Two days of hard travel later, Keiko arrived at the most prosperous street in the Land of Fire.
Tanzaku Town.
Calling it a place that made a thousand gold ryō a day would have been an understatement.
Rumor had it that at least one percent of the entire Land of Fire’s wealth passed through this town at any given time.
The math on that was staggering, and the industries that had grown up around that concentration of money were exactly what you’d expect.
If her escape from the capital hadn’t left her short on supplies, Keiko would never have come here willingly.
In six months of living in the Shinobi World, she had not encountered a single woman who could hold a candle to the body she was currently occupying.
Walking into Tanzaku Town in her current state was more or less painting a target on her back.
Wonderful, she thought.
Life is full of these moments.
She paused at the edge of the main street and raised one hand in front of her face.
Her fingers moved in a slow, deliberate sweep through the air.
Her features blurred.
The striking lines of her face softened into vague, forgettable shapes — the kind of face that slid off a person’s memory the moment they looked away.
Then she reached into her robes and drew out a small pouch of faintly luminescent powder.
She scattered it over herself in a thin, even layer and spoke a single word under her breath.
“Invisibility.”
Her body dissolved from the edges inward — as though someone was erasing an outline, working from the outside toward the center, until the last trace of her vanished entirely.
To her own eyes she was still there, hands visible, feet solid on the ground.
To anyone else, there was simply nothing standing in that spot.
At Sequence 7, with her current spiritual reserves, she had roughly twenty minutes of this before the technique collapsed on its own — and that was assuming she kept her hands clean.
If a fight broke out, the clock shortened considerably.
She still wasn’t certain whether a sensor-type shinobi could detect her through it.
Something to find out carefully, not the hard way.
Quick in, quick out.
She stepped onto the street.
Tanzaku Town in the middle of the day was overwhelming.
The street was packed — merchants, shinobi on leave, gamblers who hadn’t gone to bed yet, tourists from three different nations all flowing past each other in a loud, fragrant, chaotic stream.
Shops lined both sides selling everything from weapon pouches and soldier pills to silk robes and dango.
The smell of grilled meat and sweet dumplings drifted over everything.
The most common establishments, by a significant margin, were the casinos and the brothels.
Keiko drifted past both with a complicated expression that no one could see.
I used to be the kind of person who could walk into either of those places, she thought miserably.
Not anymore.
She shook it off and ducked into a small general store near the middle of the block.
The owner — a heavy-set middle-aged man with the specific posture of someone deeply committed to napping upright — was fully asleep behind the counter, chin on chest, snoring with tremendous dedication.
Fortune.
Keiko moved quickly, gathering what she needed from the shelves, and set several bills on the counter before slipping back out.
She didn’t know the exact prices.
She left enough that it felt right.
The door closed behind her with the faintest sound.
The owner jerked awake.
He looked at the bills on the counter.
Looked at the empty shop.
Scratched the back of his head.
Pocketed the money and went back to sleep.
A few minutes later, Keiko deactivated her invisibility in a side alley, two streets over.
The technique released in reverse — the outline reappearing first, then filling in, until she was simply standing there again, arms full of supplies, in a cramped passage that smelled of moss and damp stone.
She took stock.
The invisibility reserves were fine — she’d kept back enough for emergencies.
Using herself dry was one of the faster ways to get into serious trouble, and she wasn’t about to make that mistake in the middle of a town like this.
She looked down at herself.
Two days on the road without proper washing had done their work.
She was dusty, rumpled, and carrying the general aura of someone who’d been sleeping rough.
Under normal circumstances this would bother her.
Under current circumstances, it was an asset.
She thought of the trouble at the capital.
The pursuit.
Five shinobi and a noble’s obsession, all of it rooted in one simple fact.
Looking like this is a liability.
She crouched down, scooped a handful of damp earth from beside the alley wall, and smeared it across her face with both hands, spreading it evenly across her cheeks and brow.
The soil was cold and carried an unpleasant smell.
She worked it in methodically until her face was indistinguishable from the surrounding stone.
She stood up and examined herself as best she could.
Perfect.
She looked like a beggar.
A very convincing one.
The one remaining problem was structural and not solvable by dirt.
Her figure was what it was — curves that two days of road grime did nothing to diminish, movement that attracted attention whether she meant it to or not.
Can’t exactly remove that, she thought.
That would be worse.
She adjusted her clothes, tucked her purchases away carefully, and walked toward the alley entrance.
She kept her head down.
Low profile.
Anonymous.
She made it approximately ten steps out of the alley before a group of beggars spotted her.
They’d been lounging in a loose cluster near the street’s edge — broken bowls in the dirt, faces turned up to the sun, the comfortable sprawl of people with no particular schedule.
The moment Keiko came into their line of sight, every single one of them went still.
A collective freeze, as if someone had hit pause on all of them simultaneously.
Then the energy shifted.
“Hey — hey, look at that one.
New face.
Haven’t seen her before.”
“What a figure — way better than the usual.”
“I’m going first.”
“You always go first — let someone else have a turn—”
“I’m the boss of this corner, I go first, that’s the rule—”
They were on their feet before she’d taken two more steps, fanning out to block the alley entrance.
The one at the front was tall, hair in a catastrophic tangle, face a mosaic of grime in every shade of grey and black, clothing that had been reduced to hanging strips by a long relationship with hard living.
He looked at her with the particular smile of a man who believed he already knew how this conversation ended.
“New to the area?
You haven’t paid your protection fee.”
He reached for her.
Keiko sidestepped, fury igniting clean and fast behind her eyes.
“Touch me and I’ll bury you,” she said flatly.
The beggars found this hilarious.
“Beautiful and she’s got attitude—”
“I love that kind—”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, everyone new pays the same fee.
I’ll make sure you’re looked after—”
They pressed closer, a loose, grinning ring of them, the kind of crowd that fed off its own momentum and didn’t take warnings seriously.
Keiko’s hands closed into fists at her sides.
Fine.
Pull them into the alley, use the shadows for cover, and leave nothing but ash.
She’d done worse for less provocation this week.
She was already calculating angles when a voice cracked across the street like thunder.
“ENOUGH.”
The sound hit like a pressure wave — not loud so much as absolute, the kind of voice that carried a weight that bypassed the ears and registered somewhere more instinctive.
The beggars flinched as one, heads snapping toward the source before any of them had consciously decided to look.
A young woman was crossing the street toward them with long, unhurried strides.
She was tall.
Her hair was a vivid, sunlit gold that caught the afternoon light and threw it back doubled, and her loosely draped top did nothing to conceal the considerable physical presence beneath it.
She moved like someone who was accustomed to people getting out of her way.