Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 85 (Patreon)

There's a proverb that says bad luck always travels in threes.

Which, when you think about it, is a weird thing to say. Not because it's wrong, but because it implies the universe keeps a running tally. Like somewhere out there, fate is sitting at a desk with a checklist, making sure your misfortunes arrive in neat packages of three before giving you a breather. One, two, three, okay, that's your quota for the week, see you next Monday.

Except that's not how it works at all.

Bad luck doesn't care about math. It doesn't know when to stop. If anything, the proverb should be the opposite. Bad luck travels in ones, just one continuous one that keeps going until you either die or become so desensitized to suffering that you stop noticing. The whole "threes" thing is just cope. Something people invented to convince themselves the pain would end after a certain number of hits. Oh, I've been unlucky twice already, which means I only need to survive one more disaster and then things will get better. That's humans doing what humans do best, making up rules for a game nobody else is playing.

I thought about this while staring up at Hanzo the Salamander.

He stared back. So did his nin, eight of them perched across the branches, every last one burning with the same thought, you screwed me over. now I screw you dead.

Which, fair. I was standing in their country without permission, wearing their dirt on my sandals, breathing their air without a visa. Technically, I was the intruder here. The guy who'd just been chasing a foreign poison psycho through their backyard like it was a public park. If our positions were reversed, I'd probably be annoyed too.

The problem was that being right didn't make them any less dangerous.

And the bigger problem was that I was about to find out exactly how much pain the universe had saved up for me.

Turns out, quite a bit. The first attack came from the left.

Steel screamed toward my throat, kunai trailing wire like a metal snake lunging for the kill. I caught the wire and whipped it past my ear, already turning because the second attack was already there, short blade punching for my ribs from the right. I folded my body around it, felt the edge kiss fabric, and then the third one dropped from above with a boot aimed at cracking my skull open.

I caught the boot and yanked him down. His eyes went wide for a split second before my fist was already in his face. He blocked it, forearm snapping up just in time. I followed with a knee that he twisted away from, then a spinning elbow that clipped his jaw and sent spit flying. He tried to counter with a palm strike to my chest. I slapped it aside and drove a kick straight into his sternum, hard enough that his feet left the ground.

He ragdolled backward through the air, crashed through a low branch, and hit the ground hard enough to send up a spray of mud and dead leaves.

His friend didn't even wait for him to finish bouncing, coming in with a horizontal slash aimed at taking my head off. I tilted back just enough to let the blade whisper past my chin, then stepped into his space. He reversed the slash into a backhand cut. I caught his wrist mid-swing and used his own momentum to spin him, driving my knee into his exposed side. He twisted with the hit, trying to turn the stumble into a spinning back fist. I slipped past it and cracked my elbow across his jaw on the way through. He staggered but didn't go down, throwing a wild hook that I wove under before hammering two quick body shots into his floating ribs.

He grunted and tried to create distance with a push kick. I batted his leg aside and closed the gap again, slipping inside his guard. My elbow drove toward his chest. I felt the breath leave him in a rush, felt his stance break as he doubled over. My other hand was already coming around, ready to smash him in the brain and put him down for good.

The punch never landed.

Something slammed into my ribs from the side. A kick. Fast enough that I didn't see it coming until it had already landed. The world went sideways, ground becoming sky, sky becoming ground, and then I was flying.

Not metaphorically flying. Actually flying. Through the air. Without consent.

I hit the ground and bounced.

Once.

Twice.

Somewhere between the first bounce and the second, my brain caught up to what had happened. That wasn't one of the Ame-nin. That was Hanzo. The Hanzo. Living legend of Amegakure, bane of three nations, and apparently he had nothing better to do today than personally introduce his foot to my ribcage. I should be flattered. Most shinobi never even see him before they die. I got a whole kick. Lucky me. Also, dead me, if I kept fighting at normal speed.

So I stopped fighting at normal speed.

Lightning crackled to life under my skin. The familiar bite of electricity threading through my nervous system, sharp and hot, like someone had replaced my veins with live wire. Everything sharpened. The world didn't slow down, but I sped up, my body finally catching up to what my instincts had been screaming at me.

Gravel sprayed around me as I tumbled. On the third bounce my palm slapped the ground and I twisted sideways, launching myself into a spin, sparks trailing from my fingertips. Hanzo flickered into my path before I finished the rotation. I caught his strike on my forearm mid-air, lightning arcing where our limbs connected, and used the momentum to whip my heel at his mask.

Better. Much better. I could actually see him now, and even track his movements like a normal human being watching another normal human being do normal human things. Except neither of us were normal and none of this was human, but the point stood, even if Hanzo didn't give me time to appreciate it.

He slipped my kick and came back with a hook that I ducked under, then a knee that I barely got my forearm in front of. The impact drove me back a step. I planted my feet, let the lightning surge through my legs, and blitzed forward in a blur of sparks to fire a combination at his center. He weaved through all three like smoke, caught the fourth on his palm, and came back with a knee to my ribs that I barely intercepted with my elbow. I whipped my other hand at his throat while he was still close. He leaned away from it like water flowing around a stone, already pulling back, and something cold bit into my side before my brain registered the blur of chain.

