The masked group of four entered a rusty, dusty factory as they returned from blowing up a police station. They removed their porcelain masks to reveal Anko, Daiki, Iori, and Kameko. Upon entrance, they spotted the remaining three team members sitting on old couches.

“How did it go?” asked Gaku as he lit a new cigarette.

“According to the plan,” Anko replied as she dumped herself beside Takuma and Rikku. She turned to Takuma. “How about you guys?”

Takuma pointed to several jute and duffle bags piled up in the corner. “We cleaned up the shop, tied up the guards, painted them blue, and stuck our posters on them,” he said.

“It was child’s play,” said Gaku.

“All thanks to the recon and planning,” said Takuma.

“They’re common thugs. We could’ve gone without any preparation, and it wouldn’t have made a difference,” said Gaku with a chuckle.

“And that’s the difference between you and me,” said Takuma. “I don’t leave any room for error.”

“Can’t you both just be happy that everything went well,” Iori sighed as she threw crumpled paper balls at them.

“He was amazing,” said Rikku. “He unlocked the safe in the office like it wasn’t locked at all, we took all the money inside, and I thought that would be it, but then he started poking around in the room. He found three hidden stashes, each with more money than the last one. We have a lot of cash.”

Everyone looked at Takuma. He shrugged, “I have a lot of experience looking for hidden stashes. It’s a skill I picked up on the job.”

Takuma had searched and raided plenty of drug stash houses. Some people were creative about their hiding places, but for most, there was a general pattern they followed when hiding things..

“Okay, now that this is over,” Kameko said as she pulled out a water bottle from a cooler, “why did we do this? Isn’t it better that the enemy has an unbroken supply of drugs? Let them drown in it.”

“You’re assuming that they’re all addicts,” said Takuma. “The drugs are addictive, but not everyone is waking up every day and shooting something up in to them before their feet touch the ground. Most people only do drugs at the recreational level.

These men are in a foreign land fighting a war far away from their home. They might be winning and controlling the town, but most don’t want to be here; they want to be at home with their families. There’s stress there that drugs can dull; they can find escape through them.”

“So… you want them stressed,” said Kameko.

“Yes, I want them to feel uncomfortable in this city to build up tension among the forces. I want them to complain about their time in Yu. They shouldn’t be comfortable. I want it to snowball from minor inconvenience to something like… fear,” said Takuma.

The Renge Gang was a secondary target; the primary target was always the shinobi forces in the city. The team’s job was to weaken the enemy for the main forces. Takuma wanted all of the team’s efforts to contribute to the cause of an increasingly hostile environment for the enemy shinobi.

“The shinobi aren’t loyal to the Renge Family. They’ll turn to someone else, and the entertainment train will continue,” said Gaku, lighting up another cigarette.

“So, we just keep taking out the suppliers,” said Rikku, slicing a kunai through the air.

“Actually, I’m counting on them to find another supplier. In fact, I can probably guess what will happen. The Renge Gang was the middleman; with them out, the Goharu Family will sweep in on the opportunity because of the increased margins,” said Takuma.

“And you want that?” asked Iori.

“Yes, I want that, and I want the Goharu Family to have unprecedented levels of success,” said Takuma.

“Why?”

“Because,” Takuma leaned forward, “we’re going to poison the drugs.”

———

.

A blanket of smoke still lingered over the building as multiple people put in their effort to extinguish the fires, but the presence of a couple Hidden Frost shinobi, using water nature ninjutsu, brought both the crowd and the fires under control.

Ebi, a Hidden Frost jonin, walked down the road to the police station in shambles. The burnt-down building caught his eye, but he was more interested in the group of people lying down on the road with his shinobi surrounding them.

“What is happening here?” Ebi asked the nearest shinobi.

“S-Sir!” The genin tensed up in attention. “These men are refusing to get off the ground.”

“And why is that?”

“There… they have explosive tags on their necks, and they’re scared that they’ll go off if we remove them.”

Ebi gave the genin a look of dissatisfaction. “And why haven’t you ripped the tags off?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Err... sir, we think they might be speaking the truth.”

Ebi looked at the man as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying. He walked to one of the men lying on the ground and ripped the tag off his nape without permission.

“W-What are you doing, man!?”

Ebi ignored his protest and channelled a sharp burst of chakra through the paper. It burnt the paper and permanently disabled the tag. He observed the tag to sense for chakra palpitations, but there were none.

He turned to face the four genin that had come to the scene.

“You idiots need to learn how to disable explosive tags. It’s not that difficult,” he yelled at them. “And find a fuin-nin who’ll teach you to recognize the difference between an explosive tag and a movement trigger explosive tag.”

Normal explosive tags, for all intents and purposes, were time-based explosives. The moment chakra was funnelled into the tag, it would detonate depending on the time interval coded into the formulae. Most tags were set to detonate after a second or two, but they could be set to detonate after several minutes. The longer the detonation time, the more expensive said tags were.

However, there were explosive tags that could be triggered on movement instead of time. Chakra was loaded into an isolated part of the tag, which would be funneled into the explosive part of the tag at the slightest disturbance, leading to detonation. Those type tags were more complicated to make and delicate to use, and looked quite different from the standard time-triggered ones, making them quite easy to distinguish.

“And these aren’t even real tags.” Ebi threw the burnt tag away. He turned to the lying men and told them that they weren’t going to blow up.

He sighed.

