[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/UVzznOI.jpg[/img] [b][color=#F1A7FE]Ran Shigetsu[/color][/b] [i][color=#F1A7FE]"You want justice? There is no justice. There is only what justice you make."[/color][/i][/center] In another part of the forest and along a long forgotten dirt road there was a small village that (in more prosperous times) had made its trade selling growing and selling daikon along what was known (in more prosperous times) as the Vegetable Road. The Vegetable Road was a stretch of highly fertile land that in ancient times had attracted farmers and traders, each setting up villages around a particular product and bartering with each other and later the rest of Konoha. Though never as wealthy as the more centralized trading capitals, the villages of the Vegetable Road were, nonetheless, well-to-do in the way that successful agrarian villages sometimes are. Each village, for example, could afford their own decorated shrine and well support their priests and nuns who would, kindly, pray to whatever kami would guarantee a good harvest. The carrot village prayed to the carrot kami, the buckwheat village prayed to the buckwheat kami, and the daikon village, with its two giant stone daikon carrying spears at its entrance, worshiped the daikon kami. The people of the daikon village were simple, but not without their own language and character. It was common to hear an old daikoner declare "this daikon is my child" when tasting a particularly good daikon-based dish or to exclaim "what is this spy doing in my ramen" whenever they might come across a bit of cabbage, for the daikon and cabbage villages had been rivals for generations. Within the daikon village, this amounted to daikoners sometimes planting cabbage in their fellows' food as a practical joke, declaring them a spy for the cabbagers, but once a season the two villages would come together and compete against one another in the "Vegetable Games", followed by a two day holiday and festival. Brawls were few, but anyone caught fighting would be dropped in an enormous vegetable soup in the middle of the village. The village came to an abrupt end on a night when the village chief, the daikon priest, and their local constable were sitting around a table eating grilled daikon with mushrooms and tofu, daikon clams and potato hotpot, and daikon and mackerel. Each sipped their tall mug of daikon beer and discussed the strange news of shinobi in the local area and even the Daimyo's men occupying the taro village. It was a darker and quieter night than was customary for the summer season and a heavy atmosphere permeated the whole village. Even the cicada would not sing. "What if the Daimyo's men come here", demanded the constable, who had not yet touched his food and nursed his daikon beer anemically. He was younger than the others, only just entering middle age and had celebrated the occasion by growing a mustache and wearing a hat to hide the evidence of the war he was losing with his hairline. No one mentioned his hat. "Then we will have to afford them the courtesy of the daikon. We aren't cabbagers", said the village chief, a man with a much more prestigious mustache, long and silvery and reaching his neck. He had the benefit of having a very hairy mother and his head was a garden of silver fluff, which he had to tame in a knot. It made the constable very uncomfortable, and he never met the chief eye to eye, instead drifting his gaze a few inches higher accidentally. "And if they want our crops", the constable retorted, "Will we let them take them? I don't have the manpower to resist samurai." "Why would they take our crops? We aren't at war", the chief replied, sipping his beer furrowing his brow, but the constable did not seem convinced. He raised an eyebrow and pointed a finger in the air to underscore his next point. "You forget. There are shinobi on the move as well. It could be Leaf business." "Well...", sighed the chief, "It could be. What do you think, Kannushi?" Both men turned to the priest who had been silent up until that point. He stroked his long white beard, scratched his bald head, looked into his beer glass, and then stated with studied authority, "There was a maggot on the offerings this morning." Both the constable and the chief looked intently on the priest and then seemed to nod in unison. A few seconds later, the constable his head slightly towards the priest, as if to ask for permission to speak again, frowned, and then said, "I am only suggesting that we-" But whatever his suggestion was was interrupted by a loud scream from outside. The constable was the first to respond, grabbing the club from his belt and dashing out and looking around madly for whatever the trouble was. His eyes fell on a giant shadow looming in the night getting closer and closer. The constable did not hear a second scream and in a moment, there weren't any screams at all. And that was the end of the village, its people, and the Vegetable Road. The Juubi's rampage had wiped out everyone and the ground had been blackened and seethed with a virulent hatred that most animals and even insects avoided instinctively. Nothing but twisted pallid trees and the most stubborn and hardiest of fungus grew here now. The daikon village was no more, forgotten in times, a footnote in a record book. Even the daikon temple, the pride of the village, was empty. There were no maggots. There were no insects. There were no bodies- Except one. Haggard and dirty, what could have been a young woman sat leaning against the corner of the room. She wore a filthy kimono that was more rags than silk. It could have been beautiful at one time but so ripped and ruined stained and muddy was it that whatever it may have been before, it was ugly now. The young woman herself breathed slowly and intentionally, as if counting the seconds of each breath. Every exhale, a quiet growl. She was battered and bruised with blue on her cheek and bloodstains on her sleeves, on her side, mixing with mud to form a wholly unpleasant and foreboding color. Her matted hair stuck to her face and she wiped it out of her wild eyes, which darted, on occasion to the window as if asking "was that a falling leaf or something... else?" In fact, the only things about her that weren't despoiled were her teeth, which were brilliantly white and clean, and the massive sword that was leaning against the wall next to her. How she had gotten the giant thing there was a mystery, but whenever she found her eyes darting to the window, she seemed to instinctively put her hand on its blade, as if checking to see it was still there. Then, she'd look around the room and inspect the near invisible wires stretched taught everywhere. She'd check each one in a sort of pattern... but she couldn't seem to focus for long and her eyes would glaze over in exhaustion. The daikon village had not existed for a long time.