The kusarigama. Sneaky old man had used his own body as a blind spot, drawing it the moment I went for his throat.

Not good.

Not good at all.

The impact had forced the air out of my lungs, which meant I had to breathe in, which meant I got a nice lungful of whatever was floating around Hanzo's general vicinity. There was a reason I'd been holding my breath since this fight started. Hanzo the Salamander didn't get that name because he liked amphibians. The guy sweated poison. Literally. His body produced toxins potent enough that just standing near him was a health hazard. Most shinobi who fought him didn't die from his attacks. They died because they forgot to stop breathing.

I hadn't forgotten.

I'd just been reminded that forgetting and being forced were two different things with the same result.

Mid-flight, while the world was still spinning, I caught them in the corner of my eye. The two jonin, moving through the trees, trying to flank me while I was airborne and couldn't do anything about it.

They were wrong about that last part.

I raised my hand toward them without looking away from Hanzo and snapped my fingers.

"Bang."

The explosion came first. A rock near the left jonin's feet stopped being a rock and started being a fireball, the henge dissolving in the same moment my clone decided it was done pretending. Heat and light and pressure expanded in a hungry sphere that swallowed everything within five meters.

One of them came apart in a spray of red that used to be a person.

The other one popped. Smoke where a body should have been. Bunshin. Of course. Hard to keep track of fodder when a legend is using you as a bounce test.

The real one was still alive, and he was screaming a name. Best friends, probably. Maybe they grew up in the same village. Maybe they'd made some promise to each other about watching each other's backs, about going home together after the war, about all those things people said to each other when they wanted to believe the universe cared about their plans. The universe didn't, of course. It never did. But people kept making those promises anyway, because hope was cheaper than acceptance and twice as addictive.

I landed in a crouch, dirt spraying around my boots.

Hanzo stood a few meters away, mask angled toward me. Silent. Watching.

The surviving jonin had stopped screaming. He was glaring at me now, eyes promising slow death and a shallow grave. Fair enough. I'd just turned his friend into a memory and a stain.

I straightened up slowly, keeping my eyes on Hanzo even as I caught the rest of his squad spreading through the trees on my flanks. Six, maybe seven more, spreading out through the trees on my flanks. Ready to join in the moment their leader gave the word.

"Bad luck," I muttered under my breath. "Always comes in ones. Or sevens, apparently."

Hanzo tilted his head, mask angled toward the scorch mark that used to be his subordinate. Then back to me.

"Hm." The sound was thoughtful, almost appreciative. "I've seen a great many jutsu in my time. That one's new." He rolled the kusarigama's chain once around his wrist, the metal links clinking softly against each other. "And from someone so young. You can't be more than—what, fourteen? Fifteen?"

"Thirteen, actually. I'm tall for my age."

"Thirteen." He said it like he was tasting the word. "A thirteen-year-old jonin who can trade blows with me, even briefly. Konoha is raising interesting children." There was something that might have been amusement in his voice, the way a cat is amused by a mouse that bites back. "What's your name?"

"That depends. If I tell you, do I get to walk out of here?"

He hummed. The sound was thoughtful, like he was actually considering it. "A week ago, I might have said yes. Talent like yours is rare. It would be a waste to bury it in a place like this." He glanced at the scorch mark again. "But you killed one of mine. Right in front of me. If I let that slide, what kind of message does that send to the rest of them?"

"That you're a reasonable man with a flexible approach to conflict resolution?"

Dead silence.

Around us, Hanzo's men had gone still. A few exchanged glances beneath their masks. One guy actually shifted backward, like he wanted to distance himself from whatever was about to happen to me.

Nobody talked to Hanzo like that. That was the fundamental law of Ame.

"Ku ku ku..."

The laugh caught me off guard. Low and genuine, completely at odds with the mask and everything I'd heard about the man wearing it. “I like you.” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “Unfortunately, reputation isn't built on being reasonable. It's built on making sure no one ever thinks they can pull something like that and walk away.”

"Shame," I said. "I was really hoping this would end with us shaking hands and promising to write each other."

"Life is full of disappointments." He nodded as his kusarigama swaying gently at his side. "Your name. I'd like to know it before we continue."

"Shinji," I said, raising my hand toward him. "Nice meeting you, and goodbye."

"Bang."

My finger snapped.

Hanzo wasn't there anymore.

The spot where he'd been standing a second ago was empty, and he probably thought he'd dodged something. He hadn't. The finger pointing at him was just misdirection, a magician waving one hand while the other did the real work.

Three bursts of red behind me. The flanking ame nin didn't scream, didn't have time to. One second they were spreading out through the trees, the next they were in the trees. Literally. Pieces of them, anyway. A leg here, an arm there, chunks of meat decorating the branches like the world's worst festival. My clones had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for the signal, patient as stones until they weren't.

The survivors tensed as hot air slammed through the clearing and smoke curled into the rain. Then they scattered, leaping away from me like I was contagious, putting as much distance between themselves and my general existence as their legs could manage.

This was the thing about fighting people who didn't have your file. They had no idea what to expect. No briefing papers warning them about exploding clones, no intel reports detailing your preferred tricks, no nervous whispers from survivors who'd seen what you could do and lived to regret it. Just pure, beautiful ignorance walking into a blender. It was almost unfair. Almost. I'd take every advantage I could get against a guy like Hanzo.

