The warehouse burned brightly.
Karura watched it from the ridge, the orange glow painting the white salt flats in colors the landscape had probably never seen before. The fire climbed the timber frame and ate through the roof in under a minute, sending a column of black smoke into the pre-dawn sky that would be visible for miles. Inside, months of refined salt, crated and stacked and ready for export, popped and cracked as the heat found the moisture trapped in the mineral deposits and turned it to steam.
Mai sat beside her, legs dangling over the edge of the ridge, unwrapping a cactus fruit. "That's a lot of money burning."
"That's the point," Ebizo said from behind them. He stood with his arms folded, watching the fire calmly.
Three guards lay in a pile at the base of the ridge, unconscious, their wrists and ankles bound with rope. Mai had put them down ten minutes ago. She'd dropped from the warehouse roof onto the first one's shoulders, landed on the second one's chest before the first hit the ground, and caught the third with a spinning kick that connected with his temple before he finished drawing his naginata. Three men, three seconds, no noise louder than the sound of bodies hitting dirt.
"He's going to wake up tomorrow and find out he's lost a fortune." Karura said. She looked at the fire and felt the heat on her face even from two kilometers away.
Sometimes loud and destructive was the tool the situation needed according to Ebizo-sensei.
Ebizo-sensei set the fire with a simple fire jutsu. The wood caught fast. Desert-dried lumber in a country with no humidity, it went up like kindling.
"Let's move. We hit the road team tomorrow night. For now, we rest." Ebizo said
They pulled back over the ridge and disappeared into the hills before the first responders from the settlement reached the blaze.
Pakura couldn't help but hear what happened at breakfast.
The barracks woke to shouting and boots stamping through the courtyard.
She ate her rice in the kitchen and listened.
"The south warehouse is gone. Burned to nothing overnight."
"How? Lightning?"
"There's no lightning in the Land of Salt, you dumbass. Somebody torched it."
"Who?"
"Nobody knows. Guards were knocked out. Tied up. Didn't see anything."
Pakura chewed. The rice was bland and slightly stale. She ate it without a look of disgust on her face. Despite it being utterly and completely disgusting.
The courtyard was buzzing when she stepped outside. Goons clustered in groups, trading rumors. The lean shinobi appeared on the second-floor balcony of Doma's building, scanned the courtyard with hard eyes, and disappeared back inside.
Pakura leaned against the barracks wall and crossed her arms.
Her team.
She didn't know the details. Didn't need to. A warehouse burned overnight, guards knocked out clean, no witnesses, no trace. That had to have been her team.
The fat woman, the hired shinobi, walked through the courtyard with a twisted face. She barked orders at the wall guards, doubling shifts, extending patrols, her voice sounding frustrated. Her job had just gotten harder and she resented it.
Doma didn't emerge until noon.
When he did, everyone in the courtyard shut up. He stood in the doorway of the main building, gold rings catching the light, his round face upset about the situation.
"I want whoever did this to be found. I want them found and I want them brought to me breathing. I have questions for them." he said softly.
Nobody answered. What was there to say? They were hired muscle. They hit people and stood on walls. Hunting invisible arsonists in the salt flats wasn't in the job description.
Doma went back inside. The courtyard relaxed. Nobody wanted to be made an example of and possibly lose a good source of income.
Pakura pushed off the wall and walked to the south gate for her shift.
Three days. Maybe two left. Her opportunity would come.
The second hit came two nights later.
Ebizo chose the target. A squad of eight goons that Doma sent out every three days to make rounds through the outer mining settlements, collecting payments, reminding the miners who owned their labor, and roughing up anyone who fell behind on quotas. They traveled a fixed route along the trade road south of Shiokaze, stopping at each settlement for an hour before moving to the next.
"They leave at dusk and hit the first settlement by dark," Ebizo said, drawing the route in the dirt with a stick. "Four hours on the road between the third and fourth stops. Open ground. No cover. No witnesses."
"We take them there?" Karura said.
"We take them there." Ebizo looked at Mai. "You're the vanguard. Hit the front of the column and keep them bunched. Karura, you and I cut off the rear. Nobody runs."
