“So I just have to check these guys out?” the informer asked, holding the note Sai had given him. His shaved head and eyebrows made it hard to tell exactly how old he was. In fact, Sai had no idea how old the other man was.
They were in the woods just outside of the village. The sunlight filtering through the trees dappled the ground around them.
“Exactly.” Sai nodded.
“The Kiri rogue ninja Tenzen, Genba the Soul Remover, Baraki, leader of the criminal association known as The Deceased—these are all pretty big game. They’re basically impossible to find,” the informer noted. His voice didn’t carry far, perhaps covered up by the sound of water flowing in the nearby stream.
“Well, they’re who I want you to find. See if they’re up to anything. I want any scrap of information you dig up, no matter how trivial.”
“Understood.”
“You memorized their names?”
The informer nodded. Sai wove a simple sign with one hand, and the characters on the note the informer held disappeared, evaporating into thin air. They had been written in Sai’s own special ink.
“But still, why these guys?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Has this got anything to do with the advisor Master Homura being attacked?”
Sai stared at the informer’s face and smiled thinly. “Huh, so you know about that.”
“It’s my bread and butter. So you suspect one of these guys for it?”
“I’m pretty sure I said you don’t need to know.” Sai sharpened his gaze for a moment.
“Whoops, excuse me.” The informer looked startled. “I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, these people being who they are, it might take a while to hunt them down,” he noted before leaving.
Sai also left the forest and set out along the road back to the village.
He had set his pet informer to work on the case, but he had a feeling the man would come back empty-handed. The informer might bring him some dirt on the three big-shot criminals, but whatever information he brought, it wasn’t very likely that it would be connected with the recent attacks. But he set the man in motion just in case.
A recuperating daimyo and an observing advisor had been assaulted. Kakashi said that he didn’t think it was simple thuggery, and Sai was inclined to agree.
The day Kakashi gave the order for this secret investigation, Sai had headed for the Anbu reference room and checked into both incidents.
The daimyo was under the powerful protection of the Anbu, both while he was traveling in the palanquin and after he arrived at the onsen. A kunai had shot in through some tiny opening in that guard and nearly hit the daimyo in the onsen. He couldn’t ignore the significance of this lone kunai. If it had been attached to an explosive tag, the damage could have been enormous.
When he was assaulted, the advisor Homura also had two shinobi standing watch—although they were not Anbu—as he made his observations. His attackers were three masked men. One of them sliced the advisor with a ninja sword, giving him a shallow wound on his arm. The trio had quickly fled, and the guards had given chase but failed to catch them or learn who they were. The guards said the fleeing villains had been cloaked in light purple chakra.
Given that they evaded the security that went in pursuit of them, and managed to injure an old veteran like Homura—however slightly—these men were strong ninja. The aim and scope of the enemy was unclear, but Sai was glad to see that in terms of ninja skill at least he was up against a worthwhile enemy.
And if powerful ninja were dirtying their hands with criminal activity, then his eyes naturally turned to the most wanted, most malicious criminals of the Bingo Book. Which was why Sai decided to get in touch with the informer and have him hunt down the top-level people in it. Naturally, he couldn’t have the informer track down every single one of those criminals, so he excluded the ones he could be sure had nothing to do with the attacks.
But the Anbu were probably already investigating at this level at least. Given that Kakashi had given him a secret order to start a separate investigation, Sai was sure that Kakashi had a hunch that someone much more mysterious was behind the incidents.
Sai considered his next move.
He could go to the onsen and the maneuvering ground where the attacks had taken place, or he could go through the Bingo Book again. Suddenly, he felt a presence behind him and stopped in his tracks.
He was a distance from the forest, already in a block of town, but it wasn’t a busy part of the village. The concrete wall behind the factory ran alongside the road. There was no one else on the road. The enemy may have concealed their auras and waited until he had come this far before revealing themselves.
The fight came quickly enough.
A shuriken flew at him from behind. He knocked it to one side and whirled around to see how many people he was up against.
Two people, twenty meters or so away, in black masks. Probably the masked thugs—the ones who had attacked the advisor. He didn’t know if there were others still concealing themselves.
Then came the follow-up attack.
One threw a kunai. The other one moved at the same time, a kunai held in an underhand grip. Clearly, he planned to attack Sai when his guard was down after dodging the flying kunai. Their coordination was impeccable.