There was a large hat on her head and her eyes were staring directly at me. She had short, raven black hair and was wearing black clothes that seemed easy to move in.
Although she was only around 150 cm tall, the gauntlets on her arm, her leg guards and the dagger at her waist didn’t give the impression of a city girl.
The girl’s eyes were drawn to Ponta for a moment before looking back at me.
I remember those emotionless blue eyes from somewhere.
“Hmm…… I know you from somewhere but……”
“……Things seemed to have gone well in Diento.
The girl maintained eye contact as she spoke in a monotonous voice. The figure of a cat-eared ninja in the kidnapper’s base flashed in my mind.
“Oh, the ninja girl from the other day.”
Her eyebrows twitched in response to my unintentional utterance.
“Ninja…… so I didn’t mishear you last time.”
She raised her neck up as far as she could to look up at me as she quietly muttered to herself.
“I’d like to talk to you…… do you mind sparing some time for me?
When I nodded at her question, she looked at me with a serious expression before silently urging me into a less crowded alley, leaving me to obediently follow her.
She observed the surroundings and began to speak after calming down a little.
“Forgive me for the late introduction. My name is Chiome. I am a member of the Blade Heart Clan, one of the six shinobi clans.”
Though she gave a Japanese-style name──
“The Jin Shin clan?”
I unintentionally spoke the name I was unfamiliar with.
“‘Jin’ as in ‘Blade’ and ‘Shin’ stands for ‘heart’, and together they mean ‘Those who endure’.”¹
I couldn’t help but notice that the characters in the clan name formed the kanji for ‘Shinobi’.²
While I was in the middle of that realization, Chiome’s clear blue eyes stared back at me apparently prompting an introduction of my own.
In response to her prompting, I give her my name.
“I am the traveler Arc. For my own reasons I’m simply wandering around.”
“Is that so…… Well then Arc-dono, why did you call me a ninja?
I stared back at Chiome with sweaty palms as I try to come up with a suitable answer to her question.
She seemed to know the about the existence of ninjas but the word seemed to carry a different meaning for her.
“Hmm, in my home country we call those that dress like you were and conduct covert operations ‘Ninjas’.”
I watched her reaction to my answer.
Chiome closed her eyes and nodded in understanding at my answer.
“So that’s it…… The name “Ninja” has secretly been passed down through our clan for generations. For Arc-dono to know of it means that you must come from the same country as the first clan head.”
Apparently, only the Blade Heart Clan know of the word ‘Ninja’. Since the records were only kept by one clan, then there is no doubt that the man who taught it to them had come from the same world as I……
The clan head she spoke of either had to been Japanese like me, or someone from earth that knew about ninjas.
Though she had called him the first generation clan head──
“Could you perhaps…… tell me what the current generation is?”
“……Counting from the first generation the clan is now in the 22nd generation.
I hung my head at Chiome’s answer.
Though I was expecting some time to have passed, there is no way that the first clan head would be still alive after twenty-one generations.