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"I'll wait for you outside," Rin offered at the door. She didn't fully understand why I had to stay after class, other than that I was being tested. Tested, it sounded like I was at a damn doctor's appointment. Like they were about to open up my brain and give me a full lobotomy. See just what it was that made me tick. It didn't help that Maekawa-sensei was staring at me as if I'd just killed her puppy. Granted, she tended to always look like that.
With a loud smack, Maekawa ordered a stack of papers into a perfect rectangle and gestured for me to sit down in the first row, right in plain view of her desk.
'My mother's expecting me,' I thought about saying, but I'm pretty sure that or any other kind of excuse wouldn't fly with Maekawa. In fact, she'd probably just give me a harder time about the whole thing.
I sat down, and Maekawa delivered the papers to me with surprising gentleness. I had braced myself for a papercut, or for her to throw up her hands and let the hundred sheets float down on my head like the sky was collapsing.
"You have an hour to examine these files and decode their messages. It shouldn't have to be said that these aren't real excerpts of confidential information, nonetheless if I ever find you discussing what has been presented before you here to anyone you will be severely punished." Maekawa-sensei let that sink in for a moment before continuing. "Your time begins now."
I flipped open the first page instinctively, but was completely at a loss at what was covering it. It wasn't Japanese or English or any kind of alphabetically written language. Instead this first page was covered head to toe with symbols. Like Ancient Egyptian or something. Very aware of my time limit I flipped over to the next page only to find similar symbols. I kept going through the pages until I found a few Japanese texts and some that were just numbers. One looked almost like binary, but even if it was I didn't have a clue about binary's relation to the English alphabet, let alone Japanese. So I ended up putting all the pages I knew I couldn't solve in one pile, and all the ones I had a shot at in front of me.
When I first got the news that I'd have to stay after class and take an assessment I panicked like I was about to be taken to the gallows. After all, Konoha really did enforce the sense of communal identity among their students. Even if we didn't get along all the time, and even though there were more popular and less popular students, we all still saw each other as members of the same team. We all felt relatively familiar with each other having to see one another everyday and participate in all these team building exercises with one another. Kids like Gai and Obito may be the black sheep, but they were still sheep. Kiri, Suna, Kumo, were the metaphorical wolves out to get us. The boogeymen who'd slit our throats in our sleep.
So the idea of doing a personal assessment all by myself, one not given to the rest of the class, really shook my nerves. I had been determined to fail, but now it seemed as if I was going to fail unironically.
Here's the thing, being too awful was as bad as being too good. Hifumi had said I devoted my spare time to ciphering. That I was obsessed with it and god knows what else. It would be suspicious if I couldn't even solve one. Solving too many was even more suspicious, as many of the puzzles obviously required a key to crack. A certain criteria of information that determined which characters relayed back to the alphabet.
Basically I was screwed either way. Even most of the Japanese didn't make sense. There were tons pages with random sentences like:
Suki goes to the grocery store. Suki buys a watermelon. Suki goes home and eats the watermelon on the kitchen floor.
Or even worse math problems, that weren't really math problems.
Okuma sells red apples for 15 ryo and green apples for 12 ryo. At the end of the day Okuma sells 33 apples and makes 424 ryo. How many green apples did he sell?
After I made up that lie about the notebook I did look a little into writing secret messages. Of course, I couldn't just go up to the library and borrow a book about it. That would be like borrowing Mein Kampf. It was legal, but my name would be tacked onto some secret list and I'd be observed for what kind of content I was consuming. Unlike that world, I could no doubt be put under arrest for being too suspicious here.
The fact of the matter was, if I didn't do decently enough on this assessment there could be very real consequences beyond bad grades. And that only left me with one choice. I had to try, no matter what, to do the best I could.
I scraped all the papers that had only a few sentences. There was no way I would be able to configure any sort of key with so little source material. I knew the basics. I knew I needed to look for patterns, repeated words, mnemonics, phrases, or even ideas. Special characters, ampersands instead of the word 'and'; marks on the paper or uniqueness in penmanship.
I knew the simple ways a person could mix up their words. You know the kind of stuff you try out as kids. Having the first letter of each word spell something out. Or having a hidden message planted diagonally. Skipping every other word, or sentence, or letter.
Give me some credit here. I didn't just make up lies I knew I couldn't reasonably back up. But if any of the codetext before me was that simple I must have missed it, because none of them added up to anything.
I checked the time. Already half an hour had gone by. I was screwed. I doubled down and chose one paper I might have a shot at. It read:
'Sonomi,
Been a while. Against your advice, I am staying in my home village. After you left me I didn't want to come back to our old house. Between both of us, I believe we can come to an agreement for paying off the mortgage. It needs to be settled before the banks come together. Damage on the fences must be mended before it sells. Certainly, it can be done on the same day as you receive this. Animals were still getting in last time I was there. Naturally, it would be most ideal to get a new fence entirely. Appeal to your father for another loan if you must. I know he will give you one. Asking never hurt anybody. Don't you agree?
