Fanfic / Nin-to-Five

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Nin-to-Five is a Naruto Self-Insert Fic written by Seat_Admiral (Or Brosef, depending on the site) which has the main character reincarnated as an orphan in Sunagakure.

It can also be read on Archive Of Our Own here, Questionable Questing here, and on Royal Road here.

Nin-to-Five contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc: Mao makes plans to move into one of the spare rooms in Ryoma's inn-house. The Akatsuki attack on Suna completely obliterates it, instantly cutting that plotline short.
• Absurdly Long Wait: Ryoma is made to wait for four hours after requesting a meeting with the Captain of Suna's Ninjutsu Corps. As the last two Kazekages have come from that Corps, and their specialization tends to be profitable without requiring any monetary investment, they tend to be elitist.
• Achievement In Ignorance: Due to constantly comparing himself to the absolute best ninja he knows, Ryoma often doesn't realize that some of his own accomplishments are seen as revolutionary or legendary by others. In particular, he invents the concept of giant puppets, the concept of Puppet Prosthetics, and rediscovers the lost ability to see through puppet eyes.
  • A white veil is the mark of Suna's ANBU. According to Baki (who wears a small one over his missing eye), being given one is a great honor, and marks you as an Elite Mook. Ryoma didn't know any of this when he was given one in the war.
• Adaptation Deviation: Both played straight and averted. Nin-to-Five draws directly on the Naruto manga and anime, which includes many things that are often left out of most fanfics (Such as naturally occurring talking animals, demons, the presence of samurai outside the Land of Iron), but also makes changes to make up for the fact that Naruto canon focused on ninja to the exclusion of everything else- such as the Daimyo and Samurai's increased presence and lore behind them, the Thousand Buddhas being Hamaura and Hagoromo's allies against Kaguya ( a group that would include the first Uzumaki and Jashin), the Uzumaki clan being married into by the Senju and having existed beforehand as the Imperial clan, etc. are things that have been made up for the purposes of expanding the background lore.
• A Day in the Limelight: The story will occasionally switch from Ryoma's point-of-view to to those of other characters during Interlude chapters; in addition, there are also Intermission chapters which mark the end of one arc and the beginning of another, focusing on Ryoma's past and his friendship with Sasori.
• Addiction Displacement: In Rasa's first appearance, he's smoking a hookah smelling of scorpion venom. After his wife Karura died giving birth to Gaara, he honors her Last Request of giving up the habit by switching to eating Pocky at his desk instead. This becomes a Brick Joke when Toyoko mentions how trendy Pocky has been lately.
• All There in the Manual: Seat_Admiral often details information in the forum threads that may or may not ever be explicitly stated in the story.
• Always Someone Better: Sasori is this in terms of puppetry to Ryoma. In addition to his general puppetry being orders of magnitude superior, being able to create more chakra strings with more range and more control than Ryoma can, he creates the Kurosasori- a fifty-meter puppet scorpion-base- which is introduced to the reader mere chapters after the Great Dragoon is destroyed- and many of Ryoma's non-puppetry tricks (such as using Sand Armour to increase his puppet's durability) are one-upped by Sasori using the Third Kazekage's Iron Sand techniques instead of normal Earth Release. The author has described the difference between them as- where Ryoma has an idea, and carefully works up to it in iterations, ironing out the issues and identifying new ones each time, Sasori has an idea and simply does it, solving any issues that might come up by raw talent rather than careful design.
• An Arm and a Leg: Mari loses one of her arms from fighting off ninja turned bandits. She gets better.
  • The Suna ANBU 38-102/Tsubame lost all her limbs to poison after an unfortunate run-in with Hanzo the Salamander. Thankfully, she also gets better.
• Arc Villain:
  • The prolific thief ninja known as 'Laughing Smoke', over the course of the story's Tea Country A-rank escort mission which later leads to a separate S-rank mission issued by the Tea Daimyo; at first because of the bounties he claims to have put on the heads of nobility, and later due to the extreme threat he personally poses.
  • Arc 4, the mission to support the Takeda clan heir (and secretly to inflame the Takeda clan's conquest) features an Arc Villain Ensemble. The Akatsuki member Siwa, secretly hired by Lady Miyano implicitly in an attempt to frame Oda Naginata in an attempt to take over her lands is more prominent at first, staging attacks with her ultra-range longbow, and the second half sees Sage Seimei abruptly take centre stage.
• Atrocious Alias: Ryoma is known as "The Braggart", because of a combination of his tendency to lie and seeming humble-bragging.
  • He later learns that due to his Wood Dragoon becoming a legend among Suna-nin, they referred to its puppeteer as "That Guy" as most ninja weren't made aware of his identity.
  • The Fourth Kazekage's epithet is 'Golden Boy', due to having been generally well-liked and his personal variation on Magnet Release.
• Attack on the Heart:
  • Ryoma pulls this off on Laughing Smoke by simultaneously bursting his hand through his chest and pushing out his heart from the front, with no small amount of help from the as-of-yet unnamed Tani and Kiri Jonin.
  • How the end of Arc 4's major battle finishes. Just before Seimei is able to kill Ryoma, Kakashi puts a Chidori through the damage that Ryoma had inflicted to the Infinite Armour and bursts his heart.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Wood Dragoon Mk. 2, which, while speculated to be able to stall a jinchuuriki, is constructed from being based on so many secret techniques that, if it were ever captured, it would result in a village-wide breach of security. For this reason, Ryoma can only deploy it with the permission of the Kazekage or the leader of whatever mission he's on.
• Badass Teacher: In exchange for agreeing to Ryoma's requests concerning the construction of his Mk.2 Dragoon puppet, Rasa has him temporarily take up teaching a remedial class of Genin, who for one reason or another were not chosen by Jonin-sensei to be a part of their team. He takes to the task quite well, and imparts as much of his knowledge as he can to them to increase their chances of survival.
• Bald of Authority: The Vice Captain of Suna's Puppet Corps, Nichibotsu, sports one. He also has an elaborate image of a scorpion tattooed on it!
• Belly Mouth: The bandit ninja known as 'Ogress Omatsu' has one thanks to her bloodline ability. She's also the one responsible for the loss of Mari's arm by chomping it off with said mouth in battle.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to canon Naruto which often makes use of Gory Discretion Shots, the author does not shy away from the results of violence in Nin-to-Five; many characters here inflict or receive injuries that are often graphic in detail.
• Blow You Away: Ryoma's secondary and developed Chakra Affinity is Wind. While he doesn't have much experience with it compared to his Earth element yet, Ryoma is actively looking for ways to improve both his control and skill in using it.
  • Mari is a Fan User, and fights via Razor Wind. She is strong enough to take down multiple enemies including a Kaiju-sized Moth Summon.
• Blue Blood: Laughing Smoke claims that their real name is Takamura Gendo, a branch family of the Imperial Clan.
• Body Horror: As a result of suffering not one, but two explosions within an hour or so of each other, the enemy nin dubbed 'The Stranger' ends up looking like a burnt zombie; with exposed bone showing from massive wounds on his left arm and cheek, his left eye having seemingly lost its eyelid and both of his hands missing at least a finger.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: Commander Tenchi attempted to do this to his boss. Fortunately for the latter, he's quickly thwarted before it gets any worse.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: As of Chapter 30, Rasa assigns Jonin Tsubame to Ryoma as his "permanent guard and aide", mainly to inspire him to craft more puppet limbs for her... and partially to have her stop him from potentially pulling a Sasori. Ryoma jokes about being given a live-in maid.
