Recruiting Hōichi was a remarkably simple task, far easier than the process of breaking the Sound Four or negotiating with foreign feudal lords.
The acquisition came entirely down to Hōichi's inherent nature, since the Sand monk was fundamentally corrupt, driven by a hollow greed for power and a deep-seated resentment for those who had humiliated him.
He also lacked the moral compass that had gotten Shira killed.
Such religious garb like that was easy for Arthur to buy.
To have released the monk from his self-inflicted Dharma seal was also simple thanks to the resurrected Uzumaki clan. It took only a mere sixty seconds for one of them to dismantle it.
Once Hōichi was free, Arthur employed his ultimate safety net: the Evil Illusion Flattery technique. As for the hypnotic command, it was that Hōichi would sacrifice himself for Arthur without a second of hesitation if the order was ever given.
With the monk thoroughly subjugated and added to his arsenal, Arthur had acquired the perfect asset for his next objective: to capture a Jinchūriki.
The Seven-Tails and Fū were currently the most coveted target on the board since the Akatsuki were hunting her. Those from the Leaf Village had likely intercepted this matter by now.
Arthur knew he had to strike first, but all his plans required diligent thought. That's why Hōichi had to be recruited. With the monk's specialized chakra-absorption techniques, Arthur had a cleaner method to safely suppress the beast during capture.
✟
Some time later, Arthur was prepping to leave his country.
Right now, his spatial network of Flying raijin marks was only scattered across the Bird Country and some in key locations of the Land of Wind.
There were undoubtedly the old ones left behind, but he had no access to them. Like the marks in the northern territories near the Hidden Waterfall Village.
Teleporting straight there was off the table, meaning he was forced to travel conventionally.
'Smoke jutsu…'
Arthur quickly took to the skies and propelled himself across the continent. The journey took him just under three days of continuous, high-speed flight.
When he finally arrived at the borders of the Waterfall Village, he hovered in the mist generated by the cascades that concealed the settlement.
The tactical requirements of his mission were already understood; he needed to lure Fū out of the village and engage the Jinchūriki in a less populated area without drawing unnecessary attention.
For instance, if Arthur just snuck up on her and marked her with a Flying raijin, someone like Jada would teleport to her and discover Arthur was alive.
Arthur was sure that Jada's friends wanted to protect all of the Jinchūriki no matter the costs.
But that didn't mean Arthur was without a plan. Luring targets into isolation had become a refined science for him.
He had lured Ryūzetsu away from the Grass Village to abuse her life-transfer jutsu. He had manipulated Alice into bringing Naruto out of the Leaf Village for their confrontation. And he had even steered Sasuke directly into his hands from the Sound Village.
Isolating Fū would require the same level of calculated misdirection.
The first step was locating her.
Arthur remained hidden in a canopy overlooking the village as he activated his Crimson Gaze. Scanning the infrastructure of the village, he checked her designated residence first.
She wasn't there, so he swept his vision across the commercial district and found her a few blocks away.
The Seven-Tails host was sitting alone at a small street vendor, happily eating a skewer of food.
With her location confirmed, Arthur initiated the second phase.
His smoky body dissolved further as he drifted through the village streets, entirely undetected. He then slipped through the ventilation shafts of the central Jōnin Station before reforming in the shadows of their restricted archive room.
The village's current security protocols needed to be known. So he spent several minutes rapidly flipping through the dispatch logs and mission assignments on the commander's desk.
One highly classified incident report caught his eye: Fū had recently been attacked.
The report detailed that two Akatsuki members—the immortal duo, Hidan and Kakuzu—had attempted to ambush Fū and her Genin team after the Chūnin Exams. However, the ambush failed catastrophically since Fū had been secretly escorted by two Leaf kunoichi acting as shadow guards: Alice and Margaret.
Arthur read the after-action breakdown with cold fascination. As a coordinated team, the otherworlders and the Jinchūriki managed to completely thwart the Akatsuki assault, forcing Hidan and Kakuzu to break formation and flee.
Margaret had apparently pursued them into the wilderness, likely utilizing her advanced Sage Mode to track their signatures, but she ultimately returned empty-handed.
Arthur's earlier deduction was correct: those from the Leaf Village were actively guarding the remaining Tailed Beasts by trying to disrupt the Akatsuki's canonical timeline.
The aftermath of the failed ambush left the Waterfall Village in a state of paranoia. So the village leadership had placed their military on high alert. To ensure Fū's safety, they prohibited her from leaving the village walls by restricting the energetic girl to mundane, internal missions.
Arthur looked at the current assignment roster. Fū's next scheduled mission was humiliatingly simple: she was tasked with babysitting a pack of dogs at a random civilian's home on the west side of the village.
Extracting her just became significantly harder. The village was locked down, and she wasn't allowed near the gates.
But Arthur was never without options. He simply had to rewrite the bureaucracy.
✟
A few hours later, Fū bounded through the front doors of the Jōnin Station. She approached the dispatch counter, where a tired Chūnin sat behind a pane of glass. The Chūnin slid a mission scroll under the slot for her to take.
