TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 3
BRIDGE
JUNE, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"AAARRRGH! -WHY- does he -do- these things?!" howled Haruno Sakura as she scrubbed futilely at the stained fabric of the shirt a friend had loaned her.
"I think it's mostly based on the theory that bad attention is better than no attention," Bakusuta Neshan, the Jounin assigned to teach her and her two teammates the basics of ninja fieldcraft, observed as he leaned over her hunched shoulders and tugged the fabric out of her grip.
"Eh?" she said, then flinched away from the splatter as he snapped the shirt dry with a quick flick of the wrist.
"Hare, rat, rat, ram, hare..." The mud imbedded in the delicately patterned silk shivered slightly, then lifted away to collect into a glistening orb that hovered in mid-air between his hands. "Most useful jutsu in the world. It works on hair, cloth, metal... anything."
"Sugoi. I'll have to remember that. And you're stalling."
"Well, yes. It's not really my place to tell; I've already said more than I should have." And that, she knew, was the end of it.
"Tease."
"It'll do you two good to talk about it." He flicked the sphere of mud out into the center of the stream. "Let's get back."
"Hai!"
They walked through the forest the short distance from the stream to the road, and Uzumaki Naruto, who still had streaks of mud buried in his hair from when his enraged female teammate had ground his head into the same puddle he'd knocked -her- into, looked up, wearing an uncharictaristically chastened look on his childish, be-whiskered face. "Sakura-chan?"
"What!?" she snapped.
"I'm sorry." He bowed his head and figited a little.
She gave him a cockeyed look. "Do you even realize what you're sorry -for-?"
He hesitated. "Aaaahhh... Making you unhappy?"
She shook her head in a sort of horrified wonder. "I didn't-" a hand rested on her shoulder cut her off, and she looked up at her teacher's face. "Sensei?"
"Wouldn't any other answer just mean the same thing, at the very bottom?"
She blinked at him and thought about it for a moment, then sighed and gave Naruto a small smile. "All right. But if you do that again I -won't- be held responsible for the consequences."
Uchiha Sasuke, that year's Number One Rookie and three time winner of the Konohagakure Ultimate Teen Heartthrob Award (Under 15 division), snorted. "Wonderful. Let's go, then."
"Right!" Naruto and Sakura said, grinning, as their charge, bridge architect Umida Tazuna yawned and heaved himself upright from where he's been resting on a tree root.
"Wait." Neshan held up a hand. "Sasuke, heavy dispel."
The last of the Uchiha blinked in confusion, then nodded. "Hai!" Four quick seals, then- "Oukai no Jutsu!"
Two men dropped from the branches overhead to land in the scruffy grass along the south margin of the road. "Heh heh... You're pretty good, Mr. Leaf," said the taller of the two to the Jounin, adjusting his Hidden Mist headband slightly. "But don't think-"
"Kids, sic 'em. I'll play backstop."
All three Genin reacted to the command instantly - Sasuke lunged for one of the Mist-nin, leading his attack with a kunai that had appeared almost magically in his hand, and Sakura literally seemed to teleport from a standing ready stance to a spinning kick more than twelve feet away, right next to the other. Naruto didn't charge immediately, instead taking a moment to generate an escorting squad of Kage Bunshin before he went on the attack.
Sasuke's target flinched back out of range, then dived to one side with the edged chain built into his guantlet flickering out and free in an arc directly towards Sakura. She avoided it with ease, but the two Mist-nin used her momentary disengagement to cut and run, dissapearing into the forest.
"Pursue," the command rapped out, and they did, with Naruto's clones swinging out in a wide arc to cover more ground.
There was silence for a moment, and then Neshan spun and threw a plum-sized sphere in a classic fastball pitch at an apparantly innocuous branch. A couple of feet before impact, the ball burst like a confetti firework, scattering bits of paper barely larger than a speck of dust in a pale cloud around the bough. An instant later, the first spark caught and grew into a shattering explosion that knocked the tree over and sent burning splinters showering across the forest floor.
"You -are- good, spotting my clone like that," said the deep voice thrown to just behind his ear. "But I can't say I know your name."
"Bakusuta Neshan. And you are?" His eyes tracked slowly across the undergrowth of the forest, looking, looking.
"Momoichi Zabuza, once of Hidden Mist... I know that name... what is Konoha's famous sealing genius doing going on a pissant field mission like escorting an architect?"
Not over -there-, which meant... "I'm hardly -that- great. And I have to teach my team fieldwork -somehow-."
"No," and now the voice was no longer disguised, and coming from behind him... next to Tazuna. "I guess you're not."
All five of Neshan's array of thrown kunai blasted straight through the architect's body and buried themselves deep within the missing-nin's. Both corpses stood for a moment longer, then vanished, one into a puff of smoke and the other into a splash of water.
The younger man brought one hand up and the other down and both back just in time for the massive sword blow aimed at his back to slam into his naginata's interposed pole. A split second later, the butt of the polearm came up and right as he ducked and stepped and spun to the left, slamming the heavy metal pipe into where Zabuza's ribs would have been had the swordsman not pushed down and forward with both blade and feet, hopping high and a little back, out of reach.
"A naginata, huh? That's not a veryWHOA!" Neshan had kept turning as the older Jounin spoke, and added a quick step to the side as the weapon rotated in his grip, trading ends to lead with the razor-edged blade as he came back into striking range and sent it flicking out in a lightning strike that Zabuza barely twisted away from.
The Mist-nin backflipped twice, opening the range before he paused to reevaluate his opponent. For his part, the other simply brought the deceptively slender polearm back into its standard sloping ready position and cocked his head. "What's Gatou paying you, anyway? 'Cause, y'know, we Leaves aren't so terribly pleased with the current Mizukage's 'accidental target misidentification' policy." 'And if you don't piss us off,' went the unspoken part of the message, 'we might be persuaded to see fit to provide some free agent like yourself with the means to do something about that common goal.'
In the blur of combat there hadn't been time for them to take a good look at each other, but in the pause both of them did so. Neshan saw a rangy man of about six feet in height, greasy black hair with a scored Mist hitai-ite, pants and sleeveless shirt in dark blue with the gray mufflers which so many shinobi liked to hide things in on calves and forearms. He knew what Zabuza was seeing, too: a boy or young man in his late teens, with spectacles, Leaf headband, and dark hair pulled back in a knee-length braid, wearing dark grey pants and buttoned shirt under a forest-green high-collared trenchcoat.
"No," the taller of the two said regretfully, "I can't. This time I'm only working for the sake of my hostage to fate." He planted his sword - a massive, squared-off blade almost as long as he was even -without- the arm-length hilt - firmly in the ground and brought his hands together in the first of a blurringly quick series of seals.
Neshan was caught between sympathy for his foe's unexpected motivation and contempt for his choice of tactics, and firmly supressed both as he launched another array of kunai and followed the flying blades in.
Horizontal sweep - he knew that pattern - spinning up and around his back and down from overhead as Zabuza keeps backpedaling - Suiryuudan no Jutsu, the water dragon, and they -were- close enough to the stream for him to use that - lunging forward with the naginata pivoting against the ground towards Zabuza's face like a rake that'd just been stepped on - dragon, snake, rat, he's got seven more to go - then pivoting around the vertical weapon like a pole vaulter to slam both feet into his opponent's chest and knock the larger man flying.
He let the reaction from that impact carry him up and over and back to land on his feet, but by the time he was anchored again Zabuza had recovered and come too close to fight with such a large weapon. He dismissed it, and they exchanged blows for a period that could have been a minute or could have been only a few seconds, and in any event ended with them locked in an awkward grapple with Neshan in a half crouch, one hand trapped between that shoulder and his opponent's chest and the other held outstretched, without the leverage to fight back.
He twitched his wrist back, tapping that hand's fingertips against his opponent's chest, and as he did, sixty-four brilliant streams of chakra erupted from his primary tenketsu and arced up and around to the point of impact. For a fraction of a second - just long enough for the taller man to begin to smile triumphantly - nothing happened.
The ring-shaped secondary shockwave which propagated out perpendicular to the line of the blow was intense enough to scorch skin and set cloth to smoldering, but most of the attack's energy was absorbed carving an eighteen-inch hole through Zabuza's chest and scattering its former contents across a comet-shaped splatter mark fifty feet long. Even the tiny proportion of that force which transferred into the flesh around the hole was enough to knock the fresh corpse flying twice its own length.
"You talk too much," Neshan told the gristly tableau, and then went to find his team.
* * * * *
Block right, jump over toe kick, block right, block left, grab-twist-yank and drop an elbow across the back of the skull, step back to keep from being splashed as the bunshin dissolves...
"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura snapped from behind him. He turned slightly and glanced out of the corner of his eye as she slipped a blinding thrust past an enemy bunshin's guard and buried a kunai through its temple, then pulled the blade free and spun to slash another's throat open in almost the same motion. "I'll handle the bunshin. Just find the real ones!"
He nodded, then hesitated a moment, running through his options. Yes, that one would do.
"Sabikeibi no Jutsu," he said, and folded his cupped palms open. About a dozen tiny dancing motes of light fluttered up in front of him for a moment, then swirled and darted off into the underbrush.
He followed, and a flicker of orange to his right told him that Naruto had seen the Fireflies also. Leaves and branches tore at his face and then he was out in the open, and there was a gleam of metal heading straight towards him. He flipped over it and crouched on the vertical trunk of a tree, looking 'up' and across at one of the two brothers as the bladed chain he had thrown hissed and slithered along the ground as it was wound back up into its concealing guantlet.
"SUITON: GYOSHIBUKI NO JUTSU!" Naruto roared as he emerged from cover, spitting a spreading cluster of short, high-density jets of water as he came.
The Kiri-nin dodged, of course, flipping up and back to land on a large branch next to his partner, who at the same time had sent a barrage of shuriken flying at their orange-clad attacker.
They passed harmlessly through him, as though through nothing more than air, and the image smirked and dived back into the bushes. "Bunshin?" asked one of the partners.
"No," said the other. "Some sort of Genjutsu."
"No matter." And they ran through identical sets of five seals in perfect unison. Faint arcs and whisps of chakra began to pass between them, the light pulsing like a heartbeat.
Naruto made another attack, this time dropping from the branches overhead, crying, "SUITON: GYOSH-"
One of the pulses built rapidly into a blinding flare, a flare that swept outward and washed over Naruto and everything in his vicinity. Six feet to his right, a puff of smoke appeared with a sharp popping sound as the Kagebunshin was disrupted.
There was silence, for a moment, as the Kiri-nin stood there watching Sasuke as he watched them, and then another bright flare shattered the tree where he had been sitting. Not that it mattered - apprearances aside, he was long gone.
"well?" he asked Naruto as they crouched side by side in the bushes, using the low, quiet tones that carried so much less than the higher frequencies of an actual whisper.
"not sure," the whiskered boy answered. "some kind of area-effect, and related to that pulsing light."
"heterodyne effect," Sakura put in from behind both of them, then subsided to watch as another of Naruto's clones made a third attempt - with no more benefit than the second had gotten. Then she resumed, "like two out of tune musical instruments, how their tones pulse?"
"and the flares are the high points in the wave," the blond boy said slowly, tasting the idea as he spoke. "what's the point?"
"efficient use of power," Sasuke answered. "neither of them is putting in much chakra, but they're getting a very powerful effect."
The kunoichi crawled forward to lie between her teammates and get a good look for herself. "mizubunshin are toast, by the way. what about weaknesses?"
"of course they are," Sasuke said dryly, as though he had never doubted it - and, in truth, he hadn't. "and it'd need to be very finely tuned to work - they probably can't afford to alter the distance between them without breaking the jutsu."
