My Name is Yukama and today I am 35 years old, and here as I kneel in a pool of my own blood dying thinking upon my past, i have only a few regrets…

That i did not kill them all, that i did not take revenge for my sensei and further than that prevented the death of Marika and her family for they were the only ones other than my teacher who cared.

This all started back when I was a Street Rat living in trash at the age of 7.

I had never known any family and I was universally hated by everyone by the orphanage and excluded from the group whenever families came to adopt.

My parents unknown i was left there since I was an infant, and the original caretaker of me who was a sweet old lady whom I cannot for the life of me remember the name of by now died of old age by the time I was past my toddlerhood.

The kids of the orphanage ostracized me for my white hair and the adults of the orphanage neglected me and gave me scraps and leftovers, in japan it is not all sunshine and rainbows as tourists are to believe, it is a very rigid and pressuring society.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered and hair colors outside of the norm for society, tattoos and other features are shunned and make you an outsider. Me who had good grades in elementary but in their eyes looked like a Onryo and was super creepy, was undesirable and should be ostracized in their eyes.

And so I quickly found myself at the age of 6 after enduring a few years of this neglect and tyranny on the streets to fend for myself, eventually finding an abandoned house to live in after walking to the outskirts of town, from there as my base of operation every day i would run into town and beg for change or rummage through garbage in the alleys or by the shops to find food or things to pawn off..

But all of that changed when one day I was abducted off the street by masked men into a black van and knocked unconscious as I did my daily routine, that is looking for food and treasure among the dumpsters of the alleyways in town after exiting my hideout on the outskirts of the city.

They snatched me up off the street as I was crossing the road at night about to head back to base, put a black bag over my head, strapped me to a chair and stuck me with something in my neck, then i passed out and everything faded to darkness..

The next thing I knew when I woke up was I had been tied to a chair in a large open area indoors, my head was no longer covered and i was facing the ceiling which was high above me.

As i looked around I found myself likely inside a warehouse in darkness surrounded by many others like myself and probably around my age lined next to me tied to their own chairs with rope seated against their will, some were screaming in rage demanding to be let free, threatening the perpetrators who had yet to reveal themselves, some were crying, some were silent and confused about what was going on, it was pandemonium.

Then the lights turned on and a group of masked people appeared before us all on a stage in front of us. This is where our hell began and was as well the day i met my savior, the only light in the hell that is this place.

My Teacher, no my master and my father, who taught me everything from the Arts of the Kurokami School of ninjutsu to how to read and do mathematics to how to counter modern day technology and surveillance, basically who taught me everything i know and shaped me to be the man I am today, and also the man who unleashed on me the most hellish training out of the entire program, was standing there on stage lined up among the crowd, his name was Jiro… This was the day I met him, and the day our hell began.

The reality of the situation we were all in I learned later was actually quite simple, the Inagawa Family ruler of the international Crime Syndicate we were about to become apart of, wanted tools to assassinate and sabotage their enemies in this modern world.

So they searched hard and found the remnants of an ancient shinobi clan within japan that had adapted to the modern day, and decided to try and employ them whether by force or otherwise, along with other external experts to raise within a decade from a lot of 150 children the best assassins the criminal world had.

Their Goal was 25 Top Tier Assassins, the rest of the children could either die or become lower level underlings as they were third rate trash for all they cared.

I was ranked 3rd despite all of mine and Sensei's efforts.

You see although I tried hard and my best, simply put my talent was mediocre compared to the top two, #1 Ashina and #2 Karasuka

Although i did have one thing they did not entirely have at their disposal at the beginning, indomitable will.

During my first trainings in my batch of students it was Sensei who saw that in me and chose me out of the lot of children he was already teaching earnestly, I desperately wanted to get out of this, to get stronger and change my fate, to be given a chance and to live freely without worrying of hunger or money and to prove myself, he saw this in me and tested my courage by making me take my first life, and when i succeeded although hurling the Prison quality food they had been feeding us he decided then and there to foster me to become his successor, and maybe even escape this organization and continue the lineage, as he was one of the few who were here by force to teach us..

