Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 114 (Patreon)

While my team was running around the village like a bunch of scattered chickens trying to grab their gear for the Uzushio mission, I decided to take a little detour.

I figured I had maybe ten minutes before everyone regrouped at the north gate. That’s plenty of time if I don't screw around, right? Besides, I’d already picked up the goods on my way over. I had a wooden box of premium manju from that fancy wagashi shop near the main road, three perfectly round Yubari melons I managed to snag from a fruit vendor who was just about to close up for the night, and two bundles of high-quality incense wrapped in neat white paper. It wasn't some massive grand gesture, but for a household in mourning, bringing food and incense is just basic politeness... I think? I sure hoped so.

The Akimichi compound is only a few minutes' walk from the Hokage building if you use the back roads. When I arrived, the family restaurant was completely dark. The shutters were down, the lanterns were off, and there wasn't even a single whiff of food cooking anywhere.

I let out a quiet sigh, walked around to the family residence, and knocked on the door.

Tired footsteps shuffled toward the entrance, and then the door slid open with a soft click.

Chomi looked like she'd aged a decade since I last saw her. Her eyes were red and swollen, though it looked like she'd just washed her face and thrown her hair up into a tight bun. She was wearing a plain, dark kimono. No apron. No flour dusted on her sleeves. In all the years I'd been coming here, I realized I'd never actually seen Chomi Akimichi without an apron on.

"Shinji?" She blinked at me, clearly not expecting anyone to show up at this hour.

"Chomi-san. Sorry for dropping by so late," I said, offering a small, apologetic smile as I held out the box and the bags. "I brought a few things for the house. I wasn't quite sure what was appropriate to bring, so I just went with my gut. I hope it's alright."

She looked at the packages, her expression softening into something incredibly weary. "Oh, Shinji... you didn't need to do this."

"Take it, please," I insisted, pushing the box gently toward her. "When I was an Academy kid with zero ryo to my name, Choza was the one splitting his bento with me so my stomach wouldn't crawl during lectures. This is nothing compared to that."

For a second, her eyes welled up again, but she caught herself, took a breath, and pulled herself together.

"Alright, enough of that. Get yourself in here before you catch a cold standing on the porch. You're practically family at this point anyway, so stop acting like a guest and get inside."

I kicked off my sandals at the genkan and followed her inside.

The whole house was dead quiet. I could already smell a faint trace of incense burning somewhere deeper in the place, probably from the family altar. There were just a few candles flickering on the kitchen counter.

She set my stuff down on the counter and turned around to look at me.

"Have you eaten?"

"Ah, yes, I ate over at the office," I lied.

She squinted at me, unconvinced. "And what exactly did they feed you over there?"

"Uh... some tea. A few crackers." I didn't actually touch the crackers, though. They looked like they'd been sitting on that desk since the First Shinobi War.

She let out a weak, humorless huff. "Fine. But tomorrow, after the service, you're sitting at this table and you're eating a real meal. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am," I glanced toward the dark staircase at the end of the hall. "So... how's Choza doing?"

"He's upstairs," she said, her voice dropping. "He hasn't left his room since this afternoon. His father tried talking to him, but..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "Chozato had to leave for a council meeting an hour ago, so it's just been the two of us. I've been knocking on his door every hour. He keeps telling me he's fine, but we both know that's a lie."

"Yeah," I murmured, rubbing the back of my neck. "Kids our age aren't exactly great at asking for help when things get bad."

"Tell me about it," she muttered. "Every single one of you is stubborn as a mule." She gestured toward the staircase. "Second door on the left. Go on up. And Shinji... thank you. I know how busy the village is right now with the war just ending and everything."

I gave her a quick nod and headed up. It was a classic old house with a wide staircase, and the walls were lined with family photos. One of them made me stop. It was a picture of Choza as a little kid, sitting on Choichi's shoulders, both of them rocking the exact same goofy smile.

His bedroom door was cracked halfway open. He was just sitting there by the window, staring out into space.

I pushed the door open, the hinges giving a slight groan. "Yo."

"Huh...?" Choza blinked, turning his head slowly. "Shinji?"

"The one and only," I said, giving him a little wave.

