​ “You are being menaced by ants?” Kei repeated carefully.

“'Menaced' doesn't begin to cover it!” Pandā exclaimed. “We're talking driver ants here! The exclusion zone covers half our western border!”

“The only dangerous ants I am familiar with are the fire ants native to the Country of Noodles,” Kei mused. “They are approximately as long as my arm, and can heat their shells to the point that contact is crippling or lethal. Fortunately, they cannot tolerate those shells being rapidly cooled, and so are highly vulnerable to Water ninjutsu.”

Pandā flicked his tongue in and out nervously. “Driver ants would come up to your human waist, and their mandibles can shear through the toughest pangolin armour. Oh, they have venomous stingers too, but usually you're too dead to appreciate that. And did I mention that they travel in huge armies? Their projected route shouldn't go anywhere near our settlements, but just in case, no one is allowed to go near them in case you get followed back."

Pandā must have noted her expression.

“Are you saying humans don’t get natural disasters where a horde of animals nearly overruns entire cities?”

“Settled areas are cleared of the more threatening chakra beasts,” Kei said, visualising the Mori safety map of the Water Country. “Danger increases proportionally to distance from centres of civilisation, as the risk of losing ninja in extermination missions progressively outweighs the reward of protecting civilian settlements. This is one reason why even missing-nin do not choose to settle in the more remote corners of the world.

“I am surprised to hear you referring to the driver ants as animals when you do not do so even for the condors,” she added. “Is their clan particularly hostile to your own?”

Pandā’s tail shook from side to side nervously. “No. It’s nothing like that.” He hesitated, then ducked his head down towards his chest as if about to roll up.

“They’re kvthsss,” he confided.

Kei frowned. “That doesn’t translate. You will need to explain.”

Pandā squirmed. “Legend says that when the Pantokrator saw how horribly evil they were, he gave them the ultimate punishment. He… he made them not a clan.”

Kei raised her eyebrows.

“Only clans have the Pantokrator’s blessing,” Pandā explained uncomfortably, as if to a child asking a reasonable but highly improper question in public because she was too young to know better. “Losing the blessing is losing who you are. It’s like having your mind eaten. Like being one of those pitiful creatures the Pantokrator made so humans wouldn’t forget the Seventh Path.

“In the old days, when the Pangolin Clan was at its peak of strength before the Great Betrayal, we’d eat driver ants as a great delicacy, because killing kvthsss is a mercy. That’s why we say things like ‘delicious as a fresh driver ant’. But now we just have to roll up and wait for them to go away.”

“Delicious as a fresh driver ant…” Kei echoed. “Does that imply that they would make an effective apology gift?”

“No,” Pandā said quickly. “Nonononono. Don’t even think about it.”

He was too late.

​ o-o-o-o

Shlick!

Another ant collapsed as Kei’s kunai nonlethally severed the last of its legs from its body. The basic outline of the plan had been very reluctantly offered by Pandā, but it was Kei who saw the unique training opportunity. If only Tenten could see her now… the thought was bittersweet.

But distraction was not acceptable. While the ants were unable to reach her, or indeed properly comprehend her presence on the floating watchtower above them (Hazō, still feeling understandable guilt over his recent actions, had not hesitated to craft the materials for her), Kei’s time was not unlimited. Pandā had impressed upon her that Pangolin High Command had no intention of allowing her to wander the broader territory of the clan unsupervised, and that he could be in trouble were her presence here noted. Of course, nor could she bring him, with his lack of rapid movement or trail-concealing abilities, anywhere near the ants.

Her latest target twitched, no longer capable of making an escape. Helpless. Pathetic. Worthless without the support of its allies.

In a sudden flash of anger, she sent her next kunai straight through its head.

She regretted it immediately as the spurting of its internal fluids rendered it unfit for her purposes. But Kei was never going to run out of enemies, and the killing zone was wide.

o-o-o-o The Naraka Rollers muttered angrily in the background, disparaging comments interspersed with hissing that was either non-verbal or untranslatable. Hearing the girls’ cruel whispers behind her back, knowing that she lacked the subtlety to respond in kind and that they would deflect any attempt at direct confrontation… it was as if Kei had never left the Academy.

