Night had fallen by the time I stepped out the front door of the Intelligence Office, short one spook badge, and looked up to the stars that twinkled in the barest twilight.

By this time I was fairly certain that Fugaku would be home by now, probably eating with his family. I didn't feel like facing him just yet… the news of his betrayal was still too raw for me to deal with it now. It would have to wait until tomorrow after I'd had a chance to sleep and mull it over.

I didn't feel like thinking about it now, so I decided instead that a visit to the ninja bar was in order, I felt the need to get well and truly smashed before I could deal with all the trauma of recent events.

A few minutes later I was standing in front of the bar in question: the ninja bar didn't really have a name, the only thing that really made it stand out was the image of a kunai engraved onto an ancient piece of driftwood.

Beyond that, the building itself was nondescript, and was tucked away in a back ally near the main street that lead away from the Hokage complex.

After gazing at the driftwood sign for a moment, I shook my head and stepped into the bar. The bar was a place that one could say had… character: It was one whole open space, with about a hundred tables spaced a few feet apart, and the bar taking up a whole wall in the back.

Each table was made of intricately carved stone, which caused them to weigh a ton, and thus, no one could pick them up and throw them, which tended to happen a lot when Ninja got drunk. There were no seats, instead just cushions around the tables to sit on.

Each table was lit with a single candle in the center, and the candles had seals inscribed on them to make them last longer. The only other source of light was a small chandelier that hung above the bar itself.

On the wall to the left of the entrance was a series of billboards, each a few feet wide and long, and they were all covered in bingo pages, as it was a tradition to pin a bingo page about yourself if your entry was included in the bingo books of foreign villages.

The wall to the right, however, was just one large billboard that was plastered with thousands and thousands of bingo pages, each of which was marked with a colored X, Black for KIA(killed in action), Red for MIA(missing in action), and Blue for retired.

Obviously, the black X dominated the billboard.

I moved to the left wall, and found the spot where Enji, Shizumi, and I had placed ours about three years ago.

Shizumi's was missing, but I expected that, since it had already been marked as MIA over a year ago, and thus was moved to the other wall.

I looked at Enji's, expecting it to be the same, but apparently he had updated it:

Bounty number: 407

Name: Enji Shimura

Village: Konohagakure-no-Sato

Age: 18

Rank: A+

Operational Procedures: Approach with caution. Use numbers to surround this target. Avoid contact with Windblade. Focus on wearing him down.

Bounty: 14,000,000 Ryo.

Hidden Technique: Wind Release: Autolysys.

Important information: Wind Release: Autolysys is a powerful wind attack that degrades organic tissue over a wide range within the body upon contact. Wind Release: Autolysys is primarily channeled through subjects Windblade. A wound sustained through Wing Release: Autolysys is difficult to treat, and will often kill, even hours after contact.

Other information: Subject is a master of sword techniques and sword related ninjutsu. Subject primarily relies on his windblade in combat. Subject has no other known specialization. Subject is estimated to have Jonin level chakra pool, Subject is estimated to have a Chunin level chakra control.

Known kill count: 361

Status: Alive, active

Wanted: Dead.

Like mine, it was an Iwa bingo page. Not much had changed from the original, aside from the increase in rank and the known kill count.

Picking up one of the pens that was resting on a short end table nearby, I drew a big black X on it, then I unpinned it and walked to the other wall, where I pinned it next to Shizumi's. I then re-read Shizumi's Bingo page:

Name: Shizumi Aburame

Village: Konohagakure-no-Sato

Age: 16

Rank: B+

Operational Procedures: Use surprise attacks to keep the target off balanced. Avoid webs at all costs. Do not give the target any opportunity to set up traps. Use provided general antidote if bitten by spiders.

Bounty: 6,000,000 Ryo

Hidden Technique: Arthropod Nest Symbiosis.

Important information: Subject uses spiders to create webs to trap her targets. If given time, Subject can use her spiders to fill an area with hidden traps, which are usually lethal. Subject's spiders also have a potent venom that can kill with in a few minutes from a single bite. This venom tends to be variable in it's properties, so a general antidote will only slow it down. If bitten, retreat immediately and seek medical help.

Other information: Subject uses Chakra Strings to assist their spiders with setting up traps. Subject has some knowledge of Genjutsu, and has a working knowledge of Taijutsu, frequently using her spiders to assist her in combat. Subject relies on her spiders to help her end combat quickly, via multiple bites of their venom.

Known kill count: 41

Status: Alive, Active

Wanted: Dead.

I stared at it dully. I remembered when Enji and I had put it here two years ago… he had wanted to mark it with a Black X, but I had insisted that we mark it red because we didn't actually know that Shizumi was dead for certain.

