I bit the tip of my tongue to draw a drop of blood and weaved the handsigns for the summoning jutsu near instantly before swiping the blood on my thumb and slamming my hand on the ground. “PUFF!” a cloud of smoke appeared and when it cleared revealed my cat with a scroll in it’s mouth. I took the scroll and opened it. Reading the contents over I sighed before handing it to Karin to read. The message was more or less my sensei thanking me for the information but telling me that she was already aware of it and that so far the Akatsuki had proven to be little more than mercenaries.-
She said to watch out in case they tried to claim my bounty but otherwise they could be ignored unless they became a problem for whatever reason. Honestly I should have guessed that she’d know more about the group than I did since she was the Hokage and had the entirely of Konoha’s information gathering power behind her. Still I did as protocol dictated and sent word of what I had learned since it was always better to be safe than sorry.-
“Guess we can focus on our vacation then.” Karin said throwing the scroll into the fire.
“Indeed, best to not to mess with that lot if we can help it. Sasori in particular gave me the creeps, probably some twisted form of kinjutsu to be honest.” I said while giving my cat a beast nourishment pill from my storage scroll and sending it back to the village.
“Really? That Deidara guy made me the most nervous, he felt twitchy and volatile.” she said and I nodded.
“That was likely because his body was filled with Explosion release chakra the moment he spotted us.” I explained and she had a look of horror at it.
Indeed the moment Deidara had noticed us the chakra in his body immediately started to prime itself into Explosion release chakra that was waiting to be used. His hands were also held near his clay filled satchels that at first glance made him seem relaxed but in truth he was tensed and ready to fight the instant he needed to. Even without having fought him personally just seeing this was enough to make me think he deserved his S rank as he was definitely dangerous.-
Perhaps not to me personally since I was nigh invulnerable but to a general shinobi surviving a run in with the dude was not a very likely thing unless he wanted you to survive. Anyways we relaxed after we left the land of grass and into the land of Noodles without any issue. The land of noodles was a rare culinary wonderland with the vast majority of dishes in this world having been invented or perfected here. There were even dishes that were hard to fathom as edible such as “stone noodles” that had literal rocks in the dish.-
Even I was weirded out by that particular dish even after trying it and finding that it was completely edible and actually not bad at all. We took our time crossing the land of noodles stopping at any decently sized village we found to see if they had some unique local dish for us the try. My personal favorite so far had been a dish with noodles made of cabbage in a spicy broth with mushrooms and pork. From what I understood the noodles were prepared by drying cabbage then crushing it to powder before mixing with milk and rice flour to create a green “dough”.-
Karin’s favorite dish so far had been a sort of creamy fish soba that was loaded to the gills with meat and seaweed. Honestly there was not much worth talking about for the month we spent touring the land and cuisine before we passed into the land of hotsprings. We didn’t run into any bandits or shinobi who we needed to bother paying attention to. Nor did we find any chakra beasts I could add to my collection. That changed almost as soon as we stepped foot into the land of hotsprings however.-
“Oi looky here boys a little noble couple takin a stroll without any guards at all!” A man said as he stepped out from behind some rocks.
“Looks like nobody done gone and told em that the worlds a dangerous place, why don’t we go an educate them?” Another man said with a cruel snicker as he and a good twelve others popped up around us.
“You want to handle this or should I?” I asked Karin calmly.
“You deal with it, I don’t want to get blood on my new clothes.” she said with a disgusted look at the leering dirty men.
I reached down and grabbed a handful of sand that with a flex of earth chakra turned into small sharp pebbles.
‘Swift release: wasp execution!’ I thought as swift release chakra covered the pebbles and I swung my hand in a wide arc as I opened my palm.
“FWIIP!”
There was a single loud whistling sound as each of the pebbles were launched at high velocity through the air and precisely into the center of each man’s forehead before they could even blink. I casually hooked my arm under Karins and grabbed her hand before walking forward as time seemed to catch up with reality and each corpse fell over as their bodies realized they were dead.-
I didn’t even bother looting or disposing of the bodies but simply left them for someone or some animal to find. Karin also couldn’t care less about them as she was far too happy holding hands as we walked. It was only when we reached the next town that had been taken over by bandits that we learned that those were members of this group. I thought it rather funny how as we approached the town the very obviously bandits acted as timid as mice.-
The reason for this was because their boss was one of the rare common folk to accidentally awaken their chakra and had developed sensor abilities. Using these abilities they had avoided shinobi but had directly decided that running or hiding was pointless once they sensed us approaching. To be more specific when they sensed me approaching. According to the bandit leader I felt like a mountain sized monster that there was no escape from. The only reason we didn’t kill these bandits was because the leader convinced me that they were more thieves than murderous or raping that tolled anyone passing through the area.