Hazō stared at his hands in horror, once again cast down by the invincible rock-paper-scissors monstrosity that was Mori Keiko. One day, he swore, one day he would defeat her and seize control of his own destiny. But that day was not today.

Inoue-sensei reached out to him. For a second, he thought she was going to ruffle his hair, but—unbelievably—compassion stayed her hand, instead bringing it to settle firmly on his shoulder. For his sake, she kept her emotions off her face as long as she could. "If you are truly prepared to shoulder this burden for the sake of the team," she told him, looking him in the eye, "then here is what you must do."

"Hey, you there," Hazō swaggered up to the big tough chūnin-looking ninja picking shuriken out of a practice dummy. "I am Nishino Kaoru, star pupil of Takenaka Noe herself, and I have come here to convert all ninja to the supreme form of taijutsu: Righteous Face Punching Style!"

The ninja gave him a weary look. "Really, kid? Really?"

"That's right!" Hazō pointed at the ninja's face dramatically. "Now either face me, or submit to the glory that is Righteous Face Punching and swear eternal allegiance to the Brotherhood of Green Spandex!"

Hazō didn't know what was so scary about green spandex—in fact, he rather liked the idea—but the other ninja visibly flinched.

"Get out of here, you brat, you're creeping me out."

Sensing weakness, Hazō moved in for the kill.

"If I cannot get you to fight me, I will spend one hundred hours following you around lecturing you on the importance of burning passion!"

The ninja seemed to weigh his options, then sighed. "Oh, hell, let's just get this over with."

The ninja suddenly dropped into a low side-on stance, and then in one swift move stepped across with his back leg and unleashed a powerful kick that might have put Hazō through one of the palisade walls if he hadn't dodged. But dodge Hazō did, and in the instant his opponent was off-balance he aimed a quick series of punches at his face.

However, the lack of balance was an illusion. The ninja smoothly spun out of the way, turning the momentum of the movement into a devastating back kick that nailed Hazō's spine and disabled him long enough for a brutal elbow finisher.

"M-Most youthful..." Hazō slurred as he collapsed to the ground in a boneless heap.

o-o-o-o

"Wow, that's amazing," Noburi purred, looking deep into the girl's hazel eyes. "You mean your dad is the best of all twelve blacksmiths in the village?"

Another girl none-too-subtly elbowed the first one out of the way. "Oh, like anyone cares about that. My big brother got accepted into the Liberator's samurai training programme!"

"Really now?" Noburi turned the full force of his exotic-foreign-ninja attention onto Hoshino (was her name Hoshino?), singling her out from among the gaggle of girls who'd volunteered to be his tour guides around the village.

But before he could ask further, his attention was caught by a sudden wave of bloodlust coming from up ahead. A small crowd of local boys stood in his way, all of them glaring and some cracking their knuckles, and none of them looking too happy about his monopolisation of the village's female population.

"You've been getting a bit full of yourself, newcomer. Somebody needs to put you in your place."

Ah, crap. They probably couldn't see his forehead protector because of all the girls in the way. Now he'd have to either beat them up (easy, but a great way to earn a bunch of enemies for the duration of his stay) or lose face in front of the girls (extremely hard, and also likely to lose him a valuable source of information).

Wakahisa hated bullies. At the Academy, his small size, limited taijutsu skills, and the ridiculous-looking barrel on his back had earned him a lot of their attention, and that had only got worse with the passage of time as his tormentors learned trap-making and basic ninjutsu. So there was a pretty strong temptation to even the score for once.

But he knew what Inoue-sensei would say. "True dominance isn't about bigger muscles—it's about making someone think what you want them to think and feel what you want them to feel."

Noburi walked away from the girls, and slowly, at a casual pace, towards the boys. "Which one of you guys is the leader?"

The crowd parted. A big sixteen-year-old with bulging arms that said "son of a manual labourer" swaggered out. "That's me, Katō Shōta. Now, how about—"

Noburi cut in quickly, and just quietly enough to make sure the girls couldn't hear him. "Hey, listen, I've been meaning to come see you and pay my respects, but I just got caught up in stuff, you know?"

Then he leaned close in, speaking even more quietly in case Keiko or Inoue-sensei was around with ninja-trained hearing (because he was quite attached to his limbs).

