That might have been the first time Hazō had heard Inoue-sensei swear while sober. The diminutive redhead stared in awe at the collection of dagger-like claws and teeth that the genin had dumped unceremoniously (well, exhaustedly) at her feet.

"You're telling me you personally stripped these from an alligator. Just so we're clear, that's one of those giant killer alligators that can swallow kids like you whole, right? And not, say, some stray lizard that happened to be crawling by?"

The genin nodded. Trying to get useful materials out of the alligator in a hurry had not been easy, especially with the awareness that the sun was setting and they could be minutes away from death at the proboscises of a pack of venom gliders. But this reaction almost made the experience worthwhile.

"And you three killed it all by yourselves, on your first trip out?"

The genin nodded again.

"Well," Inoue-sensei took a step forward into Hazō's personal space, "come on, details. You can't leave a girl hanging after presenting her with trophies like that!"

Hazō exchanged brief glances with the other two. They'd taken some time and effort to craft their report after Wakahisa had brought up the idea that the jōnin wouldn't be too impressed with a tale of desperate improvised tactics and a ninja nearly getting eaten.

"I played the role of bait within a controlled environment in order to lure the alligator from concealment. As soon as Mori located and identified the target from her vantage point, the three of us exploited our terrain advantage to disable it with a combined kunai barrage, and then Wakahisa finished it off with the Water Whip Technique before it had a chance to recover. Making the judgement call that bringing the alligator back with us was not viable, we harvested its most immediately useful parts and retreated."

"Nice job. Mako would be so proud of you," Inoue-sensei reached out to ruffle Hazō's hair. Hazō reflexively tried to dodge, but when the three-year-running female jōnin CQC champion wants your hair ruffled, your hair gets ruffled.

"Who is Mako, Inoue-sensei?" Mori asked.

"Little Hazō's jōnin instructor," Inoue-sensei explained. "She and I go way back—"

She blinked.

"Went way back."

Her bouncy demeanour deflated a little.

"All right, kids. Seeing how close you've cut it time-wise, you must have plenty else to report. Get to it."

o-o-o-o

"A pity you didn't bring back the spiderbear thing too. Ichimaru would have had a field day dissecting it. That eel sure is a beauty, though. Anyway, you'll have to summarise all this again at tonight's general meeting, but I'm going to ask you to leave out the part about the shelter, OK? I'll make sure the rest of Command knows about it myself. Actually, that goes for your apex predator theories too. We don't want any overreactions."

So there was a "Command" now? Hazō filed this thought away for later reflection.

Inoue-sensei turned away. "Akabane! Get this stuff to materials storage for me!"

The genin shuffled their feet, waiting to be dismissed.

"Oh, right, you guys are still here."

"Inoue-sensei," Hazō asked, "how did the other teams do?"

Inoue-sensei gave a proud smile. "Not as well as my little Hazō, that's for sure."

Hazō began to reflexively squirm in embarrassment, and only managed to catch himself in time as he realised this would only make him look more like a kid.

"Team Yamaguchi were on scouting duty. They've managed to bring back some very detailed maps of the area, and they found a type of smokeless wood that practically had Shikigami doing a little jig. They came back without any injuries to speak of, and we think we managed to flush the toxins out of their systems before any permanent damage was done. Team Shinra, on scouting and hunting duty, weren't so lucky. It wasn't until they were stopped by the sentry on their way back that they realised there were only two of them. Even now, they can't remember losing Misaka."

Suddenly, the inside of the cave felt a lot colder.

"On the plus side," Inoue-sensei continued as if nothing was wrong, "Team Uchida completed their mission of scouting out the village with only one major encounter, a run-in with parasitic slimes which they survived unscathed. They report a community of a few hundred rice farmers, with the main body of the village surrounded by a heavy-duty palisade with watch towers and traps scattered over a wide area, presumably for the wildlife. You'll hear the full report tonight. In the meantime...."

Inoue-sensei's expression faded to neutral. She studied the genin's faces slowly and with an uncomfortable level of intensity, as if trying to see through the ninjutsu disguises they weren't using.

"Wakahisa, Hazō, you're relieved. Go play cards or something until the general meeting. Mori, you're coming with me."

