Mai found the broker at dawn.
She'd been scanning from the inn's second-floor window since her shift started, sweeping the town in slow arcs through the glasses. The Iwa squad was still in their inn on the east side. The Kiri pair had moved to a new rooftop further south. The unknown team from the north road had set up in a tea house near the river docks. The Leaf team was still invisible.
Then a new signature appeared.
It came from the western edge of town, moving along the main road toward the market district. Moving alone, at a civilian's pace, blending with the early morning foot traffic. Mai almost missed it among the merchants and laborers heading to work.
"Sensei." Mai didn't take her eyes off the signature. "I've got someone new. Western road. Carrying a large scroll. Moving alone toward the market."
Ebizo was at the window in three steps. "Describe."
"Male. Average build. He's heading for the main square."
"Is he meeting anyone?"
Mai tracked the signature as it turned off the main road into a side street. It stopped. Another signature approached from the opposite direction, this one familiar, one of the Iwa squad members she'd been tracking. They stood close together for about thirty seconds, then separated. The new signature continued toward the market. The Iwa member headed back east.
"He just met with one of the Stone nin. Quick meeting. Maybe exchanged words. Now he's moving again." Mai said.
"That's the broker. He's making contact with each team. Telling them when and where." Ebizo said.
"He's heading toward the market square."
"Then so are we. Wake the others."
Karura and Pakura were up and armed in under a minute. Pakura was upset she was woken out of her beauty sleep.
Karura pulled her scarf up. Her eyes stayed indigo and dark.
She had thought about it through her whole watch shift, turning it over while the town slept. The Leaf team had been invisible since yesterday. Invisible meant unlocated, and unlocated meant the Hyuga could be anywhere, behind any wall, on any roof, looking at anything he pleased through all of it. The moment her eyes lit, he would know for sure. So she would not use them. Until the man with the white gaze was accounted for, she would go into the worst fight of her life seeing exactly what everyone else saw, and her puppets would be her eyes the way they had been before the desert ever gave her better ones.
Puppets, her training, and Mai's mouth. It would have to be enough.
They hit the streets as the town was waking up. Market stalls were opening. Vendors were setting up their wares. The smell of breakfast cooking drifted from the tea houses. Takimura had no idea what was about to happen to it.
Mai led them through the side streets, tracking the broker's signature as he moved through the town. He stopped twice more. Once near the river, where one of the Kiri pair came down from their rooftop to meet him. Once near the market square, where the unknown shinobi team's member appeared briefly before disappearing back into the tea house.
"He's setting up the exchange," Ebizo said. "He's telling each team the location. They'll all converge at the same time."
"Where?" Pakura asked.
Mai watched the broker's signature settle into position near the center of the market square. He sat down. Waited.
"The market. He's there now. Just... sitting."
"It's a bidding war," Ebizo said. "He's planted himself in a public place and told every team where to find him. The one that bids the most, gets the scroll. The others have to deal with it."
"That's insane." Pakura said.
"That's leverage. He's pitting the villages against each other and planning to walk away with whoever offers the best deal while the rest tear each other apart."
"We need to reach him before anyone else does. Mai, where are the other teams?"
Mai scanned. "Iwa is moving. All four of them, heading west from their inn. Fast. They'll be at the market in five minutes." Her head turned. "Kiri pair is on the move too. Coming from the south. And the unknowns are leaving the tea house." Another turn. "And... oh. The Leaf team. I found them. They're on the rooftops around the market square. All four. They've been there the whole time. I just couldn't see them until they started moving." Mai giggled. "Everyone's coming together all at once. This is going to be fun."
"Stay close. Move fast. Everyone, be ready to fight if necessary."
Karura's hand went to the scrolls at her hip.
All four. Around the square. She marked the rooftops in her mind off Mai's words. Somewhere above that market was a man who could end her and her loved one's peaceful life by writing a single report.
She wouldn't let him write it.
