Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 129 (Patreon)

Shinji watched the last Uzushio uniform slip back through the barrier and stayed on the tower for a while after they were gone, spyglass hanging loose in his hand, no coherent thought in his head.

Not one.

Which was, honestly, an admirable state of mind. Because the alternative was to sit down and actually consider what he had just watched. At least six Mist squads gone. A whole squad of Uzushio shinobi walking out under Kiri's nose with the sensor equivalent of an invisibility cloak. All of this apparently pulled off by the same people who couldn't decide over breakfast whether to evacuate or die swinging.

He didn't want to think about it. He wanted to eat something warm and take a very long nap.

"Retake Uzushio," he muttered.

The words tasted worse the second time.

Konan had mentioned it like it was just another thing she had overheard. The elders were planning to retake Uzushio. She had said it between bites of chocolate, apparently unaware that this was an absolutely deranged thing to hear while the town was still surrounded by Kiri. Then again, she was half-buzzed on cocoa.

Retake Uzugakure. With what?

The nin currently arguing over rice bags? The old men on the council who could barely agree on anything? A shinobi force already trapped inside the very dome Kiri was pounding on?

“Delusional,” he decided, and then thought better of it.

Delusional was easy. The elders were plenty of things, but nobody stayed an Uzumaki elder by being simple. So either they were genuinely off their heads, or they had a card in their sleeve he hadn't been shown yet. His money was on the second one.

The anti-sensor tags were nice. Very nice. Genuinely impressive. But the moment they left a trail of dead Kiri behind them, half their value evaporated. Kiri would work it out by morning. They'd start walking the ground with their eyes instead of their senses, run patrols on visual sweeps, do all the boring homework any sensible commander would do after being made a fool of.

An ambush tool worked once. Twice if you were lucky and your enemy was lazy.

Kiri wasn't lazy.

So if the elders thought they could use these tags to march back into Uzushio and retake it, they were either counting on Kiri to stay stupid, which was a poor gamble, or they had something else. Another fuinjutsu. A bigger trick. Something the outside world didn't know about.

Shinji tapped a finger against the spyglass.

He wanted to know.

Very badly.

Later. He had priorities. Kushina first, Minato second, and the mysterious ace that could theoretically change the balance of the entire war third, no matter how loudly his curiosity complained.

Speaking of Minato.

It had been too long since he last checked on him. Far too long, considering the island seemed determined to produce a new disaster every time he looked away.

Time to fix that.

He came down off the watchtower, took two alleys to shake any curious eyes, and picked a quiet corner behind a shuttered fabric shop where no one would see him puff into smoke. Wall on one side, rain barrel on the other. A nice little booth for a magic trick.

He cracked his neck. Time for round two.

Shinji lifted his gloved hand. Twelve concentric arcs, four Uzumaki gates, and a balancer seal covered the back of the glove.

Space-time ninjutsu.

Actual, honest-to-god space-time ninjutsu.

And he'd learned it before Minato.

God, that felt good.

He bit back a grin, sank his teeth into his index finger, and dragged the blood across the formula.

The alley vanished.

...

Cool wind. Damp air. The white noise of running water somewhere close.

Shinji blinked.

The alley had been replaced by a stretch of grass and gravel along a low riverbank. Water drifted along the bank, not shallow enough to see through but not deep enough to hide anything interesting. Reeds tangled along the near bank. Beyond the far bank, the trees began.

He looked upstream, then past the trees to where the land rose in the distance.

He had landed somewhere south of the waterfall cave. About a kilometer away, give or take.

He did a quick check of himself. Head, arms, legs, ribs. Everything still attached.

Mrs. Uzumaki was a genius. He might actually buy her flowers.

Then he looked down.

Right beside his foot was a hand-cut fishing rod. A bamboo shaft, line wound down its length, a bent piece of wire for a hook, and a fat worm still wriggling at the end.

A little farther away, half-hidden in the grass, was a hand-woven basket with three fish inside. A shallow pool of water had collected between the reeds, just enough to keep them alive.

Shinji looked from the rod to the basket.

Then he sighed.

"Really?"

His clone had been fishing.

Of course he had.

He crouched and touched one of the fish. Still cold. Still fresh. The worm on the hook was still wriggling too.