Then again, she and her ego had come a long way. She could not have imagined in those days that the people whose disapproval she feared would be friends, nor that the threats to her personal safety would come from the likes of Jiraiya of the Three. In that context, the idea that the Summoner of the Pangolin Clan should be vulnerable before a pack of incompetent delinquents was preposterous.

“Ya dare show yer face before the Panchipāma, ya little traitor?!”

Of course, there were always exceptions.

The whispers fell silent as Panchipāma somehow towered over Kei despite being at the other end of the hall, arms raised and claws on prominent display.

“Ya promised me adventure, and instead summoned me into a fight fulla crazy seals ya didn’t warn me about? I did ya a huge favour, and this is how ya repay it?”

The background noise rose to a new height.

“I apologise,” Kei bowed deeply. “Our plan was overtaken by unforeseen circumstances, and I trusted in your power to save us, but it was disrespectful of me to do so without first seeking your permission.”

Panchipāma made a snuffling noise that Kei assumed indicated some kind of indignation.

“Ya betrayed the trust of the Panchipāma, Summoner. Ya owe me.”

Kei bowed again. “I am aware. I will do my utmost to repay you. In the meantime, please accept this gift as thanks for your invaluable support in our battle.”

She pulled out her storage scrolls with a flourish she had practised repeatedly during those hours of rehearsal with Pandā, and unsealed them in the middle of the hall.

Panchipāma’s eyes must have doubled in diameter. “Are those…?”

“Fresh, virtually undamaged driver ant bodies, timelessly sealed at the moment of death.”

Panchipāma’s tongue flicked out to its full length involuntarily, and she hurriedly pulled it back.

“A—Apology accepted. Pantorī, take these to the kitchen at once!”

She looked back up from the pile of ants.

“We’ll talk about this again another time. For now, the Naraka Rollers have, uh, urgent business to take care of. Panku, show the Summoner and her pet out!”

​ o-o-o-o Hazō ducked as the water whip flew over his head, then pre-emptively sprang sideways as it twisted back against itself in the second part of Noburi’s combo.

Noburi scowled.

“No fair. How do you keep doing that?” he demanded as his combo went through several more stages.

Hazō whipped out a practice kunai, aiming for Noburi’s thigh where the water whip wouldn’t reach in time. “When you’ve been sparring with someone for long enough, you get to know their moves. With the Iron Nerve, you also build up a library of tailor-made counters.”

He was feeling proud of himself for getting to a point where he could maintain an unbroked flow of sparring while talking, even though each sentence had a background of several strikes and counterstrikes.

“You always have a special advantage, don’t you?” Noburi grumbled, his whip snaking beneath the surface of the water where Hazō couldn’t track its motion. “It’s always a competition and you always have to win.”

“Is this about Yamanaka?” Hazō asked, his fist swinging towards Noburi’s chest at close range. “I’m sorry. If I’d reali—gluurble!”

He thought he’d evaded Noburi’s surprise attack! Hazō urgently scissored his legs to break the water whip’s hold, then pushed off the ground with his arms and sprang backwards into safety.

“Urgh. Nice one. As I was saying,” he went on, retreating to medium range and reaching for his shuriken pouch, “I didn’t know you were interested in her as well.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he insisted as one of his shuriken slammed into the middle of Noburi’s face.

“Ow, by dose! Point to you,” Noburi conceded. They returned to starting positions.

“I should have been more sensitive,” Hazō said, making the seals for the Living Roots Technique in a moment of inspiration. “It was unfair of me not to take your feelings into account.”

“When you say it like that, it’s hard to be properly pissed off,” Noburi complained as his left hook missed Hazō’s forehead by millimetres.

“Sorry,” Hazō said, his sheepish smile unseen as he ducked forward for a headbutt.

The attack missed and Noburi dodged back just far enough to bring a hammer fist down on Hazō’s neck.

“Point,” Hazō called out once his face was out of the water and the pain subsided to something bearable.

“It was just flirting, though,” he said. His course of action was becoming clear. “I don’t know Yamanaka well enough to know if I want anything more, and if she means something to you, I’m prepared to back off.”

Noburi sighed. “Not the point. It’s not like I know her well either. But I mean, you already have Akane, don’t you? Why would you risk messing that up?”

Hazō stood still, ready in a defensive stance. “That’s not what I’m doing, and you shouldn’t make assumptions about my relationship with Akane. I’m sure she and I can figure out how to communicate what she really feels.”

