The village of Sugi was not the kind of place scholars would write about.
It sat at the edge of the grove that gave it its name, a loose collection of forty or fifty buildings that had never quite decided whether they were a real village or simply a campsite that had stayed too long. The buildings were timber-framed and weathered to the same silvery-grey as driftwood. Most of them leaned a little in one direction or another. The main road through the village was packed dirt, and it was clear that the packed dirt had seen better days before the rains earlier that season. A few children peered out from doorways as Team 3 walked through. They did not wave.
It was the kind of place where every family ate what the forest gave them, and what the forest gave them depended entirely on the forest staying the way it was supposed to be.
The man who had come to Konoha to hire them was named Heiichi, and he was waiting for them at the edge of town beside an enormous barrel that a pair of younger men were struggling to hold upright. He was a short man somewhere in his late forties, with the deep lines in his face that came from too many seasons spent outside and not enough seasons spent eating properly. He wore a woodcutter's vest and a look of exhausted relief when he saw Guy-sensei cresting the hill.
"You came," he said.
"We would never abandon someone who needed us!" Guy declared, planting his fists on his hips. "The shinobi of Konoha has answered your call! You have our full assistance!"
Heiichi looked at the three genin standing behind the green-clad jonin with an expression that was not quite confidence but was working hard to get there.
"These are your students?"
"Some of the best young genin in Konoha," Guy said, and meant every word.
Heiichi studied them a moment longer, then exhaled slowly through his nose. He had probably hoped for an additional jonin. But an additional jonin cost more than Sugi Village had, and they both knew it.
"The grove runs half a day's walk into the hills," he said, turning toward the trees. "We used to sell wood from the outer ring and hunt small game through the middle, and there were berries and roots that the women gathered in the eastern sections. Now there's nothing. The snakes ate everything they could reach and scared off the rest." He glanced back at them. "We sent three of our own men in to try to move some of them last month."
A pause. He did not continue that sentence.
"We understand," Guy said, quietly, without the booming enthusiasm.
"There's around sixty of them in the grove, we think. Maybe more. Hard to know since they move around at night." Heiichi rubbed the back of his neck. "If we don't have the grove back before winter, a lot of families go hungry."
Lee listened to this with a look of absolute earnestness on his face, like someone had just assigned him the most important task in the world. Which, from his perspective, they probably had. He turned to look at the trees rising behind Sugi Village, already eager.
Neji had hoped for another combat mission like the one with the bandits. He wanted to make up for his initial hesitation in executing the bandits. But, a C-rank mission was a C-rank. It would look good on his shinobi record regardless of whether he wanted to be here or not.
Tenten had her arms crossed. She had read everything she could find about Kagekujira pythons the night before the mission. She knew their temperature habits, their preferred resting spots, the narrow band of humidity in which they were most active, the way their tracks appeared in soft earth. She had also read about three of their close relatives, just in case the village had misidentified the species. She had come prepared.
"How many barrels did you bring?" she asked.
"Five," Heiichi said.
"We'll need more," she said. "At least three or four more. They're too heavy individually to transport in large numbers. You'll want to move them in groups of ten at most."
Heiichi looked at the little girl. "I can have more ready by tomorrow morning."
"Good," Tenten said, and that was that.
...
The grove swallowed them whole.
The light changed the moment they passed beneath the first serious line of trees, dropping from the warm gold of open sky to something dimmer and older. The boughs pressed together overhead into a thick weave of branches and leaves that let through only scattered coins of light, each one shifting slowly as the wind moved through the upper levels. Somewhere above all of that, the sky was blue and generous. Down here, it was a different world.
The forest floor was covered in a deep carpet of old leaves, wet from recent rain and compacted into something almost spongy underfoot. The smell was rich and dark, a mixture of decomposing wood and damp earth and the clean sharp scent of living roots. The kind of smell that made you feel like you were far from any village, far from any person, standing in a place that had been going about its business of growing and dying and growing again for centuries before shinobi existed.
Birds sang somewhere deeper in. Small ones, from the sound of it, the kind that sang because they were alive and did not require an audience.
Lee immediately looked extremely happy to be there.
"What a beautiful place," he said softly, turning in a slow circle to take it in. His voice had dropped naturally, the way voices do in old forests, like the trees themselves discourage shouting.
