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By the time dawn broke, the four of them had reached the outskirts of the target village.
The village was smaller than the mission scroll described.
Twenty-some wooden houses lined the valley, backed against a cliff face, with only one road in or out.
Murakami Takuya led them around to the high ground on the east side, where they found a thicket in the woods with a clear view overlooking the entire village.
“Get down.
Not a sound.”
All four of them pressed flat into the undergrowth.
Tsunade was to Kitahara Kaede’s left.
Jiraiya was to his right.
The early morning sun had just crested the ridge, spilling across the rooftops below.
The village lay in perfect stillness.
Tsunade spoke first, her voice barely above a whisper.
“The cooking smoke is wrong.”
Kitahara Kaede followed her gaze.
Twenty-some houses.
Only three or four had smoke rising from them.
“Even a poor village has to cook when day breaks.” Tsunade’s brow furrowed.
Her instincts had never been the problem.
Her temper usually just drowned them out.
Kitahara Kaede didn’t reply.
He shifted his gaze from the rooftops to the road.
Every person moving through the village was a young adult male.
No women.
No elderly.
No children.
Not one.
Jiraiya lay on the right, neck craned long, eyes narrowed as he stared down for a long moment.
Then he patted Kitahara Kaede’s arm.
“Over there.
The one hauling crates.
Watch his walk.”
At the far west end of the village, near the cliff face, stood a large warehouse with its doors wide open.
Two men were carrying wooden crates inside.
The crates were heavy, two men to each one, their steps slow and dragging under the weight.
“Weight’s on the balls of their feet,” Jiraiya muttered.
“When I was dozing off in class, I half-heard the teacher say something about that…
That stance isn’t for hauling cargo.
It’s for someone ready to move at any second.”
Tsunade went still.
She swept her eyes over the village again, and her expression changed.
“All of them.”
Kitahara Kaede had already counted.
14 men.
Same stance.
Same gait.
Murakami Takuya lay at the very front, his gaze crossing the village three times over.
His face darkened.
“Do any of you smell something?”
Tsunade sniffed the air.
Then her body went rigid.
She had studied Medical Ninjutsu fundamentals for over a year.
In pharmacology class, she’d been exposed to the scents of dozens of compounds.
There was one she remembered without effort — quicklime.
Large-area dispersal of quicklime powder.
The battlefield disposal protocols were unambiguous about it.
One purpose, and one purpose only.
To mask the stench of decomposing bodies.
She didn’t say it out loud.
Her fingers dug into the grass beneath her without her realizing it.
“Blood, too,” Kitahara Kaede said quietly.
“Mostly covered by the lime, but not completely.”
3 seconds of silence.
“Then where are the villagers?” Tsunade’s voice dropped, like she was asking, but already knew.
“The mission scroll said rogue samurai had occupied the settlement.
Harassing the people, plundering their wealth.” Kitahara Kaede’s tone was flat.
“But there are no rogue samurai down there.
And no people being harassed.”
He paused.
“The original villagers are already gone.”
Tsunade’s fingers loosened, then clenched again.
“This isn’t a settlement,” Kitahara Kaede said.
“It’s a stronghold wearing a village’s skin.
They wiped out the population and silenced every witness, then replaced them with their own people.
What they’re hauling into that warehouse is military supplies.
What the lime is covering is a burial site.”
Jiraiya’s face went sheet-white.
His mouth opened.
His Adam’s apple worked twice.
Not a single word came out.
His hand moved on instinct to his ninja tool pouch.
Murakami Takuya turned to look at Kitahara Kaede.
His gaze was steady, unsurprised.
“I confirmed it before you said anything.” His voice was heavy.
“But your reasoning was faster than I expected.”
“Those four last night—” Kitahara Kaede kept going.
“They were carrying standard-issue military ration pills.
Not rogue samurai.
They were this stronghold’s outer perimeter patrol.
They didn’t stumble onto our camp by chance.
That was their fixed patrol route.”
Murakami Takuya nodded.
“They were supposed to return before dawn for the shift change.”
All four of them went quiet at once.
They aren’t coming back.
Those four men lay beside the camp, and they weren’t coming back.
And dawn had already broken.
Tsunade was the first to react.
“If the shift doesn’t show up, they’ll—”
“Send someone to investigate, or raise their alert level immediately.” Murakami Takuya picked up the thread, his voice dropping, words sharpening.
“Listen.
This mission’s nature has changed.
This isn’t C-rank.
A-rank minimum.
The rogue samurai assignment was a shell from the start—”
He stopped there.
“We pull out.
Right now.
Same route back.
Return to the Leaf and report.”
Tsunade bit her lip.
