​

“So,” Noburi said light-heartedly, trying to ignore the death-threatening glares passing between the two Rice ninja teams, “what’s this place you’re taking us to?”

“It’s a decent enough watering hole,” a middle-aged Hinago commented. His age and extensive scars instinctively made Hazō label him one of the most dangerous people present. “The seats are comfortable, it never gets too noisy, and say what you like about the Murano, even the biggest drunks don’t dare start fights in bars on their territory.”

The Irie leader nodded, the scowl on her face giving way to a somewhat distant expression. “And Master Yoichi’s okonomiyaki is to die for. The man is a genius, a culinary virtuoso, and when you see his magic fingers dancing over the grill…”

She broke off as she registered the stares, some of them from her own team, and went a little red.

The rest of the walk was conducted in an awkward silence.

o-o-o-o

​ A new problem arose once they arrived at the bar. There was no difficulty with treating the Rice ninja to drinks, as agreed, but Kagome-sensei didn’t drink in hostile territory as a matter of principle (which is to say he was virtually teetotal), and Hazō was fairly sure Inoue-sensei would kill him and the other genin if she heard about them subjecting their still-developing metabolisms to alcohol in a crisis situation.

“Are you saying you’re too good to drink with the likes of us?” a red-haired Hinago woman demanded. “Or are you doubting the quality of Yoichi’s sake after we went to the trouble of bringing you here?”

“Cool it, Ren,” the Hinago leader said. “You sound like an Irie. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for this apparent violation of the most basic social and diplomatic conventions. Right?”

“Ah, yes,” Hazō said quickly, his brain racing. “The thing with that is...”

Inoue-sensei Teaching no. 7: “If you don’t think you can lie convincingly, weaponise the truth.”

“…our leader has set a no-tolerance policy for drinking while on the job,” Hazō said. “Uh, not that we’re here on a job or anything.”

Noburi shot him a pitying glance. “In short,” he took over, “we’d love to share a drink with you, we really would, but we’d be breaking our own rules if we did it in the middle of what could be an important negotiation. So you’d be doing us a huge favour if you let it go just this once, OK?”

An Irie, the man who’d acted as his team’s spokesman earlier, gave a sardonic half-smile. “Well, Ajibana, unlike our counterparts here, the Hinago don’t intend to pass judgement on the drinking habits of strangers. With that said, shouldn’t your leader speak for himself?”

The Irie turned to Kagome-sensei, who of course looked oldest out of the group.

(Inoue-sensei Teaching no. 32: “When you don’t need to be extra-disguised, stick to your own gender, age group and body type. Nothing gives the game away faster to a smart observer than an accidental body language mismatch.”)

“You, sir, are the leader, are you not? The man who, if I remember right, broke out of a prison designed to hold sealmasters?”

Kagome-sensei’s eyes bulged as the attention of seven potential hostiles focused on him at close range. “What? Me? Nonono, you’ve got the wrong man! I’m not a sealmaster! You’ve got no proof! I’ve never seen a seal in my life!”

Hazō inwardly facepalmed and opened his mouth to run damage control. There was only one obvious way of saving this situation, and it had to be done fast. “Actually…”

“I’m the leader of the group,” Akane beat him to it. “And this man,” she gestured to Kagome-sensei, “is just my overly humble apprentice.”

“You?” The Irie man looked sceptically between her and Kagome-sensei who was (probably) over twice her age. “Aren’t you still in your teens?”

“Yes,” Akane said proudly. “That’s why they call me the Most Youthful Sealmistress.”

There was a sudden choking noise from Keiko’s corner of the table, which quickly turned into a cough.

“Is there really a prison designed specially to hold sealmasters?” the youngest Irie, a boy with a mop of brown hair barely older than Hazō himself, asked curiously.

Akane frowned, clearly struggling to think of her next step.

“Are you kidding?” Kagome-sensei burst out. “How can you not know the stories of Muri Fortress? A secret offshore prison, hidden deep in the Water Country, where Hidden Mist holds the world’s most dangerous sealmasters captive, using their powers…”

“…to reinforce the crumbling barriers protecting our reality from the horrors outside, or, some say, to summon those horrors and try to bind them to the Mizukage’s will,” Kagome-sensei and an Irie woman (“Minori”?) finished in unison.

Kagome-sensei and Minori looked at each other, startled, then suspicious, then realising they were holding each other’s gaze and recoiling.

The Hinago leader raised an eyebrow. “Assuming this is true, and you are an exceptionally dangerous sealmistress known to consort with cosmic abominations, why should we not eliminate you here and now for our own country’s safety? It’ll be a shame about the bar, but the Murano will understand once we explain the situation.”

