Being a ninja used to be a prestigious occupation. Parents told children bedtime stories of the exploits of great ninja, and families who discovered that their children had potential were often more than happy to send them to ninja villages and academies to learn the trade.

The Third Ninja War changed that attitude. For the first time in living memory, four of the five great elemental nations engaged in all-out war, involving eighteen smaller nations and all of their respective ninja villages. Military analysts worried that it was only a matter of time before Jinchuuriki were deployed in a real capacity instead of in small, posturing skirmishes, and they were right.

After two years of deadlock, the Land of Earth finally deployed their Jinchuuriki, and the lands of Fire and Lightning quickly followed. Never before had a war destroyed so much so quickly. Over ninety percent of the war's casualties occurred in those last six weeks; hundreds of thousands perished.

The incredible civilian casualties in the Land of Earth and the Land of Wind during those final offensives were the last straw; the public was horrified.

—Takumi Kichirou, "The History of Ninja, 3rd Edition," excerpt.

The definition of a bad man is often simply that he is the enemy.

I wet the tip of my brush in a bottle of chakra ink and began to draw the last part of the seal while channeling a steady flow of chakra. The scroll I was working on was the latest of a row of small scrolls lying bundled in front of me. The soft patter of raindrops on my window kept me company through the evening hours after yet another exhausting day of D-ranks followed by hours of grueling training with Kakashi.

Learning to mold elemental chakra was proving difficult. Kakashi said I was progressing even faster than he'd expected, but progress was in the eye of the beholder. I could barely form earth chakra, let alone control it with any precision, and I was getting increasingly frustrated at my lack of concrete progress. My initial enthusiasm had long since faded as the hours of exhausting, mind-numbing practice dragged on.

Normally I didn't even have to think about controlling my chakra, but molding elemental chakra felt deeply uncomfortable and alien—the chakra was sluggish. I imagined it was similar to the experience of re-learning to use an injured limb. At least my chakra reserves seemed to be growing, if slowly—the fact that they were doing so at all only underscored the effort involved in learning to manipulate elemental chakra.

The past few weeks had been tiring. I'd had little time to relax; sitting here and working was as close as I got. I spent every minute of my time solving some problem or other—either as part of training, as part of preparing myself for the battle with Izanami—which I regretted more and more every day—or as part of a mission. Despite their reputation, D-ranks could actually be challenging at times. The mission classification system denoted the level of danger, not difficulty, after all, and Kakashi always seemed to pick the hardest he could find.

Someone knocked on my door.

"Come in," I called, and heard them enter.

"Hey, Sakura."

I smiled and looked up. "Hey, Dad."

He smiled back, waved his hand in a loose greeting, then ran it through his wet hair. "It's raining cats and dogs out there!"

"I like it," I shrugged, a smile tugging at my lips, then turned my attention back to my work.

He sat on the edge of my bed, clasped his hands and looked at the row of cardboard boxes sitting next to the wall. "So what are you doing?" he asked, his tone good-humored. "Clearing house?"

I looked at the boxes. There were six of them, containing everything I could think to hide: my few embarrassing attempts at keeping a diary, my first forays into seals as I took the Seal Theory elective and got hooked—homework and speculation (most of which made me squirm to read today), and finally my more organized bundles of notes and test seals and outlines and block-outs full of squiggles and arrows and margin notes. It was amazing how many things you could accumulate over fifteen years of life.

I had roughly sorted everything by date and category. It had taken most of the evening, but I had decided it was well worth it. Even with my time as limited as it was, I just knew I would regret it later if I didn't impose some order now.

"I'm taking a break from training," I said.

"This is a break?" he asked.

"This is a lot easier than the other things I've been working on—here I've already done all the thinking."

He raised an eyebrow at me. "Your idea of taking a break is working on the least insanely complex problem you've got?"

"In this case, yes."

A moment of silence passed before he cleared his throat. "No, seriously, what are you doing?"

"I'm hiding my stuff away. Watch."

