It was finally night-time, and there could be no greater bliss than sleep in a comparatively safe environment where the rules prohibited their assassination (at least as far as Hazō could tell). However, before he could allow himself to collapse into oblivion, there was something Hazō needed to take care of.

“Why has thou summoned us here, O foolish Hazō?” Noburi intoned, sticking out his chin dramatically like the Demon Lord of Indolence in the old morality plays. The message was clear: this had better be important, or I’m going to go to back to bed and take your soul with me to use as a pillow.

Keiko snerked.

“I have summoned you here, O lowly Noburi, that we may discuss a matter of deep concern to me,” Hazō responded.

Noburi nodded sagely. “You’ve run out of paper for making lists, and you want us to tie you down until the shops open in the morning and you can sate your addiction without breaking any laws.”

“The last event revealed Nara Shikamaru to you in a new light, and now you seek permission to take my place as his potential bride,” Keiko suggested.

“You’ve only now realised that you’re surrounded by hot girls who don’t run screaming when they see your face, and you want me to be your wingman while you build yourself a harem.”

“You seek aid in plotting the assassination of Rock Lee, and know that none but I could exceed your passion for the cause.”

“You’ve decided that you’ve had enough playing human politics and would rather become Panzō of the Pangolin Clan, but you need Keiko’s help trading seals for citizenship and my help turning one of my old barrels into a convincing pangolin suit.”

“Uh,” Hazō said. “No, those are not things that I had in mind, although I may have to get back to you on the assassination thing once the exams are over. Actually, I was thinking about Yamamoto.”

“So you picked up on it too,” Noburi said.

Hazō nodded. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of a Multiple Earth Wall, and I’m worried that sooner or later all that anger bubbling beneath the surface is going to spill out on us.”

“Given that all but the aptly-nicknamed Team Clanless consist of the clan members he appears to despise, you anticipate some form of treachery that will advantage his team at the price of harming the rest of us,” Keiko concluded.

“Could be even worse,” Noburi said. “I’ve seen guys like him before. Not saying I know where Yamamoto draws his lines, but he could well decide to take us down a peg just because. Show up the arrogant nobles looking down on him, that sort of thing. And given the way the exam works, anything bad happening to us is good for everyone else.

“So what’re you thinking, Hazō? You want us to spend tonight laying down plans and contingencies?”

“Or are you advocating a pre-emptive strike?” Keiko asked. “It is a dangerous strategy, given that it risks alienation from the rest of the Leaf contingent, but in another way also the safest. If we contrive to remove Yamamoto from the exam, we will no longer need to expend mental resources on watching for intra-team betrayal. Team Clanless will be reduced to Haruno and Akane, a combination much more amenable to our influence, and establishing dominance over Yamamoto will prevent him from attempting to sabotage us on other occasions in the future. Or so I assume—I am more than happy to leave manipulating the interpersonal dynamics to more suitable minds.”

“No,” Hazō said. “That is not what I am advocating at all. I want us to reach out to him.”

“You want us to poke the wasp nest, Hazō?”

“Listen,” Hazō said firmly. “I don’t know what it’s like to be a commoner like him. For as long as I had the Kurosawa name, I couldn’t be nobody to the people around me. But I do know what it’s like not to be a clan kid. I remember going to the Academy and seeing the Kurosawa with their custom-made uniforms and brand new combat gear and off-the-shelf training scrolls.”

“Hazō…”

Keiko motioned for Noburi to be quiet.

“I wasn’t different from them. I wasn’t some inferior species. I even had the same blood. I learned as fast as they did. I trained as hard as they did. I matched their marks in the exams, and sometimes I even beat them. But none of it mattered. Somebody, somewhere back in the millennia of ninja tradition, had decreed that people like me weren’t allowed to have nice things. And that was that.

“You can’t argue with tradition. It’s not physical, like a statue you can topple, and it’s not intellectual, like an argument you can disprove. Even when you can almost feel it, like a weight pressing down on you or a wall cutting you off from where you want to go, it’s still not something you can touch. Challenging tradition was another thing people like me weren’t allowed to do.

“I had to live with that invisible, intangible wall every day. I had to see my future laid out in front of me like a branching path, and make myself pretend away all the branches marked ‘not for people like you’.

“Now, by what I can only call a series of miracles, I’m on the other side of the wall with the two of you. I have all the paths, all the branches. I get bowed to by people old enough to be my grandfather. I’m expected to have nice things, and if at any point I don’t, the people around me get confused.

“But the wall hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just harder to see from this side unless you remember exactly where it is, which I do. I can see Yamamoto, and everybody like Yamamoto, looking at me the way I once looked at the Kurosawa kids: ‘I am just like you, so why am I not allowed to be where you are?’”

“Wow,” Noburi said heavily after a second. “Wasn’t expecting that.”

Keiko didn’t say anything. She just sat, very still and very quiet.

“Sorry,” Hazō said awkwardly. “You weren’t asking for a speech. And honestly, it’s not like I spent nights lying awake wishing I was a clan kid. After a while you… resign yourself, I guess. You give up on fighting fate and you focus your energies elsewhere. Mari-sensei’s common-born, and she became an elite jōnin by pouring everything into her work instead of spending her time pining after things she couldn’t have. I guess… I want something like that for Yamamoto. I want him to spit in tradition’s face by being better than the clan ninja, by becoming chūnin alongside us while countless clan teams are left in the dust. If we have to fight him, if we have to throw out the commoner for daring to bare his fangs at us, then we become the hand of tradition, keeping down the weak using the very resources they beg us to share.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“How can we hope to reach out to the civilian world if we can’t even reach out to common-born ninja?”

