The rain in the Land of Rivers was a cold, grey seepage that saturated the world. It bleached the scent from the air and turned the earth into a clinging, sucking mockery of mud—a profound obscenity to a son of the sun-blasted dunes. Tazrir stood within it, motionless, the fourth step in a four-man kill-team.
Provisional Sandwatch operative. An attachment. An observer. A cleaner. The titles meant less the longer he listened to the drizzle hiss against the broad, foreign leaves. He pulled his tagelmust tighter; the indigo cloth, woven for sandstorms, drank the dampness and grew heavy against his skin. It hid his face, but did nothing for the cold.
"Movement." The word was a dry scrape. Jonin Raido, a silhouette against the weeping granite of the cliff face. "Upper ledge. Two guards."
The team dissolved into the landscape—root, shadow, and rotten log. Tazrir was absorbed by stone, a part of the terrain. His tracksense, useless in this liquid world, turned inward. He read the team itself: the subtle shift of Akane's weight to her back foot, the minute, metallic click of Goro testing his wire reel. They were a machine oiled by war. And he was the new grit in the bearing.
The target was Hayate. A Suna cryptographer, captured and presumed dead in the war's closing days. Now, intelligence whispered he was alive, compromised, and slated for a three-way trade to Iwagakure. The secrets in his mind—Suna's ciphers, the Third Kazekage's own security protocols—could not change hands. Retrieval was deemed paramount. If not—deniability. A necessary blow.
Hence, Kaze-no-Ha.
Hence, him.
"Tazrir." Raido's voice took him to the present. "Confirmation run. East gully. The transfer uses a covered cart. Tell me what you see."
Not what the intelligence report said. What he, with his senses, could actually "see".
Tazrir gave a single nod and moved. He did not use the Body Flicker; its chakra flash was a waste here. He moved with the desert's patience, stepping only when the rain's patter peaked to mask his sound, his feet finding stone, never mud. Water strolled down the geometric tattoos on his hands.
The gully was a trench of clinging mist. And there was the cart: a covered mule-drawn thing, its wooden wheels choked with red clay. Two river-nin stood guard, looking bored.
It was all wrong.
Their posture was loose, guarding nothing. They were static, bait. The mule was too calm, ears twitching at flies, not tension. Most telling were the cart's tracks, too shallow in the mud for a man's weight. It was a farce, a performance for an audience.
He returned to Raido's elbow like a ghost resolving from the damp air. "It's a diversion, the cart is empty. The real transfer is elsewhere."
Silence, longer and heavier than the drizzle. "You're sure?"
"The mud tells no lies, lead. It only tells stories. This story says 'ambush.'"
A grim, thin smile touched Raido's lips. "Good. The daimyo's manor, then. They'd keep him close." Orders snapped, low and final. "Taz." The jonin turned to face him with a steely gaze. "Find me the real trail."
It was a test that felt like a punishment. Tazrir led them not through the obvious gully, but up a steep, rocky game trail that seemed exposed and unlikely. His eyes, however, picked out the narrative: a scrape on rain-slick rock where a sandal had slipped, a single broken fern whose sap had not yet been washed clean. It was the path of least resistance for men who thought themselves clever.
It led to a humble postern gate—a servant's entrance. And there, in the churned muck, was the proof: a single footprint with a narrow, worn heel, and beside it, the distinct, round depression of a cane's tip.
"Here," he whispered, motioning towards the mark. "One man. Injured or elderly. A recent trace, possibly assisted."
Raido's hand fell on his shoulder, a grip of iron. "Report wrote of Hayate's wounds—limping from an old interrogation." The jonin's eyes turned to the rest of the team. "Remember the order. We do this clean. If we are compromised—rid of the asset and rendezvous at the point."
The words hung in the wet air.
They went over the wall, shadows flowing over wet stone. They found him not in a dungeon, but in a small, wooden-floored study. It was warm, lit by a single paper lantern that painted everything in soft, shifting gold. Hayate sat at a low desk, a man reduced to paper and bone, meticulously copying a scroll. His life's work. A cup of tea steamed untouched at his elbow. The scene held a terrible peace, a deep-boned resignation.
Raido did not hesitate. A sharp gesture. Two senborn flashed from the rafters, striking the old man's neck. Not poison, but a powerful paralytic.
Hayate gasped, a wet, strangled sound. His hands seized on the desk, knuckles white. His eyes, wide with a sudden, silent terror, found Raido in the shadows.
Raido stepped into the lantern light. Gaze set on the scrolls. "Burn them," he ordered, preparing to eliminate the target.
