Chapter 42: The Gathering Storm

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Last time on Joie de Vivre:

The Land of Lightning is displeased with the current status quo, and their reduced power. As a result they have been increasingly belligerent, trending towards more and more overt “deniable operations.” Hanzo has seized Rain, angering the Daimyos by his presumption, by the closure of all foreign business through the major trade routes, and by Hanzo’s permissive attitude towards bandits and raiders operating out of his territory so long as they don’t attack Rain’s population.

But not all the news is bad. Whirlpool and Water Country have largely eradicated piracy in their waters. Combined with new industrial developments, this has caused a massive expansion of trade, both to Fire Country’s sphere of influence, and to more exotic locales including the Eastern Continent and lands far to the south. Meanwhile, the Fire-Whirlpool alliance is going strong, and has brought in most of the surrounding minor nations as lesser partners.

Daichi and his retainers have recently finished their training as Arbitrators, and are ready to step excitedly into this brave new world.

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“So, you’re offering transportation for our goods, with a price of one part in four of our carried cargoes, said part not to be less than a quarter-koban per five tons of ship, pro-rated for partial loads, with a minimum cargo of a quarter of a hundred-twenty ton ship...” one of the merchants I was stuck supervising droned on.

The first few of these negotiations proved quite fun. I mean, every bit of the deal that I got better terms on meant more money in my pocket. Often a lot more. Then it lost its novelty, people realized they couldn’t take wild advantage of me, and I became a glorified merchant with ninja training.

See, one of the reasons I was a preferred shipping Arbitrator was that I tended to put my trade ships in their convoys. I typically got twenty percent of the entire convoy value; ten percent for protection (my ships carried small cannon-seal armed speed-boats for defense), and another ten percent for the service of having current market prices as relayed by my factors via communication seal. Though that amount could and did vary on a variety of factors, including length of journey, weather and pirate risk factors, etc.

But boy was it boring. And because I created so much value, pretty much all the arbitration work I saw for months was shipping.

I remembered when I was a kid. Maybe eleven years old or so. We were in chapel (compulsory at my school), and someone’s Dad had come in to give a talk about what they did. Yes, we had a good dose of religion, and then a good dose of life-lesson.

It was very British.

Anyway, this guy gets up in front of us all, and takes out this thick pad of paper, bound with a flexible plastic spine and cover. There were hundreds of pages, about a full printer-paper package’s worth, almost exploding with various sticky pads coming off at all angles. And this guy proudly started to talk about his career as a lawyer. Specifically, a shipping contract lawyer. He described how interesting his job was, how he methodically accounted for every possibility. If the shipped coffee spoiled what penalties there were. Inspection of the coffee on either end. Time schedules. Costs. Cost sharing. Liability. Allowed routes and ports. Disciplinary record limitations on the crew. And so on.

To be honest, it was actually a great presentation. I’d never really thought about the subject before. I learned a lot. It was, from an educational standpoint, valuable and interesting.

I swore that day I would never do shipping contracts.

I became immortal, learned (ninja) magic, destroyed nations, changed the course of history. I was a titan of that age, and living the dream of many an otaku back on Earth.

And what did I end up doing after all of that? Fucking shipping contracts.

I just… had no words. It was so boring that Kurama had literally put himself into a coma. Fucking shipping contracts, evil enough to beat the Kyubi. The chakra beast hadn’t even lasted a week, the lucky fox; I wished I could put myself in a coma until it was all over too. That was all I could say. Oh, they were just as bad as I’d feared.

Even worse, I was getting better at them. At first, it took me a week to go through the negotiation and post “mission” analysis. Then, I could do two a week, then three. After a few months, half the time I was finished by lunch. Which just meant that I would get even more fucking shipping contract missions.

I swore, if I somehow ended up Konoha’s shipping contract expert, I was going to kill someone.

Literally. To get out of that twisted reflection of a groundhog day scenario, I’d have happily murdered a lot of people. Preferably our enemies, but I was starting the think that maybe meditating inside a prison cell would be less tiresome.

I considered all this as I continued to guide our collective progress through the latest shipping contract while on autopilot myself. I knew the final result. The goods supplier would pay one part in five, or twenty percent, to the ship owner. I would get one part in five. The insurers (an Uzumaki bank in which I had heavily invested) would get one part in ten.

Spoilage would be split between the factor and the ship-owners, partially coming out of the portion they in turn paid the crew, so long as it was below a tenth. If it was more than a tenth, it would come out of the ship-owner’s portion, then the factor’s portion, then my portion, but would be recouped by the insurance at one half the destination or median price for those goods (whichever was lower) for spoilage over a fifth, subject to inspection and investigation.

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See? I was being corrupted. It was like the Borg, or some sort of memetic cognitohazard. Soon I would be standing in a temple telling young ninjas in training about how they too could enter the exciting world of shipping contracts!

Maybe I should start sending a clone to these things, I mused. Technically, dereliction of duty. Practically, a sanity saving measure.

I was considering having one of my seals “accidentally discharge” to get me out of there when Sachiko interrupted.

“Sir, there’s something you need to see,” she said.

Bless her. Sachiko was the best.

“Oh, how terrible,” I said, only able to keep from laughing in glee because she pinched me. “Excuse me, gentlemen. My assistant, Tokujonin Hisakawa Yasu, will be taking over the negotiations. He has my full confidence.” With that, I stood and left the room, not even giving them time to protest. More importantly, not giving Yasu the opening to prevent my leaving.

