Naruto: The Outsider's Resolve: CH_576: Kikyo Connection (Patreon)

That evening, Tern entered the safehouse to find Ratel slumped on the couch. His facial prosthetic lay in a bowl in the form of a lump of clay. He lifted his arm from his eyes to look at her, then shook his head.

Tern hung her head, feeling dejected. Of course, success wasn’t guaranteed, but they had worked so hard on such short notice and even gotten out safely. Still, getting nothing out of it sucked. She kicked off her heels, dropped into the one-seater, and slumped back.

A moment later, Kurosawa walked into the safehouse, still in his kimono. It took him one look to understand the infiltration mission had failed. He sighed, but he didn’t look as dejected as the other two; he wasn’t as invested in it as they were.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I searched every corner of the office, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” Ratel answered.

“What about the safe?”

“Got in there, but it wasn’t in there.”

“What was in there? Anything that could be used against Kikyo?”

“I wasn’t there to sightsee, Tokujō Kurosawa. I had to veer off the plan and expand my search area. Forgive me, but I didn’t have time to think about anything other than our goal,” Ratel said, and then stared at Kurosawa for a moment before picking up a storage scroll off the floor and tossing it to him. “Here’s what I took; you can have it all. Rest assured, that scroll and its contents will never be part of any records… I appreciate your help, Tokujō Kurosawa. Even though we didn’t get anything, we wouldn’t even have made it inside if not for you,” he said.

Kurosawa looked at the scroll in his hand, then at Ratel, like someone unsure whether they wanted to believe what they'd heard. However, he kept an impeccable poker face that betrayed none of his emotions.

Eventually, the head of the ANBU presence in the capital nodded.

“It didn’t go smoothly,” Ratel said, looking at the two.

“What do you mean?” Tern frowned.

“I ran into one of Kikyo’s core, Goshiki. Ran into him when I was leaving, and well, I had to take care of him.” Ratel folded his hands over his face as he groaned into them.

“The newest member? Please tell me you didn’t kill him,” Kurosawa said in an urgent tone, hoping for an agreeable answer.

Even Tern sat straighter in her chair for the answer, because it was her first time hearing about a fight, which meant it had gone undetected or, at the very least, Kikyo was suppressing the news to keep it from getting out. But if one of their core members had been murdered, it would spell trouble for the entire investigation.

“Of course not. Nothing that bad.” Ratel paused. “I broke his face, though. It was the only way to contain the situation without making a scene. He’s locked in one of the rooms. They’ll either find him first, or he’ll regain consciousness and make his way out. Either way, he’ll be fine… as much as a person with a broken face can be.”

Tern collapsed into the chair with a sigh of relief.

Kurosawa, on the other hand, wore a pensive expression. “You two need to leave at first light tomorrow,” he said, looking at the two ANBU. “Regardless of how Kikyo reacts, it’s safer if both of you are absent from the city. In this case, if they can’t reach you, they can’t harm you.”

“I was thinking of us staying in the city and maybe trying again in a few days,” Ratel said.

Tern had to admit that she wasn’t on her boss’s side on this one. Right now, they needed to retreat and take a moment to plan their next step instead of gambling on some half-baked attempt to get some information.

“I frankly disagree,” Kurosawa said firmly. “We failed to get anything at the party, which was the best window of opportunity. And now that you’ve robbed the place and put one of their core members in the hospital, they’ll only increase their security.”

“I agree with him,” Tern said.

“If you disagree and push the matter, I will use my authority as the highest-ranking ANBU stationed in this city to stop you from taking actions that I consider a threat to my team and operation here.”

Tern pursed her lips, feeling the tension in the room. Even though Ratel outranked Kurosawa within ANBU, they were still visitors in the latter’s territory. He could call it in and have headquarters stop Ratel’s actions. Then Ratel would need to go through the proper channels—like they had this time—to run another field operation in a high-value location like the Ember Imperial City. They had failed today and might need to do something in the city later, and they'd need Kurosawa’s cooperation then; if they pissed him off now, he wouldn’t have a reason to make things smooth for them later.

Ratel stood, walked to Kurosawa, and held out his hand for a handshake. “We will leave first thing tomorrow, Tokujō Kurosawa. This outing was disappointing, but it was a pleasure to work alongside you.”

Neither of them could tell if Ratel’s words were genuine until the end, but Kurosawa still gave him a firm handshake and returned the same sentiment to both of them before leaving. Ratel saw him to the door and then locked it.