"Shut it," Neji said, not looking at him. His Byakugan was already reading the grove. The veins around his eyes stood out slightly in the filtered light, a faint bluish cast to his gaze that saw through the undergrowth and the trunks and the dark spaces between roots where things liked to hide. He swept a slow arc of his vision across the ground ahead of them and held up one finger.
"There is one to our left, approximately twenty meters. Coiled at the base of that tree."
Lee turned his head and squinted at the darkness beneath the huge tree's roots. He couldn't see anything at that distance. The trunk was wide and old, its base a tangle of surface roots and shadow.
"Good work," Guy-sensei said. He was carrying the first barrel, holding it easily in both arms. "Lead the way, Neji."
Neji led the way.
...
The first snake was enormous.
It was about three meters long, its scales a mix of deep black and dark grey that had blended it nearly perfectly into the mass of dead leaves and shadow at the tree's base. It lifted its head when they approached, tongue sampling the air in rapid flickers, its recurved teeth visible when it opened its mouth in a display of warning.
Tenten had a net in her hands before the snake fully committed to posturing. She threw it with the same accuracy she applied to everything she threw. The python thrashed against the mesh, powerful body coiling and uncoiling, but the net was designed for this kind of work and it held.
"Excellent catch, Tenten!" Lee said, genuinely impressed.
"I practiced last night," she said, already moving to gather the net closed without letting the snake's teeth reach her fingers.
Lee crouched down to help. The snake immediately turned its attention to him, tongue flickering rapidly. Lee did not flinch. He had been around animals enough in his life to understand that most of them were scared, and scared things needed to be handled calmly.
"Hey," he said, to the snake. "We're not going to hurt you, okay buddy? You just can't stay here."
The snake tried to bite him. Its teeth glanced off the calluses on his forearm without leaving a mark.
"He's very scared," Lee told it, working the net around it with careful hands.
Tenten watched this exchange with the expression of someone trying to decide whether to be exasperated or charmed. She settled on exasperated, because it was safer.
...
By midday, they had found and collected eleven pythons. Neji's Byakugan had been invaluable for this, picking up the snakes' heat signatures and body shapes through undergrowth and root tangles that would have hidden them from ordinary sight for hours. He would stop, point, and name the direction, and the others would go to work.
He did not enjoy touching the snakes. He made this clear not by complaining about it, but by using his Gentle Fist to incapacitate each one with a single two-fingered tap before he moved it, leaving it temporarily still and cooperative while he lifted it clear and carried it to the barrel. It was the most efficient method and also the most dignified, and Neji was of the opinion that dignity mattered.
Lee had no such reservations. Three of the eleven snakes that wound up in the first barrel had spent time wrapped around him first, convinced that this create was intent on killing them, so they would kill it first! Lee had talked to them while he worked, a low and continuous murmur that seemed to didn't do anything to calm them.
"Lee, I think animals hate you." Tenten said, watching him deposit a four-foot python that had looped twice around his forearm and was trying to squeeze the life out of him.
"Snakes are just fearful," Lee said simply. "I mean, If I was the size of a snake and a human came up to me, I'd be scared like crazy too."
"You're not afraid of a constricting python?"
"Why would I be? It would be like being afraid of my own training weights." He gave the snake a gentle pat on its head. It bit his hand with everything it had, not even leaving a mark. "Besides, I think they are quite regal creatures."
Tenten looked at the snake. It continued trying to break Lee's skeleton. She was a little envious of that fearlessness.
...
They broke at midday beside a stream that cut through the grove's lower ground, eating the packed lunches they had brought and letting the first barrel rest beside the water. The barrel moved occasionally, shifted from within by something heavy and restless, but the lid held.
"Guy-sensei," Lee said, setting aside his empty bento with the satisfaction of someone who had already started thinking about the next meal. "How do clients pay for missions at different ranks?"
Guy-sensei was stretching his legs out in the sun where the stream had opened a gap in the trees above. He looked pleased that someone had asked.
"Missions are priced based on risk and required skill," he said. "D-rank missions don't involve actual combat situations. C-rank missions might. B-rank usually does. Clients who want shinobi for tasks that could involve combat against other ninja need to afford B-rank or higher."
