Seven days later.
The outskirts of Yugakure.
Keiko had changed her clothes somewhere along the road — trading her worn travel gear for something slightly more presentable, a skirt over a pair of snug shorts she had absolutely no intention of removing.
It’s cold without them.
That’s all.
That’s the only reason.
She was not alone.
Walking alongside her were six shinobi, none of them the kind you’d invite to a family dinner.
Two had no headbands at all.
The other four wore insignia from villages small enough that no one in a major Hidden Village would recognize them on sight.
Rogue nin, all of them, in the most practical sense of the word.
She’d collected them one by one over the past week, in the way you collect problems when you look the way she looked and travel alone.
The first group had wanted to take advantage of her.
The second had been planning to sell her to some minor noble for a finder’s fee.
A third had had ideas of their own.
None of them had succeeded.
All of them had ended up here, walking two paces behind her with expressions of devoted, slightly glassy-eyed loyalty.
Keiko had stopped being surprised by this around day three.
She had also, somewhere between the second and third incident, stopped feeling quite as viscerally disgusted by the process.
Not comfortable, exactly.
But the sharp revulsion had softened into something more resigned.
Once you do something twice, the third time is just a habit forming.
She wasn’t happy about that observation, but she noted it anyway.
One other thing she’d noticed: the road through the Land of Fire had been quiet.
Not a single rogue nin between Tanzaku Town and the border.
Then the moment she crossed into the Land of Hot Springs and started moving toward Yugakure, they’d been everywhere.
She hadn’t bothered working out the reason.
Either Tsunade had been keeping the road clear from the shadows — which was the kind of thing a woman with her reputation could do without being seen — or Keiko’s luck simply worked in specific and inconvenient ways.
She didn’t examine it further.
The outcome was the same either way.
What I think about it is my own business.
“Miss Keiko.” The largest of the six — a broad-shouldered man with a diagonal scar across his jaw and the headband of somewhere Keiko had never heard of — spoke up, his eyes carrying that particular mix of infatuation and absolute sincerity that she was learning to read like a weather pattern.
“We’ve arrived.
That’s Yugakure ahead.”
Keiko looked up at the village gate in the middle distance and then down at her clothes.
The outfit was slightly ornate compared to her usual preferences.
Intentionally so.
“Good.” She kept her voice level and authoritative.
“Here’s the arrangement.
Three of you stay with me — we’re running the act as planned.
The other three go into the village separately and locate whatever presence the Jashin Cult has here.
Quietly.
If you approach me without permission, don’t.”
Six faces went through the same sequence — confusion, then competitive alarm.
The scarred one moved first.
“Miss Keiko, I’m the strongest here.
Protecting you is my job.”
The lean one beside him, all sharp angles and quick eyes, let out a short, dismissive sound.
“Your idea of protection is punching things.
She needs someone who can actually think.”
A third — bald, no headband, the kind of build that suggested he’d spent significant time moving very heavy objects — threw his hands out.
“Both of you can stop talking.
The answer is obvious.”
Then all six of them were talking at once.
Keiko watched them with her arms crossed and no expression at all.
After a moment she raised her chin slightly.
“Sort it out yourselves.
Three minutes.”
The argument stopped.
They looked at each other.
Then the scarred one threw a punch at the lean one, and the answer to the question became a practical matter.
The fight was not a small one.
Fire Release techniques crossed with water jutsu in mid-air.
Kunai rang against kunai.
Two of them went for taijutsu immediately; a third used the distraction to attempt a wind technique that sheared through a tree at the roadside.
Every strike was aimed to incapacitate rather than kill, but only just barely — the line between those two things depended entirely on how good their control was under pressure.
They kept glancing at her while they fought.
All six of them, in the gaps between exchanges, throwing looks in her direction with the specific hope of someone performing for an audience.
Keiko watched the road ahead and waited.
Three minutes, give or take, and it was done.
Three standing, three sitting in the dirt catching their breath.
The scarred one was among the winners, as she’d expected — he’d taken two solid hits to get there, and his shirt had not survived intact, but he was upright and his eyes were still clear.
The three losers were left where they’d stopped.
“You know the secondary objective,” Keiko said to them, without looking back.
“Go.”
She turned toward Yugakure.
The village gate opened to a stone road worn smooth and slightly uneven by years of foot traffic and the mild subsidence that came from building on ground riddled with thermal vents.
The air was different immediately — warmer, softer, carrying the faint mineral edge of hot spring water and something floral underneath it.
Keiko’s three escorts fell into formation without being told.
The scarred one — she’d started thinking of him as Kiba, though that wasn’t his name, just the shape his face suggested — positioned himself half a step ahead and to her right.
The other two dropped back to form a loose triangle, keeping her at the center.
The villagers at the gate looked.
They always looked.
Keiko had learned to use that.
She let her chin come up.
Kept her gaze moving over the rooftops, the stalls, the people, with the unhurried, slightly bored expression of someone surveying a landscape that was interesting enough to have traveled to but not quite meeting expectations.
Innate arrogance was the wrong word for it — it was more like the settled confidence of someone who had never had reason to be nervous about where they stood.
She’d practiced this in the mirror more than she would admit.
The scarred nin read the atmosphere without prompting and raised his voice as they moved into the market stretch.
“Make way — clear the road — the young lady has business in this village.”
People moved.
Not because they were afraid of him specifically, but because of the shape of the whole scene — the formation, the clothes, the way Keiko was walking through the market like it was a venue she’d agreed to visit rather than a place she’d arrived at.
Keiko drifted to a halt at one of the stalls.
Her fingers lifted a small carved ornament from the display, turned it once, set it back down.
The stall owner’s breathing was audible.
“Crude work,” she said softly, and moved on.
She wasn’t being cruel.
She was building a picture.
A Daimyo’s daughter passing through on unnamed business didn’t browse with wonder — she observed with detachment and the faint, practiced disappointment of someone whose standards had been set early and set high.
They reached the central plaza.
A fountain dominated the open space — wide basin, water rising in a clean arc and fracturing the light into brief, prismatic scatter as it fell.
Several Yugakure shinobi who had been running drills nearby came to a stop when the group entered.
Keiko walked to the fountain and stood in front of it.
Looked at the spray.
Looked at the plaza.
Let the pause extend.
“Is this really it?” She said it to no one in particular, conversationally, as if confirming a disappointing answer to a question she’d already half-expected.
“I’m not sure what Father was thinking, sending me here.”
“Miss is right,” one of the escorts offered immediately, with the reliability of a trained echo.
“A place like this — it hardly compares.”
“Mm.”
A Yugakure guard had broken from the edge of the plaza and was approaching with the careful, measured pace of someone doing their job and not entirely sure what they were walking into.
He opened his mouth.
The scarred nin stepped in front of Keiko before the guard finished drawing breath.
“You’re addressing the daughter of a Daimyo, shinobi.
She has business in Yugakure.” His voice carried the particular loudness of someone who understood that volume was a component of authority.
“Fetch your village leadership.
Now.”