In the Hidden Mist Infiltration Handbook (which did not exist), sneaking into the same place twice in one night was listed alongside wearing black pyjamas for stealth and creating an alias by spelling your name backwards. Mari could feel the ghost of her genin team leader hovering over her shoulder, radiating disapproval, which was made all the creepier by the fact that he'd still been alive when she left Mist.

Mari froze at the sound of yet more people who didn't seem to know that night-time was for being in bed, for one purpose or another. She quickly slipped into an empty office (because that had worked out so well for her last time), and listened, ready to react at any moment.

"He was supposed to be at our card game half an hour ago." A male voice. Young, twenties? Light, not expecting trouble. "It's not like Kō to be so late. Maybe I should go drag his sorry ass back to the lounge."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck.

"He said he was going to finish the paperwork, and then go dump it at the Hamster's office. Hey, maybe they're still in there, making out." Female. Thirties, maybe. That undertone of casual confidence... chūnin at least, easy, assuming she was a ninja.

"Ick. Thanks for that mental image, Yumi. I'll be taking that with me to my grave. Maybe I should just go find one of those Brotherhood guys and get them to give me a free lobotomy now."

The woman's voice deepened and took on a distant, faux-mystical quality. "We of the Brotherhood of the Sacred Immortal Eight-Headed Serpent have one purpose and one purpose only, and that purpose is not to lift a finger to help our allies or to learn the very basics of social interaction. Now begone, mere mortal, before we harvest you for materials."

Then, in her normal tone, she added "besides, a lobotomy only works if there's something there to remove."

"Remind me why I hang out with you again, Yumi?"

"Because you want to get into my pants. You might even have a shot at it, too, if you weren't so busy chasing Sunohara and Ishida at the same time."

"What? Yumi, you've got the wrong idea–"

The voices finally moved away. Mari rolled her eyes and got on with her task.

o-o-o-o

Hazō slowly, soundlessly pushed down on the door handle and slipped into Akane's room. This was going to be–

"I knew it!"

Time slowed.

There was a pigtailed teenage girl sitting up on the bed in front of him, and she wasn't Akane. Akane's bed was the next one along. Of course she shared a bedroom—Keiko had even mentioned how common this was in her briefing on demographics.

Draw a kunai. Quick throw through the throat. That sitting position would be bad for dodging, and the girl was in her pyjamas with no kunai of her own handy to block.

But that would mean killing an innocent just to maintain secrecy.

Which was a thing ninja sometimes had to do. Inoue-sensei had talked about it many times.

But how would talking to Akane go if the first thing she saw on waking up would be her roommate's dead body?

"I knew you weren't just master and apprentice, you sly dog!" the girl went on in an excited whisper.

Hazō blinked. "Sorry?"

"And now here you are, sneaking into her bedroom at night, just like in the stories. Well, I'll just go for a long walk and let things... develop, shall I?" She stood up.

The last thing Hazō needed was more people wandering around the village while they executed their escape plan.

"No, uh, that's OK. I think I'd rather talk to her somewhere else."

The girl nodded sagely. "A romantic stroll beneath the moonlight. I see why she's so impressed with you, Nishino—you're a real pro. All right, you go wait outside and I'll wake her up."

"Wait outside?" Hazō asked confusedly.

"So she can get changed, duh. Or has your relationship progressed that far already?"

Hazō blushed and fled.

o-o-o-o

Hazō and Akane—it was strange how easily he'd slipped into thinking of his student as Akane—stood outside, looking at each other uneasily.

"Mina said you wanted to talk to me, Nishino-sensei?"

"There's something serious I want to talk to you about, but we'll need more privacy," Hazō told her. "Will you come back to my bedroom with me?"

Akane's eyes widened. Her lips moved soundlessly to spell what looked very much like "Mina was right?"

She looked down at her feet. "Well, I, um... Nishino-sensei, I'm not... I mean... it's not that I..."

Hazō hesitated briefly, then decided that where they were was isolated enough, especially given how time was of the essence.

"Ishihara Akane, I want you to run away with me," he blurted out.

At this, Akane went flaming red and gave a sort of subdued squeak. "S-Sensei..."

