Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 115 (Patreon)

So I heard this saying once. "The definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again but expecting a different result." Sounds super deep until you actually stop and think about it for two seconds. That is literally just the definition of practicing an instrument, studying for finals, learning to cook, or basically any basic human skill. Whoever came up with that line definitely quit everything after two tries and just wanted to feel better about having zero work ethic.

Anyway, I bring this up because I just spent the last hour doing the exact same thing nine times in a row. And yeah, every single time was a complete waste of breath.

Finding Jiraiya's intel guy was supposed to be the easiest part of the whole gig. The mission scroll said he was stationed somewhere in this port town, and the second we rolled up wearing our Leaf headbands, he was supposed to just spot us and make contact. Simple. We show up, he finds us, everyone wins. Except we'd been walking around for over an hour and nobody'd come out of the woodwork.

At that point, I had two choices. I could sit on my hands like a good little soldier, or I could go hunting. Sitting still isn't really my thing, so I started sweeping the parts of town my team wasn't covering, tracking every shinobi-level chakra signature I could find. I locked onto nine of them. Checked every single one, and not a single one was our guy. The first three were flying solo, so they were easy targets.

Target number one was holed up in a sketchy rented room right next to a fish market, which told me everything I needed to know about his life choices. I decided to pop up through the floor with doton, shoved a stone slab aside, and boom. He was buried up to his neck in a makeshift casket before his brain could even process what was happening. The guy immediately started screaming in some weird accent I couldn't place. Definitely not from the Land of Fire, maybe somewhere out east. But whatever sympathy I had for him evaporated when he craned his neck and tried to rip out my throat with his bare teeth.

I took a step back and just watched him squirm in the rock.

"Seriously? Biting? What are you, a rabid dog?"

"Get this off me, you Leaf bastard. I'll tear your throat open!"

"Yeah, yeah. If you were actually half as good as you talk, I wouldn't have caught you this easily. Save your breath. I'm looking for a Konoha contact, and you clearly aren't it. Tell me who you are before I leave you in these floorboards to rot."

Shocker, he cracked in about thirty seconds. Turns out he's some rogue from the Mist Bingo Book with a bounty so low it's honestly kind of insulting. Definitely not our intel guy. I walked back toward the hole in the floor and looked down at him one last time.

"I'd start shouting if I were you," I said. "With any luck, someone passing by the fishmonger's downstairs will hear you before you start starving to death. Good luck."

I dropped back down through the tunnel and left him there to yell at the walls.

The second guy was actually out cold when I found him. Just dead to the world in the back room of a warehouse, curled up on a pile of rice sacks like a cat. I boxed him in the exact same way, nice and snug, stone wrapping around everything but his face. He woke up mid-process, and hey, credit where credit's due, he didn't scream. He just opened his eyes, saw me squatting right next to his face, and whispered, "Oh no."

"Oh yes," I said. "Quick question. You know a guy named Jiraiya?"

"Who?"

"White hair, heavy build, writes trashy novels, smells like a swamp."

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and I would really, really like to go back to sleep."

Two minutes of "convincing" later and the guy sang like a bird. Turns out he's a freelance hunter-nin who'd been in town for about a week chasing a bounty that'd already left the port three days ago. Didn't know Jiraiya, didn't know any Konoha operatives, didn't know much of anything, really. I left him stuck in the stone and moved on.

The next three victims—I mean, individuals I needed to speak with were a package deal.

I caught the trio while they were grabbing dinner at a cramped table in some back-alley noodle stand. I came up through the floor right underneath them, encased all three from the waist down in stone just as their chopsticks hit their bowls, and popped up behind the counter right next to the boiling broth. The chef standing beside me completely lost his mind, screamed, and threw a ladle at my head. I ducked, and the wood whistled past my ear before clattering into the alley.

"Whoa, easy, chef! Not here for you!" I waved my hands to calm him down, then spun around to face the trio. They were trapped like stone lawn ornaments, frantically reaching for hip pouches they couldn't physically angle their arms toward.

"Gentlemen," I said, leaning over the counter to look down at their table. "Quick survey. Any of you happen to be the intelligence contact for Jiraiya of the Leaf?"

Three completely blank stares. The guy on the left still had a piece of green onion stuck to his lip.

"Big guy? Spiky white hair?" I prompted, tapping my fingers on the wood. "Ring any bells?"

"We're licensed bounty hunters!" the biggest one yelled, his face turning an impressive shade of red as he tried to yank his hips out of the concrete. "We have paperwork! We pay our local taxes to the authority! Check our gear!"

Yeah, right. Licensed bounty hunters. Paying local taxes. As if some bureaucrat's sitting in a town hall auditing rogue missing-nin receipts. The stuff criminals invent to sound respectable these days is getting out of hand.

