Genma found her near the entrance to the Kurosawa section of the training grounds.
The morning sessions had already begun. Across the broad stretch of packed earth, different regiments occupied their assigned spaces, some working through formation drills while others gathered around officers receiving instructions. The grounds had been divided well enough to prevent the units from interfering with one another, though not so completely that anyone could pretend they were alone. Voices carried between the fields. People moved along the paths separating one section from the next. A shinobi from one regiment could look up and see another without making any particular effort.
Natsumi had expected the place to be busy.
She had not expected quite so many people.
Genma fell into step beside her as she began walking.
"The revised barrier requests have all been received," he said. "The problem was the outer warning layer."
She glanced toward him.
"The coverage?"
"The formula couldn't sustain itself over the larger area for long enough to be useful. The earlier design would have worked for a fixed position, but these camps will be moving."
That had been her concern when he first showed her the preliminary arrangement. A barrier that required hours to establish and constant attention afterward was of limited value to a regiment expected to stop, rest and move again before dawn.
"The detection range is smaller, but the formula is stable. The gaps will be covered by patrols."
Natsumi looked toward the far side of the grounds.
That was preferable. The people responsible for the watches would know what they were relying on, and the seal formula would not become another burden demanding chakra from shinobi who were already expected to remain awake.
"Will the handlers have time to learn the changes?"
"They're already working with the revised version."
She nodded.
As they continued through the camp, Genma pointed out the remaining preparations. The supply seals had been redistributed between several handlers, which would prevent a single injury from leaving an entire section of the regiment unable to access its stores. A number of requests from the other formations had also been approved or redirected. Natsumi listened while keeping her attention on the people and equipment around them.
There was less time remaining than she would have preferred.
The Kurosawa had managed to gather the personnel Konoha required of them, but the regiment still looked thin when she considered what they were preparing to do. Chūnin moved among groups of genin, correcting positions and checking equipment. Several older shinobi were speaking with one another beside a stack of supply crates. Others were simply waiting for their next instructions.
Natsumi knew how many people the clan had been able to leave behind.
Genma continued speaking beside her.
"The storage formulae for the medical supplies have been separated as well. If one of the handlers is incapacitated, the remaining seals won't become inaccessible."
"Good."
A group of genin passed in front of them.
Natsumi watched them briefly before looking toward another section of the grounds.
That was when she noticed the girl.
She was considerably smaller than the people around her.
For a moment, Natsumi assumed she belonged to someone passing through from another regiment. Then an older female genin came up behind the girl, slipped her hands beneath her arms and lifted her cleanly from the ground.
She protested immediately.
Natsumi could not hear what she said over the noise of the grounds, but the older genin appeared entirely untroubled by it. She held the smaller girl against herself with the casual affection of an older sister and pressed her cheek against the girl's, rubbing it back and forth while the younger one tried unsuccessfully to pull away.
The girl looked impossibly young to be wearing a headband.
Natsumi found herself wondering whether she had even begun menstruating yet.
The thought was unpleasant enough that she immediately regretted having it.
The older girl eventually put her down.
The little girl immediately stepped away from her, apparently annoyed but otherwise unharmed, and disappeared into the group of genin as the older girl laughed.
Of course.
She had known, in the abstract, that the girl was twelve. She had seen the age written on the forms and had understood what it meant when the Kurosawa's shortage of available genin had left the clan with no realistic alternative.
Seeing her was different.
The training grounds made that difference impossible to ignore.
Natsumi looked around.
The neighbouring regiments were not watching the Kurosawa camp continuously. Most people had their own work to do. Still, there was no reason to think they had failed to notice her.
Someone would have mentioned her,perhaps more than one person already had.The Kurosawa must have trained her, because why else would a clan send a twelve-year-old into a war?
The larger clans occasionally deployed children younger than Shogi, but those children were rarely ordinary academy graduates. They came from families that had spent years training them, often from childhood, in techniques that gave them some advantage over shinobi of the same age.
Shogi had received an education through the Kurosawa's sponsorship.
That was all.
The clan sponsored students because it needed academy graduates and because the arrangement benefited both sides. There was no reason to devote the same resources to every child who entered the program that they devoted to their own members. They did not have the time, the personnel or the incentive.
Yet the people looking from the neighbouring regiments would not know that.
They would see a twelve-year-old in a Kurosawa formation and assume there was something behind her presence.
Natsumi continued walking.
Genma was still speaking about the remaining seal requests, though she had missed part of what he had said.
She turned her attention back to him.
"The revised storage tags. When will they be distributed?"
"Tomorrow morning."
"Make sure the handlers are given the additional practice time."
Genma acknowledged the instruction, and they continued through the camp.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time Natsumi returned to the compound, afternoon had begun to settle over the village.
The main Kurosawa building was quieter than the training grounds. Most of the people who had spent the morning attending to the preparations were still outside, while those who remained at the compound had found other work to occupy them. Natsumi passed through the entrance without stopping, acknowledged the bow of a younger member stationed near the corridor, and went directly to her office.
The room was much as she had left it.
The maps remained open on the low table beside the window. Several sheets of seal paper had been placed beneath a paperweight to prevent the breeze from disturbing them, and the personnel records she had intended to review before leaving were still waiting at the corner of her desk.
She sat down.
For a few moments, she did nothing.
Then she pulled the deployment list toward her.
There were names she had known since childhood.
That was the disadvantage of leading a clan that had been declining for as long as she could remember. There had been a time when the Kurosawa had been numerous enough that a clan head could not know every single member of the clan. Those days were gone. Natsumi knew the names of parents, siblings, spouses and children of her clan. She knew which households had already lost someone during the First War and which ones had managed, through nothing more than fortune, to remain untouched.