• Boring, but Practical: Ryoma's priority is survival. He favors a broad skill set, defensive tactics, and even delayed his academy graduation for years in order to maximize his own safety. Half of his combat style reflects it as well, as he sticks to using tried-and-true tactics rather than going for flashy but Chakra-costly techniques.
  Ryoma: The fact is, just staying alive is a victory. Every day you stay alive is another day you have to develop and refine as a ninja. You don't need secret jutsu, or a good teacher, or good food, or anything else like that to become strong. All of those things help, but the most important thing is just staying alive and having more time to practice.
  • This policy even extends to his meals, with Ryoma preferring the rations given to all Suna-nin instead of eating food he cooks himself or going out to eat. They are free and nutritious, after all, even if they are rather bland and detested by other Suna-nin. He also supplements them with sweet potatoes for their added nutritional value.
  • Captain Gentai's fighting style is said to be like this, but in a different way. He uses multiple human-shaped puppets and relies on traditional taijutsu and bukijutsu alongside them.
• Botanical Abomination: What the Fire Lotus is later revealed to be; it's implied to have some sort of rudimentary sapience and can also enhance a ninja's Chakra Affinity towards Fire to staggering levels after they imbibe tea made from its leaves. However, the latter is only possible after it has been thoroughly watered with the blood of Chakra-rich individuals, such as nobles.
  • It later summons another one that resembles a giant wooden amalgamation of various insects, with an "immense burning bloom of a golden-red flower" as its rear end.
• Bread Milk Eggs Squick: Suna-derived Chakra Pills are made of "an energizing, calorie-dense blend of rice, flour, dried vegetables and fruits, seeds, honey, and lab-grade methamphetamine".
  • Similarly, their all-purpose medical pills contain a mixture of antibiotic and medical essences, as well as "garlic extract, caffeine, honey for taste, and opium."
• Career-Ending Injury: Owing to the highly physical nature of the missions ninja tend to carry out, those who suffer the loss of a limb in them are generally kept benched in their Village for their own good.
  • However, this is no longer the case for Sunagakure thanks to Ryoma's new invention.
• Central Theme: Two major ones.
  • One is one from early Naruto canon, progress or the idea that 'the new shall surpass the old'. While there it was eventually thrown out the window with the Fourth War arc, where deceased ninja constantly showed up the newer ones, Seat_Admiral has brought it back as a major focus of the story.
    • It's shown multiple times that while the samurai forces are powerful, their hidebound and traditionalist methods have left them being supplanted by the more mercenary, more versatile and more effective ninja; Sarutobi Sanjuro would have been able to defeat Laughing Smoke's giant moth summon, but only with a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that would likely have meant his death, but seeing Mari defeat it with a single warfan blast gets him to explicitly comment on this, and Commander Tenchi's entire coup and Wind Country's economic warfare against Suna are both part of the samurai refusing to admit that they may have been surpassed.
    • While Warring Clans/early Ninja Wars era ninja are and were far more powerful, this is stated as a case of Had to Be Sharp - they were using relatively unrefined techniques at an incredible level of polish; the Uchiha clan, one of the most powerful and regarded ninja clans of the era, was largely built out of simple fire ninjutsu and the rare Sharingan. Even Madara Uchiha spent much of his career as a legendary ninja as just 'a guy who can use fire, wielding a sword and a warfan'. With more time spent teaching instead of killing each other, modern average ninja are less hardened and polished, but generally more overall skilled.
  • The other is the theme of connection. According to the author, the story starts at Ryoma's absolute lowest point; isolated, alone, every major social connection either defected or dead and little recognition from anyone outside his superiors. As the story goes on, he makes more friends, connections, and gets steadily more and more respect from the other members of the village and from other villages, and in turn this allows him to draw on those connections to improve himself and create better puppets.
  • There's a third, more minor, theme also inherited from canon Naruto, the Cycle of Revenge. Sage Seimei is its most notable appearance so far, being a man so lost in his own hatred that he intrudes into a conflict that had nothing to do with him, soley to get vengeance- and gets himself killed for it.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In Gaku Inzuka's first interlude, he lists off various notable bandits in Tea Country, and what got them their bounty- including Laughing Smoke, whose theft of the Tea Country's famous Fire Lotus (whose leaves are often harvested to brew a unique blend of tea that has a particularly spicy kick to it, that is the entire focus of the festival which Lady Gozen hires an escort to reach) upped his bounty to 18 million. Laughing Smoke is the Big Bad of the arc, and the Fire Lotus, when watered with chakra-blood, turns out to be a Botanical Abomination.
  • When building the Great Dragoon, Ryoma is warned that the springs in its legs, if used incorrectly, could explode with enough force to bring down a building. With the Great Dragoon in pieces, he does exactly this- compressing and launching the spring with full force- to smash Sage Mode Seimei through a building and damage the Infinite Armour.
  • When explaining tenketsu to the genin on the mission, Sugimoto mentions that it's possible to use someone else's hands to do jutsu with- something demonstrated earlier in-story with Gaku Inuzuka's ninken. Seimei forces Sugimoto himself to build chakra by forcing him to do handseals, allowing him to drain it and recharge himself.
• Child Soldiers:
  • Keeping true to the source material, Ryoma becomes a ninja at a young age, and gets to personally experience the closing years of the Third Great Ninja War in all of its sheer bloody brutality.
  • As Nin-to-Five is set years earlier than canon, we also get to see Asuma, Kurenai and Raido as experienced Genin long before their canonical Jonin appearances, led by Gaku Inuzuka^note who the author states is Kiba's Disappeared Dad in this story.
  • Masses of Child S Oldiers is a big part of ninja dominance, using minimally trained genin to bulk out forces. This is a big part of why Suna accepts random orphans and unwanted babies to be trained as ninja; that, and occasionally they'll get a Ryoma who appears to be a prodigy in his chosen field.
• The Citadel Comes to Life: Intermission 3 starts with Sasori in a tower overlooking the Land of This. Minutes later, the tower is revealed to be atop the Humongous Mecha of the Kurosasori- a giant, fifty-meter puppet scorpion, a mobile workshop designed to be useful for Sasori across his entire career.
• Cold Ham: Captain Gentai of the Puppet Corps is a stern-faced giant who always uses professional language and the same loud tone for anything he says. After a subordinate told to "lighten up" once, he added a pink, floral shirt to his pristine uniform.
• Combat Hand Fan: Mari wields a large fan in battle as befitting a Fan User, much like how Temari will in the future.
• Conflict Killer: Sage Seimei serves as this for Arc 4; he interrupts the showdown between Oda Naginata and the Takeda clan'd forces, abducts both lords and a number of ninja, and forces both sides into a truce to rescue them- after which the conflict is relatively trivial.
• Confusion Fu: The other half of Ryoma's combat style relies on him using lies, bluffs, and mind games to keep his enemies on the backfoot.
