The second shop was no better. The third had some particularly creative shuriken, but no swords that reached Katsuko’s stringent standards.

By the seventh shop, Kakashi was starting to get tired.

He stood obediently in front of a broad mirror while Katsuko handed him swords, tutted, and took them away again. Too short, too long, wrong curve, bad balance. Now he remembered why he’d stuck to the same four weapons since the war. You couldn’t go wrong with kunai, shuriken, wire, and an inherited tanto.

ANBU’s standard-issue ninjato was new, but it was a basic blade — more forgiving than Katsuko’s Hyoho-Niten style allowed for, apparently.

“What exactly are we looking for?” he asked, as she chivvied him out onto the street again.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” she said.

He sighed, but tagged along when she struck away from the permanent stores and went poking through the colorful collection of stalls in the street. Most of the owners were younger here, newly graduated apprentices trying to make a name for themselves, or creative types who thought the answer to shinobi issues was fitting the most amount of sharp edges into the smallest space possible.

Kakashi picked up a spiky lead-ball and turned it over curiously.

“The center’s packed with an exploding tag,” said an enthusiastic young woman with blue hair. “You light it, toss it, and boom — they’re picking spikes out of their eyeballs.”

“What about my eyeballs?” Kakashi asked.

The woman grinned. “Throw it hard.”

Kakashi put the ball carefully down. Katsuko caught him by the wrist and tugged him away, past the stalls and down a narrow back alley.

“What—?” he began.

She shushed him and kept dragging until they reached a dark, stained door set back into a little alcove. A slender plaque said: Tamahagane.

Jewel steel, Kakashi translated. The kind used for katana.

“I got a tip,” Katsuko said, dropping his wrist to rap her knuckles on the door.

“For a shady back-alley shop?” Kakashi said.

She smiled at him. “Trust me.”

“You already said that today. You’re not allowed to use that more than twice a year,” he said grouchily.