"I suspected Mori would be the first to figure it out," Inoue-sensei commented in a tone of weary amusement. "No, scratch that. I knew in advance, as an unmistakable, rock-hard fact, that Mori would be the first to figure it out, which by the way is something you boys should take some time to reflect on."
Hazō and Wakahisa exchanged pained glances. After several seconds' silence, Hazō, conscious of his responsibilities as sort-of team leader (and, more to the point, aware that Wakahisa was a coward), decided to bite the kunai.
"Figure what out, Inoue-sensei?"
"I told you ages ago that my elements were Water, Lightning and Wind, kids. You wouldn't think it's a hard combination to remember—it's got 'storm' written all over it. Which would have been a totally badass nickname, incidentally, but sadly for me, Captain Ayanami got there first. Though, then again, 'Heartbreaker' has it beat for subtlety.
"Anyway," she flicked her hands as if dismissing the train of thought, "given this fact, why in the name of the Mizukage's embarrassing mess of a haircut did you just smile and nod when I told you I knew Earth and Fire techniques?"
Wakahisa finally found his tongue. "But why would you—"
"Because I was afraid that, in defiance of all probability, Shikigami's little insurrection had taught you nothing. When a superior tells you something, you listen, but you engage your brain as well, and you do the work to check if it matches what you already know. Sometimes, they're just testing you. Sometimes, they've got something wrong, and if you don't tell them, you've screwed over your entire team. And sometimes, your superior's sending you on a suicide mission, and if you don't pick up on the little clues in time, there won't be enough left of you to feed the sharks. Kids, I appreciate the trust, really, I do, but you've got to know when to be good little soldiers and when to think for yourselves.
"We're not a genin training team here. We're partners in crime. And if you trust me to be right all of the time, you won't be there to catch me when I fall."
Kei took a long breath. She had not gone this deep in a while, not since before Shikigami-sensei killed Sumie-sensei and ended the future she had expected for so long. In the future-as-planned, she would not have been drawing on her Bloodline Limit like this until she was much stronger, both as a ninja and as a Mori. But Inoue-sensei had been emphatic. When experimenting with ninjutsu, there was no level of caution too high.
So she reached down, past the shadows that were the legacy of the Mori Clan's distant progenitors, into the depths of the Frozen Skein. She touched the focus point.
Thoughts, feelings, even the outside world—all was instantly washed away by a pale wave of apathy, its waters freezing into unbreakable ice that numbed all sensation. All that was left was the Mori Voice, the incurable poison in her bloodline's chalice.
Rest. Sleep. Embrace the nothingness within you. Will is struggle. Will is suffering. Step aside from the world, and know peace. Let the gears of fate grind without you. Forsake the agony of choice, the crushing responsibility of action, and find the happiness of pure oblivion.
The litany continued, endless variations on a theme, the force of sheer repetition increasingly hypnotic, compelling. The Mori Voice was why you never, ever, dove this deep without your defences in place.
But Kei's defences were ready. The counter to the Mori Voice was strength of purpose, and her purpose had been given to her by Inoue-sensei herself.
Final safety check. Three words repeated over and over like a mantra, one looping voice cancelling out another.
She drew the ice of apathy further up her body, past the frozen heart and into the structure of her mind. Final safety check. The words were a mould, reshaping the ice as it passed through them. Finally, the ice arrived inside her eyes, twin razor-sharp shards serving as lenses of dispassionate, merciless clarity.
Once those three seconds were over, Kei opened her eyes. She slowly scanned the clearing, from right to left.
Safety Rock A, out at the very edge.
The boar bristles in the centre, placed in a small pool of water. Wakahisa next to them. Safety Rock D next to both.
Kurosawa, on a treetop mirroring her own position on the far side of the clearing. Safety Rock B on the ground, some way past Kurosawa.
Inoue-sensei, lined up in a straight line with Safety Rock A and Wakahisa, hands in Substitution Technique position, medical kit and kunai both on her, within instant reach. Flawless.
Behind Kei herself, Safety Rock C, out near the edge of her range.
All relevant objects were in position, including Kurosawa, Wakahisa and Inoue-sensei. The next step was to draw the overlay of causal webs between them, and simulate their interactions given the various possible failure modes of the experiment. Were there any variables she had not yet taken into account?
Finally, Kei concluded that the precautions taken were an acceptable balance of probability of injury or death versus available time and material resources, and that further optimisation would be impractical.
The task complete, Kei took a few seconds to melt back into her normal self.
"Safety check complete. Wakahisa, you may proceed."
-o-
"In other words," Hazō summed up, "we've got nothing."
"Hey, I tried, OK?!" Wakahisa reacted. "But I'm not a sensory type. I never said I was. For all I know, those bristles are bursting with top-quality Wakahisa Noburi chakra right now, only a certain genius came up with this experiment without figuring out how to measure the results."
"Come on, kids," Inoue-sensei said in a placating voice that almost managed not to be condescending. "A negative result is still a result. And honestly, part of me is a little relieved nothing happened. I had these visions of Noburi commanding a legion of undead steelbacks, and there's no way that was going to end well for anyone.
"Now the fact that you couldn't sense, never mind drain, the chakra that was already there—that was more of a surprise. Isn't sensing and draining chakra through water a big part of the Wakahisa package?"
Wakahisa squirmed. "The mechanics of how it works are a clan secret. I shouldn't talk about it."
Inoue-sensei fixed him with a long, thoughtful look.
"Noburi, I'm not a clan ninja. My mother was a civilian, and I'm told my father was as well. So I realise I don't know what it's like for you. Maybe giving away clan secrets is the ultimate dishonour for you, something that would weigh you down for the rest of your life. And if that's what you tell me, I'll respect it.
"But there is one thing I do know. The three of you, all Bloodline Limit kids, are incredible assets."
She paused briefly.
"I mean you have incredible assets. Jeez, I sounded like one of those soulless pencil-pushers in the Mizukage's Office for a second. Anyway, those Bloodline Limits? They're your ace in the hole, the one thing you have that even jōnin don't, at least unless they're from your clan. And as a group, they're something we have that no other missing-nin do.
"As I say, I'm cool with however you choose to deal with the clan secrets thing. Just be aware that what you tell the rest of us, and what you don't, could make a very real difference to our odds of survival."
To his credit, Wakahisa managed to hold his ground for entire seconds.
"All right. So the thing is, using my Bloodline Limit is like making myself a channel between the chakra in the water outside and the chakra in the water in my supply, with the water in my body as a medium and a filter. Sensing chakra in the water is part of that. So if I can't sense chakra even when it's in the water, then that's probably because I can't channel it for some reason."
"I have a theory," Mori cut in. "The blacksmith thought the chakra in those bristles was probably Earth Element. But the chakra in Wakahisa's canister is completely neutral. Perhaps his Bloodline Limit is simply ineffective against elemental chakra?"
"Don't write me off just yet! There was the thing with the water clone!"
Hazō looked at him blankly. "The thing where you tried to drain it and it burst apart and nothing happened?"
"Yes! I mean no! I mean I felt something! If I can't absorb elemental chakra, then I guess that goes for my own elemental chakra as well, but… I got the feeling that maybe, if I was faster or more focused or whatever, I could've held onto the clone's Water chakra long enough to recycle it into some other technique!"
Inoue-sensei shrugged. "That's an experiment for another time, I think. We need to make good use of the next few days for training, before the caravan arrives. And hey, we experimented with Bloodline Limit ninjutsu and no one got killed, maimed or even particularly humiliated. I call that a win!"
-o-
The caravan, when it finally came, was impressive. There were three wagons, pulled by things that might have been cows if they'd had the right number of legs and didn't have greyish-blue carapaces and permanent expressions of thoughtful ennui. There were also, as far as Hazō could see, three guards: a giant of a man with a somewhat clichéd huge club over his shoulder, a young woman with a shortbow on her back, and an older woman with a sword at her hip, in a proper scabbard, no less.
"Yamada, huh? You can call me Baikan, trader at large!" the middle-aged man in the front wagon exclaimed with a sweeping, dramatic hand movement, followed by a self-deprecating chuckle. "My wife Miyu's in the back, sorting out the inventory. What're you interested in, Yamada? A nice heavy coat for the winter? Not that it's ever anything but winter up here, but it's the thought that counts. Or maybe some spices? If you're anything like me, you need all the help you can get making your cooking taste like there was some actual food somewhere in its ancestry. Or maybe you need to impress a lady friend? I've got all sorts, from—"
"Uh, Mr Baikan, sir, where is your caravan going from here?" Hazō interrupted.
"We've got ourselves a neat little route along the coast, lad. We swing through Rice, then spend a little longer than might be strictly necessary in Hot Springs," Baikan gave Hazō a wink, "make our way across Frost—quite the contrast, let me tell you—and then we either press on into Lightning or double back, depending on how trade's going. Why do you ask? You thinking of joining us?"
Hazō gave what he hoped was a noncommittal shrug.
Baikan waved the younger of his female guards over. "What do you reckon, Aya? Does he strike you as the sort of lad who could keep us safe out on the road? Can't have too many hands on deck, not after the ghost moth incident."
