The next moment, the two figures vanished at the same time. Meanwhile, after wandering around the nearby dark alleys for a while, Tachibana Jirō discovered something very strange.
"This isn't right—this is way too wrong, meow!"
Jirō shook his head. In a normal town, even if cats were not everywhere, it still should not be the case that after searching for so long, he could not even find a single strand of cat fur.
And whether it was just his imagination or not, Jirō always felt that those humans' gazes were very strange. Whenever they saw him, they looked almost as delighted as starving kittens that had discovered a mouse.
Unfortunately, Jirō was currently carrying out a "secret investigation," so it was not convenient for him to casually deal with those strange humans. As a result, every time, he decisively ran off before they could approach.
But because of that, Jirō also failed to notice how exasperated those people looked after he "escaped."
"Meow!?"
Just as Jirō was wondering why he could not find any of his own kind in Seagull City, he turned his head and unexpectedly came face to face with a black cat that had just crawled out of a mouse hole.
"Yo, I finally found one, meow..."
Jirō happily greeted the black cat in cat language. Just as he was about to ask his fellow cat about the situation in Seagull City, this flustered black cat covered his mouth.
"Meow your head—hurry up and hide!"
The black cat was first startled by this outrageously fat orange tom, then hurriedly looked around. After confirming that there were no humans nearby, he tried to drag Jirō with him into the mouse hole.
"Wait a second, meow! This hole is too small—meow can't squeeze in!"
Jirō tried to crawl into the mouse hole, but not to mention his absurdly plump body—even his round, pudgy head blocked the entrance completely. He could not get in at all.
"Idiot, idiot, idiot! How did you get so fat, meow!?"
The black cat instinctively glanced at Jirō's fat belly, which was practically dragging on the ground, as if he had suffered some kind of mental blow. He spoke in utter disbelief. "Other cats, even if they weighed only half as much as you, would already have been caught and eaten by those two-legged beasts, right?"
"Eaten? Those two-legged beasts eat meow?!"
Jirō's eyes widened involuntarily. The expression on his furry cat face twisted dramatically, as though he had just heard something utterly shocking. "How evil! Keizumi-sama was right after all! Seagull City... no! The Land of Water is a land steeped in sin, meow!"
"What's so strange about that? When those two-legged beasts get hungry enough, they even fight cats for mice!"
The black cat, on the other hand, looked completely unsurprised, and instead felt that this fellow cat was making too much of a fuss. "Let's find a place to hide first. Otherwise, if a cat as fat as you gets spotted by those two-legged beasts, it'll definitely cause a commotion."
While Jirō nervously followed the black cat in search of a place to hide, Biwa Jūzō also followed the route from his memory and arrived at a muddy district in utter ruin.
However, before he could head to the location of the black market, a man with long green hair and sharp fangs blocked his path.
"What, I thought someone was lurking around. So it was you..."
The man folded his arms and glanced at the slash on Jūzō's forehead protector. The hostility in his eyes eased slightly. "So you finally couldn't stand those annoying bastards either and chose to defect, Biwa Jūzō?"
"...Kurosuki Raiga. So you've been hiding here all this time."
Jūzō instinctively gripped the hilt of the Kubikiribōchō. He felt like he now knew the culprit behind Seagull City's decay into this state. But when he thought of Uchiha Izumi's earlier instructions, he ultimately did not rashly make a move.
As fellow members of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen, Jūzō had no absolute confidence in taking Raiga down. If he started fighting him head-on here, the resulting commotion would only make the investigation even harder.
For the underground black market of Seagull City to have lasted so many years right under Kirigakure's nose, even though that was partly because Kirigakure ninja had colluded with them, it was still enough to prove just how vigilant this bunch of water rats was.
If Jūzō started fighting Raiga here, the people running the underground black market might immediately grab the money and flee, only to come back after the heat died down.
"I'm on pretty good terms with the Funaya family. Do you want to come along too? That guy Yūjirō would definitely welcome you."
Raiga did not care much about the bit of hostility Jūzō had shown. After all, most Kirigakure ninja were already used to drawing blades on others at the slightest provocation and treating human lives as worthless.
Especially since they had once both been Kirigakure elites, members of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen, and had now both become missing-nin. For Jūzō to merely grip his sword hilt without slashing at him on the spot was already an extremely restrained reaction.
"I haven't decided yet. Let me think about it."
After just a few exchanges, Jūzō realized that Raiga's source of information was probably flawed. Otherwise, he would not have failed to know that Jūzō had defected much earlier, and instead thought he was a newly defected missing-nin.
"Oh, oh. Then once you've thought it through, remember to come find me."
Raiga did not suspect anything. Compared to the other former members of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen, he got along fairly well with Jūzō, his former colleague.
Of course, it was not that their relationship was especially good. It was simply that Raiga's relationship with the others was even worse, which made his relationship with Jūzō seem not so bad by comparison.
After perfunctorily brushing Raiga off, Jūzō did not try to continue infiltrating to gather intelligence. Since Raiga had managed to find him, that meant the people in the black market had already noticed something abnormal.
Under those circumstances, rashly infiltrating again would only alert the enemy. It would be better to pretend to leave and make them lower their guard. In any case, besides him, Izumi and that ninja cat were also gathering related intelligence. Ninja were not a profession that only knew how to fight alone; many times, one had to—and could only—choose to trust one's teammates.
Compared with Jirō and Jūzō, whose investigations had both gone rather poorly, Izumi's investigation went unexpectedly smoothly instead.
Of course, this was not because her ninja skills were stronger than Jūzō's. She was simply benefiting from Keizumi's gift.
Being able to see all the crimes a target had committed—an ability like that was practically a bug when it came to gathering intelligence.
Its effect was not that obvious when facing good people or ordinary people, but nearly everyone involved in running the underground black market had a red name with overflowing sin values. All Izumi needed to do was follow the trail of one red name after another, and by tracing the clues step by step, she uncovered the situation of Seagull City's underground black market with hardly any effort.
By the time the two humans and one cat gathered again, Izumi's expression had already turned extremely ugly, and the notebook in her hand used for keeping records was densely filled with all sorts of crimes.