Iwa was loud.
Not loud like Konoha loud, where you had kids running through the streets and vendors shouting about their fish and the occasional drunk stumbling out of a bar at noon. Iwa was loud in a busy way. Hammers on stone echoing from somewhere you couldn't see, that rhythmic pounding that said this town existed to dig things up and turn them into other things. Every few minutes a cart loaded with rocks or ore or whatever went rumbling past on its way to some forge or workshop. Earth Country took its mining seriously. Made sense, given the name.
I walked through the main market street with Konan trailing half a step behind me, taking in the sights and sounds and smells. Meat grilling somewhere. Fresh bread. A powdery, stone-baked scent that came with settlements built on rock. People drifted past in their usual loops, buying things and selling things and complaining about prices the way people always did everywhere. Civilians going about their civilian lives while shinobi politics played out somewhere above their heads.
It reminded me of home, actually. Strip away the different architecture and the brown color palette and the mountains looming in every direction, and you had the same basic setup. People trying to live their lives. Shops trying to make money. Kids running around being kids.
People were people, I guess. Didn't matter what village headband the local shinobi wore.
The details changed but the basics stayed the same.
Speaking of change, or the lack of it. My shadow clone research back in Konoha had hit a wall. Not a literal wall, just the metaphorical wall that happened when someone in authority told you to stop doing the thing that made your whole operation work. The old Hokage had been very specific about the whole "no clones making clones" rule, and I wasn't stupid enough to think he wouldn't find out if I violated it inside the village. Konoha's sensor network was thorough. Too thorough for my liking, honestly, but that was a different complaint for a different day.
So now I was stuck with second and third-gen clones handling all the research work, which was fine except for the part where it was slow. Like, painfully slow. The whole point of exponential clone multiplication was that you could throw numbers at a problem until it gave up and solved itself. Without that, I was back to doing things the normal way, and the normal way sucked.
Now, technically, third-gen clones were still clones made by clones. Which meant I was maybe sort of bending the rule a little. But here's the thing. Third-gen clones were tame. They followed orders, did their jobs, and showed zero signs of going weird in the head. No rebellious tendencies, no philosophical crises about their existence, no attempts to organize a labor union in my apartment. They just worked.
And the Hokage definitely knew about them. The man wasn't senile. He had sensor reports crossing his desk every day, and there was no way he'd missed a bunch of identical chakra signatures running around the village doing research. So the fact that he hadn't dragged me into his office to yell at me about it meant he was fine with it. Right? That was how silence worked. No news was good news. If he had a problem, he would've said something.
Yep. Definitely okay to keep using third-gen.
That was my deduction and I was sticking to it.
Still, even with third-gen running, the pace was sluggish. Which raised an obvious question. Could I generate more clones outside the village? Sure. Set up a whole factory operation somewhere in Fire Country's wilderness and just start pumping out copies like some kind of ninja assembly line. But that came with its own problems. The clones might do something weird. Clones left unsupervised had a tendency to develop opinions and make decisions, and not all of those decisions were good ones.
And then there was the sensor patrol issue. Konoha kept eyes on its borders. If someone noticed a bunch of identical chakra signatures popping up in the middle of nowhere, questions would be asked. Questions that snowballed into investigations, then suspicion, then me getting the Uchiha treatment. Constant surveillance. Everyone watching you like you might snap at any moment. Hard pass on that, thanks.
So Konoha research went to the bottom of the priority list for now. What mattered was fuinjutsu, learning enough to track and capture Zetsu, and then figuring out how to extract Hashirama's DNA from the creepy plant man. Fuinjutsu and medical knowledge, those were my top two. That was why I'd asked Commander Minoru to let me station some clones at the hospital before this mission started.
"Some" being a relative term.
By today's count from the clone memories filtering back to me, we were definitely past twenty and climbing. Minoru didn't seem to mind. The hospital had been attacked recently, so having extra hands around for both productivity and security was basically a free upgrade from his perspective. And every clone working there was learning something about medical ninjutsu that I'd eventually need when I got my hands on Hashirama's cells.
Because that was the goal. By the time I actually captured Zetsu, I wanted to already know exactly what to do with him.
