Thus what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer,

And achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.

Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits,

It cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.

Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.

Akatsuki strained. Her arms burned. The weak, animal part of her wanted to give in. Wanted to make it stop. But she was so close.

A little further… she leaves herself up and caught the rope between her feet. It was nothing like standing on solid ground, but it was close enough that she could reach up and brush her fingers against the ceiling.

"Got it!"

There was a bit of polite applause from the ground before Akatsuki let the rope slip between her feet, gently descending to the ground. She didn't need the soft mat on the ground to break a fall, but fortunately it did let her give her poor arms a break a moment earlier.

"Good job, Akatsuki!" Miyuki smiled.

"Wowee. You went so high I could barely see…" Uranami smiled. It was praise, of a sort.

Akatsuki smiled. She was strong! She was agile! And she was ahead of the pack in the most physically active Kansen navy in the world! The Kansen fought with swords and ran and practiced martial arts… rope climbing practice wasn't nearly as cool as sword fighting was, but Akatsuki could understand the utility.

(Miyuki might have been able to make a good way up, but just couldn't bring herself to. Meanwhile, Uranami clamped onto the rope with her arms alone and kicked her legs back and forth until she was swinging. "Doooodle-loo, the birdie in the clock goes cuckoo!")

Akatsuki let her arms hang limp at her sides as the next destroyer gave it her best shot. Oite came up to the rope next and went about it in slow, gradual fashion. Same trick as Akatsuki, rope pinched between the feet, steady all the way up to the roof. No wavering as her strength failed near the top, just perfect consistency. She slid down faster than Akatsuki, though.

Oite was followed by a much taller figure, one who also happened to be a bit more animalistic. Oite didn't have a tail like Ise did, after all. It would typically sway as she walked, but now she had it basically wrapped around her leg. Seemed inconvenient, always needed to put it somewhere, but there were probably a lot of neat tricks you could pull with that extra appendage.

Now, Akatsuki liked to think she was ahead of the pack – just getting up the rope was a feat – but she'd admit the battleships had her beat when it came to sheer strength and length of reach. Ise hauled herself six feet off the ground before she even bothered to catch the rope between her feet, and the moments she took to rest on the rope were so short you could barely pick them out. Muscular arms heaved, her tail squeezed her leg as she basically threw herself up to the roof.

The roof received a mighty slap and Ise slid down even faster than Oite. "Was that a new record?" Miyuki murmured.

But there was more to a Japanese Kansen than physical fitness! They were strong and they were smart! You got a good grasp on math free with your Kansen brain, but they learned more than just formulas to exploit that talent. They read the classics and the histories, they took time to enjoy culture…

Tea ceremony and calligraphy were all well and good, Akatsuki supposed (even if everybody got weirdly cliquish about it) but her favorite had always been history. Tales of derring-do, gallantry and betrayal, samurai lords and the ikko-ikki who resisted them. All of that was separated from Akatsuki, a destroyer made of steel, but she felt it in her blood. She felt the call of the shinobi.

Pretty funny that she ended up a destroyer and not a submarine then. Was a torpedo perhaps the naval shinobi's weapon? An arm for the small and mobile fighter, but with strength enough to endanger battleships. It was like poison or perhaps, more accurately, a musket. Would minelaying be a sort of naval ninjutsu as well? Maybe. The important thing was stealth. It was in the name: shinobu, meaning to sneak.

Maybe the problem was thinking of shinobi as a distinctive type of soldier who shinobu'd all day every day. A samurai could put on a monk's garb and gather information, and he'd probably be better at gauging an enemy's strength than some peasant yokel. If you considered convoy raiding as a whole shinobi-style activity, then any ship from a submarine to a battlecruiser could be, for a while, shinobi.

Another word that might be especially applicable to submarines was rappa. It blended a character for war or chaos with the 'wave' character in tsunami. The historical rappa would slide across an army camp like a wave, cutting horse's tethers and generally causing chaos. However, they weren't like that from the get-go. Unlike a submarine, the historical rappa had a resume of brigandage and piracy they could point to before taking up a more honorable profession… as roughly the same thing, just under the employ of a lord.

(Was Akatsuki a kunoichi? Well, yeah, technically, she guessed, but half the planet was. The strokes that formed the kanji for 'woman' could be separated into ku - no - ichi. There was a use of the word in Bansenshūkai, that old ninjutsu manual, but kunoichi no jutsu was just the brilliant tactic of using a woman where a man wouldn't work. Not exactly a lot to work with, but she supposed she'd just have to figure out the way of the female shinobi on her own.)

