Chapter 9
The training she was doing with Zabuza had raised questions, but she hadn’t thought too much about it. There was a reason for it, and eventually it would be clear. He wasn’t allowed to kill her (she had checked – maiming was allowed, but killing Mei had explicitly forbidden), and she had only benefited from his training in the past.
That being said, being taught to dual-wield didn’t make her brain jump straight to Kiba but here she was, holding the infamous sword and glancing between it and Mei.
“You’re sure about this?”
“You’re a Kirigakure shinobi and you already work well with each of the other swordsman. You’ll make a devastating team, and you’ll do it without trying to kill each other.”
That was a pointed remark at Zabuza (given how he trained people), and even if Ren hadn’t guessed as much his affronted scoff would have told her anyway.
“You’ll be fine training on it, I’m sure. And Suigetsu can help you with the chakra manipulation and learning how to weave it into battle.
“Your genin are waiting for you, though, so I wouldn’t keep them still too long. They seem to have your penchant for trouble.”
Well. She couldn’t say they didn’t. But she didn’t have to like it being pointed out to her.
“Yes, Mizukage-sama.” Before taking off toward the training ground, she made sure to secure it to the harness on her back that Suigetsu had thrown at her this morning.
*
Being back to a nearly fulltime genin supervisor was nice because she got more time to really work with them and start feeling out their abilities. Which is why she was ready to jump them to chunin style training.
“You’re all antsy for the chunin exams, I know. We aren’t entering the next one – it’s three weeks away and I don’t think you’re geared to pass. There’s another one in about seven months, though, and that’s what our focus is going to be.
“I’m upping your training. You’re going to start running more C-Rank missions,” their mission record in village was starting to stack up, but it was mostly the repair work and rebuilding that required shinobi that could get in and out of more dangerous spots than civilians. Definitely more skill-focused than in Konoha, though there was still a teamwork focus, but it was out of necessity in part.
Kirigakure, according to Chojuro, didn’t give out the same types of genin-hazing D-ranks she had taken in Konoha. Her wartime missions were usually messenger runs or as an extra body on a team that needed either her healing ability or just a decent fighter – common for genin that left their teams or whose teams had split up for whatever reason.
Instead, with the war over but so much needing to be done to repair and rebuild after, she got to watch and guide her gennin as they did either infrastructure projects or administrative projects. The administrative ones were the ones that took the hardest toll, and she tried to space them out and then find a way to reward her team for hard work after.
Coming to Kirigakure to find a missing relative was a crapshoot, and anyone in the Land of Water could tell you that but it wouldn’t change the desperation that drove mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters to come looking for someone that had disappeared during the war. The worst part was that some were refugees that had fled to other countries – most notably the Land of Fire – and were hard to track down. Some were dead, confirmed dead, but the family didn’t always take the news well.
It made their lives much harder when someone came from one of the border town families. They didn’t have formal shinobi training, but the closer they were to the edge of the collection of islands, the more likely they were to have a vicious streak a mile wide and the tenacity to train to something almost resembling shinobi ability.
A series of invasions in the early years of the Land of Water, some had told her. Ren figured it was just plain old paranoia.
But it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you. Then it’s just good sense.
Ages-old Kirigakure wisdom that usually came over alcohol and wrapped up in an insult.
Beyond that, though, the border-townspeople often reacted harshly to hearing someone was dead. They trained their children for survival. They clung to each other like teams in the village did.
Death was not noble in the border-towns. Or in the Land of Water, more generally, though the border-towns took it further than most. Only survival was allowed. If you died in battle who cared? The most honorable death out there was death in old age surrounded by loved ones, and if you asked Ren that, too, was good fucking sense.
She snapped out of her musings, stopped thinking about the people that came in and out of the village, and instead focused on her genin.
It was a rebuilding mission, but it was the last one they needed before taking their next C-Rank. Village policy mandated 12 D-Rank missions between each C-Rank, just to be sure of health and general well-being in case of injuries during the mission.
It was one of Mei’s reforms, and Suigetsu took great pleasure in guessing whether it was because of Ren’s track record of things going spectacularly wrong, and if so which mission specifically inspired it.
“Duck lower, Takeshi. Never assume you’re going to clear with a slight head nod, or have you never fought in the middle of a swamp?”
Takeshi laughed a bit, ducking lower. There was no reason to really remind him – if he clipped his head he learned his lesson – but she spent enough time with them to want to protect them.
Maybe Suigetsu was right – maybe she did have a bit of an attachment problem.
