SlimJames is back baby!!!
Okay, this is my first Naruto story and one of the ones that I'm going to be working on while I'm plotting the sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender story, Yes, I am an Animal; if you haven't read that one and you like this story, then go and read it start it RIGHT NOW (joking; finish this chapter first, then go read it)!! Anyway; Shikamaru is my favorite character from Naruot and this is a Shikamaru fic, but Shikamaru himself won't be showing up for the first few chapters, so I ask for your paitence. I've got a scene to set first. Reviews are desired, be they good or bad; I like to have feedback from whoever is reading my stories.
Anyway, enough boring stuff; on with the show.
Chapter 1
The sun doesn't rise…
The rain; always the accursed rain.
The rain was still pounding down hard, hitting the glassy surface of the swamp water, triggering millions of teeny tiny explosions and ripples that turned the murky surface of the tepid water into an angry churning mass. A thick mist hung in every direction, sitting just above the surface of the water. Slung about the roots of the giant Mangrove trees which ruled this humid, swampy abyss; the pungent mist stank of earth and rot and corpses.
From beneath the shelter offered by the massive roots of one of the mighty trees of the mangal, Kurita Nonoka, Chunin of Kusagakure- the Village Hidden in the Grass- looked out upon her surroundings with a paranoid eye. But at the moment, Nonoka was no shinobi. She wasn't even a human being; she was nothing but a mouse; a terrified little creature cowering in the safety of her den, scared to death of the mysteries and dangers of the world outside.
The teenager, in her relatively short shinobi career, had once been on a mission to the Land of Water. On the return trip, she and her team had skirted the very edges of the Village Hidden in the Mist; in her opinion, this place could give the infamous white abyss of Kirigakure some serious competition.
The pained sound of labored coughing and retching brought the freshly minted Chunin's eyes away from the wall of white nothingness and back around to the man she had been standing vigil over; her squad-leader, Honda Ryota.
"Sir, you're awake! Are you all right?"
She rushed to her captain's side, unrestrained relief evident in her voice. She had been scared that he wouldn't regain consciousness; that she would be left all alone in this place. Nonoka elevated his head and gave him a sip out of her canteen and watched as her wounded commander's bleary eyes gradually focused in on her face.
"Nonoka…chan," Honda managed to choke out through his injured body. A splitting pain in his abdomen was making it a struggle to breathe or talk.
"Easy Honda-taichou; you've just woke up. Here, let me help you sit up. Get your bearings straight."
The Kusa Jonin clutched at his side as Nonoka eased his body up into a sitting position. He took a quick look at their surroundings. The faces of his other subordinates, faces that were supposed to be there with him, awaiting his instructions, weren't.
"…Are we… all that's left?"
The young chunin's shoulders slumped and for the first time her captain noticed just how beat up she was. One side of her normally cherubic face was an ugly purple mass of bruises; shallow cuts marred her hands and neck. She was absolutely filthy, covered in inky black mud from tip to toe and she was stripped down to her black undershirt. Her field vest, the one she had been so proud of receiving upon making Chunin half a year ago, was nowhere in sight.
"Where is everybody else," Honda asked again, biting down the pain and forcing out the entire sentence without a pause.
The Jonin's question was again met with silence. He looked up at his subordinate, but she refused to meet his gaze. She didn't need to tell him anything; the cold feeling in his gut was already telling him everything he needed to know.
'The mission is scrapped. Our team is dead.'
"Nonoka, tell me!"
It was no longer voiced as a request but an order. He had to hear this from her.
"Kousuke and Arihama are gone."
"Dead," her captain asked, even though he was pretty sure of what the answer was.
"Arihama, definitely," Nonoka said sadly.
Honda cursed on the inside; Arihama had been a good man and a talented ninja who had a great deal of potential.
"Kousuke though? I dunno… things went really bad really quickly after you got knocked out. He tried to draw the enemy away from us- that's how we first got separated."
"How long has it been since things turned to shit," the captain said after taking a moment to digest the information that Nonoka had just told him.
"Um… three hours, I think," the Chunin replied in a small voice.
Three hours?!?
Honda resisted the urge to cry out in despair. After that much time, it was safe to assume that Kousuke was either A) dead or B) beating his feet back to the Demilitarized Zone as fast as he could.
Kousuke had been the one who had been tasked with carrying The Goods and if he had managed to elude his pursuers his first priority would be to make sure that The Goods got delivered back to friendly lines. Abandoning duty to rescue fallen comrades- while heroic- went against the core principle of the shinobi profession; the mission always comes first.
What that meant was that, regardless of whether Kousuke had fallen victim to option A or managed to escape to pursue option B, he and Nonoka were stuck on their own, hundreds of miles outside of the Safe Zone. They had no idea where their enemies were and their fighting ability had been ground down to almost nothing. As far as disasters went, this one was pretty complete.