They rounded the corner onto the main road that led to the market square.
And the world exploded.
The Iwa squad reached the square first.
They came in from the east at a dead sprint, four Stone nin in earth-toned flak jackets, and the lead one slammed his palms into the ground before he even stopped moving. The cobblestones erupted. A wall of earth and stone ripped up from the street in a line that bisected the market square, scattering vendors and civilians in a wave of screaming panic. Stalls collapsed. Crates flew. People ran in every direction.
The Kiri pair hit from the south. Mist poured from the shorter one's mouth, thick and white and cold, rolling across the square and eating visibility in seconds. Through the fog, the taller one moved with a drawn sword, a long straight blade that caught the morning light before the mist swallowed everything.
The Leaf team dropped from the rooftops.
They came down in a diamond formation, silent, coordinated, four green-jacketed shinobi landing in the square at the same instant. The one with the strange eyes, the one Mai had spotted scanning from the treetops, landed closest to the broker's position. The other three spread out to cover the approaches.
The unknown team from the north road charged in screaming, two shinobi with mismatched gear and wild eyes, minor village operatives with more ambition than sense. One of them threw a fistful of shuriken into the mist without looking. The other ran straight at the Iwa wall and started climbing it.
And Team Ebizo hit the square from the west.
One scroll unfurled in Karura's hand. Three clouds of smoke erupted at her sides and behind her, and when the smoke cleared, three puppets stood on the cobblestones of Takimura's market square.
Three Millions.
The same carved grinning face, repeated three times. The same four-armed body, the same bandage wrappings coiled around jointed limbs, the same unsettling smile that looked like it was laughing at a joke only the puppet understood. Three of them, standing in a loose triangle around their puppeteer, chakra threads invisible in the morning light.
The Iwa squad saw them.
The earth wall's creator, a stocky man with a beard and a Stone headband tied across his forehead, froze mid-hand seal. His eyes locked on the puppets. On the four arms. On the smile.
"That's her!" he roared. His voice cracked with something that went beyond mission focus, something that bled raw. "Akai Kugutsu! The Red Puppeteer! KILL HER!"
The name went through the square like a thrown blade. Heads turned in the mist. Even the minor village pair faltered mid-charge. The bingo book entry had traveled further than Karura's team ever had, and every shinobi in that market had read it. Unknown Sand puppeteer. Estimated age seven to nine. Twenty-six confirmed kills in a single night. Do not engage alone.
The three Stone nin behind their leader didn't need to be told twice. Whatever their original objective had been, it was forgotten. The broker, the scroll, the other villages, none of it mattered. Something other than strategy took over.
Revenge.
The bearded one drove both hands into the earth. Stone spears erupted from the ground in a line aimed directly at Karura, six of them, each one as thick as a man's torso and sharp enough to punch through wood. They came fast, ripping through the cobblestones, tearing through market stalls, sending debris flying.
The leftmost Million intercepted. Its four arms spread wide and the bandage wrappings unspooled in a fan of white cloth that caught the first two spears and redirected them sideways, snapping them at the base. The third and fourth spears hit Million's body and the puppet absorbed the impact, its wooden frame cracking but holding, and the wrappings from its lower arms lashed out and shattered the fifth and sixth spears before they reached Karura.
The second Million was already moving. It launched forward across the square toward the Iwa squad, four arms pumping, its grinning face leading the charge. The youngest of the Stone nin threw a kunai at it. Million caught the kunai in one hand and threw it back. The man dodged but the redirect put him off balance, and Million's wrappings caught his ankle and yanked him off his feet.
The third Million did not join them.
The third Million went for the Leaf team.
Karura stood at the triangle's heart with her scarf pulled tight and her fingers dancing, and she split herself the way Chiyo had taught her to split herself, one battle running on each hand. Her right hand fought Iwa in front of everyone.
Her left hand hunted.
The Leaf kunoichi with the short sword was the first to die.
