Slaying Some Bandits

Mission Details:

Spoiler:

Akame walked at a mild pace down the road headed towards the Land of Frost. She was using the Transformation Jutsu to look like a lady in her late fifties, her sword transformed into a walking stick to aid in her journey. While in reality she was wearing her typical mission attire, as the almost elderly woman she had on tattered rags underneath a plain brown traveling robe with a hood. Her hair was gray and lines were etched on her face, green eyes staring out over the horizon.

She had been sent on a mission to eliminate a few groups of bandits that were coordinating raids on this road leading into the Land of Frost. It was one of the heavily traveled roads which made it prime real estate for any bandits worth their salt to try and pick a few caravans off. Traders had begun to complain, and she was the answer to their woes. Typically she performed assassination missions when she went on a mission that required killing people since quick, one shot kills were her specialty. She could only guess that this mission was meant to ensure she hadn't lost her skill in other kinds of combat scenarios such as an ambush or a direct confrontation.

After a few hours of traveling all by her lonesome, the anticipated moment came. Out of the periphery of her vision emerged three men from the environment of rocks and trees. Each was brandishing a weapon at her. Two wielded a katana and a third had a war hammer. Akame wondered if he had any idea on how to use such a weapon but found that she didn't particularly care if he could or not. All of them were relatively skinny though not starving by any means. No, each of them was around average strength with the guy that had the war hammer having a bit more meat to his bones.

"Sorry lady, but the road's closed unless you've got the toll. We'd rather not hurt ya' so do pay up or we'll have to make you pay up," the one nearest her said. Akame stopped walking but didn't shift her attention to the one talking. Instead she kept tabs on the two others since they were making relatively little in terms of sound.

Akame would reply to the man, making her voice soft and weak to play into the part. "W-what price is that? I don't have much on me, only a couple hundred ryo," she said, feigning worry with her response. The man who spoke grinned, a few teeth missing and a few more beginning to chip and rot. He walked over to her, sword at his side, his other hand reaching out and grabbing at Akame's chest.

"We didn't mean money. We've got plenty of that, but we don't have many women. We need some fun for the next few days," he said to her with a laugh. Akame didn't reply, letting him get his fill for a couple seconds as he spoke. The other two grinned as well, each looking as threatening as they could with their weapons. "Now be a dear and make it easy for us. Just get on your hands and knees and enjoy it." He squeezed hard as he finished speaking, and with a flash of movement by Akame, it would be the last time he ever got to feel anything with that hand.

The walking stick was gone, replaced now by a drawn katana. Similarly, the old woman facade was now done. At least temporarily. In the old woman's stead stood Akame, spry and able at the age of sixteen. The talker didn't have time to scream about his arm as Akame twisted her blade and snapped her wrist to come back and slit his throat with a well placed slash. At such close range, it was a difficult thing to accomplish.

His two accomplices hadn't moved in the short time it took Akame to eliminate their friend, each barely having time to register what had happened before the Kumogakure jonin had turned her attention to them. A quick spin by Akame and a vicious series of slashes saw the second man armed with a katana missing an arm from the elbow down and then his leg from the knee down on the opposite side. The guy with the war hammer got his shit together right after this, taking a swing at Akame as his first friend lay bleeding to death from a slit throat and his second friend was laying in the road screaming in pain at his missing limbs.

"You fuckin' cunt! I'm gonna smash your pretty face it!" Akame said nothing in reply to this, simply bringing her sword up next to her face parallel to the ground with the edge facing the sky. Both hands clasped the hilt with Akame having dropped the sheathe as soon as she drew the blade against her first target. "Ya' hear me? I'm gonna fuckin' kill you!" She detected a bit of a waver in the tone of his voice indicating that he was more frightened than he was showing.

"A deer does not kill the mountain lion and I have no tolerance for rapists and robbers," she replied coldly to the bandit. He blinked at the harsh tone of her voice, so devoid of emotion. He could tell that she meant what she said, and the condition of his two friends was more than enough to prove that his instincts were correct. The man didn't make a move at first, opting instead to hold back and see what exactly she planned to do. As it was, she could see five different ways to end his life quickly. The question was, did she want to give him that mercy? The feeling of the first man's hand upon her breasts was still fresh on her skin and it made her skin crawl even thinking about it.

Neither moved for a few seconds more before the man finally let loose a chuckle. "Alright, how much do you want to forget this ever even happened? Twenty-thousand ryo? Fifty? I can give you that and more, just go back to wherever you came from and leave us be," he said as he entered the bargaining stage of this confrontation. It seemed as though he had come to understand the situation he was actually in and that his odds of surviving a fight with her were, quite frankly, zero. A bead of sweat appeared on his brow as the appreciation of his situation grew.

"Your head will suffice."

