Naruto : Monsters: Chapter 75

"I can't believe it."

Shikamaru didn't so much as glance up at me when I dumped another stack of books onto his desk. Instead, with a tired sigh of long-suffering, he picked a random book from the pile and began wrapping it with simple brown wrapping paper. Completely plain paper except for a tiny dog's paw printed on one corner.

Once he was done he passed it along to his left to where Naruto was sitting, who grunted as she took it, before reaching for another book to wrap.

Naruto set the wrapped book down before her, carefully examined a list she had propped up on her left before picking up an ink brush and began to write.

Out of us all, Naruto had the best handwriting by far.

Writing with an ink brush always felt wrong in my hands, the proper method the brush was supposed to be held and flow always felt too much like drawing for me to get right. Even after a solid decade of being forced to write with a brush my handwriting still looked like something a chicken would scratch out than actual letters.

While Shikamaru was better than me, a low bar to clear, he tended to get sloppy when it came down to writing the correct details. One number wrong and the books would end up going to the wrong address, and considering what we were delivering that would have caused a slightly larger stir than you would normally expect.

That left the responsibility of printing out the addresses to Naruto.

Under her steady hand lines began to form, the brown paper soaking up the ink as the brush danced across its surface, leaving behind neat flowing lines and smooth curves. The names she wrote down remind of me calligraphy, more a work of art than mere penmanship. It was barely the work of a minute before she was done and she set the package down to one side, only to start all over as Shikamaru passed her another wrapped package to write on.

"No, I mean I literally cannot believe it." I reiterated as I walked to a nearby wooden crate and pulled out another stack of books. "How could someone like Kakashi own a bookstore of all things?"

Surrounding us were dozens, if not hundreds of wooden crates, stacked so high they nearly brushed the warehouse roof. Each crate filled to the brim with books. And printed on the side of each wooden crate was the logo of 'Pakkun's Bookstore' - a dog's paw print.

It had been almost two full days since I found out and still I couldn't bring myself to believe it.

That Kakashi, the lazy, porn-loving, ever late Hatake Kakashi, owned not one, but an entire chain of bookstores in Konoha. That alone should have pushed the limits of my incredibility but when you stacked on the fact that it was a successful chain of bookstores, it made me feel as if I had fallen down a rabbit hole without realising and ended up in wonderland.

Konoha had a lot of business run by ninjas.

Some were clan run, others were the works of individuals, but if you walked through the streets of Konoha you would be hard-pressed to find a shopping street without at least one shinobi owned store.

It wasn't that hard to understand why.

Say what you would about the profession, but being a hired killer paid really well. And ninjas that managed to survive long enough to retire often ended up with more money in their hands than they knew what to do with. I guess with the abundance of free time and more money than they could ever hope to spend, many ninjas would try their hand in running their own businesses – often with mixed results.

In the cut-throat world of business, it didn't matter if you were a literal expert of cutting throats, you'd be eaten alive at the first slip. Being a master of stealth and espionage was all well and good but if you had no idea how to balance your books, or how to effectively promote your products in a highly competitive market you were nothing but fresh prey to the sharks of capitalism.

Which was why more often than not those businesses tended to end belly up.

Not always though.

Every now and again you end up hearing about a success story. The Yamanaka Clan's flower store or the Akimichi Clan's world-renowned restaurants were good examples. And now apparently so too was the Hatake Clan's bookstores added to the shortlist of successful businesses started by Shinobi, better known as Pakkun's Bookstore.

"Are you really that surprised?" Naruto made a face as she picked up a copy of one of the books and held up to me. "I thought it was obvious that the pervert would own something like this."

Gripped in Naruto's hand was a green-covered book with the words 'Icha Icha – Make love, not war' printed on its surface. The latest book to the best selling Icha Icha series, with this new addition revolving around the gripping tale of an Izuraya Mihom, a Kunoichi of Kawagakure - the village hidden in the river - and how she decided to end a war through love instead of death (aka seduction), or so I gathered from Kakashi's gushing review.

It had only been officially released onto the market for a couple of days but it was obviously going to become another big hit. Already the sales had broken records and were still growing.

That was where we came in.

The only thing, literally the only thing that made sense in this entire debacle, was that every branch of Pakkun's Bookstore came stocked with the entire collection of Icha Icha books. Each store had an entire section dedicated solely to the franchise. They were actually Konoha's exclusive supplier for the books, and Kakashi had somehow managed to strike a deal with Jiraiya to make it so.

In other words, every single copy of the books in Konoha had to pass through one of Kakashi's stores at one point or another.

And guess who needed an extra set of hands to help deliver the newest shipment.

Normally he wouldn't have been able to get away with it. There were laws in place preventing Jonin Instructors from abusing their power. They couldn't just go around ordering their team to do manual labour for them for free, had they tried then they would find the Hokage's foot-stomping down on them. Hard.

However, like all laws, it wasn't perfect.

There were loopholes and workarounds. To someone both devious and morally bankrupt enough to take advantage of them, they might as well have not been there. And as I had the recent misfortune to discover, there were absolutely no laws preventing a Team Instructor from hiring out his own team for personal missions so long as they went through proper channels.

And Kakashi, being the type of prick that he was, was only too happy to abuse this loophole.

Which was why we had spent the last few days running from one side of the village to the other, dropping off what felt like countless copies of the newest Icha Icha. Turns out there was a massive hidden fan-base for the series here in Konoha but – unlike our shameless Sensei – most people were too embarrassed to be seen publicly buying a copy.

That was where Kakashi's genius came in.

Pakkun's Bookstore revolved around the concept of privacy. Discretion was key.

Customers would stop by a branch of Pakkun's Bookstore, pretend to buy a copy of some random book and while at the cash register would quietly place an order to have a copy of Icha Icha be delivered to their homes on a later date. Discreetly of course.

All books delivered were delivered in plain packaging to hide their contents from any prying eyes.

And there were a lot of orders.

Even after two full days of prepping and delivering them, we weren't even halfway done.

For the last two days, we spent our morning here, stuck in a warehouse packaging and labelling books, only to spend the rest of the day running from house to house hand-delivering them to customers. We couldn't even take advantage of Shadow Clones, Kakashi forbidding both Naruto and me from using them for some reason.

Kakashi claimed that our work was meant to double up as training. Not only would this help as a team-building exercise but by personally travelling through every street in Konoha – and I mean every goddamn street, I wasn't exaggerating the size of the hidden Icha Icha fan-base – we would familiarise ourselves with the layout of the entire village, a skill that would prove invaluable in future missions or in the event the village was ever attacked.

It was all bullshit of course. Reasonable sounding bullshit, but still bullshit.

Kakashi just needed some cheap labour to deliver his goods and we just happened to be available. Well that, and I was also halfway convinced that he fed off the suffering of children. I swear there better be some kind of legitimate training or team-building exercises behind all of this because if I ever find out for sure that the only reason he banned the use of Shadow Clones was to watch us suffer I was gonna sick Naruto on him.

"Oh come on!" I was brought out of musings by Naruto's groan of exasperation as she stared down at the list of customers, "He's a pervert too? And here I thought he was one of the cool ones."

This wasn't the first time Naruto snapped at seeing a name she recognized.

During our first day prepping packages, it seemed like Naruto would erupt every other minute or so as she spotted a name she recognized. Which there was a surprising lot of.

I don't think she'd ever be able to look at Iruka in the same way ever again.

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