“Don’t sweat it,” Tern said as Ratel walked back to the couch. “We will figure out some other way to get the information we need.”

Ratel fished something out of his suit jacket on the couch and tossed it to Tern. She looked at the mini-scroll in her hand, confused. “What is this?” She blinked for a few silent seconds. “Wait, are you telling me…”

“Film rolls with the photographs of Kikyo’s ledger.”

“But you told Kurosawa… You told me that you didn’t get anything.”

“I had to lie to you so Kurosawa would see a genuine reaction,” Ratel said with a small smile. “Not that I think you can’t lie properly; I just didn’t have the time to tell you the plan. That’s why I did the whole thing about staying for a couple of days and trying again.”

Tern didn’t take any offence. Kurosawa had been right behind her, and the man seemed perceptive, as someone in his situation needed to be. She was sure that Kurosawa didn’t believe Ratel, or at least didn’t discount the possibility that he was being lied to.

“You really didn’t want to give him any information, did you?” she said.

Ratel laughed. “I’d rather solo-charge the Daimyo’s castle than give him any information. Who knows what he or those guys at the Foreign Branch would do if I so much as threw crumbs at them?”

“So, what did you see?” Tern asked.

“Won’t know until we take a closer look, but,” a grave look passed across Ratel’s face, “I found unmarked B-rank ninjutsu scrolls in Watari’s safe. I took a closer look; they looked and read like the official scrolls. They weren’t at all the work of an amateur who was putting words from their memory onto the page.”

Tern had read the jutsu scrolls for her two B-rank ninjutsu countless times and could put her knowledge of them onto paper, maybe even recall the exact words of numerous sentences from the scrolls. But jutsu scrolls were so dense with information that, unless one had a photographic memory or tried to commit every word to memory, it was nearly impossible to remember it all. The scrolls had metres of text, diagrams, tables, illustrations, footnotes, and references that pointed to external books and academic papers.

A shinobi could create a scroll with the important details about the jutsu, but it wouldn’t be complete because there was too much in there. Could they know enough that another person could learn from that incomplete scroll? Absolutely. But it wouldn’t be as comprehensive as the ones in a hidden village’s jutsu archives.

“You remember what I told you about Watari?” Ratel asked.

“That he’s not a former shinobi.” Tern knew Kikyo by reputation and knew Kyohei Watari was the leader, but she didn’t know much beyond a few stories about their impressive battlefield feats. Before getting the name from Basara, she hadn’t even known whether Watari was a Land of Fire native.

“His history is a mess. We know of his hometown; his parents still lived there the last time we checked, and according to them, Watari was apprenticing under a hunter, but he had no formal training or any training at all.”

Most independent mercenaries with any semblance of a reputation were former shinobi, because the hidden villages were the only places where one could access the shinobi arts like jutsu. It wasn’t rare for former shinobi to pass on D- and C-rank jutsu to others, but most knew few and passed on less than they knew because knowledge was power. Not to mention, there was a severe lack of written material, as people didn’t want to write down their precious knowledge because that made it vulnerable to theft, so it was passed down by direct teaching. In the end, if one wanted to learn the shinobi arts, joining the shinobi academies was the most accessible option.

The hidden villages worked hard to ensure that remained the case.

Former shinobi who fell on hard times sometimes tried to open schools to earn money. It mostly happened in the boonies, away from the Leaf’s sight, because the moment the Leaf found out about any such school, they’d visit and offer the students’ parents a chance to have their children join the nearest academy, inevitably running the independent school into the ground. There were only so many children in a deep countryside village, making the teaching business unsustainable the moment the Leaf came poaching.

“As per his parents, he ran away from home when he was fifteen years old. No one knew where he went, but they suspected he bought a ride with a travelling merchant with the money he had saved from hunting game.”

Tern recalled what she had read in Watari’s file. His earliest confirmed record was two years after he went missing. He worked as security for a caravan that was attacked by another caravan, killing all three attackers and later claiming their bounties. He continued working as security for the next year until he disappeared for another year, only to reappear as part of a mercenary group of some renown.

Unlike Kikyo, a large, established company, that mercenary group was a trio of former shinobi who hired the rest of their team based on the requirements of their ongoing job. For a year, he ran with them, doing some missions that put him on the Hidden Leaf’s radar.