She knew who would be missed if they did not return.
She ran her eyes down the page.
The first column contained the names of the personnel assigned to the support column. The second listed their rank, specializations and duties. There were several other documents beside it containing more information than she needed to read again: age, household, number of dependents, medical history, academy records.
Natsumi had not asked for some of those records out of curiosity.
She had asked for them because when she had been forced to choose who would go, she had wanted to know what she was doing.
A clan could pretend that such things did not matter. They could assign its people according to ability alone and call itself fair. The dead would be dead either way.
She had not been able to do that. She had seen enough crying mothers and lost friends for a lifetime. If she dared to be callous, then she would be murdered in her sleep.
Where she had a choice, she had tried not to send only children. She had looked first at households with several adult sons or daughters, then at people who had siblings old enough to support their parents if something happened to them. She had avoided sending the completely inexperienced where the village's requirements allowed it and kept some of the younger academy graduates out of the first group of personnel as long as she could.
It was not a clean system.
It was not even a fair one.
A person with three brothers did not have three lives to spend. The fact that their mother would still have children if they died did not make their death easier to justify.
But Natsumi had watched too many families vanish one person at a time.
If she was going to send people away knowing that some of them would not come back, she could at least avoid destroying every branch of the same family in a single generation whenever she had the authority to prevent it.
Her thumb moved down the edge of the paper.
How many?
The question had no useful answer.
The support column was not being sent to the front as an assault force. Konoha had people for that. The personnel assigned to this movement would be guarding supplies, maintaining seals, supporting the shinobi already engaged in combat and filling gaps where gaps appeared. It was safer work than walking directly into an enemy formation.
That did not mean it was safe.
There was no such thing as safe once a large enough number of shinobi began fighting in the same area.
Half, she thought.
Perhaps half would return.
The number was arbitrary. It came from no calculation, no official casualty report or estimate. It was simply the figure that arrived in her mind when she looked at the list and imagined reading the names again after the column had completed its campaign.
Perhaps half.
Perhaps more.
Perhaps considerably less.
Natsumi leaned back.
For a moment, she wondered whether the privileges were worth it.
The land. The buildings. Those were conveniences, useful things to possess but hardly irreplaceable. A family could live without a large compound. It could live without the influence that came from having a recognized jōnin among its members. It could survive without being invited to certain meetings or consulted by village officials who would otherwise have ignored them.
What could not be replaced so easily were the people who died to preserve those things.
The Kurosawa had held their position because they produced shinobi capable of fighting at a high level. Their techniques were valuable, their seal masters competent, their senior members respected. A clan with jōnin had a voice in Konoha. It could negotiate. It could protect its interests. It could ask for assignments and concessions that smaller families could not.
That position had been purchased repeatedly.
With sons and daughters.
With cousins and nephews.
With people who had grown old enough to become important and then died before they had the opportunity to enjoy it.
Natsumi knew why the clan had fought to preserve its standing. She had spent much of her life doing exactly that.
Still, there were days when the price seemed absurd.
The world had not rewarded the dead for maintaining the Kurosawa's privileges.
An A-rank technique did not care whether the person caught inside it belonged to a recognized clan.
No enemy showed mercy because her clan had served the village for generations.
She closed her eyes.
The smell came first.
Burnt soil.
She had forgotten the name of the valley where the battle had taken place, though she could still remember the shape of the hills around it. The ground had been dry before the fighting began. There had been grass between the rocks and small shrubs growing where they could find enough water.
By the time the battle was over, there had been nothing recognizable left.
It had not even been the main battle.
That was what made the memory difficult to explain to people who had never been there. Natsumi had not been standing in the centre of a carefully arranged confrontation between armies. She had been part of a group attempting to move around the edge of a larger engagement, keeping to a route that had been judged relatively clear.
Then two groups of stronger shinobi had collided nearby.
The world had changed around them.
That was the only way she could remember it.
A line of trees disappeared beneath an attack she had not seen launched. The earth split open somewhere ahead, throwing a ridiculous amount of stone and soil into the air. One moment there had been a slope. The next there was simply a wide wound in the ground.
People began running.
It did not matter which direction.
Natsumi had seen chūnin and jōnin alike disappear inside techniques that had not been aimed at them. She had watched the area around powerful shinobi become uninhabitable simply because they were fighting with everything they possessed. The people caught nearby had not necessarily been weak. Some had been experienced fighters who could kill ordinary opponents without much difficulty.
That experience meant very little when the ground itself was being repeatedly torn apart beneath them.
She had once thought that reaching jōnin would mean understanding such battles.
It did not.
Reaching jōnin only meant that she had survived long enough to be placed among the people who were expected to enter them.
Natsumi opened her eyes and looked at the deployment list again.
She had reached jōnin at forty.
Forty.
Some shinobi reached that rank while still young enough to be considered promising. They became known throughout the village before they had begun to understand what they wanted from the rest of their lives. Natsumi had not been one of them.
She had been a chūnin for years.
Then she had become an older chūnin.
After that, she had become one of those shinobi whom younger people sometimes looked at with a mixture of respect and disappointment. Capable, certainly. Experienced. Reliable. But if they had not advanced by then, perhaps they never would.
She had known what people thought.
The Kurosawa had needed her regardless.
There were missions. There were battles. There were assignments that required someone to stand between an enemy and the people behind her, and Natsumi had continued doing them because there had been no reason not to.
She had become good.
