Chapter Text
The first thing that drew Gabimaru’s notice to the swindler was his breathing.
There were lots of clues from the breath of the others around him. He’d been led in, sat down, and blinded by the face-covering paper mask of the death row convict. But his hearing still told him much about the criminals, and the samurai escorting them. Some were breathing heavily, some were relaxed, some were terrified. One unsavory man, smelling of old blood and other bodily fluids, was actually aroused. A few were in an attentive calm - breath steady, pulse regular, the barest shifts in head movement or posture indicating the heightened levels of perception a trained martial artist can reach when ready for potential threats. Gabimaru mentally noted each of these individuals, criminal or samurai; they could be trouble later. The shinobi was not surprised to find the woman who had brought him in, Yamada Asaemon Sagiri, among this number.
The swindler was another whose breathing told Gabimaru’s ears of that same attentive state. Which was weird, because nothing else about the man indicated any such training. He didn’t breathe like a martial artist, and his shuffling footsteps as he entered this strange meeting with the other criminals made it clear he didn’t walk like one. Some masters could hide sublime skill through a lazy facade; Gabimaru was certain one of the Asaemon, addressed as Sir Jikka by a peer in an overheard conversation, was doing so. The swindler couldn’t; his posture was all wrong. Those same footsteps that betrayed his lack of training also told the shinobi of a medium height and slight build, without the bulk of muscle many of the other convicts carried. This was not a physically imposing man.
And yet he was observing the crowd as keenly as some of the deadliest personal combatants in all Japan, many of whom were also assembled here. It was a curiosity Gabimaru pondered as the stuffy samurai in front of them introduced the shogun Tokugawa Nariyoshi. After a second’s deliberation, he mentally categorized the swindler under “no danger, possible person of interest” and returned his focus to the briefing for this much-vaunted secret mission.
—
Yamada Asaemon Shion stood among his comrades, and listened to the waves.
Each person gave off their own waves, with a combination of pitch and tenor and amplitude that was unique as a fingerprint, and he could hear a person’s waves as easily as he could their breathing. In his mind, he catalogued the criminals before them, matching their scents and noises to the profiles Senta had read to him. Several were easily identified; Rokurota, in particular, was obvious from his immense size. It had taken ten strong men with ropes, and bribes of dried meat, to coax the giant of Bizen to his current location. The young woman talking to the short man, whom she called a “celebrity in our world” - those were obviously Yuzuriha and Gabimaru. Senta had told Shion which criminals were marked as ‘abnormal’ with a red seal on their profiles; Shion now took the time to match the waves and sounds and smells to those descriptions. There was no telling who would be dangerous, but the red seal criminals were known threats; it would make sense to memorize their features now.
His reverie was interrupted by a gruff voice. “So Shion, want to place any bets on who’ll last more than an hour on the expedition?” Genji asked, the boredom clear in his tone. “You’re observing them closely enough, you should be able to make a solid guess.”
“It is below our station as the Shogunate’s executioners to wager on the deaths of others. Such disregard for life is unbecoming of our role.” Shion arched a disapproving eyebrow at his fellow Asaemon; the scars through his eyelids made the expression simultaneously comical and unsettling.
But as a student, Genji had never been much intimidated by Shion’s stern looks or lectures in the dojo; they certainly didn’t faze him now. “With all respect, Sensei, you must have realized,” he began, “that the majority of these convicts are unlikely to make much of a difference on a mission in a place to which 60 trained loyal men traveled and only one returned.”
“Genji, are you concealing your true opinions?” The blind samurai smiled. “I’m afraid I can’t see what you’re getting at.”
Genji snorted at his teacher’s joke. “We’re in the presence of the shogun, Shion-sensei. It’d be rude if I just said most of these scum are a fucking waste of time and skin.”
“Perhaps.” Shion’s tone was neutral. “Nevertheless our orders were clear, and remain so. We collected as many suitable candidates as we could find, and brought them here.”
“Indeed, we did. And we found more than enough.” Genji sneered at the convict’s gasps as Lord Aoki bid them take off their masks. The ‘survivor’ of the previous expedition sat before them, more flower than man at this point. “The red seals mark the only ones strong enough to be worth our time. We should have just beheaded the rest.”
“You may be right, Genji.” Shion tensed up as a third joined their conversation. Genji turned to look down at his fellow Asaemon; the smaller man’s spiky short black hair, even shorter than Shion’s, reached only to Genji’s chin. “Personally, I agree with your assessment. But Shion-sensei is correct: our orders are our orders. It is not our place to question the process his Eminence has chosen, nor the time it takes to carry out.”