Aya studied Hazō's figure and body language carefully. Hazō did his best to stand like someone who could handle himself in a fight, while not being a member of an elite warrior caste individually capable of wiping entire armies off the face of the earth (eventually, anyway).
After a couple of seconds, she shrugged. "Seems all right to me. Long as he keeps his hands to himself, I've got no problem with it."
Baikan gave a satisfied nod.
"There you go. No need to rush into anything, mind. We'll be spending a few days here, trading and resting and whatnot. I should probably look for new investors, too, after what happened to poor Kanda, but given how there's less than a hundred people in this village, I'm not too optimistic."
-o-
What are your plans from here?
[] Stay in the village and carry on with the helping and dangerous experimentation
[] Question Baikan to within an inch of his life (with or without torture)
[] Join the caravan and go forth to see the world
[] Steal and/or plunder the caravan (sorry, @eaglejarl)
[] Attempt to contact the individual nearly responsible for scattering your remains over an exceedingly wide area
"Sensei, I need to speak to you privately," Hazō said quietly.
Inoue-sensei raised an eyebrow. "Sure," she said sotto voce. She tapped him with the point of the kunai to show that he was, once again, 'dead', then rolled to her feet and gave him a hand up.
"Okay, what did we learn from this?" she said, turning to where Hazō's teammates sat watching.
"Don't kick above the knee," Wakahisa said, grinning. "Or someone might grab your leg and dump you on your head."
Inoue-sensei laughed. "Something like that, yes. It's situational. Kicks to the head, the body, and the groin hit hard and can end the fight quickly, but they also leave your leg hanging out there for an opponent. Look at the other person's style; a big man often doesn't have the speed to grab your leg, so high kicks are a good way to get it done. Many guys like that fight by soaking damage until they can get in close to grapple, take you to the ground. That is the absolute last place you want to be against an opponent like that, and if you ever end up there I will be ashamed of you.
"On the other end of the spectrum you get people like me; I don't have a lot of mass, so I can't physically generate as much power as someone like Shikigami or Captain Zabuza. I could make up for that with chakra use, but chakra runs out, so when I designed my fighting style I chose not to go that route. I'm fast; I'll move in close, break something, then move out again. In and out, like a wolf. Against someone like me you want to control the range and keep from hanging anything out where I can catch it. Someone strong, like Hazō, wants to slow me down with kicks to the legs and then move in for a grapple."
She checked to see that all three students were nodding their understanding, then clapped her hands. "Okay, new task: escape and evasion. We'll split into pairs; one person needs to E&E back to camp, the other person has to track them down and capture them. Wakahisa, you'll be hunting Mori, I'll be hunting Kurosawa. Mori, you have a thirty second headstart; go that direction three hundred paces before you turn for camp. Go!"
Mori took off into the woods like a scalded cat. Wakahisa counted down thirty seconds, then leaped after her.
"Alone at last," Inoue said. "So, what's on your brain?"
Hazō licked his lips. "There's something you need to know about my bloodline," he said. "It's a clan secret though; I need you to promise to keep it quiet."
"Nope," Inoue-sensei said. "I won't go blabbing it around, but I'll use it or share it whenever I think it's advantageous to the team."
Hazō grimaced. "Okay," he said. He took a deep breath. "How much do you know about the Kurosawa bloodline?"
"It gives you an incredible kinesthetic sense, lets you learn physical skills at an accelerated rate," she said. "Why?"
Hazō shook his head. "It's more than that. We have eidetic muscle memory. I have a library in my head of every movement I've ever made, of any muscle in my body. I can replay them at any time. Arms, legs, face, tongue—it doesn't just let me learn taijutsu quickly, it lets me reproduce any expression, any body language, any word that I've ever spoken. If you teach me an accent and I manage to say a word correctly once, I'll get it right every time from then on."
Inoue-sensei's eyebrows went up. "That's rather more significant than I knew," she said. "I can think of a lot of things we can use that for."
Hazō nodded. "There's one more thing," he said. "Seals. If I see a seal, I can reproduce the blank perfectly, every time. Here." He held out a sheet of paper with a design on it. "This is a copy of the seal on your storage scroll—the one with the red stamp. I didn't have any chakra ink so it's just the design, but if that had been done with appropriate tools a sealmaster could turn it into a proper seal in under a minute."
Inoue-sensei blinked. "Is this a joke?" she said.
Hazō shook his head. "No. We don't talk about it, but didn't you ever wonder why the Kurosawa have had at least one sealmaster in every generation?"
"Hadn't really thought about it, to be honest," Inoue-sensei said. "Which, in retrospect, was a mistake. That's statistically improbable. Why is this a secret? Why aren't you all rolling in money and living the luxury life?"
"It's...complicated," Hazō said. "Do you know our family motto?"
"'By darkness unmoved," Inoue quoted. "I never quite understood it."
"It means we hold the line," Hazō said. "My family have been ninja of the Mist since the village was founded. Before that, we were 'hilltop daimyo' for as far back as our family records go. We have always been warriors, and we have always believed that it is our duty to stand at the edge of civilization's light and keep out the darkness that threatens it. We didn't want that taken away from us when we joined Mist. If we made it known that we could produce dozens of seals an hour, the logical thing for the village to do would have been to keep us locked up and guarded, constantly cranking out seals for the use of other people. We would have been taken off the line."
Inoue-sensei thought about that. "It could be argued that that would have been a better way to hold the line," she said carefully. "That you would have done more for the fight that way."
Hazō shrugged. "I never said we were logical, just dedicated."
Inoue-sensei snorted. "I can get behind that. Okay, so you're saying that if we can find a sealmaster then the two of you can produce all the tags and scrolls and whatnot that we could possibly want?"
Hazō nodded. "Yes. Or, if I can get the training and the tools, I can make the seals myself. If all this hadn't happened, I would have started my seal training as soon as I made chūnin."
"Hm," Inoue-sensei said. "Okay, thanks for telling me. I'll keep this quiet, but it definitely factors into our plans." She paused again, staring at the ground and lost in thought, before shaking it away and looking up at Hazō. "Now, as I recall, we were supposed to be doing an E&E drill," she said. "I think you better start running." She grinned evilly and twirled a kunai in her fingers.
Hazō gulped and vanished into the forest.
o-o-o-o
"What did he say, sensei?" Mori asked as Mari came back from talking to the old fisherman.
"Nothing," Mari said. She sighed. "It was very frustrating. He's a terrible liar and it was obvious he was hiding something, but I couldn't even get him to talk around the edges of it."
"You could make him talk," Wakahisa said. "You could even use your genjutsu on him so that he didn't remember talking."
Mari shook her head. "First, genjutsu right in the middle of the village is a little obvious. Second, no reason to go to those extremes when there's an easier way. Get lost, all of you. I have someone else to talk to and I can't do it with you lot hovering. Go talk to the caravan, see if you can get any information about the nearby towns. Try to get a map, too."
"Yes, sensei," the genin chorused before turning and trotting off.
o-o-o-o
Kimiko trotted down to the beach to where Nanami and Akemi were gathering lake plums. The fruit weren't actually plums, but they were small and purple and juicy and the village ate them as often as they could. More importantly, this area of the shore was relatively safe, so gathering fruit here was a safe way for four-year-old girls to contribute.
"Hi, Kimiko!" Akemi called, smiling and waving.
"Hi yourself, Akemi," Kimiko said, smiling and joining the other two in plucking the fruit and setting it in the basket she carried over her arm. "You guys missed it! That ninja girl was talking to old man Kurō. She kept asking questions and he was all"—she screwed up her face in a four-year-old's best imitation of a grumpy scowl—"'grr, don't know nuthin' grr!' She looked so frustrated, I was expecting to see fire shoot out her nose!"
"Don't be silly, Kimiko," Nanami said. "Ninja can't really breathe fire. That's just stories."
Kimiko glared. "Mommy says they can!"
"If they can breathe fire, why did they light their campfire with flint and steel?" Nanami said triumphantly.
"Maybe they just didn't want to waste their magic entertaining you!" Kimiko said, sticking her tongue out.
"What was she asking Kurō about?" Akemi asked, trying to play peacemaker.
"Oh, she wanted to know about the 'black hunter'," Kimiko said, making quotes with her fingers.
Nanami laughed. "I think they met him on their last trip out," she said. "You know, before Yamada and the other two started mucking out the pigpens."
"Yeah, what was up with that, anyway?" Akemi asked. "Why would the grownup be mucking and one of the kids wasn't?"
Kimiko shrugged. "I heard him say that it was 'penance'," she said. "What's penance?"
"It's a ninja thing," Nanami said smugly. "You wouldn't understand."
"You don't know, do you?" Kimiko challenged.
"Do too!" Nanami said.
"Yeah? What does it mean, then?"
"It's like when the hunter killed the chakra bear that ate Matsuoko and left the body on the edge of the woods," the girl said. "It proves that he can do anything."
The other two girls digested that.
"How does mucking out pigpens prove they can do anything?" Akemi asked doubtfully.
"It...shows that they can master their pride," Nanami said.
"That's dumb," Kimiko said. She paused then glanced up the beach. "Ooh, look, raspberries!"