Her advancement had come slowly, after years of learning how much she could take from her own body and how carefully she needed to use what she had. The clan technique had always been difficult to master properly. It asked for physical energy and vitality in quantities that other techniques did not, turning the body's own reserves into something that could be used directly for defense.
For most shinobi, there were limits that could not be crossed.
Natsumi had spent years learning where hers were.
When she finally reached jōnin, there had been no grand celebration.
The clan had been pleased. She had been relieved. Then someone had placed another set of responsibilities in front of her, and she had gone back to work.
Ten years later, she had nearly destroyed herself.
Natsumi's hand moved unconsciously toward her side.
The injury was old enough now that it had become part of the way she moved. Only the people who had known her for years noticed it. She did not run as easily as she once had, and there were days when one leg refused to respond properly after she had been standing for too long. Certain motions brought a stiffness through her back that could last for hours.
She could still fight.
That was the important distinction.
She could still fight, but she could not pretend her body had survived unchanged.
The battle had been desperate enough that she had pushed the clan technique far beyond the point where it should have been maintained.
The shield surrounding her had held.
Her chakra system had not.
There had been a moment when the technique continued to draw from her body because she had not been able to release it quickly enough, the demand for energy increasing faster than her own reserves could sustain. The pain had been almost impossible to describe. It had felt as though something inside her had been forced through a passage too narrow to contain it, every channel straining against pressure it had never been meant to carry.
Afterward, the medics had told her she was fortunate to be alive. Natsumi had not found that particularly comforting. The people who died in that battle had been less fortunate.
They had simply died.
Natsumi remembered another battle with the Explosion Corps.
The memory had never left her, though she wished it had.
The shinobi had been some distance away when he released the technique. Natsumi did not remember his face. She had not been looking at him. She remembered only a movement at the edge of her vision and the sudden flare of chakra.
The Fire Release had been condensed beyond anything she had seen before.
For an instant, the attack looked almost small.
Then the world exploded.
Her technique had already been active which was the only reason she survived.
The force struck her before she understood what had happened. One moment she had been standing with the rest of her unit. The next she was airborne.
Later, someone told her she had been thrown nearly a hundred feet.
Natsumi remembered none of the flight.
She remembered hitting the ground.
She remembered the sound that came out of her own mouth.
Then she remembered lying still because she could not make herself move.
The pressure wave had passed through the formation like an invisible wall. People farther away had been thrown from their feet, some into rocks, others into one another. Around a hundred personnel had been injured in the initial blast alone. Some had ruptured blood vessels and internal organs from the sudden change in pressure. Others had broken bones when they were flung across the ground.
Closer to the point of impact, there had been almost nothing to save.
The earth had become molten in places, soil and stone fused together into blackened clumps. Flames had moved across the ground where there should not have been anything left to burn.
And among it—
Natsumi stopped the memory before it went further.
There had been people.
That was all.
There had been chūnin near the centre of the attack who were no longer recognizable as people afterward. She remembered seeing flattened remains against the ground, bodies reduced to stains and crushed masses by forces she had no ability to comprehend at the time. It had looked less like an attack had struck them and more as though the world itself had pressed down and erased them.
She had survived because the Kurosawa technique had been active.
That fact had not made her brave.
Natsumi could still remember the smell of herself afterward.
She had lost control of her body, urinated and defecated herself.
There had been no one nearby to see at first. Everyone who could still move had been running, searching for survivors, shouting names. Natsumi had crawled into a shallow depression in the ground because the open sky terrified her.
Then she had curled into herself.
And she had cried.
She had cried for nearly a minute, perhaps longer, shaking so badly that she could barely draw breath. She had been a grown woman, an experienced shinobi, and there had been nothing inside her at that moment except the certainty that another attack was coming.
She had been waiting to die until her husband found her.The memory of his voice came more easily than the memory of his face did sometimes, which Natsumi considered a cruelty of her age. He had called her name once and then again when she did not answer.
When he finally reached down into the hole where she had hidden, she had looked up at him covered in dirt and worse. She couldn't even recognise him and had begged for her life crouched on the ground in a pit of filth.
He had been angry later, when the shock had passed and they were somewhere safer. Angry that she had been close enough to the attack. Angry that she hadn't run away fast enough.. Angry because anger was easier for him than admitting how close he had come to losing her.
She had let him be angry.
They had both known what would have happened if her jutsu wasn't active.
Natsumi looked down at her hands.
Her husband had died anyway.
Not in that battle.
Not beneath some vast technique capable of reshaping the landscape.
Her eyes returned to the names.
A child like Shogi would not understand that yet.
Perhaps none of them truly understood it before their first real campaign.
They knew the stories. Children grew up hearing about the strength of Konoha's shinobi and the great battles that had preserved the village. The academy taught them what war was supposed to require: discipline, loyalty, awareness, skill.
Then they encountered the reality that a kunai did not need to be thrown by a legendary shinobi to kill someone.
Natsumi remembered that detail because it had seemed so absurd. The enemy had launched it with Wind Release, the chakra sharpening and accelerating the weapon until the ordinary metal became something else entirely.
Her husband's defensive technique had been active.
But here had been a weakness.
A moment.
Perhaps fatigue. Perhaps a lapse in concentration. Perhaps his chakra had simply not been where it needed to be when the kunai struck.
It went through.
Through the technique.
Through his body.
The force of it nearly destroyed his chest.
The healers managed to keep him alive at first. For a time, Natsumi had believed that surviving the initial wound meant he would recover. She had sat beside him and listened to his breathing. He had even spoken to her.
Then the infection began.
