[Congratulations on graduating early from the Academy as a prodigious student! You are rewarded with the skill, Tenfold!]
[Tenfold - Every investment gives a ten times reward.]
Karura glanced at the floating words, then looked away. They'd been hovering at the edge of her vision since she left the village gates, and she still didn't know what to make of them. But Ebizo-sensei was talking, and the desert stretched long ahead of them, and whatever this strange thing was, it could wait.
"Karura, is everything alright?" Ebizo asked from the front of the group.
"Yes, Sensei." She nodded quickly.
"Getting nervous on our first mission, Karura?" Mai fell into step beside her, grinning wide. "And here I thought the top of the class would have bigger guts than this." She slapped Karura on the back hard enough to make her stumble. "Don't worry, I'll protect you."
"A ninja who can't use ninjutsu or genjutsu is going to protect someone?" Pakura didn't look back. "That's laughable."
Mai's grin vanished. "You wanna go, hothead?!"
"Like I'd waste my time on trash like you."
"Children." Ebizo's voice cut between them, quiet and firm.
Both girls let out a sharp hmph and turned away from each other. Their employer, Keisuke, laughed from atop his camel, one hand on his round belly. "It's alright, Ebizo. Kids will be kids." He waved a hand. "Even little ninja kids are still kids."
"I'm aware," Ebizo said, "but outside the village, their behavior represents the village. Meaning all of you need to be on your best behavior." His eyes swept across the three genin. "Show the good side of our village."
"Yes, Sensei." Karura nodded.
"Yes, Sensei..." Mai and Pakura muttered together, neither looking at the other.
"Good. Don't let it happen again. I gave us a C-rank for our first mission because I trusted you all." Ebizo held the pause. "Don't make me regret it."
He turned back to the road. Behind him, Mai silently mouthed his words back at the air with exaggerated head-bobs. Karura pressed her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. Even Pakura turned her face to hide her quivering lips.
Ebizo saw all of it. He chose not to comment. This time.
The desert road wound south through open sand and low scrub, the sun white and merciless overhead. Keisuke rode one camel and his partner Reiji rode the other, both animals loaded with bolts of fabric, ceramic jars, and crates lashed down with rope. The caravan was small. Two merchants, two camels, and a four-person shinobi escort headed for a trade town in the Land of Rivers.
"It is a whole lot comforting having you ninjas traveling alongside us, I tell you what," Keisuke said, adjusting his seat on the camel's hump.
"We're glad to hear it." Ebizo offered a gentle smile.
"Just not too long ago, Madam Emei got hit by bandits on this same route." Reiji shook his head. "They took everything she had. Merchandise, money, all of it. And what they did to her before they left..." He trailed off. "After we heard about that, we had no choice but to hire ninjas."
"What did they do to her?" Mai asked.
Pakura glanced sideways. "Probably tortured her."
"Something like that." Ebizo said it lightly, but the look he gave both girls was a door closing. The conversation was over.
"I hope she recovers," Karura said quietly.
Keisuke sighed through his nose. "We can only hope."
The group fell into a comfortable silence after that. Mai walked with her hands behind her head, watching the clouds. Pakura kept her eyes forward. Karura let her gaze wander across the sand, the shimmering heat, the thin line of the horizon.
She thought about the notification again.
Every investment gives a ten times reward. She'd been chewing on it since they left the gate. What counted as an investment? Money? Time? If she trained for an hour, would her body improve as though she'd trained for ten? If she spent a hundred ryo on puppet supplies, would she get a thousand ryo's worth of material?
She didn't know. She had no way to test it out here. And she couldn't exactly ask anyone about it, because nobody else seemed to see the floating text. She'd checked. When the notification first appeared at the graduation ceremony, she'd looked around at the other students, then at the instructors. Nobody reacted. Nobody squinted at the air or swatted at invisible words.
Just her.
So she'd kept her mouth shut and accepted her forehead protector, and now she was on her first mission with a secret she didn't understand.
Later, she told herself. Figure it out later.
The path narrowed.
What had been open desert for the better part of the day gave way to a corridor of sandstone, wind-carved walls rising on either side like the ribs of something long dead. The sand underfoot hardened to packed earth and loose rock, and the camels' hooves echoed off the stone.
Keisuke didn't seem to mind. He was telling Reiji something about the price of dyed silk in the Land of Rivers, gesturing with one hand while the other held his camel's reins loose. Mai had her arms behind her head, half-listening. Pakura walked with her eyes forward, unbothered.
Karura noticed Ebizo had stopped talking.
It was a small thing. He'd been chatting with Keisuke on and off for the last hour. Now his mouth was closed. His eyes moved, not his head, just his eyes, tracing the ridgeline on both sides of the canyon.
"Sensei?" Karura asked quietly.
"Hm?" Ebizo glanced at her. Then he gave her a gentle smile. "It's nothing. Stay close to the camels."
He said it casually. But he didn't go back to talking with Keisuke. His hands, which had been folded behind his back for most of the walk, now rested at his sides.
