Who Was Slacking Off, and Who Was Hiding Their Skills?

Shin Kudo dropped to one knee.

He raised the scroll over his head with both hands and bowed his head, making quite a show of deference.

Yukie Miyamoto furrowed her brow, but eventually reached out to take the scroll and unroll it.

A moment later.

After reading through every detail of the mission on the scroll, she slammed her palm onto the desk.

"That little bastard!"

"What the hell did Itsuki Ishikawa learn in all those years at the academy?"

"Doesn't he understand the most basic rule of being a ninja—obeying orders?"

"He ignored his orders, charged in blindly, and couldn't even fight!"

"Seriously wounded?"

"Hah! Why didn't he just die out there?"

Yukie Miyamoto could barely contain her anger.

And understandably so.

She had been a Jonin for years. Arrogant ninja, cowardly ninja, temperamental ninja—she had seen them all.

But in this line of work, following orders was the bare minimum.

So no matter how arrogant someone usually was, they still followed their commander's instructions on a mission.

Someone like Itsuki Ishikawa? She had never encountered anything like him in her life.

Worse still.

On her very first assignment as a frontline commander, the brat had given her this enormous welcoming gift.

Even if she went on to earn distinction on the battlefield, the name Itsuki Ishikawa would remain an indelible stain on her record.

Saddled with useless trash like him, how could Yukie Miyamoto possibly stay pleasant?

If he had come from some major lineage, she might have shown him a little consideration as a civilian-born Jonin.

But, hah.

Itsuki Ishikawa was a civilian himself, so she had nothing to hesitate over.

She took a breath, suppressed her anger, and spoke.

"Go ask an ANBU officer to come here."

"Chunin Shin Kudo, hand Itsuki Ishikawa straight over to the ANBU afterward."

"You'll receive neither credit nor punishment for this mission."

"For the foreseeable future, put your lives on the line to make up for it."

"Once you've handed Itsuki Ishikawa over, your squad will rest here and wait for your next assignment."

So that was an option!

Only after Yukie Miyamoto finished speaking did Shin Kudo finally let out the breath he had been holding.

Whatever the case, he had managed to muddle through this ordeal.

He cursed Itsuki Ishikawa another eight hundred times in his head, while also feeling grateful that his other two teammates were genuinely dependable.

Not only had they saved a cartload of supplies, they had even found someone to take the blame.

People from major lineages really were different. Their minds worked fast.

About ten minutes later.

An ANBU operative wearing a Fox Mask arrived. Shin Kudo followed him to the Medical Camp and formally handed over the unconscious Itsuki Ishikawa.

Only after finishing all that did he drag his exhausted body back to the squad's tent.

The moment he entered, he collapsed onto a folding cot and rubbed his brow, lingering fear written all over his face.

He glanced at the other two in the tent and forced a smile.

"You two can stop worrying."

"Itsuki Ishikawa has been dumped on the ANBU. We won't get any credit for the mission, but we won't be punished either."

"Get some proper rest."

"We just have to wait for our next assignment!"

Kazama Nara listened with an expression that said he had expected this all along.

Jin Uchiha secretly breathed a sigh of relief as well.

This incident further convinced him that his earlier judgment had been right.

The fate that eventually befell the Uchiha ultimately came down to a problem with their outlook.

Digging down to the root of it, it was all about interests.

If the Uchiha couldn't change their attitude and learn to roll around in the same mud as everyone else, their future in the Hidden Leaf would still slide down its original course.

The days drifted by.

For several days in a row, no new assignments came down from above.

Every day, Jin Uchiha got up, walked out of camp, and sprawled on a hillside covered in particularly lush grass.

He basked in the sun.

As for training, he had stopped bothering with it long ago, ever since he had acquired his cheat system.

After all, he could grow stronger just by lying around. What wasn't to like?

That evening.

Returning from training outside, Kazama Nara spotted the figure sprawled on the grass. The look in his eyes was impossible to describe.

He walked over and sat down beside him.

"Jin, I really can't figure you out."

"We've been at the front for several days now. Whenever there's no mission, everyone's training their hearts out."

"Everyone wants to gain whatever strength they can before the next time they face an enemy."

"So why do you spend every day like some old man sunbathing?"

"Anyone who didn't know better would think you came here for a spring outing."

Kazama Nara's head was full of questions.

The more he thought about Jin Uchiha's behavior, the more baffled he became.

The closer he got, the less clearly he could see him.

Whenever he felt he had finally figured the man out, Jin's next move told him just how far off the mark he was.

There was only one thing he could say for certain now: Jin Uchiha was nothing like an Uchiha, inside or out.

Whether in how he treated people or how he went about things, he operated on an entirely different wavelength from a typical Uchiha.

It gave Kazama Nara a headache.

That was right.

He was a Nara through and through.

He usually seemed lazy simply because life was so dull.

He could see through almost anything at a glance. After a while, that naturally grew tiresome.

And so his usual demeanor made him seem rather unmotivated.

But ever since meeting Jin Uchiha, no matter how many brain cells he burned through, he just couldn't pin the man down.

That left Kazama Nara deeply frustrated.

He kept telling himself there was no need to get hung up on it.

At the end of the day, he and Jin Uchiha had merely been thrown into the same squad. They weren't even friends.

After all, no one bothered cultivating "bonds" in a cannon-fodder squad like theirs.

The problem was.

He couldn't suppress the Nara Household's competitive streak in his bones.

So for several days, he had been trying to get closer to Jin Uchiha, hoping to see right through the man before him.

But...

Only after getting closer did he realize that this guy was even better at lazing around than he was.

He at least trained for a while every day, but since leaving the Hidden Leaf, he genuinely hadn't seen Jin Uchiha touch a Kunai even once.

Naturally, that left him itching for answers. After all, Jin Uchiha had displayed considerable skill when fighting the enemy ninja a few days earlier.

At the very least, he met the standard for Class A.

He had guessed that Jin Uchiha was hiding his skills, and he had worked out most of the reasons for it, too.

There was only one thing he couldn't understand—how had someone so lazy developed that kind of ability?

With nothing else to do right now, he naturally steered the conversation that way.

Meanwhile.

Lying on the ground, Jin Uchiha looked at Kazama Nara beside him, the wariness deep in his eyes undiminished.

Rather than respond to his probing, Jin Uchiha spoke in a leisurely drawl.

"I'm pretty curious about you, too."

"With the skills you've shown, you could have made it into Class A with room to spare."

"So what's your deal? Why insist on playing the useless loser and joining a pile of cannon fodder like Class B?"

"And besides, there's the Ino–Shika–Cho."

"That's an ironclad rule for your three lineages. It's not as though our class lacks people from the other two."

"Yet here you are, teamed up with an Uchiha like me?"

"Well?"

"Aren't you pretty interested in me, classmate Nara? What a coincidence. I'm pretty interested in you, too."

"Care to talk?"