A Visit from the Hidden Cloud
Kumogakure, the Raikage's Office.
It was a stone hall built at the highest point in Kumogakure. Its four walls were natural, unpolished rock, and beyond its enormous floor-to-ceiling windows stretched an endless sea of clouds and distant snowcapped mountains.
The desk was made from a single slab of black ironwood. The Fourth Raikage's fists had already left several dents in its surface, and now a hand as broad as a fan added another.
"Five billion?!"
"Has that brat gone insane over money? He detains my Jinchūriki and then demands a ransom from me? Does that brat in the Land of Water think I run a bank?!"
The Fourth Raikage slammed his fist onto the desk. The teacup bounced up, flipped twice, and splashed tea across its surface.
Then he slowly rose to his feet, his towering frame over two meters tall, like an iron tower forged from muscle.
His bronze skin flushed red with fury, his blond hair stood on end, and arcs of lightning release chakra began spilling uncontrollably from his body, crackling through the office.
His younger brother, Killer B, was holding a concert on the eastern side of the village, so he had not attended this meeting.
"Calm down, Lord Raikage."
The speaker was Mabui, the Raikage's chief secretary, a capable woman with dark skin and short white hair.
She stood beside the desk with a freshly decoded intelligence report in her hand, her expression as cool as ice. The lightning arcing around the Raikage did not intimidate her in the slightest.
Within the Hidden Cloud's power structure, her position was equivalent to Shikaku Nara's in Konoha. She was the one responsible for keeping the reins on the Hidden Cloud's chariot.
"Yugito proposed the duel of her own accord and lost.