"Wake up Michiko." The cool response didn't have any malice in it, just disapproval from Kaken as he turned his one eye unto the blond genin. "This isn't a matter of killing someone to make a point. This is a matter that if left alive that man will become a threat to those around him. This is a matter that as a shinobi, as a weapon for your country, you will be forced to take a life and hesitance will only put the lives of your friends, comrades, family, and yourself in mortal danger. Grow up girl...what will you do if ordered to assassinate someone for no better reason then someone could afford the contract? What about if someone has a knife to Rio's throat? Would you endanger his life trying to save his attacker's own, someone who wouldn't hesitate a moment to end his or yours?"

Kaken hopped down from the back of the dead samurai's horse as Masaru charged after the one that the man had charged Michiko to slay. Masaru could feel something break under his knee but the man didn't look particularly flustered by the blow. Instead his bare blade swept across towards the black-robed genin, barely missing flesh as it went off in a wild arc that left him un-harmed.

"You are a ninja. It is inevitable that you'll have to take a life and I won't lie...it could seriously change you for the worse or give you nightmares for your entire life. Some of my oldest friends wake up screaming because of things they've seen, and that's why I was trying to help you." Kaken's voice changed from the one of subtle disappointment. It was soft, subdued unlike many other things about the man, and it all but forced a person to listen and at least consider. Honeyed words that came from a sorrowful looking man.

"To take somebody who was a threat, somebody who needed to be disposed off, and present him to you for this first time. To make it easy. To make it so your first time killing another thinking feeling human being didn't leave you an emotionless husk of a person. But no, you want to save him at the expense of others even though he was partially responsible for the imprisonment of one of your fellow ninja. Don't take the moral high ground with me Michiko...I want to save lives too but I know how to do it better then you, who have probably never even left your village or seen how the world works. So before you call me a killer again think this first...'Do I save more lives by saving him or do I end more by letting him go?' Once your able to answer that, without mistake, then you can take the same philosophy as Keimatsu, a jounin who has had to ask himself that question every day of his life, with every opponent he has fought, until it became second nature to him. Not the adopted attitude of a spoiled girl who refuses to see the larger picture and do the right thing because it'll get her hands bloodied." Again there was a subtle shift in tone from soft cajoling to persuade someone to his line of thinking, to a slowly growing irritation mixed with the disappointment from before. Kaken stared unblinkingly at Michiko after he finished, lips in a tight line, as he crossed his arms over his chest. Wherever he had gone...the joking man from the previous night was gone and a much more solemn individual who looked to have born the weight of the world stood in his place.