A polished English localization
Seeing that neither of his teammates objected, Uchiha Gen simply stepped into command and began issuing orders. There was no hesitation in his voice, no attempt to ask for permission first. In a situation like this, indecision was more dangerous than arrogance.
"I'll go to the lord of River Valley Town and get a fuller briefing from the client. Liuli, Yanjun—you two split up and enter town separately. Gather whatever other intelligence you can so we can form a more complete picture of the mission. And one more thing..."
As he spoke, Gen bit down on his right thumb until blood welled up, then immediately ran through a short sequence of hand seals.
"Boar - Dog - Bird - Monkey - Ram."
The five seals snapped into place. The instant his palm struck the ground, a thick plume of white smoke burst outward. More than a dozen jet-black ninja crows appeared in midair, cawing sharply as they beat their wings and spiraled upward.
"The crows will monitor the surrounding area and scout the terrain," Gen said. "If we're lucky, they may even find useful clues before we do."
These ninja crows had only recently signed a summoning contract with him, and their combat ability was nothing special. But every one of them had gone through the Uchiha clan's basic training. Asking them to perform simple reconnaissance over a town and the nearby mountains was well within their capabilities.
On the ground, in secret, and even from the air, Gen quietly put layers of caution in place. He had no intention of treating Orochimaru's trial like an ordinary rookie mission.
"You learned another new jutsu?" Sarutobi Enjun scratched his head as he watched the flock scatter across the sky. "I never saw you use that one at school."
Gen didn't bother answering the question. He only looked at Enjun and said, in the same calm voice as before,
"Move quickly. If we drag this out too long and make Orochimaru-senpai dissatisfied, that alone might count against us. Finish the intelligence gathering before five in the afternoon. No matter how much or how little you find, return here and regroup at five sharp."
Only then did Enjun fully register the seriousness of the situation. If they failed Orochimaru's trial and got sent back by their supervising jonin before their first mission had even properly begun, it would be humiliating beyond words. At the very least, he would never hear the end of it from Biwako and the Third Hokage.
He needed to move. So did all of them.
Soon enough, Sarutobi Enjun and Uzuki Ruri entered the town after disguising themselves with Transformation Technique, taking on the appearance of an elderly couple traveling to visit relatives. Their forms were convincing enough at a glance, and for a first layer of cover, that was enough.
Gen took a far simpler approach. He straightened his clothes, adjusted the angle of his shoulders, and made the red-and-white fan crest of the Uchiha clan on his clothing a little more visible. Then he walked toward the gate openly and began asking the soldiers stationed there for directions.
The lord of River Valley Town was named Hase, descended from retainers who had once served the daimyo directly. In terms of status, he could be counted as a mid-ranking noble. With more than one hundred thousand people under his authority, he stood comfortably above the minor nobility that struggled to keep their land, even if he was still far below the great aristocrats whom even the daimyo had to treat with respect.
A few minutes later, Gen found himself inside the lord's estate.
"I never expected Konoha would send someone from the famous Uchiha clan to assist our lord with this matter."
A short, round middle-aged man in small circular sunglasses led Gen into the manor as he spoke. His name was Ito Kei, steward of River Valley Town.
Gen had never seen a daimyo's palace in person, but the residence before him still exuded the air of nobility. Painted beams, crimson curtains, layered terraces, and decorative pavilions were arranged with almost ostentatious care. The building wasn't merely large; it wanted anyone who entered it to remember that power lived here.
"You flatter me, Steward Ito," Gen replied with a courteous smile. "This estate is magnificently kept. That alone says much about both your lord and the people who manage his household."
As he spoke, he casually swept his eyes across the passing servants, the servants' posture, and the guards' reactions. The words themselves were polite, but they were also a test. He wanted to see whether the steward would instinctively claim credit, defer to his master, or reveal some other imbalance in the estate's power structure.
Ito Kei only laughed and deflected it neatly.
"You overpraise me, young master. I merely carry out small matters according to the lord's instructions. River Valley Town is what it is today thanks to the wise rule of Lord Hase."
A slippery answer. Enough to sound proper, but not enough to reveal anything useful.
By the time Gen was led into the inner room, he was already watching everything more carefully.
There, seated cross-legged on the tatami, was a man even fatter than the steward. He was decked out in expensive robes and ornamented with gold and jade, but the overall effect did nothing to hide the stupidity in his face. He was shoveling sweets into his mouth with the kind of focus other men reserved for life-and-death decisions.