• Consummate Professional: Ryoma is able to act with an utmost professional attitude when on the job. Even the fact that he'll be working closely with the ninja who killed two of his Genin teammates, Gaku Inuzuka, doesn't affect him whatsoever.
  • Baki is this in the Interlude focused on him. He also readily defers to Ryoma being in charge of the milk run C-rank mission to buy rice from the Land of Rivers with the remedial Genin.
• Cool Old Guy: Sarutobi Sanjuro, the Third Hokage's estranged brother and Madam Gozen's samurai guard.
• Cool Sword: Mao earns the right to wield one after stealing it away from its distracted owner. Although the greenish-blue gemstone embedded on it later gets broken, it still remains a top-quality weapon.
• Crack Is Cheaper: Buying parts for all of the puppets a dedicated puppet-nin uses can quickly become overwhelming. This is a major part of why Ryoma practices his Boring, but Practical combat style: His smaller Bolter puppets are designed to be easily replaceable, and money spent on food that aren't rations is money he could be using to better his bigger designs instead.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Sage Seimei hands out a series of these in rapid succession at the end of Arc 4; obliterating the female ninja + Jonin Sugimoto, the four major Takeda samurai, and the ninja again before Ryoma arrives.
  • Intermission 3 shows Sasori's canonical single-handed slaughter of the Land of This. Thanks to his Humongous Mecha puppet Kurosasori, even the boss koala bear summon is utterly helpless and quickly slaughtered.
• Curb-Stomp Cushion:
  • Jiraiya is explicitly holding back when Ryoma fights him in Arc 3, and still utterly outclasses him; despite engaging alongside Shiki Corps captain Arada, Jiraiya has Arada captured and sealed in a toad-gourd, and the solo engagement against Ryoma leaves the latter with fractured ribs and left arm, a wrecked set of puppet-armour, and a serious concussion as he flees; the only reason he's able to get away with the gourd is that Jiraiya decides that he'll let him.
  • The four Takeda-loyal samurai at the end of Arc 4, when they fight Sage Seimei. They know that he steals chakra so they engage him using only physical energy; this leaves them standing absolutely no chance, but they manage to injure Seimei enough to reveal his ability to regenerate.
• Dangerous Deserter: Sasori of the Red Sands, who has long since murdered the Third Kazekage and converted him into one of his Human Puppets, and is also responsible for an influx of Land of Wind ninja joining Sunagakure after razing their Hidden Villages for interesting people to add to his puppet collection.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ryoma defaults to a dry wit whenever he's not just commenting inside his own mind. This has the added side effect of amusing or annoying his allies while infuriating his enemies.
• Demonic Possession: The Fire Lotus was doing this to Laughing Smoke, whispering into his ears to force him complete the ritual to make it radiant, and takes a more active role after his defeat, taking over his body just long enough for it to perform one last Summoning Technique through him.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Ryoma's primary Chakra Affinity is Earth. A lot of his ninjutsu techniques are also based around him manipulating the environment to his advantage, such as using Hiding Like a Mole to stay or move undetected underground and attracting sand towards his puppet mech to act as camouflage and ablative armor with Sand Transformation.
• Does Not Like Spam: A downplayed minor example; Ryoma has a mild dislike of mayonnaise, and his inner narration states it's "because mayo was gross and he (Ryoma) didn't like it anywhere near his food".
  • He also doesn't seem to like tartar sauce, as he rather jokingly claims to Tsubame that he would die were he to eat fried fish with it.
• The Dreaded: Hanzo the Salamander, who - during the point of time in which Nin-to-Five takes place - is still in his prime, and has subjected countless ninja who strayed into Amegakure territory to brutal death and/or dismemberment. Best exemplified through the fate suffered by the Suna ANBU, 38-102:
  Rasa: In the six seconds she was captured, the corrosive venom of the salamander had rendered her hairless, caused extensive chemical burns all over her body, and rendered her limbless. She was stabilized by a present medical ninja and returned to Sunagakure for intensive care. She has since recovered from the chemical damage, save for the missing limbs.
  Rasa: Her repeated requests for assisted suicide have been postponed until after the full details of her encounter with Hanzo the Salamander could be extracted- and may be summarily rejected if partial functionality can be restored through puppetlimbs.
  What a distinctly horrifying story.
  Ryoma: With all due respect Lord Kazekage, you could've simply said 'Hanzo' and I would've understood.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Ryoma's excuse for why he was able to identify a missing-nin's cloak as belonging to the Akatsuki, despite them only recently adding the red clouds to their outfits; he dreamed of Zetsu appearing in his apartment to extend an invitation to the Akatsuki, looked into whether the Akatsuki existed, and wound up associating red clouds with the Akatsuki. Naturally, it's all bullshit.
• Due to the Dead: Ryoma makes sure to always collect the bodies from his battlefields. Sure, he loots their corpses first, and then sells them to his Village for medical experimentation, but he maintains that, eventually, the dead will get a proper burial instead of being left to rot. Considering he fought through the Third Ninja War, it's assumed that he's seen plenty of corpses who never got that dignity.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Many characters are first seen in the sketches that Seat_Admiral draws, sometimes appearing months in advance of their appearance in the story. Nagare, Tsubame, the Kaguya ronin in Oda Naginata's employ and more first appeared like this. They were also the first indication that Sage Seimei and Kakashi were present in Arc 4's mission, the only indication in the case of the former. As of writing, there are still multiple characters who have received sketches that have not made any appearance, including the Wind Daimyo's daughter and Hanzo the Salamander's granddaughter.
• Eat Dirt, Cheap: The observation that Gelel explodes into a forest of trees when destroyed and greatly resembles Wood Release lead to the author making the conclusion; it solves a surprising number of mysteries about Naruto if Hashirama Senju somehow ate a Gelel stone as a child. ^note Why he has Wood Release, when no other Senju or Asura incarnation has before or since (it's his powerful chakra running through a Gelel stone), why his cells turn specifically heal people, can grant Wood Release, and have so many other weird properties (there's trace Gelel in them), how he has Sage Mode with no animal clan to teach him and without turning to stone (the primary use of Gelel resembles Sage Mode to a suspicious degree), and even what killed him with such a strong body (the Gelel stone eventually grew inside his stomach to the point where he didn't feel hungry ever and stopped eating, leading to a peaceful but unnaturally early death)
• Energy Absorption: The Infinite Armour's main function, allowing the user to drain chakra that has either been built or is part of a jutsu, using it to heal and empower the wielder. It can't steal pure physical energy, and Seimei has to force one of the Samurai trying this to build chakra in order to steal it, and puppet-strings contain so little chakra that Ryoma is able to outpace the healing until Kakashi is able to strike the final blow.
• Engineered Heroics: Reto, the First Kazekage, regularly unleashed the One-Tails against ninja clans that were too entrenched to absorb into the budding Sunagakure, before sweeping in to beat it back and take over the now-desperate clan. In the modern day, Sunagakure pulls off an extremely similar plan with a fake Orochimaru summoning a giant snake to wreck the Land of Rivers and incorporate Tanigakure into Sunagakure.