I didn't get to appreciate their survival instincts for long.

Something hit me from the side. Hanzo. Again. His fist slammed into my chest before I could turn. I got my arm up for the second strike but he'd already vanished—another blur, another blink—reappearing past my guard, his kick crashing into my ribs and launching me sideways. I spun like a skipping stone that forgot how to skip. My back found a tree trunk the hard way. Bark exploded around me. I kicked off the impact before gravity could claim me, flipping sideways, and my wakizashi came singing out of its scabbard just in time to meet chain, its links still blurring from shunshin, a half-second behind their owner.

And he was getting faster. That was the part that really bothered me. I'd already pushed my body into lightning mode, already cranked my reaction time as high as it could go, and Hanzo was still accelerating. Still finding new gears I didn't know existed. Every time I adjusted, he adjusted harder. It was like fighting someone who could see my ceiling and had decided to build a floor there.

Which made me think about all the other jonin I'd fought up to this point. Konoha jonin, Suna jonin, missing-nin who used to be jonin before they went rogue and started making their own rules. All of them could use shunshin. All of them thought they were fast. And compared to most shinobi, they were. Shunshin was supposed to be one of those jutsu that separated the professionals from the amateurs, the people who could flicker from point A to point B in the time it took to blink.

Hanzo made them all look like they were moving through syrup.

It wasn't just speed. Anyone could be fast. Fast was trainable, predictable, something you could learn to read if you fought enough people who thought they were quick. This was different. This was a man who had folded shunshin into his bones so thoroughly that it had stopped being a jutsu and started being instinct. Made me wonder how he'd stack up against Shisui when that kid finally grew into his eyes. Probably be a hell of a show to watch from very, very far away.

I decided to get a head start on that 'far away' part, which was when the blood climbed up my throat. I spat it sideways without slowing down. Hanzo's poison, already setting up shop in my lungs. Still not running though. Running implied panic. This was very calm. Very intentional. Very much not panic at all.

So of course that's when Hanzo's sickle came for my throat.

A clone intercepted it in a flash of lightning. A second clone was already there, wakizashi sparking blue as it carved toward Hanzo's ribs. He deflected both and spun to deal with a third dropping from above. That gave me the opening I needed.

I flickered south.

Fire bloomed on my left. I twisted mid-shunshin and let the fireball scorch past, heat washing over my face. Water bullets came from the right. I vaulted off my hands and let my body fly horizontally, the bullets threading through the gaps between my limbs. My palm hit dirt just as the ground rumbled beneath me, earth spikes already rising to meet my landing. No time to dodge. My free hand blurred through a one-handed seal.

"Doton."

The terrain turned to mud. The spikes lost their foundation and collapsed into the slurry before they could skewer me, and I pushed off the soft earth to launch myself further south. A lightning bolt crackled past my ear—lightning, really? They had lightning users too? I corkscrewed around it, hit the ground in a slide, and came up just in time to throw up a wall as three wind blades converged on my position. Stone exploded into rubble.

But the next volley never came. I waited a second, then two, bracing for more elemental nonsense to come flying at my head.

Then I saw why.

One of the Ame nin was staring at the steel growing out of his sternum. His fingers twitched around a half-formed seal as blood bubbled up his throat and spilled down his chin. My clone twisted the wakizashi once before ripping it sideways, and the nin came apart in a wet spray of red and things that should have stayed inside.

The second nin didn't even get to look surprised. Two clones hit him from opposite sides, blades punching through his back and stomach simultaneously. He made a sound like air escaping a punctured balloon, spasmed once, and went still as the clones withdrew their steel and let him drop into the mud.

The third tried to run. He got maybe three steps before a clone landed on his back and drove a kunai through the base of his skull. His legs kept moving for another second, momentum carrying his corpse forward in a stumbling lurch before it finally remembered it was dead and collapsed face-first into the dirt.

Four down when I snapped my fingers at the nin trying to flank from the east. Bang. He stopped being a person and started being a red smear across the bark of three different trees.

Five down when another one made the mistake of thinking distance would save him. Bang. It didn't. Distance just meant the pieces spread further.

Six and seven went together, back to back, thinking teamwork would help. Bang. Bang. Two snaps, two explosions, two nasty sounds that used to be people making plans for after the mission. Maybe one of them had a family waiting back home. Maybe the other one owed someone money. Didn't matter now. They were abstract art decorating the forest floor, and the debt collectors would have to find someone else to bother.

The rest of them scattered like roaches when the lights came on. Wise decision. Too late for their friends, but wise for them. I let them go. Chasing down every single one would take time I didn't have, not with the real problem still breathing down my neck.

There's an old saying about not meeting your heroes. Something about disappointment, expectations, reality being uglier than imagination. Nobody ever talks about meeting your villains though. About what it feels like to stand across from someone whose name you grew up hearing in horror stories, and realizing the stories were underselling it. Hanzo wasn't scary because he was strong. He was scary because fighting him felt like reading a book he'd already finished. Every move I made, he'd turned that page decades ago.

