Three days later, the ninja assignnts were announced.
Twelve surviving graduates stood in a single line. A middle-aged Jonin held the roster, reading nas aloud without so much as a glance upward.
"Team One—Terumi i, Akiyama..."
"Team Three—Kitahara Kaede..."
Four or five people separated them. Throughout the process, they never once made eye contact.
Kitahara Kaede's expression remained vacant, but internally, he breathed a sigh of relief.
They weren't on the sa team.
That was a good thing.
This wasn't the Hidden Leaf. In the Hidden Leaf, being part of the sa squad ant bonds; it ant facing life and death together. Three teammates were like grasshoppers tied to a single string—sharing every reward and splitting every hardship.
In the Mist Village, being on the sa team ant that your teammate could receive a secret mission at any mont.
And that mission would be to kill you.
Kaede understood the Mist Village's system perfectly. The higher-ups would periodically issue secret assassination orders to a mber of a squad, targeting their own teammates. Sotis it was to test loyalty, sotis to purge dissent, and sotis for no reason at all.
It was designed to keep everyone in a state of constant terror, ensuring no one dared to trust the person beside them, keeping the entire village locked in a cycle of perpetual suspicion.
This was the Bloody Mist.
Being placed in the sa group as Terumi i would have been like two people discussing a romance while their heads were resting under the sa guillotine.
Being apart gave him breathing room.
The assignnts ended quickly, and the squads departed with their respective Jonin.
Kaede entered Team Three's training room and spent two hours sparring with his new teammates. He suppressed his true strength, showcasing only basic taijutsu and low-level Water Style, maintaining a diocre, middle-of-the-pack performance.
When sparring ended, the lead Jonin scribbled a note in his ledger. Kaede caught a glimpse of it from the corner of his eye.
*Mainly taijutsu, basic Water Style. Capable strength, aloof personality. Requires observation.*
He withdrew his gaze.
*Observe all you want.*
***
Over the next few weeks, his life beca a loop: leave the house, execute missions, return, close the door.
His teammates tried to strike up conversations, but he responded only with nods or shakes of the head. He almost never spoke more than two words at a ti. Eventually, they stopped trying.
Every day upon returning ho, his first priority was to sweep the room. He checked for hidden sentries in the door gaps, marks on the window fras, and beneath the floorboards.
The higher-ups remained silent.
This led Kaede to seriously ponder a question: when exactly did Sunagakure plan to use him?
He had passed the graduation exam and beco an official ninja. Logically, once a pawn had been nurtured to this stage, it was ti to deploy them. Yet, there was no movent.
One possibility: Sunagakure was waiting for him to climb higher in the ranks.
Another possibility: The geopolitical situation had shifted, and Sunagakure temporarily couldn't afford to worry about a single pawn far away in the Land of Water.
And then there was a third: they were testing him.
A pawn had been buried for five years without receiving any significant orders. Long-term silence didn't just test patience; it tested resolve. Would the pawn eventually believe they had been abandoned and take an impulsive action that exposed their identity?
Leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, Kaede went through these possibilities one by one. Then, he began to think about sothing else.
When the mission finally ca—would he do it?
He would.
He was currently a man of Sunagakure. Or more accurately, Sunagakure *believed* he was their man.
This identity was a double-edged sword. The advantage was that his cover was pristine. Sunagakure had provided him with a perfect identity as a war orphan, and the Mist Village's screening system had never cast a shadow of doubt upon him.
The disadvantage was that he didn't own this identity; Sunagakure did.
If he beca disobedient, Sunagakure wouldn't need to do much. They would simply deliver a file to the desk of the Mist Village ANBU stating: *You have a ninja in your village who is actually a Sunagakure spy.*
The Mist Village would handle the rest.
The end for a deep-cover agent who had been exposed wasn't simply death; it was sothing far longer and more agonizing. He had never seen the Mist Village's interrogation thods for spies, but he had heard of them.
He had no desire to experience them.
So, for now, he would do exactly what was expected. When Sunagakure gave an order, he would execute it without hesitation, without picking and choosing, and without asking why. He would ensure no one suspected that this pawn had a will of its own.
He would deal with the rest when the ti ca.
***
Two weeks later, Team Three was assigned a joint patrol mission to clear out foreign infiltrators scattered across the northwest region of the village. Several squads were involved, including Terumi i's Team One.
At the assembly point, Terumi i stood within the ranks of Team One, just a few steps away from Kaede. When her gaze swept over him, Kaede didn't dodge or nod; his eyes simply slid past her with indifference.
Terumi i didn't linger. They were like two strangers who had never spoken a word.
The two squads began their patrol along parallel routes. Team Three took the eastern side, and Team One took the western side, separated by a strip of forest roughly three hundred ters wide.
Along the way, Team Three encountered two lone enemy ninjas. Kaede stepped in and neutralized one, while the other was taken down through coordination with his teammates.
Through the accumulation of the previous few missions, Kaede had quietly established a level of influence within the squad. When he suggested flanking to the left, the teammates flanked left. When he told them to wait, they stopped. His battlefield analysis had yet to be wrong.
