first part of velocity (unproofed bc i am running out the door) ->
“Then Orochimaru has Shiranui,” Danzo intoned, dead confident even though Shikaku’s report on the situation had included dozens of unknowns. “No one else in the area could pose a threat to a Jounin of Konoha.”
“We still don’t know anything about this new village,” Minato pointed out, “or what clans joined it. There could still be lone actors–”
“Please,” Danzo interrupted, unimpressed. “No Sound ninja could disappear a Jounin so thoroughly.”
“With all due respect,” Minato said tightly, “you have not been on the frontlines in decades. Does anyone who’s actually been to Sound have any thoughts?”
Had Minato even invited Danzo to this meeting? He barely even remembered calling the meeting. Meetings just happened, now that he was Hokage. Turns out that’s all being Hokage was: things happened, and then instead of doing anything about them, Minato sat around listening to high ranking ninja explain their opinions. Oh, and sometimes he stamped things. Forms. Proposals. Budgets. Paperwork.
Four years ago, Minato had been spending most of his time on the frontlines. Going from the most hands-on possible approach to this had been a rough transition, and he had perhaps relied too heavily on the ancient Hokage's Council as a result.
The war was slowly coming to a stop now, and he could definitely make some moves to bring in younger people with more recent experience. But for now, he had to work with what was in place. For this meeting, that was Shikaku, an ex-field commander he’d nab in the hallway because she’d been stationed in Sound, and a bunch of old people.
“Danzo-sama is right in that we’ve knocked out most of their known major players,” the ex field commander drawled. “But you never know, out there in the boonies. They’re not like us; they just let any ninja wander around and chop up whoever they want.”
To illustrate this, she held up her right arm, which ended not with a hand but with a wiry assistive device meant to let her hold a writing utensil.
“...right,” Shikaku said slowly. “Inuzuka last caught his scent near the new… village, if we’re calling it that… but we can’t pin it on them, and we also can’t eliminate some other third party.”
Genma had only been officially missing a scant thirty hours. He’d been en route between camps for normal restationing and missed his check-in. If he were most ninja, this would not have warranted a meeting. It probably would have been dealt with locally, shoved into a summary report, and Minato probably wouldn’t have found out for days that anything at all had happened. If this had been at the height of the war, even someone like Genma might have gotten this treatment.
But the war was waning, and Genma was part of the Hokage’s guard. As someone intimately familiar with Minato’s personal life and the inner workings of Hokage tower, Genma was important enough to warrant a quick investigation, and they had the people and time to dedicate to it.
“Why was Shiranui even in Sound?” Koharu asked.
Minato leaned back in his seat, biting his thumbnail in thought. He really didn’t see the need to have a full guard inside the village, and morale at field camps was usually better when popular Jounin like Genma were hanging around. Minato had seen it as more useful to have him running chores out in the field.
It was true that a Hokage’s guard would be a great hostage, if some nefarious player wanted to re-escalate war.
That would be so many meetings, Minato thought. He really couldn’t have that.
The meeting wrapped up with barely a plan in place, as was what happened at many meetings. Shikaku would send word to both camps to re-sweep the area, and then Minato would add it to his agenda at yet another meeting to rearrange people to put together a tracking team instead of just one random Inuzuka who happened to be on duty.
Miraculously, one of his afternoon meetings was canceled. Someone had died. Such was life as a shinobi.
“I could move up your meeting with the fruit vendors’ union,” his secretary said.
“Please don't,” Minato replied. He hated talking to those guys.
His secretary left, and Minato immediately felt antsy. It was very rare he had an hour free like this in the middle of the day. What could he do? Take a nap? Kidnap Naruto away from his babysitter for a playtime speedrun? Bother Kushina? He glanced at the clock. No, Naruto would be down for a nap and Kushina would be meeting with the Academy headmaster about their curriculum on storage scrolls again…
Minato glanced down at the mess of paperwork on his desk. He really, really didn’t want to do any of it right now. How was his job both stressful and boring? He liked being free to see his little family most evenings, and he mostly liked acting as a leader. But he’d thought he’d get more time to just be a ninja.
Actually, he thought. Was he not his own boss? Was there not a pressing problem he couldn’t just solve right now?
Sound Country had been home to several major ninja pathways, camps, and battles during this war. Minato had plenty of Hiraishin markers scattered around, including along the path Genma would have taken between camps.
Minato found Genma in about eight minutes of searching, several hundred meters off the normal route.
“Hokage-sama!” Genma cried in evident relief. His face was one Minato had seen often in his lifetime but not so much in the last few years of mainly administrative work: the instant relief of a man who’d consigned himself to death, now realizing that he was going to live.