"then we need to move them." She nudged Naruto. "ne, try shuriken this time. they'll have less reaction time."
"way ahead of you," he answered, at the same moment a clone popped out of cover and did exactly that. It was wiped out immediately, but the second attacker some distance away lasted much longer.
Sasuke grinned, fiercely. "they need at least one intermediate pulse before they can fire again."
"and after?" Naruto asked.
Because they were hiding, Sakura refrained from cracking her knuckles. "leave that to me," she grinned, and vanished downward into a careful tunnelling jutsu.
Naruto glanced down and where she had been, then looked up to meet his teammate's eyes. 'Scary!' he mouthed with a grin.
"moron," Sasuke said, and then they split up.
As it ended up, splitting their opponents up was harder than it had sounded - the two nuke-nin proved to be able to maintain a constant awareness of their partner's location and react in unison to any threat to -either- - but Sasuke was able to use a carefully-anchored set of wires to swing around the trunk of the tree they were standing in and hit one at the same time that Naruto bounced off of one of his own clones to clobber the other going in the opposite direction.
Sasuke was too occupied giftwrapping the man he had hit to spare attention for the other, but then, the startled yelp, sudden scuffle, and horrible, particularly -final- crunching noise that followed the other's landing on the forest floor assured him that there was no need to worry.
There was a quiet, muffled *snap!* as he tugged the last loop of wire closed, and it took him a moment to realise what the Kiri-nin had done. Then he swore and flipped the larger man over onto his back. "Naruto, help!" he yelled, tearing the gas-mask away from the other's face and grabbing firmly to his jaw and then there was another pair of hands helping hold him still and they had yanked his mouth open and Sasuke didn't hesitate at all to jam his fingers down his throat to trigger the gag reflex...
Too late, he realised as the other - whose name, he suddenly recalled, he still did not know - began to thrash and foam at the mouth as the poison hidden in his hollow tooth took effect. The measure was a standard one for the Village of the Hidden Mist, he remembered now that it no longer mattered, and the toxin a violent one that killed in seconds rather than minutes.
A hand rested gently on his shoulder as he and Naruto watched their enemy's last moments. "Suicide?" Neshan asked.
"Hai, Sensei."
"...Don't worry about it."
"Hai, Sensei."
* * * * *
Hyuuga Neji came before the assembled elders of his clan with hands bound and head high.
He had known, from the moment he calmed sufficiently to once more evaluate the shape of his fate, that he was probably going to die. Indeed, if he were to be fully honest with himself, he was rather looking forwards to it. On the one hand, he would be dead. On the other, however, he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had, in that same stroke, defied his destined slavery, exposed the inherent corruption and hypocrisy of the Hyuuga to the entire villiage, and irrevocably torn the lying webs of that simpering little spider that had been hiding behind the mask of his 'shy, quiet cousin'.
All in all, that was as good a cause as any other.
The elders of the Hyuuga were seated along the sides of a long table of ancient steelwood, whose grain had been buffed to a fine polish by hundred of hands over the years but had at the same time resisted every blade's attempts to so much as scratch it.
His 'uncle', the clan head, Hiashi, knelt in seiza at the head of the table, with that -spider- faking concern and self-effacement from slightly behind and to his right.
Except for the pair of iron-faced wardens hovering just outside the chamber's door, he was the only member of the Branch Family present.
Hyuuga Inei, seniormost of the Ten Elders of the Hyuuga clan, leaned forward and glared at the boy he would never think to acknowledge as his great-nephew. "Neji, son of Hizashi, of the Branch House of the Hyuuga Clan, do you know what you have done to be called here before us today?"
So pompous, so fucking arrogant, just as though -he- had the -right-! Neji throttled his temper back and let the icy control in his voice speak of more contempt than any outburst could have shown. "I have challenged a villian, and offended a pack of blind old fools."
"You have broken your sacred oath!" snapped another of the elderly men arrayed along the sides of the table. "You have shamed your ancestors with your ingratitude for the gifts the Main House has given you! To attack -any- you have sworn to serve, let alone-"
"I swore no oath," Neji said coldly. "I am not my ancestors. I owe -nothing- to those who murdered my father."
"Mind you place, child!" Inei roared, and his voice echoed with the memory of a power and charisma that, in its prime, would have stunned any who faced it.
The boy Konoha had hailed as the genius of the Hyuuga permitted himself a sneer. "A slave's place, you mean? A man is not a slave until he is broken - and the likes of -you- will never break me."
Most of the elders exploded in shouts of rage, and the Eldest's jaw worked and choking noises came from his throat as he tried to force coherent words out past his fury. "I! You! You -insolent-! -Cur-, how -dare- you! I will see you-"
"YOU SHALL -NOT-!" came a voice like the Devil's own flute, and there was a smack of flesh on the wood of the table as Hyuuga Hinata shocked everyone - herself not least of all - by coming to her feet in a burst of rage and will so pure that Inei's tirade ended as abruptly as it did involuntarily, cut off by the way his jaw snapped shut, as though of its own will.
There was silence for a moment, and then the table split lengthwise along its grain, starting from the place where Hinata had unconciously forced a burst of chakra as she slammed her palm against its surface for emphasis. It stayed that way for a moment, and then the two halves creaked slightly and fell majestically away from each other.
Hyuuga Keshitomaru had succeeded as a ninja by always maintaining a controlled and rational demeanor, and in the shocked silence that followed as they all stared at the wreckage of the table, he met Hinata's eyes and said, not unkindly, "Hush, child, please. As much as the shock may have benefitted my colleagues' state of mind, your presence as an observer is a courtesy - it is not yours to participate in our deliberations."
The Heir of the Hyuuga clan stared in frozen shock for a moment longer, then shook herself slightly and settled back into seiza in her previous position. "A-a-ano, s-sir, you are m-mistaken." She took a deep breath, visibly gathering her composure, then continued. "Ano... D-during the rule of the Sh-shichidaime Raikage, the... the clan head, Hyuuga Urumu was p-prone to fits of, of, of madness. Wh-when h-he was in one of h-h-his... episodes, his son, H-hyuuga Hare, was... anoo... allowed t-to speak in his p-place. Th-there were m-more than thirty times afterward when, when th-the heir spoke in deliberation."
"IDIOT COWARD GIRL!" Hyuuga Akaragao roared, seeming, as he often did, on the verge of an apopleptic fit. "YOU MIGHT THINK THAT YOUR PULING LIES WILL PROTECT YOU FROM-"
"She's right," said Hyuuga Shito with a distasteful twist of his lips, cutting across Akaragao's bellow with the ease of long practice. "The precedent is as she says, and has been upheld in numerous different cases, although admittedly never in recent times." He paused to regard her for a moment. While Hinata had always been shy, he had actually been rather startled by her newfound habit of simply sitting and trembling when confronted. It was nice to see the girl recovering - even if her timing -was- abysmal.
Especially since she had known her history well enough to quote the case so perfectly. She could never be clan head, really - not after her performance against Hanabi - but that combination of academic excellence and supportive personality had other uses, and he had to train a successor as clan archivist sooner or later.
"Very well, Hinata-hime. You have an argument?"
She smiled - just a subtle tension around the corners of the eyes and a barely perceptible curve of the lips, but it transformed her face, and warmed his heart in a way that -nothing- had since the death of his wife - and bowed politely. "A... ano, I-I would wish t-t-to remind my seniors of... of the Right of Satisfaction."
Akagarao laughed. "The pride of the Branch house against the shame of the Main! That might actually be interesting." He sneered. "-If- we were so stupid as to permit it."
The Heir's eyes sparked. "Under p-precedent, you... you have no choice."
* * * * *
"Ano sa, ano sa, is this the place?" Naruto asked, jerking his head at the largish house sitting on the border between sea and forest.
Sakura checked the slip of paper she had fished out of her pocket once they got to the edge of the town and nodded. "Should be. Let's check."
Neshan stepped forward and knocked. The woman who opened the door in response was tall and pretty without being beautiful - or she would have been, anyway, if fear and worry hadn't drawn her face so harshly taunt. "Yes?"
"Umida Tsunami?"
Her eyes flicked across their faces, darting from one hitae-ate to another. She flinched.
The Jounin smiled gently, reassuringly. "Your father has contracted my team to deliver something to you."
His explanation of their mission - and his use of the present tense for the man not present - were enough of a relief that she had to lean gently against the doorframe to stay upright. "He's all right?"
"Sakura?"
The female Genin stepped forward and pulled out another piece of paper - this time, a small scroll, which she handed to the older woman. Tsunami's hands trembled as she opened it and began to read, but she didn't hesitate in the slightest.
Which meant that, all too quickly, her eyebrows went up in a puzzled frown. "'Person...?'"
*BAMF*
"Keeping your principal in a safe place for the trip and then summoning him using a jutsu at the final destination isn't a standard procedure," Neshan explained, "because it requires considerably more manpower. At the very least, you'll need one team to protect him and one more to deliver the scroll. On the other hand, Konohagakure is a high-security area anyway, and no one would look twice at another visitor to the capital of the Fire Country... especially if he wasn't even wearing his own face."
Tazuna chuckled as he pulled his daughter into a hug. "As super-wierd as it sounded when you explained it to me, I guess this plan of yours was a good idea after all."
The Jounin shrugged. "Maybe. But that last nukenin worries me - I was hoping to catch all four of them."
"Maybe so, but there's not much we can do about it now, is there?"
"Actually," Tsunami broke in, "There might be."
"Oh?" His eyebrows went up. "Do tell."
"Come inside," she said, and they did. Eventually, after tea had been served and Sakura had threatened Naruto into silence, she explained.
"In the last few days there have been a number of very confusing rumors going around - mostly to the effect that someone has killed Gatou and taken over his criminal contacts. I wouldn't mention it, except that the things that that devil-woman is supposed to do to people don't sound like they could come from anything but a ninja." She took a sip of tea. "One of the other things the rumors are consistent on is where she's been basing her operations - an old Kirigakure outpost in the swamps along the eastern coast of the island."
Neshan took a deep breath and nodded. "All right. Sakura and I will check it out in the morning, while Sasuke and Naruto stay with you, Umida-san."
The aging engineer simply nodded, and before the conversation could move on to other things, a voice interrupted from the bottom of the stairwell. "Who are these people?"
"Ah!" Tazuna stood, smiled, and gestured towards his guards. "These four are the super-skilled ninja who've been contracted to protect me while we finish the bridge. Ninja-san, this is my grandson, Inari."
The young boy standing at the foot of the stairs adjusted his fisherman's hat and walked over to stare up at Neshan, the oldest of the ninja and the obvious leader. "What kind of fool risks his life for nothing but money?" he sneered.
"Hey, you!" Naruto yelled, advancing towards the younger boy. "You should-"
Neshan laid a restraining hand on his student's shoulder. "A tyrant thrown down, a nation freed, thousands of lives bettered... That's a success worth dying for, I think."
"You're a moron!" The boy snapped, fists clenched at his sides. "You're just going to fail and get yourself killed!"
The ninja looked down at those furious eyes and shrugged. "Maybe. But nobody lives forever, and at least I'll die trying."
* * * * *
There was a quiet, almost subliminal noise in the background as they made their cautious way through the deserted headquarters, like an unnameable hybrid of dripping liquid and the thin keening of wind through open rafters. Despite its wooden construction, the building had old-fashioned torch nooks every dozen feet or so, but they were empty and cold, leaving jagged swathes of shadow to spiderweb their way across the walls and ceiling.
Sakura paused before opening the first door. "Sensei... I smell..."
"Yeah. Me too."
She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the coppery aftertaste that that scent brought to her mouth.
