AN: Chapter title: Tower Work

"I don't like it but my old man must've heard about all this. He's made the call. For now…you all should go ahead and accept it. Just…Don't burn yourself out on this. If it gets too much, if one of those two try anything, if you feel like your lives are at risk, don't hesitate to run. Don't put yourselves in danger, not for something like this."

The words of Asuma-sensei had followed her for the past few days, came to her little more than randomly throughout the day like always.

He had given her, Shikamaru, and Choji a crash course in espionage, in evasion, drilled them on escape strategies.

He, like everyone else who knew about what they were doing, thought they were heading into the lion's den.

That they would be face to face with the beast Naruto Uzumaki had created and named the 'Orange Legion'.

'I don't think he thought this was what we were doing when he said that…' Ino could only stare at the papers in front of her. Blue eyes narrowed when she noticed one that stuck out among all the others. She snatched it up with a frown, read it over.

"You have got to be kidding me." She turned to the door, to the culprit behind it all. His attempts to look nonchalant were for not, his guilt clear from the way he looked everywhere but at her.

"Kiba! Stop trying to give Akamaru armor already!"

"But he needs it! I swear!"

"No he doesn't! We don't so he doesn't either!"

Ino crumbled up the form that had been slipped into her papers and threw it into the trash, wished Kiba was in her office instead of in the hall so he could see the glare in her bright blue eyes. When the other occupant of the office noticed her glaring at the wall, she could only sigh, reach out to lay a hand on her shoulder.

"You can't set things on fires with your mind Ino."

"I can try! I have a Fire Chakra Nature!"

Sakura returned to sorting through her half of the forms, calmly discarding the three Kiba had slipped in when he had delivered them. One had been another one about armor for Akamaru while the other two had been about adding a ninken corps to Naruto's already dangerous enough army.

'He does know we're supposed to be collecting information, not giving those two ideas, right?' At this point, Sakura wasn't too sure. She burned the papers regardless, one of Kakashi-sensei's lessons on disposing of documents.

In another few minutes, the two were done with their share of the workload. At least for now. Inevitably, either Kiba or one of the clones assigned to the task would arrive with more papers to fill out. But, for now, both could take a break and lean back in their chairs, find a moment to relax.

"This is still crazy." Emerald eyes focused on the ceiling above. "I still can't believe you talked him into letting me be one of these Tribunes too."

"I wasn't going to suffer through this by myself. Besides, it annoyed him so it was definitely worth it." Ino scoffed at the very idea of being stuck in this insane place alone. This tower, the mess she had willingly stepped into a few days ago, wasn't something she was going to endure on her own, without Sakura to back her up.

"It's still crazy. A part of me still doesn't believe we're getting paid for an S-Rank mission to do…something as easy as all this." Sakura could only shake her head, still couldn't do well in wrapping her head around how exactly they had gotten themselves here. "So…figure anything else out?"

"I wish." Ino sighed, dropped her head down to rest on her hand. "I still don't know what either of those two really want us here for. With those two gone, I'm not exactly left with chatterboxes. All I've really managed to get out of his clones is that a lot of this wasn't planned. It kind of all happened maybe the night before Sasuke spoke with us, maybe that morning from what they've been talking about."

"You actually get them to talk to you?" Sakura had become used to the glares she received from Naruto's army, the stubborn silence they held onto around her.

"Sort of." Ino brought her free hand up half way, wiggled it back and forth in front of her. "They get chatty when they get in a fight. I convinced Lee to hold some fighting thing yesterday and listened in since they talked while they waited. From what they say, none of them knew Naruto was leaving until he was gone that morning and got spotted. Sasuke sent out some special orders basically the day he handed those messages off to us, put us in these Tribunes positions. That was kind of why he was running around so much, why he looked kind of out of it." Ino turned her full attention to Sakura. "You figure out anything else about Karin?"

