"I'm confused," Kagome called, ducking under Noburi's salvo of deadly ice missiles. "Why do you want to leave our nice safe camp with our beautiful sealing lab in order to go get stabbed by lots of stinking ninja stinker border patrols?" He twisted around, moving for a better shot on Noburi, only to screech in panic and kawarimi away as Keiko's barrage went through the space his chest had just occupied.

"I'll save you, senpai!" Akane called, laughing. "Fear the flames of my—I mean, dodge this!" she called, firing a storm of snowballs at Keiko with both hands while using the sling on her ninja wire to fire one towards Noburi, who was facing away looking for Kagome's next attack. Keiko barely leaped aside from everything headed towards herself before grabbing her teammate and pulling him out of the path of Akane's cowardly attack.

It had been pouring snow for three days; the weather had just broken today. The team had spent the time huddled inside their artificial cave, eating food and water from their storage scrolls and relying on Akane's Elemental Mastery jutsu to keep them warm. Now that the sun had chased off the clouds, the world had turned into a sparkling fairyland of diamond-encrusted trees and wave-sculpted ground. The light splashed through the ice on the branches and broke into tiny rainbows, and tracks of rabbit and fox showed that the team were late risers compared to the local wildlife.

Still, rise they finally had. There was a meadow not too far from their cave where they were enjoying the sun. Noburi, Keiko, Akane, and Kagome were tearing up the landscape with a ninja snowball fight the rules of which had been very carefully negotiated in advance. Chakra enhancement, shunshin, kawarimi, and illusionary clones: in. Water Whip, water clones, weapons, parrying, traps, and pangolins: out. Explosives: Double extra special out.

Amazingly, everyone had so far been sticking to the rules.

Inoue and Hazō had declined to participate. The jōnin was more interested in playing on the snow than in it, and had threatened dire retribution on anyone who happened to strike her with a snowball, errant or otherwise. Hazō, on the other hand, had declined because he was feeling too...well, he was going to go with 'introspective', because 'depressed' sounded bad.

"I'm with Kagome," Inoue said, smiling as she skated gracefully across the knee-deep snow, held up by a cushion of chakra repulsion. "I went along with the information gathering because I thought it would be good training, but I didn't expect you to actually act on it."

Hazō paused, thinking how to phrase it.

"Why are we here?" he finally asked.

"Well," Inoue said, "your mommy and daddy loved each other very much, so—"

"Not like that!" Hazō said, shooting a dark glare at a laughing Noburi. "I mean...what are we doing? What are our goals? Do we really want to just hide in the woods for the rest of our lives?"

"Yes," said Kagome, nodding so furiously that he forgot to duck. Keiko promptly took advantage to pelt him with half a snowbank full of snowballs, but the seal master didn't seem to notice. "Yes. That. That is what I want to do." He thought about it for a moment. "And make explosives. You can never have too many explosives." Without looking he stepped aside from Noburi's attack and hurled one back, missing by a mile.

Noburi leaned over to Keiko and said quietly, "There was a time when I would have disagreed with that."

"I as well," said Keiko, nodding. She looked at him inquiringly. "I have changed my stance on the issue. You?"

"Definitely," Noburi said. "No such thing as too many explosiEEEP!" He danced in place, trying to shake off the double handful of snow that Akane had just dumped down his neck. The laughing genin vanished back into the trees before Keiko could defend her temporarily-incapacitated teammate.

"Come on, guys," Hazō said. "I'm serious. Isn't there anything you want to do with your life, anything you want to accomplish?"

"Mmmmm...nope," said Inoue, shifting from skating to cartwheeling. (She had assured them that she was 'doing physical therapy', not 'cavorting'.) "I'm good. Safe, reasonably comfortable, not lonely, safe, towns nearby if I want to buy chocolate or soap, safe...this is pretty good."

"Keiko, Noburi, Akane, back me up here," Hazō said. "Aren't there people you'd like to see again?"

"Of course," Akane said, as she leaped off a branch and fired a storm of snow down at Keiko and Noburi. "But that isn't going to happen, sensei."

