We didn’t travel as fast as we could unlike if we were on a mission and time was of the essence but rather walked casually along the road.
“I never could understand why anyone would choose to become a bandit.” Karin complained after I killed those bandits who ambushed us.
“There are many reasons, poverty, insanity, freedom, pressganging, the other villages shadow warfare. The matter is not one that can easily be dealt with even for the five great shinobi villages.” I said honestly.
“I still think it’s wrong.” she said with a huff.
“I am not disagreeing with you, bandits are detestable indeed. I am merely explaining why one might take that path despite that fact and the danger it holds.” I said and she nodded.
“What about that time when you all cleared out the bandits and rogue shinobi shortly after Sensei became Hokage?” she asked curiously.
“That was more a publicity stunt than a viable method of ridding the land of bandits. In order to regularly hold “cleaning” operations like that we’d need to triple our amount of chunin and at least double our Jonin or risk running ourselves ragged in the attempt.” I explained honestly.
We continued casually discussing possible ways to rid the land of bandits permanently but the same problems kept popping up much to her frustration. The biggest one being that we’d need to alter the way our society worked where the village NEEDED bandits to function. The missions that people paid us to do were more or less a matter of safety because of the threats that the bandits, rogue nin and assassins held for them. Without those threats our society would fall apart because the villages hemorrhage funds to function and those jobs inject money back into the village in a gratuitous cycle.-
While Konoha had a lot more leeway here due to our ability to grow herbs and food before exporting them we were still quite dependent on the missions bandits bring us. The biggest issue however with wiping out all the bandits effectively is the Daimyos of the world. Despite their weakness they aren’t stupid most of the time and any of them that see a hidden village making strides to become fully independent of them will feel nervous. It should be understood that the only real hold the Daimyos have on the hidden villages is money they give to them.-
This means if the village stops needing this inflow of funds from the Daimyo the Daimyo is helpless against the village unless they want to see their land burn by provoking the other Daimyos to start a war against the village. I thought it was all wrong personally and that at the very least the position of Kage should replace that of Daimyo but I’ll keep those treasonous thoughts to myself. We stopped in a village in the middle of our journey to the land of grass border for the night after walking all day.-
It was a quaint place with all the buildings being sturdy but simple wooden ones with rough wooden floors. The place maybe had ten or fifteen families living in it and only about two hundred or so people in total. I noticed that while the people here weren’t exactly terribly off they certainly weren’t in the best state either as many were dirty and or slightly malnourished. I was confused about this until Karin with her big heart asked one of the villagers why the place was like this.-
“Theres a bandit group nearby that regularly shows up to demand tribute and they barely leave enough for us to survive but not enough to hire shinobi to kill them. They have a member here in the village who they leave to make sure we don’t get any ideas of rebellion. He lives over there.” the man who she asked said bitterly.-
I sighed when Karin didn’t hesitate to attempt to kill the bandit in the village only to be stopped by me.
“We need him alive to find out where the group has their lair.” I said cooling her wrath a bit with logic.
“You’ll get nothing from me!” the bandit spat defiantly.
His defiance died quickly however once I went to work on him to extract information. Karin and I were both VERY well acquainted with the human body and knew exactly what buttons we could push to bring the maximum amount of agony without killing the subject. In this case I sent yin chakra into his brain, specifically the part the processes pain and gave it a little tickle. The bandit was singing like a canary in a mere five minutes of that treatment. Numbers, strength, location and even patrol times all fell in our lap and I created two shadow clones that went off to settle this matter.-
There was a whole celebration in the village when my clones came back with the head of the leader who was at least a chunin level shinobi as well as all the loot and food that the bandits had. It came as little surprise that the bandits had been stockpiling the stuff even if they didn’t need more. While the village celebrated Karin and I rented a room at the local inn and turned in for the night. The next morning we ate some jerky for breakfast before hitting the road again.-
We weren’t bothered by any rogue nin or bandits for the entire day and merely enjoyed each others company as we walked. When we reached the border the patrols there verified our stories before letting us through to the land of grass. The forest thinned out for vast swathes of field land that the land was named for. The road was probably the only part not covered in thick grass and only then because it was trampled down from the regular travelers that went over it. The land of grass bordered both the land of noodles and the land of herbs with the land of hotsprings being on the other side of the land of noodles.-
Karins vacation idea was to basically take our time traveling through the land of fire, then grass, then noodles and finally hotsprings before making a return trip using a different route. All in all at our current pace it would take us about four months to eventually return to Konoha. This wasn’t an unreasonable amount of time as the world was more or less at peace at the moment. There were still the small skirmishes and shadow battles between villages but that was status quo and not any indicator of an approaching war.