Living in a hidden village is, by necessity, living beside and within an army of supernatural assassins. Most of the time, you wouldn't notice it, though. Civilians seem to make a concerted effort to avoid acknowledging exactly how lethal their neighbors, tenants, and landlords are. No onereallywants to think about how the guy who runs the flower shop part-times in Torture and Interrogation as a mind reader, after all. Combined with the fact that there's at least tacit acknowledgment by most people that their livelihoodsdependon shinobi bringing in money and keeping out enemy agents, the populace at large has an opinion on ninja ranging from vaguely-pleasant to amicably-neutral.

Ninja have their business, civilians have theirs; shall the two cross paths as little as possible.

This means that it's something of a taboo to publicly badmouth ninja in Konoha. Notably, not any specific ninja. You could gossip about any one shinobi or kunoichi who fucked up or on the rare occasion publicly recognized, but you didn't make broad generalizations in public about how all ninja were two-faced killers or human weapons barely leashed by the daimyo. I'd had to run enough errands for Sagara that I'd run into that kind of talk behind closed doors or in the backrooms of bars. You had to be a special kind of stupid to run your mouth in public. My boss had friends and acquaintances who wore headbands, after all, and even if he couldn't refuse good business, he didn't want to deal with assholes who bad-mouthed shinobi personally.

He had me for that.

Which was how I found myself making my way through one of the alleyways that I commonly used as a shortcut when I had to make the rounds with various deliveries to people who paid extra for the convenience. Say what you will about the gig economy, but its traditions run deep. In particular, many customers were irritable when I was later than they felt I should be, as ancient traditions dictated. So whenever possible I took one of the weird winding paths that cut through the various housing blocks to make room for the great trees Konoha was famous for. Contrary to most expectations for 'alleyways,' these spaces tended to be nicely-shaded paths with benches and tables near sections of greenery reserved for Hashirama's trees, bound by shimenawa-sacred ropes-as tiny shrines to a man who was still revered as something of a god by the people of the village at large.

"So I says to the guy, ah-shit, there he is!"

On this particular occasion, though, three kids a few years older than me were lingering against a wall, their laughter coming to an abrupt stop as I neared them. With the slow confidence of someone who knew they were going to get away with what they were about to do, each of them took up positions at the left, right, and middle of the wide alley as I approached. Their body language was an open book to me with highlighted passages detailing aggression, intent to harm, and some kind of weapon on each of their person. I'd bet a knife, probably. Kunai were a possibility, but there was an aversion to ninja weapons among civilians and 'sharp stabby thing' was a fairly wide category most people were familiar with.

I came to a stop some three meters before their 'ambush' and sighed as I looked them over. Rough clothing, likely orphans, a few visible scars across their knuckles... yeah, if I hadn't been certain beforehand, I knew where this was going now.

"So you're the smith's brat who's always hanging around with those kunoichi whores." The 'leader' stated with confidence, an easy grin on his face.

...or not, I guess? I could have no idea where this was going.

I stared straight at the teen's eyes, unblinking. "Fuck off and die in a fire."

He blinked, then scowled as he uncrossed his arms and took a step forward, his minions doing likewise. "Oi, don't be like that, you little brat. We're not here to yoink your whores or nuthin, just want to make sure ya' know you gotta 'share with your seniors or somethingbadmight happen! Right, fellas?"

The retard gallery chuckled and tried to flex on me.

I wanted a witty retort for the situation, really I did, but... this was really a pearls before swine situation. Evidently, the leader took my silence as an invitation to continue. "Look, it ain't all that hard to understand, they'll even like it! Sluts like them'll think it's trainin' or sumthin'! You should take it as a compliment, even, if those bitches are all over you like that! Just can't be greedy about it, you know?"

I took a deep breath and exhaled, because I'd hoped this kind of stupid would attract the attention of the Powers That Be and remove themselves from the gene pool for their crimes against intelligence. On the one hand, the fact that a bunch of mid-to-late teenagers could talk this kind of shit as unsubtly as they were rehabilitated a tiny piece of my faith in the style of Konoha's government, if not the form of it. On the other hand, though...

"So what do you say, kid?" The leader asked, opening his hands invitingly with a grin. "You can take a beating or you can help us teach those whores of yours useful lessons when they go to work suckin' cock for the village."

...this meant that I had to be the one to deal with it.

"You know..." I began, a bit of wonder in my tone. "I'm actually kind of surprise dat how angry I am?" The idiot stared at me uncomprehendingly. "I mean, yeah, I don't really think that a bunch of kids my age should be sent out to kill bandits or other ninja, but... that's the kind of cold faceless bureaucratic pragmatism it's hard to summon up anger at. You? Gods, it's like staring at the poster-child for willful ignorant stupidity. It's like having the platonic solid of 'dumbass' reveal itself to you in all of its perfected terrible wrongness."

Going red in the face, the leader sneered at me. "Well, if you want the beatin' that bad, all ya' had to do was ask, ya' fucking' wordy shit."

I shifted my bag slightly as I watched him approach,something fluttering on the edge of my senses as a concentration-or was it two-sped by above me. Or, one of them suddenly stopped and the other felt like it had just faded into existence?Hmm...

A few months ago, I'd dipped a bit of my potential into chakra control, just to see what happened. It was, after all, a learnable skill if you had the chakra to use it. The thing was, I'd been learning chakra control on my own, by that point, for about four years.

I'd picked up the leaf exercise back before my eighth birthday and had been working it religiously ever since, making tiny yet incremental gains as I kept the leaf fluttering for longer and longer. Now that I had a base to build on, I wanted to see what adding to that with my power would allow me to do.