"We are missing-nin now," said Keiko, diving aside and rolling across the surface of the snow. "You do not come back from being a missing-nin."

"Guys, could you stop for a minute?" Hazō asked, trying not to whine. "Can we please talk seriously?"

Inoue was up in a one-handed handstand on the snow. She paused, looking over at Hazō, and then rolled smoothly out of the handstand and back to her feet. She skated over to Hazō and knelt down, waving the others to join them.

"Okay, kid," she said. "What's bugging you?"

"Well—"

"I'm cold," Kagome said. "If we aren't throwing stuff, let's go in."

"Yeah, good plan," Inoue said. She hopped to her feet, suppressing a quick flash of pain, and turned for their cave. "Last one in washes dishes!" she called as she vanished in a kawarimi.

"Hey, no fair!" Noburi said, scrambling to his feet.

Keiko didn't even stand up, she just kawarimied from seiza.

o-o-o-o

It took an hour to get everyone inside, warmed up, fed, and the dishes cleaned. Afterwards, while they were lounging around on the massive pile of furs and blankets that they had acquired since camping here, Hazō tried again.

"Look, I'm serious," Hazō said. "I don't want us to just rot in the woods. I want to make a difference in the world." He paused, biting his lip as he gathered his courage. "I want to see my momma again."

Inoue's casual lounging dropped away and she sat up, looking at him seriously. "Are you all right, Hazō?" she asked.

Hazō shrugged, looking at his hands for a moment before forcing himself to meet her eyes. "I'm okay," he said. "Mostly. I just miss her, you know? She's all I ever had. Poppa died when I was little, I never had brothers or sisters, I wouldn't join the Kurosawa if they paid me.... I'm worried about her. I don't know what she's doing now that she thinks I'm a dead traitor."

"Oh, kid," Inoue said sadly. "I'm sorry, Hazō. There's not really a lot we can do here. We could try to get a message to her, but if it were intercepted it would put her in danger. Yagura would assume that she was colluding with us. It could get her in a lot of trouble."

"I know," Hazō said. "Still, I have to believe there will be a way to make things better than this. Maybe we could talk to Jiraiya about it?"

Inoue blew out her cheeks with a sigh. "Yeah, maybe," she said. "Don't get your hopes up though, okay? I don't want you to be disappointed if we can't make it work."

"I won't," Hazō said. "Still. No matter what, I don't want to be stuck out here forever. We're missing-nin, but we aren't bad people and we didn't do anything wrong." He gestured at Kagome. "Shoot, it sounds like Kagome-sensei was escaping from a really bad situation. You're a good guy, sensei. That shouldn't have happened to you."

"Um," said Kagome, looking away quickly.

"Anyway," Hazō said. "There have to be other missing-nin like us. People who just got caught in something they had no control over. We shouldn't be cut off from our families and have to be on the run our whole lives. It ought to be possible for us to go home again, to earn our way back in."

"That is not realistic, Hazō," Keiko said.

"Well then, we make it realistic," Hazō snapped. He caught himself and took a breath. "Sorry. Look, the point is, this world sucks, right? Normal civilians are constantly in fear for their lives from chakra monsters, ninja, and just about everything else. They never have enough to eat, they get sick...how many med-nin do you know who help civilians?"

"Hashimoto-sensei did—does," Noburi said.

"That's one," Hazō said. "Name two others."

"Lady Tsudade," Akane said. "And the Konoha Medical School accepts civilian patients."

"As research and training subjects, I imagine," Keiko said with knee-jerk dismissiveness. She caught herself a moment later. "I apologize, that was overly harsh."

Akane shrugged and smiled. "It's not unfair," she said. "Mostly civilians are handled by the trainees, with oversight from a senior doctor."

"Okay, so Konoha is an exception," Hazō said, struggling to get the conversation back on track. "Remember all the places we've stopped? That lake town where Noburi fixed the kid's gapmouth and I put up some walls for them? It took me about five minutes, but it would have taken them weeks. Noburi, you were in surgery on that kid for...what? Half an hour, maybe? You changed his life, maybe even saved it. At the time I had just learned the Multiple Earth Wall—"

"Mew," Inoue said, in a perfect imitation of a kitten. She even batted playfully at the air with her hands...and, of course, turned the gesture into a good old-fashioned hair ruffling. Hazō sighed and combed it back with his fingers while continuing.