She had come in behind Pakura, quick and quiet, her blade angling for the gap under Pakura's raised guard while Pakura traded blows with the tall Kiri swordsman. It seemed all but certain that death was coming for the distracted Pakura.
The third Million's wrappings came out of the thinning mist and took the kunoichi around the throat and waist mid-lunge. She had half a second to feel it. Then the puppet's lower arms hauled in opposite directions with the strength of a tool built by a girl who understood exactly what was needed to end a life, and the sound her body made was brief, and the wrappings dropped what was left of her onto the cobblestones and were already moving again.
Pakura spun at the noise, saw the crumpled green jacket, saw the white cloth retracting into the smoke, and understood it as Karura has my back before the Kiri swordsman's next slash forced everything else out of her head. She blocked the overhead strike with her kunai and kicked him in the knee. He staggered. She burned a hole through his shoulder with a point-blank orb and he dropped his sword.
Ebizo engaged the shorter Kiri nin, the mist-maker. The old jonin moved, closing the distance before the operative could form another jutsu. A palm-knife strike to the wrist disrupted the hand seal. A knee to the gut folded the man. Ebizo's elbow came down on the back of his neck and the mist-maker hit the cobblestones and didn't get up.
The mist stopped feeding. It began, slowly, to thin.
The second Leaf nin died trying to reach the broker.
He was a big man with a tanto and taped knuckles, and he'd used the chaos by skirting the Iwa storm, letting Sand and Stone and Mist grind each other down while he ghosted toward the objective. He was three strides from the broker's position when the first Million, the one holding the western line, pivoted away from the Iwa spears for exactly one heartbeat.
One heartbeat was what Karura had built it to need.
A boulder-sized chunk of earth, one of the bearded leader's own projectiles, caught mid-flight in four wooden arms, changed direction, and arrived where the big man's next stride put him. He saw its shadow grow around his feet. There was nowhere for him to be that was not under it.
The square shook. The first Million was already back on its line, catching the next spear, and the Iwa leader, if he even noticed his own stone had just killed a Leaf shinobi, only screamed and threw more.
Mai tracked it all through her glasses from the square's edge, her back to a wall, and her jaw slowly loosened as the pattern showed itself to her and to no one else. Everyone in that square was fighting everyone.
The third Leaf nin was the team's senior hand, a jonin's flak jacket worn soft with years, and he had survived a war by noticing exactly this kind of thing. Two of his people were down. Both, on the surface of it, to accidents. Battles this size ate people, everyone knew that. He fell back toward the square's north edge, hands rising, and shouted a single word into the chaos, a name, the eye man's name, calling him in.
Karura couldn't hear it over the square. She didn't need to. She saw his mouth move and his feet turn, and knew a retreat when she watched one being born.
None of you can go home, I apologize.
The second Million disengaged from the tangled Iwa youngster and crossed the square in four strides, wrappings streaming. The senior Leaf nin met it like the veteran he was, blade out, feet right, carving through the first three lashes of cloth, giving ground with discipline, working his way toward the north street and the open country beyond it. He was skilled. He was calm. Even when the first Million's wrappings, sixty meters of white cloth thrown across the whole width of the square in a single cast, took his legs out from behind.
The two puppets folded him between them. He got his blade into the second Million's shoulder joint all the way to the guard. It cost him the second he did not have. Four wooden arms closed, and the problem was over.
Karura felt the sword grinding in the joint through her threads and routed around the damage without letting her face change, and behind her scarf she was counting.
Three.
The square stood in raw morning light now, the mist gone, broken stone and burning stalls and bodies. The minor hidden village pair was dead somewhere in it, one face-down with three kunai in his back, the other opened at the throat by a blade that could have belonged to anyone.
And at the square's eastern edge, alone, the Hyuga finally stopped scanning.
He had not engaged anyone. He had spent the whole battle at the storm's rim, head turning in slow arcs, doing what he had been sent to do, which was see. He had seen his kunoichi die to a puppet that struck through mist it should not have been able to strike through. He had seen a thrown boulder arrive with timing that was not luck. He had seen his senior call his name with his last order and die between two grins.
