Trigger warning: Rape mentioned. I'll try to get through it briefly, and the MC will stop it quickly, but it is in the chapter, hence the warning.
...
Arriving near the village, Ren quickly flickered to the roof of a house facing the area where most of the bandits were gathered. Concealing his presence, Ren quickly assessed the situation, only to sniff in distaste.
The situation was... as expected. It was nothing unusual as far as the standards of bandit attacks went in this world.
The village square, if it could even be called that, was full of blood and corpses. Most of whom were men or teenage boys who fought back. Or at least, tried to.
To the side, the rest of the still living and mostly crying villagers were gathered with their hands bound and surrounded by some very inattentive sentries, who obviously wanted to be doing anything else but watching them.
That group contained mostly kids, the elderly, and some remaining men.
As for the women, the bandits were celebrating. Several of them were around the square, naked or with clothes torn, some screaming, some trying to twist or claw at their attackers, others resigned as random bandits took them against their will. Their companions cheered and whistled as they ate or drank at the long, wooden table set up nearby, getting handsy with the shaking, half-naked women serving them while sobbing.
Through the wind-sensing technique, Ren appropriated from Ino without her knowledge as an apprenticeship fee, he could feel other bandits having sex with very much protesting women inside the houses, too. Some of which were as young as twelve. Ren tried not to pay too much attention to it as fury flashed through his mind. The sooner he assessed the situation, the sooner he could stop this.
He moved on and felt that several bandits were looting the place with vigor, taking everything even slightly valuable. Some were actually settling in the better houses for a longer stay. They clearly were not in a hurry to leave, recognizing that this far in the mountains, nobody was going to come to the village's rescue anytime soon.
In this kind of remote location, they could probably enjoy their spoils for a month before they had to move. Their organized actions told Ren these bandits were experienced. The men were older, some in their thirties, some in their forties. That meant they managed to avoid getting ninja'ed for quite a while. They knew what they were doing.
Ren refocused on the square. Another three bandits were in the middle, beating up some young boys. Ren blinked. And his stomach sank as he realized the women getting violated around the square were the boys' mothers.
He pursed his lips. The bandits... they were trying to break the boys. Ren concluded that it was probably some fucked up way to recruit them or something.
Hearing Kankuro, Temari, and Baki's muffled and gentle landing on the rooftop behind him, Ren slightly turned his head and glanced at them.
It had been barely two seconds since he had arrived himself, but cold fury and a bit of chakra had their way to make things seem to last longer than they actually did.
Seeing the sight in the village square, Temari's nostrils flared, and Kankuro's usually irritated look darkened. Only Baki's cold, impassive expression stayed exactly the same.
The poor man was jaded enough for the entire team, Ren guessed.
"Give me a moment. I'll be done in a second." Ren dryly said, and as Temari opened her mouth to say something, three shadow clones came into existence around Ren before unceremoniously leaping in three different directions.
One leaped toward the town square. And kunai rained down onto the bandits so fast that they didn't even realize when they died. A second was all it took for those chakraless men. The clone landed on the ground and flickered out of sight as he used his speed to enter a nearby house.
The other two clones went into the nearest houses to the right and left, and Ren could feel the bandits inside die with kunai to the back of their heads.
But such were the perils of not paying attention. The men, enjoying their unwilling companions, slumped and fell on the crying women, who shortly enough started screaming when they realized their assailants were dead or had a kunai sticking from the back of their heads.
That alerted the remaining bandits in the further houses, but it didn't do them much good. The benefits of sparring with Hinata ensured that Ren had to train his speed to a level where he could face off against someone using lightning release to enhance their speed. And while Ren was nowhere as fast as Hinata at her best, even Kankuro and Temari only saw three blurs entering the houses, only to come out a second or two later, and enter another house and repeat the whole process anew.
Eight seconds passed, and Temari closed her mouth with an audible click. She gave Ren, who was still crouched on the edge of the rooftop, a conflicted look before she finally murmured.
"I wanted to help, too, you know?"
Ren wryly chuckled and shook his head.
"You can help with the women. I doubt they want to see another dude after what they went through."
Even without looking at her, Red could feel the unamused, pointed look Temari was using to try drilling a hole through the back of his skull.
Yes. That was something nobody wanted to do. Comforting the victims always sucked. Any ninja who went on a bandit extermination mission and was unfortunate enough to find captives knew this fact. Ren knew several ninjas who actively prayed that their targets kill off their victims before they reached them.
It was why Ren decided to gracefully delegate the task to Temari.
"He isn't wrong." Kankuro nodded, only to flinch back as Temari's face turned toward him with a snap, and her eyes bored into him with intensity that made him lock up.
