Part of the squad's job had already been done for them, Rei was relieved to discover. Interviewing villagers about general information was her least favorite part of every mission. Captain Ryuji gave them each a copy of recent interview transcripts, then waited for their feedback before they left Lord Hanzo's tower.
"The docks on the southern border of the village are a hotspot," Karasu said. "There are a lot of abandoned old shacks out that way."
"And isn't there a big sewage pipe thing that dumps into the lake over there?" Isana asked. "They could be using it as an entrance to the tunnels. A very gross entrance."
It was a good place to start. They took shifts watching the collection of abandoned fishing huts for two days before they finally spotted a group of men using one of them as a meeting place. "Bingo," Karasu whispered. Rei barely heard him over the sound of the rain around them. They were on a nearby rooftop, letting the rain pelt them mercilessly as they kept watch. "How would you place them?"
"One Shinobi, mid-level," Rei answered in an equally quiet whisper. "The others are non-Shinobi citizens. Go do your thing."
With a grin, Karasu covered his dark hair with his cloak and slipped down the side of the building silently. He crept over to the hut and leaned his back against the wooden wall. His head was right next to an open window. Had Rei not been able to see his chakra, she'd have had trouble seeing him. His cloak was designed with a chakra pattern so that it mimicked the colors and forms of the rain around it, and he blended in flawlessly.
Rei pulled out a scrap of paper from her weapons pouch and hunched over it, shielding it from the rain as she scribbled a quick note to Isana and slid it into a plastic protective pouch. She slipped it half underneath a roof tile and waited, peering through the abandoned walls on the other side of Karasu. She couldn't see bodies, but she could see chakra as clearly as if they were right before her.
She didn't recognize the Shinobi's chakra pattern, but she committed it to memory, should she lose him. After having a brief discussion that Rei couldn't hear, the men began to shuffle around the small hut, moving things about and pointing. The Shinobi smacked one of the others across the face, probably chastising him for being too loud, Rei assumed. Karasu hadn't moved a muscle.
The men left the hut after about twenty minutes, and Karasu waited only a handful of seconds before discreetly leaping back up to Rei. "That's them. Let's go."
Leaving their post, the two teenagers melted into the rain, following their quarry. It would have been easy to discount the non-Shinobi, but through a series of subtle hand movements, Karasu offered to follow them when they inevitably split. As they grew nearer to the heart of the village, they both worked to subtly change their appearances. Karasu stowed his cloak away and pulled on a skintight diver's hood, complete with a rebreather. Rei pulled out her own rebreather and fit it securely over her mouth before wrapping her hair up into a bun and hiding it beneath a wide-brimmed fisherman's hat that she unfolded silently from her pack.
The Rain was painted a thousand shades of gray. It was easy to become completely forgettable.
When they reached the edge of the residential quarter, two of the men bid goodbye to the others and departed for their own home. Rei and Karasu noted the location mentally and continued to follow the remaining two until they divided as well. Nodding to each other in confirmation, the two young Shinobi diverged paths.
To Rei's slight annoyance, her subject did not go straight home, nor did he lead her to other smugglers. After hours of following a man who stopped to eat at a sandwich shop, buy groceries, and feed ducks in a nearby pond, he finally stopped for the day. At a motel.
He wore a Hidden Rain Shinobi forehead protector, but he was staying at a motel?
It wasn't an impossible situation, but Rei's suspicions rose. She watched subtly from across the street as the man waved to the woman behind the welcome desk and ascended the stairs, presumably to his room. She watched his chakra rise until he entered a room on the second floor, dropped his pack, and entered an alcove, probably the bathroom. The moment he sat down, Rei sprinted across the road and dug through her weapons pouch for her newest device.
Headmaster Iwa had certainly made himself useful as a non-Shinobi civilian in the Rain. He'd been tinkering constantly, always bouncing ideas off his fellow refugees, and then letting them test everything that he developed. This would be the first official use of the Droplet Eavesdropper, and Rei prayed that it would work correctly.
People were passing on the street, heading home for the evening, and climbing up the side of a motel would definitely be noticed. She sighed inaudibly, looking up at her target's window. She wished she were better at the Camouflage Technique. Utakata had spent days trying to help her perfect it, but she had never been able to flawlessly mask her visible presence unless she was standing perfectly still.
