“What happened to you, Hazō?” Noburi asked, staring aghast at Hazō’s weary, staggering form. “You look like you got jumped by ten Zabuzas in the latrine.”

“I let Keiko explore my anatomy,” Hazō wheezed. “She was very… thorough.”

Noburi’s eyes narrowed. “You know, if this was a year ago, those would have been your last words.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hazō said. “I already feel half-dead after all the time she spent targeting my ligaments with practice shuriken. She wanted me to go through every form of evasion I know so she could test which ones were easiest to go for under which conditions.”

“Yeah,” Noburi sighed. “I figured it was something like that. I’m starting to get why Akane saw Rock Lee in you.”

“Anyway,” Hazō chose not to take offence at that inexplicable insult, “Come back to the cave—Kagome-sensei’s making dinner, and there’s something I want to talk to everyone about.”

-o-

“Thank you for the soup, Kagome-sensei,” Hazō smiled. “I’m not going to ask what was in it, but it was very good.”

“Just something I dug up. It’s a kind of many-legged, spiny, maggoty—”

“I’m not going to ask what was in it,” Hazō repeated.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“But while everyone’s here,” Hazō swallowed, “there’s something I want to talk to you all about.”

“I’m sorry, Hazō, but I don’t think you’re ready to make written lists again,” Mari-sensei said. “Not so soon after the Wall Painting Incident.”

Hazō winced. One little sequential enumeration, and everyone acted like he was trying to design a city-killer seal.

“No, not that. I think we should leave Iron.”

“Leave Iron?” Noburi repeated. “Why? We’ve got a good setup going here. The camp’s comfy, you’ve got your fancy research facility, Kagome’s got his Three Circles of Hell around the perimeter—”

“Three and a Half Circles as of this afternoon,” Kagome-sensei chipped in smugly.

“Right. It’s a nice site, we’ve put time and effort into it, we’re miles from the nearest terrifying rift into unspeakable hell dimensions full of things wanting to chop us into salad… what’s not to like?”

“That’s all true,” Hazō conceded. “But it’s not worth being in Iron for. I mean, there’s nothing especially safe about Iron. Back when we first came to Iron,” on the trip when they met Akane, “this was an excellent place to be a missing-nin because none of the villages cared what happened here. Now, after the Liberator incident, I’m sure they have to be monitoring it to make sure there isn’t any further trouble from any survivors. The only benefit of being here is the reason we came—your training—and it sounds like you’ve got the important part down now.”

Noburi nodded. “Hashimoto may be a whole tribe of oni compressed into one tiny ferocious hag, but she’s at least taught me the core principles of research. If I had the time and the materials, I could keep going on my own. Besides, I think she and I are getting on each other’s last nerve. She’s started making noises about how she wants me to go to the woods and bring her back some black hunter eggs in exchange for advanced training.”

“Right!” Hazō said. “There’s nothing keeping us here now. And let’s face it, we’ve been to Yuni several times recently. Given that it’s one of the biggest towns in the south, every visit risks drawing attention. Even with all our precautions, all it takes is one Mist sensory specialist dropping by, and Captain Zabuza will be knocking on our door the next morning.

“There are plenty of smaller, more remote countries where we can pursue our current plans without being next door to the Elemental Nations. It gives us control over our circumstances, with less risk of being caught in others’ crossfire.”

Mari-sensei leaned back, her height conveniently just right to avoid bumping her head on the sloping cave wall.

“I suppose it’s not the worst idea in the world. I hear the southern islands are heaven this time of year. Warm, sunny, great food, you can swim all you like…”

“Um. Actually, I was thinking Snow.”

Mari-sensei sat straight up. “Snow?”

“Now hear me out. It’s a very long way from Mist, and from everywhere else people might be looking for us. If you were the Mizukage, would you think of looking for us in Snow? How many ninja would you commit to do it if you did?”

“And what exactly are we going to do in,” Mari-sensei shuddered, “Snow? I’ve just done a bunch of information gathering in Iron. It took time and effort and some classic Inoue Mari ingenuity, and you’re telling me you want to throw it all away just so we can go to Snow?”

“That information’s still valuable,” Hazō said. “If we go to Snow, we’ll be able to use our ever-growing combat skills to get plenty of animal furs and skins that you can’t get elsewhere, and use those as capital to invest in building relationships with traders.

“I know it’s something of a change of pace, but let’s face it—every time we’ve tried to take on a conventional ninja mission, it’s ended in disaster, from that yakuza who wanted an escort to the Hot Springs infiltration. I think at this point we can conclude that acting like village ninja isn’t going to get us far.”

“It’s true,” Mari-sensei agreed. “Proper ninja missions require leadership and coordination. Those aren't things you can fake just because the situation demands it.”