I quickly drew the last part of the seal, blew on it for a second to make sure the ink was dry, and placed a box square on the seal. I put my hands down on either side of it, set my fingers on different points on the seal, and channeled chakra through in a specific pattern. Store.

A good deal of my chakra poured into the seal and the box disappeared with a small pop. A few additional symbols, called storage symbols, drew themselves around the seal's boundary, rendering it in an inert storage state until the release chakra pattern was given.

My dad jumped. "It disappeared!" he exclaimed, staring at the scroll. "It was supposed to disappear, right?"

I rolled my eyes. "Of course it was supposed to disappear. That's a storage seal. Basically, it vanishes stuff, then brings it back when you want it."

"And why would you vanish your stuff?"

"So people can't look at my notes and figure out how some of the things I'm doing work."

He peered down at the remaining boxes, furrowing his brows. "People would really steal your old homework?"

I shrugged. "I'm just being careful…"

"You ninja," he muttered, shaking his head.

I studied the storage symbols. Nobody concretely knew what they were, only that they drew themselves in the ink which the rest of the seal was drawn in, and that they seemed to be unique to every storage seal. There was a way you made storage seals, a combination of symbols and connections that was well-known and had few variations, having been perfected long ago, and the storage symbols were simply an integral part of how that worked. Of course, you could always tack on extra bits and pieces, or integrate the seal into a larger array, but the core always followed the same pattern.

Right now, I didn't care what the extra symbols were; I just cared about the fact that they could be broken and repaired, something I'd confirmed with repeated tests. I selected three small, simple parts, put my fingers on them to feel them out, then turned to an open notebook, and wrote down how to reproduce them.

"What are you doing now?" my dad asked.

"Ruining it."

With my finger, I removed the minute traces of chakra in the ink, took another brush, and drew over the entire boundary of storage symbols in normal black ink, so nobody could see their pattern and guess which parts had been ruined by feeling for symbols without chakra. In the margin, I marked the seal as containing box number seven and put that down in the notebook as well.

I leaned back in my chair with satisfaction and gestured at the seal. "There, it's ruined."

My dad stared at it dubiously. "I don't get it."

"It's ruined, and"—I tapped the notebook—"I'm the only person who can repair it. So nobody but me can open it."

After three weeks of on-off musing, this was the best solution I had come up with to secure my notes.

The scheme had its flaws, of course. If I Iost a scroll, I lost its contents, and if I lost the notebook, I would lose everything. Still, it was an acceptable risk; I was going to keep the scrolls in my room, where they wouldn't be more at risk than my notes had been in the first place, and I would be making at least one copy of the notebook and hiding it away.

It would be cumbersome and slow to access my notes, and I wasn't sure how sustainable this really was, whether the seals somehow degraded over time with constant breaking and repair. Obviously, I was going to have to make improvements to the method in the future. Still, this was decent enough for a first try. It would do for now, even if it was only a stopgap measure.

I frowned, peering at the seal. "It's weird, though."

My dad blinked to attention. "Uhm?"

"The seal."

He nodded sagely, peering at it, and said, in deadly serious tones: "That it is."

I sighed with exasperation, ignoring him. "I mean, this shouldn't work. But it does, I tested it."

I picked up the scroll and held it in the air. "The weight's not here, of course, so it's not actually in the scroll. But it's like there's nothing inherently it about the storage symbols either, it's not in the symbols even immaterially, since I can just remake them with different ink. So why…"

I set the scroll back down, narrowed my eyes and peered at it, murmuring: "It's almost as if it's not attached to the seal itself. It's just… free-floating. And that means…"

My train of thought was interrupted by a snore. I frowned and looked at my dad; he was leaning off to one side with his eyes closed. He gave another obnoxiously fake snore.

"Dad!" I leaned over to punch him in the shoulder mid-snore, unable to keep myself from grinning despite my frustration—I'd lost the thought, now.

"Ow!" he exclaimed, jumping awake. "I protest my innocence! Violence solves nothing!"

