The train thundered over the rails, and the electric-metal smell inside the carriage was so choking it made people sneeze.
Yoru leaned back in a soft leather seat, holding an unlit cigarette as his teeth idly gnawed at the filter.
His leather shoes were caked in mud from the Land of Lightning trenches yesterday. It had long since dried, and with the train's vibrations, black flakes of dirt kept falling off.
Across the table, Deidara was practically pumped full of adrenaline.
His hands, which were always covered in clay dust from working with clay, frantically tapped at the screen of a specially made tablet.
The other end of the screen was connected to the central mainframe of Iwagakure's research department, where hundreds of thousands of tiny green signal dots were densely scattered.
"Boss, do you see that?"
Deidara's sky-blue eyes were wide as bells, and in his excitement, he sprayed Yoru's face with spit.
"Back when Iwagakure sold Explosive Tags, we had to transport everything by camel. If we ran into bandits on the way, we'd lose even our underwear!"
"But now?"
He stretched out a finger and jabbed hard at a red curve on the screen.
The line immediately jolted like an electrocardiogram.
"Once our Explosive Tag Internet Project is up and running, those little mercenary punks all over the shinobi world will only need their phones to ring once."
"Even if they're stuck in the most remote desert hole in the Land of Wind, as long as they place an order, our drones will deliver the goods to them within half an hour!"
The more Deidara spoke, the more excited he became. He even pulled out a lump of kneaded clay and quickly molded it into a bird-shaped remote control.
Watching him make such a fool of himself,