Then she opened the door, and was immediately occupied with avoiding the aftertaste of that morning's breakfast. She succeeded, barely, and Neshan simply closed his eyes sadly for a moment once he realized what he was looking at. A moment and a soft, sighing breath later, he opened them and closed the door behind him, leaving his student standing in the hallway and - to her relief - cutting off all view of that... pocket of hell.
[Dear gods, please, let me -never- understand how someone could use human skin to do...] her mind shied away from the image. In the back of her conciousness, another part of her mind clenched its metaphorical fists. {This bitch is fucking -dead-,} she vowed, and for once her more public half couldn't have agreed more.
She glanced away as the door opened. "Sensei... do we have to..."
"Yes. Anything we can learn is needed; no matter what we have to wade through."
She swallowed. "'A ninja is someone who does whatever it takes,'" she said, bouncing one of his favorite maxims back at him.
"Exactly." And with no further words needed, they moved calmly through, checking each room as they passed. Fortunately for Sakura's stomach, rooms like the first were rare - some of the others had old bloodstains spread across every surface, but for the most part there was nothing to indicate that people had ever been present.
"Well, at least the kitchen's normal."
"Take another look at what's on the spit."
"...-Thanks-, Sensei. That's -exactly- the image I needed to have in my head before dinnertime."
"You've been spending too much time around me. You're starting to pick up my sense of humor."
"At least we know that Gatou-san isn't a threat anymore."
"Granted, but do you really think that the psycho-bitch needs to get paid for this?"
"Point."
And then, at last, they came to a largeish room just off of the building's massive central chamber. Neshan paused outside of it, and raised one eyebrow in an unspoken question as he met his student's eyes. 'Do you feel it?'
She blinked, then closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment. Eventually, she opened them and shrugged. 'No, nothing.'
He opened the door. At the center of the squarish room was a plain wooden table a little more than waist high for an adult. It was slightly inclined, and had deep grooves running its length arranged for maximum drainage. Much of the table was crusted to a dark brick red, as was a broad circular swathe of the floor centered underneath the table's lower end. Thin streams of brighter red flowed slowly down the grooves to drip and splash in the tiny puddles underneath the ends of the gutters.
The person - the boy - lying naked on the table looked like an image out of a nightmare. Vast patches of his skin were either missing entirely or stretched and opened away from the flesh underneath by thin cords depending from the ceiling. More cords wrapped around the table and into and -through- his body, binding him tightly against the rough wood, and still others supported both the several still-living organs held in the air above his motionless body and the blood vessels that kept them as part of the whole.
For a moment, she thought that that nightmarish web of strings was nothing more than simple thread, but as she looked closer she realised - from their appearance and -where- they penetrated into his body - that they had almost certainly actually been woven from living connective tissue.
"What a horrible way to die," she murmured unconciously.
The boy on the table turned his head to look at her, and his eyes were clear and all too lucid amid the horrible scarring and desecrated flesh that had once been a human face. "...who..."
She ran. She turned and bolted and curled up in one of the farthest corners of the main chamber to hug her knees as close to her chest as she could manage and hyperventilate until either she passed out or that image burned into her soul went away.
Some time later - she would never be precisely sure how long - someone rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. Since she had unconciously picked up his chakra approaching, she didn't jump in fright, but instead only looked up into her Sensei's concerned eyes.
"Are you okay?"
She swallowed, then nodded convulsively.
"All right." And she stood when he beckoned, and then followed him back into That Room.
"his name is haku," Neshan said to her in an undertone as he began to divest himself of most of his usual ninja gear and pile it into her arms. "and what you could see of what that woman did to him is barely even the half of it. i've managed to get him stable enough to move without danger, but we're going to need to get him to a real hospital as soon as physically possible." He paused, hesitating. "don't let him see you."
Then he walked over to stand next to the bandaged form on the table and said, gently. "I'm sorry. This will hurt."
"...w..t..." Haku whispered.
The Jounin leaned closer. "Yes?"
"...where... going...?" he forced out.
"Konoha. You'll be welcome there."
A tear gathered at the corner of one eye, then dropped and started to trace its way through the pattern of those horrible scars. "...never... want...me..."
Neshan smiled. "Konoha was founded by a number of clans who had run from different countries, each for their own reasons. Some wanted to escape being used for others' agendas; others were tired of being persecuted, and still more saw a chance to gain greater power as part of a new nation rather than an old. Regardless, they all went into what was, at the time, an impenetrable jungle full of lethal plants and nin-beasts... and they were all dedicated to building a nation where people with Bloodline Limits like theirs could live as equals rather than tools or demons. Things've changed some since then, of course, but the Hidden Village of the Leaf still holds more Bloodlines than all the other nations put together." He leaned down and adjusted the bandage across Haku's forehead before picking him up in his arms with infinite gentleness. "You'll fit right in."
* * * * *
JULY, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. Haku was safe, Gatou was dead, his company was in disarray, and his pet psychopath hadn't shown her face in weeks. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the maniac hadn't just packed up and left, but some fragment of her subconcious kept insisting that they hadn't seen the last of that twisted mind.
As time had gone by, Team 7 had settled on the routine of having Naruto - or rather, his obligatory retinue of shadow clones - do most of the watching while the other three members took shifts staying close to their principal. While the clones couldn't observe any better than their creator, they -could- be in as many as twelve places at once, making up in redundancy and proximity what they lacked in acuity. Naruto himself simply rested and studied most of the time, conserving his chakra to replace the guards when the energy supplies holding them together ran out.
The construction workers who actually had to labor on the bridge while the four ninja apparently sat around and did nothing had been surprisingly understanding. All but a very few of them had had experience in other professions, like fishing, which made up for long dry periods with bursts of intense activity, and the site's grapevine had comfortably absorbed the idea that ninja duties followed the same pattern.
"Oi, Boss!" one of the men clustered around the bottom of the newest piling shouted up at Tazuna. "When are we due for lunch?"
"Finish that, then take a half hour!" their superior bellowed back.
"Yosh'! We'll do that!"
Naruto had been stretched out on his belly with an elbow on either side of the scroll he was working on, but now he rolled over to stare up at where his teammate was perching crosslegged on one of the bridge's railing's posts. "Ne, ne, Sakura-chan?"
She blinked and swore as his voice broke her concentration, disrupting the finely-metered flow of chakra she had been using to fold an origami crane in the palms of her cupped hands and tearing the delicate paper. "What?!"
He flinched and crab-walked a couple feet further away. "Eheheh... nothing, nothing!" he said, with a nervous grin.
She glared for a moment longer, then sighed. "Sorry. If I need to concentrate that hard then I guess I haven't got it down yet, have I?"
He nodded blankly. "If you say so, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura snickered and fished out another sheet of origami paper, then paused for a long moment before setting it gently on her knee. "Naruto?"
He twisted around to sit upright as he took in her tone of voice. "Eh?"
"A couple of weeks ago... You remember what happened just before those Nuke-nin attacked?"
His face scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he grinned. "Oh, yeah! There was that puddle... and..." Halfway through the sentance he seemed to remember exactly why he had thought the incident was funny, and also why mentioning that fact might not be the smartest thing for him to do.
The girl on the pole had taken out a kunai and begun twirling it between her fingers as he spoke, and she kept the motion and matching glare up for a moment before tucking the blade away and letting him off the hook with a smile. "If it hadn't been me, it actually -might- have been funny," she admitted. "But that wasn't what I was really thinking of. See, Sensei said something while I was trying to get the dress clean that stuck in my mind - that he thought you'd done it because 'bad attention was better than no attention.'" The last phrase she delivered with a fair imitation of their teacher's voice and accent, with its gutteral 'r's and odd pitches.
The smile on Naruto's face slid away abruptly, and he glanced aside rather than meet her eyes. "Yeah?"
She stared at him, taking in his fisted hands and the tension in his jaw - a posture, she suddenly realized, much like that he'd adopted that first day, when he had told her and Sasuke about his status as a Jinchuuriki.
Something someone else had said about him came to mind, and she sighed quietly and glanced down, folding the fragile paper between her fingers in one of the dozens of intricate patterns Suzume-sensei had made the entire Girl's Class at the Academy memorize before she'd let them move on to more obvious things like disguise or chakra theory. "'He doesn't have any parents... The sadness of having a parent yell at you is nowhere near what he feels,'" she quoted, with a sad smile. "Sasuke-kun told me that, when I was..." She sighed, and pressed the completed tulip between her palms to sharpen the creases. "I was ranting on like a blind little idiot."
He jerked, almost as though he had been struck, and stared up at her. "What? No! Sakura-chan, you're not an idiot! You're the smartest person I know! Even Sensei says you're smarter than him!"
A paper tulip bounced off his nose. "-Being- smart isn't the same as -acting- smart - as you ought to know better than anyone, ne?"
Naruto rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and chuckled nervously. Then he blinked. "Wait, wait... -Sasuke- said that? That stuck-up bastard?"
She leaned to one side a little, and then kicked him, gently, in the head. "Sasuke-kun is -not- stuck up! He's just..." she hunted for the right word for a moment. "...reserved."
He stuck his toungue out at her. "-Sensei- is reserved. Sasuke's an ice cube." She gave him a skeptical look, and after a moment he sighed and looked at his hands again. "But, I guess... if he could say that, then... he couldn't be as bad as I thought." The serious moment vanished as he broke back into a grin. "Damn if I know -how-, though!"
"Eh?" Sakura uncrossed her legs and turned towards him, leaning her elbows on her knees. "You don't know?"
"Know what?"
"His family, his clan, the Uchiha..." she said slowly, very serious. "They were all killed." He just stared, so she explained. "It was... I think three or four years ago. One of the clanmembers, an ANBU who had been under consideration for promotion to Captain, went... mad... and..."
Both of them were silent, remembering what their quiet teammate had said during that first dinner together. 'To kill a certain person...' Eventually, though, Sakura's mind turned back to where the conversation had started. "Naruto..."
"Yeah, Sakura-chan?"
She had been looking down at the concrete under the piling she was sitting on, but now raised her head to meet his eyes as she slowly worked out what she wanted to say. "All those times you said... 'Let's go on a date...' You... weren't just trying to bother me, were you."
When she said it like that... He felt like launching himself into a dozen cartwheels in a row, but didn't. He was learning to see patterns in things, and the pattern here was that that kind of thing, the acceptance he'd wanted to see so much, hadn't come from any of his joking or clowning, but from a quiet, serious conversation. So he didn't let himself even smile, and instead just said, with as much honest sincerity as he could muster, "No. Not with that."
She looked away for a long moment. 'You're annoying,' whispered two different voices from out of her memory. "Lets make a deal."
[She likes -Sasuke, you moron!] he reminded himself. [Remember that!] "A deal?"
"If you'll act like... a real person, rather than... someone out to cause as much chaos as he can... Then, I promise I'll..." she broke off and sighed. "I love Sasuke. It used to be just how he looks or how good people say he is, but now, since we graduated, he's a -person-, a -friend-, who's hurting, who I want to help, no matter what it costs me." She looked up and met her teammate's eyes again. "So... I can't give you what you want. But... I'll give you as much as I can."
"sakura-chan..." he whispered, eyes wide and teary.
She smiled, and held out a hand. "Friends?"
He took it. "Friends!"
They shook on it, and laughed, and then one of Naruto's clones pelted down the bridge to skid to a halt in front of its prototype, gasping for breath. "Boss! We... We got big trouble!"
"Huh?" Naruto and Sakura traded a glance, then turned to stare at the construct. "Trouble?"
It nodded, so fast it almost looked like its head was about to come off. "Uh huh! There's, there's half a dozen of these... zombie things, with bits missing and insides hanging out and skin dangling off and these stitches all over! There're coming this way! One of the others got close to them, so we could see what'd happen, and they just... tore him apart! Bam! They're real fast!"
