| abstract | - Monad's breakfast that morning consisted of daikon, arame, pickled plums, tofu, konnyaku, yams, boiled burdock root, marinated freshwater clams, broiled striped mullet, and pickles. Although exceedingly luxurious for a mere bodyguard, he had been granted this privilege due to spending this morning meal with the Mizukage herself. A few times each month, the Mizukage would chose not to spend her mornings with her family as the custom dictated, but instead enjoy her first bites with her trusted bodyguard whom she had developed a close bond with ever since he saved her during the festival. Although initially frowned upon, it soon became clear that Monad had no malicious intentions towards the Mizukage's attractive appearance, and it had eventually become a part of the Terumī residence as much as the koi pond. Or at least, that was what supposed to happen. Despite the extravagance of his meal, Monad was quite alone in the small room next to the Mizukage's chambers, and he had been in the same company during each breakfast he and the Mizukage supposedly had spent together. This did not entail Mei had to endure any kind of solitude during these occasions, however. In fact, the very reason this lie had come into existence was to disguise the steps of a certain general and whatever happenings that involved his presence in Mei Terumī's personal chambers. Should any servant arrive to deliver the Mizukage an urgent message during these early hours, a subtle trapdoor behind Monad's closet would allow him to keep up the facade without any hassle. Although the samurai had pulled an eyebrow at these needlessly complicated measures, it was not his place to meddle in the Mizukage's affairs. Besides, the food he received as hush money was delicious. A few hours later, the royal blue topped with auburn that made the leader of the Land of Water so easy to recognize, flanked with the neutral gray-and-white attire of her bodyguard dwelled through the streets of Kirigakure, saluted and compliments by many a citizen they came across. The last convulsions of the rumors surrounding the mysterious samurai had ceased quite a while ago, and whatever talk there was still left leaned more towards praise than fear. Some had started calling him "Yatsurugi", due to his lack of surname and skill with the sword. Monad himself was just relieved most villagers had stopped paying any particular attention to him, as it made his job only that much harder when he had to differentiate between those who tried to subtly stare at him and those who were planning to attack his mistress. Where they were headed today, he didn't know. Although Mei had told him they were to visit a special division and check up on their progress, he didn't yet fully understand her intentions. He had no real grasp on the amount of squads and divisions the Mizukage had under her wing as leader of Kirigakure and the Land of Water and surely they all had important information to divulge, but what would urge her to pay them a personal visit when she could simply ask for the results to be delivered to her office? A few weeks ago, he might have inquired her about this fact, but since he had taken up the task of yojimbo he had learned that questioning some of the Mizukage's more extravagant resolutions held little purpose. They eventually arrived at what seemed to be a large office building in the center of the city, with their eventual destination residing on the first floor. Various shinobi were seated at desks covered in scrolls, short notes and mission reports, with others crossing between the little isles of paperwork to deliver information they had received through the radio station positioned in the corner of the room. Rolls of paper detailing family trees, famous historical happenings and notable figures were plastered across the wall, parts of them marked with bright red circles. It all seemed very chaotic in Monad's eyes, but somehow none of the shinobi ever got in each other's way or failed to deliver on time, like a well-oiled machine. Mei walked over to a bespectacled man bent over a scroll marked with the mark of a Chinese paper lantern, in avid discussion with a colleague and tapped him on the shoulder. As the old man - now that he stood up Monad clearly noticed that he was almost twice the Mizukage's age - greeted Mei very informally, hinting he had been her superior in the past, Monad remained in position near the door post. He didn't really expect to have to initiate any kind of action during their stay in this office. Whether her purpose had been to oversee whatever project this was or to visit this old friend, he would simply wait until the Mizukage had completed her occasions and then escort her to her next appointment. His attention did not waver, however - only a second rate bodyguard let his guard down because they were in a seemingly harmless environment. Unable to discern what the topic of their conversation was, Monad saw how the bespectacled