Good thing running away was still an option.

Or so I thought.

Chain rattled behind my ear. I felt the cold links brush my neck before the loop could tighten.

A clone burst from the side and threw itself between us, taking the kusarigama meant for my spine. It popped into smoke and I was already flickering away, putting ten meters between us.

Ten meters wasn't enough. I flickered south. He was there. Of course he was there. Where else would he be? Steel met chain in a shower of sparks and I pushed off the clash to create distance. Flickered again. He was there again. Another clash, another desperate parry, another few meters of hard-won ground.

Trees blurred past. Hanzo blurred after. We met once, twice, three times in a single breath, steel screaming against chain, and then we were somewhere else. The clearing. The treeline. The riverbank. Each location lasting just long enough for the fight to leave a mark before we flickered again, purple mist and crackling lightning painting the forest in colors it was never meant to wear.

South. Keep going south.

Tsunade was south. Tsunade and the rest of the squad and backup and people who could help me not die against the living legend currently trying to separate my head from my shoulders. Any minute now she'd notice something was wrong. Any minute now she'd come looking for her lovely student who'd been gone too long. Any minute now the cavalry would arrive and I could stop being the main character of this one-man tragedy, though the blood trickling down my chin was voting for the bad ending. My chakra was working overtime to slow the poison's spread through my system, but iryoninjutsu was great for a lot of things, and fighting Hanzo while simultaneously trying not to die from his personal brand of toxin was asking a lot from multitasking.

That said, I've always preferred being my own cavalry. Tsunade showing up would be nice. Me showing up would be better.

See, south wasn't just where Tsunade and the outpost were. South was also where I'd been stashing clones for the past hour. Lots of clones. An irresponsible number of clones. More clones than any responsible shinobi would approve of, assuming responsible shinobi existed.

Guess who just arrived at the party.

Branches creaked overhead. Black black figures dropped from the trees ahead.

One. Five. Ten. Twenty. More.

They hit Hanzo like flies on shit in summer, and suddenly the forest was alive with purple mist and crackling lightning and raw, unrestrained violence that made the earlier fighting look like a friendly spar. Hanzo's kusarigama sang through the air, clones popped into smoke, and then the explosions started.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang bang bang.

The forest lit up like someone had taken a grudge against the marshland. Fire and force and shrapnel shredded through the underbrush, one explosion bleeding into the next until the individual blasts stopped mattering and it all became one continuous roar of destruction. Somewhere in there, Hanzo was probably having a very bad time. Or maybe he was fine. Hard to tell with legends. They had a habit of walking out of things that should have killed them.

Either way, it wasn't my problem anymore.

I slipped away while the chaos did its job. Hanzo wasn't a sensor. He couldn't track chakra signatures through the mess of clone smoke and explosion residue and general mayhem. And even if he could, it wouldn't have mattered. I'd sent a dozen clones fleeing in different directions the moment the ambush started. East, west, north, zigzagging through the trees like panicked rabbits. Any one of them could be the real me. None of them were. But Hanzo didn't know that.

By the time he figured it out, I planned to be very far away, drinking something strong and pretending this whole day never happened.

It was a good plan. A great plan, even. Flawless in theory.

My legs disagreed.

The poison chose that exact moment to remind me that it was still there, still eating through my system, still very much unimpressed by my Iryoninjutsu. My knees buckled. The trees started spinning. The ground rushed up to meet me like an old friend I'd been avoiding.

I hit the dirt face-first.

Somewhere behind me, the explosions were still going. Somewhere ahead of me, safety was waiting. And somewhere in the rapidly shrinking space between consciousness and unconsciousness, a single thought drifted through my increasingly fuzzy brain.

I hoped Tsunade found me before the bugs did. Ame had big bugs. Really big bugs.

…

Meanwhile, several hundred kilometers away, in a town that had never heard of Hanzo and probably wanted to keep it that way, a certain purple-haired student was having problems of her own.

They were significantly less life-threatening problems, admittedly. No poison eating through her bloodstream. No legendary shinobi trying to separate her head from her shoulders. No unplanned make-out sessions with the forest floor.

But to Konan, sprawled across a rooftop in Tanzaku Quarters with nothing but cold tiles and colder dango for company, her problems felt plenty serious enough.

She didn't move.

Moving would require effort. Effort would require motivation. And motivation, as it turned out, had packed its bags and left town the same moment her sensei did.

She stared up at the evening sky, watching clouds drift past like they had somewhere important to be. Lucky them. At least the clouds had direction. At least the clouds weren't stuck on some random rooftop in Tanzaku Quarters while their teacher ran off to do fun things that apparently didn't include students.

He hadn't even explained. Hadn't even given her some excuse about business or contacts or anything she could pretend to believe. Just gone, leaving her with his clones like she was luggage that needed babysitting.

She puffed out her cheeks and blew a strand of purple hair out of her face. If boredom could kill, she'd already be dead twice over.

Below her, Tanzaku Quarters was doing what Tanzaku Quarters did best, being loud. Someone was singing off-key in one of the bars. A vendor was shouting about fresh yakitori. Two drunk men were arguing about something that probably wouldn't matter in the morning. Everyone down there had somewhere to be and someone to be with. Must be nice.