Naruto blinked, then grabbed the clone's shoulder. "Go wake Sasuke. Tell him what's going on - -now-!"
It flipped him a casual salute and pelted off, and he turned to Sakura. "Tell Sensei -"
She was already nodding. "And then cover Tazuna-san. Right!"
They traded a glance, and then she was gone and he was concentrating deeply. He formed the seal - pushed the chakra - and then sent half of the fres Kagebunshin to evacuate the work crew before following the others to buy more time.
The... -things- shambling out of the forest and towards the shore end of the bridge looked like someone had constructed some malformed array of nin-puppets out fo deismembered human body parts. Their frameworks were clearly human skeltons, but their arms were attached wrong, some had extra joints, others no head, and non of them had any skin - instead, their muscles and sinews stretched and flexed and glistened wetly in the open air.
The day's deliveries for the construction had already arrived, so there were no boats moored to the causeway's outer end - which meant that the ninja would have to hold that end clear until Tazuna and the other workers could get clear.
That, in itself, would have been easy enough - there were less than a dozen of these, these ghouls, and they have four powerful ninja to work with - except that the distracting frontal attack was about as classic a setup for a knife in the back as there -was-. Naruto knew his own weaknesses, though - self-knowledge had to be the first step of any successful plan, after all - and observation topped the list. He could travel, he could throw, he could hold his own in a taijutsu fight and boy, oh boy could he do ninjutsu, but he wasn't devious enough to cast goo genjutsu and a threat virtually had to walk right up and bop him on the nose before he'd be able to notice it.
Those traits were, for the most part, as well-suited to the front lines of a battle as they were -poorly- matched with the constant caution and watchfulness required of a bodyguard. Either of his teammates, though, could have done quite well in either role - Sasuke was observant, Sakura was even more so, and both of them could fight like anything.
Sensei... well, he was a Jounin, 'nuff said, but once that and its implications were accepted he, too, was better suited to the battle line - and, if needed, he could quickly cover the ground between either of the team's elements.
Since Naruto knew all that, and knew that Neshan knew that, it was no suprise when he heard his teacher's voice from just over his shoulder, as calm and mile as always. "Well?"
Hm. How to handle this... Sensei could have jsut given him his orders of course, but the older boy - man, and how -wierd- to realize that the law said -he- was in that category now, too - had said that he thought that the three Genin would learn best by experience, by shaping their own course. His own role was, first, to teach them -how- to do so - how to learn, and why they should work to. Second, to act as a resource to learn -from-, whether tapping into his experience on the battlefield or the jutsu he could teach them or even, as was often the case with -their- teacher, the details of the past and how they affected the present and future. And, finally, third, to act as a safety net, and prevent their otherwise promising careers from being snuffed out by some minor mistake that only a novice would have made. "An area trap?" he suggested. "Something like a spider's web, to hold them in place?"
"They exist. I don't have one." Neshan's voice was harsh and taunt, though still controlled. Naruto knew it wasn't driected at him - Sensei believed in being prepared for his battles, sometimes even relied on it -too- much, and would regard any gap in his readiness as a personal failure... something he forgave easily enough in others, but never in himself.
"Too many to just mix it up with and keep busy..." the Genin thought out loud. "And too many other unknowns. Chikusho! Attack?" he asked, since if the enemy's numbers made conventional delaying tactics impossible, the only thing open to them was to reduce those numbers until other options became practical.
"Attack," his superior confirmed.
It had almost been time to replace his picket clones when he and Sakura had started their conversation, which meant that he was about as fresh as he could be. And -that- meant... He hopped up onto one of the causeway's pilings, then bounced off it to get as much height as he could. One, two, -three-! "KATON: GOUKAKYU NO JUTSU!"
A couple of the monsters ducked out of the way, but the reason he had picked that technique, rather than one of the other fire types he knew, was that it combined power (which was useful) with a large area of effect - particularly if the user was trying to spread it, rather than concentrate it. If these things were as freakish and inhuman as they looked, then they wouldn't even feel any pain from being lit on fire like that - but having their connective tissues and driving muscles burn away to ash should slow them down more than a bit, and if they really were as close to being nin-puppets as the resemblance between their motions and the descriptions he'd read of the Sunagakure specialty looked, then touching them and taking himself into range of a contact trap would have been a real bad idea anyway.
One of the ghouls was lunging at him now, with flames licking off its upper surfaces like a canopy of trees on a hill, so he ducked to the side and slashed a kunai across the underside of the arm it had attacked with and severed the tendons there - it might not bleed, but without -those-, that arm was useless - and spun as he dropped into a crouch and brought a second blade out in his other hand to cut the monster's hamstrings (which were clearly visible - YUK!) in two quick strokes.
Then he skittered left and lunged forward and upright to slam both of the heavy throwing knives -through- the shoulder joints of the ghoul that had tried to sneak up on him while he was dealing with its companion. There was a crunch of shattering bone as the blades' design concentrated the force of his weight and muscles into two unyielding points less than a millimeter across and then he was dancing out of the way of the kick it launched as the impact of his strikes knocked it flat on its back and left it wriggling there helplessly without a spare limb to pull it around and get its legs back under it.
That won him a second to spare, and he used it to glance over and check on Sensei. His help wasn't need, he saw, and actually he hadn't expected it to be - but you just -didn't- leave a teammate's safety to chance when there was something you might be doing about it. If you couldn't see them, then it didn't -matter- how certain you thought you were - you damn well checked and made sure!
Some part of the back of his mind had been monitoring the work crew as they flooded past the fight, and even as he finished dumping another dozen Kagebunshin into the fray Naruto was turning towards where one of the frailer members of the group had tripped and fallen and was being helped to his feet by Tazuna.
Sasuke shouted, Neshan cursed, and Sakura's kick oblitherated half the man's skull, snapped his neck, and knocked his corpse flying in the bargain, but by then it was too late, and the engineer was already begininning to thrash and scream as the poison on the needles that had erupted from the worker's chest to bury themselves in his arms and nearer leg began to work its lethal way into his bloodstream.
Naruto forced himself not to think about it, and launched himself back into the covering action beside his teacher, but he still caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of his two teammates trading wordless question.
Then Sasuke shouted at the construction workers to start moving again, and Sakura screamed and threw herself at the nearest cluster of ghouls.
None of them wanted to think about what they'd have to tell Tsunami-san, who'd been so kind - any more than they wanted to think about the fact that they were actually -glad- that the waiting was over, and that Gatou's mysterious fifth shinobi had made a move they could react to.
* * * * *
It was too similar to be a coincidence.
Sasuke's jaw clenched. This woman -knew- them, knew -him-, and had deliberately arranged her murder of their host's family to...
"She's changed their clothes," he told his teammates.
"Yeah, so?" Naruto asked. "It's just a Henge."
The dark-haired Genin didn't answer directly, instead simply crouching down to roll... Tsunami-san's corpse... over onto its front, ignoring the tacky, drying blood and dangling shreds of flesh.
"Kuso," the shorter of his teammates whispered, with an uncharacteristically pale expression.
"The Uchiha crest..." the third murmured, looking puzzled for a moment, then her eyes widened. "No! This is like..."
"That day. Yes."
"Sasuke..." she said, reaching out a hand, helplessly offering... neither of them was certain what.
He nodded to her, acknowledging and showing gratitude for the effort at the same time as he refused it, and said, "Lets look around. Maybe this... madwoman left something we can use."
And they did, spreading out to cover the entire house and its immediate grounds thoroughly.
"Well?" Sakura asked eventually, leaning over their sensei's shoulder to glance at the tracks he was examining.
"You know already. She's made it too obvious; she -wants- to be followed." He sighed and sat back on his heels. "Unfortunately, I don't see much else that we can do at this point."
Naruto snorted. "Well, then, what are we waiting for?!" And with that he was gone, and Sasuke close behind.
"Sakura."
She turned to look at her teacher, and that constant unease that had been dogging her was back again. She had never heard him sound that serious. "Hai, Sensei?"
"I... Haku told me about our enemy. I'd spare the three of you from this if I could - but I'm not strong enough to win this without you." He hesitated. "I... I'm sor-"
She cut him off. "It's all right. I understand about duty."
He nodded sadly, and then they followed her teammates.
* * * * *
"Looking for me, Sasuke-kun?"
Team 7 stopped in place and spun as a single body.
Sasuke knew, looking at last at the face of their enemy, that she must have been beautiful, once. She was tall, for a woman, almost six feet, and if she hadn't looked so worn and starved then her long, powerful frame and lethal ninja's grace would have been outright riveting. As it was, even with the scars seaming her body and his knowledge of what she was capable of, she was still attractive. Her yukata-like dress had long, sweeping sleeves but was cut high across her thighs, and its brilliant red fabric was scattered with irregular patches of darker red, particular around the cuffs and the lower edges of the sleeves.
Her long, slightly feathery pink hair swept and tangled behind her in an unrestrained mass which was held back from her face by a Konoha hitae-ite across the top of her head. Its slightly tarnished surface had had a deep, straight score etched across its distinguishing sigil. Her eye sockets were badly scarred, and the organs occupying them had obviously been transplanted, since one of them gleamed with the deceptive white blankness of the Hyuuga Byakugan.
"Sharingan," he breathed, as he took in the other. And indeed it was, blood red, with three comma-shaped secondary pupils spinning slowly around the central fourth.
"Yours, even, Sasuke-kun" the apparition said, with a horrible parody of a giggle. "And the other gives -dear- Hina-chan another look at you at last, Naruto."
"H-hina-chan?" Naruto stuttered, transfixed as a songbird facing a snake.
"Hyuuga Hinata, Naruto," Their sensei said idly. "And no, we weren't, quite yet. We wanted to figure out what you wanted, first."
"I want you to suffer, of course. And then I want you to die. Your blood and your agony... I want to splash around like a little girl as it puddles at my feet. I want to bathe in it, caress it, impale myself on it, devour it."
Sasuke, despite all the years of effort he had invested in controlling his actions and emotions, flinched away from the thought. "Sakura...san... Why would you-"
She cut him off with a snarl. "Why? Why do you think, you condescending fucking ice-hearted traitor! Because you pushed me down, because you tried to break me, because you tried to -own- me, you and that fucking fox-bastard crashing around trying to sneak up behind me." She cocked her head and leaned forward with her hands braced on her knees and a secretive little smile on her face. "And you'll pay for it - pay in full, both of you and especially that cowardly little cunt beside you."
Sakura - their Sakura, the younger girl with the short temper - had been standing frozen, trembling slightly and trying frantically to reconcile herself to the instinctive, bone-deep knowledge that this woman, this nightmare, -was-, in every meaningful way, -her-.
The other purred slightly, and licked her lips, taking a slow step towards the terrified Genin, but their sensei stepped in to intervene. "Then I guess I'll have to stop you."
The Smile widened, hungry and eager. "Do you really think you can beat me?"
He gave a smile of his own. Being scared wouldn't accomplish anything, nor being angry. With those gone, he could appreciate the humor of the situation, black as it was. "Not unless you do something a lot dumber than I expect you to. But a draw isn't out of the question."
She laughed, and if they hadn't been able to see her eyes, then it would have seemed perfectly natural and human... which made it all the worse, of course. "Who do you think you're talking to?" She leaned forward again, and spoke in a mock-confidential tone. "I'm the perfect killer!"
*crich*
*gunch*
"I take a lot of killing."
TO BE CONTINUED...
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
chapter 3
BRIDGE
JUNE, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
"AAARRRGH! -WHY- does he -do- these things?!" howled Haruno Sakura as she scrubbed futilely at the stained fabric of the shirt a friend had loaned her.