Mai was already wrapping her fists. "How many do we leave breathing?"
"We only need one alive."
"Sounds good to me." Mai grinned.
They moved at sunset, running low across the salt flats, their shadows stretched long and thin behind them. Karura's Byakugan tracked the enforcer squad from a kilometer out, eight chakra signatures moving in a loose column along the trade road. They were armed but relaxed. Clubs and short swords, no formation, no scouts, the casual leisure of men who had never been hunted or attacked before in these lands.
The team intercepted them in a stretch of open ground between two low ridges. No cover for the enforcers. Nowhere to run.
Mai came from the front.
She dropped from the ridge onto the road twenty meters ahead of the column and stood there with her fists at her sides and that grin on her face. The one that was all teeth. The enforcers saw her and laughed. A girl. A kid. Standing in their road with bandaged fists and a look on her face like she thought she was dangerous.
The laughter lasted about two seconds before they realized what was on her forehead.
Mai covered the distance between them in a blur. The lead enforcer barely got his club up before her fist caved in his throat. He dropped, gurgling, hands clutching his neck, and Mai was already past him. The second man swung a short sword at her head. She ducked under it, stepped inside his reach, and drove her palm upward into his nose. Bone crunched and his head snapped back and he crumpled without a sound.
The column bunched. Exactly what Ebizo wanted. The remaining five enforcers clustered together, back to back, weapons out, shouting at each other, trying to prevent themselves from dying.
Karura hit the rear.
Million landed in the road behind the cluster with a thud that cracked the salt crust. Four arms spread wide. That carved smiley face staring at five grown men who had just realized they were surrounded. The bandage wrappings unspooled from Million's arms and shot forward, catching necks and limbs, yanking two men off their feet and into the air. The bandages tightened before they snapped their necks and the wrappings released as two bodies hit the road.
Ebizo handled the two who tried to flee. A kunai across one man's throat as he turned to run. A second blade buried in the spine of the other before he'd made it three steps.
It took less than a minute.
Six men lay on the trade road. All of them still. Mai stood over the seventh, her foot on his chest, looking down at him with that grin.
"Look at Mr. Lucky here." Mai teasingly said.
The man stared up at her. His club was broken beside him. His face was bleeding from where he'd hit the road. His eyes were wide and glassy.
"Go on home, little bandit," Mai said. "Tell your boss what happened. Tell him the road isn't his anymore."
She lifted her foot. The man scrambled up and ran, stumbling over his own legs, not looking back.
Mai watched him go. Then she turned to Karura and Ebizo, bouncing on her feet, barely winded.
"That was fun! Can we do another one?"
"No." Ebizo said.
"Just a small one?"
"We're leaving. Now."
They disappeared into the hills before the runner reached the first settlement.
The runner reached the compound at dawn.
Pakura was on the south wall when he came staggering through the gate, alone, his face swollen, his clothes torn, his legs barely holding him up. The gate guards caught him before he collapsed and dragged him into the courtyard.
Word spread fast. By the time Pakura climbed down from the wall, the courtyard was full. Goons pressed in from every direction, craning to see the man who'd limped in looking like he'd been through a rock grinder.
"They're dead," the runner was saying between gasps. His voice was high and cracking. "All of them. Ishida, Goro, everyone. We got hit on the trade road. There were three of them, maybe more, I don't know, it happened so fast. One of them had a, a thing, a doll, it had four arms and it snapped their necks!"
His voice broke. He sat on the ground in the middle of the courtyard and put his hands over his face.
There was a silence amongst the hired men, fear was spreading…
Doma emerged from the main building.
He walked to the runner, looked down at him, and said nothing for a long time. The courtyard held its breath. The gold rings on Doma's fingers glinted as his hands curled into fists at his sides.
"A doll?" he asked. "You said one of them used a doll?"
"It had four arms…"
Doma turned to the lean shinobi standing behind him. Something passed between them, something Pakura couldn't hear from her position at the edge of the courtyard.