"Huh?" she said as she read the mission parameters.
The ink on the scroll detailed that she was to venture several miles outside the village walls and secure a classified package at a designated drop zone in the eastern wasteland.
"Are ya sure this is right?" she asked, leaning close to the glass. "They told me I was grounded."
The Chūnin frowned and requested to see the mission specs again. He took the scroll and read the text. To his eyes, the ink clearly stated that Fū was assigned to babysit the dogs at the civilian residence in the west district.
Little did either of them know, Arthur was watching this interaction closely from the rafters with his Crimson Gaze active.
He had forged the physical text on the scroll prior to her arrival by writing the fake extraction coordinates.
And the moment the Chūnin had taken the scroll to verify it, Arthur had quickly cast a localized genjutsu directly into the man's optic nerves. The illusion perfectly masked the forged text, feeding the chūnin the exact mundane details he expected to see.
"Yes, this is right," the Chūnin sighed, sliding the scroll back to her. "Try not to cause any trouble while you're there."
"Um… Okay? Hey, I won't!"
After a little bickering, Fū practically skipped out of the station, thrilled to be given a real assignment outside the walls.
Arthur drifted through the air vents and tracked her progress toward the main gates.
Armed guards were stationed at the village exit. They had standing orders from the village leader not to let Fū leave the perimeter under any circumstances. But as the energetic girl casually strolled out onto the main road, walking right past the sentry posts, the guards didn't say a single word. They didn't even look in her direction.
That was because Arthur had placed the entire gate detail under a subtle visual genjutsu.
As Fū walked past them, they didn't see a girl with mint-green hair leaving the village; they only saw the wind rustling against the empty dirt road.
All these acts meant that Arthur had successfully extracted a Jinchūriki from a paranoid, locked-down military installation in broad daylight, all without raising a single alarm!
✟
Thirty minutes later, Fū arrived at the designated coordinates.
The environment was a stark contrast to the lush waterfalls of her home. It was a remote, barren area where there were hardly any trees. Just cracked dirt and dry scrub brush that stretched for miles in every direction.
The perfect isolation zone.
"I wonder where the package is," Fū asked herself, wandering in a slow circle and kicking at the dirt. "Don't tell me I got lost."
Suddenly, she heard the crunch of dry earth close behind her.
When she turned to look, approaching her was a man draped in a white coat. The wind caught the fabric, revealing the orange jacket underneath as the man slowly raised a hand and pushed his hood back, revealing his cold eyes.
Fū gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. "You…! You're Arthur Bennett! Oh my gosh! I thought they said you were sealed away!"
"Guess they were wrong…"
Arthur didn't waste another second on conversation as he flicked his wrist, shooting a kunai from his sleeve.
Fū reacted by dropping her center of gravity and throwing herself in a rapid cartwheel to the left. The blade hissed past her ear as she landed safely in a crouch.
"I always wanted to meet you after the tournament," she yelled, "but why are you attacking me?!"
"You have something that belongs to me…"
Fū was puzzled at first, unsure of what he was referring to. Until she remembered that she was a host to a powerful monster sealed inside her.
"You can't be serious!" she said.
Recognizing the severe danger, she quickly reached into her weapons pouch and began digging for her emergency beacon. But when she couldn't feel it, she looked down, only to be surprised that it was missing entirely from her gear.
"Looking for this?" Arthur said.
Pinched between his fingers was a rectangular piece of paper glowing with a faint red chakra. It was Jada's specialized Flying raijin mark, and he had sealed it away.
Arthur had already made the mistake once of not checking for it back in the Land of Tea when he fought Team 7 and again when he isolated Naruto out of the Leaf. But if there's one thing he never did, it was make the same mistake twice.
"Oh crap!" Fū exclaimed.
Arthur did not give her time to comprehend her predicament.
'Ice style: dragon vs tiger…'
The moisture in the dry air rapidly froze before forming a sculpted tiger made of translucent ice. Then the beast roared and hurled itself across the dirt directly toward Fū. To evade, she instantly manifested two pairs of insect-like wings as she launched herself into the sky.
Hovering in the air, she looked down at Arthur. "That was ice style!" Little did she know, his clone body had to be reinjected with more of Haku's cells to acquire that Kekkei Genkai again. "So cool! Can't we just be friends?!"
Her desperate plea went entirely unheard as Arthur adjusted the flow of his freezing chakra, forming more ice wolves. They all then bounded upward like they were running on the wind itself.
Fū screamed, banking sharply to the left, then diving to the right. Arthur watched while she swayed and barrel-rolled through the sky, frantically trying to outmaneuver the wolves.
They were just as fast as she was, even while airborne. So much so that she was sweating heavily. Arthur could see her heart hammering against her ribs just to maintain her erratic flight path.
"Just leave me alone!" she cried out as a wolf almost snapped at her heel.
Her chakra was already running thin while he had just begun to fight.