Shinji looked at the basket.

His stomach growled.

Three fish. A small fire. Some salt from his sealing scroll. Twenty minutes, maybe less.

It would be a waste not to.

Actually. Forget grilled. He had a little sesame oil in the storage seal. He could butterfly them, brush a light coat of oil, salt, and use the coals for something closer to a proper river-grill. Maybe even a quick miso glaze from the packet he'd been carrying around for emergencies just like...

Shinji's hand had already drifted toward the sealing scroll on his hip before he caught himself.

No. Absolutely not. He was supposed to be finding Minato. Somewhere ahead, a bootless blond had murderers after him.

This was not the time.

It was the exact opposite of the time.

He straightened up.

His stomach, betrayed, growled again.

"Sorry," he told it. "We'll come back for dinner."

He kicked the fishing rod into the river. It bobbed once, twice, and floated downstream. Then he picked up the basket, and gently emptied the three fish into the shallows. They flopped in confusion for a second, righted themselves, and disappeared into the reeds like they'd been let out of prison.

The basket he tossed after the rod. It bumped a rock, spun, and drifted away.

There. No sign of him. Any Kiri passing through would see a bit of river and some reeds. No fishing gear. No fish going 'help, a shinobi tried to fillet me.'

Shinji dusted his hands and turned toward the trees.

The cave was north.

...

The waterfall came into view about five minutes later, and Shinji's first thought was that the mist coming off the falls looked lower than usual. His second thought was that the reason it looked lower was because the cliff face behind it had significantly less cliff.

He slowed to a stop near the cave.

'...Okay,' he thought carefully. 'That's not what I left.'

What he had left was a cave. A dry, tucked-away cave hidden behind a curtain of falling water, comfortable enough for two shinobi to eat grilled fish and argue about which of them was going to sleep closer to the wet side.

What he was looking at now was a heap of rubble, half of which had fallen into the pool, the other half still smoking gently along the cracked edges.

Something had gone off inside there. Something big. The rock face above the cave mouth had cracked, and a section of it had come down in slabs. Whatever had detonated hadn't been trying to be subtle. It had been trying to erase the cave from the map, and it had mostly succeeded.

'How long ago,' he thought, and started reading the damage.

The scorch marks along the rock had gone cold. The smell of ash and cooked stone had thinned to almost nothing. Splinters from a shattered tree were scattered near the pool, none of them smoking anymore.

The blast wasn’t fresh. Whoever had been caught in the middle of it had already had plenty of time to move on.

Shinji rubbed the back of his neck.

Yeah. Maybe leaving Minato alone hadn't been his best idea.

He stepped into the clearing and searched for signatures.

No hostiles within six kilometers. No Minato either.

The area was empty.

Shinji searched the rubble, the pool beneath the waterfall, then the nearby trees.

No bodies.

He began picking through what the fight had left behind.

Now, tracking wasn't his field. He'd picked up enough from the scouts at the outpost to follow something fresh, provided whoever left it hadn't tried very hard to hide it. Footprints, broken branches, blood, disturbed dirt. He could work with that.

Anything more subtle and he was mostly hoping the ground felt generous.

Compared to a real tracker he was an amateur, though compared to some travel blogger with a compass, he was practically Sherlock Holmes.

Blood along the rocks near the water. A large splash of it, then a spatter trail leading north. Broken branches at chest height. A gouge in the earth where somebody had rolled hard and skidded before pushing back up. Impact craters in the soil that read as ninjutsu, water pressure mostly, the shape of the splash suggesting the rounded blast of a water bullet rather than the linear cut of a jet.

He crouched at the biggest bloodstain.

Not Minato.

Too much of it. Way too much. If this was Minato's, then either he had been bled out like a pig at slaughter, in which case there would be a body, or something else was going on. He tested the blood with a fingertip. Not tacky yet. Half-dried. The color right for arterial. And there was, again, no body attached to it.

Which meant, most likely, someone had bled here and then been dragged, walked, or carried away.

He kept going.

A second bloodstain waited farther back among the trees. Smaller this time. One trunk had a deep gouge hacked through it, broad and blunt at the edges. Another had been cut halfway through by something much narrower.

Two different blades. Both far too sharp for ordinary swords.