"So the people in Sugi Village could not afford a B-rank mission," Neji said. He was sitting with his back against a mossy stone, arms folded, having thoroughly refused to touch any of the food until he had cleaned his hands twice in the stream.
"Correct," Guy said. "That is often how it works. Small villages, small budgets. They hire what they can afford and hope the situation does not escalate."
"And sometimes it escalates," Tenten said.
"Yes."
She thought about that for a moment, looking at the moving water. Thought about the three men Heiichi had mentioned. She did not ask what happened to them, because she had already guessed.
"So when that happens," she said, "when a C-rank turns into a B-rank or worse..."
"We assess the situation and make a decision," Guy said. "Standard procedure is to withdraw and report back to Konoha for mission reclassification. The client is informed, and new arrangements are made with appropriate shinobi." He paused. "But there are times when withdrawal is not possible, or when the situation develops too quickly for that option. You will encounter both during your careers."
"And the village?" Neji asked.
"Depends on the timing," Guy said. He did not dress it up. "Clients who can't afford higher-ranked missions are often clients who need the most help. That is one of the harder truths of this work."
"I'd like to help everyone who looks up to us, Konoha shinobi, for help."
"That's the spirit, Lee!" Guy gave him a thumbs up with a bright white smile. "Konoha shinobi should always do whatever we can to help those that rely on us for help!"
"Even if its a little slimy, dirty, and hard, I guess it feels good to help people." Tenten had a small smile on her face.
Neji refused to add to this nonsensical conversation. Helping people feels good? In what world? He didn't feel anything about helping these people who can't even help themselves. But, they were just regular people. Shinobi were just naturally more capable. It is fate that they have no choice but to rely on shinobi for help. So, he supposed, it was fate in the end for those lacking capability to look for those that have it.
"Ready to get the next group, team?"
...
The days in the grove had their own rhythm. They started before dawn, moving through the cool and dark of early morning when the Kagekujira were most docile from the night's chill. Lee would move through the undergrowth to flush them from their hiding spots while Neji tracked with his Byakugan, calling out positions in the quiet and unhurried way he had developed for this work. Tenten managed the nets and the containment, always positioning herself to catch what the others pushed her way. Guy handled the barrels, which were heavy even for a jonin by the time they had a dozen snakes loaded in.
By the third morning, they had settled into something that was almost comfortable. Neji would go to collect any snakes his Byakugan found. Lee would chase any snakes he heard with his enhanced senses. Tenten was doing her best with the limited time she had to study.
They did not need to talk about it. It just happened.
...
On the second night, they camped inside the grove rather than walk the half-day back to Sugi Village and the half-day back again in the morning. Guy-sensei had brought supplies for exactly this possibility. They made a fire in a small clearing, ate hot food for the first time in two days, and sat around the warmth in comfortable silence that was slowly becoming less uncomfortable than the silence they had shared on the first day.
The sounds of the grove at night were different from the sounds during the day. Deeper, somehow, and more layered. Insects worked in the undergrowth in enormous numbers, creating a constant background hum that was almost like water if you stopped paying attention to it. Occasionally something larger moved through the trees, and occasionally the barrel shifted and settled as something inside decided to rearrange itself.
"How many do you think are left?" Tenten asked, warming her hands around a cup of tea.
Neji considered. "Fewer than twenty. Perhaps fifteen, scattered through the northern part of the forest. The numbers are much lower than the southeastern part we cleared today."
"We will be done tomorrow," Lee said with absolute confidence.
Neji almost insulted him just out of principle, but stopped. He was right. They had cleared more than forty pythons in two days, which was more than anyone in Sugi Village had expected of them. At their current rate, Neji's estimate of fifteen remaining snakes was accurate, and with his Byakugan at full range they could sweep the north within a single long morning.
So instead of dismissing it, he said nothing. Which was, for Neji, essentially an agreement.
Lee took it exactly that way and smiled at the fire.
...
On the morning of the third day, Lee found the one he would remember.
It was tucked into a hollow at the base of an old cedar that had been hit by lightning at some point and split down the middle before healing badly, creating a dark crawlspace between the two halves of the trunk.