The two boys watched as Mori meekly, and somewhat anxiously, followed Inoue-sensei into the depths of the cave.

"So, uh, any idea what that was about?" Wakahisa asked the second they were out of earshot.

Hazō considered Inoue-sensei. Mist knew her as a top-class genjutsu specialist with a preference for infiltration and seduction missions (even though every single one involved having to dye long, red hair) and an improbable gift for close quarters combat. To this list Hazō could add limitless energy, a cast-iron liver, complete obliviousness to personal boundaries and a disturbing fondness for gossip. Quite frankly, though Inoue-sensei wasn't a bad person as such, he wouldn't want to see anyone left alone with her, much less a helpless innocent like Mori. However, if the alternative was getting in Inoue-sensei's way himself...

"I think we'd better leave it," he told Wakahisa. "Do not meddle in the affairs of genjutsu users, for they are creative, and don't mind breaking their toys.

"She told me that once, after I pointed out a couple of issues with her stance."

Wakahisa bit his lip, and did not press the issue.

o-o-o-o

"...while you were staring down the throat of that eel like it had swallowed your house keys!"

"Well, maybe if you'd maintained line of sight like you were supposed to, instead of playing with dead fish, I wouldn't have ended up—"

The voices bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the small chamber Team Kurosawa had been assigned for sleeping quarters cut off instantly as Mori walked in. Her movements were slow and slightly sluggish. She hadn't been at the general meeting (although Inoue-sensei had been), or at dinner afterwards.

The boys watched their teammate as if she were an exploding tag with the delay counting down.

"Uh, Mori?" Wakahisa finally asked as he settled back down onto his bedroll. "What did Inoue-sensei want with you?"

"That's private," Mori said flatly.

Then, without any further comment, she leaned over and began to sort through her pack in preparation for bed.

A few minutes later, after everyone had settled down to sleep, they heard her voice in the darkness. "I'm sorry. That wasn't meant to sound so harsh. I don't always know what I'm going to sound like when I speak."

A pause.

"Inoue-sensei said to tell you that if... if you ever feel like you're breaking, go talk to her. She can help."

o-o-o-o

The next couple of days went by peacefully. Team Kurosawa was alternating between guard duty and downtime, with Hazō fitting training in between bursts of rapid reproduction of swamp maps. Shikigami-sensei (who'd had his own mix of congratulations and "how the hell could you be so suicidally stupid" to offer), had taken to the idea like a 600 kg ravenous killing machine to water, though he'd asked Hazō to mark their location with a hazard symbol instead of a cave symbol in case of interception. He'd also saluted Hazō's decision to invest his limited training time in learning water walking from Mori, and advised them to spend some of the rest on grasping the basic principles of hunting, with input from the more experienced jōnin to show them the ropes, the snares and the kunai traps.

Meanwhile, the cave hideout was beginning to take shape, with Earth Element digging and Water Element draining coming together to create something that increasingly resembled a living environment. One of the chūnin had even managed to extract the pulsing chakra bladders from the luminous green things genin teams were fishing up, each bladder generating several days' worth of sinister green light before being ruined by decay.

But nothing peaceful lasts forever.

"All right, you three," Shikigami-sensei announced, "time for you to get off your asses. As you know, Team Ueda is still in intensive care, and Hotaru says we're running low on basic medical supplies. Seeing as our real medic's dead, we're not about to go harvesting medicinal plants from the swamp, which means somebody has to go get what we need from the village. That somebody is you. Sneak in and steal them, or disguise yourelves and go trade, and either way, don't screw up."

"Why us?" Hazō asked. "Given how badly things could go wrong, isn't this a chūnin job?"

"It would be if we could spare the chūnin," Shikigami-sensei said. "But we can't spare them today, and Hotaru needs the stuff on this list yesterday. You've shown good judgement and survival skills, and I'm trusting you to pull this off without getting anyone killed or attracting attention. Don't be afraid to retreat if you're forced to—but above all, don't let me down.

"Maehara's Acting Quartermaster after what happened to Shinagawa, and he has orders to give you the supplies you need—conditional on you convincing me that you have a good use for them. So I'll give you twenty minutes to discuss, and then I'll hear you out.

"What's your plan?"