Sure, I knew for a fact that there was no way that she could have beaten those Kiri ninja, they were basically the worst match up for her abilities that she could have had, but still, part of me maintained a faint hope that somewhere out there, she was still alive….

I shook my head. Damn it, I was getting depressed…

I turned around and walked over to the bar. I had come here to get smashed, not wallow in old memories.

"A bottle of your finest sake, please," I said to the bartender. "And make it warm."

"My finest sake, huh?" The bartender replied with bemusement. "I'll have to go down to the basement to get that."

I nodded, before putting a big wad of cash on the bar top. "Then do that, and while you're at it, I'm buying a round for the house."

The bartender's eyes widened. "Really?"

I nodded again.

The bartender smirked, before turning to the rest of the room and calling out: "Hey everyone! This gentleman's buying a round for the house!"

That was accompanied by whoops and cheers and cries of thanks.

I just nodded again.

With that, there was a great movement in the room as people came up to get another round, and it took a while for the bartender to get that bottle for me.

When he was done with the rounds, he got the bottle and put it on a tray with shot glasses for me, which I took and sat at one of the tables with. I poured my first shot and knocked it back, and the alcohol burned my throat, causing me to descend into a coughing fit.

"What have I told you about drinking it like that?" a voice from the other side of the table said when I had finished hacking out my last cough.

I looked up and saw that it was Toyokuni, who was sitting on the other side of the table. Tsuga was sitting next to him.

"Arn't you supposed to be in the Hospital?" I asked curiously.

"Eh, they fixed me up yesterday, but wanted me to stay in for a few days for 'observation'," Toyokuni shrugged. "Load of bullcrap if you ask me, I feel fine. And don't change the subject."

I rolled my eyes. That was pretty typical of Toyokuni.

"It's not a big deal…" I shrugged as I refilled my shot glass.

Toyokuni gave a sigh. "If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, Sake has to be savored to be appreciated, especially expensive Sake like that. If you're gonna throw it back in your throat like that, you can't taste any of it. You can't appreciate it. Hundreds of farmers grew the rice used to that make that Sake. Are you just gonna spit in the face of their efforts for nothing?"

I rubbed my forehead to mitigate the migraine that was developing there. "Yes, I get it, you're a massive alcohol critic, now please, kindly fuck off so I can get smashed."

He gasped in mock betrayal. "How dare you! It offends my delicate sensibilities that you refuse to favor your drink with the tender loving care that it deserves!"

He said that right as I drinking another shot, causing me to spit-take and break down in coughing laughter. Toyokuni always knew how to make me laugh. A moment later, Toyokuni and Tsuga started laughing as well.

"How long did it take you to come up with that one?" I asked breathlessly after a few moments of laughter.

"Oh, it was a spur of the moment thing," Toyokuni replied lightly. "Now, don't you feel better?"

I paused. I did indeed feel a bit better now. For a moment, he had successfully distracted me from thinking about the events of the past few days.

"Yes… thank you," I nodded.

"How are you feeling?" Tsuga asked delicately. "I know being dismissed from the department couldn't have been easy."

"Actually, it's fine," I replied simply. "I managed to wrangle a promise out of Utatane that she would help me get promoted. Besides, I have other things to occupy my attention, things that I wouldn't be able to do if I was still a member of the department."

"Seriously? Utatane is gonna help you get promoted?" Toyokuni asked with disbelief, before giving me a fist bump. "That's great, man!"

"Yes, congratulations, Kazuto," Tsuga nodded.

"Don't congratulate me yet," I warned after returning the fist bump. "I havn't actually been promoted, she just said she would help me secure it."

"Still, I have a feeling that you'll get it," Toyokuni replied. "Especially with Utatane-sama's help."

"Thanks guy," I nodded. "Anyway, any of you want anything to drink?"

"I wouldn't say no to some of that Sake," Toyokuni pointed at the bottle.

"I'll have a glass of Umeshu on the rocks," Tsuga replied. "Yamazaki Umeshu if that's fine."

I nodded, and went to the bartender to order the drinks, another bottle of Sake for Toyokuni and a glass of Yamazaki Umeshu on the rocks for Tsuga.

Half an hour later we were all well and truly smashed, with Toyokuni and Tsuga laughing uproarously while I told a funny story about Enji:

"… and then, if you can believe it, we found him a few days later, in this girls house, all trussed up in ropes and bound down on the bed! And when we tried to rescue him, he said… he said: 'could you leave please? I'm kind of busy!'!"

"No way! No way! He really said that?" Toyokuni asked with disbelief. "All because he didn't want to lose your bet?"

I just nodded tearfully in between laughs, and Toyokuni laughed uproariously, thumping the table with his fist.