The three girls hurried up the beach towards the tasty fruit.
o-o-o-o
"They said they're going this way," Hazō said, tracing his finger along the map that he'd bought from the caravan. It wasn't nearly up to the standards of the Mist cartography service, but at least it had all the major and some of the minor towns marked. "Also, I got a briefing on some of the towns in the area." He passed over a sheet of paper with small but neat handwriting across the front.
Inoue-sensei skimmed the paper, then glanced at Hazō. "Written briefing, not verbal? We don't have unlimited paper."
"It helps me remember, sensei," Hazō said. "It seemed like important information."
Inoue-sensei nodded, understanding the implication. "Okay. You're right, this is good stuff. Wakahisa, Mori, what did you get?"
"I spoke to the caravan guards," Mori said. "Specifically, Michi, the older woman. I informed her that we were caravan guards and offered to trade survival advice with her. As our conversation progressed, she told me about the others. Aya, the young woman with the bow? She was a ninja candidate in Lightning, but she was discarded in her first semester—she lacked the discipline. Daisuke, the man with the club, is from a village in the north of Iron that was annihilated in a ninja battle. He was a teenager when it happened; he lacked skills other than combat, and has thus been a guard ever since. Michi'has been working with Baikan for nine years, but the other two only joined recently—Aya three months ago, Daisuke just under a year ago."
"I managed to get a barrel," Wakahisa said, holding it up. "And I heard about a place up in the north. There's a bandit leader there who's trying to found a new city and go straight. He's brought in merchants of all kinds—paper makers, tanners, builders. He's got a call out for fighters to serve as a militia, and apparently he's got money to pay. No one knows where he's getting it, but he's paying in gold. Apparently he's got five thousand ninja serving in his army already."
Inoue-sensei snorted. "There's a tale that grew in the telling," she said. "There's probably a bandit, and he's probably trying to put a place together, and the rest of it is probably crap. Still, could be an interesting place to look. In the meantime, I found out something interesting about our ninja friend: according to a snotty young lady named Nanami, the so-called black hunter has contact with the villagers other than killing them. Apparently they were having a problem with a chakra bear; he killed it and left the carcass on the edge of the woods for them. They skinned it out and ate it, and then they left three baskets of lake plums where it had been. The plums were gone the next morning, but the baskets were still there, and undisturbed."
"What do you think it means, sensei?" Wakahisa asked.
"That he's not completely a hermit," she said. "That maybe he can actually be approached, if it's done in the right way. Now, I want to give us some options. First, Hazō: draw me three identical pictures of one of those waterbugs. I want to give these people a recognition signal that we can use to communicate. Next, let's talk about plans for the future."
Here endeth the episode. Voting time! What do you do next:
Head for that bandit town and its 'five thousand ninja'
Join the caravan; they leave tomorrow
Try to contact the 'black hunter'
Stick around town, settle down, become fisherfolk, and while away the days eating lake plums
- The caravan moves slowly, so you can catch up with them as long as you leave the village anytime in the next two days. If you give them more of a head start than that, you can't catch up without it being obvious that you're ninja.
- If you want to contact the black hunter, how do you do it?
"That cunning little son of a bitch!" Inoue-sensei gave a wry laugh before passing the note to the three genin.
Hazō studied the "response" that the mysterious missing-nin of the forest had left on the back of their note. The top half was a simple but exact map of the area, with a dozen marks scattered across it. The bottom half was more complicated. Twelve separate lines were filled with very small, neat markings, each line different in style from the others. At the bottom, something was written in common script.
One genin only. The rest stay at the village. I will know.
Hazō thought about it. "If those are the instructions for who is to meet him, then the other part must be where and when. But there are lots of different marks on the map. So presumably, the lines are supposed to tell us which mark to use."
Wakahisa rolled his eyes. "Great, so he's a missing-nin puzzle specialist. Wonderful. Remind me why we want to contact this guy again?"
"It could have been a girl," Mori muttered. "Inoue-sensei did say she was unable to get a clear look."
She studied the note for a few seconds longer, aware that Inoue-sensei was watching, and probably expecting her to figure it out before the boys did. There was something familiar about the patterns…
"Inoue-sensei, are these military cyphers?"
"Very good," Inoue-sensei nodded. "I only recognise the fourth one, though. It's a retired Mist cypher, meaning it's not in use anymore because someone outside Mist managed to crack it. It says dawn tomorrow, Location D. And I'd bet my portable torture kit the other lines are retired cyphers from other villages. When we go to meet him tomorrow, we'll automatically be telling him which village we're from."
"Uh, Inoue-sensei, why do you have a portable torture kit?" Wakahisa nervously asked.
"Rule One of infiltration: have as much information as possible before going in," Inoue-sensei explained matter-of-factly. "Take note of that one, it's one of the most important rules of being a ninja full stop."
Hazō frowned. "But by showing us he knows all these cyphers, isn't he giving away the fact that he's an ex-codebreaker? If he thinks we might be enemies, it's weird for him to reveal his abilities."
"Wow, you guys are all sorts of on the ball today," Inoue-sensei beamed. "But in this case, it's a good trade for him. We already know he's into seals, and it's standard practice for sealcrafting students to be assigned to the Cryptology Department when they're not training. The required personality traits and skillsets overlap more than you'd expect, and it means they're useful even before they can be trusted with mass seal production.
"So he's trading away a small amount of information about him for a large amount of information about us. And that's not all. Take a look at the points he's put on the map."
This time, it took longer for anyone to work it out. Needless to say, Wakahisa never stood a chance against him, but on this occasion, Hazō even beat Mori to the solution. Her rueful expression only made him feel better.
"Those areas have two things in common—they're within sight of the forest, and they're places the villagers told us in no uncertain terms not to go near if we didn't want to get eaten. So whoever goes there has high odds of getting attacked by something. Then the missing-nin can watch from safety and take notes, and at the end he can come in and have free choice of which side to finish off."
"That's right!" Inoue-sensei smiled happily, as if Hazō hadn't just explained that one of their team would have to be put in mortal danger before they even met their target. "If I were him, I'd personally make sure that the other person had an unexpected encounter with something bitey, because it's really hard to keep up a disguise and only fight at genin level when there's something trying to eat your face. In other words, while the sensible thing to do normally would be for me to go in disguised as one of you—I'm thinking Mori, for cuteness value—our friend has neatly ruled that option out.
"So, which one of you is volunteering to go into hostile territory without backup and negotiate with an antisocial chūnin-or-higher mad bomber? Don't raise your hands all at once, now."
-o-
"Hey, Mr Ninja, where do you come from? Is it cold like it is here? Is it full of trees? Are there giant fish? Are you married? Can you do ninja magic? Would you like some berries? Is that lady your girlfriend? Are any of the ninja villages bigger than our village?"
Hazō had been through a thousand D-rank babysitting missions, and hated each more than the last.
In fairness, this one was probably more like C-rank. After all, there were dangerous creatures to be found out here, though probably not enough to justify the villagers hiring all four of them just to look after a few girls. And anyway, who sent a bunch of little girls to forage for fruit and berries such a long way away from the village, and in the evening at that? Were they trying to get their offspring eaten by dire wolverines?
Then again, they wouldn't have paid for four ninja's worth of protection if that was their objective. No, this mission just didn't make sense. Even the timing was awkward, coming right as a new group of wanderers came into the village, likely full of useful new information that would help Hazō and the others decide what to do next – only now they might not get a chance to talk to them before the group moved on in the morning.
And the girls never shut up. Not for a second. Nanami was an insufferable know-it-all, Mina took offence at every little thing, and Kimiko was paranoid about ghosts or doppelgangers or something. The rest were even worse. He and Mori, also an only child as far as he knew, swapped many a commiserating glance as the girls verbally and physically tugged them to and fro. Wakahisa, meanwhile, seemed to be entirely in his element, joking and telling stories and successfully using his charm on those too young to see through it. And Inoue-sensei…
Her fingers flickered as she reached over to fix Nanami's sandal, showing the oldest and most commonly used ninja hand sign. Something is wrong.
More followed. I. Distraction. You. Settlement. Investigate.
Then she raised her voice. "Say, girls, can you keep a secret?"
Hazō slipped away as the children instantly converged around Inoue-sensei.
-o-
Something was wrong. Nearly all the lights in the village were out, except those in the village hall—and outside the building, several burly men stood with torches, their expressions vaguely anxious.
After a couple of close calls, Hazō managed to make his way to a window outside the guards' sight range. They seemed on edge, which made them more alert, but on the other hand it hadn't occurred to them to actually patrol the site they were guarding. Civilians.
The village hall was full to bursting. Practically everyone in the village was there, minus the children and the men stationed outside. At its heart, being listened to with rapt fascination, were the four wanderers who'd come in earlier that day.
Just as Hazō leaned in to listen, Granny Yoshino's voice snapped out like a whip.
"Anyone can make a claim like that. You think you're the first group of troublemakers I've seen in my life, gnawing on the bones of the past like a pack of splinterclaws?"
One of the men waved his hands placatingly. "You can't deny the timing, ma'am. It's been exactly one hundred years."