More than one of Kiri's Seven Swordsmen.

They had sent a whole party after Minato.

He winced.

Alone, bootless, and surrounded by Seven Swordsmen. He was going to owe Minato apology dinners for the rest of his life.

Except.

Except Minato hadn't died here. No body, and the further Shinji worked the site, the clearer it got that the fight had turned. Around the north edge of the clearing, the craters ended and the ground got chewed up in a different way. Deep gouges, displaced soil, the whole strip of earth looking like it had briefly decided to become a swamp and then thought better of it.

Shinji stared at that patch of ground for a while.

Then he sighed.

"...Old perv."

Outside of an Uzu nin wandering by at the right moment, he couldn't think of anyone in the area who would've stepped in for Minato. Which left the old perv. Which meant Minato was, in all probability, fine.

He resumed walking.

He needed to work out where Minato and Jiraiya had gone next.

The fight had chewed the ground apart, and whatever tracks the two of them had left were buried under water, mud, and broken stone. Anything still readable had probably been wiped on their way out.

A pair of cart ruts cut straight through the ruined ground and continued east. Beside them, he found a single set of straw-sandal prints leading east.

One person. Civilian, probably.

He considered his options.

Option one, sit beside the rubble and hope one of them wandered back. Odds of that? Low. Whatever the old perv had shown up for, he'd finished it and left. Sitting on rubble waiting for two of the fastest men in the country to double back was, frankly, a pretty sad plan.

Option two, follow the civilian. The cart had passed through the wreckage and left without joining the pile of blood, which meant whoever drove it had probably arrived after the fighting stopped. There was a fair chance Minato and Jiraiya had seen them too.

Maybe they'd gone with the cart. Maybe they'd followed it somewhere safer. Maybe the civilian had at least watched them leave.

Not much, but it was the only trail Shinji had.

Before he left, though, there was one small piece of business he wanted to handle.

If Minato came back looking for him, there needed to be a note.

He crouched beside a flat slab of rubble that had survived the blast, pulled his ink brush from his pouch, and popped the cap off with his teeth.

Then he drew a small fox.

It had a round face and two tiny paws. One paw gave a thumbs-up while the other pointed at the message beside it.

He added a speech bubble.

‘The red package is still in the box.

I’ll handle the delivery.

You two go back to the Leaf first.’

He stared at it.

Then added:

‘PS. If you’re dead, please ignore this note.’

He tilted his head. Considered the composition.

The fox's grin, he decided, could be a little wider. He fixed that with two quick strokes. The raised paw needed a little more force behind it, so he added a small burst of lines around it. Tiny shonen-manga speed lines showing that the paw carried Great Meaning.

There. Exquisite.

He capped the brush, stood back, and looked at the fox one more time.

The fox smiled back at him.

Beautiful.

And the longer he stared at it, the less that felt like a joke.

He had, without any real effort, produced a small work of genius. The grin. The paw. The little speed lines.

It was stupid.

It was perfect.

If the war ended anytime soon, and if he could reasonably retire, say, next week, there was maybe a second career waiting for him here. Mangaka. Manga artist. He rolled the word around. It fit. He could see it. Him, in a nice apartment, no more forehead protector, no more midnight missions, just a desk, an ink brush, and a small crowd of grown men weeping outside his window because volume seventeen had ended on a cliffhanger.

He could be the first mangaka in the elemental nations. Nobody had done it yet. He would invent an entire art form, single-handedly, from scratch, and everyone else who tried after him would be a knockoff.

His debut work would be about a charming rogue with a mysterious past, incredible taijutsu, and a lot of female problems. He would base it on someone else, obviously. No self-inserts. That was tacky.

The series would run for two hundred chapters. Then three hundred. The publisher would beg him to stop. He would refuse, because his readers deserved a proper ending.

Little kids in Kirigakure would trade contraband copies under their desks. Old men in Sunagakure would argue about the ending in tea houses. The Raikage would probably pretend not to read it but keep a full collection hidden behind a false panel in his office.

He'd be rich. Absurdly rich. Mangaka-rich!

And then Shinji saw the rabbit.

Tiny thing. Snow-white fur, round black eyes, and one ear folded over like it had been badly drawn.

