[Episode Ikki Pt1] Mebu Castle

[Sentou Sanada]

The sound of hurried footsteps crossed the courtyard before he had even made it past the gates.

A few of the younger monks rushed by him, robes shifting with the wind as they made their way toward the castle proper. Chō said nothing at first, only stepping aside enough to let them pass as his eyes followed after them. There was a feeling in the air that he couldn’t quite place. Not panic. Not exactly fear either. Something quieter than that, but no less heavy.

Anticipation?

His gaze eventually shifted toward the orange-haired man walking off through the courtyard, cigarette hanging from his mouth as smoke trailed after him. Chō had not caught whatever words had been spoken before, if any had been spoken at all. But there was something about him. Like even when no one stood near him, the space around him still felt taken.

Important, maybe. Troubled, definitely.

Still, it was not Chō’s place to pry. Not yet.

Reaching into the sleeve of his robe, he felt the edge of one of his talismans beneath his fingers and exhaled softly through his nose. For a place this quiet, too much felt like it was moving underneath it all. And if the young monks were rushing inside, then maybe the best thing he could do was not get in their way.

So he continued forward at his own pace, eyes drifting over the castle grounds as if searching less for a person, and more for whatever had made the air feel so restless.

 

[Earljt4]

The library was huge, filled to the brim with scrolls of many types, knowledge assorted from all over both the shinobi world and the oni world, possibly from even further than that. Eiji had been in the library since he separated from his former group; he now sat at a desk with a pile of scrolls, looking for anything that could help him with his situation, his understanding of puppetry, and possibly trying to unravel the idea of the Uzumaki adamantine sealing chains to apply that theory and skill to his own fighting style. He knew very little about what was going on in the world outside the library as Eiji sought to grow from learning in the library so as not to hold his team back any further and to grow to his own true potential, which some of the Oni and the Salesman saw, but he was only glimpsing at. At the moment, he was holding a scroll to understand the basic theory of chakra threads and chakra form manipulation. He was wondering how the rest of the group was faring on the mission.