The crowd murmured.
"Ninety-eight by the Old Calendar," Granny Yoshino shot back. "That is, the calendar the Liberator himself would have used."
"Well, these things are never precise, are they?" The man gave what he doubtless thought was a winning smile. "And anyway, maybe it's not meant to be a hundred years until his return—maybe it's a hundred years until the Liberation. In two years' time, I'm sure the armies of freedom will just be getting ready to march."
"This is fool talk, and the lot of you are fools if you think—"
"Now, now, Yoshino," the village elder interrupted. "I think we should hear more of what these men have to say. You can't tell me you're comfortable having ninja in the village, walking around like they own the place. They could murder us all in our beds just like that, and nobody would be able to stop them!"
Some of the villagers exchanged uncomfortable glances.
"You are the greatest fool of all, Renzō," Granny Yoshino told him. "Those ninja have been nothing but good to us since they turned up. They've sure been a lot more use than some people." She gave him a pointed look. "And anyway, you think this so-called Great Liberation is going to happen without ninja on both sides? Well, tell him, boy. What does your false Liberator have to say about ninja?"
"He is not false," one of the other men growled. "He is Ashikage no Yōtarō himself, reborn to liberate the Land of Iron by any means necessary."
The first speaker waved him into silence. "What my friend here means to say is that the Liberator does not discriminate. To him, there are no 'missing-nin'. There are only the free ninja, and the tyrannical ninja villages that oppress both them and us. Already, countless ninja have joined his force, and are ready to fight for freedom alongside the New Samurai Army."
The murmuring of the crowd turned to full-fledged shouting at these last few words, a mix of excited demands for more information and equally excited demands that the newcomers be whipped for their blasphemy.
"MY FRIENDS!" The man shouted over the crowd. "There is no need to argue over these things. If you don't believe me, you need only travel to the Fortress of White Steel, north of Shinamachi, and witness for yourself that the Liberator has returned. Warrior, craftsman or farmer: all shall be made welcome! All shall have a place by the Liberator's side!"
A flicker of light in Hazō's peripheral vision indicated that the guards were starting to move around. He took one last look as Granny Yoshino began to shout something about exploiting the naïve, and faded back into the shadows. He'd heard enough.
-o-
[] Send someone to the arranged site alone to talk to the missing-nin
[] Capture and interrogate the wanderers before they can leave
[] Forget all the complicated stuff and just join the caravan
[] Settle down in the village
"Damnit," Mari said, staring at the faint tracks that disappeared into the forest. The 'wanderers' had fled the village.
"Should we follow them, sensei?" Mori asked.
Mari sighed. "Not tonight," she said. "By the looks of those tracks they've been gone a couple hours already, I don't want to track them through these woods at night, and we should be getting ready for meeting our friend tomorrow." She shook her head. "They must have lit out of here like their tails were on fire the minute they finished with that meeting," she said. "If I hadn't needed to stay with the girls, I could have caught them. Meh, we'll find them in a day or two. They're only civilians—well, unless they're being deliberately sloppy about their trail. In the meantime, let's talk about tomorrow...."
o-o-o-o
"Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one-hundred," Hazō muttered. He stopped and unsealed a small boulder, setting it in a rocky patch where it would look as natural as possible. The situation was a little too tilted in the foreign ninja's favor; the team had spent a good chunk of the night brainstorming ways to help Hazō survive the encounter. Having a nice chain of ideal substitution targets leading back to the village seemed like a good plan. He'd also allowed Inoue-sensei to substitute with him; from now on she'd be able to switch with him at will until he revoked the permission. If things really went to hell she could substitute along the chain and substitute him out of danger in under a minute.
He automatically checked for threats before continuing on. The meet point was just up ahead, and his timing was good; dawn was right on the horizon. He should reach the clearing with no further trouble.
He finished his survey of the area and set out....
...taking care to step just close enough to the chakra vole nest that they would attack, but not close enough that they'd succeed. The stupid animals collapsed the dirt where he'd been standing and were taken greatly aback by his failure to fall into their trap. A swarm of furious carnivores leaped out of the hole teeth-first, chittering madly in their ravenous desire to...
...be utterly and completely crushed at the fists and feet of a vastly superior opponent who had a major score to settle. Hazō grabbed the first two out of the air and slammed their heads together, shook the resulting meatpaste off his hands in time to snapkick the third vole into a tree (taking care to kick with his left foot, because putting any weight on that heel was still agony), then grabbed the fourth by the tail and used it as a flail to smash the fifth into the dirt, then....
It took a while, but eventually all the voles were dead and Hazō was feeling much better about the shape of the universe. (In point of fact, the voles had been dead for quite a while before Hazō started liking the shape of the universe. He didn't mind.)
The sun was just lumbering up over the horizon, so he hurried on to the clearing up ahead, trying not to be too obvious about limping on his left foot.
He arrived just as the first rays of the sun were washing across the vine-covered clearing. It wasn't technically a clearing, but 'open spot between beach and forest where nothing particularly tall is growing' was a bit unwieldy, so 'clearing' it was.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing, surveying everything carefully. A small stream fed into the lake here, and the ground cover was thick; a tumble of thick green vines had grown up out of the streambed and sprawled everywhere. Wide, flat leaves grew from the vines, completely obscuring the ground.
Hazō frowned. Ever since he'd started living in the wilderness he'd learned not to trust anything he couldn't see. Not being able to trust the ground was a bad thing.
He fastened a kunai to some ninja wire and hurled it out into the clearing a few times, slicing into the vines and probing at the earth. Nothing responded, but he kept probing. After all, he had nothing better to do until the other ninja showed up.
The eleventh throw of the kunai stirred up the expected psychotic chakra nightmare.
This particular nightmare was a carpet of crabs, each the size of his hand with claws as long as his thumb. They scuttled towards him like the onrushing tide, snapping their claws with a sound like thunder. The surprise rocked Hazō back on his heels; the massive bleeding wound in his left heel reminded him of its existence and politely requested that he not rock back on it again anytime soon.
The crabs were fast; in under a second they'd crossed the thirty feet between the edge of the clearing and himself. They would easily have overrun and consumed a civilian in a few heartbeats. Hazō, however, was a ninja. He pushed chakra into his legs and leaped for the trees. He'd get a little height and then go to work with a kunai and some wire; the crabs could watch in frustration as he turned them into hors d'oeuvres one by one. He twisted in midair so he'd touch the tree feet-first...
...only to note that the tree he was aiming for wasn't casting a shadow.
Still in midair, Hazō tossed the kunai and its attached wire up and forward, freeing his hands for just an instant. With the precision of the Iron Nerve, his fingers flicked through the requisite seals of a technique he'd hardly ever used but was suddenly desperately grateful to have learned.
"Dispel!"
The world dripped into a different shape around him; the 'tree' that he was headed for was actually a boulder on which sat a red-eyed crow and about a billion scuttling crab-things.
He grabbed the wire and its attached kunai out of the air, whirled it once, and flung it to the side, looping it smoothly around an adjacent tree—a real one this time! With his left hand Hazō pulled hard on the wire, diverting his course to land outside the carpet of monstrosities. With his right he hurled a shuriken...
...into the chest of the crow that sat staring at him so intently as the crab monsters scuttled around it. The angle was bad and he was doing too much at once; even with the Iron Nerve he barely landed the strike. Still, it was enough. The crow squawked and fell down dead into the surging tide of crab-things, who cheerfully stripped the flesh off the bones of their erstwhile ally.
Hazō's foot touched the bark of the tree and he swarmed upwards to the very top where he stood, puffing and gasping in the aftermath of the adrenaline crash, and looked down at the crab-things that would have devoured him in seconds if he hadn't managed to break the genjutsu.
The branch swayed under him; before he could move, something slapped him on the back and a voice whispered in Hazō's ear: "Be still or you explode."
Hazō froze.
"Drop your weapons," it said. It was raspy, high pitched for a man but low for a woman, and he didn't recognize the accent.
Very carefully, Hazō removed the kunai holster from his belt and let it fall. His shuriken pouch and ninja wire followed.
"The last pouch is a pair of sealing scrolls," he said carefully. "One of them is for you; I'd rather not drop them if that's all right."
A bight of rope slapped over his shoulder, both ends pre-tied in wide loops.
"Right wrist to left ankle, around the tree," the voice said.
Hazō licked his lips. Even with the loops fully tightened, the rope was only about twenty centimeters long; putting it on was going to leave him effectively helpless. This might be a good time to bail.
Mentally, he shook his head. No. Whoever this ninja was, he'd apparently put an explosive tag on Hazō's back. What he hadn't done, though, was to put a knife in his back. He'd had the drop on Hazō and could have killed him. The fact that he hadn't done so yet probably meant that he didn't intend to.
Well, it could also mean that he intended to torture Hazō for a while and then kill him, but let's be optimistic.
"Now, boy!" the voice snapped.
"Okay, okay!" Hazō said. He bent down so he could tie himself as directed. He needed to use treewalking to keep himself in place; the branch he was standing on was much too narrow to balance on while in such a contorted position.
"How did you find me?" the voice asked. "Who else is looking for me?!"