It stared at him from beside a tree root.

Shinji stared back.

Mascot.

The word struck him with divine force.

Every great manga needed a mascot. Something cute, memorable, and easy to draw fifty times without ruining his wrist. This rabbit was perfect. He could already picture it sitting on his protagonist’s shoulder, contributing nothing to the story and somehow becoming the most popular character.

The rabbit hopped away.

Shinji followed.

It hopped again.

He followed faster.

A few minutes later, Shinji stopped halfway through squeezing under a thorny bush.

Then he smacked his forehead.

Right. Minato. The actual human being he was supposed to find.

Shinji slowly backed out of the bush.

The rabbit watched him from several trees away.

He pointed at it. “This isn’t over.”

The rabbit turned and vanished into the brush.

Right. The cart.

Shinji pushed back through the bushes until he found the tracks again.

They wound east-southeast through the trees for about twenty minutes, keeping to the easier ground. Whoever had pushed the cart had taken his time, steering around roots and sticking to the flatter stretches.

Then the trees thinned, the ground sloped toward the coast, and Shinji stopped where the forest opened up.

Small village. Maybe twenty houses, all wood, most with thatched roofs. One main road. One store. Probably one guy who fixed everyone's nets. The road ran down to a stony beach where a handful of fishing boats had been pulled up above the tideline. Nets hung on wooden frames. Smoke rose from three or four chimneys. It looked, more or less, like every coastal village Shinji had ever passed through.

Except.

Except for the cookout.

In the open dirt yard in front of what was clearly the chief's house, about a dozen Kiri shinobi were sitting at long, mismatched tables with cups in their hands. One of them was laughing at something the man across from him had said. Another was tearing into a grilled fish with both hands and complimenting the woman who'd brought it, and the woman was blushing and refilling his cup before he'd finished asking.

The villagers were bringing them plate after plate of grilled fish, rice bowls, pickled vegetables, and a very large clay pot of something that smelled, from a few hundred paces away, like a proper stew. A round old woman was topping up sake. A little boy carried a tray twice the size of his head, weaving between the benches like this was the annual harvest festival. When it tipped, one of the Kiri jonin caught the edge and set it straight without interrupting his drink.

Nobody was tied up. Nobody was on their knees. The villagers walked among the Kiri without a trace of caution, refilling cups, passing dishes around, and arguing over who needed another bowl of rice.

Just twelve enemy shinobi eating fish, and twenty-odd villagers happily feeding them.

Shinji stared.

...What.

He blinked, in case he was imagining it. He was not.

...What.

He ducked behind a tree and started sorting through the possibilities.

Kiri had taken the village hostage and was making everyone cook for them. Except nobody looked like a hostage. The villagers were smiling, talking, and running back and forth with bowls. One old woman was asking the village chief whether their guests wanted extra ginger.

Fine. Option two. The village had sided with Kiri from the start. Uzushio didn’t control every fishing hamlet along the coast, and small villages tended to support whichever army was standing closest at the time.

Option three, Kiri had bought them off.

Option four, he was hallucinating from hunger.

He kept that one in reserve.

...

Down the slope from Shinji's tree, someone came out of the woods on the eastern path, humming.

Cart wheels. Straw sandals.

A lone boy returning from the woods with an empty cart. Shinji tilted his head. This was his guy.

The boy looked seventeen or eighteen, short and lanky, with ears that stuck out and a long, rectangular face. He leaned against the cart’s handle as he walked, one hand in his pocket, whistling without a care in the world.

A fishing rod was strapped to the side.

The cart was empty.

So much for fishing.

Time to say hello.

Shinji stepped out from behind the tree, waited for the kid to notice him, and lifted a hand.

"Yo."

The kid stopped humming. Looked at him. Blinked once, slowly.

"Uh. Yo?" the kid offered back, the word trailing off into a hesitant question mark.

Shinji nodded at the village below. “What’s going on down there?”

The kid blinked again. “Down where?”

“With the Kiri nin.”

"The what?"

“The twelve Mist shinobi sitting in the middle of your village, stuffing grilled squid into their mouths while everybody runs around filling their plates.”

The boy turned and peered down at the village.

“Oh. Them.”

Yeah. Them. The armed strangers eating half the village.