Genji gave a noncommittal grunt to conceal the awkwardness. He’d never like the atmosphere between these two; they were always stiff around each other. Genji knew that Tesshin had abandoned the dojo once, but he’d come back, and besides, that was years ago; weren’t they over it yet? “You are right, Tesshin. I know. It just seems like a waste, especially when so many of these thugs lack real combat experience, or survival training, or any other skills that might be actually useful on this mission.”
The dark-skinned larger Asaemon scanned, his eyes settling on the swindler. “Like that one, the con artist. You can’t tell me you expect him to make any real difference.”
—
The swindler gritted his teeth behind a closed mouth. He knew a setup when he saw one. He also knew when to keep his mouth shut.
The idiot courtier up there, fatter and stupider than Lord Aoki, was currently blubbering about how gracious the shogun was in sending them on an expedition with an existing survival rate of one in sixty, given a very generous definition of survival. There were actually tears rolling down the man’s face as he went on about Shinsenkyo and the privilege of visiting the pure land. Strongly religious, a fragile ego sensitive to defiance of authority, likely some deep rooted insecurities and a sheltered background, the swindler noted. But now was not a time or place he could take advantage of such weaknesses. He kept his mouth shut.
The dark-skinned kid in the front row piped up. “The island’s totally unknown, right? What if there’s no elixir of life on it?” It was a smart question, and the kid struck the swindler as a smart one; dressing and looking like a boy probably saved her a lot of trouble. Other convicts spoke up in protest. The swindler didn’t want to attract attention. He kept his mouth shut.
When Aoki confirmed that the elixir possibly not existing changed nothing, one huge tattooed man stood up to leave. An Asaemon, the redhead with the eyepatch, casually decapitated him in an instant, and the hardened convicts gasped as though they were being treated unfairly when Aoki reminded them that they were still death row convicts. Morons , the swindler thought . What were they expecting, a vote? It turned out the Asaemons would still be holding swords over their heads during this entire expedition. The fact that they had to keep their hands tied only confirmed to the swindler that this was a setup. Through it all, he kept his mouth shut.
Then the shogun called Lord Aoki over to whisper something, and the swindler got nervous. That was a bad sign.
“Ah, my apologies.” The single vertical scar on Aoki’s face lent his neutral tone seriousness. “There is one last point I must raise. Before your departure, we must ask you to whittle down your numbers.”
Oh. Oh, shit.
There were some confused murmurs from the others. The swindler kept his mouth shut and started slowly edging away from the rest of the crowd. He began scanning the beach for improvised weapons, something, anything. They’d cleared the sand, but maybe he could find a buried piece of driftwood or some rocks.
“Y’all aren’t too bright, are you?”
The swindler, and everyone else, looked at the source of the voice. And there was the famous Bandit King of Iyo, Aza Choubei himself, casually choking a man to death with a grin on his face like he was opening a barrel of sake at a party. Everyone else kept their eyes on Choubei as he pointed out the obvious. The swindler kept scanning the ground, inching away from the crowd.
“You get it? They saw that, and they ain’t said shit!” Choubei crowed, casually kicking a rock bigger than a man’s head out of the sand and up into his hands like it was a child’s toy. Of course, he found an improvised weapon right away, lucky son of a - there.
A stone, about the size of dagger, but worn smooth by the sea. Still longer than a hand’s width, better than nothing. A bit beyond that, a forearm-length stick.
The swindler started shuffling towards his finds a bit more urgently as Choubei smashed another convict’s face in with his rock. “They’re telling us to kill each other , dumbasses! You’re slow, you’re dead, simple as that.”
A bit faster, but not too sudden a movement to draw attention; it was clicking for most of the convicts now.
“I suppose if you take what I said that way, it can’t be helped,” Lord Aoki commented drily. He almost sounded apologetic; the swindler wanted to slap that bastard. “Anyone who would die here likely wouldn’t be of much use to the expedition.”
He got to the stone.
“Oh, and keep your hand bindings on.” Fucking setup -
Everything exploded into chaos.
The swindler managed to get his hands on the first improvised weapon he saw, before desperately rolling out of the way as another convict tried to stomp on him. He scrambled away from his attacker before a third party grabbed that man from behind and tried gouging his eyes out. It was a moment’s respite, but enough for the swindler to leap for and grab the stick he’d noticed earlier. I mean, both weapons were useless together in his untrained and bound hands - he hadn’t been in a fight in years , not since he was a kid - but at least that meant someone else wasn’t using them.