Now the white eyes, bare and blazing, veins standing at his temples, fixed on the small figure in the yellow scarf at the center of the triangle, and did not move on.
He was not looking at her puppets. He was looking at her. At her face. At her dark, ordinary, indigo eyes, and through them, and Karura stood forty meters away under that gaze knowing exactly what it could do, what it was doing, what it was reading beneath the surface she wore. Her own eyes stayed dark. It didn't matter. She had known since the ridge that it wouldn't.
His head tilted. Just slightly. The tilt of a man rechecking a sum that could not be right.
His mouth opened.
Both Millions hit him at once.
He already saw them coming. Palms turning, body flowing into the opening steps of a form that had been breaking people apart for centuries. Gentle Fist found no tenketsu in wood, so he went for the threads. His first two strikes were flawless, chakra-laced fingertips finding the lines above the second Million's shoulders and severing them the way experience had taught him, and half the puppet died in the air, arms dropping slack.
He never saw that she wanted it to.
The slack arms fell against him, dead weight, and dead weight was still eighty kilograms of ironwood, and for one half-instant his footwork carried the load instead of his defense. The first Million's wrappings arrived inside the half-instant. They came from three directions, low and mid and high.
He was only able to sever two with his Gentle Fist.
The third took his throat.
He fought it. Even then. His hands came up and his fingers were cutting the wrapping strand by strand with edges of shaped chakra, teeth bared, white eyes wide and locked on hers across the square, and there was no confusion anywhere in them. None. Only the sum, finished, and the terrible urgency of a man who has one message and no time left to send it. His lips shaped it. There was no air behind them to carry it anywhere.
Karura closed her left hand.
The wrapping closed with it.
He got one palm flat against the cloth at his own neck, and then it stopped building, and his arms came down slowly, and the first Million lowered him to the cobblestones almost gently.
On his forehead, dark against the pale skin, a mark surfaced through the dying chakra like a bruise rising. A pinwheel shape. It flared once, bright green.
The Caged Bird Seal. Behind the blank lids, the clan's treasure sealed itself away from the world, and the eyes that had seen her were only eyes, and then not even that.
And with the mark came the answer to his death. Branch house. That was why a Hyuga jonin had met three wrappings from three directions with nothing but his hands. The Rotation, the spinning shield that shed attacks from every angle at once, belonged to the main house alone. No one had ever taught it to him. No one had ever been going to. His clan had denied him the one technique that would have saved his life, and then reached across a continent to burn the proof of him off his own face.
I'm sorry, Karura thought to herself.
Four.
The square rolled on around the body as if nothing inside its storm had ended. The Iwa leader was charging her position with a fist encased in stone, and Ebizo appeared in his path, sidestepped the stone fist, caught the extended arm at the elbow, and redirected the man's own momentum into a throw that sent him face-first into the cobblestones. The impact cracked the stone. The Iwa leader pushed himself up with blood running from his forehead and Ebizo was already behind him, a kunai stabbing into the back of his neck.
The scarred Iwa woman screamed her comrade's name and threw a volley of hardened stone shuriken. The first Million intercepted, wrappings catching the projectiles and hurling them back. Two embedded in the wall behind her. The third caught her in the thigh and she went down.
The last Stone nin had stopped struggling in the wreck of the second Million's grip long ago.
The battle was sprawling across the town now.
Fighting had spilled out of the market square and into the surrounding streets. A section of the riverside district was on fire, smoke rising in a dark column. Somewhere to the north an explosion shook the ground and windows shattered in buildings two blocks away. Civilians had fled the central district entirely, leaving the streets to the shinobi who were killing each other in them, and to the ones already done being killed.