“No idea. They showed up while I was gone, I guess.”

“They just… showed up?”

“Looks like it.”

“And your chief decided to feed them?”

The kid scratched his head. “Maybe. I dunno.”

Shinji looked at him. “Is this normal around here? Your chief feeds every pack of armed strangers that wanders in?”

“How would I know? I’ve been gone all day.”

“…”

Shinji stared at him for a long, patient moment.

This kid had rocks where most people kept thoughts. As an intel source, he was a dry hole.

As a disguise, though...

Shinji put on his nicest smile. “What’s your name?”

“Genta.”

“Genta,” he repeated. “Nice name.”

“Thanks.”

Shinji slung an arm around Genta’s shoulder like they were old friends, then popped him behind the ear.

The boy folded like a busted picnic chair.

He caught him before he hit the ground, dragged him into the underbrush by the ankles, and propped him against a tree. From a distance, he looked like he was taking the world's most peaceful lunch break.

He made a couple of quick hand seals.

His face rippled. His hair shortened. His ears grew, unfortunately, a lot. His jaw slackened to match Genta's stupid look. His nails grew dirt under them and his knuckles chapped. He looked down at his new hands and sighed.

The things he did for his job.

...

Halfway down the road, a knot of old men leaning against a low stone wall spotted him and waved.

"Oi! Genta!"

Shinji lifted a lazy hand in greeting.

"Where'd you go, boy?" one of them called. "Your dad's been searching the whole beach for you.”

Another old man chuckled. “He was shouting loud enough to scare the fish away.”

“That man doesn’t need an excuse to shout. He wakes up angry.”

Shinji ambled over and gave what he hoped was a plausible Genta-shrug. He kept his mouth shut. Nodding felt safe. Smiling felt dangerous. He let his shoulders sag and tried to look harmless, a little vacant, and generally not worth talking to.

"Any bites?" the first old man asked.

Shinji shook his head.

"None?"

Head shake.

"You went out all morning and you came back with nothing again?"

Head shake, slower, apologetic.

The old men made a series of pitying noises, the noises old men made when they were pretending to feel sorry for you and were, in fact, deeply enjoying themselves at your expense.

“Poor boy. Eight days without a fish.”

“Nine,” one of them corrected.

“Has it been nine already?” The oldest man nodded as though this proved something important. “It’s the moon. You can't be fishing during a waning gibbous."

“That has nothing to do with fishing.”

“And that attitude is why you’ll never be the best fisherman in the village.”

Shinji nodded along and let the old men keep talking.

They wandered from fishing to the moon, from the moon to somebody’s bad knee, then into an argument over whose wife made the worst pickles. Shinji only half-listened. His eyes stayed on the chief’s yard, moving from the Kiri shinobi to the villagers serving them, then to the pretty woman seated near the middle of the table.

Minutes passed before one of the old men finally noticed.

He followed Shinji’s stare across the road, then broke into a grin.

“Oho. So that’s what’s got you so quiet.” He slapped the man beside him on the arm. “Look here. Boy finally found out what women are.”

The others turned to inspect Shinji as though he had achieved an important milestone.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Thought we’d have to explain it to him.”

“Nah. Too late for that. Cart’s already got his heart.”

Shinji let his shoulders droop and pushed out his lower lip, giving them what he hoped was a convincing Genta-sulk.

That only made them laugh harder.

The old man hooked an arm around Shinji’s neck and hauled him closer. “Don’t go acting shy now, boy. Ain’t no shame in looking. Hell, with that woman sitting there, not looking would be the strange part.”

“About time, too,” another said. “We figured you’d marry that cart and raise a litter of wheelbarrows.”

“Hard to blame the boy. I saw her walking up from the beach and nearly swallowed my tongue.”

“Banged right into Hama’s fence when she walked past.”

“You walk into that fence every week.”

“Not twice in one morning.”

“Twice?”

“Heh, he turned around for another look.”

“Forty-two years I’ve been with my wife. Never once had a reason to look at another woman. Then this one comes strolling along the coast with skin as smooth as fresh cream. And that chest...”

He raised both hands and shaped an ambitious curve in the air.

The other man studied his estimate, frowned, and quietly widened the distance between the hands.