One of the things that Akatsuki's study had taught her was that samurai honor was, as Uranami might put it, "a whole lotta hooey!" Sure, there were gallant samurai, she wouldn't argue that. Heck, Akatsuki would say she lived with some girls like honorable modern samurai, but there was a stark difference between the sort of man who'd set a monastery on fire to consolidate his conquests and an Edo-period paper-pusher.

She wasn't exactly a shinobi, and she supposed Ise and Hyuuga weren't exactly samurai. Onna-musha, maybe? The naginata were the historical weapon those warrior women used, and that role certainly seemed a better fit than sōhei, the warrior monks also associated with the weapon. Ise and Hyuuga were many things, but ascetics they certainly weren't.

Akatsuki squeezed the edamame pod until the seeds popped out and ate a few as Ise drank. And drank. And drank. "Come on, Akatsuki! What's the point of edamame without booze?"

"It's still good with water," Akatsuki defended herself.

"You're missing out… but I guess the admirals would get all pissy if I gave you booze…" Ise frowned. "You should try it if you get the chance. I promise I won't tattle."

"Thank you." It was a nice offer, even if Akatsuki didn't feel like she'd ever really take Ise up on it. The little sips she had sneaked before had never really impressed her. She may not have liked booze, but Akatsuki rather liked going out for drinks as a social activity. Why would you want to pass up on warmth and light and company during the darkening night?

Well, Ise and Hyuuga didn't always wait until it was dark to start drinking. Ise, fittingly enough, was fond of using the hair of the dog as a hangover cure. Ise was… well, a canid of some kind, for sure. A fox when she was cozy with Kaga, a mutt when Akagi was having a fit of pique. It was hard to imagine the word ambiguous being used to describe Ise, but it seemed appropriate. She wasn't with Kongou or Kaga or anyone but her sister and the Fusous, although she'd happily share a drink with anyone.

That was an admirable trait, whether you were shinobi or no. A good nature and the ability to spend a happy evening with someone… especially if you were capable of exploiting the way alcohol loosened lips without giving yourself up in turn. A heavy drinker like Ise or Hyuuga were more acclimated to that sort of thing, right? Akatsuki wasn't sure she had the figure for that, honestly. Putting on enough pounds to reduce the impact of alcohol on her system would probably hurt her athletics in turn…

Ise had changed topics. "And you'd think that they'd let me in, right? I've got the same name as the shrine an' everything but nooooooo…"

All that was not to say Ise was a perfectly lucid drunk. She, uh, wasn't. However, she usually cut herself off before she was physically incapable of getting back to her dorm. It meant that Akatsuki could usually rely on company as they walked back home, although the swaying and the staggering and the occasional bouts of sickness weren't so pleasant.

(There were times when Akatsuki wondered if that drunkenness was some sort of complex plot, a facade that Ise put on to hide a political schemer, a sort of drunken fist politician. That… probably wasn't true, but it tidily kept her out of the worst political entanglements. There was a merit to that.)

Akatsuki still had her patch from when they tried to fix her lazy eye. It was good now, or at least at a point where more eye patch use didn't make her vision better. She still held onto it though, as a keepsake and a means of keeping her night vision. It made the dark a little less scary.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The loss of depth perception was a no-go during anything important and it provoked questions unbecoming of a shinobi, who shouldn't be wearing a special outfit because it would rather ruin the point. (The typical costume associated with shinobi? It was a stagehand's outfit, playing on the audience suspending their disbelief and just accepting the men in those outfits as being invisible.)

Still, there were times when it was useful. When you were slipping from well-lit areas to dark ones frequently, it turned a few minutes of awkward waiting into the mere second it took to flip the patch up. It improved her adaptability like a good shinobi's tool should.

Take, for example, her kunai. It was a knife, yes, sharp near the point and absolutely capable of causing some hurt if you stuck it in someone, but it was also a tool. There was this old shed in a forgotten corner of the base which she used for practice, sticking the kunai in deep and trying to use it as a climbing aid… it was tricky. Get too scuffed up and Houshou or Fusou would start asking awkward questions and that was a recipe for ruined ninja training.

(Well, the part where Fusou sat down and cleaned her scrapes was nice… the part where she was told off for getting them in the first place wasn't.)

But the humble kunai was useful for more than getting her up onto a corrugated iron roof she managed to slip off of! A ring in the handle let her tie knots – she was good at tying knots, her sailors had shown her more knots than she had ever dreamt of – so it could be used as an anchor or a retrievable throwing dart or she could just keep it attached to her person at all times.

