“This is very good,” Takuma said, giving a nod to Gaku.
“Really?” said Anko, surprised by his reaction. Given their relationship, she was sure Takuma would rip into Gaku.
The three of them were alone in the factory base. She had wanted to run Gaku’s plan by Takuma because she doubted her ability to look at the situation impartially and because Chinatsu was the cornerstone of their cover identity; putting her close to an enemy shinobi would risk them all getting exposed.
“It was a risky move, yes— but he was able to convince them and if she manages to convert the chunin into a regular and gain his trust, we’re golden,” Takuma said as he worked on sorting objects collected from around the factory like screws and bolts using chakra strings.
“That’s what I said,” Gaku smiled victoriously at Anko. “I’ll coordinate with Chinatsu and prepare her for the information we want from the guy. Leave it all to me.”
“Yeah, let’s not get ahead of us there. This one thing going well doesn’t mean everything will. Anko and I need to be keyed into everything you plan to do,” said Takuma. Gaku opened his mouth to argue, but Takuma cut him off before he could speak. “You can take the lead on this, but we need to be aware of everything before it happens. Got it?”
Gaku was peeved, but he didn’t say anything. On the other hand, Anko was surprised that Takuma gave Gaku the lead; she thought he would take on the lead from Gaku—but she nodded as she agreed that she needed to know about things before they happened. She allowed Takuma some freedom to operate independently but wouldn’t extend that treatment to Gaku.
“Alright, keep in touch,” Takuma said as he got off the couch and grabbed his weapon pouches and a long hooded overcoat to hide everything underneath.
“Going out?” asked Anko.
“Yeah, I think I have a lead on the Goharu Family.” Takuma looked at Gaku, “I followed that guy from the Goharu Family, and I think I found their stash house.”
“I knew they’d come in handy,” said Gaku.
The resistance group led by Motohiro had helped the team spread the anti-occupation posters around the city. They agreed with what the team was doing and wanted to help more. Seeing their success, the team decided to give Motohiro’s group another job—to find the Goharu Family’s drug stash house.
Takuma wanted to poison the drugs, but for that to happen, they needed to find the packaging and stash house. The team didn’t have enough time to find it by themselves, so Takuma decided to outsource it to the resistance group, which knew the city better than the team.
They failed to find it.
The Goharu Family had done an excellent job of keeping it hidden. However, they found a high-ranking person inside the family who was connected to Goharu’s drug trade, which was good enough as Takuma spent a few days following that guy and found the stash house.
“I’ll confirm it today,” he said to Anko, “after which, you and Daiki can go in to map the interior and plan how you want to do it.”
“That’s fine by me,” said Anko. “I want to talk to you.”
“Sure, let’s go,” said Takuma.
“You really gave Gaku the lead… just like that?” Anko said as they walked to the back entrance to the factory building.
“I would’ve liked to have the lead, but it’s clear that Chinatsu trusts him the most. She’ll be putting herself in danger by fishing for information so it’s imperative that she does whatever is asked of her. She needs to feel comfortable, and Gaku is the best choice for it… I could take the lead and ask Gaku to cooperate, and he might support me in the open but he’ll instruct her differently behind our backs.” Takuma shrugged. “It’s better to let him have this one. At least this way, there’s no risk of Chinatsu blowing our cover because of conflicting instructions.”
Anko thought that she would need to discipline Takuma about letting his personal feelings for Gaku interfere with the mission, but here he was, proving her wrong. He was self-aware enough to realise that Gaku was the best choice to directly work with Chinatsu.
“Good job—”
“And well… if he screws up and Chinatsu ends up blowing our cover, I’ll be safe,” Takuma smiled and patted her on the back, “I can’t say that about you guys, though.”
Anko was left speechless as she watched Takuma leave the factory while chuckling to himself. He might find it amusing, but Anko didn’t find it funny as she looked back at the base corner where Gaku probably had a cigarette in his mouth.
———
.
Takuma sat perched on a roof, staking out the Goharu Family building identified as the drug stash house. As he observed the building, it couldn’t be clearer that the building was important. There were two guards with swords at both entries, the windows were boarded and barred, and anyone who stood close to the building for any reason was asked to move or leave under the threat of violence.