"My point is that I'm a genin who had just learned the jutsu, but I could build more for them than a team of adults working ten times as long. Noburi was a barely half-trained apprentice medic—no offense, man—but he was the next best thing to a miracle worker as far as they were concerned. Keiko and Akane were still genin, yet they could clear out all the chakra monsters in the area with barely a thought, whereas entire groups of civilian men needed to travel together to fetch clay while keeping the beasts off. If the ninja wanted to, we could make people's lives better with almost no effort."

"Sure, if you wanted to start a war," Kagome said.

Hazō blinked. "What?"

Kagome shrugged. "What do you think causes the shinobi wars? It all comes back to economics eventually. Say we cleaned out all the chakra monsters around that lake town and kept them down. Patrolled every day to make sure things were safe. You built all the walls they needed. Noburi mediced them into perfect health. We used jutsu to irrigate their fields and clones to help with plowing. What happens next?"

"...Everyone is happy?" Hazō said.

"For a little while," Kagome said. "Then they get prosperous. There's no monsters to attack the fields, so the people who were on guard duty can shift to growing food. With good medical care people aren't sick as much, so there's more labor to spend on food production. The town starts to generate a surplus, so they can trade with other towns, transform excess food into other forms of wealth like better tools. The new tools make their labor more efficient, so it takes fewer people to do the same amount of work. That frees up more labor for other things...maybe they build a windmill, buy a loom, start planting non-survival crops like medical plants. Caravans start stopping there more often, since the town has wealth to buy with and goods to sell. Other people hear about this great new town and they move there."

"This sounds pretty good..." Hazō said carefully.

"The world is not like that, though," Keiko said.

"Nope," Kagome said, rummaging in his pack as he spoke. "More food, more wealth, more people. Can't have that. Power balance would change. Not allowed. Need to prevent it, so they invented the scorch squads." From the bottom of his pack he pulled out a storage scroll and unsealed a small brick of something wrapped in waxed paper and tied shut with twine.

"Usually they're on the ball," he said, putting the storage scroll away. "They're fast enough to prevent that kind of prosperity from happening, so you get towns about the size of that one. Small, everyone's fairly happy, national population is fairly stable. As long as they're careful and they work in small squads there's not much to be done about it. Can't patrol an entire country. Can't defend ten thousand tiny little hamlets. Can't gather everyone into a few big cities 'cause you can't feed them."

He shrugged and started picking the knot out of the bundle with his fingernails. "As long as the scorch squads are careful they don't get caught, things stay stable, there's no problem. If the ninja start actively helping the civilians, though...well, too easy to make their lives better, set off a population boom. Then things start improving too much. Suddenly needs a major strike force to get the job done. That gets noticed. Host nation kills a bunch of the strike force, strike force fights back, everyone's angry, wants to avenge dead friends and family, pretty soon you've got a full out war. Boom. Lots of people die."

"Hang on, what?" Noburi asked. "Scorch squads? Strike forces? What are you talking about?"

Kagome paused to give Noburi a puzzled look. "Scorch squads," he said, as though that explained anything. "You know, the teams that go around culling the civilian population. What do you call them in Mist?"

"We don't call them anything in Mist!" Noburi said, aghast. "What are you talking about?! Why would anyone do that?"

Kagome went back to fiddling with the knot, looking unhappy. "S'obvious," he said. "Lots of people, lots of people with the chakra reserves to be ninja. Find a way to increase the civilian population, a generation later you have more ninja. The other countries can't have that, so they send scorch squads out to keep the civilian population low among their enemies."

The knot finally came free and he carefully peeled the paper open to reveal a brick of chocolate, which he proceeded to carve up. He nodded to Akane as he did. "Leaf's nice, though," he said. "The Hyūga and the Uchiha can see chakra, so they only need to kill the kids that actually have it. They usually leave the rest of the town alone. Chocolate?" He held out a small block about the size of his thumb.

