After walking into town as a trio of poor (and legitimately exhausted) labourers, Wakahisa proposed his plan for getting a room at an inn without tipping off anyone watching that a group of three strange visitors was in town. It was a mark of the group's collective tiredness that no one bothered to argue.

Hazō was the one to pay for the room. Half an hour after he headed upstairs, Keiko and Wakahisa turned up, both in sexy teenage girl forms, giggling and unsubtly inquiring which room their "friend" was in. Hazō strongly suspected that Wakahisa had ulterior motives for making Keiko take an aged-up, underdressed transformation. Keiko, meanwhile, showed unprecedented multitasking abilities, combining airheaded giggling directed at the receptionist with an aura of savage bloodlust directed at Wakahisa.

The knock on the door came minutes after they were done settling in. All of them smoothly moved their hands to the kunai their disguises didn't have, then back again.

"Come in!"

The visitor was a middle-aged man in a non-descript black suit, with a perpetual ironic smile hovering around his lips. There was something in the way he moved, his face and body relaxed and his eyes not bothering to make an initial sweep of the room, that managed to say "I own this place and a thousand like it—this is just scenery to me".

"Good evening, gentleman, ladies, or whatever your true genders may be. I am Twist, a representative of the Yamada Group. We are the organisation responsible for overseeing commercial activity in Yuni and other regional population centres."

Hazō and the others gave various forms of wary nod.

"I am here to collect a certain debt that the three of you owe the Yamada Group. I am given to understand that you have taken possession of twenty-four thousand ryō belonging to us. In addition, since you are responsible for the failure of a shinobi mission funded by the Group, which entailed retrieval of the full sum, you are also liable for the total fees of three shinobi."

Hazō frowned. "I'm sorry, sir, but I think you have us confused with someone else. My friends and I don't know anything about twenty-four thousand ryō or a shinobi mission."

Twist somehow managed to roll his eyes without moving them in the slightest. It suggested a mastery of micro-expressions beyond anything they'd been taught as ninja.

"I believe you don't entirely understand the scale of the organisation you've crossed. The Yamada Group easily has the funds to hire specialists when necessary. A number of such specialists, in fact, are on standby outside this establishment, so as to ensure a satisfactory and peaceful resolution to our discussion.

"Now, to the matter of the debt."

Hazō swapped glances with his teammates.

"Can we have a couple of minutes to confer, please?"

Twist nodded. "By all means."

o-o-o-o

"Thoughts?" Hazō asked, already having several but not wanting to tread on Wakahisa's toes as the Master Diplomancer.

"Well, we can't fight them," Wakahisa nervously replied. "The yakuza can afford enough ninja to wipe the floor with us."

"And returning the money to them is not an option given the amount of time we have remaining," Keiko added. "Nor can we offer to provide an equivalent amount of labour, for the same reason."

"That's right," Hazō said. "We'll have to leave in order to see Kagome, and how could they ever trust us to come back? We are not leaving hostages as collateral on my watch–" He bit his tongue, but it was too late.

Fortunately, Wakahisa was preoccupied enough not to notice, though Hazō noticed Keiko giving him an unreadable look.

"Uh, anyway," Hazō quickly went on, "Mori, do you have any ideas? Between our three skillsets, there's got to be some non-obvious way to turn this around."

Keiko looked thoughtful for a few seconds. "Now that you mention it..."

o-o-o-o

"I think we started off on the wrong foot," Wakahisa told Twist. "You have to consider our perspective on this whole thing. We took on a typical escort job for an individual that the Yamada Group had not publically announced to be working against its interests. We were then accosted, without provocation, by a ninja team."

"A ninja team which would have been child's play to wipe out at our level," Hazō added in a soft voice, like a stiletto sinking into a velvet cushion.

"However," Wakahisa continued, "we chose not to force the Yamada Group to lose valuable assets, and instead left with nothing but the mission fee we were owed. We even accepted the hit to our reputation for failing a job, and I'm sure a representative of an organisation like yours appreciates that reputation is everything. If anything, it is we who made sacrifices, on multiple levels, out of respect for the Yamada Group."