elder gestured for a young girl to emerge behind a pile of historical records at Mei's request and how the latter enthusiastically waved at her bodyguard to join them. With a slight frown Monad tried to find his way through the jungle of documents without damaging anything, with years of honing his reflexes being the only thing preventing him of knocking over a lone coffeepot with the bottom-most end of his sheath. The smile Mei bore was that of a kid who had just been given their favorite piece of candy. It made Monad suspicious. "Monad-kun" she started while stretching out her arm to the young girl that had joined them. "This is Ren Natsumekan-san. She is part of the Kekkei Genkai Registration Project, the brightest mind of her generation and has recently been promoted to chūnin for her valiant contributions in the war." Monad took the girl in as she claimed the Mizukage was given her too much credit. She was a slender girl with short, brown hair and green eyes and was wearing a casual pink shirt with jeans underneath and her hitai-ate tied around her upper arm. He reckoned she was three, maybe four years younger than him and didn't fail to notice the fact that she was highly attractive, although that was an aspect of her he would not act upon during working hours. Greeting him with closed eyes and a cheerful smile, Ren bowed deep for the Mizukage and only slightly less for Monad, a degree of respect which mildly surprised him. "Pleased to meet you, Monad-san. I look forward to our cooperation!" Monad bowed as well, a bit uneasily, and turned to wards Mei. "What kind of cooperation would this be?" He tried not to sound too rude, but frankly the whims of his mistress were beginning to annoy him at this point. "Well, ever since you told me about your sword, I've been thinking about having it be examined, and Natsumichan is without a doubt the most qualified to do so." The sudden shift of honorifics was quite noticeable, but no one seemed to mind it. Monad knitted his eyebrows together again. Examined? He turned toward the young girl. "Where and when would this examination take place?" Ren seemed to be unfazed by Monad's barely-veiled aversion or the Mizukage's sudden familiarity. "I have been given a lab at the end of the hallway, where I would like to deduct some basic experiments on the sword today. The results will dictate how many will follow." Before Monad could protest or say anything else, Mei clapped her hands together. "Great! I was planning to look through the process of this week anyway, so while I'm busy working on that, Monad-kun will be in your hands. Do you need anything else?" "No, I have everything prepared. I'll see to it that I will return him as soon as I have what I need." Monad did not like how the two women were talking about him like some lawnmower they were loaning to each other. Seeing no legitimate escape out of the situation, he sighed and followed Ren through the door to the laboratory. The lab was small, but possessed all the equipment one could possible need to examine a sword. Ren gestured Monad to lay Hajikukare down on the metal table in the middle of the room and proceeded to pull on a lab coat. The fact that she also put on protective gloves and glasses made Monad wary of what she was going to do exactly. She noticed his worry and smiled. "Just in case." Still not completely assured, Monad pulled the sheathed nodachi over his shoulders and put him on the cold metal. Ren rumbled a bit at the tables occupied with equipment lined up against the wall, returning to Monad and his blade with a small knife and various pots and a few devices. As she continued to cross the distance between the blade and the equipment, each time bearing new gifts, she requested Monad to tell her what he had told to the Mizukage before. The young samurai sighed. He started to wish he wouldn't have had to use Hajikukare at that time. "Do you know of the sessho-seki?" Ren looked up from her task of trying to scrape a bit of metal from the flat side of Hajikukare, something which stung Monad but he did not react to. "I'm afraid samurai folklore is lost on most shinobi academies, Monad-san." "It's not folklore, it's the name of a giant rock in the north of the Land of Flint." Ren opened her mouth, but Monad had already anticipated that. "North of the Land of Iron, my motherland." The young girl closed her mouth, nodded and continued undisturbedly. "Legend has it that anyone who touches the stone dies. But that's not entirely true. Anyone who possesses chakra and touches the stone dies. In the past, many people tried to prove their bravery by traveling up to the rock and climbing it. Some even attempted to mine ore from it to create some kind of weapon. But no one succeeded and anyone who journeyed to the rock was never see again." Ren lifted herself from the blade. "Doesn't chip, doesn't rust, cannot be corroded, doesn't bend, unaffected by heat, doesn't react to salt or low levels of oxygen,..." She