As for fuinjutsu, that was already in progress. One of my clones had been learning from Kushina at the outpost, and if the lack of dispelling was any indication, he was probably still at it right now. Every memory that came back from that clone was another piece of the puzzle I didn't have to figure out myself.
Konan was the real problem.
I glanced at the girl walking beside me, her purple hair looking almost blue under the midday sun. What was I supposed to do with her?
The problem was simple on paper but also completely unsolvable no matter how I approached it. She wasn't a Fire Country citizen. Sneaking her into Konoha meant paperwork at best and accusations of smuggling a spy into the village at worst. She was too old for the orphanage, way too old for the Academy, and I couldn't exactly bring a random teenage girl to a military outpost without someone asking questions I didn't want to answer.
The more I thought about it, the more stuck I felt.
Someone tugged at my hand.
I glanced over. Konan was pointing at a dumpling stall near the bridge, where an old lady with grey hair pulled back in a bun was serving customers from behind a wooden counter. Steam rose from the bamboo steamers stacked behind her, and the smell drifting over was pretty good, actually. Pork and chives, if I had to guess.
"Can we get some?" Konan asked, already starting to drift in that direction.
I raised an eyebrow at her. "Didn't you just eat five fish like an hour ago?"
"That was an hour ago. Things change." She tugged at my hand again. "Come on, it smells really good."
"It's also like a hundred degrees out here. You want to eat something hot and steaming when you're already sweating?"
"Dumplings transcend weather." She said this like it was an established fact. "Look it up."
"Look it up where? There's no book that says that."
"There should be. Someone should write one."
I let her drag me toward the stall because honestly, I didn't have a good counter-argument and the dumplings did smell pretty good.
The old lady gave us a warm smile when we approached. Konan ordered nine, which seemed excessive for someone who'd just demolished half a bucket of grilled fish, but I'd already learned that food just disappeared into this girl like it was falling into a void. Maybe it was a sensor thing. Burning through energy detecting chakra signatures all day or something.
A few minutes later we were walking away from the stall, Konan chewing happily on a dumpling while I held the rest in a little paper package. She made a small sound of contentment that could've come straight out of Kushina's mouth.
"These are so good," she said around a mouthful of food. "When I first found this stall, I came back three times in the same day."
"Three times?"
"The heart wants what it wants, sensei."
I shook my head and kept walking. We crossed the bridge and turned down a side street, heading toward a part of town I'd scouted earlier. Konan followed without complaint until the new inn came into view.
"That's where you'll be staying tonight."
Konan slowed down, frowning. "Wait. Why do I have to switch inns again?"
She was pouting. Actually pouting, with her lower lip sticking out and everything. It would have been more effective if she didn't have dumpling grease on her chin.
I stopped and looked at her. Raised an eyebrow. Let the silence stretch for a second.
She huffed. "Okay, fine, I know why. I'm just making conversation. The old monk disappeared and now there's some random guy walking around with me instead, so staying at the same inn would look suspicious. I get it."
"And?"
"And if people start asking questions about the weird blind monk who vanished into thin air, they might connect him to the teenager who showed up at the same time he left." She sighed. "I know, I know. You don't have to explain it."
I nodded, satisfied that she understood. But there was one more thing.
"Don't underestimate civilians," I said, keeping my voice low enough that only she could hear. "They might not be shinobi, but they've got eyes. They notice when things don't add up. And if something feels off to them, they report it."
Konan nodded slowly. "And talking reaches Iwa eventually."
"Always does. They've got informant networks just like every other hidden village. The innkeeper sees something weird, mentions it to someone, who mentions it to someone else, and suddenly you've got ninja asking questions you don't want to answer." I gestured at the new inn ahead of us. "Hence the new inn. Different place, different story. As far as anyone here knows, we just arrived in town today."
"Got it." She paused, chewing slowly. "But, um. Speaking of people noticing things."
I looked at her.
"We've got a tail. Same chakra following us for a few blocks now." She swallowed her dumpling and glanced over at him. "So much for the fresh start, huh?"
I stopped walking.
Wait, what?
I ran through the last twenty minutes in my head. The market street, the bridge, the dumpling stall. Had I felt anything? Sure, a few stares here and there, but those were just civilians doing what civilians did when two attractive people walked past together. Nothing unusual. Nothing that pinged any of my instincts.