"Sure you do, buddy," I said, giving his shoulder a pat. "And I'm the Sage of Six Paths. Enjoy your audited noodles."

I dropped straight back down into the dirt before the cook could find another ladle.

And that's pretty much how the whole hour went. By the time I'd worked through all the signatures, I had nothing to show for it except a collection of very pissed-off strangers trapped in stone and zero leads on our guy. Which is how I ended up chilling on the roof of a shipping warehouse, watching the ocean stretch out toward the horizon while the salt wind did absolutely nothing to fix my mood. At this point, I was starting to wonder if our contact's run into serious trouble. Maybe he's been compromised. Maybe he's gotten himself killed. Maybe he's floating face-down in the harbor somewhere and we just hasn't found him yet. Super cheerful thoughts all around.

I leaned back on my hands and just stared out at the water. The sea looked beautiful. On any other day, I might’ve actually enjoyed the view. But somewhere past all that blue, Kiri had an entire fleet wrapped around Uzushio, and Kushina and Minato were stuck on the wrong side of it.

I let out a heavy sigh.

If I still had Moryo’s chakra, we’d be having a completely different conversation right now. I could’ve just ditched the squad right here, sprinted across the ocean solo, and flooded the Kiri navy with a few hundred clones as a "distraction" while I slipped onto the island.

But yeah, that wasn't on the table anymore. Moryo shut me off and we shut her off right back, because letting an ancient demon with world-conquest ambitions slowly eat through her seal was just a great way to die in a really stupid way. She wanted to be whole again. She wanted her body back. And every single drop of chakra she fed me was just another thread in the leash she was trying to slip around my neck.

Look, I’m not Naruto. I can’t just walk around, give some big speech about believing in each other, and expect my demon to start crying and hand over the keys to the castle. Moryo doesn’t work like that. She’s not misunderstood, and she’s definitely not lonely. She’s a world-ending entity with a thousand-year plan and all the patience in the world to wait it out. You don’t win her over with the power of friendship, and the exact second you stop being useful, she starts looking for her next option.

So, the alternative was fuinjutsu. I had to learn enough about sealing to forcefully rip the chakra right out of her without her cooperation. Basically, turn the seal into a one-way pump. Take what I need, give absolutely nothing back, and deal with the whole "winning her heart" thing later, assuming that’s even a thing.

It’s not elegant, and it’s definitely not nice. But it’s the only play that doesn’t end with me becoming a puppet.

I’d need a proper teacher for that, though. Someone who actually understood high-level fuinjutsu. And wouldn’t you know it, I was currently heading toward an island packed with the greatest seal masters in shinobi history.

Well, assuming any of them were still alive by the time I got there.

I just sat there, watching a couple of half-sunken boats bob in the water until Dan and the rest of the squad finally showed up on the roof. Judging by their faces, nobody else had a blast either.

"Alright," I said, not even bothering to stand up. "Let’s hear it."

Dan rubbed the back of his neck. "The docks are worse than they look. I talked to five different dock workers and two merchant captains. Kiri's fleet has been running a hard blockade out in the strait for a while now. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out. Civilian ships, trading vessels, fishing boats, anything that tries to head east gets sunk or turned around at spearpoint. The port authority gave up trying to manage the backlog about four days ago, and now the harbor is just a bottleneck of rotting cargo."

"Any sign of our guy?"

"No," Dan said, pausing to choose his words carefully. "But I did find something else. There's a trading company operating in the lower district. They're buying up rice, salted fish, and medical supplies at heavily inflated prices, way above what even this market should justify. They're draining the town's reserves."

"Buying up supplies? So they’re hoarding?"

Shinku Yuhi chimed in from his end, confirming it. Apparently, the warehouse district had gotten super busy over the last week. A handful of merchants had rented out the bigger buildings near the eastern piers, and they had hired muscle guarding the doors. Most of them were just big dudes with clubs, but Shinku spotted a couple of guys moving like trained shinobi among the civilians. Whoever was running this operation had deep pockets and enough brains to buy some real protection.

"The same name keeps coming up," Shinku added, his eyes scanning the street below us. "Kaigan Trading Company. The dock workers wouldn't say much about them, and they got real grumpy when the name came up."

Shunpei had picked up on the vibe, too. "Yeah, because the locals are terrified. Two different shopkeepers told me they'd been threatened this week. Muscle from Kaigan came by and told them to stop selling to the public altogether. They were ordered to hold their stock because 'prices are about to shift.' One old guy tried to keep his stall open anyway. Next morning, his shop was an inferno. His family was still sleeping in the back. They got out, but barely. Nobody's said no to Kaigan since."

“Hold their stock?” I leaned back, staring up at the gray sky. Now that was an interesting little detail. There are a few reasons why you'd tell merchants to stop selling, but when you throw arson into the mix, the picture gets real simple real fast. They weren't just buying up the supply. They were bullying local sellers into keeping their own stock off the market, too. A double squeeze. Prices don't just climb, they skyrocket, and all the profit funnels straight into the hands of the only group that actually has inventory left to sell.