It wasn't a tanto, all samurai fanciness, but you wouldn't be using a tanto in the garden, now would you? Well, maybe practicing stances in the garden could be nice, but using a tanto as a trowel sounded like a good way to have it wrested away from you. (But how could they take it if you had the tanto…?)

The kunai might lose some of its edge cutting through the sod and cutting at roots certainly wasn't like cutting a person, but she could garden with it. She uh, also didn't have any stabbing people experience, just to be clear. The perennials didn't tend to scream or bleed.

Working in the garden was simple. Nonoffensive. Unless you were some insane, spartan, all-combat all the time madwoman, you could appreciate a nice garden and pretty flowers. None of her comrades were so callous as to despise a flower for its beauty, although you couldn't always trust Ise or Hyuuga near the beds if they were a little too wasted.

Sure, you might say, the kunai had practical use here, especially considering how Akatsuki's future wouldn't include much masonry work, but how was gardening that special? Well, consider this: desert rose. Dwarf columbine. Japanese belladonna. Angel's trumpet. Yellow oleander. Japanese andromeda. Gardening could provide you with all sorts of tools…

But poison plants weren't allowed anywhere the Mutsukis might get them, which meant practically everywhere on base. Practical, but another unfortunate disappointment when it came to the action-packed side of Akatsuki's shinobi career.

(She had been doing some reading in that area. Did you know there was an Indian plant called the suicide tree? Mixed with jaggery sugar or masked with spice, the seeds would kill you… or somebody else. It, ah, gained a certain infamy around the world after the collapse of the Raj.)

There were a few medicinal plants growing in some of the beds, the occasional spice or vegetable, and of course all sorts of flowers. Any flower that could reasonably survive outside had a few fans, and the ones that couldn't might benefit from an upcoming greenhouse… Akatsuki dreaded the thought. The last thing base needed was another out-of-the-way location she could get lost trying to find.

Gardening had a second benefit in addition to being a typical daytime activity – no having to work at it in the dark – and that was how it made people happy. Nobody hated a gardener unless they like, planted a corpse flower outside of a window, and she couldn't think of any gardener as famed as Hokusai, or whomever. Wasn't such a position perfect for a shinobi?

Akatsuki heard footsteps and looked up to see a cloud of brown tails behind a skirt. That could be either Akagi or Amagi… looking a bit further up proved that it was Akagi looking down at her. Akatsuki gulped, even if the battlecruiser's expression was without any (visible) malice. "Ma'am?"

"How long have you been working with the plants, Akatsuki?" She knew her name. She knew Akatsuki's name!

"A few months, ma'am." Originally, her plan was to 'spy' on Owari, but Akatsuki swiftly realized that spying on Owari made her feel like the worst person in the world. What, was she going to spread the word about Owari's awful coughing fits?

(Owari knew more about herbal medicine than Akatsuki thought it was possible to know, and none of it fixed her.)

"Have you seen the spider lilies bloom?" Akagi asked, kneeling down to take a closer look at the plants. Even when she knelt, she seemed huge, the ears and the tails casting a shadow that never quite stayed still. The tails always shifted, the ears moved minutely.

"Not yet. It takes a heavy rain, doesn't it?"

"That it does," Akagi remarked, looking at the bed of flowers before her. The edge of her lips curved up ever so slightly. (Like a tanto across her face.) Akatsuki's kunai dug into the soil and sat there. She couldn't bring herself to turn back to her work.

Was she just here to observe the flowers? She didn't seem to care much for the roses, but her gaze eventually settled on a clump of camellia. "Could I arrange to have some of these moved?"

"You'd like some… ma'am?"

"They're lovely flowers. I'd like a few for myself." Akatsuki vaguely realized she was staring. Akagi frowned. "Is such a thing beyond your ability?"

"No, not at all! It's just… these are Owari's…" Akagi's expression seemed to hint she didn't think much of Owari's claim to the plants, and Akatsuki tried to change tact. "And they need a lot of looking after that you shouldn't bother yourself with…"

Akagi was quiet for a moment. "You do it."

"What? You can't mean… ma'am, I can't…"

"If you can't even water some plants for me, what good will you be in a fight?" Akagi scoffed.

"I… I can do it!" Akatsuki squeaked, not quite certain where her sudden willingness to talk back came from.

"Good. I'd prefer them outside my sill. Don't make a bother of yourself."

Akatsuki wasn't planning to…

Akagi lived on the first floor of the dorms, sharing a room with her sister Amagi. Funnily enough, it wasn't that far from Owari's room, who lived on the first floor for… rather obvious reasons. Akatsuki wasn't sure why Amagi and Akagi did, though. Something to look into, she supposed, although she certainly wasn't complaining. It made looking after Akagi's camellias much simpler, saving her from having to go through Akagi's room to do so.