She turned her head slightly, looking at the dango sitting beside her on the tiles.

Three sticks left, going cold since she'd bought them. The glaze had gone sticky and cold, the rice dumplings looking more sad than appetizing at this point. She'd bought them thinking maybe today would be different. Maybe today the clones would have news about when Shinji was coming back. They didn't.

Now even the dango tasted like disappointment.

She picked up a stick anyway, took a bite, chewed. The sweetness sat on her tongue like it was waiting for permission to actually taste good. It didn't get any. All the dango did was remind her that she was eating alone.

Should she just go find him?

She reached out with her senses. There. And there. And over there too. Three clones scattered around doing whatever clones did when they were bored. Not that it mattered. Bored or not, they'd already intercepted her twice today when she'd tried to slip out of the city.

Shinji had probably stationed them specifically to watch her. Because he'd known she would try to follow him. Because he knew her well enough by now to predict exactly what she'd do.

She wasn't sure if that was flattering or irritating.

"You look bored."

Konan didn't flinch. She'd felt him approaching a few seconds ago. One of the clones dropped onto the rooftop beside her, settling into a cross-legged position as casually as if this were his living room.

"I am bored," she said flatly. "Thanks to you."

"Technically the boss's fault. I'm just following orders." He pulled something out of his backpack, a flat wooden board with a grid pattern carved into it and a small bag that clinked when he set it down. "You any good at strategy games?"

She glanced at the board, then back at his face. "What is that?"

"Chess, a game I invented."

She raised an eyebrow.

"What? I did." He said it with a straight face, completely shameless.

Of course, "invented" was probably a strong word. She had stayed with the clones in this city long enough to notice the pattern. Random things they knew that nobody else seemed to know. Recipes that didn't exist anywhere. Games that had no history. Ideas that came out of nowhere fully formed. She wasn't stupid. There was something going on there, something Shinji wasn't telling her. But she'd also learned not to ask, because asking got her nowhere except a subject change and a snack to distract her.

"Anyway, I partnered with a merchant here in the city about a week ago," the clone continued, apparently satisfied that she wasn't going to challenge his claim. He began unpacking the pieces, arranging them on the board without even glancing down. "We've been selling sets to gambling halls, tea houses, a couple of noble estates. Turns out there's a massive market for games that let people convince themselves they're smarter than whoever they're playing against."

"Fascinating." She let the word drip with disinterest. "And you're sharing this business update with me because...?"

The clone grinned. "Because I'm pretty sure this puts me in the lead for who gets to be Ryouma next. Original business venture, steady income stream, cultural contribution to society. That's got to count for something."

Konan couldn't help it. A laugh escaped her before she could stop it.

"You're not even close," she said, shaking her head with something that might have been pity. "Nana-kun brought back three new recipes last week, one of them involved chocolate, so you've already lost that round. Juu-chan found a vendor who sells those sweet buns I like and brings me one every morning. And Yon-yon?" She held up a single finger, watching his face. "Yon-yon started selling something called poker to the gambling halls four days ago. Last I heard, three different establishments were already fighting over exclusive rights to host tournaments."

The clone's confident expression crumbled like a sandcastle meeting the tide. "Poker? That backstabbing little—I was going to introduce that next week!" He paused, rewinding what she'd said. "Hold on. Sweet buns every morning? That's not a contribution to our cause, that's just bribery. Blatant, shameless bribery!"

"Your point?"

"My point is that shouldn't count!"

She lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. "It counted. I like sweet buns."

"That's corruption. If this were an actual organization with actual rules, there would be hearings."

"And yet." The smirk tugging at her lips refused to be suppressed any longer. She let it spread, savoring the way his expression shifted from outrage to dawning concern. "You're going to need something significantly better than chess if you want my vote. Or at the very least, a better ‘bun’."

The clone opened his mouth, closed it, then let out a sigh and rolled his eyes at her. "You're enjoying this way too much."

She was. She absolutely was.

Before Shinji had left, he'd given her one job. Judge the clones, pick who gets to take over the Ryouma persona next. A small thing, maybe, but it meant the clones actually had to be nice to her if they wanted a shot at living the high life in the pleasure district instead of standing guard on rooftops or doing boring stuff.

It was, she had to admit, a pretty good consolation prize for being ditched.

"So," the clone said, setting up the chess pieces on the board. "If bribery is officially on the table, and apparently it is, what would it take to secure your vote? Hypothetically speaking."

"Hypothetically?" She tilted her head, pretending to give the question serious consideration. "More sweet buns. Better sweet buns. Maybe some of those fried dumplings from that little stall near the east gate, the one with the old woman who yells at anyone who takes too long to order."

"That's a lot of food."

"I'm a growing girl."

"You're a bottomless pit is what you are." He placed the last piece and gestured at the board. "Alright. Since we're stuck here anyway, I might as well teach you how to play. White goes first, and the goal is to trap the other person's king so it can't move anywhere without getting taken. Each piece moves differently, so..."

"What's in it for me if I learn?"

He blinked, caught off guard. "The satisfaction of intellectual growth? The joy of mastering a new skill? The timeless pleasure of—"

She stared at him, utterly unmoved.

