"Higher! You can do it!" Hazō shouted, leaping into another tuck-jump. "Feel the springtime of your youth burning within you! It is a fire that lifts you up!"

"Yes, sempai!" Akane shouted. It was actually more of a gasp; the girl was in excellent condition for a civilian, meaning mediocre condition for a ninja, and was having trouble keeping up.

"Rejoice, for we have completed one hundred and ninety-two tuck jumps!" Hazō shouted, leaping again. "There are only three hundred and eight to go, and then we shall practice our Youthful Punching!"

Akane groaned and pushed herself to continue, even though every muscle in her body was about to go on strike.

o-o-o-o

"Hey there," said the young genin, sliding onto the bench next to her. "Mind if I join you?"

Kei's heart hammered in her chest. She'd done it exactly as Inoue-sensei had told her: settle on the bench with your book, read for a minute or two, then peek up under your bangs to make eye contact with your target. Quickly look down at your book again and hunch slightly as though you were embarrassed. (That last part had been easy.)

Boys are simple creatures, Inoue had said. You're still a little too young to go for sexy, but you're rocking the 'shy and vulnerable' thing. Show a tiny bit of interest, let them come to you. Look uncomfortable but interested, encourage them to talk about themselves. Here, let's practice. She had then henged into a teenaged boy and engaged in the most absolutely horrific three hours of ninja training Kei had ever endured. Physical training until she puked? Pah. Getting beaten unconscious in sparring? Child's play. Practicing flirting with her beautiful twenty-something incredibly talented and skilled sensei on whom, yes, she had to admit, she had a bit of a crush? Oh kami, kill me now.

Sadly, the earth had stubbornly refused to open up and swallow her.

"I'm Iseki," the boy said. "I'm a ninja." The last was said proudly, with a thumb to his chest.

Kei swallowed and forced herself to look up, remembering at the last moment to keep her chin slightly down and widen her eyes just a bit. "I know," she said softly. "I have...been watching you practice. You are very skilled."

Other boys were starting to drift over, breaking off their taijutsu- or weapons practice.

"Hey, is this guy bothering you?" one of the boys asked. "Geez, Iseki, don't crowd the poor girl."

"Shut your face, Ichikawa," Iseki said. "I wasn't bothering her." He turned to Keiko. "I wasn't, right?"

Kei peeked up at him again, then shook her head and visibly forced herself to look up at the other boys. "He is not bothering me," she said quietly. "Thank you for your concern, though. You are all very kind, as well as strong."

The boys—all thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds—puffed up at the praise. "Well, sure," one of them said, crouching down with one knee to the ground and his arms leaning comfortably on his bent leg. He wasn't quite subtle enough about pushing his shoulders back and flexing his pecs. "After all, we're ninja—like the Liberator says, it's our job to protect people. What's your name?"

Kei ignored the faint wisps of killing intent rising from where Iseki sat to her left. "Kobayashi Aimi," she said. "It is a great honor to meet you." She forced herself to smile, meanwhile doing everything she could to hide her desire to melt into a puddle of embarrassment. "Are you from the village originally?"

"Nah," Ichikawa said. "Me and my sensei came here about four months ago. Before this loser showed up." He jabbed a dismissive finger at Iseki.

"Hey!" Iseki said, jumping to his feet.

"Please do not be cruel," Kei said. "It is unfitting such a powerful ninja. And...." She paused deliberately, swallowed visibly and twined her fingers together. "I do not think that Iseki is a loser," she said quietly. "He is very kind, and very strong."

Iseki executed a perfect Grin of Smugness No Jutsu while Ichikawa glowered.

"There seem to be so many ninja here," Kei said. "I think I've seen at least ten."

"Nah," one of the other boys said. "Way more than that. Thirty-seven, I think? And most of us are strong, too."