"Wait." The word was out, born in Tazrir's gut, before he could stop himself. Every eye in the room turned to him, each gaze hard and dangerous. Tazrir's mind raced. "Lead, look at his work."
Raido turned to the scroll, this time reading its contents. It was not filled with ciphers or tactical maps. The characters were simple, looping, deliberate. A child's practice script for the Land of Rivers' alphabet. Beside his paralysed hand, half-hidden, lay a small, clumsily carved wooden animal.
"Something is wrong," Tazrir said, the truth rising cold and sharp. "He appears a tutor." He turned to Raido. "We may have been led."
Raido's blade did not waver. His gaze, when it finally flicked to Tazrir, was void of anything human. "The order is not to judge his guilt. The order is to ensure his silence. The why is not our concern. The fact of his continued existence is the threat."
The rain drummed a steady requiem on the tiled roof above, a sound a thousand miles from home. In the lantern's intimate glow, Tazrir understood the true nature of the Sandwatch. It was the village's silent, and utterly ruthless heart.
He had to choose.
"The order is flawed." His voice was lower now. He did not move toward the blade. He moved toward the evidence. With a deliberate, slow disrespect, he reached past Raido and picked up the wooden bird. It was shockingly light, smooth under his calloused thumb.
"The leak must be elsewhere." He forced himself to meet the jonin's unnerving stare. "This one barely qualifies as a stale asset."
"You question the intelligence?"
"I question the interpretation of it." He held up the tiny bird. "The intelligence spoke of a 'compromised asset in possession of protocols.' It did not say he was actively transmitting." He paused, voice shushing. "The protocols in his head are years out of date by now. We are being used to clean a stale mess."
It was logic, a desperate, instinctual weave. He saw it land—in the slight frown that marred Goro's stoic face, in the almost imperceptible tilt of Akane's head as she reassessed the room.
Raido's blade still did not waver. But his eyes flickered. Not with doubt, but with cold, recalculating judgment. His primary duty was not to kill, but to ensure the outcome. If the outcome—Suna's security—could be better served another way…
A sound from the hallway. A boot scuffing on polished wood, off-rhythm, off-schedule.
The trap. The realization dawned, cold and clear. Raido's blade, meant for Hayate's heart, flipped in his grip. The pommel slammed into the old man's temple with a dull, sickening crack. Hayate slumped, unconscious.
Before Raido could even hiss a new order, the paper-panelled door to the study exploded inward in a spray of splintered wood and wet wind. Two River-nin, their faces masked by scaled hoods, surged through. They weren't the bored guards from the gully. These moved with the compact efficiency of professionals, short swords already clearing their sheaths.
The reaction from Kaze-no-Ha was instantaneous, a single organism under threat. Goro's wire, already strung in a defensive web across the door frame, sang as the first man hit it. It didn't cut—there was no room—but it entangled, a fraction of a second of delay. Akane was a blur of motion from the ceiling, dropping behind the second, a kunai finding the gap between neck and armour with a wet choke.
The first River-nin tore through the wire, ignoring the shallow cuts on his arms. He went straight for Raido, the clear leader.
There was no time for jutsu, for grandeur. The room was too small, the risk of bringing the manor down on them too great. This was the ugly, intimate work of shinobi in a box. Raido met the River-nin's charge, his own blade deflecting a thrust.
Raido parried another blow, forcing the man toward a corner, where Goro moved to flank.
Another figure appeared at the shattered doorway—bulkier, an Iwa-nin, his face grim under a forehead protector. His hands flew through seals. Doton.
The wooden floor at Tazrir's feet erupted. Not in stone, but in a spike of hardened, compacted mud that shot upward like a fang. He threw himself sideways, Hayate's limp weight wrenching his shoulder. The mud-spike grazed his ribs, tearing fabric and skin, a hot line of pain. He landed hard, rolling to shield the old man with his body.
The room was becoming a death trap. Close quarters favoured the defenders, but not against earth techniques that could reshape the very space.
"Out!" Raido roared. He dispatched the River-nin with a brutal, efficient slash across the thighs, then turned to the Iwa-nin. "Akane, clear a path! Goro, with me! Tazrir, move that burden or lose it!"
Tazrir scrambled up, hauling Hayate over his shoulder again. The old man's head lolled, a thread of saliva mixing with blood from the temple wound. The weight was a moral anchor, threatening to sink him in the chaos.
