The morning had been well-spent, Shikaku decided, since obtaining valuable information from his contact while raising the profile of the Urushi Café which served excellent cake his wife did not need to know about and whose location allowed him to watch the flow of early-morning pedestrian traffic for interesting trends was always satisfying.

Matters were improved further still when he heard Gōketsu Kagome’s voice from inside a nearby bookshop.

“Charge this to Jiraya-sti—I mean, the Hokage.”

(A foreigner would not personally draw on and a Leaf citizen would use the proper channels to access the funds of the Hokage who was a separate financial entity from Jiraiya to whose resources only the Gōketsu who were both foreign and Leaf and thus capable of confusing the two had access and of whom Gōketsu Kagome was the only one whose voice Shikaku did not recognise.)

It was a valuable opportunity as Shikaku’s best agents had drawn a blank on the background of a man adopted as a cousin by Jiraiya despite his erratic behaviour that potentially made him a liability to the clan and about whom Shikaku was curious as well as burdened with non-urgent but necessary paperwork waiting for him in his office.

“Pardon me,” he caught Gōketsu as the man was leaving the bookshop with a copy of the latest edition of Jen’s Armaments of the Elemental Nations. “May I speak with you?”

“You’re Nara Shikaku, aren’t you?” Gōketsu’s eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s your game?”

“I would like to learn more about you, Gōketsu,” Shikaku said simply. “My clan and yours are determined to build a strong alliance. I already have a certain limited degree of familiarity with Hazō, Noburi and of course Keiko, and through my wife I am not wholly ignorant about Mari. But you and I have never interacted in any way. Also, I gather you have some very… original theories.”

“Hmph,” Gōketsu grunted. “She did have this idea of getting me to talk to you so you could go through the things I know and tell me which ones Leaf is ready to admit to. She trusts you enough for that, so I guess I’ll do it if it makes her happy. But! There’s going to be a price for getting me to share my knowledge.”

Shikaku found this reassuring as Gōketsu who could not be a charlatan ready to take payment and flee before his fabrications could be verified was thus demonstrating genuine confidence in his information by assigning material value to it.

“What price is that?”

“Cake,” Gōketsu said firmly. “And I’ll be the one choosing the shop and the cake, and you’ll be the one taking the first bite.”

Morning cake twice?

Shikaku didn’t know whether to be glad of the excuse or fearful of the consequences if Yoshino ever learned of the event.

-o-​

Shikaku leaned back in his chair and pondered the wild nay outrageous idea of lupchanzen which it would nevertheless display a lack of intellectual sincerity to dismiss without consideration when it came from a man to whom Jiraiya had extended the highest possible trust.

Chakra parasites capable of controlling human hosts were rare as civilian hosts had too little chakra to sustain them and ninja were naturally resistant to interference with brain chakra as reflected by the complexity of genjutsu but they were not non-existent such that civilian villages where a majority of the population showed chakra abnormalities were burned to the ground though the chakra cordyceps which had been rendered extinct at terrible cost had been the last credible large-scale threat.

Natural chakra parasites at most subverted their host’s motivations so as to make them use their intelligence to further the parasite’s reproductive cycle meaning that a chakra parasite capable of the sophisticated coordinated planning Gōketsu described imposed an additional burden of probability as the potentially highly elaborate application of said intelligence depending on the host’s ability and the parasite’s specific reproductive requirements would still not extend so far.

But a parasite engineered with a goal other than pure reproduction was another matter given that while Nara had discarded the idea a long time ago due to the high extinction risks of an error in homogeneous mass mind control a fool confident in their ability to eliminate said risks might still attempt it.

A chakra brain parasite with its limited structural complexity could not adequately comprehend, replace and imitate the human host’s functioning but only inject its own influence into the existing mental substrate meaning it was impossible for the host to be aware of the infection including the Hyūga who would either have to all be infected and their perceptions filtered or be unable to flag lupchanzen signs as abnormal because everyone they had ever met had been infected.