Up close, he looked worse. His face was puffy, his eyes bloodshot, and he had the hollow, exhausted stare of someone who’d spent the last six hours crying in the dark.

"What're you doing here?" he asked, his voice thick and nasal. He gave a quick, rough sniff.

"Came to see you. Obviously." I stepped into the room, navigating the familiar clutter of his floor, and leaned my back against the wall next to the window frame. "Your mom let me in."

I took a quick look around the room. There was a food tray sitting on his desk with some rice and grilled fish, completely untouched. The rice was already getting all dry and crusty around the edges, so it'd obviously been sitting there for hours.

"You going to eat that?"

He didn't even look at it. "Not hungry."

"An Akimichi saying they're not hungry." I let out a dry, quiet breath, nudging his shoulder with the back of my hand. "Never thought I’d live to see the day. Come on, man. Your mom's downstairs right now, staring at the ceiling, just waiting to hear the sound of chopsticks. Do it for her."

He didn't take the bait. He just locked his eyes back onto the dark courtyard outside.

"You know," I said, sliding down the wall until I was sitting flat on the tatami, my knees pulled up. "This reminds me of the Academy. You used to carry that massive bento box. The thing had enough food to feed three genin squads, and you’d still complain about being starving by third period. Pretty sure it weighed more than Inoichi’s entire pack."

A tiny, fragile ghost of a smirk twitched at the corner of his mouth. "And every single day, you’d come up with some stupid wager to get a piece of it. Rock-paper-scissors, or seeing who could flip a kunai the longest. You definitely rigged half of those."

"Hey. Never proven in a court of law," I muttered, looking up at him.

"You won every single time," he said, finally turning his head to face me. "You won rock-paper-scissors fourteen times in a row, Shinji. That’s not luck. That’s just impossible."

I grinned faintly, staring at my own socks. "Alright, fine. Blame Inoichi. He was reading your hands and giving me hand signals from the back row before you even threw."

"I knew it!"

"I still owe him a drink for that," I chuckled softly. "He handled the intelligence, I handled the frontline gambling. It was a flawless operation."

"Flawless operation my ass," he grumbled.

"Hey, I was a broke orphan with nothing but lint and a couple of rusted shuriken to my name. A guy’s gotta eat." I leaned my head back against the wall. "Those bentos were the only thing that kept me awake through Takada-sensei’s lectures on the Second Hokage’s irrigation tax policies. I’d just sit there thinking, ‘Two more hours until I hustle Choza out of his fried chicken.’"

That actually got a weak laugh out of him.

After a long silence, he finally reached out, his thick fingers wrapping around the wooden chopsticks. I kept my mouth shut, looking away to give him some space while he picked up the cold fish.

"They told me this afternoon," he said quietly. He stared down at the tray, his hand trembling slightly. "Dad sat me down at the kitchen table and just... said it. Uncle Choichi is gone."

He swallowed hard, forcing a piece of rice down his throat. It looked like it hurt.

"I kept waiting for the rest of it. You know? Like... how it happened, or who did it, or when we're going to hunt down whoever did this. Anything. But Dad just sat there. He couldn't even look me in the face."

His grip tightened, his knuckles turning a stark, bloodless white against the dark wood of the chopsticks.

"And then he told me they couldn't recover the body. He’s just... out there. Somewhere in the dirt."

He shoved another piece of fish into his mouth, chewing aggressively, as if trying to force the grief down with the food. Then the tears spilled over. They ran hot down his cheeks, dripping off his chin and splashing right onto the lacquer tray, soaking into the cold rice. He kept eating anyway, chewing, choking, sobbing completely open-faced, but refusing to put the sticks down.

The sight twisted something tight in my chest. I looked down, letting out a slow, heavy breath, and reached inside my flak jacket. I pulled out a small, heavy object wrapped neatly in dark cloth.

"Here," I said, holding it out across the floor.

Choza froze, his chopsticks hovering an inch from his face. He stared at the package.

"I found it on him," I said quietly. "Before the explosion. It looked like something he wouldn't want left behind. I kept it safe."

Choza’s hands began to shake violently. He didn't take the package right away; he just stared at the dark cloth, his breathing turning into ragged, shallow hitches.

