Anri could tell when a dimension between her world and the other three was opened since Saika and her could both suddenly hear the three children from that world. She could tell some of the demon sword's confusion each time as well. Her children on this world never seemed to reach true independence, though Anri suspected that some had strayed outside of her knowledge.
But Ramen, Erma and Weird became progressively more independent each time the dimensions closed and re-opened.
Anri worried about that herself. If they became too independent, would she still be able to control them and keep them from causing havoc on that world?
We graduated! Erma's voice declared. A crazy guy tried to kill Naruto and Hinata. And he and the Kyubi scared Ramen, but Naruto and Hinata graduated!
"Are they all right?" Anri asked worried, though if Erma was talking at least Hinata was alive.
Anri didn't think the three were independent enough yet to inhabit their blades completely. She didn't even think that was possible, actually.
Saika didn't seem to think it was from what Anri could glean when she could hear bits and pieces of something useful through the eternal ramble of love and cutting and taking over humanity so that everyone could love and be loved. The sword's consistent attempts to drive past Anri's wall of emotional indifference and drive her into being an insane, crazed slave to the sword's will.
Hinata's arm is broken. Naruto was stabbed, Ramen explained. They are going to be fine.
"That's good," Anri said quietly as she sat in her house and ate her Ramen alone. "I start school tomorrow. I managed to get into Mika's class. I'll be glad to see her, I haven't seen her for a couple of days."
I like hearing about Mika! that was Weird's voice. She knows how to love! I told Tenten to be like Mika, but she won't. And you said not to make her do it, Mother.
You sound farther away, the somewhat sedate Ramen said.
"The portal must be somewhere far away from me...or you," Anri reasoned.
The conversation continued as the dimensional passage that fluctuated open between the two worlds held open in a place distant from Konoha on one end, and in the heart of Ikebukuro on the other.
There was an individual in Naruto's world who fancied himself the chosen of a particularly blood-thirsty god. Hailing from the Land of Hot Springs and the Hidden Village there, he'd grown disgusted with how his home had grown more and more into a tourist attraction rather than a center to hire ninja for espionage, bodyguard or assassination work.
Especially assassination work. For slaughter was the holy work of his religion.
As far as he was concerned, the role of a ninja was to kill people. Not to run hot springs for travelers between the Lightning and the Fire.
So as a young ninja, he'd slaughtered his nearest neighbors in retaliation for their blasphemous peace and complacency and then set out to follow the precepts of his religion.
And eventually he'd stumbled upon a secret that had elevated him from being a mediocre ninja turned serial killer into something that was an actual threat.
Ever since then, his life had been pure sweet pleasure and the pain of death.
He still had mediocre skills, and truly skilled opponents against him alone still had the edge, but it didn't change the fact that he was dangerous.
At the moment, he was wandering through the wilderness and a grove of trees somewhere in Cloud country, thinking about when he might next find a chance to perform his worship. Being a somewhat simple and foolish man, he failed to note the subtle disruption in the world around him as he walked through the moonlit trees and found the grove ending a bit sooner than he expected and opening out into a strange, glittering place full of people, people, people!
All sorts of heretical, blasphemous people who did not worship Jashin and were thus fit sacrifices.
As he walked out, heaving his massive three-bladed scythe, people along the streets near him started backing away nervously and starting to look like they were about to run away from him. Aside from one tall man with dyed blonde hair and a cigarette where he stood dressed in a pair of black pants with a black vest, white shirt and black bow tie.
"Wooohooo!!" Hidan shouted. "All of you heretics! Listen up! I'm bringing the wisdom of the God Jashin! So if you want to live forever you'd better listen up! I'm willing to start taking converts now! Anybody who doesn't convert! Well I'll be ending your aethestic heretical and meaningless lives right...."
The blonde man took the cigarette in his hand and bent it in the middle with a simple motion before tossing it down and stamping it out hard.
"Shut up!" the man said, turning to glare at Hidan. "Shut up with your Jacey crap and your cult nonsense and killing people! You make me sick"
"Hehehe! Sooo, one of you people thinks that you..." Hidan blinked when he realized the tall, skinny dyed-blonde wasn't waiting for the return banter.
