Five swordsmen.
They emerged from the buildings and alleyways around the broker's position in the space of three seconds, converging on the riverside road like fingers closing into a fist. Two from the north, three from the east, coming out of a warehouse.
Five Kiri nin. Five swords. Five headbands bearing the four-lined symbol of the Hidden Mist.
And one girl standing on the cobblestones with bandaged fists and a grin that did not belong on an outnumbered shinobi.
The leader was the first to speak. Mid-twenties, a standard katana on his hip, lean jaw and calm eyes. He looked at Mai as if she were an insect.
"One Sand brat..." He looked at the broker. "Is this some sort of joke?"
The broker, standing behind the formation with the scroll clutched to his chest, shook his head. "There are more. Her team is in the market district. She broke off alone."
"Stupid too it seems." the leader chuckled. He didn't draw his sword yet.
The big one did. He stood a head taller than everyone else and carried a cleaver-style blade that was wider than Mai's torso. He rested it on his shoulder and looked down at her with a grin that matched hers in width.
"Instead of stupid, do you think she thinks she's brave?" the big one said.
"Can I kill her?" asked the youngest. He stood on the leader's left, maybe fourteen or fifteen, a standard Kiri sword in a two-handed grip. His voice cracked on the last word. "She's just a kid. This'll take five seconds."
"You're barely older than her, Isamu." said the fast one. Small and quick, dual short swords resting loose in both hands. He bounced on the balls of his feet, weight shifting constantly.
The water user stood furthest back. Short grey hair, a long blade with a curved guard. Standing in front of the river.
"She tracked us here somehow." the leader said. His calm eyes moved over Mai's glasses, her bandaged fists, her Suna headband.
"Who cares how she tracked us?" The youngest, Isamu, was already stepping forward. "She's one girl. Let me have some fun."
"No." The leader drew his katana. The sound of steel leaving the sheath cut through the morning air. "Everyone. At once. Just because she's a kid, doesn't mean you underestimate her." He didn't know why she was still smiling…
All five took out their swords.
The river churned behind them. The empty street stretched ahead. Mai stood in the center of it with her feet set and her fists up and the Byakugan glasses feeding her a perfect, unbroken view of every body on the road. Every heartbeat. Every chakra point. Every chakra pathway glowing beneath their skin.
She could see all of them. Front, back, sides. The big one going for a lunging swing. Isamu gripping his sword too tight, the tendons in his forearms bunching. The fast one's ankles coiling. The water user weaving through hand signs, the water from the river behind him moving. The leader, still and watchful.
"Before we do this," Mai said, "I want you all to know something."
"You got some last words?" the big one asked.
"I'm going to enjoy every second of this."
Two of them laughed while the other three didn't.
They came at her all at once.
The big one led with a horizontal cleaver swing that would have cut Mai in half at the waist. It came from her left. At the same instant, the fast one closed from her right, dual blades scissoring toward her neck. Isamu charged from the front, overhead swing, screaming. The water user fired a pressurized jet from behind her.
Four attacks from four directions in the same heartbeat.
Mai dropped to the ground, her knees folded and her body fell straight down, and the cleaver passed over her head and the scissoring blades closed on air where her neck had been and Isamu's overhead swing split the space she'd occupied a half second earlier. The water jet screamed past at chest height and hit the wall of the building across the street, punching a hole through the wood.
Mai's palms hit the cobblestones and she pushed, launching herself sideways out of the convergence point before the five of them could adjust. She came up three meters to the right, already spinning, and her foot connected with the big one's wrist as his cleaver completed its follow-through.
She'd aimed for the tenketsu on the inside of his wrist joint. Two hundred grams of force. A whisper of chakra injected through the sole of her foot into his pathway system.
The big one's hand opened because the tendons stopped receiving signals from the chakra network that controlled them. His fingers splayed wide, involuntary, and the cleaver fell from his grip and hit the cobblestones with a clang that echoed across the empty street.
He stared at his hand. Tried to close it. The fingers twitched once and went still.
"What the f..."
Mai was already gone.
She pivoted off the big one's body, using him as a shield between herself and the water user's follow-up shot. Another pressurized jet screamed past, clipping the big one's shoulder instead of Mai's back. He roared in pain and stumbled sideways, and Mai moved with him, staying in his shadow.
The fast one came around the big one's flank, dual swords leading. He was quick. The fastest of the five, and his blades cut the air in combinations that Mai's glasses could see a fraction of a second before the muscles fired. She read the pattern. Left blade, low. Right blade, high. Left again, sweeping. She bobbed under the first, leaned away from the second, and stepped inside the third.
