__________ POV Akira__________
It was a great failure on my part...
I was, at first, unable to find any entrance to the hideout, so I stalked the wasteland near the mountain for the first day.
But then I managed to track some cultists going in and out of the hideout. I wanted to get in myself, disguise myself as one of the cultists... But it didn't go quite as I expected.
The one I tried to take out covertly was an immortal... How was I supposed to tell? They were all dressed up the same... Probably because they were going on a mission or something.
The Immortal was able to alert more people, and things escalated from there. With quite a few cultists joining in, and a different immortal also coming out to take care of things.
I wasn't expecting them all to have decent skills. I tried to run away, but I was quickly encircled and taken down.
I had no chances against two immortals, and one of them seemed to be able to control my body with a straw doll after putting a strand of my hair on it.
I should've known better... I should've listened to the Master's words and just observed from a distance...
But it's already far too late for that.
From the moment I was captured, things became a blur. I didn't have any recollection of how I ended up in that cell, all I know is that two panicked cultists entered it, and started taking out their stress on me...
And that was also when I learned that, for some reason, I couldn't die... The only apparent downside was... I was hungry. Ravenously hungry.
Now, this may have also been just because they hadn't fed me in god knows how long. But at the same time, I have starved for weeks in the past, and it was never like this...
I felt a hunger so great that I ended up cannibalizing my own tongue repeatedly. At some points, I was so crazed that I tried to bite off the faces of my torturers...
The more they tortured me, the more I felt like I was becoming less and less human. The hunger was transforming me... That was when Ken arrived.
My two torturers, who had acted all high and mighty for as long as I've known them, were crushed like ants in front of the 'Red Dot'.
The first thing I did when I regenerated my gouged-out eyes was to look at their corpses. I took a bit of enjoyment in seeing their fearful faces...
But that was about it. I passed out after realising I was safe. Finally got a break from the torture and pain. The hunger is still there, but I need rest just as much as I need food...
When I woke up, I was already tied to my Master's back, and we were going home.
That was when I first acted out...
I... Took a bite out of his shoulder. Ripped out a bit of his cloak and bit him near the neck, a place where his shoulder plates didn't extend to.
I am ashamed to even think about it now. But back then, my mind was so clouded in hunger and insanity that it simply felt like the 'right' thing to do...
After swallowing down the badly chewed-up chunk of flesh, my mind cleared up... And I realised what I had done.
I was both ashamed and scared... Scared of what I had become and what I had done to my benefactor.
But Ken didn't seem to particularly care.
His genuine response to that was. 'Oh, I guess you were hungry...'
His shoulder was also healed up before I had even finished swallowing it.
He didn't mention anything of it after that, he merely stopped, hunted down a few animals and cooked them over a fire for me.
I couldn't move or do anything to help. My body was still far too weak.
The little nutrition I got from being a mindless cannibal only got me to the point where I could regain my consciousness...
But with food right in front of me, I was barely able to hold myself back... I dug in like a hungry bear, eating the most I had ever eaten in one sitting ever...
Ken also seemed surprised, seeing me eat the portions of 10 men in a few minutes. But he went along with it, hunted more and more until I was finally back on my feet.
After that, we silently made our way back to the compound. It took a few more days to get there, but we were going at a surprising pace.
Somehow, I was actually able to keep up with Master! It seems that on a full stomach, I am much stronger than before... Maybe my ordeal was a blessing in disguise after all?
At least I thought so, until my stomach started aching slightly... It was only then that I noticed how bloated it was.
After all, I had eaten an overwhelming amount of food... Where would all the waste go?
Ken, however, seemed to have been expecting that... 'I was afraid that this would happen...'
That was the first time I heard about one of the many downsides to my condition... I am unable to defecate normally.
We didn't know the specifics at the time, but most of my organs aren't working at all. Food isn't even being digested, and I am just absorbing some energy from food made out of living things...
Anyway, Ken had to cut open my belly, allowing a lot of poorly chewed-up and unprocessed food to spill out of my body, alongside my organs.
Maybe my senses have dulled due to the torture, but it barely felt like I was pricked by a wasp.
The only actual hard thing in that ordeal was watching my own organs spill out of my body once again...
Thankfully, I seemed to heal relatively quickly with my energy replenished.
Even after emptying out my stomach, I was satiated for a good few days. Whenever I got even slightly hungry, we would immediately start hunting and cooking some meat.
It kept going like that all the way to the Dark Brotherhood compound, where the first thing that I did was to step into Saburo's Laboratory.
Saburo himself seemed jealous of my newfound 'immortality'. I could see quite a bit of greed in his eyes, as a former thief, greed is something I am VERY familiar with...
I wonder if he'll try replicating whatever happened to my body... Regardless, I had a lot of testing ahead of me...