"I'm sorry I couldn't bring him back, Choza," I murmured, keeping my eyes fixed on the floor between us. "But... I could at least bring you this."

He raised his hand slowly, hesitating, as if he were terrified the cloth might turn to ash if he touched it. He finally took the weight of it into both palms, turning it over once. The dark fabric was bound with a tight, simple knot. He picked at the threads, pulling them loose, and let the cloth fall open across his knees.

It was a pill case.

Judging by the weight and color, it was brass finished with a dark lacquer, roughly the size of a cigarette case with rounded edges and a hinged lid designed to clip right onto a shinobi pouch. I could tell right away it was custom. This wasn't some mass-produced gift you'd buy at a shop, every edge and contour had that slightly uneven look that only comes from someone shaping metal by hand, hour after hour, getting it perfect just by feel.

Choza ran his thick thumb across the lid, and then his hand froze.

Engraved into the lacquer with deep, deliberate strokes were his initials. A.C.

He recognized that handwriting instantly. It was the same crude, blocky lettering his uncle used to scratch into the handles of his wooden kunai back when he was a kid.

A single, heavy tear broke free and splashed straight onto the dark lacquer, filling the deep grooves of the letters.

There was no body left to bring back to the village. There wouldn't be a casket. But right there in his hands was the undeniable, handmade proof that his uncle had been thinking about him until the very end.

…

-Konan-

Meanwhile, about a hundred and twenty miles east of Konoha, Konan was getting her first real taste of what it actually takes to be a bounty hunter.

She stood in a cramped, windowless backroom hidden behind a sketchy gambling den in a packed town, waiting for her payout. The broker counted out the cash, slid the stack of bills across the table, and didn't say a single word. Konan stuffed the money into her pouch and gave him a polite bow, which he completely ignored. Whatever, she thought. She decided to be the bigger person and let his total lack of manners slide. Clearly, social skills aren't on the hiring checklist for this job.

As she turned to leave, two guys walked in through the same back entrance. Both of them looked like they had been dragged through a hedge backward, covered in scratches, completely exhausted, and lugging a heavy canvas bag between them that was very obviously shaped like a human head. One of them glanced her way and stopped mid-step. His partner bumped into him from behind, looked at what he was looking at, and also stopped. Neither of them said anything. They just stood there for a second like they'd forgotten why they came in. Then the louder one cleared his throat, nudged his partner, and they both shuffled over to the desk. Business first. But the loud one kept sneaking glances.

They dropped the bag onto the broker’s desk with a wet, heavy thud. Konan was almost out the door when the louder one groaned and started rubbing his neck.

"Man, screw this chump change," he complained. "We are out here breaking our backs for literal scraps while people down south are hitting the lottery."

His partner didn't even look up from watching the broker count their money. "If you don't want the cash, leave the bag and shut up."

"No, I'm serious," the guy muttered, leaning heavily on the desk. "Did you hear about that crew heading up to the Land of Demons? Four freaking S-ranks on a single ticket. Plus a whole army of A-ranks to back them up."

His partner snorted and spit right on the floor. "That's bullshit. Who on earth has enough cash to bankroll four S-ranks at the exact same time?"

"I'm telling you, it's real. My guy over at Tanzaku heard it first-hand. Whoever's throwing that money around wanted a small army put together in forty-eight hours, completely off the grid."

"What are they even hunting?"

"That's the crazy part. Nobody has any idea."

Konan froze right in the doorway.

Four S-ranks. An army of A-ranks.

She looked down at the modest stack of bills tucked into her pouch, her grand reward for tracking down some low-level thief. Standing there, listening to them casually mention a hit that could flatten an entire village, it really hit her just how small she was in the grand scheme of things. She wasn't even a blip on the radar yet. She still had a long way to go before she could even dream of looking at a contract like that.

When she finally stepped outside into the cool night air, she completely missed the look the louder bounty hunter shot at her back. His eyes tracked her up and down, checking her out. Seriously, it'd been years since he'd seen a woman that beautiful. She made the top-tier girls over at the Plum Blossom House look like absolute garbage.

But Konan didn't notice any of it. She just adjusted her pack, feeling the money from today's job sitting warm against her hip. It was a decent haul for a C-rank rogue. Nothing to complain about.