Figure it out yourself if he doesn't. I won't be there to tell you otherwise. It is best if you'd start thinking for yourself. Otherwise, we'll never get rid of the house. Another thing. Open the cellar to get the mouse smell out. Always close it before night, we don't need any more bugs in there. I appreciate it. Another price deduct on that house would be a shame.
Bye,
Daisuke Abe'
It was pretty similar to the other excerpts. Although on the longer side which gave me a better shot at stumbling upon patterns or hints. Something else about it bugged me. I remembered how Maekawa mentioned that none of these were real or had actually been used to try to infiltrate Konoha before. Yet that didn't mean that they weren't based on real instances of counter-intelligence. There were events in this letter that related to the real world. For example, it talked about the banks coming together. A few months back many of the major private banks supporting the current Daimyo suffered from class-action lawsuits and unionizing bank workers. I had only known about it because mom used to do accounting work for merchants, and she still had many friends who worked in finance.
Surly Maekawa knew enough about me to know that I might be familiar with something like that. It seemed like a specific call out to me. A tease. 'You're supposed to be smart, aren't you?' I could practically hear her croon.
Have you ever got that before? A mulligan. A freebie. A question on a test that may have already been answered by a previous question. Or something about the very way it was asked narrowed down the options to all but one.
I broke down what it was saying. The characters in the story were trying to sell a house, and talking about the repairs that it needed before it sold. They had been in a relationship before, and now it could only be described as complicated. Hifumi would have been able to pick up on that easily, but not many other kids our age would have recognized it.
Not only that, but the language that was used seemed purposeful. 'It is best if you start thinking for yourself' I could hear it with Maekawa's own voice as if she was talking to me directly. 'Asking never hurt anybody. Don't you agree?'
I glanced up discreetly. Maekawa was grading papers. She was using a pencil. And there were these almost inaudible scratching noises of the granite X's.
I sucked in a breath. What the hell…
I knew for a fact that Maekawa always used red pens to grade papers. Yet now she held in her hand this feeble brown pencil, a lot like that one I had snatched off her desk nearly a year ago.
I swear I wasn't imagining it. Which could only mean that she was doing this deliberately.
'Appeal to your father for another loan if you must. I know he will give you one'
What was this? Her way of giving me a break? Of shining the spotlight down on the greatest clues? Or was she trying to stress me out, to tell me that I was in it deep. That whatever I had been hiding all this time was finally going to be revealed.
It was very quiet all of the sudden.
Maekawa had stopped grading, yet she didn't make any move to relax her wrist or check the clock or anything. She just sat there. And it was the creepiest thing. I wanted to get up and run out of the classroom. I'd rather be having a tea party with Obito-fucking-Uchiha then any where in the near vicinity of Maekawa.
Yet I couldn't move. It was as if we had both simultaneously stumbled upon a flaming car crash. And while I was horrified一terrified beyond belief; Maekawa was curious, reproachful, wondering, a bit morbidly but a little hopeful too, what was behind that blackened car door. What made it swing on its hinges in the nonexistent wind?
'Figure it out yourself'
My hands were shaking. Yet, when I forced a little chakra to calm my nerves the images disappeared. The silence broke, and the pencil in Maekawa's hand was no longer a pencil but that familiar red pen.
Genjutsu. But why?
I looked back down at the words before me. I had figured it out.
Just like the car, which didn't exist in the Naruto world; the answer to the cipher before me required knowledge only I knew. It required 'The Tale of The Utterly Gutsy Shinobi'. It required Naruto. If I hadn't been so disturbed I might have started laughing.
You see, in The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi, the main character Naruto must learn this super secret S-class jutsu. Since it's meant to be a kids book it obviously plays up on the dramatics, and in no way reveals anything that might actually lead a person to learn a real S-class jutsu, however it does employ a real sealing technique. Hexadecimal sealing worked on a base of sixteen, using A-F and 0-9. It had been used over a hundred years ago before the use of symbols became more prominent, and it was more often used to express numerical values rather than words. Symbols were far superior to using code to seal. But before the spread of Uzumaki techniques, most of the shinobi world used cryptology to seal. Afterall it was discrete and difficult to emulate if you didn't know it's specifics. It was almost like its own language, or a computer language. Like python or C++. Sure you could memorize a few sequences easily enough, but that didn't mean you could build a website or create a video game.
When I applied the rules of hexadecimal sealing to the message, and then translated the first letter of each sentence一 it matched up: 6b75726979616d612070617373. Then separating that into doubles, 6b 75 72 69 79 61 6d 61 20 70 61 73 73, and changing that to plain language turned into, "Kuriyama pass". A location near the border with Iwa.
I had five minutes left. There was no way I could even attempt another message, so I checked it again. And it worked. It had been laid out there for me as if I was meant to find it. I was meant to find it.
"Times up," Maekawa said on the exact second of the changing hour. She didn't smile at me or anything. She didn't give any indication that she had used a genjutsu on me, or that I was meant to figure out that one excerpt. If anything she looked disappointed. "Remember to turn in your anatomy worksheet tomorrow."
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