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“Still, Snow?” Noburi asked. “I don’t even know if my powers will work in Snow, because no Wakahisa has ever been stupid enough to go there. I could be unstoppable over there, or I could be flat-out useless with no unfrozen water to work with. And, I mean, Snow.”

“Actually,” Kagome-sensei said, “I like it. It’s quiet, remote, good for camouflage, easy to hide traps in… not like all the exposed terrain around here.”

He looked away. “They say it’s very peaceful in Snow…”

“There’s a reason for that,” Mari-sensei cut in. “It’s because nobody sane goes to Snow. It’s a brutal, freezing wasteland unfit for human habitation. It’s got the only hidden village that’s still a true hidden village—because tracking down its location would mean spending time in Snow.”

She looked around. “Don’t tell me the rest of you are seriously thinking about this.”

Hazō turned to Keiko, who had a strange, distant expression on her face.

“They say it is always silent in Snow,” she said quietly. “No people. No conflict. There are great mountains of pure ice, perfectly clear, perfectly still, vast beyond imagination. When the wind is still and the snowfall pauses, you can see miles of endless white…”

“Let’s do it,” Noburi said suddenly a few seconds later. “What the hell, it’ll be an adventure.”

Hazō’s inner Mari-sensei told him it was time to go in for the kill, plotting her physical counterpart’s downfall in a twisted act of self-destruction.

“I know we have some projects on the go right now,” he said, looking at her, “but my birthday is coming up too, and… I don’t like the idea of being too busy to enjoy it. Besides, there’s something to be said in exploring new scenery, isn’t there? In making new memories instead of… retreading old ones?”

“… Fine,” Mari-sensei said curtly. “But when we all die of exposure and my soul gets dragged into the Abyss, I am totally pulling you down with me so I can spend my millennia of torment ruffling your hair.”

“Great,” Hazō beamed while reflexively tucking his head in. “Then let’s see if we can get the camp dismantled tonight so we can make an early start tomorrow.”

Kagome-sensei gave him an incredulous look. “Early start tomorrow? Do you realise how long it’s going to take me to dismantle my Three and a Half Circles? Never mind breaking down the research fort so the stinkers can’t steal our safety protocols.”

“We could just leave them,” Noburi suggested.

“What, for civilians to stumble into?” Hazō snapped. “No, thank you. I feel bad enough about that rift, and at least that’s supposed to go away eventually. I don’t want to imagine what would happen to any hunting party that tripped one of Kagome-sensei’s arrays.”

“Boom! Splat!” Kagome-sensei whispered happily as he put away his soup bowl.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Hazō concluded. “And we’ll need to spend a while gathering wood anyway. It’s not like we’re in any particular hurry.”

-o-

The wary hunter-nin stood on the brink of hell and looked a while, pondering his voyage.

It hadn’t taken long to track down Inoue’s camp for one simple reason: the site was ringed by a concentric aura of utter devastation. Not one single inch within the broad ring had been spared, as if some furious deity of fire had chosen this place to begin its campaign of human extinction. The smell of smoke still hung in the air.

Nothing shocked him anymore, but he was certainly impressed. The sealmaster who had crafted the escape route in Hot Springs was both competent and thorough, and, it seemed, healthily paranoid about having his capabilities revealed.

The demolished structure at the edge of the camp doubtless belonged to the sealmaster as well. It was fortunate that his targets had already revealed their ability to create permanent stone, else he might not have thought to search for the tell-tale shards of granite.

There were few reasons to place such a thing so far from the main site, and given the presence of a skilled sealmaster, a sealcrafting research facility was the most obvious. A facility of stone, established even at a temporary wilderness camp. That a sealmaster of such calibre was performing research for Inoue’s force would doubtless bump them up on the Mizukage’s priority list.

But the true puzzle, and the one he had yet to solve, was the extraordinary obliteration of the campsite proper. Gaping craters had wiped any and all evidence from the face of the earth, as if Inoue had managed to find the legendary ninjutsu scroll of Madara’s Minute Meteors. But assuming that she had not learned how to magically make rocks rain down from the heavens, only to disappear without a trace… The mysterious sealmaster’s threat rating rose another notch.

The Cold Stone Killers had a skilled sealmaster creating new seals for them. They had the means to completely obliterate a wide area, and the cunning to do so as a means of information control. And even though his hunter’s intuition was certain they had only just departed, their powers of concealment were so great that they had seemingly left no tracks at all upon the soil. If it hadn't been for the conspicuous recent deforestation in the surrounding area, he'd have been left with no clues at all.

The Demon of the Hidden Mist gave a broad, toothy smile. This was going to be even more fun than he had anticipated.