His initial hope was to run around quickly and evade everyone’s attention. The kid was doing that, and rather well; she was fast and nimble. The swindler, not so much. He’d hoped to hide behind some of the more dangerous convicts, but that wasn’t going to work. Choubei was practically tearing men in half with his bare hands, and that ronin with a goatee was swinging a half-conscious man around like a sword. The smarter convicts had started to give them a wide berth.
Then he noticed another man staying at the edges of the conflict, a skinnier convict with a shaved head. This one also looked like he wasn’t a great fighter, and was sticking to the strategy of waiting it out. A strategy leapt into the swindler’s mind. He knew when to keep his mouth shut, but he also knew when to speak up.
He rushed the man with the shaved head, throwing the stick at their feet. While his target was distracted, he jumped on the man from behind, arms around his neck.
“AGGGH! Fuck y-”
“Grab the stick at your feet and make like you're stabbing me with it,” the swindler whispered urgently into the man’s ear. “I’ll pretend to stab you with this rock. We gotta roll around in some of the blood and guts nearby, and then we play dead while they kill each other. Quick now!”
The convict turned his head to look at him, his argument bolstered by the fact that he wasn’t actually trying to choke out his potential partner. A moment’s eye contact, a quick nod, and then right into the act. They fell to the ground, the bald man picking up the stick. They shoved and wrestled and poked each other in the gut with dull weapons - the swindler felt he’d gotten stabbed a bit too hard for an act, but hey, gotta sell it. They rolled over several dead bodies that their peers had left in convenient locations. Then they broke apart, ‘dying’. The stone and stick were conveniently bloodied. The swindler held a handful of borrowed guts to his stomach before falling back and looking up at the sky, trying to slow his breathing to imitate shock. His partner gave a horribly dramatic gurgle and lay on his side, eyes closed. Shitty acting, but it’d do if the audience wasn’t paying attention.
And it seemed they weren’t. The lady ninja was busy dancing back and forth, snapping necks with expert kicks. But she wasn’t leaping over to stomp them to death. The bandit king laughed as he caved in a man’s face with a single elbow, but he was paying no mind to anyone on the ground. All the other convicts were preoccupied, to put it lightly. There was no one who was free to move about and looking at them closely.
Except for the voluptuous lady in a courtesan’s outfit, who looked them over and licked her lips. Uh oh .
She began to crawl slowly over to the swindler’s partner. The other convicts didn’t attack her. Of course not; none of the men wanted to threaten the half-dressed pretty girl. Leered at but unmolested, she made her way over and turned the swindler’s partner over onto his back, leaning down to kiss him. Don’t kiss her back, you idiot! Keep up the act…annnnnd he’s kissing her back. So hard to find good help these days.
Then, to the swindler’s horror, she levered a practiced thigh over the other man’s centre of mass to keep him down, and pressed one elbow into his throat, all without breaking the kiss.
The man began spasming as the courtesan began suffocating him. His legs kicked into the sand, but he couldn’t get purchase. Her leverage was too solid, and his attempts to push her off failed. The swindler realized he had at most two minutes before his partner died and she moved on to him. Quickly, he looked for the opportunity to stand up.
A body fell to the ground beside him. The goateed ronin was right there , swinging around a convict - a new one, he must have traded out his last makeshift sword for a new one with fewer broken bones - and laying men flat in wide arcs. The swindler couldn’t stand up now; that swordsman was felling every opponent he saw, and with the speed and power of his wide swings, he was likely as not to bash the swindler’s brains out by accident if the swindler stood up. Then the ronin locked eyes with the courtesan as she sat up, the bald convict beneath her twitching out his last. Please, please please kill her , the swindler mentally begged.
She gave the ronin a smile, a wink, and a really good view of her chest. The ronin grinned back, turned around, and started smashing down other convicts with even more enthusiasm. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me , thought the swindler.
He glanced around, his moving eyes betraying the play-dead act. The Asaemon? One of them, the woman with long dark hair, had just cut down three convicts who attempted to attack her. No, they were only attacking convicts who were a threat to them. His mind was racing through his options when the courtesan was on him, surprisingly strong for her size. A forearm was pressing on his throat.
He reached desperately for the blunt stone.
He was out of time.
—
“Killing people is never okay, you know.”