Her palm touched his stomach.
She pushed chakra through the contact point, a needle of energy that pierced his pathway system and sliced through the network surrounding his liver. The organ ruptured internally. The boy's eyes went wide as his body seized as something vital inside him stopped working the way it was supposed to.
The fast one's momentum carried him forward two more steps. Then his legs crumpled and he hit the ground face-first, the dual swords clattering away from hands that couldn't hold them anymore. He curled onto his side. Dark and thick blood leaked from his mouth.
"Haze!" The leader's voice cracked for the first time. "What did you, what did she do to him?!"
Isamu screamed. Not a battle cry. A scream of rage and fear and something breaking inside a fifteen-year-old who'd just watched two of his comrades fall to a girl who didn't even have a sword.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" He charged, his blade swinging in wide, frantic arcs that had more emotion than form.
Mai sidestepped the first swing. Ducked the second. Read the third through the glasses, saw it coming from behind her left ear as Isamu tried to catch her blind side, and she leaned forward just enough that the blade passed over her back, slicing a thin line through the fabric of her shirt without touching skin.
She caught his wrist on the follow-through. Her fingers found the tenketsu on the inside of his forearm, two points, pressed simultaneously, and chakra needles pierced the pathways that fed his sword arm.
The arm dropped. The sword fell. Isamu stared at his dead limb hanging at his side and his mouth opened and closed without sound.
Mai's other hand came up. Two fingers pressed against his chest, over his heart. She pushed chakra through the network surrounding the organ. The pathways there were dense, tightly woven, each one running alongside the muscle fibers that kept the heart beating. She disrupted three of them.
Isamu's eyes rolled back. His body went rigid for one second, every muscle locking, then loose. He collapsed.
Three down. Two standing.
The water user acted.
He'd been building something while Mai handled the others. His hands came apart and a wall of water rose from the river behind him, ten feet high, churning, pulled from the current by his chakra. He thrust both palms forward and the wall launched at Mai in a horizontal flood that covered the entire width of the street.
Mai couldn't dodge it. Too wide. Too fast. The water hit her like a truck and she was off her feet, tumbling, the current slamming her into the wall of a building. Stone cracked behind her back. Water filled her mouth and nose. For two seconds she couldn't see, couldn't breathe, couldn't orient.
The glasses kept working. Even underwater, even disoriented, the tool showed her the water user's signature closing in from behind the wave, his blade drawn, aiming to cut her while she was pinned.
Mai planted her feet against the wall behind her and pushed. She launched out of the receding water like a thrown stone, covering the distance between herself and the water user in a single bound. He swung his blade. She twisted in the air and the curved edge passed under her arm, slicing through the bandage on her left forearm. Blood sprayed. A shallow cut, long but not deep, running from elbow to wrist.
She landed inside his guard. Her palm found his throat.
She didn't hit a tenketsu. She hit the pathway cluster where the chakra network fed the brainstem. A surgical injection of energy that scrambled the signals between his brain and his body.
The water user's eyes went blank. His sword arm fell. His legs buckled. The water he'd been shaping collapsed back into the river with a splash that soaked the cobblestones. He hit the ground and didn't move. His chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular gasps that were getting further apart.
Four down.
The leader stood alone on the riverside road.
His katana was drawn. His feet were set. The calm eyes that had assessed Mai at the start of the fight were still calm, but the quality of the calm had changed. It wasn't dismissal anymore. It wasn't even caution.
"What are you?" he asked.
"One of the Sand's strongest genin." She smiled.
"That's not Sand. I've fought Sand nin before. Puppets. Fans. Wind ninjutsu. Poison. That wasn't any of those." His eyes moved to his fallen comrades. To the big one clutching his dead hand. To the fast one curled on the ground with blood pooling under his face. To Isamu, motionless. To the water user, barely breathing. "Only Hyuga are capable of putting people down with a single touch. And as far as I know, Sand didn't hold members of the Hyuga Clan."
"That's right, we don't."
"Then how?"
"Do you really expect me to just tell you?" Mai laughed at him as if he were an idiot. "Idiot! Dumbass! Moron! Stupid!"
The leader's grip tightened on his katana. Water began to coat the blade, drawn from the river, pressurized, extending the cutting edge by a foot in a shimmering blue envelope. A water-enhanced strike. Longer reach. Sharper edge. The technique of a swordsman who'd trained his water release and his kenjutsu to work as one.
