Fortune and Misfortune Go Hand in Hand

Tsunade was beginning to feel uneasy after the events that had been happening throughout the day, quickening her pace down the street as Shizune was preparing, gathering her things at the inn to leave this village and join her at the exit. She began by finding a suitcase full of money in an alley and feeling lucky, went to the casino like every day to satisfy her compulsive gambling urges.

The routine continued and the money at her disposal dwindled with each bet, until she was left with only a handful of coins. Annoyed at suddenly losing the good luck with which she woke up, she hit the table and the coins shot out towards the nearby unoccupied slot machines.

As if guided by an unknown force, each of the twenty coins entered perfectly into the slot of its corresponding slot machine and set off, only for the same result to come out in all of them after a few seconds: 777.

The machines spewed out gleaming coins as if their lives depended on it.

Tsunade looked amazed at the machines before looking at her fist and then back at the machines, while Shizune hurried to recover the money with tears in her eyes.

But Tsunade frowned, nothing good ever happened when she won a bet and a bad feeling settled in the back of her heart, so she ordered Shizune to get ready to leave.

But as she walked down the main street trying to distract herself, things only got worse!

"Congratulations! You are the ten thousandth person to pass through our sake shop and you have won a complimentary basket of good fortune, with five jars of our finest beverages."

"We are opening a new premium barbecue business and you will be the first lucky person to try our A5 wagyu beef, completely free!"

"There we have the lucky one! As the one millionth tourist in our village, you receive an all-expenses-paid vacation for a weekend at the best hot springs we have."

Each piece of news only made Tsunade more anxious and she almost wanted to start running to leave this damned place.

"Let me go, I have to save my sister!"

A childish cry in a side alley, only audible due to her training, made her step slow down and against her instincts, she tried to approach the origin of the voice.

It didn't matter if it was the tone of the voice, its pronunciation, or the impatience it transmitted, it resembled so much the voice of Nawaki...

Hiding in the shadows of the alley, she saw some thugs holding a twelve-year-old boy, who was struggling to free himself from his captors, with no apparent success.

"Shut your mouth, kid!" shouted the one who seemed to be the leader of the thugs, "Your sister should consider herself lucky to be noticed by a nobleman, don't bother the little lovebirds while they deepen their feelings, hehehe..."

Tsunade frowned disgusted when she caught the general situation.

"My older sister doesn't want to be with that old man!" the boy protested loudly, "He's like seventy years old!"

"Come on, you talk as if she got nothing out of this," the man shrugged as a smile formed on his face, "Your sister wants to be a doctor, right? Those studies cost a lot of money, but after today, I don't think she'll be short of money."

"She won't stoop to that level!" the boy's face reddened with anger as he indignantly shouted.

"You talk as if her opinion mattered," the smile on the boss's face disappeared and he looked at the boy coldly, "Weaklings like you have no right to speak up, you just have to follow the orders of the strong."

"You!" the boy went from anger to a deep sense of helplessness as he realized that he couldn't avoid anything with his limited strength.

Bang!

A sudden impact sound made the thugs and the boy turn their heads towards its origin, which turned out to be the leader of the men.

Only...

Why is their boss's head at such an odd angle?

It was only after seeing the boss's body fall lifelessly to the ground that they realized the blonde woman standing behind him, with her fist still in a striking position.

"It seems that my fist is stronger, so following your logic, you should listen to me, right?" Tsunade looked emotionless at the scared thugs, "Let go of the boy and let's see if you can live another day."

The thugs exchanged glances and nodded determinedly, decisively leaving the place as they ran and cursed their mothers for not giving them another pair of legs.

"Save my older sister, please!" the boy approached Tsunade and, recognizing that she was his only hope, grabbed her shirt firmly.

Tsunade looked at the boy, who was a spitting image of her brother except for the dark hair color, and tried to answer him, but found that the boy had gone from looking at her with hope to one of despair.

"Why didn't you save me?"

Tsunade felt her skin crawl and before she could step back, the boy's lower waist exploded and covered her in blood and guts, leaving her paralyzed as she recognized the red liquid and its smell.

The boy still held her shirt with one hand, looking at her with hollow, dead eyes, evoking the image of Nawaki and forcefully unleashing the memory in which she saw her little brother's body.

"Why didn't you save me?" the sentence she had just heard resonated in her head as her throat closed and her hematophobia acted forcefully, making her tremble uncontrollably as she held her head and began to shed tears.

"No, no, no, no..." she murmured as her trauma blurred her from reality and pushed her towards despair, unable to feel the person who at some point appeared behind her as she floated just centimeters above the ground and held a sword similar to a clock needle in her right hand.

Placing the sword horizontally at a timed pace, a single fluid movement was enough to pull Tsunade out of her misery.

Taking out a scroll, Takara stored the corpse of the legendary Fat Sheep, the last surviving member of the Senju clan and one of the three Sannin of Konoha.

"I'm probably the first genin to personally kill a Kage-level power in history, right?" Takara contemplated the sealing scroll mockingly, "I'll never understand why Konoha allowed one of its best cards to wander the world with such a critical weakness, killing her only required a simple puppet filled with human blood."

He released the noxins to clean up the scene and erase any trace of his presence, including the thugs who believed they had managed to escape safely.

He couldn't allow there to be any living witnesses.

"Tsunade-sama?" a female voice sounded behind him and Takara turned around slowly, listening as the other party approached closer and closer.

"I think today is my lucky day, a two-for-one deal!" he exclaimed in a low voice as his figure blurred into a blue flicker and he waited for Shizune's arrival, who unknowingly, would meet her teacher very soon.

But not in the way she expected.