"Konoha would never be so unyouthful!" Akane said. "We do not kill innocent people!"

"Um..." Kagome said, awkwardly holding the chocolate out as it melted around his fingers. "Yeah? They do? Five years in the crypto department, right?" His eyes flicked to the side and the fingers of his free hand started twitching, plucking at the edge of his sleeve. "Black clearance, but only grade two. Never saw the really nasty stuff. Occasional hints about the lupchanz farms, but I wasn't supposed to know about that. Scorch squads though, yeah. Bad people. They must have sent them to the seal division to have their brains eaten so their eyes would look like that."

"Konoha would not do that!" Akane shouted, jumping to her feet with fists clenched.

"They do." Kagome's voice was as certain as the tides. "They all do. Stinkers, all of 'em. S'why I like the woods. Well, that and no rat-faced school masters with whips and knives recruiting for the Kage."

Akane was so furious she couldn't speak. She just stood, glaring at him for long seconds before spinning on her heel and stalking out of the cave.

"I better go after her," Inoue said, rising to her feet and slipping out of the cave after her enraged student.

The silence hung in the air.

"You guys want chocolate?" Kagome asked hesitantly, holding out the cut-up brick of sweets.

None of the genin said anything, too horrified to speak.

"Uh...okay," Kagome said. He set the candy on the ground between them. "Um...feel free," he said, fingers twitching towards it. "If you want, I mean. I like it. When everything else is bad, it feels good to have something a little sweet. There's one thing that isn't completely awful and full of destruction and screaming and exploding eyes every day."

"You were serious about the scorch squads," Keiko said.

Kagome shrunk in on himself. "Um...yeah?"

Keiko considered that. "The ninja villages—all the ninja villages—really send out teams to wipe out civilians simply to reduce the number of enemy ninja who will be born at some point in the future?"

"Yes?"

Keiko considered it more. "If we set aside the moral horror, it is actually an extremely efficient way to wage war," she said, in the voice of the Frozen Skein. "Far more ninja would die in an outright conflict, so if one cares only about preserving one's subordinates and no other elements matter—"

"Of course they matter!" Noburi said. "My god, Keiko, how can you be like that? Of course they matter! We're talking about genocide!"

She turned to him with the smoothness of a mechanical doll, her eyes mirrors of ice. "In any equation, all factors must balance. Where they cannot balance, extraneous elements must be removed until they do. The balance of power in the Elemental Nations is extremely precarious. The presence of the Kages means that no major Hidden Village can be attacked without catastrophic losses, so there is no point in attacking. Without the ability to win a direct military victory the polities are forced to rely on indirect warfare. The Mori clan specializes in logistics and planning; we spend a great deal of time thinking about economic and logistic attacks—how to inflict them upon the enemies of Mist and prevent our enemies from inflicting them on us. Steadily reducing enemy population makes a great deal of sense...so long as it was carried out slowly and in small pieces it would be difficult or impossible to prove who had done it, and if a group were to be caught Mist could claim they were missing-nin. It is probably the most effective tactic I can think of for covert battle between ninja states."

Noburi was pale. "That's...."

"Awful?" Kagome said, slurping on a piece of chocolate. "Yeah. S'why I live in the woods." He chewed and swallowed. "Well, that and the seal factory."

"No!" Akane shouted from the mouth of the cave. Everyone whipped around to see her stalking back inside, Inoue gliding silently behind her. "I will not accept this. Hazō-sensei, you were talking about how to make the world better for everyone; that is the Will of Fire! That is the Power of Youth! I will not accept a world where people slaughter children simply to weaken enemies that haven't even been born! We will change this!"

Everyone looked at each other uncomfortably.

"Ish—Akane," Keiko said, forcing herself to use the familiar name that the other girl had asked her to use. "Akane, I agree with you. It is a horror, yet it is a horror that is perpetrated by Kages and villages. We are merely six missing-nin...there's nothing we can do. The Mori clan is in charge of most of Mist's logistics, infrastructure, and economics. If this is happening, the elders have to have known of the issue for decades. They are a highly respected clan in positions of power in the second most powerful Hidden Village in the world. If they have been unable to effect change, there is no way that the six of us can."