"You know how women are—once they start talking, you can't shut them up. And if I just walked away, they'd get pissed off and cause me no end of trouble."

Shōta's angry look turned measuring, and maybe even a little sympathetic.

"Anyway," Noburi went on, "I don't want to break any rules or tread on anyone's toes, so how about I find you tomorrow, after my jōnin team leader briefs me, and you tell me how things work around here?"

Shōta processed the respectful treatment, and then the phrase "my jōnin team leader", and gave Noburi a mostly haughty and only slightly please-don't-kill-me nod.

"See that you do, newcomer."

At the last second, Noburi added an afterthought. "Oh, yeah, and my mate Kaoru's taken quite a lot of blows to the head, so if you see him acting weird, do me a favour and just let it go, OK?"

With that, Noburi returned to his girls as Shōta led his cohort away.

"So about your brother..."

o-o-o-o "Righteous Face Punching Style: Even More Simplified Diplomacy Technique!"

The other genin dropped low as Hazō's chakra-accelerated fist sailed through the space where she'd just been, then moved quickly into a leg sweep. When Hazō jumped to avoid it, she sprang up after him, a burst of chakra propelling her into an uppercut with the entire mass of her body behind it.

Hazō managed to bring his arms up in a painful but effective block that gave him a chance to regain his balance as he landed. He lashed out with a rapid punch combo to try to break his opponent's momentum. The first punch missed, the second connected, and then he inexplicably found himself on the ground, with everything spinning and his arm feeling like someone was slowly wrenching it out of its socket (probably because someone was).

"Now take back what you said," the girl growled.

"Y-You're right," Hazō squeezed the words out through the pain, "you wouldn't look better with a bowl cut."

On the other side of the makeshift arena, Munakata the scribe redistributed a few pouches of ryō and updated the odds.

o-o-o-o Kei absent-mindedly chewed the end of the brush as she stared at the numbers she'd written down. Something didn't add up.

A thousand civilians. An indeterminate number of ninja (she'd seen dozens in the village, and it was unclear how many were out on missions at any given time, or how many were in the off-limits fortress). A disproportionately high number of craftsmen and construction workers, but few farmers and limited agricultural development. Extensive food and raw material imports, but no major exports.

The village was not self-sustaining.

It could have been a sign of incompetence on the part of the Liberator, evidence that he really was an overambitious bandit chief whose "empire" would soon fall apart of its own accord. But the logistics didn't add up. There were twenty separate buildings being erected right now, from houses and storage to workshops preallocated for different sorts of manufacture. There were no buildings standing empty, nor any apparent housing shortfalls. There was a 100% employment rate.

There was also no prison. That bothered her.

The Liberator acted like an ordinary charismatic leader, with emotive weekly speeches that emphasised unity in the face of an oppressive outside world, a grand destiny for the faithful, willing sacrifice in the name of a better future, and the need to sever all ties with non-believers. But he planned like an experienced civic administrator with a luxurious budget, and he arranged his patrols and defences and distributed his military resources like a careful strategist. Yes, something didn't add up.

o-o-o-o The teenager shifted into a defensive stance and drew a set of shuriken. "Bring it on, weirdo."

The teenager lifted his hands for a throw, but Hazō was quicker. In a flicker of movement that took advantage of the blind spot created by the ninja's own arm, he was inside the ninja's guard and ready to strike.

"Righteous Face Punching Style: Universal Problem-Solving Technique!"

Hazō punched his defenceless opponent in the face several times to soften him up, then followed through with a carefully-aimed punch to the face.

The opponent began to swerve sideways, out of the way of the attack, and almost made it... but he hadn't accounted for the deceptive cunning of Hazō's technique. Hazō sharply pulled his arm back at the last second, revealing that the move had only been a feint. All along, Hazō had actually been setting him up for... one overwhelming face punch.

The target went flying, unconscious even before he hit the spectator stands and nearly knocked over the woman selling refreshments.

"Witness the supremacy of Righteous Face Punching Style!" Hazō proclaimed as he scanned the crowd for a ninja he hadn't challenged yet.

o-o-o-o The guard at the gates of the Fortress of White Steel changed once again. Noburi glanced at the towering rebuilt walls of what was said to have been the original Liberator's base of operations, scanned the two ninja's forehead protectors, then moved out of his hiding place and walked into view.

