38: Again? Seriously? (Double Chapter 2/2)

*poof*

Once Seija was out of Amegakure's range, she summoned her chosen ride for this mission, Rathalos.

He didn't seem to enjoy the rain much, but he was a bit faster in the air than Seija was on land, at least if she wanted to save chakra by not Body Flickering with every step.

"Yeah yeah, you're a big angry wyvern, I get it." She told it as it grumbled at her during the flight.

"Why don't you save that scary expression of yours for the bandits? We might not even need to fight them if you can scare them away, you know."

It huffed at her and continued flying. Checking her map, Seija spotted the village that had been attacked by her targeted camp. Commanding Rathalos to descend, she lept off its back once it was low enough and landed gracefully right in front of the village gate. Rathalos in the meantime flew a short distance away to find a nice tree to hide under the rain from.

A man, barely past his teens by the look of him, rushed out of the gate.

"W-Who are you?! What was that monster?!" A young man shakily spoke as he pointed a pitchfork at her. Several other townsfolk watched cautiously from their doorways behind him.

She removed her mask and spoke to him.

"You can relax, sir. I'm a shinobi from Amegakure, and that was my Summon. Your village and a few others recently pooled together your funds to pay for a shinobi team to clear out the bandits who have been harassing you, is that right?" She raised her hands and waited for him to respond.

He sighed with relief and propped his improvised weapon up on its end.

"Phew, we didn't think anybody would show up so soon. Is, uh... is it just you? And your big lizard... thing?" He asked her.

"Don't worry, my team, Akatsuki, has split up to target all three bandit camps in the area at once. We're planning on dealing with this whole issue in a single day to try and build up a good reputation, you see." She spoke honestly.

"Huh... well if you can actually do that, I sure as heck wouldn't complain. The bandits nearest us are in the forest a bit south of here, you'll probably spot 'em just fine on your winged beast. O-Oh and, please try not to destroy our stolen stuff while you're trashing the place. We really need it. I-If it's not too much trouble..."

"Of course. Well, you let your fearful friends back there know what's going on, and I'll be on my way."

She called Rathalos back and climbed aboard before taking off again.

'South then. Shouldn't be far.'

- - -

She spotted it after just three minutes of flying. Nestled between the trees and boulders of the forest was a large wood-walled camp containing roughly two dozen chakra signatures, and a total of eleven large tents. She could see a few piles of sacks through the entrances to a number of these tents, which seemed to be the supplies that she was asked to retrieve.

She thought it was rather odd that such a coordinated set of bandit gangs would only attack small villages without killing the residents, so she figured it would be best to try and intimidate them into submission first to get the info out of them.

The first bandits started pointing and screaming as soon as they spotted Rathalos flying overhead.

Seija brought her mount low to the ground at the northern edge of the camp and shouted down at the criminals.

"Nobody move! You've been marked by the shinobi of Amegakure for the crime of thieving from its people! Surrender immediately and you will not be harmed!"

"FUCK YOU! Men! Shoot her down!" A burly, leather-armored man standing in the doorway of the biggest tent in the camp shouted back.

Arrows flew from the bows of the terrified bandits, somehow more scared of their boss than they were of the wyvern above them. Unfortunately for them, such tiny weapons clattered harmlessly against Rathalos' scales as Seija sighed to herself and called out once more.

"Don't say I didn't warn you." She snapped her fingers and the red wyvern drew back its neck, inhaling hard enough to displace the rain around its mouth.

*Boom*

The fireball that Rathalos exhaled landed in between a cluster of bandits, sending the poor men flying across the camp. They were lucky it was raining otherwise they would've been set ablaze, a fact that Seija would happily use to spare as many as possible if she could.

"Shit, that fucking thing breathes fire?!"

"No no no I can't die like this!"

"Fuck this! Nobody told me I'd be fighting fucking monsters! I'm outta here!"

The bandits began to panic and scatter, much to the fury of their leader at the back.

"Get back here you idiots, there's over twenty of us and only one of her! I'll skin any man who runs awa-" But his voice trailed off as Seija put her hands together and summoned a dozen shadow clones to catch the runners, as she herself hopped off Rathalos' back, landing right in front of him.

"I'll say it one more time. Surrender." She gave her final warning. Which fell on deaf ears as the man drew his sword and tried to slash at her.

She moved faster than he could swing his arms, uppercutting him straight in the gut. The sheer force of the blow seemed to knock the wind out of him and he doubled over, choking and groaning in pain.

With him out of the fight, Seija took the time to check how her clones were doing before she tied him up with wire. Needless to say, the bandits never stood a chance. Half of them had already suffered a similar fate as their boss, and the final few had been cornered together by five of her clones, and Rathalos.

The bandit with the strongest chakra signature out of that group, likely the second-in-command of the whole gang by Seija's estimate, turned to her and spoke with a tired voice.

"I knew that idiot would get us caught up in something like this eventually... we surrender." he said as he sheathed his sword. The other bandits looked at him in shock for a moment, but saw no reason to resist any further, putting down their own weapons.