"We can. We will! Nothing is impossible if one holds to youth and refuses to give in! Now figure it out!"

Keiko blinked. "Akane," she said. "That isn't how the world works. Shouting about youth does not magically make problems go away. Some things cannot be changed."

"And some things can," Akane insisted. "And we will change this. Not tonight, not tomorrow, but eventually. The six of us will change it. And you will put us on the path to success." She dropped to her knees next to Keiko and put her hands on the other girl's shoulders. "Please, Keiko. I don't know what to do, I don't know how to fix this. You're smarter than I am, and you can see a way. Please."

Keiko flinched away from the touch and stared at her, open-mouthed with horror to the point that she couldn't even try to shake herself free of Akane's grip. "I can't...that's not...it doesn't...."

"She can't do it without our help," Hazō said, setting a hand on Akane's arm and turning her gently towards him. "The Frozen Skein is good at critiquing other people's ideas, but not at coming up with its own. Right, Keiko?"

"I...yes. Yes, that's right," Keiko said.

"All right," Hazō said, looking around the circle. "This is what I was talking about. We could spend our lives wandering aimlessly around, avoiding patrols and living in caves, or we could make a difference. We aren't some random bunch of weaklings, we are a team." He gestured to Noburi. "A medic-nin who can share his nigh-infinite chakra. Two sealmasters to make explosives, barriers, and whatever else we need. A summoner, like the Sannin. A spy who can stop people's hearts with her illusions. And you, Akane." He smiled at her. "Inoue-sensei can gather all the intelligence we need to make a plan. Keiko can figure out how to make it work. Kagome and I will blow up or punch out anything in the way, and Noburi will keep us all alive while we do it. You're the one who makes us do it, the one with the fire to get us moving."

He looked around the circle. "Well? Who's in?"

"I'm not a medic-nin," Noburi said shakily. "I can't do what you said."

Hazō put a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye. "Yes, you can," he said. "We'll go back to Iron and get you the rest of the training you need. Or we'll find you another teacher. Whatever it takes, we will help you become what you want to be: a powerful ninja and a brilliant medic-nin. Someone who isn't afraid of anything or anyone. Someone who saves lives, just like you saved that little boy. Someone that people admire and respect, the way his mother did."

A snakebasket of emotions chased across Noburi's face—fear, embarrassment, hope, all flashing by too quickly to register.

"Yeah," Noburi said. He thought about it. "Yeah. Yeah, let's do this."

"Hazō," Inoue said. "I don't want to ruin the mood, but—"

"You want to do what's right, not what's easy," Hazō said. "That's what you said. Did you mean it?"

"Yes, but this...."

"Fine," Hazō said. "Then do the right thing and help your students. You left Mist because you believed in Shikigami-sensei's vision, because you wanted to build something. When you left the swamp, you could have just vanished. We were nothing but a drag on you, and bringing us along increased your risk a lot. You brought us anyway. Why?"

Inoue looked uncomfortable. "Look, I know what you're doing—"

"Why did you bring us?" Hazō demanded.

She sighed. "Yes, you're right. I wanted to build something, I wanted to save some lives even though I couldn't save everyone. I just...this is too big. There's no way that I—that we—can influence something on this scale."

"Why?" Hazō demanded.

She looked at him as though he were insane. "Because this is Kages and villages and we're just missing-nin?"

"We can't do it now," Hazō said, his brain flicking through possibilities. Inoue-sensei was the key; where she went, Keiko went. It could work the other way—if all the genin were on page, Inoue would follow. That was the wrong way, though; if she went because of them she would be reluctant, looking for reasons to give up. If she went of her own free will then she would throw everything she had into it, and inspire Keiko to do the same. Either way, wherever Akane, Hazō, Noburi, Inoue, and Keiko went, Kagome would follow. If he could convince Inoue-sensei, it was done.

