Chapter 6

Trees... Trees.. and trees.. I was traveling towards the location provided by the village at full speed and my path was filled with just huge tress. They were welcomed though because I could speed up considerably by jumping on branches.

At first I was naturaly not used to high speed of a jonin but it did not long to adapt either. My guess would be that I was adapting to the new body faster maybe because of some intervention by the system. Well it was good news anyway.

The speed was three times faster than my predictions so I would reach near the town in at most two more hours. So I decided to think of multiple plans while traveling.

The exploding plan was my first choice but it would require some conditions to be fulfilled.

I had two seal papers on my wrists which contained kunai and shuriken. So using them to ambush the enemies was also doable.

One of the best plans would be to kill a enemy chunin as soon as possible and then transform into him. Then my tasks would process rather easily. For some reason my transformation jutsu mastery was really good so I was confident with this plan.

Time passed quickly while I was thinking and the town walls were already in my sight. That was fast but I was also done with simulating multiple scenarios in my mind. All that left was to execute my plans.

I stopped about a kilometer away from the walls and transformed into a random shop keeper I had seen in the village. This was natural because it would be stupid to enter inside the town while announcing my real identity as a leaf jounin.

From Aoki's memories, the best place to collect information fast would be the black market's branch in the town but I rejected the though because that would be expensive.

Besides I wanted to train my tracking and stealth techniques too so spending some more time on the mission was fine too. Maybe because I was getting used to this body , my instincts were really sharp and I could guess the intent of other people easily. This ability was fine with me but I was not used to it either. While walking in the crowd, I was more focused on maintaining a poker face which was not my specialty.

I was using a particular face which was not that memorable one. In a big crowd barely anyone would notice me. The effect was already confirmed by me so I was a little more teased while walking and surveying my surroundings.

The town was a bustling one from my observation. But I could tell that , the influence of mercenaries was large in this town because there was a tavern located here for their stay. This did not affect my search because the information from the village contained the portraits of the three chunin bandits. Without those pictures ,it would have been a difficult task for me to find the bandits from all those mercenaries who reaked of blood.

Right now , I really wanted the sensor talent because it would be a piece of cake to see if anyone was using transformation jutsu to disguise their appearance. After all the ones who could disguise their chakra signature too, were too rare in this world.

No matter what, I was a jounin and my sensitivity to chakra was ahead of chunins. So it was not difficult for me to see through the disguises of those who were weaker than me unless they were veterans. At this point , the bandits could not hope to hide from me because they were not real chunin ninja.

It was just that their strength was categorized at chunin level not their mastery in skills or jutsu. When it came to mastery of jutsu , no one was better than the ninja from great hidden villages. So with experience of Aoki , seeing through their disguises was not a difficult task for me.

Even if they were bandits, it would be illogical to think that they would stay in the wild all the time. After all they were after money in the first place to enjoy the worldly desires like liquor , prostitutes etc. Such stuff could only be found in towns and cities and according to the information, this town was the main base of operation for the bandits.

Well they would definitely find their targets from the crowd in this town like merchants who would have money on them. All that was left for them was to follow the target and kill them. Come to think of it , bandits really made easy money. It was just that I found this method really distasteful.

Now I was drinking tea at a stall while watching a farmer who was definitely suspicious. The reason was simple because he was using transformation jutsu on himself. I could see through it but not the real appearance. I was not a master tracker or anything so I could only find this much information. Still the chances of him being a mercenary was too low.

The reason was that most of the mercenaries had no reason to use transformation jutsu to hide their identity. Unless they mainly took missions from the black market or had too many enemies. In this small town , the chances of someone being a target on black market's list was close to none because such people were either well known merchants or other big shots. Naturally such rich people would not choose this small town for their residence or recreation purposes.

So I was already seventy percent sure in my mind that this person I was monitoring , was definitely a bandit because only they would chose targets in this small town. Thus I decided to follow him but used a shadow clone for the job. Even if it was discovered, then the possibility of the real me being affected would be slim..