(She thought she might be able to get to a second-story windowsill with a bit of practice. Akatsuki could climb… there was just the problem of being seen climbing every day. While Akatsuki didn't hold back during athletics practice, the true breadth and magnitude of her skills remained a secret.)

She crept up to Akagi's window every other day, just about, and checked on the camellias. She had managed to get them up there without too much trouble, and the minor strain of moving a sack of soil was replaced with the stress of looking after Akagi's flowers.

What had Owari said? An inch of water per week? But, ah, hadn't she said something about drainage in the pot and gravel and… urgh. She didn't remember! Fumbling through her pockets, she searched for her notebook. Akatsuki was pretty sure that she had jotted down something about that in there…

Akagi's door creaked open and she ducked immediately. Just being visible near her window was probably enough to qualify as being a bother, or at least it probably would be on a bad day, and Akatsuki did not want to take bets on Akagi's bad days. There was enough room to hide under the sill, and Akatsuki summoned up her inner shinobi to make a quiet exit when…

She heard a conversation. Akagi was talking with someone, and shinobi instincts superseded the urge to run away like her life depended on it.

"Indochina is barely a regime in the first place!" Akagi growled.

"Yes, but that's all the more reason to leave it be. Why start a war with Germany for a territory they might lose without our help?"

"You're sounding almost like Kongou, sister…"

"Kongou isn't always wrong. You shouldn't let your political disagreements with the woman distract you from her experience."

"Apologies," Akagi sighed. "It's just… I can't understand how she can be so passive. If we're not getting stronger…"

If they weren't getting stronger, they were falling behind while the rest of the world did.

"Would you really say we're not getting stronger, sister?" Amagi asked.

"No… but the Great War was a resource war, wouldn't you agree?"

Amagi was silent for a moment. "I suppose. We'd all appreciate a little extra oil, wouldn't we?"

"If we don't take our share now…"

"Then we'll be at a strategic disadvantage, yes. I think Kongou knows that too, sister. She's reasonably afraid of getting into a long war like that before we're ready. What good would all of Indonesia be if rebels bomb the oil pumps?"

"But when will that fear stop being reasonable?" Akagi asked.

"I don't know, and I wouldn't dare make a prediction. Sometime. All we can do is prepare as best we can for a moment when the risk is acceptable, given what we know."

"It's possible it could never happen, isn't it?"

"It is," Amagi admitted.

"And then what…?"

"And then, hopefully, we last until we join Kongou in retirement."

"Retirement?" Akagi scoffed. "Really?"

"Well, that's the preferable option, isn't it? It's retirement, getting discharged, or dying. Which seems preferable to you?"

"Retirement." Akagi admitted begrudgingly.

"Yes. Ideally, we have a more amicable relationship with our successors than you have with Kongou, and then go off to enjoy the fruits of our labor."

"Just the two of us?" Akagi asked.

"Maybe. Or perhaps one of us will find someone we want to keep."

"You think so?" Akagi asked. "My crew haven't impressed me so far…"

Uhhhh… a shinobi question just occurred to Akatsuki. Who was she supposed to share her secret observations with?

I don't think this chap has the same… idk, thrust as some of the others? A little all over the place, but Akatsuki has been sitting in my secretary slots recently and the noggin got a joggin. I gave Owari the same break Amagi got just because she seemed a good fit as a gardener. Shinobiyori means something like 'to steal up' and maybe this Akatsuki has succeeded in that by not screaming "I'm a ninja!" at the top of her lungs. (Research for this chapter involved some investigation of what it meant to be a ninja... and tbh I think I'm in the invented tradition camp, at least when it comes to highly professional ninja trained in and exported from Koga province and whatnot. Eric Hobsbawm haunts me)

Future plans… I don't know what my muse will land on next. There's a tab for a German baltic fic haunting me, but I've also got an England one (working title 'Strange Bedfellows') that has a lot of words already down, although it will likely need some reworking. Otherwise, maybe the famed southwest Pacific chapter ('Maid in Manilla' was a chapter title that came to me, but I've got a different working title now. No story to go with it, though.) Either that or I take the schizo-pill and swing down to Mexico.

I've got like five hundred down on a little oneshot about Haruna and her namesake (totally not Mount Akina bro) and a silly one about several ships playing a game of Crusader Kings. I'd feel more confident writing it if the wiki ever gets lines for ol' Gunsway, but those might come out soon. Nanowrimo has been beating my eepy behind