Bad Hair Day

Enter the Claws of Grima.

Not to be confused with the Jaws of Grima, or many other sub branches of this truly heinous organization that Kohei was intending to tangle with. They tended towards rather severe rivalries despite some obscene differences in power, but never let it be said that bravado counted for nothing.

Kohei had finally learned an actual offensive jutsu, and was experimenting with another, but very similar jutsu. Hair Needle Senbon, basically. The name was self evident, but the quantity was not. Perhaps because there was no need to create the material shaped into offensive needle points, it was possible to create more needles and launch them with the same amount of chakra, compared to manipulating water elements into liquid stabby things. Yeh. A lot more. As in ten times the amount. Apparently, material costs were pretty significant in the world of ninjas.

Now, Kohei was stealthily creeping towards the outside of the dingy building which appeared to be related to the Jaw- sorry, Claws of Grima. A couple of brutal looking thugs were standing outside, milling around aimlessly, but still looking pretty threatening. If they caught anyone, that is. A normal human would have to walk into their grasps, as these guys had big arms and huge beer guts. Evidently, they skipped cardio day, and probably their leg days as well.

He came to a stop outside the clearing that surrounded the entrance, crouching behind a tree with a bit of undergrowth around it. He thought he had nudged the bushes slightly, but the two guards on watch didn’t seem to notice. Whew. He was about to straighten out, but then he felt something pushing against his neck.

“Don’t move, and keep quiet. I don’t want those thugs stealing my kill. Claw bastards.”

Apparently, whoever was threatening Kohei had a grudge, maybe he was from the Jaws of Grima. Interesting.

Kohei held still, as the disembodied voice walked closer, and stopped at Kohei’s side, crouching to be out of the sight of the guards. Unfortunately, Kohei had a decent idea of how to perform the jutsu he was intending to work on, and there was nothing like a trial by fire to provide motivation. As the assailant babbled on and on about how the Claws of Grima were useless human scum, and his own sub-organization was the cream of the crop, Kohei slowly concentrated his chakra around his hair.

The small spray of needles that erupted from the side of his head (the jutsu DID cover 180 degrees after all, centered on the direction the user faced) silenced his opponent mid speech, his long rant about incompetent leadership cut short with a couple of painful sounding “squish” sound effect and a slightly drawn out gurgle. Useful.

Now Kohei just needed to get that to work behind him as well, but sadly he did not have eyes in the back of his head. Given how bad he was at aiming for trash cans, there was a decent chance that he was going to miss even with 500 odd missiles flying in every direction behind him. So that would wait for a different day.

He looked closely at the assailant. A bit of blood had splattered, but for the most part, the clothing looked clean, as the needles had plugged the holes, and Kohei had aimed for the face anyway. The mask covering the lower face - the nose and mouth mostly, was clean. Which was good.

Checking back to make sure the guards had not noticed anything untoward - they hadn’t - Kohei pulled the body deeper into the thicket. He had an idea to get inside that abandoned building. Little did he know how crazy his adventure might become this day.

The first thing he did was strip.

Don’t get the wrong idea, you pervs.

It was for practical reasons. His dead opponent had clothing in much better shape, and Kohei’s own were getting kind of raggedy. The more important reason, however, is that this fellow was apparently a part of the Jaws of Grima, here to contact the Claws of Grima. Why, was not said.

Kohei switched his outerwear with the dead body. Good thing it didn’t smell. He had a way in now, with that body, so that there would be no suspicions aroused. Hell, he might get in good with those two guards. His identity would be harder to uncover since his opponent was a similar build, and the mask being worn around allies implied that the many organizations of Grima were rather secretive about their actual identities.

Carefully, after switching outer layers of clothing, Kohei checked his pockets everywhere. He looked very similar to the other fellow he had killed off. He found a letter.

He opened the letter. It was not like he was in the chuunin exams or something yanno. Besides, it was not sealed to begin with. Good for him.

He read through the letter. Apparently, this person he had killed was a messenger between the Jaws of Grima and the Claws of Grima, as indicated by the initial paragraph. Apparently, the Jaw of Grima were supposed to reinforce the Claws of Grima on some mission to overthrow a village or something. Honestly, he didn’t care much, he just wanted to have an idea of what he was dealing with here. He knew enough.

He closed back up the letter, and put it back into the same pocket. He picked up the body with a bit of trouble, slinging it over his shoulder.

He approached the guards.

“What’s the password?” the larger of the two grunted.

Kohei thought for a second, the dead body dangling off of one shoulder attracting their attention. He looked the part, they weren’t questioning that at least.