He had yet to go inside to confirm that the building was the drug stash house, but he didn’t need to because one of the guards was particularly talkative and openly yapped to his partner about what was going on inside. To the guard’s credit, he didn’t talk about it around strangers but Takuma’s ears were much sharper than the average guy—and he caught the conversation when the guard confirmed no one was in earshot.
So why was Takuma staking out the building when he already had confirmation?
In a conversation between the talkative guard and a packer working in the building, he heard that today was the fulfilment day of an important big order—that got Takuma interested.
He wanted to confirm his hunch that the big order was related to the enemy shinobi.
A carriage pulled up in front of the building while Takuma watched. A minute later, a bald man with a long scar on the top of his bald head stepped out of the building with a large duffle bag. He wore a tacky suit and shaded sunglasses and entered the carriage with two other sword-carrying men, most probably for protection.
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Takuma got up and started following the carriage from the rooftops.
The bald man was Waichi. He was the Goharu Family higher-up found by Motohiro’s resistance group. Takuma had followed to find the drug stash house. Waichi was the brother-in-law of the Goharu Family’s current head, a fortune that had granted him a privileged position in the family.
When Takuma arrived today, he didn’t know if Waichi would be involved with the big order, but seeing him come out of the building with a duffle bag strengthened Takuma’s belief that it was for the enemy shinobi.
In that case, Waichi taking point made sense. He had clearly attained his position through nepotism, but in the few days Takuma had spent following him, he seemed to be a capable, high-ranking family member.
There were advantages to leaving the client-facing of the drug trade with shinobi to the Renge Gang. Shinobi were dangerous, and having the Renge Gang between the family and the shinobi was a layer of separation and protection for them. But now, with the Renge Gang out, the Goharu Family were forced to deal with them directly and thus had to exercise caution.
A ten-minute journey later, the carriage stopped in front of a bar called the [Ice Sphere].
Takuma noted the name and address, intending to find out if the Goharu Family owned it.
Waichi and his guards entered the bar, and Takuma settled in the shadows to observe the entrance. He wished to head inside to take a look, but the risk of detection was high, and his personal safety was at risk as he speculated the attendance of shinobi. It was smarter for him to stay outside and infer the happenings inside from the context clues.
Takuma fell back on the rooftop and found a tap. He blocked the drain before opening the top to let the running water pool on the roof for a few minutes. He weaved hand seals for the Water Clone Jutsu. The chakra leaked out of his feet trickled outward into the water on the floor that gathered together into a human-shaped silhouette. Takuma felt a sizable amount of his chakra drain away as a clone formed before him.
“I’ll go keep an eye on the back entrance,” said the clone before disappearing off the roof.
Takuma returned to observe the front entrance. There was no movement in or out of the bar for half an hour until four men finally appeared at the bar’s entrance. Seeing them jump down from a nearby rooftop made it clear they were shinobi.
Takuma shrunk himself into a corner and peered down at the bar. From the looks of it, there was a leader among the group, with the remaining three as followers. He assumed the leader was a chunin and the rest were genin.
As the shinobi entered the bar, Takuma was convinced that he had found the group acting as drug dealers for the enemy forces and that the Goharu Family was officially supplying for the shinobi.
At long last, he had found the link in the chain he could exploit to shake up the status quo in Yu. The meeting went on for another hour. As Waichi saw the shinobi out, they chatted outside the front entrance, so Takuma snuck to the back side of the bar to meet his clone.
“Anything to report?” he asked.
The clone replied with a negative.
“Okay, we’re going to follow the shinobi to see if we can find something new.”
The clone no longer had any use, but Takuma had already spent a considerable amount of chakra to create one, and there was no harm in having a secondary opinion—especially since it was his.
Takuma and his clone took off and tailed the four-person group. They exercised caution, staying well behind to avoid being detected.
“They’re overconfident. They’re travelling too openly,” said the clone.