She looked down once more at the quiet village below.
Twenty-some wooden houses.
Three or four wisps of cooking smoke.
Fourteen “villagers” who walked like soldiers.
The people buried under that lime had maybe once lit fires in those same houses.
Maybe there had been elders sitting in their doorways in the afternoon sun.
Children running up and down the road.
Her fists clenched tight.
The urge to charge down the slope rose hard in her chest.
Reason crushed it.
She pulled her gaze away.
“Move.”
Jiraiya said nothing.
He was already bent low, shifting backward through the brush.
Kitahara Kaede swept one last look toward the warehouse.
A bald man stood in the doorway, arms folded across his chest, eyes scanning ceaselessly past the village’s edge.
He wasn’t watching the men hauling crates.
He was waiting for the men who should have come back.
The four of them withdrew from the thicket, bent low, retreating along the treeline.
Fallen leaves pressed flat under their feet.
Every step was controlled, quiet.
Kitahara Kaede walked at the rear.
Every few paces he glanced back.
Tsunade walked ahead of him, fast and steady, not saying a word.
They had pulled back roughly 200 meters.
Murakami Takuya stopped.
Kitahara Kaede stopped almost at the same instant.
Chakra fluctuation.
Very faint, from deep in the woods to the left.
A sensor-type.
Someone was sweeping the area.
Kitahara Kaede looked at Murakami Takuya.
Murakami Takuya’s hand was already on his sword hilt.
His face was iron.
“We’ve been made.”
Tsunade’s whole body snapped tight.
The words weren’t even finished when the canopy to the left exploded.
Three kunai streaked toward them, explosive tags fluttering behind them.
“Scatter!”
Murakami Takuya drove both palms into the ground.
Earth Style: Mud Wall.
An earthen wall ripped up from the ground, throwing itself between him and the three kids.
BOOM!
The blast hammered their ears.
The shockwave surged around both sides of the wall, filling the air with chunks of soil and shredded leaves.
Kitahara Kaede grabbed Tsunade and rolled right, putting his body between her and the blast.
The instant Tsunade hit the ground, she grabbed his wrist and yanked him toward her.
Not panic.
She just wasn’t going to let him do that again.
Jiraiya dove left.
His movements were sharper than they’d been the night before.
The second wave came right behind it.
Shuriken from three directions at once, trajectories crossing each other, blanketing the exit.
Murakami Takuya drew his blade and batted aside the volley from the front.
Sparks bit across his face.
“North side too!” Jiraiya shouted.
His voice shook.
The kunai in his hand didn’t.
Footsteps flooded up from the direction of the village.
Not one or two.
A wave of them.
Those crate-hauling “villagers” were closing the net.
Kitahara Kaede released Tsunade and checked the way they’d come.
Silhouettes moved between the trees.
The path back was already gone.
Retreat was sealed.
He swept the terrain fast.
North side: trees, dense but low, no room to run.
South side: open slope, exposed.
East: their original route, completely cut off.
One possible gap, southwest corner.
A breach between two fallen trees.
No way to know if anyone was waiting on the other side.
“Close in!
Everyone, close in!”
Murakami Takuya’s voice was strained.
It was the first time Kitahara Kaede had ever heard that from him.
Kitahara Kaede pulled Tsunade toward the earthen wall.
Running, Tsunade snapped two shuriken back over her shoulder and drove back the figures closing from the right.
Jiraiya rolled in from the other side.
A shuriken was buried in his right shoulder.
Blood ran down his sleeve and dripped into the grass.
He clenched his jaw.
Didn’t make a sound.
Didn’t slow down.
All four of them pressed behind the earthen wall.
Cracks were already spreading across its surface.
Kitahara Kaede looked through one of the gaps.
At least 20 people converging from three sides.
Some still wore the coarse cloth of laborers.
Their hands held kunai, tachi, explosive tags.
Ninja tool pouches strapped at their waists.
The bald man walked straight down the center, the corner of his mouth twitching upward.
He looked toward the wall and spoke.
Not loud.
But in that valley, the sound carried fine.
“Now where did these little rats come from?
No wonder the patrol hasn’t come back.”
His gaze swept above the wall and settled on the young faces in the gap.
The smile deepened.
“Leaf shinobi?
Just kids, at that.” A pause.
“Here to die?”
Tsunade’s teeth ground together.
Jiraiya pressed his right hand to the wound in his shoulder.
His left hand held a kunai.
Kitahara Kaede stared through the gap at the 20-plus figures still closing.
He turned the kunai in his hand half a rotation, shifting from a forward grip to a reverse grip.
…
➤ Next: I’ll Take Ten