"She's nice if a little shy." Sakura gave her best summary of the redhead she had spent the day with yesterday, had endured the glares of Naruto's clone army to do so. "He really cares about her. Those clones watch her a lot and Sasuke came by yesterday to see her a few times too. He didn't say a lot but he kept looking at her with his Sharingan, it looked like he was scanning her or something."

"Now that's very interesting." Ino filed that information away, an excited gleam in her eyes. "I think we finally have something to go on Sakura."

Looking at the familiar smile on her face, the fire figuratively fire burning in her eyes, Sakura felt a silver of dread.

'I might have done a bad thing here.' She didn't want the nice girl she had met to have to deal with an interrogation from Ino. Even if the blonde would be nice about it, there was no telling how the girl would react to what she was about to deal with.

"Forget all this." Ino was on her feet, seemed excited for the first time in the past few days as she reached out to Sakura. "Let's go see her. I want to check something!"

Before Sakura could protest any further, before she could try to dissuade Ino from going to see Karin, she was already being pulled out the door and dragged down the halls.

From the glimpses she could see of the clones, even they looked confused at what was happening.

'What did I just get myself into?' She managed to catch a hint of Ino's expression, the hunger at a puzzle to solve clear on it. 'At least she's having fun.'

If nothing else, she could be happy that she had gotten Ino excited today.

Away from the two Kunoichi currently in pursuit of another, Shikamaru sat across from his once enemy in Gaara, once of the Hidden Sand and now, if his armor declared his allegiance, of the Orange Legion. The two of them continued their game of Go. He had an idea of where exactly Sasuke, Naruto, or Naruto's army had managed to acquire such a beautifully engraved floor board for the game. A carving of a story, of history of some kind, swept around the sides of it. Without being able to see what laid on the side Gaara's set, he had no idea what it was. He could guess it had something to do with the Land of Waves.

It didn't change the fact that the board seemed to simply scream expensive, scream excess.

His father was someone who played the game rather often, had taught him how to play the game, and his board was one passed down from his father to him, passed down the many Nara Clan Heads since the near beginning of the Clan. It was well cared for, had been an expensive gift from a Daimyo of some kind for the Nara Clan's aid in a battle during the Warring States Period if his father's history lesson was correct. While the board was clearly something that had cost a fortune, the Genin didn't discount the high price for the artistically crafted bowls or for the seemingly individual painted stones, white bearing gold and black bearing silver in carefully laid out designs.

Instead of taking in the grandeur of the board or the fact that this was the second highly expensive floor board he had seen in the Legion's possession, he focused on playing the game with Gaara.

He had already played against the head of Naruto's bodyguard, the Praefectus Castrorum, in by far the oddest games of Go he had ever experienced. His list of odd games had previously included a handful against Kiba, one against Kiba's sister Hana, a match immediately after against her three ninken partners the Haimaru Brothers, and he had ended the day playing against Akamaru with Kiba and Hana watching. With such a series of oddities under his belt, he had considered the title of oddest game unassailable, the top five or so firmly entrenched in their all but permanent places. His game yesterday with the head of Naruto's bodyguard had quickly made it to the top of the list. From the initial misunderstanding to how the game was played to the odd strategy he had played against. It had ended with him needing to find a new Go board for his game with Gaara and the Praefectus Castrorum wanting a rematch the Nara was not in a hurry to give him.

Now playing the game with Gaara, he simply wanted to confirm something before he figured out how to convince the Uchiha to play against him.

"I don't understand how this game is a stand in for strategy." Gaara placed another stone, black, on the board. He hadn't taken longer than a second, had remained in a competitive game with the Nara so far.

"I don't put a lot of thought into stuff like that." Shikamaru played his next move at around the same pace as Gaara, his dark eyes meeting the blue of his former enemy. "But what makes you think that?"

"The stones. There's too many rules to using them, how to place them." Gaara placed his next stone as he spoke, had returned his eyes to the board the two sat on opposite sides of. "If you were to apply a Go strategy to actual battle, you would be killed or fail your mission."

"And you're certain about this?" A white stone was placed on the board as the Nara asked his opponent the simple question.

