Hazō scanned his surroundings as he trudged through the waist-deep water of the swamp.

"3D vision," Shikigami-sensei had explained when they'd asked him for tips. "Forget to look up, and the bats will suck you dry. Forget to look down, and the alligators will tear off your legs. Forget to look to the sides, and the jumping leeches will lunge from the trees and eat your face."

Even so, Hazō felt that he'd made the right choice in convincing his teammates to go scouting within the swamp, rather than to attempt to trade at the nearest town. Wakahisa Noburi, the short, stout boy on his left, never shut up, and if he grated on the villagers' nerves half as much as he did on Hazō's, they'd be chased out with torches and pitchforks. Mori Keiko, the slim, waifish girl on his right, wasn't so bad, but she didn't speak unless spoken to, and that did not suggest highly-developed social skills. Of course, Hazō himself wasn't one to talk, in multiple senses.

The other thing that Shikigami-sensei had emphasised was the need to stay aware of trees and dry ground, because if they couldn't get out of the water at short notice, they were as good as dead. Water walking would help against some things, like the lurker mandibles snapping up out of the mud, but it wouldn't get them far against the water snakes or the razorfish.

Of course, water walking was another of Hazō's weaknesses. It was a technique seemingly designed as a counter to the way he preferred to learn, requiring constant adaptation to a shifting environment, and given all those manual labour D-rank missions, it wasn't like he'd had much opportunity to practise either. In the end, he'd swallowed his pride and asked Mori to help him, but she told him that it would take days at best to get a new skill developed to the level of casual use.

But if there was one thing that cheered him up, it was the awareness that he was now effectively team leader, and the team was following his plan. Mori had never been in the running, of course, and while Wakahisa talked a good game, in the end he had shrunk away from the responsibility. It felt odd to lead others like this, but it wasn't a bad feeling.

The harsh cry of some distant bird brought Hazō's conscious attention back to his surroundings, and he realised to his dismay that Wakahisa was still talking.

"I'm just saying, if we stay here either this place will kill us by attrition, or the Mist hunter-nin will catch up with us, or Leaf will scrape together a patrol with the right skills to come in and hunt us down. The Leaf clans have lived in the Fire Country for centuries, there's no way there isn't one with swamp survival know-how."

"All right," Hazō patiently replied, "so what would you do if you were Shikigami-sensei?"

"I'd negotiate with Leaf, duh. Between the twenty-seven of us, we must have enough valuable information to trade for our safety. We could even offer to—"

"The day I was assigned to this mission, my grandfather came to see me," Mori cut in, in a slightly distant, flat voice that sounded like she was reading from a book. "He was ex-ANBU, and after he congratulated me, he gave me a few tips that he said every genin heading into hostile territory ought to know."

The two boys were all ears.

"The most effective means is an exploding tag placed here," she indicated a spot near her solar plexus. "There's little time for pain, and the damage prevents the enemy from dissecting your remains for village secrets. But exploding tags have a time delay, and require activation, so the enemy can stop you. Therefore the most reliable means is to sever the carotid artery with a kunai. If you make a movement like this, you will bypass the thick neck muscles and inflict a deep, broad cut. In the final moments, try to fall so that your body cannot be retrieved before you bleed out.

"If you are captured, don't bother trying to bite out your tongue. Even if you hit the lingual artery, it heals before you can lose enough blood. The exception is if the torturers have destroyed your ability to write. A genin who cannot speak or write is usually too much trouble to keep interrogating, and they will promptly execute you. If your hands have been kept intact, you should instead—"

Part of Hazō was uncomfortable, while part of him was taking notes since this was valuable information. Wakahisa, on the other hand...

"Mori, stop. Just stop."

"She's right," Hazō said. "Jōnin are valuable enough that they might have room to negotiate, but genin like us would only be a liability to Leaf. We could be spies. We could be saboteurs. We could be bait to make Leaf violate the missing-nin exchange treaties. There is no scenario in which our group surrenders to Leaf and the three of us are left alive."

"There has to be something," Wakahisa insisted. "We could hire ourselves out as black ops, give them ninja with plausible deniability. We need allies if we're going to survive, and we're a group of tough fighters with a lot to offer."