"Gotta admire the hustle," I said dryly. "Setting up a textbook monopoly in the middle of a naval crisis. But pulling a stunt this brazen on Fire Country soil? That takes a special kind of stupid, or a lot of leverage." I looked around at the squad. "Konoha hasn't sent a deployment to crack down on this?"

"The war just ended," Shinku said. "Konoha's still sorting out its own problems. Give it another week or two and someone will probably get dispatched, but right now the eastern coast isn't high on anyone's priority list."

Fair enough. When you've just finished fighting a whole war, some merchant syndicate shaking down a port town doesn't exactly make the top of the to-do list.

Dan was quiet for a second before speaking up. "Our contact. The one who was supposed to find us." He glanced over at me. "If he's been stationed here for any length of time, there's no way he missed what Kaigan's been doing. An intelligence operative doesn't just ignore a hostile economic takeover. He would've started poking around."

I saw where he was going with that. “And if Kaigan caught wind of someone snooping around their operation...then our guy might not be missing because he's late, he's missing because he got in their way."

I let out a sigh. "Look, this isn't our mission. I need to make that absolutely clear before anyone starts getting heroic ideas. We're here to find our contact, get across the strait, and reach Uzushio. That's the goal. I don't have the time, the budget, or the patience to play vigilante and dismantle a trading company playing warlord in a dirty port town."

I stared out at the ocean for another second.

"The problem is," I continued, clicking my tongue in irritation, "our contact's the only one who knows the route past Kiri's blockade. Without him, we're stuck on this side of the water. And if there's even a decent chance that Kaigan grabbed him..." I trailed off, the decision making itself. "Then I guess we're going to have to look into Kaigan."

"It's the fastest path back to the mission anyway," Dan said. Then he added, "I tracked a few of their collectors earlier to a sake house on the third block of the merchant district. They were using the back room as a base. At least three of their heavy hitters were inside when I left, and they've got a lookout posted on the cross street."

"You didn't go in?"

"Solo approach against unknown numbers with at least one shinobi on their payroll? No. I'm not suicidal."

Smart move. "Alright. Lead the way. Let's go see what kind of hospitality these merchants have to offer."

Dan led us through the back alleys of the merchant district. We stuck to the rooftops for the first few blocks, then dropped down to street level once we got close enough that jumping from building to building would've been too obvious. The sake house wasn't hard to spot. Two-story building, wooden shutters closed tight even though it was the middle of the day, and a steady stream of guys going in and out through a side door.

We didn't even get within three houses of the place before everything went sideways.

Six shinobi closed in on us from three different angles. Two from a side alley, two from a roof overhang, and two more stepping out of a doorway that had looked empty ten seconds ago. All six had their weapons out, and none of them looked friendly.

"Konoha," the one in front said, blocking the path. "Hold it right there. State your business with the Kaigan Trading Company."

I raised an eyebrow and glanced at Shinku. "Any of these guys look familiar? Major village affiliations?"

Shinku studied them for a second. "No confirmed affiliations, but I can't rule it out either."

Dan leaned in slightly. "A couple of them have the complexion for Water Country, but that doesn't mean much in a port town. The one on the left has a Kumo-style tanto rig on his back, but he could've just bought it off a dead man." He kept his voice low. "My best guess? Hired missing-nin. But I wouldn't bet money on all six being simple mercenaries. A big company like Kaigan is exactly where Kiri or Kumo would plant a few sleeper operatives on Fire Country borders."

I gave a vague grunt and pushed my senses out toward the sake house. Nothing. No ninja signatures inside at all. Just a bunch of regular civilians doing regular civilian things. Whoever was running their operation out of that place earlier had already pulled their muscle.

I decided to widen the search grid. The six guys standing right in front of us were hard to miss, but then I picked up two more about forty meters to our left. They were crouching behind a chimney stack on a low roof, just waiting. So, eight guys total. Six acting as a distraction, and two ready to ambush us if things went sideways.

"Hey," I said, putting on my best 'I have something super important to say' voice. I did not.

Instead, I just tapped my foot on the ground.

Two massive pillars of stone shot out of the earth right behind the six ninjas, punching straight up past the second-story roofline. The cobblestones shattered around the base, throwing up a cloud of dust that rained down from the nearby walls. Everyone in the vicinity flinched hard, including my own squad.

Trapped at the very top of each pillar, spread-eagled and fused solid into the rock, were the two roof campers. The stone held them tight, leaving them hanging upside down like a pair of scarecrows. They hadn’t even had time to yell. One of them was still gripping a kunai, except his entire hand was now completely swallowed by solid rock.

