Chapter 7 Meeting The Contents Of Your Stomach

I do not own Naruto

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"Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck fuck," Ryuishi hisses under her breath, tromping her way to the outer courtyard.

"Twelve fucking cocks in a bucket full of butts."

Watanabe Ryuishi is six years old, and today she is going to die.

Well, maybe not really, but there is a good chance of it. She really shouldn't have been so feisty around one of the Seven Swordsmen's apprentices, but goddamn, she never imagined it would end like this. Maybe Kisame would have thought she was too blunt. Maybe he would have been a giant douchebag. Perhaps, the two would have personalities that couldn't mesh. But no, after some struggle, the very first canon character she meets gets along fine with her! (By some very loose standards of course.)

They bickered, she laughed, and he even spat tea! It had been the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Then, wonder of all wonders, she fucks up.

Again, she didn't think things through. She didn't consider the words coming out of her mouth, how offensive they could seem. She didn't pay attention to her surroundings, and then went and blabbed a challenge to a boy who had to be at least six fucking years older, right on the verge of puberty, with enough training to kick her ass ten ways to Tuesday.

This isn't going to be a spar or even a duel. It's going to be a slaughter.

Ryuishi wasn't lying when she said that Kisame could kill her and get away with it. The mist had a shit view of civilians. The whole of ninja society did, incidentally. Shinobi, from what she had seen, seemed to have no care for their non-military counterparts. In the show and the manga, the only reason a civilian would appear would be to hire a team for a mission or to make the ninja look better in comparison.

Sometimes, like in the cases of Teuchi and Ayame, who owned the infamous Ichiraku ramen stand, it showed them performing their duty, which was serving their Shinobi overlords. It was a subtle but insidious thing in what she remembers. Genin teams would help out with common, everyday chores performed by civilians, all the while nattering about how boring and lame they were.

The comments, while funny at the time, exposed a darker side to the Elemental Nations. Ninja did not care about the lives of civilians. This was doubly obvious in Kirigakure. Shinobi laughed when they recounted tales of assaulting business owners and day labourers. Those returning from outside the village enthusiastically recounted tales of a battle against dangerous opponents, ignoring how a single jutsu would ruin the farmland around them, tearing up crops and ruining soil, thus destroying the lives of farmers. Trade caravans were regularly assaulted, and no one could connect the dots to the loss of trade, it seemed.

Ninjas could not support a farm, and they could not continue in most trades. Few owned businesses, and fewer had marketable skills outside mercenary work. This, alongside their ignorant behaviour, left the everyday people indignant and angry, and they far outnumbered their ninja brethren. It seemed that the entire system was a powder keg, waiting for a single spark to burst into civil war. The daimyo did nothing to control his military dogs and rarely outstretched a helping hand to his people. The whole situation was begging to be taken advantage of.

Ryuishi mourns the fact that she will be too dead to do anything after today. Then she snorts. She'll be double dead. Death twice over. Hah.

Then she thinks of the empty void, the haunting, endless abyss, and quickly turns her thoughts away from that direction.

She supposes that the meeting she had last month with Hanako and the other orphans will be her last. She wishes the blond-haired girl luck with her growing gang. Maybe she has time to write her a letter? No, Hanako can barely read. It seemed a silly thing to teach the group she had met that day, and all their subsequent meetings had been filled with new faces and more lessons about survival and how to stay unnoticed. Man, she really should have taught them to read. What kind of monster was she, leaving starving orphans on the streets, never showing them the wonders of literacy...

Argh! Enough! She has to get her mind into the fight! Even if she's (definitely, for sure) going down, she won't do it quietly!

After all, that goddamn, motherfucking, piece of trash teacher of Kisame's threatened her with something worse than death.

She lets the outrage at the man's brashness fill her. He had been dealing with Kagami Okaa-sama, negotiating for her Mizuage. The thought of it floods her little body with fear and hate, which she carefully fans until the gale inside her heart turns manageable. She will use it in the upcoming fight. Maybe it will make the punches hurt less. She hopes so.

She broods about it as she stalks the halls. The brothel emulated the geisha culture in many ways, only, ya know, seedier and more prostitute oriented. Right now she would be considered a maiko, an apprentice, too young to deal with adult dealing. It should have stayed that way for a long, long while. Yet, Kagami Okaa-sama was negotiating her Mizuage. The Mizuage was a ceremony for initiation into the working girl's ranks. Here, in a brothel, it meant that the Matron was considering selling her virginity already. Kagami was trying to whore her out, that bitch! It should have never come up so soon, and it led her to believe that the giant man was not only using his political clout but offering obscene amounts of money. Or so she assumed.