Don't give more attention to any specific one, Inoue-sensei had said. Give all of them just a little so they keep competing for more. "You all seem strong to me," Kei said, looking around the circle with soulful eyes. "Even in practice. I feel very safe, knowing that there are such strong men protecting me."

The boys pretty much didn't have a chance after that. Kei maintained the mask that Inoue had so humiliatingly drilled her on, but all the while her Mori brain was taking mental notes as perfect as any scribe could take on paper.

o-o-o-o

"Not bad," Inoue said. "Thirty-seven ninja, none more recently arrived than five months ago, who found the place already mostly built and ninja in place. That's a long-term presence, but it's only recently that they started going out recruiting. They must think they've passed some threshold and are ready to spread out."

"Yes, sensei," Keiko said. "Also, the money doesn't add up. There's too much of it—all of them are being lavishly paid. Even the least skilled among them is earning five thousand ryo a month. This place has no trade, no source of income that I have been able to identify, yet I estimate they are spending nearly a million ryo a month. Who has that kind of money?"

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Inoue frowned, then turned to the boys. "Well?" she asked. "Pop quiz: answer the lady's question."

"Uh," Hazō said, mentally scrambling. "It's too much for any individual. Maybe a trade consortium that wants to develop their own guards?"

"What's their motivation?" Noburi asked. "They could hire ninja escorts for every caravan for a fraction of that price. And they have to realize that setting up a non-ninja military force is going to attract attention from the villages." He shook his head. "That would be true of any civilian force."

"Very good," Inoue said. "So, if it's not civilian, what does that leave?"

"One of the villages?" Noburi said. "That doesn't make sense, though. Why would a ninja village be developing an army intended to fight ninja?"

"Why indeed?" Inoue said. "When we know the answer to that, we'll have the whole mystery. Noburi, what did you get from your fanbase?"

The genin reached into his pocket and pulled out his notepad, flipping to a heavily be-scrawled page. Before he could say a word, Inoue yanked it out of his hands. "Ninja can't afford written notes," she said. "What, you're just going to leave all your intel lying around for someone to find? C'mon, tell me what you got."

Noburi blushed but forced himself to answer. "There's twelve blacksmiths, and the other trades appear to be in proportion to that. There's swordsmiths, papermakers, tailors, everything you'd expect from a town this size. A lot of the people are runaways from somewhere else, but no one I talked to had been here for more than six months, and they all said that the place was pretty well established when they showed up."

"Interesting," Inoue said. "Hazō, what about you?"

Hazō rubbed his bruised ribs. "There are a surprising number of ninja for a civilian settlement, and they skew more towards chūnin than I would have expected. The only genin are students of a chūnin or jōnin, not lone actors. None of them want to talk about where they got their training, but I recognized the fighting style of three of them. They're from Mist, and they studied under Shiomi-sensei in the Academy. He trains the gifted students, and he favors a style with much heavier emphasis on CQC than the other instructors. His favorite combination leads with a kick-feint, then follows with a sweeping elbow to the face and a stamp to the knee. The elbow is intended to cut the forehead so that blood drips into the eyes in case they avoid the stamp finisher. I had three different chūnin try it on me."

"Interesting," Inoue said. "Any of them likely to recognize you?"

Hazō shook his head. "I don't think so. They're all older, late thirties maybe. They would have graduated before any of us entered the Academy, and I don't remember ever seeing them around."

"Okay," Inoue said. "If there's a Mist presence we'll need to be careful. Let's talk contingency plans."

o-o-o-o

Inoue slipped effortlessly past the guards, running up the wall of the temple and dropping down into the courtyard on the inside of the gate. After three days of poking around the village it was time to get a look inside the sanctum sanctorum and find out what this samurai business was all about.

She could hear kiais and the thud of synchronized movement from inside the main building. Carefully, she slipped inside, closing the massive door softly behind her. It was late and the building was only lightly lit with paper lanterns hung at intervals on the walls. The sound was coming from down the hall to her right, so she padded towards it, passing several closed doors that held nothing more interesting than offices or supply cabinets. Her soft leather sandals made not a whisper on the polished wooden floor.