"We weren't looking for you," Hazō said honestly. "We came to Iron just trying to stay off everyone's maps, and this was the first town we stopped at. When we heard the villagers talking about you we thought that maybe this was a chance—maybe we could link up, share resources and work together."
"'Work together, huh?!" the man snapped, poking Hazō at the base of the skull with the tip of a kunai. "I'll give you some 'work together'! I'll give it to you right in your godsdamned pie hole, you stinking ninja stinker!"
Hazō blinked. 'Stinking ninja stinker'?
"Um...we're happy to just leave, if you like?" he said. "But I did come with a peace offering. In my scroll there's paper, furs, and lake plums. We weren't sure what you'd like, but those seemed like things that might be useful to you."
"Useful, huh?! Useful! What do you know about useful, you stinking...hang on. Paper?"
"Yes?" Hazō said carefully.
"How much paper?" the man—he was pretty sure it was a man—asked with studied nonchalance.
"A couple dozen sheets," Hazō said. "I'm afraid we didn't have much."
"And what exactly was it you wanted?" the man said suspiciously.
"We just want to trade," Hazō said. "We'd like whatever information you have about Iron. We don't know what you're looking for, but if you tell us we can probably get it. We've got current news, we can get you whatever goods you're interested in if you tell us where to go, and we have a supply of seal blanks that we're willing to offer."
The knife suddenly dug in harder; Hazō could feel a small drop of blood running down his neck. "Seal blanks?! Seal blanks?! Do you think I'm crazy, letting you give me seal blanks?! You just want to get me killed, don't you?! Admit it! You want my face to burn off and the tentacles to grow out my ears and use my arms like puppet arms as I slowly melt into a puddle of reeking goo that I have to clean up with a mop because some jackass thought it was a good idea to mess around with someone else's seal blanks!"
"Whoa, whoa! Easy!" Hazō said, leaning forward as much as he could to get away from knife that was jabbing into his neck to emphasize each phrase in the man's diatribe. "It's an offer, you don't have to take them! They're good, though, I promise. Just examine them, see if they're valid. If they are, they're yours and I can get you plenty more exactly like them. If they're not, then you're not out anything but a little time."
"Time? You think being out of time is a joke?" the ninja snapped, poking him with the knife again. "You think it was funny that time that Kawaguchi accidentally put himself in storage and came out all mangled up?" The knife jabbed Hazō lightly in the back.
"No, not funny! Not what I meant!" Hazō said, trying desperately to evade the stabby thing that this clearly-more-than-a-bit-crazy ninja was using like a pointer at a briefing. "Look, just check the blanks, okay? I can get you as many as you want, and they're all good. I promise, every single one."
"A likely story," the ninja said, but he eased off on the stabbing. "Okay, smart guy. What do you want for these all-good blanks, hm?"
"You infuse them for us," Hazō said. "You get one blank for every one that you inf—" The knife jabbed harder. "Two! You get two for every one that you infuse for us! Ow, okay, three! Go easy on the knife, man, I'm just trying to deal!"
"Hm," the ninja said. The knife retreated. "Let's assume, just for a moment, that you're actually playing fair, you stinking stinker. You have to want more than just some blanks infused. You could get that from any sealmaster."
"We don't know any other sealmasters," Hazō said. "But, yes. We were hoping that we could trade for a while, show you that we're honest, and then maybe talk about some seal training."
The knife was back. "Seal training, huh? You want me to sit in a room and just make seals for you all day until you decide to send me off into the middle of nowhere with a group of fumble-fingered jackasses who won't keep their godsdamned hands off the face-melting unholiness, is that it? Is that the kind of training you want me to have?!" Jab, jab, jab.
"Ow!" Hazō said, wriggling on the branch in a futile attempt to dodge the repeated jabs that were starting to do actual damage. "No! Not training for you, training for me!"
The knife stopped. "What."
"My family has had at least one sealmaster in every generation as far back as we have records," Hazō said. "I was supposed to start my training once I made chūnin, but now that won't happen. I could be a great sealmaster, I'm sure of it. It's something I've wanted since I was a kid; I couldn't wait to start my training, but I wasn't allowed to even open the books until I made chūnin."
There was silence from behind him. Hazō took it as a good sign.
"Would it be so bad, training someone who really wanted to learn?" Hazō asked. "Wouldn't you like to leave a legacy? You must have made some amazing discoveries; do you want them to be forgotten when you die?"
The man went to one knee, yanking Hazō's head back by the hair and pressing the knife tight to his throat. "What do you know about me dying? Is your jōnin coming after me? Is this all just a big distraction?" For the first time, Hazō was actually able to see his assailant's face. It was long and narrow, with a weak chin and a hair line that was already starting to recede despite the fact that the man probably wasn't out of his late thirties or early forties. The hair was brown, tangled, and full of leaves and twigs, but the eyes were what bothered Hazō; they were the eyes of a panicked wolverine.
"No, she's not!" Hazō said, taking care not to move his jaw too much lest he slice his own throat open. "We're being honest, really. I just meant that no one lives forever. Wouldn't you like it if kids were studying your theories a hundred years from now? You could be on the shelf next to Nishimura and Kita...but not if you don't pass on your knowledge."
The eyes got very slightly calmer and the knife pressed a little less tightly.
"Nishimura and Kita, huh?" the man murmured. "Hm. 'Pay attention, class: now that you've finished Kita, we'll be moving on to Kagome.'" The knife loosened a bit more and the man mumbled to himself for half a minute. "Yeah. Yeah. 'Hamasaki-sensei, may I please be allowed to check out Kagome, volume VII?' 'No! That's much too advanced for you, brat!' Yeah...." The knife fell away completely—less because Kagome (if that was his name) was taking it away and more because he was lost in his thoughts and not paying attention to keeping the knife in place.
Momma would have described this man as 'a little too tightly wound'. Momma had always said that the best way to deal with ninja who were a little too tightly wound was to speak softly and back away slowly. Momma was really smart.
The silence dragged on. Hazō stayed silent and completely still.
"Okay, kid," Kagome said, coming back from his daydream. "Where's this stuff you had for me?"
"The red scroll, in my hip pouch," Hazō said carefully. "Would you like me to get it?"
"Hells no!" Kagome said jabbing him with the knife for emphasis. "I'm not about to let you activate a seal while I'm right here. Here's how this is going to work: I'm going to step off. You're going to count to fifty—slowly!—then unseal the stuff you promised and drop it. Count to a hundred—no, to a thousand!— and then you can come down. If you mess with me, I'll blow you to the Summon Realm. Got it?!" The knife tip made several fast jabby motions to emphasize the point. Each one of them drew blood.
Hazō blinked. He hadn't actually expected an apology. He decided to try to push very gently. "You're welcome to the stuff," he said. "I just want to point out that the lake plums are going to get squashed if I drop them."
"Oh," Kagome said. "Yeah. Uh...here, have some rope." From somewhere he pulled out a hundred-foot coil of handwoven rope. "Lower the stuff down with this. You can keep the rope."
"Thank you," Hazō said. It was actually quite a gift; that much rope must have been a lot of work and time to make. "Just one thing: I think there's an explosive tag on my back."
"You can keep that one too," Kagome said. "Assuming I don't have to blow you up, of course." His voice got hard again. "And don't think you can just take it off and throw it away, either! I'll be watching you, and I've got this entire area secured! Mess with me and I'll squash you into meat jelly, got it? No taking that tag off until you're on the ground!"
"Got it," Hazō said. He paused, but nothing happened. "Should I start counting now?" he asked carefully.
"Uh, yeah. You do that," Kagome said. The tree limb bounced slightly as he leaped away; Hazō ignored it and concentrated on counting slowly.
He followed the directions to the letter and, when the time came, he climbed down slowly instead of just jumping. At the base of the tree was a note:
Okay, kid, maybe you're not a stinking ninja stinker. I want a thousand sheets of seal-quality paper, a gallon of chakra ink, a pound of good chocolate, a gallon of honey, ten pounds of good tea, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Leave all that here a week from today and I'll teach you some basic theory.
PS: Make sure the bread has raisins in it, okay?
PPS: Oh, and bring a copper kettle. Making tea in a waterskin sucks.
PPPS: When you bring the stuff back, don't worry about the crabs. I'll make sure they don't bother you.
PPPPS: Oh yeah: Run.
Hazō took off like a bat out of hell, but he'd gone barely twenty yards when there was a loud crump! in the clearing behind him. A powerful wind blew inwards, almost knocking him off his feet. A moment later it reversed; an outward surge of air lifted him and practically threw him forward. He ran farther, then turned to look.
The clearing had been scourged down to bare dirt. Needless to say, there wasn't a single crab anywhere. XP AWARD: 37
Vote time! What to do now?
- Get the team, go get Kagome his stuff, and do some seal training! This guy is awesome!
- Get the team and get the hell out of here! This guy is crazy!
- Put your pants on your head and run into the water screaming! This guy's crazy is contagious!
Voting ends on Wednesday, Feb 10, 2016, at 12pm UTC. Next update is by @Velorien.