The Jonin doubled over as he was wracked by a round of coughs, spitting up a mouthful of blood.
"Honda-taichou," Nonoka said in alarm.
"M'fine," the squad leader mumbled, wiping the blood dribbling from his lips as he struggled to gain his breath.
It was becoming increasingly apparent that he in absolutely no condition to do anything that even resembled fighting. Should their phantom assailants find their hiding place, their only defense would be Nonoka- who wasn't looking very spry at the moment.
The Jonin sighed wearily.
Regardless of how poor the situation looked, he was still the leader of this squad and he still had a responsibility to its surviving member to lead them through this crisis.
"Nonoka-chan… help me up. I need to see outside."
Throwing his arm around her shoulders, Nonoka gently hoisted her captain to his feet. Together, the two wounded Grass shinobi struggled across to the edge of the gigantic mangrove's massive roots and peered out into the curtain of impenetrable mist and driving rain.
"Quite the view, huh," the chunin joked sarcastically. Honda smiled, even though it had been a pretty lame joke.
Their situation was no laughing matter however. The two of them had to come up with something quick or else they were as good as dead.
"Wait, what is that?"
Honda's head snapped up and began scanning the surroundings.
"You see something," he asked urgently.
Maybe it was nothing, maybe his subordinate had just been mistaken, or she thought that she had seen something that really wasn't there.
"Over there, by that felled tree; look down and to the left," she said, pointing her finger to guide her captain's eyes in the right direction.
"You see that dark shape? I'm pretty sure that it wasn't there the last time I was scanning the area."
Honda focused his vision in on the area that Nonoka indicated. He squinted and tried to make out what it was that she had seen. After a few tense seconds of searching, the Grass Jonin saw that there did in fact appear to be an oddly shaped black mass sitting beneath the carcass of a mangrove. For what must have been the thousandth time that day, Honda cursed this country's abysmal weather; the rain was coming down too hard for him to determine if what he was looking at was a human, an animal, a piece of vegetation or million other things other than an enemy ninja.
Though the Jonin's vision was impaired by the weather, Honda's ability to sense chakra was still as acute as ever. Seemingly arising out of nowhere, he felt a massive spike in chakra from somewhere out in the mist; his brain had around two seconds to register just how massive a jutsu powered by that much chakra would be before an enormous wall of water came rushing right at the two Grass shinobi.
Years of training and experience on a dozen different battlefields took hold of the Jonin as he forced his battered body to snap into action. They had only seconds before instant death came crashing into them. Enveloping his much smaller subordinate into a bear hug, Honda Ryota forced out all of the remaining chakra still in his body for one last, desparate, jutsu.
Doton: Iron Shell
'Please, let one of us survive…'
"Heh, heh, heh. Splash two invaders; man I am on fire today!"
Four figures approached the tangled and splintered roots of the mangrove tree where the two surviving trespassers onto their territory had been taking refuge. The mangrove tree listed slightly after the abuse that had been committed against its roots but still stood tall; the sturdy beasts of the Great Salt Marsh weren't going to be toppled by an attack of that magnitude.
The group of four approached the scene of destruction at a leisurely pace, leaving a small trail of ripples in their wake as they treaded across the water's surface. The tallest of the group, a young man sporting one of the odd breathing apparatus' favored by some shinobi hailing from Amegakure- the Hidden Rain Village- was talking and gesticulating wildly, reveling in his own powers of indiscriminate destruction.
"Oh will you shut up already Ichi-kun," the one of the two females in the group snapped.
The girl looked to be in her mid teens with long, flaxen hair and carrying a parasol to protect her head from the pouring rain.
"So you managed to splash to enemies who, by the way, were already half-dead with an unnecessarily big and showy technique. Big whoop!"
"Damn straight it's a big whoop Shigure-chan," the irrepressible Ichi replied arrogantly, effectively combating the girl's sarcasm with the power of pure douche.
"You think you could pull off a super effective, mega-pwnage jutsu like that? Please! Just stand someplace and try to look pretty. Leave the real fighting to the rest of us."
Shigure simply rolled her eyes at her childish teammate. Ichi had always been a tool, but ever since he had gotten that stupid seal he had been especially insufferable. That power boost it gave him seriously went to his head.
"Oh yeah, you're a real killer Ichi… jackass."
"I'm just saying; two for one! I would think some congratulations were in order. People still do that, right? Congratulate their teammates for a job well done, I mean."
A cold, authoritative voice cut off the conversation before it could escalate any further.
"You only got one."
Shigure and Ichi looked back at their two trailing teammates. The other Kunoichi of their cell, the deathly pale Okoi, and the unofficial leader of their unit, Nanashi, were sharing the space beneath Nanashi's large red-iron umbrella. The pair was peering off into the mist away from the mangrove where the two enemy shinobi had been taking refuge.
