It's almost done and I'm sick of sitting on it.
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TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 3
A Loss, a Hero, an Enemy and a Bridge
JUNE, TWELFTH 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 legendary 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, -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.
* * * * *
[J.L. vs. Demon Bros.]
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 pulled his cupped palms apart. 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.
* * * * *
[Gai informs Hiashi of Neji's fight with Hinata; neither of them are at all pleased to have H. know about it.]
No ninja, no matter how skilled or powerful, could reach the rank of Jounin without first demonstrating both self-control, acting ability, -and- an ability to determine the correct response to a given situation - tactical -or- social. Thus, while the restrained dress and manner which Maito Gai had adopted for his visit to the Hyuuga estate might have shocked those who, like his students, knew only his efervescant public persona, they were actually quite well in line with the man behind the mask.
Or spandex, as the case may be.
"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Hyuuga-sama," he said, accepting the cup of tea his host had just poured.
* * * * *
"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 harshely taunt. "Yes?"
"Umida Tsunami?"
Her eyes flicked across their faces, darting from one hitae ite 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 threat, but as she looked closer she realised that - from their appearance and -where- they penetrated into his body - 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 all right?"
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 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."
* * * * *
[gorepuppets kill Tazuna]
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. 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.
* * * * *
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 exactly 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."
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."
=======================================
TEENAGE GENIN NINJA HEROES
chapter 3
A Loss, a Hero, an Enemy and a Bridge
JUNE, TWELFTH 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 legendary 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, -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.
* * * * *
[J.L. vs. Demon Bros.]
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 pulled his cupped palms apart. 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.
* * * * *
[Gai informs Hiashi of Neji's fight with Hinata; neither of them are at all pleased to have H. know about it.]
No ninja, no matter how skilled or powerful, could reach the rank of Jounin without first demonstrating both self-control, acting ability, -and- an ability to determine the correct response to a given situation - tactical -or- social. Thus, while the restrained dress and manner which Maito Gai had adopted for his visit to the Hyuuga estate might have shocked those who, like his students, knew only his efervescant public persona, they were actually quite well in line with the man behind the mask.
Or spandex, as the case may be.
"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Hyuuga-sama," he said, accepting the cup of tea his host had just poured.
* * * * *
"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 harshely taunt. "Yes?"
"Umida Tsunami?"
Her eyes flicked across their faces, darting from one hitae ite 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 threat, but as she looked closer she realised that - from their appearance and -where- they penetrated into his body - 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 all right?"
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 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."
* * * * *
[gorepuppets kill Tazuna]
Sakura was nervous, and she didn't know why. 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.
* * * * *
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 exactly 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."
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."