• Enlightened Self-Interest:
  • Ryoma freely offers Gaku's team a set of explosion-sealing seals after their encounter with a bandit with an explosion bloodline ability. When they're suspicious about accepting tools from a former enemy, he bluntly points out that Konoha has far better seal masters than Suna, so it's not like he's giving them anything that their village didn't already have. For the mission at hand though, it'll help them protect both of their clients.
  • Ryoma's first lesson to the remedial Genin is trying to teach self-preservation to the indoctrinated child soldiers. Ninja are expensive to train and outfit, and some missions just aren't worth dying for, if only so they can better benefit Suna in future missions.
• Fake Weakness: The Wood Dragoon has a double-bluff to it: The "Ryoma" outside of it is actually a sand clone, while the real Ryoma is piloting it from the inside the protective armor. However, attempting to ignore the clone is a trick too, as it actually can assist in puppeting the Dragoon, making it far more nimble if the fake weak-point outside is ignored.
• Faking the Dead: Ryoma and Gaku use a pair of clones under henge to fake their deaths at the start of an ambush to see how Gaku's Genin team will respond. According to the three after the fact, Gaku has done this a lot and it's gotten old at this point.
• False Flag Operation: The plot to take over Tanigakure and the Land of Rivers involves a Suna Jonin with a Snake Summon contract acting as an Identity Impersonator for Orochimaru, wrecking key locations before being publicly "fought off" by Ryoma in the Great Dragoon.
• Fate Worse than Death: Hanzo the Salamander inflicted this on the Suna ANBU 38-102, by using one of his salamanders to corrode her body in its mouth as per The Dreaded above. It had ninja on both sides of the battle immediately calling for a truce.
• Friendless Background: Ryoma is a taciturn introvert by nature, more interested in his puppets and mech than people. His Genin team and Jonin instructor all died in the Third Great Ninja War. And the only peer around that he could freely talk to was Sasori... who abandoned Sunagakure after murdering its Kage.
• Foreshadowing: Often. The most notable bit of Foreshadowing thus far has yet to pay off, as Jiraiya thinks that Ryoma's face looks familiar, but can't work out why.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: Aoi, Captain of the Suna Medical Corps, winds up replacing most of her body with a puppet during the Time Skip.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The bandit ninja dubbed 'Streaker' by Asuma and later 'Naked Boom-Boom Man' by Ryoma. Justified, as he has a bloodline ability that would hinder him if he had clothes on.
• Genki Girl: Mari exudes this sort of energy. She verges on Break the Cutie territory after losing her arm in an ambush on her first mission as a Special Jonin, leaving her despondent and thinking that her career was over, but Ryoma crafting her a puppet arm has her swinging right back around to her normal self after some happy tears.
  • Mao is one, as well as some of the other remedial Genin whom Ryoma taught in Arc 2.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Did you recognise the mysterious swordsman in Arc 2? If you didn't know he was Hoki from anime filler, then the sudden appearance of Sage Seimei in Arc 4 will utterly baffle you, as he arrives to force the arc into a Halfway Plot Switch. In-universe he's considered this too; after barely killing him, Ryoma and Kakashi muse that they have absolutely no idea who he was.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Ryoma's melee fighting style is his take on boxing from half-remembered episodes of Hajime no Ippo. Justified in that he was an orphan with no access to a dedicated taijutsu instructor outside the Academy, and, as a Puppeteer, his melee combat only needs to be simple and effective, not flashy.
• Had to Be Sharp:
  • A big part of Ryoma's experience comes from having been on the front-lines during the Third Ninja War, osmething we get snapshots of during the second and third Intermission chapters.
  • The reason given for why the first generations of Ninja resurrected during canon Naruto's Fourth Ninja War seem to be so much more powerful than their modern-day descendants; they took relatively primitive techniques and made them deadly, because anyone who wasn't good enough to become a legend simply died young.
• Hero Antagonist: Jiraiya pops up and winds up fighting against Ryoma during a mission to destroy three bridges between Suna and Iwa and wipe out a small town along with them. Ryoma, for his part, is rather thankful for the interruption even if they do have to fight over it.
• Heroic BSoD: Team Chikako goes through this in the aftermath of their very first mission going wrong. Luckily, Ryoma manages to help them through it.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: Ryoma is constantly comparing himself to the monsters that make up the main players of Fourth Great Ninja War.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Captain Gentai is a mountain of a man who is married to Nagisa, a petite kunoichi who's barely half his height. Their daughter Toyoko is similarly short, and is romantically pursuing Ryoma, who Nagisa amusedly points out is similarly tall to her own tastes in men.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • Ryoma's Mk.2 Wood Dragoon is this compared to its predecessor, being over five meters tall and requiring a dedicated Puppet Corps silo to completely finish building it. Larger mecha run into the issue of the square-cube law, and would require ready access to a supermaterial (like Senju wood or Kaguya bone) to really get big.
  • Sasori's take on the idea, the Kurosasori, is a mild subversion of this. It looks like a giant, scorpion-shaped mecha, and it is big enough to fit the 'humongous' description... but by word of god he's cheating and the limbs are mostly for decoration; it actually moves around on wheels.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Until Ryoma started crafting a full set of puppet limbs for her, this was the Suna ANBU 38-102's repeated request to everyone within earshot. Ryoma snaps her out of it.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Bazo, moments before blowing himself up.
• Impoverished Patrician: Lady Oda of the Land of Rivers wears rather worn clothing for a noble, and her Interlude reveals that she had to save up for several months to afford even that.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Mari does this after Ryoma gifts her a puppet arm to replace the one she lost, and offers to help her learn to control it.
  • Suna ANBU 38-102 also gets to do this after Ryoma crafts her replacements for her missing limbs.
• Jack of All Trades: Ryoma relies on multiple skills because, as the author states, he's not good enough to be a specialist in any one of them.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • At the start of Arc 5, it's revealed that Captain Arada of the Shiki Corps and Vice-Captain Nichibatsu of the Puppetry Corps were killed by the Akatsuki attack on Suna, among many other ninja who never appeared onscreen.
  • Lady Miyano is noticed to have suddenly and abruptly vanished following the fight against Sage Seimei. Intermission 3 reveals that she was killed by the Akatsuki for trying to avoid paying them and her body is given to Sasori to be used as raw materials.
• Lamarck Was Right: In Nin-to-Five's take on Naruto, having Chakra-using heritage increases your own chakra capacity even if there isn't a proper bloodline involved. Ryoma, an orphan handed to Suna and raised essentially as future canon-fodder, notably lacks this.
• Large and in Charge: Captain Gentai, leader of the Puppet Corps of Suna, is a massive man, towering over even Ryoma while also being built like a fridge.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Ryoma was completely unaware that his Wood Dragoon became a legend among Suna-nin due to wiping out whole battlefields of enemies during the Third Great Ninja War, until Mari tells him as much after she learns he was the one controlling it.
  • Ryoma is surprised to learn from Toyoko that a white veil is the uniform of Suna's ANBU, and that people have mistaken him for one. He continues to wear it after checking up and confirming with them that it's okay for him to keep doing so.
• Lone Wolf Boss: Sage Seimei is one of these, with no overarching connection to the greater plot beyond the Cycle of Revenge theme; he jumps in to take over the Arc Villain spot from a character who is, and doesn't survive to become a recurring villain.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Ironically, this is the fate of the bandit ninja 'Streaker' / 'Naked Boom-Boom Man' - courtesy of Gaku slapping an explosive-containing seal on him, just right before reducing him into many fine pieces with his Half-Measure Fang technique.