The six Kaigan ninjas in front of us froze solid. Every single one of them stared up at their backup squad, who were currently dangling three stories in the air, completely helpless and looking miserable. You could practically see the exact moment the realization hit them. Their faces went pale, and every single pair of eyes slowly drifted from the pillars right back to me.

My own team wasn't handling it much better. Dan, Shinku, and Rei just stood there completely speechless, trying to wrap their brains around the sheer, physics-defying absurdity of what they'd just witnessed. Their captain had just sniped two hidden targets in a complete blind spot, without even looking, right through a solid wall. It looked less like shinobi skills and more like a glitch in the matrix.

"Damn," Shunpei whispered behind me, breaking the suffocating silence. "The rumors from the front line weren't exaggerating."

I flashed a bright smile at the lead Kaigan ninja. "Sorry, where were we? You were asking about our business with your company?"

Behind the leader, his men were frantically darting their eyes back and forth, silently begging their boss for literally any order that didn't involve getting violently entombed in concrete.

"Uh, Captain...?" one of them muttered. "What do we do?"

"Hold your ground!" the captain barked, never breaking eye contact with me. He took a sharp, controlled breath, doing his absolute best to fake some confidence. "Don't lose your heads. Keep the rest of the Leaf squad pinned down in this alley. Delay them. I'll take care of this one myself, then come back to help you finish off the rest."

Wow. Am I cocky? That's slander. Personally, I think I'm the most humble guy on the planet, and I know a lot of people.

The moment the last word left his mouth, he vanished.

Fwip!

A flash of silver exploded straight toward my throat. It wasn't just one dagger, either. It was two. Custom jobs, thin silver blades with no guards. They looked beautiful as hell. Damn, I want them.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

I snapped a kunai up and caught the first three slashes in a burst of sparks while my boots slid sideways across the cobblestones. Oh, wow. This guy's actually as fast as Dan. What a surprise.

His left dagger came whistling toward my throat. I leaned back, the silver edge shaving the air with a sharp shwip. He didn't waste the miss, though. He used the momentum to pivot on his heel, driving the second dagger in a vicious upward stab aimed right under my chin.

Now that was a nice combo. Walking away from an invitation like that would've been lame, so I didn't. I twisted my upper body into a sharp lean, letting the blade graze right past my neck. As his follow-up slashes came raining down in a blinding blur, I whipped another kunai out of my sleeve with a quick sleight-of-hand spin and deflected the next few strikes. Sparks showered between us with a frantic clang, clink!

He lunged again with a quick double thrust. Naturally, I stepped inside his guard, letting those silver daggers slip harmlessly past my ribs.

I flicked my wrist, releasing my kunai from a reverse grip and launching it straight up between his arms, aiming directly under his chin. He flinched, his head snapping back instinctively to dodge the flying steel. Huh. He can actually dodge that? Not bad.

Still, the moment his chin went up, I slammed the heels of my open palms upward against his inner forearms. His elbows flared out violently, blowing his entire centerline wide open. Catching my spinning kunai by the hilt as it dropped back into my palm, I drove the heavy iron pommel right into his exposed jaw.

Thwack!

The impact rattled his teeth so hard his vision definitely went blurry. Spit flew everywhere. Man, that's just nasty. I planted a hand on his shoulder and drove the heel of my boot right into the dead center of his chest.

Thoom!

The kick sent him flying backward, his boots skidding heavily across the dirt and tearing up the road. But hey, he wasn't an elite jonin for nothing. He absorbed the momentum, flipping backward twice to catch his balance, and immediately blurred his hands together into a set of signs.

He sucked in a massive breath and spat a rapid stream of high-pressure water bullets right at me. I didn't even bother with hand signs. I just tapped my heel softly against the ground.

Crack!

A massive, thick stone slab ripped upward from the cobblestones right in front of me. The water bullets slammed into it a split second later with a loud boom, boom, boom! They punched deep craters into the stone face, sending chunks flying while water sprayed in every direction, soaking the street behind me.

The impact completely shattered nearly half the slab.

I tapped my foot again.

The remaining chunk shot forward, racing at him like a catapult round.

Boooom!

The captain's eyes widened and he leaped sideways off a nearby merchant cart a split second before the spinning slab obliterated it into splinters.

Too bad I'd already planned for that.

The ground right beside his landing zone exploded upward.

Kraaak!

A stone pillar erupted directly into his ribs while he was still midair.

"Guh—!"

The hit launched him upward, sending him spinning violently through the air.

I vanished.

Fwip!

I reappeared right beside him in the sky. The captain's eyes snapped toward me just in time to see my leg already chambered back.

I drove the heel of my boot straight into his solar plexus. The impact folded his body instantly, spraying blood from his mouth. He crashed straight through another merchant cart, sending wood exploding everywhere, and then his body skipped across the street before slamming hard into the side of a stone wall.

