Chapter 9
In the silent night, only the soft gusts from the hospital’s air conditioner could be heard; the noise growing quieter and quieter as the machine whirled sleepily. The man woke up again, vaguely remembering that this was his second time gaining consciousness.
Where am I? He summoned all the strength to be poured into his brain as he formulated his thoughts. Every muscle in his body felt like torn rubber bands and his bones cracked he tried swinging his head to shake away his weariness; the pain in the back of his head was acute and his neck cracked as he craned his head out the curtains to study the room.
The furniture blurred in his vision as if all he could see were smeared silhouettes of objects and shadows flouncing about in front of his eyes. Groaning, he drew his knuckles into his eyes then let his hands fall limply in his lap as he averted his gaze to the scenery outside the window. While he froze in uncertainty, his eyes trained on the moon (whose brilliant radiance immediately captured his attention). He beheld the full moon in his dark eyes that were dull with the absence of light. He scanned the roofs of block after block of houses; one by one, their outlines appeared clearer to him as his vision gradually adjusted to the darkness of the night and the searing pain at the base of his skull. The splatter of orange, blue, green, and red that painted the houses and shops bled into his sight; the metal-web gates on the balconies of apartments and the way the cabins were built to stack on top of stores and restaurants reminded him of a familiar place: Konoha. Although parts of him still doubted whether he had truly arrived at his mission’s destination as from the room he was within, it was hard to see the heads of the Hokages on the stone cliff at the very end of the village.
The interior of the ward had felt so unfamiliar to him a moment ago that he couldn’t recognize almost half of the equipment and layout of the room. He peered over at his sides where a drawer half his height stood holding out a pile of books for him. On the wall to his left, was a clipboard slipped into a pocket extending out from the wall designed for containing paper files. Swiftly, he grabbed the clipboard out of his pocket and began reading the files in it: the information was short, written in the form of a paragraph that used up only half a page; it described how he was found and his injuries as well as the after-effects of these internal wounds. The man sighed drearily and placed the clipboard back in its place.
Beep——beep——chakra sufficiency level——the monitor beside his bed signaled to remind the patient that he still has chakra detection tubes plugged into his body. Chakra's sufficiency level is below average——Expressionlessly, he ripped the tubes off from the arm that they were bandaged on and flung them to the end of his bed. It was a tedious process, his hands lacked the powerful grip they used to have. What has happened to me? The man stared despairingly at his palms and then at the cuts on his bare upper limbs as his fingers slowly traced through each one of them.
He could feel time slipping by him until something hit him on the back of his skull…he was Hatake Kurai: an elite shinobi of the Leaf sent out on a mission with the hope of the entire shinobi world on his back, and the mission he was tasked with was a long-term one, particularly those that were hard to determine if one could make it back alive or not.
Kurai, Kurai, his mind chanted to him. Kurai’s hands grappled with his messy grey hair as his eyes widened in revelation. The torment at the back of his head spread like wildfire, now his entire brain felt like it was smoldering with flames and smoke. Pieces of memories folded in his mind as he tried to process every piece of them as they dashed past his eyes.
“Hatake Kurai——”
Everything before him faded to black until a flash of blonde hair suddenly appeared and the darkness dissolved around him.
“——Good luck on this mission, we hope you return safely.” The red letters that said “Fourth Hokage” on the back of the man’s white robe seized his attention as the Hokage turned away from him, and Kurai’s eyes followed.
Around him was a crowd of ordinary citizens to great shinobis, their faces, illuminated by the flickering torchlight, betrayed a mix of excitement and apprehension; their eyes fixed on the lone figure in their midst. Feeling courage suddenly swarming up in his body, Kurai looked around him: he was in the heart of a forest clearing (possibly the very one that the Nara family owned for the stars above him couldn't be seen in the same position from anywhere else) and shrouded by the cloak of the night.
As Kurai’s gaze drifted downward, a surge of recognition washed over him, mingling with a profound sense of disbelief. Before him lies a circle etched to the ground with a radius of about five meters long; decorated with intricate symbols and kanji characters that made no sense as he attempted to read them together in a sentence and then separately in words. Four inky lines from the center of the circle——where he was standing——stretched far out from the shape, almost reaching the feet of the first row of the crowd, where the few ANBU members waved for people to step backward; with the four lines sticking out from the circle’s central points, it had changed to resemble a compass, although in his mind, a more similar image burned——it was a ritual circle. Something sparked in his eyes as he hastily noted the characteristics of this ring, it was some ritual circle that could be categorised into the classification of Summoning Jutsu…except he wasn’t to be summoned, Kurai remembered.
“…Roger, I’m ready over here at station three. Reporting to station four now, Orochimaru, how is the condition of station four?” A stern voice spoke up far behind him, in the southern direction. Kurai peered over his shoulder and caught the honey-blonde shade of someone’s hair.
“…Tsunade…” A voice coming from the west hissed huskily, “I’m all set here, ready to go. Are all the inter-cardinal coordinates ready?”
Intercardinal ordinates? Kurai thought to himself as the intangible memory before him wavered in his mind. Like inter-cardinal directions on a compass? What are they?
“This is Team Kabuto reporting from the northeast ordinal station. It is all set up and good to go.”
“Hai! This is Rin reporting from the southeast ordinal station, we are all prepared too!”
“This is Ao reporting from the southwest ordinal station. We are okay to go.”
“Great! And this is Obito from the northwest ordinal station relaying: we’re ready too!”
Voices that sounded as if they were muffled by microphones shot consecutively into his ears. They weren’t shouting across the fields, Kurai analyzed as it dawned on him that they were speaking to wireless radios, which he was also wearing, and watched as his hands moved to adjust the volume settings on his earpiece. Automatically, Kurai found his mouth opening as he casually announced to his teammates: “This is Hatake Kurai reporting to all stations on the final procedure of this mission. The test subject is ready——”
Blinding lights flooded his vision and the memory sizzled into ashes in his brain. Kurai was forcefully snapped out of his recollection. Surprisingly though, he found the pain in his head ceased by a bit.
Was that what had happened? I was sent here on a mission, Kurai concluded from the observations he made from his memory. A mission with the purpose of…the ache aggravated once more, so Kurai could only put away his thoughts for now and turn his mind to something…less energy-consuming. Whatever was going on with my mind must have been the after-effects of what these injuries on my body, he sighed to himself as he reached out reluctantly to pick a book out from the pile beside him and didn’t even glance at what he had chosen until his dreary eyes skinned over the cover of the book as he turned it around mindlessly several times in his hands.
“Make-Out Paradise” it read, and the longer he stared at it, the more recognizable these threads of words became. Wasn’t this the exact novel he received when…Kurai narrowed his eyes in concentration, the volume’s cover crinkled slightly as he tightened his grip…And he gave up trying to remember, providing consolation to himself that he should preserve his energy for retaining the forgotten details of his mission.
And there he sat with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Kurai thought to himself dryly, the one who had remembered everything but what to do. He shrugged halfheartedly to his thoughts and began flipping open the pages of the book; scamming through every word and sentence until a note clipped between the end of the introduction page and the first chapter of the book fell into his lap, which Kurai picked up thoughtlessly and scanned over a few times then slid it back to where it fell from.
So he was in Leaf, the note had proved his evaluations; Kurai averted his attention back to the romance novel and read on absent-mindedly.
Hmm, I guess the note will make a decent bookmark for now.