"Damnit," Inoue said, staring at the faint tracks that disappeared into the forest. The 'wanderers' had fled the village.

"Should we follow them, sensei?" Mori asked.

Inoue sighed. "Not tonight," she said. "By the looks of those tracks they've been gone a couple hours already, I don't want to track them through these woods at night, and we should be getting ready for meeting our friend tomorrow." She shook her head. "They must have lit out of here like their tails were on fire the minute they finished with that meeting," she said. "If I hadn't needed to stay with the girls, I could have caught them. Meh, we'll find them in a day or two. They're only civilians—well, unless they're being deliberately sloppy about their trail. In the meantime, let's talk about tomorrow...."

o-o-o-o

"Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one-hundred," Hazō muttered. He stopped and unsealed a small boulder, setting it in a rocky patch where it would look as natural as possible. The situation was a little too tilted in the foreign ninja's favor; the team had spent a good chunk of the night brainstorming ways to help Hazō survive the encounter. Having a nice chain of ideal Substitution targets leading back to the village seemed like a good plan. He'd also allowed Inoue-sensei to Substitute with him; from now on she'd be able to switch with him at will until he revoked the permission. If things really went to hell she could Substitute along the chain and then Substitute him out of danger in under a minute.

He automatically checked for threats before continuing on. The meet point was just up ahead, and his timing was good; dawn was right on the horizon. He should reach the clearing with no further trouble.

He finished his survey of the area and set out, taking care to step just close enough to the chakra vole nest that they would attack, but not close enough that they'd succeed. The stupid animals collapsed the dirt where he'd been standing and were taken greatly aback by his failure to fall into their trap. A swarm of furious carnivores leaped out of the hole teeth-first, chittering madly in their ravenous desire to be utterly and completely crushed at the fists and feet of a vastly superior opponent who had a major score to settle. Hazō grabbed the first two out of the air and slammed their heads together, shook the resulting meatpaste off his hands in time to snapkick the third vole into a tree (taking care to kick with his left foot, because putting any weight on that heel was still agony), then grabbed the fourth by the tail and used it as a flail to smash the fifth into the dirt, then....

It took a while, but eventually all the voles were dead and Hazō was feeling much better about the shape of the universe. (In point of fact, the voles had been dead for quite a while before Hazō started liking the shape of the universe. He didn't mind.)

The sun was just lumbering up over the horizon, so he hurried on to the clearing up ahead, trying not to be too obvious about limping on his left foot.

He arrived just as the first rays of the sun were washing across the vine-covered clearing. It wasn't technically a clearing, but 'open spot between beach and forest where nothing particularly tall is growing' was a bit unwieldy, so 'clearing' it was.

He stopped at the edge of the clearing, surveying everything carefully. A small stream fed into the lake here, and the ground cover was thick; a tumble of thick green vines had grown up out of the streambed and sprawled everywhere. Wide, flat leaves grew from the vines, completely obscuring the ground.

Hazō frowned. Ever since he'd started living in the wilderness he'd learned not to trust anything he couldn't see. Not being able to trust the ground was a bad thing.

He fastened a kunai to some ninja wire and hurled it out into the clearing a few times, slicing into the vines and probing at the earth. Nothing responded, but he kept probing. After all, he had nothing better to do until the other ninja showed up.

The eleventh throw of the kunai stirred up the expected psychotic chakra nightmare.

This particular nightmare was a carpet of crabs, each the size of his hand with claws as long as his thumb. They scuttled towards him like the onrushing tide, snapping their claws with a sound like thunder. The surprise rocked Hazō back on his heels; the massive bleeding wound in his left heel reminded him of its existence and politely requested that he not rock back on it again anytime soon.

The crabs were fast; in under a second they'd crossed the thirty feet between the edge of the clearing and himself. They would easily have overrun and consumed a civilian in a few heartbeats. Hazō, however, was a ninja. He pushed chakra into his legs and leaped for the trees. He'd get a little height and then go to work with a kunai and some wire; the crabs could watch in frustration as he turned them into hors d'oeuvres one by one. He twisted in midair so he'd touch the tree feet-first, only to note that the tree he was aiming for wasn't casting a shadow.