The lean shinobi nodded once and left.
Doma looked at the crowd. His eyes swept across them, face by face.
"Everyone stays inside the walls. No one leaves without my direct authorization. Anyone who disobeys gets the same treatment our friends on the road got." He pointed at the runner. "Get him to the kitchen. Feed him. Then someone tell me how this group is dismantling my operation!"
He stormed back into the building. The lacquered door slammed shut.
Pakura stood at the edge of the courtyard with her arms folded and her face blank. It looks like her chance was going to arrive soon.
She went back to the wall.
The third hit was Karura's idea.
"The miners…" she pointed out. They were in their camp behind the northern ridge, the morning sun turning the salt flats white-gold. "Doma's holding families hostage to keep them working. If we free even one family, the miners will see that someone is fighting for them. Some of them will stop showing up. His production drops and his income shrinks."
"If the miners think he can't protect his own hostages, they'll stop being afraid of him."
"That's a good point, Karura." Ebizo gently smiled at her.
"How do we find the hostages?" Mai asked.
Karura tapped the side of her head. She didn't need to say more. Mai suddenly remembered. Karura couldn't help but shake her head with a smile. She even fell asleep with those glasses on, how could she not know?
"I don't know what secret you two are hiding from me, but with this secret you're able to find where the hostages are?" Ebizo's eyes narrowed at them.
"Yep!" Mai nodded.
"I see. I'll trust you then." Ebizo silently watched his genin. He let the question sit where it was. There was a family to pull out of a locked room first, and the rest would have to wait for now.
They waited until nightfall.
Karura scouted the settlement from the ridge, her Byakugan reaching through walls and floors and locked doors. The storage room behind the kitchen was there, just as Doma's overheard conversation had described. She could see through the building's walls from this distance easily. Inside, three chakra signatures. Small. Dim. A woman and two children, huddled together on a bare stone floor. No guards inside the room. One guard outside the door, sitting in a chair, half-asleep.
"One guard on the door, sleeping. The family is inside. A woman and two young children. I'll handle the guard." Mai said.
"I'll watch your back." Karura nodded.
They moved into the settlement under cover of dark. The streets of Shiokaze were empty at night, the few oil lamps that lined the main road casting pools of yellow light that were easy to avoid. The compound wall loomed ahead, but they weren't going inside the compound. The storage room was in a separate building behind the kitchen, accessible from an alley that ran along the outside of the compound wall.
Mai went first. She rounded the corner of the alley, located the guard through the window of the building's rear entrance, and was through the door before the man registered her shadow. A single palm strike to the side of his neck. His head lolled, his body went limp, and Mai caught the chair before it could tip and make noise. She lowered him to the floor.
Karura followed. She moved past the unconscious guard to the storage room door. Locked. A heavy iron bolt on the outside. She forced it open with chakra enhancing her strength.
The room was small and dark and didn't smell the greatest. The woman pressed herself against the far wall, pulling the two children behind her. They were young, maybe four and six. The older one was staring at Karura with eyes that were too old for his face. His right hand was bandaged. Thick wrappings. Blood had seeped through.
Karura's stomach turned. She knelt in front of them, making herself small, and pulled down her scarf so they could see her face.
"It's alright," she said softly. "We're from Sunagakure. We're here to take you somewhere safe."
The woman didn't move. Her arms tightened around her children. "He'll kill us. If we run, he'll kill us and he'll kill my husband."
"He won't. He can't reach you where we're taking you, and by the time he finds out you're gone, he'll have bigger problems to worry about."
"How do you know that?"
"Because we're the bigger problems." Mai added, slinking in.
The woman looked at her. At the Suna headband. At Karura's face, young and bright. She didn't look like she was lying. Then she looked at her son's bandaged hand. At the fingers that were missing under the wrapping.
She stood up.
"Where are we going?"
Karura led them out through the alley. Mai covered the rear. They moved through the dark streets to the edge of the settlement where Ebizo waited with a blanket and water. The woman drank. The children drank. The older boy held his bandaged hand against his chest and didn't cry.