…

-Shinji-

Everyone was already waiting at the north gate by the time I showed up, all packed and ready to go. Shinku Yuhi didn't have to say a single word; the sheer intensity of his glare told me exactly how he felt about his squad leader being the absolute last person to arrive.

My bad, my bad, I thought, offering a weak, apologetic smile that did absolutely nothing to cool him down.

The sprint to the eastern coast ate up most of the night. We were traveling light and moving fast, sticking straight to the main road. Nobody was really talking either, just some occasional basic small talk about the route and the mission specs. I could tell they were all on edge, though. Honestly, I couldn't blame them. It was their first S-rank mission, they were fresh off a literal war, and instead of getting to crash in their own beds for more than a single night, they were running headfirst into another warzone. I would probably be just as pissed off if this whole thing didn't involve Kushina or Minato. Jiraiya, on the other hand, could honestly go straight to hell for all I cared.

We reached the port town a little bit after sunrise.

The place was an absolute trainwreck.

I mean, I expected things to be a little chaotic. Obviously, a massive siege on Uzushio was bound to screw up the shipping lanes. But "screwed up" didn't even begin to describe what we were looking at. The docks were just wall-to-wall madness. There were wooden crates piled everywhere, stranded cargo ships idling by the piers, and people. Just way too many people. They were packed onto every single available square inch, sitting on crates, leaning against the pylons, and huddling together under cheap tarps that looked like they were about to fall apart at any second.

We hadn't even made it past the main port entrance when I started noticing the weird details.

The crowds lining the sides of the road weren't just random drifters. Sure, their clothes were filthy and wrinkled, and some of them looked like they desperately needed a shower, but the actual quality of the fabric was surprisingly good. I noticed nice cotton weaves, dyed cloths, and even a few pieces of genuine silk mixed in. These people were probably wealthy merchants, shopkeepers, or high-end tradespeople. At least, that's what their clothes were telling me.

Right near the gate, this woman was trying to force-feed a toddler out of a cracked clay bowl. The kid was absolutely not having it, constantly swatting her hand away and screaming his head off. I managed to catch a quick glimpse of whatever was inside that bowl and, yeah, I was on the kid’s side. I don’t know what that gray slop was supposed to be, but it looked like something scraped out of a drain.

Further down the line, a bunch of merchants were standing on top of their own cargo crates, holding what I can only describe as the absolute saddest auctions I have ever seen in my life. One guy was waving a land deed over his head, screaming at the top of his lungs about forty acres of prime farmland. The woman right next to him was holding up a jade necklace, shouting to anyone who would listen that her grandmother wore it on her wedding day. Another guy in a stained silk robe was offering up his entire shop inventory, we are talking fabrics, dyes, everything.

The crazy part was that every single one of them was asking for fair market value. Which, given the current situation, might as well have been a million ryo. You just cannot sell a luxury jade necklace to someone who had to skip breakfast because they couldn’t afford a piece of bread.

We kept walking, doing our best to weave through the crushing crowd.

"Is it really like this along the entire coast?" Shunpei Haruno asked. The usual goofy smile he always wore was finally wiped clean off his face.

"It's probably even worse further south," Shinku Yuhi said, keeping his voice low. "More major shipping lines go through those ports."

Shinku was probably right. If this specific port looked like a total disaster zone, the ones further down the coast were probably ten times worse. Blocked shipping lanes meant that absolutely nothing was moving. No fish, no rice, no medical supplies. Nothing. The entire eastern coast was just slowly suffocating, and nobody was doing a single thing about it because everyone was way too busy fighting their own wars to notice. If you give it another couple of weeks, these people are not going to be arguing over cash anymore. They are going to be tearing each other apart for food. And once that happens, they are going to stop fighting and just start dying.

The deeper we went into the town, the nastier it got. The humidity was already brutal, but this close to the water, it was on a whole different level. It was peak summer heat with absolutely zero airflow between buildings that were stacked on top of each other. The whole district was just baking in its own filth.

