"We've been here two weeks now," Shikigami announced gruffly, standing tall atop the rock formation that allowed him to survey his audience. The entire population of 'The Village Hidden in the Swamp'—barring the three genin on guard duty—watched him raptly.

"We've been lucky so far; most of us are still alive, we've had positive contact with the nearest town, and no one's come looking for us," he said. His smile was more a baring of teeth. "Funny thing about luck: the better you are, the more of it you have. Based on how lucky we've been, I'd say we're seriously godsdamn good."

A quiet chorus of "damn right!", "preach it!", and "oorah!" went around the cave.

"Now, we're settled in," he said. "Living quarters are built. Water is being pumped out so we aren't squatting in puddles. We've got two separate escape tunnels. We've got a smoke room for meat, and a vent system to disperse the smoke. We've got a well-stocked larder so we don't have to eat any more of those stinking trail bars." He snorted. "Don't know about the rest of you, but if I had to have one more bite of the stuff, I would have marched into the swamp and let it bloody well have me."

Quiet laughs answered him. The trail rations were a constant source of griping; bars made of compressed nuts, seeds, and jerky held together with honey, they were delicious the first time you tried them and sickening the thirty-first.

"Take a moment to recognize your accomplishments," Shikigami said seriously. "We have escaped the second most powerful ninja village on Earth. We have passed freely through the territory of the most powerful ninja village on earth. We have taken up residence in a hellhole of a swamp and made that swamp our chewtoy. Those gators that were so impressive on the way in? I went out yesterday, couldn't find a one of them within two miles. Team Kurosawa"—he nodded at the genin in question—"were the first to meet one of those spiderbears. Bigass hairy monsters, lightning fast, raiton attacks. Bunch of genin folded the thing up like a piece of origami and mailed it home to its mom." Another nod, this time to a team on the other side of the group. "Team Hisakawa met up with that mobile vegetable monster with the toxic spore jets and mind-control tentacles. Turns out, the things are mighty tasty with a bit of salt.

"Time after time, you have shown yourselves to be some of the most badass shinobi it has ever been my pleasure to serve with." He mock-glared at one of the chūnin. "Even if some of you snore like a godsdamned ripsaw and keep me up half the night!"

The chūnin, a blocky man named Takanaki, laughed and rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. "Sorry, Shikigami-sama!" he said with a smile.

Shikigami snorted. "Well, given how you blew the everloving crap out of that nest of fire-breathing ants, and waterproofed my living quarters, I'll let it go. This time, anyway."

His face got serious again. "It's taken a bit of time, but we've got our feet under us. The short-term challenges are dealt with, now it's time to look to the future. There are three main challenges facing us: Mist, Leaf, and growth.

"Mist is simple: Zabuza-sama is hunting us, and he's going to find us eventually. Now, we all know what a murder-boner Yagura-sama has for people like us; he'll have told Zabuza-sama to bring our heads back on a plate."

A nervous sussurance went around the circle. Shikigami patted the air to quiet everyone down.

"Unclench your sphincters," he told them. "He's impressive as hell, but Zabuza-sama is just a man. He still puts his boxers on one leg at a time."

"He doesn't wear boxers!" Inoue shouted with a raunchy grin. "He can't find ones big enough to fit!"

There was a surge of catcalls from around her.

"I will leave that to our resident expert," Shikigami said. "Personally, that's a bit more information about Zabuza-sama's crotch than I would have preferred. Now, if I may continue?" He waited with exaggerated politeness until she nodded.

"Like I said, Zabuza-sama is going to show up," he said. "He's going to do the standard hunter-nin thing: send a water clone in to talk to us, promise to take us back unharmed, give us the chance to plead our case, blah blah blah." He snorted. "He's good at it too; I went on two or three missions with him, back when I was a chūnin. He's as smooth with his words as he is with that damn sword. Over the years he's actually talked half a dozen missing-nin into 'coming in from the cold.' Damn fools.

"Anyway, once he sees that we're not stupid enough to go for the trap, he'll start hanging around the camp, picking off anyone he can. I'm not going to lie, it'll be bad; there's a reason he's called the Demon. He won't risk a frontal assault against four jōnin, a dozen chūnin, and a whole pack of genin who have demonstrated more combat capacity than most chūnin." He paused to glare. "Get those smiles off your faces! What, you think because I say one nice thing you can let your heads swell up?! If I want you feeling happy, I'll damn you tell you to be happy!" He continued mock-glaring furiously until everyone settled down again.