Karura gave the woman a cactus fruit and watched her break it open for the children. The pink juice ran down their chins. Color returned to faces that had been grey.
"There are settlements to the west that Doma's people don't reach," Ebizo said. "I'll guide you there tonight. You'll be safe."
The woman nodded. She looked at Karura one more time.
"Thank you," she said.
Karura smiled. "Take care of them."
Ebizo left with the family. Karura and Mai stayed behind, crouched in the hills, watching the settlement.
"The kid was missing fingers." Mai said angrily.
"I know..."
She stared at the compound in the distance, the walls and the gate and the building where Pakura was sleeping among the men who served a person capable of cutting fingers off a child.
"If Pakura wasn't going to kill him, I definitely would."
"I feel the same..." Karura agreed.
"Good."
They sat in the dark and waited for Ebizo to return.
Ebizo came back in the small hours, the family seen onto the western track and gone. They fell back over the ridge to the cold camp behind it and lit a low fire against the desert night.
The fire had burned down to coals by the time Ebizo spoke.
Mai slept across from it, flat on her back, mouth open, the glasses still on her face. They were always on her face. She'd worn them through the hostage run and the climb back to camp and dropped into sleep without pulling them off, the violet lenses catching the last of the light.
"She sleeps with those?" Ebizo asked.
"She says the world looks wrong without them now."
"Mm." He let the quiet stretch. "I asked her about them. On the road, while you scouted ahead."
Karura had known that was coming since the Land of Dust.
"She told me you gave them to her. That they let her see good." A dry note came into his voice. "Then she went back to singing. I don't think the girl has wondered once where a thing like that comes from."
"She wouldn't."
"No. But I do." He turned his head, and the coal-light found the long lines of his face. "In Sajin she watched a man through stone. I've worked alongside sensors for forty years." He folded his hands. "That is not natural to say the least. A girl who couldn't shape chakra for a clone if her life hung on it, can now see things she shouldn't. So. Where did it come from?"
Karura looked at the coals. She thought about telling the truth, she really did. But she chose not to. Maybe one day, she will reveal her kekkei genkai… But it didn't feel right to share it now.
"The Land of Dust," she said. "I took them off one of the Stone nin. After dealing with them… He had them on him. I don't know where he got them and I couldn't ask him, what with him being dead. I kept them. After the battle and finding out how he knew what my puppets could do, I gave them to Mai to help her better since she can only use Taijutsu."
Ebizo said nothing for a moment.
"A Stone jonin, then." he said, "special spectacles, out in a dying country at the edge of the map."
Karura nodded.
He looked at her. He had spent a lifetime telling truth from the shape of a lie, and she could watch him doing it now, weighing the tidy little story against everything he knew about the girl who'd handed it to him. "I don't believe you." he told her.
"..." Karura was silent, nervousness rising through her gut like butterflies.
"I'm not mad at you Karura. A shinobi takes what's useful off the people she kills. A good one gives the best of it to the people she stands beside. If that's the whole of this, then all you've done tonight is be what the village made you, and dressed it up as stealing to spare me the longer questions."
Karura kept her face still.
"So I won't be taking you to interrogations." Ebizo said. "I know everything you do is in service for others and the village. Plus I am aware that young girls are quite keen on their secrets and pulling the truth out is like pulling teeth." He chuckled.
Relief filled Karura's heart as she giggled along with her sensei. "Thank you, sensei… For trusting me…" Tears pooled in Karura's eyes.
"Don't thank me yet." He warned with a smile. "One pair of glasses is fine. I can cover for you easily. But if a second pair ever turns up, on Pakura, or on anyone else and then it stops being a thing you found and starts being a thing you make. And a child who can make something like that is not a child her sensei gets to leave be." The smile didn't look so warm. "Then you and I won't be the only ones talking next time, and they will want every word of it. Are we clear?" His voice dropped low.
"There won't be a second pair."
"Good." He turned off his scary voice. "Then there was never a first one worth the breath we've spent."
Mai snorted in her sleep, mumbled something that might have been about fruit, and rolled onto her side. The lenses flashed once in the dark and went out against the sand.