Mai watched it all from the edge of the square, her glasses feeding her information faster than her brain could process. She tracked Karura, who stood in the center of her triangle with one puppet hanging half-dead on its threads, her scarf pulled tight across her face. She tracked Pakura, who was burning through what was left of the opposition with a ferocity that would have terrified anyone who wasn't Mai. She tracked Ebizo, circling the two of them, dismantling anyone who came within arm's reach.
And she tracked the broker.
He was moving.
While every ninja in Takimura was trying to kill every other ninja, the broker had left the market square. He was heading north, toward the river, at a pace that was faster than a walk but slower than a run. Trying not to attract attention. Slipping through the empty streets that the civilians had vacated.
He wasn't alone.
There were shinobi near him. Two, moving parallel to his route on adjacent streets. Mai could see them through the buildings, their chakra signatures keeping pace with the broker, matching his turns, maintaining a consistent distance.
She didn't understand the formation. Were they chasing him? Tailing him? They weren't attacking. They weren't closing in. They were just... escorting.
It didn't matter. The broker was moving and if he reached whatever extraction point he was heading for, the mission was over.
"I SEE HIM!" Mai shouted.
Karura turned. Pakura turned. Ebizo turned.
"The broker! He's heading north toward the river! He's got two ninja near him, I don't know if they're following him or what but he's LEAVING!"
"Mai, hold your position!" Ebizo's voice cut through the noise of the battle. "We regroup and pursue together!"
Mai looked at the broker's signature. Moving north. Already three blocks from the square. Two blocks from the river. If he reached a boat or a bridge or wherever he was going, he was gone. By the time her team disengaged from what was left of the Iwa squad and the Kiri remnants and everyone else, the broker would be a memory.
She looked at Ebizo. He was twenty meters away, a kunai in one hand, an Iwa kunoichi between them throwing earth projectiles that he was deflecting with his forearm. Karura was holding the square's whole western half with two and a half puppets. Pakura was locked in a running fight with the Kiri swordsman, who had picked his blade back up with his off hand and apparently no sense of when to quit.
Nobody could come with her. Nobody could break free.
"Forgive me, Sensei!"
She ran.
"MAI!"
Ebizo's voice chased her down the street. She didn't stop. Her legs pumped and her glasses locked onto the broker's signature and the buildings blurred around her as she sprinted north through the empty streets of a town that was tearing itself apart behind her.
"MAI, GET BACK HERE! THAT IS AN ORDER!"
"THE MISSION ALWAYS COMES FIRST SENSEI, DON'T YOU REMEMBER?!" Mai screamed back.
That was a lesson taught to every Sand child in the Academy.
Mai turned a corner and his voice was gone.
The sounds of the battle faded as she ran. Explosions became thuds. Screaming became murmur. The smell of smoke thinned. By the time she crossed into the riverside district, the fighting was a distant roar at her back and the streets ahead were silent.
The broker was two blocks ahead, still moving north. The two shinobi near him had shifted, closing in, flanking his position more tightly now that they were away from the chaos.
Mai adjusted her course, cutting through an alley to close the angle. Her breathing was eager. Her fists were wrapped. Her glasses showed her everything.
The broker turned onto the riverside road. The two shinobi converged on his position from both sides. They stopped moving.
They were waiting.
Mai rounded the last corner and saw them. The broker, a man of average height in nondescript clothes, standing on the riverbank. And the two shinobi, flanking him, their hands on their weapons, their eyes on the street Mai was running down.
They'd seen her coming.
She skidded to a stop twenty meters from them. The riverside road was wide and empty. The river churned behind the broker, grey-green water rushing between stone banks. No civilians. No witnesses. No team.
Just Mai.
She looked at the broker. She looked at the two shinobi flanking him. She looked at the road behind them, where three more signatures were approaching fast, converging from the buildings to the north.
Five shinobi total. Arriving from different positions. Converging on the broker's location.
Not chasing him.
Meeting him.
Mai's grin spread across her face.
"Ah," she realized. "You bastards tricked everyone."