“That would be unwise,” Keiko spoke up for the first time in the conversation. “Kasuga-sensei may joke about her age and favour a ‘youthful’ appearance, but she has spent decades refining her dead man’s switch seals. And I understand this town and the fields around it are of value to your clans.”

There was a sigh from the Irie leader. “This is why Hinago diplomats are an embarrassment to this entire country. We’ve got a super-deadly sealmistress, the apprentice of a super-deadly sealmistress, a girl who, reading between the lines, is a pangolin summoner, and two kids who are probably about to turn out to be Uchiha Itachi and a jinchūriki at this rate, and your first response is to threaten them?

“I’m sorry my opposite number is an idiot, guys. I promise that if the Irie were to consider you a threat, we’d treat you with the proper respect and strike without warning.”

(Behind her, the Irie boy whispered to Minori. “What’s a pangolin?”

“Killer shellfish,” Minori whispered back.)

That was the last straw for Hazō. He had to take back control of this meeting, otherwise he might as well just throw away his plan and start sketching out a new one on the tablecloth.

“Please,” he said, raising his hands slowly. “I appreciate that we’re all on edge here, but my group is here for a reason. As we mentioned, we’ve travelled to Sarubetsu for specific reasons—to purchase local medicines, and perhaps also to rest and resupply before we move on, circumstances permitting. If there is some kind of protocol we need to follow, channels to go through, individuals to speak to, then we would really appreciate it if you explained them to us. We’re perfectly fine with following the rules, making a mutually beneficial exchange, and conducting our business in a non-disruptive manner before we leave. Is that OK with you?”

“I like this one,” the older Hinago man said quietly. “Respectful, straightforward and polite. I think all of us could do worse than follow his example.”

“Quite,” the Irie man drawled. “As someone with no fewer than three dates lined up tonight, I feel this meeting has been dragging on. Now, as visiting ninja, you’ll be wanting to head to the Irie compound at the heart of the Western Quarter. Ask anyone for directions—the Irie have a long and proud history in this town.” He cast a contemptuous look at the Hinago side. “Ask for Irie Shintarō, and tell him Shūji sent you. He’ll have you registered so there are no more entertaining little misunderstandings like this one, and can direct you to one of our licensed vendors. You’ll get Sarubetsu’s signature product at high quality and unmatched prices etc. etc.

“Is there anything else, or am I about to learn that we could have skipped this entire farce with a single minute’s exposition?”

“Don’t listen to that Irie scumbag,” Ren the now slightly drunk redhead cut in. “So what if we haven’t been in Sarubetsu as long? At least we don’t count on back-alley muggers and rapists to do our dirty work for us! You want your medicine trickling through those filthy civilian hands, processed by amateurs and then slapped with a markup the size of the Akoma ego? By all means drink from the Irie trough! Or you could buy top-quality, perfectly refined Vermilion Sigh from experts in phamoca—pharamoco—pharaca—drugs, and even if it’s a little more expensive, at least your money will be funding better medical research instead of buying the yakuza more whores!”

Irie Minori leapt up, kunai in hand. “You want me to cut your throat, Hinago bitch?!”

Ren’s hand went to her weapons pouch.

Within the blink of an eye, every ninja in the room was on their feet and positioned for combat, Hazō’s group once again uncomfortably caught in the middle.

Any second now, somebody was going to go for a pre-emptive strike…

“Stop it!”

All of the deadly tension in the room focused on Akane.

“Captain Irie,” she said, “if you fight now, you’re going to destroy this bar, and then you won’t be able to have okonomiyaki here anymore.”

The Irie leader (who may or may not have been a captain) winced.

“You,” Akane went on, looking from one Irie to the next, “are going to miss your dates. You shouldn’t be standing on a table people eat their meals off. You should know that a pangolin is a kind of mammal.”

She pivoted around to the Hinago.

“You still haven’t told us how we can get medicine from the Hinago. You shouldn’t be drinking on the job if you can’t hold your liquor. And you…” she hesitated, facing the middle-aged man… “you should be old enough to know better!”

Akane’s own team stared at her in awe.

“Kasuga-sensei?” Keiko asked cautiously.

“I’m sorry,” Akane said in a put-upon voice, “but it seemed like we were finally getting somewhere, and then one wrong word and everybody has their weapons out again. Can’t we all just talk like normal people? I’m not even asking anybody to be youthful, but... would it be too much to ask to have a single encounter with unfamiliar ninja that doesn’t end up breaking out into violence?”

The Irie and the Hinago stood still. Hazō could see them doing the maths. Super-deadly sealmistress. Constant violence. Super-deadly sealmistress who is still alive despite same. And who is now upset with them.

And the best part? Akane was following Inoue-sensei Teaching no. 7 to a tee, possibly without even trying.