The canyon bent ahead, curving left where the rock walls climbed higher and the path thinned enough that the two camels had to walk single file. Loose stone and old scree littered the base of the walls. Ledges jutted out overhead, wide enough for a person to crouch on.
Ebizo adjusted his pace, falling half a step back so he walked between the rear camel and the open stretch of canyon behind them. His eyes settled on a cluster of rocks near the top of the left wall. Then moved to a shadow on the right that was a little too deep for the angle of the sun.
"Mai," he said. "Walk beside Keisuke's camel, please."
"Huh? Why?"
"Because I asked you to."
Mai shrugged and jogged ahead. Pakura glanced at Ebizo, then at the canyon walls, then back at Ebizo. Something in his expression made her keep whatever she was thinking to herself.
Karura stayed close.
The bend came. The path squeezed tighter. The wind, which had been a constant companion all day, died somewhere behind them at the mouth of the canyon, and the air went still.
Keisuke's camel stopped walking.
"Come on now, come on." He tugged the reins. The camel's ears were flat against its skull. It let out a low, guttural groan and refused to move. The second camel did the same, planting its legs and pulling against Reiji's grip.
"What's gotten into them?" Reiji muttered.
Then the sound came. Not from ahead or behind, but from above. On both sides. The scrape of sandals on rock, the clatter of loose stone kicked free, dozens of feet moving at once.
They poured over the ridgeline.
From the left wall, from the right, dropping down from ledges and scrambling over the lip of the canyon with weapons already drawn. Scimitars, hand axes, crude spears wrapped in leather grip. Sun-darkened skin and cloth wound tight around their faces against the sand, nothing visible but their eyes. They came whooping and screaming, kicking up dust as they slid down the rock face, and there were far more of them than a single merchant should have attracted.
"Protect the clients!" Ebizo shouted.
He was already moving. The jonin crossed twenty feet of ground in the time it took the first bandit's boots to hit the canyon floor, and the sound that followed was a crack like a whip. Karura only caught the end of it. Ebizo's open palm connected with a man's sternum, and the man folded around it and flew backwards into the three behind him, all four of them hitting the wall in a heap of tangled limbs.
Then Ebizo was past them, deeper into the wave, and the genin were on their own.
Karura, Mai, and Pakura closed ranks around the merchants without needing to be told. Karura took the front, Mai the left, Pakura the right. Karura reached behind her and grabbed the scroll from her waist and tossed it in the air.
Smoke burst around her shoulders. Two massive wooden arms appeared in the air, each one nearly as long as she was tall, the joints clicking as her chakra threads pulled them to her upper back.
"So you were a puppet girl!" Mai shouted.
"Focus, Mai!"
The first bandit came at Karura swinging a scimitar in a wild overhead arc. She sidestepped, light on her feet, and her left puppet arm swung up from below. The wooden fist caught him under the chin. His jaw snapped shut with a wet crunch and his feet left the ground. He sailed upward, arms pinwheeling, and hit the canyon wall six feet up before sliding down in a limp pile.
Two more rushed in together. One with a spear, one with an axe.
The spearman thrust straight at her chest. Karura spun away from it, her scarf flaring behind her, and her right puppet arm came around in the spin's momentum. It caught the spear shaft and snapped it in half. The spearman stumbled forward into the space where Karura had been, and her real foot caught him across the temple. He crumpled.
The axe-man swung for her neck. Karura ducked and both puppet arms came together overhead, catching the axe between two wooden palms. The blade bit into the wood and stuck. The bandit yanked. It didn't budge. He looked up just in time to see Karura's knee rising toward his face.
Cartilage popped. He staggered back, blood sheeting from his nose, and her left puppet arm came free from the axe and hammered him square in the ribs. Something in his chest collapsed, and he went down hard, mouth open, no air coming out.
More of them. Always more. They came in clusters, emboldened by numbers, and Karura kept moving through them. Her body moved between her puppet arms skillfully; where the wooden fists couldn't reach, her own hands and feet filled the gaps. A bandit grabbed for her scarf and she twisted, wrapped his wrist in the fabric, and let her right puppet arm do the rest. The crack of his forearm breaking echoed off the walls.
She was breathing hard and the puppet joints were already groaning under the abuse. No poison, no blades, no hidden mechanisms. Just wood and force. It was all she could afford as a civilian academy student.
It was enough for bandits. It probably wouldn't be enough for anything more.
To her left, Mai was a mess of fists and blood.
A bandit twice her size lunged at her with a short sword. Mai stepped inside his reach before he could bring it down, planted her feet, and drove her fist into his gut. Chakra flared through her knuckles on impact. The man's body folded around her arm, his eyes going blank, and she heaved him off his feet and threw him into the man behind him. Both went sprawling.
Another came from her blind side with a club. She avoided the downswing with a sway and headbutted him so hard that his nose collapsed against his face. He dropped the club. She caught it before it hit the ground and swung it into the knee of the next attacker. The knee shattered and he screamed. Mai was already past him.