The snake that emerged was smaller than most of the ones they had found. Still easily a meter and a half long, still muscled with the same heavy, cable-like strength all Kagekujira possessed, but younger, its scales a shade brighter where the charcoal-grey hadn't quite deepened to the near-black of the mature specimens. It came out of the hollow slowly, tongue sampling the air, and rather than coiling into a warning posture when it reached Lee, it simply stopped.
It looked at him.
Lee looked at it.
It crossed the remaining distance between them and investigated his knee with a series of rapid tongue-flicks, apparently reaching some conclusion Lee was not privy to, because it then simply coiled around his forearm and seemed to have no further plans.
Tenten, arriving with the net, stopped. "Is it doing what I think it's doing?"
"I think so," Lee said.
"It's coiling up to sleep on you."
"It seems that way." Lee was watching it with an expression of pure delight. The snake had tucked its head underneath one of his forearm wraps and gone still in the specific way animals went still when they were comfortable and had nowhere better to be.
Tenten opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again. "Lee. We have to put it in the barrel."
"Of course!" Lee agreed, and then did not move to put it in the barrel.
Tenten watched him sitting there with a juvenile Kagekujira using his arm as a hammock. She thought about several things she could say. She thought about asking Guy-sensei to intervene, but Guy-sensei had arrived at the clearing by this point, seen the situation, and was presently making a face that could only be described as deeply moved.
"The bond between man and beast!" he whispered, visibly emotional.
Tenten closed her eyes.
"Lee," she said. "We have a mission to finish."
"Right," Lee said, and stood carefully to avoid disturbing the snake. It opened one eye, apparently decided this rearrangement was acceptable, and went back to whatever it was doing. Lee walked to the barrel, deposited two other snakes he was also carrying, and then looked at the one on his arm.
The one on his arm looked back.
"Tenten," Lee said.
"No," she said.
"But-"
"No."
"I was only going to ask if-"
"Lee, I know what you were going to ask."
He was quiet for a moment. "Can I at least think about it?"
She stared at him. He stared at the snake. The snake stared at nothing in particular, which was the snake's only contribution to the conversation.
"...Think about it while we finish the mission," she finally said, because there was no other choice.
"Thank you, Tenten!"
"I didn't agree to anything!"
It was the first snake that hadn't bit him when he reached for it!
...
They finished by midmorning.
Neji found the last three Kagekujira pressed together in the root system of a tree near the grove's northern boundary, two adults and one juvenile barely longer than Lee's forearm. He incapacitated them with his characteristic two-finger tap, carried them to the barrel without comment, and that was it. The grove was clear.
Guy-sensei set the barrel down and looked at the trees around them, at the light coming through the upper branches now that the morning was getting on, at his students standing sweaty and tired and satisfied in various degrees.
"Well done," he said simply. Then, because he was Might Guy and being simple was not really in his nature: "YOOOOUTH!!!"
His voice carried through the grove and startled something in the upper branches that departed with a great deal of noise and indignation.
Tenten winced. "Guy-sensei, there are still snakes in the barrels, please don't-"
The nearest barrel rocked sharply.
"Eheh… I'm sorry," Guy gave a small bow to his student.
...
Heiichi was at the edge of the grove when they emerged, along with six other villagers who had come with the additional barrels. They all stopped when they saw Team 3 walking out of the trees, loaded down with the full set of containers, and for a moment nobody said anything.
Then Heiichi counted the barrels.
"All of them?" he said.
"All of them," Tenten confirmed. She had a scrape on her left arm from a branch and pine needles in her hair and the satisfied expression of someone who had done their homework and been proven right by events.
Heiichi looked at the barrels. Looked at his villagers. Looked back at Team 3.
"We'll get them relocated today," he said, his voice carrying something rough in it that was trying very hard not to be gratitude. "The eastern tributary is their native range. Two hours' travel. We can manage from here."
"The snakes will need water during transport," Tenten said. "Not too much, just damp conditions in the barrels. They'll be calmer."
Heiichi nodded slowly. "You know your stuff."
"I read about snakes before we came," she said.
"Right," he said. "Thank you, young lady."
Lee had been standing slightly apart from this exchange, still holding the juvenile Kagekujira that had, over the course of the morning, migrated from his forearm to his shoulder to its current position draped partly across the back of his neck like a very heavy scarf. He had been trying to formulate an argument. He was not a natural arguer, which made this difficult.
