Back in his room in the safehouse in the Land of Tea, while having a hard time stopping his snickering, Ren removed the orange ANBU mask from his face. The Raikage's expression at the end was simply priceless.
"Ah! That hit the spot!" Ren sighed in satisfied relief as he put the makeshift Akatsuki cloak back into his storage seal.
This little excursion to Kumo managed to ease Ren's frustration somehow. It was not perfect. He would have loved nothing else but to appear as himself in there and stick a real exploding kunai up A's ass for sending assassins after him. And another one up B's ass for slaughtering that village.
But he had already married Temari to stop the war from erupting and ruining all of these efforts, because he was butthurt... Now, that would be just immature.
No. It was better this way. Kumo was humiliated, their Raikage was humbled, and their best ninjas were catching stray shots, too. The best part? They won't be able to do anything about it.
With his disguise shed, Ren left his room and headed out to the forested area behind his safe house.
The thing was, Hidden villages lived and died by their reputation. It was partly why Konoha had so many clients. The tree-huggers were friendly, after all. Right?
So, Kumo could not make a big deal out of this. They could not threaten a war against somebody for it. They could not get prissy. No. They had to suppress it. Anything else would be unthinkable from their perspective.
Because somebody had just waltzed into their village, bypassed all their security measures, infiltrated the Raikage's office, made a fool of him and his best ninjas, and stole a super duper secret document straight out of Raikage's hand right in front of his nose before easily disappearing.
It made them look like absolute clowns.
The scroll in question popped into Ren's hand as he leisurely walked, and he considered opening it for a moment. Honestly, he had no idea what it was, but A risked leaving himself open to save it from his desk, so it had to be important, no?
Well... Ren inwardly shrugged and created a shadow clone before handing him the unopened scroll with the instructions to take it to Ino. She was the information specialist in his household. She could deal with it. Ren decided he'd rather happily dodge that responsibility.
But back to Kumo, there were many ninjas in that office, and Ren deliberately waited for them to arrive before using his pleasure grenade for a reason.
He considered and wanted to use the inverted version of that particular seal. The one that would cause immense, torturous pain. But he thought better of it.
In the first place, Ren only let his clones research it because he wanted to recreate some other explodey effects he remembered Bakuda using in Worm. It was nothing but a curious project, something he didn't think he would ever use.
Hell, he didn't even pay that much attention to their progress. Only when he started rummaging through his options on how to screw with Kumo did it come to his notice that his clones had recreated the pain-inducing effect and even managed to extrapolate it into a pleasure-inducing one by inverting the seal's effectiveness.
In an instant, Ren realized that this was perfect for his needs.
After all, ninjas were all very used to pain. These pain grenades? They were pretty useless in this world. Against low-level goons, they would work marvelously, but against S-rank ninjas, they would be barely an inconvenience. Ninjas are usually trained to resist pain.
But what they were not trained to resist, or at least, not often, was pleasure.
Gritting their teeth through immense pain would make the Raikage and his ninja look like badasses, because they could take it. But collapsing from pleasure? Heh.
Much like Konoha, Kumo had its own political factions. And many of the ninjas there were part of different factions. The days in front of A were going to be hard indeed. The political vultures were going to be circling him for the foreseeable future. He was the Raikage conquered by an orgasm.
Now that wasn't something to brag about.
It will make him look weak. And any unrest inside of Kumogakure meant less time for them to focus on external conflict with other villages.
Finally entering the forest, Ren rolled around his shoulders and started stretching, trying to push down his desire to be lazy. He didn't really feel like training... most of the time. Unfortunately, he wanted to stay alive, so he had to overcome his laziness.
But his actions in Kumo were not just about stopping their ambitions from creating another ninja war. Ren was genuinely vindictive. And he knew that no matter how much Kumo suppressed today's events, the news about them was going to reach important people eventually. The happenings were far too public for them to be suppressed without a leak.
But Sage, Kumo was going to do their damnedest to prevent that.
It helped that their desire to keep their shame under wraps would be yet another layer that would prevent them from using Ren's actions for their own means, spinning them as an assassination attempt against Raikage, and declaring war over it.
For now, it was just a curiosity. People knew that 'something' had happened. But if Kumo made a big deal out of it? This curiosity would become a priority to investigate for every spy in their village. And Kumo could not have that.
A was simply going to have to gulp down his fury for this.
Even appearing as Tobi was a calculated move. Ren couldn't have A suspect that this attack was a response to his assassination attempt. That would just fuel his desire to wage a war on Konoha and Suna.
So, Ren decided to spin the whole situation differently. Once B came back and informed A about his confrontation with the Akatsuki boys, their attire was going to be mentioned. Ninjas pay a lot of attention to details like that.
And A was no doubt going to connect the dots. Incorrectly, of course. But the good thing about people with massive temper was that they tended to lash out at convenient targets after being humiliated.
To be honest, Ren had no idea what A was going to do about Akatsuki. The best-case scenario? He takes offense and blames Iwa for the whole thing. Their alliance would break, and a conflict between Iwa and Kumo would begin.
As bad as that sounds, it would also mean the Fourth Ninja War would not erupt. Iwa and Kumo were ready and raring to go, but the other three villages were not. This conflict didn't have much potential to evolve into a continent-wide war.
Oh, how Ren wished that would happen. But it was the least likely scenario to occur.
There were other possibilities that could happen, but the most likely one? Nothing would happen.
But even then, Ren would win because, at the very least, A would be paying Akatsuki more attention now. Even if he suspected he was being manipulated, what could he really do about it?
It's not like he would sit down with Nagato behind one table and discuss things like civilized people do. They are ninja. Their ego is their predominant feature.
Peace was never an option, and so Ren would win either way.
Done with his stretching, Ren activated a perception seal mark 82, hoping that this time it would work. The little thing was starting to irritate him, with how many flaws it had. Even his intangibility seal was not this difficult to get right!
Channeling his chakra and using it for a body flicker, Ren zoomed through the forested area, around the tree trunks, with a rush of adrenaline filling him. He suddenly came to a stop a hundred meters away and turned to look toward his starting position with a big grin, as he saw all the tree trunks in between where he now stood and where he started.
"Yes!" Whooping, Ren pumped his fist. This looked promising!
If he wanted to start a catfight with three S-rank ninjas at once by his lonesome self, then he absolutely needed more advantages on his side. And as fast as S-rank ninjas were, the body flicker was still faster.
Shisui had a reputation for a reason.
But the whole thing was far harder to do in practice than Ren initially thought. He was not Uchiha, so he could not cheat with freaky eyes. But he was a seal master, and if his eyes could not keep up, then maybe other senses could? After all, the Fourth Hokage was teleporting around like a chipmunk high on coke, and the man never stumbled.
He had to move and adjust his movements even faster than Shisui, and the man was managing it just fine. So, Ren took it upon himself to figure out how to make the body flicker usable for him. One way or the other.
Ren channeled his chakra into a body-flicker again...
It was going grea-!
And his face smacked into a tree trunk sixty-ish meters away as his perception seal failed to alert him that it was there in time.
With a groan, Ren woodenly onto his back, a trickle of blood streaming down from his nose as he left a head-sized dent in the wood.
'I think I'll need a Mark 83.' He dazedly thought as the sky swam in front of his eyes.
Hearing a stifled snort of laughter from the side, Ren slowly turned his head and blinked as he saw Temari awkwardly standing there, trying not to laugh at him, while holding a picnic basket in her hands.
"Hello." She greeted him, and Ren looked at the sky again and closed his eyes.
"The price I pay for power." He wistfully said to the clouds, causing Temari to break her composure and snicker at him.