[x] North-West, to the sacred mountains and forests, where you'll pick up the abbot of a monastery you've never heard of.
It takes you a few days to reach the old capital by boat. Civilization waxes and wanes as you travel upstream - only Amegakure and the regional capitals have lights which blaze all through the night, but a river is a river is a river. There's always people living on the banks.
Even if, right now, you can't see them.
"Why are we keeping watch?" Yuma asks you as you stare out into the black.
"Bad habits kill good ninja," you reply. "If you're outside of the city, even if there's no war, you set a night watch. Every time."
Yuma grunts in acknowledgement. "So do we just sit until it's Akira's turn?"
"We can talk, if you like," you say. "But quietly."
Neither of you says anything for a while. Overhead you see the stars, brilliant in a way they never are in the village. It's vaguely unsettling: like there's a vast empty space above you, and the world might just tip over and send you falling into it.
Eventually he comes up with something to say. "How does this mission make us better ninja?"
"You mean, a better fighter?"
"Yeah."
You think about it. "It doesn't, really," you say. "But it teaches you skills you need. Understanding the country, interacting with people. That's not nothing."
"Aren't fighting skills what matter?" he asks. You look at him. Brown hair. Pale, freckled skin. A normal kid, except for all the talent and dead parents.
"Eh," you reply.
"Eh?" he asks, affronted.
"You need to be a fighter, but you also need to know when to be a fighter. Awareness, leadership, that kind of thing." Of course, you're the worst person to be making this argument. You dangle your arms off the side of the boat, but can't quite reach the water. "That can't be learned in a training ground."
"Aren't ninja supposed to be soldiers?"
"And this is what soldiers do when there's no war. Besides, do you think being a soldier means you just follow orders?" You snort. "That sort of soldier died in the second war, and chakra doesn't change that. Ninja can't afford to be stupid." Yuma couldn't afford to be stupid.
Yuma's lips thin. "Isn't that what being strong is, though?" He scowls, staring down at the black waters. "Someone who's strong can be stupid, or mean, or whatever they like. And ninja are strong."
He's not wrong, you think. You wonder if there's a story there. Yuma has by far the most civilian background of your team, and the least stable. Your mother isn't a high-ranked shinobi, but she was there, even if your father wasn't, and you grew up in Amegakure knowing what profession you'd join. Takashi might have had different expectations, but he's still from a chakra using clan. And of course, the battlefield is in Akira's blood. "Is that what kind of person you want to be, when you're strong?" you ask.
Yuma flinches like you slapped him, and says nothing. You listen to the waves lapping against the boat.
"It's not a bad thing, to want to be strong," you tell him, once his mood seems to shift into something unspoken and unhealthy. "And you're right. Most missions don't make you stronger. For now, it's my job to do that. Eventually, it's going to be yours."
He hums tonelessly. Not happy, but no longer upset. You spend the rest of the night talking about more trivial things.
~
You don't stay in the old capital long. There's really only one thing to do, anyway.
"Why is it empty?" Takashi asks. It's a fair question. Space isn't at a premium in quite the same way as in Amegakure, but it's quite a bit of land to go unoccupied.
Akira's face is serious as he answers in your stead. "Because the poison's still there."
The palace district of the Daimyo of Rain lies scattered before you, like the bare bones of a long-rotten corpse. The Salamander's sacrilege. Even now, Hanzo's toxins rest in the dirt, warding off the quickly spreading city to its south. No animal lives there. Few plants grow. He'd gone to the Daimyo a beggar - or so the story goes. Bare-handed and servile, Hanzo had gone, to beseech the Lord of Rain for more funds to fight a war that Rain was losing. But he'd been denied. Politely or rudely, totally or only in part, nobody could say. Only Hanzo had walked out of that grave, and he'd emerged to speak of what would be.
Not what no longer was.
~
A few more days along the roads, with all the attendant frustrations of trying to teach field camping techniques to city-raised genin, and you arrive at the village. The villagers look at you like you're something otherworldly. By their standards, you suppose you are. It's quite possible a jonin has never visited this community nestled in the foothills of the northern mountains. With how isolated it is, even chunin might be things of more rumor than substance to these people. Behind you, your genin are unsettled by the quiet whispers and nervous second glances. You've already told them in no uncertain terms that however they act reflects on you and, in turn, on Amegakure, but there's really nothing you could have said to prepare them for the distance between the freshest genin in Rain's service and the most respected elder out here in the periphery.
You could wipe this village off the map, and nobody here could stop you. Maybe you'd even get away with it.
A man old enough to be your father makes his way towards you, his face somewhere between terrified, desperate and determined. The client, probably. His clothes are on the finer side for a village like this, and it would have taken some amount of pull to have a missing person case rise to the attention of Amegakure.
"Mr. Sato," you greet calmly, and watch as his face twists through some complicated dance of emotions.
"Honoured shinobi," he returns, bowing low. Behind you, your genin shuffle their feet as they fail to mimic your bland professionalism.
"You've called for aid, and Amegakure has answered," you recite. "What is it you require?"