"That's reasonable. Temari, you've got your orders." Baki gruffly interrupted the argument that was about to begin, causing Temari's face to fall.
"I hate you. All of you." She muttered.
The quartet of ninjas jumped down from the roof just as Ren's clones started carrying everybody from the houses back to the square, and landed near the wooden table.
The villagers were just now starting to realize that the bandits who tormented them had somehow dropped dead. Some of them seemed almost too shocked and were clearly mentally somewhere else. Others noticed the kunai knives and started to look around with scared expressions, probably wondering if they would be next. And a few looked relieved and were now crying tears of joy.
"ALRIGHT!" Baki raised his voice, attracting the attention of the villagers.
Ren inwardly smiled as he saw their expressions turn from horror to relief and embers of hope start to flare in their previously dead eyes. It was... satisfying. Helping people like this.
It took him twenty seconds, tops. He really had no reason not to help them. Yet, if he listened to Baki, they would have just gone around the village.
Sometimes, Ren truly hated the ninja way of life.
"GATHER UP AND-" Baki continued.
But as the deep-seated satisfaction was filling Ren's chest, warning bells suddenly went through his head.
His eyes widened.
His body moved on instinct before his mind could catch up.
A whistling noise came to Ren's attention, getting louder by every millisecond.
Ren's hand slammed onto the ground as his three clones tackled Baki, Kankuro, and Temari to the ground, causing them to fall behind him.
A seal sprang up on the ground around them, the same seal that Ren had used to withstand Yagura's bijuudama, just a split second before a projectile impacted it, and the entire world around them went white.
Ren painfully narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth as the loud booming explosion unpleasantly rippled through his eardrums. The seal muffled it, but not enough.
Kankuro threw himself over Temari without even realizing it, shuddering in fear that he probably wasn't even realizing he was feeling on such short notice. Temari let out a choked gasp as she pressed her hands tightly against her ears, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
They were both acutely aware of how close to death they had just come as the seal trembled with every wave of tremors caused by the shockwaves that assaulted it, while blinding, orange liquid fire flowed all around them like a river.
Baki just stood at attention, pupils constricted while he was gripping his kunai extremely tightly, and sweat poured down his forehead.
Ren grimly frowned.
Somebody had just shot a freaking bijuudama at him! Again!
His breath slightly hitched as the village he had just saved came to his mind. Dark, ugly rage surged in his eyes. The explosion was subsiding by then, and as the air rushed in. The created winds cleared the cloud of dust quickly, letting the massive crater that formed around them be plainly visible.
Ren involuntarily growled in anger, and the detection seal he had on him briefly shone. His head snapped fifteen degrees to the left, where he felt three presences, far away.
The muscles on his right arm flexed, and a split second later, a kunai was hurled through the air straight toward them. Ren felt one of the three grab the other two and jump away, and then he could see a big blast of salt blowing upward above the treeline as everything in the range of his exploding kunai turned into salt.
He scowled, still feeling the three ninjas who, unfortunately, survived.
Another kunai popped into his hand before he stiffened, and his eyes narrowed as the three enemies appeared in front of them, inside the crater.
Ren inwardly frowned as he sealed the kunai back into his storage seal. He couldn't use that. Not with the enemy so close that they could deflect it back toward him. Not with Kankuro, Temari, and Baki in the potential line of fire. As much as it grated on him, he needed something less immediately lethal to his allies. He didn't want to turn them into salt by mistake.
Ren's gaze fell on the three ninjas who were assessing them, just as Kankuro, Temari, and Baki regained their composure and stood back up behind him. He didn't recognize two of them, but the third one, who stood in the middle...
Ren felt another one of his childish expectations die right there and then. For some reason, deep down, he expected the good ninjas to actually be good. But, well, they were still ninjas.
It was still disappointing to be faced with this reality as he stared at the Killer Bee in front of him. The man who had just bijuudama'ed an entire village of civilians out of existence in an attempt to assassinate him.
One of his childhood heroes had just died in Ren's mind as the man opened his mouth and gestured with his hands.
"Good block, kono yaro! Let's fight, baka yaro! For returning Darui to us in stony shards, Brotha' A sends his regards!"
Ren's lips twitched, and he dearly regretted still not finishing his black hole seal because he had an almost irresistible urge to throw it at his mug.
"Congratulations," Ren drawled. He stood up from his crouch and looked Killer Bee straight in the eyes through his sunglasses. "You just ruined my day and made this personal."
He was going to do his damnedest to ensure that even Gyuki would feel the ensuing ass-kicking.