Noburi was moving forward to close the distance with a simple taijutsu attack. “What do you need two girls for anyway? Isn’t the thing you have going with Akane special enough for you?”

Hazō dodged sideways, keeping his centre of balance neutral. “Noburi, are you honestly telling me the idea of a harem of hot ninja girls doesn’t appeal to you on any level?”

Noburi hesitated. “When you put it like that…”

Hazō’s senses tingled with the awareness of a connection being made. He stamped down hard as the water whip’s underwater vibrations approached his left foot.

“I promise,” he added as he converted the momentum into a twist of the hips, “next time something like this comes up, I will come talk to you about it.” The powerful straight punch got Noburi, still reeling from the failure of his stealth strike, right in the chest.

Noburi whimpered with pain and checked himself for cracked ribs.

“That reminds me,” Hazō said, “if you decide to get more medical training, let me know. I have some ideas that might help.

“Shall we go another round?”

​ o-o-o-o

“Inoue-sensei,” Hazō said tentatively. “Would this be a good time for the political training I asked you about earlier?”

Inoue-sensei gave him a serious look that could have meant anything from “I’m glad you’re finally ready to take this seriously” to “Where should I bury the body?”

“Fine,” she finally said. “Come with me. You won’t want any of the others to witness this.”

Hazō gulped.

Keiko nodded solemnly at him. “Hazō, your courage shall forever be recorded in the annals of this team, specifically under ‘cautionary tales’.”

“If you die, can I keep your stuff?” Noburi added encouragingly.

Kagome-sensei merely grunted, but it was one of his “I’m trusting you not to get yourself killed while I’m not supervising you” grunts.

“Oh,” Inoue-sensei said as an afterthought, “can I borrow Pandā for this?”

“Why?” Keiko asked.

“Trade secret. I’ll teach you when you’re older.”

​ o-o-o-o “Why did you want Pandā for this, Inoue-sensei?” Hazō asked, looking warily around the remote beachside cave.

“We need to talk about Keiko’s birthday,” Inoue-sensei said, “and we can’t have her star summon messing up.”

“Star summon? Me?” Pandā’s tail bounced against the floor so fast it sent pebbles scattering across the ground. “I mean, yes, of course, me. Military liaison, tactical genius and anthropologist extraordinaire at your service!

“Um, what’s a birthday?”

Inoue-sensei seemed prepared for this. “It’s a celebration of somebody’s birth, which we hold once a year on its anniversary.”

Pandā’s eyes scrunched up. “Why would you celebrate somebody’s birth? As far as I can tell, it’s a traumatic experience for everyone involved. And besides, being born doesn’t mean anything. It’s not something you achieve, it’s something that happens to you.”

“So pangolins don’t celebrate birthdays?” Hazō asked.

“No. The whole idea’s weird. Why would you celebrate the same thing every year, anyway? You can celebrate Shell-Hardening. You can celebrate Graduation Day. You can celebrate First Blood. Things like that. But if you’re going to celebrate things over and over, it should be something that matters to the whole clan, like Vengeance Day or Homeland Defenders’ Day—things we mustn’t forget no matter how many generations pass.”

“Right,” Inoue-sensei said. “But Keiko isn’t a pangolin, though I’ll admit there are some similarities. So if you want to be nice to her, then when the day comes, you’ll wish her a happy birthday as soon as you see her, and you’ll give her something she likes as a present.”

“’Happy birthday’, ‘something she likes’… got it.”

“Good,” Inoue-sensei said coolly. “You can go now. Remember to keep your present a secret until you give it to her.”

“Inoue-sensei,” Hazō said as Pandā disappeared, “before we get into training, I’d like to talk to you about Keiko’s present as well. I have a few ideas I wanted to run by you.”

“Go on.”

“I was thinking of ways to show her how valuable she is to the team, and as a friend. So the first one I call a ‘bazooka’. It’s a long-range area-of- effect weapon. If we modify Kagome-sensei’s unidirectional explosive seals, she can use it to propel missiles across a great distance, and if we make the missiles explosive as well, it could do a lot of damage without endangering the user. I also have some ideas on how to refine the design using Five-Seal Barriers.”

Inoue-sensei nodded sceptically. Hazō moved on quickly.

