Naruto: The Outsider's Resolve: CH_562: Case of the Suspicious Instructor (Patreon)

The Fourth Ward Corridor was all any Leaf shinobi needed to arm themselves. By day, the market offered everything from specialist tailors to niche shops that sold made-to-order balms and salves. But past dusk, when the heavy shutters were pulled and locked, the market’s main street underwent a complete metamorphosis. The district transformed into Night-Feast Market—a chaotic, shoulder-to-shoulder street-food bazaar that drew people from all over the village and lasted until the early hours of the morning.

Despite the wide streets, the cheap food and great atmosphere packed the roads every day without fail.

“Here you go, miss. Enjoy,” said the bald and muscular chef behind the sizzling yakitori grill.

Arisu accepted the skewer of dripping and perfectly grilled chicken cuts with a grin. She was famished, having skipped lunch because she knew she'd gorge herself at the night market.

A hundred crimson paper lanterns were strung across the narrow gaps between the shops' eaves, loud lights that somehow managed to be beautiful, and a noise of sales calls, metal against metal, and sizzling fires. The market's energy and life were tangible. Every time she visited, it made her want to eat more, which probably wasn’t a good thing because she always overate to the point that the walk home was mighty difficult. The food tasted better with company, which was usually the case at the market as she always visited with friends, but today she had none. Takuma was an early riser who kept early hours, preferring to eat several hours before bed—coming with him always made her self-conscious when he at most got a light dessert.

“Didn’t order anything for me, young miss?” Some company made the food taste worse; the chicken instantly felt drier. “That does look nice.” The short man with a wide belly had a large beer bottle wrapped in brown paper and ordered a couple of skewers before standing beside her.

The advantage of a heavy crowd was that it was easy to get lost in it. As long as two people pretended they didn’t know each other, no one would think two people in front of a stall knew each other.

“Do you have the information?” Arisu asked.

“Relax, young miss. There’s no need to be in such a hurry,” the man chuckled. Arisu fixed him with an unimpressed stare. “Alright, alright, no need to look at me like that… I found the information about the guy you were looking for. One thing’s for sure, he isn’t just a teacher.”

As a side to her normal duties, Arisu had been working on a case that had nothing to do with narcotics or counterfeiting. Takuma had asked her to look into Chūnin Mizuki, an instructor at the shinobi academy. She had contacted her informants, but none of them knew anything about Mizuki, which most probably meant he wasn’t active in the drug trade. That led her to ask a friend in another department to connect her with one of their informants and find out more about Mizuki.

“He’s a middleman, works for commission. Knows a lot of people I’ll call good, hardworking people, but you may turn your nose away from, and does business with them on behalf of people with money to spare. From what I’ve heard, your boy does well for himself, but I won’t do business with him.”

“Why?”

“Heard that he doesn’t work hard for his clientele. Just wants his commission.”

Arisu hummed. She didn’t know how invested Takuma was in Mizuki. If he was dealing counterfeit goods and deceiving some of his customers, she could keep the case under her, but if that weren’t the crime, she would rather pass it to someone better equipped to handle it.

“Get me information on who he usually deals with,” Arisu said before moving deeper into the market. Work was over; now it was time to enjoy her evening stuffing herself with delicious food.

———

Arisu returned to her usual rhythm, waiting for the informant to return with a list of people. Things like that took some time, so when he contacted her the very next week without prompting to meet at the Night-Feast Market, she was pleasantly surprised because she wasn’t expecting such a quick turnaround from an informant that she hadn’t directly cultivated. Instead, she was prepared to need two or three reminders and at least three weeks of waiting to get the names.

Expecting a quick hand-off, she invited some of her friends to the market and asked them to meet at the entrance while she waited at the same yakitori stall they had met at last time.

“You came up quick,” Arisu said when she saw the man appear from the crowd, fully intending to praise him when she noticed that he was frowning.

He handed her a scroll. “The names you wanted.”

“Something wrong?” she said, unfurling the scroll to see some names.

“I was at the club three days ago,” the informant looked around semi-apprehensively, “minding my business, the music was great, there were some very stunning ladies on the dance floor, and I had an empty table ready for when they tired out their dainty feet—”

“Get to the point, man,” Arisu sighed.

“I spotted that Mizuki fellow there,” he said. “He was heading up to one of those top-floor private rooms—the kind only the real heavy spenders book, paying out the nose for the exact same drinks. I’ve got a lovely friend working hostess duty at the club, so I had her check who he was with. Turns out he was drinking with people from the Land of Rapids delegation.”

The lead came so entirely out of left field that, for a few seconds, Arisu couldn’t even fathom a link between them.

Foreign powers were permitted sovereign embassies within capital cities to manage diplomatic and trade channels. In the Land of Fire, a dedicated district of the Ember Imperial City housed the foreign enclaves charged with trade negotiations and bilateral communications. The Hidden Leaf—like all hidden villages—strictly banned permanent embassies on its soil, though it did accept occasional visiting envoys. As it happened, the Leaf was playing host to one right now: an official delegation from the Land of Rapids.

“I don’t know what the connection is there. I’m just sharing what I happened to see,” the informant said.

“You did well,” Arisu said, but was internally distracted by the new revelation. She had wanted to pass the case to another department, but now it had caught her attention because there seemed to be more going on than she'd initially anticipated.

———

.

The next day, Arisu stepped into the empty nightclub just past noon. It was dead quiet. The chaotic rigs that drowned the dance floor in a garish vomit of neon each night were off, replaced by cold white utility light that helped the cleaning staff get the place ready for another night of intensity that swept the space.