"What are you even doing in here?" I asked. "Shouldn't you—cook, or something? Get in the kitchen."

He winced theatrically. "Ooh, good one. Maybe later, your mom is working late again."

"And I'm trying to!"

He shook his head ruefully. "You're turning into your mother."

"I've always been like this."

"No, you haven't."

"Have so."

We locked gazes for several seconds, until I broke into a helpless smile and looked back down at my desk. "Okay, maybe not."

"Still a little bit left of daddy's girl in there, I see," he said after a small while.

Something in my dad's tone made me frown and look up at him, sitting there in my bed. He was looking at me more seriously, now, the humor for once gone from his face, replaced with a hint of something more melancholy.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I used to think it took forever…" he said quietly. "But I agree now, it's true. Children grow up too quickly. Is it weird, that I already kind of miss you?"

My frown deepened. "I'm right here."

He smiled. "Yeah, but you're not begging me to read you bedtime stories from 'Tales of a Gutsy Ninja' any more, or to tell the exciting story about how the Fourth Hokage, Namikaze Minato, saved Konoha from the nine-tailed beast!" His lips twitched. "You were smitten; didn't want to hear about anything else."

"That was years ago," I said, feeling slightly embarrassed.

"It never occurred to me to be worried that your childhood hero sacrificed himself in order to save Konoha," he said wryly, shaking his head. "Even though it's obvious in retrospect."

I smiled slightly. "Clearly I'll just have to save it without dying. Will that do?"

Dad chuckled. "You'd settle for nothing less, I suppose." His lips turned up in a lopsided smile. "It used to be that I only needed to prevent Mebuki from working herself to death. You were supposed to be my ally, you know, but now you've joined her side!"

"It's not that bad."

"Is too."

I rolled my eyes. "Dad, you're being sentimental. And silly."

"I think I'm entitled to be."

"And speaking of work"—I gestured at the remaining boxes, feeling a little guilty—"I really should get back to it."

My dad put on a face of stern disapproval and pointed a finger at me. "Sakura, as your father, I order you to forget about work and spend some time with me."

My lips twitched, but I kept my expression under control. "You have no power over me." I picked up my brush and unfurled the scroll a little further to continue with the next storage seal.

There was a small pause.

"Sakura, as your father, I beg you to forget about work and spend some time with me. We'll order sushi."

And now he resorted to bribes. I didn't look up. "I swear, you're like a child sometimes."

"Somebody has to be the child in this relationship, or it wouldn't be the same," he said indignantly. "If it's not you any more…"

I rolled my eyes. Sometimes, it occurred to me that I must simply have the weirdest, goofiest dad ever. This was one of those times.

"Sakura," he said firmly when I didn't respond, his tone worried. "You need to relax for a bit. You've got bags under your eyes. You come home every day looking like death warmed over, and I know you don't sleep enough because you sit hunched in here like this far into the night."

"I've got stuff to do," I muttered uncomfortably.

"You're pushing yourself too hard. Just take the rest of the day off, come out and play a few board games with me—you can slaughter me in shogi. We'll order sushi and eat with mom when she comes home, and you can go to bed early. Just tonight. It'll be like old times."

I considered it. It was true; it would have been nice to relax, to take an evening off. But it would also mean that I'd have to do this tomorrow, when I had other plans, which I would then have to push further back, in turn pushing other plans. Or I'd have to drop this and leave all of my notes out in the open.

In the end, it wasn't that difficult a choice. There would always be time for family later, after I'd dealt with everything else on my plate.

"No," I said. "I'm busy."

"I call in your debt to me."

I looked up. "What?"

"I could have chewed you out over not keeping your deal after the graduation ceremony, but I didn't."

My eyes narrowed a little bit and my lips pressed together. I'd apologized for somehow slipping, even if I still had no idea how I'd managed to do it, and nobody had mentioned it for weeks—it was over. I was silent for a few seconds. My gaze dropped before I looked up again, crossed my arms, and glowered at my dad.