He never explained to me the circumstances of how they were forcing him to do this, but he had broken many rules in order to foster me as his successor, way beyond the things they deemed un-allowed like pulling me to the side at times outside of their reach of surveillance to have private conversation or giving me private lessons and picking favorites as he was holding back on teaching my batchmates everything.

Which i should mention at the same time lessened their odds of killing me and made the gap between me and them wider, although the training he gave was 10x worse and the brutality of it when looking back once i was free and exposed further to the real world was not something children are supposed to go through I cannot complain.

Although my batchmates and everyone else were still under quite the level of brutal training which was progressing in intensity as they got older and smarter he quite literally tortured me physically and sometimes mentally every day to hone me into something stronger.

And yet despite breaking many rules more than this to add to all of those I mentioned before as he was the oldest teacher of the shinobi clan and id say probably the most cunning he somehow got away with many of them, but a few he did not as they raised suspicion of him and led to our demise.

It was at the end of our grueling education and training that left us bloodied and bruised at the end of every day, although for me the training was much worse that what he did finally caught up to him, and they were on the verge of knowing just the level of sheer sabotage he was doing not only to the program but to the organization itself, but he had one last trick up his sleeve to make sure I would live through his mistakes, a plant.

On the day we turn 17, we the top 25 were to travel across the world in the countries of influence of the Syndicate in cells along with some of the failures who ranked below us, deemed third rate and wait for assassination orders.

I was lucky in that mine was the smallest cell, which made it special along with the fact that our handler was my Sensei's plant, we had only 4 people other than the additional handful in our tail during transport which made it easier for us to kill them all and escape, plus not to mention me and my no named handler were unknowingly to them together in attempting to escape the organization's grasp so we could use that to our advantage if need be.

The plan was simple, my sensei leaked the information of our location, thanks to the information from my handler on our route to where we would be in the middle of transport to our cell area of operation in Western Russia.

A rival syndicate would then learn this from him in order for them to ambush us and hit us hard, In the confusion the handler and i would act like we were killed and fake our deaths to summarize everything in a nutshell and then escape back to Asia somewhere and live off the savings sensei had for us, and unlike the handler what i would do is continue Sensei's teachings and lineage of his division of martial arts of the clan along with whatever else I had learned in the program if I so chose, the only problem is that everything went horribly wrong…

You see what we did not anticipate is that there would be an syndicate tail beyond the one we knew on our transport, so while yes the two third rate trashes died along with our immediate tail and the plan went off without a hitch of us faking our deaths, we didn't exactly succeed to fake them as the extra tail knew we lived and escaped after they started calling reinforcements and began killing the Attackers, we were caught red handed.

And although they could not catch up to us and we escaped this immediately sent alarms to the heads of the Inagawa Family, who then promptly found out of my Senseis involvement and sale of information somehow along with his other traitorous acts, he was supposed to find his own way out and I believed in his ability, but they got him before he could do anything and forced him to commit Harakiri for his Traitorous deeds.

Suddenly everything came crashing down, they were putting a bounty on our heads while scrambling more Agents to find and capture or kill us and we had to run and try to hide our traces the best we can, the issue with that is our enemies from the organization were put under similar training and knew how we operated.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

We ran across Russia, a cat and mouse game where the outcome is death either way, maybe with a little bit of torture beforehand.

The bit about my Sensei's death only was found out by me later, and when I found out I was stricken with grief, because although he gave me the most brutal training out of all of the Candidates, he unlike the others had a sense of compassion and acted like the father I never had, and fought for my well being and wished to like me, escape the syndicates clutches and influence..

I don't remember how many attacks we faced, how little rest we had, it truly was a cat and mouse game, the amount of losses I incurred to the organization must have been in the hundreds, if not the thousands in my journey to find freedom, me and my handler split up when we reached Mongolia after crossing the southern Russian border, i never saw him again.. And after that...