So, weaponless, angry, and dressed in a beautiful kimono, Ryuishi steps out into the outer gardens. (She will relish ruining the fine piece of clothing. It's the least she can do to Kagami for being an underhanded, traitorous hag.)

The outer gardens are a polite euphemism for the muddy, run-down, half-acre plot of land behind the Okiya. The ground is mushy and unsteady, and there is little plant life. The area is commonly used for the back door dealings of the brothel and as a place to sneak out for the girls. It is also where the food, cosmetics, and other supplies are delivered so that the unwashed workers from the trade district do not have to be seen in front of the business. It smells like scum, and she can feel her geta slip into it. Smiling, she slips them off and lets the slime squish between her toes, happily examining the bottom of her robes trail in the filth. This single action serves the dual purpose of giving her more traction and getting her clothes dirty. Content in costing the brothel owner money she stalks towards the side of the plot, the hair dangling from a high ponytail swishing with her steps.

She notes to keep the environment in mind during the fight, and subtly begins to stretch. Behind her, she can hear the footsteps of the other two and thinks that it is kind of them to let her hear their approach. As shinobi, they could just as easily appear out of nowhere, or silently slip up directly behind her. Like that bastard, the teacher had done when he had entered the room.

With little direction, Kisame takes the side opposite of her. His shisho watches from the doorway.

Kisame looks fierce and determined, his bokken loses in his hands, but maybe that's just from her perspective as dead-girl-walking. She doesn't think her ego could take it if he looked anything but competent. It's already suffered serious blows today and is probably gonna be crippled from the beating she is about to receive from a twelve-year-old. Her vanity is screaming at her from inside her head for getting their clothes dirty, and reminding her how ugly they look when they fight. She ignores them and lets her mind focus on surviving for as long as possible.

Ryushi breathe in, holds it, and lets

her angerfustrationfear fills her and lets the breath flood out.

"You may begin," the giant man says.

She drops down into the mud and rolls forward, underneath the strike that sends a small splash of swampy earth raining down. Kisame is fast, faster than she has any hope of being, but she rolls underneath his first strike, coating herself and her pretty robes in filth. She can see his foot raised, ready to stomp down on her, and she rolls underneath that too.

His foot crashes down behind her with an insane amount of force, sending out a small wave of filth. It upsets his balance on the slick terrain and he stumbles a bit before regaining it.

Ryuishi uses that time to scramble up, keeping her centre of gravity low and her weight shifting between her feet, her toes digging into the slime. It's a bastardization of a horse stance, but it keeps her grounding firm.

Kisame is quick to spin around, using the moment of his turn to add more force behind his upward slash. She leans away, letting one palm grip the muck behind her, another held firm in front of her face. Her robes pull her down and restrict her movements, and she almost, almost regrets her bokken sweeps upward and only misses her nose by a centimetre, sending her bangs flying.

(Not the face, not the face! It's so cute, don't ruin that!)

His arms are up and she shifts her weight, leaving it all on one foot while the other leg arcs up, aiming for his ribs, the force of a full-body twist behind it. He deftly grabs it, removing a hand from his training sword, halting the blow. She keeps moving through the twist, letting her other leg leave the earth, and sends a palm-full of mud at his face right before he flings her to the side.

She slams down hard and her whole body rolls through the muck. She is covered in it now, and the outer robe will probably forever smell like a quagmire.

She scrambles up again, ignoring the screaming in the ankle he caught and used to throw her. Ryuishi lets herself slide into the bastard horse stance again, mentally thanking her old father for being such a paranoid bastard. Yet, if she wants to live a little longer, she knows she'll have to get in close again, close enough that his stick won't be able to strike her.

Kisame is wiping mud off his face, bokken at his side, looking so absolutely done with everything it startles a laugh out of her. His beady eyes lock onto her and he scowls, displaying his vicious teeth.

Then he is in front of her, and his bokken is lodging itself in her gut lengthwise, driving the air from her lungs and her stomach into her trachea. It is hard enough to bend her body around it, but her stance is firm enough that she doesn't go flying, only slides back.

(Kisame regrets doing this because it sends the mud from her robes flying off of her, and onto him.)

Still bent over his sword, her arms up and guarding, Ryuishi loses her lunch. Kisame makes a disgusted sound and backs away, and she turns her head, instinctively trying to keep an eye on the opponent when another wave climbs its way up her throat and fountains out of her lips, right onto his pants.

