What’s up with the Shinobi?
The Dragonblood Village was not a ninja village.
It wasn’t a massive city like Naruto’s Konohagakure, it was an actual village – a subsistence-level farming community where the people struggled to grow food from infertile land. These people were too busy fighting the land and its wild beasts to support a trained military force like Konoha’s shinobi corps.
It couldn’t have even been like a ninja village from the real world, or else the Shinobi and other trained members of the village would have been serving as spies and mercenaries for King Medius or some other powerful figure. But the King and his people would rather destroy the Dragonblood Clan than make use of them, and it’s only after the destruction of Dragonblood Village that any clansmen venture to the city to become mercenary adventurers.
By all appearances, the Dragonblood Village just wanted to live and let live, focused more on merely surviving the hostile environment of their home and trading with their few neighbors rather than interacting with any of the kingdoms.
It does still make sense that someone like the Shinobi would exist. The Dragonblood Clan know their enemies would like to destroy them, and the Divine Family likely attempted attacks in the past. The power granted by Atruum’s blood wouldn’t always be enough, so it makes sense the community would permit some of their own to focus entirely on training for combat rather than farming the land, with the community providing them food in return for protection.
So the Shinobi was born to one of the village’s previous guardians, and he and his friend were trained from birth in the arts of stealth and combat, so that they could one day take over as the sentinels watching over their people.
What makes less sense is why his friend would be considered a “nukenin” for running away to Marlayus, and then hunted down and forced to return.
As I understand it, the primary threat a “runaway ninja” posed to a ninja village was exposing their existence and giving up all of their secrets. But what secrets would a poor farming village have? The village’s enemies knew exactly where it was.
It just seems like a waste of time and energy hunting down a trained ninja who doesn’t want to serve the village anymore. How is capturing him and dragging him back supposed to change his mind? They can’t spare the resources to imprison him, and they can’t trust him to not run away again, and clearly they didn’t intend to kill him since the Shinobi was bringing him back alive when the village was attacked.
Oh, and I think someone over at TVTropes supposes that the Shinobi and his friend were trained by the branch of the Dragonblood Clan in Marlayus, but that doesn’t make any sense either. If the two branches had so much contact with each other, why would anyone care that much if his friend ran away from one to join the other?
Indeed, the Shinobi’s friend running away to that specific country seems to me to be the only hint we have that anyone in the Dragonblood Village knew anything about the existence of the Marlayus Dragonblood branch.