“Caught the pre-show,” Raidou said, with a quick glance around them. The closest shinobi were out of eavesdropping distance; Team Six had this section of wall to themselves.

Well, three-fifths of Team Six.

Captains had free licence to share information with their subordinates as they deemed fit, with an understanding that complete indiscretion was frowned upon. Genma already knew. Katsuko could be scattered, but Raidou trusted her implicitly when it came to the important things.

Most of the important things.

Mission-related important things.

“Taicho?” said Katsuko, with an under-thrum of tension in her voice.

“One of the candidates went rogue,” Raidou said. “Nearly took one guy’s hands off, and stabbed another. Nothing confirmed, but he might have been an Orochimaru plant.”

Katsuko’s posture didn’t change, but her chakra was noisy enough that even Raidou felt the flicker that ran through it. Genma definitely did; his hands twitched. Medics were more sensitive—that’d probably felt like a sledgehammer.

“Understood,” she said, distantly.

Genma’s mask tilted towards her. “It’s not confirmed. For all we know, this guy just cracked.”

Katsuko’s head dipped once in acknowledgement, and her chakra muted down to a background static.

Raidou frowned at her. “Yondaime-sama seemed pretty on edge, though. But it was his student who got knifed.”

He felt the moment Katsuko snapped back into the present. “Hatake?” she demanded, because everyone knew Sharingan no Kakashi was trying out for ANBU the second he was legally old enough—and Raidou had to wonder, sometimes, how much it sucked having a whole village in your business.

“Hatake,” Genma confirmed, shifting his weight. His attention kept flicking between them and the outside of the wall. “He's not critically injured. Neither is the other candidate. Unfortunately Hatake killed the guy who went rogue though.”

“Nearly killed us, too,” Raidou said, remembering that burst of blue-white light slamming through the wall an inch from his face. “I’ve never dodged so fast in my life.”

Genma’s bare shoulders twitched in a faint echo of that brief, mutual heart attack. “We were lucky.”

If Katsuko cared about their dice roll with death, she kept it to herself. “He used Chidori?” she asked, with ghoulish fascination. “Did his hand really go through that guy’s chest?”

There was the girl he knew and loved.