But Konan's mystery follower? I had nothing. Completely blank.
Which was a problem.
If I couldn't sense them at all, that ruled out random townspeople. Civilians didn't know how to mask their presence. They didn't need to. They just existed out in the open, gawking at whatever caught their attention without any attempt to hide it.
This was someone who knew how to stay hidden. Someone trained.
An experienced shinobi.
But here's what didn't make sense. As far as I knew, Suna and the other villages had no idea what I actually looked like. I was still relatively new to the game. They knew my name, sure. They knew my jutsu, the exploding clones, the shadow clone spam. But my face wasn't in any bingo book I'd seen.
And I hadn't exactly been walking around looking like myself either. I'd touched up my appearance with a subtle henge before entering Iwa. Nothing dramatic, just enough to shift things around. My all-black outfit was gone, replaced with something more forgettable. My face was a bit different too, jawline slightly sharper, features more rugged. Less pretty boy, more ordinary handsome. I'd even let my hair grow longer to change my silhouette.
So how did someone find me?
I ran through the possibilities and came up blank.
But figuring out how they found me could wait. Right now, I needed to know where they were.
"Where?" I asked, keeping my voice low.
She whispered the direction and distance. Behind us, maybe seventy meters, moving when we moved.
"Keep walking," I murmured, barely moving my lips. "Act normal. We'll turn into an alley up ahead."
"And then?" she whispered back.
"Then you wait."
We kept our pace casual, just two people finishing their dumplings and heading toward their inn. Nothing to see here. Nothing worth paying attention to. A left turn at the next corner, then another right, and we slipped into a narrow alley between two buildings. Empty. No windows facing us, no doors, just stone walls and shadow.
"Stay here," I said. "Don't move until I come back."
Konan nodded, then her eyes went wide as the earth took me. The ground softened under my feet, and I sank into it like stepping into water. As gently as a sinking stone, shoulders, chest, neck, all of it sliding beneath the surface until there was nothing left above ground.
The last thing I saw before the earth closed over my head was Konan's face, caught somewhere between amazement and the expression of someone who just realized they'd signed up for something way weirder than they expected.
....
Moving through solid ground was always a weird sensation. Not unpleasant, just weird. Like swimming through something thicker than water but not quite as solid as it looked from the outside. I followed the direction Konan had given me, counting distance in my head. Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty. Close enough.
I burst out of the ground like a trap going off, one hand shooting up first. My glowing fingers brushed his leg and the man buckled, dropping to one knee with a grunt. He was fast for someone caught completely off-guard. By the time my head was above the surface, he already had a whistle in one hand and a sealed scroll in the other.
Didn't matter.
I hit him before he could even decide which one to use.
A straight to the jaw.
A palm strike to the throat.
A chakra-scalpel swipe across the tendons in his wrist that made his fingers spasm and drop the scroll.
Another punch.
Another.
And another.
Each one harder than the last.
His breath turned wet. His spit mixed with blood. He tried to gasp around it, tried to bring the whistle up anyway, but all he managed was a choking sound that barely counted as a wheeze.
I watched him twitch for a few seconds until he stopped.
No point in keeping him alive. Shinobi didn't talk. Not the trained ones, anyway. They either had suicide methods built into their bodies or enough willpower to hold out until their village sent a cleanup crew. Interrogation was a waste of time unless you had a Yamanaka handy, and I didn't.
So I didn't bother.
I brushed the dirt off my hands and sighed. "I told you to wait in the alley."
A small squeak came from somewhere behind me. I didn't bother turning around. I already knew who it was.
Konan stepped out from around the corner, looking sheepish. "I was curious. I wanted to see how you were going to handle him."
"And?" I turned to face her, stepping over the body like it was just another piece of street clutter. "Curiosity satisfied? Or did watching that make you rethink this whole shinobi thing?"
She didn't answer right away. Her eyes drifted to the corpse behind me, then back to my face.
"Because if it did," I continued, "that's fine. I can drop you off somewhere safe in Fire Country. Find you a nice town, set you up with some money. You could live a normal life. Be a civilian. Never have to see stuff like this again."