  • This is also what remains of Bazo.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: While waiting for Team Chikako to wake up from their ordeal, Ryoma goes fishing and snags a giant catfish... who he talks at due to having to leave it behind so he can see to his duties. It then turns out that animals can talk back in Nin-to-Five. ^note Animals sometimes just being able to talk for no given reason is something canon to Naruto, but is usually handwaved as 'summon creatures' supposedly being from a different dimension, or as trained ninja-animals. Neither of these are ever explicitly stated.
  Ryoma: Hey- catfish! You mind calling it a draw for today? I have something to do.
  Catfish: ... Draw?
  • Made amusing in that though Ryoma seems to take it in stride, his inner narration caps the encounter off with the following lines:
    Fish were somehow much creepier when they could talk.
    The last one, the one they ate, congratulated them on the 'fine match' as they pulled it up.
• Making a Splash: Nagare, one of Mari's friends, is a talented Water Release user. In Suna. She carries around a pair of large containers of water with her which, when paired with her figure, leads to a great many "jugs" jokes in Ryoma's inner narration.
• Master Poisoner: As is in canon, both Sasori and Chiyo. The latter in particular is noted to have been quite irritated at Tsunade for developing cures to her poisons during the Third Great Ninja War.
• Mini-Mecha: Ryoma's Wood Dragoon is a wooden version of this, with select seals and gadgetry installed within and on it that gives him a greater degree of survivability in battles.
• Mirror Character: Ryoma is a mirror to Kakashi. A young jonin lauded as a prodigy, who preferentially wears a face-concealing mask, has a terrible sense of humour, was a surprisingly lethal force for their village in the Third Ninja War, and had nearly all of their familial connections die on them.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-universe. according to posts in-thread, Jashin was one of the Thousand Buddhas who aided the Sage of Six Paths and his brother against Kaguya, and much of his teachings are references to her Infinite Tsukuyomi and various military strategies about dealing with her and her plans to build this super-Genjutsu. But because the term 'Genjutsu' hadn't been invented yet and 'illusions' were uncommon, a lot of his statements about 'breaking the impure world' seem to be much more sinisterly referring to the material world, and most modern Nin-to-Five Buddhists don't know that the Infinite Tsukuyomi was even a thing, making most Jashinists who intend to kill everyone this by default.
• Monumental Theft: After the fight with Sage Seimei, the Suna and Konoha teams loot his entire castle down to the bedrock, with only a few stones and timbers left (because Ryoma's bulk storage scrolls were full).
• Mundane Utility:
  • Wind Release: Convection Air is a Suna ninjutsu technique that's used to defend against light debris and airborne toxins during battle. It also happens to bring in cool air to the user while keeping hot air away from them, making it nigh-essential for comfortably traveling through a desert during the day as many Suna-nin can attest to.
  • Ryoma's Great Bolter puppets are a rough replacement for his initial puppet-armour the Wood Dragoon, after his direct replacement is placed under initial classification by Sunagakure. It has chakra batteries, shiki cannons, multiple fighting limbs... and it's large enough on the inside to not only house an entire team of ninja, but also a field kitchen, and is fast enough to transport them all in relative comfort.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Rasa's plan to seal the Ichibi in Gaara resulted in his wife's death. Despite his internal rationalizations of his decisions, he is clearly still grieving her. He honors her Last Request to give up smoking, reacts with discomfort to his secretary's attempts to seduce him, and gets flashbacks when he sees her brother Yashamaru or her teammate Mari caring for Gaara in her stead.
• Necromancer:
  • Laughing Smoke remotely controlled Corpse Clones as Mooks via a seal placed on their bodies, and can also engage in a form of Fighting a Shadow by pouring additional Chakra into one of them. This is similar to a technique used by the Akatsuki in canon, and the Akatsuki archer uses this very technique in Arc 4.
  • The Suna Puppet Corps can use corpses as impromptu puppets, in a pinch. This is the entire basis of Sasori's puppetry style, using preserved and modified corpses as puppets; Ryoma would get an immediate and massive power up if he ever followed in Sasori's footsteps, but won't because he considers using corpse parts too gross.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Ryoma expounds on the philosophy of his design of the Bolter to Sasori in the Intermission 1 flashback, calling it an interchangeable design that, while any individual unit would be short-lived, the design is something that would last his entire career. While this is antithetical to Sasori's worldview, it does inspire his creation of the Kurosasori, a fifty-meter scorpion-puppet Base on Wheels filled with internal workshops that, thanks to its utility, will last Sasori's entire career. He even calls it his own 'Bolter', knowing that if Ryoma ever heard him call it that he would be greatly annoyed.
• Not So Above It All: Lady Ikeda and Madam Gozen are Team Ryoma's and Team Gaku's respective clients, and both are of noble descent. They have no qualms teasing Ryoma back for his relative youth.
  • Ryoma can't help noticing Nagare's "jugs" when Mari introduces them to each other.
• Odd Friendship: Ryoma and Sasori had one, which started when the latter mercilessly critiqued the former's Bolter during a puppet design evaluation. It was only after Ryoma unexpectedly agreed with him and clearly explained his reasoning behind it that he ended up catching Sasori's attention, where then they gradually got to know each other through Sasori regularly invading Ryoma's apartment (and laughing at his notes, not that Ryoma saw the difference between laughing at his notes and laughing at his ability).
• Off the Rails: Ryoma has passed a message along to Minato Namikaze that Tobi, claiming to be Madara Uchiha, and Zetsu are after his wife and that during childbirth is when they're most likely to strike.
  • Minato takes this appropriately seriously, thus rendering the sneak attack that killed him, his wife, and a great portion of Konoha in canon a known issue he's planning for. It also clears the Uchiha Clan as a whole from being suspected in the affair, which may result in the events leading to the Uchiha Massacre going a much different way. With one quiet message, Ryoma just took a sledge to The Stations of the Canon.
• Old Master: Sarutobi Sanjuro, a long-time Samurai who acts as Lady Ikeda's personal retainer and bodyguard for the duration of her trip to and from Tea Country as a favor to her father.
• One Degree of Separation: Sarutobi Sanjuro is related to the Sarutobi Clan in Konoha. Asuma is startled to know about their relation, as the former didn't formally introduce himself until he had to slice a boulder that was barring their path.
  • It's revealed in Ryoma's thoughts during a karaoke party that his Jonin-sensei Jin was killed by Jiraiya (Though Jiraiya's own thoughts later cast doubt on this), and is also the same body that will be used by Pain as the Asura Path in the future.
• One-Man Army: The Wood Dragoon effectively makes Ryoma this, as the multiple layers of armor plus the various wide-area attacks allows him to plough through entire squadrons of low-level shinobi with minimal effort, made even more lethal through the fact that he was pretty much constantly backed up by ANBU during the war to take out high-priority targets and take advantage of the chaos he provides.
• One-Winged Angel: By the end of Arc 1, Laughing Smoke is a burning creature with flaming, moth-shaped wings, and blood hot enough to boil sake (at least 78°C/172°F).