Akane blew past, a whirlwind of kunai and sharpened wind that forced the Iwa-nin back a step, disrupting his seals. Goro and Raido pressed the Iwa-nin, a dance of slashing wire and flickering blade keeping the earth-user pinned.
Tazrir followed Akane into the hall. The manor was awake now. Alarms—actual gongs—were sounding somewhere deep in the compound. Servants' doors slammed shut. Boots pounded on floorboards above and ahead.
"Left!" Akane snapped, flinging a handful of caltrops behind them. "Servant stairs. Down!"
They were rats in a flooding maze. The elegant corridors of the daimyo's home became a nightmare of turns and dead ends. Tazrir's tracksense, overwhelmed by the panic-churned mud of many feet, was useless. He ran on instinct, on Akane's curt directions, the breath burning in his lungs.
A River-nin appeared from a side passage. Tazrir didn't stop. He shifted Hayate's weight, drew his blade in the same motion, and met the man's downward chop. The curved blade hooked the River-nin's sword, guided it wide with a shriek of metal, and Tazrir drove his shoulder into the man's chest, sending him stumbling back into a lacquered screen. He didn't look back.
They found the narrow, steep servants' stairs, plunging down into the kitchen's heat and steam. A cook stared, a cleaver frozen in his hand. Akane put a genjutsu on him with a glare—the man's eyes glazed, and he began meticulously chopping nothing.
Through the kitchen, out into a sodden herb garden. The cold rain was a shock, a blessing. It meant open space.
Raido and Goro burst from another door, the jonin sporting a burn across his forearm where an earth technique had grazed him. "Courtyard," Raido gasped, not from exertion but from fury.
They moved as a unit now, a wounded beast seeking to bite back. Over a low wall, through a trampled flower bed. The central courtyard opened before them, a scene of surreal normality amidst the alarm bells.
There, under the shelter of a broad pagoda, the exchange was happening. A River Country official in rich robes held a sealed iron chest. Across from him, an Iwa-nin with the bearing of a commander, a scroll case already at his hip. They were concluding business, their guards a perimeter of alert, professional shinobi facing outward.
Raido pointed at the chest. "Seize or destroy it."
The fight in the courtyard was different. It was not the confused, room-to-room brawl of the manor. It was a sudden, violent eruption in an open space. No more subtlety. Wind Release met Earth Release in visible, crashing displays. A razor-edged gust from Akane sliced through a wooden support beam of the pagoda, sending a section of the roof crashing down between the Iwa commander and his guards. Goro's wires, glinting in the rain, wove a deadly fence, separating the River official from his retinue.
Tazrir saw his role. He was compromised, burdened. He could not join the central fray. So he made for the periphery, for the shadows of a stone lantern. He laid Hayate down, propping him against the cold rock.
He turned to guard the approach. A River-nin, younger, face set in a grimace, charged him. This boy was not a master. He was frantic, overcommitting. Tazrir let him come, stepped inside the wild spear thrust, and used the man's own momentum. A twist of his hips, a guided pull of the arm, and the River-nin sailed past him to slam headfirst into the stone lantern with a crunch. He didn't get up.
Tazrir set his eyes on Raido. The jonin was a force of nature, a whirlwind of focused violence. He'd reached the official. One moment the official was clutching the chest, the next he was falling, his throat slit. Raido snatched the chest, tucking it under his arm like a trader taking a bolt of silk.
"Kaze-no-Ha! Disengage!" Raido's voice cut through the din. The objective was acquired. The trap had been sprung, but they had stolen the bait and the prize.
The retreat was a fighting sprint back through the gardens, over walls, into the welcoming, obscuring blanket of the river woods. They ran until the manor's alarms were a faint, discordant echo, until the only sounds were the rain, their ragged breaths, and the relentless chitter of disturbed birds.
In the dripping sanctuary of a hollow beneath a massive, mossy fallen tree, they stopped. The unit was wounded, bleeding, soaked. But alive. And in possession of the chest.
Raido looked at the iron box, then at Hayate, propped against a root, still mercifully unconscious. Finally, his gaze settled on Tazrir. It held no praise. No condemnation. It was the look of a man recalculating a complex equation.
He didn't say what they all knew. The mission was a success. They had prevented the sale. They had the evidence. But they had also exposed Sandwatch's methods, confirmed the new leak's severity, and were now burdened with a living, breathing complication.
Raido's eyes didn't leave Tazrir. "You made your choice, Taz. He's your charge. You see him to the Kazekage. You explain why and how to them." He hefted the chest. "And we will see what this poison tells us. Move out. We have a long, wet walk home to prepare our story."
The rain continued unabated.