"Fine." He sighed, the sound of a man watching his profit margins evaporate. "I'll buy you dumplings after."

"Deal."

He started explaining how the pawns moved, pointing at the little pieces lined up at the front. She listened, sort of, while also calculating how many dumplings she could reasonably demand before it stopped being a bribe and started being extortion. The clone was mid-sentence about something called "castling" when another presence landed behind them.

"Oi." A second clone landed on the rooftop behind them, hands in his pockets. "You're up for Hana-san's treatment."

The clone's hand froze over the board. "Already? I thought Six had this rotation."

"Six is busy. Apparently one of his merchant deals went sideways and now there's yelling involved." The second clone's shrug conveyed a complete lack of interest in the details. "So congratulations, you've been promoted."

The clone exhaled through his nose, not quite a sigh, but definitely in the same family, and began gathering the chess pieces back into their bag. "Duty calls, I suppose." He shot Konan an apologetic look as he stood. "Rain check on the rest of the ‘lesson’?"

"You still owe me dumplings."

"Yeah, yeah." He tucked the board under one arm, already turning to leave. "Add it to my tab."

And then both of them were gone, flickering away into the night.

She stared at the empty rooftop for a moment, then flopped onto her back with a huff.

Sensei was probably having the time of his life right now. Good food, good drinks, doing whatever fun things required ditching his student. Meanwhile she got an empty house and a dumpling debt that would probably never get paid.

Must be nice.

…

Shinji was, in fact, not having the time of his life.

His eyes cracked open to a world made of blur and pain. Mostly pain. The blur was just a bonus feature, like the universe had decided that suffering alone wasn't enough and threw in some visual impairment for free.

Everything hurt. Not surface pain like a stubbed toe or a punch to the jaw. This went deeper. Venom threaded through veins and sank claws into marrow. Hanzo’s poison still burned, slow and stubborn, no matter how hard his body fought.

Zero out of ten. Would not recommend.

Something blonde swam into view. It took my brain a few seconds to assemble the pieces into Tsunade's face, and a few more to register that she looked like she wanted to either hug me or strangle me.

“Sen-sei…” I croaked, my voice sounding like someone had dragged it across gravel. “Did you… carry me all the way here? I’m genuinely touched. My soul is doing cartwheels. There might be sparkles.”

She bonked me on the head.

"Ow."

"Your clone dragged your sorry carcass here." She crossed her arms, glaring down at me. "I just happened to be the one who kept you from dying after it dumped you on my table and went poof.”

"So you 'did’ save me.” I tried (and failed) to smirk. “My heart is literally breakdancing right now. I think I just caught feelings.”

"I will put you back in a coma."

"Understood. Shutting up now."

I didn't shut up, of course. "How long was I out?"

"Long enough for me to seriously consider letting the poison finish the job." Her expression softened. "Two days. You're lucky your clone had the sense to get you here when it did. Another hour and we’d be picking out funeral flowers instead of arguing.”

I let my head flop back against the pillow. “Ahhh, so you’re telling me the romantic cutscene, me as the tragically beautiful corpse, pale and poetic, you kneeling in the rain with perfect tears streaming down your face while cherry blossoms fall in slow motion—”

“Is not happening,” she snapped, cutting me off before I could really lean into the violins. “What we actually almost got was me hunched over a desk at 3 a.m., mainlining coffee and rage-typing a twelve page incident report called ‘How My Dumbass Student Committed Suicide by Salamander: An After Action Review’.”

"That’s the most dumbest way to die. I refuse. I demand a cooler death.”

She snorted

I took the opportunity to actually look around, and that's when reality caught up with me.

White sheets. Medical equipment. The smell of antiseptic and rows of beds stretching out on either side, some occupied, some empty.

The field hospital.

I'd been here before, obviously. Walked these aisles, treated patients, assisted with surgeries. But always on the other side of the equation. Always the one doing the healing, never the one lying in bed staring at a ceiling and smelling like medicine and someone else's sweat.

The sheets were scratchy. The pillow was flat. Something was poking into my back, probably a wrinkle in the mattress, but moving to fix it felt like way too much effort. And there was this constant low-level ache everywhere. Even my teeth hurt, somehow.

Being a patient sucked.

"Welcome to the other side," she said, clearly reading my mind. "How does it feel?"

"Terrible. How do people stand this?"

"They don't have a choice." She pulled up a chair and sat down beside my bed. "Unlike you, who had plenty of choices and decided to pick a fight with Hanzo of all people."

"In my defense, he started it."

"I'm sure he did."

"He really did. Ask anyone. Well, anyone who survived. Which might just be me and him, actually."

She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Speaking of which. What happened out there? Your clone was barely coherent when it got here, just kept mumbling about poison and explosions and something about bugs."

"Ame has big bugs. Really big bugs. It was a legitimate concern."

"Shinji."

"Fine, fine." I shifted slightly, immediately regretted it, and settled back into my scratchy pillow. "Short version? Ran into Hanzo. He wasn't happy about me poking around his backyard. I tried to leave. He took that personally too."

"And?"

"And I may have blown up a significant portion of the forest trying to get away from him." I paused. "Also some of his men. Mostly his men, actually. The forest was collateral damage."

