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The past two months of Okahachi's life had been turbulent to say the least.
Until two months ago, Okahachi was a middleman for people who wanted to hire shinobi assassins. Five years ago, he set up shop at Kanaoka near Maizuru Quarters, and roughly a year and a half later, he convinced one of his regular shinobi to accept an assassination. It was a gold mine that had made him very rich.
However, it was shut down. Some normal agency middlemen stayed, thinking it would blow over, but he knew better. There was reward in risk—but he also knew when to pull out. It saddened him to leave and he too hoped that things would return to normal, but that didn't happen.
He didn't mind it. He grew up in abject poverty. His father abandoned their family before he was born, and his single mother did her best to raise him. However, she resented him for being born—the woman said this to his face almost every other day—and even she ran away when he was only ten. If his parents could disappear from his life, he didn't think Kanaoka would stay.
Like other street kids, he begged for food. Eventually, he got into stealing and pickpocketing—he got caught plenty, but that was part of the risk—until one day, he was thrashed a bit too severely and swore it off. Fortunately, he soon got a job at a matchstick factory; unfortunately, children got dirt pay, to say nothing of the exposure to the chemicals.
When he was sixteen, he struck fortune when he caught the eye of a bandit group—a special one where the main members knew how to use chakra and shinobi arts. They trained him to use them and he stayed there for a few years before stumbling into the mercenary business, until he grew weary of repeatedly putting his life in danger.
He had changed his life's trajectory several times; he had no problem doing it again.
But contrary to his expectations, the worst was yet to come because Leaf was behind him. Two weeks ago, Leaf shinobi came looking for him. He barely managed to escape before they could actually find him. It was serious because he had done his best to hide, but they had still sniffed him out.
To remedy this situation, he hired guards in case he was found again—which was the right choice because, once again, there were Leaf shinobi outside his inn.
Okahachi peeked out from the sliver between drawn curtains and saw a man standing in the building's shadow across the street. His back stiffened when he spotted another man standing at the corner. Both men were wearing identical full-body cloaks. He recognised the cloak because he had once seen it on a Leaf shinobi. And they were just standing there doing nothing.
He pulled back and immediately stuffed his belongings into his backpack and rushed into the room across the hall where his bodyguards were staying.
"Hey, we need to leave. Now!" Okahachi yelled as he banged on the door—which suddenly creaked open, so he stepped inside. "Let's go—"
An unfamiliar figure dressed in a black hooded cloak stood with their back to him. The figure turned around to reveal a white porcelain mask with black markings.
"A-ANBU," he muttered as a chill went up his body. Even though he had never been a shinobi, he knew enough Leaf shinobi from his time at Kanaoka and had done enough work against shinobi as a mercenary to know how an ANBU-nin dressed.
His trembling eyes looked beyond the ANBU-nin and saw a pair of legs wearing heavy boots on the ground, which he recognised as belonging to one of his three guards.
"Stop."
The ANBU-nin's distorted voice made his heart palpitate in fear, but it also sent his instincts sprinting. He immediately turned around to run away, but he couldn't move a muscle. He couldn't even turn his head, and he helplessly trembled, staring as the ANBU-nin walked toward him.
"You've given me a lot of trouble, Okahachi," the distorted voice made his pulse jump when it was so close. "I hope you've enjoyed the sunlight because you're not going to experience it for a very long time."
Okahachi could barely see the fist that knocked him out.
———
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Just because the Inquisitor Unit was an ANBU entity, didn't mean they were all that different from other shinobi. They took partook in workplace gossip much like anyone else, and for the past two months, the newest rookie was the main topic of the water cooler discussions.
The early consensus was that he had caught a lucky break from the trash mail, and was bound to make a mistake due to his lack of experience. The other two squads waited to sweep in to take the juicy case. It wasn't personal—competitiveness was the culture under Barbary's leadership style.
However, a month later, Ratel had strategically used his ANBU authority to mobilise regular shinobi all around the Land of Fire to identity and apprehend about 60% of the clients behind the assassination despite the missing agency middlemen by solely relying on information from the Third Squad which he then passed on to the local shinobi.
It was all going great until the sixth week, where progress plateaued as the leads dried up in the absence of the middleman from the Kanaoka agency.
Campbell sighed in relief as he saw a stack of reports submitted to him by Ratel. It had only been ten days since he had brought the middleman in and Ratel had already ordered the apprehension of another 20% of the assassination clients. The lack of progress had mildly stressed him, so seeing it flowing again was superb.