“Or we could miniaturise it. I have a similar idea for something I call a ‘gun’, which would be easily portable and deal less collateral damage, which still being much deadlier than shuriken or kunai, with lots of penetrating power.”

“Hazō, your naming sense is appalling. Do you think anybody could ever take a weapon called a ‘bazooka’ seriously? And ‘gun’ is just plain ugly. There’s a reason our weapon names are polysyllables that roll off the tongue, you know.”

“They’re only provisional,” Hazō muttered awkwardly. “It’s the sound I imagine they’ll make when they trigger.”

Inoue-sensei sighed. “What else have you got?”

“I could combine the Poor Man’s Yellow Flash with macerators to create multi-purpose ranged explosives. I have an idea for large-scale weapon delivery at range to saturate the battlefield. And I thought you might have some ideas for where we can get specialised weaponry—just because Keiko never got round to using the kusari-gama doesn’t mean we can’t find something else.”

“Uh-huh,” Inoue-sensei said, giving him a pitying look. “Tell me, Hazō, how does expanding Keiko’s arsenal make it clear how much you value her as a friend rather than just a combat asset?”

That brought Hazō up short. “I’m investing time and effort in designing something just for her?”

“And these are ideas which are obviously meant for her and not just ones you think would be useful for the team as a whole, and are giving to her because she’s our best ranged fighter?”

Hazō had imagined the entire team using the gu—the Poor Man’s Water Bullet Technique.

“Hazō, Keiko is still struggling with the idea of being accepted for who she is, personality quirks and flaws and all. Are you sure you want to feed her belief that she’s only important to the team because she’s useful on a strategic level?”

“I could make her some carvings of pangolins?” Hazō suggested helplessly.

“And you can learn to carve in a few weeks, without her noticing?

“Besides, I hate to say it, but as a team we’ve set a pretty high standard for birthday gifts. If you don’t come up with something really special, Keiko is just the kind of person who’ll assume it’s because she’s not good enough compared to me or Akane or Kagome, and worst of all, she’ll think it’s justified.”

Hazō groaned. “Can’t you at least give me any tips, Inoue-sensei?”

She shook her head. “It has to come from you. That’s what makes it special. If you want it to be a present she remembers every time she starts questioning what she means to you, it has to express how you see her, the way your present to me did.”

She gave a wan smile. “I still mist up sometimes when I think of that.”

“Thank you, Inoue-sensei. I’ll keep thinking. In the meantime, I guess we should start on that training.”

“Right.” Inoue-sensei crossed her arms in front of her. “Hazō, there’s a different reason I wanted to speak to you in private.”

“What’s that?”

Inoue-sensei was silent for a few long, uncomfortable seconds.

“I realised something in those days after Jiraiya let us live. It was a mistake for me to act as your teacher. I’ve never been an instructor or a team leader. It’s not something I’m suited to. I’m an infiltrator. A manipulator. An assassin. Looking back, I think all of us would have been in much less danger if I’d stuck to my role instead of trying to change.

“I’ve been blaming you for the Jiraiya incident, but we both know that it was really my fault. It would never have happened if I’d been a proper mentor. I spent a year thinking I was teaching you, and then you failed so badly in my primary area of expertise, the thing I’ve been doing all my life. That tells you everything you need to know.

“What it comes down to, in the end, is that I had a—“

She stopped.

“It doesn’t matter. What I wanted to tell you is this: there is a solution. Thanks to you and your amazing new skywalker seals. If we go to Jiraiya, we can easily bargain Leaf citizenship out of him with those, and with the promise of more great designs to come. We’ll be safe without the need to marry anybody.

“You’ll have everything you need for your research. You’ll be able to be with Akane, and you’ll give Leaf very strong reason to rescue your mother. You’ll live a life of comfort, protected by Leaf as a top priority, with the influence to guide Leaf to create the better world you dream of. The rest of us will have the same privileges extended to us because they’ll want you kept happy. The Yamanaka might even be able to help Keiko and Kagome. Noburi could become a great medic-nin without ever having to put himself in danger by leaving Leaf. I’ll retire. None of you will need me anymore.

“It has to be your decision, because while there might be some leeway for the rest of us, you’ll be too valuable to ever be allowed out of Leaf again. It’s not much of a price to pay for everything you’d gain—everything we’d gain—but it’s something you have to agree to before we bring it before the rest of the team.

“What do you say, Hazō?”