"Over the next few days I'll be coordinating with the other jōnin and the senior chūnin to design traps, sensors, and defenses throughout the swamp. You think this place is a hellhole now? By the time we're done the combined forces of Leaf and Mist together couldn't march through here without getting their gonads blown up into their necks.

"We'll also be looking for strategic assets. In particular, we're going to go out recruiting for a seal master, at least one medic, and all the missing-nin we can find who are smart enough to be interesting and good enough to be worth our time. Suggestions are welcome from the peanut gallery as well.

"That takes care of Mist. Next is Leaf. Leaf is a lot easier than Mist; they aren't actively looking for us. Oh, I'm sure they've got some people scouting the area; they saw our tracks on the way in, so they'll want to keep an eye out for a while. They aren't going to be putting a huge force on it, though. Our tracks showed us cutting through Fire on a course for Grass and then disappearing into the swamp. They don't want to come into this swamp; we saw that on the way in. Most likely, they'll figure we're either dead or out of the country. So long as we don't actually wave our bits in their faces and shout 'all Leaves are pansies' at them, they're not going to bother with us. Doesn't mean we don't need to be ready for them, but they are a longer term issue.

"Most important challenge we're facing is growth. We need to recruit more nin. We need a sealing master. We need a proper medic. We need to find a steady income source. Taking ninja missions per se would fall into the category of insult-shouting and bits-waving that I previously mentioned to be undesirable, but there are plenty of other options.

"The swamp has resources to sell. Hotaru said she might be able to salvage the raiton-generating organs from a spiderbear corpse, if she could get to it fresh. If she can do it, there's all sorts of possibilities there.

"We can present ourselves to various towns as civilian hunters and get paid to exterminate the local wildlife; it's a solid cover because there really are civilians who make a living doing that." He waved over at Team Kurosawa. "That bunch of troublemakers is going to be trying out the 'exterminate' part later today, although someone else will handle the actual bargaining.

"As I mentioned before, we'll be looking to recruit. You can't be a ninja village without at least one seal master and one medic; next week Inoue will be leading a team to find one of each and bring them back. It will need to be a complete vanish; no evidence whatsoever, so there's going to be some competition for the job. If you think you're hard enough, leave your name with Inoue-sensei and start thinking. You won't know the conditions of the challenge until it starts but the basic parameters will be 'kidnap high-value ninja, return him to village while leaving no trace'. Once he's here, Inoue and a few others will have time to...convince him that he should make his home here from now on.

"Right now we are a tiny village, but I intend for us to grow, and to become strong. All of you are the future leaders of this village; five years from now, every one of you will be a jōnin with the power to stand against your opposite number from any village in the world. Those of you who are jōnin and chūnin: you will be the leaders of this village, the cadre that sets our policies and recruits, trains, and shapes the next generation.

"Lest you are feeling left out: right now you are teenagers at best. You have the experience, the knowledgebase, and the maturity of teenagers—which is to say, not much. This is not your fault; youth is a condition that is cured only by time. How much time it requires is up to you; five years from now—hell, one year from now—you will have the power of jōnin. You will not have the authority of jōnin until you prove you're worthy of that trust. None of you are stupid, and I see a great deal of potential in all of you. If you want to live up to that potential, if you want to be worthy of a place of respect among the adults, then you need to learn to be leaders, not followers. I expect to see you stretching yourselves and growing faster than you think you can. I expect to hear suggestions. I expect to hear intelligent questions. Most challenging of all, I expect to see awareness as to when it's appropriate to ask questions and when it's appropriate to shut your yap and follow orders. Am I clearly understood?!"

"YES, SHIKIGAMI-SAMA!" bellowed the genin.

"Good!" Shikigami yelled back. "Then get the hell outta my cave and go earn that trust!"

o-o-o-o

The trip out of the swamp went by faster than ever before, as the genin were too excited to stop talking. The routes in and out were well mapped by this time, and they dealt with the hazards with unthinking ease—Noburi whipped several bloodbeaks out of the air without pausing in his enthusiastic babble about spear-lily farming as perimeter defense. A razorsnake leaped at them from under the water; Hazo was too absorbed in brainstorming with Mori to notice that he had grabbed the snake out of the air, twisted its head around, and tossed it aside without even noticing he'd done it.

Even Mori was excited. Ideas for improved logistics poured out of her so fast she tripped over her words, her mouth unable to keep up with her brain.

The excitement carried them the full two hours to the town; it was only with some effort that they put it away and focused down on the mission.

