Chapter 18.1- One Thousand Hands

The next course of action was clear. Since we’d killed the shinobi that was here to watch the situation, and thus our foremost source of intel oil the situation, there was only one more option open to us to figuring things out. The only issue was that pursuing this option was basically going nuclear. The land of waves was allied with the land of fire even if there were no official written treaties proclaiming that, there was still decades of trade relations. That meant that doing something as serious as capturing and interrogating the Mayor of the town was basically going to flush a lot of that down the drain. So were forced to ask ourselves one simple question, ‘would it be worth it?’

“Konoha does not negotiate for the Land of Fire, and we sure as hell do not speak for Konoha. Doing this would be terminating an agreement for both of those parties. We’d be overstepping our boundaries by several orders of magnitude. We’d get in so much trouble, that I find it difficult to even conceptualise the level of mud we’d be wading through in the end of this” Toshiro dropped in his two cents. So far, Uzume had made it clear that she had no interest in leaving things unfinished and that if the Mayor’s head had to roll for us to get to the bottom of this, then ut was an acceptable sacrifice.

Shika remained silent for a few seconds before turning to me, “What do you think?”

“ I think that there is a difference between the Mayor of the Land of Waves, and the Land of Waves themselves. Considering he needed a shinobi to keep him power, it’s clear that he isn’t at the peak of his popularity with his people and that gives us an opportunity here. If they already dislike him, then removing I’m from his position could actually mean that the alliance gets strengthened. The opposite is also through. Leaving right now like Shori suggests is dangerous because eventually the fear of the absent shinobi will die, and the will go for him again. Except this time, they will succeed and then replace him. Considering civilians, at the best of time, barely have any understanding of the concept of different shinobi belonging to different villages, I think its likely that they’ll just lump us in with whoever’s been taking their kids and we’d lose the alliance either way.” Was my own submission on the matter.

Shika sat still for a few minutes. Going through the academy with her meant that we allowed her to have her space as we knew that she was thinking things through. Probably working through more permutations in her mind than we could comprehend. In three minutes, her eyes snapped open.

“Okay, I’ve made up my mind guys. We follow Shori’s plan, but we have to make sure that we do this in a way that leaves the civilians with the best possible impression of us. That means that we don’t just need to take him out, but we need to figure out some way to either get the kids back or conclusively deliver closure on what happened to them.”

A/N; First chunk