Chapter 12: Just Spoiling Meat
March 11, 6 AK
I stared at the dead bandit before me.
My head was slightly cocked. My kunai was still held in a firm grip by the hand now hanging loosely by my side.
He was sort of handsome, in a rugged, dirty sort of way, I suppose. Blue eyes. Tanned skin.
The wind in the trees was quiet. Just a slight ruffling of the fresh spring leaves, new growth tinted almost teal by the bright Fire Country sun. The smell of blood faintly overshadowed the rather pleasant odor of recent rain that I had been enjoying for the last few days of travel.
My eyes slid loosely over the camp. It was still now, where before it had been a riot of activity. My gaze briefly caught on a cluster of small yellow flowers poking out from between a few bits of granite, now marked with a concealing splatter of muddy red.
Was that it?
The short knife in my hand had only a slight smearing of red over the matte black metal. It tapped against my thigh gently, leaving a small stain on the dark grey fabric of my pants as it continued its absentminded oscillation.
I expected... I don't know. Maybe a little fear? A moment of reflection?
'Oh, that could be you! Look out!'
But the whisper of terror was strangely absent. Perhaps I was too used to it to hear.
The bandit had stopped oozing while I ruminated. He stared in the general direction of my feet. There is a lot of blood in the human body, but once your heart stops, it doesn't flow as freely. The pool spreading from the gaping wound in his neck wasn't growing anymore, already transitioning from verdant crimson to a dull and crusty brick-brown.
Everyone talked about first kills being big, life-changing events.
But... I wasn't really feeling it.
Was I in shock?
My free hand pushed inside my collar to press a pair of fingers against my pulse point. I pulled it back and extended the palm flat, fingers splayed.
No trembling.
Steady pulse.
No symptoms of shock.
Though I did seem to be having a little trouble looking away from his face, and my thoughts were slipping through my mind a trifle freely...
My lips pursed in a small frown. My eyebrows pinched under my forehead protector.
"Hiroki."
I turned smoothly on my heel to look at Kakashi. My face twitched slightly as I aborted the habitual smile response.
Don't smile after killing someone, weirdo.
"Yes, Sensei?"
The Hatake looked me over slowly. His eye drifted for only a moment to the kunai held at my side. A flicker of something vaguely unhappy clouded his placidity for a moment before he reestablished eye contact.
"Are you alright?"
I considered the question carefully. My teeth pulled gently on my lower lip.
"I… think so? I dunno. I sort of expected something a little more..."
I trailed off, my gaze tracking over the handful of other bandits scattered around the camp in various states of disassembly.
"It's just... inside... we're all just... It was so easy. Just a little push and... no more person. Just spoiling meat."
And it was easy. Really easy.
The Sharingan, even with only two tomoe in each eye, made tracking movement effortless. So long as the enemy wasn't significantly faster than me, I was practically invulnerable. I could simply permit the natural flow of events to bring the enemy to my blade.
"It's alright. You did the right thing."
My gaze snapped back to the Jōnin. I blinked, nonplussed, as he steered my train of thought to completely foreign tracks.
"I was following orders."
Kakashi-sensei normally displays very little affect, but there is still a subtle difference between a guarded expression of assessment and one of blank incomprehension.
"What?"
My head tilted a bit to the other side as I considered my words. My eyes tracked the arcing lines of splattered crimson across the meagre possessions of the outlaws, my attention wandering slightly.
"You said I did the right thing. I was following orders. Orders cannot be right or wrong; they just are. I serve Konoha; following orders is what I do."
I gestured vaguely with my bloodied hand.
"Saying I did something right or wrong would be like saying the sun was right or wrong. It can't be right or wrong—in fact, those adjectives can't even be logically applied. It would be like saying what I did was purple, or what I did was banana flavored."
I paused, realizing I was rambling.
"I suppose you could say it was the right thing in a... what do you call it... analogy? No; metaphorical. In a metaphorical way. Like, it was very efficiently done, and being efficient is logically better than being inefficient, so it was the 'right' thing to do."
I bent down and finally wiped my kunai off on the ragged clothes of the bandit. My face was still drawn down slightly into a frown. I glanced back up at Kakashi curiously.
"But I get the sense that isn't what you meant."
Kakashi was looking at me with a vestige of worry and more than a little exasperated concern.
"I was going to say something about how these were bad men who would have hurt other people if we didn't stop them, but now... Hiroki, you know there are such things as orders which are morally wrong, right?"
Okay, I really didn't get where this was going anymore.
"Yes...?"
"Okay. So, if an order is morally wrong, that makes the order wrong."
I shook my head in negation.
"Only if you use morals as a defining factor. But we're ninja. We are the textbook definition of amoral. Literally: devoid of moral consideration. There is virtually nothing we won't do for pay; it is the entire reason we go on missions."
I waved vaguely in the direction of the nearby corpses. The kunai glinted briefly in the anemic sun shining through the thin haze of smoke over the camp before I tucked it away in the pouch hanging on my hip.
It'll need a fresh coat of paint, I guess.
"Sometimes the mission comes with an objective that is morally praiseworthy, like killing bandits. Sometimes it's strangling orphans. But I'm a ninja. I don't care. I care about my team, and the village. They're safe, so the world is correct. And I get paid."
My teacher rubbed his forehead in small circles. The backs of his armored gloves reflected the blue of the clear sky. His expression was unhappy, but no longer alarmed.
"We don't take missions just for pay, Hiroki."
"Yes we do...? There is more than one kind of pay, Sensei. I get paid by fulfilling my duty to the village, by keeping my team safe, by lots of things."
I could see that my answer was not quite satisfying to the Jōnin, but I couldn't quite figure out why. My breathing remains deep and even. My eyes stayed wide and open as they tracked from point to point.
"Hiroki, what would you do if you were given an order to kill your teammates? Would you follow it?"
I was still feeling oddly distracted from the current situation. My thoughts weren't digging in as far as I would like into the stream of consciousness. It took me a moment to arrange the ideas in a coherent order.
"No? My first loyalty is to Konoha. The Hokage is Konoha, but Konoha is not the Hokage. If the Hokage issued orders which were contrary to Konoha, then he is no longer part of Konoha. So we would replace the not-Konoha Hokage with a Konoha Hokage. A Konoha Hokage would not order the death of the Konoha members of my team."
I paused.
"...Unless they were traitors, I guess, in which case killing my team would be the Konoha thing to do. I think... I would act in the best interests of Konoha. Doing so will always be... correct."
"Hiroki, you're doing it again."
I blinked at a pallid and clammy-faced Wasabi.
I glanced down at the spot where blood had begun seeping out of the back of my hand. My scratching fingers stilled immediately.
I caught the thrown roll of bandages with a muttered thanks and bound up the minute abrasions.
Kakashi stared at me for a long moment before sighing. He turned towards where Nikkei was faintly retching next to a pile of sick as her ninken nosed at her comfortingly. My squadmate's gaze was fixed on her own freshly made corpse.
"Well," Kakashi muttered, "at least you aren't loud."
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