Chapter 173: Uncomfortable Questions​

It was a complicated morning. On the positive side, there had been no overnight assassination attempts, the news from Jiraiya was something the team could celebrate quietly once the client was out of sight, and to top it all off, the old hag had low blood pressure and thus was at her least “feisty” in the early mornings. The latter was almost certainly a lie, given what she’d been like when they originally met at dawn, and was bound to come back to haunt them if somebody attacked in the morning, but for now Hazō would take whatever breaks from the client’s libido he could get. On the negative side, she had not decided to go to bed early last night, but instead to celebrate their unprecedented success with alcohol and new and hitherto-unseen levels of lechery. Finding ways to politely avoid partaking in either had been nerve-wracking, and the lack of sleep was not doing anyone any favours now.

Fortunately, they were having a slow start today. The client was finishing the last of her painstakingly prepared herbal porridge, ensconced in the safety of her room. Keiko was sitting in a corner, evaluating Hazō’s latest security proposal with the Frozen Skein. Noburi was deep in thought about something, or possibly dozing with his eyes open. Hazō himself was pondering the team’s options in advance of the upcoming discussion on what to do next, and regretting that his ability to come up with instantaneous plans no matter what was going on around him only functioned in bursts.

In short, all of them were completely off guard.

“So,” the client said as she set aside her empty bowl, “just how long have you strapping young lads, and the little girl there, been batting for the other team, hmm?”

Keiko’s eyes snapped open. Noburi choked.

“What?!” Hazō exclaimed without thinking. “No, you have completely the wrong idea! I’m not—we’re not—”

Wait. If he denied it now and insisted he was into women, there was no way she wouldn’t turn that into some kind of come-on. On the other hand, what if rolling with it meant she’d stop harassing him?

“You’ve got me,” he said, forcing himself to smile widely. “I’m as gay as a Noodle bard. Nothing but other men for me. I was hiding it before because… because… I only recently realised it and hadn’t come out of the closet yet. I should have known you wouldn’t be taken in.”

It was his worst acting since he’d started training with Mari-sensei. But on the other hand, it was probably normal for somebody to be acting very awkward when admitting this kind of thing to a stranger, and the client ought to be as tired and off her game as the rest of them (though she certainly didn't look it).

Then Hazō caught the look of absolute shock on Keiko’s face. Crap. Painful past experience had established that being abruptly jerked out of the Frozen Skein did not do her mental clarity any favours, and this particular topic would never be a laughing matter for Keiko to begin with.

But at this point, there was no choice for Hazō but to go all in.

“You feel the same way, don’t you, Noburi?”

Noburi was giving him the weirdest stare. Double crap. He’d really thought Noburi was perceptive enough to pick up on his intentions, but apparently he was feeling even worse than Hazō himself. Noburi’s mouth opened.

“You know, Noburi,” Hazō said quickly, “weren’t you telling me the other day that you’d finally given up on women, all women, and that you were going to find solace in the hairy arms of the manliest man you could find?”

Noburi’s expression was balanced somewhere between disbelief and murderous intent. Then, mercifully, after a couple of seconds it clicked.

“That’s right,” he said, much more smoothly than Hazō. “I wasn’t ready to make it public just yet, but I’ve been talking to Rock Lee, Maito Gai's apprentice, and it turns out we have a lot more in common than I thought.”

Keiko gave an appalled squeak that sounded like she’d swallowed a weasel. Her stunned expression gained hints of both horror and regret.

The client’s attention swivelled to her.

Still apparently unable to speak, Keiko just shook her head in a desperate and not-all-that-convincing motion.

Granny Karina gave a raspy chuckle.

“That’s nice, children, but I was asking how long it’s been since you started working for Hidden Leaf.”

Hazō couldn’t commit honourable suicide right here. The cost of getting the blood out of the floor would come out of Team Gōketsu’s points.

“How long?” he squeezed out.

“When were you recruited?” the client asked in a voice of neutral curiosity. “Was it before or after you graduated from the Academy? What did they bribe you with? It’s not every day I get to be escorted by a team that’s changed villages.”

“We—we weren’t recruited at all,” Hazō said dizzily. “Not from Mist.”

“Oh?”

Hazō’s brain started to pull itself together.

“There was a Mist jōnin who wanted to start his own hidden village. He chose some genin and chūnin to take with them on a large-scale mission, then murdered the real commander and told us that we were on a suicide mission and had to run or die.”

Granny Karina raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know ninja were allowed to abandon suicide missions. Isn’t the point of a suicide mission that letting a few ninja die in one place will save lots more ninja somewhere else? That’s how they did it when I was a little girl.”

Ouch. This woman was good.

“He said it wasn’t a proper suicide mission,” Noburi came to the rescue. “That they’d just picked the ninja they most wanted rid of and decided to throw them in the vague direction of the enemy to cut down numbers before the real attack. If that was true, it wouldn’t be a strategic sacrifice—it would be like having us executed even though we didn’t do anything wrong. And since a lot of us weren’t much liked by the authorities, or by our clans, it sounded way too plausible.”

“Hmm,” Granny Karina said. “And this jōnin thought he could found his own village with just a handful of particularly unvalued genin and chūnin?”

