A Kazemaru with head covered in mud seeks out her parents. She's been trained to become a shinobi since she was five. Family, loyalty, freedom, future, she has no clear awareness of any of it at that age. She just grits her teeth and endures training too ruthless in some measures for a child, and in her wide eyes gleams light—she wants to be what her strongest senpais are, reach the top, offer her loyalty to the lord. But she doesn't know what 'offer her loyalty' means. She just knows it's an honor, it's what her parents and herself want to do, so she has to do it. A Kazemaru no longer cleaning the mud from her head again seeks out the young lord. She has become the lord's shinobi. Her hair is bound beneath her hat, her nails orderly trimmed, and missions arrive secretly one after another from the bamboo tubes into her hands. Kazemaru pulls out the scroll inside, and silently looks over. The name she has no recognition of written at the top of that scroll is about to silently lose everything he originally possessed, all before a single fowl is startled. 'Well done.' So the lord often commends her, but while in hiding, she hears a mother in another courtyard scolding her crying child: 'Keep crying, and the people in black will take you away!' The young lord looks at his employee whose head is covered in mud. She changes out of the black bodysuit, and will no longer receives scrolls in bamboo tubes. The old lord has passed, and Kazemaru has a new outfit. The meeting room isn't secret, but it's cramped and inaccessible; contracts fly back and forth in the open, but it's all too smooth and steady. As the days wear on, Kazemaru flexes her stiffened spine at her office desk, joints chafing with a 'krrk,' and the last time she heard that noise, it was like a hidden weapon scraped at her bones. She doesn't like sitting, nor becoming one of the 'people in black' which that mother had tried to spook her child with. This isn't what she's meant to do. This isn't what she likes to do. She wants to do actual good work. She doesn't want to neglect her skills like this. She wants a new way out, but she still hasn't found the full resolve to take the step. The young lord reaches out, brushes away the grime caking Kazemaru's pale hair, and hands her a contract termination, along with a business card for Rhodes Island. One time when returning from work, an unsteady flowerpot was blown into the air, crumbs of soil and leaf fragments flying out to form a graceful arc, and the planter compacted with soil plummeted down and crashed straight onto Kazemaru's head. Head covered in soil and ceramic chips, Kazemaru was struck awake—she needed to leave. She had to leave.