"Did your father raise you on wielding that blade? Perhaps a late relative?

"...Well?"

A delicate beauty turns partially, her back twisting and stretching to field this demand, this man's question.  Select caramel brown strands of hair obscure his view of her face, and she's grateful for the distraction hiding her velvet green eyes' sharp, silent glare.  Comfortable in the weighty silence, she swallows the small sip of tea she'd taken amidst the formation of that question, casually contemplating her answer as her small teacup falls chaperoned into her lap, cradled by fine, porcelain-skinned hands.  She's perfectly content to sit there, staring at the insolent man, contemplating how to answer, or if she should indeed answer at all.

Yet this era affords her little option.  Though worlds apart from it herself (as she suspects he is as well), society beckons her answer.  She shakes her head, a brief, small, indignant motion, barely lifting that soft brown ponytail with its notion.

"No. I was not raised by men."

"Can you take him out?"

She answers in action.  Enshrouded in the shadowy confines looming behind the building, she bypasses her comrade, silently encroaching upon the guard.  Her last step marks the fluid draw of steel, angled slightly to the left on the guard's back, directly beneath his heart.  If the guard heard the unsheathing of her well-preserved katana, it was far too late, as the unsheathing itself pierced his most life-giving flesh, marking him for dead.  Quick, painless.  Not a sound from him, even as he pitches forward, his expression forever frozen in shock.  She darts in front of him quickly, crouching to catch her cooling burden.  Blood drenches her kimono (quite an odd choice for the mission, but all she has), slicking her arms with sticky filth as she lays the dead weight down on the scummy, slimy boards of the docks.

As she rises again to her feet, her velvet green eyes pierce the shadows, scouting the visible perimeter for trouble potentially caused by her one fleeting moment of visibility.  Her entire body is tense, her ki silent as the grave, as if it's as nonexistent as the ex-man now in front of her once more, his crimson death puddle creeping outwards in a final show of mortality.  So, too, does finality drip unheeded from her sword, the small sound afforded in the rationale that it's soon swallowed and lost amongst the sounds of the waves caressing the shore, licking the wooden stilts of the docks, moistening barnacles on their borrowed homestead.

She pauses briefly, following her partner's movement onward with keen eyes.  With brief, all-too-graceful motion, she flicks the guard's drying blood from her sword in slight, expert torsion of her wrist.

A clean sword is a clean kill.

He was giving these blackened, soul-soiled men a chance to live.

It's a bit too much for her adrenaline-sponge of a mind to allow.  Breaking her stride, she leaps over the fallen, diving headfirst into the water, a hungry shark amongst minnows.  Soon, the water above and around her muddies, murky with thick crimson strains of life, now death.  She doesn't resurface until the scattered remnants of bodies do, having killed every henchman in the water with one breath.  Thus she treads, waiting for future targets tossed irrevocably to the dragon by her more pacifistic companion, or for any sign that he might need her aid.  Her beautiful kimono may, perhaps, be ruined, but in this faithless era, the knowledge of blood stain removal is more commonplace than the fish in the sea.  It might yet be saved.

It is, after all, a relic.

The battle complete, her companion joins her, standing over the edge of the dock, staring at the woman with fairly incredulous curiosity.

She shows absolutely no remorse in killing.

"You're quite the swordswoman.

"I've only come across a few...in my lifetime."  Very few women of this era and her age have dared desire to stand alone, to defend themselves.  It's an oddity, and something, odder still, that this man finds honorable.  Very honorable.

Beginning to shiver in the rapidly cooling confines of the now-polluted waters, she nods, a succinct motion.  She's still caught up in the heady scent of blood; recent history has witnessed her vomiting after such vividly blood-soaked scenes, a mark of her continuing frailty as a woman, but damn if she'd do it here in front of this man, a partner.  As he offers her his hand up onto the docks, she reaches to take it, letting him pull her up onto dry land.  She's really not thinking of much, her mind almost a complete blank at the moment, seeking to keep her all-too-small dinner down, fighting to calm her adrenaline-drenched nerves from the brief battle.

It'd be a bit of a stretch to say she loves the kill, but she loves the balanced iniquity and resulting justice found in it.