Still in midair, Hazō tossed the kunai and its attached wire up and forward, freeing his hands for just an instant. With the precision of the Iron Nerve, his fingers flicked through the requisite seals of a technique he'd hardly ever used but was suddenly desperately grateful to have learned.

"Dispel!"

The world dripped into a different shape around him; the 'tree' that he was headed for was actually a boulder on which sat a red-eyed crow and about a billion scuttling crab-things.

He grabbed the wire and its attached kunai out of the air, whirled it once, and flung it to the side, looping it smoothly around an adjacent tree—a real one this time! With his left hand Hazō pulled hard on the wire, diverting his course to land outside the carpet of monstrosities. With his right he hurled a shuriken into the chest of the crow that sat staring at him so intently as the crab monsters scuttled around it. The angle was bad and he was doing too much at once; even with the Iron Nerve he barely landed the strike. Still, it was enough. The crow squawked and fell down dead into the surging tide of crab-things, who cheerfully stripped the flesh off the bones of their erstwhile ally.

Hazō's foot touched the bark of the tree and he swarmed upwards to the very top where he stood, puffing and gasping in the aftermath of the adrenaline crash, and looked down at the crab-things that would have devoured him in seconds if he hadn't managed to break the genjutsu.

The branch swayed under him; before he could move, something slapped him on the back and a voice whispered in Hazō's ear: "Be still or you explode."

Hazō froze.

"Drop your weapons," it said. It was raspy, high pitched for a man but low for a woman, and he didn't recognize the accent.

Very carefully, Hazō removed the kunai holster from his belt and let it fall. His shuriken pouch and ninja wire followed.

"The last pouch is a pair of sealing scrolls," he said carefully. "One of them is for you; I'd rather not drop them if that's all right."

A bight of rope slapped over his shoulder, both ends pre-tied in wide loops.

"Right wrist to left ankle, around the tree," the voice said.

Hazō licked his lips. Even with the loops fully tightened, the rope was only about twenty centimeters long; putting it on was going to leave him effectively helpless. This might be a good time to bail.

Mentally, he shook his head. No. Whoever this ninja was, he'd apparently put an explosive tag on Hazō's back. What he hadn't done, though, was to put a knife in his back. He'd had the drop on Hazō and could have killed him. The fact that he hadn't done so yet probably meant that he didn't intend to.

Well, it could also mean that he intended to torture Hazō for a while and then kill him, but let's be optimistic.

"Now, boy!" the voice snapped.

"Okay, okay!" Hazō said. He bent down so he could tie himself as directed. He needed to use treewalking to keep himself in place; the branch he was standing on was much too narrow to balance on while in such a contorted position.

"How did you find me?" the voice asked. "Who else is looking for me?!"

"We weren't looking for you," Hazō said honestly. "We came to Iron just trying to stay off everyone's maps, and this was the first town we stopped at. When we heard the villagers talking about you we thought that maybe this was a chance—maybe we could link up, share resources and work together."

"'Work together, huh?!" the man snapped, poking Hazō at the base of the skull with the tip of a kunai. "I'll give you some 'work together'! I'll give it to you right in your stinking pie hole, you stinking ninja stinker!"

Hazō blinked. 'Stinking ninja stinker'?

"Um...we're happy to just leave, if you like?" he said. "But I did come with a peace offering. In my scroll there's paper, furs, and lake plums. We weren't sure what you'd like, but those seemed like things that might be useful to you."

"Useful, huh?! Useful! What do you know about useful, you stinking...hang on. Paper?"

"Yes?" Hazō said carefully.

"How much paper?" the man—he was pretty sure it was a man—asked with studied nonchalance.

"A couple dozen sheets," Hazō said. "I'm afraid we didn't have much."

"And what exactly was it you wanted?" the man said suspiciously.

