Author's Note: This chapter involves a boat. I thought about whether to use the nautical jargon for conciseness or go through lots of circumlocutions. Then I realized that our readers are brilliant and sexy people, and they already know that on a boat 'windward' and 'leeward' are the directions the wind is coming from / going to, that a 'sheet' is a rope used to move sails around, that to 'heel' a boat is to tip it up on edge, that the 'rail' and the 'gunwale' refer to the same thing (namely, the side of the cockpit), and all the rest of that jazz. Ergo, no need for me to provide a glossary.

Hazō bent over to pick up his shirt, using the motion to conceal his hand seals. "Dispel," he muttered. He pulled on the shirt and turned to look; nope, Inoue-sensei still looked like Inoue-sensei. She had pulled out the map and was studying what the next step in their route should be. Kagome was hovering nervously around her, reluctant to stick his nose in but clearly wanting to know in what sort of horrific way they were all going to die now.

"Substitution," Hazō said. Suddenly he was standing next to Kagome and Inoue was a few yards away, where Hazō had been a moment before.

"Satisfied?" Inoue asked, not looking up from the map.

"I don't suppose you could tell me whether it was me or Noburi who won the chakra-vole-killing contest back at the lake town?" Hazō asked.

Mari glanced over at him and rolled her eyes. "It was a waterbug-killing contest and it was between Keiko and Noburi," she said. "Keiko won. Now are you satisfied?"

"Yes, sensei," Hazō said meekly.

"Good. Everyone get your gear on, I want to put some real distance under our feet before sundown."

Seconds later, the six ninja had vanished into the distance and the riverside was calm once more.

o-o-o-o

Hazō's feet splashed as they pushed the boat into the surf.

"Quiet!" Inoue hissed. "And hurry!"

They shoved the boat out until it was deep enough to take their weight and then piled in. Everyone grabbed a paddle and rowed furiously as they tried to get out past the breakers. The crashing waves threw the boat up and down while salt spray blasted into faces and eyes, making everyone blink furiously and try to wipe them clear on their sleeve without breaking the rhythm of paddling.

"Hey! You! Come back with my boat!" yelled a voice from the shore.

Hazō glanced back to see a party of ten or twelve villagers, most of them carrying a makeshift weapon of some sort and the rest carrying torches. They charged down the beach and into the surf, wading after the boat. Hazō dug in frantically, paddling with all of his strength. He really didn't want to have to kill those people, and if they couldn't get out of reach it would be necessary.

They crested the last breaker, surfed down the back side, and suddenly they were in open water. Inoue laughed triumphantly and started pulling ropes. The sail rose up, billowing out like a gull's wing in the evening breeze. The small boat leapt forward....

...and nearly flipped over as the tight-trimmed sail levered the boat to the side. All six ninja scrambled up onto the windward rail, treewalking so they could lean farther out in order to keep the boat from capsizing.

"Let the sail out!" Kagome yelled.

Inoue let go of the mainsheet; it careened out through the blocks and the sail banged all the way over until it touched the water. With no more wind pressure on the sail to heel the boat it promptly righted itself...which would have spilled all six ninja in the drink if they hadn't been gluing their feet down with chakra. As it was, Hazō's head and shoulders went under the water. The surprise almost made him lose his grip and fall completely in, but Kagome's wiry hand clamped onto his collar and yanked him, sputtering and choking, back into the boat.

With no control on the sail, the boat sat in place, pitching up and down in the waves but otherwise just drifting. Inoue grabbed the mainsheet and hauled it in hand-over-hand, pulling as fast as she could to bring the sail in and get the boat under control again.

"You said you knew how to sail!" Noburi yelled.

"I said I had sailed before!" Inoue said. "There's a difference!"

"Urrrrrrrrrppppp!" said Kagome, heaving everything he'd ever eaten over the side of the boat he happened to be sitting on. Which, unfortunately, was the windward side.

"Other side!" yelled all five of the other ninja, wiping their faces. "Puke over the other side!"

o-o-o-o

"I never want to see another boat as long as I live," Keiko said feelingly as they pulled themselves up onto the shore and collapsed in exhaustion.