"Fine," I said. "Go ahead. Chew me out."

He blinked. "Excuse me?"

"It's faster. Get it over with."

He peered at me. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"I told you I've got stuff to do. We talk every day, but I really need to get this done now, because this is the only time in my schedule to do it. I'm busy."

He stared at me for several seconds, looking genuinely surprised and dismayed. I firmly squashed any sense of guilt. I was around all the time, after all—nothing would change that. I just had so many things to be doing right now, and this wasn't productive.

Then, finally, my father stood up, his face expressionless, and turned away.

"Fine," he said quietly. "I'll call when there's dinner."

He left the room without another word.

I watched him go with a deep frown. His footsteps receded quickly down the hallway, and then there was nothing but the sound of the rain.

After a moment, I shook my head and turned back to my desk. I brushed a lock of hair out of my face, dipped my brush in the bottle of chakra ink, and continued working.

"You've already made a mistake! You're in close combat with an Uchiha!"

Ino lunged at me. I parried and retreated under her onslaught, trying desperately to keep from accidentally looking at her face. It wasn't easy fighting an opponent you couldn't even look at; her blows clipped me several times, kicks glancing off where they should have missed, badly executed parries hurting me more than they did her.

Dammit, this is impossible.

I accepted a direct blow to my shoulder so I could get the time to form a seal and body flicker twenty meters away, to a small glade at the corner of my vision. My hands didn't stop moving—I formed a clone technique mixed with a body flicker, leaving a mirage of me behind looking like she was taking a breather while the real me disappeared into the branches of a tree above. I set my back against the trunk and finished with a transformation technique so it would look like I was just a misshapen but natural part of the tree.

By then, Ino had already moved to attack again, only to disperse my clone into nothingness—I could hear her swear softly. I turned my head to look at her, slowly, so I could keep up the transformation by carefully modifying it on the fly.

"You've gotten faster!" Ino called with a grin, turning slowly in a circle to see if she could spot me in the foliage. "I don't even know how many times you just died there, though."

We were at the Yamanaka clan compound, using their private training area to spar in—it was a small, forested area, maybe a hundred meters a side. I'd persuaded Ino to train here, since it was one of the only places where I was confident Izanami couldn't spy on my preparations for our fight.

Not that what I was doing seemed to be working that well.

"This is kind of cheating, you know!" Ino called. "The Sharingan can see through things like clones and transformations like they were glass."

She was right; I was bending the rules. But I'd gotten what I wanted: a breather, which was something that Ino would never give me while she was pretending to be Izanami. While I was training seriously, she was just having too much fun abusing the handicaps I'd put on myself to simulate a battle with an Uchiha. She took great joy in being as unfair as possible, fighting as dirty as she could. Not that I should actually be complaining; I'd asked her to.

Okay, let's try again.

I fished out a training kunai—a regular one with blunted edges—with a paper tag and a chakra wire attached and set it in my belt. Then I took out another one with one hand and used my other hand to form half of the seal for the body flicker technique, furrowing my brows in concentration. Forming the correct chakra patterns with only half a hand-seal to help was still difficult (and it was much more so to internalize it completely and do it entirely without hands), but I had the time to do it right.

I threw the kunai at Ino just before I body flickered to another nearby tree, then pulled the tagged kunai from my belt and threw it towards the ground at her feet, holding onto the end of the wire. Ino turned and swatted aside the first kunai with one of her own, then started to turn towards my new position. I shut my eyes firmly and sent a chakra pulse down the wire, detonating the tag. There was a flash of light which was just barely perceptible through my eyelids, accompanied by a sharp, hissing sound.

I jumped clear of the tree and opened my eyes again, landing lightly on all fours and looking at Ino. The kunai I'd thrown was lying on the ground a bit away from her, the remnants of the attached tag still smoking a bit, its burnt edges shining with a faint light. Ino had her hands over her eyes, and was stumbling around.