After three doors the hall turned ninety degrees left. She paused and extended a mirror just enough that she could see what was on the far side.

Thirty feet down the hall was an arched doorway eight feet high made of heavy oak. The sounds of the training hall—clashing bokken, kiais, the thump of bodies hitting the mat—were coming from inside. Unfortunately, there was a guard at the door.

She studied him in silence for a minute, then pulled the mirror back and thought. His musculature, general build, and the way he stood suggested that he had some ninja training, but no jōnin would be guarding a door. She could undoubtedly beat him in a fight, but that would blow her cover. She could trap him in Truth Lost in the Fog, make him believe that she was somone who was allowed to be there. She'd need to be careful; her kinjutsu was powerful, but it couldn't erase anything that happened more than a few seconds before the genjutsu started—basically, just enough time to blank the memory of being caught in the genjutsu. Plus, there was the price. She shook her head. No, it wasn't worth it. She straightened up and retreated the way she'd come.

She'd gone barely ten steps before she heard footsteps coming towards her. She cursed silently; she was trapped between the guard and this new person.

She glanced around; the area was too well-lit to be able to cling to the ceiling without being seen, and there was nothing she could henge into that would plausibly be found in this empty stretch of hall. She ducked into an office, pulling the door shut softly behind her. Just in case, she shifted into the form of Ukiyo Jun, an early-twenties girl with a serious rack and laughing green eyes that had literally charmed the pants off more guys than she could remember. Hopefully, whomever was coming wasn't going to this particular office, but it wasn't all that unlikely.

And, of course he was. The footsteps—male, young, not too heavy, some corner of her brain automatically cataloged—stopped right outside the door. Inoue turned quickly and leaned back on the edge of the desk, her hands behind her and one foot up.

The door opened and in came a sandy-haired young man, about her own age. Not bad looking, with callouses on his hands that indicated taijutsu and weapons training. Left-handed, body language quiet and maybe a bit shy—

He stopped and stared at her, dumbfounded. "Mari?" he asked.

She blinked, straightening up from her carefully posed position. "Hello," she said. "My name is Ukiyo Jun. I—"

"No it's not," he said. "It's Inoue Mari. Don't you remember me, Mari? I'm Eiji. Ko Eiji. I was in your year at the Academy." He smiled shyly. "I remember all of your henges, and the way you like to eat pickled ginger one delicate nibble at a time. And the way you brush your hair back when you're frustrated. And the way you fight, like poetry. I...I never had the nerve to talk to you, and I was only there for a year, but I remember you. Have you come to join? That's wonderful!"

Inoue sighed. Lovely. Who was this little weasel, anyway? She flipped through her memories, trying to identify him, but came up blank. Very vaguely, she thought she remembered some creepy kid making eyes at her on the training ground, but she couldn't have brought his face to mind for all the tea in the Elemental Nations. What was he doing here...? He said he'd only done a year at the Academy; did he drop out or get expelled? He'd addressed her with her first name, an incredible presumption that suggested some kind of fixation. Oh, this just got better and better.

"I'm so happy to see you," he burbled. "I knew we'd meet again, I knew it. It has always been fated for us to be together. Have you been assigned a place to live? I know most of the houses are full, so you can stay with me. I'll talk to the Liberator about it—"

She stopped the babble of increasingly creepifying words with a straight-fingered jab to his throat, crushing his trachea and preventing him from calling out. She followed up with a knee to the groin, doubling him over to present his neck for an elbow-drop that shattered the spine at C-4, paralyzing him instantly. He'd suffocate in minutes.

Quickly, she stuffed his body under the desk and slipped out into the hall. She and the kids were the newest ninja in town; a murder coming right on the heels of their arrival, in a secure area that no civilian could have accessed? She and her team would be the very first suspects. It was time to get out of town.