"Heiichi-san," he said.
Heiichi looked at him. At the snake on his shoulder. Back at him.
"This one is younger than the others," Lee said. "It will be harder for it to establish territory in the relocation area with the adults already competing for the space." This was based on something Tenten had mentioned during the second day's work, which he had absorbed carefully. "I could... take responsibility for it. Make sure it is looked after."
Heiichi considered this for what felt like a very long time.
"It's a python," he said.
"Yes."
"It will get very large."
"I know."
Heiichi looked at the snake again. The snake flicked its tongue at him. He looked at the jonin in the green jumpsuit, who was watching this exchange with tears forming in the corners of his eyes for reasons Heiichi chose not to investigate.
"Not my snake to give," Heiichi said at last, with a shrug that meant he was washing his hands of the entire matter. "But I'm not going to argue with a shinobi about it."
Lee's face lit up with a brightness that probably qualified as a minor weather event.
...
They were most of the way back to Konoha before anyone addressed the snake directly.
It had settled into the depths of Lee's travel pack with a thoroughness that suggested it considered the matter settled. Every now and then the top of the pack would shift slightly. At one point a dark head emerged, looked around at the road and the trees and the late afternoon sky, and then withdrew again.
"You're going to have to name it," Tenten said. She had accepted this somewhere around the second hour of walking, the way you accepted weather.
"I am thinking," Lee said.
"You've been thinking for two hours."
"It is an important decision. A name shapes a life."
Tenten did not argue with this because it was the kind of thing that sounded absurd and was probably true.
Neji said nothing. He had said nothing about the snake since they left the grove, which was its own kind of position. His silence was too pointed to be indifference.
"Kagerou," Lee said, eventually.
Tenten turned the word over. Shadow-drift. The kind of shimmer that rises off hot stone in summer, there and then gone, almost not there at all. She thought about the snake's scales, black and grey, the way it had blended into the hollow of that lightning-split tree.
"Well, it isn't something crazy like I expected from you. That name's pretty normal." she said.
Neji said nothing. Which meant, from Neji, that he didn't care.
Lee smiled at the road ahead, the pack shifting slightly at his shoulder, the weight of the journey sitting easy on him. Three days in a forest doing honest work for people who needed it. A team that had found its footing, slowly and without announcement. A snake that had looked at him and decided, with whatever reasoning snakes used, that he was worth staying near.
Not a bad few days.
He picked up the pace, because Konoha was ahead, and he had training to get back to.
...
They reached the gate as the sun was going down, the sky behind them a deep and burning orange over the hills. The gate guards waved them through with the mild curiosity of people who had seen Konoha's shinobi come back from stranger things than three barrels of pythons and a new snake in someone's pack.
"Report to the mission desk in the morning," Guy-sensei said, as he had said after every mission, but with the warmth he reserved for moments he was proud of. He let the instruction hang there for a second and then added: "Today was well done. All three of you. The people of Sugi Village will eat this winter."
He said it simply, without drama, and that made it land harder than anything else he could have said.
Tenten stood a little straighter. Neji looked away at the road, not caring if they ate or not.
Lee just beamed, because he had never learned to hide it and had stopped trying a long time ago.
"Group hug!" Guy declared, dropping what remained of the mission equipment with a dramatic thump and opening his arms.
"Tch." Neji's attempt to sidestep was countered by the simple fact that Guy-sensei was a jonin and Neji was not, and the gap between those two things expressed itself immediately in the form of being scooped off his feet.
"This is so embarrassing," Tenten said, caught under Guy's other arm, acutely aware that they were standing at the village gate where anyone could see them.
"The power of youth always succeeds even when it fails!" Lee cheered, already in the hug, arms going around everyone in reach without waiting to be asked.
Kagerou's head emerged from the pack to investigate what was happening.
The head withdrew again, apparently satisfied, or at least unbothered.
The gate guards watched all of this with smiles of men who had been watching Guy for a long time.
The sky burned orange and then red and then the deep quiet blue of early night, and Team 3 stood at the gate of Konoha, tangled together and tired in the good way, and the grove was cleared, and the village would eat, and nothing about any of this would make anyone's history books.
It did not need to.