***
As the patrol began to turn back, they passed the edge of an abandoned fishing village.
Out of the corner of his eye, Kaede noticed movent in the roadside brush.
A child.
Seven or eight years old, wearing tattered clothes, collapsed beneath a dying wooden shed. There was a wound on the left arm; the blood had already dried, left untreated. The child looked like a civilian, likely a refugee from a nearby village scattered during a conflict.
The lead Jonin didn't even look. His two teammates glanced over and then looked away, their pace never faltering.
A wounded civilian child did not fit into any column on a Mist Village ninja's mission checklist.
Kaede walked past with a blank expression. After about ten minutes of marching, he spoke.
"There was a strange noise to the southeast. I'll go confirm it; there might be soone who slipped through."
The lead Jonin looked back at him. "Five minutes."
"Understood."
Kaede detached himself from the group and headed southeast. Once he entered the forest, however, he changed direction. He didn't go southeast; instead, he looped back in an arc toward the ruins.
The area was empty.
He knelt, pulled a portion of ergency rations and half a roll of bandages from his waist pouch, and placed them where the child could easily reach them.
Then he stood, turned, and rejoined his squad.
***
On the western route, Team One passed the outer periter of the sa abandoned fishing village.
Terumi i was positioned in the middle of the formation. As her line of sight crossed a gap in a low wall, she saw the child.
Lying under the wooden shed, motionless, with dried blood on the left arm.
Her pace faltered for a mont.
The lead Jonin did not stop. Neither did her teammates. Terumi i bit her lip and kept walking.
After eight or nine steps, she looked back. The child was still curled there.
She wanted to go back. But she couldn't find a reason. In the Mist Village, leaving a formation without cause was a punishable offense. She was a fresh graduate with no influence in the squad; she didn't even have the standing to say, "I'm going to check on them."
Terumi i turned her head and followed the group. However, her gaze remained fixed toward the east.
Across the three-hundred-ter strip of forest, the ruins were intermittently visible through the canopy. Just then, she saw soone from the eastern side detach from their group.
A figure split off from Team Three's marching line, walked southeast for a short distance—and then changed direction.
The figure looped back in an arc, returning to the ruins.
Terumi i stopped in her tracks.
She stood on a low slope, peering through the gaps in the canopy. She saw him squatting beside a wooden shed, leaving sothing behind before vanishing back into the woods.
The entire encounter had lasted less than two minutes.
"Terumi i, let's move!" her teammate called from ahead.
"Coming."
She followed, remaining silent for the rest of the journey.
On the way back, the routes of two different squads briefly converged at a checkpoint. As the mbers of Team 3 walked ahead, she overheard one of them ntion sothing in passing.
"Kaede said he heard sothing strange to the southeast, so he went to check it out."
Another teammate chid in, "He said that? Then it's a sure thing. Last ti he warned us about an ambush, there actually was one."
Terumi i turned her head away, avoiding their gaze. But she had heard everything.
So, it was him.
He was able to break formation because his judgnt had never once been wrong. His squad trusted him; even their leading Jonin trusted him.
He had achieved sothing she couldn't. It wasn't because he was kinder than her, but because he was more capable.
Only those with power have the luxury of choice.
Terumi i stared at the road ahead, her mind racing. She thought back to the river on the day of the graduation exam. Those words of his resurfaced in her mind:
'If he is strong enough—strong enough that one day he can sit in the position where the rules are made—then he can personally abolish this exam.'
At the ti, she thought the statent was too grandiose, like a daydream. But now, she realized sothing.
He wasn't daydreaming. He was already doing it.
He wasn't waiting until he sat in that seat to act; he was doing what he could, right now, within the scope of his current abilities.
A cat, a child... things so small they were practically insignificant. Yet, in this village, everyone else had walked past that child without a second glance.
Only he had turned back.
***
That evening, Terumi i went to the training grounds.
In the days that followed, Kitahara Kaede noticed sothing.
While passing by the training grounds once, he saw Terumi i practicing taijutsu alone. She repeated the sa combo over a dozen tis. Sweat had soaked through her collar, but she didn't even stop to wipe it away. She didn't look for a sparring partner; she simply put her head down and polished her technique.
A few days later, he ran into her again. Sa place, still alone.
Kitahara Kaede didn't linger; he turned and walked away.
She wanted to get stronger.
Returning to his quarters, he closed the door and sat on the edge of his bed, leaning against the wall in thought.
In the Mist Village, there were very few ways to get close to soone.
Offering warmth and concern? In a place where your own teammate might slit your throat in the middle of the night, unsolicited kindness was seen as a trap.
Staging "accidental" encounters? Falsehoods were worthless to people who lived in a world of lies.
But there was one exception.
When a stronger person sees soone struggling and desperate, and offers a few pointers. In a place like the Mist Village, that was the only form of contact whose motives wouldn't be questioned.
The ti of the strong is expensive. The re act of spending that ti on soone was, in itself, a form of recognition.
Kitahara Kaede closed his eyes. He had found his entry point.
***
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