The wound had been terrible from the beginning, and whatever the poisoned metal had carried into it made things worse. The healers fought it. She remembered the smell of medicine and blood, the heat of his skin, the way he became weaker even when everyone around him insisted they were doing everything possible to save him.
Natsumi had watched him die slowly enough to understand that strength was not a shield.
A moment of weakness.
That was all it took.
A person could survive battles against powerful shinobi, walk away from explosions that had killed hundreds, and still be killed by a kunai if it found the right place.
She did not look at the deployment list for some time.
When she finally did, her attention went to the names of the chūnin she had removed from it.
They were not young in the way Shogi was young.
Most were around thirty. A few had children. They were old enough that no one would blame Natsumi if she sent them into battle tomorrow.
Several were among the strongest people the clan still possessed.
That was precisely why she had kept them.
The Kurosawa needed another jōnin.
It needed more than one, ideally, but Natsumi had learned not to make plans around ideals. Even the most minute action that could increase the chances of a jonin appearing in the clan was to be addressed. If she was honest with herself, the chances of a jonin awakening in the next ten years was a slim hope. But it was her job to nurture that hope.
The current generation of senior shinobi was aging. Some were injured. Some had reached a point where the village still counted them among its experienced fighters while quietly avoiding assignments that would place too much strain on them. The clan could survive losing a chūnin to a campaign.
It might not survive losing the chūnin who would have become its next jōnin.
So she had made another calculation.
Those people would remain.
They could train. They could take missions within the village and strengthen the clan's defenses. They could continue the work that might, within another ten years, elevate one of them to the level the Kurosawa desperately needed.
If none of them managed it, then the clan had other problems.
Natsumi did not enjoy the thought.
There was no certainty that protecting them would produce anything. She could keep every promising chūnin away from the war and still watch them fail to advance. People reached jōnin when they reached it, if they reached it at all. Ability could be developed, experience gained, techniques mastered, but there was always something beyond the calculations.
Still.
If they were sent away and died, there would be no possibility left to consider.
She had chosen to gamble on the future and the rest of the clan would pay for that decision in the present.
Natsumi folded the deployment list.
The room had grown darker.
She looked toward the window and realized she had spent more time sitting there than she intended. The gathering would begin after sunset, and she still needed to prepare.
For several minutes, she considered not going.
It was not an official meeting. No decision depended on her presence. She had spent the day reviewing preparations and thinking about the people she was sending away. There were still documents waiting on her desk, and she could easily claim that clan business required her attention.
Then she thought of the host.
Refusing would be noticed.
Natsumi disliked being noticed for the wrong reasons.
She stood, gathering the papers into a neat stack before leaving the office.
Her rooms were on the quieter side of the compound. She changed there without assistance, choosing clothing suitable for an informal gathering while remaining conscious that she would be representing the Kurosawa.
She had never enjoyed dressing for these events.
A shinobi's clothing was simpler. You wore what allowed you to move, carry what you needed and survive the conditions you expected to encounter. Formal clothing required other considerations. The fabric had to be appropriate. The colors had to suggest the right degree of respect without appearing as though she had spent an afternoon thinking about them.
Eventually, she settled on something restrained.
She examined her reflection briefly.
The woman looking back at her appeared older than she felt on most days.Then again at 70 she should be grateful she had aged as well as she had.
There was nothing unusual about that.
She selected a small gift from one of the storage cabinets: a bottle of good sake that had been given to the clan during a previous negotiation and had never been opened. It was expensive enough to be appreciated and modest enough that it would not appear excessive.
Then she went looking for Daichi.
She found him in one of the outer offices, reviewing several sets of papers with another chūnin.
Daichi looked up when she entered.
For a moment, Natsumi saw the resemblance to his mother more clearly than usual.
It happened occasionally.
He had grown into an adult years ago, but there were still expressions that belonged to the child he had once been. It was an uncomfortable reminder of how quickly time passed when people survived long enough to experience it.
"Aunty."
"Are you occupied?"
Daichi looked at the papers in front of him.
"Not urgently."
"Good. You're coming with me this evening."
The other chūnin glanced at them before returning his attention to his own work.
"Where are we going?"
"Clan elders meeting. Near the fourth district gate."
He considered the answer for a moment.
"Should I change?."
"Yes."
That was all.
She turned to leave, then paused.
Daichi had been the one assigned to meet with the sponsorship students and handle the registration process. He was the one who had placed the documents in front of Morita Shogi barely a week after the girl graduated from the academy. Natsumi wondered whether he had thought about the child afterward.
Probably not.
There were always more documents and meetings than any reasonable person wanted to remember.
She did not ask.
Instead, she returned to her rooms and waited.
By the time Daichi was ready, the compound had begun to settle into the rhythm of evening. The sounds from the training areas had faded. People moved through the corridors on their way home or toward whatever work remained before night.
Natsumi met him near the entrance.
He had changed into darker clothing, simple enough for an informal visit. He looked at the bottle in her hand.
"A gift?"
"For the host."
Daichi nodded.
They left together.
For a while, neither spoke.
Natsumi was comfortable with silence. Daichi had grown accustomed to it when he was young. He knew better than to fill it simply because they were walking in the same direction.
The streets were busier than she expected. Several other shinobi appeared to be heading toward the same general area, some already dressed for the gathering, others still carrying the remnants of their day's work.
War preparations had changed the atmosphere of the village.There was more movement. Natsumi wondered how many of the faces she passed would still be present in Konoha a year from now.
She stopped that line of thought. There was no purpose in counting the dead before they had died.
Natsumi had seen the girl that morning.
Young enough that the sight of her had remained in Natsumi's mind long after she had returned to the compound.
She had not thought of Shogi again while reviewing the deployment list.