"You'd think someone who could manipulate chakra would have no problem bending the reflection of light with it," Utakata had thought aloud.
"Yeah, you'd think," Rei had replied in frustration.
"Well, no one can be good at everything. You come pretty close, though." He'd smiled, one of those rare ones that lit his whole face. "Don't let one failed technique bring you down."
Rei remembered how she'd frozen, trying to glean a deeper meaning from his words than he'd intended. But he had moved on to a different skill, and the two years that separated them in age suddenly felt like an ocean.
She exhaled hard. She had no better option today. She stepped off to the side of the building, ensuring that she was completely shielded by the motel's trashcan, and focused her chakra on the Camouflage Technique. Her feet disappeared, then her ankles. The invisible cloak of chakra rose up her body until she couldn't see her shoulders anymore. She tugged a lock of hair out of her bun to reassure herself that she couldn't see it and suppressed another sigh when she realized that it wasn't completely invisible. It had greyed to a near transparency, but it was still detectable. Her hat was still completely unshielded, so she folded it up and stowed it away. That was all she needed, for someone to scream because a possessed hat was creeping up the side of a motel.
The Droplet Eavesdropper vial clutched tightly in her hand, Rei scaled the motel until she got to the window in question and jimmied it open silently. Headmaster Iwa's new invention was a tiny listening device that perfectly mimicked a droplet of rain on a surface. Rei couldn't begin to understand how he'd done it, but he'd somehow developed a transparent, flexible polymer that perfectly mirrored the appearance of water, and he'd used a combination of technology and chakra to turn it into a highly sensitive listening device for espionage.
With the window open a few inches and the Shinobi still in the bathroom, Rei touched her finger to the liquid inside the vial and transferred a single droplet to the inside of the window. It wouldn't move or evaporate, and should the Shinobi move to wipe it away, it would simply dissolve and lose all function. If it worked, it would be perfect.
She slid the window shut and dropped back to the ground, hiding behind the trashcan again before releasing the Camouflage jutsu. She also packed away the rebreather and let her hair down. The rain had lightened to a drizzle; she'd enjoy the walk back to base.
Her squad was waiting for her back at one of the unoccupied fishing huts, and she shucked off her jacket the moment she was through the door. Captain Ryuji triple checked that the windows were covered sufficiently and lit another lantern, lighting their faces in the darkness eerily. "Alright, let's hear it. What'd you get?"
Karasu began to relate what he'd heard. "They civilians are lackeys, very low on the totem pole. But the Shinobi was giving orders. He's probably still an underling of some sort, and he had a strange accent that I didn't recognize. He was wearing a Rain Shinobi uniform, though."
"What were they talking about?" Isana asked.
"Snow grass, mostly."
Rei almost rolled her eyes. Snow grass was the newest recreational drug that was making the rounds on the street. The longest users were already displaying blackened teeth, sunken eyes, and extreme weight loss, but supposedly the high was monumental.
"And they were talking about other cargo, but they didn't mention what it was. There's going to be a drop-off tomorrow night, and they're planning to store it under the hut. There's a hatch that they were opening and closing in the floor."
Rei related the events of her day in turn and took out the receiver that was set to pick up the signal from the Droplet Eavesdropper. It was made from an old, outdated radio that Headmaster Iwa had repurposed, and Rei anxiously turned the dial, listening for the telltale crackling that always came before the first recorded voices.
The sound of a door opening and closing finally came from the radio, and Rei breathed easier. The only sounds to come after for several minutes were those of the television, and Captain Ryuji crossed his arms. "Is there a way to…fast-forward?"
After accidentally rewinding, Rei got the recording to skip forward quickly, but slowly enough that she could pick up the voice of a real person. "Did anyone see you?" a woman asked, and a door shut.
"No," the Shinobi said. "I was alert all day. The team is collecting the cargo as we speak, and they will ensure that it is all delivered to Site B tomorrow evening."
Rei's smug pleasure at a successful surveillance was completely overshadowed by a realization that paled her, and the Six Tails shifted uncomfortably in her chest. She knew that accent. She'd spoken with it herself until very recently. That man was a Blood Mist Shinobi.