Inoue is a jonin. If you're in a battle with her, you've got bigger problems than her kawarimi privileges. Regardless of whether you're using "with" to mean "against" or "alongside", you've got bigger problems.
You can just imagine it though. Years from now, the mountains stretch on endlessly around them, snow gusts past, a dramatic confrontation between teacher and student on a rickety wooden bridge.
"Inoue! You've gone too far this time! Stealing Mori's ice cream was completely uncalled for."
"You think you can stop me? Next week I'll take Noburi's ice cream as well! Muahahaha!"
"I can't let you go on like this. Every moment you continue is an insult to your past self."
"I may have taught you everything you know, Hazou, but I didn't teach you everything I know. Now, come!"
Inoue drops and activates an explosive tag, then swaps with Hazou. Hazou is exploded into giblets with an anticlimactic whoomp-sclrntch, falling to the canyon floor thousands of metres below as Inoue skips away into the snowstorm dramatically.
"This world is mine and mine alone. First stop, the ice cream parlour."
Alright you little shit, you finished reading volume VI before the timed explosion seal in the back cover went off so obviously that was too easy for you.
That in mind, let's try you on something a little more advanced.
The following is the design for a storage seal that will generate a new storage pocket each time it's activated, allowing for infinite storage space.
Study it.
Copy it.
Infuse it.
Activate it.
Familiarise yourself with its functionality.
Once you know it like the back of your hand proceed to chapter 2.
Chapter 2
If you're still alive to read this then congratulations you stinking stinker, you figured out that the design was for an explosion seal disguised to look like an infinite storage seal.
Below is the real infinite storage seal design.
Same deal again. Proceed to chapter 3 when you know it inside out.
Chapter 3
Still alive, huh?
Then I guess you noticed that the designs in chapters 1 and 2 are identical.
Kagome: What's your favourite idea? Mine is making explosions!
Keiko: How do you have ideas?
Kagome: I just tried to plan for THE ENEMY. Now when you look at this paper, tell me please, what do you see?
Noburi: It's just some boring old paper!
Kagome: Maybe to you, but not to me. I see a mushroom cloud!
Hazou: Wow!
Kagome: Blowing the stinkers to tiny bits!
Noburi: I don't see what you mean.
Kagome: Because you're not prepared for THE ENEMY. So take a look at my seals!
Hazou: Cool!
Kagome: I use my seals to protect myself.
Inoue: That sounds really dangerous.
Kagome: I use my seals to protect myself. Now, when you stare at the shadows in the trees, don't you find it unnerving?
Keiko: No.
Kagome: Come on! Take another look!
Noburi: Oh wait! I can see a rational Orochimaru hat! I can see a summoned cat! I can a hunter-nin, carrying a bat!
Hazou: I can see an Inuzuka's dog! I can see Jiraiya's frog! I can see an ANBU, replacing with a log!
Kagome: I think you're getting the hang of it now, using fear to not run out of time.
Keiko: I made psych profiles of the people in the town!
Kagome: Whoa there kid you might need to slow down!
(Kagome pours ink on Keiko's notes.)
Kagome: Here's another good tip,
Hazou: Yeah?
Kagome: on how to be a sealing whiz-kid. Go and collect some paper and ink, and arrange them into your favourite seal.
Hazou: Explosive!
Noburi: Explosive!
Keiko: Storage.
Kagome: Storage is not your favourite seal. There's one more thing that you need to know, before you let your explosive seals blow. Listen for the ANBU! Listen in the rain! Listen to the voices in your brain!
Hazou: Come on guys, let's level sealing!
(scenes of utter carnage and unspeakable evil)
Inoue: Now let's all agree, to never let Hazou level sealing again.
"Nope, doesn't ring any bells," Inoue-sensei said. "But honestly, that's not surprising. Sealing's never been my thing—I'm a people person all the way—and in terms of general fame, sealmasters don't tend to get much of that outside their own village. The really good ones normally don't get sent on missions, because they're way too valuable to risk. And when you get a sealmaster who can hold her own in combat… well, it's hard to build a reputation when there's no comprehensible evidence left of what you did, and no survivors to tell anyone that you did it. I mean, look what happened with Whirling Tides."
The three genin gave her blank looks.
"Uhh, Hidden Village of Whirling Tides? Land of Whirlpools? Come on, you must know some foreign history."
Inoue-sensei looked at them despairingly.
"OK, basic education time. So there used to be this teeny little country called the Land of Whirlpools on an island down south. It was one of those islands with weird currents that made it a nightmare to sail to if you didn't know the routes, kind of like Rokushima back in Water. And despite being as isolated as it was, Whirlpool had its own ninja village, the Hidden Village of Whirling Tides. Highest concentration of redheads in the world, a paradise ultimately brought low by the jealousy of the boring-haired majority."
Inoue-sensei flicked a hand through her hair demonstratively, then noticed that the genin's faces remained resolutely blank. She sighed.
"All right, jokes aside. Apart from having the best hair, they were also the world's best sealcrafters. They could do things with seals that the rest of the world still can't replicate decades later. And that freaked a lot of people out. Now, this was all before my time, but the long and the short of it is that the Elemental Nations, minus Leaf, sent them an ultimatum: 'stop your research or we'll do it for you'.
"That went down about as well as you'd expect. The reply they got was along the lines of 'our research focus is on non-military applications; mess with us and that will change.' Classic six-year-old-boy school of diplomacy on both sides. And naturally, when six-year-old boys don't get what they want, they throw a tantrum. If by 'tantrum', you mean 'huge joint punitive force'.
"Here's the thing, though. When that force finally gets to Whirlpool, communications drop like there's a ninja with the Gravity Element around. Suddenly, no one's getting any reports back from their troops, and even summoners can't get in touch with each other. So, of course, they send a new wave of scouts to find out what the hell happened. And do you know what those scouts find?"
Inoue-sensei gave a dramatic pause.
"Nothing. Literally nothing. The Elemental Nations did a full sweep, aerial scouting, genjutsu specialists, everything. There's no Land of Whirlpools anymore."
"What do you mean by that?" Mori asked.
"There's just a blank patch of sea where Whirlpool is supposed to be now, with some really freaky weather patterns. Pretty much every village with sensory specialists went over the area, and there are no bits of blown-up island, no ninja gear or corpses sunk beneath the waves, no blood, no bone, no ash. We don't know how that's possible, and we don't even know if it was deliberate or accidental. The only thing we know is that if the Whirling Tides sealmasters are still out there, then they have the power to get rid of entire countries… and they are royally pissed off."
She gave that a little time to sink in.
"Incidentally, some villages lost a lot more ninja than others in that fiasco, and the Third Great Ninja War just happened to break out shortly afterwards. A little something to think about."
The journey to Yuni was not particularly eventful by local standards. The chakra voles were no threat now that Hazō knew in advance what to look for, and even the hunter-killer dragonflies' near-silent wingbeats were loud to someone who'd been training with Inoue-sensei (who moved like a cat, in addition to being as elegant as a cat, as capricious as a cat, and on occasion as sadistic as a cat—not that Hazō was atall bitter about that round of punishments after the first encounter with Kagome). Dispatching attacking creatures had taken more of an effort—for instance, even without the advantage of surprise, the dropbears were heavy, aggressive, capable of taking amazing amounts of punishment, and very, very good at grappling. If it hadn't been for Mori and the ninja wire strangulation trick, Hazō wasn't sure he'd still have all his limbs.
The town itself was the biggest settlement Hazō had seen outside Mist. After the tiny villages the group had spent its time in, they were struck by the sight of crowds, the myriad different smells and the sound of multiple different accents. The guise they'd chosen for themselves was that of travelling mercenaries, loosely modelled after Baikan's caravan guards for extra verisimilitude. After establishing a temporary base (i.e. renting a room at the nearest inn), it was time to discuss their immediate plans.
Inoue-sensei, of course, wasn't here. She'd split off in an attempt to track the "Liberator"'s recruiters after every single villager averred that no, they had no idea where the travellers had gone, hadn't seen them leave, and in most cases didn't even know they'd been there at all. When she sent the group onward to Yuni, Hazō had asked how she'd find him and the others again, given that they'd be in disguise in an unfamiliar town, only to receive a stare of pure incredulity, followed by vengeful ruffling of his hair.
"All right," Hazō began in his burly warrior baritone, having, as usual, tuned out Wakahisa's chatter during the journey in favour of making plans. "Here's what I think we should do. Wakahisa, you can start by—"
"Hold it," Wakahisa scowled. "Who died and made you team leader?"
Hazō blinked. "Shikigami-sensei, actually, though not in that order."
Mori gave a quiet snerk, but the amused expression quickly disappeared. Wakahisa's scowl deepened.
Hazō refrained from rolling his eyes by dint of extraordinary, nay, legendary willpower.
"Look, anything I come up with is going to get run past Mori. If she vetoes it, we'll go with something else. OK?"
Wakahisa shrugged, satisfied and apparently unaware that he'd just agreed to being the only group member whose opinion didn't matter.