Not directly.
Yet when Natsumi looked at Daichi beside her, she found herself wondering how many people would remember the child when she was dead.
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The house belonged to an old acquaintance whose family had occupied the same part of Konoha since before the village had been founded. The compound had changed around the original structure over the decades, with newer rooms and a larger garden added as the family grew, but Natsumi still remembered enough of the place to know which parts had remained untouched.
Guests were already arriving.
Most were older than Daichi, and that was probably what he had expected when she described the evening as a gathering of elders and former representatives. The younger guests were less immediately visible, gathered farther inside the garden and around the open rooms of the house. Daichi noticed them soon enough.
"You said this was a gathering for clan elders."
"It is. That doesn't prevent people from bringing younger relatives or friends with them."
He gave her a look that made his suspicion clear.
Natsumi ignored it and walked through the gate.
The host met them near the entrance. He was a retired shinobi himself, though he had spent the last two decades managing the civilian interests of his family. His wife came out to greet Natsumi as Daichi handed over the gift, and for the first few minutes the conversation remained comfortably familiar: questions about health, mutual acquaintances, and the increasingly obvious preparations being made throughout the village.
Natsumi answered what she was willing to answer about the Kurosawa's mobilization.
There was little point pretending that people did not know the clan was sending personnel. Nearly every family in Konoha had someone involved in the preparations by now. What they did not need to know was how carefully she had counted those people before agreeing to the final numbers.
An attendant passed with drinks while they were speaking. Natsumi accepted two and handed one to Daichi.
He looked at it before taking it.
"You're in a generous mood."
"Don't become accustomed to it."
He drank.
The host was pulled away by another arrival, and Natsumi continued farther into the compound with Daichi beside her. She let him remain there through several introductions. He knew some of the older guests and was polite enough when addressed, but she noticed him looking toward the garden again.
There were perhaps a dozen younger people gathered there, talking around a low table where food and drinks had been set out. Several were shinobi. Others belonged to the civilian branches of shinobi families or had never attended the academy at all.
Natsumi waited until Daichi had finished his drink.
"You can go."
He looked at her.
"There's no reason to spend the entire evening listening to me discuss contracts with people who remember your grandparents as children."
Daichi followed her gaze toward the younger guests.
"You planned this."
Natsumi took a sip from her own cup. "You're twenty-seven, Daichi. I am not asking you to get married tonight. But you need to go and meet people your own age before people begin to think there is something seriously wrong with you."
He looked faintly offended.
"I'm perfectly capable of meeting people on my own."
"Then demonstrate it."
Daichi remained where he was.
Natsumi glanced toward the garden once more and then back at him.
"Go. If the conversation is unbearable, you may return and stand beside me again. And if you happen to meet a woman you like, try not to make a fool of yourself."
His expression changed.
She had seen him notice one of the women.
Daichi sighed and finally walked away.
Natsumi watched him join the group and decided that her responsibility towards her nephew had been fulfilled for the evening.
She had other things to do.
The gathering had no official purpose.
That was precisely what made it useful.
The people present belonged to the same loose world, though their lives had taken them in different directions. There were retired jōnin who had left the village's active forces and found themselves managing family businesses, former company representatives who had spent years negotiating between clans and merchants, and shinobi who had moved into work that was less glamorous than missions but often considerably more profitable.
Several civilian representatives were present as well.
Some came from clans that had deliberately reduced their shinobi presence after the First War. A generation of children had been encouraged to pursue other work, and the families had invested in construction, transport, workshops, trade, or land rather than replacing every shinobi who died.
Other clans had taken a different path. They maintained a small but continuous military presence while allowing the rest of their members to pursue civilian careers. One or two promising children might still enter the academy each generation, but the clan's survival no longer depended entirely upon missions.
Natsumi found those arrangements increasingly understandable as she grew older.
A shinobi family could be destroyed by a single disastrous campaign.
A warehouse could burn as well, of course, but at least the warehouse workers did not usually volunteer to be killed.
The first person she spent any significant time speaking with was a former chūnin whose family had moved almost entirely into civilian work after the war. He had never been particularly important as a shinobi, by his own admission, and seemed perfectly content with the fact that his children had inherited a better head for business than he ever possessed.
His grandson, however, had recently entered the academy.
"He wants to become a jōnin," the man told her with enough pride to make Natsumi suspect he had already mentioned it to several other guests.
"Does he have the ability?"
"That remains to be seen, but he's serious. More serious than I was at that age."
Natsumi considered him. "I remember you at that age."
The family was trying to decide whether to support his ambitions fully or encourage him to remain involved in their businesses while he gained experience. Natsumi did not offer an opinion. Families had been destroying themselves by deciding their children were either destined for greatness or incapable of it since long before Konoha existed.
Instead she listened as the man began discussing a transport route his family was considering investing in.
That was more immediately useful.
The route passed through an area that had recently become more valuable as merchants began looking for alternatives to older roads. Several companies were interested, and the man wanted to know whether the Kurosawa had heard anything about future village development in the area.
Natsumi had in fact hear something about it,but she did not tell him.
By the time the conversation ended, she knew the names of the people involved, the likely timeline for the investment, and which company was having difficulty raising enough money to participate.
Information had a habit of appearing when people believed they were merely making conversation.
She spent some time speaking with a woman from a clan that had become better known for its workshops than its shinobi. The woman herself had once been a kunoichi, though Natsumi remembered her primarily as someone who could turn a straightforward discussion into an argument if sufficiently bored.
Age had not improved the habit.