"Yes." A black stone followed it as Gaara answered.

"Why?" A white stone was played.

Gaara didn't play another stone. The clatter associated with grabbing a stone told the Nara his opponent had just come to a stop.

Shikamaru looked up from the game board at his inaction, dark eyes meeting the green of the Jinchuriki.

"If a stone is to represent a Shinobi of a Hidden Village, a samurai serving his Lord, any combatant on the battlefield, why is it constrained by such arbitrary rules?" Gaara looked at the artfully painted black stone in between his fingers. "When you capture one of these stones, you suffer no losses, face no struggle besides however long it takes to surround it. All you have to do is block it in with four of your own. If a stone is supposed to represent us, is this game telling us we surrender easily? That we refuse to fight when we believe we've been surrounded, that we're supposed to simply give in?" The stone fell into his hand, his closed fist threatened to crush the stone. "Such a concept confuses me."

"That may be looking into it a little too much." Shikamaru shrugged. "At the end of the day, this is just a game to play. Something to pass the time, something to play against friends, family when you have the chance." The Nara looked over the board, the mostly erratic or reactionary placement of the stones Gaara had been laying down. "If you try to turn the moves you make in a game of Go into an actual strategy for the battlefield, I don't know how well that'll turn out. We're just playing with stones, not human life."

"I see." Gaara set the stone down without much thought behind it, the Nara taking note of the random placement of the stone. "So we're just playing this to pass the time?"

"Yeah." Shikamaru paused in the midst of placing down his next stone, met Gaara's eyes once more. "That alright with you?"

"Yes."

Shikamaru, much like his opponent, set his stone down without much rhyme or reason to it. It was in reaction to wherever Gaara placed his own.

Gaara drew his next stone out of the bowl, laid it down on the board.

The Nara took in the game board, the trio of straight lines Gaara had laid out and his own replicated strategy. The board divided nearly perfectly down the middle between the two fields of stone.

'It was dumb of me to think his strategy would be any different from the other guy.' He spared a glance to the bowl at his side. 'And I'm starting to think we're going to run out of stones.' He withheld the urge to sigh. 'Hopefully Choji's doing better than me today.'

Shikamaru would have to hope for the Akimichi to succeed while he wasted his time in a game of Go.

Shino Aburame observed the state of Naruto's two prisoners from the doorway, couldn't help the silver of pity that he had begun to hold for them over the past few days. The two were caged inside of Naruto's tower, ignored by their guards unless they refused to eat multiple meals in a row, were visited by Sasuke Uchiha at least twice daily to check them for scars or, if reports had reached them, to put them into a dreamless sleep. They could do nothing in their situation, whatever orders Naruto had given concerning them seemingly set to impose such a mindset of utter helplessness every minute of every day.

They didn't even possess a door any longer, Sasuke had commanded its immediate removal to the guards posted outside just yesterday.

His reasoning for why was known only to him, the second in command of Naruto's army unreachable by them when he was guarding the Daimyo as he traveled around the village.

"Is it bad to…you know, feel bad for those two?" Kiba had come onto the floor serving as the cell for two of the children of the Hidden Sand's Kazekage, his voice a whisper. "I mean, they should be the bad guys and they should be in prison for the attack but…they're not even that much older than us. You know?"

Even if he did speak at a normal volume, Shino was sure the two prisoners wouldn't react to his words. So far, they simply remained seated next to each other, left themselves awash in the misery of their situation.

"That's a difficult question to answer. It's natural to pity others…even those who should be our enemy." Shino turned away from the two, motioned to Kiba that it was time for the two of them to leave. The Praetorians of Naruto's army took up their positions once more as they passed by them in the hall. At the door leading to the stairs off the floor reserved for the prisoners, the one Shino knew was called a Centurion, a leader in Naruto's army, let them pass by without a word or a greeting.

Kiba waited until they were in the stairs to let a shiver loose down his spine.