• Original Character: As part of the author's efforts to flesh out the world of Nin-to-Five, many new characters are introduced into the story as either this or as O.C. Stand-ins, such as Mari and Gaku respectively.
  • Pre-existing personages like Rasa, Chiyo and Pakura or others who do not fall in either category are further characterized instead.
• Parasol of Pain: One type of tool in Ryoma's Wood Dragoon arsenal is based on the umbrella weapon the Genin team from Amegakure used against Gaara during the Chunin Exams. Because of its synergy with his puppet mech's capabilities, Ryoma opted to shamelessly copy it for his own use - if only for its extreme effectiveness at clearing out waves of enemy chaff via the rain of senbon it fires below.
• Playing with Fire: A specialty of countless Konoha-nin, which Ryoma exploited during the Third Great Ninja War with seals on his puppet mech that were designed to release their Fire Release attacks back at them at his discretion after initially storing them.
  • Laughing Smoke's primary Chakra Affinity is Fire, and he demonstrates his skill and power in it over the course of the Tea Country escort mission arc. Guess who ends up fighting him?
• Point of Divergence: Some of Ryoma's actions have irrevocably altered things from canon.
  • Suna is made aware of Puppet Prosthetics years earlier due to Ryoma pointing out that they're possible and demonstrating it with a quadruple amputee ninja.
  • Warning Minato of Obito and Zetsu's attack led to him and Kushina surviving.
• Power Crystal: The stone on the sword of the ronin Ryoma fights towards the end of Arc 2, which gets shattered. After discovering that Suna has no need for it (Rasa's trawling of the entire desert of minerals has turned up a few kilograms of the stuff already and they haven't found it to do anything), Ryoma makes the shards into a necklace and uses them as toothpicks. These become more significant in Arc 4, with Sage Seimei demonstrating that, not only do they suspiciously resemble Gelel Stones in function, they're made from ''people''.
• Powered Armor: During the Time Skip, Ryoma builds the Mk. 3 of his armor puppet, acting as a personal suit of power armor to wear all the time. Thanks to it being controlled by his Chakra Strings rather than physical muscle, it makes him much stronger and more flexible than he would otherwise be.
• Power Glows: Taking from the Naruto manga rather than the anime, every character's chakra has a unique colour instead of being universally blue (such as Naruto's being a bright yellow). Ryoma's chakra is a vivid green, and Sasori's is a rancid purple.
• Private Military Contractors: Hidden Villages in a nutshell. The author notes that Hidden Villages aren't 'cities with a military they hire out', they are more akin to 'mercenary companies who happen to have a city they own as their home base'.
• Rank Up: The story starts with Ryoma being promoted to Jonin. He's promoted again at the start of Arc 5, to Vice-Captain of the Puppetry Corps, after the Akatsuki attack on Suna kills off the previous Vice-Captain Nichibatsu.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Rasa, the Fourth Kazekage of Sunagakure. Despite the mess he's inherited thanks to Sasori's secret murder of his predecessor and the tenuous position of his Village due to circumstances beyond his control, he nonetheless does what he can to keep his home afloat in spite of the economic crisis it's facing.
  • The Tea Daimyo. After being informed of key details as well as the gist of the mission stipulations the various ninja were contracted for by Ryoma, he quickly issues an additional but entirely optional mission to stop Laughing Smoke from throwing Tea Country into further disarray.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Mari, a Genki Girl, wind-specialist, and her old teammate Nagare, a calm water-specialist.
• Revenge: As this is a Naruto fic, the Cycle of Vengeance plays a major part of the themes in the story.
  • Ryoma weirds everyone out by averting this, having absolutely no problems with working alongside Gaku Inuzuka (who killed both of his Genin teammates) and not holding it against Jiraiya for (supposedly) killing his sensei. Even Jiraiya, who recognises the issues of the Cycle of Vengeance, finds this unsettling.
  • Revenge is Sage Seimei's entire motivation for being involved in the plot. He finds Ninja repulsive after they've killed too many of his disciples and used his tools and intends on using the Suna and Konoha ninja as raw materials to make more Gelel crystal due to Mao using one of his disciples' swords- ignoring that she only has that because said disciple murdered an entire village and Mao's fellow genin for absoltuely no reason.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • The Tea Daimyo. His intervention is what ultimately stops further destruction from being caused in Tea Country.
  • Really, something expected of all Daimyo; having a contract with a Boss Summon is something that gives them their legitimacy as a ruler. Laughing Smoke's contract with the Moth clan is what makes Commander Tenchi able to put him forth as a replacement Daimyo in his attempted coup, and the Daimyo of the Land of This summons a giant koala bear to try and defend against the Kurosasori.
• Running Gag: Any time Ryoma has an alternate version of himself appear, it takes on a Portmanteau name, such as "Clone Ryoma, Cloma", "Illuyoma", or the post-Time Skip Aduloma.
• Samurai in Ninja Town: While canon Naruto only had Samurai as a major force in the Land of Iron (though they were noted to be more common historically), they're more common in this timeframe, though they are notably on the decline. They have something of a Force and Finesse dynamic with their Ninja counterparts; A Samurai will usually win in a fight versus a Ninja of a similar skill-level, but the latter's refusal to fight fair, less adherence to rigid and outdated tradition, and overall versatility means that the former are steadily losing their traditional role and relevance.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Ryoma and Mari.
• Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!: Chiyo uses Chakra Strings to manhandle an unsuspecting Ryoma into her home and afterwards acts like a curmudgeonly, cantankerous old bat. Her brother, on the other hand, is a good host who politely offers Ryoma a place to sit and pours him some tea.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Jonin that Ryoma meets at the Puppet Corps's karaoke party are all modelled after Mistral, Monsoon, and Sundowner - with an absent Jonin also implied to be the same for Jetstream.
  • The method that Ryoma uses to keep track of his chakra reserves is pretty much a one-to-one reference to how Essence works in Exalted.
• The Silent Bob: The surprisingly intimidating Suna ANBU whom Ryoma visits to confirm their tacit approval of him continuing to wear their uniform communicates with him entirely through sign-language.
• Sole Survivor: Out of his Genin team, Ryoma is the last one left by virtue of outliving them during the Third Great Ninja War. At least two of his teammates were killed by Gaku, while his Jonin-sensei was killed by Jiraiya.
  • It gets worse. Ryoma confesses to Team Chikako that out of his 31-strong Academy class-group, "Jackal", he was the only one amongst them who survived for more than a year during the war.
• Square-Cube Law: A major issue with the Great Dragoon and with creating any bigger humanoid puppets, especially ones that have to walk and not be floated around like normal puppets. A stated method of getting around this is by using one of the various super-materials lying around, such as Kaguya bone or Senjuwood. Sasori's take on a giant puppet, the Kurosasori, gets around this by being mostly hollow, by having a much lower profile (its body drags along wheel-treads most of the time, rather than standing on its legs) except for the tail, and by being built out of one of the aforementioned supermaterials- in this case, the carapace of a giant chakra-beast scorpion.
• Stealth Pun:
  • The room that Ryoma builds Tsubame's new Artificial Limbs in is labelled as an operating theater, another name for an operating room. Puppet Jutsu is based off of Bunraku, a form of traditional puppet theater. Ryoma literally builds theater puppets in the operating theater.