They spoke about the sudden demand for materials as Konoha prepared for a prolonged conflict. Timber was becoming more expensive. So were metals, certain types of treated cloth, and anything that could be used to supply or protect the military formations being assembled around the village.
The woman complained about three contractors in particular and one of them was already having difficulties fulfilling contracts with the Kurosawa.
Later she found herself speaking with a retired representative who had once managed negotiations for several smaller clans. He had spent so long working with village officials, merchants, and family heads that Natsumi suspected he knew more about the movement of money through Konoha than many people employed by the village itself.
He was currently complaining about the man who had taken over his position.
"He's too eager to threaten people."
Natsumi smiled slightly.
There were people Natsumi had known for decades in rooms like this. Some had fought alongside her. Others had never been shinobi at all but had been present at the edges of her life through clan business, marriages, contracts, and funerals.
Konoha's world was larger than the village's military structure suggested.
The shinobi were visible because they carried weapons and wore the symbols of their ranks. Beneath them existed a web of families who paid for things, built companies, sold food, transported goods, and occasionally profited from disasters that killed other people's children.
Natsumi did not resent that. Not entirely.
But there were moments when she wondered whether anyone had understood what they were creating when the great clans gathered and agreed to live together.
The wars had not ended.
They had simply become wars with better roads, larger markets, and more people who needed to be consulted before an army moved.
Natsumi accepted another drink and allowed herself to relax enough to enjoy the evening.
When she looked toward the garden again, Daichi was no longer standing alone.
Good.
Daichi had discovered that talking to people was considerably easier when Natsumi was not somewhere behind him waiting to see whether he embarrassed himself.
The group was not particularly large. Several of them knew one another already, and he recognized Aiko from another gathering he had attended months earlier. They had spoken then, though not for long. She remembered his name, which was enough to make the first few minutes easier than he expected.
Someone brought up the war.
A man who worked with one of the merchant clans had been describing the number of regiments moving through the village when another guest remarked that the academy seemed to have emptied itself into the training grounds.
"There are more genin than I expected," he said. "Some of them have only been out of the academy for a few months."
"That's hardly unusual during a war."
Aiko leaned against the low garden wall, listening.
The conversation turned toward the larger clans and the advantages some children had over others. A clan with a well-established training regimen could begin preparing its heirs long before they became genin. Some techniques required it. A child who inherited something powerful enough to matter in battle could spend years learning how not to kill themselves with it.
Daichi knew what they meant.The Kurosawa did not have that kind of reputation.
Their techniques required instruction, but the clan was not known for producing children who could walk into a battlefield and change its course. Their strength came from knowledge and experience.
Daichi found himself speaking before he had intended to.
"Not every young genin being deployed is unprepared."
The others looked toward him.
Daichi wished immediately that he had said nothing.
"I work for the Kurosawa," he said before anyone could ask what he meant. "I've been involved in some of the preparation
That was true.
"How did the Kurosawa choose who to send?" Aiko asked.
Daichi explained more than he had intended to, describing the difficulty of balancing experience against the need to leave enough personnel behind. He did not mention the specific decisions Natsumi had made. Those belonged to the clan.
But the others seemed interested, and Daichi found that he was comfortable speaking about the parts of the process he understood.
Eventually the subject narrowed.
"Did the clan really include a twelve-year-old among the support regiment?"
Daichi did not know how much had already spread beyond the training grounds.
He answered honestly.
"Yes."
Aiko looked at him. "You've met her, haven't you?"
He hesitated for a moment and then admitted it.
"What is she like?"
"She's serious," Daichi said. "More serious than most people her age, anyway."
"Is that why the clan chose her?"
"I don't know if anyone chose her for one reason."
The conversation became quieter for a moment.
Nobody had said the Kurosawa was wrong to send her. Yet Daichi could see the thought forming in their expressions. Twelve was young enough to make the circumstances uncomfortable.
He did not want them to imagine Shogi as someone who had simply been collected from the academy because the Kurosawa needed another body to meet the quota.
"The clan has known about her for years," he said.
A few of the others looked toward him.
Daichi continued before he could reconsider.
"She entered the academy under the Kurosawa sponsorship. It wasn't as though her name appeared for the first time when the mobilization began."
They seemed to accept that.
The Tetsu heir, however, looked thoughtful.
"Did she receive any training from the clan?"
Daichi knew what he meant. Not the academy sponsorship or the ordinary instruction available to students connected to the Kurosawa, but the sort of preparation that would explain why a newly graduated twelve-year-old was being included in a regiment preparing for war.
Daichi took another drink.
"She was given opportunities that other students wouldn't necessarily receive."
It sounded reasonable enough.
Aiko looked at him with mild amusement. "That sounds like you're avoiding the question."
Daichi glanced toward the garden.
He could still explain it plainly. Shogi had been sponsored through the academy. The clan had kept track of her progress because it was useful to know how its students were doing. There had been occasional instruction when personnel had the time.
But none of that sounded like enough.
Not after he had already suggested that the Kurosawa had known her for years.
"The clan does not ignore potential," he said.
The Tetsu heir looked at him.
"Potential for what?"
Daichi hesitated, suddenly aware that everyone was waiting for an answer he had not actually prepared.
Instead he said the first thing that came to his mind.
"She has an aptitude for some of the Kurosawa techniques."
The words settled differently than he had intended. Aiko's expression changed slightly.
"Really?"
Daichi immediately understood where this was going.
"She hasn't mastered anything," he said. "She's still very young."
"But she's being trained?"
Daichi hesitated.
He remembered the Clan Head walking through the training grounds. Shogi had been with the genin. The Clan Head had been there. She had seen the formation.
"The Clan Head has overseen her training before."