Gabimaru was extremely disinterested. He was disinterested in killing more people. He was disinterested in the looks of shock and offense from the shogun’s retainers when he communicated this. He was disinterested in this whole show taking place; unnecessary ceremony that wasted his time when he could be on his way to earning that pardon and seeing his wife again. And his disinterest showed.
“Get back! What do you think you’re doing, approaching His Emin-”
“Isn’t there some other way of doing this?” Gabimaru interrupted. “Like, not everyone here actually wants to kill people. You get that, right?”
“You who already defies the laws of this land would dare show such insolence in front of the shogun?”
Gabimaru paid the disapproving looks and drawn swords no mind; the Asaemon were the only ones here who could cut him down. “Cut me some slack here. I just wanna avoid killing people if I can. You know, the way normal people do.”
“You can abandon pursuing the writ of pardon if this bothers you so.” Lord Aoki glowered at the shinobi below him. “It is as simple as that.”
This was starting to give Gabimaru a headache. “Okay, reasonable arguments aren’t gonna work on you. Good to know.”
Aoki’s eyes narrowed at the comeback, and he looked to the group of convicts nearest the shinobi. “You lot!”
“Huh?”
“Kill this man, and I’ll see to it you all get a seat on the expedition.”
Gabimaru spun, inwardly groaning as they all locked eyes on him. “Wait, we just gotta kill the one guy?” “Nice!” “Taking that deal for sure .”
A tiny voice started in Gabimaru’s head. Like you ever had a way out of this. You’re Gabimaru the Hollow. You were always going to have to kill more people. That doesn’t end. That never changes.
He shook his head. No. That voice was wrong. Yui had seen a better way.
He turned to the closest, a man with a white furoshiki cloth wrapped around his head and a large rock in his hands. “You have a problem with pointless killing too, right?”
“The hell I do!” The rock was thrown, and easily dodged.
“You can’t be serious!”
“The hell I’m not!”
“Can’t we talk this out?”
“Just fight or die! If you wanna die, just sit still, I’ll give ya that!”
The little voice in his head laughed. He grimaced. I’m sorry, Yui .
Gabimaru the Hollow sighed like a man stuck with an unexpected overtime shift at work. “Can’t be helped then. Guess I’ll kill you.”
A grunt of confusion. To be expected; true to his training, he’d extinguished his killing intent and started walking slowly towards the man. That throws most people off. The other convicts were confused too; in their world, you don’t make death threats and then act like a bored teenager walking down the street on an errand.
“Yes. If you try to kill me, I’ll kill you first. Obviously.”
“Didn’t you just say -”
“I did. I don’t wanna do this. But I can’t die here either, so here we are.” A few more steps. “Gotta do what you gotta do.”
“You fucking with us, little man?” Several convicts shifted back, unnerved by the change in atmosphere. “You crazy or something?”
A few more steps. Gabimaru kept his killing intent suppressed. “No, just bummed. I don’t wanna do this.”
Dozens of eyes were on him. The confused eyes of the convicts and the curious eyes of the shogun. The stunned look of Sagiri’s eyes. The wary eyes of the other Asaemon. Gabimaru didn’t care.
The only eyes he cared about were far away. Eyes that got so sad to see him come home covered in blood.
“This is gonna be so heavy.” Gabimaru noticed Sagiri’s astonishment at those words. “It really sucks.”
A few more steps. The little voice laughed again, and he surrendered.
I’m so sorry, Yui .
Now.
First opponent, two metres in front of him. Obvious weak point is the throat - quickest kill for all of them. Sudden burst of movement forward, double handed hammerfist through throat. He dropped to his knees as he completed the first attack, blood raining through the air.
The convicts’ eyes tracked his movement downward, hands tightening into fists as their survival instincts started to replace their confusion. Their eyes betrayed them. Gabimaru’s strength and small stature leant itself well to misdirection; it’s hard to track a foe who is charging you at knee height before suddenly bounding up over your head. He leapt, spinning. To conserve angular momentum and attack a foe who misread the direction of your jump, a roundhouse kick is best. His target’s neck snapped like a twig as he hammered the man’s head into the ground.
Got to keep the momentum going. He leapt again. Next target, another double hammerfist through the throat. He was airborne leaping into the next target, could probably crack the ribs with a shoulder ram - actually, the man’s throat was right there, his teeth were at the perfect height. He bit, tearing the throat out and landing on his feet, still moving. Next opponent.
