Hiashi skimmed the latest letter from his brother. It seemed that he and his squad were continuing to find little results; they'd only managed to conclusively come across a years-old lab of Orochimaru's—one long abandoned, with no notes left behind.
Still, the slow-and-steady approach was working, and Suna had not yet noticed their presence—a very good thing indeed.
(Odd, though. Hiashi would have been confident that Suna had at least one infiltrator in or around Konoha that managed to at least guess at how Konoha was attempting to deal with Orochimaru. He wondered why they didn't.)
"He says he will not be back soon," Hiashi said. "They are not making sufficient progress to take a break to celebrate the alliance."
"Unfortunate," his wife Yukina murmured. "I do know Hitomi misses him so."
Unlike them, she didn't say.
Theirs was a marriage determined at her birth, a political one that had no space for love.
He'd not—
He hadn't cared, in the past.
Except now his family was breaking apart, most of the clan counting the days until they could leave, and he'd seen the way Hizashi and Hitomi looked at each other, treated each other.
(The Hyuuga had never valued romantic love highly.
(He wondered if that was yet another failing of his ancestors'.)
"I will write to him, encourage him to value his personal health," Hiashi said. "It is not as if Orochimaru is an urgent issue, after all."
Yukina nodded quietly, keeping to her sewing.
The dim light of the living room made it hard to read her face, and it would be rude to activate his byakugan to try to understand how she was feeling.
He fell silent, instead, turning to a note on a recent Hyuuga newborn—a soon-to-be-not-Hyuuga child. Born healthy, except for a mild cleft lip that would be repaired when the child was older.
He made a note to visit the family in a month (as was tradition) and turned to the next missive.
One day—hopefully, one day soon—Hiashi would feel comfortable in his own skin, in his own world.
That day was not today.
.
Ryoma frowned as he marked yet another seal as failed. There was a deadline now—the celebration of the alliance, to be held in a mere two months—and they needed a way to get bedbugs under control before then.
It wasn't—
Like, he'd asked around, and bedbugs were just a fact of life, really.
Nobody expected not to get them when they spent all their time traveling, because they were nasty little bloodsuckers and it took months to kill them off.
But Konoha was Konoha, Erigami said. Konoha wasn't just ordinary—Konoha was extraordinary. The sort of place you could go to with bedbugs and come out without a single bite.
Ryoma marked another seal as failed.
The only good news, when he'd been put on this, was that there were already several bug-killer seals (primarily directed at the Aburame, actually, but the Aburame had a nasty habit of copying the seals meant to keep them away, and that meant Konoha had a lot to go off of.)
Around half, Erigami said, likely didn't work at all.
Like, they absorbed chakra like a seal should, and then… did nothing.
That was really normal, he'd learned in the Academy. Lots and lots of seals actually did nothing, but if you didn't test them, or if there was no way to test them, you could maybe get convinced that it did work, and that was without taking into account how many people sold seals they knew didn't work.
Erigami had said half.
Ryoma figured they were wrong—the real number had to be way, way closer to all.
It had been weeks, after all, weeks and weeks of nothing. And even once they found one that worked for bed bugs, it had to not work on Aburame bugs or any other beneficial bugs like ladybugs or whatever.
And Ryoma knew that he hadn't yet started testing any of the ones the Aburame said did work on them—various sealers would be working to modify them when they had the time—but—
Well, he was a sealer, wasn't he?
Not a very good one, but he'd got a passing score in the Academy, hadn't he?
It couldn't be that difficult to make an anti-bedbug seal, right? He even noticed most of the reasons why these seals wouldn't work!
And, and it would count as work, too! If he succeeded, he got a chunk of money, and even if he didn't he got a smaller chunk! He could use that to buy a new stove, one that didn't take a jutsu to light!
…He just had to figure out how to get started.
.
Sakura, Taro, Tsunade, and Kushina stood around the desk.
None were happy.
"So you all agree, then?" Taro asked. His voice had the dry rasp that many Naras did—a sort of permanent half-asleep sound.