“Still too small.”

“Bullshit.”

“Look again.”

Shinji followed their eyes across the yard.

The old men weren’t exaggerating.

The woman at the table looked about thirty, with pale skin and long auburn hair braided over one shoulder. A loose strand covered the right side of her face.

Her top was, technically, a top. In the same way that a napkin was, technically, a garment. It was doing the bare minimum required to keep its job. One good sneeze and the whole arrangement would resign on the spot. How it had made it through the morning at all was beyond him.

She was also armed. A long, thin sword lay across her thigh. Extremely thin. He'd never seen a blade quite that shape.

Her face, though, kept bothering him. The shape of her mouth when she laughed. The slight lift of one brow as she looked across the table.

He knew that face from somewhere.

Before he could dig any deeper, the old men pulled him back into their conversation.

Somehow, in less than thirty seconds, they’d gone from guessing her cup size to guessing her age from her cup size, then arguing over whether tits stayed the same size forever. One of them brought up his wife’s chest when she was nineteen, compared it to what she had now, and started sharing details no husband with a survival instinct should ever say out loud.

Shinji nearly rolled his eyes hard enough to blow the disguise.

Four old bastards. Gooning in broad daylight, right out in the open, over a woman who looked armed enough to gut the whole village before lunch.

Did any of them know who she was?

Nope.

Where she came from?

Not a clue.

Why she was eating with the chief?

Couldn’t give less of a shit.

Shinji gave them the sort of nod Genta would give. Loose face. Empty head. Just happy to be included.

Then he grabbed the cart handles and dragged it another ten meters down the road, far enough to escape the uncles’ tit conference without walking into the yard itself. He stopped there and let his Genta-eye wander over the party again.

This time, he checked out the chief.

The man was pretty much what he had expected. Short, round, bald, and carrying enough chin that his neck had filed for divorce.

He stood on the woman’s left, back straight as a board, nodding along to every word out of her mouth. Her cup dropped below three-quarters and he filled it. She reached for food and he pushed the plate closer. A real gentleman.

Right up until she leaned over.

Then his eyes went straight down her top.

No shame. No attempt to hide it. Just one long, thirsty stare like the man had been lost in the desert and found water between her tits.

Another gooner.

Shinji stayed nearby. A chief eager to impress a foreign woman over food and drink would eventually say something useful.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The chief clapped his hands toward the kitchen.

“Oi! More meat! Bring the good stuff out! Terumi-sama’s plate is damn near empty. You trying to make me look cheap?”

Shinji went still.

Terumi.

He knew that name.

Not from this woman, though. From someone much younger. Auburn hair. Lava Release. Boil Release. Future Mizukage.

Mei Terumi.

And once that piece fell into place, the rest followed. The Terumi were a major bloodline clan in Kiri. Money, influence, people in the right rooms.

Except Mei was years younger than Minato and Kushina, which put her at five or six right now.

So the woman at the table had to be family.

An aunt, maybe. Older cousin. Maybe her father’s sister.

The age fit. Woman looked thirty, give or take. Same auburn hair. Same face around the jaw. Even that little lift in her brow looked familiar.

Then the woman looked up.

Past the chief. Past his greasy little smile and the empty sake jug. Right across the yard, over the dirt road, straight at Genta.

Shinji’s blood went cold.

He kept moving.

Genta wouldn’t care. Genta was some cart-pushing village kid with dirt on his sandals and nothing worth hiding. People looked at him all the time. Probably wondered how he remembered to breathe.

So keep walking.

Look bored.

Get past her.

He pushed the cart another step.

Then she smiled.

Small smile. Warm smile. A real nice one, too. The sort some pretty older woman gave a kid before calling him over for sweets.

“Oh my. That boy with the cart. Sweetheart, could you come here for a moment?”

Sweet. Airy.

Every hair on Shinji’s neck stood straight up.

Shit.

He stopped with one hand on the cart and one foot half off the ground.

Cover blown.

Had to be.

Blown to hell and pissed on afterward.

His head was already digging for exits when the rest of his brain grabbed it by the collar.

Calm down.

Maybe she was just curious. The woman had eyes. Genta lived here. Foreign big shots liked poking at locals, especially the odd ones. Maybe she’d spotted him and thought, Look at that. The village idiot comes with his own cart.

