65. Kirigakure

Nothing out of the ordinary happens after Zoro's meeting with Zetsu. He just keeps hunting strong criminals for their bounties and to train himself.

Currently, he is hunting a missing nin from Kirigakure. It's been a long time since he hunted someone wanted by Kiri.

He has been avoiding that village because it is being controlled by Black Zetsu and they are always suspicious of outsiders. Every time he was there, he was being followed by ninjas everywhere until he left, so it wasn't pleasant.

But now, he is targeting someone wanted by them and will go to Kiri again. It's because he is very curious about their swordsmanship as Kiri has a very famous group of swordsmen that he wants to at least see and even better if he can see their skills.

So while Kiri isn't really a nice place to visit, it's not to the point where he'll never go there at all, not when he can get a lot of money from hunting a rather easy prey.

Zoro's prey is an S-Rank missing nin, so he is not weak. But the price for his head is higher than most S-Ranks and it's too high for his skill level. This guy just has a really high bounty not because of his threat level but because of his crime level.

He was actually a rapist and one of his victims was the Water Daimyo's relative. So the Water Daimyo puts a very high bounty for his head and prefers him being captured alive so they can punish him themselves.

The difficult part here is capturing the criminal alive. It's harder to defeat a strong ninja without killing rather than just go straight for a kill from the beginning because then he needs to hold back to not kill his target.

Though thankfully they only need this criminal to be alive. They don't say he needs to be captured in good condition. So Zoro beats him up real good when he fights the target.

At his level, Zoro can control whether he will use his swords to cut something or not. So he controls his sword attacks to not cut the target's body at all, making it feel like he uses blunt weapons instead of sharp swords.

Because of that, the target's body doesn't have any cut wounds at all. But now he is full of bruises caused by Zoro's "blunt" sword attacks.

Of course, the target is getting defeated easily by Zoro. He isn't really strong for an S-Rank ninja actually. But he is very tricky because he specializes in hiding, infiltrating, and escaping which are the reasons he is labeled as an S-Rank.

Too bad for him, all those skills are useless against Zoro's Observation Haki that keeps getting better every single day. Zoro can detect him easily even if he uses his best skill, so Zoro can defeat him quite easily because his fighting skills are not worthy of being an S-Rank nin.

Now Zoro is on his way to Kirigakure with the tied up criminal that has a broken body. The bones on his limbs are broken, so he can't escape or even use jutsu to break free.

When Zoro finally arrives in Kiri, the ninja officers there are very impressed by his catch. It's because the village has been hunting this guy for a while but he kept slipping out of their grasps because he is very good at hiding and escaping.

So they are very impressed at how a bounty hunter manages to catch someone they failed to catch even after they send many skillful ninjas.

After receiving his reward, Zoro finds an inn to stay for the night. As he has thought, there are some ninjas following him again, just like his previous visits to Kiri.

But he ignores them and acts oblivious. He just keeps track of them to make sure he can respond anytime they try to do something funny.

*****

Zoro has been using his Observation Haki so much since he learned it. He uses it every day, every time, because he is in a world of shinobi where people might suddenly appear out of nowhere and attack him.

So he always makes sure to keep his Observation Haki active all the time. The result is incredible. Now he feels like his Observation Haki is a passive skill that will keep detecting anything around him 24/7.

Though in its passive state, his Observation Haki range is not really wide, only around 50 meters around him. It can also only detect presence faintly unlike how he can feel them very clearly when he uses Observation Haki actively.

But it's already good for daily use because he can already sense the people around him and those who are hostile toward him. It's good as long as he can sense any attacks directed at him, especially sneak attacks.

The best thing about his Observation Haki is that it can detect attacks even when he sleeps. Thanks to that, he isn't worried too much even when he sleeps in dangerous places.

He has been attacked at his sleep a few times since some criminal organizations put bounties on his head, but he always sensed their attacks and avoided being killed. It really feels like a very strong 6th sense now.

Other than training his senses and skills, Zoro also trains his poison resistances. A lot of ninjas use poisons to kill their enemies and Zoro almost died because of them a few times.

So he decided to raise his resistance to many types of poisons by ingesting a lot of them starting from very low dosages and he keeps increasing their dosages slowly.

Thanks to his strong physique that has a great metabolism, he can adapt to them quite quickly. But there are so many types of poison that he will need years to gain immunity to a lot of them, so he also buys a lot of antidotes.

His poison resistance training might not work on every type of poison, but they can at least help him stay alive longer so he will have a longer time to find the antidotes.

Torao actually can use Medical Jutsu now. That cat has been assigned by the God that sent them here to be his assistant, so Torao has been granted some support skills including Medical Jutsu.

His Medical Jutsu can cure poisons too, but it can't be used to remove poisons that are too strong, so Zoro still needs to be careful and raise his poison resistance.

*****

Tonight, Zoro sleeps in a cheap inn that doesn't even have a bathroom. It's because the inn is right beside the public bath. So the guests are using the public bath to clean themselves.

While staying in his room, Zoro can sense a ninja hides on the ceiling. It's one of the ninjas that has been following him since he got his reward.

Zoro ignores the ninja to fool Kirigakure. If they know he can sense the ninjas they send to stalk him, they will be very wary of him and might try to kill him with all they got.

Kirigakure is still known as the Bloody Mist now, so this village is the most dangerous among all hidden villages in Zoro's opinion and he needs to always be careful here.

Though he also never lets his guard down anywhere he is because he never knows when dangers might come. Especially when he is known to not have any country backing him.

Well, even if he is backed by a country, the hidden villages won't hesitate to kill him if they see him as an enemy. The countries are always at odds with each other, after all.

Like how even if he is protected by the Land of Iron, they'll still choose to kill him even if it means being the enemy of the Land of Iron. It's because they all know that a country won't start a war just because of a single bounty hunter.

Anyway, nothing happens that night. The ninjas that stalk him don't do anything even after 4 days of his stay in Kirigakure.

Zoro stays for 4 days to gather information about the 7 Swordsmen of Mist. He sends Torao who can move through the shadows and is an actual cat to do it as usual while he goes around the village to distract the ninjas.

It will be suspicious if he just walks around like a tourist for 4 days. So he uses his sword maintenance as an excuse. He goes to a swordsmith for it. The maintenance needs 3 days, so with the 1st day, he will stay here for 4 days.

Though, of course, the swords he gives to the swordsmith are not the real Enma, Sandai Kitetsu, and Wado Ichimonji. He gives the replicas he made a few months ago for training.

Their qualities are quite good and they are sturdy. But they can't handle his power as well as his 3 "Meito". So they have quite a number of broken edges and dents, making the maintenance service look normal.

Then as Zoro thought, Kiri is checking the swords he left in the swordsmith. He already knew they would do this when the swordsmith said the service would need 3 days.

Even if he asks for the maintenance of 3 swords, it still shouldn't take much time. The swordsmith made an excuse by saying that there was a long queue before him.

He knows it was a lie because the swordsmith looked free enough before he came. So the 3 days of maintenance is the time they need to investigate his swords to see if they have special traits like Kiri's swords that are used by their 7 Swordsmen.

Too bad for them, the swords are not Zoro's main swords but his training swords of average quality. So no matter what they do, Zoro won't really care.

But nothing bad happens to those swords when Zoro picks them up. They are also being repaired properly. Maybe because they are just normal average swords, so Kirigakure lost interest in them.

Well, it doesn't really matter to Zoro anyway because his purpose with those swords is only to give him time to stay longer in this village. Now that he's done, he leaves the village to continue his bounty hunting.

Though it seems he can't do it immediately because some pesky bugs are following him.

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Chapter 85. More Enemies

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