"I'm blind! I'm blind!" she exclaimed. "I, the mighty Izanami, am felled by the cheapest of tactics! A low-born peasant bested me at my own game! My eyes are useless!"

I stared at her. "Overdoing it a little, aren't you?"

She stopped moving, dropped her hands and grinned at me. "Only a little. I actually did look straight at it." She blinked a few times as if to clear something out of her eyes. "But it does pass quickly."

It wouldn't, hopefully, if I actually used a scroll instead of just a single tag. Still, I'd had trouble making sure she looked at it at the right time, and I'd messed up again by getting into close combat with her. She'd been right before; I'd lost that fight many times over by the time I finally 'won'.

I probably had to be more willing to body flicker a lot to stay out of her range. In a real fight, I wouldn't be able to use transformations and clones to hide and regain the initiative, and I'd fallen for that temptation here, which was a mistake. I held back a sigh of frustration—this was a far cry from the kind of plan that I liked. It was too desperate.

"Let's go again," I suggested.

Ino sighed exasperatedly. "Come on! First chance we get to hang out for three weeks and the only thing you want us to do is beat each other up!"

I frowned. "I need to practice this strategy. Test it, refine it, identify its weaknesses and fix or mitigate them, or, failing that, know that it's useless so I can try to think of something different." I crossed my arms and dryly raised an eyebrow. "What else would I do? Just jump in and improvise? That doesn't sound like a recipe for success, particularly against Izanami."

Ino's lips twitched and she shrugged airily in half-agreement. "Relax. It's gonna work. You put those flash tags in a scroll so they're actually strong enough to be useful, even a Sharingan's got to be affected temporarily when it blows. Add in those fire-on-release storage seals full of howler fireworks you mentioned and she'll be blind and deaf. Even Izanami can't fight like that."

"It could work," I said. "Maybe. If I can stay out of close combat, and the scrolls work against a Sharingan, and I've got enough to get her to look straight at one of them. If everything doesn't go right the first time, I'll have tipped my hand and it won't work. I've only got a week left, and it can easily take a day or two to make a scroll of tags. I've only got three of them, and I still need to make those howler seals."

"Why would you ever agree to a duel with Izanami, anyway?" Ino asked, frowning.

"I, uh, kinda lost my temper." I licked my lips and took a deep breath. "She gets to call me a useless weakling if I lose."

Ino smirked. "Oh, that kind of duel. I see. Out of all the dumbest things you've ever done, it must be…" she frowned. "Well, okay… maybe—no… well, at least top ten."

I bit my lip, trying not to smile at the non-sequitur. "Really? That I did?"

She waved a hand dismissively. "Well, I might have been peripherally involved in some of that."

"Some?"

She huffed, her expression amused. "Okay, fine, all of it. So this is the stupidest thing you've ever done on your own."

"Now that, I can agree with."

Ino looked around the small glade, then up at the sun, then walked over to pick up the two kunai I'd thrown at her. "Come on, let's go do something else," she said. "It's getting late and we've been killing each other over and over since lunch. I'm starving."

The price of cooperation, I thought.

"Just… one more go?" I asked. "Please?"

She hesitated, then shot me a dark look. "Fine, one more go. And then we go out and eat and do something fun."

"I had plans for after dinner," I said.

Ino glowered at me. "Oh no you don't. You're not haggling me down to just dinner after half a day spent testing your strategy."

I considered it for a moment. "Okay, but then we go again twice."

"Now you're pushing it."

"Come on. This is important."

Ino frowned thoughtfully for several seconds, before finally nodding and grumbling: "Fine."

"So how the hell are you even pulling an entirely new kind of tag out of your ass the moment you need it?" Ino asked. "I know you spend more time than is healthy buried in your papers and books, and that you're good at it, but really?"

She punctuated the question by picking up a piece of sushi from the large plate between us with her chopsticks, plopping it into her mouth, and leaning back in her chair to stare at me with an expectant expression. We had an isolated table on the balcony of one of the more exclusive restaurants in downtown Konoha. Ino had secured it simply by virtue of mentioning her name and shooting the head waiter a bright, expectant smile.