Hazō mentally kicked himself. If only he'd chosen rock instead of paper back then, this entire mess would have been Noburi's to deal with.

Then he took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

"Let me start again," Hazō said carefully. "Something very bad has happened, and my team and I have to leave. Tonight. We think that if you stay, you'll be in a lot of trouble because you've been associating with us so much. Do you want to come with us?"

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Akane's blush gradually faded. "OK, Nishino-sensei. Please start from the top. What's happened, and how can I help?"

"Unfortunately, you can't," Hazō said. "A ninja tried to assault Takenaka-sensei, and she was forced to kill him. And she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be at the time. As soon as his body's found, they'll come to interrogate us, because we're newcomers and because our jōnin leader is exactly the kind of person who could pull something like this off. And there's a significant risk that they'll come for you too."

Akane took this in with surprising calm. "If he were here, he'd say that running from the consequences of your actions is unyouthful."

Hazō tensed. Thanks to Mina, Truth Lost in the Fog was no longer viable. Instead, the rest of the team was ready, out of sight, to take Akane out the second it became necessary. But surely there had to be a way...

"But," Akane went on, "he'd also say that abandoning your friends when they're in trouble is far more unyouthful."

Hazō relaxed a little.

"Nishino-sensei, maybe we should just go to the Liberator and confess. He's a good man, I know he'll–"

"Stop," Hazō said sharply. "Ishihara, do you really believe all this... this propaganda? That the man in the fortress is some kind of magical reincarnation of a hero from a hundred years ago?"

"I–"

"That he originally invented the samurai arts, only now he has to re-invent them in secret, and people keep vanishing into the depths of the fortress and aren't even allowed to send messages back because they're just training?"

"But–"

"That there is a flourishing, rapidly-growing village with the money to pay dozens of ninja in the kami-forsaken far north of the Iron Country, and they're doing all this on pure hard work and dedication?"

"Nishino-sensei, I know it seems hard to believe..." Akane looked like she was casting around for words.

Hazō made his final argument. "Ishihara, just tell me this. Where do you think this is going to end? The Liberator's setting himself up as the enemy of every ninja village in the world. What's going to happen when he goes to war? They're all going to converge on him and the New Samurai Army, and everybody here is going to die. No matter how many attacks he can beat back, do you really think the forces he's got assembled here are going to mean anything once the Kage come knocking?"

Akane looked at him silently.

"If you believe that... then why are you here?"

"We're spies," Hazō very quietly explained. "There's someone powerful who believes that the Liberator's actions are going to cause enough chaos that, combined with everything else, it's going to trigger the Fourth Great Ninja War. And he wants to prevent that. He made us an offer we couldn't refuse, and we came up here to gather information for him. Now we're going back."

Akane took this in without comment.

"I've been where you are, Ishihara," Hazō said more gently. "I was exiled from my village and marked for death by the very people I grew up with. I was forced to struggle for survival in a hostile world. And then, suddenly, it seemed like I finally had comrades and a place to belong."

Akane was looking down, her face concealed in shadow. "What happened?"

"Someone I trusted showed me that the world we were building was a soap bubble, and told me that I could run, or I could die with the others when it burst. I ran, and it's the only reason I'm still alive."

No one said anything for a while.

"What if this time is different?" Akane finally asked. "What if the Liberator's dream is worth believing in, and if I abandon it I'll never find anything like it again?"

Hazō just looked at her, and slowly, the tension in her seemed to melt away, leaving only a sense of vulnerability.

"Nishino-sensei," she whispered, "what am I supposed to do?"

Seeing Nishino Kaoru's faint reflection in her brown eyes, Hazō felt the world grow a little quieter, a little more still, and for once he knew what to say.

He reached out and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder, choosing for the moment to ignore the fact that she was taller than him.

"Ishihara, let me share a teaching of Righteous Face Punching Style with you. When we're still children, other people dream our dreams for us—parents, teachers, team leaders, all the way up to the Kage, know what we should want and who we should try to become. Enter the Academy. Ace the tests. Beat the final exam and become a genin. Become a taijutsu expert. Master sealcrafting. Or maybe specialise in stealth and deception. Pass the Chūnin Exam and get your own squad. Eventually, give your life for the village and be remembered as a hero.

