Four hours into their run, they stopped to drink a full canteen of water each, and to gulp down ration bars as if they actually enjoyed them. Ibiki was mildly surprised to see Asuma had chosen the same cinnamon-apple bars as himself. And then, of course, while Ibiki checked the compass and a map, Asuma smoked.

They pressed on.

As long as they were running flat out, Asuma was actually a fairly decent traveling companion. He was good at picking level terrain when he was in the lead, and a champion trail eraser when he was bringing up the rear. He had good instincts about when to switch rolls, and he kept up well, despite what had to be seriously compromised lungs from all those cigarettes.

He was also still an ass whenever he opened his mouth, but thankfully there wasn't much time for talking.

They crossed into Coal Country at the narrowest point of the slender country, in a terrain of rolling limestone hills overlying the mines the country was named for. The soil was a clay-like yellow-tan, muddy from recent rains, and the deciduous woods covering the countryside were in full riotous young leaf, just a week or so behind Konoha's foliage. Then it was a steady down-slope run, avoiding villages and towns as they got closer and closer to the coast.

The sun was down by the time they reached the seaport village of Kuroihama, famous for its black sand beaches and giant clams, giving the Konoha shinobi shadows to hide in. They stopped by mutual agreement at a terraced graveyard at the southern edge of the town. Asuma picked the lock on a gardener's shed while Ibiki kept watch, then they slipped inside to regroup.

"Our rendezvous is with a fisherman named Asano," Ibiki said. "But not until 2200." He checked his watch. "So we have almost an hour. We're meeting him in a dockside pub called Maitake. He'll know us by our blue hats." A flicker of chakra and the simplest of genin-level illusions had Ibiki looking like a bearded, pony-tailed crab fisher in a heavy sweater and a blue knit cap. "But obviously you already knew that, since you read the dossiers."

"Obviously," Asuma said with a grin. He cast his own henge, clothing himself in an identical navy cap, a red plaid shirt, and grubby jeans with heavy work boots. The bracelets, Ibiki noticed, stayed. Asuma's grin broadened into something midway between friendly and predatory, and he touched the edge of his illusory hat. "Hello, sailor. Shall we hit the bar?"

Ibiki's instinctive recoil sublimated into a faint stilling of the face, a narrowing of the eyes. And even that was too much. He could see Asuma had read him like a book, by the laughter in the other man's eyes.

Shida would call Ibiki ten kinds of a fool for that transparency.

"We can get dinner down there, while we wait for Asano," said Ibiki, following the ages-old recovery plan of pretending the lapse had never happened. Without another word, he led the way down to the docks, and the rough-hewn little pub full of sailors and dock workers where they were to meet their transport.