Then the smell hit us about two blocks in. Rotting fish, and produce that nobody was ever going to buy, just sitting in crates and leaking this nasty brown sludge onto the cobblestones. There were flies everywhere. And the rats, oh man, the rats were something else. They were fat, happy, and living their best lives. They didn’t even care that we were walking there. The fat little bastards were just waddling around in broad daylight. One of them scurried right across our path, and Shunpei straight-up punted it into a wall.

"For Kami's sake," Shunpei muttered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. "That thing was the size of a cat!"

"Don't kick the rats," Shinku Yuhi said, his voice flat.

Shunpei blinked. "Why? Do you actually feel bad for it?"

"No. Because now you have plague-juice all over your boot. Keep moving."

Shunpei stopped mid-stride, staring down at his shoe with a look of pure regret. "...Right. Gross."

We ducked into a tavern that actually looked cleaner than anything else on the street. It had real glass in the windows and no mystery puddles on the floor. Inside, the place was practically a ghost town. There were only four other guests, and they were all wearing clothes that screamed they had money, like silk collars and clean sleeves. I ordered a round from the bartender, and he came back with five cups of barley tea.

"That'll be fifteen hundred ryo."

I just stared at him. "For tea?"

"For five teas," the bartender corrected me. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the counter with a heavy, bone-deep sigh. "Look, I'm really not in the mood to play games with you guys. You want to complain about the prices, go complain to the jerks blocking the docks. No shipments are coming in at all. Rice went up five times its weight in just two weeks, and this happens to be the very last of my tea leaves. When this batch is gone, everyone's going to be drinking plain well-water. So either pay the fifteen hundred, or leave the cups."

Fair enough. I paid the fifteen hundred. The guy had a point. When the supply's gone, it's gone, and I'd way rather overpay for tea than drink whatever biohazard was coming out of the wells in this town.

Haruno glanced around the tavern, then looked right at me. "So, Taichou, do we actually know where to find our contact?"

Good question. The mission scroll said Jiraiya's intel guy was somewhere in this town, but that was literally as specific as it got.

"He's around here somewhere." I picked up my cup. "Drink your tea, then let's spread out. Find our guy, and while you're at it, get a solid read on the local situation. Docks, streets, people, whatever juicy rumors you can pick up."

Nobody needed me to spell it out for them. These were four Jonin, all war vets, and all perfectly capable of digging up intel without me holding their hands. Which was great, because the finer details of ninja recon were never really my thing. I've always been more of a "find the problem and kick it in the face" kind of guy. They downed their tea and split, heading out of the tavern in different directions.

I stayed behind and took another sip. Ugh, brutal. Fifteen hundred ryo and this stuff tasted like someone boiled a tree stump.

I set the cup down and started going over what I knew. According to the scroll, Kiri's fleet had been sinking ships left and right near the Land of Eddies. Anything that got too close, whether it was military or civilian, was going straight to the bottom. But since Jiraiya was already on the other side, he obviously found a way through. Hey, that's at least one useful thing the old man managed to do. Right now, finding his contact here was priority number one.

I glanced out the window, letting my senses stretch across the town. I could feel my team fanning out through the streets, along with a few scattered chakra signatures here and there, shinobi trying their best to blend in with the crowd. Honestly, some of them weren't even trying that hard.

And then there was this guy.

I looked over at the bartender. For a dude who just charged me fifteen hundred ryo for bitter garbage water, he had a really interesting chakra signature hiding under that apron.

I swirled what was left in my cup and set it down with a soft clink.

"You been here long?" I asked quietly.

The guy kept his back to me, casually wiping down a glass. "Long enough."

"Long enough to spot a problem before it walks through the door, I'm guessing," I muttered, leaning against the bar. "A port town like this has to get pretty loud."

He paused, glancing over his shoulder with a flat, unreadable look. "It's getting louder right now."

I let out a dry chuckle. "Fair point. But ordinary bartenders don't usually have heavy calluses carved right into their trigger fingers, my friend. Or drop their hand under the counter the second a customer starts asking questions."

He turned around slowly, tossing the rag over his shoulder. "Funny. Most people just drink their tea and get out. They don't spend their free time dissecting a working man's hands. Seems like we're both pretty bad at pretending."

I just smiled into my cup. Honestly, whether he was a rogue ninja playing house or some retired veteran, I didn't care. As long as he wasn't actively trying to screw over Konoha, he could pour drinks until he was ninety for all I cared.