It wasn't too long ago that lights had started blinking on around the place as the sun set. The restaurant had rows of paper lanterns that hung from wires above and shone down—equipped with the finest electric bulbs money could buy—coloring the streets and walkways beneath us and the leaves above us a pleasantly cozy orange-red. It felt like the entire city was under one big roof, even though the sky was easily visible.

I'd always enjoyed downtown; the oldest parts of Konoha had a charm that you simply didn't get in the outskirts. This was where the trees had had the longest time to grow, where the mix of old, tiered architecture, money, and time had created a bustling hive of restaurants, bars, and shops. Music was beginning to emerge from all kinds of establishments around us, mixing with the sound of the crowds below and the conversations in the restaurant to form a background murmur that felt oddly lifelike, as if the city itself was alive around us.

"It's not a new kind of tag," I said. "They're an old thing; we still use them for some signal flares, I think. It's basically a juiced up version of the seals we sometimes use for light in lamps, they've just never been powerful enough to be useful in combat."

I shrugged, dipped a piece of sushi into a mix of soy sauce and wasabi, plopped it into my mouth, and immediately picked out another piece with my chopsticks. No sense wasting the opportunity now that it was here—Ino was paying. There was no way I could ever afford a restaurant of this pedigree.

"They weren't powerful enough until now, that is," Ino said.

I thought back to Kakashi's revelation that, at the very least, Konoha's ANBU had already figured out how to time rolls of explosive tags for exactly simultaneous detonations, and kept a frown from crossing my face.

"Yeah…" I said. "Until now." I took another bite of sushi and continued with my mouth still half-full. "I tested a scroll, once, to see if the design worked with the flash tags. It was, uh… pretty wild. And I think I can still improve the design, actually. I've got a few ideas…"

I washed the food down with a sip of sumptuous tea, and sat back with a contented sigh, perusing the plate for what to pick next.

Ino picked up another piece herself, then pointed it at me accusingly, chunks of rice falling off it onto the table. "You know, that's so typically… you."

I perked up a bit. "What?"

"It's like this neurosis you have. Life gives you a wall, you'll climb it, mine it, sap it, punch it, kick it, whatever works"—she grinned—"hell, if it came down to it, you'd be slamming your head into it until it broke or you did. And, if by the end there's only half a brick left of the poor wall, you're still not satisfied." She waved the piece of sushi at me once more, then wolfed it down. "I mean, if this is your response to someone pissing you off now, I shudder to think what it's going to be in a few years. I'm glad I'm on your good side."

I frowned. "Now you're just exaggerating. I think you'd put up a better fight against Izanami than I could. You've got your clan techniques to pull from and a lot more chakra and training than I do."

Ino's clan, the Yamanaka, specialized in mind techniques. Mind control, mind reading, and there were whispers of memory manipulation too, though I didn't know how true that was. Most of them tended to end up with the Interrogation Section, headed by Ino's father. He was a nice man, but just the thought of anyone messing around in my mind or using my body, however temporarily, was enough to send a shiver down my spine.

Ino looked speculative for a moment. "Maybe I could put up a fight, but I don't think I'd have a real chance of winning, even if the fight might look better. With a Sharingan, she would probably break my body control, even if I managed to hit her with it."

I ate a piece of sushi and chewed it thoughtfully.

"How were the C-ranks, anyway?" I asked. Ino had mentioned that her sensei, Sarutobi Asuma, had already taken their team on a few C-ranks.

Ino shrugged. "Fine. Pretty uneventful, really—the only one worth mentioning is an escort mission we did to the Land of Waves, but nothing happened, even though our client was really twitchy. It was pretty boring, actually. The D-ranks here in town can be a lot more fun." She smirked at me. "Helping the police, getting black eyes, you know…"

How did she even hear about that?