"We just want to trade," Hazō said. "We'd like whatever information you have about Iron. We don't know what you're looking for, but if you tell us we can probably get it. We've got current news, we can get you whatever goods you're interested in if you tell us where to go, and we have a supply of seal blanks that we're willing to offer."

The knife suddenly dug in harder; Hazō could feel a small drop of blood running down his neck. "Seal blanks?! Seal blanks?! Do you think I'm crazy, letting you give me seal blanks?! You just want to get me killed, don't you?! Admit it! You want my face to burn off and the tentacles to grow out my ears and use my arms like puppet arms as I slowly melt into a puddle of reeking goo that I have to clean up with a mop because some jackass thought it was a good idea to mess around with someone else's seal blanks!"

"Whoa, whoa! Easy!" Hazō said, leaning forward as much as he could to get away from knife that was jabbing into his neck to emphasize each phrase in the man's diatribe. "It's an offer, you don't have to take them! They're good, though, I promise. Just examine them, see if they're valid. If they are, they're yours and I can get you plenty more exactly like them. If they're not, then you're not out anything but a little time."

"Time? You think being out of time is a joke?" the ninja snapped, poking him with the knife again. "You think it was funny that time that Kawaguchi accidentally put himself in storage and came out all mangled up?" The knife jabbed Hazō lightly in the back.

"No, not funny! Not what I meant!" Hazō said, trying desperately to evade the stabby thing that this clearly-more-than-a-bit-crazy ninja was using like a pointer at a briefing. "Look, just check the blanks, okay? I can get you as many as you want, and they're all good. I promise, every single one."

"A likely story," the ninja said, but he eased off on the stabbing. "Okay, smart guy. What do you want for these all-good blanks, hm?"

"You infuse them for us," Hazō said. "You get one blank for every one that you inf—" The knife jabbed harder. "Two! You get two for every one that you infuse for us! Ow, okay, three! Go easy on the knife, man, I'm just trying to deal!"

"Hm," the ninja said. The knife retreated. "Let's assume, just for a moment, that you're actually playing fair, you stinking stinker. You have to want more than just some blanks infused. You could get that from any sealmaster."

"We don't know any other sealmasters," Hazō said. "But, yes. We were hoping that we could trade for a while, show you that we're honest, and then maybe talk about some seal training."

The knife was back. "Seal training, huh? You want me to sit in a room and just make seals for you all day until you decide to send me off into the middle of nowhere with a group of fumble-fingered jackasses who won't keep their stinking hands off the face-melting unholiness, is that it? Is that the kind of training you want me to have?!" Jab, jab, jab.

"Ow!" Hazō said, wriggling on the branch in a futile attempt to dodge the repeated jabs that were starting to do actual damage. "No! Not training for you, training for me!"

The knife stopped. "What."

"My family has had at least one sealmaster in every generation as far back as we have records," Hazō said. "I was supposed to start my training once I made chūnin, but now that won't happen. I could be a great sealmaster, I'm sure of it. It's something I've wanted since I was a kid; I couldn't wait to start my training, but I wasn't allowed to even open the books until I made chūnin."

There was silence from behind him. Hazō took it as a good sign.

"Would it be so bad, training someone who really wanted to learn?" Hazō asked. "Wouldn't you like to leave a legacy? You must have made some amazing discoveries; do you want them to be forgotten when you die?"

The man went to one knee, yanking Hazō's head back by the hair and pressing the knife tight to his throat. "What do you know about me dying? Is your jōnin coming after me? Is this all just a big distraction?" For the first time, Hazō was actually able to see his assailant's face. It was long and narrow, with a weak chin and a hair line that was already starting to recede despite the fact that the man probably wasn't out of his late thirties or early forties. The hair was brown, tangled, and full of leaves and twigs, but the eyes were what bothered Hazō; they were the eyes of a panicked wolverine.

