that. What was there to be afraid of?

That’s right, that’s right! No, rather than let this dangling girl try and pull something fishy, it would be better just to cut her down here. The free claw drew back just a bit in preparation. A simple raking thrust forward would end it. Each of the elongated digits hardened and sharpened in response, turning every finger into a razor sharp nail to be driven into whatever soft target might lay in their path. The Annitou soldier’s own ‘armor’ might as well have been paper against the lethal edge of her jutsu. Metal protection would have been a showstopper, but coming across opponents in full steel plate was a bit of a rarity in these modern times. There wasn’t anything standing between her and another tidy evisceration. Ringo wouldn’t even be the younger person Hana had killed.

Ringo didn’t pull any one thing out of her pockets. Instead what came out was a handful of...dirt? Mere seconds away from swinging the lethal appendage at Ringo, Hana took a moment to pause. This girl possessed no remarkable abilities. Yuu explained to her after their meeting that it seemed as though the cadet they had fought could do some basic tricks with bubbles and not much else. A fistful of soil had no special property worth being concerned about. It almost felt silly now, being so threatened by a tiny child whose intention seemed to be to literally fling mud in response to her dire situation. How petulant! But that’s what separated adults from children. Leave it to a juvenile mind to spend their last waking moments in pursuit of a petty insult.

Hana knew better.

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