The speedy progress Ratel had made in his first month had bought him a few more months, so the stalled progress wasn't a problem, but it still stressed Campbell out because he had seen hot cases go freezing cold in the matter of days and didn't want that to happen now when the squad was on the edge of the climb towards recovery.
He had even considered transferring the case to senior members like Caracara, Dhole, or Krait or taking it over himself, but that didn't seem necessary, as he had observed Ratel's work.
At first, he thought that Ratel would try to handle everything by himself after the other two squads tried to take the case away and that he would see his squad mates as competition. While Barbary indeed promoted competition, that was only among the squads and not between the squad members.
However, those worries were unfounded.
Campbell thought Ratel would be proud of his background as a Police officer and would want to handle the Third Squad's interrogation by himself even when he had a Yamanaka—with a background in T&I, at that—within his reach. Instead, he immediately involved Kestrel, which allowed him to move quickly because Kestrel had extracted copious amounts of information.
Ratel and Dhole had not gotten off to a good start, which affected their relationship as colleagues. They didn't say a word to each other unless it was work-related. But Ratel knew about Dhole's ability to process information into facts and actionable knowledge, so he unhesitatingly sought his assigned mentor's help—even though their mentorship was all but dead in name, much to Campbell's dismay.
Even Caracara was roped in for her connections and experience working with local shinobi around the Land of Fire. She told him who to contact and how to talk to them, and she even personally contacted some people in case of high-profile assassination targets like those with connections to the Daimyo's search. This was possibly the biggest boon because without people on the ground, Ratel would've either visited dozens of places, which would've taken months, or worked with incorrect people, which would've at least tripled the time it took.
Campbell was thoroughly impressed by Ratel's ability to seek help when it shouldn't have. He knew Ratel came from the Police Force and had built a very successful sub-department from scratch, which put his ability to delegate responsibilities in context.
He was thankful for Barbary because if his boss wasn't so comfortable with letting his subordinates do their work without micromanagement, he didn't think he would've allowed Ratel to continue working as lead on such an important case given the squad's situation.
He opened the report and the bottom of the first page brought him a smile when he saw that while Ratel's name was in the lead operative section, he had made a custom section and added the squad members as contributors. The act of sharing credit was not to be taken lightly because Campbell had seen many credit pinchers who tried to take all the credit for themselves regardless of contribution.
"What are you thinking?"
Campbell looked up to see Barbary at his door, who was in the squad's office to have a meeting with Caracara.
"...Nothing, I'm grateful for my fortune," said Campbell.
"Really? Great, let's celebrate that and go drinking tonight!"
Campbell sighed, knowing he would wake up hungover the next day and wished he had never spoken up.
———
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Since returning from Maizuru, Takuma had found himself increasingly frowning. He sat in his office, with his clusters of notes on the assassinations pinned on a cork board, representing one of his two big current problems.
He had closed or was nearing closing 80% of the assassination cases, which meant that the judicial system now had them in their processes. The rest of the team had helped him tremendously and he was extremely thankful because he couldn't have done it by himself.
The problem was that while he had closed 80% of the cases, he had made close to zero progress on the remaining 20%. Before he had caught the middleman, he had to identify the clients through good, old-fashioned investigations.
He contacted the local law enforcement agency handling the homicide investigations and looked at their case files to see if he could identify the clients through the suspect lists. Dhole, the master of information, helped him by giving him tips about where to look. Those tips, combined with his own experience, had solved many cases. In some cases, he didn't even have to do anything because some people were idiotic enough to brag about it.
But after he had caught the middleman, they had the client list on their hands. It became as simple as sending them to the local law enforcement. He still needed to help some of them where the clients were difficult, but that wasn't an immediate issue.
However, there was one main difference in the remaining 20%.
"One guy," he muttered to himself.
All the remaining assassinations—six people—were ordered by one man. And if that wasn't concerning enough, all of those assassinations were of high-profile targets. Takuma knew a few of them and knew about their deaths through the news. Nobles, industrialists, businessmen with big state contracts, shinobi and samurai in important positions—it was highly concerning how important these people were.
And if one man was responsible for all of their deaths.
"It's a god-damned conspiracy," he whispered and it stressed the hell out of him.
He had his theories. The most credible one: the man was a foreign agent who was systematically eliminating influential people around the Land of Fire to destabilise the nation. The man had been clever as none of the targets were connected and lived in drastically different parts of the country—and the assassination squad were given special instructions for a few of them. One of them was made to look like an accident, whereas three of them were murdered while they were travelling and made to look like robberies gone south.
If he wanted to find the truth, which was his job, he needed to find the man who ordered the assassinations—which he knew wouldn't be easy.
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