"No," Keiko said.

Hazou blinked. "What?"

"I said no, I am not going to focus my training efforts on stealth," she said, vibrating in place as she pushed chakra through her muscles for no purpose other than to use it up. Empty your coils, then let them refill; the nausea and muscle aches made the training miserable, but it was the only way to stretch your coils enough to increase capacity quickly.

"Ohkaayy," Hazou said. "Why not? We're about to go on a stealth-focused mission."

"Our opponents on this mission are civilians and genin," she said. "I am skilled enough at stealth for that. Going forward, I need more chakra for summoning. I was only able to summon Pankurashun because I was able to use Noburi's chakra water to overcharge my capacity. I cannot rely on that in an emergency and it has harmful long-term effects if used regularly. Right now I have a mere two contracts; Pandaa is a non-combatant and Pankurashun is not willing to be summoned. I need to gain more contracts and I need to have the capacity to summon them. The summoning contract is my primary contribution to this team—"

"No it isn't!" Hazou said. "Why would you think that? Keiko, you're an incredible fighter and a brilliant tactician. Even before you got the contract you were an amazing asset to this team."

"Thank you for the support," Keiko said politely. "If you'll excuse me, I need to focus."

o-o-o-o

"Here," Kagome said, his tone darkly satisfied. "This will work. Keep an eye out." He knelt down to unseal a bundle of poles and started digging two of them into the ground so that they just barely poked up through the clump of bushes he and his partner knelt behind. Akane nodded and stretched up tall so she could see in all directions. She carefully said nothing; this was not the best time to talk to Kagome.

To say that the sealmaster was not thrilled about being here would be an understatement. He was onboard with the "conquer the world and turn the stinking stinkers into a lovely red mist against the wall before blowing up the wall and then doing a victory dance on the rubble" plan, but it didn't mean he enjoyed leaving their safe and comfortable lair in the woods. For the first time in years he'd actually been enjoying doing seal research—indeed, he'd managed to remember the thing that had been his single pleasure through most of his adult life. The fact that he needed to abandon that idyllic life in order to conquer the world so he could do his victory dance on the aforementioned bloody-mist-soaked wall had him feeling generally grumpy and twitchy.

Should the team need to come out of the resort hot, whoever was pursuing them was going to discover just how grumpy Kagome was feeling.

o-o-o-o

"Not bad," Mari said, studying Akane's expression. "Relax your forehead a little more. Yes, like that. Let's try it again. Remember, correct yourself on a minor detail."

"Hello," Akane said, smiling brightly and bowing to her sensei. "My name is Arakida Kanna. My father and I are bakers and we just arrived from Wave on Thursday—well, Wednesday night—and we're looking for new customers. Would you be interested in a regular delivery contract?"

"Not bad," Mari said, her tone indicating that 'not bad' was the accurate phrase. "Still needs some work, though. Okay, let's practice microexpressions again. What did I just show?"

"Happiness, sensei," Akane said immediately. "The corners of your eyes crinkled and your cheeks were raised."

"Good!" Mari said, clapping the genin on the shoulder. "Excellent. We'll make a spy out of you yet." She suddenly laughed. "And you, young lady, just showed me a microexpression of unhappiness. Don't worry, I promise I'll be gentle."

o-o-o-o

"Ahhh," Hazou said, leaning back in the hot water with unfeigned satisfaction. Say what you would about the safety and relative comfort of their hidden forest cave, relaxing in a hot mineral spring was amazing. As was having a proper toilet nearby instead of a latrine two miles away.

"Not bad, eh?" said one of his fellow bathers, a red-faced and fleshy man in his fifties with a bald spot that was still painfully obvious no matter how much hair he swirled around it. He lazily waved one hand in the air to indicate the entire facility. "I should have come here ages ago. Much better than that Mizuchi place." He snorted. "Do you know, they don't even have guards there? Random commoners were wandering in all the time. I had to share a bath with a dockworker. Ugh."

Hazou made a sympathetic noise. "Ugh. How horrible—you're right, this is much better." He offered a casual nod that was the relaxing-in-a-hot-spring equivalent of a bow. "I'm Lord Oisha Dai, pleasure to meet you." He laughed self-deprecatingly. "And before you ask, yes, just a hill daimyo. Tiny little place on the border of Earth, but it's been in the family twenty generations, so that's something."