Too clustered together. Gabimaru smashed a man’s skull with a flying knee, driving terrified convicts away from him in different directions. Even Choubei had stopped his rampage to watch the shinobi now. No matter, too far away. Next opponent.
Too many on the flanks. Gabimaru leapt backward and spun, hitting a convict who tried to sneak up on him, hammerfist folding the man in half like origami paper. His senses took in everything. Up on the stage, the shogun had dropped his fan in shock. The dark skinned kid had retreated to the opposite corner of the field from him. The courtesan was struggling with the man underneath her for some reason. No matter. Next opponent.
Too crowded. More space. Gabimaru rammed an opponent through the cloth walls surrounding the field, Asaemon with hands on their swords jumping to the side as he leapt between them. He pulled his hands from the bloody mess of the latest target’s throat. A few convicts still rushed him, desperation and fear and pride making them stupid.
Another double hammerfist to the throat.
Kick to back of skull, decapitating target.
Double punch to solar plexus and chest, shattering the sternum and driving the fragments into the heart.
And it was over. The little mocking voice in his head wouldn’t stop laughing. One of the Asaemon was cutting down a convict who’d tried to flee in the chaos he’d caused; the rest were watching him like dogs growling at a bear come down out of the mountains. His hearing caught murmurs of “monster” and “the empty shinobi” and “the Hollow” coming from the assembled samurai. It didn’t matter to him. He dunked himself in the sea and then shook himself like a dog. It wouldn’t get all the blood off, but it was important to clean yourself when you could. Yui had told him that.
Sagiri was crying, to Gabimaru’s astonishment. She’d been watching him through the reflection in her blade, like she did sometimes. He’d wondered why she did that. And the man next to her…
That Asaemon was looking down at Gabimaru with disgust. The redhead with an eyepatch. He had moved to stand between Sagiri and the shinobi - a protective affection, but also utterly condescending to Gabimaru’s eyes. Gabimaru looked Eizen straight in his remaining eye. This man was blind to half the world, blind to Gabimaru’s life and history, blind to the strength of the woman he instinctively guarded like she was a child. He thought the ideal death was a single perfect cut, somehow removed from the brutality of violence.
“What a brutal display.” Eizen didn’t blink.
“Would you like it better if I made it pretty, instead?” Gabimaru didn’t either.
They held eye contact the whole time Gabimaru walked back to the shallows, until the shinobi began washing his face, while Aoki announced - a bit nervously - that the selection was over. At that point, Eizen noticed Sagiri wiping her eyes. “Are you all right? I knew that this was too much for you.”
“No.” Sagiri shook her head, surprising Eizen with the determination on her face.
“No. It is exactly what I needed to see. I will be the one to cut that man down.”
And Gabimaru felt a bit of a shock, recognized the threat, but he just had to smile a little bit at that. Because she corrected that arrogant redhead. And because he was not going to die on this mission. But if any of the Asaemon could kill him…it would be her.
—
When a man just under 5 feet tall reduces a dozen-plus opponents to shark chow in under twenty seconds, it’s going to occupy your attention. Everyone had eyes on Gabimaru the Hollow. But it was Yamada Asaemon Tesshin who identified the real final victor in the convict selection battle.
“Lord Aoki!” The scarred lord noticed the Asaemon, and where the Asaemon was pointing. “The courtesan.”
Akaginu, the Cannibal Courtesan, fell over, her face staring up at the sky, still beautiful and quite dead. Blood ran out of her mouth from where her tongue had been bitten, and the blunt piece of stone jutted out of the right side of her skull. It was too dull to be a proper knife, but the temple is one of the weakest points in the skull. Weak enough for a desperate man to punch through with a somewhat-pointy rock and enough adrenaline. She lay there as the swindler sat up, spitting blood out of his mouth and shaking the sand out of his blonde hair.
Now, the swindler thought, getting his bearings, I just need to not draw any more atten-
“NOOO!” the goateed ronin cried. “You killed Nice Rack Lady!”
The swindler backed away from the much taller man. “Hey, she started it! I was trying to play dead!”
“Don’t matter,” the bandit king chimed in. Choubei looked the swindler up and down like he was examining a bug to squish. “Liked her face, don’t like yours. On the island, you’re the first one I’m killing.”
“Are you for real ? She was trying to throttle me!”
“Too bad. I was looking forward to getting to know her better. You’re dead meat.”