"My lord," Ito Kei said with a bow, "this is Uchiha Gen, the ninja sent by Konoha to deal with the mountain bandits."
"Oh? A Konoha ninja?" Lord Hase looked Gen up and down with what he probably imagined was an intelligent gaze. "Hey, kid. Since you're an Uchiha, you must be very strong, right? I heard all of you can breathe fire. Is that true?"
Gen's brows twitched almost imperceptibly. In that instant, he roughly understood the situation within the estate. Because the stupidity in this lord's expression... did not look like an act at all.
Ito Kei hurriedly apologized on his master's behalf and gently tried to steer the noble away from saying anything even more absurd. Apparently, one did not let a ninja stand too close to a lord if one valued the lord's safety, whether from actual danger or simply from his own foolishness.
"Impressive, impressive," Lord Hase mumbled after half-listening to the explanation. Then he slapped his enormous belly, making the flesh ripple. "Very well, I'll leave the bandits to you. Ito, I'm going to the capital for a few days. You handle things here."
With the aid of a maid, the lord hauled himself upright and waddled off, swaying with each step. After bowing him out with perfect respect, Ito Kei turned back to Gen and regained his composed expression.
"Since my lord has entrusted this matter to us, I hope Steward Ito will cooperate fully," Gen said, lifting his cup and taking a small sip of tea.
"Naturally, naturally. We will do everything we can." The steward hesitated, then added, "But... are you truly the only one here for this mission? It is not that I doubt Konoha's ninja, only that those bandits are cunning and vicious. If there is not enough manpower, I fear..."
The hesitation in his voice was real this time. No matter how famous the Uchiha were, the boy in front of him still looked too young. If not for the clan crest on Gen's clothes, he might already have shown open displeasure.
"There's no problem," Gen said easily. "My teammates are already in town gathering information, and our squad includes a jonin. Our capability isn't something you need to worry about. What I need from you is a more detailed explanation of the situation from the people who issued the mission."
That answer clearly reassured the steward. Or at least, it reassured him enough to start talking.
"The truth is, there were no bandits around River Valley Town a year ago," Ito Kei said with a sigh. "It was only after the effects of the Shinobi World War began spreading that this group appeared."
"Refugees from the border?" Gen asked.
"No. If that were all, things would actually be simpler. The real trouble is that these bandits are deeply connected to the town's residents."
Just as I thought, Gen said to himself.
If all Orochimaru wanted was a straightforward combat mission—find the bandits, kill them, recover the stolen taxes—there would have been no reason to pick this assignment specifically as a test. The deeper problem had always been hidden under the surface.
"The mountains around River Valley Town are rich in mineral resources," Ito Kei continued. "Especially iron ore. The quality here is among the best in the entire Land of Fire. Since the war began, the daimyo has ordered every territory with iron resources to produce enough ore for the war effort."
Gen listened in silence, already sensing where this was headed.
"But high-quality ore does not mean easy extraction. The shallow deposits are almost exhausted. The miners must now go deeper and deeper underground to bring any more out. It is dangerous work, slow work. And to meet the daimyo's quota, we had to..."
"Push the miners too hard," Gen finished for him. "Until some of them fled to the mountains and became outlaws. And because they still have relatives and friends in town, the townspeople shelter them, warn them, and keep them informed. That's why they're so hard to catch."
Ito Kei stared at him in surprise.
"And the taxes?" Gen continued before the steward could answer. "If ordinary people dared to steal tax money in the first place, that means someone was already desperate enough to risk death. What rate were you collecting?"
For a moment, the steward just looked at him. This young ninja had taken only a few clues and pieced together far too much from them.
"In the past, the rate was five parts public, five parts private," Ito Kei said at last. "But after the miners fled, we had to hire more labor, and that cost money. We also had to buy iron ore from neighboring territories to meet the daimyo's quota in time. So the tax was raised to six public, four private."
A heavy tax. Very heavy.
In peacetime, perhaps half the harvest taken by the state might already leave ordinary families barely surviving. Add another tenth during wartime, and the last thread holding those families above starvation would snap. The people who fled to the mountains were not strangers. One was someone's cousin. Another was someone's uncle. Another was a brother who had simply run out of choices.
They probably hadn't even realized the shipment they robbed contained taxes for the daimyo. They had seen money and grain, and in their desperation they had acted. Then one crime became two, and now the whole thing had turned into a knot impossible to untangle cleanly.