"Man, those guys are the ones that really freak me out. They know how to be creepy with the way they just stare at us." Kiba spared a glance to the metal door that had been slammed shut behind them.

"They are indeed creepy." Shino paused, gave in to the sudden urge to search Kiba with his covered eyes. Behind his glasses, they widened. "Akamaru?" He finally noticed the absence of the ninken, was more than a little embarrassed it had taken him this long to take note of such a thing. He had become far too used to Kiba and Akamaru being little more than one entity to view them separately.

It didn't help that the two had a similar enough Chakra signature that he couldn't tell the difference some days.

"Oh yeah, that Karin girl in the tower likes him so I left him with her for the day. He wanted to check something out about her too, try to figure a few things out." It was strange to see Kiba suddenly take a turn for the serious, the look on his face losing its normal relaxed appearance as he thought about the redhaired girl. "With how weird she smells, I wanted to give him some time on his own to figure out what's going on with her."

"And how exactly does she smell weird?" Shino felt the need to ask such a thing, familiar with the Inuzuka Clan and how "weird smells" usually meant something bad.

From poison to illnesses, an Inuzuka's nose could discover any number of things from "weird smells" as they called them.

"That's the thing. She doesn't really have a smell. At least sometimes she doesn't. It just goes away and then it comes back all of a sudden, totally without warning. It's hard to explain if you don't, you know, can smell it. Or not smell it. Like today, the only thing I ever got from her when I stopped by was whatever perfume she's wearing and barely at that. Akamaru got a little more but not much, just the smell of her clothes, whatever was lingering from what she had for breakfast, stuff like that." It wasn't hard to see how much such a thing threw his teammate off from the look on his face. "There's not a lot of people who can just get rid of their scent like that. Not even we do it well. We know how to cover it up but that's exactly it, you work at it hard enough and you can still find it. But, at least sometimes, I just get a whole lot of nothing from her."

"It could be a Bloodline Limit, a secret technique of the Uzumaki. That could perhaps be why Naruto had secured her inside this building, placed her under such heavy guard." Shino gave his best guess towards how Karin was able to do such a thing, why she was within Naruto's tower. "Should I investigate her with my kikaichu?"

"Nah." Kiba shook his head. "I don't think we should freak her out with something like that." Suddenly, a grin took over his teammate's face. "Or, do you think she's into bugs?"

Shino merely shook his head at Kiba's words, the clear lean he was taking with them.

"Is that really where your mind goes?"

Kiba only laughed before the two Shinobi parted ways. The Aburame was heading further up the tower to try and speak with Shikamaru while Kiba was heading off to find where Choji had went off to with those clones, see if he could tell him where Hinata had gone off to since they had arrived at the tower today.

Just like yesterday and the day before, minus spotting her at the start of the day, he hadn't seen her at all.

'Just where are you heading off to all the time Hinata?'

The Tribunes, despite what they had come to think over the past few days, were not given full access to Caesar's tower. None of them had been allowed into the lower floors save for one.

Caesar's pet project: Hinata Hyuga.

Only she had been allowed to the level the Legate had taken to keeping his own pet project: The three he had captured from the Hidden Sound during the invasion. The Legate had spoken with her before her first day as a Tribune, explained what he needed from her, what Caesar needed from her.

"You've done well Hyuga." Sasuke was, unknown to any of the others, in the tower. He examined the three he had entrusted to the Hyuga to educate as he normally would. If he possessed the time. He was surprised at just how thorough she was, how perfectly she had followed his orders. "A few more days of this should do it."

His Sharingan swept over the three, took note of any possible long-lasting damage and found none. A part of him was growing more and more impressed with the Hyuga, at the results created from the fire mere words from Caesar had ignited within her. He had, for a long while, not thought she was worth Caesar's effort, that it was a waste for him to spend his limited time speaking with a girl like her.

Clearly, he had been wrong.

Caesar had an eye for talent above his own and, more importantly, knew how to draw it out.

The once disappointing Hyuga had improved to a level he would've thought impossible for her a few months ago.