Minato shot him a reassuring smile even as his eyes darted around the clearing. There were no ninja in the area, but Genma was currently trapped within the glowing walls of a massive blue-green chakra barrier. It had an unusual shape, delineated by stalks of bamboo at the corners of an irregular pentagon.
Well, this shouldn’t be too difficult to dismantle. Minato might be off the battlefield, but he was still up to snuff on all things fuuinjutsu. He stepped up the closet bamboo shoot, which had a seal carved… into it…?
“What happened?” he asked Genma as he eyed the seal. This was… not a normal piece of fuuinjutsu. Hmm.
“There was a little girl,” Genma started. He sounded incredibly stressed as he described the sequence of events: Genma had encountered a local civilian girl on his trek. He recognized her as belonging to a nearby village and being one of the local women and children who’d occasionally barter with Konoha field camps. She’d sprained her ankle, and he’d stop to help.
“But then she… I don’t know, she… the barrier…”
Then this random civilian girl had activated a barrier and left Genma. Sure. Why not.
“Are you sure she’s not a ninja?” Minato asked, frowning at the seal. He could recognize it as a barrier seal, but there were like seventeen things going on with it he didn’t understand. A civilian could activate certain types of ninja-made seals in theory, but not this one.
“No, she’s the soap girl!” Genma bemoaned. “She shows up sometimes to sell shitty soaps. There’s no way she’s a ninja.”
But then, Genma continued in a clearly upset sort of ramble, she’d asked him if he was well-hydrated and how much water and food he had on him, and just left.
“I’ve been here at least two days,” Genma said.
“The barrier lasted that long?” Minato asked. “Impressive.”
“Impressive?” Genma repeated.
“It’s a fairly chakra-heavy barrier,” Minato replied. Genma continued to stare at him with what looked like a vaguely scandalized expression. “Usually to maintain something like this long-term, you’d need to put a lot of chakra in at the beginning– usually done with multiple people, and definitely not by a child– or you’d need to be actively maintaining it. This little girl never came by? No other ninja?”
Genma stared at him, wide-eyed, his mouth hanging open. Minato raised his eyebrows, waiting for an answer.
“Well, no,” Genma said after a few moments had passed. “Can you please get me out before we debrief?”
Ah, Minato supposed Genma was a little freaked out by the prospect of his own untimely death, withering away in a random barrier by what seemed to be the random whims of a child. That was fair. Minato turned back to the seal.
He looked at it some more, then moved around to the next bamboo shoot, and then the next.
“Hokage-sama?” Genma asked.
“I have no idea how to undo this,” Minato said, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice.
Genma was looking at him in horror now, but Minato could feel a certain giddiness building in his stomach. Finally, something interesting! What was going on with this seal? He could tell a bunch of the mystery components had to do with pulling chakra, but from where? The bamboo itself? Minato had heard stories from Kushina of ancient Uzushio seals using length of living kelp, twisted into seals that could pull on chakra as long as the kelp was alive. But those were supposed to be legends!
“Hokage-sama, are you smiling?” Genma whined.
“It’s just really interesting,” Minato defended. He was going to save Genma, okay? “I’m going to get my notes.”
It only took Minato a minute to teleport to his office, dig up a notebook with enough blank pages, and then teleport back. Genma still gave him a look of deep betrayal that he’d left at all.
Minato was pretty good at multitasking, so he quizzed Genma on details of how the seal had been activated while copied the location of the seals and took etchings of them.
“She didn’t mention any name at all?” Minato confirmed. “No boss she’s working for?”
Minato really, really wanted to meet whoever had made this nightmare of a seal. He wanted to know how they’d come up with it, and then quiz them if they new more seals like this, that could use chakra from natural sources, and then maybe have this person to dinner to just talk fuuinjutsu with him and Kushina all night.
Except they were in an enemy nation, so probably Minato would have to settle for imprisoning this person and then interrogating them via Yamanaka mindwalk. Boo.
Also, on top of the wild chakra source, the barrier was just really well made. Genma had not just been sitting around for two days; he’d executed several earth jutsu to try and burrow out, but the barrier extended underground. It even stood up to a rasengan. Minato couldn’t even destroy the five bamboo shoots powering the whole thing, because they were integrated into the walls of the barrier itself.
“This person must have troubleshooted this a lot,” Minato said, squinting at one of the seals. This thing matched no reports of anything Konoha had seen during the war. How could they have never noticed this person running around?