"I watched how you fight," he said. "You need to touch your opponent. Direct contact. Palms, fingers, feet. Every takedown required physical contact. So I won't let you touch me."
He was right. Mai knew he was right. Her new fighting style required contact. Chakra injection through the chakra points in her hands and feet into the opponent's pathway system. No contact, no injection, no damage. A swordsman who kept his distance and fought at the edge of his blade's reach could theoretically keep her at bay indefinitely.
Theoretically.
Mai reached into her weapon pouch.
Three shuriken left her hand in a spread pattern aimed at the leader's center mass. He deflected all three with a single sweep of the water-coated blade, the steel singing, the shuriken ricocheting into the river. Mai was already moving, circling right, and a kunai flew from her other hand at a low angle aimed at his knee.
He stepped over it. Smooth. His eyes never left her.
She threw a smoke bomb at his feet. The grey cloud erupted and swallowed him. Through the glasses, his figure blazed clear as day inside the smoke, his katana sweeping in defensive arcs to cover his blind spots.
Mai hit the smoke from the side. She came in low, under the sweeping blade, and reached for his leading leg. He read it somehow, felt the displacement of air or heard her sandals on the wet cobblestones, and his water-coated blade came down in a vertical slash that forced her to pull back. The water extension caught her shoulder, a thin cut that burned cold, the pressurized water slicing deeper than a normal blade would have.
She hissed. Blood ran down her arm.
The smoke cleared. They faced each other again. Mai was breathing harder now. The cut on her forearm from the water user. The cut on her shoulder from the leader. The bruise across her back from the water wall that was already stiffening her movements.
The leader hadn't taken a scratch.
"You're good," he said. "For a child. But you're alone and you're hurt and I've seen through your technique. You can't reach me."
Mai looked at him through the glasses. At the chakra flowing through his body, the pathways lit up like a map of everything that kept him alive. She could see his heartbeat in the rhythm of the energy around his chest. She could see his breathing in the ebb and flow around his lungs. She could see the slight tension in his right ankle from an old injury that made him favor his left foot on pivots.
She could see everything.
"You're right," she said. "I can't reach you. Not with my hands."
She threw an explosive kunai. Not at him. At the cobblestones between them. The tag detonated and the street erupted in a blast of dust and stone fragments that turned the air opaque.
The leader's blade swept through the debris cloud, cutting, deflecting, his water release sharpening the edge to handle anything that might be hiding in the dust. He was ready for her to come through the smoke again. Ready for the low approach, the reach for his legs, the grab for his sword arm.
He wasn't ready for the cobblestones.
They came out of the dust one after another, kicked, fist-sized chunks of broken street arriving at his face and throat and knee. He cut the first out of the air. Slipped the second. The third he had to commit to, a full sweep of the water-coated blade that smashed the stone to gravel.
The sweep was the door.
She had watched it all through the dust with eyes he couldn't see, his feet, his wrists, the blade, and she came in behind the third stone so close on its heels that girl and rock might have been thrown together. He read her anyway. He was that good. The katana was already turning back, a recovery that would have split any other genin, and his weight went to his right foot to pivot into the cut.
The right ankle. The old injury. The knot of scarred pathways the glasses had shown her ten minutes ago, dimmer than the tissue around it, the reason he'd favored his left foot on every turn he'd made in this whole fight.
Mai had gone right on purpose.
The ankle held for most of the pivot. Then it didn't. A stutter, a half-beat of nothing, his turn arriving late by the width of a hand. The water-edged blade still came, and from where she stood there was no dodging it, and she didn't try.
She caught it.
Her left hand closed on the flat of the blade through its shimmering envelope, and the pressurized water sliced into her bandages and the palm beneath, cold first, then burning, blood welling up through the cloth in a line. Her grip did not open. Her grip had cracked training posts and split desert stone, and it closed on his sword like a manacle, and the blade stopped, and both of them learned in the same heartbeat which of them was stronger.
His eyes went wide. "That's... not possible."
"You said I couldn't touch you." Mai grinned at him through her teeth, blood running down her wrist. "So I made you touch me."
He let go of the katana. But it was already too late.
The katana rang off the cobblestones.
Mai smashed both palms flat against his stomach. Then an uppercut with her fist that led into a spinning kick that would've sent him flying if she didn't grab him by the ankle and slam him into the ground. A spray of blood erupted from his mouth as Mai continued her assault.
