Chapter Nine:​ Information Warfare (PT 1): Leverage​

Three months later…

It was a sunny afternoon today and from my post beneath the shade of a large maple tree, I gazed out at the open field in front of me. It was a tranquil scene, hence I found myself subconsciously relaxing where I sat, my eyes lidded in what an onlooker might presume to be an expression of profound contentment.

The rest of my team was away, with Tatsuya and Kaede some three miles to the north setting up camp. Our Jonin-sensei discreetly supervised them from some distance away whilst she attended to other matters. Some thirty minutes ago, I had separated from the group to hunt dinner and to replenish our rations, hence my current solitude.

My gaze was fixated on a large doe browsing in a clump of shrubs some two hundred meters away. There were myriad ways I could possibly kill the thing, but few seemed appropriate for my current mood. I watched as the animal slowly meandered its way down the trail in search of more saplings to browse upon.

A step.

Two steps.

Three.

My index finger twitched, tugging the thin metal wire wrapped around it. There was a faint glint that stretched along the length of the entire clearing, but it was so brief that most would fail to even notice it. The doe continued walking for a few more meters, oblivious, before suddenly collapsing to the ground; its severed head tumbling down the path into a ditch.

My expression did not change much in response to the animal's ignoble demise; such was simply the way of this world. I could have killed a careless genin or chunin just as easily. And just as easily some could do the same to me.

Life was beyond cheap here.

A fact that saddened me beyond belief.

With a sigh, I rose from my seat and slowly made my way towards the corpse. The body still twitched and the legs continued to pump as the headless animal seemingly tried to walk off its lack of a head. At sight, a morbid man might have joked, saying something cliché along the lines, "Tis' just a flesh wound", but such crass remarks were more Jeremy's forte than mine. I hardly had the bone in me to crack a proper joke, much less a dark one of that nature.

The carcass vanished into the storage scroll I laid out on the floor in front of me with a flatulent whoosh and a cloud of white smoke. Frowning as I put the scroll away, I crouched to examine the blood stains on the ground. It was not as casually messy as I would have liked; anyone sufficiently skilled would be able to discern my intention to doctor the scene. The wire strings were off by a few millimetres and cut more cleanly through the tendons than I intended, exaggerating the splatter. I needed to work on that. No matter. I rose from my crouch, turning my back to the ROOT agent who had been tailing me for a while now to return to my team.

Upon arrival, I found Kaede and Tatsuya squabbling as usual. The Hyuga was sprawled out on his bedroll, seemingly unconcerned with the kunoichi standing to the side, berating him.

"Itachi," Kaede groaned miserably as she turned to face me. "Good sages, you are here. Please tell this stupid oaf to stop lazing around and help!"

A sigh escaped me as my gaze flickered to regard Tatsuya before returning to Kaede's flushed face. "That's a tall ask, team lead," I drawled, running my fingers through my hair. "This is Tatsuya we are talking about."

"He listens to you," the girl groused before turning to stomp away unhappily. "Get him to help. I am going to get more wood."

I watched her leave with a raised brow before turning back to the unrepentant cause of her woes. "...Why do you insist on annoying her?" I asked the Hyuga, genuinely curious.

Tatsuya shrugged. "I don't," he said. "I just want to be left alone, is that too much to ask? The camp is fine as it is; I don't know why she insists on doing more than is necessary."

"You know why," I retorted calmly. "Also, you can't just dump all the work on her… however deserved it might seem. Now get up before I hose you down with ice water again."

Tatsuya silently considered the threat for a moment. I arched a brow as I crossed my arms over my chest and began tapping my feet expectantly on the forest floor.

"...Fine," the Hyuga groaned. "Sheesh."

I eyed Tatsuya as he clambered his way to his feet before stretching and heading off after Kaede. Teens, I mused internally with a slight shake of my head. The same, all of them.

As the boy disappeared into the foliage, I retrieved the carcass from my storage scroll, setting it at my feet in front of the campfire my teammates had set up beforehand. Twirling my curved kunia in my right hand, I eyed the headless doe before bringing my hand down in a shallow swooping cut. Hide parted before blade without resistance and a pile of steaming innards spilled out of the carcass onto the forest floor.

Fingers sinking into the seam of the cut, I pulled the gash open before swinging my blade once, then twice. The intestines came loose as the cut opened further. Expressionlessly, I cleaned it out, excavating the doe's abdomen, and then ribcage in a matter of moments. Raising the carcass from the ground, all that was left of it was the skeleton, muscles and the hide wrapping it all.

I gathered the extracted organs into another scroll, before turning my attention back to the rest of the meat. With a flourish, the left side of the hide came off with a single swing of my kunia followed promptly by the right as the bloodied blade swung again. The hide was collected into another scroll before I mounted the beheaded, skinned and disembowelled doe on a three-meter-long stake to keep it off the ground.

Carving the rest of the animal took just a bit longer, but in the end, I was left with a properly disassembled pile of meat and bones. A handful was set aside for soup, whilst the rest were strung up on smaller wooden stakes to be smoked. Kaede and Tatsuya returned then to take over the strenuous task of smoking the meat into rations, whilst I cobbled together a few bowls of meat and bone broth.

The sun was setting by the time the meat was smoking over the fire. Kaede was poking at the embers, while Tatsuya was sprawled on his bedroll once more, though this time he had the sense to appear somewhat helpful by occasionally activating his Byakugan to keep an eye on the nearby woods. Not that that helped much; my stalker skilfully lingered just a few meters beyond the Hyuga's range.

Yuna-sensei emerged from the shadows of the trees, her demeanour calm. Behind her was Hachi; the ninken momentarily eyed me before curling up on the ground beside the log his partner settled on.

