"Okay," he said, and screwed his courage to the wall. "Of course I had insufficient training. I didn't fall through a crack. I was graduated early, deliberately, with the rest of my classmates because the war needed living bodies, and we were it. That's not the fault of my teachers, or even the fault of my village. We won the war. It worked. But now I'm an ANBU captain and my team has one kid who can't read, another who doesn't trust we won't stab him in his sleep, and a kunoichi with a literal bomb in her belly. The lieutenant’s decent but overstretched, and I have rage blackouts that break seafronts because genjutsu gives me hives.” He leaned forwards, bracing his elbows on his knees. "But I'm not supposed to say any of that, because a shinobi has unquestioning loyalty to his village, even though he's also supposed to see underneath the underneath, and what I'm seeing is mostly broken cogs in a machine so overtasked that it'll split ANBU teams in half to execute our own countrymen."

He sat back, breathing hard, and waited for the ax to drop.

Shibata was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, it was quiet. “Unquestioning loyalty is not the same thing as blindness to weakness. ‘A shinobi works at all times to expand his limitations’,” he quoted. Rule 57. “You wear body armor not because your skills are lacking, but because a gut wound would end your mission and maybe your life.”

That… was not what Raidou had expected.

He rubbed a shaky hand over his mouth, swallowed, and said, “My mother — the ninja one — used to say there is no perfect training, the thing worth learning is adaptability. When we flex, we don’t break.”

“You should listen to your mother.” Shibata topped off his tea and offered a cup again. This time, Raidou accepted; it was something steady to wrap his hands around. Shibata continued, “I’d like to know more about those times you’ve broken rather than bent. On this mission, you said it was a combination of genjutsu and seeing your subordinate Ueno injured. Is that right?”

Raidou burned his mouth on the first swallow. “Do you need details?”

“Yes.”

“I died first,” Raidou said. “Kiri had a hidden genjutsu-user in the nursery. When I went to take care of the baby and the little girl, they vanished, and I caught a katana between the shoulderblades. Came out here.” He touched the center of his chest.

Breath on his neck. Hello, Konoha.

“So, that was rattling. Spent a couple seconds thinking I was dead, and then the sword melted into metal restraints, so I figured maybe not. The Kiri-nin didn’t kill me only because she was wrangling the kids — at least, I’m guessing, since I’m still here. We fought. She did a couple more brain-melting things; I blew her off with an explosion tag. She made me think my skin was shredding, and—” Protected screaming, traumatized children with her last breath. They haven’t done anything. “I cut her head off.”

Shibata waited, silent.

“Then the house caught fire,” Raidou said. “I don’t know who did that. Servants tried to protect the children; I knocked them out, and killed the baby.” A hot line slipped down his cheek. He rubbed it away, carried on. “Went to kill the girl, and she turned into flowers.”

Shibata’s good eyebrow lifted fractionally. “How did you break out of the genjutsu, assuming you recognized it for what it was?”

“Bit my tongue the first time. Stabbed myself with a senbon the second. Tried a kai for the flowers; that didn’t work. The last time, I didn’t break out of it.” He closed his eyes, picking slowly through concussed, fractured memories. “The second genjutsu-user, I think he mixed henge with genjutsu, maybe some kawarimi for actual flowers, I don’t know. The ceiling was on fire, the girl was gone, the shinobi vanished, and then Katsuko was there, and— Then the shinobi came out of the wall. He stabbed her in the back. She died at my feet, next to the baby.”

His voice wasn’t shaking. She hadn't really died.

His eyes were still hot, though.