"What the hell do you mean I only got one," Ichi demanded, personally insulted by the suggestion that one of his jutsu could do anything less than kill everything in its path.
"There were two chakra signatures hiding in the roots of that tree. There was one left after you finished making a mess out of everything," Nanashi replied matter-of-factly.
"Bullshit," Ichi snorted while waving his hand dismissively, "I got'em both."
Ever so slowly, Nanashi turned his head, directing his vision away from the retreating point in the mist to his hotheaded teammate. The taller boy felt himself flinch involuntarily as his eyes automatically flew to the two grotesque tears in the other young man's face. At some point in the past, someone had cut open Nanashi's cheeks, extending the ends of his mouth by almost an inch on each side. Disturbingly, he had never allowed his disfigurement to be repaired, instead opting to use a pair of piercings to secure the skin in place and keep his face from coming apart. Though he was good at hiding it, Ichi was little bit afraid of Nanashi.
"No. You didn't. This might be hard for you to accept, but you're not as good as you think you are," Nanashi replied evenly.
Ichi felt his temper flaring; Nanashi unsettled him- the little creep always had- but he'd be damned if he'd let anybody belittle his power.
Not after all he had sacrificed to obtain it.
Ichi walked aggressively to where Nanashi and Okoi still stood under the umbrella
"You want to see how good I am you little wimp!?"
The shorter male rolled his eyes; he could kill the blowhard a dozen different ways, but murdering one of your own teammates- no matter how tempting it may be- was behavior unbecoming of a shinobi. Closing his umbrella, Nanashi turned on his heel and walked began walking in the other direction.
"Okoi, calm this idiot down," he called out over his shoulder.
"And where are you going," she asked.
"…To take care of the loose end."
Nonoka was running for her life; the knowledge of what she was doing made her sick with shame. This was different from a retreat or a tactical withdrawal- she was honestly running for her life. She had no plan of what to do now, and she wasn't running to a specific destination. She was running because she was panicking and couldn't think of anything else other than running away.
Her captain- her friend- had just died to save her life, shielding her body with his own. Her chest heaved painfully the air was sapped from her chest through the twin exertions of running and crying. It was a miracle that she was even able to keep her legs moving.
All of her muscles burned as Nonoka struggled to pump more chakra into her damaged body, urging it desperately to go faster- to give her more than it already was. If she was too slow, if she slowed down, if she stopped to rest, it would be over.
She would be dead, just like the rest of them.
The Grass chunin pushed herself even harder, darting across pools of brackish water and hopping over felled trees as if they were twigs. If she could just get out of this goddamn swamp; if she could make it to one of the main highways; if, if, if, if! So many if's! But ifs were all she had right now and whether or not she managed to reach safety depended entirely on an if.
Landing on the half-submerged root of a mangrove, Nonoka crouched and gathered as much of her dwindling chakra as she could into her legs and with a tremendous effort, propelled herself upwards.
Just as she passed the apex of her jump and was beginning her descent, a single kunai came speeding out of the mists and pierced the Grass chunin through her calf.
A scream tore its way from Nonoka's ragged lungs as the murky water and twisted roots below her rushed up at her. Unable to land properly on her hobbled leg, she landed hard and felt one of her ankle shatter beneath her weight.
She screamed again; louder. It was a scream of pain and frustration and anger and fear and at the horrific knowledge that her young life was about to come to an end. Her tears came unabated; she didn't it to end this way. It couldn't end this way.
"You're all the same," a sinister voice from nowhere in particular said.
"You think that you can use our country to fight your battles and play games with our lives. But when one of us turns the tables on you, you want to cry."
She heard him coming towards her, and looked up. From her position on her knees, Nonoka saw a young man around her own age, with ugly scars on his face and pure hatred in his eyes. He wore the forehead protector of Amegakure slung around his throat with a single scratch disfiguring the Rain symbol.
Wordlessly, he drew a blade from the hilt of the red-iron umbrella he carried in his hand and raised it over his head. She watched, paralyzed in dispair as her killer drove the point of the blade into the space between her breasts; she was too exhausted to even cry out.
From her place on the ground the Grass chunin idly watched as her life's blood steadily flowed out of her body, only to be washed away by the endlessly driving rain. With the last of her strength, she looked up at her killer and asked the question that had been on her mind since her team came to this accursed country.
"…Tell me… does it ever stop raining here?"
"……This isn't rain. These are tears."
"…Konohamaru, wake up!"
"Huh," Sarutobi Konohamaru, chunin of the Hidden Leaf Village and grandson of the late Sandaime Hokage, snapped back into reality.
"Dude," Udon said, pushing his glasses farther up onto his nose.
"I said that it's time to get back on the road. Moegi's already outside; let's not keep her waiting."
Pushing himself off of the bench, the simian ninja and his friend left the protection of the Rest Stop awning and back into the downpour that so frequently afflicted this country.
"Man I am so sick of rain; I can't wait to get home!"