"I think it's mostly based on the theory that bad attention is better than no attention," Bakusuta Neshan, the Jounin assigned to teach her and her two teammates the basics of ninja fieldcraft, observed as he leaned over her hunched shoulders and tugged the fabric out of her grip.
"Eh?" she said, then flinched away from the splatter as he snapped the shirt dry with a quick flick of the wrist.
"Hare, rat, rat, ram, hare..." The mud imbedded in the delicately patterned silk shivered slightly, then lifted away to collect into a glistening orb that hovered in mid-air between his hands. "Most useful jutsu in the world. It works on hair, cloth, metal... anything."
"Sugoi. I'll have to remember that. And you're stalling."
"Well, yes. It's not really my place to tell; I've already said more than I should have." And that, she knew, was the end of it.
"Tease."
"It'll do you two good to talk about it." He flicked the sphere of mud out into the center of the stream. "Let's get back."
"Hai!"
They walked through the forest the short distance from the stream to the road, and Uzumaki Naruto, who still had streaks of mud buried in his hair from when his enraged female teammate had ground his head into the same puddle he'd knocked -her- into, looked up, wearing an uncharictaristically chastened look on his childish, be-whiskered face. "Sakura-chan?"
"What!?" she snapped.
"I'm sorry." He bowed his head and figited a little.
She gave him a cockeyed look. "Do you even realize what you're sorry -for-?"
He hesitated. "Aaaahhh... Making you unhappy?"
She shook her head in a sort of horrified wonder. "I didn't-" a hand rested on her shoulder cut her off, and she looked up at her teacher's face. "Sensei?"
"Wouldn't any other answer just mean the same thing, at the very bottom?"
She blinked at him and thought about it for a moment, then sighed and gave Naruto a small smile. "All right. But if you do that again I -won't- be held responsible for the consequences."
Uchiha Sasuke, that year's Number One Rookie and three time winner of the Konohagakure Ultimate Teen Heartthrob Award (Under 15 division), snorted. "Wonderful. Let's go, then."
"Right!" Naruto and Sakura said, grinning, as their charge, bridge architect Umida Tazuna yawned and heaved himself upright from where he's been resting on a tree root.
"Wait." Neshan held up a hand. "Sasuke, heavy dispel."
The last of the Uchiha blinked in confusion, then nodded. "Hai!" Four quick seals, then- "Oukai no Jutsu!"
Two men dropped from the branches overhead to land in the scruffy grass along the south margin of the road. "Heh heh... You're pretty good, Mr. Leaf," said the taller of the two to the Jounin, adjusting his Hidden Mist headband slightly. "But don't think-"
"Kids, sic 'em. I'll play backstop."
All three Genin reacted to the command instantly - Sasuke lunged for one of the Mist-nin, leading his attack with a kunai that had appeared almost magically in his hand, and Sakura literally seemed to teleport from a standing ready stance to a spinning kick more than twelve feet away, right next to the other. Naruto didn't charge immediately, instead taking a moment to generate an escorting squad of Kage Bunshin before he went on the attack.
Sasuke's target flinched back out of range, then dived to one side with the edged chain built into his guantlet flickering out and free in an arc directly towards Sakura. She avoided it with ease, but the two Mist-nin used her momentary disengagement to cut and run, dissapearing into the forest.
"Pursue," the command rapped out, and they did, with Naruto's clones swinging out in a wide arc to cover more ground.
There was silence for a moment, and then Neshan spun and threw a plum-sized sphere in a classic fastball pitch at an apparantly innocuous branch. A couple of feet before impact, the ball burst like a confetti firework, scattering bits of paper barely larger than a speck of dust in a pale cloud around the bough. An instant later, the first spark caught and grew into a shattering explosion that knocked the tree over and sent burning splinters showering across the forest floor.
"You -are- good, spotting my clone like that," said the deep voice thrown to just behind his ear. "But I can't say I know your name."
"Bakusuta Neshan. And you are?" His eyes tracked slowly across the undergrowth of the forest, looking, looking.
"Momoichi Zabuza, once of Hidden Mist... I know that name... what is Konoha's famous sealing genius doing going on a pissant field mission like escorting an architect?"
Not over -there-, which meant... "I'm hardly -that- great. And I have to teach my team fieldwork -somehow-."
"No," and now the voice was no longer disguised, and coming from behind him... next to Tazuna. "I guess you're not."
All five of Neshan's array of thrown kunai blasted straight through the architect's body and buried themselves deep within the missing-nin's. Both corpses stood for a moment longer, then vanished, one into a puff of smoke and the other into a splash of water.
The younger man brought one hand up and the other down and both back just in time for the massive sword blow aimed at his back to slam into his naginata's interposed pole. A split second later, the butt of the polearm came up and right as he ducked and stepped and spun to the left, slamming the heavy metal pipe into where Zabuza's ribs would have been had the swordsman not pushed down and forward with both blade and feet, hopping high and a little back, out of reach.
"A naginata, huh? That's not a veryWHOA!" Neshan had kept turning as the older Jounin spoke, and added a quick step to the side as the weapon rotated in his grip, trading ends to lead with the razor-edged blade as he came back into striking range and sent it flicking out in a lightning strike that Zabuza barely twisted away from.
The Mist-nin backflipped twice, opening the range before he paused to reevaluate his opponent. For his part, the other simply brought the deceptively slender polearm back into its standard sloping ready position and cocked his head. "What's Gatou paying you, anyway? 'Cause, y'know, we Leaves aren't so terribly pleased with the current Mizukage's 'accidental target misidentification' policy." 'And if you don't piss us off,' went the unspoken part of the message, 'we might be persuaded to see fit to provide some free agent like yourself with the means to do something about that common goal.'
In the blur of combat there hadn't been time for them to take a good look at each other, but in the pause both of them did so. Neshan saw a rangy man of about six feet in height, greasy black hair with a scored Mist hitai-ite, pants and sleeveless shirt in dark blue with the gray mufflers which so many shinobi liked to hide things in on calves and forearms. He knew what Zabuza was seeing, too: a boy or young man in his late teens, with spectacles, Leaf headband, and dark hair pulled back in a knee-length braid, wearing dark grey pants and buttoned shirt under a forest-green high-collared trenchcoat.
"No," the taller of the two said regretfully, "I can't. This time I'm only working for the sake of my hostage to fate." He planted his sword - a massive, squared-off blade almost as long as he was even -without- the arm-length hilt - firmly in the ground and brought his hands together in the first of a blurringly quick series of seals.
Neshan was caught between sympathy for his foe's unexpected motivation and contempt for his choice of tactics, and firmly supressed both as he launched another array of kunai and followed the flying blades in.
Horizontal sweep - he knew that pattern - spinning up and around his back and down from overhead as Zabuza keeps backpedaling - Suiryuudan no Jutsu, the water dragon, and they -were- close enough to the stream for him to use that - lunging forward with the naginata pivoting against the ground towards Zabuza's face like a rake that'd just been stepped on - dragon, snake, rat, he's got seven more to go - then pivoting around the vertical weapon like a pole vaulter to slam both feet into his opponent's chest and knock the larger man flying.
He let the reaction from that impact carry him up and over and back to land on his feet, but by the time he was anchored again Zabuza had recovered and come too close to fight with such a large weapon. He dismissed it, and they exchanged blows for a period that could have been a minute or could have been only a few seconds, and in any event ended with them locked in an awkward grapple with Neshan in a half crouch, one hand trapped between that shoulder and his opponent's chest and the other held outstretched, without the leverage to fight back.
He twitched his wrist back, tapping that hand's fingertips against his opponent's chest, and as he did, sixty-four brilliant streams of chakra erupted from his primary tenketsu and arced up and around to the point of impact. For a fraction of a second - just long enough for the taller man to begin to smile triumphantly - nothing happened.
The ring-shaped secondary shockwave which propagated out perpendicular to the line of the blow was intense enough to scorch skin and set cloth to smoldering, but most of the attack's energy was absorbed carving an eighteen-inch hole through Zabuza's chest and scattering its former contents across a comet-shaped splatter mark fifty feet long. Even the tiny proportion of that force which transferred into the flesh around the hole was enough to knock the fresh corpse flying twice its own length.
"You talk too much," Neshan told the gristly tableau, and then went to find his team.
* * * * *
Block right, jump over toe kick, block right, block left, grab-twist-yank and drop an elbow across the back of the skull, step back to keep from being splashed as the bunshin dissolves...
"Sasuke-kun!" Sakura snapped from behind him. He turned slightly and glanced out of the corner of his eye as she slipped a blinding thrust past an enemy bunshin's guard and buried a kunai through its temple, then pulled the blade free and spun to slash another's throat open in almost the same motion. "I'll handle the bunshin. Just find the real ones!"
He nodded, then hesitated a moment, running through his options. Yes, that one would do.
"Sabikeibi no Jutsu," he said, and folded his cupped palms open. About a dozen tiny dancing motes of light fluttered up in front of him for a moment, then swirled and darted off into the underbrush.
He followed, and a flicker of orange to his right told him that Naruto had seen the Fireflies also. Leaves and branches tore at his face and then he was out in the open, and there was a gleam of metal heading straight towards him. He flipped over it and crouched on the vertical trunk of a tree, looking 'up' and across at one of the two brothers as the bladed chain he had thrown hissed and slithered along the ground as it was wound back up into its concealing guantlet.
"SUITON: GYOSHIBUKI NO JUTSU!" Naruto roared as he emerged from cover, spitting a spreading cluster of short, high-density jets of water as he came.
The Kiri-nin dodged, of course, flipping up and back to land on a large branch next to his partner, who at the same time had sent a barrage of shuriken flying at their orange-clad attacker.
They passed harmlessly through him, as though through nothing more than air, and the image smirked and dived back into the bushes. "Bunshin?" asked one of the partners.
"No," said the other. "Some sort of Genjutsu."
"No matter." And they ran through identical sets of five seals in perfect unison. Faint arcs and whisps of chakra began to pass between them, the light pulsing like a heartbeat.
Naruto made another attack, this time dropping from the branches overhead, crying, "SUITON: GYOSH-"
One of the pulses built rapidly into a blinding flare, a flare that swept outward and washed over Naruto and everything in his vicinity. Six feet to his right, a puff of smoke appeared with a sharp popping sound as the Kagebunshin was disrupted.
There was silence, for a moment, as the Kiri-nin stood there watching Sasuke as he watched them, and then another bright flare shattered the tree where he had been sitting. Not that it mattered - apprearances aside, he was long gone.
"well?" he asked Naruto as they crouched side by side in the bushes, using the low, quiet tones that carried so much less than the higher frequencies of an actual whisper.
"not sure," the whiskered boy answered. "some kind of area-effect, and related to that pulsing light."
"heterodyne effect," Sakura put in from behind both of them, then subsided to watch as another of Naruto's clones made a third attempt - with no more benefit than the second had gotten. Then she resumed, "like two out of tune musical instruments, how their tones pulse?"
"and the flares are the high points in the wave," the blond boy said slowly, tasting the idea as he spoke. "what's the point?"
"efficient use of power," Sasuke answered. "neither of them is putting in much chakra, but they're getting a very powerful effect."
The kunoichi crawled forward to lie between her teammates and get a good look for herself. "mizubunshin are toast, by the way. what about weaknesses?"
"of course they are," Sasuke said dryly, as though he had never doubted it - and, in truth, he hadn't. "and it'd need to be very finely tuned to work - they probably can't afford to alter the distance between them without breaking the jutsu."
"then we need to move them." She nudged Naruto. "ne, try shuriken this time. they'll have less reaction time."
