"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?