Chakra flooded through two dozen contact points simultaneously, piercing his pathway system like needles through cloth, each one targeting the network surrounding a different organ. Stomach. Liver. Kidneys. Intestines. The energy sliced through the pathways and the organs intertwined with them took the damage, rupturing, hemorrhaging internally, shutting down in a cascade.
The leader's mouth opened. Blood welled up from somewhere deep inside him and spilled over his lips. He looked up at Mai. He was no longer calm or confident. What was left was the terrifying understanding of a man who knew he was dying and couldn't do anything about it.
"What... are you?" he asked again. Blood stained his teeth.
Mai looked down at him. The grin was even uglier.
"The strongest taijutsu specialist of the Sand." she said proudly.
The leader fell forward onto the cobblestones and didn't move.
Five swordsmen. All down. One girl barely standing.
Mai turned to the broker.
He was backing away. His hands were raised, the scroll clutched against his chest, his civilian disguise abandoned in the terror of what he'd just watched.
"Take it!" He held the scroll out, his hands shaking. "Take the scroll! I'll give you everything, the information, the contacts, whatever you want. Just let me go!"
Mai didn't look at the scroll. She looked at him. At the Kiri ninja who'd played every major village as suckers, who'd set up an exchange that was designed to get shinobi killed for his village's benefit, who was now begging a child for mercy.
"You can keep the scroll for now," Mai said. "I'll just take it from your broken body."
The color drained from his face.
Mai closed the distance in three steps. The broker dropped the scroll and tried to run. He made it two steps. Her hand found his back. Two fingers pressed between his shoulder blades, into the tenketsu that fed his spinal column.
His legs stopped. His arms stopped. Everything below the neck stopped receiving signals. He toppled forward like a felled tree and hit the cobblestones face-first, the scroll rolling from his limp fingers.
Paralyzed. Conscious. Unable to move anything except his eyes, which stared sideways at Mai's sandals as she stepped over him.
She picked up the scroll. She slung the broker over her shoulder, like a sack of grain.
She reached into her pouch with her free hand. One explosive kunai left. She threw it straight up.
It climbed above the rooftops, above the smoke rising from the distant battle, above the tree line. At the apex of its arc, the tag detonated. A sharp crack and a bloom of orange fire against the morning sky that was visible for a kilometer in every direction.
The signal.
Mai stood on the riverside road with a paralyzed Kiri operative on her shoulder and a classified scroll in her hand and the bodies of five swordsmen scattered around her on the wet cobblestones. Blood dripped from her forearm and from the cut of her left palm. Her shoulder burned. Her back ached from the water wall that had slammed her into a building. .
She hurt everywhere.
But she was grinning.
They found her on the north road outside Takimura.
Ebizo came first. Karura was behind him, her scarf dark with dust and someone else's blood. Pakura brought up the rear, a fresh burn mark on her arm-warmer and that arrogant, satisfied look on her face that said she was proud of what she accomplished.
They saw Mai standing in the road with a body on her shoulder and a grin on her face and they stopped.
"I got him," Mai said. She dropped the broker onto the road. He hit the dirt with a thud and stared at the sky, unable to move anything. "And the scroll." She held it up. "You're welcome."
Ebizo looked at the broker. At the scroll. At Mai's injuries, the cuts, the bruises, the blood soaking through her bandages. His forehead furrowed.
"You disobeyed a direct order," he said. "You broke from the group during a battle. You pursued a target alone into unknown territory with no backup and no extraction plan. You are a genin. Not a jonin. Not a special jonin. A genin. What you did could have gotten you killed."
Mai's grin didn't waver. "But it didn't."
"That is not the point."
"It kind of is, Sensei."
"It is NOT!"
"The mission comes before the shinobi carrying it out." Mai repeated it robotically. The same way she'd been told hundreds of times in a classroom. "That's the first rule for a Sand shinobi. The broker was leaving, sensei. I could complete the mission or I could follow orders, and the Village says which one wins." She wasn't gloating. That was the worst part. She was genuinely puzzled, standing there bleeding through her bandages, waiting for him to explain what she'd gotten wrong.
Ebizo opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it, because there was nothing in the village's whole catechism to put there. She was right. The doctrine was on her side, the council would be on her side, the Kazekage himself would read this report and see initiative and dedication and a mission completed at acceptable risk to a single genin. Everything he wanted to shout at her came from somewhere else entirely, somewhere with no standing in any Suna classroom, and he could not find a way to say you are worth more to me than any scroll that would not be, by every standard he had sworn to uphold, heresy.
"The rule," he said at last, "assumes the shinobi in question can be replaced."
"So I can't?" Mai's grin came back, delighted.