For a decade I ran throughout Asia and Europe, escaping both the authorities and my pursuers, i had killed many lower rankers from the program, surprisingly not once had they ever sent the top two against me.

By the time I was 28, i was feared and gained much notoriety in the underworld, and they also had at least at the time it was what i thought, decided to cut their losses and stopped sending people after me, i did occasionally have the displeasure of dumb bounty hunters trying to kill me in rare cases where i didn't hide my tracks well enough, but that was at that point from all the battle experience i had easy winnings.

I kind of was stricken and guided by my emotions back then, and didn't use what I was taught effectively, i kept slipping up and a CCTV camera would catch me or something, bounty hunters would try to come after me, and a gunfight would ensure attracting authorities and making it so I had to run again, on repeat for ages...

At least compared to the time the syndicate was after me this was easier, as they knew part of my training and could trace me by using the methods we were taught against me much easier, it honestly took years for me to figure out on my own how to make it harder for them to do this...

It was then soon after I found out about Sensei's death and his whereabouts, and for almost a month I stayed in one place, risking my life immensely doing so from all of the heat that was coming down on me from the bounty hunters looking for me as I had slipped up again, stricken with grief and eating almost nothing...

I then had a change of heart..

I eventually found myself bored of the vagabond life of going from town to town in a rush due to constantly being hunted and thought that I had seen enough of the world, in the years that followed I curbed my paranoia little by little, stopped training and honing my skills, hid my tracks well enough and eventually settled in a quiet little village in Cambodia near the jungle.

This was a great place to hide honestly in my opinion at the time, it was close to the jungle so I could survive out there and even cross the border into Vietnam to escape if I wanted to, the country had corrupt officials so if need be I could do a bribe here or there to stay out of trouble and get myself certain benefits, and while yes we had shoddy electricity here with my purchase of solar panels and a backup generator for my concrete home i had built discreetly with my savings things were going great.

I spent my days until now in peace without fear of when was the next time I would need to eat or who was after me trying to kill or capture me, i had even got myself some satellite dishes and a Gaming Computer along with a TV and got myself Satellite Internet and Cable to entertain myself with something other than good old fashioned books i went to buy from a bookstore in town that sometimes had imported literature and a decent foreign section.

I soon lost myself in the world of Cyberpunk Dystopian and Post Apocalyptic video games like Fallout, Cyberpunk 2077 and others as those genres became my favorites strangely along with Animated Cartoons from either my home country of japan and whatever other things I could find, and because of my skillset of knowing most major languages on earth I wouldn't need subtitles or translation for any foreign media I watched,.

I had my own little garden along with chickens I used to be self sufficient too so i would not have to go into town that much and risk exposure other than the occasional groceries and books, and I played video games with my neighbor Nuangs daughter Marika who seemed for some reason super interested in me no matter what all the damn time, the annoying rascal that she was.

Occasionally I would help my neighbors family in tending to their crops along with my own and with some other miscellaneous tasks, we all knew each other, all of us in the houses and plots next to each other, Nuangs wife made a mean Stir Fry I must say though as we spent many times eating dinner together, truly they were a kind family...

I built a local reputation in the village as the well off bachelor uncle who helped out sometimes but mostly kept to himself, with my scars and scary demeanor contrasting with my kind actions I had around the place, most people just attributed it to me having fought in a war or something I bet.

My Neighbors Kid Marika was always annoying me about letting her play the more violent games on my computer too, maybe I could have seen her smile more if I had let her yet I always told her no, heh well now those happy days are gone and its all my fault…

These people never deserved all of this..

Here I am now on my 35th birthday sitting here with a poisoned knife in my gut, my flesh pierced by a dozen or more bullets from rifles, Marika Dead in front of me with my empty M92 in my hand and the village burning around me and the people being slaughtered.