As the tension began to drain, Akane gestured around the room. “And you’ve scared off all the other customers. Is this how you behave in a bar in somebody else’s territory?”

Actually, the majority of the customers had fled over the course of the conversation, but Hazō didn’t see any need to point this out.

After a long silence, the Hinago leader lowered her weapon. “Our headquarters is the Shiwa Building in the Eastern Quarter. Ask for Ichiru. And… tell her Junko said to give you the loyal customer discount. Assuming you’re going to be a loyal customer.”

“Thank you,” Akane said primly. “Let’s go, everyone.”

Nobody tried to stop them.

​ o-o-o-o

​ Later, after a long and circuitous route back to the base…

​

“Stay transformed all the time?” Kagome-sensei asked, looking at Hazō as if Hazō had just announced his upcoming betrothal to the Mizukage. “Do you want your brain to explode and trickle out of your ears? What do you think’s going to happen if you pour an entire day’s worth of experiences into your brain every night for weeks or months or years? Brain. Kersplat. If you’re lucky. Worse if you’re not.”

He gave Hazō another incredulous look, then turned away as if to mark the conversation over.

o-o-o-o

“Akane, that was amazing,” Hazō said as the two of them sat by the fire waiting for Inoue-sensei to return (while Noburi kept watch, Kagome-sensei lurked in a corner thinking about Kagome-sensei things, and Keiko beat herself up for her terrible information security skills). “You probably saved lives back there.”

Akane shook her head. “Thanks, Hazō-sensei, but it wasn’t, really. I lost my temper in a sensitive situation.

“I… just… is it always going to be like this? I thought the ‘meet interesting people; kill them’ recruitment slogan was supposed to be a joke, but when you look back at our record…

“Is it because we’re missing-nin?” she suddenly asked. “Is that why we’re always ending up in situations where everyone is hostile and suspicious and ready to kill us at the drop of a hat?”

Hazō remembered Jiraiya’s words. “Akane, are you thinking about taking Jiraiya’s offer?”

Akane looked down at her hands. “Hazō-sensei, I love all of you. I don’t want to leave any of you behind. But I do have family in Leaf who must be worried sick about me, and friends I miss, and him, and… I know we have all these amazing youthful plans about making the world a better place, but… lately it seems like we’ve just been stumbling from one disaster to the next, and Leaf has people like Jiraiya who want to make the world a better place and are actually managing it, and when I think about being part of a system that can really change the world…”

Hazō swallowed.

“But if I leave you,” Akane went on, “what if something happens to you, and I could have made a difference? What if I'm not there when you need me, and somebody gets hurt or killed? And then when I think about watching Inoue-sensei learning to be happy, and seeing Kagome come out of his shell bit by bit, and Keiko finding her strength and Noburi lighting everything up and… and you, Hazō-sensei, and I imagine losing all of that forever… I just don’t know what to do.”

“Akane,” Hazō said after taking a little time to sort out his thoughts, and a little more to gather the courage to express them. “If you decide to leave, then I will miss you. I will really miss you. You are the best apprentice ever, and you make everything better just by being here. Asking you to join us could be the best decision I’ve ever made—or at least,” his natural honesty compelled him to say, “second best after deciding to go with Inoue-sensei instead of being killed by Captain Zabuza.

“But… this is about your happiness, not mine.” It was a hard sentence to say, harder than it should have been. The next few would be even worse.

“You’ll be safer in Leaf, and you’ll have a constant income and a stable, structured life. And you’ll get to be with your parents. I can’t dismiss how important those things are. So if you decide that you want to go back to Leaf and become a village ninja, I will understand, and I will support you in any way I can, and all the rest of us will too. We will understand and support you no matter what you decide to do.”

Hazō found himself trembling a little. Why did it hurt to say these things? He knew they were the right things to say.

Then, before he could figure out where to go from here, he suddenly found himself engulfed in a hug by a teary-eyed Akane.

“Hazō-sensei!”

Tentatively, he hugged Akane back, then more firmly as he took in the reassuring solidity of her. At least for now, she was here, with him.

Eventually, after a long time of taking comfort in each other’s proximity, he pulled his hands back to her shoulders, and, holding them, gently pushed her out to arm’s length. There was one more thing that needed to be said.

Hazō looked Akane in the eye.

“Akane, you’re wrong about one thing. I know we’ve had a poor track record so far, but I promise you this. We will change the world, and we will make it better than Leaf or Jiraiya ever could.”

​ o-o-o-o

​ “Well ahead of schedule,” Inoue-sensei beamed. “You kids really are early bloomers.”

It was at this point that Hazō became aware that Akane was practically in his lap, and that he was holding her tightly while gazing into her eyes and saying something in a low, intense voice.

“In-Inoue-sensei, it’s not like that!” Hazō stammered while hurriedly pushing Akane away. “We were just—”

“Hazō-sensei,” Akane said calmly. “She knows.”

