Heart of the Infiltrators

Chapter 27: Drowning Babel

Heart of the Infiltrators

(Senran Kagura x Male Reader)

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Chapter 27: Drowning Babel

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Sitting around the wooden dining table within their cave, the renegade shinobi were all silently eating the burnt dinner that Yomi had cooked for them. All of their eyes were deadly serious, only ever blinking whenever they looked at one another. Wrapped around all of their heads were bandages, save for Haruka who also needed a makeshift splint for her foot. No one dared to utter a word as the occasional sound of stone grinding against itself echoed throughout the cave. Finally, once she'd gone through half of her blackened beansprout concoction, Yomi turned her head up to Homura and murmured, "I think you hit his head too hard..."

The tanned girl kept a straight face as she raised another spoonful of her dinner, grimacing just before it reached her mouth, "From what I can see, probably..." and shoveled the sprouts in.

Having had the silence broken, Mirai felt confident enough to turn over to Haruka and proceeded to ask, "So... I was flying when you went down. What happened?"

Haruka's expressionlessly spoke as she leaned her face against a hand, "Oh, nothing serious. The couch landed on my foot and I slipped backwards... There was a bit of a nasty twist in my ankle and I hit the back of my head on the ground."

"Ouch... was there at least some carpet to break the fall?"

A hollow smirk came upon Haruka's face, "Nothing but rock."

"Double ouch..."

While the two conversed, the other three were gazing over to the side of their cave. Hikage asked, "Do we stop him?"

Homura felt her eyes droop tiredly as she retorted, "He'll figure himself out."

Leaning his bandaged head against the soothingly cold wall of the cave, the young man was on the verge of all-out defeat. While the deadest look clung onto his exhausted eyes, he carefully and deliberately carved a pointed rock against the cave wall so that he could engrave the words "Blessed be this Place" to soothe himself. To ensure a lack of guilt for desecrating the renegades' home, the young man made sure to ask for permission and unenthusiastically shared his different designs for each written character. Once a particular pattern was chosen, he went about his mediatory practice and hadn't uttered another word.

With every straight line or smooth curve, the young man found himself encroaching on a familiar self-pity. He had no intention of remaining that way nor did he want to be so low in the first place, but the events of the prior few days were beginning to weigh on him for the worse. The young man could handle surprise jogs that involved getting hurt because of his own mistakes, getting flashed because of bizarre circumstance, and getting his butt groped by a certain pervert. He wasn't comfortable with those things but he could still handle them. The young man could also handle sudden intrusive visits into his residence, obnoxious interruptions while he tried to repair his glasses, and uncomfortable confessions of love. Again, he wasn't comfortable with those things but he could still handle them.

But, on that fateful Saturday after school, the young man had been pushed to his limits. He'd been forcibly kidnapped, learned that he had a fourth admirer in a situation where he wasn't allowed to have any, had been sexually harassed while he was trying to calm himself down, thrown into an uncomfortable questioning which only served to further motivate Homura's crush on him, and was physically thrown face first into a couch. Perhaps if they were the only things that happened, the young man would be more tolerant to it all. But, once compounded by everything else that had happened, the weight of it all just began to crush him. The young man knew very well that there were people out in the world who were suffering much worse everyday but, even if just for a while, he wanted to keep his mind on himself. Ergo, his focus remained on perfecting the Japanese characters he was engraving into the wall so that he could keep his mind off his bad luck.