(3rd Person POV)

Back at the Eastern Theatre office, Arthur watched as Leonard ran through the technique he’d spent the last two days drilling into his head.

The «Shadow Clone Jutsu». Arthur had taught it to him two days prior, figuring that for someone filling as many roles as Leonard did, a technique like this was practically made for him.

"Shadow Clone Jutsu~" Leonard ran through the hand signs, circulated his mana, and with a puff of smoke — another Leonard appeared right beside him. Both of them stared at each other for a moment. Then the original broke into a wide grin.

"I finally got it! After all those failures, I actually got it!"

"Not bad," Arthur said. "Two days to master it."

Leonard dismissed the clone, watched it dissolve back into smoke, and immediately turned to Arthur with bright eyes. "Is there anything else you can teach me, boss!?"

Arthur looked at the man’s enthusiasm and smiled. "I won’t be the one teaching you further. I have someone better suited for that."

As if on cue, a figure slipped through the office door — moving at a speed that Leonard, for all his training, didn’t register until the person was already standing beside Arthur.

Leonard went rigid. "Wh — who are you? How did you get in here?"

The man standing there looked to be around sixteen, with bright blue eyes and spiky blond hair that seemed to defy any attempt at neatness.

He wore a distinctive dark cloak over his clothes, the fabric marked with a bold red flame pattern along the hem, and carried himself with the kind of easy confidence that sat oddly on someone his age — the sort that came not from arrogance but from having already been through more than most grown men ever would.

There were faint marks on his face — whisker-like lines on each cheek, three to a side — that gave him a striking, almost wild look.

"Relax," Arthur said. "I know him."

Leonard’s shoulders came down slightly.

The man grinned. "I’m Uzumaki Naruto. Good to meet you!" 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"Uzu... what?" Leonard tried to repeat it and visibly gave up halfway through.

"Naruto will be teaching you some ninja techniques from here on," Arthur said, as casually as if he were assigning someone to sweep the office.

The reason Naruto was here at all was straightforward enough. Arthur had wanted someone capable — genuinely, mortally capable — operating in this world without the complications that came with deity power.

Keanu and Kaiser were reliable in their own way, but they leaned too heavily on their divine strength, which made them a liability every time the question of the Origin or the local gods came up.

Naruto, who had been living in Arthur’s home world since being summoned, was a different matter entirely. His strength was his own, earned through years of the kind of training that didn’t require divinity to back it up.

Arthur had sent Keanu and Kaiser to bring him over two days ago. He had arrived today.

"What are ninja techniques?" Leonard asked, looking between the two of them. The word ninja seemed to exist nowhere in this world’s vocabulary.

Arthur gestured for Naruto to take it from there, and Naruto launched into an explanation with the energy of someone who never got tired of talking about this particular subject.

Leonard listened. Then listened more. Then his eyes went very wide.

"So the Shadow Clone Jutsu — that’s a ninja technique?"

Naruto nodded, clearly enjoying the reaction.

---

While Leonard threw himself into his new curriculum with characteristic enthusiasm, his former party was having a considerably less enjoyable time across the city.

Six of them, crammed into a single inn room, because that was what the budget allowed.

"We are almost completely out of coin," Charlotte said, sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms folded. "Our funds are running critically low."

"Can we at least spread out a bit?" Cael muttered from the corner, tugging at his wizard’s collar. "It’s sweltering in here with six people."

"Ugh. I hate this as much as you do." Vera sat against the wall with her bow across her knees, red hair sticking slightly to her face from the heat. "But we can’t afford separate rooms right now, so stop whining."

Brom, somehow managing to look even larger than usual now that he was folded into a corner of the room, sniffed at the sleeve of his shirt and pulled a face. "Something smells in here. Sable, did you actually wash the clothes properly or not?"

"It really does smell," Vera agreed.

"My robes still have dirt on them," Charlotte added.

Sable, perched on the windowsill with her arms crossed, let out a short breath through her nose. "Don’t wear them if you’re going to complain. We’ve all been taking turns with the laundry and none of you are doing it any better than me. And don’t even get me started on the gear — I don’t even know how Leonard kept everything so clean without any of us noticing."

A silence fell over the room.

Then Sable said, quieter and with something that might have been guilt underneath it: "...All the little things. Laundry, gear maintenance, rations, managing the funds. Leonard handled all of it. Every bit of it. Without us ever asking him to." She looked at the floor. "Things have gotten difficult fast without him around."

"The food we made last night was terrible," Brom said, in the tone of a man confessing something. "I’ll just say it. I don’t want to admit it, but that useless bastard actually had his uses."

"We can’t even take on B-Rank hunts properly right now, let alone A or S," Sable added. "His planning felt excessive every time, but without it we can’t even coordinate properly."

