Chapter 72: Bread, Rain, and a Fork in the Road
The heart of the Land of Rain wasn't a battlefield, but it festered with a different kind of war—a war of whispers, shadows, and slow strangulation. In a grimy alleyway of a rain-lashed town, three figures in standard Amegakure gear huddled, their voices low murmurs against the drumming downpour.
"...no movement from the central command. The skirmish lines are static. Iwa and Konoha are probing, not pressing."
"Something is brewing. The calm is unnatural. Maintain observation. Report any concentration of forces immediately."
"Understood."
The exchange was routine, intelligence clerks passing bland updates. They finished their coded phrases and turned to disperse into the labyrinthine streets.
A white flash, faster than thought, cut through the gloom of the alley.
It wasn't lightning. It was a blur of motion so sharp it left a retinal burn of silver.
Shhh-lick.
The sound was the soft parting of air, followed by an even softer, wetter sigh.
The three Rain-nin froze mid-step. Their hands, halfway to hidden weapons, fell slack. Their eyes, wide with a shock that hadn't yet registered as pain, stared ahead.
A figure stood before them now, having moved from the alley's mouth to its center in the span of a blink. He wore a common, threadbare rain cloak, the hood down. His face was young, but held a severity that belonged to weathered stone, not flesh. His eyes were chips of glacial ice, assessing the result of his work with detached clarity. In his right hand, held casually at his side, was a long sword. A faint, unsettling purple miasma seemed to weep from its blade, though not a drop of liquid stained its dark steel. As they watched, the steel itself deepened from grey to an absolute, light-swallowing black.
Ragnar. He'd listened to their dry report from the shadows. Useless. No tactical value. A waste of his time.
Without a word, he turned on his heel and walked back towards the alley's entrance, Yama held loosely.
Behind him, the three ninjas tried to move. A strange, cold line blossomed around their throats. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then, a crimson thread appeared, fine as a spider's silk, before erupting into a violent geyser. Three heads tipped from shoulders, hitting the wet cobbles with dull, successive thuds. The headless bodies stood for a surreal moment before collapsing into the spreading puddles of their own blood.
Ragnar didn't look back. He stepped out of the alley and into the main street, the rain immediately seeking to wash the alley's scent from him.
Half a month. That was how long he'd been operating alone in the Rain Country, a ghost following the Hokage's list. He'd visited safe houses, watched border posts, eavesdropped on patrols. These three were minor cogs, their deaths barely a footnote in the grim ledger he was compiling. His experience points inched forward: 9,800 / 50,000. Close to another ten-thousand mark, close to another upgrade for his Haki.
The constant cycle of hunt, kill, and move had not been idle time. He practiced. He refined. The scroll from Hatake Sakumo had become his bible. The White Fang's philosophy was elegance through brutal efficiency: absolute speed, absolute precision, absolute lethality. The ultimate principle was universal: speed is supreme.
Sakumo's training method was a revelation—a fusion of taijutsu and ninjutsu principle similar to Kumogakure's famed lightning-enhanced styles. It used Lightning-natured chakra not for external jutsu, but for internal stimulation. By carefully channeling it along neural pathways, one could amplify the electrical signals of the body itself, boosting reaction time to supernatural levels. Concurrently, the chakra could excite muscle cells, temporarily pushing physical capability beyond normal limits.
Ragnar had been experimenting. He already possessed the Lightning affinity. During his missions, in moments of stillness, he would cycle a trickle of Lightning chakra through his system according to Sakumo's notes, feeling the faint, exciting buzz in his nerves, the latent power in his muscles humming in response. When combined with his Shave technique, the result was… transformative. His movement became less a dash and more a controlled, localized thunderclap. The three Rain-nin hadn't seen a sword; they'd seen the afterimage of lightning before the strike.
He walked the muddy street, mentally cataloging his progress, planning his next move towards a known Iwa outpost. The town was a dreary tableau of grays and browns, its people moving with the hunched, hurried gait of those who live under perpetual siege.
Then, a commotion tore through the rhythmic patter of rain.
"Stop them!"
"Thieves! Grab the thieves!"
"Don't let them get away!"
Shouts rose over the general murmur. The crowd near a baker's stall rippled and parted. Two small, ragged figures burst from the press of bodies, clutching stolen loaves of coarse brown bread to their chests. They wove through the startled civilians with the desperate agility of hunted animals. The shopkeeper and a couple of burly helpers gave chase, but the dense, rain-slicked crowd hampered them.
Ragnar's pace didn't falter. He'd seen this scene a dozen times in a dozen villages. War created hunger, hunger created thieves. It was the background noise of suffering, irrelevant to his mission.
But a voice, young and ragged with panic, cut through his indifference.
"Konan! This way, hurry!"
A responding voice, younger, softer, tinged with fear. "I'm coming, Yahiko!"
The names were like two precise strikes, halting him mid-stride.
Yahiko. Konan.
His mind, a repository of future-knowledge that felt both like a curse and a map, supplied the context. The founders. The idealists. The heart of the original Akatsuki. Born in this war, molded by this rain. According to the timeline swimming in his head, they should be children now, orphaned and starving. And they hadn't yet met the third piece of their tragic trinity—Nagato.
He turned his head, his hunter's eyes picking them out of the chaos. A boy with wild, orange hair, face set in determined fear, pulling a girl with distinctive short, blue hair along by the wrist. They were all skin and bone, their clothes little more than sodden rags.
They were fast for starving children, but fate—and uneven, rain-filled cobblestones—was faster. Konan's foot caught in a hidden rut. She cried out, her grip on Yahiko's hand breaking as she pitched forward. The precious loaf of bread flew from her grasp, arcing through the air towards the edge of the street where Ragnar stood.
Yahiko, propelled by momentum and terror, stumbled a few steps further before realizing he was alone. He skidded to a stop, whirling around, his face a mask of horror. "KONAN!"
The bread spun, a sad, muddy projectile. Konan flailed, arms outstretched, heading for a face-first meeting with the filthy street.
Ragnar stood at the confluence of the two trajectories: the falling girl and the flying bread.
For a fraction of a second, the calculus of his mission—stay anonymous, avoid entanglement, kill only designated targets—warred with a simpler, more human impulse. These weren't targets. They were potential keystones in a future he knew would be catastrophically significant. Letting Konan smash her face on the stone or letting the bread—their sole prize, their reason for being chased—be lost in the muck… it was a different kind of choice than the ones he usually made.
His body moved before his mission-logic could finalize a verdict.
In one smooth, effortless motion born of impossible speed, he stepped forward. His left hand shot out, his fingers closing not around the loaf of bread, but around the back of Konan's ragged tunic. He lifted, arresting her fall mere inches from the ground, setting her lightly on her feet as if she weighed nothing.
His right hand, meanwhile, snapped up. The falling loaf smacked neatly into his palm. He didn't even look at it.
He stood there then, a still point in the chaotic street. In his left hand, he held a wide-eyed, trembling blue-haired girl by her scruff. In his right, he held a stolen loaf of bread.
Yahiko stared, his panic momentarily frozen into sheer bewilderment.
The pursuing shopkeeper and his men finally shoved their way through the last of the crowd, heaving and red-faced. "You little rats! I'll—" The man's tirade died as he took in the new figure—a cloaked youth with a calm, dangerous face, holding both the thieves and their loot.
The street fell silent, save for the rain. All eyes were on Ragnar.
He looked from the terrified Konan in his grasp to the muddy bread in his hand, then to the panting Yahiko, and finally to the angry shopkeeper.
A choice, it seemed, had been made for him.
(End of Chapter)
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