'Well that was surprisingly easy. Now, lets see what's going on here...'

- - -

With all of the bandits tied up and gathered inside the largest tent, which appeared to be some kind of makeshift planning room, Seija set to work questioning the bandits' second-in-command.

The man didn't know much, only that they were paid a goodly sum of money to join up with two other nearby bandit gangs to steal as much food as possible for their clients.

"The boss knows more. He's an idiot, but he was the one who did all the dealings with whoever it was that hired us." The man said.

Naturally, she moved on to the unconscious bandit leader to question him next. But as she got close to his slumped form to wake him up, something felt off. She crouched down and examined him.

'He's not breathing.'

She quickly scanned him with her senses, believing that he may have had some kind of suicide seal or poison placed on him by his employers to make sure he couldn't talk.

But what she found in the end left her disappointed with herself.

'Damn it...'

She'd simply hit him too hard. He had died from organ failure and internal bleeding from a single punch. She quickly examined several other bandits who had been knocked out by her clones and discovered that most of them had faced a similar fate.

Seija felt like tearing her hair out. 'FUCK! I thought I was holding back... Are ordinary people just that weak?' She rubbed her temples in frustration. 'This is just like the time with those Iwa Genin three years ago. I really need to get a grip on my power when it comes to people with zero chakra enhancement in their bodies. I guess that'll have to be next on the training agenda.'

Filing that issue away to the back of her mind, she turned her thoughts to what she should do next. The bandits were all captured and rounded up, so her mission was technically complete, but she still felt like she could've done more to solve the root cause of the bandit attacks.

Just as she was thinking that, a tiny fast-moving chakra signature caught her attention just outside the bandit camp. She flickered after it into the woods, drawing a kunai as she ran. As it dashed out from behind a rock - having noticed that it had been spotted - she threw the kunai, nailing it to the ground. The chakra signature vanished with the creature's death.

She examined the tiny creature's body.

'A lizard. But it's wearing a tiny vest with an equally tiny scroll on its back.'

Searching through her memories for any usage of lizards in the series, she realised that this was all the evidence she would need to figure out the culprits. These summoned lizards were a specialty of Kumogakure, the Village Hidden in the Clouds. She knew that they were gearing up to begin the Third Shinobi War in a few months time, and everything clicked into place.

'Kumogakure is well known for having a massive military force. And a massive military force needs feeding. The bandits are stealing food for Kumogakure to use in their war effort. And that must also be why the villagers were spared from harm; You can't steal any more food if the people who work on growing it have been murdered.'

Satisfied that at least one thing had gone well with this mission, she stowed the lizard's body inside one of her many spare storage scrolls. She wanted to read the scroll on the lizard's back to see what orders it contained for the late bandit leader, but it was sealed with wax and it could be dismissed as dubious evidence if she broke the seal before handing it in to the authorities back in Amegakure.

She rounded up the living bandits, and buried the ones that she had accidentally killed, using Earth Style. She wasn't sure what the judiciary system of the Land of Rain was, so she was just going to drop the remaining fourteen restrained bandits off with the villagers, since she was going there anyway to report a successful mission and drop off their supplies.

She summoned Rathalos' partner, Rathian, to assist in carrying the extra people and supplies before setting off back to the village.

- - -

Nagato could only hang his head in shame at the scene before him. He had thought that just one Great Breakthrough would've been enough to knock the bandits away and gather them all in roughly the same place so he could capture them all in one go.

But he had failed to take into account what could happen to a person who can't reinforce their body with chakra if they were hit by such a powerful blast of wind and kinetic energy.

The result was the pile of exactly twenty three crumpled, twisted, broken corpses piled up in front of him. Only four bandits had survived his attack, and all of them had fled. He didn't have the heart to chase them after making them witness that massacre, so there was nobody left to interrogate to find a motive. He could only hope that his team mates would figure something out as he and his shadow clones gathered the scattered supplies for the villagers he had spoken to.

- - -

Konan and Yahiko had had a far easier time with their bandits. The two of them took a far more strategic approach to their attack, with Konan's Paper Clones all transforming into different people wearing Ame shinobi uniforms. All it took was for the clones to leap up onto the log walls of the camp out of nowhere for the bandits to cave and surrender to what they thought was a sizeable shinobi force.

Yahiko gave them a surprisingly inspiring speach about all the things they should be doing to improve their lives and the lives of others around them. He mostly bullshitted his way through the explanations since he didn't actually know much about how all that stuff works, but the speech was a surprising hit with the crowd of criminals and many of them even offered to assist in carrying the stolen supplies back to the village that they stole them from in the first place.

One placated bandit gang and one somewhat confused yet relieved village later, the two of them headed back to Amegakure to meet up with the other two. In all the excitement Konan realised that they had forgotten to ask the bandits anything about who was paying them to steal food in the first place so she, like Nagato, hoped that someone else had bothered to gather that info themselves.