The other man smiled and nodded. "Lord Kuwabara Seiji. No shame in being born to a small holding, Dai," he said magnanimously. "Pity this isn't the good old days, right? Used to be you could train up a group of samurai, hire some ninja for backup, and claim all the land you liked." He took a pull from his sake cup and shook his head sadly. "Glorious times, those. A man could really be a man back then." He tossed back the rest of his sake and refilled it from the bottle on the ledge beside him before waving the bottle in Hazou's general direction. The genin took it with a grateful smile, poured some into the cup that the man handed him, and took a polite sip.

"You ever fight?" Kuwabara asked slyly. "Nothing gets the blood going faster. Sometimes I think about starting a mercenary company, eh? Could be great fun, riding around having adventures. Kill the odd chakra beast here, carve up a few bandits. If things heat up any more between Fire and Mist there might even be work there, securing borders and what not. Keep the peasants in line while the ninja are fighting. Great fun!"

Images blinked through Hazou's mind in a series of lightning flashes: the town near Hidden Swamp with the fierce women guards and the fisherfolk and weavers from the lake town in Iron—people carving a life from a harsh world through sheer grit. The merchants in Yuni, running caravans that were the lifesblood of a hundred tiny villages. The civilians in the Liberator's camp, their spirits soaring at the simple opportunity to build lives for themselves.

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Hazou nodded politely to Kuwabara and forced his mouth into the closest approximation of a smile he could manage.

Kuwabara took one look at Hazou and went sheet white. He fumbled his cup back onto the ledge, not even noticing that he'd knocked it over in his haste to scramble out.

"Just remembered," he babbled, wrapped his robe around him with shaking fingers. "Have a massage I need to get to. Terribly sorry, lovely to meet you. Enjoy your soak. Yes. Right. Goodbye!" He rushed away.

Hazou watched him go with a feeling of resignation. He wasn't sure if Inoue-sensei would laugh at him or scold him about this, but she was definitely going to give him a furious hair-ruffling.

o-o-o-o

He'd known exactly what was coming, he knew when it was going to happen, and he'd planned carefully. He was across the table from Inoue and he actually started dodging before he even spoke the words. Somehow, she still got him, although only barely. He sighed and sat back down, combing his hair and swearing to himself that some day, some day, she would miss.

"So, Hazou pooched it in the baths," Inoue said. "How about the rest of you. What did you get?"

Noburi and Keiko exchanged looks. "Go ahead," Noburi said. "You were the one who found it."

"We found a significant point of attack," Keiko said. "Poisoning or drugging the food supplies for the dogs would be straightforward. Doing the same for human supplies is feasible, but it would be difficult to make it useful.

"Wakamoto, the company that provides the food for the resort, supplies the dog food as well. The dogs are fed a mash of meat, lard, and vegetables. Wakamoto makes up a fresh batch every week and delivers it the following day. He uses a vat with an automatic stirring apparatus powered by a water wheel; the vat is frequently unattended and if drugs or poison were dropped in they would be thoroughly mixed into the mash without anyone noticing. The next batch will be made tomorrow and shipped in the following morning."

"Nice one," Inoue said. "Really nice. Getting the dogs out of the way would make things a lot easier. You mentioned that drugging the humans would be harder. Why is that?"

"Wakamoto's cold room is in the back of his shop, and his shop is his living quarters," Noburi said. "Because they live there they don't actively guard the place. It wouldn't be too much trouble for us to get in at night, but civilians aren't going to pull it off. We could put whatever we want in the food, but there's no way to predict who would get what or when. Once the food gets to the resort it's kept in the icehouse—dog food and human food both. The resort's icehouse is actually pretty well guarded; they've had trouble with staff pilfering the tasty stuff in the past. There's always two guards, and the patrols check in on an irregular schedule but at least once every two hours. Also, they've got the strictest inventory system I've ever seen outside of the Academy. The manager, Sekine Shou, is a fussy little guy." (A hint of approval flickered across Keiko's face.)

"Okay," Inoue said. "That gives us a way to clear out the dogs, which is good. I managed to get up close to the owner's daughter and have some girl talk. Her name is Honami, she's twenty-three, doesn't get out much these days. She's having a tough pregnancy—lots of pain and swelling, nausea, the works. They've had herbalists and even a med-nin in; it helps, but not much. Fortunately the baby is due in six weeks so it's almost over."