"way ahead of you," he answered, at the same moment a clone popped out of cover and did exactly that. It was wiped out immediately, but the second attacker some distance away lasted much longer.
Sasuke grinned, fiercely. "they need at least one intermediate pulse before they can fire again."
"and after?" Naruto asked.
Because they were hiding, Sakura refrained from cracking her knuckles. "leave that to me," she grinned, and vanished downward into a careful tunnelling jutsu.
Naruto glanced down and where she had been, then looked up to meet his teammate's eyes. 'Scary!' he mouthed with a grin.
"moron," Sasuke said, and then they split up.
As it ended up, splitting their opponents up was harder than it had sounded - the two nuke-nin proved to be able to maintain a constant awareness of their partner's location and react in unison to any threat to -either- - but Sasuke was able to use a carefully-anchored set of wires to swing around the trunk of the tree they were standing in and hit one at the same time that Naruto bounced off of one of his own clones to clobber the other going in the opposite direction.
Sasuke was too occupied giftwrapping the man he had hit to spare attention for the other, but then, the startled yelp, sudden scuffle, and horrible, particularly -final- crunching noise that followed the other's landing on the forest floor assured him that there was no need to worry.
There was a quiet, muffled *snap!* as he tugged the last loop of wire closed, and it took him a moment to realise what the Kiri-nin had done. Then he swore and flipped the larger man over onto his back. "Naruto, help!" he yelled, tearing the gas-mask away from the other's face and grabbing firmly to his jaw and then there was another pair of hands helping hold him still and they had yanked his mouth open and Sasuke didn't hesitate at all to jam his fingers down his throat to trigger the gag reflex...
Too late, he realised as the other - whose name, he suddenly recalled, he still did not know - began to thrash and foam at the mouth as the poison hidden in his hollow tooth took effect. The measure was a standard one for the Village of the Hidden Mist, he remembered now that it no longer mattered, and the toxin a violent one that killed in seconds rather than minutes.
A hand rested gently on his shoulder as he and Naruto watched their enemy's last moments. "Suicide?" Neshan asked.
"Hai, Sensei."
"...Don't worry about it."
"Hai, Sensei."
* * * * *
Hyuuga Neji came before the assembled elders of his clan with hands bound and head high.
He had known, from the moment he calmed sufficiently to once more evaluate the shape of his fate, that he was probably going to die. Indeed, if he were to be fully honest with himself, he was rather looking forwards to it. On the one hand, he would be dead. On the other, however, he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had, in that same stroke, defied his destined slavery, exposed the inherent corruption and hypocrisy of the Hyuuga to the entire villiage, and irrevocably torn the lying webs of that simpering little spider that had been hiding behind the mask of his 'shy, quiet cousin'.
All in all, that was as good a cause as any other.
The elders of the Hyuuga were seated along the sides of a long table of ancient steelwood, whose grain had been buffed to a fine polish by hundred of hands over the years but had at the same time resisted every blade's attempts to so much as scratch it.
His 'uncle', the clan head, Hiashi, knelt in seiza at the head of the table, with that -spider- faking concern and self-effacement from slightly behind and to his right.
Except for the pair of iron-faced wardens hovering just outside the chamber's door, he was the only member of the Branch Family present.
Hyuuga Inei, seniormost of the Ten Elders of the Hyuuga clan, leaned forward and glared at the boy he would never think to acknowledge as his great-nephew. "Neji, son of Hizashi, of the Branch House of the Hyuuga Clan, do you know what you have done to be called here before us today?"
So pompous, so fucking arrogant, just as though -he- had the -right-! Neji throttled his temper back and let the icy control in his voice speak of more contempt than any outburst could have shown. "I have challenged a villian, and offended a pack of blind old fools."
"You have broken your sacred oath!" snapped another of the elderly men arrayed along the sides of the table. "You have shamed your ancestors with your ingratitude for the gifts the Main House has given you! To attack -any- you have sworn to serve, let alone-"
"I swore no oath," Neji said coldly. "I am not my ancestors. I owe -nothing- to those who murdered my father."
"Mind you place, child!" Inei roared, and his voice echoed with the memory of a power and charisma that, in its prime, would have stunned any who faced it.
The boy Konoha had hailed as the genius of the Hyuuga permitted himself a sneer. "A slave's place, you mean? A man is not a slave until he is broken - and the likes of -you- will never break me."
Most of the elders exploded in shouts of rage, and the Eldest's jaw worked and choking noises came from his throat as he tried to force coherent words out past his fury. "I! You! You -insolent-! -Cur-, how -dare- you! I will see you-"
"YOU SHALL -NOT-!" came a voice like the Devil's own flute, and there was a smack of flesh on the wood of the table as Hyuuga Hinata shocked everyone - herself not least of all - by coming to her feet in a burst of rage and will so pure that Inei's tirade ended as abruptly as it did involuntarily, cut off by the way his jaw snapped shut, as though of its own will.
There was silence for a moment, and then the table split lengthwise along its grain, starting from the place where Hinata had unconciously forced a burst of chakra as she slammed her palm against its surface for emphasis. It stayed that way for a moment, and then the two halves creaked slightly and fell majestically away from each other.
Hyuuga Keshitomaru had succeeded as a ninja by always maintaining a controlled and rational demeanor, and in the shocked silence that followed as they all stared at the wreckage of the table, he met Hinata's eyes and said, not unkindly, "Hush, child, please. As much as the shock may have benefitted my colleagues' state of mind, your presence as an observer is a courtesy - it is not yours to participate in our deliberations."
The Heir of the Hyuuga clan stared in frozen shock for a moment longer, then shook herself slightly and settled back into seiza in her previous position. "A-a-ano, s-sir, you are m-mistaken." She took a deep breath, visibly gathering her composure, then continued. "Ano... D-during the rule of the Sh-shichidaime Raikage, the... the clan head, Hyuuga Urumu was p-prone to fits of, of, of madness. Wh-when h-he was in one of h-h-his... episodes, his son, H-hyuuga Hare, was... anoo... allowed t-to speak in his p-place. Th-there were m-more than thirty times afterward when, when th-the heir spoke in deliberation."
"IDIOT COWARD GIRL!" Hyuuga Akaragao roared, seeming, as he often did, on the verge of an apopleptic fit. "YOU MIGHT THINK THAT YOUR PULING LIES WILL PROTECT YOU FROM-"
"She's right," said Hyuuga Shito with a distasteful twist of his lips, cutting across Akaragao's bellow with the ease of long practice. "The precedent is as she says, and has been upheld in numerous different cases, although admittedly never in recent times." He paused to regard her for a moment. While Hinata had always been shy, he had actually been rather startled by her newfound habit of simply sitting and trembling when confronted. It was nice to see the girl recovering - even if her timing -was- abysmal.
Especially since she had known her history well enough to quote the case so perfectly. She could never be clan head, really - not after her performance against Hanabi - but that combination of academic excellence and supportive personality had other uses, and he had to train a successor as clan archivist sooner or later.
"Very well, Hinata-hime. You have an argument?"
She smiled - just a subtle tension around the corners of the eyes and a barely perceptible curve of the lips, but it transformed her face, and warmed his heart in a way that -nothing- had since the death of his wife - and bowed politely. "A... ano, I-I would wish t-t-to remind my seniors of... of the Right of Satisfaction."
Akagarao laughed. "The pride of the Branch house against the shame of the Main! That might actually be interesting." He sneered. "-If- we were so stupid as to permit it."
The Heir's eyes sparked. "Under p-precedent, you... you have no choice."
* * * * *
"Ano sa, ano sa, is this the place?" Naruto asked, jerking his head at the largish house sitting on the border between sea and forest.
Sakura checked the slip of paper she had fished out of her pocket once they got to the edge of the town and nodded. "Should be. Let's check."
Neshan stepped forward and knocked. The woman who opened the door in response was tall and pretty without being beautiful - or she would have been, anyway, if fear and worry hadn't drawn her face so harshly taunt. "Yes?"
"Umida Tsunami?"
Her eyes flicked across their faces, darting from one hitae-ate to another. She flinched.
The Jounin smiled gently, reassuringly. "Your father has contracted my team to deliver something to you."
His explanation of their mission - and his use of the present tense for the man not present - were enough of a relief that she had to lean gently against the doorframe to stay upright. "He's all right?"
"Sakura?"
The female Genin stepped forward and pulled out another piece of paper - this time, a small scroll, which she handed to the older woman. Tsunami's hands trembled as she opened it and began to read, but she didn't hesitate in the slightest.
Which meant that, all too quickly, her eyebrows went up in a puzzled frown. "'Person...?'"
*BAMF*
"Keeping your principal in a safe place for the trip and then summoning him using a jutsu at the final destination isn't a standard procedure," Neshan explained, "because it requires considerably more manpower. At the very least, you'll need one team to protect him and one more to deliver the scroll. On the other hand, Konohagakure is a high-security area anyway, and no one would look twice at another visitor to the capital of the Fire Country... especially if he wasn't even wearing his own face."
Tazuna chuckled as he pulled his daughter into a hug. "As super-wierd as it sounded when you explained it to me, I guess this plan of yours was a good idea after all."
The Jounin shrugged. "Maybe. But that last nukenin worries me - I was hoping to catch all four of them."
"Maybe so, but there's not much we can do about it now, is there?"
"Actually," Tsunami broke in, "There might be."
"Oh?" His eyebrows went up. "Do tell."
"Come inside," she said, and they did. Eventually, after tea had been served and Sakura had threatened Naruto into silence, she explained.
"In the last few days there have been a number of very confusing rumors going around - mostly to the effect that someone has killed Gatou and taken over his criminal contacts. I wouldn't mention it, except that the things that that devil-woman is supposed to do to people don't sound like they could come from anything but a ninja." She took a sip of tea. "One of the other things the rumors are consistent on is where she's been basing her operations - an old Kirigakure outpost in the swamps along the eastern coast of the island."
Neshan took a deep breath and nodded. "All right. Sakura and I will check it out in the morning, while Sasuke and Naruto stay with you, Umida-san."
The aging engineer simply nodded, and before the conversation could move on to other things, a voice interrupted from the bottom of the stairwell. "Who are these people?"
"Ah!" Tazuna stood, smiled, and gestured towards his guards. "These four are the super-skilled ninja who've been contracted to protect me while we finish the bridge. Ninja-san, this is my grandson, Inari."
The young boy standing at the foot of the stairs adjusted his fisherman's hat and walked over to stare up at Neshan, the oldest of the ninja and the obvious leader. "What kind of fool risks his life for nothing but money?" he sneered.
"Hey, you!" Naruto yelled, advancing towards the younger boy. "You should-"
Neshan laid a restraining hand on his student's shoulder. "A tyrant thrown down, a nation freed, thousands of lives bettered... That's a success worth dying for, I think."
"You're a moron!" The boy snapped, fists clenched at his sides. "You're just going to fail and get yourself killed!"
The ninja looked down at those furious eyes and shrugged. "Maybe. But nobody lives forever, and at least I'll die trying."
* * * * *
There was a quiet, almost subliminal noise in the background as they made their cautious way through the deserted headquarters, like an unnameable hybrid of dripping liquid and the thin keening of wind through open rafters. Despite its wooden construction, the building had old-fashioned torch nooks every dozen feet or so, but they were empty and cold, leaving jagged swathes of shadow to spiderweb their way across the walls and ceiling.
Sakura paused before opening the first door. "Sensei... I smell..."
"Yeah. Me too."
She took a deep breath and tried to ignore the coppery aftertaste that that scent brought to her mouth.
