"Ino what did you see." Tsunade sat behind her desk staring at Ino intently. She had a calm but concerned look on her face.

If the interrogation would have went as planned Ino and Shikamaru would both be writing up paperwork and arranging for new missions by now, but it had not gone at all as planned, not at all, so he brought a shaken up Ino to the only person he thought could get something out of her at that point.

"Ino you don't have to tell me, you could use your jutsu and show me."

Shikamaru watched as Ino's hands recoiled at the notion of using her jutsu again. It pained him to see her in this state.

"I didn't really see anything. It was mostly darkness but I felt…" she trailed off and Shikamaru could see her eyes glaze and her jaw stiffen. She was reliving the moment. It must have been something powerful.

"I could feel tremendous pain and suffering and torment. I saw flashes of a village and fire. It wasn't like most interrogations. I wasn't sifting through her memories, she was… she was giving them to me, and they never feel like my own. They don't feel like my memories. I think like she was forcing me to experience these awful moments, but she was blocking my vision somehow. She didn't want me to see something. She just wanted me to feel…everything."

Even now Ino was trying to analyze the girl. As she recovered from her state of shock she looked up to Tsunade hoping for some kind of interpretation, but it was Shikamaru that spoke first.

"She must have some kind of mind jutsu and she's obviously hiding something from us. We need to get to the bottom of it. Ino and I discussed the possibility that these weren't mercenary hits, and there isn't some puppet controlling her. If Ino's up for it I propose a second interrogation preformed under sedation." Shikamaru said straightening up. He wanted to protect Ino, but he also knew she was strong enough, if not stubborn enough, to continue with their mission.

"Shikamaru, we have some of our best people working on this with you. It wasn't much to go on, actually it was pretty much nothing to go on, but the name helped. We can now connect Rogue X to 2 other assassinations." Shikamaru felt the tension in his shoulders increase. This was a step forward, but it just thickened the plot, very troublesome.

Tsunade pulled a folder from a stack on her desk and tossed it to Shikamaru. He shuffled through it and listened as Tsunade began to speak again

"We don't have her actual name or any connections to a village, but we know that she's been active in both Earth country and western Fire country. She's been known as The Mist or The Grey Wolf and has only been referred to as a merciless undetectable assassin. She's the thing of folk lore in small villages. Each of her two recorded kills were very similar to the two that brought us to this mission. The fact that we didn't connect them sooner only attests to the danger she poses on our village."

Tsunade looked wary as she rubbed at her temples, like she was leaving some parts of the story out that weighed greatly on her mind.

"I'm having two ANBU take over this case. If you or Ino remember anything of relevance pertaining to it please come to me, but you have been dismissed from this mission."

"You're putting ANBU on this case?" Shikamaru said a little confused. He could solve this, he was the head of the Strategies Unit in Konoha and Ino was rising in the ranks of the Interrogation Unit. They were probably the best people for this case.

"She's dangerous Shikamaru. Have you not witnessed it? She's a danger to you and Ino and me and this village. I won't be argued with. You can submit your reports tomorrow so they can be turned over to the ANBU. You are both dismissed." She said with finality.

Shikamaru could feel a hint of anger well up in him, but he didn't let it show. He waited for Ino to stand and then let her follow him closely out of the room.

"I feel like she's not telling us something. She said she has other people on this case that we had no idea about and then she takes the case and hands it over to the ANBU. She must have more than that useless file she just showed me. Half of it is redacted"

"Shika she obviously thinks this case is better suited for the ANBU. I mean at least you don't have to deal with it now. Too troublesome" She said in a mocking tone, which told him she had recovered from the whole ordeal. But still, there was something in the way that she didn't want to fight for this case that told him the incident with Mist had affected her.

Shikamaru shoved his hands in his pockets. This was an unintended sign to Ino that he hadn't given up he just didn't want to argue. Ino gave him a defying look and he smiled back at her scratching his head.

Shikamaru left for home early, which didn't happen very often, but he had been bothered by Mist's case all day. Something felt off about it.

He didn't know the ANBU's methods when it came to things like this, but he could only assume it involved torture or possibly a quiet, unpublicized assassination; either way it involved her disappearing even from the ninja's records. She would become a few paragraph or redacted black text and ash.