He decided to take a gambit. “Look, every damn time I come here, the password is different, you know how those dumb bureaucrats are, they don’t know what it's like in the field. I think killing a spy skulking around your base should say enough about where MY loyalties lie. Not that I have time to bury the body. I have an urgent message to deliver to your superiors, and I can’t be wasting time with trivialities. Here, you two can claim credit for the body instead. I killed him just over there.” He waved the letter he had found, dumped the body, and waved in the general direction that he had killed his assailant in.

Apparently, these thugs were none too bright.

“Okey.”

They waved him in, and then began running off, presumably to bury the body or show their superior or something. Either way, Kohei now had free entrance into the base.

The hallways were dimly lit. As he walked, Kohei circulated chakra through his hair, hardening and shaping them into needles, making the points sharp. However, he did not launch them. He only had hundreds of thousands of hairs on his head, or something like that.

As it turned out, variations of his earlier conversation were enough to get him into the antechamber of the command center. Explaining his intended mission was enough to get him past a bored secretary. Evidently, skulkers were killed outside the base on a regular basis, she didn’t even blink.

He soon found himself within the command center itself, told that the recipient of the letter would be meeting him shortly, since apparently even the secretary had no clearance to see this letter. However, this meant that Kohei had some time to gather information. He knew the Claws of Grima had been responsible for getting him labelled as a missing ninja, they were the power behind the political force that had outlawed him. However, he did not know what their later goals were, and now that he was here, he decided to see what he could learn about, so he could wreck their plans.

Finding some confidential files, he began flipping through them quickly.

So, the Claws of Grima were behind the various attempts to unseat the ninjas of Tengakure. Ok. It seemed, from their communications files, that there were many sister organization to the Claws of Grima. Jaws of Grima he knew of. But, Paws of Grima? Macaws of Grima? Laws of Grima? Each seemed to have a different purpose - the Laws of Grima appearing to be the ones in command of all the other subdivisions, Macaws of Grima seemed to either be an acronym or a bird watching division. The overarching goal was to mount rebellions in many ninja villages, so they could take over as many places as possible, and eventually the entire world! Good golly, his life of small time crime might be over! Kohei couldn’t let this slide! And besides, he felt they deserved some cold revenge. After all, it was their fault he could not hold a regular job, nobody wanted to employ a criminal nowadays.

He was interrupted by a hand falling on his shoulder. He flinched away, just in time to be grazed by a large fist crashing into the wall behind him. Eep!

A large dude who looked almost as wide as his six and a half feet of height loomed over Kohei.

“You’re a spy, aren’t you.”

Crap.

He was found out.

Kohei didn’t have to look to pull out a kunai, holding the other man’s gaze with his own as he spoke. “I have a message for you.”

The other man, a half giant more likely, quirked his eyebrow. Almost at the same time as Kohei’s knife slid between his target’s ribs. Evidently, the other had not seen this coming, literally and figuratively. Kohei leaned forward and jumped, combining a headbutt with a practice shot of the Hair Needle Senbon, the needles being formed as he rocketed forwards. His forehead would collide with the front of the goon’s face, eliciting a crack from the jaw and the nose alike, the needles being released briefly after, incapacitating if not killing the dude.

As the opponent fell to the ground, dying, he bellowed in pain, loudly enough to wake the dead. Loud. Really loud. Kohei’s ears rang a bit, and he kicked the man several times, but he was already dead by the time his blows connected. Withdrawing his blade from the man’s torso, he wiped it clean, stuffing a bunch of documents into pockets inside his pilfered outfit. He almost made it to the door unhindered.

A slender man with a God-Fatherish aura about him stood in the ante-chamber, the man was flanked by two more goons with similar builds to the one Kohei had just felled.

Crap.

They also had some decent sized katanas.

Ack!

Kohei ducked as one of them tried to behead him horizontally. His chakra flared briefly, and a large number of needles sprang forth from his head into that of his opponent. He grabbed the katana from the man’s outstretched arm, and used it to stab the other charging opponent in the chest. Meanwhile, the boss was working on pulling out what seemed to be a senbon launcher. That looked dangerous. There was little cover available, so Kohei pulled the dying bodies of the two goons together in front of him and shoved them at their former leader. Flying senbon won’t stop close to five hundred odd pounds of flesh, just not enough surface area. That didn’t stop the fellow from trying, briefly, before realizing he should ask for backup.

He managed a few quick yells before Kohei tackled him from the side and silenced him, but a few yells was all it took, really. It seemed the Claws of Grima, if we were to refer to the normal people, were rather numerous, it sounded as if thousands of voices had taken up the call to arms, though that was surely an exaggeration induced by the underground setting, since the voices could bounce off of the walls.