  • The Puppet Corps Jonin, who operate out of the Land of Wind, are based on the Winds of Destruction.
• Story Arc: The story is separated into several different arcs, each focusing on a particular part of Ryoma's career. Arc 1 involves Ryoma's escort mission to the Land of Tea, Arc 2 focuses on Ryoma's non-active time building the Great Dragoon and acting as a remedial Genin teacher, Arc 3 involves a series of missions key to securing resources necessary for the future of Sunagakure, Arc 4 involves a foray into the Land of Rivers to advertise Suna's capabilities, and Arc 5 is another non-active arc involving Suna's preparations to fight a major foe.
• Stripperiffic: The unnamed Tani kunoichi that Ryoma and Mari end up working with on their mission is noted to be wearing "fishnet everything", with attendant sketches confirming her outfit is basically a bikini with mesh armor and a Chunin vest/jacket over the top with a mask and bandanna.
  • Ryoma notes that Tani-nin spend a lot of time in the water, so their outfits tend towards swimwear in any case. This includes the males as well.
  • It's later revealed that the said Tani kunoichi in question has a signature jutsu which has her body secrete slime laced with poison from her exposed skin. She also isn't above using her outfit to mess with people for fun, either.
• Stronger with Age: Ninja do this, as a general rule. Ryoma's personal philosophy holds survival to be a victory in itself because of this.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ryoma's Bolters are cheap but efficient stickbug-like disposable puppets he designed to explode upon his enemies after using up their kunai, shuriken or senbon payload (the kunai versions may also be equipped with explosive tags on each kunai). They are essentially grounded drones with a puppeteer bent, as Ryoma can also 'see' through their singular puppet eye for limited scouting purposes.
  • The naked bandit ninja Ryoma and co. encounters has a bloodline ability that allows him to generate explosions outwardly from his body, of which he exploits his immunity to by going into the melee range of his opponents.
• Summon Magic: Something present in Naruto cannon, and given a major focus here- despite Ryoma never acquiring an animal clan contract.
  • In the Nin-To-Five version of the backstory, Queen Himiko was a shaman who successfully bargained with the Animal Clans, becoming their first contractor; with their strength she became a great conqueror, and many others followed suit. These shamans became the Daimyo of the modern day, and the warriors that followed them became samurai- or at least, that's the in-universe story. It is true that having a contract with a boss summon is treated as a legitimising factor to become Daimyo; Laughing Smoke's contract with the Moth summons is what lets him be used as a rallying point for Commander Tenchi's attempted coup.
  • The Dragon summon clan was the summon clan contracted to the Imperial Family, before the War of Three Dragons lead to the Warring Clans period and the current Daimyo layout. They have since gone missing.
  • The summoning technique does not require the user to summon an animal; it can in fact summon anything the user has signed a 'contract' with. In canon this is used for the summoning of proctors at the Chunin Exams, the Rashomon gates, and Jiroboro's earth golems. Ryoma leans heavily on this technique, to summon the too-large-for-a-storage-scroll Great Dragoon series, a knockoff version of the Rashomon gates (just made of earth either carved from a cliff or with the Practise Brick technique), and himself via Sand Clone.
  • Various summon clans have differing requirements for their summoners, and may have more than one; one Suna jonin becoming a signatory to the Snake contract is a key part of Operation Catching Swan, Suna's plan to annex Tanigakure and pin the blame on Orochimaru, and a crane summon is seen being defeated by that snake. The Hawks meanwhile are notoriously mercenary, as Toyoko's lifetime contract with a single hawk cost her father a full tael.
• Super Breeding Program: As in canon, clan bloodline limits are a result of these, in both samurai and ninja clans. Also present is a Super Breeding Program for the nobles; generations of marrying the greatest of the samurai warriors and making sure that the Daimyos have enough chakra to summon boss summons without ever doing serious training has made their blood intensely chakra-rich. this is a major driving force behind Laughing Smoke's bounty on nobles in Arc 1: by using blood filled with chakra, he can water the roots of the Fire Lotus and allow it to blossom into the Botanical Abomination it truly is.
• Superior Successor: Played with.
  • The institution of Samurai being supplanted by the Ninja Villages. An individual Samurai can usually easily kill an equivalent-strength Ninja in a straight fight; they ignore all the utility aspects of chakra-use in favour of 'move fast and kill things' applications, are rich enough to afford top-quality arms and armour, and are typically trained from birth, on top of being able to call up masses of conscripts to join them in combat. But Ninja, specifically the much more stable and reliable Ninja Villages, are becoming the preferred tool for the nobles due to many reasons- there are more of them, there are more high-quality ninja than samurai ^note Ninja recruit even random orphans to be trained in their academies, even if only as Cannon Fodder; even if the vast majority of them die or never make anything of themselves, the sheer number of them means that even the tiny percentage who do thrive outnumber the samurai, they don't have much in the way of 'pride' (so while a samurai might balk at being ordered to create a stone road, the Ninja would simply nod and get on with it), and most importantly- while they cost money, the daimyo aren't obligated to give them any legal authority or traditional rights as they are with samurai.
  • Much is given to the idea that the super-strong monsters of the past were so because they took primitive techniques to an incredibly degree of mastery, rather than being inherently superior in all aspects; Father of combat puppetry Chikamatsu may have been able to fly with chakra-strings and created puppets that had the ability to see through without effort, but he would have had no idea about puppet-limbs, corpse puppetry, pupper-armour, or many of the innovations that later puppeteers had come up with, and for much of his pre-Konoha career Madara was a guy with a basic Sharingan, fire ninjutsu, a warfan and a katana but still became a legend; it's just that the insane pressures of the Warring Clans era and the early Great Ninja Wars produced absolute monsters who thrived or died.
• Super Mode: Seimei's Infinite Armour allows him to use one of these. It's an imperfect version of Sage Mode, which seems to give him immense control over the wind and incredibly enhanced regeneration.
• Taken for Granite: Late in Arc 4, we see Sage Seimei's power crystal manufacturing process involves transforming chakra-warriors into stone with nature energy. The Uchiha chuunin on Kakashi's team is midway through this process when she's rescued, and goes home with her arms unusably petrified and a cyst of solid rock next to her heart. Seimei himself isn't immune to this, as his unstable Sage Mode often results in parts of his skin petrifying and needing his regeneration to bail him out.
• Taking You with Me: Bazo does this to stop his attacker from coming after Mao. Downplayed in that while it didn't quite work out the way he wanted it to, it did injure him enough to slow him down.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Arc 1 has Ryoma and Mari assigned to a joint mission with a Konoha team led by Gaku, the ninja who killed one of Ryoma's genin teammates. Once they arrive to the Tea Capital, the ninja bodyguards of various villages all form an uneasy alliance to take down Laughing Smoke. Negotiating the sharing of duties, information, and reward is a frequent, tense affair.
• Time Skip: Arc 3 of Nin-to-Five takes place 3 years directly after the end of Arc 2.