Seeing my Dead Neighbors Daughter Lying before me while surrounded by the dogs of the syndicate, slowly slipping away, more than the great sadness I feel, I feel anger and revulsion more than anything, revulsion at myself for not taking it a step further after they seemed to have stopped, revulsion for not taking revenge for my Sensei's death, Revulsion at myself for not taking the head off of the shoulders of the Inagawa family Patriarch and instead deciding to immerse myself in this false peace putting all of these innocent villagers lives at risk by coming here.

Ashina that vile bitch loomed over me with Karasuka behind me while I knelt, taunting me of my foolishness and detailing how much joy she had when they finally killed my Sensei after torturing him..

Her Rambling then went to how it was a pity she couldn't torture me in the end..

But all of that I ignored, my life flashing before my eyes in my final moments, what kept coming up was my Sensei's Face, and the moments that led to this...

I thought back to when the end began...

The gunfire started popping off as i was sitting in my bedroom having just finished downloading some cheat mods for Cyberpunk 2077 in order to break the limits of stat distribution and add some extra content for my next playthrough choosing to go down a Corpo path.

Just as quickly as i heard the shots it startled me and in instinct I quickly grabbed my stashed Silenced M92 Beretta Handgun and Combat Knife from under my desk that I taped there and in that moment I panicked which was something every bit of my training and what I went through told me not to do..

In my panic I rushed out of the front door seemingly to me in slow motion to take a look and see what on earth was happening outside even though from the clear gunfire it was obvious what was happening, in all of these years I truly had gone soft, it was foolish looking back at that decision as well..

I turned looking at the slaughter around me, men in black tactical gear surrounding the place, with surplus Soviet Heavy machine guns and assault rifles, shooting right through the villagers homes and at anything that moves, throwing Napalm Grenades and burning the homes and whatever in the way to a crisp, it was a massacre…

All I could think to myself in that moment was

'I gotta find Marika and her family, they must be saved!'

I was really fucking stupid, but i had gotten attached and cared about them, despite when i first came here i knew that his was a possibility although slim.

I dashed to my neighbors yard to find him dead sprawled on the ground with a bullet in his head, Ashina the #1 looming over behind him with a Glock in her hand and a tanto with some green liquid slathered all on its blade in the other, I'm assuming poison, her long black ponytail floating in the wind, clad in a black jumpsuit and battle gear, headset and all.

Ashina was very sadistic, she took pleasure in killing people, and had great talent for murder as it seemed the only emotion she felt was pleasure from the suffering of others, to put it simply a talented psychopath who probably had the biggest body count of fellow candidates during our training.

As she turns her head to my movement she notices me almost instantly and in my shock taking it all in managed to quickly throw the poisoned knife at me and began to sprint to cover, likely seeing the M92 handgun in my hand, I couldn't dodge fast enough and got it the right of my abdomen, I truly was getting rusty wasn't I?

With no antidote or supplies to make a general one to counteract the common ones the syndicate uses I'm a goner, the antidotes i did have expired awhile ago and I never bothered to make some new ones, and I don't even know what poison she put on it as there are many that are green. However now that the number 1 is here this all makes sense, THEY found me, this is all my fault, I had gone soft and attached in their appeared laxing of effort on me and they got me when I had my guard down those fucking bastards!

I Moved my M92 towards her soon after registering this, I was luckily only in a daze for around a dozen seconds, I fired in quick succession, the 9mm +P projectiles missing by hairs breaths as she ran across the courtyard to cover, in the process of this I saw she hit the panic button on her radio setup and reinforcements are likely coming now that they know where I am thanks to her, I have to hide Marika or make a break for the jungle! Although it is just a chance I can save her I must try, I know I can't live through the battle this time but maybe she can!

I Grazed that vile bitches shoulder as she reached cover behind one of the stone fences of the courtyard, my 9mm bullets doing nothing to her, I needed to move fast, preferably inside the house to grab Marika and make a break for it outside of their encirclement quickly into the jungle.

