Chapter 176: Hazō Dethroned

"Well, that was interesting," Hazō said, walking in with a puzzled expression on his face that clearly presaged a desire to share. Which, of course, would be followed by a request that Kei share in turn.

"Oh?" she asked calmly, meanwhile turning her eyes back to the kunai she was busily sharpening. The repeated, rhythmic glide of the blade across the whetstone was calming. It was the whetstone that Hazō had given her for her birthday, the one that showed them all seated around the game table together, alongside the other Leaf genin teams.

This way, every time you use it, you'll remember how awesome you are, and how handily you thrashed some of the world's greatest ninja gamers. And as you keep using it, you'll start making room for new memories, and they'll be awesome as well.

Hazō's remembered words rang hollow in her ear. For years now, she had been destroying relationships without even realizing she'd done it. How different would her world have been had she been more in control of herself? If she hadn't panicked over something that normal people didn't even imagine could be an issue, leading her to push Anna away? If she had been considerate enough to actually notice the impact her lack of control had had on the other girl?

"Yeah," Hazō said. "Shin wanted to...honestly, I'm not sure what he wanted. We talked about how we ended up in Leaf, and how Leaf differs from the propaganda, and then he called us out. He said that his team would 'take us down' and 'climb our unconscious bodies to Chūnin Exam success'. Not because we're traitors, though—he was actually pretty good about the whole thing. He's prepared to...maybe not exactly 'work with us', but at least interact in a non-hostile way."

"What did you tell him?" Noburi asked from his seat on the bunk opposite Kei's.

"About what?"

"About how we went to Leaf, and what it's like there."

Hazō thought about that for a moment, then pulled out a pair of Air Dome seals and started setting them up on the floor. With a sigh, Kei slid down and joined her clansibs.

"I told him that we'd seen both sides of the conflict," Hazō said, once the Dome was up. He took care to cover his mouth against notional and wildly unlikely lipreaders. "We'd seen both sides, and that there was the possibility for peace. That the evidence doesn't add up for Mist's propaganda—that not everyone in Leaf hated Mist or wanted to murder them, that determining the aggressor in the last three wars wasn't easy, and so on."

"Bet that went over real well," Noburi said with a laugh, likewise covering his mouth.

"Yeah," Hazō said. "I told him that Team Uplift accepted his challenge, and he said that he guessed that made them Team Downfall—ours in particular."

Noburi snorted. Kei held herself merely to a small smile.

"I wish them all the luck," Noburi said. "They're gonna need it."

Hazō laughed. "Hey, what ended up happening with you?"

"I had a great talk with cousin Kiri," Noburi said casually. "She was trying to mess with my head before the next event, but it kinda backfired on her. I shut her down hard and started to leave, so she switched over to 'hey, want to go out some time'? I told her to call me when she was done being such a bitch."

Something in Noburi's overly-casual tone pinged an alarm at the back of Kei's mind. "When you say you 'shut her down', what exactly does that mean?"

Noburi shrugged. "Nothing special. I just told her that I'm not the lameass she was making me out to be, that I'm a valuable member of this team, and that she doesn't have shit on me as far as experience goes."

"'As far as experience goes'?" Hazō asked. "Did you mention anything in particular?"

Noburi shifted uncomfortably. "I...might have said something about a chakra megalodon."

"What else?" Kei asked. She might not have spent as much time as Hazō had working on deception training with Mari-sensei, but even she could see that there was more.

"...I maybe alluded to Arikada once."

"By name?"

"Mmmmmore along the lines of 'psycho bio-sealer who can raise the dead'?"

Hazō facepalmed. "Anything else?"

"Not really...or, at least, nothing important," Noburi said defensively. "I said something about ninja riding trained chakra beasts, but no details. Oh, and I mentioned beating Neji on unfamiliar ground when I didn't have any chakra, and I guess I mentioned staying ahead of Captain Zabuza until he died of natural ninja causes, but I didn't use their names. I just said 'the greatest hunter-nin' and 'the greatest chūnin-candidate', or something like that."

