They heard the town from a distance.
Strings and drums carrying over the last hill, and then the smell, grilled meat and sugar and something floral that none of them could name, and then the road crested and the town opened below them in a sprawl of color and noise and people. So many people.
Banners hung between every rooftop. Paper lanterns in reds and golds swayed on lines strung across the main street. Stalls crowded both sides of the road selling everything from candied fruit to wooden masks to bolts of dyed silk, and the crowd was loud and happy.
"Holy crap…" Fuki said.
"Language." Lee politely requested.
"Holy smokes, sensei…" Fuki corrected.
"A festival!" Ami's eyes were already moving across the stalls with cute accessories. "Is it a holiday? What are they celebrating?"
"Harvest festival, annual. Three days." Kasumi said quietly, reading a banner near the gate.
"Three days!" Fuki grabbed Lee's sleeve. "Sensei, how long is this mission? Can we stay for the whole thing? Look at that food stand, is that yakitori, I can smell it from here, I'm going to die if I don't eat some of that immediately."
"Fuki-chan." Lee gently removed his sleeve from her grip. "We are not on vacation. We are here to complete a mission. People in this town have been robbed and harassed and they asked Konoha for help. That is why we are here." He reminded her, and then he smiled. "However! A good shinobi gathers information by blending into the local environment! So we will explore the festival, and while we explore, we will be working. Watch how I talk to people. Watch what I ask and how I ask it. And keep your eyes open at all times. Understood?"
"Yes, sensei!" Three voices, three levels of sincerity. Fuki was already looking at the yakitori stand again.
They entered the town through the main gate.
The first merchant's office was above a silk shop on the central street, and the man behind the desk had the soft hands and an opposing temperament.
"Finally!" He stood when Lee showed the mission scroll. "I've been waiting weeks for Konoha to send someone. Do you know how much I've lost? Three shipments! Three! The southern road is unusable. My clients are taking their business to the northern route and my competitors are eating my margins alive."
"I understand your frustration, sir." Lee sat across from him, back straight. "Can you tell me about the attacks? How many bandits, what weapons they carried, whether any of them were shinobi?"
"How would I know that? I wasn't there! My drivers were there. One of them quit after the second time and the other two won't take the southern road anymore." The merchant waved a hand. "All I know is they took everything. Silk, spices, a case of lacquerware that was worth more than your mission fee, no offense."
"None taken. Where were your drivers attacked? Can you show me on a map?"
"Somewhere south. On the road. Where roads are." The merchant's helpfulness had reached its natural limit. "Look, I don't know where they hide or how many there are or what they look like. I know they took my goods and I want them stopped. That's what I'm paying you for, isn't it?"
Lee nodded, thanked him, and left.
In the hallway, Ami let out a breath. "That was completely useless."
"Almost completely useless." Lee held up one finger. "We learned three things. The attacks are on the southern road, not the northern. The bandits take goods, not lives, which means they are selling what they steal somewhere and need the merchants alive to keep stealing from. And this man has been waiting weeks, which means the bandits are comfortable. They are not worried about being caught. What does that tell you?"
Ami thought. "They've been doing this for a while. They have a base nearby. And nobody's challenged them yet."
"Excellent, Ami-chan!"
The second interview was a wealthy landowner's wife in a house with a garden, and she was more upset than the merchant and less useful. She described the bandits as "horrible rough men" and their weapons as "sharp things" and their numbers as "a lot, maybe, I wasn't there, my husband's foreman told me." She offered them tea and spent twenty minutes describing the emotional toll the robberies had taken on her household and the quality of the carpets that were stolen.
Lee listened to every word of it with total patience. He thanked her for the tea. He complimented the garden on the way out.
"Sensei," Fuki said, in the street, with the particular suffering of a girl who had just endured twenty minutes of carpet talk. "Rich people are freaking useless."
"She told us one useful thing." Lee shook his head. "Her husband's foreman was present during at least one attack. If we can find him, he might have real information. Sometimes the person you need to talk to is not the person who called for help."
"Can we find the foreman after lunch?" Fuki's nose had found the yakitori stand again. "Please? I haven't eaten since we got here and that stand is right there and I can literally feel the food calling my name, sensei, it's speaking to me."
"...I suppose we have been walking for a while." Lee conceded.
"YES!" Fuki was already gone.
The festival pulled them apart as three very different girls found three very different reasons to stop walking.