Konan shook her head.
"No."
"No?"
"Watching you just now..." Her gaze slid past him, somewhere far away. "It made me realize how easy it is for shinobi to just... end a life like it's nothing. That's what happened to my parents. Some Suna shinobi decided they should die, and that was it. They were gone."
She looked up at me, and whatever hesitation had been there before was gone. In its place was something that looked a lot like resolve.
"I don't ever want to be on that side of it again. The side that can't do anything. The side that just dies because someone stronger decided it was time." She took a breath. "So please, make me strong enough that I never have to feel that helpless again."
I looked at her for a long moment. This girl who'd lost everything, standing in a dirty alley next to a fresh corpse, asking me to turn her into someone who could make corpses of her own.
What was I supposed to say? No? I'd been where she was standing. The need to become strong enough that the world couldn't take anything else from you. I understood that better than most.
"Alright," I said, passing the dumplings back to her. "But you're carrying these back to the inn. My hands are dirty."
She took them, and the smile that spread across her face was bright enough to light up the whole alley. "Thank you, Shinji."
I raised an eyebrow. "Try again."
"Huh?"
"You just asked me to be your teacher. What happened to sensei?"
She looked me up and down. "We're the same age."
"So?"
"So it's weird. Also, we're the same height. It doesn't feel right calling someone sensei when I can look them straight in the eye without tilting my head."
"Height has nothing to do with respect."
"It has a little to do with respect."
"It has zero to do with respect. Try again."
She sighed dramatically. "Thank you, sensei."
"There we go."
We walked in comfortable silence for about three seconds before curiosity won out.
"So," Konan said, falling into step beside me. "Who was that guy?"
"Suna, probably." The henge had fallen apart after a couple of hits, revealing someone completely different under the civilian disguise. "Two disguises stacked on each other. Clothes and henge both fake. But the face, the bone structure and skin tone... yeah, that's Wind Country for sure."
"And he was following us because...?"
"Because he was looking for me."
She gave me a sideways look. "You specifically? Why would some random Suna shinobi be looking for you?"
I shrugged. "Might not seem like it, but I'm actually pretty well-known. Strong too. Got a decent bounty on my head and everything."
"You're joking."
"I'm really not."
"You don't look that strong."
"Thanks. I'll take that as a compliment."
She let out a quiet huff, but I could see the gears turning behind her eyes. She was looking at me differently now. Good. Healthy amount of respect for your teacher was important.
"Does this mean we have to leave?" she asked after a moment. "If they're already looking for you here, staying seems like a bad idea."
"Yes, we'll need to move soon. Can't stick around after something like this."
She nodded, processing that. Then her eyes dropped to my face and stayed there. Specifically, my mouth.
"Um." She hesitated. "Sensei, are you... okay?"
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Your lip. There's blood."
I lifted a hand and wiped my mouth. My fingers came away red. Not a lot, just a thin smear, but enough to notice if you were paying attention. And apparently Konan was paying very close attention.
"Ah, this? I'm fine," I said. "Don't worry about it."
She didn't look convinced. If anything, she looked more worried than before.
"Seriously," I added. "I'm also an Iryonin, a medical ninja. Healing is literally part of my skillset."
"A medical ninja?"
"Yeah. We use chakra to treat injuries, heal wounds, that sort of thing. It's a whole specialization."
"Oh." She stared at me. "So why are you still bleeding?"
"I'm not still bleeding. That was old blood."
"It looked pretty fresh to me."
"Well, it wasn't. I'm just a little banged up. But I've been healing myself the whole time we've been talking. Actually, I've been healing myself since before we met."
"Then heal faster."
"It doesn't work like that."
The internal Mystical Palm was running in the background like it had been for hours now. Tsunade had drilled this jutsu into me during our training sessions, and I'd never been more grateful for anything in my life. Without it, my fight with Chiyo would have ended very differently.
That battle had been ugly. Trading blows with a puppeteer who was also a poison master and a healer in her own right wasn't something you walked away from cleanly. Every time I thought I had her, she'd pull something new out of her sleeve. Literally, in some cases. Puppet arms had a lot of hidden compartments.