Sakura knew he was anything but.
"No other answer," Tsunade grunted. She glared at her tea.
"I mean, shit," Kushina said. She glared at the spreadsheets, at every single example of missing funds. "Is this… like, is every department experiencing this?"
"Not that I've noticed," Sakura said, "and I've been asking. There has been some mismanagement in a few departments and bureaus, but nothing to this extent and almost all of it was easy to trace to the source. This…"
"We'll have to get T&I—or whatever they're called nowadays—to interrogate everyone that has access." Tsunade leaned forward, shuffling through the spreadsheets and summaries. "Do we even have an idea of how many people that is?"
"Only about fifty right now," Taro said, "but before the reform it was… a lot more than that."
"So, do we assume it's just one actor—and therefore we only need to monitor and interrogate the fifty, or do we assume that it might be multiple, and cause every single mind-walking Yamanaka to off themselves to get away from the mountain of work?"
Sakura closed her eyes. "That's not the only problem. If they are siphoning funds from Konoha—from the hospital—then we need to remove them. Just removing everybody with access to the budget now would still stop the hospital from functioning."
Kushina shivered. "What do we do, then?"
"Talk to Minato?"
"He'll be back from Kumo's front sometime this week," Kushina said. "That's not too far away, and it's not as if another few days will make much of a difference."
"It might," Taro countered. "I haven't exactly been that subtle in my investigations."
"Shit."
"Any ideas?" Tsunade said. She swallowed the rest of her tea in one gulp, looked very much like she wished the act had burned.
And Sakura—
What was there to do?
They couldn't detain everybody, they couldn't identify the traitor(s) without mindwalking, they—
Wait.
"A lot of people work in the hospital," Sakura said. She spoke slowly, her mind still whirring. Arden's world, after all, did not have mindwalking. Arden's world had to rely on other forms of investigation, of monitoring. "A lot of people work in the hospital, and I bet you anything that they notice shit. They might not be right, but that's still noticing. Let's look at the paperwork, like Taro already is, look at who is on paper as spending unreasonably. Let's talk to people, ask them who they've noticed behaving oddly. That's what T&I already does, but between the four of us we have more expertise in research, budgeting, and the hospital, so we can help them out. That will allow for the mindwalkers to start with the highest-positioned employees, work their way down."
"It'll be obvious," Tsunade warned.
"We should request help from the Uchiha police," Kushina said. "They do stuff like this for white collar crime, don't they? And they only request mind-walking help when they have the suspects really narrowed down."
"That's a good idea," Taro said. "And it's not as if there's really much overlap between the Health Department and the Police Bureau, so they'll be able to see things with fresher eyes."
"So we're not keeping this secret?" Tsunade asked.
"We don't really have the resources at the moment, even with the end of the dispute on the western front," Sakura said. "Especially with all the things Kumo is trying. We'll have to deal with the image hit; I'll stop in with the Propaganda Bureau after this."
"Tsunade, do you mind doing a round of miracle healing here?" Kushina asked. "That might help."
"I really wish people would stop calling it miracle healing."
"Even better:" Sakura said, "Get a bunch of medics and train them on tough cases. Have them follow you around and teach them in front of civilians. Focus on the most complicated subjects, stuff that really takes time and expertise. We'll even bring in prisoners with conditions, and nobles and the like. Everyone in the hospital will be glad for the help, awed by your knowledge. They'll spread it about, helping with the hospital's image, and provide a reason for the increased police presence. The shinobi will still know, but it'll be something."
"I wouldn't mind spending more time with my niece," Tsunade said, "and I've got to do some research on other things in the meantime. Why not?"
Taro nodded. "What's the immediate plan?"
"Kushina gets the police on it, I'll tag in the Propaganda and Intelligence Bureaus. You organize all the paperwork you have in your office—I'll send a Nara runner to you with more secure seals—and prepare to liaise with all of them. Tsunade, do you mind looking into prisoners and nobility to treat at the hospital?"