Genma was clearly starting to panic again.
“Sir, what are you going to do?” he asked. “I’m out of water and food.”
Minato cocked his head to the side, thinking. He did have another meeting he really had to go to, as much as he wanted to stay here and geek out over this cool new seal. He could teleport over to the nearest camp, tell them where Genma was so they could put a guard on him, and then come back later with Kushina. Could they safely bring Naruto? He always felt guilty when they had to leave the kid alone in the evening…
Then, they heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps approaching. They weren’t particularly loud, but they were definitely civilian. Genma shut his mouth, and Minato turned to the source, eyebrows raised.
The person got close enough that he could see the outline of a figure through the bamboo. The person was small, clearly a child. Then they clearly realized they’d made a terrible mistake and turned to flee.
Minato shot forward, grabbing the kid by the back of her yukata. She matched the description Genma had given of the kid who’d trapped him: dark curly hair and eyes, around eight. She stomped over to the clearing like a civilian who was used to navigating bamboo, and then for the briefest moment where she’d attempted to run, made it very clear she was a ninja in training.
So. That was interesting.
Minato pulled her into the clearing and set her down on her feet. She was technically an enemy who had put an important Konoha Jounin in a situation which might actually kill him, but also she was a little kid. Minato hated having to kill or bully kids.
“Hi there,” he said, shooting her his most child-friendly smile.
“Reina, you horrible little brat!” Genma yelled, banging his fists on the wall of the barrier.
Reina ignored him entirely, eyeing Minato up and down with deep suspicion. She was either extremely confident the barrier could completely contain Genma, or she’d recognized Minato as the greater threat, or both.
“Don’t worry,” Minato said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Just answer some questions as best you can, and you won’t even get in trouble, okay?”
“Oooh, you’re going to be in so much trouble when I get out!” Genma screamed.
“Ignore him,” Minato said, then winked playfully at her.
Reina’s lips thinned and she looked doubtful. But she also didn’t even spare Genma a glance as she shouted threats at her.
“Look, I’m not going to kill him,” Reina said finally. “I was… even coming to feed him.”
She produced a beat up looking bag of dried fruit from her pocket and held this up as if it were evidence. There were only a few pieces left. If Minato hazarded a guess, he’d say it was left over from her own snack and then forgotten in her pocket.
“Right,” Minato said slowly. “Listen, I don’t really care that you trapped him.”
“But I really want to know, Reina-chan,” Minato continued, trying to look as friendly as possible even as Genma continued to bluster in outrage, “do you know who made this barrier?”
Reina’s brows furrowed slightly, studying his face. Minato smiled back encouragingly. He eyes finally darted over to the barrier.
“Oh,” she said, as if realizing something. “Oh. Yeah, of course that’s what you’d want. Ummm.”
She fidgeted with the bag of dry fruit in her hands, crinkling the plastic under her fingers. The label was faded with time and the wear and tear of riding around in a child’s pockets, but it was one of the brands Konoha included in their ration packs for field camps. She’d likely gotten it from a field camp.
“Did someone show you the trap?” Minato asked gently.
“Uh, well,” Reina replied. “About that…”
Reina didn’t seem to be too afraid to talk to him, but she also seemed to be afraid of whatever the answers to his questions were. This made sense to Minato. If she was a ninja living in this area, she was probably associated with this new “village” Orochimaru had made. It would be logical to fear he’d turn violent if she brought up Konoha’s most notorious missing-nin.
Briefly, Minato wondered if the seal was Orochimaru’s design. Setting up and then abandoning a trap such that a child might take advantage of it was not something Orochimaru was likely to do, but perhaps he’d developed the fuuinjutsu and someone else had set it up.
Except, no– that wasn’t really aligned with Orochimaru’s skillset. Orochimaru was a prolific fuuinjutsu user, but he wasn’t a true master. Under Konoha he’d never shown interest in developing new fuuinjutsu beyond some modifications to seals useful to his research. Not even he could wake up one day and spontaneously invent what looked like an entirely new field of fuuinjutsu.
Minato felt like fidgeting himself with excitement. If it wasn’t Orochimaru, maybe dinner wasn’t completely off the table.
Reina still hadn’t answered, so Minato tried, “I know you’re an Oto-nin, and that our villages don’t really get along. But I promise I just want to know who made this seal. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”
He did his best “don’t worry, I’m here to save you and you’re not going to die” smile. Reina tilted her head back, eyes narrowing.
“Okay,” she said. “Nothing bad will happen to me? I have your word?”
“So if I go back to my boss and tell him I gave up fuuinjutsu secrets to the Hokage, he won’t do anything bad?”