"Good. Now, Mori, you should go and find some ways of earning money, because I have a feeling what we earned back at the village might not be enough to cover everything that luna—um, Mr Kagome wants. Quality paper and ink are supposed to be expensive. Please figure out the most efficient jobs in terms of time, our skills and not exposing ourselves as ninja. Inoue-sensei said a lot of bigger towns have job boards for itinerant workers and such, so that's probably a good place to start."
Mori nodded seriously.
"Wakahisa, you can go and find the actual things we want to buy. Obviously, be discreet, and come up with good reasons why we want them if anyone asks. Also, if you can, use those conversational tricks Inoue-sensei taught you to try and lay the groundwork for some discounts once we're ready to buy. Try not to overdo it, though—she won't be happy if we get chased out of town with torches and pitchforks before she even gets here."
"What about you, Kurosawa?" Mori asked before Wakahisa could respond.
"I'll be looking for information. This Liberator business sounds like it's going to be a big deal. I don't know if we can make use of it or not, but we definitely don't want to get caught off guard. I'll also see if I can find out anything about ninja in the area, because getting caught off guard by them would be much worse.
"We'll meet here again at sunset and talk about what we've found out. Mori, any comments?"
Mori was silent for a little while.
"I am reminded that every last one of them is dead now. Shikigami-sensei and Kanna-sensei and Ueda and Saitō and Unabara and Yamaguchi and the rest."
For a couple of seconds, no one was sure how to respond.
Eventually, Wakahisa tried. "It's OK. They were fighting Captain Zabuza, so I'm sure they died quickly and without too much pain. And they were all strong ninja, so he wouldn't have been able to capture many of them for torture."
Wakahisa was stunned when Mori gave him a look of pure venom before disappearing downstairs. After a second, he glared at Hazō as if the whole thing was his fault, and then left as well.
Hazō was beginning to understand why so many jōnin instructors had perpetually hounded expressions.
-o-
Until Inoue-sensei gets back, your main priority as a group is to…
[] Seek lucrative but dangerous/questionably legal sources of income
[] Seek straightforward but less rewarding sources of income
[] Seek to directly persuade or "persuade" merchants to give you the things you need
[] Seek more information on events up north
[] Seek other ninja and news from the shinobi world
Write-ins accepted.
Voting closes on Saturday the 13th, 9 am Pacific Standard Time
"I found several options for employment," Mori said. "Given our disguises as mercenaries we are not eligible for most civilian jobs, and many of those are controlled by the guilds in any case. We are, however, able to pursue bodyguard work, caravan protection, escort duty, bouncing at various bars and clubs, messenger work, supply runs, and illegal pit fighting."
Hazō's eyebrows went up. "Pit fighting?"
"All right!" Wakahisa said. "We will absolutely demolish any pansy-ass civilian. Candy from babies! Where do we sign up?"
"That might be risky," Hazō said carefully. "We'd lose our disguise the minute we hit the opponent."
"Also, it would be clear that we were ninja," Mori said. "No civilian would fight the way we do. On the other hand, I investigated some of the fights; the more popular ones have a great deal of money moving around. Unfortunately, they are all run by the Yakuza."
"Ah," said Hazō, momentarily flashing back to a conversation with a man covered in tattoos who had just placed a hammer gently on the table. "That...might be unwise."
Wakahisa opened his mouth to say something, then shot a glance at Mori and closed it again.
"We could talk to them about it," he said. "There's no organized ninja presence in Iron, but there are ninja. That means many of them are missing-nin like us—maybe even most of them. If so, maybe we could just go to the Yak and ask them for work. We're a lot better than most genin and there can't be that many ninja available; we could probably get good rates."
"That's...actually a really interesting idea," Hazō said slowly. "We'd be breaking cover as ninja, but the Yak would undoubtedly love to have us, and having an in with them would make a lot of things easier. Mori, what do you think?"
Mori said nothing for long seconds; her face had the blank, distant expression that the boys had seen only once before: when she'd gone deep into her bloodline to ensure Wakahisa's safety during the ninjutsu experiments.
"I think...," she said, her voice very far away, "...I think that this is a balance point. There are hazards on both sides. Speaking directly with the Yakuza carries significant short term risks, but not speaking to them carries steadily increasing risks as time goes on. If we continue to operate in Yuni the probability of them identifying us as unaligned ninja approaches unity. Once they discover us and determine that we have been operating here without their approval they will assume we are hostile, especially since we will likely have disrupted some of their businesses. They have the resources to employ other ninja and might well send them after us. We could mitigate those risks by not returning to Yuni, but this is the main center of trade and population in Iron; our resources and options would be severely constrained if we were not able to come here."
She fell silent and stood still. Her eyes were pointed at a knot in the wall near the ceiling, but Hazō was absolutely certain that she was not seeing it.
"Mori?" Wakahisa said. "Mori?" He reached out and tapped her arm gently. When that got no response he took hold of her shoulders and shook her lightly. "Mori! Hey! Wake up, Keiko!"
Mori blinked very slowly; her head pivoted slightly, her eyes passing across his face and slowly coming back into focus.
"Wakahisa?" she said, confused. She stumbled and would have fallen if he hadn't caught her and helped her to sit down on the edge of the bed.
"What just happened?" Hazō asked.
Mori blinked several times like someone just waking up from a heavy sleep. "Nothing," she said. "I am fine. I merely went a little too deep. It is difficult to analyze things with so many variables."
"Yeaaaah, how about you never do that again?" Wakahisa said, trying to sound casual and failing. It was at this point that Mori finished waking up, or whatever the term was, registered Wakahisa's hand on her shoulder, and moved away so fast it could have been a chakra-enhanced leap.
"Let's leave the Yak alone until Inoue-sensei comes back," Hazō said. "We should talk about it with her."
"Definitely," Wakahisa said. Mori nodded dreamily.
"Wakahisa, what about you? Did you find anything useful?" Hazō asked.
Wakahisa shot him an annoyed look. "Of course!" he said. "What, you think I was slacking?"
"No! I just...." Hazō sighed, then tried again. "No," he said. "That came out wrong. What I should have said was 'what did you find?'" He gritted his teeth a little and forced himself to finish without sounding sullen. "I'm sorry for the mistake—I wasn't trying to be insulting."
"Good," Wakahisa said. Like Hazō , he took a breath and clearly forced himself to be calm. "Sorry, didn't mean to snap. I'm a little stressed about all this."
"I think we all are," Hazō said, grateful to have defused things. "Anyway, trying again: what did you find?"
Wakahisa dug in his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of notepaper; upon opening it, it was revealed to be covered in incomprehensible notes. Hazō wasn't quite sure whether Wakahisa had great skill in cryptography or terrible skill in penmanship.
"Okay, I found everything we were looking for," Wakahisa said, his eyes skimming over the paper. "It looks like this place has whatever we're likely to need for the foreseeable future, so that's good. High-quality paper wasn't too bad, and there's plenty of it. I sighed and looked put-upon, told the guy I was a local factor for a hill daimyo with pretensions to being a poet. The guy laughed and didn't bat an eye when I told him how much I needed. The paper was only middling expensive and the inkstones weren't too bad. The copper kettles were moderately spendy, but I talked the guy down to practically nothing. The bread, raisins, and honey weren't too bad, but the chocolate is insane. A pound of the stuff starts at ten thousand ryō and goes up; the most expensive I saw was twenty-eight thousand, and I have no idea how to judge the quality. Personally, I say we just steal it."
Hazō and Wakahisa reflexively glanced at Mori, having gotten used to her assessing any plan they came up with. She was still sitting passively and staring at her fingers as they twined nervously back and forth in her lap. The two boys looked back at each other and silently agreed that they weren't going to push.
"Did you—" Hazō caught himself. "What sort of prices were you able to get?"
"I had them set stuff aside for us," Wakahisa said. "The kettle we can get for basically nothing, the bread, raisins, honey and tea aren't too bad, but the chocolate is going to cost. A LOT. Assuming we go for the middle of the range on the chocolate, we're looking at about thirty thousand ryō for everything together.
Hazō winced. "That's a lot," he said.
"Hey, you want to try beating decent prices for things you don't know squat about out of grabby merchants while you have to be careful not to sound like a foreigner, you go for it," Wakahisa said angrily.
Hazō held up both hands placatingly. "I wasn't criticizing," he said. "Just noticing. Mori, what kind of money are we looking at for those various jobs?"
"Highly skilled bodyguards with excellent references command up to eight hundred ryō an hour," Mori said. She was sounding less out of it, but her voice was shaking slightly in exchange. "Although it is highly variable, and I suspect that most clients simply negotiate a retainer with significant discount built in. Given that we are new in town and have no references, I suspect we could only earn two hundred at most. Assuming we could find employment in the first place. Also, bodyguard work tends to mostly be long-term and paid on salary, although there are a few jobs where someone needs a bodyguard for a few hours or a day while traveling to an event or a nearby town. The other jobs are extremely variable in their payment, and caravan work does not fit our timeframe."
"Suppose we give ourselves references that are actually us, under different disguises?" Wakahisa suggested.
"Stop," Hazō said quickly. "Mori, don't analyze that just yet; wait until you've recovered first. Wakahisa, that sounds like a great idea to me, but let's wait until she's a little more together before we decide on it, okay?"
