"Whoosh!" Before Tōji could even walk over to greet his two classmates, a figure appeared in front of him via Body Flicker.
Tōji could tell from the attire at a glance—this was a jōnin. And he guessed this was the special jōnin assigned to lead their squad.
Made sense. No-name genin squads usually got a tokubetsu jōnin as their instructor.
Only the squads that Konoha had its eye on got a full-fledged jōnin or an elite jōnin assigned as their supervising sensei.
"Morning, everyone!" Being polite to his classmates was basic social etiquette—Tōji managed it well enough.
"Morning!" "Good morning!" Both classmates looked over and responded in kind.
"Alright, so you're Izuno Natchi, Kazamatsuri Tōji, and Rai Akane. I'm Yawara Raicho—your supervising jōnin." The newcomer was a tall guy with short dark-blue hair. He slowly swept his gaze across the three genin.
And then he cut straight to business. "I've read your files. Since we've got a mission this afternoon, there's no time for the usual skill assessment."
"Sensei, we have a mission on day one? What kind?" Akane's voice was, in Tōji's impression, her only standout trait—crisp and clear. She was the first to ask, and she asked exactly what everyone was most curious about.
Of course, all the genin present were concerned about this. Anyone could guess it had something to do with the front lines—people on the streets were already buzzing about it, after all.
"You've probably guessed it—our squad's mission is to head to the battlefield. However!" Raicho had to pause for a solid two seconds at the key moment—did he not know you're supposed to finish a sentence in one breath? "We're heading to the Kikyōyama area to help with the cleanup. On the way back, we might need to escort some severely wounded personnel."
"Phew~" Tōji let out a breath of relief.
"Not bad. Not going head-to-head with Iwa-nin."
Tōji figured that since a lot of combat forces had been pulled away from Kikyōyama, they were sending fresh genin over there as grunt labor.
At the very least, this kind of mission would get a line added to his shinobi file—a C-rank mission under his belt.
Seeing the genin visibly relax, Raicho added a word of caution, "Don't take 'cleanup duty' too lightly either. You might still run into some Suna-nin hiding out. Have all your gear ready. We regroup here at one in the afternoon!"
They'd stood around on the riverbank for less than fifteen minutes before heading off—each back to their own home, back to their own families.
Tōji mainly needed to check in with the clan, and grab a couple more Exploding Tags while he was at it.
Exploding Tags were a luxury consumable!
In Konoha, depending on the yield, they sold for anywhere from two thousand ryō to twelve thousand ryō apiece.
Meanwhile, an ordinary civilian's monthly expenses ran somewhere between three thousand and eight thousand ryō.
Tōji's parents combined made about ten thousand ryō a month.
Shinobi income was a good bit higher than most regular jobs.
A mission like fruit-picking, trash-collection, or weed-pulling paid five thousand ryō split among the whole squad. With one tokubetsu jōnin and three genin, each genin would get about five hundred ryō. You could do up to three of those missions in a day—so a lucky genin could pull in roughly sixteen hundred ryō a day.
Which meant two decent Exploding Tags would cost a genin four or five days' worth of income—or half of what Tōji's parents made in a whole month.
In the original story, genin like Shikamaru usually carried only one Exploding Tag on them. So Tōji was shelling out a small fortune to arm himself!
Families as wealthy as Tenten's were few and far between. If Tōji had that kind of background, he'd probably go all the way—retire on the spot!