"Look on the bright side," Noburi said, from where he lay gasping on the sand next to her. "Maybe next time we'll just get eaten by a chakra monster!"

"Hey, it wasn't so bad, right?" said Inoue. The redhead was looking sheepish; not only had her sailing skills proven less good than she had thought, but her plan had gone a bit south when the storm blew up. She'd barely managed to keep the boat afloat, much less headed in anything like the right direction. The water had been pouring over the sides of the boat faster than they could bail it out. The boat nearly capsized every time she tried to do anything except run before the fury of the storm. Even so, the boat had ended up sinking out from under them, and they'd had to waterwalk through the teeth of a storm, up and down waves ten feet high with rain slashing into their faces like stinging sand. They all knew waterwalking, but there was a difference between walking on the calm surface of a swamp or a river and walking on the storm-tossed ocean. Especially walking two miles on storm-tossed ocean. At night. As their chakra slowly drained away and they had to drink Noburi's chakra water to keep from drowning. Without spilling it. While climbing up and down large hills that were moving in three dimensions.

Inoue smiled hopefully at the genin who were busy trying to set her on fire with their minds. "C'mon, it really wasn't that bad."

"YES IT WAS!" yelled all four genin.

"Not really," Kagome said with a fatalistic shrug. "At least there weren't any lupchanz."

"Not. Helping," Keiko hissed, performing an S-ranked Glare of Death no Jutsu at him.

"Eeep!" said Kagome.

o-o-o-o

The following day was spent recovering. There was no training or strenuous planning; none of them wanted to do anything except relax on the beach, drink plenty of water, make sandcastles, kill the chakra-imbued sand snakes that tried to eat them, nibble on the copious supply of delicacies Inoue had squirreled away in her storage seals and was breaking out in a so-far-vain effort to buy back her genin's affection, and other such relaxing activities.

"We should probably go find our contact tomorrow," Inoue said. "Soonest begun, soonest done, right? I mean, summoning scroll? Massive powerup?"

"Would you please pass me the canteen, Hazō?" Keiko asked, ostentatiously rolling onto her side so her back was to her sensei.

"Of course," Hazō said, handing it over and very pointedly not looking at the pouting redhead.

"Ooh, look! There's a bunny in the clouds!" Noburi said.

"Nah," said Kagome. "Looks more like a spikey tentacle." The forest-nin was spraddled out on a blanket, his arms folded over his belly and his toes paddling in the white sand. He was finding the area remarkably calming; the beach had great sight lines, especially after he'd used his implosion seals to flatten the forest near them into a hundred-yard-wide killzone. He had then spent some time 'securing the perimeter' and since then had been surprisingly relaxed. (Well, for him.)

"You are a very disturbed person, sir," Noburi said.

A sharp BOOM! echoed from the forest to the northwest as some unlucky forest creature crossed one of Kagome's traps.

"Yes!" Hazō said. "Four minutes! Pay up, Noburi."

Noburi grumbled but dug around in his pack for a ten-ryō coin. "Fine," he said. "Next one in six minutes."

"Two," said Keiko, not bothering to open her eyes.

o-o-o-o

"Akane, may I speak to you for a moment?" Hazō said quietly.

Akane's head snapped up from where she'd be cleaning her messkit. "Of course, sensei!" she said, popping to her feet.

Hazō winced; he'd been hoping to do this quietly. "Come with me, please," he said.

"Have fun, kids!" Inoue called from her place by the fire.

Hazō gave her a death glare; it rolled off her salacious grin like water off a duck. With a minor 'hmph', he turned and led Akane a short way down the beach to where the team had set a log of convenient size for sitting on and looking out over the water.

"Have a seat," he said, settling down himself and gesturing for her to take a spot beside him. Akane sat, looking at him attentively but not speaking.

Hazō took a deep breath and blew it out, nerving himself up for a difficult conversation. "Akane...those ninja that Inoue-sensei killed back around Rain? They weren't actually Rain nin, they were from Leaf." He braced himself for whatever came next—yelling, punching, crying. He really hoped it wasn't going to be crying. He wasn't good with crying.