Wakahisa nodded, staring at Mori and looking stricken. "Right. Sorry, Mori."
"I am fine," she said. She looked down at her shoulder where Wakahisa had touched it and shuddered. Wakahisa flinched.
rolz.org (retroactive said:
Hazō, Awareness (for simplicity, one roll for the entire time):
sum 9 1D100 => 34 ; 94 ; 79 ; 46 ; 18 ; 90 ; 7 ; 64 ; 42 ; total=474
Hazō hurried to fill the awkward silence. "Wakahisa, great job with the prices. I think I've got some good news; there's a lot of craps games in this town, which is something I'm pretty good at. Most of them are low stakes—say, fifty ryō a bet—but I found twelve just in a couple of hours. There's also a couple of casinos with higher stakes; I didn't do any betting, but I saw some craps games with a hundred ryō minimums and five hundred table max."
"What do you mean you're 'good at craps'?" Wakahisa asked suspiciously.
"I cheat," Hazō said blandly. "But nobody's going to spot me cheating; it's a bloodline trick. Also, I memorized the probabilities when I was nine and I don't bet emotionally."
"People would still notice if we won too consistently," Mori said.
Hazō shrugged. "Yeah. Also, the casinos work on a chip system. You play with chips, then you cash out at the end. It makes it easy for them to track how much you're actually winning. The private games you can win some, lose some, and as long as you're careful you can clean people out without them noticing."
"What does security look like at the casinos?" Wakahisa asked.
"Varies a lot," Hazō said. "I checked three different casinos. They all had civilian guards floating around, armed both nonlethal and lethal. On top of that, the first casino had a ninja prowling around out in the open, plus another one blending into the crowd. The second had another ninja, also hiding. The third place was the most upscale, but I didn't see anything but civilians guarding it. It did have a bunch of seals scattered around the ceiling and the tables, disguised as patterns in the wood or whatever."
"Seals?" Wakahisa said dubiously. "That doesn't sound good."
"Yeah, I know," Hazō said. "On the other hand, they had a lot of money. There was one table with a table minimum of two thousand ryō. We could go in there and make our bank in just a few minutes."
"We do not have the table minimum," Mori pointed out. "In fact, we have almost no money whatsoever."
"Oh, right," Wakahisa said. "I also talked about selling the stuff we've got. The meat isn't worth much at all; about four hundred ryō for all of it. The steelback bristles I couldn't sell at all; none of the smiths I talked to had heard of them so they figured I was just a scam artist. Fortunately, I was using a disposable disguise when I talked to them, so it shouldn't be an issue. Anyway, sell all the meat and combine it with the two hundred that we've got left after paying for the room and we've got almost nothing in terms of spending power."
"I can win us plenty in craps," Hazō said confidently.
"Hang on," Wakahisa said. "What's this trick of yours? If we're talking about gambling as our money-making strategy, that sounds like a losing proposition."
"I used to gamble back in Mist, to help my momma pay the bills," Hazō said, his voice catching. He swallowed before continuing. "I got so good that I got banned from a lot of games. I'm pretty sure that I got sent on this mission because I pissed off some Yakuza casino owners."
"That was a seriously dumbass move," Wakahisa said.
Hazō's lips tightened, but Mori broke in before he could respond.
"Please do not fight," she said, her voice still far away.
Hazō swallowed the angry retort he'd been planning to make and took a breath. "In retrospect, yes. There were good reasons at the time and I've learned from the mistake. Let's move on."
"Okay, so what's the plan?" Wakahisa said. "We need thirty thousand ryō, and we need it fast. The bodyguard work is a possibility but a difficult one, talking to the Yak could get us a lot of money but is risky, gambling has some major risks, and the other stuff sounds pretty uncertain."
Mori sat silent, hands folded in her lap. Hazō pondered.
"I think first we should get some lunch," he said. "Personally, I'm hungry. Wakahisa, could you give me a hand carrying? Mori, why don't you see if you can sleep a bit, get yourself back together; Wakahisa and I can bring something back"—he turned quickly to Wakahisa—"that is, if you don't mind helping me carry stuff?"
"Hm," Mori said, not looking at him.
Wakahisa looked at her, clearly torn, but shook his head. "Sure," he said, and followed Hazō out the door.
The two boys found a noodle shop and ordered some ramen to go; it was the cheapest food they could find, but it was still forty ryō a bowl.
While they waited, Hazō turned to Wakahisa. "Can we talk?" he said. "There's some tension between us, and I'd like to get rid of it if we can."
Wakahisa looked surprised, but nodded. "Okay," he said. "Talk."
"You and I have been striking sparks on each other, and it's getting worse," Hazō said. "You're a smart guy with good ideas, and we're living in a dangerous situation. We can't afford to have problems in the team, so I'd like to know what to do about it. How can we work together better?"
Wakahisa blinked. "Well, for one thing, you could stop assuming you're the leader and we all need to do what you say," he said. "Shikigami-sensei didn't know us from a hole in the ground. He chose you as leader pretty much at random, and I don't see why that should still hold true."
"Okay," Hazō said. "I can work on that. Do you have a specific problem with my leadership?"
"You miss things," Wakahisa said. "Like when you proposed fighting the steelback hand-to-hand. That was s—" He cut himself off, then continued more diplomatically. "I don't think that was the best approach."
Hazō nodded. "True, it wasn't. And you pointed that out and I changed the plan. Personally, I'd say that leaders don't have to be right all the time, they just need to be able to get everyone moving in a good direction and then not be too proud to take suggestions from people who have better ideas. Is that fair?"
"Yeah," Wakahisa said. "It's fair."
"Okay," Hazō said. "I'm guessing you'd like to be leader?"
"Uh...." Wakahisa paused, clearly not wanting to sound arrogant by answering 'yes'. "I think I'd be good at it," he said instead.
"What exactly would it look like, for you to be the leader?" Hazō said. "How would it work in practice?"
"Well, I'd propose plans and we'd do them," Wakahisa said.
"You'd take input from us, right?" Hazō asked. "After all, I don't think either of us is as good at spotting holes in plans as Mori is." He flashed Wakahisa a grin—a perfect grin, the same one that he'd once given to a friend in school when they'd agreed on a wicked prank. "That's not on us, though—she cheats like crazy with that bloodline of hers, though."
Wakahisa laughed. "Yeah, true," he said. "And yeah, I'd ask you guys for input."
"Okay," Hazō said. "So you being in charge would be you proposing plans, the three of us talking about them, and then—assuming we all agree that the plan is good—we do them. Right?"
"Yeah," Wakahisa said.
"What's stopping you?" Hazō said.
"What?" Wakahisa said.
"You're welcome to propose plans," Hazō said. "If I think they're good, I'm certainly not going to vote against them. I really doubt Mori would either."
"Yeah, but—" Wakahisa stopped, then tried again. "You're always pushing your plans out first," he said.
Hazō nodded. "Okay. I'll slow down, give you a chance to get yours in first. You don't mind if I suggest plans, I assume? You did say that you'd take input."
"Yeah, that's fine," Wakahisa said.
"Okay, good," Hazō said. "Do you mind if I make a suggestion now?"
"Go ahead," Wakahisa said.
"If you want to lead, you need to be focused on more than just whether we take the bodyguard job or the escort job," Hazō said. "You need to think more long-term, think about things that could get in the way. Things like bad team dynamics."
Wakahisa's lips thinned as he saw the trap. "Thanks for the suggestion," he said tightly.
Hazō nodded, the point made. "Anyway, what do you think we should do for money, O fearless leader?" He said it lightly, smiling widely and inviting Wakahisa to be part of the joke.
Wakahisa smiled back, then glanced around and lowered his voice. "You really can win at craps?" he said. "Reliably?"
Hazō nodded. "You know how craps works—the shooter rolls two dice and whatever number comes up with is the point. If he rolls two, three, or twelve then he craps out and loses his bet. Seven or eleven, he wins immediately. Otherwise he keeps rolling until he get the point again, but he loses if he rolls a seven before rolling the point. Once he loses, he passes the dice to the left." He waited until Wakahisa nodded, because Hazō actually had no confidence that the boy knew how to play craps.
"Anyway," Hazō said. "Because of my bloodline I can roll any number that I've rolled before with that pair of dice. I'll lose a few in the beginning until I learn how to roll seven and one of the good point numbers, but after that the dice will do whatever I tell them to. The only problem is if they switch dice on me."
Wakahisa nodded his understanding. "That's a pretty cool bloodline," he noted. "But that dice-switching thing sounds bad."
"Yeah, seriously," Hazō said. "It won't happen in the private games, though—well, not unless someone's cheating. The problem is that the casinos switch the dice periodically and they give you a choice of four pairs at the start of each round. I'd need to be able to tell the difference, and they might start to notice if I always chose the same set, so I'd have to learn all the pairs in each set. We'd lose a few bets here and there, but in general I can make as much as I want, as long as I'm careful to lose some too."
"Probably smart if you lose your entire stake and Mori and I do the winning," he said.
"Yeah, good plan," Hazō said, just as the chef set three bowls of ramen in front of them, packaged for take-out. "C'mon, let's get back to Mori and figure out what we're doing."
