Arisu stared at the man slumped against the wall with no life in his eyes. The numerous gashes and bruises, the kunai handle sticking out of the chest, and the blood on and around the body told a story of a struggle better than any amount of words could. It was a horrifying sight, but Arisu continued to stare in an effort to find the chain of events that had led to this.

Turning away from the man, she looked to the middle of the building's ground-floor lobby, where another body lay with a sword sticking out its gut, surrounded by a pool of blood staining the dirty gray floor.

Two dead men on the ground floor of the apartment complex didn't come as a surprise to her. She had seen many similar situations, especially in the type of neighborhood they were called to. And the blade tracks and shuriken in the walls, sole prints on the ceiling, and light jutsu damage around the scene made it evident they were dealing with shinobi.

'What a waste,' she sighed to herself.

Arisu saw Kano enter the building and walked to the second man to join Takuma.

"Is everything tagged?" asked Kano.

"Yes, ma'am," Arisu replied.

Takuma, who was observing the second man, pointed over at the dead body with a pen as he spoke, "Brutal… A lot of bruising on the front of the neck, from the lower leg I can tell that the other guy was really trying to hobble this one by striking the calf and knee… and look at this," Takuma pointed at the man's left eye, "he even tried to poke the eye out— that other guy was trying to impair him to get in the murder strike. Straight for the liver." Takuma touched the sword blade with his pen, making a ting against the metal.

"Same for that one," Arisu pointed at the man against the wall.

"Any signs of a third party?" asked Kano.

Arisu shook her head. "No, from the looks of it, only these two were involved." The wounds and state of the violence around the scene were congruent to a scene created by two people fighting each other. "We will have to look deeper after tagging everything to know for sure."

Kano squatted by the dead body and observed in silence for a minute before sighing,

"Well, haven't we seen this before," she sighed.

Takuma titled his head.

"Any identification?" Kano asked.

"We got one of them," Arisu held up the shinobi registration card she got from the dead shinobi.

Takuma held up the same for the second guy.

"Good. Yup, this checks out. Let's wrap this up," Kano took the registration cards from them.

"What was that about?" Arisu asked as Kano walked away to the other body.

Takuma stared at Kano. From the looks of it, he also found her behavior strange, but he shrugged.

"She will tell us later. Come on, I want to get out of here," he said.

Arisu frowned. It was Kano who had told them to come to the crime scene to inspect it. And she knew that the Homicide department was swamped and that they had to shift case load to other departments. It wasn't that Organized Crime didn't handle killings— in fact, they handled more killings than Homicide due to the fact that there were a lot of deaths connected to organized crime.

The fact that Kano had ordered them meant she knew the connection.

'Why not tell us right away,' she thought.

——

.

"We got confirmation on the identity from the two we found in the Rabani building," Kano said to Arisu and Takuma after calling them into her office.

Arisu furrowed her brows a smidge. They already knew the two men from their shinobi registration, and they had already gone to their houses and talked to their neighbors about them. She was confused as to what confirmation Kano was talking about.

"I see you're confused," Kano said to Arisu, surprising her.

"… Yes. What's this about, ma'am?"

"Close the door," Kano said to Takuma, who stood up and closed the office door. "I will preface what I'm about to tell you by saying that you are not allowed to discuss what I'm about to tell you with anyone outside the Force. Don't gossip about it with others if it's unrelated to a case— and if you have any questions, come to me, and I'll tell you what you need to know…."

Arisu was even more confused but stood up straighter as she was about to get some answers. In the couple days of the investigation, the case seemed to be an open and shut case, with the two shinobi killing each other over some conflict. The friends of one man didn't know the other, and neither did their close mission team members and peers— which did raise questions about the reason behind the fight.

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They hadn't found the signs of a third party on the crime scene— but that didn't mean there wasn't one involved indirectly.

The crime scene was called the Rabani building, a cheap apartment building in one of the downtrodden and low-income districts of the Hidden Leaf. Neither men's home were anywhere near the Rabani building, and after some digging around, they found that one of the men was 'seeing' a woman who lived in the building. After they interrogated her, the woman admitted that she knew one of the men but refuted knowing the other one. From the looks of it, she wasn't lying. So, they eliminated the theory of a love triangle gone wrong.

One of the theories they were considering was of an assassination. One of the shinobi was asked to kill another one. It was illegal, and the punishments were severe for the person issuing the hit and the assassin— but it still happened here and there in a village full of shinobi. Arisu was following that theory and had asked for their bank records to see if she could find something there; they were supposed to be delivered tomorrow afternoon.

"We will be closing the investigation," Kano's words snapped Arisu out of her thoughts. "The two killed each other; that's it."

"What! Why?!" Arisu stood up from her chair.

"Sit down; I'm not done yet," Kano said.