The guy slowly slid down the cracked wall and collapsed face-first into the wreckage, completely still.

I stared at him for a second.

"...Is he dead?" I muttered under my breath, tilting my head.

Nah. No way. I didn't even use Tsunade's super strength on that one.

I turned around to check on the others. The rest of the Kaigan squad was on the absolute verge of getting mopped up. They'd be done any second now.

"I'm going on ahead," I said, already moving. "Clean up the street and catch up."

The sake house was only three buildings down. I covered the distance in a few quick jumps, landed softly on the tall fence right outside a second-floor window, and peered inside. A woman was sitting at a cluttered desk, completely hunched over a stack of papers, scribbling away with a brush.

I gave the window a friendly little knock and waved.

She looked up, saw my face smiling at her from the other side of the glass, and let out a shriek.

Wow, that's just rude. I was smiling and everything.

A few smiles and some incredibly forced conversation later, the woman was leading me down a hallway, her shoulders stiff as a board. We passed a handful of staffers along the way, mostly clerks and errand runners who all stopped what they were doing to stare at the stranger their coworker was escorting through the building. I gave every single one of them a friendly nod.

She stopped in front of a heavy wooden door at the end of the hall and knocked twice.

"Sir," she called out, her voice pitching slightly from nerves. "There's a... a guest here who insists on speaking with you."

"I'm busy," came the irritated reply from inside. "Tell them to make an appointment with the front desk like everyone else. I don't take walk-ins."

The woman turned to me with a helpless look. I patted her on the shoulder.

"You can head back to your desk. I'll take it from here."

"But he said—"

I was already opening the door.

The office was nicer than anything else I'd seen in this town. It had actual carpet on the floor, a heavy oak desk covered in documents and account books, and a set of lacquered shelves lined with super expensive bottles. Behind the desk sat a heavyset guy in a silk vest, brush in hand, caught mid-stroke on some kind of ledger entry. His face was already twisted into an annoyed scowl before he even looked up.

"I said I don't take walk—"

His eyes found the headband on my arm and the rest of that sentence just evaporated. The scowl vanished. What replaced it was something I'd seen a hundred times before on a hundred different faces.

"Well, well, well." All that irritation instantly melted away into a super warm, practiced smile. He set his brush down and folded his hands neatly on top of the desk. "A Konoha shinobi. What an unexpected honor. Please, come in, sit. Can I offer you some tea? Or perhaps something stronger? I have a lovely aged junmai from the capital that—"

Wow. I had to give it to him, this guy was smooth. The mercenaries standing outside were just hired muscle with all the social skills of a brick wall, but this dude knew exactly what to say, which smile to fake, and how to make ‘please do not kill me’ sound like ‘welcome, honored guest.’ He was a professional bureaucrat, through and through.

I have run into guys like him before. Politicians, wealthy merchants, clan elders who spend way more time sitting in air-conditioned meeting rooms than actually fighting on a battlefield. They all speak the exact same language, say a whole lot of nothing, mean absolutely none of it, and just keep smiling until the other person gets so confused that they eventually just leave.

And there is really only one good way to deal with people like that, and that is with pure, unadulterated violence.

A few seconds later, the guy was hanging upside down from the ceiling. His arms were pinned tight to his sides with ninja wire, his fancy silk vest was bunching up around his neck, and his face was turning a seriously impressive shade of maroon as all the blood rushed straight to his head.

"What is the meaning of this?!" he sputtered, swinging gently back and forth like a really overpriced wind chime. "This is assault! This is an outrage!"

"Yeah, probably," I said, pulling his chair over and plopping right down into it. "Nice chair, by the way. Super comfortable."

"You are making a catastrophic mistake, young man!" His voice was shaking pretty badly, but he was still trying his best to sound like he was the one in charge. "The Kaigan Trading Company is a legally registered enterprise! We hold full commercial licenses from the regional trade authority! If Konoha insists on violently harassing legitimate, tax-paying businesses, I will file a formal grievance directly with the Fire Daimyo's court! I promise you, you'll be stripped of your rank!"

I kicked my heels up onto the polished oak of his desk, letting them rest right on top of his ledger books, and laced my fingers behind my head. "Yeah? Go ahead. File it. Write the letter. I'll even provide the ink."

"You think this is funny?!"

"A little bit, yeah." I reached over, snagged one of his imported sake bottles off the desk, and turned the ceramic over in my hands to check out the label. High quality stuff. "You can try the official complaint route if it makes you feel better. But between you and me, I'm kind of hard to punish. It's been a recurring issue for a lot of people."

His swinging finally started to slow down. His eyes were beginning to bulge a little bit, partly because of all the blood pooling in his face, but mostly because of the sudden, cold realization that his standard corporate playbook didn’t mean a damn thing to the person sitting in his chair.