Fuki hit the food stalls first and did not come back. Lee found her twenty minutes later at a game stall where you threw a ball at wooden targets for prizes, and she had won a stuffed frog and was arguing with the stall owner about whether her last throw had hit the line or cleared it.
"It was in!" Fuki insisted. "Half the point was over the line! That counts!"
"Half doesn't count, kid. The whole thing has to clear."
"THE WHOLE THING DID CLEAR! Look at the mark! LOOK AT IT!"
"Fuki-chan." Lee appeared beside her. "Are you gathering intelligence from this man?"
"...He's withholding my prize, sensei. That's intelligence."
"It is not intelligence. It is a frog. Come."
She came, but she brought the frog, because while Lee had been looking elsewhere she had secretly swiped it off the counter, and the stall owner did not notice for another ten minutes, by which point Fuki and the frog were three streets away sharing a stick of yakitori.
Ami had found the textile district.
She moved through the fabric stalls like she was born with money. Fingers running over bolts of colored silk, holding swatches up to her skin to check the contrast against her purple hair, and she was, for a few minutes, simply a girl shopping, and Lee let her be, because there was nothing wrong with a shinobi who liked nice things, and because the look on her face when she found a particular shade of violet that matched her eyes was one of the most honest expressions he had seen from her.
"Sensei." She held up a ribbon, dark violet, almost black. "What do you think?"
"Very nice! It would look good on you, Ami-chan!" He replied.
She bought it. She tied it around her wrist and tucked the ends under her sleeve.
Kasumi did not wander.
She walked beside Lee or slightly behind him, and she watched. The crowd, the stall owners, the way people moved, which alleys fed into the main street, where the side roads went, how the rooftops connected. She was enjoying the atmosphere, the noise and color and the warmth of being somewhere new with people she belonged to, but underneath the enjoyment her eyes never stopped moving.
She was doing exactly what he had asked. She was the only one…
They regrouped at a dumpling stand near the center of town in the early afternoon, three girls and a sensei around a standing table, and Lee laid out what they had.
"So. A morning of investigation. What have we learned?"
"Rich people don't know anything." Fuki said, through a dumpling.
"Rich people don't know anything useful," Ami corrected. "They know they were robbed. They know they're upset. They want us to fix it. They can't tell us where, how many, or what we're facing."
"The southern road," Kasumi said. "Multiple attacks. Goods taken, not people. The bandits sell what they steal, so they have a connection to a buyer somewhere. And nobody has challenged them."
"We didn't find the foreman." Lee added. "He was not at the estate today. We will look for him again tomorrow, but for now, the honest truth is that we do not have enough information to locate the bandits' base. We know the area. We know the road. We do not know the position." He finished his dumpling and smiled. "This is normal. Most missions do not hand you the answer on the first day. Patience is as much a part of the job as strength."
"Sensei," Fuki said, "can I get more dumplings? There's a stand over there that does them fried."
"...One more…" Lee said, because he was learning that command was sometimes about choosing which battles to fight.
…
Something happened on the fourth street past the dumpling stand, and Kasumi almost missed it.
She had been watching a juggler near the fountain, briefly, a lapse in attention of maybe eight seconds, and when her eyes came back to the crowd she noticed the same face she had seen near the silk stalls an hour ago. Dark hair, civilian clothes, average height, nothing remarkable about him at all except that he had been unremarkable in the same places they had been for too long.
Her eyes moved left. A second man, different build, leaning against a wall eating a skewer, and she had seen him too, near the merchant's office this morning, in the same leaning posture, in a different spot.
Two men. Same distance from them. Different positions, but always the same distance.
Her heart accelerated. She stepped close to Lee and tugged his sleeve once and spoke into his ear.
"Sensei. Two men have been following us. Dark hair near the fountain, and the one eating by the wall. I saw them both near the silk district an hour ago, and the one by the wall was near the merchant's office this morning."
Lee did not turn. He did not react. He kept walking at the same pace, the same smile, and his voice came back low and warm and for her alone.
"Good job, Kasumi. Being observant is a vital shinobi skill that will help keep you alive and keep you at an advantage against enemies. I'm proud of you."
Fuki and Ami, who had heard the whisper, both started to turn around.
Lee's hands came down on their heads. Both of them. One hand per girl, firm, holding their faces forward with a grip that was gentle and absolutely immovable.
"Do not turn around."