"Yes?" she said, cocking her head quizzically. "And?"

Hazō blinked. "But..." he started. "I thought...you're from Leaf, I thought you'd be upset."

She looked at him as though he were an idiot. "Of course I'm upset," she said. "Leaf is my home. I've wanted to be a ninja of the Leaf since I could walk. That doesn't mean I can't recognize reality. I'm a missing nin, in company with other missing-nin, inside Leaf's territory. Any patrol that caught us was going to kill us."

"But...."

She sighed. "Sensei," she said. "I love my home and if Lord Jiraiya were ever able to arrange for me to return—" She paused; when she continued there was surprise in her voice. "I started to say that I would jump at the chance, but then I realized that it would mean leaving my sensei, and my team." She shifted, looking down at her hands. "I...sensei, I have to admit, I'm not sure what I would do. Still, that changes nothing—it's unlikely that he could get me a pardon, and without one seeing a Leaf ninja would likely be the last thing I'd see. I hope that none of those ninja were people I knew, but that's the reality of ninja life."

She smiled wistfully. "That's actually the first class you take at the Academy," she said. "'Realities of Ninja Life'. They emphasize the fact that ninja have an average life expectancy of eight years and that very few live to retire. That you will see friends die. That you will kill, and that the people you kill will be no different from yourself—not evil, not monsters, just young ninja from a different village."

She turned to face him, her lips quirked in a sad smile at the ridiculousness of life. "I'm sorry if you've been worrying about my reaction all this time. I didn't know for a fact that those were Leaf ninja, but it seemed likely. I'm not happy about it, but I understand why it had to happen."

"I'm...glad?" Hazō said. The world seemed so strange that gravity might have just decided to point left. He had no idea what the correct response was to Akane's speech.

She laughed softly and stood up, offering him her hand. "I think we should rejoin the others before Inoue-sensei poisons their minds with lewd stories about us."

Hazō hopped to his feet and nearly ran back to the fire.

o-o-o-o

"Hello? Mr Okanao? Are you here?" Inoue said, pushing carefully through the curtain into the scribe-slash-postmaster's office. The others filed in behind her, trying not to loom.

The office was small, claustrophobically so once six people had jammed in. It was the front part of a neatly put together wooden house painted a faded blue. The room itself was of a blond wood that had been shined until it almost glowed. A wide shelf ran along the eastern wall with paper and pens laid out. A counter stretched across the south side of the room; behind the counter was a door to the rest of the house.

"Just a minute!" someone called from the next room. A minute later an elderly man with bushy eyebrows came bustling out. "Welcome, welcome. I'm Okanao, what can I do for you? Do you need letters written?"

"I'd like this copied and mailed, please," Inoue said, handing over the paper that Jiraiya had given them.

Okanao unfolded the paper and studied it for a moment. "Of course," he said. "No trouble at all. One copy or two?"

"Four, actually," Inoue said, offering the first half of the countersign. "And we'll need delivery by Friday, if that's possible."

Okanao nodded sharply, accepting the sign. "All right," he said. "Bar the door, please. I don't get much traffic so it's not likely another customer would come wandering in, but best not to take chances. What can I do for such good friends of Lord Jiraiya?"

"He said that you had word about a summoning contract," Inoue said. "What can you tell us about it?"

The old man raised his eyebrows. "Hm. Interesting. I didn't actually expect to get a response on that, and certainly not so soon." He shrugged. "I don't know much, but I'll tell you what there is. First, though, may I offer you some tea?"

Inoue glanced over at Kagome, who was starting to twitch from being in a confined space that he hadn't built with his own paranoid hands. He was sidling along the wall towards the corner; she spotted him pressing an explosive tag to the underside of the writing shelf. She immediately made the not-so-difficult leap that it probably wasn't the first seal he'd placed.

"I apologize, Mr. Okanao," she said. "I'm very sorry, but we don't have much time. We can't afford to be seen, and we need to leave as quickly as possible."