When Takuma was learning to tail someone, he had also done self-study on how to shake off tails. Shinobi, who frequently travelled through rooftops, added a few simple tricks to throw off a possible tail. One of those tricks was to make the tail lose sight by dipping down to the street level every once in a while. The shinobi in front of them were openly travelling across rooftops without ever stepping down on the streets.
Takuma nodded. “It’s surprising given that the Renge Gang was targeted by shinobi.” The use of the explosive tag in the Bentetsu police station bombing was enough of an indicator of shinobi involvement. “One would think they’d fear that they were the next targets… but from the looks, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“Good for us,” said the clone.
“Is it incompetence, or do they have a reason not to be worried?” Takuma asked himself.
Much to his disappointment, the group returned to the area where the majority of shinobi resided in the city. The area was well-guarded and the most dangerous for the team. Anko had forbidden them from exploring the area because of the risk involved.
“That’s unfortunate,” said Takuma. “Well, we got the proof that the Goharu Family and the enemy forces are directly connected.”
“Yeah,” the clone dragged the word, “what do you think that’s about?”
Takuma looked where the clone pointed and saw a pillar of smoke that rose and blot out the sky in the distance. The amount of smoke was the indicator of the massive size of the fire source.
“Should we go take a look?” asked the clone.
“Yeah, let’s…”
———
.
“This is bad,” said the clone, horrified as he looked down at the scene from a nearby rooftop.
Takuma stared at a burning police station building. Flames burst out of every orifice that building had: the windows, the doors, and the cracks in the ceilings and the walls.. Spectators stared at the fire from a distance as the firefighters tried to put out the raging fire to no avail.
The fire wasn’t the horrifying part of the situation.
The police station was built on the corner of an active street. In the middle of the street in front of the police station, three bare poles were stabbed into the road. And from those poles hung three corpses of blue spray-painted men dressed in Yu’s police force uniform. If it wasn’t already similar enough, they had the blue posters stuck to their chests.
Someone had copied the police station bombing.
Takuma stared at the hanged man, unable to move his eyes away. His mind raced at what this meant and how it would affect the team’s plans. It was clear they wouldn’t be able to proceed as intended.
“I need to inform Anko—”
As Takuma spoke to the clone, he felt a gaze on him. Takuma straightened up and looked around to find the source of gaze. He scanned the crowd on the ground, and the windows of the buildings, but couldn’t find the source—the gaze was still on him.
He felt his skin prickle as he scoured the rooftops.
In the same line of buildings, five rooftops away from him stood a solitary man dressed in black tactical gear with a sword on his back. The middle-aged man smiled at Takuma when their eyes met which sent chills down Takuma’s back.
“Bro, we have company,” said the clone, gravely.
Three more figures in black tactical gear and white porcelain masks were on the rooftops around then. They were all staring at Takuma. He was surrounded from all four sides.
“Bro?” The clone looked at Takuma when he didn’t get a reply.
Takuma had grabbed his head as a sharp migraine stabbed his brain and was groaning in agony.
When Takuma found himself in the 10-year-old orphan, shinobi academy student’s body, he wasn’t given the boy’s memories. It had been a big problem because Takuma had near zero idea about the situation he’d found himself in. However, instead of memories, he got something akin to intuition that told him things like his name, the academy teacher’s name, the address of his apartment.
The intuition was godsend because without it, Takuma wouldn’t have been able to pass himself as that 10-year-old orphan.
However, even that intuition had limitations.
Takuma had wanted to know about the origins of the scars on his body—but instead of giving him some answers, he was punished by harsh headaches. For whatever reason, the intuition didn’t want him to know about the scars, and every time Takuma tried as much as to think about the story behind the scars, he was punished. It was so egregious that even looking at himself in the mirror would leave him in pain.
He had to force himself to not think about the problematic parts of the boy’s past like the origin of his scars and the identity of his parents. The pain acted as potent negative reinforcement, and beat the urge out of him. He wished he knew everything about the boy’s past, but it wasn’t worth it when it meant getting a horrible headache every time his thoughts wandered in that direction.
It had been a very long time since Takuma had one of the headaches, and he was glad for it.
But here it was again.
Takuma looked up at the man smiling at him. He had no idea who the man was… only that the man was somehow related to the boy's problematic past.