He dodged under the first punch and cackled madly as he darted to the side of the man.
"You aren't actually thinking you're going to stand up to the chosen of Jashin do you?"
A skinny man with a narrow face and broad, sharp smile looked away from the spot where a teenage girl should have splattered across the pavement.
"Ahh, Celty," he said tsking. "I told her your job ended when you brought the girl here. Oh well. Was interesting anyway."
He'd gone to all that trouble to set himself up as someone willing to enter a suicide pact. Then he'd had the girl kidnapped by people impersonating him so that she would fear for her life. And had her rescued by Celty so that she could be relieved that she still had that life. Then, when Celty had dropped her off, he'd had that little conversation about how terribly hypocritical she was. Claiming to want to die and yet fearing for her life.
As if one death was any different than the next.
It had been amusing to see her tip herself over the edge of the building just to prove him wrong about her. He doubted it was an actual urge to commit suicide and end her life.
But then a net or web of supernatural, living shadows had grabbed the girl and set her softly down on the ground where a biker woman hiding her lack of a head under a cat-eared yellow biker helmet gave the girl a pep talk consisting of a single typed line on a PDA.
"My, my," he said. "All that work erased in such a little time."
He was distracted when a cloud of dust and smoke rose up into the distance, seeming nothing less than the explosion of some massive bomb somewhere in the center of Ikebukuro.
"Hmmmm, what could Shizu-chan be doing over there?" the man wondered.
Hidan boggled as the blonde man he was trying to fight tossed aside massive, metal lamp-post in his general direction. It was at least twenty feet long, possibly thirty and possibly three feet thick in diameter.
It had managed to last as a weapon for five strikes before succumbing to the insane strength that his opponent held.
He'd dodged the first of those strikes, been clipped by the second and been slammed into the ground on the third. The remaining two strikes had splattered Hidan about before the lamp-post shattered and the blonde glared down at him.
Hidan picked his battered and slowly healing body out of the multiple craters and and backed away from the monster who stared at him with barely contained anger that was threatening to spill out again.
His Scythe had been shattered into a thousand pieces early on. His pike was a twisted piece of metal tossed aside after the immortal ninja had managed to stab it into Shizuo.
Meanwhile, with every strike that Hidan had survived, the blonde had upped the ante to something heavier.
"Get out of my town," Shizuo growled. "Or I'll kill you. Your talk of sacrifice and crappy cult idiocy. I hate that stuff. It reminds me of Izaya. He'd probably pull off some crap like that."
"weh...weh...wooo," Hidan wheezed. "WOOOO!! You idiotic hedonist! You can't kill me! I'm immortal! Haven't you...ehhh...got that by now."
"I don't care," Shizuo growled. "I'm done."
Narrowing his eyes and turning away from the more or less crippled stranger, Shizuo started to walk down the street as the crowd of onlookers, standing a minimum of fifty feet away from the infamous strongest man of Ikebukuro, shifted about nervously.
Stepping forward woozily, Hidan bent down to where Shizuo had carelessly left his blood behind and started up his ritual as he looked for anything to deal the wounds with.
He found the twisted and gnarled remains of one of the street signs that Shizuo had procured as a weapon earlier. Meanwhile his feet traced a circle about the ground.
"Hehehehe!" Hidan shouted, licking up the blood. "It's all over now you stupid brute!"
Hidan's skin turned black with decorative bones painted on in white at appropriate places. He whooped again with wild joy, trying to ignore the fact that his enemy didn't even seem to be paying attention to him.
"Now face the curse of Jashin!" he shouted.
And then he stabbed down into himself with the rod and watched the blonde man....
...continue walking for three more seconds before pausing, glancing down at the spread blood under his vest and shirt.
The vest and shirt given to him by his younger brother.
Hidan stared in a total lack of comprehension at the slowness of his enemey's response. There was no way he could have been expected to know who he was facing.
Human beings had limits placed on their strength for the simple fact that if they used the total amount of power available in their muscles, that they would do all manner of hideous damage to themselves. Maito Gai would call these limiters the Eight Gates.
Shizuo Heiwajima was born with no such limiters.
He should have been dead through his own strength ages ago. His medical record from the middle of elementary school to the end of junior high read like the report taken after a single massive earthquake or terrorist report in which hundreds of people had died.