She stared at me for a long moment, and I watched her expression shift from confusion to concern to something that looked a lot like irritation. “Why the hell did you even fight him? You were supposed to kill Chiyo and leave. Not pick a fight with Hanzo."

"I didn't pick anything. He picked me."

"Did you say something to him?" She squinted at me. "You said something to him, didn't you. Something that made him want to kill you."

"Hey, I am offended by that accusation. I am a mature, responsible shinobi who would never antagonize a living kage just because I couldn't keep my mouth shut."

Her expression didn't change, but somehow it got more judgmental.

"For your information, Hanzo actually liked me. Called me a rare talent, once in a generation genius." I spread my hands. "It's just that I accidentally killed some of his men while we were chatting, so he felt professionally obligated to return the favor. You know how politics are."

"He liked you so much he tried to gut you." Her voice was flatter than paper. "Congratulations."

"Thank you. I thought it went rather well, all things considered."

She let out a long breath and pinched the bridge of her nose. This was her student. This was the brat she'd agreed to teach. Patience.

"Fine." She dropped her hand. "What about Chiyo? Your clone mentioned something about capturing her."

"Already at the outpost. Gift-wrapped, bow and everything."

She blinked. "You actually got her?"

"You don't have to sound so shocked."

"I'm shocked you're not a corpse. That old hag has been making Command tear their hair out for weeks." A grudging note crept into her voice. "They're going to lose their minds."

"They can send flowers." I buffed my nails against my collar. "I also accept fruit baskets."

The corner of her mouth twitched.

Then it faded. She glanced down at the papers on her desk, shuffled one to the side like it suddenly needed organizing.

"Your clone mentioned something else." Her tone shifted, lighter notes draining out of it. "About the rest of your squad."

Ah. That.

"Is it true?" she asked. "Are they all...?"

"Yeah." I didn't blink. "We had Chiyo cornered, her and what was left of her escort. Fight was all but over. Then Hanzo dropped out of the sky with reinforcements. Caught us in a pincer." I lifted one shoulder. "They didn't stand a chance."

Blaming Hanzo was the obvious move. Who was going to argue? The dead guys?

She was silent for a moment. "That's... unfortunate."

"It is what it is."

She studied my face, probably looking for cracks. Signs of trauma, survivor's guilt, the usual things people expected when you were the only one who walked away from a squad wipe.

She wasn't going to find any.

"You don't seem particularly broken up about it," she said carefully.

"Should I be?" I held her gaze without flinching. "They were assigned to me right before the mission. I didn't know their favorite foods. I didn't know if they had families waiting back home. They were strangers who happened to share my mission." I let my head sink deeper into the pillow, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. "It's hard to mourn people you never really knew."

That, at least, wasn't a lie.

Tsunade didn’t push further. She probably chalked it up to battlefield detachment, emotional distance shinobi developed after seeing too much death too quickly.

She wasn't wrong, exactly.

Just not right in the way she thought.

"Get some rest." She stood up, brushing off her coat. "I'll check on you again in a few hours. Try not to do anything stupid while I'm gone."

"Define stupid."

"Anything that requires you to move more than your eyeballs?"

"That's a very restrictive definition."

"It's a very accurate one." She paused at the edge of my bed. "I mean it, Shinji. Rest. Your body's been through hell and it needs time to recover. Even with my treatment, you're looking at another day minimum before you can walk without collapsing."

"Yes, sensei."

"Don't 'yes sensei' me like you're actually going to listen."

"Yes, sensei."

She gave me one last look, shook her head, and left.

The tent flap swung closed behind her, and I was alone with my thoughts.

Which, as it turned out, was not a great place to be right now.

Danzo.

The name floated up from the back of my mind like a piece of debris that refused to sink. The Root agents in my squad hadn't exactly introduced themselves as such, but their cover was about as convincing as a cat pretending to be a dog, it didn't take a genius to connect the dots.

So. Danzo wanted me. Or wanted me dead. Or wanted me captured for some creepy underground experimentation thing. Or sealed and turned into a good little puppet like the rest of his collection. Honestly, with that guy, all four options were equally plausible.

The question was what to do about it.

Killing him would be easy. Well, not easy easy. But easier than Hanzo, definitely. Danzo was strong once, probably. Now he was just a scheming NEET who happened to have a handful of ‘loyal’ attack dogs. His combat skills had probably atrophied to the point where a sufficiently motivated jonin could take him if they caught him at the right moment.

Anyway, the point was, killing Danzo wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was getting him out of the village.

See, I couldn't just stab a village elder in his office and call it a day. Not because I couldn't pull it off. I probably could. Walk in, do the deed, walk out. Simple enough on paper.

But then what?

Become a missing-nin? Live on the run for the rest of my life? Sleep in caves and eat questionable berries while dodging hunter-nin every other Tuesday?

No thanks.

I liked Konoha. I liked my apartment. I liked my kitchen and my bed and my weekly cooking sessions with Kushina. I liked being able to walk into a restaurant without worrying about whether someone was going to stab me before the appetizers arrived. I liked having a life.