"Now," I said, setting the bottle back down. "Let's talk about the Konoha shinobi you guys grabbed."

"What?" The confusion on his face was practically flawless. His eyebrows knitted together, his mouth parting with just the right amount of offended disbelief. "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! We haven't touched a Konoha shinobi!"

The real problem with professional liars is that they're so good at adjusting their micro-expressions that you genuinely can't tell when they're actually telling the truth. I couldn't tell at all. Which meant, logically, I just had to assume he was full of it and work from there.

"Okay," I said, and tapped a glowing fingertip right into the soft spot just under his jaw.

His entire body went rigid. His eyes rolled right into the back of his head, and he let out a noise that I can only describe as the human equivalent of someone stepping on a boiling teakettle. I held it there for maybe two seconds, then pulled my hand away.

He just hung there swinging, gasping for air, with tears streaming upward into his hairline.

"Medical ninjutsu," I said cheerfully. "I can do that to any nerve cluster in your body. Want to see which one controls your bladder? Because I'm real curious how that works upside down."

"Please—"

"Where's the Konoha shinobi you grabbed?"

"I don’t—"

I tapped him again. A different spot this time, right in that dense nerve cluster behind the collarbone. He let out this ragged, strangled shriek, his heels twitching like crazy against the wires.

"Now, the fun thing about medical training," I said, pulling my hand back to casually inspect my fingernails, "is that I can do that to any part of your body, as many times as I want, and it won't leave a single mark. No internal bruising, no torn skin, nothing. You could walk out of here, go straight to a doctor, and they’d tell you you're in perfect physical health." I wiggled my index finger just inches away from his sweaty, twitching face. "So. The Konoha ninja your people grabbed. Where is he?"

It took about five minutes. Just five agonizing minutes of me calmly explaining exactly which nerve branch I was aiming for next, giving him all the fun details on what a localized seizure feels like, before his whole corporate facade finally cracked.

"THE OVERSEER CAPTURED A LEAF NINJA YESTERDAY!" he screamed, the words tumbling out in a panicked, breathless rush. "THAT'S ALL I KNOW! That's everything, I swear to God! Please!"

I paused, hovering my finger about two inches away from his kidney. "Your overseer? So you're not the one calling the shots here."

"No! God, no! I'm just an administrator! I'm staff! The Kaigan Trading Company is managed by a council of Overseers! I just handle the ledgers and logistics for this specific port district!"

"Where's our nin being held?"

"I don't know!" He was straight-up hyperventilating now, tears and snot running up his forehead. "Everything like that is handled by the Overseer's private shinobi! I'm not involved in any of that! I just do paperwork!"

I narrowed my eyes and leaned in a little closer. "Your boss kidnaps a Konoha operative on Fire Country soil, and you expect me to believe an administrative head doesn't know a single detail about it?"

"I swear on my life! I swear on my family's names!" His voice cracked, sounding desperate. "I didn't even know the man was a shinobi until the Overseer's personal guard dragged him through the lower courtyard! And from what I saw, it wasn't a planned operation! The Overseer looked just as panicked as the rest of us when they brought him in!"

I tilted my head. "Aha. So our guy was doing recce, stumbled into something he wasn't supposed to see, and this Overseer had to make an emergency play to shut him up..."

"Maybe! Probably! That's all I know, I swear!" He choked out a sob, his face turning a dark, dangerous shade of purple. "I'm just an accountant! Please, let me down... the pressure... I'm going to pass out..."

I studied his face for a long second. The tears were real. The snot was real. The sheer terror in his eyes was about as genuine as it gets. He was either telling the absolute truth or he was the greatest actor in the history of the Five Nations.

I cut the wire. He hit the floor with a heavy thud and immediately curled into a ball, gasping and shaking.

He just lay there for a few seconds, trying to breathe. Then my shadow fell right across his face. He looked up, real slow, and found me standing right next to him.

He shivered.

"Alright," I said, giving him a pleasant, completely normal smile as I crouched down to his level. "Now that we've gotten the unpleasant introductory protocol out of the way, let's have a real, productive conversation. I want everything you have on the Kaigan Trading Company. Your Overseer, his base of operations, his private residence, his guard rotations, right down to what he likes to eat for breakfast. All of it. Take your time, don't leave out any details, and let's try to keep my fingers away from your neck."

He stared at me, his eyes wide with a profound, terrifying understanding, and immediately started spilling everything he knew.

See? People always say diplomacy is an art, but when you're short on time, a well-placed nerve strike really cuts right through the red tape.

…

A few minutes later, I left a clone chilling in the fat guy's chair with its feet up on the desk, casually swirling a cup of sake. The fat guy was standing right next to it, refilling the cup with trembling hands and a smile so forced it looked physically painful. The clone raised the cup to me as I slipped out the window. "Bring me back something nice, boss."