The planning had been simple, because the basic plan was simple: find a lone steelback, trap it, drown it. The only awkwardness had happened when Hazō had been thinking about contingencies.

"If it manages to break the whip, I should be able to stab it from in front—it won't have bristles on its nose," Hazō had said.

"I like that plan," Noburi had replied. "After you slash your arm to ribbons on the wall'o'knives and it tramples you into the mud, I expect Shikigami-sama will give me my own team." He had turned to his other teammate with a magnanimous wave. "Mori, you can be my second."

Mori hadn't said a word, just studied him for long seconds until Noburi's confident body language faded.

"Hm," Mori had said, before looking aside and vanishing back into her own world.

"Incoming!" Hazō said, pelting out of the trees at a speed that would have been a top-speed sprint for a civilian but was only a moderate dash for a ninja. Behind him came eight hundred pounds of furious animal, squealing furiously and gnashing its teeth. Two-foot gleaming-steel bristles stuck out of it in all directions.

"What did you do?! You were supposed to find a small one!" Noburi shouted, opening his cask and pouring the water into a twenty-foot whip.

"This was the smallest one I could find!" Hazō said, dropping the looped end of his ninja wire behind him and leaping for the giant ash tree they'd determined would be their ambush point. They'd originally intended to use the immense oak twenty yards to the east...until they discovered that the whole thing was coated in tiny ants whose shells exuded acid. Mori had gotten acid burns across much of her forearm; fortunately, Noburi had managed to wash the acid off before it did enough to incapacitate her.

The genin had barely gotten his feet into the tree when the boar's left front leg stepped into the open loop of ninja wire. Hazō hurled himself off the branch, blasting chakra through his feet to fire himself at the ground. The boar outweighed him by six to one; he needed as much speed as he could get in order to yank its foot to the side and make it trip. The pig swerved, lifting its foot out of the loop just as Hazō yanked it closed. Squonking in fury, it charged at where Hazō had just touched the ground, clearly determined to rip the genin's guts open and dance on them.

An errant beam of sunlight filtered through the trees and gleamed off the loop of Mori's ninja wire as it wrapped with delicate perfection around the hog's head just behind its stubby ears, lacing through the forest of spikes without being diverted. The genin leaped off her tree branch, swinging herself down and around the thick trunk in a descending spiral before latching herself to the bark with the most powerful tree-walking she'd ever attempted. Eight hundred pounds of hog hit the limits of the ninja wire at fifteen miles an hour; the windings around the tree trunk kept the wire from being pulled out of Mori's hands.

The loop pulled tight and the pig nearly decapitated itself; blood fountained everywhere, and the pig dropped, instantly dead.

It took a moment for Noburi and Hazō to finish blinking in shock and cautiously approach the pig carcass. By the time they did, Mori was standing in front of it, hands clasped behind her back as she bent to inspect the bristles.

"Uh...," said Noburi.

"I thought you were just supposed to catch its leg," Hazō said in amusement. "Didn't we have this whole cunning plan where you and I were going to each get a loop around one foot and hold the thing immobile while Nobby drowned it? What happened to the plan?"

"You missed," Mori said absently, before going back to studying the bristles.

The next three hours were spent on cleanup; they very carefully filled in all the damage the boar had done to the ground, replacing as much of the turf as possible, brushing out all the tracks they could manage, and covering up as much as possible of the blood. They couldn't do much to conceal the damage to the treebark and the gashes where the ninja wire had dug in, but those weren't quite so obvious.

By the time they finished, the only signs that there had been a battle were the damage to the trees and the eight-hundred-pound skinned-out carcass. The latter was easily dealt with; they simply poured a trail of blood from the acid-ants tree to the carcass. After a few minutes observation to make sure the ants followed the trail, the team was on their way home. The storage scroll that Shikigami-sensei had loaned them ("If I find so much as one tiny stain, I will make a replacement scroll from your skin!") was stuffed full of hundreds of bristles and several dozen pounds of what was probably going to be delicious meat. The excitement and pride of the hunt buoyed them up on the way back, making the miles fly by effortlessly. Mori blushed when the boys teased her and called her 'Mori the Mighty, Slayer of Pigs!' but she didn't seem all that bothered.

Four o'clock found them most of the way home, skating smoothly across Red Route One, the most direct of the mapped paths leading to the lair from their entry point into the swamp. They were making the southwest turn to avoid the waterskater nest when the distinctive BOOM! of an explosive tag echoed across the swamp from the east.