"Hey, relax, there's no judgment here," I said. "Everyone's running from something. Whatever your old village happens to be, that's your business."

His eyes dropped right to the Konoha headband tied around my arm. "Six years," he said. "I walked away six years ago. Built this place out of absolutely nothing. I don't want any trouble with Leaf ninja. Or anyone else."

"Then you won't get any from me." I pushed my cup toward him. "Honestly, the only thing I'm holding against you right now is the price of this tea."

A faint, cynical smirk finally broke through his guard. "You think fifteen hundred is bad? Last week it was two grand."

"Two grand?" I groaned, throwing my head back. "What do you charge for the actual good stuff then? A kidney?"

"Supply and demand," he shrugged, his hand finally relaxing away from the under-counter shelf. "Welcome to the coast."

"Yeah, well, at least you're upfront about the highway robbery." I stood up, tossing a few extra bills onto the wood. "Keep the change. Go buy some actual tea leaves next time."

I walked out the front door with my hands buried in my pockets. The second I stepped outside, that lovely port stink hit me right in the face again. I walked about half a block down, turned a corner, and immediately dropped the smile.

Retired, my ass.

Sure, maybe Mr. Fifteen-Hundred-Ryo was telling the truth. Maybe he really did walk away six years ago and just wanted to pour overpriced tea in peace. I can respect the hustle. But last time I checked, retired shinobi don’t keep another ninja stashed away in their basement. There was a chakra signature sitting directly under that tavern right now, completely alive and alert, and our friend the bartender conveniently forgot to mention that little detail. Funny how that works. Was it a spy? A handler? It could easily be Kiri, given how close we were to the water and the absolute mess Kiri was making around Uzushio. It could be Kumo, too. Either way, someone was running an active operation out of a tea shop, and the bartender was definitely in on it.

I ducked behind a row of stacked cargo crates and pressed my heel on the ground. The earth opened right up and I slipped inside. At this point, swimming underground with doton is basically second nature to me, especially after having hundreds of my clones doing it daily. I swam right through the soil, heading straight back toward the tavern's foundation, feeling my way toward that hollow pocket beneath the floor.

The basement wall was right in front of me. It was thin, just cheap stonework. I gave it a little push with my doton, and a clean rectangle of the wall crumbled inward with a dull crunch, scattering chunks of stone across the floor inside. I stepped right through the opening.

The basement looked exactly like a basement. Stone floor, low ceiling, wooden shelves lining the walls with crates and jars. Normal stuff. What was not normal, though, was the smell.

Blood. Raw human blood. It was fresh enough to still feel sharp in the air, but old enough to have that sour, rotting edge underneath it. I know that smell all too well. I spent weeks drowning in it on the battlefields, and it’s not something you ever forget.

Before I could even look around to see where it was coming from, something whistled from my left. Senbon. A whole mess of them. I stomped my foot and a slab of stone ripped up from the floor, catching the needles with a dozen metallic pings. I tapped the ground again and that same slab shot forward along the floor like a battering ram, senbon still sticking out of it like a porcupine, racing straight at the figure crouched in the corner.

The guy's face went from ambush-ready to pure panic in about half a second. He threw himself sideways, and the stone slab smashed into the wall right behind him. I gave the ground another quick tap, and two thin slabs erupted from the earth right behind him. They curled around his torso like fingers, wrapping, tightening, and locking his arms firmly to his sides. They squeezed until only his head was poking out of the top, his face turning bright red and his veins bulging from the pressure.

I walked over and tilted my head to get a good look at him. Let's see. Kumo or Kiri? Pale skin, dark hair, narrow features. Definitely not Kumo. Kiri, maybe? It's hard to tell without a headband.

"Let me go, you piece of—" he started.

I ignored him and turned to scan the rest of the basement. That bloody smell was coming from the far corner, right behind a stack of crates. I walked over, shoved the crates aside, and found a large burlap sack, soaked through at the bottom with something dark and wet.

I opened it.

Heads. Human heads. A dozen, maybe more, piled on top of each other in various stages of freshness. Some still had expressions frozen on their faces. Others were way too far gone to tell.