I dropped lightly onto the clay tiles of the roof next door, where Dan and the rest of the squad were waiting. They'd already cleaned up the street. The remaining Kaigan mercenaries had been disarmed, dragged into a nearby storage shed, and left securely tied up and gagged with heavy wire.

"Yo," I said, catching their attention.

Dan straightened up, his hand dropping away from the hilt of his blade. "Taichou. What did you get out of him?"

"Our contact is likely alive," I said, leaning against a chimney stack. "Or he was as of yesterday. One of Kaigan's upper-tier Overseers snatched him after the guy poked his nose into the wrong warehouse. The catch is, this Overseer isn't stationed in the port. He’s running operations out of an offshore site. But our friend the accountant was polite enough to let me know there's a heavy supply vessel loading up at the eastern pier right now. It sets sail in about thirty minutes carrying cargo, weekly ledgers, and reports straight to the boss."

"A ship?" Shunpei’s eyes lit up, a sudden grin breaking across his face. "Taichou, are we seriously doing a maritime op right now? That’s awesome."

"Calm down, it's a smuggling boat, not a pleasure cruise." I looked at the rest of them. "And we aren't going in as a Konoha squad. The crew on that vessel know their regulars. If we show up on deck wearing Leaf protectors and flak jackets, the Overseer's private security will execute our contact or turn him into a human shield before our boots even touch the gangplank."

Dan caught on immediately. "Infiltration. You want us to go in disguised."

"Exactly. The administrative office sends a fresh rotation of hired muscle with every major shipment. We use Henge to pass ourselves off as a group of freelance mercenaries the accountant hired off the docks. We merge with the existing guards on board, and nobody flags us because the roster changes every single week."

Shinku Yuhi crossed his arms, his eyes narrowing slightly. "And this administrator is actually going to play his part without tipping them off?"

"He's highly motivated to keep me happy right now," I said. "And just to ensure his work ethic doesn't waver, I left a clone sitting at his desk to oversee the paperwork."

Shunpei slowly raised his hand, looking slightly unnerved. "Taichou... I could literally hear a grown man weeping from a block away while we were tying up the guards. What exactly did you do to 'motivate' him?"

"We had a brief, professional heart-to-heart."

"A heart-to-heart."

"A medical heart-to-heart," I clarified, tapping my temple with a smirk.

Shunpei winced, lowering his hand. "...Yeah, I'm just going to stop asking questions."

"Thirty minutes," I said, checking the position of the sun. "The loading crew is assembling at the eastern pier as we speak. We need to blend into the crew before the lines are cast."

"Understood," Shinku said, already focusing his chakra to alter his physical profile and clothing into the drab, stained rags of a coastal mercenary.

"One last thing," I added. "There's a high probability our contact is compromised or dead, but he remains our only viable route through Kiri's naval blockade. We find his location first, extract him second, and cut our way out third. Everybody clear?"

Four nods.

"Good," I said, letting my own Henge snap into place, bleeding my clean Konoha gear into the salt-crusted leather of a low-end rogue. "Let's go catch a boat."

We made it to the eastern pier with time to spare. The administrator clone had done its job, and the crew didn't bat an eye when five unfamiliar faces showed up claiming to be the new security hires. A few grunts, a couple of nods, and we were waved aboard like we'd been doing this for years. Professionalism at its finest.

The ship was way bigger than I expected. It wasn't a warship or anything, but compared to the dinky fishing boats and sketchy merchant vessels clogging up the rest of the harbor, this thing was practically a cruise liner. It had three masts, a massive cargo deck, and plenty of room below to store whatever "shipments" the Kaigan Trading Company was moving around. They had even given the hull a fresh coat of paint.

Shunpei was bouncing on the deck planks. His head was on a swivel, taking in the rigging, the sails, and the open water just past the harbor mouth. The guy looked like a kid who just found out he could have seconds at dinner.

"This is incredible!" he blurted out, leaning way over the wooden railing to stare down at the churning wake. "Look at the color of the water out here, Taichou. It’s completely clear! I can’t see anything but blue!"

Behind him, Rei and Shinku just stood there with identical blank stares, looking like two people who got dragged to a party they didn't want to go to. I couldn't tell if they were genuinely unimpressed by the ocean or if they were just professionally committed to looking completely miserable at all times.

"First time on a ship?" I asked.

"First time!" Shunpei confirmed, grinning from ear to ear.

"Great. Put that energy to use and go recon the layout," I muttered, lowering my voice so the nearby crew wouldn't catch it. "Check the cargo hold, the crew quarters, any hatch that isn't locked. See if there's anything worth knowing about our inventory or structural blind spots on this tub. And for God's sake, try to look like a cynical mercenary while you're at it."

I gave the group a lazy, backward wave and turned toward the bow, figuring my highest priority right now was finding wherever they hid the coffee on this damn ship.