Then she opened the door, and was immediately occupied with avoiding the aftertaste of that morning's breakfast. She succeeded, barely, and Neshan simply closed his eyes sadly for a moment once he realized what he was looking at. A moment and a soft, sighing breath later, he opened them and closed the door behind him, leaving his student standing in the hallway and - to her relief - cutting off all view of that... pocket of hell.
[Dear gods, please, let me -never- understand how someone could use human skin to do...] her mind shied away from the image. In the back of her conciousness, another part of her mind clenched its metaphorical fists. {This bitch is fucking -dead-,} she vowed, and for once her more public half couldn't have agreed more.
She glanced away as the door opened. "Sensei... do we have to..."
"Yes. Anything we can learn is needed; no matter what we have to wade through."
She swallowed. "'A ninja is someone who does whatever it takes,'" she said, bouncing one of his favorite maxims back at him.
"Exactly." And with no further words needed, they moved calmly through, checking each room as they passed. Fortunately for Sakura's stomach, rooms like the first were rare - some of the others had old bloodstains spread across every surface, but for the most part there was nothing to indicate that people had ever been present.
"Well, at least the kitchen's normal."
"Take another look at what's on the spit."
"...-Thanks-, Sensei. That's -exactly- the image I needed to have in my head before dinnertime."
"You've been spending too much time around me. You're starting to pick up my sense of humor."
"At least we know that Gatou-san isn't a threat anymore."
"Granted, but do you really think that the psycho-bitch needs to get paid for this?"
"Point."
And then, at last, they came to a largeish room just off of the building's massive central chamber. Neshan paused outside of it, and raised one eyebrow in an unspoken question as he met his student's eyes. 'Do you feel it?'
She blinked, then closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment. Eventually, she opened them and shrugged. 'No, nothing.'
He opened the door. At the center of the squarish room was a plain wooden table a little more than waist high for an adult. It was slightly inclined, and had deep grooves running its length arranged for maximum drainage. Much of the table was crusted to a dark brick red, as was a broad circular swathe of the floor centered underneath the table's lower end. Thin streams of brighter red flowed slowly down the grooves to drip and splash in the tiny puddles underneath the ends of the gutters.
The person - the boy - lying naked on the table looked like an image out of a nightmare. Vast patches of his skin were either missing entirely or stretched and opened away from the flesh underneath by thin cords depending from the ceiling. More cords wrapped around the table and into and -through- his body, binding him tightly against the rough wood, and still others supported both the several still-living organs held in the air above his motionless body and the blood vessels that kept them as part of the whole.
For a moment, she thought that that nightmarish web of strings was nothing more than simple thread, but as she looked closer she realised - from their appearance and -where- they penetrated into his body - that they had almost certainly actually been woven from living connective tissue.
"What a horrible way to die," she murmured unconciously.
The boy on the table turned his head to look at her, and his eyes were clear and all too lucid amid the horrible scarring and desecrated flesh that had once been a human face. "...who..."
She ran. She turned and bolted and curled up in one of the farthest corners of the main chamber to hug her knees as close to her chest as she could manage and hyperventilate until either she passed out or that image burned into her soul went away.
Some time later - she would never be precisely sure how long - someone rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. Since she had unconciously picked up his chakra approaching, she didn't jump in fright, but instead only looked up into her Sensei's concerned eyes.
"Are you okay?"
She swallowed, then nodded convulsively.
"All right." And she stood when he beckoned, and then followed him back into That Room.
"his name is haku," Neshan said to her in an undertone as he began to divest himself of most of his usual ninja gear and pile it into her arms. "and what you could see of what that woman did to him is barely even the half of it. i've managed to get him stable enough to move without danger, but we're going to need to get him to a real hospital as soon as physically possible." He paused, hesitating. "don't let him see you."
Then he walked over to stand next to the bandaged form on the table and said, gently. "I'm sorry. This will hurt."
"...w..t..." Haku whispered.
The Jounin leaned closer. "Yes?"
"...where... going...?" he forced out.
"Konoha. You'll be welcome there."
A tear gathered at the corner of one eye, then dropped and started to trace its way through the pattern of those horrible scars. "...never... want...me..."
Neshan smiled. "Konoha was founded by a number of clans who had run from different countries, each for their own reasons. Some wanted to escape being used for others' agendas; others were tired of being persecuted, and still more saw a chance to gain greater power as part of a new nation rather than an old. Regardless, they all went into what was, at the time, an impenetrable jungle full of lethal plants and nin-beasts... and they were all dedicated to building a nation where people with Bloodline Limits like theirs could live as equals rather than tools or demons. Things've changed some since then, of course, but the Hidden Village of the Leaf still holds more Bloodlines than all the other nations put together." He leaned down and adjusted the bandage across Haku's forehead before picking him up in his arms with infinite gentleness. "You'll fit right in."
* * * * *
JULY, 12TH YEAR AFTER THE ATTACK OF THE KYUUBI
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. Haku was safe, Gatou was dead, his company was in disarray, and his pet psychopath hadn't shown her face in weeks. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that the maniac hadn't just packed up and left, but some fragment of her subconcious kept insisting that they hadn't seen the last of that twisted mind.
As time had gone by, Team 7 had settled on the routine of having Naruto - or rather, his obligatory retinue of shadow clones - do most of the watching while the other three members took shifts staying close to their principal. While the clones couldn't observe any better than their creator, they -could- be in as many as twelve places at once, making up in redundancy and proximity what they lacked in acuity. Naruto himself simply rested and studied most of the time, conserving his chakra to replace the guards when the energy supplies holding them together ran out.
The construction workers who actually had to labor on the bridge while the four ninja apparently sat around and did nothing had been surprisingly understanding. All but a very few of them had had experience in other professions, like fishing, which made up for long dry periods with bursts of intense activity, and the site's grapevine had comfortably absorbed the idea that ninja duties followed the same pattern.
"Oi, Boss!" one of the men clustered around the bottom of the newest piling shouted up at Tazuna. "When are we due for lunch?"
"Finish that, then take a half hour!" their superior bellowed back.
"Yosh'! We'll do that!"
Naruto had been stretched out on his belly with an elbow on either side of the scroll he was working on, but now he rolled over to stare up at where his teammate was perching crosslegged on one of the bridge's railing's posts. "Ne, ne, Sakura-chan?"
She blinked and swore as his voice broke her concentration, disrupting the finely-metered flow of chakra she had been using to fold an origami crane in the palms of her cupped hands and tearing the delicate paper. "What?!"
He flinched and crab-walked a couple feet further away. "Eheheh... nothing, nothing!" he said, with a nervous grin.
She glared for a moment longer, then sighed. "Sorry. If I need to concentrate that hard then I guess I haven't got it down yet, have I?"
He nodded blankly. "If you say so, Sakura-chan!"
Sakura snickered and fished out another sheet of origami paper, then paused for a long moment before setting it gently on her knee. "Naruto?"
He twisted around to sit upright as he took in her tone of voice. "Eh?"
"A couple of weeks ago... You remember what happened just before those Nuke-nin attacked?"
His face scrunched up in thought for a moment, and then he grinned. "Oh, yeah! There was that puddle... and..." Halfway through the sentance he seemed to remember exactly why he had thought the incident was funny, and also why mentioning that fact might not be the smartest thing for him to do.
The girl on the pole had taken out a kunai and begun twirling it between her fingers as he spoke, and she kept the motion and matching glare up for a moment before tucking the blade away and letting him off the hook with a smile. "If it hadn't been me, it actually -might- have been funny," she admitted. "But that wasn't what I was really thinking of. See, Sensei said something while I was trying to get the dress clean that stuck in my mind - that he thought you'd done it because 'bad attention was better than no attention.'" The last phrase she delivered with a fair imitation of their teacher's voice and accent, with its gutteral 'r's and odd pitches.
The smile on Naruto's face slid away abruptly, and he glanced aside rather than meet her eyes. "Yeah?"
She stared at him, taking in his fisted hands and the tension in his jaw - a posture, she suddenly realized, much like that he'd adopted that first day, when he had told her and Sasuke about his status as a Jinchuuriki.
Something someone else had said about him came to mind, and she sighed quietly and glanced down, folding the fragile paper between her fingers in one of the dozens of intricate patterns Suzume-sensei had made the entire Girl's Class at the Academy memorize before she'd let them move on to more obvious things like disguise or chakra theory. "'He doesn't have any parents... The sadness of having a parent yell at you is nowhere near what he feels,'" she quoted, with a sad smile. "Sasuke-kun told me that, when I was..." She sighed, and pressed the completed tulip between her palms to sharpen the creases. "I was ranting on like a blind little idiot."
He jerked, almost as though he had been struck, and stared up at her. "What? No! Sakura-chan, you're not an idiot! You're the smartest person I know! Even Sensei says you're smarter than him!"
A paper tulip bounced off his nose. "-Being- smart isn't the same as -acting- smart - as you ought to know better than anyone, ne?"
Naruto rubbed a hand across the back of his neck and chuckled nervously. Then he blinked. "Wait, wait... -Sasuke- said that? That stuck-up bastard?"
She leaned to one side a little, and then kicked him, gently, in the head. "Sasuke-kun is -not- stuck up! He's just..." she hunted for the right word for a moment. "...reserved."
He stuck his toungue out at her. "-Sensei- is reserved. Sasuke's an ice cube." She gave him a skeptical look, and after a moment he sighed and looked at his hands again. "But, I guess... if he could say that, then... he couldn't be as bad as I thought." The serious moment vanished as he broke back into a grin. "Damn if I know -how-, though!"
"Eh?" Sakura uncrossed her legs and turned towards him, leaning her elbows on her knees. "You don't know?"
"Know what?"
"His family, his clan, the Uchiha..." she said slowly, very serious. "They were all killed." He just stared, so she explained. "It was... I think three or four years ago. One of the clanmembers, an ANBU who had been under consideration for promotion to Captain, went... mad... and..."
Both of them were silent, remembering what their quiet teammate had said during that first dinner together. 'To kill a certain person...' Eventually, though, Sakura's mind turned back to where the conversation had started. "Naruto..."
"Yeah, Sakura-chan?"
She had been looking down at the concrete under the piling she was sitting on, but now raised her head to meet his eyes as she slowly worked out what she wanted to say. "All those times you said... 'Let's go on a date...' You... weren't just trying to bother me, were you."
When she said it like that... He felt like launching himself into a dozen cartwheels in a row, but didn't. He was learning to see patterns in things, and the pattern here was that that kind of thing, the acceptance he'd wanted to see so much, hadn't come from any of his joking or clowning, but from a quiet, serious conversation. So he didn't let himself even smile, and instead just said, with as much honest sincerity as he could muster, "No. Not with that."
She looked away for a long moment. 'You're annoying,' whispered two different voices from out of her memory. "Lets make a deal."
[She likes -Sasuke, you moron!] he reminded himself. [Remember that!] "A deal?"
"If you'll act like... a real person, rather than... someone out to cause as much chaos as he can... Then, I promise I'll..." she broke off and sighed. "I love Sasuke. It used to be just how he looks or how good people say he is, but now, since we graduated, he's a -person-, a -friend-, who's hurting, who I want to help, no matter what it costs me." She looked up and met her teammate's eyes again. "So... I can't give you what you want. But... I'll give you as much as I can."
"sakura-chan..." he whispered, eyes wide and teary.
She smiled, and held out a hand. "Friends?"
He took it. "Friends!"
They shook on it, and laughed, and then one of Naruto's clones pelted down the bridge to skid to a halt in front of its prototype, gasping for breath. "Boss! We... We got big trouble!"
"Huh?" Naruto and Sakura traded a glance, then turned to stare at the construct. "Trouble?"