The apple of his throat bobs as he composes himself. Around you, not close enough to crowd but definitely near enough to hear, other villagers watch one of their leaders shiver in front of you. "My- my son," he replies. "He went up into the mountains, and-"
Never returned. You resist the urge to sigh. It took you nearly a week to reach this village. The request must have been sent a month ago or more, to work up from local efforts, through the magistrates, to Amegakure. Where you picked it up because it was conveniently placed, not because it was marked high priority. The odds of his son being alive aren't particularly good. You wonder if it would've been more merciful for Mr. Sato's prayers to have never been answered.
You offer him a reassuring smile that doesn't reach your eyes. "Let's take this inside, shall we?"
Mr. Sato can only nod.
~
It's the work of a few minutes for Mr. Sato to offer what hospitality he has. No wife or daughter appears to pour the tea, and you detect no other presences, so you suspect he's a widower and lives alone. Which might explain why he was desperate enough to push his son's case past the point of reason. After offering some sincerely rote compliments, you get straight to the point.
"Mr. Sato, the odds of your son being alive are slim." You try and say it as compassionately as possible. Not very, given the subject matter, but it could be worse.
He folds a bit like paper in damp weather. "I- am aware, Sir Kitagawa."
"The way I see it, we have a few options," you continue. "The first is that we continue to treat this as a missing person case. Due to how delayed Amegakure's response was and the attendant reduction in the odds of success, the cost will be diminished. It's entirely possible we will not find your son, particularly if he is no longer living." You pause for a moment. "My skills make me very effective at locating living targets. This is not the case for the dead. Nevertheless, we can make the attempt."
Mr. Sato nods morosely.
"Second." You raise another finger. "We cancel this mission. There will be no further cost to you, beyond quartering us for a night."
He spasms, slightly. Mr. Sato truly loves (loved?) his son, you think, if the suggestion that he give up hurts him so much. Or maybe it's a civilian fixation. Ninja are much more used to unrecoverable bodies, even with much better reason to make sure they're accounted for.
"Third." You pause, for a moment, hesitant to broach the subject weighing on your mind. "We treat this as a murder investigation."
Now he startles, looking at you with shocked brown eyes. "Is- was my son murdered?" he whispers.
You suppress your habitual shrug and meet his watery stare dead-on. Mr. Sato flinches away. "I don't know. It's still possible, if unlikely, that your son is alive and in position to be found. Of the possibilities where that isn't true, only some of them are from a human cause."
"And the- investigation?"
"We would focus more on questioning potential suspects. I am not an interrogator by trade," you say, "but I do have some advantages to bring to bear."
The small room Mr. Sato was hosting you in is silent as the man stares into his tea cup. You see his thoughts play out on his face. What if? Could he live with himself for not trying to know? What if not, and he set a shinobi on his village without cause? And if his son lived, what then? You take a sip of your tea. Maybe it would've been kinder, not to let him know about the third option, but you only flinch away from honesty when it's uncomfortable for you.
Eventually he comes to a decision.
"Just- just find my son. To bury him, if nothing else."
You and your team sit in Mr. Sato's empty house and nod. You'll give him a contract to sign later.
~
The thing is, while you're not going to be combing through alibis, the beginning of looking for a missing person and a murder investigation are very similar. You have to find out who saw the target last, what they were up to on the last day.
The other thing is, you're curious. You poke and prod at things. Especially when those things don't poke and prod back.
And civilians are so easy.
Genjutsu is the art of using chakra to connect to a target's mind and, generally, proceeding to lie like a soapmaker. Preventing unwanted feedback is the first lesson any would-be genjutsu adept learns, because any connection more responsive than a prepackaged burst of bad memories and trauma goes both ways. And there's no more embarrassing way to go than to have your own technique turned back on you. You've done it to a few would-be adepts. They died mortified. Another reason most people don't do more than dip their toes into the field, you suppose. Getting burnt to a crisp or a dozen ruptured organs is a more dignified way to die for most ninja.
But that's ninja. People who know what chakra is and how to use it, who have at least cursory knowledge of genjutsu and the willingness to break open their own hearts just to cut someone with the pieces. Dangerous people. So you're comfortable ensnaring the people you talk to in what might be considered the most basic genjutsu - no lie, no illusion. Nothing at all, from your end, except the connection. And while you're carefully not battering them with thoughts or scourging them with feelings, they can't help but bleed their deeper truths into your chakra.
It's not mind-reading. Only four villages have figured that trick out, and Rain isn't one of them. But when you go to Mr. Sato and say you'd like a guide up the mountain in the morning, you're not asking for his most experienced hunter. You're asking for someone whose heart was particularly suspicious.
He puts you up in the rooms which once belonged to his wife and daughter. Your team draws straws for who stays with you and does the middle watch. Meanwhile, his son's room remains unoccupied.
~
Who are you bringing up the mountain?
[ ] The fiancee.
A young woman of modest means whose guilt and fear had been sickeningly strong. You'd insinuated some things about the circumstances of her husband-to-be's death, and it had only gotten stronger.
[ ] The best friend.
A slender and pretty young man who'd been skittish around you - perfectly normal - but whose emotions had been… strange. Muted, and underneath that, a nearly animal sort of panic.
[ ] The old flame.
A young priest who had formerly been Sato the Younger's fiancee, before deaths in the family pushed him into a role you suspect she didn't want. Underneath his grief, you'd felt a coal of black satisfaction.