I'd pushed myself to the limit trying to put her down, healing internal damage as fast as she could inflict it, burning through chakra like water through a sieve. Then Suna reinforcements showed up and things got even messier. So I made a choice. Trade injuries and go all out, hit her hard enough that she couldn't chase me, then run. In the end, I'd only managed to leave her half-dead before I had to bail.
It worked. Barely.
If not for Tsunade's jutsu, I probably wouldn't have made it out. But even with it, I wasn't anywhere close to her level. My healing speed was maybe half of what she could pull off, and the effectiveness wasn't quite there either. That's why recovery was taking so long. The jutsu was incredible, subtle enough to use anywhere without anyone noticing, but I still had a long way to go before I mastered it.
"Sensei?"
I blinked, pulled out of my thoughts. Konan was looking at me expectantly.
"Sorry, what?"
"I said I don't have any luggage, so I'm ready to leave whenever you are."
Right. The inn. Her stuff. Or lack of stuff, apparently.
"No rush," I said. "We've got a little time before we need to move. And before we leave Iwa, there's something I want to teach you."
Her eyes lit up. "A jutsu?"
"Yeah."
"What kind? Something cool? Is it the thing you did with the ground? Or the glowing hand thing? Oh, or is it the clone thing? I want to learn the clone thing."
"It's a henge."
Her smile dropped.
"A henge," she repeated flatly.
"Yep."
"That's... the disguise jutsu. Like what the old monk used. And what you're using right now to make your hair longer."
"That's the one."
She looked at me like I'd just offered her a rock and called it a present. "Henge? Really? I thought you'd start with something more... I don't know, combat-oriented."
"Combat comes later. Survival comes first."
"But you just took out that guy with the glowing hand thing. And the ground jutsu. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach me how to defend myself?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because the best defense is not being found in the first place." I stopped walking and turned to face her. "Listen. The flashy jutsu, the combat stuff, that's all useful. But none of it matters if you get spotted before you can use it. Henge is the foundation. You learn to change your appearance, blend in, become someone nobody looks twice at, and suddenly you can go anywhere. Do anything. Walk right past enemies who are looking for you because they're looking for someone who doesn't exist anymore."
She was quiet for a moment, thinking it over.
"The old monk," she said slowly. "I knew he was using a henge. I could tell from the chakra. But I never figured out what he actually looked like underneath. I just assumed he was some middle-aged guy pretending to be older." She glanced at me. "Not... this."
"That's the point. Even when you knew something was off, you couldn't see through it."
"Because the act was too good."
"Exactly, that's what a good henge does. It's not just about changing your face. It's about becoming someone else. The way they walk, the way they talk, the little habits they have. If you do it right, people don't see through it because there's nothing to see through. You're not pretending to be someone else. You just are someone else."
Konan stared at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, a smile spread across her face.
"Okay," she said. "That does sound pretty cool actually."
"Told you."
"When do we start?"
"Right now. We've got time to kill before we move, and you're going to need this if we're crossing foreign territory together."
She nodded eagerly, the earlier disappointment completely forgotten. "Yes, sensei."
....
We stayed in the alley for a while longer.
I walked her through the basics, the hand seal, the chakra flow, the mental image you needed to hold while the jutsu did its work. She picked it up faster than I expected. Not perfectly, not even close, but the foundation was there. Shaky at first, then less shaky, then something that actually resembled a proper henge.
Not bad for a complete beginner.
Ten minutes later, we emerged from the alley and rejoined the flow of foot traffic on the main street. The market was in full swing now, shops and stalls lining both sides of the road, vendors hawking everything from dried fish to farming tools to bolts of fabric in colors that hurt to look at. Bodies flowed around us like water around rocks, everyone somehow knowing exactly where to step without looking.
"We're hitting the market first," I said. "Stock up on some supplies before we leave town."
Konan nodded, then brushed a strand of hair from her damp forehead. The sun wasn't helping.
"Is it always this hot here?"
"Pretty much." I squinted up at the sky. Clear blue, not a cloud in sight, sun beating down like it had a personal grudge against everyone below. "Earth Country doesn't really do mild weather. It's either baking or freezing, depending on the season."
"That's terrible."
