"She didn't seem to understand the significance behind a certain word they were using as a code name for suspicious individuals such as myself...but perhaps you could shed some light on their connection to them."
"This certain word being...?" Hirumo said curiously.
"'Akatsuki.'"
...
"Akatsuki..." Hirumo repeated slowly, tasting the word with his tongue. His eyes had lit up like a child that had just caught sight of a favorite toy he had put aside at one point, and then forgotten about its existence. "I'd heard rumors but dismissed them..."
"Rumors about?" Jiraiya prodded him.
"About a growing organization that was supporting Gatō from the shadows – or even controlling, perhaps," Hirumo said. Then with a thoughtful look, he added, "There's been a confirmed recent sighting of Kakuzu at one of the bounty stations along the coastline."
Jiraiya folded his arms across his chest, processing the information. Kakuzu was one of the more frequently spotted members of Akatsuki, showing up from time to time to turn in a ridiculous amount of bounties in exchange for money. However, there was nothing Jiraiya could do about that – bounty stations were strictly black market, and while information regarding Kakuzu's visits could be bought at a price, his visits were indiscriminate and without pattern, making them impossible to track.
Hirumo got up, wiping his hands clean on the sides of his pants. "Was that it, Jiraiya-sama?"
"There was one final thing I got out of the interrogation," Jiraiya said distractedly. "They were supposed to report back to Zabuza at some sort of big event soon, in the harbor city. Do you know anything about that?"
"That'll be the daimyo's ceremony for sure," said Hirumo without any hesitation.
"Ceremony?"
...
"Out of the way, kid!"
In the fat man's hurry to get to the front of the crowd, he reached out with an impatient hand to shove the small boy to the side – but to his surprise, it swiped uselessly through the air. The man glanced down and then did a double take, finding nothing there. He looked around – but there were at least a dozen other children of the same size and coloring in the immediate vicinity. The boy could have been any one of them. So, with little more than a fleeting wondering thought, the man moved on.
Meanwhile, through bright blue eyes, Naruto watched the man disappear into the crowd before effortlessly merging into it once more. As he began to be jostled forward by the mass, he looked around at the numbers calculatingly.
It seemed that a substantial number of people had gathered at the city for the ceremony, for he had never seen even half that number of people during the busiest hours of the city. And while most of them looked like civilians, there were some who stood out like a sore thumb, namely those with weapons. Most were subtle, with daggers strapped to their thighs, but here and there were the obvious ones with bulky swords and katana on their backs. Those kinds of people walked about with a bubble around them, as the civilians avoided eye contact and gave them a wide berth.
A flashing motion caught Naruto's eye, and he turned to see a scruffy-looking boy with dark coloring nod at him before ducking and disappearing into the crowd – Rai. As he looked around, several more caught his eye – a sour-faced girl with short hair, a scratched-up boy with cropped black hair...Sakura. Menma.
He couldn't spot Mayu, Sai or Sasuke but that was because they were situated on the other side of the venue, a winding path that led from the daimyō's ceremonial estate to the city's center. They were all arranged strategically near the front of the crowd, along with most of the other civilian children. It was a custom in Wave country for the daimyō's procession to hand out ryō and candy to the watching children, and as Naruto looked around at the many orphans crowding around him, it was apparent that most of them had made the pilgrimage here for that very purpose.
Is this why Kaine-san took it as well as she did, when she found out we were her escorts?, Naruto wondered.
Henge, the transformation jutsu, was an E-rank jutsu, but it was difficult to maintain perfectly while under high external strain. And the closer your transformation was to your real appearance, the easier it was to maintain it. For example, it would be easier for an adult male to transform into another adult male than into a young boy, and vice versa. Once Naruto and Sasuke's teams had transformed into typical hungry-eyed children, melting into the background became effortless.
This was key for the mission Kaine had proposed to them three days earlier in Tazuna's house: to rescue the daimyō's two children, the prince and princess, so that Gatō couldn't use them as a means of controlling the daimyō anymore. According to Kaine, rescuing the daimyō himself would be too risky – not only would he be the most heavily guarded, but it would only give Gatō a reason to seize the vacuum of authority left behind in the daimyō's absence, no matter how temporary.