It was embarrassing that the genin didn’t understand the tools they were using. They didn’t need to be fuin-nin with extensive formulae knowledge to recognize the difference between a standard explosive tag and a special trigger explosive tag.

Ebi looked down at the men covered in blue and plucked the blue poster that were posted around the city against them. It seemed the resistance was behind the demolition of the police station. It wasn’t surprising because the Bentetsu Street police station was one of the stations where none of the police officers stayed on board.

But he was interested in the report he got stating that this was the work of shinobi.

Ebi raised his hand to call the one of the shinobi who had extinguished the fire.

“Were you able to find the cause of the fire?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. They used gasoline as an accelerant, and… we found signs that explosive tags were used.”

“Are you sure? Are the signs definitive?” Ebi asked.

“We found two separate pieces of debris that confirm it.”

Ebi breathed a deep sigh as he cracked his knuckles. The posters proved that this was the work of a resistance. Now, there were two ways to look at the situation. First, someone had supplied the resistance with the explosive tags, and there was someone in the resistance who had the capability to trigger the tags—which wasn’t difficult as not much chakra was needed to trigger the tags. A second-year academy student triggers the tags. Teaching someone to channel enough chakra for blowing up tags wasn’t tricky. The second option was that there were shinobi among the resistance. It meant there were enemy shinobi in the city.

The second option was much worse.

Ebi was staring at the poster when he sensed a gaze. His eyes sharpened, and he looked around to find a man standing in the shadow of a tree. Ebi recognized the man and walked toward him to have a chat.

“You find out about this quickly," Ebi told the man.

Kon nodded. “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I couldn’t find out about an explosion destroying one of the city’s police stations.”

Ebi gazed at the man. Kon wasn’t part of the Hidden Frost, nor was a Hidden Cloud shinobi. Ebi didn’t know where Kon came from, but he was sent to help them take control of the city. There were five jonin in the city, but none of them had any experience in controlling and converting a foreign city. The higher-ups at home had sent Kon and his team of masked men to give them their experience. Ebi didn’t like Kon, but the man had done a great job extending their influence over the city in a short period of time.

“We found explosive tags,” said Ebi.

“And?” asked Kon.

“One of those men said that the masked people who did this, one of them punched through a pillar…. I think it’s safe to assume that we have at least one shinobi in this city. Worst case scenario, there are four unknown shinobi running free in the city.”

“Worst case, we have seven shinobi,” said Kon as he looked at the demolished building. “These men are from the Renge Gang… Their stash house was raided at the same time this happened. It seems they specifically targeted the Renge Gang.”

“I have heard of them,” said Ebi. He might not be well-versed in how to take over cities, but he had familiarised himself with the city on a level. He had heard of the Renge Gang because of their dealings with his shinobi. “I fear that this will have a negative impact on our efforts. I hope you have a plan for this.”

“Well… if they’re so keen on blowing up police stations, then how about we help them blow up another one,” Kon smiled. “We will even throw some people as gifts.”

———

.

“Poison their drugs?” asked Kameko.

Daiki’s eyes shined. “We’re going to poison their drugs to kill them?”

“”” No!”””

Takuma, Gaku, and Anko all yelled at Daiki, who physically took a step back at the strong rebuke.

“If we poison their drugs enough to kill them, they’re going to take it out on the city,” said Gaku.

Takuma nodded in agreement. “There’s no telling how they’ll respond. There’s a very high chance that they won’t stop those involved in the drug trade and punish everyone for establishing control by spreading fear…. We’ll have different ways to kill them.”

“Then what? How much can we poison them?” asked Iori.

“Just enough to make them seriously sick for a while without actually being lethal,” said Takuma. “What do you think happens when drugs that keep their minds occupied suddenly make them extremely sick?”

“They stop taking them,” Anko replied.

Takuma snapped his fingers as he pointed at her. “They’ll stop taking the drugs. Once the drugs are tainted, the shinobi are never going to touch any drug that comes from Yu, no matter who gives it to them. They’ll be too scared that the next time, it won’t end up with them only getting sick.” He looked at Gaku. “When you poison the soil, all the fruit, no matter the tree, is poisoned.”

And once drugs are out of the equation, the stress would continue to pile up.

“The city is running low on alcohol, so it’s a good time for us to make this move,” said Takuma.

“If the plan was to poison the drugs, why did we screw over the Renge Gang,” Daiki asked. “We could’ve just tainted their drugs.”

“Because the Renge Gang is a small fish, but the Goharu Family is a big player,” said Takuma.

There were two big underworld mafia families in Yu. The Goharu Family and the Hatani Family. When Yu was invaded, the Goharu Family sided with the enemy, who gave them power, and the Hitani Family, who were once equal, were no longer in power. The Goharu Family was introduced into the police force, giving them the power of the law enforced by shinobi. The Hatani Family was immediately pushed back and lost much of their control over the city.

“If we tainted Renge Gang’s drugs, the Goharu Family would’ve used them as scapegoats, but when they start providing drugs directly to the shinobi, they will get a serious blowback from the shinobi,” said Takuma. “There’s going to be serious tension between the enemy and their local lackeys—it’ll decrease their influence because even though they’re lackeys, even lackeys can be resentful.”

Takuma leaned into his seat.

“As expected of working in Narcotics at the Police Force,” said Anko.

Takuma took in a deep breath and sighed,

“Yeah, that’s where that came from.”