The ronin nodded along. “Indeed. For the crime of removing such beauty from the world, you have to be punished first. Bandit man!” He pointed a finger at Choubei. “I’ll race you! First to cut this scoundrel down wins!”
“Heh! You’re on, mustache!”
The swindler groaned. So much for avoiding attention.
Meanwhile, Lord Aoki grunted, nodding at Tesshin before turning to correct the secretaries taking note behind him. “Thank you, Asaemon. Correct the records! It appears that the cannibal courtesan will not be joining the expedition after all.” A quick exchange of nods with the shogun, and he turned to the assembled criminals. “ You shall be our expedition party! ”
“And we’re down to the red seals, two fraudsters, and a mountain boy,” Genji muttered to Tesshin under his breath. “Nearly called it.”
“ Aza Choubei, Bandit King of Iyo! ”
“Your instincts were correct, Genji.” Tesshin nodded, looking straight forward, and pointedly not at the gore by their feet. “The red seal criminals are certainly a cut above.”
“ The Sword Dragon, Tamiya Gantetsusai! ”
“Still, it is no harm to the mission if they are complemented by a few others who showed great talent just now,” Tesshin continued.
Genji stifled a sarcastic laugh. “Harm to the mission ?”
“ Warped Keiun, Hunter of a Hundred! ”
“Look at these poor bastards on the ground. It did a lot of harm to them . We’re Asaemon. We’re supposed to bring a quick and painless end to criminals. This? This wasn’t it.”
Tesshin couldn’t reply.
“ Nurugai of the Sanka! ”
“I know, I know. Samurai must obey. And I always will.” Genji growled, looking away. “But a samurai obeys orders they don’t like, and I don’t have to like this.”
Tesshin also looked away. He knew the price of disobedience.
Wait…was the Hollow looking at him?
“ The Prayer for Murder, Hourubou! ”
Gabimaru and Tesshin locked eyes for a second. Like his sensei, Tesshin had taken the time to study each of the profiles. He knew that the infamous assassin had been captured with assistance from Iwagakure; the ninja must have disobeyed his superiors too. And that disobedience had led to a death sentence and a suicide mission.
For a moment, Tesshin sympathized with the criminal. He too had to understand the price of disobedience. They’d both learned hard lessons in that regard.
“ The runaway shinobi, Gabimaru the Hollow! ”
For his part, Gabimaru only scanned Tesshin. Good technique, clearly well trained, but he had an…uncertainty to his posture. A lack of the weight possessed by the more experienced Asaemon - and Sagiri. His movements got particularly tense around the older, blind Asaemon with lighter hair. Another moment of deliberation, and he mentally noted this one as “possible threat, less dangerous than Sagiri, better to evade”.
“ The Sixty-Thousand Ryo Swindler, Tenza! ”
Tenza squawked, his blonde bangs framing an indignant expression. “That’s my title? ‘The Sixty-Thousand Ryo Swindler’? Who came up with that?”
Gantetsusai laughed. “You’re right, that is a stupid title. Worry not! I’ll erase it after I kill you.”
“ The Kunoichi of Keishu, Yuzuriha! ”
Tenza massaged his temples. This was bad. He didn’t have enough information to form a good plan, he was outed as a known liar, and two of his rivals had it out for him from the start.
“ The Apostate, Moro Makiya!”
Form an alliance? Maybe with the kid, but she seemed standoffish. None of the stronger ones seemed like safe partners. Yuzuriha and Makiya were already whispering - there might be an opening there, but it was just as likely that opportunity was closed. Makiya wouldn’t be interested in someone else filling the “talk a lot of bullshit” job in any team of his.
“ The Giant of Bizen, Rokurota! ”
The swindler scanned the Asaemon. No, his best bet was using one of the executioners to his ends. Earning their confidence wouldn’t be easy; they’d suspect anything he said from the start. No, he’d have to be careful. No quick cons; play for the long game.
In a race with nine other criminals. The long game. Right. This was gonna suck. So bad.
“You ten will go on the expedition!” Aoki continued with his announcements. “And accompanying each of you, a Yamada Asaemon! You will soon board a ship…”
As the lord’s speech droned on about Shinsenkyo and how lucky they were to set foot on a promised land of Nirvana, Tenza the swindler made eye contact with Gabimaru the shinobi. The two men, who both knew what a setup looked like, had the same idea at the same time.
“You have nothing to fear!” Aoki’s voice boomed. “You will be setting foot on Paradise itself! No harm can befall you!”
Horseshit , they thought.