Okanao chuckled. "Yes, Lord Jiraiya's operatives rarely want to take tea with an old man. All right, then. To the point! Just give me a moment." He ducked into the inner room he'd previously come from and was back a moment later, a pair of books in his arms.

"How's your history and mythology?" he asked, spreading the books out on the counter and flipping one open. He leafed through it until he found the page he wanted, then he spun it around so the team could read it. They crowded close—all except for Kagome, jammed into the corner, and Hazō, who was trying to keep Kagome calm so that he didn't blow up everything within twenty miles.

"Do you know the legend of Ui Isas?" Okanao asked.

"Sure," Inoue said. "The Beast Lord. All of nature fought at his side, he killed the six dragons of the seas, rode the winds on the back of a sky serpent, and destroyed the army of Warlord Sen. What about it?" The other ninja nodded; it was a common children's story that every child of the Elemental Nations grew up hearing.

"It's a matter of historical fact that he was a real person," Okanao said. "He was born not far from here, actually. His adventures are woefully exaggerated, of course—I doubt he ever flew, and the dragons were probably some sort of chakra monster, not the offspring of a demon. One thing is for sure, though: Ui really did break the army of Warlord Sen single-handed.

"Sen was a bandit chief about three hundred years ago, up in Noodle. He was very successful, too; he put together an army of maybe two thousand civilian fighters and a dozen ninja and started conquering his way south. He destroyed everything in his way, and nothing could stop him.

"Ui had retired from ninja life and was living about a mile from this spot. The town grew up here because Ui regularly went out and killed off all the local chakra beasts, so this area was pretty safe. I think they would have set up in his backyard if they'd allowed it, but this was the closest he would let anyone settle. He was an old man, and he lived alone with his student, Akio—Akio was about ten at the time—and he valued his privacy. He did like the villagers, though, and often came into town to gamble, drink, or shop.

"Some refugees from up north arrived with word about Sen's approach. Ui could have taken Akio and gotten clear, but he wasn't willing to abandon the village."

"Sure, everyone knows this part," Noburi said. "He sent Akio to bring treasure to the Forest King to buy the King's aid against Sen. When the King didn't respond, Ui went forth alone. He destroyed Sen's army, then he and Sen fought for thirteen days and thirteen nights before they killed each other."

"That's what the legends say, anyway," Okanao said, nodding. "I suspect it went a little quicker than that, and I doubt that it was Sen who did for him. Probably one of the other ninja. Still, he broke the army and killed Sen. Without a leader to rally around, the survivors broke up and drifted off. A few settled here, most of the rest probably went back to Noodle."

"And we care about this, because...?" Inoue asked.

"Interesting thing about the Forest King," Okanao said. "The myths about him don't seem to have appeared until thirty years after Ui's death. Everyone has always assumed that they were a later addition to Ui's legend, but I recently got my hands on some old mythology scrolls from that time," Okanao said. "Took me a while to work through the archaic language, but I realized that the original version never mentioned the Forest King at all. The original passage was 'sent Akio with his treasures to the forest.'"

Inoue frowned. "You think that his treasure was the summoning contract?" she said.

"He was known as the Beast Lord," Okanao said. "Summoning contracts were rarer than hen's teeth back then. If people saw animals fighting beside him, they wouldn't have thought 'contract' they would have thought 'familiar spirit' or 'nature magic'. Hence the title 'Beast Lord'."

"Do you know where the kid went?" Inoue asked.

Okanao shook his head. "No, but the blacksmith of the village was supposedly good friends with Ui. The village grandmothers still tell stories to their grandkids about Ui and the blacksmith drinking and carousing through the town, testing their strength by smashing things and so on. Ui wouldn't have sent the kid off alone, so he probably sent him with the blacksmith and the blacksmith's family."

He grinned and flipped open the other book; this one contained a seemingly endless list of names and dates. "As it happens," he said, "my family has kept a genealogy for a very long time, and the village blacksmith in those days was my several-times-great granduncle. He was married to a woman from a town about a week north of Degarashi Port, as the civilian travels. If I were running away from a rampaging warlord, I'd probably head somewhere that I felt safe. Somewhere like my wife's father's house."