Every bone fractured at least once. Spine snapped in two to six places on four separate occasions. Skull fractured repeatedly. Lungs collapsed. Heart muscles torn enough to stop the heart three times. Organs ruptured. Skin split open and massive blood loss. Muscles shredded over ninety percent of his body, sometimes in a single incident.
He'd eventually healed from it all.
It wasn't until he reached high school that his body finally developed into something strong enough to channel power enough to shatter tank armor with out itself tearing apart.
It was doubtful if Hidan was capable of doing enough damage to his own body to make Shizuo even care.
A small part of Shizuo wondered how the man had hurt him. But the majority didn't care. The majority of his mind only saw the damage to his brother's gift.
And ignored the fact that his brother had given him dozens of the same outfit in an effort to try to encourage Shizuo to hold down a single specific job.
"You stained my uniform," he growled turning about.
That was all the warning that Hidan had before the blonde turned around and started charging forward, roaring at the top of his head.
"Wh...what the hell?!" the Immortal demanded as he removed the twisted metal and stabbed down into his own leg.
Blood poured out from a likewise spot on Shizuo, but it didn't seem like the berserker ever noticed as he continued with his run, snatching a vending machine with barely casual strength along the way and hefting it over his head.
Hidan stabbed himself again into the heart and watched as blood poured out of the crazy man's mouth.
And then the vending machine was flying through the air and Hidan was soon moving ahead of it.
Shizuo himself actually stumbled as the curse transferred that impact to him, but was immediately charging forward again, snatching up Hidan by the hair where the psychotic immortal had landed. Ripping the stunned man up into the air by the roots of the hair and slamming him down again before lashing his arm up again.
This time, the roots of Hidan's hair gave way and he went flying up into the sky before toppling down again into Shizuo's grip and a one-handed choke slam into the pavement.
Then the choke slam was repeated.
Five times over the course of two seconds, creating a larger crater each time.
Finally, the blonde stood up again, growling down at the twitching mess he'd left.
"Still alive?" he asked.
Hidan whimpered and tried to raise a hand up.
"Good, get out of my town. Or I'll tear you up until I kill you."
He walked off in the direction of a certain street doctor he knew, complaining about the stiff feeling in his body and the way the blood was getting everywhere and ruining his bartender's uniform.
Izaya had returned to his office by the time his cell phone rang showing the number of a certain pharmaceuticals representative.
"One of our gather teams was taken out today," the woman on the other end of the line said. "Following your information. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"
"I am an information broker, Namie-chan," the man said with the same wide grin he'd displayed in watching the headless woman save that suicide. "I just might know anything."
On the other end, his current client was grimacing and he just knew it.
The thought widened his smile significantly.
"Then I have something else for you to look into," Namie said. "Another team picked something up in the wake of one of Shizuo Heiwajima's rampages. We'd like to see if you can get information on him."
That was interesting. Yagiri Pharmaceuticals didn't usually like to know details about the human lab rats they were snatching of the street. Not to mention the fact that Izaya could have previously counted the number of people capable of getting Shizuo into such a cataclysmic state of anger on one finger.
Himself.
"Hmmm," he said with a broad smile. "I'll see what I can dig up."
After all, anybody that could annoy Shizu-chan that much would be a good person to know.
He turned to the wooden board at his side, a go board that had on it a collection of chess, shogi, go and reversi pieces scattered about it seemingly at random.
"I wonder if I'll have to get some new pieces," he said idly as he took up a shogi piece from the side and slammed it down on to the board threatening a white go stone and a black bishop.
Namie closed her phone tight and considered how much danger she put herself in by depending on Izaya Orihawa. A man who could go one on one with Shizuo Heiwajima, and survive unscratched even if he couldn't do anything to significantly hurt the living incarnation of rage. A man who had more information on the goings on of Ikebukuro and surrounding areas than was good for anybody.
And, worse, a man who might betray her just for the simple motive of seeing what would happen.
Unfortunately, he was the only one she knew that might be able to track down where this new immortal had come from.
Until then, in addition to the Dullahan's head, she had another interesting thing to run experiments on.
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(Posted Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:37)
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