Another Walk Followed By Brief Conflict and Return

At least it got easier.

At the absolute very least, the continuous walking made continually walking easier. Even if it was somewhat stupid, it was necessary. And it also definitely served as a motivation to get faster, because it was such a supermassive pain in the legs to take so long walking from place to place. Teleportation would not necessarily be an awful investment either, but he only had so much room in his brain for cool tricks, and learning to appear miles away was definitely harder than running and running and getting progressively faster with training.

But the walking was brought on by a quest, and the quest was initiated as soon as Roku reached a reasonable sized chunk of civilization; find someone with a lot of money and supplies, and then proceed to rob or kill them to take their things. Very simple.

Roku had located a man, and that man had a business. He was not a good person; he had occasionally hit his wife until she left rather recently, and he never had any children. Although he may have possessed some love in his soul at some point, all that Roku could see after a month of stalking was a hardness, a bitter hatred to the world formed out of spite and unsuccessfulness in the more fulfilling aspects of life. It was better to hate the world because it was an awful place, or so were the boy's thoughts on the matter, but he had been through enough to understand such a thing. This man, he appeared to only know hatred from failure, jaded by constantly failing. It could be no person's fault but his own, of course, as anyone can pull success from the jaws of the void if they simply make it happen. One must simply reach in and take it, a task this man seemed ill-equipped to do. His life was plain and rather distasteful, comprised chiefly of working, drinking, yelling, and being yelled at. Pointless unpleasantness permeated every bit of his daily routine, and although it was clear there must have been opportunities to escape this lifestyle, it was where he had landed. Observing people like this could turn very sad if one were to be reflective as well as compassionate, but Roku was only one of those things.

But the man had a business, and what Roku did have was ambition.

It was a rather large one, as a matter of fact, supplying general necessities, comforts, and materials for rather reasonable prices. If the man had any care for anything in the world, it was money or his stores. It was hard to tell which, exactly, as the man only ever smiled when he unlocked the doors, took from the till, or counted his earnings; Roku watched his entire life for approximately twenty-eight days before he started walking.

Every two weeks on the dot, the man traveled a route to several different settlements relatively near the Land of Iron; his chief reason for being so successful was his dedication to making money because it was the only thing he was any good at, and that was exactly why he would run his wares from a wagon on a four day journey. He made a rather pretty penny from dropping by only a couple places to restock his stores and leave once more; even more to his liking, the communities were so small that the journey was actually rather cheap, and he was a very thrifty man indeed.

Actually, that had been why his wife had left him.

Roku would not go to the first community, as it worried him to go where the people seemed overly vigilant, nor would he go to the second, which he had already been through once. He had found a rather nice vest there, a nice warm garment that fit under his kimono rather nicely and helped to keep his temperature stable during the cold. The biggest problem was that it still smelled like alcohol and homelessness... He had taken it from a drunkard who was virtually comatose, but if nobody was going to pick him up from the side of the road, then he was probably going to die alone soon and better the vest went to some use. Digressions aside, the only sound way he could make his blossoming scheme work was to find the man and his goods in the middle of their journey, when there were still supplies to sell as well as ryo to steal. It would only take Roku a day and a half to reach the midway point, trekking through the terrain as a covered wagon could not and cutting out a bit of sleep each night. That would leave him approximately nine hours to rest, prepare, and stalk his target to properly deal with the situation.

So he started walking, and he kept walking. All the time and energy he could have put int training, into learning new jutsu, into almost anything that was not traveling, he reflected on. Maybe compassion was not his strong suit, but he was rather reflective indeed, and it led to certain bursts of insight on occasion. The fire he had lit in his belly still existed, if muted; just because the furnace was turned down, there was no reason to stop expecting any heat at all. That's what this was for, after all. Strength, experience, money.

It all still just meant power, and power was all that meant anything.

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