awoke from her murmurs when she noticed Monad had stopped talking. "Okay, okay, that's nice and all, but why are you telling me this." She chewed on the pen she had used to write down her findings and looked at her notes. "You know, this blade is really something. You probably never have to sharpen it, seeing hos its immune to practically-" "Hihiirogane." Ren stopped mid-sentence and looked at him as if he had just confessed to her. Is this girl even taking me seriously? "It's how my ancestor called the ore he mined from the sessho-seki. This blade was made using what he had gathered." Ren's gaze went from Monad back to the nodachi and her eyes widened as if she suddenly saw everything in a new light. "But you said-" "Apparently my ancestor found some way to survive the influence of the sessho-seki. I don't know how he did it either, and I don't really care. That sword has been in my family for generations, I doubt there's still anyone in this world who would have any information regarding how and why it was created." He grabbed a chair leaning against the wall and sat down as Ren picked up the blade and tried to raise it. "It's light..." With considerable effort, she unsheathed the blade beyond the few centimeters she had used to test it, exposing the entire 160 centimeters that the nodachi covered. A series of holes was drilled throughout the length of the blade, each one having enough space for a grown man's thumb. Ren gasped and clenched her two hands around the hilt, lifting the gigantic weapon into the air. "I see, the holes make it possible to reach high speeds despite the blade's length. But doesn't that make the blade too frail to use properly?" Per demonstration, she cautiously swung the nodachi from right to left, only narrowly avoiding a few microscopes and Monad's head. Monad caught the blade with his hand and placed it back on the table where it wouldn't hurt anyone. "Not a bad observation. If it was made from regular materials, then this would indeed hurt the durability of the sword too much to be worth it, but hihiirogane is strong enough to endure this." As Monad spoke, Ren reached back to her notepad and wrote down another line. "You said the sessho-seki killed anyone who possesses chakra. If this is made from the same matter, why does it not have that effect?" "It isn't as strong, but the blade does reject all forms of chakra. It's something that-" Monad stopped his explanation when he noticed Ren had dropped her notepad and was staring at him in utter shock. "All forms of chakra...? How... How is that possible?" She hurried back to the equipment table and scanned through a few scrolls she had set there beforehand. "We have records of chakra disruption, but to completely reject it..." She turned back and looked Monad in the eye, in search of any sort of bluff. "Are you sure? Can I test it?" "Of course. I don't have any reason to lie about something like this." Monad crossed his arms and watched curiously as a blue hue surrounded Ren's hand. Her voice was shaky when she clarified what she was about to do. "This is a Chakra Scalpel. When used with the right amount of chakra and pressure, it can cleanly cut through metal. I must warn you this may cause irreparable damage to your sword." Monad smiled at the sudden hesitation that had crept into the young scientist's otherwise so confident voice. "Go ahead." Ren gulped and brought her hand down on the nodachi's blunt edge. Like mist in a morning breeze, the chakra surrounding her hand sputtered for a second when she came close before disappearing entirely when her hand touched the surface. Ren raised her hand to her face again and stared at it in agony. It took a few seconds of unbearable seconds, but eventually the blue aura around her hand shot up again like a gentle flame. "For a second there I thought-" The rest of her sentence became a murmur Monad could not comprehend. "Monad-san, I'm afraid we'll have to see each other a lot more in the future." She picked up her notepad from the floor, turned a page and frantically began writing down annotations. "For now, I think it's time for you to return to Mizukage-sama." She stripped herself of her lab outfit and showed Monad out of the room. "From a investigatory standpoint, it would be best if your sword could remain here for the duration of the experiments, but I would never want to compromise Mizukage-sama's safety, so I will let you take it back." Monad hung the nodachi over his back again. You're acting as if you decided where I leave my sword. This girl certainly wasn't born a shy one. Ren locked the door behind them and then ran over to Monad's side as he coursed towards the office where they had left Mei. "Monad-san, could you please not tell anyone else about this? I would like to gain certainty in all possible areas before I draw any conclusions." The bodyguard merely nodded. He would just have to endure all this, he guessed.
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