NABC bandits
bandits
bandits
We didn't travel as fast as we could unlike if we were on a mission and time was of the essence but rather walked casually along the road.
"I never could understand why anyone would choose to become a bandit." Karin complained after I killed those bandits who ambushed us.
"There are many reasons, poverty, insanity, freedom, pressganging, the other villages shadow warfare. The matter is not one that can easily be dealt with even for the five great shinobi villages." I said honestly.
"I still think it's wrong." she said with a huff.
"I am not disagreeing with you, bandits are detestable indeed. I am merely explaining why one might take that path despite that fact and the danger it holds." I said and she nodded.
"What about that time when you all cleared out the bandits and rogue shinobi shortly after Sensei became Hokage?" she asked curiously.
"We need him alive to find out where the group has their lair." I said cooling her wrath a bit with logic.
"You'll get nothing from me!" the bandit spat defiantly.
His defiance died quickly however once I went to work on him to extract information. Karin and I were both VERY well acquainted with the human body and knew exactly what buttons we could push to bring the maximum amount of agony without killing the subject. In this case I sent yin chakra into his brain, specifically the part the processes pain and gave it a little tickle. The bandit was singing like a canary in a mere five minutes of that treatment. Numbers, strength, location and even patrol times all fell in our lap and I created two shadow clones that went off to settle this matter.-
There was a whole celebration in the village when my clones came back with the head of the leader who was at least a chunin level shinobi as well as all the loot and food that the bandits had. It came as little surprise that the bandits had been stockpiling the stuff even if they didn't need more. While the village celebrated Karin and I rented a room at the local inn and turned in for the night. The next morning we ate some jerky for breakfast before hitting the road again.-
We weren't bothered by any rogue nin or bandits for the entire day and merely enjoyed each others company as we walked. When we reached the border the patrols there verified our stories before letting us through to the land of grass. The forest thinned out for vast swathes of field land that the land was named for. The road was probably the only part not covered in thick grass and only then because it was trampled down from the regular travelers that went over it. The land of grass bordered both the land of noodles and the land of herbs with the land of hotsprings being on the other side of the land of noodles.-
Karins vacation idea was to basically take our time traveling through the land of fire, then grass, then noodles and finally hotsprings before making a return trip using a different route. All in all at our current pace it would take us about four months to eventually return to Konoha. This wasn't an unreasonable amount of time as the world was more or less at peace at the moment. There were still the small skirmishes and shadow battles between villages but that was status quo and not any indicator of an approaching war.