It nodded, so fast it almost looked like its head was about to come off. "Uh huh! There's, there's half a dozen of these... zombie things, with bits missing and insides hanging out and skin dangling off and these stitches all over! There're coming this way! One of the others got close to them, so we could see what'd happen, and they just... tore him apart! Bam! They're real fast!"
Naruto blinked, then grabbed the clone's shoulder. "Go wake Sasuke. Tell him what's going on - -now-!"
It flipped him a casual salute and pelted off, and he turned to Sakura. "Tell Sensei -"
She was already nodding. "And then cover Tazuna-san. Right!"
They traded a glance, and then she was gone and he was concentrating deeply. He formed the seal - pushed the chakra - and then sent half of the fres Kagebunshin to evacuate the work crew before following the others to buy more time.
The... -things- shambling out of the forest and towards the shore end of the bridge looked like someone had constructed some malformed array of nin-puppets out fo deismembered human body parts. Their frameworks were clearly human skeltons, but their arms were attached wrong, some had extra joints, others no head, and non of them had any skin - instead, their muscles and sinews stretched and flexed and glistened wetly in the open air.
The day's deliveries for the construction had already arrived, so there were no boats moored to the causeway's outer end - which meant that the ninja would have to hold that end clear until Tazuna and the other workers could get clear.
That, in itself, would have been easy enough - there were less than a dozen of these, these ghouls, and they have four powerful ninja to work with - except that the distracting frontal attack was about as classic a setup for a knife in the back as there -was-. Naruto knew his own weaknesses, though - self-knowledge had to be the first step of any successful plan, after all - and observation topped the list. He could travel, he could throw, he could hold his own in a taijutsu fight and boy, oh boy could he do ninjutsu, but he wasn't devious enough to cast goo genjutsu and a threat virtually had to walk right up and bop him on the nose before he'd be able to notice it.
Those traits were, for the most part, as well-suited to the front lines of a battle as they were -poorly- matched with the constant caution and watchfulness required of a bodyguard. Either of his teammates, though, could have done quite well in either role - Sasuke was observant, Sakura was even more so, and both of them could fight like anything.
Sensei... well, he was a Jounin, 'nuff said, but once that and its implications were accepted he, too, was better suited to the battle line - and, if needed, he could quickly cover the ground between either of the team's elements.
Since Naruto knew all that, and knew that Neshan knew that, it was no suprise when he heard his teacher's voice from just over his shoulder, as calm and mile as always. "Well?"
Hm. How to handle this... Sensei could have jsut given him his orders of course, but the older boy - man, and how -wierd- to realize that the law said -he- was in that category now, too - had said that he thought that the three Genin would learn best by experience, by shaping their own course. His own role was, first, to teach them -how- to do so - how to learn, and why they should work to. Second, to act as a resource to learn -from-, whether tapping into his experience on the battlefield or the jutsu he could teach them or even, as was often the case with -their- teacher, the details of the past and how they affected the present and future. And, finally, third, to act as a safety net, and prevent their otherwise promising careers from being snuffed out by some minor mistake that only a novice would have made. "An area trap?" he suggested. "Something like a spider's web, to hold them in place?"
"They exist. I don't have one." Neshan's voice was harsh and taunt, though still controlled. Naruto knew it wasn't driected at him - Sensei believed in being prepared for his battles, sometimes even relied on it -too- much, and would regard any gap in his readiness as a personal failure... something he forgave easily enough in others, but never in himself.
"Too many to just mix it up with and keep busy..." the Genin thought out loud. "And too many other unknowns. Chikusho! Attack?" he asked, since if the enemy's numbers made conventional delaying tactics impossible, the only thing open to them was to reduce those numbers until other options became practical.
"Attack," his superior confirmed.
It had almost been time to replace his picket clones when he and Sakura had started their conversation, which meant that he was about as fresh as he could be. And -that- meant... He hopped up onto one of the causeway's pilings, then bounced off it to get as much height as he could. One, two, -three-! "KATON: GOUKAKYU NO JUTSU!"
A couple of the monsters ducked out of the way, but the reason he had picked that technique, rather than one of the other fire types he knew, was that it combined power (which was useful) with a large area of effect - particularly if the user was trying to spread it, rather than concentrate it. If these things were as freakish and inhuman as they looked, then they wouldn't even feel any pain from being lit on fire like that - but having their connective tissues and driving muscles burn away to ash should slow them down more than a bit, and if they really were as close to being nin-puppets as the resemblance between their motions and the descriptions he'd read of the Sunagakure specialty looked, then touching them and taking himself into range of a contact trap would have been a real bad idea anyway.
One of the ghouls was lunging at him now, with flames licking off its upper surfaces like a canopy of trees on a hill, so he ducked to the side and slashed a kunai across the underside of the arm it had attacked with and severed the tendons there - it might not bleed, but without -those-, that arm was useless - and spun as he dropped into a crouch and brought a second blade out in his other hand to cut the monster's hamstrings (which were clearly visible - YUK!) in two quick strokes.
Then he skittered left and lunged forward and upright to slam both of the heavy throwing knives -through- the shoulder joints of the ghoul that had tried to sneak up on him while he was dealing with its companion. There was a crunch of shattering bone as the blades' design concentrated the force of his weight and muscles into two unyielding points less than a millimeter across and then he was dancing out of the way of the kick it launched as the impact of his strikes knocked it flat on its back and left it wriggling there helplessly without a spare limb to pull it around and get its legs back under it.
That won him a second to spare, and he used it to glance over and check on Sensei. His help wasn't need, he saw, and actually he hadn't expected it to be - but you just -didn't- leave a teammate's safety to chance when there was something you might be doing about it. If you couldn't see them, then it didn't -matter- how certain you thought you were - you damn well checked and made sure!
Some part of the back of his mind had been monitoring the work crew as they flooded past the fight, and even as he finished dumping another dozen Kagebunshin into the fray Naruto was turning towards where one of the frailer members of the group had tripped and fallen and was being helped to his feet by Tazuna.
Sasuke shouted, Neshan cursed, and Sakura's kick oblitherated half the man's skull, snapped his neck, and knocked his corpse flying in the bargain, but by then it was too late, and the engineer was already begininning to thrash and scream as the poison on the needles that had erupted from the worker's chest to bury themselves in his arms and nearer leg began to work its lethal way into his bloodstream.
Naruto forced himself not to think about it, and launched himself back into the covering action beside his teacher, but he still caught a glimpse, out of the corner of his eye, of his two teammates trading wordless question.
Then Sasuke shouted at the construction workers to start moving again, and Sakura screamed and threw herself at the nearest cluster of ghouls.
None of them wanted to think about what they'd have to tell Tsunami-san, who'd been so kind - any more than they wanted to think about the fact that they were actually -glad- that the waiting was over, and that Gatou's mysterious fifth shinobi had made a move they could react to.
* * * * *
It was too similar to be a coincidence.
Sasuke's jaw clenched. This woman -knew- them, knew -him-, and had deliberately arranged her murder of their host's family to...
"She's changed their clothes," he told his teammates.
"Yeah, so?" Naruto asked. "It's just a Henge."
The dark-haired Genin didn't answer directly, instead simply crouching down to roll... Tsunami-san's corpse... over onto its front, ignoring the tacky, drying blood and dangling shreds of flesh.
"Kuso," the shorter of his teammates whispered, with an uncharacteristically pale expression.
"The Uchiha crest..." the third murmured, looking puzzled for a moment, then her eyes widened. "No! This is like..."
"That day. Yes."
"Sasuke..." she said, reaching out a hand, helplessly offering... neither of them was certain what.
He nodded to her, acknowledging and showing gratitude for the effort at the same time as he refused it, and said, "Lets look around. Maybe this... madwoman left something we can use."
And they did, spreading out to cover the entire house and its immediate grounds thoroughly.
"Well?" Sakura asked eventually, leaning over their sensei's shoulder to glance at the tracks he was examining.
"You know already. She's made it too obvious; she -wants- to be followed." He sighed and sat back on his heels. "Unfortunately, I don't see much else that we can do at this point."
Naruto snorted. "Well, then, what are we waiting for?!" And with that he was gone, and Sasuke close behind.
"Sakura."
She turned to look at her teacher, and that constant unease that had been dogging her was back again. She had never heard him sound that serious. "Hai, Sensei?"
"I... Haku told me about our enemy. I'd spare the three of you from this if I could - but I'm not strong enough to win this without you." He hesitated. "I... I'm sor-"
She cut him off. "It's all right. I understand about duty."
He nodded sadly, and then they followed her teammates.
* * * * *
"Looking for me, Sasuke-kun?"
Team 7 stopped in place and spun as a single body.
Sasuke knew, looking at last at the face of their enemy, that she must have been beautiful, once. She was tall, for a woman, almost six feet, and if she hadn't looked so worn and starved then her long, powerful frame and lethal ninja's grace would have been outright riveting. As it was, even with the scars seaming her body and his knowledge of what she was capable of, she was still attractive. Her yukata-like dress had long, sweeping sleeves but was cut high across her thighs, and its brilliant red fabric was scattered with irregular patches of darker red, particular around the cuffs and the lower edges of the sleeves.
Her long, slightly feathery pink hair swept and tangled behind her in an unrestrained mass which was held back from her face by a Konoha hitae-ite across the top of her head. Its slightly tarnished surface had had a deep, straight score etched across its distinguishing sigil. Her eye sockets were badly scarred, and the organs occupying them had obviously been transplanted, since one of them gleamed with the deceptive white blankness of the Hyuuga Byakugan.
"Sharingan," he breathed, as he took in the other. And indeed it was, blood red, with three comma-shaped secondary pupils spinning slowly around the central fourth.
"Yours, even, Sasuke-kun" the apparition said, with a horrible parody of a giggle. "And the other gives -dear- Hina-chan another look at you at last, Naruto."
"H-hina-chan?" Naruto stuttered, transfixed as a songbird facing a snake.
"Hyuuga Hinata, Naruto," Their sensei said idly. "And no, we weren't, quite yet. We wanted to figure out what you wanted, first."
"I want you to suffer, of course. And then I want you to die. Your blood and your agony... I want to splash around like a little girl as it puddles at my feet. I want to bathe in it, caress it, impale myself on it, devour it."
Sasuke, despite all the years of effort he had invested in controlling his actions and emotions, flinched away from the thought. "Sakura...san... Why would you-"
She cut him off with a snarl. "Why? Why do you think, you condescending fucking ice-hearted traitor! Because you pushed me down, because you tried to break me, because you tried to -own- me, you and that fucking fox-bastard crashing around trying to sneak up behind me." She cocked her head and leaned forward with her hands braced on her knees and a secretive little smile on her face. "And you'll pay for it - pay in full, both of you and especially that cowardly little cunt beside you."
Sakura - their Sakura, the younger girl with the short temper - had been standing frozen, trembling slightly and trying frantically to reconcile herself to the instinctive, bone-deep knowledge that this woman, this nightmare, -was-, in every meaningful way, -her-.
The other purred slightly, and licked her lips, taking a slow step towards the terrified Genin, but their sensei stepped in to intervene. "Then I guess I'll have to stop you."
The Smile widened, hungry and eager. "Do you really think you can beat me?"
He gave a smile of his own. Being scared wouldn't accomplish anything, nor being angry. With those gone, he could appreciate the humor of the situation, black as it was. "Not unless you do something a lot dumber than I expect you to. But a draw isn't out of the question."
She laughed, and if they hadn't been able to see her eyes, then it would have seemed perfectly natural and human... which made it all the worse, of course. "Who do you think you're talking to?" She leaned forward again, and spoke in a mock-confidential tone. "I'm the perfect killer!"
*crich*
*gunch*
"I take a lot of killing."
TO BE CONTINUED...
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