They froze under his hands. The tone was different. Lee-sensei had many tones, loud, warm, encouraging, goofy, sincere, and this was the one they had heard exactly once before, on the morning of the genin test, the one that did not sound like their Lee-sensei at all.
"Kasumi identified two people who have been following us through the town since this morning. She spotted them. You did not." He held their heads a moment longer, then released. "I told you we are not on vacation and that we are here for a mission. I was waiting to see how long it would take you to notice them the way Kasumi did, and you never did. And then when you heard about them, you almost immediately turned around and showed them that we know. Not good, girls."
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Disappointment from Rock Lee was worse than shouting from anyone else, because this was the man who believed in them louder than anyone they had ever met, and hearing that belief go quiet, even for a moment, was unbearable.
Fuki's jaw clenched. Her fists balled at her sides and her face went hot and red and she stared at the ground ahead of her and said nothing.
Ami's composed expression cracked as she was flushed with embarrassment. She was the leader. She was always the one who noticed things first, who organized, who stayed ahead. And the quiet girl, the one she had spent years always ordering, had outperformed her at the one thing that mattered on a real mission. In front of Lee.
Kasumi looked at both of them and felt something she had never felt before: guilty about being praised. But she also felt pride and joy at being acknowledged by Lee-sensei…
Lee let go of their heads after seeing their ashamed faces.
"Now. We have identified people who are following us. What do you think we should do?" He walked them casually toward a food stand, bought four sticks of grilled squid, and handed one to each of them as if nothing in the world was wrong and they were simply four people enjoying the festival. "Eat. Smile. Act natural. And think."
"We do not turn around, chase them, and beat them up." Fuki said in an unsure tone.
"That's right. We do not do that. Ami?"
"We should lead them somewhere. Keep making them think we don't know they're following us." Ami's voice had regained its composure. "We let them get comfortable. And then we set a trap."
"I'm liking the sound of that. Kasumi, is there anything else?"
"We should capture them." Kasumi's voice was a little steadier now, warming in the light of being asked, of mattering. "If they're following us, they're reporting to someone. We need to find out where the hideout is, how many people are there, what kind of people they have. If we capture these two and get that information, we can strike the hideout directly and finish the mission without hoping to get lucky."
"Excellent!" Lee's smile came back and he bit into his squid. "Three answers, three parts of the same plan. Fuki knows what not to do, which is the first and most important lesson. Ami knows how to use what we have, which is the second. And Kasumi knows what we need next, which is the third."
Fuki and Ami glanced at Kasumi. The look was complicated. There was jealousy in it. The old hierarchy asserting itself, because Kasumi was not supposed to be the one getting praised. Kasumi was supposed to be the quiet one, the extra, the girl who followed. And today she had been the best of them, twice, and neither of them could pretend otherwise.
They didn't dwell on it for now. There was work to do.
"Alright, girls." Lee finished his squid and tossed the stick into a bin without looking. "Here's what we do. We keep walking. We keep smiling. We let them follow us for another twenty minutes. And then we leave through the eastern road, toward the wooded hills, at a pace that says we're heading somewhere for the night." He looked at each of them in turn. "Ami, I need a location. You've been looking at the layout of this town all day. Where is the best place within walking distance to set an ambush?"
"East of here, past the last houses, there's a bend in the road where the trees come close on both sides and the slope drops off to the left." Ami answered without hesitation. She had been shopping, yes, but she had also been looking.
"Kasumi, I need numbers. How far back are they keeping? Have they changed positions since you spotted them?"
"Same distance, about thirty meters. They switched sides of the street once but they're still at the same range." Kasumi had not stopped watching.
"Fuki, I need you to act completely normal for twenty more minutes. Can you do that?"
Fuki looked at him.
"I need you to laugh and eat and look like a girl at a festival who does not know she is being followed. That is your mission right now. Be loud. Be obvious. Be yourself who did not know people were following us. Can you do that for me?"
A grin crept across Fuki's face.
"Sensei," she said, "I have been training for this my entire life."
"I'm happy to hear it."
They finished their food. They picked up their pace, just slightly with the girls leading the way while Lee stood in the back. Fuki bought another stick of yakitori and ate it loudly and argued with a stall owner about overcharging her, and Ami drifted beside her looking bored, and Kasumi twiddled her fingers as they walked.
Behind them, thirty meters back, two men who thought they were invisible kept following ninja kids.
Team Lee moved through the festival crowd toward the eastern road, and the town's music and laughter faded behind them, and the trees ahead grew taller and closer together.