"I was going to be in Logistics & Support," Mori said dully. "It's the Mori speciality. I was assigned to be Sumie-sensei's assistant. I wasn't expected to enter live combat outside an emergency.

"Then Sumie-sensei died. I watched it happen. She was standing still, looking so peaceful. Then Gorō-sensei put his hand through her chest. I could see the realisation in her eyes as the genjutsu broke, and then they just went blank and she fell."

Wakahisa moved to put a hand on her shoulder. "Mori, I—"

Mori slapped it away with a quick, sharp movement. Then her eyes seemed to focus.

"I'm sorry!"

She looked down at the muddy water, and took a few long breaths.

"I'm OK. I'm sorry for distracting you two from the mission. That was stupid. I'm OK."

Hazō wanted to be sympathetic, but honestly, they'd all been through the same thing, and the middle of a killer swamp where everything was out to get them was not the best place to get emotional. If he hadn't kept paying attention to the environment, all sorts of things could have gone wrong.

o-o-o-o

They'd managed to cover a fair amount of ground since then, most of it in silence, and the blank map Shikigami-sensei had given them was slowly filling up. Topographic features, static hazards, natural resources, good sites for fallback positions and hidden caches.... Shikigami-sensei would be pleased.

The hunting part was not going so well. There had been some raised ridges with what Wakahisa thought were deer trails, but the team had neither the knowledge nor the materials to set proper snares, and given that the local deer were probably three metres tall and breathed fire, no one wanted to try taking them on in a straight fight. So they had gone back to Plan A, which was to say fishing.

When prompted, Mori had offered some suggestions to improve Hazō's original scheme, such as placing the watcher on top of rather than behind the rock face, because a lot of local creatures would hunt by scent or chakra sense, and so line of sight would be far more valuable to the ninja than to their quarry. Hazō had also asked Shikigami-sensei for safe fishing advice, and ended up making a reinforced fishing rod out of a hefty tree branch, a metal hook and some ninja wire, with tree frogs for bait. Any creature capable of breaking the rod was probably too dangerous to tangle with in the first place, while anything else would be trapped and in pain, and easier to kill.

Or that was the theory. In practice, their catch for the day had amounted to the following:

One balloon-shaped fish which rapidly extended two-foot-long spikes whenever they got near, even when dead. Three water snakes of various sizes, two probably venomous and one constricting. Two potentially (but unconfirmedly) edible fish. One member of a school of very small piranha-like predators with many teeth and dubious nutritional value. A luminous green… thing… which they all agreed had to be inedible. A huge eel which was less caught and more choked to death on the fishing rod after tearing the entire thing out of Hazō's hands and swallowing it whole.

They decided to cut their losses at the last one.

Wakahisa sorted the catch to figure out what to take home while Mori kept watch on their surroundings. Hazō went down to extract the hook and ninja wire, and assess the eel for potential edibility. He was just bending down when Mori shouted.

"Out of the water! Now!"

Hazō sent an immediate burst of chakra into his feet, leaping out to the rock face and barely making it out of the water before the jaws of the monster alligator closed around the space where he'd been.

"Well," he said, adrenaline running through his veins, "I guess we have dinner."

Before the alligator could recover from its failure and make its getaway, Mori and Wakahisa's flurry of kunai struck its enormous face, making it thrash in pain for the few seconds it took for Wakahisa to deploy his Water Whip jutsu and asphyxiate the thing.

After enough strangulation to make sure the crocodile was very definitely dead, plus kunai through both eyes in case it changed its mind, the group was left only with the difficulty of carrying their catch home. The corpse took all three of them to lift, and promised a slow journey. They would have to make good time to make it back to the base before sunset—and sunset meant reduced visibility and vampire bats.

As the team was cresting a ridge on their way back, Mori stopped them. "I didn't see that before, but look. Don't those fallen trees look like they could be a concealed shelter?"

"No, they don't," Wakahisa quickly replied. "It's just your imagination. And anyway, we need to hurry. We can report this to the jōnin and they can decide whether to send someone out to investigate."

"We're here to scout and identify threats and objects of interest," Mori said. "That is either a threat or an object of interest, and if it's a threat and we leave it, there may be catastrophic consequences."

Both of them looked to Hazō.