There was a brief silence.
Daichi took another drink.
The Tetsu heir leaned back.
"Well," he said. "That would explain why she's going."
Daichi stared into his cup.
It did not explain anything.
Unfortunately, correcting that would require him to explain what he had actually meant.
Aiko looked at him again.
"So the Kurosawa found themselves a little prodigy?"
Daichi should have denied it,instead he shrugged.
The others laughed a little, taking the gesture for something more meaningful than it was.
Daichi realized, a little too late, that silence could be interpreted just as easily as agreement.
Aiko looked at him.
"Is she really that good?"
Daichi thought of Shogi.
Nothing about her indicated potential.
"I suppose we'll find out."
The conversation moved on, though Daichi could not stop thinking about it.
He told himself that nobody would remember.
There were dozens of guests at the gathering. People drank, talked, and repeated things differently from the way they had heard them. Perhaps someone would mention it again tomorrow, but the story would eventually disappear.
Across the garden, the Clan Head was speaking with several older guests.
Daichi looked at her.
She appeared completely unaware.
For the moment, he decided that was probably for the best.
Natsumi was speaking with a representative from a seal-storage company when the conversation became interesting.
The company had been doing well recently. Their products were used primarily by merchants who needed to move valuable goods but did not have shinobi available to manage every aspect of the storage process. The representative had approached her because the company was considering expanding its work and wanted to know whether the Kurosawa might be interested in supplying specialized formulas.
The idea was not immediately appealing.
Then the representative explained the problem they were trying to solve.
Their current storage units required trained handlers to manage anything more complicated than basic activation. That limited their usefulness. The company wanted to create a standardized system where the difficult work was completed during manufacturing and ordinary workers could use the finished units without understanding the formula itself.
Natsumi listened carefully.
They spoke for several minutes about the practical limitations. Natsumi found herself asking questions she had not expected to ask when the conversation began. The proposal would require significant work, but there might be value in it if the company had enough money to develop the system properly.
Someone approached from behind them.
"Forgive me for interrupting."
Natsumi turned.
For a moment, she did not recognize the man.
Then she remembered. He had handled contracts for one of the companies the Kurosawa had worked with years earlier. She had not seen him since the period when the clan's finances had been at their worst.
He looked older but she supposed she did as well.
"It's been some time, Natsumi san, I hope you don't mind" he said.
"I do," Natsumi replied. "But continue."
He laughed, and the company representative beside her smiled.
The man asked after her health. It was not an empty question. He had known enough about the Kurosawa's difficulties to understand that she had spent much of the past decade carrying responsibilities that would have exhausted most people.
Natsumi answered briefly and asked about his family. He had retired several years earlier, though apparently retirement had not prevented him from attending gatherings and involving himself in business whenever he felt like it.
When the brief exchange had run its course, the company representative picked up the earlier discussion again.
"I should say, Kurosawa-san, hearing about the Kurosawa's recent success made me even more interested in approaching you."
Natsumi looked at him.
For a moment, she had no idea what he meant.
"Success?"
"The new talent you've found."
Natsumi stared at him.
Her mind went through the clan's personnel.
There were younger members showing promise. There were seal handlers who had recently improved. Genma had been working with several people on revised formulas.
What exactly had reached this man's ears?
She nodded before her expression could reveal her confusion.
"Potential is always encouraging."
The former contractor beside her smiled.
"I'm glad to hear it. Your clan deserves some good fortune."
Natsumi nodded again.
Someone else nearby had caught enough of the conversation to turn toward them.
"I heard about her as well," he said. "She's only twelve, right?"
Natsumi looked at him.
For a moment, the meaning of the conversation escaped her. The Kurosawa had younger shinobi showing promise. There were students still in the academy whose names occasionally appeared in reports. She had assumed the representative was referring to one of them.
Then she remembered the training grounds.
The small girl standing among the Kurosawa genin. The older girl who had lifted her from the ground as though she were a much younger child. Natsumi had looked across the training fields afterward and wondered how many people from the neighbouring formations had noticed.
Apparently enough of them had.
Shogi.
"Recently graduated," Natsumi said to fill the silence.
The man nodded. "That's what I heard."
The company representative looked interested. "Twelve and already being deployed?"
Natsumi took a sip from her drink before answering.
"She is."
There was no reason to say more. She had already made the mistake of answering. Now she intended to learn a little more before giving anyone else an opportunity to build upon her words.
The former contractor looked faintly pleased.
"I heard the Kurosawa had found someone promising. I didn't realize she was so young."
Natsumi gave him a small nod.
Promising.
That was at least a word she could accept without committing herself to anything. She knew very little about Shogi's actual ability. The girl had been sponsored through the academy and was now part of a Kurosawa regiment. If people wanted to assume there was a connection between those facts and some particular talent, that was their decision.
"The younger generation will eventually surpass us," she said.
The answer was vague enough that the conversation did not linger there.
The company representative returned to the matter that had brought him to her in the first place, and Natsumi was grateful for it. There was a difference between allowing a harmless rumour to pass and allowing a merchant to believe that the Kurosawa had suddenly acquired some extraordinary new resource. She had no intention of discussing Shogi's supposed potential as though it belonged in a business negotiation.
They returned to the proposal.
Natsumi asked about the company's expected production costs and how they intended to handle damaged storage units once they were in circulation. The representative answered directly, admitting that they had not settled upon every detail.
By the time the conversation ended, they had agreed only to speak again after the deployment. The representative seemed satisfied with that. Natsumi was not certain whether she would ultimately involve the clan, but the idea was worth examining when there were fewer immediate concerns demanding her attention.