“No,” Minato replied slowly, and Reina looked at him like he was deeply stupid, the type of look only a little kid could level at an adult. It was the type of unimpressed expression he now only ever got from his own child. “Well,” Minato corrected. “I won’t do anything to you, and my friend here won’t either.”
He shot Genma a look. Genma glared back at him but shut up.
“So I don’t have your word that nothing bad will happen,” Reina concluded.
Gods above, Minato thought, starting to feel annoyed. His meeting was in fifteen minutes, but he wanted the identity of this fuuinjutsu user so bad. Why do they have to make kids so smart?
“At least ask her to get me out of here,” Genma said, keeping his voice level this time, although there was a hint of desperation in there.
Minato had not asked for this, because he had assumed the girl had simply known of the trap and walked Genma into it, and was therefore unlikely to know how to deactivate it. But she eyed Minato up and down again, and then said:
“I’ll let him out, but you have to keep your word.”
Then she pulled a brush and a bottle of ink from her sleeves and walked over to the nearest bamboo shoot. Minato followed her, holding back the urge to ask her about fifteen questions. She was eight. She probably had no idea how the seal worked.
“You know, my clan kicked me out,” Reina said conversationally as she applied ink directly to the barrier as it hummed over the wood of the bamboo. Who the hell taught her to do that? No one did that. That would have been Minato’s “well, nothing else worked” level attempt at breaking it. “I don’t have any biological family to defend me or look after me. My clan only lets me stay around because uniting the clans means other people take care of me. Really, I’ve been looking for a way to escape.”
“Uh huh,” Minato replied, watching her hands as she painted characters over the ones etched into the bamboo. A counter-seal then… what a bizarre way to design something, to only be able to undo it by painting a brand new seal on top. That barely left room for any error, although he supposed the benefit was that this approach had made it so Genma couldn’t just break the bamboo, and even someone like Minato would need days of work to come up with a counter-seal.
Reina made no errors in her counter-seal, and so she didn’t blow them all up or screw up the seal such that no one could take it down. The walls of the barrier fizzled away, and for a second Genma looked like he was on the brink of tears.
“Hey, stand down,” Minato chided when Genma made a move towards them and Reina tensed. Had Genma not been listening to their whole conversation?
Genma obeyed, standing at attention while also scowling at Reina.
Reina stared up at Minato expectantly, the ink brush still in her hands. The counter-seal had melted into ink stains on the bamboo and the surrounding grass when the barrier lifted, and Minato considered asking her to draw it again for him to make sure he got all the details.
Still, who on earth had taught such a young child such advanced fuuinjutsu? Minato flipped his notebook to a new page and eyed Reina.
“Reina-chan,” he said slowly. “Who is your fuuinjutsu teacher?”
“Oh, um,” she said. “Oto encourages… self study…?”
“About your promise,” Reina started.
Minato had his stupid meeting in two minutes, and it was vital to keeping the village running or whatever. He didn’t have time to unpack this right now.
“You said your clan kicked you out?” he asked Reina.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “So if you could just drop me off in–”
“So you don’t have family you’d miss?” he asked.
Right. This was perfect. He took her hand, then grabbed for Genma’s forearm. He teleported all three of them into his office.
“This isn’t–” Reina started, for the first time showing actual fear.
“It’s okay,” Minato said, patting her on the head. Children liked that, right? Well, Naruto hated it, but Academy kids loved when he paid attention to them. “Genma, go get checked out at the hospital and then come back for a debriefing.”
“Um, yessir,” Genma said, eyeing Reina and looking completely unsure of the situation.
Minato actually couldn’t wait to quiz Reina on what the fuck was going on in Oto. How much fuuinjutsu did she actually know? How had she gotten the idea for the wild bamboo seal? Did Orochimaru maybe have old Uzushio materials lying around that Minato and Kushina should know about?
“Hokage-sama,” his secretary said, entering the office, “the Hyuuga clan representative… who is this child?”
Right. His meeting. He’d have to hold off on talking to her. If she were an adult, the protocol would be to stick her with T&I. But she wasn’t an adult; she was an increasingly frightened looking child. If he stuck her in T&I, he’d not only create a ton of red tape for himself to interact with her, but she might end up too freaked out to talk to him as soon as he wanted her to.
“Genma,” he said, deciding on the best course of action. “On your way down, drop Reina-chan off with Kushina.”
Genma sighed. “Sure, Hokage-sama,” he said, sounding deeply unhappy.
There. Now Minato could have his fun little dinner.