"We can't do it now," he said again. "That's not the same as can't do it at all. We don't need to be able to punch people to make a difference. We need knowledge and money. Look at Jiraiya—he's fighting to prevent a war, and he's succeeding. He's powerful, sure, but not so powerful that he could fight one of the Kages or the Villages on his own. He's getting it done with his spies, and probably with a merchant network as well. We can build one of those, and who better to build a spy network than a spy?"

He studied her carefully. "Think about it, sensei. Jiraiya is a better fighter than you, but I bet he's not a better infiltrator. You can get in anywhere and find out people's secrets. Then we use those secrets—maybe for blackmail, maybe just for knowing where there's a good opportunity to sell things so we can get rich. Then we use the money to buy information and favors. You must have done this before—turned someone, used them to find things out."

"Yes..." Inoue said, nodding slowly and looking into memory. "Yes, I have. Maybe...."

"It's just more of the same," Hazō said. "Spy missions, finding things out, influencing people. We choose the missions, so nothing too dangerous, nothing that we aren't sure we can pull off. It's exactly what you're best at."

"If I could do it, so could other people," she said, clearly looking for objections. "If it's so easy, why hasn't someone else done it?"

"Because the villages want things to stay the same," he said. "And most missing-nin don't want to do anything except keep their heads down. Because they don't have a team with the Power of Youth to motivate them and the skills to get it done. Our team is probably unique in the Elemental Nations—we can fight, spy, steal, whatever it takes. We have a jōnin who is a master spy. We have a demolitions expert. We have a medic, and a brilliant tactician, and a summoner. On top of all that, we have the ear of one of the most powerful ninja in the world, who is also a spymaster and a close personal friend of the God of Shinobi."

Inoue was clearly wavering. She just needed a push, and it needed to come from someone else. Hazō looked over to Noburi in mute entreaty. The stout boy met his eyes and quailed, but visibly braced himself.

"Think about it, sensei," said Noburi. "You wanted to make a difference, to save lives, to build something? This is it. Maybe we aren't strong enough individually, but Hazō is right. We'll get stronger, we'll get contacts and money. As a team we are unstoppable. "

"You wanted to do something right," Akane said. "To show your strength, your youth. This is the chance. This is the moment when you can change the world. All you need to do is decide."

Inoue's snorted in amusement. "Fine," she said, her voice firming up even as she spoke. "We will kick ass, take names, and change the world. And you're right, we'll get stronger. Jiraiya owes me a rematch, and one of these days I'm going to put him on his back." She paused, then grinned. "In a spar, I mean."

Hazō manfully refused to acknowledge the comment; instead he turned to Keiko and Kagome in silent question.

"Yes," Keiko said, her voice far away in the Mori ice. "This balance is only metastable. The wilderness is a constant threat, and if the villages keep killing any civilians who grow too strong then humanity will slowly erode. Fewer civilians being born means fewer ninja over time. Small populations exhibit greater stochastic variance. Eventually there will come a generation where, simply by chance, many ninja are born in one country and few or none in another. Power will shift and the other nations will have no choice but to ally against the strongest. There will be a war, and some of the countries will be wiped out and the rest weakened. With fewer ninja to defend civilization, more civilians will be claimed by the wilderness. The population shrinks even more, there are fewer ninja, the political landscape becomes still more unstable."

She paused for long seconds. "This explains things that I always wondered about in my studies; Mist's imports have shrunk since the founding of the village. Not enough to matter, but by a statistically significant amount. Mist does not have enough farmland to sustain itself, so it is dependent on those imports. If they shrink below a certain point, there will be no choice but conquest. That may even have been what our original mission was about—we were to capture land in Noodle in order to guarantee the village farmland and a beachhead on the mainland as a staging ground for future warfare."

Her eyes defrosted and she looked around the circle. "This cannot be allowed to stand," she said firmly. "My clan would perish alongside everyone else I care about. They are constrained by the will of the Kage, but I am a free agent. I can act to protect them because I am outside their system. Yes, I'm in. Let us change the world."

Five sets of eyes turned on Kagome; the sealmaster shrunk back in on himself.