"To enter the Springtime of Youth is to let all of that go and to dream your own dreams.

"Other people's dreams are like training weights. They have their uses for a while, but there comes a time when they are nothing more than a burden, and you have to cast them off in order to do what you truly want to do. Only a dream born from the blaze of your own youth will give you the strength to make it come true. And when you do find such a dream, you will be ready to punch fate itself in the face if it tries to get in your way."

Akane looked at him with awe. "I'm... I'm sorry I doubted you. You really are just like him, Nishino-sensei.

"I trust you, and I will follow wherever you go."

o-o-o-o

"Wake up!"

If the shouting and the prodding didn't do the trick, the splash of cold water in her face certainly brought Akane back to her senses. Where was she? What had happened to Nishino-sensei and his team?

Everything seemed kind of hazy. Was she concussed?

Never mind. As he always said, a blow or ten to the head never stopped a real fighter. The important part was to keep going and stay aware of your surroundings.

"What... happened?" Akane asked woozily. "Who are you?"

"Tch. You don't recognise me?" the half-masked ninja demanded unreasonably. "I didn't mean to hit you that hard. Anyway, we caught up with you four days out. Muramatsu drew off the jōnin, and Bōsatsu, Mirai and I fought the genin. Luckily, we took them completely by surprise, and between Bōsatsu's fists, Mirai's kusari-gama and my ninjutsu, it wasn't a hard fight. We've got two tied to a tree over there, and once Muramatsu gets back, we'll hunt down the third—he couldn't have gone far."

Akane very nearly asked "are they OK?", but managed to bite her tongue. Instead, she looked around. They appeared to still be in the same woods northeast of the Fortress of White Steel, but her exact surroundings were unfamiliar. The ninja in front of her, wearing what she thought was a Hidden Rock-style leather breastplate over an off-white uniform, with an equally off-white mask over his mouth, was staring down at her with a frown as she slumped back against a tree.

"We'll give them a full, thorough interrogation once we get them back to the fortress," the ninja went on. "For now, it's time for your debriefing. I see your infiltration was successful, so you must have plenty of information for me."

Akane did her best to focus through the blurriness. She'd been captured. Nishino-sensei was in trouble, and so were Takenaka and the rest. They needed her. But she was still alive, and free, and for some reason the enemy thought she was one of them. Even though she'd failed to protect her new comrades, she was being given a second chance.

Just like her bloody journey north had given her a second chance to learn to live and fight like a real ninja after she'd failed to so much as graduate. Just like the Liberator had given her a second chance to be part of something bigger after her gullibility got her exiled from Leaf. Just like Nishino-sensei had given her a second chance to learn the burning passion of youth after she'd given up on ever seeing Rock Lee again.

Akane was fed up with being the kind of person who needed second chances. She would save them, no matter what it took, and then, with Nishino-sensei's help, she would learn to get her life right the first time.

To begin with, she needed information. "I'm still feeling dizzy," she said, partly truthfully. "Where are we?"

"Still more or less where we caught up with you. We're going to rendezvous with another team camped six miles to the west tomorrow, get medical care, and hand over the prisoners for initial interrogation and transport back to the fortress.

"Now," the ninja said, "I know I knocked you out—and sorry about that, I wanted to maintain your cover for when we interrogate them—but it's time for you to focus. I need to know what you've learned."

Just as Akane was trying to think of a suitable response, another unfamiliar ninja came into view. He stopped sharply when he saw her.

"Ken, what in holy hell do you think you're doing? That's Ishihara Akane—she's not on the informer list, she's just some random genin. And apparently a traitor genin at that."

A chill went down Akane's spine as both ninja drew kunai.

o-o-o-o

Next time, Hazō promised himself as he watched the enemy camp, everybody was going to be on watch while Inoue-sensei performed surprise genjutsu.

But for now he had bigger concerns. It was down to him to beat three-to-one odds and rescue the team, and he hadn't the faintest idea how.