Eiji grimaced as he stepped closer to the village gates.
He hadn't wanted to go to the mainland, dammit.
He'd been perfectly happy on that nice little island.
Stupid convincing future-leader's-wife.
Stupid duty.
All he wanted to do was charge a nominal fee for accounting services.
Interact with no one.
At least no one else in the line was particularly chatty.
Of course, that meant he had plenty of time to look around.
The Land of Fire was a stupid country.
Trees weren't meant to be that size, dammit!
Trees were meant to be, like, climbable, or whatever.
But the further inland he'd gotten, the taller Fire's trees had gotten.
He glared at the closest one, which had to be at least 100 meters tall.
100 meters.
Stupid trees.
Stupid ninja jumping in between stupid trees.
The line shifted forward again.
He missed the Land of Dragons.
Okay, fine, there was a bit of a resource shortage… more than a bit of a resource shortage, actually… and the Daimyo had that weird thing going on where he was claiming to be a god, or whatever, but at least their shinobi had been sensible enough to stay on the ground!
And who cares about the Daimyo's delusions, anyway?
At last count, the port town he'd lived in had about one hundred different faiths being practiced simultaneously—what's the issue with adding one more?
The Yamanaka who had been assigned to take him inland—a surly teenage chuunin who needed to learn how to act in polite society—seemed to be asleep on his feet.
Eiji glared at him too.
If Yamanaka-dono (because the woman was running the whole damn Yamanaka portion of Uzu—because that's apparently something women did in the east, so she deserved the title regardless of nuptials) hadn't been so damn convincing, then he'd be in his office right now.
He missed his office.
The line moved forward.
.
In truth, the statement that most of Konoha's nin weren't jounin-track was a bit of a misnomer.
Paperwork ninja—researchers, administrators, judges—weren't considered jounin-track, but if they got promoted high enough—jounin.
Backline ninja—medical people, interrogators, police—also weren't considered jounin-track but, again, if they got promoted high enough… jounin.
So really, jounin-track just meant mission-oriented.
And the funniest part of that was how the only ninja in Konoha who could absolutely not be considered jounin-track were mission-oriented.
And therefore jounin-track.
Maki Kyou had been a member of the genin corps for almost twenty years now. He counted himself lucky because his job—running sealed messages—was about as high-paying as it got before they started requiring a lot more than a seventeen-year genin had to offer.
Plus, you know, medical benefits.
That was the whole reason he'd stayed in the first place.
In hindsight, he really could have done well enough to get promoted back when he was young enough to still get taught. But he was lazy, and young, and stupid.
And so he'd just missed the target enough times that…
No more teachers.
No jounin-sensei at all.
Only a lifetime of simple labor to look forward to, the type where he wasn't privy to any important information at all because the assumption was that he'd be easy to torture.
He was only a genin, after all.
He really could have been more, once.
If only he'd had a little more time.
A little more maturity.
He still remembered when the Fourth Hokage took office, when he and his friends had gone out drinking to celebrate the mandatory minimum ages of genin, chuunin.
He still remembered running into other genin corps members, drinking away their anger—'how dare they get it easy when we didn't?'
He still had a scar from that night.
But now—
Now he ran sealed messages across Konoha.
Kept on Konoha's payroll.
And so life was… fine.
Decent.
Good, even, sometimes.
(He even had a girlfriend now, one he'd been dating for almost a year.)
But today…
Today really reminded him of the boredom of being a non-jounin-track jounin-track shinobi.
He'd go to Diplomacy, give them a seal. Receive a seal.
He'd go to Research, give them a seal. Receive a seal.
He'd go to Diplomacy, give them a seal. Receive a seal.
He'd go to Research, give them a seal. Receive a seal.
Over, and over, and over again.
And again.
He'd been running the same route for almost ten hours.
Daylight was almost completely gone.
And still.
He was running.
As he ran, and ran, and ran, his fellow older genin corps members gave him commiserating glances, knowing just how boring it was to run the same route repeatedly.
He doubted they'd ever done it for ten hours straight, though.
By the kami, he was tired.
Maybe they'd finish with dusk?
(They wouldn't.)
.
Sakura's eyes were burning.
She'd expected it, of course.
Planned for it.
But disappointment was still disappointment.
She'd pulled something out of nothing before—why not now?
But Iron…
Iron was built to say no.
And so they had.
Repeatedly.
Even Tsunade wasn't enough to persuade them.
Tsunade thought they were idiots.
Sakura was inclined to agree.
But that didn't change the facts, didn't change that they desperately needed raw goods that they had no other way of obtaining.
And they'd failed.
Sakura knew, already, that every upcoming death would weigh on her.
Would they have survived if they'd had enough iron to make more chakra-conducting ink for seals?
Would they have survived if they had enough metal to put down more railways, provide for more options?
Would they have survived if they had the necessary materials to continue to invent, innovate?
She'd never know.
But she'd never stop wondering either.
.
Shin was an insomniac.
Sometimes that had benefits.
For instance, his insomnia meant he was wide awake at three a.m., when Konoha sent him an emergency radio call.
And by nine—the earliest he could squeeze in a meeting with the Daimyo's advisors—he'd already managed to iron out exactly how he was going to sell it to them.
Sakura had told him, before, exactly how bad the resource shortage was.
The sheer number of resources Konoha has devoted to doing anything about it told Shin exactly how bad the resource shortage was.
And now—
Now he had a chance.
Not to fix it, necessarily, but to… mitigate.
So much could go wrong; anything but perfection would be some version of a failure.
But Shin—
He'd trained for that.
He'd practiced for this.
And so he would not fail.
Shin took a breath, rolled his shoulders.
He was ready.
.
It wasn't the Land of Dragons.
The Land of Dragons was too far away, too remote.
But the Land of Dragons had many snowy mountains, and those snowy mountains were once rife with resources.
Now they were mined out, of course, but that meant the Land of Dragons could mine those wintry elevations.
Which meant the Land of Iron wasn't the only nation that had that technology.
And the Land of Frost had mountains.
Many, many mountains.
They just lacked the technology.
Frost was Fire's ally.
Had once been Lightning's, but that was forever ago, now, in the timespan of ninja.
Frost was made of mountains.
Those mountains—they were absolutely full of minerals, but all the easy stuff had already been mined.
They needed better technology to get to the rest.
There were existing spies in the Land of Dragons.
At noon three days after Shin brought up the proposition, the Daimyo granted Konoha permission to 'acquire' the technology using those spies.
(Going the diplomatic route would take too much time, and how much did Fire actually care about Fire-Dragon relations?)
Barely a week later—
Confirmation.
The spies—three of them, every single current Dragon spy—had completely blown their cover, but they'd managed to hide their loyalties, stay alive, and—most importantly—get the technological plans.
They were racing, now, racing home.
Assuming nothing went horribly wrong, they'd have those plans in less than two months.
Based on what they already knew, they could get started setting up the mines immediately.
They'd suffer, fall and winter would be a struggle, but come spring—
Konoha would burn anew.