I've seen a lot of messed up things. War-torn battlefields. Mass graves. Orochimaru's creepy lab. But something about a sack full of severed heads in a basement under a tea shop hits different. Maybe it's the context. Maybe it's the fact that I was just upstairs drinking tea from this guy's counter five minutes ago.

The tea.

The bitter taste. That weird aftertaste I couldn't place.

Oh no.

Oh, no no no no no.

My stomach did a violent flip. I looked at the sack. Looked at the ceiling. Thought about the cup I just drank from. The tea that tasted like someone boiled a tree stump. What if it wasn't a tree stump? What if it was—

I'm gonna be sick.

Right then, the bartender came thundering down the stairs. He took one look at me, one look at his partner wrapped in stone, and his face twisted.

"You two-faced son of a—I knew it! I knew you were full of shit! You lying, backstabbing little—"

"Shut up." I turned on him, and I definitely wasn't smiling anymore. "You sick bastard. You actually fed me people."

"W-What?" He blinked, looking genuinely lost.

"The tea. The barrels upstairs." I pointed a finger straight at the blood-soaked sack on the floor. "You're running a slaughterhouse up there, and you made me drink whatever the hell you're brewing out of ‘that!’"

His face went white. "That's not—wait, no, that's not what—"

"I'm so going to turn you into paste or I'm not human." I slammed my heel down and the floor cracked wide open. He bolted for the stairs, but stone pillars shot from the ground like a row of teeth, shattering the steps. He tried to smash through them, but more sprouted right behind them, even thicker, sealing the stairway from bottom to top. He ran out of room, and then the stone floor beneath his feet began to rise. He realized way too late that the pillars weren't a cage. They were a hydraulic press.

"WAIT! WAIT, STOP! IT'S A MISUNDERSTANDING! STOP!"

I stopped the stone about two inches from the ceiling. He was pinned flat, his face squished sideways between the slab and the wooden beams above, his body spread out like a bug on a windshield.

"Talk," I said, my voice dropping dangerously low. "Give me one good reason not to crush you."

"Ghhk—the tea is just normal barley! Regular tea, I swear to God!" His voice came out crushed and distorted, squeezed right out of his lungs. "I'm not a cannibal! I run a bounty station!"

"A what?"

"Bounty! A bounty station!" He tried to turn his head but couldn't. One eye was visible, wide and desperate. "Hunters bring the heads here for verification! That's what's in the sacks! Bounties! I just process them and send the paperwork up the chain! That's it!"

I just stared at him. Then I forced myself to look back at the sack, pushing past the disgust to actually analyze it. I squinted at the exposed faces. Now that the initial shock was wearing off... the man with the jagged scar across his nose, the short-haired woman... they looked exactly like the low-level rogues listed in the back pages of the Bingo Book.

"I operate with Konoha's explicit permission!" he wheezed. "Your village knows about me! They know about this station! I've been filing reports for six years! Call your intelligence division, they'll verify it! Just let me down!"

I eased the pressure. Just a little bit. Just enough for him to breathe without sounding like a dying accordion.

"If you're telling the truth, then you know Jiraiya," I said, stepping closer. "He passed through here. Where is he?"

"Uh, the weird guy with the spikey white hair? Yeah, yeah, he was here! He left town days ago, I don't know where he went!"

"His contact. There's an intel agent hidden somewhere in this port. Where are they?"

"I don't know! Look at me, I'm a clerk! I'm not a spy, I don't have some crazy information network! I just weigh heads and log the ryo! That's all I do!"

"Haa... how can someone be this useless?"

"I'd tell you if I knew!" he croaked, his voice cracking with a mix of terror and genuine offense. "I've got nothing! I'm just the guy who signs the receipts, man!"

"Uh-huh."

I started pacing around the basement, poking through the shelves, popping open crates, and checking every dark corner. If this dude was lying to me, there'd be something down here that didn't fit the story. A coded scroll, a hidden compartment, a communication device, just something.

