“Ha ha! Quite the sorry state, hm?” Karyu murmured, looking at himself and his comrades tied up around him. Then he looked up at Sasuke, before shifting his gaze to Iou. At the sight of Iou with bandages wound around his stomach, Karyu let out a contemptuous laugh.
Iou flushed red with anger at this challenge. “I thought I told you to kill him! So why is he locked up in here?!” Iou complained to Sasuke.
Sasuke looked down on Karyu. “You said you were tossed aside. What did you mean?”
The second things aren’t convenient for you, you toss us aside. How do you have any right to say anything to anyone? In the middle of the fight, Karyu had spat this at Iou. But Sasuke didn’t know the details behind this.
“What’s the point of asking about that?!” Iou cried. “It doesn’t change the fact that they’re evil!”
“If you’re going to yell, go outside. I can’t make any decisions until I know everything.” Sasuke’s words made Iou swallow hard.
“Can’t you just look with the sharingan?” Karyu teased, but Sasuke simply stared silently at him until he guffawed and looked away. “My Lava Style is a kekkei genkai. Although in Kumogakure, shinobi who use the same Lava Style as I do are apparently given important posts, I was born into a small country village. So every time a fight broke out with an outsider, our clan was made to stand at the very front lines. They said that it was only natural to contribute to the village, given that we had special powers. Because of that, everyone died young.”
Karyu slowly told the tale of his own past.
“I knew I’d be killed by the village one day too, so I left. The village sent ninja after me to kill me. I fled desperately, but my back was pushed up against the wall; I couldn’t run anymore. And then, the Bright Lightning Group took me in.”
That was back when they were called chivalrous thieves.
“The head of Bright Lightning Group had a kekkei genkai he was persecuted for, too, just like me. Which was exactly why he wanted to be an ally to the weak. He crushed people doing evil things, and gave the money he got from them to the poor. … like to this village, hm?”
Iou pressed his lips together tightly.
“We were treated almost like heroes. Whenever we showed ourselves, the people of the villages welcomed us. They’d give us food and lodging. Good times.”
So they had built good relationships at the time. Then how did this tragedy come about?
“Seeing how we didn’t belong to any village and yet we wielded power, ninja villages tried to use that,” Karyu continued. “They had us crush the source of capital for hostile ninja villages. It was like that then, too. During the era of the previous Mizukage, Kirigakure offered us work. They asked us to go attack the senior officials of a land that was squeezing money from the weak.”
This was the era when Kirigakure was known as the Village of Bloody Mist. The face of Momochi Zabuza as they faced off on a mission with Team 7 popped up in the back of Sasuke’s mind. He had been a man with terrible bloodlust.
“For us, Kirigakure was a valued client. However, when we attacked the group of officials they told us to, ninja from Kirigakure appeared and surrounded us, of all things. The ninja of Kirigakure, gallantly arriving to save the officials in a tight spot! So, well, Kirigakure used us to curry favor with the officials.”
Karyu let out a sigh, like he was cursing their fate.
“We knew too much. They dealt with us efficiently; they also had the ulterior motive of trying to build a channel with the officials. They had lined up their best and brightest. We lost comrades, but we just barely managed to escape with our lives, thanks to the chief’s Lava techniques. We arrived here in the village of Takeno. We said, please let us rest here, just for a little while. We had no intention of causing any trouble for the village; we planned to leave soon. The answer came back quickly enough: ‘Go somewhere else.’”
Sasuke could feel the coldness of those words. It was more than enough to make a person despair.
“I-if we had hidden you, they might’ve hurt us too!” Iou protested. “And to begin with, it’s mighty nervy of you to take on such a big shot attitude, when all you were doing was handing out money you took from someone else!”
“Such memories …” Karyu replied. “Those are the very words you said to me when I pleaded with you, with my comrade in my arms on death’s doorstep, to at least let him stay there, just for a very short while! The door to the village was very firmly closed, and we walked through the bamboo grove to another village. My comrade died along the way, you know. At every village, all the villages, the answer was the same. You wouldn’t even give us a cup of water!”
There was hatred in Karyu’s eyes. Iou trembled at the light in them.
“The chief disbanded Bright Lightning, and everyone fled their own separate ways. It wasn’t as though we had any dreams or hope. Fearing our Kiri pursuers, we lived like rats for who knows how many years … And then I heard about you attacking the summit of the five Kages, Sasuke.”
Karyu narrowed his eyes, as if remembering that time.
“I was so moved at the way you lived as you pleased, not bending before the fate of the kekkei genkai. I wanted to be like you. So I got some new comrades together, and formed the Dark Thunder group. Our objective … revenge!”
Sasuke remained silent.
“At first, there were only a few of us, but after the Fourth Great War, we gradually grew in number. With fewer battles, ninja were out of work, and they left their villages to join up with us. And now that we have plentiful strength … we’re carrying out our vengeance. On the villages that rejected us!”
“So that gives you an excuse to kill everyone?!” Iou shouted. “Some people have nothing to do with any of this, you know?! Why would you do something so awful?”
“You all were living so happily, stupid faces out in the sun, not feeling any kind of pain … that alone was annoying! So we crushed all of you!” A fierce malice bled onto Karyu’s face. “Getting revenge was fun. The way your daughter wept and begged for her life, it was magnificent!”
“Y-you monsteeeeeeeeerrr! I’ll kill you!” Iou started to fly at Karyu, and Nowaki hurried to stop him.
“Was there no other way?” Nowaki asked.
Karyu dropped his eyes. “I wouldn’t have been able to stand it any other way,” he replied.
Sasuke watched over all of this with a bitter taste in his mouth. It was almost like he was looking at his old self.
Nowaki returned the agitated Iou to his home, rather forcefully. The wall of Iou’s house was destroyed, and the building was smashed here and there in other ways, but there was a roof and a bed. Iou had a place to rest.
Sasuke left the shed, and went on his own into the bamboo grove, where he spotted a rock and sat down. He pulled out a piece of the paper he carried for communication, and wrote a concise description of the events in Takeno, before entrusting it to the hawk he called with his mind, and sending the bird toward Konoha.
How to deal with Dark Thunder wasn’t a problem Sasuke could resolve on his own. He wanted to seek the Hokage Kakashi’s judgment. Sasuke had originally been working to investigate the large number of shinobi who had disappeared, but he couldn’t very well leave Takeno before he got a response from Konoha.
Sasuke looked up at the sky. A hazy moon hung beyond the bamboo leaves.
The chain of hatred that wrapped again and again around the pillar of vengeance. Wasn’t there a way to save people from it?
“… It’s not easy.” The words slipped out of his mouth. And then he sighed, and went back to keep watch over the Dark Thunder group, to at least prevent any further tragedy.