Inoue-sensei rolled her eyes. “Spoilsport. I guess I’m going to have to up my game with you around.”

Hazō felt a chill, like a drop of cold autumn rain running down his spine. “Oh, no. Akane, what have you done?”

“Oh, this’ll be great!” Inoue-sensei practically skipped into the base. “I can put on an air of innocence while tormenting you psychologically, and you can live your life in a twilight state of gradually losing your touchstones for what is real and constantly asking whether your own mind is lying to you! It will be like Remedial History with Sakadzuka-sensei all over again!”

“All right,” Akane said, watching her retreating back, “that was more effective.”

​ o-o-o-o

​ “So Noburi tells me that thanks to you, the Sarubetsu clans think there’s a different deadly missing-nin sealmistress in town to buy Vermilion Sigh,” Inoue-sensei said. “Nice going, kids. That’s going to make using my new cover… interesting.”

“How did your plan go, Inoue-sensei?” Hazō asked.

“Piece of cake. Play up the sympathy angle, present a stark moral choice, dollop out the information at a rate that lets them fill in the blanks with their imagination… oh, and playing an abuse victim is great—you get a cast-iron explanation why you don’t want to be touched, why you want to sleep in a room with a locked door… it makes maintaining a disguise so easy. Maybe I should do it more often. Or will that just make me get lazy?”

Inoue-sensei registered the uncomfortable looks.

“Oh, for the… kids, you’re ninja. Nothing is immoral, nothing is off-limits when you’ve got a job to do. That’s the kind of thinking that’ll get you killed.

“Look, let’s move on. We should talk tactics, then I’m heading back to the Firefly Inn so I can actually get some sleep and be there for Emi to wake me up in the morning.

“Hazō,” she proclaimed, casting a hand forth majestically, “bring out the lists!”

​ o-o-o-o

​ “Full frontal, huh?” Inoue-sensei considered. “Well, it’s an option. But it’s got good odds of drawing hostile attention from the clans, plus it would be easy to kill Arikada. And, of course, it begs the question of what I’ve been doing all day.”

“What about Plan B?” Keiko asked. “More defensive-style combat after an initial surprise strike, here on Sheets Three and Four.”

“I’d like to finally test my new Vampiric Dew skills,” Noburi said. “If it works, it’ll be proof of concept for a whole new fighting style.”

“Higher odds of survival for us,” Inoue-sensei said. “A good feature of any plan. A longer fight also means more time for Arikada to figure out how to make optimal use of the seals she’s prepared, of course. Also more time for the clans to notice the fight, which they will once the explosives start going off.

“Plan C is more interesting. You and I are both making good inroads with the Sarubetsu worthies. If we can figure out, or for that matter influence, where Arikada gets her drugs, then manage to mess with those, then it’s an instant victory for us, bar any issues with her guards. Either way, it would eliminate the biggest threat.

“But what we’re doing is shifting the work forwards in time and making more of it social. It’s still going to be tricky finding the right drug dealer, and more tricky to convince them to meddle with their own product. That sort of thing can kill a reputation fast, so we’d need to either make it worth their while or bypass them entirely with our stellar stealth skills. Still, it’s a plan worthy of a ninja.

“As for Plan D… Hazō, you are hereby banned from making any more illustrations of Noburi draining sleeping women with his Water Whip. Ever.

“That aside, Noburi’s ability served us well back in Hot Springs, and I’d love to see what it can do at its full potential. But… Noburi, was this your suggestion?”

Noburi nodded sheepishly.

“Looks like you still have some things to learn from Hazō, kid,” Inoue-sensei reached out without looking and ruffled Hazō’s hair, getting him just as he was distracted filing away his notes for Plan A.

“Great, so we’re next to an open door or window to the room where the target’s asleep. That’s ninety percent of the work already done. How do we find out where she’s staying? How do we make sure she’s asleep? How do we make sure there’s a slightly open door or window? How do we get to it, and stay there, without being spotted?”

Noburi cringed.

“With that said,” Inoue-sensei said mercifully, “your plan does accomplish one important thing. Hands up, class, who can tell me?”

Kagome started to raise his hand, then quickly put it down again.

“Kagome?”

“Uh,” Kagome grunted. “She can’t use any active-trigger seals?”

Inoue-sensei nodded. “It’s the difference between facing you on a battlefield you’ve prepared, and walking onto the same battlefield while there’s no one there.”

“Inoue-sensei,” Hazō said uncomfortably, “you’re making it sound like the difference between suicide and… well, slightly less suicide.”

Inoue-sensei nodded. “And that is the other thing we need to figure out how to deal with before we try to sneak into a paranoid sealmistress’s room at night.”