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Suggesting that not only do we know that Captain Zabuza is dead, but how he died," Kei said.

"We could easily know that just by being Jiraiya's kids," Hazō pointed out. "Captain Zabuza was a famous enemy nin, but he wasn't politically powerful. It would be good news in Leaf if he died, but it wouldn't have the sort of international implications that Yagura's death had. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine Jiraiya coming home from the office crowing about something like that." He snorted. "Especially if you know Jiraiya."

"True," Kei admitted grudgingly. "So, you alluded to a crazy bio-seal expert who can raise the dead. That should attract some attention."

"Um."

"I will also note that there are comparatively few sealmasters in the Elemental Nations, and vanishingly few bio-seal experts. In fact, of the two sealmasters we know, Kagome thinks the mere idea is insanity and as far as I'm aware Jiraiya has never so much as dabbled in the area."

"We don't know half of what he's done," Hazō said. "Remember when I asked him about what seals he knew of and what we got instead was a bunch of stories about the Three?"

"Yeah, and you just know those stories were full of crap," Noburi said, obviously glad to have the focus off of himself. "He was saying that Lady Tsunade was open to being propositioned, and I'm really not seeing it. All the medic-nin and doctors say that she used to smack him around for being such a skirt-chaser."

"We are becoming sidetracked," Keiko said. "Hazō, I am sorry to say that you have been dethroned."

Hazō's brow furrowed. "Dethroned?"

"Yes. You are no longer the prime infosec leaker on the team."

"Hey/Hey!" said both Noburi and Hazō at the same time, before pausing and frowning as they tried to figure out exactly which of them should be insulted.

"Hey, all I did was vaguely allude to a couple of things in a quiet coversation with one person," Noburi objected. "I didn't shout my bloodline secrets in a public library."

"Look, I thought we settled this—" Hazō began.

Noburi rode right over his objection. "And what about that time in Sarubetsu when you infodumped all the details of our adventures to those ninja in the alley, huh?"

Kei fought not to hunch her shoulders at the memory. The anger, buoying her up and pulling unwise words out of her mouth. "That was different," she said uncomfortably.

"Oh?" Noburi said, smug grin spreading across his face. "Do tell?"

"We were in immediate danger for our lives. I had no time to think, and I needed a way to bluff the enemy out of combat."

"Uh-huh. Sure. No infosec leak at all."

"Speaking of infosec," Hazō said, very obviously coming to her rescue, "we should get our story straight concerning how we ended up in Leaf. Granny Karina called us out on this and someone else is sure to sooner or later. I'm thinking we blame it on Yagura and his policies. We say that we decided we'd rather live than give ourselves up and die to Yagura's paranoia, and if that makes us disloyal, then so be it. We should take the blame for following Shikigami in the first place, even though we didn't really have a choice. Then we keep things vague—talk about our life on the road but no details, just 'constant threat of death but beauty of the wilderness' kind of things."

"I'm onboard with that last part," Noburi said. "Although I definitely don't think we should admit to being disloyal in so many words."

"We can work on the wording," Hazō said with a shrug. "The tricky part is going to be explaining how we joined Leaf."

"No," Keiko said. "The tricky part is going to be reconciling what we actually did, what we have already told people here in Mist that we did, and what Jiraiya told the people back in Leaf that we did. Remember? He claimed that a group of Mist ninja spontaneously developed the Will of Fire, attempted to work through channels to change Yagura's policies, then left when they couldn't. Yagura butchered them, Mari-sensei got us out, and then we volunteered to be agents of Jiraiya's until he could bring us in, which he did once Yagura died. We then told Granny Karina that Shikigami lied and told us we'd been sent on a suicide mission and forced us to go with him, and that we couldn't have gotten home on our own. Once we did leave Shikigami we eventually negotiated our way into Leaf by means of a 'bargaining chip' that Noburi stated was the summoning scroll. How do we fit all that together?"

Silence reigned.

"Well," Hazō said, "how about—"