What I found instead was a stack of thick, leather-bound ledgers tucked behind a makeshift counter, their spines worn soft from years of use. I flipped one open. Mugshots. Profile sketches, front views, side views, back views. A bunch of the entries had massive red X's drawn right through them. Confirmed kills. The handwriting was incredibly meticulous, and the records went back for years. This wasn't exactly the stuff of international espionage. It was just a desk job. A really messed-up desk job, sure, but a desk job nonetheless.

Then I stumbled onto the briefcases. They were heavy iron cases, neatly stacked together. I popped one open.

Well, hello there.

Crisp ryo banknotes, bundled up and organized perfectly by denomination. A lot of them. I picked up a stack and fanned it right under my nose. Mmm. Nothing in the world smells quite like fresh cash.

"T-that's not ours!" the bartender blurted out. He was still pinned to the ceiling but was doing his best to crane his neck and watch me. "That's government money! Allocated bounty funds! It's accounted for, like every single ryo's in those ledgers! Please, don't—"

I turned around to look at him, putting on the most offended face I could possibly manage. "What exactly are you implying here?"

"N-nothing! I'm not implying anything!"

"Because it sounds a lot like you're calling a Konoha shinobi a thief."

"No! No, no, no, I'd never say that!" he stammered, his panic spiking all over again. "I was just—I was just explaining what the cash was for! That's all! Just giving you some context!"

"Really?"

I dropped the stack back into the case with a heavy, deliberate thud.

"I drop by, clear up a massive misunderstanding that could've easily ended with both of your heads in your own sacks, and your first instinct's to insult my integrity? Is that seriously how you treat your guests?"

"You smashed through our wall!" his partner yelled out, his voice muffled and echoing from inside his stone cocoon.

I didn't even bother looking back at him. "Shut up. Nobody asked you."

I did one more lap around the room. Nothing else stood out. No hidden seals, no communication gear. Just a bunch of heads, cash, and paperwork. The guy was actually telling the truth.

I walked back over and let them both loose. The stone unwrapped, the floor lowered, and two incredibly sore guys collapsed onto the ground, gasping and groaning for air.

I squatted down and patted the bartender on the cheek. He flinched big time but forced out a smile anyway.

"Next time," I said, "don't lie to me about being retired while you're hiding a shinobi in your basement. It sends a wrong message. A good, honest, upstanding ninja like me might get the wrong idea and accidentally turn you into wall decor. You feel me?"

They both nodded. Aggressively.

"Great. Glad we're on the same page."

I stood up and headed for the stairs. I grabbed the door handle and pulled.

Locked.

I turned around, and they both flinched again.

"The door's locked."

"R-right! Right, sorry, basement security, I'll get it, let me just—"

The bartender scrambled to his feet, frantically patting his pockets for the key. While he was doing that, I walked back over to the briefcases and casually ran my fingers along the lid of the top one.

"You know," I said, keeping my voice totally casual, "it's customary in some places to offer a little gift to someone who helped clear up a bad situation. Just a gesture of goodwill, you know? To show there aren't any hard feelings."

The room went dead silent. The two guys exchanged a frantic look, their eyes darting to me, and then finally dropping down to the cash.

"I... we..." the bartender stammered.

"Completely voluntary, obviously," I added, giving them a warm, pleasant smile. "I'd never extort anyone. That'd be wrong."

The bartender's partner reached for one of the briefcases with trembling hands, popped it open, pulled out a thick stack of bills, and held it out to me. He was smiling, but it was easily the worst smile I'd ever seen in my life. Every single muscle in his face was actively fighting it.

"P-please. Take it. As a token of our appreciation."

"Oh, I couldn't possibly." I waved my hand, playing dumb. "That's government money. You said so yourself."

"We insist," the bartender said through clenched teeth, grabbing a second stack and slapping it onto the pile. His smile was somehow even worse than the first guy's. "For the... the inconvenience. Please."

"Well, if you're going to insist."

I took the cash, flipping through the bills once before tucking them safely inside my flak jacket. Then I gave the bartender a friendly tap on the shoulder.

"See? No hard feelings. This is what good communication looks like."

The bartender unlocked the door with hands that were definitely still shaking from excitement. I gave them both one last pat on the shoulder, climbed the stairs, and stepped right out of the tavern into the humid morning air.

Behind me, I could hear very quiet, very intense whispering that I'm sure was full of praise and gratitude for my visit.