I considered what it would be like to be trapped like this in the dark for days, and suppressed a shudder. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Just…remember that, if things are ever the other way around.”
She closed her eyes in concentration, and vanished along with the last of the light. A moment later the training ground where I’d been practicing swam into view before me.
“Let’s see now,” she said casually. “If this is a time loop I can do just about anything without having to worry about getting caught. So whose blood should I use to call home?”
10. Corruption
“What the fuck is your problem, kid?” My supervisor growled at me. “You think the boss is going to come up here and explain the big picture to you just cause your little head’s all confused? Grow up! If she wanted you to know she would have told you.”
Kogura was the class two limited in charge of corruption operations in Fire Country, not that you could tell by looking at him. With his bad suit and oily expression he could easily have passed for a petty yakuza boss, aside from the red slashes on his cheeks that identified him as a demon. But he was also my immediate supervisor, so I gritted my teeth and tried not to punch the little shit. My inherited reflexes kept telling me he was a half-trained brawler I could trash without breaking a sweat, but I knew he was way more powerful than I was.
Were those reflexes wrong, or was my mortal self really strong enough to take down a mid-level demon? Yet another thing I should have known, but didn’t.
“But sir, this time loop has completely screwed up the system’s Sharingan Invocation program,” I protested. “It made me from her pre-loop data, but since then she’s gone from an insecure genin to some totally badass super-ninja. How am I supposed to absorb her when she’s stronger than I am?”
He rolled his eyes. “Kid, no one in this world is that hard to corrupt. Ever since the gods pulled out the whole place has been shifting over to our side, and these days the mortals are practically born damned. It’s not like those high-tech paradise worlds I used to work in, where everything’s all puppies and unicorns and a pretty goddess shows up in person to grant wishes every time some mortal is feeling down. Just offer her some vengeance, or seduce her, or make her think she needs the power to protect someone. For that matter, you could quite pussy-footing around and torture her until she gives in.”
“She doesn’t deserve it,” I said quietly.
He paused in his rant to stare at me. “She’s a ninja,” he said. “They all deserve it.”
Wordlessly, I called up my mortal counterpart’s profile. The real one, as of now, instead of the truncated version of her pre-loop life. A normal human profile looks like a twelve-dimensional explosion of spikes and jagged edges, mostly grey with a few darker or lighter areas. A typical ninja would be especially spiky and dark, with only a few regions of grey or off-white.
Sakura still had plenty of sharp points and jagged edges, but her pattern was shot through with smooth curves of clean, white crystal, like a swan struggling to emerge from a tar pit. Kogura studied it for a moment, and whistled.
“No wonder the big shots want this one,” he said thoughtfully. “But this op is more likely to end up a big clusterfuck than a fancy victory, and…hmm. Yeah, this is a dangerous one. Wait, have we had this conversation before?”
He gave me a sharp look, but fortunately the fact that I hadn’t thought of that yet made my startled look genuine enough to pass muster. “No, sir,” I protested. “That would be gaming the system.”
He nodded. “Right, and I’ll kick your ass if I catch you at it. Ok, I’ll tell you this much. If this girl loops long enough she’s got a shot at ascending, and if the other side gets a fresh goddess trainee out of this world in the state it’s in now the Daimakaicho’s going to have us all in the Pit for the rest of eternity. So I’m ordering you to do whatever it takes to throw her off track. Get her some enemies, drive her nuts, kill yourself, whatever. If you two end up in Hell without merging I’ll take you on as a trainee myself, assuming the big shots don’t have other plans for you. I hope I don’t have to explain what happens if she gets light enough to drag you up to Heaven instead?”
I swallowed nervously. “There’s no place in the realm of the Bright Kami for the likes of me, but they can’t separate us because we share the same soul. So they’ll burn out every part of me that can even imagine violence or justice or passion, and call it a cure. I’ll be lucky if I’ve got enough brains left to use a spoon.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Now, I don’t know how you’re going to do any of that while you’re stuck in a time loop, but you’ll just have to use some creativity.”
“Couldn’t we just end the loop?” I asked curiously. “Or at least find out what it’s for, since it’s way too big to be anything secret? Time manipulation is supposed to be really hard, so there must be some serious power behind that thing.”
“I already checked. It isn’t ours, kid.”
“Oh, great.” I hung my head. “So not only do I have to deal with my creation being bugged, but I’m living in the middle of a major enemy operation?”
“Sucks to be you, kid,” Kogura replied with a chuckle. “And you’re out of time. Good luck.”
The last trickle of blood ran out of the heart I held in my left hand, and it stopped beating just as Kogura vanished. I dropped the organ onto Sasuke’s cooling body with a sigh, and absently licked the blood off of my hand.
“Alright, so I’m in a bad spot,” I told myself. “I’ll cope. At least now I’ve got more options than just trying to win a mental battle with someone who’s better at it than I am.”
I suppressed a shiver at the memory of my last attempt at that. Demons can be very sensual creatures, but we’re usually good at turning that to our advantage. My mortal aspect had blown through my defenses with a single kiss, and her follow-up had reduced me to a quivering puddle of surrender in seconds. She could have had me if she’d pressed the advantage. Instead she’d stopped to investigate, and tried to help me, and I’d turned the tables on her.
For now.
I’d seen enough to know that she might find a way to escape my trap eventually, but that wasn’t what scared me. Demons are made to fight, to endure pain and loss and hardship, to switch from hunter to hunted and back again in the ebb and flow of the eternal battle. The mortal Sakura could chain me in her mindscape and torture me for a century, and I’d still be ready to break free and trap her again at the first opportunity.
No, what frightened me was the little voice in the back of my head that insisted I was being an idiot. That I didn’t have to solve this alone. That all I had to do was let her go, let her help me, cooperate with my other self instead of fighting, and everything would work out.
Demons aren’t made to trust. It shouldn’t be possible. But some part of me trusted my mortal self. I was terrified that if she ever had me at her mercy again she’d somehow convince me to give in, and let her turn me into everything I hated.
“Get a hold of yourself, girl,” I muttered. “It could take decades for her to get free, and if you can’t turn her by then you deserve to get dragged up to Heaven and brain-burned. Now, what could I do that would convince her to stop fighting me? Or at least keep her from turning into a fucking Light-sider? She wants companionship, power and an end to the loops just like I do, but her priorities are different.”