Both the merchants and my poor assistant were becoming wise to how I would leave for “emergencies” and spend the rest of the afternoon in “necessary strategic consultations” with Sachiko in our bedroom. The merchants had learned that if I was that bored, I’d often give up as much as five percent, a full quarter of my cut, just to get them out the door. Unfortunately, that meant they tried to make things even worse, at least until I realized I could just ditch after delegating to Yasu.

I left the room trailed by Sachiko. As soon as the door was shut my shoulders slumped. “Oh, Sachiko, thank god. I was going insane. So, where exactly is this emergency?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.

Sachiko shook her head. “There’s an actual emergency. You’re needed back at the residence.”

As an aside, we weren’t even posted somewhere nice. We were, instead, in a second tier port on the southern peninsular region of Fire Country, bordering the Kanashii ocean. The port was rapidly expanding without the perennial issue of Water Country pirates/privateers, and responsible for an increasing portion of Fire’s trade with Tea, Sea, Crimson, Moon, and various other Countries that also either bordered or were islands in the Kanashii ocean.

But for all its importance for trade, it lacked culture to enjoy or a surfeit of high ranked ninja to train with. The dinners with the local merchant powers were much more chore than pleasure.

Sachiko was referring to the secured residence, part of the property where we had set up our trade mission. If she couldn’t mention it without being there, then it was serious.

I sighed. When I prayed for deliverance, no matter the source, I wasn’t serious.

Soon enough we entered the residence.

“So, what is it?” I asked.

“Priority message,” she replied. “Significant troop buildup in Lightning.”

I snorted. “So what’s new?” They’d been sabre rattling pretty noisily for over a year and a half, but I didn’t expect them to do anything about it.

“They’ve established widespread cloud cover using jutsu,” she replied. “Reports from infiltrators are that multiple legions have left barracks and are headed for the border. A low-pass by an aerial asset showed similar indications of mass mobilization from Hidden Cloud before it was destroyed. Grain is being distributed from the granaries, and the Lightning ports are empty. The Daimyo is not in residence at his palace.”

“Oh, fuck a duck,” I swore. “What are the reports from Frost?”

“They were reporting another surge of violence. We thought it was the usual, but we’re not hearing from several of our listening posts at the border. The chakra-laced fog would block most communications, but I think we have to assume the worst.”

“So it’s not just a war-game, but a full on invasion,” I noted as we entered our war-room. It was equipped with numerous screens for different video conferences, priority message boards for orders from command, tickers and chatrooms showing real-time intelligence reports and analysis, maps showing allied and assumed enemy locations, and various images from active flight cameras. Far too many of the last showed fog.

“It looks like,” she agreed.

“Are any of our assets overhead?” I asked. Over the years my fiefdom’s contribution to aerial superiority had grown, as was perhaps only natural considering I invented the subject, and Hikaru jii-san was among its top pioneers. Nearly all of my fiefdom’s taxes were paid off by our contributions, both research as well as pilots and aircraft, to Uzushio’s air power.

“One of our Ospreys based out of Hidden Leaf should be overhead one of their assumed gathering points within the hour.”

“The new variant?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

That was great. The new variant was a surveillance optimized Osprey which jii-san and I had been working on. It was specifically designed to counteract anti-surveillance attempts. Particularly clever were the networked system of bio and chakra mimetic sparrows and mice, with larger owls and moles to act as control nodes and long-distance repeaters. Some of their communication channels should be capable of piercing through the fog, which some sacrificial probes had shown was being kept far enough off of the ground to allow the Lightning forces to know where they were and where they were going.

The new system was pretty expensive, but it was the height of foolishness to assume that no one would come up with any way of reducing or removing our aerial advantage. For Uzushio it was less of an issue; a ship, or fleet, could only generate so much fog, and we could just hammer the whole area. On land, with water chakra trapped between the hills and valleys, the region was simply too large to efficiently bombard.

I fully familiarized myself with the situation, and then waited anxiously. There was really nothing I could do or contribute until we got images. Or didn’t get images, but I was hoping for a successful first combat usage of our designs.

And then we had image, and even sound. We were watching a fort and supply depot near the border. If Lightning was trying anything, this was a natural gathering point from which to re-equip, stocking up on food and water before launching the invasion.

And Lightning, it seemed, was doing just that. To make it more serious, judging from the flags, their Daimyo was there, as was their Kage. Clearly this was a “do or die” moment politically, and even accounting for their high dispersion, the size of the army was estimated to be about twenty percent of their total forces. Considering this was just one of the border forts, and taking into account the number of “mercenaries” and “rogue ninja” active in Frost before hand, and our best estimates were that sixty percent of Lightning’s standing army had been mobilized for the attack.

It seemed that Fire and Whirlpool-Water’s joint economic pressures had had a result. Just not the one we wanted, where Lightning accepted the new reality, reduced its militaristic nature, and joined us in trade and prosperity. Instead, they were throwing the dice on one last gasp of imperialism. I doubted it would work, but it could easily spark another continent spanning war.

Soon enough, a command meeting was called. Given that the current surveillance was coming from a Seal-Hawk Island Guard flight, and my own position as consul, sealer, advisor and lord, I was invited. This was an initial Uzushiogakure conference, where we decided how we wanted to react before we then added Konoha and Fire Country to the discussion.

Kazuo-sama started the discussion off as Whirlpool’s reigning lord. “It seems that Lightning has finally made their move,” he said. “Let us discuss our response. Though before that, Uzumaki Hikaru and Daichi, you have my thanks, and that of our nation, for the timely and extensive surveillance you have provided.”

We bowed in response.

“So,” he continued. “What are your recommendations?”