Inoue leaned back, smiling. "Bright girl," she said. "Reads, writes, and can do basic math. She's actually pretty well read, all things considered. She's got the entire staff wrapped around her little finger, and was cadging lessons from them since about a minute after she learned to make puppy-dog eyes. Her dad's furious about it—thinks that it's inappropriate for a girl to be educated. There's a lot of resentment there, actually. Her father's been trying to marry her off for years, and I have a feeling she got pregnant just to keep that from happening. Still, Dad's hung the moon about having a grandson, so he's willing to forgive his daughter 'for being a strumpet.'"

"What if the child is female?" Keiko asked.

"That could be bad," Inoue said. "He's rich, powerful in a merchant sort of way and used to getting what he wants. Doesn't deal well with rejection, apparently, and what he wants is a grandson. He wanted a grandson from wedlock, but I think he'll take what he can get. If it's a girl, I'm not sure what he'll do. Give it to the orphanage would be my guess."

"What about the ninja?" Kagome asked. "There was supposed to be a ninja living there. And those twerps on the walls, of course." He sniffed dismissively.

"Ah, yes," Inoue said. "Royama Mariko. Lovely woman. She's from Earth, got hurt in a fierce battle with a chakra dragon that attacked Iwagakure."

Hazou's eyebrows shot up. "Really?"

"No," Inoue said, laughing. "She was embarrassed to admit it, but I eventually weaseled it out of her: she's a jonin and her baby brother recently got promoted to chunin. They were having the celebration here, she got drunk at the party, and she fell off a table while sword-dancing. Her brother and his friends had to report back to Iwa for duty, but she's on medical leave while her leg heals."

"Wait, what?" Noburi asked. "She fell off a table?"

"I told you she was embarrassed about it," Inoue said, grinning. "The funny part is that I think she really did—she's a taijutsu type, and if she were going to self-injure just so she could skive off then she wouldn't have chosen something that would reduce her mobility. Also, the woman can't lie for beans." She winked at Akane. "I don't suppose you have any family in Iwa, do you kid?"

Akane blushed furiously but laughed.

"Anyway, she's healing up nicely," Inoue continued. "I think she's actually ready for duty now but she's milking it for all the time she can get. I sure would."

She sighed. "So. We've got all this wonderful intel. Anyone notice the one piece of information we have not managed to get?"

"Where our target is?" Noburi asked. "I haven't seen a single person with red and green on them."

"And the prize goes to the water master," Inoue said. "Gotta say, I hate missions like this. I don't mind ones that take a few months to set up, but I don't like it when the location of the objective isn't known. Too many ways for things to go wrong when you might not even be operating in the right area."

No one had anything to say to that.

After a few seconds of awkward silence, Inoue glanced at the water clock on the mantel. "Come on, it's getting late," she said. "Everyone hit the sack, I want to be out early tomorrow. According to Honami that big important guest is supposed to be arriving in the morning. His name is Joutano, he's some lord she's never heard of, and he demanded their very best suite for himself and his friends."

o-o-o-o

The next day Inoue and Hazou were at the resort—she was sunbathing on a deck lounger, lying on her belly with her top down and her head shaded by a wide straw hat as she sipped on a cold drink and read, in a very lazy fashion, through a poorly-written romance novel that she'd borrowed from the resort's library. He was a few dozen yards away, participating in an abstract painting class alongside a group of civilians who were mostly thirty years older than Hazou's henged twenty-something appearance.

All activities screeched to a halt at the arrival of Lord Joutaro and entourage.

"Who do I have to bribe to get some service here?!" the barrel-chested giant bellowed, the very moment that his foot touched the ground inside the resort's fence. "HO! Manager! Get some people out here to take our bags!" He strode towards the reception house, the ponytail of long white hair bobbing behind him serving only to emphasize the oversized tachi he wore across his back, angled for a left-hand draw.

Joutaro had taken hardly two steps when a pack of bellhops descended on the tired-looking woman and the clearly embarrassed teenage boy that were trailing along in his wake. They snatched the bags out of the hands of both woman and boy and hustled off with a hasty volley of bows, asking if the most honored guests would please deign to follow them to this humble resort's best quarters which they dearly hoped would be adequate for the honored and mighty guests.

Inoue groaned and pulled the hat all the way down over her head. Of course Joutaro was wearing the red-and-green scarf. Of course.