"Hm," I grunted, not responding to her jab, and took a sip of tea. "Maybe you just got lucky."

She smiled. "You'd say that."

I shrugged, then leaned back in my chair and looked up at the sky. There would have been stars peeking down through the leaves, if there wasn't so much light in Konoha.

"What do you want to do, after we've eaten?" I asked.

"I don't know," Ino said. "You have any ideas?"

"We could go to the top of the Hokage monument. It's been ages since I was up there."

"What would we even do up there?" Ino asked. I smiled; I could almost hear her wrinkling her nose at the idea.

"I don't know. Just… relax. Talk, whatever."

"That sounds very… dull."

I suppressed a small smile. "I guess I'm in a dull mood."

"I thought we could go to a bar or something. Get a drink." Ino's tone turned impish. "Maybe even meet a few guys."

I groaned. "Not again…" I let my head fall down to look at her. "Last time was bad enough, thank you."

"You hardly got drunk!" Ino protested. "You just went home when we were finally getting started for real!"

"I—wait, what do you mean?"

Ino smirked. "You don't remember? You said you'd promised your dad that you'd be home early. Honestly, he's nice, but he's such a mother hen. He reminds me of my mother."

I blinked as what she'd just said registered, and sat up a little straighter. "No. I don't remember. I had a hell of a hangover."

Ino looked baffled for a moment, before her expression switched over to offended. "You mean to say that you went to some other party, without me? And got so piss drunk you can't even remember it?"

"I…" my voice trailed off, and I stared at her, a shiver running down my spine. "When did I leave?"

"Around… one?"

And I came home around four.

I froze as the implications of that raced through my head, taking the form of a tiny, accusing voice. Wasn't it just a little odd? That you would have gotten so drunk? And that you came home so late when you recall actually meaning what you'd promised dad…

Yes. That was odd. It had seemed unlike me, and it had bugged me a bit, but I'd just shrugged and moved on instead of noticing what had bothered me and actually thinking about it.

But then what—

And the rest clicked into place.

It did seem odd, now that I thought about it, that Kakashi messed up all of my notes so badly, when he was only looking for the ones on my scrolls, and those were right on the desk. Was I sure that it hadn't been messed up before Kakashi looked around?

No, I had to admit to myself. No, I wasn't sure. I had to admit the possibility…

"Sakura?" Ino asked, when I didn't answer her. "You okay?"

I looked up at her, feeling dazed, and became aware that my mouth was hanging open. I promptly shut it.

"Uh, yeah…" I said, trying to gather my mind to myself. "I… guess that's what happened. Sorry."

She stared at me for several seconds before she finally smirked and said, "I never knew you had it in you."

"Neither did I," I responded absentmindedly, looking down at the table.

Should I tell her? I didn't know; Ino would raise hell, and I didn't even know whether there was a hell to raise. I could just be paranoid; I could be wrong. And how embarrassing would it be if it turned out that I'd really just stumbled into another party on the way home, seen someone I knew, some old acquaintance, and gone over to talk, and 'just one more drink' had turned into many…

Maybe that had been the case.

I practically felt my heart stop when I realized that… that maybe I should check whether I'd… I'd been…

No. Just no. I was sore in a lot of places, but not like that. Not like that.

"You look a little weird, Sakura," Ino said. "You're sure you're okay?"

"I, uh…" I began, then stopped. "Yeah, I was just thinking about the fight with Izanami again. It kind of struck me how hopeless it feels."

Ino looked skeptical. "It's not like you to worry this much about something. Even that kind of something."

I licked my lips, trying to shift tracks and get my head around the topic at hand quickly. "It's, uh… it's like, she just gets to me, you know? She's born with fancy eyes from her bloodline, has a noble lineage, good chakra, she's been destined for greatness practically from birth—"

Ino arched an eyebrow. "You do know you basically just described me, right?"

I paused. "Well… yes, but unlike Izanami, you're not a bitch about it. In fact, you're actually pretty cool."

That brought an amused smile to her lips. "Thanks. Flatterer."