"Of course not, what are you say-" Ebizo was tackled by Mai as she hugged him.
Ebizo had a difficult look on his face as he could do nothing but sigh. He rubbed her head.
"You're going to be the death of me, you know that?" Ebizo exhaled.
"I love you too, Sensei!" Mai hugged him tighter.
"The broker is alive," he said. "The scroll is secured. You completed the objective." A pause. "This is the one and only time that disobeying my orders works in your favor. If you ever do this again, I will personally drag you back to Suna by your ankles and send you back to the academy. Am I clear?"
"Crystal."
"Are you lying?"
"Absolutely."
Pakura pinched the bridge of her nose.
Karura was staring at Mai's injuries. At the cuts and the bruises and the blood. She handed her a cactus fruit from one of her storage scrolls. Mai thanked her and took a big messy bite as her injuries recovered. They were filled to the brim with sweet juiciness.
"Let's move," Ebizo said. "Before the other villages regroup and come looking for the scroll."
They ran back home. Mai carried the broker for the first hour. Karura took him for the second.
By noon they'd crossed out of the Land of Rivers and into the border territory between nations. By evening they were back in the Land of Wind, the familiar dry heat and open sky settling around them like an old blanket.
Mai breathed in the desert air and smiled.
"Home…" she said.
"Home." Karura agreed.
"Finally, I never want to see another tree again." Pakura scoffed.
They made camp in the shelter of a rock formation and Mai cleaned the dried blood off of her arms.
"Five swordsmen," Pakura said. She sat across from Mai with her arms folded. "You fought five Kiri nin by yourself."
"Yep."
"And won."
"Obviously."
"How?"
"Because I'm the best most amazing most awesomest genin ever, duh."
"..." Pakura didn't even want to respond to such nonsense.
"Yep, I know. If you want an autograph, just tell me where on your body you want me to write it."
Pakura's eyes narrowed. She looked at Ebizo. Ebizo said nothing. She looked at Karura. Karura didn't meet her gaze.
"You two are hiding something," Pakura said. "And it involves those glasses. And whatever it is, it's the reason an eleven-year-old with no ninjutsu could take on five Mist ninjas."
"You're just jealous you can't find glasses as fashionable as mine," Mai said.
"Those dorky glasses are the farthest thing from fashion!" Pakura would not be lectured by Mai of all people on fashion.
"Sounds like jealousy to me."
"I am NOT!"
Mai's laugh echoed off the rocks. Pakura's face turned the color of a sunset. Karura hid behind her scarf, giggling.
Ebizo watched his students from across the dying fire. The broker tied up and gagged next to him. The classified intelligence was secured. The mission was complete.
His students were alive.
He closed his eyes and felt proud.
Immense, unbearable, terrifying pride.
Because his genin, yes genin, had just walked into a multi-village combat engagement against Iwa, Kiri, Leaf, and minor village operatives, and they'd walked out with the target, the scroll, and all four of their heartbeats.
He opened his eyes and looked at the stars.
The Kazekage is not going to believe this, he thought.
…
"Mai. On the ridge. What you almost said, about the Leaf nin's eyes."
Mai looked at her for a second, then went back to scanning the dark. "That they light up like yours do?"
Karura's heart jumped silently, at how simple it was in Mai's mouth. Months. She'd known for months, and it had gone into the same drawer as Karura likes red bean buns and Karura sleeps curled up. "You can't ever say it. Not in front of anyone. Not sensei, not Pakura, not your mother. If the wrong person hears it, they'll take me somewhere and I probably won't come back."
Mai was quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay."
That was all. No questions. Karura had prepared answers for an hour of them, and Mai hadn't asked any at all.
"You're really not going to ask?"
"You'll tell me someday." Mai grinned. "If Karura of all people has a secret to keep, I know its for the right reasons."
"Thank you, Mai…" Karura nearly teared up. "I couldn't be luckier to have a friend like you…"
"That's what I'm saying. If only those other bastards in the academy could see that too. Just because I can't use ninjutsu or genjutsu, doesn't mean I'm not a great person to get to know!" Mai balled her fist as she thought back to her days in the academy.
"Their losses if you ask me." Karura smiled. "I'm proud to have Mai as one of my best friends."
Mai expressed her joy the only way she seemingly knew how.
By tackling Karura with a hug and laughing joyously.
"Girls, you're supposed to be keeping watch, not goofing around." Ebizo's tired voice floated over to them.
"Sorry, Sensei!" They apologized, immediately getting up and returning to their post.