A look of anger twisted his face and a snarl was followed by him beginning a charge at her with his war hammer. Like a well-oiled machine Akame would end the fight in one swift movement. As his hammer swing came around, Akame would jump up and place a hand on the head of the hammer to aid in getting her spin going. The jonin twisted her coiled body in mid-air to bring the sword around in one quick and clean cut. Akame landed on her feet lithe as a cat and pounced away from the man's body as blood began to spurt from the stump where his head used to be. A thud on the ground nearby denoted where exactly that head was. And just like that the confrontation was over. At least, the first one. She wasn't sure how many there were on the road ahead, but all of them were sure to meet the same fate as this group.

The second man of the group, the one she had only maimed, was still screaming as Akame used the headless man's shirt to clean the blood off of her blade. The jonin would then stand and calmly walk over to him, sad eyes staring down at him as he began to go hoarse from the screaming. "I do hope you've learned your lesson. If you survive, please do more with your life than petty banditry. If you get to Kumogakure quickly enough you can have a medical shinobi reattach your limbs for you." The man just looked at her like she was crazy as he writhed in pain in the pool of blood beginning to form around him. It was unlikely he was going to survive.

"Fuck you bi-"

A final slash took this man's head as well prompting her to clean the blade off again on the newly dead man's shirt. "I was really hoping you'd try. I didn't want to kill you," she said softly to his corpse while wiping the blood from her blade. And that was true, but orders were orders. These men had committed many crimes including rape and robbery. Capital punishment was the due course of action, but she tried to believe there was some good in even bad people. All you needed was a wake up call, and she was good at being that. Of this she was sure.

Akame would then drag the bodies to the side of the road, propping them up in a sitting position in a triangle shape. There she would leave them, an obvious message to any who may be thinking of taking after their example and becoming a criminal. The jonin then resheathed her blade and applied the Transformation Jutsu to become the almost elderly lady with a walking stick once more. She turned towards the Land of Frost afterwards, continuing on with her mission.

If she wasn't mistaken, the next hotspot for activity was only a few kilometers ahead. It was very likely that they were in cahoots with the three she had just killed, double robbing people or robbing people first and then killing and raping them at the second spot when they couldn't afford to pay. It was a strategy she had seen in use a couple times before and it was a very effective one, she had to give them that much. However, it was only effective when nobody decided that they had had enough and did something about it. The average bandit stood no chance against a seasoned swordswoman like Akame which is what the village was depending on in order to get this done. It was much easier to draw the bandits out when working alone since men tend to foolishly believe that having more people means they're going to win whatever encounter they may happen to come across. There were many who had learned that they were wrong moments before their deaths, these three were just the most recently educated.

Akame continued her walk at an average pace down the road, keeping an eye out for anybody who might come from the woodworks to try and do something funny to her. Hell, maybe she'd get lucky and all the bandits would be as dumb and arrogant as the last three had been. It had been an hour since that last engagement and Akame hadn't spotted anything too unusual on the road. Traffic was down since the banditry started and she had yet to see any caravans or groups of people today. That was probably a good thing though since she didn't exactly want to expose ordinary people to the dangers of combat. They just wanted to go their merry way and go about their lives like normal. Akame was the shadow who followed and made sure that was possible, and it was good of her to keep that attitude.

After another half hour or so of walking the hair on the back of Akame's neck would begin to stand on end. The jonin slowed to a halt in the middle of the road, mock concern and fear playing across her features as she played the part of a worried old woman all alone on the road. Her eyes darted to each side of the road, carefully analyzing everything she saw. It was less what she could see and hear and more a gut feeling that something wasn't quite right here. She made no effort to move, staying right where she was at.

"I-is anyone there?" She kept her voice feeble and afraid, trying to lure the bandits out that way. If none appeared then it was perhaps just her paranoia getting the best of her. To be a shinobi and not be at least a little paranoid was to be a dead shinobi. Every jonin knew this and some practiced it to different degrees. Akame was not particularly paranoid about everything, but she did get these feelings every once in awhile. The sounds of sandals sliding against earth to her left drew her attention as a bandit hiding behind a boulder stepped out from behind it aiming a bow and arrow at her.

"Just stay right there woman," he ordered.

"Well, that was easy," Akame said as she sheathed her freshly cleaned blade. The man who had tried to accost her for the second time was alone and easy to dispatch. Similarly to the other three bandits, Akame had made sure to prop his corpse up within view of the road as a warning to any who would try to follow in their footsteps. It had to be known that Kumogakure would not tolerate banditry within the Land of Lightning. That was her true mission with killing these scoundrels, warning the rest of their fate should they continue their ways. The rest of the mission was uneventful, so Akame would return home afterwards. She passed the corpses she had created along the way, a strange sense of satisfaction mixed with disgust sending a shiver up her spine.



[exit]