Tsunade nodded. "I'll talk to the hospital, too, about how I'm going to be here until… let's say, until the alliance celebration, and I'm taking the opportunity to teach. Get them to agree that anyone can tag along when I start up my rounds in… four days, do you think?"
Sakura, Taro, and Kushina nodded. Taro began sealing everything back up, and Kushina rolled her neck.
"Nothing's ever easy, is it?" she asked Sakura.
Sakura snorted in agreement. "Never."
.
Minato made himself sit on the empty cot, his legs trembling with the effort.
He'd expected Kumo to go on the attack when they learned of the alliance, planned for it, and his plan had even succeeded—he'd been a blur across the battlefield when Kumo had turned off gravity, went from one kunai to the next and slaughtered everyone in his path.
(He'd always been very, very good at killing.)
In less than two hours Kumo had retreated, backed off as they always did when he appeared on the battlefield, and he had no doubt that every tactician they had was clustered around one table or another, trying to plan for his increased presence and the increased presence of other Konoha powerhouses now that they weren't pulled in so many directions.
It was, by every measure of the term, a success. They'd even nabbed a handful of new prisoners to tap for information, prisoners who had been incapacitated before they could follow through with whatever suicide method they'd been taught.
A success.
Except Minato's every muscle was aching, trembling, burnt out, and his chakra was just as bad.
He'd overdone it, like an idiot.
He could feel the ANBU hovering nearby, and he knew he needed to get back to work, deal with whatever problems had cropped up or reached boiling point in his absence, but he didn't really have the energy.
He expected that this time it was about the former Kiri bloodlines—most had not chosen to join Konoha, or even Kaiso, were instead taking up positions in various former Water islands and rebuilding themselves. At some point he would have to do something about that, and the first time they made a move—which may very well have been today—he would have to act.
He didn't want to, right now, though.
He just wanted to sleep.
He grabbed the canteen he was offered, began taking small sips while he waited for the various pills he'd swallowed to take effect. He was in public, now, surrounded by other hurt and exhausted soldiers, so his ANBU were staying back for the moment.
Not too urgent then.
He allowed himself to turn, laying back on the cot, and closed his eyes.
Just for a few minutes, at least.
A few minutes…
.
Rento rubbed his head. Any kind of seal that dealt with nebulous things—and truth was the very definition of that—was painfully difficult to work with. In comparison, the seals that he had created for the Hyuuga, the Yamanaka-Akimichi-Nara… those were simple addition.
And that had taken him ages.
And the Hyuuga were still bowing far too deeply whenever they had the opportunity.
(The branch Hyuuga anyway.)
And Rento was going to do this. He had no choice, not if he wanted to give his sister and the other mindwalking Yamanaka a break.
He had to do this.
But it felt as if he was running into the Konoha wall over and over again, with no end in sight.
Notes were strewn about in every direction, most on the floor where they'd been tossed in one pique or another.
Outside he could hear some of the Diplomacy Bureau hanging about, talking about the bear summoning contract Konoha was in the process of signing.
The bear contract—
It wasn't that Rento didn't think it was important.
Bears were…
Well, bears.
Insanely powerful, insanely broad, insanely useful.
And when the Aburame had done it, when the terminal team (as they'd begun calling themselves, as everyone had begun calling them) had done it…
It wasn't that Rento didn't think it was important.
It was just—
What did it do, exactly?
Like, the lemurs were currently working to bolster Konoha's defenses, to catch intruding summons. And the pika, they had agreed to allow teachers and their students to reverse-summon into their realm for safety in exchange for the opposite, were now constantly dotted in and around the Academy. And the finches…
Okay, so Rento actually had no idea about the finches.
But the thing was, the bears weren't—
Like, they looked good. They seemed good.
But what good would they do, really?
Practically?
Everyone used all the right words, but Rento hadn't actually heard anything about what the contract would actually contain, about what the bears would actually do.
His seal…
His seal would do something.
Would change his sister's life, change the life of so many Yamanaka.
…He just needed to get it to work.