"Sorry, friend," one of the guards called out, "only those most trusted by the Liberator beyond this point, and I'm afraid you're not on that list yet."

"Oh, no," Noburi said, "I was just here to talk to one of my countrymen." It was a calculated risk, but after some thought Inoue-sensei had authorised it. "I figured if you've been out of Mist for a long time, you might want some news of the old place."

The ninja raised his eyebrows. "Oh, duh, the barrel. I should have realised. You're a Wakahisa, right?"

After a second, his eyes widened. "If you are from Mist, can you tell me if my little sister is all right? Satō Minori—she'd be a genin by now."

Noburi internally winced. As it happens, he had known Satō Minori. "She graduated with top marks," he chose his words carefully, "and last time I saw her, she'd been cherry-picked for a large-scale special mission."

The ninja smiled with relief. "That's my Minorin, always shoulder-to-shoulder with the best. Then how about my old friend..."

o-o-o-o

"Ri—"

Hazō woke up a couple of minutes later. Damn, must've been a jōnin.

o-o-o-o

"Sorry I can't be more help," the ninja told Noburi, "but I'm not supposed to talk about what's inside the fortress. I mean, it's where the Liberator and his elite advisers and the Big Four and the Brotherhood of the— ah, anyway, you can see why we'd be in a lot of trouble if someone managed to get their hands on that sort of info, especially while the New Samurai Army's still in training."

Noburi smiled politely while internally kicking himself. It was the anecdote about Captain Shimada and the headcrabs and the Twelve Forbidden Pirate Sea Shanties, wasn't it? He knew he should have saved that one until the guard was more relaxed.

"No, that's OK. Thanks for chatting to me. I'll see you around."

As he slowly made his back to Inoue-sensei, Noburi reviewed what he'd managed to learn.

Many people volunteered to become samurai. Not all were accepted. Others were invited directly. Nobody refused. A couple of hundred would-be samurai had entered the Fortress of White Steel. So far, they were still being trained, and were not permitted to leave the fortress.

The Big Four were the Liberator's first ninja disciples. They were unstoppable S-rank battle monsters (although no one had ever seen them fight, and they did not train with the other ninja) and master infiltrators, and right now they were tasked with ninja recruitment in sensitive areas (i.e. anywhere the village ninja might hear of it).

One or two families arrived in the village every day, drawn by rumours of well-paid jobs, plentiful food and strong guards. Those who did not come with existing hatred of the ninja or dreams of an independent Iron Country quickly acquired them from the surrounding environment.

Missing-nin were offered the ability to live and work freely (and with appropriate compensation), in a fortified location where they would collectively outnumber even the biggest hunter-nin party. The Liberator promised that once he was in full control of the Iron Country, they would be offered the opportunity to work as part of a decentralised guardian ninja force, with job security and full medical and pension plans. For now, typical missions involved scouting, patrolling and monster hunting (both for general safety and in order to procure useful ingredients). A few were also hired out to nearby villages to generate goodwill and drive recruitment.

o-o-o-o

So far, Hazō had fought fifteen genin (and beaten eleven), eight chūnin (and beaten two) and three jōnin (for a sum total of seven seconds). He wasn't sure how much of the village that made now, only that he was getting really, really tired.

For some reason, he got a bad feeling as he approached his latest target, a rather attractive teenage girl in a figure-hugging green outfit. Feeling it best to get this one over with, he opened his mouth—

Abruptly, she threw herself into a humble kneeling bow in front of him. "Please accept me as your apprentice!"

Oh, there was no possible way this could be good.

"...what?"

She looked up at him, a fierce look in her eyes. "I want to learn your ways, your... Righteous Face Punching Style."

"B-But... who... why... what?"

She stood up. "My name is Ishihara Akane. When I was at the Academy at Hidden Leaf, there was a senior who talked exactly the way you do, about hard work and never giving up and the importance of the burning passion of youth—he even used those exact words. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. But then right when I was due to graduate, Mizuki-sensei tricked me... well, anyway, things happened, and now I'm here on the run and I... I've lost my chance."

She gave another bow.

"Please, Nishino-sensei, accept me as your apprentice. I will do anything, absolutely anything, to learn Righteous Face Punching Style and its philosophy, so that one day I can face the man of my dreams with my head held high!"