Nobody argued with that. The room sat with it for a moment — the particular quiet of people who had arrived, somewhat late, at a conclusion they didn’t enjoy.

It was only now, packed into one room and smelling faintly of unwashed equipment, that the Six of Diamonds were beginning to understand what they had actually thrown away.

Aldric sat there quietly through all of it, jaw tight, hiding the fact that his teeth were grinding together. Kicking Leonard out had seemed so straightforward at the time — one less dead weight, smoother operations, a leaner party. The reality of the past few days had been a thorough and deeply unpleasant correction to that assumption.

"It’ll get better," he said, his voice carrying the particular steadiness of someone who had decided to project confidence regardless of how he felt. "With my leadership, we’ll push through this." He paused, then added, "Besides, we’ve already taken on a task through the Underground Guild. Simple enough job, high pay — 150 gold. That should cover us for several months, maybe longer."

Vera’s expression soured immediately. "We’re really doing something illegal? If the Adventurer Guild finds out we’ve been working through the Underground Guild, we’re finished. Everything we’ve built — gone."

"What choice do we have?" Aldric spread his hands. "This keeps us going. And Master Delly is throwing in an extra 100 gold on top if we bring the target in alive and get him to talk. Every secret he has."

Sable had gone still. "The target..." She glanced at the posted task, which included a drawn image of the man in question. "That’s the one from the inn, isn’t it. Arthur." She was quiet for a moment. "I don’t think this is going to be as clean as you’re making it sound, Aldric. That man... I couldn’t get a read on him properly. That alone is enough to make me cautious."

Aldric’s expression split into a wide grin, something sharp and hungry glinting behind his eyes. "He caught us off guard that time. That’s all it was. If we go in properly — together, coordinated — we can handle him." He leaned forward slightly. "And honestly? Fate handed us this one. Of all the tasks available, this one shows up right when we need it most. The pay, and on top of that, a chance to settle what happened at the inn." His grin didn’t waver. "I’m calling that an opportunity."

The others exchanged glances around the cramped room. Most of them didn’t argue. The money was real and the grudge was fresher than any of them wanted to admit.

Sable said nothing further. But behind her eyes, something was already working — running through contingencies, mapping exits, calculating what she would do if this went sideways.

’This isn’t going to end well,’ she thought quietly. ’I need to think about what happens if it falls apart.’

---

Five days after taking the task, the Six of Diamonds made their move.

Weeks of hardship had worn them down to the point where even B-Rank hunts felt out of reach. So they swallowed their pride, sat down, and planned — the one thing most of them had always left to Leonard. The plan was simple enough: buy tickets, blend in with the audience, and use the cover of the crowd to locate Arthur and take him by surprise.

Their assumption was that he’d be somewhere in the building running things behind the scenes.

They filed in with the rest of the audience, took their seats, and waited.

Charlotte knew the Eastern Theatre from childhood — Leonard’s father had owned the place, and she’d visited enough times that the general layout had stuck with her over the years. Sitting down now, she could see things had changed.

Arthur had clearly put some work into the place. The details were different from what she remembered. But the overall structure felt the same, and that was what the plan needed, so she put it out of her mind.

Then the film started.

Two hours passed without any of them noticing.

Nobody moved. Nobody whispered about the plan. Nobody even glanced at each other. When the credits finally began rolling up the wall, the six of them sat in a silence that had absolutely nothing to do with keeping cover.

"...What do we do now?" Vera asked, her eyes still drifting back to the screen. "Do we still go ahead with it?"

’I can’t believe I sat through the whole damn thing,’ Aldric thought, teeth grinding together. He’d spent weeks dismissing everything he’d heard about this film as exaggeration. He was wrong. ’Damn it.’

"It doesn’t matter. We proceed as planned." He turned and pointed at Sable. "Scan the building and find which room Arthur is most likely in. You should’ve done this an hour ago — we’ve already wasted enough time on that damn film."

"Ri-right!" Sable nodded and closed her eyes.

As an assassin, Sable had trained her mana sensitivity to an edge most mages couldn’t match — she could extend her perception outward and detect the presence of people through their mana signatures.

The problem was that inside a building, walls constantly blocked and cut off her perception, forcing her to physically navigate the corridors and work her way around each obstruction rather than sensing freely.

A mage with sufficiently powerful mana could push their perception straight through walls and scan an entire building without moving an inch — but Sable was nowhere near that level.

That was where Charlotte’s map came in. Instead of wandering the halls blindly trying to find her way around every wall and corner, she could follow the sketched layout deliberately and move through the building without wasting time getting lost.

She pushed outward. Her awareness moved quickly through the corridors, following the rough lines of Charlotte’s map — and before long it arrived just outside a door marked with a small sign: Chairman’s Office.

’That should be where Master Lykan’s old office was, going by Charlotte’s illustration. Renamed when Arthur took over, most likely.’