For a while, the room was silent.

“Did you hate us?” It was almost a whisper.

“What?”

“Did you hate us?” Keiko repeated hesitantly. “Did you hate the clan ninja for having what you couldn’t?”

“Not the way you think. We weren’t different—that was more or less the point. We all studied together. We all played together. For every boy who gave himself airs because some random ancestor of his happened to luck into a Bloodline Limit ten thousand years ago, there’d be a boy who picked you for his team just because he saw that you were good at running, and didn’t even bother to ask your name. If I had to hate anyone, it would be the ancient ninja who came up with the rules, the ones who built the wall in the first place. The same ones who decided to treat civilians like cattle and make ninjutsu a weapon of war. The ones whose work I will see undone even if it kills me.”

“Hazō gives a big speech, pledges to turn the world upside down, morality play at eleven,” Noburi said. “Seriously, though, are we adding this to the list? Dismantling the freaking clan system? Is that before or after we create a civilian paradise?”

“The clan system is an essential, perhaps the sole guarantor of stability in shinobi relations,” Keiko said. “It structures both individual and group relationships, allows individuals to locate themselves in social space, and maintains hierarchies that variously shackle and direct destructive power in a controlled fashion. While it is not without its flaws, notably the poor integration of meritocratic and seniority-based mechanisms of role assignment, its removal would plunge the shinobi world into instant and fatal anarchy. I cannot accept this course of action.”

“What she said. I mean, maybe you’re right and there’s a big gap between clan and non-clan ninja where there shouldn’t be. No, sorry, that’s dumb. I believe you when you say there’s a big gap. Just like there’s a big gap between ninja and civilians. And we’re going to reduce that gap as best we can. But nothing we do can make ninja and civilians the same. If we try to erase the difference, we’ll only fail, and probably end up doing huge damage to both in the process.”

“But there is no difference!” Hazō exclaimed. “Weren’t you listening? This isn’t about having chakra or not. This is about people who are completely identical getting treated differently because of who their ancestors are!”

Noburi and Keiko exchanged glances.

“But we’re not, are we? Completely identical, I mean. You have the Iron Nerve. I have the Vampiric Dew. Keiko has the Frozen Skein. No common-born ninja will ever be able to do the things we do, not if they live to be a thousand.”

“Even in the case of clans such as the Nara, whose superiority stems from lore rather than something as unique as a Bloodline Limit, the centuries of accumulated and refined knowledge bestow upon them a set of abilities and a perspective on the world that cannot be imitated by any outsider,” Keiko said. “A common-born ninja could achieve the same results as them by immersing themselves in the same lore—but to the extent that they succeeded, they would be making themselves into a Nara, because mastery of that lore, a process begun at birth and never ceased, is what makes the Nara the way they are.

“Hazō, nobody here is asserting that clan and non-clan ninja should not be equal. But to claim that they are identical is to deny reality. In terms of knowledge and capabilities, both physical and metaphysical, clan ninja are superior by definition, or their clans would not have survived."

“And that’s it?” Hazō demanded. “The privileged keep racking up more privilege while the rest of us stay in the dirt? How is this any different to what’s happening with ninja and civilians?”

“Enough, Hazō,” Noburi snapped. “Seriously, enough. How many times have you used the Gōketsu name, or Gōketsu resources, to get an advantage? How about the Iron Nerve? Have you ever once regretted it?”

“Well, no, that’s not—“

“You’re better. We’re better. Don’t pretend otherwise just so you can feel morally superior. You don’t hesitate to use whatever resources you have to get what you want, and you shouldn’t. Power exists to be used. It’s practically the Wakahisa motto. You can use it well, you can use it badly, but the one thing you can’t do is leave it in the barrel. That’s not what it’s for.

“I’m trying to be sympathetic here, Hazō, I really am, but you’re not making it easy. You’ve exploited every possible advantage to claw your way into a position of power and safety. You’ve won the ability to reshape the world the way you want. Just like my ancestors did. Just like Keiko’s ancestors did. But for some reason you expect our clans to give up power while you keep yours.”

“Although my reasoning is different, I must concur with the main thrust of Noburi’s argument. Some clan ninja should not rule but do. Some civilian-born ninja should rule but do not. As I have said before, the system is insufficiently meritocratic. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the clans represent the pinnacle of human achievement, combining countless generations of knowledge and insight with the raw power necessary to put it into practice. I do not claim that the clans use this power wisely, or well—indeed, insofar as they are responsible for the state of the world, they have crafted a living hell—but only that over millennia of human history, this is the best we have been able to achieve. Discard that limited success, and we will be left with nothing at all.”

Hazō didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know where to begin.

“Look,” Noburi said more kindly, “I’ll try to sound out Yamamoto tomorrow. Maybe hit up Akane and see if she has any thoughts. For tonight, can we just put the social revolution talk aside? We can hash it all out on a day when we’re not in the middle of an exam event with dozens of enemies waiting for us to slip up.”

“All right,” Hazō said reluctantly, mentally papering over the gulf he could feel spreading between him and his teammates. He wasn't going to get much sleep tonight. “All right. In that case, there’s one other thing I wanted to run past the two of you…”