Day two begins at dawn, with Sensei and Minato scaring the life out of both her and Kakashi.
Minato finger whistles and Kakashi springs out of his bedroll with a kunai at the ready. Honōka falls through the bare dirt the tent rests on, arms flailing as she goes under. After a moment of finding her bearings and confirming that nothing potentially life threatening is occurring, she peeks her head above the ground, eye level only. Minato turns away, holding his mouth to smoother the escaping laughter.
She climbs out of the ground, hauling her bedroll with her.
"That wasn't funny," she tells him.
Sensei crosses his arms at her. He's less amused and more unsatisfied with her reaction.
"Kakashi-kun responded correctly to the unconsciously perceived threat. Honōka-kun, you did not."
She petulantly curls up in her bedroll, burying her face in the thick and somewhat scratchy material, then sticks an arm out to give them all a thumb's down. "My sensor ability hates you all right now."
"Does your sensor ability have sentience, Honōka-kun?" Sensei retorts.
She grumbles.
"…no."
"I didn't think so. Up, now. We have a busy day ahead of us. Minato, put on the kettle. Kakashi-kun, miso soup. Honōka-kun, get a dozen eggs from the mess hall."
She worms her way out of her bedroll and goes hunting for her stirrup socks and shinobi sandals. They are on border patrol, so she slept in her clothes. Ugh. Three months of sleeping in armor is going to get old, fast.
She flickers to the mess hall—startling the two chūnin on duty.
"A dozen eggs, please."
"Uh… we can't just give you eggs, kid."
"Orochimaru-sama told me to get him a dozen eggs."
They look at each other and parse out what to do in hushed whispers. They slide her a carton of eggs after a moment and she thinks Sensei's name should be its own form of bullying.
"Thanks!"
She flickers back to the tent and is greeted with a pat on the head, but ducks out of it and gives Sensei the stink eye. She hasn't forgiven him for the wake up call yet. He chuckles at her.
Minato is rinsing rice to put in a pressure cooker, and Kakashi is bringing a batch of miso soup to a simmer. That Sensei trusts Kakashi with the miso soup over Minato says nothing good about Minato's cooking skills.
She puts the eggs down on the folding table Minato brought and sits on one of the matching chairs, bringing her knees up to her chest. She didn't sleep well last night. Too much activity in the camp.
"What are we doing today?" she asks, yawning.
"You will be doing reconnaissance with the Intelligence Division here in the camp." Sensei sits across from her and opens the carton of eggs. He takes one and pushes the carton her way. "Depending on what you find, Minato and I may commit some light sabotage at sunset."
She takes an egg and they crack them on the tabletop in unison. Kakashi watches on in horrified disgust as they swallow down the eggs, raw. He tugs on Minato's sleeve.
"Sensei, Sensei! They just ate raw egg!"
"Sensei, Sensei!" she mimics. "Show him the trick where you swallow the whole egg!"
Sensei reaches for the carton, but it's only to put his broken egg shell in one of the empty slots. She pouts.
"Not before breakfast, Honōka-kun. It would be rude to put Kakashi-kun off his meal."
Minato lets out a nervous laugh, and Kakashi grips his sleeve tighter. "Oh, look guys, the rice is done… haha…!"
After breakfast, Sensei shows her to the tent where the Intelligence Division works from. They seem to operate on shift work. A group of four chūnin are just leaving, yawning and rubbing their eyes, as another group of four takes over.
It's dark inside the tent, but she's never had trouble seeing in low lighting.
At the back of the tent, a man with major bags under his eyes reclines on a folding chair being held together with compression bandages and spite. They approach him.
"Yo, Orochi," the man drawls unenthusiastically. "How can I help you today?"
"It is rather how I can help you today, Kōmori."
Honōka glances between them. There's some kind of thinly veiled maybe-animosity-maybe-not-animosity. She's not sure what it is, yet.
The man, Kōmori, gestures to the four chūnin situating themselves at the long table in the center of the tent.
"As you can see, I have all the help I require."
Sensei makes a noise that is one hundred percent meant to sound the way it sounds—patronizing. He maybe really doesn't like this guy? She's not quite getting the exact nuance.
"Yes, I suppose you do. Of course, if you were planning on looking beyond the border, you would need a significantly larger team—or perhaps one S-rank sensor-nin."
Kōmori slowly leans forward, chair creaking ominously. His eyes flick down to her and he discretely focuses his chakra—oh, he's a sensor type!
"The kid doesn't seem like much, Orochi."
Sensei rests a hand on his hip and gives her a mental nudge. Go wild, he seems to say. Not like there's any point in her hiding if the biggest Boogie Man around already knows what she is.
She glances over to the chūnin at the table. They're wearing interesting helmets and seem to be manipulating water droplets on a map of the surrounding area, except she knows each of those drops is an ally in their camp. She wonders what would happen if she made her frequency really screech?
The man in front of her winces and the water droplets on the table explode. One of the chūnin sensors rips their helmet off.
Then she raises her amplitude until it matches the area's ambiance and effectively disappears, leaving the chūnin sensors at the table scrabbling to figure out where the sudden spike came from.
"Kōmori-san! Unconfirmed encounter with an enemy sensor-nin!"
Kōmori near snarls.
"Shut up, Kanzai! It's just Orochi's little monster here."
Four heads turn, gaping at her. She crosses her hands behind her back and waves at them from where their boss can't see.
"You lot, stop gawkin' and get back to work!"
A long moment passes, of which Kōmori attempts to discern her chakra signature. She's shocked when he gets it.
"Shōkyo, huh? You're brazen, I'll give you that much, brat."
She purses her lips.
"However, Shōkyo's old school now, brat. You'll have to come up with something else to trick ears like mine."