Throwing all of that away just to kill one wrinkly old man in a basement? Danzo wasn't worth my apartment. He definitely wasn't worth Kushina's questionable omelet.

So the trick wasn't killing him. The trick was making him disappear without anyone connecting it back to me. Get him out of the village, somewhere remote, somewhere his body could vanish and everyone would just assume enemy forces got him. Tragic loss, tears would be shed. Probably. By someone. Maybe. The point was, life would go on.

But how do you lure a paranoid old man out of his hiding hole? That was the real puzzle. He'd spent decades building a web of informants and contingencies and probably had seventeen different escape holes for—

The tent flap rustled open.

I didn't think much of it at first. Field hospital, people came and went all the time. Medics checking vitals, nurses changing bandages, the occasional lost soul looking for the latrine.

Then I saw who it was.

My heart nearly punched its way out of my chest. Just outside the tent, one of my clones almost exploded on pure reflex before I reeled the chakra back in. That would've been hard to explain. Sorry sensei, I just accidentally detonated because an old man walked into my room. No, I don't know why. Trauma, probably.

Funny how that works. You spend five minutes planning someone's death and then they stroll in like they heard you talking shit.

Danzo. Danzo was here. In the field hospital. Walking toward my bed.

"Shinji." The way he said it made my skin crawl, and he hadn't even said anything yet. "I heard about your mission. Quite the ordeal."

"Elder Danzo." I kept my expression slack. Tired. Just a bedridden patient, mildly surprised by an unexpected visitor. "Didn't expect to see you all the way out here."

"I make it a point to check on our more... promising shinobi when circumstances allow." He came to a stop at the foot of my bed. The smile on his face was technically there, but nothing behind it was smiling. "Especially those who manage to survive encounters with Hanzo of the Salamander."

"Lucky, I guess."

"Luck." He repeated the word slowly, rolling it around like a stone in his mouth. Finding it wanting. "Yes. I suppose that's one way to describe it."

Silence pooled between us like spilled ink.

Then he spoke again.

"I'm curious about something." His tone was warm. Concerned, even. "The situation at the front has been weighing heavily on my mind. So many young shinobi lost to this war. So many promising careers cut tragically short."

"It's war," I said. "Tends to happen."

"Indeed. Indeed it does." He nodded, all grandfatherly sympathy. "Your squad, for instance. Such a tragedy. Seven operatives, all experienced, all carefully selected. Gone, just like that."

Carefully selected. Interesting choice of words.

"Hanzo doesn't mess around," I said.

"No. No, he certainly doesn't." Danzo's eye crinkled slightly. Almost a smile. Almost. "You must have been terrified. Alone against the Salamander himself, watching your comrades fall one by one around you."

"Something like that."

"And yet." He tilted his head. "Here you are. The sole survivor. Remarkable, really. One might even call it miraculous."

"I've always been lucky."

"Have you?" He tilted his head slightly, still smiling that empty smile. "How very fortunate for you."

We watched each other. Two people having a perfectly pleasant conversation about absolutely nothing at all.

"I do have one small question, if you don't mind." He clasped his hands behind his back. "We've received troubling reports of infiltrators posing as Konoha shinobi near the border. Enemy agents wearing our headbands, embedding themselves in our squads, gathering intelligence from within." He sighed, shaking his head slowly. "Your squadmates, before Hanzo's arrival. Did you happen to notice anything... peculiar about any of them? Any behaviors that struck you as out of place?"

There it was. The real question, hiding behind three layers of bullshit.

"Peculiar how?"

"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps in how they fought. Or how they fell. A shinobi's final moments often reveal more about them than years of service. I'm simply curious whether you noticed anything worth noting. For the official record, of course."

Translation: did you figure out they were mine before you killed them?

I let my brow furrow. Scrunched my face up like I was thinking hard, really digging through the trauma. Selling the confused survivor bit for all it was worth.

"Now that you mention it," I said slowly, "there was one thing."

Danzo leaned in. A centimeter, maybe two. On anyone else it would've been nothing.

"The guy who made our rations." I shook my head sadly. "Well, not technically in my squad. But definitely suspicious. Worst cook I've ever met. I'm talking criminal levels of bad. Pretty sure his rice balls violated at least three articles of the Geneva Convention."

Danzo's expression didn't flicker. But something behind his eye went very, very still.

"I see," he said. "How... unfortunate."

"Right? I kept thinking, if Hanzo doesn't kill me, that guy's cooking definitely will. Never tasted anything so bad in my life."

Somewhere in the distance, a cricket probably would have chirped if we weren't in a hospital.

"Well." Danzo stepped back from the bed. "I won't keep you from your rest any longer. Do take care of yourself, Shinji." He smiled—thin, papery, utterly devoid of warmth. "Konoha needs its... ‘lucky’ shinobi."

"I'll do my best, Elder Danzo."

He turned to leave. Paused at the tent flap.

"Oh, one more thing." He glanced back over his shoulder. "If you ever remember anything else about that mission, anything at all, do let me know. I'm always interested in hearing what our soldiers experience on the front lines."

"Of course." I smiled back, just as empty. "You'll be the first to know."

Our eyes met one last time.

Neither of us believed a single word the other had said.

The tent flap fell shut behind him.