While I may have had let my guard down so badly that I forgot to grab my bug out bag, I could still teach her a little bit on survival before the poison finally got me hopefully and show her to one of the handful of caches I hid in the jungle filled with emergency supplies and weapons and die on my terms.

I rushed for the house door while simultaneously jumping over my dead neighbor Nuangs body, and firing another part of the extended baseplate magazine in my handgun at Ashinas Position behind the low stone courtyard boundary as I moved to pin her down.

I got into the hallway and quickly ejected my magazine in practiced motion checking my bullets left.

I only had 5 bullets left in this magazine now, plus the one chambered. "I better make it count."

I quickly put the mag back into the gun and rushed through the house clearing the rooms as I went quickly, moving my way to Marika’s room.

All while keeping an eye out for an angle of attack Ashina may use I found ducking under a few bullets through exposed windows at one time even, but i finally reached her room and when I entered I found something that broke me just as bad as News of my Sensei's Death.

There was Marika and her mother lying seemingly dead in the room pierced by gunfire through the walls, I came over dropped my knife and scooped her up, trying to feel for a pulse quickly.

Luckily she had one but it was faint, and loosing alot of blood like this would not help.

Her breathing was light but unlike her, her mothers chest wasn't rising at all so she was likely dead and I couldn't waste time on her, I tore off a piece of my shirt and quickly wrapped it around the most dangerous bleeds, her mom was surely dead already just comparing the blood pooled on the floor from her other than the blood pool from Marika if her lack of breathing wasn't enough evidence, I had to get us out of here to get to one of my cache’s and patch us up!

I took her in my hands and rushed out of the window, which was already partially broken from the heavy machine gun fire reigning down on the village indiscriminately , it seems they already went over this side so they shifted their fire, it was pure dumb luck that they hadn't gotten my home and shot me up through the walls, either that or it was planned and they somehow knew which house was mine…

I got up on my legs after crashing through the window only to find myself surrounded on all sides by the Organizations dogs, weapons trained on me, there were too many for me to get out of this one, and no routes of escape other than the way i came which they quickly blocked off, even if its going through the motions i will not be going down without a fight!! I needed to save Marika!

I quickly lifted my gun and fired 4 shots at the heads of the masked men trying to close our path of escape by coming to block the window and i did indeed hit my mark, but in vain only for the men around us to fire on us indiscriminately with their Kalashnikov Assault Rifles, i was quickly turned into swiss cheese, and some bullets went right though me into Marika, snuffing out her life immediately and leaving only a few minutes for me..

Then came that stupid bitch Ashina along with Karasuka walking over as the death squad around me perceived my threat gone and lowered their weapons, With my life flashing before my eyes along with my last moments before all of this as I sat there in a pool of my own blood with Marika ahead of me, breathing my last breaths I felt such unbridled rage at my situation and stupidity.

I could have done so much more, this is all because of me.

So to spite her i got one last good look at Ashina's face as she was rambling on during her monologue about how it was a pity they couldn't torture me some before my death, and other nonsense only a crazy sadistic bitch like her could come up with. I spat the blood pooling in my mouth at her, getting it on her jumpsuit and combat boots.

"GO FUCK YOURSELF!" I said.

It was then in my last throes before death just after I had did that, as I was kneeling down about to fall over and finally embrace the sweet release of death on my own terms and hope that they wouldn't speed it up and just let me lie there peacefully, I felt the coldness of a handgun barrel pressing against the back of my head which was likely Karasuka and then for a split of a second heard a gunshot...

And then nothing….

I felt nothing but coldness, everything was dark, I couldn't feel my body, I couldn't breathe, I just sat in this perceived void for I don't know how long freezing…

And then I slowly felt warmth, my sense of touch and other senses slowly came back to me, I started to try to move a bit...

I breathed once more…

To be continued…