Could be nothing.

Could also be the exact opposite of nothing.

Shinji stayed frozen while his heart tried to kick its way out through his ribs.

“Oi, Genta!” the chief barked. “Terumi-sama’s talking to you, boy! Quit standing there like a stunned mullet and get over here!”

Right.

No getting out of it now.

Shinji swallowed the sigh in his throat and let Genta’s shoulders sag instead. He lowered the cart handles nice and slow, wiped his palms against his hips, then tucked his chin down until all he could see was dirt.

After that, he shuffled out from behind the cart.

One dragging step.

Then another.

The walk of a farm boy called over by people richer than him, meaner than him, and far too important to ignore.

He crossed the yard with all the speed of a man walking to his own hanging.

At the end of the table, he stopped. Head down. Arms loose. Harmless as mud.

Kirara put her cup down. She kept looking at Genta, but spoke to the chief beside her.

“Who’s the boy?”

The chief damn near floated out of his chair.

“Him? Oh, Kirara-sama, don’t mind him. He’s nobody. Genta, that’s his name. Old Sokichi’s boy from up the hill. Poor fisherman, may his wife rest in peace, though the woman nagged enough for three wives while she was alive. But this boy, ah, what an eyesore. Forgive us. He’s the village disappointment. Couldn’t catch a fish if one jumped into his lap.”

The chief burst out laughing at his own joke.

Loud, wet laughter. His chins shook like a sack of dough.

Nobody else laughed with him.

Shinji kept Genta’s head down and took it.

That felt right. Genta probably heard some version of this crap every other day. Too slow to argue. Too used to it to care. The village needed someone to kick when it got bored, and poor Genta had apparently been born with a target painted on his ass.

The chief finally ran out of breath, wiped his mouth, and beamed at Kirara like he’d just dropped the funniest line in the Land of Water.

Kirara didn’t beam back.

“How odd,” she said softly. “My men were killed this morning, and we found cart tracks beside the bodies. Now those tracks have led us here.”

Her eyes dropped briefly to the cart, then returned to Genta.

“You wouldn’t happen to know why, would you?”

Shinji stayed still.

His pulse didn’t.

...Okay.

Okay, okay, okay.

Cover was, in fact, blown. Or was in the process of being blown. Or was on a very short timer to being blown. He started counting problems. Twelve Kiri jonin. Kirara herself, probably one of the Seven judging by the sword across her lap. Villagers everywhere. Kids.

Even fresh, Shinji wasn’t sure he could put her down quick. Not her and twelve jonin. Not in a yard full of civilians unless he felt like turning the whole village into burnt lumber and body parts.

Kirara waited.

When Genta offered nothing but silence, she rested one finger against her cheek. “No? Then perhaps you can help me with one more thing.”

Her smile stayed warm.

“One of the men who died this morning was carrying a sword. A very large one. Rather difficult to overlook.”

She lifted her cup, but instead of drinking, watched him over the rim. “You haven’t seen it anywhere, have you, Genta?”

Shinji blinked.

Sword.

Wait.

Sword?

The pieces dropped into place so hard he nearly cursed out loud.

Genta had been in the woods.

The tracks Shinji followed had crossed ground chewed up by fighting, and somehow this skinny little dumbass had walked out the other side alive.

You stupid kid.

You stupid, greedy little shit.

Genta had robbed a dead Swordsman.

Or a half-dead one. Mostly dead. Dead enough that stealing his giant murder-blade had seemed like a good idea.

He’d tossed it onto the cart, hauled it back to the village, then hidden it somewhere before Shinji ever found him.

Wherever the thing was now, it wasn’t on the cart. It wasn’t under Genta’s clothes. And, best of all, Shinji didn’t have one damn clue where the kid had put it.

He could lie.

That was usually the solution.

Unfortunately, Kirara had followed the cart here, knew the sword was missing, and was now watching him like she had already heard every lie he might try. Worse, Shinji had gotten barely ten words out of Genta before knocking him unconscious. He could copy the face. The slouch. The voice was another problem.

One wrong word and the chief would know Genta wasn’t Genta.

So…

Was this really going to end in bloodshed after all?