“There were two other jōnin as well,” Noburi said. “Strong ones.”

“Aren’t jōnin those big super-ninja who can break whole armies with their bare hands and blow up mountains with their mind?” Granny Karina asked. “They sound really valuable. And you say you thought Mist had sent three on a suicide mission?”

Hazō… didn’t actually have an answer for that. Why had they believed that the Mizukage had sent Shikigami, Kanna and Mari-sensei on a suicide mission? Mari-sensei on her own would already be too valuable to sacrifice, and with the wrong specialization for frontline combat anyway. And if the Mizukage had doubts about their loyalty, then putting all three of them together on an out-of-village mission was the stupidest possible thing he could have done. Yagura had been ruthlessly pragmatic, but never stupid.

Hazō glanced at Keiko for help, but she was still out of action. He cringed at the thought of what must be going through her head right now.

“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Noburi said after several seconds. “If he was lying, that would mean he was a traitor. If we’d called him out on being a traitor, he wouldn’t have let us go back to Mist—he’d have killed us.”

“Couldn’t you have run away?” Granny Karina asked. “With as big a group as yours and only three jōnin, he couldn’t possibly have kept an eye on you every minute of the day.”

“By the time we knew what was happening, we were in Fire being chased by Leaf patrols. And then we were in the middle of the Swamp of Death, full of extra-deadly chakra monsters, with the patrols still outside. There was no possible way genin like us would have survived the journey back.”

“So this jōnin,” Granny Karina said slowly, “took a bunch of genin like you into the Fire Country, and then into a terribly dangerous spot in the Fire Country where you had no chance of surviving on your own. And this was his idea for building a hidden village. Are you sure you’re not spinning me a tall tale, boys?”

Noburi looked back to Hazō.

“It’s not our fault he was insane,” Hazō said. “We had no choice but to follow him anyway.”

“All three of them must have been insane,” Granny Karina corrected. “All three of these incredibly powerful and experienced ninja made the same enormous mistake at the same time, if you’re to be believed.

“But let’s set all that aside, hmm? If you claim you weren’t already working for Leaf when you left, then how did they recruit you?”

It didn’t feel like it was a good idea to openly admit that Jiraiya used missing-nin as deniable assets, and Mist missing-nin at that, especially not while he was in the middle of sensitive negotiations. What was the best thing to do here, given that he didn’t want to lie to the client’s face (since she was almost certainly some kind of social spec)?

“We found a good bargaining chip,” Hazō said carefully, “and we were the ones to approach Leaf with an offer to exchange it for citizenship. There wasn’t any kind of conspiracy.”

Granny Karina raised an eyebrow. “What kind of bargaining chip?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“So you’re saying you chose to join Mist’s worst enemy entirely on your own initiative? Instead of, say, offering this mysterious bargaining chip to Mist in exchange for amnesty? Or at least choosing a village that wasn’t out to kill everyone you knew back home?”

Hazō couldn’t think of a reply. It was a uniquely horrible feeling.

“Well,” Granny Karina said mildly. “I think I have the measure of you now, my strapping young lads. Unless you have anything to add, why don’t we move on to deciding our plans for the next few days?”

Wasn’t there anything Hazō could say? Some justification for joining Leaf that didn’t involve explaining their relationship with Jiraiya or their ideological approval of the village (and the corresponding condemnation of Mist)?

He mentally sighed. Maybe they could come back to this conversation once he’d had a chance to think things through in a non-sleep-deprived kind of way.

“Are you going to be able to restock?” he asked instead.

Granny Karina chuckled. “I never expected I’d sell out so quickly. Something you and I have in common, hmm? But no, I won’t be able to restock—wouldn’t do to give some creative young ninja indirect access to an unlimited supply of goods and risk flooding the market, after all.”

“I see,” Hazō said. “And what would happen if we stepped down from the event with our current earnings?”

“You’d be confined to the barracks until the event was over. Can’t have you going around assassinating my fellow traders, now can we?”

That was… less than optimal. Well, from a certain point of view it was optimal—it would mean securing their winnings and being safe from opportunistic assault by other teams. But in a way, it also felt like giving up. It wouldn’t let him gather valuable information about other teams, or practice his skills in a challenging but fundamentally non-lethal environment, or devise and test new strategies… he’d put aside his preferences for the good of the team if he had to, but what if there was a better way?

“Granny Karina,” he asked suddenly, “is there any rule saying we’re only allowed to sell the supplies we’ve been provided with?”

“Now, now,” the client waggled a crooked finger in mock admonition, “it would be terribly poor manners to ask questions about the rules when you’ve already been told everything a boy your age needs to know.”

“Does that mean if we haven’t been told a rule, then we don’t have to assume it exists?”

The client smiled, but didn’t say a word.

“In that case… what’s to stop us taking the money we’ve earned and reinvesting it into more goods so we can keep making a profit?”

The client’s smile widened, unfortunately revealing her terrifying teeth. “Well, you got there a lot quicker than I thought you would. What do you have in mind?”

Hazō thought about it. “Keiko can run the numbers and tell me if my idea is at all viable, but I was thinking we could start trading in…”