She fought like someone who had nothing to lose. Just her body, pushed beyond what any eight-year-old body should be capable of, every strike backed by chakra she couldn't shape into anything except raw force. And raw force, applied by someone who'd spent half of her life with nothing but raw force, was terrifying.
On the right, Pakura was ending the fight before it started.
She'd finished her hand signs before the first bandit reached her, fingers blurring through a sequence that would have taken most genin twice as long. She inhaled, her chest swelling, and breathed out a torrent of fire that lit up the canyon like a second sun. Three bandits caught the heat head-on. Their screams lasted about two seconds. Then the screaming stopped and the smell started; charred hair and cooked meat and something else underneath.
The survivors flinched back from the heat. Pakura didn't give them time to recover. She wove another set of signs, faster, and the air in front of her rippled. Wind, hot and sharp, tore forward in a cutting arc. A bandit who'd been circling to flank her took it across the chest. His leather vest split open and so did the skin beneath it, a red line appearing from hip to shoulder. He looked down at himself, confused, and split in two in the sand.
A bandit charged Pakura from behind while her hands were mid-seal. He was close, close enough that Karura almost shouted a warning. Pakura turned, and something in the air between her palms shimmered. A sphere of heat materialized, no bigger than a fist, glowing a dull orange-white. She didn't throw it. She simply let it drift forward, lazy and slow, and the bandit ran into it.
He didn't scream. The moisture in his body evaporated so fast there wasn't time. His skin cracked and dried and pulled tight against his bones, and by the time he hit the ground he looked like he'd been dead in the desert for a hundred years. A dried husk. A mummy made in seconds.
Pakura's eyes were flat. She turned away from the body without looking at it twice.
Nobody else snuck behind her after that.
The fight was over in minutes.
Ebizo walked the canyon floor afterward, checking bodies. Most of the bandits were dead. Some were not. Karura watched as her sensei knelt beside a man who lay face-down in the dirt, fingers still twitching around the handle of his axe. Ebizo rolled him over gently, almost carefully, the way you'd turn a sleeping child. He looked at the man's face. Then he drew a kunai and pushed it through the man's chest, just left of center.
The fingers stopped twitching.
Karura's stomach clenched. She swallowed hard and looked away, but the sound stayed with her. The soft resistance and then the give. The exhale the man made that wasn't really an exhale, just air leaving a body that no longer needed it.
Ebizo moved to the next one.
He did this five more times. Each one the same. Kneel. Check. Finish. Some of them were still conscious enough to see him coming. One tried to crawl away. Ebizo caught his ankle, pulled him back, and did it quick.
When it was done, the man cleaned his kunai on a dead man's shirt and stood up straight. His expression hadn't changed the entire time. The same gentle, patient face he wore when he lectured them about chakra control.
Karura's hands were trembling. She balled them into fists and shoved them against her thighs.
This is what shinobi do, she told herself. This is what you signed up for.
It didn't help as much as she wanted it to.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold fighting experience!]
[You have gained tenfold loot!]
The notifications appeared at the edge of her vision, bright and impossible to ignore. Beside the text, a new display materialized: small boxes showing the goods held by the bandits she'd defeated. Coins, a rusted knife, a waterskin, a pouch of dried meat. Each multiplied by ten. Ten rusty knives. Ten waterskins. Ten pouches. And the ryo. The coins she could see glinting in those little boxes were far more than a fresh genin should have after one fight.
She stared at the number.
She thought about the puppet arms on her back. The joints that groaned when she swung too hard. The bare wood with no lacquer, no reinforcement, no hidden compartments. She'd carved them herself from scrap lumber she'd found behind the carpenter's shop near the academy. Sanded them with a rock because she couldn't afford sandpaper. Fitted the joints with wire she'd pulled from a broken fence.
A real puppet cost money she'd never had. Good wood, quality joints, spring mechanisms, poisons, etc.
But this number in the little box...
And the mission pay hadn't been collected yet. If that got the same treatment...
"Karura, are you okay?" Ebizo's voice pulled her back. The group was moving again. Keisuke had coaxed his camel forward, and Reiji's followed on shaking legs.
"Yes, Sensei!" Karura smiled, and the smile was real, though not for the reason Ebizo probably thought.
"Good." He studied her for a moment, then looked at Mai and Pakura. "I know it's your first time killing. You did well out there. All three of you. I'm proud."
"Heh!" Mai punched the air. "It was a piece of cake!"
"Not even worth my time." Pakura flipped her hair, but her chin was a little higher than usual.
Keisuke clutched his chest from the camel's back. "I'm so grateful for ninjas... I thought I was a dead man."
"We would've been dead ten times over without them," Reiji agreed, still pale.
"You can always count on the Hidden Sand Village!" Mai patted her chest at the merchants with a grin so wide it split her face.
"You can say that again." Keisuke laughed, the color slowly returning to his cheeks.
Karura walked behind them all, her puppet arms sealed back into their scroll, her scarf swaying in the wind that had finally returned to the canyon.