“Been a while since I saw you two,” Shikamaru said to his old friends in his own office next to the Hokage’s.
Before him stood two ninja wearing white masks, one a monkey and the other a cat. From their physical statures, it was clear that the monkey was a man and the cat a woman.
“Totally. Like, ages,” the woman said, removing her mask. Her orange hair, once long, was now cut short. When they’d met, she was a girl just out of the academy, but the intervening decade had turned the girl into a woman. Her eyes, looking down on Shikamaru sitting at his desk, were brimming with confidence. As an Anbu commander, she’d come through countless bloody battles.
“You still all ‘like, like,’ huh, Hinoko?”
“It’s not something you can, like, just stop just ’cause someone told you to. And, like, I told you before not to call me by my real name!”
“I guess you did, Hinoko.”
“Gah! You, like, just said it again!”
Shikamaru’s lips curled up at the familiar exchange. Hinoko’s Anbu name was Soku. She hated her real name and got angry when called by it. Shikamaru was well aware of this fact, but he did it anyway.
“You must calm yourself,” sighed the man in the monkey mask. He removed his mask to reveal a stern jaw and thick eyebrows. The hair that was black in Shikamaru’s memories was threaded with conspicuous gray now. Going by the name of Ro, he was a veteran ninja, a dozen or so years older than Shikamaru.
Shikamaru had once been assigned to work with them for a period. He would never forget it: the Land of Silence.
When all communication ceased with Sai, who had gone to this small country to find Gengo, a man who could control people with words alone, Shikamaru had, without saying a word to anyone, set out on the journey to the Land of Silence to find him alongside these two Anbu ninja. He had been captured and very nearly caught in Gengo’s trap when Temari came to his rescue and awakened him from the vocal genjutsu. It was all a fond memory now. That had been the first and last time he’d worked as part of a three-person cell with the Anbu.
Currently, both Ro and Soku were jonin leading their own squads. But peace had come to the world, and so the Anbu had also seen their numbers in steady decline. Ninja like these two, able at work on the front lines, were valuable resources. Shikamaru had half-forced their schedules open to bring them before him now.
This was an important matter. He wanted to leave it to people he could trust.
“Lord Shikamaru is, at present, second-in-command in Konoha. Tread lightly with him, or you will be sec-olded harshly.” Ro pursed his lips as he distinctly emphasized “scolded.”
Raising an eyebrow, Shikamaru looked at Hinoko. “This old guy still the same as ever?”
“I think he was, like, making a play on ‘second’ and ‘scold,’” Hinoko said, looking exasperated, and Ro listened with a tense smile. This middle-aged ninja had a habit of making bad puns and jokes.
Although Shikamaru had remembered that Hinoko got angry when she heard her real name, he’d forgotten Ro’s pun thing, but it all came back to him when he saw his look of self-satisfaction. He hadn’t understood Ro’s pun at all, but naturally Hinoko had caught on instantly. But even now that he knew what the pun was meant to be, it wasn’t funny at all. Still, he rewarded Ro’s efforts with a wry smile.
“Coming together after all this time means some kind of annoying job, right?” Hinoko asked, a serious look on her face.
“Mm.” Shikamaru brought his gloved hand to his mouth. He stared at the Anbu. “Smells like fire around Mount Iwa. I want you to go check into how much magma we’re looking at.”
“Oh ho!” Ro knit his thick eyebrows together.
As for Hinoko, a smile spread across lips painted in orange lipstick. They knew just from the words “Mount Iwa” that he was talking about Iwagakure. “Haven’t, like, heard anything ‘on fire’ in a while,” she said, brushing back her short front fringe with orange nails.
It was true that since the Great Ninja War—no, since the Five Kages joined hands—fighting between countries had dropped dramatically. They were, of course, different communities, so smaller conflicts were an everyday occurrence, but because they all prioritized cooperation, none of these had ever turned into anything more serious.
Which was exactly why when it started to come apart at the seams, the whole thing would burst open. Stability bred inflexibility, and inflexibility made swift reaction impossible. A single sharp and powerful shock was all that was needed to cause one tiny fragment after the other to chip away, revealing the peace they believed in to be nothing more than an illusion. He had to pluck this budding unrest out at the root sooner than later.
“Was there some matter of concern at the earlier meeting?” Ro asked. His intuition was as sharp as ever.
Shikamaru nodded. “The Tsuchikage proposed a strange motion.”
“Which was?”
“Disclosure of Konoha’s confidential information to the other villages.”
“Ha! There’s, like, no way you can do that. We’re hidden villages precisely ’cause we got secrets. That’s not, like, something a ninja working in the shadows’d say.”
Hinoko was exactly right. As someone who governed a village, Kurotsuchi was proposing something well beyond the realm of common sense. Exposing the secrets of their own country was equivalent to admitting defeat as a village. Kurotsuchi was not a stupid woman. She had said what she said in full awareness of this.
Why exactly? Shikamaru couldn’t get past how odd the whole thing was. Kurotsuchi’s move was far too reckless. There had to be something behind it. If he were Kurotsuchi…
Disturbance. Dare to make a bad move and upset the board.