In either scenario Leaf had no means of lupchanzen detection.

It was necessary to assume that if lupchanzen existed Shikaku himself who had the best hope of inventing countermeasures would be a priority target for infection which would most obviously manifest as a strong inclination to dismiss the idea of their existence which Shikaku indeed felt and was thus rationally compelled to suppress that instinct until he could fully investigate the matter and come to a firm conclusion which if the head of the Nara Clan was unable to reach meant that either they did not exist or he was powerless to stop them and in either case he could only set the matter aside and return to his normal life.

With that in mind Shikaku invited Gōketsu to share his next horrifying belief.

-o-​

“It’s basic economics,” Gōketsu explained to the head of the Nara Clan. “The villages don’t want their rivals to have financial prosperity, because that means more money and more civilians to give birth to ninja, so they secretly send scorch squads to burn civilian settlements to the ground and cull each other’s populations. You can’t stop small squads from getting through your borders, not all the time, and you can’t afford to have ninja stationed everywhere to guard the civilians. After the attack, you can’t prove anything because little villages fall to chakra beast attacks all the time, and it’s not like you can identify which of your rivals was responsible anyway.”

Shikaku nodded thoughtfully. “How many ninja were in your squad? What were their roles, and was this representative of Mist scorch squads? Do you know how many others Mist had?”

“My squad?” Gōketsu stared at him with surprisingly convincing incomprehension. “What are you talking about, Nara?”

Denial on Gōketsu’s part would not serve Shikaku’s purposes here so while Shikaku disliked breaking down his thought processes as it felt like wading through mud when there was a paved road next to him and his destination was already in sight on this occasion it was impractical to avoid it.

“You yourself have stated that scorch squads are secret to the point that their existence has been successfully concealed from the public for decades. Of necessity, they must contain only the most discreet and fanatically loyal shinobi. Thus, it is impossible for you to have learned of them from a scorch squad member. Nor does the evidence available to me suggest that you were a prominent enough member of Mist’s government to have overall top secret clearance.

“Since you describe scorch squads as highly stealthy and targeting solely settlements with no ninja presence, and an ordinary sealmaster would spend a limited amount of time outside the village, it is highly implausible that you would witness them at work by accident. Thus, you must have been a scorch squad member yourself, likely selected for your proficiency at large-scale destruction.

“The psychological trauma of regularly massacring innocents is a highly plausible reason to abandon even a village so determined to hunt down missing-nin. A deep sense of guilt would account for why you abandoned a long-term reclusive lifestyle to join with Hazō, whose ideals centre around aiding and protecting the civilian population. If you fled Mist with knowledge of vital state secrets that made you a priority target, this also would explain your… extreme wariness of others.

“Finally, if your testimony has value as a diplomatic trump card against Mist, this would provide additional incentive for Jiraiya to directly adopt you as his cousin despite your limited acquaintance and somewhat incompatible personalities.”

Gōketsu whose secret Shikaku now suspected he’d been the first to deduce gazed at him in an ominous silence that suggested that Shikaku had perhaps been unwise in provoking an emotionally unstable explosives expert.

What would Yoshino do?

“Your secret is safe with me, Gōketsu. I have nothing to gain from undermining your acceptance in Leaf society, nor would I risk interfering with Jiraiya’s plans for you. We continue to be allied in the cause of protecting Leaf and foiling its enemies, and should you choose to provide me with the tactical data I’ve requested, it could be of great use in curtailing the activities of the Mist scorch squads you’ve described.”

Gōketsu rose from his seat. “I have never been in a damn scorch squad, you… you… you… urgh!” Gōketsu threw up his hands in wordless fury and stomped away without giving Shikaku a chance to reply.

Shikaku was left sitting alone pondering how to test for the presence of a parasite that could potentially control his thinking and perception and had evaded every existing means of detection thus far.

Never let it be said that the Gōketsu didn’t make his life interesting.