Yuna nodded approvingly at the meat-smoking setup before addressing us. "Good work, team," she said. "We might need those rations for our trip back."

Kaede beamed at the compliment "Thank you, sensei," she replied, laying down the last skewer. "Have you finished clearing the traps?"

"Most of them," the Jonin said. "I'll need to go back out after dinner to finish the last sweep."

I handed Yuna-sensei two bowls, one for herself and the other for Hachi, before settling down to eat myself. The momentary silence was comfortable, but unfortunately shortlived. Kaede and Tatsuya began to quarrel just a few minutes later and didn't find it in themselves to stop until Yuna-sensei decided to break them up.

"Alright you two," she growled, "to bed. We have an early start tomorrow. Itachi, you are taking the first watch."

I nodded as the two complied with varying levels of enthusiasm. Tatsuya crawled onto his bedroll with a smug glint in his eyes whilst Kaede eyed him with a baleful gaze. Being forced to be an audience to their unending feud had been annoying the first two weeks, but I soon grew numb to it. My gaze flickered from the pair to regard Yuna-sensei who was gathering the used utensils to put them away.

"How long is she going to keep tailing us?" I asked the Jonin as I rose to my feet to assist her.

Yuna shrugged, her expression dismissive. "Can't say. But as long as she remains professional I do not see how that's our concern."

I arched a brow in response. "She has been tailing us now for five weeks," I said. "It is starting to get annoying."

"Take it up with the Hokage when next you are in the village," Yuna replied. "The ANBU answer to him only; if she's here, it's because the Hokage deemed it so."

Had I been a less perceptive person, I might have pointed out that my stalker wasn't ANBU. But the existence of the Foundation and the fact that they answer to Danzo rather than the Hokage were both state secrets that I logically should have no access to. Revealing that, especially to a former member of the ANBU, didn't seem like the smartest thing to do. So, I just shrugged and moved on, dropping the matter.

Yuna-sensei departed to return to her task a few minutes later with Hachi in tow, leaving me alone to look after my teammates whilst they slept. She had been clearing that patch of the woods for booby traps left behind by a nearby band of bandits for unwitting travellers. Our mission here had been to sterilise the region of bandits that had been harassing the trade routes passing through the area for a few weeks now. But with that done, the Jonin, for some reason, elected to clear the forest of the traps they left behind herself rather than let us deal with it.

There. After three months of chasing pets and helping matronly old ladies mow their lawns, we finally received and completed our first C-rank mission. As expected, it was hardly a challenge for Kaede and Tatsuya, much less myself. No one was really excited about the mission, in fact. Kaede was merely glad we were moving on to more serious tasks—that were, in her words, befitting of the headband she had been bestowed by the village. Tatsuya, on the other hand, was not enthused about going on missions at all, the lazy bastard.

Following our altercation, Yuna had grown much more reserved and solemn, unsurprisingly. The result of this change was… odd, to say the least. As for myself, I wasn't entirely sure what exactly to make of this impasse. I could still feel the walls of eventuality closing in on me. And while I was certain I could not afford to stand still, I was also not certain what direction to run. My misunderstanding with Yuna-sensei had garnered a significant amount of scrutiny: I was no longer merely just the prodigious heir of the Uchiha clan who was slowly fading into relative obscurity. I was now also the academy student who had battled a war-hardened Jonin to a standstill mere minutes after receiving his forehead protector.

I had hoped to have more time before any approximate intel regarding my combat capabilities became common knowledge, but as the saying goes; no plan survives contact with the enemy. The shadow clone adversarial training program and a few other relatively visible projects had to be put on an indefinite hiatus due to the risk of a severe intel leak. And with very few training alternatives, I had to turn to more subtle means to further expand my capabilities and prepare for the coming storm.

In the aftermath of this, a gnawing desire to know how fast the enemy was learning of me, adapting to me, and reacting to me began to fester in my chest.

Hence, I turned to my old friend. Maths.

I was quick to realise that even in a fictional world like this one, mathematics continued to remain an indispensable tool to possess. There was nothing more useful for intelligence-gathering, murdering, or protecting one's self from the prior two, than cold, hard data crunching. The lust for intel has and always will be an ever-present constant in warfare, regardless of scale, form or shade: And when faced with the operational dilemma of lacking actionable information, it quickly becomes obvious that intuition or guesswork alone would never be a sufficient replacement for predictive computation.

Back in the real world, a proper understanding of mathematical analysis, statistics and probabilities has always been the go-to means of making sense of the chaos of warfare. I knew this because, for a brief period before my unfortunate demise, I was one of the faceless grunts that aided the US government in making sense of that chaos: It was rare that the CIA hired anyone without at least a bachelor's degree, so most would understand my suspicion when I was reached out to by a recruitment officer to tack on being a part-time, open-source exploitation officer to my already busy schedule.

Despite my then-RO's claims of my supposed prowess in the realms of IT, I remained hesitant. After all, at the time, I was only a student and my other gig already paid enough for me and my mother to live comfortably. But, as it turned out, I was too curious and logical for my own good. I wanted to know what the whole schtick was about and, at the time, the extra cash didn't seem like a bad idea.

Regardless of how it turned out in the end for me, I still learned a lot about the means of refining seemingly worthless, publicly available information into actionable intel for my handlers: And finding myself reincarnated in a fictional past riddled with enemies often unrelenting, unreasonable, and unpredictable, I quickly retorted back to these acquired skills.

Whether or not these skills would give me an edge over my adversaries in a world of kung-fu wizards and energy-based kaiju, however, is yet to be seen…