"Aaaargh!" the blue boy bellows in repulsion, hands outstretched to his sides, glaring at the

half-digested remains of rice and salted salmon dripping down his pants.

Panicked, in pain and seeing an opportunity, Ryuishi lunges, tackling his legs, and smashing her face into her upchuck. He topples and lands with a splat in the mud. He immediately retaliates and she can feel one, two, or three solid strikes to her skull before she's knocked out Fubukiuki Suikazan, jonin of Kirigakure, member or the renowned seven swordsmen, current wielder of Samehada, has never laughed so hard in his entire life.

His student is currently shoving an unconscious six-year-old off his lap and scrambling away from the prone girl's form. His back is covered with mud, and his front is covered with projectile vomit.

Seeing the boy's shattered expression as he looks down at himself makes him laugh even harder. His bellowing reverberates in the mist-laden air, and actual tears are gathering in the corner of his eyes. He hopes to never, ever forget his student's priceless expression at this moment, and he knows that he will never have to warn the boy of the dangers of striking an opponent in the gut again after this.

He is leaning against the doorframe for support and his protruding gut is hurting as bad as it does after a hard workout, but he can't seem to stop the shaking. Behind him, he can hear Kagami-san and another woman slide around the corner, eager to learn the results of this particular test.

He looks up and gestures to the plot of land wordlessly, still laughing. The woman, who must surely be the girl's mother, looks startled and wide-eyed at the state of her daughter but is well educated enough to hide her distress in front of a shinobi. Kagami just eyes him with a curious, if calculating, gaze.

"Well?" the weathered matron asks, taking in the scene, a single thin eyebrow raised high on her brow.

Fubuki reigns in his chuckles, standing tall once more, carefully keeping his eyes off his student—lest he burst into laughter once more. "She certainly is Academy material. I will stand as her sponsor," he intones with a grin.

The Okiya mother smirks victoriously, and even the mother looks relieved. It doesn't surprise him. If the girl hadn't shown her ability today, she would most likely have started training as a brothel runner, and then as an initiate. As it is, the child has shown enough promise to enter training. The Zabuza brat will be elated.

The test had begun long before the spar, of course.

They had been under observation since the moment she had stepped inside the room with his student. When faced with a customer so bearing the Kiri hitai-ate the child had immediately gone to ingratiate herself with the target, pushing him in different ways to get a read on his personality. It had started with the immediate invasion of personal space and then continued with blunt honesty and perseverance for the sake of the goal. The brat had even managed to worm her way into shocking his student, fearlessly offering a limb to prove herself. The whole time the girl had kept in the control of the conversation, seamlessly moving from an over-enthusiastic persona who used her age as a shield from more serious repercussions, to a sarcastic one that belied her wit, to a bold one that showcased situational cunning, and finally ending in aggression. He severely doubts she even knew what she was doing at the time, or that she did any of it at all, but each trait was something every Academy candidate has to have in some form or another.

Her physical display was not disappointing either. The girl did not run away from the fight, facing the consequences of her brash words, most likely only because of his earlier insinuations. She did not immediately attack, or attempt to strong-arm her way through. Fuguki is certain she knew she could not win from the beginning. She did not land a single blow, but she did display a good amount of flexibility and creative use of the environment around her. The fact that she was ready to strike at any opening presented, even if it meant a face full of her own sick, speaks well of her future ruthlessness.

"I will begin her papers immediately. Keiko, gather your child and send one of the other girls down with a change of clothes and some food for the young master. Perhaps even a bath."

The young mother accepts her orders graciously, bowing respectfully to both of them before rushing to the mud-covered form of her offspring.

"Will you accompany me to my office for some celebratory sake, Suikazan-sama?" the smug Matron asks, her lips quirked upward in a tight smile that makes her seem years younger. For a second, Fuguki sees a flash of the woman from twenty years ago, dressed in the form-fitting gear and giving that same smile, her hair trailing behind her. He grins wider, and motions for her to go forward.

"Only if you don't mind reminiscing as you finish up that paperwork, Kagami-san."

She only raises her brow once more, smile still on her face, and nods in acquiescence, beginning to walk away. He looks back to his dejected student, waving his arm to catch his attention. The boy looks up, scowl across his face.

"Good work boy. Let the girls take care of you, and we'll leave in a little while."

Then he is stalking after the matron, licking his lips at the thought of sake and nostalgia.

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private: Sorry for the late update! The site had some repairs to do. And if you think the fight is short, please remember at this time Kisame is a genin, and so far Ryuishi has only been training by -whoopinghooping was inevitable.