“Kanna’s a helpful little puppy who could level a small mountain with her ninjutsu, but I’m an infiltrator, and I promise you, I’m not going within a mile of Leaf without a pro support team."ĭan had thought long and hard about this. He could see the nightmares lurking behind her eyes. Inoue’s smile didn’t waver, but Dan was a veteran leader and she was a prodigy barely out of her teens. “But you can stay here in Mist if you like. A hand-picked force, under my leadership, is going to crush those horrors like a bug. I'm thinking of bringing in Kanna as well, and she'll handle the document side of the plan. “I’ve got the credibility, and I can get my own team put together without any real oversight. “I’ve been making a case to the high-ups for cleaning up the mess in Noodle with one big strike,” Dan said. “No, forget that, you don’t trust anyone. “You want to run from our home, Captain Zabuza’s home, into a place in Leaf territory that’s almost as scary?” Hell, the Leaf trackers refused to follow me in.” It made everything I’d been through, before or since, look like child’s play. Chakra monster every three steps, and we're talking real chakra monsters, not the namby-pamby kind you can kill with explosive tags. A swamp I had to cut through on a mission a long while back. “Where?” she asked, sobering up instantly. But sometimes you just had to take limited intel and roll the dice for the rest. “Deadly serious, Inoue.” And if she refused at this point, things were going to get messy. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Because if you are, either you’re insane or this drink is a lot stronger than I thought.” It means building something better, something ours, and then finally turning around to say, ‘This is what a Mist ninja can do when we’re not under his yoke.’ On that path, we become a power to be reckoned with, a power that even the Big Five have to listen to, and then it won’t matter whether you or me can beat him in a fistfight.” “I’m here because I want to save my village from that bastard and everyone who thinks like him,” Dan said, “and right now, saving it means letting go. They were carefully avoiding words like “coup” and “missing-nin”, and certainly “Mizukage”, because while the secret police couldn’t be listening in on everyone all the time, especially in a secure space like this, there were some things a sensible person just did not do where others might hear. “So you’re not here because you want to be in charge?” Inoue clarified. Hoshigaki? She can’t even keep her own bay in order. He doesn’t see people he sees numbers going up and down. “Who do you think would take over from him? Mori? Gives me the creeps almost as bad. Inoue downed another Gutripper like it was water, and didn’t say anything. But what would that get me now? What would it get us?” “Believe me, if I could give that bastard the death of a thousand cuts right this minute, I would, and consequences be damned. “Revenge is not the point, Inoue,” Dan patiently explained to his latest, and most promising, drinking companion. Those three words were what finally made Dan understand the Village Hidden in the Mist. The Mizukage’s expression never changed as he watched Dan with those inhuman eyes. Yūji’s gear was in his equipment chest, minus one thing.ĭan had firmly protested, then rationally argued, then finally begged on his knees. The homework scroll was sprawled across the small desk, displaying an incomplete essay on marine combat. The bed was messily unmade, just as it had been messily unmade a month ago. Failing to respond to a superior officer, for any reason, was another. Gritting his teeth, Dan stormed into the boy’s room. “Yūji, if you are not up and dressed and washed and at the table within the next five minutes, you’re on half rations for the rest of the week, do you hear me? If Yūji was late to the Academy again, Headmaster Kurosaki was going to give Dan an earful, and if there was one thing Dan hated, it was being lectured by another layabout, who thought a droplet of meritorious service twenty years ago was an excuse to swan around basking in his own superiority. Ena had been too soft on the boy, that was the problem. If Yūji was still asleep…ĭan gave a theatrical sigh. If Yūji asked, he’d just say it improved concentration. Not that he couldn’t cheat with a cup of manly herbal tea to warm him up again. Privately, Dan thought the whole thing was dumb, but he had to set a good example if he was ever going to reform that hopeless layabout. Opening the shutters greeted him with a blast of freezing cold wind, but that was another thing a real man bore without complaint. Stifling a yawn, Dan pulled on his day clothes-they were getting tight around the shoulders again apparently, he’d put on yet more manly muscle-and headed through to the living room.