"Now, get some sleep. I have the watch. You two did well with the family tonight." Ebizo told her, softly rubbing her head.
Karura lay down with her scarf bunched under her head and her eyes on the stars. This was definitely why she needed to hide the existence of the Byakugan and the Blastsword. Even something like those glasses are enough to bring such scrutiny and attention. No matter what, she could never tell anyone about her kekkei genkai…
By the next morning, the compound was suffocating.
Pakura could feel it in the air. Goons who'd swaggered through the courtyard a week ago now walked with their shoulders hunched, their eyes jumping at sounds. The wall guards gripped their weapons too hard and flinched at shadows. Conversations happened in whispers.
Three strikes in five days. A warehouse burned. A squad of enforcers wiped out on the road. And now, as of this morning, a hostage family vanished from a locked room inside the settlement, the guard unconscious with no memory of what hit him.
That last one broke something in the compound's spine. The warehouse was property. The enforcers were men. But the hostage family was control. Doma's entire grip on the mining operations depended on the miners' belief that he could reach their families whenever he wanted. That belief had just evaporated, and the whispers spreading through the barracks said that six miners hadn't shown up for their shift this morning. Then ten. Then fifteen.
Doma's screaming was audible through the walls of the main building.
The lean shinobi emerged onto the balcony and stood there for a long time, looking over the settlement, the surrounding hills, the empty trade road. The fat woman made three full circuits of the compound wall in an hour, checking every gate, every post, every shadow.
Pakura sat on a crate near the kitchen and ate her lunch.
The order came at sunset.
The lean shinobi walked through every barracks, every guard post, every building in the compound, and delivered a single message.
Meeting. Main building. Everyone. Now.
The courtyard emptied as men filed through the front door. Pakura fell in with the crowd, her dusty brown hair hanging in her face, her shoulders rounded, just another body.
The meeting room was on the ground floor. Oil lamps hung from hooks. The windows were shuttered. Hot and close and packed with men who were scared and trying not to show it.
Doma stood behind a table at the front.
He looked worse than the last time she'd seen him. The gold rings were still there, the silk still pressed, but his eyes had changed. Jumpy, darting, the look of a man who could feel the floor shifting under him and couldn't find solid ground.
"Someone is attacking us," he said. His soft voice had a waver in it now that hadn't been there five days ago. "In the last week, we've lost the southern warehouse, seven men on the trade road, a hostage family, and half our mining workforce has stopped showing up. Whoever is doing this knows our operations, our routes, and our schedules."
He placed both hands on the table. The rings clicked against the wood.
"I built this from nothing. Every person in this room eats because of what I built. And now someone thinks they can take it. They're wrong." The waver hardened. "Every patrol is cancelled. Every man on perimeter duty is recalled. Nobody leaves this compound until I say otherwise. We dig in, we wait, and when they come for us again, we'll be ready."
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the room. Some of them sounded almost convincing.
"Get to your posts. Double shifts on the walls. Anyone who sees anything, reports it immediately."
The crowd began to thin. Men filing back through the door, heading for the walls, the barracks, the kitchen.
Pakura didn't move.
She stood near the back of the room, her feet planted on the stone floor, her heart beating at a rhythm that was slower than it should have been. Everyone was recalled. The roads were empty. The walls were packed. Doma was sealed inside his own fortress with every man he owned, including the two shinobi who stood on either side of him like bookends.
The window she'd been waiting for was here.
Let the dust settle. Let the double shifts exhaust the guards and the fear keep everyone focused outward, watching the hills and the roads for enemies that weren't coming from outside.
Tomorrow. After he'd slept badly and woken worse. After another morning of miners not showing up and another evening of staring at walls and wondering when the next blow would fall.
She'd give him one more night of being afraid.
Then she'd give him something worse.
Pakura turned and walked out with the rest of the crowd. Her face was blank. Her pulse was steady. Under the transformation, behind the dusty brown hair and the flat eyes and the grey tunic that smelled like salt, Pakura of Team Ebizo was smiling.