Sighing, she watched as Masuyo and Suzume caught the end of the beam that Takeshi was carrying. “You were about to let it drop off the building, idiot.”
“Suzume-“
“You don’t get to tell me not to call him an idiot, Senpai. You called Suigetsu-senpai an idiot last night at dinner.”
Sometimes this whole living together with her team and her genin thing was a pain in the ass.
“Fine. But please try to limit it?” Ren threw a senbon to train Kimiko into awareness – her largest deficit in training, though she was getting better at noticing and dodging – as she turned back to Suzume. “Suigetsu fucked up rice. He deserved it. You’ve called Takeshi an idiot three times this mission alone.”
Suzume scowled. “But he almost dropped it off a building. What if it hit someone?”
Ren rolled her eyes. These four were going to kill her. Or drive her to murder – that was another very real possibility.
*
Suigetsu got a peek, once in a while, at the softer parts of his teammates.
Chojuro liked playing with the stray cats. He would tut at them and would occasionally care for them or get them to a vet if he thought they needed it. Their landlord hated it, but there was an unspoken leeway given to shinobi and their quirks in any Hidden Village.
Haku played music. He did it when he thought he was alone, and he hid his instrument of choice (a small flute) under the floorboards of their room.
Ren threw herself into people. She helped the neighbors, she gathered the civilian kids at the Academy into a cohesive unit when they gave their teacher trouble, and she worked with her genin. Those four got the most out of her in terms of a softer personality, he knew that much. She drove them harder and harder as time went, but she also fretted like his own mother once had over himself and Mangetsu.
It was nice to see. The war was starting to recede – whatever loyalists were left were learning to hide and to let things lie, and people were starting to go back to normal life. The next generation didn’t have to carry all the same burdens as theirs, and Mei was working to address social and military concerns.
Things were looking up, domestically speaking.
The paper in his pocket told him enough to know the international situation was not nearly so optimistic.
*
Zabuza glanced at Mei. “You’re sure about this?”
“We will have to keep them in-village until at least one of those genin gets a promotion, but the sooner we make them work together the better. Akane first, though. I want her being drilled in teamwork with various teams and formations. The others have worked together enough that they won’t have to worry as much, and in-village training will largely be to solidify roles and group fighting styles. Akane was a lone actor throughout most of the war. We need to make sure she will be up to this kind of long-term cooperative assignment.”
“And what about Ren’s work with Hiroshi?”
“Hiroshi submitted a preliminary report to me yesterday.” Mei sat behind her desk, taking the report out. “There have been some unexpected complications.”
“Such as?”
“This second chakra doesn’t work well with her primary chakra. According to his report, after use it bonds to it awkwardly, destabilizes it, and then clogs up her chakra system. She had a seizure yesterday from switching between the two too quickly. Each time it has triggered a reaction it was when she was switching back to her normal chakra, and he says if she isn’t careful, the clog in the chakra system sends her body into a sort of shock. Something about the sudden cut off to the circulation and the subsequent chakra buildup behind the block.”
Zabuza let out a low whistle. “You sure we should be putting her on this team if she can’t even control her own bloodline?”
Mei sighed, leaning back and spinning her chair slightly. “We need that kind of skill on the team.”
“We have other assassins and strategists.”
“We don’t have other Nara-trained strategists.”
“We can have her train someone.”
Mei sighed. “That would take too much time. Hiroshi is optimistic that he might find a solution – especially if we put him on the team. He can keep studying it, maybe even develop a medicine for her or a seal that will help moderate the bloodline while maintaining her control over her primary chakra.”
“So, we want to send a pretty good scientist, probably one of our best if he wasn’t such a fucking ditz, out with a potential time-bomb and two other Swordsmen?”
Mei sighed. “We don’t have many Jonin we can trust on this kind of mission. It’s across the entire damn world, hunting people we have no lawful right to hunt other than as ‘national security’, or in one case ‘reclamation of Village property’, and they have to do diplomatic work to ensure their own damn safety.
“I don’t have too many Jonin that have that diverse a skillset. Hell, we only have those kinds of skills in this team because they balance each other out and can communicate well enough to make sure that no one on the team does something stupid while also avoiding an issue of infighting.”
Zabuza rolled his eyes. “Why do you even bother asking me when you’ve already made up your mind?”
Mei smiled. “Because it bothers you. Besides, if you can convince me, then that means I was attacking the problem from too far down the river and needed the reality check.”
Zabuza grunted, clearly not pleased with his impromptu position as bodyguard-and-advisor, but willing to deal with it.