"Damn, I wish I had met that kid," Tsuga said in between laughs herself. "He sounds like he had a lot of spirit, but a seduction master a fresh genin like him did not make."

I chuckled at that. "Yeah, one thing he never lacked for was spirit."

"I mean, why was a kid like him trying to get in Root?" Toyokuni asked. "It makes no sense."

"Don't ask me, it never made sense to me, honestly," I replied with a shrug. "All I knew was that it was his dream to become Danzo's apprentice. He never told me why, and I never asked because I thought it was pointless."

That seemed to kill the mood, and the two of them seemed to sober up.

"Kazuto, you're not to blame for his death," Tsuga said lightly.

"I know that," I replied shortly, before taking a sip from my shot glass. "It was the Iwanin's fault, but they're all dead now, so he has been avenged."

"Do you really believe that?" Toyokuni asked carefully.

I looked at him carefully. Toyokuni had joined the Intelligence Department shortly after I had, and I had always suspected that he was a Root Agent planted there by Danzo to keep an eye on me. Toyokuni had usually accompanied me on most of my missions, so I had gotten to know him quite well. He didn't fit the stereotype of a typical Root Agent, as he never concealed his emotions, and was usually quite honest with me.

I was fairly certain that my suspicions were baseless, but some part of me had never been able to let those suspicions fade. For this reason, I was never completely honest with him about my motivations, and usually concealed a few things from him, such as things related to my clan and the internal village politics that I was privy to.

"Yes," I nodded. "The people responsible have been dealt with. It's over. I'll be ok, don't worry about me."

"Alright," Toyokuni nodded, before smirking. "I wish you'd saved some of them for me. I would have liked to get some revenge for what they did to my leg… and the team."

"Speaking of which, are you gonna be outfitted with a prosthesis?" I asked curiously.

"Yep, they're gonna give me one in a few weeks," Toyokuni nodded, before pouting. "in the meantime I'm restricted to light duty, which means I'll be stuck doing archival work for the next few weeks, until I can get out in the field again."

"Huh, that's strange," I frowned. "The Hokage gave me three weeks off."

"Yeah he did the same for me," Toyokuni replied. "Utatane-sama just wants me to spend that time doing archival work."

"That's too bad," I shrugged. "Well, at least you have the rest of your life to look forward to."

Toyokuni didn't reply with the bluster I had expected, instead just looking glum, and nursing his shot glass of sake.

I took the time to get a good look at him: Toyokuni had long dark brown hair, large expressive eyes, a nose that had been broken a few times, a wide chin, a narrow mouth, and smooth cheeks.

He wore pretty typical ninja clothing, with the usual green flak jacket, and he wore his forehead protector around his neck.

"Every time I try to think about it, I get a headache," Toyokuni said suddenly. "I seriously can't remember what happened, and every time I try… it hurts. The last thing I remember is us setting out for the bunker. Kazuto, tell me… what happened that day?"

I sighed. "It's pretty simple, honestly. I detected the barrier going up, we couldn't escape using the traditional methods, and they were closing in on us…"

I could feel little more than mute, abject terror as the barrier slowly shrunk in, getting close to confining us to a small space. We were trapped, and there was little we could do to stop it. As the barrier shrunk, the team captain called off our attacks on it.

"The space is getting too small, we risk killing our selves if we keep attacking it," he said, somehow keeping calm in this situation. "Eventually they'll have to fight us somehow, that's when we'll escape."

"No, captain, there's nothing stopping them from just trapping in earth before we can fight back," I pointed out.

"Oh kami," one of the others muttered. "We're dead, we're so dead…"

"Well, unless you've got another escape technique that can get us out of here, I don't think there's much of a choice, Uchiha-san."

I paused at that, and the captain noticed. "You do have another escape technique… don't you?"

"What?!" said the man who had muttered before. "Then what are we sitting around for?! Get us out of here, man!"

I shook my head. "I do have another technique, but… it's tied to my bloodline, and it doesn't work with other people. Just me."

"What?! No! You're lying!" the man began to shake me on my shoulders. "You're lying! You have to get us out of here! Or we're all gonna die!"

"Get ahold of yourself, man," The Captain barked, pulling him off me.

"He's lying, sir, he has to be," the man muttered.

The captain turned to regard me. "Are you absolutely certain that you can't use it to help us get out of here?"

"Yes," I nodded glumly. "I've tested it, it only works with me. I'm sorry. Perhaps I could use it to take them down out there-"

"No, the mission comes first," The captain replied, shaking his head, before handing me a scroll. "Get this intel to the Bunker, and have them come help us if they can… now go, there's nothing else you can do here."