I made it about twelve steps before my feet completely froze.

A chakra signature. It was familiar. Way too familiar to be a coincidence, and way too far from where it was supposed to be for me to feel good about it.

‘No way. That is not possible.’

I stood there for a second, just to make sure my senses weren't playing tricks on me. They weren't. The signature was definitely coming from below deck, somewhere near the back.

‘What the hell is she doing here?’

I completely forgot about the coffee and cut hard toward the lower hatch. The corridor below deck was narrow and dimly lit by cheap oil lamps bolted to the walls. I followed the signature toward the back of the ship until I turned a corner and hit the door. It was heavy wood reinforced with iron.

A mercenary was sitting on a stool right next to it, leaning against the wall with a cup of sake in his hand, looking completely bored out of his mind. He looked up when he heard me walking over.

"Oi, new guy," he said, lifting his cup in a lazy, dismissive wave. "You took a wrong turn. Roster's up front. There is nothing back here for you."

"Yeah, I know. Just doing the walk-around they told me to do." I scratched the back of my neck and let out a fake yawn. "First day and they already got me checking every corner of this ship. You'd think I was a janitor, not a bodyguard." I glanced at the door. "What are you babysitting, anyway? Must be something good if they've got a guy posted."

His mouth curled into an ugly, yellow-toothed grin that immediately grated on my nerves. "Heh. Let's just say the vanguard picked up a little extra commission on the high road outside town. Real young, blue hair, face like a doll." He took a slow, wet sip from his cup, keeping his eyes on me. "The Overseer’s got a specific palate for local beauties. We figured if we present her as a personal tribute, the old man might be a bit more flexible with our hazard pay this month. You know how it—"

My hand was already blurring before he could even finish the sentence.

A flash of lightning crackled around my fingertips as I drove them right into the soft spot behind his ear, right where his jaw unhinged. His eyes went blank mid-word, his whole body seized up for a split second, and then he just slid right off the stool. The clay cup hit the floorboards, spilling sour alcohol all over his boots.

I kept moving toward the door and gave it a tug. Locked.

The lock was solid iron, bolted into the frame with heavy brackets. I raised my hand and slammed the handle with a tiny burst of super strength, crushing it right along with the lock. The metal crumpled with a quiet crunch, and the door swung open.

The room was tiny. It was basically a storage closet turned into a cell. There were no windows, and the only light came from the hallway behind me. There was a thin mattress on a wooden pallet, and sitting right on the bed with her wrists and ankles locked in thick iron shackles was Konan. She was watching me with those calm, lavender eyes that looked exactly like I remembered.

Her hair was longer now. A lot longer. It used to barely touch her shoulders back when we traveled together, but now it was spilling halfway down her back in a dark purple wave. She looked like one of those fairy tale princesses locked in a tower, waiting for some idiot to come rescue them. Except Konan was not the type to wait around for anyone, and the faint smile on her face when she saw me proved she knew exactly who just kicked her door in.

"Fancy meeting you here, Sensei," she said, her voice smooth and completely unbothered by the fact that she was in a cell. "I was honestly running out of ways to pass the time. It’s incredibly dull in here."

Paper suddenly fluttered out of her sleeves. Sharp, folded sheets that moved like they had minds of their own, wrapping around the shackles and slicing clean through the iron in two quick snaps. The broken pieces hit the mattress and rolled to the floor. She shook her wrists out and stood up like she was getting out of a chair at a tea shop.

She could've left anytime she wanted.

I stared speechlessly at her. Part of me wanted to laugh. The other part was still burning over the fact that these people had locked a girl in a closet and were shipping her to their boss like a bottle of wine. The guard's words were still echoing in my head. 'The Overseer has a specific taste for local beauties.' Yeah. The Overseer and I were definitely going to have a chat.

How did she even get caught in the first place, though? I had left clones with her. Multiple clones, specifically tasked with keeping her safe while she trained in Tanzaku. There was absolutely no way some random merchant goons should have been able to grab her with my clones standing right there.

Then, the missing puzzle piece clicked into place, and I internally cursed.

Moryo went on strike again. That meant every single clone I had running across the continent ran out of chakra and popped. Including the ones babysitting Konan. The very last batch of memories I had gotten from those clones was them telling her to keep her head down, stick to low-level contracts in the area, and absolutely under no circumstances do anything dangerous or wander too far from Konoha.

I rubbed my temples, looking at Konan. She was currently standing on a ship heading directly to an island run by a criminal trading syndicate, which was about as far from Konoha as you could get.

I let out a long, heavy sigh that felt like it aged me five years.

Some students actually learn from their teacher's words. Others learn from experience. And then there is a special third category that hears "don't do anything dangerous" and treats it like a personal challenge.

I was seriously starting to understand exactly how Tsunade-sensei feels.