Kushina straightened Obito's collar with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done it many times and would do it many more.
"You follow Minato-sensei's lead," she said. "Stay close. Let him protect you."
"Sister Kushina," Obito said, with the specific complaint of someone who wanted to be taken seriously and was being treated like a child, "this isn't our first long mission. We've done this. When I come back, I'll be the hero of this whole operation."
"Come back in one piece first," Kushina said, and rubbed his hair.
Minato, standing nearby with the patient expression of a man who had long since stopped trying to hurry this part, said, "We need to move. I'll look after them."
Kushina released Obito and looked at her husband for a moment. "If it gets dangerous—"
"I'm a shinobi," Obito said, chin up. "I can't be cowardly about it."
"Come back and I'll make you something good," she said, and she was smiling when she said it, which was the way Kushina communicated most things that actually mattered.
They gathered at the village gate shortly after. The four of them, moving together in the way of people who had been a unit long enough that the coordination was automatic, disappeared down the road toward Kannabi Bridge.
The capital of the Land of Earth — Daimyo City, as every major country's capital was called, with only the country name to distinguish them — was, against all expectations, thriving.
The front lines were active. The Hidden Rock Village was engaged across multiple theaters. Supply caravans moved through the wide main streets in both directions, horse-drawn carts loaded to their frames, the drivers moving with the brisk certainty of people who knew their routes and their deadlines. The war had not reached this city. The war had, if anything, made this city considerably wealthier. Someone was profiting from every caravan dispatched, every supply contract honored, every piece of military logistics that needed civilian infrastructure to function.
The wealthy merchants and their clients moved through the markets with the contentment of people for whom the distant noise of conflict was, at most, a backdrop for business.
Three figures moved through the main street among them.
Finn had changed his appearance since the Land of Birds, in the incremental way that someone accumulates changes over months of not thinking about consistency. He had not cut his hair since arriving in this world, and the medium-short style he'd had at the start had grown into something longer that he'd resolved by braiding a small section at the back — practical rather than intentional, which gave it the kind of casual elegance that intentional styling rarely managed. He wore a loose silver-gray hakama, the fabric embroidered at the chest with a tiger descending a mountain; the embroidery read like a landscape painting from a distance and like a threat up close. Shindokutō hung at his waist. The pipe between his fingers had ivory fittings set with jade, and it was the kind of object that cost more than most people in this city made in a year.
From a suitable distance, he looked like a young noble who had somewhere important to be.
Kakuzu and Sasori walked behind him in their usual configurations — Sasori still in Hiruko's armored shell, Kakuzu in his dark wrappings — neither of them having ever displayed the smallest interest in appearance for its own sake, which was almost funny given that Sasori called himself an artist. They read as retainers. The overall picture was coherent.
"Hard to believe there's a war happening," Finn said, watching a cart loaded with bundled provisions roll past. The pipe smoke was local blend, acceptable if not excellent.
"The people who profit from the war live here," Kakuzu said. "The people who die in it don't. This is normal."
Sasori had been looking in the direction of the daimyo's compound since they entered the street. The structure was visible above the surrounding buildings — a walled enclosure, essentially a city within the city, with samurai rotating through their patrol routes at regular intervals and a separate contingent of shinobi wearing Earth Country insignia coming and going through the main gate. The daimyo's private forces. Competent, probably. Numerous, certainly.
"Do we go in quiet or loud?" Sasori asked.
"Can we at least walk around for a day first?" Finn said. "Once we finish this job, my face goes on wanted posters at every city gate between here and the ocean. I'd like to enjoy the capital while I still can."
A pause.
"Reasonable," Kakuzu said. Then: "In that case, I'm going to the gambling district."
Finn looked at him.
"Not to gamble," Kakuzu said, reading the expression correctly. "I have two outstanding loans with a dealer who operates there. High-interest. I need to collect before we make ourselves unwelcome." He was already orienting toward the southeast quarter with the familiarity of someone who had walked these streets before. "Three days, then we regroup."
He left without waiting for a response.
Finn watched him go. High-interest loans to a gambling house dealer. Of course. Kakuzu lending money at usurious rates to someone who was himself in the business of extracting money from people with poor judgment about risk — there was something elegant about that, in a specific and slightly predatory way.