Where before, I had the chakra control of a particularly talented genin, now I estimated I was more on par with a talented chunin. Itachi's words two months ago had confirmed it, even if my lackluster capacity meant that I could only stretch my reserves to perhaps three hours of moderate activity. I could have dipped further into the discipline and started to pick up a few elemental and shaping aspects of control as well to round me out, but...

I lived in the house paranoia built and, with the understanding that Itachi was leaning over my shoulder, I wanted something he couldn't necessarily just blink and copy for himself. Which was kind of stupid and petty since it wasn't as though I'd actually be able to take the guy on in real combat, but... it kind of made my pride itch that he'd likely seen enough to take what I was teaching Tenten and Satsuki for himself. Even if that hadn't been his intention in watching over his sister.

So I'd used the interim months to take another advancement in Prana-Bindu and then grabbed my first real training in the Weirding Way. The asshole in me, deep down, looked forward to the first time Itachi tried to mimic a martial arts form that required complete and utter control of every muscle in your body to the point that you could massage your own adrenal gland and indirectly stimulate parts of your brain to increase your own perception of time temporarily.

The glorious leader pulled his hand back with a wide, vicious smirk as he put the full effort into using the half-foot of height he had to loom over me, no doubt deciding to down me with a single blow to the head and then beat on me once I was on the ground. Instead, as he exhaled and moved to draw in a huge lungful of air to shout as he struck me, I reached out and tapped him in the center of his chest with my open palm.

He gasped, his momentum stolen as his breathing pattern was disrupted. Desperately trying to get air, he toppled to the ground holding his own throat and wheezing just to stay conscious.

If I'd intentionally timed it better, I'd have stopped his heart completely.

With the two lackeys standing to either side of me, stupified and staring in surprise at their erstwhile boss struggling to breathe on the ground beside them, my hands lashed out again, each receiving a gentle tap in the split-second their lungs started to inflate, quickly landing them in just the same situation as their nominal boss.

I sighed again, dropped into a crouch and deftly began patting the boys down for their village identification cards, finding them after a few moments in their coin purses. "Takeshi." I pointed at the center teen, then the other two. "Ren, Moku. All of you in orphanage three, fifteen years old, about to be aged-out I'm guessing since you're talking shit about kunoichi like you got dropped from the academy." Fanning the cards, I flapped them in the air as I contemplated the three teens gasping on the ground in front of me. "So. Here's what we're going to do." I picked the coin purses back up and put the cards back into them before tucking them away back into their pockets.

Even as scared and incapacitated as they were, I read confusion at the action in their eyes.

Then I pulled out the knife I carried strapped to the back of my waist and their eyes got very large indeed. Contrary to the sharp pieces of metal with leather-wrapped handles I'd found in their pockets, my 'knife' was the length of my eleven-year-old forearm, hand included. "I'm going to forget this happened, this one time." I stated bluntly, waving the shiny blade at each of them, intentionally catching a stray ray of sunlight to show off the water-like pattern on the steel. "You three pull a stunt like this again? After I do things to you that give you nightmares for the rest of your lives, I hand you over to the ninja police because you were talking about raping a kunoichi. Specifically, the daughter of the clan head of the Uchiha, who run the ninja police."

One of them loosed their bladder.

"If they don't kill you for attempted bloodline theft, you're going to get inducted into the penal legion of the genin corps." I explained slowly and carefully. "To be perfectly clear, I am not doing this because I don't want to hurt you or anything, it's because you're stupid and I pity you. If I was the type of person to give into the anger I felt when someone talked about hurting my friends, I would have systematically carved you up in places that would leave you alive, but permanently crippled so that when the orphanage kicks you out in a few months, you'd only be able to beg for food instead of working a real job."

I rapped the width of the blade on my knuckles, chiming out a tinny ringing sound against their abating choking. Punctuating my statement with a blank-faced stare at each of them in turn, I nodded and rose to my feet. Sheathing my knife, I smiled at the three. "It'll take you another minute or two to get your breath back, by that time I'll be gone. I see any of you again, I'll assume you're going to try something very stupid again and I'll have to hurt you."

Then I stepped over them and went on my way.

One of the nodes of active chakra that had been above me faded back into obscurity while the other... started following me. I made it about a block before ablur of blonde hair and a wide grindropped down from the single-story shop next to me. I stopped, having been half-expecting this, and blinked in surprise as a girl just a bit shorter than I was, stood from her landing crouch. She was wearing blue open-toed sandals, orange shorts, and an open blue and orange jacket over a plain white t-shirt. Her expressively wide blue eyes locked onto my brown ones and her lips curled even wider.

"That. Was. Awesome!" She cried, drawing ire from random villagers walking nearby as she waved her hands wildly. "They were like,'we're gonna' beat ya' up!' and you were like 'pop-pop-pop! Not today suckers!'" She mimed throwing several open-hand strikes before dissolving into giggles and bouncing on her toes in excitement. "I was totes just gonna' cover 'em in slime and stuff, but that was way better, 'specially the part where that jerk wet himself!"

I stared blankly at the girl, trying to decide if I should just quietly start moving around her and if she would notice or not before she spun back to me.

"I can't even-I can't even! Hehe!" She giggled again, covering her mouth before looking alarmed. "Oh shit! Mom always says I should introduce myself first!" She cleared her throat, standing up and sticking her non-existent chest out before jabbing a thumb at her heart. "I'm Uzumaki Naruko!"

...yeah, I kinda' figured, because that's just the way my luck is going today.