He needed an out, and the goons were swarming up the stairs towards the boss’s greeting room.

That was when he found the secret bolthole in the antechamber, the secretary cowering in there, scared to death, almost literally. He assumed that the secretary was innocent, though he did check her over for important documents - empty handed unfortunately - and swipe the interesting stuff from the desk before scampering away. Fortunately, the bolt hole could close from both sides. It would take some time for anyone to notice the secretary behind the revolving door, out cold. As much as this seemed risky, he felt it was the better option, since if she was left outside the trap door, she would probably point them in his direction sooner.

Actually, it would have been better in some ways to bring her as a prisoner, but he might have to fight one handed, and that would be hard. Likewise, she might put up a fuss, turn out to be pretty strong, or just get in the way, and he had nothing to restrain her with. Hopefully he got a big enough lead that by the time she was found, she was not going to get him in too much trouble.

He scampered down the narrow passageway, and had to follow a series of twists and turns. Up and down. Left and right. A few places where he had to crawl on his hands and knees.

He ultimately came out after what felt like a few hundred meters or more. Apparently, this was the back wall of a larger compound. He had not gotten a good look before, but the building he first examined seemed to be part of a larger complex, the rest was just hidden behind shrubbery and significantly behind the building he first saw.This specific room was pretty small, though decently lit, it seemed empty. This was good, he could use a breather. He also wanted to practice his hair jutsu, because it seemed incomplete.

He sat down in a corner, after checking around the outside of the room, and got into a meditative position. Closing his eyes briefly, while remaining on the alert for any approaching sounds, or other suspicious noises, he began concentrating chakra in his head, pushing it slowly out into his hair. As much as he wanted to train the hair needle senbon tech earlier while fighting, it was just not that useful unless you sprayed an entire room with it. He was somewhat waiting for time to pass and the agitated Claws of Grima people to chill out, so he did not mind taking his time practicing the basics of this jutsu again.

The chakra gathered into his hair, he set about hardening every individual hair, sharpening it to the point of perfection. He did this with every hair on his head, counting up until he had 500 ready at any given time, then releasing one, and replacing it with another. This was pretty time consuming, given that he, like most people, had about a hundred thousand hairs. On the bright side, he could potentially go after any angle he wanted, assuming the jutsu allowed for it. When he had finished, the entire process thus far having consumed around ten minutes, he repeated it, wanting to be able to form hair needles at his beck and call. Bigger and better.

This was in many ways similar to the water needle training he had been working on earlier. The disadvantage of this technique being that people would probably notice hairs embedded in targets of a most unusual color, given the target’s hair was not always black. Another was that technically the ammo was limited, and the range was always centered on the user. However, the water needles were far more limited in number, and harder to form on instant notice to counter attack someone who had gotten too close for Kohei’s liking. His hair, on the other hand, should be effective unless he was shaved bald. Then he would have to artificially grow hair first.

He wanted to practice his accuracy since his throwing capabilities were, to put it politely, completely awful. Hopefully, his jutsu training would go a bit better than the last time he skinned the target of a different training dummy with his thrown weapon. He let down his hair, withdrawing all the chakra from his tenketsu and re-circulating it through his body. He took a deep breath, because the narrator thought this kind of stuff was helpful, and abruptly pushed his chakra back into his hair and his head, launching the beginnings of a volley of hair oriented spikes.

Maybe he should have bought some hair gel, just to improve the strength of his hair cells. That would be a pretty funny item to make, actually.

Each of the hair spikes was intended to land right next to the previous one, hopefully in a line that stretched across the room, in a semicircle within his vision. They were close. But not good enough. Some were above each other, which was obviously wrong, they should be on a horizontal plane. Others had noticeable gaps between consecutive hair needles - at least, he hoped those were consecutive hair needles. Otherwise his pickiness might get him in trouble.

He wound up, picked another row of hairs on his head, and tried again. Launching the hairs was not hard for him, but control was. He tried again, making a new set of lines on the wall, the hairs casting little shadows from their resting spots on the walls of this room. Well, anyone who came through later who saw the earlier bodies might think that Kohei had come through the same passage as before, as they were likely recognizable hairs. Though, when the chakra wore off, the hairs would probably fall out of the holes. Maybe people would think a senbon launcher was snuck in here or something. Eh.

For giggles, he gathered up a bunch of chakra, then launched 500 more hairs in all directions in front of him. Probably just to prove he could do it. Not perfectly, but decently enough, perhaps. He did need to stop with this hair training though, before he became bald.

(exit)

(ttl wc: 3019
claiming +15 stats and http://naruto-role-play-rpg.forumotion.com/t27042-needle-hell if possible, if not, will repost later)

Approved