The former contractor had long since wandered elsewhere.
Natsumi remained in the garden.
The rumour did not occupy her thoughts constantly, though it returned now and then between conversations. She spoke with an older representative from a civilian branch of another clan about a contract dispute that had apparently outlived two generations of the families involved. Later, a retired shinobi who had once managed supplies for several formations attempted to convince her that modern quartermasters had become too dependent on storage seals.
The evening continued around her.
It was only later, after enough time had passed for the earlier conversation to become one small detail among many, that Natsumi noticed Hiruzen Sarutobi across the garden.
He had been there since the beginning. She simply had not been watching him.
The Hokage was moving between groups with the patience of a man who knew that leaving early was impossible. People stopped him wherever he went. Some wanted a few minutes of his time for matters that could have waited until the following week. Others merely wanted to speak with him because they remembered him from before he became Hokage and had not entirely adjusted to the fact that he now carried the office.
Natsumi understood the feeling.
Seeing Hiruzen still occasionally made her think of his father.
Sasuke Sarutobi had been dead for ten years now. He had been one of the strongest shinobi of his generation, and Natsumi had known enough of his reputation firsthand to understand why his name still carried weight among older shinobi.
Hiruzen had surpassed him anyway.
He had done so before becoming Hokage, and he had taken the position young enough that it had caused more than a few people to question whether the village was moving too quickly.
Hiruzen had not been anyone's first choice.
Natsumi doubted even Hiruzen himself would have claimed otherwise.
There had been older shinobi. Men with longer records and more obvious claims to experience. Names that people could mention without needing to explain why they belonged in the discussion.
But there had also been worse choices.
That was how Natsumi had first looked at him.
She had respected Hiruzen's strength, though strength alone had never impressed her as much as people assumed it should. By the time Tobirama recommended him, Hiruzen was already powerful enough to stand above most of his contemporaries. If Tobirama had chosen another path and Hiruzen had not considered the position himself, Natsumi believed she might eventually have gone to him and asked him to put his name forward.
Not because she had believed he would be perfect.
She had not expected that from anyone.
Hiruzen tried to be fair. More importantly, when circumstances made fairness impossible, he still appeared to understand that the people affected by his decisions were not pieces that could simply be moved around and forgotten.
He listened.
He could be stubborn. Natsumi had seen enough of that to know better than to romanticize his character. But he listened before deciding that he was right, and once he made a decision, he seemed prepared to do his best with it rather than retreat behind the authority of his office.
A great deal of what the Hokage did would eventually come down to choices between things nobody wanted. Someone would suffer. Someone would lose and someone would have to be told that the village could not help them.
Natsumi did not need a Hokage who could pretend otherwise.
She preferred one who would at least try.
Her attention returned to the gathering.
Some time later, as she was leaving one conversation and considering whether she had enough patience left for another, she heard a familiar voice nearby.
"Clan Head."
Natsumi turned.
"Hokage-sama."
Hiruzen approached, carrying his drink in one hand. He had clearly been speaking with another group before noticing her, and Natsumi expected nothing more than the ordinary exchange of greetings.
They spoke briefly about the deployment instead.
The preparations were nearly complete. Hiruzen asked whether the Kurosawa were ready to leave, and Natsumi gave him the answer she had been giving people for the past several days: they would be ready.
He seemed to accept that.
Then, after a moment, his expression softened.
"I was glad to hear that your clan has something else to look forward to."
Natsumi looked at him.
Hiruzen smiled.
"Your young prodigy."
For a moment, Natsumi simply stared at him.
Prodigy.
She understood the shape of the story now, though not yet its source.
Someone had seen Shogi and learned that she was twelve. Somewhere along the way, the Kurosawa's connection to her had apparently become evidence that the clan had spent years preparing her for something extraordinary.
And apparently the story had travelled far enough to reach the Hokage.
Natsumi felt a brief and deeply unpleasant curiosity about how much of it Hiruzen had actually heard.
He continued before she could ask.
"Your clan has had a difficult decade. I hope the stories are true. It would be good to see the Kurosawa's fortunes change."
There was nothing insincere in the words.
He was offering encouragement because he believed the clan had finally been given something to celebrate. She could have told him that Shogi had only recently graduated from the academy and that, as far as Natsumi knew, nobody had discovered some extraordinary talent hidden within the girl.
But she had already allowed the earlier conversations to pass without correction.
And she still did not know what, exactly, had been said to create this rumour.
"I hope she proves equal to the expectations people have already placed on her," Natsumi said.
Hiruzen looked at her for a moment.
Then he smiled.
"I hope so too."
Another guest caught his attention shortly afterward, and the conversation ended as naturally as it had begun. Hiruzen offered her a final word of goodwill before moving away to join the waiting group.
Natsumi remained where she was.
The garden continued around her. Someone laughed near the veranda. Glasses touched somewhere behind her. A conversation about shipping contracts had grown louder than it needed to be.
She took another drink.
Then she began looking for Daichi. She found him near the garden with the younger guests.
He looked comfortable. Natsumi watched him for a moment before she began walking toward him. Daichi noticed her approaching before she reached the group.
His expression changed.
Natsumi stopped in front of him.
"Come with me."
Daichi looked at the others.
Then back at her.
"Now?"
"Yes."
Aiko glanced between them.
Daichi excused himself and followed Natsumi away from the garden.
She did not speak until they had reached a quieter section of the compound.
Then she turned to him.
"Tell me exactly what you said."
Daichi stared at her.
"About what?"
Natsumi looked at him.
His face changed again.
"Ah."
"Yes," she said. "Ah."