I nodded, before turning around and activating my Mangekyo Sharingan. I first used Ugayafukiaezu to scout the area for a suitable landing spot that was close to the bunker, then I used Jimmu to teleport there. This was only the third time I had used Jimmu.

From there, I quickly made my way to the bunker. However, as per my usual paranoid self, I was careful to check the entrance out from a distance to make sure that it was safe.

I frowned as I observed the ninja at the entrance with the sensory string… something didn't feel right. These guys didn't look and feel like Konoha ninja. Taking a risk, I brought the tip of my sensory string closer to one of the ninja. They had a general earthy, dusty smell.

Hmm, that didn't seem right.

I decided to trust my instincts: Something was wrong, and I wasn't sure what…

So what to do now?

I thought back to the situation I had just left: Iwanin had captured my teammates. If I couldn't get help from the bunker, I had to rescue them myself.

It took over an hour, but I managed to make my way back to the spot where I had left them: as I had expected, the Iwanin had used Earth release to trap them in earth and prevent them from escaping.

The Iwanin were currently huddled together, with one of them keeping an eye out. I had plenty of Chakra, and they hadn't detected me yet, so it was a simple matter to use Art of the Dancing Arc to take them all out.

When I was certain that they had stopped moving and were all dead, I approached the site carefully. What I found there would have probably haunted my nightmares, if I hadn't already seen more gruesome things in my career:

The captain and one other was dead, crushed by the earth release technique, but Toyokuni, my fellow spook, was still alive.

Flesh had been carved off of him in chunks, and there was a mess of seals about him, no doubt designed to keep him alive even at the point of death. Without someone to power them, however, he had started to bleed profusely.

I acted quickly, summoning shadow clones to help clean up the site while I focused on keeping him from dying. He was mercifully unconscious, so it was a simple matter to sterilize most the flesh, put it back where it belonged, apply a few seals to keep him from bleeding out, then applying bandages.

Once I was done, I realized that I needed a place to hide while Toyokuni was healing, so I sent out several of the clones to find such a place...

"… then a few hours later we were in the ravine, and you were unconscious for several days. Soon after you woke up, I managed to find Minato and his team, and the rest is, as they say, history," I finished.

Toyokuni was quiet for a long moment. "Do you think they knew I was a spook?"

"I have no idea," I replied simply. "None of them survived to tell me why you were chosen for interrogation."

He frowned, then nodded slightly. "Alright. I suppose it doesn't matter anyway, if they're all dead."

"Can I ask what this secret technique related to your bloodline is?" Tsuga asked curiously.

"You can ask," I replied simply. "but the answer is the same: It's a Clan secret. I'm not allowed to tell."

"Say, what happened at the bunker?" Toyokuni asked. "I never found out."

"I'm afraid most of that's classified," I replied. "You know how it goes. But to put it simply, I used my technique to kill most of the Iwanin there, but one survived. Minato and I encountered her as we were making our way in. I captured her, I interrogated her, then she died, plain and simple. The intel I learned has already been passed down to Utatane."

"I can't imagine how someone could survive that lightning technique of yours," Tsuga commented. "That must have been a difficult fight."

"It wasn't, particularly," I shrugged.

"Still, couldn't have been easy to survive the explosive clay," Toyokuni pointed out.

"There was explosive clay?" Tsuga asked with surprise, before frowning. "I guess that explains all the wreckage that was there."

"Yeah," I nodded. "But thankfully I already had a chakra string set up, so escaping wasn't difficult."

"I don't know how you do it, man," Toyokuni chuckled. "You always make it seem like it's no big deal, but I don't know of anyone else who could do what you do."

"Hey, what can I say?" I said with a smile, holding my arms wide. "I'm awesome. I just wish the world would stop making me prove it."

Tsuga rolled her eyes. "The only thing that's awesome about you is your awesomely inflated ego."

"Wow, ouch, that hurt," I said with mock betrayal, a hand over my hearth. "And I thought we were friends!"

Tsuga rolled her eyes again, before standing up. "Alright, well. I think I've had enough alcohol for tonight. See you around, Kazuto."

Toyokuni stood up as well. "Yeah, I think I need to turn in too, see you around, Kaz."

"Ugh, don't call me that," I sulked.

"Whatever," Toyokuni rolled his eyes, before walking out into the night.

I chuckled. Despite the events of the past few days, it seemed that everything was going to be alright…

I stared down at my shot glass, which was half full of sake. I suddenly had the sense that I had missed something, something important that I had learned in the last conversation…

Carefully, I turned the events of the conversation over in my mind, trying to figure out what it was…

With a start, I realized what it was…

When had Toyokuni learned about the explosive clay?