Mori chimed in, cool and dry like an accountant. "Financially speaking, the loss of income for the Yamada Group from this series of events is close to trivial. As a conservative estimate, it is equivalent to the weekly earnings from the Ginza, Kinji or Kamomura casinos. You also receive the reputational gain from the swift capture and return of a renegade member, again as a result of our actions."

"I would like to emphasise," Wakahisa concluded, "that we are not demanding compensation from the Yamada Group for interfering with our mission. Your present actions, on the other hand, could be mistaken for extortion, something ninja traditionally respond to with the use of force.

"Now, you could go back to your superiors, and explain to them that you chose to alienate a powerful ninja team, leading to a confrontation with great collateral damage, and injury and death for a number of expensive hired specialists. Assuming, of course, that you yourself are not caught in the crossfire of a large-scale battle. Or you could tell them that you were not only able to prevent a confrontation between said team and the Yamada Group, but also to extract a formal apology—something we are prepared to provide as a show of good faith. Additionally, you will be returning with valuable information obtained for free, namely the location of our former client's contact, and the time at which they are scheduled to meet."

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There was a few seconds' pause.

"Nice job," Inoue-sensei announced.

o-o-o-o

"You know," Hazō told Inoue-sensei, "that testing thing of yours is getting really old."

Inoue-sensei laughed, and inevitably ruffled his hair. "Oh, this is nothing. My instructor used to use genjutsu to make me believe I'd been captured by Hidden Cloud, and expect me to talk my way out of being tortured for information I didn't have.

"Tip of the day, kids: treasure your fingernails," she added in exactly the same light-hearted tone.

"Anyway, that was pretty smooth. You've really matured in my absence. Which is weird, since I've only been gone a couple of days, but I'm not going to look a gift raptor in the mouth. But it's late, so you guys hurry up and report everything that's happened so I can either start putting out fires, or preferably go to sleep."

o-o-o-o

"So let me get this straight. You took on a job with someone on the run from the yakuza. You didn't cover your tracks well enough to prevent pursuit by a bunch of common-or-garden genin. You didn't secure your camp properly. And then you let down your guard to the point where you lost the civilian escorts, and very nearly lost your client.

"And then you handed the client over to the people you were supposed to protect him from, robbed him, and ran away."

Nobody had anything to say in reply. Impulses of self-justification flickered, and then died unspoken.

Inoue-sensei let the sense of impending doom build for a while. Then, finally, she sighed. "Well, you made a bunch of excellent judgement calls in the moment of crisis. And those judgement calls just about managed to compensate for the spontaneous three-way brain death that led to you getting into that crisis to begin with.

"You also managed to gather a lot of money quickly without exposing your identities or drawing unhealthy amounts of attention, and you've set yourselves up with a potential in with the yakuza. For these reasons, and also because frankly I'm too damn tired, I'm going to go easy on you this time round."

"Um, Inoue-sensei, what about the Liberator's followers? What did you find out?"

o-o-o-o

It was a dark and stormy night. Fujiwara hated dark and stormy nights. They brought back bad memories. So he had a lot of praise to offer his ancestors when Haka spotted a shallow cave, an ideal camping site, exactly on their path through the hills. Better yet, the place was empty, with nothing but a few human-sized boulders that must have fallen from the ceiling in some minor earthquake.

If Fujiwara had ever had any doubts that greater powers were watching over him, they would have vanished when another, even greater miracle occurred—over an hour of rest went by without Yagami griping about one thing or another.

But of course, no joy lasts forever.

"I still say," Yagami insisted, brandishing a leg of ham donated by the last crop of villagers, "that we shouldn't be dealing with these backwater settlements. Nothing but yokels, narrow-minded and worthless to the Liberator's cause even if they did have the sense to join up. Yuni is only a few days away. Soft beds! Cooked food! Uh, I mean, lots of missing-nin to bring back to the fortress! Think of the glory if we were the ones to recruit even a few. Next time it might be us chosen for the samurai experiments."

Fujiwara gave him a long-suffering look as he shifted a little closer to the fire. "We've been over this. Our assigned duty is to drum up support among the common folk. We can't afford to draw attention to the New Samurai Army until we're ready to defend ourselves from the ninja villages. Do you know how many village ninja there are in Yuni, openly or in disguise? No? Well, neither do I. That's why we leave missing-nin recruitment to the Big Four. Unless you want to be captured and tortured for information, and made to betray the Liberator before they devour your soul with their evil ninja magic, be a man and suck it up."

