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The air inside the cavernous warehouse was three degrees colder than the night air. As Kameko stepped through the heavy sliding doors, the sheer density of over a hundred shinobi fizzled the yawn she was trying to stifle.
"Whoa…"
The last time she had been in the presence of this many shinobi was at the Steam-Frost war.
"Feels like war, doesn't it?"
An arm wrapped around her shoulder. She frowned until she saw Fuma Arisu standing beside her.
"I didn't know the Police Force was involved in this mission," Kameko said.
"They were looking for people, so I volunteered," Arisu said.
Before them lay a vast floor, a sea of dull green jackets. Leaf shinobi were being grouped into clusters, wooden crates of weapons and supplies were being brought down by cranes from tall warehouse shelves, and a projector was throwing an image of the information on a big white sheet hung on the innermost walls.
"This is big, but I don't think it's 'war' big," Kameko said. A hundred was a big number, but that was nothing even for the smallest war activities. However, a hundred people under the same roof, all having been summoned for the same mission, was indeed war-like.
"This is just one of the many marshalling areas," Arisu said.
"How do you know that?"
"I'm in the Police Force. We hear things," she winked.
They spotted a person who seemed to know what was happening and moved towards the armoury station, where a logistics officer barked without looking up at them.
"Names and registration numbers?"
They gave him the information, and he shuffled through the stack of lists on his clipboard before telling them their assignments.
"You're both on the same team," he said and then pointed to the armoury station behind him. "Collect your supplies and head towards the space reserved for Team 14. You'll be joined by your chūnin team leader in due time."
They looked at each other before heading towards the armoury station, where a heavy wooden crate was slid towards them. Inside was Leaf's standard loadout, provided to general assault-type shinobi. Both of them added the equipment to the personal, specialised gear they had brought with them from home.
"I still don't get how you use something so big," Kameko said, eyeing the ginormous collapsible shuriken she had brought as part of her kit. If she knew her friend, Arisu probably had more sealed in a scroll somewhere on her body.
"I don't see why more people don't."
Kameko shook her head and then eyed the whetstone at the edge of the armoury station, but then caught the sight of a couple of Aburame silently checking their hive-jars with the insects skittering around inside. Their haunting drone made her shiver inside.
"Who else is going to be here?" Arisu asked.
"At least a couple more, I guess," Kameko said, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. "Let's go."
———
.
"Room two, please."
Momoe nodded to the kunoichi and walked down the hallway of a building she didn't know existed until half an hour ago, and entered the room marked with a number two plaque. It was silent inside, and everyone in the room turned to look at her as she entered the room.
Just from the first glance, she recognised everyone she saw and then many more as she was walking down the channel between two grids of chairs. One thing common to everyone was that they were all chūnin.
It was a chūnin-only meeting.
She found an empty seat near the back. As she sat down, a man rolled in a projector on a trolley along with a briefcase of slides that he stood by as though guarding them. Just from looking around the room, it had to be serious, or else there wouldn't be twenty-five chūnin gathered in the room. And there were more rooms in the building, and she guessed all of them had a similar demographic in them.
"Hey, they called us pretty late at night. You got any info?" Momoe asked her neighbour.
The purple-haired kunoichi beside her was leaning on the back legs of her chair and had her feet on the chair in front of her. More strangely, she had a sleep eye mask and what seemed like a lollipop stick sticking out from between her slightly open lips. While everyone in the room was serious, reflecting the atmosphere, she was the only one who seemed not to fit the vibe.
"Huh? No idea," she said, shifting her lollipop until it bulged her cheek.
"Oh…"
"You got any?"
"Unfortunately, no."
The woman took out a lollipop from her pocket and held it out to her. "Want one?"
"…Thank you?" she said, taking the lollipop. "I'm Okubo Momoe."
The woman pulled the mask off one of her eyes. "Mitarashi Anko. Nice to meet you… Do you have any guesses?"
"They're making a big deal out of it. With this many chūnin in the building, I'm assuming it's a matter of national security or at least a threat to the village. But there's this secrecy around it, so I'd say it's not an attack from our side."
"What does secrecy have to do with that?"
"There's no reliable way to hide this big force," Momoe assumed. If there were this many chūnin, then jōnin would be involved, and many more genin. "If we mobilise in large numbers, the news is going to go to every other village, and they'd be ready before we even get there."
Every village had foreign spies that relayed information back home.
"Really? I think there are a couple of ways to get by undetected."
"It's definitely possible, but I don't think that's it," Momoe nodded.
If they took their time, it would be possible to remain undetected long enough to gain advantage, but while she was coming down the building from her home, she had seen a lot of shinobi with backpacks and satchels out there—seeing people out after midnight was by no means strange, but seeing shinobi in gear with baggage wasn't normal. That wasn't trying to hide anything.
"Makes sense," said Anko.
There was a rush of noise in the room before it immediately quieted down as a masked ANBU-nin walked into the room with a couple of regular shinobi walking behind him and locked the door. He had a mask that had a deer motif on it and a head of black hair. He walked to the podium at the front of the room before facing the crowd.
"I'm the ANBU Commander…"
Which meant he was a jōnin and the most important ANBU there was. Everyone immediately stood up except Anko, who had to get her feet down, and by the time she did that, the jōnin had already told them to sit down, and so she didn't bother to stand up. At least her chair was now standing on all its legs, and she had pulled her eye mask to her forehead.
"… I'll be giving you an initial briefing for the mission you have been called here for." The ANBU captain's voice was stern with a tone of authority that anyone could tell demanded their full attention.
The man who had rolled in the projector placed a slide into it, which was then reflected on the screen in the front.
Momoe recognised the shape of her country's northern border. A place relatively near the border of the Land of Fire, shared with the Land of Rapids, the home to the Hidden Waterfall, was marked on the map with a red dot.
"The location marked on this map here is our target. This is the current location of the traitor Shimura Danzo."
Those words caused a commotion in the room. Someone even stood up in shock, and Momoe recognised him as an Uchiha. Anko even leaned forward in her chair, and the lazy look in her eyes changed as she intently stared at Danzo's face that appeared on the second slide.
He was currently Hidden Leaf's public enemy number one. The former Shimura clan head, once a candidate for the position of the Hokage and among the most decorated Leaf shinobi, had been an adviser to the Third Hokage for as long as he had been in office. There was a lot of anger from the general shinobi against the man, especially the shinobi with a civilian background—which was the majority of the Leaf shinobi population—who thought of him as the clan shinobi who took advantage of the Hidden Leaf with their influence.
"Danzo is the founder and leader of the now rogue ROOT, a former independent department of ANBU. I expect all of you to know the basics about that situation, so that I won't elaborate about it here. Still, we have managed to locate ROOT's main base of operation and are going to strike it before noon tomorrow—well, today, it's past midnight, the day changed," said the commander, his strict voice a match with the atmosphere in the room.
"It's going to be a full-scale, direct assault," he continued. "There are over two hundred chūnin reserved for this operation, and you're among them. All of you'll be led by a jonin. Those details will be shared later.
"Coming to your duties. Of the participating chūnin, only half will lead five-man genin squads—that's you. Everyone in this room is going to be leading their own team. We're counting on you to keep your teams safe and be the lifeblood of this operation."
.
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