The particular one that got him his Bingo Book entry was thwarting an assassination attempt on the life of an underworld boss. A Hidden Stone chūnin tried to reap the boss’s life, but was killed by Watari in a life-or-death battle.

A month later, the Hidden Stone put a bounty on his head.

At twenty, he killed the mercenary trio and claimed their bounties before disappearing again. In the blink of an eye, the Hidden Leaf had a chūnin no one had heard of operating within their country. Over the next five years, he made enemies in four of the Great Five by killing their chūnin and the clients under their protection, along with all kinds of other things people hired mercenaries for.

But then, at the age of twenty-five, he founded Kikyo, and that made the Hidden Leaf send their killers after him because, in a single moment, they suddenly had a mercenary group with ten chūnin at the helm.

Kikyo was born when Watari united four independent mercenary groups under one banner with himself at the head. The mercenary groups, each led by one or at most two chūnin, suddenly came together to form a single force. That got him six chūnin, and then he somehow managed to integrate four Hidden Leaf rogues into his group.

Ten chūnin were more than enough for most jobs, which made them serious competition.

It was an open secret that all hidden villages killed their competition. But they couldn’t do it willy-nilly without resistance. Being a chakra user and taking jobs didn’t make one a criminal. So their preferred way to weed out competition was to steal their clientele by driving prices into the ground, even if that meant taking a loss on the job—it was considered an investment to maintain their dominance.

As Kikyo grew in both the foreign and domestic job markets, the Hidden Leaf faced a rare problem. They couldn’t woo the clientele away from Kikyo. Not only was Kikyo hyper-competent, but Watari also earned his clients’ loyalty through charm.

It took the Hidden Leaf three years to decide that Kikyo had to go. They identified Watari as the glue that held Kikyo together, and if they could get rid of him, they could break the group apart into what they had been before: disjointed and thus not a threat.

They aimed for a window when seven of the ten chūnin were out on jobs, and Watari was resting after returning from a mission. They sent a team of five chūnin after him. The result? Watari killed two Leaf chūnin, maimed another one, and left a fourth seriously injured before managing to escape the country altogether, fleeing to the Land of Wind.

Though they failed, the Hidden Leaf got what they wanted. Without Watari, Kikyo fell apart as the remaining nine chūnin went their separate ways, but not before two chūnin died in an internal dispute over how to split Kikyo’s assets.

Watari reappeared a year later as a solo mercenary, operating out of the Land of Wind. He started from zero. He rebuilt his reputation with skill and his clientele with charm, and his forces grew as the first two did.

But how did the man who was run out of the country come to live in a castle in the capital city, rubbing shoulders with the country’s elites?

It was because of the Third Shinobi World War.

As the Great Five were focused on the war, he once more united independent mercenaries and rogues under the Kikyo banner. The war was a gold mine for mercenaries, and Watari took full advantage, taking on high-profile missions from a clientele spanning the continent and completing every single one without losing a single chūnin.

And it seemed the Fire Daimyo was part of that clientele because, a few years later, when the Nine-Tailed Fox ravaged the Hidden Leaf, the Daimyo declared Watari under his protection and officially invited Kikyo back into the country. The timing was perfect: the Hidden Leaf was distracted by the tragedy. It couldn’t stop the re-entry, and once that happened, Kikyo operated openly without worrying about being targeted by the top dog.

The rest was history as Kikyo grew into what they were today, based on the reputation they had earned during the Third Shinobi World War.

“Part of that reputation was that Kyohei Watari knew multiple B-rank ninjutsu,” Ratel said, staring at the ceiling from his spot on the couch. “He used them during the war. Never before that. Who taught them to him? One could be explained away—but he used three distinct Fire Release ninjutsu back then. There were a couple more in Kikyo who used one B-rank ninjutsu back then as well… That’s what made Kikyo stand out. They had shinobi who could use B-rank ninjutsu; you usually only see that in official shinobi like us.”

“…And now we find jutsu scrolls in Watari’s safe,” Tern said.

Ratel nodded.

“It has to be the Hidden Sand. He went there after he was run out of the Land of Fire,” Tern said, feeling her heart beat faster. They had always known that Kikyo had roots in the Land of Wind, but that didn’t equate to relations with the Hidden Sand.

But with this, they could make a connection that might hold up under scrutiny.

“It seems that,” Ratel paused, “the Hidden Sand might be planning something big.”