The Fox's Third Flash of Hope

Chapter 21

Hmmm I would put a song if I knew what I wanted to put.

Kansen had been out for almost two days straight at this point. Senai had pretty much freaked out when she saw her passed out on the floor, and the discovery of the gash on her arm didn't help much to relieve the tension. Now she was lying on her stomach on her bed, still unconscious. The redhead was dangerously close to the edge of the fluffy mattress, so close that her entire wounded arm and part of her hair hung off the side of the wooden frame. It wouldn't be a surprise if she fell off the bed altogether if she shifted an inch more.

Her classmates and teachers had all come to visit her at some point, and considering the commotion their gathering made, Kansen should have woken up already.

At the end of the awry mission, she was the one with the worst wounds. That probably wasn't the case anymore though. 

WIthout opening her eyes, the jinchuriki slowly sat up, the blankets soundlessly sliding off her shoulders. No dreams had come to visit when she was sleeping. She was wearing her cream colored and sleeveless nightdress, so the rough bandages on her left arm were the first things that caught her attention after she blearily swept her unforcused gaze around the almost completely dark room. Blinking away the blurriness, Kansen untied the white cloth. There was a trace of dried blood on the fabric, but the skin that it once covered was unblemished. Not even a scar was there.

Cuts and scrapes had always healed at inhumane speeds for Kansen, but for the first time she was awed by just how fast her regeneration ability as a jinchuriki got to work. The clock on her desk on the other side of the room informed her that the time was 1:34. Then she squinted and looked at the two smaller letters just to the side of the digital display: A.M.

Goddammit. So she had a choice for the next 8 hours: Either attempt to go back to sleep and wake up with energy, or do something kind of productive and spend the rest of the day half sleepwalking.

Neither of those were very appealing, although one was slightly more ideal than the other. The jinchuriki ended up knocking the daylights out of her better sense and then stepping onto the hardwood floor and getting dressed. Her old shirt and jacket were nowhere to be seen and probably pretty much destroyed, so Kansen had to settle for a light blue long sleeved shirt and a dark green jacket with an off center zipper. At least her normal pants were still there. Not that it mattered anyway, since all of her pants looked exactly the same to the unfamiliar eye and only Kansen could precisely tell them apart.

After swiping a flashlight from one of the many storage drawers in the house, she ended up sneaking out of the mansion through the front door. It would have been much more fun to go through her bedroom window, but then she would be going around the village without shoes. That was a definite no. There were way too many jagged roof tiles and random ditches and bumps in the streets. Even if she could heal scratches within hours, the pain wasn't worth it.

The two story building she arrived at after five minutes of leaping across streets was familiar, even in the dark. It was where she had spent half her time in her Academy days, after all. The library technically wasn't open yet, but she knew that there was a skylight at the very top that could be opened from the outside. Said entrance swung open on soundless hinges, and Kansen made her way inside. The security here was loose and she knew the librarian as a good friend, so she doubted there would be any consequences even if she were found skulking throughout the building by some other nocturnal person at 2 in the morning. She headed straight for a particular section of the oversized shelves that never received very many visitors.

After scanning through the titles with her flashlight, she selected some three inch thick tomes. Carefully balancing them on one hand and holding her light source in the other, the redhead leapt up to her unofficially reserved reading spot. It wasn't as if anyone else could make it there anyway.