"And you?" Finn asked Sasori.
"The market," Sasori said. "Capital city markets stock materials you can't find in the dark world. I want to look." He turned without further ceremony and disappeared into the crowd, Hiruko's armored bulk somehow moving through the press of people without incident.
Finn stood alone on the street with his pipe and the ambient noise of a prosperous wartime capital going about its business around him.
He thought about how long it had been since he'd had any company beyond Kakuzu, Sasori, and Orochimaru. More than a year. The pirate world felt, in the way that things do when enough time passes, like something that had happened to someone else — clear in detail but remote in emotional weight. Back there, he'd had Hina, Gion, Stussy. People whose specific presence made the world a more interesting place to occupy.
Here, he had an immortal miser and a puppet who cooked without being able to eat.
He was a person with normal human needs, and he was in the most prosperous city in the Land of Earth, and he had exactly three days before he needed to assassinate a daimyo and make himself permanently unwelcome in establishments like this one.
He spotted a likely candidate within a minute: a middle-aged man with the broad, comfortable build of someone who had eaten well for years, jade pendant at his waist, clearly local, clearly familiar with the city. Finn reached out and caught his arm.
The man turned with the mild irritation of someone interrupted, which downgraded slightly when he took in Finn's outfit. Money recognized money.
"I just arrived from the Land of Fire," Finn said pleasantly. "First time here. Point me toward the interesting parts of the city."
As he spoke, he pressed a white jade ring into the man's palm. Not money — money was crass. A small object of obvious quality, offered as one person of taste to another. The man's fingers closed around it automatically, and his expression reorganized from interrupted to hospitable.
"Ha! We in the Land of Earth know how to treat guests." He turned the ring once between his fingers, assessing it without appearing to, and found the assessment satisfactory. "What kind of interesting are we talking about, brother?"
Finn smiled with the specific quality of a man who didn't need to say anything further.
The man's eyebrows went up, and then he smirked. "You asked the right person. Most visitors never find their way there on their own." He lowered his voice slightly. "Head southeast, cross two streets. You'll pass the cloth market. Don't go to Shirouzuchi — that's for tourists. Kaseigai is where the real quality is. Talented women, proper entertainment, the kind of place where you get what you pay for and the price is worth it."
He paused, then added, with the reflective air of a man reviewing his recent social calendar: "A courtesan came up from the Land of Water a few days ago. Brilliant, they say — only performs, doesn't take other arrangements. Very selective about who she even speaks with. Word is she's looking for a man worth talking to." He patted his chest. "Not my type of thing. I never had the schooling for conversation at that level."
Finn looked at him with slightly increased respect. It was a rare quality, in men of his evident station, to admit a limitation with that kind of straightforwardness.
"I have some education," Finn said. "I might try my luck."
"Then go, brother! If it works out, you owe me a story." The man was already turning to walk alongside him. "I haven't been in months myself, but since you brought it up — might as well."
They walked together through the afternoon streets, the man offering a running commentary on the establishments they passed, the reputations of various performers, the particular character of the Kaseigai management. He knew the city the way a person knows a place they've returned to often enough that the knowledge is in the feet rather than the memory.
The flower district began where the character of the street changed. The buildings were older and better maintained than the surrounding blocks, their wooden facades painted in colors that caught the last of the afternoon light. Lanterns were being lit in the doorways as dusk came on — paper screens in yellow and red, throwing warm patterns onto the street stones. The sound of instruments came from upper windows, different tunes layering over each other in a way that somehow didn't cancel out but instead produced something like atmosphere. The smell was layered: incense over perfume over wood smoke over something warm and cooking from kitchens in the back of each building.
Women leaned from open second-floor windows in the cooling air, watching the street with the specific professional attention of people who are very good at reading who has money and who intends to spend it.
Finn stopped in the entrance to the district and took it in for a moment.
It was, objectively, a great deal of effort arranged to produce a particular effect. Someone had given significant thought to the lighting, the sound, the arrangement of the buildings, the management of the approach. As aesthetics went, it was sincere if not especially subtle.
He followed his guide into Kaseigai, the pipe smoke trailing behind him in the evening air.