Only then did Gen fully understand why Orochimaru had chosen this mission.
This wasn't merely a matter of locating criminals and carrying out justice. It was a test of judgment. A test of conscience. A test of whether they could draw the blade when the people standing in front of it were miserable rather than monstrous.
Pitiful or not, those people had robbed the daimyo's taxes. Under the logic of the shinobi system, that meant they had to be eliminated. Ninjas were tools for completing missions, not wandering heroes who enforced some private standard of morality.
Would Orochimaru consider hesitation a weakness? Almost certainly. If they could not do what was necessary here, how could they be trusted on a battlefield later? That was probably how he saw it.
After that, Gen continued questioning Ito Kei on smaller details—routes into the mountains, recent movements in town, missing persons, suspicious families, the terrain of the nearby ravines. By the time he left the estate, he had filled a small booklet with notes.
When he stepped back into the evening air, the sky had already begun to deepen toward orange. It was nearly five o'clock.
The three genin regrouped in the woods outside River Valley Town as agreed. Orochimaru was nowhere to be seen. Whether he was hidden nearby or had gone elsewhere entirely, none of them could tell.
A dozen ninja crows descended from the darkening sky, wings beating through the trees before dropping onto nearby branches.
"Let's compare intelligence," Gen said. He pulled two packets of dried meat from his pocket, tore them open, and began feeding the crows while speaking.
"We didn't get much directly," Sarutobi Enjun admitted with visible frustration. "Most people answered vaguely. They avoided saying anything about the bandits' numbers or where they were hiding."
"That's probably because they weren't being vague," Ruri said quietly. "They were avoiding the subject on purpose. Yanjun and I split up, then both went to the tavern. We bribed a waiter for information. Not long after that, some men cornered us in an alley. I captured them, dragged them somewhere secluded, and used genjutsu to interrogate them."
She sat cross-legged on the ground as she spoke, expression calm, but there was a faint hardness in her eyes. Clearly, she had not been idle. Many of the so-called bandits, she explained, were tied by blood or friendship to the people living in town. Because the tax increase had pushed more and more families toward ruin, more and more men had fled into the mountains to become outlaws.
"That lines up with what I learned," Gen said. "The difference is that I heard how it began."
He then recounted everything from the lord's mansion: the daimyo's iron quota, the collapse of the mines, the tax increase, the desperate townspeople, and finally the theft of the tax shipment itself.
"It's obvious Orochimaru-senpai chose this mission on purpose," Gen concluded. "If we can't harden ourselves enough to complete it, then from his point of view, we're unqualified. He'll send us back without a second thought."
"So what do we do now?" Uzuki Ruri asked softly. "Find the bandits, wipe them out, and recover whatever tax money is left?"
Sarutobi Enjun's face had darkened by then.
"Is there really no other way? They... they're just ordinary people who got driven into this."
"There is a way," Gen said at once.
Both of his teammates looked at him.
"You can die right now and head to the Pure Land," Gen said flatly. "If you're lucky, maybe you'll run into the First Hokage or the Sage of Six Paths and persuade them to revive you, stop the war, rebuild the entire political system of the ninja world, and make daimyo and nobles willingly hand over part of their wealth to the people who actually produce it. If that happens, not only will this problem disappear, but ninety percent of the misery in the shinobi world will disappear with it."
Enjun stared at him, dumbfounded. Ruri rubbed her forehead.
"Don't make jokes like that at a time like this," Enjun muttered.
"Then we're left with reality," Gen replied. "And reality is simple. No matter what the situation is, a ninja must prioritize the mission. That's written clearly in the shinobi code, and it's part of everything the academy drilled into us. We are not heroes of justice. We are tools for completing assignments."
His voice remained calm, but the words landed heavily in the dimming forest.
Of course, he did not want to be a tool either. No one truly did. But unless one possessed the kind of overwhelming power that could force the world itself to bend—power on the level of the First Hokage—then ideals were often crushed long before they could change anything.
"Right now, we're just three genin," Gen said. "Even if you're the Hokage's son, you can't change the structure of the whole world with a few words."
Enjun fell silent. His expression tightened, conflicted and unwilling.
"Then at least we can still do something within our power, can't we?" he said after a moment. "For example... do we really have to kill them? Couldn't we just arrest them instead?"
This kid... Gen thought, looking at him.