There was a sudden rustle from a tree just off the balcony. I was on my feet an instant before Ino, a kunai drawn, peering into the branches to see if I could spot what had caused the disturbance. I heard a few exclamations behind me—apparently someone else had had a similar reaction inside the restaurant.

"Chill, it's just me," a voice called. A branch shivered slightly, leaves rustling, and Naruto poked his head out through an opening.

My mouth opened and closed a few times, until I finally managed to hiss: "What the hell are you doing here, and why the hell can't you people just use the bloody doors?"

Naruto blinked at my vehement tone, but quickly recovered. "I kinda tried, but the waiters wouldn't let me in. Apparently I can't just waltz into fancy restaurants 'cause of noble blood, or something." He pulled on his shoulders, his lips turning up a bit. "Gits."

"How did you even find me?"

"I'm… a creepy stalker?"

I suppressed a flinch. Behind me, Ino choked back a snort of laughter.

"Naruto…" I said warningly.

His face dropped a bit. "Relax, sheesh, what's up with you tonight?" He scratched the back of his head, messing up his blond hair even more than it already was. "Well, Kakashi said I should go fetch you, so I went to your place, then to Ino's place, and then here."

"Oh," I said tonelessly as I absorbed that, then furrowed my brows and peered at him. "Why?"

"We've got a mission."

"Now? We're seriously doing a D-rank now?"

Naruto pursed his lips and scratched his ear. "I… don't think it's a D-rank, and I'm not sure Kakashi actually picked it either. My guess is, this is coming down from further up."

"Oh." My gaze flickered aside at Ino, who was looking as surprised as I felt. "What are we doing?"

"We're going to the Fire Court."

I blinked. "The capital?"

"Yeah." Naruto grinned. "We have to save a princess."

CHAPTER END

Anything that is done with chakra can be reduced to two simple concepts: information and cost. Information describes the action which is wanted, and the cost is the amount of chakra required to perform that action. Information is in this case analogous to complexity: the more complex or specific an action you wish to perform and the more control you wish to exert, the more information is needed to define it.

However, the measure of a technique's complexity is anything but straightforward. Take the simplest of techniques, the body flicker technique, which requires only one hand-seal and a certain state of mind—an awareness of location and destination. This seems simple, yet the technique both manipulates momentum and stabilizes the air around the moving user so as not to cause injury or noise from the speed, taking a function of the horizontal distance and height traveled in chakra cost.

This complexity is clearly not in the state of mind—no user thinks of moving the air around him when he body flickers. Therefore it must be in the hand-seal which is used to perform the technique. We call the complexity inherent in the hand-seals the fundamental complexity of the technique, and the complexity defined by the user the imparted complexity of the technique.

But this raises the question: where does this fundamental complexity come from?

The only true answer is that we do not know. This enormous hidden complexity, this "language", is not something that has been created; it is something that has been discovered over time, and it seems inherent in the way things fundamentally work. The discovery of more symbols only increases knowledge, not understanding.

Written seals follow the exact same principles, except that they almost completely lack imparted complexity. Only fundamental complexity can be used to define the action of a seal. This strictly limits their uses, but there is also an advantage: a written seal can contain more fundamental complexity than any technique performed with hand-seals. A person can only form so many hand-seals—a written seal can consist of thousands of symbols.

Even a small seal can contain much fundamental complexity due to the vast number of symbols available: there are hundreds of known written symbols, and while they can generally be categorized, and visually similar symbols are more likely to share traits, each has its own unique meaning, its own specific function to perform. It is commonly agreed that each symbol is irreducible: it cannot be reduced to any smaller parts and still make sense.

I believe that there are thousands of such symbols which can be discovered if we derive the patterns that exist and extrapolate further. Right now we are simply fumbling in the dark, skirting the edges of a puzzle we do not understand.

—Namikaze Minato, "On Seals" unfinished draft, excerpt of introduction—classified level two by order of the Konoha Ninja Administration

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