Shikamaru headed to the only place he knew he could be alone to think.

He wandered to the familiar patch of earth on his hill at the outskirts of Konoha. When his head finally collapsed back into the soft prairie grass he felt a familiarity that he hadn't in a long time. He rarely got the opportunity to do this anymore and it was a real shame because he felt something close to tranquility.

Shikamaru needed the world to slow down for a bit so he could clear his mind, and this was the only place he could do it. He spent some time watching as cloud after rolling cloud went by, imagining them as his thoughts passing in and out of focus and once, he finally felt his mind at ease and his body relaxed he closed his eyes.

"Our scoots say she's been moving sporadically through fire country but she is currently stationary on the western border. It's the perfect time to move in for an extraction."

Tsunade clasped her hands in front of her with the usual smirk on her face.

Shikamaru went home that night with the small file for the mission and laid its content out on the floor. He had a photographic memory, so it was easier to create a schema that way.

Rogue X

Age: Unkown (assumed to be 16-20)

Gender: Female

Height: Unknown (assumed to be 1.6-1.67 m)

Weight: Unknown (assumed to be 50-60 kg)

Rank: Unknown

Jutsus: Unknown

Affinity: Earth & Water, possible unknowns

Hand-to-hand Combat: Advanced

Melee Skills: Advanced

Mission: S-Rank

Ninja(s): Shikamaru N., Ino Y.

Estimated Length: 4 days

Location: Kinoko, Western Fire Country

Description: Extraction of Rogue X. Use of force is permitted. Suggested form of attack: long range.

Report back to: Interrogation and Holding, Hokage's Office

A small photo was clipped to the fill and he pulled it off scrutinizing the lack of focus and the blur of a strong moving body and swish of light blonde hair.

The two victims were both high-ranking officials in their villages, but other than that he had no idea who they were because much of their files were redacted. Thick black lines covered a majority of the text on the page. This wasn't completely out of the ordinary. Most of the missions he was sent on had some kind of classified information on them.

The ANBU were the only ones that had the privilege of seeing certain information, for the safety of the village he had always been told. It was his job to follow orders and he had always been okay with that because he never thought the information being withheld had any importance to what he did, which was protect the village. That was his greatest responsibility; to protect the people and place he loved. The rest he believed was all politics and formalities that the Hokage and the ANBU dealt with.

Sometime before he had been inducted into the Strategies Unit of Konoha he had been offered a position in the ANBU, but had turned it down. They lived much too troublesome lives. Without all that blacked out information Shikamaru would be reading cases all night. But now he was curious what exactly lay beneath those black bars.

He did remember another distinct observation about the victims; each kill was clean. They were bloody but they were precise. That's why he had assumed they were payed assassinations at first. There was no pageantry to them held meaning or sloppiness that hinted at a heat of the moment kill. Each victim was killed in almost the same manor, which was very common when it came to mercenaries.

Their files both came with coroner's reports. Shikamaru recalled the two identical rudimentary diagrams of the human body with a long straight dash drawn in red pen across the throat. There were pictures that accompanied one of the victim's files, paper clipped to the top of the manila folder.

He remembered the eyes of the victim. There was the empty look that he had seen so many times before, but then he wondered if he could also see their last thought; fear.

Now the pain that had been welling up in Shikamaru's temples and behind his eyes came to a climax as he tried to weave in the new files he had just seen briefly in Tsunade's office; a simple villager transporting fruit along fire country boarders, and a hermit living in earth country's woods.

It was the same coroner's report, except the hermit who had none. He was found too deep in the wilderness for any coroner to wander, and it seemed he had no one to be returned home to.

Ino had said that these could be more than assassinations that they were more personal. Mist could be killing for revenge, but then again, she was so clinical and that was not a trait of someone killing for revenge. Revenge normally came with anger, and a fight, it came with bruises and uncalculated blows. All this had was one simple red line.

How were any of these people connected except by one swift slice at the hands of a lethal woman?

Then something clicked and all these images flashed behind Shikamaru's eyelids all at once he grabbed at his throat reflexively.