Honestly, I was expecting the study done on me to be a more gruelling experience, similar to that of torture.
But Saburo is, at the end of the day, a friend. Despite his greed and jealousy, he treated me very well throughout the whole thing, speaking to me all the time, which was strangely comforting.
He even used some natural herb with an anaesthetic effect to numb my whole body before actually doing anything, so the entire thing was completely painless on my part.
We ran through a plethora of different tests and looked for different things, even compared my constitution to that of the immortal we still have captured.
Saburo seemed to have taken out his vocal cords, but he was still alive and well... Scratch that. He was just alive.
Regardless, we found out that the curses used on me were not any different to the ones used on our prisoner.
Apparently, they just had different reactions in my body.
It did kill off most of my organs and their functions, but it, in turn, made me a lot stronger. I was faster, more dexterous and more focused. and even had more Chakra... At least while full of energy.
My newfound powers had rather clear downsides.
Besides killing most of my organs, regenerating and using chakra, in general, would lead to me becoming hungry.
I could handle a bit of hunger, but I also became much weaker with it.
At my hungriest, I wouldn't even be able to lift a finger, while being peckish brought me down to my previous strength.
Saburo was able to find out that I basically only absorbed some energy from the food I ate.
This led to him creating a special diet for me, which made it a lot easier to empty out my stomach. It was mostly just soups, eating only liquids and crushed herbs.
It seemed to do the trick just fine!
It still required me to stab a funnel into my stomach, but at this point, I am happy with whatever leniency I get...
In the end, the conclusion that Saburo had reached regarding my constitution was that I had achieved some sort of 'Regenerative Immortality'.
I could even regenerate from burns, so I didn't even have the same weaknesses as the other immortals.
He said that the Cult Leader, who was most likely the one to experiment on me, would never be able to get the same result he did with me.
It was a 1 in a million, quite literally an infinitesimal possibility of all of the curses coming together to create such an effect ever again.
Even then, it wasn't really 'immortality'. I wasn't actually unaging.
He said that at some point, the curses would kill my body completely.
But it would likely take a few good decades for that to happen. More study would be needed, but that is the timeframe he provided me at first.
To me, this basically just means that I'll basically die of old age. I am ok with this, I still get to live a full life at least.
Tosho was less ok with it though... He was mad at me for my recklessness.
I couldn't exactly blame him. He knows that I was told to not get close to the cult, so he knows that I fucked up quite a bit.
Him being hard on me just shows that he cares really...
Master is still a bit harder to read.
No one knows that I harmed him while in a mindless state. I didn't have the courage to mention that to either Saburo or Tosho, Ken himself seems to have forgotten about it already...
But even then, I can see him sometimes slightly turning his head away from me when I'm in the room. I can somewhat feel him tacitly avoiding me at times...
I have already apologized profusely, and even cried when I came back to my senses at that moment. But even then, I feel like I deserve this treatment... I betrayed his trust...
Not only did I disrespect his orders, I even injured him after he went out of his way to rescue me...
He even neglected further building relations with the Cloud Village after the mission in order to take me back to base...
Shame. It was a total failure caused by none other than me...
Guilt and shame are all I will be able to feel around Ken now... At least for the foreseeable future.
__________ POV Narration __________
While Akira was wracking his mind with useless thoughts and misplaced emotions, Ken was looking at things from a very different perspective.
To him, he had put one of his men in harm's way due to his own carelessness.
Just because he had been once interested in a random cult. He pursued that cult, culled it, and put all of his people in danger.
He was the one to make things right by exterminating it, sure, but it was still because of him that everything had happened the way it had.
'I have to be more careful in the future... I'm no longer a lonely assassin travelling the world... I have more responsibility... People depending on me...'
The young leader took a few days to reflect on his actions, and on how to improve in the future.
The Dark Brotherhood was not yet at the point where it could even stand on its own. Even the smallest Hidden Village would be able to wipe it out without Ken being there...
But even with Ken being there, the Dark Brotherhood wouldn't necessarily be safe...
Ken's mission with the Raikage and B gave him quite a bit of perspective... He was still weak. Too weak to even protect himself.
If the Raikage decided to attack his Dark Brotherhood, he wouldn't have any other choice but to die.
And if B wanted to erase it from the world, he could do it in a few seconds.
'I need to get stronger...'
In the end, it all came back around to power...
If Ken was strong enough, he wouldn't have had to put any of his subordinates in danger in a scout mission, he wouldn't even have had to worry about the cult attacking them in the first place.
And so, the Blind Assassin was now determined, his training would start that very second, as he jumped out of his room and went into the forest nearby.
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Hope you liked the chapter!
Had a bit more time to write today, motivation's kinda hard lately, but I did have some today
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