"Think about it, sensei," Hazō urged. "Those people who did all those things to you? They're part of the system that makes all this happen. Break that system, they go down. With them gone, we're all safer. No one trying to track us down. No one trying to lock us up, make us draw seals all day. We go where we want, do what we like. Respect, power, safety—all we have to do is take it. Best of all: payback."

Between one blink and the next, Kagome's eyes shifted, the terrified rabbit being replaced by the hungry wolf. "Yeah," he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Yeah. Those stinkers would look really good spread across a wall. Couldn't do it myself. No choice but to run, hide in the woods like an animal. This team though...yeah. Maybe. Not today, but maybe." He looked at the pile of seal blanks that he'd pulled out of a storage scroll without even noticing he was doing it. "I've had some ideas over the years...never pursued them, too dangerous. Maybe, though...with a partner for the research, with Mori to plan...it would be nice not to be afraid all the time."

Suddenly the wolf was replaced with the shy forest nin. "It's, uh...it's nice having a team, too," he said, ducking in embarrassment. "Can't let the stinkers get you guys." He nodded firmly. "Yeah. Let's do this."

"Congratulations, Hazō," Inoue said, her voice laced with amusement and purpose. "You've convinced us. In the face of all sanity and in direct opposition to what Jiraiya told us, we're going to conquer the world. What's our first step, O Mighty Inspirer?"

Hazō grinned. "Simple," he said. "We go to Hot Springs, get this information, and get paid. While we're at it, we develop some contacts there, start building a network."

"Okay," Inoue said, nodding firmly. "Let's do this."

o-o-o-o

"Gear check," Inoue said. "Show me six full bottles."

"Check," said Hazō, hands tapping a quick tattoo on the half dozen canteens strapped to his tac vest. Each canteen sloshed full, its contents crammed with as much chakra as Noburi could put in it after a long day of each team member chasing down chakra monsters and bringing them back to him to be drained to death of their chakra. By now everyone was tired and sweaty, but the clock was ticking; outside of Noburi's barrel, the chakra would only remain in the water for a few hours.

"Check / check / check / check," said the rest of the team, tapping their bottles.

Inoue surveyed them one more time, then nodded. "Okay, let's go. No stopping, no slowing down. Drink your water before you start feeling low on chakra, but do it on the move. We don't want to fight anyone, we just want to outrun them." She checked in with everyone by eye, then turned and ran out onto the surface of the Kanashii Ocean and set off at something one step short of a sprint. The rest of the team followed hard on her heels.

The geometry of their route was bad; Tea and Fire shared a border on the peninsula, and there was a heavily-patrolled chokepoint from the peninsula to the mainland, so going by land was a short trip to a graveyard. They could try to ocean-run to the east, perhaps stopping at Nagi Island to rest before turning north, but no matter what route they took they would be passing near Mist, the capital of Noodle, and the horrible currents and storms around Wave. Alternatively, they could try to run straight across the Hanguri Gulf to Fire, but that would have taken them through the widest part of the Gulf and then given them a long run through Fire. The prevailing west-to-east winds meant that the Gulf was always choppy and frequently stormy; after their experiences in the boat no one wanted to spend more time on the ocean than they needed to, especially not while water-walking.

Lacking a good option they went for the least awful one: start on the eastern side of Tea where the ocean was typically a little milder, run five miles to the east on the water, loop back to land in the middle of the Fire portion of the peninsula (thereby bypassing the border), then across to the western border and across the Gulf where it started to pinch down. Touch land in Fire but several dozen miles west of the chokepoint. From there, north-northeast at top speed to the southeast corner of Fire, back onto the water and island-hop to circle around and enter Hot Springs from the north.

To say that there was a lack of enthusiasm about the plan was an understatement, but it was the best they had. There was a betting pool about what exactly was going to go wrong; Akane was the only one to bet on "nothing!" Keiko took this as confirmation that the youthful genin was out of her mind.

