"You have knowledge we lack," Yoshida said. "Knowledge I think will outweigh the harm you do merely by being here. If you keep your screw-ups to a minimum, we might be able to come out of this with both sides enriched, and nobody being blown up or trampled to death. That is, of course, provided you agree to my conditions.
"Let Kouta go free.
"Stay away from the other elders.
"Let me do the negotiating on your behalf.
"Don't do anything stupid."
She locked gazes with Inoue-sensei.
"Well?"
Inoue studied the older woman thoughtfully for several seconds. "You keep talking about my team's screwups," she said calmly. "I think perhaps there is some confusion here. From where I sit, my team has been nothing but polite and generous, and has been very poorly treated in return.
"Your tapirs attacked us on sight," she said with a shrug. "Fair enough, they're animals. It would have been easy for us to kill every one of them, but I instructed my team not to hurt the tapirs while we waited for you to show up. When your team showed up I tried to parley. They ignored me and attacked immediately. I demonstrated that we had complete martial superiority, but deliberately chose not to kill anyone and I kept the breakage to a minimum. We came here voluntarily to treat your wounded, despite having no obligation to do so. We've done that for days now, making no demands on you. We made a friendly offer to train with anyone who wanted to. Your thug was offensive to my team, but they remained polite and professional. Kimiko sparred with him; when he discovered that he wasn't good enough to beat her he turned it into a lethal fight. He would have killed her if I hadn't intervened."
Inoue's face got hard. "We've been extremely tolerant, but no one hurts my students and walks away. You're very lucky that all I did was cripple your brat. Where we're from it wouldn't have been nearly so gentle; if a Mist ninja had attacked a representative of a friendly foreign power, that Mist ninja would have been executed and reparations made to the foreign nin in order to prevent a war."
Yoshida opened her mouth to say something but Inoue raised a finger warningly. "Don't," she said. "Just don't."
She paused, studying the older woman again. "History and geography lesson," Inoue said. "Your village is in the Land of Tea, which is a second tier country in the Elemental Nations. West of Tea is the ocean, this section of which is known as the Hanguri Gulf. On the other side of the Gulf is the Land of Fire, the most powerful country in the Elemental Nations by a good margin. Five or six of the most powerful shinobi in the world live there. One of them, possibly the second most powerful, is a man named Jiraiya. He's known as the Toad Sage, and he's the spymaster for Fire."
Yoshida shifted slightly, frowning in confusion at the seeming non sequitur, but she didn't interrupt.
"We met Jiraiya a little while ago," Inoue said. "It was an interesting meeting. The first thing he did was kick all of our asses at once, just to prove that he could. He made the point that once the question of power levels was settled we could get on with reasonable discussion. We knew we couldn't kill him, we knew he didn't want to kill us, so there was no reason for tension.
"I think I'm going to take a page from the most powerful non-Kage ninja I've ever met," she said. "Time for you to face facts: my team and I represent a level of military force that your village cannot cope with. It's possible that you could bring us down, but the damage you would suffer would be catastrophic. There might be a few of you left afterwards, but you would cease to exist as a village. More likely what would happen is that we'd kill a whole bunch of you, then escape. If we escaped without injury—which is what I would expect—then we would just leave you to bury your dead. In the unlikely event that you managed to hurt or kill any of us we'd hang around and slaughter your patrols until your military was eliminated. Then we'd come in and erase every trace of the Village Hidden in the Mountain from the face of the earth. Every person: dead. Every building: destroyed. Every tapir: rotting in the sun. We would make it like your village had never happened. Do you have the slightest doubt that we could do this?"
Yoshida's face was growing steadily redder with fury. "Don't you threaten me, you little—"
"Shut. Up," Inoue said. "Answer the question. Look at the number of seals surrounding you and recognize that we have at least one sealmaster in the party. Think about the way I demolished your patrol and took out Kouta before you could blink. Think of how one of my genin batted him around before he decided to escalate. Do you have any doubt that we could flatten your village if we really wanted to?"
Yoshida looked as though she'd swallowed a lemon with bugs in it. "No," she ground out.
"Good," Inoue said. Her tone got friendly again and she smiled. "Then let's put this on a better footing. We don't want to hurt you, or upset your village. Honestly, we think you guys are amazing to have built what you've built while staying completely off the map for so long. I think we could really help each other a lot, and I would like to. We'll leave if you want us to, but it would be a missed opportunity for both sides. Do you want us to go?"
Yoshida chewed on the lemon a little longer. "No," she finally said. "As much as you're going to flip everything upside down, we need to establish contact with the outside world in a controlled way, and you're our best chance to do that."
"Good," Inoue said. "Now, you're right that we don't know your culture. We could easily misstep without a guide, and you would be the best guide we could ask for. We aren't willing to be your puppets, but we are more than willing to be your partners. Let's talk about the best way to make that happen, okay?"
The lemon got a little smaller and Yoshida nodded. "Right," she said.