"You're from Ame. Everything probably feels hot compared to that."
She made a face. "Ame isn't that cold."
"Ame is literally famous for constant rain. That's like saying Water Country isn't that wet."
"It rains a lot, sure, but it's not cold rain. It's just... rain." She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. "This is different. This is like standing inside an oven."
"Welcome to Iwa."
"I don't like it."
"Nobody asked you to like it."
She huffed, but there was no real annoyance behind it. Just the general frustration of someone who wasn't used to sweating through their clothes before noon.
Something caught my eye up ahead. A shop with an open front, displays of clothing and accessories visible from the street. I changed direction without really thinking about it, and Konan followed, curiosity overtaking her complaints about the weather.
"What are we doing?"
"Shopping."
"For what?"
I didn't answer. The inside of the shop was cooler than outside, shaded from the direct sun, and I took a moment to appreciate that before scanning the merchandise. Clothes on one side, accessories on the other. My eyes landed on a section near the back wall.
Hats.
I walked over, Konan trailing behind me. There was a decent selection. Straw hats, cloth caps, a few things with wide brims meant for farmers or travelers. I glanced back at Konan, taking in her white dress, then turned back to the display.
There. A white sun hat, simple but elegant, with a ribbon around the base that matched the shade of her dress almost perfectly.
I picked it up and turned around.
"Hold still."
"What? Why?"
I put it on her head before she could protest, adjusting it slightly so it sat at the right angle. Then I stepped back to look at the result.
White sun hat. White dress. Purple hair spilling out from underneath the brim.
She looked like she belonged on a movie poster instead of running from enemy shinobi through hostile territory. The contrast was almost funny. Here was this girl who'd just watched me kill a man in an alley, who'd asked me to make her strong enough to never be helpless again, and right now she looked like some rich merchant's daughter on vacation.
I had to stop myself from laughing.
"What?" She reached up to touch the hat. "Does it look weird?"
"No. It looks good."
She didn't seem to believe me, turning to find a mirror somewhere in the shop. While she was distracted, I considered the practical side of things. The hat was fine for blending in, but that dress wasn't going to work long-term. If we ran into trouble on the road, she couldn't exactly fight in that thing. Too restrictive, too easy to grab, too likely to get caught on something at the worst possible moment.
I should probably pick up some proper kunoichi gear for her. Something she could move in. Something that wouldn't get her killed if we had to run or fight.
"Oh my, how lovely!"
The voice came from behind me. I turned to find the shop owner approaching, a middle-aged woman with a merchant's smile and that look shopkeepers got when they spotted a potential sale walking through their door.
"That hat suits you perfectly, young lady," she said to Konan, clasping her hands together. "It brings out your features beautifully. The white complements your hair so well, and with that dress... you look absolutely stunning."
Konan's cheeks turned pink. "Um. Thank you."
The woman turned to me, her smile widening. "You have wonderful taste, young man. Your girlfriend is very lucky to have someone with such a good eye."
"Thanks," I said. "We'll take the hat. She also needs traveling clothes. Something light and comfortable for the road."
The shop owner's eyes lit up like I'd just handed her a winning lottery ticket.
What followed was fifteen minutes of my life I was never getting back.
The woman disappeared into the back of the shop and returned with an armful of clothes, depositing Konan behind a changing screen before I could say anything. Then came the parade. One outfit after another, Konan emerging each time looking vaguely uncomfortable while the owner gushed about how wonderful she looked and how perfect the fit was and how this particular style was very popular with young travelers these days.
I shook my head at the first one. Too flashy.
Shook my head at the second. Too restrictive around the shoulders.
The third was better but the fabric looked like it would tear if you sneezed on it. No.
Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. The owner kept pulling things off shelves and racks, clearly determined to find something I'd approve of, while Konan shot me increasingly desperate looks from behind the changing screen.
Too bright. Too dark. Too loose. Too tight. Wrong material. Wrong cut. That one had way too many unnecessary buckles.
By the tenth outfit, the shop owner's smile was starting to look a little strained. Konan had given up on expressions entirely and was just staring at me with flat eyes every time she stepped out, silently asking how much longer this was going to take.
I was asking myself the same question.
...
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