The sight of a startled employee who immediately ran into the back didn’t surprise her. She simply walked to the closed bar and waited there for a few minutes until a suave man with skin that made her jealous crossed the floor in fluffy slippers, silk pyjamas, and a bathrobe.

“What a surprise to see you here, Officer Arisu. It’s not every day we see such esteemed company. Allow me to show you some of our famous hospitality.”

The man was Mizutani Gin, the owner of the nightclub called the Shinkiro.

Arisu returned the man’s charming but plastic smile with a laugh. “I think we both know that’s not what you’re famous for, Gin.”

Nightclubs like Gin’s were the hotspots for drugs and other illicit substances. The Department of Narcotics Control kept a close eye on the clubs. Most of them managed to keep their hands clean by not supplying drugs directly, but they also didn’t take any serious steps to stop the sales and distribution of narcotics, as it was one of the reasons why people often visited clubs.

Gin gave her a wide smile. “I think we can agree to disagree on that matter. May I ask the reason behind your visit? I can give you a very competitive discount if you’re planning a party. We have a standing Police Force discount, you see.”

Arisu knew that wasn’t a lie, and she knew a few people who had thrown small parties in the club, and Gin had given them a discount in the name of developing connections. The Department of Narcotics Control had an internal mandate not to accept discounts or gifts from people or places that could create a conflict of interest.

Gin was a powerful man with many connections. One needed to be well-connected to open and operate such a nightclub that did as much business as Shinkiro. It was one of the reasons why he had managed to break rules and avoid punishment.

And yet, Gin was once one of Takuma’s cultivated informants. Shinkiro was riddled with code and safety violations—not mistakes, but intentional breaches of law—so he could have things the way he wanted at his cherished nightclub; fixing them would cost a fortune, but Gin had long skirted the law through well-placed bribes and friendly bureaucrats.

According to the files Takuma had left hidden, Arisu uncovered that Takuma had catalogued every single infraction, then coerced those same compromised inspectors and their bosses into doing their jobs properly under threat of public corruption charges. Once the authorities turned their crosshairs on the club, Takuma offered Gin a way out: he would call the authorities off, provided that the club owner fed him information.

Gin was trapped. Solving the club’s systematic failures would have forced a protracted, potentially ruinous closure—something he wasn’t prepared for.

“I want to talk about one of your clients. Give me that, and I might bring my whole team here to drink and have fun,” she said, smiling. “Oh wait, I think you’d prefer if that didn’t happen.”

Gin’s smile didn’t so much as twitch, but his eyes narrowed a fraction.

“We value the privacy of our clientele,” he said.

“That’s admirable,” Arisu said. “Upstanding businesses like yours are essential for the village. I appreciate your commitment to your clients and would like to help you. I’m thinking of stationing some uniformed officers outside the club to make sure your dear customers feel safe.”

She wasn’t Takuma, but she had her ways to make him talk.

The staff around them felt uncomfortable with the tension between them.

“Let’s talk inside,” Gin said after a while.

———

.

The situation turned out far bigger than Arisu’s initial imagination. She witnessed firsthand how snowballs tumbling down a slope not only gained mass but also picked up speed.

When Gin revealed to her that Mizuki had been meeting with the Land of Rapids delegation one or two times every year for the past three years, Arisu felt the case grow out of her scope due to the involvement of foreign dignitaries.

She decided to report her investigation to her boss, who then reported it to his boss.

Two days later, Arisu found herself sitting across from the Head of the Leaf Military Police Force in his office. She silently thanked her mother for drilling proper posture into her bones; it was the one thing she didn’t have to worry about as she sat tense. To distract herself, she looked around the office that was filled with Police Force history, like the first document signed between the Uchiha clan and the Hidden Leaf that established the Police Force and granted the former complete control of it.

“You say Chūnin Takuma gave you this case?” asked the Uchiha clan head.

“He requested me to look into it, sir,” she replied, not wanting to make it look like a former officer had ordered her. “He was concerned.”

“He asked you because you were his second-in-command when he was part of the force…”

“Yes, sir,” Arisu said—and because she was his girlfriend, but she didn’t think it was right to reveal that in front of the current company.

“He was right to be concerned,” Jōnin Uchiha Sayuri murmured from the seat beside Arisu, idly turning a page in the background dossier on Mizuki. “There has to be some angle; this is definitely some scheme that the Waterfall is running.”

“Do they have a history?” Arisu asked. She knew it had to be serious, but didn’t know much about the Land of Rapids other than that they housed the Hidden Waterfall Village. They weren't the Great Five, but they possessed one of the tailed beasts.

Fugaku closed the case file as he answered, “The embassies and dignitaries from the Land of Rapids have a reputation of being middlemen and information brokers on an international scale. If two parties can’t trust each other, they bring these guys in to make sure they’re not cheated. They also have an excellent intelligence network that has reach in every corner of the continent that is the source of their reliable information trade.”

“And an academy instructor isn’t buying information from them, so it can only mean that they’re getting it from him. The question is what?” Sayuri looked up at Fugaku. “We should bring him in.”

Arisu was instantly taken aback. She thought she would need more to justify an arrest.

Fugaku nodded. “I agree…”

Arisu’s jaw loosened at the rapid escalation.

“…though we will need to loop ANBU in.”

“ANBU?!” She couldn’t keep it quiet anymore.

“Well, yes. This is their jurisdiction.” Sayuri hummed in thought. "Though, I think they’ll want to observe until they’re convinced before stepping in."

“Good job on this, Officer Arisu.” Fugaku gave her a nod of approval and was about to say something when Arisu mustered up her courage.

“May I remain on the case?” she said. “It’d be a valuable learning experience.”

Fugaku gazed at her in silent thought for a few moments that made her instantly regret asking until he said, “Very well, you may remain on the case.”