It was as if she was a totally different person when gifted direction by Caesar, when he had imparted to her such a simple thing as drive.

"The Gentle Fist is truly a terrifying style." Sasuke continued his examination of the three, spare a glance with his Sharingan to the Hyuga standing nearby before returning to the three. "I didn't expect my dogs to be so well trained so soon." He dragged the limp head of Zaku up, saw no damage from Hinata's strike to his head to knock him unconscious. Despite the dog having the chance to experience Caesar's might firsthand during the Chunin Exams, he was the most disobedient of the three dogs the Legate had found, constantly found reason to backtalk or insult to the detriment of himself and the other two. "At this rate, I'll no longer have to confine Karin to the tower." He allowed himself to laugh. "The Praetorians may be disappointed to have her leave but I'll assign her a protection detail just as precaution."

Hinata said nothing.

The Uchiha spared her another look.

He didn't exactly fear the Hyuga but her silence was concerning.

"Does Naruto love her?" Hinata spoke and Sasuke almost wanted to laugh.

'I had almost forgotten she's in love with him.' It had slipped his mind, the one critical facet of Hinata Hyuga that Caesar's plan was intent to use rather thoroughly. 'Her skills at all this overshadowed that. For the moment.' The Legate didn't immediately ridicule the Hyuga for such a question, chose to address this now.

The last thing Caesar needed was to deal with something like this upon his return to the Hidden Leaf. "Caesar does indeed love Karin. Deeply and fiercely does Caesar love her." Sasuke chose to at least have some fun with this. "The moment he came to know of her, he loved her as deeply as anyone in his position would. When he learned of her torment, of the agony inflicted on her by the Hidden Grass, his rage was greater than anyone else's. And when he saw her safe at last, protected, treated as she deserved, his joy was second to none."

Sasuke carefully watched the Hyuga without turning to her in full, his Sharingan waiting for the moment she moved to attack him, waited for the moment where her love bled away to nothing short of pure rage.

When it came, regardless of what Caesar would've wished if he was here, he would remove the girl as a threat. Whatever consequences would come of this, he would deal with them in place of Caesar.

If her love proved to be an obsession for Caesar in lieu of devotion, proved to be nothing short of a detriment to the Legion if it was ever spurred, the Legate would act within his duties and eliminate her before she could become a problem.

All he needed was a silver of that rage he knew so well, would need the slightest hint to her moving to attack him.

It didn't come.

"Like any one would love their family, Caesar loves his cousin. She is like a sister to him, one he holds a great deal of familial love." Sasuke turned to face the Hyuga as he spoke.

Relief covered her face, love once more bloomed in her eyes. He wasn't entirely sure if it didn't burn stronger now than it had only moments before.

"Why were you so curious about Caesar's love for his cousin?" The Legate took some joy in taunting her, playing with her emotions a little. If she wouldn't prove to be a source of danger, she would be a source of entertainment for him like the rest of the Tribunes he had placed between Karin and the Hidden Grass.

His question didn't earn any words as the answer.

Her was almost a little impressed by the glare she gave him, the look of annoyance directed at him.

"Easy Hyuga. I'm simply teasing." He headed past her and towards the door. "Come, your work is good but there's plenty of room for improvement. I need them turned compliant, not rendered invalid. They won't be able to serve the purpose I have in mind if you break them." He shook his head, despaired for a moment at having to go about the three's "education" in such a way. "This would be so much easier if the Daimyo didn't eat up so much of my time."

The Praetorians posted outside the cell wordlessly opened the door for them, a pair going inside to slacken the restraints keeping the three in place with the Hyuga's time with them done.

At least for today.

She would no doubt return tomorrow, begin the whole process again.

To her, acts such as these merely confirmed her love for Caesar.

As concerning as the Legate considered her infatuation, he couldn't deny the results her 'love' for Caesar had created.

AN: I threw in line breaks in this one.

Next chapter in 1-2 weeks.

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Peace.