It was a long route—three hundred miles until they were out of Fire and could afford to camp for the night, then another two hundred or so to hop around Hot Springs. It was going to be a long day, and Inoue had made it clear that they weren't stopping for anything at all, so everyone should either visit the latrine before they left, hold it, or do laundry and be laughed at when they got to the islands.

The first part went smooth as silk; when they entered the Hanguri Gulf Akane was starting to look as close to smug as the youthful genin ever did. That, of course, was the moment when she lost the pool.

The team was running in line abreast, the rapid-fire pounding of their feet splashing water up in a rooster tail behind them. A rooster tail that blocked vision.

Inoue glanced behind her, as she'd been doing every few seconds since they'd left land. It was hardly relevant here on the ocean, where they were the only living things within miles, but it was a habit and—

There was a mouth wider than the entire team and full of waaaay too many teeth surging up behind them at speeds that made ninja look slow.

"VAULT!" she yelled, leaping straight up with maximum chakra boost. "Pincushion!"

Everyone followed her up, soaring into the air; the immense pseudo-shark passed below them, but by far less of a margin than anyone would have preferred. Hazō barely cleared it; the edge of its fin clipped him in passing and sent him tumbling out of control down its sandpaper side. He kept himself together enough to stay on the surface and roll across the chop thrown up by the creature's titanic re-entry to the water.

Even before he'd touched down, Noburi was pushing his chakra drain out to maximum range, his finger following the beast as it dove and circled back under them. The team dove aside again, tumbling over the waves as the thing leaped straight up, teeth-first and thrashing in the air as though to swim into the heavens.

Hazō rolled back up to his feet and started firing tag-equipped kunai up to bracket the monster. An instant after leaving his hands the tags unsealed logs that made perfect kawarimi targets. The megalodon's tiny brain was shocked to find itself in midair, suddenly surrounded by a flock of the tiny little morsels it had been planning to snack on before looking for a nice juicy whale or squid for dinner. Worse yet, they were fighting back! That wasn't what morsels were supposed to do!

Keiko was flinging kunai and explosive disks in a nearly solid stream, holding nothing back for later. A line of pointy metal stitched its way up the creature's side before exploding and blowing massive craters in its rubbery flesh.

On the far side, Noburi's Water Whip flicked back and forth, carving big chunks of blubber out of the monster's sides.

Kagome swapped himself with a target that had, more by luck than Hazō's intent, ended up near the creature's tail. He raised his hands and triggered all eight of his palm seals in a staccato crash that carved straight through the join between tail and body.

The monster hit the water in bloody shreds, dead before the splash was done.

Everyone paused, panting and shaking with leftover adrenaline.

"Come on," Inoue said. "Let's get out of here before its big brother shows up."

o-o-o-o

Despite the 'no stopping' rule, when they hit land they paused just long enough for Kagome to reload his palm boxes, Keiko to restock her kunai holsters with tag-equipped kunai, and Noburi to disinfect and clean the oozing wound that reached from Hazō's left hip to right shoulder, where the creature's rough hide had sanded his skin off as he tumbled down its side.

Ninety seconds after their feet touched land, the team was back on the move.

The terror of the Gulf crossing had a strange effect on the rest of the trip: five hours of running through the most powerful ninja nation in the world was anticlimactic, but running across a total of ten or twenty miles of water as they island-hopped around to the north side of Noodle had them all in danger of needing to do laundry. Fortunately, nothing else decided to snack on them for the rest of the trip and so no one's bladder control was put to the test.

After two days of running flat-out for twelve hours without stops, it was a footsore, weary, and soaking wet group that came ashore on the northern border of Hot Springs and dragged themselves into town. Inoue barely even haggled with the innkeeper, simply dropping money on the desk so that everyone could fall on their noses in two upstairs rooms. Hazō and Noburi were asleep before Kagome finished setting up Force Wall seals to block doors, walls, and ceiling. In the girls' room, Inoue seriously considered not bothering to set up the Force Walls that Kagome had pressed on her, but she knew that the sealmaster would rant and complain at her if she didn't. No matter how much she begrudged the effort, she had to admit that having the Force Walls up made falling onto her lovely soft pillow a much more relaxing affair.