• Thought They Knew Already: Ryoma casually created a puppet-based shinobi prosthetic for a teammate while out on a mission. He is baffled to find everyone very impressed by an innovation that he considered too obvious to be worth mentioning.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Laughing Smoke gets a brief Interlude in which he acts completely at odds to his pre-established identity. Justified, as by that point he has long since been subtly Brainwashed by the Fire Lotus he stole from Tea Country.
• Tragic Keepsake: Ryoma's conical hat is from Jin, his Jonin-sensei killed by Jiraiya. He also keeps his Genin teammates' unused puppets in storage.
• Tranquil Fury: Ryoma's reaction towards 'The Stranger' after being Reverse Summoned to Team Chikako's aid. It's particularly noticeable as the usual indifference he displays in his eyes is nowhere to be seen compared to the other sketches that were previously provided by the author.
• Troll: How Ryoma acts in his interactions with anyone while not in a professional setting, but especially when he decides it will be fun to mess with someone, like Toyoko, his Chunin handler assigned to him by the Puppet Corps during the lengthy construction of his Mk.2 Dragoon puppet.
  • His off-duty behavior also extends to Tsubame, as he doesn't hesitate to prank her while they're out shopping for food.
• Unishment: Due to the secrecy surrounding the mission to stealthily wreck Tanigakure and force it to become part of Suna, Ryoma's usage of the Mk.2 Dragoon has to be punished to not give away that it was part of a sanctioned mission; as such, he's subject to a month of "solitary confinement" and "re-education", which are just codewords for repairing the Mk.2, refilling its chakra resevoirs, drafting future versions of the Mk.2, and figuring out how to upgrade it with Senjuwood.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • There are subtle hints sprinkled throughout the story which suggests that Ryoma is not being entirely truthful with himself as he thinks, despite his apparent indifference to most things:
    • Upon learning that Mari lost an arm, he prioritized making her a replacement while keeping it a secret from Gaku's team. Granted, he knew it was possible thanks to his pre-SI knowledge, but it says something about the kind of character he has when he also got it to work on his first try.
    • For all that he appears to be over the deaths of his Genin teammates, he seems to have kept their old puppets with him instead of recycling them.
    • His late Jonin-sensei Jin had a habit of spouting Buddhist-like idioms; Ryoma may have internalized some of those sayings to help him cope easier during the war. Notably, Ryoma wears a straw hat similar to Jin's.
    • In Mao's perspective after Yoshimi signalled for help, Ryoma appeared with a growl. In his, he didn't. And before that, Ryoma also took a risk in trying out a novel application of the Summoning Technique just to massively cut down on the travel time it would take for him to get to them.
  • In addition, his Humble Hero nature means that he doesn't recognize how exceptional of a shinobi he really is, especially in the eyes of others:
    • While he considers himself normal as far as shinobi go when it comes to talent, people like Mari and Nagare comment that he's actually rather prodigious, though not to the point of truly mastering any one subject. Similarly, while he knows that he's mostly cribbing from Sasori's puppet techniques in canon, the people around him are rather impressed by his ingenuity when it comes to puppetry.
    • His first usage of the Wood Dragoon is followed by Mari revealing that he as a reputation as "That Guy" due to supposedly being ANBU's secret weapon during the war, as any battlefield he deployed the Dragoon in left no survivors.
    • Later on, the Puppet Corps karaoke night has Captain Gentai reveal that he has a combined kill and kill assist count of around 668 people during his three years as a shinobi. Considering how all of his missions prior to the Land of Tea mission took place during the Third Great Shinobi War, which had a total death count of around 10,000, that would make Ryoma responsible for over 5% of all deaths during the war.
    • His fight against Kakashi leaves him frustrated and upset that his almost two decades of training didn't even come close to matching even a younger Kakashi's ability, seeing him as completely unfazed beyond chakra expenditure and having deliberately targeted the Great Dragoon's chakra batteries to break it in two. From Kakashi's perspective, he's putting up a strong front to try and hide how beat-up he is; aching, bruised, and badly on the back foot, having had his every move countered seemingly effortlessly and been beaten around by someone he compares to Gai using two or three of the Eight Gates, his initial success with destroying the Great Dragoon having been a complete accident.
  • Ryoma is not the only point-of-view with reliability issues, though as the most frequent narrator it comes up the most.
    • Sho, Vice-Captain of the Weaponry Brigade, comes off as incredibly dismissive of Pakura, calling her a girl with a powerful gimmick and not a 'true' legendary Ninja, similarly dismissing most of the world's S-rank nin. While he's not wrong neccesarily ^note In canon Pakura would suffer an Undignified Death and go down in a pathetic manner compared to almost all the other S-rank deaths we know of, being literally backstabbed without a real fight, out-of-story comments suggest that his bitterness mostly stems from jealousy, as Sho is reaching his limits as a ninja and doesn't have a special bloodline or technique like the Scorch Release to carry him any further.
    • Sage Seimei is similarly unreliable, filled with rage and hate towards ninja and dismissive apathy towards the samurai and nobles.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: During a mission set after the events in Tanigakure, Ryoma and co. meets a Samurai in their client's entourage with notable demonic features, who later reveals himself to be half-Oni. Everyone else barring Ryoma seems to treat this as a normal sight, however, with him quickly following suit as to not stick out like a sore thumb.
• Villainous Breakdown: Laughing Smoke gradually goes through a downplayed version of this whenever Ryoma and co. starts steadily beating him back in battle, but especially when Ryoma reveals another unexpected facet of himself mid-battle.
  Laughing Smoke: And using wind against my fire? Where did you come from, to have such magnificent power? Surely not just Suna? Why have I never heard of you before?!
  Ryoma: We ninja are a secretive bunch, you understand?
  Laughing Smoke: Haha-HAHAH! Fire Release! Indiscriminate Arson!
• Villain Respect:
  • Laughing Smoke gradually develops this towards Ryoma, partly due to him noting similarities between them (especially in regards to using Confusion Fu), partly due to Ryoma's name (Dragon-Horse, two noble and revered animals) adding a legendary aspect to their clash, and part simply due to how competent he is and how much he distinguishes himself amongst the other ninja sent to stop him.
  • Sasori openly praises Ryoma in Intermission 3, calling him the only other puppeteer worthy of the name, and even having incorporated some of his design work into the Kurosasori.
• Weird Trade Union: While ANBU, Intelligence, and Logistics are still centralized under the Kazekage, Suna has eight semi-independent Corps focused on different specializations. The Barrier Corps, Genjutsu Corps, Medical Corps, Ninjutsu Corps, Puppetry Corps, Sealing Corps, Shiki Corps, and Weaponry Corps each have a seat on Rasa's council of advisors, and serve as Suna's non-biological equivalent to Konoha's Clans. Following the annexation of Tanigakure, the former Tani shinobi have been re-branded as Suna's Taijutsu Corps.
• Wham Shot: At the end of Arc 4, the team sent to Rivers are returning to Suna, and on cresting a hill discover that Suna is badly damaged and now surrounded by a huge, glittering-blue lake.
• Wind Is Green: As seen with Ryoma's Wind Chakra Flow, which produces a green light around whatever weapon he coats with it.
• Worthy Opponent: How Laughing Smoke feels towards Ryoma by the time of his defeat. The feeling is mutual, as the latter admits that he would've died had Ryoma decided to face Laughing Smoke alone.