Suddenly, there was a flurry of motion and then hushed whispering. The moving crowd came to a stop, all of the heads facing one direction – and there, at the far end of the pathway, Naruto could see what looked like the beginnings of a procession making its way through. At the back was a series of ornately decorated sedan chairs, from which Naruto could make out smiling faces and waving hands – the daimyō and his children. And standing around them was an array of women and men with kunai and swords glinting nakedly on their persons. Naruto quickly did a headcount and saw that Kaine's information had been on spot: the sedan chair holding the princess and prince was relatively lightly guarded with three bodyguards, not including the carriers. If Kaine's information could be further counted on, there were a few more guards scattered in the crowd disguised as civilians, but if their plan worked out, they shouldn't have time to matter.
The daimyō's sedan chair on the other hand, was surrounded by no less than seven guards, most prominently of which was a pale-skinned man with bandages running across the lower half of his face, and a gigantic broadsword on his back. Without fail, wherever he passed through the crowd, a visible wave of fear swept through it.
"That's Zabuza," a passing voice hissed tightly in his ear – Menma – and Naruto nodded. So this was the infamous missing-nin. He'd thought that Menma's team had finished him off, but this was no time to question things. Either Zabuza had survived or someone was impersonating him – whatever the case, he was another powerful obstacle they would have to get through to complete the mission.
Naruto felt an uneasy shiver go down his spine. It was strange, however, that a missing-nin could be so boldly parading in front of thousands of people like that. No matter how powerful he was, he was basically painting a target on himself for any of his village's hunter nin.
As he waited for the signal, Naruto watched the procession get closer and closer to where he was standing. Every now and then, a hand, full of something that glinted brightly in the afternoon sun, popped out of one of the sedan chairs and every time, as if a dam had broken, the children surged forward. There seemed to be some invisible rule in place that prevented adults from joining in; when a few stragglers moved forward to do so, they were promptly knocked out by the children around them. If they were lucky, their unconscious bodies were dragged out to the edge of the crowd.
Just as the first sedan chair began to pass by where Naruto was waiting, the hand popped out once more, and this time, he could see that it was attached to a young-looking girl dressed richly in pale robes. She looked cheerful – likely she was too young to understand the precarious hostage situation her family and country was in. The children around Naruto surged forward, and he joined in half-heartedly. He reached up in the air with a hand – and in that instant, met the princess' gaze. Her eyes were blue, like his. Taken aback, he held his breath – and then with a bright smile, she tossed the coins in her hand toward him.
Before they reached him, however, several of the larger and rougher orphans knocked his hand aside and leaped up to swipe the coins. Naruto saw another orphan boy aiming a kick at his chest; easily dodging it, he nevertheless pretended to have been hurt and fell backward in the crowd, intending to disappear and lose whatever the small attention he'd unintentionally gathered.
But before Naruto hit the ground, a strong hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him up. He looked up to see a tall man with long shaggy white hair, and immediately recognized him as the man he'd chanced upon in the bathhouse a week ago.
"Are you alright?" said the man, and Naruto mutely nodded, his mind whirring with several possibilities – was this other man working for Gatō? Had he found out about the plot, and seen through Naruto's disguise? But before Naruto could do anything else, the man simply said, "be more careful from now on," and then walked away.
Naruto stood still, unsure of how to react – and as if answering him, a roaring sound filled his ears. Naruto's head snapped toward the procession's path just in time to see three massive black and white tigers leaping at Zabuza – the signal!
The crowd had been stunned into silence, but as the missing-nin pulled his sword off his back with an accompanying flash of steel, they were galvanized into action. Screaming, people, children and adults alike, began scrambling away from the path. The same orphan boy who had tried to kick Naruto before came running at him with a panicked expression on his face; leaping forward, Naruto jumped past him, heading straight for the procession.