There was a snort from Haka, who wasn't permitted to speak at recruitment gatherings due to his abysmal sense of humour. One more time, Fujiwara wished their group had been assigned one of the sensible hunters. But Haka did the job, at least insofar as his skills kept the group well-provisioned out here in the wilds, and it took levels of seniority Fujiwara didn't have if he wanted to pick his own team. Still, he was patient, just as the Liberator taught. The time was coming when Fujiwara's kind would be uplifted as the new rulers of the world, and the likes of Yagami hopefully sent to the front lines to die for the greater good.

o-o-o-o

Noburi thought he'd hated menial labour before. Now he realised that he'd only been feeling mild dislike. Real hatred took a morning like this one, in which an overfilled warehouse had presented him with an endless series of crate puzzles to solve, while steadily wearing down his stamina. And now he was the one deputised to conduct the group's shopping—all the shopping, all of it—while Kurosawa and Keiko (was it OK to think of her as Keiko?) were doubtless relaxing back at the inn. And she was still giving him the evil eye. It wasn't like he'd been asking anything of her that he wasn't prepared to do himself.

On the plus side, the group had been wise to choose him to represent them. His silver tongue had saved them a lot of gold, so to speak. Three thousand shiny ryō, all the fruit of his labours. He bowed politely to the merchant, and turned to leave the inn (this particular guy being a caravan trader without his own stall at the market, he merely rented an upstairs room and relied on his reputation).

Something made him hesitate as he was leaving the room. He heard two voices coming from downstairs, one rough and gravelly, the other high-pitched and anxious.

"Have there been any groups of three strangers renting a room here recently?"

Oh, crap.

"No, sir. We had four come in yesterday, but mostly it's ones and twos."

"Hmph. I figured. All right, I'm going to go quickly check your rooms. If they're smart, they'll be hiding their numbers anyway. You just stay right here."

"Sir, I... I... I must object to... to... you disturbing the privacy of our guests."

"They humiliated my team and fucked up a paid mission. I am going to get my hands on them, and if you get in my way, I'm going to show you exactly what Hidden Mist does to civilian collaborators. Are. We. Clear?"

"Here are the room keys, sir. Please go right ahead."

Don't panic. Shit shit shit I'm going to die. Don't panic. No time to panic. Shit. What do I do? Window? It's the non-opening kind. Break through it? Noise. He'll hear it and run after me. Can't outrun a chūnin. What if it's a jōnin? Going to die. Shit.

Some part of his brain taking over on autopilot, Wakahisa turned to the shopkeeper. Lie? Threaten? Throw himself on the man's mercy? Oh, he was so going to die.

His brain kicked it up a notch. What the hell, it worked yesterday.

"Listen, I'm not here and you never saw anyone. If that guy finds me, I'm going to have to fight, and in a room this small, there's no way you'll survive a fight between two high-level ninja. So just keep quiet and everything will be fine."

The shopkeeper gave a quick, terrified nod. "Anything for my best customer."

Then Noburi thought faster than he ever had before.

First, he opened his storage scroll, and upended the contents behind the merchant, quickly arranging them so they looked like ordinary trade goods. Then he quickly pulled the mattress off the bed and put that into the storage scroll. Then he transformed into a copy of the mattress.

With admirable presence of mind, the shopkeeper threw the blanket back over Noburi's transformed form, leaving him out of direct line of sight.

A few seconds later, a tall, unshaved, grizzled-looking ninja with a Mist forehead protector walked into the room. "Hey, you. Have you seen any ninja?"

"The shopkeeper shook his head. "Not today, sir."

"Hmph."

The ninja walked over to him and yanked him up by the collar. When nothing happened, he sighed and released him.

"Damn. How many inns does one town need anyways?"

He cast a quick glance over the rest of the room, then muttered what could conceivably have been an apology, and stalked out again.

Five minutes later, Noburi fled—by a reasonably circuitous route—to the inn where the other three were staying. Their time in Yuni appeared to be up.