"No, she's not!" Hazō said, taking care not to move his jaw too much lest he slice his own throat open. "We're being honest, really. I just meant that no one lives forever. Wouldn't you like it if kids were studying your theories a hundred years from now? You could be on the shelf next to Nishimura and Kita...but not if you don't pass on your knowledge."

The eyes got very slightly calmer and the knife pressed a little less tightly.

"Nishimura and Kita, huh?" the man murmured. "Hm. 'Pay attention, class: now that you've finished Kita, we'll be moving on to Kagome.'" The knife loosened a bit more and the man mumbled to himself for half a minute. "Yeah. Yeah. 'Hamasaki-sensei, may I please be allowed to check out Kagome, volume VII?' 'No! That's much too advanced for you, brat!' Yeah...." The knife fell away completely—less because Kagome (if that was his name) was taking it away and more because he was lost in his thoughts and not paying attention to keeping the knife in place.

Momma would have described this man as 'a little too tightly wound'. Momma had always said that the best way to deal with ninja who were a little too tightly wound was to speak softly and back away slowly. Momma was really smart.

The silence dragged on. Hazō stayed silent and completely still.

"Okay, kid," Kagome said, coming back from his daydream. "Where's this stuff you had for me?"

"The red scroll, in my hip pouch," Hazō said carefully. "Would you like me to get it?"

"Hells no!" Kagome said jabbing him with the knife for emphasis. "I'm not about to let you activate a seal while I'm right here. Here's how this is going to work: I'm going to step off. You're going to count to fifty—slowly!—then unseal the stuff you promised and drop it. Count to a hundred—no, to a thousand!— and then you can come down. If you mess with me, I'll blow you to the Summoned Realm. Got it?!" The knife tip made several fast jabby motions to emphasize the point. Each one of them drew blood.

"Yes! Ow, stop with the stabbing!" Hazō said.

"Oh," Kagome said, sounding embarrassed. "Right. Sorry."

Hazō blinked. He hadn't actually expected an apology. He decided to try to push very gently. "You're welcome to the stuff," he said. "I just want to point out that the lake plums are going to get squashed if I drop them."

"Oh," Kagome said. "Yeah. Uh...here, have some rope." From somewhere he pulled out a hundred-foot coil of handwoven rope. "Lower the stuff down with this. You can keep the rope."

"Thank you," Hazō said. It was actually quite a gift; that much rope must have been a lot of work and time to make. "Just one thing: I think there's an explosive tag on my back."

"You can keep that one too," Kagome said. "Assuming I don't have to blow you up, of course." His voice got hard again. "And don't think you can just take it off and throw it away, either! I'll be watching you, and I've got this entire area secured! Mess with me and I'll squash you into meat jelly, got it? No taking that tag off until you're on the ground!"

"Got it," Hazō said. He paused, but nothing happened. "Should I start counting now?" he asked carefully.

"Uh, yeah. You do that," Kagome said. The tree limb bounced slightly as he leaped away; Hazō ignored it and concentrated on counting slowly.

He followed the directions to the letter and, when the time came, he climbed down slowly instead of just jumping. At the base of the tree was a note:

Okay, kid, maybe you're not a stinking ninja stinker. I want a thousand sheets of seal-quality paper, a gallon of chakra ink, a pound of good chocolate, a gallon of honey, ten pounds of good tea, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Leave all that here a week from today and I'll teach you some basic theory.

PS: Make sure the bread has raisins in it, okay?

PPS: Oh, and bring a copper kettle. Making tea in a waterskin sucks.

PPPS: When you bring the stuff back, don't worry about the crabs. I'll make sure they don't bother you.

PPPPS: Oh yeah: Run.

Hazō took off like a bat out of hell, but he'd gone barely twenty yards when there was a loud crump! in the clearing behind him. A powerful wind blew inwards, almost knocking him off his feet. A moment later it reversed; an outward surge of air lifted him and practically threw him forward. He ran farther, then turned to look.

The clearing had been scourged down to bare dirt. Needless to say, there wasn't a single crab anywhere.