She tilts her head at Sensei, subtly pointing her chin to her stomach. Sensei returns her an amused eye roll.
She pulls her chakra in with an exaggerated sigh and places it inside her lower dantian, beyond the nexus.
Total silence.
A shiver that's three parts thrilled and one part absolutely terrified runs down her spine. She's not used to not feeling anything. The silence is like staring into an impossibly deep chasm with no bottom. It makes her feel weak in the knees, and she's not even afraid of heights.
She holds it. She can't tell what Kōmori is feeling, but there's sweat breaking out on his forehead, possibly from engaging his sensor ability to the extreme.
"How?"
Sensei's lip twitches and she shrugs. She brings her chakra signature back out, clamping down on a jerk as the momentary silence breaks with a cacophony of too many ringing signatures and blaring emotions. She adjusts her amplitude again until she's the loudest and everyone else is quiet in comparison.
Kōmori looks like he wants to be sick.
"Orochi, where in the eight hells did you find this kid?"
"Wouldn't you like to know, Kōmori." Sensei doesn't deign to actually answer him.
"Tsunemori Honōka-desu." She provides.
"…Tsunemori-ya, like the bathhouse?" he asks.
"Tsunemori, with kanji, actually." She finger-spells the characters. "Tsune, always; and mori, forest. Would you like me to spell Honōka for you as well?"
His brows creep up and the bags under his eyes look all the deeper for it. Sensei is mentally cackling.
"Orochi… this kid is either full of shit, or seriously has the heat to back what they're packing, yeah?"
Uh-oh. She just committed some shinobi faux pas. She can feel it.
Sensei fondly ruffles her hair, surprising her. He never does that in front of strangers?
"Honōka-kun, you made three major statements just now. Would you like me to inform you of which three you made?"
She nods, pretending very hard that she is not completely mortified.
"First, you declared an official spelling for your family name. Historically, that would be the same as declaring yourself a clan head. The more contemporary meaning is, more or less, to boast your ability as a shinobi.
"Second, you declared your name as a challenge to do battle. While I am sure Kōmori appreciates your vim, we are currently on a mission. Perhaps save it for another time?"
Her entire face turns red, and Sensei has to hide a face splitting grin behind his hand for a couple seconds.
"Thirdly, and I think this is the angle you were trying for; you insulted Kōmori's intelligence by suggesting he could not read kanji."
A moment of tense, awkward silence.
"She's not going to apologize, is she?" Kōmori asks.
"Goodness no, what does she have to apologize for, you old bat?" Sensei thinks she was hilarious just now.
"You're a slimy snake bastard and you shouldn't be allowed anywhere near children." Kōmori accuses. "Look at this one; I'm sure she was a nice, normal, kid before you got your hands on her."
"That is debatable," Sensei sniffs. She huffs.
Kōmori blows out a long sigh and rubs his forehead.
"Alright, alright. I'll bite. Is this kid actually an S-rank sensor-nin? Can she really look across the border, preferably without being noticed?"
She nods. "Get me a big enough map, a compass, and a protractor and I'll prove it."
"Kid, you're so old school you're making me feel hip." Kōmori says.
Sensei pats her head again and brags. She can't say he never does that, but he doesn't brag thoughtlessly either. "She did learn everything she knows from the Second Hokage's personal journals."
"Gods, have mercy. Do I need to set up a giant map on the ground somewhere?"
"One centimeter every half kilometer is fine if you don't want to waste too much space." She says.
"Gods, this kid."
By lunch, Kōmori has set up another tent where the whole floor has been manipulated with Earth Release to form a scaled map of the region. She kneels in the middle of it, scratching notes on it with a kunai.
Sensei sits on a stool nearby, fingers steepled in front of his mouth. Kōmori's been drinking coffee straight from the pot for the last two hours. She grits her teeth. They're both… anxious.
She stops on another spot and starts sorting signatures again. They're a lot farther away than what she's used to sensing for and expanding her sensory-field so far while using Shōkyo to make doubly sure no one notices her is a lot. She rests her forehead on the ground and tries to make her mental image stop shaking so much.
"Honōka-kun?" sudden concern.
She holds up a finger and continues sorting the jumbled mess. After another moment, she lifts her head off the ground and scrawls out an approximate number. Two hundred to two hundred fifty. That brings her total count to somewhere around… thirteen hundred?
She rolls over on her back. Her sensory-field snaps back and her ears ring.
"Sensei, everything's spinning." She sounds slurred. She feels like she might throw up.
"That would be chakra exhaustion, you daft child…!" He's hovering over her, using the Mystical Palm Technique to check her. "Honōka-kun! You reckless child—might I remind you your chakra ratio is one-to-one—just because you can use your maximum amount of chakra does not mean you should!"
"Oh, right," she says. Her mouth taste funny. "You die when that happens…"
A flash of something almost hysterical, then cooler, forced, levelheadedness.
"Chew this."
Sensei shoves something smelly under her nose. She screws up her face at it. She thinks it might be a soldier pill. "Smells yuck," she says. It doesn't budge, and Sensei is crushing her under the weight of his concern. She reluctantly opens her mouth and he drops the soldier pill in her mouth after tipping up her head.
She chews, and it's not as bad as she thought. The spinning stops and she blinks, exhausted. Everything was kind of gray for a moment there. Sensei helps her up.
"Straight to bed," he says.
"Eh… but, I'm not done—"
"You are done."
"But—"
"You are done. Go back to the tent and go to sleep."
"Sensei—"
"I will carry you," he threatens.
She stops protesting. "Okay."
He expects her to start walking, but she just waits. He sighs and picks her up.
"You are so spoiled."