Arisu reluctantly sat down and stared hard at Kano, her eyes demanding an answer.

Kano sighed, "… Those two were part of something called The Ring. Do you know what that is?"

Ring? Arisu shook her head. "No, what is it?"

"It's an underground gladiator arena where shinobi fight each other in front of an audience for money," Kano's words shocked Arisu. "Those two were fighters in the Ring, and one of our contacts in the Ring tells us that they had a fight a week back. The loss didn't sit well with Kimoto, and well… he decided to have a rematch. The contact tells us that Kimoto was very dissatisfied with the fight and wanted to reschedule one, but the Ring refused to do so any time soon, which might have led him to find Mihara at his sidepiece's home.

Now you have the motive, and from the crime scene, we don't see a third-party involvement. A clear close-and-shut case. Process it as such."

Arisu was shocked and turned to look at Takuma, who looked to be taking in the information.

"How… is that still going on?" Arisu asked. She knew for a fact that shinobi weren't allowed to fight each other as a sport. Any sort of underground combat was prohibited.

And from Kano's words, she clearly knew about it; the Police Force knew about it. If they knew about it, why had they let something like that exist?

"It's an open secret of sorts. We know about it, but we don't do anything about it because we are told to do so," Kano explained. "It's used as a tool to train Hidden Leaf shinobi's combat preparedness. The fighters that fight each other get better due to the exposure to combat and earn while doing it, allowing them to grow stronger if they wish to do so.

Helps a lot of clanless shinobi develop…."

Arisu once again glanced at Takuma beside her. He must've noticed her looking at him because he looked back. He didn't have much expression on his face, but that was him most of the time.

Takuma turned back to Kano. He asked, "You identified them instantly when you arrived at the scene. Did you know one of them or both from before and that they were from the Ring?"

"I didn't know them."

"Then how?"

"It doesn't happen often, but we do see cases like this. I've seen a few of them in the last few years. The Ring fighters all fight a certain way, influenced by each other, it keeps changing year by year, but some things are carried over… I have formed an eye for the injuries which Ring fighters usually inflict— it's not anything unique and there are other unrelated cases with similar injuries, so we usually confirm with our contact inside the Ring. But this time, we were given the information by our contact beforehand that an incident had happened."

Arisu was still reeling from the discovery of an apparent underground gladiator. She had lived her entire life in the Hidden Leaf, and to suddenly find out that there was something so big was jarring when her first exposure to it was through a double murder.

"How big is it?" she asked.

"Bigger than you might think," said Kano. "It has been here in the village for a long time. You'll find people older than me and people as young as you in the Ring."

"Fuck me," Arisu cursed.

Takuma asked, "This Ring…. What is our relationship with them?"

"Not much. We know to ignore their operations, and they make sure not to come to the surface. When cases like this and some others do arise, they provide us with anything we want to make them go away because that's good for both of us."

"Do we have a list of the Ring fighters on file?" Takuma asked.

Kano shook her head.

Takuma leaned against the chair. He was done asking questions.

Arisu asked a few questions before they left Kano's office.

"You don't seem too surprised by the Ring," Arisu said to Takuma— not anywhere close to as she was.

Takuma sat down at his desk. "I've heard about something like that existing. Didn't think it was real, but can't say I'm that surprised to know now it's real, you know." He looked at her. "You get to hear a lot of things when you live in a place where I do."

Arisu knew where Takuma lived. It was in the opposite direction to her home. She had never been to his part of the town but had seen areas like that while on cases. It wasn't a good place to live— and she didn't know why someone like him would continue to reside there. She couldn't imagine living in a place like that.

"Would you have joined the Ring?" Arisu asked. "Kano said that it helps a lot of clanless shinobi— help them develop."

Takuma laughed. He looked up at her and pointed at his arm where the red Police Force armband sat. "I'm part of the Leaf Military Police Force— an officer of the esteemed Organized Crime division— do you think I can be in any better place to develop as a shinobi?"

Arisu couldn't deny his words. Except under a jonin teacher, the Police Force was perhaps the place to be.

As she looked at Takuma, Arisu couldn't help but remember the Takuma of the past when they were in the academy. Dead last. Someone who couldn't hit a target, win a spar, cast a jutsu, if his life depended on it. Someone who had failed the academy graduation test twice before passing at the last chance. Takuma hadn't even been given a chance to try out for a jonin and was directly put into the Genin Corp.

Seeing that guy in the same place as her after two years honestly made her feel… insecure. She couldn't help but compare herself to him and couldn't help but wonder if her effort was lacking in comparison to Takuma.

"I want to finish the damn paperwork as soon as possible," said Takuma as he tidied up his desk.

Arisu shook her head and got herself back together. There was no use thinking about those things. If she felt she was lacking, then all she had to do was up the work she was putting in.

"Yeah, let's do this."